| Union League Terrorists-Reconstruction |
| Union League |
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The
immense racial discord and animosity sown by the Republican party’s
Union League was incalculable and much of its sad residue remains with
us today. With their military victory over Americans in the South
complete, and to rule the desolated South politically, Republicans used
the black race to deliver their votes to unscrupulous Northern men and
scalawags who plundered what was left and impoverish future generations.
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
"Unsurpassed Valor, Courage and Devotion to Liberty"
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Reconstruction’s Poisoned Air
“The
freeing of the slaves left a strong impression upon Clarence [Dixon],
Tom’s older brother, who said many years later: “It was a pathetic
occasion when father told the slaves they were free. But the most
pathetic part was nearly a year afterwards when they sent a committee to
beg father to take them back on the plantation on the old terms, and
look after them as he had done before.”
Of
course, the poverty-stricken Mr. [Thomas] Dixon [Sr.] could not see
means of supporting his own family, to say nothing of the numerous Negro
families now asking aid. In the fall of 1865, the Dixons, now stripped
of all their possessions, not knowing how or where to find the
necessaries of life from day to day, and faced with the prospect of no
harvest because of a lack of laborers to till the soil, gave up the farm
and moved to an old-fashioned white house facing the public square in
Shelby [North Carolina].
Then
came the terrors of Reconstruction. The young Thomas Dixon was never to
forget the impressions he received during this chaotic period, for he
was to say over three-quarters of a century later: “The dawn of my
conscious life begins in this strange world of poisoned air. My first
memories still vibrate with its tense excitement.”
When
Lincoln was assassinated, the most powerful political figure among the
Northern leaders was Thaddeus Stevens . . . [and his] determination to
subjugate the South became almost an obsession. The two main
instruments by which Stevens hoped to bring about the subjugation were
the “Union League” and the “Freedmen’s Bureau.” Stevens planned to
confiscate the farms of the South and give them to the Negroes. By
offering food, clothing, and free land, the agents hoped to induce the
poverty-stricken Negro to cease working for the white man.
In
the fall of 1866 throughout the next year, many men from the Union
League of Philadelphia and New York filtered through the Negro
population, sowing discontent. [In] an effort to consolidate their
[Republican] party, they were seeking the Negro vote in the South. The
agents of the Leagues wandered about the plantations, seeking the Negro
in field and cabin, promising him preposterous wealth and privilege if
he would turn against his white neighbor and vote himself free of the
[Southern] white man’s restraint.
Unscrupulous
agents took advantage of the ignorant, illiterate Negro populace, often
inciting it to acts of treachery and violence. The enmity, fear and
distrust thus aroused between the white and Negro populations resulted
in a reign of terror that is still remembered as one of the darkest
periods in American history.
The
corruption of the Reconstruction period can scarcely be exaggerated.
[Thomas] Dixon said in his old age, “We are too close to realize the
tragedy. The scholar and historian must have the perspective of a
hundred years in which to tell this story to make it credible.”
Unscrupulous political leaders, interested only in the wealth they could
obtain from the disrupted government of the south, aroused antagonisms
that never died among those who experienced the terrible years after the
Civil War.”
(Fire from the Flint, The Amazing Careers of Thomas Dixon, Raymond Allen Cook, John F. Blair, Publisher, 1968, pp. 9-13)
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