uaskme
1st Lieutenant
- Joined
- Nov 9, 2016
- Location
- SE Tennessee
If people believe that white Southerners are to be applauded for the election of black men to Congress after the Civil War, then that is something that must be unlearned.
As a matter of fact, white former Confederates did not support the idea of black politicians. Rather they sought to assassinate them, or otherwise remove them from office. The only reason blacks were elected to office is because the United States, through a number of actions, forced southern states into allowing black men to hold office. But white southerners hated it.
After the collapse of the federal Reconstruction regime, the former Confederates showed their true colors. After 1901, and the primacy of Home Rule throughout the South, there was not a single black southerner in Congress until after the Civil Rights movement.
Black politicians during Reconstruction was not an innovation or creation of white southerners. It was an innovation and creation of white northerners and black southerners. The idea that these former Confederates deserve credit for the existence of black southern politicians is preposterous. If it was up to the former Confederates, the CSA would have won the war, and black men who were politicians would be picking cotton.
In his 1881 book The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Chapter XXVI, former CSA president Jefferson Davis spoke for white southerners about what he felt was natural relationship between blacks and whites, which would obviously prohibit black officeholding:
Their (the negroes') servile instincts rendered them contented with their lot, and their patient toil blessed the land of their abode with unmeasured riches. Their strong local and personal attachment secured faithful service to those to whom their service or labor was due. A strong mutual affection was the natural result of this life-long relation, a feeling best if not only understood by those who have grown from childhood under its influence.Never was there happier dependence of labor and capital on each other.The tempter came, like the serpent in Eden, and decoyed them with the magic word of "freedom."
These men deserve no credit for post war black officeholding. Overwhelming they considered blacks holding office an abomination. Once these men achieved home rule, they couldn't eliminate black officeholding, and even black voting, fast enough.
- Alan
This is a little nutty. A bunch of African Americans were elected to state and national office because of the Reconstruction governments, the carpetbaggers and scalawags and southern blacks and overbearing federal authorities that we hear so many complaints about, and despite white southerners. When white southerners were in charge again, they drove African American officials from office and African American voters from the rolls.
I realize people can get a little worked up in a debate, but let's not lose sight of reality.
Why didn’t the North try to install Black Congressmen? Why the Social Experiment in the South, not in the North? MA was one of the Yankee States to Refuse Negro refugees. North rejected Negro Voting for several years after forcing it on the South.
It was evident by 1876 with the expulsion of the Radical Republicans and the flipping of over 90 Congressional seats to the Democrats, the Racist Yankees didn’t approve of Black voting or Black Representatives. The Republicans wanted blacks to vote in the South politically they could have a political majority. A social experiment they used in the South but Refused in the North. By the end of Reconstruction and after adding Western States. Republicans faced the reality they would lose the the house, put would keep the Senate and Presidency. No more use of the Negro, they abandoned him.
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