Appomattox

    “ With special delight  (Lee)  saw that officers would be allowed to save face by retaining their sidearms and horses and could resume their lives  unmolested.”

     

    Grant : Penguin Books 2017  Ron Chernow page 509

            *************************************

     

    “The following month(Ackerman) portrayed the Klan not as bands of isolated ,wild-eyed ruffians  but

    spanned the entire community."

    page 707

     

     next election was  delayed for 90 years.

    page795

     

    (White Democrats ' ) " remember  an oppresive peace          on honorable men    who laid down their arms"

    But the South never laid down its  arms

     

    Chernow  857

     

    page 857

    Comments

    I think this bit of news hasn't been emphasized enough, wondering where I should put it, then I noticed your post again, thought it might be a good place:


    We learned in elementary school to be properly proud of Grant's sending the confederates homes with

    their horse and weapons for the late  planting.

    And....

     

    Grant  page 575

    "Political tensions flared ...July 30 ..when a white mob backed by police...many of them Confederate...veterans fired...

    until the floor with blood ...the riot left 34 blacks and 3 white Republicans -the "moderates" Flavius- dead..

    Late planting.Fl

     


    You are not painting the pretty picture required.


    The permission to leave as gentlemen got the people producing the war to go home.The privilege separating officers from enlisted troops was preserved by disarming the latter after the surrender.

    These conditions certainly played a part in overturning the efforts of Reconstruction. They don't reveal what might have happened if the conditions had been more punitive and humiliating.


    Or, or, or.. ? If enjoyment as a gentlemen was conditioned on being one.


    I was not defending the privilege, just trying to figure out how it became so powerful.


    To add some facts to "what we learned in elementary school... about the late planting".

    Supreme Court Justice Joseph P. Bradley, ruled the federal conviction, by jury, of white defendants in the 1873 Colfax Massacre in Louisiana was unconstitutional.  This decision ended federal protection from white terror, murder etc for blacks in the Deep South.

    The book, The Day Freedom Died describes the 1873 federal prosecution in New Orleans, convictions by jury, and then the dismissal of the conviction by Bradley, a decision later affirmed the complete Supreme Court.

    In a decision that gave free reign to white terrorists the Supreme Court ruled that murder and terrorism is not a federal offense, and that the 14th Amendment to protect civil rights applied only to the actions to deprive rights by state government, not individuals or groups of white terrorists.

    14th Amendment:

    No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..

    Murder and/or lynching, or terror acts like burning down homes or businesses of blacks was not deemed a federal crime in the reconstruction era after 1873. In the unlikely event a state prosecuted such crimes, the terror threats against jurors, prosecutors, and/or white supremacists on a jury would make such action a futile enterprise.

    The power of the federal government to prosecute lynching by mobs was still a controversy as late as the 1948 election, as such authority was considered an affront to "state's rights".


    Just checking, was the title of the book "The Day Freedom Died"?

    Thanks for this.


    Yes, by Charles Lane. Corrected the title. Book starts a little slow with background info, gets into the gritty details and events soon enough. I got Kindle copy.


    I do the same. Helps being able to refer back to books easily. 

    Helps to have a grasp of our true history.

    During the Civil War there was the Fort Pillow Massacre 

    Does give you the warm and fuzzies about Confederates


    After risking their lives pre -War , the former abilitionists seemed  relatively less active   after 

    wards. .Wonder why.


    I think that the idea of forgiveness is a strong tribal urge.

    Lincoln thought the nation would heal if Confederate were forgiven

    Today, there is a belief that not assessing whether Trump et. al committed crimes will lead to peace.

    There is no evidence that the Republican base wants peace.

    Very few Republicans in Congress concede that Biden is the legal President-elect.

    I suppose the answer to the moderation of the abolitionists is simply human nature

    In truth former Confederates were vicious when dealing with so-called carpetbaggers 

    Hope springs eternal in every human breast


    You're going to bollocks that up, eh? Lincoln was hard scrabble compromiser, & would have stood a better chance projecting tough love on the South, but instead he was shot, and succeeded by Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Southerner & "War Democrat" who pushed for easy terms for the south over the objections of the Republican Congress, including opposing the Civil Rights bill of 1866 and any mention  of black suffrage as a "state matter". Interestingly had Johnson not survived his impeachment trial by 1 vote, he would've been replaced by the pro-women's suffrage Senator Wade, the Senate pro tempore from Ohio, who might have derailed Grant's inept presidency.


    Lincoln on amnesty

    On Dec. 8, 1863, in his annual message to Congress, Lincoln, the first Republican president, had outlined his plans for reconstruction of the South, including amnesty terms for former Confederates. A pardon would require an oath of allegiance, but it would not restore ownership to former slaves, or restore confiscated property that involved a third party.

    and

    During his presidency, Lincoln issued 64 pardons for war-related offences: 22 for conspiracy, 17 for treason, 12 for rebellion, nine for holding an office under the Confederacy, and four for serving with the rebels.

    https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/25/this-day-in-politics-dec-25-1868-1074077

     


    So you agree? Or what?

    Johnson's version of amnesty largely retained rights of slaveholders, opposite to Lincoln's . But Abe got shot, and Andy pushed his version - even if overridden by Congressional Rebubs, Johnson's stance encouraged Southern resistance to reform, especially in opposing the Fourteenth Amendment.


    My statement

    Lincoln thought the nation would heal if Confederate were forgiven

    Lincoln offered amnesty and pardons

    I was discussing the actions of Lincoln

    On December 8, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln offers his conciliatory plan for reunification of theUnited States with his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction

    By this point in the Civil War, it was clear that Lincoln needed to make some preliminary plans for postwar reconstruction. The Union armies had captured large sections of the South, and some states were ready to have their governments rebuilt. The proclamation addressed three main areas of concern. First, it allowed for a full pardon for and restoration of property to all engaged in the rebellion with the exception of the highest Confederate officials and military leaders. Second, it allowed for a new state government to be formed when 10 percent of the eligible voters had taken an oath of allegiance to the United States. Third, the Southern states admitted in this fashion were encouraged to enact plans to deal with the freed slaves so long as their freedom was not compromised.

    https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/lincoln-issues-proclamation-of-amnesty-and-reconstruction

    It does not seem that Lincoln was going to run roughshod over the South


    He was killed 15 months later.

    Odd that we would pin such a practical man down on earlier words. Here's his *last speech*:

    But, as bad promises are better broken than kept, I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest. But I have not yet been so convinced.

    Lincoln was unique, and his approach to shepherding through Reconstruction would have undoubtedly diverted from asimplified "just the facts, ma'am" of his proposed plans mid-war.

     


    You make up your version of his future (past?) and I'll make up my version.


    He was killed. He had no future. I just quoted his attitude towards sticking with bad plans, and I've reference before how he navigated uncomfortable decisions in the Minnesota/Dakota's Indian wars - with gusto, attention to detail, carefully splitting the difference between the hard core indian haters and basic rights & humanity of the natives themselves.. You just quoted a mid-war early stab at a surrender protocol as if it's the only thing to say on the matter, case closed.

    I start to understand what you see in OGD.


    You created a story that fit your narrative. 

    The future (past?) term was acknowledging that we make a guess.


    Huh? I quoted his last speech. That's "creating a story"?


    You guess what he would have done.


    No i fucking didn't, you [insert approoriate epithet here] - i reference the historical facts of what he said *last* and what he did in other situations to imply he would have been more creative and less directly obvious than "I am a Southern racist" Andrew Johnson who made Reconstruction how we know it. Which is funny, because you spend a lot of time around here putting words and actions into MLKs and other dead people's mouths and behavior.

    It's also hilarious because I'm the one who keeps pointing out there's an ethical quandary in choosing as #1 a prez who presided over internecine warfare as a solution to national problems, and instead if waging it on the defensible principle of "it's immoral to own slaves", he did it in the principle that "you just left a dysfunctional relationship four score and 7 [5] years ago, so now you're stuck with this one forever". But to his defense, there's probably no way he could have gotten a clear mandate to launch the war based on eliminating slavery, and certainly not black voting rights/full citizenship, when he couldn't even do it with border states, and northern states outside New England didn't give blacks much in the way of voting rights much less full equality. It took a full army occupation to do that sleight of hand.


    I have no clue what you are arguing.

    If Lincoln was arguing for harsher action against the South, would action did he take in the 15 months prior to his death that support he was going to get tougher?

    Fellow Republicans thought Lincoln was too lenient

    On December 8, 1863, in his annual message to Congress, President Lincoln outlined his plans for reconstruction of the South, which included terms for amnesty to former Confederates. A pardon would require an oath of allegiance, but it would not restore ownership to former slaves, or restore confiscated property which involved a third party. The pardon excluded office holders of the Confederate government or persons who had mistreated prisoners.[1] Congress, however, objected to Lincoln's plans as being too lenient and refused to recognize delegates from the reconstructed governments of Louisiana and Arkansas. Congress instead passed the Wade–Davis Bill, which required half of any former Confederate state's voters to swear allegiance to the United States and also swear that they had not supported the Confederacy. The bill also ended slavery, but did not allow former slaves to vote. President Lincoln vetoed the bill. During his presidency Lincoln issued 64 pardons for war-related offences; 22 for conspiracy, 17 for treason, 12 for rebellion, 9 for holding an office under the Confederacy, and 4 for serving with the rebels.[2]

    Under the terms of surrender for the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on April 10, 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant stipulated that "each officer and man will be allowed to return to his home, not to be disturbed by United States authority so long as they observe their paroles and the laws in force where they may reside". On May 5 the parole was extended so that soldiers from the 11 Confederate states, plus West Virginia, would be allowed to return home on their paroles but that "all who claim homes in the District of Columbia and in States that never passed the Ordinance of Secession (MarylandKentucky, and Missouri included) have forfeited them and can only return thereto by complying with the Amnesty Proclamation of the president and obtaining special permission from the War Department".[3]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pardons_for_ex-Confederates

    Your need to call me a moron solidifies that you are not different in the intolerance of opposing opinions you argue is the position of the Woke. Pot ..... Kettle.

     


    Uh, actions during war diff from actions when war won.

    Like doh.


    Kettle



    thnks 4

    the link

    heart

    those 2


    Grant , Lincoln , Lee .  Moat?  To varying extents shared that urge and  maybe  ( unrealistically) expected it  to be a more prevalent  reaction among the Reb tents than actually transpired.

    Having been a participant ,didn't necessarily mean you were weird,.  But at least you  behaved differently  from most other  folks.


    Do you mean being a participant in some shared code of honorable behavior?

    Your original post presents the conditions of the surrender as a forerunner to what happened in the South after the war. That clearly was the case on many levels. But I don't understand those events as opportunities to have done something better by the people calling the shots then. The Union held together by the weakest of rubber bands. Not letting the officers return to "polite society" would have been its own kind of conflict.

    Nostradamus is not answering my calls.


    Yeah. Unrealistically . As it turned out. 


    If you read the book we mentioned, and a little history of the era:

    1. Exhaustion with continuing to send troops to police the Deep South-  in often futile hunts up and down rivers, across 'wilderness' for white supremacist terrorists, and against the prevalent Deep South white public mood, including rich white businessmen and also not popular with white voters in the north who increasingly had other concerns (see #2).

    2. The crash of 1873, the first 'great depression'. Note although Republicans maintained control of the presidency until 1884, in 1876 Hayes was the first president to lose the popular vote, while barely winning the electoral vote which was in fact very much in dispute. Grant knew the Republicans were in trouble in his second term, budgets were cut, funds for military operations in the South were hard to come by.

    3. To add to what was mentioned above, from the Bradley decision, killing a black voter only became a federal crime if:

    it could be proven the intent of the white murderer was to deny the black the right to vote, which the SCOTUS determined Congress had a right to legally intercede to defend.

    But -  'Intent' of course, is virtually impossible to prove, there could be a dozen other reasons purported by the assailant. and even if witnesses to intent were available, their lives might be forfeit to testify in federal court.


    As I noted above, amnesty was on Lincoln's mind


    I think one reason the abolitionists became less influential is that their viewpoint became less aligned with industrialists and bankers after the war.

    The issue of whether there could be new slave states or not had a wooden stake driven through it so the expansionist spirit that had led to the war was now the sole prerogative of the Union. The scope of the enterprise became much larger. Sherman's march to the sea was turned toward the Pacific ocean.


    Key was the 2nd Industrial Revolution, a new bout of European immigration to man the factories, the heavy expansion of railroads largely bypassing the South, and i imagine a good amount of transfer of wealth from southern plantation owners to northern creditors. While cotton was important, wealth in steel, coal, large scale cattle runs/meat packing abetted by refrigeration, etc. changed the game completely. The south didn't have the population % nor money to be a key player after the war.

    [the US had 39 million in the 1870 census, less than 1/4 in the South, with NY, PA and Ohio having the same as the whole south - demographics had moved on.]

    A big change in the post-war industry was reorganizing especially northern textile factories as corporations and the much greater output through greater number of spindles (*not* am increase in factories). Northern production went from 1/6 England's in 1860 to 1/2 forty-five years later. The south finally built spinning factories post-war, but nowhere near the size of the north's.

    https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/7048905.pdf


    In addition, the expansions of railroads to the West was developed to control the territory at the same time. The military developed by the Civil War was integral to gaining that control. Those old boys at Appomattox had a new bag.


    absolutely as in: doh. If it hadn't happened they would have had to find something else, as just like now, and much more so because the death count was so high, everyone was eager to move on, enough already about Trump fans the Confederacy, fuggeaboutit, we did what we could and that's all we can bear, the rest will or won't sort itself out. So Jim Crow flourished, but southern black citizens also started moving north in large numbers...


    re: post-war industry was reorganizing especially northern textile factories 

    SPEAKING OF--serendipity first thing I saw over at Twitter, the Tweeter colorizes old photos--

    here's August 1910--you don't really get that "free at last" joy out of Addie here either, ya think?

    People were different, people thought different. It takes a village and a whole lot of time to change some of these things.

     


    Like a group puzzle, breakout room...


    The golf course lay so near the plant that almost every day the children  working at the mill..could see the men at play


    excellent point, and as more became intrigued by the westward the course of empire thing to the non-states, more learned about completely different cultures with which to compare, not black and white as it were:

    [...] legacies were born of a tortuous story of colonial conquest and forced assimilation.

    New Mexico, which had the largest number of sedentary Indians north of central Mexico, emerged as a coveted domain for slavers almost as soon as the Spanish began settling here in the 16th century, according to Andrés Reséndez, a historian who details the trade in his 2016 book, “The Other Slavery.” Colonists initially took local Pueblo Indians as slaves, leading to an uprising in 1680 that temporarily pushed the Spanish out of New Mexico.

    The trade then evolved to include not just Hispanic traffickers but horse-mounted Comanche and Ute warriors, who raided the settlements of Apache, Kiowa, Jumano, Pawnee and other peoples. They took captives, many of them children plucked from their homes, and sold them at auctions in village plazas.

    The Spanish crown tried to prohibit slavery in its colonies, but traffickers often circumvented the ban by labeling their captives in parish records as criados, or servants. The trade endured even decades after the Mexican-American War, when the United States took control of much of the Southwest in the 1840s.

    Seeking to strengthen the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in 1865, Congress passed the Peonage Act of 1867 after learning of propertied New Mexicans owning hundreds and perhaps thousands of Indian slaves, mainly Navajo women and children. But scholars say the measure, which specifically targeted New Mexico, did little for many slaves in the territory [....]

    from  Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It.

    By Simon Romero @ NYTimes.com, Jan. 28, 2018

    bigger excerpt on Dagblog here.

    I think too little has been written about how expansion started to change the eastern American culture of the time from a predominately Anglo-Brit mindset, many  are just starting to write about it now. Not to mention that warfare was going on there with the "natives" for a very long time, just didn't start up with Custer. Edit to add: I put "natives" in quotes because they were separate tribes who fought with each other about territory, too. There's no such thing as one "native american tribe" occupying "the west". Heck whypipple from the east one big tribe of several occupying the San Francisco area since 1848.


    I find the second half of the aforementioned Peonage Act of 1867 especially interesting, because it does indicate an intent that any agent of the federal government, military or civilian, must continue to prosecute any incidence of anything appearing to be slavery:

    [....] and any person or persons who shall hold, arrest, or return, or person in peon- cause to be held, arrested, or returned, or in any manner aid in the arrest age. or return of any person or persons to a condition of peonage, shall, upon conviction, be punished by fine not less than one thousand nor more than five thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not less than one nor more than five years, or both, at the discretion of the court.

     2. And be it further enacted, That it shall be the duty of all persons in the military or civil service in the Territory of New Mexico to aid in the enforcement of the foregoing section of this act; and any person or persons shall obstruct or attempt to obstruct, or in any way interfere with, or prevent the enforcement of this act, shall be liable to the pains and penalties hereby provided; and any officer or other person in the military service of the United States who shall so offend, directly or indirectly, shall, on conviction before a court-martial, be dishonorably dismissed the service of the United States, and shall thereafter be ineligible to reappointment to any office of trust, honor, or profit under the government. APPROVED, March 2, 1867

    edit to add: curious about the value of the fines outlined, I used this inflation calculator which though not entirely accurate for this purpose, it gives and idea that the range would be $17,593.78 to $87,968.92. A wealthy person might think the chance of a fine like that worth the risk and train "peons" or slaves to simply say to outsiders that they are "servants" to maintain the lifestyle.


    Well, the New Mexican stuff happened as a collision between different imperial enterprises.The real estate wars that happened afterwards is it's own bizarre tale.

    It is hard to keep up.


    Cabeza de Vaca washed up on the Florida panhandle, and spent 10 years enslaved by one tribe then another, before he finally made it to the Spanish base in Galveston, 1000 miles or so away. Oh, and mosquito-borne malaria - yum. History - everyone was bastards.


    Anyone know of historians who have promoted the theory that the primary cause of the Civil War was economic, with abolition a necessary but secondary objective? Most political upheavals are related first to the economy....?


    That is an interesting and difficult request.

    The people who just want to make it about one thing or another are not interested in the multiple causes approach.


    Yet slaveholding was a more emotional issue than most.


    Was slavery mentioned in secession documents?


    Yes.

    Is this some kind of test?


    I think the multiple causes argument is a dodge

    South Carolina, for example, made it clear that failure of non-slaveholding states to enforce the Fugitve Slave Act and the possibility of the Federal government ending slavery were the main issue.

    The multiple causes were a post-loss argument.


    rmrd still doesn't get the Scotch-Irish bit in Appalachia, for example. He sees his own grudges, and can't imagine others have theirs, even possibly for good cause. He prolly doesn't realize Forrest Gump is pretty insulting, the more so by being "popular" or even thought accurate (by some). Certainly not issues that compete with keeping humans enslaved, but it is good to know your adversaries and their thinking if they're going to live in your brain rent-free as they say most of your life. The taxation issue South Carolina fought with Andrew Jackson in the 1820s was important re:self-determination, the prerogatives of states - and he was a Southerner. Anyway, "a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest".


    Nah

    In the case of the Civil War, I was just noting what Confederate states gave as reasons when they left the Union, and what Southern members of Congress said in their departure speeches.

    I also got the part about draft riots in NYC, and the fact that a rich white Northerner had ways out of the fight.

    The poor white guy thought that it wasn't his fight

    Regarding economics, the 1619 argument about slave owners in 1776 says that the owners wanted to keep their slaves to keep their wealth

    The Civil War says slave owners wanted to keep their slaves to keep their wealth.

     

    The message I got from Forrest Gump, the Black guy always dies.


    To observe multiple causes were at work is not to discount the central importance of slave ownership to the Confederacy. But the practice did not develop in a vacuum. To treat it as a self generated principle unaffected by the circumstances of that place and time is to draw a recursive circle where it becomes isolated from the rest of existence.

    Figures like Adam Smith argued that it was both a failed form of economy as well as being morally reprehensible. Are you going to turn him into a "post war" apologist? 


    The South definitely wanted to avoid the abolition of the enslaved. The 1619 project presented arguments the 1776 revolution may have been pushed by an 'economic' reaction by American slave states to British sentiment to ban slavery. As Moat said with the railroad expansion and the money and law to do it, the slave states threw up roadblocks as they wanted more slave states to balance any free states as the West was settled. After the Civil War the railroads were booming, at least until the general economic crash of 1873.

    The Boston Tea Party could be seen as a revolt by American tea bootleggers to cheap British tea, as the Crown had just cut taxes on tea export - undercutting the Boston/American tea black market coming through countries other than Britain. Not to be too cynical, but to say the Revolution was only about freedom and high ideals, and not political power/money, may be just another nationalistic tale of righteousness 'taught in elementary schools.'  Similarly, with the rapid collapse of defense of the rights of the emancipated in the South, some skepticism is warranted as to the objectives of the Civil War.


    Emancipation was an unanticipated consequence of the Civil War. The Proclamation only applied to states that left the Union. Slavery remained intact in DC and the rest of the Union.


    There was a big backlash to the essay in the 1619 Project that implied protection of slavery was the reason for the Revolutionary War.

    The NYT issued a clarification 

    Today we are making a clarification to a passage in an essay from The 1619 Project that has sparked a great deal of online debate. The passage in question states that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. This assertion has elicited criticism from some historians and support from others. 

    We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery. Versions of this interpretation can be found in much of the scholarship into the origins and character of the Revolution that has marked the past 40 years or so of early American historiography — in part because historians of the past few decades have increasingly scrutinized the role of slavery and the agency of enslaved people in driving events of the Revolutionary period.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the-1619-project.html


    Tea tax was just one of many, and the Colonialists got tired of being a captive market only allowed to shop at the company store to fill in any shortfalls in the King's budget or European operations.

    The slave bit as a cause for their independence is just ahistorical.


    A reminder that The Stamp Act of 1765 was the main one that started it all, where the slogan "no taxation without representation" came from. That and then the 1770 Boston Massacre (just hit me now that the current Portland anarchists should love that story!--goons of big faraway gummint shoot protesters--wonder why they don't.)

    The Boston Tea Party just gets more attention in modern pop history than it deserves because of the kabuki show aspects. Actually I remember reading original texts that a lot of colonialists who weren't fond of their overlords didn't approve of it, was somewhat counter-productive.Same with the tarring and feathering gigs. (The out of control mob thing as always?)


    Slavery may have pushed some Virginian's to support the colonial rebels

    It's true that had the US stayed, Britain would have had much more to gain from the continuance of slavery than it did without America. It controlled a number of dependencies with slave economies — notably Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies — but nothing on the scale of the American South. Adding that into the mix would've made abolition significantly more costly.

    But the South's political influence within the British Empire would have been vastly smaller than its influence in the early American republic. For one thing, the South, like all other British dependencies, lacked representation in Parliament. The Southern states were colonies, and their interests were discounted by the British government accordingly. But the South was also simply smaller as a chunk of the British Empire's economy at the time than it was as a portion of America's. The British crown had less to lose from the abolition of slavery than white elites in an independent America did.

    The revolutionaries understood this. Indeed, a desire to preserve slavery helped fuel Southern support for the war. In 1775, after the war had begun in Massachusetts, the Earl of Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, offered the slaves of rebels freedom if they came and fought for the British cause. Eric Herschthal, a PhD student in history at Columbia, notes that the proclamation united white Virginians behind the rebel effort. He quotes Philip Fithian, who was traveling through Virginia when the proclamation was made, saying, "The Inhabitants of this Colony are deeply alarmed at this infernal Scheme. It seems to quicken all in Revolution to overpower him at any Risk." Anger at Dunmore's emancipation ran so deep that Thomas Jefferson included it as a grievance in a draft of the Declaration of Independence. That's right: the declaration could've included "they're conscripting our slaves" as a reason for independence.

    For white slaveholders in the South, Simon Schama writes in Rough Crossings, his history of black loyalism during the Revolution, the war was "a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery."

    Slaves also understood that their odds of liberation were better under British rule than independence. Over the course of the war, about 100,000 African slaves escaped, died, or were killed, and tens of thousands enlisted in the British army, far more than joined the rebels. "Black Americans' quest for liberty was mostly tied to fighting for the British — the side in the War for Independence that offered them freedom," historian Gary Nash writes in The Forgotten Fifth, his history of African Americans in the revolution. At the end of the war, thousands who helped the British were evacuated to freedom in Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.

    This is not to say the British were motivated by a desire to help slaves; of course they weren't. But American slaves chose a side in the revolution, the side of the crown. They were no fools. They knew that independence meant more power for the plantation class that had enslaved them and that a British victory offered far greater prospects for freedom.

    https://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/american-revolution-mistake


    There were 193k slaves in Jamaica alone in 1775, roughly half that of all the colonies put together. Maybe the colonies' rebel slaves got some kind of special status heading to Jamaica, but I doubt it was to the level of some Disney feel-good film.

    As for Bermuda, not quite a slave economy, but...

    Black and Native American slaves captured aboard enemy ships were considered property, and returned to Bermuda for sale along with ships and cargoes.

    Bermuda was also used as a dumping ground for peoples ethnically-cleansed from their homelands by the expanse of the English Empire. This included particularly Algonquian peoples from New England, such as Pequots and Wampanoags, and native Irish Gaels, following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. All of these peoples were shipped to Bermuda and sold into bondage. Whites (excluding the Irish) remained the majority in Bermuda at the end of the Seventeenth Century. Although fears of blacks and Irish especially led to the discouragement of black immigration, the prohibition of the importation of Irish, and continual efforts to encourage slave-owners to export their slaves and free non-whites to emigrate or risk enslavement, the blacks, Irish, Native Americans, and some part of the white Anglos merged into a single demographic during the course of the Eighteenth Century which was known as coloured (anyone who was not entirely white).

    (note the special undesirability of Irish)


    This has nothing to do with the argument that Virginians may have had a fear of slaves being freed if the British won a war with the colonists. The discussion is about the situation in the colonies at the time. Slavery was a bigger factor than reflected by past historians.


    Huh? You said the Brits were going to give rebellious slaves refuge in Jamaica and elsewhere, even Ye Ole Merrye England.

    At the end of the war, thousands who helped the British were evacuated to freedom in Nova Scotia, Jamaica, and England.

    I just pointed out the reality of Jamaica and Bermuda at the time, that it was no nirvana for black folk.

    And best not to be French Canadian under British control - the Brits packed them up like sardines and killed half of them shipping them round to New Orleans, the Acadians aka "Cajuns". Kinda similar to how they treated Irish, et al.


    My opening statement 

    Slavery may have pushed some Virginian's to support the colonial rebels


    You also said:

    It [England] controlled a number of dependencies with slave economies — notably Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies — but nothing on the scale of the American South. 

    But I pointed out Jamaica 1775 had *half* the slave population of all the colonies together, and there was no way of predicting the 1793 invention of the cotton gin that changed the whole game, along with expansion into Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, or the 1803 acquisition of Louisiana and also snagging Florida and the extended panhandle in 1820. There's just so much guessing of motives and opinions based on 20/20 hindsight.

    Your article also mentions 3000-4000 slaves carried away to freedom by the Brits. Not sure where you get your 100k number if escaped and freed slaves, which would've been 1/4 of the total at that time, and been a much bigger deal, but hey, if those were the numbers dug up, just might be. But where?

    Not sure where slavery was the convincing issue to turn Virginia's allegiance. Perhaps, maybe, who knows...

     


    The 100K number comes from a PBS documentary series

    While the Patriots were ultimately victorious in the American Revolution, choosing sides and deciding whether to fight in the war was far from an easy choice for American colonists. The great majority were neutral or Loyalist. For black people, what mattered most was freedom. As the Revolutionary War spread through every region, those in bondage sided with whichever army promised them personal liberty. The British actively recruited slaves belonging to Patriot masters and, consequently, more blacks fought for the Crown. An estimated 100,000 African Americans escaped, died or were killed during the American Revolution.

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2narr4.html

    You can ask the documentarian the source


    1 article lists 66k black loyalists from VA, SC & GA, with 75k-100k overall. A lot of the blacks going to Dunsmore died of fever, it sounds like.

    Many of those in Nova Scotia and London chose to leave for Africa.

    Oddly, black men in North Carolina had the vote at time of independence, and could serve in the state militia until 1830.


    I would just like to point out that nobody claimed it was a finished work; rather, this was supposed to be the takeaway:

    ...It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth


    p.s. And the United States is still here! I've noticed lately that some even advocate adding more states to ameliorate certain faulty issues concerning elections and a certain Congressional body.

    edit to add: not to mention discussions about changing the number of justices on the the Supreme Court of the land...it continues...


    Rough Crossings tells the story of the Black Loyalists who fought with the British

    Imagine how history would have unfolded had we lost the Revolutionary War and been brought to heel by His Britannic Majesty, King George III. Instead of being revered as founders, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and their compatriots could well have been marched to the gallows and forgotten. British propagandists would have churned out a mythology much like the one American schoolchildren are force-fed today — but with the national roles reversed. The British monarchy would be depicted as the champion of liberty, with the rebels cast as agents of republican chaos and tyranny. The lesson would no doubt focus on the contradiction cited by Samuel Johnson, who inquired pithily of the Americans in 1775: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" 

    Simon Schama's "Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution" picks up where Dr. Johnson left off. It offers a stirringly ambitious reconsideration of the Revolution with the question of slavery set at the very heart of the matter. Schama follows on the heels of historians like Benjamin Quarles, Gary Nash, Sylvia R. Frey and Cassandra Pybus, who have already highlighted the paradox of a revolution initiated in the name of liberty for people who passionately defended slavery. Always a master storyteller, Schama — an Englishman who has long made his home in the United States — has woven the strands laid out by those who went before him into an epic work that gets the reader's blood rushing as it debunks the traditional American view of the Revolution. Schama throws more than a few bombs along the way, as when he writes of the Southern slave owners: "Theirs was a revolution, first and foremost, mobilized to protect slavery." 

    "Rough Crossings" focuses on the black American role in the Revolution and, most particularly, on the tens of thousands of slaves who fled to British lines after Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation in November 1775 offering slaves from rebel plantations freedom in return for service to the crown. It was for the most part a nightmare journey. Many runaway slaves were caught by their masters, savagely punished and returned to bondage. Of those who reached British protection, many died agonizing deaths from smallpox and other diseases. Those who survived worked as laborers, guides, spies and fighters. They often served valiantly — at one point wearing sashes that read "Liberty to Negroes" — and spilled the blood of their former masters with alacrity. If nothing else, Schama's portraits of black loyalist fighters should provide Hollywood with fresh ideas about how to depict this war. Screenwriters will find prime material, for example, in the black guerrilla fighter known as Colonel Tye, who escaped from his master in New Jersey, survived the epidemics that ravaged Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment in the Chesapeake and returned North to haunt the patriot outposts that were reachable from the British stronghold of New York.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/books/review/04staples.html

     

     

     


    Slave Nation tells us that Southern states secured the right to own slaves before joining the Northerners to fight the British 

    In 1772, a judge sitting in the High Court in London declared slavery “so odious” that it could not exist at common law and set the conditions which would consequently result in the freedom of the 15,000 slaves living in England. This decision eventually reached America and terrified slaveholders in the collection of British colonies, subject to British law. The predominantly southern slave-owners feared that this decision would cause the emancipation of their slaves. It did result in some slaves freeing themselves.

    To ensure the preservation of slavery, the southern colonies joined the northerners in their fight for “freedom” and their rebellion against England. In 1774, at the First Continental Congress John Adams promised southern leaders to support their right to maintain slavery. As Eleanor Holmes Norton explains in her introduction, “The price of freedom from England was bondage for African slaves in America. America would be a slave nation.”

    Thomas Jefferson relied on this understanding when carefully crafting the stirring words of the Declaration of Independence. In 1787, about the time Benjamin Franklin proposed the first affirmative action plan, negotiations over a new Constitution ground to a halt until the southern states agreed to allow the prohibition of slavery north of the Ohio River. The resulting Northwest Ordinance created the largest slave-free area in the world. Slave Nationis a fascinating account of the role slavery played in the foundations of the United States that traces this process of negotiation through the adoption of Northwest Ordinance in 1787, and informs our understanding of later events including the Civil War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

    https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/slave-nation/


    Thanks for the book reviews. Both by eminent scholars.

    Bottom line, we got the undemocratic obstructing oath defying all powerful Senate, now run by a power obsessed scoundrel elected by 1.2 million rubes, hillbillies, bigots and grifters in a state in the top ten for poverty, and number one for folks on federal disability, BECAUSE the 'Revolution from tyranny' depended on giving the Deep South not only 3/5 slave count  power in the House, but the obstruction power of 2 senators for each slave state, done regardless of population. 


    We have to look at history to understand where we are today.

    At some point, the fact that a political party wins the majority of votes in a state, but has less seats in the legislature will come to a head.

    The same thing will happen at the Presidential level.

    People like McConnell actually laugh at the carnage they leave behind.


    It still bothers me we write off these "disproportionate" states, though we have enough tiny ones as well - Delaware, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island... And the states we're really talking about are the bigger ones we're halfway there on.

    Biden flipped Arizona and Georgia. North Carolina was very close (with Michigan & PA tight the other way). Biden was competitive in Texas. Florida is a mystery soup still to be deciphered - every single time. Iowa's within striking distance, Ohio a bit further.

    The electoral college is not a problem. Voter disenfranchisement is. Messaging and the acceptance of pure disinfo/false facts are the biggest challenge, but we still haven't decided whether we want these voters, or we just call them deplorable a and pursue GOTV with our split progressive<=>left-centrist base. Lincoln Project showed some fun side, but is that enough? And how about engaging at state level, cuz that's where federal candidates come from usually...


    The electoral college is the problem.

    Each state has two Senators.

    Let the entire voting public decide the President.

    Otherwise, the future could be repeated Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote.


    They could even it up tomorrow and we'd figure out a way to lose by Thursday. We are not winning at state level. GOP and Dems both have 6 low population states with 3 or 4 electoral votes. The biggest issue is California, which at 55 dwarfs the next state, so should have an extra pair of Senators. Maybe New York with it's 29. But the GOP has Texas with 38.  That's about it; the rest is based on apportioned representatives. Guess the founding fathers didn't anticipate huge unoccupied stats, but they basically average out. But they did anticipate the urban/rural divide, and decided not to let the cities overdominate. But I still figure we need to be more persuasive while getting laws enforced.


    One person, one vote for President.


    We make this myth that the US constitution was the greatest document in history and a template for all other democracies going forward when it was the result of tough compromises that weren't liked but accepted as the only choice. The population difference in the 13 colonies was not that great. Except for Virginia most of the states were relatively close. Virginia had about 10 times the population of the smallest state and they bit the bullet to get the constitution passed. It was a tough fight that Virginia didn't like but they gave in to get the 13 colonies to unite That wouldn't have happened if Virginia had 80 times a populated as California is today compared to the least populated state.


    Not unless that Rhode Island bunch had a modified AR-15 to 2nd Amendment their asses. Different ways to compromise. ("in all the excitement of signing the Constitution, i forgot - did i fire the whole clip or just half. Make my day, punk...")


    I thought of you using the example of California when I just now saw this tea-leaf reading piece

    NEWS THIS MORNING THAT GOLDMAN SACHS may move its asset management division from New York City to Florida got us thinking about the major political shift that will come after this year's census. The winners in the 2024 election - and in upcoming congressional redistricting - will be Texas and Florida; a high-profile loser will be California....

    It really got me thinking that most of the arguments on this thread are very much passe, history themselves.

    The only constant we have right now is massive change.

    If one is going to use a historic analogy, try early 1869, a new President Grant is going to be inaugurated in March. What happens next? That's really where we are...


    USA Today has an article about the ongoing crap thought about Slavery and Civil Rights in high school classes. This leads to resistance to accepting new data when it is presented.

    The same forces that took over public spaces to erect monuments to the Confederacy and its white supremacist tenets also kept a tight grip on the history taught to Southern pupils. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spent decades shaping and reshaping textbooks to put a strong emphasis on Lost Cause views of the Civil War and Reconstruction, which glorified the white supremacist foundations of the Confederacy and was used to justify segregation and authoritarian Jim Crow governance. 

    “With all the attention they received in terms of reference to the monuments, I think their most lasting impact was in controlling and censoring textbooks,” said Kevin Levin, a historian who has written on the Civil War in American memory. “That’s often overlooked.”

    But Black Southerners refused to accept these distortions. Black historians mounted challenges to Lost Cause mythology as early as 1913. Parents and grandparents pushed back against the school lessons given to their children. They passed family stories onto children and grandchildren. They took ordinary moments, like preparing food or fixing hair, to tell stories of Black achievement. 

    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/12/07/southern-history-textbooks-long-history-deception/3809954001/


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