The Confederacy That Survived - How Postwar Pardons Kept Racism alive in America

dig into how Confederate leaders avoided real punishment after 1865 and how that choice helped preserve racist power structures for generations. I connect Reconstruction’s collapse, the Lost Cause myth, and the dismantling of modern voting protections to explain why America still fights the same battles over rights and representation. 

• how Confederate leadership receives paroles, pardons, and public honor 
• the Lost Cause mythology as a long-running rewrite of Civil War memory 
• Andrew Johnson’s mass amnesty and how power uses the pardon pen 
• Black Codes, KKK terror, and “Redemption” as the counterattack on Reconstruction 
• political dynasties and institutions that carry Confederate influence forward 
• Jim Crow’s legal framework as a successor to postwar racial control 
• the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and how Shelby County v. Holder changes enforcement 
• how burden shifting and redistricting tactics weaken Black voting power 
I hope you share this podcast or this episode with someone that you know and love 
Remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable 

Transcript

Welcome And Why This Matters

SPEAKER_00 0:35

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Speak Plainly Podcast, where we speak plainly about things that matter. I'm your host, Apple Medicine, and in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about the Confederacy that survived. Welcome to another episode. And in this episode, on this podcast, where I explore whatever feels like important and worth sharing with people, I decided to do a little more of a deep dive into some things I'd heard whispers of and things about just the South after the Civil War, kind of just getting like really forgiven and not actually kind of doing anything that's like, you know, you shouldn't like enslave people. They kind of just let everybody go, which is wild. And I recently heard about how here in the US, on I think it was like April 29th, the final like nail in the coffin of the Civil Rights Voting Act was driven in. And it's it was been it's been mind-blowing to me how many people have no understanding, no concept of how incredibly racist this stuff is. I mean, I get people are dumb. I get that. Like a lot of people are real dumb, but like wow, the level of dumb that you have to be in order to not understand that this stuff is racist, it's just like it's impressive the level of ignorance. Now, I get that life keeps hammering at all of us, and very few people does it hammer more at than the people who are very poor. And the people who are very poor are very under-educated, very poorly educated. They don't have much. We bust our ass to just pay the bills, go to work, get back home, have barely enough to eat, only shop at Walmart, and d d do life just day after day after day. This is my Midwest roots. They these Midwest roots, my Midwest roots come from Southern roots because I was the first person in my family born in Indiana. Both of my parents, like they were born in Kentucky,

Growing Up With Confederate Myths

SPEAKER_00 3:01

and it's like my my culture from my family was very much the Southern culture, having had just moved up north after the Great Depression, because that's when my grandma was born. Around the Great Depression, and her father was a preacher, his father was a preacher, his father was a moonshiner. Um but this this is of special interest to me because I've used this as an example before. Like I'm a loud, proud, atheist, liberal, like anti-racism thing person, and a lot of that's because I grew up not having any idea how racist the history was. I wore a Confederate flag belt buckle to high school. I've said that um quite a few times, and I fully believed that it was heritage, not hate. So when I say these people are dumb, I mean they're dumb because I was one of those dumb people. You can read books and you can learn things, and you can be around people who are less dumb, and you will become less dumb. By dumb, I mean like learning a few things, becoming less ignorant, getting exposed to ideas that are new to you, and not just poo-pooing them immediately. But the reason this is so interesting to me is because of this weird juxtaposition I had of the location of my childhood in Indiana. Indiana, like Kentucky was technically a border state, but as we'll see in this episode, there are some heavy, heavy Confederate ties to Kentucky, and Southern Indiana, um, as far as sociologically, is very much the the edges of Appalachia, and that's where I grew up. And so the kids where I grew up had a weird we had a weird idea of what the South was. We only knew about the times that we like visited our families down in Tennessee or Georgia or Virginia or wherever. And we only knew about the kind of stereotypes of the South. And because of that, we embodied those stereotypes. And unfortunately, the stereotypes of the South aren't nearly as good as the actual South, because the stereotypes are the it being kind of insular, but it being like super racist, and it it is those things, but they're also like really kind and like open-hearted and are like willing to help you in that sort of that sort of thing, and they're amazing cooks and all of that sort of stuff. The hospitality is is unparalleled. But when all your exposure is just the stereotypes, you glom on to the stereotypes, which are typically the kind of either the overly best or overly worst aspects, and with the south, it's the overly worst aspects. So we became like Indiana and the southern part of Indiana, it has like a weird tie to the South, and because of that, my high school was one of those places where it was like it was kind of a weird subtext war between what was actually taught in school because we had a lot of that southern influence, but we also had a lot of northern influence. So the concept of like who or who fought the Civil War, meaning like the people behind them, what they were like, and what the Civil War was fought over, were were kind of heavily debated, which is kind of wild to to think of now. But it was kind of heavily debated because there was this idea of this noble South. Um, but there was also this idea that like slavery was wrong. And so uh you just have this weird this weird thing, and it's like, well, when I left high school, I wasn't sure whether slavery was whether this civil war was fought over states having their own ability to determine their future by controlling their own rights or slavery. Um, but then I read books and I found out that like the corn the the speech considered the cornerstone speech by um the Confederate leaders said literally that slavery was a cornerstone of the new government of the South. So clearly slavery was a big part of it. But because of the region I grew up in, it was debatable. And this is this is why I want to talk about this, because they just gutted the Civil Rights Act, and it was very, very clearly to me a super racist thing to do. And it was actually strike three um uh uh against the Civil Rights Act,

The Thesis And New Format

SPEAKER_00 8:05

but we'll get there. So today's episode, what I'm calling it, is the Confederacy that survived. I'm gonna try to do this a little bit differently. That was my intro. I'm gonna try to do this a bit like um well, like a visual like video that you would watch on YouTube where I read things to you almost like a script. We're gonna see how this goes. It took a while to write this out, but it's been kind of fun. So, the Confederacy that survived. The Civil War ended in 1865. The Union won, the Confederacy lost, and slavery was abolished. That's the school book version. The real story is more unsettling. The Confederacy wasn't destroyed, its leaders weren't executed, most weren't jailed, they were pardoned, reintegrated, and in many cases headed back to the levers of power within years of surrender. They passed laws, wrote constitutions, raised monuments, and built myths, and the systems they rebuilt, political machines, voting restrictions, racial hierarchies dressed in legal language, shaped American life for the next century and a half. The war ended in 1865. The Confederacy never really did, though.

Confederate Leaders Walk Free

SPEAKER_00 9:31

Section one, leaders walk free. On April 9th, 1865, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant on a Potamox courthouse. Grant's terms were generous. Confederate officers and enlisted men were paroled, allowed to return home with their horses and side arms. It was a military tradition. Parole meant that you could go home instead of a prison camp. But it was not amnesty. It was not a pardon. It did not restore citizenship. That would come later, and it would actually come extremely easily. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States, was arrested in Georgia on may tenth, eighteen sixty five and was imprisoned at Fort Monroe, Virginia. Initially they took him in shackles and they held him there for two years. The federal government never actually tried him for treason. The president of the Confederate States, they never actually tried him for treason. Northern officials feared, with good reason, that a Virginia jury might acquit him, which would have amounted to a judicial validation of succession. And Davis was released on bail in May of 1867, and Andrew Johnson's Christmas Day Pardon of 1868 covered him entirely. The president of the Confederate States retired to Mississippi, where he wrote memoirs and died revered across the South in 1889. Alexander Stevens is another guy. Alexander Stevens, the vice president of the Confederacy, the man who delivered the infamous Cornerstone speech declaring that the new Confederate government rested on a great truth of black racial inferiority, was imprisoned at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor for five months before being pardoned by President Johnson on October of 1865. After that, he went home to Georgia, wrote a two-volume constitutional defense of secession, returned to the US to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1873, and was elected governor of Georgia in 1882, nine years later. He died in office at March of 1883 at 71 years old. The Confederacy's second in command finished out his life as a celebrated statesman. The Confederacy's second in command. The vice president of the Confederacy finished his life as a statesman. He died in office in the House of Representatives. That's wild. I'm sorry, not in the House of Representatives. He did the House of Representatives. He died as governor. He died as the governor of Georgia. They gave him the governorship. Okay, so Robert E. Lee. There's a lot of these, so we're gonna keep it moving. Robert E. Lee spent no time in prison. Zero. Robert E. Lee, like the most famous general, spent zero time in prison. Paroled at a Potomax, he applied for a formal pardon from President Johnson in June of 1865. Though his application was misplaced and the pardon was not officially restored until 1975, over a century after his death, Lee became president of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, and was Lionized across the South as the embodiment of honor and grace in defeat. He died in 1870, and the college was renamed Washington and Lee University. Robert E. Lee, the most famous general driving people to defend slavery, never spent a day in prison, and became the president of a college that eventually was named after him. James Longstreet, here's another guy for you. James Longstreet, Lee's most capable commander, the man that Johnson reportedly told reportedly said could never receive amnesty, alongside Davis and Lee himself, eventually received his pardon by act of Congress in 1865 with the backing of his old friend Ulysses S. Grant. He supported Grant for president, joined the Republican Party, and was appointed surveyor of customs in New Orleans. For this, the South never forgave him. He was labeled a traitor and a scallywag and coordinated and a coordinated campaign led by General Jubal Early spent decades blaming him for the Confederate defeat at Gettysburg, a historical smear campaign that shaped Civil War memory well into the 20th century. Jubal Early himself fled to Mexico, and then Canada after the war, refusing to seek a pardon. He returned to Virginia in 1869 after everybody else had been pardoned, after he was also pardoned in 1868, and spent the rest of his life as the foremost architect of the Lost Cause mythology, presiding over the Southern Historical Society and the Lee Monument Association, churning out a revisionist history in which the Confederacy was noble, slavery was incidental, and defeat a function of Yankee numbers rather than a Southern failing. He died in 1894, and the myth he built out lasted him by generations. So the Lost Cause mythology, I actually had to look up separate from this. That was a phrase I had not heard. The Lost Cause mythology was actually a book. It was called The Lost Cause, and it was genius because it was this guy who wrote this book called The Lost Cause about it was a re it was his own revisionist history retelling the Civil War and uh reframing everything as well, as exactly what we just described, as the pe the men of the South being noble patriots and like and accepting defeat gracefully and all of that sort of thing instead of them wanting to buy and sell people. So for here, for me, the pattern was consistent. If of the Confederacy's highest leadership, not one was executed for treason. Only one Confederate officer, Henry Wurz, come commandant of the Andersonville prison camp, where roughly thirteen thousand using Union prisoners of war died of disease, malnutrition, and exposure, was tried and executed. Everybody else went home. Everybody else went home. One man, and he was the commandant of a prison. Was executed, everyone else went home.

Amnesty And The Pardon Machine

SPEAKER_00 17:22

All right, this takes us into amnesty architecture. The legal machinery of leniency was constructed in stages. Lincoln's 1863 proclamation of amnesty had been designed to encourage defection from the Confederacy and speed the war's end. It offered pardon to any Confederate who swore an oath of loyalty, with exceptions, for the for the highest civil and military officers. Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln Lincoln's assassination in 1865, initially seemed poised for harsher terms. He quickly moved to or in the opposite direction. He quickly moved in the opposite direction. Johnson's proclamation in 1865 excluded fourteen classes of Confederates from blanket amnesty, including all military officers above the rank of colonel, former U.S. officials who had joined the rebellion, West Point graduates who had fought for the Confederacy, and anyone with personal property exceeding $20,000. But those excluded classes could and did apply directly to the president for individual pardons. Johnson spent enormous amounts of his time in office granting exactly those pardons. By June of 1866, he had issued $12,652 individual pardons. 12,652 individual pardons is crazy. His Christmas 1868 proclamation was unconditional and universal. Full amnesty for all remaining Confederates without exception. You see how they like do a thing and then they back off of it? They're like, Amnesty for these people, but not for these people, like high-ranking people and important people, decision makers, you don't get amnesty. A few years later, actually, yeah, you do. Just kidding. Congress tried to check him. The federal district judge, John Curtis Underwood, impaneled a grand jury to indict Confederate leaders for treason. The indictments were drawn up, but they were never prosecuted. Johnson's pardons and the political calculus of the Reconstruction era, the North's exhaustion, its desire for sectional reconciliation, its unwillingness to sustain military occupation indefinitely made accountability a dead letter. The pattern of a president using clemency to protect his own political allies is not confined to the 19th century, though. Because Donald Trump pardoned his 2016 campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who had been sentenced to more than seven years in prison for bank fraud, tax evasion, and illegal foreign lobbying. He pardoned Roger Stone, his longtime political advisor, who had been convicted of witness tampering and lying to Congress. He pardoned Michael Flynn, his first national security advisor, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian officials. In each case, the pardon came to a man who refused to cooperate with federal investigations looking into the president's own conducts. The pardons were not random acts of mercy, the way that we think of pardons. They were, as one senior Mueller prosecutor observed, he said, they were rewards for silence. The mechanism was Andrew Johnson's deployed 150 years later with the exact same logic. Power protects power and pardon pen. Power protects power, and the pardon pen is the instrument.

Reconstruction Undone By Terror

SPEAKER_00 21:21

Reconstruction, brief justice, and long betrayal. The years between 1865 and 77 were the only period in American history when the federal government meaningfully enforced black civil and political rights in the South. Under radical Republican Reconstruction, freedmen voted in large numbers. Black men held office at every level of Southern government. Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce represented Mississippi and the U.S. Senate. Hundreds of black men served in state legislators across the former Confederacy. Confederate veterans, meanwhile, were regrouping. In 1865 and 66, before federal oversight could take hold, former Confederate states passed the Black Codes. I don't know if you have heard of the Black Codes. This was another one I had to look up, because I'm not black and I'm not a black historian. But dang, we have we white people have done everything we can to screw over black people and to make sure that they are less than and able to be used as slaves one way or another. So the Black Code was a system of vagrancy laws, labor contracts, and civil restrictions designed to restore as much of the antebellum labor order as possible without the legal name of slavery. And isn't that a cute way to put it? The antebellum labor order. Slavery. The antebellum being like the old South. When Congress struck down the Black Codes and imposed Reconstruction, the response was organized violence. How organized? Enter the KKK. The Klu Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee in 1865 or 66 by Confederate veterans. It first its first Grand Wizard was Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate cavalry general, became the first ever Grand Wizard of the KKK. Are you shocked? I'm shocked. I'm utterly shocked. The clan and its successor organizations, the White League, the Redshirts, operated as paramilitary extensions of the Democratic Party. Targeting which at the time that was the super racist people in the South. They operated as paramilitary extensions, targeting black voters, Republican officeholders, and their allies with systematic terror. Their goal was not merely to intimidate individuals, but to collapse the political infrastructure of Reconstruction entirely. And Andrew Johnson's leniency made all of this possible. By pardoning former Confederates and restoring their political rights and handing them back the levers of power, he allowed them back into state legislatures almost immediately after the war's end. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 68, enfranchised black men and guaranteed equal protection under the law. The fifteenth amendment, ratified in eighteen seventy, prohibited racial discrimination in voting. For several years, federal enforcement gave these amendments teeth. Then the teeth were pulled. How are they pulled? Redemption? The Confederates returned to power. The process called redemption, the recovery of Southern state governments by the Democratic Party, which was overwhelming the par overwhelmingly the party of Confederate veterans and their allies, proceeded through the 1870s through a combination of electoral manipulation, economic coercion, and outright violence. Wade Hampton III, Confederate Lieutenant General and former cavalry commander, was elect was elected governor of South Carolina in 1876 in an election conducted under conditions of organized paramilitary intimidation of black voters. He subsequently served two terms in the Senate. Jordan B. Gordon, Confederate general and reputed leader of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan, became a senator of Georgia in 1873. Then governor of Georgia in 1886 to 1890, then U.S. Senator again from 1891 to 1897. He was a founding member of the Southern Historical Society and one of the central figures in reconstructing the Lost Cause mythology. The compromise of 1877 sealed the process. In the disputed presidential election of 1876, a backroom deal gave the White House to Rutherford, B. Hayes, in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the remaining Reconstruction states. Without federal enforcement, the constitutional amendments became paper guarantees. The Reconstruction was over, and the Confederates had won peace. They were left alone, no more interference. That was a lot. There is like these are a lot of people, a lot of individual things that all happened. This is a big overview. So what we have so far is a series of people who were really powerful and in charge becoming senators, becoming representatives, becoming governors and state and um House of Representatives, they wind are appointed to treasuries and to all kinds of positions in power. People who were political enemies, people who were enemies of the state or whatever you want to call it, because they were part of the Confederates, they're part of the Confederacy, and were like, hey, slavery's great. All of these people, nothing really happened to them. They the ones who had power maintained their power after a short stint. It sounds a lot like police nowadays, getting a paid vacation and then coming back. Because we have the president of the Confederacy and the Vice President of the Confederacy. We have um two of the lead of the lead generals and some of the lead generals' favorite um leaders, all of which take power back maybe five or ten or fifteen years later, some even less than that. And we wonder why things like the April 29, 2026 passing of the gutting of the Civil Rights Voting Act. We wonder why and how that happens. This is why. Because it's not just those people got power then and they paved the way. It also happens through bloodlines and political dynasties, and that's the next section. The

Dynasties That Keep Power Alive

SPEAKER_00 28:33

political recovery of the Confederate elite was not just institutional. It was also dynastic, meaning like families, dynasties. Power passed from Confederate officers and office holders to their children and grandchildren. The Breckinridge family of Kentucky illustrates the pattern. John C. Breckinridge had been vice president of the United States under Buchanan, then a Confederate general, then Secretary of War of the Confederacy before fleeing to England at the war's end. The family line continued through Kentucky politics into the 20th century. His nephew, Desha Breckenridge, became an influential newspaper publisher whose editorial voice shaped the Southern politics in the early 1900s. The Byrd family of Virginia traced its roots to Confederate elites and produced Harry F. Byrd Sr., who served as the governor of Virginia and then U.S. Senator. There's so much more. Then there's Pitchfork Ben, which you may have heard of, or Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina, was not a Confederate general, but a post-war paramilitary leader who organized the Redshirts and the violent campaign that then destroyed the Reconstruction in South Carolina, the Reconstruction being like the North trying to like help out the black people in the South. Um totally screwed it over. Storm Thurmond, there's uh also family had roots in the South, um, specifically in South Carolina plantation economy, and he began his career with the political world that Tillman had built. He ran for president in 1948 on the state's rights democratic or what they call Dixiecrat ticket, explicitly in opposition to the civil rights platform. This was this is what they've been doing. They have families uh that just keep creating. You forgive one and it exacerbates and goes further and further and further. So the Confederate litter the Confederate legacy was not only personal and dynastic, it was institutional as well. This was the thing I had another thing I had to look up, those black codes. The black codes of 1865 and 1866 were suppressed by um by the Reconstruction. But once Reconstruction ended, former Confederate states reconstructed the legal architecture of racial control through Jim Crow laws. Like the Black Codes were passed and then Reconstruction, which were super racist, and then the Reconstruction came in for a while, and then they were like, okay, well, it's fine. We're gonna, as I we described earlier, we're like, we'll pull our states out. It's fine, we'll pull, we'll pull all of our all of our troops out and leave the reconstruction of the Carolinas alone. And as soon as that happened, Jim Crow laws. And we all know what the Jim Crow laws are. The line from there to the president or to the present is incredible. The

Voting Rights Act Guardrails Removed

SPEAKER_00 31:52

Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the federal government's most serious attempt since the 15th Amendment itself to enforce black voting rights against the very obvious and systematic resistance of Southern states. And it worked. It produced a generation of black political representation and legislators in state houses and eventually the presidency that Reconstruction had briefly glimpsed and then lost. But in 2013, the Supreme Court ruling in Shelby County versus Holder struck down the formula used to determine which jurisdictions required federal preclearance of voting laws. So basically, the voting laws there were three parts that were really useful in the Civil Rights Act. Part one was dismantled in 2013. And this was the first bodyguard. And the first bodyguard for black people, and we're calling, I'm just kind of um calling them bodyguards, these these these rail, these guardrails to allow black people to be able to vote, was in the first one, there was a five to four conservative majority that struck down the coverage that first made it to where you had to get pre-clearance as a southern state or southern jurisdiction in order to do anything that had to do with voting. If you wanted to move a voting poll, you had to get federal permission first. If you wanted to redraw lines, you had to get federal permission first. You had to get permission. That was called the pre-clearance. And they got rid of that in 2013. What that meant was that the state had to prove that what they were doing was not racist to the federal government. And after 2013, it became now the states didn't need pre-clearance for anything. They had to wait until after something had been obviously racist and then they would face lawsuits. So literally hours after that happened in 2013, they started making political changes to um w where where the voting polls were going to be and to redrawing lines, and they did it immediately because they knew that they would have months to years before any c any kind of lawsuit would be able to actually land. So that was blow number one in 2013. Blow tw number two was 2013 to 2025. The second, the lawsuit option was still alive, but now states had um, instead of states proving that their laws were fair before passing them, because before it was just about moving vote moving voting stuff, now you were um you as a black person were allowed to sue, and they had to prove that they weren't being racist. And now they have made it to where you actually have to prove that they were being racist instead of the burden of proof being on the other end. So that just exhausted everything. And then the final nail in the Voting Rights Act was April 29th of this year, the last bodyguard falls. And Louisiana had drawn its congressional map with only one majority black district, despite black people making up a third of the state's voting population. What they did was make it to where you can just redraw anything you want, anywhere that you want. And the the thing is, is if you have control over the bylaws and you have a group of 50, you can make that group of 50 vote any way that you want if you control just 15 of them. And it doesn't seem that way if the rules are majority majority votes, but if you have control of the bylaws of how all of this stuff works, you can control that. You can take those 50 and you can break them down into smaller groups. And you make you make those you take those smaller groups and you give those smaller groups representational votes, and then you have those smaller groups, and if the smaller group is actually just uh eleven people or so, then you actually only need to convince six, right? Or you need to convince eighteen, and then now you have three groups, because you have six in each of those three groups, that will give you half. And if it's split into five groups, well, hooray. You now, even though you have you have a third, you have a third of the votes, you actually still have a majority vote because you have control of the bylaws, so you can you can manipulate things in such a way, and that's exactly what they've done with the voting rights act. They have basically completely dismantled it. It's it is now use it is now useless and toothless.

Why Racism Persists Into Today

SPEAKER_00 36:56

This is what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about how and after like the Nazi Germany war, same thing, the Nuremberg trials, there was only a handful of people and they were grunts. All the actual scientists, all the Nazi leaders, they were all allowed to retire or or they got absorbed into the government and and governmental institutions of other foreign entities. That's the way it goes. So if you want to know why America is still so freaking racist, this is a big part of it. It's the Confederacy that survived. The people who led the South, the president and the vice president, Ulysses S. Grant, his um his family and descendants, these people were revered because they were never properly punished. They were never actually um, they were never punished for what they did, they were never corrected. And the the poisoned narrative that they uh pushed through the lost cause, and you get the daughters of the confederacy and things like that. And I I went to um when I was in the honor guard, I went to a concert at a concert hall that was the Daughters of Confederacy concert hall in Washington, DC, where the Air Force band was playing, and that's where I heard Jake Shimabukudo for the first time. It was amazing, and thank goodness, because I love Jake Shimabukuto, but also like why why the Daughters of the Confederacy existed only as a way to manipulate the public opinion on slavery in the South and change how people were viewing themselves and the entire uh the entire system of slavery, North, South, governmental, um, governance, all kinds of things. So yeah, the South is still alive. There's that song, you know, the South's gonna rise again. Uh the South never really went away. We just hit it better. And it it's it's coming out coming out big and strong now. We've got these loud, racist people in office like Trump. And like he he pardoned all of the all of the the d um rioters. Like it's been crazy.

Final Takeaways And Sign Off

SPEAKER_00 39:27

So that's my episode for the day. The Confederacy that survived. We still are dealing with their crap because we didn't beat them properly. Thank you for hanging out with me. I hope that you enjoyed this podcast. I hope you got something kind of interesting out of it, or you at least enjoyed spending some time with me and learning some new weird screwy things. I hope that you enjoy the rest of your day. I hope you share this podcast or this episode with someone that you know and love. I hope you have a marvelous day, and remember, stay curious and stay uncomfortable.