Neo-Secessionism in 2009

Gingrich makes states’ rights appeal in South
By Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times
February 29, 2012, 5:36 p.m.
Reporting from Atlanta—

With his presidential aspirations riding on support in the Deep South, (Republican candidate) Newt Gingrich opened his final one-week dash to the crucial Georgia primary on Wednesday with a states’ rights appeal laden with racial symbolism.
More on this story here.

This story brought to mind 2009, when a rash of politicians – mainly Southern, always Republican – made comments to the effect that their states would be better off if they seceded from the United States. For example, The Huffington Post reported that in Austin, Texas Governor Rick Perry “fired up an anti-tax “tea party” Wednesday with his stance against the federal government and for states’ rights as some in his U.S. flag-waving audience shouted, “Secede!”" Perry ran as a Republican candidate for this year’s presidential election, but dropped-out of the race in January after poor performances during candidate debates and disappointing finishes in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary.

In the 2010 Georgia gubernatorial race, several Republican candidates talked of secession during their primary campaigns. This brought a sharp rebuke from General David Poythress, who ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for Georgia governor. Poythress had this to say about politicians who would “cut and run from America”:

For years, Georgia’s 8th Grade students read in their history books about our state’s decision to secede from the United States back in 1861. Today, our students need only look at a daily newspaper to see that talk of secession isn’t just a thing of the past. In fact, four of the six Republican candidates said they would support Georgia seceding from the United States of America. This is outrageous.

This is absolutely disgraceful—it’s a slap in the face to every patriotic American, to anybody who has served under the American flag and to those brave Georgians who have fought and died for our country in Iraq…

What really offends me the most, is that none of these Republican secession candidates ever wore, for a single day, the uniform of our country, carried a weapon, or heard a shot fired in anger. Not ONE ever put their life on the line to protect our freedoms and liberty.

But they recklessly call for secession from America. They would in effect, ban the American flag and end the pledge of allegiance. They would say to the world that when they don’t get their way, they quit.

That’s just childish. That’s cowardice, not leadership… Real leadership means we work toward common sense solutions to protect American values, not just quit our country because we don’t agree with other Americans… United We Stand. Divided We Fall… Know this: when I’m the Governor of Georgia, I won’t cut and run from America… When I say the Pledge of Allegiance, I mean it.

 
What would Republicans of 1860-1865 say about Republicans today who speak of secessionism and states’ rights? Would they see this as “the party of Lincoln?”

John Trowbridge’s Visit to the Desolate South (Post-War Atlanta)

This illustration shows a group of freedmen in Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1865, holding a “street convention” to discuss their political status in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation.
Source: The South: A tour of its battlefields and ruined cities, a journey through the desolated states, and talks with the people, by John Trowbridge.
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In the summer of 1865, and in the following winter, I made two visits to the South, spending four months in eight of the principal States which had lately been in rebellion. I saw the most noted battle-fields of the war. I made acquaintance with officers and soldiers of both sides. I followed in the track of the destroying armies. I travelled by railroad, by steamboat, by stage-coach, and by private conveyance; meeting and conversing with all sorts of people, from high State officials to “low-down” whites and negroes; endeavoring, at all times and in all places, to receive correct impressions of the country, of its inhabitants, of the great contest of arms just closed, and of the still greater contest of principles not yet terminated.

So began John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916) in his book The South: A tour of its battlefields and ruined cities, a journey through the desolated states, and talks with the people. (The full, ridiculously long title of the book is The South: a tour of its battlefields and ruined cities, a journey through the desolated states, and talks with the people; being a description of the present state of the country, its agriculture, railroad, business and finances; giving an account of Confederate misrule, and of the sufferings, necessities and mistakes, political views, social condition and prospects, of the aristocracy, middle class, poor whites and Negroes; including visits to patriot graves and rebel prisons, and embracing special notes on the free labor system, education and moral elevation of the freemen, also, on plans of reconstruction and inducements to emigration; from personal observations and experience during months of Southern travel.)

Trowbridge wrote The South under commission of L. Stebbins, a Hartford, Connecticut, publisher. Trowbridge’s “tour” of the post-war South was one of several such first hand accounts of the region that were produced by the press. His book won praise for its impartial, fair-minded approach to the subject, and the detail and breadth of his study.

I purchased a copy of The South during a recent visit to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and found it an interesting and compelling read. The original version is in the public domain; it can be viewed by going here: http://www.archive.org/details/southtourofitsba7228trow

Below, I have provided an interesting excerpt from the book about post-war Atlanta. Large swaths of that city were devastated during Sherman’s march to the sea in late 1864, and the ruin was still evident when Trowbridge visited the area the following year. This excerpt touches on several subjects, including:
• the harshness of post-war life in the South, especially for freed blacks
• Union support among poor southern whites
• relations between blacks and poor whites in the South
• views on who was responsible for some of the ruin in Atlanta (this differs from the view that Sherman’s Union forces were to blame for all of the burning in the city)
• African American dialogue concerning their political future in the post-war South.
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From John Trowbridge’s The South:

IN AND ABOUT ATLANTA (Chapter LXIII)

A sun-bright morning did not transmute the town into a place of very great attractiveness. Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar and misery. The burnt streets were rapidly rebuilding; but in the mean while hundreds of the inhabitants, white and black, rendered homeless by the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels, which made the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of gypsies or Indians.

Some of the negro huts were covered entirely with ragged fragments of tin-roofing from the burnt government and railroad buildings. Others were constructed partly of these irregular blackened patches, and partly of old boards, with roofs of huge, warped, slouching shreds of tin, kept from blowing away by stones placed on the top. Notwithstanding the ingenuity displayed in piecing these rags together, they formed but a miserable shelter at the best. “In dry weather, it’s good as anybody’s houses. But they leaks right bad when it rains; then we have to pile our things up to keep ‘em dry.” So said a colored mother of six children, whose husband was killed “fighting for de Yankees,” and who supported her family of little ones by washing. “Sometimes I gits along tolerable; sometimes right slim; but dat’s de way wid everybody; — times is powerful hard right now.”

From ZoNation: Stars & Stripes Forever – Time to Lower the Confederate Flag

Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel is a video blogger at the conservative blog Town Hall Patriots. In this video, Zo takes a college student to task for putting a confederate flag in his dorm room. The student (who is African American) argued that he was just showing his Southern pride. But Zo says that the student should fly the Stars and Stripes, “the only flag that should matter in America.”

 

Ground Breaking for US Colored Troop Memorial Monument, March 4, 2012, in Lexington Park, Maryland

The Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions is inviting one and all to the Ground Breaking Ceremony for the United States Colored Troops (USCT) Memorial Monument to be installed in Lexington Park, Maryland. Lexington Park is in St Mary’s County, MD, and is 90 miles south of Baltimore, MD, and 65 miles south of Washington, DC.

The event will be held on Sunday, March 4, 2012, at 2:00 pm at John G. Lancaster Park, 21550 Willows Road, Lexington Park, Maryland. For information contact:
• Idolia Shubrooks – 301.863.2150
• Nathaniel Scroggins, President (UCAC) – 301.862.9635
• Shell Jackson – 240.431.8880

The USCT Memorial Monument will be dedicated and unveiled at 10:00 am on June 16, 2012 at the 2012 Juneteenth Celebration. Some prospective images of the monument are here and here.

The website for the Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions has more details about the Monument. This is an excerpt:

The Unified Committee for Afro-American Contributions (UCAC) Monument Committee has initiated an historical project to educate the citizenry and preserve local, state and national history by erecting a memorial monument to honor United States Colored Troops. It will recognize Congressional Medal of Honor recipients and all Union soldiers and sailors from St. Mary’s County who served during the Civil War. UCAC is working in partnership with the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW). Together we will bring the lives of these American heroes to the attention of the public, so that their sacrifices will never be forgotten.

The United States Colored Troops were regiments of the United States Army and Navy during the Civil War that were composed of African American soldiers and sailors.  Recruiting stations were set up at various places by the Union.  This action was taken despite the complaints of plantation owners who depended on slave labor for local agricultural needs.  In St. Mary’s County during the 1800s there were more than 6,500 slaves and over 600 were recruited as USCT to fight with the Union to end slavery in the United States. This history is a vital part of our local heritage, and this project will create a legacy which will serve to educate the community and preserve our history for future generations.

We are proud that St. Mary’s County produced two USCT recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Pvt. William H. Barnes and Sgt. James H. Harris. These sons of St. Mary’s County were awarded the Medal of Honor for their gallantry in the Battle of Chaffin’s Farm also known as the Battle of New Market Heights (Sept. 1864) in Varina, Henrico County, Virginia.

Nationally recognized sculptor Gary Casteel will build the monument.  Mr. Casteel’s work is highly regarded and may be seen in collections of the National Park Service, state and local governments, corporations and private enterprises.  Visit Mr. Casteel’s website for more information regarding this talented artist:www.garycasteel.com.  The site for the monument has been donated by St. Mary’s County in John G. Lancaster Park in Lexington Park, Maryland.

Hat tip to Yulanda Burgess at usctbrigade@yahoogroups.com for the info.

Scenes from the 2011 Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade

USCT Reenactors at the 2011 Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade. Several of the female reenactors are from FREED (Female Re-Enactors of Distinction), a reenactors group based in Washington, DC.

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is the site of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War. As a result of the three day battle, lasting from July 1 to July 3, 1863, almost 8,000 men are estimated to have died, and another 38,000 were wounded, captured, or missing. (Some estimates put total casualties – men killed, wounded, captured, and missing – as high as 51,000.) On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln gave this speech at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, which has famously become known as the Gettysburg Address:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The dedication event is commemorated annually on Remembrance Day. The official date of Remembrance Day is November 19, during which a ceremony is held at the National Cemetery. On the Saturday of Remembrance Day week, a parade of Union and Confederate soldiers is held in the city of Gettysburg. Thousands of Civil War reenactors participate, and this is considered one of the largest reenactor events in the northeast.

These are some pictures from the 2011 Gettysburg Remembrance Day Parade. This year, the parade date was the same date as Remembrance Day – November 19. It was sunny and cool, and a great day for holding the parade.

The person on the left is Dr. Franklin Smith, who heads the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, DC.

I believe the man to the far left is James Price, who publishes The Sable Arm, a blog about the United States Colored Troops.

Roger Williams University, Nashville,TN – Academic class c. 1899

Roger Williams University – Nashville, Tenn.-Academic class (1899)
Source: Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-126752; see here for more details
Fashion Note: Most of the men have their hair parted in the middle; this was a common hair style at the time

After the Civil War, freedmen exhibited an insatiable desire for education. Throughout the South, schools, institutes, colleges, and universities sprang up to provide places of learning for ex-slaves. These institutions might have any of the following:
• an education or “normal” school, to train teachers
• an industrial school, to provide vocational and craft training
• a theological school, to prepare students for the ministry
• an agricultural school, for instruction in farming skills and practices
• an academic school, for learning in the arts and sciences.

The distingushed-looking young people in the photo are from the academic class of Roger Williams University, Nashville, Tennessee, circa 1899. Post-war Nashville was an appropriate for freedmen schools. During the war, the city’s black population went from under 4,000 to over 12,000, mainly as a result of slaves fleeing their masters or the ravages of the war. This count of blacks does not include any number of United States Colored Troops who might have been in the city. (Tennessee provided 20,000 men to the USCT, the third most of any state.) Many of these migrants or soldiers stayed in the city after the war.

Roger Williams University began as a school for Baptist teachers, but it expanded over time. As noted in the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture,

One of four freedmen’s colleges in Nashville, Roger Williams University began as elementary classes for African American Baptist preachers in 1864. Classes were held in the home of Daniel W. Phillips, a white minister and freedmen’s missionary from Massachusetts. By 1865 the classes had moved to the basement of the First Colored Baptist Mission.

In 1866 the “Baptist College” was officially named the Nashville Normal and Theological Institute under the auspices of New York’s American Baptist Home Mission Society (ABHMS). A year later, the school moved from old Union army barracks on Cedar and Spruce streets to a two-story frame building at Park and Polk Streets..

Soon after granting its first bachelor’s degree, the Nashville Normal and Theological Institute… started a new campus in 1874-75 (near) Vanderbilt University… African Americans held faculty positions and served on the board of trustees. In 1886 Roger Williams expanded the curriculum to include a master’s degree program.

I’ll talk some more about Roger Williams University in my next post.

Dr. John Rock, 1858: “The black man is not a coward… Of course they will fight.”

Dr. John Rock
Source: Harper’s Weekly, February 25, 1865; from Wikipedia

Dr. John Rock knew a war was coming. And he had no doubt: his people were ready to strike a blow.

John Rock was an American renaissance man. Born in 1825 to free black parents in New Jersey, he would move to Philadelphia and then Boston, becoming a teacher, dentist, doctor, lawyer, abolitionist, and orator along the way. Among his many accomplishments: he was the first black attorney allowed to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court. To both blacks and whites, he was surely seen as a man of high standing.

On March 5, 1858, Dr. Rock delivered a speech in Boston as part of the annual Crispus Attucks Day observance organized by Boston’s black abolitionists in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. That decision infamously stated that the black race was “so far inferior they… had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But John Rock felt inferior to no man.

Rock shared the platform that day with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker, leading figures of the American abolitionist movement. Many abolitionists eschewed violence as a means of challenging slavery, and avoided references to violence in their writing and speeches. But the language of the Dred Scott decision amounted to fighting words, and Rock would have his say.

Rock’s speech is notable for its prediction of a civil war, and the prominent role that blacks would play in it; its expression of black pride; its call for black self-improvement; and its subtle or overt wit and humor. But mainly, it rails against the idea that the negro lacked the courage and will to seek his own freedom; this was a degradation that Rock could not tolerate. His talk appears below, with a minor abridgment. The whole speech is here.
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Ladies and Gentlemen: You will not expect a lengthened speech from me tonight. My health is too poor to allow me to indulge much in speechmaking. But I have not been able to resist the temptation to unite with you in this demonstration of respect for some of my noble but misguided ancestors.

White Americans have taken great pains to try to prove that we are cowards. We are often insulted with the assertion, that if we had had the courage of the Indians or the white man, we would never have submitted to be slaves. I ask if Indians and white men have never been slaves? The white man tested the Indian’s courage here when he had his organized armies, his battlegrounds, his places of retreat, with everything to hope for and everything to lose.

The position of the African slave has been very different. Seized a prisoner of war, unarmed, bound hand and foot, and conveyed to a distant country among what to him were worse than cannibals; brutally beaten, halfstarved, closely watched by armed men, with no means of knowing their own strength or the strength of their enemies, with no weapons, and without a probability of success. But if the white man will take the trouble to fight the black man in Africa or in Hayti, and fight him as fair as the black man will fight him there—if the black man does not come off victor, I am deceived in his prowess. But, take a man, armed or unarmed, from his home, his country, or his friends, and place him among savages, and who is he that would not make good his retreat? “Discretion is the better part of valor”… but for a man to resist where he knows it will destroy him, shows more fool-hardiness than courage.

There have been many Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Americans enslaved in Africa, but I have never heard that they successfully resisted any government. They always resort to running indispensables. The courage of the Anglo-Saxon is best illustrated in his treatment of the negro. A score or two of them can pounce upon a poor negro, tie and beat him, and then call him a coward because he submits. Many of their most brilliant victories have been achieved in the same manner.

Our true and tried friend, Rev. Theodore Parker said, in his speech at the State House, a few weeks since, that “the stroke of the axe would have settled the question long ago, but the black man would not strike.” Mr. Parker makes a very low estimate of the courage of his race, if he means that one, two or three millions of those ignorant and cowardly black slaves could, without means, have brought to their knees five, ten, or twenty millions of intelligent brave white men, backed up by a rich oligarchy. But I know of no one who is more familiar with the true character of the Anglo-Saxon race than Mr. Parker. I will not dispute this point with him, but I will thank him or any one else to tell us how it could have been done. His remark calls to my mind the day which is to come, when one shall chase a thousand, and two put ten thousand to flight.

But when he says that “the black man would not strike,” I am prepared to say that he does us great injustice. The black man is not a coward. The history of the bloody struggles for freedom in Hayti, in which the blacks whipped the French and the English, and gained their independence, in spite of the perfidy of that villainous First Consul, will be a lasting refutation of the malicious aspersions of our enemies.