Circa1865

Despite their formerly-invincible political influence waning in the early 1890s, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) took aim at school textbook authors who suggested that the American South may have fought for the same independence and liberty their forefathers had in 1776 – branding it “disloyal history.”

School book authors mentioned below are John Fiske (1842 – 1901), born in Hartford, Connecticut; and Daniel H. Montgomery (1837-1928), a graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island. Both States dominated the colonial transatlantic slave trade.

GAR War Upon “Disloyal History”

“Another phase of their patriotic campaign was the Grand Army’s intensified textbook warfare, in which the Confederate Veteran’s finally took up cudgels for the authors and point of view of their own section. Union veterans, feeling the general public reaction against liberality to old soldiers after the pension gift of 1890, sought some explanation for their declining prestige.

The GAR veterans concluded that it lay in the growing tendency of literature and textbooks to minimize the American South’s “crime.” The Boston Grand Army Record asserted:

“It is often spoken of in [Grand Army] Post meetings and at Camp Fires and on other public occasions that the general public opinion is not so favorable to the surviving Union soldiers as it formerly was . . . voters who have studied School Histories since 1865 have no idea what the Union Army contended for, what sacrifices they endured . . . [and] the present emasculated public opinion regarding the Right and Wrong of the Rebellion is the natural fruit of these emasculated School Histories. The indifference regarding the duties of the present generation to the surviving Union soldiers is the legitimate product of False School histories written by Professor Fiske and Reverend Montogomery imported from England. Englishmen helped the Rebels when the United States was in what seemed its death throes. We do not now need the services of Englishmen to write up the Rebellion in our School History.”

While national and State GAR headquarters showered educational institutions with angry complaints, local GAR committees paid grim calls upon school superintendents. These committees made scathing reports on textbooks by Southern writers and wrote even more bitter reviews of those produced in the north for national sale.

A typical expression was that of the Massachusetts GAR that many histories were “open to the suspicion that that they had “soothed the wounded spirit of secession for the sake of Southern trade.”  They give over-prominence and over-praise to the  leaders and movements of the secession forces, and so treat the events of the war period as to leave the impression upon the youthful mind that the war was merely a quarrel between two factions, in which both were equally to blame.”

(Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR. Mary R. Dearing. LSU Press, 1952. p. 480-481)

The author below was born in Ireland in 1822 and 9 years later came with his family to Philadelphia. He later studied law and theology before moving to Iowa in 1843 and was admitted to the bar in 1847. Politically active, Mahony was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives twice; co-founded the Dubuque Herald in 1852 and elected twice as Dubuque County sheriff.

He was arrested in mid-1862 for criticism of Lincoln’s government, held in Old Capitol Prison, and released in November after signing a document stating that he would “form an allegiance to the United States and not bring charges against those who had arrested and confined him.”

It was Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, and his Attorney General Black, who both determined that to wage war against a State and adhere to its enemies was the Constitution’s very definition of treason.

Lincoln’s War Proclamation

“One of the most flagrant acts of Executive violation of the United States Constitution was the proclamation of the third of May 1861, providing for the increase in number of the regular army and navy, and prescribing that volunteers called into the service of the United States under that proclamation should serve for a period of three years if the war might continue during that period. As part of the history of the subversion of the government, this proclamation is referred to as evidence of fact.

The United States Constitution, in the most positive, express and unequivocal terms, delegates to Congress the sole authority both to raise armies and to make rules for their government, as well as those of the naval force. This Constitutional provision was disregarded by the President in his proclamation of the third of May. He assumed the power in that proclamation which the Constitution had vested in Congress alone, and which no one ever supposed that a President had a right to exercise.

Thus, by almost the first official act of Lincoln did he violate the Constitution, which, little more than a month previous he had taken an oath to “preserve, protect and defend.” This oath, it seems, he has since construed so that it does not require him to obey the Constitution, as if he could both preserve, protect and defend it by the same act which disobeys it.

It was in vain that the Constitution vested in Congress only the power to raise and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy, and to make rules for the governing of the land and naval forces. Lincoln by his proclamation assumed the right and power to do all this – a right which scarcely any monarch, if a single one, would dare to assume, and a power which no one but a usurper would attempt to exercise.”

(Prisoner of State. Dennis A. Mahoney. Addressed to Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton and entered by Act of Congress in the year 1863. Published by Crown Rights Book Company, 2001, pp. 29-31)

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed the “Dependent Pension Bill” which sought to reward a favored Republican constituency, the North’s veterans of the Civil War. Since 1865, the Republican party had created and expanded a virtual national welfare program to attract their votes. Viewing this bill as simply a “raid on the US Treasury” benefitting the Republican party, Cleveland incurred the wrath of Northern veterans as he believed it was charity, and his veto the honorable path to take.

The Daily Advertiser of Boston in early September 1865 contained the letter of an astute resident who advised the public to give veterans work and a full share of public offices. Otherwise, he feared, “we shall guarantee a faction, a political power, to be known as the soldier vote . . . I wonder if our State politicians remember that 17,000 men can give the election to either party.”

America’s First Welfare Program

Lincoln’s government initiated a military pension system in mid-July 1862 and included a $5 fee for Claim Agents who assisted veterans; attorneys could charge $1.50 if additional testimony and affidavit were required. The House of Representatives set this latter amount given the temptation for unscrupulous attorneys to take undue advantage of the pensioners. With this Act passed, practically every member of Congress became anxious to provide for soldiers, sailors and their dependents – more than a few began to take advantage of the political power that lay in the hands of the “soldier vote.” A Mr. Holman, representing Indiana in Congress, praised the 5,000 Indiana men “who gave up the charmed circle of their homes to maintain the old flag of the Union.”

As the war continued into 1864 and the spirit of revenge in the North increased, it was officially proposed to create a large pension fund for Northern soldiers by confiscating Southern property.  In September 1865, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a former slave-State, “proposed a plan whereby he hoped the government would realize over three and a half billions of dollars by confiscating Southern property. Although no such a measure ever became law, it reveals the attitude which several members of the House had toward the question of pensions.”

The abuse of the pension system by 1875 caused the commissioner, Henry Atkinson, to state that “the development of frauds of every character in pension claims has assumed such magnitude as to require the serious attention of Congress . . .”

(History of the Civil War Military Pensions, 1861-1865. John William Oliver. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 844, Vol. 4, No. 1. pp. 11-12; 14; 20; 41)

Historian Richard Weaver wrote that at the close of the Civil War “the side which more completely abjured the rules of chivalric combat won, and the way was cleared for modernism, with its stringency, abstractions, and its impatience with sentiment.” He added that here the Americans “proved pioneers in a field whose value to civilization is dubious.” He reminds the reader of General Sheridan’s postwar visit to the Prussian staff and suggestion that “noncombatants be treated with the utmost rigor” and opinion that the people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” It then seemed but an easy step from the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan to the blitzkrieg of the Nazi’s.

The Task of Conquering the American South

“Realization that the North as a whole did not propose to regard the war as a game came as a shock to the Southern people, who had always counted the Yankees out of chivalry, but who seemingly had never reckoned what this would mean in practice.

For the north had already become industrial, middle-class and bourgeois, and if it began the war with old-fashioned conceptions, they vanished after the removal of the dramatic and colorful George B. McClellan. Thereafter the task of conquering the South became a business, an “official transaction,” which cost a great deal more in dollars and lives than had been anticipated, but which was at length accomplished by the systematic marshalling of equipment and numbers. When Gen. John Pope’s Virginia campaign gave the South its first intimation that the north was committed to total war, the reaction was indignation and dismay.

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to read in Lee’s brief sentence, “Pope must be suppressed,” a feeling that he was fighting not so much against an individual enemy as an outlawed mode of warfare. And when Sherman, Sheridan and Hunter began their systematic ravaging and punishing of civilians, it seemed to the old-fashioned South that one of the fundamental supports of civilization had been knocked out, and that warfare was being thrown back to the barbarism from which religion and chivalry had painfully raised it in the Middle Ages.

The courtly conduct of Lee and his officers to the Dutch farm wives of Pennsylvania had been perhaps too much sentimentalized, but the fact remains that these men felt they were observing a code, which is never more needful than in war, when fear and anger blind men and threaten their self-control. Sherman’s dictum that war is hell was answered by E. Porter Alexander’s remark that it depends somewhat on the warrior.

Naturally the thought of being beaten came hard to Americans priding themselves on their martial traditions, but . . . what has done more than anything else to support the unreconstructed attitude is the thought that an enemy, while masking himself under pious pretensions and posing as the representative of “grand moral ideas” dropped the code of civilization in warfare and won in a dishonorable manner.”

(Southern Chivalry and Total War. Richard M. Weaver. Sewanee Review, Vol. LIII, 1945, pp. 8-9)

Lincoln fully approved of Grant’s plan to simply deplete Southern forces through constant attacks, regardless of the cost in human lives. Generous enlistment bonuses, impressing immigrants and colored men – plus conscription could fill the ranks 1864-65 and hammer the South into submission. It was Grant who stopped prisoner exchanges and was responsible for the deaths of northern prisoners as the South was being starved and denied medical supplies.

Grant’s Plan of Depletion

“If Grant can effect, with every assault on our lines, not an equal but proportionate depletion of our ranks, then the satisfactory solution to the problem is, from his point of view, a mere question of arithmetic, a mere matter of time.

He would cooly throw away the lives of a hundred thousand of his men if, by that means, he could put fifty thousand of ours hors de combat. He believes that we are on our last legs . . . and once hamstrung, good night to the Southern Confederacy. So, Grant will not yield until he is fairly exhausted, and he means more than most Yankee generals do by their bravado, when he declares he will not re-cross the river while he has a man left.

But Grant is not the sole manager of the campaign [against Lee]. There is another question besides the subjugation or independence of the South – a question of far more importance to certain people in Washington and their partisans. What is to be the name of the first Prince-President, or Stadtholder, or Emperor of the United States? Is it to be biblical or classical? Is it to be Abraham or Ulysses? And this is a matter in which Lincoln is profoundly interested.

Now, Lincoln has shown, in the plainest way, that he will not scruple to use any device, to invent any falsehood, to shed any quantity of blood . . . if he can perpetuate his power. We think it tolerably evident that he is afraid of the tool which fortune has thrust into his hands, and no one would rejoice more sincerely than he if Grant were to expire in the arms of victory, or, that alternative failing, he was to perish politically, crushed under the odium of an utter defeat.

Grant has perspicuity enough to see through Lincoln’s benevolent intentions, and self-reliance enough to push on regardless of Lincoln’s designs. Lincoln’s plan is that Grant shall do all the fighting and [Benjamin] Butler shall get all the glory. Butler is Lincoln’s representative in the field; and they both hope that the capture of Richmond will repeat the capture of New Orleans . . . and Butler is to make a triumphant entry into our capital without having exposed his precious carcass to the bullets of the audacious rebels.

Like many shrewd men, Lincoln a touch of superstition and it is evident that he believed in Butler’s star. [If] Richmond is to pass into Butler’s hands, Lincoln has nothing to fear from any glory which he may acquire . . . [and] the north would hardly be willing to hail him as their official chief. [B]orn satrap that he is, Butler would be satisfied with the position of Viceroy of the Southern provinces under His Majesty Abraham the First, by the Device of the Devil, Emperor of all the Yankees.”

(Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War. Ward W. Brigg, Jr. University Press of Virginia. 1998; pp. 315-316)

John Brown and his 4 surviving co-conspirators were arraigned on October 25, 1859, and the next day indicted for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia – instigating insurrection and waging war against that State. All were found guilty on November 7^th and sentenced to hang. After Brown was hung at 11:30AM on December 2, 1859, a Virginia militia colonel in the crowd spoke: “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such enemies of the human race!”

Those States of the north providing troops for Lincoln to wage war against the States of the south, all committed treason as defined below.

What War Did Jefferson Davis Levy?

“Article III, Section 3, of the United States Constitution defines “Treason” – the only crime the Constitution does define. It is limited to two offenses:

“Treason against the United States shall only consist of levying war against Them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

In light of the events of 1861-1865 . . . and considering the attempt to ascribe to the Confederate States President crimes against the internal sovereignty of [a] State, that is, treason – a question arises, one that stumped even the authorities, even the United States Supreme Court, where now Mr. Justice Chase was successor to Roger B. Taney.

What war did Jefferson Davis levy? After all, who perverted the Constitution? Who instigated the break? Who invaded? Who attacked?

Davis failed to obtain a hearing, although the wicked charges against him were never erased but were allowed to lie against him unpurged for “every orator-patriot or penny-a-liner in the North to hurl at his head the epithet “Traitor,” as Mrs. Davis wrote.

And, ‘. . . he had asked only a fair trial on the merits; [had been held on trumped up accusations in] close confinement, with circumstances of unnecessary torture for a year and a half and constrained to live in Fort Monroe for two years, to the injury of his health and the total destruction of his interests, . . . he was denied trial while his captors vaunted their “clemency” in not executing their victim . . . These accusations were either true or false; he asked neither indulgence nor pardon, but urged a speedy trial, constantly expressing an ardent desire to meet it.’

He had been borne, unwillingly enough, to the position of Chief Executive of eight million Americans in the South who understood their rights and thought it incumbent upon them to maintain them. He had been one of the last to yield to the dread necessity of strife, and was last to leave Washington . . .”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts. Russell Hoover Quynn. Exposition Press, 1959, pp. 128-129)

Grant’s disaster at Cold Harbor in June of 1864 earned him the moniker “Butcher” from his own men – after a battle better known for its mindless slaughter. Grant later admitted that he should not have ordered the all-out attack on General Robert E. Lee’s well-entrenched troops. A staff officer in grey referred to the one-sided Southern victory as “perhaps the easiest ever granted to Southern arms by the folly of northern commander.” To deepen the anger of northern troops for their general as Grant’s delay in allowing a truce for the wounded to receive medical attention as well as burial details. He finally agreed to a truce after the dead and wounded had lain for four and half days in the oppressive June heat.

Lincoln’s New General

“But to the average citizen what was Grant’s situation? Though having odds [over Gen. Lee], practically two to one in his favor, in three terrific battles within a month, he had been always thwarted & had lost 50,000 men. And he was no nearer Richmond at the end than his ships might have landed him at the beginning, without loss of a man. He was indeed consuming the Southern male population, but beside the cost of over two million dollars a day, he was paying more than man-for-man in northern blood.

In Georgia, Sherman, with over 100,000 men against Johnston’s 45,000, had advanced as far as Kennesaw Mountain, near Marietta, but had gained no advantage over Johnston and had fought no serious battle. Nowhere were the Federal armies accomplishing any success of importance, and in Virginia, it looked as if their greatest army was being wrecked. And by the general sentiment of both parties, it was in Virginia that the issue was to be settled.

In [William] Swinton’s [History of the Army of the Potomac] he writes of this period: “War is sustained quite as much by the moral energy of the people as by its material resources, [and it has not] infrequently occurred that, with abundant resources, a nation has failed in war by the sapping of the animating principle in the minds of its citizens. Now, so gloomy was the military outlook after [Grant’s] action on the Chickahominy, that there was at this time great danger of a collapse of the [northern war effort]. The history of this conflict truthfully written will show this. The archives of the State Department, when one day made public, will show how deeply the Government was affected by the want of military success, and to what resolutions [Lincoln] had in consequence. Had not success elsewhere come to brighten the horizon, it would have been difficult [for Lincoln] to have raised new [recruits for] the Army of the Potomac, which, shaken in its structure, its valor quenched in blood, and thousands of its ablest officers killed and wounded, was the Army of the Potomac no more.”

Of the condition of Lee’s army at the same time he says:

“The Confederates, elated at the skillful manner in which they had constantly been thrust between Richmond and the Union army, and conscious of the terrible price in blood they had exacted from the latter, were in high spirit, and the morale of Lee’s army was never better that after the battle of Cold Harbor.”

(Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander. Gary Galagher, ed.  UNC Press, 1989, pp. 416-417)

Vallandigham (below) had the support of many in the north’s Democratic party such as editor Thomas Beer of Ohio’s Crawford County Forum of 30 January 1863. He wrote: “every dollar spent for the prosecution of this infamous war is uselessly wasted – and every life lost in it is an abominable sacrifice, a murder, the responsibility of which will rest upon Abraham Lincoln and his advisors. Support of this war and hostility to it, show the dividing line between the enemies and friends of the Union. He who supports the war is against the Union.”

Washington the Arch-Rebel

“Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham excoriated Lincoln and his followers on January 14, 1863, in the US House of Representatives by stating: “Yet after nearly two years of more vigorous prosecution of war than ever recorded in history . . . you have utterly, signally, disastrously failed to subjugate ten millions of “rebels”, whom you had taught the people of the North and . . . West not only to hate, but to despise.

Rebels did I say?  Yes, your fathers were rebels, or your grandfathers.  He [Washington] who now before me on canvas looks down so sadly upon us, the false, degenerate and imbecile guardians of the great Republic which he founded, was a rebel.  And yet we, cradled ourselves in rebellion and who have fostered and fraternized with every insurrection in the nineteenth century everywhere throughout the globe, would now . . . make the word “rebel” a reproach.”

(The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham & the Civil War. Frank L. Klement. Fordham University Press, 1998, pg 136)

The Conspiracy Which Brought on the War

The article in this number on the “Sudden Change in Northern Sentiment as to Coercion in 1861,” by Dr. James H. McNeilly of Nashville, shows that there was evidently a deeply laid plan to force the South into making the first hostile demonstration in order to arouse that sentiment which would respond to the call for troops necessary to invade this section. It is well-known that the general sentiment in the North was against making war on the seceding Southern States, but there was a powerful political element which really wanted war and could see the value of forcing the South into making an offensive move. Forcibly illustrating this spirit is the following quotation from a thoughtful writer of the South:

“On February 2, 1861, Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in a letter published in the Memphis Appeal, wrote of the Republican leaders as follows:

‘They are bold, determined men. They are striving to break up the Union under the pretense of serving it. They are struggling to overthrow the Constitution while professing undying attachment to it and a willingness to make any sacrifice to maintain it. They are trying to plunge the country into a cruel war as the surest way of destroying the Union upon the plea of enforcing the laws and protecting public property.’

Shortly after Douglas wrote this letter Senator Zach Chandler of Michigan, wrote to Gov. Austin Blair which proves the conspiracy of the men determined on war. Virginia had solicited a conference of States to see if some plan could not be devised and agreed upon to prevent war and save the Union. Chandler wrote Governor Blair that he opposed the conference and that no Republican State should send a delegate. He implored the governor to send stiff-necked [anti-compromise] delegates or none, as the whole idea of compromise was against his judgement. Chandler added to his letter these sinister words: ‘Some of the manufacturing States think that a war would be awful; without a little bloodletting this Union will not be worth a curse.’”

(The Conspiracy Which Brought on the War. Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXIV, No. 10, October 1916. pg. 436)

After his military’s defeat at Second Manassas in August 1862, Lincoln thought that threatening to free black laborers at the South might help his prospects in his war against the South. Despite those who thought it a barbarity to incite insurrections, he replied: “Nor do I urge objections of a moral nature in view of possible consequences of insurrection and massacre at the South.”

In New York City, a French-language newspaper opined: “Does the Government at Washington mean to say on January 1^st, 1863, it will call for a servile war to aid in his conquest of the South? And after the blacks have killed the white people of the South, they themselves must be drowned in their own blood?”

Inciting Insurrection

“In the Senate, Stephen A. Douglas, pursuant to the Constitution, introduced a bill to punish those people who seek to incite slave insurrections. “Abraham Lincoln, in his speech at New York, declared it was a seditious speech” – “His press and party hooted it.” “It received their jeers and jibes.” (pg. 663, Stephen’s Pictorial History).

Then came the election of President. The party of [black] insurrection swept the Northern States. The people of the South had realized the possible results. With the people of the North making a saint of [John Brown] who planned and started to murder the slaveholders . . . and the Northern States all going in favor of the Republican party which protected those engaged in such plans.  Naturally there were in every Southern State those who thought it best to guard against such massacres by separating from those States where John Brown was deified.

When news came that Abraham Lincoln was elected, the South Carolina Legislature, being in session, called a State Convention. When the Convention met it withdrew ratification of the US Constitution and declared South Carolina an independent State.

In its declaration it said: “Those States have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who have remained have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection. For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing until it has now secured to its aid the power of the general government. “

So, to escape insurrections and ensure public safety, South Carolina separated itself from the United States government to free itself from a government led by a man who was not opposed to the massacre of the Southern people.”

(A Southern View of the Invasion of the Southern States and War of 1861-1865. Capt. S. A. Ashe, Raleigh, North Carolina, pp. 46-47)