THE BOOK OF DAMN
YANKEES
OTHERWISE KNOWN AS THE BOOK OF MANIFEST DESTINY
The Yanks honor Lincoln’s memoryThe south gets kind of bitter
Chapter 48
The president who came after Lincoln was named iAndrew Johnson,
2Who wasn’t born in a log cabin,
3jAnd was therefore dishonest and stupid.
4In fact, Johnson almost got impeached,
5For some reason,
6And did kReconstruction completely wrong,
7lWhich everybody knows,
8Although there’s still a lot of disagreement about how Reconstruction could have been done right.
9For example, the southerners and quite a lot of Yanks still think that the biggest thing wrong about mReconstruction was that it was done at all,
10Because the Yanks who wanted to get even with the south set everything up to make things as hard as possible for the white southerners,
11Like sending a bunch of opportunistic and unscrupulous ncarpetbaggers down to spread as much corruption around the south as they had up north,
12And creating a bunch of puppet state legislatures full of ignorant. illiterate black field hands who were anxious to learn as much as possible about corruption from the carpetbaggers, and not much else,
13And letting black people run absolutely wild and free in the streets. so that they could terrorize white women and children and humiliate powerless, unarmed southern men.
14oThe people who think this way about Reconstruction are usually the white people in the north and the south who were never that upset about slavery anyway, and thought the best way to get over the war was to forgive and forget,
15aAnd leave it to the south to figure out how they should treat all the free black people who weren’t going to be slaves anymore.
16bOn the other hand, there are a lot of white northerners and black southerners who think the worst thing about cReconstruction was that it didn’t last long enough,
17And finally got repealed,
18Because it was really working the whole time,
19Even when it didn’t look that way,
20At all,
21dAnd would have given black people their rights about a hundred years before they decided to go get their rights all by themselves.
22Still, the one point that all Yanks agree on is that eReconstruction was a disaster, one way or the other,
23fFor the south,
24gFor black people,
25hAnd for everybody else too,
26Except the carpetbaggers.
✦ · · ✦ · · ✦
Chapter 48 / 154