Day 114. June 22, 1862.
114
who had rightfully expected to be tried and hung as traitors….
when white southerners threatened to reverse the verdict of the war….
June Sunday 22 1862
Quite pleasant this morning. The sun came up quite bright. We found ourselves at Mrs Harnishes. We went to Church at Water Street.* Rev Christ Preached. The House was quite full
Note: Ephraim is sounding better today. Lutherans all came out, the day after equinox, quite bright sun, & not a word deeper…. not about the war, the scripture, his friends or family, the men back in VA., or his thoughts about furlough ending. Perhaps this was the day he decided ENOUGH. The final day he writes, he’ll note Rev. Christ drops him off in a wagon. I wonder if Ephraim spoke with him about whether to return to the battlefield. In the end, Ephraim’s Christ, one way or another, delivers him home.
American War Ballads and Lyrics: A Collection of the Songs and Ballads of the Colonial Wars, the Revolution, the War of 1812-1815, the War with Mexico, and the Civil War. Volume II 1889 Edited by George Cary Eggleston P. 204-206
The Conquered Banner by Abram J. Ryan
“Furl that Banner, for 't weary,
Round its staff 't drooping dreary :
Furl it, fold it,—it is best ;
For there 's not a man to wave it,
And there 's not a sword to save it,
And there 's not one left to lave it
In the blood that heroes gave it,
And its foes now scorn and brave it :
Furl it, hide it—let it rest !
Take that Banner down ! 'tis tattered ;
Broken is its staff and shattered,
And the valiant hosts are scattered
Over whom it floated high.
Oh, 't hard for us to fold it,
Hard to think there's none to hold it;
Hard that those who once unrolled it
Now must furl it with a sigh !
Furl that banner—furl it sadly ;
Once ten thousands hailed it gladly,
And ten thousands wildly, madly,
Swore it should forever wave—
Swore that foemen's sword could never
Hearts like theirs entwined dissever,
And that flag should float forever
O'er their freedom, or their grave !
Furl it !—for the hands that grasped it,
And the hearts that fondly clasped it,
Cold and dead are lying low ;
And that Banner—it is trailing,
While around it sounds the wailing,
Of its people in their woe ;
For, though conquered, they adore it—
Love the cold, dead hands that bore it,
Weep for those who fell before it,
Pardon those who trailed and tore it ;
And, oh, wildly they deplore it,
Now who furl and fold it so !
Furl that Banner ! True, 't is gory,
Yet 't is wreathed around with glory,
And 't will live in song and story
Though its folds are in the dust !
For its fame on brightest pages,
Penned by poets and by sages,
Shall go sounding down the ages—
Furl its folds though now we must !
Furl that Banner, softly, slowly ;
Treat it gently—it is holy,
For it droops above the dead ;
Touch it not—unfold it never ;
Let it droop there, furled forever,—
For its people's hopes are fled.”
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 157
Former slaves’ version of “Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
“We are done with hoeing cotton,
We are done with hoeing corn.
We are colored Yankee soldiers,
As sure as you are born.
When Massa hears us shouting,
He will think ’tis Gabriel’s horn,
As we go marching on.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 209-213 (selections)
“If the bringing over of the plantation into industry meant that he was at the command and mercy of the masters of the mills, the fact was lost upon him. The plantation was the only pattern of large-scale organization he knew. More, it was in essentials the only possible one in the premises. He had to have a house to live in, and as obviously could not find it ready-built in the Southern towns or provide it for himself. And if the masters of the fiefs were largely paying for church and school, for preachers and schoolmasters and policemen, they were doing it—out of scoundrelly calculation?
Nothing of the kind. At least, if there was any part of that here, it was almost wholly subconscious. In the main, they were doing it simply because these things, like houses, had to be provided from somewhere and because the burden was plainly too great for the worker himself. Because, the worst labor-sweaters included, they were themselves nearly always pious men. Because they were full of the ancient Southern love for the splendid gensture. Because they shared in the rising enthusiasm for education—genuinely felt that a degree of schooling would be an excellent thing for the children of the masses, provided of course it did not interfere with their duty to work. Because it was an essential part of the Southern paternalistic tradition that it was the duty of the upper classes to look after the moral welfare of these people and get them safely into heaven at last—because that tradition had been introduced and firmly established in the mills by the founders of Progress—because it was so ingrained in Southern thought and expectation that it would scarcely occur to anybody to defy it—because it was so bound up with the Southern notions of the good man, of leadership, and of aristocracy, with all that the man coming up in the scale naturally aspired to represent and body forth, that it gloriously flattered his vanity.
The whole, in short, was largely meant and entirely conceived by the mill-owners as a benefaction. It genuinely did contain much of benefaction. The village parson and schoolmaster naturally and continually and in the best of faith represented it as pure and unalloyed benefaction. The upper classes, looking on from the viewpoint of Progress, of course saw it in the same fashion, and did not fail to say so. When the workman went into a store in the town, he was certain to hear—when the doctor came down into the mill village, he was sure to remind him—how great was his debt to the good people who were making these benefactions possible. The Southern newspapers, headed by the Atlantic Constitution and the Charlotte Observer, the orators at political rallies and picnics, the pulpit at large, nearly every organ of publicity or captain to the South—all these were constantly—had been for twenty years increasingly—dinning it into the worker’s ears that here was benefaction practically without parallel in human annals.
And to top the measure, the baron rarely used his power beyond the limit traditional on the plantation and was not often too arrogant in its exercise. Men were discharged arbitrarily; but there was perhaps less of that here than has been common elsewhere. And there was not enough of it to arouse any general resentment, or even any general feeling of insecurity. When election time came around pressure was brought to bear on the voting workmen, of course. But always it was brought in the shape of a hand on the shoulder and friendly advice; from within the pattern of the old-fashioned paternalism, and in the light of the unstudied knowledge that it was far easier to cajole these people, to flatter and suggest, than to command and threaten.
Thus it fell out that the common white in the mills accepted the plantation system in industry, not only without question, but as being a great a benefaction as he was assured it was.
P. 212
The master of the mill stood to his workmen as the immediate representative of the upper classes, of course. And it was an inherent part of his paternalistic approach, a natural corollary of the bringing over of the plantation system, that, as I have before suggested, the old easy personal relations should have been brought over too. The baron knew these workmen familiarly as Bill and Sam and George and Dick, or as Lil and Sal and Jane and Lucy. More, he knew their pedigrees and their histories. More still, with that innocent love of personal detail native to Southerners, he kept himself posted as to their lives as they were lived under his wing; knew their little adventures and scandals and hopes and loves and griefs and joys. Day by day he moved among them full of the small teasing jests and allusions to kinsfolk so dear to Southern heart, of ready and benign counsel, of sympathetic interest and concern for Granny Meg’s rheumatism or the treasured cow that had died– a concern which in even the most hard-bitten wage-shaver was somehow and characteristically real at the core.
Did he want hunting and fishing companions? He was often likely to take them from the mill. Sometimes, in truth, when there was holiday, he might pick up the whole crew, man, woman, and chit, and carry them off to a barbecue or picnic, where, as likely as not, his women might appear, a little cool and remote it might be, but sweetly gracious after the tradition of the South.
And when the workman went into the town, there was still much the same personal atmosphere that had always existed. As in the old days, there was nearly always some more or less exalted person to invite him into the closet for a drink. And as of old, there was the inevitable great lawyer, towering, leonine, long of coat and mane, the breathing epitome of the Confederacy, to drop a familiar hand upon his shoulder and warm his heart with confidential chat about the Proto-Dorian bond of the Democratic Party.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 433
“In the South, intimidation by the Klan and allied groups cut into the Republican vote, returning Democratic majorities in Louisiana and Georgia. In Georgia, eleven counties with a black voting majority recorded not a single vote for Grant.
P. 432
“The local Union League chapter sponsored a campaign rally on September 19, 1868. Blacks came from the surrounding plantations, some with weapons because of threats from local whites. As they entered the town square, a much larger group of armed whites opened fire, killing nine blacks and wounding dozens more. Despite the Republicans’ numerical advantage in voter registration, the district went for the Democrats on election day. White paramilitary groups repeated this scenario in various versions throughout the South as the November 1868 election approached. Ulysses S. Grant, the Republican presidential nominee, campaigned on the slogan “Let Us Have Peace.” It was an odd theme considering that the war had ended more than three years earlier.”
P. 498
“Such intimidation worked, and the Democrats swept to victory in Mississippi. They would not allow Governor Ames to finish his term, threatening him with impeachment. Fearing for his safety, Ames resigned and fled the state. A federal grand jury convened several months later and concluded that the “fraud, intimidation, and violence perpetrated” in the 1875 state elections were “without parallel in the annals of history.” The South’s second war of independence was reaching its climax.”
How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays Kiese Laymon P. 118
“If white American entitlement meant anything, it meant that no matter how patronizing, unashamed, deliberate, unintentional, poor, rich, rural, urban, ignorant, and destructive white Americans were, Black Americans were still encouraged to work for them, write to them, listen to them, talk with them, run from them, emulate them, teach them, dodge them, and ultimately thank them for not being as fucked up as they could be.”
Conversations with Shelby Foote Edited by William C. Carter P. 28-29 1970 interview
“Carr: What are some of the blank spots that you’ve found in your research?
Foote: It’s very hard to get straight in your mind how different people in the South felt about the war. It’s hard to get hold of, balancing their pride against the strain, balancing their losses against their hopes, balancing their early hopes against their later realizations, the bitterness of the thing. They had a terrible adjustment to make. They thought they were going to be successful at the start. There was no doubt about it. They thought there wouldn’t be anything or if there was any fighting, it would all be over real quick because Southerners could whip Yankees. They had to adjust to it. And then when it was over, they had the hardest time of all. They had to admit that they had been whipped, and that was hard. They explained away being whipped by saying the other side had all the money and men. Then they had to say that they would have been whipped no matter what happened, because the North won the war fighting with one hand, and if it had had to use both hands, it would have done it.
Carr: I hate to draw parallels, but I think the Normans were able to completely subjugate the Anglo-Saxon culture, because the culture just wasn’t able to carry on.
Foote: Yeah, I think the Southern culture was not able to support the strain that was put on it. People were not able to unite and lay aside differences. They were not able to give up things. Southerners have a curious way– they would send their sons, but they wouldn’t lend their slaves. They would make all kinds of sacrifices, but they would not make certain sacrifices. Their conservative principles were more important to them than their new country was. They would pass resolutions saying, “Better that we be trumped off the end of the continent into the Gulf of Mexico than that we should compromise our principles.”
P. 33
Foote: What the union-loyal Southerners had, more than anything else, was not a love of the Union as much as it was a fierce independence. They were not going to let the state of Mississippi* carry them into something that they had no interest in.
P. 34
Foote: The Confederacy asked for nothing more than to get its case before the Supreme Court, and the tragedy was that they couldn’t get it there. Davis, after the secession of Mississippi, stayed in Washington, hoping to get arrested** as a secessionist, because then he could get to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court would almost certainly have declared secession legal. Almost certainly.
P. 34
Carr: The thing that always interested me about the Confederacy was that as a nation, it was stillborn….
Foote: You see, they were trying to do an extremely difficult thing: they were trying to mount a conservative revolution, and it is an extremely difficult thing to do if your people are not radicals and won’t hand together. Anytime, you ask one of them to give up something for the sake of the whole, he says, “Not me, that’s not why I got into this thing, to give up anything.” Alexander Stephens said if he had to have a despot ruling him, he would prefer it to be a Northern despot.
Foote: The Confederacy’s position got idealized because it was never put to the test. The Northern position got run down something awful because it was put to the test and failed. They won the war and had their war, and led us through one of the worst eras in this country’s history. The South never had a chance to do anything, so it can’t be blamed– practically. The monument at home says: “To the memory of the Confederacy, the only nation which lived and died without a sin on its record.”
Foote: A war comes along and you know how crooked the war is, and that there are a lot of people who are totally innocent who are going to be killed in it, and you know how wrong it is…
Carr: Right.
Foote: But you would not miss it for anything. It is your war. It doesn’t make any difference if it is a good war or a bad war or whether you are right or wrong. You can’t even make those judgments. But this is your war. Now here are these kids today, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, or twenty-six years old, saying, “Hell no, I won’t go.” Well, they could not keep me out. They couldn’t keep Hemingway out, or Faulkner, or any of them out. They would run off at the age of eighteen and join the Air Force or something. Anything to get there. Something that big going on in the world and be nineteen years old and miss it? It’s unbelievable.
P. 124 (from a 1978 interview)
Foote: Most historians are, I am afraid, so concerned with finding out what happened that they make the enormous mistake of equating facts with truth. No great column of facts can ever pose as the truth. Truth is order imposed on those facts; truth is the breath of life breathed into facts. It is not the facts. You can’t get the truth from facts. The truth is the way you feel about it. It’s made me question our judgment on great American political figures, for example. I remember the Kennedy years– both of them– and I don’t think history will ever get any kind of true view of John Kennedy and what he meant to us at the time he was alive, because the facts don’t support what we felt. What we felt about Kennedy cannot be expressed with facts. It was a feeling and that is going to be very difficult for future generations. They may be able to quote what some of us had to say about him, but that is not enough, either. It was a feeling that has to be communicated and some future historian is– in the course of writing the history of the United States– going to get to the Kennedy years and just be plumb mystified. What in the world was going on? He looks like a pretty ordinary little gent to me, and historians are not going to understand what he was. They are not going to understand that he followed Eisenhower when everybody was so weary of this big Kewpie doll sitting in the White House.”
kenrahn.com/JFK/History/The_deed/Smeed/Brehm
Quoting Charles Brehm, witness to the JFK assassination (15-20 feet away): “When all of us old goats are dead and gone, there will be somebody here with some theory about the shot from up there, or the shot from down there. They are not going to understand the reaction. It makes you question history when you see how much you cannot do. Up there, or over in the sewer. They’ll still come up with those things, but there won’t be anybody around who was here to say, “No, you’re wrong on that.’”
“Original black and white photographic negative taken by Dallas Times Herald and United Press International photographer Darryl Heikes. This image shows assassination eyewitness Charles Brehm giving a telephone interview while at the Dallas County Sheriff’s office the afternoon of November 22, 1963. This image is the fifth photograph on negative strip 22 in the Dallas Times Herald collection. The Dallas Times Herald newspaper employed a number of staff photographers who were assigned to cover President Kennedy’s visit to Fort Worth and Dallas. Not all photographs have a confirmed photographer.”
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth184758/
Note: 1865: By proclamation, President Johnson grants amnesty and pardon to all persons who directly or indirectly participated in “the existing rebellion”– with some exceptions– upon the taking of an oath declaring their allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and laws. Some diplomatic and civil officers and those above the rank of colonel in the army & those above lieutenant in the Navy and those educated at the United States Military and Naval Academies were not given a free pass for treason.
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War Edmund Wilson (1962) P. 234
“For the Negroes, the moment seems hopeful. The Yankees remain on the ground, with their military commandants and their Freedman’s Bureaus, to which the ex-slaves can come with their grievances and problems. The religious and benevolent societies of the North have established many Negro schools. Yet it is plain that Mississippi and South Carolina are already putting through new codes designed to restore serfdom, and the government of Andrew Johnson is confusing the situation on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina by giving back to the white planters, who have taken the oath of allegiance to the Union, extensive properties on which Negro freedmen have been encouraged to settle and on which they have been comfortably farming.”
The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People, 1867 J.T. Trowbridge, J.H. Segars, Editor P. 587
“The Southern plan is simple; it is this: that the States, lately so eager to destroy the Union, are now entitled to all their former rights and privileges in that Union. Their haste to withdraw their representatives from Congress, is more than equalled by their anxiety to get them back in their seats. They consider it hard that, at the end of the most stupendous rebellion and the bloodiest civil war that ever shook the planet, they cannot quietly slip back in their places, and, the sword having failed, take up once more the sceptre of political power they so rashly flung down. Often, in conversation with candid Southern men, impatient for this result, I was able to convince them that it was hardly to be expected, that the government, emerging victorious from the dust of such a struggle, and finding its foot on that sceptre, should take it off with very great alacrity. And they were forced to acknowledge that, had the South proved victorious, its enemies would not have escaped so easily.”
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism Edward E. Baptist P. 407
Abraham Lincoln was either the last casualty of the Civil War or one of the first of a long civil rights movement that is not yet over. He was succeeded by his vice president, Andrew Johnson, who was unfortunately an alcoholic racist bent on undermining emancipation. Johnson spent the summer signalling to southern whites that they could build a new white supremacy that looked much like the one African Americans had fought to end. In the fall of 1865, southern white voters made it clear that they did not plan to come to terms with freedom. In elections intended to reseat southern states in Congress, they sent a host of sullen Confederates back to Washington. At the same time, whites in southern legislatures were trying to keep the status of African Americans as close to slavery as possible, passing vagrancy laws to limit mobility, proposing apprenticeship laws binding black youths as unfree laborers in white families, and making troubling threats about bringing back the whip as cotton-picking rates declined.
White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide Carol Anderson
P. 15
“First, within weeks after taking office, Johnson pardoned scores of former Confederates, ignoring Congress’s 1862 Ironclad Test Oath that expressly forbade him to do so, and handed out full amnesty to thousands whom, just the year before, he had called “guerrillas and cut-throats” and “traitors… [who] ought to be hung.” Beneficiaries of his largesse included the head of the Confederate Army, Robert E. Lee, and even CSA vice president Alexander Stephens. Even more shocking, given Johnson’s decades-long resentment against and vilification of the “damnable aristocracy,” his generosity and forgiveness extended to the plantation owners themselves.
P. 17-18
The reigning leaders of the Confederacy, who had rightfully expected to be tried and hung as traitors, now were not only poised to sail back into power in the deferral government but also, given Johnson’s amnesty, allowed to regain control of their states and, as a consequence, of the millions of newly emancipated and landless black people there. As he welcomed one “niggers will catch hell” state after the next back into the Union with no mention whatsoever of black voting rights and, thus, no political protection, he effectively laid the groundwork for mass murder.
One of the president’s emissaries, Carl Schurz, recoiled as he traveled throughout the South and gathered reports of African American women who had been “scalped,” had their “ears cut off,” or had been thrown into a river and drowned amid chants for them to swim to the “damned Yankees.” Young black boys and men were routinely stabbed, clubbed, and shot. Some were even “chained to a tree and burned to death.” In what can only be described as a travelogue of death, as he went from county to county, state to state, he conveyed the sickening unbearable stench of decomposing black bodies hanging from limbs, rotting in ditches, and clogging the roadways. White Southerners, it was obvious, had unleashed a reign of terror and anti-black violence that had reached “staggering proportions.” Many urged the president to strengthen the federal presence in the South. Johnson refused, choosing instead, to “preside over… this slow-motioned genocide.” The lack of a vigorous—or, for that matter, any—response only further encouraged white Southerners, who recognized that they now had a friend in the White House. One former cabinet member in the Confederacy “later admitted that… the white South was so devastated and demoralized it would have accepted almost any of the North’s terms. But… once Johnson ‘held up before us the hope of a white man’s government,’ it led ‘[us] to set aside negro suffrage’ and to resist Northern plans to improve the condition of the freedmen.” Thus emboldened, Virginia’s rebellion-tainted leaders planned to “accomplish… with votes what they have failed to accomplish with bayonets.”
P. 22
This congratulatory, rose-colored vision of the State of the Union ignored the brutal conditions that greeted four million people by the war’s end. Johnson dismissed the numerous reports of mutilated black bodies piled up like logs, did not hear the incessant crack of the whips tearing into black flesh, and found in the draconian Black Codes that reinstalled slavery by another name nothing but progress. How stunning, too, that such a prideful, stubborn man could swallow his dignity over and over again when the states he had just welcomed back into the fold defied even the very low standards he had set to rejoin the United States of America.
P. 20
Not even Union general (and future president) Ulysses S. Grant saw anything wrong. Under Florida’s Black Codes, disobedience or impudence was a “form of vagrancy and a vagrant could be whipped.” In Lousiana black adults had to sign labor contracts within “the first ten days of each year that committed them and their children to work on a plantation.” In North Carolina “orphans were sent to work for the former masters of their families rather than allowing them to live with grandparents or other relatives.” But Grant, despite all brutal evidence to the contrary, was convinced that white Southerners had adjusted well to losing the Civil War. If African Americans resisted and complained bitterly about the Black Codes, this meant only that the Freedmen’s Bureau was “encouraging unrealistic expectations among the former slaves.” Grant did not attribute the turmoil in the South to the incredible levels of violence unleashed on the newly freed or to the barbaric Black Codes to which they were now subject; General Howard’s staff, he felt, must be the source of the problem. Bureau and federal oversight were, in Grant’s mind, “unnecessary, even harmful.”
P. 30
For Johnson, nearly 250 years of unpaid toil to build one of the wealthiest nations on earth did not earn citizenship. And so, by his veto, he rendered the Civil Rights Bill null and void, fearing it would “establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.’”
What Caused the Civil War: Reflections on the South and Southern History Edward L. Ayers P. 151
“When the war ended, the United States government had no explicit and coherent plan for the postwar South. Lincoln’s assassination threw things into even greater uncertainty, and the rise of a Southerner, Andrew Johnson, to the presidency confused things more. White Southerners, unrepentant after their military defeat, treated their conquerors with contempt. They unleashed riots in Memphis and New Orleans, created the Ku Klux Klan, and enacted Black Codes that sought to reinscribe as much slavery as possible in the postwar world. White resistance galvanized the power of the Radicals among the Republicans and brought Radical Reconstruction down on the South in the spring of 1867, two years after the war had ended.
P. 152
White Southerners won a victory in their counterrevolution when they managed to hang derogatory names on lead characters in Reconstruction: carpetbaggers and scalawags. In neutral language, carpetbaggers were non-Southern Republicans holding office in the South, necessary agents of political leadership and social transformation. Scalawags were white Southern Republicans willing to ally themselves with new African American citizens. In the white Southern lexicon, carpetbaggers were avaricious, small-minded, opportunistic scavengers who descended on the South for profit; they were unprincipled hypocrites who ignored injustice in their own states while elevating ill-prepared slaves into the highest political offices. The scalawags were turncoats to their region and their race, ready to sell their heritage in return for a cheap political office.”
Note: The paramilitary groups like the Mississippi Redshirts & the Louisiana White League that will crop up & never leave. They simply shapeshift to voter suppress by other means, like Senator Sinema’s defense of the filibuster, & her shitting on the voting rights of all Americans in 2022; the U.S. government acting like a government the U.S. government would invade. Also, 2022, Mitch McConnell: “African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Also Mississippi: Hiram Rhodes Revels (1827-1901), born free in N.C., was a chaplain during the war, plus recruited Black Union regiments, then fought at Vicksburg. He was first African-American (though mixed, variously) to win office in the Senate (Mississippi). When he walked in the chamber to take the oath on February 15, 1870 visitors in the gallery stood & cheered. He served 1872-1873. Right before Governor Revels was an Albert G. Brown, mixed bag, yikes. After Revels was yet another slaveowner & mixed bag.
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 499-500
“Grant’s inaction was political, not personal. In the early days of Congressional Reconstruction, he intervened in several southern states to protect African Americans and the electoral process. He sent troops to North Carolina in 1870 to assist Republican governor William Holden’s fight against the Klan. In 1872, he dispatched soldiers to Alabama to prevent violence after a disputed election in that state. Grant’s most extensive military operation occurred during the fall of 1871 when he rounded up South Carolina Klansmen. Declaring nine upcountry counties to be “in a state of rebellion,” he suspended the writ of habeas corpus and ordered federal military authorities to arrest suspected Klansmen, though the leaders escaped to northern states or to Canada. The intervention broke the Klan in in South Carolina. By July 1872, however, reports from the state indicated “the K.K.’s are becoming very much emboldened and their organizations are coming together again.” Out of 1,300 Klan cases, 1,200 never went to trail. Juries convicted twenty Klansmen, and seventy others pleaded guilty. Grant’s actions yielded sparse results and managed to serve as an excellent recruiting tool for white paramilitarists.”
P. 500
“When Mississippi Republicans requested federal intervention to protect their state government in January 1874, Grant had had enough. “This nursing of monstrosities has nearly exhausted the life of the party. I am done with them, and they will have to take care of themselves.” Everyone was on his own now.”
The Democrats’ victories in 1874 were the final arguments against intervention. Northerners had never really endorsed the extent of the Radical program to begin with. Except for a brief period of collective anger in 1866-1867 when white southerners threatened to reverse the verdict of the war, northerners were keen to let the South go on its way as long as it did not interfere with the nation’s progress. Unlike in the era before the Civil War, southerners no longer wielded power nationally. White southerners simply wanted to rule at home.”
Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law James Q. Whitman (2017) P. 68-69
“Once again it was not only the Nazis who found these American developments fascinating. Throughout Europe it was commonplace in the 1930s and 1940s that the South, through its systematic deprivation of the voting rights of blacks (and Mexicans and Native Americans), had embarked on the creation of something that looked unmistakably like the American version of a race-based fascist order. “The Ku Klux Klan are the fascists of America,” a French author reported; they were a group founded in order to combat black enfranchisement. Bertram Schrieke, a Dutch ethnographer who published an interesting book on American race relations in 1936, declared that the southern “process of undoing reconstruction– with its violence, intimidation, open bribery, stuffing ballot boxes, manipulation and falsification of election returns, use of tissue ballots, etc., all serving to eliminate Negro voters… reminds one strongly of the rise of the Nazis in Germany”; “[o]n account of its one-party system and the precarious state of civil liberties,” wrote Gunnar Myrdal in 1944, “the South is sometimes referred to as fascist.” Nevertheless, if Europeans widely shared this thought, it is especially striking to discover Nazis themselves expressing it– declaring, as Krieger did, that the Democratic Party of the South, through its “racist election law,” had built a one-party system, and that the only remaining question was whether it would succeed, as the Nazis had done, in making “the Party an organ of the State.’”
P. 94
“German interest in American anti-miscegenation measures that that prewar colonial administrators produced may or may not have directly influenced the Nuremberg Laws; historians disagree. But there can be no doubt that the drafters of the Nuremberg Laws studied American law just as eagerly as their colonial predecessors did. America was the great model in 1905, and it remained the great model three decades later.”
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 538-539 (Excerpts)
“The Northern Idea of the Situation
The Negroes are free now, and must have a fair chance to make themselves something. What is claimed about their inferiority may be true. It is not likely to approve itself; but, true or false, they have a right to equality before the law. That is what the war meant, and this must be secured to them. The rest they must get as they can, or do without, as they choose.”
“The Southern Idea of the Northern Idea
The negro is made a voter simply to degrade and disgrace the white people of the South. The North cares nothing about the negro as a man, but only enfranchises him in order to humiliate and enfeeble us. Of course, it makes no difference to the people of the North whether he is a voter or not. There are so few colored men there, that there is no fear of them being elected to office, going to the Legislature, or sitting on the bench. The whole purpose of the measure is to insult and degrade. But only wait until the States are restored and the “Blue Coats” are out of the way, and we will show them their mistake.”
Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829-1877 Walter A. McDougall P. 509
“All that the Republicans left behind on adjournment in 1865 was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands to relieve immediate suffering. The law provided for exactly one commissioner, ten clerks, a one-year mandate, and zero dollars.”
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 Eric Foner P. 582
“Hayes did not, as legend has it, remove the last federal troops from the South, but his action implicitly meant that the few remaining soldiers would no longer play a role in political affairs.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 527
“W.E.B. DuBois summarized the Reconstruction experience for southern blacks. “’The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” DuBois was only partially correct, however. Reconstruction failed the freedman, but it also failed the South and the nation.”
Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 Eric Foner P. 597-598
“Blacks in the cotton South owned a smaller percentage of the land in 1900 than they had at the end of Reconstruction and possessed few options other than moving from plantation to plantation each January in search of improved conditions. Their fortunes varied from year to year, according to vicissitudes of the weather and cotton prices, but rare was the black farmer who could sustain upward mobility or escape dependence upon white landowners and merchants.”
The Legislative Branch of Federal Government: People, Process, and Politics Gary P. Gershman P. 211-212
“The battle over Reconstruction was between Johnson and Congress. Whether Lincoln would have been able to withstand confrontations with the Radical Republicans will never be known, but it is clear that Johnson’s style helped galvanize opposition generally and also brought together disparate elements in Congress. Johnson repeatedly acted in a manner that irritated and angered Congress. Rather than call it into special special session to deal with Reconstruction issues, he ignored it. Johnson acted on his own and began to formulate and institute policy independent of Congress. He announced and put into effect his pardon and amnesty policies and his program for readmitting the former Confederate states. This audacity only served to outrage Congress, which upon meeting in the winter of 1865, declared itself to be the country’s policy making body and repudiated Johnson’s actions.”
*After several months– and ten separate entries– mentioning the lack of preaching in camp (i.e., we have had but one Sermon since we left the state oh I am afraid some of our chaplins are rather careless and I think that some of them don’t think much about the future wellfare of their fellow men) Ephraim returns home, attends his first service, and proceeds to write nothing about it. No nothing: No Huyett, no Hays, no catching up on food, no church wisdom. He keeps up with the weather, writes who he sees, & that he doesn’t feel well. June 19: “there is nothing new that I know of.” Hasn’t been home in over 6 months, & can’t think of a thing to sa, yet June 14, just a few days before, he wrote one of his longest & most introspective entries. He wrote a lot even on the trip home, but once home, he let it drop off. And he wasn’t interested in recording how anyone he knew felt about the war. Either that or for some other reason. I get the sense no one wanted him to have gone. That he may have stood alone in this. After all, he was exempt. He volunteered purely out of wanting to take a small part in holding the Union together, & because “the time has come when the South needs a new race of people to cultivate the land and destroy the Selling of Humane Flesh from one state to another or person and I hope the Southern schivelry will soon be wiped out of Existence and men of pure motives settle the land where they can live in peace with their fellow men and may peace soon be restored to our land” Then June 20: “I was at home Sinking Valley Blair Co Pa”—Ephraim knows where he is. He’s telling a future audience? It seems he’s still intending to return to the 110th?
At any rate, he is home, & in one piece (so it seems). He will not write about his wife Mary except to say she is not as harty. He will not write about his children but to say Lee has grown. A day later he writes Elmer has grown. He will not write about the war. Does he want to put it behind him immediately? He will not write about what it’s like being home. He will not write about missing his friends. Again, he will not write about the war. I feel like this notebook to him was an etheric entity far more than paper. It had nothing to do with anything material about the war. I can’t explain more than that. Just that the end of the diary shows what it was in some way, its function to him. It guided him home, & once he was safe, that was it. He let it go blank.
*In 132 years, if you go 15 miles in an northeasterly direction, you can join the Keystone Knights of the Ku Klux Klan rally sponsored by Invisible Empire (October, 1994). Be sure to check out the Triple Cross-Lighting at Dusk on Saturday Night, and Games and Fun for the Little Klans People! (Bring Lawn Chairs.) Food, beverages, and souvenirs available, along with Many Political Speakers From Across Our Nation. While there, get a blessing from Pastor Mark Thomas, leader of Aryan Nations of Pennsylvania, but observe this is a no cameras un-less [sic] prior authorization situation, and Please Observe: This Is A White Unity Gathering (No media–No illegal drugs–No firearms–No fighting) and they Reserve the Right to Refuse Admittance To Anyone and that Everyone Welcome–Public Invited–No Admission. Rally Grounds Needed For Cross-Lightings And Future Events. Share the flyer with the kids, who will enjoy hand-drawn illustrations like the robed man donning the pointy alien-looking top hat reposing on a horse; in the background a tree with a branch that has a rope tied in a noose that hangs empty, a Confederate flag, various KKK insignia, crosses, and the smiley face with “K-Nation” written near the eyes and mouth. Miscellaneous caped man atop a horse dashing around Riding Towards The Future. Turn right at Rolling Acres Dairy Queen.
As it turned out, Altoona PA. was a KKK hotbed, with about 1/4 of their national organization’s 250,000 members living in counties around Pittsburgh in the mid-1920s. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “Unlike white nationalist organizations, whose meme wars and pressed khakis appeal to an impressionable younger generation, the Klan’s online presence and public image remains rigid and unrefined, effectively diminishing their recruitment. Infighting between members on Facebook and Stormfront involves accusations of drug use, domestic violence and disloyalty, and the number of groups continues to plummet. Klan groups have attempted to form alliances with other segments of the movement, such as the League of the South and the National Socialist Movement, to retain some semblance of relevance.”
Pennsylvania currently hosts 36 hate groups– 11 of these being Black Nationalist groups– with 6 in Pittsburgh. The KKK is still present, called now the East Coast Knights of the True Invisible Empire. “Who are the East Coast Knights? The mainstream media has lied to you about:
*Russian collusion
*Diversity is our biggest strength
*NAFTA & Globalism would create American jobs
*Political approval numbers
The Hart Celler Act of 1965 not changing the culture of our nation
*Immigrants from third world countries would assimilate to our customs and values
Maybe they were lying to you about us too. We’re the patriotic, God fearing, family oriented working men & women of the East Coast Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and we’re fighting for the same values your family lives & breathes every day. We do not preach hate & at no time would we react hatefully to any man, woman, or child. We do wish to preserve the White Christian ways. The same way other races wish to preserve their race and beliefs. The East Coast Knights wish to take back only the right of free speech and right to say that we are White and Proud! We see people of all races walking with their heads held high, proud to be of whatever race or religion never to be persecuted or questioned as to their motives. Except for the Whites! Participate in club related acitivities that is within your realm. Including, but not limited to: Klavern meetings, funraisers, litter removal, self-defense excersices [sic] & other means of activism.”
You can look under gallery, see some members whose faces are black- markered out, wearing sheets. Giant rebel flags strung on a clothesline next to Trump flags, with crosses lit on a summer night in Lancaster County, Pa. The membership application reads “there are only two” genders, asks the ethnicity of & if your children are adopted, & “if no do not apply” if not native-born, White, gentile, and American. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s picture is on the memorial page, along with Anthony Laricci, Grand Dragon of Maryland looking like a set extra on Star Trek, and others. Call their hotline “if you think you have what it takes to start a realm in an unoccupied state” at (717) 659-2256.
Note: 12/19, while reporting from a small Mississippi town, a journalist films a Christmas parade. A white pickup pulls the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ float; a banner calls it the “9th Mississippi Cavalry 1748.” A Middle School band marches right behind. The 9th regiment– Davis’ escort in May, 1865– ‘surrendered’ in Forsyth Georgia alongside him but some are still trying to find their way back to America. (Davis elected himself for 6 years so there was no war question about his reelection while the war rages unless the war lasts beyond those 6 years. Only picture Jeff skulking in that tall gauntness, sneering around the still-going-up-Capitol Building, the dome not on yet, littering pieces of the U.S. Constitution around the horse dung dirt paths, as he prays to get thrown in the back of a squad car. He knows the dream cold, using himself like a rendition order, trying to get arrested to get the Confederacy’s case to the Supreme Court. Jeff with his detachable starch collar and bowtie in ’65, he walks or rides a horse off to the edge of town then disappears. He got a clean walk on all charges).
Comments on the Christmas parade video:
“@FutbolProfessor Let them secede… let them realize how bottom of the barrel they are economically, educationally, and socially. Let the sociopaths have their own nation state to kill each other within. Let them play out their fantasies amongst themselves. They just won’t won’t get fed $ to do so.
@ ODA_555 The Confederacy are still winning and most likely will win it all.
@nationsfilm Russia’s the one winning.
What were they tossing to the crowd?
Candy.
It’s gut-wrenching to see those kids’ hands reaching up to catch it.
When that kid first reached their hand up I just assumed they were going to flip them off. Sigh.
The Civil War didn’t really end. It evolved.
When I lived in GA there was a house a few towns over where some KKK guy lived, he and all his buddies would wear their robes and throw candy at kids from the front lawn on Halloween. It was the 90’s.
We won. The losers are just still talking through their descendants, because we didn’t hang them all before they got to have kids.”
Touched by Fire: The Best of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War Edited by Harold Holzer P. 1178
“Mr. Davis was imprisoned at Fort Monroe immediately after his arrest, and was indicted on the charge of treason, by a Grand Jury in the United States Court for the District of Virginia, at Norfolk, May 8th, 1866. On May 13th, 1867, he was released on a bail-bond of $100,000, signed by Cornelius Vanderbilt, Gerrit Smith, & Horace Greeley, and in December 1868 a nolle prosequi was entered in the case.” –Editors
Note: Millions believed the lies about Southern Whites terrorized unless redeemed by the KKK, especially after the release of Birth of a Nation, a silent film. They thought they filmed something that made themselves out well; originally called The Clansman, it was an adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s 1905 play & novel. BOAN (1915) was the top-grossing film for nearly a quarter century until Gone with the Wind (1939) blew in on a bad wind. In the 1970s, my Pennsylvania school district showed it to us; upon rewatch, I only remembered the Black man chasing the White woman, her terrified look, then the cliff jump. Also recall the panoramic shot over the town square & the pan-out. I missed the whole Lincoln at the play scene, but the YouTube has viewers actually debating whether the footage is of the real assassination. This is where we are as a society. I also don’t remember any context given for our having been shown this, though I imagine it was history class.
Note: Lincoln: “While the people maintain their virtue, & vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years.”
Note: 9/29/19 @realDonaldTrump “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they never will be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” Pastor Robert Jeffress, @FoxNews”
14 hrs later Hillary Clinton tweets “The president is a corrupt human tornado.”
“Didn’t expect that reaction” he said after he said out loud “Today I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we’ve made. In less than two years my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of the country.” Says under his breath while people burst out laughing, “America is…” and “So true….” “Didn’t expect that reaction but that’s okay…”
10/31/19 Trump tweets “The Greatest Witch Hunt In American History!” 1.77.3k likes, 36.4k retweets
Eric Gonzaba @Egonzaba: “If you’re reading this in the year 2159, this Civil War, like the first one, was NOT about tariffs either. #twitterstorians”
hashtags 9/30/19 were #CivilWarSignUp #CivilWar2 #CivilWarPotluck
June, 2018: Trump doesn’t know words to “God Bless America” at his “Special Ceremony to Celebrate America.” 500K views on Twitter within 24 hours. Final tally: 30,573 false or misleading claims with the Union flag on his lapel.
Note: Back to 1862 (a preferable time?): Lincoln creates America’s Department of Agriculture today, 1862.
the House was quite full….
The Real War. Does it come down to who, what, when, where, why? Motive, means, opportunity. You can’t use words for this. That’s the problem. Nobody remembers, so the grainy, over-pixelated details of the story have to suffice. There’s what we know, there’s what we sense, then there’s post-production changes, ideological line edits, casino rules, Gaelic chants, crow court transcripts, & a table of elements across 160 years: it’s a lot of time to rehearse your lines as a country. All that’s left is a scattering of historians, a few forums. Some muskets, quilts. A handful of battle sites they beg funding for.
Government clerks took 30 years to compile the O.R.; they went through paper by paper a 3 story building’s worth of Confederate records alone, “well night beyond computation,” says Gary Gallagher, plus there were 2 million Confederate dispatches. It may be enough to know you can open at page one of the O.R. & there it is. The evidence, simply. Withal, we have 138, 579 pages of means by which we can know, & 1,006 maps, in 128 volumes, published between 1881-1901. General Halleck foresaw in 1863 that a way to gather official records was needed, a White male military elite’s version of what the war was. After the first print run (10,000 copies, Congress got most of them) veterans from both sides contested battle reports; outrage about contradictory recollections– accounts of Shiloh & Ball’s Bluff, especially– where retract or add became the buzzwords of the day. Men would disagree with former officer’s records; statements of what transpired did vary significantly, heart-rending when you think about it. Who got to decide which history went in the public collection/recollection versus what got shunted back into cardboard archive boxes in a non-temperature controlled room on the lowest level of some Federal or State building? Put back into the dark of a box in the basement of a government archive you can never pay enough to see? In the end, what’s actually in the ground or is discovered in the documents do equate to what it was to be alive in the 1860s before somewhere far off, a sonic boom happens.
Brandon Johnson, used with 5/2/22 permission, his shot of a D.C. church. This was as large as the photograph would go here. See his phenomenal work at linktr.ee/jjbrndn
There are one hundred thirty eight thousand five hundred & seventy nine pages of means by which we can know, 138, 579, pages containing words that did as well as any could before heading back out to sea. The 128 volumes worth of the O.R. are like massive blood evidence telling the numbers killed or wounded, the outcomes, dates of battles, names of soldiers & generals, civilians, patriots, names of towns, creeks, rivers, valleys, rail lines, cemeteries, gravestone dates. Yet it’s an impossible standard of evidence to locate where the blood of the land actually lies. If there were one page, one paragraph that would say it all; a line, a word. Something. So we could write our way out of all that remains in the ground, in the documents, all the ingredients, properties, definitions of where the Real War lies, the Real War that will never get in the books. Because there is something we don’t know beyond what exists in the artifacts, mementos, diaries, congressional records, the 10,000 other named ways & means & Google Earth views where there’s still ridges in the landmass from when they stopped filling in the trenches following the Vultures that dropped to the ground, producing a more defined darkness, the dark groundmass containing artifacts, letters, diaries, maps in fading pencil, battle plans, tracing maps, local stories passed down, the burnt out barns, towns, entire charred cities of the South, war measures, medical reports, resolutions, amendments, ship logbooks, compiled service records, ancestry files, newspapers, magazines, prescription books, accounts of hospital stores, requisitions for medical supplies, acquisition & distribution of all supplies, quarterly reports of the sick & wounded, records of prize money for burning cotton, lists of prizes captured by ship, obituaries, recruitment posters, pension indexes, tax records, regimental rosters, spy reports, architectural remains, discharge papers, certificates of disability for discharge, hospital inspection reports, wills & specific bequests, engineer records, ordnance records, summary statements of quarterly returns of ordance stores on hand in the regular & volunteer armies, first, second, third person testimonials, mentions in dispatches, church records, various society & organization lodge minutes, religious revival accounts, letters to general’s wives, disease records, breakdown by type of casualty counts, evolving medicine records, drill & training records, accounts of property received, IOUs, review records, political rally records, riot records, famine records, letters of appeal for help to government officials, political speeches, train records, recruits passing through towns’ records, train track building & repair records, fence rail replacement records, Commissary Department records & reports of irregularities therein, tent & shoes & clothing manufacturer records, fire & flood records, police records, Sanitary Commission records, cemetery relocation & reburial records, oaths & vows, forest & tree records, livestock & other animal records, forage records, places of land marked where men fell records, recollections of scents like pennyroyal & fennel, fishing records, tide records, full moon records, shells & bullets & minie balls located later, records of mounds in backyards, animal behavior records for horses, donkeys, rabbits, cows, hens, funeral records, spirituals & hymns, daily camp routine accounts, reflections of the principals decades later, scriptures most referred to by preachers, guerrilla & sniper accounts, childhood recollections, informal ditties about Lincoln or about Rebels, advertisements, post office records, voter registration & counts totals records, election outcomes, accounts of battle fatigue, depression, homesickness, countermanded orders, hysteria, pregnancy & miscarriage records, insect infestation records, bird migrations & nesting sites, rabid animal bite records, people moving out of state records, new territory names & geographic lines, local disputes & murders, camp ministry records, prayer meeting accounts, accident records, supposed friendly fire records, rank dispute summaries, promotions & denial of, straggler & deserter records, records of furloughs taken or not, requests for passes denied, records of those who never returned from furlough, endorsements, crime statistics, indictments, superseding indictments, rape reports, suicides, national debt records, state fairs & county carnivals, train engineer records, bank records, lease records, real estate buying & selling paperwork, planting records, crop trade records, travel records, art & theatre productions, recipes, era scholarship, comics, editorials, letters to editors, secession ordinances, letters written or dictated on death beds, count of the bullets in the trees at, say, Gettysburg, the two constitutions, new books, gambling rings, horse betting, stolen horse reports, orphanage records, adoption records, court house records, rosters of the sick, wagon repair records, veterinary records, blacksmith records, musket supply & demand records, invention patents, sunrise & sunset records, rainfall levels, snow levels, heat & humidity indexes, the furniture left or sold out of Appomattox, horse hairs, human locks that ended up at auction, lynching records, rumors, stone markers, adjutant’s monthly reports, records for lookout balloons, Medal of Honor authorizations, home guard records, farm records, weather records, income tax records, black troop records, communiques between countries, international newspapers & wires between leaders, minutes of meetings, quartermaster & cook records, slaughterhouse records, distillery records, dime novels, Bible inscriptions, annotations, & underlinings, local water supply records, sailor’s accounts, merchant records, parole records, contraband camp records, POW camp records, flag design records, soldier pay records, novels, poetry, song lyrics, slave & free-person writings, volunteer records, surviving weaponry, state archives, genealogical indexes, DNA testing, birth, death, marriage records, coroner reports, surgeon’s records, Census records, immigration records, prison rolls, hospital registers, Confederate & Union service records, the Grand Army of the Republic minutes, National Park Service records, telegrams, runaway slave ads, African slave ship database, abolition society records, broadsides, court transcripts, National Archives, Library of Congress documents, wires between Lincoln & the generals, Congressional records, photographs, trenches still dug in the ground, the graves, the statistics, & knowing what we don’t know– whatever the Real War did consist of– like it has some occult significance you need to understand, given what we have– language’s useless tremors– letters pushed together into words that makes sounds not much beyond grunts when you think about it– and don’t have now– living witnesses– for 36 hours is all the time it takes for a body to cool completely, after all– this is all that’s left. That’s where the Real War stays.
Remembrance of Things Past Marcel Proust (Excerpt)
“I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life.”
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