What Ulysses Grant Can Teach Joe Biden About Putting Down Violent Insurrections
The deadly siege of the Capitol in Washington, which sought to overturn a legitimate election by targeting lawmakers with assassination, was not the first attempted insurrection in American history.
During Reconstruction, a raft of attempted insurrections flared up across the former Confederacy. Violent storms of white supremacists rocked swaths of the South, all aimed at undoing the Union’s victory during the Civil War, as well as the civil rights gains made thereafter. Racial equality, civil rights protections, basic recognition of democratic outcomes — all were targets of rampaging white terrorists, using violence to launch themselves to power once more. Numbers are hazy, but dozens perished as a direct result of insurrection, part of the thousands of victims of white supremacist political violence during the era.
“What occurred in the South in the late 1860s and the 1870s was at a scope and scale of violence and resistance that was not even remotely similar to what we saw [in Washington],” Mark Pitcavage, a historian and senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League, told me. The scale of violence “was so big that there are some people who say it was a low-intensity conflict. I don’t know if I want to go all the way there, but parts of it weren’t too far off from that.”
However, the echoes of that Reconstruction-era violence — led by both white marauders (cloaked as the Ku Klux Klan and other terrorist groups) and white supremacist Democratic officials bent on reclaiming power from Republicans — were impossible to escape in Washington in early January when the rioters paraded Confederate flags through the halls of the Capitol and chanted threats to hang the vice president. Though largely overlooked in mainstream American history, these insurrections — in Louisiana, in South Carolina, in Mississippi, in North Carolina — attempted to install terrorist-backed regimes in multiple post-Confederacy states. Their longevity was echoed as well in the warning last week from the Department of Homeland Security, which said for the first time publicly that the country faced a rising threat from “violent domestic extremists” who sympathized with the Capitol attack and the false narrative, stoked by former President Donald Trump, that the election was rigged.
-more-
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/what-ulysses-grant-can-teach-joe-biden-about-putting-down-violent-insurrections/ar-BB1deGWw?li=BB141NW3&ocid=DELLDHP
= new reply since forum marked as read
