Never Let Treason Go Unpunished. You'll Regret It Later.
America is living with the consequences of a failure that dates back to 1865, when Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, sat down across from Union general, Ulysses S. Grant, to surrender the army of Northern Virginia. The war itself went on with other Confederate armies holding out. The army of Tennessee was going to surrender to Sherman before Confederate president, Jefferson Davis, ordered its commander, Joseph Johnston to resume battle. The last Confederate forces lingered on for 16 months after Lee threw in the towel.
Jefferson Davis was captured and expected the worst. So too did Robert E. Lee and his fellow turncoat generals. In the bloodiest war the United States endured - before or after - they had ample reason to fear being led to the gallows. They were traitors who had inflicted terrible suffering on the North and the South but they were spared.
President Andrew Johnson wanted the South brought back into the Union as quickly as possible. He even went to the point of betraying Abraham Lincoln by looking the other way as southern states enacted Black Code laws designed to keep blacks powerless and in a condition of quasi-slavery. Word spread that "the South would rise again."
Emboldened, some southern states kept slavery in effect, in various forms, right up until World War Two.
By the end of 1865, every Southern state except Arkansas and Tennessee had passed laws outlawing vagrancy and defining it so vaguely that virtually any freed slave not under the protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime.The South was allowed to keep the Confederacy alive in the hearts of its patriots. The Confederate dead and its generals were venerated. State capitols flew not the flag of the Confederacy:
They flew the Confederate Battle Flag:
Statues of Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee or even the most venal general Nathan Bedford Forrest who ordered any black captured in Union uniform immediately put to death proliferated in state capitols and parks across the South. Many of those odious sculptures weren't even put in place until after WWI. Across the South the Civil War is still venerated and romanticized as a war for states rights, not a war they declared in order to preserve enslavement of blacks.
The US Army even named bases after these traitors - Fort Hill, Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Fort Hood, Fort Lee, Fort Pickett and more. When the Department of the Army decided to erase these names it sparked a furor among many southerners and the GOP.
That battle flag became an unofficial symbol of everything from tractor pulls to, until recently, NASCAR. It retains its popularity with Trump's base, even being waved in the rotunda of the Capitol Building on January 6th.
During the Trump presidency, the long-smoldering discontent, erupted in a wave of white supremacy.
Yesterday, Washington Post columnist, Jennifer Ruben, wrote that evangelicals are no longer the beating heart of radical Republicans. For most GOP voters today, it's white supremacy that matters, not Jesus.
Many essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity.The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation.
It’s all about race and religious identity, not policies founded in Christian values and certainly not about finding a role model for civic virtues. Trump was determined to protect White evangelicals against people of color and the decline in Christian identification; that was all they could hope for in a politician.
Second guessing history? What fun! But it belongs in a fictional setting, imo.
ReplyDeletefor example:
Too bad Chris Columbus arrived in America as conqueror rather than emissary!
(O. S. Card wrote a whole time travel book on that theme.)
Speculation about more recent history: what if world powers had kept their promises to hold elections in Korea (late 40s) and Vietnam (mid 50s) instead of trying to crush the people? Or what about the CIA staying neutral in Iran in 1953?
The south is riddled with statues of these guys statues, though most likely died in their beds of old age. Creating martyrs has its own consequences and perhaps the slavery issue was not as dominant in the US civil war issue as our version of history teaches.
Admonishing the ancestors is perhaps less useful than dealing with today's appeasers ...
Delete"Have Democrats reached the limits of White appeasement politics?
For half a century, as the Republican Party has stoked White grievance, the Democrats’ answer has been hiding in plain sight. It’s time we took a closer look at it." ~WAPO
NPoV, you fail to discern the subtle difference between a WAG and a SWAG. A WAG is a "wild-ass guess." A SWAG is a "silly wild-ass guess." A WAG is a rough approximation taking relevant factors into account. A SWAG ignores such factors and is just plucked from your backside. These terms, as I was taught them, derived from the period before the introduction of the range and drift computing gunsight.
DeleteI find this war compelling, interesting enough that I even made my way through Grant's memoirs, cover-to-cover. Next to the colonies that form the New England states, I find the South, ante- and post-bellum, richly interesting. A good way to follow this path begins with Louisiana U. prof, Nancy Isenberg's book, "White Trash." That opens with near-slave labour in America prior to the arrival of African slaves.
Hypotheses about alternative outcomes in Korea, Vietnam and Iran have been exhaustively covered by scholars. A quick Google will give you reading material for years.
As for the relevance of the slavery issue, again that has been broadly explored. It was certainly less relevant to the average guy, recall the race riots in New York that had Lincoln recalling Army units to quell the unrest. Much of the rebel ranks consisted of "po' white boys" who never owned nor had any prospect of owning slaves. They were fed a diet quite similar to the "grievance stew" Trump uses on his "base."
Where it was relevant was where it mattered - in Southern state houses, in a divided Congress and in the White House.
My point about the monuments to Confederate generals is that many of them didn't appear until decades after the fact, evidencing how the bond with the Confederacy was something of an eternal flame in much of the South. Those embers are still quietly tended by those who profit in the discord.
perhaps one of the slave states will erect a statue of Trump some years after his death?
ReplyDeleteTB