The Joint Committee On Reconstruction, Or Do You Love Big Brother ?
3/29/2009
Many Southerners were, quite naturally, bitter after the War of Northern Aggression ended and the Marxist/abolitionist cultural program called “reconstruction” was forced upon them. They’d seen their country pillaged and burned by Marxist Yankees during the war and now they were seeing the last ounce of blood being wrung from it with “reconstruction.” Incidentally, the term “reconstruction” is really a Marxist term. When Karl Marx praised Abraham Lincoln, one of the things he praised him for was that he was fighting for “…the reconstruction of a social world.” So begin to get it fixed in your minds that “reconstruction” in the South was really Marxism in living colour.
One bitter Southerner was a man named Innes Randolph, who penned the words to a song many of us know and enjoy, entitled “Oh I’m A Good Old Rebel.” After mentioning his hate for “the Yankee nation” and it’s flag and founding documents, Randolph closes his song with: “I can’t take up my musket and fight’em (the Yankees) now no more, but I ain’t gonna love’em now, that is certain sure. I don’t want no pardon for what I was and am. I won’t be reconstructed and I don’t give a damn.” Whether you totally agree with all of Randolph’s comments and sentiments (many Southerners do not completely) is not the real point. He expressed a viewpoint that was, at least partially, natural to many after the war’s end. The wounds were not healed yet–and “reconstruction” was never intended to heal them.