Ever since Lincoln’s War the North has referred to Southerners as traitors and rebels, while claiming that the conflict itself was fought over slavery. After the War Confederate veterans were often ridiculed, slandered, and disgraced, prohibited from wearing their uniforms, establishing Confederate cemeteries, or erecting Confederate monuments. Southern women were even prevented from decorating the graves of their husbands, sons, brothers, and sweethearts. This anti-South sentiment has been vigorously carried into the present day: the Confederate Flag is being banned, Confederate graves are regularly defaced, Confederate monuments are being torn down across the country, and once again the old charges of treason and racism are being hurled at the South.

Is any of this credible? Of course not! And award-winning historian Lochlainn Seabrook proves it in his unprecedented work Rise Up and Call Them Blessed: Victorian Tributes to the Confederate Soldier, 1861-1901. Here, those who lived during the War, and more particularly those who fought in it, are given voice to describe, explain, and vindicate the actions of the South, from secession to so-called Reconstruction, in an open, truthful, and objective forum–without the intrusion of editorializing pro-Union partisans. Thanks to Colonel Seabrook we are no longer dependent on the biased and willfully uninformed opinions of South-loathing historians to learn the truth about the War. We can finally view and understand the conflict as it was actually experienced by the Conservative people of Dixie, rather than by those using presentism, South-shaming, revisionism, and other Leftist tactics to conceal the crimes and illegalities of the Liberal North.

Covering the mid to late Victorian period, Colonel Seabrook, a leading authority on Confederate culture, has carefully selected excerpts from some 300 letters, speeches, reminiscences, personal observations, anecdotes, stories, and official reports (military and civilian), that fill in the many blank spaces left by Yankee historians. His entries are made all the more enlightening and historically accurate by his inclusion of the words of both men and women, European-Americans and African-Americans, slaves and free blacks, Southerners and Northerners, Confederate soldiers and Union soldiers, privates and generals, surgeons and prisoners, upper class and lower class, educated and unschooled, Conservatives and Liberals, sectionalists and nationalists; nearly the entire spectrum of Victorian American society.

Generously illustrated and comprehensively researched, Rise Up and Call Them Blessed reveals what Northern histories of the War have been studiously avoiding for the past 150 years: The South was not treasonous in leaving the Union; at that time secession was a legal act of true conservatism and patriotism. The South did not take up arms over slavery; she fought to preserve the original government of the Founding Fathers. The South did not detest the black man; instead he was welcomed into the Confederate armies with the promise of emancipation at war’s end. The Confederate soldier was not hated by Union officers; Federal heroes such as Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, in fact, were in awe of them.

These and a thousand other suppressed facts are fully revealed here in the words of Southerners themselves, first-hand accounts offering complete justification for the South’s behavior before, during, and after Lincoln’s War. Available in paperback and hardcover.