Greetings Gentle Readers!!
I haven't written a blog in quite a while.....nothing has inspired me to opine about anything....all of the folks in our government are clowns and morons.....the stuff I read in the newspaper gets weirder and weirder.....how can I write anything like "today I saw something really weird in the newspaper" when this happens daily. Before I go to the US Civil War, I did see the head of ObamaCare say that "only" 5% of Americans have had their health care policies canceled (something BO said wouldn't/couldn't happen) and realized that the "only 5%" of Americans was something like 15 million people!!!!!
But onto another topic. I've just finished a class on the US Civil War and while I found it interesting, it was also very depressing.....the North's use of "total war", destroying everything, anything in the South that might be useful to the war effort was burned, looted, left as debris. The horrors of the Andersonville Prison Camp where Yankee POWs were starved to the point of looking like survivors of Auschwitz....a horrible, huge tragedy.
Reconstruction of the South produced little good and lots of bad. Which brings me to some questions: Lincoln was assassinated after Lee surrendered but before the war had officially ended. What would have happened if he had survived?? What plan, if any, did he have for the south and how did he envision "reconstruction"??? No one will ever know.
Did he have some plan for those freed from bondage?? Too many of the former slaves were unprepared for "freedom", in that, all they know of life was working on the plantation, all their parents and grandparents knew of life was working on the plantation. To say "lucky you, you're now free!! Go forth and take care of yourself" was unfair to them. If the plan of "40 acres and a mule" had been carried out, it is possible that so much of the ugly that happened later could have been avoided.
If Andrew Johnson, a former tailor with suspected Southern leanings, had not been president, but one of the strong abolitionists had been.....could this country have escaped from the war with more understanding and better economics than share-cropping???
One of the lessons I learned from my class was how "special", the "special institution" of slavery in the southern US was AT THAT TIME....Europe, England, etc. had banned slavery by 1861 and, it seems to be unique to the South, that after the ban on importation of slaves from Africa in 1807, that the whites set up what seems to have been a "breeding" program to get more slaves.....the break up of families was not uncommon...this didn't happen in places like Brazil, a country with lots of slaves or the Caribbean.....It was a US institution.....thanks to rich planters in the South with no conscience what so ever.
And all of us are still paying for their greed and lack of humanity.....rich, greedy, fat, pig-headed morons.....thanks guys for killing 100s of thousands of people to satisfy your desire for the easy life.
