Saturday, October 24, 1874. Domestic terrorists.

 

October 24, 1874 political cartoon by Thomas Nast decrying the alliance between the White League and the Ku Klux Klan in the South.

Last edition:

Monday, September 28, 1874. The Battle of Palo Duro Canyon.

Labels: 1870s, 1874, Army, Battle of Palo Dura Canyon, Cheyenne, Comanche, Indian Wars, Kiowa Tribe, Personalities, Ranald Mackenzie, Red River War, Texas

Blog Mirror: July 1, 2024 – Virginia Becomes 12th State in US and First in South to End Child Marriage

 

July 1, 2024 – Virginia Becomes 12th State in US and First in South to End Child Marriage

Tuesday, April 29, 1924. The Townsend Fire.

In Casper, the well known fire in the Townsend Building broke out.

The building still stands, and still looks largely the same as it did in 1924, although its exterior would be renovated in 1934.

This building is not, of course, to be confused with Casper's Townsend Hotel, which is now the Townsend Justice Center.

And Councilman Royce was struggling to retain his position.

There was a huge tornado outbreak in the southern United States.

"His Master's Voice", Chicago Tribune, April 29, 1924.

Southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe, elected its first colonial legislature, with voting restricted to whites.

Last prior edition:

Monday, April 28, 1924. Another West Virginian Coal Mine Disaster.

1920s, 1924, 1930, 1930s, Coal, Crime, Disaster, Herbert Hoover, Indiana, Ku Klux Klan, Mining, West Virginia

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 61st Edition. Illiberal Democracy. . . coming soon to a republic near you and boosting the birth rate.

 

"Mothers, fight for your children". World War Two German posters.  Prior to the war you can find quite a few posers of fawning mothers with babies, including the ever popular large breasted young woman breastfeeding babies.  The Nazi Party was freakishly pro natalist, even though the country was very densely populated.  While I can't find it, a Nazi informational cartoon even exists lamenting a woman's increasing first childbirth age, taking it back to a point at which it was in the early teens.

There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban. He’s fantastic…He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.

Donald Trump on Viktor Orbán, yesterday.

What the crap? 

Right wing fawning over Viktor Orbán is really getting over the top.  Why?

Well, I know why, it's because of his philosophy of "Illiberal Democracy", which will be coming soon to a large North American republic near you.

And while you are enjoying being told how exactly to think, you can get back to work on birthin' dem babies.

Eh?

Ah yes, has any notices that there's growing far right obsession on increasing the birth rate.  It's one thing to support families, but that's not what I mean.  If you listen carefully, there's suddenly a genuine "we need more babies" movement going on in the far right.

This has long been the case in Russia, which has crashing demographics, so it probably makes sense.  If they don't arrest this trend, irrespective of how much Vlad Putin expands the borders of the country, sooner or later China is going to help itself to a large portion of Siberia.  So its been going on there for a while, but appears to be picking up.

Vlad delivered a message on this in Russia yesterday, for International Women's Day, something that actually isn't about babies.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Dear women,

From the bottom of my heart, I wish you all the best on International Women’s Day.

We always look forward to this wonderful spring day with pleasure and excitement, preparing for it well in advance. Today, in every home and every family, Russians are expressing their most tender and loving wishes for their mothers, wives, daughters, grandmothers and girlfriends.

Dear women, you certainly have the power to improve this world with your beauty, wisdom and generosity, but above all, thanks to the greatest gift that nature has endowed you with – the bearing of children. Motherhood is a glorious mission for women. A difficult and critically important mission, but also a source of so much joy and happiness.

Family remains the most important thing for any woman, no matter what career path she chooses or what professional heights she attains. Her family, relatives, friends, her tireless concern for her children, their health and education, teaching them what is right and making sure they grow up to be decent and successful people is what matters most.

This year is dedicated to the family in Russia. The meaning, the essence of the family is primarily about the continuation of life, the continuation of the lineage, of the story of each family and our entire country. The family is the bond that has ensured continuity from generation to generation, and consideration and respect for women and motherhood are an integral part of our traditions.

The family, its interests and needs are in the spotlight and an absolute priority in Russia today. We will certainly do everything we can to ensure that families with children, including large and young families, young mothers, feel supported and assisted by the state.

I would like to specifically address the women who are serving in the special military operation now, carrying out combat missions, as well as to others who are now separated from their family members, waiting for our heroes to come home, inspiring them with their love, cheer and support, worrying about every soldier, helping them on the front line, in hospitals, and in numerous volunteer organisations. Again and again, you prove that a woman’s heart is truly an irresistible force, providing an example of perseverance and confidence that good and truth are on our side.

Dear women!

You take on extremely difficult challenges, achieving success and impressive results in a variety of fields. We, men, often feel amazed at your ability to get things done quickly and efficiently, yet thoroughly, seeing to every detail. You handle an endless succession of problems and burdens without losing your charm and allure. It is impossible not to admire you.

I would like to wish you genuine mutual understanding with those you hold dear, as many truly happy moments in your lives as possible, and success in everything that is important to you.

All the best to you. Happy International Women’s Day!

Tsar Vlad has spoken.  Get to work on those babies.

Tim Scott, who recently sold his dignity to fawn over Don Trump, said a line like this just the other day in an interview where it wasn't subtle.  It doesn't seem to have been picked up in the press, which doesn't seem to have picked up on this at all, but he said something like "we need more babies".  I can't, however, recall the context.

This has really started to appear now that the topic of IVF has come up.  I'm a Catholic, and frankly I fully agree with the Church's position that IVF is immoral, in part because it creates people to be wasted.  That this has turned into a controversy, however, was predictable.  Interestingly, however, some of the language that now appears is along these lines. Republicans are declaring that they're in support of IVF as we need more babies.

This showed up a bit in some odd way in the State of the Union address rebuttal by Sen. Katie Britt.  Frankly, State of the Union addresses have become almost completely pointless since the introduction of television for the most part.  Joe Biden's was a bit of an exception, and there are others, but usually the President declares the State of the Union to be great, hands out kittens, and leaves.  In the rebuttal, the opposing party comes in and declares puppies to be great, but kittens to be a menace.

This year Sen. Britt, a youngish Alabaman Senator, delivered the rebuttal from her kitchen. Some thought the scene of a woman delivering a message from a kitchen to be an ironic accident.  

I doubt it.

I think the message was intentional.  Women's primary duties are in the kitchen. . . and maybe the bedroom.

Her speech

Good evening, America. My name is Katie Britt, and I have the honor of serving the people of the great state of Alabama in the United States Senate. However, that’s not the job that matters most. I am a proud wife and mom of two school age kids. My daughter Bennett and my son Ridgeway are why I ran for the Senate.

I’m worried about their future and the future of children in every corner of our nation, and that’s why I invited you into our home tonight. Like so many families across America, my husband Wesley and I just watched President Biden’s State of the Union address from our living room. And what we saw was the performance of a permanent politician who has actually been in office for longer than I’ve been alive.

One thing was quite clear, though. President Biden just doesn’t get it. He’s out of touch. Under his administration, families are worse off, our communities are less safe, and our country is less secure. I just wish he understood what real families are facing around kitchen tables just like this one. You know, this is where our family has tough conversations.

It’s where we make hard decisions. It’s where we share the good, the bad, and the ugly of our days. It’s where we laugh together, and it’s where we hold each other’s hands and pray for God’s guidance. And many nights, to be honest, it’s where Wesley and I worry. I know we’re not alone. And so tonight, the American family needs to have a tough conversation, because the truth is we’re all worried about the future of our nation.

The country we know and love seems to be slipping away, and it feels like the next generation will have fewer opportunities and less freedoms than we did. I worry my own children may not even get a shot at living their American dreams. My American dream allowed me, the daughter of two small business owners from rural Enterprise, Alabama, to be elected to the United States Senate at the age of 40. Growing up sweeping the floor at my dad’s hardware store and cleaning the bathroom at my mom’s dance studio, I never could have imagined what my story would entail.

To think about what the American Dream can do across just one generation in just one lifetime, it’s truly breathtaking. But right now, the American dream has turned into a nightmare for so many families. The true unvarnished state of our union begins and ends with this. Our families are hurting. Our country can do better.

And you don’t have to look any further than the crisis at our southern border to see it. President Biden inherited the most secure border of all time. But minutes after taking office, he suspended all deportations, he halted construction of the border wall, and he announced a plan to give amnesty to millions.

We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped.

The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be ok with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.

This crisis is despicable, and the truth is it is almost entirely preventable. From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one because of President Biden’s senseless border policies. Just think about Laken Riley. In my neighboring state of Georgia, this beautiful 22 year old nursing student went out on a jog one morning, but she never got the opportunity to return home.

She was brutally murdered by one of the millions of illegal border crossers President Biden chose to release into our homeland. Y’all, as a mom, I can’t quit thinking about this. I mean, this could have been my daughter. This could have been yours. And tonight, President Biden finally said her name, but he refused to take responsibility for his own actions.

Mr. president, enough is enough. Innocent Americans are dying, and you only have yourself to blame. Fulfill your oath of office, reverse your policies, end this crisis, and stop the suffering. Sadly, we know that President Biden’s failures don’t stop there. His reckless spending dug our economy into a hole and sent the cost of living through the roof.

We have the worst inflation in 40 years and the highest credit card debt in our nation’s history. Let that sink in. Hard working families are struggling to make ends meet today. And with soaring mortgage rates and sky high childcare costs, they’re also struggling to how to plan for tomorrow. The American people are scraping by while President Biden proudly proclaims that Bidenomics is working.

Goodness, y’all. Bless his heart. We know better. I’ll never forget stopping at a gas station in Chilton County one evening. The gentleman working the counter told me that after retiring he had to pick up a job in his 70s so that he didn’t have to choose between going hungry or going without his medication.

He said I did everything right. I did everything I was told to do. I worked hard. I saved. I was responsible. He’s not alone. I hear similar concerns from fellow parents, whether I am walking with my friends or whether I’m at my kid’s games. But let’s be honest, it’s been a minute since Joe Biden pumped gas, ran a carpool, or even pushed a grocery cart.

Meanwhile, the rest of us see our dollar, and we know it doesn’t go as far. We see it every day. And despite what he tells you, our communities are not safer. For years, the left has coddled criminals and defunded the police, all while letting repeat offenders walk free. The result is tragic but foreseeable.

From our small towns to America’s most iconic city streets, life is getting more and more dangerous. And unfortunately, President Biden’s weakness isn’t just hurting families here at home. He is making us a punchline on the world stage. Look, where I’m from, your word is your bond. But for three years, the president has demonstrated that America’s word doesn’t mean what it used to. From abandoning our allies in his disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan to desperately pushing another dangerous deal with Iran, President Biden has failed.

We’ve become a nation in retreat. And the enemies of freedom, they see an opportunity. Putin’s brutal aggression in Europe has put our allies on the brink. Iran’s terrorist proxies have slaughtered Israeli Jews and American citizens. They’ve targeted commercial shipping and they’ve attacked our troops nearly 200 times since October, killing three US soldiers and two Navy Seals. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party is undercutting America’s workers. China is buying up our farmland, spying on our military installations and spreading propaganda through the likes of TikTok. You see, the CCP knows that if it conquers the minds of our next generation, it conquers America.

And what does President Biden do? Well, he bans TikTok for government employees, but creates an account for his own campaign. Y’all, you can’t make this stuff up. Look, we all recall when presidents faced national security threats with strength and resolve; that seems like ancient history. Right now, our commander in chief is not in command.

The free world deserves better than a dithering and diminished leader. America deserves leaders who recognize that secure borders, stable prices, safe streets, and a strong defense are actually the cornerstones of a great nation. Just ask yourself, are you better off now than you were three years ago? There’s no doubt we’re at a crossroads and it doesn’t have to be this way.

We all feel it. But here’s the good news. We the people are still in the driver’s seat. We get to decide whether our future will grow brighter or whether we’ll settle for an America in decline. Well, I know which choice our children deserve and I know the choice the Republican Party is fighting for. We are the party of hard working parents and families and we want to give you and your children the opportunities to thrive and we want families to grow.

It’s why we strongly support continued nationwide access to in-vitro fertilization. We want to help loving moms and dads bring precious life into this world. Wesley and I believe there is no greater blessing in life than our children. And that’s why tonight I want to make a direct appeal to the parents out there and in particular to my fellow moms, many of whom I know will be up tossing and turning at 2:00 am wondering how you’re going to be in three places at once and then somehow still get dinner on the table?

First of all, we see you, we hear you, and we stand with you. I know you’re frustrated. I know you’re probably disgusted by most of what you see going on in Washington. And I’ll be really honest with you, you’re not wrong for feeling that way. Look, I get it. The task in front of us isn’t an easy one, but I can promise you one thing.

It is worth it. So I am asking you for the sake of your kids and your grandkids, get into the arena. Every generation has been called to do hard things. American greatness rests in the fact that we always answer that call. It’s who we are. Never forget we are steeped in the blood of patriots who overthrew the most powerful empire in the world.

We walk in the footsteps of pioneers who tamed the wild. We now carry forward the same flame of freedom as the liberators of an oppressed Europe. We continue to draw courage from those who bent the moral arc of the universe. And when we gaze upon the heavens, never forget that our DNA contains the same ingenuity that put man on the moon.

America has been tested before and every single time we’ve emerged unbowed and unbroken. Our history has been written with the grit of men and women who got knocked down, but we know their stories because they did not stay down. We are here because they stood back up. So now it’s our turn our moment to stand up and prove ourselves worthy of protecting the American Dream.

Together, we can reawaken the heroic spirit of a great nation because America, we don’t just have a rendezvous with destiny, we take destiny’s hand and we lead it. Our future starts around kitchen tables just like this, with moms and dads just like you. And you are why I believe with every fiber of my being that despite the current state of our union, our best days are still ahead.

May God bless you, and may God continue to bless the United States of America.

Okay, this speech wasn't Vlad's "how's that baby making going?" speech, but there's some interesting subtle messages in it.  Delivered from a kitchen, with lots of references to kiddo's.  You know, y'all? 

As an aside, this was just about the most affected Southern style of speech ever by somebody who is really Southern.  I can't recall a political speech with so many "y'all's".  And the "Bless his heart" line. Do Southerners realize that other Americans either don't know why Southerners say this, or find it weird?  No wonder this speech has been so widely lampooned.

Anyhow, I want to be very careful here as I'm certainly not against married couples having children, (note I inserted married in there) and I'm a proponent, perhaps a radical one, of traditional values, but neo pro natalism is a little weird.

Pro natalism?

Yes.

Consider Pronatalist.org.

There's a movement going on and the founders of Pronatalist.org, Simone and Malcolm Collins, are sort of at the point of the spear of it.  And in a way, while I'm not accusing them of anything, the message is pretty clear.  Populations are collapsing, they argue, and having babies is the counter to it.

Well, if that's correct, that's an obvious solution, but the added subtly to it is that the right kind of people aren't having babies.

All the other problems before us in this country, important though they may be, are as nothing compared with the problem of the diminishing birth rate and all that it implies.

Theodore Roosevelt.

Hardly remembered now, a big concern of the early 20th Century, in some quarters, was "race suicide".  Basically, whites had a declining birth rate, even before pharmaceutical birth control, and African Americans didn't.

I'm not stating that this is exactly what the neo pro natalists are concerned about. Rather, what I think some are concerned about is that the declining birth rate in Western and Westernized nations is falling.  Actually, the birth rate (and, FWIW, sperm count in males) is falling all over the globe.  But like a lot of issues, once it's notice, the actual nature of the problem, if there is a problem, is usually past its peak, although certainly isn't always the case.

There are some things here which are real problems, as well.  The decline in Western nations is a symptom of something, and that something isn't good, whatever it is.

But the added problem here is that it's easy to cross from concern into being creepy, and far right and far left movements do that, and have done that on this very issue in the past.

Consider the efforts in the 2023 legislature to oppose banning child marriages, which we posted on at the time. Some of our comments.:

I've been waiting for the opposition to happen.

This bill sailed through the house and is in the Senate, and I'm frankly surprised that the opposition didn't appear before now. Not because the bill is a bad idea.  It's a good one, and it should pass.  Marriages lower than 16 years old are a hideous idea, and frankly marriage below 18 sure a good one.  Nonetheless, a similar attempt at banning such marriages failed last year.

The reason I thought it would fail is that there's some silent opposition from at least the members of one religion in the state, and I thought it might arise there.  But, it didn't.  The objections to have a religious tinge to them, but not from the expected quarter.

But it's also taken on a rather creepy tone.

Apparently the email, which wasn't published in full by the press, stated the following:

This bill may seem harmless, but there are concerns about constitutional rights that you need to form your own opinions about

And then it linked to a blog post which it endorses, stating that it's a succinct analysis..

The blog post is easy to find.  And it provides, in its entirety, the following (complete with photo):

HB0007 - Underage marriage-amendments

HB0007 - Underage marriage-amendments

Sponsored By: Representative(s) Zwonitzer, Dn and Oakley and Senator(s) Case and Furphy

ESSENCE: "No person shall marry who is under the age of sixteen (16) years." PERIOD. END OF STORY. AND "Marriages contracted in Wyoming are void without any decree of divorce:... When either party is under sixteen (16) years of age at the time of contracting the marriage."

ACTION:

Write the members of the Senate and ask them to vote "NO" when HB 7 comes up on Monday's 2nd Reading.

Jim.Anderson@wyoleg.gov; Fred.Baldwin@wyoleg.gov; Eric.Barlow@wyoleg.gov; Bo.Biteman@wyoleg.gov; Brian.Boner@wyoleg.gov; Anthony.Bouchard@wyoleg.gov; Evie.Brennan@wyoleg.gov; Cale.Case@wyoleg.gov; Ed.Cooper@wyoleg.gov; Dan.Dockstader@wyoleg.gov; Ogden.Driskill@wyoleg.gov; Affie.Ellis@wyoleg.gov; Tim.French@wyoleg.gov; Dan.Furphy@wyoleg.gov; Larry.Hicks@wyoleg.gov; Lynn.Hutchings@wyoleg.gov; Bob.Ide@wyoleg.gov; Stacy.Jones@wyoleg.gov; Dave.Kinskey@wyoleg.gov; John.Kolb@wyoleg.gov; Bill.Landen@wyoleg.gov; Dan.Laursen@wyoleg.gov; Troy.McKeown@wyoleg.gov; Tara.Nethercott@wyoleg.gov; Stephan.Pappas@wyoleg.gov; Tim.Salazar@wyoleg.gov; Wendy.Schuler@wyoleg.gov; Charles.Scott@wyoleg.gov; Cheri.Steinmetz@wyoleg.gov

CONCERNS:

HB 7 denies the fundamental purpose of marriage:

Marriage is the only institution in Wyoming Statute designed to keep a child's father and mother living under the same roof and cooperating in the raising of any children that they, together, conceive. This is the NATURAL RIGHT of every child. As such, it is protected in the Wyoming Constitution (see. Art. 1, Sec. 3 and 23). Since young men and women may be physically capable of begetting and bearing children prior to the age of 16, marriage MUST remain open to them for the sake of those children. 

The sad fact that physical maturity often does not match emotional and intellectual maturity is an indictment of our modern educational system. That is a problem that should be addressed. But we should not use it as an excuse to instantiate bad law.

HB 7 denies parental rights.

Parents, by virtue of their right to conceive children, have the pre-political (i.e. God-given) responsibility to raise their own children. This right and responsibility includes guiding their own maturing children into the estate of Holy Matrimony. HB 7 strips parents of their right to consent to properly desired and well-ordered marriages when they are below an arbitrary age. Moreover, this arbitrary age limit is demonstrably lower than the historical norm of millennia of human existence. 

It is true that some perverse religions and cultures COERCE children to marry young, against their wishes. Sometimes, as in the case of human trafficking, this coercion comes from outside the family. Sometimes, it comes from the parents themselves. The Constitutional rights of children require that side-boards be in place to prevent such perversions. But those side-boards already exist in the form of written parental consent and judicial review of that consent. HB 7 removes those side-boards and replaces them with an arbitrary number that has no organic or essential impetus behind it. 

Comparison with other states:

Nearly all (49 out of 50 states) set the minimum age of legal consent at 18--just exactly as Wyoming does. Also like Wyoming, 46 of 50 allow people to get married below the minimum age if their parents give permission. Of these, 37 set the lowest age of marriage with parental consent at 16, while four (IN, NE, OR, WA) set it at 17, two set it at 15 (HI and MO), one (NH) sets it at 13, and two (CA and MS) have no minimum age for parental consent. 

In addition to CA and MS, 12 other states (AK, GA, HI, KS, MD, MA, NM, NC, OK, RI, UT, WV, WY) have judicial mechanisms that allow exceptions to the minimum age with parental consent. Some of these exceptions specifically name pregnancy, some prohibit age-differentials between the bride and groom more than four years. The sponsor testified that "Wyoming is one of eight states remaining, I believe, that do not have a minimum marriage age in statute" (AK, CA, MA, NM, NC, OK, RI, WV, WY and Puerto Rico). (Only California has both NO minimum age, and NO judicial mechanism.) The remaining 42 states set the absolute minimum age at 13 (NH), 15 (HI and MO), 17 (IN, NE, OR, WA) and 18 (KY and LA) and 16. HB 7 wipes away Wyoming's current mechanism for taking into account ANY special circumstances.

Testimony: 

Additionally, the bringers of HB 7 offer no evidence that Wyoming is facing any statistical uptick of coerced marriages. In the House committee, there was no testimony weighing the trade-off of parental rights over against any “significant issue” with child marriage in Wyoming. To the contrary, the sponsor of the bill openly admitted that “it is not what we would call a problem in this state.” On average 20 marriages per year under 18 and under in Wyoming. There was no testimony about the factual number under 16. Nor was there any testimony about why under 16 years old there should be no judicial exceptions.

Rather, the sponsor openly testified that the reason for bringing the bill is to “keep up with the Jones’” (i.e. 42 other states have put arbitrary age restrictions on marriage. After this dubious motivation, the testimony given in committee was fraught with hypothetical harms. For instance: “if a minor wants a divorce, she can’t hire of lawyer.” Or, “Minors might be coerced into marriage.” Or, “Minors, are not mature enough to marry.” All these cautions are already covered by current law that requires a judge to investigate whether or not the person is being coerced into marriage if that person is mature enough to legally consent. It is rather insulting to say that Wyoming judges are not up to the task that has been given them by law. But, that could be remedied by giving them legislative guidance or additional help. The responsibility does not need to be taken away altogether.

HB 7 violates the right of Wyoming citizens to marry.

Only a generation ago, people were regularly ready for marriage by the age of 15, not 16, and still today many Wyoming couples are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary after having been married prior to 15. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is pertinent, here. "1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution. 2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses. 3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State." As evidenced by the wide differences between states, the age of 16 is an arbitrary limitation that may serve as a general rule, but cannot be absolutely enforced without violating the "full age" standard of Article 16. HB 7 would arbitrarily strip away that right from people who actually have a legitimate reason to marry, and who desire to give their child a stable and loving home. This is unjust both to child and parents. 

FOR FURTHER READING:

Cowboy State Daily, Bill Banning Teens Younger Than 16 To Marry Passes Unanimously Through Senate Committee

Jonathan Lange, UNICEF Comes to Wyoming: Ham-handed uniformity oppresses the human family

PROGRESS:

1/13/2023 H Introduced and Referred to H03 - Revenue

1/17/2023 H03 - Revenue:Recommend Do Pass 6-3-0-0-0

Ayes:  Representative(s) Byron, Harshman, Northrup, Oakley, Storer, Zwonitzer

Nays:  Representative(s) Bear, Locke, Strock

1/18/2023 H COW:Passed / 1/19/2023 H 2nd Reading:Passed

1/20/2023 H 3rd Reading:Passed 36-25-1-0-0

Ayes:  Representative(s) Andrew, Berger, Brown, Burkhart, Jr, Byron, Chadwick, Chestek, Clouston, Conrad, Crago, Eklund, Harshman, Henderson, Larsen, Lloyd, Larson, Jt, Lawley, Nicholas, Niemiec, Northrup, Oakley, Obermueller, O'hearn, Olsen, Provenza, Sherwood, Speaker Sommers, Stith, Storer, Trujillo, Walters, Washut, Western, Wylie, Yin, Zwonitzer, Dan, Zwonitzer, Dave

Nays:  Representative(s) Allemand, Allred, Angelos, Banks, Bear, Davis, Haroldson, Heiner, Hornok, Jennings, Knapp, Locke, Neiman, Ottman, Pendergraft, Penn, Rodriguez-Williams, Singh, Slagle, Smith, Strock, Styvar, Tarver, Ward, Winter

Excused:  Representative Newsome

2/2/2023 S Introduced and Referred to S07 - Corporations

2/9/2023 S07 - Corporations:Recommend Do Pass 4-0-1-0-0

Ayes:  Senator(s) Barlow, Boner, Case, Scott

Excused:  Senator Landen

2/9/2023 S COW: Passed 15-12 (standing vote)

Aye: Case, Cooper, Anderson, Boner, Scott, Jones, Pappas, Geireau, Ellis, Schuler, Barlow, Landen, Rothfuss, Furphy, Bouchard

Nay: Dockstader, Baldwin, Kinsky, Hicks, Steinmetz, Biteman, Salazar, Ide, French, Kolb, Hutchings, McKeown

Absent: Nethercott, Brennen (chair), Driskill, Laurson

Note the photograph, presumably representing a teenage girl, was in the original,  I didn't put it up there.

The gist of the argument is several fold as being presented here and elsewhere, which is.

1.  The bill will make it impossible for girls younger than 16 to get married if they get pregnant.

2.  In the past such marriages were common and its only through the operation of negative modern societal institutions that they aren't now.

3.  There are lots of examples of such marriages working out.

All of these are pretty bad arguments.

Which, in a lot of ways, defines the far right in general right now.  It's taking a genuine concern, and morphing it into something.

I.e., a concern over the loss of existential, and frankly Christian based, values and culture, doesn't need to morph into fawning over Viktor Orbán and imagining that Donald Trump is Cyrus the Great.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 60th Edition. Catching some z's.

Blog Mirror. The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

The Agrarian's Lament: Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.: 

Agrarian(s) of the Week: The Southern Agrarians.

Farm in Louisiana, 1940.

A few weeks ago, with John Pondoro Taylor, on our companion blog Going Feral, we made a controversial entry.  Keeping with that theme, we do the same here.

If a person has agrarian interests, there's no escaping The Southern Agrarians as there is not escaping their magnum opus, I'll Take My Stand.  It is one of the great, if highly flawed, works of modern agrarian thought.

The irony, I suppose, of the work and the group needs to be mentioned from the onset. They did not make their living from the land, although it's not necessary to do that in order to be an agrarian. Rather, they were twelve men of letters who wrote what amounted to an agrarian last stand, which they were very conscious of it being at the time.  They were:

• Donald Davidson, from Tennessee, poet, essayist, reviewer and historian. He was also a segregationist.
• John Gould Fletcher, from Arkansas, poet and historian.  He was the first Southerner to win the Pulitzer Prize
• Henry Blue Kline, a writer educated at Vanderbilt who taught at Tennessee, before ironically taking government employment for the rest of his life.
• Lyle H. Lanier, an experimental psychologist from Tennessee.
• Andrew Nelson Lytle,, also of Tennessee and also of Vanderbilt. a poet, novelist and essayist
• Herman Clarence Nixon, of Alabama and a political scientist.
• Frank Lawrence Owsley, also of Alabama and Vanderbilt. a historian
• John Crowe Ransom, of Tennessee and Vanderbilt poet, professor, essayist
• Allen Tate, poet, and of Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
• John Donald Wade, of Georgia, and a professor at Harvard and Columbia, biographer and essayist
• Robert Penn Warren, of Kentucky, and who was a university professor in a variety of universities, and a poet, novelist, essayist and critic, later first poet laureate of the United States
• Stark Young, of Mississippi, a novelist, drama and literary critic, playwright

What marks them is their monumental work, which was a Depression Era, anti-New Deal, strike against the modern world and capitalism. It is flawed, in that its view of the American South was highly romantic, and frankly they were not bothered by its inherent racism and manged to basically not even see it.  The work, while important, includes muted strain of Lost Cause yearning which are not admirable at all.  Indeed, it's hard not to notice that they didn't notice that the class that was hurt the most by New Deal farm policies were African American tenant farmers.

Still, as noted, there'rs no escaping this work.  It remains the magnum opus of American Agrarianism.

Can you say "slavery"?

Why does this absurd version of the Civil War still exist in the South? The war was about slavery. At the time, the Southern states fully admitted it.

It had nothing whatsoever to do with "economic freedom".

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.

I didn't realize that boiled peanuts were a thing.

 Truly, I did not.

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.

In Memoriam. Winston Groom

Winston Groom, known by most due to Forrest Gump, died yesterday at age 77.

Groom was born in Washington D. C. in 1943 and raised in Mobile Alabama.  His original ambition was to have been a lawyer, like his father, but he switched to writing while in university.  Graduating in 1965, he entered the Army as an officer due to having been in ROTC and served a tour of duty in Vietnam with the 4th Infantry Division.  After leaving the service he worked as a newspaper reporter before quitting to write novels, with his first novel being Better Times Than These, about riflemen in Vietnam.  He returned to Mobile in 1985 and write from there.  A novel released in 2016 was his first in twenty years.  In between he wrote works of history, ultimately writing more of those than he did works of fiction.

He'll always be remembered for Forrest Gump, his fourth novel, with the title character being the subject of a sequel written after the famous move was released.  While Groom was a Southerner not all of his novels were set in the South.  Having said that, Forrest Gump was and it fits sort of uniquely, in my view, on the edge of the Southern Gothic literary genre.

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.