re: #43 jaunte

Your link about Forrest sent me wiki-walking. After re-reading his page and reading about his (male) descendants, I went over the the page on the Klan and found the excerpt below, taken from a “Why the Ku Klux Klan” address given on Thanksgiving Day observance at UT Austin in 1914.

The author, William Stewart Simkins, was a Civil War veteran who helped organize the Florida Klu Klux Klan and was a professor at the UT Austin. Let me repeat that so it can really sink in—this racist was openly giving his pro-KKK speech at the university where he was a professor on a major U.S. holiday—I just can’t even… Anyway, the whining sounds strikingly familiar:

Again, I would protect from the withering influence of ignorance the character of those secret organizations of the South that sprang out of a great necessity for readjusting social conditions and resisting oppression and hate. Again, I think you will see that the men of that day had the spirit of the martyrs of old who passed through the fires of persecution for their faith. […]

Our political peace lasted until the meeting of Congress in December, 1865, which was dominated by such men as Stephens, Sumner and Wilson, all apostles of hate and one of whom at least had declared the Constitution of the United States “a league with hell.”

Their theory was that the States, by secession, had been reduced to territories and Congress could deal with them as such; and their theory practically prevailed, as the South was denied representation in Congress and thus lay prostrated at the feet of this irresponsible body of fanatics. It was only by reducing us to a territorial existence that their Congressional fulminations could reach us, and their envenomed prejudices could be satisfied; and the suffering of the South was sweet incense to their passionate hate.

With the enforcement of their theory our troubles began. The Freedman’s Bureau, organized shortly after Congress, met under the guise of protecting the negroes from their former masters; it was in fact a method of organizing the negroes as pliant tools of the Republican party. It was also armed with powers that were intended to humiliate the South, and enforce the anticipated Civil Rights laws, the germ of which was social equality. The severest penal laws were enacted against those who interfered in any way with the free exercise of any whim of these ignorant masses, and the federal courts, then presided over by party tools, were given jurisdiction in enforcing these penalties. To make it more effective the Bureau was made an annex of the War Department and the soldiers of that victorious army were to obey the orders of that villainous Bureau and assist in crushing the pride of the South by the elevation of the negro to political control. The pillar of cloud by day and fire by night that marked the trail of Sherman’s army were not more blighting in its effect upon the people of the South. […]

en.wikisource.org

SSDD, no? They haven’t changed a bit.