Author: Circa1865

This is an informational website created and maintained by North Carolina historian and author John Bernhard Thuersam. Born and reared in New York, he a graduate of Villa Maria College at Buffalo, the SUNY Buffalo, and graduate school at the University of Georgia. His 2022 book, "Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here: Key West's Civil War was published by Shotwell Press; his 2022 book "Plymouth's Civil War: The Destruction of a North Carolina Town" was published in 2024 by Scuppernong Press. For the latter, Mr. Thuersam was awarded the 2025 "Douglas Southall Freeman Award" from the Military Order of the Stars & Bars.

Prewar Immigration Fears

Orestes Brownson, 1803-1876, was born in Vermont, raised Calvinist and later Catholic convert. As an antebellum political activist, he saw the two-great political parties, Whig and Democrat as nearly equally balanced in most regions of the country. But he also saw immigration as introducing both parties to bidding for the “foreign vote,” which he saw as truly ruling the country.

Prewar Immigration Fears

“[Brownson] explained that from the years 1820-1845 the flow of immigration into the country had been principally Catholic, and hence sufficiently conservative in nature to exert a wholesome moral and religious influence on the country. But since 1845, and especially since 1849, the character of the immigration has been entirely different.

The reaction to the revolutionary movement on the continent of Europe that began in 1849 had poured a still larger immigration onto our shores in which an infidel and anarchical element predominated, and which currently seemed likely to predominate.

He confessed that he was opposed, not to the coming of such to our shores, but rather to their ready admission into the bosom of American political society. He feared that the support such an element would bring into the filibustering, ultra-democratic fanatical tendencies of some of his countrymen would only tend to undermine genuine republicanism as it was conceived in the minds of the Founding Fathers.

He simply did not believe that such immigrants were entitled to political citizenship since they were “to a fearful extent banded together in secret societies, affiliated to the terrible secret societies of Europe, and directed by foreign demagogues and revolutionists, such as Kossuth and Mazzini.” Such immigrants showed no intention of becoming quiet, orderly and loyal American citizens. Hence, Brownson concluded:

“As an American citizen and as an American republican, we cannot but be opposed to their naturalization, and a fortiori as a Catholic; for they are the worst enemies of the Church in this country, are hand and glove with the [anti-immigrant] Know-Nothings taken generally and may be regarded as the real instigators and the most effective supporters of the Know-Nothing movement. Know-Nothingism is no Yankee invention, no American production, but a combination of Irish Orangeism, German radicalism, French socialism, and Italian astuteness and hate.”

In speaking of “Italian astuteness and hate,” Brownson was of course referring particularly to the notorious apostate priest Alessandro Gavazzi, who with the dregs of Italian and German revolutionists fomented the “Bendini Riots” through the country on the occasion of the visit of Archbishop Bendini to the United States in 1853. When, on this tour, he reached Cincinnati, an organized attempt was made to hang him and destroy the cathedral there.

Brownson emphasized that American citizenship is a boon or a grant, not a natural or indefeasible right. As it is the right of every sovereign society to open or close to whom it will, so it is the right of every nation to close its political citizenship, if it sees proper, to all foreign-born immigrants that might prove a danger, or that it would bring no advantage to it.”

(Orestes A. Brownson. A Definite Biography. Thomas Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 1976, pp. 470-471)

 

A Final Dash to Supply Lee’s Army

As the end of the war approached, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory planned a desperate mission to supply General Lee’s army after its retreat from Richmond. Mallory dispatched Lt. J. Pembroke Jones to locate Capt. John Newland Maffitt at Matamoras or Havana and organize the supply attempt.

Both Maffitt and Jones likely knew each other in the prewar at Wilmington, North Carolina, as Maffitt was a US Navy Lt. surveying the coast adjacent to the Cape Fear River, and Lt. Jones was often in Wilmington where his wife resided. Jones served aboard the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in 1862; he commanded the ironclad CSS Raleigh in April 1864 which scattered the enemy blockading fleet off Wilmington.

A Final Dash to Supply Lee’s Army

“Shortly after the Owl departed Galveston [approximately mid-March 1865], Lt. J. Pembroke Jones, assigned to special service, passed through Galveston from Richmond in search of Maffitt. [Secretary of the Navy Stephen] Mallory had ordered Jones to make his way out of the Confederacy as best he could, report to Maffitt, purchase two steamers to take supplies to Lee on an urgent basis, one for a run up [Virginia’s] York River, the other up the James River. Jones had with him money in specie checks and was accompanied by pilots for the Virginia river trips, but when they reached the Mississippi headed for Texas, Lt. Jones heard of the end of the war in the East.

Jones sent the pilots home, continued alone to Galveston, and conferred with General John B. Magruder, who informed him the war would not be continued in Texas. Jones decided to continue to Matamoras, where he took a steamer to Havana and found Maffitt. Lt. Jones probably brought with him the well-known 24 February 1865 letter from Navy Secretary Mallory. It was the last from Mallory to Maffitt, and desperation was now apparent.”

High Seas Confederate. The Life and Times of John Newlsnd Maffitt. Royce Shingleton. University of South Carolina Press, 1994, pp. 97-98)

Economic Purposes of Reconstruction

The capture and occupation of New Orleans and South Carolina’s Sea Islands early in the war energized Northern Radicals. This brought both Southern cotton into their near bankrupt treasury and brought forth measures designed to destroy the South’s economic system to include the destruction of plantations to include crops, livestock and equipment, and also carry off Southern farm workers. For Radicals, they represented a potential new electorate, and source of troops.

Economic Purposes of Reconstruction

“[Gen. Benjamin] Butler’s course in New Orleans was far removed from Lincoln’s conciliatory efforts to find and organize a loyal population of the South, but it met enthusiastic response from the Radicals in Congress and their supporters in the Union League. The measures designed to destroy the Southern economic system met warm approval, while the organization of a potential new electorate appealed to the ambitions of aspiring politicians. Not least among the latter was Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase.

Butler’s administration in [occupied] New Orleans, the Secretary informed the General, had given “the greatest satisfaction” to all his friends. Lincoln, said Chase, had put Butler in an embarrassing position by having no fixed policy in regard to slavery. But Butler should make his own position clear: “Let it be understood that you are no pro-slavery man.” In fact, Chase could find but one admonition to give. Rumors abounded that Butler and his officers had been engaged in “mercantile speculation” and this, thought Chase, sounded the only sour note in an otherwise excellent administration.

In the Confederate vocabulary, [Butler’s men] were looting . . . In the idiom of a later generation, they were engaged in “black market” activities . . . acquiring cotton and shipping it northward. At Ship Island, General Neal Dow, author and defender of Maine’s prohibition law, diverted a government vessel to carry the contents of several plantation homes to his own house in Portland. Butler’s brother, favored by cotton trading permits, grew rich in the Crescent City. The military government in New Orleans was giving a crude but a vivid and well-understood lesson in the economic purposes of Reconstruction.

[In November 1861, South Carolina’s Sea Islands] containing 195 plantations and about ten thousand slaves, fell into Union hands. When the troops arrived, they found a large store of cotton, and Chase immediately sent agents to collect it. By June 1862, Sea Island cotton shipped to New York had brought $724,984, of which more than half a million, went into the US Treasury.

[Gen. David] Hunter in January 1863 began to force Negroes into the army, [but] they took flight. The Northern plantation superintendents and foremen found the Negroes unwilling to work. Younger ones roamed the islands while the older ones lazed indoors and neglected the fields. They had, to the astonishment of the Yankees, no concept of wages, expected provisions to be furnished them, and worked only under compulsion.”

(Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction. William B. Hesseltine. Peter Smith Publishing, 1963, pp. 82-85)

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

The notorious “Union League” organization, working in concert with the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a postwar enforcement arm of northern Radicals which shepherded enfranchised freedmen to the polls to vote Republican and also discourage Southern white voters. Grant depended on 500,000 black votes to gain the presidency in 1868 – and thus began the tradition of a solid black Republican voting bloc of voters through the end of the century.

In 1867, arms were secured for League members in military companies “which became a menace to peace and good order in North Carolina communities. The most common of the graver outrages committed by the Negroes was barn-burning, which for a white farmer meant complete ruin and absolute want of food.” (Hamilton, pg. 339).

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

“The postwar North Carolina Convention met in October of 1865; and was composed, for the most part of men who had already been prominent in public life in North Carolina, and of others who were destined to become so. The Convention provided for an election to be held for Governor and members of the legislature. To fill the former position Jonathan Worth was duly elected; and a legislature composed of the best element of the State was chosen.

This legislature met on 12 December, when Worth was inaugurated, and all the machinery of a full State government at once put in operation. An able judiciary was also chosen, and Wm. A. Graham, the most illustrious of her many distinguished sons, was sent at the head of the North Carolina delegation to Washington to take the State back to her place in the Union.

But alas! the wild fanaticism of the North, which had driven the State from the Federal government was not sufficiently appeased, nor had the State and her people been sufficiently humiliated. Till that was done, there was no place for her around the old hearthstone. Her people must yet go through the “hell” of Congressional reconstruction, and drink deep of its fiery broth, before her Senators and Representatives could be admitted to their seats.

This legislature recognized the changed status of the Negro, and enacted laws appropriate to his new condition, giving him such civil rights and duties as that condition justified. County, town and city governments were reorganized, courts were regularly held and presided over by able and just men; the law was once more asserting itself and its invigorating influences were seen in the more hopeful demeanor of all classes of people. Had this state of affairs been allowed to continue, the dark pages of the Reconstruction regime might have never been written, and the name of the Ku-Klux Klans might never have appeared in the pages of National or State history.

But this was not to be. A prominent Northern politician had declared that the States which had been guilty of the crime of rebellion should be kept within the grasp of war for thirty years. The dark valley and shadow of death lay once more before the people of North Carolina.

The State was again put under military rule and the conquerors were not only to plant their heels upon the necks of the men who had been overcome in war, but were urged to press with all the vigor of their conquering power.

Though President Andrew Johnson asserted that the States had never having been separated from the Union, and had lost their Constitutional rights only while engaged in rebellion, and that on the laying down of arms and the renewal of allegiance to the United States Government, they had resumed their ante-bellum attitude and condition and should at once be recognized as a part of the Union. This policy aroused a frenzy at the North, scarcely less savage than the abolition craze, and it found fierce utterance in the Congress assembled at Washington. A controversy of intense partisan bitterness was then inaugurated between Johnson and the Radicals.

The vindictive House of Representatives affirmed, with redoubled emphasis, that, by the act of secession, the States recently engaged in war, had forfeited all their rights under the Constitution – and not having acknowledged their rebellion until they were forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, they should be relegated to the condition of territorial possessions, to be governed by Congress till the latter should deem them sufficiently humbled; and until new Constitutions should be framed and adopted by a vote of all the people, including the recently freed Negro. Most of the seceding States were formed into military districts, subject to the will of a Major General, and to be ruled by tyros and neophytes in government; —the standard of loyalty being the color of the skin, or an acknowledged membership in the Union League.”

(The Conditions That Led to the Ku Klux Klans, Mrs. T.J. Jarvis. North Carolina Booklet, May, 1901, No. 1, pp 13-14) (Reconstruction in North Carolina, J.G. Hamilton, Books for Libraries Press, 1971, pp. 337)

Slavers and Opium Clippers

Frederick Douglass was employed in two Baltimore shipyards, Gardner’s and Prices, for at least eight months, a city with a large population of free black and one of every six black men holding a skilled occupation.

Slavers and Opium Clippers

“Unknown to Frederick Douglas working at Price’s [Baltimore], shipyard, he helped complete the slavers Delorez, Teayer, and Eagle in 1836 and 1837. In the spring of 1838, as a young journeyman, he worked on the slaver Laura at the nearby Butler & Lamdon yard.

Continued foreign orders for slavers helped the Gardners’ business survive the financial panic of 1837. In July 1838, William Gardner launched the 465-ton Venus while Frederick Douglass likely watched this from Price’s shipyard, only three hundred yards away.

The Venus first sailed for Africa where here exploits as a slaver would bring international recognition to the Gardners – and, ultimately, an order for two opium clippers from John and George Dixwell of Augustine Heard & Company. The latter became the third largest firm in China in the mid-nineteenth century, while importing large quantities of opium to the United States.

The 140-ton schooner Frolic was laid down at Gardner’s yard in April 1844 and dispatched to the Far East on September 1st for Malwa opium runs between Bombay and Canton.”

(The Voyage of the Frolic. New England Merchants and the Opium Trade. Thomas N. Layton. Stanford University Press. 1997, pp. 49-51)

 

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

Jim Fisk’s father, known as “Pop,” was pure Yankee descended from English forbears, an itinerant peddler who left home with a loaded wagon on Mondays to return at week’s end with diminished cargo but thicker wallet. On one peddling trip, he ran out of shawls and had an excess of small, flowered tablecloths, he assured housewives that the tablecloths were the latest Boston style in shawls and sold them all.”

Below, Fisk’s son Jim followed in his father’s footsteps, doing what it took to turn a profit. Once war came, he never “felt any desire to shoulder a musket and help save the Union,” leaving the war to be fought by enthusiastic volunteers and reluctant draftees, and himself more like those who bought their way out.

During the war Jim hired adventurous actress Lottie Hough to wheedle passes through Union lines and her success so complete that she retired postwar with an immense fortune. As Grant closed in on Richmond and sensing the Confederacy’s inevitable demise, he and a small clique sent an agent to London to buy Confederate bonds short to all buyers. The agent arrived two days before news of Lee’s surrender reached England, after making a financial killing for his employers.

The Jordan Marsh enterprise below was founded at Boston in 1841 by Eben Dyer Jordan and Benjamin L. Marsh.

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

“Unlike most Bostonians, Fisk sensed that the South would not swallow Lincoln, that a war was coming. In the merits of the North-South quarrel he took little interest, but it struck him that whatever they were fighting about would open vast new merchandising opportunities. When Sumter fell and the war did come, he went to Washington to see if the government might be interested in purchasing textiles.

No one entertained with the rollicking bonhomie of James Fisk, Jr., one of the first of the war profiteers. Fisk’s company had several thousand blankets of an unappetizing color and somewhat mildewed. Retailers spurned them but Uncle Sam snapped them up.

In 1862, with cotton rotting in Southern warehouses and hard to come by in the North even at two dollars a pound, he set about to remedy the imbalance. While getting cotton out of the South involved trading with the enemy, violating the blockade, smuggling and possibly other illegalities, he justified on the ground of patriotism, reasoning that it was ridiculous that soldiers should be deprived of essential clothing – and merchants of profit – because of a mere technicality. The details of this bootleg operation, with its essential stratagems and bribes, remain dim, for he said little about it after the war.

Fisk never lacked courage if there was money in it, made several buying trips into the Dixie No Man’s Land . . . sending cotton north by the boatload, cargoes of fabulous value that kept the spindles whirring at Jordan Marsh, now the nation’s biggest enterprise of its kind. One of his biographers solemnly avers that his purchases of contraband cotton reached peaks as high as $800,000 a day.”

(Jim Fisk: The Career of an Unstoppable Rascal. W.A. Swanberg. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959, pp. 17-19

Africa’s Established Order

The Muslim Arab conquest of north Africa from the seventh century onward began the regular trans-Saharan trade in black slaves. To Africans and Arabs at the end of the 18th century, European travelers were “the devil’s children” and “enemies of the Prophet,” meddlesome interlopers who, with their idle talk of abolishing the slave trade and supplanting Arab caravans with British shipping, challenged the establish order.

Africa’s Established Order

“In Sierra Leone . . . the activities of the expatriate whites – whether traders, officials or army officers – were restricted to villages easily accessible from the ocean, if not to the narrow confines of the trading beaches where they could escape to their ships or forts at night to avoid the pestilential diseases that were thought to come with the setting sun.

This isolation by the sea was also the result of the slave trade, the middlemen of which had seen to it that their European customers were denied access to the hinterlands, the source of their own supply of new slaves. Though officially abolished, the “traffick” continued.

As [British Lt. Alexander] Laing was to learn, the indigenous peoples of Africa were loath to let the white men know too much about the geography and riches of their interior lands for all sorts of commercial and political reasons. Arab traders too, had a vested interest in keeping Europeans out. They helped sow distrust by relating stories of the British colonization of India, tales not lost on local African kings.

On March 18, 1819, [allowed Laing to] head south with Mohammed El Mukni who was soon to leave on a slave-raiding caravan made up of two hundred men and as many camels. The caravan succeeded in enslaving some 1200 tribesmen, many of them women and children, who were shepherded painfully across the hilly wastes. Mounted overseers battered this mass of wretched humanity with whips and sticks; sick slaves were thrown by the side of the road and left to die.

The tracks they took were lined with human skeletons, often near dried wells. The Meghara Arabs roared with laughter at the concern the white explorers showed over these exposed human remains. “These creatures were only blacks,” they said, adding “Nam boo!” (Damn their feathers!).” They played horrific games with the cadavers, using skulls as footballs and making comments on the gender of the scrags.

This was the infamous slaving route over which tens of thousands of black Africans, taken from their homes in the Sudan, were forced to march to slavery in Tripoli. It was only too clear that multitudes had not made it. One English observer recalled how surprised he had been to see a happy slave-gang on first entry into Murzuk. The reason for their joy was now clear – they were alive. That they would soon be off to be fattened for the markets of Tripoli was a minor worry.”

(The Race for Timbuktu; In Search of Africa’s City of Gold. Frank T. Kryza. HarperCollins, 2006, pp. xxi; 54; 78; 99)

 

Shapers of Opinion

Those around Lincoln in mid-1864 were unsure of his reelection as emancipation was far from being popular, Grant’s casualty lists were endless and heartbreaking, and the draft was universally hated. Even Lincoln believed he would be replaced. To the rescue came   insiders like Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, the former editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Dana wrote: “All the power and influence of the War Department was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln.” Some 200,000 soldiers were furloughed to go home and vote, as well as patrol the polls to ensure Republican ballots were being cast. (Prince of Carpetbaggers, Jonathan Daniels. JB Lippincott Co., 1958, p. 105)

Shapers of Opinion

“Dana’s Chicago Republican, as the name implied, was strictly partisan, as was nearly every other contemporary newspaper. If the truth be told, editors of that era generally saw their job as more of shaping of opinion than the providing of news. And if they had to stretch the truth to get results? Well, that came with the territory.

From the hour I first occupied the position of editor to the present time,” a retiring journalist confessed, I have been solicited to lie on every given subject, and can’t remember ever having told a wholesome truth without diminishing the subscription list or making an enemy . . . Having a thorough contempt for myself, I retire in order to recruit my moral constitution.”

Except for subscribers to large metropolitan dailies, Americans interested in politics got their news from the partisan press and that press depended on party coffers and official funding. Editors acquired tremendous power, and far too often politicians awarded contracts and patronage because of that power. They also listened if an editor recommended someone for office, especially if that someone was the editor himself.”

(The General and the Journalists: Grant, Greeley and Dana. Harry Maihafer. Brassey’s Inc., 1998, p. 87; 222)

 

Grant’s Reputation

Ulysses Grant’s well-known heavy drinking led to his resignation in 1854 after a superior officer found him intoxicated while on duty out West. Ironically, Grant’s resignation was approved by then-Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.

Grant’s Reputation

Grant’s chief of staff, John Rawlins, was a self-appointed guardian of Grant’s reputation and morals. In Dana’s words, Rawlins watched over Grant “day and night, and whenever he commits the folly of tasting liquor hastens to remind him that the beginning of the war he gave him [Rawlins] his word of honor not to touch a drop as long as it lasted.”

On June 6 [1863], Rawlins handed Grant a note that began: “The great solicitude which I feel for the safety of this army leads me to mention, what I had hoped never again to do, the subject of your drinking.” Rawlins then said he might possibly be “doing you an injustice by unfounded suspicion.” Still, he had heard that the general recently had a glass of wine at Sherman’s headquarters, and he had seen a box of wine in Grant’s tent; the wine was supposedly being saved to celebrate the capture of Vicksburg.

And now, Rawlins wrote, “I find you where the wine bottle has just been emptied, in company with those who drink and urge you to do likewise . . . If my suspicions are unfounded, let my friendship for you and my zeal for my country be my excuse for this letter.”

According to reporter Sylvanus Cadwallader, Grant went on a fearful binge during [a visit up the Yazoo River to Satartia], riding wildly cross-country while roaring drunk, falling off his horse, and finally being led to safety [and saved from disgrace] by Cadwallader, the hero of the tale. Charles A. Dana, aide to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, was also with the group.

Despite [later Grant-defenders dismissing the story], Grant had one or more drinks the evening before. If he continued drinking, and heavily, Dana’s word “sick” might have been a euphemism for “intoxicated.” However, Dana’s reports to [Stanton] said nothing about [Grant’s] drinking. If they had, it could have been the end of Grant’s career; this silence – if indeed silence was necessary – was yet another way in which Dana rescued that career.

(The General and the Journalists: Grant, Greeley and Dana. Harry Maihafer. Brassey’s Inc., 1998, pp. 161-163)

British Responsibility

Edmund Burke declared in the House of Commons that one of causes of the American Revolution was Britain’s inhuman traffic in Negro slaves, and that Southern families were simply at the real “mercy of the slaves and in need of protection from their uprising.” This materialized as thousands of slaves, incited by the proclamations of royal governors, flew to English protectors to be armed against the colonists.

Britain’s Responsibility

“On the eve of the Revolution we find firmly entrenched at the American South because British greed was supplemented by a few persistent and bold pro-slavery leaders who were able to induce the many of opposite views to grant their demands for the sake of harmony and peace. The sentiment of the colonists can be seen in the following second Article of the Continental Association, which was adopted and signed by all the members of Congress on the 20th of October 1774:

That we will neither import nor purchase any slave imported after the first day of December next; after which we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.

All the Southern colonies, as far as was possible, gave approval to the Articles of Association, which were no doubt inspired to a large degree by Mr. Jefferson in his instructions to the first delegation from Virginia. These were published in pamphlet form under the title of A Summary View of the Rights of British America. The following passage will indicate that feeling toward the mother country was as intense on the slavery question as on measures of taxation:

For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, His Majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object is the great object of desire in those colonies, where it was, unhappily introduced in their infant state. Yet our repeated attempts to affect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by His Majesty’s negative; thus, preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting efforts of the American States, and to the rights of human nature, deeply wounded by this practice.

(The Republican Party, The History of its Fifty Years’ Existence. Francis Curtis, G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1904, pp. 6-7)