You've got a real penchant for insults and for accusing people of advocating murder and rapine if they oppose your views, yet you're the first to complain when the tables are turned. If you make all manner of allegations against others, you ought to expect by now that people will wonder how close you (singular) can stick to the old pro-slavery and racist arguments without being racist yourself.
But I'm not trying to stigmatize you with that label. People will have to make up their own minds about that. I just point out that your views were common a century or so ago and have been repudiated by most people who have thought seriously about Reconstruction.
Oh, stow it, Harriet. The people who came south after the war were either looking for vulture-capital opportunities, or they were carpetbaggers sent by the federal Government, or by the vindictively partisan Union League clubs in the big Northern Cities. But don't take my word for it -- God knows I wouldn't want you to take the word of an unlettered bumpkin who can't frame an argument and never read a book!!! God, you are a piece of work.....try this:
In the autumn of 1866, and through the winter and summer of 1867 strange men from the North were flocking into the black belt of the South, and mingling familiarly with the negroes, day and night. These were the emissaries of the Union League Clubs of Philadelphia and New York that have been unfairly denied their historic status in the consolidation of the negro vote. Organized in the dark days of the war to revive the failing spirit of the people, they had become bitterly partisan clubs with the conclusion of the struggle; and, the Union saved, they had turned with zest to the congenial task of working out the salvation of their party. This, they thought, depended on the domination of the South through the negro vote. Sagacious politicians, and men of material means, obsessed with ideas as extreme as those of Stevens and Sumner, they dispatched agents to turn the negroes against the Southern whites and organize them in secret clubs. -- Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era, p. 198.
"Strange men ... mingling familiarly with the negroes, day and night," we can't have that Debbie, can we? Debbie, are you quoting Claude Bowers? The Claude Bowers who was a regular speaker at Democrat conventions in the 1920s? FDR's favorite historian? The one whose book on Jefferson and Hamilton FDR reviewed in glowing terms in The Evening World? The one Roosevelt wrote a fan mail letter to? The one FDR made ambassador first to Spain at a crucial moment in history then to Chile? Is that the same Claude Bowers that Harry Truman and John Kennedy quoted in support of their policies or to rally Democrats to the cause?
Is that the Claude Bowers who wrote about the Reconstruction era, Louisiana state legislature:
"The lobbies teem with laughing Negroes from the plantations, with whites of the pinch-faced, parasitic type; and Negro women in red turbans peddle cakes and oranges to the very doors of the chambers. It is a monkey house with guffaws, disgusting interpolations, amendments offered that are too obscene to print, followed by shouts of glee."
Could that be the same Claude Bowers who wrote "Rape is the foul daughter of Reconstruction," and "[when] the Klan began to ride ... white women felt some sense of security"? Is that this Claude Bowers:
Bowers, Claude Gernade (zhrnäd´ bou´rz) (KEY) , 1878–1958, American journalist, historian, and diplomat, b. Hamilton co., Ind. After serving as editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (1917–23), Bowers, as editorial writer on the New York World (1923–31) and political columnist on the New York Journal (1931–33), was an influential spokesman for the Democratic party. Ambassador to Spain (1933–39), Bowers remained in Madrid throughout the Spanish civil war and tried to get the Roosevelt administration to support the Spanish Republicans. He then served (1939–53) as ambassador to Chile. Though much of his historical writing is vigorous, well written, and deservedly popular, it is frankly partisan, further praising or reappraising favorably the characters and accomplishments of Democratic leaders in the past, e.g., The Party Battles of the Jackson Period (1922, repr. 1965), Jefferson and Hamilton (1925), The Tragic Era (1929), a now discredited anti-Republican view of Reconstruction built on the principle that political order could be restored only on the basis of racial inequality, Jefferson in Power (1936), and The Young Jefferson, 1743–1789 (1945, repr. 1969).
A long dead Democratic hack, an unreconstructed Copperhead and New Dealer, who had a real problem with African Americans, and whose works have been universally regarded as unbalanced and outdated? That's a fine source. I don't have time to read that Claude Bowers's books, but I notice him citing Hillaire Belloc on the front page of The Tragic Era to the effect that "readable history is melodrama," and thought, "Of course, that's why his books sold so well three generations ago, and why lentulus loves him so -- it's the melodrama!"
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is hardly any great improvement over Bowers. He's another Democrat sycophant who talked up the powers of the Presidency when it looked like his party was going to have more or less permanent control over that office, and thus took a dim view of Andrew Johnson's enemies. Beard was certainly talented, but he's been dead for half a century, and nobody can seriously accept his good agrarians vs. bad industrialist point of view any more. Things are too mixed together. A cotton planter who relied on slave labor and sold to the burgeoning mills was in key ways as much a capitalist as a mill owner or cotton broker. Look up Kenneth Stampp or Richard Nelson Current for more balanced views of Reconstruction that correct Bowers's errors.
Bowers's frankly melodramatic approach to writing history goes a long way to explaining why you cast everything into simply terms of scheming villains and suffering victims. Northerners and Southerners organize in similar ways to achieve goals that may be material or idealist or both, and you'll always see the "Yankees" as evil conspirators and the "Southrons" as noble and weak and bent only on defending themselves. History isn't so simple and human motivations don't sort themselves so easily on different sides of a state or party line. But you have to believe what you believe. The way out would be to try to understand what history looked like to those you consider villains. But most likely you won't do that, because you need the easy, comforting melodrama of victims and villains.
First you posted this:
Your cronies attack Lincoln for showing not being absolutely committed to emancipation and equal rights throughout his career. For them, Lincoln is pro-slavery and racist. But you (singular) show far more support for slavery looking back on the 19th century than Lincoln did in his own day. So what does that make you (singular)? What should they or anyone else, make of your (singular) opinion? You (singular) justify segregationist policies, that are commonly denounced as racist today? Does that make you (singular) a racist?
2,629 posted on 02/13/2005 8:53:50 PM CST by x
There you go again -- this is an attack. Don't tell me it's not. And I've told you, ad hominem is not a valid form of argument. But you're going to do that anyway, because you're a liberal committed to defending Lincoln's reputation, and you're going to try to get my privileges suspended as a bloodless votary offering to your brazen godling -- and your own ego, I don't doubt. After all, if you've got a weak argument, silencing the other guy's will do, right?......I don't think Lincoln was insincere about his dedication to the slavery issue. I think he was misdirective, indirect, and frankly misleading about his real platform on slavery. I think he promised to lead the Republicans all the way to abolition, by steps, .... But I don't think he ever, after 1855, had any other end in view than the suppression of slavery and, if that's what it took, the total destruction of the South.
My position that I argue is reactive to that perception of Lincoln's policy -- his true, tacit policy. I argue that Lincoln stalked, assaulted, and destroyed the South pro bono his two great constituencies, the freesoil Western farmers and the Eastern Industrialists.
As for slavery itself, I don't favor it any more than I favor high income taxes, but I argue that what Lincoln did needs to be undone, because he damaged the Constitution in trying to abridge the Southern planters' rights and committed lese majeste' on the People themselves. Lincoln laid a marker, that the People of a State can be wrong because he said so, and he used the Government to overthrow the People. This is the same charge H.L. Mencken made with respect to the Gettysburg Address, which it no doubt tired Mencken to hear praised by people who didn't understand what it meant.
2,633 posted on 02/14/2005 12:35:04 AM CST by lentulusgracchus
[Emphasis added for the obstinate who refuse to take a point the first two times it's put up.]
You've got a real penchant for insults and for accusing people of advocating murder and rapine if they oppose your views, yet you're the first to complain when the tables are turned. If you make all manner of allegations against others, you ought to expect by now that people will wonder how close you (singular) can stick to the old pro-slavery and racist arguments without being racist yourself.But I'm not trying to stigmatize you with that label. People will have to make up their own minds about that. I just point out that your views were common a century or so ago and have been repudiated by most people who have thought seriously about Reconstruction.
2,663 posted on 02/14/2005 5:58:16 PM CST by x
First you recriminate and add an imputation of moral cowardice and hypocrisy: "You've got a real penchant for insults and for accusing people of advocating murder ...you're the first to complain when the tables are turned."
Well, let's see. Speaking of the Abolitionists, I certainly did accuse them of advocating murder. Henry Ward Beecher acted on the ground his sister had prepared. So did John Brown and the Wide Awakes. Which, of course, is not to excuse the Missouri Red Legs who invaded Kansas and shot up freesoiler communities, either -- or Quantrill, later on. But the Abolitionists did do these things.
Thaddeus Stevens, during the war, demanded that the South be "utterly annihilated", to the point of erasure of state boundaries and recolonization with a new population. After the war, he took the lead in impeaching President Johnson and imposing military rule on the South.
William Seward in 1850 supplied a key enabling formulary to the Abolitionist campaign of moral erasure of the South, "a higher law than the Constitution" (speech cached online, here. He was right, but not in the way he meant it, and his rhetoric helped stir the spirit of "a law unto themselves" among Abolitionists generally.
Wealthy New England Abolitionist Wendell Phillips publicly cursed the Constitution in a Boston Abolitionist rally in Faneuil Hall in 1842. In 1959, Irving Bartlett wrote a paper on Phillips and his oratory in the American Quarterly titled, "Wendell Phillips and the Eloquence of Abuse."
William Lloyd Garrison added his own flourish in the 1850's by publicly burning a copy of the Constitution.
John Brown, Ben Butler, and Henry Ward Beecher require no additional comment on their destructive and selfrighteously hate-ridden public careers. And of course, as we've discussed above, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass were among the foremost propagandists of the movement, who attempted to fasten especial, endogamous, and unwashable criminality and moral contemptibility to the South, precisely in order to mobilize public opinion for the bloodbath to come.
So, yes, I stand by my accusation, which is supported by recent scholarship previously quoted.
.....you're the first to complain when the tables are turned.
Of course I complain. I'm not advocating turning half the country into a pillar of smoke with violent retribution of any kind, so there are no tables to turn. I have, in the past, advocated seizing the Ivy League campuses under eminent domain and closing them pro bono publico, but that I advocate for other reasons, as part of another discussion.
I repeat: yes, it is unfair to accuse me of doing the same thing the Beechers did, because I'm not doing what they did -- which was pregnant with moral liability for later results, and would have been so understood by any of their contemporaries.
This is the objective record of the moral assault of the Northern Abolitionists on the South. A countervailing assault by the South on the North was never represented by contemporary discourse, except by some fabulous 1863 Republican pamphlets about "the Slave Power" and its alleged Struldbrug plans to turn the Northern States into citadels of slaveholding by vast, unseen pro-slavery conspiracies, as acting to overreach the North, rather than vice versa.
Southerners, as shown by the speeches of Toombs, Rhett, and other spokesmen cited and quoted above, demanded access to the Territories on an equal basis with Northern freesoilers (fat lot of good it would have done planters, to have transplanted to Nebraska or the Dakotas), and they wanted the fugitive-slave laws and Article IV enforced. Turning Ohio into a slaving "victory garden" was never on the agenda, never mind that Republican political pamphleteers occasionally said it was.
If you make all manner of allegations against others, you ought to expect by now that people will wonder how close you (singular) can stick to the old pro-slavery and racist arguments without being racist yourself.
This is a non-sequitur. The premise and conclusion are not related. This is nothing more than a threat to label me a racist in a public forum, if I continue to mine the evidentiary vein of Republican and Abolitionist propaganda, showing how they, over a period of years, superheated the country's political environment to dissolve the political compact, which IMHO died in the aftermath of the John Brown raid, and then the Union.
So save your labels and your threats of labels; you cannot begin to prove what you threaten to say about me, for the very simple reason that it isn't true. I posted my position to you, as I've cited and quoted to you above. If you continue to accuse me of things, that's dishonesty and bad faith, and I'll have a lot to say about that.
I just point out that your views were common a century or so ago and have been repudiated by most people who have thought seriously about Reconstruction.
I take it that you mean my views on Reconstruction. You can't be serious, to say that there is a consensus in favor of McPherson's position. And simply trying to sweep away all the Southern writers of the last 120 years by crying out "moral impurity" won't work for Reconstruction any more than it will wash for the origins of the Civil War. Either they had a point about the validity of Reconstruction acts and the authority by which the Congress pretended to reorganize the conquered States, or they did not.
So you see, legalism follows your side around like a biting dog, all the way through Reconstruction: just winning a war doesn't make one right. To say it does, of course, is teleology, which would severely embarrass your side of the argument, if the Nazi Reich had won the Second World War. Had the Germans won, you would now be burdened with thinking up reasons why they were right, and dispelling the samizdat of such as Hannah Arendt complaining about the outcome. But of course Arendt would herself already have been conveniently taken care of, so perhaps her awkward moral questions wouldn't arise after all.
As to Reconstruction history, I question the legitimacy of the 14th Amendment, for one thing, precisely because it was passed by rump "state governments" formed by the mass classification of citizenship by the Congress in the conquered States, and exclusion of most of the electorate from the polls, in favor of a politically convenient minority.
The same disability attaches to the 14th Amendment that attaches to the State of West Virginia, frankly, and for the same reasons. The United States Government played favorites about who was a citizen and who could form a State -- playing God with the People, whose creature the United States Government by law and by right was. The Government laid hands on its master, and for that alone deserved to be dissolved.
Even Mark Neely concedes that Reconstruction history has a long way to go. The premature and politically motivated representations by Clintonoid historians, five and ten years ago, that there is a New Historiographical Consensus on the Civil War and Reconstruction, were the work of the academic Left, and the National Park Service initiative to introduce PC "it was all about slavery" exhibits to "contextualize" the Civil War in a bath of liberation and Democratic Party propaganda was no service to the public. Every one of the historians present at the 1998 Clintonoid confab, at which McPherson got his own section of the online "book" produced by the conference, was a Confederate flag-folder. Every single one of them came out against any public display of the Confederate flag outside a museum, a military park, or some other socially constrained, PC-controlled environment. (And of course, if they ever got preclusive control of the military parks, it's even money the Confederate monuments would disappear -- to make the parks into "freedom parks" or some such -- just as they disappeared from New Orleans as soon as a black mayor was elected.)
Did you save that as a macro, to invoke on any/every Southern historian born before 1960?
Universally? I don't believe you. And let's say, arguendo, that it's true. Does that make him unusable as a source, so that you can just wave your hand over his writing and pronounce, like a magician or a geophysicist, "ALL LIES, ALL LIES!!"?
I quote and use John Nicolay, who is quite strong in his biases -- to the point of foaming sometimes -- because he is an eyewitness and because he had access to documents and the ability to pull them together and write a coherent, if biased, narrative.
Either the Union Leagues' members were vindictive Republican partisans or they were not. If they weren't, and you have information to contradict my post -- put it up! Quote somebody!
If instead of "vulture capitalist" venturers on the flood tide of opportunistic fortune, as I characterized them, the carpetbaggers were instead Mary Poppinses of timely good help, flown south to repair the damages of war out of endless resources of eleemosynary goodwill, then I'll be happy to see your documentation.
Beard was certainly talented, but he's been dead for half a century, and nobody can seriously accept his good agrarians vs. bad industrialist point of view any more.
What, on your sayso? Did you pass the word on Beard, too? You've been busy! But of course you'll have a better source. Some nice, fresh, crisply-minted Berkeley Marxist? Or maybe just a Marist?
Look up Kenneth Stampp or Richard Nelson Current for more balanced views of Reconstruction that correct Bowers's errors.
Oh, I'm sorry -- I don't accept homework assignments. You've got a better story and a better source? Post away! (That's your job, you see.)
Bowers's frankly melodramatic approach to writing history goes a long way to explaining why you cast everything into simply terms of scheming villains and suffering victims.
No, it doesn't. It only means that our styles are similar. My objections to your attempt to rule him out of order because he's not on your reading list, or UCLA's, or Claremont-McKenna's, or UWash's, or Georgetown's, doesn't cut it. If you want to make a point, make your point. And no, you don't get to bulk-obsolete historians by date. That Neely lecture I pointed you to highlighted what Neely sees as a serious drawback to the contemporary fashion in historiography that is stifling studies of single events -- and biography. Modern does not equal "bulletproof".
.....you'll always see the "Yankees" as evil conspirators and the "Southrons" as noble and weak and bent only on defending themselves. ....
Oh, please.
But you have to believe what you believe. The way out would be to try to understand what history looked like to those you consider villains. But most likely you won't do that, because you need the easy, comforting melodrama of victims and villains.
More ad hominem bulltwaddle. I look at the constitutional issues, and I look to see who overstepped and who didn't. That's what I stand on, and your broad characterization, with its generous ascription of personal infantilism, isn't worth the electrons you buggered to put that up there.
Twaddle.