Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 29: Adelbert Ames, Blanche Ames, LQC Lamar, and John Kennedy

The Atlantic Monthly had a special issue last year on Reconstruction. In one of the articles is by Jordan Virtue, about John Kennedy’s how view of Reconstruction was heavily influenced by Lost Cause dogma. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later noted that it was the view that Kennedy learned in history classes at Harvard in the 1930s. (1) Schlesinger also noted that after his experiences as President with segregationist Governors like Alabama’s George Wallace and Mississippi’s Ross Barnett, Kennedy began to think more favorable about the advocates of Reconstruction.

Virtue focuses on JFK’s description of two 19th century Mississippi politicians in his book Profiles in Courage (1955). One of them was Adelbert Ames, the best Governor Mississippi ever had and an actual hero of democracy for defending equal rights as Reconstruction Governor there in 1874-76. He had also been a Union General. When he passed away in 1933 at age 97, he was the last surviving Civil War general.

The other Mississippian was Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II, often referred to as LQC Lamar, who served as Mississippi Senator 1877-1885, and later as federal Secretary of the Interior and a Supreme Court Justice. Lamar was an enemy of Reconstruction and democracy, and he supported the anti-democracy “Redeemer” movement to deprive Black Americans of the rights they had won.

Lamar had worked on drafting Mississippi Secession Ordinance and served on the staff of Confederate Gen. James Longstreet, who was the cousin of Lamar’s wife. Had the anti-insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment (2) been properly enforced, he would never have been allowed to hold a federal office again. Because he was a Congressional Representative in the 1850s, which meant he had taken an oath to support the Constitution.

Virtue summarizes what was wrong with JFK’s approach this way:

Lamar and Ames were the preeminent politicians of Mississippi Reconstruction. They hated each other. (At one point, Lamar threatened to lynch Ames.) Profiles in Courage had relied heavily on the work of influential Dunning School historians — disciples of the Columbia University professor William A. Dunning, who scorned Black suffrage and promoted the mythology of the Lost Cause. Kennedy may have been genuinely misled by these historians, but he also aspired to higher office and needed to appeal to white southern voters. His book denounced Reconstruction, casting Ames as a corrupt, carpetbagging villain and Lamar as a heroic southern statesman. [my emphasis]

A good example of how views of history and contemporary political postures affect historical narratives.

Virtue tells the story of how Ames’ daughter Blanche repeatedly wrote Kennedy demanding that he revise his book, which he declined to do. “[W]hen when Kennedy refused to amend Profiles, Blanche did what any sensible Massachusetts woman would do: she sat down and wrote her own book.”

Virtue sketches out more of Adelbert Ames’ career, who she accurately describes as “a champion of racial rights [i.e., equal rights for African-Americans], embracing a personal ‘Mission with a large M’ to support Black citizens.

Ames’ daughter Blanche carried on her father’s and mother’s tradition of social justice advocacy:

Adelbert encouraged his daughters to attend college. Blanche went to Smith, where she became class president. At commencement, she delivered a forceful address promoting women’s suffrage, with President William McKinley in the audience. Blanche helped spearhead the Massachusetts women’s suffrage movement, working as a political cartoonist for Woman’s Journal. She founded the Massachusetts Birth Control League. Once, Blanche sauntered onto Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue carrying a hand-carved wooden penis to demonstrate proper condom use; she was arrested, but police released her after realizing she was the daughter of one governor and the granddaughter of another. “If she was a man,” one historian has observed, “there would be five books” about her already.

Virtue’s account also includes this observation:

Before the Civil War, Mississippi had contained some of the richest counties in the nation, but most Mississippians—some 55 percent—were enslaved. After the war, Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union.

JFK as a historian was bad on Reconstruction. And he accounts of Ames and Lamar really are embarrassingly bad. But as President, he acted on civil rights much more in the tradition of Adelbert Ames than that of the thoroughly odious LQC Lamar.

A new biography of Ames was just published, Adelbert Ames, the Civil War, and the Creation of Modern America (2024) by Michael Megelsh.

Richard Nelson Current devotes an excellent chapter to Adelbert Ames in the ironically titled Those Terrible Carpetbagger: A Reinterpretation (1988).

As Virtue reports, Blanche’s own biography of her father (Adelbert Ames: General, Senator, Governor) went to press on the day Kennedy was assassinated, November 22, 1963.

Notes:

(1) Virtue, Jordan (2023): Kennedy and the Lost Cause. Atlantic Monthly Dec. 2022, 90-94.

(2) Temme, Laura (2024): Disqualification from Public Office Under the 14th Amendment. FindLaw 01/08/2024. <https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment14/annotation15.html> (Accessed: 2024-29-04).