Tag: Reconstruction

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Edward Ball
Life of a Klansman: A Family History in White Supremacy
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

It is 2013 in the deep South of America, and deep in the woods it seems a historical film-set is in production. A dozen or so actors portraying men from America’s famous and notorious Ku Klux Klan are recreating the ceremony of the lighting of the burning cross. “Do you accept the light?” each Klansman is asked as he is handed a lit brand. (more…)

Thomas Dixon. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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Thomas Dixon Jr. was a committed White Nationalist who worked tirelessly to promote race realism and white solidarity. At various points in his life, he was an attorney, a legislator, a Baptist minister, a lecturer, a novelist, and a filmmaker. He is best known as the author of the screenplay for D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, and of the 1905 novel The Clansman on which the film was based. In his lifetime, however, Dixon’s influence extended far beyond one novel and one film, even though the film in question was the most famous of its era. But after his death, Thomas Dixon did not receive the recognition that he deserves. (more…)

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Part 1

Roosevelt on Reconstruction

Roosevelt takes aim at the idea, present in the standard story of American history, that the Union victory and subsequent Reconstruction was “a process of better realizing founding ideals, through the process of change set out in the Founders’ Constitution.” He instead argues that “We would do better to think of it as a revolution that destroyed Founding America.” (more…)

4,184 words

Thomas Dixon Jr.
The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden- 1865-1900
New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902

The most memorable book that I read in 2024 was written in 1902. In addition to being highly entertaining, I found it to be quite relevant to our cause today. This is, perhaps, rather peculiar considering that in addition to being well over a century old, The Leopard’s Spots is a work of fiction. But there is a great deal of truth in Thomas Dixon’s first novel. (more…)

1880 cartoon showing the “Solid South” being forced to carry Ulysses S. Grant and the Reconstruction regime at bayonet point.

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Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

Creating & Expanding the Solid South

The end of Reconstruction did not immediately lead to segregation or the disenfranchisement of sub-Saharans in the South or any other part of the country. In 1878, segregation and sub-Saharan disenfranchisement seemed impossible — especially since the South had just barely thrown off a military occupation government. In parts of the South, in fact, sub-Saharans outnumbered whites. South Carolina even had a white minority. (more…)

President Ulysses S. Grant (image source: The White House website)

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Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Fourteenth Amendment, Foreign Policy, & Commander-in-Chief Grant

With the South under the United States Army’s heel, the Radical Republicans turned the Civil Rights Act of 1866 into the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. This amendment has turned out to be a disaster, mainly due to its birthright citizenship clause, which gives anyone born in the United States citizenship regardless of his parents’ status or his race and national origin. (more…)

Sub-Saharan misrule during Reconstruction.

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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. (more…)

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Joseph Ford Cotto, 1st Baron Cotto, GCCCR (DBA)
What Happened to America? How — and Why — the American Dream Became a Nightmare
Independently Published, 2024

Tinker with the demographic fabric, and you meddle with the legacy of generations to come. — Baron Joseph Ford Cotto, p. 141

It’s no secret that American society has plunged into a place of despair. Nothing works right, and progress is non-existent. (more…)

The Confederate Memorial Day ceremony held in Arlington National Cemetery in 2014. (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia Commons)

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You should do your duty in all things.
You can never do more, you should never wish to do less.
— Robert E. Lee

Several Southern states observe state holidays at this time of year to remember the men who died fighting for the Confederacy during the War Between the States. (more…)

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The following is editor and publisher Amory Stern‘s Introduction to his collection of previously untranslated essays by the Romanian writer Mihai Eminescu, Old Icons, New Icons. The book is available in both Kindle and paperback editions.

Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)

US Civil War recruiting poster, 1863 (image courtesy of Picryl)

2,538 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

[The present constitutional crisis over slavery] embraces the fearful issue whether the Union shall stand, and slavery, under the steady, peaceful action of moral, social, and political causes, be removed by gradual voluntary effort, and with compensation; or whether the Union shall be dissolved and civil war ensue . . . — William H. Seward, speech to the US Senate, 1850

Their vices are vices aped from white men, or that white men and bondage have taught them: improvidence and intemperance and evasion — and laziness . . . Promiscuity. (more…)

Fani Willis (photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

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Corruption can be funny. This is especially the case when someone is bad at it, because then it ventures into the realm of comedy. Ultimately, however, it isn’t funny. It is the rust that corrodes civilizations. It rewards the lazy, the selfish, the cunning, and it punishes and demoralizes everyone else — especially if the perpetrators get away with it.

I once knew an Indian woman who said that she admired the fact that politics in the United States lacks corruption. (more…)

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Virtually all whites in the South, including New Orleanians, were absolutely convinced that the mass of Negroes were innately inferior mentally and morally to most whites, and were perhaps even more certain that wherever two disparate races occupied the same soil one race must rule the other.
—William Ivy Hair, Carnival of Fury

Imagine that it is one century from now. It is a more civilized age and a time of great reflection among the black diasporas of the world. (more…)