When the Terrorists Won

When the terrorists won. Nathan Newman argues that we should think much more highly of Ulysses S. Grant as president, because he tried.

NathanNewman.org: Ulysses Grant: Our Greatest President?... [W]e should think more about the true founding of a nation with the Civil War where all men were to be "truly created equal" and the President who worked to make it so. No not Lincoln-- who didn't live to finish the job--but the General, Ulysses Grant, who won the Civil War and went on to be the President who would oversee the ratification of the 15th Amendment and enactment of the civil rights enforcement laws that -- after the interregnum of disuse under Jim Crow -- to this day are a backbone of civil rights in this nation....

If Grant is not more respected, it is because the fight for racial justice and Reconstruction that he oversaw has been so rawly defamed over our history to the point of almost being forgotten. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote "[n]ot a single great leader of the nation during the Civil War and Reconstruction has escaped attack and libel." But Grant's accomplishments should be remembered.... Even as Grant was being elected in 1868, he faced Klan-based racial terrorism fighting to manipulate the vote throughout the South. The first result was the 15th Amendment to protect the right to vote but as importantly was the creation under Grant of the Department of Justice in 1871 and a series of "Enforcement Acts" to eliminate Klan violence. The language was sweeping in its defense of black voting rights.... Grant used his new authority to crack down on Klan terrorism in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 and essentially destroyed the Klan there and then throughout the South....

Unfortunately, his successors abandoned those commitments.... So what went wrong and why isn't Grant more honored. Basically, both his policies and reputation were murdered by Klan violence supported by the United States Supreme Court.... [I]n 1873 there was a new surge of racist violence and this time the courts blocked the Grant administration from enforcing the new civil rights laws. Racist violence ran wild as the courts blocked prosecution of the ringleaders. The key legal case was based on an incident in Colfax, Louisiana where more than a hundred people defending black voting rights were murdered by a white mob, yet the prosecution against the leaders were thrown out by lower courts and the Supreme Court in 1875's Cruikshank v. US would affirm that decision, saying that the federal government lacked any power to prosecute private individuals for racial crimes against other individuals. According to that Court, the 14th Amendment "adds nothing to the rights of one citizen as against another."... Reconstruction governments were driven from office throughout the South. Violence destroyed the Republican Party in Mississippi.... In 1876, Confederate General Matthew Butler led a white mob to murder an opposing black militia defending the South Carolina government -- and was then elected to the United States Senate by the new, "redeemed" legislature...

Comments

[hack]

Ah, the good old days before activist judges.

[liberal]

As long as we're remembering heroes, lets remember some villains, too.

E.g. Woodrow Wilson, who extended Jim Crow to the Federal workforce.

[rea]

Another incident (and damaged reputation) worth remembering took place in 1874 in New Orleans, where white rioters defeated black militia led by Longstreet, the former Confederate general. 38 of Longstreet's men were killed, Longstreet was wounded, and the governor of Louisiana was forcibly replaced.

Conventional Civil War history, which often portrays Longstreet as an obstructionist and the reason Lee lost at Gettysburg, is much influenced by the post-war vilification of Longstreet for supporting civil rights.

[col]

Colfax, LA?

That's weird--"Colfax" was the name of Grant's VP, and I don't think the name had any national prominence before him.

So the town is named after Grant's VP (a northern Quaker, if I recall), but then suffers a reaction?

[b]

Colfax LA

Wiki gives ol' Schuyler credit for several Colfaxes, (Colfaces?) but not LA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuyler_Colfax

[NBarnes]

In 1876, Confederate General Matthew Butler led a white mob to murder an opposing black militia defending the South Carolina government -- and was then elected to the United States Senate by the new, "redeemed" legislature

Bold added by myself.

Remember, the War of Northern Aggression wasn't about slavery, it was about principles. Those good 'ole boys that wore the grey were fighting for their principles.

[A. Zarkov]

“Ulysses Grant: Our Greatest President?..”

No, our greatest president was our first president. Washington created the republic-- others have maintained it.

[Blissex]

«Washington created the republic»

It is only a small details that the republic he created was devoted to protecting slavery (and to allowing the genocide of natives, but who ever cares about those).

But you can't have everything on the first try :-).

[A. Zarkov]

Blissex:

The republic Washington created was not “devoted” to slavery, in fact the founding fathers were very conflicted about the subject. They were well aware of the contradiction between their stated ideals of liberty, and the reality of slavery. But to make a revolution they needed the cooperation of the southern states, and they had to compromise. The American Revolution was a very fragile thing at its inception; it could easily have failed, and almost did. When one considers all the contributions Washington made at many critical points, you have to come to the conclusion that the Revolution would not have happened without him. He has no peer among American presidents.

Sounds like you are disenchanted with the American republic, have you considered emigrating?

[andres]

"Sounds like you are disenchanted with the American republic, have you considered emigrating?"

If every complainer who was disenchanted with the state of the Republic actually listened to your suggestion and left, Zarkov, this country would still be a backward, slave-based landed oligarchy where lynchings provided a cheaper alternative to gladiator circuses. Anyone who was as fond as you of taking such cheap shots would suggest that that's the type of republic you seem to want to live in.

Many of the founders were southern aristocrats who were either totally committed to slavery or who did not believe that there was a practical solution to the problem (Jefferson never freed his slaves and thought that the social violence that would arise from abolition meant that the only practical alternative was to remove the country's black slaves back to Africa). Other than Jefferson, you will look in vain in the writings of Hamilton, Madison, John Adams, Franklin, or Washington himself for anything that approaches abolitionist sentiments. Even before the dominance of cotton, slavery was too much a part of the South to be considered an approachable topic, whatever the founders may have thought privately.

And while Washington was certainly a good man, his main achievement was a negative one: when the war was over and it was clear the Continental Congress didn't have its act together, he refused to follow the suggestion of many of his followers to set up a military dictatorship, if not a new monarchy. And he set the tone as president by doing his best to listen to all sides of the debate, especially between Jefferson and Madison.

However, Washington did not take part in the writing of the Constitution or in writing in favor of its ratification, so it cannot be claimed he _created_ the republic. It should also be added that he put friendship and factional loyalty ahead of principle and refused to condemn the unconstitutional Alien and Sedition Acts passed by his successor, and that will remain one black mark in his record.

So no, the republic was far from perfect in its founding and is still far from perfect today. Not only that, but there continues to be a yawning gulf between the political values that the USA claims to espouse and the values it actually practices in its foreign and social policy. There is still a lot of work to be done, and those who deny it are only burying their heads in the sand.

[A. Zarkov]

andres:

“However, Washington did not take part in the writing of the Constitution or in writing in favor of its ratification, so it cannot be claimed he _created_ the republic.”

Washington made the revolution possible. Without the revolution, there would have been no republic, at least as we know it. He also presided over the constitutional convention. When you say things like “... his main achievement was a negative one:” you reveal a profound ignorance of American history. Your criticisms of people like Washington, Hamilton, Madison and Franklin are warmed over 1960s claptrap. All countries and people are far from perfect. We deal with the possible, not the perfect in this life. Anyone so profoundly unhappy with his country, and can only see it through the lens of slavery and oppression should seriously consider emigrating.

[andres]

"Washington made the revolution possible. Without the revolution, there would have been no republic, at least as we know it."

That's it? That's all he did? Don't you think it's a little more subtle than that? Don't you think that he would have had to do a little more in order to set himself apart from a Julius Caesar at best and a Cromwell, Lenin, or Mao at worst? After all, those men also led revolutions that overthrew profoundly unjust social systems. You have a very shallow conception as to what makes people great.

"We deal with the possible, not the perfect in this life. Anyone so profoundly unhappy with his country, and can only see it through the lens of slavery and oppression should seriously consider emigrating."

Your second sentence above is in profound contradiction with your first. When one looks at injustice in one's own country, one sees reflected what is possible, whereas to say that the country is doing fine in spite of manifest injustices is in effect to wish for an _impossible_ popular acceptance of what is not just.

To say that anyone who is unhappy with the way a country is should leave is a common tactic of tyrants: Fidel Castro does it repeatedly when addressing his fellow Cubans. In the interests of having a better, more just, and more united republic, the universal reply is simply: thank you for the offer, but I'm staying.

[andres]

Getting back to Grant, probably the reason his successors did not follow through on "his" commitments is that they realized that they probably would have to refight the civil war in order to enforce proper civil rights for blacks as opposed to just keeping the states in the unions. The 1876 elections were the key turning point, when the country nearly fell apart again and when the southern states reconciled themselves to Republicans "stealing" the presidential election only with the tacit promise of the new administration that the pro-civil rights Reconstruction policies would be quickly terminated.

Grant had his heart in the right place, but it could well be that the US was just not willing in the 19th century to become a fully integrated society. Nor does Grant's idealism mitigate the transformation of the Republican party (during his administration) from an idealistic, abolitionist organization into the corrupt, business-financed political machine that it still is. That Grant made no attempt to stop this transformation is a point against him, but then again no one is perfect.

[wkwillis]

Tom Paine created America.
Everything he advocated came to be, except that social security/old age pensions are not funded by real estate taxes. There was a reason he was so hated by the British and had a higher price on his head than Washington.
Whatever Washington's shortcomings as a general, he did step down after two terms and that alone gives him a place as one of our three best presidents.
Oh, and one other thing. Stop blaming the south for slavery being in the constitution. New York had the second highest number of slaves in 1776. Georgia damn near abolished slavery before the northerners did around then.
But Whitney invented the cotton gin and we were go for civil war.

[andres]

Hmmm. The part about slaves in New York is something new for me--I'd be glad to be able to look at your source. Still I doubt that New York had as many slaves as a proportion of the population as South Carolina or Virginia. Then again, I've been wrong before. ("When the facts prove me wrong, I change my mind. What do _you_ do, sir?").

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/opinion/15thu3.html?ex=1292302800&en=3139bb702358ce54&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

December 15, 2005

A Convenient Amnesia About Slavery
By BRENT STAPLES

Americans typically grow up believing that slavery was confined to the cotton fields of the South and that the North was always made up of free states. The fact that slavery was practiced all over the early United States often comes as a shock to people in places like New York, where the myth of the free North has been surprisingly durable. The truth is that New York was at one time a center of the slave trade, with more black people enslaved than any other city in the country, with the possible exception of Charleston, S.C.

The New-York Historical Society in Manhattan has set out to make all this clear in its pathbreaking "Slavery in New York," which ends in March. It is being described as the first exhibition by a major museum that focuses on the long-neglected issue of slavery in the North.

New York's central position in the slave trade was partially exposed back in 1991, when workers excavating for an office tower in Lower Manhattan uncovered a long-forgotten burial ground that may have originally spread for as much as a mile. It served as the final resting place for thousands of enslaved New Yorkers.

Among the bodies exhumed and examined, about 40 percent were of children under the age of 15; the most common cause of death was malnutrition. Some enslaved mothers appear to have committed infanticide, rather than bringing their children into what was clearly a hellish environment. Adults typically died of hard labor, dumped into their graves by owners who simply went out and bought more slaves.

Slavery was no less brutal in New York than in the South - and just as pervasive. At one point, about four in 10 New York households owned human beings. The free human labor that ran the city's most gracious homes also helped to build its early infrastructure and supplied the muscle needed by the beef, grain and shipping interests, which forestalled emancipation until 1827 - making New York among the last Northern states to abolish slavery.

Judging from the videotaped responses of visitors to the historical society, people who thought they knew New York's history well have been badly shaken to learn about the depth and breadth of human bondage in the city. As one distraught patron put it, "The ground we touch, every institution, is affected by slavery."

Historians who had expected to find early 18th century slavemasters agonizing over the moral questions associated with slavery were surprised in a different way. One researcher said the record before the Revolutionary War contained not a single scrap of paper to support the notion of guilt among the slaveholding classes....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/specials/dubois-souls.html

April 25, 1903

The Negro Question
By NEW YORK TIMES

THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK
Essays and Sketches.
By W. E. Burghardt DuBois.

It is generally conceded that Booker T. Washington represents the best hope of the negro in America, and it is certain that of all the leaders of his people he has done the most for his fellows with the least friction with the whites who are most nearly concerned, those of the South. Here is another negro "educator," to use a current term, not brought up like Washington among the negroes of the South and to the manner of the Southern negro born, but one educated in New England- one who never saw a negro camp-meeting till he was grown to manhood and went among the people of his color as a teacher. Naturally he does not see everything as Booker Washington does; probably he does not understand his own people in their natural state as does the other; certainly he cannot understand the Southern white's point of view as the principal of Tuskegee does. Yet it is equally certain that "The Souls of Black Folk" throws much light upon the complexities of the negro problem, for it shows that the key note of at least some negro aspiration is still the abolition of the social color-line. For it is the Jim Crow car, and the fact that he may not smoke a cigar and drink a cup of tea with the white man in the South, that most galls William E. Burghardt Du Bois of the Atlanta College for Negroes. That this social color line must in time vanish like the mists of the morning is the firm belief of the writer, as the opposite is the equally firm belief of the Southern white man; but in the meantime he admits the "hard fact" that the color line is, and for a long time must be.

The book is of curious warp and woof, and the poetical form of the title is the index to much of its content and phraseology. To a Southerner who knows the negro race as it exists in the South, it is plain that this negro of Northern education is, after all, as he says, "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh" of the African race. Sentimental, poetical, picturesque, the acquired logic and the evident attempt to be critically fair-minded is strangely tangled with these racial characteristics and the racial rhetoric: After an eloquent appeal for a fair hearing in what he calls his "Forethought," he goes in some detail into the vexed history of the Freedman's Bureau and the work it did for good and ill; for he admits the ill as he insists upon the good. A review of such a work from the negro point of view, even the Northern negro's point of view, must have its value to any unprejudiced student- still more, perhaps, for the prejudiced who is yet willing to be a student. It is impossible here to give even a general idea of the impression that will be gained from reading the text, but the underlying idea seems to be that it was impossible for the negro to get justice in the Southern courts just after the war, and "almost equally" impossible for the white man to get justice in the extra judicial proceeding of the Freedman's Bureau officials which largely superceded the courts for a time. Much is remembered of these proceedings by older Southerners- much picturesque and sentimental fiction, with an amble basis of truth, has been written about them by Mr. Thomas Nelson Page and others. Here we have the other side.

When all is said, the writer of "The Souls of Black Folk" is sure that the only side interference of which the Freedman's Bureau was the chief instrument was necessary for the negro's protection from supposed attempts of his former masters to legislate him back into another form of slavery, yet he admits that "it failed to begin the establishment of good-will between ex-masters and freedmen." It is proper to place beside this, of course, the consensus of fair Southern opinion that the interference in question and the instrumentalities it employed were the cause of the establishment of an ill-will previously non-existent. Here is a point where Booker T. Washington, as a Southern negro, has the advantage of his present critic in this that he knows by inherited tradition what the actual antebellum feeling between the races was. Du Bois assumes hostility....

Many passages of the book will be very interesting to the student of the negro character who regards the race ethnologically and not politically, not as a dark cloud threatening the future of the United States, but as a peculiar people, and one, after all, but little understood by the best of its friends or the worst of its enemies outside of what the author of "The Souls of Black Folk" is fond of calling the "Awful Veil." Throughout it should be recalled that it is the thought of a negro of Northern education who has lived long among his brethren of the South yet who cannot fully feel the meaning of some things which these brethren know by instinct- and which the Southern-bred knows by a similar instinct; certain things which are- by both accepted as facts- not theories- fundamental attitudes of race to race which are the product of conditions extending over centuries, as are the somewhat parallel attitudes of the gentry to the peasantry in other countries.

[anne]

http://www.bartleby.com/114/12.html

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963).
The Souls of Black Folk. 1903.

The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,—the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and—sometimes—Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, "Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?" And then all helplessly we peered into those Other-worlds, and wailed, "O World of Worlds, how shall man make you one?"

[andres]

Ask, and it shall come forth. Thanks anne ;-)

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/07/arts/design/07slav.html?ex=1286337600&en=0bd0de1cae0d54d8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

October 7, 2005

The Peculiar Institution as Lived in New York
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Hanging sedately on a wall, almost out of the way of the more elaborate displays in "Slavery in New York," the exhibition opening today at the New-York Historical Society, is a map of New York City created by a 76-year-old man, David Grim, in 1813. New York was on the verge of extraordinary economic growth, when it was about to become a modern 19th-century city. But the map recreates the New York of his childhood before 1745.

It is a meticulous rendering of an antique world in which the British still ruled, in which the western half of the Battery had not yet been consumed in the Revolutionary War's flames, in which religious institutions punctuate the winding streets. But included in this detailed reconstruction are two images that must also have inscribed themselves indelibly on a child's consciousness. Deep in today's downtown, but well north of the era's houses, is a tiny cartoon of a gallows from which a man hangs. It is inscribed "Plot Negro Gibbeted." Not far off is a small bonfire labeled "Plot Negro's burnt here."

In 1741, these "Plot Negroes" were accused of trying to burn down the city (the subject of a new book, "New York Burning," by the historian Jill Lepore). After confessions were obtained and a plot outlined, 13 blacks were burned at the stake and 17 hanged.

It is one sign of the deformations created by slavery that a lifetime later, Grim felt haunted enough to evoke these events on a map of buildings and streets. It is a more profound sign of those deformations that even today one approaches this exhibition with discomfort.

While "Slavery in New York" is marred by its tendency to slight the broader context and by its earnest attempts to pull in all age groups, its virtues are so considerable, and the information and objects on display so potent, that they are bound to transform the way any visitor thinks about slavery in New York City's past....

But the history here was carefully vetted. The 9,000-square-foot exhibition was shaped by Louise Mirrer, the president of the society; Richard Rabinowitz, a historian and the president of the American History Workshop, a Brooklyn company that designs museum exhibitions; and James Oliver Horton, a historian at George Washington University - along with more than a score of scholarly advisers.

The society's slavery narrative - exploring what it calls "New York's rootedness in the enslavement of Africans" - will continue late next year with another major exhibition; there will also be smaller shows, along with lectures and programs, some mounted with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. A Video Emphasis

It is still difficult to comprehend that something that is now unthinkable was once not only taken for granted, but also defended as rational and necessary - and defended not just in the Deep South, but in New York, where slavery provided manual labor from the time of the Dutch, and where it was implicated in an international network of trade.

During the period reconstructed by Grim's map, for example, almost a fifth of New York City's estimated 11,000 residents were black, and almost all of these were slaves. The 1800 census for New York State showed 20,500 slaves, each counted as three-fifths of a person in calculations of proportional representation. It took until 1827 for slavery to be abolished in New York State. The only northern state to delay longer was New Jersey....

[theorajones]

The above statement that "Slavery was...just as pervasive [in the North as in the South]," is false. Utterly incorrect.

Of course there were slaves in the North. Sojourner Truth was from New York, for god's sake--her first language was Dutch.

But by the mid-to-late late 1700's, slaves were overwhelmingly in the South. This is not to suggest that there were not population densities of transient slaves at Northern trade points, or that early on in colonial times (pre-1750) slavery was far more widespread in the north than it was subsequently, or that the role slaves played in building colonial New York and the North has not been dramatically under-represented in our history, or that many Northerners didn't willingly and eagerly profit off all aspects of the horrors of slavery, or that slavery was more horrific in the south than it was in the north (though, really, I question the distinction between "bad" and "worse" slavery; it seems to me we're straying into the territory of distinctions between being burned alive vs. buried alive).

But the suggestion that in the late 1700's or any subsequent point, systemtically screwing over black people was as central to New York's dominant culture, economy, and white people's sense of security as it was to South Carolina's is utterly preposterous.

The census stats clearly show that in 1790, more than 40% of the people living in South Carolina were slaves. This is compared to 6.9% of those living in New York. And New York tied with NJ as the slave-heaviest Northern state.

I have no idea where anyone would get the idea that "Georgia damn near abolished slavery before the northerners did around then." I know Georgia started out technically free, but many in Georgia pushed agressively for the introduction of full slavery, which occurred in 1752. When one considers that by 1790 (before the cotton gin was invented), every third person in Georgia was a slave, I find the suggestion that Georgia was poised to end slavery some time between 1750 and 1790 (when most Northern states had either banned it or begun to phase it out) to be a difficult one to accept.

http://www.vw.vccs.edu/vwhansd/HIS121/Census1790.html

From 1790 on, the split between slave density in the north and south only got worse. By the time of the civil war, South Carolina had MORE slaves than free whites, while New York had none.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm

I respect that "North = Angels; South = Devils" is an unhealthy oversimplification of a very complex system of injustice.

But suggesting for even a moment that white Northerners feared black empowerment the same way that white Southerners lived in utter terror of it is completely ludicrous.