Second only to the Lost Cause in the traditional narrative of southern whites is the tyranny of Reconstruction. According to this meme a conquered, prostrate South was under the iron heel of utterly corrupt and venal military governors and Federal troops, carpet-baggers, scalawags and marauding negroes; and that the Ku Klux Klan was ultimately a desperate attempt at self-defense against these abuses.
Needless to say, this “Birth of a Nation” narrative has been- if you’ll pardon the term- deconstructed extensively since the Civil Rights era. Overwhelmingly the chief goal of southerners after the Civil War was to reduce the freedmen to a state of helotry, and the actions of the North to oppose this. But is this really all there was to it? Was “tyranny” solely having to accept blacks as legal and political equals, or was Reconstruction indeed accompanied by significant abuse of the southern white population?
To be sure, virtually all 19th-century American politics was at least semi-corrupt; and the Republican Party lost no time in leveraging its advantage over the Democrats with so many southern white men not having regained the right to vote. The North disbanded white militia forces (though still held the personal right to own and carry arms sacred), and in some cases the southern states were ruled by near-puppet legislatures. Abolition and high taxes after the war were ruinous to the planter class. Doubtless quite a few Northerners did go south after the war to line their pockets at the southerners’ expense. Even the 15th Amendment extending the vote to the former slaves can be seen as less a noble ideal and more a way to make every newly enfranchised freedman a guaranteed Republican vote.
So did a typical post-war southerner really have to fear being plundered, beaten or raped due to Reconstruction?
[Moderating]
While “what really happened” might be factual, whether what actually happened counts as “oppression” is a matter up for debate. I think this thread is a much better fit for GD.
A poor southern white had the same problems before the war as he did after - he was poor and rich folks took advantage of him (just as they did during the war). The goal of the former elites (the same ones who led the drumbeat for war, and were the leaders during the war) was to make sure that poor whites and freed slaves didn’t become allies (in spite of their common enemy) - and the propaganda about Northern oppression and Black outrages was the means to that end. In fact, freed Blacks remained in far greater danger than poor whites (see Memphis riots of 1866 - Wikipedia and New Orleans massacre of 1866 - Wikipedia, and many more events) from violence and fraud.
Soon after the war, black majorities were able to elect African Americans into office. Checking a few of their entries on the Wikipedia, I’m not seeing any particular notes that they were cruel or unfair to whites in any way. It might have happened but someone would need to point it out, who knows more on the subject. I’m not aware of it.
Regardless, the Ku Klux Klan formed and started to hound African Americans - especially, ones in power - and the South passed laws to prevent African Americans from taking office. The former lead to the Federal government passing the Ku Klux Klan Act, which empowered President Grant to send people down into the South to fight and arrest people who were terrorizing black individuals and families.
From the vantage of a member of the KKK, they were being oppressed. Personally, I don’t sympathize.
I don’t think so. Everybody wants somebody to look down on, and I think that’s the main source–some of it ongoing even today–for the hatred poor whites had toward blacks.
Oh, yes. This is the thesis of W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, that the planter class deliberately fostered racial hatred and white supremacy to distract lower-status whites - whom they generally looked down on - from their own economic exploitation.
Harper Lee illustrated this nicely in To Kill A Mockingbird - the upper-class whites of Maycomb are patronizingly approving of Tom Robinson and his family, but united in their disdain and disgust at Bob Ewell. Bob, for his part, hates the Maycomb establishment, but is by far the most virulent white supremacist in the novel. He’s poor, and ill-educated, and lives on the margins of society. He knows he’s “po’ white trash”, but at least he’s not black (although he’d use a different word).
You probably right - but even in the deep South there were a few pro-Union, anti-slavery white people. The Confederate government had also been unpopular during the war (for a lot of reasons), but the Lost Cause propaganda washed the leaders of guilt and pointed blame everywhere else.
Those “abuses” largely involved such heinous crimes as voting Republican and seeking education for one’s children. The K.K.K. burned black schools and churches and murdered educators (black and white). People were labeled “carpetbaggers” for simply helping or sympathizing with blacks.
The romanticized image of the K.K.K. defending oppressed whites and Southern values essentially dates to the 1890s and later (i.e. The Birth of a Nation). The reality was that the Klan engaged in thuggery and terrorism to preserve racial domination.
A good book on the subject is West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War by historian Heather Cox Richardson. She makes it clear that the vast majority of stories about Black-dominated legislatures oppressing white people are lies. Most of the people elected to office by Black voters in the early years were well-educated and experienced, and made great efforts to improve the lives of everyone in the South.
But as it is today with the modern GOP, rich people who feared losing their money, power and influence went out of their way to oppose everything the newly elected leaders were trying to do, and portrayed them as being corrupt, vile, and evil. And people bought it, just like now.
It has been awhile but there was many an outcry against the “High Security Space” being oppressing of players freedom. High Security Space meant that if you attacked another player, within like 10-15 seconds a large fleet would warp in and blow you up.
Some players hated that oppression.
However, as you can probably see, that ‘oppression’ was the force that kept them from oppressing others.
As someone in the forums quoted at the time… “It is amazing that the people the most crying out about freedom are the ones that are so willing to take it away from others”.
The first time I heard this word was in 9th grade Alabama History, shortly after we moved to Birmingham from Philadelphia (PA, not MS) in 1977. I don’t clearly remember the context, but I don’t think Reconstruction was portrayed in a positive light.
I’ve never heard this word before, and had to look it up. It’s an apt one, and I thank you for teaching it to me.
I read it all the time in history during the late '50s and early '60s in New York. While the North winning was a good thing, the history I learned was negative on those from the North who came to the South and silent on Blacks being elected to public office.
And yet it was taken seriously as far afield as Britain, where none other than C.S. Lewis invoked it in an essay of his, “Delinquents in the Snow” (collected in “God in the Dock”):
What I fear, however, is not, or not chiefly, sporadic out-breaks of individual vengeance. I am more afraid, our conditions being so like that of the South after the American Civil War, that some sort of Ku Klux Klan may appear and that this might eventually develop into something like a Right or Central revolution.