Portside

Ain’t Gonna Play Acoustic Guitar No More

JANUARY 15 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY OF Bob Dylan recording Maggie’s Farm, which was one of 11 tracks released two months later on the album Bringing It All Back Home. 

The album marked a dramatic shift for Dylan. He turned away from the all-acoustic instrumentation of his four very successful previous albums to embracing, and also helping to create, the electric instrumentation of folk-rock. Some of his fans were not pleased, but most of them came around to appreciating Dylan’s new artistic vision. He never looked back. You can listen to Maggie’s Farm here: https://youtu.be/BIGefJ--nyE?si=atWg5gJ9OLwdd25u

40 Acres and a Mule Was Working Fine

JANUARY 16TH IS THE 160TH ANNIVERSARY of a well-remembered moment in the final months of the Civil War. On this day in 1865 General William T. Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscated more than 400,000 acres of rich, but abandoned, farmland on the coast of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida to be divided into 40-acre parcels. Each parcel was distributed to a formerly enslaved family. Many of the recipients of the parcels also received an army-surplus mule that could pull a plow or carry heavy loads. To this day Sherman’s policy is remembered as the 40-acres-and-a-mule order.

Sherman was not the first Union officer to confiscate land that had been owned by slave-owning southerners and turn it over to the same people who had previously worked under the lash of slavery. As early as 1862 land that had made up hundreds of plantations had been turned over to formerly enslaved men and women who put their hard-earned knowledge of agriculture to work and produced not only enough vegetables, meat and eggs to feed themselves, but also large crops of cotton, sugar and rice for consumption in faraway places.

By the time the Civil War ended in April 1865, millions of southern acres were being cultivated by hundreds of thousands of hardworking, newly emancipated people. Three years after beginning an unplanned experiment in growing crops tended by free labor, it had proven to be a success. That success might have continued but for Lincoln’s assassination and his replacement by Vice-President Andrew Johnson, who, almost immediately after taking office, cancelled Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 and dozens of similar arrangements. 

The experiment in radical agricultural reconstruction that had shown so much promise was abandoned. During the next four years almost all the southern land that had been confiscated during the war was returned to its former owners. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/special-field-15/

‘Your Heritage Is My Slavery’

JANUARY 17 IS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY of the largest protest demonstration that has ever taken place in South Carolina’s capital, Columbia. 

It was on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday in 2000 that some 50,000 people – Black, white, Latinx and Native American – took over the streets to demand the South Carolina legislature stop flying the Confederate flag over the State House, a practice that the all-white legislature had started in 1961 to display their hostility to the civil rights movement. 

Demonstrators chanted “Bring it down” and “Your heritage is my slavery.” 

The South Carolina legislature was not impressed. They continued to fly the Confederate flag over the State House until July 2015. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-confederate-battle-flag-became-symbol-racism

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