Civil War's End: Saturday Political Soapbox 109

A casual reading of American history would seem to indicate that the South lost the Civil War with the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

But it did not.

The resistance began almost immediately with the terroristic assassination of President Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth, and his defiant shout of "Sic Semper Tyranus! The South is avenged!"

Different elements of the Confederacy did not surrender right away, staggering over the next year or so, and President Andrew Johnson did not officially declare the war over until August 20, 1866.

But the South still had not truly lost.

Reconstruction continued for about a decade after the Civil War, and was met with fierce and angry resistance.  This was the period of the KKK and massive cruelties done to the black population, and Yankee sympathizers.  Reconstruction ended in 1877, with the withdrawal of the last federal troops.

The progress that had been made by African Americans was immediately reversed.  It would be another one hundred years before black politicians would be elected from the South. Jim Crow laws re-instituted slavery in all but name only.  Voting rights were effectively stripped.  Separate facilities were  constructed and enforced.

By 1877, the South had won the Civil War.

The South effectively controlled American national politics.  Even as FDR moved the nation towards greater economic justice and greater safety net support, he did so only because he had Southern Democrats as part of his coalition.  This meant that little progress could be made in obtaining civil rights for African-Americans.

There was some evidence of the unease of this relationship, even as early as 1948.  When President Truman integrated the armed forces, Strom Thurmond and other Southern Democrats formed the Dixiecrats. Gradually, a version of the Confederate flag (one used by the Virginia army and some naval units) was used to symbolize segregation and white supremacy, a defiance of the federal government based on wanting to maintain Jim Crow laws.

When President Lyndon Johnson passed civil rights laws in the mid 60s, he thought that it might lose the South for the Democrats for a generation.  He was wrong.  It's been at least two generations that the South has been lost, and maybe more.

Republicans decided that they needed to deploy a Southern Strategy, to appeal to the Southern white voter, and began to use more and more coded racist language.  The South's conversion took place slowly, first at a Presidential level, then Senate (symbolized by Strom Thurmond's conversion to the Republican Party) and House, and finally at the local level, so that the South became solid red, with only a few gerrymandered pockets of blue.

And so, for generations, the south's political will, with rare exceptions, continued to dominate the country's politics and direction.

But that dominance has now ended.

The South officially lost the Civil War on Friday, June 19, 2015.

It lost it when, at a bond hearing for the murderous, terrorist thug Dylann Roof, these words were spoken by family members of the victims -

I forgive you

That powerful message of love and forgiveness shocked a nation into realizing where true strength and grace lay.

People who you thought would never surrender the Confederate flag began to call for it to be finally removed, including Strom Thurmond's son, State Senator Paul Thurmond.  People from all walks of life, from all ethnic and economic groups came together to honor the fallen.

The race war that Dylann Roof thought he would ignite completely backfired, and it actually achieved the opposite.  The power of love is stronger than hate, grace is more moving than cruelty, forgiveness more powerful than revenge, light is greater than darkness.

The South has lost.  But it is the old antebellum South that has lost.  With changing demographics, the old South no longer has the strength to dictate American politics.  Right now, the Democrats can with without the Dixiecrats.  The Republicans cannot win as long as they embrace Dixiecrat values.

But that does mot mean the the South is over, vanquished forever.  Oh, no.

I have faith that the South will rise again, but as a new South, one based on mutual respect and tolerance. One free of voter suppression, a multi-cultural South that respects the past but progresses in to the future. One that will move forward with love, tolerance and forgiveness.

No, it will not be a perfect path.  There will be hiccups, and resisters, and those who fuss and fume and preach hate.  A wounded bear may not be a winning bear, but it is a very dangerous bear.  Vigilance against this must be constant.

But I believe the path is there now.  I am sorry and sad and tearful at the horrible sacrifice that was made at the Emanuel AME church, but I am hopeful we have turned the corner.  Thank you, Emanuel AME, for these powerful words -

I forgive you

Thank you for showing us the way to grace, freely offered to all who will accept it, whether we deserve it or not. 

God bless you, Emanuel AME.  

God bless the UNITED States of America.