July 16, 1862, Congress and Lincoln begin legislation to deport all people of color from the U.S. and it’s territories. Later, on July 21, Lincoln signed and an act approving $500,000 to begin “colonization”, AKA deportation.

37th Congess. (US)
No. 148. REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE ON EMANCIPATION AND COLONIZATION, In the House of Representatives, July 16, 1862:

“It is useless, now, to enter upon any philosophical inquiry whether nature has or has not made the negro inferior to the Caucasian. The belief is indelibly fixed upon the public mind that such inequality does exist. There are irreconcilable differences between the two races which separate them, as with a wall of fire. The home for the African must not be within the limits of the present territory of the Union. The Anglo- American looks upon every acre of our present domain as intended for him, and not for the negro. A home, therefore, must be sought for the African beyond our own limits and in those warmer regions to which his constitution is better adapted than to our own climate,and which doubtless the Almighty intended the colored races should inhabit and cultivate.

Much of the objection to emancipation arises from the opposition of a large portion of our people to the intermixture of the races, and from the association of white and black labor. The committee would do nothing to favor such a policy; apart from the antipathy which nature has ordained, the presence of a race among us who cannot, and ought not to be admitted to our social and political privileges, will be a perpetual source of injury and inquietude to both. This is a question of color, and is unaffected by the relation of master and slave.
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Why, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, do we continue to cherish “Walden”?

An illustration of Henry David Thoreau in a pond: Why, given his hypocrisy, sanctimony, and misanthropy, has Thoreau been so cherished? – Illustration by Eric Nyquist

In the evening of October 6, 1849, the hundred and twenty people aboard the brig St. John threw a party. The St. John was a so-called famine ship: Boston-bound from Galway, it was filled with passengers fleeing the mass starvation then devastating Ireland. They had been at sea for a month; now, with less than a day’s sail remaining, they celebrated the imminent end of their journey and, they hoped, the beginning of a better life in America. Early the next morning, the ship was caught in a northeaster, driven toward shore, and dashed upon the rocks just outside Cohasset Harbor. Those on deck were swept overboard. Those below deck drowned when the hull smashed open. Within an hour, the ship had broken up entirely. All but nine crew members and roughly a dozen passengers perished.

Two days later, a thirty-two-year-old Massachusetts native, en route from Concord to Cape Cod, got word of the disaster and detoured to Cohasset to see it for himself. When he arrived, fragments of the wreck were scattered across the strand. Those victims who had already washed ashore lay in rough wooden boxes on a nearby hillside. The living were trying to identify the dead—a difficult task, since some of the bodies were bloated from drowning, while others had struck repeatedly against the rocks. Out of sentiment or to save labor, the bodies of children were placed alongside their mothers in the same coffin. Continue reading →

~ Foreward ~
I am delighted to publish this article by Mike Scruggs, historian, author, columnist for The Times Examiner out of Greenville, South Carolina. I have Mike’s 359 page illustrated book, The Un-Civil War, Shattering the Historical Myths, which promises to be outstanding. I look forward to reviewing it in the next few weeks.

Thomas D. Rice, the original Jim Crow, in costume.

This article contains much historical detail and makes it clear why Southern states, after the horrors of Reconstruction, felt an imperative to copy the Jim Crow laws of the Northern states. Before Reconstruction, the South was integrated, by necessity, according to C. Vann Woodward in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, which produced an intimacy between blacks and whites not found anywhere else in the country. That’s not to say that race relations were always great, but they were far better in the South than in the North and the West. Blacks and whites in the South did not recoil from each other as did the white Yankee women at the end of Gone with the Wind with the thought of Mammy touching their children. Scarlett O’Hara found that absurd. That is a good case of fiction perfectly illustrating reality.

The North and West were the opposite of the South. Blacks and whites were rigidly segregated, by custom, law, or both. ~ Gene Kizer, Jr. Continue reading →