Questions About John Brown

[Wild Bill]

To Eva, you are too generous with Alex Stephens and Abe Lincoln. Root hog means more than you think. It is abandonment of the blacks as freed people and nothing less. Read Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory

To Tom, read C. Vann Woodward, read "The Irony of Southern History" in his Burden of Southern History (numerous editions) on the South being the only part the US to have history happen to it, i.e., it lost a war, something the rest of us did not experience until after the World Wear II victory. That means that the South did not know how to surrender. Colonization is an old Henry Clay solution to the problems of a free black race in the US. Lincoln was a Clay fan. It was also tried under US Grant's administration and by blacks themselves under Marcus Garvey in the 1930s and others like WEB DuBois in the 1960s.

To Laurie, I would love to be able to put up a diagram that I used in my Reconstruction classes years ago to illustrate what Lincoln, Johnson, Congress and the South saw as the solution to the Civil War and Reconstruction's problems. I simply cannot work within the limitations of space that the computer places me and I lack the technical skills to solve the problem. I really have not left the 19th century mentally. That is why I was a natural at shoeing horses and mules, I guess.

Lincoln had one big advantage over Johnson for example. Lincoln was a Northerner and a Republican through and through, Johnson was a Southerner Democrat. I say this even though Lincoln was born in the border South and Johnson was not a secessionist. No matter what opponents thought of Lincoln, he was always in favor of Republican rule. Johnson was not. All that made him a Republican was temporary--it was the war. Once it was gone he was a Democrat.

One needs to divide up the parties into their factions--Republicans being Conservative (ex-Whig), Moderate (anti-slavery), or Radical (abolitionists), while Democrats were War, Peace, ex-Whig, and Secessionists. Thee factions appear during the 1860 Election when the Whigs become Constitutional Unionists under Bell/Everett, the Moderate and Radical Republicans unity under Lincoln/Hamlin, the future War and Peace Democrats back Douglas/Johnson, and the Secessionists favor Breckinridge/Lane.

After the Radical Republicans try to dump Lincoln in 1864 for Fremont, but fail, Lincoln joins with the War Democrats typified by Johnson. This is called the National Union Party. Lincoln ran as a National Unionist not as Republican his second term. Lincoln hopes to continue to include the War Democrats in postwar Republicanism when faced with the return of the white South to the Democrat fold. Johnson hopes to unite all Democrats North and South with the Conservative Republicans, while Congress hopes to keep the Republicans of all stripes together buttressed with the black vote. All this continues until the South is defeated, redeemed, and the war finally compromised in 1877 (with blacks abandoned to Southern niceties), when the Southern Whigs briefly rejoin their Northern brethren over often corrupt economic desires (railroads and industry) known as the Great Barbecue.

The Redeemers (Southern Secessionists defeated by war) do not formally install Jim Crow until the 1890s, when the North indicates they will not challenge the exclusion of blacks from the national political scene by the Populist Revolt which merges into Progressivism. (As South Carolina US Senator Pitchfork Ben Tillman put it, You Yankees subdue you little brown brothers in the Philippines with a Krag rifle, and we will take care of ours at home with a shotgun and a rope). Woodrow Wilson forms this up during his administration when the Solid South comes into his administration in all sorts of executive department positions. (And you though Wilson was from New Jersey?--he was born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, and the KKK-White League-Red Shirt-Soms of the Rising Sun /Sons of the White Camellia Redeemers were a vital part of his power base).

I admit that this is American History as you all have never seen or heard it before and there are numerous other ways to look at it, but. . . .