HOW THE SOUTH WON THE AMER. CIVIL WAR

This post is about suppressed Amer. history as well as moral & spiritual thoughts about the subject. As the Confederate armies one by one surrendered across the South, the defeated soldiers were in a state of shocked defeat where they would accept anything. Pres. Johnson, who replaced Lincoln, was a Southerner & a white supremacist, and for the next 2 yrs. insured that the blacks were essentially returned to slavery, & denied all rights. Once back on their feet, the Southern whites via groups like the KKK & Redshirts waged a war to reverse all attributes of freedom that blacks might have. Blacks & freedom loving whites were repeatedly massacred. A few actual military type battles were fought. The Federal govt., & Federal troops occupying the South were unable to protect people, esp. since the forces at hand were very inadequate. As an example of how the thousands of hit & run attacks of invisible kingdom of the KKK were a military operation, when the KKK met in April, 1867 in Nashville’s Maxwell House for an Imperial Klonvokation, the leaders were former Confed. generals/Freemasons. The imperial wizard who presided was ex-Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Grand Dragon from Ark. was ex-Gen. Albert Pike, the Grand Dragon from Georgia was ex-Gen. John B. Gordon, from So. Carolina the famous ex-Gen. Wade Hampton, and from Alabama ex-Gen. W.J. Hardee. These leaders insured that the guerrilla terrorist war was disciplined & well-led under a professional central military command.

Just one example of hundreds of battles…this one from the start of the post-war war of terror, when blacks at first were being given a place in society. In 1866, the Governor of Louisiana, a white in favor of civil rights, was holding a convention in which the majority of the 150 delegates were black. The mayor of New Orleans was against blacks having rights. He gathered the police force which was white, and the terrorist group Southern Cross and assaulted the convention hall. One black delegate, Rev. Horton, raised a white flag to surrender. The police replied, “We don’t want any prisoners. You’ve all got to die.” A massacre then took place against defenseless government civilians, around 50 died, 170 were wounded. The Federal authority General Sheridan apparently felt helpless to stop it, but did report to the Fed. govt. “It was an absolute massacre by the police….It was murder which the mayor & police of this city perpetrated without the shadow of necessity.” Multiply this kind of violence hundreds, if not thousands of times, and you have a picture of the “Reconstruction” era.

This bloody war was waged for over a decade until the 1876 Presidential election between Rutherford Hayes & Samuel Tilden. The South was so out of control that a proper election was impossible. When Fed. marshalls escorted blacks to the voting polls, both marshalls & blacks were shot dead. The election “results” were a total corrupted disaster, which resulted in months of drama & hardfisted political fighting. Neo-Confederate militias were ready to start another civil war. The stalemated drama ended with the Republicans in Feb., 1877 making a secret deal with the Southerners to allow Rutherford Hayes, the Republican candidate, to be declared winner of the Presidential election (no one could determine the real election totals, nor the electoral college votes) and in return the new president would pull Federal troops out of the South, & let the Whites legally re-institutionalize white supremacy in every way without any interference.

After that secret deal (primarily made in the Washington D.C. Wormsley Hotel, but also involving bribes to others), most blacks in the South were returned to de-facto slavery & denied basic rights throughout the South until the modern civil rights in the 1960s. Along with the secret deal to negate human rights for southern black Americans, was a campaign carried out to cover up how the 13th (abolishing slavery), 14th (guaranteeing equal rights for all), and the 15th (forbidding states to deny voting on the basis of race) amendments to the Constitution became meaningless words, & the moral victory of the Civil War overturned.

A CHANCE FOR PEACE WHEN THE CIVIL WAR ENDED. The former slaves to a large degree were so happy to have freedom they did not want revenge for centuries of slavery. Gatherings of blacks took place across the South where they adopted position papers to let their former masters know they wanted peace. Booker T. Washington in his book Up From Slavery (1902 ed.), pg. 26-32, provides the text of one of these: “That we have no feelings of resentment toward our former owners, but are willing to let the past be buried with the past, and in the future treat all persons with kindness & respect who shall treat us likewise.”

A FEW MORE DETAILS. This period after the Civil War in the South was called Reconstruction. The North wanted to reconstruct the South to have civil rights & loyalty to the USA. I always wondered why the Civil War got so much attention by historians & Reconstruction was basically ignored. Part of the reason is the cover up of what really happened!!! The North lost in Reconstruction what they had gained on the Civil War battlefield. Slavocracy was est. soon after the Civil War ended. It was forbidden to pay blacks money. Soon after the war, vigilante bands raided employers who paid cash wages to blacks. A successful campaign was waged to keep them unskilled & uneducated. Black tradesmen were required to pay exorbitant impossibly high license fees to practice. Head taxes were charged (only on blacks) and anyone not paying could be jailed. The generous plantation owners would pay the head tax and “generously” allow the blacks to “work it out” (i.e. return to slavery). Even on jobs where money was promised, blacks were systematically cheated out of their wages, and if they protested, they often ended up dead. “Vagrancy” laws were passed by the Southern states making any black who didn’t have property to sustain themselves or support their families a vagrant… blah blah blah went all the excuses to label decent people a “vagrant” who could be arrested. This basically made almost any black in the South subject to arrest as a “vagrant” if the ruling white authorities wanted to. Bona fide jobs were denied the Blacks. Ownership of land was forbidden. And then they had the threat of arrest hung over their head unless they worked (as a slave) for some white. Only now, they were superficially “free”.

LOVE CALLS FOR JUSTICE. YHWH’s justice loves all people, and works to bring life in all its way. Yahshua identified with the downtrodden. In sheer volume of verses, idolatry (putting things first before God) is the primary subject of the Word, and next is the economics & spirituality of wealth & poverty. The Word even equates the poor with the righteous, “You oppress the righteous…and you deprive the poor of justice in the courts.” (A) The ancient Law of God is clear, “Do not deny justice to your poor people…” (B) The affluent areas of World are hard hearted to the gospel, but poor nations are turning to the gospel. In the World, it is typical for things to swing from one extreme to the other. Call it bipolar. During South Africa’s apartheid, the whites abused the blacks. After the demise of apartheid, it swung the other way, now we have blacks raping, murdering, robbing & terrorizing whites. This is why the Prophet of God explains that God wants to heal this worldly bipolarism: “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain & hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, & the rough places plain [level].”(C) Those who love peace, must establish it on justice & fairness.

(A) Amos 5:12 (B) EX 23:6-8 (C) ISA 40:4, cf. ISA 42:15, 45:2