Bobert, who told you that Greg and I were affected by "slavery, poverty and culture" too? Just not the affects you're thinking of.

Greg F, this is the Greg F I exchanged some posts with earlier in this thread? I'm suprised at some of your questions. My examples in the previous post weren't meant to represent anything you said, but are legitimate examples of what I'm trying to say, that the facts are less trouble than how different people interpret them. That ex-Confederate soldiers were prevented from voting (after being eligible in one election) is fact. The explanations why they were prevented from voting (stubborn refusal or Northern malice) are interpretations.

I worried about vigilante because if what you say is true, that gives them more credit than they deserve. Vigilante committees were common across the West where ever there was lawlessness. Sherman described being on a vigilante committee when he was in California in his autobiography. As one historian noted, you couldn't expect any man hardy enough to survive the Civil War to sit just accept lawlessness just because there was no law handy. Of course he was talking about the Territories further west in later years, not Texas, but it's the same thing.

BTW., what makes you so sure that they hanged "mostly unarmed Black folks, Union sympathizers, etc."? I don't think either of us know that for a fact. The reports I've seen from West Texas speak only of desperados and bandits. I don't know that I'd trust reports from the Army or Union sympathizers in local government to be objective either. Maybe newspaper reports of the time, but there weren't many papers in the state. I don't doubt they committed atrocities, but I don't think the record is clear either.

The KKK? I found enough reports calling them the Klan and you called them the Klan in response to one of my posts, but the facts I seen don't support that and it would be a convenient way possible to put the most negative characterization on the oganizations, wouldn't it.

I really wasn't trying to rehash this, though. I'll let it rest. All I was trying to say was that, even with the same facts in front of us, we wouldn't be able to agree on intepreting them. That's the big problem.