…in a post by Victor Davis Hanson over at PJM:
The kind of thoroughgoing liberal orgy of corruption and incompetence that has followed the Obama coronation has been seen only once before in American history: in the carpetbagger/scalawag/freedmen radical Republican governments in the South during the early years of Radical Reconstruction following the THE War.
The Obamites should take the lessons of Reconstruction seriously. Not the ones that modern historians who say it was not radical enough try to draw, but the lessons that (1) the only thing that supported those governments was the presence of lots of Federal bayonets, (2) the excesses of Reconstruction were real, and were major factors in shaping Southern responses ranging from the initial Ku Klux Klan to Jim Crow, (3) it ended badly with serious political violence in 1876, and (4) after 1876, it was three or four generations before any respectable Southerner could even think about voting for a Republican.
In this situation, we have a military that is mostly conservative and has generally stayed out of law enforcement in the US since the Compromise of 1877. Even though changes to the Posse Comitatus Act probably would now permit Obama to use the military in the US to enforce his measures, I doubt there would be much enthusiasm for that in the officer corps or the ranks.
Unlike the post-War situation where the North had not only active Army units in the South but a vast body of veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic who could have been called out had the South actually risen again, today the Left that supports the Obama agenda is almost devoid of veterans or even men and women trained to arms at all.
Not only is the majority of the entire country center-right, the overwhelming majority of men of military age and trained to arms are decidedly on the Right.
I think we are reaching a point where the current Congress and Administration behave like a combination of the Radical Republicans in 1866 and the contemporary Carpetbagger/Scalawag/Freedmen governments in the South at their peril.
The next year is going to be very interesting.
I’m not so sure – the Prez seems to command an inordinate amount of “street power” that can hit those Right wing military guys where they live, literally, all while maintaining plausible deniability.
So if it hadn’t been for those bad soldiers with bayonets, the South would have gladly treated former slaves with dignity? The Ku Klux Klan started in Tennessee, which wasn’t under Reconstruction (thanks to Lincoln’s VP, Andrew Johnson) and they rode around in sheets claiming to be ghosts of Confederate soldiers. The “serious political violence” was caused by white racists trying to violently overthrow elected black governments.
Regarding the idea that the modern military will somehow fail to support the elected government, this veteran has his doubts.
So if it hadn’t been for those bad soldiers with bayonets, the South would have gladly treated former slaves with dignity?.
Who said that?
Are you sure you’re commenting at the right post, or blog?
Titus,
Obama may have a lot of “street power.” But he is clearly not commanding it, or else the healthcare debate would look a lot uglier than it already has. I have not heard any rhetoric from him about restraint, and we only have one poor gentleman in Missouri who was beaten up.
I am frankly shocked after the election activities where I have read about much more open intimidation and then the Black Panthers getting a free pass, that there isn’t widespread, open violence against the healthcare protesters. Maybe it was all about checking a box for the first(or is it second?) black president.
The #2 point above, talking about the “excesses of Reconstruction” causing the Ku Klux Klan. These “excesses” including attempting to teach blacks to read. If the commenter wasn’t serious, it would be so wrong as to be laughable.
The #2 point above, talking about the “excesses of Reconstruction” causing the Ku Klux Klan. These “excesses” including attempting to teach blacks to read.
It’s kind of nutty to assume that teaching blacks to read was one of the excesses he was talking about. He certainly didn’t say it.
Is it your claim that there were no excesses of Reconstruction, or injustices ensuing from it? If so, you are profoundly ignorant of the history of the era.
Mike, right now youtube videos of protestors getting beaten by union guys only hurts the agenda. That’s why they’ve changed the subject to attacking the CIA and Darth Cheney (while they act unilaterally in Congress.) However, when and if it no longer matters if people see the violence is when it’ll happen. IOW, the worst is yet to come (hope it doesn’t!)
Is it your claim that there were no excesses of Reconstruction, or injustices ensuing from it? There are always excesses in any era of history. The large majority of excesses in Reconstruction were committed by whites upset at the fact that they had lost the war and their slaves.
The large majority of excesses in Reconstruction were committed by whites upset at the fact that they had lost the war and their slaves.
That could be true, and still completely irrelevant to the point, because they weren’t the excesses under discussion. Why don’t you stop commenting until you can say something that actually addresses the issue? Up until now, you’ve simply been wasting bandwidth and both of our time.
But also a tired and trusted tactic of the typical lefty concern troll.
I’ll admit to being just a tiny bit disappointed this example came from Mr. Gerrib, as opposed to Jim or Daveon. Just a tiny bit.
Oath Keepers adds an interesting twist to this discussion…
http://oathkeepers.org/oath/2009/03/03/declaration-of-orders-we-will-not-obey/
I’m sorry, but in the history I learned, the KKK burnt “freedman’s schools” and killed the teachers. The “political violence” in 1876 was things like whites dragging a cannon up and shelling their way into a courthouse because they thought the sheriff was a “Negro sympathizer.”
I guess I don’t know what excesses the original comment was pertaining to.
Is there any historian today who would agree that “the excesses of Reconstruction were real, and were major factors in shaping Southern responses ranging from the initial Ku Klux Klan to Jim Crow”?
VDH seems to be 50 years behind the times where Reconstruction historiography is concerned.
The “liberal orgy of corruption and incompetence” was as much an invention in the 1870s as it is today. Back then it referred to things like taxing white property owners in order to pay for schools for black children, and putting black men in elected office simply because they won more votes. I suppose it still does.
Perhaps you should call up your history teacher and demand your money back.
VDH seems to be 50 years behind the times where Reconstruction historiography is concerned.
VDH didn’t write that.
Back then it referred to things like taxing white property owners in order to pay for schools for black children, and putting black men in elected office simply because they won more votes.
No, it referred to seizing property and handing it off to carpetbaggers.
Josh Reiter – I would, if somebody would kindly suggest where I should go to get the correct education.
Seriously, what historian or website is arguing that the Radical Republicans caused the KKK? I’d like to see how they came to that conclusion.
Rand – you mean the wartime “Confiscation Acts?” The laws intended to confiscate slaves and property used to resist the Federal army? As I recall, the Radical Republicans wanted to do much more – like bust up plantations and give the land to the ex-slaves. This obviously didn’t happen.
It was a lot more than that, and the idea of the Confiscation Acts wasn’t supposed to be to reward Yankee cronies while punishing the general populace (and not just the slaveholders, who were a minority). And just because the Radical Republicans didn’t get all they wanted didn’t mean that what they did get was reasonable.
In general, a lot of people felt betrayed that, after Lincoln’s assassination, the government didn’t live up to the agreements at Appomattox. The bitterness from this was part of the cause of the later violence in the West as the rednecks, who for the most part had never been fighting for slavery or racism, per se, headed out there. The War Between the States isn’t as simple, and clearcut right/wrong as they teach you in school.
Actually, the agreements at Appomattox were for the soldiers not to be imprisoned, which, having committed treason by making war on the US, they could have been. I guess I’m not very sympathetic to the Confederate cause. I still don’t see how anything in Reconstruction justified the KKK or Jim Crow.
“I’m not so sure – the Prez seems to command an inordinate amount of “street power” that can hit those Right wing military guys where they live, literally, all while maintaining plausible deniability.”
What about the real power and water and food shipped in from outlying areas that make modern blue state metroplexes livable as opposed to wastelands?
The next revolution, if by misfortune it comes to that, will be fought with a pair of bolt cutters and a siege, not massive firepower.
You would expect Obama to lose big in the midterms. I fear the massive taxpayer theft will undermine that expectation. Watch where the money goes six months before the elections. I believe the level of thuggery will be beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. I really want to be wrong on this.
To you and me, none of those things would — but to a population that had recently been beaten in war and had their entire economy and culture overturned, perhaps they might.
Aren’t we always told to try to see the point of view of our enemies? Does that only apply to those who don’t speak English as a first language?
I’ll be honest; I don’t know much about the period. What I do know is that making the slaves full citizens raised their count in the Census from 3/5ths of a person to a full person, granting the southern states greater votes in the House, which the Republicans then didn’t acknowledge. For about 130 years, Andrew Johnson was the only president ever impeached because he, correctly, stood up for the Constitution and insisted the additional southern representatives be seated. The temptation to exact unjust revenge against a fallen enemy would be very tempting to any human being and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Republicans succumbed to great corruption, in addition to many good things like building black schools and raising black statesmen. I don’t know much about what happened, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
McGehee – I understand why the South supported the KKK and Jim Crow – they were racists and were mad that their slaves were taken from them. Perhaps obviously, I don’t agree with those reasons.
Moving back to my original point – comparing the current health care debate to Reconstruction is hyperbole at best. Doing so by arguing in defense of the poor downtrodden Southern white man suggests at best great historical ignorance.
comparing the current health care debate to Reconstruction is hyperbole at best.
We’re not just talking about the health-care debate. Health care is just the latest, if not last straw.
Well, comparing the current political situation to Reconstruction is hyperbole at best.
VDH didn’t write that.
Mea culpa.
No, it referred to seizing property and handing it off to carpetbaggers.
Prewar property taxes were very low in the South, and landowners were responsible for assessing their own holdings. After the war, with the need to educate the freedmen (more than half the population in Mississippi and South Carolina) and rebuild destroyed public infrastructure, property taxes skyrocketed. Then as now, landowners who could not pay the taxes they owed lost their lands at auction — in many cases to Northerners looking for bargains.
The landowners saw that as “seizing property and handing it off to carpetbaggers”; I see it as a government fulfilling its duty to provide for the education of all its citizens, and maintain public infrastructure. The fact that the government was elected by, and seeking to serve the interests of, citizens who had only recently had the legal status of livestock, made for a one-two punch of economic and social humiliation (on top of the military one administered by the Union Army). The motivations of those Southerners isn’t hard to appreciate, but it does not make their cause any more just.
Well, comparing the current political situation to Reconstruction is hyperbole at best.
Fortunately it is hyperbole, but it’s disturbing that VDH’s commenter sees the parallel, and chooses to identify with the white Southerners — the people who used terrorism to thwart the Constitution.
That’s in the same vein of “universal health-care opponents are racists who don’t want poor people to get health care” and “supporters of the war in Iraq are just racists whose response to problems is ‘kill more foreigners!'” and “Republicans are all racists.” I hear this sort of thing from leftists all the time in response to complex issues, which is why I laugh when they lecture us non-lefties on how we should appreciate “nuance.” Then again, I’m not the one playing shift-the-goalposts.
That’s in the same vein of “universal health-care opponents are racists who don’t want poor people to get health care”
People shouldn’t throw charges like that around without specific evidence. That said, you have to wonder why, for example, belief in the “birther” nonsense runs so much higher in the South (where 70-75% of whites aren’t sure Obama is American) than everywhere else (where the comparable numbers are under 20%)? Might race be one factor that keeps a large segment of our population from seeing Obama’s presidency as legitimate? Or is there some other explanation for that regional difference?
Since I don’t know where you got your statistics, I’m not sure that the “there are more birthers in the South” claim is true. In any case, I’m not one of them — Obama’s caginess about his documents is irritating but I think he’d just hiding the fact that his real name is “Bartholomew.”
Anyway, you obviously are more comfortable with your stereotypical view of Southerners than you are willing to learn the truth of that matter. For one thing, if the South sucks for blacks so much, why are so many of them still down here? For another, I love the way Yankees talk as if there’s no racism anywhere else in the country, only in the former Confederate states. I can tell you plenty of people from such bastions of liberalism as New York City are as racist as Jefferson Davis. (Many of these people move to places like Miami and are shocked that there’s so much interracial dating and marriage.) In fact, I think race relations in the South are a far cry better these days than they are up North. Or it’s been replaced by black vs. Hispanic racism and black vs. Asian racism, neither of which can be blamed on the American Civil War, unless it’s the way blacks used to be the darlings of victimhood until these other upstart minorities horned their way in.
Andrea – I never claimed that people who are against health care reform are racist. Now, if somebody tells me “why should I care if you are sick” I may call that person heartless and uncompassionate, but I think that’s obvious based on their statements.
Havin said that, if you ask me about the Reconstruction-era US, I would say a majority of whites, north and south, were racists, even by the lax standards of the time. A lesser majority in the North (say 70%) vs say 90% in the South, but still a majority. And very few Northerners were for full equality of blacks, to include one A. Lincoln. (One could be against slavery but not for equal rights.)
Not that it is particularly relevant, the “Southerners are birthers” thing comes from a poll by Research 2000 for Daily Kos.
Daily Kos. OK.
*snerk*
Incidentally, it’s interesting that Chris is so obsessed with the “birther” phenomenon while ignoring the key question, “Was Obama born in the US?” Legally, Hawaii says he is and they issued a birth certificate indicating so. So that covers it – unless of course, evidence should surface that indicates that the birth certificate is fraudulent and Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii. I personally don’t think that will happen even if Obama was born overseas.
Is there any historian today who would agree that “the excesses of Reconstruction were real, and were major factors in shaping Southern responses ranging from the initial Ku Klux Klan to Jim Crow”?
Jim, I’m not going to bother to google for such a historian. The real question is why would you think otherwise? At the least, there are Confederacy apologists who probably have been making similar claims since the 19th century. Given how Reconstruction worked, it’s a reasonable claim to make. There are a lot of examples in history of injustices perpetrating future injustices. We see this in racial quotas and similar bad ideas of modern times.
Prewar property taxes were very low in the South, and landowners were responsible for assessing their own holdings. After the war, with the need to educate the freedmen (more than half the population in Mississippi and South Carolina) and rebuild destroyed public infrastructure, property taxes skyrocketed. Then as now, landowners who could not pay the taxes they owed lost their lands at auction — in many cases to Northerners looking for bargains.
Definitely the most disingenuous remark in this thread, Jim. The “need” to educate the freedmen somehow results in the choice bits of real estate and wealth ending up in the hands of opportunists. It still happens today especially with the bailouts and the faux green businesses angling for a public handout. There’s always a “need” that allows one an excuse to redistribute wealth via government power to fellow kronies.
Karl Hallowell – not sure I’m obsessed with the birther phenomenon. Andrea Harris asked for a link, I did a Google, and provided same.
The problem with arguing that the KKK resulted from Reconstruction is that they were founded in Tennessee, a state that did not go through Reconstruction.
I’m not sure why you put scare quotes around “need to educate freedmen.” These people had been held as slaves – surely the absolute least that the slaveholders could do in recompense was educate them?
I’m not sure why you put scare quotes around “need to educate freedmen.” These people had been held as slaves – surely the absolute least that the slaveholders could do in recompense was educate them?
What gave you the idea that the craven seizures of wealth during the Reconstruction had anything to do with educating former slaves? Why do you feel the urge to rationalize avarice from almost a century and a half ago?
I see this as a good example of why there’s so much disagreement about economics and history. It’s not because of the considerable uncertainty in the field, but because the arguers bring their modern biases and belief systems with them. Chris, my impression is that you can’t admit the true character of the Reconstruction (or similarly the 1870-1910 period in the US which you revile elsewhere) because that would undermine your belief system in the now.
Finally, concerning the so-called “birther” phenomenon, it’s worth noting that Obama both is in a unique position to be disqualified, to my knowledge no other president in modern times has had a foreign born parent, and has not made a serious attempt to dispel the accusations. It’s also worth noting that you, Chris both use the slang term “birther” and have brought up this matter before.
Karl – There is no argument but that the Reconstruction was poorly administered and that there were many abuses. But I do find it interesting to see you protest against the seizure of property, ignoring that the property was gained by the seizure and keeping of slaves.
A moral argument can be made that all such property should be forfeited as recompense for slavery. This was not done or even very seriously considered. Instead, an extremely moderate course was followed.
Jim brought up the birther thing – which I am not sure is relevant to this discussion – and have said so repeatedly. Take it up with him.
What gave you the idea that the craven seizures of wealth during the Reconstruction had anything to do with educating former slaves?
Reading about the period. For instance, Nicholas Lemann’s “Redemption” (highly recommended).
How would you propose to fund the education of millions of former slaves, if not with taxes? And how would you propose to collect property taxes from property owners who can not pay, if not by confiscating their property and selling it to the highest bidder? There’s nothing special or craven about it — it’s what every town in the U.S. does to this day.
Finally, concerning the so-called “birther” phenomenon, it’s worth noting that Obama both is in a unique position to be disqualified, to my knowledge no other president in modern times has had a foreign born parent
Hoover’s mother was Canadian, and Wilson’s was a Scot.
And I do not see why Obama Sr.’s birthplace explains why the birther meme is so much more prevalent in one region of the country.
But I do find it interesting to see you protest against the seizure of property, ignoring that the property was gained by the seizure and keeping of slaves.
So you find it “interesting”. I see one question to ask here. Did government recognize an ownership right by the residents prior to seizure? Government is prohibited from arbitrary seizure of property, but the twist is that the property rights have to be recognized by government first. My view is that we had here an unlawful seizure of property even if that property in turn had been acquired through illegal or immoral means in the past. Past injustices do not justify future injustices.
A moral argument can be made that all such property should be forfeited as recompense for slavery. This was not done or even very seriously considered. Instead, an extremely moderate course was followed.
Morality can mean whatever you want it to mean. These little games bedevil us still. My view is that a legitimate moral code must be consistent and fair to all, even those who may have benefited from inequality in the past or who may still have beliefs inconsistent with the moral code. And it’s worth repeating that slavery wasn’t illegal at the time the estates would have been created.
I don’t believe it should ever be legal to take wealth from someone merely because of legal activities that they did in the past. A modern example would be the unpopular AIG bonuses. Government gave money to AIG for such things. Just because AIG chose to spend (or squander) a portion of this money on executive bonuses, doesn’t mean Congress should be able to tax that money at punitive rates. If it was a theft, it was a legal theft. And aside from the unpopularity of the act, there’s little to distinguish it from other consumers of public funds, particularly the entitlements.
Karl, if you want to continue fighting the fight for the rights of slaveholders dead a hundred years, be my guest. I think you will find it a lonely fight.
Karl, if you want to continue fighting the fight for the rights of slaveholders dead a hundred years, be my guest. I think you will find it a lonely fight.
The thing is such things have relevance to modern times. For example, you attempted to coat blatant government-backed theft and greed with a moral veneer. But all that does is to once again call into question your judgment. If you can’t even understand a relatively straightforward period of US history, then how can you make statements about a more complex present?
There’s always a grievance real or imagined to excuse any injustice. I wish you would stop supporting injustices rather than continuing these unseemly mental contortions to rationalize unjust choices.