A BIT OF HISTORY | © SARAH BECKER
“Secesion is Nothing But Revolution” On April 1, 1865, Union General Philip H. Sheridan, in the last important battle of the Civil War, crushed a Confederate assault at Five Forks, Virginia. The Confederate army withdrew from Petersburg the next day. On April 3 Union troops entered Petersburg and Richmond—the Confederate capital—and the South’s War of Northern Aggression, America’s Civil War came to an end. President Abraham Lincoln [R-IL] arrived in Richmond on April 5 and settled into Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ chair. “The South, in my opinion, has been aggrieved by the acts of the North,” Confederate General Robert E. Lee told Confederate General A.L. King in his Memoirs of Robert E. Lee. “I feel the aggression and am willing to take every proper step for redress. It is the principle I contend for, not individual or private benefit. As an American citizen I take great pride in my country, her prosperity, and her institutions, and would defend any State if her rights were invaded. But I can anticipate no greater calamity for the country than a dissolution of the Union. It would be an accumulation of all the evils we complained of, and I am willing to sacrifice everything but honor for its preservation. I hope, therefore, that all constitutional means will be exhausted before there is resort to force.” “Secession is nothing but revolution,” Lee continued. “The framers of our Constitution never exhausted so much labor, wisdom and forbearance in its formation, and surrounded it with so many guards and securities, if it was intended to be broken 8 | February 2022
by every member of the Confederacy at will. It is intended for ‘perpetual union,’ so expressed in the preamble.” Lee was the son of Revolutionary War hero Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee. Union General Ulysses S. Grant called for Lee’s surrender on April 7. Pined Lee just prior to the army’s surrender, “I know they will say hard things of us: they will not understand how we were overwhelmed by numbers. But that is not the question: The question is, is it right to surrender this army?” Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865— at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Less than a week later—on April 14, 1865— President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by Southern patriot John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre. Vice President Andrew Johnson [D-TN], described as a “hard-drinking, racist, self-made man from Tennessee,” succeeded him. “‘The sovereignty of the States’ is the language of the Confederacy, not the language of the Constitution,” President Johnson stressed in his First Annual Address on December 4, 1865. Reconstruction, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary: “the period 1865 and 1877 during which the states of the Confederacy were controlled by the federal government before being readmitted to the Union.” Segregated Virginia was readmitted to the Union on January 26, 1870—after accepting the 15th Amendment. The last of the three Reconstruction amendments, Amendment 15 was
ratified on March 30, 1870. Amendment 15: Section 1. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Voting rights remain a hot topic especially when discussing Black Codes and Jim Crow, Jim Crow and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The latter enabled the Federal government to suspend all literacy, knowledge or character tests for voting in areas where less than 50% of the voting age population is registered. Robert E. Lee—former Confederate General, Virginia loyalist, and college president—died as a result of a stroke on October 12, 1870. Thirteen years later, in 1883, the United States Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Act of 1875: “Be it enacted… That all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall be entitled to the full and equal and enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement; subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and color, regardless of any previous condition of servitude. And…That no citizen possessing all other qualifications which are or may be prescribed by law shall be disqualified for service as grand or petit juror in any court of the United States, or of any State, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” According to the Virginia Museum of History & Culture, “White Virginia legislators had ‘restored A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 9
Old Town Crier
