The Lost Cause and the Arlington Confederate Monument. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 53d Edition.

Laying the cornerstone in 1912.

Coming at a particularly odd time, given the resurgence of the type of views that the monument represents¹, the Federal Government is removing the Confederate Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

A massive allegorical work, the monument by Moses Jacob Ezekiel² portrays the Southern cause heroically, and includes a slave in the "mammy" role, saddened by the departure of her soldier owner.

Probably always offensive, the work was part of the rise of the Lost Cause myth in the early 20th Century, which is when many of these monuments date from.  It's being removed and will be relocated at a park dedicated to Confederate monuments.

This process has been going on for a while. Under President Biden, military posts named for Confederate generals have been renamed, but even before that, monuments in Southern states started coming down on a local basis.  Interestingly, right now the Southern cause is strongly in mind as Donald Trump tacks closer and closer to the secessionist's view of the nation that brought the war about and which preserved racial segregation for a century thereafter.

The monument itself was located in the Confederate Section of Arlington, which was created in 1900 at the request of those who felt that Confederate dead in the cemetery should be located together.  Ironically, the move was opposed by some in the South, who felt that they should be relocated to "Southern soil".  Laying of the cornerstone of the monument came in 1912, and it was dedicated, Woodrow Wilson in attendance, in 1914.

Wilson at dedication of the monument in 1914.

Things like this are particularly problematic in various ways. For one thing, the monument is a work of art, and as such it has its own merits, no matter how dramatically flawed its image of the Southern cause was.  And they have, interestingly, an image of the South which was, while false, sort of bizarrely aspirational in that it depicted, as many such monuments of that period for that cause do, a South which was a yeoman state, when in reality the South was controlled by strong large scale economic interest to the detriment of the Southern yeoman, and certainly to the massive detriment of Southern blacks.

And they also reflect a period of American history, lasting roughly from the end of Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Era, when the nation as a whole adopted a false view of itself, or at least a large portion of itself.  They reflect, therefore, the zeitgeist of that time and our own.  Removing the monuments is understandable, but it doesn't cure the massive defect of past racism and slavery.  It does serve to help us forget how racist we once were, and not only in the 1776 to 1865 time frame, but the 1865 to mid 1970s time frame as well.

Footnotes:

1.  Just this past week Donald Trump, whose acolytes sometimes brandish the Confederate battle flat at his events, or in support of him in general, spoke of immigrants "poisoning" the blood of Americans, much like Southern Americans sometimes did in regard to desegregation in the 1960s.  The Nazi allegory has come up frequently, but to my ear, perhaps because I'm old enough to remember the tail end of that era, it sounds more the Southern view of the 60s or even 70s.

2.  This work is by far Ezekiel's best known one.  Interestingly, another major one is an allegorical monument from the 1870s dedicated to and entitled Religious Liberty.

Last Prior Edition:

Lame. Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 52nd Edition.

Takeaways, so far, from the 2022 General Election.

Early takeaways.

1.  Poll models are existentially wrong.

There is no longer any reason to pretend otherwise.

For weeks prior to elections, we read of poll results. They were wrong in 2022, wrong in 2020, and wrong in 2016.

They're wrong.

Something is amiss in them, one thing simply being that younger generations don't really care to talk to pollsters.

This might be, overall, a good thing.

2.  Conservatism retains a strong appeal, but Trump doesn't.

Edmund Burke.

Trump caused the Republicans to lose the House and Senate in 2018.  He lost the Presidency in 2020, and never secured the popular vote in the first place ever.

The midterm election always sees a return of the party of power, something that may be a good thing, democratically, or not, but it's a fact.  This year there's real doubt that will happen, and Trump is the number one reason why.

Trump, whose appeal to anyone completely escapes me, loves Trump only the way that Trump and his acolytes can, and he's going to announce next week that he's running for the Oval Office.  In normal times, the GOP would send a delegation to Mar-a-Lago, invite Trump to go fishing and require Lindsey Graham to go along to listen to Trump's weird, weird diction in the same way that Uncle Colm is used by the girls to talk to the police in Derry Girls.  But these aren't normal times, so he's going to go ahead and run and the Republicans, including Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, will fall right in line.

An opportunity exists here for other Republicans to take advantage of this and push for the Presidency.  The problem with that, however, is Trump.

The ultimate irony here is that the elections from 2016 forward have demonstrated that there is a strong base for a conservative political party, including a conservative political party that includes populism.  People are, in many areas, voting culturally, and voting culturally for a return to Western values. There's nothing wrong with that, and the concept that these have been under attack by the left is correct.

But linking that movement, to Trump, will kill it.

3.  Wyoming has become the Post Reconstruction South.

Eh?

Bear with me.

In 1860, as we all know, the Southern states attempted to leave the United States and form their own country over the issue of slavery.

Most Southern whites, throughout the South, were yeomen.  Small independent farmers.  

The Civil War was about one issue and one issue only, race based slavery.  But slavery impacted everything in the South, most particularly its economy.

It's sometimes claimed, and indeed has been recently, that only a small percentage of Southerners owned slaves prior to the Civil War.  I recall hearing that myself when in school, and even recently apparently somebody in the Internet claimed that only 1% of Southerners owned slaves in 1860.  A pretty detailed analysis of that shows that's actually incorrect, and a whopping 30.8% of free Southern families did, a pretty high number.  You can knock the percentage down by addressing only individuals, rather than families, but frankly that's unfair and inaccurate in an era prior to female suffrage.  And it's also been knocked down by including the entire Southern population, but you can't really count the enslaved in this analysis and have it make any sense.

At any rate, the reason that we note this is that about 69% of Southern families didn't own slaves, but that 30.8% that did dominated the culture and the region's economics.  Owning slaves was thought to be a necessity by planters, the large industrial farming class, just as serfs were in fact necessary to the feudal system.  The planter class absolutely dominated the economics and the politics of the South, even though the majority of Southerners were not in the class and in fact, as noted, were yeoman.

Not all yeoman were poor, as is sometimes claimed, and some of them owned slaves as well.  But the planters, who were the wealthy class in the South, completely dominated its economy and politics.  It would not be proper to take a Marxist view of this and assume that they dominated it simply because they were wealthy, but their wealth had the practical impact of making them the only really educated class and the only class that had time for leisure in the sense that Josef Pieper has written about.  This meant that their own self-interest became the interest of the entire region and were regarded as such.  When barefoot Southern farmers hit the road to fight against the North in the Civil War, they were pretty convinced that their interest and the planters were the same.

They were not.

That became pretty evident during Reconstruction, but the domination of the planter class actually never waned.  White Southern yeomanry had more in common, economically, with the recently freed slaves than they did with white planters. For a time it briefly looked like they'd act accordingly.  And during Reconstruction, they found themselves nearly violently at odds with the planter class.  Yeoman who had always made use, for example, of the woods as commons for the grazing of cattle and for hunting found themselves suddenly fenced and locked out, and nearly resorted to arms over it.

To a degree, what prevented that from really developing is that while the yeomanry did not feel itself aligned with the planters at first, planter propaganda, the nature of being occupied by the North, and the shared experience of the Civil War won them over against their own interests.  The monied and powerful classes of the South backed the concept of "The Lost Cause", a noble struggle for "Southern Rights", which wasn't about slavery at all, but about something else, never mind that it couldn't be rationally defined as it didn't exist.  All Southern officers were noble, all the enlisted men stalwart loyalists, sacrificing themselves to the cause.  The myth lasted so long that the dedication of Stone Mountain in the 1970s could still be regarded in the Oval Office as a noble thing, and not a monument to treason.  Southern yeoman remained in second class status and following Reconstruction were basically heavily marginalized along with Southern blacks.  The entire region declined into second class economic status as it clung to an old economy benefiting mostly the already wealthy.  Education became second rate. 

That all started to change during the Great Depression, but it really took into the 1970s for it to break.  We'll omit that part of the story, as that would be secondary to what we're looking at now.

Wyoming is now the New Post Reconstruction South.

How so?

Consider this.  Plantation economics had originally made the South one of the wealthiest parts of the United States.  Cotton actually was the second crop subject to the plantation system.  Tobacco was first, and tobacco made the south wealthy.  Cotton followed and added to that.  The North wasn't poor, but in the pre industrialized country, agriculture was king and the South had market agriculture, producing tobacco, cotton, and corn based alcohol, all for sale.  Nothing like it existed in the North.  Going into the Civil War, they still believed that this was the case.

It wasn't.

Wealth had moved to industry by 1860 and the North had taken advantage of it.  It was much more economically developed, and as a result, much more of the wealth had gone down hill to its population.  It also had an economy which acknowledged and accepted government assistance, which made for good roads and canals.  It was more affluent, better educated, and much better informed.  The South fooled itself into believing the opposite and entered into a war it couldn't win as a result.  After the wear, the class that had controlled that wealth maneuvered to keep it, and did so successfully, keeping the South in a state of existence that, but for slavery, closely mirrored that which had existed before the war.

So what does this have to do with Wyoming?

Quite a lot.

The original wealth of the South came from simple farmers, true yeoman, the class that Thomas Jefferson hoped thought necessary to democracy and hoped to see flourish in the country even though he was a planter. The conversion to a planter based economy took some time.

That's true of Wyoming, to a degree, as well.

The first European cultured people to enter Wyoming weren't Americans at all, but rather Quebecois.  French culture people were pretty prominent in the state early on, and it was really the fur industry they built that caused the early private fort system to come about.  The government followed in the 1840s following the Mexican War, when the Army first marched into the purchased Ft. Laramie in order to guard the trails to the Pacific Coast that were developing.  The first really Wyoming based economic endeavor to some about after trapping was the livestock industry, which didn't enter the state until the 1870s, for the most part.

But even as early as the 1880s petroleum was seen as the state's future.  By the 1890s, it was common for newspapers to put remote oil prospects on the front page, even as the livestock industry was dominating the actual economy and providing for most of the state's employment.  Coal had an even earlier appearance, being first mined by the Union Pacific railroad to fuel its trains.

It was really World War One, however, that gave Wyoming an oil extraction, and at that time refining, economy.  And much of that was locally centered.  Refineries sprung up all over the state in this time period.  Casper saw not only three refineries develop, but major structures as well. The Oil Exchange Building was completed in 1917.  The Pan American Building sometime after that.   The Ohio Building in the 1940s.  The Sinclair Building, now only a memory, was built during this time period as well. The big club, where all sorts of business deals were made, was The Petroleum Club.

So we based our wealth, after 1917, on the extractive industries.

We did nothing wrong whatsoever by doing that.

But times have really changed, and they're in trouble.  

We can't and won't accept that.

The US of 2022 isn't the US of 1917, or 1922, or even 1962, or 1982.  But we basically are looking back to 1982, or so, economically, culturally and politically to an era when things were better for us.  

And this requires us, apparently, to now believe in The Lost Cause.

At one time if you talked to Southerners, everybody's Civil War ancestor was a colonel of epic heroism, not a deserter from the Confederate armies, even though a huge number of Southern soldiers became just that.  And they didn't fight for slavery, but for their culture.

We haven't been able to adjust to the fact that Trump lost the popular vote, twice, so we now have that as our Lost Cause Myth.  The brilliant super genius "very good genes", as Trump would have it, didn't lose, the election was stolen.

Never mind the clear evidence that Trump was planning to steal the election prior to the election occurring.  Never mind the destruction of the U.S. Post Office as part of that.  Never mind the effort to undermine COVID voting protocols.  Now, listen to people like Chuck Gray and you'll learn that 10,000 mules were employed in a nefarious plot.

I don't know how many Wyomingites really believe that, but probably about the same number, percentage wise, of Southerners at one time that believed that Uncle Euclid was a Colonel in the Confederate Cavalry, and not a barefoot infantryman in who deserted.  There were likely always doubts.  But like Homer Stokes in Oh Brother! Where Art Thou, there are underlying issues that people really have in mind.  "That ain't my culture and heritage".

The ultimate problem is that this is going to, long term, marginalize us economically and politically.  Just like it did the Post Reconstruction South.

4.  Democracy can work for the left.

As we've noted elsewhere, the real starting point in the attack on American democracy was by the left going towards a Court oriented aristocracy.  If Americans wouldn't reform and usher in the new liberal era on their own, the Courts could rule and force them.

The left was pretty comfortable with that.

Now the Courts have stripped that role away from themselves and returned issues that never should have been determined solely by nine ancient people with Ivy League law degrees to the people, effectively telling them they'll just have to figure these things out for themselves.

And low and behold, they actually can.

On the anniversary of an insurrection. Where are we headed?

There will be a lot of retrospective columns appearing here and there today, although oddly, our local paper didn't have one.  Many of these, like the two I already posted, will warn that American democracy is in peril.

And indeed it is.  

On January 6, 2021 an insurrection attempting to prevent the certification of the Electoral College vote occurred resulting in the storming of the chambers of the Senate and the House for the first time since the War of 1812.   The Confederate battle flag flew in those halls, something that symbol of racist hatred had not ever managed to come close to doing in the Civil War.  Members of the national legislature and the Vice President feared for their lives while, as we now know, President Trump ignored pleas for his supporters to stand down.

We further now know, thanks to the January 6 Committee, that plans to steal the election, effectively mount a coup, in fact occurred, but they were undertaken by Donald Trump, not the Democratic Party.  The Democrats, who as we noted in an earlier recent item, had grown comfortable with forty plus years of court forced social change, and therefore non-democratic rule of a type themselves, are not wholly free of blame, but there had never been in the country's history an effort to absolutely impose the rule by a President that had twice lost the popular vote and then lost the electoral vote in his second run for office.

Moreover, there's an ongoing effort right now to put Donald Trump back in office in 2024 which is now so pronounced that he himself may no longer have that much of a choice on running.

That Trump ever was elected in the first instance is a sign of how ill American politics have become.  In any earlier time, nobody with Trump's character would ever have received the nomination of a major political party, let alone be elected. The fact that he was remains a serious sign of American decline.

A serious sign of our ongoing state of peril is that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Al Smith, Dwight Eisenhower, and the like now is no longer committed to democracy at all on a national level.  On a local level it continues to struggle somewhat, but in places like that where I live the primary election will effectively be the general election and the only issue will be how blindly loyal to Trump and his lies a candidate is.

Some are predicting the end of American democracy.

A very erudite commentator I heard didn't predict that, but rather something like a new Compromise of 1877 coming into effect, which I think is probably a more accurate prediction of this type.  For those who do not recall that, that was the political compromise in which Republicans of the 1870s proved willing to sell their souls and their loyalty to democracy and gave up on it in the South, thereby leading to nearly a century of highly imperfect elections in the South. Some have noted, or claimed, that because of this, the US wasn't a real democracy until the 1960s, and that it threatens to become a fake one again.

I think, as noted, that there's a real chance that something like that will occur. The GOP will facture into two parties, which it nearly already has, and the Democrats will as well.  Only in the really contested regions will issues like a person's unthinking loyalty to Trump be an issue.  In areas like Wyoming, it will be assumed and not even mentioned except in the apple pie and motherhood sort of way..^[1]

That's not my prediction, however.

I'll be frank that I am extremely worried.  I think the chance that the Trumpist pull off a coup in 2024 is pretty high, and that this would in fact rocket the United States into second nation status.  Our run as the premier global democracy will be over, and historically it will have proven to be surprisingly brief.  The American Century would have been just about that, in real terms.

But in spite of that fear, I'll weigh in with some cautious optimism it won't happen.

My first prediction here is that slowly, slowly, things are turning.  The news from the January 6 Committee is getting out.  Of note, political wind sniffer Ted Cruz, whose role in trying to position himself as the Trump heir apparent post insurrection led to his post insurrection effort to affect a coup, came out on the anniversary of the event and stated:

We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week, and it is an anniversary of a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol, where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage, incredible bravery, risk their lives to defend the men and women who served in this Capitol. We are grateful for that courage, we appreciate the selfless sacrifice of the men and women who keep us safe.

Those are admirable sentiments indeed, even if Cruz's own post insurrection role was despicable.  But Cruz is pretty good at switching sails rapidly, and the fact that the former primary opponent of Trump, and then Trump acolyte, suddenly is throwing rocks at insurrectionists is telling.  He knows something we don't, and the 1/6 Committee was hinting all last week that there are some real bombshells out there.

The fact that Donald Trump cancelled his planned speech for this day is telling as well. Something is coming.

So far, Trump loyalist have proven immune to the news and even Trump efforts to change the story on anything, so those who claim whatever it is won't matter have a good point.  Robert E. Lee refused to march in step after the Civil War at Washington & Lee College, James Longstreet became a Republican, and Pickett called Lee "the man who destroyed my division", none of which kept Southerners from elevating the effort to keep men enslaved into the memory of "The Lost Cause".

It took another crisis, the Spanish American War, and then a second, World War One, to really get over those events, and it's certainly not impossible we might get another one as well that would serve the same purpose.  In modern times, it seems events come much quicker.  China or Russia, for example, could easily provide the unifying emergency that puts Trump in the dust. We'll see, but if I were the Chinese, I'd be weighing my options for invading Taiwan now and trying to determine if they're better before 2024, or or after.

Anyhow, while much of what is in these electronic pages is not very optimistic, I'm going to note some predictions here and a collapse of American democracy will not be among them.

First of all, I'm going to predict that this summer, Liz Cheney prevails in the Wyoming primary over Harriet Hageman.

By that time, whatever is lurking ready to explode in the 1/6 Committee halls will be out.  Hageman so far has been able to semi camouflage her campaign's sole point being loyalty to Trump, albeit not much, but whatever it is, by that time, will be out and wholly unavoidable.  She'll be forced into determining whether Ride for the Brand is the same thing as Loyalty Is My Honor.^[2] and won't really have a good answer for that question.

Moreover, it's likely to turn out that real native Wyomingites and those immigrants from the neighboring states were never as Trumpy as the COP county committees.  Indeed, I heard one immigrant from one of our neighboring states who had been a Republican office holder refer to the local GOP as "batshit crazy" even before the election, showing how dissent was already there.  My guess is that Cheney will win, and not just by a little bit, but not as much as before.

I hope a solid Democrat runs, although I'm not optimistic about it.  Wyoming has become a one party state, and that's not a good thing

My next prediction will be that in 2024 voting for Trump won't be an issue, and it won't be an issue for one of two reasons.

The less likely reason is that he'll be indited on criminal charges.

This appears to be likely in New York, in Federal court.  Beyond that, I don't think it's unlikely that the January 6 Committee will refer over charges to the US Attorneys Office. 

That will be a nightmare for the Biden Administration, a nightmare in part inflicted by the country's utter prior failures to indite Richard Nixon, which should have happened, and to fully punish the Southern insurrectionists of 1860-65, which also should have happened. But I don't think the country will actually allow a third the King Can Do No Wrong event go by when the deposed monarch is vying for reinstatement.  If charges are referred, he'll be indited, and convicted.  By 2024 he may be in prison.

But I also don't think that's the reason he won't be running.

I don't think he'll be running for the same reason Joe Biden won't be running.

Both men are ancient.  Biden is older, and looks infirm and ill, but Trump looks bloated and like a man packing around a ton of makeup. 

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Psalm 90:10..^[3]

I'm not predicting, and certainly not wishing, any disaster upon either men, and most definately not a man made one.  Unlike the shockingly high, but still minority, percentage of Americans who now apparently feel that violence for political reasons is sometimes justified, I do not..^[4]  I'm not keen on violence of any kind.

Rather, what I'm saying is that the reality of things is that men past pretty much age 30, yes 30, can find that they have a seat on the barque over the River Styx at any time.

Now, men who have obtained threescore years and ten, or more, may be in fantastic shape.  Some have active minds and rigorous bodies.  Indeed, one fellow resident of this state I follow appears to have both.  I've seen ranchers and cowhands who still worked pretty much full days into their 70s.  There are exceptions.

But those exceptions often appear, well, exceptional. They've made the effort to be active and beyond that none of the ones that come to mind offhand, the problematic Éamon de Valera, and the exceptional Winston Churchill, aside, occupied stressful positions until they took their seats on that passage.

And even at that, the comparisons are notable.  De Valera remained thin and vigorous looking up until the end, even though he went blind.  Churchill, weight and drinking aside, remained remarkably able, although he was frankly failing towards the end.  Trump looks like a man who is about to have a heart attack or stroke any day, and the pressures upon him are about to get considerably more pronounced.  Biden looks a bit dottered in spite, no doubt, of efforts to keep him from appearing so.

So while it is a grim prediction, my guess is that the scythe that takes us all, naturally, will have taken them by then.  Biden, who has lived a tragic life in many ways, but not one of excess, will probably simply pass, Trump, who has lived a life of excess, is more likely to go by heart attack or stroke.

That would mean that in 2024, of course, Kamala Harris would be the incumbent President.  But as is so often the case with Vice Presidents, she's failed to secure a following and I doubt she would even after being the first female President. I'm not sure if she'd even run.  I do think it more likely that a less disliked female candidate, Amy Klobuchar, would run.  

I also think that Ted Cruz would run as the self-appointed political adopted son of Donald Trump, and fail to gain the nomination.  I don't think it would be impossible that Liz Cheney would secure the nomination.

And a race like that is the one we will see in 2024.  A likeable female Democrat against either a stern female Republican conservative or a widely disliked, consummate Republican Senator.  The first race would be difficult to predict the outcome of. Cruz, who is easy to detest, would lose in such a race.

Either way, the Trump era will pass with Trump pretty quickly.  Political movements centered on one man fail when the man isn't there, even if they had some larger structure.  The Progressive Party died when Theodore Roosevelt left it.  In no way comparable to Roosevelt's Progressive Party, but as another example of a movement based on one man, Francoist political parties bit the dust after Franco died, in spite of having ruled Spain with no opposition for forty or so years.  Fascists remain in Italy, or rather "Neo-fascists", but they've never seriously threatened to rule the country following the demise of Mussolini.  Millions of Germans voted for Hitler, followed him into war, and joined the Nazi Party during Hitler's rule of Germany, but efforts to revive any form of Nazism following the war have been a complete failure.

Indeed, the more a movement is not only based on a man, but a demagogue, the more likely it is to pass.  Some people admire Huey Long today, but most people regard him as sort of a comic buffoon.  And when politicians finally fall from grace, finding anyone who will admit to supporting them is a difficult task.  Formerly popular causes, when they become unpopular, are ones in which, seemingly, there were never any members.

Healing from the attempted coup is going to be difficult. There can be no doubt about it.  But my guess is that the election of 2024 will play out the way noted, and the healing will begin even before that. The Mitt Romney wing of the GOP will come back out of hiding as the Trumpites deny that they ever were for the man.  The McConnell's will pick up  and move on in the direction they were always going in, and indeed already are.  

Some of the legitimate concerns of populists will be permanent insertions into the GOP, but the GOP will have to start reckoning, and soon, with the fact that it is a minority party and becoming more of one every day.   And indeed that's the ultimate irony of Trumpism.  It might just, if it keeps on, awaken a tidal ave of Democratic heavily left wing opposition that's already there but not doing much.

Wider Republicans have always known this, but have not acted wisely.  Democratic disorganization has allowed them to cower.  In reality, they're being given just a little bit of a breathing room to act.  But they obviously can't or won't as long as Trump seems to command a personality cult.

As noted, while not wishing ill on anyone, the American belief that we all live forever and in perfect health is a lie in and of itself.  Death takes everyone and nobody as old as Trump or Biden really has that much longer to live.  Nature is the ultimate arbiter of everything.  

And when that comes, naturally, as it will, and soon, maybe some of the grip of this era, will be released.  It probably will be.

The nation won't be healed overnight, but the turning of a corner has already started.  Democracy won't die, and it certainly won't die with Trump or Biden.  Having gone through this crisis the real question will be what politics will look like as we emerge from it. Will we have some version of the Compromise of 1877?  Will legitimate populist grievances be taken into account so that a new version of Trump does not arise, or so that populist do not become a dangerous underground fifth column. Will the Democratic left have had enough and use its its majority to reform the country into more of a quasi parliamentary, more democratic and less republican state?  Could all of this happen.

All questions remaining to be answered, but the death of American democracy will be one of the things that will not occur.

Footnotes.

1.  On that, it might be more akin to Republican citations to being for "family" and the like.  It may be time, when candidates start talking about issues like this, to see what their own situation is.  Are they living the "family" life themselves, for example. Do they really hunt, fish, etc., if they cite those things.

"Values" candidates are common, but the point here, are they exhibiting those values in their daily lives?

2.  Loyalty is my honor", as earlier discussed here, was the motto of the SS.

3.  Those are, of course, 70 years of age and 80 years of age.

4.  If the civil war that some are predicting comes about, well my region can count on me sitting it out.  I'm not going to take up arms to shoot at anybody in an internecine spat.  I guess that lets me know how I would have reacted if I'd been, let's say, a Texan in 1860-65.

An American Story?

This goes to post on July 4, 2021, rather obviously.

But it's about events in the 1860s and 70s.  And maybe about today as well.

Just recently I ran across an article about an African American woman who was researching her family's history.  She was aware that she had white ancestors, and indeed nearly every African American whose family is traced back to the 19th Century does.  By the same token, while its rarely mentioned, nearly every white Southern American whose family can be traced back to the 19th Century in that region also does, making all the fighting and whatnot from 1865 forward over race really odd.  

There's a lot of interpretations on what this means, of course, with the word "rape" commonly appearing in such discussions.  This isn't gong to go into things like that.

Rather, what the article revealed is an oddly human story that probably ought to just cause everyone to pause and ponder it.

It dealt with a  man who came from a slaveholding, relatively well off, plantation owning family.  Not a massively wealthy, Gone With The Wind type situation, but relatively well off.  Not so well off that, when the Civil War came, he entered the Confederate army as an officer, however.

He did enter it, was wounded, convalesced at home, and then reenlisted and fought again.

Now, the cause of the South, anyway you look at it, was slavery. That's what the war was about.

And in his household among the slaves was a young female slave.  

When he was home convalescing.  Something happened.  Nobody noticed until he'd gone back into the Confederate army.  She was pregnant.

He was the father.

He returned from the war alive, and this story doesn't go in the direction you'd suppose.  Interracial marriage was illegal in the South (and often elsewhere as well) but he did not abandon her, or their child.  In fact, in the early 1870s when there was very briefly a brake in the prohibition on interracial marriage, they married, and they lived the rest of their lives as a married couple.

That couldn't have been easy. They lived in the South, and they must have been outcasts.  But they carried on anyhow.  When he died, he was buried in an all white cemetery. When she died some years later, she was buried in an all black cemetery.  That shows, I suppose, the attitudes of those around them.

I suppose the fact that their descendants today are regarded as African Americans also does. The half white, half back, children of that union were black under the strange American "one drop of blood" viewpoint, and they must have slipped into the black community where they lived.

It's an interesting story, however.  A son of a planter and a Confederate soldier develops a relationship with a black slave owned by his family, during the war, and later marries her.

Postscript.

Oddly enough, on the same day I posted this, I ran back across this being linked into one of my cousins' Facebook feeds.  A very powerful essay.

You want a Confederate Monument?  My Body is a Confederate Monument.

Resolution from the House of Representatives to President of the United States, 1/10/1866

 

2020 Election Post Mortem XI. The Post Insurrection Administration and Congress.

Actions and words, we're told, have consequences. And we're told that because they do.

During Trump's rise to power and during his administration his biggest ally in the press has been Fox News, which for the most part has reliably been on Trump's side.  That started to come apart after the election during which Trump's increasingly extreme efforts to deny the reality of his loss grew, but even then they still supported him when they could conscience it.

A couple of days ago a Fox commentator, Ainsley Earhardt made this observation on her show Fox & Friends:

There are 75 million people that voted for President Trump. And they are scared. They are worried about what the future of this country looks like. They are confused and heartbroken that their candidate didn't win and they don't want to be forgotten.

She was pretty rapidly shouted down in the media.

That doesn't mean that Earhardt isn't right.  Indeed, she largely is, although the 75,000,000 figure for the brokenhearted and scared isn't correct.  Donald Trump did receive 75,000,000 votes, but some of those votes were from lukewarm supporters who won't cry over his departure now.  Quite a few conservative voters felt that Trump was the only option they had, which doesn't mean that they otherwise were his fans.  Catholic and other Apostolic Christian voters often felt they had to vote for him as, ironically, his Catholic opponent seems to stand for principals that are deeply contrary to their moral beliefs, but quite a few of them otherwise found the President to be repulsive.  And Donald Trump's actions following his November defeat have turned quite a few of his former supporters definitively away from him.

That doesn't mean, however, that he doesn't have a lot of support.  The down ballot results for the GOP show that the populist wing of the Republican Party definitely had a lot of support going into the November election, although it lost some in formerly Republican Georgia as a result of Trump's behavior.  It's no doubt lost more now.

Still, Earhardt has a point.

Populist and conservative voters, and the two may overlap but are not the same, have a real reason to be scared, worried, confused and heartbroken.

And the reason for that is that Donald Trump's post election behavior has brought in a united Democratic government that's not only united by party, but united against Trumpism, and licensed for radicalism to a large degree.

In other words, since the election, Donald Trump has machinated for reasons that are difficult to discern, but which seem rooted in narcissism, to bring about the very situation which he claimed to be the one who was protecting against it.

Early after the election we did a series of "post mortems" on where it appeared things were headed, but we did note that the Georgia election would determine a lot of that.  What we didn't see was an insurrection and an administrative support for it that has caused some overseas to regard it as an attempted coup.  

And that changes everything. . . probably.

We really only have three examples of something like this, with one so old as to be probably not worth really discussing in this context. The three would be the post Revolution government of the United States, the second the post Civil War, and the third being the post Watergate.  

The post Watergate is the most analogous.

We don't remember very much of what occurred in the US after the American Congress won the war against the United Kingdom.  What we do tend to recall is the prolonged effort to work out a form of government, which was messy and which involved a lot of infighting.  We won't go into it in detail, but it's worth noting that we commonly hear about the American Revolution was that it was a "conservative revolution".

It wasn't.

The American Revolution was a radical revolution based on the concept, by its end, if the people being sovereign.  It was framed, however, by a largely common culture that had largely shared values and a preexisting governmental structure.  It's overall thesis; monarchs meant nothing and the rights of individuals as expressed through legislators was radical.  The country rejected the concept of monarchy and the rights of monarchs entirely.  It also adopted a type of nationalism that is prior sovereign had not expressed and would not for many years.  It went so far as to see the severance of the dominant church, the Church of England, which claimed apostolic succession, from its acknowledged head, an act of near schism that went along with the Revolution.

Following the Revolution the country did adopt an orderly form of democracy that we retain, with modifications, today.  But it also expelled Loyalist through community action and kept them out through legal process after the war, turning large numbers of Americans into refugees simply because they took loyalty to the legitimate government seriously.  It's not well remembered now, even though it was a dramatic hostile act at the time, and it formed the real origins of Canada, through loyalist refugee communities.

Tory Refugees by Howard Pyle for Harpers, 1901.

Following the Civil War, in contrast, the nation rejected the guidance of the Radical Republicans.  The Radical Republicans would have reformed the South by dispossessing the rebellious large property owners, vested the land in the former slaves, and would have tried significant rebels for treason.  It's often believed that President Lincoln's kindly view of his defeated countrymen kept this from happening, but I frankly doubt it.  Had Lincoln lived the shrewd lawyer and politician likely would have adopted some of the radical desired policies and indeed, the nation should have.  

Most of the Radical's policies were not, however adopted and by the 1870s, a very short time after the war, the nation was giving up on Reconstruction in general. The Compromise of 1877, which has been in the news again, was a result of that as the election of 1876, expressed its final end.  From 1865, or even earlier in some instances, the victorious Union did attempt some reforms in the South, but gaps in their enforcement caused a beaten population to revive, combined with Congress quickly readmitting the recently defeated Southern representatives to Congress.  This had resulted in a tight election in 1876 and the Southern Congressmen, writing the script for which we just witnessed again in 2021, attempted to hold up certification of the results.  

In 1876/77 the effort was much more successful than the one which was just experienced in 2021 and the Republicans compromised by promising, unofficially, to end Reconstruction and withdraw troops from the South.  During the 1865 to 1876 period real progress had actually been made on advancing the rights of blacks and poor Southerners, but it all evaporated over the coming decades and it wasn't until the 1960s that real progress would return.

There are a couple of real lessons from the post Civil War era that should be instructive here.  One is that a victorious side in a real dispute was essentially lead by those only committed in concept to a principal, that being restoration of the Union, and who were only weakly committed to the remainder of what had been fought for.  That is, while the war was over slavery, commitment to reconstruction the South was only barely there a decade after the traumatic event that brought it about.  In 1865-70 the will to really remake things was strong, but by 1871-76 that will had faded.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the failure to really overhaul the South after the Civil War is, in spite of how it might be remembered now, one of the nation's great historical failures.  From 1876 to 1900 the nation crept back into a type of virulent racism that disenfranchised blacks whose legal rights had only barely been established.  The entire civil rights movement of the 1960s would really have been completed during the Progressive Era of the early 20th Century had that not occurred, and the disastrous result of the failure to remake the nation in the late 1860s is something we are still living with today.  Indeed, had we handed the post Civil War reconstruction correctly, we might have avoided what occurred last week.

The bloody flag of treason which has spread in recent years throughout the country.

The final example we have, and the most analogous one, is the Watergate scandal.  And is lessons are the ones that should worry conservatives and populist now.

The entire Watergate break-in episode was a wholly avoidable example of stupidity by overzeals paranoids.  The nation was going to support Richard Nixon's reelection in 1972 and the Democratic Party lurching to the left in the wake of 1968 and all that had occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s was going nowhere.  But the break-in followed by Nixon's complicity in trying to cover it up brought him down and the Republicans with him.  It also swept into power Democrats who were far to the left of their predecessors.

They were there already, but they weren't in control of the overall party.  The Watergate scandal changed that.  Following Nixon's downfall Democrats swept into control of Congress, although ironically the Presidential candidate whom they chose to run in 1976, Jimmy Carter, was really a middle of the road politician.  Carter likely saved the country from going deep hard left in the 1976-1980 time frame, both by the fact that he wasn't a radical, and by the fact that he was a pretty ineffectual President.  Four years of Carter were enough to allow the Republicans to reorganize and come back with Ronald Reagan in 1980, and it also started the formation of the modern Republican Party and its bipolar personality.  Reagan was a conservative, but he stoked the flames of populism and the GOP further abandoned a long standing support of strong civil rights so that it could make headway with Southern voters who remained deeply resentful of changes brought about in their region in the 1960s and 70s.  An ineffectual management of the economy, moreover, by Nixon, Ford and Carter aided in Carter's downfall.

President Carter with Roslyn Carter and Hyman Rickover.

What that lesson tells us is that in a very brief amount of time real left wing Democrats were able to make major inroads into Government.  Some of them still remain there today.  Their period in control was actually surprisingly brief, but it was preceded by an advance in their fortunes during the 1960s and was made real by the collapse of a center right President due to scandal.  Voters were disgusted with Republicans and punished them at the ballot box in 1976.  They got over a lot of it by 1980, which is really amazing in context.

Nixon had his supporters right to the end, and even after, and even today.  But much of that support was lost pretty quickly and Gerald Ford's actions in pardoning Nixon wrecked his chances at reelection.  Democrats in Congress who were mad at what occurred lurched left.  Even during President Ford's administration he didn't attempt to stop that direction as it was unstoppable.

And that's where I suspect we are right now.

Joe Biden goes all the way back to that era, but he's really an East Cost centrist Democrat, just as Jimmy Carter was a Southern centrist Democrat.  Like Carter, however, Biden is going into office with a now invigorated Democratic left.  Right now, while he has a unified government, it's only barely so, but a lot of Republicans, just like Republicans in 1973, have become disgusted with their President.

Moreover, Donald Trump has actually managed to make Richard Nixon look good.  Nixon was paranoid but he didn't attempt to retain power and actually resigned, rather than be impeached and convicted.  He didn't have the support of his party at that time, of course, and he knew it, but Trump has rapidly lost much of his support in Congress as well and doesn't seem to acknowledge that other than to lash out at those who have left him.  Nixon's GOP, however, remained largely intact in 1976 and reorganized, with an insurgent wing that still remains, by 1980.  That new party, part establishment and part populist, just ripped apart and is only barely a single party.  There's a good chance that it will split into two.  

So, here's what I think follows.

At this point, Biden has no reason not to go as left as he wants to and there will be no real hindrance to him going as far in that direction save his own inclinations and those of Democrats who are really in tightly contested regions.  All the warnings and crises about "Socialism" and the like mean utterly nothing whatsoever right now, and they won't for the rest of the year.  Ironically, therefore, Donald Trump has brought about the very situation which he used to stoke the flames of his support.

Moreover, Biden is beholding to his party's left and has now lost the argument he had for not giving it much of what it wants.  He can't maintain that a divided government forces him to play ball with the GOP in the same way he could have before last week.  He can still make that argument, but it's much weakened as the Democrats can get their legislation through unless they themselves do not support it.

And this means that we're going to get a lot of pent up Democratic legislation. There will be new environmental regulation and it will go much further than anything prior to it. There will be gun control.  Policies favoring abortion and new categories of sexual identity are going forward.  The courts are now going to take a giant leap to the left in terms of new appointments.

The country isn't going to be completely made over, but much of it is.  And the people the country can thank or blame for that are those who stormed Congress last week.

Sowing the wind.

It has long been part of the American political canon that what George Washington did for the country should be and must be repeated by his Oval Office successors.

Washington served two terms as the first President under the Constitution.  As he approached the end of his second there was serious debate in some quarters on whether he would step down and out, run again, or just declare himself to be the chief administrator of the country.

He simply retired and went back to public life.

No American President broke that tradition until Franklin Roosevelt kept running, ultimately dying in office.  Controversial at the time, it lead to the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting that.  But Roosevelt's presence in the office was democratic, not judicial.

Now President Trump has shattered that tradition, refusing to concede that he has lost when he did, and resorting to crackpot litigation.  Lawyers who are deeply in Trump's camp have signed on for the effort, including the Attorney General of Texas and Ted Cruz, who offered to argue the Pennsylvania appeal at the Supreme Court level if it got in the door. . . as if that was really supposed to achieve something.* The Republican Party has generally gone along with this.

The real thing that separates democracies from dictatorship is the democratic habit.  That's about it.  Lots of dictators started out as elected officials and then retained office by refusing to step down, manipulating the organs of power in order to make their retention of power appear legitimate.  It's extremely common.

Here the US judicial system has been put a stress test and really held up. The Republican Party has been put to one and has not.  Real questions remain going forward what this will end up causing.

Back in 2016 when Trump secured the GOP nomination I commented here that the GOP would have to live with the implications.  It will, and now the question really is, is there a GOP?  The party has certainly changed from what it was four years ago, and one of the things that has developed is a scary section of belief that the leader's word must be true because he is the leader. Added to that is the additional element that power must be retained as the opponent is unworthy of power, or even traitorous.

That crosses over a political line from supporting democracy to something akin to what fascist parties believed.  At their core they believed that only they were worthy of rule as their opponents were evil.  Indeed that outlook caused a debate in the 1930s on whether or not Communist parties were fascist parties, as that was in essence their belief as well.  It's not that the Soviet Union didn't have elections, it always did.  It's that only the "right" votes counted.

Added to that you can only stress things so many times before they bend.  Due to the disfunction of the American Federal Government since the 1990s the Courts have increasingly become an unelected national legislature.  Chief Justice Roberts complained about this openly in an oral argument just the other day.  Now the Courts are all that is keeping an attempted coup through the courts from succeeding. They're doing a magnificent job of it, but how many times can they keep doing that, and will it now be the case that every one of our national elections is legislated this way.  

If the latter is the case, we're now a second or even third rate nation, protected only by the overabundance of lawyers in our society.  That's a scary situation to be in.

We really don't know where this will lead over the next two to four years.  My suspicion is that the Trump banner will rapidly fade and with it will come a restructuring of the GOP back to a more Buckleyesque part.  If not, it'll split in two into a center right party and an alt right part, neither of which will be able to contend against the largest party in the nation, the Democratic Party.  

"they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind"

The sad thing is that this is pretty conclusive evidence that there is something extremely fractured in American society.  It'd be too early to consign the country to the grave in terms of it being a first rate nation, but the US is fooling itself it believes that there's a quick fix to this.  Donald Trump promised to "make American great again", and he has some economic advances to his credit.  But the political damage now done to the country won't be repaired in four years, eight years, or twelve.  His legacy will be principally defined by an effort to illegitimately hold on to power, just like Richard Nixon's long and distinguished career is defined almost wholly by Watergate.

The country did get over Watergate, of course, although in real ways the reaction to Watergate and what it brought into the nation's politics is responsible for what we're seeing now.  It's certain, retrospectively, that Gerald Ford is partially responsible for what is happening now by his pardoning of Nixon, something that never should have been done.  Nixon should have been tried and convicted for his crimes so as to set a standard and example for the future.

Indeed, Nixon's pardoning is one of the two great American pardoning political mistakes that continues to haunt the nation, the first being the United States decision to decline prosecuting the treasonous Southern figures who lead the rebelling against the country in 1860 to 65.  Just as Washington's peaceful transfer of power set an example that lasted over 200 years, the post Civil War  and post Watergate examples set a precedent that you really can attack the institutions of the country and get away with it.  Trying the Southern rebels for treason would have shocked the Southern population into reform, which they were already inclined towards, in 1865 and have kept their antebellum masters from returning to rule over white and black alike once again.  Trying Nixon would have proved that the President wasn't above the law even when sitting behind the Resolute Desk.  Instead we made heroes out of traitors in the first instance and inserted the concept of near dictatorial powers while in office in the second.  Indeed Nixon openly opined that the President couldn't commit a crime.

But the President can and in a loose non judicial sense a crime against the American political culture is being committed right now and shows ever sense of running right up to the inauguration.  The Atlantic magazine has turned out to be prophetic in what Trump intended to try.  For the most part only the courts, and some brave state Republican officials, have kept this from occurring.  If it had succeeded the result would have been complete anarchy.

Some commentators, at this point in time, have begun to ponder if what is presently occurring goes further than that, however.  It might be a real crime, they're stating, with that crime being sedition.

Sedition, in Federal law, is as follows:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both.

As can be seen, the elements require two or more people, making it a species of conspiracy, who conspire to overthrow the government or "to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States".  

There's been commentary that this must be an attempt to violently overthrow or hinder, but that's not really clear.  Law is not only in the details, but also in the grammar.  It's perfectly possible to read 18 USC § 2394 to prevent conspiracies to 1) overthrow, or 2) put down, or "destroy by force". That doesn't require the conspiracies to overthrow, put down, or  hinder to require force.

Of course, that question is academic as nobody is going to charge Trump or his confederates with sedition.  And if they did, they'd fail, contrary to what some commentators have argued, as the effort has been pretty open and doesn't look like any sort of conventional conspiracy so much as a rather odd litigation based strategy.  The point, however, is that by sow the winds of the court, the doors are now open to what that may reap.  Some on the left are now openly advocating for trying Trump for something.  

By and large, that would be disastrous for the left unless something really dramatic comes forward post election, which some are speculating will.  That, they argue, is Trump's real reason for trying to hold on to power. The evidence doesn't support that, however.  It appears just to be an effort to hold on to power combined with a disrespect for the American democratic tradition.

Disrespect, of course, won't take a person anywhere without support and it seems pretty clear that the last time a crisis of this type, Watergate, existed neither the public nor the Republican Party were willing to participate in it. Of course, in that case an outright crime had occurred.  Still, being old enough to remember 1973, I can remember Nixon being held in contempt by average people for what he did.

Here we are seeing something else.  People are signing up to be part of this effort.  And that points to something just as troubling.

It wasn't in 2016 that the nation suddenly had a disgruntled populist segment of the country that was voting to light the match to the nation.  That impulse went all the way back to the latter part of Ronald Reagan's administration in the figure of such people as Newt Gingrich.  Starting in the 1970s the blue collar, rust belt, section of the nation began to suffer a decline which nobody made any effort to reverse.  At the same time the American left went from begin a WASP based sort of Episcopal left to an increasingly Hight Ashbury sort of left that had a really strong element of contempt for Western culture and tradition.  The right, in turn, began to give lip service to deep nativist impulses that have always been a feature of American culture even while directly participating in left wing agendas that directly impacted and damaged the people they were pitching to.  Rust Belt denizens who felt that they'd been forgotten and abandoned by both parties and cultural elites were completely correct, they had been.

Hence what we are now seeing with Donald Trump.  Trump is a populist and if he seems a populist in the mold of Huey Long or Fr. Charles Coughlin, it's because he is. Both of those men from the 1930s pitched to the same base and in the same fashion, and if people suspected that they were anti democratic, it was was a suspicion that was merited in the first instance and correct in the second.  Indeed, Trump may be more like Long in his personality that Coughlin, who was more anti democratic but not personally tainted by personal vice.  

That should be really frightening as what that means is that a large demographic really doesn't care if what Trump does in an effort to retain power is democratic or not.  And that's what gave Italy a figure like Mussolini, Spain a figure like Franco, or Portugal Salazar.  They didn't seize power on their own, they obtained it as they were supported by a real base that had lost interest in democracy in the greater sense and who were concerned only about their own agendas, which they believed to be the correct agendas.

What this means is that the incoming President, Joe Biden, has a massive amount of work to do in order to address populist complaints.  Ultimately, all populist movements break upon reality and the key is to address the complaint, or alternatively to completely bury the complaining demographic politically.  Indeed, all totalitarian populist movements ironically achieve that latter result. Portugal went right from a right wing dictatorship to a radical Socialist government with nothing in between. The Spanish Falangist are thing of the political past.  In the US, however, the disgruntled populist demographic is too large to ignore.

Biden has only four years to really get this fixed.  It'll be a big task, but frankly not an impossible one.  To do it, he has to ignore the advice of his supporters who want to treat the nation like a giant sociology petrie dish.  Forcing more left wing ideology down the throats of the public on social issues will cement the populist drift of the GOP and likely bring a rapid end to Democratic power in Congress in 2022.  Biden, who was once a Republican, and who was at one time an observant Catholic, can return to much of his roots and assuage fears while also addressing issues that need to be addressed.  If that's done, he may come out a hero in what is likely to be his single term, and perhaps start to repair the damage being meted out to the country by a President who clearly doesn't respect American political culture.  Or he can ignore that, or just be ineffectual, and make the damage worse.

At some point, however, people who supported this poorly thought out effort to effect a sort of judicial coup will have to come to account.  We can expect them all to have long political careers, but like American politicians who said nice things about the Nazis in the 1930s, and not like the American politicians who said nice things about  the Soviets in the 1940s, they'll need to address it.  With this having been loosed in the hot wind of this election seasons, something is going to be need to send when the wind calms and the weather cools.  It'll be necessary for the country.

*It probably did put an end to speculation that Cruz would make a good Supreme Court justice.  There's no way he'd pass muster now.

The missed opportunity. 40 Acres and a Mule.

"The end of the line of one hundred thirty Negro farmers with mule teams who are buying their cotton seed and other supplies cooperatively at Roanoke Farms, North Carolina."  1938.

Every once and a while in  history you can look back on a specific event and know exactly when the opportunity to cause a different historical outcome was lost.  It's rare, but it does occur.

And eschewing Radical Reconstruction following the Civil War is one such example, the tragic consequences of which we are still living with today.

That opinion, which I've held for a very long time, has not been a popular one in American history for the reason, I'd submit, that the compromise of the 1870s followed by the renewed rise of Southern aristocracy and the glorification of the "Lost Cause" worked an inaccurate historical revision on it, or at least upon its attitude.  Suffice it to say, most historians have tended to herald the demise of Radical Reconstruction following the Lincoln assassination and have taken the position instead that Lincoln wouldn't have approved of it, and as the great reuniter, he would have done what Andrew Johnson did . . . reconstruction, but not so radical.

I'm not so sure.  Lincoln was a shrewd man, something often forgotten about him.  A man willing to endure the war that he did may have been willing to thrown in with the radicals in his final term and forced the conclusion of the effort that was started in 1860.  There are, of course, reasons to believe that he would not have taken that path, he was after all acting in a conciliatory way as the war ended, but there are reasons to believe the opposite  He was a shrewd politician, and one of conviction, who had proven unusually willing to endure extreme hardship in order to obtain a goal. Would any other newly elected President have been willing to take the country into a Civil War in 1860 without any effort to placate the states attempting departure?

We'll never know, of course, but we can wonder and truly not know.  We can know, however, that not following through with the goals of the Radical Republicans was a mistake.

A huge mistake.

The Radicals would have taken steps to reform, in the true sense of the word, the South politically, economically and socially (and for all practical purposes in that order, while simultaneously). That would have meant politically disenfranchising the treasonous portion of the white Southern population while enfranchising the blacks, but it would have meant far more than that.  Indeed, the one good bit of evidence that Lincoln would have gone with the Radicals is that politically enfranchising the former slave population in fact did occur during Lincoln's late administration and it continued on during Johnson's.  Blacks were made citizens and given the right to vote, even achieving a majority black government in South Carolina for a time.

But it also would have meant, in some form, putting the black population into the economic shoes formerly owned by the treasonous planter class who dominated the South economically and politically. And that would have meant busting up the plantations and distributing land to the freed slaves.

And that idea was definitely around by the mid point in the Civil War.  Indeed, it was definitely circulating around in the Army, which had occasionally taken a liberating view towards slaves even early in the war.  It was expressed in the sentiment that caused General William T. Sherman to issue Special Field Order Number 15, which read:

Special Field Orders No. 15.

Headquarters Military Division of the Mississippi, In the Field, Savannah, Ga., January 16, 1865.

I. The islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the Saint Johns River, Fla., are reserved and set apart for the settlement of the BLACKS now made free by the acts of war and the proclamation of the President of the United States.

II. At Beaufort, Hilton Head, Savannah, Fernandina, Saint Augustine, and Jacksonville the blacks may remain in their chosen or accustomed vocations; but on the islands, and in the settlements hereafter to be established, no white person whatever, unless military officers and soldiers detailed for duty, will be permitted to reside; and the sole and exclusive management of affairs will be left to the freed people themselves, subject only to the United States military authority and the acts of Congress. By the laws of war and orders of the President of the United States the negro is free, and must be dealt with as such. He cannot be subjected to conscription or forced military service, save by the written orders of the highest military authority of the Department, under such regulations as the President or Congress may prescribe; domestic servants, blacksmiths, carpenters, and other mechanics will be free to select their own work and residence, but the young and able-bodied negroes must be encouraged to enlist as soldiers in the service of the United States, to contribute their share toward maintaining their own freedom and securing their rights as citizens of the United States. Negroes so enlisted will be organized into companies, battalions, and regiments, under the orders of the United States military authorities, and will be paid, fed, and clothed according to law. The bounties paid on enlistment may, with the consent of the recruit, go to assist his family and settlement in procuring agricultural implements, seed, tools, boats, clothing, and other articles necessary for their livelihood.

III. Whenever three respectable negroes, heads of families, shall desire to settle on land, and shall have selected for that purpose an island, or a locality clearly defined within the limits above designated, the inspector of settlements and plantations will himself, or by such sub-ordinate officer as he may appoint, give them a license to settle such island or district, and afford them such assistance as he can to enable them to establish a peaceable agricultural settlement. The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the inspector, among themselves and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground, and when it borders on some water channel with not more than 800 feet water front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves or until Congress shall regulate their title. The quartermaster may, on the requisition of the inspector of settlements and plantations, place at the disposal of the inspector one or more of the captured steamers to ply between the settlements and one or more of the commercial points, heretofore named in orders, to afford the settlers the opportunity to supply their necessary wants and to sell the products of their land and labor.

IV. Whenever a negro has enlisted in the military service of the United States he may locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure and acquire a homestead and all other rights and privileges of a settler as though present in person. In like manner negroes may settle their families and engage on board the gunboats, or in fishing, or in the navigation of the inland waters, without losing any claim to land or other advantages derived from this system. But no one, unless an actual settler as above defined, or unless absent on Government service, will be entitled to claim any right to land or property in any settlement by virtue of these orders.

V. In order to carry out this system of settlement a general officer will be detailed as inspector of settlements and plantations, whose duty it shall be to visit the settlements, to regulate their police and general management, and who will furnish personally to each head of a family, subject to the approval of the President of the United States, a possessory title in writing, giving as near as possible the description of boundaries, and who shall adjust all claims or conflicts that may arise under the same, subject to the like approval, treating such titles altogether as possessory. The same general officer will also be charged with the enlistment and organization of the negro recruits and protecting their interests while absent from their settlements, and will be governed by the rules and regulations prescribed by the War Department for such purpose.

VI. Brig. Gen. R. Saxton is hereby appointed inspector of settlements and plantations and will at once enter on the performance of his duties. No change is intended or desired in the settlement now on Beaufort Island, nor will any rights to property heretofore acquired be affected thereby.

By order of Maj. Gen. W. T. Sherman:

L. N. DAYTON, Assistant Adjutant-General.

— William T. Sherman, Military Division of the Mississippi; 1865 series - Special Field Order 15, January 16, 1865.

What Sherman ordered had a limited application, but others had a broader one in mind. And Sherman had seen something and appreciated it which made his act no only charitable, but political.  His armies had just marched across the American South from west to east and he'd seen nearly all of the Southern heartland.  He well knew that the economic power of the South was completely vested in large plantations and that the plantations and the planters are what had supported, and caused, the war.  Deprive the planters of their slaves and the Southern cause was over.

Indeed, most Southern soldiers were yeomen, which provided in some ways the ultimately irony of the Southern fight.  Yeomen by and large did not own slaves, although a few did. Their lives were marked by fierce independence and they were more or less aligned against everyone but their immediate families and neighbors.  Their stalwart independent frames of mind made them good soldiers in combat but also made them unreliable as well, figuring into both the length of the Southern war against the odds and the high desertion rate of the Southern armies, and even some instances of outright rebellion of various regions, West Virginia being the most notable, against the Confederacy.  In the antebellum period the yeomanry had been hostile to blacks but their hostility was not merely racist (it certainly was in part) but economic, viewing blacks as economic implements used against them by their real class enemies, the planters.

There was real hope in the post war period that enfranchising blacks with land would convert them to yeomanry and even the yeomanry seems to have grasped that in some places, forming tentative alliances in the post Reconstruction period with blacks as the planter class reasserted itself and disenfranchised everyone else.  In the immediate post war period, however, the real opportunity was presented, and lost.

Radical Republicans would have redistributed the planter landholdings to freed slaves. The logic was inescapable to everyone.  Plantations had been built and worked on forced black labor.  They would not have existed but for it. Deprive them of it, and they wouldn't exist.  Moreover, as that labor was forced it could be regarded as stolen, with the reparation of the worked land as compensation for the theft.

Most of the Southern black population had farming skills in an era when most Americans were farmers. What they lacked was land, animals and implements.  Lost to the modern American romantic notion of "homesteading", building up sufficient resources in order to start a farm was very difficult and nobody just simply "did it".  Homesteaders often took years building up sufficient assets in order to strike out on their own even when supported by paying employment or (farming) families.  Freed blacks in the South had, at best, their household possessions at the time they were freed.  They were universally poor.

Hence the "40 acres and a mule" ideal. What that really meant was the vesting of 40 acres, the basic American agricultural unit, and a mule, the most durable farm animal and one that could be used for planting and transportation.  Inherent in that phrase was the provision of basic implements.  All of these were readily available in the South and capable of quick obtainment and distribution.

What was needed in order to do that was a legal vehicle to accomplish and the will to do it.  Both were lacking.

Legally,. the problem was the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution which provide that people's property simply can't be taken.  There are exceptions, of course, such as Eminem domain, but they they still require that the land taken be taken with "just compensation" to the owners.  Therefore if we can imagine a way in which the land would have been taken from planters we still have to imagine one in which the planters would have been compensated for it.

That might not, however, be as difficult to imagine as we might think.  For one thing, while it would have been a huge investment on the part of the United States, the land's value in 1865 wasn't what it was in 1860.  Purchasing plantations at fair market value, all that would have been owed, would have been getting a heck of a deal at the time.  Like Tara in Gone With The Wind, that land was a mess by the end of the war.

But more radical means may have been available as well.

The South would never have attempted to break away from the Union but for slavery. The slave holding class saw slavery as vital to the economy of the South (this turned out not to be true) and thought the elimination of slavery would destroy the Southern economy.  No matter how it was dressed up, that was the underlying basis for it all.  Most Southerners, as noted, were farmers but most weren't slaveholders. Balancing that out, it should be noted, there were a lot of mid sized farmers that owned a small number of slaves but who still worked their own lands. Not all slaveholders, in other words, owned large plantations.  Indeed, there were slaveholders who were not in agriculture at all, although most were.  But production agriculture based upon slave labor was the economic backbone of the South.

Political power in the South was very unbalanced in addition.  Whereas Jefferson, a slaveholder, could imagine in the late 1700s a republic in which most voters were free yeomanry, in reality the slave-holding class held the political reins.  Yeomanry, the most numerous class (outside of South Carolina) did not.  Everywhere, of course, blacks held no political power at all, which made the Southern claim of the Civil War that their departure from the Union represented the will of the people a lie.  The people's will didn't include, rather obviously, the will of the black residents.  In South Carolina, the majority of those residents were black.

This is all noted as there were no Southern states where support for succession wasn't backed by the slaveholding class directly and there were few planters who weren't connected, in some fashion, with the South's war against the nation.  Given that, they were implicated in treason, if we accept that reason not only included fighting in a rebel army against the nation, but serving in a rebel legislature or rebel government, or giving material support to the rebellion.  It would have been few in that class who could have really escaped being implicated in the war against the United States.

Now, a person can't be tried for treason simply because he was on the losing side of a rebellion in terms of his residents or regional residence. But the United States didn't bother attempting to try anyone for treason at all.  Treason, at that time, was a capitol offense.  Executing those who had committed it seriously would have been allowable under the law, but would not have been a wise thing to do.  But trying those, like Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis, who made war against their country and sentencing them to long prison sentences would have been warranted.  Indeed, Davis was held in anticipation of just such a trial, and a jury pool, half black and half white, raised in anticipation of that, before he was released.  In fairness, part of the reason he was not tried was a fear that succession would be held to be legal, a fear that was relieved in 1869 when the Supreme Court held it was not.

Lee and Davis both lost their plantations in fact, and others did as well. But what did not occur was the mass acquisition of them by the United States for redistribution to the freed slaves.  Freed blacks were well aware that land was economic freedom and none the less pursued it, but given their lack of resources they could never acquire it in the same volume that white southerners could and did.  Starting in the 1910s they began to give up and move out of the South, with the result that changed a situation in which 90% of blacks lived in the South in 1910, a figure that had held steady since 1790, to its current figure of just over 50%, which was reached in the 1970s.

Had blacks been able to acquire farmland in the 1860s, as they hoped to do, this history would undoubtedly have been radically different.  The breakup of the Southern plantation economy would have destroyed the planter class as an economic and political base, and vested it in a black and white yeoman class instead.  This is not to say that black and white yeomanry would have suddenly existed in harmony. Southern whites of all classes were hostile to blacks and steeped in generations of racism.  Northern whites, for that matter, held strong racist views.  But Southern yeomanry had shown an acclimation for appreciating their political position and making alliances accordingly.  It's not impossible to imagine them doing that fairly rapidly in the late 19th Century.

Of course history didn't take this path.  Lincoln was assassinated in 1865 and Andrew Johnson, surviving an attempt at impeachment, took the country down the road he thought Lincoln would have wanted to travel. Reconstruction was attempted, but not of the radical variety.

An opportunity was lost.