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After Charleston finally surrendered in Feb 1865, James Redpath entered the city with 2 regiments of US Colored Troops. He made his way to the offices where he had been briefly employed 10 years earlier. The MERCURY was the most influential pro-slavery publication of the 1850s.
In the editor’s office, he found a family of newly emancipated people hiding beneath a bust of John C. Calhoun, a revered Congressman and two-term VP. A virulent white supremacist, the strategy which protected and extended slave rule from 1820-1860 was often called Calhounism.
Redpath was a militant abolitionist. Charleston made it illegal to own a copy of his biography of John Brown. He pointed to Calhoun bust & said, “That man was your great enemy - he did all he could to keep you slaves - you ought to break his bust.” A women took it & left the room
Remembering the scene afterwards, Redpath responded to the assertion, popular then as now, that monuments to Confederate sympathizers and secessionists deserve respect because of their legacy as American statesman. Here's how Redpath responded: https://abcnews4.com/news/local/protest-against-removing-calhoun-monument-planned-monday-evening-in-charleston
“I have no respect whatever for mere intellect & when it is perverted & made an engine for the oppression of the poor, I have a detestation of it. These human infernal machines, these torpedoes in trousers, should be treated as their mechanical images are treated - destroyed...
...Calhoun did more than any man to make Slavery respectable - he used all his great powers to crush the negro. So I hate him.”
This one can't come down too soon.
This one can't come down too soon.
