Circa1865

Captain John Yates Beall, a Southern officer, was captured at the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge in December of 1864 after attempts to capture the USS Michigan on Lake Erie, free Confederate prisoners held at Johnson’s Island, and rescue seven imprisoned Southern generals near Buffalo. For taking the brutal war to the Northern border of the United States in retaliation for Sherman’s and others crimes in his country, he was hung as a “guerilla” on February 24, 1865.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Captain Beall Executed by the Hypocritical Dix

“Mounting the platform, the prisoner takes his seat upon the chair immediately under the fatal rope. The adjutant of the post commences to read the charges, specifications and the orders of General Dix for his execution.

Beall, little dreaming of the test to which he is to be subjected, rises respectfully when the reading is commenced . . . When he hears himself designated as a citizen of the “insurgent State of Virginia” his smile grows intensely sad and significant; he sees now the men before him no longer as his own murderers only, but as the executioners of a sovereign State – his own beloved Virginia, and he smiles not in derision, but in protest and remonstrance.

Again when they denounce his heroic attempt to rescue from a vault the souls of three thousand fellow-soldiers, “piracy,” he smiles; but when the accuse him of an attempt as a “guerilla” to “destroy the lives and property of peaceable, and unoffending inhabitants of said State” (New York), he ceases to smile, and mournfully shakes his head in denial. But finally, when the adjutant reaches the concluding passages of the order of General Dix . . . Beall laughs outright . . .”

The reporters do not understand the joke; the truth is, Beall hears this homily upon the proprieties of war coming from a Federal officer; he hears it, whose home is in the valley of the Shenandoah! There rises up before him his own homestead, its desolated fields, its level forests, the ash heaps which now mark the positions of its once beautiful, and cottage-like out-houses; and the thousand other vestiges of rural beauty despoiled by the brutality of the Federal soldiers, in its unrestrained career of pillage, plunder, wholesale robbery, and wanton destruction.

He hears the protests of his helpless mother, and her appeals for protection heeded only by the God of the widow and fatherless. He remembers the deep burning insults which Federal officers have heaped, in their language, upon his own sisters. He hears in the hypocritical cant of General Dix that officer’s own self-condemnation; and knows that every breath which the commanding general draws is in default of the penalty which he attaches to the violation of the laws of civilized warfare.

He hears a sermon on the “rule which govern sovereign States in the conduct of hostilities with each other,” by the man who, through his unlicensed, ill-disciplined, unrestrained, and unpunished soldiery, laid in ashes William and Mary College, an institution whose associations were hallowed by the literary nurture of the fathers of the Republic, and whose vulnerable walls were whitened by the frosts of a century.

A general who, after an arduous campaign, succeeded in capturing a lunatic asylum, and who is said to have tendered to its patients the oath of loyalty to the United States, and who is known to have treated its refractory and unfortunate inmates with cruelty and inhumanity.

Turning upon the officer of the day, he speaks in a calm, firm voice. “I protest against the execution of this sentence. It is a murder! I die in the service and defense of my country!  Thus died in the thirty-first year of his age, on the scaffold, John Yates Beall.”

(Confederate Operations in Canada and New York, John W. Headley, Neale Publishing Company, 1906, pp. 365-366)

At their 7 June 1864 meeting in Vichy Baltimore, the “National Union Party” re-nominated Lincoln for a second term in office. This party was in reality Lincoln’s party of Radical Republicans which began the war, and repackaged as an energized patriotic organization. The soldier volunteers referred to below were paid generous State and federal bounties in appreciation of their volunteerism.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Politicizing the Soldier Vote

“The Union Party appeal also helped to consolidate the support of soldiers for Abraham Lincoln. In November 1864, they gave him an estimated 78 percent of their ballots (as compared to 53 percent of the civilian vote) and, at least in New York and Connecticut, their support probably made the crucial difference that carried those States for the Union Party.

The demographic and ethnic profile of soldiers – especially the volunteers who made up the vast bulk of the Union army – made them more likely to be Republicans than Democrats. It is also undoubtedly the case that intimidation and interference of various kinds meant that a certain amount of bravery was required to cast a Democratic ballot in the army.

Among the most important reasons for the support Lincoln received from the army, though, was that fighting for the Union was a powerful experience that politicized many young men who had previously been unmoved by politics. Moreover, distanced from the pressures of their communities, soldiers were open to the influence, both direct and indirect, of their officers and comrades and, whatever their past political associations may have been, many were apt to see the northern party battle through the sobering lens of their enemies: if Confederates were praying for McClellan’s victory [in 1864], Lincoln must be sustained.”

(No Party Now, Politics in the Civil War North, Adam I.P. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 156-157)

Commenting on the presidential election of 1864, Lincoln’s Assistant Secretary of War, Charles A. Dana, stated that the whole power of the War Department was used to secure Lincoln’s reelection. Dana was in earlier days a Brook Farm socialist, and while employed by Horace Greeley’s prewar New York Tribune, contracted with Karl Marx to write a weekly column on his radical social views. It was Dana who ordered the imprisoned Jefferson Davis to be manacled in irons.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lincoln’s 1864 Reelection Assured

“During the fall of 1864 it became evident that Pennsylvania was a “doubtful” State. Gen. McClellan, the candidate of the Democratic party, was not only popular there as a native Pennsylvanian, but, even among those loyal to the administration, he had a strong following and great sympathy, from the belief that he had been a much abused man.

Lincoln was advised by the Republican State Committee of Pennsylvania that the prospect was very uncertain. It was felt that, on the result of the Keystone State, hinged the fate of the national election. A gentleman belonging to the Republican Committee then, as now, one of the leading politicians of the State, had a consultation with the President on the situation. He thus relates the interview:

“Mr. President,” I said, “the only sure way to organize victory in this contest, is to have some fifteen thousand, or more, Pennsylvania soldiers furloughed and sent home to vote. While their votes in the field would count man for man, their presence at the polls at home would exert an influence not easily to be estimated, by exciting enthusiasm and building up party moral[e]. I would advise you to send a private message to Gen. Grant, to be given in an unofficial way, asking for such issuance of furloughs to Pennsylvania soldiers in the field.”

Lincoln was silent for some moments and seemed to be pondering. Then he answered: “I have never had any intimation from Gen. Grant as to his feelings for me. I don’t know how far he would be disposed to be my friend in the matter, nor do I think it would be safe to trust him.”

The President’s interlocutor responded . . . ”Then, let it be done through Gen. [George] Meade, the direct commander of the Army of the Potomac – and Gen. [Philip] Sheridan, how about him?” At this question, Lincoln’s face grew sunny and bright. “I can trust Phil.” He said; “he’s all right!”

As a result of this conference, one of the assistant secretaries of war was sent to Petersburg with a strictly unofficial message to Gen. Meade, and another agent was deputed to visit Gen. Sheridan. Some 10,000 or more Pennsylvania soldiers went home to vote when the time came, and Pennsylvania was carried by a handsome majority for the [Lincoln] administration.”

(The South’s Burden, The Curse of Sectionalism, Benjamin Franklin Grady, Nash Brothers, 1906, pp. 131-132)

Those in attendance at Lincoln’s November 1863 short address after Edward Everett’s long speech were disappointed and Lincoln himself described his remarks as a “wet blanket.” After his assassination, presumably by Radical Republicans who wanted him out of the way, Lincoln’s apotheosis began.

Lincoln’s Revised Gettysburg Address

“General Donn Piatt, who traveled with Lincoln during his campaign and knew Lincoln perhaps as well as any man: “When a leader dies all good men go to lying about him. Abraham Lincoln has almost disappeared from human knowledge. I hear of him, I read of him in eulogies and biographies, but fail to recognize the man I knew in life . . . Lincoln faced and lived through the awful responsibility of war with a courage that came from indifference.”

Ward Lamon, intimate friend of Lincoln and his United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, and Colonel in the Secret Service; Historian Shepherd of Baltimore; W.H. Cunningham of the Montgomery (Missouri) Star, who sat right behind Lincoln at Gettysburg, all agreed and publicly stated that the speech published was not the one delivered by Lincoln . . .

[B]oth Edward Everett and [Secretary of State William] Seward expressed their disappointment and there was no applause; that Lincoln said: “Lamon, that speech was like a wet blanket on the audience. I am distressed by it.”

These gentlemen who heard the speech all say that the speech delivered was not the one which has been so extensively printed. Even [Lincoln secretary John] Nicolay says: “It was revised.”

William H. Herndon, under whom Lincoln began his law practice and longtime friend, wrote one of the first biographies of Lincoln, “Story of a Great Life,” but because of its frankness in unfolding the life of Lincoln it was bought up and suppressed. It was republished some years later, much modified . . . Lamon, in his “Life of Lincoln,” said:

“The ceremony of Mr. Lincoln’s apotheosis was planned and executed after his death by men who were unfriendly to him while he lived. Men who had exhausted the resources of their skill and ingenuity in venomous distractions of the living Lincoln were first after his death to undertake the task of guarding his memory, not as a human being, but as a god. Among those participating in the apotheosis Lamon names Seward, Edwin Stanton, Thad Stevens and Charles Sumner.”

(Two Presidents: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, The Naylor Company, 1973, pp. 78-79)

President John Tyler’s son Lyon Gardiner Tyler was incensed in 1917 by a New York Times editorial which compared Southern planters to Hohenzollern autocrats plaguing the world. In 1928, Tyler was provoked again when the Virginia legislature adjourned on Lincoln’s birthday and declared publicly that Lincoln did not merit the honor. Time magazine fired back that President Tyler was a dwarf in comparison to the rail splitter, and Lyon published a book in 1929 defending his distinguished father – who had met Thomas Jefferson as a boy.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lincoln, Grant and Beast Butler

“The reader of [Dr. Tyler’s] book will also have called to his attention the fact that in the recent World War this country had its flag fired upon time and time again and its citizens killed on the high seas without resorting to war, and Lincoln knew that the capturing of a fort guarding and controlling the most important city of South Carolina meant merely protection for that city and not an attack on the North.

It could be likewise been shown here that just a matter of weeks before the ballyhoo about “firing on the flag” at Sumter had been set to work to enrage the North, the flag had been fired upon when the Star of the West was shot at and turned back, but under Buchanan’s calm rule there was practically no excitement.

As to Lincoln’s cabinet [in contrast to John Tyler’s], “the accounts teems with the insubordinate actions of Seward, Stanton and Chase, to say nothing of Welles, while Stanton and Chase reveled in insults to Lincoln.”

As to the ideas of the two men in regard to personal responsibility and family obligations . . . ”Lincoln wrote to Grant in February 1865 (the war almost over), asking that his son, aged twenty-two, who had been kept at Harvard in spite of the draft, should be put on his staff and “not in the ranks.” President Tyler had four grandsons in the Confederate army, one of whom was killed and another wounded, and two sons by his second marriage who surrendered at Appomattox, aged sixteen and seventeen.”

“When [Beast] Butler issued his notorious “Order N0. 28” at New Orleans (an order that shocked decent humanity), which Lord Palmerson, the Prime Minister of England declared in the British Parliament was “unfit to be written in the English language;” Lincoln did not revoke the order, but on the contrary promoted Butler to responsible positions and wanted him as his running mate for the vice presidency in 1864. Yet Butler is the man who, Dr. John Fiske declared, “could not have understood in the smallest degree the feelings of gentlemen.”

(John Tyler and Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Lyon G. Tyler; book review by A. H. Jennings, Confederate Veteran, June 1929, pp. 213-214)

Seldom mentioned as a direct cause of the War Between the States is the Republican party refusal to compromise with Southerners in Congress in order to save the Union. As president-elect, Lincoln is said have led the resistance to compromise and pushing the South toward secession. After its first national electoral contest in 1856, the Republican party in 1861 would destroy the Founders’ Constitution and the union of fraternal States it had created.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Republican Block Schemes of Conciliation

“Congress was in session beginning December 3 [1860]; and in a bungling, legalistic fashion it was going about the business of saving the country. Incidentally, this should be borne in mind as a sidelight of Buchanan’s policy. With Congress seeking modes of adjustment, the President would have been going counter to the national legislature if he had taken warlike measures against the South.

Panaceas and compromise solutions piled up in such quantity that each house chose its committees to centralize the discussion, sift the numerous schemes, mediate between opposing points of view, and report such solution as seemed most hopeful of success.

In the House of Representatives this function was performed by the “Committee of Thirty-three,” a special “grand committee,” one from each State, created at the suggestion of Representative [Alexander R.] Boteler of Virginia. On the one hand the committee was embarrassed by the attitude of the radical Republicans, in Congress and elsewhere, who seemed intent upon blocking schemes of conciliation . . . [and on] December 13 . . . a group of Southern members of Congress, before secession had been voted in any State, issued an address to their constituents which read as follows:

“The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union, through the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or constitutional amendments, and we trust the South will not be deceived by appearances or the pretence of new guarantees.

The Republicans are resolute in the purpose to grant nothing that will or ought to satisfy the South. We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people are to be found only in a Southern Confederacy – a result to be obtained only by separate State secession – and that the sole and primary aim of each slaveholding State ought to be its speedy and absolute separation from an unnatural and hostile Union.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction, James G. Randall, D.C. Heath and Company, 1937, pp. 200-201)

Accidental presidents like Chester Alan Arthur were the result of the war, the marriage of government and big business, the predictable Gilded Age, and rampant political corruption in the North. Conservative Southern statesmen in prewar Congresses were an impediment to the Republican revolutionaries bent on power.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Republican Political Bosses and Layers of Graft

“Chester [Alan] Arthur was an accidental president at an inopportune time, but he is part of the tapestry of who we are more than most ever have been or most of us will ever be. He was president in an un-ideological era. The Senate would shortly be dubbed the “Millionaires’ Club,” and the House of Representatives was an unruly place of loose coalitions and influence trading.   State and local politics were controlled by party machines that prized loyalty. Politicians genuflected to the concept of the public good, and they occasionally spoke of public service. But they didn’t seem to hold either very dear.

The politicians of the Gilded Age, perhaps mirroring the mood of the public, turned away from troubling intractable like freedom, democracy, equality, and attended instead to order, stability and prosperity.

Though the Republican party continued to “wave the bloody shirt” at each presidential convention, hoping to dredge up Civil War passions and eke out an advantage against the better-organized though less popular Democrats, that yielded diminishing returns. In a Gilded Age version of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, the voting public demanded more than nostalgia for the glorious battles of Gettysburg and Antietam.

Cities were kept together by political machines, which were tight-knit organizations that corralled votes, collected a percentage of profits, and kept the peace. The machine was epitomized by Tammany Hall in New York City and its majordomo, William Marcy Tweed, a Democrat boos surrounded by a sea of Republicans. More than any mayor, “Boss” Tweed ran New York.

His men greeted immigrants as they stepped ashore in lower Manhattan, offered them money and liquor, found them work, and in return demanded their allegiance and a tithe. Supported by Irish Catholics, who made up nearly a quarter of New York’s population, Tweed held multiple offices, controlled lucrative public works projects (including early plans for Central Park), chose aldermen, and herded voters to the polls, where they drunkenly anointed the Boss’s candidates.

Tweed was gone by 1872, forced out and prosecuted, but the system kept going. Every [Northern] city had its machine, and counties did as well. National politics was simply the apex of the pyramid that rested on local bosses and layers of graft.”

(Chester Alan Arthur, Zachary Karabell, Henry holt and Company, 2004, pp. 5-6)

The freedmen did not receive the franchise because of their political maturity and judgment as the clear intent was to simply keep the Republican party in power. The Republican party’s Union League organization taught the Southern black man to hate his white neighbor, and to vote for Northern men whose own States had initiated Jim Crow laws. An excellent source for Northern antebellum racial views is “North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860,” Leon Litwack, Chicago, 1961.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lincoln’s Party of White Supremacy

“The Republican leaders were quite aware in 1865 that the issue of Negro status and rights was closely connected with the two other great issues of Reconstruction – who should reconstruct the South and who should govern the country. They were increasingly conscious that in order to reconstruct the South along the lines they planned they would require the support and the votes of the freedmen.

And it was apparent to some that once the reconstructed States were restored to the Union the Republicans would need the votes of the freedmen to retain control over the national government. While they could agree on this much, they were far from agreeing on the status, the rights, the equality, or the future of the Negro.

The fact was that the constituency on which the Republican congressmen relied in the North lived in a race-conscious, segregated society devoted to the doctrine on white supremacy and Negro inferiority.

“In virtually every phase of existence,” writes Leon Litwack with regard to the North in 1860, “Negroes found themselves systematically separated from whites. They were either excluded from railway cars, omnibuses, stagecoaches, and steamboats and assigned to special “Jim Crow” sections; they sat, when permitted, in secluded and remote corners of theaters and lecture halls; they could not enter most hotels, restaurants and resorts, except as servants; they prayed in “Negro pews” in the white churches . . . Moreover, they were often educated in segregated schools, punished in segregated prisons, nursed in segregated hospitals, and buried in segregated cemeteries.”

Ninety-three per cent of the 225,000 Northern Negroes in 1860 lived in States that denied them the ballot, and 7 per cent lived in the five New England States that permitted them to vote. Ohio and New York had discriminatory qualifications that practically eliminated Negro voting.

Ohio denied them poor relief, and most States of the old Northwest had laws carrying penalties against Negroes settling in those States. Everywhere in the free States the Negro met with barriers to job opportunities, and in most places he encountered severe limitations to the protection of his life, liberty and property.

[Many Republican leaders], like Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, the close friend of Lincoln, found no difficulty in reconciling antislavery with anti-Negro views. “We, the Republican party,” said Senator Trumbull in 1858,” are the white man’s party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor respectable and honorable, which it can never be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it.” [And] William H. Seward, who in 1860 described the American Negro as “a foreign and feeble element like the Indians, incapable of assimilation”; [and], Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, who firmly disavowed any belief “in the mental or intellectual equality of the African race with this proud and domineering race of ours.”

(Seeds of Failure in Radical Race Policy, C. Vann Woodward, New Frontiers of the American Reconstruction, Harold M. Hyman, editor, pp. 125-12”

Lincoln’s endless levies for troops and dwindling enlistments forced him to scour Europe for mercenaries, sending agents with cash and promises of government land to attract military age immigrants. The editor of the Ulster Observer cited below pointed out that the Southern army was full of Irishmen and “asked on what principle the Irish people could leave their homeland to steep their hands in the blood of those who were their kith and kin.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

European Mercenaries for Lincoln

“[T]here had begun to be opposition to the departure of Irishmen from the country by the thousand, a migration greatly aggravated by the economic distress of the island. As early as January, 1862, the Liverpool Reporter observed that for several months young men loaded with gold watches and large bounties had been leaving Ireland, ostensibly to emigrate to America, but actually to serve in the Federal army, for which they were engaged by Northern agents.

An extract from the Ulster Observer of Belfast is typical of the comments appearing in the opposition press:

“We have more respect for our country and our countrymen than to see them wearing the livery of a foreign state in a cause which involves no principle with which they can be identified . . . [but America] cannot, and should not, expect our countrymen to be her mercenaries in the present fratricidal struggle. Already the battlefields are white with the bones of their brethren.  Thousand of Irishmen have, thanklessly, it would appear, laid down their lives for the North . . . and if President Lincoln still stands in need of human hecatombs, he should look elsewhere than to the decimated home of Ireland for the victims.”

In general, it can be stated that the public journals were loud in denouncing “Federal agents” and clamorous for their prosecution and punishment.

” . . . One might say that [Secretary of State] Seward did everything he could to encourage . . . [foreign enlistments] . . . the Homestead Act of May, 1862, which provided free farms to all aliens who had filed declarations of intention to become citizens of the United States. It further provided that foreign-born residents might become full citizens after one years’ residence on condition of honorable service in the army.

By an act approved July 4^th, 1864, the Office of Commissioner of Immigration was created under the Secretary of State; the duties imposed upon him were to gather information as to soil, climate, minerals, agricultural products, wages, transportation, and employment needs. This information was to be disseminated throughout the countries of Europe.”

(Foreigners in the Union Army and Navy, Ella Lonn, LSU Press, 1951, pp. 412-418)

After terrorizing the civilian population of Georgia and South Carolina, the enemy entered North Carolina in early March 1865 to bring the same to its women and children living in their path. Houses were ransacked for anything of value, livestock was taken or killed, and the defenseless were left to starve.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Sherman’s Escaped Fiends from the Lower Regions

“General Sherman was traveling with the Fifteenth Corps on March 8 [1865] when it crossed the line into North Carolina, and that evening both the General and the corps went into camp near Laurel Hill Presbyterian Church, a region his soldiers thought looked “Real northern-like. Small farms and nice white, tidy dwellings.”

General Sherman, still riding with the Fifteenth Corps, took refuge on the night of March 9 from a “terrible storm of rain” in a little Presbyterian church called Bethel. Refusing a bit of carpet one of his staff had improvised into a bed on the pulpit platform, the General stretched himself out on one of the wooden pews for the night. Not far from Bethel Church, at the meeting hall of the Richmond Temperance and Literary Society, could be found another reminder of Sherman’s visit. J.M. Johnson, secretary of the society, entering in the minutes, April 22, 1865:

“After a considerable interruption, caused by the unwelcome visit of Sherman’s thieves, the Society meets again. And, of course, when God’s own house is outraged by the Yankee brutes, temples of morality and science will not be respected.  We find the ornaments of our fair little Hall shattered and ruined; our book shelves empty; the grove strewn with fragments of valuable, precious volumes; the speeches and productions of members who are sleeping in their silent graves, torn and trampled in the mire, “as pearls before the swine.”

“Ye illiterate beasts! Ye children of vice! Ye have not yet demoralized us, Today we marshal our little band again; and with three cheers for Temperance and literature, unfurl our triumphant banner to the breeze.”

A resident of the village of Philadelphus [Robeson county], after passing through “the ordeal of brutal, inhuman and merciless Yankeeism,” wrote: “They visited us in torrents,” and acted like “escaped fiends from the lower regions . . . ”

(The Civil War in North Carolina, John G. Barrett, UNC Press, 1963, pp. 301-302)