Disclaimer: These events are told from the viewpoint of this descendant of one of the first American families. One side came over on the Mayflower; the other to colonize for the crown, participate (on both sides) in the Revolutionary War, had Lincoln as an ancestor on one side; slavers on the other, Quakers, quaffers, and a cabal of creatives from TV, movie-making to radio.

Chapter 10: Founding Fathers — Enlightenment Thinkers with Slaves and Syphilis

The American Revolution didn’t just create a nation—it kicked off one of history’s most ambitious rebranding campaigns. Men like Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison—names etched into currency and concrete—crafted a republic from scratch using Enlightenment ideals, French wine, hookers and, where necessary, a flexible definition of hypocrisy.

They talked about liberty, of course. Endlessly. Liberty was the word of the day, the week, the whole century. But the liberty they spoke of was a very exclusive club—strictly gentlemen only. Membership required land, whiteness, and an aversion to paying taxes unless you were the one collecting them.

Let’s begin with Thomas Jefferson, the man who penned “all men are created equal” with one hand while cradling a whip in the other. He owned over 600 enslaved people throughout his life, including Sally Hemings, a woman he legally owned and personally impregnated—several times.

Enlightened? Maybe. Consensual? Less so.

Jefferson was also deeply conflicted about slavery—but in the same way a man is “conflicted” about eating meat while grilling a steak. He wrote pages on the moral rot of bondage... but kept the plantation running because, well, Monticello wasn’t going to weed itself.

George Washington, the general who would not be king, had wooden teeth, which were not actually wood but rather harvested from the teeth of enslaved people. He freed his slaves in his will—after he died—a final gesture of conscience best described as too little, slightly too late.

And then there’s Ben Franklin, the jolly polymath who did everything from inventing bifocals to founding libraries to allegedly contracting syphilis in every available French salon. He started out owning slaves, then had a political epiphany late in life—roughly around the time it became fashionable in Philadelphia to pretend you were an abolitionist. When I was around 13, I met my grandparent’s neighbor (in Englewood Florida), Benjamin Franklin VIII. This later ancestor had the Franklin family Bible which listed in the back Pages the pounds and shillings the original Ben had earned as one of the world’s greatest “Whoremasters”, running his brothel in Philadelphia. It was around that time that I also read this astounding Founding Daddys’ autobiography which was seminal in helping me develop critical thinking skills and lofty opinions.

Alexander Hamilton, Broadway’s tragic antihero, did not own slaves personally—unless you count the human beings his in-laws owned, whom he occasionally rented. A technicality, perhaps, but not exactly the stuff of moral high ground. He opposed slavery, mostly, but also opposed doing anything practical about it.

James Madison, the so-called Father of the Constitution, was five foot four, owned over 100 slaves, and spent his life talking about the delicate balance between liberty and tyranny while sitting comfortably atop the heads of the enslaved.

These men gathered in Philadelphia, drafted documents with florid calligraphy and righteous tone, and created a government “by the people, for the people”—so long as “the people” excluded women, Black people, Native Americans, and anyone without property. They codified freedom with such straight-faced earnestness, you’d almost forget half of them died surrounded by unpaid laborers and unpaid debts.

Yet, despite all this, they built something lasting. That’s the American contradiction: the same men who drew the blueprint for democracy also nailed shut the door on half the population. And we’ve been living in that contradiction ever since—calling it freedom while debating who counts.

We honor the Founding Fathers not because they were perfect—but because they were flawed and audacious.

Enlightenment thinkers with plantation schedules. Syphilitic philosophers who wrote sonnets to freedom and then foreclosed on it.

They were brilliant, brave, and ambitious.

And yet, what they started was real. Fragile. Glorious. Hypocritical as hell (depending on who you are). But real.

So here’s to the Fathers of the Nation:

* Enlightened, but not fully awake.

* Principled, until the mortgage came due.

* And forever inscribed in history—warts, wigs, whips, and all.

Chapter 10a: REVOLUTION! Tea, Tantrums, and the Guillotine

(or, “How America Declared Independence and France Picked Up the Bill”)

Let’s dispense with the powdered wigs and patriotic incense right up front: this was not a revolution. This was a colonial meltdown—a fiscal hissy fit with muskets. King George nudged the tea tax, and Boston promptly hallucinated itself as Sparta. One tariff hike and suddenly every dockworker was quoting Locke like they’d been born in a philosophy seminar instead of a rum-soaked warehouse.

“No taxation without representation!” they screamed—while owning human beings, denying women a pulse, and keeping “representation” chained in the shed behind the house with the livestock. Liberty, it turns out, was very selective. A boutique freedom. Invite-only.

George III, meanwhile, was genuinely confused. And frankly, that’s fair. He’d acquired the colonies the traditional European way: conquest, paperwork, and the casual spilling of blood. To him, America wasn’t oppressed—it was ungrateful. A loud, acne-ridden adolescent who ate at the table, slept under the roof, and then tried to stab Dad because allowance negotiations went poorly.

So imagine his delight when that adolescent torched the family silver, dumped perfectly good tea into the harbor like a drunken frat stunt, and ran off with France—specifically a teenage aristocrat named Lafayette, who had the enthusiasm of a golden retriever and the battlefield experience of a dinner guest.

Ah yes. France. Enter the sugar daddy.

History’s most expensive bad decision.

France didn’t back the American rebellion out of love for liberty. That’s the bedtime story. France backed it because England was bleeding, and Versailles smelled opportunity the way a shark smells blood—except this shark wore silk stockings and had zero concept of budgeting. Ships, guns, gold, soldiers, credit—France handed it all over, chanting “liberty” while meaning “anything that humiliates Britain.”

And America took it. Smiled. Wrote pamphlets. Declared destiny.

France, meanwhile, forgot to feed its own people.

Versailles glittered like a jewelry store during a famine. Powdered wigs towered over empty bread baskets. The treasury collapsed. The peasants noticed. And while Americans toasted freedom with borrowed French wine, France stared at the bill and whispered, Mon Dieu… we have funded our own execution.

Which brings us to the French Revolution—history’s most aggressive refund request.

Because nothing radicalizes a population faster than watching someone else get a revolution delivered express while you starve in line for bread. So France decided: fine. We’ll have liberty too. And we’ll have it now. With steel.

Enter the guillotine—designed by a doctor who promised it was painless, humane, and efficient. This was technically true, which is a cold comfort when your head is being introduced to physics. The blade fell. And fell. And fell again. Kings, queens, aristocrats, moderates, nuns, radicals—anyone who blinked at the wrong moment got the haircut of destiny.

Louis XVI—the generous idiot who helped bankroll American independence—couldn’t escape without tripping over his own incompetence. Caught in disguise. Beheaded. Marie Antoinette followed. Then everyone else. Robespierre climbed atop the pile of corpses, screamed about virtue, and proceeded to continue to murder the French into moral purity. Eventually, they murdered him too. Equality achieved.

Across the Atlantic, the Americans were busy congratulating themselves and drafting a Constitution—a brilliant document if you were white, male, land-rich, and breathing calmly. “All men are created equal,” they wrote, while quietly adding footnotes in chains. Freedom had arrived, but it came with exclusions, exemptions, and a lifetime warranty for hypocrisy.

King George lost the colonies and then his grip on reality. Talked to trees. Appointed them to office. Given later developments, this may have been prophetic.

And France?

France got liberté, égalité, decades of terror, a general (Napoleon) who crowned himself emperor, and a national personality disorder that still flares up every few years.

All because it helped a newborn republic that believed freedom meant no taxes, full autonomy, and someone else eating the cost.

So when you celebrate the “Spirit of ’76,” raise your glass high—but not too high. Toast the bankrupt kings. The headless nobles. The peasants who paid with their bodies. And the nation that mistook America’s tantrum for a universal moral awakening.

Liberty is a lovely word.

But it’s never free.

Someone always pays.

And this time, France paid—

with interest, penalties, and a blade.

Chapter 10b: Checks, Balances, and the Sudden Rise of People Who Can’t Read

After our revolution, the Constitution was engineered with the delicacy of a Swiss watch and the cynicism of men who had already been betrayed by friends, kings, and human nature itself. It assumed that power attracts idiots the way manure attracts flies, and it prepared accordingly.

And then America handed it to the flies.

The Founders, in their powdered wigs and terminal distrust of mankind, built a system so layered with restraints that no single man could hijack it without first tripping over three committees, two courts, a veto, and a mob of pamphlet-wielding lunatics yelling in Latin. Power was split, divided, diluted, and shackled like a dangerous animal that had already bitten the handler twice. (They had never envisioned billionaires chainsawing the federal government or the Chief Executive owning his own social media platform plus a stake in TV networks.)

What they further did not anticipate—because it would’ve sounded like satire—was a future citizenry that would treat literacy as optional and screaming and insults as proof.

The ink had barely dried before people began discovering loopholes—not in the Constitution, but in their own skulls.

Suddenly, the republic was crawling with men who hadn’t read the document but felt very patriotic about it. They quoted half-remembered phrases, skipped entire amendments like commercials, and declared the rest “up for interpretation,” which is historically what fools say right before lighting something on fire.

Checks and balances, they complained, were obstacles.

Separation of powers was inefficient.

Independent courts were elitist.

And accountability was communism with punctuation.

These were the same people who look at a seatbelt and say, “I don’t like being told what to do by physics.”

The system, meanwhile, worked exactly as designed—slow, maddening, noisy, and immune to tantrums. Laws stalled. Courts interfered. Executives were told “no” (until recently), which remains the single most traumatic syllable in American public life. Legislators argued for months and achieved nothing, which is not a bug but a constitutional feature meant to prevent emotional stampedes from becoming policy.

But patience has never been America’s strong suit. This is a nation that invented drive-thru weddings.

Enter the Selective Originalist—a modern marvel of historical cherry-picking. He worshipped the Founders the way a teenager worships a band he’s never listened to. He quoted the Second Amendment loudly, the First when convenient, and treated the rest like a restaurant menu written in French.

He adored “freedom” in theory and despised it in practice—especially when someone else exercised it. He wanted liberty without dissent, order without law, and power without consequence. He loved checks and balances right up until the moment the check bounced his way.

At that point, the Constitution became “outdated.”

This accusation would have astonished the Founders, who had written the document specifically to restrain loud scalawags with simple ideas and fragile egos. They had anticipated demagogues who mistook applause for consent. They had planned for mobs intoxicated by certainty. They had built friction—vetoes, courts, elections, delays—because friction is the only thing that stops idiots from sprinting straight into tyranny.

But friction feels like oppression when you’re trying to run over everyone else.

Soon, a new patriotic subspecies emerged: people who revered the Constitution as a holy relic while despising its contents. They waved it like a flag, not a manual. They demanded “states’ rights” without reading the Supremacy Clause, “law and order” without tolerating the law, and “original intent” without context, history, or a dictionary.

Courts became “enemies.”

Elections became “suggestions.”

Facts became “opinions.”

And anyone who actually read the document was labeled an elitist—which, in this context, meant functionally literate.

The Founders had feared tyranny.

They had not planned for illiteracy armed with confidence, cameras, social media, and a microphone.

And yet—against all odds—the system held. Not elegantly. Not politely. But stubbornly, like a mule tied to a post of precedent. Judges blocked nonsense. Legislatures stalled extremism. Executives were slowed, restrained, sued, impeached, or at least mildly inconvenienced. The machinery groaned, rattled, and leaked oil, but it did not collapse.

Because the Constitution was never designed to rely on virtue.

It was designed to survive stupidity.

Every time someone screamed that checks and balances were “destroying the country,” the document calmly replied, Yes, but they’re also stopping you.

Every time someone insisted democracy was broken because they didn’t get their way, it demonstrated—slowly, painfully—that no, it was merely resisting them.

And so America learned, again, the great constitutional truth: democracy is not fast, not clean, and not emotionally satisfying to people who crave dominance. It is slow, loud, argumentative, and dependent on an electorate that occasionally remembers how words work.

The real tragedy isn’t that the Constitution is misunderstood.

It’s that it’s understood just enough to be abused, misquoted, and weaponized by people who think “interpretation” means “whatever I yelled last.”

But it endures.

Because it was written not for angels, not for geniuses, and certainly not for saints—but for a future in which someone would wave it in the air, shout about freedom, and have absolutely no idea what the hell it says.

Chapter 11: Manifest Destiny — Or, This Land Is Our Land, Because God Says So, Apparently

By the early 1800s, America had survived a revolution, a constitution, and at least one serious flirtation with monarchy dressed up as democracy. And still, it wasn’t satisfied. It had the East Coast—but the East Coast had rules. Laws. Tea. Colleges.

What it really wanted was elbow room. And buffalo. And gold. And anything not already bolted down.

So the nation collectively turned its bloodshot eyes westward and birthed one of history’s most aggressively sanctimonious slogans:Manifest Destiny—the belief that Americans were divinely ordained to spread coast-to-coast like spoiled mayonnaise.

Of course, it wasn’t called conquest. It was called progress. It wasn’t expansionism—it was Providence with a wagon. And if your village happened to be in the way? Well, you were clearly on the wrong side of God’s zoning plan.

The intellectual scaffolding for this imperial shuffle came from the likes of John O’Sullivan, a newspaper editor who, like many opinion columnists, confused verbosity with wisdom. He declared it America’s “destiny to overspread the continent.” Which is a very polite way of saying: “We want your land, and we’re bringing guns and Jesus.”

The religious crowd lapped it up. After all, what could be holier than transforming wild, unspoiled lands into strip malls and cemeteries? Missionaries followed the settlers, handing out Bibles in one hand and smallpox in the other. The tribes who’d been living there for centuries were described as barriers to civilization, obstacles to commerce, and other euphemisms that made it easier to bulldoze their teepees without losing sleep.

To be fair, some settlers did feel bad. Briefly. They wrote letters about “noble savages” and “tragic necessities,” then promptly returned to planting corn on the graves of people they’d relocated.

And let’s not forget the government’s role—a sort of divine realtor in waistcoats. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, for instance, politely escorted entire nations off their ancestral lands and deposited them in a part of the country known at the time as “absolutely nothing.” This led to the Trail of Tears, which was not a metaphor. It was an actual trail. Of actual tears. And dysentery.

But expansion wasn’t just about stealing land. It was about exporting an ideal—a vision of white, Protestant, property-owning, tobacco-chewing masculinity. Towns were renamed. Territories sliced and diced. Railroads laid like arteries of empire. And every act of theft was draped in the American flag and blessed by a man with a mustache and questionable theology.

By the time the country reached the Pacific, it had convinced itself that the whole thing had been inevitable.

THE MONROE DOCTRINE

(or, Hands Off Our Hemisphere, Says the Guy Borrowing Britain’s Muscles)

The Monroe Doctrine began as a polite suggestion and metastasized into a threat, a habit, and eventually a personality disorder.

In 1823, the United States—still a young republic with baby teeth, a hangover from empire, and a wildly inflated sense of destiny—stood up on the world stage, cleared its throat, and announced: Europe, keep your hands off the Americas. This was adorable. Like a raccoon slapping a bear and declaring the forest a raccoon-only zone.

President James Monroe delivered the message with the calm confidence of a man standing behind the British Navy and pretending it was his own muscle. The doctrine wasn’t enforced by American power so much as borrowed British firepower on layaway. The Royal Navy did the heavy lifting; America took the credit and wrote the press release.

The pitch was moral. The subtext was territorial. The translation was blunt: We’re not strong enough to police this hemisphere yet, but we’re calling dibs. It was geopolitical puberty—awkward, loud, and convinced the future owed it something.

The Monroe Doctrine claimed to be about anti-colonialism. This was technically true, in the way a landlord opposes trespassers while charging rent. Europe was told to stop meddling in the New World not because meddling was wrong, but because America wanted exclusive meddling rights. Colonialism was bad—unless done by us, with better branding and worse Spanish.

At first, the doctrine sat on the shelf like a decorative Bible. Then America grew muscles. Then it discovered gunboats. Then it learned that phrases like hemispheric security and regional stability could lubricate almost anything.

Suddenly, the Monroe Doctrine wasn’t a statement—it was a hall pass for intervention.

Mexico learned this the hard way. So did Central America. So did the Caribbean. So did anyone with resources, strategic geography, or the audacity to govern themselves incorrectly. The doctrine evolved from “hands off” to “hands everywhere”, preferably wrapped around ports, plantations, railroads, and customs houses.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States was no longer warning Europe—it was informing Latin America. Elections were suggestions. Sovereignty was conditional. Self-determination was encouraged, as long as it didn’t inconvenience American investors or offend the sugar lobby.

Enter the Roosevelt Corollary—the Monroe Doctrine’s roided-up cousin who didn’t knock before entering. Teddy Roosevelt took the original idea, added a mustache, a big stick, and the assumption that brown people required supervision, and turned it into a regional probation system. America would now intervene proactively, because irresponsibility was contagious and someone had to be the adult in the room (said the country currently inventing lynching and child labor).

This was imperialism in khakis.Paternalism with a gun.Democracy delivered at bayonet point.

The language stayed noble. The actions got messy. Coups bloomed. Dictators were installed, funded, trained, and occasionally overthrown when they stopped returning calls. Banana republics were cultivated like cash crops. The doctrine became a Swiss Army excuse—pull out the blade you need: stability, communism, drugs, migrants, God, freedom, markets.

The Monroe Doctrine did not prevent European imperialism so much as replace it with an American franchise. Same extraction. New management. Better pamphlets.

And the real genius? Plausible innocence. Every intervention was framed as reluctant. Every occupation temporary. Every disaster unforeseen. When things went wrong—and they did, constantly—it was always someone else’s fault: local corruption, cultural deficiencies, historical baggage. America just showed up with tanks and advice.

By the Cold War, the doctrine had matured into a hemispheric anxiety disorder. Any election that went left was a Soviet plot. Any reform that smelled like land redistribution was Marx at the door. The doctrine justified covert operations, overt invasions, and a string of “misunderstandings” that left thousands dead and democracies strangled quietly in the night.

The euphemisms piled up:

* States’ rights meant “we pick your leaders.”

* Stability meant “don’t touch the assets.”

* Freedom meant “open your fu*kin’ markets and shut up.”

Through it all, America insisted it was not an empire. Empires were bad. Empires were European. America was a guardian, a partner, a friend—who occasionally needed to slap you around for your own good.

The Monroe Doctrine survives because it flatters American self-image. It casts the United States as protector rather than predator, referee rather than player, landlord rather than owner. It is the national myth that allows power to call itself restraint while exercising both.

History books treat it as doctrine.Policy wonks call it precedent.Its victims call it Tuesday.

In practice, the Monroe Doctrine taught America its favorite trick: how to dominate while pretending not to. How to interfere without admitting interference. How to declare a neighborhood yours without ever buying the house.

The doctrine didn’t age out. It updated its wardrobe. It learned to speak human rights. It hired consultants. It stopped calling invasions invasions and started calling them missions.

And the moral receipt is this:

Hands off our hemisphere, said the guy who never stopped touching.

Chapter 12: The Civil War — A Family Reunion with Cannons

By the mid-1800s, the so-called “United” States was less a functioning democracy and more a chaotic group project gone wildly off the rails. The North was busy inventing factories, moral superiority, and wage slavery. The South was clinging to an economy built entirely on human bondage and denial. And the West? It just wanted to shoot buffalo, displace some Indigenous nations, and mine gold while pretending not to notice the screaming match between its roommates.

The Constitution—crafted by powdered-wig idealists who couldn’t quite decide whether liberty applied to everyone or just the land-owning class with a good tailor—left America with a couple of unresolved issues. Chief among them: whether enslaving human beings was “economic necessity” or merely biblically justified kidnapping with better marketing.

Slavery was the rotting corpse at the national dinner table. The South called it a “peculiar institution,” which is the genteel way of saying, “Don’t ask questions, we’re making money.” The North, meanwhile, had abolished slavery but not racism, and spent most of its moral energy on being self-righteous while still making a tidy profit off Southern cotton.

Into this national hot mess walked my Illinois ancestor, Abraham Lincoln—tall, tragic, awkward, and morally upright enough to be suspicious. He didn’t run for president to end slavery; he ran to keep the union intact. But when the South saw Lincoln coming, they packed their bags, clutched their pearls, and flounced out like a plantation-themed production of Les Misérables.

South Carolina seceded first, naturally, because someone had to be dramatic. This is, after all, the home of the dramatic Senator, Ms. Lindsay Graham. Ten other states followed like jealous exes who couldn’t stand to see the Union happy.

The Confederacy, bless its treasonous heart, styled itself as a noble republic, valiantly defending the sacred right to own other people. In reality, it was a fever dream of aristocratic cosplay, Jeffersonian fantasy, and deeply selective Bible quoting. Their first act? Shell a federal fort. Their second? Beg Europe to support them.

Europe passed, politely. Even Queen Victoria wasn’t touching that mess. Though Britain did flirt with the idea like a colonial ex drunk-dialing at 2 a.m.—curious, but not ready to commit. The notion of taking back the former colonies with a built-in Southern plantation production system was intriguing. But if Abe got his way, all bets would be off.

But, the Union was flailing.

Its first generals were mostly retired museum exhibits who treated battle strategy like gentleman’s cricket. Thousands of young men marched off in hot, smelly wool uniforms designed to attract bullets and repel common sense. The battlefields were blood-drenched theater stages—Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga—starring mud, dysentery, and bayonets in horrifying technicolor.

If bullets didn’t get you, the doctors would. Amputations were done with whiskey and optimism. Anesthesia was a theory. Germ theory was… well, still in development. Hospitals were basically barnyards with extra pus.

Then, in 1863, Lincoln dropped the Emancipation Proclamation—a partial, pragmatic, and profoundly symbolic mic drop. It didn’t free all the slaves, but it did change the stakes. The war was no longer just about the Union; it was about morality, identity, and whether America could pretend to be a free country while keeping millions in bondage.

The turning point came at Gettysburg—three days of carnage that ended with Pickett’s Charge, a suicidal assault led by men who clearly hadn’t read the room. Lincoln showed up later, scribbled 272 words on the back of an envelope, and managed to redefine the nation while sounding like a disappointed parent.

By 1865, the Confederacy was collapsing faster than a Southern belle’s corset in the parlor when the master was off the plantation and one of the lean and muscular workers was called into the parlor to fix a lamp. Sherman marched to the sea, torching plantations and dreams along the way, and Lee surrendered at Appomattox, looking every bit the man who had bet it all on cotton and lost to iron.

And just as victory arrived, Lincoln was shot in the head by John Wilkes Booth, a failed actor with daddy issues and delusions of Confederate grandeur. The war ended not with a triumphant cheer, but with the gasping sob of a country that realized it had won—but at a cost so brutal it barely recognized itself.

The slaves were free. The South was wrecked. The nation was whole—barely.

And instead of healing, America marched straight into Reconstruction, a brief attempt at justice that was promptly faceplanted by racism, revenge, and the kind of fiscal disinterest only rich white men can muster.

The Civil War didn’t solve America’s contradictions—it just aired them in 4D, with fire, steel, and sorrow. It proved three things:

1. You can build a nation on a contradiction—you just can’t expect it not to implode.

2. You can win a war without winning peace.

3. And if you don’t finish the work of justice, history will just keep circling back like a starving vulture with a bayonet.

Chapter 13: Reconstruction — The Art of Snatching Defeat from Victory

(or, “We Abolished Slavery and Immediately Lost Our Nerve”)

The war was over. The bodies were buried—badly. The cannons cooled. The Confederacy lay face-down in the dirt, its economy vaporized, its cities smoking, its aristocracy emotionally shattered by the shocking discovery that their hands might have to touch tools.

Slavery was dead. Officially. Legally. On paper.

Which, as America would soon demonstrate, is the least binding form of reality.

This was the moment history hands you a loaded pen and says, Finish the job. Rebuild the South. Enforce equality. Make freedom mean something other than a pamphlet slogan. For about ten minutes, it looked like the country might actually do it.

Then this former British colony remembered who it was.

Reconstruction arrived wearing lofty rhetoric and carrying the shelf life of warm milk. The plan—such as it was—called for rebuilding Southern infrastructure, integrating four million formerly enslaved people into civic life, and transforming a defeated slave empire into something resembling a democracy.

It was ambitious. Necessary. And completely incompatible with white America’s tolerance for inconvenience.

First came the Amendments. The 13th ended slavery—except as punishment, a loophole so generous it would later birth chain gangs, convict leasing, and a prison system that could have been designed by Satan’s accountant. The 14th granted citizenship. The 15th promised voting rights. It was revolutionary ink applied to a nation already reaching for the eraser.

Enter Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s replacement and history’s most compelling argument for stronger succession rules. A Southern Democrat who despised secession but loathed Black equality even more, Johnson believed Reconstruction should be gentle, forgiving, and above all, white. His vision of healing involved welcoming former Confederates back into power before the ashes cooled—because nothing rebuilds trust like letting traitors rewrite the rules.

He vetoed civil rights protections like they were personal insults. Congress overrode him. He kept vetoing. Congress impeached him. He survived by one vote—proving, even then, that America had a deep emotional attachment to failing upward.

Meanwhile, freed people did something deeply offensive to the Southern psyche: they behaved like citizens.

They built schools. Churches. Newspapers. They voted. They organized. They ran for office. Some even made it to Congress—men who had been property now writing laws while former plantation owners foamed quietly in their parlors.

It was miraculous. It was unprecedented.

And it triggered a full-blown white meltdown.

Enter the Ku Klux Klan, America’s original homegrown terrorist organization and spiritual ancestor of every grievance-fueled hate group that followed. Not yet ironic or merchandised, the Klan was a night-riding enforcement arm of white panic—burning, beating, lynching, and murdering with the clear goal of replacing democracy with fear.

Elections were canceled by violence. Ballots were answered with bullets. “States’ rights” became code for we’d like to keep killing people, please.

The federal government noticed. Briefly. Troops were deployed. Laws were passed. Arrests were made. Justice flickered like a dying gas lamp.

Then the North got bored.

Reconstruction was messy. Bloody. Politically inconvenient. Wall Street wanted railroads, not racial justice. Northern voters developed a sudden allergy to Black suffering, especially when it interfered with profits or dinner plans. The national mood shifted from “finish the work” to “haven’t we done enough?”

And so, in 1877, America quietly sold out Reconstruction in a backroom deal known as the Compromise of 1877—a bargain so cynical it deserves its own plaque in Hell. Federal troops were pulled out. Southern elites reclaimed power. Black Americans were abandoned with the efficiency of a bad divorce settlement.

What followed was Jim Crow—a meticulously engineered system of racial control disguised as law and tradition. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Segregation. Lynching as civic entertainment. Freedom existed in theory, like unicorns or bipartisan ethics.

Reconstruction is often called a missed opportunity. That’s charitable. It was a moral collapse in real time—a radical experiment in justice strangled by cowardice, comfort, and the American instinct to declare victory halfway through the fire.

The Civil War ended.

Reconstruction proved something far worse: You can win a war and still lose your soul.

You can write equality into law and erase it with indifference.

And if you abandon justice once, history doesn’t forgive you—it haunts you, shows up every election cycle, and demands interest.

The ghosts didn’t leave.

They just learned how to vote—and how to suppress it.

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THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

(or, How America Invented Progress, Fed It Children, and Called the Screaming “Productivity”)

America didn’t enter the Industrial Revolution. It face-planted into it, teeth first, waving a flag and yelling about destiny while the machinery warmed up.

The pitch was glorious: steam, steel, railroads, miracles. The reality was soot, stumps, tenements, and the sudden discovery that capitalism, when left alone with a stopwatch, will cheerfully eat anything it can reach—hands, lungs, childhoods, cities, rivers, ethics—then ask for seconds.

This was progress with rabies.

Factories rose like brick tumors along rivers that promptly died of shame. Machines multiplied. Output soared. Profits orgasmed. And somewhere beneath the gears, America discovered a thrilling new business model: turning people into replaceable parts. Not metaphorically. Literally. Arms were cheaper than safety guards. Fingers were expendable. If a worker lost a limb, the market shrugged and hired another one with more limbs.

Efficiency, it turned out, loved blood.

The Industrial Revolution promised liberation from toil and delivered a time clock with fangs. Men worked until their spines resembled question marks. Women were paid in condescension and exhaustion. Children—small, bendy, and legally negligible—were fed directly into the machine like organic lubricant. Tiny hands fit nicely between gears. Tiny lungs inhaled coal dust like it was patriotic incense.

If you’re wondering whether this was illegal, congratulations—you’re thinking too late. Laws arrived eventually, panting and apologetic, long after the bodies had done the market research.

And towering over this mechanized abattoir were the Captains of Industry—a phrase that deserves to be beaten with a rolled-up balance sheet. They preferred industrialists. Or entrepreneurs. Or visionaries. History later upgraded them to Robber Barons, which is polite shorthand for men who treated the nation like an unlocked liquor cabinet.

Carnegie. Rockefeller. Vanderbilt. Morgan. Men who believed competition was immoral unless they were winning. Men who crushed unions like bugs and then funded libraries to launder their consciences. Men who preached Social Darwinism—survival of the fittest—while quietly fixing the race.

They didn’t build monopolies.They smothered competition with money until it stopped twitching.

Railroads were laid not to connect people, but to extract everything that wasn’t nailed down—and then pry up the nails. Oil was refined. Steel was forged. Fortunes ballooned so fast they required new math. Meanwhile, workers lived six to a room, drank water that doubled as industrial runoff, and learned that injury was a personal failure, not a structural inevitability.

This was the Gilded Age—a term so perfect it practically mocks itself. Gilded, not golden. A thin, shiny layer of wealth slapped over rot like makeup on a corpse. Beneath the chandeliers and corsets festered poverty, corruption, and political bribery so casual it could’ve been invoiced.

Politics, during this period, was a flea market for influence. Senators were bought wholesale. Judges were rented. Regulators were decorative. The government didn’t so much oversee industry as curl up in its lap and purr. If a corporation asked nicely—and by nicely we mean with a sack of cash—the answer was always yes.

Strikes erupted. Workers demanded sane hours, intact bodies, and the radical notion that being alive at the end of the week was not an unreasonable expectation. The response was predictable: clubs, bullets, private militias, and the sudden rediscovery of how much the law loved property and loathed people.

When workers were shot, newspapers called it “unrest.”When unions organized, it was “mob rule.”When corporations crushed them, it was “stability.”

Science joined the party. So did medicine. Industrial diseases bloomed like toxic flowers. Lungs blackened. Spines warped. Minds snapped. The clinical language grew sophisticated while the conditions remained medieval. Progress learned Latin so it could sound respectable while doing the same old dirty work.

And yet—oh, the confidence.

The era vibrated with self-assurance. Everything was inevitable. The market knew best. Wealth would trickle down any minute now. Any objections were dismissed as weakness, envy, or socialism—America’s favorite four-letter word long before it learned to spell it.

This was the age that taught America its most enduring lesson: if you call exploitation “growth” loudly enough, someone will build a statue to it.

Eventually, reforms arrived. Muckrakers exposed. Regulations limped into existence. Antitrust laws made a show of teeth. Some of the blood was mopped up. Some of the children were rescued from the gears. The nation congratulated itself and moved on—never quite addressing the foundational truth that made the whole carnival possible.

The Industrial Revolution didn’t go wrong.It went exactly as designed.

The Gilded Age wasn’t a glitch.It was capitalism without adult supervision.

And if this story feels uncomfortably familiar—if the language, the justifications, the smug certainty ring bells—it’s because America never really left this era. It just swapped smokestacks for servers, factories for platforms, and child labor for “gig opportunities.”

Different machines.Same appetite.Better lighting.

Look for my complete book “A MAGA history of the United States” coming out in the next months. I perform chapters often on my LA public radio show, the Cary Harrison Files”, Fridays at 10 AM Pacific, KPFK 90.7 FM Los Angeles.

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