Circa1865

In 1862, black pilot Robert Smalls intentionally delivered a ship to the fleet blockading Charleston and thus adhered to the enemy of his people and State – the very definition of treason in the US and CSA Constitutions. He gained further infamy by leading enemy forces through local waters, and encouraging black South Carolinians to desert their State and wage war against it as the British had done 88 years earlier. After the war and part of the corrupt Reconstruction government in South Carolina, State Congressman Smalls was convicted in 1877 of taking a $5000 bribe for the awarding of a State printing contract to a Republican crony.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

High Treason Against South Carolina

“On May 12, 1862, the small but fast shallow-draft steamer Planter was sent to Cole’s Island to take on board four guns that were there, with orders to transport them to Middle Ground Battery (Fort Ripley). Having loaded the guns, the Planter proceeded to the city; since it was late, she tied up at her usual berth at Southern Wharf. In spite of a general order stating that officers were to remain on board during the night, the captain, mate and engineer left the Planter in charge of the Negro crew under the command of Robert Smalls and returned to their homes. Smalls, a man of exceptional ability, planned to abscond with the Planter and turn her and the guns over to the [enemy] blockading fleet outside the harbor.

By the time anyone on [Fort] Sumter realized that anything was wrong, the Planter was out of range of the guns. Heading for the nearest blockade vessel, the USS Onward, Smalls lowered his two flags and ran up a white sheet. The captain of the Onward immediately brought his ship into position so that his port guns could be brought to bear on the oncoming Planter . . . as soon as the Planter came alongside she was boarded and the [United States] ensign raised. A crew was put aboard, and she went straight to Port Royal.  Smalls was praised by Du Pont for his part in the abduction of the Planter, and it was through the insistence of Du Pont that he and his crew received a share of the prize money. Smalls’ share amounted to $1500; the other crew members received less.

The [Planter’s] captain, mate and engineer were arrested and tried. The first two were found guilty, and the engineer was released because of insufficient evidence. The captain was sentenced to three months in prison and a fine or $500; the mate was to be imprisoned for one month and pay a fine of $100. Smalls was made a pilot by Du Pont. After the war he was elected to the State House of Representatives and then to the State Senate; later he became a United States congressman. A high school in Beaufort, South Carolina bears his name.”

(The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865, E. Milby Burton, USC Press, 1970, pp. 94-97)

The war itself was a profitable enterprise for the North as “life insurance in force tripled during the Civil War, and one company, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., targeted military men in particular. In 1865, the Connecticut General Life Insurance Co. began writing policies for those who did not qualify medically.” Northern business found vast profits even in the lives of their own soldiers.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

High Estimates of Yankee Shrewdness

“Notorious as they are for the matter-of-course way in which they are wont to put off the ties of nature, they could yet grow eloquent when descanting on the brotherhood of all citizens, or the sisterhood of States. When first secession “reared its awful form” they called us “erring brethren” and “wayward sisters,” “rebellious brethren” and “estranged sisters,” “a little more than kin and less than kind,” and so on ran the gamut of appropriate epithets to their unfraternal relatives of the South.

Then they became still more affectionate as we became less fond, and next assumed the paternal type; Uncle Sam found out that his nieces were his own children; and imported citizens in Wisconsin and Minnesota mourned in High Dutch, and wept in lager beer, over the unfilial conduct of South Carolina and Georgia.

But the climax of sentimentality for the North and of insult to the South, was attained when the Yankee worked himself up to the amatory pitch and represented the union of States under the symbol of wedlock – the Northern States the bridegroom and the Southern the bride. We all remember how the fit idol of these modern Egyptians, their god Anubis, their chosen chief, Abraham Lincoln aired this comparison on his way to Washington, and how he enlivened the parallel by ribald allusions to Free Love and Elective Affinities.

[The] true standard bearers of the South – her statesmen and her thinkers – were never so much given to bursts of sympathy as the declamatory champions of the North; and now that the fiery trial of actual warfare has brought out the stamp of each nationality in clear outlines, no one should wonder that the Yankees have the monopoly of the sentimentality department; for sentiment is always idle, always selfish; real feeling alone is active and self-sacrificing.

Still we have too high an estimate of Yankee shrewdness to suppose that these displays of rhetoric are meant for any other ears than those of the groundlings; and the initiated have, no doubt, a far different idea of the real nature of the Union. They are not imposed on “by brotherhoods and sisterhoods, by the bonds of a common descent, a common language and a common history.” They too, take a business view of the connexion, and look upon the Union as a great Life Insurance Bubble. And how well they understand the workings of such institutions, our Southern policy-holders know to their cost.

The peculiar form of insurance company after which the Union, as they have it, was framed, is technically called a Tontine, and the brief exposition of the system is conveyed in the familiar regulation: “the longest liver takes all.” The Southern States, according to them, had so many inherent elements of weakness that they were to die out, and the North was to succeed by virtue of survivorship, to the rents of their less vigorous neighbours, and, meanwhile, by dexterous management in the board of directors, to cheat them out of any annuities which might be due. But the process of dying out was very slow. In short, it soon became evident that the “course of ultimate extinction” was very tardy, and it was deemed expedient to aid nature a little.

Wholesale murder – the last resort of Yankees as kings – is their present experiment…[but] the butcher’s business, as conducted by the Federal armies, does not pay. Our throats are not easily cut, and so far from letting them have the whole body of the Confederacy as the fee of their exertions we begrudge them even the “fifth quarter.”

(Soldier and Scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve and the Civil War, Ward W. Briggs, Jr., editor, pp. 128-131)

Grant learned quickly who his masters were and who would ensure his government position and pension after the cheering stopped. A man most unsuited to the presidency, he was merely the front-man for corporate interests which rode his popularity into unchecked power. The Captain Winslow mentioned below, ironically was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and fought against his native State; his family ties with the old New England Winslow family caused him to join the revolutionaries of the North.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Heroes and Idols of the North

“General Grant, in spite of all that is said about his modesty, his integrity and his respect for civil authority, is already beginning to put on princely airs. For a long time he has been very firmly slamming his door in the face of Cabinet members who have tried to look too closely into the affairs of his army. Today he sent Mr. Lincoln a message expressing his satisfaction with his performance and conveying kind congratulations in the tone the Tsar of Russia might use when writing to his dear cousin the Emperor of Austria.

America is at present honoring one of those ephemeral heroes who change from week to week. Grant has a rival for the applause of the masses in the person of Captain [John A.] Winslow. This naval officer, who defeated the privateer Alabama, has been literally borne in triumph from one end of the United States to the other. Boston has just given him a splendid welcome, New York is clamoring for him and the national propensity for imitation — which reminds one of Panurge’s sheep — will surely bring him many more ovations. Prominent men like Mr. [Edward] Everett do not hesitate to harness themselves to his triumphal chariot.

You would almost think that the fight between the Alabama and the Kearsarge was the most glorious feat of arms in this century. The hero, puffed up by his unexpected fame, goes from banquet to banquet telling the tale of his great deeds. If you believe all he says, you would think that all by himself on his little boat he held the envious powers of Europe at bay, paralyzed with terror, that he thumbed his nose at the French navy, slapped a British admiral in the face and defied Lord Russell by sailing right up the Thames — indeed, that he has made the name of America shine like a fiery sword in the eyes of a terrified Europe.

The American public soon gets enough of its idols. Clever men never let themselves be exploited in this way; they prefer to be the impresario who sponsors one of these seven-day wonders; in this way they avoid inflating for themselves the dangerous balloon of popularity that rises so high and so swiftly, but will just as suddenly let fall those it has lifted up.”

(A Frenchman in Lincoln’s America, Ernst D. de Hauranne, Donnelly & Sons, 1974, Volume II, pp. 92-94 )

Republican President William McKinley was disturbed by the untended condition of Confederate graves near Fredericksburg in 1896 and responded favorably to the United Confederate Veterans interest in re-interring Southern veterans of the War Between the States. The Confederate Section of Arlington Cemetery was created with a monument approved in 1906 by Secretary of War and future President William Howard Taft. The 1929 US Public Law 810 authorized the Secretary of War to “erect headstones over the graves of soldiers who served in the Confederate Army”; US Public Law 85-425 of 1958 provided pensions for Confederate veterans equal to that of Union veterans.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Confederate Veterans Recognized in Arlington

“The solemn and patriotic undertaking resulting in the attentive care now being given by the [United States] government to the graves of the thousands of soldiers of the South who died while prisoners of war and the marking of these graves with the proper inscription of the Confederate States army was commenced by the establishment of the beautiful Confederate Section in Arlington Cemetery, the great national burial ground near Washington, and was brought about by Camp No. 1191, United Confederate Veterans, under the leadership of its commander, Dr. S.E. Lewis, now the United States Commissioner for this great work.

[Dr. Lewis has] devoted himself in all these years since 1898, when he investigated the graves of such Confederate soldiers as were buried at Arlington and in other places around the capital. Finding them in unsuitable locations, neglected, and without a soldier’s mark, in 1899 he, in conjunction with his Camp Committee on Confederate Dead, brought the matter by petition before President [William] McKinley and received his sympathy and support, which resulted in an appropriation by Congress in 1900 and in an order for reburial and proper marking by the secretary of War, April 25, 1901.

These Confederate dead, numbering one hundred and twenty-eight in the National Soldier’s Home Cemetery, in the District of Columbia, and one hundred and thirty-six in the older part of Arlington Cemetery, were re-buried . . . with new headstones and the inscriptions . . . consisting of the name and rank of the Confederate soldier, his company, regiment, State, and finally, the letters C.S.A., signifying the Confederate States Army.

The completion of the work in Arlington Cemetery opened the way [for Dr. Lewis] to extend the same attention to the graves of all Confederate soldiers and sailors, over thirty thousand, who died as prisoners of war . . .

This work of rescuing and marking soldiers’ graves under such circumstances has no parallel in history, and those whose knowledge of Confederate soldiers and sympathy with their families in our Southland led them to initiate and prosecute this great memorial have earned the lasting gratitude of every Confederate veteran and should be held in the highest esteem by all who value the honor of the South to the end of time.”

(Patriotic Work of Dr. S.E. Lewis, by E.W. Anderson, Jacksonville, Fla., Confederate Veteran, July 1914, pg. 331)

The first commander-in-chief of the United Confederate Veterans, General John B. Gordon of Georgia, tried repeatedly to retire from his high office, “but his comrades would not consent.” Below, he spoke in 1890 of the necessity of maintaining unblemished the nobility, heroism, sacrifices, suffering and glorious memory of the American soldiers in grey.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Here Lies and American Hero

“[The United Confederate Veterans] was created on high lines, and its first commander was the gallant soldier, General John B. Gordon, at the time governor of Georgia, and later was United States senator. General Gordon was continued as commander-in-chief until his death.

The note . . . struck in the constitution of the United Confederate Veterans were reechoed in the opening speech of the first commander-in-chief. General Gordon, addressing the Veterans and the public, said:

“Comrades, no argument is needed to secure for those objects your enthusiastic endorsement. They have burdened your thoughts for many years. You have cherished them in sorrow, poverty and humiliation. In the face of misconstruction, you have held them in your hearts with the strength of religious convictions.

No misjudgments can defeat your peaceful purposes for the future. Your aspirations have been lifted by the mere force and urgency of surrounding conditions to a plane far above the paltry considerations of partisan triumphs.

The honor of the American Government, the just powers of the Federal Government, the equal rights of States, the integrity of the Constitutional Union, the sanctions of law, and the enforcement of order have no class of defenders more true and devoted than the ex-soldiers of the South and their worthy descendants. But you realize the great truth that a people without the memories of heroic suffering or sacrifice are a people without history.

To cherish such memories and recall such a past, whether crowned with success or consecrated in defeat, is to idealize principle and strengthen character, intensify love of country, and convert defeat and disaster into pillars of support for future manhood and noble womanhood.

Whether the Southern people, under their changed conditions, may ever hope to witness another civilization which shall equal that which began with their Washington and ended with their Lee, it is certainly true that devotion to their glorious past is not only the surest guarantee of future progress and the holiest bond of unity, but is also the strongest claim they can present to the confidence and respect of the other sections of the Union.

It is political in no sense, except so far as the word “political” is a synonym for the word “patriotic.” [It will] cherish the past glories of the dead Confederacy and transmute them into living inspirations for future service to the living Republic; of truth, because it will seek to gather and preserve, as witness to history, the unimpeachable facts which shall doom falsehood to die that truth may live; of justice, because it will cultivate . . . that broader and higher and nobler sentiment which would write on the grave of every soldier who fell on our side, “Here lies an American hero, a martyr to the right as his conscience conceived it.”

(The Photographic History of The Civil War, Vol. 5, Robert S. Lanier, editor, Blue & Grey Press, 1987, pp. 298-299)

Henry Lee’s Letter to Son Carter Lee, September 30, 1816

“Important as it is to understand nature in its range and bearing, it is more so to be prepared for usefulness, and to render ourselves pleasing by understanding well the religious and moral knowledge of right and wrong, to investigate thoroughly the history of mankind, and to be familiar with those examples which show the loveliness of truth, and demonstrate the reasonableness of our opinions by past events.

Read therefore the best poets, the best orators, and the best historians; as from them you draw principles of moral truth, axioms of prudence and material for conversation. This was the opinion of the great Socrates. He labored in Athens to turn philosophy from the study of nature to the study of life. He justly thought man’s great business was to learn how to do good, and to avoid evil. Be a steady, ardent disciple of Socrates; and regard virtue, whose temple is built upon truth, as the chief good.

[But] virtue and wisdom are not opponents; they are friends and coalesce in a few characters such as [Washington]. A foolish notion often springs up with young men as they enter life, namely, that the opinion of the world is not to be regarded; whereas, it is the true criterion, generally speaking, of all things that terminate in human life. To despise its sentence, if possible, is not just; and if just, is not possible. H. Lee.”

(Life of General Henry Lee, Revolutionary War Memoirs, R.E. Lee, editor, DaCapo, 1998, page 60)

Henry Clay, the “great compromiser,” pleaded with the abolitionists to cease their incendiary activities which threatened to disrupt the Union in a speech before the United States Senate in February 1839. The States he labels as “free” were former slave and slave trading States which were offering no peaceful and practical solutions to the African slavery they helped nurture and perpetuate.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Abolitionists Mad and Fatal Course

“. . . Abolition should no longer be regarded as an imaginary danger. The abolitionists, let me suppose, succeed in their present aim of uniting the inhabitants of the free States, as one man, against the inhabitants of the slave States. Union on one side will beget union on the other.

And this process of reciprocal consolidation will be attended with all the violent prejudices, embittered passions, and implacable animosities, which ever degraded or deformed human nature. A virtual dissolution of the Union will have taken place, while the forms of its existence remain.

The most valuable element of union, mutual kindness, the feelings of sympathy, the fraternal bonds, which now happily unite us, will have been extinguished for ever.

One section will stand in menacing and hostile array against the other. The collision of opinion will be quickly followed by the clash of arms. I will not attempt to describe scenes which now happily lie concealed from our view. Abolitionists themselves would shrink back in dismay and horror at the contemplation of desolated fields, conflagrated cities, murdered inhabitants, and the overthrow of the fairest fabric of human government that ever rose to animate the hopes of civilized man.

Nor should these abolitionists flatter themselves that, if they can succeed in uniting the people of the free States, they will enter the contest with a numerical superiority that must insure victory. All history and experience proves the hazard and uncertainty of war. And we are admonished by Holy Writ, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. But if they were to conquer, whom would they conquer?

A foreign foe – one who had insulted our flag, invaded our shores, and laid our country waste? No, sir; no, sir. It would be a contest without laurels, without glory; a self, a suicidal conquest; a conquest of brothers over brothers, achieved by one over another portion of the descendants of common ancestors, who, nobly pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor, had fought and bled, side by side, in many a hard battle on land and ocean, severed our country from the British crown, and established our original independence.

The inhabitants of the slave States are sometimes accused by their Northern brethren with displaying rashness and sensibility to the operations and proceedings of the abolitionists.

[But] Let me suppose that the people of the slave States were to form societies, subsidize presses, make large pecuniary contributions, send forth numerous missionaries throughout all their borders, and enter into machinations to burn the beautiful capitals, destroy the productive manufactories, and sink in the ocean the gallant ships of the Northern States. Would these incendiary proceedings be regarded as neighborly and friendly, and consistent with the fraternal sentiments which should ever by cherished by one portion of the Union toward the other?

Would they excite no emotion? Occasion no manifestations of dissatisfaction? Nor lead to any acts of retaliatory violence?

I beseech the abolitionists themselves, solemnly to pause in their mad and fatal course….let them select some one more harmless, that does not threaten to deluge our country in blood. I entreat that portion of my countrywomen, who have given their countenance to abolition, to….reflect that the ink which they shed in subscribing with their fair hands abolition petitions, may prove but the prelude to the shedding of the blood of their brethren.

I adjure all the inhabitants of the free States to rebuke and discountenance, by their opinion and their example, measures which must inevitably lead to the most calamitous consequences.”

(The South, A Documentary History, Ina Woestemeyer Van Noppen, D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958, pp. 258-260)

Though Southern people may have held Africans as slaves, a labor arrangement of the British colonial system and accelerated by Northern slave traders and New England cotton mills needing cheaply-produced raw material, this in no way indicated a hatred of black people by Southerners. Before and during the war black and white people attended the same churches; in the postwar interracial harmony ended as the Republican party sowed the seeds of racial hatred between black and white for political purposes.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Helping Those in Need

“During the Depression my parents befriended an old Negro woman who didn’t have a husband but a house full of children. We had a smokehouse down here where we’d keep the meat, corncribs, potato bins, produce of the farm. And the woman’s family was fed out of that for several years. She was too old to do much work, but she was competent and she did what she could in gratitude and out of knowing that she’d been provided for.

Well, she brought along some little boys. There were Billy and Charlie and Lester and Matt and James. We’d play outside, ride the marsh ponies, hook up the old mule and ride him, go out and gather wood, get in fights, kill snakes, go fishing. I didn’t know that we were especially conscious of any strain.

We knew that on Sunday they went to their church and we would go to ours. We had three or four Negro servants in the house in those days – a housekeeper, a cook, a washerwoman, a gardener. Most of them were people who desperately needed food and shelter in the Depression.

When those boys I used to play with got to be teenagers, I went away to college. And we grew apart. I’ve seen then through the years, and once in a while we’ll stop and talk. I’ll ask them how they’re getting along. They don’t have any interest in talking to me. I don’t think there’s any resentment or hurt, but it’s hard to relate to them today as individuals the way we did back then. It’s part of the times.

One of them left these parts. He’s a bartender in Camp Lejeune over in Jacksonville. He makes more money than I make. I know he owns a better home than I have; he drives a new automobile. He certainly isn’t impressed. The fact is, he doesn’t need me anymore. His family does not need my family. We helped when he did need help, and I think maybe that’s appreciated. But there’s no more corn in the crib. There’s no more meat in the smokehouse.”

(William Dallas Herring: Rose Hill, Reed M. Wolcott, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1976, pp. 32-33)

The disruption of Southern race relations by federal authorities, the Supreme Court and imported agitators, has done more harm than good, according to author William D. Workman, Jr. He writes that “In many respects, the refusal of the North to leave the South alone has had a harmful effect upon the very individuals about whom the Northerners profess most concern – that is, the Southern Negro.” As they “helped” the Southern Negro, they also ruined his good relations with the white neighbors he had to live with.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Heart of the Race Relations Problem

“More [problems] can be expected in the future if Northern integrationists, with or without political backing, continue to pillory the white South under the guise of helping the black South.

Meanwhile, the harried Southern Negro, who may or may not agree with the fulminations made in his behalf, stands to lose more than he gains. In most of the South, he is now possessed of all the purely legal rights which are coming his way, and continued agitation from the North can add little to his political status . . . [and] On the other hand, and this has become quite apparent in the last few years, the Negro becomes – willingly or unwillingly – the object of the white Southerner’s resentment.

Basically, the white Southerner has little quarrel with his Negro neighbor, and frankly despises the Northern propagandists – including the Supreme Court of the United States – with far greater intensity than is ever directed toward the Negro.

When the Northerner preaches the “brotherhood of man,” the Southerner calls for “freedom of association” and proceeds to sever longstanding ties which formerly linked him amicably with his Negro fellow-Southerners.

The net result is that the Northern action brings about almost the reverse reaction from that desired. Instead of bringing Southern whites and Negroes closer together, it drives them farther apart since, in the eyes of the white Southerner, the Negro is identified with those forces which seek to pillory and persecute the South.

The heart of the problem lies in the achievement of community acceptance of whatever pattern of race relations seems best for that community. [Where] there is not acceptance, no amount of pressure – federal, religious, or otherwise – will bring about a satisfactory situation. The matter of race relations is too close a thing . . . and not a thing to be handled by impersonal formula and governmental edict . . . .

In the years preceding the Supreme Court decision of 1954, and in a diminishing degree since then, Southern communities were making notable progress in the expansion of not only racial amity but of bi-racial achievement. The pressures which have built up following the desegregation decision, however, tended in large measure to “freeze” things as they were, and indeed in many cases to undo the good that had been accomplished by slow, patient work over the years.

Florida’s Gov. LeRoy Collins had this to say on March of 1956:

“For as long as I can remember, the Florida A&M [Negro] University choir on Sunday afternoons has held vesper services open to the general public. Many white citizens have over the years attended these concerts with great admiration for the excellence of these Negro voices singing the spirituals of their race. But this has almost completely stopped, I am advised. The singing still goes on each Sunday, and it is as good as it has ever been, but there are no longer white listeners. Fear of being labeled integrationists has intimidated them into staying away . . .

These things don’t make good sense but they are happening nevertheless. They signal not just a halt in the advancement of good race relations, but actually a decided move backward. They show the insidious results when our people are pulled by one side or the other into the fighting pit of the extremists . . . “

(The Case For the South, William D. Workman, Jr., Devin-Adair, 1960, pp. 134-138)

The French Revolution unleashed the idea of the Rights of Man and Nations, an unstoppable force which led to the 1848 socialist revolutions in Europe. The latter sent radical German revolutionaries, the “Forty-eighters,” who controlled the powerful German-American press which Lincoln did not ignore in 1860. The Federal host invading the American South included divisions of Germans, Irish, the Red Shirts of Garibaldi, and some who had followed the Hungarian revolutionary, Kossuth.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Revolutionary Indemnity Deja Vu

“The French Revolution was different [than previous revolutions] because it brought into the world and Europe in particular, a new idea, the Rights of Man, and with the Rights of Man went the Rights of Nations. Where previously states had been based on dynastic power they were now based on national existence. In the old days, right up to 1789, the state was simply the property of the ruler . . . Then suddenly there appeared the French people who said, “We are France.”

This was a challenge to all the dynasties of Europe and there was a competition of propaganda and of assertion, with, as the [revolution] developed, first the liberal and then the radical, and then the revolutionary leaders staking out more aggressively the claims of the people of France and in time the claims of others. After all, if France had the right to be a nation . . . this applied to others.

One of the factors which produced the revolutionary war was the provocative declaration which the French legislative assembly made on 19 November 1792, promising help and fraternity to every nation seeking to recover its liberty.

The word recover is curious. Most of the nations had never had their liberty, but it was already a myth that there had been a distant time when peoples had all been free and had then been enslaved by their kings.

Something else was curious about it. Although two great forces, the one of monarchy, of tradition, of conservatism, the other of liberalism and nationalism, were moving against each other, neither of them looked at it in practical terms [and action beyond issuing threats].

Strangely enough, though France was the one threatened [by the other monarchies seeking a restoration of Louis XVI], it was the French revolutionary government which finally plunged into war, declared war – threatened Austria in April 1792, and then actually went to war, though unable to do very much.

Why? Because as one of them said: “The time has come to start a new crusade, a crusade for universal liberty.” When the French revolutionary armies encountered the armies of the old [French] regime and were defeated, the cry arose, as it does in a war, of “Treason.” “We are betrayed.” The very same cry that the French raised in 1940 when they were again defeated.

[As the French revolutionary armies] began to achieve victories, [they] certainly brought liberation from the traditional institutions, liberation from the kings and princes, liberation from the Christian religion. At the same time, they brought demands . . .”After all,” the French said, “We have done the fighting, we have liberated you, we have presented you with the Rights of Man, we not only had to pay the money for these armies, we had actually to do the fighting for you as well. Therefore you must pay us.”

Wherever the armies of liberty went in Europe, they imposed indemnities. They collected so much that there was a time when the French revolutionary wars were practically paying for themselves. Moreover, as the armies grew greater and more powerful, the apprehensions of the civilian politicians in Paris grew greater also.

What they wanted was that these revolutionary armies . . . devoted as they were to liberty and equality and fraternity, should not exert power in Paris itself. As one of the revolutionaries said “We must get these scoundrels to march as far away from France as possible.” Revolution had become something for export.”

(How Wars Begin, A.J.P. Taylor, Atheneum Press, 1979, excerpts pp. 20-33)