RECONSTRUCTION!!!

[unionblue]

Ron, what's the going rate for a guy who is at a job and can't use the internet to do his first love, debate the Civil War?

Shoulda took a Postal "job", my friend!

Unionblue

It ain't enough my friend. Took away my property by proclamation and didn't pay me for it.

Wait, that is what Lincoln did with his Emancipation Proclamation ain't it?

See you Friday!!!!!!!

oldreb

[mobile_96]

Now I understand why my loss rate for mail delivery has reached 20%, Sent my server payment on July 1st, approx 12 miles away, and it not been received yet.
No online ability with my job either, but with being the plant quality control supervisor,2nd shift, leaves me with only a short lunch to read anythingCW. And somedays don't get a lunch until I get home
Ron, interesting number of books, as mine has just exceeded 300 with my last purchase from LSU and Hamilton Books. (My entire collection is Not listed on my website,yet.) Some I count as CW as they are concerned with both economics of the era and causes, such as the Nullification Crisis.
I also have the complete set of Gettysburg Magazine and North and South.
Wages
Lowest wages I find are about $1.25/wk for a at home seamstress. But this is not true in all case, but where unscrupulous owners were able to take advantage of workers.And thats just in this country. Seems that many women were willing to move here from Scotland as they could earn up to $100/year vs $15/year at home.
Laborers (commonly called mechanics at that time)
were earning in area of 1.75/day in New York and Chicago, Women would earn a bit less. And of course children even less. To stay at a boarding house in Chicago would run up to 2/wk, with board (meals) varying from 1 meal/day to as low as 1/wk
Bricklayers in New Orleans and New York were close in wages at as high as 2.75/day and staying in boarding houses at rates of up to 2.50/wk, which probably included 1 daily meal.
You rarely found any children, over the age of 9 IIRC, in school as they were needed to work to help support the family. Especially if the head of household was bringing in in the area of 300/year.
A figure that would not support a family of 5 or over.
I do know that the living conditions of the 'wage slaves' were very poor in many cases. However, most everyone I know today is still a 'wage slave' No work, no eat. I understand that many (but not all) people, could not just up and get another job. But that can be very difficult today also, my area is losing jobs faster than can be replaced. My last layoff lasted a full year and have friends out longer.
But the white wage slaves had things they didn't have to face as "slaves" did. I never had to worry about coming home from work and finding "massa" had sold the wife and kids off to pay a bill or gambling debt. On New Years day we don't get lined up on the 'work grounds' and rented off to someone for a year, with little or no chance to see or visit our family, and to receive little more than food and clothes for our years labor.
Ron, I use the internet quite a bit myself, but have learned its really necessary to try and cross check many of the sites especially if fail to list sources. Sometimes a email to the site can reveal their accuracy. If nothing further is learned thru the, then I'm off to the county lib., which can be a waste sometimes, as my collection is better than theirs to start with, message groups or to look at other online sites to crosscheck.

I concur on every point Charles. Especially the Library. I wish beyond Wishes that I could get into the Ohio State University, where they have over 1250 books, the entire collection of the Confederate Veteran, and many personal letters, memoirs, etc.
Best I have done so far was to become a researcher at the Mississippi Dept. of Archives and History and evn then they charge me $5/hr to do research for me. (living 790 miles from home and facilities is a royal PITA!)
Talk to you again real soon.

Somebody start a new thread. I am getting bored!

oldreb

[unionblue]

Thea,

Then Reconstruction was going on in the North, too. Grandma had 13 kids and Grandpa had no high school education and had to work on the railroad at odd jobs until he got to work as a high school janitor. My Mother and Father also did not graduate high school, but managed to raise a son and a daughter who completed high school and went on to college. Mom raised us until we could watch after ourselves and went to work in a glass factory. Dad worked as a caulk and point man in the bricklayers union. Fell three stories from a building he was on, broke his pelvis and cracked some bones in his back. After he survived, he went back to work at the same job. Said he couldn't let his family down.

I remember my Grandmother, Grandfather, Mom & Dad, talking about walking the railroad tracks to pick 'greens' and that would be the meal for supper. Hunger was not unknown in my little corner of the North either during the Great Depression. Our parents and grandparents are really remarkable people who sacrificed so much so that their children could be better off. No amount of thanks could be enough in my opinion.

Tough times are not unique to any part of the country, tough people are unique and I am proud to call them my ancestors and parents.

YMOS.
Unionblue
PS Thea, I am NOT trying to detract from your ancestors and I want you to understand that I believe you when you tell us times were hard in those days, even only if 10 years had passed since reconstruction. That is not my dispute.

[johan_steele]

Thea,

I got a job delivering papers at 10, started another... less honest job at 13 so my mother could pay the mortgage on the house. The food stamps fed us. My mother busted her back up to the point that she now requires a wheel chair and barely subsists on disability. She lives w/ her sister which helps pay the bills as she is also indigent. My father suffered through a malicious divorce, losing the house he built and almost his bussiness. He has worked as the county gravedigger since 1968, that income has fed him many a time when he might not otherwise have eaten, as well as running his own business since 1965. He has been the fire chief, state rep to the Legion, President of the IBWA, active in his church and community. He took time out of it a minimum of once a month, often twice a month, to drive a 10 hour round trip to see his son. He is likely the most respected man in his county.

I remember all too well visiting my father and looking in the fridge to see only a gallon of milk and the cupboard that held only beef bullion. He lived in the office of his shop for a decade, sleeping on a board tosssed over two sawhorses and showered twice a week at a sympathetic friends home down the road. Thankfully things have improved for him since the 1980's.

I worked my way through college working two full time jobs and a part time while averaging 16 credits a semester. Neither parent could support me in any way and my granparents twice robbed their retirement fund to give me $500. I ate well because I knew how to spend my approx $2 a day. But I worked myself into a nervous breakdown, averaging two and a half hours of sleep for a year will do that, quit college and joined the USAF for a steady paycheck and quality training. The rest is a relatively succesful story.

Life is ALWAYS hard unless you're wealthy. Reconstruction was little different than the Great Depression, or the 1857 crash in the north. In short life is pain, anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

There is a lot of old wealth in the Carolinas, dating to well before the Civil War. Having lived in SC, racism still exists there I assure you. Maybe I notice it more because my wife is mixed and I idolize her grandmother, a poor black woman w/ too much pride to ask for help. Until very recently my in-laws marriage was not legal because mixed race marriages were not legal in SC. SC still has a ways to go, but at the same time it's come a VERY long way since 1865.

As it is I bid you a good day!

[unionblue]

To All, But Mostly Tommy, Bill and Thea,

I am now into reading the Strange Career of Jim Crow, and find it very interesting reading. I have read up to Chapter 2, page 45, and hope to finish the rest of the book tonight. As of now, I have not read anything that has surprised me as I was already aware of some of the facts stated in the book thus far (i.e., Northern segregation, black codes, and Southern whites closer contacts and tolerence towards blacks in the decade after the Civil War).

I'll let you all know what I think when I finish.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

(Message edited by Unionblue on November 05, 2003)

[thea_447]

Reconstruction is far too complex a task to argue here but I'll say this: Simply put, the South spent 12 years under a ruthless and corrupt northern military rule and occupation which accomplished the true purpose of the conflict, a politically powerless South whose remaining wealth was plundered under the color of “law”. Now the standard books on the matter try to soften this fact. For instance, Chapter 31 paragraph 2 of Randall Donald’s Civil War and Reconstruction quotes James Ford Rhodes’s judgment that,the South’s fate was the “mildest punishment ever inflicted after an unsuccessful civil war.”(Pardon me while I complete the Heimlich maneuver on myself!) Too bad Mr. Rhodes wasn't around to console the destitute millions in the South with those words at the time. Mr. Donald also reprimands a couple of paragraphs later,same chapter that, “it is also important to remember that the reconstruction period cannot properly be understood in terms of legal or constitutional issues. It was,in fact,an abnormal time and, like all such anomalous situations, it forced the principle participants into ambiguous and self-contradictory positions.” (Wasn't that a big mouth-full and such a nice way to say the rules were being invented as the game progressed.)

Specifically what Mr. Donald means, is that the South,now prostrate and having lost a contest by force of arms over the principle that the government was constructed one way,but with the north maintaining another (to wit that the union was permanent and secession illegal), now submitted to the result of the contest and attempted to bring their existing state governments back into alignment with the union. (This of course being done per the north’s contention that they had never in fact left it....Am I going too fast here? It gets "curiouser and curiouser".) Neither Lincoln nor the US Congress would have any of this, now maintaining that the Southern states had in fact been out of the union and now had to reenter. (MORE double-talk!)

Despite the obvious inconsistency, there was a reason for such legal trickery. Had the Southern states simply been able to “pick up where they'd left off”,the old democrat majority and the devotion to the principles of the original republic eventually would have come back into power. The barely 10 year old new Republican Party, without the political neutering of the South which was crucial to their agenda’s survival would have died.

Lincoln’s plan at first, did not call for abolition. (Which is what the abolitionist Lysander Spooner complained:Lincoln was not interested in freeing the slaves, only in aiding his crony capitalist backers and could not be trusted. hmmm...Give Spooner an A!).

Lincoln was willing to allow only those slaves who had come under federal control and therefore to be free under his war measure as he called it (the Emancipation Proclamation). On this one point he was consistent. He'd maintained that he had no power under the constitution to free any slaves and had promised the South their property was safe as long as they were “loyal”.

As an example of the above, consider Lincoln’s amended version of the 13th amendment that had first been offered on 2 March 1861. In his state of the union address in December of 1862, that amendment now was to allow slavery to continue, with gradual emancipation until 1 January 1900. (As an aside, the year 1900 is the same year that the last legal slavery in the hemisphere expired when Brazil abolished slavery, without a war of course). To effect same, rather than the 14th and 15th amendments as we have them today, his proposed 14th was to provide that limited compensation to slave owners whose slaves were emancipated and the 15th was to provide the legal foundation for the funding of the deportation of all blacks so freed back to Africa. (And please don’t forget the crucial principles involved in providing compensation for forcibly freed slaves. The founders believed (rightly) that property rights are one of, if not the main, support for liberty.(hence the little known language of the 5th amendment regarding citizens not being deprived of property without due process). It was the call of the abolitionists that evil slave owners never be compensated for the forced loss of property, which represented another aspect of unconstitutional behavior the South was unwilling to brook. They felt that once such power was given to the federal authority, there would be no end to government at all levels, intruding on people’s rights to enjoy their own property. (Boy, were they right! Example:smoking bans sweeping modern America, which tell restaurant owners how they can operate their business (end result: depressed revenues), or farmers in the west (lost use some of their land due to federal wet lands regulation), or in the northwest (thousands of farmers bankrupted when the irrigation water they needed was withheld to protect some obscure type of fish). The big BIG fish in this barrel(pun intended), is the power of the IRS to seize property, without judicial approval or review for taxes owed to the federal authority, power recently in the news as to the capricious and damaging ways they have used same over the years.(Think confiscation and the king's power which formed much of the grievances cited against King George III in the D. of Independence).

The radical congress knew that Lincoln’s program, strong Whig but lukewarm Republican he was, was the death knell of their power. The surrender at Appomattox occurred on 9 April 1865. By 15 April 1865, Lincoln was dead and the radicals were free to implement the reordering of the constitution to assure Republican dominance (until 1930) of the federal government. Who benefited from his murder?)

To secure that power with Lincoln out of the way, the Jacobin US Congress declared the Southern state governments to be void (including Virginia’s, which had been the first legislative body on the North American continent). They had to be rebuilt from the ground up, with new constitutions, specifically renouncing secession that had to be approved by congress and overseen by federal armies. The condition for their reentry into the union then was their agreeing to the Jacobin versions of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. (I would encourage anyone to read at length about the dubious passage of these amendments). It was the 14th in particular upon which federal supremacy rested, which ****ed state governments into the status of mere provinces and turned people into citizens of the US rather than of their respective states. These are the amendments which granted blacks the right to vote etc, and coupled with the deprivation of the right to vote of anyone who had supported the Confederacy, which comprised almost all white Southerners and some blacks, that enabled the Republican party to control the Southern state governments and the national government for 3 generations. It did so precisely by USING black votes. In other words, blacks were NOT given freedom, equality and the suffrage out of high blown moral principles. They were given such, because they were NEEDED to obtain the political ends and survival of the party friendly to the New England mercantilists. The fact that the country, even the north with Ohio and New Jersey being the most adamant, was not in favor, fearing that freed and politically empowered blacks would come north, is why those amendments had to be forced through extra constitutional means. It was also accomplished by what came to be called, “waving the bloody shirt”. The northern radicals screamed, “we just fought a war to free the slaves and establish equality (see the first line in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address- where he claims two fictions: that the founders brought forth a new nation [they brought forth 13 independent states that confederated with one another, not a nation, whose purpose was to, as the preamble of the confederating agreement {the US Constitution} said ‘…..secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity’, not dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal which of course the Dred Scott decision had shown manifestly that equality of the Jacobins of the French Revolution – later communist - sort was not what the founders had had in mind), we must preserve our victory”, so the north eventually acceded to these amendments to avoid admitting that the sacrifice of 360,000 of its sons had been in vain!

Anyone with the ability to read can see that the north had to take this position regarding its war aims, not just to mask its true goals, but also because of the legal aftermath of a country divided. Jefferson Davis was captured in May of 1865 and held in captivity for two years under a treason charge. The US Attorney General prepared the government’s brief against Davis, consulted the best legal minds in the country and advised the president that they'd better drop the case, because Jefferson Davis, the preeminent constitutional scholar of his time, would show WITHOUT a doubt that the country had been founded on the right to secession (i.e., Jefferson’s famous ‘consent of the governed’ principle and its victory over the English had established a legal precedent, which prevented the term rebel from being applied to the Confederates). The north would be shown as having fought AGAINST the very principle that had founded the country in pursuing an unconstitutional war (but in any event making a mockery, of the last line of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address). So the treason charge was dropped, with the concurrence of the cabinet after this legal advice, one saying, ‘we have our victory, that should suffice’ and Davis was released, as they explained, in a gesture of goodwill and humanitarian spirit. The brief Davis wrote in his defense while in prison, became the core of his two volume book, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government.

So Lincoln’s saving the union (because while saving it geographically he was killing it in principle), took a back seat to a country now “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”. At all times and places where that ethic has taken hold, it has been based on the following basic points: 1. We(your moral and intellectual superiors) know how people should live 2,Your group is not living by that vision 3. It is imperative, for the sake of, peace, human rights and progress that humankind should be made to conform with that vision 4.Given that imperative, we have the right to force that result 5.Even if it means destroying the opponents of that vision.

It was precisely that ethic which founded the abolitionist instigated John Brown raid. It is not an insignificant fact that Union armies marched South singing, “John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave” or that the tune of that song would become “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, singing of “stomping out the grapes of wrath”. This stance was entirely in agreement with northern fundamentalist religion, growing out of Puritan New England, (which in the colonial period had brooked no dissent from its understanding of Christian doctrine thereby creating Pennsylvania and Rhode Island from the Christian sects which disagreed with them). In fact, the millennialism (holding that to usher in the return of Christ required the creation of the perfect [utopian] society here on earth as its prerequisite), coupled with this wrathful Old Testament sort of God’s avenging justice, is why there are those who argue that this program’s (one writer calling it Hebraic Puritanism) victory should be called “Yankeeism triumphant”. The secular version of this program, also to be found predominately in New England, was called Transcendentalism and its roots were in the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the father of the romantics. His philosophy (on which there will be more below), became the foundation for Jacobin/Socialist/Communist/Fascist (they are all of a piece as will be become clear) thought and is the reason that all such societies founded on this ethic have ended up slaughtering millions in the name of the glory of the state, for the sake of human rights and progress, freedom or whatever other slogan specific to time and place pertained. In Jacobin Revolutionary France, the period of the rule of folks agreeing with this principle came to be called, “The Terror”. Such is the reason, when the north celebrated the “martyrdom” of the terrorist John Brown, that event became an important trigger for the South’s secession.

<<“They were fighting for freedom.” Freedom for who? White guys, that’s who.
When half your population is enslaved, you are not fighting for freedom.>>

Brilliant politics no- to force one's enemies to adopt one's own view (that the South's fight was over race and slavery) thereby arranging to equate its symbol with negative connotations. The use of race politics is exactly how power was shifted to the federal government and how it's maintained there today. Barry Goldwater, a bitter foe of segregation, opposed the civil rights bills as unconstitutional. Did the South use the same symbol they used 100 years before to oppose unconstitutional behavior by the federal authority? Were there also racist elements to that? You bet! and do you think the nature of such had anything to do with the cynical and ruthless creation of precisely the kind of nasty, ignorant reaction to northern occupation policies post 1865. You better believe it. If the real story was known, the race game would disappear, but so would the US government as we know it. That's why the power elite will never give that game up. It has too much utility for maintaining their warfare/welfare state for which they depend for their wealth and position. Lincoln fought his war for precisely the creation of this type of system.

[thea_447]

It is worth noting that, in 1865, when Karl Marx issued his praise of Abraham Lincoln, part of that praise was for Lincoln's "...reconstruction of a social world." Obviously Marx had no problem with the term when used in this fashion.

Thaddeus Stevens, no admirer of the South, made a speech in September, 1865 in which he said of the South: "But reformation must be effected; the foundation of their institutions--political, municipal and social--must be broken up and relaid or all our blood and treasure have been in vain. This can only be done by treating and holding them as a conquered people."

Both Marx and Stevens (kindred spirits) talk openly about changing the social institutions and foundations of the South.
Frank Conner, author of "The South Under Siege 1830-2000" wrote: "In 1865, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens and Senator Charles Sumner created the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Under its aegis they developed a long-range master plan for impoverishing, subjugating, dominating, and humiliating the Southerners, while destroying their culture and brainwashing them into third-rate copies of the Northerners." Conner notes the main objectives of this ideological war. They are: "(1) to discredit white Southerners; (2) and thereby discredit Southern Christianity; (3) which would clear the way for them to discredit Christianity throughout the United States; and (4) replace it with their own religion of secular humanism as the official religion of the U.S."

Mr. Conner has noted some of the more degrading aspects of the "reconstruction." He writes: Although many ex-Confederates owned no clothes but the patched uniforms they had been wearing at the surrender, it was now unlawful for them to wear those clothes. They had to cut off all the buttons stamped 'CSA' and to fasten their clothes as best they could with pieces of string. Ex-Confederate parolees had to carry their paroles on their persons at all times, and display them to any U.S. soldier upon demand. Woe unto any Southerner who displayed--under any circumstances at all--a Confederate flag or any other symbol of the Confederacy; he would be arrested immediately."

"Reconstruction" in the South after the war was intended to tax what little was left in the South, to put the South under Northern military rule and fill all the political offices with Northern carpetbaggers and their friends, to make sure the blacks got the vote and to make sure they all continued to vote Republican so the pillage could continue as long as possible.

[unionblue]

Thea,

So I guess now, Karl Marx is no longer a 'good' reference from the Southern point of view?

(Thea, just checking to see if I need to change the type of ammunition I'v e been using! <grin>

Sincerely,
Unionblue

(Message edited by Unionblue on November 20, 2003)