How the South Beat Reconstruction
Part 1

Sub-Saharan misrule during Reconstruction.

3,259 words

Part 1 of 3 (Part 2 here)

On the evening of April 14, 1865, the actor and Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage at Ford’s Theater and shouted “Sic semper tyrannis!”, followed by “The South is avenged!” Booth had just fatally shot President Lincoln. He was acting as part of a larger conspiracy to decapitate the Lincoln administration and was the only conspirator to successfully carry out any part of the overall plan — a plot that had been initiated by Booth, not the Confederate government.

Lincoln’s assassination is one of the big “What ifs?” of American history. Throughout his first term, Lincoln proposed that sub-Saharans should be freed — and then sent away. It is uncertain if he could have carried this out in his second term had he not been killed, but it is possible. Had Lincoln lived to resettle the sub-Saharans, America would certainly be a better country today.

A hypothetical (return) Middle Passage. Had Lincoln not been killed, it is possible he’d have returned the newly-freed sub-Saharans to Africa. In 1865, the US government possessed an enormous Army, Navy, and bureaucracy which could have carried out the project efficiently.

The Cause & Occasion for the Civil War

Lincoln was a casualty of the United States Civil War — just one of hundreds of thousands. The cause of that terrible war was a cultural, economic, and political clash between two closely-related Anglo-Saxon peoples. The first group, the Unionist Anglo-Northerners, consisted of Pennsylvanians who had mostly originated in England’s North Midlands, as well as a subset of “Dutch” from the Rhineland Palatinate and the Yankees, who had mostly originated in East Anglia, with a sub-section from England’s West Country. To put it simply, the combined culture of the two Anglo-Northern groups included an appreciation for hard work, which led to an industrial economy and an intense, but malleable, religious fervor that could lead to moral aggression against outgroups.

The Southerners who became the secessionist Confederates also consisted of several different groups of British origin. The first consisted of the Virginians. The upper-class Virginians were the second sons of English aristocrats who had originated in London or the rural areas around Gloucester, England. These aristocrats came to America with their servants, so Virginia was socially stratified from the beginning. In 1619, the first sub-Saharan slaves in British America were purchased by the Virginians in Jamestown. In the mountains of the South, the population was mostly Scots–Irish, with a contingent of Anglo-Dutch Pennsylvanians as well. There were very few sub-Saharans in southern Appalachia although slavery was legal there. The population of the Deep South consisted of Anglos whose political elite had come from Barbados. It was they who brought the West Indian socioeconomic system to South Carolina in the late seventeenth century, which consisted of large plantations worked by sub-Saharan slaves.

The Northerners and Southerners expanded westwards parallel to each other. After the Mexican War, the question which socioeconomic model should be applied to the new territories led to vicious political polarization over the slavery issue along Anglo “intra-ethnic” lines. This question thus became the occasion for the war.

The Southern political elite claimed slavery was a moral good and already knew for certain that it was profitable. The most important motivation for the conflict, however, was that Southerners recognized that ending slavery would create a new political system that would lead to unending racial strife. Thomas Jefferson, who both owned slaves and sought to create a nation with a large class of self-sufficient white yeoman farmers, wrote of the impracticality of integrating the sub-Saharan and white races in a single political order, saying:

Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

The location of slaves in the United States on the eve of the Civil War.

Injuries, New Provocations, & the Distinctions of Nature: The “Why” of the Anglo-South’s Race-Oriented Behavior

The Southerners also recognized racial realities. Even after decades of “civil rights” laws, affirmative action, special education programs such as Head Start, and the welfare state, sub-Saharans still have many social pathologies and very few true accomplishments. The mainspring of the problem is the biological differences between Europeans and sub-Saharans, which cause blacks to have an average IQ that is one standard deviation lower than whites. This average IQ difference explains all other factors: crime, urban blight, poor performance, etc.

When considering the South’s “racism,” the bedrock facts of racial realities must always be considered. Every political affair which includes a sub-Saharan angle must deal with this reality, and no part of America can ignore this truth — especially not the South, which is where so many sub-Saharans live. In the Civil War’s immediate aftermath, this problem was worse given that the newly-liberated sub-Saharans were completely uneducated, and were being empowered by a vengeful, conquering army.

The Accidental President & Grim Old Thad

Vice President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee became President in the wake of Lincoln’s murder. William Archibald Dunning, a Yankee who published the definitive history of Reconstruction, wrote:

The man who took up the exercise of the chief executive power on April 15, 1865, was not the man whom any important element of the people in either North or South would have deliberately chosen for the task. Andrew Johnson had been nominated for the vice-presidency at Baltimore, in 1864, under the influence of two ideas which pervaded the convention — namely, that the Republican party had given up its identity and become merged with the Union party; and that the Union party was not sectional, but included South as well as North in its membership . . . Mr. Johnson on the ticket with Lincoln, served excellently as a symbol of the party transformation which the war had effected; but few of the party which elected him vice-president would have judged it wise to entrust the difficult task of reconstruction to a man whose antecedents were southern, slave-holding, and ultra-states-rights Democratic; while the northern Copperheads and the southern secessionists alike regarded him with all the scorn which is excited by an apostate.[1]

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The Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania became the most powerful politician in Washington after Lincoln’s death. Stevens and the Radical Republicans sought a more vindictive policy toward the South.

Stevens was a Vermont Yankee, born in 1792. He was born with a club foot and was mocked as a child for his infirmity. In 1815 he left Vermont for Pennsylvania, where he became a lawyer and got involved in politics. Sevens was part of the anti-Masonic Party, which believed that America was under threat from a conspiracy of internationalist Freemasons. He also joined the American Party, which was nicknamed the Know-Nothing Party. The American Party wanted to reduce immigration, especially that of Catholics.

In the long run, Irish immigration turned out to provide racial reinforcements for the old-stock Americans, but in the mid-nineteenth century Irish Catholic immigration was incredibly disruptive. Had the Know-Nothings figured out how to keep slavery confined to the South and avoid the Civil War, they might have created a system which would have kept out those far worse immigrant groups which arrived later — such as Ashkenazi Jews.

As it happened, the same people who wanted to end immigration from non-traditional sources also wanted to end slavery, and they foolishly followed abolitionist mattoids and wild fanatics into the abyss of self-destruction. Wilmot Robertson said it best: “The decline of the American Majority began with the political and military struggle between the North and South.”

Stevens and his Radical Republicans also had a large constituency that was angry over the South’s actions during the war, but the mainspring of their vindictiveness was theology rather than anything to do with politics or the war. In the early nineteenth century, two negative religious ideas spread through American Christianity. The first was Dispensationalism, which reproduces the first-century heresy of the Judaizers, which puts racial Jews at the top of a religious hierarchy that runs contrary to Christ’s message. The second, which is what Stevens followed, was Negro worship; sub-Saharans are seen as divine figures oppressed by white evildoers.

The heart of Negro worship is the White Savior narrative, where a white lifts non-whites out of an unfortunate situation. Negro worship also attracts broken people who wish to harm others. Stevens was warped by the taunting he had received due to his club foot as a child. In more recent times, the Minneapolis “firefighter” who helped turn the arrest  and accidental death of the sub-Saharan career criminal George Floyd into the riotous “Summer of Floyd” had the dark look of a scorned woman looking to do others ill. Stevens the Radical Republican and Johnson the moderate Southern Unionist were bound to clash over how to win the peace.

Reorganizing the South

At the end of hostilities, the situation across the former Confederacy varied. Only Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas had state governments that had been formed before the end of hostilities by Unionists who were supported by the Lincoln administration. The seven remaining states were under military occupation — and that military was rapidly demobilizing.

The Union Army’s white troops were eager to resume their civilian lives and they were quickly mustered out. Sub-Saharans enlisted to replace them. They only began to be recruited after the war’s manpower requirements had reached a crisis. They were less eager to muster out, however, given that most had nothing else to go home to. The US military kept them garrisoned at critical places in the South, in part to emphasize the totality of the South’s defeat to the local population. Dunning writes:

Protests against the presence of the black troops began very early from the southern whites, and the demoralizing effects of such garrisons, and especially of small posts in rural districts, where discipline was not the most rigorous, became more and more evident as time went on.[2]

Employing sub-Saharans as soldiers indeed filled the ranks. But in the end, it just puts sub-Saharan criminality in a uniform, nor is the military enhanced overall. The behavior of black troops during Reconstruction set the precedent for endemic sub-Saharan mutiny and violence in the military which has continued to occur until the present day, and continues to be covered up. As for the larger population of sub-Saharan slaves who were soon to be freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, some stayed with their former masters and worked out new labor arrangements, such as sharecropping, but many did not want to work and drifted into criminality, or went begging near the Union Army camps.

The Johnson administration moved to restore the local governments of those states which were under military occupation. The first was North Carolina. President Johnson appointed a provisional Governor and directed him to assemble a constitutional convention of delegates chosen by identified Union loyalists — usually former Whigs who were merely required to take a loyalty oath. The North Carolina model was applied to the other states under military occupation as well. On April 2, 1866, President Johnson declared that the rebellion was over. Nothing was said from the White House about enfranchising sub-Saharans.

The Radical Republicans and a great many notables in government, including Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, thought that Negro suffrage was a good idea, however. While the Radicals schemed for African votes, state government elections led to the rise of officials who had been secessionists in 1860 and Confederate soldiers during the war. The Freedman’s Bureau, a government agency set up to help the ex-slaves, likewise spread a rumor among the sub-Saharans that each would achieve 40 acres and a mule, plus farming equipment. This led to an unstable situation in the South in late 1865 and 1866: The Radical Northerners wanted sub-Saharans to become voters, while the Southerners were electing ex-Confederates and sub-Saharans were either unemployed and causing trouble or else signing labor contracts, all while believing they were due a reparations package from the Northerners who’d already shed so much blood on their behalf.

Various government officials traveled throughout the South and issued reports which either called for supporting the situation as it was or else warning that sub-Saharans would be returned to bondage in some way. In the end, these reports didn’t matter. Dunning writes, “Sectional passion and partisan political emotion had taken the first place; and this had come to pass through the spirit which attended the proceedings in Congress.”[3]

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Thaddeus Stevens began undermining President Johnson as soon as Congress convened on December 4, 1865. He first denied recognition to any of the members elected from those states which had formally been in rebellion, according to Congress’ internal rules. Then Stevens passed a resolution, which was supported by the Senate, creating a joint committee to investigate the situation in those states that had been in the Confederacy, with the authority to report whether any of them were entitled to be represented again in either house of Congress.

The stage for conflict was therefore set for a showdown between the Negro-worshipers led by Stevens and the moderate Unionist President. The fuse was lit in Mississippi. The Johnson administration’s newly-created state legislature developed  what the Radicals would come to call the “black codes.” These “codes” used the term “persons of color” to denote a new legal class of people — those who had at least one-eighth sub-Saharan ancestry — and placed restrictions on them. The two most important restrictions were that “persons of color” could not carry a firearm without a license, and they needed to be gainfully employed. The “black codes” described “vagrancy” in such a way that local judges had wide latitude to determine if a sub-Sharan was a vagrant, and employment was found for vagrants on plantations which needed labor. These “black codes” enflamed the Northern public, and President Johnson was unable to provide a different solution.

The Radical Republicans on the joint committee used their respective connections with the press to circulate the rumor that the newly-created legislatures in the defeated South were seeking to enact laws which would bypass the Thirteenth Amendment in order to recreate slavery in all but name. The Northern public, which had been conditioned by decades of abolitionist propaganda to believe that slavery was the cause of all the nation’s ills, reacted with indignation.

Radical Republicans used the outrage generated by the “black code” controversy to pass a bill extending the Freedmen’s Bureau’s territorial jurisdiction as well as its charter indefinitely. President Johnson vetoed the legislation. The veto eventually allowed the Radical Republicans to consolidate their grip on power by arousing the anger of the Congressional moderates who had previously supported the administration. Johnson and Stevens were now formally at war.

Shortly after the Freedmen’s Bureau veto, Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which gave sub-Saharans the same rights of citizenship as whites. The President vetoed the bill, but the Congress overrode it. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was the first piece of legislation which led to the creation of the Empire of Nothing. Today, American citizenship is nothing but a matter of paperwork. “Palestinian-Americans” fight it out with “Jewish-Americans” over who can best exploit the US Treasury, while white lives are fed into the US War Machine to vaporize their respective tribal enemies in the Levant.

1866 was a midterm election year, so President Johnson’s plan to allow the Southern States to rejoin the Union under the lenient terms he had laid out as opposed to the harsh, “civil rights” terms offered by the Radical Republicans went to the people. The President initially held the advantage, but several incidents ultimately turned the tide.

The first incident occurred on July 30, 1866. A fight broke out between whites and sub-Saharans in New Orleans who were attending an inflammatory convention regarding African suffrage and other issues. Shots were fired, and the blacks fled to a building where a mob, which included the local police, shot many of the Negroes. The incident was hyped in the press as a deliberate massacre led by ex-Confederates. Following this debacle, President Johnson set the conditions for the second incident himself. He went on a speaking tour which went badly, as he appeared meanspirited and offensive. The Radical Republicans were reelected, and what few supporters Johnson had were ousted from the House.

The results of the midterm election of 1866 doomed President Andrew Johnson’s chances for an easy peace with the South.

The new Congress passed a bill that stripped the former Confederate states of self-government. President Johnson felt compelled to sign the bill into law. The former Confederacy was now divided into a series of military districts, with Virginia becoming the First Military District. Each district was commanded by a US Army officer who was tasked with disenfranchising any former Confederates. Any ambiguities regarding this policy were referred to the US Attorney General, who supported the Southerners as best he could. President Johnson was the Commander-in-Chief, so he could have easily circumvented Congress, but his orders to the troops in the field went through Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who supported the aims of Congress and opposed Johnson at every turn.

On July 3, 1867, Congress passed a law over Johnson’s veto which denied the President any latitude in carrying out the will of Congress, and restricted his ability to control his own cabinet. Congress went into recess, so Johnson suspended Stanton and put Ulysses S. Grant in his place. President Johnson regained control over his own administration for three months, but when Congress reconvened, the House judiciary committee presented a report consisting of 1,200 pages of evidence of his “criminality.” The report was spurious, but the Senate refused to recognize Stanton’s suspension, which caused Grant to vacate the office — which he in fact did not have to do. When Johnson finally fired Stanton, the House determined that Johnson had committed a misdemeanor and recommended impeachment.

The Radical Republicans were looking to impeach Johnson from the outset, and without an independent base of supporters, Johnson was defenseless. He was spared removal from office by the votes of seven senators, although had even one of them voted against him, the necessary two-thirds required would have been reached. Regardless, the next election was on the way, and Johnson was not renominated by the Republicans.

The above map shows the process of Reconstruction. The Civil War ended with several ex-Confederate states having a government backed by the Lincoln administration. The remaining states were reorganized under the Johnson administration and soon had many ex-Confederate office-holders. After the midterm elections of 1866, the Radical Republicans in Congress forced a shift in policy to military government.

The Radical Republicans moved to disenfranchise the ex-Confederates via the US Army. Then the radicals convened new state constitutional conventions that politically empowered sub-Saharans. This is the first time that sub-Saharans were put into high office in American history. Reconstruction thus set the precedent which led to the dismal legacies of Lloyd Austin, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Jessie Jackson, and others.

There were no underground white terrorist militias such as the Ku Klux Klan in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Southern insurgent groups only emerged in an election year as a reaction to an intolerable situation created by the Radical Republicans in the North three years after the surrender at Appomattox. The Ku Klux Klan was dissolved at the national level in 1869, but continued operating underground at the local level.

Notes

[1] William Archibald Dunning, Reconstruction, Political & Economic, 1875-1877 (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1907,) pp. 18-19.

[2] Ibid., p. 30.

[3] Ibid., p. 50.