Circa1865

Greatly concerned in the mid-1700s over their growing African populations, both Virginia and North Carolina petitioned the British Crown to end its slave trade. This was denied while New England slave ships continued their importations of Africans as well.

Southern Aristocracy?

“That subordination of the black race which was called slavery gave rise to a certain development of society, not at all English, however, bore some features of an aristocracy. But this was by no means so general as might be inferred from much seen lately in print about the subject of the “slave oligarchy” of the South. It was by no means the controlling force. In South Carolina alone, by her peculiar Constitution, could it be correctly said that the slaveholders as a class held the political power.

The anti-slave element was always strong in Virginia; but for external agitation, I have no doubt slavery would have been abolished there long ago, or have been greatly modified. The same is true of North Carolina.

Throughout the South no feeling was more general, none stronger with the voting majority, than a deep-seated detestation of the very name “Aristocracy.” I do not think there was a county in Georgia where a man could have been elected to the State Legislature, or to any other office, upon the principles of an aristocracy, or if he were ever known to favor such a doctrine.

Eight-tenths of the people of Georgia, I believe, were thorough Jeffersonian Republicans and would have been as thorough abolitionists as Jefferson if they could have seen what better they could do with the colored people than they were doing.

They had a hard problem to solve, and the external agitation kept down internal inquiry and discussion as to whether there was any proper and safe solution [to the slaves among them].”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pg. 422)

The following is an introductory paragraph from the June 2021 Chronicles magazine article by Roger D. McGrath identifying the source of many misunderstood events in history. Too often the culprit is poorly researched government or media-generated reports – or simply propaganda – that soon become “history.” This is followed by teachers who pass this on to their students.

“It’s What People Believe Happened That Counts”

“Arguing with my liberal high school teacher did not endear me to him. It got worse when a day or two after one of these class disagreements I brought to class material demonstrating the teacher had been feeding us a false narrative. The teacher was not doing so intentionally but simply out of ignorance, having accepted a narrative generated by leftists in academe.

However, it soon became evident to me that my liberal teachers were quick to accept a leftist narrative not only because it came from university professors – the putative intelligentsia – but because it made America look bad.

The problem worsened in college. Nonetheless, in those days there still existed a substantial minority of conservative professors. I recall discussing with a conservative history professor a topic of great interest to me. He told me I was right about a particular sequence of events, but then added, “Remember, it is not what actually happened that matters – it’s what people believe happened that counts.”

(The Deliberate Infection Myth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Roger D. McGrath. Chronicles Magazine, June 2021, pp. 44-45)

The Other Side of the Story

“As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian of a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as a matter course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.”

(Excerpt, Prefatory Note by James Ford Rhodes: The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences, Hilary Herbert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, pg. vii – viii.)

It became clear in the postwar that both Grant and Lincoln were responsible for the excessive mortality in the South’s prison camps, especially Camp Sumter – aka-Andersonville. But northern politicians still “waved the bloody shirt” in 1876 with James Blaine of Maine claiming Jefferson Davis “was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.” Benjamin Hill of Georgia replied to him: “If nine percent of the [northern] men in Southern prisons were starved to death by Mr. Jefferson Davis, who tortured to death the twelve percent of the Southern men in Northern prisons?”

Prior to his release from postwar captivity, former Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was asked himself about the conditions at Camp Sumter, also known as the Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

The Horrors of Andersonville

“Regarding treatment of prisoners at Andersonville and other places, which was brought up, I said that the matter had caused me deep mortification and pain. From all I had heard, the sufferings of prisoners were terrible. I had no idea, however, that these sufferings were by design or system on the part of Mr. Davis and other authorities at Richmond. Something akin to what might be styled indifference or neglect toward our own soldiers on the wounded and sick lists I have witnessed with distress. To this subject I have given a great deal of attention.

I had never seen in Mr. Davis any disposition to be vindictive toward prisoners of war. I had no idea that there was any settled policy of cruelty on his part to prisoners.

In all my conversations with him on the subject of prisoners, he put the blame of non-exchange on the authorities at Washington: he always expressed earnest desire to send home all we held upon getting in exchange our men equally suffering in northern prisons. Our prisoners, it was said, were treated as well as they could be under the circumstances; those at Andersonville were crowded into such a miserable pen because we had no other place in which to secure them. They had the same rations as our soldiers, who, to my own knowledge, suffered greatly themselves from food shortages, not only in our hospitals, but also in the field.

The advice I had given was to release all our prisoners on parole of honor, whether the authorities at Washington exchanged theirs or not. I had advised such a course as one of humanity and good policy.

Against it was urged that if we were to release all our prisoners, our men would be held and treated not as prisoners of war but as traitors and would be tried and executed as such; our authorities must hold northern soldiers as hostages for ours.  And I could not, after looking over the whole matter, come to any other conclusion than that some blame rested on the authorities at Washington.

War is at best a savage business; it never had been and never would, perhaps, be waged without atrocities on all sides. Hence, my earnest desire during the late conflict to bring about pacification by peaceful negotiations at the earliest possible moment.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 444-446)

Below, Alexander Stephens explains the original intent of citizenship of the United States being first State citizenship. Stephens wrote the following from a Fort Warren jail cell after his arrest in 1865 for an unknown crime.

Citizenship as Intended

“Eight weeks today [July 6, 1865] I have been a prisoner; six weeks in this place; all without the slightest intimation of the cause. Seized by an armed force, sent here by an armed force, kept in close confinement, guarded by an armed force, deprived of all means of appealing to judicial power for redress; and yet Eagle-orators and reverend rhetoricians scream and shout about the glorious freedom we Americans enjoy.

PM – [A newspaper] article on naturalization in the cyclopedia attracted my attention. It is strange what errors have crept into vogue and pass without scrutiny or question, especially on naturalization and its sequence, citizenship of the United States. The subject is treated as if Congress were empowered by the Constitution to confer upon aliens’ citizenship of the United States distinct from citizenship of particular States and Territories.

The truth is, Congress has no power to naturalize or to confer citizenship of the United States. Its only power is to establish a uniform rule to be pursued by the respective States and Territories on admitting aliens to their own citizenship.

Before the Constitution was adopted, each State possessed the right as an Independent Sovereign Power to admit to citizenship whom she pleased, and on such terms as she pleased. All that the States did on this point in accepting the Constitution was to delegate to Congress the power to establish a uniform rule so that an alien might not be permitted to become a citizen of one State on different terms from what might be required in another; especially, as in one part of the Constitution it is stipulated that the citizens of each State shall be entitled in all the rest to the rights and privileges of their citizens.

But no clause of the Constitution provides for or contemplates citizenship of the United States as distinct from citizenship of some particular State or Territory. When any person is a citizen of one of the States united, he thereby, and thereby only, becomes and can be considered a citizen of the United States.

Errors in the public mind on this question are radical and fundamental and have the same source as many others equally striking.

I was first struck with these on the annexation of Texas. How could her representatives, it was asked, take their seats in Congress, not having been citizens of the United States for the term of years required by the Constitution? The answer, upon the true principles of the Constitution and the only citizenship it contemplates, was plain: members and senators could not present themselves until the State was itself one of the United States; then, whoever might present himself as a member, having been seven years a citizen of Texas, would, in the terms and meaning of the Constitution, have been seven years a citizen of the United States, so constituted.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 312-313)

Gen. Henry Halleck told his invasion forces in 1861 that Southerners “have been warned that we come to oppress and plunder. By our acts we will undeceive them.”

In November 1861, Gen. John Dix prepared his invasion of Virginia’s eastern shore and spoke of “giving [Virginians] them the strongest assurances of kind treatment and protection . . . they may be gained over without bloodshed.” Dix added that Virginians “have got it in their heads that we want to steal and emancipate their Negroes.” Despite these pronouncements of deliverance from despotic “rebel” rule, the reality told a different story.

A colonel of the 20^th NY Volunteers at the Outer Banks of North Carolina wrote his commanding officer: “I regret to be compelled to state that the conduct of the men and some officers of my command has been that of vandals.” The descent into total war had begun.

Not a War of Oppression

“Few northerners sought the overthrow of slavery, for although most considered the institution morally corrupting and economically stifling and wanted to halt its spread, they deemed blacks unfit for freedom in a republic.

The northern-dominated U.S. Congress of July 1861 affirmed the narrow goals of the Crittenden Resolution, which it passed with hardy a dissenting vote. It declared “that this war was waged, on our part, in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of these States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union, . . . as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.”

These last twelve words reflected a fear that a prolonged war might rage out of control, burst its bonds and devour the very ideals and institutions it was meant to preserve. Lincoln himself worried that an extended conflict would “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”

(When the Yankees Came: Conflict & Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865. Stephen V. Ashe. UNC Press, 1995, pp. 25-27)

The State of Tennessee established Fort Pillow in 1861 on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River to prevent the passage of northern warships. The Confederate States government later fortified it, but in early 1864 abandoned it to northern troops.

Fort Pillow’s So-Called “Massacre”

“Two ridges gave Confederate sharpshooters complete command of the fort’s interior, and General Forrest decided to send up a formal demand for surrender. The enemy commanding officer was notified that he was surrounded, and that, “if the demand was acceded to, the gallantry of the defenses already made would entitle all its garrison to be treated as prisoners of war.

An answer, after considerable delay, was brought up from the fort, written in pencil on a soiled scrap of paper, without an envelope. It read: “Your demand does not produce the desired effect.” General Forrest read it and hastily exclaimed: “This will not do, send it back and say to Major Booth that I must have an answer in plain English – yes or no.”

Shortly the messenger returned with “no.” Forrest immediately planned to make the assault. The bugle sounded the “charge,” and the Confederates, with a rush, cleared the parapet and swept with their fire every face of the work. General Forrest’s men drove the enemy toward the river, leaving their flags flying, but they turned and fired as they ran.

Now thoroughly panic-stricken, many of the enemy threw themselves into the river and were drowned; others, with arms in their hands, endeavored to make good their escape in different directions but were met by flanking parties of the Confederates and either killed or captured. Fortunately, the firing instantly ceased after General Forrest rode into the fort and cut down the garrison flag.

On the Confederate side, 14 officers and men were killed and 86 wounded. Under a flag of truce, an enemy steamer came to the landing place as Forrest allowed parties to come ashore to look after their dead and wounded, to bury the former and remove the latter to the transport. Of the enemy wounded, there were 61: 34 whites and 27 colored men, according to the reports of the Federal surgeon at the Mound City, Illinois hospital.

There were taken as prisoners of war, 7 officers and 219 enlisted men – 56 of whom were colored and 163 white men without wounds, which, with those wounded, make an aggregate of those who survived, exclusive of those who may have escaped, some 300 souls, or fully 55 percent of the entire garrison. Those who survived unhurt constituted forty percent.

This was the so-called massacre of Fort Pillow.”

(Jefferson Davis: A Memoir by His Wife, Volume II. Varina Davis. Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America. 1990 (originally published 1890), pp. 484-485)

The author below writes that “Most Puritans sought a homogenous society that made any kind of stranger generally unwelcome,” and “their efforts to expunge untrustworthy members with white skin were legendary.” Those with white complexions from different cultures posed a “complicated dilemma” for Puritans, but the vast gulf between their own and Indian and African cultures made the latter unwelcome except as slaves.

Puritan Slaveholders

“Slavery began in New England during the first years of settlement in Massachusetts, and thus, the Puritans learned how to be slaveowners immediately on arrival. As white New Englanders established their new settlements, they enslaved Indian populations both to control them and draw upon them for labor. Although John Winthrop did not immediately see Indians as slaves, it dawned upon him that they could be used as such.

Winthrop recorded requests for Indian slaves both locally and in Bermuda. Wars with the Narragansett and Pequot tribes garnered large numbers of slaves, and the trading of Indian slaves abroad brought African slaves to Massachusetts shores. In 1645, Emmanuel Downing, Winthrop’s brother-in-law and a barrister, welcomed a trade of Pequot slaves for African slaves.

However, the enslavement of Indians had a different tenor than the enslavement of Africans. The indigenous slaves represented an enemy, a conquered people, and a great threat to Puritan society. African slaves represented a trade transaction, laborers without strings attached. Moreover, Indians slaves were part of peace negotiations and control of the region. They served as collateral with which to negotiate with local Indian leaders. Further, Puritan colonists could expel troublesome Indians out of the colony or simply control them as slave property.”

(Tyrannicide. Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts and South Carolina. Emily Blanck. UGA Press, 2014. p. 12-13)

The trade in African slaves long-predated Britain’s American colonies, as it was essential for labor-intensive plantations. By 1705, New England’s own transatlantic slave trade began surpassing England’s. At the time of the Revolution, cotton production was limited to a small scale, but in 1793, Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney’s cotton gin greatly increased production and the demand for more African slaves. By the early 1800s, Massachusetts textile mills competed with England’s own industry – both were deeply responsible for the perpetuation of slavery in America. Even as late as 1860, New York businessmen and Portuguese slave merchants were bribing New York port authorities to allow ships bound for Cuba for outfitting as slavers, which then sailed for Africa to load slaves, thence to Cuba and Brazil to work the sugar cane fields.

The African Slave Market

“. . . in the high Middle Ages numerous Sudanese and Guinean slaves were brought to the African shore of the Mediterranean by [Muslim] trans-Saharan caravans and then sold to Christian merchants who marketed them in eastern Spain, southern France, and Italy.

During the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese re-routed a great part of this trade, as they re-routed much of the trans-Sahara gold trade at the same time. In both instances, from an overland trade with Muslim and Italian intermediaries, they developed a direct maritime trade with West Africa for gold and slaves, exactly as they did in the following century with the spices from the East Indies.”

(The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays. Charles Verlinden, ed., Cornell University Press. 1970. C.R. Boxer review excerpt, The American Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 1, February 1972, 118)

Both Thomas Jefferson and John Madison feared the Adam’s administration’s “Alien and Sedition Acts” and agreed that these should be attacked on the grounds of their unconstitutionality. A stern response should emanate from State legislatures, and those opposing the “Acts” had to do so anonymously to avoid arrest. To Jefferson especially, it was federal power that represented a clear and present danger as would be the case some 63 years later.

States Above Federal Authority  

“John Breckinridge, who would later become Thomas Jefferson’s Attorney General, authored resolutions in 1798 which opened with ‘the American States were not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their government.’ And there was nothing startling about at that time in his reference to the Constitution as a compact between States, for this view of it was widely held.

Jefferson, remaining in the background, did not say, as Calhoun did later, that sovereignty was indivisible and remained with the States. The abstract question of sovereignty probably did not greatly interest him. He took the position which Madison well-described a few months later: “The authority of constitutions over governments, and of the sovereignty of the people over constitutions, are truths which are at all times necessary to be kept in mind, and at no time, perhaps, more necessary than the present.” At this moment Jefferson would not have used the word “perhaps” . . . with him the essential truth was the sovereignty of the people, and the reality as he saw it was that the people lived in the several States and could express themselves more readily through State action.

Regarding constitutions as shields against arbitrary power, he was disposed to interpret all of them strictly. In construing the federal constitution strictly, however, he was pursuing no solitary course: he was quite in line with the Republican spokesmen in Congress.”

(Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty; Volume III. Dumas Malone. Little, Brown and Company, 1962, pp. 402-403)