1. My illness has mostly recovered, leaving me only extremely tired, hence I’ve been spending most of the weekend resting.

2. My US history class has reached the period of Reconstruction. In trying to research it, I spotted what I think is a narrative in progress. See, I was trying to look up specifics on the corruption that went on in the south, and what I found in searching was page after page of articles with titles like “Myths of Reconstruction.” Upon reading one, I found it to be a series of very weak arguments to the effect that the problem with Reconstruction was that it didn’t go far enough. For instance, one ‘myth’ was that the south was under military occupation after the war, which was dispelled by claiming that the number of troops in the south was relatively low. The fact that the South was divided into what were literally called military districts wasn’t mentioned.

3. We seem to have two contrary narratives here: the first being that the South was occupied and subjected to shortsightedly punitive measures after the war, most of its white population stripped of their civil rights, leading to a series of corrupt governments ushered in by a combination of northern opportunists and newly-enfranchised Blacks. This intensified the bitterness already felt by the defeated southerners and, when they inevitably regained power, they retaliated by effectively stripping Blacks of their civil rights.

The new narrative is that the south was treated too gently after the war, allowing their irrational hatred of Blacks to fester and grow, until they were able to act on it due to the indifference of the northerners.

The former strikes me as a by far the more likely. There is a logical cause-and-effect: bitter northerners want to punish the south for the war, bitter southerners resent being further punished after already losing the war. The North rushes to enfranchise former slaves, who, having no experience with voting and being mostly illiterate, prove extremely easy to manipulate into supporting corrupt opportunists, thus Blacks are associated in the Southern mind with corruption, misgovernment, and the hated occupiers, an association already in place due to the nature and causes of the war and coming on top of the sense of superiority created by slavery. The South then takes steps to ensure that ‘Black rule’ of that sort never happens again.

It’s a narrative in which no one comes off especially well, except a few individuals trying to push back against the tide (e.g. Gen. Beauregard, who, along with some others, tried to incorporate Blacks into a pro-southern political movement that would have made common cause against the Northern occupiers).

The latter is a pure good-versus-evil narrative, in which Blacks are the innocent victims of wholly irrational hatred by evil southerners. It’s a suspiciously cartoon-like depiction of a situation where one side has no legitimate claims and the other admits no reason for opposition.

4. Incidentally, former slaves absolutely should not have been given the vote en masse. Blacks as such shouldn’t have been prevented from voting or barred from citizenship, of course, but men who had been slaves a year before, who had no experience with civic government, and who mostly couldn’t read (literacy rates among Blacks were about 5% immediately after the war) should certainly not have been given the vote.

The counter would be “without the vote they wouldn’t have any control over their political destiny.” The answer to that is, if people lack the education or experience to understand what they are voting for, then they don’t have control over their political destiny regardless of whether they can vote or not. All they can do is bring harm on those who do have such understanding by serving as an easily manipulable block for the unscrupulous.

Honestly, with few exceptions, I don’t think the political good of the freedmen was a high priority for anyone at the time; they weren’t given the vote to empower them, they were given the vote to empower the Republican party of the day.

5. Because of the reasons stated above (that voters who don’t understand what they are voting for are no more able to act in their own interests than if they couldn’t vote), I’m in favor of there being qualifications for voting. It should be something you apply to be able to do and have to pass a test for, showing that you can at least read and have some basic understanding of how the government works. Make the standards uniform across the board in each state, so that everyone gets the same test (that is, each state sets their own standards, but those standards are uniform for all residents of that state). That seems to me the most sane way of approaching suffrage.

I mean, I don’t care for democracy at the best of times, but if you’re going to have it then you should at least try to do it in a logical fashion.

6. The villainization of the American South is, I think, a very deliberate step in the culture wars. Not that the South didn’t have plenty of villainous traits, but that I don’t think those traits are really the issue. You can villainize just about anyone if you put your mind to it, and have plenty of justification (e.g. conditions in northern cities would make that part of the country just as suitable a bad guy as the south). The villainization of the South is, I think, a way to have a handy example of Americans whose rights could be and were justly overridden for the greater good. So, if you claim that such-and-such approved new movement violates your rights, well, you’re just like the slaveholders and segregationists of the South, and we need not pay you any mind. It shifts the burden of proof from the innovator (to explain why his new movement is worth sacrificing established rights) to the conservative (to explain why his rights are different from those of the wicked Southerners).

The South, being both the historical losers and a minority of the overall population, make for a very convenient national bad guy to threaten association with.

7. And I’ll end with one of my favorite Confucius quotes:

“A gentleman takes as much trouble to discover what is right as lesser men take to discover what will pay.”