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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"Not-a-tea-party, a-confederate-party"
This is an excellent article on the state of our body politic.
While I have a few disagreements with the author's assertions, I think his conclusions are spot on.
http://weeklysift.com/2014/08/11/not-a-tea-party-a-confederate-party/
JustAnotherGen
(31,866 posts)The Americans won the war - but the traitors won the peace.
Note the 'words' he would used to describe the sides . . . He was black, grew up in the Jim Crow Era, and had an amazing career in the military (Green Beret/Army Officer). He truly felt the South were traitors who hated America worse than the Nazis - and every single officer in the Confederate Country should have been hung.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)And barred from political office.
My personal opinion is that Northern industrialists colluded with Southern aristocrats to undermine reconstruction.
They too had little interest in seeing an insurgent black majority in the South making common cause with poor white workers in the North.
JustAnotherGen
(31,866 posts)thucythucy
(8,086 posts)by David Blight pretty much says that.
For about a half a decade after the end of the war there was some real progress--actual democratic elections in the south where men (though not women) of color could vote, black men elected to state offices, public schools established (for both emancipated slaves AND poor whites)... This was the era later slandered by revisionist right wing bullshit historians as "corrupt"--"carpetbaggers"-- the whole "Gone with the Wind" revisionist view of southern history. As if southern politics after 1870 has been devoid of corruption!
Even the progress that was made was undermined, almost from the beginning. The very first thing President Andrew Johnson did as president, immediately after Lincoln's assassination, was to take the lands of traitorous slave-owner aristocrats out of the jurisdiction of the Freedman's Bureau. Lincoln had wanted to confiscate all that land, divide it up amongst emancipated slaves and landless whites, thus giving blacks some degree of economic power, and poor whites a vested interest in the destruction of the slave owning oligarchy. This was the "Forty Acres and a Mule" program ridiculed by "Gone with the Wind" and "Birth of a Nation." In other words, "land reform."
There is this myth that Lincoln was for a "soft" peace, but what he seems to have meant by that was no retaliation against southern enlisted men. His preference in dealing with the leaders, as he said on at least one occasion, was that they go into exile. I certainly don't think he would have sat by, as president, and allowed a slave driving war criminal like Nathan Bedford Forrest to found the KKK, which is what happened after Lincoln's death.
Had there been a REAL restructuring of American society--for which there was at least the potential in 1865--this country would be in a whole different place. I've often thought that the murder of Abraham Lincoln--by an avowed white supremacist--was the single most pivotal event in American history. Not that other shit hasn't happened, or been tragic. But had Lincoln been able to serve another four years, I think our culture today might well be substantially different.
Just MHO.
First Speaker
(4,858 posts)...I agree. Lincoln in the White House from 1865-69 would have made us a different country. I don't know, given the endemic racism in the South *and* North in the 19th century, just how far Reconstruction would have gone, and how enduring it might have been. But Lincoln at the very least would have defended black Union veterans to his last breath. Had we a President who believed in something approaching equal rights, well--who knows? With his prestige and political sagacity, it might have been quite different.
Art_from_Ark
(27,247 posts)I don't think the bigwigs in the Republican party were really interested in letting Lincoln survive past the end of the war. It's no coincidence, for example, that Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, tried to set himself up as de facto President after Lincoln's assassination, going so far as to preside over the kangaroo court that tried and convicted the "conspirators" and hanged them without giving them a chance to say anything, and then getting Congress to pass a law that made it illegal for President Johnson to fire him. And of course, the administration that succeeded Johnson's, the Grant administration, ended up being the most corrupt administration in the US up to that time.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)The assassination is one of those tragic 'missed' opportunities in history that would have made the US a much better place for all of us.
The fact that after his death, Southern leaders like Lee, Davis, and the rest of the aristocracy were not divested of all rights and property made the Union 'victory' a sham.
That Northern industrialists saw Reconstruction as an example of what would eventually happen to them can not be over stated.
A Southern political block made up of freed slaves and working class whites would have been a huge challenge to the growing Victorian cultural hegemony that was taking root within the Union political and industrial classes at the end of the war.
DashOneBravo
(2,679 posts)At least they didn't name a bunch of US Army bases after them.
Oh wait..
JustAnotherGen
(31,866 posts)It would be a symbolic thing - but a good thing to rename them for Presidents . . . But the folks waving rebel flags will get all up in arms at the horror of it.
DashOneBravo
(2,679 posts)I'd love to see that.
I'm a southerner and have never understood the love of those flags.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)The fact that these traitors have statues and monuments all over the South is fucking disgusting.
I still can't believe that the KKK and other 'white power' terrorist groups are allowed to even exist.
DashOneBravo
(2,679 posts)Every podunk town has one. The good news is that way of thinking is dying off. Hopefully they'll bulldoze them.
JustAnotherGen
(31,866 posts)That has one in his window. In New Jersey! *smh*
blackspade
(10,056 posts)AlinPA
(15,071 posts)It feels different to me (I'm 77 years old) than when I was a young person. It's nearly hopeless- what a joke today with the media talking about congress working with the President on legislation.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)As the article makes clear, the Confederate worldview and revisionist history has infected our national discourse from Texas to Alaska and Maine to Hawaii.
These neo-Confederates are everywhere, subverting voting rights, destroying civility, and attempting to reduce working class and poor people of every color and creed to indentured servitude.
They make me sick with loathing.
phantom power
(25,966 posts)Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)in my heritage, I am trashing this thread.
Skidmore
(37,364 posts)Thanks for the link.
blackspade
(10,056 posts)I found it enlightening and infuriating in equal measure.
The comments section is priceless if you can stomach it.
Many underscore the clueless hatred that the Neo-Confederates have instilled into the fabric of uneducated white 'culture.'
Pacifist Patriot
(24,654 posts)Cali_Democrat
(30,439 posts)cp
(6,652 posts)calimary
(81,436 posts)Glad you're here! It IS interesting, isn't it!? It makes some troublesome points about our nation. I find myself fascinated and bothered like hell to discover how much propaganda we've fed our children via their textbooks at school, over the generations. AND how much propaganda WE ate from many of those textbooks. What I remember from ages ago was how "the COMMMMMunists" were always pointed to as the Great Evil of the World. "The COMMMMunists" were the source of all evil and "the COMMMMMunists" were this and "the COMMMMMunists" were that. I was seven years old when I started noticing that, and wondering what it was about these "COMMMMMunists" that was so doggone bad. That part of it was never explained.
Cha
(297,515 posts)Cha
(297,515 posts)stage left
(2,965 posts)bookmarked to read later.
stage left
(2,965 posts)Should be required reading.
orpupilofnature57
(15,472 posts)phantom power
(25,966 posts)hz_xlnc
(10 posts)1step
(380 posts)They woke up on the morning of Obama's inauguaration and "discovered" America had serious problems, like the shredding of the Constitution (Patriot Act onwards) and the national debt (which Clinton had eliminated but Bush exploded).
linuxman
(2,337 posts)Not by a long shot.
The last time the US was in the black was 1835.
Clinton had a budget surplus. Enormous difference.