Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pecaana Show.
I'm here with George Bagbee. How are you doing, George,
I'm doing well.
Speaker 2: I've been traveling a lot today and I'm back at
home again and ready to talk reconstruction.
Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome, first time on the show. Please tell everybody
a little bit about yourself, tell them your story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I call myself George Bagbee. I am a content creator.
I'm a guest on a lot of other people's shows,
and I've got a YouTube channel on which I've recorded
a lot of readings. That's just what I do mostly
on my YouTube channel. I have a small press that
I've started called Tall Men Books. You can get more
information about that through my pinned posts on my Twitter handle.
My twitter handle is at tall Men Books. I've republished
or initiated the first publication of six books now with
several more in the works. My focus so far has
been mostly on the reconstruction of the Southern States after
the Civil War. So my first book that I republished
was Walter L. Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama,
and I have published another number of other books on
the subject.
Speaker 1: Awesome, awesome, Well, that's what we're here to talk about today.
We're going to talk I want you to, you know,
talk about reconstruction, and we're going to get the history
of that, the background behind it, and we're going to
lead up to the reaction that some men in the
South decided to take. So why didn't you tell us
a little bit about what the conditions were right after
the war ended?
Speaker 2: Indeed, well, the conditions immediately following the war are extremely
uncertain and quite dire in most Southern communities. So let
me let me outline to what it's like. The South
has virtually no cities, with the exception of New Orleans.
New Orleans is exceptional for so many different reasons. It's
that's a sizable city. But the rest of Southerners live
out in rural conditions and are engaged directly in agriculture.
That is, the vast majority of the Southern population. The
vast majority of white Southerners own farms up until the
Civil War. This is an important thing to understand. We
have a competing narrative about American history that was popularized
by the genius the travel writer and landscape architect of
Frederick Law Olmsted. Frederick Law Olmsted traveled around the Nabellum
South and popularized a mistaken idea that white Southerners could
be divided into two groups, and those were the aristocratic
landlord lords of all creation, who lived in palaces and
owned hundreds of slaves apiece, and the poor white trash
who predominated in the rural districts. That's a mistaken idea
about the Nbellum South. The vast majority of white Southerners
were what we might describe as small holding yeoman farmers.
We know from the eighteen sixty census, which gives us
a huge amount of detailed information about this period. We
know from the eighteen sixty census that somewhere between twenty
and twenty five percent of Southern whites, that's just the
whites owned slaves. Of that number, a small percentage in
the single digits are what we might describe as planters.
So those are the lords of all creation, and also
the very famous Southern elites that were statesmen and military
leaders and things like that. People like Andrew Jackson and
Thomas Jefferson were of that planter group. So they're a
very important group, and they did tend to own large
numbers of slaves, but the vast majority, vast majority of
Southerners were just small farmers who owned their land outright
after the war. Initially, the condition of the slaves is
in question until the reconstituted Southern governments ratify the Thirteenth Amendment,
and the thirteenth Amendment ends slavery in mid eighteen sixty five.
Up until that point, there is an awful lot of
speculation that there is going to be some kind of
compensated emancipation or some kind of colonization effort headed by Washington, DC,
some plan for the freedmen and their future that never materializes.
There is never any plan. What happens is they are emancipated,
and then everyone tries to decide what happens next, and
this results in an awful lot of conflict and dissatisfaction.
The visceral impact of the war is that somewhere somewhere
around one quarter of the Southern male population of military
age is dead. In eighteen sixty five, A quarter of
the white male military age population is dead. Another twenty
percent or so are wounded and returned home they've survived
their wounds. A great number of those are amputees, so
we're talking about at minimum, the loss of about forty
percent of the of the useful labor of the white population.
That there's argument about some of these numbers, but that's
that's a modest survey. I'm I'm low balling this.
Speaker 1: That starts crossing over into twentieth century numbers where you'll
see thirty percent of a pop of the male population
just gone.
Speaker 2: Indeed, it's it's absolutely devastating. Another another big problem that
pops up afterwards is the radical dispossession of a lot
of the small property owners. So the fact that the
elites get dispossessed is not very surprising because they bet
their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor on independence and they lost.
So the elites property, their mansions, their bank accounts, their
portable possessions, all of those things get seized as a
matter of course in the war. But what happens after
the war is very drastic. It's the gutting of the
middle class in the South, basically the confiscation of the capital,
most of which is held in land. Not to say
that the slave the end of slavery and the uncompensated
emancipation is also so a massive blow at southern capital.
I'm just kind of bypassing that here. What happens immediately
after the war is the federal government imposes four years
of back taxes on the property owners. So this is
this affects the white farmers predominantly and those that cannot pay,
you know, and this is an extremely tall order for
most of them, being that their sons are dead or
they have their limbs amputated, they can't bring wealth out
of the land. And then there's the portion of them
that had slaves that are accustomed. You know, they have
a track of land and the way to get wealth
out of it is to work the slaves on it.
That's not working for them anymore that they don't have
that labor relationship worked out, and this is extremely inefficient
at this time. So that means that a huge number
of farms go up for tax sales. In the first
couple of years after the war, you have a massive
movement of the white population from freeholding farmers into people
whose only asset is their ability to labor for wages.
So you see the proletarization of a massive number of
whites in the South, and this in effect puts them
on the same economic level as the freedmen. And this
is an important thing to understand because previous to the war,
seventy five to eighty percent of white property owners and
their and their family members Okay, I'm counting in their
women and children in that figure. Like seventy five to
eighty percent of white Southerners didn't own slaves. They lived
on independent farms, the vast majority of them. There is
a subset that are squatters, that are vega bonds that
move from place to place and live in the mountains,
don't necessarily have title to the land that they're on.
There is always a group of people like that, but
they are a minority. There's another minority that are working
people that work for wages, that have useful skills. Most
of these people are in cities exempting them. The vast
majority of White Southerners are farmers. They are reduced to
working for wages. Now, another one of the problems in
the post war South is that all of the banks
have failed. Every bank in the South fails in eighteen
sixty five. So I try to point this out to
folks when I take them on tours. I will walk
through the financial district in the French Quarter in New
Orleans where all the Antebellum banks were, and the buildings
are all still there. It's a very interesting street corner.
And I described to them the importance of these banks
in an agricultural society and kind of the disproportionate role.
Strangely enough, considering Southern attitude, the Jeffersonian attitude towards banks,
they don't like banks. They are very suspicious of the
activities at banks. Banks are nevertheless an extremely important element
in an agricultural society where the majority of the population
only sees profit once a year at harvest time. Then,
as now, farmers are disproportionately reliant on credit for their
day to day operations. They aren't like working people that
get paid weekly or monthly or bi monthly or whatever
it is. They don't have money flowing through so often. Now,
this made them averse to a consumer sort of economy,
because they don't have a lot of money flowing through.
Like people out on the farm far away from a
city might not ever handle money. It was quite possible
if you lived as an independent farmer, that you would
very seldom or never handle currency. You might you might,
uh you know, settle your accounts once a year when
you went to the market with your crop in the city.
So but nevertheless, they were relying on credit. They relyingt
relying on lines of credit. So at the end of
the war, the failure of all the banks meant that
the entire population was reduced to a barter economy. At
the exact same time, the entire population loses access to credit,
has no financial institutions they can work with. Most of
them have lost all their capital. Unless they've managed to
hold onto the farm by hooker by crook, or they've
buried gold in their backyard, most of them have no capital.
And this is the precise moment at which the United
States as a unified entity is totally embracing a free
labor economy where everyone is supposed to be receiving wages
for services rendered. That doesn't work. That is highly dissatisfying
to everyone involved. What that meant was that the proletariat,
the people who only had labor to exchange for their livelihood,
they don't have any other capital. They don't have land.
They have to make contractual arrangements to work on a farm,
to work for someone who owns a farm for a
long period of time, not for a week, not for
a month, but for a harvest season, for a whole
season until after the harvest, and they they don't get
wages at the time of the harvest. Instead, they get
a portion of the profits of the harvest, so they
have to market it and it's dependent on what the
crop is going to sell for. In exchange for that
contractual arrangement, they basically get a form of a form
of labor very analogous to slavery, with several several bad
features that weren't there in slavery, to be quite frank.
For instance, you have people that are reliant upon you
that cannot perform labor. You have young children, you have
a you have an amputee son who's a war veteran,
he lost his legs or something. He can't perform another
day's work in his life. He's reliant upon you. You
have a super annuated relative in your in your family,
you have your your grandmother who lives with you, who's
reliant upon you. All right, in slavery, they are all
accounted for taking care of I know, I know that
people get really been out of shape about this. Don't
take my word for it. Just go read about it.
Go read eugenejen A Vesey. Go read Role Jordan Roll,
Go read Stanley and Ingerman Time on the Cross. Go
read Old Rich Phillips American Negro slavery. Go read about
how the institution of slavery worked. People that were injured
as slaves couldn't be killed. That was against the law,
and it was treated as murder. All right, Just because
your slave gets injured or gets sick, you still have
to take care of him. When your slave gets old,
you still have to take care of them. There are examples,
are really weird examples of people selling a super anniated
slave and giving a stipend to the buyer, so it's
actually a reverse sort of transaction. Instead of the buyer
giving the seller money, the seller is actually giving the
buyer money because cost money to maintain the life of
the slave. We have examples like that. Normally it's impossible
to get rid of an old slave or an injured slave.
You just have to take care of them. So under slavery,
they have housing, they have food, they have some measure
of care and provision whether or not they can do
the work. In the system of sharecropping, if you can't
do the work, you get no benefits. Therefore, sharecroppers that
have dependents of the amputee son, the super annuated grandmother,
they have a big drain on their resources. So in
sharecropping they would get a cabin, not surprisingly, it was
probably a former slave cabin. They get rations, not surprisingly,
this is identical to the former slave rations, and they
get less benefits. And if you get injured on the job, well,
hopefully you've got a family member that cares whether you
starve to death, and they will take you into their
hut and they will feed you whatever rations they can spare.
For this reason, very interestingly, in the Federal Writers Project
in the nineteen thirties, when the Roosevelt administration sends journalists
out to interview former slaves and ask them about their lives,
you get a lot of very interesting information from these
oral accounts. These are very elderly slaves, former slaves at
that point. They frequently talk about the period of reconstruction
as a time where they're very happy to be free.
But they also speak of the time as worse than
slavery economically, far more stressful, more uncertainty, things like that.
So sharecropping, sharecropping is a dreadful situation. It's important to
understand that the vast majority of the former slaves are forced.
I don't think it's I don't think it's wrong to
use the term forced, at least in an economic sense.
If they did not want to starve, they had to
enter into one of these contractual labor agreements that many
of them thought as worse than slavery. And from a
certain perspective, we might say that's that's reasonable to think
of it that way. But also the vast not vast majority,
but sixty to seventy percent of the white population is
reduced to that status as well. All Right, so they formally,
before the war, we're talking about seventy five eighty percent
the white population own their own farms and are not
engaged in slavery. After the war, sixty to seventy percent
of them become sharecroppers. So this is a massive, a
massive reduction in economic status. Okay, enough of enough of
the labor problems. Suffice to say that it's so dissatisfying
that a great number of the freedmen who are formerly
slaves are inclined to leave their labor agreements when they
see what the conditions are like. And given that they've
been filled with all sorts of promises about life and
freedom and the advantages of a free economy working for wages.
Of course, no one in the North can imagine a
free economy without WI ages, no one in I guess
nobody in the world had really done much of that before.
In an agricultural society like the South. There's so much
about that that doesn't make any sense, But no one
was really thinking about how it was going to work
at the time. They said, no, it must happen now
for humanitarian purposes. We don't have time to plan. So
they got what they asked for, and then with these
problems result, a lot of these freedmen leave their their
contracted conditions of employment. Now they also can't sign a contract.
Most of them are making marks, all right, they're making
an X, and there's some kind of some some places
they try to notarize this and stuff like that. There's
a certain legal procedure that's possible. But this is also
all going on, you know, in very remote locales through
the South, which is not it's not easy accessible. So
they're wandering away and leaving the landholders in a terrible situation.
So the ones that are that we're able to hold
onto the land overwhelmingly white, virtually all of them white,
and who else is in the picture. At this point,
you have a really important group of new white Southerners
that we refer to as carpetbackers. Now it's another term
that people get all bent out of shape about. Let
me explain. A carpetbacker is a Northerner who comes south
during or immediately after the war to take advantage of
the circumstances in the post war South. And I would
like to I would like to acknowledge the benefits of this. Initially,
the South is berift of capital. It is extraly important
that we have investors coming in who can pay wages,
who can afford to rebuild things without banks involved. They
they come down from all over the place, they have
a little money, they show up at a tax sale,
they can make aggressive bids, and they can buy former
cotton plantations for pennies on the dollar, and they can
afford to pay the weight the wages of the operation,
and they're able to keep the economy of the South running.
So I want to acknowledge that if it if the
carpetbaggers had not come south when they did. Had not
injected the capital into the economy and gotten the farms
working again when they did, then we would have seen
far worse famine in the South. There would have been
a farm worse offering.
Speaker 1: Are you going to go over or do you know
who would have been the money behind some of these people.
I mean, it sounds like a It sounds like an
eighteen hundreds version of like what black Rock is doing now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well, they become landlords all around the South. They
start some very prosperous businesses. I know down here in Louisiana,
carpetbaggers come in and restart the sugar industry, which is
extremely profitable and requires industrial plant to operate. You have
to grind and granulate the sugar on the premises of
the plantation. Even today, the sugar mills are in close
proximity and well spaced out in sugar country. You can't
take the sugar very far before you have to process it.
It spoils too quickly. So they rebuild this stuff and
they get this industry working again, and because it's such
a high profit industry, they're able to pay the workers'
wages down there, so they become a new capitalist class
in the South. But they've got another advantage as well.
Not only are they economically ambitious, but they are the
only white people in the South that are allowed to
hold office thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment
says that former officials and military leaders in the Confederate
States are not allowed to hold office. And this means
that anyone that has any connection, and no one has
to dig very far to find connections. Virtually all Southerners
were engaged in the purchase of war bonds. Virtually all
white Southerners were engaged in the war effort. If not
their own sons going off to war, then it was
their you know, it was their nephew, it was their cousin.
It doesn't take much of an accusation. I don't I
don't really know how that would work legally to connect
these people to the Confederate war effort. But they're they're
basically disenfranchised from participating. And and to make it even
even worse, once Congress takes over, once the radical Republicans
in Congress take over reconstruction, once they they initiate the
impeachment of President Johnson, which is its own its own story.
The South is treated as conquered military territory and subjected
to martial law. And the Southern States are divided into
military districts, and though they they have a nominal civil government,
the military governors who are all former Union generals, and
sometimes they're brutal Union generals, like Philip Sheridan who burned
up the Shenandoah Valley. Philip Sheridan was put in charge
of Louisiana and Texas, which was military District number seven.
Maybe I forget the numbers of the districts. Is much
easier to say Louisiana and Texas. But Philip Sheridan was
put in charge of that area, and he could overrule
any executive in the area. He could overrule the governors,
he could overrule the mayors, he could over overrule any
any executive decision maker in the area. So he was
ultimately the guy in charge. And they didn't have trial
by jury, they didn't have habeas corpus. This is all.
This is all very important. I remember when when I
was I had a fellowship with the World War Two
Museum and we all got sent to Hawaii. I was
part of various discussions and lessons about martial law in Hawaii.
And I had all of these leftist public school teachers
moaning and groaning about how civil rights got suspended in
Hawaii for so long during the war with the Japanese,
and they were so paranoid about Japanese Americans. And I said, well,
you're forgetting another episode of this reconstruction, and that they
had never heard that there was martial law in the
South after the Civil War that lasted so long. It
lasted until eighteen seventy six, when the last pieces of
it were finally dismantled.
Speaker 1: But what was the name of the act? I can't remember.
It was named after a German I think what was
the name of the act that basically made all property
part of the state. I used to know it by heart.
Speaker 2: I don't know this one.
Speaker 1: It's been years, been years years. I'll try and look
it up while you go on.
Speaker 2: Okay, all right, So we've we've talked a lot about
the legal, the industrial circumstances of the post war South.
Things are extremely bad and also very uncertain. You may
remember UH Lincoln very famously in his second inaugural address,
he says that he wants to bind up the country's
wounds with malice towards none and charity for all. And
he also he also makes a couple of important communications
the month of his assassination when he's talking about pardoning Confederates,
he's talking he was he was always very consistent about
the Confederate armies disbanding and the Southern States sending their
representatives back to Congress, the idea being that they never
left the Union. They're still in the Union. Secession is impossible. Okay.
This is one of the one of the things that
makes studying reconstruction maddening and very irritating for virtually everyone.
And I understand the frustration people have here, but I
also think it's very important and I'm trying to I'm
trying to popularize it. People need to know about these things.
It's that it doesn't make any sense the way that
it was done. It really doesn't make any sense. The
Southern States, under the authority of Congress, after they've defanged
President Johnson, they're treated as conquered military territory, and they
the representatives voted on by those Southern governments. Immediately after
the war, they immediately elect former military and Confederate officials
because those are the leaders of the voting population of
the South. The men in uniform and in office in
the Southern, in the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War,
are the actual leadership of the South. When they get
sent to Congress in eighteen sixty five, the radical Republicans
who've been running everything in the federal government for the
last four years and are extremely bitter and paranoid about
the assassination of Lincoln, they deny them their seats and
send them home. Now, this is a certain level, this
makes good sense because I mean, I mean, we can
understand why this is happening. Georgia elected former Vice President
Alexander Hamilton Stevens as their senator, and we expect him
to join Thatadius Stevens and Senator Sumner of Massachusetts. Is
he actually going to sit in the same body as
those men. No, they will murder him before they allow
that to happen. And so it's no surprise that they
close the door for these people. But does that mean
that the Southern states actually left the Union? Well, it's
an academic question. In short, they're treated as conquered military territory.
Now we get to a very interesting part. Let's shift
gears at this point in time Republican leadership with people
like the famous, the famous Hater of Congress, Thaddeus Stevens,
the brutal and bloodthirsty Thus Stevens of Pennsylvania, and people
like Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who Preston Brooks famously caned
back before the war, and other radicals Benjamin Butler, the
famous General Benjamin Butler, famous famously nicknamed Beast Butler by
the indignant women of the South who he had insulted
and given his men licensed to sexually assault in New Orleans.
He becomes Senator from Massachusetts as well. These vindictive radical
Republicans start making utterly preposterous and irresponsible speeches claiming that
the white population of the South, the disloyal ex Confederates,
our traders deserve the Hangman's news, should be expelled from
the territory, should be forced to immigrate. They are openly
talking of ethnically cleansing conquered Southern territory and seizing all
the property and transferring that to the freedman. In doing so,
they will make the loyal freedmen a permanent Republican voting
base in the South and the Party of the Union.
According to Thaddeus Stevens, who spoke very openly about this,
the Party of the Union will be the American Party,
dominating all of the federal government going forward with that
permanent stock of voters. Now, this is very interesting because
we talk these days about ethnic loyalties of demographics to
political parties, and this is something that is that is
talked up quite a bit at that time. So it's
very useful to look at that and to look at
promises and patronage that are involved with that, even during reconstruction.
It's a very useful object lesson however, and this is
a very important point. This is an existential sort of pledge.
The continued existence of an entire distinct demographic in the
United States is threatened by this proposal. Now they are
not talking about exterminating them, they're talking about forcing them
to immigrate, but that is ethnic cleansing. And how many
people might die under these circumstances, being that they're already
facing famine. The Union Army is already distributing rations military
rations to the civilian population in several southern regions. Interestingly,
and I don't want to get sidetracked on this, the
reconstruction Governor of Mississippi later on, several years later, estimates
that a significant portion of the black population of Mississippi
starves to death in the years following the end of
the war. That's still a big open question. We don't
really understand what's going on there. We don't have those stories.
We don't know. Over in South Carolina, something like one
tenth of the black population of South Carolina disappears between
eighteen sixty and eighteen seventy. That's tens of thousands of individuals.
There is some reason to think that they starved at
some point, either during the war or immediately after. It
wouldn't be at all surprising to discover that is true.
But the problem is we don't know that for sure,
so we can't say that for sure. But we do
know that there are large portions of the black population
that disappear in the records in this period. They were
there in the census of eighteen sixty, they aren't there
in the census of eighteen seventy, and we do not
know what happened to them. We assume they're dead or
they're across the country under another name, which is possible
but also unlikely. Anyway, Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner. They talk
about forty acres and a mule for every freedman. That
would require the confiscation of property in the South, the
dispossession of ex confederates in the South. The radical Republicans
say this is all justified based on treating ex confederates
as traders. They have no rights, they have no citizenship.
We don't have to charge them in a court of
law and do a legal procedure. We can just confiscate. However,
most irresponsibly, most cynically, and I must insist on this point.
This was a cynical ploy. This was a political move
to win a short term loyalty of the black Southern population.
Because none of these irresponsible cretns who promised these things
in Congress, people like Benjamin Butler, people like that Eus Stevens,
none of these bloodthirsty cretns ever actually put a bill
to vote on the subject. So if it was a
serious political proposal and they actually wanted to do it,
they actually wanted to do like the purgation of Kulaks
in the South, they never put their money on the
table and actually made a serious proposal to do it.
And this meant that it was nothing more than a
demagogic rumor of incredible political consequences. All right, So the
next stage, if you will, the Republican Party. During the war,
in eighteen sixty two, a bunch of elite Philadelphians form
a fraternity. I like telling stories of fraternities. It's an
awful lot of fun. This one still exists. It's called
the Union League, and it's in Philadelphia, and it's one
of the premier elite fraternities that still exists today. I
understand they can keep their membership of a certain caliber
through their very high initiation prices. If you want to
join today, it might cost you fifty grand or something
just as an initiation fee. So they keep the riff
raff out that way. But they have an awesome clubhouse
and things like that. It's pretty cool just as a fraternity.
But they were they called themselves the Union League. They
were a Republican club, and they were formed as a
fraternal aid association to help Union veterans and to support
the war effort, in particular Lincoln's reelection, and then during
reconstruction they became a very important force of Republican politics
in the South, which is an important sidetrack. The Republican
Party did not exist in the South in eighteen sixty
It did not have any organization in the South. Now,
some people say, well, if they could have just grabbed
enough people to formally incorporate as the Republican Party in
southern states, then Abraham Lincoln would have gotten a few
votes in the Southern states. Well, maybe so, but they
didn't even have that level of organization to recognize the
Republican Party in states like Virginia, in states like Georgia,
in the states that became the Confederacy, and border states
like Kentucky. Abraham Lincoln did not receive a single vote
in eighteen sixty one or in eighteen sixty when he
ran that he was inaugurated in sixty one. There was
no organization on the ground. The Union League had the resources,
had the connections with the elites that they planted the
Republican Party on the ground in the Southern states by
organizing two, well, let's say three important groups in the South.
Number one the newly enfranchised freedmen. No surprise. Okay, hey
y'all sign up here, We're gonna get you forty acres
in a mule We're gonna seize the property of the
ex Confederate whites and we're gonna give it to you,
and you'll all be farmers. Okay, So it's a massive
land grab, redistribution plant, massive wealth transfer plant. Okay. Second
group is carpetbaggers from the North, many of whom are
already Republicans, but not all. Okay, I'm interested in giving
the carpetbaggers their due. All right, we can understand why
Southerners hate it and load them, why it became a byword,
et cetera, et cetera. I want to acknowledge all that,
but I also want to give them their due. They
weren't all Republican radicals, and they did serve a useful
economic role. Okay. Third is what we call scalawags. The
scalawags are Republicans or they become Republicans. They are ex
Confederate Republican converts who join the Republican effort in this
on the state level and later on the federal level.
In the s Outh. Among them are some really interesting people.
Uh people like General James Longstreet, uh Lee's trust trustee
lieutenant people like oh, I'm forgetting his name now, Edward
Porter Alexander there he is the chief of Artillery in
the Army of Northern Virginia. Other other people, General William
Mahone of Virginia, one of the great stalwarts of the
Siege of Petersburg, becomes a Republican during reconstruction. We call
these these men scallawags. And that is another term of
of uh disapprobation. Uh another slur. It's like it's like
a synonym FI trader. Okay, Uh. Southerners who become Republican Okay,
So those are the people the Union League is appealing to.
The Union League organizes here are military groups across the South.
To make things even more harry, the federal garrisons in
the Southern States are made of mostly United States colored troops.
So the federal soldiers that intervene on behalf of the
Republican state governments in the South. Now that the ex
Confederate Democrats have been proscribed and forbidden to participate the
state governments, the local governments become Republican dominated. If you
could just imagine what would happen in a place where
you have outlawed the opposition party. They cannot vote, they
cannot run for office. They must apply for a presidential
pardon to participate. They have no habeas corpus, they have
have no trial by jury. If they have a problem,
they have to go to the Union general who's in
charge of the court's martial, who you know as a Confederate.
They killed that union general's nephew, they killed that Union
general's brother. They've got a lot of bad blood, and
he is not going to give them a fair shake.
And under these circumstances, everyone would agree that's that's natural.
More or less, you could not expect a fair shake
in this system. And the freedmen who own nothing, who
are eighty to ninety percent illiterate, who do not know
the law, who do not have any tradition of civic responsibility,
they haven't been trained for this role. And now I'm
not here to disparage them, Okay, I'm here just to
try to explain what's going on. They are now the electorate,
they have the ability to elect officials. Now let me
let me explain what this results in. Not only is
the Union League arming freedmen, organizing them into paramilitary groups
led by demagogic carpetbackers. So Northern nurse who have just
come down, just bought property, can run for office. Are
now leading armed groups of black freedmen with the with
the rallying cry forty acres in a mule for every freedman,
let's seize it from the white farmers and the government.
The nominal government is made up of Republicans voted in
by the freedmen. The the white electorate who ran everything
up to this point are disenfranchised, are forbidden to participate,
are turned around and sent home. When they are elected nominally,
they are They're put in this this alarming, terrifying situation
where they are listening to speeches in their towns. They're
listening to speeches saying we will dispossess the white population,
we will force them into exile, we will see them
all leave. To give you an example of the results
of this, of this ploy, you see really wild characters
like Henry Clay Warmouth elected as governor in Louisiana. Henry
Clay Warmouth is a guy that I I have some
affection for as a Louisiana character, and I like characters
in my own state. Henry Clay Warmouth is one of
the most infamous men ever elected to office in the
United States. He was accused of stealing his company's payroll.
He was in an Illinois regiment in the war. For
whatever reason, I believe he got a presidential pardon. I don't.
I don't know the details of his court martial, but
he was court martialed or corruption, he was released and reinstated.
Weird situation. So a man of controversy at the least, Okay,
whether or not he actually did something. During the war.
He becomes a carpetbag character in Louisiana. He's only in
his twenties. I heard I forget just how old he
is when he's elected governors, but he is a young firebrand.
The center of politics at the time. And also the
post war capital of Louisiana is New Orleans. Baton Rouge
has been utterly destroyed, and it's years before the capital
moves back up the river. So New Orleans is capital.
Henry Clay Warmouth gives outrageous speeches to the freedmen in
New Orleans. Why would he speak to a white audience.
They've all been disenfranchised, basically, okay, his speeches. In his speeches,
he promises that he will, as governor, invent a machine
that will trade the blood of a black man for
a white man's blood, so he will make them white
on the inside. He repeats this promise a couple of times,
and when he's speaking to a group of white Republicans,
he plays it off as a great joke and they
all laugh, not surprisingly because he never had any intention
of doing anything on that front. No one imagined such
a thing as possible. But it does give us a
little insight into what did the black electorate want. They
wanted to be like white people. They wanted to be competent, educated,
you know, equal on the inside. That's what they wanted,
and that's what they voted for, and they got Henry
klay Warmuth, who becomes a multi millionaire on a salary
of like twenty thousand a year or something. He becomes
a multimillionaire in his first couple of years. When newspapers
interview him about this, he says, yeah, I'm corrupt. Corruption
is the fashion. Everyone's doing it. I just do it better,
and you're jealous. So he's really in your face about it.
He has the audacity, and my goodness, is the man audacious.
You can't help but admire his spunk, his brazenness. He
writes a memoir after his term of office, and he
does something very interesting. He describes his tumultuous administration where
he is finally impeached. Even though he is the Republican
carpetbag governor. The Republicans themselves have too much problem with him,
and they impeach him and replace him with arguably the
first black governor in American history PBS Pinchback PBS pinchback,
and interesting Louisiana character not elected, but was lieutenant governor
under Warmouth and was what was it, governor pro tempore
of Louisiana, first black governor in America because Henry Clay
Warmouth was removed from office by impeachment. Warmouth writes in
his memoirs that his opposition is so scary that the
white population of Louisiana should be thankful it was him
and not someone else. He describes the New Orleans Tribune Party.
So the New Orleans Tribune starts out as Les Union,
which is the very first African American owned newspaper in America.
It started in eighteen sixty two during the Federal occupation
of New Orleans as a French French newspaper directed at
the the African American French speaking population of New Orleans.
So these are really interesting set of people. There are
a lot of freedmen among this group. They've been free
for many years before the Civil War. They have resources,
enough resources to start newspaper. They are literate and they
are writing in French, specifically for the French, the French
literate Black population of New Orleans. So this is a
very niche set of people. They're all Roman Catholic as well,
which is also very interesting. They're all black, but they're
all Roman Catholic. Their editorial line is fascinating. They reform
after the war as a dual language newspaper. They start
writing in English and they call themselves the New Orleans Tribune.
Their editorial line is that the post war South should
take as its model Hati, which is not surprising because
that is where these people came from. What they propose
is a race war, and they're proposing it in print,
in black and white in New Orleans. They have enough
clout to distribute their paper to every registered Republican in
the state of Louisiana at state expense. They got a
subsidy from the carpetbag government to distribute this newspaper all
across the state, and that's how they're able to stay
in business. And evidently it was pretty good business. So
Henry Clay Warmouth, they're also distributing it to people in Congress. Okay,
they're distributing it to the Republicans up in Congress and DC.
So they're publicizing all kinds of propaganda anyway, Henry Clay
Warmouth says, Okay, y'all don't like me. You think that
I'm so bad. This was your alternative and I was
holding them at bay so that they couldn't do what
they wanted. And we all know what happened in Haiti's
so you can't hate me too much. And he's got
a point. So Henry Clay Warmouth, who survives on until
the Huey Long administration before he dies and is quoted
disparaging Huey Long, thinks Huey Long is an amateur, a
very funny guy. I like to eulogize Henry Clay Warmouth
at Metarie's cemetery. So promise is made. The radical Republicans
are making these outrageous, very dangerous promises. The Union League
is formed. They have paramilitary groups they are intimidating people
on election day. They are marching in the street, they
are doing military drills. They are saying they will confiscate
property by force if necessary. There is no legislation for this,
but everybody knows that the situation is increasingly dangerous. And
then something very interesting happens, and now I need to
to shift gears once again.
Speaker 1: The clan.
Speaker 2: Now this is going out all over the internet, so
I want to be very clear here. I am interested
in the history of the period, and I'm trying to
explain what's going on, and I'm trying to give clear exposition.
When people talk about the clan, people get very emotional.
I would like to say at the Oddset, I encourage
you to believe whatever you want to believe about the Clan,
and I'm not here to tell you otherwise. If you
feel that it was something, I want you to believe
that it was that thing. Now I'm I'm going to
try to talk about what was going on, right and
I want to be clear based on my understanding of
the evidence, and I've worked a lot in this, so
I think I know something about what I'm talking about.
Right ahead, in eighteen sixty six or thereabouts in Pulaski, Tennessee.
A member of the bar had a meeting with other
elites from the neighborhood. So he was an ex Confederate.
His friends were all ex Confederates, and they decided that
they were going to form their own secret paramilitary vigilante organization,
and they picked as their name, the Ku Klux Klan. Now,
there is an awful lot of debate among the scholars
about just where the name came from. I don't mean
to go into that right here, but there were actually
several of paramilitary civil defense. You might say, okay, now
I'm already in trouble. Civil defense. They were advocates for
the interests of their communities. They most of them had
military experience. They didn't have to train for this. They
already had weapons. They didn't have to make special efforts
to arm. They already had experience and skill. But they
formed secret societies for the defense of their communities in
this time of great uncertainty and a special threat. In Louisiana,
the Klan did not predominate. It was an organization called
the Knights of the White Camellia, and there were other
organizations as well. The Knights of the Golden Circle is
another organization that seems to have its roots before the
Civil War, but it seems to persist very interestingly. The
the guy in Pulaski who organized the Klan, allegedly he
was a very prominent member of the Masonic lodge. And
so they already know, Oh, here we go, Judge Thomas M. Jones. Okay,
that was his name. He was prominent in the Freemasons.
So they already knew a lot about secrecy and how
to keep their initiation and activities secret, and they incorporate
some of that. It's not the same thing, Okay, the
Klan is not the Freemasons, and no one should no
one should confuse the two. But they they obviously pick
up on a number of these those traits of a
secret society and initiation and ritual and things like that.
The clan is mostly active in the Upper South. It's
very active in Tennessee, of course, where it's formed, Alabama,
Northern Mississippi, North Carolina. It is not active in Virginia
as an example, and Virginia is really a special case
for many reasons. Very first Southern state to re enter
the Union on equal terms, first Southern state to have
the military withdrawn and the restoration of civil law, the
end of martial law, the restoration of trial by jury. Okay,
So Virginia is a very special example, and that certainly
has something to do with the lack of the presence
of the clan there. These things are connected. Right. If
you don't if you don't have civil law, and if
the enforcement of the law is not equal among the citizenry,
then vigilanteism arises in a vacuum of executive power. Organization
is a necessity and anevitability. People will organize and fill
that vacuum. And the clan is an example of this,
of this commonly understood political principle about order in society. Now,
in that statement, I'm I'm probably beyond the pale for normies,
right there, So be it. If you want to blackbot
list me for that, that's fine. That's that seems to
me what's going on, And plenty of historians of the
period would agree. Interestingly, I republished, or or I published,
actually for the first time, a collection of monographs by
Walter AL. Fleming. I titled it Southern Concerns. The shorter
writings of Walter L. Fleming In that volume Fleming is
talking about the organization of the clan, and he says,
there are a great many examples of the organization of
ethnic interests, even in secret, in the history of Europe,
and he names several in particular. I think it's I
think it's fascinating he names Italian groups and German groups.
I don't have them in front of me right now,
but that is a very interesting point that he makes,
and he says, this is a European characteristic. Europeans do that,
and no one should be surprised that it happened under
these circumstances in the South after the war. So that's
that's a curious thing right there. They weren't just going
to take it lying down, Okay, So what did they do?
There is a very practical element in the clan's campaign
of intimidation and violence, and whatever whatever we might think
about the justice of this, I want to I want
to be clear. It was a campaign of intimidation and violence,
and it was outside of the law, and the law
had been withdrawn in some sense, a military law had
been imposed. Even even without all that taken into account,
it was a campaign of intimidation and violence. What's going on? Okay.
The one of the most practical elements going on here
is the unfaithfulness of sharecroppers. We talked about this at
the beginning of our conversation. The sharecroppers have been initiated
into this new makeshift industrial regime for an economy that
is overwhelmingly agricultural and has no capital and no one
has the credit to pay wages. It's impossible under this regime.
Many of the former slaves are describing conditions that they
call worse than slavery, and they are peons, and no
one denies this. Okay, this was an utterly miserable condition
to be in. They were promised far more. And the
demagogues in their communities are saying, you don't have to
put up with this, And they say, okay, I am
skipping town, I am getting up and I'm leaving. Now
what can they go to? I'd I'd like to make
one thing quite clear, Northern states do not want them
there and are taking serious political and practical measures to
keep them from coming. At the very same time, and
this is another another confounding thing about reconstruction, at the
very same time that the Republican congressmen in Washington are
saying that all the slaves have been freed, and all
the slaves are citizens, and with the fifteenth Amendment, they
all have the right to vote. They are they're enforcing
military territories who they say, or conquered provinces to ratify
amendments to the Constitution that makes no legal sense at all,
but they are unwilling to do those things in their
own native states. States like Ohio and Indiana, States like
Oregon prohibit the immigration and settlement of free blacks, and
that was the case before the Civil War. So these
laws eventually come off the books. Nevertheless, these northern states
remain incredibly antagonistic to freedman immigrating. And there's virtually none
of that that happens. That happens mostly with the phenomenon
we call the Great Migration that happens decades later anyway,
mostly in the twentieth century. Actually, anyway, the clan, the
clan goes to faithless sharecroppers, black sharecroppers primarily. There are
cases of the clan attacking white people, that is, mostly
carpetbaggers and scallawags, but the clan goes to faithless sharecroppers
to intimidate them. And how do they do it, well,
it's the characteristic view that we have, if we have
any cultural impression of this at all. They dress up
as ghosts, They ride around, they hoot and holler uh.
They are impersonating the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers on
a mission of vengeance. That's what they're doing. That's how
they describe themselves. This is all very interesting. Let me uh,
let me read you a example of a clan communicate.
So the Klan, they they're very interested in playing off
the superstitions of the freedmen population, so they they dress
up as ghosts. They they seem go in for sleight
of hand and magic tricks. For instance, a klansman shows
up at a sharecropper's hut. There's some reason that he
goes there. We don't really know why the klansman goes there,
but the Klan is very targeted in their actions. Apparently
we have the testimony of the sharecropper on this measure.
Congress opens an investigation and we have an awful lot
of testimony about the activities of the Klan. The klansman
shows up at the sharecropper's cabin and asks for a drink.
He's dressed in white sheets with a pointy white hat. Right,
so he's dressed rather like a ghost, kind of ghostly looking.
He picks up a bucket of water and apparently drains
the entire bucket of water and asks for more. So
he performs something that apparently looks like a superhuman feet.
He says, I haven't drunk a drop since Chickamauga. Okay.
So it's like he's he's the ghost of a dead
Confederate and he's he's thirsting like like Lazarus in the parable. Okay,
like he's thirsting in hell, roasted over fire or something.
And he he performs these things. And there are there
are accounts. We have testimony. This is testimony given to
a congressional committee by sharecroppers, by freedmen in the South,
that klansmen can dismember themselves. They pick up their limbs
off the ground and carry them away. They can take
off their heads and walk around headless. So there are
these these spooky Halloween magic tricks that they're said to perform.
They burn crosses. This is one of one of their tricks.
I don't I don't know why this has any special significance,
but this is something they're very well known to do.
They ride around on horseback with flowing robes and torches
in hand, hooting and hollering and pledging vengeance on those
that violate the code. You know, honor doing what you
say you're going to do. Here is a clansman communicate. Now,
imagine every every spelling is every spelling possible is made
with a k Okay, So they're being kind of ham
ham fisted on this. They're they're playing up the absurdity
on some level. These these are obviously literate people, but
they're they're also they're playing something up and making a
game out of it. The ku Klux Klan are called
upon to custigate or kill any colored cusses who may
approve the constitution being concocted by the contemptible carpetbaggers at
the capitol. Okay, so just as just as an example,
the clan runs amok around the South. They have massive rallies,
sometimes in the daylight. In places like Huntsville, Alabama, there
is a huge clan rally in the daylight. Thousands of
people show up and they are saying, let's see, they're
saying that they do not want outsiders in their government.
They do not want outsiders running their communities against their
own interests. They are particularly indignant about illiterate members of
their state government and local government, in particular school school
officials being illiterate. This this is a really interesting thing.
One of these, one of these clan messages occasionally that
the clan will publish things in southern newspapers to let
their intentions be known and to make warnings and threats.
One of these, one of these communicates famously says that
ignorance is the curse of God, and that any illiterate
member of the school organizations, which is obviously freedmen that
were appointed to those positions by a friendly Republican administration,
any illiterate member of the local or state government needs
to resign or flee. And the threat is quite obvious.
And this of course works its way out in extra
judicial lynchings of offenders. So it's quite clear here what's
going on. But I'd like to make something a little
more clear, and that is class differences in the white population.
Sea Van Woodward in his excellent work The Strange Career
of Jim Crow, which everyone should read, is very short
and it's very clarifying. It's about the origins of segregation.
Woodward writes about the class distinctions regarding the freedmen in
the post war South. He writes that the slave owners,
the former slave owners, who are mostly of the old
Southern elite set, we could describe them as aristocrats. They
have a distinctly conservative line towards the freedmen. So the
minority of dispossessed Southern elites have a very conservative approach
towards the former slaves and tend to favor their political integration,
their social integration obvious to everyone. If the slaves will
stay in America, if the freedmen, pardon me, if the
freedmen have a destiny as American citizens, then there must
be some training for them to be responsible citizens. And
however you want to call this the the former slave
owners had, as in slavery, a paternal feeling towards the
former slaves, as they did when they were actually slaves
and they were actually responsible for their basic necessary needs
of life. They continued to feel that way after emancipation,
so they tended to take a more conservative political line. Now,
in spite of this, we see elite Southerners in a
couple of states join these vigilante organizations. But I think
a good example of the sort of Southern elite involved
in the clan would be Nathan Bedford Forest. Nathan Bedford Forest,
famous cavalry commander, military genius, hero of Tennessee, was a
self educated entrepreneur who engaged in many forms of business,
including slave trading, which put him kind of at the
bottom of Southern polite society. All right, slave traders were
not welcomed into the higher circles in the South. Nevertheless,
Forrest is a fascinating character. He forms cavalry units in
the war. He brings his capable slaves with him on
his campaigns. He offers his slaves manumission for their service.
They serve loyally by his side. They fight by his
side under his own authority. He arms them and trains them,
and they fight along his side. When Forrest Is finally
dies and is buried in Memphis after the war, he
is buried by a with a procession of black freedmen
in Memphis who fondly remember him. That's that's a fascinating
episode in in uh the the Saga of Nathan Bedford Forest.
Speaker 1: And they and recent and in recent years, he and
his wife were disinterned in Memphis, and uh yeah, their
grave is I visited his grave, his he and his
wife's grave recently there at a varied a a Confederate
museum in Colombia, Tennessee.
Speaker 2: Is that the sons of Confederate Veterans establishment there in Columbia.
Speaker 1: I believe that's what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so
it was also the statue, the huge statue of him
on his horse is there too. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Oh did they rescue that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, uh it.
I got into history because I like the people that
I read about, and I disagree with plenty of them. Okay,
it's not that I agree with everything they said or did,
but they're dynamic. They did something. What did you do?
You know? Are you the equal of these people? Who
among us could claim to be their equal? So it
just rends my heart to read about things like that.
But anyway, yes, very important point. Yeah, it's quite the
contrast to his recent history. The fate of his corpse.
But Forrest Forrest was the wizard of the clan in Tennessee.
He did not found it, but he came to be
in charge of it. Very interestingly. The clan, though it
has elites, in it. Initially we talked about the judge
in Pulaski that allegedly formed it. And it attracts Southern
elites in certain areas once the once the violence gets underway,
Southern elites are increasingly alarmed by it and increasingly disinclined
towards it. All right, Forest, Now the sources that we
have about Forest and his role as the Imperial Wizard
of the Clan, which is a very high official in
the clan. The clan has lots of really wild names.
A regular member of the clan is a ghoul. Officers
in the clan are called Grand Exalted Cyclops, a titan,
a wizard. You know, it has all these really wild names. Again,
the purpose is to playoff of superstitions, all right, And
communicates from the clan frequently read like dispatches from demons
in hell, and they play up that aspect, Okay. They
they speak in code, they're talking about days and hours,
and they're they're publishing these things in newspapers, so members
of the clan will know what they're saying, but no
one else will know. And they talk about the Dismal Hour,
the hour of hell fire, the caves of the wicked,
and they use like all sorts of weird mythological terminology.
That's actually a code that the members would understand, but
no one else would. So it's it's a curious thing anyway,
the regular member being a ghoul, like a ghost, like
a zombie. Right, it tells you a bit about what
the act was all about about, and how they were
playing off the fears of the freedmen in particular. But
what was I saying? Oh, Forrest, Forrest attempted to disband
the clan in sixty eight sixty nine. This was not successful. Now,
the reason for it is very interesting, and that is
because the dispossessed small farmers were particularly antagonistic towards the freedmen. Now,
let's remember just what happens to them, and let's have
let's have a bit of understanding. Okay, things don't happen
in history just because you can divide all of humankind
into people who are pure of heart, who have no
ill motives in their soul, and there are people who
are encouragably evil and can only do wicked things, and
they must be utterly destroyed and cannot be negotiated with all. Right,
that is a completely blinkered view of humanity. That's not
how people are. People are all mixtures of good and evil.
Every person has a dark part in them that can
come out in certain circumstances. Okay, we're all sinful, we're
all falling. Okay, this is a basic Christian understanding. And
some of us are more virtuous than others as well. Okay,
but none of us are totally good. And a true saint,
a saint will tell you that he has evil in
his heart. A true saint will go to confession for this. Okay,
so let's keep that in mind. The Ku Klux Klan
is made of human beings who are doing things in
response to circumstances that we can understand. There I go again,
saying something that is extremely controversial. I think that this
is obvious. I truly do. I think this is obvious.
And that doesn't mean that I think that lynching people
is a good thing. I don't think that extra judicial
killing is a good thing. I don't want that. I
think that should be avoided at at a great sacrifice,
it should be avoided. But also we need to understand
the circumstances and reconstruction are unprecedented. When have Americans lived
under circumstances such as these, and we can understand why
people are doing what they're doing. All right, So when
Forrest attempts to disband the clan, it is unsuccessful initially. Okay,
Forrest again calls for the disbanding of the clan when
the military government ceases in the South after the election
of Rutherford B. Hayes, or at least the corrupt bargain
that makes Rutherford B. Hayes the president. Okay, that is
when the clan is disbanded. But it's first, the first
attempts of Southern elites to disband it fails. And that
is because the white population of the South that didn't
own slaves before the war, they have been reduced to
the same level as the former slaves economically, and they've
been reduced to a level lower than them politically, and
they are resentful. And these are precisely the people, especially
the lower class. Okay, And I I want to be
I want to be frank about this. Uh. I mentioned
Frederick Law Olmsted, the great Northern genius who designed Central
Park in New York City, and it's called the father
of landscape architecture. Remarkable man, great American travel writer. I
don't really call him a historian. He was mistaken on
too many things and is too much of a bad
influence in that regard. But genius and Frederick law Olmsted
came up with the term poor white trash to describe
the lower levels of white Southern society, antabellum society. These
people are quite vindictive, and they are they are I
think more represented among the ranks of the Klan. Now
they're the foot soldiers, if you will, all right, and
they do not have scruples when it comes to violence,
so they are more of the Scotch Irish persuasion. So
they're representing a certain element of that heritage, which is
a fighting heritage, which is a much more independent sort
of heritage, has a long history of being on the
outside of law and polite society and things like that.
They are used to as they are today by the way,
they are used to very unfavorable comparisons between them and
the African American population, and they don't like that, and
they are quite active in the clan, all right. So
this is uh, this leads, as I said before, to
a massive congressional investigation, and that produces a huge amount
of information that we have on the Klan we it's
a it's got to be a dozen volumes of testimony.
I've seen condensed versions of it. It's an awful lot
to weighe through. I would recommend sources on that, but
there everything is out of print. So give me a chance.
I might bring some of that back into print. But uh,
that'd be awesome. Yeah, I'm I'm really hoping to get
Flemings volumes about documents related to reconstruction back into print. Again,
who who likes reading primaries so is on reconstruction? Folks,
raise your hands for me. I'm working for you. I
love I love doing these nerdy, autistic things, and I
don't know who I'm doing it for. Encourage me, folks,
go buy my books. But anyway, but.
Speaker 1: Sure, I'm sure you could sell them to museums, you
could sell them through the certain institutes. Yeah, I'm sure that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I just don't want to bring the hammer down
on them here. I don't want anyone going and persecuting
them because they're buying books from me. But I I'm
making headway on that front. Interestingly, Nathan Bedford Forrest actually
testified to the Congressional Committee, and they did not know
at that time, nobody knew that he was the Imperial
Wizard of the Klan in Tennessee. Yet they had the
Congressional Committee had the good fortune to get his testimony
concerning the Klan, and they asked him questions about it,
and he answered, And my knowledge of this i've read.
I have not read his testimony. I do not have
that book. I've read quotes from his testimony and the
assessment of historians on his testimony. The idea of the historians,
the consensus that I've read of the historians is that
he did not perjure himself in his testimony. He claimed
ignorance on a number of points, but he did not
perjure himself, nor did he reveal his role in the clan,
which is really quite clever. He was a very cunning man,
and he handled himself well. Anyway, Here is a quote
from Forrest on the composition of the clan. My information was, okay,
that's interesting. It's like, oh, well, I don't I don't
actually know like other people told me. My information was
that they admitted no man who was not a gentleman
and a man who could be relied upon to act discreetly,
not men who are in the habit of drinking, boisterous men,
or men liable to commit error or wrong. All of
that is pretty fascinating because although I've i've really, i've
really gone after the boisterous Scotch Irish cure the Mountain
people where clan activity is particularly particularly egregious, we might
say those are my people. By the way, Okay, I've
got a lot of Scotch Irish ancestry, and I'm not
I'm not castigating them, as you know, categorically or anything.
They're my people, and I know I know the people
I'm talking about. I'm familiar with them. The record of
the Klan is also something that speaks for itself. Clan
members did not reveal who was involved. They were very
well disciplined, They would not give up their comrades. They
maintained a strict secrecy. Their activities remain very obscure to us,
as does their membership. Now that's from this period. Now
I want you, I want you to note there are
several incarnations of the clan. There are at least three,
and I'll tell you a bit about the second one
in a moment. Just for the sake of clarity, it's
important that I make that point later. The second klu
Klux Klan is distinct from the first, and that's an
important point. But it is very important to note that
the Ku Klux Klan is active in states with martial law,
states who are deprived of habeas corpus, trial by jury
and regular civil government, and the first klu Klux Klan
of Reconstruction is disbanded when martial law is ended in
those jurisdictions, and during that time the clan does not
reveal its membership, and their actions remain very obscure and
secret and are still a mysterious subject to this day.
There actually aren't very many sources on them. We do have,
we do have some really interesting material, like oaths that
were recalled by members after the disbandment of the Klan,
newspaper communicates of the Klan, other interesting things. Let's see,
I'm looking for a quote or two. Now, okay, here's some.
Here's some interesting things that These are not bits from
the Klan. This is from the Knights of the White Camellia,
which was which was established in Louisiana and did exist
in some other places like Texas, The Knights of the
White Camellia had a preamble. This is a constitution adopted
in eighteen sixty nine, so during reconstruction, and i'll I'll
just read some things here as an example, all right,
whereas radical legislation is subversive of the principles of the
government of the United States. By radical legislation, they're talking
about radical Republicans, subversive to the principles of the United
States as originally adopted by our fathers. And whereas our
safety and our prosperity depend on the preservation of those
grand principles and believing that they can be peacefully maintained, Therefore,
we adopt the following One questions to be asked of
the candidate. Do you belong to the white race? Two?
Did you ever marry any woman who did not or
does not belong to the white race? Three? Did you
ever promise to marry any woman but one who belongs
to the white race?
Speaker 1: Four?
Speaker 2: Do you believe in the superiority of your race? Five?
Will you promise never to vote for any one for
any office of honor, profit, or trust who does not
belong to your race? Six? Will you take a solemn
oath never to abstain from castigating from casting your vote
in any election in which a candidate shall be opposed
to a white man, attached to your principle, unless we're
prevented by severe illness or any other physical disability. All right,
so we see the basic racial antagonism involved here, and
this is not It doesn't seem to me at all
surprising given the circumstances. This was their form of government
in status quo anti and defeat in the war did
not change their minds. And to go back in conclusion,
I'm trying to wrap things up here, to go back
to a earlier point the now I'm now, I've lost
my train of thought. I'm sorry.
Speaker 1: Take your time. You're providing a ton of information and
it's valuable.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I'm missing, I'm missing the point that I
was that I was searching for just then. So let
me let me instead wrap up another loose end. And
that is the second plan. So as I said before,
and this is an important thing to note. When the
military garrisons are finally withdrawn from the South in eighteen
seventy six, the clan is disbanded. Now we have it
on several authorities that it is so in including Union
Republican authorities who have been rounding up, literally rounding up
thousands of people suspected of membership in the Klan in
the eighteen seventies. This is so egregious, This is such
a wild abuse of criminal power in the reconstruction South
that entire towns, all the able bodied men in these
towns are are getting away. They get they get spooked
that there is going to be arrayed by federal forces
to round up people suspected of participating in clan activities,
and they all ski town. So this increases the uncertainty
and the dynamism of the time. There are stories of
farmers that are working with a saddled horse nearby in
case Marshalls show up trying to arrest them. The vast
majority of these people accused of membership or participation in
the Klan. This is over ninety percent of the ones
arrested are released without without any conviction. There isn't enough
evidence about them. So this is a really extraordinary period.
Congress passes special legislation to enable this. The radical Republicans
are interested in rounding up these people, they are very
unsuccessful in doing so. Once military reconstruction ends with their
election of Rutherford Hayes. The troops are withdrawn and the
Klan disbands. Now I wanted to give you a resource
on that. I'm going to quote from one hundred American
The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in
the nineteen twenties by Thomas Pegram. This is a mainstream work.
He does not claim to be partisan. Actually he's quite
the opposite. The Ku Klux Klan was liquidated. Here's the quote.
Hiram Evans, who was the Imperial Wizard of the Klan
in the nineteen twenties. All right, so he is he
is the leader of the second Klan. He said, the
old Klan was liquidated when its work was finished. The
new Klan has no essential connection with it. Thomas Pegram
also says the second Clan was born in nineteen fifteen,
and it did not prosper until nineteen twenty one. So
many of our many of our visions or cultural impressions
of the Ku Klux Klan come from vintage newsreel footage
of the clan with American flags, marching on the National
Mall and such things, really wild things. The brain just
freezes up at these images. We don't know what to
make of them. We don't know what's going on, and
a large degree we really don't know what that is
all about. It's its own subject and it's an interesting subject,
but it ought to be distinguished. These are people that
are a generation removed from reconstruction. Also, whatever else we
might say about the Klan, and there's so much more
that could be said about it. The Klan, the Second
Clan is much more active in the North. The North
is where the clan actually takes over state governments like Indiana.
The Second klu Klux Klan actually takes over the government
of Indiana, and I believe the government of Oregon as well.
So being being where I am and not claiming any
knowledge of a place like Oregon, I look at the
modern radicalism and vigilanteism in Portland, for instance, and I think, oh,
they they have always had this disposition. Uh, They've just
changed their ideology or something. So I don't know, I
know knowledge of what goes on out there. I think
it's a beautiful place and I wish it better than
paramilitary groups marching around and causing disruption. So yeah, with
with all that said, I I appreciate your your tolerance
of my long rambles here. It's a fun subject. I
like talking about reconstruction, and I hope that this has
been some somewhat enlightening for our audience here.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, there were things that you had mentioned that I
had no I thought I had a good understanding of reconstruction,
and there was a lot there that was that was enlightening.
Thank you, And I mean you you have an open
invitation to come back on the show whenever, and we'll
just figure out another their topic. I've heard you speak
on other topic.
Speaker 2: I've heard you speak on diverse topics.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it does and always have to be uh
be on the South or something related to American history.
I heard the the one that mister Burden uh redid
recently your your reading of a letter on uh on Zionism,
and uh yeah, that was that was impressive.
Speaker 2: Oh, indeed, that one has been very popular. I was.
I was really lucky to find Whitney Webb's article, and
I certainly want to give her credit there. I was
just reading material that I had found. I'm very interested
people people often ask me about more resources on political
Zionism in America. If you know of more articles that
should be publicized. I would love to hear from you.
Go find me on on X and D m me
and tell me what other things I should produce on
political Zionism in America, where Zionism among the evangelicals, I
would like to know about it. But yes, thank you,
I appreciate that, and I do want to make further
efforts to let people know more about these things.
Speaker 1: Well, remind people where they can buy your books or
anything else you want to point them too.
Speaker 2: Yes, thank you. I have a YouTube channel. If you
look for George Bagbee on YouTube, you can find me there.
I read a variety of of essays. Mostly occasionally I
will I will monologue on a special subject. I have
Twitter handle at tall Men Books, which I'll send to you, Pete.
Hopefully you would mind putting that on the description of
the video so that people could find it. Pinned to
my Twitter profile. You will find links where you can
purchase the books that I have republished, including The Civil
War and Reconstruction in Alabama by Walter L. Fleming and
also History of Reconstruction in Louisiana by John Rose Ficklin,
among other volumes. And thank you very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I know, of course, let's do this again very soon.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Have a good evening, thank you, thank you. It's a
pleasure to join you.