Posted on 05/16/2015 5:12:04 AM PDT by OttawaFreeper
The North rejoiced: The rebellion had been put down and the Union saved. But Northerners also breathed a sigh of relief. Many had feared that the Confederacy would not accept defeat, but instead would continue the struggle by means of guerrilla warfare. Indeed, Lee’s chief of artillery, E. Porter Alexander, had suggested this option before Lee’s surrender. The Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, also wished to continue the war in this manner. But Lee rejected the guerrilla option in favor of unifying the country. And General Joseph Johnston defied Davis’s orders to continue hostilities, instead surrendering his force to William Tecumseh Sherman at Durham Station in North Carolina in order to “save the people [and] spare the blood of the army.” But in reality, the war was not over. It would continue for nearly another decade and a half in the form of Reconstruction.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
I love the irony of Lee’s Arlington being seized by the Fed.Gov and purposefully desecrated with a cemetery that later becomes the nations most hallowed ground.
I believe you are correct!
“Always seemed to me that having it be the resting place of the greatest American soldiers and other leaders is something Lee would have, in contrast, considered a great honor.”
I seem to remember reading that the legality of what the Union did to Lee’s home was questionable, and it was a very real possibility that Lee could have forced the US Gov’t to dig up all those graves and move them. But he chose not to.
***...the push to the West picked up a lot of steam and many uprooted people moved West with grudges against the other side.***
This is true. Lt Ware, in his book THE INDIAN WAR OF 1864 mentions lots of people moving west DURING the Civil War. Many of those heading west, still wore parts of Confederate Uniforms.
After RE died his son brought suit for recovery against the federal government for illegal confiscation of the property.
In 1882 the Supremes ruled that he was in the right and returned title to him. In 1883 Congress bought the land and home from him for $150,000.
Nobody EVER outmaneuvered Lincoln, probably the most effective pure politician in US history. Johnson, OTOH, was perhaps the worst. He alienated even people who really, really wanted to support him.
I agree with you. Lincoln was exceedingly shrewd. This is why I find it credible that he correctly manipulated the Confederates into starting the war. All they had to do was sit on their hands, and the Secession would have become a fait accompli. The only thing which could have changed the dynamic was if they gave the Union an excuse to wage war.
Que Abraham Lincoln and his brilliant ploy to get them to attack. I don't know if he played them like a fiddle, but it is not an unreasonable conjecture from what I've seen. One of my oldest Friends who is Black, and a History Major, thoroughly believes that Lincoln engineered the start of the Civil war by his ability to read and predict people.
Yes, Lincoln was quite the clever fellow.
Reconstruction ruined the South for a century after the war; the Carthaginian peace handed down by Thaddeus Stevens and his ilk fundamentally altered the nature of our Federal system in a bad way, and Lincoln, had he lived, would have in my opinion pursued a more moderate course that would have left a better legacy both in reconciliation and balancing the power of the Federal government with that of the states.
Everybody misunderestimated him. Seward even sent him a memo intimating Lincoln should delegate power to run the government to him, because Lincoln couldn't handle it.
Of course, after a year or so everybody looked around, noticed what he'd accomplished in that year and said, "Wait, what?"
What is even more interesting is that even his greatest rivals, like Seward, generally became loyal supporters as they got to know him.
Thanks. I was right in a fuzzy way.
You give them too much credit for intelligence. The plain truth is that they don't give a crap about the black family, they give a crap about black voters.
It has long been my belief that the "War on Poverty" which began in 1964, was the consequence of the one-two punch of the Passage of the 24th amendment (You don't have to pay taxes to vote) and the "Civil Rights Act of 1964". Both of these things were actually Republican schemes to gain more power by enfranchising blacks that had previously been marginalized by various Democrat tactics to suppress their representation.
I have to give it to Johnson. When he saw which way the wind was blowing, he acted quickly to flip all those voters over to his side. By giving them free government money, and by acting like he cared, he created millions of new Democrat voters. Just look at the Black Voting percentages from 1936 to 2012.
The Black vote for Republican Presidential candidates
1936-2012
1936: 28%
1940: 32%
1944: 32%
1948: 23%
1952: 24%
1956: 39%
1960: 32%
1964: 6%
1968: 15%
1972: 13%
1976: 15%
1980: 12%
1984: 9%
1988: 10%
1992: 11%
1996: 12%
2000: 8%
2004: 12%
2008: 4%
2012: 6%
See what happened in 1964? No, the Democrats aren't explicitly *TRYING* to keep black people in Poverty, (Well, maybe some of them are) that is merely the unintended consequences of their policies. The fact appears to be that the "Great Society" and the "War on Poverty" were in fact, nothing more than Democrat vote farming schemes, and they have worked brilliantly.
Much of what is wrong with the Nation today is the result of the success of Johnson's tactic.
When the Colonies exercised their natural right to secede from England, every colony was a slave state. They were *ALL* slave states.
It was actually the words in the Declaration that started the ball rolling towards abolition. The State of Massachusetts explicitly cited the Declaration of Independence in the "Freedom cases" which overturned slavery there.
Pennsylvania explicitly rejected that argument, though.
you are right reconstruction continued on into the 50’s.and to a degree to this day.
You might want to look up what the Romans actually did to Carthage before assigning that term to Reconstruction.
The aftermath of our WBTS was the mildest of any great civil war in history.
Unless you’d care to provide an example of one that was milder?
For example, exactly one Confederate was executed after the war for war crimes.
In Spain, which had a war in which the population, duration and number of dead is not dissimilar, 50,000 were executed in the first five years and at least another 150,000 died from mistreatment in prison.
Everybody misunderestimated him. Seward even sent him a memo intimating Lincoln should delegate power to run the government to him, because Lincoln couldn't handle it.
If they had read any of his speeches prior to that time, they would realize this was no average mind. This man was exceedingly Brilliant. He could write with an eloquence that I have seldom seen matched elsewhere in History, let alone among his contemporaries.
And now is the time to mention my theory about "Brilliant Presidents." They screw things up utterly. If you look back at the history of our Presidents, I dare say you will notice that all of them who were considered "Geniuses" were the ones that made the biggest mess of things, Obama and Clinton being but the latest examples.
Except for the fairly obvious fact that when he took office he was, as he said, faced with a task greater than that faced by Washington. He did not cause that mess, he simply had to deal with it.
IMO no other American president, not even Washington, would have been capable of pulling the country intact, however damaged and diverted from its original course, through the mess.
I have a three-volume set of books that contains most of his known letters, speeches, articles, etc.
The personality really comes through, especially in the early private letters that he had no reason at all to believe would some day be perused by scholars.
The war started with the Gulf of Tonkin incident . . . er, I mean the Fort Sumter incident.
What about Jesse James’ involvement with the Knights of the Golden Circle?
I agree. As Lincoln had implored Grant at Appomattox, “Let him up easy.”
(It probably didn’t hinder as much either the Grant and Lee were both West Pointers.)
If Lincoln had had children, they would look like Bill Clinton. And Hillary Clinton.
You need to be more cynical. Johnson was a brilliant political tactician. He was also antebellum. He recognized the power of the Republican support of Civil Rights legislation and found an effective way to, in his words, “Keep the n*****s enslaved for 100 years by virtue of the War on Poverty. It was, in fact, a cynical ploy to maintain a substantial segment of the American public in poverty.
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