Confederate Flag Removed in Palestine, Texas

The first national flag of the Confederacy is removed from the flagpole outside the Anderson County (Texas) Courthouse. (Photo by the Palestine, Texas, Herald Press)

CNHI News Service, by Tom Lindley on April 5 2011: PALESTINE, Texas — As a small crowd sang “Dixie,” the first national flag of the Confederacy was lowered from a flagpole outside a southeast Texas courthouse, ending a brewing controversy.

The Anderson County commissioners had voted, 3-2, to fly the flag during Confederate History and Heritage Month. But the flag, which also drew a group of protesters, flew for only a few days before representatives of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans lowered it.

Their action came minutes before the Palestine City Council voted unanimously to ask the commissioners to take it down.

Mayor Bob Herrington

Palestine Mayor Bob Herrington said he took an oath to defend the U.S. and Texas flags.

“It’s (the Confederacy) a government that no longer exists,” Herrington told the crowd. “...It’s hard for me to recognize a flag like the Confederate flag that is so divisive in nature.”

The issue had drawn attention from media outlets across the state to the community which is located southeast of Dallas.

Not all agreed to remove the flag. “Many members of the community, along with myself, are extremely disappointed that the Confederate flag was taken down from the courthouse this evening,” said Palestine resident Morgan Carroll, who added a protest response was being planned.

(source: By Tom Lindley at Apr 5 2011 - 10:39amDetails for this story were provided by the Palestine (Texas) Herald-Press.)

Enslavement After Emancipation

On the local level, most southern towns and municipalities passed strict vagrancy laws to control the influx of black migrants and homeless people who poured into these urban communities in the years after the Civil War. In Mississippi, for example, whites passed the notorious "Pig Law" of 1876, designed to control vagrant blacks at loose in the community. This law made stealing a pig an act of grand larceny subject to punishment of up to five years in prison. Within two years, the number of convicts in the state penitentiary increased from under three hundred people to over one thousand.

It was this law in Mississippi that turned the convict lease system into a profitable business, whereby convicts were leased to contractors who sub-leased them to planters, railroads, levee contractors, and timber jobbers.

Almost all of the convicts in this situation were blacks, including women, and the conditions in the camps were horrible in the extreme. It was not uncommon to have a death rate of blacks in the camps at between 8 to 18 percent. In a rare piece of journalism, the Jackson Weekly Clarion, printed in 1887 the inspection report of the state prison in Mississippi:

"We found [in the hospital section] twenty-six inmates, all of whom have been lately brought there off the farms and railroads, many of them with consumption and other incurable diseases, and all bearing on their persons marks of the most inhuman and brutal treatment. Most of them have their backs cut in great wales, scars and blisters, some with the skin pealing off in pieces as the result of severe beatings.

Their feet and hands in some instances show signs of frostbite, and all of them with the stamp of manhood almost blotted out of their faces.... They are lying there dying, some of them on bare boards, so poor and emaciated that their bones almost come through their skin, many complaining for the want of food.... We actually saw live vermin crawling over their faces, and the little bedding and clothing they have is in tatters and stiff with filth.

As a fair sample of this system, on January 6, 1887, 204 convicts were leased to McDonald up to June 6, 1887, and during this six months 20 died, and 19 were discharged and escaped and 23 were returned to the walls disabled and sick, many of whom have since died."

(Creating Jim Crow: In-Depth Essay, by Ronald L. F. Davis, Ph. D.)

Interest Of Non-Slaveholders In Slavery

INTEREST OF NON-SLAVEHOLDERS IN SLAVERY

by Confederate Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry

Unreflecting partisans have sometimes insinuated, rather than openly expressed the opinion, that non-slaveholders are not interested in the institution of slavery. No greater or more mischievous mistake could be made, and a few suggestions will show it. The most perplexing problem to modern governments is the relation between labor and capital. Nothing is so terrible to England, nothing so fearful to France, nothing awakens such serious apprehensions with the thoughtful and far-seeing in the populous portions of the North. Laws are passed regulating labor, fixing wages, restricting capital and lubricating the friction between clashing labor and capital. Between the two opposing forces in free society, there is a constant tendency to collision.

In Europe standing armies, and restricted suffrage, and artificial privileged classes, and sumptuary laws, and perpetual governmental interference, keep the interests of labor in subordination. In the North, facility of emigration to the fertile and unoccupied West and the conservative influence of slavery have mitigated the severity of the conflict, significant premonitions of the irrepressibility of which are occasionally heard in the "strikes" of the operatives and the bated whisperings of "bread or blood." Where slavery does not exist, the antagonism between labor and capital is everywhere felt, and it is mitigated or aggravated by the mode of employment of both. The warfare "between opposing and enduring forces" is inseparable from the unadjusted relation. There is no sympathy, no recognized and felt moral relation between the combatting forces and capital tyrannizes over labor, depriving it of political rights, of personal freedom and wresting from its hard earnings all but a scanty subsistence.

The difficult problem finds a solution in African slavery, and here labor and capital are identified. The two are blended in harmony and political irreconcilability is adjusted by the providential and predestined distinction of color. Profits and wages in our social organization are blended. The slaveholder, owning both capital and labor in the negro, is interested in receiving for his labor a remunerating return, and hence the wages of mechanics and field-laborers in the South are higher than at the North. Besides, no matter how the price of produce may fluctuate, the slaveholder makes his largest possible crop, as his negroes must be clothed and subsisted. Labor is not turned loose adrift in times of pecuniary depression, and thus all classes of the community and every profession, the lawyer, the merchant, the overseer, the mechanic, the physician, the preacher, are interested in the products of slave labor. In the North, social distinctions are defined by the rich and the poor. In the South, color draws the ineffaceable line of separation.

In Europe, to preserve the wall of partition, privileged classes are created and voting is confined to a favored few or prohibited altogether. In the North, like distinctions would be made but for connection with the South. Putting out of view, in the event of abolition, the abhorrent degradation of social and political equality, the probability of a war of extermination between the races or the necessity of flying the country to avoid the association, it is susceptible of demonstration, that those whom the abolitionists stigmatize as "the poor whites of the South" are more interested in the institution than any other portion of the community. Thank God, they cannot be duped by the wiles of their enemies, and none are more ready when the occasion demands to

JLM Curry

"Strike for their altars and their fires,

Strike for the green graves of their sires,

God and their native land."

Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman Justifies Violence Against Southern Blacks

“Their Own Hotheadedness”: Senator Benjamin R.“Pitchfork Ben” Tillman Justifies Violence Against Southern Blacks

In this March 23, 1900, speech before the U.S. Senate, Senator Benjamin R. “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina defended the actions of his white constituents who had murdered several black citizens of his home state. Tillman blamed the violence on the “hot-headedness” of Southern blacks and on the misguided efforts of Republicans during the Reconstruction era after the Civil War to “put white necks under black heels.” He also defended violence against black men, claiming that southern whites “will not submit to [the black man] gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him”—an evocation of the deeply sexualized racist fantasies of many Southern whites.

. . . And he [Senator John C. Spooner, of Wisconsin] said we had taken their rights away from them. He asked me was it right to murder them in order to carry the elections. I never saw one murdered. I never saw one shot at an election. It was the riots before the elections precipitated by their own hot-headedness in attempting to hold the government, that brought on conflicts between the races and caused the shotgun to be used. That is what I meant by saying we used the shotgun.

I want to call the Senator’s attention to one fact. He said that the Republican party gave the negroes the ballot in order to protect themselves against the indignities and wrongs that were attempted to be heaped upon them by the enactment of the black code. I say it was because the Republicans of that day, led by Thad Stevens, wanted to put white necks under black heels and to get revenge. There is a difference of opinion. You have your opinion about it, and I have mine, and we can never agree.

Demonstrators carry Confederate flags as they leave the South Carolina Statehouse after the removal of flag in Columbia, S.C., July 1, 2000. Photograph: Eric Draper/Associated Press

I want to ask the Senator this proposition in arithmetic: In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters. General Canby set up a carpetbag government there and turned our State over to this majority. Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task. You had handcuffed us and thrown away the key, and you propped your carpetbag negro government with bayonets. Whenever it was necessary to sustain the government you held it up by the Army.

Mr. President, I have not the facts and figures here, but I want the country to get the full view of the Southern side of this question and the justification for anything we did. We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. If no other Senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity. We have had no fraud in our elections in South Carolina since 1884. There has been no organized Republican party in the State.

We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina to-day as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his “rights”—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him. I would to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none of them had ever been brought to our shores. But I will not pursue the subject further.

I want to ask permission in this connection to print a speech which I made in the constitutional convention of South Carolina when it convened in 1895, in which the whole carpetbag regime and the indignities and wrongs heaped upon our people, the robberies which we suffered, and all the facts and figures there brought out are incorporated, and let the whole of the facts go to the country. I am not ashamed to have those facts go to the country. They are our justification for the present situation in our State. If I can get it, I should like that permission; otherwise I shall be forced to bring that speech here and read it when I can put my hand on it. I will then leave this matter and let the dead past bury its dead.

Source: "Speech of Senator Benjamin R. Tillman, March 23, 1900," Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 1st Session, 3223–3224. Reprinted in Richard Purday, ed.,Document Sets for the South in U. S. History (Lexington, MA.: D.C. Heath and Company, 1991), 147.