Circa1865

The thick chaparral on the banks of the Rio Grande provided cover for cross-border raids into Texas during the 1850s. The Juan Cortina raid on Brownsville in late September, 1859 was a last straw for Sam Houston – jailed prisoners were freed, the jailor murdered, and Cortina threatened to burn the town while issuing a proclamation of war against Americans. He additionally raised the Mexican flag and gathered recruits from the local Mexican population.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Texas Border Crisis of 1858

“The Cortina crisis almost provoked a major invasion of Mexico by Governor Sam Houston of Texas. On February 18, 1858, Houston advocated to the United States Senate that the United States establish a protectorate because of Mexican anarchy, but his proposal was laid on the table. Houston then warned that he might take individual action if the United States continued to refuse to forcibly involve itself.

When he delivered his inaugural address as governor of Texas in the midst of the Cortina panic, he reiterated his threat. Paternalistically describing Mexicans as “mild, pastoral and gentle people” terrorized by “demagogues and lawless chieftains,” he said that if federal authorities could not correct the situation, he might have to exercise his “fullest powers.”

Houston nearly carried out his threat in 1860. Besieged by complaints over Mexican infringements of the border, Houston wrote to the War Department and sent emissaries . . . to get more troops on the Rio Grande or financial support for a Texas Ranger regiment to police the border. Simultaneously, he undertook preparations for an invasion of Mexico in the event that federal support was not forthcoming.

Houston even contacted Colonel Robert E. Lee, temporary U.S. Army commander of the Department of Texas at San Antonio, for the purpose of engaging him in a leadership role in the filibustering expedition. But Lee declined; he would not involve himself in any such enterprise without federal authorization.

[Houston] wanted to get the English bondholders of the Mexican debt to finance the enterprise, and . . . he planned to employ Texas Rangers mustered to fight Indians, Indian guides, and perhaps the Indians themselves for a grand move into Mexico. It is certain that had Houston made a move, Texas citizens would have rallied to his banner . . . and Texans were anxious to get another chance to fight their old foes.”

(The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861, Robert E. May, LSU Press, 1973, excerpts pp. 144-146)

The Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, was a radical departure from previous immigration policies which restricted African and Asian immigration while favoring those coming from northern and western Europeans. Promoted by civil rights activists, as well as Lyndon Johnson and Ted Kennedy, proponents “argued that the new policies would not significantly influence American culture.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

One Hundred Years After 1865

“Since 1965, farsighted critics with an understanding of history and human nature have warned that the new immigration would lead, and is leading, to the balkanization of the United States of America. Democrats and liberals, as well as radicals, have steadfastly denied the likelihood, even the possibility, of such a thing; whoever argues otherwise, they say, is a racist and xenophobe.

Liberals persist in maintaining this fantasy, whose falsity is demonstrated by liberalism itself in its new guise of identity politics, whose rise coincides exactly with the arrival of scores of millions of nonwhite, non-Christian, and non-Western peoples and whose program is ideally fixed to the phenomenon, as well as a reflection of it.

In 1861, the United States was a house divided (though not nearly so widely as she is thought to have been). In 2018, she is a house shattered and tottering.

As for democracy, only the politicians profess to believe that the US is any such thing anymore. The majority of Americans are weary of war, weary of financial and human sacrifice, weary of unsavory allies, weary of unpleasantly foreign, unsuitable, and unassimilable hordes arriving from uncivilized places to transform their country into a congeries of crowded International Houses subsidized at their expense.”

(One Nation Divided, Chilton Williamson, Jr., Chronicles, June 2018, excerpts pp. 9-10)

Samuel Morse (1791-1872) was an inventor born in Massachusetts and graduated from Yale in 1810. His father was a Puritan idealist, Calvinist preacher and supporter of the aristocratic Federalist Party. Though descended from foreign immigrants, especially those who decimated and enslaved the Pequot tribe of New England, Morse the younger developed a distaste for foreign immigrants.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Nativists in New York City

“[Nativists in the mid-1830s appealed] to anti-Catholic prejudices through lurid tales of illicit affairs among the clergy. Subscribers to local journals could read the serialized accounts of brothels and nunneries . . . [the New York Sun] fed its readers new accounts by a Rosamond Culbertson describing what she alleged to be the licentious practices of certain Roman Catholic clergy in safely distant Cuba.

Nativists and their sympathizers continued to play upon the prejudices of the populace in preparation for the election to be held in April 1836. Finding a suitable candidate [to carry the Nativist Party banner for mayor of New York City] proved difficult.

Finally, during the first week of April Samuel F. B. Morse was selected, thus ending the difficult search. During a sojourn in Europe (1829-1832) the artist-inventor developed an ardent dislike of foreigners, particularly Roman Catholics, and had an active fear of Jesuits and the Papacy.

As early as 1834 he had expressed these views vociferously in the New York Observer, a Protestant newspaper, and in his correspondence.

Despite his Nativist views, Morse was an ardent Jacksonian. He described his political views as “Democratic principles of the Jeffersonian school, as they stand opposed to aristocracy in all its shapes, ruinous monopolies, to a union of church and state.”

He explained his identification with the Nativists as resulting from a fear that these ideals were endangered by riots and lawlessness instigated by “priest-controlled machines.”

(Native Democratic Association in New York City, Leo Hershkowitz, New York Historical Quarterly, Volume XLVI, Number 1, January 1962, excerpts pp. 56-58)

The “Nativist” movement of the 1830s in New York City could be traced back to the then-defunct Federalists of John Adams, and their old alien laws of “persecution and intolerance” used to gain political advantage. Not to be outdone in the arena of political advantage, the Tammany Machine of New York City went to work attracting immigrants to their fold to attain political advantage. In this manner, and as foreigners unfamiliar with America’s political foundation and traditions increased in the North and West, the American South became the last bastion of the Founders’ republic with an increasingly unrecognizable neighbor to the north.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Anti-Immigrant Hate, Violence and White Supremacy in New York City

“Opposition to the immigrant has often played a part in the American political and social scene. This became especially evident in New York City during the decade of the 1830s when ever-larger numbers of aliens made their first contacts with the indigenous population.

The rapid increase in immigration was met by hatred, even violence, against foreigners, then predominantly Irish, on the part of various segments of the urban population. Whether or not sharing in this antipathy, politicians were forced, especially at election time, to weigh the advantages and disadvantages to their party of pro- or anti- immigration policies.

Thus, regardless of conservative distaste for the foreigner, the newly-organized Whig Party during the municipal election of April 1834 (the first time New Yorkers were privileged to choose their mayor by direct vote since 1690) attempted to attract the immigrant voter away from his already traditional Democratic allegiance.

Failure to achieve this end together with distrust of Irish Catholicism resulted in the formation in New York City of the short-lived but influential Native American Democratic Association of 1835-1836 . . . and a forerunner of the nativist parties of the 1840s and 1850s.

Violence and rioting had marked the election proceedings. For three days of the election Whig merchants closed their shops to march through the city. During one of these parades prolonged fighting broke out between Whigs and Irish Democrats. Frightened and angry, Whigs scored “Irishmen of the lowest class” for creating the disturbances. The Whigs . . . charged that the Irish made a mockery of peace and order and demanded a registration law that would keep foreigners governed by “Lords and Priests” from voting at all.

Late in June, 1835, meeting in their wards, “Native Americans” denounced popery, foreigners in office, and a dangerous outpouring of European felons onto American shores. Foreigners, they shouted, like “Goths and Vandals, pillage the United States.”

On Sunday, June 21, 1835, fighting between native Americans and Irish began within the squalid Five Points section and quickly spread to other areas of the city.

“White men conquered the land, [editor Mordecai Noah of the Star newspaper] wrote, and “the Native Americans must control the country.”

(The Native American Democratic Association in New York City, 1835-1836, Leo Hershkowitz, New York Historical Society Quarterly, Volume XLVI, Number 1, January 1962, excerpts pp. 41-42; 44-45; 48-49;52)

On the subject of naturalization of citizens, Congress derives its limited authority through Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution: “To establish [a] uniform rule of Naturalization . . .” and there was no intention to create a separate citizenry “of the United States.” The individual States determine who will become a citizen, and who is entitled to vote. Alexander H. Stephens expounds on this below.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Radical Errors of the Public Mind

“P.M. – The 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 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 any 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.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, His Diary, Myrta Lockett Avary, LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), excerpts pp. 312-313)

Northern politicians in Congress regularly railed at postwar Southern elections whenever corrupt Republican-endorsed carpetbaggers were defeated, claiming voter suppression. The prewar political machines in Northern cities were notorious for gross election frauds and herding unlettered immigrants to the polls.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Governing Voting Cattle in New York

“During the long years of drought, while the party of Lincoln “battened at the public crib,” vital fragments of the opposition [Democratic] party, much diminished and discredited in its national pretensions, had survived, nay, flourished — in the citadels of certain municipal machines. Thus the practiced demagogues of Tammany Hall retained for generations their grip over the polyglot proletarian mass of New York City.

A great proportion of the immigrant arrivals in the land of milk, honey, and gilded pavements clung to life in New York’s frightful slums, comprising one of the most ignorant, violent, lumpen proletariats in the modern world. For this rabble, traditionally, the rulers of the city’s dominant political organization provided bread and even circuses in the form of annual clambakes and excursions.

Tammany agents, meeting their poor Irish and foreign brothers at the dock, gave them advice and aid, food baskets, beer, and even work; in return the new arrivals permitted themselves to be inducted—sometimes at the rate of 1000 a day — as citizens and “voting cattle” into the Democratic party.

Like their predecessors, [Boss] Tweed and his partners, Sweeny and Connally, had long levied upon the numerous brothels, saloons, gambling dens, and criminal associations, through the city police and the courts. Commanding the preponderance of voters who ruled at the polls, they earned tolerant support of the leaders of society, business and professional life who also must dwell with some security in their city.

By 1870, the depredations of the [Tammany] ring went far beyond a “necessary evil”; they were no longer an “instrument” for governing voting cattle, but an immense piratical monopoly.

By the operation of public-works schemes, they plundered $1,000,000 a month from the city treasury, earning more in a year than Mr. Vanderbilt; they had added some $50,000,000 to the public debt, controlled banks and embarked with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk upon perilous, unsocial schemes to corner railroads and the money market, as in the Black Friday affair of 1869.

The masses of the people had been highly indifferent to reports of the Tweed Ring spoliations; indeed they were traditionally friendly to the Tammany leaders and heartily prejudiced against “reformers.” Tweed himself held that the majority of his supporters could not read what was said of him, but he ascribed his disasters to [political cartoonist] Tom Nast’s pictures, which required no reading.

Commenting upon the overthrow of Tweed and the appearance of a reform movement in a letter to Samuel Tilden, [Horatio] Seymour says with exquisite justice and wit: “Our people want men in office who will not steal, but who will not interfere with those who do.”

(The Politico’s, 1865-1896: The Spoilsmen in Power, Matthew Josephson, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938, excerpts pp. 151-153)

By 1860, the immigrant floods which spread westward in the 1840s and 1850s had changed the United States into two distinct cultures and political views. The South maintained its ties to the 1776 generation and its republican political character; the North had become a conglomerate of immigrant ethnic groups controlled by machine politicians eager for power and beholden to industrialists eager for cheap labor. Immigrant voters, wholly unfamiliar with American political concepts and traditions, were easily led by demagogues and money.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Northern Prosperity at the South’s Expense

“The festering corruptions of the post-war period sprang up in every part of America and in almost every department of national life. Other loose and scandalous times – in [James] Buchanan’s day, in [Mark] Hanna’s, in [Warren] Harding’s – have been repellent enough; but the Grant era stands unique in the comprehensiveness of its rascality.

The cities, half of which had their counterparts in [New York’s Boss] Tweed; the legislatures, with their rings, lobbyists and bribe-takers; the South, prey of unscrupulous Carpetbaggers and Scalawags; the West, sacked by railway and mining corporations; Congress with its Credit Moblier’ [scandal], its salary-grab, its tools pf predatory business; the executive departments, honeycombed with thievery; private finance and trade, with greedy figures like Jay Cooke and Collis P. Huntington honored and typical – everywhere the scene was the same. Why?

The war explained much: its terrible strain upon all Ten Commandments; the moral exhaustion it produced; the waste and jobbery which it bred; its creation of vast new Federal responsibilities. Washington became an irresistible lodestone for crooked men.

The fecund war contracts, the tariffs, the subsidies, and [enlistment] bounties, huge appropriations for speculators and [pension] claim-agents, the opportunities for theft in both collecting and spending the swollen Federal revenues, drew them as honey draws flies.

The South was ruined, and the fine principles and traditions of its aristocracy were engulfed. The industrial revolution in the North wrought the roughest, most aggressive business elements to the front. As the West was settled with amazing rapidity, a more extensive and influential frontier than ever before gave manners a cruder cast.

Cities were filling up with immigrant communities, subservient to machine politicians. Everywhere tested standards, restraints of public opinion, the cake of custom, were broken down. Co0nditions of the day produced a new and flashier political leadership. They brought demagogues and pushing brigadiers into office; generals like Ben Butler and “Black Jack” Logan, vote getters like Oliver P. Morton and Zach Chandler, speculators like Oakes Ames.

But one fact must be emphasized. Contemporaneous with this corruption, geared to it as a motor is geared to the conglomerate machinery of a factory, was the tremendous industrial boom which followed the war. For eight years Northern business rollicked amid a flush prosperity.

With money easy, with fortunes rising on every hand, with the temptation to speculate irresistible, the whole tendency of American life conduced to greed.”

(Hamilton Fish, the Inner History of the Grant Administration, Allan Nevins, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1937, excerpts pp. 638-639)

When the orphaned and penniless Maunsel White arrived in New Orleans in 1801 from his native Ireland, it was a small town controlled by Spain. Only thirteen, he clerked in a counting-house for sixteen dollars a month, half of which he paid to a French teacher to learn the language. He later explained his son that “I had a proud spirit” and let no obstacle stand in his way. That son later wrote of his deceased father that as a great merchant, “he first made a name & his name made the money – none stood higher for integrity – his word was inviolable as an oath.” White was proud of his sugar plantations and purchased the best machinery from New York manufacturers, and envisioned strong political and commercial ties between the South and the developing West, a union Northern which northern political interests could not abide.  White did not live to see the devastation and defeat of the South,  passing peacefully at his Deer Range Plantation on December 17, 1863.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Maunsel White, Irish Immigrant

“Behind the highest pile of oyster shells of any of the patrons of the old Gem Restaurant in New Orleans could frequently be found the great merchant, Maunsel White. With the gourmet’s taste for oysters, he concocted a peppery sauce which his Negro servant carried with his when the entered his favorite restaurant. Called the “Maunsel White Sauce,” it later received the name of tabasco sauce.

Gradually Maunsel White established himself as a reliable and successful factor in selling crops of the planters and forwarding plantation supplies to them. An important step in this was to secure the cotton business of Andrew Jackson. Jackson had become acquainted with the young merchant when White served as the captain of a volunteer company under him at the Battle of New Orleans.

To the task of superintending his four plantations, White brought a keen sense of business and great energy. “I am up at [3 to 4 o’clock] in the morning, and all day at the Sugar House or Field,” he wrote during the grinding season of 1847 when he was sixty-four years old.

When one of his female slaves died from an accident at the sugar mill which crushed her hand and arm, he wrote to the Northern manufacturer of the mill, “this melancholy accident has caused myself and family the most sincere sorrow, as we view our Slaves almost in the same light as we do our children.” Although he bought many slaves, he refused to sell any of his own servants, explaining, “I have made myself a solemn promise never to sell a Negro – it is a traffic I have never done, I had rather give them their liberty than sell them.”

While his fortune was intact, White made generous gifts to the recently founded University of Louisiana at New Orleans . . . [and] was elected a member of its first board of administrators. In September 1847 he announced that he would donate to the infant university and endowment of lands to provide an income of one thousand dollars a year.

He became one of the early advocates of home education for Southern youths and the opponent of sending them to schools and colleges in the North, where they would be exposed to [alien doctrines].

White advised his son [Maunsel, Jr.] not to think about becoming a politician, because he questioned the happiness of politicians. He was particularly incensed by the Wilmot Proviso, which he thought was calculated “to do more injury & make a wider breach between the North & the South than any other subject ever brought forth in our political strife.” Although he declared himself to be a Democrat, White also stated that he would never sell himself to any party.

When he invested money in a cotton mill at Cannelton, Indiana, in 1849, he wrote that he wished to see the interests of the South and West united so that nothing on earth might separate them. Though he affirmed his attachment to “the perpetuity of the glorious union,” he said it must be “a Union of equals, jealous of their own & each other’s rights and submitting to no infractions of the constitutional compact as it was framed by our Republican Fathers.”

He developed a strong prejudice against Yankees as a result of sectional strife . . . On May 16, 1848, he wrote to his Richmond factor that he suspected that the Yankee captains of the ship which carried his molasses and sugar were dishonest, adding “Curse the Whole Race of Yankee Captains.” He advised his factor in Philadelphia to who he consigned his sugar crop to watch the captain of the ship carefully, for he was a shrewd Yankee.”

(The Mind of the Old South, Clement Eaton, LSU Press, 1964, excerpts pp. 69-73; 75-77; 80-84; 87 )

Turn of the century Republican Senator from Vermont, William P. Dillingham (1843-1923) did not serve in the Civil War, citing “ill-health” and may well have purchased a substitute to serve as many northern men had done. Though Republican Party views toward immigration had been very liberal during the war as it needed a never-ending supply of recruits for its war against the American South, by 1911 Dillingham’s congressional commission issued a report supporting more severe immigration restrictions.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Republican Party Supports Immigration Restrictions

“The xenophobia of the 1880s and 1890s pointed inevitably in one direction: immigration restriction. Although the Chinese were banned in 1882 and the first general federal immigration law of that year had excluded certain classes of immigrants, these laws did not greatly affect the flow of immigration traffic. The time had come [many insisted], to decide whether the nation was “to be peopled by British, German and Scandinavian stock, historically free, energetic, progressive, or by Slav, Latin and Asiatic races, historically downtrodden, atavistic, and stagnant.”

The most popular scheme for stemming the tide was the Literacy test, Led by the Immigration Restriction League, founded in Boston in 1894 and led by Boston blue bloods, agitation for federal action grew. The literacy test, which required immigrants over 16 to be literate in some language, made no distinction among nationalities or races, but the intent of the proposal was clear.

The literacy test, supported by the Republican Party, finally did pass in 1896, only to be vetoed by President Grover Cleveland . . . it quickly reappeared and by 1901 President Theodore Roosevelt . . . called for a comprehensive immigration act to keep out “not only all persons who are known to be believers in anarchistic principles or members of anarchist societies, but also all persons who are of a low moral tendency or of unsavory reputation” and “all persons . . . who are below a certain standard of economic fitness to enter our industrial field as competitors with American labor.”

The President also wanted a careful educational test to ascertain the capacity to “appreciate American institutions and act sanely as American citizens. Roosevelt insisted that his proposals would decrease the “sum of ignorance” in America and “stop the influx of cheap labor, and the resulting competition which gives rise to so much of the bitterness in American industrial life, and it would dry up the springs of the pestilential social conditions in our great cities, where anarchist organizations have their greatest possibility for growth.”

Congress responded in part to the President’s request by excluding anarchists in 1903 and “imbeciles, feeble-minded [persons] and persons with physical or mental defects which might affect their ability to earn a living” four years later.

[Senator Dillingham’s 1911 report’s main] assumption was that the newer immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were more ignorant, more unskilled, more prone to crime, and more willing to accept a lower standard of living than the older immigrants from northern and western Europe. The newcomers, [Dillingham’s] commission announced, were “content to accept wages and conditions which the native American and immigrants of the older class had come to regard as unsatisfactory.”

(Ethnic Americans, a History of Immigration and Assimilation, Leonard Dinnerstein and David Reimers, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1975, excerpts, pp. 66-67)

Chaos reigned in 1919 America as Woodrow Wilson labored for his League of Nations while anarchist immigrants advocated domestic labor strikes – and newly-created police unions demanded pay increases comparable to the labor unions. In Boston, most of the predominantly Irish police force walked off the job and looting began in earnest as “professional criminals arrived by the trainload from New York and other cities to get a share of the swag.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Beginning of the End of the United States

“On the floor of Congress, Representative James Byrnes of South Carolina made an incendiary speech, accusing the Bolsheviks of influencing black Americans to turn against their country. He blamed the reds for the recent riots in Washington, DC and Chicago. A Department of Justice investigation of the role of radicals in racial unrest confirmed this accusation.

[Attorney-General A. Mitchell Palmer] estimated that there were 60,000 Bolshevik plotters loose in the United States. Virtually confirming this estimate for the jittery public, in Centralia, Washington, a gunfight broke out when the newly-founded American Legion, marching in its first Armistice Day parade, detoured to clean out an IWW [International Workers of the World] union hall with baseball bats and pistols. On November 7, 1919 . . . Palmer ordered federal agents to raid organizations suspected of Bolshevik ties in eleven cities.

During the fall [of 1919], paranoia about Soviet Russia had similarly replaced paranoia about Germany. The Bolsheviks were blamed for terrorist bombs and the ongoing epidemic of strikes. The US Army patrolled the streets of IWW strongholds, such as Bisbee, Arizona, and Butte, Montana.

When workers went on strike in the steel mills of Gary, Indiana; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and other cities, army military intelligence agents worked closely with local police to arrest hundreds of suspected Bolsheviks. On October 16, 1919, the Pittsburgh Post wrote . . . “every third man on the streets . . . seems to be a government official.”

In late December, 249 aliens seized . . . in roundups were marched to the aging troopship Buford and deported to Russia. Newspapers dubbed the ship “the Soviet Ark” and gave the story reams of publicity. As the ship got under way, one of the most outspoken radicals, Emma Goldman, shouted, “This is the beginning of the end of the United States.”

[J. Edgar] Hoover, backed by 250 armed soldiers, personally supervised the departure. The State Department said the deportees were “obnoxious” and a “menace to law and order” as well as to “decency and justice.” They were therefore being “sent from whence they came.”

Liberals were aghast that their former hero, Woodrow Wilson, apparently countenanced Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover and the operations of the military intelligence agents.”

(The Illusion of Victory, America in World War One, Thomas Fleming, Basic Books, 2003, excerpts pp. 425-426; 438-439)