Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunningites, Part 1
Mark T Pitcavage
James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850
(Reconstruction volumes published 1906-07).
(re black codes)
"these laws were not passed in a spirit of defiance to the North, but many good
people believed that they were; and this and other misconstructions of them had
a powerful effect on Northern sentiment. The difficulties of the problem
were not generally comprehended at the North. Three and a half million
persons of one of the most inferior races of mankind had through the agency
of their superiors been transformed from slavery to freedom. It was a race
the children of which might with favorable circumstances show an intellectual
development equal to white children [here Rhodes begins quoting someone] 'up to
"the age of thirteen or fouteen; but then there comes a diminution, often a
cessation of their mental development. The physical overslaughs the psychical
and they turn away from the pursuit of culture.'"
vol VI, p 41
(re blacks voting)
"No large policy in our country has ever been so conspicuous a failure as that
of forcing universal suffrage upon the South. The Negroes who simply acted out
their nature were not to blame. How indeed could they have acquired political
honesty? What idea could barbarism thrust into slavery obtain of the rights of
property?...With his crude ideas of honesty between man and man, what could
have been expected of the negro when he got his hand in the public till?"
vol VII, p. 232.
(re Republican blacks)
"From the Republican policy came no real good to the negroes. Most of them
developed no political capacity, and the few who raised themselves above the
mass did not reach a high order of intelligence. At different periods two
served in the United States Senate, twenty in the House; they left no mark on
the legislation of their time; none of them, in comparison with their white
associates, attained the least distinction."
vol. VII, p. 233
(on Negro and Reconstruction and afterward)
"The negro's political activity is rarely of a nature to identify him with any
movement on a high plane. He takes no part in civil service or tariff reform;
he was not a factor in the contest for honest money; he is seldom, if ever,
heard in advocacy of pure municipal government and for him Good Government
Associations have no attraction. He is greedy for office and emolument; it is
for this reason that he arrogantly asserts his right to recognition; and he has
had remarkable success in securing offices under the Federal Government. In a
word he has been politically a failure and he could not have been otherwise.
In spite of all warnings of science and political experience, he was started at
the top, and as is the fate of most unfortunates, he fell to the bottom."
Mark T Pitcavage
John W. Burgess, Reconstruction and the Constitution, 1866-1876.
"It was a great wrong to civilization to put the white race of the South under
the negro race. The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin is a
great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never
of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore,
created any civilization of any kind. To put such a race of men in possession
of a 'State' government in a system of federal government is to trust them with
the development of political and legal civilization upon the most important
subjects of human life, and to do this in communities with a large white
population is simply to establish barbarism in power over civilization."
p. 244-245
"There is something natural in the subordination of an inferior race to a
superior race, even to the point of enslavement of the inferior race, but there
is nothing natural in the opposite. It is entirely unnatural, ruinous, and
utterly demoralizing and barbarizing to both races."
ibid
Mark T Pitcavage
William Dunning. Reconstruction, Political and Economic.
"The negro had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like the
whites. With civil rights and political power, not won, but almost forced upon
him, he came gradually to understand and crave those more elusive privileges
that constitute social equality. A more intimate association with the other
race than that which business and politics involved was the end towards which
the ambition of the blacks tended consciously or unconsciously to direct
itself. The manifestations of this ambition were infinite in their diversity.
It played a part in the demand for mixed schools, in the legislative
prohibition of discrimination between the races in hotels and theatres, and
even in the hideous crime against white womanhood which now assumed new meaning
in the annals of outrage."
REB 4 LIFE
In article <4pa3nt$1...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>
>"The negro had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be
like
>the whites, (etc....)
So what's your point with all this? You want me to admit
that general attitudes regarding race have changed for the
better? Yes, they have. But it still doesn't change the
basic fact that the freed slave was, in most all instances,
unprepared to contribute in any constructive manner to
the post-war South. Was this their fault? I think not, but
it doesn't change what happened.
Flame on, Senor.
R4L
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4pakec$i...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
I don't need to flame on. Your statement that the freedmen were "unprepared to
contribute in any constructive manner to the post-war South" speaks volumes and
volumes and volumes, all on its own.
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 10, 1996 12:58:28 in article <Re: Those Wonderful, Non-Racist
Dunningites, Part 3>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T
Pitcavage)' wrote:
>>So what's your point with all this? You want me to admit
>>that general attitudes regarding race have changed for the
>>better? Yes, they have. But it still doesn't change the
>>basic fact that the freed slave was, in most all instances,
>>unprepared to contribute in any constructive manner to
>>the post-war South. Was this their fault? I think not, but
>>it doesn't change what happened.
>>
>>Flame on, Senor.
>
>I don't need to flame on. Your statement that the freedmen were
"unprepared
>to
>contribute in any constructive manner to the post-war South" speaks
volumes
>and
>volumes and volumes, all on its own.
those benevolent reconstructionists who had no qualms
about using these people to futher their own personal
and political agendas, and who then abandoned them when
they had outlived their usefulness? Just asking...
T. Reb
System Janitor
Brooks:
* I see where Mark Pitcavage is posting rather extensive quotations from
* the so-called Dunning groups of Reconstruction historians and (perhaps)
* their popular counterparts . . . John Ford Rhodes, John Burgess, Walter
* Fleming, Claude Bowers, and perhaps Dunning himself may make appearances.
* Mark's good work in itself should provide a rather telling rebuttal to
* those posters who celebrate this work because of its "objectivity" and
* "fairness".
* I will add that for those posters who insist that today's scholarship is
* shaped primarily by notions of "political correctness" that in their time
* Dunning and company were "politically correct," in that they embraced
* white supremacy and black inferiority as scientific givens.
So Brooks... given that it is uncomfortable to wade through
Bowers' descriptions of mahogany quadroons, how does the use
of accepted scientific givens reduce the objectivity and
fairness of his work? In the past I have defended Bowers
from Mark Pitcavage's assertions that Bowers ``made up stuff
out of the air'' by pointing out that some of Bowers' sources
were the same ones used by Mark's hero Zuczek. So Mark changed his
tack and started saying that Bowers history was worthless because
it was racist. Mark never managed to characterize Bowers'
weakness, but you've done so perfectly... Bowers was blinded
by the particular flavor of political correctness that was
being practiced in his time.
* Having noted that Mark's industriousness will educate the lurker
* population and others, however, I doubt that it will persuade certain
* people (including those who have attacked Eric Foner's work without
* apparently having read it) that their own perspective of Reconstruction
* is in error.
It would seem that the lurker's perspective of Reconstruction would be
more accurately forged if, instead of early twentieth century historians,
Mark had posted quotes from principal Reconstruction participants.
In another thread Justin Sanders has mentioned a conservative convention
headed by James Chesnut, Wade Hampton and BF Perry, which issued an
address that said, in part:
...The black man is what God and nature and circumstances have made him.
That he is not fit to be invested with these important rights [ political
rights ] may be no fault of his. But the fact is patent to all
that the negro is utterly unfitted to exercise the highest functions
of the citizen...
If my notes are correct, the following came from the same address, in
any event it came from the same people, including Wade Hampton...
...The enforcement of the Reconstruction acts by military power under
the guise of negro voters and negro conventions cannot lawfully
reestablish civil government in South Carolina. It may for a time hold
us in subjugation to a quasi-civil government backed by military force,
but it can do no more. As citizens of the United States we
shall not consent to live under negro supremacy, nor should we
acquiesce in negro equality. Not for ourselves only, but in behalf
of the Anglo-Saxon race and blood in this country, do we protest
against this subversion of the great social law, whereby an ignorant
and depraved race is placed in power and influence above the virtuous,
the educated and refined. By these acts of Congress, intelligence and
virtue are put under foot, while ignorance and vice are lifted into
power...
A key question, I think, is: Did they believe this, or were they
hypocrites, pursuing white supremacy for some other, unstated, reason...
like, maybe they were the earthly embodyment of evil, or they
enjoyed and were stimulated by making other people kneel before them?
I often attack Eric Foner's work. Do you believe I have not read
Foner? I have made specific charges against specific parts of
Foner, and you did not challenge them then, it is not helpful
for you to challenge them now, especially in such a broad way.
* For I have
* been rather amazed at the volume of posts over the last several months
* dedicated to celebrating, excusing, justifying, or in other ways
* defending the efforts of some white Southerners to preserve white
* supremacy by all means necessary during Reconstruction. And I
* have been sickened by their content. Readers of this group have heard
* about how slavery wasn't so terrible, how blacks caused postwar racial
* friction and violence, and so on--to say nothing of the usual "you too"
* posts directed at Northerners. Some of this may be due to honest
* ignorance, but all of it can't be.
I'll bite on ``justifying'' and ``defending''. The people of the
antebellum South fought and lost a war for independence. Their
conquerors placed the reins of their government into other hands,
incompetent hands, the hands of their former slaves. Empowered with
the majority vote in the State, the freedmen elected two white carpetbags
and a white scalawag with no redeeming qualities, for governor, and
allowed men like Whipper and CC Bowen to rise to power. Corruption was
rampant, I'm sure you could mention some specifics, especially under
Moses' administration. We once came to an agreement that
Reconstruction was a good idea prosecuted poorly. Corrupt
adventurers and haphazard direction from the Federal government,
not the skin color of the majority of South Carolina's voters,
were the cause of the problems in South Carolina. But, just as
the antebellum whites did not distinguish themselves (by eliminating
slavery) when they controlled the vote (the ultimate power, those
who control the vote can make and unmake the laws), neither did the
the freedmen distinguish themselves when they had within their
grasp the ability to control the government. Mark thinks it speaks
volumes about a person to admit that the newly freed slaves weren't
ready to be thrust into control of the government in 1868, and
it does... but not the volumes that Mark would like to insinuate.
The white Southerners, as they said they would from the beginning,
regained control of their government. Characterizing the turmoil of
the intervening years as a period of white on black violence ignores
federally-funded state-wide all-black militias, the Hunkidories,
the Live Oaks, the Charleston riots, the Cainhoy massacre, and much
more. I honestly doubt you are ignorant of this information. And I
must correct you. The Southerners didn't fight to preserve white
supremacy, they fought to *regain* white supremacy. It was the
government in Washington that preserved white supremacy, from that
time, until beyond WWII. Oops... I've just directed a ``you too''
at the Yankees!
* I am genuinely curious as to why some people seem compelled to defend
* white supremacists and defame its opponents, including Thaddeus Stevens.
I defend the Southerners, not because of, but in spite of, the fact
that they had not yet escaped the grasp of white supremacy.
* Stevens may not be a flawless hero, but on matters of race I prefer him
* to Andrew Johnson or Nathan Bedford Forrest. Readers of my own work
* will note that I have said very critical things about Charles Sumner and
* Carl Schurz, but I find Sumner's attitudes on race and human freedom
* laudable (and Schurz's inconsistent course rather puzzling). I may not
* agree with everything Eric Foner and James McPherson say about race, the
* war, and reconstruction (in fact they both know that I do not), but on
* the whole I find their work far more compelling than I do the work of
* Bowers, Burgess, Dunning, and Rhodes, all of whom I have read (and own).
I find neither Foner's one sided attacks on my ancestors nor Bowers'
descriptions of mahogany quadroons compelling, but I admit that
both are important in the overall picture.
Let's talk about Stephens and Foner and Dunningites... find fault,
(falsehoods and errors, not evidence of an unpleasant attitude)
in the following, a quote from Sheppard's ``Red Shirts Remembered'',
for which Sheppard cites Bowers:
The lines fell in pleasant places for Governor Chamberlain in the role
of Reformer. Death had snatched the sceptre of adamant Negroism from
the fingers of Thaddeus Stevens. Leadership of the Radicals in the
Congress descended upon Oliver P Morton, a political opportunist
whose weakness was inherent of insincerity. The North sickened of the
affluvium arising from the political cesspools of the South. Comedy
crept into Morton's frantic weaving of the Bloody Shirt. The tide of
public disfavor set against the Republican Party and swept its majority
from the Congress. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennesse, Texas
and Virginia shook off their Negro governments, and were free.
Let's figure out what Sheppard was talking about when he
referred to Steven's ``adamant negroism''...
According to Jarrell:
If the Southern states could be made and kept Radical Republican, Radical
control of the nation, they thought, would be perpetuated. As Thad
Stevens put it, the restoration of Southern states to the Union would
be considered only when the federal Constitution had been so amended
as ``to secure perpetual ascendancy'' of Radical Republicanism. The
enfranchisement of Negroes in the South was an absolute prerequisite.
Yates Snowden indicates that Stevens had never even been to the South,
knew nothing directly of the people of the South, and professed to
know nothing more. Snowden attributes the following to Gov. Chamberlain:
The personal knowledge of the writer warrants him in stating that
eyes were never blinder to facts, minds never more ruthlessly set
upon a policy, than were Stevens and Morton on putting the white
South under the heel of the black South.
Foner attributes the following to Stevens:
``We are making a nation, technical scruples'' must not be allowed to
stand in the way. The Southern states... could be treated as
conquered provinces...
* But then that's the difference between pursuing an interest in history as
* a way of understanding the past and selectively using it as a means of
* defending or justifying one's own beliefs and identity.
I believed that I recently showed that Richard Zuczek, a professed
professional modern historian, has just the above fault. And in the
past I've show indications (I'm not qualified to refute an entire
work with the Breadth of Foner's Reconstruction) that Foner has the
same problem.
I believe the redemption of the South was inevitable, and, considering
what had gone before, a good thing. Historically speaking, so
did many people:
According to Chamberlain, Republican Governor Andrew, of Massachusetts,
endorsed the following Reconstruction plan:
1. Prosecute peace as vigorously as we have prosecuted war;
2. inflict no humiliation, require no humiliation of the South;
3. enlist the sympathy and services of the ``natural leaders
of the South'' in the work of reconstruction.
His motivation was his belief that if ``the natural leaders of the South
were not thus enlisted as friends they would resume their supremacy as
enemies.''
Foner mentions the above, but only in the typically understated manner
that he usually uses for occurrences that don't fit into his thesis.
* Brooks "Incoming!" Simpson
Mike ``BOOM!'' Marshall
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834500532@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>So Brooks... given that it is uncomfortable to wade through
>Bowers' descriptions of mahogany quadroons, how does the use
>of accepted scientific givens reduce the objectivity and
>fairness of his work? In the past I have defended Bowers
>from Mark Pitcavage's assertions that Bowers ``made up stuff
>out of the air'' by pointing out that some of Bowers' sources
>were the same ones used by Mark's hero Zuczek.
If you did, then that was an incredibly stupid tack to take, since it was not
Bowers' "sources" that I was criticizing, but the fact that he made up stuff
and attributed it to those "sources."
So Mark changed his
>tack and started saying that Bowers history was worthless because
>it was racist. Mark never managed to characterize Bowers'
>weakness, but you've done so perfectly... Bowers was blinded
>by the particular flavor of political correctness that was
>being practiced in his time.
No, I've said all along that his history was worthless because one cannot rely
on what he says the sources say. The fact that it is incredibly racist is
gravy.
>I often attack Eric Foner's work. Do you believe I have not read
>Foner? I have made specific charges against specific parts of
>Foner, and you did not challenge them then, it is not helpful
>for you to challenge them now, especially in such a broad way.
I believe you have only read those small sections of Foner that dealt with
South Carolina. You yourself admitted you gave up reading the whole thing.
>I'll bite on ``justifying'' and ``defending''. The people of the
>antebellum South fought and lost a war for independence. Their
>conquerors placed the reins of their government into other hands,
>incompetent hands, the hands of their former slaves.
Wrongo reindeer. Only three states in the entire South for even a short period
of time were in the "control" of former slaves. Furthermore, they do not
appear to have been incompetent.
>Empowered with
>the majority vote in the State, the freedmen elected two white carpetbags
>and a white scalawag with no redeeming qualities, for governor, and
>allowed men like Whipper and CC Bowen to rise to power. Corruption was
>rampant, I'm sure you could mention some specifics, especially under
>Moses' administration.
People with no redeeming qualities in your eyes, anyway. Why are you so
presumptuous in assuming that those men had no redeeming qualities in the eyes
of those who voted for them?
We once came to an agreement that
>Reconstruction was a good idea prosecuted poorly. Corrupt
>adventurers and haphazard direction from the Federal government,
>not the skin color of the majority of South Carolina's voters,
>were the cause of the problems in South Carolina. But, just as
>the antebellum whites did not distinguish themselves (by eliminating
>slavery) when they controlled the vote (the ultimate power, those
>who control the vote can make and unmake the laws), neither did the
>the freedmen distinguish themselves when they had within their
>grasp the ability to control the government. Mark thinks it speaks
>volumes about a person to admit that the newly freed slaves weren't
>ready to be thrust into control of the government in 1868, and
>it does... but not the volumes that Mark would like to insinuate.
What I made the "volumes" comment in response to was something quite different
from what you just said. But I will say here that the freed slaves were just
as competent to participate in the regulation of their own society as any
white. And furthermore, you seem to forget that many blacks who took part in
that government were not newly freed slaves.
>I find neither Foner's one sided attacks on my ancestors nor Bowers'
>descriptions of mahogany quadroons compelling, but I admit that
>both are important in the overall picture.
Do you have an example of a "one sided attack"?
> Congress descended upon Oliver P Morton, a political opportunist
> whose weakness was inherent of insincerity.
Oliver P. Morton was a political opportunist? Explain his Civil War history,
then.
System Janitor
>South Carolina. You yourself admitted you gave up reading the whole thing.
You have selective or poor memory. When I first checked Foner out of the
library over a year ago, I failed to read the whole thing before it
became due and didn't care to check it back out. I purchased a
first edition hardback at a used bookstore last December, and
have read from and refered to it many times since. If you get books,
read them cover to cover like novels, and then put them back
on the shelf to grow dusty, no wonder you don't have a clue. You
can consider me a professional technical manual reader... I use
these books the same way, and as far as I'm concerned it serves
me much better than whatever voodoo method you apparently use.
>Wrongo reindeer. Only three states in the entire South for even a short period
>of time were in the "control" of former slaves.
Well, twinkie, I guess that's just another way of saying ``all the
states whose populations were predominantly black.'' Short
period of time is... 2 seconds? half an epoch? a month? In South
Carolina it was until 1876. With potential beyond that.
>Furthermore, they do not appear to have been incompetent.
I've specifically indicated what makes them appear to have
been incompetent, and you've blown some hot air. I'm interested in
seeing which one of us is taken more seriously by those who
care enough about this thread to give it some thought.
>People with no redeeming qualities in your eyes, anyway. Why are you so
>presumptuous in assuming that those men had no redeeming qualities in the eyes
>of those who voted for them?
This is why I responded to Brooks post, not yours. Talking to you is
like talking to a brick wall. You can't really be this dense. I'm
not assuming anything. I'm not assuming there was a civil war, there
was one. I'm not assuming Moses had no redeeming values, he had none.
Have you got a big list of them?
>But I will say here that the freed slaves were just
>as competent to participate in the regulation of their own society as any
>white.
Yep, you can say it.
>And furthermore, you seem to forget that many blacks who took part in
>that government were not newly freed slaves.
I've forgotten nothing. The majority of the people in South Carolina
were newly freed slaves, and they ran the government with their
votes. That they were manipulated into placing the reins of
government into the hands of speculators is exactly their failure.
>Do you have an example of a "one sided attack"?
You bet. I've posted them, and they rolled off your back like water
off a duck's back, just like everything I've ever posted.
>> Congress descended upon Oliver P Morton, a political opportunist
>> whose weakness was inherent of insincerity.
>Oliver P. Morton was a political opportunist? Explain his Civil War history,
>then.
Why don't you? I focused on the ``rampant negroism'' part of Sheppard's
Bowers related extract. I posted it so you could shoot holes in it.
-Mike
Brooks Simpson
hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu (System Janitor) wrote:
>So Brooks... given that it is uncomfortable to wade through
>Bowers' descriptions of mahogany quadroons, how does the use
>of accepted scientific givens reduce the objectivity and
>fairness of his work?
"Accepted scientific givens?" Please clarify.
I think that Bowers's work, while written with florid style, has major
shortcomings as an account of Reconstruction, in part because it is
warped by racist assumptions.
In the past I have defended Bowers
>from Mark Pitcavage's assertions that Bowers ``made up stuff
>out of the air'' by pointing out that some of Bowers' sources
>were the same ones used by Mark's hero Zuczek.
Interesting point. Here's what I would add to that conversation:
Walter Fleming's SEQUEL TO APPOMATTOX quotes parts of the reports offered
by Carl Schurz and Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. Having edited a complete
edition of the letters of Schurz, Grant, and others on their observations
about the South in 1865, I'd deem Fleming's use of quotes selective.
By the way, anyone who takes a look at that book (ADVICE AFTER
APPOMATTOX) will see that I have some harsh things to say about Schurz
and Salmon P. Chase--as well as about two of Johnson's henchmen, Harvey
Watterson and Benjamin Truman. Indeed, my comments about Chase and
Schurz caused one reviewer, Harold Holzer, to charge me with essentially
being a neo-Confederate. I enjoyed that.
>Bowers was blinded
>by the particular flavor of political correctness that was
>being practiced in his time.
Blinded . . . or embraced. In any case, do you agree?
>It would seem that the lurker's perspective of Reconstruction would be
>more accurately forged if, instead of early twentieth century historians,
>Mark had posted quotes from principal Reconstruction participants.
I wish that was true. But, as a comparison of the accounts in ADVICE
AFTER APPOMATTOX suggests, even the participants often disagreed on what
was going on. Indeed, this is one of the most serious challenges a
Reconstruction historian faces: determining what happened. Having the
accounts of participants is not necessarily enough, when the participants
disagree.
[section on South carolina snipped]
>A key question, I think, is: Did they believe this, or were they
>hypocrites, pursuing white supremacy for some other, unstated, reason...
>like, maybe they were the earthly embodyment of evil, or they
>enjoyed and were stimulated by making other people kneel before them?
I think they sincerely embraced white supremacy. I think they sincerely
dreaded black equality. White supremacy united white Southerners in ways
that slavery never did.
As a historian, my task is to understand what they believed and explain
it to others. That doesn't mean I have to justify it.
Here I think you would benefit from reading what I say in print.
Moreover, I think that white supremacist beliefs did not justify
terrorist behavior.
Hampton seems most interesting here, in part because he was a more
flexible figure. In light of the world in which he grew up, I think he
moved away from more repressive versions of white supremacy to more
benevolent, paternalistic versions of it.
>
>I often attack Eric Foner's work. Do you believe I have not read
>Foner? I have made specific charges against specific parts of
>Foner, and you did not challenge them then, it is not helpful
>for you to challenge them now, especially in such a broad way.
It would be better to say that I let them go by. I think that your
understanding of Foner is basically confined to what he says about South
Carolina. Even then, you don't always give him credit. In the shorter
version of his book (p. 230) he in fact criticizes Scott and Moses.
>I'll bite on ``justifying'' and ``defending''. The people of the
>antebellum South fought and lost a war for independence.
The majority of the white people . . .
>Their conquerors placed the reins of their government into other hands,
>incompetent hands, the hands of their former slaves.
After white Southerners had shown themselves incapable of resuming the
reins of self-government without repressing blacks . . .
Perhaps, as Grant said later, the problem was the haste with which
Northern policy makers sought to reestablish civil governments in the
South.
>Empowered with
>the majority vote in the State, the freedmen elected two white carpetbags
>and a white scalawag with no redeeming qualities, for governor, and
>allowed men like Whipper and CC Bowen to rise to power. Corruption was
>rampant, I'm sure you could mention some specifics, especially under
>Moses' administration.
You bet. Even Grant complained about Moses.
But, Mike, South Carolina isn't the entire South. Compare its experience
during Reconstruction with that of Virginia, for example. You err, I
believe, in making all the world (or at least all the South) into South
Carolina, although I know from personal experience that South
Carolininans are prone to this error <SMILE--Mike has a sense of humor,
but some of you don't>.
>We once came to an agreement that
>Reconstruction was a good idea prosecuted poorly. Corrupt
>adventurers and haphazard direction from the Federal government,
>not the skin color of the majority of South Carolina's voters,
>were the cause of the problems in South Carolina.
Your first statement is true. But I'm afraid that we would disagree on
some matters of emphasis on the second part, for I would add that the
behavior of Southern whites didn't exactly help matters. Nor would I
classify all carbetbaggers and scalawags as corrupt (Chamberlain?).
But, just as
>the antebellum whites did not distinguish themselves (by eliminating
>slavery) when they controlled the vote (the ultimate power, those
>who control the vote can make and unmake the laws), neither did the
>the freedmen distinguish themselves when they had within their
>grasp the ability to control the government.
Oh, I don't know. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they divided over
issues of class and previous condition of servitude, as Tom Holt's book
on this matter suggests. I'd guess that I'd agree with you that on the
whole black legislators in South Carolina during Reconstruction were no
better and no worse than their antebellum white counterparts--or, I would
add, the white Redemptionists who followed.
Mark thinks it speaks
>volumes about a person to admit that the newly freed slaves weren't
>ready to be thrust into control of the government in 1868, and
>it does... but not the volumes that Mark would like to insinuate.
Oh, but some were--like Robert Smalls, Robert Elliot, even Martin Delany.
>The white Southerners, as they said they would from the beginning,
>regained control of their government. Characterizing the turmoil of
>the intervening years as a period of white on black violence ignores
>federally-funded state-wide all-black militias, the Hunkidories,
>the Live Oaks, the Charleston riots, the Cainhoy massacre, and much
>more.
First, South Carolina is a special case. Second, of course the militia
would be almost all-black under Republican rule--just as it was to be
all-white in Mississippi in 1865. And which Charleston riot? Heck, you
could make some big points if you are talking about the one between black
and white Union soldiers in 1865.
With Hamburg and the 1871 enforcement of the KKK Act in mind, I'd still
rest content with stating that the majority of violence in South Carolina
was initiated by whites against blacks. If there had been no political
violence, blacks, so long as they stayed together, would have formed the
base of the Republican electorate. However, as Mike has pointed out, by
1876 there were a growing number of blacks who, for one reason or
another, decided to join forces with the Democratic party. Martin Delany
was among the most prominent of this group.
>I honestly doubt you are ignorant of this information. And I
>must correct you. The Southerners didn't fight to preserve white
>supremacy, they fought to *regain* white supremacy.
Well, I must modify you . . . ;) White Democrats fought to regain white
supremacy.
> It was the
>government in Washington that preserved white supremacy, from that
>time, until beyond WWII. Oops... I've just directed a ``you too''
>at the Yankees!
I have no problem with this statement . . . although the federal
government was not always the pawn of the North, as Woodrow Wilson's
presence in the White House would suggest.
For, as anyone who will read my stuff can affirm, I think that white
Northerners in the 1870s became spineless on supporting Reconstruction.
Democrats, of course, never did support it; they were joined by just
enough white Republicans to make continued federal intervention in the
South suicidal. Thus Grant, I believe, decided upon grounds of political
pragmatism to pull back--regardless of his own horror at what was going
on.
Actually, I'd say that Republicans in the North found it
counterproductive to fight for black rights (and fewer were inclined to
do so any way) after 1877 (and the decline had already begun by the
1870s). It was surely not in the Democrats' interest to do so.
And, of course, by 1877 white southerners were part of the federal
government, were they not? Certainly they were in Congress.
> * I am genuinely curious as to why some people seem compelled to defend
> * white supremacists and defame its opponents, including Thaddeus Stevens.
>
>I defend the Southerners, not because of, but in spite of, the fact
>that they had not yet escaped the grasp of white supremacy.
And this is where we would differ. I don't defend these people per se.
I am interested in representing to others the way they viewed their world
and the assumptions under which they operated. I dislike Charles Sumner,
not because of, but in spite of, his commitment to justice and racial
equality. And, of course, I really don't care for Schurz . . .
[snip]
>Let's talk about Stephens and Foner and Dunningites... find fault,
>(falsehoods and errors, not evidence of an unpleasant attitude)
>in the following, a quote from Sheppard's ``Red Shirts Remembered'',
>for which Sheppard cites Bowers:
>
> The lines fell in pleasant places for Governor Chamberlain in the role
> of Reformer. Death had snatched the sceptre of adamant Negroism from
> the fingers of Thaddeus Stevens. Leadership of the Radicals in the
> Congress descended upon Oliver P Morton, a political opportunist
> whose weakness was inherent of insincerity. The North sickened of the
> affluvium arising from the political cesspools of the South. Comedy
> crept into Morton's frantic weaving of the Bloody Shirt. The tide of
> public disfavor set against the Republican Party and swept its majority
> from the Congress. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennesse, Texas
> and Virginia shook off their Negro governments, and were free.
Could we look at this, just for a moment? . . .
The Negro governments of Virginia? Tennessee? Texas? Arkansas?
Alabama? Come on. Race was of far more importance in Georgia.
Let's just say that the process of redemption as described by this
historian cries out for elaboration.
>Let's figure out what Sheppard was talking about when he
>referred to Steven's ``adamant negroism''...
>
>According to Jarrell:
>
> If the Southern states could be made and kept Radical Republican, Radical
> control of the nation, they thought, would be perpetuated. As Thad
> Stevens put it, the restoration of Southern states to the Union would
> be considered only when the federal Constitution had been so amended
> as ``to secure perpetual ascendancy'' of Radical Republicanism. The
> enfranchisement of Negroes in the South was an absolute prerequisite.
Well, not exactly. If one was to readmit the Southern states to the
Union, thus restoring their civil state governments, with whites-only
electorates, then they would, of course, go Democratic. But Stevens also
believed that if one was going to restore civil government, then blacks
should vote, just like whites. In such cases, he anticipated (correctly)
that most blacks would vote Republican.
>Yates Snowden indicates that Stevens had never even been to the South,
>knew nothing directly of the people of the South, and professed to
>know nothing more.
And I think that's pretty much true.
Snowden attributes the following to Gov. Chamberlain:
>
> The personal knowledge of the writer warrants him in stating that
> eyes were never blinder to facts, minds never more ruthlessly set
> upon a policy, than were Stevens and Morton on putting the white
> South under the heel of the black South.
This is Chamberlain in 1901, right? For by that time Chamberlain had
indeed completed the cycle from pledging "no more negroism" in 1874 to an
avid critic of Reconstruction--unlike, say, Adelbert Ames, his
counterpart from Mississippi.
>Foner attributes the following to Stevens:
>
> ``We are making a nation, technical scruples'' must not be allowed to
> stand in the way. The Southern states... could be treated as
> conquered provinces...
Yes. You bet. Recall what I said about Stevens--not a flawless hero,
but I feel more comfortable about his views on race than I do about those
espoused by, say, Andrew Johnson or Benjamin Perry.
* But then that's the difference between pursuing an interest in history
as
> * a way of understanding the past and selectively using it as a means of
> * defending or justifying one's own beliefs and identity.
>
>I believed that I recently showed that Richard Zuczek, a professed
>professional modern historian, has just the above fault. And in the
>past I've show indications (I'm not qualified to refute an entire
>work with the Breadth of Foner's Reconstruction) that Foner has the
>same problem.
Perhaps so. Perhaps not. I've met Richard, and he and I do not always
agree about Reconstruction. Same in the case of Eric Foner.
But my statement also applies to some so-called "Confederate" posters.
>I believe the redemption of the South was inevitable, and, considering
>what had gone before, a good thing.
Inevitable? Probably, under the circumstances. A good thing? We
disagree.
Brooks "counterbattery" Simpson
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834584547@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>>People with no redeeming qualities in your eyes, anyway. Why are you so
>>presumptuous in assuming that those men had no redeeming qualities in the eye
s
>>of those who voted for them?
>
>This is why I responded to Brooks post, not yours. Talking to you is
>like talking to a brick wall. You can't really be this dense. I'm
>not assuming anything. I'm not assuming there was a civil war, there
>was one. I'm not assuming Moses had no redeeming values, he had none.
>Have you got a big list of them?
This just shows how ridiculous you are. Because you are so dead set in your
beliefs that "Negro rule" was ruinous, you have made up your mind that no black
politician had any redeeming qualities and that blacks only voted for them or
for "carpetbaggers" because they were being led through their noses. It is a
shame that you do not have the capability to give blacks any credit for
judgment. I'm no fan of Moses and yet I would rather have him any day than
M.C. Butler.
>>But I will say here that the freed slaves were just
>>as competent to participate in the regulation of their own society as any
>>white.
>
>Yep, you can say it.
Meaning you don't believe it. Illiterate whites (which made of 30% of South
Carolinian males) were perfectly capable of regulating their own society, but
no blacks, literate or not, were. Uh huh.
>
>>And furthermore, you seem to forget that many blacks who took part in
>>that government were not newly freed slaves.
>
>I've forgotten nothing. The majority of the people in South Carolina
>were newly freed slaves, and they ran the government with their
>votes. That they were manipulated into placing the reins of
>government into the hands of speculators is exactly their failure.
How is it that blacks were "manipulated" into voting certain people into
office, but South Carolinia whites were not "manipulated" into voting Wade
Hampton into office? Why is it that only blacks can be manipulated, Mike?
Hmmm?
RStacy2229
Been busy for the past week, trying to meet a deadline, and -- lo! -- when
I download alt.war.civil.usa, I find that Mr. Pitcavage has posted an
entire *series* denouncing the Dunning school of Reconstruction history.
OK.
But before we go further, let us just seek the conclusion which Mr.
Pitcavage is attempting to implant in the unsuspecting, and see how he
goes about proving that conclusion.
Mr. Pitcavage's conclusion, we might assume, is that the Dunning school's
version of Reconstruction history is untrustworthy, because the
Dunningites were racist. So if we break this down to a syllogism we find
Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
et ergo
Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
Mr. Pitcavage having, to his own satisfaction at least, proven Premise A,
it must now be his duty to prove Premise B. However, if we should discover
that somewhere, somehow, in the distant recesses of benighted antiquity,
that someone was both a.) a racist and b.) a trustworthy historian, then
Mr. Pitcavage's syllogism crumbles to dust. I suggest that such cases
exist, and am getting out the broom to sweep up the remains of that
syllogism.
It might be that the alleged "racism" of the Dunningites somehow colored
(no pun intended) perception of what went on during Reconstruction. Big
deal. Someone please find for me the first use of the word "racism" in
American jargon. Bet it postdates Reconstruction, if not postdating the
Dunnigites themselves. In fact, a great many persons of all persuasions,
especially in the 19th and early 20th century, were "racist" in some form
or fashion. Did only folks in Alabama and Mississippi laugh at the pidgin
gullah of Buckwheat on "The Little Rascals"? Was the Jack Benny Show only
a radio hit in Dixie, where the KKK tuned in to laugh at Rochester? What
about Amos 'n' Andy? Wasn't that a nationwide hit? Probably even some PhDs
at Ohio State once laughed at such "racist" hijinks.
I have in front of me Rufus R. Dawes' history of the 6th Wisconsin. In it,
he manifests a great charity toward black persons, but I suppose that a
Fawn Brodie or some other such Freudian fool would find plenty of evidence
of condescension and paternalism evidenced in Dawes' work. Condescension
and paternalism are both racist, by modern lights, so maybe the 6th
Wisconsin didn't REALLY charge the railroad cut at Gettysburg, right? I
mean, racists can't write trustworthy history, so you can throw out
Herodotus and Plutarch, too, I guess.
Mr. Pitcavage and the other Fonerites attack the Dunning school because
the history they wrote is at odds with the modern worldview which the
leftist mind requires in order to justify any number of socio-cultural
attitudes. The dispute has nothing to do with history and everything to do
with modern politics.
Have a nice day! :)
Robert Stacy "Hemlock? Seems a little rash, eh?" McCain
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4ppb5r$g...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
RStacy2229 <rstac...@aol.com> wrote:
>Been busy for the past week, trying to meet a deadline, and -- lo! -- when
>I download alt.war.civil.usa, I find that Mr. Pitcavage has posted an
>entire *series* denouncing the Dunning school of Reconstruction history.
>OK.
I posted five parts of an on-going series demonstrating that the Dunning school
was racist.
>
>But before we go further, let us just seek the conclusion which Mr.
>Pitcavage is attempting to implant in the unsuspecting, and see how he
>goes about proving that conclusion.
>
>Mr. Pitcavage's conclusion, we might assume, is that the Dunning school's
>version of Reconstruction history is untrustworthy, because the
>Dunningites were racist. So if we break this down to a syllogism we find
>
>Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
>Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
>et ergo
>Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
>
You have done all sorts of assuming, but it is not of very high quality. In
this series of posts, rather than your peculiar syllogism, I have been
demonstrating:
Premise A: The Dunningites were racists.
I have been doing this in response to a post from Linda Teasley which made the
remarkable statement that they were not.
>Mr. Pitcavage having, to his own satisfaction at least, proven Premise A,
>it must now be his duty to prove Premise B.
By this statement you seem to be saying that the Dunningites were not racist.
Apparently, then, you agree with the sentiments they expressed in the various
quotations I provided?
>However, if we should discover
>that somewhere, somehow, in the distant recesses of benighted antiquity,
>that someone was both a.) a racist and b.) a trustworthy historian, then
>Mr. Pitcavage's syllogism crumbles to dust. I suggest that such cases
>exist, and am getting out the broom to sweep up the remains of that
>syllogism.
I am glad you are getting out the broom, because it seems appropriate to use an
instrument made of that material in order to deal with a straw man, one of your
own making. You created this wonderful syllogism all on your own without
paying attention to anything I have actually said on the matter.
Would you like me actually to address the issue of the "trustworthiness" of the
Dunning books? It is far more complicated than you postulate.
One must take into account all of the following issues:
1. They are old, old books, generally published in the first decade of the
twentieth century. Eighty-plus years of research has added immeasurably to our
knowledge of the Reconstruction era. This is research that the Dunningites
simply did not have at their disposal.
2. Related to #1, above, the Dunningites, as was typical for historians of the
time, used very crude research techniques. Generally speaking, they used only
secondary sources, printed primary sources, newspapers, and sometimes selected
public archives. And hearsay, in some cases. Historians have subsequently
developed all sorts of additional sources of information, as well as new
research methods. Even the best of the Dunning works, on a purely technical
level, cannot compare with the quality of research that goes into an average
work of history today. This is irrefutable.
3. The Dunningites were racists. This affected their work in various ways.
Most notably was the general tendency to disregard all source information that
came from blacks. Some Dunningites were far more pernicious, printing rumors
as fact, such as Fleming's contention that black women were such incompetent
mothers that they did not know how to take care of their own children, or the
assertion by many that black men desired to rape white women.
4. Some Dunningites purposely miswrote history. This was true more often of
the populizers than the academics. For instance, Bowers often simply made up
things, then attributed them to a source that said no such thing.
5. Some Dunningites were better historians than others. Garner, for instance,
was far more scrupulous in providing evidence to support his contentions than
was Fleming. Similarly, when he did not have evidence, he made no
unsupportable claims. Fleming's work is full of unfootnoted brash assertions.
How does this relate to "trustworthiness"? It depends on the author. Some,
like Bowers, really are untrustworthy; you cannot believe what he says unless
you can find other historians also saying it. Some, like Fleming, do have
biases so great that some sections of their works cannot be trusted to be
accurate; in Fleming's case it is worsened by poor documentation. Others, like
Garner, can be "trusted," in that the information they present is reliable, or
was the best information at hand in 1901. But since that information is still
nearly a century out of date, it may very well be that it has been superceded
or modified by later findings; no historian could afford to rely solely on a
work that old.
You will find that I have a great deal more nuanced view of "trustworthiness"
and the Dunningites than you do about the people you label "Fonerites"
(although what school you actually mean by this is hard to tell, since you seem
to lump all post-1930s scholarship together) and "leftists".
Mr. Pitcavage and the other Fonerites attack the Dunning school because
>the history they wrote is at odds with the modern worldview which the
>leftist mind requires in order to justify any number of socio-cultural
>attitudes. The dispute has nothing to do with history and everything to do
>with modern politics.
You simply do not know enough about the historiography--or history--of
Reconstruction to be able to make such a statement.
System Janitor
Before I posted, I looked in the library for turn of the Century
Encyclopedias or pedestal dictionaries for a discussion on this, there
were none older than the 1950s. I have a turn of the century pedestal
dictionary in storage, it has giant sections on history and general
knowledge, I believe similar ideas will be reflected there, and
I believe such a generic source could be claimed to hold
generic mainstream givens... we'll see. At any rate, you used
``accepted scientific givens'' in your post, so I didn't think
that I had to argue that (white) people generally believed that stuff then.
>I think that Bowers's work, while written with florid style, has major
>shortcomings as an account of Reconstruction, in part because it is
>warped by racist assumptions.
I believe it has major shortcomings as a one-stop source of complete
information on Reconstruction.
>caused one reviewer, Harold Holzer, to charge me with essentially
>being a neo-Confederate. I enjoyed that.
Welcome! When do you want to speak at one of our SCV meetings?
>>Bowers was blinded
>>by the particular flavor of political correctness that was
>>being practiced in his time.
>Blinded . . . or embraced. In any case, do you agree?
Sure. I think that's the perfect way to characterize him and others,
I wish I'd thought of it.
>As a historian, my task is to understand what they believed and explain
>it to others. That doesn't mean I have to justify it.
Yes. Your job is to present us with something we don't have to wade
through like a minefield, and each of us can justify it on our own.
>Here I think you would benefit from reading what I say in print.
ADVICE AFTER APPOMATTOX & LET US HAVE PEACE right?
>Moreover, I think that white supremacist beliefs did not justify
>terrorist behavior.
One doesn't have to justify whatever terrorist behavior took place to
realize that the diverse people of South Carolina, both white and
black, banded togather under Hampton's leadership in 1876, and that
they would have let nothing short of thorough military occupation
prevent them, at that point, from regaining control of the State.
>Hampton seems most interesting here, in part because he was a more
>flexible figure. In light of the world in which he grew up, I think he
>moved away from more repressive versions of white supremacy to more
>benevolent, paternalistic versions of it.
I believe an argument can be made that Hampton was always paternalistic,
never repressive.
>>Their conquerors placed the reins of their government into other hands,
>>incompetent hands, the hands of their former slaves.
>After white Southerners had shown themselves incapable of resuming the
>reins of self-government without repressing blacks . . .
>Perhaps, as Grant said later, the problem was the haste with which
>Northern policy makers sought to reestablish civil governments in the
>South.
Perhaps. The Radicals went ballistic over the Black Codes and, with
no thought to any kind of further compromise, forced upon the South
what can only be described as unsustainable punishment. Before
Congressional Reconstruction, Hampton could have sold conditional
franchisement, and after 1876 many Blacks wished for it.
>But, Mike, South Carolina isn't the entire South.
True. But South Carolina *is* the center of the universe!
>Compare its experience during Reconstruction with that of Virginia,
>for example.
I am not well rounded enough, yet. But I'm all ears here, and hopefully
I have lots of years left to read lots of books.
>You err, I
>believe, in making all the world (or at least all the South) into South
>Carolina, although I know from personal experience that South
>Carolininans are prone to this error <SMILE--Mike has a sense of humor,
>but some of you don't>.
I have often wondered, because of what I know about South Carolina,
and because I do at least know that Reconstruction went very differently
in several other States, whether or not what the ``post-revisionists''
would call the ``myth of Reconstruction'' isn't in some part some kind
of general extrapolation of what happened in South Carolina into a
somewhat skewed general view of Reconstruction as a whole. I don't
know if that made sense, but I do wonder it sometimes... :-)
>Nor would I
>classify all carbetbaggers and scalawags as corrupt (Chamberlain?).
He was the best of the Republicans. But his inability to, for example,
prevent the likes of Whipper and Moses from becoming judges, and his
opposition to Hampton in 1876 counterbalanced his honest attempts
at reform.
>I'd guess that I'd agree with you that on the
>whole black legislators in South Carolina during Reconstruction were no
>better and no worse than their antebellum white counterparts--or, I would
>add, the white Redemptionists who followed.
My admission that the Antebellum government failed to distinguish itself,
and quite a amazing accomplishment it would have been, by
solving the social problem of human slavery without a war, is a
long way from admitting that the true leaders of the South were
no better or no worse than, for example, R.B.Elliot, who aligned
himself with Whipper and ``Honest John'' Patterson, ``whose
career and mental processes are more fitting subjects for
examination by the police than by the political critic.''
The above quote comes from Jarrell, who attributes it to The Nation.
>>the newly freed slaves weren't ready to be thrust into control of
>>the government in 1868
>Oh, but some were--like Robert Smalls, Robert Elliot, even Martin Delany.
Wasn't Smalls the only freedman from the above group? And unlike
Delany, Smalls didn't join with the redeemers in 1876.
> Snowden attributes the following to Gov. Chamberlain:
>> The personal knowledge of the writer warrants him in stating that
>> eyes were never blinder to facts, minds never more ruthlessly set
>> upon a policy, than were Stevens and Morton on putting the white
>> South under the heel of the black South.
>This is Chamberlain in 1901, right?
Yes.
>>I believe the redemption of the South was inevitable, and, considering
>>what had gone before, a good thing.
>Inevitable? Probably, under the circumstances. A good thing? We
>disagree.
>Brooks "counterbattery" Simpson
-Mike ``Colors not yet captured'' Marshall
System Janitor
>beliefs that "Negro rule" was ruinous, you have made up your mind that no black
>politician had any redeeming qualities and that blacks only voted for them or
>for "carpetbaggers" because they were being led through their noses. It is a
>shame that you do not have the capability to give blacks any credit for
>judgment. I'm no fan of Moses and yet I would rather have him any day than
>M.C. Butler.
Moses was neither Black nor a Carpetbag. We were specifically discussing
Moses' lack of redeeming qualities, and now you've accused me of
charging all blacks with that deficit. Whose ridiculous? And there's
no waiting line for Moses... you can have all of him you want.
>>>But I will say here that the freed slaves were just
>>>as competent to participate in the regulation of their own society as any
>>>white.
>>
>>Yep, you can say it.
>Meaning you don't believe it. Illiterate whites (which made of 30% of South
>Carolinian males) were perfectly capable of regulating their own society, but
>no blacks, literate or not, were. Uh huh.
If the above paragraph is supposed to represent my thoughts, then
you made it up out of the air, Mr. Bowerscavage. There's a difference
between being merely unable string two written words together and
being freshly emergent from untold generations of slavery. The
record of the freedmen's control of the government via their control
of the vote is plain, disregarding your obfuscations, for all to see.
>How is it that blacks were "manipulated" into voting certain people into
>office,
Intimidation, violence and lies. Efforts by organs like the Union League
to enforce upon the freedmen that they must vote Republican, resulting
in events like 1868's constitutional convention, which saw 100% of
the black vote go Republican. From the US Congresses' ``Ku Klux
Conspiracy, The Reports of the Joint Select Committe to inquire
into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary States, Vol. I.,
page 302'':
The elections pretended to be held were mere farces; all the
registrars, judges, ballot counters, police, militia and other
machinery were in their [the Radicals'] own hands... where the negroes
could not be inspired with sufficient hatred... to vote for these
loyal leaguers and carpet-baggers they were forced to do so... and the
recusant negro who dared to disobey was ostracised, denounced, and
often beaten to compel obedience...
>but South Carolinia whites were not "manipulated" into voting Wade
>Hampton into office?
South Carolina whites and blacks were ``manipulated'' into voting
for Wade Hampton by their belief in his ability to bring sanity and
dignity back to the prostrate state.
>Why is it that only blacks can be manipulated, Mike?
Bait.
-Mike
System Janitor
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Even the best of the Dunning works, on a purely technical
>level, cannot compare with the quality of research that goes into an average
>work of history today. This is irrefutable.
>4. Some Dunningites purposely miswrote history. This was true more often of
>the populizers than the academics. For instance, Bowers often simply made up
>things, then attributed them to a source that said no such thing.
On page 571, discussing the events at Hamburg, Foner gives conflicting
versions of M.C.Butler's participation in the killing of 5 captive blacks.
Foner claims, with no attributions, that Butler claimed to have
left the scene when the crowd began ``committing depredations''.
While it is doubtful that I have typed in everything M.C.Butler ever
said on the subject, I have posted posted a description of the event
made by Butler which in no way matches Foner's claims.
On the next page Foner says:
...Hampton had seen his fortune collapse with emancipation and, saddled
with enormous debts, had played little role in public affairs since
1865. But his correspondence and few public statements revealed a man
unable to formulate a coherent reponse to the crises of
Reconstruction.
As if emancipation, and not Hampton's investment of everything he
had into the failed Confederacy, caused Hampton's fortune to collapse.
Having included Hampton Jarrell's work, which indicates Hampton's
active role in South Carolina politics during 1866 and 1867, for
the above cite, one must conclude that Foner simply made it up
and attributed it to a source that said no such thing. Or maybe,
since Foner used several sources, one did support his claim, and
he just added the other sources to fluff up his resume. Neither
seems very trustworthy. If I'm going to trust Foner, I need to
double check his citation (Jarrell) and find out that Hampton
was incoherent. It's not there.
Foner's other citations are Simkins and Woody, and some letters and papers.
One collection of Hampton's papers was published in 1957 (I guess
the latter represents the ``irrefutable technical edge'' Foner has
over Simkins and Woody and Jarrel...).
Hey Mark... can you post a couple of things Bowers made up? Not
racist things, like Bowers' description of the people in South Carolina's
state house that you posted before, but made up things. And
include the attributions. Thanks.
-Mike
Justin M Sanders
System Janitor (hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu) wrote:
> My admission that the Antebellum government failed to distinguish itself,
> and quite a amazing accomplishment it would have been, by
> solving the social problem of human slavery without a war, is a
> long way from admitting that the true leaders of the South were
> no better or no worse than, for example, R.B.Elliot, who aligned
> himself with Whipper and ``Honest John'' Patterson, ``whose
> career and mental processes are more fitting subjects for
> examination by the police than by the political critic.''
Mike has used the term "true leaders of the South" a couple of times
recently, and on several occasions in the past. I must confess that I
have never understood what (and whom) he means by a "true leader".
I know I have inquired in the past, and Mike may feel that he has amply
answered me before, but the fact remains that I still don't know who the
"true leaders" were or how, if I were to take a Reconstruction-era leader
at random, I could tell if he were a "true" or a "false" leader.
Would Mike care to try to enlighten this "bear of little brain"?
--
Justin M. Sanders "I will listen to any hypothesis on
Dept. of Physics but one condition-- that you show me
Univ. of South Alabama a method by which it can be tested."
jsan...@jaguar1.usouthal.edu --August Wilhelm von Hofmann
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4pqomr$a...@hermes.acs.unt.edu>,
Justin M Sanders <jsan...@jove.acs.unt.edu> wrote:
>System Janitor (hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu) wrote:
>
>> My admission that the Antebellum government failed to distinguish itself,
>> and quite a amazing accomplishment it would have been, by
>> solving the social problem of human slavery without a war, is a
>> long way from admitting that the true leaders of the South were
>> no better or no worse than, for example, R.B.Elliot, who aligned
>> himself with Whipper and ``Honest John'' Patterson, ``whose
>> career and mental processes are more fitting subjects for
>> examination by the police than by the political critic.''
>
>Mike has used the term "true leaders of the South" a couple of times
>recently, and on several occasions in the past. I must confess that I
>have never understood what (and whom) he means by a "true leader".
>
>I know I have inquired in the past, and Mike may feel that he has amply
>answered me before, but the fact remains that I still don't know who the
>"true leaders" were or how, if I were to take a Reconstruction-era leader
>at random, I could tell if he were a "true" or a "false" leader.
>
>Would Mike care to try to enlighten this "bear of little brain"?
I would like to join Justin in asking this question of Mike. I would like to
know why Elliot was not a "true leader" of the South.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834691200@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>Hey Mark... can you post a couple of things Bowers made up? Not
>racist things, like Bowers' description of the people in South Carolina's
>state house that you posted before, but made up things. And
>include the attributions. Thanks.
I think Bowers' description of the state house is a great example of
fabrication.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834682814@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>
>>How is it that blacks were "manipulated" into voting certain people into
>>office,
>
>Intimidation, violence and lies. Efforts by organs like the Union League
>to enforce upon the freedmen that they must vote Republican, resulting
>in events like 1868's constitutional convention, which saw 100% of
>the black vote go Republican. From the US Congresses' ``Ku Klux
>Conspiracy, The Reports of the Joint Select Committe to inquire
>into the condition of affairs in the late insurrectionary States, Vol. I.,
>page 302'':
>
> The elections pretended to be held were mere farces; all the
> registrars, judges, ballot counters, police, militia and other
> machinery were in their [the Radicals'] own hands... where the negroes
> could not be inspired with sufficient hatred... to vote for these
> loyal leaguers and carpet-baggers they were forced to do so... and the
> recusant negro who dared to disobey was ostracised, denounced, and
> often beaten to compel obedience...
>
>>but South Carolinia whites were not "manipulated" into voting Wade
>>Hampton into office?
>
>South Carolina whites and blacks were ``manipulated'' into voting
>for Wade Hampton by their belief in his ability to bring sanity and
>dignity back to the prostrate state.
>
>>Why is it that only blacks can be manipulated, Mike?
>
>Bait.
What an amazing double-standard you hold. Whites and blacks, you say, believed
in Hampton's ability to "bring sanity and dignity back to their prostrate
state." But earlier blacks were manipulated by "intimidation, violence and
lies" into voting for carpetbaggers, scalawags and blacks. This not only
ignores all of the "intimidation, violence and lies" that people like M.C.
Butler committed in 1876, and grotesquely overstates the presence of any such
goings-on circa 1868, but also completely ignores the fact that blacks might
have had -valid reasons- for voting for the people for whom they did.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4psa7t$h...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
RStacy2229 <rstac...@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <4ppet9$9...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
>white >women.
>
>Not to put too fine a point on this, Mark, but I would suggest you refer
>to some of the crime statistics in chapter 10 of Dinesh D'Souza's "The End
>of Racism" in which he reports that black perpetrators are 200 times
>(that's TWO HUNDRED TIMES) more likely to rape a white victim than are
>white rapists to choose black victims.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but relyong on Dinesh D'Souza for anything
seems like a risky strategy indeed. Since most crimes committed on blacks are
by blacks, and most crimes committed on whites are by whites, the statistic
above, even if true, declines into irrelevancy. It does not take very much to
get a "200x more likely" statistic: what is hard is to make it mean something.
For instance, say that out of a sample of 2000 rapes, 1000 committed by blacks
and 1000 committed by whites, that 999 of the by-white rapes were white on
black, and 800 of the by-black rapes were black on white. This means that the
ratio of black on white rapes is 200 times greater than the number of white on
black rapes. But so what? The overwhelming majority in both cases remains
black on black and white on white. To speculate that "black men desire to rape
white women" from this would be absurd.
>I might further refer you to U.S. Army records relating to the Fifth Mass.
>Colored Cavalry in 1864-65, when Gen. Hallack accused black soldiers of a
>"number of cases of atrocious rape." Some members of Co. D of that
>regiment were actually tried for such crimes in January 1865, one of whom
>-- Cpl. George Butler -- was sentenced to 20 years in prison. (Source: "We
>All Got History" by Nick Salvatore, Times Books)
>
>Now, given that we had wartime official testimony of black troops
>committing rapes against white women and given that current law
>enforcement figures show that such rapes are disproportionate in a
>statistically significant way, I would assert that the question is not
>*whether* some black rapists show (or showed) a racial preference among
>their victims, but rather *why* they do (or did) so. That such a victim
>race-preference among black rapists should have mysteriously waned during
>the late 1860s and 1870s, I find an unwarrantable claim.
>
First let me point out that you do not show that the victims in this incident
were white. But even if they were, how you can assume that several rapes by
blacks in the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry somehow means anything
whatsoever is beyond me. That is like saying that since you read about an
Albanian selling drugs there must be an Albanian drug-dealing problem.
Frankly, I think your post is rather racist.
>Robert Stacy McCain
>(By the way, Mark brought this up, folks, not me)
Brooks Simpson
hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu (System Janitor) wrote:
>Brooks Simpson <brooks....@asu.edu> writes:
>>"Accepted scientific givens?" Please clarify.
>
>Before I posted, I looked in the library for turn of the Century
>Encyclopedias or pedestal dictionaries for a discussion on this, there
>were none older than the 1950s. I have a turn of the century pedestal
>dictionary in storage, it has giant sections on history and general
>knowledge, I believe similar ideas will be reflected there, and
>I believe such a generic source could be claimed to hold
>generic mainstream givens... we'll see. At any rate, you used
>``accepted scientific givens'' in your post, so I didn't think
>that I had to argue that (white) people generally believed that stuff then.
Okay. For scientific racism flourished at the time. I just wanted to
establish context--all too often we here see what happens when that does
not happen . . .
>>Here I think you would benefit from reading what I say in print.
>
>ADVICE AFTER APPOMATTOX & LET US HAVE PEACE right?
Actually, a good deal more than that. Perhaps we'll take this issue to
private mail--don't want to be accused of advertising. ;)
>>Moreover, I think that white supremacist beliefs did not justify
>>terrorist behavior.
>
>One doesn't have to justify whatever terrorist behavior took place to
>realize that the diverse people of South Carolina, both white and
>black, banded togather under Hampton's leadership in 1876, and that
>they would have let nothing short of thorough military occupation
>prevent them, at that point, from regaining control of the State.
I think that (at best) a slim majority of the people of South Carolina
supported Hampton, and that that support was disproportionately white.
Otherwise your statement describes things in a succinct manner.
>>But, Mike, South Carolina isn't the entire South.
>
>True. But South Carolina *is* the center of the universe!
Nah. Boston. Ask them.
>I have often wondered, because of what I know about South Carolina,
>and because I do at least know that Reconstruction went very differently
>in several other States, whether or not what the ``post-revisionists''
>would call the ``myth of Reconstruction'' isn't in some part some kind
>of general extrapolation of what happened in South Carolina into a
>somewhat skewed general view of Reconstruction as a whole. I don't
>know if that made sense, but I do wonder it sometimes... :-)
Well, Pike's book, issued as a anti-Republican campaign document, became
one of the favorite sources of the recently oft-quoted Dunning school.
But then SC has played a disporportionate role in histories of the coming
of the war, too. Perhaps historians like to research in Columbia and
Charleston.
>>>the newly freed slaves weren't ready to be thrust into control of
>>>the government in 1868
>>Oh, but some were--like Robert Smalls, Robert Elliot, even Martin Delany.
>
>Wasn't Smalls the only freedman from the above group? And unlike
>Delany, Smalls didn't join with the redeemers in 1876.
You are right on Delany; as your posts have persuaded me to bring some of
my SC books into the office soon, let me get back to you on black
leadership. However, black leaders often disagreed among themselves, and
some did, as Mike says, decide to go to the Democrats and cut what deals
they could.
Brooks Simpson
Brooks Simpson
rstac...@aol.com (RStacy2229) wrote:
>But before we go further, let us just seek the conclusion which Mr.
>Pitcavage is attempting to implant in the unsuspecting, and see how he
>goes about proving that conclusion.
>
>Mr. Pitcavage's conclusion, we might assume, is that the Dunning school's
>version of Reconstruction history is untrustworthy, because the
>Dunningites were racist. So if we break this down to a syllogism we find
>
>Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
>Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
>et ergo
>Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
Remember: when you can't counter an argument, distort it.
From what Mark has posted, he has clearly proven that the Dunning-era
historians who erected the prevailing orthodoxy of Reconstruction as
understood at the turn of the century to, say, 1930, embraced to varying
degrees notions of racism--notions well accepted by a good number of
white Americans at the time. In so doing, he has effectively countered
suggestions that these historians were not racist.
Let me also suggest that Mr. McCain and the people who have assailed
Foner have used the following argument:
Premise A: Foner is a Marxist
Premise B: Marxists can not write trustworthy history
Premise C: Foner's account of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
Sometimes it is just too easy . . .
Mark has also posted that there are matters of value included in these
books. And there are. But I would approach their accounts of black
behavior, race relations, the motivations of policy makers, and so on
with some suspicion, for they are often shaped by the racial biases of
that period--as, to a large extent, are today's accounts shaped by
prevailing assumptions about race today.
>Mr. Pitcavage having, to his own satisfaction at least, proven Premise A,
Let me ask everyone--do you see the racist assumptions in the material
Mark has quoted? Is Mr. McCain saying that those statements aren't
racist?
Now I think we are getting somewhere . . .
Brooks Simpson
RStacy2229
In article <4ppet9$9...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Even the best of the Dunning works, on a purely technical
>level, cannot compare with the quality of research that goes into an
average
>work of history today. This is irrefutable.
Precious little Federal aid to education back in the 1920s, don't you
know, and they were limited to extremely crude 286s and Apple IIe's.
And the quality of research that goes into the "average work of history
today" is mostly built on the work of old hacks like D.S. Freeman, et al.,
as well as upon the archival materials compiled by unemployed clerks doing
WPA work during the Depression. But thank goodness now we have folks from
Ohio State University, Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley and so forth to tell us
ignorant Southerners what our own history is.
Bruce Catton wrote his fine histories while otherwise employed as an
editor and journalist, but it now seems that the history-writing business
has been taken over by folks with advanced degrees and grants from
prestigious foundations. And they wonder why these things don't find a
mass market ...
Robert Stacy McCain
RStacy2229
In article <4ppet9$9...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Some Dunningites were far more pernicious, printing rumors
>as fact <SNIP> or the assertion by many that black men desired to rape
white >women.
Not to put too fine a point on this, Mark, but I would suggest you refer
to some of the crime statistics in chapter 10 of Dinesh D'Souza's "The End
of Racism" in which he reports that black perpetrators are 200 times
(that's TWO HUNDRED TIMES) more likely to rape a white victim than are
white rapists to choose black victims.
I might further refer you to U.S. Army records relating to the Fifth Mass.
Colored Cavalry in 1864-65, when Gen. Hallack accused black soldiers of a
"number of cases of atrocious rape." Some members of Co. D of that
regiment were actually tried for such crimes in January 1865, one of whom
-- Cpl. George Butler -- was sentenced to 20 years in prison. (Source: "We
All Got History" by Nick Salvatore, Times Books)
Now, given that we had wartime official testimony of black troops
committing rapes against white women and given that current law
enforcement figures show that such rapes are disproportionate in a
statistically significant way, I would assert that the question is not
*whether* some black rapists show (or showed) a racial preference among
their victims, but rather *why* they do (or did) so. That such a victim
race-preference among black rapists should have mysteriously waned during
the late 1860s and 1870s, I find an unwarrantable claim.
Robert Stacy McCain
System Janitor
jsan...@jove.acs.unt.edu (Justin M Sanders) writes:
>Mike has used the term "true leaders of the South" a couple of times
>recently, and on several occasions in the past. I must confess that I
>have never understood what (and whom) he means by a "true leader".
Me, the governor of Massachusetts in 1866, the redeemers of South
Carolina in 1876 and probably a few other people consider(ed) the
true leaders of the South to be... the redeemers of South Carolina
in 1876. It is a term that, to me, only makes sense in the
context of a South Carolina governed by unwelcome puppet leaders
whose days were numbered. An example of it's use might be:
``Honest John'', you might think that there's five more good years
of stealing left in South Carolina, but your days are numbered,
the true leaders of the South are packing your carpetbag right
now.
-Mike
System Janitor
>know why Elliot was not a "true leader" of the South.
You're almost on track, but you have your polarity reversed.
Disreputable Yankees were the exact opposite of true Southern leaders,
such as M.C. Butler, who distinguished himself as one of Hampton's
lieutenants during the war, during the struggle to regain
control of South Carolina during Reconstruction, and as a Senator
after the Redemption. Since you're so glad that humor is back, you'll
enjoy my response to Justin's initial query.
-Mike
System Janitor
>fabrication.
One day you don't like Bowers because he was a liar.
The next day you don't like Bowers because he was racist.
Then you go back to not liking him because he was a liar, but his
racism is some kind of confection.
Not only am I confused by your flip-flopping, but I don't remember
any fabrications in the state house description, though it was
full of distasteful remarks directed at the legislative members
present at the state house which were unrelated to their performance.
-Mike
steven f miller
RStacy2229 (rstac...@aol.com) wrote:
[snip re Pitcavage's series on the Dunning school]
: Mr. Pitcavage's conclusion, we might assume, is that the Dunning school's
: version of Reconstruction history is untrustworthy, because the
: Dunningites were racist. So if we break this down to a syllogism we find
: Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
: Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
: et ergo
: Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
I'm sure Mr. Pitcavage will speak to this himself, but my recollection is
that his point was to demonstrate only premise A, in response to people who
believed the Dunningites were *not* racists.
Speaking for myself, I do not believe that racists *cannot* write trustworthy
history. But to the extent that their historical explanations rest on false
assumptions about inherent "racial" characteristics, "racial" superiority and
inferiority, and suchlike notions, they *are* untrustworthy. Does this mean
we can dismiss out of hand everything such writers say? No. Does it mean
we should--and must--be suspicious of what they have to say about "racial"
matters. Absolutely. And since much of what the Dunningites had to say
about Reconstruction rested on assumptions about race, much of what they have
to say is therefore suspect. Now, within those limitations--which were also
limitations of virtually all of their peers in the profession--some of the
Dunningites were first-rate historians (Garner still holds up very well, for
example); others were second rate or worse.
: It might be that the alleged "racism" of the Dunningites somehow colored
: (no pun intended) perception of what went on during Reconstruction. Big
: deal.
Well, yes, it is a big deal, for those of us who are interested in
understanding Reconstruction without being misled by the patent biases and
distortions of people who wrote about it in the past. (Of course, our
successors reserve the right to criticize us for our patent biases and
distortions. More power to 'em.)
[snip]
: I mean, racists can't write trustworthy history, so you can throw out
: Herodotus and Plutarch, too, I guess.
Not on the grounds of racism as such, no. The Greeks and Romans certainly
believed that some peoples were superior to other peoples, but they tended
to justify their beliefs on the ground of culture, nationality, and religion,
not race. In fact, the idea of "race" as we know it didn't come into being
until the late eighteenth century. Its spread throughout western
thought in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was closely tied to
justifications of, first, slavery and then, imperialism and white supremacy.
Put another way, the Dunningites'
brand of racism was part of the "politically correct" thought
of their day and place.
Knowing this does not mean we should dismiss the Dunningites and their peers
out of hand. It does mean that we should bear it in mind when we read their
stuff.
: Mr. Pitcavage and the other Fonerites attack the Dunning school because
: the history they wrote is at odds with the modern worldview which the
: leftist mind requires in order to justify any number of socio-cultural
: attitudes. The dispute has nothing to do with history and everything to do
: with modern politics.
I'm not sure just what Mr. McCain means by the first sentence--too many
abstractions swimming around in there.
The second sentence implies that the rejection of the Dunningite view of
Reconstruction is something new, but it's not. It's older than Eric Foner
and I would guess older than Mr. MrCain. Fact is, the
"modern politics" that animated the first sustained criticism of the Dunning
are not the politics of the culture wars of the 90s, but the politics of World
War II--particularly the revulsion at the Nazi's use of racial ideology--and
the early Civil Rights movement.
As to Mr. McCain's last point, there's *always* a relationship between how
historians view the past and the politcs of their own time. It's telling
that he can't see any connection with respect to the Dunningites when it
seems so obvious to him with the "Fonerites."
Cordially,
Steven F. Miller
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834767779@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>>know why Elliot was not a "true leader" of the South.
>
>You're almost on track, but you have your polarity reversed.
>Disreputable Yankees were the exact opposite of true Southern leaders,
>such as M.C. Butler, who distinguished himself as one of Hampton's
>lieutenants during the war, during the struggle to regain
>control of South Carolina during Reconstruction, and as a Senator
>after the Redemption. Since you're so glad that humor is back, you'll
>enjoy my response to Justin's initial query.
>
Well, I guess we'll have to narrow you opinions down. If Elliott was not a
"true leader," despite having a faithful and loyal constituency which he served
well, because he originally came from the North, what about Robert Smalls? Why
was he not a true leader?
It seems to me that the "true leaders" of South Carolina would be about 60%
black and 40% white, since they would be roughly proportionate to the
population. So which blacks do you consider to be the true leaders of South
Carolina?
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834762242@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>jsan...@jove.acs.unt.edu (Justin M Sanders) writes:
>>Mike has used the term "true leaders of the South" a couple of times
>>recently, and on several occasions in the past. I must confess that I
>>have never understood what (and whom) he means by a "true leader".
>
>Me, the governor of Massachusetts in 1866, the redeemers of South
>Carolina in 1876 and probably a few other people consider(ed) the
>true leaders of the South to be... the redeemers of South Carolina
>in 1876. It is a term that, to me, only makes sense in the
>context of a South Carolina governed by unwelcome puppet leaders
>whose days were numbered. An example of it's use might be:
It is more than a little ironic that the people you consider to be the "true
leaders" of South Carolina were people who wanted to disfranchise and subjugate
the majority of the people of South Carolina.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <hubcap.834768317@hubcap>,
System Janitor <hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu> wrote:
>mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>>fabrication.
>
>One day you don't like Bowers because he was a liar.
>
>The next day you don't like Bowers because he was racist.
>
>Then you go back to not liking him because he was a liar, but his
>racism is some kind of confection.
I don't like Bowers because he is a racist and a liar. Does that satisfy you?
>
>Not only am I confused by your flip-flopping, but I don't remember
>any fabrications in the state house description, though it was
>full of distasteful remarks directed at the legislative members
>present at the state house which were unrelated to their performance.
Sigh.
Justin M Sanders
System Janitor (hub...@hubcap.clemson.edu) wrote:
> Me, the governor of Massachusetts in 1866, the redeemers of South
> Carolina in 1876 and probably a few other people consider(ed) the
> true leaders of the South to be... the redeemers of South Carolina
> in 1876. It is a term that, to me, only makes sense in the
> context of a South Carolina governed by unwelcome puppet leaders
> whose days were numbered.
So the only "true leaders of the South" were the South Carolina
redeemers. (Hmm, I think Mike's Carolina-centrism is showing! :)
But seriously, if the true leaders and the redeemers are identical, why
not just use the term "redeemers"? It is a well-understood and
reasonably precise term.
I suspect that Mike means to say something more than just "redeemer" when
he says "true leader." I suspect that the emphasis is on true-- the ones
who properly should lead, rather than those who are improperly leading.
Are these suppositions correct? Would Mike care to elaborate on the
meaning of "true leader" beyond "redeemer?"
Linda Teasley
Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
: I posted five parts of an on-going series demonstrating that the Dunning school
: was racist.
That is an extremely optimistic summary of what you have done.
[snips] Stacy McCain summarizes Mark's position:
: Premise A: The Dunningites were racists.
: I have been doing this in response to a post from Linda Teasley which made the
: remarkable statement that they were not.
It is in no way a "remarkable" statement. The Dunningites were not
racists.
{Some of Mark's fantasy deleted]
: One must take into account all of the following issues:
: 1. They are old, old books, generally published in the first decade of the
: twentieth century. Eighty-plus years of research has added immeasurably to our
: knowledge of the Reconstruction era. This is research that the Dunningites
: simply did not have at their disposal.
"Old, old, old" would then apply to all primary source material on the
Civil
War. Eighty-plus years of research has made some minor improvements in
some kinds of historical research, but it in no way invalidates all
Dunning historians.
: 2. Related to #1, above, the Dunningites, as was typical for historians of the
: time, used very crude research techniques. Generally speaking, they used only
: secondary sources, printed primary sources, newspapers, and sometimes selected
: public archives. And hearsay, in some cases. Historians have subsequently
: developed all sorts of additional sources of information, as well as new
: research methods. Even the best of the Dunning works, on a purely technical
: level, cannot compare with the quality of research that goes into an average
: work of history today. This is irrefutable.
It is not irrefutable. Frank Owsley, for example, knew perfectly well
how to do primary research and depended upon it. Your conclusions are so
jejeune and banal that I wonder why I'm bothering to debate these weak
points.
: 3. The Dunningites were racists. This affected their work in various ways.
: Most notably was the general tendency to disregard all source information that
: came from blacks.
Wrong again. John Wallace was well known to them.
Some Dunningites were far more pernicious, printing rumors
: as fact, such as Fleming's contention that black women were such incompetent
: mothers that they did not know how to take care of their own children, or the
: assertion by many that black men desired to rape white women.
More silly nightmares.
: 4. Some Dunningites purposely miswrote history. This was true more often of
: the populizers than the academics. For instance, Bowers often simply made up
: things, then attributed them to a source that said no such thing.
Another assertion without the faintest prospect of being proved. How
do you know what they "purposely" did? Are you some kind of mind reader?
You have a weak case and also insupportable assertions.
Linda "I'm back!" Teasley
--
Five pelican bedecked battle flags began to flap. . . three thousand
men stepped off on the left foot. With strict cadence, ninety paces per
minute, a forest of burnished steel paraded up the hill.
Winchester --- 25 May 1862
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4pvp3k$n...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrote:
> It is in no way a "remarkable" statement. The Dunningites were not
>racists.
Linda, you apparently have absolutely no idea what a racist even is. For you
to make a blanket statement like that after being confronted with -blantantly-
racist statements, including talk of superior and inferior races, is simply
ridiculous.
>
> It is not irrefutable. Frank Owsley, for example, knew perfectly well
>how to do primary research and depended upon it. Your conclusions are so
>jejeune and banal that I wonder why I'm bothering to debate these weak
>points.
Frank Owsley was eleven years old when James Garner published _Reconstruction
in Mississippi_. Moreover, the level of research in his books has been far
surpassed.
When I say that generally speaking historians do -much better- research than
they did eighty years ago, I am telling you a -fact-. It is irrefutable.
Southern Witch
In article <4pshc8$f...@news.asu.edu>, Brooks Simpson
<brooks....@asu.edu> wrote:
> rstac...@aol.com (RStacy2229) wrote:
> >Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
> >Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
> >et ergo
> >Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
And then Brooks wrote:
> Premise A: Foner is a Marxist
> Premise B: Marxists can not write trustworthy history
> Premise C: Foner's account of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
All these lists of premises remind me way too much of proving theorems and
corollaries in high school math (which I hated and was no good at). Let's
cut to the chase.
> Mark has also posted that there are matters of value included in these
> books. And there are. But I would approach their accounts of black
> behavior, race relations, the motivations of policy makers, and so on
> with some suspicion, for they are often shaped by the racial biases of
> that period--as, to a large extent, are today's accounts shaped by
> prevailing assumptions about race today.
Brooks' statement is so obviously true as to not even be worth arguing
over. How can people's assumptions *not* be colored by the prevailing
attitudes of the time and place in which they live?
I would submit to Robert that the way he and I look at things is colored
*very much* by the particular region of the country in which we were born
and raised. We are Southerners, and that fact affects our take on
everything. Folks of a more northerly persuasion look at the battle flag
and see a symbol of racial hatred and slavery...Robert and I look at it
and see the standard our ancestors followed into battle, and we feel pride
rather than revulsion and distaste. And that feeling is most assuredly a
function of where we grew up and what we have been surrounded by and
taught all our lives. (Which is not to say that our feelings of pride in
our ancestors and in our heritage are not valid and legitimate...they are,
and I will not concede that point for the sake of *any* argument.)
But to assume that the Dunningites were immune to the prevailing attitudes
of their time and place makes no sense whatsoever, given everything we
know about the human mind and how it works. Racism was more virulent and
aggressive at the time the Dunningites were writing than it is today (and
it's pretty darn virulent and aggressive now, as any number of burned-out
black churchgoers across the South will tell you). How could *any*
historian writing then *not* have been affected by it? If they weren't
implicitly condoning the prevailing climate of racism, they would have
been reacting against it...but either way, their conclusions would have
been influenced by it.
Everything has to be read with a filter. Times change, attitudes
change...and the spin put on documentable historical occurrences changes
because history is written and interpreted by human beings who are not
immune to the political, social, cultural, and economic currents swirling
around them. Even now, we're looking at the Dunningite writings with our
own particular set of biases.
I've never read Dunning (and as sick as I am of seeing his name in
threads, I may never!), but I don't have to have read him or any of his
followers to know that Mark and Brooks are most likely right in their line
of reasoning on this issue. No one can separate himself from his era and
write as if it didn't exist for him.
Now, I'd better go check my e-mail...I'll probably be hearing from Linda
and Dennis over this one!
--
Kathie Fraser http://www.erols.com/kfraser
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The South is a land that has known sorrows...a land of legend,
a land of song, a land of hallowed and heroic memories."
--Edward Ward Carmack
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 16, 1996 15:31:46 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>When I say that generally speaking historians do -much better- research
than
>they did eighty years ago, I am telling you a -fact-. It is irrefutable.
thing to do with the authors' conclusions? For instance, I have
reached what most would consider to be some very valid conclusions
about *you*, personally, and I didn't have to talk to your mother or
your sixth-grade teacher to know that they are valid.
T. Reb
Linda Teasley
Southern Witch (kfr...@erols.com) wrote:
: In article <4pshc8$f...@news.asu.edu>, Brooks Simpson
: <brooks....@asu.edu> wrote:
: > rstac...@aol.com (RStacy2229) wrote:
: > >Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
: > >Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
: > >et ergo
: > >Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
: And then Brooks wrote:
: > Premise A: Foner is a Marxist
: > Premise B: Marxists can not write trustworthy history
: > Premise C: Foner's account of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
These premises and conclusions would seem to indicate that the
Dunningites shouldn't be trusted on matters of race, and that Foner
cannot be trusted on matters of value judgments about class conflicts.
Mark and Brooks maintain, however, that Foner is reliable and that the
Dunningites are not. Even if I accepted their first premise, which I do
not, the judgment that make at the end is not reasonable.
: I've never read Dunning (and as sick as I am of seeing his name in
: threads, I may never!), but I don't have to have read him or any of his
: followers to know that Mark and Brooks are most likely right in their line
: of reasoning on this issue. No one can separate himself from his era and
: write as if it didn't exist for him.
Why do you think this is a reasonable position? Let me quote from an
article about Foner and then ask you to explain to me why his account of
Southern Reconstruction should be considered objective and reliable.
Foner was a life-long pro-Soviet Marxist who finally broke with the
Soviet Union only when there was no more Soviet Union. He never even
criticized Stalin until long after scholars like Eugene Genovese rejected
the crimes of the old Leftists and went public about it. Foner was silent.
His hands-on infatuation with the Soviet Union extended to 1990, when
that hideous system was in its final stages of collapse. He was a
Fulbright Lecturer in American History at Moscow State University, and ws
altogether horrified at what he found. Not horrified, unfortunately, by
the malfunctioning of a miserably inefficient economic system, at the
heavy tips patients had to pay medical staff at hospitals for surgery or
to get their bed linen changed, or even at the highly stratified state
structure and privileges of the Soviet ruling class. No, what horrified
him was that his students and other Soviet intellctuals were so critical
of the Soviet system, and that when he told them what a rotten place the
United States was, they wouldn't believe him. Foner was quite
astonished, for instance, that almost every one of his students, who had
enjoyed the exhilirating benefits of Soviet life, supported Estonia's
right to leave the Soviet Union! Nor did his students express regret at
the recent Soviet loss of Eastern Europe or the decline of the Soviet
Union as a world power. He found himself pulling for Gorbachev--NOT
because of the incidental liberations of glasnost, but rather because he
was trying to keep the Soviet Union together, a fact that led Foner,
eager for this to be accomplished, to compare the Soviet transitional
leader to Abraham Lincoln.
He was acutely distressed at his students' "love affair with America,"
as he told Harper's magazine, and said that he felt puzzled by a new
Russian view that the U.S. Constitution embodied both "universal human
ideals" and that the words "Progress" and "class" were out of fashion in
Russian intellectual circles. To people who had survived Stalin, Lenin,
and the Gulag, he said "Lenin is still widely revered as a kind of George
Washington figure."
And this is the guy that you prefer to Dunning?
: Now, I'd better go check my e-mail...I'll probably be hearing from Linda
: and Dennis over this one!
I have a lot of respect for your views, but I disagree with you on this
one.
Linda T.
Linda Teasley
[snips of tiresome discussion]
: When I say that generally speaking historians do -much better- research than
: they did eighty years ago, I am telling you a -fact-. It is irrefutable.
Much as I squabble with other members of this newsgroup, you are the
only person whose views I consider totally unreliable.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q2ks7$8...@news2.h1.usa.pipeline.com>,
Tennessee Reb <tennes...@usa.pipeline.com> wrote:
>On Jun 16, 1996 15:31:46 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
>Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
>(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>
>
>than
>>they did eighty years ago, I am telling you a -fact-. It is irrefutable.
>
>thing to do with the authors' conclusions? For instance, I have
>reached what most would consider to be some very valid conclusions
>about *you*, personally, and I didn't have to talk to your mother or
>your sixth-grade teacher to know that they are valid.
If you have one document that says "Benjamin Butler was a stud," you may then
make conclusions from that document which seem very valid to you. But someone
else may later discover a -photograph- of Benjamin Butler, as well as several
letters from John C. Fremont to Salmon Chase discussing Butler's body odor,
items you didn't come across because you never went to Fred's Archive. This
would render your conclusions somewhat suspect, in the light of the better
research.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q3e14$e...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrote:
<long ad hominem attack on Eric Foner deleted>
Linda Teasley seems to hate Eric Foner with a vicious passion, but his opinions
on the Soviet Union, and whether or not he should have publicly criticized the
men that Linda Teasley thinks he should have publicly criticized, are hardly
relevant to his views on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
I'll simply point out that Eric Foner is a highly respected historian among
liberal and conservative historians alike.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q3e6j$e...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrote:
>Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
>: In article <4pvp3k$n...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrot
e:
>
> [snips of tiresome discussion]
>: they did eighty years ago, I am telling you a -fact-. It is irrefutable.
>
> Much as I squabble with other members of this newsgroup, you are the
>only person whose views I consider totally unreliable.
Coming from someone who still has egg on her face from her assertions about the
secret entity called the Freedmen's Bureau which lasted for decades and
confiscated millions of acres of land, this sort of statement is ludicrous.
Linda Teasley
Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
[insults deleted]
: Coming from someone who still has egg on her face from her assertions about the
: secret entity called the Freedmen's Bureau which lasted for decades and
: confiscated millions of acres of land, this sort of statement is ludicrous.
The Freedmen's Bureau was a secret. Neither was its land confiscation.
Linda "he thinks Fessenden was a conservative" Teasley
System Janitor
>leaders" of South Carolina were people who wanted to disfranchise and subjugate
>the majority of the people of South Carolina.
More bait.
I don't consider them the true leaders of the South, they *were* the
true leaders of the South. They lead the South before the war, then lost
and regained control of their government, as was inevitable under the
circumstances.
The ``True Leaders of the South'', the redeemer government of 1876,
neither ran nor governed on the above platform, though they
openly espoused a ``white man's'' government and home rule as a cure
for the evils of Reconstruction. They were eventually replaced by
the ``agrarians'', who, influenced by Martin Gary's more radical
conservatism, did disenfranchise the blacks after solidifying public
sentiment over fears of a return to black supremacy.
Martin Gary's faction wasn't preeminent in 1875, but fifteen years
later they were cheered as they laughed Wade Hampton and his
moderate ideals off the political stage. And at that time they were
the true, influential, non-puppet, uncontested leaders of South Carolina.
-Mike
System Janitor
>they did eighty years ago, I am telling you a -fact-. It is irrefutable.
It is irrefutable that modern historians have added an entire new
facet to the study of history. It goes beyond universal access to
massive archives, and computerized information. They've all taken
series of PhD level ``How to lie with statistics'' courses, and
they've gone through all the census data, extracted values from
columns one and four, screened them for sociological quirks,
and divided the whole mess by the universal pseudo-constant of
post revisionism (as if the elements of history were easily assigned to
variables in a linear equation) and stumbled upon the truth. It is
irrefutable.
-Mike :-)
Stephen Schmidt
kfr...@erols.com (Southern Witch) writes:
>I would submit to Robert that the way he and I look at things is colored
>*very much* by the particular region of the country in which we were born
>and raised. We are Southerners, and that fact affects our take on
>everything. Folks of a more northerly persuasion look at the battle flag
>and see a symbol of racial hatred and slavery...Robert and I look at it
>and see the standard our ancestors followed into battle, and we feel pride
>rather than revulsion and distaste. And that feeling is most assuredly a
>function of where we grew up and what we have been surrounded by and
>taught all our lives. (Which is not to say that our feelings of pride in
>our ancestors and in our heritage are not valid and legitimate...they are,
>and I will not concede that point for the sake of *any* argument.)
I should not, perhaps, venture to criticize a post in which I
agree with so much, but I wish to raise two points.
1) When Kathie says "We are Southerners," unquestionably what she
actually means is "We are -white- Southerners" since it seems
entirely apparent that her following phrase, "the standard our
ancestors followed into battle" would not apply to the large
majority of black Southerners. Those who wonder why the pro-South
contingent is occasionally viewed as racist might reflect on the
language used, which tends by such phrases as this one to ignore
the fact that about a third of Southerners are not white and do
not share the allegedly "Southern" view of history. I do not
mean to imply any racism on Kathie's part - I am sure she is
free of it - but I would strongly encourage her to use terms
and language which do not give the impression of it.
2) I saw a PBS program a week or so ago about a young Pole who
is studying the history of his town in the Holocaust. Like the
Southern Civil War historians, his view of events is colored
by who he is and the society from which he came. As long as he
retains his objectively he can arrive at historical truth. But
several of the Poles shown in the film failed to do so; they
placed their "pride in their ancestors and their heritage" so
far above historical truth that they were happily prepared
to deny that Poland had had anything to do with the Holocaust
or that Jews had ever lived in Poland.
I will happily agree that Kathie's views are colored by her
upbringing, and will agree that mine probably are as well,
although I suspect that since I grew up in an area where
Civil War history is much less of an issue, mine may be
colored somewhat less (if comparatives can be made at all.)
However, the fact that there are differences in perception
and in background does not mean that there are two different
truths out there. Ultimately, either the Confederacy was
a slave system fighting to preserve slavery, or it was not.
If it was, then even if it was much more than that (and I
will agree that it was) then it cannot but be tainted by
the close association between slavery and secession (and
please note that I say association rather than causation).
If one group chooses, for reasons of background, to emphasize
one aspect of the Confederacy rather than another, that's fine.
It is the denial of other aspects of it that bothers me, that
are false, and that differences in perception cannot excuse.
Steve
--
Stephen Schmidt Department of Economics
210A Social Sciences Union College
(518) 388-6078 Schenectady NY 12308
System Janitor
>not just use the term "redeemers"? It is a well-understood and
>reasonably precise term.
I stumbled over ``true leaders of the South'' in then (1866) Massachusetts
governor (?)'s farewell speech and liked it. Redeemers is a more accepted,
term, although both ``redeemer'' and ``true leader'' make an editorial
statement that I like :-). Mark could probably make a long winded argument
that we should refer to them as the ``nasty racist goat fondlers'', but I
probably won't adopt that term.
>I suspect that Mike means to say something more than just "redeemer" when
>he says "true leader." I suspect that the emphasis is on true-- the ones
>who properly should lead, rather than those who are improperly leading.
>Are these suppositions correct?
Yes.
>Would Mike care to elaborate on the meaning of "true leader"
>beyond "redeemer?"
Actually, I can't think of much else I do around here. Home rule,
government that can stand without military occupation, ZERO more
good years of stealing, open bribery and fraud by state Senators...
-Mike
Dennis Maggard
kfr...@erols.com (Southern Witch) wrote:
[Re: Dunning, et. al.]
>Everything has to be read with a filter. Times change, attitudes
>change...and the spin put on documentable historical occurrences changes
>because history is written and interpreted by human beings who are not
>immune to the political, social, cultural, and economic currents swirling
>around them. Even now, we're looking at the Dunningite writings with our
>own particular set of biases.
>I've never read Dunning (and as sick as I am of seeing his name in
>threads, I may never!), but I don't have to have read him or any of his
>followers to know that Mark and Brooks are most likely right in their line
>of reasoning on this issue. No one can separate himself from his era and
>write as if it didn't exist for him.
>Now, I'd better go check my e-mail...I'll probably be hearing from Linda
>and Dennis over this one!
I've no doubt Dunning et.al. were racists and that affected the way they
viewed Reconstruction. Similarly with the political and social biases of
historians living today. And similarly with the biases of historians
who'll be writing history fifty years from now. Which is exactly why
historical "truth" is such a slippery commodity and any proclaimation of
the discovery of the same should be taken with a large grain of salt.
Dennis
DAKearns
In another thread, Mike Marshall wrote:
>On page 571, discussing the events at Hamburg, Foner gives conflicting
>versions of M.C.Butler's participation in the killing of 5 captive
blacks.
>Foner claims, with no attributions, that Butler claimed to have
>left the scene when the crowd began ``committing depredations''.
>While it is doubtful that I have typed in everything M.C.Butler ever
>said on the subject, I have posted posted a description of the event
>made by Butler which in no way matches Foner's claims.
Actually, Foner gives a balanced account. He tells what some witnesses
claim, and what Butler himself claimed. Your characterization seems to
imply that Foner contradicted himself. He did not. If anything, he gives
Butler the benefit of the doubt.
There is a footnote for the paragraph in question. It would seem from the
way the paragraph is structured that the quote comes from one of the
Congressional hearings.
>On the next page Foner says:
>
> ...Hampton had seen his fortune collapse with emancipation and, saddled
> with enormous debts, had played little role in public affairs since
> 1865. But his correspondence and few public statements revealed a man
> unable to formulate a coherent reponse to the crises of
> Reconstruction.
>
>As if emancipation, and not Hampton's investment of everything he
>had into the failed Confederacy, caused Hampton's fortune to collapse.
Hampton's fortune was in slaves...emancipation caused that fortune to
evaporate. That's not such a mental challenge.
To continue the quote that you began, Foner says:
"Along with bitter denunciations of the Freedman's Bureau, black soldiers,
and even the Emancipation Proclamation, Hampton's attitudes towards blacks
vacillated between early support of "qualified" impartial suffrage,
predictions of the freedmen's imminent "extermination," and advocacy, as
late as 1869, of their removal from the country."
There is a great deal of difference between qualified suffrage and
expulsion. It certainly isn't a coherent, or consistent stance on
reconstruction.
Further, Foner's use of quotations on certain words serves to show that
they were Hampton's own words. According to the footnotes those
quotations can probably be found in the Hampton papers, _The Family
Letters of the Three Hamptons_, or "Post-Bellum Days: Selections from the
Correspondence of the Late Senator James R. Doolittle" in the _Magazine of
History_.
I've just started reading Foner, so I can't give a full opinion of his
work, but a cursory look at the work in view of the objections above shows
those objections to be completely unfounded.
Regards,
David Kearns
Southern Witch
In article <1996Jun17.1...@unvax.union.edu>,
schm...@unvax.union.edu (Stephen Schmidt) wrote:
> I should not, perhaps, venture to criticize a post in which I
> agree with so much, but I wish to raise two points.
>
> 1) When Kathie says "We are Southerners," unquestionably what she
> actually means is "We are -white- Southerners" since it seems
> entirely apparent that her following phrase, "the standard our
> ancestors followed into battle" would not apply to the large
> majority of black Southerners. Those who wonder why the pro-South
> contingent is occasionally viewed as racist might reflect on the
> language used, which tends by such phrases as this one to ignore
> the fact that about a third of Southerners are not white and do
> not share the allegedly "Southern" view of history. I do not
> mean to imply any racism on Kathie's part - I am sure she is
> free of it - but I would strongly encourage her to use terms
> and language which do not give the impression of it.
Point well taken, Steve. I will try to remember that in the future.
However, I can't presume to speak as anything other than the white
Southerner that I am. My comments, clearly, were intended to explain the
white Southern attitude about a certain school of historical thought. They
were never meant to address the black Southern take on the issue. Whatever
I might have to say about history as viewed from the perspective of a
black Southerner would be suspect and just as open to criticism as
anything I might have said in my post...maybe more so.
> 2) ~~~snips~~~
> However, the fact that there are differences in perception
> and in background does not mean that there are two different
> truths out there. Ultimately, either the Confederacy was
> a slave system fighting to preserve slavery, or it was not.
I won't contest that point, either. Although there is plenty of evidence
that the Confederacy was fighting for things *other* than slavery as well,
slavery was certainly the main issue. The context in which the South
fought for slavery is open to much debate and many interpretations, but
the fact is indisputable.
> If it was, then even if [the Confederacy] was much more than that (and I
> will agree that it was)...
Thank you for acknowledging that. :-)
>...then it cannot but be tainted by
> the close association between slavery and secession (and
> please note that I say association rather than causation).
> If one group chooses, for reasons of background, to emphasize
> one aspect of the Confederacy rather than another, that's fine.
> It is the denial of other aspects of it that bothers me,
I don't believe I've denied any aspects of the Confederacy.
>...that are false, and that differences in perception cannot excuse.
An excuse is a line offered up to *justify* a specific piece of
behavior...a reason is an explanation of *why* that behavior occurred.
There's a fine difference, but it's there. I was not offering up
excuses...I was offering an explanation.
Dennis Maggard
l...@panix.com (Linda Teasley) wrote:
>Southern Witch (kfr...@erols.com) wrote:
[Much on Foner snipped]
> And this is the guy that you prefer to Dunning?
I don't believe Kathie said that at all.
>: Now, I'd better go check my e-mail...I'll probably be hearing from Linda
>: and Dennis over this one!
> I have a lot of respect for your views, but I disagree with you on this
>one.
> Linda T.
>--
> Five pelican bedecked battle flags began to flap. . . three thousand
>men stepped off on the left foot. With strict cadence, ninety paces per
>minute, a forest of burnished steel paraded up the hill.
> Winchester --- 25 May 1862
Speaking for myself and the comments I made earlier today in response to
Kathie's post, I certainly did not mean to imply that I rejected Dunning
and accepted Foner. And I don't believe Kathie does either, although she
is certainly more than capable of speaking for herself. My personal belief
is that the racism of Dunning et.al. should not be denied or ignored and
calls into question the validity of their work every bit as much as Foner's
avowed Marxism calls into question the validity of his work. Anyone who
would deny the possible effect of either bias is naive at best. And I
don't trust anyone who tells me they are unbiased or that unbiased
historical truth was discovered just a few years ago. All historians
should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt, especially when they
obviously have political and social axes to grind.
Dennis
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 17, 1996 12:58:39 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
><long ad hominem attack on Eric Foner deleted>
>
>Linda Teasley seems to hate Eric Foner with a vicious passion, but his
opinions
>on the Soviet Union, and whether or not he should have publicly criticized
hardly
>relevant to his views on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
>I'll simply point out that Eric Foner is a highly respected historian
among
>liberal and conservative historians alike.
Tennessee "Linda Teasley is my Hero" Reb
RStacy2229
In article <4psevu$m...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Frankly, I think your post is rather racist.
Again confirming the entire drift of Pitcavagism: Southerners are racist,
therefore any history favorable to the South is racist. Anything the
*North* calls racist *is* racist, and by such ad-hominem assaults, the
Pitcavagist means to discredit entirely an opposing argument, thus further
implying that to disagree with the Pitcavagist is to be a de facto
racist.
As I said before, Mark: YOU brought up the subject of blacks raping white
women, not me. I drew upon statistics quoted by D'Souza in order to
suggest that such incidents were (and are) more than a Dunningite fantasy,
not to demean black people in any way.
Robert Stacy McCain
Maury
REB 4 LIFE
In article <1996Jun17.1...@unvax.union.edu>,
schm...@unvax.union.edu (Stephen Schmidt) writes:
>1) When Kathie says "We are Southerners," unquestionably what she
>actually means is "We are -white- Southerners" since it seems
>entirely apparent that her following phrase, "the standard our
>ancestors followed into battle" would not apply to the large
>majority of black Southerners. Those who wonder why the pro-South
>contingent is occasionally viewed as racist might reflect on the
>language used, which tends by such phrases as this one to ignore
>the fact that about a third of Southerners are not white and do
>not share the allegedly "Southern" view of history.
What makes you so sure of yourself, all the way up there in
Schenectady? Native-born Southerners *all* share the same
heritage, Sir. It largely due the likes of yourself, who continue to
judge us from afar, that the stereotype of Southern Heritage=
White Heritage persists.
<snips>
>I will happily agree that Kathie's views are colored by her
>upbringing, and will agree that mine probably are as well,
>although I suspect that since I grew up in an area where
>Civil War history is much less of an issue, mine may be
>colored somewhat less (if comparatives can be made at all.)
>However, the fact that there are differences in perception
>and in background does not mean that there are two different
>truths out there. Ultimately, either the Confederacy was
>a slave system fighting to preserve slavery, or it was not.
>If it was, then even if it was much more than that (and I
>will agree that it was) then it cannot but be tainted by
>the close association between slavery and secession (and
>please note that I say association rather than causation).
>If one group chooses, for reasons of background, to emphasize
>one aspect of the Confederacy rather than another, that's fine.
>It is the denial of other aspects of it that bothers me, that
>are false, and that differences in perception cannot excuse.
According to "Webster's New Ideal Dictionary" (the only one
available here at the office): PARTISAN-- (n) 1. a person who
takes the part of another; *esp*: a devoted adherent to the
cause of another."
I am a Southern/Confederate partisan, and I don't believe Kathie
would mind being categorized as such, herself. That doesn't make
me ignorant of the less than ideal aspects of The Cause. But I
sure don't need to bring 'em up on my own--you guys do that
often enough.
R4L
(Posted 2:00 PM 17 June--we'll see how long it takes to
get around. Just set a new record--3 days to appear on
NG.)
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q5g2i$n...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
Don't set up a straw man. Nowhere did I say "Southerners are racist," much
less "any history favorable to the South is racist." Since I am a Southerner,
I would hardly make a statement like that.
I did bring up the myth of blacks desiring white women, and you quoted
"statistics" that had no actual meaning without the proper context, cited by
Dinesh D'Souza, himself a virulent racist whose most recent book was criticized
even by many of his conservative friends. When you have to resort to quoting
from D'Souza on matters of race, you know you are pretty desperate indeed.
Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men have a
rapacious sexual desire for white women?
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q677j$n...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
REB 4 LIFE <reb4...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>According to "Webster's New Ideal Dictionary" (the only one
>available here at the office): PARTISAN-- (n) 1. a person who
>takes the part of another; *esp*: a devoted adherent to the
>cause of another."
>
>I am a Southern/Confederate partisan, and I don't believe Kathie
>would mind being categorized as such, herself. That doesn't make
>me ignorant of the less than ideal aspects of The Cause. But I
>sure don't need to bring 'em up on my own--you guys do that
>often enough.
I will be interested in seeing Kathie's reply. I think that like many
Southerners she is fascinated by Southern history and the actions of her
ancestors, particularly the bold and exciting actions. But unlike you, her
posts do not seem to indicate belief in "The Cause."
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q4eij$k...@news2.h1.usa.pipeline.com>,
Tennessee Reb <tennes...@usa.pipeline.com> wrote:
>On Jun 17, 1996 12:58:39 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
>Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
>(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>
>><long ad hominem attack on Eric Foner deleted>
>>
>>Linda Teasley seems to hate Eric Foner with a vicious passion, but his
>opinions
>>on the Soviet Union, and whether or not he should have publicly criticized
>the
>>men that Linda Teasley thinks he should have publicly criticized, are
>hardly
>>relevant to his views on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
>
>The hell they aren't!
That is for you to demonstrate, not to assert.
>
>>I'll simply point out that Eric Foner is a highly respected historian
>among
>>liberal and conservative historians alike.
>
>and his biases are obvious and his conclusions are bogus.
That is for you to demonstrate, not to assert.
Linda Teasley
Dennis Maggard (dmag...@access.digex.net) wrote:
: l...@panix.com (Linda Teasley) wrote:
: >Southern Witch (kfr...@erols.com) wrote:
: > And this is the guy that you prefer to Dunning?
: I don't believe Kathie said that at all.
You're right, Dennis. She didn't. I do apologize for not making clear
that Kathie did not commit herself on a value judgment between these two
historians. It was careless of me.
[snips]
: My personal belief
: is that the racism of Dunning et.al. should not be denied or ignored and
: calls into question the validity of their work every bit as much as Foner's
: avowed Marxism calls into question the validity of his work. Anyone who
: would deny the possible effect of either bias is naive at best.
I mostly agree with you, but I would express this is a different way.
I don't think that Dunning's examples of racial blindness provide
sufficient reason to say that he is a racist, unless you want to consider
Horace Greeley racist, or Abraham Lincoln, or William Lloyd Garrison, or
Thaddeus Stevens. They all thought that white people were intellectually
and culturally superior to black people. So the term "racist" doesn't
have much meaning in the nineteenth century unless you restrict its use
to those who are willing to persecute others on the basis of their race.
Certainly, I would discount Fleming's views or judgments about race --
not his facts about racial matters, but his judgments. Perhaps. And I
think that Foner's judgments about historical matters is just as bad
because he is clearly biased. Again, I would stress that in matters of
historical fact, he may be entirely accurate. But a lot of his judgments
would not be acceptable to me at all.
A very recent example of Foner's judgment is provided in yesterday's
*Chronicle of Higher Education*. There is an article about the
Rosenberg spy case, in which an historian who presented the view in his
book about this case (that the Rosenbergs were guilty) has been
blacklisted and hounded by the Leftist supporters of the Rosenbergs.
Foner is quoted as saying "...many people in the academic world who are
on the right like to think of themselves as a beleaguered, oppressed
group. They take political disagreement with their work as persecution."
Now, I don't know anything about this case, but I know something about
Foner from this remark. I know that I would be unwilling to submit
anything to his judgment that involved left or right political matters.
The left has long had a monopoly on Victimhood; and Foner is biased
towards the left.
And I
: don't trust anyone who tells me they are unbiased or that unbiased
: historical truth was discovered just a few years ago. All historians
: should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt, especially when they
: obviously have political and social axes to grind.
Agreed.
Linda Teasley
: <long ad hominem attack on Eric Foner deleted>
: Linda Teasley seems to hate Eric Foner with a vicious passion, but his opinions
: on the Soviet Union, and whether or not he should have publicly criticized the
: men that Linda Teasley thinks he should have publicly criticized, are hardly
: relevant to his views on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
"Vicious passion?" You're really groping here. I question his
historical judgment because of his bias. And yes, Virginia, his views on
historical matters is indeed relevant to his views on the American Civil
War and Reconstruction.
: I'll simply point out that Eric Foner is a highly respected historian among
: liberal and conservative historians alike.
I'll be glad to provide a list of historians who think Foner is warped.
Linda "no, I changed my mind; this is the Internet" Teasley
System Janitor
Good one, Maury!...
Oh well, back to the *more* Foner thread...
Me:
>On page 571, discussing the events at Hamburg, Foner gives conflicting
>versions of M.C.Butler's participation in the killing of 5 captive
>blacks. Foner claims, with no attributions...
*Dakerns:
* Actually, Foner gives a balanced account. He tells what some witnesses
* claim, and what Butler himself claimed. Your characterization seems to
* imply that Foner contradicted himself. He did not. If anything, he gives
* Butler the benefit of the doubt.
Foner presented two conflicting accounts, both negative. Since Foner is an
expert professional historian, I must assume that his exclusion of
accounts that don't reflect poorly on Butler have something to do
with Foner's explicit desire to cast only negative aspersions.
* There is a footnote for the paragraph in question. It would seem from the
* way the paragraph is structured that the quote comes from one of the
* Congressional hearings.
Check again. The text indicates unambiguously that the Congressional
hearings referenced in the footnote are citations for Butler's assertion
that ``Blacks had little regard for human life'', and nothing to
do with Butler's alleged statements about Hamburg.
* Hampton's fortune was in slaves...emancipation caused that fortune to
* evaporate. That's not such a mental challenge.
One merely needs to fire up a couple of unused neurons to realize
that, while the entire South suffered after the war, not every planter
in the South lost everything. Hampton invested his entire fortune
in the Confederacy, and into the legion he raised and lead. The
Yankee's destruction of Millwood was itself no small loss. Foner's
insinuation that Hampton amounted to nothing more than his slaves is
ridiculous.
* "Along with bitter denunciations of the Freedman's Bureau, black soldiers,
* and even the Emancipation Proclamation, Hampton's attitudes towards blacks
* vacillated between early support of "qualified" impartial suffrage,
* predictions of the freedmen's imminent "extermination," and advocacy, as
* late as 1869, of their removal from the country."
Hampton promoted qualified franchisement.
The belief that blacks would simply ``die out'' was widespread in
the South at that time, but no historians who focus on Hampton
indicate that this notion has any particular association with
Hampton, Foner is probably just continuing his habit of casting
negative aspersions.
Anyone who believes, as Foner indicates, that Hampton was making
serious efforts to remove blacks from the country in 1869 must be smoking
rope.
* Further, Foner's use of quotations on certain words serves to show that
* they were Hampton's own words.
I cannot resist the urge to say... Well Duhh...
* can probably be found in the Hampton papers, _The Family
* Letters of the Three Hamptons_, or "Post-Bellum Days: Selections from the
* Correspondence of the Late Senator James R. Doolittle" in the _Magazine of
* History_.
* I've just started reading Foner, so I can't give a full opinion of his
* work, but a cursory look at the work in view of the objections above shows
* those objections to be completely unfounded.
Let's see. You've just started reading Foner. I must assume that your
familiararity with his sources, particularly the ones mentioned here,
are zero. I am somewhat familiar with Foner, am somewhat familiar with
Simkins and Woody, and am quite familiar with Jarrell. If I have failed
to discredit Foner, you have failed to defend him with anything other
than wide-eyed fawning full-acceptance of whatever he has to say. I
have begun the process of locating all the sources relevant to these
excerpts, and will air them as soon as I have them. The congressional
documents would probably be easy for many to find, but those particular
volumes are gone (stolen or lost?) from my library, so I'm having
to have them called in.
-Mike
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 18, 1996 12:42:34 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>That is for you to demonstrate, not to assert.
so to the satifaction of all, apparently, with the
exception of yourself.
T. Reb
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q6c2l$h...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrote:
>Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
>: In article <4q3e14$e...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrot
e:
>
>: <long ad hominem attack on Eric Foner deleted>
>
>: Linda Teasley seems to hate Eric Foner with a vicious passion, but his opini
ons
>: on the Soviet Union, and whether or not he should have publicly criticized t
he
>: men that Linda Teasley thinks he should have publicly criticized, are hardly
>: relevant to his views on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.
>
> "Vicious passion?" You're really groping here. I question his
>historical judgment because of his bias. And yes, Virginia, his views on
>historical matters is indeed relevant to his views on the American Civil
>War and Reconstruction.
You assert that his views on the Soviet Union in the twentieth century are
relevant to his views on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, but you
make no effort whatsoever to demonstrate that they do.
>: I'll simply point out that Eric Foner is a highly respected historian among
>: liberal and conservative historians alike.
>
> I'll be glad to provide a list of historians who think Foner is warped.
Please do.
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 18, 1996 12:48:55 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
>"statistics" that had no actual meaning without the proper context, cited
by
>Dinesh D'Souza, himself a virulent racist whose most recent book was
>criticized
>even by many of his conservative friends. When you have to resort to
quoting
>from D'Souza on matters of race, you know you are pretty desperate indeed.
I have heard D'Souza speak, and the only people who refer to him as
a racist are those who have a vested interest in perpetuating their
status a 'victims', or who have a problem with cold, hard, fact. I find it
interesting that a native of India, who himself has experience with
class and race discrimination in the form of the caste system, would be
so offhandedly dismissed as "racist" when he is in fact, as an "outsider"
more qualified to observe and comment than either you or I.
>
>Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men have a
>rapacious sexual desire for white women?
Bait. I will now patiently await Steve Schmidt's pious condemnation
of this "starter".
Tennessee Reb
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q6dkq$k...@news2.h1.usa.pipeline.com>,
Tennessee Reb <tennes...@usa.pipeline.com> wrote:
>On Jun 18, 1996 12:48:55 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
>Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
>(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>
>
>>I did bring up the myth of blacks desiring white women, and you quoted
>>"statistics" that had no actual meaning without the proper context, cited
>by
>>Dinesh D'Souza, himself a virulent racist whose most recent book was
>>criticized
>>even by many of his conservative friends. When you have to resort to
>quoting
>>from D'Souza on matters of race, you know you are pretty desperate indeed.
>
>
>I have heard D'Souza speak, and the only people who refer to him as
>a racist are those who have a vested interest in perpetuating their
>status a 'victims', or who have a problem with cold, hard, fact. I find it
>interesting that a native of India, who himself has experience with
>class and race discrimination in the form of the caste system, would be
>so offhandedly dismissed as "racist" when he is in fact, as an "outsider"
>more qualified to observe and comment than either you or I.
What makes you think that a member of a minority cannot be racist? Louis
Farrakhan is quite the racist. And so is Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza is, in fact,
disgustingly racist, a man who argues for discrimination and calls blacks
"pathologically irresponsible" and "parasitically dependent." He is a man who
distorts, misuses, and lies about history. He argues that segregation was
imposed to "protect" blacks. In describing the "pathologically irresponsible"
black culture, he makes much of the fact that black illegitimate births have
increased more than 3 times since 1900; he virtually ignores the fact that
white illegitimate births have multiplied by 10 in the same period.
He offers common myths as fact, such as the notion that "there are more young
black men in prison than in college" (a myth easily disproved by looking at
justice statistics, which show quite the opposite).
Among his thousands of critics are two people who have neither problems with
"cold, hard, fact" nor any interest in perpetuating their status as "victims,"
as you so brazenly assert the categories into which you think all his critics
fall: Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury, respected conservatives who resigned
their positions at the American Enterprise Institute (where D'Souza worked as a
research fellow) in protest (Loury also switched publishers).
>>
>>Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men have a
>
>>rapacious sexual desire for white women?
>
>Bait. I will now patiently await Steve Schmidt's pious condemnation
>of this "starter".
Answer the question. Do you believe that black men have a rapacious sexual
desire for white women?
James F. Epperson
On 18 Jun 1996, System Janitor wrote:
> Me:
> >On page 571, discussing the events at Hamburg, Foner gives conflicting
> >versions of M.C.Butler's participation in the killing of 5 captive
> >blacks. Foner claims, with no attributions...
>
> *Dakerns:
> * Actually, Foner gives a balanced account. He tells what some witnesses
> * claim, and what Butler himself claimed. Your characterization seems to
> * imply that Foner contradicted himself. He did not. If anything, he gives
> * Butler the benefit of the doubt.
>
> Foner presented two conflicting accounts, both negative. Since Foner is an
> expert professional historian, I must assume that his exclusion of
> accounts that don't reflect poorly on Butler have something to do
> with Foner's explicit desire to cast only negative aspersions.
I have not read Foner (yet), but wanted to jump in here with an alternate
inference to draw, one which I frankly think (IMO) is the correct one.
Foner may have excluded "accounts that don't reflect poorly on Butler"
because it was his sincere, honest, professional opinion that those
accounts were either not accurate or not trustworthy. The exclusion does
not have to be motivated by a pre-set agenda. Having said that, it would
have been best for Foner to have at least mentioned (or outlined in a
footnote) the arguments he was ignoring, with some discussion of why he
was doing so. But his failure to do so is not, in and of itself,
evidence of a pre-set agenda.
Jim Epperson | I would like to see truthful
Department of Mathematical Sciences | history written -- US Grant
University of Alabama in Huntsville +-------------------------------------
eppe...@math.uah.edu URL: http://www.math.uah.edu/~epperson
URL: http://members.aol.com/jfepperson
Southern Witch
In article <4q691u$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) wrote:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm *real* leery of getting into this one because my news server has not
shown me REB4LIFE's original post yet. But I think Mark's included enough
of it for me to get the drift and take a crack at it. It's probably not
going to please everyone, but I'm getting used to that.
No, I don't mind being considered a Southern/Confederate partisan. It's
pretty much the way I think of myself. What else would you call someone
who belongs to the UDC, flies the Stars and Bars every day, plays "Dixie"
on her answering machine, and has pictures of dead Confederate generals on
the walls of her house? The word "partisan" does come to mind (although
I'm sure the Resident Yankee would consider "fanatic" a bit more
accurate). I *am* fascinated by Southern heritage and history in all its
aspects, and I find no fault with the Confederate soldiers who took up
arms in defense of their homeland. And that's how most of them saw it, I'm
convinced...as a defense of their homeland, not as a defense of slavery
per se. Their service *was* honorable, even if the cause that their
actions were ultimately furthering was not. And I will continue to honor
their sacrifices in any way that I can, and I will rail against those who
think it's inappropriate for me to do so. That, I think, could be
construed as a belief in "The Cause"...but probably not quite the way Mark
meant it.
Would I consider myself a modern-day Southern separitist? No. I don't
belong to the Southern League, and I must admit that I'm perfectly happy
to be a citizen of the restored Union. It's nothing less than what the
General Commanding advised us all to be after the War ended, and, good
Virginian that I am, I'm complying with his wishes.
Can I admit that slavery was not an honorable institution? Certainly I
can, viewing it from my vantage point as a citizen of the 20th century.
But those who realized, in the mid-1860's, that it was not honorable were
in the vanguard of public opinion, not in the mainstream. So I find it
difficult to fault the average white Southerner (I'm learning, Steve!) for
defending his home and family against what he perceived (with a great deal
of justification) as Northern interference and aggression.
I'd like to think that I can be a proud Southerner who wouldn't trade her
heritage and history for anything *and* an American citizen whose
attitudes and outlook on most issues are a direct result of the moral and
ethical changes brought about in this country *by* the WBTS. I realize
that a lot of folks will find such a balancing act traitorous, but I
prefer to think of it as realistic. I'm just trying to play the hand I've
been dealt as a white American Southerner the best way I know how.
RStacy2229
In article <kfraser-1606...@as6s46.erols.com>, kfr...@erols.com
(Southern Witch) writes:
>Folks of a more northerly persuasion look at the battle flag
>and see a symbol of racial hatred and slavery...
Because they are evil, usurping, damnyankees
>Robert and I look at it and see the standard our ancestors followed into
battle,
>and we feel pride rather than revulsion and distaste.>
Because we are godly, law-abiding Southrons.
>And that feeling is most assuredly a
>function of where we grew up and what we have been surrounded by and
>taught all our lives.
We grew up in God's country, surrounded by good people who taught us the
fundamental truth of the literal inerrancy of both the Scripture and the
10th Amendment.
And then the meddling Yankees try to turn it into an "us-and-them" thing
;)
Robert Stacy McCain
RStacy2229
In article <4pshc8$f...@news.asu.edu>, Brooks Simpson
<brooks....@asu.edu> writes:
>Remember: when you can't counter an argument, distort it.
To reduce his argument to a syllogism is no distortion at all. Mr.
Pitcavage cites evidence of Dunningite racism as if it were evidence of
Dunningite falsehood, suggesting that they are racists and therefore
untrustworthy as to the facts of the matter. If he intended to suggest
something else, it entirely escaped me.
RSMc
RStacy2229
In article <4psgjj$k...@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu>, sfmi...@wam.umd.edu
(steven f miller) writes:
>Put another way, the Dunningites' brand of racism <SNIP for brevity>
>Knowing this does not mean we should dismiss the Dunningites and their
peers
>out of hand. It does mean that we should bear it in mind when we read
their
>stuff.>>>
Well, DUH. Like any reasonable person is going to read accounts which
describe blacks in demeaning terms and not think, "Gee, maybe this guy
Bowers is a bit racist." But at the same time, if I read an account
describing unscrupulous or unseemly behavior by black legislators during
Reconstruction, I need not say, "Well, this is just racist propaganda ..."
In fact, given the circumstances surrounding slavery and the method by
which slavery was ended, coupled with knowledge of the low-life Yankee
carpetbaggers and turncoat scalawags with whom the freedmen were
associating during those years, it is quite surprising to find that *any*
of those legislators were even marginally capable of exercising
legislative authority.
By the way, as soon as I get off my current deadline, I intend to take
some time to post some segments of contemporary Georgia Reconstruction
documents I've come across. Very enlightening.
DAKearns
l...@panix.com (Linda Teasley) wrote:
>: > rstac...@aol.com (RStacy2229) wrote:
>: > >Premise A: The Dunningites were racists
>: > >Premise B: Racists cannot write trustworthy history;
>: > >et ergo
>: > >Conclusion C: The Dunningite history of Reconstruction is
untrustworthy.
>: And then Brooks wrote:
>: > Premise A: Foner is a Marxist
>: > Premise B: Marxists can not write trustworthy history
>: > Premise C: Foner's account of Reconstruction is untrustworthy.
> These premises and conclusions would seem to indicate that the
>Dunningites shouldn't be trusted on matters of race, and that Foner
>cannot be trusted on matters of value judgments about class conflicts.
>Mark and Brooks maintain, however, that Foner is reliable and that the
>Dunningites are not. Even if I accepted their first premise, which I do
>not, the judgment that make at the end is not reasonable.
Linda, respectfully, you need to read the posts more carefully. Both
posters were claiming that the logic in both of these theories is
incorrect. The error in both is Premise B.
[This is Kathie]
>: I've never read Dunning (and as sick as I am of seeing his name in
>: threads, I may never!), but I don't have to have read him or any of his
>: followers to know that Mark and Brooks are most likely right in their
line
>: of reasoning on this issue. No one can separate himself from his era
and
>: write as if it didn't exist for him.
> Why do you think this is a reasonable position? Let me quote from an
>article about Foner and then ask you to explain to me why his account of
>Southern Reconstruction should be considered objective and reliable.
[snipped for space...interesting though]
> And this is the guy that you prefer to Dunning?
Again, respectfully, Kathie made no mention of Foner. Her statement, as I
read it, simply conceded the fact that Mark and Brooks had convinced her
that some of the Dunning school historians were influenced by racist
beliefs and their writings reflect that influence.
Regards,
David Kearns
RStacy2229
> In fact, the idea of "race" as we know it didn't come into being
>until the late eighteenth century.
I don't think so. Having read accounts of the Spanish exploration and
conquest of the New World -- and the conquistadors brought black slaves
with them, of course -- it seems to me that the race of the conquered had
something to do with their being judged fair game by the invaders.
RSMc
Rob Karr
I have just done some research on an ancestor of mine who died of
wounds suffered at Todd's Tavern, which I understand was called the
"Battle of the Wilderness".
I happened to be at a bookstore last night, and picked up Shelby
Foote's -really- large Civil War book to read a bit about it, and
found too much info to read quickly. I'll get to that.
But, today I think- hey, I'll see if anyone in this newsgroup feels
like giving me some info on how Todd's Tavern figured in the war.
I do want to thank this group. I've been an occasional reader for
some time, and it was info from this group that allowed me to
successfully complete my query to the archives. Which, incidently,
just made an appreciated Father's day gift to my dad.
Thanks very much,
Robk.
--
Rob Karr
ro...@sgi.com
James F. Epperson
Todd's Tavern was a =part= of the Battle of the Wilderness. Maybe it
would be more accurate to say it was a separate action that was part of
the same operation. Here is the basic outline:
While the infantry of the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern
Virginia struggled in the thickets of the Wilderness, the respective
cavalry arms fought for the possession of Todd's Tavern, located at a
strategic intersection of the road network in that part of Virginia.
Union possession of the crossroads would give them a clear route to
Spotsylvania Court House, allowing Grant to manuever between Lee and
Richmond. Confederate possession would make Grant fight for this
advantage.
In the end, the Federals won and the Yankee infantry was able to advance
to SpotsCH, but the delay in the march because of this action was crucial
in allowing the Confederate infantry to get to SpotsCH first and
entrench. The resulting recriminations within the Federal high command
resulted in Sheridan's cavalry being detached for a raid on Richmond
which resulted in JEB Stuart's death.
This was a quickie. Details and elaborations available on request. Good
sources would be Steere's book on the Wilderness (recently reprinted),
Rhea's book on the Wilderness, and Matter's book on SpotsCH.
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 18, 1996 18:26:47 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>>>Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men have
a
>>>rapacious sexual desire for white women?
>>Bait. I will now patiently await Steve Schmidt's pious condemnation
>>of this "starter".
>Answer the question. Do you believe that black men have a rapacious
sexual
>desire for white women?
T. Reb
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 18, 1996 18:26:47 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>Farrakhan is quite the racist.
And so is Dinesh D'Souza.
D'Souza is, in
>fact,
>disgustingly racist, a man who argues for discrimination and calls blacks
>"pathologically irresponsible" and "parasitically dependent."
the phrases you quote were preceded by the words "give the appearance
of being" (or something similar). Not the same thing.
He is a man who
>distorts, misuses, and lies about history. He argues that segregation was
>imposed to "protect" blacks. In describing the "pathologically
irresponsible"
>black culture, he makes much of the fact that black illegitimate births
have
>increased more than 3 times since 1900; he virtually ignores the fact that
>white illegitimate births have multiplied by 10 in the same period.
And to what percentage of total births by race? Somebody has to be
responsible. Right?
>He offers common myths as fact, such as the notion that "there are more
young
>black men in prison than in college" (a myth easily disproved by looking
at
>justice statistics, which show quite the opposite).
Don't have those statistics, so I won't comment.
>Among his thousands of critics are two people who have neither problems
with
>"cold, hard, fact" nor any interest in perpetuating their status as
"victims,"
>as you so brazenly assert the categories into which you think all his
critics
>fall: Robert Woodson and Glenn Loury, respected conservatives who
resigned
>their positions at the American Enterprise Institute (where D'Souza worked
as
>a
>research fellow) in protest (Loury also switched publishers).
Wow! What a revelation! I s'pose they preferred the "martyr" status
for themselves...
Gee, this is fun. Let's talk about "The Bell Curve" too... Or maybe
about Cleopatra being a black woman. I think her Macedonian parents
would have been surprised...
Tennessee Reb
Stephen Schmidt
tennes...@usa.pipeline.com(Tennessee Reb) writes:
>On Jun 18, 1996 18:26:47 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
>Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
>(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>>>>Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men have
>>>>a rapacious sexual desire for white women?
>
>>>Bait. I will now patiently await Steve Schmidt's pious condemnation
>>>of this "starter".
Sure it's bait. I will piously condemn it. I will point out that
there's a difference between advocating a racist position (as Reb
did) and asking someone else whether they advocate one or not
(as Mark did), so my condemnation is less, but if it'll make Reb
happy, I'll do it. I hope the distinction is not lost on Reb.
In a separate note, I have been informed by email that Reb
denies giving me permission to quote his earlier email. I have
not seen Reb's post. I will again state that he did give me
permission to do so. I will quote from the email I sent him
(since that is my own writing I can see no objection to my
quoting myself):
>If you wish, I will post
>your letter and my reply to it; let me know if you would like
>that done. If your post appears on my server, I will probably
>post the identical reply.
I will not quote his reply, since it is his writing, but I will
strongly assent that he gave permission. If he will give me
permission to quote his reply (it is only one sentence) then
I will do so. If he denies such permission, then we'll all know
who it is that has something to hide.
ObCivilWar: The influence of the Civil War on the Vietnam War
was, perhaps, nearly nothing, but I ran across the following
in Stanley Karnow's _Vietnam, A History_:
McNamara, an intimiate friend and godfather to one of [LBJ's]
sons, had confided to [Robert] Kennedy his own sense of
forboding about the war in the hope that Kennedy could
encourage Johnson to stonewall the joint chiefs of staff,
who were then clamoring for renewed bombing. Kennedy sent
Johnson a copy of _Never Call Retreat_, one of the volumes
in a history of the Civil War by Bruce Catton, with a
handwritten note suggesting that Johnson might derive
"some comfort" from the marked passages - which showed that
Abraham Lincoln had faced "identical problems and
situations." Kennedy meant to indicate that Lincoln had
resisted pressure from his generals, and Johnson ought to
do the same. But Johnson interpreted the gesture as an
expression of support. On January 31 [1966], the day the
bombing raids over North Vietnam resumed, Kennedy moved
towards a break with Johnson over the war.
Karnow does not say, and I cannot easily imagine, exactly what
analogy Kennedy was trying to draw... any opinions?
Steve
--
Stephen Schmidt Department of Economics
210A Social Sciences Union College
(518) 388-6078 Schenectady NY 12308
RStacy2229
In article <4q68jn$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Nowhere did I say "Southerners are racist," much
>less "any history favorable to the South is racist."
And nowhere did I say -- in so many words -- "Scalawags are treacherous."
RSMc
RStacy2229
In article <4q68jn$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>I did bring up the myth of blacks desiring white women, and you quoted
>"statistics" that had no actual meaning without the proper context, cited
by
>Dinesh D'Souza, himself a virulent racist whose most recent book was
>criticized
>even by many of his conservative friends. When you have to resort to
quoting
>
>from D'Souza on matters of race, you know you are pretty desperate
indeed.
>
Ah, the ad-hominem attack AND guilt-by-association! Mr. Pitcavage again
seems to be intent on demonstrating in detail the tortuous sequence of
fallacies required to sustain his peculiar belief system.
Now, just so that we all understand what has happened here:
1. In order to discredit Reconstruction history a la Dunning, Pitcavage
cited "the myth of blacks desiring white women" -- black-on-white rape
stories within Dunnigite accounts of Reconstruction -- as evidence of
racism on the part of the authors of those works.
2. I replied by citing accounts of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry
and its involvement in charges of this sort, and further introduced
latter-day statistics from D'Souza (in 1991, there were 200 times as many
black on white rapes as white on black rapes), the intent being to show
that such incidents *did* occur, that there *does* seem to be evidence of
a tendency in such matters, and that therefore it is incorrect to claim
(as Pitcavage was apparently claiming) that any Dunningite chronicling of
such incidents is tatamount to racism. Whatever one makes of the motives
behind such crimes, they did and do occur, and it is fairly naive to
suppose that these crimes were not outrageous to Victorian sensibilities.
3. Now Pitcavage replies -- and how? By alleging that these statistics are
meaningless without context, and that my source for such statistics was
*himself* "a virulent racist," so that we may again draw the conclusion
Pitcavage desires: "A racist is untrustworthy, therefore these statistics
are untrustworthy, therefore I may safely dismiss the viewpoint of anyone
whom Pitcavage labels a racist."
Let me now make a few points here:
1. I am not a racist, let Pitcavage say what he will.
2. D'Souza is himself "a person of color," being the child of immigrants
from India.
3. I did not encounter D'Souza by accident. His work was recommended to me
by an anti-racist student at the University of Georgia who wanted to
inform me of the beliefs held by a certain Jared Taylor, whose American
Renaissance movement forthrightly declares that "race is important" and
that the future of Western civilization is dependent on the continued
hegemony of the white race. In investigating Mr. Taylor -- I disagree with
him on the issue, since his argument is largely Darwinian and I am a
creationist -- I was directed to Chapter 10 of D'Souza's book, "Bigotry in
Black and White." There I found D'Souza's citation of the crime statistics
quoted above.
4. D'Souza does not pluck such statistics from thin air, but cites the
work of criminologist William Wilbanks, providing footnotes for those who
might wish to pursue the matter. Assuming that Wilbanks is not employed by
the Aryan Nations, can we not assume that there is *some* significance to
the statistics he provides?
5. As I said elsewhere, I do not consider referring to these statistics to
constitute an act of racism. You need no special background in
demographics, sociology or criminal psychology to infer the factors which
may contribute to such a statistical phenomenon, and some might even cite
such a phenomenon as evidence of the heavy burden of oppression which our
society places on the black male.
6. We might then travel back in history 130 years and see that many of the
factors which contribute to black-on-white crime in the 1990s were also
present in the 1860s and 1870s, some of those factors being present in a
much greater measure.
7. It is thus more than a Dunningite fantasy to suppose that there was
some justification for Southern whites fearing of crime at the hands of
freedmen, especially when many of those freedmen were almost daily incited
to resentment of their former masters by the carpetbaggers and scalawags.
8. Fears of such vengeance (can you say "Santo Domingo"?) was one of the
deepest roots of pro-slavery sentiment in the antebellum South and helped
fuel resistance to abolitionist agitation. The South saw a bloodthirsty
John Brown in every Northerner who voted Republican.
Robert Stacy McCain
Rome GA
RStacy2229
In article <4q68jn$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Dinesh D'Souza, himself a virulent racist
Excuse me?
RSMc
RStacy2229
In article <4q68jn$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men have a
>rapacious sexual desire for white women?
Well, I know that *I* do. ;)
RSMc
RStacy2229
In article <4q2ks7$8...@news2.h1.usa.pipeline.com>,
tennes...@usa.pipeline.com(Tennessee Reb) writes:
>For instance, I have
>reached what most would consider to be some very valid conclusions
>about *you*<MARK PITCAVAGE, that is>, personally, and I didn't have to
talk to your mother or
>your sixth-grade teacher to know that they are valid.
Careful, TR: If you talk to his mother and his sixth-grade teacher, they
might make him stop playing on the computer and clean up his room.
RSMc
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q77o2$f...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
I did -nothing but- cite evidence of Dunningite racism. I did it in response
to a post by the Terminator. Any "as if it weres" are coming from your own
mind. You are certainly correct in inferring that a number of things hae
entirely escaped you.
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q8hbf$5...@newsbf02.news.aol.com>,
RStacy2229 <rstac...@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <4q68jn$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
>mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) writes:
>
>>"statistics" that had no actual meaning without the proper context, cited
>by
>>Dinesh D'Souza, himself a virulent racist whose most recent book was
>>criticized
>>even by many of his conservative friends. When you have to resort to
>quoting
>>
>>from D'Souza on matters of race, you know you are pretty desperate
>indeed.
>>
>Ah, the ad-hominem attack AND guilt-by-association! Mr. Pitcavage again
>seems to be intent on demonstrating in detail the tortuous sequence of
>fallacies required to sustain his peculiar belief system.
>Now, just so that we all understand what has happened here:
>1. In order to discredit Reconstruction history a la Dunning, Pitcavage
>cited "the myth of blacks desiring white women" -- black-on-white rape
>stories within Dunnigite accounts of Reconstruction -- as evidence of
>racism on the part of the authors of those works.
No, it was far more than "black-on-white rape stories," it was also such
commonplaces as people saying that "blacks will marry your daughter if they get
equal rights."
I used no guilt-by-association in the post from which you quote; I associated
D'Souza to no group or organization. I did call him racist--he is a virulent
racist--but I also addressed the facts (or purported facts) that you brought
forward. Therefore, there was no "ad-hominem attack." Furthermore, the
question of D'Souza's racial views is directly relevant to what he is saying.
Were I to have said, "D'Souza? He molests baby badgers!" you might rightly
have called my remarks ad hominem. However, this was not the case.
>2. I replied by citing accounts of the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry
>and its involvement in charges of this sort, and further introduced
>latter-day statistics from D'Souza (in 1991, there were 200 times as many
>black on white rapes as white on black rapes), the intent being to show
>that such incidents *did* occur, that there *does* seem to be evidence of
>a tendency in such matters, and that therefore it is incorrect to claim
>(as Pitcavage was apparently claiming) that any Dunningite chronicling of
>such incidents is tatamount to racism.
The fact that there may have been some rapes committed by a regiment of troops,
and an out-of-context statistic based on 1991 crime rates do not prove--do not
even BEGIN to prove--that black men had a great sexual desire for white women.
Whatever one makes of the motives
>behind such crimes, they did and do occur, and it is fairly naive to
>suppose that these crimes were not outrageous to Victorian sensibilities.
>3. Now Pitcavage replies -- and how? By alleging that these statistics are
>meaningless without context, and that my source for such statistics was
>*himself* "a virulent racist," so that we may again draw the conclusion
>Pitcavage desires: "A racist is untrustworthy, therefore these statistics
>are untrustworthy, therefore I may safely dismiss the viewpoint of anyone
>whom Pitcavage labels a racist."
I did not "allege" that the statistic (not statistics) were meaingless without
context; I made the rather obvious point that the statistic--which never
mentioned actual numbers at all--were meaningless without context. It is easy
to get the rate that you mentioned, and still have it be meaningless when the
actual numbers involved are revealed. I noticed that you snipped my example
which dealt with the meaningless of the statistics. I'll post another. If
100,000 Californians eat fruit, and of those, 99,999 prefer oranges to apples,
while of 100,000 Pennsylvanians, 99,800 prefer oranges to apples, then we
discover that Pennyslvanians who prefer apples to oranges are 200 times greater
than Californians who prefer apples to oranges. And yet, clearly, only a
vanishingly small percentage of both prefer apples to oranges and the
difference between Californians and Pennsylvanians is meaningless.
Of course, the whole thing could be academic; D'Souza in his book quotes
figures that have been shown to be incorrect (like the one I mentioned in
another post, in which he alleges that more black men are in prison than
college). This 200x could be another one of those, for all I know.
>
>Let me now make a few points here:
>1. I am not a racist, let Pitcavage say what he will.
Then don't act like one.
>2. D'Souza is himself "a person of color," being the child of immigrants
>from India.
That is hardly relevant. One can be a racist no matter what the color, as
Louis Farrakhan has shown so well. And we needn't forget Jesse Jackson's
remarks about "Hymietown," either.
>3. I did not encounter D'Souza by accident. His work was recommended to me
>by an anti-racist student at the University of Georgia who wanted to
>inform me of the beliefs held by a certain Jared Taylor, whose American
>Renaissance movement forthrightly declares that "race is important" and
>that the future of Western civilization is dependent on the continued
>hegemony of the white race. In investigating Mr. Taylor -- I disagree with
>him on the issue, since his argument is largely Darwinian and I am a
>creationist -- I was directed to Chapter 10 of D'Souza's book, "Bigotry in
>Black and White." There I found D'Souza's citation of the crime statistics
>quoted above.
No comment on the fact that you are a creationist, but I can't say I'm
surprised. If one hides from historical facts, it is not surprising that one
will hide from scientific ones as well.
Incidentally, Jared Taylor was so incensed at being consistently misquoted in
D'Souza's book that the Free Press had to replace the book's first print run.
Ted Waltrip
>
>On Jun 18, 1996 12:48:55 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was
Re:
>Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>,
'mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu
>(Mark T Pitcavage)' wrote:
>
>
>>Let me ask you a question. Do you honestly believe that black men
have a
>
>>rapacious sexual desire for white women?
>
I think all men have a rapicious sexual desire for all women:-)Ted W.
danksmt
tennes...@usa.pipeline.com(Tennessee Reb) wrote:
>
>Gee, this is fun. Let's talk about "The Bell Curve" too...
>
>Tennessee Reb
>
Well, it sure is fun for me, lurking. As one who has read "The
Bell Curve", I would dearly LOVE to read any discussion about it
you guys would care to post. Go for it!
danksmt
involved though.
Sorry. My post was unsigned. Don't believe in unsigned posts, even
one as innocuous and devoid of content as this one. So here it is
again.
Terry Danks
Halifax, Nova Scotia
CANADA
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4q9bk0$o...@news.nstn.ca>, danksmt <dan...@fox.nstn.ca> wrote:
>tennes...@usa.pipeline.com(Tennessee Reb) wrote:
>
>>
>>Gee, this is fun. Let's talk about "The Bell Curve" too...
>>
>>Tennessee Reb
>>
>
>Well, it sure is fun for me, lurking. As one who has read "The
>Bell Curve", I would dearly LOVE to read any discussion about it
>you guys would care to post. Go for it!
Let's not; that is more than a little off-topic.
efr...@cc.memphis.edu
>>Well, it sure is fun for me, lurking. As one who has read "The
>>Bell Curve", I would dearly LOVE to read any discussion about it
>>you guys would care to post. Go for it!
>
> Let's not.
Second!
Ed "what's Sylvia Plath got to do with it anyway?" Frank
DAKearns
Lets go back to the original to start this off...
Mike wrote:
> Foner claims, with no attributions...
This is the sole reason that I wrote anything about Foner. I had the book
next to me on the desk...Mike made a bold statement, gave a page number,
and I looked it up...I found that either Mike was deliberately lying or he
just doesn't understand how footnoting is done.
>Foner presented two conflicting accounts, both negative. Since Foner is
an
>expert professional historian, I must assume that his exclusion of
>accounts that don't reflect poorly on Butler have something to do
>with Foner's explicit desire to cast only negative aspersions.
The fact that Butler's own statements cast negative aspersions on himself
is not Foner's fault.
I wrote:
* There is a footnote for the paragraph in question. It would seem from
the
* way the paragraph is structured that the quote comes from one of the
* Congressional hearings.
>Check again. The text indicates unambiguously that the Congressional
>hearings referenced in the footnote are citations for Butler's assertion
>that ``Blacks had little regard for human life'', and nothing to
>do with Butler's alleged statements about Hamburg.
This is where my suspicion is supported most strongly...Mike just doesn't
seem to understand how footnoting is done...of course, I really dislike
Foner's method of footnoting, which is using a single note for each
paragraph...it *can* be confusing to some who aren't used to it. Still,
Mike's assertion that the text indicates that the citation had nothing to
do with Butler's alleged statements about Hamburg is false. The text
makes no such indication or distinction.
Foner wrote:
* "Along with bitter denunciations of the Freedman's Bureau, black
soldiers,
* and even the Emancipation Proclamation, Hampton's attitudes towards
blacks
* vacillated between early support of "qualified" impartial suffrage,
* predictions of the freedmen's imminent "extermination," and advocacy,
as
* late as 1869, of their removal from the country."
>Hampton promoted qualified franchisement.
and Foner says he did...wow, you agree.
>The belief that blacks would simply ``die out'' was widespread in
>the South at that time, but no historians who focus on Hampton
>indicate that this notion has any particular association with
>Hampton, Foner is probably just continuing his habit of casting
>negative aspersions.
Foner is probably quoting from one of Hampton's letters, as his citations
indicate.
>Anyone who believes, as Foner indicates, that Hampton was making
>serious efforts to remove blacks from the country in 1869 must be smoking
>rope.
Once again, Mike is either misleading or he just doesn't understand what
is actually written on the page. Foner does not say that Hampton made
"serious efforts"...he says that Hampton *advocated*, "as late as 1869,
of their removal from the country." There is a big difference between
Mike's and Foner's statements.
[snips]
* I've just started reading Foner, so I can't give a full opinion of his
* work, but a cursory look at the work in view of the objections above
shows
* those objections to be completely unfounded.
>Let's see. You've just started reading Foner. I must assume that your
>familiararity with his sources, particularly the ones mentioned here,
>are zero. I am somewhat familiar with Foner, am somewhat familiar with
>Simkins and Woody, and am quite familiar with Jarrell. If I have failed
>to discredit Foner, you have failed to defend him with anything other
>than wide-eyed fawning full-acceptance of whatever he has to say.
First, Mike has no idea what my background in the source material is, but
his assumption is, well let's say, incorrect. Second, to be modest, (and
trying to avoid the whole yardstick thing) I have an extensive background
in Reconstruction history, as well as specific knowledge of the incident
in Hamburg. Having grown up less than ten miles from the site, and
studying the incident under the most prominent historian of Augusta
history, Dr. Edward Cashin, the Hamburg massacre has been a topic of
focussed study for me. Third, my intention was not to defend Foner as
Mike asserts, but to show that Mike either didn't understand, or
deliberately mis-represented what Foner had written. Finally, to think
that I would accept anything wide-eyed and fawning is indeed ridiculous.
As the statement at the end of my original indicated, I have no opinion of
Foner as yet, because I haven't finished reading his work.
The fact remains that Mike claimed that Foner made statements without
attributions. Anyone near a library can look on page 571 and see that
Mike's claim is false.
David Kearns
Tennessee Reb
On Jun 19, 1996 04:08:57 in article <Re: Logic of Mr. Pitcavage (Was Re:
Those Wonderful, Non-Racist Dunnin>, 'schm...@unvax.union.edu (Stephen
Schmidt)' wrote:
<T.Reb sez, regarding question on sexual appetites of black men>
>>of this "starter".
>
>Sure it's bait. I will piously condemn it. I will point out that
>there's a difference between advocating a racist position (as Reb
>did) and asking someone else whether they advocate one or not
>(as Mark did), so my condemnation is less, but if it'll make Reb
>happy, I'll do it. I hope the distinction is not lost on Reb.
to as "advocating a racist position":
---begin prior statement---
>> Finally, and as merely an observation and not an endorsement,
>> there are many people these days who see the FBI crime
>> statistics regarding young black men, or other figures
>> concerning illegitimate births, etc., who would tell you
>> that Gov. Brown was remarkably prescient. He was just off
>> by 100 years as to when his predictions would be fulfilled.
---end of prior statement---
I'm thrilled, and no the distinction is not lost on me. However,
there *is* a problem with your perception of the *facts*. In the
statement in question, I stated up front that I was merely making
an observation on the views of some persons, and *not* an endorsement
of those views. Somehow you have transformed this into advocacy, a
leap in logic even you should be able to recognize.
Are you so conditioned by personal prejudice that when any Southerner
comments on a non-enlightened, non politically correct racial viewpoint
that you automatically infer that that Southerner is a racist? I hope not,
but it seems to be the case.
Would I be in error in classifying you as one of those high-toned
damnyankee moral elitists that we in the South have despised for
over 150 years? Read your assertion above, and then re-read the
statement you based that assertion upon, and then tell me what
I should think.
Tennessee Reb (aka R4L)
Dennis Maggard
kfr...@erols.com (Southern Witch) wrote:
>In article <4q691u$q...@charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu>,
>mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu (Mark T Pitcavage) wrote:
>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This most excellent post, and outstanding exposition of the moderately
pro-Southern point a view, may be the best example of shining sanity I have
ever seen on this newsgroup so dominated by extremists and ideologues.
Kathie has made an important statement here which is as courageous as it
is lucid. While the shrill voices on both sides dominate the posting wars,
Kathie reminds us that there is room for sanity, that there are middle
paths and common ground, that the shared history of the American Civil War
can -- and should -- serve to unite us rather than to divide us.
Bravo, Kathie, for another post extremely well done! I have deliberately
quoted Kathie in full for the benefit of anyone who's news server failed to
pick up her post the first time around.
Dennis
Linda Teasley
Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
[snip of exchange between Pitcavage and McCain]
: I did -nothing but- cite evidence of Dunningite racism.
Actually, you have references in your collection that are not
associated with Dunning. And those that are make a fairly insignificant
case for their "racism."
I did it in response
: to a post by the Terminator.
Are you leasing out your title these days? What's the monthly rate?
Linda "curious" Teasley
--
Five pelican bedecked battle flags began to flap. . . three thousand
men stepped off on the left foot. With strict cadence, ninety paces per
minute, a forest of burnished steel paraded up the hill.
Winchester --- 25 May 1862
Mark T Pitcavage
In article <4qbo4t$3...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrote:
>Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
>
> [snip of exchange between Pitcavage and McCain]
>: I did -nothing but- cite evidence of Dunningite racism.
>
> Actually, you have references in your collection that are not
>associated with Dunning. And those that are make a fairly insignificant
>case for their "racism."
I have posted five authors to date: Dunning, Burgess, Fleming, Garner, and
Rhodes. Of those five, four of them are intimately associated with the Dunning
school, and the fifth was a contemporary who is pretty much universally
acknowledged as having the same opinions.
As for their making a "fairly insignificant case" for their racism, I will
merely note that you seem to have an inordinately high threshold for what
constitutes racism. I'd wager that the overwhelming majority of people who
read those excerpts would call them racist.
System Janitor
In his latest installment in this thread, DAKearns reveals two things:
- he has made more than a passing effort to study South Carolina
history.
- he is willing to form drastic conclusions.
I don't think that the average member of this group needs me to
diagram Foner's paragraphs for them, but neither do I think they
should have to run to the library for details in order to follow
a usenet thread.
Foner puts a footnote at the end of each paragraph. Often, as in the
case of the Hampton-related paragraph under discussion, Foner makes
multiple citations, which, if one takes the time, can usually be matched
up to a phrase or sentence in the paragraph. The Hampton-related paragraph
contains the following sentence:
* Indeed, a close look at Hampton's own record might have raised
* doubts about the depth of his statesmanship and moderation,
* despite his eloquent appeals for racial harmony.
This is the only sentence (and really, only a phrase within that
sentence ``his eloquent appeals for racial harmony'') from that
paragraph that could possibly be the result of Foner's citation
to page 34 of Jarrell. In fact, another phrase from that paragraph
indicates that Hampton ``had played little role in public affairs
since 1865.''. This directly contradicts page 34 of Jarrell, which
says ``The national election of 1868 had ended Hampton's active
participation in the political affairs of South Carolina until 1876.''
The point of my analysis of Zuczek's Last Campaign was not to
indicate that Williams contained the canonical truth, rather that
Zuczek made repeated references to a source that in no way
supported Zuczek's position. Limited to the scope of the above
mentioned Foner paragraph, it seems Foner has a similar weakness.
Are Foner and Zuczek writing history, or are they writing
overly liberal interpretations of history (ie: historical novels)?
More seriously, it seems to me that they pick and choose from
their sources only the bits that suit them. And, as with DAKearns own
admission, people accept what what Foner says with no question.
Here is the entire Butler related paragraph:
* If you can find words to characterize [this] atrocity and
* barbarism...'' wrote Chamberlain, ``your power of language exceeds
* mine.'' Among the affair's most appalling features was the conduct of
* General Butler, who either selected the prisoners to be executed
* (according to black eyewitnesses), or left the scene when the crowd
* began ``committing depredations'' (his own, hardly more flattering,
* account). In either case, Butler's conduct testified to the utter
* collapse of a sense of paternalistic obligation, not to mention common
* decency, among those who called themselves the region's ``natural
* leaders.'' (A few months later, he had the temerity to tell a
* Congressional investigating committee that blacks possessed ``little
* regard for human life.'') Certainly, no one could again claim that the
* South's ``respectable'' elite disdained such violence, for in one of
* its first actions, South Carolina's Redeemer legislature in 1877
* elected Butler to the U.S. Senate.
Foner's footnote cites Simkins and Woody (I haven't checked, but
that is almost certainly where the Chamberlain quote came from)
and ... gasp... as I read it right this second, I see TWO citations
from different 2nd session 44th Congress documents, not one, as I
had believed until this very second, and was the reason for my...
I must now admit... incorrect... claim of no attribution. Ugh.
Mike DAKearns
---- --------
0 1
The conclusion of this posting isn't going in the direction I
had originally intended. I expect, now, that, if Foner can
be trusted on this point, that Butler's alleged admission to leaving
the scene when the crowd began ``committing depredations''
will be found in 44th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Miscellaneous
Document 48, does DAKearns agree? I'll have a look at that document
as soon as it is in my possession, if there's anyone reading this
besides me and DAKearns, your library may have it.
-Mike
steven f miller
RStacy2229 (rstac...@aol.com) wrote:
: In article <4psgjj$k...@cville-srv.wam.umd.edu>, sfmi...@wam.umd.edu
: (steven f miller) writes:
: >Put another way, the Dunningites' brand of racism <SNIP for brevity>
: >Knowing this does not mean we should dismiss the Dunningites and their
: peers
: >out of hand. It does mean that we should bear it in mind when we read
: their
: >stuff.>>>
: Well, DUH. Like any reasonable person is going to read accounts which
: describe blacks in demeaning terms and not think, "Gee, maybe this guy
: Bowers is a bit racist."
People in this newsgroup have said they didn't think Bowers and other
historians of the Dunning school were racist. You acknowdged that they
were, but dismissed the significance of it with a snide "Big deal."
: But at the same time, if I read an account
: describing unscrupulous or unseemly behavior by black legislators during
: Reconstruction, I need not say, "Well, this is just racist propaganda ..."
Well, DUH, yourself. Of course you need not, and neither I nor anybody
else that I'm aware of said or implied that you should.
: In fact, given the circumstances surrounding slavery and the method by
: which slavery was ended, coupled with knowledge of the low-life Yankee
: carpetbaggers and turncoat scalawags with whom the freedmen were
: associating during those years, it is quite surprising to find that *any*
: of those legislators were even marginally capable of exercising
: legislative authority.
[Sigh. . . ] I'd like to think we could talk about *all* the participants
in Reconstruction as complicated, flesh-and-blood human beings, with their
own life experiences, economic and political interests, ideological
perspectives, and strengths and weaknesses. You seem to prefer dealing
with cardboard cutouts. According to the script, I should counter your
"low-life Yankee carpetbaggers" and "turncoat scalawags" with "brutal
former slaveholders" and "reactionary racists redeemers." Thanks, but I'd
rather change the script.
: By the way, as soon as I get off my current deadline, I intend to take
: some time to post some segments of contemporary Georgia Reconstruction
: documents I've come across. Very enlightening.
Hope you make deadline, & I'll look forward to seeing the documents.
Please don't edit them "for brevity" in the same way you edited my
post ;).
Cordially,
Steven F. Miller
Linda Teasley
[snips of discussion about Dunningites]
: As for their making a "fairly insignificant case" for their racism, I will
: merely note that you seem to have an inordinately high threshold for what
: constitutes racism.
I do appreciate your being reticent to call me a racist outright,
because I'm sure that's what you think. I don't think I have a high
threshold for racist actions or judgments, but this is probably not the
right forum to examine all that.
I will note that tagging the Dunning historians with "racism" is
certainly a political statement, not a statement about the content of
their judgments. For example, when Fleming says that most freedmen
didn't want to work, you obviously consider that a racist statement on
the face of it (you included a couple of remarks of his to that effect).
Now, was that statement true or was it not? Calling it a racist
statement is really irrelevant.
I'd wager that the overwhelming majority of people who
: read those excerpts would call them racist.
I think they would be right to be suspicious of what the author's real
feelings about race were. However, it is largely unimportant when making
a judgment about his book.
Linda T.
DAKearns
Mike wrote:
>In his latest installment in this thread, DAKearns reveals two things:
> - he has made more than a passing effort to study South Carolina
> history.
I guess that's an accurate statement, perhaps understated, but accurate.
> - he is willing to form drastic conclusions.
I don't know what drastic conclusions I have made. I offered two
possibilities for your mistake, being unaware of any other possible
reasons. I specifically stated that I believed you didn't understand the
footnoting and pointed out the confusing nature of the footnoting which,
imo, can lead to the mistake that you made. That doesn't seem drastic at
all, considering that it was correct.
[snips]
>Foner puts a footnote at the end of each paragraph. Often, as in the
>case of the Hampton-related paragraph under discussion, Foner makes
>multiple citations, which, if one takes the time, can usually be matched
>up to a phrase or sentence in the paragraph.
That is generally accurate. However, a single source in a footnote with
multiple sources can and often does refer to multiple sentences and even
ideas in a paragraph.
[more snips]
> And, as with DAKearns own
>admission, people accept what what Foner says with no question.
I don't recall making that "admission" and if I did I withdraw it. I have
no idea of the nature in which other people accept Foner.
[another snip]
>Foner's footnote cites Simkins and Woody (I haven't checked, but
>that is almost certainly where the Chamberlain quote came from)
>and ... gasp... as I read it right this second, I see TWO citations
>from different 2nd session 44th Congress documents, not one, as I
>had believed until this very second, and was the reason for my...
>I must now admit... incorrect... claim of no attribution. Ugh.
[scorekeeping snipped, I'm not keeping any score]
One question: Does this mean that you told me to check again before you
checked again?
Anyway, there are actually three different citations from two different
Government documents, but why quibble? Hell, I made a mistake,
too...though the paragraph starts on page 571, the citation is on page
572...I said it was on 571.
But your statement above supports a growing suspicion that you believe
that every quote requires a separate citation. That is not accurate. If
I were to write an article on your post, I could include dozens of direct
quotations and note them all from a single source.
>The conclusion of this posting isn't going in the direction I
>had originally intended. I expect, now, that, if Foner can
>be trusted on this point, that Butler's alleged admission to leaving
>the scene when the crowd began ``committing depredations''
>will be found in 44th Congress, 2d Session, Senate Miscellaneous
>Document 48, does DAKearns agree? I'll have a look at that document
>as soon as it is in my possession, if there's anyone reading this
>besides me and DAKearns, your library may have it.
My initial answer is that the statement in question, according to Foner's
citation, should be in either Doc 31 or 48, yes.
I made a quick call to the Ole Miss library and with the friendly
assistance of another fantastic librarian (the guardian angels of
historians) found that the gov docs are indeed available here. They are
serial #'s 1722 and 1729-31. I will look over them tomorrow.
Please note (just for my satisfaction) that this is a turning point in my
involvment in this thread. To this point I was questioning your
reliability, and I was not discussing the reliability of Foner's
statements. Now that the question of your reliability has been settled
(it was a simple misunderstanding of the footnote), I'll be happy to check
these citations with you and determine if Foner actually uses Butler's own
words, or if Foner made them up.
David Kearns
F Andrew McMichael
Linda Teasley (l...@panix.com) wrote:
: Mark T Pitcavage (mpit...@magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu) wrote:
: : In article <4qbo4t$3...@panix2.panix.com>, Linda Teasley <l...@panix.com> wrote:
Glad to see the group is humming along as normal here.
Dennis Maggard
It is a lot more lively than the moderated group, that's for sure. ;-)
Dennis