Working Table of Contents for the Completed AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS-- 31 March 2023

 

Copyright 2023--Hershel Parker

"Reckoning with a History Fraught with Violence and Injustice"

        In the Washington Post on 22 November 2021 Ken Burns wrote: "Being an American means reckoning with a history fraught with violence and injustice. Ignoring that reality in favor of mythology is not only wrong but also dangerous. The dark chapters of American history have just as much to teach us, if not more, than the glorious ones, and often the two are intertwined.”  Reckoning with history is precisely what I have been doing for almost three years, starting just after the murder of George Floyd. An Okie's Racial Reckonings is my private part of the national "history fraught with violence and injustice"--but sometimes tempered with understanding and what passes with us for glory.

 

AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS

HERSHEL PARKER

        PREFACE

1   "GODDAMN OKIES"—HOW "OKIE" BECAME A HATE TERM

 

2   WHO THE OKIES REALLY WERE

 

  3   OLD FAMILY STORIES NONE OF US KNEW

  4     RACIAL DOCUMENTS—In Wills, in Advts. for                                    Runaways &c.

  5     CAROLINA KINFOLKS AND THE WAR ON THE                                            CHEROKEES 1758-1783

  6     JEFFERSON, COCKE, INDIAN TREATIES, & THE SIMS SETTLERS

  7     ERRATIC OBLIVIOUSNESS AT TRAP HILL: THE SIAMESE TWINS, THE ROARING RIVER BAPTISTS, THE UNIONISTS, THE REBEL GESTAPO, & THE SLAUGHTER OF YOUNG MEN BOUND FOR UNION LINES

  8    1850s UTAH AS A MILITARY THEOCRACY: ROBBERIES, MURDERS, & THE ULTIMATE AMERICAN ATROCITY

  9   SLAUGHTERING FAMILIES FOR PARLEY, BRIGHAM, & JESUS—BUT HOLDING SOME LITTLE CHILDREN FOR RANSOM

10     WHITES,  INDIANS,  & NEGROES—THE TRAJECTORY OF AN INNOCENT TEXAN, JESSE  SPARKS

11     ATROCITIES IGNORED (GRANT'S EXPULSION OF "JEWS & OTHER VAGRANTS") & ATROCITIES FABRICATED (COUSIN MILTON "SENTENCED TO BE HANGED")

12    FLETCHER HILL—ESCAPE HERO, PROMOTER OF VETERANS

13   CAPT. J. H. MATTHEWS, STAR WITNESS FOR THE FREEDMEN'S BUREAU WHOSE LIES BECAME HISTORY

14    RECONSTRUCTION FOES: ALBION TOURGEE VS MONTFORD MCGEHEE

15    COUSIN WILLY SIMS CAUSES THE DANVILLE MASSACRE—& CAUSES JIM CROW?

16     AT WOUNDED KNEE: SHERMAN'S SHAME & DICK COSTNER'S GALLANTRY

17    THE GLENN-TUCKER LAWSUIT: CHOCTAW OPPRESSION OUTLASTING THE CONFEDERACY BY DECADES

18     ONE BAD COP & THE "LARGEST MURDER TRIAL IN THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES."

19    DOVEY COSTNER—BEING BLACK IN THE CAROLINAS, TEXAS, INDIAN TERRITORY, AND OKLAHOMA   

 

Flood in old San Bernardino

 The Robards cousins converted to Moronism and left Mississippi for the long trek to Southern California.

Orchid

 

Grandpa Costner

 

Holger Hoock's SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE and seeing 2 sides of everything, or not

 When I bought this book in June 2017 I was happily planning to write my next JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION article under the title "What was Wrong with Hanging Tories in North Carolina?" I had to drop it to do a Melville Library of America volume, COMPLETE POEMS. Then I got very sick and began divesting myself of my Melville collection, first, then my ten thousand family items on my computer. Then George Floyd was killed and I had to make a selection of documents. Now, improbably, I have finished a book, AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS. I wrote this in mid-2017, before all hell broke loose. It is about Holger Hoock's SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE: AMERICA'S VIOLENT BIRTH.

"There are always 2 sides to every issue." Sure!

This morning I had to respond to a "2 sides" comment in JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION:

               An even-handed judicious see-all-sides-of-every-issue sort of fellow, I have been reading Holger Hoock's SCARS OF INDEPENDENCE. Now, it's relevant to deduce that "educated at Freiburg and Cambridge" with a doctorate from Oxford means that, well, that Hoock is German-born and England-educated. One can expect a certain amount of sympathy with the British in his book. And one does find remarkable passages, such as on 319 his declaring: "Among the most notorious rebels was Colonel Benjamin 'Bull Dog' Cleveland, who terrorized Loyalists in the Yadkin country." I have been following Cleveland for many months because some of my cousins rode with him and I never heard him called "Bull Dog." I have a strong desire to celebrate Cleveland in a little article I have been calling “What Was Wrong with Hanging Tories?” Bull Dog?   I just checked Google and find that of all people Patrick Ferguson, the “if you choose to be pissed on forever by a set of mongrels” man, was known as “Bull Dog.”
              Then you turn the page to 320 and find this: “Loyalists gave as brutally as they got.” Well, given the sequence of brutality a true not-quite-rabid Whig might mutter something like, “Loyalists continued their unspeakable brutality.” What I am getting at is an apparent instinctive bias which in fact Hoock overcomes as best he can.      
               Whether or not you will agree about the instinctive bias, I point to pages 308-313, the “Beasts of Prey” section. Hoock makes it clear that the Patriots who cried “Tarleton’s quarter” knew exactly what slaughter they were avenging. The fact that Tarleton was celebrated once he got home says more about the British need to justify themselves than it says about their knowledge of what kind of brutality Tarleton engaged in—even assuming they knew more about it than they likely did. I have not tried to find what reports were published in England.
               The paragraph on 320 beginning “such sadistic American-on-American cruelty” (equating what happened to Thomas Brown with what William Cunningham did) is devoted to “Pyle’s Massacre” conducted by those amazingly successful tricksters led by Henry Lee. I have been waiting years to say “I have a dog in this hunt.” I have a dog in this hunt because my Tory Uncle John, Dr. John Pyle Jr., lost an eye and part of a hand in this event. I have cousins (one was David Cockerham) on the other (Whig) side. In all even-handedness I judge that Pyle’s Hacking Party went far to deter Tories from rising up to welcome Cornwallis’s triumphal march through North Carolina.
               I am not saying Hoock’s bias runs all through but I am saying that if even he understands the horror of Tarleton’s slaughter of wounded rebels, then this is not the time for our pulling the opposing fighting boys apart by their collars and saying Shame on both of you! Go play nicely! I am going to let myself try being judgmental for once, about Tarleton, just as Hoock is. And think about writing “What Was Wrong with Hanging Tories?”

 

Signatures of Grandpa Robert Knox, born in 1742 in Ireland

 

 

How angry a fellow can get at bureaucrats

 

1834 10 February. Fold3. My seriously pissed 4 Great Grandfather Ezekiel Henderson answers the bureaucrats who rejected his first pension application:

         Personally came Ezekiel Henderson before the subscribing Justice of the Peace and being first duly sworn according to law, makes oath, that the services, mentioned in his declaration returned from the Pension office, were rendered his country in regularly embodied corps called into service by the state of North Carolina for the purpose of protecting the inhabitants of that state against the depredations of the Tories and for the purpose of driving the Tories out of the country, who were marching over the country in large bodies; that during the whole of the tour mentioned in his declaration he was constantly and actively engaged in marching after and skirmishing with the Tories. The names of the officers under whom he served are already mentioned in his declaration and also the places where his services were performed. He has also stated in his declaration that he knows of no one whose testimony he can procure as to his services. Sworn to . . . February 10th. 1834.