How the GOP Betrayed Lincoln's Great Republican Promise

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Richard Nixon sought the Presidency an underdog. To win he had to reshape American politics. He had to force a realignment which his strategist, Kevin Phillips, called 'Southern Strategy'. Years later, in a televised interview with Bill Moyers, Phillips regretted having unleashed an evil GOP genie.

'Southern Strategy' put Nixon in the White House. What had been a Democratic 'solid South' was transformed --it is said --though it was the same bigotry that had inspired Southern 'Democrats' to promise 'continued segregation' as late as the 1960s. 'Southern Strategy' did not eliminate bigotry, it exploited it! The resulting 'transformation' is the story of which party most successfully kissed up to bigotry, racism, prejudice. For that reason, I take issue with those who write glowingly of a 'transformation of Southern politics'. The emergence of the GOP in the solid, Democratic south is not so novel and more accurately described as just another instance in which the GOP 'triangulates' the stupid and the bigoted, the 'bubbas' and the 'buttheads'!

At the time, Southern politicians openly promised 'continued segregation'. The Civil War seemed recent and many wounds still bled.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

--Kevin Phillips re: "Southern Strategy"

There is some quibbling about whether Nixon political strategist Kevin Phillips originated or merely popularized 'Southern Strategy'. In any case, Phillips owns Southern Strategy by putting Richard Nixon into the White House with it. 'Southern Strategy' was the original 'trickle down' theory as local and regional candidates benefited from their identification with the candidate at the top of the ticket. At that time, the biggest prize was the 'solid south'. Nixon won both the south and the White House.

From the ashes of the "Old South" rose a mean and prejudiced spirit. In Monroe, LA, for example, I found in the only large bookstore in town, a huge section devoted to various Civil War books; most dealt with how the South had been betrayed. Across town, just a stone's throw by big city standards is the Civil War Cemetary, a more sobering reminder of tragedy. Farther afield, down the road is Vicksburg, MS, where the forces of US Grant had approached from the Mississippi River from Memphis only to learn that Vicksburg could never be taken by a direct assault. Grant's Vicksburg siege came to symbolize the ideological stand-off. Having grown up in the far reaches of Comanche country, I was not prepared to learn that, in the South, to this day, there is still found a lingering resentment that can only be felt by those who are occupied by a foreign power.

The "Negro vote" had been the GOPs to lose. The GOP had been the party of Lincoln, the party of liberation, the party which ended slavery! It was the "Radical Republicans" --not Lincoln --who had imposed upon the 'South' a reconstruction which turned the 'South' into occupied territory alienating the 'White' vote. The era of "reconstruction" is best known for the terrorist organization it spawned: the 'White Supremacist' Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization, blamed as recently as the 1960s for its bombing of the Pacifica broadcast transmitter in Houston. Then, as now, US policies and occupations cause terrorism in response. That's just the way it is. Every foreign occupying army since our ancestors began to walk upright and leave the Savannahs has been opposed by 'guerrillas'!

It would be a mistake to ascribe to the North some mythical moral superiority. Martin Scorsese probably got it right in his great motion picture, Gangs of New York. Lincoln was as despised in New York as he had been in the deep, antebellum south. The economies of 11 states making up the Confederacy were dependent upon slavery to produce and harvest the crops, most famously, cotton. Slavery was illegal in the north but opposed by a mere handful of vocal opponents. Though many have gone underground, others will openly defend the institution of slavery --even today.

Others resent the harsh reconstruction even today. It was Nixon's evil genius that his campaign was able to overcome the natural resentment of his party's role in "reconstructing" the South. It was Nixon's evil genius that allowed, encouraged him to 'tap' that gurgling well-spring of latent resentment, hatred, and prejudice. That the Democrats would pay dearly for having done the right thing even as the GOP has benefited handsomely for doing the wrong thing may explain Democratic timidity today. Democrats have historically paid high very high prices for doing the right thing! As he signed the Voting Rights Act, LBJ famously said that he was, in fact, forever ceding the South to the GOP.

A long story is, of necessity, made short. Nixon's legacy is that of a GOP benefiting from George Wallace's politics of hate as well as from LBJ's signature on the Voting Rights Act. The GOP would find votes wherever there was resentment or prejudice. The GOP would foment distrust when our various peoples might have put the Civil War behind them and moved forward. The GOP would wage war on labor as well as "the nattering nabobs of negativity", Spiro Agnew's code word for academics and free thinkers.

The Civil War looms like a ghost above the body politic. It was just a few years ago that, in Jaspar, Texas bigots dragged a black man at high speeds over back country roads until very nearly nothing was left of his body.

A bit longer ago, the lynchings and public burnings of black people was not merely tolerated, they were celebrated like county fairs. Photographs of the events were mailed as post cards. It made of civic murder a macabre celebration, literally, a barbecue.

American History is of two chapters --pre Civil War and post Civil war. American History cannot be understood without understanding the economics of the Antebellum South and the institution of slavery upon which it depended. The "rise of the South" cannot be understood without understanding how the south that hated Lincoln became Nixon's "Solid South". It is one of the great ironies of convoluted history that as the GOP represents a threat to our freedom, our future as a nation cannot be ensured unless we, at last, effect the words of a Republican.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

--Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

Trailer: Gangs of New York

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How the GOP Benefited and Continues to Benefit From Lincoln's Assassination

The South had more to gain with a live Lincoln than a dead one. Lincoln's "re-construction" built around an economic rehabilitation of the South. Typically, the GOP plan was punitive, harsh, and long. Northern, "radical Republicans" benefited from Lincoln's murder. Disillusioned, embittered Southerners like John Wilkes Booth did not.

The "official" theory paints a vivid picture of Booth and his accomplices --disillusioned Southern racists out to wreak revenge on Lincoln. Booth had wanted to kidnap Lincoln and exchange him for Southern POWs but favored killing Lincoln when his original plan fell apart. But this theory forgets that Lincoln's plan of reconstruction was more lenient toward Southern states. Northern, "Radical Republicans", sought to punish the South and exact retribution, insisting upon stringent requirements for re-entry into the union. Clearly, a southern "patriot" had nothing to gain by murdering Lincoln.

Every mystery writer and criminologist will tell that you every crime has three elements: motive, method, and opportunity. Qui bono? addresses the issue of "motive". Who but Northern Republicans benefited from Lincoln's death? The South most certainly was much worse off for Lincoln's murder and Booth most certainly would have known that. So --why would a "Southern Patriot" enter into a conspiracy which would undermine the Southern cause?

Like today, the Radical Republicans were "politically motivated". A rapid return to congress of Southern anti-industrialists would have diluted GOP strength in the Congress, a fact motivating the length and severity of the GOP plan. Nor was the GOP interested in protecting Freedman's Rights. As is true today, the GOP was primarily concerned with retaining its power in Congress and the economic power of its industrialist constituency. In retrospect, the GOP plan seems guaranteed to continue GOP control of Congress and, in fact, did so for the duration of a punitive "reconstruction".

Secondly, the longer reconstruction plan would, in fact, allow the GOP the time it needed to consolidate its power. Most Republicans believed that Lincoln's V.P., Andrew Johnson, would go along with their plans. They were disappointed and eventually impeached Johnson upon the flimsiest of cases.

It was when Johnson fired Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton that the GOP moved against him. Stanton had been Attorney General in the James Buchanan administration but Buchanan ignored Stanton's advice that he act forcefully against the South; Stanton then became a spy for the GOP!

And it is Stanton who figures prominently in one of the most interesting and most recent of the Lincoln assassination conspiracy theories:

It alleged that Stanton was against Lincoln's mild Reconstruction policies and wanted him out of office so more radical Re-constructionist policy could be employed. On the day of the assassination Ulysses S. Grant was expected to attend Our American Cousin with the Lincolns. Eisenschiml argued that had Grant attended, the military guards who protected him would never have allowed Booth to enter the State Box at Ford's Theatre. Eisenschiml further argued that Grant's refusal of the Lincolns' theater invitation was due to an order by Stanton to change his plans for the evening.

--From a summary of Otto Eisenschiml's Why Was Lincoln Murdered, 1937

Stanton and Grant most probably had "foreknowledge" that Lincoln would be murdered.

To be fair, some aspects of reconstruction have had good and lasting effect, specifically, the 13th and 14th Amendments. Neither would have come about had not the South endured the longer and often tragic consequences of reconstruction.

But as those developments might recommend the longer reconstruction period, a radicalized south would resort to "terrorist" methods to keep GOP office seekers out of office. The Ku Klux Klan's program of racist, voter intimidation continued well into the 20th Century and, in some instances, continues to this day.

Resentment stemming from the Civil War and the Republican Party’s policy of Reconstruction kept Southern whites in the Democratic Party, but the Republicans could still compete in the Southern States with a coalition of blacks and highland whites. After the North agreed to withdraw federal troops under the Compromise of 1877, and the further failure of the "Force Bill" (to protect black voting) in 1890, Southern blacks, the base of Republicans' power in that region, became increasingly disenfranchised. The white Democratic Party in the South enacted Jim Crow Laws and, through the terror of vigilantes and the Ku Klux Klan, undertook other measures to ensure and enforce black disenfranchisement. As blacks lost their vote, the Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete.

--Wikipedia

Just recently, by historical standards, the two parties would flip. Again --this Machiavellian strategy, this "Southern Strategy, was of GOP origin. Though he must certainly regret it today, it was Kevin Phillips who urged it upon Richard Nixon.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats. --Kevin Phillips

A recent summary from The Nation.

Now Republicans were doing the unthinkable: convincing folks they were on their side. Up on a platform erected on the runway, two key architects of the GOP's new Southern strategy, President Nixon and North Carolina's own Jesse Helms, were railing against hippies and atheists and other un-American elements holding down the "silent majority" of white working folk. Mixing pietistic appeals for school prayer and nostalgia for "traditional American values," they were mouthing a neopopulist pitch borrowed from George Wallace's scarily successful 1968 backlash campaign and scripted by Kevin Phillips's The Emerging Republican Majority.

And the blue-collar Democrats were eating it up, roaring approval at every racially coded "law and order" applause line and spitting epithets back and forth with antiwar protesters. All except for my father, who had glanced around forlornly when we arrived and seen a depressing array of crew cuts, work shirts with names on the patches and rebel-flag mesh caps. "Good grief," he muttered. "Looks like a bunch of Democrats. What in the world?"

--The Way Down South, The Nation

Since the Civil War, a "robber baron" class, represented if not ably, crookedly by the GOP, industrialized the nation. This "class" did it by utilizing the apparatus and the method of the GOP --denying for decades the right of workers to organize. To this day, the rich get richer and everyone else is left behind. The enemies of science and intellectual progress have renewed their numerous assaults on learning itself. They wish to roll back the enlightenment.

The right wing has bet its future on a few cynical tactics --the big lie, character assassination, and wedge issues designed to divide and conquer. How the GOP became America's radical reactionary party is a long and winding road. Nevertheless, I am less appalled than surprised to find in the US a level of hatefulness that we dared hope had been laid to rest on the battlefields of the Civil War.

When the Radical Republicans ruled the South, they were despised by the same demographic segments that now embrace the likes of George W. Bush. It was Democrats who had an interest in suppressing Negro suffrage. The Great Grandfathers of Bush's most staunch southern supporters were most certainly Democrats at a time when the GOP was identified with and blamed for the horrors of reconstruction. Under Bush, the GOP now embarks upon new horrors ---endless war abroad, dictatorship at home!

Not surprisingly, the sea change is best associated with the 1960's. It was then that the GOP decided that there were more bigot votes down south than moderate votes elsewhere.

The GOP would battle Democrats for the low ground and win. Today --the likes of Mitt Romeny and Mike Huckabee scrimmage over less than 30 percent of the total population, a 30 percent that Carl Jung would have called "incipient psychotics".

JFK was never forgiven for having put his own party on the right side of morality and history, for eschewing the old bigoted allies, for threatening a Texas sacred cow --the Oil Depletion Allowance. As he promised to smash the CIA into "a thousand pieces", JFK came to embody the ideals of numerous "liberals" assassinated or otherwise dispatched mysteriously concurrent with the rise of the right wing, a crooked GOP specifically!

Certainly, this mentality has proven that it is capable of doing whatever it takes to gain power and keep it. Be prepared for more "surprises" enroute to the upcoming election. Fanatics do not go quietly into that good night and a party that has proven itself capable of both election theft and violence most certainly has more tricks up its sleeve. In a previous essay I had written that "...from the ashes of the 'Old South' rose a mean and prejudiced spirit".

Some additional resources:

• Lincoln Crossing the Rubicon
• The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
• Lincoln; An Account of his Personal Life
• The Oil Depletion Allowance, Good or Bad?
• Kevin Phillips on Now with Bill Moyer
• Ron Paul: Libertarianism’s Latest Love Affair with Insanity

GOP, Assassination, Southern Strategy, Terrorism

---

'The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down' or The Origins of a Culture War

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Some distinguished historians and the famous poet Walt Whitman have said that it was only after the Civil War that the several "United" States became a single nation. I would like to believe that true but the fact is we have never been more divided. Some divisions have never healed. It has taken the most radical regime in US history to expose them and exploit them.

Strange (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should so condense a nationality?

--Walt Whitman, as quoted by James Piereson, Lincoln and Kennedy: A Tale of Two Assassinations

This quote also found its way into Ken Burns' famous "The Civil War", where the point was made by historians Barbara Fields and Shelby Foote that from the carnage of civil war, this national crucible which claimed the lives of at least 620,000 Americans, came our nationhood, our identity as a single nation. As Fields describes the Civil War, "it is the moment that made the United States as a nation." Certainly, she points out, the US had become a nation with the ratification of the Constitution but a it remained for a Civil War the baser job of sorting it all out, making real what had been only written. That is precisely the problem. What had been written is a precious legacy left us by the founders. It is ours to lose. Making it real is the task that befalls every generation. As this administration demonstrates daily, the battle is not won. If our nationhood must be won by war, the war has only just begun.

"before the war it was said that the United States "are". Grammatically, it was spoken that way and thought of as a collection of independent states. After the war, it was always 'the United States "is" ... as we say today without being self-conscious at all. That sums up what the war accomplished. It made us an 'is' "

Historian Shelby Foote, The Civil War, a Film by Ken Burns

This idea might well have originated with Whitman, though it finds eloquent expression in Foote. There is always the slim chance that Whitman, a man of his times, was simply in accord with a popular consensus, writing as he did of the greater "use" to which a nation had put its young men. It would have been hard at the end of that bloody conflict to say of it that all those young men had died in vain.

"Then there is a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying than anything written in the constitution, or courts or armies" Whitman wrote in 1879, "namely the cement of a death identified thoroughly with that people, at its head, and for its sake. Strange (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should so condense a nationality?" I don't wish to pick a fight with a deceased poet and certainly not one who has achieved the stature of American sage. Yet, I must point out that the tragedy of "the South" is not Greek tragedy imposed by 'gods'. It is rather, an end that is found in its beginning. As Pogo said "We have met the enemy and it is us!"

Not so long ago, I might have agreed with Whitman --despite the many tragedies of reconstruction, Jim Crow, Viet Nam, the Civil Rights movement, a wave of political murders obviously designed to wipe out a nation's left wing, a radicalized youth movement, the desperate flight to suburbia in which many had found not Utopia but Stepford.

Today, we are more divided than ever. Did the Civil war, in fact, forge the nation that had been dreamt of and written down at Philadelphia? I think not! The fault lines are tragically familiar --race, class, and religion. Despite the gains made throughout the sixties, the struggle for racial equality is not won. Like the murder of JFK, the cold blooded murder of Dr. Martin Luther King had the effect of benefiting only those who most certainly wished him dead.

The great difference between Lincoln and Kennedy is that the former died at his moment of victory while the latter was killed before he was able to achieve any great success. Lincoln was assassinated at the end of a Civil War, Kennedy at the beginning of a long-running cultural war.

--James Piereson, Lincoln and Kennedy: A Tale of Two Assassinations

Since the Civil War, a "robber baron" class industrialized the nation by denying, for decades, the right of workers to organize. To this day, the rich get richer and everyone else is left behind. The enemies of science and intellectual progress have renewed their numerous assaults on learning itself. They wish to roll back the enlightenment.

The right wing has bet its future on a few cynical tactics --the big lie, character assassination, and wedge issues designed to divide and conquer. How the GOP became America's radical reactionary party is a long and winding road. Nevertheless, I am less appalled than surprised to find in the US a level of hatefulness that we dared hope had been laid to rest on the battlefields of the Civil War.

The story is not without its surprising plot twists. When the Radical Republicans ruled the South, they were despised by the same demographic segments that now embrace the likes of George W. Bush. The Great Grandfathers of Bush's most staunch southern supporters were most certainly Democrats at a time when the GOP was identified with and blamed for the horrors of reconstruction. It remained thus until the middle 1960's when Richard Nixon effected what is known as the "Southern Strategy". Simply, the GOP decided that there were more bigot votes down south than liberal/moderate votes elsewhere. The GOP battled the Democrats for the low ground and won. JFK was never forgiven for having put his own party on the right side of morality and history. Thus, from the ashes of the "Old South" rose a mean and prejudiced spirit, just as from the ashes of Watergate rose a radicalized, reactionary Republican party.

In Monroe, LA, for example, I found in the only large bookstore in town, a huge section devoted to various Civil War books. Many of them are filled with venom, disillusionment, and hate. Some of them dealt with how the South had been betrayed as Hitler believed Germany had been betrayed at the end of World War I. Across town, a stone's throw by big city standards, is the Civil War Cemetery, a more sobering reminder of tragedy. Farther afield, down the road is Vicksburg, MS, where the forces of U. S. Grant had approached from the Mississippi River only to learn that Vicksburg could not be taken by direct assault. Grant's Vicksburg seige came to symbolize the ideological stand-off as well.

It was among the disaffected descendants of the Civil War south that the GOP found manna, a strategy often falsely attributed to Kevin Phillips who was nevertheless its most articulate voice.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats. --Kevin Phillips

It must be remembered that this "Negro vote" had been the GOP's to lose. They were, after all, the party of Lincoln. It was the "Radical Republicans" --not Lincoln --who had imposed the reconstruction that turned the South into occupied territory faring little better than Iraq. The era of "reconstruction" is best known for the terrorist organization it spawned: the Ku Klux Klan.

It would be a mistake to ascribe to the North some mythical moral superiority although it is true that the economies of 11 states making up the Confederacy were dependent upon slavery to produce and harvest the crops, most famously, cotton. Slavery, to be sure, was illegal in the north but only a handful actively opposed it. Martin Scorsese probably got it right; Lincoln was probably as despised in New York as he had been in the deep south.

Richard Nixon is remembered as much for his Southern Strategy as for Watergate, bombing Cambodia, and his involvement in the cover up of a famous burglary of Democratic Headquarters at Watergate. The Southern Strategy turned a solid Democratic South into GOP occupied territory.

Not every division in America is traced directly to the civil war, though you will find, to this day, many who will defend the institution of slavery. Others still resent the harsh reconstruction. It was Nixon's evil genius that his campaign was able to overcome the natural resentment of his party's role in "reconstructing" the South. That the Democrats would pay dearly for having done the right thing may explain the party's timidity. In better times, Democrats did not shy from confrontation. They sought it out. Nevertheless, Democrats have historically paid high prices for being or doing right. As he signed the Voting Rights Act, LBJ famously said that he was, in fact, forever ceding the South to the GOP. And so, he was.

A long story is, of necessity, made short. Nixon's legacy is that of a GOP benefiting from George Wallace's politics of hate as well as from LBJ's signature on the Voting Rights Act. The GOP would find votes wherever there was resentment or prejudice. The GOP would foment distrust when our various peoples might have put the Civil War behind them and moved forward. The GOP would wage war on labor as well as "the nattering nabobs of negativity", Spiro Agnew's code word for academics and free thinkers. The Civil War looms like a ghost upon the body politic. It was only a few years ago that, in Jaspar, Texas bigots dragged a black man at high speeds over back country roads until very nearly nothing was left of his body.

The Reconstruction period may be found at the very roots of American political, cultural and racial divisions. Reconstruction was the real war and real wars are never won on the battlefields. The military campaigns preceding reconstruction decided nothing except who had the greater arms and the industrial stamina to slug it out and endure. The issues of division are in fact still, fueling cultural and racial unrest throughout the sixties. It was always the counterpoint to the grassroots opposition to US militarism/imperialism in Viet Nam.

George Wallace was Nixon's biggest competition for southern voters unhappy with civil rights. They had mounted a movement to Impeach Earl Warren, then the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a court identified with integration and civil rights. Even today, Texas seems a liberal bastion compared to most parts of Louisiana where billboards had promised "Continued Segregation".

Southern attitudes have not changed. Like the party as a whole, it communicates with its base in code words, not wishing to tip off the greater population. Since the ascension of George W. Bush, a separate south is now talked about openly. There are websites advocating the dissolution of the United States, a separate, independent south.

The Night They Drove Ol' Dixie Down

Additional Resources

• The Price in Blood! Casualties in the Civil War
• Lincoln and Kennedy: A Tale of Two Assassinations
• America in Crisis, Parts I and II
• The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns

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How the Democrats paid dearly for doing what was right while the GOP profited from evil

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Richard Nixon is associated with Southern Strategy as well as his enemies list, the secret bombing of Cambodia or the burglary of Democratic Headquarters at Watergate --the cover up, the hearings, the lies and, eventually, the threat of impeachment. Nixon's Southern Strategy turned a solid Democratic South into GOP occupied territory. It was not a simple appeal to bigotry that did it. It required the Democrats do what was right while Nixon strategists plotted what was wrong. They succeeded. GOP appeals to bigotry and hatred are now well-practiced.

It is appalling to find in the US a level of hatefulness that one hoped had been laid to rest in the battlefields of the Civil War. From the ashes of the "Old South" rose a mean and prejudiced spirit, just as from the ashes of Watergate rose a radicalized and reactionary GOP.

In Monroe, LA I found, in the only large bookstore in town, a huge section devoted to various Civil War books. That is to be expected. Bothersome was the fact that most of them dealt with the 'betrayal of the South'. Across town, just a stone's throw by big city standards is the Civil War Cemetery, a more sobering reminder of tragedy.

Farther afield, down the road is Vicksburg, MS, where the forces of Ulysses S. Grant had approached by way of the Mississippi River from Memphis only to learn that Vicksburg could never be taken by a direct assault. Grant's Vickburg seige came to symbolize the ideological stand-off as well. Having grown up in the far reaches of Commanche country, I was not prepared to learn that, in the South, to this day, there is still found a lingering resentment that can only be felt by those who had been occupied by a foreign power.

It was among those disaffected descendants of the Civil War south that the GOP found manna, a strategy often falsely attributed to Kevin Phillips its most articulate voice.

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

--Kevin Phillips

It must be remembered that this "Negro vote" had been the GOP's to lose. They were, after all, the party of Lincoln. It was "Radical Republicans" --not Lincoln --who had imposed upon southern states a reconstruction that turned the South into occupied territory which at the time fared little better than Iraq. The era of "reconstruction" is best known for the terrorist organization it spawned: the Ku Klux Klan.

The raison d'etre of the KKK was to keep 'negroes' from voting for Republicans. The ranks of the KKK were filled by angry southern Democrats! As recently as the early 1960's, one could find in Louisiana (and presumably other southern states as well) large political billboards promising 'Continued Segregation"! The billboards were posted by Democratic --not GOP --candidates.

While it is true that the economies of the 11 states making up the confederacy were dependent upon slavery to produce and harvest the crops (most famously, cotton), it is a mistake to ascribe to the North some vague, mythical moral superiority. Slavery, to be sure, was illegal in the north but only a handful of 'yankees' actively opposed it. Martin Scorsese got it right; Lincoln was as widely despised in New York as he had been in the deep south.

Not every division in America is traced directly to the civil war, although you will find die hards and throwbacks who will --to this day --defend the institution of slavery. Still others resent the harsh reconstruction. It was Nixon's evil genius that his campaign did not merely overcome the natural resentment of his party's role in "reconstructing" the South --it exploited it! That the Democrats would pay dearly for having done the right thing explains the party's timidity today. Democrats have historically paid high prices for being or doing right. The GOP, by contrast, is rewarded handsomely for making a Faustian bargain with bigotry and prejudice. As he signed the Voting Rights Act, LBJ famously said that he was, in fact, forever ceding the South to the GOP.

A long story is, of necessity, made short. Nixon's legacy is that of a GOP benefiting from George Wallace's politics of hate but as well from LBJ's signature on the Voting Rights Act. The GOP found votes wherever there was resentment or prejudice. Clearly --but for the GOP exploitation of hate, distrust and lingering prejudice, our various peoples throughout the nation might have put the Civil War behind them and moved forward.

But for the GOP's war on labor as well as "the nattering nabobs of negativity", Spiro Agnew's code word for academics and free thinkers, the Civil War might have been transcended! Alas, no! It was not to be! The Civil War looms like a ghost upon the body politic. It was only a few years ago that, in Jaspar, Texas bigots dragged a black man at high speeds over back country roads until very nearly nothing was left of his body.

Not so long ago, lynchings and public burnings of black people were not merely tolerated but celebrated like county fairs. Photographs of the events were mailed as post cards. It made of civic murder a macabre celebration, literally, a barbecue.

Thus --American History is of two chapters --pre Civil War and post Civil war. American History cannot be understood without understanding the economics of the Antebellum South and the institution of slavery upon which it depended. The "rise of the South", as we have seen, cannot be understood outside that context. It is one of the great ironies of history that the 'south' that hated Lincoln became Nixon's "Solid South".

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

--Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863

I fell in love with Ashokan Farewell during Ken Burns' famous "Civil War" series on PBS. Hearing Jay Unger's story of its creation helps me appreciate it the more. I like his description of it as a "Scottish Lament".

Ken Burns was wise to allow this piece to set the mood for what has been --until now --America's most profound tragedy --the loss, perhaps forever, of our freedoms. And, again, as then, that tragic loss has come not from abroad but from the cancer within.

Additional resources

• The Beleaguered City: The Vicksburg Campaign, December 1862-July 1863
• Stars in Their Courses : The Gettysburg Campaign, June-July 1863
• The Slaves' Story
• Ken Burns: The Civil War
• FBI Files on the KKK
• Vicksburg National Military Park
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965
• The Civil Rights Movement 1964-1968

Discoveries

• Dario & ses musiciens - Le Pénitencier, Video by Vierotchka
• Rainbow in the Jet d'Eau
• Newton's Dark Secrets
• The Oil Factor: Behind the War on Terror
• How the banks lure you into debt

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