The inevitable end result of our last 56 years

[W. Niederhut]

       BTW, here's one of the best op-eds I've read in recent years on the subject of the Confederate statue controversy-- an essay by the world's leading expert on Reconstruction era American history, Columbia University Professor Eric Foner.  Foner makes a great point about Longstreet and the raison d'etre for these statues.

       (Reprinting this for non-subscribers to NYT.)

Confederate Statues and ‘Our’ History

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/opinion/confederate-statues-american-history.html?auth=login-email&login=email

by Eric Foner

August 20, 2017

President Trump’s Thursday morning tweet lamenting that the removal of Confederate statues tears apart “the history and culture of our great country” raises numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that “our”?

Mr. Trump may not know it, but he has entered a debate that goes back to the founding of the republic. Should American nationality be based on shared values, regardless of race, ethnicity and national origin, or should it rest on “blood and soil,” to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., whom Trump has at least partly embraced?

Neither Mr. Trump nor the Charlottesville marchers invented the idea that the United States is essentially a country for white persons. The very first naturalization law, enacted in 1790 to establish guidelines for how immigrants could become American citizens, limited the process to “white” persons.

What about nonwhites born in this country? Before the Civil War, citizenship was largely defined by individual states. Some recognized blacks born within their boundaries as citizens, but many did not. As far as national law was concerned, the question was resolved by the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. Blacks, wrote Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a statue of whom was removed from public display in Baltimore this week), were and would always be aliens in America.

This was the law of the land when the Civil War broke out in 1861. This is the tradition that the Southern Confederacy embodied and sought to preserve and that Mr. Trump, inadvertently or not, identifies with by equating the Confederacy with “our history and culture.”

Many Americans, of course, rejected this racial definition of American nationality. Foremost among them were abolitionists, male and female, black and white, who put forward an alternative definition, known today as birthright citizenship. Anybody born in the United States, they insisted, was a citizen, and all citizens should enjoy equality before the law. Abolitionists advocated not only the end of slavery, but also the incorporation of the freed people as equal members of American society.

In the period of Reconstruction that followed the war, this egalitarian vision was, for the first time, written into our laws and Constitution. But the advent of multiracial democracy in the Southern states inspired a wave of terrorist opposition by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups, antecedents of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. One by one the Reconstruction governments were overthrown, and in the next generation white supremacy again took hold in the South.

When Mr. Trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as essential parts of “our” history and culture, he is honoring that dark period. Like all monuments, these statues say a lot more about the time they were erected than the historical era they evoke. The great waves of Confederate monument building took place in the 1890s, as the Confederacy was coming to be idealized as the so-called Lost Cause and the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching. The statues were part of the legitimation of this racist regime and of an exclusionary definition of America.

The historian Carl Becker wrote that history is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Historical monuments are, among other things, an expression of power — an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.

If the issue were simply heritage, why are there no statues of Lt. Gen. James Longstreet, one of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s key lieutenants? Not because of poor generalship; indeed, Longstreet warned Lee against undertaking Pickett’s Charge, which ended the battle of Gettysburg. Longstreet’s crime came after the Civil War: He endorsed black male suffrage and commanded the Metropolitan Police of New Orleans, which in 1874 engaged in armed combat with white supremacists seeking to seize control of the state government. Longstreet is not a symbol of white supremacy; therefore he was largely ineligible for commemoration by those who long controlled public memory in the South.

As all historians know, forgetting is as essential to public understandings of history as remembering. Confederate statues do not simply commemorate “our” history, as the president declared. They honor one part of our past. Where are the statues in the former slave states honoring the very large part of the Southern population (beginning with the four million slaves) that sided with the Union rather than the Confederacy? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery or to the hundreds of black lawmakers who during Reconstruction served in positions ranging from United States senator to justice of the peace to school board official? Excluding blacks from historical recognition has been the other side of the coin of glorifying the Confederacy.

We have come a long way from the days of the Dred Scott decision. But our public monuments have not kept up. The debate unleashed by Charlottesville is a healthy re-examination of the question “Who is an American?” And “our” history and culture is far more complex, diverse and inclusive than the president appears to realize.

Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia and the author, most recently, of “Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History.”

 

 

Edited June 12, 2020 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

Thanks, but I disagree with both of you.

As I stated Grant should have arrested Lee and then used his army to occupy the south.

Although, William says the 1876 election was the tipping point, that is not really true.  The Redeemer movement was rising in the south prior to that.

Also the Radical Republicans began under Johnson and the Civil Rights act of 1866 and 14th and 15th amendments were passed under them. James Hinds  a RR senator was murdered by the Klan in 1868.  The fact that Lee was not arrested and his army set free allowed the beginnings of terrorist groups like the White League, the Red Shirts and the White Line.  These confederates formed the spine of the Redeemer Movement.  The following took place before the Hayes deal:

Opelousas Massacre of 1868

Meridian Race Riot of 1871 

The horrendous Colfax Massacre of 1873

The huge Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans in 1874

Hamburg Massacre of 1876

Let me quote my article, which apparently you guys did not read:

In the Meridian and New Orleans instances, the Redeemers’ aim was to overthrow, respectively, the local and state government. In Meridian Mississippi, the Redeemers shot and killed a judge during a trial, and massacred as many as thirty freed slaves, ultimately driving the mayor from office. A force of three hundred Redeemers then escorted the mayor to a train and literally packed him off to New York, thereby achieving their goal of overthrowing the municipal government.

There is no excuse for not getting the hint of what was happening over these incidents.  The south did not accept the fact that they lost the war and the terms were much too easy.  I have always stated that what happened to African Americans with the passage over, the auction blocks, chattel bondage, that was so ingrained in that sick society that unless you occupied that criminal insurrection, and jailed as many of them as possible, it was not going away.  And it did not.

Let me ask this: does everyone here know that Wilson supplied the subtitles to Griffith's racist, Lost Cause  Birth of a Nation.

 

Edited June 12, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Not patting my own back, but I really think William and Dave should read this.

To me this cannot ever be forgotten:

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-1

Edited June 12, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[James DiEugenio]

Please do not pass over this, which took place before the Hayes deal:

"It is worth describing a smaller scale event in more detail in order to understand the murderous mania that possessed the Redeemers. In September of 1875, in Hinds County Mississippi, the Republican Party decided to hold a combination barbecue and rally for the upcoming elections. Freedmen had been voting for about eight years there, so this type of event was not uncommon. For purposes of policy debate, they invited the Democrats to attend. The Democrats sent a spokesman, accompanied by about 75 White Line men with concealed weapons. The Democrat spoke without interruption. The Republican speaker thanked and congratulated his opponent. But as he began to address the crowd, he was heckled. He was then accused of being a xxxx. The leading black politician in the area, Charles Caldwell, stood up and asked the former slaves not to let themselves be goaded into a confrontation. Then a Republican freedman, Lewis Hargraves, was shot in the head at point blank range. In what appeared to be a choreographed action, the White Line men let loose with a series of volleys. The Freedmen, some whom came armed, fired back. Mothers began gathering up their children and running for cover in the nearby woods. At the end of the first day, three White Liners and five freedmen were dead.

The Redeemers called in reinforcements. In a move that had to be planned in advance, hundreds came in by rail. As one witness noted, they began to hunt down every black man they could see: “They were shooting at him just the same as birds.” Many freedmen were stalked to their homes, taken from their domiciles, shot to pieces, and their mangled corpses tossed into swamps. One of the victims was an old enfeebled grandfather. Some freedmen were forced to stand on tree stumps before they were killed. Caldwell escaped, but the posse told his wife that no matter how long it took, they would find him and he would perish like the rest:

We have orders to kill him and we are going to do it, because he belongs to this Republican Party and sticks up for these negroes … We are going to have the South in our own charge … and any man that sticks by the Republican Party, and he is a leader, he has got to die."

These are not the kind of people you let free to roam the land murdering the innocent in cold blood.  

 

Edited June 12, 2020 by James DiEugenio

[W. Niederhut]

48 minutes ago, James DiEugenio said:

Not patting my own back, but I really think William and Dave should read this.

To me this cannot ever be forgotten:

https://kennedysandking.com/reviews/the-kennedys-and-civil-rights-how-the-msm-continues-to-distort-history-part-1

Jim,

    I recall reading your excellent essays on Reconstruction era history (above) in (?) 2018 or 2019.  It's a subject that I got interested in during Obama's White House tenure-- because I was genuinely surprised by the shocking hostility to Obama in the South.  I thought the country had made more progress on racial equality after the Civil Rights struggles of the 60s !

    The point I was making in defending Ulysses Grant's oft-maligned reputation is that meaningful Reconstruction efforts were sabotaged by Andrew Johnson before Grant ever ascended to the Presidency.  And compared to Andrew Johnson, (and Hayes) Grant, at least, made some efforts to implement meaningful Reconstruction.

   A more protracted, aggressive Union occupation of the South after Appomattox would, I suspect, have been a very costly, bloody quagmire.  Nor did Grant have a Federal mandate to implement such a campaign.   Lincoln was explicitly calling for "charity" for all and "malice toward none."  He put Johnson on his 1864 ticket because he was a Border State Unionist.

   Did the post-war Union have the politic will to sustain such an occupation?

Edited June 12, 2020 by W. Niederhut

[James DiEugenio]

I agree that Johnson was a horrible president and he should have been impeached.

I don't know how Lincoln would have adapted to these huge massacres.

In doing my reading on this, under my fine Professor Ron Davis, Sherman was correct.  He was the only guy i know of in power who wanted to cut up the plantations and give them to the  freedmen, which according to Foner, is what a lot of them expected.

This is why I have such a problem with Ken Burns.  What he allowed Shelby Foote to do was a disgrace.  Foote was very appreciative, as he should have been.  He wrote to Ken, geez you made me a celebrity and a millionaire. 

All for propagating that pernicious and lying Lost Cause BS.

[David Andrews]

How would arresting Lee have improved Reconstruction?  By example?  Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for two years and it didn't do anything but worsen the anti-Union sentiment.

If they're going to start removing statues in Washington, then with Davis's should go not only Andrew Johnson's, but those of pro-slavery Democrat Franklin Pierce, James Knox Polk who extended slavery into Texas, plus James Buchanan who protected slavery in the western territories.  Throw in Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears against the Cherokee on top of his slaveholding, and add every other slaveholder president down to George Washington.  Special attention to Jefferson for Harvey Weinstein-ing Sally Hemings. Where will the line be drawn?  Should we hope sacrificing Davis's effigy will be enough?

Edited June 13, 2020 by David Andrews

[Ron Bulman]

https://www.bing.com/search?q=belle+island+prison&form=PRUSEN&mkt=en-us&httpsmsn=1&msnews=1&rec_search=1&refig=b5ac58f559e248c280bd9b2b6053e69f&sp=1&qs=AS&pq=belle+island&sk=PRES1&sc=8-12&cvid=b5ac58f559e248c280bd9b2b6053e69f

Where one great great grandfather died from starvation because he couldn't decide on a side.  Food for soldiers and citizens was in short supply, more so for prisoners. 

https://www.civilwaracademy.com/belle-isle-prison

Edited June 13, 2020 by Ron Bulman

[James DiEugenio]

I am specifically saying the confederacy.  

Lee deciding to lead the revolt was an act of treason. And it was a key part of the insurrection.

It was his troops who then led the Redeemer movement in their murderous forays against freedmen.  Did Thomas Jefferson ever kill anyone in cold blood over a political debate?

No, instead he resigned and started his own political party.

 

 

 

[David Andrews]

And I used to sit around thinking that I had enough to think about.

Edited June 13, 2020 by David Andrews

[W. Niederhut]

12 hours ago, David Andrews said:

How would arresting Lee have improved Reconstruction?  By example?  Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for two years and it didn't do anything but worsen the anti-Union sentiment.

If they're going to start removing statues in Washington, then with Davis's should go not only Andrew Johnson's, but those of pro-slavery Democrat Franklin Pierce, James Knox Polk who extended slavery into Texas, plus James Buchanan who protected slavery in the western territories.  Throw in Andrew Jackson for the Trail of Tears against the Cherokee on top of his slaveholding, and add every other slaveholder president down to George Washington.  Special attention to Jefferson for Harvey Weinstein-ing Sally Hemings. Where will the line be drawn?  Should we hope sacrificing Davis's effigy will be enough?

David,

     During the past two years, after I retired,  I have been reading biographies of James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, (and other 19th century U.S. Presidents, including Van Buren, Jackson, Taylor, Fillmore, etc.) from an Easton Press Library of the Presidents series that I bought on eBay several years ago.  It's an interesting exercise in historiography, because there is, obviously, considerable overlap in the historical events described in the lives of these contemporaries-- told from different geographical and cultural perspectives.

   One of the most striking things about these Antebellum Presidents, as early as the beginning of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1830s, (and under Van Buren) is how desperately they all struggled to bridge the growing chasm between the North and the slave-owning Southern aristocracy.  Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, in particular, have been vilified for their policies to preserve the old Jacksonian coalition of Northern and Southern Democrats-- including the dreadful Fugitive Slave laws.  (Fillmore, the Whig from Buffalo, was similarly lambasted for the Compromise of 1850.)

    In fact, these Antebellum politicians were all engaged in the same impossible task-- trying to prevent the inevitable fracture of the Union over the issue of slavery in the Western territories.   That issue came to the fore more prominently in the aftermath of the annexation of Texas and Polk's Mexican War.  (Even Lincoln, himself, had never advocated interference with slavery where it existed in the South, prior to the Civil War.)

    Pierce and Buchanan were, essentially, adhering to the old Jackson/Van Buren/Polk party line of appeasing the Southern half of the Democratic coalition, to keep the Union (and the Democratic Party) intact.  Yet, ironically, both men were pilloried by historians after the war for not preventing the catastrophic dissolution of the Union!   Fillmore has been similarly relegated to the dustbin of history for the Compromise of 1850.

    I'm, certainly, not defending these Antebellum Jacksonian Democrats for compromising with Southern slave owners on issues relating to the extension of slavery in the territories and Fugitive Slave laws, but we can't have it both ways.  They wouldn't have preserved the Union until 1860 if they had not compromised with the Southern aristocracy on slavery.

[David Andrews]

8 hours ago, W. Niederhut said:

David,

     During the past two years, after I retired,  I have been reading biographies of James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, (and other 19th century U.S. Presidents, including Van Buren, Jackson, Taylor, Fillmore, etc.) from an Easton Press Library of the Presidents series that I bought on eBay several years ago.  It's an interesting exercise in historiography, because there is, obviously, considerable overlap in the historical events described in the lives of these contemporaries-- told from different geographical and cultural perspectives.

   One of the most striking things about these Antebellum Presidents, as early as the beginning of Jacksonian Democracy in the 1830s, (and under Van Buren) is how desperately they all struggled to bridge the growing chasm between the North and the slave-owning Southern aristocracy.  Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, in particular, have been vilified for their policies to preserve the old Jacksonian coalition of Northern and Southern Democrats-- including the dreadful Fugitive Slave laws.  (Fillmore, the Whig from Buffalo, was similarly lambasted for the Compromise of 1850.)

    In fact, these Antebellum politicians were all engaged in the same impossible task-- trying to prevent the inevitable fracture of the Union over the issue of slavery in the Western territories.   That issue came to the fore more prominently in the aftermath of the annexation of Texas and Polk's Mexican War.  (Even Lincoln, himself, had never advocated interference with slavery where it existed in the South, prior to the Civil War.)

    Pierce and Buchanan were, essentially, adhering to the old Jackson/Van Buren/Polk party line of appeasing the Southern half of the Democratic coalition, to keep the Union (and the Democratic Party) intact.  Yet, ironically, both men were pilloried by historians after the war for not preventing the catastrophic dissolution of the Union!   Fillmore has been similarly relegated to the dustbin of history for the Compromise of 1850.

    I'm, certainly, not defending these Antebellum Jacksonian Democrats for compromising with Southern slave owners on issues relating to the extension of slavery in the territories and Fugitive Slave laws, but we can't have it both ways.  They wouldn't have preserved the Union until 1860 if they had not compromised with the Southern aristocracy on slavery.

Yes, when making generalizations about statuary and historical memory in a single paragraph, one tends to leave nuance out, not to mention Millard Fillmore. 

All of the presidents between Jefferson and Lincoln had to deal with the expansion westward beyond the Appalachians, which for the south meant westward expansion of slavery.  Critically, however, for the Executive, preserving the Union meant compromise with actual or would-be slaveholders settling and seeking statehood in the middle-northern territories of Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska, and with those politicians seeking electoral support for their pro-slavery views; or, in the case of types such as Stephen Douglas, for their willingness to pander to slavery adherents in order to advance their investments (in Douglas's case, in railroads) once statehood and political office were secured.

Compromise was a beast that every president of the antebellum had to ride, including Lincoln.  Those presidents also had to accommodate the views of politicians in their own parties who had assisted their ascent, or who had lost to them in the primaries and remained formidable rivals, as Lincoln (Republican) and Fillmore (Whig) before him each had to accommodate the views of William Seward and his backer, Thurlow Weed -- to name only one instance.

We tend to disparage Fillmore because he refused to play slavery as a political issue, and over-generalize this as support for slavery based on his political rise on the back of the "Know-nothing" anti -immigrant movement.  Franklin Pierce, however, was nominated by the Democrats as a willing pro-slavery candidate, and his notions of Jacksonian Union not only included approving the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but vocal opposition to emancipation.  The Kansas-Nebraska Act, done in the name of railroad expansion westward, gave states' rights to allow or disallow slavery to those territories, and led to the feuding warlord state known for its political violence as "bleeding Kansas."  There have been past motions to remove Pierce's name from schools, and another is currently underway:

https://whdh.com/news/law-school-bearing-franklin-pierce-name-considering-removal/

One might argue that James K. Polk's war with Mexico was necessary to close a northern border on a foreign republic (and possibly on a future European ally) and to allow southerners to buy land not available in the parallel states of Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana.  But the Mexicans saw it as theft, and slaveholder incursions into pre-statehood Tejas as a betrayal of the ideals of Democracy they had learned from the American and French revolutions; northern war opponents in the US agreed.  It is hard to fathom that Polk, like other slaveholder presidents (Jefferson perhaps excepted) did not see advantage for his family and his constituents in the westward expansion of slavery.

In my little town we should perhaps agitate for a name change for Millard Fillmore Drive, Fillmore being the only President from western New York.  Among other state notables, we already have a Roosevelt Avenue, and I fear renaming MFD for Donald J. Trump will be unpopular.

 

Edited June 14, 2020 by David Andrews

[Joseph McBride]

Barbara Pierce Bush was related to Franklin Pierce, a fourth cousin.

[W. Niederhut]

47 minutes ago, Joseph McBride said:

Barbara Pierce Bush was related to Franklin Pierce, a fourth cousin.

   There's a strange rumor on the internet that Barbara Bush (nee Pierce) was the illegitimate daughter of Aleister Crowley, conceived during an occult ritual.

[Ron Ecker]

36 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

   There's a strange rumor on the internet that Barbara Bush (nee Pierce) was the illegitimate daughter of Aleister Crowley, conceived during an occult ritual.

There was also a strange rumor that Barack Obama was the illegitimate son of Malcolm X.

I also seem to recall some kind of controversy about where Obama was born. I remember Donald Trump saying that he had investigators working on the case in Hawaii and they were finding out "some amazing things." Trump never has told us what those amazing things were. Could he have been lying?