Reconstruction's Legacy

There is two very good reasons that the War Between the States has been much more imprinted upon the Southern mind then the Northern mind, and that is the fact that the war, for the most part, was fought in the South, and Reconstruction and all the hoops that Southern had to jump through to get readmitted to the Union.  This period lasted for about 12 years after the war.

Right after the war only freedmen (blacks who were former slaves) and those white Southern who had not supported the Confederacy were eligible to take the "ironclad oath," as required by the Reconstruction laws passed in 1867 to vote or hold office.  Carpetbaggers (Northerners who moved to the South during Reconstruction between 1865 and 1877) formed a coalition with Freedmen and Scalawags (Southern whites who supported the Reconstruction) in the Republican Party, which in turn controlled the Confederate States for a period of 10 years or more, 1867–1877.

Lincoln wanted to speed up Reconstruction and reunite the nation as painlessly and as quickly as possible, but alas that possibility ended in Ford Theater, and the Republican Congress took over from Johnson how Reconstruction would be run.

This meant that those who thought of themselves true Son of the South had to live under the thumb of an oppressive occupation, with the Union Army enforced the ruling Republicans.  My very own Grate Grandparents lived through this period, and told me of their first hand experiences of the Yankee invaders. As in all wars of that epoch there was a lot of raping, pilings, and looting that the army and civilian officials just looked the other way, if they did not join in the fun.

Whites who had not sworn the oath, and many were not allowed to take the oath for years, were not allowed the use of firearms, and were at the mercy of the armed freedman and the Carpetbaggers’ armed enforcers.  In retaliation veterans of the Confederate Army, most notable Nathan Bedford Forrest, founded the Ku Klux Klan.  Its main purpose, at first, was to resist Reconstruction. It focused as much on intimidating "carpetbaggers" and "scalawags" as on putting down the freed slaves.

The North went on as it had before the war, without a occupation in a land that had not been razed to the ground like Sherman laid waste as the South.  As Sherman said, “I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell!” those were not Northern cities and homes he was talking about.  It is not at all surprising that the North could put the war behind them a lot faster and easier than the South could.

This hate was passed on, to succeeding generations, specially the distaste of having been forced to accept the blacks as equals, the North had their own problem with this as well, remember it was Cicero, Ill where Marten Luther King, Jr. was stoned by the Polish.  In the 1870s, many whites switched from the Republican Party to the conservative-Democrat coalition, who called themselves Redeemers. Conservative Democrats replaced all Southern state Republican regimes by 1877.

This is the Democrat Party that set up segregation as the law of the land and held the South from then until Regain came and pointed out that, well as he said, “I did not leave the Democrat Party, it left me.”  Of course he was referring to the party’s ongoing tilt to the left and not the oppression of the black people.  Now the Democrats, and for some time in the past, have a lock on the black vote in spite of their history of oppressing the black people.  They set up the sharecropping system in the south to replace slavery with wage slaves.  It was the Democrat Party that fought against the Emasculation of the blacks, and they were the one who stood in front of Federal troop to try and prevent the integration of southern schools.

It is the Democrats that raise race as a political issue at every opportunity, they have fostered the animosity between blacks and whites to divide and conquer.  When they realized that suppressing black would no longer keep them in office they swung to the left, and completely reinvented themselves as the champion of the black man and the poor white man.  I now fear the Democrat Party more than a Sherman army marching across the land, for in their sight is not just the South but the whole country.