Day 55. April 24, 1862.
55
non-slaveholding whites referred to by the Southern gentlemen as constituting any part of what they called the South….
Thursday 24
Quite frosty this morning and cool all day. We was making some preparations to move. I sent my trunk to the Adams Express Co to send home as I did not need. I sent two cannon balls one grate shell 1 bomb shell & balls and it is cool this evening the mud is drying up very much. I wrote a letter to [illeg. initials, maybe JN] Burket. Cool this night
Note: A year from today: Picture of the 110th, “nearly annihilated at the Chancellorsville: https://www.loc.gov/item/2004677110/ What brave men. Makes me cry to think about them.
Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 31 (selections)
“Thursday, April 24th. On the 24th I wrote to my wife: “I avail myself of a lull in business caused by the dreadful weather of today, snowing great big flakes, like all the world all day, to write you while I can, for I do not know how long I shall have that privilege or how long before communication will be wholly cut off.
We have just received a messenger from Winchester. He says they have an iron rule there. Soldiers visiting houses, searching through everything marauding over the country and insulting people. Most of the troops there are Dutch (Germans) and they are more brutal than any others but our women there are not afraid of them and tell them freely what they think of their conduct. We learn that they have about 21,000 men under command of Rosecrans, Banks and Shields having gone away. We take a number of prisoners every day. Today we had one from Maine, one from Connecticut, one from Vermont, one from Pennsylvania, and one German. The Conn. man says the people in his state think they will conquer us by July but he does not think so now. Said he would take the oath of Allegiance to the Southern Confederacy if we would let him go.
McClellan is still idle on the Peninsula, bound down hand and foot by the mud of that region, said by those that know to be bottomless. His large army is being increased daily but still he fears to offer battle, knowing as he does, that his whole reputation hangs on the result. Gen. Jackson remarked today that he was in the same class with McClellan at West Point and that he thinks he lacks nerve.
If the foe should come to your door, outwardly submit, but coldly and abhor to the last those who bring to our firesides slaughter and devastation. Train our children, as you have done, in the ways of knowledge, virtue and holiness, and so fill up the weary hours of our separation; and may the Lord in mercy shorten these days of tribulation. I hope you have no need of anything and that you are all being restored to a measure of health. I am extremely anxious to hear from you.
The rain is now beating against our windows and it is dark without. I pity our poor shelterless men.
I hope the foe may not visit you but if they do try and keep them from destroying our property by claiming protection, as a lady, from the officers and they may give some heed to your claim. I do not think it worthwhile to move anything, although you might secrete your provisions if you can. My love to all.”
Note: Hotchkiss adds at the end of the entry: “I recall that I paid Col. Ashby a visit on the 24th, in his quarters near ours. Found him sitting before the fire in a very moody humor. He complained that Jackson was treating him very badly in desiring to divide his command into two regiments and requiring him to drill them. He seemed to think that although he had so many companies he could easily manage them all himself and that it was [unnecessary] to have them drilled.’”
The Peninsula: McClellan’s Campaign of 1862 Alexander Stewart Webb P. 92
“The sudden intelligence of Banks’ reverses, and the fact that Jackson was on the Potomac, caused the wildest excitement at Washington. McDowell, who had already taken up his line of march to join McClellan, was turned back and ordered to put 20,000 men in motion at once for the Shenandoah, in conjunction with Frémont, to capture the force of Jackson and Ewell; and on the 24th McClellan was advised by telegraph from the President that he must not look for operation from that quarter. So here again did the promising plan on the Peninsula fall through. Both generals protested or represented to the Government that Jackson’s movement was evidently intended as a “scare,” and that not only was Washington not in danger, but that an attempt to entrap “Stonewall” in the Valley by moving part of McDowell’s corps to that quarter would probably not succeed. The Government authorities and “advisers” however, appear to have been in no mood to listen to calm military reasoning. And McDowell was again withheld from McClellan, while his reinforcements, as predicted, could effect nothing against Jackson. The latter eluded Frémont, approaching from the West, and Shields’ from the East, fought and gained the battles of Cross Keys and Port Republic, and resumed a safe position up the Valley. By these flying movements he had paralyzed McDowell’s force, which was to have, and should have, joined McClellan and fallen like a hammer upon Richmond.”
The South in History and Literature: A Hand-book of Southern Authors from the Settlement of Jamestown, 1607, to Living Writers Mildred Rutherford P. 373
By William Tappan Thompson.***
“There has been, and still is, a class of whites in the South, the most ignorant, and yet the best meaning people in the world. This class is known as the poor whites or crackers. They have in their veins the best blood, being descendants of the Huguenots and Scotch-Irish, who came over in early Colonial days and settled in the mountain districts of the State, and were thus cut off for generations from all educational advantages, so that their descendants have lost all ambition to be learned, and have rather gloried in being unconventional and caring little because they murder the king’s English. These crackers are honest until it is proverbial, and the shutting of a door or bolting a window, night or day, is an unheard-of-thing among them. They are hospitable in the extreme. What they have, if only one day’s rations, they gladly divide with a newcomer. They have a certain kind of pride that makes them brook no interference with their rights or imputation against their honor. The negroes have always held them in contempt, calling them “po’ white trash,” and they have tolerated the negro in slavery, but have not been able to tolerate him in his “uppity educated ways.”
Now, these people have furnished material for many of our Southern writers, and Thompson, knowing them well, chose them as the theme for his Letters.
It is said that Major Joseph H. Butt, who recently died in Gainesville, Georgia, was the original “Major Jones.” He was an old batchelor, an ideal of the courteous, chivalric, aristocratic Southern gentleman. He was an intimate friend of Judge Longstreet and Thompson. He himself has been a newspaper man, editing at one time the “Eagle,” at Gainesville.
These “crackers,” living as they have for generations, far remote from the cities or centers of civilization, have advanced but little. Their language is a peculiar dialect, exhibiting a mixture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”
Note: Malachy Postethwayt defined the British empire: “A magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power, on an African foundation” in 1745.
Blood, Class, and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship (1990, 2004) Christopher Hitchens P. 156
“Great Britain’s establishment had a hundred and one ties of affection and emotion with the Southerners, and an equal and opposite repulsion for the tradesmen and financiers of the north. The very idea of the Southern gentleman– along the lines of caricature that Woodrow Wilson later etched– was an English simulacrum of the landed gentry and the colonial planter combined.”
“On Seeing England for the First Time.” Jamaica Kincaid
“At that moment, I was thinking, who are these people who forced me to think of them all the time, who forced me to think that the world I knew was incomplete, or without substance, or did not measure up because it was not England; that I was incomplete, or without substance, and did not measure up because I was not English. Who were these people?”****
ATTITUDE OF FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS DURING THE WAR.
“Looking over my scraps, I find I wrote the following during 1864. The happening to our America, abroad as well as at home, these years, is indeed most strange. The democratic republic has paid her to-day the terrible and resplendent compliment of the united wish of all the nations of the world that her union should be broken, her future cut off, and that she should be compell’d to descend to the level of kingdoms and empires ordinarily great. There is certainly not one government in Europe but is now watching the war in this country, with the ardent prayer that the United States may be effectually split, crippled, and dismember’d by it. There is not one but would help toward that dismemberment, if it dared. I say such is the ardent wish to-day of England and of France, as governments, and of all the nations of Europe, as governments. I think indeed it is to-day the real, heartfelt wish of all the nations of the world, with the single exception of Mexico—Mexico, the only one to whom we have ever really done wrong, and now the only one who prays for us and for our triumph, with genuine prayer. It is not indeed strange? America, made up of all, cheerfully from the beginning opening her arms to all, the result and justifier of all, of Britain, Germany, France and Spain—all here—the accepter, the friend, hope, last resource and general house of all—she who has harm’d none, but been bounteous to so many, to millions, the mother of strangers and exiles, all nations—should now I say be paid this dread compliment of general governmental fear and hatred. Are we indignant? alarm’d? Do we feel jeopardized? No; we help’ed, braced, concentrated, rather. We are all too prone to wander from ourselves, to affect Europe, and watch her frowns and smiles. We need this hot lesson of general hatred, and henceforth must never forget it. Never again will we trust the moral sense nor abstract friendliness of a single government of the old world.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 758-759
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet, said to her “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 337
“Asked if she knew her maker, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s trickster child Topsy replied, “I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me.” Nobody made the Old South. It just grew from the Cavaliers’ tobacco, rice, and indigo cultures in the Chesapeake and Carolinas through Scots-Irish Appalachia and the cotton states of the Gulf to the Mississippi River and out yonder in Texas. That sprawling South was not the least homogeneous. As two generations of scholars have shown, it was diverse and complex. Slavery was barely in evidence throughout much of Delaware, the western counties of Maryland and Virginia, eastern Tennessee, Kentucky beyond the bluegrass, and southern Missouri. The tobacco country of tidewater Virginia and North Carolina survived, but had long since conceded leadership to younger elites in the Deep South. There King Cotton reigned because British textile mills could not get enough of the stuff. Prices doubled to fifteen cents per pound in 1857, and production soared to 3.8 million bales by 1860, by which time cotton accounted for 57 percent of all American exports.”
P. 437
“What is more, King Cotton was by no means all puff and no fiber in 1862. Nearly one-fifth of England’s families lived off textiles one way or another, and the depletion of inventories from the 1860 bumper crop hurled Lancashire and Liverpool into depression. The Economist estimated that the Civil War made paupers of 35,000 heads of households, and increased tenfold the number of people on the dole. The stock exchange tumbled.”
P. 153
“Between 1810 and 1860 U.S. manufactures grew tenfold to about $2 billion, 45 percent of which was “value added” beyond the costs of capital, labor, and raw materials. The United States’ foreign trade grew from an annual average of $186 million around 1820 to $1.6 billion before 1860: a rate of increase greater than Britain’s.
Note: To illustrate the chaos of the times:
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 713 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
APR 24
“All very quiet today. No rumors from any source that can be relied upon.
Some think that the big war is about to commence, a war of some Magnitude. France Austria Mexico and the Confederacy on one side, against England Russia and the U S on the other, and the great battle ground will be in the Confederacy. One plan is for the Confederacy to go back into the Union, then France will declare war with the U S and land her troops on the C S Coast where they will have no opposition, and as the French Army advances through the C S the people will take the oath of Allegiance to France, and our soldiers will enlist under French colors & so on.”
Black Reconstruction in America W.E.B. DuBois P. 20
“For all that had been written and said about the ante-bellum South, one almost loses sight of about 5,000,000 white people in 1860 who lived in the South and held no slaves. Even among the two million slaveholders, an oligarchy of 8,000 really ruled the South, while as an observer said, “For twenty years, I do not recollect ever to have seen or heard these non-slaveholding whites referred to by the Southern gentlemen as constituting any part of what they called the South.’”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 23-28
Note: Cash on sallow cornpone & hookwormed Whites is so transcendent there had to have been some kind of supernatural intervention as he sat there & wrote. Of course my Southern relatives would have fit this, too, the Brewers, the Dopplers, the Tuggles. The way he puts forth the overall backdrop milieu of the entire situation is the Real War too.
“The poor whites in the strict sense were merely the weakest elements of the old backcountry population, in whom these effects of the plantation had worked themselves out to the ultimate term; those who had been driven back farthest—back to the red hills and the sandlots and the pine barrens and the swamps—to all the marginal lands of the South; those who, because of the poorness of the soil on which they dwelt or the great inaccessibility of markets, were, as a group, most completely barred off from escape or economic and social advance. They were the people to whom the term “cracker” properly applied—the “white trash” and “po’ buckra” of the house-niggers, within the narrowest meaning of those epithets, which, however, were very far from being always used with nice discrimination.
They exhibited some diversity of condition, beginning at the bottom with a handful of Jukeses and Kallikaks, with all the classical stigmata of true degeneracy, and scaling up to, and merging at the top with, the lower type of yeoman farmer. Not a few of the more abject among them were addicted to “dirt-eating,” but the habit was by no means so universal as has sometimes been claimed. Some of them were masters of hundreds of acres of a kind. Others had no claim to their spot of earth save that of the squatter. The houses of the better sort were crude shells of frame or logs, with as many as seven or eight rooms at times. Those of the run were mere cabins or hovels, with shutters for windows, with perhaps no other door than a sack, and with chinks wide open to the wind and the rain. Very often an entire family of a dozen, male and female, adult and child, slept, cooked, ate, lived, loved, and died—had its whole indoor being—in a single room.
But whatever their diversity, their practice of agriculture was generally confined to a little lackadaisical digging—largely by the women and children—in forlorn corn-patches. The men might plow a little, hunt a little, fish a little, but mainly passed their time on their backsides in the shade of a tree, communing with their hounds and a jug of what, with a fine feeling for words, had been named “bust-head.” And finally, as the very hallmark of the type, the whole pack of them exhibited, in varying measure, a distinctive physical character—a striking lankness of frame and slackness of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and mis-shapeliness of head and feature, a peculiar sallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar and a not less sallow faded-out colorlessness of skin and hair.
This is the picture—often drawn more or less as I have drawn it here—which no doubt has given rise to the whole classical notion of the poor whites as belonging to a totally different stock from the run of Southerners and particularly from the ruling class, and which has persuaded so many eminent historians that he must be explained by the convict servants and redemptioners of Old Virginia. But, quite apart from the considerations I have already urged against it, that theory can be fully disposed of by a moment’s reflection on what it is one is asked to believe in order to swallow it; to wit: that some fifty thousand indentured servants set down in tidewater Virginia in the seventeenth century account in the nineteenth for at least two million crackers, scattered all the way from the Great Dismal Swamp to the Everglades and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and beyond—that these servants and their progeny were so astoundingly inferior that through two centuries they spread over the land, past a dozen frontiers and through vast upheavals, without ever in the slightest losing their identity, without every marrying and intermingling with the generality, and breeding steadily only with their own.
Actually, there is nothing in the description of the cracker to give us pause— nothing which need raise any doubt that he derived from like sources with the mass of Southerners of whatever degree—nothing that is not readily to be explained by the life to which the plantation had driven him back and blocked him in. For this life, in its essence, was simply a progressively impoverished version of the life of the old backwoods. The forest, which had been the rock upon which that life had been built, was presently in large part destroyed by the plantation and the prevailing wastefulness. Hence the hunter who had formerly foraged for the larder while his women hoed the corn found himself with less and less to do. Lacking lands and markets which would repay any extensive effort as a farmer, lacking any incentive which would even serve to make him aid the women at tasks which habit had fixed as effeminate, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to sink deeper and deeper into idleness and shiftlessness. More, the passing of the forest increasingly deprived his table of the old abundant variety which the teeming wild life had afforded. Increasingly his diet became a monotonous and revolting affair of cornpone and the flesh of razorback hogs. And so, increasingly, he was left open to the ravages of nutritional disease (long since proved to be the cause of “dirt-eating”) and of hookworm and malaria.
Take these things, add the poorness of the houses to which his world condemned him, his ignorance of the simplest rules of sanitation, the blistering sun of the country, and apply them to the familiar physical character of that Gaelic (maybe a little Iberian) strain which dominated in so large a part of the original Southern stocks—to this physical character as it had already been modified by the backwoods into the common Southern type—and there is no more mystery about even the peculiar appearance of the cracker. A little exaggerating here, a little blurring there, a little sagging in one place and a little upthrusting in another—and voila!… Catch Calhoun or Jeff Davis or Abe Lincoln (whose blood stemmed from the Carolina foothill country, remember) young enough, nurse him on “bust-head,” feed him hog and pone, give him twenty years of lolling—expose him to all the conditions to which the cracker was exposed—and you have it exactly.
The matter of the derivation of the poor white, indeed, goes further than I have yet said. Not only is it true that he sprang from the same general sources as the majority of the planters, but even that, in many cases, he sprang from identical sources—that he was related to them by the ties of family. In any given region the great planter who lived on the fertile lands along the river, the farmer on the rolling lands behind him, and the cracker on the barrens back of both were as often as not kindred. And in sections half a thousand miles apart the same connection could be traced between people of the most diverse condition.
The degree of consanguinity among the population of the old Southern backcountry was very great. As I have suggested, economic and (for all the considerable variation in original background) social distinctions hardly existed prior to the invention of the cotton gin; certainly few existed to the point of operating as an effective barrier to intermarriage. And the thin distribution of the people often made it necessary for the youth, come of marrying age, to ride abroad a considerable way for a wife. Hence by 1800 any given individual was likely to be cousin, in one degree or another, to practically everybody within a radius of thirty miles about him. And his circle of kin, of course, overlapped more or less with the next, and that in turn with the next beyond, and so on in an endless web, through the whole South.
What happened when the cotton gin tossed the plantation ferment into this situation is obvious. Given a dozen cousins—brothers, if you wish—one or two would carve out plantations at home (in the Carolinas or Georgia, say); another or two, migrating westward, might be lucky enough to do the same thing there; four or five, perhaps attempting the same goal, would make just enough headway to succeed as yeoman farmers; and the rest would either fail in the competition or, being timid and unambitious, would try the impossible feat of standing still in this world of pushing men—with the result that, by processes I need not describe, they would gradually be edged back to poorer and poorer lands. In the end, they—or the weakest and least competent of their sons—would have drifted back the whole way: would definitely have joined the ranks of the crackers. And once there, they would be more or less promptly and more or less fully forgotten by their more prosperous kinsmen.
That this is really what took place is a proposition which does not depend on mere supposition or dogmatic statement. Whoever will take the trouble to investigate a little in any country in the South—outside the areas occupied by the colonial aristocracies, at any rate—will be immediately struck by the fact that the names of the people long prominent locally, people emphatically reckoned as constituting the aristocracy, are shared by all sorts and conditions of men. Stay awhile in any town of the land, and presently some gentleman native to the place will point you out a shuffling, twisted specimen, all compact of tangled hair, warts, tobacco stains, and the odor of the dung-heap, and with a grandiloquent wave of the hand and a mocking voice announce: “My cousin, Wash Venable!” What he means, of course, is what he means when he uses the same gesture and the same tone in telling you that the colored brother who attends to his spittoons is also his cousin—that you will take him seriously at your peril. What he means is that the coincidence of names is merely a little irony of God, and that the thing he says is clearly not so.
But though he may know it only vaguely if at all, it more often than not is so just the same. It is not necessary to rest on the reflection that, while it is plausible enough that some such coincidences should arise from mere chance, it seems somehow improbable that a hundred such coincidences in the South generally, can be so explained. If one goes out into the countryside where the “cousin” lives, one is pretty sure to come upon definite and concrete evidence. Maybe there will be an old woman—there nearly always is an old woman—with a memory like a Homeric bard’s. Capable of moving easily through a mass of names and relationships so intricate that the quantum theory is mere child’s play in comparison. And scattered here and there all about the South are—one-gallus genealogists, somewhat smelly old fellows with baggy pants and a capacity for butchering the king’s English, but shrewd withal and, like the old woman, capable of remarkable feats of memory. From such sources one may hear the whole history of the Vanables, beginning with Big John, who used to catch squirrels with his hands and whoop with laughter when they bit him, down to seventh cousin Henry’s third wife and the names that had been selected for the babies that were born dead. One may discover, indeed, that the actual relationship between the mocking gentleman in the town and “Cousin Wash” is somewhat remote. But—it was not so remote in the Old South.
Perhaps there are limits beyond which this should not be pushed….”
Note: Or perhaps there aren’t.
Conversations with Shelby Foote Edited by William C. Carter P. 263-264
“Question: How do you account for the awful things that did happen?
Foote: I blame the “decent people” for most of that. They did not want integration either, but instead of accomplishing it in an orderly way–and they did know it was coming–they stepped back and said, “Let the riffraff take care of it.” In place after place they did that. And wherever they did that there was big trouble, because those yahoos were very anxious to get some excitement into their lives. I think Mark Twain was right–the main cause of lynching was boredom.**** These people were delighted to get out and loot and burn and curse and spit. And if decent people had not permitted it, it would not have happened. You take a town like Yazoo City–a decent, good town. That town stepped back and let every yahoo in it take over during that time, believing that those were the people who were best able to deal with the problem. They were wrong. They were as wrong as they could be, and they know that now.”
Question: Was this a loss of nerve or looking the other way? Did they do it consciously?
Foote: They consciously believed many of the beliefs of these Ku Kluxers. They weren’t Ku Kluxers and never could be, but they wanted the same thing the Kluxers wanted. They wanted to keep segregation, and they believed that the Kluxers might be able to keep it regardless, but they should have known they were wrong the day they thought about it. Finally they did know, and they put these people back where they belonged, that is, within the law. And it was a sad thing–it always happens. It happened in Reconstruction; we had a good chance then, a really good chance; our grandfathers had a great chance to do the right thing. But it was a missed chance. They held the Negro down and left him for us to deal with when he finally busted out.
Question: Did you not say that many of the worst fears about blacks being integrated into the society have been realized?
Foote: Yes, I think that many of them have been realized. The disruption is just as great as it was expected it to be. It took a different form, but I was for letting the blacks up from the beginning–I said when the whole thing started we ought to being the Marine Corps out and knock everybody in Mississippi in the head with the butt of an M-1. I thought that would be the solution to the whole thing, so I was for it, all-out, the day it began. But the consequences have been dire, and they might have been expected. You can’t hold people down for two hundred years, and then all of a sudden let them up and not expect them to celebrate being up. And they celebrated it in some pretty strange ways. Memphis is the rape capital of the United States today. There’s more rape per thousand people in Memphis than any place in the United States. And that’s a celebration. It’s not a sex act; it’s an act of violence, a protest and a celebration. The muggings that occur are mostly done–around here anyhow–by blacks, and that’s a form of celebration. You do what you can, and when you can’t do anything else you go to crime. It’s a perfectly natural thing to do. And the presumption is that the people who have been let up and are celebrating will get tired of celebrating and become more civilized in all kinds of ways. I’m glad that they’ve been let up, but certainly there’s a price to be paid.’”
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 409
“Outside the cabin, the dark was coming down. Across the South, night riders went out– hooded in white, burning, raping, beating, and killing. They stole one state’s elections after another. They torched the houses of black folks bold enough to buy land, or even bold enough to paint their own house, for that matter. They rode to Washington and made deals. To resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876, northern Republicans made a corrupt bargain with the South’s Democratic rulers to let the latter have “home rule.” The “Redeemers,” as the white southern Democrats called themselves, changed the laws to roll back as much of Reconstruction as they could. By 1900, they had taken away the vote from most black men, and many of the less reliable white men as well. They also lowered the boom of segregation– “Jim Crow,” as people would come to call it– an array of petty and brutal rules. This forbade African Americans from, for instance, drinking from the same water fountains as whites, waiting at the same restaurants, and attending the same schools– that is, from enjoying the civil right to move in public spaces as equals or have access to the same educational and economic opportunities as whites.”
Note: Martin Luther King “Letter from Birmingham Jail” 1963
(excerpt)
“I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White citizens’ “Councilor” or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action” who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
Note: James Baldwin: “What is it you want me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost sixty years ago. I’m not going to live another sixty years. You always told me it takes time. It’s taken my father’s time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s time, my brothers’ and my sisters’ time, my nieces’ and my nephews’ time. How much time do you want for your ‘progress’”? YouTube, “James Baldwin was tired of waiting for progress. So are we.” Please watch. At once.
*** The hyoid is a small horseshoe-shaped bone in the neck is in the shape of a horseshoe. The first anti-lynching bill was introduced in 1900 by George Henry White, & he will be the last African-American in Congress for almost three decades… the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act will see 200 Bills in 120 years worth of tries to define lynching before the law as a Federal crime. But four states vote against: Texas, Kentucky, Michigan, Florida, making it 410-4 to not designate lynching a federal hate crime. “An overreach of the Federal government that tramples states’ rights.” Finally, the 117th Congress saw the Senate pass it on 3/7/22, & sent it to President Biden to sign. But again, the vote had holdouts, at 422-3, with 3 Republicans (Texas, Kentucky, Georgia) voting against. Note that the maximum penalty for the lyncher is 30 years. The lynchee gets death.
Also, it will take until late 2019 for the Department of Homeland Security– a new dept. since 9/11– to recognize White Nationalism a “major terror threat.”
****Literally too much to unpack in Foote here, but at the least, why weren’t these bored White folk lynching other bored White folk? Then none of them would have suffered boredom? There were more of them bored than Black people, surely. Or was boredom not it? Such a tough question, such a tough question, with only a black color target swinging from the limb of the old Oak tree, not white, those ropes, the special knots their fathers taught them when it drops down onto succeeding generations like a stigmata. And they’re gonna tie knots when the sun is down, when the sun is up, when the sun is in such stasis that your shadow up & walks directly behind you in a perfect outline like a long bullseye. All depending on the frequency or repetition of alleles.*
*“Discover up to 180,000 years” it says on Family Tree DNA, as if this were a desirable thing. Just $199, with personalized customer support, as if we are closer to unraveling the mystery than we’ve ever been. We arrive at the end of our line at a certain point. Then what?
Note: Something specifically American. An essence they think needs defined for the world. The best of us that we have. Or wish we had. Or wished we could ever have. It has to do with the city on the shining hill, that liberty one way or another, but shifts to the commercial, the look & tilt of a flag streamer floating in the breeze outside a K-Mart on a Blue Light Special night like something kept warm next to your body. They were only-so-far-Americans. They’d only take the city on the hill so far, and not a centimeter more if it meant someone with darker skin than them would be as American as them. Only they could be full Americans. To hell with everyone else.
Note: The Treaty between the United States and Great Britain for the Suppression of the Slave Trade, or the Lyons-Seward Treaty for short, was unanimously ratified by the Senate April 24, 1862. Also, the Land Act passes today in 1820, which reduces the price of land in the Northwest Territory and Missouri Territory, so more people head west to settle.
***William Tappan Thompson (1812-1882) designed the Confederate Stainless Banner (’63–’65). Cofounder of the Savannah Morning News, he promoted the Confederate flag’s second design, otherwise known as the “Stainless Banner” (Jackson was buried with it), & said on this day in 1863: As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race: a white flag would thus be emblematic of our cause. Upon a red field would stand forth our southern cross, gemmed, preserving in beautiful contrast the red, white, and blue. Such a flag would be a suitable emblem of our young confederacy, and sustained by the brave hearts and strong arms of the south, it would soon take rank among the proudest ensigns of the nations, and be hailed by the civilized world as THE WHITE MAN’S FLAG.” The final version of the flag, I’ve read different accounts about who designed it. Was it really PGT Beauregard? Or William Porcher Miles? This reminds me of group projects I’ve worked on where everyone & their cousin wants to take credit if it goes well.
****The British. These were people who, as late as 1945, had over 1/4th Earth’s land to themselves. There are pyramids in Egypt, some say, only because they were too heavy to cart off to the British Museum. The British Raj caused 31 famines in 120 years, killing tens of millions even as late as 1943. Spreading disease, death, a religious cult, & war on every continent, including Antarctica, where 40 England’s could fit. The empire was also the world’s leading drug dealer & human trafficker for a century. Out of almost 200 countries in the world, just 22 never had a British invasion, but I digress. (See March 22 for the 22.) Meanwhile, the English working class is for the North in the Civil War, because of course they are. Some kind of English high class? Without their slaves, they’d have nothing, be nothing.
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I sent two cannon balls one grate shell 1 bomb shell….
According to Tuskegee Institute: 4,743 lynchings from 1882-1968, with just 1,297 whites in that total. Only 67 indictments & 12 convictions. What do you call that? Watch this: a double-tap, shot twice in a row. The longest filibuster in United States’ history– 534 hours– to oppose the 1964 Civil Rights Bill.
Moore’s Ford lynching in 1946, Walton County, Georgia, where Roger and Dorothy Malcolm and George and Mae Murray Dorsey were dragged from their car on July 25th, tied up then shot 60 times by someone standing right in front of them. After 2,790 witness interviews & 106 testifying before the Grand Jury, no one ever got indicted. Yet in 2020 the court ruled the records could not be unsealed. What the fuck are they waiting for.
On record at the NAACP (differs from Tuskegee), in the war after the war: 3,450 Black Americans were lynched from 1882-1968. Only five states had no lynchings in that period. Mississippi had 581; Georgia 493. Seven presidents petitioned Congress to end lynching from 1890 to 1952. Southerners in the Senate repeatedly prevented Congress from declaring lynching a Federal crime. In 2005. Holding the Bill pitched to the air like an English sporting rifle, like they’re a member of the Order of the British Empire a last final moment. Or century. Or millenium. Just the same, the KKK don’t put the scissors down, put the bed linens back in the closet; it doesn’t narrow to a point & burn out; they’re still here in almost every state. In 2019, 954 hate groups, groups that have grown 813% since Obama was elected in 2008, like one long piece of rope we can tie to his election: 3x the death threats as any other president in his 1st year in office, like the death threats that followed Lincoln’s train East. We are now seven times more likely to be killed by a White nationalist extremist than by ISIS.
“For a Negro there’s no difference between North and the South. There’s just a difference in the way they castrate you.” James Baldwin.
In 2019, the NAACP advised against travel to Missouri, but if so, to use “extreme caution.” Announced travel on American Airlines consists of a “pattern of disturbing incidents.” And reported on the Bureau of the Census lawsuit, “perpetuating a cycle of political and financial disempowerment.” Motifs, themes, patterns. A modern mock-up, people who still believe your servitude is their birthright, the normative standard for humanity, that they are the default human that life is based on. Always whiteness as the default. Inviolate rights where white skin has an innate capability at government. Something to the blood it is. To run the world, to resegregate society, which lasted into the 1920s, then a second spike in the early 1950s that lasted throughout the 1960s. They’re trying again. Banner with giant flag on a plane over florida “Confederate heros matter.” There they go again. That it hovers low. Metamorphosia. They will remind you. It is never what it is, is it. But here’s the thing: you have to cut out the intestines if you don’t want the body to float.
Note: In 1892, there were 255 lynchings on record. Ida B. Wells put out a pamphlet “Southern Horrors Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” a sample of 728 lynches in recent years, which said only 1/3 had been charged with rape. The story’s the same one & it keeps coming back, A Hello Kitty hooded figure in an adult-sized neo-Confederate flag onesie, Easter bunny fat tail at the bottom, & eyes red jeweled plastic beads; an evil like that never really dies, it just circles Earth touching down continent to continent, refueling with molecules, the same old song too low to hear the words to. Note also: The 1936 Wilkes-Barre Record (PA) has a photo of Confederate Memorial Day as the Klan parades their white ghost eyehole asses smack down Main Street with weapons held high. In 2020, they can still be found in the wild, holding them pitched to the air like English sporting rifles, like they’re a member of the Order of the British Empire one long last minute, ordering at Chick-fil-A. See: The Old Rugged Cross, on PBS, the a KKK cross with bulbs taped around it. Can’t get more cheesy. Or the 60 foot one wrapped in burlap then soaked in gas by the Ladies Auxillary of “Klansville U.S.A.,” in a county fair cow pasture where they have a pig on the spit & they talk down on Lyndon Johnson.
Note: See Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. DuBois, chapter XVI, “Back Toward Slavery” for searing accounts of White on Black violence post-war. For instance, P. 550: “Some planters held back their former slaves on their plantations by brute force. Armed bands of White men patrolled the county roads to drive back the Negroes wandering about. Dead bodies of murdered Negroes were found on and near the highways and byways. Gruesome reports came from the hospitals– reports of colored men and women whose ears had been cut off, whose skulls had been broken by blows, whose bodies had been slashed by knives or lacerated with scourges. A number of such cases, I had occasion to examine myself. A veritable reign of terror prevailed in many part of the South.” And plenty others, like the Omaha Race Riot of 1919. Fifteen thousand there, one thousand bullets into the body of Will Brown, after which men who burned him posed with his corpse on fire. And the attempted lynching of Mayor Edward Parsons Smith. The U.S. Army sent 1,600 soldiers. The “Red Summer” was 60 White supremacist terrorist actions across dozens of U.S. cities from January through December. See: https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/history-lynching-america
Note: Southern commanders besides George Henry Thomas who stayed loyal to the United States partial list appears June 29.
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