Johnson is an interesting guy.
He was essentially a class warrior against the southern aristos he’d been patronized by and insulted for his whole life.
The problem is that in his innermost heart he was in awe of them, and when they sucked up to him after his becoming president he rolled over on his back.
With the federal government fully in charge of the country, the push to the West picked up a lot of steam and many uprooted people moved West with grudges against the other side. It took a while for the "microaggresion" to settle down.
Not to be glib, but in the movie "Shane", the farmer character known as "Stonewall" is gunned down by Wilson (Jack Palance) in part because Wilson doesn't like the guy's nickname.
Reconstruction would not have turned out as it did had Lincoln survived for the simple reason that the Radicals would have been unable to outmaneuver Lincoln.
Nobody EVER outmaneuvered Lincoln, probably the most effective pure politician in US history. Johnson, OTOH, was perhaps the worst. He alienated even people who really, really wanted to support him.
Lee’s house became the Arlington cemetery center.
Lee lived at the Greenbrier for some time.
Bkmk
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Would like to point out that this author has had a whole series of articles about the WBTS on NRO.
Here’s a link.
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/mackubin-thomas-owens
Highly recommended.
The South was brought to its knees.......
Reconstruction was an insult upon insults.....
If only Lincoln lived.....who knows......a kinder, gentler reconstruction?
But the South survived ......Atlanta rose from the ashes.....
And the South is considered the Bible Belt of the country.
We were brought to our knees......and the only place to look was up, from whence cometh our help.
or, at least, that’s the way it was for many years in our Judeo Christian nation.....
But that, too, may be gone with the wind soon.
Acknowledging the role of Southern Democrats in dismantling reconstruction is a vital component of LBJ’s brilliant efforts to institutionalize blacks in poverty status after the passage of civil rights law.
By providing financial support that required families be broken and fatherless generations of blacks have grown up without the foundation of an in tact family. This was more than incentive. It was and remains today a requirement. It was not simply unintended consequences.
Government welfare was a deliberate effort to create and sustain economic hardship and dependency in the black community. It persists even today with cries of more money for the embattled ghettos of Baltimore.
Reconstruction was an evil America has never fully recovered from.The awful calamity of civil war is a wound that has not been allowed to heal. Both North—and South tolerate each other almost like the Sunni and Shia of Islam.We have much in common—yet much that to this day divide us.
I think it interesting that the South, particularly its soldiers, eventually (if begrudgingly) accepted the unified nation. While it was not so much let “bye gones be bye gones” the collateral and longer term strife it produced is today pretty much an artifact. Apparently such is not the case for the legacy of slavery which was largely a national institution at its inception.
Yikes! I tought to some of the more nuanced libs, the mere utterance of “Jefferson Davis’” name was racist. To some it appears that there was absolutely NOTHING positive done by the southern states. Ever.
Reconstruction ruined the South for a century after the war; the Carthaginian peace handed down by Thaddeus Stevens and his ilk fundamentally altered the nature of our Federal system in a bad way, and Lincoln, had he lived, would have in my opinion pursued a more moderate course that would have left a better legacy both in reconciliation and balancing the power of the Federal government with that of the states.
By the standards of the day, did Lincoln’s security people fail him?
Were there standards in place for the protection of the President that were relaxed on the day of his assassination, or was it just a case of the assassin getting through the barriers as they existed at that point in time?
In my opinion, by the standards of the day, Kennedy’s security people did fail him. How they could let him ride in an open car past multi-story buildings with no rooftop observers (or any observers anywhere looking at those buildings) was, to me, a failure of security standards as they existed at the time.
Can we say the same for the Lincoln assassination, or not?
The South discovered that Slavery was a really, really bad idea.