Due to some unexpected business, I've gotten behind on the "heritage" postings. But I'll catch up and will be back to normal posting schedule in a few days.
I link to the daily entry, but right now the link takes you to the top of the page. But the Edward Sebesta link for April 14 is about an article from the Confederate Veteran magazine in 1902 opposing an African-American postmaster being appointed in Mississippi.
Minnie Cox, a Black postmistress in Indianola, Mississippi, offered to resign after whites protested her reappointment. They claimed that the reappointment allowed for "nigger domination." President Theodore Roosevelt refused to accept her resignation and suspended postal service to the town.
Theodore Roosevelt was a Republican President, although the party had long since to be anything like the party of Lincoln and Grant when it can to enforcing equal rights.
Sebesta quotes further from the article, in which Senator McLaurin of Mississippi links the Lost Cause image of the Civil War and the horrible suffering of the (white) South to what he saw as the continuing tyranny of the North in expecting white Southerners to accept an American citizen of color as a postal official (my emphasis):
I have seen the soil of Mississippi drenched with the blood of her sons that laid the dust like rain. I have seen the careworn women and hungry children of our State cry for bread, while the contents of their cribs and their smokehouses went up in flames, kindled by the hands of invaders in resistless numbers. I have seen the elements black with the smoke of our cities and towns and villages and country homes, and our schoolhouses and churches and eleemosynary institutions erected for the care of the halt and lame and blind and deaf and dumb and those bereft of mind, when the torch was applied by hostile armies. I have seen the time come when, arrived at the age of sixteen, under a sense of duty I still approve, I took a rifle as a private and joined the ranks to fight against that government for the establishment of which my ancestors only three generations removed fought in the incipiency of the Revolution. I haveseen the time come when our treasury emptied, our ranks depleted, the sources from which they were recruited exhausted, we were compelled to lay down our arms, and $400,000,000 of property in which the Constitution of the United States invited us to invest the fruits of our toil was swept away without indemnity. I have seen the time come when it was declared we were not a part of this Union. I have seen the time come when there was put in charge of the government of Mississippi a race of people who knew nothing of government except the absolute government of the slave by the master, and whose only training for self-government, to say nothing for the government of the white superior race, and whose only elevation from barbarism and cannibalism was found in the school of slavery.
That $400 million of property of which he spoke was, of course, human property in slaves.
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