Sunday, April 24, 2016

"The long night of oppression which will follow the return of our people to the ‘Union'"

 
 Image result for Jefferson Davis writes  wife, Varina, jim limber


Confederate President Jefferson Davis writes to his wife, Varina, of the desperate situating facing the Confederates.

“Panic has seized the country,” he wrote to his wife in Georgia. Davis was in Charlotte, North Carolina, on his flight away from Yankee troops. It was three weeks since Davis had fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, as Union troops were overrunning the trenches nearby.

Davis and his government headed west to Danville, Virginia, in hopes of reestablishing offices there.

When Confederate General Robert E. Lee was forced to surrender his army at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, Davis and his officials traveled south in hopes of connecting with the last major Confederate army, the force of General Joseph Johnston. Johnston, then in North Carolina, was himself in dire straits, as General William T. Sherman’s massive force was bearing down.

Davis continued to his wife, “The issue is one which it is very painful for me to meet. On one hand is the long night of oppression which will follow the return of our people to the ‘Union'; on the other, the suffering of the women and children, and carnage among the few brave patriots who would still oppose the invader.” The Davis’ were reunited a few days later as the president continued to flee and continue the fight. Two weeks later, Union troops finally captured the Confederate president in northern Georgia. Davis was charged with treason, but never tried. In 1889, he died at age 81.

6 comments:

  1. I guess this is where that old movie 'Birth of Nation' came
    from along with Obama who rallies around blacks killing
    Whites.
    Brownlow, who controlled the electoral machinery, denied ex-Confederates the vote, while enfranchising the Black freedmen. Whites who had taken part in the secession were forbidden to carry weapons, while Brownlow organized his Black supporters into companies of riflemen. The situation General J.H. Clanton described in Alabama in his testimony before a congressional committee in 1871 held true in Tennessee: “The White people did not go to the polls . . . . But the Negroes marched to the polls by battalions, armed with muskets and stepping to the beat of drums.” The Blacks, whipped to a frenzy by the carpetbag leaders of the Loyal Leagues, engaged in an orgy of murder, rape, arson, and theft. Brownlow’s administration greeted these outrages with indulgence, often securing the release of Black offenders within hours of their capture. Where the Blacks did not resort to outright criminality, they assumed a swaggering arrogance toward the less prosperous Whites, aping some of their former plantation masters in contempt for the “po’ White trash.”
    http://nationalvanguard.org/2016/04/the-shame-of-reconstruction-part-2-the-whites-fight-back/

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  2. Union League active in my county also. (Dixieland)

    http://namsouth.com/viewtopic.php?t=203&highlight=union+league

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  3. Thanks. Good article. The atrocities by the Union was
    happening all over the South. What was done to the
    Southerner was done to the Germans except a thousand times
    worse. The wrong side won, both times.

    ReplyDelete