Civil War and Reconstruction

Slavery Was Cause of Civil War SMALL
Civil War and Reconstruction

We Fought the Civil War to Preserve Slavery, Confederate Leaders Proclaimed

05/19/2023 Bruce Strom 2

The Confederate VP Stephens proclaimed:
“Our new government’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Stephens continues, “Our confederacy is founded upon principles in strict conformity with these laws” establishing slavery. “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner,’ the real ‘corner-stone,’ in our new edifice.” This is religious imagery, as Christ was proclaimed as the corner-stone of Christianity.

Furthermore, the Confederate VP Stephens proclaimed that the new Confederate “Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery as it exists among us, and the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” […]

General Longstreet and Reconstruction
Civil Rights

Terror During Reconstruction, White League Confronts General Longstreet and Union Army

02/10/2023 Bruce Strom 3

We will tell the stories of General Longstreet and the Union Major Merrill. General James Longstreet, a former Confederate general who had become a pariah in the South when he changed his party affiliation to Lincoln’s Republican Party, tried to prevent the insurrection in New Orleans. For his second posting during Reconstruction, Major Merrill attempted to reverse the insurrection of parishes on the outskirts of New Orleans. […]

Civil Rights

Chaos of Reconstruction, Terror After the Civil War

02/08/2023 Bruce Strom 1

Major Merrill says that he knew that the “Ku Klux Klan is much greater in numbers than is commonly supposed, and that a large number of the most respectable people in the county are more or less intimately connected with it. The debauched sentiment of the old slave-holding communities sees no great offense in whipping a negro for being a radical. The old sentiment is rife, where differences of opinion are settled by killing the man who dares to disagree with them.” […]

Civil War and Reconstruction

Why Were Union Soldiers in the Civil War Willing to Fight to Preserve the Union?

12/09/2022 Bruce Strom 3

Professor Gallagher opens his book on the Union War, “The loyal American citizenry fought a war that also killed slavery. In a conflict that stretched across four years and claimed more than 800,000 US casualties, the nation experienced huge swings of civilian and military morale before crushing Confederate resistance. Union always remained the paramount goal, a fact clearly expressed by Abraham Lincoln in speeches and other statements designed to garner the widest popular support for the war effort.” […]

Civil Rights

History of History of WEB Dubois’ Black Reconstruction, Challenging Lost Cause Myth and Dunning School

12/02/2022 Bruce Strom 4

The established dogma was that the Reconstruction Era following the Civil War was a dark period in American history, where black rule bred corruption and unwanted federal interference in the governments of the Deep South. WEB Du Bois counters by claiming that the Jim Crow Redemptionist Era following Reconstruction was the dark era when blacks lost the right to vote and any semblance of due process and fair play, that many blacks were, in effect, re-enslaved in a more brutal segregationist society, and that the Reconstruction was a time of greater democracy where the civil rights and liberties of all races and classes were respected. […]

Civil Rights

Slavery By Another Name, Convict Labor in the Jim Crow Deep South

08/12/2022 Bruce Strom 0

In this blog we will reflect on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, with the subtitle, The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. This book documents both on an individual level and historically how the convict labor system worked in the Deep South. These convict labor camps were often every bit as brutal as the Siberian gulag labor camps in Russia under Stalin, in both systems many of the prisoners died from overwork, neglect, abuse, and starvation. […]

Civil Rights

WEB Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, Essays on Alexander Crummel, Black Episcopal Priest, and Sharecropping

08/10/2022 Bruce Strom 0

How does WEB Dubois start his essay on the life of Alexander Crummell? By how he confronted the temptations and doubts that faced all talented black men in a time when whites could not comprehend that a black man could actually be a true intellectual, that he could think independently of his white overlords. WEB starts his essay, “This is the history of a human heart, the tale of a black boy who” “struggled with life that he might know the world and know himself,” fulfilling the instructions written on the Temple of Delphi so many millennia ago. […]

Civil War and Reconstruction

Civil War Struggle Through Paintings

04/29/2022 Bruce Strom 3

General Winfield Scott, brilliant strategic general and hero of the Mexican War, served under seven Presidents, but in the 1860’s he was in his seventies, and was so obese that he had to be hoisted on and off his horse with a crane. But he was still a sharp general, and his “Anaconda Plan” was the strategy that would win the war, and this Great Snake picture was printed in the newspapers across the country. 1861. This plan called for a naval blockade that strangled the commerce of the Confederacy, the Union forces seizing control of the Mississippi River, then Union forces marching through the heart of the Confederacy. General Scott predicted that 300,000 soldiers would be needed to defeat the Confederacy, which was less than half the size of the eventual Union Army, but it was shocking numbers at the beginning of the war, when the Union Army had fewer than twenty thousand soldiers. […]

Civil Rights

Ida B Wells, Journalist, Brave Woman, and Anti-Lynching Crusader

04/22/2022 Bruce Strom 5

Historically, lynchings were justified by the myth that black men were eager to rape white women, and that white womanhood needed to be protected. Spurred by her knowledge of the details of this lynching of a dear friend, Ida B Wells started to research the history of other lynchings, discovering that for most lynchings had no connection to any intimate acts, and where there was intimacy, the white woman consented, which was so repugnant that it enraged white men of the day. […]