Should plaque be put up about racist South Carolina governor? (Tillman statue on Statehouse grounds)

Certainly there were good and bad in every bunch. My comments were intended to point out that the historic association of the the Republican Party with Lincoln, the Union during the Civil War and particularly the abuse heaped upon white southerners during Reconstruction made the GOP very unpopular until the Democratic Party was taken over by Civil Rights liberals in the 1960s followed by how attractive the conservatism of Reagan’s GOP made the party to typically traditional southerners. Lots of southerners who would be called conservative today were in the Democartic Party because disdain for the GOP made being a republican a non-choice.

>>”We have done our level best....”<<

I’ve been searching the net for that 1900 quotation in its original context but so far without success. I don’t doubt that Tillman was a racist, but am skeptical about quotations like that until I track them down to the original source. Wikipedia merely gives a secondary source from 1965 (The Betrayal of the Negro, from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson). Do you know the primary source? So far the closest I’ve come is something similar from the New York Times (February 25, 1900 - in pdf format). http://preview.tinyurl.com/2mnmb3

Also I thought interesting the official state report about the Hamburg Massacre (”derived chiefly from Trial-Justice Rivers” — black judge and major general in the militia) produced during the Reconstruction itself. http://www.arete-designs.com/shultz/black/report.html

i note that you are NOT from SC, but rather from "the LEFT coast". may i suggest that what we SC folk do in SC is NONE of your business & that (at least until you get strech pelosi, diane SWINEstein, "barbie boxer" & ALL the other kooks from CA/OR/WA OUT of the congress) you worry about YOUR state???

fyi, NOBODY in SC/dixie CARES what the denizens of "the LEFT coast" & the northeast think or "care about". further we southerners couldn't care less WHAT/IF you think/feel/desire "out there"/"up there" as long as you do not get ANY of our tax dollars for your "social programs", "environmentalist WHACKO ideas", etc,etc,etc.

if you want to "get along" as good neighbors SHOULD, keep your opinions to yourself. fyi, southerners just want you to go away & leave us ALONE.

free dixie,sw

I recall reading the quote long before the Wikipedia entry was written, at least 12-15 years ago, in an article or encyclopedia, but I can’t recall the source.

I know with respect to the Hamburg Massacre that Matthew Butler, the General mentioned in the report, was elected Senator within a year. I don’t view these folks as particularly heroic in reestablishing uncontested Democrat party supremacy and White rule by any stretch of the imagination. Who knows how far along we’d have been today if we had rightfully assimilated Blacks into society with their full-fledged rights that were fought for during Reconstruction.

In any event, I don’t want to make it look as though the North was “all right” vs. the South being “all wrong.” As with anything, it is far more nuanced. While I roundly condemn the likes of Tillman for being a thug, demogogue and Republican disenfranchiser, I similarly wrote a defense of Rep. Preston Brooks, the South Carolinian who assaulted Sen. Charles Sumner. After reading more in-depth reports about Sumner, I concluded that it was he that was deliberately looking to provoke an attack with his Senate floor antics. Most articles written today make Sumner look like a saint, and he is anything but.

I agree that if the assimilation had taken place earlier, the South would have benefited. I think that what Reconstruction attempted to do, though, was practically impossible in the context of the time. Former Confederate soldiers were disenfranchised by law, leaving the election of the state government to former slaves (the vast majority illiterate), some idealist whites, and the notorious “carpetbaggers and scalawags”. Even without the race question this is a situation that would be expected to evoke violent resistance.

To have a black government without white resistance, Southern whites would have had to be destroyed (as in Haiti after the revolution). Northern whites wouldn’t have supported that, and with some exceptions treated blacks as inferiors themselves (then and for many decades afterwards). Note many of the statements of Lincoln himself. It’s likely that a more gradual approach to achieving equality of rights would have ultimately gotten there more quickly.

Finding a balance would’ve been difficult, but I don’t believe it was absolutely impossible. The former Confederates needed to recognize, like it or not, that former slaves were Constitutionally guaranteed as their equals and any efforts to disenfranchise them should’ve been met with federal resistance. It’s unfortunate the devil’s bargain of the 1876 election that Rutherford Hayes made to just simply end Reconstruction in exchange for Democrats not contesting the likelihood of Tilden’s victory. While a President Tilden would’ve given the same order regardless, the Republican party should’ve held firm as a group that until full enfranchisement was guaranteed permanently, that we’d keep sending in troops to maintain that. Instead, we grew “comfortable” with the arrangement, and Blacks paid the price for it.

While you’re right that the gradual approach might’ve worked out better, I’m not sure how even that could’ve been achieved logically. Stating at such and such a date you’ll get your rights the same as the White folks seems a bit absurd.

You’re also right that Northern Whites weren’t necessarily any morally superior in their attitudes towards Blacks. Since few of them were in the North to begin with, they could afford to be sympathetic to a cause a far distance away. There was something I read not too long ago about a Northern Congressman discussing the situation with a constituent. The constituent seemed genuinely concerned about the plight of Blacks, but when the Congressman asked him how he would feel if they relocated large numbers of them to the North to escape Southern oppression, the man’s reaction was along the lines of, “I don’t think so.” A handful of them was one thing, that could be acceptable, but taking in, say, 20-25% in each small town or larger city in the North to take them away from the Southern oppression scared the pants off of Northern Whites.

I forgot the Black comedian that told the joke about the difference between the racism of Northern Whites vs. Southern Whites. That Southern Whites don’t care how close Black folks get as long as they don’t get too big, while Northerners don’t care how big Black folks get as long as they don’t get too close.

Regarding Lincoln. Many have an idealized view that somehow had he not been the victim of Booth’s bullet that Reconstruction would’ve gone far more smoothly, but I’m not sure that would’ve necessarily been any different than it was ultimately under Johnson & Grant. Frankly, our failures with Reconstruction almost made the Civil War a pointless exercise, if not in some cases making it worse for Blacks. At least when they were enslaved, White Southerners had an obligation to them. Once they could no longer be, they had no obligation to them at all, except to brutally oppress, drive out, or kill them (or practice de facto slavery via feudalistic sharecropping). They harbored a pathological hatred towards them, since they viewed them as the reason for their losing the old ways.

I doubt that a majority of northern whites would have supported the continued use of troops to impose black rule on their fellow whites. (Women too were not thought competent to vote back then, and the idea of allowing state governments to be controlled by mostly illiterate blacks--who had been slaves just a few years before--was repellent to northern whites too.) Also it would have been difficult to suppress what in effect would have become a guerrilla war that had the support of most Southern whites.

The Civil War and Reconstruction left a bitterness in white Southerners that took more than a century to overcome. It's unfortunate that slavery had to be ended in the context of such a terrible war. I agree that even with a gradual peaceful plan there would have been resistance, but I believe much less. Gradual steps would gain acceptance more easily than the policy of suddenly allowing an illiterate majority to rule.

What the black comedian said about Northerners preferring blacks to be free at a distance reminds me of some of the things said in the last part of Lincoln's 1862 State of the Union Address. In discussing concerns about emancipation, and the fear that large numbers of blacks would come north, Lincoln says, "And in any event, can not the North decide for itself whether to receive them?"

In other words they were not going to have the same rights to go where they pleased that whites had. They would attain their full rights only over time. In discussing his plan for gradual emancipation, he also said in that same speech, "The emancipation will be unsatisfactory to the advocates of perpetual slavery, but the length of time should greatly mitigate their dissatisfaction. The time spares both races from the evils of sudden derangement...."

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