We Blew It With Reconstruction
Source: Chauncey De Vega
Speaking of the Civil War, the Reconstruction period that followed proved to be another arena for failed policy. For about 80 years, the history of Reconstruction went something like this account from David Saville Muzzey’s 1911 textbook, An American History:
“Nearly 4,000,000 slaves had been liberated. Very few of them had any sense of responsibility or any capacity or capital for beginning a new life of industrial freedom. Their emotional nature led them to believe that prosperity was to be bestowed upon them without their effort . . . They were, with few exceptions, utterly unfit for the exercise of political rights . . . [T]he rule of these negro governments . . . was an indescribable orgy of extravagance, fraud, and disgusting incompetence . . .”
What this account leaves out is that, immediately after the defeat of the South, but before the white backlash could be organized, the federal Freedmen’s Bureau managed to found over 3,000 schools where hundreds of thousands of former chattel slaves began learning to read and write. Right after the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified, former slaves were being elected to high political office, registering to vote, and founding freaking universities, such as Fisk and Howard. With a little official support, this shocking progress might have continued to the end of the century, as it did across the British Empire, but this was not to be.
“Let blacks mind their own business and quietly succeed in public life? NEVER!” Source: Authentic History
Reconstruction was one of the most bitter failures in American history. If the federal government, or whites in the North, had given a damn about Southern blacks, there were 1,001 legal mechanisms for repealing states’ “Black Codes,” which all but reintroduced slavery, and for controlling the KKK hooligans who were showing uncharacteristic efficiency and industry in torching black schools and churches all over the South. Maybe, if three generations of black Southerners hadn’t been shackled to the land as sharecroppers, with minor violations of the unwritten law punished with lynching, the eventual Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have been necessary, countless murders and other barbarities could have been avoided, and Strom Thurmond would have spent his life as a half-witted stable hand, the way God intended, rather than raping the family maid and spending over 9,000 years in the US Senate.
“Applesauce now, applesauce tomorrow, applesauce forever!” Source: Wikipedia
Instead of building a genuinely post-racial Utopia, whites on both sides decided to reconcile with each other over the broken promises made to ex-slaves. America spent the next century hysterically lying to itself about the war, the period that followed it, and whether or not Civil Rights leaders were sympathetic to Communist Russia.
