The Truly "Left Behind"

According to Charles Adams's book, "When in the Course of Human Events", scores of Southern blacks at the end of Reconstruction (the Treaty of Versailles of the U.S.) pleaded with the Northern soldiers to take them with them when they headed back north, and in virtually every case these requests were denied. It appears, folks, that the North, after having plundered the South with "total war" (a clear violation of the Geneva Conventions), high taxation, disenfranchisement, etc., and also having stirred up racial hatred by having black (and in many instances understandably vengeful) troops controlling predominantly white areas, had concluded that they didn't really want the recently freed black folks, either (some states actually having made it illegal for blacks to cross their borders)..................................................................................................I think that we just have to face it here, people. America was a racist country IN IT'S ENTIRETY, and this whole notion of Northern enlightenment is laughable (the fact that even many abolitionists were racists, that Lincoln's first inaugural was essentially a "slavery forever" speech, that virtually all of the slave ships were Northern, that many Northern states were virulently inhospitable to blacks, that slavery - albeit it was termed differently - had lasted in New Jersey until 1865, that no Northern politician had ever made a meaningful proposal for compensated emancipation, that a significant percentage of Northerners had fully supported colonization, etc., etc.)...................................................................................................P.S. And the fact that they (the military, political class, etc.) had to have known the repercussions of this (the leaving of freed blacks behind) makes it even more despicable, in my opinion. "Yeah, you stay behind and we go home to safety, that's the ticket."