charles grumm
10.6K posts
@charlesnblue
Class of Richland Northeast 1985
I stand with whoever believes it's wrong to destroy Confederate war memorials, take down historic flags of the South, and dig up Confederate graves of men and women that were buried in peace in the 19th century. Them's my sentiments.
While the federal government was responsible for forced emancipation, it refused to accept responsibility for its actions. Freedpeople petitioned military officials for food, clothing, shelter, medicine, and proper burials for their families, which represented their first efforts to gain political rights. The federal government responded to those appeals by arguing that state and municipal authorities in the South should assume responsibility for freedpeople’s health. ~ Downs, Sick From Freedom
"The story of Louisiana under carpet-bag-negro rule from 1868 on is a sickening tale of extravagance, waste, corruption and fraud. The Republican party was composed of negroes, carpet-baggers and a small number of native whites, but, as, the coloured population exceeded the white by 2000 and the negroes were almost wholly Republicans, they were the real basis of the party at the ballot-box. When it came to the division of the offices they got at the outset by no means a proportionate share: their cleverer white allies took most of the fat places, but in the composition of the legislature the constituencies could not be ignored and there the negroes had a large representation. Ignorant beyond any previous conception of legislators, except in their sister Southern States, they were not at first as corrupt as their white colleagues, but this was due not to virtue but to inexperience. As time went on they proved apt pupils. Corruption was unblushing. Legislation was openly bought and sold. "What was the price of a senator?" asked a member of a Congressional committee. "I think, six hundred dollars" was the reply. In the rotunda of the St. Charles Hotel, New Orleans, among railroad lobbyists who were corrupting the legislature, a more frequent inquiry than "What's cotton?" was "How are negro votes selling to-day?" -James Ford Rhodes (Pulitzer Prize Winning Northern Historian)
