Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Friday, August 14, 2015
TREASON DENIED, TRAITORS UNTRIED, AND EQUITY
TREASON DENIED, TRAITORS UNTRIED AND EQUITY
By Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman
Friday, August 14, 2015
The debate over the Confederate flags and their memorabilia’s propriety on federal and state flags and sites squarely raises the question of treason and traitors.
What is the treason and who are the traitors?
Both sides in the Civil War and after it, both North and South, deemed blacks to be inherently, genetically inferior to whites. Both sides exploited, enslaved, segregated, disfranchised, murdered, lied to, discriminated against, the blacks for purposes of expediency, at various times, before and after the Civil War as well.
So, perhaps; just perhaps, there were no trials for treason after the Civil War, because both sides were guilty of treacherous treason relative to the blacks.
Nearly a million lives lost, a country almost bisected, and no one is a traitor?
That may appear to beg the question, but it is true!
http://www.futurity.org/civil-war-union-rebels-treason-725752/
No one was tried for treason after the Civil War.
One thing is for sure. The blacks were not the traitors. They were the saviors.
They saved the nation from dissolution, just as they saved themselves, and their heirs, from slavery. Abraham Lincoln belatedly enabled the Union’s enlistment of blacks as Union soldiers on January 1, 1863, due to “military necessity.” Dire straits!
Twice before, President Lincoln had expediently countermanded the manumission field orders or enlistments by his Department Commanders; in the West, John C. Fremont, and in the South, David Hunter, in 1861, and in 1862, respectively. Both Generals had acted for the same reason as Lincoln later acted: “military necessity.”
Civil War, needless to say, did not end the uncivil discord over the status of this nation’s ironic “saviors.” Through “Reconstruction,” through the “Hayes-Tilden Compromise,” through the “Jim Crow” era, through the “Civil Rights” and “Black Power” eras, through the “Reagan Revolution” era, and now into the present of “Barack Obama era,” incidents describing this continuing, uncivil discord around the citizenship and too-long-deferred entitlements of America’s blacks yet rages.
Ironically, the blacks are the only non-traitors in the United States. The white North points the finger at the white South, which just as emphatically points back. The North argues “we the people” rights, with the South arguing “states’ rights.” Lost in the middle are blacks’ rights and entitlements. These have served as the fulcrum upon which the seesaw of American might and right rests. So, arguably, both the white North and the white South are, and have been, traitors to the rights of the blacks. Both have denied blacks, repeatedly, their earned equity in their nation, by pervasive, parsimonious, political, cultural, judicial, and economic compromises predicated upon the scurrilous, discredited “white power” paradigm.
This “white power paradigm” rests upon precariously balanced Constitutional nee economic canards, fictions, and lies, whose cultural roots date back, quixotically, to the nation’s founding fathers. John Jay, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, were members of the Executive Committee of Five urging “with liberty and justice for all” in the Declaration of Independence, on one side. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, slaveholding Virginians, were part of the Committee of the Whole, of the same Continental Congress, on the other hand, who struck any references to slavery from that vital, unifying “Declaration of Independence.”
So, from before the nation’s beginning, metal mixed with clay and oil blended with water, in an unholy concoction, in the nation’s first decree. This tacit agreement carried over into the Constitutional Convention, as implicitly reinforced by the Federalist Papers, that black rights would be subordinated for and to national unity.
Sunset was set for 1808, when the importation of slaves would end slavery’s national “obloquy” as they termed it. But, the introduction of the cotton gin, slave smuggling, the Industrial Revolution, and notions of “Manifest Destiny” coalesced to bury the precariously balanced Constitutional canard about its end, under the far more imposing weight of ponderous profits to white men in the North and South.
So, getting back to the Confederate flag, only those in the right can legitimately assert that right. That cancels the North and the South from the equation, as such.
The blacks have persistently called for equity denied them in national sovereignty. This equity means, restitution, reparation, inculcation, as fully endowed citizens, with retroactive citizenship rights, dating back to the founding of our Republic and coming forward with interest. With commensurate equity, blacks will salute any flag, both flags, or a brand new flag, to reflect their and their ancestors’ true equity.
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