The Mockingbird's Ballad

"General, don't let down any of the people. Remember all of our citizens, Sir," counseled Professor W. H. Councill, the most important African-American leader in North Alabama and president of Alabama Normal College in Huntsville, Alabama. A leading Republican, Council, like most practical leaders, accepted the shifting of power after Rutherford B. Hayes and the GOP abandoned black empowerment in the old Confederacy. Allies were needed in all sorts of camps to keep some of the blood purchased rights African-Americans had practiced for over a decade, active participatory citizenship.

Joseph Wheeler, one-time career soldier, now forty-four year old planter - lawyer and Democratic candidate for the US Congress representing the 8th District of north Alabama, shook hands with the dignified and well-spoken professor.

Joseph Wheeler II, by heritage and education: Connecticut Yankee merchants, early schooling there and at West Point, NY; and experience - US Army service in the southwest, Confederate General all over the mid-south, New Orleans businessman, Alabama planter and lawyer - was given the opportunity to be an agent of reconciliation and renewal for his region and nation. The "calling" of clergy is but one way of being. Others are called to be for life or against it in a huge variety of ways. Joseph Wheeler was about being and doing that which he saw as right and good. As everyone he wasn't always successful or his path straight but he was faithful to his call.

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It was past time to look forward not backward. The ordeal of national civil war and the hard time afterward certainly informed the future, 1876 onward, but new vision was needed if Alabama, the south, the nation could achieve "a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth". Abraham Lincoln had presided over the terrible ordeal of war. He kept faith with the ideal of one nation and the goals of the Declaration of Independence. Had he embraced the moral imperative of the abolishing of slavery for political expediency? Little did it signify. He and the Union Army's supremacy made it happen.

Lincoln, the low-born backwoods Kentucky native become substantial Illinois corporate lawyer and politician had advised the victorious Union commanders in the field at the defeat of the South. He counseled them to "let them up easy". Lincoln was killed and the unfortunate Andrew Johnson couldn't carry out the "malice toward none" his champion and predecessor had envisioned. President Grant governed for eight years and the harsh reconstruction policies of revenge on the white south gradually gave way to a compromise of federal hands off with the Compromise of '76. Blacks and poor whites were thrown to the pleasures of a new/old aristocracy. It was an uneasy and conflicted era.