Claude Bowers in his notable book The Tragic Era that I have mentioned in some of these articles made note of the Union League Clubs.
John Chodes, author of Segregation–Federal Policy or Racism? (Shotwell Publishing, Columbia, South Carolina,) noted the Union League on page 26 of that book. He said: “The Union League began as a political club in New York in 1863 to revive the sagging patriotic spirit of the Northern states during the War for Southern Independence. It’s philosophies were similar to the Radical Republicans so it fused with and became part of Republican vote-building machine for blacks in the post-war South…The Union League’s expenses were covered by the sale of confiscated white Southerners’ property, thus inciting the volunteers to harass the people in time of peace by unlawful seizure to provide the means of paying themselves. This further alienated whites from blacks.” In other words, the Union Leagues were “legal” Yankee/Marxist thieves.”
Of the Union Leagues Bowers wrote: “…the Union saved, they had turned with zest to the congenital task of working out the salvation of their party. This, they thought, depended on the domination of the South through the Negro vote. Sagacious politicians…obsessed with ideas as extreme as those of (Thaddeus) Stevens and (Charles) Sumner, they dispatched agents to turn the Negroes against Southern whites and organize them in secret clubs.” Again, nothing more than the classic class struggle technique employed by the communists–pit one group against another so you can manipulate both!
Bowers continued: “Left to themselves, the negroes would have turned for leadership to the native whites, who understood them best. This was the danger. Imperative then, that they should be taught to hate–and teachers of hate were plentiful. Many of them were found among the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau…devoting themselves assiduously to party organization on government time.”
Again, it is important to stress this, the Civil Rights Movement began as a political tool, to be used in furthering Northern expansionist aggression. It was, from the beginning, a movement that had to use the Marxist class struggle method of employing racial hatred to further its own ends. It was 19th century reverse racism in the truest sense of that term. And you all thought reverse racism didn’t rear its ugly had until the mid-20th century, right? That’s what they taught most of us, but their timetable was off by about 90 years–on purpose! When, today, we hear all this leftist propaganda about “Civil Rights” and “multiculturalism” let us be discerning enough to go back and take a look at the roots of the movement–roots sunk deep in apostate, radical abolitionism–and ask ourselves if this is the sort of tree we really wish to have growing upon our national landscape.
At the end of the War there were all manner of ex-slaves roaming all over the South. Many had no marketable skills, and therefore could not support themselves. Many of them were footloose and irresponsible. Due to false promises made to them by Union officials, they envisioned their new life as free men as one of ease and luxury, with all the goodies handed to them on a silver platter, much as many of them seemed to think their situation in our day was going to change when Comrade Obama assumed the throne in Washington. I remember reading of one case where a black lady just stopped paying her rent when Obama took office because she now thought that, with Obama as president “things were going to be different.” Many ex-slaves had no real sense of responsibility, just as many today who wait for the federal gravy train to show up and take care of them. They don’t work and they don’t want to work. They expect those of us who worked all our lives to support them.
In that day, most had no real understanding of freedom or liberty, nor of the truth that real liberty carries with it the responsibility to preserve that liberty. They thought that liberty was being free from work and just waiting around for the federal government to support them all their lives. What lots of these folks really desired, although they didn’t realize it, was not liberty, it was license, with no moral restrictions. Most of them, once off the old plantations, had no visible means of support and so they became a vast welfare problem. Sound familiar? Some realized that they did have to make their own way and so, along with many poor white folks, became sharecroppers in a “new South” that, according to the Kennedy Brothers, was punished with poverty for daring to want to be free of the Yankee Empire.
At this point, most of the Southern states adopted what became known as the Black Codes, which governed the work and employment of blacks. According to Clarence Carson’s Basic History of the United States – Volume 3: “The black codes aroused considerable opposition in the North. It should be noted that at the time they were adopted they were not contrary to the laws of the Constitution of the United States; Some of their provisions did not differ much from rules Union army officers had adopted for blacks, nor were vagrancy laws any harsher than those in some states in the North…Even so, the black codes were the occasion of acrimonious comment from the North.” Just a bit of hypocrisy here, folks, but pay it no mind–the “history” books sure don’t!
The Yankee/Marxist government in 1865 established the Freedman’s Bureau,* supposedly to protect the rights of blacks in the South and to provide food and medical care for them. According to Kent Steffgen’s The Bondage of the Free, “Congress established the Freedman’s Bureau on March 3, 1865, under Lincoln. Funds were appropriated to set up agencies in counties throughout the South and the Bureau was given the power to divide up abandoned lands and assign them in portions to the Negroes…Local agents of the Bureau were the Northern whites who had been brought into the South during the fighting or who were given subsequent assignments out of Washington. Those who later joined the corrupt political regimes became known as ‘carpetbaggers’ because many of them arrived in the South penniless, or with mustering out pay from the army, with nothing but bare essentials which were sometimes literally carried in a piece of carpet tied at both ends.”
The Marxist concept of state ownership of all property must have already been in their minds if they felt they could just move on in and have their flunkies start dividing up abandoned land with no attempt to find former owners. Ponder that thought for awhile. It just may give you something to reflect on as to where the Union government really was in 1865 and afterward.
Mostly, the carpetbaggers were what Southerners referred to as “white trash” – poor whites, quite a few of whom were criminals of one sort or another. Many had been abject failures in the North so they came South to see what they could steal.
President Andrew Johnson
As with the Union League Clubs, the Freedman’s Bureau was ultimately managed by carpetbaggers whose main thought was building for themselves a political force to make sure they held onto lucrative power. True concern for the welfare of the blacks was, in most cases, a minor secondary consideration, if even that high on the list.
In February, 1866, Congress passed a bill that added to the already existing powers of the Freedman’s Bureau. President Andrew Johnson vetoed it. He felt it gave unconstitutional power to the military. A radical Congress overrode his veto. It was hardly to be the last time for that. They also passed a Civil Rights bill in April of that year, which Johnson also vetoed on the grounds of its unconstitutionality. Needless to say, Congress overrode this one, too, and so we were, officially, off to the Civil Rights Races – which even up to our own day, have had no ending!
* The Freedman’s Bureau, formally known as the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, was established in 1865 by Congress to help millions of former black slaves and poor whites in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
November 30, 2018
~ The Author ~
Al Benson Jr. is the editor and publisher of “The Copperhead Chronicle“, a quarterly newsletter that presents history from a pro-Southern and Christian perspective. He has written for several publications over the years. His articles have appeared in “The National Educator,” “The Free Magnolia,” and the “Southern Patriot.” I addition to that he was the editor of, and wrote for, “The Christian Educator” for several years. In addition to The Copperhead Chronicles, Al also maintains Revised History.
He is currently a member of the Confederate Society of America and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and has, in the past, been a member of the John Birch Society. He is the co-author, along with Walter D. Kennedy, of the book “Lincoln’s Marxists” and he has written for several Internet sites as well as authoring a series of booklets, with tests, dealing with the War of Northern Aggression, for home school students.
He and his wife now live in northern Louisiana.