This site is published to promote the book Like Slaves on the Run: A novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction, which is the centerpiece of the author's Defense of the Second American Revolution, as the site is named.
     The author, George H. Johnson, is a Kentuckian who began his study of the War and Reconstruction more than 40 years ago, with an interest in Ulysses S. Grant. It quickly became obvious to the author that Grant and Lincoln should have been heroes celebrated everywhere, but they weren't, in Kentucky textbooks. Indeed, everywhere he looked, Kentuckians seemed to support the Confederacy, although he knew that had certainly not always been the case. Adults on the farm on which he grew up were Republicans, while almost everyone else in Shelby County was a Democrat. Through his family and its friends, he learned the early history of Kentucky, which had been strongly pro-Union until the Civil War ended. Some who counted themselves as Republicans when he was growing up insisted they were Lincoln Republicans, to differentiate themselves from the modern, anti-New Deal Republicans.
     The author became convinced that Grant and Lincoln had been and were maligned, and for the same reason: Their support of emancipation of the slaves and of the political rights of freedmen. After his death, Lincoln was misrepresented as the "great conciliator," who would have sacrificed the freedmen to bring harmony between the sections of the country. This was despite his solid support for the rights of freemen in the Second Inaugural address. Grant was castigated for corruption, real but mostly imagined, because of his steadfast support for Radical Reconstruction.
     The author worked from his first high-school year, beginning as a pinsetter at a bowling alley, then a grocery clerk, gas station attendant, backyard mechanic, draftsman, and auto assembler. He studied mechanical engineering at Purdue University for two years, and liberal arts [English] at the University of Louisville at nights while working.
     Thusly prepared for life, he was drafted into the Army. In his second and last Army year, he was sent to Korea, where he observed the April 19, 1960 uprising that overthrew the U.S.-backed tyrant Syngman Rhee. He was radicalized by this, and by the Cuban Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement. He spent the next six years in Korea as a journalist [copy editor at a local English-language newspaper, and stringer for CBS News and Newsweek -- fired from the magazine because of his increasingly radical politics]. He went to Vietnam in 1966 to work for a civilian contractor.
     Returning to the U.S. in 1967, he worked as a journalist, printer, welder, auto assembler, garment-shop floor boy, bicycle mechanic, office assistant, developer in Microsoft Excel [a spreadsheet program] and Access [database]. Unfortunately, he retired from information technology without learning HTML and Java, which a computer-literate person will observe by examining this website.
     He was for years a contributor and staff member for The Militant, a Socialist newsweekly published in the interests of the working class.