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"Too bad the South had not built the type of railroad system the North had built. It could have helped them during the war. But that would have run counter to the South's disdain for internal improvements. Lincoln and the Republicans were forward thinking, while the South's leaders were stuck fighting for the past, a society built on the backs of 4 million slaves."
This sounds very much like it was written north of the Mason-Dixon line. The South, namely those who had invested in railroads, had built a considerable rail network. It just wasn't finished. River transport down the Mississippi, Tombigbee, Santee, Chattahoochie and other streams was still quite economical, though a bit slow. Even the Cumberland and Tennessee carried some commerce. It wasn't 'disdain'; but rather slow demand. The southern population was and is still widely distributed. To say 'fighting for the past' is probably not very accurate. There were some white backs working alongside or independently of the black ones. The other catch was the simple fact, that even with a full component of railroads, there wasn't much to load on the cars, except for gunpowder. Guns and bullets were the problem, along with blankets and medical supplies. A war that started both before and after it's time.
The South's railroad system was not built uniformly, as in, one train could not transfer to another rail line. This caused the contents of the first train to be transfered to the second train. This cost time and expense. It was a backward system. The South continually voted against internal improvements. About 40% of the Southern population in 1860 were slaves, 3.5 million slaves of 9 million total. Slave labor built the South!
__________________ "Those who forget to remember the past are condemned to repeat it", George Santayana.
Good points Larry. Slave labor built the country Freddy. It came from the North and more slaves died needlessly by the actions of the North than did in the South. Nothing done by the South can compare to the deaths on the slave ships run by New England firms.
The ragtag origin of the slave trade is interesting (all histories tend to start with the commercialization of the trade. That's like starting the history of hamburgers with McDonald's and leaving out all the mom and pop places, drive-ins before McD).
First, drop the image you have of the pirate. That is taken from movies, and is not real. Captain Kidd had an office on Wall Street when he was asked to stop the pirate raids that had destroyed the economies of the UK and the America's. He took his men out and would attack these, well, terrorists who flew no nation's flag, had a wacky religion that blended together many odd beliefs, and had ports of support they could sell their merchandise at and drink and the other entertainments pirates indulged in.
After awhile, Kidd was so effective that the American economy took off. The UK however, preferred to fight the pirates with its own military, and its economy remained crushed. So the British, who had paid over 95% of our costs to live here, asked for some back in the form of new taxes to help their economy out.
Well, we know what that led to!
Kidd would go to the cities friendly to pirates and bomb them indiscriminatly from one end to the other. After several hundred civilian deaths, mobs would greet the pirates the next time they showed up, and they would be killed and some hanged on the port to show Kidd they no longer let pirates in!
Kidd said his men needed hookers, tobacco, liquor and drugs. After awhile he began to put slaves on the ships going back to the colonies so they weren't empty. And so it bagan.
Our nation was built on slavery. Tobacco. Drugs. Hookers and whiskey. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. Robert Ritchie has a great book on the really misunderstood and heroic Captain Kidd, CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE WAR AGAINST THE PIRATES. It is also free of Hollywood stereotypes - Captain Kidd had a staff in his office for heaven's sake! Yo ho ho indeed!
New York City was built by slaves. Slaves weren't sold to the South until the market was flooded in the North. Yep, the guys who started slavery, pat themselves on the back for ending it! LOL!
My ongoing nightmare with Lincoln quotes continues. This from an article today on the peace offer made to Hillary ( her surrender terms that is) which is horrifying:
Another Democrat who has discussed strategy with friends in the Obama inner circle said that Mr Obama was openly considering asking Mrs Clinton to join his cabinet, alongside two other former presidential rivals: John Edwards, who is seen as a likely attorney general; and Joe Biden, who is a leading contender to become Secretary of State.
Mr Obama hinted at the plan last week. "One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln," he said. "Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his cabinet because whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was 'how can we get this country through this time of crisis?' And I think that has to be the approach that one takes."
Yep he sure did do that. One I believe was a General who would later run against him and refused to send his troops into battle. Civilian boards were made up of both Lincoln loyalists and his foes- they quickly bogged down the war as well. In other words, if Obama knew the truth about Lincoln and not what is taught in Ivy League schools he would know that move was a disaster.
Good points Larry. Slave labor built the country Freddy. It came from the North and more slaves died needlessly by the actions of the North than did in the South. Nothing done by the South can compare to the deaths on the slave ships run by New England firms.
The ragtag origin of the slave trade is interesting (all histories tend to start with the commercialization of the trade. That's like starting the history of hamburgers with McDonald's and leaving out all the mom and pop places, drive-ins before McD).
First, drop the image you have of the pirate. That is taken from movies, and is not real. Captain Kidd had an office on Wall Street when he was asked to stop the pirate raids that had destroyed the economies of the UK and the America's. He took his men out and would attack these, well, terrorists who flew no nation's flag, had a wacky religion that blended together many odd beliefs, and had ports of support they could sell their merchandise at and drink and the other entertainments pirates indulged in.
After awhile, Kidd was so effective that the American economy took off. The UK however, preferred to fight the pirates with its own military, and its economy remained crushed. So the British, who had paid over 95% of our costs to live here, asked for some back in the form of new taxes to help their economy out.
Well, we know what that led to!
Kidd would go to the cities friendly to pirates and bomb them indiscriminatly from one end to the other. After several hundred civilian deaths, mobs would greet the pirates the next time they showed up, and they would be killed and some hanged on the port to show Kidd they no longer let pirates in!
Kidd said his men needed hookers, tobacco, liquor and drugs. After awhile he began to put slaves on the ships going back to the colonies so they weren't empty. And so it bagan.
Our nation was built on slavery. Tobacco. Drugs. Hookers and whiskey. Anyone who tells you differently is lying. Robert Ritchie has a great book on the really misunderstood and heroic Captain Kidd, CAPTAIN KIDD AND THE WAR AGAINST THE PIRATES. It is also free of Hollywood stereotypes - Captain Kidd had a staff in his office for heaven's sake! Yo ho ho indeed!
New York City was built by slaves. Slaves weren't sold to the South until the market was flooded in the North. Yep, the guys who started slavery, pat themselves on the back for ending it! LOL!
My ongoing nightmare with Lincoln quotes continues. This from an article today on the peace offer made to Hillary ( her surrender terms that is) which is horrifying:
Another Democrat who has discussed strategy with friends in the Obama inner circle said that Mr Obama was openly considering asking Mrs Clinton to join his cabinet, alongside two other former presidential rivals: John Edwards, who is seen as a likely attorney general; and Joe Biden, who is a leading contender to become Secretary of State.
Mr Obama hinted at the plan last week. "One of my heroes is Abraham Lincoln," he said. "Lincoln basically pulled in all the people who had been running against him into his cabinet because whatever personal feelings there were, the issue was 'how can we get this country through this time of crisis?' And I think that has to be the approach that one takes."
Yep he sure did do that. One I believe was a General who would later run against him and refused to send his troops into battle. Civilian boards were made up of both Lincoln loyalists and his foes- they quickly bogged down the war as well. In other words, if Obama knew the truth about Lincoln and not what is taught in Ivy League schools he would know that move was a disaster.
Oh well. Doomed already!
"Conditions on the slave ships were terrible, but the estimated death rate of around 13% is lower than the mortality rate for seamen, officers and passengers on the same voyages."
I find this hard to believe.
"As a result of the slave trade, five times as many Africans arrived in the Americas than Europeans. Slaves were needed on plantations and for mines and the majority was shipped to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the Spanish Empire. Less than 5% travelled to the Northern American States formally held by the British."
Most went to the Southern states. Over 11 million African slaves were transported to the Americas and only 500,000 to the British North America.
A reminder, gentlemen: Look up at the top title. Says reconstruction, doesn't it? It's already in the wrong forum and I'm waiting for a webmaster to move it to an appropriate forum. Meanwhile, the very next post that's unrelated to Reconstruction will be severely messed with.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
This is one of the better pieces on the reconstruction era. There aren't really a whole lot of them!
On April 13, 1873, the United States experienced the worst one-day slaughter of blacks by whites in its history. In tiny Colfax, La., white paramilitaries attacked lightly armed African American freedmen who had assembled in a local courthouse to defend their elected officeholders. By the time the Colfax Massacre was over, more than 60 black men lay dead. Most were killed after they had surrendered.
Perhaps even more shocking than the bloodshed in Louisiana was the ultimate resolution of the case. Initially, Northern public opinion was outraged, and the Grant administration vowed swift punishment for the guilty. But as Louisiana whites rallied around the massacre’s perpetrators, the costs—financial and political—of prosecution mounted. Washington gradually lost interest. Denied the funds and military support he needed, New Orleans-based U.S. Attorney James R. Beckwith valiantly tried to win convictions, but succeeded against only three of the 98 men he indicted. Even that paltry result was overturned by Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley in mid-1874; his ruling gave a green light to Klan-like groups in Mississippi and South Carolina, which overthrew those states’ pro-civil rights Republican governments in 1875 and 1876, respectively. When the full court upheld Bradley’s ruling in 1876, it dealt a lasting blow to federal law enforcement authority throughout the South.
Thus did a white supremacist crime mutate into a white supremacist triumph. This is why I called my book about the Colfax Massacre, The Day Freedom Died.
My goal was to provide the first definitive account of the massacre--from its origins in the antebellum plantation economy of Louisiana’s Red River Valley, to its repercussions in constitutional law today. It is too late to correct a 135-year-old injustice. But I felt an urgent need to correct the record. For the injustice at Colfax was compounded by cover-up. White Louisianans have systematically distorted the event, blaming rampant “Negroes” for provoking their own murders and erecting marble monuments and historical markers in honor of the guilty. This cover-up, unfortunately, was abetted for many years by historians, Northern and Southern, who taught that Reconstruction had collapsed due to its own misguided attempt to include unworthy black men in government. In that sense, I was following the revisionist trail blazed by historians such as John Hope Franklin, Kenneth Stampp, and Eric Foner. Thanks to them, the rights and wrongs of Reconstruction are now more accurately comprehended; the old fable of carpetbaggers and scalawags has lost currency and respectability.
But as I completed the book, I also wondered whether the time has come to take the interpretation of Reconstruction in a new direction. The work of Franklin, Stampp and Foner properly emphasized the political and economic weaknesses of Reconstruction, such as the Radical Republican Congress’s failure to distribute land to Southern blacks, or the Grant Administration’s evolution from a revolutionary force to a patronage machine.
However, Reconstruction not only failed because of such flaws in its design; it failed because it was resisted. It was resisted bitterly in the courts, where Southern lawyers made use of every conceivable cause of action—plausible or not—to tie Republican state governments in knots and to generate favorable propaganda. And it was resisted through cruel but sophisticated paramilitary campaigns, starting with the Ku Klux Klan’s rampage through the southeastern states in the late 1860s and culminating in the Red Shirts’ seizure of power in South Carolina in 1876. Southern litigation and southern terrorism attacked Reconstruction at its weakest points: a post-Civil War constitutional structure whose new rules of state-federal relations were open to judicial interpretation, and a Northern political climate in which sympathy for beleaguered freedmen did not exceed the desire to avoid a new Civil War. The rulings of Justice Bradley and his Supreme Court colleagues reflected Northerners’ interest in an exit from the intractable morass of the South.
For all the savagery they visited upon black freedmen and their white Republican supporters, for all their warfare against Republican-led state militia units, the white Reconstruction-era paramilitaries in Louisiana—as far as I can determine—never killed or wounded a single Federal soldier. Indeed, white supremacist politicians went out of their way to praise U.S. generals in their public statements, even as they may have cursed them in private. The reason was simple: the white supremacists assumed that, as long as they did not actually harm U.S. troops, white Northern public opinion would not support the all-out invasion that could have crushed them. And they were right.
Eventually, the U.S. government retreated from the post-Civil War South just as it would retreat from Vietnam and ****lia a century later—and as it may yet retreat from Iraq. What began as a bold effort at democratization and nation-building ended as a politico-military quagmire. I mean this as a provocative analogy, not an exact one: Washington’s duty to its own citizens, regardless of the cost, was more apparent than its duty to Southeast Asia or Africa. Still, for the idealistic men (and women) who traveled South from New England during and after the Civil War, places such as Coushatta, Louisiana and Vicksburg, Mississippi were almost as alien, culturally, as Mogadishu and Baghdad are to U.S. soldiers and diplomats today.
Surveying the ruins of Reconstruction after he left the White House, Ulysses S. Grant concluded that the South had needed neither home rule nor episodic federal intervention, but benevolent dictatorship. “Looking back, over the whole policy of Reconstruction, it seems to me that the wisest thing would have been to have continued for some time the military rule,” he said. “That would have enabled the Southern people to pull themselves together and repair material losses. Military rule would have been just to all: the Negro who wanted freedom the white man who wanted protection, the Northern man who wanted Union. As state after state showed a willingness to come into the Union, not on their terms but upon ours, I would have admitted them. The trouble about the military rule in the South was that our people did not like it. It was not in accordance with our institutions. I am clear now that it would have been better to have postponed suffrage, reconstruction, State governments, for ten years, and held the South in a territorial condition. But we made our scheme, and must do what we can with it.”
Grant’s analysis—a characteristic mixture of hard-headed militarism and wishful idealism—has its attractions. But, as Grant acknowledged, “our people did not like it.” The white South was firmly united behind “redemption,” while the Republican Party was an agglomeration of industrialists, farmers, Negro freedmen, and Northern-born officeholders in the South. This coalition lacked unity; it lacked conviction; it lacked certitude. And certitude was the one thing the white South had in abundance. The South pushed and pushed on Republican fault lines until they cracked. The Confederate States of America lost the Civil War. But the South won Reconstruction.
Howdy folks I'm back after a brutal move into a 1700 square foot new pad, set up one room as a 1980's disco, set up the sundeck for barbq and sunning, now busy putting computers in all the rooms but the bathroom and kitchen! Hooked up the stereo, computer and DVD to a nightclub sound system (I pity the neighbors!) now I just have 40 boxes of books to set up in a library in the attic.
As many of you know by now, my approach to the Civil War is fluid.
Muddy, would be a better word.
While others may strive to identify correct buttons on jackets in modern films made about the war, I am interested in the effect Lincoln has had to this day. This approach has gotten me into trouble as its pretty easy to bait me into explaining what I mean,
Which is usually based on something you have read that appeals to you, not based in historical fact or events.
then attacking me for explaining.
DJ, you are "attacked" for not thinking for yourself, only for being a pipeline for someone else's agenda.
(One particular person calls me a liar quite frequently around here and even when others chime in that I'm not, if I respond by explaining and not just name calling guess who gets in trouble? If I say there are no good wars and people list wars they think are just, and I respond, guess who is blamed for "hijacking threads"? So is the questioner to blame, or the person that answers?).
Maybe it's just people not buying the product YOUR trying to sell, even at the expense of historical accuracy?
Hey, it's not my house, so from now on such questions should probably be posted to me with a special message so as not to appear here and cause palpitations.
Relax, DJ, no one is calling for the EMTs nor requires the paddles because of the agenda you cannot bring yourself to research or reject.
Let's begin this look at Reconstruction with the murder of Lincoln. When did Lincoln go from being the most hated man in America ( in the North and South ), to his present state of being thought of as Jesus?
And here we have a completely objective, non-partisan, no bias question, right? And your surprised that such draws a negative response?
These excerpts from the New York Times (the entire article at the link is well worth a read ) I think cover this touchy subject- and why it was done.
WHEN LINCOLN BECAME JESUS
THIS year, Good Friday, the day commemorating Christ's crucifixion, falls on April 14, as it did in 1865. On that evening, in the balcony box of Ford's Theater in Washington, John Wilkes Booth fired a handmade .41-caliber derringer ball into the back of Abraham Lincoln's head.
In the days that followed Lincoln's death, his mourning compatriots rushed to compare him to Jesus, Moses and George Washington.
Despite the Good Friday coincidence, the Jesus parallel was not an obvious one for 19th-century Americans to make. The Protestant population, then as now, included a vigilant evangelical minority who thought that Jesus, sinless on earth, was defamed every time ordinary sinners presumed to imitate him. No mere mortal could be put beside Jesus on a moral balance scale.
But Honest Abe overwhelmed the usual evangelical reticence — by April 1865 the majority of Northerners and Southern blacks took him as no ordinary person. He had been offering his body and soul all through the war and his final sacrifice, providentially appointed for Good Friday, showed that God had surely marked him for sacred service.
At a mass assembly in Manhattan five hours after Lincoln's death, James A. Garfield — the Ohio congressman who would become the second assassinated president 16 years later — voiced the common hesitancy, then went on to claim the analogy: "It may be almost impious to say it, but it does seem that Lincoln's death parallels that of the Son of God."
Jesus had saved humanity, or at least some portion of it, from eternal ****ation. Lincoln had saved the nation from the civic equivalent of ****ation: the dissolution that had always bedeviled republics. "Jesus Christ died for the world," said the Rev. C. B. Crane in Hartford. "Abraham Lincoln died for his country."
The small minority of Jews and Catholics, equally awed by Lincoln's bodily sacrifice, joined Protestants in hailing the president's uncommon virtues: forgiveness, mercy, defense of the poor and the oppressed. Catholics joined Protestants in noting his Christ-like habits of brooding in private and keeping his own counsel.
Nearly everyone joined in heralding Lincoln's phrase "with malice toward none, with charity for all," which Christian mourners hailed as the heart of the Gospel. Those words from his second inaugural address, delivered just six weeks before his death, turned up on hand-scrawled banners all over the Union. People mounted them, along with black-bordered flags and photographs of Lincoln, in the windows of their homes and shops.
Thomas Nast's 1866 painting "President Lincoln Entering Richmond" (commemorating his surprise stroll into the capital of the Confederacy on April 4, 1865, shortly after Robert E. Lee's retreat) reinforced the sentiment: Lincoln shepherded his people just as Jesus did. The president walked into Richmond before Holy Week the way Jesus rode into Jerusalem before Passover: humbly, not triumphantly. Both men were enveloped by exuberant admirers.
Most American Christians turned to the Jesus analogy because they realized how much they loved Lincoln. They took his loss as personal, often comparing it to a death in the family. Many felt attached to Lincoln almost as they felt attached to Jesus. The striving rail-splitter from Illinois and the simple carpenter from Nazareth resembled them, the people. In contrast, while still heroic, Washington seemed more distant, even aloof.
Yet calculation as well as veneration entered the campaign to sanctify Lincoln. Radical Republicans revealed a political reason for comparing Lincoln to Jesus. Trying to explain why a rational Providence had permitted Lincoln to die, they decided that the savior of the nation had proved himself too Christ-like, too softhearted, too "womanly," for the necessarily punitive job of "reconstructing" the postwar South. God in his wisdom had put Andrew Johnson in place for the messy task of enacting justice.
Many Protestants also displayed a religious motive for emphasizing the resemblance between Lincoln and Christ. They made the president a virtual holy man because they wished retroactively to make him a morally impeccable and believing Christian. They considered theater-going, a favorite pastime of the president, as morally dubious; his choice of the stage for recreation on this day of crucifixion made them sick at heart.
And Lincoln, who after 1862 had spoken repeatedly of his dependence on God and Providence, had never referred much to Jesus. The barrage of Jesus comparisons offered a camouflaging aura of piety for a man who had enjoyed lowbrow, off-color humor as much as play-acting.
And WHY, DJ, did you leave out the last paragraph of the article you linked to?
"Seven score and one years have passed since Good Friday 1865, and Lincoln has always remained his own man. In his final years, he had set his own course by balancing a pressing sense of the rule of Providence with a persistent belief in the power of reason. Still, he can--and should--stand as historic demonstration that a republican hero's sacrifice for the people comes very close to Christ's ideals of self-denial and self-giving."
What made you choke and forget to include this in your "article?" This is why you get "attacked" DJ, because people cannot trust your sources or your use of them. Your agenda is clear. Let not the truth interfere with what I believe is truth.
Now that we have had another shot at seeing Lincoln trashed by someone in this century, who cannot be trusted to give a complete and honest hearing or viewing of a source, may we move onto something about Reconstruction?
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Thanks for the input, DJ. I was aware of the massacre, but had no inkling of the politically tangled aftermath. What fools we mortals be.
Where may one find a copy of that book?
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
I think there was a step between the end of the war and the beginning of Jim Crow. The animosity and hatred of blacks whites displayed and their exclusion from society was decidedly post war. The race riots that began during Grant's time and went on for decades did not occur before the war in the South.
I think we have a difficult quest on this one. Intentions are nearly impossible to guess, we can try to formulate theories to understand how it happened, which leads me to the UK punk rock band The Sex Pistols and The Alamo. Bear with me, I promise I'll make this work. How true it is? Well, I wouldn't bet on it but I think we can reach an understanding as to how it may have occured.
We all know the Alamo story, right? Pro-slavery Mexicans and Americans fight an army blessed by the Catholic Church for fighting slavery everyone in the Alamo is killed.
Nowhere in all this time, has anyone found any anti- Mexican thoughts attributed to the men in the Alamo. Not one. The Mexicans who died along side of them had the same opportunity to leave and didn't take it.
Funny thing happens. Articles appear from the east in the newspapers fabricating what happened, screaming in headlines about the Mexicans slaughter of the brave white men.
So people get their guns and travel to Texas- and sometimes they randomly shoot a Mexican. Remember the Alamo and all that.
This is not what Boone and the rest died for. It is what the newspapers invented.
Ahhhh, The Sex Pistols, punk rock at it's finest with a look that scared the heck out of the UK.Then TV shows began presenting punks, and newspaper articles began to appear.
Utter rubbish is pushed by the tabloids ( much as it was against hippies decades ago), the bands get sick onstage! The all wear mohawks! They stick safety pins in their face! Utterly stupid.
What happens? Kids start showing up with mohawks. They buy fake safty pins to attach to their face. Is that what the Pistols were about? Of course not.
See where I'm going with this? The shift occurs from the emerging next generation or wave comes in. They go by what they read or saw on Quincy.
Show me Civil War art with Blacks fighting for the South. Or standing holding a rifle by the Mistress of the plantation and an old man to fight off the yankees coming to burn down the house. The image of the freed men of color is gone. The largest realtor in New Orleans was a pair of Black Creoles. One became a slave owner and bought his family and freed them. No one tried to hang him!
The politicians were able to blame Blacks for the troubles in the South. Huey Long would be the first Southerner to break with apartheid by signing up Blacks to vote. The history books wrote them out, in both the North and the South. In the late 1870's when the Democrats took over the legislature, lynching began.
Take the Black confederate out of the equation and you are left with a cartoon approach to the war. And a public eager to find a scapegoat!
Oh boy here we go with the black confederates again. How do they fit into reconstruction? I have a hard time adding to this post as I generally read about the war and not what happened after. Would love some decent input on this. Was Lincolns original plan possible or even feasible? And why did Johnston go in such a different direction?
__________________ "In mortal combat, a man may and will become so infuriated by the din and dangers of a bloody fight that his heart will turn to stone and his every de sire [be] for blood."
John Hadley, 7th Indiana after the battle at Port Republic
Race riots were vicious. A white woman is rumored to have been raped, whites go to the Black part of town and start randomly killing Blacks who fight back. This scenario happens many times after the Civil War.
Funny thing, I have seen a poster from the KKK in Indiana in the 1920's when they ran everything in the state, urging people NOT to lynch. That threw me until I realized it made sense. Cops were KKK, the government was KKK, the Judges were KKK, why on earth get in the way of a legal lynching?
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