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.
Monday, January 28, 2019
SPIRIT OF 1776 REVIVAL
SPIRIT OF 1776'S REVIVAL BEATS
The "Spirit of 1776" was banked in 1781, at Yorktown near Jamestown, Virginia, when General Cornwallis surrendered Britain's defeated army to Its rebellious colonists. All hues were there, even the blacks, whose double agent, Armstead, posing as a valet trickled ole Great Britain, into the trap, and its doom.
The "Spirit of 1776" was suborned, was betrayed, was waylaid, in 1785 when Jefferson's scandalous and secretly distributed book, privately published, NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, "Query XIV", was released by Thomas Jefferson in an "Articles of Confederation" America and in Europe. By it, through it, the "white" and the "black" became the true American paradigm not that "Declaration of Independence", an edited, publicly praised document proclaiming "liberty, justice for all ."
The "Spirit of 1776" was destroyed in 1787, in Philadelphia, after the Constitutional Convention there, released a new government edict, under pretense of amending its old; that extended the slave trade until 1808; that made slaves 3/5s units for Southern Congressional count; that made the federal power the predominant political power over any and all states; that capitulated to slavery fully as fuel of capitalism.
The "Spirit of 1776" was mocked in 1814, when American Gen. Andrew Jackson reneged on promised land grants and freedom to black slaves, black freed men who had famously defeated the British at the Battle of New Orleans, while giving land and other emoluments to "whites"; but the blacks got zero, but hot air, and even worse, remanded to slavery.
The "Spirit of 1776" was revived by the stimulants in Denmark Vesey's 1822 African Methodist Episcopal, Charleston, South Carolina, plot that was betrayed by a scary slave solicitous of his master's safety. But, it was revived in "David Walker's Appeal to the Colored People of the World," in 1827, and sanguinely with Rev. Nat Turner's fierce rebellion in Southhampton, Virginia in 1831, all reminders of us!
The "Spirit of 1776" spoke softly, in revival, through the apostrophic pages of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe's UNCLE TOM'S CABIN in 1852; and barked belligerently in a hail of bullets condemning historic heresies in Bishop John Brown's military assault on Harper's Ferry in 1859, when, where, black-white patriots, true to the Spirit of 1776, unedited, and to the Word of God, descended like locusts for arms!
The "Spirit of 1776" was called into question in a "Civil War," to whites, in a "Freedom War" to blacks. It was fact that before the executive order "Emancipation Proclamation" of 1863, blacks were excluded from fighting, because it was declared a "white man's war," repeatedly. That it was, until the South kept winning! Then, what the President Abraham Lincoln termed "military necessity" compelled, impelled, the enlistment of black troops in consideration of instant freedom given to enslaved blacks in the Confederate States of America by the Union, conditioned on victory . It was a neat, decorous diplomatic, political and military maneuver that debased the South, while it exalted the North, in the war, and international debate over the meaning of the "Spirit of 1776."
The "Spirit of 1776" had seemed to win the debate between North and South over its fate, April 9, 1865, when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox . But five days later Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed in Ford's Theater on April 14, by a secret special agent plot of the CSA, carried out by John Wilkes Booth. This depressing murder raised up Vice (literally) President, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, to become President. Johnson, a slaveholder at heart, was a white supremacist indeed! He too quickly readmitted unrepentant rebels, who were yet unredeemed racists back into the Union, while not protecting, nor securing newly freed blacks' spoils! This rascal was impeached, but acquitted, serving but one term.
The "Spirit of 1776" was slandered by the ruse of "Reconstruction" for blacks, but really reconciliation for the whites, as the blacks got no land--no forty acres nor a mule--as had been promised in February 1865 in Savannah, Georgia, by Edwin Stanton , War Secretary, and General William Sherman to 27 black preachers in a meeting on that specific subject. Preachers said they wanted land and to be left alone in peace to do for self. Instead, abandoned lands that whites had fled, that blacks had historically worked, were slowly surreptitiously siphoned away by Congress and given to white real estate speculators in total disregard of prior government promises . Similarly, the Congressionally chartered Freedmen's Savings Bank was being mulcted of millions by Wall Street speculation after Congress amended the banks' charter to allow investments outside of government securities and outside of Washington, D. C., in the 1870s.
The "Spirit of 1776" was corrupted in the collusive election outcome of 1876-1877, when Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, a Republican, was made the President by Congress, in consideration of his withdrawal of the remaining federal troops from the South (South Carolina and Louisiana). Samuel Tilden, Democrat of New York, who won more electoral votes (but not enough) got nothing "on the public record" but token symbolic thanks. https://www.270towin.com/1876_Election/
The "Spirit of 1776" hit "its nadir" in 1896, when Jim Crow, "separate but equal ", segregation was decreed in Plessy v. Ferguson as the new law of the land, in all public accommodations until the "Brown v Board of Topeka" cases overruled it in 1954. This epochal litigation was directed by the NAACP's Special Counsel, Thurgood Marshall, as it had been previously outlined by then-deceased Charles Hamilton Houston, when dean of Howard Law School, until 1935. Howard U. Law is a residue of Reconstruction.
The "Spirit of 1776" encountered turbulence in the 1950-1960s which saw blacks fighting for "civil rights" by many demonstrations , sit-Ins, boycotts, and nonviolent civil disobedience led primarily by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee in 1968, leaving a void in spiritual philosophical leadership, that remained largely void until the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
The "Spirit of 1776" still seeks to find power, peace, permanency in 2019 in the mercurial presidency of Donald John Trump of New York, a new politician, who, as I write this in January 2019, has had a number of his advisors, campaign officials, lawyers, aides, indicted or arrested; and who has shut down the federal government for the longest time in history over a border wall dispute in the southern United States with Congress, which will not agree to appropriate billions of dollars to it.