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.

The fight over Reconstruction in John Kennedy's "Profiles in Courage" (1 of 2)

This is the first on two posts relating to Reconstruction and its overthrow. This is the kind of thing I post about every April as a counter-celebration of Confederate "Heritage" Month. But I'm posting this because of its relevance to the Trump impeachment.

John F. Kennedy’s book Profiles in Courage (1956) is an interesting enigma.

Kennedy was a Senator at the time he wrote it and, as we know, had higher political ambitions. The book is a series of historical sketches about Senators who displayed what JFK took to be political courage. (Theodore Sorenson was a significant collaborator on the book.)

The book is now mainly famous for its author, not so much for the content. But it won a Pulitzer Prize and is obviously very well-informed about nineteenth-century American history. Of the seven chapters devoted to individual men, five of them deal with 19th-century political figures and events.

It’s also, unsurprisingly, written with careful attention to contemporary political alignments. Which also makes the book fascinating as a historical document. Because in 1956, phrases like “reaching across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” had not yet taken on their 2019 meaning of Democrats surrendering to Republicans. The segregated South was still the “Solid South” where conservative Democrats were overwhelmingly dominant. The ideological differences between liberal (left/center-left) and conservative cut across both parties. Notably, there were many Republicans who were willing to support some civil rights legislation, in part to weaken the Solid South segregationist bloc.

This context shows up in his chapters on Mississippi Sen. Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar (Senator 1873-85) and Sen. Edmund Gibson Ross of Kansas (Senator 1866-71). Both chapters apply what in 1956 was still the respectable mainstream academic view that held Reconstruction to have been a bad enterprise driven by vengeful Northerners egged on by malicious, fanatical Radical Republican politicians.

LQC Lamar had the dubious distinction of having been a pre-Civil War Congressman from Mississippi, author of the treasonous Mississippi state secession ordinance, and a soldier in the Confederate Army which was dedicated to killing the soldiers of the United States Army.

The Reconstruction period ended in 1977. As a Senator, Lamar played a double role. In Mississippi, he fired up Klan violence. In the Senate, he played the dignified reconciler, the role Kennedy celebrated as a profile in courage. He praised Lamar as “a man of law and honor” without appraising the sinister double role he played with people in Mississippi. This chapter is genuinely bad because it is so immersed in the “Redeemer” (anti-democracy, anti-Reconstruction) that was still the dominant view even among white historians.

A more progressive and realistic view of Reconstruction was still held and actively defended at the time, even if was considered disreputably left. The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African-American History), published the more realistic version. The October 1955 issue of that journal, for instance, published an article by Clarence Bacote (“William Finch, Negro Councilman and Political Activities in Atlanta During Early Reconstruction”), which presented a view of the real stakes in Reconstruction that sounds perfectly mainstream now, but didn’t fit the picture of vengeful Yankee fanaticism dominant at the time that so influenced Kennedy’s own view:

In the political history of the Negro in Atlanta, there are two dates that have great significance, namely, December 7, 1870, and May 13, 1953. On the first date, Negroes for the first time were elected to public office in the city; on the second date, after a lapse of eighty-three years, Negroes again were elected. However, the climate of opinion in 1870 was entirely different from that which prevailed in 1953. The first date fell in a period when the social, economic, and political conditions were unsettled, and when the Negro faced insurmountable odds in trying to adjust himself in an hostile environment. Despite these obstacles, Negro leaders were struggling to lay the foundation for those rights and privileges which accompany first-class citizenship. [my emphasis]

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., sometimes called the court historian of Camelot, would later write that Kennedy’s experience as President with hardcore segregationists like Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett led him to wonder whether he had been overly harsh in his view of the pro-Reconstruction Radical Republicans.

Part 2 will cover JFK's treatment of Edmund Ross, who played a pivotal role in obstructing democratic Reconstruction in the former Confederacy.