Questions About John Brown

[Thomas Thorne]

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ast-speech

I hope people can read the above story. In Lincoln's last speech and in an interesting private letter in 1864 he supported suffrage for educated blacks and blacks who had served as soldiers as a way to ''keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom."

The defeated white South's imposition of the Black Codes was certainly a smack in the face of Lincoln's ideas. Eric Mckitrick in "Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction" said Johnson failed to communicate the North's displeasure with what amounted to self imposed Southern Reconstruction and argued Lincoln would have quickly disabused the South of the idea that the North found their behavior to be acceptable. .

The author made some interesting comparisons of how differently the defeated Japanese behaved after WW2 in placating the victorious US by adopting democratic institutions. In the post WW2 Japanese parliament there were no unrepentant swaggering uniformed soldiers justifying Japanese militarism.
Tom