The Second Civil War: 1870-72

General Grant won the first Civil War- 1861-65; President Grant won the second Civil War--1870-72.  

I discovered the second Civil War as I read Ron Chernow's excellent biography about Grant.  Fearing their loss of control over blacks and facing domination by blacks as they gained the right to vote, in an extreme panic reaction to the Reconstruction, the Klan through terror, violence and murder replaced the normal political and criminal justice system operations in the South.  Here is Chernow's description:

"The important story of Grant's presidency was his campaign to crush the Ku Klux Klan.  Through the Klan, white supremacists tried to overturn the civil war's outcome and restore the [racist] status quo.  No southern sheriff would arrest the hooded night riders who terrorized [and frequently murdered] black citizens and no southern jury would convict them.  Grant had to cope with a complete collapse of evenhanded law enforcement in the Confederate states.  In 1870 he oversaw creation of the Justice Department, its first duty to bring thousands of anti-Klan indictments.  By 1872 the monster had been slain, although its spirit resurfaced as the nation retreated from Reconstruction's lofty aims.  Grant presided over the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the right to vote, and landmark civil-rights legislation, including the 1875 act outlawing racial discrimination in public places."

Hooray for Grant!  But before the century was out, the South, which had lost the War had won the peace as it redesigned a new system of oppression to replace slavery---segregation, sharecropping, prison gangs and lynchings.

Lincoln and Grant were great presidents in some ways.  Yet their pursuit of justice for blacks ultimately failed in large measure.  Why?  American whites never rejected the false claims of American exceptionalism nor did they ever repent of white ethnocentrism and oppression.  The power of the presidency is more limited than most Americans realize.

Next a broader look at American history that will help explain the power and pervasiveness of white ethnocentrism and oppression.

Shortly before the British colonists invaded America, the British perfected their ethnocentrism and oppression in a brutal conquest of nearby Ireland.  Then they brought their religiously legitimated ethnocentrism and oppression (think Puritan) to America.  This now American ethnocentrism and oppression has permeated all of American history from the early 1600s down to the present.

From time to time, heroic efforts by Lincoln and King have slowed down or temporarily reversed the American steamroller of ethnocentrism and oppression which has crushed every ethnic group in its path from Indian to Filipino.  A severe white backlash usually reverses some of the progress and a new system of oppression is created.  In the 1860s and 70s, Lincoln and Grant made valiant to achieve a measure of justice.  A major reason for their limited success was the ongoing and deep racism of the North which by the way conducted and profited from control of most of the slave trade; the North also profited from the sale of slave produced cotton to Britain.

The American church is primarily to blame.  It never developed a biblical theology about ethnocentrism and oppression nor a good NT theology of justice to replace it.