Gone with the Wind

Gone With The  Wind is a well known & very popular book about the South of America during the American Civil War and its aftermath, the Reconstruction, from 1861 onwards. It was written by Margaret Mitchell, who lived in Atlanta all of her life and knew people who were there at the time.  Margaret Mitchell's book reads as good history, albeit from a European perspective than African. Given its huge popularity it has been a starting point for historians and, more especially Propagandists marketing White Guilt and Black Hate. The book reads as right about the feel of the period but now Propaganda machines run by the Main Stream Media and the Education industry attack her work. They are very successful in marketing White Guilt and Black Hate.

Paul Craig Roberts, an American economist and one time politician tells us that the American Civil War Was About Taxing the South To Pay For The North. Doctor Roberts also told us about Falsifying History In Behalf Of Agendas. 

Another look, a well informed look comes from Fred. He is from the deep South, where everyone is guilty or black, according to the illiterate, the ignoramii, the Racists, to Lenin's Useful Idiots full of hate. But Fred is special. He knows his history. Fred mentions the Haiti Slave Revolt and its well known results. Fred tells the truth and gives links to sources. That is evidence, that is as good as it gets. It is at Fun with Slavery - Dark Spots in a Shining Sea of Twaddle. Read for yourself. Think for yourself. Decide for yourself.
PS Fortunately the book is now on line at Gone With The Wind On Line.

Happily the New York Post has written about the making of the film as Vivien Leigh had nervous breakdown filming ‘Gone with the Wind’. It was the highest grossing film of all time at $1.8 TRILLION inflation adjusted dollars.

After the  American Civil War (1861 to 1865) and defeat, the Southern States were subjected to Reconstruction by Carpetbaggers. Southerners were not amused, especially by the way in which Sherman did his March to the Sea, looting and destroying on the way.

Mrs Mitchell understood relationships. She tells us about the class divisions among black and white. House slaves regarded themselves as superior to yard slaves, to field hands and, interestingly to poor white people such as Crackers. Blacks were called Niggers, Negroes or darkies by all and sundry without any great malice.

She makes a number of points en passant:-
The war was cruel.
The Southern lack of industry was a major weakness.
The blockade of Southern ports was effective, cutting off trade & reducing people to poverty.
Speculators and blockade runners did very well for themselves.
The subsequent pillaging & looting made matters worse in the South.
Sherman drove everybody, young and old out of Atlanta into the November cold, quartered his men there then burnt the town to the ground. People died as a direct result.
The Freedmen's Bureau was a bunch of crooks abusing power to rob the South. Imposing arbitrary taxes to bankrupt estate owners was one technique.
She has Rhett Butler saying to Scarlett O'Hara in Chapter 34 ......you looked as hard as nails. I’ve seen eyes like yours above a dueling pistol twenty paces from me and they aren’t a pleasant sight. This was after her proposal of marriage  fell flat. 
Yankees incited blacks to rape white women - see Chapter 37. This led gentlemen to kill and to the Ku Klux Klan. The Wiki pretends it wasn't like that; that Lincoln wanted reconciliation. Believe it if you want.
Chapter XXXVII gives the lie to the reconciliation story: Carpetbaggers throve while decent folk starved. She says QUOTE I'd have taken their damned oath [ Ironclad Oath ] right after the surrender if they'd acted decent. I can be restored to the the union but by God I can't be reconstructed into it. UNQUOTE. The Southerners who took the oath got compensated for the damage done by the North. They even got the vote.
The Northern women were racists who would not trust a Negro nurse with their children and believed that Southerners had branding irons & kept bloodhounds to track down run aways. See Chapter 38. 
The state government imposed by the North i.e. Republicans was monstrously greedy & corrupt - see Chapter 52.
Bullock, the governor was bent as a nine bob note;  he lied to hang on to power then had to do a runner to beat impeachment. The Wiki skates over these details - see Chapter 58 but see what it admits in a different article, Georgia During Reconstruction. It does hostile commentary on the White League ex Wiki - lying(?)

The book became a very successful film in 1939; also called Gone with the Wind. When it gets to Atlanta the schools close so that everybody can see it. Stars included Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, Olivia de Havilland as Melanie Hamilton and Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes. A first class choice for Rhett would have been Errol Flynn, a genuine scoundrel; he would have been acting naturally. 

The Wiki's depiction of the Freedmen's Bureau contrasts strongly with Margaret Mitchell's. I prefer her view. The Wiki is a Propaganda machine, which is usually reliable until the agenda is involved; tending to lie by omission. Notice that it refers to "African Americans", the current Politically Correct term used by Marxists, Lenin's Useful Idiots and other Culture Warriors intent on destroying Western Civilization.

Chapter 49 is about the deep resentment felt by Southerners about the Scalawags, the turncoats & their corruption. The Freedmen's Bureau was also cheating people. Governor Bullock was deeply loathed. Impractical Yankee schoolmarms wanting to uplift the blacks were too but had the excuse of their ignorance.

The Wiki chooses to tell us that Presidents, both Lincoln and Johnson took moderate positions regarding the South, the Confederate States of America. This contrasts with the truth of Lincoln's scorched earth policy, with Sherman's pillaging & destruction during his March to the Sea. The Wiki has an agenda of lies.

 

Margaret Mitchell ex Wiki
Gone With The Wind was her one book, a great success and somewhat biographical. E.g. she did ride a lot. She learned about the civil war directly from he mother's mother.

 

Gone with the Wind ex Wiki
Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman's destructive "March to the Sea". This historical novel features a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, with the title taken from a poem written by Ernest Dowson.

Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.

Written from the perspective of the slaveholder, Gone with the Wind is Southern plantation fiction. Its portrayal of slavery and African Americans has been considered controversial, especially by succeeding generations, as well as its use of a racial epithet and ethnic slurs common to the period. However, the novel has become a reference point for subsequent writers about the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to it in their writings, interpret and study it. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture.

Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into a 1939 American film. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.^[2]

Mitchell used color symbolism, especially the colors red and green, which frequently are associated with Scarlett O'Hara. Mitchell identified the primary theme as survival. She left the ending speculative for the reader, however. She was often asked what became of her lovers, Rhett and Scarlett. She replied, "For all I know, Rhett may have found someone else who was less difficult."^[3] Two sequels authorized by Mitchell's estate were published more than a half century later. A parody was also produced.

 

Gone with the Wind (film) ex Wiki
Gone with the Wind is a 1939 American epic historical romance film adapted from Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel of the same name. The film was produced by David O. Selznick of Selznick International Pictures and directed by Victor Fleming. Set in the American South against the backdrop of the

American Civil War and Reconstruction era, the film tells the story of Scarlett O'Hara, the strong-willed daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, from her romantic pursuit of Ashley Wilkes, who is married to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton, to her marriage to Rhett Butler. The leading roles are portrayed by Vivien Leigh (Scarlett), Clark Gable (Rhett), Leslie Howard (Ashley), and Olivia de Havilland (Melanie).

Production was difficult from the start. Filming was delayed for two years due to Selznick's determination to secure Gable for the role of Rhett Butler, and the "search for Scarlett" led to 1,400 women being interviewed for the part. The original screenplay was written by Sidney Howard, but underwent many revisions by several writers in an attempt to get it down to a suitable length. The original director, George Cukor, was fired shortly after filming had begun and was replaced by Fleming, who in turn was briefly replaced by Sam Wood while Fleming took some time off due to exhaustion.

The film received positive reviews upon its release in December 1939, although some reviewers found it overlong. The casting was widely praised and many reviewers found Leigh especially suited to her role as Scarlett. At the 12th Academy Awards, it received ten Academy Awards (eight competitive, two honorary) from thirteen nominations, including wins for Best Picture, Best Director (Fleming), Best Adapted Screenplay (posthumously awarded to Sidney Howard), Best Actress (Leigh), and Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel, becoming the first African-American to win an Academy Award). It set records for the total number of wins and nominations at the time. The film was immensely popular, becoming the highest-earning film made up to that point, and retained the record for over a quarter of a century. When adjusted for monetary inflation, it is still the most successful film in box-office history.

Gone with the Wind has been criticized as historical revisionism glorifying slavery, but nevertheless, it has been credited for triggering changes to the way African-Americans are depicted cinematically. It was re-released periodically throughout the 20th century and became ingrained in popular culture. The film is regarded as one of the greatest films of all time; it has placed in the top ten of the American Film Institute's list of top 100 American films since the list's inception in 1998, and in 1989, the United States Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

 

American Civil War ex Wiki   [ 1861 - 1865 ]
The American Civil War was fought in the United States from 1861 to 1865. After a long-standing controversy over slavery and state's rights, war broke out in April 1861, when Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina, shortly after Abraham Lincoln was elected. The nationalists of the Union proclaimed loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. They faced secessionists of the Confederate States of America advocating states’ rights to perpetual slavery and its expansion in the Americas.

Among the 34 U.S. states in February 1861, seven Southern slave states individually declared their secession from the U.S. to form the Confederate States of America. The Confederacy grew to include eleven states; it claimed two more border states (Kentucky and Missouri), the Indian Territory, and the southern portions of the Union's western territories of Arizona and New Mexico, which was organized and incorporated into the Confederacy as Confederate Arizona. The Confederacy was never diplomatically recognized by the United States government, nor was it recognized by any foreign country (although Britain and France granted it belligerent status). The states that remained loyal, including the border states where slavery was legal, were known as the Union or the North.

The North and South quickly raised volunteer and conscription armies that fought mostly in the South over four years. During this time many innovations in warfare occurred, including the development and use of iron-clad ships, ultimately changing naval strategy around the world. The Union finally won the war when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at the battle of Appomattox, which triggered a series of surrenders by Confederate generals throughout the southern states. Four years of intense combat left 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers dead, a higher number than the number of American military deaths in World War I and World War II combined, and much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and 4 million slaves were freed. The Reconstruction Era (1863–1877) overlapped and followed the war, with the process of restoring national unity, strengthening the national government, and granting civil rights to freed slaves throughout the country. The Civil War is arguably the most studied and written about episode in American history.

 

Reconstruction ex Wiki
The term Reconstruction Era, in the context of the history of the United States, has two senses: the first covers the complete history of the entire country from 1865 to 1877 following the American Civil War (1861 to 1865); the second sense focuses on the attempted transformation of the Southern United States from 1863 to 1877, as directed by Congress, with the reconstruction of state and society. With the three Reconstruction Amendments, the era saw the first amendments to the US Constitution in decades.

Three visions of Civil War memory appeared during Reconstruction: the reconciliationist vision, which was rooted in coping with the death and devastation the war had brought; the white supremacist vision, which included terror and violence; and the emancipationist vision, which sought full freedom, citizenship and Constitutional equality for African Americans.

Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson both took moderate positions designed to bring the South back into the union as quickly as possible, while Radical Republicans in Congress sought stronger measures to upgrade the rights of African Americans, including the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, while curtailing the rights of former Confederates, such as through the provisions of the Wade–Davis Bill. Johnson followed a lenient policy toward ex-Confederates. Lincoln's last speeches show that he was leaning toward supporting the enfranchisement of all freedmen, whereas Johnson was opposed to this.^[3]

Johnson's interpretations of Lincoln's policies prevailed until the Congressional elections of 1866 in the North, which enabled the Radicals to take control of policy, remove former Confederates from power, and enfranchise the freedmen. A Republican coalition came to power in nearly all the southern states and set out to transform the society by setting up a free labor economy, using the U.S. Army and the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau protected the legal rights of freedmen, negotiated labor contracts, and set up schools and churches for them. Thousands of Northerners came south as missionaries, teachers, businessmen and politicians. Some also entered politics. Hostile whites called them "Carpetbaggers". In early 1866, Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights Bills and sent them to Johnson for his signature. The first bill extended the life of the bureau, originally established as a temporary organization charged with assisting refugees and freed slaves, while the second defined all persons born in the United States as national citizens with equality before the law. After Johnson vetoed the bills, Congress overrode his veto, making the Civil Rights Act the first major bill in the history of the United States to become law through an override of a presidential veto. The Radicals in the House of Representatives, frustrated by Johnson's opposition to Congressional Reconstruction, filed impeachment charges. The action failed by one vote in the Senate.

Elected in 1868, Republican President Ulysses S. Grant supported Congressional Reconstruction and enforced the protection of African Americans in the South through the use of the Enforcement Acts passed by Congress. Grant used the Enforcement Acts to effectively combat the Ku Klux Klan, which was essentially wiped out (although a new incarnation of the Klan eventually would again come to national prominence in the 1920s), but was unable to resolve the escalating tensions inside the Republican party between the northerners on the one hand, and those Republicans originally hailing from the South on the other (this latter group would be labelled "Scalawags" by those opposing Reconstruction). Meanwhile, "Redeemers", self-styled Conservatives (in close cooperation with the a faction of the Democratic Party) strongly opposed reconstruction.^[4] They alleged widespread corruption by the Carpetbaggers, excessive state spending and ruinous taxes. Meanwhile, public support for Reconstruction policies, requiring continued supervision of the South, faded in the North, largely due to concerns over the Panic of 1873. The Democrats, who strongly opposed Reconstruction, regained control of the House of Representatives in 1874. In 1877, as part of a Congressional bargain to elect Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president following the close 1876 presidential election, U.S. Army troops were removed from the South, ending Reconstruction and allowing Democrats to return to power.

Reconstruction was a significant chapter in the history of civil rights in the United States, and in economic history. After Reconstruction ended, the South remained a poverty-stricken "backwater" dependent on agriculture.^[5] White Southerners soon succeeded in re-establishing legal and political dominance over blacks through violence, intimidation and discrimination. Historian Eric Foner argues, "What remains certain is that Reconstruction failed, and that for blacks its failure was a disaster whose magnitude cannot be obscured by the genuine accomplishments that did endure."^[6]

 

Errol Flynn ex Wiki
Errol Leslie Flynn^[1] (20 June 1909 – 14 October 1959)^[1] was an Australian-born American actor who achieved fame in Hollywood after 1935.^[2] He was known for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films, as well as frequent partnerships with Olivia De Havilland. He became an American citizen in 1942.

Errol Leslie Flynn was born in a suburb of Hobart, Tasmania, where his father, Theodore, was a lecturer (1909) and later professor (1911) of biology at the University of Tasmania. His mother was born Lily Mary Young, but shortly after marrying Theodore at St. John's Church of England, Birchgrove, Sydney, on 23 January 1909,^[3] she changed her first name to Marelle.^[4] Flynn described his mother's family as "seafaring folk"^[5] and this appears to be where his lifelong interest in boats and the sea originated. Both of his parents were native-born Australians of Irish, English, and Scottish descent. Despite Flynn's claims,^[6] the evidence indicates that he was not descended from any of the Bounty mutineers.^[7]...................

His formal education ended with his expulsion from Shore for theft,^[11] and, he later claimed, for a sexual encounter with the school's laundress.^[12] After being dismissed from a job as a junior clerk with a Sydney shipping company for pilfering petty cash, he went to Papua New Guinea at the age of eighteen, seeking his fortune in tobacco planting and metals mining. He spent the next five years oscillating between the New Guinea frontier territory and Sydney.^[11]

In January 1931, he became engaged to Naomi Campbell-Dibbs, the youngest daughter of Mr and Mrs R Campbell-Dibbs of Temora and Bowral NSW, a relationship which ended before 1935.^[13]

 

Carpetbagger ex Wiki
In the history of the United States, a carpetbagger was a Northerner who moved to the South after the American Civil War, during the Reconstruction era (1863–1877). Many white Southerners denounced them fearing they would loot and plunder the defeated South and be politically allied with the Radical Republicans.^[1] Sixty men from the North, including educated free people of color and slaves who had escaped to the North and returned South after the war, were elected as Republicans to Congress. The majority of Republican governors in the South during Reconstruction were from the North. Historian Eric Foner argues:

... most carpetbaggers probably combine the desire for personal gain with a commitment to taking part in an effort "to substitute the civilization of freedom for that of slavery". ... Carpetbaggers generally supported measures aimed at democratizing and modernizing the South – civil rights legislation, aid to economic development, the establishment of public school systems.^[2]

"Carpetbagger" was used by Southerners as a pejorative term, referring to the carpet bags (a form of cheap luggage made from carpet fabric) which many of these newcomers carried. The term came to be associated with opportunism and exploitation by outsiders. In the early 21st century in the U.S., the term is used to refer to a parachute candidate, that is, an outsider who runs for public office in an area where they do not have deep community ties, or have lived only for a short time.

 

Scalawag ex Wiki  [ Scallywags? ]
In United States history, scalawags were southern whites who supported Reconstruction and the Republican Party, after the  American Civil War. Like the similar term "carpetbagger," the word has a long history of use as a slur in Southern partisan debates. The opponents of the scalawags claimed they were disloyal to traditional values of white supremacy.^[1] The term is commonly used in historical studies as a neutral descriptor of Southern white Republicans, although some historians have discarded the term due to its history of pejorative connotations.^[2]

Origins of the term
The term is a derogatory epithet, yet it is used by many historians anyway, as in Wiggins (1991), Baggett (2003),^[3] Rubin (2006) and Wetta (2012). The word scalawag, originally referring to low-grade farm animals, was adopted by their opponents to refer to Southern whites who formed a Republican coalition with black freedmen and Northern newcomers (called carpetbaggers) to take control of their state and local governments^{[citation needed]}. Among the earliest uses in this new meaning were references in Alabama and Georgia newspapers in the summer of 1867, first referring to all southern Republicans, then later restricting it to only white ones.^[1]

Historian Ted Tunnel writes that

Reference works such as Joseph E. Worcester's 1860 Dictionary of the English Language defined scalawag as "A low worthless fellow; a scapegrace." Scalawag was also a word for low-grade farm animals. In early 1868 a Mississippi editor observed that scalawag "has been used from time immemorial to designate inferior milch cows in the cattle markets of Virginia and Kentucky." That June the Richmond Enquirer concurred; scalawag had heretofore "applied to all of the mean, lean, mangy, hidebound skiny [sic], worthless cattle in every particular drove." Only in recent months, the Richmond paper remarked, had the term taken on political meaning.

During the 1868–69 session of Judge "Greasy" Sam Watts court in Haywood County, North Carolina, Dr. William Closs, D.D. testified that a scalawag was "a Native born Southern white man who says he is no better than a negro and tells the truth when he says it." Some accounts record his testimony as "a native Southern white man, who says that a negro is as good as he is, and tells the truth when he says so."

By October 1868 a Mississippi newspaper was defining the expression scathingly in terms of Redemption politics.^[4] The term continued to be used as a pejorative by conservative pro-segregationist southerners well into the 20th century.^[5] But historians commonly use the term to refer to the group of historical actors with no pejorative meaning intended.^[6]

History
After the American Civil War during the Reconstruction Era 1863 to 1869, Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson undertook policies designed to bring the South back to normal as soon as possible, while the Radical Republicans used Congress to block the president, impose harsh terms, and upgrade the rights of the Freedmen (the ex-slaves). In the South, Black Freedmen and White Southerners with Republican sympathies joined forces with Northerners who had moved south (called "Carpetbaggers" by their southern opponents) to implement the policies of the Republican party.

Despite being a minority, scalawags gained power by taking advantage of the Reconstruction laws of 1867, which disenfranchised the majority of Southern white voters as they could not take the Ironclad oath, which required they had never served in Confederate armed forces or held any political office under the state or Confederate governments. Historian Harold Hyman says that in 1866 Congressmen "described the oath as the last bulwark against the return of ex-rebels to power, the barrier behind which Southern Unionists and Negroes protected themselves."^[7]

The coalition controlled every former Confederate state except Virginia, as well as Kentucky and Missouri (which were claimed by the North and the South) for varying lengths of time between 1866 and 1877. Two of the most prominent scalawags were General James Longstreet, one of Robert E. Lee's top generals, and Joseph E. Brown, who had been the wartime governor of Georgia. During the 1870s, many scalawags left the Republican Party and joined the conservative-Democrat coalition. Conservative Democrats had replaced all Republican minority governments in the South by 1877, after the controversial presidential election of 1876, in which the remaining Reconstruction governments had certified the Republican electors despite the Democratic candidate having carried the states.

Franklin gives an assessment of the motives of Southern Unionists. He noted that as more Southerners were allowed to vote and participate:^[8]

A curious assortment of native Southerners thus became eligible to participate in Radical Reconstruction. And the number increased as the President granted individual pardons or issued new proclamations of amnesty....Their primary interest was in supporting a party that would build the South on a broader base than the plantation aristocracy of Antebellum days. They found it expedient to do business with Negroes and so-called carpetbaggers; but often they returned to the Democratic party as it gained sufficient strength to be a factor in Southern politics.

Eventually most scalawags joined the Democratic Redeemer coalition. A minority persisted as Republicans and formed the "tan" half of the "Black and Tan" Republican party. It was a minority element in the GOP in every southern state after 1877.^[9]

Most of the 430 Republican newspapers in the South were edited by scalawags—only 20 percent were edited by carpetbaggers. White businessmen generally boycotted Republican papers, which survived through government patronage.^[10][11]

 

Freedmen's Bureau ex Wiki
The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, usually referred to as simply the Freedmen's Bureau,^[1] was a U.S. federal government agency established in 1865 to aid freedmen (freed slaves) in the South during the Reconstruction era of the United States, which attempted to change society in the former Confederate States.

The Freedmen's Bureau Bill, which established the Freedmen's Bureau on March 3, 1865, was initiated by President Abraham Lincoln and was intended to last for one year after the end of the Civil War.^[2] The Freedmen's Bureau was an important agency of early Reconstruction, assisting freedmen in the South. The Bureau was made a part of the United States Department of War, as it was the only agency with an existing organization that could be assigned to the South. Headed by Union Army General Oliver O. Howard, the Bureau started operations in 1865. Throughout the first year, its representatives learned that these tasks would be very difficult, as Southern legislatures passed laws for Black Codes that restricted movement, conditions of labor, and other civil rights of African Americans, nearly duplicating conditions of slavery. The Freedmen's Bureau controlled limited arable land.^[3]

The Bureau's powers were expanded to help African Americans find family members from whom they had become separated during the war. It arranged to teach them to read and write, considered critical by the freedmen themselves as well as the government.^[4][5] Bureau agents also served as legal advocates for African Americans in both local and national courts, mostly in cases dealing with family issues.^[4] The Bureau encouraged former major planters to rebuild their plantations and urged freed blacks to return to work for them, kept an eye on contracts between the newly free laborers and planters, and pushed whites and blacks to work together as employers and employees rather than as masters and slaves.^[4]

In 1866, Congress renewed the charter for the Bureau. President Andrew Johnson, a Southerner who had succeeded to the office following Lincoln's assassination, vetoed the bill because he believed that it encroached on states' rights, relied inappropriately on the military in peacetime, and would prevent freed slaves from becoming independent by offering too much assistance.^[2][6] By 1869, the Bureau had lost most of its funding and as a result been forced to cut much of its staff.^[2] By 1870 the Bureau had been considerably weakened due to the rise of Ku Klux Klan violence in the South.^[2] In 1872, Congress abruptly abandoned the program, effectively shutting down the Bureau by refusing to approve renewal legislation. It did not inform Howard, who had been transferred to Arizona by President Ulysses S. Grant to settle hostilities between the Apache and settlers. Grant's Secretary of War William W. Belknap, was hostile to Howard's leadership and authority at the Bureau, and aroused controversy by his reassignment.

 

Crackers ex Wiki
Cracker, sometimes white cracker or "cracka", is a usually derogatory and/or offensive term for white people,^[1] especially poor rural whites in the Southern United States. In reference to a native of Florida or Georgia, however, it is sometimes used in a neutral or positive context or self-descriptively with pride (see Florida cracker and Georgia cracker).^[2]

A 1783 pejorative use of "crackers" specifies men who "are descended from convicts that were transported from Great Britain to Virginia at different times, and inherit so much profligacy from their ancestors, that they are the most abandoned set of men on earth." ^[3] Benjamin Franklin, in his memoirs (1790), referred to "a race of runnagates and crackers, equally wild and savage as the Indians" who inhabit the "desert[ed] woods and mountains." ^[4]

The term cracker could have derived from the Middle English cnac, craic, or crak, which originally meant the sound of a cracking whip but came to refer to "loud conversation, bragging talk".^[5] In Elizabethan times this could refer to "entertaining conversation" (one may be said to "crack" a joke) and cracker could be used to describe loud braggarts; this term and the Gaelic spelling craic are still in use in Ireland, Scotland and Northern England. It is documented in Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this same that deafs our ears with this abundance of superfluous breath?"^[6][7] This usage is illustrated in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth which reads:.............

 

Abraham Lincoln ex Wiki
Lincoln's victory prompted seven southern slave states to form the Confederate States of America before he moved into the White House—no compromise or reconciliation was found regarding slavery and secession. Subsequently, on April 12, 1861, a Confederate attack on Fort Sumter inspired the North to enthusiastically rally behind the Union. As the leader of the moderate faction of the Republican Party, Lincoln confronted Radical Republicans, who demanded harsher treatment of the South, War Democrats, who called for more compromise, anti-war Democrats (called Copperheads), who despised him, and irreconcilable secessionists, who plotted his assassination............

 His primary goal was to reunite the nation. He suspended habeas corpus, leading to the controversial ex parte Merryman decision, and he averted potential British intervention in the war by defusing the Trent Affair in late 1861.

Lincoln closely supervised the war effort, especially the selection of top generals, including his most successful general, Ulysses S. Grant. He also made major decisions on Union war strategy, including a naval blockade that shut down the South's normal trade, moves to take control of Kentucky and Tennessee, and using gunboats to gain control of the southern river system............

 Anticipating the war's conclusion, Lincoln pushed a moderate view of Reconstruction, seeking to reunite the nation speedily through a policy of generous reconciliation in the face of lingering and bitter divisiveness. On April 14, 1865, five days after the surrender of Confederate commanding general Robert E. Lee, Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth and died the next day. Lincoln has been consistently ranked both by scholars^[5] and the public^[6] as among the greatest U.S. presidents.

 

Andrew Johnson ex Wiki
Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808 – July 31, 1875) was the 17th President of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. Johnson became president as he was vice president at the time of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. A Democrat who ran with Lincoln on the National Union ticket, Johnson came to office as the Civil War concluded. The new president favored quick restoration of the seceded states to the Union. His plans did not give protection to the former slaves, and he came into conflict with the Republican-dominated Congress, culminating in his impeachment by the House of Representatives. The first American president to be impeached, he was acquitted in the Senate by one vote.

Johnson was born in poverty in Raleigh, North Carolina. Apprenticed as a tailor, he worked in several frontier towns before settling in Greeneville, Tennessee. He served as alderman and mayor there before being elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1835. After brief service in the Tennessee Senate, Johnson was elected to the federal House of Representatives in 1843, where he served five two-year terms. He became Governor of Tennessee for four years, and was elected by the legislature to the US Senate in 1857. In his congressional service, he sought passage of the Homestead Bill, which was enacted soon after he left his Senate seat in 1862. As Southern slave states, including Tennessee, seceded to form the Confederate States of America, Johnson remained firmly with the Union. He was the only sitting senator from a Confederate state who did not resign his seat upon learning of his state's secession. In 1862, Lincoln appointed him as military governor of Tennessee after most of it had been retaken. In 1864, Johnson, as a War Democrat and Southern Unionist, was a logical choice as running mate for Lincoln, who wished to send a message of national unity in his re-election campaign; their ticket easily won. When Johnson was sworn in as vice president in March 1865, he gave a rambling speech, after which he secluded himself to avoid public ridicule. Six weeks later, the assassination of Lincoln made him president.

Johnson implemented his own form of Presidential Reconstruction – a series of proclamations directing the seceded states to hold conventions and elections to re-form their civil governments. When Southern states returned many of their old leaders, and passed Black Codes to deprive the freedmen of many civil liberties, Congressional Republicans refused to seat legislators from those states and advanced legislation to overrule the Southern actions. Johnson vetoed their bills, and Congressional Republicans overrode him, setting a pattern for the remainder of his presidency.^[3] Johnson opposed the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave citizenship to former slaves. In 1866, Johnson went on an unprecedented national tour promoting his executive policies, seeking to destroy his Republican opponents.^[4] As the conflict between the branches of government grew, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act, restricting Johnson's ability to fire Cabinet officials. When he persisted in trying to dismiss Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, he was impeached by the House of Representatives, and narrowly avoided conviction in the Senate and removal from office. After failing to win the 1868 Democratic presidential nomination, Johnson left office in 1869.

Returning to Tennessee after his presidency, Johnson sought political vindication, and gained it in his eyes when he was elected to the Senate again in 1875, making Johnson the only former president to serve in the Senate. He died just months into his term. While some admire Johnson's strict constitutionalism,^[5] his strong opposition to federally guaranteed rights for African Americans is widely criticized. He is regarded by many historians as one of the worst presidents in American history.

 

Confederate States of America Wiki
The Confederate States of America (CSA or C.S.), commonly referred to as the Confederacy, was a self-proclaimed nation of 11 secessionist slave-holding states of the United States, existing from 1861 to 1865. The Confederacy was originally formed by seven states – South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas – in the Lower South region of the United States whose regional economy was mostly dependent upon agriculture, particularly Cotton, and a plantation system that relied upon the labor of African-American slaves.^[2]

Each state declared its secession from the United States following the November 1860 election of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln to the U.S. presidency on a platform which opposed the expansion of slavery. Before Lincoln took office in March, a new Confederate government was established in February 1861, which was considered illegal by the government of the United States. After the Civil War began in April, four slave states of the Upper South – Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina – also declared their secession and joined the Confederacy. The Confederacy later accepted Missouri and Kentucky as members, although neither officially declared secession nor were they ever largely controlled by Confederate forces; Confederate shadow governments attempted to control the two states but were later exiled from them.

The government of the United States (the Union) rejected the claims of secession and regarded the Confederacy illegitimate. The Civil War began with the April 12, 1861, Confederate attack upon Fort Sumter, a Union fort in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. No foreign government officially recognized the Confederacy as an independent country,^[1][3][4] although Britain^[1] and France granted it belligerent status which allowed Confederate agents to contract with private concerns for arms and other supplies. In early 1865, after four years of heavy fighting which led to an estimated 620,000 military deaths,^[5] all the Confederate forces surrendered and the Confederacy dissolved. The war lacked a formal end; nearly all Confederate forces had been forced into surrender or deliberately disbanded by the end of 1865, by which point the dwindling manpower and resources of the Confederacy were facing overwhelming odds.^[2] Jefferson Davis later lamented that the Confederacy had "disappeared" in 1865.^[6]

 

Eric Foner ex Wiki
[ Is one of the ] American people of Russian-Jewish descent

 

Ku Klux Klan ex Wiki
The Ku Klux Klan /ˈkuː ˈklʌks ˈklæn, ˈkjuː/,^[7] commonly called the KKK or simply the Klan, is the name of three distinct movements in the United States that have advocated extremist reactionary positions such as white supremacy, white nationalism, anti-immigration and—especially in later iterations—Nordicism,^[8][9] anti-Catholicism^[10][11] and antisemitism.^[11] Historically, the KKK used terrorism—both physical assault and murder—against groups or individuals whom they opposed.^[12] All three movements have called for the "purification" of American society and all are considered right-wing extremist organizations.^{[13][14][15][16]}

The first Klan flourished in the Southern United States in the late 1860s, then died out by the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South during the Reconstruction Era, especially by using violence against African American leaders. With numerous chapters across the South, it was suppressed around 1871, through federal law enforcement. Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks and conical hats, designed to be terrifying and to hide their identities.^[17][18]

The second group was founded in 1915 and it flourished nationwide in the early and mid-1920s, particularly in urban areas of the Midwest and West. Rooted in local Protestant communities, it opposed Catholics and Jews, while also stressing its opposition to the Catholic Church at a time of high immigration from mostly Catholic nations of southern and eastern Europe.^[6] This second organization adopted a standard white costume and used code words which were similar to those used by the first Klan, while adding cross burnings and mass parades to intimidate others.

The third and current manifestation of the KKK emerged after 1950, in the form of localized and isolated groups that use the KKK name. They have focused on opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, often using violence and murder to suppress activists. It is classified as a hate group by the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center.^[19] As of 2016, the Anti-Defamation League puts total Klan membership nationwide at around 3,000, while the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) puts it at 6,000 members total.^[20]

The second and third incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan made frequent references to America's "Anglo-Saxon" blood, hearkening [ sic ] back to 19th-century nativism.^[21] Although members of the KKK swear to uphold Christian morality, virtually every Christian denomination has officially denounced the KKK.^[22]