Opinions | America Punishes A Certain Kind of Rebel

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Before he died, Davis wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, a two-volume work in which he said it would show that Southern states had the power to leave a Union in which they had, as sovereign community, voluntarily entered and that separation was a just response to the violations and deprivation of the Constitution.

Similarly Stephens sought justification in a book that framed the Civil War as a fight against the conflicting principles that lay in the organic structure of state government. It was a dispute, he wrote, between the principles of federation, on the one hand, and centralism, or unification, on the other.

Being calm for the defeated Confederates not only gave them a chance to shape the memory of the nations at war; it also contributed to a climate of impunity that fueled violence against Blacks and their allies. Current observers have blamed the New Orleans massacre in 1866 in which a group of white mobsters attacked a group of mostly Black Unionists, leaving dozens dead and many more wounded in Johnsons that allowed the policies. in Reconstruction.

The blood is on his hands, the blood of innocent, honest citizens, who have committed no crime but the desire to protect themselves against the wrongdoing of the rebels, which he, Andrew Johnson, has criticized. of them, wrote The Chicago Tribune.

To explain Johnsons looseness, historian Eric Foner lists two factors. The first was Johnsons who sat deeply on racism, his belief that only white men should rule the South. The second is his ambition to serve a second term. Therefore, as Foner writes in Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, Johnson saw cooperation with the former Confederate elite as indispensable to the two interrelated goals of white supremacy in the South and his own. election as president.

Put a little oddly, Johnsons ’willingness to hold the former Confederates accountable was tempered by both ideology and party political realities. The planter class of the South may be dishonest, but it still represents the kind of citizenry that Johnson believes should lead, as well as the kind of voter he wants to attract.

This is an important point. The United States has never struggled to punish radicals who stand against hierarchy and domination. Whether you are a labor radical, Black revolutionary or left militant, to attempt to undermine existing forms of social and social relations or, at times, to even contact people who hold those ideas is to suppress state of the court. The two Red Scares of the 20th century are ample evidence of this fact.

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