Lincoln is actually one the presidents I have become least disillusioned of I know he has flaws but he still rises above them in the end. FDR on the other got knocked the pedelstool the hardest for me.
Until Every Drop of Blood Is Paid: A More Radical American Civil War
- Thread starter Red_Galiray
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I know a Class Clown or two who might have had the same thought.Depending on exactly how the assignment was phrased. I might have tried to take one of the Presidents of the Continental Congress. I guarantee no one else would have tried to take Elias Boudinot.
however, we were limited to the presidents on the list which was George Washington through Ronald Reagan.Although our teacher had a very good sense of humor, I can see him saying, "if you can find 20 Pages worth of actual material on Boudinot and write an actual paper on him, I'll give you about a thousand points extra credit." I don't know how anyone could have found much information on him in 1987. It's not like we had the internet.
Edit: Although I'm surprised how big is Wikipedia page is. Maybe it wouldn't have been that hard.
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My senior year was 1985. I'd have probably had to go to the nearby University of Maryland to start.I know a Class Clown or two who might have had the same thought.
Although our teacher had a very good sense of humor, I can see him saying, "if you can find 20 Pages worth of actual material on Boudinot and write an actual paper on him, I'll give you about a thousand points extra credit." I don't know how anyone could have found much information on him in 1987. It's not like we had the internet.
Edit: Although I'm surprised how big is Wikipedia page is. Maybe it wouldn't have been that hard.
Oversimplification, I think; Marx wasn't Orthodox Marxism, he was a writer working in Britain. His views weren't fixed in stone, and certainly not in the 1860s. He was thrilled to see and very interested in Lincoln's work OTL.
He will have a challenge to the narrow-minded idea watching all this happen. And anyway, a slave hardly has the ability to overcome rurality while forced to work on a plantation.
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The concept of kulaks was very Russian and very very Bolshevik. Pre-1917 it wasn't meaningfully Marxist at all. And in the American cultural context? Nah.
Oh, I think I saw that in my campus library while looking for stuff on the Dred Scott case earlier this week!
Some of them were getting whipped. Historically freed slaves were hyper-aware of social conditions that reminded them of aspects of slavery.
That was and is a popular perception, but it often didn't work that way. Slave labor tended to outcompete free labor in practice. Just for one, training free labor in specialized skills just gives them more power in the relationship, where skilled slave labor is held at the job by law.
It's real good stuff. Of course, there were no official political parties in the Congenital Congress, but there were certainly factions. There have, however, been very little analysis (of least of what I found) of where members aligned from 1776-1787. The book fills that void, in my opinion.
Huh....
To totally contradict myself from a few hours ago, I've been ruminating on American contempt for successful landowners in this timeline. In other words, whether there is room for a parallel with OTL kulaks or Chinese dizhu/地主: a naturally renewing resented class.
I thought the answer was no, but if blaming the planters works, maybe not. A Loyalist tenant farmer who gets appropriated land in '65 and has a very successful 15 years, buys the signs of success, to the eyes of the less successful or to former slaves how different will he seem from The Class Enemy? "They're coming back."
Clearly a plantation owner and a kulak are different orders of magnitude, but the potential seems there for discomfort with certain kinds of success by certain types of people.
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But wasn't the whole idea of the land of gentry the idea that they had this aristocratic lineage also? You can't just say, "I have land, therefore I am in aristocrat." How did they View Andrew Jackson, whose Hermitage probably rivaled many of the at least medium-sized plantations of the day back east? After all, he spouted that his only regrets were that he had not shot Clay or hung Calhoun. (Then again, that could be despite mentioned above or it could be the ramblings of a backwoodsman who didn't have any refinement. And it probably depended on which party you were.)
Andrew Jackson might come back into prominence here, because it's possible that they could see a new breed of Southerner who does become successful after 1865 as okay as long as they support the proper things. Sort of like when a rich star athlete today is accepted if he gives back to his community and maybe has a few of the boys from back home helping him to run things.
And the problems would come if those rich-since-1865 landowners decided they weren't going to see their poor fellows as equals.
Andrew Jackson probably wouldn't have been near as popular if he hadn't been so much in support of the dirt poor Farmers that he did things like allowing lots of people into his inauguration party in 1829 when they supposedly trashed the White House. (I'm not sure how accurate that story is but it is funny to imagine.)
This is where the black church becomes prominent. They will be the ones to insist on not only salvation by grace through faith but in Ephesians 2:10 and other verses showing how good works need to follow and people need to accept each other as equals and the bowels of compassion cannot be closed. Because they must help their fellow man.
Andrew Jackson might come back into prominence here, because it's possible that they could see a new breed of Southerner who does become successful after 1865 as okay as long as they support the proper things. Sort of like when a rich star athlete today is accepted if he gives back to his community and maybe has a few of the boys from back home helping him to run things.
And the problems would come if those rich-since-1865 landowners decided they weren't going to see their poor fellows as equals.
Andrew Jackson probably wouldn't have been near as popular if he hadn't been so much in support of the dirt poor Farmers that he did things like allowing lots of people into his inauguration party in 1829 when they supposedly trashed the White House. (I'm not sure how accurate that story is but it is funny to imagine.)
This is where the black church becomes prominent. They will be the ones to insist on not only salvation by grace through faith but in Ephesians 2:10 and other verses showing how good works need to follow and people need to accept each other as equals and the bowels of compassion cannot be closed. Because they must help their fellow man.
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Confiscation and redistribution of Japanese property was also the formula for Taiwan's early economic prosperity, though I don't know how equitably it was split up.
No, far from it. The whole affectation of the landed gentry was that they had aristocratic lineage. While some Old South families did endure over two centuries, that's not what the planter class was. In practice - in places like Texas, Arkansas, and even Mississippi - many of the original plantation founders had been "new money" and were still alive in 1860.
There were a couple more steps: "I have land, I have successfully made money off of it, and I have been accepted as respectable by aristocrats, therefore my kids are aristocrats."
Counterintuitive, but this was even broadly true for literal aristocrats in medieval Europe. In A Distant Mirror* one point I found jarring was that noble families often lasted only a few generations, and were constantly being replaced with new ones of merchants and soldiers with enough loot who married up and 2-3 generations later were the establishment new families wanted to marry into.
Back in Alabama or North Carolina, it isn't even a matter of declaring or even self-identifying as an aristocrat. The Loyalist in question might likely have personal contempt for the old planters, in fact. Doesn't necessarily matter. The question is of whether he looks planter-like enough to trigger memories in a way that would be politically useful to someone who thinks they can make hay out of it. Because the South'll be full of people who have some idea how to make hay out of it.
It would be hard to not look the part. Has the money, has the land, would get a nice big house as Southerners imagine "nice big houses." Family would tend to dress upper class... more or less the way Southerners imagine upper class style. Kids going to more expensive schools, riding in more expensive carriages, encouraged into "better sorts" of courtships.... If someone like that fell out with the well-off black neighbors, people might assume things. Now if someone like that got into a nasty labor dispute with his farm workers, that nice mansion might just catch fire.
Yeah, Jackson had a popular image as a Self-Made Western Frontiersman, not as an Established Plantation Gentlemen. American history being what it was, though, the difference between the two was about 30 years.
I don't want to overstate the case or be ridiculous. Radical middle school girls with USCT armbands aren't going to be rampant over Dixie or beating university professors to death in Richmond. But the more I reflect on it, the more I'm convinced that there's a risk of persistent communal violence of the type we mostly haven't discussed.
Thank goodness it's (still) Lincoln, I suppose. They need him.
* By Barbara Tuchman
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Thanks, that's interesting. So if I understand right, the old money in the South didn't look down on the new rich like, say, a wealthy New England merchant tycoon whose family came over in the 1660s would look down on someone who had just come from Britain around the time of the Revolution and had worked himself up from a dirt poor family because he got rich on some invention. As long as that new rich person displayed the same kind of attitude and characteristics as the old wealthy, they were accepted.
It really is counterintuitive. Both ways possess great problems because they look at the outward appearance instead of the heart. But here in the North the concept is that the mere fact of having money is the outward appearance they focus on, whereas in the south it is the fact of how one acts and talks and all that stuff.
It really is counterintuitive. Both ways possess great problems because they look at the outward appearance instead of the heart. But here in the North the concept is that the mere fact of having money is the outward appearance they focus on, whereas in the south it is the fact of how one acts and talks and all that stuff.
I recently remembered Booth's supposed OTL last words:"Useless, useless." Could I suggest a minor retcon, maybe? They seem so apt.
This is great! Finally got me to make an Alt History account. Apart from the appalling human suffering at the hands of everyone's partisans, this is one of the most based timelines I've ever seen.
Tragically, I'm rather of the impression that the horrors of Partisan Warfare are much as OTL.
Yes, the idea intrigues me. Something like that would be bound to found acceptance within the Black rural population.
That seems like something that could be applied here. After all, couldn't American socialists argue that the enslaved, having been robbed of education by the system, needed the instruction of Northerners and educated Blacks before they were able to rise up, and that similarly the wage slave will rise up when taught how.
I imagine that something like a Black sheriff fighting against White terrorists would become a very popular character in the nascent entertainment of the Black community, with ties to the Civil War and Reconstruction.
That's way better, I'll incorporate it, thanks.
Thank you for your kind words!
I think the horrors are on a similar level, it's just that they are much more extended. IOTL actual guerrilla warfare could only be found in some "hot spots" in Missouri and Kansas. Here it is everywhere.
Btw, sorry you all for taking so long. Exams are coming close and with them a lot of stress. And I have been playing Persona 5. It's so addicting lol. Anyway, the update will take a little while longer. In the meantime, I have written another vignette. I hope you like it.
Side-story: "Somewhere in Georgia"
Somewhere in Georgia
Thomas tried to convey of all his feelings to Sarah with a look. Even whispering is dangerous now, so he just looked her into the eye and tried to say “just keep quiet, don’t worry, let me do it”. And she nods, curling into herself and out of view. But her eyes follow him, and the sorrow and pain is so deeply etched into her gaze that the pain in his heart for once overshadows the pain in his stomach, in his limbs, in his hands. Not for long, however, for his hands bleed and it feels like his stomach is eating itself as he keeps working, doing both his work and Sarah’s share. More than once he feels like just collapsing and dying, but if he does he knows that Sarah would be sure to follow. He finishes the work after several hours more, fetches her and then heads to the overseer. Seeing that their share of work has been completed, he hands them two rations of rice and dismisses them. Thomas eats his ration fast. It’s small and when he finished it he’s still hungry. It’s the kind of hunger that’s always present, that’s always hurting, because the master only gives them enough rice to not die, but never enough to feel full. It’s almost as cruel as the whip, he believes.
Since the war had started things had just gotten worse and worse in the plantation. The master, Thomas knows, had been once of the arch-secessionists that had wanted an independent South even since the war with Mexico. Curses upon the names of Philipps, then of Frémont, and finally of Lincoln, were omnipresent, even if most of the hands knew little of those gentlemen. All they knew was that they wanted the Black people to be free, or so did master and his fire-eating friends say. Kneeling by the windows, his muscles taut and his heart in his throat, Thomas would listen to their conversations and then relay the message to the rest. They all relied on him for knowledge. He was one of the few Black people in the plantation that could read even a little, you see. Taught himself by studying posters and cards, and drawing the letters and then sentences into the dirt. By spying on conversations and glancing at newspapers, he knew that the White people would elect a President and that if that was Mister Lincoln he would free the slaves. But Thomas also knew that the masters would go to war to prevent this. The night that Lincoln won, Thomas found out because the master hosted several other planters who all hotly declared that they would die to defend their honor. When he relayed the message, the enslaved prayed for the right to triumph in the coming struggle, sitting quietly on the black soil of the nearby forest and whispering in the moonless night.
Master’s two sons had gone to the war; his daughter was a nurse as well. When they had left for Tennessee, their swords shining and their uniforms impeccable, the master had assembled all of the plantation and ordered them to bid a farewell. As if the men who would be fighting to keep them in slavery deserved such praise. A few months later, one son returned, not to a hero’s welcome but in a box to be buried next to his mother. Thomas felt satisfaction that he had uselessly died of typhus, not having even seen the Yankees and not seeing the battle when General Grant whipped the haughty rebels. The daughter then came, whole in body at least. She too had fallen sick, and was now too weak to do anything but knit socks for the soldiers. And that she did, staring ahead with dead eyes. The girl used to be so lively, one of those White people who took pride in being “nice” to the enslaved, by saying that 20 lashes instead of 30 should be fine or giving chickens in Christmas to women who had seen their children sold down south. She now never said anything, except when she sobbed about men thorn to pieces or how she just couldn’t bear to see more death and gore. In Thomas’ chest, the sense of satisfaction mixed with the anger at how death and gore never bothered her before when it was Black people who suffered them.
It's hard to even pretend to care about the pain master was suffering due to his children, when this was the same man that saw their children as nothing more than future profit. If Thomas could, he would run to the Union folks and return in a blue uniform and burn it all to the ground. But there’s people he cares about, people he needs to protect. Both master and the overseer suspect him, whisper that he’s disloyal and uppity. They can’t force him to submit, Thomas knows. Of course, they can kill him anytime they want, but the master wants to break Thomas’ spirit and with every small act of defiance, every refusal to work, every furtive reunion in the woods, every curt word and fiery glare, Thomas tell him that he will never succeed. “Titus, boy”, the master would say, using that mocking slave name, “you are going to get yourself killed”. But Thomas persisted, until the master started to say “you are going to get someone else killed”. Though his heart was still full of defiance, Thomas kept his head down, less those lashes fall on Sarah or someone else, and started to work with more vigor. The next funeral at the plantation was, thankfully, not for one of them, but for master’s other son. The boy had fallen during the Battle of Atlanta. Master took solace in that it was a glorious death, but Thomas knew that now the Union was at the gates of Atlanta. Their plantation was now close to the Yankees. It was that day that Titus became Thomas, taking the name of the General that, he hoped, would soon be their Liberator.
The days continued to stretch before them, full of pain and hunger. Hard times had come to the plantation, and cuts in food and other necessities had been made. Master still had ham and wine, naturally, but now the enslaved only had rice to eat. The beef cows had been butchered and sent to Savannah; the swine had been taken by the Confederate Army. They couldn’t even fish, for the weights of their nets had been melted and turned into bullets. They most likely where now lodged in the heart of some poor Yankee boy. They felt sick, and some had died. Of course, there wasn’t any funeral for them. Sarah especially was growing weaker with each passing day, and now couldn’t even stomach the little rice they receive. It was the fear of her dying that drove Thomas to slip away through the forest, hoping to find something else, anything else to keep her dying. It was dangerous, he knew, and foolish, for Georgia was full of rebel guerrillas that liked to massacre the slaves that wanted to flee. In fact, Thomas found a corpse, still dressed in blue fatigues, propped up like a scarecrow in the middle of the path. This was a warning to those who might consider joining the Yankees. But Thomas was still not cowed. He trudged on, thinking of the people that soldier might have had, those he wanted to protect. He offered a silent prayer for them.
Reaching a dark clearing in the forest, Thomas hung up two small lanterns, each one in a different tree. He waited until the grass fluttered, and then a voice asked, “how did Mister Lincoln know that Allen was lying?” Thomas then replied, “because the almanac showed that that was a moonless night”. This was one of the exploits of Mister Lincoln when he was a young lawyer, and now was used a secret code for the Union League and its allies. Five White men, rifles drawn, then approached. Two Black men followed, but they didn’t carry weapons. Thomas was not a fool, he knew many of the Leaguers in the South were still imbued of prejudice. But in this fight they at least could listen to a nigger if it meant getting information that helped them against the rebels. Their grapevine telegraph could tell them of the positions of rebel soldiers, of the houses of Union men, and what plantations could be plundered. Thomas was one among many slaves who helped them. He told them that they shouldn’t take the western path, because there were Confederate soldiers there. The eastern path was longer, but Mister Wood was a Union man and would give them shelter in his barn. Further bellow there was the plantation of Johnson, who had hidden wheat and sent the soldiers away to protect it.
The guerrillas sat down a moment to check their map. One White man said, gruffly, “thanks boy”, and gave him some salt pork. Another, with a calmer expression, then sat down besides Thomas. He asked why he couldn’t just join them, and Thomas explained that he couldn’t abandon his people. The man nodded in understanding. He didn’t have a people to come back to after his two sons had been drafted and then murdered. He had then joined the guerrillas when they tried to draft him too. “Just to defend the right of those aristocrats to enslave your people, Mister Thomas”, he said with vehemence. “We both know what it means to have a planter take your child”. The guerrillas left, and Thomas returned to his plantation just before dawn. That night, when after working his share and Sarah’s he received their rice portions, Thomas scrapped the salt of the pork into the rice and then did his best to roast the meat. They didn’t really have much salt either, so that little already made the rice taste much better. And although the pork was somewhat rancid, it was still filling. For the first time in months, the hunger pangs lessened, and Sarah seemed just a bit stronger. Before parting, she and Thomas prayed again. According to the guerrillas, the Union soon would take Atlanta. The day of jubilee was nearby.