Harry Targ : The 'Unfinished Revolution' of the Emancipation Proclamation

Emancipation from Freedmen's viewpoint. Illustration from Harper's Weekly, 1865. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The Emancipation Proclamation:
The 'Unfinished Revolution'

The candidacy of President Obama in 2012 offers a continuation of the struggle for political rights against the most sustained racist assaults by neoliberals, conservatives, and tea party activists since the days of segregation.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 25, 2012

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free… -- President Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” January 1, 1863.

The Purdue University Black Cultural Center on September 21, 2012, organized a panel honoring the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the final version of which was issued by the President on January 1, 1863.

The proclamation declared slaves in the states rebelling against the United States to be free. It did not apply to those border states which had not seceded from the Union. In those states 750,000 slaves were yet to be liberated.

Celebration of political anniversaries provides an important opportunity to better understand the past, how the past connects to the present, and what needs to be done to connect the present to the future. As a participant on this panel I was stimulated to reflect on the place and significance of the Proclamation and the centrality of slavery and racism to American history.

First, as Marx suggested at the time, the rise of capitalism as a mode of production was inextricably connected to slavery and the institutionalization of racism. He described the rise of capitalism out of feudalism and the centrality of racism and slavery to that process:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation (Capital, Volume 1).

Second, the Emancipation Proclamation began a political revolution, abolishing slavery in Confederate states, but it did not embrace full citizenship rights for all African Americans nor did it support economic emancipation.

The historical literature documents that while Lincoln’s views on slavery moved in a progressive direction, the President remained more committed to preserving the Union than abolishing slavery. Until the Proclamation, he harbored the view that African-Americans should emigrate to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America to establish new lives.

As historian Eric Foner wrote: “Which was the real Lincoln -- the racist or the opponent of slavery? The unavoidable answer is: both.” In short, President Lincoln, an iconic figure in American history thought and acted in contradictory ways.

Third, Lincoln’s growing opposition to slavery during his political career and his presidency was influenced to a substantial degree by the abolitionist movement. As an influential participant in that movement Frederick Douglass had a particular impact on Lincoln’s thinking.

Foner points out that on a whole variety of issues “Lincoln came to occupy positions the abolitionists first staked out.” He continues: “The destruction of slavery during the war offers an example, as relevant today as in Lincoln’s time, of how the combination of an engaged social movement and an enlightened leader can produce progressive social change.”

Fourth, the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation was never fully achieved. It constituted an “unfinished revolution,” the creation of political rights for former slaves but not economic justice. The former slaves remained dependent on the plantation system of agriculture; landless sharecroppers beholden to former slave owners.

Fifth, post-civil war reconstruction began to institutionalize the political liberation of African Americans. For a time Blacks and whites began to create new political institutions that represented the common interests of the economically dispossessed. But the collaboration of Northern industrial interests and Southern plantation owners led to the destruction of Reconstruction era change and a return to the neo-slave system of Jim Crow segregation.

Even the “unfinished revolution” was temporarily crushed.

Sixth, over the next 100 years African Americans, workers, women, and other marginalized groups continued the struggle to reconstruct the political freedoms implied in the Emancipation Proclamation and temporarily institutionalized in Reconstruction America. The struggle for democracy culminated in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and the rising of Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians.

Finally, the contradictions of victories achieved and the escalation of racist reactions since the mid-1960s continues. And, most vitally, the unfinished revolution continues. The question of the intersection of race and class remains as gaps between rich and poor in wealth, income, and political power grow.

In this historic context, the candidacy of President Obama in 2012 offers a continuation of the struggle for political rights against the most sustained racist assaults by neoliberals, conservatives, and tea party activists that have existed since the days of segregation.

At the same time Obama’s reelection alone, while vital to the progressive trajectory of American history since 1863, will not complete the revolution. The need for social movements to address the “class question,”or economic justice, along with protecting the political gains that have been achieved, will remain critical to our future.

One hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation the struggle for democracy, political empowerment, and the end to class exploitation, remains for this generation to advance.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : German Freethinkers and the Massacre at the Nueces

A number of German Freethinking Unionists were hung after the massacre at the Nueces River in the Texas Hill Country. Graphic from Thoughts, Essays, and Musings on the Civil War. Inset image below: Treu der Union monument at Comfort, Texas.
A tale of Civil War Texas:
The battle and massacre at the Nueces River

The German Freethinkers in the Hill Country stood up for their beliefs in the face of hostile, organized, and armed opposition.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / August 15, 2012

Among Civil War battles, the fight that has come to be known to many as “The Battle of the Nueces” was not very important, but it may be one of the most controversial battles, because of its characterization by Civil War historians and aficionados -- Was it a battle or a massacre? From my research, it appears to have been a massacre within a battle.

It occurred 150 years ago on August 10, 1862. But the story begins around 1848, when about 1,000 freethinking Germans immigrated to the Texas Hill Country, mostly to the area between and west of San Antonio, New Braunfels, and Fredericksburg.

About 20,000 German Freethinkers (Freidunker in German) immigrated to the U.S. around 1848 to escape political and religious persecution in Germany. They included prominent doctors, writers, newspaper publishers and reporters, philosophers, scientists, engineers, and inventors. While many consider the Freethinkers atheists or agnostics, a more apt characterization is that they viewed the idea of a diety as irrelevant to their lives.

Ed Scharf’s research on Hill Country Freethinkers found that they took political and social positions that could be considered anti-authoritarian, democratic, and communitarian by today’s standards. These Freethinkers were products of the Enlightenment. They revered science and intellectual pursuits, and they opposed superstition. They were intolerant of abuses by both the church and the state.

Scharf reports that in San Antonio, at an 1854 Saengerfest, a singing convention which the German Freethinkers held annually, they adopted resolutions which, among other things, demanded

• laws to be enacted, so simple and intelligible, that there should be no need of lawyers
• the abolition of the grand jury
• the abolition of capital punishment
• the abolition of all temperance laws
• taxation based on level of income -- the greater the income, the greater the tax
• the elimination of religious instruction in schools and preachers as school teachers
• the abolition of laws respecting Sunday or days of prayer
• the abolition of a religious oath
• an end to opening Congress with prayer

The Freethinkers also opposed slavery and stood on the side of the Union, as did Sam Houston, the first president of the Republic of Texas. After Texas was annexed by the United States in 1845, Houston became a U.S. Senator. During a debate in the Senate over several bills known as the Compromise of 1850, Houston said, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand,” a sentiment echoed eight years later by President Abraham Lincoln. However, most German immigrants to the southern U.S. did not follow Houston’s and the Freethinkers’ lead -- they supported the Confederacy.

German Freethinkers were prominent in the Hill Country and beyond. They could be found in the Texas counties of Kendall (Comfort, Sisterdale, and Tusculum), Llano (Castell), Colorado (Frelsburg), Washington (Latium), DeWitt (Meyersville and Ratcliffe), and Austin (Millheim and Shelby). A German Freethinker, Dr. Carl Adolph Douai, published the San Antonio Zeitung, a newspaper dedicated to social progress and fiercely opposed to slavery and secession. In 1855, the newspaper offices were destroyed by people opposed to the views regularly expressed in the newspaper.

In 1861, German Freethinkers in the Texas Hill Country around Comfort and Fredericksburg organized the Union Loyal League to oppose secession, provide protection from Confederate soldiers who patrolled the area between their encampment near Fredericksburg and San Antonio, and to protect settlers against outlaws and hostile Indians (though many Indians interacted with the settlers peaceably).

Some members of the League were strong supporters of the Union and celebrated Union victories that they learned about. By mid-1862, the League had an estimated 500 members who were armed with conventional weapons of the time -- pistols, shotguns, and rifles.

The League clearly hoped to restore Federal power to the region when the Civil War ended, and they wanted “to prevent the forced enrollment of Unionists in the Confederate Army.” Some in the League threatened people who sided with the Confederacy. League members shared information through “an underground communication system” and encouraged the Union to invade Texas.

If an invasion did occur, the League planned to help Union forces, including freeing Union sympathizers who had been imprisoned and fighting Confederate units. Because of these threats, the Confederate government located in Austin organized a detachment of state militia forces and Confederate cavalry forces to patrol the Texas Hill Country.

These patrols were given the task to locate and capture any men in arms against the Confederacy and to keep order among those who resisted the recently enacted Confederate Conscription Act, which required all men between the ages of 18 and 35 to pledge allegiance to the Confederacy and serve in the Confederate Army. The detachment, under the control of Captain James Duff, was bivouacked near Fredericksburg.

Duff had been a member of the state militia before receiving a commission as captain in the Confederate army. His unit left the Fredericksburg area in June, but in July Duff was given command of four companies to return to the area to put down what was believed to be open insurrection by Hill Country Unionists. Duff was appointed as provost marshal for the area. In late July, Duff proclaimed martial law in Gillespie County and in portions of other adjacent counties.

Even many of Duff’s men considered him ruthless in his harassment of Unionists in Gillespie, Kerr, Kendall, Edwards, and Kimball Counties. Consequently, many League members decided to flee the state because of their political views, to avoid conscription into the Confederate Army, and for personal safety.

One of their leaders, Frederick Tegener, an organizer of the Union Loyal League, reported that he had read a proclamation stating that Texas Governor Francis Lubbock had ordered that those men who could not follow the requirements of the Confederate Conscription Act would be given 30 days to leave the state, though no documentary evidence of such an order has been found.

On August 1, 1862, 80 German men met at Turtle Creek, 18 miles west of Kerrville. Sixty-one decided to flee to Mexico. From there some of the men thought that they could make their way to New Orleans, which had been taken by Union forces on May 1, 1862, to join up with the Union army.

During the next two days, the men left their homes to head toward Mexico by way of Devil’s River, led by Frederick Tegener and accompanied by a non-German, John W. Sansom. Probably two spies in their midst reported the departures and plans to Duff, who dispatched 96 men under the leadership of Colin D. McRae to pursue them. Leaving on August 3, they tracked the fleeing Unionists from the Pedernales River, down the Guadalupe.

At some point, another five men (four Anglos and one Mexican) joined the Unionists in their trek to Mexico. The men continued down the Medina and Frio Rivers until they reached a bend in the Nueces River. There they decided to camp on the night of August 9.

The pace for the trip had been leisurely, with reports of target practice and wood carving by some of the men as they made their way toward Mexico, which was only one day's ride from their campsite on the Nueces.

Hunting parties sent out by the Unionists from their Nueces camp reported seeing unidentified riders on the Unionists’ backtrail, but neither Tegener nor any of the other Unionists seemed concerned, apparently not realizing that they were being hunted down by Duff’s troops. The Unionists were so unconcerned with safety that they did not even post sentries for the night.

When the Texas Confederate forces neared the Unionists’ encampment, they prepared for an assault on foot and split into two groups to attack the Unionists from two sides. They planned to attack during the night and were in place by 1 a.m. A gun shot was to be the signal to begin the assault.

Two of the Unionists wandering from the encampment during the night, stumbled upon one of the groups of Confederate forces around 3 a.m. and killed one of the men. That shot was thought by the Confederates to be the signal to attack, and the battle began with sporadic fighting and re-positioning of forces by the Confederates during the night.

Before dawn, 23 Unionists escaped the encampment through McRae’s scattered forces to return to their homes. That increased the Confederates’ advantage considerably. At dawn the Confederates slowly made their way toward the Unionists who remained.

During this initial battle, two Confederates were killed and 19 more wounded. McRae was wounded with two shots. Twice the Confederates were made to fall back by the determined fighting of the Unionists, but a final charge by the Confederate forces killed, wounded, or scattered the remaining Unionists.

When the fighting subsided early in the morning, some of the Confederates attended to their own wounded and to wounded Unionists. Some of the men cooked breakfast. Immediately after the fighting ended, according to the eyewitness account by Confederate fighter R. H. Williams, “a couple of boys were sent off, post haste, to Fort Clark,” about 30 miles away, to get medical help for the wounded.

In the late afternoon, after tending to the needs of some of the wounded Confederates, Williams decided to check back on the wounded Freethinkers, but found they had been moved. A group of Confederates, taking directions from Lt. Edwin Lilly (whose name has also been reported as Luck) moved nine to 11 of the wounded Unionists into a cedar thicket under the excuse that they needed to be in the shade.

Williams started to go see to them when he heard a number of shots fired. Lt. Lilly had had all of them summarily executed with shots to their heads. Williams wrote that he considered it a cowardly and despicable act, and that the Lieutenant was a “remorseless, treacherous villain,” which he told him to his face.

The Confederates buried their dead in a long trench, but left the bodies of the dead Unionists to the vultures, coyotes, and wolves. Nine other Unionists were pursued by various units of Confederates and state troops and shot or hanged within two weeks of the Battle at the Nueces, but it is unclear from the historical record how many of them had been at the Nueces battle.

In 1865, a group of family and friends of the dead Unionists made their way to the battle site and recovered the remains of the Unionists. The remains of 36 Freethinking Unionists were buried at Monument Hill in Comfort, Texas, where a memorial -- called the “Treue der Union” (loyalty to the Union) -- was erected in their memory.

Harper's Weekly, in 1866, described the burial ceremony as including a military honor salute “without any religious fanfare.” After the Civil War ended, German Freethinkers scattered throughout Texas, many moving to urban areas and continuing to make significant cultural, social, and political contributions to the state.

The German Freethinkers in the Hill Country stood up for their beliefs in the face of hostile, organized, and armed opposition. They adopted the same tactics against the Confederacy, a course they believed was their only hope for survival. Even in their efforts to leave Texas and avoid conscription into the Confederate Army, nearly 70 of the Freethinking men were tracked down and most were killed by Confederate forces.

When all the facts are known, it seems clear that the Battle at the Nueces River was not unlike many Civil War battles, with one difference: it included a massacre of wounded men that was unnecessary and considered vicious retribution by many. In 1929, the Dallas Morning News referred to the massacre within the Nueces battle as “The Blackest Crime in Texas Warfare.”

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

[SOURCES: Paul Burrier, an independent historian of the Battle at the Nueces, of Leakey, Texas -- interviewed February 29, 2012; Edwin E. Scharf, " ‘Freethinkers’ of the Early Texas Hill Country,” published in Freethought Today, April 1998; Stanley S. McGowen, “Battle or Massacre?: The Incident on the Nueces, August 10, 1862,” published in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 104, July 2000-April 2001; Robert W. Shook, “The Battle of the Nueces, August 10, 1862,” published in The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 66, July 1962-April 1963; Dominque De Cleer (translated into English by Gerald Hawkins), a tract titled “Victory Without Heroes on the Nueces” published by the Confederate Historical Association of Belgium; Joe Baulch, “The Dogs of War Unleashed: The Devil Concealed in Men Unchained,” published by the West Texas Historical Association; Egon Richard Tausch, “Letter From Texas: Gott Mit Uns,” published in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, August 2007; Irene Van Winkle, “Myth, fate clash around Tegener’s role in Unionist movement, published by the West Texas Current, March 10, 2012; R. H. Williams (who fought in the battle on the Confederate side) and John W. Sansom (who fought with the Freethinkers but escaped before the battle ended and later was a Texas Ranger), “The Massacre on the Nueces River: The Story of a Civil War Tragedy,” published by the Frontier Times Publishing House]

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Bob Feldman : Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1876

The Freedman's Bureau in Texas. Image from Afrotexan.com.
The hidden history of Texas

Part VII: Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1876/1

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / October 26, 2011

[This is the first section of Part 7 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Just before the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, “the Confederate troops in Texas got out of hand and began rebelling and looting [in] towns like Houston [which] were burned,” according to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction.

But by mid-June 1865, General Gordon Granger entered Texas and on June 19, 1865, an Emancipation Proclamation was announced by General Granger that freed most of the 250,000 African-Americans who then lived in Texas from being legally defined as the property and slaves of their mostly white Anglo masters.

Yet despite the presence of Union troops in Texas, “between 1865 and 1868, 468 freedmen met violent deaths -- 90 percent at the hands of white men” in Texas (while “only about 1 percent of the 509 whites killed” during the same period in Texas were killed by black men), according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans.

According to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas, “from 1865 to 1867 Presidential Reconstruction in Texas created state and local governments [in Texas] controlled by a conservative combination of prewar Unionists and former secessionists, with the latter holding the upper hand.”

So, not surprisingly, a black code was enacted during this period which “forbade inter-marriage, voting, holding public office, serving on juries, or testifying in cases where Negroes were not concerned” by Texas’s African-American residents, according to Black Reconstruction.

Federal troops entered Austin on July 25, 1865, and between 100 and 200 U.S. government troops remained stationed in Austin until President Grant ordered their withdrawal in March 1870.

But following the February 1868 election of 90 delegates to the reconstructed State Constitutional Convention (which included nine progressive African-American delegates and a white progressive majority of delegates -- as well as a white reactionary minority of 12 delegates) Texas’s new 1869 state constitution officially abolished slavery, established free public schools, and “decreed that the receipts from public lands should go to the school fund, besides other revenues,” according to Black Reconstruction.

The same book also noted that after another election in 1869 (in which local eligible Anglo, Mexican-American, and African-American male voters participated) to choose representatives to Texas’s new state legislature, “E.J. Davis... marshaled the Negro vote [and] was elected Governor by a small plurality,” and “in the ensuing legislature, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments [of the U.S. Constitution, which legally prohibited the abridgement of African-American citizenship rights and voting rights in former Confederate states like Texas] were adopted almost without opposition, and [on] Mar. 30, 1870, the representatives of Texas were admitted to Congress.”

In addition, between the late 1860s and the fraudulent election of 1873 (in which African-American supporters of Texas Governor E.J. Davis were “in many communities ordered to keep away from the polling places” by the white supremacist Democrats who had previously supported the Confederacy, “while white men under age... voted”), many African-Americans in Texas held public office and “there were Negroes in the state militias and the various police forces” in Texas, according to Black Reconstruction.

After Texas Governor Davis was defeated in the fraudulent 1873 election, however, the same type of rich white Anglo landowning Democrats who controlled the Texas state legislature in Austin before the Civil War regained control of the state government, and a new state constitution was drawn up by an 1875 Texas Constitutional Convention, which went into effect on April 18, 1876, that allowed institutionalized racism to develop in Texas again.

In addition, factually incorrect versions of what actually happened politically inside Texas between 1865 and 1874 were promoted by some U.S. academic historians until the second half of the 20th century. As Gone To Texas, recalled:

The traditional interpretation of Reconstruction is replete with factual errors. For example, claims that Carpetbaggers ran Reconstruction in Texas and that the era ruined the fortunes of a great many whites are completely unfounded. Carpetbaggers held fewer than one-quarter of the...major offices in state and county government between 1867 and 1874.

Instead, a majority of the men who led Texas during Congressional Reconstruction were...natives of the South who supported the Republican Party... It is clear that most of the wealthy did not have to relinquish their position in society between 1865 and 1876. They lost their slaves…but they did not lose their lands or other forms of property.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : The Confederate State of Texas, 1846-1860

Between 12,000 and 15,000 Texas lost their lives in the Civil War. Painting from the Texas Civil War Museum.
The hidden history of Texas

Part VI: The Confederate State of Texas, 1860-1865

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / October 26, 2011

[This is Part 6 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

In 1861, the slave-owning Anglo political leaders of Texas decided that the state should secede from the United States and join the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.

According to Alwyn Barr's Black Texans, “as their declaration of causes repeatedly proclaimed, white Texans seceded in 1861, primarily to defend `the servitude of the African to the white race.’” And “as Union armies pushed into Arkansas and Louisiana,” the “slaveholders from each state became refugees to Texas” and “they brought their slaves,” according to Barr's “Black Texans During the Civil War," an essay that appeared in Donald Willett and Stephen Curley’s Invisible Texans.

As a result, “by 1864, the slave population” in Texas “probably grew to 250,000.” In 1862, in Texas’s Smith County, authorities “arrested over 40 slaves and hanged one after hearing rumors of a plot to revolt,” according to the same essay.

White opponents of Texas seceding from the United States to join the Confederacy who lived in Texas were also repressed between 1861 and 1865. As Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas recalled, “some of the more vocal Unionists had to leave Texas” and “James P. Newcomb, editor of the San Antonio Alamo-Express, fled to New Mexico after a mob attacked his press.”

Although most white Texans “continued throughout the war to support the Confederacy as they had supported secession in the first place,” according to Gone To Texas, some organized support for the U.S. government’s Lincoln Administration and the cause of the Union Army did develop inside Texas during the Civil War. As the same book recalled:

Small groups of Unionists living in regions that voted against secession organized internal opposition to the Confederacy... Germans in the Hill County northwest of San Antonio formed a Union Loyal League with its own military companies... In the Spring of 1862 Confederate officials sent Texas troops into the region to disband the military companies and enforce the conscription law, whereupon 61 of the Unionists, mostly Germans led by Frederick "Fritz" Tegener, decided to go to Mexico and from there join the United States Army.

They… were overtaken by a detachment of 91 Texas Partisan Rangers... while camped on the Nueces River. Attacking before dawn on Aug. 10, 1862, the Confederates killed 19 of the Germans and captured nine who were badly wounded. The remaining Unionists escaped... After the battle, state troops executed the nine wounded Germans, and nine of those who escaped were caught and killed before they reached Mexico...

Armed Anglo supporters of the Confederacy in Texas also repressed supporters of the North and the Union in Cooke County between 1861 and 1865. As Gone To Texas notes:

In Cooke County... the passage of conscription led to the formation of a secret Peace Party that opposed the draft and supported the Union. Rumors that the Peace Party planned to... foment a general uprising led to the arrest on October [1862] of more than 150 suspected insurrectionists by state troops...

An extralegal "Citizen’s Court"… found seven leading Unionists guilty of treason and sentenced them to death. At this point, a mob... lynched 14 more of the prisoners and killed two who tried to escape...When unknown assassins killed Col. Young [of the Eleventh Texas Cavalry]…the jury then sentenced another 19 men to hang, bringing the total number of victims to 42. Texas authorities condoned this "Great Hanging at Gainesville"...

The military conscription law that provoked more organized internal opposition in Hill County and Cooke County, Texas, to the South’s Confederate Government had been passed in April 1862 by the Confederate Congress. As a result, all white males in Texas who were between 13 and 46 in 1860 -- except for any white males whose work involved them in supervising 20 or more slaves -- were now in danger of being drafted into the Confederate Army for as long as the U.S. Civil War continued.

So, not surprisingly, “nearly 5,000 Texans deserted from Confederate and state service, and an unknown number avoided conscription” by hiding “in isolated areas throughout the state -- for example, the Big Thicket in Hardin County and the swamp bottoms of northeast Texas” or “in the northwestern frontier counties,” according to Gone To Texas. And, according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History, “draft-dodging was especially common among Austin’s unionists.”

But slightly more than 50 percent of the white males in Texas who were subject to the Confederate government’s draft during the Civil War were unable to avoid being drafted, and between 1861 and 1865 between 60,000 to 70,000 white men in Texas served in either the Confederate Army or in Texas state military units. And thousands of these military conscripts from Texas died during the U.S. Civil War. As Gone To Texas observes:

Approximately 20 to 25 percent of Texas soldiers died while in the army. More than half of these deaths resulted from a variety of illnesses... Deaths in battle and Union prisoner-of-war camps accounted for the other lives lost. The final death toll can be estimated at between 12,000 and 15,000 men, most of them in their twenties and thirties.

According to Austin: An Illustrated History, Texas’s “loss `in bone and blood’” during the Civil War was “proportionately higher than that of any northern state.”

While between 12,000 and 15,000 people in Texas lost their lives as a result of the Civil War, some other Texans apparently made good money between 1861 and 1865. As W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction 1860-1880 recalls:

Texas was one of the Southern states that had considerable prosperity during the war. She was outside the area of conflict; excellent crops were raised and slave labor was plentiful. Many slaves were deported to Texas for protection... so that Texas could furnish food and raw material for the Confederate States; and on the other hand, when the blockade was strengthened, Texas became the highway for sending cotton and other goods to Europe by way of Mexico.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Ted McLaughlin : Post-Racial America? Yeah, Right.

Confederate massacre of black Union troops after the surrender at Fort Pillow, April 12, 1864 -- under the command by Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Post-racial America?
Some would honor Confederate
Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / February 14, 2011

A couple of years ago some people were saying that America had entered its post-racial phase. The ides was that because the United States had elected an African-American as its president, surely we were beginning to get past the terrible racism that has plagued this country since its founding (when slaves were only considered 3/5 of a person).

And that endemic racism has been very hard to get rid of. It took a Civil War costing the lives of many thousands of Americans to end slavery. But even after slavery was abolished and the Fourteenth Amendment was passed, racism did not go away. It just changed forms and assumed the guise of segregation, the KKK, and other forms of Jim Crow-ism. It then took another 100 years to outlaw those forms of racism.

After the civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s, racism did not disappear but it did go underground: it was not quite as upfront and in-your-face as it had been in the past. Even in the South it was starting to be considered gauche to be overtly racist in public. The war against racism had not been won, but many battles were beginning to be won.

Then we progressed enough to elect Barack Obama as president. But don't think this meant the country was post-racial -- far from it. If anything, having an African-American president seemed to give the racists permission to crawl back out from under the rocks where they had been hiding, and once again make their odious views public.

Once again racism became a public menace -- a menace that could now be disguised as conservative politics (which must make conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley turn over in their graves).

Politicians have been favoring the rich over everyone else since the Reagan administration, and this has resulted in a very unfair America -- and in George W. Bush's final term it culminated in the current recession. But those were white presidents, and while there was some complaining, poor, working class, and middle class whites generally went along with what was happening.

But when Obama was elected that all changed. Now we had the teabaggers complaining loudly about socialism and big government takeovers -- even though the president and his policies were actually center-right on the political scale (and rather embarrassing to real progressives). Even the great socialist evil health care reform was only a slight reform and, in fact, a strengthening of the prevailing capitalist system -- and most of the reforms had been proposed by Republicans in the past.

Obama's great sin is not in being a socialist or even a liberal -- he's neither. It is the color of his skin. The teabaggers just can't stand having an African-American president (just look at their signs when they rally) and their political views are a thinly-veiled excuse for their racism. The "birthers" are even more obvious about their racism. They never worried about a birth certificate when whites were president (or even when McCain ran for president, and he was actually born in a foreign country).

Greg Stewart of the Mississippi chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans displays mississippi license plate commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. They're considering another to honor Confederate general and KKK pioneer Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Photo by Solis / AP.
And its worse than just the teabaggers or the birthers. The KKK and white-only militias are seeing growth once again, after a couple of decades of declining membership. And even some state leaders are again starting to celebrate white privilege. Some states are celebrating the 150 anniversary of the formation of the Confederacy (an act of treachery by 13 Southern states). And in Mississippi, the state is considering a license plate that would honor the racist hero Nathan Bedford Forrest.

I'm sure those wanting to honor the Confederate general with a license plate will say it is just a celebration of "Southern heritage." That's nonsense. It's nothing less than a celebration of racism. And a cursory glance at the life of Forrest will confirm that. During the Civil War, at Fort Pillow, he massacred hundreds of African-American troops -- after they had thrown down their weapons and surrendered! After the war, he was very active in the KKK. Although he did not found the organization, he did centralize the disparate KKK groups under one banner and gave them a recognizable leader after being chosen Grand Wizard.

Honoring Nathan Bedford Forrest isn't a celebration of Southern heritage -- it's a slap in the face not only to minorities, but to all decent Americans. And it's just one more example of racism in America.

The election of Barack Obama to be president did not mean America was post-racial. It just showed how racist the country still is. We still have a long way to go before we live up to the dream of equality written in our Constitution.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Jonah Raskin : Historian Eric Foner: A Contemporary View of America's Past

Historian Eric Foner. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.
A Rag Blog interview:
Lincoln biographer Eric Foner
tells history from the bottom up

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / November 29, 2010

The award-winning American historian, Eric Foner, has often written about the Republican Party -- its origins, icon leaders, and tipping points -- but Foner himself is not now nor has he ever been a front man for the Republicans.

A popular professor of history at Columbia University since 1981, he is the author most recently of The Fiery Trial: American Lincoln and American Slavery, in which he charts both the strengths and weaknesses of our 16th-president, and depicts him as an original thinker and as an adept politician in near-constant evolution.

Revered by students and fellow historians -- a past president of the American Historical Association -- and reviled by right-wing ideologies, Eric Foner seems to have been destined to write history. His father, Jack Foner, was an American historian who was blacklisted for years; his uncle Phil Foner was also a historian who wrote about nearly everything and everyone in American history -- from 19th-century New York merchants to Frederick Douglass, Helen Keller, and the Black Panthers.

Like his father and his uncle, he is thoroughly immersed in the American past, and yet attuned to contemporary history as it unfolds today.

I met Eric Foner at Columbia in 1960 when we were both freshman, and members of Action -- a student-run organization and a forerunner of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) -- that protested nuclear testing, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the policies of a paternalist administration.

Even in 1960, at the age of 17, he already knew he would go on to teach and to write about American history, to see it from the bottom up and from the point of view of the underdog: the slave, the worker, the immigrant.

Fifty years on, and at the start of the 50th anniversary of the 1960s -- an era that shaped his own view of history -- Foner continues to teach, write, and speak out on controversial political issues of the day. This interview was conducted over the long Thanksgiving holiday and ranged over a wide variety of topics -- from Lincoln to Obama and Karl Marx to revolution.


Almost every day I go on line there's another piece about Lincoln? Why is this?

Lincoln is so iconic a figure in American culture -- the self-made man, frontier hero, liberator of the slaves -- that everyone wants to claim him as their own. Also, because the issues of his day still resonate with ours, he somehow seems to be our contemporary in ways other figures of our past do not.

If you could channel Lincoln what do you think he'd say about Obama?

Historians don't like to answer questions like this. Lincoln would no doubt be pleased and surprised that a black man was elected president but on bailouts, gay marriage, Afghanistan -- who knows?

And about Sarah Palin?

All that I’ll say on that subject is that Lincoln had great respect for learning and expertise.

You have a new book out on Lincoln and slavery. Why did it take so long for someone to write a book about a subject that seems to obvious?

There are previous books on Lincoln and slavery but they tend to be either hagiographies -- he was born ready to sign the Emancipation Proclamation -- or prosecutorial briefs -- he was an inveterate racist. I think it requires someone from outside what a friend of mine calls the Lincoln-industrial complex to try to show the man in all his strengths and weaknesses, and how his views changed over time.

What does the reception to your book tell you about the state of our country today?

To the extent that people relate the book to the present it may reflect a longing for political leadership in which one can take pride and have confidence.

Was Lincoln a prophetic president? Did he see into the future and see the way U.S. society was developing?

Lincoln looked back more than forward. He thought of himself as fulfilling the promise of the American Revolution. He did not foresee the rise of the industrial state of the late 19th-century, which undermined many of his deep assumptions about the dignity of labor.

You became an historian in the 1960s. What do you see now as the impact of the 1960s as an historical era on the writing and the teaching of history?

The 1960s put on the agenda of historians, issues that had been very marginalized before then -- the history of race and racism; women's history; the history more generally of ordinary people, neglected groups. We are still trying to create a persuasive new overall view of U.S. history incorporating this expansion of the historical cast of characters.

You teach U.S. history to students now. Could you characterize how this generation views history and the past?

Like previous generations, they look to history for a sense of their own identity as individuals and Americans. Because students are today so much more diverse than in the past, so must history be.

American history is continually rewritten. Only recently I read a piece about the ways that the Boston Tea Party has been viewed through the ages. Which historical periods are rewritten and revised and rethought more than others?

Reconstruction after the Civil War has been revised most thoroughly by historians, although the general public has not really caught up. The role of slavery in American life has been completely rewritten. But every period is open to reinterpretation -- that's what historians do.

What do you think is the single most important thing we ought to learn from Lincoln?

Open-mindedness, willingness to listen to critics and not surround one's self with yes men, willingness to abandon ideas and policies that are not working and move to new ones, while maintaining one's core principles.

Karl Marx wrote about the U.S. in the 1850s; how astute was he about the U.S.?

Marx was a shrewd observer of the Civil War, understanding the revolutionary implications for the society of the emancipation of the slaves.

And on Lincoln?

Marx saw Lincoln as a man willing to take radical steps to achieve his goals, but to couch them in mundane language like a lawyer. He also saw freeing the slaves as an essential step toward liberating labor more generally.

Do you think it's impossible for there to be another civil war in the U.S. -- a third American Revolution?

Probably not. A third Reconstruction (the second being the civil rights movement) would be a good idea, however.

Are all the major events of our society behind us?

I doubt it. The most important things in history come as complete surprises. More surprises will come in the future.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor of communication studies at Sonoma State University.]

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Textbooks and the Confederacy : Teach the Whole Story

Image from photobucket.
Texas textbooks:
Let's teach the truth about the Confederacy

By Michael Lind / June 2, 2010

'Our new government is founded upon... the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.' -- Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy

The Texas State Board of Education, the most astringently reactionary body since the Spartan Ephorate, has decreed that textbooks for the schoolchildren of Texas are to include Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address along with the first inaugural of Abraham Lincoln.

This controversy holds particular interest for me. I am a fifth-generation native of Texas. One ancestor of mine had his farm in Georgia incinerated by Gen. Sherman. Another came to Texas in the federal army of occupation of Gen. Custer. One of the last things that my late grandfather said to me was: "Sam Houston was a traitor to the South!" The Civil War ended in 1865, but clearly its meaning is still contested in the 21st century.

By all means, let schoolchildren in Texas read Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address. But there should be more material from the Confederate side of the conflict than that. For generations, apologists for the Confederacy have claimed that secession was really about the tariff, or states’ rights, or something else -- anything other than preserving the right of some human beings to own, buy and sell other human beings.

That being the case, the education of schoolchildren in my state should include a reading of the Cornerstone Speech made by Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy, on March 21, 1861. With remarkable candor, Stephens pointed out that whereas the United States was founded on the idea, enshrined in Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal," the new Confederacy was founded on the opposite conception:

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically ... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Let the children of Texas compare what Stephens had to say about natural rights and human equality with Lincoln’s views on the subject, and contrast the ideals of the American and Confederate Foundings. That should make for interesting classroom discussions.

Let Texas schoolchildren, as well, read the Confederate Constitution. It is surely the most bizarre constitution ever adopted. It is a copy of the U.S. Constitution, rewritten to cripple the central government. The Confederate Constitution bans the government of the new federation from spending money on infrastructure, with a few exceptions like harbors and lighthouses, and prevents the new government of the South from fostering industry.

With a central government that was deliberately weakened at its formation, how did the Confederacy expect to prevail in a war against the forces of the Union? The answer is that the rich oligarchy of slave lords who ruled the South hoped that the British empire would intervene to secure their region’s independence, just as France had intervened in the American Revolution to help the United States win its independence from Britain.

When the British declined the offer, the geniuses in charge of the Confederacy realized that they would have to win their independence with their own resources. This was no easy thing to do in a wannabe country that prided itself on its absence of factories and banks. But they tried anyway. They threw libertarianism overboard and mobilized for war. They instituted a draft. They passed an income tax and inflated the currency to push citizens into higher brackets. Lacking a native Southern capitalist class, they put generals and colonels in charge of government-owned factories and munitions plants.

But conscription, taxation and state socialism were not enough. Too many Southern men were avoiding the draft or deserting, to say nothing of slaves who ran away to freedom or to join the U.S. Army. And there was the resistance. In the semi-mythical "free state of Jones" in Mississippi, in the Big Thicket in East Texas, in the Texas German Hill Country, rebels fought the rebellion, in the name of the United States or their own rights.

The tradition of anti-Confederate resistance survived in the South after the war, to inspire Radical Republican "scalawags," populists, socialists, and New Deal Democrats. The Southern right and the Northern left have erased the resisters from history. But not all of us have forgotten them.

Toward the end of the war, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis came up with a plan. Following Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, they proposed to save the Confederacy by freeing and arming slaves. In "Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War," Bruce Levine quotes some typical responses.

Brig. Gen. Clement H. Stevens: "If slavery is to be abolished then I take no more interest in our fight." Gov. Zebulon Vance of North Carolina: "Our independence is chiefly desirable for the preservation of our political institutions, the principal of which is slavery." Once it became clear that the only way to save slavery and anti-statism in the South was to abolish slavery and adopt statism, the malfunctioning Confederate Mind short-circuited completely.

That is what my fellow Texans of younger generations should learn about the Lost Cause. Under British protection, the CSA might have evolved into a squalid banana republic run by landlords for the benefit of investors and industrialists in Britain. Without British protection, the CSA might have survived as a proto-fascist regime, with an economy of permanent war socialism and a government run by colonels.

In either case, the victory of the Confederacy would have been far worse for most white and black Southerners than its well-deserved defeat. For ensuring that I would be born in the United States of America instead of a broken-down failed state that combined the least attractive features of apartheid-era South Africa and death squad-era Honduras, I say: Thank you, President Lincoln, and thank you, Gen.Grant.

So let the students of Texas read the inaugural address of Jefferson Davis, and the Cornerstone Speech of Alexander Stephens, and the Confederate Constitution. And let the readings conclude with the speech that Texas Gov. Sam Houston gave on Sept. 22, 1860, in my home town of Austin, the state capital.

Houston had led the successful Texan revolt against Mexico in 1836 and had served as president of the Republic of Texas, then as a United States senator after Texas was admitted to the Union. His final campaign, before he was deposed from office by the Confederates, was his failed attempt to prevent the secession of Texas from the United States.

In front of that audience in Austin, the haggard old soldier mocked the claim that the rights of the Southern states were threatened in any way by the North:

Our forefathers saw the danger to which freedom would be subjected, from the helpless condition of disunited States; and, to "form a more perfect Union," they established this Government. They saw the effect of foreign influence on rival States, the effect of dissensions at home, and to strengthen all and perpetuate all, to bind all together, yet leave all free, they gave us the Constitution and the Union.

Where are the evidences that their patriotic labor was in vain? Have we not emerged from an infant’s to a giant’s strength? Have not empires been added to our domain, and States been created? All the blessings which they promised their posterity have been vouchsafed; and millions now enjoy them, who without this Union would to-day be oppressed and down-trodden in far-off foreign lands!

What is there that is free that we have not got? Are our rights invaded and no government ready to protect us? No! Are our institutions wrested from us and other foreign to our taste forced upon us? No! Is the right of free speech, a free press, or free sufferage taken from us?

Has our property been taken from us and the government failed to interpose?

No, none of these! The rights of the States and the rights of individuals are still maintained. We have yet the Constitution, we have yet a judiciary, which has never been appealed to in vain -- we have yet just laws and officers to administer them; and an army and navy, ready to maintain any and every constitutional right of the citizen.

Whence then this clamor about disunion? Whence this cry of protection to property or disunion, when even the very loudest in the cry, declared under their Senatorial oaths, but a few months since, that no protection was necessary? Are we to sell reality for a phantom?

Class dismissed.

[Michael Lind is policy director of the Economic Growth Program at the New America Foundation and author of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America’s Greatest President.]

Source / Salon

Thanks to Tom Cleaver / The Rag Blog

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