This is from an excellent article by William N. Grigg titled ‘Civil Rights’ and Total War, posted on LewRockwell.com. Be sure to read the entire article.
William N. Grigg
Following Appomattox, Sherman’s genocidal skill-set proved useful to the corporatist federal railroad combine, which required the removal of the Plains Indians from land that it coveted but couldn’t be troubled to purchase on honest terms. In carrying out that task Sherman abandoned what little restraint he had exercised in dealing with white southerners. In the meantime, the war of federal consolidation and cultural liquidation against the South continued by way of what was euphemistically called “Reconstruction.”
In theory, “Reconstruction” was the process of re-integrating the rebellious states into the One Holy Eternal Union. In practice, it was a reign of terror and plunder swaddled in the rhetoric of righteousness and carried out through the apparatus of military dictatorship.
“After the Civil War, radical Republicans sought to drastically alter the social and political structures of the states of the former Confederacy,” notes historian Benjamin Ginsberg of Johns Hopkins University in his book The Fatal Embrace. “They sought to establish a regime that would break the political power of the planter class that had ruled the region prior to the war.”
The “radical Republicans” to whom Ginsberg refers were Jacobins, not Jeffersonians. The most powerful figure in that cohort was the detestable Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Congressman who, in the words of historian Paul Leland Haworth, “possessed much of the sternness of the old Puritans, without their morality.”
Rep. Stevens hated the pre-Lincoln Constitution with a passion eclipsed only by that he nurtured toward the South; the document produced by the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, Stevens once told an associate, was nothing but “a worthless bit of old parchment.”
As co-chairman, with Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, of the Joint Committee for Reconstruction, Stevens adapted Cromwell’s schematic for military dictatorship in England for use in administering the conquered Confederacy.
“Where Cromwell had divided England up into eleven military districts, each governed by a major general with wide-ranging powers, [Stevens and the radical Republicans] divided the South into five districts, each ruled by a military governor under the overall direction of General Grant,” explains Daniel Lazare in his book The Frozen Republic:
“The military authorities banned veterans’ organizations and other groups deemed threatening to the new order, fired thousands of local officials and half a dozen governors, and purged state legislatures of pro-Confederate elements as well. A twenty-thousand-strong army of occupation, aided by a black militia, enforced order…. Political rights were withdrawn from thousands of Confederates who had been granted executive clemency by the President, and all told some one hundred thousand white voters were stricken from the rolls.”
As Dr. Haworth observed in his 1912 study Reconstruction and Union, military governors on the occupied South “proceeded to create a new electorate and through it new civil governments.” Those “civil governments,” predictably, used patronage and officially sanctioned plunder to entrench themselves.
When federal subsidies and confiscation of private wealth proved inadequate, the Reconstruction governments turned to deficit financing, driving the states they misruled into even deeper economic misery.
The Reconstruction regime, writes Haworth, was built on a “sinister alliance” between military governors, their political satraps, and state-allied secret societies within the “Union League” (also known as the “Loyalty League”). Those criminal cabals were used to enforce political discipline and carry out covert acts of terrorism against dissenters. For example, notes Haworth, League members “resorted to whipping or otherwise maltreating Negroes who became Democrats.”
