Anne,

a couple of thoughts.  Yes, I did mean to exclude Native Americans, because
their experience with defeat, enslavement, conquest, rape, torture, and
extermination went on for several hundred years, roughly 1622 (or earlier, but hey,
what's a few decades more or less of genocide?) to Wounded Knee or later.
Followed by generations of forced residence on reservations for the survivors;
together with very high rates of poverty, alcoholism, and loss of culture.

White Southerners had not experienced any of the above prior to 1861 for the
most part.  They had always been on the winning side, just like other normal
Americans.  Their defeat and conquest took only 4 years.  Most Americans did
not experience defeat until Vietnam, and even now there are some vets arguing
that they were not beaten by the VC or NVA, but by Jane Fonda, Walter Cronkite,
and the lying politicians at home.  Much like the German soldiers after WW I,
who felt they had been stabbed in the back by Jews and other domestic villains.

What I was getting at is not the way in which ex-Rebels regrouped and managed
to defeat Reconstruction, drive out the carpetbaggers and scalawags, and
terrorize blacks; but why they got away with it.  Why were southern whites allowed
to do what they did?  Yes, many books have been written about this question
and Reconstruction generally, as another poster suggested, but like Lemann's
Redemption all too often the focus is on racist, violent, embittered,
unreconstructed Southern whites.  Who were, and some still are, if you've read Tony
Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic, all of those things.

And why do you suppose that was?  No, I don't think my Confederate ancestors
were owed anything, but perhaps the slaves were owed a lot more than they
ultimately got, which in many ways was a freedom in name only.  Had this country
dealt with the problem in 1865 and the yrs immediately after, we would not now
be talking about reparations.  Instead, having defeated a rival for political
power, turf, and dominance in the U.S., the North took the spoils of victory,
and left bitter, defeated Rebels, and ex-slaves, to deal with each other.

That's so typical of how it has so often happened in American history, esp
when issues of race and class are in play.

I've lived in Boston since 1973, and I just do not think that New Englanders
or those above the Mason-Dixon line generally are the sole repositories of
human virtue, either in 1860, 1865, or today.

Michael Chesson

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