Circa1865

(The following is drawn from David Hackett Fischer’s excellent “British Folkways in America.”)

The American Revolution was not a singular struggle but a series of four separate Wars of Independence waged in very different ways by the major cultures of British America.

The first (1775-1776) was a massive popular insurrection in New England. An army of British regulars was defeated by a Yankee militia much like the Puritan bands from which they were descended and urged on by their Calvinist clergy. This war, as stated by John and Samuel Adams was not fought to secure any rights of man in any universal sense, but against what was called “the contagion of venality and dissipation” which was spreading from London to America. New Englanders felt that they had always managed their own affairs and when England tried to stop them – especially their smuggling of goods and slave trade without the Crown’s percentage paid – the war came.

The second war for independence (1776-1781) was more protracted and fought mainly in the middle colonies and coastal south. It was a gentleman’s war of British regulars and professional mercenaries commanded by English gentry, against an increasingly professional American army led by a member of the Virginia gentry. They were fighting for what Jefferson called “the ancient liberties of his Saxon ancestors.”

The third war of independence reached its climax in the years 1779-1781. It was a rising of British borderers in the southern backcountry against American Loyalists and British regulars who invaded the region. The result was a savage struggle which resembled many earlier conflicts in North Britain with much family feuding and terrible atrocities committed on both sides. Prisoners were slaughtered, homes were burned, women were raped, and even small children were put to the sword.

The fourth war of independence continued in the years from 1781 to 1783, a non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle, in which the elites of the Delaware Valley played a leading part. The economic war against England was led by Robert Morris of Philadelphia; the genius of American diplomacy was Benjamin Franklin.

The end of the war resulted in the creation of three “regional republics” of British America – voting blocs of “eastern” colonies of New Englanders; a Southern bloc centered in tidewater Virginia; and a midland bloc of mainly Delaware Valley delegations. The Constitution of 1787 was an attempt to write the rules of engagement among these three regional republics – an agreement which began dissolving in Andrew Jackson’s first term. The nullification issue of 1832 tested the strength of a State’s true sovereignty.

By 1850 the Southern bloc had enough and began reconsidering the value of its political alliance with the others. In 1854 the new Republican party arose from the ashes of the Whig party and absorbed anti-Catholic Know Nothings, Transcendentalists and radical abolitionists. In 1860, this strictly sectional party fielded its second presidential candidate and won a plurality victory in November 1860. Within a month this party would drive South Carolina to independence; other States would soon follow.

In an act of desperation and fearful of his party losing its recently-gained power, this first Republican president violated Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution he was sworn to defend – “Treason against the United States shall consist only of levying War against them; or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” “Them” is the States, individually or collectively.

(Primary Source: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 827-828)

Union Victory in Colorado

Philadelphian Edward W. Wynkoop migrated westward in the late 1850s and became an officer in the First Colorado Regiment early in the Civil War. By 1864 his unit was fighting irate Cheyenne Indians who resisted the constant encroachments of white settlement in their territory. His view of the Indian being less than human was in line with most easterners coming West.

Wynkoop’s superior was Ohioan Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister who believe that the Cheyenne would “have to be soundly whipped before they will be quiet.” He instructed now-Major Wynkoop that any Cheyenne found in his vicinity were to be killed outright as that was the only way to deal with them.

Wynkoop came to better understand the Cheyenne leaders after they agreed to peace negotiations as well as release white captives, though Unionist Governor John Evans at Denver agreed with Chivington. Major Wynkoop’s better relations with the Cheyenne was rewarded with his transfer to Fort Reilly, Kansas, ostensibly for not killing enough Indians.

In late November 1864 Col. Chivington, in command of the First and Third Colorado Regiments descended upon the Cheyenne-Arapaho village at Sand Creek which thought it was at peace with the whites. Chivington’s dawn attack butchered about two hundred Cheyenne – two-thirds of them women and children. His troopers later paraded through Denver “with the genitals of the dead dangling from their shirts and hats.”

Wynkoop was soon promoted to lieutenant-colonel and charged with investigating the Sand Creek “battle.” He called the affair an “unprecedented atrocity” in which “women and children were killed and scalped, children shot at their mothers’ breasts, and all the bodies mutilated in the most horrible manner.” Despite the official investigation and Wynkoop’s condemnation of Chivington’s monstrous conduct, the colonel was not charged and allowed to resign and retire from the United States Army.

Col. Chivington’s massacre of helpless Cheyenne only intensified the conflict as the southern Plains once again dripped with blood. Wynkoop continued to arrange peace talks and bring more peaceful relations, but continued postwar white encroachments brought an uneasy peace.

In early 1867 came Gen. Hancock and Custer to threaten the Indians – later came Sheridan, Sherman and Miles on their mission to clear the Plains of Indians.

(Between the Army and the Cheyenne. Louis Kraft. Military History Quarterly, Winter, 2002, pp. 48-53)

While Northern Gen. W.T. Sherman is notorious for his war upon Southern civilians, his wife Ellen wrote of her fond hope of seeing a war “of extermination and that all Southerners would be driven like Swine into the sea . . . [and that we may] carry fire and sword into their States till not one habitation is left standing.” Lincoln used Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and Pope to remove or exterminate those in the way of the Republican party’s manifest destiny.

The Republican Party’s Manifest Destiny

“In 1851, the Santee Sioux Indians in Minnesota sold 24,000,000 acres of land to the federal government. The white people got the land but the Indians got almost none of the money. After a devastating crop failure in 1862, the Sioux were starving. With the federal government refusing to pay what was owed the tribe, the Sioux rose up.

Abraham Lincoln dispatched General John Pope to put down the insurrection, and rising to the occasion, Pope told a subordinate: “It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux . . . they are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties and compromise can be made.” The revolt was subdued and the Indians removed.

After show trials of ten to fifteen minutes each, 303 male Indians were sentenced to death. Fearing the bad international publicity that such a bloodbath might bring, Lincoln ordered the list pared down to thirty-nine representative native miscreants – all of whom were hanged on the day after Christmas, 1862.  It was the largest max execution in American history.

In July of 1865 with the war to subdue the American Confederacy scarcely over, Gen. Grant sent Gen. Sherman against the Plains Indians to allow government-subsidized railroads unrestricted passage westward. Warming to the task, Sherman wrote his commander in 1866: “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads. We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, ever to their extermination, men, women and children.”

Passing orders down to his army, Sherman observed that “during an assault [on an Indian village] the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age. As long as resistance to the government is made, death must be meted out.”

(Confessions of a Copperhead. Mark Royden Winchell, Shotwell Publishing, 2022, pp. 48-49)

Once the Constitution was ratified in 1789, a State’s declaration of independence from it was recognized and fully acceptable. New York, Rhode Island and Virginia specifically noted this reserved right in their ratifications of the US Constitution, just in case the Tenth Amendment was ignored.

What we refer to as our “civil war” is erroneously claimed to be caused by a desire to abolish slavery when it was not. The decision for independence by several Southern States in 1860-1861 – secession – was not a cause for war as it was an inherent right of a State to do so. Lincoln’s minority government had no constitutional remedy to stop any States from departing. The “cause” of war was Lincoln’s decision to instigate a violent incident at Fort Sumter and then unconstitutionally raise an army without the sanction of Congress to wage war upon a State. Though many governors refused Lincoln’s request for troops to subjugate Americans, those who did were also guilty of treason.

The US Constitution’s very definition of treason in Article III, Section 3 is the waging of war upon “Them” – the States – and adhering to their enemies. What Lincoln unleashed cost a million lives lost along with our Constitution, Americans in the South subjugated and disenfranchised, the North saddled with enormous debt, inflation and fiat money, and the US government embarking on a career of imperialist ventures.

It Wasn’t About Slavery Nor a “Civil War”

In his excellent “It Wasn’t About Slavery,” author Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. notes that “The noted historian Shelby Foote was right: those who say that the Civil War was all about African slavery are just as wrong as those who declare that the war had nothing to do with African slavery.  The fake historians and purveyors of the myth of the North’s noble and enlightened cause to end slavery willfully ignores other cause, including huge constitutional issues such as a State right to withdraw, nullification, and judicial overreach – which led Thomas Jefferson to refer to the federal judiciary as “a despotic branch.”

The issue of secession can be dealt with very simply. The United States itself was the produce of secession and the Declaration of Independence was the most beautiful ordinance of secession ever written.”

A “civil war” is a struggle of competing factions within a nation or country for control of its government. The Southern States pursued political independence from the United States in 1861 just as the thirteen colonies pursued political independence from Britain in 1776.

Mitcham notes that the North’s war did indeed actively destroy the South’s agricultural labor system and armed these workers against the South, and importantly that “freeing the slave was a result of the war, not the casus belli.”

(It Wasn’t About Slavery, Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. Regnery History Press, 2020. Pp. xvi-xvii)

If continued black labor in the South was essential to the economic survival of the region and the ultimate reason for seeking independence, it was equally essential that the economic survival of Northern financial, textile, and manufacturing industry interests. It was not unexpected that after the Confederate States of America was formed in early February 1861 and enacted a modest 10% tariff which would have decimated northern ports, that those northern interests urged war against the South. It was not about slavery.

The following is excerpted from Mark R. Winchell’s posthumous “Confessions of a Copperhead” recently released by Shotwell Publishing. See www.shotwellpublishing.org.

It Was Not About Slavery

“If the North was fighting for an imperial vision of American hegemony rather than for the abolition of slavery, what motivated the South? The statement of South Carolina’s anti-flag scholars quotes several Confederate officials, who declared they were fighting to preserve slavery.

It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Confederacy was formed to assure the economic survival of the American South. (The revolutionist’s declaration of independence from England was motivated by similar economic considerations.)  In 1861, African labor seemed essential to that survival [just as New England’s poverty-wage slavery held mill workers to their employment.]

Of even greater concern, however, was the agricultural tariff passed by the US Congress on behalf of Northern industrial interests. This tariff made it difficult for Southerners to sell cotton and other crops in European markets. An independent South, free of the tariff, would have prospered among the community of nations. If Lincoln was willing to assure the perpetuation of slavery, this former corporation lawyer was not willing to ease the tariff.”

(Confessions of a Copperhead, Culture and Politics in the Modern South, Mark R. Winchell, Shotwell Publishing, 2022, pg. 183)

Lincoln was a one-term Whig US congressman from Illinois before assuming the presidency with a mere 39% of the popular vote, and not even being on the ballot in many States. He had little knowledge of the US Constitution, no foreign policy awareness or experience, and led a purely sectional party of former northern Whigs and anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, Transcendentalists and abolitionists. Despite Southern unionists imploring him to abandon Fort Sumter to allow a cooling-off period to defuse the crisis and stop other States from seceding, he consciously lit the fuse of war which cost the lives of a million Americans and ended the American republic.

Trusting Congress to Ratify Unconstitutional Actions

Eighty days was the interval between Lincoln instigating the confrontation at Fort Sumter and the regular assembling of Congress in July, providing the new president with a virtual monopoly of emergency powers. On April 15^th 1861, in language reminiscent of Washington’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion, Lincoln declared an “insurrection” to exist, announced that federal laws were being opposed in seven States “by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, by the powers vested in the marshals of the law,” and on his own claimed authority called forth the militia of the States to the number of 75,000 to “suppress said combinations.”

This was how our “civil war” commenced and without a declaration by the only entity vested with the constitutional authority to do so. Though the States which declared independence from the US Constitution fully considered their actions legal and peaceable, Lincoln’s political party and those supporting his actions viewed this independence movement as null. They assumed a defensive attitude with a readiness to strike in retaliation for any act of resistance to what they saw as the national authority – which they viewed the withdrawn States as still a part of.

Author J.G. Randall wrote that “Lincoln was to take other war measures. He issued on his authority two proclamations of coastal blockade by which he could continue to collect tariffs, which was the lifeblood of the US treasury.  The second applied to Virginia and North Carolina, the latter of which was still a part of Lincoln’s union – and an act of war against a State.

He decreed the expansion of the regular army on his own authority, calling forth on May 3^rd recruits of the regular army beyond the total then authorized by law – any increase is a congressional function.  Acting independently and not waiting for the constitutionality of his acts to be questioned, he advised Congress in July that “whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon under what appeared to be a popular demand and public necessity, “trusting that Congress would readily ratify them.”

(Civil War and Reconstruction, James G. Randall, DC Heath & Company, 1937, pp. 360-361)

The antebellum idea of compensated emancipation for slaves never gained traction as the North would not agree to help fund the repatriation of Africans’ they themselves had grown wealthy importing to the Americas for 100 years or more. Abraham Lincoln was an avid proponent of colonization once his armies overran the South and created refugees, knowing the North would not accept them flooding northward. Lincoln’s Caribbean colonization schemes are mentioned below and further detailed in the soon-to-be-released “Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here: Key West’s Civil War,” by Bernhard Thuersam.  www.shotwellpublishing.com.

Emancipation and Colonization

Hugh Talmadge Lefler and Albert Ray Newsome well-explained antebellum views toward slavery in their History of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1954). They wrote that slavery was the most serious antebellum controversy between North and South with people in both sections criticizing it as a moral, economic and social evil. But importantly, the United States Constitution recognized those held to labor and left the States with complete authority over the question within their own borders. Though every Northern State took action to begin gradual emancipation by 1804 – with many selling their slaves southward – no Southern State followed suit because of economic, social and racial considerations.

Lefler and Newsome wrote that “Many Southerners opposed slavery and realized its dangerous possibilities, but most of the early Southern opposition to the slavery was conditioned upon the “antislavery” idea of gradual emancipation to owners, and colonization to Africa or elsewhere. The colonization plan, sponsored by various manumission societies, proved impractical, though Liberia on the African coast was begun as a result of a few thousand Negroes being colonized there by the joint efforts of these societies and acts of Congress.”

The question of colonization was on the mind of Abraham Lincoln once his 1861 invasion destroyed Upper South plantations and produced numerous black refugees.  It was Lincoln’s early intention to emancipate by decree through constitutional amendments and compensating owners – but this failed to gain support in his fractious party.

Author Michael J. Douma has written extensively of Lincoln’s colonization plans and noting that “Historians have long known that in the summer of 1862 Lincoln announced his intention to negotiate with foreign powers concerning the colonization of freedmen abroad.” For the next two years federally-funded initiatives arose to settle freedmen in Chiriqui [Panama] and Haiti – in addition to the British Honduras, Guiana and Dutch Surinam. These talks were quite serious and continued even after the war, anticipating the transport of freedmen to these islands as laborers.

The Danes also expressed interest in colonizing unwanted contrabands to work their plantations on St. Croix, now the US Virgin Islands. In 1862 Seward signed an agreement with the Danes to take all captured aboard slave ships in the Atlantic to St. Croix to work as plantation labor despite Danish acknowledgement that workers on the island would not find conditions much different from previous slavery, but they would be technically “free.” To facilitate the process of removal the Lincoln authorized Danish ships to sail down the US east coast to recruit freedmen. The Danish minister viewed South Carolina as a highly fertile recruiting ground which was seconded by Secretary of State Seward. The Dutch were also fascinated with freedmen and actively sought them as labor for their colony of Suriname on South America’s northeast coast.

Lincoln and Seward were not the only proponents of colonization as they were ably supported by leading Republicans Charles Sumner, Francis Blair, Preston King and Benjamin Wade. Though supportive before 1863, all became aware of the value of black troops used to invade the South as white volunteers became hard to find or had to be paid astronomical financial bounties to enlist. Few black men stepped forward and many had to be coerced, but by war’s end the colonization to the Caribbean regained speed.

The Republican party of Maryland had come to power in 1896 advocating political virtue and responsible leadership. As in other States, this party went right to work in erecting barriers to the Democrat party ever regaining power and diluting their voter strength. In Baltimore, city wards were “renumbered and regrouped in order to assure maximum Republican ascendancy.” Republicans also repealed the Eastern Shore law which denied the traditional assignment of one senator from the east, thus permitting two from the West where Republicans were firmly in control. It took only several years of Republican political virtue for the State’s voters to return the Democrats to power in 1899.

Republican Political Virtue in Maryland

“Even more offensive to the political reform element was the record of political legerdemain of the Republican leaders both in the city and in the State governments. Gov. Lloyd Lowndes personally endeavored to fulfill campaign promises of an honest administration, but his efforts were nullified by chicanery and fraud on the part of his Republican associates. Foremost among these was Congressman Sidney E. Mudd of the Fifth Congressional District who in 1896 while Speaker of the House of Delegates, had extended his influence over the counties of Southern Maryland and, corralling the Negro vote there, had quickly become one of the leading Republican bosses.

Although well-educated, his attitude toward political morality was cynical and can best be exemplified by his own definition of an honest man as “a bastard who will stay bought.”

The worst Republican scandal arose over fraudulent census returns. While serving in Congress in 1900, Mudd had sponsored the appointment of a group of census enumerators for his district and, it was alleged, had intimated to them the type of returns he expected. One of Mudd’s ardent henchmen made certain that census lists for several counties were padded with names secured from tombstones and similar sources. Children aged five and six were listed as day laborers and schoolteachers so that the Federal Census of 1900, insofar as it applied to Southern Maryland, enhanced the influence of Mudd’s bailiwick and gave the Republicans there a sizable number of non-existent voters.”

(Arthur Poe Gorman: A Biography, John R. Lambert, LSU Press, 1953, pg. 273-274)

Author Jonathan W. White’s book “Emancipation, the Union Army and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln” (LSU Press, 2014) contends that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton utilized intimidation tactics to ensure Lincoln’s election and use the soldier vote to help accomplish it. His assistant secretary, Charles A. Dana, admitted to using the full power of the War Department to ensure Lincoln’s electoral triumph. Stanton also employed creative solutions for filling the blue ranks with soldiers.

By May 1864, the initial three-year enlistments had expired and strong measures utilized for re-enlisting the veterans. The hated draft was causing riots in northern cities, and Grant complained often of the useless soldiers he was sent — paid substitutes and draftees who often deserted at the first opportunity.

Desperate to retain the veterans, Stanton demanded additional government bounty money to entice them to stay, one-month furloughs home to show off their “Veteran Volunteer” sleeve chevrons, and commanders rewarded with promotions for re-enlistments obtained. Commanders unsuccessful in their re-enlistment efforts were denied promotion or cashiered.

The bounty money made soldiers wealthy men for the time, but naturally caused them to avoid battle in order to spend it. White estimates that only 15 percent of veteran soldiers re-enlisted, leaving 85 percent who walked away, as it had become an abolition war rather than the “save the Union” banner they had enlisted under. Additionally, they saw emancipation bringing many black freedmen north in search of employment, thus depressing wages and taking jobs from white northerners.

Penalty for Not Re-Enlisting

In May [1864] the three-years’ service of the regiment had expired; and three hundred and seventy-five men who had not reenlisted as veterans were mustered out and made their way home as best they could. On arriving in New York, they drew up and adopted a series of resolutions. They began by rehearsing an order of Col. [Henry L.] Abbot, dated May 21, urging them to “stand by their colors, and not march to the rear to the sound of the enemy’s cannon.”

The reason for their non-re-enlistment seems to be stated in the charge against Col. Abbot:

“That he has spared no pains to place over us a military aristocracy, subjecting us to every variety of petty annoyance, to show his own power, and take away our manhood; subjecting men to inhuman and illegal punishments for appealing to him for justice; disgracing others for attempting to obtain commissions in colored regiments; . . . about May 4 ordering his heavy artillery men who had not re-enlisted, into the ditch for the remainder of their term of service, thus placing us on a level with prisoners under sentence for court-martial; and finally capping the climax by leaving us to the tender mercy of provost-marshals, turning us loose on the world, without pay, without officers, without transportation, without rations and without our colors.”

(The Military & Civil History of Connecticut, During the War of 1861-1865. W. Croffut & J. Morris. Ledyard Bill. 1869, pg. 558-559)

Scourging Republicans from the Temple of Freedom

As the Democratic party split into North and South factions in early 1860, it paved the way for the new, sectional Republican party — comprised of former Whigs, abolitionists, transcendentalists, and anti-Catholic Know-Nothings — to triumph in November with a 39% plurality. Aware of the extreme danger Republicans posed to the Union, rational Southern men traveled northward to alert their Democratic brethren.

One voice was William L. Yancey, born at Warren County, Georgia but educated at Williams College in northwestern Massachusetts, where he likely absorbed that State’s tradition of threatening secession from the 1789 union should that State’s equality in the federation be threatened. He relocated to Elmore County, Alabama in 1837 and eventually represented his district in the United States House of Representatives.

Aware of the extreme danger to the Union should the Democratic party fragment in 1860, he joined “Southern men of all parties who came north in an effort to arouse the masses to the danger of the situation.” He was then prevailed upon to make an extended campaign from Memphis to Boston, speaking to many audiences.

In a speech at Nashville on August 14, 1860 and published in the Nashville Union and American shortly afterward:

“Yancey denied that he was a disunionist per se; but declared that in the event of a Republican victory, “I hope to God there will be some man or set of men, whom Providence will rear in our midst . . . that there will be some great Washington [to] arise who will be able to scourge them from the temple of freedom, even if he is called a traitor – an agitator, or a rebel during the glorious process.”

(Source: The Secession Movement: 1860-1861, Dwight L. Dumond, The MacMillan
Company, 1931, pg. 110)