by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m not exactly in a situation where anyone will listen to me if I get upset over what I might hear on a liberal podcast, but I’m a devoted student of history and when I hear bullshit, I call it out.
So, there I was, listening to Deep State Radio when a historian they had on as a guest said some pretty weird things. I’m not questioning her credentials — I mean, she was on Deep State Radio, not me — but some her historical interpretations left me cold. I don’t remember her name and don’t care to spend the energy to look it up — which is probably for the best — but here’s what is eating away at me.
First, she said that Lincoln and Grant’s decision not to throw the book at the leaders of the Confederacy after the Civil War was a huge mistake because it led to the “Lost Cause” mythos. As a Southerner, I can tell you that is complete and total bullshit.
The Lost Cause was a macro trend that was inevitable given how ingrained slavery was in Southern culture and the lingering sense of nascent nationhood within the defeated CSA. By the end of the war, the North just wanted to put the whole thing behind it — enough blood had been shed — and so it was decided that in the name of mending the nation’s wounds that Jefferson Davis, Gen. Lee, et al would be given a pass.
And, remember, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address was all about forgiveness and compassion. It would have been pretty weird for him to be in favor of prosecuting the leaders of the defeated Confederacy. What’s more, the United States was very, very lucky that once the CSA was defeated that everyone was so chill as Reconstruction changed everything.
A note on Reconstruction — one of my pet peeves is when someone talks about the missed opportunity of Reconstruction. This bothers me because at the time, nobody knew nothing about how to handle the situation, so there were a lot of mistakes, half-starts and dumb compromises. It just was not practical to fix 300 odd years of servitude within the two year period of time that Reconstruction really had to do anything.
And if Reconstruction had been as radical as it could have been, there’s a good chance that all the prosperity that the United States enjoyed in the latter part of the 19th century would not have happened. What I’m saying is — don’t superimpose the woke expectations of the 21 century on what was going on during Reconstruction. It was probably doomed to fail no matter what happened, because to fix the systemic problems left over from slavery, you probably would have had to kill a lot of people over and above the number of people who died in the Civil War itself.
Reconstruction was, in fact, a unique moment in American history because for a brief moment the ideals of America actually were done in a real, practical manner. But, like I said, there was a lot going on at the time and there came a point when the victorious North grew tired of the South and gave up. This was going to happen eventually, no matter what. Americans, by nature, aren’t very radical for great lengths of time and Southern whites were just way too fucking racist to do a yadda, yadda, yadda, we’re going to have a society without any systemic racism anymore. Race is called America’s original sin for a reason.
The other thing that really fucking annoys me about what the historian said was her statement that some big event happened in 1879 that was almost the death of American democracy. I know my American political history fairly well and there was nothing that happened that year that could have possibly be interpreted as some sort of autocratic path not taken.
She brought this year up and there was no follow up by anyone else on the postcast. Either she misspoke the year in question or her interpretation of something that happened that year is so off the wall that her wokeness has warped her historical perspective.
Like I said, no one is going to listen to me. I’m kind of in the same situation Twitter is in whenever we all collectively gang up on the Trump Whisperer Maggie Haberman — powerful liberals are always — and I mean always — going to circle the waggons around her because she’s a member of the elite and they look after their own.
