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).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 28: More on L.Q.C. Lamar

I posted about LQC Lamar back in the 2005 edition of this Confederate "Heritage" Month series and his active role in the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction government of Mississippi headed by Republican Gov. Adelbert Ames.

Richard Nelson Current described Lamar's role in 1875 in supporting the anti-democracy "Redeemer" movement in Those Terrible Carpetbaggers (1988). Ames tried to raise a state militia consisting of both black and white citizens to defend the elected democratic government against, 2which Lamar polemically called "negro regiments." Here is how Lamar, who is still credited by Britannica Online as having had a "moderating influence during Reconstruction" responded:

[Various compromise measure agreed to by Gov. Ames and the Republicans] did nothing to appease the Democrats. They were infuriated by other legislation that Ames secured - a law authorizing him to reorganize the militia and to purchase rapid-fire, multiple barrel Catling guns - which they denounced as the "Gatling Gun Bill." The anti-Republican Brandon Republican [newspaper] advised "Mr. Adelbert Ames to pack his carpet bag and take his wife and babies to Massachusetts before he issues an order to his 'melish' to turn his Gatling guns on the white people of Mississippi." Regarding Ames and his prospective "negro regiments," the Mississippi congressman Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar wrote to his own wife: "He will get them killed up, and then Grant will take possession for him." Lamar was to mastermind the strategy by which the Democrats, having learned their lesson from events in Vicksburg, would get enough blacks killed to carry the state election in the fall - and would do it in such a way as to keep Grant from taking possession for Ames." (my emphasis)

The "events in Vicksburg" to which Current refers are known as the Vicksburg Massacre of December 7, 1874.

And Lamar was remembered as a moderate!

President Grover Cleveland, the most reactionary Democratic President since before the Civil War, appointed Lamar as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

As Joseph Angelillo noted last year, "rather than a lauded leader in the advance toward national reunion, Lamar should be regarded as central in the retreat from Reconstruction." (The “Unrepentant Secessionist”: The Nomination of L.Q.C. Lamar and the Retreat from Reconstruction Journal of Supreme Court History 05/10/2021)

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 27: L.Q.C. Lamar

LQC Lamar - Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was his full Southern pompous name - is another of the somewhat better-known villains of American history. He was a true disciple of John Calhoun, the official evil spirit of American history. But he was also an important innovator of the post-Civil War "moderate" Southern segregationist and white racist.

My favorite stodgy-but-reliable source, Britannica Online, gives some information about his background:

Lamar was admitted to the bar in Georgia in 1847 and was a member of the Georgia House of Representatives (1853). He moved to Mississippi in 1855 and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives the following year, serving until December 1860, when he resigned to participate in the Mississippi secession convention. He was the author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession (Jan. 9, 1861) and served in the Confederate army.

After the war Lamar taught law at the University of Mississippi (1866–73). He then served in the U.S. Congress, both in the House (1873–77) and in the Senate (1877–85), where his moderating influence during Reconstruction won him the sobriquet “the Great Pacificator.” President Grover Cleveland appointed Lamar secretary of the interior (1885) and later associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1888). [my emphasis]

Okay, that was a little heavy on the stodgy part. No, Lamar was not a "moderating influence during Reconstruction." He was a hardcore white supremacist and enemy of the Reconstruction democracies in the South that recognized African-Americans as equal citizens. He specialty, though, was putting on a polite face in Congress for Northerners who were tired of supporting the democratic Reconstruction so they could pretend that what was happening in the post-Reconstruction South wasn't so bad.

Dennis Mitchell in A New History of Mississippi (2014) explains how Lamar established his moderate schtick by giving a half-decent tribute to the Abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner after Sumner death in 1874:

During his first months back in Congress, Lamar kept quiet, waiting for an opportunity to establish himself as spokesman for reconciliation between the South and North that would persuade the North to abandon its protection of the freedmen in Mississippi. Charles Sumner's death provided the perfect occasion. Before his death, Sumner had called for amnesty and forgiveness for the South, and Lamar used that as a springboard to praise Sumner and make his appeal for reconciliation between northerners and southerners, concluding: "My countrymen know one another and you will love one another:' The timing and tone proved to be perfect, winning the former fire-eater the reputation of peacemaker and conciliator and gaining lavish praise from the press. In the next Congress, Democrats elected him chairman of their caucus, further enhancing his status. As the face of the Mississippi Democratic Party, Lamar practiced the big lie technique as his allies back home brutally wrestled control away from [Mississippi's Republican Gov. Adelbert] Ames and his black majority. Lamar and his fellow Democrats adopted the face of reasonableness and conciliation to the white North while their allies employed violence to eliminate blacks from the political process in Mississippi. Confronted with accounts of murder and white intimidation of voters, they simply lied and denied the evidence. [my emphasis]

Did you catch the part in the Britannica quote about how Lamar was the author of the Mississippi ordinance of secession? A leading traitor to the United States, in other words. What a shock that less than a decade later he wanted to "persuade the North to abandon its protection of the freedmen in Mississippi"! Who could have predicted it?

Adelbert Ames is one of the genuine heroes of American democracy who seriously tried as Governor to defend democratic government in Mississippi. Mississippi suffers to this day from the fact that people like Lamar were on the winning side back then instead of those like Ames and his supporters.