Our next Civil War has Already Been and Gone. Did you White People Miss It?
A whole bunch of people think this country only had one Civil War. Incorrectly they assume the War Between the States, as the South called it, lasting only from 1861–1865, ended the deep divisions we’ve always had.
It didn’t.
The causes of this bloodiest of American wars are several. Among them, economic and social differences between the North and the South, States versus federal rights, but overwhelmingly, Slave and Non-Slave state proponents.
Even today, some 160 years later, fragments and parallels of these three still exist, and in some cases actively resist. That’s not by accident. Because ever since the end of the first Civil War, we’ve fought several more.
Our second Civil War didn’t officially begin with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States.
Local and state governments, in the South, began with Black Codes, which governed how formerly enslaved people could work and for how much compensation. Basically this led into a sharecropping situation, where uneducated Blacks were manipulated into whatever degree of unscrupulousness the landlord or merchant planter could devise.
For the next seventy or so years, this form of slavery continued. Eventually by the 1880’s landlords even brought in poor whites, to also work in this thinly disguised indentured servitude. Slavery had been thwarted, or at least black slavery. Now slavery was again an equal opportunity position.
It was a nice quiet cold civil war. Normal every day, white people didn’t have to concern themselves. Groups like the KKK helped maintain order, with both the black and white population. Police and judges, consisting of civil war soldiers ignored those groups with Jim Crow laws in the daylight. The black folks unfortunately, and as we’re all well aware, received the harshest of these judgements.
So it would seem the South won this civil war. Not really. Eventually unionization of tenant and sharecroppers along with the Great Depression led to the end of this system of servitude.
Again, through force, and through the suffering of African Americans and poor Whites, the South was beaten. The South did rise again, but without high ideals and without a moral compass, and again our Founding Fathers beat the South into submission.
The third Civil War occurred in cities of the South. It was a bit hotter. It also carried on separately from the second Civil War. The “theater of war” was different, if you will.
After 1865, many Blacks obviously saw the writing on the wall and abandoned rural farm life for the cities of the South. In those cities, Jim Crow laws were not as prevalent and so former slaves, and their families could live more of a fair life.
But that respite would come to an end during the 1880’s. The twenty year migration of blacks obviously saw the populations grow, and you know how this is going to end.
Yep, white people got scared. And Jim Crow found his way into those neighborhoods as well.
Public parks were forbidden for people of color. Theaters and restaurants were segregated. We know where this all led. We all have heard of or seen the White Only signs of our not so distant past. Well this is where it began, from the 1880’s to the 1960’s, where finally it would become illegal.
But as I said, this was no Cold War. Dotted along the timeline of those eighty years were mass murders, lynchings and attacks by white mobs against Black city dwellers. We had mob lynchings of Black people right here in our little town of Paris. Right up there on the Court Square.
But the Civil Rights Act of 1964, much like the 13th Amendment, ended that war as well. And again, through eighty years of suffering of African Americans, primarily in southern cities, the South lost again!
Next week: The fourth Civil War, and the beginning of the fifth.