Um, guys? I think I'm going to take a brief, two or three weeks hiatus for now. The academic side of my life is very busy, and (this is rather personal, so I'm not sure if it's appropriate to share, but oh well...) I'm not in a good mental place either. Nothing too bad, just some issues I have to deal with regarding friendships and my family. But I can't really deal with them and write the TL, so I'd rather wait until I'm in better shape and can write updates of quality. Sorry guys.
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
- Start date
fdas
Banned
Take as much time as you need. It is better to have a very good update that takes a while as opposed to a mediocre one quickly.
Take all the time you need. We can wait as long as you need us to wait real life and especially the mind is solar years away from online life. Just remember if you ever need support you have an entire of community of people who are here for you @Red_Galiray.
Good luck the next couple weeks hope you feel better!
Good luck the next couple weeks hope you feel better!
Real life and proper mental health comes before any timeline. Hope you feel better soon.
Take all the time you need. I know things can get stressful but things will get better. Praying for your wisdom in all these situations.
See you when you come back, if needs be, merry christmas and a happy new year.
Thought this be relevant for discussion for reconstruction after the civil war or possibly internal union politics.
Frederick Douglass’s Vision for a Reborn America
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.
Frederick Douglass’s Vision for a Reborn America
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.
“We are a country of all extremes, ends and opposites; the most conspicuous example of composite nationality in the world … In races we range all the way from black to white, with intermediate shades which, as in the apocalyptic vision, no man can name or number.”
— Frederick Douglass, 1869
In the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. It is a vision worth revisiting at a time when the country seems once again to be a house divided over ethnicity and race, and over how to interpret our foundational creeds.
The Thirteenth Amendment (ending slavery) had been ratified, Congress had approved the Fourteenth Amendment (introducing birthright citizenship and the equal-protection clause), and Douglass was anticipating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (granting black men the right to vote) when he began delivering a speech titled “Our Composite Nationality” in 1869. He kept it in his oratorical repertoire at least through 1870. What the war-weary nation needed, he felt, was a powerful tribute to a cosmopolitan America—not just a repudiation of a divided and oppressive past but a commitment to a future union forged in emancipation and the Civil War. This nation would hold true to universal values and to the recognition that “a smile or a tear has no nationality. Joy and sorrow speak alike in all nations, and they above all the confusion of tongues proclaim the brotherhood of man.”
Douglass, like many other former abolitionists, watched with high hopes as Radical Reconstruction gained traction in Washington, D.C., placing the ex–Confederate states under military rule and establishing civil and political rights for the formerly enslaved. The United States, he believed, had launched a new founding in the aftermath of the Civil War, and had begun to shape a new Constitution rooted in the three great amendments spawned by the war’s results. Practically overnight, Douglass even became a proponent of U.S. expansion to the Caribbean and elsewhere: Americans could now invent a nation whose egalitarian values were worth exporting to societies that were still either officially pro-slavery or riddled with inequality.
The aspiration that a postwar United States might slough off its own past identity as a pro-slavery nation and become the dream of millions who had been enslaved, as well as many of those who had freed them, was hardly a modest one. Underlying it was a hope that history itself had fundamentally shifted, aligning with a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious country born of the war’s massive blood sacrifice. Somehow the tremendous resistance of the white South and former Confederates, which Douglass himself predicted would take ever more virulent forms, would be blunted. A vision of “composite” nationhood would prevail, separating Church and state, giving allegiance to a single new Constitution, federalizing the Bill of Rights, and spreading liberty more broadly than any civilization had ever attempted.
Was this a utopian vision, or was it grounded in a fledgling reality? That question, a version of which has never gone away, takes on an added dimension in the case of Douglass. One might well wonder how a man who, before and during the war, had delivered some of the most embittered attacks on American racism and hypocrisy ever heard could dare nurse the optimism evident from the very start of the speech. How could Douglass now believe that his reinvented country was, as he declared, “the most fortunate of nations” and “at the beginning of our ascent”?
From December 2018: Randall Kennedy on the confounding truth about Frederick Douglass
few americans denounced the tyranny and tragedy at the heart of America’s institutions more fiercely than Douglass did in the first quarter century of his public life. In 1845, seven years after his escape to freedom, Douglass’s first autobiography was published to great acclaim, and he set off on an extraordinary 19-month trip to the British Isles, where he experienced a degree of equality unimaginable in America. Upon his return, in 1847, he let his profound ambivalence about the concepts of home and country be known. “I have no love for America, as such,” he announced in a speech he delivered that year. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” Douglass let his righteous anger flow in metaphors of degradation, chains, and blood. “The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man,” he declared, “except as a piece of property.” All that attached him to his native land were his family and his deeply felt ties to the “three millions of my fellow-creatures, groaning beneath the iron rod … with … stripes upon their backs.” Such a country, Douglass said, he could not love. “I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.”
Benedict Anderson’s modern conception of an “imagined community.” In his “Composite Nationality” speech, Douglass explained that nationhood “implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization.” And a nation requires a story that draws its constituent parts into a whole. The postwar United States served as a beacon—“the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.”
Americans needed a new articulation of how their country was an idea, Douglass recognized, and he gave it to them. Imagine the audacity, in the late 1860s, to affirm the following for the reinvented United States:
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family.
Few better expressions exist of America’s founding principles of popular sovereignty, natural rights, and the separation of Church and state. From his enslaved youth onward, Douglass had loved the principles and hated their flouting in practice. And he had always believed in an Old Testament version of divine vengeance and justice, sure that the country would face a rending and a renewal. Proudly, he now declared such a nation a “standing offense” to “narrow and bigoted people.”
In the middle section of his speech, Douglass delivered a striking argument on behalf of Chinese immigration to America, then emerging as an important political issue. In the Burlingame Treaty, negotiated between the U.S. and the empire of China in 1868, the American government acknowledged the “inalienable right” of migration and accepted Chinese immigrants, but it denied them any right to be naturalized as citizens. Douglass predicted a great influx of Chinese fleeing overcrowding and hunger in their native country, and finding work in the mines and expanding railroads in the West. They would surely face violence and prejudice, Douglass warned. In language that seems timely today, he projected himself into the anti-immigrant mind. “Are not the white people the owners of this continent?” he asked. “Is there not such a thing as being more generous than wise? In the effort to promote civilization may we not corrupt and destroy what we have?”
Migratory rights, he asserted, are “human rights,” and he reminded Americans that “only one-fifth of the population of the globe is white and the other four-fifths are colored.”
Just as important, he placed the issue in the context of America’s mission. The United States ought to be a home for people “gathered here from all quarters of the globe.” All come as “strangers,” bringing distinct cultures with them, but American creeds can offer a common ground. Though conflict may ensue, a nation of “strength and elasticity” would emerge through contact and learning. What might sound like a manifesto for multicultural education in the 1990s or a diversity mission statement at any university today actually has a long history.
Douglass made sure to embed his bold vision in first principles. To the argument that it is “natural” for people to collide over their cultural differences and to see one another only through mutual “reproachful epithets,” he countered with the notion that “nature has many sides,” and is not static. “It is natural to walk,” Douglass wrote, “but shall men therefore refuse to ride? It is natural to ride on horseback, shall men therefore refuse steam and rail? Civilization is itself a constant war upon some forces in nature, shall we therefore abandon civilization and go back to savage life?” Douglass called on his fellow citizens to recognize that “man is man the world over … The sentiments we exhibit, whether love or hate, confidence or fear, respect or contempt, will always imply a like humanity.” But he did not merely ask Americans to all get along. He asked his fellow countrymen to make real freedom out of slavery, out of their sordid history—to see that they had been offered a new beginning for their national project, and to have the courage to execute it.
swept up in hope, Douglass did not anticipate the rising tide of nativism that lay ahead in the Gilded Age. The U.S. passed a first Chinese-exclusion law, directed at women who were deemed “immoral” or destined for forced labor, in 1875. By 1882, Sinophobia and violence against the Chinese led to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, banning virtually any immigration by the group—the first such restrictive order against all members of a particular ethnicity in American history. Those who remained in the country lived constrained and dangerous lives; in the late 1880s, Chinese miners were gruesomely massacred in mines across the West. The Chinese also faced the hostility of white workers who now fashioned the ideology of “free labor” into a doctrine that sought to eliminate any foreign competition for jobs, especially in economic hard times. For Douglass, these bleak realities were just the outcomes he had warned against as Reconstruction gathered momentum.
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to rival the great universities in the North and transform a slave-owning generation. As the university celebrates its 200th anniversary, Annette Gordon-Reed reviews Alan Taylor’s new book about how Jefferson’s plan was launched.
By the 1890s Douglass, aging and in ill health but still out on the lecture circuit, felt hard-pressed to sustain hope for the transformations at the heart of the “Composite Nationality” speech. He never renounced his faith in natural rights or in the power of the vote. But in the last great speech of his life, “Lessons of the Hour”—an excoriating analysis of the “excuses” and “lie” at the root of lynching—Douglass betrayed a faith “shaken” and nearly gone. Disenfranchisement and murderous violence left him observing a nation mired in lawless horror. Lynchings were “lauded and applauded by honorable men … guardians of Southern women” who enabled other men to behave “as buzzards, vultures, and hyenas.” A country once endowed with “nobility” was crushed by mob rule. His dream in tatters, Douglass begged his audiences to remember that the Civil War and Reconstruction had “announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”
Many civil wars leave legacies of continuing conflict, renewed bloodshed, unstable political systems. Ours did just that, even as it forged a new history and a new Constitution. In 2019, our composite nationality needs yet another rebirth. We could do no better than to immerse ourselves in Douglass’s vision from 1869. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had embraced the exercise of human rights as “the deepest and strongest of all the powers of the human soul,” proclaiming that “no argument, no researches into mouldy records, no learned disquisitions, are necessary to establish it.” But the self-evidence of natural rights, as Douglass the orator knew, does not guarantee their protection and practice. “To assert it, is to call forth a sympathetic response from every human heart, and to send a thrill of joy and gladness round the world.” And to keep asserting those rights, he reminds us, will never cease to be necessary.
Practicing them is crucial too. In an 1871 editorial he took a position worth heeding today. The failure to exercise one’s right to vote, he wrote, “is as great a crime as an open violation of the law itself.” Only a demonstration of rebirth in our composite nation and of vibrancy in our democracy will again send thrills of joy and emulation around the world about America. Such a rebirth ought not to be the object of our waiting but of our making, as it was for the Americans, black and white, who died to end slavery and make the second republic.
— Frederick Douglass, 1869
In the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. It is a vision worth revisiting at a time when the country seems once again to be a house divided over ethnicity and race, and over how to interpret our foundational creeds.
The Thirteenth Amendment (ending slavery) had been ratified, Congress had approved the Fourteenth Amendment (introducing birthright citizenship and the equal-protection clause), and Douglass was anticipating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment (granting black men the right to vote) when he began delivering a speech titled “Our Composite Nationality” in 1869. He kept it in his oratorical repertoire at least through 1870. What the war-weary nation needed, he felt, was a powerful tribute to a cosmopolitan America—not just a repudiation of a divided and oppressive past but a commitment to a future union forged in emancipation and the Civil War. This nation would hold true to universal values and to the recognition that “a smile or a tear has no nationality. Joy and sorrow speak alike in all nations, and they above all the confusion of tongues proclaim the brotherhood of man.”
Douglass, like many other former abolitionists, watched with high hopes as Radical Reconstruction gained traction in Washington, D.C., placing the ex–Confederate states under military rule and establishing civil and political rights for the formerly enslaved. The United States, he believed, had launched a new founding in the aftermath of the Civil War, and had begun to shape a new Constitution rooted in the three great amendments spawned by the war’s results. Practically overnight, Douglass even became a proponent of U.S. expansion to the Caribbean and elsewhere: Americans could now invent a nation whose egalitarian values were worth exporting to societies that were still either officially pro-slavery or riddled with inequality.
The aspiration that a postwar United States might slough off its own past identity as a pro-slavery nation and become the dream of millions who had been enslaved, as well as many of those who had freed them, was hardly a modest one. Underlying it was a hope that history itself had fundamentally shifted, aligning with a multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious country born of the war’s massive blood sacrifice. Somehow the tremendous resistance of the white South and former Confederates, which Douglass himself predicted would take ever more virulent forms, would be blunted. A vision of “composite” nationhood would prevail, separating Church and state, giving allegiance to a single new Constitution, federalizing the Bill of Rights, and spreading liberty more broadly than any civilization had ever attempted.
Was this a utopian vision, or was it grounded in a fledgling reality? That question, a version of which has never gone away, takes on an added dimension in the case of Douglass. One might well wonder how a man who, before and during the war, had delivered some of the most embittered attacks on American racism and hypocrisy ever heard could dare nurse the optimism evident from the very start of the speech. How could Douglass now believe that his reinvented country was, as he declared, “the most fortunate of nations” and “at the beginning of our ascent”?
From December 2018: Randall Kennedy on the confounding truth about Frederick Douglass
few americans denounced the tyranny and tragedy at the heart of America’s institutions more fiercely than Douglass did in the first quarter century of his public life. In 1845, seven years after his escape to freedom, Douglass’s first autobiography was published to great acclaim, and he set off on an extraordinary 19-month trip to the British Isles, where he experienced a degree of equality unimaginable in America. Upon his return, in 1847, he let his profound ambivalence about the concepts of home and country be known. “I have no love for America, as such,” he announced in a speech he delivered that year. “I have no patriotism. I have no country.” Douglass let his righteous anger flow in metaphors of degradation, chains, and blood. “The institutions of this country do not know me, do not recognize me as a man,” he declared, “except as a piece of property.” All that attached him to his native land were his family and his deeply felt ties to the “three millions of my fellow-creatures, groaning beneath the iron rod … with … stripes upon their backs.” Such a country, Douglass said, he could not love. “I desire to see its overthrow as speedily as possible, and its Constitution shivered in a thousand fragments.”
Benedict Anderson’s modern conception of an “imagined community.” In his “Composite Nationality” speech, Douglass explained that nationhood “implies a willing surrender and subjection of individual aims and ends, often narrow and selfish, to the broader and better ones that arise out of society as a whole. It is both a sign and a result of civilization.” And a nation requires a story that draws its constituent parts into a whole. The postwar United States served as a beacon—“the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family.”
Americans needed a new articulation of how their country was an idea, Douglass recognized, and he gave it to them. Imagine the audacity, in the late 1860s, to affirm the following for the reinvented United States:
A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for its existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family.
Few better expressions exist of America’s founding principles of popular sovereignty, natural rights, and the separation of Church and state. From his enslaved youth onward, Douglass had loved the principles and hated their flouting in practice. And he had always believed in an Old Testament version of divine vengeance and justice, sure that the country would face a rending and a renewal. Proudly, he now declared such a nation a “standing offense” to “narrow and bigoted people.”
In the middle section of his speech, Douglass delivered a striking argument on behalf of Chinese immigration to America, then emerging as an important political issue. In the Burlingame Treaty, negotiated between the U.S. and the empire of China in 1868, the American government acknowledged the “inalienable right” of migration and accepted Chinese immigrants, but it denied them any right to be naturalized as citizens. Douglass predicted a great influx of Chinese fleeing overcrowding and hunger in their native country, and finding work in the mines and expanding railroads in the West. They would surely face violence and prejudice, Douglass warned. In language that seems timely today, he projected himself into the anti-immigrant mind. “Are not the white people the owners of this continent?” he asked. “Is there not such a thing as being more generous than wise? In the effort to promote civilization may we not corrupt and destroy what we have?”
Migratory rights, he asserted, are “human rights,” and he reminded Americans that “only one-fifth of the population of the globe is white and the other four-fifths are colored.”
Just as important, he placed the issue in the context of America’s mission. The United States ought to be a home for people “gathered here from all quarters of the globe.” All come as “strangers,” bringing distinct cultures with them, but American creeds can offer a common ground. Though conflict may ensue, a nation of “strength and elasticity” would emerge through contact and learning. What might sound like a manifesto for multicultural education in the 1990s or a diversity mission statement at any university today actually has a long history.
Douglass made sure to embed his bold vision in first principles. To the argument that it is “natural” for people to collide over their cultural differences and to see one another only through mutual “reproachful epithets,” he countered with the notion that “nature has many sides,” and is not static. “It is natural to walk,” Douglass wrote, “but shall men therefore refuse to ride? It is natural to ride on horseback, shall men therefore refuse steam and rail? Civilization is itself a constant war upon some forces in nature, shall we therefore abandon civilization and go back to savage life?” Douglass called on his fellow citizens to recognize that “man is man the world over … The sentiments we exhibit, whether love or hate, confidence or fear, respect or contempt, will always imply a like humanity.” But he did not merely ask Americans to all get along. He asked his fellow countrymen to make real freedom out of slavery, out of their sordid history—to see that they had been offered a new beginning for their national project, and to have the courage to execute it.
swept up in hope, Douglass did not anticipate the rising tide of nativism that lay ahead in the Gilded Age. The U.S. passed a first Chinese-exclusion law, directed at women who were deemed “immoral” or destined for forced labor, in 1875. By 1882, Sinophobia and violence against the Chinese led to the federal Chinese Exclusion Act, banning virtually any immigration by the group—the first such restrictive order against all members of a particular ethnicity in American history. Those who remained in the country lived constrained and dangerous lives; in the late 1880s, Chinese miners were gruesomely massacred in mines across the West. The Chinese also faced the hostility of white workers who now fashioned the ideology of “free labor” into a doctrine that sought to eliminate any foreign competition for jobs, especially in economic hard times. For Douglass, these bleak realities were just the outcomes he had warned against as Reconstruction gathered momentum.
Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia to rival the great universities in the North and transform a slave-owning generation. As the university celebrates its 200th anniversary, Annette Gordon-Reed reviews Alan Taylor’s new book about how Jefferson’s plan was launched.
By the 1890s Douglass, aging and in ill health but still out on the lecture circuit, felt hard-pressed to sustain hope for the transformations at the heart of the “Composite Nationality” speech. He never renounced his faith in natural rights or in the power of the vote. But in the last great speech of his life, “Lessons of the Hour”—an excoriating analysis of the “excuses” and “lie” at the root of lynching—Douglass betrayed a faith “shaken” and nearly gone. Disenfranchisement and murderous violence left him observing a nation mired in lawless horror. Lynchings were “lauded and applauded by honorable men … guardians of Southern women” who enabled other men to behave “as buzzards, vultures, and hyenas.” A country once endowed with “nobility” was crushed by mob rule. His dream in tatters, Douglass begged his audiences to remember that the Civil War and Reconstruction had “announced the advent of a nation, based upon human brotherhood and the self-evident truths of liberty and equality. Its mission was the redemption of the world from the bondage of ages.”
Many civil wars leave legacies of continuing conflict, renewed bloodshed, unstable political systems. Ours did just that, even as it forged a new history and a new Constitution. In 2019, our composite nationality needs yet another rebirth. We could do no better than to immerse ourselves in Douglass’s vision from 1869. Nearly 20 years earlier, he had embraced the exercise of human rights as “the deepest and strongest of all the powers of the human soul,” proclaiming that “no argument, no researches into mouldy records, no learned disquisitions, are necessary to establish it.” But the self-evidence of natural rights, as Douglass the orator knew, does not guarantee their protection and practice. “To assert it, is to call forth a sympathetic response from every human heart, and to send a thrill of joy and gladness round the world.” And to keep asserting those rights, he reminds us, will never cease to be necessary.
Practicing them is crucial too. In an 1871 editorial he took a position worth heeding today. The failure to exercise one’s right to vote, he wrote, “is as great a crime as an open violation of the law itself.” Only a demonstration of rebirth in our composite nation and of vibrancy in our democracy will again send thrills of joy and emulation around the world about America. Such a rebirth ought not to be the object of our waiting but of our making, as it was for the Americans, black and white, who died to end slavery and make the second republic.
Oh, for the future Reconstruction period, here's an interesting article on what they think the USA should have done to the CSA.
By Gary Brecher, written onApril 10, 2015
It’s a tricky question: Which representatives of Southern manhood should have danced in the air, come April 1865?
I think we can all agree, Lost-Cause loons aside, that every Southern officer was a traitor who’d earned the right to dangle. But alas, if you go hanging every single officer of a defeated army, you can very easily end up with a nasty insurgency on your hands. Those men had brothers and cousins, quite a lot of them. In the 19th-century Anglo world, wealthy families had lots of kids, and their brats tended to survive at a higher rate than starved poor kids. Take the ex-Confederates I’m going to talk about here: Jubal Early and Porter Alexander each had nine brothers and sisters, and Nathan Bedford Forrest had 11 siblings. Kill the twenty-something son who served with the Confederacy, and you have to deal with four or five kid brothers swearing revenge.
At the same time, it’s clear that the policy the Union actually pursued—not hanging any Southern officers except the miserable wretch who commanded Andersonville POW camp—failed miserably. A decade after we defeated the Confederacy at the cost of 300,000 loyal Union soldiers’ lives, the same planter oligarchy was running the South again, terrorizing the Freedmen and women who were our only loyal allies during the war, making sure black people never got a chance to vote, running them off their farms, doing their best to recreate slavery without the name.
And it might have been possible to prevent that disaster by hanging key ex-Confederate officers in the spring of 1865. All the leaders of the post-war terrorist fascist gangs that disenfranchised African-Americans in the South were former Confederate officers. If we’d thinned their ranks in an intelligent way, Reconstruction might have been something other than a grotesque and bloody farce.
There are some obvious guidelines for thinning the ranks of a dangerous group:
No, I’m talking about practical killing. Who were the most dangerous ex-Confederates in 1865? Could they have been identified and killed before they neutralized all the gains of America’s most costly war?
You can assume that in a group as big, as tough, and as dispersed as the Confederate officer corps and its core civilian elite, there will be a huge range of reactions to surrender. Some will commit suicide, like the South Carolina long-haired fanatic Edmund Ruffin did in June, 1865. (He’d planned to do it on April 9, but he had company that day, and as a polite Southern host, he was forced to live on another two months before putting the barrel of a rifle in his mouth.)
Others, like Lee’s very talented artillery officer Porter Alexander, will be drawn to guerrilla warfare.
This will have particular appeal for younger officers, and those (like the buffoon-ish Sterling Price) who are far from the main front and can’t grasp the reasons for the defeat. Price had the brilliant idea of fleeing to Mexico to take service under Emperor Maximillian, soon to be known as “that dark spot on the pockmarked wall.” Price came back to Missouri and died, which was by far the best thing he ever did.
None of these men, or even more effective postwar irregulars/bandits like the James Brothers, ever represented a real threat to the Union victory. That threat came from ex-Confederate officers who were cold-blooded and intelligent enough to bide their time, take advantage of the North’s ridiculous leniency, and form quasi-legal organizations to negate every gain for which those 300,000 soldiers died. These were the men who needed to hang in April 1865.
It’s easy to identify the two ex-Confederate leaders who did the most to ruin the lives of the African-American and poor-white Southerners after the war: Nathan Bedford Forrest in the West, and Wade Hampton in the East. If those two had been hanged in 1865, American history might have gone in a different direction, and frankly, almost any outcome would have been better than the debacle that actually followed the war.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, un-hanged, went on to front for a little group you may have heard of, called the KKK. Wade Hampton, who gets less press but was probably the worse of these two monsters (admittedly, it’s a tough competition) created America’s first homegrown fascist group, the Red Shirts, and used them to terrorize black voters, ensuring his election as South Carolina’s first postwar racist senator in 1876.
And these guys didn’t suddenly turn bad after the war. Both of them were born bad, and had done enough during the war to deserve death by any moral or legal criteria you care to name, from the Code of Hammurabi to Buzzfeed’s “Nine Things You Shouldn’t Do on A First Date.”
Forrest was a slaver and a killer long before the war, but he distinguished himself among the bloody Southern officer corps by his fondness for “No Quarter” orders. “No Quarter” was much more common in the Southwestern theatre of the war than most people realize. The James brothers, Quantrill, Anderson—those guys didn’t come out of nowhere. They were typical of the Southern irregular cavalry, and Forrest was the best, most ruthless leader they had. Forrest didn’t like taking prisoners; he preferred killing them on the spot. And it worked for him, once his rep got around. Many weak commanders surrendered to him rather than face the prospect of being slaughtered if he won.
When he attacked Fort Pillow in April 1864, Forrest encountered a garrison that wouldn’t surrender, and was half African-American. The black troops were from two artillery units, backed up by raw infantry. Forrest’s raiders outnumbered them, 1,500 to 600, and Forrest expected to win easily. He issued one of his standard threats after initial skirmishing, telling the Union commander he and his men had fought well enough to be “entitled” to be treated as POWs if they surrendered, but if Forrest was “forced” to attack, he couldn’t guarantee their safety.
It worked, many times, but it didn’t work on the second-in-command at Fort Pillow, who replied, “I will not surrender.” Forrest’s men overran the fort and killed every black soldier they could find. One of the Confederates who took part in the massacre reported it like this:
“Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The whitte [sic] men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen.”
After a half hour of slaughter, Forrest resumed command, and sent a proud dispatch boasting that the “river was dyed red” with the blood of the African-American soldiers. Forrest was a master of terror in war, and saw the massacre as a good way to neutralize the growing number of African-American soldiers the Union was recruiting. He wrote, using the modest passive mode, “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”
Forrest later realized he might have gone too far for his own safety and started backpedaling. In a less than coincidental incident, Bradford, the Union commander who’d witnessed the whole massacre, was shot “while trying to escape” from Forrest’s men.
So by the time of Lee’s surrender, Nathan Bedford Forrest was guilty of murder several hundred times over. He was kill-able. He was the most eminently kill-able man who ever lived. He deserved death many times over. But he was allowed to return to civilian life, which for him meant becoming the First Grand Wizard of the KKK. And please, don’t go on about how he “later renounced the violence of the Klan.” What Forrest didn’t like about the evolution of the KKK was that he, Forrest, wasn’t in complete command of it, and that he felt its violence was amateurish. He was a pro, and he wanted artistic control over the symbolic violence in which the Klan traded.
Forrest’s survival after the war was a disaster on any level you want; legal, moral, political. Nathan Bedford Forrest should have graced a gallows in the spring of 1865, and that should have been clear at the time to any resolute Union government.
Wade Hampton, the other leading candidate for a spring hanging in the wake of Apomattox, was, if you can believe it, even worse than Forrest. At least Forrest was a self-made monster; Hampton was a rich boy, the son of the South’s leading slave-holder. Hampton’s family owned more than 3,000 human beings, but rich didn’t mean pampered in the planters’ world. Wade Hampton III was not pampered. His hobby was hunting bears. With a knife. None of these guys were pampered. In fact, you feel a lot fonder of pampered, soft people after reading about these monsters.
Like a lot of tough kids, Wade Hampton III had something to prove. His grandfather, the original Wade Hampton, was the commanding American officer at the Battle of the Chateauguay in 1813, against a small, hastily assembled force of Mohawk Indians and Canadian militia. You don’t hear much about that fight in America, just as you don’t hear much about the Battle of Patay in Britain. If there’s one thing us Anglos are good at, it’s burying our humiliations. Chateauguay was a complete humiliation, with an American force routed by a mixed militia half its size, then lost in the woods by Wade’s grandfather.
By the time the Civil War started, Wade Hampton III was 42 years old, with no military experience. But he was a mean bastard, he knew how to ride and kill, he was willing to use his own money to raise his own “legion,” and he rose fast. In fact, one of the best ways to identify candidates for hanging is to look at fast risers.
In the whole Confederate army, only two men who started with no previous military experience rose to the rank of Lt. General: Wade Hampton III and Nathan Bedford Forrest. That’s a good noose-fitting device right there.
And if you’re looking for good legal cause to hang ol’ Wade, you won’t have much work to find it. Hampton talked his head off to Sherman’s officers, late in the war, as they arranged the surrender of Johnston’s forces, and his main theme, as recorded in multiple Union officers’ memoirs, is shooting deserters and “recruiting” new troops at gunpoint. Military life, for Hampton and many another Confederate officer in the last year of the war, consisted of rounding up deserters, shooting every one who didn’t seem useful, and re-enlisting the rest by holding a pistol at their head until they sang “Dixie” in the proper key. There’s no knowing how many Union men Hampton killed, but he boasted about killing dozens of reluctant Confederates.
Hampton survived the war, alas, in the same state of mind of most of the planters: not having learned a damned thing except to hate Yankees, African-Americans, and anyone else who failed to genuflect to the Lost Cause myth that his buddy Jubal Early was peddling—the South’s version of the ol' “stabbed in the back” myth so popular with certain Teutonic parties of the 1920s and 30s.
As the North lost the will to enforce basic human rights for African-Americans and white dissidents across the South, Hampton made his move to regain control of South Carolina for the planter elite. He borrowed an honorable symbol, the “Red Shirts” of Garibaldi’s insurgents, and made the red shirt the mark of his own racist militia. The South Carolina version of the Red Shirts murdered African-American leaders (150 of them during the 1876 Senate election, by one account) terrorized black voters and white Republicans (yeah, the Republicans were the good guys in those days) from voting, and indulged in any private violence that happened to interest its members. The 1876 election, with Hampton vs. a Reconstructionist, was a bloody draw, but Hampton’s fascists wanted it more and he eventually simply took power. He never looked back, and neither did South Carolina. Any threat of a new South, where something other than class or money might determine your chance in life, was wiped out for a century.
An outcome like that is worth preventing. If a few hangings had interrupted the premature love-fest between (white) North and (white) South in 1865, that outcome might have been avoided. And it would not have been difficult to identify the Confederate leaders most likely to organize treasonous groups like the Red Shirts and KKK. Both were led by civilians who rose quickly through the ranks, ending up as Lt. Generals—the only two men to follow that trajectory in the whole huge Confederate army. Both these leaders, Forrest and Hampton, were notable for their efficiency and extreme brutality throughout the war. Both were relatively young. Both were unrepentant racists and secessionists. For all these reasons, they were all obvious candidates for the top spots on a gallows list.
Granted, it might not have been possible to isolate their names among other brutal, successful, young, civilian-origin leaders. But there’s a simple solution for that problem: Hang every damn traitor who fit that bill.
[illustration by Brad Jonas]
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By Gary Brecher, written onApril 10, 2015- Share this article on
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It’s a tricky question: Which representatives of Southern manhood should have danced in the air, come April 1865?
I think we can all agree, Lost-Cause loons aside, that every Southern officer was a traitor who’d earned the right to dangle. But alas, if you go hanging every single officer of a defeated army, you can very easily end up with a nasty insurgency on your hands. Those men had brothers and cousins, quite a lot of them. In the 19th-century Anglo world, wealthy families had lots of kids, and their brats tended to survive at a higher rate than starved poor kids. Take the ex-Confederates I’m going to talk about here: Jubal Early and Porter Alexander each had nine brothers and sisters, and Nathan Bedford Forrest had 11 siblings. Kill the twenty-something son who served with the Confederacy, and you have to deal with four or five kid brothers swearing revenge.
At the same time, it’s clear that the policy the Union actually pursued—not hanging any Southern officers except the miserable wretch who commanded Andersonville POW camp—failed miserably. A decade after we defeated the Confederacy at the cost of 300,000 loyal Union soldiers’ lives, the same planter oligarchy was running the South again, terrorizing the Freedmen and women who were our only loyal allies during the war, making sure black people never got a chance to vote, running them off their farms, doing their best to recreate slavery without the name.
And it might have been possible to prevent that disaster by hanging key ex-Confederate officers in the spring of 1865. All the leaders of the post-war terrorist fascist gangs that disenfranchised African-Americans in the South were former Confederate officers. If we’d thinned their ranks in an intelligent way, Reconstruction might have been something other than a grotesque and bloody farce.
There are some obvious guidelines for thinning the ranks of a dangerous group:
- You don’t kill the top, the figureheads. They’ve got enough name recognition to become martyrs quickly, and they’ve usually passed their peak by the time of their defeat.
- You don’t kill incompetents. Keep those incompetents alive as long as possible.
- You don’t kill the corrupt. You buy them and use them to turn your former enemies against each other.
- You kill the exceptional, the most ruthless, fearless, unkillable leaders in the defeated army. If you don’t kill them now, at their weakest point, you’ll regret it.
No, I’m talking about practical killing. Who were the most dangerous ex-Confederates in 1865? Could they have been identified and killed before they neutralized all the gains of America’s most costly war?
You can assume that in a group as big, as tough, and as dispersed as the Confederate officer corps and its core civilian elite, there will be a huge range of reactions to surrender. Some will commit suicide, like the South Carolina long-haired fanatic Edmund Ruffin did in June, 1865. (He’d planned to do it on April 9, but he had company that day, and as a polite Southern host, he was forced to live on another two months before putting the barrel of a rifle in his mouth.)
Others, like Lee’s very talented artillery officer Porter Alexander, will be drawn to guerrilla warfare.
This will have particular appeal for younger officers, and those (like the buffoon-ish Sterling Price) who are far from the main front and can’t grasp the reasons for the defeat. Price had the brilliant idea of fleeing to Mexico to take service under Emperor Maximillian, soon to be known as “that dark spot on the pockmarked wall.” Price came back to Missouri and died, which was by far the best thing he ever did.
None of these men, or even more effective postwar irregulars/bandits like the James Brothers, ever represented a real threat to the Union victory. That threat came from ex-Confederate officers who were cold-blooded and intelligent enough to bide their time, take advantage of the North’s ridiculous leniency, and form quasi-legal organizations to negate every gain for which those 300,000 soldiers died. These were the men who needed to hang in April 1865.
It’s easy to identify the two ex-Confederate leaders who did the most to ruin the lives of the African-American and poor-white Southerners after the war: Nathan Bedford Forrest in the West, and Wade Hampton in the East. If those two had been hanged in 1865, American history might have gone in a different direction, and frankly, almost any outcome would have been better than the debacle that actually followed the war.
Nathan Bedford Forrest, un-hanged, went on to front for a little group you may have heard of, called the KKK. Wade Hampton, who gets less press but was probably the worse of these two monsters (admittedly, it’s a tough competition) created America’s first homegrown fascist group, the Red Shirts, and used them to terrorize black voters, ensuring his election as South Carolina’s first postwar racist senator in 1876.
And these guys didn’t suddenly turn bad after the war. Both of them were born bad, and had done enough during the war to deserve death by any moral or legal criteria you care to name, from the Code of Hammurabi to Buzzfeed’s “Nine Things You Shouldn’t Do on A First Date.”
Forrest was a slaver and a killer long before the war, but he distinguished himself among the bloody Southern officer corps by his fondness for “No Quarter” orders. “No Quarter” was much more common in the Southwestern theatre of the war than most people realize. The James brothers, Quantrill, Anderson—those guys didn’t come out of nowhere. They were typical of the Southern irregular cavalry, and Forrest was the best, most ruthless leader they had. Forrest didn’t like taking prisoners; he preferred killing them on the spot. And it worked for him, once his rep got around. Many weak commanders surrendered to him rather than face the prospect of being slaughtered if he won.
When he attacked Fort Pillow in April 1864, Forrest encountered a garrison that wouldn’t surrender, and was half African-American. The black troops were from two artillery units, backed up by raw infantry. Forrest’s raiders outnumbered them, 1,500 to 600, and Forrest expected to win easily. He issued one of his standard threats after initial skirmishing, telling the Union commander he and his men had fought well enough to be “entitled” to be treated as POWs if they surrendered, but if Forrest was “forced” to attack, he couldn’t guarantee their safety.
It worked, many times, but it didn’t work on the second-in-command at Fort Pillow, who replied, “I will not surrender.” Forrest’s men overran the fort and killed every black soldier they could find. One of the Confederates who took part in the massacre reported it like this:
“Words cannot describe the scene. The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men fall upon their knees and with uplifted hands scream for mercy but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. The whitte [sic] men fared but little better. Their fort turned out to be a great slaughter pen.”
After a half hour of slaughter, Forrest resumed command, and sent a proud dispatch boasting that the “river was dyed red” with the blood of the African-American soldiers. Forrest was a master of terror in war, and saw the massacre as a good way to neutralize the growing number of African-American soldiers the Union was recruiting. He wrote, using the modest passive mode, “It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”
Forrest later realized he might have gone too far for his own safety and started backpedaling. In a less than coincidental incident, Bradford, the Union commander who’d witnessed the whole massacre, was shot “while trying to escape” from Forrest’s men.
So by the time of Lee’s surrender, Nathan Bedford Forrest was guilty of murder several hundred times over. He was kill-able. He was the most eminently kill-able man who ever lived. He deserved death many times over. But he was allowed to return to civilian life, which for him meant becoming the First Grand Wizard of the KKK. And please, don’t go on about how he “later renounced the violence of the Klan.” What Forrest didn’t like about the evolution of the KKK was that he, Forrest, wasn’t in complete command of it, and that he felt its violence was amateurish. He was a pro, and he wanted artistic control over the symbolic violence in which the Klan traded.
Forrest’s survival after the war was a disaster on any level you want; legal, moral, political. Nathan Bedford Forrest should have graced a gallows in the spring of 1865, and that should have been clear at the time to any resolute Union government.
Wade Hampton, the other leading candidate for a spring hanging in the wake of Apomattox, was, if you can believe it, even worse than Forrest. At least Forrest was a self-made monster; Hampton was a rich boy, the son of the South’s leading slave-holder. Hampton’s family owned more than 3,000 human beings, but rich didn’t mean pampered in the planters’ world. Wade Hampton III was not pampered. His hobby was hunting bears. With a knife. None of these guys were pampered. In fact, you feel a lot fonder of pampered, soft people after reading about these monsters.
Like a lot of tough kids, Wade Hampton III had something to prove. His grandfather, the original Wade Hampton, was the commanding American officer at the Battle of the Chateauguay in 1813, against a small, hastily assembled force of Mohawk Indians and Canadian militia. You don’t hear much about that fight in America, just as you don’t hear much about the Battle of Patay in Britain. If there’s one thing us Anglos are good at, it’s burying our humiliations. Chateauguay was a complete humiliation, with an American force routed by a mixed militia half its size, then lost in the woods by Wade’s grandfather.
By the time the Civil War started, Wade Hampton III was 42 years old, with no military experience. But he was a mean bastard, he knew how to ride and kill, he was willing to use his own money to raise his own “legion,” and he rose fast. In fact, one of the best ways to identify candidates for hanging is to look at fast risers.
In the whole Confederate army, only two men who started with no previous military experience rose to the rank of Lt. General: Wade Hampton III and Nathan Bedford Forrest. That’s a good noose-fitting device right there.
And if you’re looking for good legal cause to hang ol’ Wade, you won’t have much work to find it. Hampton talked his head off to Sherman’s officers, late in the war, as they arranged the surrender of Johnston’s forces, and his main theme, as recorded in multiple Union officers’ memoirs, is shooting deserters and “recruiting” new troops at gunpoint. Military life, for Hampton and many another Confederate officer in the last year of the war, consisted of rounding up deserters, shooting every one who didn’t seem useful, and re-enlisting the rest by holding a pistol at their head until they sang “Dixie” in the proper key. There’s no knowing how many Union men Hampton killed, but he boasted about killing dozens of reluctant Confederates.
Hampton survived the war, alas, in the same state of mind of most of the planters: not having learned a damned thing except to hate Yankees, African-Americans, and anyone else who failed to genuflect to the Lost Cause myth that his buddy Jubal Early was peddling—the South’s version of the ol' “stabbed in the back” myth so popular with certain Teutonic parties of the 1920s and 30s.
As the North lost the will to enforce basic human rights for African-Americans and white dissidents across the South, Hampton made his move to regain control of South Carolina for the planter elite. He borrowed an honorable symbol, the “Red Shirts” of Garibaldi’s insurgents, and made the red shirt the mark of his own racist militia. The South Carolina version of the Red Shirts murdered African-American leaders (150 of them during the 1876 Senate election, by one account) terrorized black voters and white Republicans (yeah, the Republicans were the good guys in those days) from voting, and indulged in any private violence that happened to interest its members. The 1876 election, with Hampton vs. a Reconstructionist, was a bloody draw, but Hampton’s fascists wanted it more and he eventually simply took power. He never looked back, and neither did South Carolina. Any threat of a new South, where something other than class or money might determine your chance in life, was wiped out for a century.
An outcome like that is worth preventing. If a few hangings had interrupted the premature love-fest between (white) North and (white) South in 1865, that outcome might have been avoided. And it would not have been difficult to identify the Confederate leaders most likely to organize treasonous groups like the Red Shirts and KKK. Both were led by civilians who rose quickly through the ranks, ending up as Lt. Generals—the only two men to follow that trajectory in the whole huge Confederate army. Both these leaders, Forrest and Hampton, were notable for their efficiency and extreme brutality throughout the war. Both were relatively young. Both were unrepentant racists and secessionists. For all these reasons, they were all obvious candidates for the top spots on a gallows list.
Granted, it might not have been possible to isolate their names among other brutal, successful, young, civilian-origin leaders. But there’s a simple solution for that problem: Hang every damn traitor who fit that bill.
[illustration by Brad Jonas]
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okay this is probably gonna sound like a lost causer but..foresst really wasn't that much of an ideloge post war
he later on denounced the KKK (although lying about founding it) give speeches to black audiencea and said that whites who kill blacks should be"exterminated "
he's more of a corrupt dude who will say and do anything to save his reputation
if the union play there cards right and give a few concussions they can have him going around preaching for unity and black rights .
now the war IITL is well going to be more radical so the list of who should hang will probably be different but i think like happened in AMPU .
avoid hanging high ranking officers expect those who committed the most war crimes hang the high ranking poliltcans including davis and blame the southern rich for the war while going ahead with reparations to former slaves and poor whites.
he later on denounced the KKK (although lying about founding it) give speeches to black audiencea and said that whites who kill blacks should be"exterminated "
he's more of a corrupt dude who will say and do anything to save his reputation
if the union play there cards right and give a few concussions they can have him going around preaching for unity and black rights .
now the war IITL is well going to be more radical so the list of who should hang will probably be different but i think like happened in AMPU .
avoid hanging high ranking officers expect those who committed the most war crimes hang the high ranking poliltcans including davis and blame the southern rich for the war while going ahead with reparations to former slaves and poor whites.
Another option os just getting as many slavers to leave as possible. A number ended up in Brazil IOTL and if you up it a bit that'll help , especially as if there are established communities abroad you'll get more chain migration later on.
But rather than killing a lot of officers you could confiscate their land and hand it out.
Although not really just maybe the most politically pragmatic approach would be to give a lot of plantation land to poor whites and move more ex-slaves out west. Historically there were a shit ton of black cowboys. A bigger push in that direction could lead a lot of independent black communities out west.
But rather than killing a lot of officers you could confiscate their land and hand it out.
Although not really just maybe the most politically pragmatic approach would be to give a lot of plantation land to poor whites and move more ex-slaves out west. Historically there were a shit ton of black cowboys. A bigger push in that direction could lead a lot of independent black communities out west.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
Harry Turtledove's TL-191 Forrest seemed like a pretty accurate imagination of the guy. He's definitely someone who would go from a clownish footnote to a more sinister figure in a Confederate victory TL, not because he was a fanatical racist but because he was the sort of guy who could wind up gathering a lot of political influence in a weak unstable society like the CSA and it would probably further his career to act as fanatically racist as possible.
I don't remember Forrest in Timeline 191. He was prominent in Guns of the South however. He was Lee's opponent in the 1867 election.
Burton K Wheeler
Moderator
I haven't read either since they came out, so you may be right. "Hit 'em again Forrest" was Guns of the South?
Aye, it was a slogan (or nickname) created by the AWB during Forrest's presidential campaign as the Patriot party candidate (his running mate was John Reagan).