Part II:In the South, the pattern of Old World feudalism quickly began to take root instead. A small minority of hereditary, landed Lords owned most of the land, just like in Europe, and political and economic power there was manifested through land-- and slaves. The planter-class aristocracy used slaves to clear and work the land, just like the European aristocracy used serfs. They built huge, castle-like mansions and manor houses to live in, just like European aristocrats. They ruled the land like a House of Lords, desiring to live like the dukes, barons, counts and even kings back in jolly old Europe. But whereas even Medieval serfs had some standing at law, as well as being protected to some degree by the church, and were often allowed to claim their freedom if they could escape their lord for a year and a day-- this Southern feudalism used chattel slavery instead, where humans were considered mere property, devoid of souls, and relentlessly hunted down with no statute of limitations on their crime of being human property, as the Dred Scott decision by the US Supreme Court proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in 1857, a mere four years before the outbreak of the Civil War.
This Planter class opposed taxes as an article of faith, laughing at those who advocated education for the dirty and filthy poor-- white or black-- or even roads, railroads, canals, hospitals, or public schools and universities for that matter. They shunned industrial production, and marginalized the small farmer and businessman who were barely able to eke out an existence. If they could get their slave-processed agricultural commodities to the nearest river, they could make obscene amounts of money selling them to urbanizing, industrializing Europe and New England. That is all that mattered (forget common-wealth-- it was all "theirs", just as it is today). So the South lagged behind the North in every way-- in infrastructure, technology, education, and freedom-- just as the entire nation is now lagging behind the rest of the industrialized democracies of the world today. This lagging would cost the short-sighted rebels dearly under the harsh conditions of attrition which were to characterize the coming Civil War, and it is costing our entire nation dearly today-- in fact may lead to the extinction of our form of government if something is not done to change the direction in which we are once again heading.
Our modern Red/Blue states are living, ideological fossils of that by-gone age. Color the Red states east of the Mississippi grey instead, and you have nearly redrawn the battle lines from the Civil War-- Union blue vs. Rebel grey. This is no mere coincidence or historical accident. In many ways, we are still fighting that war in our politics today. Certainly, it is clear now that the South never truly gave up, in spite of Lee surrendering his sword at Appomattox, though their antiquated aristocratic system had been soundly trounced by armies of free farmers, shop keepers, artisans and an industrial working class representing the advancing and superior infrastructural engines of the North.
Indeed, instead of conceding defeat when it was dealt to them, many in the south spread whispers of the 'stab in the back' or 'the noble, lost cause', attempting by any and all means to blame their loss on anything but the superior economic, political and cultural realities in the North. The Yankees had been the aggressors, they cried. They had invaded their sovereign lands in a gentleman's squabble over tariffs and state's rights; according to these latter-day apologists the war had nothing to do with slavery, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, including these following words, spoken by the future president of the Confederate States of America, on the floor of the US Senate, just one year before the outbreak of war:
"The condition of slavery with us is, in a word, Mr. President, nothing but the form of civil government instituted for a class of people not fit to govern themselves. It is exactly what in every State exists in some form or other. It is just that kind of control which is extended in every northern State over its convicts, its lunatics, its minors, its apprentices. It is but a form of civil government for those who by their nature are not fit to govern themselves. We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator, and from the cradle to the grave, our Government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority." (US Senator Jefferson Davis, February 29, 1860)
And, in spite of all propaganda to the contrary, that the war had nothing to do with racism or slavery but everything to do with state's rights and tariffs, less than a decade following the end of the war, as the national will to continue to spend money on Reconstruction in the south wavered, and as soon as federal troops began to be withdrawn accross the region southern racists launched the bloody era of night-riding terror, such as was most notoriously characterized by the Ku Klux Klan (organized by pardoned rebel general Nathan B. Forest). Disguising their identities behind sheets and hoods to terrorize the black population into submission, using fire and the rope to take out on them their rage at having lost the war, members of such organizations set about systematically denying blacks access to economic opportunity and such civil rights as one man one vote, reducing the population nearly again to the status of slaves, and perfecting the process of regularly stealing elections in order to regain and retain local and state power so that they could operate their deviant schemes with impunity for more than a century after their defeat in the Civil War.
While most victorious nations would have seen a good number of such rebel officers shot and a similar percentage of such rebel politicians hanged for treason-- in 1865 this was not Abraham Lincoln's way. Preaching malice towards none, he commanded that the defeated rebels be not molested and instead offered full forgiveness to all, allowing them to return to their homes, encouraging the nation to forgive and begin to heal-- but a conspiratorial circle of assassins left him mortally wounded in treacherous repayment, shooting him to death from behind in Ford's Theater under cover of darkness. And with his death so was his hand removed from the rudder of the ship of peace which emerged from the horrific storm through which he had guided the nation, a peace which he should have overseen and implemented, as he had overseen and implemented the war. Who knows what this nation lost by that dastardly and cowardly deed, what he might have accomplished in his second, third, and fourth terms? Yet with their many treasons forgiven, their right to vote returned, and along with these things the right to hold office, thousands of unrepentant and still racist southerners traitors set, with bloody hands, about re-gaining political and economic power with one ultimate goal in mind-- the replacement of chattel slavery with American apartheid.
Through the spread of Jim Crow laws, the systematization of poverty, the nurturing of ignorance and superstition, and the on-going use of racial terror, the South was all but returned to the social system as it had been before the war. Freed slaves-- their hoped for promise of 40 acres and a mule having been denied-- were returned instead into poverty-stricken share croppers, stripped of the right to vote or even travel, in a region so historically dependent on their unpaid labor for the creation of wealth that it wallowed in backwardness without it for generations, never again able to return to antebellum glory. But like some insidious parasite, these un-reconstructed rebels merely bored into the flesh of the nation-- and waited.
In the North after the Civil War, under Lincoln's successors in the Republican Party-- a party which had been derided as consisting of "filthy operatives (factory workers), greasy mechanics, tight-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists" by a southern demagogue in 1860 (McPherson, 'Battle Cry of Freedom')-- the rise of industry, surging immigration, technological innovation, and the opening of the west to agriculture and mining led to unprecedented wealth creation, urban growth, and upward mobility. But there was a dark side. Union war heroes-- like Sheridan and Custer-- had almost immediately been sent west, and employing the well-honed tactics and industrially-produced weaponry of mass destruction developed over the course of history's first Industrial Total War, began "pacification" programs against the Commanche, Kiowa, Plains Apache, Cheyenne, and Sioux. For the most part, this meant either wiping them out or driving them onto useless tracts of land called reservations-- that is, until something useful was found there, and then someplace even more useless would have to be proferred, with the ratifying "treaty" dangling from the barrel of a gun.
As is usually the case with history's greatest crimes, most of the blood and gore spilled in this relentless process fell away from center stage, in rugged canyons and along the banks of lonely rivers and streams, the old and weak falling on forced marches, or killed by the policies of scorched earth, out of sight and so out of mind. That it mirrored what Britain and Belgium were doing at the same time in Africa, or the French in Indochina, or the Russians in central Asia does not excuse it, but merely contextualizes it. In any case, the vast prairies and mountains of the North American west-- gradually swept empty of man and beast by this inhuman, post Civil War extermination program-- soon lured hundreds of thousands of Union veterans and immigrants from Europe-- who mostly took up the plow-- onto the central plains, while Confederate veterans who first went to Texas and New Mexico, then later to Colorado, Wyoming and Montana mostly took up the lariat and clothing of the Mexican vaquero, pushing cattle north or south to railheads in Kansas, sometimes combining the attitude of vengeful rebel with that of the pistolero/bandito in such outlaw manifestations as the James Gang, among others.
It would require an entire history unto itself to document how the largely pro-Union Republican sodbusters fought the largely pro-Confederate Democratic cowboys along barbed-wire fence lines and in the streets and saloons of rail head towns and frontier outposts from Tombstone in the far west to Dodge City, Abilene and Wichita in Kansas, to a large extent carrying on the Civil War for decades after it had officially ended. It is useful to remember that this was actually the case, for it plays a pivotal role in understanding why to this day those farming/ranching states of the Great Plains and Mountain West remain Republican while their Union brethren above the Mason Dixon line east of the Mississippi have become Democrats, such that their descendants now find themselves in political bed with the descendants of the sworn ancestral enemy. Suffice it to note the further ironic fact that both Republican homesteader and Democratic free grazer took root on land which Lincoln's federalist vision had led him to appropriate, and they shipped their products over railroads which he had facilitated building for that purpose, utilizing the latest scientific research collected and made available by his US Department of Agriculture and growing R&D infrastructure-- eventually sending their children to various Land Grant colleges which he had the foresight to sign into existence:
"without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life." (Morrill Land-Grant College Act, 1862)
That Lincoln had been willing to launch such massive national programs as these at all during such a desperate, blood-drenched war for the very survival of the Union, the outcome of which was by no means certain at any time, leaves little doubt that these expensive, federally-funded initiatives represented his second line of defense after the actual military campaigns of the war themselves-- in effect an economic second front to guard against any possibility of an economic and cultural victory for the rule of an aristocratic "few" over the democratic "many" in his dreamed-of post-war America. By spreading economic AND political power in the hands of millions of everyday American farmers, workers, and shopkeepers (and providing educational opportunities for their children) instead funneling the bulk of the nation's wealth and power into the hands of a handful of hereditary lords, Lincoln hoped that his beloved Union might have the opportunity to enjoy his much hoped for "rebirth of freedom" after victory over its internal enemies and historical contradictions had once and for all been achieved through so much blood and sorrow.
His willingness to expend such huge quantities not only of mortal flesh, but also of precious capital at such a time is overwhelming evidence of Lincoln's belief that there was no other way to give hope to his dream that, "government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth". He did not envision a corporatocracy to rule his beloved Union, though one unfortunately came to pass with his assassination. Nor did he envision the creation of a cradle-to-grave nanny state of bloated bureaucracies and entitlements-- though his hand had signed into existence the United States Department of Agriculture. Most certainly he did not envision an Orwellian police state-- for if he had the door to his balcony compartment at Ford's Theater would have certainly been better guarded on the night of April 14, 1865. No, he was adamant up to that bloody end in his support for a Union made strong and free by an environment of liberty and prosperity which he was convinced would always flow from America's rugged, hard-working common folk (for he was one), small farms (for he had grown up on them), small businesses (for he had run them as a young attorney), and small towns (for he had lived in them most of his life).
Lincoln was convinced, as Jefferson had been before him, that such rural/agricultural environments alone are capable of forging the kinds of men and women with the character a nation needs if conditions are to remain such that self-government "can long endure". A nation "so conceived and so dedicated" requires not the "bad morals" and "bad economics" of "heedless self-interest" (Franklin Delanor Roosevelt), but people willing to give "their lives that that nation might live", and who will pour out "the last full measure of devotion" to its ideals, as so many hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers-- and Lincoln himself-- ultimately did in that Civil War. Furthermore, his domestic policies were clear evidence of his conviction that an educated, well-informed citizenry-- and the institutions which they build and nurture, and which build and nurture them in turn-- must always form the backbone of our free and Constitutional state and produce leaders like himself who need never erect barriers-- either of economic class or military cordon-- between themselves and those in whose names they govern.
It should, therefore, be a cause of utmost concern for all Americans today to see that those small farms, small businesses, and small towns-- along with quality public education and the free press-- are dying before our eyes. And that, not coincidentally, today's skinflint, corporate-controlled Republican Party-- centered as it is on Wall Street and with so much of its electoral power flowing from a narrow band of the political spectrum located mostly in the heartland and diaspora of the revived, risen, and still racially-enraged neo-Confederacy-- hates and opposes the political ideals and democratic economics of the first member of that party to be elected US President as much today as its Democratic ancestors hated him in 1861. Despite its claims to the contrary, the Republican Party of today is in no way a "conservative" party, or-- if it is-- it is a party of "conservatives without conscience" (John Dean, Barry Goldwater) with little regard for the "common good", whose only concern is the "bottom line".
In reality, Lincoln's former party today represents a radically revisionist, activist movement, busily re-writing history along racialist and Christian Dominionist lines, while at the same time enabling and facilitating Economic Globalization's pillaging of the very heart and soul of our nation's real economy-- agriculture and manufacturing-- while loudly claiming to be fighting to preserve them. This has been accomplished, of course, by relying largely on Orwellian euphemism and Madison Avenue psychological warfare techniques to successfully divert the eyes of the people away from the real and corrosive effects of Big Business and its deification of mindlessness consumerism, which has led to "swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism" (Teddy Roosevelt) as well as spelling "ruin in its worst form" (ibid) for our national socioeconomic fabric, something TR and the agrarian/populist inhabitants of Osawatomie, Kansas -- to whom he spoke those words over a century ago in 1910-- were well aware of from their own experiences with the rise of illegal trusts and freedom-killing monopolies in their own day.
Because unfortunately, after Lincoln's assassination the Republicans had quickly forgotten their roots as the party of the greasy mechanic, filthy operative, tight-fisted farmer, and moonstruck theorist, and as the gold piled high and blood ran deep, they traded justice and equality for The Gilded Age and the rule of Robber Barons. Lincoln had been the biggest tax-and-spend President in history. He instituted the first, graduated Federal income tax. He created the US Department of Agriculture. He spearheaded the Homestead Act, laid the foundation for the Transcontinental Railroad, signed into law the Land Grant College Act. He improved harbors, canals, and river channels for transportation-- all while at the same time defeating armed insurrection and winning the Civil War. The southern Democrats who, once shown that they were unable to achieve victory either on the battlefield for which they had so bitterly longed, nor with a ballot box open to all which they had so long bitterly feared, instead set about crushing black voting rights, maintaining poor whites in ignorance and poverty, and through opposition to any taxation designated for the alleviation of any such ills, patiently waited for their chance to re-gain the national power they had wielded for so long prior to the Civil War.
Before Lincoln's election in fact, nearly every President had been a slave-owner or come from a slave state. And nearly every Supreme Court Chief Justice, as well as Senate and Congressional leader had come from the South as well. So, after the Grant administration (Republican) gave up on southern Reconstruction and withdrew Federal troops in 1877, when the rest of the nation had grown tired of struggle and turned its attentions elsewhere, these same boll weevils who had worn grey, flown the stars and bars, and waged treasonous war against their own nation and flag, proceeded by hook and by crook to wrap themselves in both that flag and the trappings of patriotism, in order to take over the governments of their southern states once again, regaining their seats in Congress and on the courts, and after waiting more than a century until President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, they 'flip-flopped' and become Republicans.
It was during that century, when the American "picture" continued its long, complicated process of "turning upside down", and the entire historical landscape appears to flip politically and geographically-- that the previous analogy of an object being viewed through a magnifying glass that suddenly emerges completely inverted as the glass is moved further away from the eye, should perhaps be replaced by the more apt analogy of a tornado, which roars through a neighborhood, ripping the roofs off of houses, blowing entire buildings off their foundations, and so completely destroying the order that had gone before that not a thing that existed in that previous time is discernable in the chaos that results. For in many ways this period resembles just such a storm.
Fueled by war-time production and Lincoln's economic programs, northern industry began to grow furiously in the years after the war, giving rise to the early labor union movement and the first waves of consumerism. Swollen by the huge numbers of ethnic immigrants pouring through Ellis Island from southern and eastern Europe after 1880, who began their existence on the bottom rung of the new economic ladder, this labor movement found that by supporting the Democratic Party and being supported by it created some degree of counter-weight to the growing economic might of the so-called Robber Barons, mostly Republicans, who with their attempts at achieving monopolies in agricultural commodities and industrial raw materials along with their growing system of largely unregulated factories and hellish working conditions were methodically destroying Lincoln's dream of a rebirth of freedom. Having lost none of its racist underpinnings in the meantime, the Democratic Party embraced this new labor movement in northern industrial cities while insisting on the continued opposition of most early organized labor unions to opening their ranks to black membership, thereby turning and keeping blacks into a permanent, un-represented under-class of cheap labor, North and South, agricultural and industrial-- in many ways really no better off than the slaves they had once been.
After decades of such Republican economic policies succeeded in pushing the country over the brink into the Great Depression after 1929-- a cataclysm nearly repeated more recently by three similar decades of post-Reagan Republican policies which led to the Great Recession of 2008 (in which many economists believe a second Great Depression was only narrowly averted by a massive government bailout of the financial "industry" with an infusion of at least a trillion dollars)-- FDR was elected. Though he had typical racist sentiments himself, as did most white Americans to one degree or another at the time, but especially the leadership and the rank and file pro-segregationist Democratic party in the South-- Roosevelt's wife Eleanor was a social and economic progressive as were growing numbers of Democrats in the North and South as well as increasing numbers within the labor movement, and as the roots of the Civil Rights struggle began to grow, so did demands for many of the other great socio-economic reforms that were enacted during Roosevelt's three terms in office.
End of Part II