Circa1865

Popular histories of Gettysburg proclaim that Lee suffered a great defeat at the hands of Meade and that the Confederacy’s strength was on the wane; however, Colonel Thomas L. Livermore of the US Army wrote: “After Gettysburg, the Confederacy had the same capacity for recruiting armies and supplying them as before, and the morale of the Army of Northern Virginia was just as good.  In the autumn of 1863, Lee crossed the Rapidan to attack Meade, and in December he came out of his entrenchments along Mine Run to attack, but failed to come to blows because Lee had retreated across the Rapidan in the night.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Grant Versus Lee at the Wilderness

“In referring to the opening of the campaign in May 1864, Colonel Tyler, of the Thirty-seventh Massachusetts, wrote: “The Army of the Potomac had never won a decisive victory on Southern soil . . . The Army of Northern Virginia . . . against great odds had achieved victory after victory, and hardly tasted defeat.”

In May 1864 came General Grant with the prestige of his success in the southwest, and with the vast resources of the North and West at his call, confident that his 118,649 “present for duty equipped,” could defeat Lee’s 61,953.

But Grant was meeting Lee – “the greatest of all the great Captains that the English speaking people have brought forth,” whose name, says General Sir Frederic Maurice, must be added to the select group of the world’s greatest commanders named by Napoleon – Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugene, and Frederick the Great.

[Northern] General [Morris] Schaff says . . . [in] the two days of deadly [at the Wilderness] encounter every man who could bear a musket had been put in; Hancock and Warren repulsed; Sedgewick routed, and now on the defensive behind breastworks; the cavalry drawn back; the [supply] trains seeking safety beyond the Rapidan.

Colonel T.L. Livermore estimates that the numbers engaged were: Federals, 101,895; and Confederates, 61,025. The total Federal losses in the Wilderness battles were 17,666. The Confederate losses were reported in only 70 out of 183 regiments; Livermore says, “it is not extravagant to estimate the Confederate losses at a total of 7,750.”

(A Colonel at Gettysburg: Life and Character of Colonel Joseph N. Brown, Varina D. Brown; The State Company, 1931, excerpts pp. 237; 244-245)

The “glittering prize” of political party victory was control of the distribution of political offices, and Lincoln astutely arranged the patronage to control his party as well as keep jealous competitors at bay. The Collectors of Customs posts were most important, and were decisive in Lincoln’s decision for war rather than lose his tariff money and appointing powers.  Count Gurowski, the Polish immigrant and political gadfly mentioned below, believed in the European tradition that “treason” was simple opposition to royalty. In the United States, however, Article III, Section 3, defines treason only as waging war against “them,” the States, or adhering to their enemies.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Creating Engines for Political Security

“The arduous task of cabinet-making was far from completed before Lincoln was beset with a swarm of office-seekers. Indeed, Washington was a veritable mecca for patronage mongers bent upon securing consulships, Indian agencies, postmaster-ships, or anything else in the gift of the appointing power [of the President].

Those who witnessed the rush of job hunters could not easily forget the spectacle. Wrote home a Michigan Congressman: “The City is overwhelmed with a crowd of rabid, persistent office-seekers – the like never was experienced before in the history of the Government.”

An Indiana member reminisced later: “I met at every turn a swarm of miscellaneous people, many of them looking as hungry and fierce as wolves, and ready to pounce upon members [of Congress] as they passed, begging for personal intercessions, letters of recommendations, etc. . . . the scuffle for place was unabated.”

And the eccentric Count Adam Gurowski, viewing the scene, confided to his diary in this same month of March 1861 his impressions:

“What a run, a race for offices. This spectacle likewise new to me. The Cabinet Ministers, or, as they call them here, the Secretaries, have old party debts to pay, old sores to avenge or to heal, and all this by distributing offices, or by what they call it here, the patronage. They, the leaders, hope to create engines for their own political security, but no one seems to look over Mason and Dixon’s line to the terrible and with lightning-like velocity spreading fire of hellish treason.”

Politically and financially, the collectors of customs posts were among the most important at the disposal of the Administration. That at the metropolis of the Empire State was the most lucrative. “There is no situation in the U. States which enables the incumbent to exert such influence . . . as the Collectorship of New York,” one political observer had written in the 1840’s; to another this position was second only in influence to that of Postmaster-General.”

Under the caption “Fat Offices of New York,” Horace Greeley’s Tribune informed its readers in 1860 that ranking first in importance and revenue was the collectorship, with its fixed salary of $6,340, and some $20,000 more in the form of “pickings and fees.” Before Lincoln’s first administration had run its four years, the Surveyor of the Port estimated the number of employees in the New York Custom House at 1,200 and the assessment on their salaries for political party purposes at 2 percent.”

(Lincoln and the Patronage, Harry J. Carman & Reinhard H. Luthin, Peter Smith, 1864, excerpts pp. 53-54; 59-60)

The official intent of the early 1864 Red River Campaign was to forcibly restore the US flag to Texas soil and thus serve as a warning to Louis-Napoleon and Maximilian, though the real motivation was the seizure of vast quantities of Southern cotton needed by New England mills and export to England at high profit. As prior to the war, neither New England mill owners, Manhattan banks nor the British, the latter being firmly responsible for planting African slavery upon American shores, experienced any moral qualms regarding cotton produced by the labor of African bondsmen. In the words of historian E. Merton Coulter: “Business morality reached a very low ebb.”  The C.A. Weed Company below has been described as “either commission merchants or US Treasury agents, acting for several others.” General Banks was reportedly offered a $100,000 bribe to ensure maximum cotton bale acquisition.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Cotton Profiteering on the Red River

“Interest in upper Louisiana cotton and an expedition up the Red River was reignited [in January 1864] by the arrival of three thousand bales of cotton in [occupied] New Orleans from upriver Natchez, Mississippi. Michael Hahn, who would soon be elected governor of the Lincoln-loyal Louisiana State government, wrote the president that the arrival from Natchez “produced such a sensation as to cause a large number of persons to take the oath of allegiance in order to resume their business.”

Within a few months, a US marshal in Louisiana wrote Lincoln, “Commerce is still King. You have it in your power to reduce the price of gold, pacify the clamor for cotton from abroad, make friends for yourself and country and put into the exchequer from this department some $30-$40 million.”

On January 23, 1864, General [Nathaniel] Banks replied to a letter from General in Chief Halleck that [he] had completely accepted Halleck’s view regarding the merits of an advance up the Red River [to seize additional Southern cotton]. Earlier that month, Banks learned that two Confederate officers were willing to be bribed in order to ensure that massive quantities of cotton were not burned ahead of an advancing Union army, as otherwise required by Confederate law.

Banks was an ambitious politician with eyes on the White House. He knew that if he could deliver sizable quantities of cotton to England, powerful politicians would be influenced to look favorably on a Banks candidacy. As described by author Robert Kerby [Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 1972]:

“[In the Trans-Mississippi theater, whenever] a river steamboat churned from Shreveport or Alexandra, Louisiana, with a cargo of cotton consigned to New Orleans, it was fairly obvious that responsible people were permitting trade across the lines. Rebel customs officials collected the duties due on smuggled shipments . . . while New York financiers openly dealt in shares of Confederate cotton.

Swarms of Northern cotton buyers, bearing licenses signed by Lincoln himself, endured the rude hospitality of Shreveport, while agents dispatched by [General] Kirby Smith . . . became accustomed to the amenities of New Orleans and Washington.

Banks gathered a total of only about four thousand cotton bales, of which twenty-five hundred went to C.A. Weed & Company in New Orleans. Earlier, Weed had been a business partner of General [Benjamin] Butler’s shady older brother, Andrew. [Also, Northern Admiral David] Porter is estimated to have collected over $90,000 before [the US Congress altered cotton seizure protocols].”

As Confederate Major-General Richard Taylor, whose army pursued Banks, remembered: “In [the enemy’s army’s] rapid flight from Grand Ecore to Monette’s Ferry, a distance of forty miles, the Federal burned nearly every house on the road. In pursuit we passed the smoking ruins of homesteads, by which stood weeping women and children.”

(Trading with the Enemy; The Covert Economy During the American Civil War, Philip Leigh, Westholme, 2014, excerpts pp. 112-113; 122)

Between 1808 and 1832, tariff protection for New England shipping interests was the most important economic debate in the country. Though by 1860 constant resistance by the Southern States had kept rates relatively in check — and this was the primary income of the federal government — after sufficient States had seceded, the new Northern congressional majority raised tariff rates to near 50 percent. Once the new Confederate States Congress voted a virtual free tariff in early March, 1861, the “slave-importing shippers” of New England decided upon war against the South. The following was delivered by Lloyd T. Everett of the Washington [DC] Camp of the United Confederate Veterans on February 10, 1914.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Milk of the Cocoanut

“Mark well this fact: In the debates in Congress on the tariff dispute of 1833, John Quincy Adams, ex-President of the United States and then a member of the House of Representatives, uttered this significant remark from the floor of the House:

“But protection might be extended in different forms to different interests . . . In the Southern and Southwestern portion of the union, there exists a certain interest [by which Adams meant Negro slavery] which enjoys under the Constitution and the laws of the United States an especial protection, peculiar to itself” [i.e., return of fugitive slaves escaping from one State to another].

He referred to the slaves of the Southern States as “machinery,” and added: “If they [the Southern States] must withdraw protection from the free white labor of the North [the protection of a high tariff, Adams meant], then it ought to be withdrawn from the machinery of the South.”

Ah – here we have the milk in the cocoanut . . . In the framing of the Constitution, the North and the South – rather, New England and the far Southern States – arranged a quid pro quo, by which the shipping interests of New England obtained control, and permanent control, of commercial regulations by a mere majority vote, instead of a two-thirds majority vote, in the Congress, and the South (together with the slave-importing shippers of this same New England) defeated the possibility of prohibition of the continued importation of Negroes, temporarily, or for some nineteen years.

And now, her darling of sectional customs “protection” in danger from South Carolina’s firm stand, through John Adams as her spokesman, gave warning, in 1833, that tariff “protection,” although not guaranteed by the Constitution, and slavery protection, which was expressly guaranteed by that instrument, must be held as twin special interests, to stand or fall together.

In this light, then, these remarks of Adams, of Massachusetts, should be carefully marked and constantly borne in mind in connection with the subsequent growth and course of anti-Southern agitation, under the guise of an anti-slavery crusade, from the time – this time South Carolina’s Nullification stand and the resultant tariff reduction of 1833 – that a definite check was placed upon high tariff, North-favoring legislation.”

(Living Confederate Principles, Lloyd T. Everett, Southern Historical Society Papers, No. II, Volume XL, September 1915; Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991, excerpts pp. 21-22)

The following is taken from Dr. Clyde Wilson’s “Expansion and Conflict of the Northern and Southern Cultures in 1860” which traces the emerging and deepening fissures in the young American republic. Central to this conflict was the original and traditional American constitutional system of laws well-understood in the South, versus New England’s developing industry and the flood of immigrants into the North and Midwest, with little or no understanding of that American constitutional system of laws. The source book is available online at www.Amazon.com, and via free download from www.southernhistorians.org.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Understanding the War Between the States

“The economic conflict between North and South . . . was important and was present from the beginning. It was the root of the disagreement between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that was the first serious political conflict of the Union. But the undoubted importance of economics was no more central to the conflict than the persisting and evolving differences in values and ways of life.

Southerners had first developed the Midwest by settling the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. As time went on, this region changed character as industry and great cities developed and as New Englanders and European immigrants swarmed in. From the 1840s large numbers of impoverished Irish came to the US and settled everywhere, especially in the cities.

After the failed revolutions of 1848 many Germans and other central Europeans came, and settled largely in the Midwest. They had strong, centralist, progressive and authoritarian attitudes and knew nothing of the South or American constitutional traditions. They would be zealous supporters of the Republican Party and the Federal Army.

Abraham Lincoln secretly bought a German language newspaper [the Springfield Zeitung] to support his presidential candidacy. By the 1850s a majority in the Midwestern States no longer identified with and voted with the South as they had traditionally . . . [and] The Northern people were one-fourth foreign born.

It must be understood that Northern abolitionists had little sympathy for black people – they considered them an obstacle to what they wanted as American “progress.” Most Northern States denied rights to the few black people who lived there. In Lincoln’s Illinois, before and during the War Between the States, were not even allowed to move into the State.

If slaves were freed in the South, as abolitionists demanded, they were still not allowed to move North. The majority of free black people in the US were in the South and demonstrably better off than those in the North. For a long time New Englanders made the “racist” boast that they were “pure Anglo-Saxons” and thus superior to other Americans.

It is simply wrong to thing that antislavery was for racial equality. It was against black people and even more against those who held them as bonded labor. To assume otherwise is to make the mistake of reading the later 1900s back into that time. Abolition had little to do with the actual life lived by people, white or black, in the South. No abolitionist ever made any constructive suggestion [regarding peaceful or practical emancipation].”

(Understanding the War Between the States, A Supplemental Booklet, Clyde N. Wilson, Howard White, et al, 2015, excerpts Chapter 6)

What arch-Federalist Alexander Hamilton thought was merely a bad dream and impossible, achieved reality with the sixteenth person to occupy the Oval Office. Lincoln converted the republic into a government which made “war and carnage the only means of supporting itself – a government that can exist only by the sword.” Those States which enabled Lincoln to gain a plurality victory as president willingly provided the troops who marched into other States intent upon subjugation. Hamilton and his contemporaries never imagined a future president ruling with dictatorial powers and an army of two million under his command.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Hamilton’s Nation at War with Itself

“Remember, this is the arch-Federalist speaking, the man whose name is associated more than any other in the Constitutional Convention with the authority of the federal government. He paints a picture of the country without this [coercive] power, and of a State refusing a federal requisition:

“It has been observed, to coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. A failure of compliance will never be confined to a single State. This being the case, can we suppose it wise to hazard a civil war?

Suppose Massachusetts, or any large State, should refuse, and Congress should attempt to compel them, would they not have influence to procure assistance, especially from those States which are in the same situation as themselves? What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying State at war with a non-complying State; Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another; this State collecting auxiliaries, and forming, perhaps, a majority against the federal head.

Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well-disposed towards a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself – a government than can exist only by the sword.

Every such war must involve the innocent with the guilty. This single consideration should be sufficient to dispose every peaceable citizen against such a government. But can we believe one State will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream; it is impossible.”

(The Legality of Secession, excerpt, www.etymonline.com)

All the States of the Union were “free” in 1860, with some having ended the African labor system inherited from the British. The irony of the late antebellum hatred directed at the American South is that Northern slave ships, captained by the fathers and grandfathers of a great many Northern industrialists and political leaders profited handsomely in the transatlantic slave trade which populated the South with Africans; and no Southern leaders were to be found calling for the young Northern mill workers laboring 16 hours a day in unhealthy conditions to rise up and kill the wealthy mill owner.  It is noteworthy that no abolitionist leader or group presented a peaceful and practical solution to this African slavery — only war to the knife.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Millard Fillmore’s Prophesy

“[Daniel] Webster laid down, in immortal speeches, that the Union is not a compact between States, but a fundamental law no longer subject to their choice, and that each State is bound up with the rest by chords that cannot be legally severed. Thenceforward the opinion of Webster prevailed among American jurists.

The right of redress was taken away from the South, and the Northern Republicans, taking advantage of their constitutional victory, entered upon those violent courses which ended in making the Union intolerable to those who were opposed to them.

At that time the abolitionists commenced their crusade, which was directed as much against the Union, which they denounced as an “agreement with hell and a covenant with death,” as against slavery itself. It became a settled doctrine among them that the North and the South could not continue together, and they made the public familiar with the idea of dissolution [of the Union].

“The Union,” said Mr. Horace Greeley, editor of The [New York] Tribune, “is not worth supporting in connection with the South.”

But the stronger part of the Republicans resolved to make themselves master of the central government, for the purpose of coercing the South to submit to their political opinions. The Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts confessed that “the object to be accomplished was this, for the free States to take possession of the government.”

The spirit in which they meant to exercise it is expressed with the characteristic force and candor of American language by the representative of the same State in Congress: “When we shall have elected a President, as we will . . . and after we have exterminated a few more [Southern-friendly statesmen] from the North, then if the [Southerners Senators] shall not give way, we will grind it between the upper and nether millstones of our power.”

A pamphlet, which was widely circulated and was read in Congress, contains the following sentence: “Teach the slaves to burn their masters’ buildings, to kill their cattle and hogs, to conceal and destroy farming utensils, to abandon labor in seed time and harvest, and let the crops perish.”

Mr. [Salmon P.] Chase said, in 1859: I do not wish to have the slave emancipated because I love him, but because I hate his master.” A Senator from Ohio said very truly: “There is no union now between the North and the South, no two nations on earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancor towards each other than these two nations of the Republic.”

In this state of public feeling and political division, the candidate of Abolitionists and Republicans was elected President. Four years before, a former President, Mr. Fillmore, prophesied the catastrophe that would ensue:

“We see a political party presenting candidates for the Presidency and Vice-Presidency, selected for the first time from the Free States alone, with the avowed purpose of electing these candidates by suffrages from one part of the Union only, to rule over the whole United States. Can it be possible that those who are engaged in such a measure can have seriously reflected on the consequences which must inevitably follow in case of success?

Can they have the madness or the folly to believe that our Southern brethren would submit to be governed by such a Chief Magistrate?”

(The Civil War in America: Its Place in History; Selected Writings of Lord Acton, Volume I, Essays in the History of Liberty, J. Rufus Fears, editor, Liberty Fund, 1985, excerpts pp. 275-276)

During the mid-1700s, the legislatures of Virginia and North Carolina voted to restrict the slave trade into their colonies, only to be overruled by George III. Jefferson’s original Declaration draft included a detailed excoriation of England for the slave trade, though it was removed as New England had to share the blame of the mother country for transporting slaves to the South. A great irony of history was England prospering handsomely from the war between North and South, ostensibly excited by and fought over the existence of African slaves in their midst, and the slaves originally placed there by England itself. Counting the military and civilian deaths of nearly a million, and an ultimate cost of some $8 billion dollars, it is a wonder that England did not sense a responsibility for the carnage, 1861-1865.  A further irony is Lincoln, faced with the same potential loss of territory and people to rule over, duplicated the emancipation edicts of the British for the purpose of waging a cruel race war upon the South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Assigning Responsibility for Perpetuating African Slavery

“He [George III] waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people [Africans] who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of Infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain.

Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assembly of horrors might want no fact of distinguished dye, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

(Declaration of Independence as Drawn by Jefferson; The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia, A Comprehensive Collection of the Views of Thomas Jefferson, John P. Foley, editor, Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1900, pp. 813)

Lee had 55,000-some troops with which to oppose Grant’s invading force of 108,000 at Cold Harbor, though the latter consisted of many raw, inexperienced garrison troops unfamiliar with infantry tactics. They were nonetheless thrown into mass assaults against Lee’s entrenched veterans in suicidal assaults, and Grant’s apparent disdain for the lives of his own men was later matched by his refusal of prisoner exchanges which be believed benefited the South. This led to the death of many Northern prisoners from disease and starvation, despite President Davis’ offer of allowing food and medicine for the prisoners.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

One Thousand a Minute Casualty Rate

“Many officers and men in grey were taken by surprise at Grant’s move to interpose his forces between them and the Rebel capital. After the long and brutal contest in The Wilderness, Rebels had expected men in blue to retire for a period. Instead, here they were – apparently headed toward Spotsylvania.

This showed Grant had no intention of retreating. Furthermore, the usual pattern of actions in Washington had not been followed. That meant failure or defeat would not remove [Grant] from command. He would be expected to continue his war of attrition, regardless of losses sustained by his own forces.

Despite [concerns of Northern officers], the general advance ordered by Meade and Grant began about 4:30PM on June 2 [1864]. [General William F.] Smith castigated the movement as providing conclusive proof of the “entire absence of any military plan” among the Federal forces. Despite “a murderous fire,” men in blue managed to reach the edge of the woods, where the second line caught up with them . . . resuming their advance [but] the enemy fire was so heavy that the fell back.

Whether the decision was made by Grant or by Meade, orders soon came for a full frontal assault at 4:30 on the following morning. Smith saw the Rebel positions as being more than merely formidable . . . Generations later, [historian] Jeffrey D. Wert characterized the Rebel works at Cold Harbor in two words: “nearly impregnable.”

Impregnable or not, orders were to take the Confederate works. Diaries and letters reveal that on the night before the scheduled grand assault, large numbers of men in blue wrote their names and addresses on slips of paper and pinned them to their shirts . . . essential if bodies of the slain were to be shipped home to their relatives.

Soon afterward it became generally known that the Federal move at Cold Harbor, whose width is variously estimated at having been from one-half to six miles, lasted less than 10 minutes. During that time, men in blue became casualties at a rate of about 16 per second. Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg is far better known and may have involved more casualties. Yet no other Civil War action approached Cold Harbor in its June 3rd per-minute casualty rate of approximately one thousand men.

Smith dashed off a dispatch to Meade in which he reported the triple repulse of one body of Federals [adding that] there was no hope that they could carry the works in front of them without relief from galling Rebel fire. In reply, he received orders to move forward [and later] an oral command that he lead another assault. “That order I refused to obey,” Smith later confessed.

Because the leader of the XVIII flatly disobeyed his commander, some eight thousand men in blue – more or less – watched as their comrades were once more mowed down. In the melee of battle, it is unlikely that anyone except a handful of loyal aides knew that he had defied Meade. If his action had been known at headquarters and regulations had been followed, his disobedience would have led to a charge of mutiny.”

(Mutiny in the Civil War, Webb Garrison, White Mane Books, 2001, excerpts pp. 134; 136-139)

“[The] Narragansett planters” of Rhode Island had also a reputation for generous living.  Indentured servants came in from England and Ireland . . . Prosperous families, especially in the larger towns, often had one or more Negro slaves and there was no general feeling against the practice, though a few protests were heard. Rhode Island [by 1740] had the largest proportion of Negroes and the Narragansett planters used slave labor more than any other part of New England.

Generally speaking, the small farmers of New England could not use Negro slaves to much purpose.”

(The Foundations of American Nationality, Evarts Boutell Greene, American Book Company, 1922, excerpt pg. 266)