The+Old+South+in+Retrospect

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= VIDEOGRAPHY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY:INTERPRETING THE CIVIL WAR =

The White South: Winning the War in Retrospect, After Having Lost It on the Battlefield
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An absolutely crucial video to watch to understand how, after the fact, the White South managed to interpret the Civil War in such a way that they come out not as the “losers” but as the “winners” of both the Civil War and, more importantly, Reconstruction. (“It is quite a trick to win the war in retrospect, after having lost it on the battlefield, no?) A person cannot understand segregation and the next hundred years of “Jim Crown” Southern history without properly appreciating the sentiments of White Southerners expressed in this video. The perceptive viewer will hardly need a Black Southern response.

"The Old South"
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This short video trailer was produced in 1939 as an introductory piece for “Gone With the Wind” film, although it only very obliquely refers to it. This short “history of the old South” is meant to help viewers of the longer Margaret Mitchell-based film understand how the south was founded and how the Civil War came about -- in short, how the antebellum South came to be the way it was. The historiography is very arguable, and perhaps it shows more about America in 1939 than it does about Georgia in 1869. Pay particular attention to the strange interpretation of the importation of African slaves as primarily a post-1808 phenomenon, the simplistic portrayal of African-Americans lamenting how hard it is to pick cotton seeds from cotton, and the description of an old South (which is itself an invention of 20th century America) that was full of chivalry, grace, and elegance (“Cavaliers and cotton”). The implication seems to be that “cotton” made the south back in the past, and then remade it during and after Reconstruction? Did cotton really bring the rehabilitation of a prosperous South after the Civil War? And did we lose much of value by destroying the plantation aristocracy of the antebellum South and the slave labor it was built upon? Or should we be happy it is “gone with the wind”?

//Gone With t//he Wind: Reconstruction
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Here we see the Southern myths about Reconstruction at full throat: the “white trash” “carpetbaggers” and their “bad Negroes” (versus the “good Negroes”) who “jack up the taxes” in order to take advantage of the defeated South after the war. Then there was the crisis in law and order necessitating the “black codes” to clear the streets of criminal vagabonds, and then the need for “political meetings” where decent folk could keep their womenfolk safe. A “political meeting,” indeed! (“Ashley! Rhett! Break out the white sheets!”)

Gone With the Wind: The Civil War
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American author Pat Conroy and native South Carolina had written thusly about "Gone With the Wind:" “It is the story of war told by the women who did not lose it and who refused to believe in its results, long after the occupation had begun. According to Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry, and grace. To Southerners like my mother, "Gone With the Wind" was not just a book, it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who sang the praises of the Union. The novel was published in 1936 and it still stands as the last great posthumous victory of the Confederacy. It will long be a favorite book of any country that ever lost a war. It is still the most successful book published in our republic.” Whether one mourns the end of the Confederacy and its supposedly wonderful culture, it is worth noting the story's continuing importance to some in the South. Whether it is the "most successful book published in our republic" is arguable, and its righteous and resolute conviction that "the wrong side surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse."

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Mr. Geib mentioned that in the South there existed considerably more anger about Reconstruction than about the Civil War itself -- tempers were white hot, and nasty violent deeds done by night were not uncommon. This vignette about the Red River Parish area of Louisiana and the tensions between "Carpet Bagger" Marshall H. Twitchell and ex-Confederate "White League" member Ben W. Marston lays out this history in concrete detail. It crystallizes into real life the abstract ideas of "Black Republican rule" and "redeemer Democratic" opposition: this resulting "Coushatta Massacre" is what the struggle could mean on the ground. Pay attention to final result for Twitchell and Louisiana (not to mention the rest of the South), as well as the absolutely unrepentant views of Marston's great-grandson, James G. Marston, III.

THE SOUTHERN BACKLASH TO RE CONSTRUCTIO N:
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The Southern Democratic response to the “Black Republican” rule by “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags” was to use organized, extralegal violence and intimidation to “redeem” state governments back to traditional rule by local white elites. Deeply ambivalent about African Americans to begin with, the North began to tire of endless polemic in the South and came to release the region back to the Democratic Party in the 1870s. The end of the Reconstruction experiment would have tragic consequences for African Americans.

CONGRESSIONAL RECONST RUC TION:
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Congressional Reconstruction started with a sweeping Civil Rights Act passed over President Johnson’s veto, and then the imposition of a military occupation across the defeated South: the Confederates must learn, the Radicals concluded, that they in fact lost the war and their societies must change. The 13, 14th, 15th amendments must be ratified for the seceded states to re-gain admittance and representation to the Union, and a Freedman Bureau would move in to help former slaves build a multiracial democracy in a “new South.” The traditional Democratic leadership (re. Confederates) would come to resent immensely the “Black Republican” rule imposed at bayonet point in their societies, with their “scalawag” and “carpetbagger” white allies helping African Americans to rise to positions of power and authority unheard of before 1865. Thus was set the bitter wrestling match over who would control the social and political structure of the post-Civil War south. Did Congressional Reconstruction remedy the ills of Presidential Reconstruction? Or did it create evils of its own? Both?

PRESIDENTIAL RECONS TRUC TION:
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When Republican Party politicos dumped Hamlin from the vice presidency for Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, nobody ever thought the border state senator would ever become President of the United States. It was simply a political bone thrown to the border states. Abraham Lincoln was firmly in the presidency, in good health, and would serve out his second term whereupon the country could choose someone new. No president had ever been assassinated before, but Abraham Lincoln would be the first. And then Andrew Johnson – a Democrat with few friends in the Republican North, a southerner hated by most of the South for remaining loyal to the Union – was president. It was an unhappy presidency. His “presidential reconstruction” was wildly unpopular in the North as the winners of the war saw the South act as if it had won the war, with Johnson apparently in collusion with them; this would help elect a more “radically” Republic Congress in 1866 that would directly challenge President Johnson’s authority to run the country. Barely surviving an impeaching trial by a single vote, Presidential Construction would end not with a bang but a whimper.