RE DK CURRENT POST

"...Few historical forces and more powerful than bad consciences.  In the white South, it became essential in the decades after Appomattox to argue that the "war between the states" had been forced upon the southern states by the north, that it was not really about slavery, and that, fortunately, heroic southerners had preserved white supremacy after the war.  In the decades following the conflict southern politicians and northern Democrats managed to prevent Lincoln's birthday from ever becoming a national holiday, and agitated unsuccessfully to create a national holiday in honor of Lee.  They also, of course, established segregation and deprived their black citizens of equal rights...." DK

 

The history of the Civil War has had nothing to do with bad conscience, then or now, on either side, although many descendants of people in the North have lived to regret their ancestors having freed and then not transported the slaves. One might call that a sort of late blooming bad conscience about the stupidity of their ancestors. Let's just call it, nowadays, Northern and Western late blooming racism. 

 

It only really started to hit the North hard about 1960, about as long as Lincoln had predicted might be needed to solve the race problem he was about to create; but it didn't solve it, even in a hundred years, especially in Northern cities, it only began to fester there as well as always in the South.

 

Secession had been forced on the South by the election of Lincoln. War had always been Lincoln's choice, his concept of a solution to a gathering crisis, think S & H, necessary to face...

 

In the 2 decades after Appomattox, gangs of ignorant and obedient freed negroes were regularly herded by handlers to Southern polling places to support Republican candidates, candidates who themselves were often freed negroes who took their orders from above,  throughout the Union-occupied South. See J G Randall's account.

Those Republican radicals and their lackeys who ran the South had no conscience.... they didn't have to worry about a bad conscience.

Gradually the white Southerners took back from the Northern bosses and their black lackeys the reins of power in the South. That, only in the 1880s, is what became known as white supremacy.

Before that the South had been run by the North. That is why the radical Republicans had overturned Lincoln's, and Johnson's plans, and instituted black suffrage, black citizenship, and black politicians, enforced by Northern troops, in the South. They didn't do that in the North, because there were almost no blacks to use as voters.

Lincoln's position, which Johnson tried vainly to implement, had had no place for black suffrage or black citizenship. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, The First Complete, Unexpurgated Text

 

These Southern states were occupied and run for many years by Northern carpetbaggers, and Northern politicians and their southern scalawags.

 

You can pretend that this never happened, but then you might just as well deny the holocaust...