Neo-Confederate

Neo-Confederate is a term used by some to describe the views of various groups and individuals who portray the Confederate States of America and its actions in the American Civil War in a positive light.

Historian James M. McPherson used the term "Neo-Confederate historical committees" in his description of the efforts from 1890 to 1930 to have history textbooks present a version of the Civil War in which secession wasn't rebellion, the Confederacy didn't fight for slavery, and the Confederate soldier was defeated by overwhelming numbers and resources. Historian Nancy MacLean used the term "neo-Confederacy" in reference to groups, such as the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, that formed in the 1950s to oppose U.S. Supreme Court rulings demanding racial integration, in particular Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Former Southern Partisan editor and co-owner Richard Quinn used the term when he referred to Richard T. Hines, former Southern Partisan contributor and Reagan administration staffer as being "among the first neo-Confederates to resist efforts by the infidels to take down the Confederate flag." It is possibly the earliest use of the term "neo-Confederate" in Southern Partisan.

This definition is not necessarily accepted by neo-Confederates, though Mel Bradford, who was a key figure in the neo-Confederate movement and frequent writer for Southern Partisan from its founding, titled one of his books The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary and Political.

An early use of the term came in 1954. In a book review, Leonard Levy (later a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1968) wrote, "Similar blindness to the moral issue of slavery, plus a resentment against the rise of the Negro and modern industrialism, resulted in the neo-Confederate interpretation of Phillips, Ramsdell and Owsley.".

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