What Most People Don’t Know About “Reconstruction.”

Via Billy

Valerie Protopapas

The following newspaper accounts are, obviously, only a minute sampling of what reportage occurred on murders and assaults not against “helpless freedmen” by evil white Southerners, but against Southerners, white and black, who refused to go along with the Radical Republican agenda. Notice that the newspaper involved was not from the South and neither was it reporting upon a story in a Southern paper:

Semi-Weekly Idaho World – May 13, 1868

The New York Herald remarks: Whenever any Radical firebrand, Loyal Leaguer or negro is killed or hurt in the South, the Radical press and orators of the North make a terrible noise about it. They ring the changes and howl day after day about rebel outrages, rebel hatred and rebel murders, but we never hear anything from them concerning the murdered Southern whites, and black outrages. The Radical papers are full of sensation accounts and denunciations of the murder of Ashburn, in Georgia, but they say nothing about the white one-armed ex-Confederate soldier who was shot dead on his horse recently near Selma, Alabama, or of the other four white men who have been murdered in the same vicinity since the war and no one arrested for these murders.

No, we hear nothing from these Radicals of the numerous other murders of the conquered Southern whites and outrages on them in other localities of the South, because there is every reason to believe this is the work of the black Loyal Leaguers. At a public procession and meeting of negroes at Macon, Georgia, on March 30th, the “loyal blacks” carried a banner on which the figure of a negro, cut in pasteboard, hung dangling from the gallows, and to which was attached, on a piece of white paper, the following inscription:

“Every man that don’t vote a Radical ticket this is the way we want to do him—hang him by the neck” These Radical Loyal League negroes boldly proclaimed, too, that the negro who failed to register would receive thirty-nine lashes; if he failed to vote at the election, two hundred lashes; if he voted the Democratic ticket he should be hanged. Need we be surprised, then, that white Southerners are murdered in every part of the South and that the murderers are not arrested?

In the same paper: RADICAL FRAUDS.—The most infamous frauds were perpetrated in many counties at the Arkansas election. At Clarksville, for instance, ninety-nine votes were returned against the Constitution—since then the affidavits of one hundred and eighty have been taken of those who voted against it. One of the registers is known to have voted twice, and was seen to tear up Conservative tickets from the military ballot box. Negroes were permitted to vote two or three times and even negro women, dressed in men’s clothes, appeared and deposited ballots.