Questions About John Brown

[Eva Elisabeth]

Since it is not entirely in the article - I once posted about the letter to Hahn on another thread, but here it goes again:

On March 12, 1864, Abraham Lincoln met with two leaders of the black community in New Orleans, French descendants named Jean Baptiste Roudanez and Arnold Bertonneau. They presented him with a petition demanding black suffrage signed by over thousand literate African Americans, many of them of French descent. The next day, Lincoln wrote a famous private letter to Louisiana Govenor Michael Hahn, in which he suggested that certain blacks should be allowed to vote:

Abraham Lincoln
Executive Mansion Washington D.C.
March 13, 1864



Hon. Michael Hahn

My dear Sir:

I congratulate you on having fixed your name in history as the first—free—state Governor of Louisiana. Now you are about to have a Convention which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise. I barely suggest for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in—as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.

Yours truly

A. LINCOLN
http://rogerjnorton.com/LincolnDiscussio...n#pid29558

---

I think "root hog or die" simply meant that freedom also means to take over responsibility and care for oneself, DIY, like he himself and many others had to do at the frontier. The freed slaves had worked before and I would think their work force was still needed.
And I believe even if he had not yet an perfectly elaborated plan one goal Lincoln had in mind was equal rights and thus (legal) opportunities, like accessible education, for everyone to make his fortune.

I consider it much colder what Alexander Stephens considered benevolent to the blacks, as he wrote to Lincoln in December, 1864:

“We at the South do think African slavery, as it exists with us, both morally and politically right. This opinion is founded upon the inferiority of the black race. You, however, and perhaps a majority of the North, think it wrong."

As for Lincoln's former colonialization plan, I think this was due to the thinking of those times. He considered it better for both sides' sake as he expected the races not being able to live peacefully together. Due to considering the races to be too different, not one to be inferior.

[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. . . .

[Eva Elisabeth]

Re.: "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'd love to see. Do you have it in any digital file form? If you send I would try to resize or whatever and post it.

[Wild Bill]

No, it is beyond me, I fear

[L Verge]

(02-13-2016 04:41 PM)Wild Bill Wrote:  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. . . .

Thanks, Bill. Actually, I do recall some of this from poli sci in college. And even my solidly Democratic family members agreed that Woodrow Wilson was rather two-faced.

There are increasingly more frequent occasions over the past decade when the current political events in all three of the branches of government remind me of Reconstruction days. Which leads me to worry about the death of Justice Scalia today...

[Eva Elisabeth]

(02-13-2016 04:41 PM)Wild Bill Wrote:  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.

You said what I did/meant to say yourself here:
http://rogerjnorton.com/LincolnDiscussio...g#pid32172
"All things considered, however, root hog or die was the way Lincoln himself was brought up as were most frontier families."

[Wild Bill]

I do not find my statements contradictory in any way. The newly freed slaves might have needed more than "root hog or die" given their former condition. Many then evidently thought so, hence the Freedmen's Bureau.

[Eva Elisabeth]

The Freedman's Bureau was established exactly one month after the "root hog" statement. I wonder when the idea developed. It showed IMO that there was more caring than abandonment.

[L Verge]

It has often seemed to me that Lincoln's suggesting voting rights for the educated and military black man may have formed the "caste system" among African Americans that we still have in existence today. Also, I think the racial situation in New Orleans and Louisiana was much different than in other Southern states.

[Wild Bill]

The Freedmen's Bureau showed that there was more caring in CONGRESS until 1868 when its program was gradually phased out by 1870. The other congressional "caring" was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (which became the first part of the 14th Amendment), the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, and the so-called Force acts in the early 1870s designed to curtail the operations of the KKK and other private white armies. But most of this was declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court by 1880, which allowed the private armies openly to obstruct Reconstruction once again so long as the individual states did not sanction their use, and Congress' inability to pass the Fourth Force Act against the South in the 1890s, which led to the disfranchisement of Black voters and the separate but equal doctrine, which held until the Brown case in the 1950s and the Civil Rights Public Accommodations Act in 1864 and the Voting Rights or the Fifth Force Act in 1965.

Admittedly Louisiana was different from the ret of the South in its well educated, large, mixed race population in New Orleans, but the state excelled in corruption so rampant that one commentator once called it the US's only "banana republic." One of the best sources here is Frank Wetta's book, The Louisiana Scalawags."

Actually the only Reconstruction president who showed the slightest interest in protecting blacks in the South was US Grant (through vigorous carrying out of the Force Acts by drawing the Seventh US Cavalry off the plains and sending it to Louisiana, Kentucky and South Carolina), not Lincoln (although he admittedly signed the original Freedmen's Bureau Act for a one year duration) or Johnson (whose veto of its extension was overridden by Congress). Even Congress gave up on Civil Rights after passing the 1874 public accommodations act in honor of Charles Sumner in 1874. The readmission of most of the Confederate states back into the Union in 1868 really marked the beginning of the end for the whole process.

[Eva Elisabeth]

I truly appreciate all the info, Bill!

[L Verge]

About the only book on the Reconstruction that was ever mentioned during my college and post-graduate work in the 1960s and early-70s was The Tragic Era by Claude Bowers. How does it stand up to later ones?

And yes, I know he was part of the Dunning School of historians who have been blamed for creating the racial issues we have today... I'm no expert on that School, but if you have not heard about it, you really should read up on it.

[My Name Is Kate]

I've just finished reading online (mostly on Wikipedia, FWIW) about the Freedmen's Bureau, Dunning School of "thought", post Civil War Reconstruction, etc. From what I have read, it sounds as though most newly-freed black people were eager to learn to read and write, be employed and earn their own living, exercise their right to vote, find family members who they had been separated from during the war or from having been sold to different slave-holders, and they wanted to cement family relationships by having marriage ceremonies performed, which they had previously been denied. The (short-lived) Freedmen's Bureau tried to help them with some or all of these things.

But, then I read this: For William A. Dunning (from Plainfield, NJ), blacks "had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like whites"...etc., etc., etc. Where did he get that idea? Why did he blame all, or most of the Reconstruction corruption and problems on black people? So Jim Crow laws could be implemented, basically negating much of the new freedom of black people?

Then, years later, along came people like LBJ and his Great Society and welfare (I know that deviates somewhat from the topic of this forum, but I'm trying to understand the progression of events in the race relations of this country). Did LBJ think he was doing a good thing, and was welfare originally intended to get less-fortunate people back on their feet and independent, or was it basically a write-off of people who were considered hopeless or incapable of living in American society without government assistance? Was it a way of winning votes in exchange for dependence on the government for basic necessities?

[Rogerm]

President Johnson definitely thought he was doing a good thing by introducing through his Great Society, the Civil Rights Bill and greater access to welfare. He was a great admirer of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and probably saw his "Great Society" as an extension of Roosevelt's "New Deal." He originally intended welfare to get the less-fortunate people to get back on their feet and independent. However, the quagmire which became the Vietnam War, eventually diminished the country's enthusiasm for the president.

[maharba]

WildBill
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...

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...

Some amazing insights into history, Will Bill. So, in the 2nd term Lincoln abandoned the standard of Republican and ran as the Union Party. He'd been a Whig most of his short career, then switched to Republican for the 1860, then in 1864 Lincoln did not run as a Republican but instead the National Union Party. For Abraham Lincoln to actually say in terms of the survival of free Blacks "root hog or die" is a truly staggering remark.