The Left Side of History

Claremont Review of Books ^ | Spring 2020 | Allen C. Guelzo

[ThanhPhero]

...Even after the war, the federal government would be paying pensions to nearly one million Union veterans or their dependents, at a total cost (by 1900) of almost 22% of all federal expenditures.

And for what? Emancipation, yes. Union, yes. But the promise that emancipation would produce an egalitarian, biracial society was cruelly smashed by the failures of Reconstruction, and reunion only resulted by the 1880s in a revival of the same old alliance of corrupt Northern Democrats and white-hooded Southern Democrats that had brought the country to the brink of war in the first place.

[ThanhPhero]

An excellent recounting of the roots of Progressivism. We should all know this.

[PAR35]

The Yankees made their last pension payment for the war of Northern Aggression in May, 2020. Irene Triplet, $73.13 a month.

[Verginius Rufus]

Very few white Americans in 1865 dreamed of racial equality--most Northerners were as prejudiced as any white Southerners. The 14th amendment was carefully crafted to try to force Southern states to give voting rights to black men while not forcing Northern states to do the same. It was only with the 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, that all of the Northern states were required to let black men vote.

Reconstruction was a great disappointment because of the lack of the "vision thing." People just failed to understand what needed to be done to enable the former slaves to become economically independent. There was some land available for homesteading in the South but not nearly enough. If the government had bought the large plantations from their owners and helped the former slaves become successful small farmers, that would have been better than sharecropping or tenant farming, but there wasn't any tradition of spending large sums of money in that way (other than for war).