Circa1865

Due to continued Southern victories and no States returning to his rule with African labor safely secured, Lincoln was persuaded by Secretary of State William Seward “to withhold his proclamation so that it could be issued on the morrow of victory and thus not appear as “our last shriek on the retreat.”

Lincoln would claim his “victory” at the battle of Sharpsburg in mid-September 1862, where his refusal to accept Southern independence caused 23,000 casualties. Northern General George McClellan’s 76,000 man army had been fought to a standstill by General Robert E. Lee’s 38,000 troops.

Even after a bloody Northern defeat at Fredericksburg (18,000 casualties) in December ended a dreadful year of carnage wrought by Lincoln, he remained steadfast in refusing to end the slaughter and inaugurate peace.

Emotional Red Herrings and Shameless Edicts

“During the last months of 1861, United States fortifications along the Niagara were significantly strengthened with guns and men. And even before [captured Southern diplomats] Slidell and Mason had been released from [Northern] custody, followed by strong and prolonged British protest, at the beginning of the following year, Canadian admiration for the Confederate cause persisted – in spite of the slavery issue – which sophisticated foreigners (and not a few Unionists) perceived to be an emotional red herring.

This particular fact of political life was obscured for most Americans a year later, when they heard of the Emancipation Proclamation – but failed to read its text with any care.

President Lincoln had not, by this edict, freed all the slaves, but merely those who resided in Southern territory still under the control of the enemies of the Union. This gesture which was to give the martyred Lincoln the name of the “Great Emancipator” was shamelessly political and selective, designed to split the Confederacy by allowing Southerners to infer that if they only caused their States to rejoin the Union, they might retain their “peculiar institution.”

And as such, the Emancipation Proclamation accomplished nothing concrete – though it undoubtedly gave Northerners a feeling of complacency. It emancipated no one.

It would require three amendments to the Constitution and the passage of more than a century before “emancipation” had any real meaning – and it would be for the blacks to emancipate themselves.”

(The Niagara, Rivers of America, Donald Braider, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, excerpts pp. 238-239)

It is widely acknowledged that had the representatives of each of the thirteen colonies been told that there would be no voluntary withdrawal from the Articles of Confederation once ratified, that none would have ratified it. And none would have ratified the new Constitution had the same been declared – no withdrawal. And North Carolina made it requisite that a Bill of Rights, including a Tenth Amendment, to ensure that States were sovereign in anything not expressly and specifically delegated to the federal agent. And Americans celebrate secession every 4th of July.

Flags and Historic Erasure

“How refreshing it would be for someone to acknowledge the historic reality of the Secession of 1861! The South did secede, even if the arbitrament of war reversed the action. Since there was no Union to be saved, therefore this preservation never occurred. What did eventuate was rather a conquest and an imposed rule, which we have lived under ever since.

Only some few Northerners have ever realized that the triumphalist view has, though not without some justification, occluded an understanding to the damage done to the interests of all citizens, even themselves. The confusion about the meaning of a flag is an internal problem [for Americans], exclusively. And a rather convenient problem it is, especially for politicians.

My own view about the Confederate [Battle] flag is that it is no issue at all, which is not to say that it has not been made into one. But the flag is necessary for the hatemongers – the progressives who love to hate. Few of the hatemongers know anything about the various flags of the Confederacy and the State regiments and the corps within armies.

But now there has developed a movement to reconstruct various Southern State flags that have any Confederate aspects at all. The focus on State flags is related to an obsession with historic erasure that is deceptive and dangerous. Since the Stars and Stripes denoted a slaveholding nation for decades before the Confederate flag existed, it would seem that the flag of the United States is the one that should be reformulated or replaced, or at least referred to as being “like the swastika.”

Educated people know what that means – and what it doesn’t. Though flaunting the swastika is intolerable, the study of imagery, art, art, symbols, religion and anthropology is not. In an academic sense, even the swastika can be looked upon without sinister implications.

But with fierce recklessness, some can deface graves, destroy monuments, and forbid the sight of offensive and dreadful images. But memory depends on something to remember, which was the point of the memorials in the first place. And I know how difficult this is.”

(A Monumental Proposal, James O. Tate, Chronicles, June 2016, excerpts pp. 36-37)

A bill to establish a Bureau of Freedmen’s Affairs was introduced in the House of Representatives on February 17, 1864, by Massachusetts Republican Rep. Thomas D. Eliot. Democrat Rep. Samuel S. “Sunset” Cox of Ohio responds to the bill, in part, below.

The War Power is All Power

“Mr. Cox said: “Mr. Speaker . . . the member who introduced it [Mr. Eliot] recalled to our minds the fact that we opposed the confiscation bill for its inhumanity. This bill is founded in part on the confiscation system. If that were inhuman, then this is its aggravation. The former takes the lands which are abandoned by loyal or disloyal whites, under the pressure of war; while the present system turns these abandoned lands over to the blacks.

The effect of former legislation has been, in his opinion, to bring under the control of the Government large multitudes of freedmen who “had ceased to be slaves, but had not learned how to be free.” To care for these multitudes he presents this bill, which, if not crude and undigested, yet is sweeping and revolutionary.

It begins a policy for this Federal Government of limited and express powers, so latitudinarian that the whole system is changed. If the acts of confiscation and the proclamations, on which this measure is founded, be usurpations, how can we who have denounced them favor a measure like this?

This is a new system. It opens a vast opportunity for corruption and abuse. It may be inaugurated in the name of humanity; but I doubt, sir, if any Government, much less our Government of delegated powers, will ever succeed in the philanthropic line of business such as is contemplated by this bill.

The gentleman from Massachusetts appeals to us to forget the past, not to enquire how these poor people have become free, whether by law or by usurpation, but to look the great fact in the face “that three million slaves have become and are becoming free.” Before I come to that great fact, let me first look to the Constitution.

My oath to that is the highest humanity. By preserving the Constitution amidst the rack of war, in any vital part, we are saving for a better time something of those liberties, State and personal, which have given so much happiness for over seventy years to so many millions; and which, under a favorable Administration, might again restore contentment to our afflicted people. Hence the highest humanity is in building strong the ramparts of constitutional restraint against such radical usurpations as is proposed to be inaugurated by measures kindred to this before the House.

If the gentleman can show us warrant in the Constitution to establish this eleemosynary system for the blacks, and for making the Government a plantation speculator and overseer, and the Treasury a fund for the Negro, I will then consider the charitable light in which he has commended his bill to our sympathies.

The gentleman refers us for the constitutionality of this measure to the war power [of Lincoln], the same power by which he justifies the emancipation proclamation and similar measures. We upon this [Democratic] side are thoroughly convinced of the utter sophistry of such reasoning.

If the proclamation be unconstitutional, how can this or any measure based on it be valid?

The gentleman says, “If the President had the power to free the slave, does it not imply the power to take care of him when freed?”

Yes, no doubt. If he had any power under the war power, he has all power.

Under the war power he is a tyrant without a clinch on his revolutions. He can spin in any orbit he likes, as far and as long as he pleases.”

(Eight Years in Congress, 1857-1865: Memoir and Speeches of Samuel S. Cox, Samuel S. Cox, D. Appleton and Company, 1865, excerpts pp. 354-356)

The following is transcribed from the Atlanta Journal of Friday, 15 April 1921, page one. James Jones (1831-1921) was the servant and confidential courier of Jefferson Davis. He was a native of Wake (not Warren) County, North Carolina and born to free parents.

Jones accompanied President Davis after Richmond fell to the enemy, and was directed by Davis to hide the Great Seal of the Confederacy before capture. As only the silver dies of the Great Seal of the Confederacy had reached Richmond from England by the end of the war, and perhaps Jones had these in his possession at the time of capture. As the blockade tightened greatly in early 1865, the large embossing press and brass dies remain in Bermuda today.

Jones attended the cornerstone laying of Richmond’s Jefferson Davis monument in 1906, where he saw Mrs. Davis for the last time. Shortly before her death, she sent Jones her husband’s favorite buckhorn walking cane.

James Jones’ Silence

“Death Claims Jefferson Davis’s Negro Bodyguard: The following interesting account of a Negro of much notoriety and of sterling worth is taken from the Atlanta Journal. Jones was a native of Warren County and evidently was well raised and trained in his youth – as the Negroes of Warren County were raised, being servants of the most aristocratic and intelligent men and women of any land or Country.

The latest information, however, about the Great Seal of the Confederate States is that it is in the Museum at Richmond.

“Washington, D.C., April 9. – Taking with him to the grave the secret of the whereabouts of the great seal of the Confederacy, which he hid away when Jefferson Davis was captured, James Jones, the colored body guard of the president of the Confederate States, is dead here to-day. The body of the faithful old servant of the sixties will be sent to Raleigh, N.C., for burial on Sunday.

Throughout his long life, with its latter years spent in the government service in Washington, James Jones would never reveal what became of the Confederate seal. “Marse Jeff” had bidden that he never tell – and he never did.

Veterans of the Union and Confederate armies, newspaper writers, curiosity seekers and the curie hunters from time to time urged Jones to reveal where he buried the Great Seal. They argued that the Civil War was far in the past and the seal should be produced for the inspection of the younger generation of today and generations that are to follow in a reunited country. Always James Jones shook his head and to the end he maintained his silence.

The colored bodyguard was with Jefferson Davis when his capture was [effected]; in fact, he is said to have warned his master of the approach of the enemy, but President Davis did not escape in time. Jones accompanied President to Fort Monroe, where he was placed in prison.

After the war he headed a colored fire department in Raleigh, and became a minor city official. He turned Republican in politics, but always voted for Representative William Ruffin Cox of North Carolina, who represented the State in the House in the Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth Congresses. Later, when Mr. Cox became secretary of the United States Senate, he brought Jones to Washington with him and gave him a messenger’s job in the Senate.

That was in 1893. Since that time he has had several jobs about the capitol and was a messenger in the Senate stationery room until a short time before his death.” 

In the four prewar years 1856-1860, total federal expenditures were a mere $274 million, and financed by tariffs (disproportionately paid by the South), and the sale of public lands. The direct costs of the Northern war effort 1861-1865 is estimated at $2.3 billion; when indirect costs such as outright destruction and soldier pensions are included the estimate rises to $8 billion. “[The] Union’s expenditures on the war were equivalent to more than 70% of the North’s share of the 1859 gross domestic product. Lincoln’s war economy enabled Philip Amour to make $2 million selling pork to the Northern army; Clement Studebaker amassed a fortune providing wagons to Northern forces, and Andrew Carnegie grew rich as an iron merchant.

Lincoln’s Broad Economic Revolution

“First . . . the [Northern] citizenry remained passionately resistant to any form of federal income tax. A second option was to turn to borrowing. The great advantage of this choice was that it would pass some of the cost of the war on to future generations (in the form of interest and debt). A final choice was to print money and declare it legal tender – a policy not without cost. The printing of currency not backed by specie would raise prices, thus financing the war through inflation.

As soon as the war began, President Lincoln ordered Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase to begin taking steps to fund the war. Chase faced an economy that had barely recovered from the Panic of 1857 before being thrown into recession by the secession crisis. Chase initially turned to increase import fees, excise taxes and the sale of government land, but he soon shifted his attention to the sale of [war] bonds [hoping] to fund its war effort through a form of borrowing.

Congress [passed] the revolutionary Legal Tender Act [in] February 1862 [which] provided for the issuance of $150 million in non-interest bearing notes. Although not backed by gold or silver, these “greenbacks” were legal tender for all debts except import duties and interest on government loans. By issuing notes without the backing of specie, the government risked serious inflation.

In August 1861 Congress passed a 3 percent tax on incomes of more than eight hundred dollars, but it was a year before those funds were collects. The following July a new revenue measure expanded income taxes and added an assortment of other levies.

In late summer 1862 bond sales had dwindled [and] Secretary Chase turned to Philadelphia broker Jay Cooke to orchestrate a massive campaign to stimulate them. This strategy [of 2500 agents nationwide] anticipated the patriotic war bond drives of World Wars I and II. [Roughly] one in four Northern families [purchased them,] Yet it appears most war bonds ended up in the hands of banks and wealthy investors.

The final piece of Chase’s financial program did not fall into place until midway through the war. The National Banking Act of February 1863 (and legislation of June 1864) established a new system of banks. Finally, in March 1865, Congress passed a 10 percent tax on all notes issued by State banks [which was sufficient to] drive most State banks into the new banking system.

When all was said and done bond sales funded two-thirds of the North’s military expenses. Various forms of wartime taxation funded 21 percent of the war’s cost, and the remaining costs were financed through inflation. By printing greenbacks the federal government caused an increase in prices, which had a measurable impact on the Northern economy. At their peak, prices rose to 80 percent above antebellum levels.

The funding legislation passed by the war Congress raises a broader issue. How did wartime measures reshape the American economy?

One long-standing interpretation is that the war was a triumph of industrial capitalism. With for decades the intellectual heirs of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had battled over the constitutionality of federal measures to assist economic development.

With the [Southern] congressmen safely out of the way [in 1861] – so the interpretation goes – Republicans were free to pursue an agenda which features protective tariffs and strong banking legislation. The Civil War provide the perfect excuse for imposing a broad economic revolution.”

(The North Fights the Civil War: The Homefront, J. Matthew Gallman, Ivan R. Dee, 1993, excerpts pp. 96-99)

Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the democratic revolution in America was an irresistible one, and that to attempt to stop it “would be to resist the will of God.” The elevation of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1829 pushed the democratic revolution forward – in the North the friction became one between the commercial-financial aristocracy and the working men, and in the South the planters and the yeoman farmers. Against simple majority rule and “the tyranny of king numbers” stood John C. Calhoun and Abel P. Upshur in the South, as well as James Kent, Joseph Story and Orestes Brownson of the North.

Broadening the Base of Democracy

“To what extent was aristocracy weakened and democracy strengthened by the work of the [State constitutional] conventions of the 1830s? In the first place, property qualifications for voting were abolished . . . except Virginia, North Carolina, [New Jersey and Rhode Island], and with Louisiana [Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio] still requiring the payment of taxes. The last of the religious restrictions were also abolished.

In still another way these changes broadened the base of democracy. For the first time the people had been consulted as to the revision and amendment of their constitutions. The conventions were called directly or indirectly by action of the people. The revised constitutions were in turn submitted back to them for ratification or rejection.

In one matter there was a definite reactionary movement. This was the issue of Negro suffrage. Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania took the ballot from the Negro. And New York in 1821 limited Negro suffrage by requiring that he possess a freehold valued at two-hundred fifty dollars over and above all indebtedness. Hence only five of the Northern States granted equal suffrage to Negroes.

Whether or not Jefferson, Mason, and other Revolutionary proponents of natural rights philosophy intended to include Negroes in the statement that “all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights” is a debatable question; but in actual practice the American people had decided by their constitutional provisions that Negroes were not included in the political people.”

(Democracy in the Old South, Fletcher M. Green; The Journal of Southern History, Volume XII, Number 1, February 1946, excerpts pp. 15-16)

Though opposed to Lincoln’s violations of the Constitution in his war against the American South, Northern Democrats saw the need to crush secession, which was a manifestation of the Tenth Amendment and inherent right of the people of a State to withdraw from a federal compact to which they conditionally assented. Those Northern Democrats did not see that due to the vast differences between the sections by 1861, peaceful separation was the only logical solution for the Southern people to pursue free, representative government. Connecticut Senator William C. Fowler (below) was born in 1793, during Washington’s presidency – living long enough to see the end of Washington’s Union.

“Thou Wicked Servant”

“Expressing opposition to secession, [Northerners Clement] Vallandigham, [Samuel S.] Cox, [Stephen D.] Carpenter, and Fowler maintained that they desired not an independent Confederacy but simply a restoration of the “Constitution as it is” and the “Union as it was.” They declared they were in favor of a constitutional war to crush secession, but they charged that Lincoln was waging a battle for the conquest and subjugation of the South and that he was conducting it in a despotic fashion, subverting the constitutional liberties of individuals and the rights of States.

Opposing military conscription, they also criticized the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and declared that freedom of speech had been abolished in the Union.

In particular, they attacked Lincoln’s policy of emancipation. Spurning the argument that emancipation was a legitimate measure adopted to aid the prosecution of the war, they pictured it as an unconstitutional act by which the President had changed the war aims of the North from the preservation of the Union to abolition of slavery.

“If,” said Fowler in the Connecticut State Senate in 1864, “the President should avow the fact that he has violated the Constitution, in order to save the Union, as the President did in a letter to Mr. Hodge, let us say to him “out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.”

The peace advocates placed special blame for war upon the abolitionists of the North, stating repeatedly that it was not the institution of slavery but the agitation of the slavery question by the abolitionists that had caused hostilities.

For the immediate outbreak of fighting, the three Midwesterners placed responsibility upon Lincoln and the Republicans because of their refusal to compromise with Southerners in the crisis of 1860-1861.”

(Americans Interpret Their Civil War, Thomas J. Pressly, 1954, Princeton University Press, excerpts pp. 131-133)

The protectionist Morrill Tariff passed the Senate on March 2, 1861, with many Southern members already having resigned their seats due to their States no longer being part of the United States. In response, Virginia Senator Roger Pryor delivered a blistering tirade against the Northern protectionists: “The importune protectionists of Pennsylvania . . . after higgling successively with every party for a stipend from the Treasury, at last caught the Republicans in a moment of exigent need, and from their lust for place, extorted the promise of a bounty to iron. This bill is the issue of a carnal coalition between the Abolitionists of New England and the protectionists of Pennsylvania.” The low, free trade tariff passed by the Confederate Congress would be ruinous to high-tariff Northern ports.

The Real Cause of Secession

“Southern agrarians had made known their intense hostility to protective [import] duties which they considered a burdensome tax upon their enterprise for the benefit of Northern manufacturers. It was the issue that drove South Carolina to the edge of rebellion thirty years before, and ever since 1846 Southern influence had kept tariff schedules at low levels.

But a tariff increase had been one of the major planks in the Republicans’ Chicago [party] platform. Its appeal had won them many votes in the East, especially in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Accordingly they were determined to redeem their pledge without delay; indeed they were warned repeatedly that failure to act would ruin them in Pennsylvania.

[Republican Simon] Cameron’s correspondence made it evident that conservative Pennsylvanians were determined to have a higher tariff regardless of the consequences; that this was not an issue which they regarded as properly open to compromise. Harry C. Carey of Philadelphia, the doctrinaire protectionist who was ready to concede almost anything else to the South, comforted his sympathizers with a unique diagnosis of the secession crisis which absolved them of any responsibility. In begging Northern congressmen to raise the tariff, he argued that free trade was actually “the cause of the discord with which we are troubled.” Only protection [of Northern manufacturers] could form a sound foundation for a prosperous and harmonious Union.

In any event, Republicans wasted no time in bringing the tariff question before Congress. A bill sponsored by Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, which provided substantial protection for Pennsylvania iron and other Northern manufactures, had passed the House at the previous session. Cameron pressed for its consideration in the Senate as early as the second day of the new session.

Senator Hunter of Virginia, defending the rights of farmers and consumers, led the opposition to the new tariff . . . [as to] Virginia and the rest of the South this bill would be ruinous. “I know that we here are too weak to resist or to defend ourselves; those who sympathize with our wrongs are too weak to help us . . . No sir, this bill will pass. And let it pass into the statute-book; let it pass into history, that we may know how it is that the South has been dealt with when New England and Pennsylvania had the power to deal with her interests.”

A week later an amended version of the Morrill Tariff passed the Senate by a vote of 35 to 14, the opposition coming exclusively from Southerners and western Democrats. Representative [Daniel] Sickles of New York City reflected the views of the merchants when he protested that this bill would further alienate the South from the Union, for “our Southern friends perceive that . . . you intend . . . to tax them on the necessaries of life in order to enrich the manufacturing classes of the North . . .”

(And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861, Kenneth M. Stampp, LSU Press, 1950, excerpts pp. 161-164)

One cannot fully understand the cultural Marxist ideology present in America today without reviewing the Bolshevik consolidation of power in post-WW1 Russia – and its feat of social engineering led by an iconoclastic youth movement directed against bureaucratic authority. A rigid communist, Stalin instituted a new Inquisition in Russia which “forced thinking people to desist from their independent thoughts to desist from their independent thoughts and moral principles and to identify with a party and with policies felt to be unacceptable or questionable. . . or else be declared treasonable.” Doubting official Marxist ideology equaled treason. Highly recommended is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931,” Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Banishing Confederate Symbols

“It goes without saying that each generation interprets the past – its past – to enhance, justify and confirm its view of itself. Certainly, the politically correct, cultural Marxist Left, which spearheads the effort to “cleanse” our society of Confederate symbolism, has erected its own set of symbols, totems and myths to legitimize its present activities and its extreme revolutionary zeal.

Thus in the place of Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, we witness the rising cults of Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, “the Secret Six” abolitionists, and the rehabilitation and virtual canonization of the bloody thirsty fanatic, John “Pottawatomie “Brown.

In the America of 2017 we have a whole new set of martyrs and saints, whose message is carefully massaged and congealed, and then presented as models for us and our children. And the can be no dissent from this new imposed vision.

The historical profession, almost to a man, has joined in, with the likes of Stalinist historian, Eric Foner, now heralded as the nation’s “leading historian on slavery and the War.”

Everything revolves around slavery and racism as the sole causes of the War, and an almost unexpungable stain each generation must strive to overcome. Put very simply, it was historic white oppression that had to be defeated and destroyed as part of the advancing historical process, a process which is posited as inevitable and irreversible. It is represented as the latest conquest of the “Idea of Progress.”

And that campaign, that ideological narrative for the Left, continues with the present efforts to banish symbols honoring anything to do with the Confederacy and its leaders, even if morally irreproachable individuals like Robert E. Lee are included in the crosshairs.

What distinguishes the cultural Marxist historians’ narrative from earlier views is not just its social omnipresence, but its rigid dogmatism brooks no disagreement, no opposing views.”

(The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, Boyd D. Cathey, Scuppernong Press, 2018, excerpts pp. 105-106)

Recognizing Valor

“It is not the battle itself which is being celebrated, but the heroism of the men who took part in it. The battle itself was an abominable thing . . . In all its crimson horror . . . Not a thing to celebrate . . .

At Gettysburg thousands died in utmost agony . . . Good and gentle women were widowed and the happiness of homes was destroyed . . . We are not celebrating the battle . . . but the valor of the men who faced, without flinching, a thing that was infernal.”

(Charleston News & Courier editorial, July 4, 1913.)