A Review of Reconstruction: Destroying a Republic and Creating an Empire by James Ronald Kennedy (Shotwell Publishing, 2024
Since they wrote The South Was Right, the Kennedy twins have become legendary in the field of Southern history, and this latest effort by Ron Kennedy does not disappoint. He begins by quoting Marxist historian James S. Allen, who wrote: “Reconstruction was the continuation of the Civil War into a new phase, in which the revolution passed from the stage of armed conflict into primarily a political struggle which sought to consolidate the Northern triumph.”
Although establishment historians are quick to praise Reconstruction as a high water mark in American civil liberties, it was not. Kennedy tells “the rest of the story” and exposes the truth. It is not what those suffering from Noble Cause Delusion Disorder (NCDD) want you to hear.
The double standard which Southerners often face today is not new. They faced it during the occupation and Reconstruction phase, only it was more overt. Southern whites were reduced to the status of what General Sherman called “demizens.” Ex-Confederates (i.e., most Southern males) lost certain rights, such as the right to vote, but they retained other rights, such as the right to pay taxes. And while the neo-Marxist and NCDD sufferer is quick to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, they fail to analyze why it emerged. The Confederate States of America did not collapse in a vacuum. The local economies collapsed with it, as did law and order. Throughout the South, anarchy prevailed. Outlaw gangs, deserters, bandits, rapists, murderers, and lawlessness ran rampant. The occupying Union Army did little to correct this situation and, as often as not, was on the side of the lawbreakers. Many Southerners, led by General Nathan Bedford Forrest, believed that vigilante justice was better than no justice. The Ku Klux Klan was a violent reaction to violence. When things settled down and civil government was allowed to function, General Forrest (now the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan) ordered it disbanded in 1869.
It is unfortunate that the KKK of the 1910s as well as today pirated the name “Ku Klux Klan.” If it had not, we might view the Klan entirely differently than we do today. But it did, and I degress.
In the beginning of his book, Kennedy discusses “what could have been,” vis-à-vis Southern race relations, had it not been for the Carpetbaggers. To control the South politically, the Carpetbaggers practiced the old political practice of “divide and rule.” They deliberately pitted black Southerners against white Southerners, a tactic which kept them in power for a number of years. They used their time in office to enrich themselves, loot the defeated Southern states, and poison race relations in the South for decades. Mr. Kennedy cites numerous examples of the sense of community which existed in the post-bellum South between the blacks and the whites, and how the Union League and Northern politicians sowed the seeds of divisiveness between the races, in order to enrich themselves. And enrich themselves they did. Using the power of the government they controlled, they issued bonds which they purchased for as little as one cent on the dollar. The South had to redeem these bonds later at their full face value, yielding a huge profit for the Carpetbagger. The city debt of Vicksburg, for example, grew from $13,000 to $1,400,000 in just five years of Republican rule. (Although $1,400,000 does not seem like a huge amount today, given the present degraded state of the dollar, it was enormous in the 1870s.) These irresponsible city officials were elected by mostly illiterate, non-taxpaying voters. A coalition of highly responsible black and white citizens overthrew the corrupt Vicksburg regime in 1874, but the Federal courts backed the bondholders, and the debt had to be repaid. This was true everywhere. South Carolina did not finish paying off its Reconstruction debts until 1955.
Carpetbagger governments also imposed confiscatory taxation on Southern property owners. At one point, fifteen percent of the total land area of Mississippi was confiscated by the corrupt state government for failing to pay taxes. Kennedy enumerates how each Southern state struggled to regain control of its own government and its own elections and how self-rule was eventually achieved but only after a pattern of poverty was set which lasted for generations.
Equally important in Reconstruction’s history is the intentional destruction of America’s original Constitution and its replacement with a “living” Constitution which, as Jefferson warned, can be “molded like a lump of clay” into any shape the modern liberal or neo-Marxist wants it to be. Before Active Reconstruction, the idea that the Federal Government could harass parents complaining about Critical Race Theory or Drag Queen Story Hour was simply unthinkable. In the Modern Reconstruction Era (1965 to the present), however, anything seems to be possible. As predicted by Robert E. Lee, the stage is now set for the ultimate destruction of local self-government and the rise of the Yankee Empire, which, as Lee predicted, has become “aggressive abroad and despotic at home.”
This book is not only well-written history but a thought-provoking warning of what we are likely to face in the future. It belongs on the bookshelf of every Southerner who cares about the future of his region and his country.
