The Civil War Ending too Soon Guaranteed
the South Sovereign Power
By Uriah J. Fields

     The Civil War that was fought to prevent Southern states from seceding from the Union. Or, to end slavery in the United States. These two reasons for the Civil War are not inseparable. As long as the South was able to maintain slavery there was no interest in or reason to secede from the Union. It was only when the abolishment of slavery was on the horizon after more than two hundred years of slavery that seceding from the Union became a pursuit for the South. The 11 slave states that seceded from the Union are: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee,
     According to the United States Census of 1860 the polpulation of the United States was 31,443.31 which included 3,517.110 slaves. One-third of the southern families owned slaves. There were 385,000 slave owners in the United States. There were states other than the eleven states that seceded from the Union that owned slaves. In 1861 there were 34 state in the United States: 19 were free states and 15 were slave states.
    The Civil War began on April 12, 1862 when the Union Army attacked Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865 when the Confederate Army surrendered at the Appomattox Court House in Northern Virginia. However, it was not until May 9, 1865 when Robet E. Lee surrendered. A total of 618,222 men died in the war - 360.222 from the North and 258,000 from the South.
     President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865 by John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer. Andrew Johnson from Tennessee who had been vice president only 42 days when he became president. President Lincoln had approved of him being vice president as a way of bringing the North and South together. Time proved that was a mistake. Johnson assumed the position of president on April 15 1865.  Later Johnson was accused by the House of Rpresentatives of having committed "high crimes and misdemeanors." Although the  first president to be impeached he served his full term that ended on March 4, 1869.
     After the Civil War ended only Jefferson Davis, president of the Confedercy, was sent to prison for two years. During the Recostruction peroid 1865-1877 former slaves enjoyed many civil rights and civil liberties. But after that period they lost most of these rights and liberties. The Ku Klux Klan, a white supremacy group was founded in 1865 in Pulaski Tennessee, and other anti-African American whites assaulted African Americans, which included lynching. Without weapons African Americans were defenseless facing armed racists. In the late 1860 the Ku Klux flourished. At one time there were 600,000.000 Klanpersons not counting women and children in the South.
    The Supreme Court, in some respects, as it relates to African Americans, was not unlike the Ku Klux klan, often siding with the Klan as it did in the decision they made In the 1896 Plessy v Ferguson case, the decision held that "separate but equal" was consitutional. That decision gave the South the legal right to enact  all kinds of laws that legally denied African Americans citizenship rights. It was not until 1954, fifty-eight years later, when the "separate but equal decision law changed that the Supreme Court ruled in "Brown v Board of Education" that "separate but equal' is "inherently unequal and unconstitutional."
      This brings the writer to the crux of this discourse, "The Civil War ended too Soon." At the end of the Civil War the Sourh had power to do their own thing, i.e, the South had sovereign power codified in law that would be known as 'states rights."
     The Civil War should have been fought another year or until the South was divested of political and economic power. And after the war Confederate leaders in addition to Jefferson Davis should have been tried and imprisoned for their crimes. Instead statues were erected depicting them as the most honorable men of the United States and the South in particular. They were allowed to remain free and continue to benefit from labor provided by former slaves and their descendants in a discrimination and Jim Crow system. The property slave owners owned that had been made profitable with slave labor,  in some instances by 244 years of slave labor, at least one-half of that property should have been bequeathed to former slaves. Slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule which many of them never received. And some of those who received it were not able to keep it because of state laws and violence against them. To reiterate, African Americans had no political  power or weapons to defend themselves against the armed ku Klux klan and other racists.
        Today, the struggle for justice for African Americans continues. The white police killing of African American George Floyd on May 20, 2020, preceded by the killings of many unarmed black men, has caused people not only in the United States but many other countries to join the Black Lives Matter movement and protest as they demand the cessation to killing unarmed black men, reform of the criminal justice system and more to have a just society. These protests,  staged in many countries, are an endeavor to affect desystemization. Desystemization is transformational. For an understanding of desystemization by Uriah J. Fields visit: authorsden.com/na.asp?id=79201.
     The actualization of desystemization will prevent the Supreme Court from being able to make decisions that are unjust as they did in Plessy v Ferguson. With desystemization the ultimate power will be with the people, not institutions and agencies.
    Included in desystemization is the removal of Confederate statues that include statues of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson that are prominent erected throughout the South. These names of schools and other public institutions are places are also to be removed.  They are offensive to African Americans and should be to all Americans who believe in freedom, justice and equality for all Americans.

Names of these10 military bases located in the South are to be removed:
Fort A. P. Hill - Ambrose P. Hill, Jr., - Virginia
Camp Beauregard, P. T. Reauregard - Louisiana
Fort Benning, Henry Bragg - North Carolina
Fort Gordon,  John Brown Gordon - Georgia
Fort Hood John Bell Hood - Texas
Fort Lee, Robert E. Lee - Virginia
Fort Pickett, George Pickett - Virginia
Fort Polk, Leonides Polk - Louisiana
Fort Rucker, Edmund Rucker - Alabama

     The South has maintained a great deal of power in the military. When I enlisted in the Army I left my native state of Alabama and traveled to Fort Dix, New Jersey for basic training at this military base in the North which was segregated.  African American soldiers from New York who had attended integrated public schools were required to serve in a segregated Army in the North. I said at that time, this proves fhat the South either won the Civil War or did not lose it.    I recall during my basic training there was an African American soldier from New York who was angry about being placed in a segregate Army in New Jersey. I don't recall if he was able to complete basic training. Let me add, this happened just as I finished my basic training on the eve of President Harry S. Truaman issuing an Exective Order to integrate the military. Even at that, it was another year before I was placed in an intergrated military company'

Mandate of Citizenship
Citizenship doesnt ask us to come to
the table of freedom, justice and equality
without judgment.  It simply ask us to
come presuming that every American
citizen has a right to be there.

The future belongs, not to the past, but to those who live in the future.

Copyright 2020 by Uriah J. Fields