“Ona Judge was an enslaved woman who famously escaped George Washington's household. In late January, federal park employees [at Trump’s order] removed interpretive plaques detailing the stories of Ona Judge and eight other enslaved people who lived at the presidential residence in Philadelphia.” AP
In the news today, some (but not all) of the plaques have been returned at a judge’s order.
Thank you for this column, Erik! It’s good to hear recent scholarship past McPherson’s The Battle Cry of Freedom and C Vann Woodward’s Strange History of Jim Crow. Civil War History used to be whitewashed by the need to sell books to guys like Jimmy Carter, who was big on Shelby Foote. (That says a lot about Carter, and why some guys who worked with him called him an awful man. He should have stepped aside for Ted Kennedy, who would have cleaned Reagan’s clock, especially with Anderson as a third party Republican.) But after Blacks escaped Jim Crow with the VRA, we started getting books like The Ruling Race, which also pointed out that thr history of slavery is a history of labor relations as well as one of race relations. And that slaves didnt like being slaves. “Many slaves stayed with their masters after the war.” Boy, we used to get some mawkish pablum in elementary school, especially from our racist teachers. And we lived in Michigan! I can imagine what kids learned in Mississippi and Virginia.
“Oh those d****** just were so happy being slaves, sitting around in their free housing of 10’x10’ slave cabins with dirt floors and leaky roofs, wearing their free clothing of one shirt and one pair of pantaloons, going to the bathroom outside in an outhouse, and eating their free meals of master provided corn meal mush and molasses, drinking water from a gourd, and supplementing with the vegetables they grew themselves in the plots Ol’ Massa gave them, resting after a 12 hour day in 90 degree heat picking cotton and bringing their large bags full to the cottin gin invented by that white northerner, Eli Whitney. Just as important as the steam engine, the steamboat, the steam locomotive, the McCormick Reaper, the telegraph, and the sewing machine, all invented by white men! And those slaves didn’t need to learn to read, cause Ol’ Stonewall Jackson taught his servats—ok his slaves—Sunday school lessons. So they would laugh and smile and dance about, singing because they were so happy, like carefree young innocent chirren that they were. And they stayed happy, until outside Jewish Communist agitators came down from the North, stirring up the Negroes, filling their heads with ideas of equality and voting and college degrees.”
I kid you not, that was Lincoln’s Birthday in 1966. (No such thing as Black History Month.) The Bobbsey twins were racist AF with Sam and Dinah, read in dialect by our teachers. Then there was Huck Finn, also in dialect, (thank God not in blackface), with explanations about how Jim wasnt as smart as Huck, and skipping over the implied critique of Christianity in the camp meeting and “you can’t pray a lie” and freeing Jim from slavery.
Roots blew every one away. Seeing Leslie Uggams get raped by Chuck Connors after being sold off by Robert Reed and seeing John Amos’s foot get chopped off instead of his testicles was a real eye opener.
It was like, hey, slavery really, really sucked. And really, really sucked after that. Let us never forget that those slaves really, really went and self-freed, as soon as the Union Armies got within 20 miles.
Thank you Erik. It wasn’t easy to become woke when you grew up with racist people in racist towns, not far from where Malcolm X grew up. (He wasnt making up the burning and the lynching around Lansing Michigan. We could see the pictures of the KKK parading down Main Street in 1924 on people’s walls.) If we could make to journey to freedom from the slavery of being racist whites, there is hope for MAGA.
God’s ways are not our ways. Happy Memorial Day to you!
“Bedford Forrest was a tactical military genius. He became Grand Wizard of the KKK because it was a fraternal organization of Confederate War Veterans. He wasnt present at Ft Pillow when the US Colored Troops who tried to surrender were massacred.” Uh-huh. Like if he had been, he wouldnt have participated joyfully in the war crime, like Kesselring and Rommel and Manstein did for the Germans in WW2. Being a tactical genius does not make a war criminal into a figure of admiration. Being a slave trader was not like being a used car sales man, as I have read about as I was becoming woke. 30 or 40 human beings, women and children too, were chained together by neck collars and leg irons, and made to walk by shuffling along from dawn to dark, without food, water, or bathroom breaks, for 15-20 miles a day, barefoot, from Memphis to Belle Meade Plantation, while Mr Bedford Forrest and a couple of other white sadists rode along on mules, with a gun across the saddle and a whip to keep the slow ones moving. (Like he would have a problem after doing that for a living with shooting POWs of either race. Hell, after the missed opportunity at Chickamauga, he visited his commanding general Braxton Bragg in his tent, called him a coward, and threatened to shoot Bragg if Bragg did anything about that, I choose to believe that Bedford Forrest was enough of a John Wick guy that this actually happened, and wasnt just an apocryphal legend. I also choose to believe that Mr. Racist John Wick would have had no problem burning the freedman’s cabin and lynching any freedman foolish enough to try to vote when his Knights were around. (Lloyd Bridges in Roots.) Does anyone, including the Ghost of Shelby Foote, really think a sadistic racist psychopathic serial killer like Bedford Forrest would have foreborn from fighting as dirty as he possibly could have?)
But he’s a God in Tennessee, and all over Civil War reenactments. Everyone wants to be the guy who plays him, so that they can say, “Get thar fust with the most men.”
Funny thing, that guys want to pretend to be a racist, remorseless killer, is it not?
Your grasp of this part of history is much, much better than mine. I remember mostly (if at all) as, “Lies my teacher told me. Thanks for the in depth!
In the 1960s Alabama, survival was an accomplishment. I’m very glad you made it. They were pushing over Freedom Rider buses and setting them on fire and beating white ministers and rabbis and college students until they were paralyzed or dead, and turning fire hoses and attack dog trained German Shepherds (or Alsatians) on liberal white Christians who could go home to the North, and courageous Blacks for whom Alabama and Missisippi was home. They had to live with Sheriff Bull Connor 24/7/365. (By the way, the Michigan State Police guy brought Sabre the German Shepherd to do a show and tell to our church covered dish supper, and it may be anatomically impossible for Alsatians to achieve vaginal penetration, but it isnt impossible for Sabre to bite a man’s testicles off and produce permanent genital mutilation in females, cause I saw this State trooper wear a padded suit and Saber didnt just bite the arm or leg, he bit the crotch and the neck. I was scared straight. Like Winston Smith. Every civil rights demonstrator and boycotter who survived that deserves our thanks and reverent appreciation.)
Looking at the years preceding the Civil War, I see many parallels to today. Slavery was of course the "Hot Button" issue, but unyielding partisanship, lying populists swaying people's minds, a desire to cling to outmoded, stupid ideas and outright regressive thought a few of the deeper root causes. The war could have been avoided, slavery abolished via economic pressures and technological advances, all without the loss of blood , resultant virulent racism and animosities which have yet to be fully resolved. Something about repeating the mistakes of the past...?
This maneuver satisfied the Lincoln administration, which did want to find a way to undermine slavery but also needed to keep slave states in the Union.
And yet and still, Union soldiers kept harassing my ancestors in southwestern Ohio and southeast Indiana for facilitating the Underground Railroad until early 1863. They never got us though.
As if the soldiers had nothing constructive they could have been doing.
Today I learned something new and informative. Never thought about how important slave labor was to southern living, and not just for cash crops like cotton and tobacco,
BT Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery” has an eye-opening account of the first days of emancipation. The slave owners on his plantation were dazed and confused — they didn’t know how to do the most basic things, like cooking, laundry and shoeing horses, and were not equipped to plant and harvest crops. Some slaves stayed on as paid servants. Washington left to get an education. The book is not favored now because it espoused the principle of separate-but-equal instead of full integration, but it is a good first-person account of the times.
I am of the opinion that the main failure of the Abolitionists was that they completely forgot to come up with a plan to deal with the former slaves after they'd been freed. "You're free, congratulations. You're also on your own."
what would be the most ethical way for an abolitionist that found themselves inheriting slaves to divest themselves of owning human beings? ideally without getting everybody tulsa massacred.
Could do what Lee's father did and just free them.
Course, they he wasn't rich anymore. Which is precisely why his son found him a rich wife who owned a lot of slaves. Not my slaves, dad, their my wife's, can't do a thing about it
To be sure, tenant farming was not all exploitation. Not if the owner wanted to keep his tenants and hence his money. Right after the war, black folk started owning land even, buying it from their former owners in a lot of cases, because said former owners did not want to go out and get a job so kept their lifestyle by selling off those gigantic swaths of land. The only folk buying at the time were former slaves.
Course, by then the soil was greatly depleted by the cash crop industry so there was that, but that is when we start to see a lot of beans and peanuts and other legumes being grown.
Think the exploitation settled in a bit later when the former confederates noticed they were losing power and made Jim Crow laws to claw that back.
Enjoy one American package of bootstraps and hard tack, and then good luck! I’m sure you’ll have no problem asserting your dignity and basic humanity around generations who viewed you as plow mules.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “last-minute” commencement speech Saturday in New York to West Point graduates, during which he made the startling admission that the Trump administration could very well be sending those graduates “to war,” and soon.
“Now, today, we are going to send you – we're sending you to lead, we're sending you to forge warriors, and we're sending you – perhaps – to war,” Hegseth told the nearly 1,000 West Point graduates.
Aside from the specific horrors of Kegsbreaths ongoing existence.
All of these assholes are stupid 12 year olds. A graduation speech at a service academy should be a call towards a higher purpose. It shouldn’t be “NO TRANNIES NERDS”
“and with any luck, for some of you, maybe some of you living bear a big american “urban” city polling place, it will be a 15-minute bike to work gig. Which also works out since we spent $800 billion dollars on lobster and Jack Daniels.”
Back in '79 my housemate and his buddy went all in on Apocalypse Now face painting on Halloween. I doubt that Petey's TV friendly facial regimen could handle that.
And we see confederate flags regularly. To be fair, we live in the boonies, and Trump flags predominate as you drive by the local farms.
One of the most shocking things I have seen in the past decade was seeing a pickup truck at a gas station.
And the passenger was a black man.
The pickup truck had a confederate flag where states that require front license plates would have a license plate / tag.
I genuinely was shocked. Since I was in a town that has a lot of automotive factories, maybe the black man needed a ride to work, and his coworker who offered a ride was a raging racist?
It’s been maybe 8 years since I saw that, but my immediate thought was that I couldn’t imagine why a black man would ever get into a truck with a confederate flag on the front🤷♂️.
I saw a confederate battle flag sticker on a parked car at the grocery store a couple days ago (upstate NY). Honestly I had to restrain myself from committing an act of vandalism.
Butler basically told them to shove it up their collective asses.
Paraphrasing is fun!
Really good history that I am certain is being censored in many parts of America.
Oh… look.
“Ona Judge was an enslaved woman who famously escaped George Washington's household. In late January, federal park employees [at Trump’s order] removed interpretive plaques detailing the stories of Ona Judge and eight other enslaved people who lived at the presidential residence in Philadelphia.” AP
In the news today, some (but not all) of the plaques have been returned at a judge’s order.
I hope the balance of the plaques are returned or replaced. And all this cartoonish effort to hide history is fucked.
Thank you for this column, Erik! It’s good to hear recent scholarship past McPherson’s The Battle Cry of Freedom and C Vann Woodward’s Strange History of Jim Crow. Civil War History used to be whitewashed by the need to sell books to guys like Jimmy Carter, who was big on Shelby Foote. (That says a lot about Carter, and why some guys who worked with him called him an awful man. He should have stepped aside for Ted Kennedy, who would have cleaned Reagan’s clock, especially with Anderson as a third party Republican.) But after Blacks escaped Jim Crow with the VRA, we started getting books like The Ruling Race, which also pointed out that thr history of slavery is a history of labor relations as well as one of race relations. And that slaves didnt like being slaves. “Many slaves stayed with their masters after the war.” Boy, we used to get some mawkish pablum in elementary school, especially from our racist teachers. And we lived in Michigan! I can imagine what kids learned in Mississippi and Virginia.
“Oh those d****** just were so happy being slaves, sitting around in their free housing of 10’x10’ slave cabins with dirt floors and leaky roofs, wearing their free clothing of one shirt and one pair of pantaloons, going to the bathroom outside in an outhouse, and eating their free meals of master provided corn meal mush and molasses, drinking water from a gourd, and supplementing with the vegetables they grew themselves in the plots Ol’ Massa gave them, resting after a 12 hour day in 90 degree heat picking cotton and bringing their large bags full to the cottin gin invented by that white northerner, Eli Whitney. Just as important as the steam engine, the steamboat, the steam locomotive, the McCormick Reaper, the telegraph, and the sewing machine, all invented by white men! And those slaves didn’t need to learn to read, cause Ol’ Stonewall Jackson taught his servats—ok his slaves—Sunday school lessons. So they would laugh and smile and dance about, singing because they were so happy, like carefree young innocent chirren that they were. And they stayed happy, until outside Jewish Communist agitators came down from the North, stirring up the Negroes, filling their heads with ideas of equality and voting and college degrees.”
I kid you not, that was Lincoln’s Birthday in 1966. (No such thing as Black History Month.) The Bobbsey twins were racist AF with Sam and Dinah, read in dialect by our teachers. Then there was Huck Finn, also in dialect, (thank God not in blackface), with explanations about how Jim wasnt as smart as Huck, and skipping over the implied critique of Christianity in the camp meeting and “you can’t pray a lie” and freeing Jim from slavery.
Roots blew every one away. Seeing Leslie Uggams get raped by Chuck Connors after being sold off by Robert Reed and seeing John Amos’s foot get chopped off instead of his testicles was a real eye opener.
It was like, hey, slavery really, really sucked. And really, really sucked after that. Let us never forget that those slaves really, really went and self-freed, as soon as the Union Armies got within 20 miles.
Thank you Erik. It wasn’t easy to become woke when you grew up with racist people in racist towns, not far from where Malcolm X grew up. (He wasnt making up the burning and the lynching around Lansing Michigan. We could see the pictures of the KKK parading down Main Street in 1924 on people’s walls.) If we could make to journey to freedom from the slavery of being racist whites, there is hope for MAGA.
God’s ways are not our ways. Happy Memorial Day to you!
Grew up in AL in the 60s. The retconning of Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Ku Klux Klan was something gloriously disgusting to behold.
“Bedford Forrest was a tactical military genius. He became Grand Wizard of the KKK because it was a fraternal organization of Confederate War Veterans. He wasnt present at Ft Pillow when the US Colored Troops who tried to surrender were massacred.” Uh-huh. Like if he had been, he wouldnt have participated joyfully in the war crime, like Kesselring and Rommel and Manstein did for the Germans in WW2. Being a tactical genius does not make a war criminal into a figure of admiration. Being a slave trader was not like being a used car sales man, as I have read about as I was becoming woke. 30 or 40 human beings, women and children too, were chained together by neck collars and leg irons, and made to walk by shuffling along from dawn to dark, without food, water, or bathroom breaks, for 15-20 miles a day, barefoot, from Memphis to Belle Meade Plantation, while Mr Bedford Forrest and a couple of other white sadists rode along on mules, with a gun across the saddle and a whip to keep the slow ones moving. (Like he would have a problem after doing that for a living with shooting POWs of either race. Hell, after the missed opportunity at Chickamauga, he visited his commanding general Braxton Bragg in his tent, called him a coward, and threatened to shoot Bragg if Bragg did anything about that, I choose to believe that Bedford Forrest was enough of a John Wick guy that this actually happened, and wasnt just an apocryphal legend. I also choose to believe that Mr. Racist John Wick would have had no problem burning the freedman’s cabin and lynching any freedman foolish enough to try to vote when his Knights were around. (Lloyd Bridges in Roots.) Does anyone, including the Ghost of Shelby Foote, really think a sadistic racist psychopathic serial killer like Bedford Forrest would have foreborn from fighting as dirty as he possibly could have?)
But he’s a God in Tennessee, and all over Civil War reenactments. Everyone wants to be the guy who plays him, so that they can say, “Get thar fust with the most men.”
Funny thing, that guys want to pretend to be a racist, remorseless killer, is it not?
Your grasp of this part of history is much, much better than mine. I remember mostly (if at all) as, “Lies my teacher told me. Thanks for the in depth!
In the 1960s Alabama, survival was an accomplishment. I’m very glad you made it. They were pushing over Freedom Rider buses and setting them on fire and beating white ministers and rabbis and college students until they were paralyzed or dead, and turning fire hoses and attack dog trained German Shepherds (or Alsatians) on liberal white Christians who could go home to the North, and courageous Blacks for whom Alabama and Missisippi was home. They had to live with Sheriff Bull Connor 24/7/365. (By the way, the Michigan State Police guy brought Sabre the German Shepherd to do a show and tell to our church covered dish supper, and it may be anatomically impossible for Alsatians to achieve vaginal penetration, but it isnt impossible for Sabre to bite a man’s testicles off and produce permanent genital mutilation in females, cause I saw this State trooper wear a padded suit and Saber didnt just bite the arm or leg, he bit the crotch and the neck. I was scared straight. Like Winston Smith. Every civil rights demonstrator and boycotter who survived that deserves our thanks and reverent appreciation.)
Looking at the years preceding the Civil War, I see many parallels to today. Slavery was of course the "Hot Button" issue, but unyielding partisanship, lying populists swaying people's minds, a desire to cling to outmoded, stupid ideas and outright regressive thought a few of the deeper root causes. The war could have been avoided, slavery abolished via economic pressures and technological advances, all without the loss of blood , resultant virulent racism and animosities which have yet to be fully resolved. Something about repeating the mistakes of the past...?
I am reminded that one of the cases that turned the UK against slavery was an insurance cases regarding claiming for jettisoned cargo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre
Working my way slowly thru the book Cloudsplitter. It's amazing how little we know about this stuff. Just the veneer, really.
IS MAGA STATES NEEDED?
This maneuver satisfied the Lincoln administration, which did want to find a way to undermine slavery but also needed to keep slave states in the Union.
All my gay, Black, and progressive friends living in those states say, “Hell yeah!”
800,000 voted against Trump in AL, 4,800,000 in TX, 1,000,000 in TN, 465,000 in MS. Not ready to give all those folks to MAGA.
And yet and still, Union soldiers kept harassing my ancestors in southwestern Ohio and southeast Indiana for facilitating the Underground Railroad until early 1863. They never got us though.
As if the soldiers had nothing constructive they could have been doing.
Or even Reconstructive.
Today I learned something new and informative. Never thought about how important slave labor was to southern living, and not just for cash crops like cotton and tobacco,
BT Washington’s autobiography “Up from Slavery” has an eye-opening account of the first days of emancipation. The slave owners on his plantation were dazed and confused — they didn’t know how to do the most basic things, like cooking, laundry and shoeing horses, and were not equipped to plant and harvest crops. Some slaves stayed on as paid servants. Washington left to get an education. The book is not favored now because it espoused the principle of separate-but-equal instead of full integration, but it is a good first-person account of the times.
Thank you, Erik. One of the best discussions of this that I've read.
I am of the opinion that the main failure of the Abolitionists was that they completely forgot to come up with a plan to deal with the former slaves after they'd been freed. "You're free, congratulations. You're also on your own."
"Here's a one-way ticket to a bit of Africa we're calling Liberia"
what would be the most ethical way for an abolitionist that found themselves inheriting slaves to divest themselves of owning human beings? ideally without getting everybody tulsa massacred.
Could do what Lee's father did and just free them.
Course, they he wasn't rich anymore. Which is precisely why his son found him a rich wife who owned a lot of slaves. Not my slaves, dad, their my wife's, can't do a thing about it
was hoping for something better than "you're free now, get off my land" or "y'all are sharecroppers now, welcome to endless economic exploitation".
To be sure, tenant farming was not all exploitation. Not if the owner wanted to keep his tenants and hence his money. Right after the war, black folk started owning land even, buying it from their former owners in a lot of cases, because said former owners did not want to go out and get a job so kept their lifestyle by selling off those gigantic swaths of land. The only folk buying at the time were former slaves.
Course, by then the soil was greatly depleted by the cash crop industry so there was that, but that is when we start to see a lot of beans and peanuts and other legumes being grown.
Think the exploitation settled in a bit later when the former confederates noticed they were losing power and made Jim Crow laws to claw that back.
Give them each some money along with the freedom, to get them started.
The former slave owners and those that fought for them were let off the hook and not held to account for the most part.
Enjoy one American package of bootstraps and hard tack, and then good luck! I’m sure you’ll have no problem asserting your dignity and basic humanity around generations who viewed you as plow mules.
I need to read that W. E. B. DuBois Black Reconstruction book asap.
Suit up, Kegsbreath:
***
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth delivered a “last-minute” commencement speech Saturday in New York to West Point graduates, during which he made the startling admission that the Trump administration could very well be sending those graduates “to war,” and soon.
“Now, today, we are going to send you – we're sending you to lead, we're sending you to forge warriors, and we're sending you – perhaps – to war,” Hegseth told the nearly 1,000 West Point graduates.
Aside from the specific horrors of Kegsbreaths ongoing existence.
All of these assholes are stupid 12 year olds. A graduation speech at a service academy should be a call towards a higher purpose. It shouldn’t be “NO TRANNIES NERDS”
*drink*
“and with any luck, for some of you, maybe some of you living bear a big american “urban” city polling place, it will be a 15-minute bike to work gig. Which also works out since we spent $800 billion dollars on lobster and Jack Daniels.”
Followed by muted golf clap, I suspect.
Back in '79 my housemate and his buddy went all in on Apocalypse Now face painting on Halloween. I doubt that Petey's TV friendly facial regimen could handle that.
very inspiring and motivational.
Let's get out there and take a helicopter ride with Kid Rock!
Alex Jones faces new defamation suit over social media comments https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/alex-jones-faces-new-defamation-suit-over-social-media-comments/ar-AA23Q5oU?cvpid=e7a57afe4b6a4a22dd5891df90ab8f95
The courthouse workers in Austin must be planning their days off mere minutes after Jones' trial days are scheduled.
Gee, I hope they don't take away his shopping cart and sleeping bag that he's going to need living under a highway overpass.
he manages to live pretty well on the generosity of the peeps he uses to shield his assets.
The term useful fool springs to mind.
O/T: From "Girl with the Dogs", Vanessa attempts to give Pumpkin, a big ole orange Maine Coon, a spa day:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHEA7GmyRYk
I will never forget going back home to Pittsburgh to visit Dad (may he rest in power.)
Said something along the lines of "I'm just glad Pennsylvania was a Union state."
Dad paused, got an uncomfortable look on his face, and said "well, you'll see confederate flags on some vehicles here."
DAFUQ?
Managed--just barely--not to yell "oh, for fuck's sake!" But only just...
/FFS
We reside in Michigan.
And we see confederate flags regularly. To be fair, we live in the boonies, and Trump flags predominate as you drive by the local farms.
One of the most shocking things I have seen in the past decade was seeing a pickup truck at a gas station.
And the passenger was a black man.
The pickup truck had a confederate flag where states that require front license plates would have a license plate / tag.
I genuinely was shocked. Since I was in a town that has a lot of automotive factories, maybe the black man needed a ride to work, and his coworker who offered a ride was a raging racist?
It’s been maybe 8 years since I saw that, but my immediate thought was that I couldn’t imagine why a black man would ever get into a truck with a confederate flag on the front🤷♂️.
I saw a confederate battle flag sticker on a parked car at the grocery store a couple days ago (upstate NY). Honestly I had to restrain myself from committing an act of vandalism.
size?
5x7, maybe. on a window
everything's bigger in Texas i guess. fortunately Spurs flags are outnumbering trump flags in my area by about a thousand to one now.
Where you at?
Hudson Valley in NY.
Neighborhood of Kingston
Ah yes, beautiful up there. I grew up in Poughkeepsie, and we’re regularly in Columbia County.
Howdy, neighbor!
I live in Columbia County. Haven’t seen as many loser flags or Trump stickers lately.
*waves from Austerlitz*
Yeah, I used to see more of that on the other side of the river, where I guess taxes are lower, so perhaps skews more conservative.
He was not wrong. Between Pittsburgh and State College/Penn State, my alma mater, you’ll see that sort of thing.