One thing to remember on confederate surrender day is that after the war many thousands of elite rebel officers and government officials had their citizenship restored and their lands left unconfiscated. They worked their way back into public life -- white zillionaire class solidarity is a powerful thing --- and then, once the 1877 Hayes-Tilden compromise shut down any hope of radically reconstructing the South, these newly redeemed rebels fully reclaimed their ruling class status.
They served as state governors, federal representatives and senators, state legislators, judges from local magistrates all the way up to the US supreme court and everything in between, university presidents, cabinet members, and on and on and on. Former Confederate States Army captain Cameron Thom even served as mayor of Los Angeles.[1]
These men, perpetrators and beneficiaries of American chattel slavery, the most horrific crime in US if not world history, not only escaped all consequences but spent decades in powerful positions. They were able to shape American government, law, and culture to their own ends, ends which they now fully shared with the capitalist elite they'd been at war with just a few years earlier.
We still suffer from the effects of this. The racist laws, the violent cops that enforce them, the prisons, the 13th amendment slavery, etc., the former Confederate elite had a hand in making all of it. The fact that modern US police evolved from slave patrols isn't just a rhetorical flourish. Both were created to solve the same problems, in many cases created by the same people.
So yeah, it's fun to talk and joke about April 9 and stuff, but Appomatox wasn't the end of capitalism, only the end of a squabble between capitalists over the most sustainable way to exploit their victims. By 1877 the elites had settled their differences and buried their hatchets and were working in harmony once again. And the rest of us are still paying for it.
[1] See the book Patriots Twice: Former Confederates and the Building of America after the Civil War by Stephen M. Hood. This book is a self-published piece of revisionist lost cause bullshit, but it has useful and independently checkable lists of what former confederate elites got up to postbellum.
#ConfederateSurrender #CivilWar #Reconstruction #Slavery #HayesTilden #LosAngeles #Capitalism
Mastodon Feed
