(CHEERING AND CLAPPING)
I can thank God for Jesus
because I know Jesus is three in one.
(GOSPEL MUSIC)
Thank the Lord!
(INDISTINCT SINGING)
(COOKE) For more than three centuries, the negro in America has been, in turn,
slave, lackey, hired help, licensed clown,
who mostly gave to America his cheap labour
and his powerful, melancholy music.
His lowly status has mocked, and only recently challenged,
the old American declaration that all men are created equal.
In general, the negro is at the bottom of the heap.
He has less schooling, worse health, more infant mortality,
double or triple the unemployment rate of the whites.
He is a permanent invalid in American society.
And the places he lives, whether in the town or the country,
are its casualty wards.
Sometimes it does seem, in some places, that he's not much better off
than he was when Jefferson feared that the condition of the negro
might ring a firebell in the night.
Let's go back to the beginning
and listen to some words that were written 190 years ago.
They were put down by Jefferson at the end of a day
after he'd seen a planter abusing a slave while the planter's son stood by.
"The whole commerce between master and slave
"is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions -
"the most unremitting despotism on the one part,
"and degrading submissions on the other.
"Our children see this, and learn to imitate it.
"The parent storms, the child looks on, and puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves,
"and thus nursed, educated and daily exercised in tyranny,
"cannot but be stamped by it, with odious peculiarities.
"The man must be a prodigy
"who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances."
I suppose today the word "slave"
calls up an image of a man wholly black.
A man sold in Africa by black men
to British or American shippers,
and then put up on auction block somewhere in the West Indies or the American South.
When the slave arrived here, in Protestant North America at any rate,
he would have no hope, as he had in Catholic Brazil,
of working out his freedom.
He would be set to work on a rice or tobacco plantation
and watched from dawn to dusk by an overseer.
His whole life would be spent within the confines of his master's domain.
He was usually not allowed to marry or form lasting attachments.
They would produce, in time, more hands for work, but at once, more mouths to feed.
But if his lot here below was miserable, he was encouraged to hope for pie in the sky.
And he was freely allowed then, as now, the consolations of religion.
It's up to you today to tap the treasure of good.
If I can give you the right communication,
then you will be a friend to me.
You will be a just man. A fountain of beauty.
(ALL) Yeah!
(GOSPEL MUSIC)
(MUSIC DROWNS WORDS)
...in the name of Jesus!
Thank you, God.
Yes, Lord.
Stretch out thy arm of understanding. Remember this child.
We pray in the name of Jesus. Thank you, God.
(COOKE) Yet, to the foreign visitor, the hardships of this labouring society
were cloaked with the facade of great natural beauty and elegant living,
but always behind the facade was the force that maintained it.
The labour force that the southerners called the "Peculiar Institution".
These are the slave cabins, and rather more imposing than most.
These were built in 1740 by the slaves themselves.
These were reserved for the house servants.
The labouring slaves had their smaller huts in the woods and the fields.
As you see, they're pretty solid, and now in disrepair.
In each cabin, one, two, possibly three families
were born, lived, died.
Whole generations lived their lives away in these huts, and the fields in which they worked.
# Go down, Moses
# Way down in Egypt land
# Tell ol' Pharaoh
# To let my people go
# Go down, Moses
# Way down in Egypt land
# Tell ol' Pharaoh
# To let my people go #
(COOKE) In many plantations, they ran away.
And there was no place to hide.
There were small, fierce insurrections,
and they were put down.
I suppose nothing is more permanent in human nature
than indignation by hindsight.
There are people running around who say Jefferson had slaves, so he was a hypocrite.
I remember when I first came to this country,
I was disturbed by the separate signs "Black" and "White" that you saw in restaurants,
and dividing off sections in theatres and trains and so on,
and it seemed to me then that the negro was a sore thumb
sticking up through the Declaration of Independence.
But I didn't shudder as Americans did and do
at the inhumanity of sending eight-year-old boys away to boarding school.
I think it all depends on the conventions that you were brought up with.
After all, Franklin Roosevelt was a humane man, and so were my many southern friends.
And I decided that it was their country and perhaps they knew best.
Now, this is scandalously insensitive today,
and it's caught up with us.
And the negro has a long way to go, but he has come further in the last 30 years
than in the previous 300.
Well, by the time of the American Revolution,
half the population of Virginia were black slaves,
and in the Carolinas it was two blacks to one white.
Many southerners, as you must have gathered from that anguished passage of Jefferson,
felt ashamed, humiliated by their ownership of slaves.
George Washington, by the way,
he performed his own act of emancipation
by setting his slaves free in his will.
But the slave trade was too profitable to the northern shipper,
and too vital to the economy of the south to be abolished.
It WAS abolished in 1808 - that's to say, the legal importation of slaves from Africa.
Indeed, long before then,
the port of Savannah in Georgia had hoped to prosper without them.
Savannah was planned by an English humanitarian -
a greatly admired friend of Dr Johnson, James Oglethorpe.
It was his ambition to make of Georgia a decorative, ideal colony
that should be free from, as he put it, "the stain of slavery".
But white men had no taste for stooped labour under a tropical sun.
Then, around the turn of the 18th century,
something happened that made slaves more desirable than ever,
and the bootleg trade in them more lucrative than the legal trade.
That something was the cotton kingdom.
In the autumn of 1792,
a young man, fresh from Yale College, arrived in Savannah.
His name was Eli Whitney.
He took a boat up the Savannah River.
He was a northerner, the son of a Massachusetts farmer.
He was at once impressed and moved
by the strangeness of the landscape, the bird sounds
and the primal life on the bayous.
He was going to his first job as a schoolteacher on a plantation in Georgia.
To a boy from a snowbound, New England farm,
his first sight of the south must have seemed as exotic as a journey to Siam.
Young Whitney was a recluse. An inquisitive, brooding type.
What today we should call a loner.
In his native north, he had to do all the chores of a farm,
but his mania was carpentry and mechanics.
As a boy, he'd amazed his family by disappearing to his work bench for days on end
and reappearing with wheel rims, polished axles, hat pins, finely ground knives,
clocks, needles, metalwork, fiddles -
all of his own construction.
Well, one evening in Georgia, he sat in silence at a dinner party
and listened to some southern planters in a bitter lamentation
about the tedium and the cost of cleaning cotton.
It took 20 slaves a whole day to pick and clean the cotton.
This was an old and nagging problem.
The precious part is the lint. What you had to get rid of were these bothersome seeds.
They're as hard as peas, and buried in there.
They just had to be pulled out by hand.
Separated like that.
There was no machine, no device ever contrived that could do it.
Until they could separate their own Sea Island and green-seed cottons, they could not compete.
Until this visit to Georgia, Whitney, of course, had never seen any species of cotton,
but he was fascinated by the problem.
In the next few days, he went off to a carpenter's shop that the family had rigged up for him.
He tried out all kinds of shapes of cylinders, and he pulled drawknives over them
and nothing worked.
Then he tells us in a letter, one day he saw a cat sitting by a fence that enclosed the poultry yard.
The cat could just get one paw through the fence,
and held it there like a pointer, poised, waiting for a strolling chicken.
And then darted the paw forward, missed the chicken, but retrieved a pawful of feathers.
In this, he saw a principle of friction and separation.
He applied it, and he came up with this - the cotton gin.
This is an actual demonstration model that was made by Whitney himself.
It's preserved in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, which is where we now are.
Like so many awesome discoveries, like the propositions of Euclid,
it was so simple that it seemed incredible nobody had thought of it
any day after the invention of the wheel.
Well, here it is. A wooden cylinder implanted with metal spikes divided by metal bars.
You take a piece of raw cotton, drop it in, turn the crank,
you shed the seeds into the box,
and up comes here... the pure lint.
Whitney calculated that a hand machine like this could do the work of ten slaves.
Of 50 slaves if it was driven by water.
It was so simple, so obvious that every rude wheelwright could make it,
and it was Whitney's misfortune that most of them did.
Trying to monopolise it was like taking out a patent on a shoelace.
But the thing itself, in all its forms,
gave a gigantic lift to the fortunes of the southern planters.
# 0h, I wish I was in the land of cotton Old times there are not forgotten
# Look away, look away, look away Dixieland
# In Dixieland where I was born Early on one frosty morning
# Look away, look away, look away Dixieland
# 0h, I wish I was in Dixie Hurray, hurray
# In Dixieland I'll make my stand To live and die in Dixie
# Away, away
# Away down south in Dixie
# Away, away, away down south in Dixie #
And then, less than two years after Whitney's invention,
a Frenchman in New Orleans made sugar granulate from boiling sugar cane.
So now, also a sugar empire
turned the hot, wet delta lands of Louisiana
into more fortunes, and yet another recruiting ground for black slaves.
How to get it to the north?
The Mississippi has a powerful downstream flow and treacherous currents.
They tried and failed to pull boats upstream with teams of horses on the banks.
Then, in 1811, New Orleans built the first steamboat
and solved the problem of upstream navigation.
They started shipping cargoes of raw sugar up the Mississippi for refining
as far as St Louis, Louisville and Cincinnati.
20 years after the first steamboat went up the river,
New Orleans boasted that it had the largest sugar refinery in the world,
and was the capital port of king cotton.
(MUSIC: "DIXIE")
So now the south settled into its golden age.
The sugar went up the river, and on the return journey,
steamboats picked up the cotton
from plantations begun on the banks of the Mississippi.
The first stop the steamboats made was here at Natchez,
a town that had been ruled successively by the Indians, the French,
the British, the Spanish, and was only recently American.
Before the coming of the cotton gin, it had been a frontier capital, and a rough one.
A loading place for the flatboatmen taking aboard the rafts
skins and hams, tobacco and grains and whisky.
It was a way station for pioneers going west into the new lands,
and a boom town for land agents and fly-by-night real estate men.
Land was cheap, and money was easy to make and lose.
New farmers found that tobacco here didn't pay,
but with the cotton gin, the land bloomed,
and in time, so did the new rich, from the south but also from the north,
and even from Scotland and Ireland.
They built new houses on the models that the French and Spanish had given them,
but the grandest mansions followed the conservative fashion of the Greek revival.
The man who built this house was an Irishman - Frederick Stanton -
and he was one who profited royally from the mating of the cotton gin and the steamboat.
In 1852, he sold his first big house to Natchez's first millionaire,
and he decided to build something bigger and better of his own.
And this is it.
Stanton Hall.
It's characteristic of the mid-century southern tycoons,
that though they admired and retained the classical forms outdoors,
indoors, they packed their houses with the gaudiest, the most funereal early Victoriana.
He was a cotton broker.
After the steamboat, he shipped his cotton north to Memphis
and all the northern ports of the Mississippi,
down the river to New Orleans and out to Europe, particularly to Manchester.
He was a type that anticipated the more lordly habits of the later financial barons.
This house took five years to complete.
Towards the end of the work,
Stanton grew a little impatient with the regular timetables of the transatlantic ships,
so he charted his own liner to fetch the furniture, the mirrors
and the expensive baubles that he'd bought or had made to order in Europe.
They were reshipped to New Orleans, came up the river, and were unloaded here in Natchez.
And here they are. Mantels of Carrera marble.
Bronze chandeliers, also from Italy.
Two giant matching French mirrors.
And mahogany doors made in England.
It was a far cry from Natchez, Mississippi to Savannah, Georgia,
and from the new fortunes to the old,
but to cross the thousand miles that separated them,
you would have seen the same crop, the same lifeline,
the same legions of the blacks.
It's time to leave this graceful, feudal cotton kingdom,
and go back to the north,
as Eli Whitney did, to devise in these factories of his
a method of making a uniform product with interchangeable parts.
It no longer required special skill to make a gun, or later, a sewing machine.
Moulds could produce identical parts
that had always had to be made by the hands of skilled craftsmen.
It was the fateful turning point between craftsmanship and industry,
and it heralded all the benefits and all the troubles of mass production.
Whitney's ingenuity in two places
had given a tragic guarantee that the north would embrace the industrial revolution
and the south would reject it.
That the north would go one way and the south another,
and that sooner or later they would collide.
The historical fact is that the south was spreading cotton, tobacco and sugar
into new land, and extending the empire of slavery through the south and west,
while into the north and west were pouring men and machines
and, most of all, independent farmers.
They were against slavery - not so much on principle.
They'd expected to go west and work free land for their own prosperity,
and did not expect to compete with slave labour.
So the very awkward question came up.
What would happen when the two streams of settlers flowed together on the same ground?
Let's look at the map. This is the actual map of the times.
The first frightening omen - Thomas Jefferson called it "A firebell in the night" -
came so early as 1819, when Missouri asked to come in as a state.
Now, Missouri had been settled by slave holders,
but it lies north of the tumbling, horizontal line
that divided the free states of the north from the slave states of the south.
If Missouri were let in as a slave state,
a northerner would look at this map and see a precedent, an invasion,
at best a buffer state.
The Congress let Missouri in as a slave state,
but to maintain its habit of balancing one free, one slave,
it also let Maine in as a free state.
But in the same act, it prohibited from then on
all slavery north of this line of latitude, 36-30.
It is known as the "Missouri Compromise Line",
and it drew a battle line.
This geographical balance lasted precariously for about 30 years.
Then the United States fought a war with Mexico and won,
and acquired vast lands, most of them south of the Missouri Compromise Line.
Texas, the territory of New Mexico, California,
and Utah well to the north.
This presented a massive challenge to the Missouri Compromise,
and it inspired massive enmity
which festered for a couple of years or so,
and came to a head, as all great issues do,
in the United States Senate, which is where we are now.
We're in the Senate reception room, and on the opposite wall there,
I see a portrait of the last man, the last great political figure
to try and reconcile the north and the south.
His name was Henry Clay, and he was from Kentucky.
He gave 60 years of his life to a failing campaign to abolish slavery,
beginning in his own state.
But in spite of his ardent feelings,
he was known as the "Great Compromiser".
He looks a whole lot younger and healthier here
than he did when he stood on the Senate floor to give the last speech of his life.
He was 83, haggard, racked with asthma, and he talked for two days.
And this was his solution. Let the north return all fugitive slaves.
Let California be admitted as a free state.
Give to the territories of Utah and New Mexico the time and the freedom
to decide when, if ever, they want slavery.
And let the new state of Texas keep the slave system it had always had.
The compromise was voted and grudgingly accepted by both sides,
but then came one of those frightening decades in American history
when fear on the one hand and self-righteousness on the other
combine to seize a public issue.
Of course, there were fair, high-minded men in every part of the country,
but they were drowned in a boiling sea of rhetoric and propaganda.
There was a secret highway worked out by abolitionists in defiance of the federal law
to help fugitive slaves escape from the south.
At least 50,000 of them got away through this underground.
And there was a maniacal egotist from Connecticut, John Brown,
who raided a federal arsenal with the intention of arming slaves in the south.
He was caught, tried and hanged,
but, oddly, his name goes marching on in a song.
(MUSIC: "JOHN BROWN'S BODY")
All these things taunted and enraged the southerners.
They retreated into an equally self-righteous defiance,
and soon the word "Secession" became a badge of southern pride.
The last fatal blow was struck by, of all healing institutions,
the Supreme Court of the United States.
A negro slave, Dred Scott, from a slave state, Missouri,
had lived for some time in a free state, Illinois, with his old master's permission.
When he went home again, he sued in court to have himself declared a free man.
In a fatal decision, the Supreme Court ruled
that whether or not you could argue that a negro was a citizen, a slave was not.
The laws of Missouri were binding.
In a word, the court said that Congress was powerless to exclude slavery from a free state.
From then on, the two nations, for that was what, in fact, they had become,
almost resolutely fell apart.
On 12th April, 1861,
the southerners unloosed their fire on a federal fort, Fort Sumpter,
built on a sand bar in the mouth of Charleston Harbour.
"A house divided against itself," said Lincoln, "cannot stand."
A casual sentence that immediately had a piercing relevance to the army regulars.
If they came from the south, they had to choose which side to be on.
Two brothers were major generals with the opposing armies.
The commander of the Confederate navy had a son killed in the Union navy.
And Mrs Abraham Lincoln's three brothers died for the south.
I doubt that any war is more wounding to the young than a civil war,
which turns the homeland into alien country
and a map of bloody family feuds.
In the beginning, the northerners thought, as one side always does,
that the war would be over by Christmas.
The north had 22 million people against nine million in the south.
It had the steel to make its guns and materiel.
The south had to buy them from France and Britain.
New York alone produced twice as many manufactured goods
as the whole of the south.
The north had 22,000 miles of unified railroads,
and the south only 9,000 miles of track of various gauges.
For all these disparities, camp life on both sides was about equally primitive.
Country boys, until they were talked into a little elementary hygiene,
into the magic of carbolic soap,
dropped like swatted flies.
Amputation was the regular cure for a badly wounded limb,
and if you survived, you had one chance in four of dying from infection.
But gradually, the huge experience of gunshot wounds
brought new knowledge to medicine, to neurology in particular,
and after two years, the battlefield use of anaesthetics became routine.
For the northern armies,
high-minded men and women formed the National Sanitary Commission,
which started veterans' pensions, organised nursing wards at the front
and faced the human problems of the men who went home again.
For the southerners, there was only the compassion of scattered families,
and the hope that the next raid would seize some of the drugs and chloroform
which Abraham Lincoln barred from shipment to the southern armies.
Why, then, did it go on for four years?
The south had the resources of a vast granary, but its human resources were its strength.
It had more adroit and disciplined generals
who became skilled at fighting along interior lines.
It had the southern people,
and all they wanted was to prove that their homeland was unconquerable.
To this day, the moment you leave Washington and cross the Potomac into Virginia,
the highways throughout the whole arc of the south for 1,000 miles
are posted with historical markers that tick off placid fields as the scene of ghastly encounters.
We're in one of them now, in Southern Tennessee.
It is called Shiloh, and it's only one of a whole poem of remembered place names.
They toll through the American memory like an elegy.
Antietam and Vicksburg. Manassas and Bull Run.
Chattanooga and Chancellorsville and Gettysburg.
They were unforgettable even down to our own time.
I once knew a very old man
with a huge chiselled face and a great snowy moustache and a blazing eye.
And he was a New England aristocrat of immense reserve,
but he couldn't help beginning his entry in "Who's Who" with this -
"Born March 8th 1841.
"Captain, 20th Massachusetts Volunteers.
"Wounded in the breast at Ball's Bluff.
"In the heel at Fredericksburg.
"In the neck at Antietam."
Nevertheless, he survived to become the most distinguished jurist
in the English-speaking world.
His name was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
I still find it hard to believe that I met a man who was wounded in the American Civil War,
when his comrades have been dead for over 100 years.
Their only lasting memorial is the photographs they had taken
when they first put on their uniform.
#Just before a battle, Mother
# I am thinking most of you
# While upon the fields we're watching
# With the enemy in view
# Comrades brave are round me lying
# Filled with thoughts of home and God
# For well they know that on the morrow
# Some will sleep beneath the sod
# But, oh, you'll not forget me, Mother
# If I'm numbered with the slain #
(COOKE) The north had the reserves, but the southerners had the audacity.
And the best of them fought with a single-minded passion
behind the last gentle knight of modern warfare -
General Robert E Lee.
A man so deeply humane that it's incredible to us, to me at any rate,
that he should have chosen the profession of soldiering.
When the slavery issue came to a boil,
Lee made quite clear where he stood.
He wrote, "Slavery is a moral and political evil in any society.
"A greater evil to the white man than the black."
And he freed his slaves.
We are in his study.
A very simple Victorian study, as you see. This is the little chess set
that he carried with him on all his campaigns.
And he even took this desk on campaign with him, too.
When the war started, he faced an acute moral conflict.
It's always a shock to recall that Lincoln offered him the command of the northern forces.
He could have taken it on principle,
because he believed very strongly that secession was unconstitutional.
But through five generations, all his loyalties and his affections were with Virginia.
He spent a day and a night padding around upstairs, trying to resolve this ordeal,
and at the end of it he wrote to his son.
He said that he believed in the Union...
"But a Union that can only be maintained by swords and bayonets
"has no charm for me."
So he went back to Virginia, offered his services,
and was put in command of the southern forces.
And by a tragic irony, he came to believe in a principle
that Lincoln later was to attribute solely to the northern cause,
which was the right of a people - how about the people of Virginia - to govern themselves,
so that government of the people by the people for the people
shall not perish from the earth.
I doubt that Alexander the Great or Napoleon
commanded such respect, you might even say reverence, from his troops as Robert E Lee.
There's an incident when, one time, 15,000 soldiers were marching along a road at night,
and they heard that nearby Lee was asleep.
And without any orders, they broke their march
and they all tiptoed by.
A few days after Fort Sumter,
he left this house and he never came back again.
And within a few more days, it was a northern camp, and then a graveyard.
The Secretary of War saw to it that no one would want to live there again
by ordering that solders' graves should be planted as close to the house as possible.
Later, the place was confiscated by the government
and is now THE national military cemetery.
Not only for soldiers.
This light on the grave of John F Kennedy
is a perpetual reminder of the bad day in Dallas in 1963.
And this cross on the grave of Robert F Kennedy
a reminder of the bad night in Los Angeles five years later.
I don't suppose there's a more beautiful, bleak view in all America than this,
from the porch of a saintly man who might have commanded the Union but lost the south,
looking over the graves of two murdered brothers
across the river to yet another murdered president.
The man who, more than any northern soldier, was Lee's opposing figure.
We're talking, of course, about that bemused country boy, frontier farmer, carpenter,
drifter, rail splitter, lawyer, tough and wily politician
whose rude boyhood we looked at last time.
Abraham Lincoln.
This is the room in the White House where he sat down with his Cabinet,
and he used to rest when he was overcome, as he often was,
with what he called "a profound melancholia".
He was never wildly popular when he was alive,
especially at the beginning of the war.
Like all strong characters, he was well hated,
and many newspapers, including the London "Times",
called him the Baboon.
Now, I think this was a very snobby thing.
It was mainly because of his country manners and his gangling gait,
and his fondness for rough stories.
And his maddening habit of being, in a kind of tooth-sucking way,
wiser and sharper than you.
To make it worse, he was.
He did lead the winning side.
He did, in this room,
sign the proclamation emancipating the negro slaves in the slave states.
And then he was assassinated.
And so he was canonised,
because a halo encircles all the murdered presidents, and Lincoln most of all.
Now, this room is now a guest bedroom.
But some people who come here are just overpowered by it.
It has accommodated all kinds of dignitaries, heads of state - Prince Philip, Bob Hope -
but there are some people who have this worship of Lincoln
who feel when they enter this room that they're coming into a crypt or a private chapel.
I remember when Adlai Stevenson was summoned here by Harry Truman
to be told that he was the Democrats' heir apparent.
He was put to stay the night in this room.
Stevenson worshipped Lincoln.
He padded around the room for many hours
and he kept looking at this bed
and, in the end, he just couldn't do it.
He just could not bed down in Lincoln's bed.
So he bedded down on that sofa.
The joke is that in Lincoln's day, the bed wasn't here. The sofa was.
So, you see, it's difficult, almost tasteless, to talk sense about such a man.
But we must try.
First, he dignified the trade of politician perhaps more than any man before or since.
He had an extraordinary sense of the humanity of quite inhuman people,
and tolerated them long enough to win them over.
Powerful men who were the scum of the Republic.
Gun contractors, war profiteers. Wheeler-dealers of every stripe.
He learned pretty quickly about war.
Having started by firing every general in sight if he spotted a character flaw,
in the end, he chose the best.
He had so little egomania
that he said to them, "When you are in the field, you are the Union."
And then, by some brain chemistry that's never been explained,
he transformed his whole style of speaking and writing.
His early speeches are full of the usual fustian of the time,
then he steeped himself in three books.
In the subtleties of Shakespeare, the cadencies of the Bible,
and the tough humanity of Robert Burns.
And he became what he was - a shrewd, honourable frontiersman of very great gifts.
Never did he use these gifts more movingly
than in a small town in Pennsylvania - Gettysburg.
In three sweltering days in July 1863,
it had seen over 150,000 men fight for every hill and creek and pasture,
and a cemetery gate.
Only three months after the battle, this cemetery was dedicated as a memorial
before a restless crowd milling in the stinking air
of shallow graves and rotting bodies.
It was here that Lincoln made the short speech
which alone has immortalised him among the English-speaking peoples.
At the time, the speech was not only disregarded,
it was thought to be either a bore or a discredit to a solemn occasion.
43,000 men were killed or missing or wounded at Gettysburg.
A single slaughter not matched again until the second battle of the Somme.
Lee's men never again penetrated so far north.
When Gettysburg was over, there were many more battles and almost two years to go,
but it was the flood tide of southern hopes.
From then on, Britain and France backed away
from the seductive appeals to come in on the southern side.
And at the end of it, what?
The south was beaten, and much worse, it was devastated.
The cotton kingdom was destroyed,
the plantation system with all its evils and its virtues was debauched.
Four million slaves were freed, but there was nowhere for them to go.
The land, simply the natural richness of the land and the man-made culture of the south
were defiled.
In a single long march of 60,000 men from Atlanta to the sea,
General Sherman destroyed every town, railyard, mansion, crop
across a swathe of 60 miles.
# So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train
# 60 miles in latitude, 300 to the main
# Treason fled before us, resistance was in vain
# While we were marching through Georgia
# Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee
# Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free
# So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea
# While we were marching through Georgia #
So, the Union held.
At what a price?
Germany after the second war was hardly so badly off as the conquered south.
And it was not only conquered, it was now to be punished.
It took the most strenuous efforts of General Grant
to prevent Lee and the other Confederate generals
from being brought to a Nuremberg trial.
They were seen as traitors by northern politicians.
They said, "If the southerners get their rights back, they'll run the country."
So several southern states were put under military control,
and in these and others,
the whites were totally disenfranchised
and the state governments were run by negroes who could barely read or write.
They were controlled by northern idealists, to be sure,
but also by southern renegades,
and by northern businessmen and salesmen who descended on the south like locusts.
It planted a trauma in the southern whites,
and when the reaction came, which it did very swiftly,
the negroes were swept from power and from the voting booths,
and they never entered them again for many decades.
The negro was, once again, a hireling, never to be trusted as an equal.
He'd been pitied and despised - indulged, even.
Now he was feared.
And I think that is the root of the trauma from which, after a century,
we're only now beginning to recover.
Meanwhile, every spring,
docile tourists troop through the old battlefields in the southern gardens,
and the mansions, either surviving or restored,
and occasionally they come on these reminders of the power and the glory
that will never be restored.
(CH0IR) # In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea
# With a glory in his bosom
# That transfigures you and me
# As he died to make men holy
# Let us live to make men free
# While God is marching on
# Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
# His truth is marching on
# Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!
# His truth is marching on!
# Amen
# Amen #