Last week we discussed the most recent publicly-aired GOP debate about whether the Northern victory in the civil war was, on balance, a good thing or a bad thing. A member of the Board of Directors of the California GOP, Randy Ridgel, wrote an open letter to fellow Board member Bill Back, taking him to task for apologizing for republishing an article which was a touch soft on slavery. (Back is a candidate to lead the California GOP). Ridgel saw no reason for the apology since …
The main thrusts of the article was that our rights under the 10th Amendment began to erode chiefly as a result of the South losing the Civil War (true) and that blacks suffered far more from reconstruction than they did from the war. Of course they did; they suffered the destitution and starvation imposed by draconian Northern Reconstruction laws even worse than whites, and most of the poor devils had no experience fending for themselves, so they fared worse than before the war and during the war.
Well, now we bring you the Ridgel Letter in its entirety — just added to the TPM Document Collection.
