On New Battlegrounds

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It was past time to look forward not backward. The ordeal of national civil war and the hard time afterward certainly informed the future, 1876 onward, but new vision was needed if Alabama, the south, the nation could achieve "a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth". Abraham Lincoln had presided over the terrible ordeal of war. He kept faith with the ideal of one nation and the goals of the Declaration of Independence. Had he embraced the moral imperative of the abolishing of slavery for political expediency? Little did it signify. He and the Union Army's supremacy made it happen.

Lincoln, the low-born backwoods Kentucky native become substantial Illinois corporate lawyer and politician had advised the victorious Union commanders in the field at the defeat of the South. He counseled them to "let them up easy". Lincoln was killed and the unfortunate Andrew Johnson couldn't carry out the "malice toward none" his champion and predecessor had envisioned. President Grant governed for eight years and the harsh reconstruction policies of revenge on the white south gradually gave way to a compromise of federal hands off with the Compromise of '76. Blacks and poor whites were thrown to the pleasures of a new/old aristocracy. It was an uneasy and conflicted era.

"Professor Councill, I hope I can do justice to all my neighbors," the general answered. His words were those of a politician, but his sincerity was true.