Circa1865

The “Big Four” of Central Pacific Railroad fame included Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford, both of New York. While the War Between the States raged in the East, they made a fortune through generous government subsidies usually obtained by bribery or special treatment for Republican Party donors. While that party claimed to be waging war against the American South to eradicate slavery, the government-supported railroad companies used virtual slave labor for construction crews. The railroad crews used white supervisors of Chinese laborers in the same manner as Northern regiments of colored troops were led by white officers.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Chinese Labor for the Central Pacific Railroad    

“Early in January 1865 Crocker’s agents scoured Sacramento, Stockton, and San Francisco for laborers . . . [but many] quit when they had earned enough money to pay stage fare to Virginia City. But children, too, were scarce in the foothills and for months the labor shortage remained acute. In the company’s new San Francisco office [Leland] Stanford . . . petitioned the War Department to send out five thousand Rebel prisoners to be put to work under the guard of a few companies of Union soldiers. But the war ended and the scheme had to be shelved.

A plan of importing, under contract, thousands of peons from Sonora and other Mexican states never got beyond the discussion stage . . . [but another] dubious possibility remained – the lowly Chinese. There were already thousands of them on the Coast . . . crowded into the wretched warrens of a score of “Chinatowns.”

A threatened strike of his white crews proved the deciding point. [Fifty] Chinese were herded on freight cars in the Sacramento yards and hauled to the end of the track. By sunrise they went to work with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. At the end of their first twelve hours of prodding industry Crocker and his engineers viewed the result with gratified astonishment.

Another gang of fifty was hired at once, then a third. Finally all doubt vanished and the Chinatowns of the state were searched for every able-bodied male who could be tempted by the bait of steady work and forty dollars a month.

Of course the white laborers of the Coast resented the affront. To counteract this injury, railroad spokesmen were presently referring to the Chinese as “the Asiatic contingent of the Grand Army of Civilization,” and Stanford was incorporating into company reports long defense for them . . . To charges that the Chinese were held in a state of virtual serfdom by the labor contractors with whom the company dealt, Stanford stated: “No system similar to slavery . . . prevails . . . Their wages . . . Paid in coin at the end of each month, are divided among them by their agents . . . in proportion to the labor done by each . . . These agents are generally American or Chinese merchants, who furnish them with supplies of food, the value of which they deduct monthly . . .”

By the end of 1865 the company was committed to the use of Chinese for most of their labor, and Stanford was hopeful that the force might be increased to fifteen thousand during the coming year. Of course no such supply was available in California . . . [but accordingly] boats from Canton were presently tying up at San Francisco piers, their rails swarming with yellow faces, while labor leaders predicted economic ruin for the Coast and threatened reprisals.

The advent of the Chinese relieved white men of pick and shovel work; many became gang foremen, others were promoted to teamsters, powdermen, or stone-workers. Moreover, the Chinese lived in their own camps, cooked their own meals, and knew their place. Thus the superiority of the Caucasian was undiminished, his dignity enhanced. Harmony reigned in the Sierra canyons and real progress began to be made.”

(The Big Four, The Story of the Building of the Central Pacific, Oscar Lewis, Borzoi Books, 1938, excerpts, pp. 69-72)

Alabamian John Moncure Daniel was appointed charge’ to Sardinia by President Franklin Pierce in July, 1853, a post he would hold until early 1861. His conversation with Jeremiah Black (below) reveals the murky nature of Northern war aims as Black later claimed that slavery abolition was the pure cause of the war, despite his known hostility toward abolition fanatics.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Slavery is But an Accident in this Quarrel

“John Moncure Daniel had one last official duty to perform in Washington: a farewell visit to the Department of State, to which he had reported for almost eight years. His mission to Italy had formally ended on January 28 [1861], when President [James] Buchanan had signed the warrant for his recall.

One day in February Daniel paid a call on the new secretary of state, Jeremiah Black, a Northerner who had taken office only two months earlier, after the resignation of Lewis Cass. Black had been the U.S. attorney general and a successful lawyer in Pennsylvania. Daniel’s great-uncle considered him the ablest member of Buchanan’s cabinet.

Three years after their 1861 meeting, John Daniel recalled that he had expressed Southern sentiments to the new secretary of state. The two had talked about the troubles that were approaching, and Daniel had alluded to the matter of slavery. According to Daniel, Black had replied:

“Sir, slavery is but an accident in this quarrel. Slavery is only the John Doe and Richard Doe case, in which this mooted question is to be decided – whether your States shall continue their sovereignty and self-government, or the Northern majorities shall govern you and all of you as they please and according to their own separate interest. If they had not the point of slavery convenient, they would try it on other points just the same.”

(Pen of Fire, John Moncure Daniel, Peter Bridges, Kent State University Press, 2002, excerpt page 161)

Elihu Root was an attorney, Carnegie institution functionary, served as Secretary of War under McKinley and Roosevelt the First, as well as Secretary of State under the latter. Born in New York in 1845, he witnessed the American South become an economic colony of New England, became a member of the notorious Union League Club and proponent of the income tax and American entry into WWI. Root was an opponent of the Federal Reserve Act. Signed into law by Woodrow Wilson with four gold pens on 23 December 1913, he remarked that the controversial Federal Reserve “measure had suffered many narrow escapes” before reaching his desk.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Ccirca1865.com

Soundest Fiat Note Ever Issued

“On the floor of the Senate the [Federal Reserve] bill encountered heavy opposition. Senator Elihu Root, of New York, led the attack. His remarks were bitter and persistent. Such was Root’s standing that his assaults attracted much attention. The vehement antagonism of Senator Root was based on the charge that inflation and “fiat” money were at the center of the proposed system.

“The American people,” he argued, “closed the case for and against inflation . . . when they sustained the vote of the inflation bill by President Grant in 1874. Coming into power, the Democratic Party undertakes to reserve the oft-repeated judgment of the people of the United States upon this question. We are setting our steps now in the pathway which through the protection of a paternal government brought the mighty power of Rome to its fall. And we are doing it here without a mandate from the people of the United States.”

Defenders of the bill admitted that it was true that the Federal Reserve note was not, strictly speaking, a “Government” note, but contended that it was quite obvious that it was not “fiat” money. On the contrary, it was a sound bank note, secured by a forty percent gold reserve, a lien on the issuing bank and its stock, and by the Federal Government itself. There was little or no need for the Government obligation, it was held, but for the sake of safety and William Jennings Bryan, it was there.

The Senate paid little attention to the admonition of Senator Root. In fact, it actually enlarged the inflationary features of the bill. [They] deplored the fact that a statesman of Senator Root’s international reputation should have seized upon a politician’s catch phrase and denounced as “fiat” money the soundest note ever issued.”

(Carter Glass, Unreconstructed Rebel, James E. Palmer, Jr., Institute of American Biography, 1938, pp. 100-102)

There were two clear-cut factions within the Republican Party in North Carolina in the early 1900s: one which supported industrial development, and the more dominant one whose primary interest was in the spoils of office with one political aim – the holding of a Federal job. As Secretary of War William H. Taft relates below, the entire Federal service in North Carolina was controlled by “a distant appointing power.” The author writes of “Revenue officials, often openly and unblushingly corrupt, almost alone had the ear of the Federal administration and dominated Federal politics in the State. The people could not forget that the Federal government had forced Negro rule on them at the point of the bayonet, nor that every Democratic victory for years had been accompanied by a threat of Federal interference in State elections.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Reconstruction’s Long Life in North Carolina

“The chief interest in State politics in 1906 centers in the fight within the Republican party for control of the organization. So bitter did the fight become that President [Theodore] Roosevelt felt called upon to take a hand. He sent his secretary of war, William H. Taft, to address a warning to the State Republican convention which met in Greensboro, July 9-10, and it was in this speech that Secretary Taft said:

“I do not wish to seem ungracious, but I must be candid. In my judgement the Republican Party in North Carolina would be much stronger as a voting party, if all the Federal officers were filled by Democrats. Of course I cannot deny that a wish to fill public office is an honorable aspiration, whether by appointment of by election, but when all hope of choice by the people is abandoned, and everything is given over to influencing a distant appointing power to choose particular men to perform official functions in a community hostile to those men, the result is not good for the men or the community . . . As long, however, as the Republican Party in the Southern States shall represent little save a factional chase for Federal offices in which business men of substance in the community have no desire to enter and in the result of which they have no interest, we may expect the present political conditions in the South to continue.” [Raleigh News & Observer, July 10, 1906]

The warning of Candidate Taft fell upon deaf ears . . . [and] Thus the Republican party in North Carolina specifically acknowledged itself to be an organization merely for the control of Federal patronage.”

(Republican Office Holders Refuse to Abdicate; North Carolina, Rebuilding an Ancient Commonwealth, 1584-1925, R.D.W. Conner, Volume II, American Historical Society, 1929, pg. 527)

Lincoln’s war not only destroyed the Southern economy and impoverished the region, but also became a vehicle for New England’s commercial colonization of the South. This status persisted through FDR’s first term as he recognized the South as America’s number one economic problem and used Democrat Party patronage and power to keep the region in bondage. The North continued tales of “Southern outrages” from Reconstruction days, and Presidential candidate George Wallace noted in 1968 that Northern editors would always refer to racial incidents in the South as “race riots,” while the same in the North were labeled “civil disturbances.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Postwar South Ruled by Genial, Patronizing Viceroys

“The manufacturers and distributors of the North and various adjunct agencies are bleeding the South white. The same may be said of a very large part of Southern industries, owned, as has been observed, in the North and operated by local overseers.

To a great extent the region is controlled by the absentee owners through their overseers and retainer agents. These agents are the symbols of success in the South and the paragons of social life. Their mansions stand on a thousand hills. It is good to wine and dine with these genial, if patronizing, viceroys. The absentee overlords retain the best legal talent to help them with their battles in the courts and the legislatures. Other types of influential persons, good public relations men and lobbyists, are also retained. Some of their retainers are always member of the legislatures. By selling some stock locally they raise up other friends and defenders.

Small wonder, then, that the corporations have exercised a large influence over law-making in the Southern States. Too often they have been able to defeat measures objectionable to them especially tax measures – and to promote those favorable to them. Too often they have not been willing to pay their fair part of the cost of public services or a fair wage to their employees.

Such industries are of questionable value to a community. The South has advertised its cheap labor, and industrialists from the North have tried to keep it so. There are other differentials against the South, already noted, that have also been a factor in the lower wage scales of Southern industry.

The absentee masters of Southern industry and the chain store magnates are interested in profits and not in the welfare of the South. This is natural, but it illustrates a fundamental weakness in an industrial system based on outside capital. It would seem that those who gather their wealth from the South might reasonably be expected to give some of their educational benefactions to higher education in the South.

But their gifts have generally gone to northern institutions that are already rich compared with those in the South. Their contributions to cultural development, whether in the form of gifts or taxes, go largely to the North.

The North has not only held the South in colonial bondage, but it has been very critical of the South, even for conditions that inhere in such an economic status. It is doubtful if the British ever had a more superior and intolerant attitude toward the American colonists.

The “Southern outrages” complex, fomented by Radical politicians in the old Reconstruction days, has persisted. Incidents that have escaped editorial eyes if they happened in the North have been denounced as outrages if they occurred in the South. A public lynching in a well-known western State a few years ago did not evoke nearly as much condemnation as does the lynching of a Negro by a clandestine mob in the South.

The people of the North are not denounced as being crude and barbarous because of the persistent activities of murderous bands of racketeers in large northern cities.”

(One Hundred Years of Reconstruction, Albert B. Moore, 1943, Southern Historical Society Addresses; Journal of Southern History, 9, 1943, excerpts, pp. 159-164)

Newspaper editor William Watts Ball of South Carolina could painted a vivid picture of life in the postwar South, and railed at the “foreign poison of democracy” injected into his State by Northern radicals. The Founders’ erected barriers to democracy in their Constitution; historian Charles Beard tells us that “When the Constitution was framed, no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat.” John C. Calhoun’s greatest fear was that democracy in the United States would evolve into a class warfare system with taxpayers perpetually looted by the tax consuming class. Alexis de Tocqueville also noted the evil powers of this “strange new democratic monster with its tyranny of public opinion and numerical majority dwelling in perpetual self-applause.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

South Carolina Injected with a Foreign Poison

“The State That Forgot” is a historical sketch of South Carolina from colonial days to the turn of the twentieth century, generously adorned with “local color” and autobiographical anecdotes. But the heart is [W.W.] Ball’s political philosophy; everything else is embellishment. South Carolina had surrendered to democracy, he said, and as surrender implies defeat, so had she induced her own decline when rule by the aristocracy gave way to rule by the masses. Ball traced the democratic curse back to Reconstruction:

“My political thesis is that the Federal Government, by means of armed forces, placed South Carolina on the operating table in 1867, that in 1868 the Carpetbaggers made an incision in its body, and, by the constitution they adopted, injected into it the deadly and foreign poison of democracy, which, after causing the loathsome ulcers of Reconstruction, subtly spread through the bloodstream of the white people and killed for ever in it the inherited corpuscles of political and social health.”

“The new constitution,” said Ball, was a long step but not a plunge in democracy.” The State had not spurned the colonial constitution fashioned along semi-feudal lines by John Locke. “A more “numerous democracy” had been made but a “too numerous democracy” had been avoided.

South Carolina, however, was forced to scrap that constitution and devise another which would better satisfy the [Northern Republican] Radicals who had taken control of the federal Reconstruction program. Accordingly, a convention composed almost entirely of carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Negroes fashioned the constitution of 1868. Ball appraised the new constitution with these words:

“The finished product of the convention was a document copied from constitutions of Northern States . . . [T]hus at last the rash of democracy was spread by law, backed by bayonets, over the body of South Carolina . . .”

(Damned Upcountryman: William Watts Ball, John D. Stark, Duke University Press, 1968, pp. 144-146)

The antebellum North received the bulk of immigrants from Europe – and these immigrants avoided the South as black men were trained in various trades and dominated the labor force. The Republican Party of Lincoln was not anti-slavery – it wanted to confine blacks to the South and open the West to immigrant labor, and Republican votes. The aftermath of war saw the North’s notorious Union League organization mobilize black voters and turn them against their white neighbors for bare political purposes. Grant’s 1868 election over Horatio Seymour was due to a majority of 300,000 votes – and thanks to 500,000 recently-enfranchised Negroes.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

South’s Postwar Labor Problem

“Since the first settlement of this country the great need of the South has been men. We want settlers, honest, industrious, home-seeking immigrants, and I do not believe any country can offer inducements greater than those presented by the South. We expect hundreds of thousands in the next few years from less favored sections of the Union, but we want also high-class foreigners. The Negro in the South has been our chief reliance for hired labor, but they are yearly becoming more uncertain and unreliable and worthless.

Slavery was the greatest manual, moral and intellectual training school for a weak and depraved race that history has ever known. Before the war the Negro was the main agricultural laborer. There were four million slaves, probably half of them laborers. At the same time were engaged in agricultural labor 803,052 white laborers and 215,968 white laborers in the other occupations of the South.

The Negro in slavery was kindly treated. His great pecuniary value, rising from $1000 to $1,800 just before the war, was in itself a bond for the “best moral and material care” and he was devoted to his master. History presents no parallel to his fidelity during the Civil War, as it was necessary for the enemy actually to occupy our territory before the slaves could be persuaded to leave their masters.

Since the war the South has spent hundreds of millions upon asylums, hospitals and schools for them. The average young Negro is indisposed to labor, indolent, thievish and inclined to be insolent, and as the older heads of the race die out it seems that we must be forced to substitute other laborers for them.

The South is the Negro’s best friend. When he remains with us, observes the unwritten law of the land and is willing to labor for a living, we welcome him.”

(Annual Agricultural Resources and Opportunities of the South, J. Bryan Grimes, Farmers’ National Congress speech, 1901, pp. 15-16)

Contrary to mainstream belief, Lincoln and his Republican Party demonstrated no interest in preserving the Union and regularly spurned peace initiatives. Those who wanted to resort to the United States Constitution for a solution to the intense sectionalism in both North and South, saw a convention of the States as the method provided by the Founders. As in the peace overture noted below, all efforts to end the bloodshed of Lincoln’s war originated in the South, and all ended in failure due to Lincoln’s intransigence.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The South Seeks a Convention of the States

“As early as February, 1863, it was rumored that [South Carolina Representative William W. Boyce] had been advocating in secret session of the [Confederate] House [of Representatives] some form of conciliation with the Northwestern States.

When the Democratic convention, meeting at Chicago August 29, 1864, adopted a platform declaring that efforts should be made immediately for a cessation of hostilities and that a convention of the States be employed to restore peace “on the basis of the Federal union of the States,” Boyce addressed an open letter to President [Jefferson] Davis urging him to declare his willingness for an armistice and such a convention that Northwestern Democrats proposed.

In his letter of September 29 Boyce argued that a republic at war inevitably drifted into despotism . . . [through] conscription, illegally laid direct taxes, [issuing] vast quantities of paper money . . . suspended the writ of habeas corpus . . . in short, [giving] the President all the powers of a military dictator.

Nor would the evils necessarily end with the war; that would depend on the nature of the peace. “A peace without reconciliation carried in its bosom the seed of new wars.”   A peace without harmony would be a mere armed truce. Such a peace would cause the North to develop a great military power and the South would be forced to do likewise. There would then be two opposing military despotisms under which republican institutions would permanently perish.

To prevent such an outcome a peace of harmony must be negotiated with the United States. In bringing this to pass a successful military policy was essential but it was not enough; it must be accompanied by a political policy, a political policy which could not succeed if Lincoln, representing the fanaticism of the North, were returned to the White House.

The South’s only hope for a satisfactory peace, therefore, lay in the victory [in November 1864] of the Northern Democratic Party which should be encouraged in every possible way. [Boyce’s advice was to] . . . Assure [Northern Democrats] of the South’s willingness to cooperate in a convention of the States, and let South cooperate even if an amendment of the Constitution be necessary for that purpose. Such a convention would be the “highest acknowledgment” of State rights principles.”

(South Carolina Goes to War, Charles Edward Cauthen, University of South Carolina Press, 1950, 1860-1865, excerpts, pp. 217-218)

That Lincoln and his abolitionist colleagues did not propose a peaceful and practical to the African slavery they seemed to object to, is a national tragedy. Had they followed compensated emancipation as the British had done earlier (the British were primarily responsible for populating their American colonies with Africans), or helped advance a reasonable solution to the need for large numbers of workers to support their agricultural economy, a million lives would have been spared as well as the death, destruction and tortured legacy of the war Lincoln was responsible for.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Southern Christianity and Slavery

“ . . . Southern [slavery] reformers cast much blame on the Northern Abolitionist movement. They constantly complained that it was difficult to persuade planters that they should be teaching their slaves to read when the Abolitionists were sparing no effort in smuggling into the Southern States inflammatory literature which urged the slaves to rise up and slit their masters’ throats, among other things.

The palpable hostility and antagonism displayed by the Abolitionists toward the white South, their calls for a bloody slave rebellion, and their unrealistic demands for immediate and unconditional emancipation made slavery reform more difficult by producing resentment, fear, and a siege mentality among the whites.

[Many] Northerners (including Sen. Daniel Webster, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, and Princeton theologian Charles Hodge) condemned the Abolitionists for actually worsening the plight of the slaves and for creating hostility and distrust between the Northern and Southern people.

[It] is at least possible that an independent South might have enacted the reforms urged by her Christian leaders and thus avoided falling into a state of economic backwardness and dependency.  After all, Southerners consistently valued such non-monetary goods as country living, personal independence and liberty, and an harmonious and rich social life at least as much as mere wealth and material accumulation; and independence [from the North] might have created a more favorable environment for Christian reform of their labor system.

Southerners might have introduced a smaller and more humanely scaled industrialization to provide some measure of industrial self-sufficiency, and black Southerners might eventually have achieved legal equality and propertied independence.  In other words, an independent South could well have found an alternate – and perhaps more Christian – path to modernity.  Thanks to Mr. Lincoln, we shall never know.”

(Christianity and Slavery in the Old South, excerpt, H. Arthur Scott Trask, Chronicles Magazine, July 1999, page 33)

Prussian Major Heros von Borcke accompanied Gen. JEB Stuart as the latter observed Northern soldiers burying their dead after Burnside’s disaster at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Von Borcke expressed shock at the rough manner in which Northern soldiers handled their dead, watching corpses being tossed into a nearby abandoned ice house pit “until the solid mass of human flesh had reached near the surface, when a covering of logs, chalk and mud closed the mouth of this vast and awful tomb.” To the Prussian officer, it seemed as if the Federal were more interested in doing the job quickly than doing it well. Had he been appalled at the carnage in late 1862 as Americans slaughtered each other, Lincoln might have called for an armistice and peaceful settlement of the conflict.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Northern Tomb at Fredericksburg

“On December 15, 1862, two days after Fredericksburg, [Gen. Ambrose] Burnside, his units having crossed back across the Rappahannock, asked Lee’s permission to remove his dead from the battlefield. The manner in which they performed their duties caused many of Lee’s soldiers to believe that what they were seeing before their eyes revealed another seamy side of the Yankee character, by their treating their fallen comrades, “these brave soldiers,” as one Gray observer termed them, like so many lumps of inert matter, dumping them into common graves “without even a blanket or words of prayer.”

Different in appearance but representing the same lack of feeling was an abandoned ice house, which the grave diggers converted into a “vast and awful tomb.” (Opened months later it revealed within a ghastly “hecatomb of skeletons.”)

These acts of desecration completed, the bulk of the Northerners disappeared, their pickets on the north side of the river about the only evidence of their presence nearby.”

(wha hae wi [Pender] . . . bled, A.L. Diket, Vantage Press, 1979, excerpt, pg. 106)