i have some thoughts/questions.
i hope this thread doesn’t become overly focused on the U.S. Civil War; it’s dominating now, i’m most hoping to find some perspective on Winning versus Annihilation, what is enough?
what is too much?
It definitely did not start with obama. i’m not sure he started anything.I’ll give it a shot. It didn’t start with Obama. The Confederate flag that was taken off the South Carolina Statehouse grounds after the Charleston massacre used to fly on top of the capitol dome! It had been placed there in the 1960s as a statement against the Civil Rights movement. I remember very well the fight, around 2000, to take it down off the capitol dome.
he resurrected old conflicts, not just this one, and breathed new (and questionable) life into them. he opened the floodgates on different hot button topics, notably homosexual interests. he enjoyed tossing matches, watching things blow up, while standing there/far enough away, looking innocent.
This could be another topic.
Thank you.As for what happened after the war, probably the best book if you’re interested is Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.
Good reference.Why didn’t the North feel obliged to obliterate the South? The parts of the South that Sherman’s March passed through might disagree with that characterization.
The infamous “forty acres and a mule” originated as Sherman distributed plantation land to the freed slaves that had worked it.
The idea being to dismantle the Southern aristocracy that drove the war in the first place.
My perception (in the north, not knowing much about the south) is that Sherman’s March was chilling, maybe accepted as a necessity and consequence of war, but not celebrated. For those who want to annihilate, maybe they would celebrate?
[Hiroshima was bombed, but not celebrated; the end of WWII was celebrated, not the loss of life.
The U.S. did not annihilate. Over decades, Japan prospered and is accepted and respected.]
The economic dismantling of the south, i believe, was understood to be necessity, but, again, not celebratory? (i’m not suggesting my perceptions have any value.) i’m also NOT suggesting there was only 1 response to these various events. it’s likely examples of ANY response can be found, these are my perceptions, and generalizations.
Important points.After the war former Confederates were temporarily not permitted to vote or hold office, while freedmen could.
This opened the path for black and Republican governments in the South, including several blacks were elected to Congress.
There were other efforts as well to remake the South away from the Confederacy, for example the Freedmen’s Bureau.
A lot of the former Confederate energy, meanwhile, was directed into continuing the war in other ways, most notably the Ku Klux Klan. They were held at bay by the US Army that still occupied the South.
This must be important, in part, to understanding why annihilation was avoided.Reconstruction ended in 1877 and all because of politics. The presidential election in 1876 was disputed with no clear winner. The Democrats agreed to recognize the Republican as the winner in exchange for a number of concessions, including withdrawing the remaining troops from the South and taking a hands off approach to the South.
These rather directly led to the 1960’s/1964 U.S. Civil Rights Law, somehow, MLK Jr, did not feel defined or threatened by (statues) .. i agree, no one should place that kind of value on statues. For myself, i think more value could be had by ADDING informational plaques to the statues, giving context to changes and progress.This done, the South was taken over by “Redeemers”—often former Confederates who were redeeming the South from the Republican governments imposed on them. They are the source of the Jim Crow laws. They’re also the source of a lot of the Confederate monuments that are being torn down. They were statements of defiance against the new order in the South.
i appreciate something Josh wrote elsewhere, regarding constructive, rather than destructive choices: Page 24 / http://forum.mennonet.com/viewtopic.php ... 809#p92809
Power. Jesus’ way.Josh:
A poll tells us the majority’s opinion. It doesn’t make that opinion actually right.
Now, can we move on to discussing how to deal with certain groups of people who feel disadvantaged? In my experience, it doesn’t matter what the facts are if someone feels disadvantaged.
The first thing I usually work on is encouraging someone to quit giving in to those feelings.
Yes, uprooting was the goal, not obliteration. If possible, is obliteration better?So in summary, it’s not so much that the North didn’t try to uproot the Confederacy, but the roots went a lot deeper and the diggers weren’t diligent. The stump kept sending up shoots.
Do you want to destroy? Or hope for something better?
i admit to not giving thought to Fusionists, so i read this:That’s kind of a down note to end on, so I’ll also mention the Fusionists:
poor white populists in coalition with black Republicans that existed in the South in the late 1800s.
There was even a Confederate officer who formed a fusion party in North Carolina that I came across the other week. I wish I could remember his name, but it does give a glimpse of another way things might have been.
https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/populists-fusionists-and
(All this from memory and Wikipedia, so some parts might be a little fuzzy.)
As i was reading about fusionism:
A lot to mull over... In short, fusionism is a balancing test.
A defining feature of conservatism — in some sense the defining feature — is comfort with contradiction.
Conservatives — unlike libertarians, socialists, and extreme nationalists — do not believe that every answer can be reduced to a single principle or factor.
The conservative is not trapped in what Chesterton called
“the clean and well-lit prison of one idea.”
that’s amazing.