Well, talk about the power of the pen. In just over a month since first publishing my post on the Holden biography and the injustices done to our Reconstruction governor by the KKK-dominated General Assembly of the 1870's, today's state Senate has voted to overturn his impeachment (see today's Opinion page in the N&O). Of course, the timing is just a coincidence, as you can see by the plethora of comments to that post (see post on Holden, 6/17/2011). Nevertheless, I am proud to see it and only hope that the state House will follow suit without some sidestepping from the reps of Alamance or Caswell Counties, the hotbed of the most prolific Klan violence during that period. If the historical marker outside the Caswell County Courthouse is any indication (referring to the brutal and well-documented murder of State Senator John S. Stephens as the "alleged Ku Klux murder"), Holden may be in for a long wait before the House approves his pardon (see http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ncccha/memoranda/kirkholdenwar.html). Feelings surrounding the history of North Carolina and the Civil War thru Reconstruction Periods still run very strong throughout this state. Like the Vietnam Era across the United States, the Civil War Era was (and remains) a complex and confusing time for North Carolinians. One can hope that as knowledge of the true history of this era comes to light and is shared with more and more Tarheels that, just as Americans have come to terms with Vietnam, North Carolinians can eventually lay the myths to rest and come to a still proud but more realistic perspective of their ancestors' roles during that period. The N&O's editor is more confident than I am that the General Assembly will complete Holden's pardon, but it would definitely be the right thing to do.
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In American History textbooks, the white terrorism during Reconstruction is mostly "white-washed" and downplayed. Terms such as 'carpetbagger' and 'scalawag' are still used and perpetuated, defined as Northern and Southern whites respectively (and some blacks) who took advantage of post-Civil War conditions in the South to get ahead politically and economically. Barely is there any reference to those who came to the South out of a sincere desire to help. The term 'Redeemer' is still used to refer to the Democrats (and a mythical union with white southern Republicans) who rallied to re-establish southern white control after the 'bayonet rule' of Federal troops was removed (Prentice Hall United States History, p.422). Congress is controlled by 'Radical Republicans,' defined as those who "favored punishment and harsh reorganization for the South" and believed in full citizenship including voting rights for African Americans (p.404), and students are misled to believe that "white southerners from all economic classes were united in their insistence that African Americans not have full citizenship (p.416)." Klan violence is discussed, but no numbers are given, no tortures, rapes, or murders are detailed, and, perhaps worst of all, students are left with the inference that blacks were (still are?) incapable of handling the responsibilities of citizenship: "In the end, most northerners came to understand what (white) southerners already knew (p.419)...what difficulties are in the way of the system which has been established by those who are ignorant of the nature and character of the blacks (p.431)." This from a textbook that is currently in use across the country. No wonder the old comedian Jerry Clowers could make us laugh instead of cry when he talked about Yazoo City, Mississippi. After having read Cicelski & Tyson's Democracy Betrayed, I was already very much aware of these missing and sordid details, at least in regard to the white backlash following Reconstruction in North Carolina, but I was not prepared for Budiansky's book which detailed white supremacist violence and political corruption across the entire South from 1866-1876. There are many villains in The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomatox, such as M.C. Butler and Senator Ben "Pitchfork" Tillman who later tutored Strom Thurmond, but Budiansky also provides us with the stories of the tragic heroes who tried - almost always in vain - to ensure the civil rights of formerly enslaved people and to protect them and their white benefactors from harm. Most of these heroes, like South Carolina's Prince Rivers, or Aldebert Ames and Albert T. Morgan in Mississippi, I had never heard of, but one, former Confederate General James Longstreet, certainly stands out anew for such efforts in post-Civil War Louisiana, and Budiansky includes the story of Lewis Merrill and the U.S. 7th Calvary in their efforts to protect freedmen and sympathetic whites in South Carolina before the fateful meeting with Sitting Bull in 1876. I was grateful to learn that the 7th, at least in its pre-Western assignment, was capable of such good. Together, these books have helped me form a more realistic picture of what happened after the Civil War, and helped me to see how, in many ways, "the South" (i.e., the minority of white power brokers before and after the War) actually won the Civil War; it took them losing the actual war to do it, but they did it in the succeeding decades following Appomatox. (See James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me for the details.) The most tragic part is that their efforts actually hurt and crippled the real South - all Southerners - from that time on up to the present. Budiansky's book is a critically important read, if you have the stomach for it. As for me, I'm going to step away from Reconstruction and Jim Crow for a while, maybe concentrate on sudoku or Rummikub; I need a break from discovering much more about our real past, but... if I ever teach American history again, The Bloody Shirt will be required reading. True dat. Oh yeh, your homework assignment: See if you can even find the town of Hamburg, SC on a current map. (Go ahead, fellahs, and play through.) |
Charley NorkusHigh school history teacher for almost 20 years Archives
November 2015
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