civil war - Quaker Ranter

Education and Empowerment in Post-Civil War America: Lynette Love

Martin Kelley — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 15:04:51 +0000

I talk with Lynette Love, who’s written an article about a post-Civil War school in South Carolina that was started by Friends.

We discuss the life and impact of Cornelia Hancock, a Quaker nurse during the Civil War who played a significant role in establishing Freedmen Schools in South Carolina. The discussion covers Hancock’s bravery, the humanitarian crisis of contraband during the war, and the legacy of education for freed slaves. Lynette also addresses the current controversies surrounding her book about this history, touching on themes of censorship and the importance of remembering the full scope of history, including its darker aspects.

In today’s political climate, not everyone is comfortable with that full scope. A report in the Charleston Post and Courier last month says that Love’s book has been flagged under Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum’s May 2025 order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” Here’s a clip of Lynette and I talking about this.

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Cool historical find of the day

Martin Kelley — Thu, 09 Aug 2018 12:29:33 +0000

This is totally cool. The Historic Charleston Foundati on in South Carolina is restoring the Nathanial Russell House, a remarkable example of neoclassical architecture on the National Historic Register, and found a fragment what they list as 1868 Friends Intelligencer above the kitchen firebox.

More fascinating discoveries from the walls of the #russellhousekitchen – new artifacts were extracted from cavities above the kitchen firebox on the first floor! This latest batch of artifacts dates to the 1850’s and 1860’s, which I think we can agree is an interesting and… fractious time in Charleston’s history. The most intriguing scrap of paper recovered from the walls is pictured here: a page ripped from a Quaker periodical entitled “Friends’ Intelligencer,” published in Philadelphia in 1868.

Who were the Friends in Charleston in the years right after the Civil War? Was the Intelligencer hidden or just recycled to plug up a draft? I wonder if this could be related to Quaker relief work in South Carolina. The most well-known example was the Penn School on St Helena Island, founded by northern Unitarians and Quakers in 1862 to educate freed Gullah after the slaveowners fled Union troops.

Curious about the fragment, I typed a few of its legible words into Google and sure enough, they’ve scanned that volume of the Intelligencer (hattip to my FJ colleague Gail, who found this link). It shows a date of Fourth Month 20, 1868, though curiously FI also republished it in 1874, which I first found. The poem is credited to Bessie Charles, the English poet also credited as Elizabeth Bundle Charles; it seems to have been published in various collections around that time. The Intelligencer continues today of course.

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Taxes then and now

Martin Kelley — Sat, 14 Mar 2015 02:54:34 +0000

Every year as April’s tax deadlines comes near, the War Resisters League produces a pie chart showing military spending as a percentage of the federal budget. This year Ed Hedemann went back in time to see what the chart would have looked like during World War I:

A striking difference between this fictional WW I era pie chart and today’s version is how much simpler the federal budget was back then. Not only was it a lot smaller – vastly smaller – there were many fewer categories. A hundred years ago, the budget was mostly military (75% of the budget) – even before entry into WW I – a large part of which was to pay off expenses incurred during the Civil War from 50 years earlier and the recently-ended Spanish-American War. The nonmilitary portions were labeled “Indians,” “Postal Deficiencies,” and “Civil and Miscellaneous.”

H/t The Pickett Line

Christian peacemaker Teams News

Martin Kelley — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 10:13:41 +0000

On Saturday, November 26, 2005 four members of “Christian peacemakers Teams”:www.cpt.org were abducted in iraq. On March 20th the body of American Quaker Tom Fox was found; on March 23rd, the remaining three hostages were freed by U.S. and British military forces.
Here at Nonviolence.org, we have always been impressed and highly supportive of the deep witness of the Christian peacemakers Teams. Their members have represented the best in both the peace and Christian movements, consistently putting themselves in danger to witness the gospel of peace. Not content to write letters or stand on pickett lines in safe western capitals, they go to the frontlines of violence and proclaim a radical alternative.
While we can be grateful for the release of the three remaining hostages, we should continue to remember the 43 foreign hostages still being held in iraq and the 10–30 iraqis reportedly taken hostage each and every day. As iraq slips into full-scale civil war we must also organize against the war-mongerers, both foreign and internal and finde ways of standing alongside those iraqis who want nothing more than peace and freedom.

Here’s links to recent articles on the situation: https://delicious.com/martin_kelley/news.cpt-four.foxmemorial

And a personal note from Nonviolence.org’s Martin Kelley: I myself am a Christian and Quaker and one of our folks, Tom Fox, of Langley Hill (Virginia) Friends Meeting is among the hostages. I don’t know Tom personally but over the last few days I’ve learned we have many Friends in common and they have all testified to his deep committment to peace. Some of the links above are more explicitly Quaker than most things I post to Nonviolence.org, but they give perspective on why Tom and his companions would see putting themselves in danger as an act of religious service. I am grateful for Tom’s current witness in iraq–yes, even as a hostage–but I certainly hope he soon comes back to his family and community and that the attention and witness of these four men’s ordeal helps to bring the news of peace to streets and halls of Baghdad, Washington, London and Ottawa.

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Thirty years later: Kissinger’s war crimes

Martin Kelley — Sun, 07 Dec 2003 21:01:57 +0000

Newly-declassified documents from the U.S. State Department show that former U.S. Secretary of State “Henry Kissinger sanctioned the dirty war in Argentina”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1101121,00.html in the 1970s in which up to 30,000 people were killed.
bq. “Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed,” Mr Kissinger is reported as saying. “I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems, but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better … The human rights problem is a growing one … We want a stable situation. We won’t cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”
Forgiving away human rights abuses in Latin America was standard U.S. policy in the 1970s. Washington favored strong military power and control over messy unpredictable democracy (a formulation which could be a shorthand definition for post-Nazi _fascism_). After reading this week that the U.S. is wrapping entire iraqi villages in barbed wire, it’s hard not to see us returning to this era. What will declassified documents reveal about today’s White House occupants thirty years from now?