Circa1865

Lincoln was not the first to invoke an emancipation of slaves in the South for the purpose of carrying off his enemy’s agricultural labor and inciting a bloody race war – Virginia’s Royal Governor Lord Dunmore did this in 1775 and Rear Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane the same in 1814. As enlistments for his war machine had virtually ceased after the carnage of 1862, Lincoln saw more blue-clad troops in slaves carried off from their Southern plantation homes.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lincoln’s Instrument of Subjugation

“Lincoln had laid aside his [emancipation] proclamation waiting for a victory. He waited two months, meanwhile giving out public statements based on his previous noncommittal attitude [regarding African slavery]; then on September 22, after Lee’s invasion had been foiled at [Sharpsburg], he issued the preliminary proclamation.

That this proclamation was far from an abolition document is shown by a careful reading of its provisions. The President began by reiterating that the purpose of the war was the restoration of the Union and reaffirming his intention still to labor for compensated emancipation. He then declared that on January 1, 1863, slaves in rebellious States should be “then, thenceforward, and forever free” . . .

The proclamation was not expressive of any general antislavery policy. On January 1, 1863, the definitive proclamation was issued, its chief provision being that in regions then designated as “in rebellion,” (with certain notable exceptions) all slaves were declared free. [But] the stereotyped picture of the emancipator suddenly striking the shackles from millions of slaves by a stroke of the presidential pen is altogether inaccurate.

The whole State of Tennessee was omitted [from the proclamation]; none of the Union slave States was included; and there were important exceptions as to portions of Virginia and Louisiana, those being portions within Union military lines. In fact freedom was decreed only in regions then under Confederate control.

“The President has purposely made the proclamation inoperative [declared the New York World] in all places where we have gained a military footing which makes the slaves accessible. He has proclaimed emancipation only where he has notoriously no power to execute it. The exemption of the accessible parts of Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia renders the proclamation not merely futile, but ridiculous.

The proclamation is issued as a war measure, as an instrument for the subjugation of the rebels. But that cannot be a means of military success which presupposes this same . . . success as the condition of its own existence . . . A war measure it clearly is not, inasmuch as the previous success of the war is the thing that can give it validity.”

“We show our sympathy with slavery, [Secretary of State William] Seward is reported to have said, “by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.”

The London Spectator declared (October 11, 1862): “The government liberates the enemy’s slaves as it would the enemy’s cattle, simply to weaken them in the . . . conflict . . . The principle is not that a human being cannot justify owning another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

Earl Russell in England declared: “The Proclamation . . . appears to be of a very strange nature. It professes to emancipate all slaves in places where the United States authorities cannot exercise any jurisdiction . . . but it does not decree emancipation . . . in any States, or parts of States, occupied by federal troops . . . and where, therefore, emancipation . . . might have been carried into effect . . . There seems to be no declaration of a principle adverse to slavery in this proclamation.”

It will be noted that Lincoln justified his act as a measure of war. To uphold his view would be to maintain that the freeing of enemy slaves was a legitimate weapon of war to be wielded by the President . . . [and] in the new attitude toward slavery which the war produced [in the North] it was natural to find considerable support for the view that slavery was a legitimate target o the war power [of the President]; but it is a matter of plain history that prior to the Civil War the United States had emphatically denied the “belligerent right” of emancipation.

Indeed, John Quincy Adams, who has been credited by his grandson [Charles Francis Adams] with having originated the idea of the emancipation proclamation, declared officially while secretary of state in 1820 that “No such right [emancipation of slaves] is acknowledged as a Law of War by writers who admit any limitation.”

To Lincoln’s mind the war emergency justified things normally unconstitutional. “I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional,” he said, “might become lawful by becoming indispensible to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction, J.G. Randall, D.C. Heath and Company, 1937, pp. 489-493)

Today’s progressive religion of empathy with oppressed peoples worldwide emulates that of the antebellum abolitionist, who expressed deep concern with people he had never met, could not understand, and whose world was alien to him. To salve their own guilt and difficult grasp of reality, the abolitionist fomented a bloody conflict which unleashed forces no one could control, and an oppressive result we live with today.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Emancipation Regardless of Consequences

“Most Northerners before the Civil War, and indeed many slaveholders, were “against” slavery.” The abolitionists recognized also that they must continually reinforce their own commitment to their cause. The frequent meetings and intra-group journals of any movement for change serve an indispensable function even when they repeatedly pass the same resolutions and proclaim familiar truths to the already committed.

The twin tasks of refreshing the commitment of abolitionists and of converting outsiders’ passive disapproval of slavery into active opposition differed only in emphasis, especially after the movement had grown from a handful of pioneers into a network of societies with thousands of members.

In propaganda aimed at both groups, the abolitionists relied heavily on the same arguments: among others, that slavery denied the humanity of the Negro and prevented the slave from having normal family relations and religious life, that the North shared the slaveowners’ guilt, that absolute power of one individual over another encourages atrocities, that slavery was responsible for the degraded condition of Northern free Negroes . . . ”

[William Lloyd Garrison] deliberately [pictured] himself in the place of the oppressed. On the first anniversary of his marriage, he wrote to his brother-in-law describing his happiness and extolling the institution of marriage; and he added, how horrible it would be if he and Helen were slaves and were separated by sale. All the more reason, then, to rededicate his life to the abolition of slavery.

This theme, which for convenience will be referred to as “empathy,” appears repeatedly in abolitionists’ private discourse and public propaganda, in exhortations among themselves to increase their zeal and in efforts to induce complacent whites to imagine themselves in the place of the slaves.

But the abolitionist movement comprised mainly white men and women, most of whom had never been in the South. The empathy theme can thus be seen, perhaps, as a substitute for direct involvement in the suffering that movement was dedicated to end. It appeared in other forms as well. When Abby Kelley Foster was asked how she could leave her baby with others, to travel the abolitionist lecture circuit, she replied, “For the sake of the mothers who are robbed of all their children.” Beriah Green . . . [said]: You can act as if you felt that you were bound with those who are in bonds, as if their cause was all your own . . .”

Abolitionist propaganda reiterated that Northern whites were in fact indirectly “bound with” the slaves. Paradoxically, the North was not only an accessory to the enslavement of the Negroes; it was at the same time a secondary victim of the slaveowners. With their strong religious motive for proclaiming the duty of emancipation regardless of the consequences, the abolitionists could not in good conscious appeal to the North solely or chiefly on the basis of interest.

The empathy theme enabled them in a remarkable way to combine interest with principle, for if a Northern white could be made to feel bound with the slave he would fight the slave power to defend himself, as Beriah Green suggested, as well as to exculpate himself. To free the slave would be to free himself of both guilt and bondage; the two motives would become one.”

(Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, Aileen S. Kraditor, Pantheon Books, 1967, pp. 235-238)

With his war bankrupting the national treasury and consuming available gold reserves, Lincoln’s solution was to create a national banking system controlled from Washington, claiming military necessity as the reason for printing paper currency of questionable value and legality. Radical Ohio Senator John Sherman knew national banking “would centralize power in Washington” and he urged congressional colleagues to “nationalize as much as possible,” even the currency, so as to “make men love their country before their States.” All private interests, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything, should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Revolutionary War Financing Precedes the Federal Reserve

“At the time of the Civil War the [United States did not have a nationalized] system of banking and banknote currency, and one of the important matters of [Northern] war finance was the creation of such a system.

“[Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase] . . . in his report of December, 1862 . . . outlined his plan for national banks and national bank currency. What Chase proposed was a system of national banking associations under Federal supervision, which would issue bank notes based upon United States bonds and guaranteed by the Federal government.

It became law on February 25, 1863; but this law had certain defects, so that Congress faced the whole problem afresh and reframed the statute. It is therefore to the law of June 3, 1864, that one must turn for the legislative basis of the national banking system as it emerged from the Civil War. Other provisions of the act were concerned with the maintenance of a required reserve against both banknotes and deposits; the depositing of such reserve in “reserve cities” (which permitted the concentration of bankers’ funds in New York City); . . . and the use of banks as depositaries and financial agents for the government.

As a method of stimulating, or rather forcing, the sale of United States bonds, the national bank act became an essential feature of Civil War finance. After the war (1866) a tax was placed on State banknotes in order to tax them out of existence, so that national banks possessed a monopoly of banknote currency.

To think of the national banking system as a purely fiscal measure innocent of politics and free from exploitation would indeed be a naïve assumption. Investigation shows that it soon “developed into something that was neither national nor a banking system.

Instead it was a loose organization of currency factories designed to . . . [serve] commercial communities and confined…almost entirely to the New England and Middle Atlantic States.” One of the chief injustices of the system as actually administered was the favoritism shown after the war to the eastern States which received the lion’s share of the $300,000,000 of banknote circulation assigned by law as the maximum for the whole country.

As explained by George LaVerne Anderson, each State in the New England and Middle Atlantic regions obtained an amount of banknotes in excess of its quota, while not a State in the South received an amount equal to its quota.

“Massachusetts (writes Anderson) received the circulation which would have been necessary to raise Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas to their legal quotas . . . The little State of Connecticut had more national bank circulation than Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee . . . Massachusetts had more than the rest of the Union exclusive of New England and Middle Atlantic States.

[An] interesting comparison [he continues] can be made between comparatively small New England towns and the Southern States. Thus Woonsocket, Rhode Island, had more national bank circulation than North and South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas; Waterville, Maine, had nearly as much as Alabama; New Haven, Connecticut, had more than any single Southern State.

If it be said in answer to these facts that distributing according to population is absurd . . . it should be kept in mind that not a single Southern State had obtained, by October 1869, its legal share of the $150,000,000 which was to have been apportioned according to existing banking capital, wealth and resources.”

With some modification [this] national banking system continued for half a century. Though it had some merit, it created an inelastic currency, tended toward the concentration of bank resources in New York, opened the way for serious abuse in the speculative exploitation of bank funds, and contributed to the sharp financial flurry of 1907. Proving inadequate as a nationwide control of currency and banking, it was tardily superseded by an improved plan in the federal reserve act of 1913.”

The Civil War and Reconstruction, J.G. Randall, D.C. Heath and Company, 1937, pp. 455-458)

Crucial to the success of Lincoln’s creation of fiat money and bond-sales was master publicist and financier Jay Cooke. The latter “subsidized editors and columnists of most of the important papers of the nation” whose journalists were still receiving bribes from him when he pushed for bond redemption in gold. At the end of the war, Cooke worked hard to convince the Northern populace that their onerous debt was justified and “His efforts were supplemented by the Loyal Publications League, which was resuscitated in 1868 in order “to spread throughout the country correct views upon the subject of taxation and currency.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Radical Ideology Printed on “Lincoln Green”

“The cruel quandary which the effort to rein in the lower classes created for radicalism became enmeshed in the debate over the greenback currency. Despite all its complexities, the currency question typified the fate of Radical doctrines, for here the Republican party repudiated its own radical handiwork.

Both the plan for a managed fiat currency and the rhetoric subsequently used in its defense were the offspring of the Radical wing of the Republican party. The legal tender bill was taken up by Congress at the end of 1861 because gold loans floated by the Treasury had exhausted the coin supply of the banks and forced them to suspend specie payments.

The Union was confronted by the prospect of runaway bank-note inflation and the sale of bonds below par value, either of which would have raised the cost of prosecuting the war toward a prohibitive level. At this juncture, Elbridge Spaulding, a Buffalo banker and Republican congressman, proposed a solution in defiance of the national traditions of States’ rights, hard money, and bank control of currency: that the federal government should issue its own interest-free notes receivable for all public dues and legal tender for all private transactions.

The value of these notes was to be stabilized by permitting their conversion into government bonds bearing 6 per cent interest, which were payable in five years and redeemable in twenty, commonly known as 5-20s’.

This majestically simple scheme met with furious opposition from the Democrats and many bankers. Pendleton, Vallandigham, Conkling and Justin Morill stood shoulder to shoulder against the bill; but its Radical supporters, led by Thaddeus Stevens, enlisted enough Conservative (and even banker) support for the scheme as a temporary war measure for it to pass the House 93 to 59. Senate opponents were strong enough to graft on an amendment providing for payment of interest on the 5-20 bonds in coin.

This action created the problem of how to raise the promised gold. [but compromise established a dual-currency system]: gold for the importer [tariffs] and bond-holder, greenbacks for everyday domestic purposes.

As the war continued and governmental needs for borrowed funds soared, both the currency supply and the debt structure grew ever more complex. By the war’s end the country was faced with rampant inflation, constant manipulation of gold prices by speculators, a morass of different bond issues, and four major forms of currency – greenbacks, specie, national bank notes, and State bank notes. The task of unraveling the mess fell on Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch . . . [and] with authority granted by Congress in March 1866, [he] initiated a steady withdrawal of greenbacks from circulation, and redemption of short-term notes.

[A] bill introduced by Robert Schenck to force a halt to the Treasury’s contraction policy enlisted the support not only of Stevens, Butler and Logan, but also Senator Sherman and Jay Cooke, and of numerous Democrats. The measure swept the House by a vote of 127 to 14, and in the Senate only four Conservative Republicans voted against it. The Conservative economic program had been thoroughly defeated.

Hard money advocates characterized their own position as scientifically sound and moral, and that of their [fiat money] foes as demagogic and dishonest. Speaking for Spaulding’s bill in 1862, Henry Wilson had described the debate as “a contest between brokers and jobbers, and moneychangers on the one side, and the people of the United States on the other.”

Not to be outdone, John Bingham charged the bill’s foes with misconstruing the Constitution for “the purpose of denationalizing the people . . . [and stripping] the power of the people over their monetary interests in this hour of national exigency.”

Here was the Radical ideology in its purest form, printed, as it were, on bills of “Lincoln green.” Understandably, Henry Carey attributed both the economic vigor and the patriotic spirit of the nation to protection and greenbacks . . . Thaddeus Stevens [had] judged the whole national banking system as a “mistake,” [and] declared: “Every dollar of paper [money] in circulation ought to be issued by the Government of the United States.” [Republican editor Benjamin Bannon of Pennsylvania] devised a scheme for the circulation of greenbacks as the exclusive currency of the nation, with national banks serving as distribution centers only.

From the tariff of 1846 until the Republican legislative triumphs of 1862, Bannan argued, nonproductive capital had ruled the land, and now it was again “striving to gain the ascendancy.”

(Beyond Equality, Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872, David Montgomery, University of Illinois Press, 1981, pp. 340-345)

The vigilante justice of lynching was not confined to the South as is commonly believed, and race relations in the North, before and after the war, were not as harmonious as abolitionists and accounts of the mythical underground railroad claimed.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865

Rochester’s Spirit of Hate

“After his Rochester, New York, home was burned to the ground by incendiary on June 1, 1872, Frederick Douglass expressed his anger in his weekly New National Era: “Was it for plunder, or was it for spite? One thing I do know and that is, while Rochester is among the most liberal of Northern cities, and its people are among the most humane and highly civilized, it nevertheless has its full share of the Ku-Klux spirit . . . It is the spirit of hate, the spirit of murder.”

Race relations were often contentious in Rochester due in part to Douglass’s strong civil rights voice. By 1870, although Rochester’s African-American population was minute – just 427 out of a total population of 62,386 – racial tension, especially over employment, prompted concern by whites.

On Saturday, December 30, 1871, the [Rochester Daily] Union’s third edition published the city’s first report of the rape of an eight-year-old German girl by a black man after she had returned from a church event. News of the crime “spread like wild fire” after the child was returned to her parents. She had been brutally beaten but described her attacker to the police who began a frantic search for him.

Early Monday morning officers arrested William Edward Howard, and he was identified as the rapist by the girl at her home. Her father later “apologized to [a] reporter for not having killed the Negro when he was in the house.” Howard was not a stranger to the city’s police. In early 1871, he was arrested for voting illegally, and he served six months in jail. At the time of his arrest for rape, there was a warrant for his arrest for stealing from a local German woman.

Douglass’s son, Charles, who worked with his father on New National Era, wrote to his father on January 20: “That Howard boy was in my company in the 5^th Cavalry. He came to the regiment as a [paid] substitute, and asked to be in my Co. I had to tie him up by the thumbs quite often. His offence was stealing.”

Outside the jail an agitated mob assembled . . . composed mainly of Germans, was intent on taking the law into its own hands, and the jail became Howard’s fortress. The [Rochester Daily] Union’s reportage was most descriptive: “Threats were made to lynch him and matters looked serious . . . four or five hundred people in the assemblage . . . [and cries of] “kill the nigger, give us the nigger” were loud and frequent.” [Judge R. Darwin Smith pronounced] “The sentence of the Court is that you be confined to Auburn State Prison for the period of twenty years at hard labor. The law formerly punished your crime with death.”

At the prison entrance, Howard turned toward [an angry crowd of several hundred men] and with his free hand placed his thumb on his nose and waved his fingers to mock them. Once in jail, Howard renounced his guilty plea, and professed his innocence.”

(The Spirit of Hate and Frederick Douglass, Richard H. White, Civil War History, A Journal of the Middle Period, Volume 46, Number 1, March 2000, pp. 41-47)

In colonial Fairfield, Connecticut, free and slave Africans worked the ships that delivered New England rum and Yankee notions to Africa — traded to African slave traders for more slaves. Towns like Fairfield grew affluent producing goods, barrel staves, foodstuffs and trinkets for the West Indies, where the majority of the slaves acquired would end up. As a young man Frederick Douglass worked the Baltimore shipyards helping to build fast slavers for New England merchants for the same purpose.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Connecticut and the Slave Trade

“Connecticut conducted another census in 1774. With a population of 4863, Fairfield was the eleventh largest town in Connecticut in 1774. The 4863 persons included 4544 whites and 319 blacks, giving Fairfield the highest percentage of black population in the colony. Fairfield’s growing trade encouraged the growth of its black population. Approximately three out of every four blacks in Fairfield in the 1770’s were slaves. Most of them were men who worked as laborers or household servants; a smaller number of women were household servants; and even a smaller number were children.

Most slaves were denied the pleasure of residing, with or without the benefit of marriage, with a member of the opposite sex. Captain David Judson owned a married couple and their child, but more typical was Hezekiah Gold, who owned four men, “a wench,” a young man, and two boys. Slavery was a luxury that Fairfield came to afford as it became more affluent.  Most free blacks in Fairfield worked as laborers, either on the docks or on board ship.”

(Fairfield, The Biography of a Community, Thomas J. Farnham, Fairfield Historical Society, 1988, pp. 71-72)

An irony of history has the doctrine of secession originating in the South when it was first advanced by New England over the issue of Louisiana’s admission to Statehood. Jefferson and Madison, both Southerners, opposed secession; New England Federalists demanded it.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

New England Federalist Secession Doctrine

“The final political phenomenon to arise out of the North-South competition of the 1790s was the doctrine of Secession. It represented the death rattle of the Federalist party. The pivotal year was 1800 when the Democratic leaders Jefferson and Burr succeeded in putting together a coalition of the have-nots of the country – the agriculturalists of the South and the proletarians of the Northern cities. They won control of the nation.

The Federalist party survived another sixteen years, although it never again won control of the House, Senate or presidency. It did not take defeat well.

Barely three years after the Democratic rout, Northern Federalists began arguing for the secession of the New England States from the Union. There was nothing understated about their secessionist position. It was widespread, and if it could not be done peaceably, they said, it should be done violently.

Listen to one of the many secessionists, Josiah Quincy III, scion of the New England Quincy’s, future mayor of Boston and future president of Harvard University. In 1811 he was a thirty-eight-year-old congressman standing opposed to the admission of Louisiana as a State:

“It is my deliberate opinion,” he said, “that if this bill passes, the bonds of this union are virtually dissolved, that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations, and that as it will be the right of all, so it will be the duty of some to prepare, definitely, for a separation; amicably if they can; violently if they must.”

One man who listened carefully that year was a freshman congressman from South Carolina. He was John C. Calhoun, who had been taught the secessionist doctrine in the law schools of New England, who had listened to it in the Congress, and who would one day carry it back down South . . . . Meanwhile, it is an unfair stroke that history has identified the South with secession when in fact the earliest and clearest arguments against it were proposed by Jefferson and Madison.

The creators of secession doctrine, and the teachers of it from 1800 to 1817, were New England Federalists.”

(The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians, A Revisionist History, David Leon Chandler, Doubleday & Company, 1977, pp. 114-116)

Marylander Reverdy Johnson defended Mary Surratt in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy trial, argued that his client and others charged were civilians, and that the military commission Judge Advocate John A. Bingham convened had no jurisdiction – but to no avail. Major Bingham was a Pennsylvanian and Radical Republican appointed by Lincoln. In contrast to Bingham, Alexander H. Stephens and Jefferson Davis were the ablest constitutional scholars in the country.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The Life and Soul of the United States Government

“Read Judge Advocate Bingham’s argument before the Military Commission in Washington in reply to Hon. Reverdy Johnson. It is rhetorical sophistry, specious and plausible to the careless and uninformed reader; but it is utterly fallacious. It affects me in nothing so much as in the sadness it produces when I view it as but an additional evidence that Power, in its incipient and dangerous strides in trampling on the liberties of a country, is never wanting in able and brilliant advocates and defenders.

[Bingham’s] main ground, [is] that the Constitution . . . is intended and made for peace only and not for war, is fundamentally wrong. The Constitution was made for war as well as peace. To the various questions put by the Judge Advocate: Whether in war, men are not slain, prisoners captured, property taken, all without due process of law; the answer is, that they are not; no more than a man who, in peace, puts himself in defiance of the law officers, and is shot down by the sheriff or his posse: that is due process of law in such case. So in war.

In the cases of rebellion and insurrection, the only military forces known to the Constitution are such as are called out in the nature and character of the posse comitatus. For their government, when so called out, laws are made, as well as for the government of such permanent force as may be kept on hand. What a soldier rightfully does in taking life in battle he does according to law prescribed, and orders given in accordance with that law.

No soldiers, even in war, can be rightfully quartered on any man’s premises except in accordance with law previously described. This is an express provision of the Constitution. The idea that the Constitutional guarantees are all suspended in war and that during war martial law takes the place of the Constitution is monstrous.

The Judge Advocate’s remark about the natural principles of self-defence, and that the nation, as a man, may resort to any means to save its life, is rhetoric and not argument; its sentiment is ruinous to liberty. The life and soul of the United States Government is the Constitution and the principles with all the rights therein guaranteed. Whoever strikes at them, or at one of the least of them, strikes a deadly blow at the life of the Republic.

Nothing can be more absurd than that the life of a man can be preserved by an extinction or suspension of all the vital functions of his organism; and yet this is no more absurd than is the argument of those who speak of warding off a blow at the life of the nation, by a suspension or violation of the guarantees of the Constitution.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, His Diary, Myrta Lockett Avary, LSU Press, 1998 (Original 1910), pp. 291-293)

Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia thought African slavery “one of the greatest problems of this interesting age,” and wondered “what is to be the fate of the poor African God only knows. His condition as a slave is certainly not a good one” though far better in the American South than in “his own barbarous clime.” Stephens believed the problem of Africans selling their own people into slavery to be a Christian nation’s duty to solve, and this was something European nations fairly accomplished in the late 19^th century.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Forebodings of Unequal Equality

“I see in the Boston Herald that there was a riot yesterday in Washington, D.C., between Federal soldiers and Negroes; attack by the former upon the latter; 150 or 200 soldiers engaged. The military, or provost guard was called on to suppress it. Several were wounded and some killed on both sides.

Is this but the beginning of deplorable conflicts hereafter to be enacted between the races, until one or the other is extinguished? Sad forebodings haunt me. I apprehend intestine strifes, riots, bloodshed, wars of the most furious character, springing from antipathies of castes and races.

Equality does not exist between blacks and whites. The one race is by nature inferior in many respects, physically and mentally, to the other. This should be received as a fixed invincible fact in all dealings with the subject. It is useless to war against the decrees of nature in attempting to make things equal which the Creator has made unequal; the wise, humane, and philosophical statesman will deal with facts as he finds them. In the new order of things, I shall hope and, if permitted, strive, for the best; yet I cannot divest myself of forebodings of many evils.

My own judgment was that those who elected to go to a free State would not be so well off as those who should remain at home with masters of their choice. Still, that was a matter for their own decision and which I did not feel at liberty to control.

So far as my own Negroes are concerned, there is nothing now that would give me more pleasure, under the changed order of things, than to try the experiment and see what can be done for them in their new condition.

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, His Diary, Myrta Lockett Avary, LSU Press, 1998 (Original 1910), pp. 207-208)

As in the postwar South, the Republican party believed the votes of Rhode Island’s colored population were for sale – the following early 1880s resolution was apparently aimed at black Republican voters: “Resolved: That we will hold in contempt, as a traitor to mankind and his race, that man who will permit his vote to be influenced by a tender of money or any other corrupting influences.”  It should be remembered that Providence, Rhode Island was the highly-profitable center of the slave trade in North America in 1750.

Bernhard Thuersam, ww.circa1865.org

Free Colored People Unhappy in Rhode Island

“Colored Voters: The colored voters of Rhode Island, who have long complained of the treatment which they have steadily received at the hands of the Republican party in the State — they being unrecognized as citizens, neglected and totally ignored in regard to their political rights, excepting that of suffrage, which is eagerly sought for — assembled in convention at Newport on the 18th of October, 1882, to express and make known their sentiments.

Several public speakers of high repute among them addressed the convention, set forth in plain language, besides other causes of complaint, that the colored voters were highly insulted by the [Republican] party in power, as they were not considered worthy being voted for, for any public offices in the gift of the people; declaring also that henceforward they intended to act independently of the Republican party on all occasions, but vote for the person, whatever the party to which he might belong, who would recognize them as citizens.

The colored people of the State numbered 6271 in 1875, and 6592 in 1880.”

(Rhode Island, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia, 1882, Appleton & Company, pp. 791-792)