The blacks always knew and felt that their status was the central issue of this novel, American existence, even if the whites in both regions, North and South, could not or would not acknowledge it. Both "white" groups--"white" itself being a political construct and value-laden paradigm imposed by ruling "whites" to divide and conquer black and white indentured servants, thus facilitating their plutocracy-- perfumed it or parodied it. This central issue of American history has ever been the status of the blacks, from 1789, the year of this nation's founding, until 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation reified it, by "freeing" slaves in parts of rebelling states.
Sheer, abject, absolute military necessity of national self-preservation made it indubitably clear, in 1863: that the blacks must have at least military citizenship to bear arms, or this country was doomed!
The precarious, ensuing peace between North and South, under the surviving paradigm of "white" privilege and black deprivation, was balanced on the blacks' backs and at their grievous expense, after 1877, in defiant contempt of U.S. statutory and constitutional law.
Both groups were "terrorists" against the legal "rights" of blacks, and both profited from their perfidy. Those few "whites" who protested such treasonous obloquy against their ever-faithful, fellow-Americans were murdered--like Viola Liuzzo and others--beaten, or otherwise ostracized, stigmatized and brutalized, to this day.
The continuing paradigm of "white" privilege elides and abides today through snarky, disparate treatment of blacks in the legal, economic, political spheres under the guise of the "No Child Left Behind," "drug war," affirmative action, and budget sequesters. Black denial of the constitutionally-mandated legal, economic and political fruits of freedom being the overriding object of both groups of traitors!
Here, in Missouri, where the fighting and killing began, slavery was always the central, defining issue. It mandated the murder of Rev. Elijah Lovejoy in 1837 in Alton, Illinois, and the ransacking of his press. It necessitated the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which launched the "Border War," which brought John Brown and James Montgomery to the forefront of abolitionist consciousness in the fateful, fight for freedom which was later betrayed, as noted above in 1877 in the "Hayes-Tilden Compromise." Both have unclean hands.
No other discussion has merit.
