POLICING FOR PEACE OR PROFITS?
Hesseltine, William B.
Policing For Peace Or Profits? By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the seeond of a series of articles by Prof, Hesseltine on American experience with the policing of a conquered...
...Northern churches sent preachers to take over Southern pulpits...
...It's not without significance that the trainees in this part of the ASTP have been signed up for three years after the "duration...
...His successor, Andrew Johnson, had none of Lincoln's hnmanitarianism or moderation...
...The Jacobins were delighted when Johnson became President...
...Thus the conquered South could be made permanently into a colony, and its resources perverted to Yankee profiteers...
...The true policy," said one religious journal, "is to be on the ground while society is in its chaotic state," in order to free the South from "utter barbarism" by the "infusion of a purer, a liberty-loving Christianity...
...FOR MORE than three years, now, the American public has been hearing—with something less than whole-souled enthusiasm—about policing the world after the current war is over...
...It will not be the first time that the victors in a war have attempted to patrol the vanquished, and to establish pliant and obsequious governments over the victims...
...Cotton speculators followed the advancing Federal armies, and Treasury agents moved in to seize Con-, federate cotton, horses, mules, tobacco, rice, and sugar...
...The New York Commercial and- Financial Chronicle, the entrepreneur's Bible, reported that Northern men, accustomed to business, were hurrying South to promote industrial development...
...The period of Reconstruction has been portrayed as everything from a crusade for democracy to a "tragic era" and an "age of hate...
...In the United States, a decade of military dominance of the South followed the Civil War...
...Moreover, those classes would stop the acquisitive activities of the South-bound Northern business men, while the representatives of agricultural communities might, in Congress, oppose legislation for the benefit of industrialists...
...In neither case were the results successful—either from the standpoint of the conquerors or the conquered—and makers-' of AMGOTs and teachers of CATS may well learn caution from the past...
...Occasionally, some bridge player, pushing back his chair at the end of a rubber, devises some system of bidding for troops in an international police force...
...So, apparently, the minimum period of occupation will be three years, and, if the mysterious Kingsbury Smith is xight, it will extend for one or more decades...
...Owl-eyed historians have presented it as a great constitutional struggle between nationalism and states rights, and between the legislative and the executive branches of the government...
...I Long before the Civil War ended, many Northerners : saw opportunities for profits in the defeated region...
...By WILLIAM B. HESSELTINE EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the seeond of a series of articles by Prof, Hesseltine on American experience with the policing of a conquered people...
...In fact, about the only concrete answer that questioners have been able to extract from the war-lords of the United Nations about their postwar plan is that the conquered lands will be kept under military government for a long, long time...
...To Andrew Johnson, on the other hand, the exploiting interests of Northern industry and finance had little appeal...
...During the war, he had served on the Jacobin's Committee on the Conduct of the War, and had been as loud and venomous in his castigation of the South as any of his colleagues...
...In actual fact, these were merely the propaganda devices by which both sides hid their real objectives...
...The fundamental fight was over the economic control of the South...
...The collapse of the Confederacy offered opportunity to his own kind to control the South...
...At the end of the war, Secretary of War Stanton surrendered Southern church property to Northern denominations...
...Young officers from the Federal armies, spotting likely opportunities on their military expeditions, rushed South as soon as they were discharged, bought plantations,' or built iron furnaces...
...They took over plantations and worked them for the benefit of the government—and themselves...
...In Europe, the most recent, large-scale attempt to play policeman followed the Napoleonic wars...
...Hardly had the Johnsonian governments gotten under way, in the Summer of 1865, when the predatory Jaeobins began to howl...
...The Jacobin victory was signalized by the passage early in 1867, of a Military Reconstruction Act, dividing the South into five military districts, each under the rule of a major-general...
...These "radicals"— John Hay called them "Jacobins"—proposed to strip Southerners of their property, settle Northern colonies on the Southern plantations, seize the mines and the railroads, and to use the newly-freed Negro to keep the Republican Party in power in the national Government...
...The generals would have complete control of the South until new constitutions, giving Negro suffrage—and, in effect, guaranteeing a free field for Northern exploitation—should be adopted...
...When the war closed, Yankee businessmen regarded the South as a colony into which business might expand...
...Ohio's Ben Wade led the Committee on the Conduct of the War to call on the new executive...
...Lincoln & Johnson Business men were not alone in the Southern trek...
...Economic Exploitation The American experience is especially packed with "significance, although most of the "history-books" deliberately hide its meaning...
...The central theme of the Reconstruction drama was the economic exploitation of the conquered South...
...In the end, the "radical" Jacobins wrenched control of the Republican Party from Johnson and the moderates, and proceeded to fasten military government on the South...
...The schemes and ambitions of grasping clergymen, edueators-with-a-mission, and profit-seeking capitalists lay behind the constitutional theories which "radicals" ©f the Republican Party devised...
...They wanted to exploit the South for the benefit of Northern bankers, investors, and manufacturers...
...Lesson For Today In the ensuing conflict, contemporaries and later commentators have seen a gigantic struggle between the President and Congress, between states rights and national consolidation, between freedom and slavery, between war-born hatreds and the spirit of magnanimous forgiveness...
...Their ranks were swollen by missionaries and educators...
...The Jacobins' support came from the industrial and financial interests who wanted to run the Government in behalf of national banks, the protective tariff, and the railroads...
...More frequently, some semi-official pundit makes vague promises of preserving perpetual peace by providing police protection for the milkmen on the Hottentot route...
...How long the time will be is not stated...
...The Jacobins promptly began a smear campaign against Southerners and Johnson, and proclaimed, with tear-stained hypocrisy, their own devotion to democracy and the Negro...
...Our safety and the peace of the country," declared one Jacobin, "requires us to disfranchise the rebels and enfranchise the colored citizen...
...Northern humanitarian groups sent teachers to open schools for poor whites and Negroes, and even to take over the property of Southern colleges...
...The modern talk of an international police force, the CAT-campuses for potential conquerers, the schemes for taking over the educational systems of the vanquished, are strangely reminiscent of the years 1864 to 1867...
...Johnson's interests lay with the Souths yeomen farmers and poor whites...
...Charles Sumner, hypocritical humanitarian from Massachusetts, claimed the Southern states had reverted to territories, while Pennsylvania's ironmonger, Thad Stevens, held the South was a conquered province, devoid of all rights under the Constitution...
...A representative of the laboring and small farming classes of the South, Andrew Johnson had long hated his section's cotton aristocracy, and had refused to follow Tennessee into secession...
...Remembering the economics of the Reconstruction period, and observing such modern phenomena as Middle Eastern pipe lines, Palestinian colonization plans, and the competition for postwar air-bases, one might well wofider whether the AMGOT and the plans for a global police force are inspired by the hopes of preserving peace or by the dream of perpetuated profits...
...During the war, the armies had used Southern churches as hospitals and barracks...
...Treason, he had proclaimed, should be made odious and Southern traitors should be "punished and impoverished...
...But the Jacobins were soon to learn that there was a fundamental cleavage between them and Johnson...
...Thad Stevens, his most vociferous antagonist, talked so loudly about his devotion to the common man that he fooled Karl Marx and has been canonized by the Communist Party...
...A Fundamental Cleavage Abraham Lincoln fought the Jacobin schemes until the day of his death...
...By the gods," exclaimed the Jacobin Senator, "there will be no trouble now in running the Government...
...Johnson immediately proceeded to appoint provisional governors from among Southern "Unionists," and to reorganize the state governments on the basis of the submerged classes...
...The Jacobins were not interested in reconstructing the South for the benefit of Andy Johnson's small farmers, laborers, artisans, and poor whites...
...The reconstruction period furnished so much drama, so many clashing personalities, so many conflicts of ideas that its essential features have been ignored...
...To obtain their ends, the Jacobins planned to subject the South to military government until new, easily controlled civil governments, based on Negro suffrage, could be established...
...At various times, Andrew Johnson has been pictured as a drunken dictator and as a plebian knight in armor...
...Quickly, Northerners formed corporations to exploit the South's natural resources...
...For some time the University of Virginia and other institutions have been running the CATS (Civil Affairs Training School) program for officers, and part of the ASTP has been devoted to a "Language and Area" study in ¦which orderlies for the "CATS" are being trained...
Vol. 8 • April 1944 • No. 14
