April 23, 2022 - The Political Cesspool - James Edwards
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You're listening to the Liberty News Radio Network, and this is the Political Cesspool.
The Political Cesspool, known across the South and worldwide as the South's foremost populist conservative radio program.
And here to guide you through the murky waters of the Political Cesspool is your host, James Edwards.
When the states went to war, well, some soldiers came.
Claimed to bring old Dixie down.
Fought their way to the edge of old hell-hole swamp.
But that's where they turned around.
Because they riled them folks, and they soon learned they could fight you a hundred ways.
But the rest, well-lucked haters ain't.
Did the North win the war?
Let me tell you it ain't so.
They lost it down in old hell.
All right, there's a new one for you, ladies and gentlemen.
That's been sent in by audience members as well as Confederate History Month on TPC continues.
It will wrap up next week, but we've still got tonight.
And then this is the broadcast live, of course, as always on Saturday, April the 23rd.
I'm your host, James Edwards.
Keith Alexander in the studio with me, as he almost always is.
Great show last week as we celebrated and commemorated and had a remembrance for not just our Southern patrimony, but for Easter as well.
And a great Easter message by Pastor Brett McAtee.
And it's been two months of special series, very nearly two months.
In March, we concerned ourselves exclusively with international affairs and our march around the world.
And of course, celebrating our Southern heritage here in April.
And I could tell you, though, that a lot of current events and news items that we would have otherwise been covering have piled up on the news desk.
And we will be getting to them as soon as the calendar flips to March.
But let me tell you what we've got coming for you tonight.
A flash of creative genius.
We'll see if the practice is as good as the theory or if we can execute it as well as it appears to me in my mind.
But I got an email this week from Michael Andrew Grissom, who very well may be the preeminent living Southern author.
He has written such epics as Southern by the Grace of God, Can the South Survive, The Last Rebel Yell, that Michael Andrew Grissom, and he's got a new book out.
He's got a new book out.
One is a collection of his essays, and he's got something else out as well.
And he emailed me, and I said we will certainly promote that.
And it gave me a spark of what I hope will be genius here.
It caused me to remember an interview that we had with Michael Andrew Grissom that still in my mind stands out as just a really solid interview.
Bill Rowland, our dear friend, dearly departed comrade Bill Rowland, conducted the bulk of that interview in January of 2006.
So this was 16 years ago.
And as soon as I got the email from Mike, it caused me to remember that.
Now, Mike was Bill Rowland's favorite author.
And when Bill passed away in 2013, Mike donated a couple of boxes of autographed copies of Southern by the Grace of God, which we were able to use in Bill's memory.
And I got to thinking that it would be a little twist on things if we replay that for you in the second hour.
Now, we're not just going to go to the can and play a tape.
Now, what we're going to do is Keith and I will offer a little bit of commentary and retort as we play clips from that 2006 interview in each of the segments in the second hour.
And then, while that is happening, the great and the incomparable Sam Dixon is tuned in tonight, and he's going to be taking notes on what he hears.
And then there will be a roundtable discussion in the third hour during which yours truly and Keith Alexander and Sam Dixon will see how that interview holds up and see what has changed since 2006.
But it was a very, very candid interview.
Bill, I could tell you, one of the things that I've been good at is flanking myself with talent and intellect.
And a good front man knows if you've got that sort of talent, you let them shine.
And Bill was just really, really exquisite interviewer.
And you'll hear it, I think, in the second hour.
Obviously, Keith Alexander with his master in command of historical knowledge and just a great mind as well on pretty much any issue you can throw at him.
We've had some great team players.
So that's what's going to happen tonight.
That's what's going to happen.
I say all that to say this.
That's what's going to happen.
And I bet you that 95% of those tuned in tonight were not around in 2006.
Now, certainly there were some that were around from the very beginning, and we hear from you.
But we're going to play this, and I think you're going to get a kick out of it.
I think it's going to be something that will be very informative.
And then, as I said, we're going to break it down with Sam Dixon the third hour.
Is that all right with you, Keith Alexander?
Well, as you said, we'll see.
And I believe that it's really going to be good.
Also, tonight, and coming up here in the very next segment, we will hear from Gene Andrews, our good friend and always a mainstayer in our Confederate History Month series.
Let's talk a little bit more about what I think will shape up to be a memorable night of Talk Radio when Sam Dixon returns to the broadcast to offer opinion and insight on that classic TPC interview with Michael Andrew Grissom that we've just been talking about.
Here's a little more info on Michael Andrew Grissom.
If you don't know who Mike Grissom is, let me tell you, he is the author of 13 books.
He is the recipient of the Oklahoma Heritage Distinguished Service Award and the United Daughters of the Confederacy's prestigious Jefferson Davis Medal.
In 1996, he wrote the inscription for Tennessee's Confederate Monument in Vicksburg National Military Park.
And in 2004, he wrote the inscription for the Confederate Memorial in Wynwood, Oklahoma.
He has earned two degrees from the University of Oklahoma and has lived in both Tennessee and Oklahoma.
Grissom writes from what younger generations would call an eyewitness to history.
Having lived his late teen years, Keith, I think this is something that makes me think of you.
He lived his late teen years and early college years during the centennial commemoration of the war between the states in the early 1960s.
So at that time, Confederate soldiers were still living during his early teen years, giving him a living bridge to the Confederate past, a unique experience that threads its way through his southern writing.
I am really, really excited to revisit this interview with our current audience from all the way back in 2006.
And we'll be with you in the second hour and then a big roundtable discussion in the third hour.
So that's what's coming up tonight.
What do you got for us, Keith?
Well, I'm just going to be riding.
I'm along for the ride, I guess you would say, tonight.
And I'm going to enjoy hearing what Sam has to say about this.
I know that like Mike Andrew Grissom was present and there at the centennial of the Civil War, which unfortunately was eclipsed by the unfortunate incidents of the Civil Rights Movement.
And he mentions, and in his opinion, that was no coincidence.
Go ahead.
Yeah, that's it.
I think that they did that on purpose.
And What we found is that, you know, there's not any way that the left and the people that motivate the left, are responsible for it, are going to leave any opportunity on the table when it comes to taking down white southern society.
You know, next to Germans, we're the worst people in the world.
And if you don't believe it, just listen to what they have to say about us.
This is what we're having to deal with.
And Michael Andrew Grissom basically swam against the tide and wrote some excellent articles and books back when they were very desperately needed to give our side of the story.
And you'll hear from him in the second hour.
And you'll hear back from Sam Dixon in the third.
And Gene Andrews is coming up next.
Gene Andrews is at a hoot nanny tonight.
You know, there are underground Southern celebrations going on all over Dixie.
He's at one right now.
We'll see what he's up to.
Gene Andrews.
next.
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Why does the left lie constantly?
Because they get spiritual power from lying.
The lies come from Satan, the father of lies.
John 8, 44.
Here's how the political lying process works.
Satan provides the beast with a lie.
Then the more they use the lie, the more spiritual power they get.
Look, the media is a lie multiplier, and this multiplication gives more evil spiritual power to the beast.
And that can overwhelm and even deceive the body of Christ, especially when the body is being disobedient to the head.
The churches today are incorporated, so they're subordinate to human government.
They obey the beast and do nothing to restore our national relationship with God.
And the government shall be on his shoulders, Isaiah 9, 6.
That verse is not for the present-day church.
Rather, it is for the end time church, the body of the line of Judah.
A message from Christ's Kingdom Ministries.
He's coming after me just to stand your ground.
What fear to control?
The angels did not.
Yeah, but what all this day is doing Yeah, but Rossi and Jakey will be With the...
That was a song Ride with the Devil by Rick Revel.
And of course, the Wizard of the Saddle is who he's singing about, Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And I always like to play that song when Gene Andrews is with us.
Gene Andrews, of course, a retired combat officer and history teacher who now serves as the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home in Chapel Hill, Tennessee.
And he's rejoining us this evening.
He's a mainstay guest with us throughout the year, but always during our Confederate History Month series.
And he is up at an event tonight, a southern gathering with music and speakers, and he's having a great time.
How are you doing tonight, Gene?
Well, we're doing great.
Doing great, James.
Thank you for letting us come on.
And we're having a lot of fun.
Out here in the woods, away from downtown Nashville, that's a plus right there.
And we've got about two dozen reenactors out here.
And I don't know if we had the Confederate band playing in the background.
They just wound up the Bonnie Blue flag and Dixie.
I wish that could have been on when we came on the air.
And so, yeah, and a lot of great Southern people here.
And we've already had two lectures on Confederate history, Ross Massey talking about the Battle of Nashville, and then Fred Proudie talking about some of the things he did at all these reenactments he went to.
So it's been a great time.
Great time.
Glad to be here and glad we could share that with the listeners.
Well, this is Keith, Gene.
You are our resident expert on all things Forrest.
Tell us what you think of that song and also why you think that Forrest should be one of the luminaries of Southern Confederate people today.
Well, I think Forrest, in my estimation, was probably the greatest mounted warrior in American military history.
I think two of the greatest fighters in our military history never went to West Point.
They understood the concept of how to carry out not necessarily guerrilla warfare, but not conventional warfare.
And that would be Geronimo and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
And both of them fought against the United States Army.
And so I think Forrest just had a concept of how the war should be fought from the Southern perspective.
He knew that there's no way that we could fight a conventional war and have these huge pitched battles that even if they won, even if the Confederates won, they couldn't replace the losses.
If we lost 3,000 men in the battle, we get maybe 1,000 back.
And if the Yankees lost 10,000, they'd get 12 or 15,000 replacements coming in.
So eventually it was going to be a war of attrition.
And so he is.
Why was that, by the way?
Can I stop you right there, Gene?
Why was it that they had so much of an advantage when it came to manpower?
Was it because of Irish immigrants or what was it?
Well, just the population at the beginning.
We had nine at the 1860 census that we have every 10 years, we had 9 million people in what later became the Confederate States.
And 3.5 million of those were blacks.
And not all of them were slaves.
There were a lot of free blacks.
But you couldn't count all of those being in the military service until toward the end of the war, and it was too little, too late.
The 1860 census, then the northern states had 21 million.
So you're having 21 million against maybe 5.5 million.
And then you're right.
They brought in boatloads of Irish and German immigrants into the U.S. Army.
They flat out lied to the Irish.
You know, the English were stealing all the food out of Ireland.
That's what caused the famines in Ireland.
And they were telling them if they come to the United States, they could get jobs on the railroad.
And so they packed them on the boats and brought them over here into New York and Philadelphia and Boston and all the cities up east.
And then they said, well, yeah, but if you get jobs on the railroad, you've got to be an American citizen.
So hold up your right hand.
No, no, no, no, your right hand and swear that you're an American citizen, take an oath.
And they did.
And then they told him, oh, yeah, by the way, now that you're an American citizen, we have this thing called the conscript laws or the draft laws.
And you've been drafted into the U.S. Army.
And they were saying, well, I thought we got jobs on the railroad.
And he said, well, you're going to be on the railroad, all right, but you're going to the killing fields in Virginia.
And the railroad now is.
You're being railroaded.
You're taking the railroad right down to Morasses.
That's right.
In Antietam.
Gene, well, that actually segues into my next question for you, what I was going to ask and bring up.
I mean, those numbers are just staggering.
21 million to 9 million.
Of course, if those 9 million, you're not talking about 9 million white men of fighting age, okay?
And then, of course, you didn't even factor in the North's manufacturing advantages with their industrial might.
And the fact that we took them four years and if there was a couple of could have-beens and what-ifs, that that thing could have been won.
It could have been.
It's amazing.
Amazing.
Several opportunities.
Unfortunately, we had some government officials and some military officials or commanders on the field that could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory every time.
Name them and shame them, Gene.
There's no time like the present to do that.
We're supposed to be celebrating.
That's right.
No, but you're right.
There were so many turns and twists and turns and what-ifs.
And, you know, one thing I've talked about in several speeches and programs, what if Forrest had been turned loose to attack the Federals in the Western theater of the war?
And he did.
And Forrest stopped Grant.
He stopped Sherman.
He stopped Buell, and he stopped Rosecrans and caused all four-stop Sherman in the March to the sea.
No.
I understand that one of the things that he wanted was to be set loose on Sherman during the March to the sea, and that was countermanded by higher-ups in the Confederate command.
What do you think about Eden as a prospect?
Even before then, he had a concept of how to stop Sherman when he was still in Chattanooga before he even started the Atlanta campaign.
And Forrest could read a map much better than the officials in Richmond could.
He knew that if he could take out the Nashville and Decatur Railroad running down to Decatur, Alabama, if he could take out the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, Sherman would be stuck.
He couldn't use the Tennessee River in the summertime for large amounts of supplies because of Muscle Shoals, Alabama.
They couldn't get large steamboats over the shoals in the summertime because the river was too low.
So if you took out the railroads, Sherman's stuck in North Georgia with no supplies coming in, no forage for the animals.
And you think an army over 100,000, how much food it requires, probably they had 60 to 70,000 mules and horses just to move all of that.
How much forage it takes for a horse every single day, and they wouldn't have that.
The ammunition wouldn't be coming in.
The medical supplies wouldn't be coming in.
And so he understood that.
And he wrote to Richmond and begged Richmond to turn him loose on the supply lines, not fight Sherman head to head.
He was smart enough.
He wasn't going to do that, but take out his supplies and let him starve.
And they turned him down.
Gene, let me ask you this with a couple of minutes remaining this segment.
Then we've got you for two more segments.
Outside of the heroes that we all know, why is it still to this day and every year we've been on the air, but still to this day, every year that advances, we get a little bit further away from that period of time in the 1860s.
Why is it still important to be proud of that ancestry and of that attempt that our forefathers made, the attempt that they made?
Well, that's our family.
Our family did that.
My family was in the Confederate Army.
Rich Hamlin's family was in the Confederate Army.
Your family was in the Confederate Army.
We're not going to turn our backs on our family just because they were unsuccessful in their attempt.
They were heroes.
They tried to do the right thing.
They tried to preserve a constitutional government for us, and it failed.
And we're paying that price today in the clowns that we've got running the government in Washington today.
Well, there's no doubt about that.
And also, I mean, they were very well aware of racial realities too.
And you never know.
I mean, obviously, had the South won its independence, the South of today would have looked like the South of 1865, 1866 had they been victorious.
But I still think you see the moral rudder of the country being turned by the South.
I mean, we are, of course, overruled and stymied by judges and the Supreme Court at every turn.
And, you know, we always end up taking an L on social issues or whatever we're engaged in.
But there is still a separate culture in the South that I think makes it distinct.
I think that's a prerequisite for nationhood.
We talk about that a lot.
I think it does still exist here.
As watered down as it may be, especially, and it's especially in the urban areas of the South now, there's still a pulse.
There's still a heartbeat out there.
And it's a superior culture.
Amen.
And it exists on this program for damn sure.
We'll be right back with Gene Andrews.
Stay tuned, everybody.
Pursuing Liberty, using the Constitution as our guide.
You're listening to Liberty News Radio, USA Radio News with Kenneth Burns.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken are coming to his country.
It'll be the first time that senior officials from the Biden administration visited Ukraine since Russia invaded it a couple of months ago.
The Pentagon declined to confirm the visit.
The White House had no comment.
A parade of foreign dignitaries have made their way to Kiev to show their support for the Ukrainian people.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin doing what it can to blunt the effects of economic sanctions on Russia.
Measures include interest hikes as high as 20% and forcing businesses to convert their profits to rubles.
That made Russian President Vladimir Putin confident enough this week to proclaim that, quote, a blitzkrieg of sanctions from the West hadn't worked.
Despite the proclamation, Russia is enduring its worst bout of inflation in 20 years, and some companies in the country have been forced to shut down.
This is USA Radio News.
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Russian forces are focused on a steel plant in Mariupol, part of the Kremlin's plan to try and crush the last bit of resistance in the southern port city.
It claims that the plant is the last part of resistance and is the only part of Mariupol that has not been captured.
Officials claim Russia has fired at least six cruise missiles at another port city, Odessa, killing at least five people.
Ahead of a presidential runoff election in France, President Emmanuel Macron has the lead over his rival, Maureen Le Pen.
A victory for him would mean that he would be the first French president in two decades to win a second term.
Opinion polls have him winning in a margin that's ranging between 6 to 15 percent.
The civil trial in the case of a murdered University of Virginia lacrosse player set to go on Monday.
Yardley Love killed more than a decade ago by her estranged boyfriend, George Hughley.
Hughley is now halfway through his 23-year prison sentence.
The civil case is followed by Love's mother, who is seeking more than $30 million in damages.
You are listening to USA Radio News.
15 years after the Mexican War, many of those same West Point officers would answer the call of duty once again.
Political differences so divided our nation that a war between the states was inevitable.
Brother against brother, North against South.
One of the greatest military geniuses of all times had no formal training, yet he rose from the rank of a private to lieutenant general.
His name was Nathan Bedford Forrest.
That devil Forrest must be hunted down and killed if it cost 10,000 lives and bankrupts the federal treasury.
All right, back with Gene Andrews, the caretaker of the Nathan Bedford Forrest Boyhood Home.
I had a very memorable afternoon with Gene last fall when we got to stand about as far away as I am from Keith Alexander right now in front of the casket that carried the remains of General Forrest when he was about to be reinterred because of the just the criminal wickedness that has taken place in the city of Memphis throughout the South.
But we were there, Gene, and it's just a wonderful thing the way you take care of that property and that home and your service.
I can't thank you enough.
And to be there, to be there with you and to be there with my wife and my children and to share in that experience, I'll never forget it.
Well, we're proud to have you there, James.
Glad you come by.
And we got hit with that big storm.
We've got about five big trees laying down out there.
If you ever need firewood, you can have firewood for about the next 20 years.
Come by and pick it up.
Hey, any excuse to get up there is one that I'll certainly take.
Gene, I was at Shiloh last week, and we did a whole hour last week, the first hour of last week's show.
It was Easter weekend.
So folks, if you missed it, go back and listen to it.
I took my wife and my kids up to Shiloh.
We spent the day there.
And of course, it was there where Forrest's legend grew even more.
Tell us about General Forrest at Shiloh, if you would, Gene.
You're the resident expert in the South, I think, today on General Forrest, and we'd like you to sound that forrest.
Part of that Confederate attack on the first day, and they had him on the right flank.
And the plan was to drive the Federals away from Pittsburgh landing and force them back away from the river and into steep gullies of a creek kind of to the northwest of where the battle actually started.
And Forrest would be on the flank.
Well, the plan never worked out that way.
I don't know why Albert Sidney Johnston did this, but he took his line and say you had a division and the Confederate attack was going to be five miles.
He would take one division and spread it out over that five-mile front.
And then we'd have another division in the second rank and spread them out over that five-mile front and so on.
So if the attack bogged down, rather than stacking them up and splitting the division up, you know, one brigade in front of another where you had a whole division under command and control, you had them spread out over about a five or six mile front.
It's virtually impossible to bring up reinforcements from somebody else's command into your command, where if you had your first, second, and third brigades all lined up, you just say, hey, we stopped up front, bring up the second brigade, bring up this, bring up that.
So anyway, it really got confused in the woods.
And, you know, at that time, that was the biggest battle that had ever been fought in the North American continent, Shiloh.
And so they weren't that experienced at having that many troops under their command and so forth.
But Forrest was on the flank, and he, just like he had done before at Fort Donaldson, he overran federal artillery batteries, took a lot of prisoners, captured their cannons, so forth.
And that evening, he actually took, he with some of his scouts took Federal overcoats and uniforms and crept along the riverbank and found out that Buell and his reinforcements were being ferried across the river.
So he sent word back to the Confederate high command.
Of course, Albert Sidney Johnston had been killed.
Command fell to General Beauregard.
And he was telling them, we've got to do something.
Even if we launch a night attack, they're bringing in reinforcements tonight.
We're going to be outnumbered tomorrow.
And the officers, the West Point professional generals, felt like that the Confederate Army was too exhausted.
They couldn't do anything.
And you always have to remember both armies were exhausted.
And a victorious army has much less exhaustion than a defeated army.
They're already in a bad state of mind.
And who knows if the Confederates had launched an attack late in the day or in the early evening, they may have finished off the Federal Army.
And Buell would have been stuck facing Confederate guns when he tried to come across the Tennessee River.
But they didn't look for it.
Yeah, well, that would have presented the Mississippi Valley.
And that was a big turning point.
That would have changed the war in the West.
It would have ended the career of U.S. Grant.
That would have been it right there.
And so you would have never had Grant at Vicksburg or Grant at the Wilderness or Grant at Appomattox, probably.
That would have been the last.
He'd have been a footnote in history like Irving McDowell and Ambrose P. Burnside or fighting Joe Hooker or somebody like that.
Geez.
Well, I'm just going to ask you this because I don't want to run out of time and I've got several more questions for you before the end of the hour.
But can you just tell if we could fast forward?
And I mean, we could cover Shiloh for hours.
We could cover Shiloh the whole show.
We did for an hour last week, at least my experience there.
Let's talk about Forrest, though, Fallen Timbers, the Confederate retreat at Shiloh.
His legend grew quite a bit.
One of his real strengths was covering retreats, right?
Yes, sir.
Well, he covered Hood's retreat after the disaster at Nashville.
Unfortunately, he got that job.
They didn't want to listen to him until the battle was lost, and they needed somebody to bail him out and pull him out of the fire.
So after the battle at Shiloh, he had the cavalry.
The cavalry was the rear guard.
They were covering the retreat away from the Shiloh battlefield back down into northern Mississippi.
And so Barst was once again covering the retreat, and Sherman this time.
Okay, if we can call him back.
I know he is out at a remote location.
When we were testing the connection earlier in the program, we lost Gene.
So we'll let Mr. Producer get Gene back, and if nothing else, we'll call him on Rich Hamblin's cell phone.
We can always do that.
So anyway, we'll come back with Gene in a little rapid fire to sort of make up for lost time.
We'll find out about Forrest at Fort Pillow, rather, Forrest at Fallen Timbers.
Gene does a history.
Well, History Channel, if the History Channel told you the truth on Fort Pillow, he does a history of the History Channel episode on Forrest if they would ever do one.
That's right.
That's right.
And we've actually had him on in previous installments of Confederate History Month just to talk about the Battle of Fort Pillow.
And that's just another amazing story.
And of course, we had the opportunity to have a little TPC retreat with some of our donors and some of our supporters.
We went out in the woods to the site of Fort Pillow, and he showed us where everything happened and what happened.
And we had a great group of people with us.
Talk about Sam Dixon being on later tonight.
Sam was with us then, and we chartered a bus and we were up there.
But anyway, Gene, about a minute to go, Forresters, Fallen Timbers.
No, no problem.
Yeah.
So he was covering the retreat.
Sherman was his regiment.
He was only a regimental commander then, was pressing the Confederates, and he threw out some skirmishers.
They got into a low swampy area, and it was called Fallen Timbers because a lot of the wood had been cut out of there for furnaces, for iron works.
And so there were a lot of stumps and trees laid out and everything.
Well, Forrest decided they were getting too close to the Confederates and their wagon trains and supply trains.
So he charged the skirmishers out front and scattered them, rode right over them, came up over a ridge, and here was Sherman's whole regiment in line of battle.
Well, Forrest never pulled up on the reins.
He kept going.
His men saw that the Yankees knew they were outnumbered.
They halted.
And Forrest just went riding right on through them, broke right through their lines and was in behind them.
And, of course, they were shooting at him and trying to stab him with bayonets and knock him off his horse.
And he did get shot in the hip.
And luckily, because of the rough terrain around there and these stumps and cut trees, he was able to kind of maneuver and they couldn't really get a good shot at him or get up there and grab the reins of his horse.
And he did make it back to Confederate lines, but he was severely wounded and had to be ride around in a buggy for the next several weeks.
So wasn't there a story about him grabbing some Union soldier and putting him on his back?
We've heard that a lot.
And Dr. Michael Bradley said there's really no specific evidence that that did happen.
But that's another one of the Forrest legends that's gone on and on and on.
I'll tell you what, though.
I tell you what, Gene, it certainly sounds like something you would have done.
I mean, you're talking about a guy that killed 31 enemy combatants, lost 30 horses, and survived the war.
But that is it.
Absolutely.
Gods can't do that.
In hand-to-hand combat.
Yeah, less.
Gene, we're about to go to break, but we were just mentioning when you got cut off a second ago about the incredible tour you gave us at Fort Pillow, spending time at Shiloh.
I was there last week.
When you walk on the battlefields, Bryce's Crossroads, any of these places where our ancestors fought, even to this day, when you go there, what is it like to you?
What's that experience like?
I love it when they have those big metal signs and it lists all the units that were there and you can find the 50th Tennessee.
And we did that two weeks ago down at Raymond in Mississippi.
And the 50th Tennessee was right smack in the middle of the battle at Raymond.
And to see that sign and said, you are here, and then see the diagram of where they crossed 14 Mile Creek and came through the woods and came out and attacked that federal column coming up toward Raymond.
It's really something to know that, hey, a great-great-grandpa McGee probably came right across this creek here through these woods and out into this open cottonfield.
Hey, man, it is amazing.
We talked about it for an hour last week.
My recollections and observations from being at Shiloh just the day before the show.
My ancestor was in the 15th Tennessee Calvary under Forest, by the way.
Sit tight, everybody.
Sit tight.
We will be back.
One more segment with Gene Andrews.
And then we've got something special coming up for you on the second hour.
Sam Dixon in the third.
Stay tuned.
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Each loyal southerner's heart they cheer with the victory cake and shallow.
I've had more people send in music from not from that era, but about that era this year than at any other, any of the other 18 years we have done a Confederate History Month series.
A lot of interest in this series that always isn't and is not just from the South.
You know, I had a friend, hopefully he's listening tonight, a native New Yorker who went to Gettysburg and he's totally with us on all the issues and including the war for southern independence.
And he asked the people at Gettysburg, he says, what sells more, the Union stuff or the Confederate stuff?
And he said that the shopkeeper laughed.
He said, the Confederates, Confederate stuff.
I've got that on.
James, I've got a t-shirt on right now that I got in Gettysburg.
It's got the Confederate battle flag, and it says, I won't be reconstructed, and I don't give a damn.
That's from that I'm a good old rebel, Behainis Randolph.
Yes, absolutely.
And I'm from Gettysburg.
How bad?
Well, you know, they don't sell it anymore.
You know, when we went to Fort Pillow a couple of years ago, they had all the Confederate merchandise locked down.
They said, we'd love to sell it to you, but they won't let us.
I mean, it's just, that's where we're at.
But hopefully that'll change.
Things can change, by the way, ladies and gentlemen.
We're not resigned to take eternal losses.
Things can change.
Hey, Gene, I shared with you a moment ago.
By the way, let me just say again how great it is.
Always great to have Gene with us.
Gene has spoken at every conference I've ever hosted for TPC, and he led that most memorable chartered bus tour up to Fort Pillow a couple of years ago for some of our VIPs.
And just a wonderful guy.
Can't thank Gene enough.
Think the world of Gene Andrews.
Again, caretaker of Nathan Pedford Forrest, Boyhood Home.
No, no, no.
You're thinking about my brother.
Not me.
That's my brother you're thinking about.
Been a commander of the Tennessee Division of the SCV, combat veteran, officer, and a history teacher.
Just a great Civil War.
Yeah, no, no, no.
But, Gene, I told you.
If he had been, we would have won.
We'd have won if Gene had been there.
Hey, Gene, I told you what we were going to be doing for the rest of the program.
We are going to be revisiting an interview that Bill Rowland conducted on this program in January of 2006 with Michael Andrew Grissom.
Oh, my great.
Super great.
And Sam Dixon's going to join us in the third hour, and he's going to break it down.
We're going to be taking notes and seeing how the interview holds up.
But you're actually, when I mentioned that to you during a commercial break, you said, I actually just bought Mike's newest book.
What do you think about the plan for the rest of the show?
And what can you tell us about Mike Grissom?
And why should people be interested in hearing what he has to say in the next hour?
He is a fantastic Southern writer.
And even before Don and Ronnie Kennedy, he was the first modern writer that stood up for the South and was telling us, you do not have to be ashamed of your history.
You do not have to be ashamed of your heritage.
What you do need to do is learn the truth about what happened, the causes of the war, the total destruction, the war criminals that were brought down here to destroy the South.
And any one of those books that Mike has are just fantastic.
Southern by the Grace of God.
And this new one that has come out, Dixie's Southern Essays, there are 13, I believe, 13 or 14 essays that he's collected from his writings over the last 30 years.
And they are fantastic.
It's what it means to be a Southerner, why you do not have to be ashamed to be in a Southerner, what they did to destroy the campus at Ole Miss, just all sorts of things like that.
And it's a great book.
And I was telling him, you know, it really ought to be required reading for any Southern to find out what your history is about.
I've got it right here.
The promotional material that I received from Mike earlier this week.
By the way, folks, Michael Andrew Grissom, you can spell Michael and Andrew, I'm sure, easily enough.
Grissom is G-R-I-S-S-O-M.
If you go to Amazon.com, I normally wouldn't recommend it.
But if you go to Amazon.com and type in Michael Andrew Grissom, you can get this new collection of essays.
And here are some of the things Gene was pointing it out.
I've got the paperwork right here in front of me.
These are some of the issues that Grissom tackles in this newest book.
What role did Eisenhower play in destroying Southern schools?
What was Franklin D. Roosevelt's contribution?
How did the Kennedy Cabal of Massachusetts manage to wreak havoc in the colleges and universities of the South?
How did the cleverly named Freedom Riders, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Southern newspapers join forces to shatter peace and harmony of the sunny South?
What is the Iron Curtain of Silence?
Can the South trust Republicans?
What happened in Berkeley, California, and what does it have to do with Dixie?
Who is a Southerner and what are his bloodlines?
Hey, these are all topics that Michael Andrew Grissom covers in this newest compilation.
You can get it at amazon.com.
Just type in his name, Michael Andrew Grissom.
And again, in the second hour, we're going to be revisiting a classic, a classic 2006 interview.
And we're not just going to be playing it from a tape.
Keith and I are going to be taking you in and out of each segment and offering some retorts.
And then Sam Dixon's really going to sink its teeth into it.
But another thing I like so much about this interview that we're about to play is that Confederate History Month was always Bill Rowland's favorite time of the year on the program as well.
And Bill, his favorite writer, was Mike Grissom.
And so to be able to revisit that, any reason to get Bill Rowland's voice on these airwaves again, I know, Gene, you will agree.
I have actually got a card here.
I saved it.
You sent it to me last fall.
And you wrote that while Bill and I had some great times as Mosby's partisan rangers fighting behind enemy lines, you and Bill Rowland went back and had a shared history of activism that predates this radio program, certainly, and his involvement with it.
But I'll tell you about Bill.
If Bill played such a role in the development of this program from its inception, he was a founding member in 2004 up until his untimely death in 2013, that I don't think we would be here without him.
I would say that perhaps he was like a Stonewall Jackson, but he was really Lee and Jackson, and I was just James Edwards.
That's how much I think of Bill.
And you'll hear it in this interview.
So what could you say about Bill Rowland?
You there?
Yeah.
Okay.
No, I was just asking you, what would you say about Bill?
For the people, obviously there's more people that listen to the show that are tuned in tonight that made it up to 2013.
I don't know how many people made it all the way back to 2006.
For the people who have tuned in over the course of the last decade and didn't know Bill as we did, maybe missed those early years of the broadcast.
What do you want to say about him?
Oh, he had a fantastic sense of humor.
And I mean, he had a sharp wit.
He could cut you to pieces.
And it took about 30 minutes afterward to find out you'd been skewered by Bill, especially these liberals.
He used to give me copies of his newspaper, Confederate Underground.
And across the masthead, it said, often disputed, never refuted.
And I would take him around and buy a copy of USA Today out of one of those newspaper boxes, take the copy out of the door and stick a copy of Confederate Underground in U.S. Today or Nashville, Tennessee, which is probably on the Cumberland.
And I wouldn't steal their paper.
I'd pay for it.
I'd buy it.
But I put Confederate Underground in the door.
So that's what you saw through the door.
And then I'd put three or four copies in there for people.
So that was the kind of operation that Bill and I put.
Let me say this about Grissom.
What you were just reading, James, about the contents.
Yeah, I'd love to have you just take that and run with it as well.
Well, what's wonderful about that is that he saw that unlike today's conservative mainstream, he's not willing to give a pass to the civil rights movement.
They try to say, well, you know, liberalism has gone off the rails now on transgenderism and homosexual marriage and things like this.
But it started out as a righteous and holy movement.
Michael Grissom knew that was false.
Let me tell you something, Keith.
You are on to something more than you know.
I don't know if you even heard this interview we're about to play in the next hour, but he talks about that and he doesn't mince words about it.
And you're going to hear it in just a moment.
I can't wait to revisit this with the audience.
But Jimmy's nose in the tent for every liberal egalitarian movement that has bedeviled America since the 1960s.
Gene, I want to thank you again.
Yeah, go ahead.
Oh, no.
The good thing, the great thing about that book, and you read off a lot of those titles of those different chapters, it's not something you have to pick up at page one and read all the way through, like a novel or a history book or something.
You pick it up, and any chapter that appeals to you, you thumb through it and start right there.
You don't have to start at the front and go all the way to the back.
So it's a great book.
It's a great collection.
And it's a great eye-opener when you look at all the things that have happened to the South.
And we've been like the frog boiling in water.
You know, maybe we didn't know it was as bad as it was until you get somebody that gives us a whole collection of that period in history and says, and we'll say, this is where we were, and this is the disaster that we have today.
Well, that was a historical perspective that he provided.
And also Bill Rowland.
Bill was down there at Ole Miss when all of this stuff was going on, too.
And he was there on the front line.
So I'm really interested in hearing this interview.
It's coming up.
And then you, Keith, and Sam Dixon will share with the audience what your takeaways are.
But the name of the book, this new book by Michael Andrew Grissom is Dixie Southern Essays.
And Gene, I want to thank you again for coming on tonight.
Is there any way we can grab Rich Hamlin to say hello for a quick two minutes?
Yes, sir.
Here he is.
Hey, James.
Hey, brother Rich.
I wanted to get you on sooner, but you know how it goes around here.
I couldn't get Keith to stop talking.
I'm kidding.
Listen, I just wanted to say hello.
I know you're there with Gene and I wanted to say hello, and we've got about a minute before break.
How's your day been going?
It's been going fine.
We're having a good time here and meeting a lot of people and haven't seen you in a while and hearing some good lectures and find out some more about our Confederate heritage.
It's a wonderful thing that these things are going on.
I mean, of course, by design, people don't know about them by either the necessity of keeping it secret or that they wouldn't be publicized even if we did have an open media.
But it's wonderful that there are get-togethers.
I mean, we've broadcasted from get-togethers in South Carolina and other places and that y'all are at one tonight.
These things still do occur.
Dixie's not as dead as you think.
It's not as healthy as we want it to be, but it's not dead.
There's still a pulse, and we're talking to two live specimens of that tonight.
Rich, I want to thank you as well, my friend, for your friendship and your support over these years, Gene.
I mean, it's just always great when we have all these southern guys on and your wife, I know Janice is there, and we love y'all dearly.
And y'all have a safe trip back to your part of Central Tennessee after what I'm sure will be many more hours tonight of celebrating.
I wish we were there with you, but we'll take a break and we'll come back in the second hour.
Next.
Thank you, Rich.
Thanks, Gene.
Don't forget the fourth homecoming.
Hey, we'll have Gene back on long before that takes place, and we'll get all that information.
That's, of course, coming up this summer.
Thank you, Rich.
Talk to you soon, brother.
Good night.
Real special treat coming up in the next hour.
We're going to revisit this 2006 interview with Michael Andrew Grissom.