Circa1865

In his last major campaign speech of the 1940 election, to the “Boston Irish,” FDR reaffirmed his opposition to intervention in the European war, and added that “while I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I will give you one more assurance.  I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lend-Lease Equals Dead American Boys

“The 1940 presidential campaign soon settled into a phony contest to see who could most reassure American fathers and mothers that their boys would not be sent off to fight a war. [Republican presidential candidate Wendell] Wilkie kept calling FDR a warmonger and the public reaction finally got under the President’s skin.

The late Robert Sherwood, a Roosevelt ghost writer, has written that on a trip through New England on October 30 FDR was flooded with telegrams “stating almost tearfully that if the President did not give his solemn promise to the mothers, he might as well start packing his belongings at the White House.”

For this reason, Sherwood explained, the President that night in a speech in Boston spoke those unforgettable lines: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again – and again – and again – your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign war.” According to Sherwood, FDR rejected a suggestion by another speechwriter, Samuel Rosenman, that he add the phrase that was so important to him in the [Democratic] platform – “except in case of attack.”

The President’s campaign promises did not square with an impression I was getting from insiders. In October, Vice President John Nance Garner called me into his room off the Senate floor. He had just come from a Cabinet meeting.

“I’ll bet you a grand,” the Vice President [stated], “that we’re in the war by June first of next year.” Garner paused, ruminating, then added: “[Secretary of State Cordell] Hull is more anxious to go to war with the Japs than the Chief is.” I asked why.

“Because he thinks we’ve got to go to war with them sometime and we might as well do it now,” the Vice President said.

“That’s a hell of a reason,” I said. Garner agreed. Later, I mentioned Garner’s report on Hull’s attitude to Chairman Tom Connally of the Foreign Relations Committee and he grunted, “That’s right.”

The evidence that Hull wanted to go to war with Japan is overwhelming. Senator George W. Norris, the great liberal independent, knew it and once innocently assured me we would not lose any soldiers in a war with Japan.

Immediately after the election . . . Roosevelt [asked] Congress for authority to lend-lease all sorts of aid to the allies. It would be a revolutionary law giving him tremendous dictatorial powers to further our intervention – something he would not dare broach before the election.

When I arrived in Washington, DC, Senator Ed Johnson, a Colorado Democrat who shared my sentiments about the war, said he could not prevent its passage . . . . “The skids are greased and the Republicans and Democratic leaders are all for the bill,” Johnson said. I told him I would fight it even if the only vote I mustered was my own.

“When you pass this bill, it means war,” I told my colleagues. All the Democrats speaking for the Administration said the bill meant peace.

“If it is our war,” I said on January 2, 1941, “how can we justify lending them stuff and asking them to pay us back?” If it is our war, we ought to have the courage to go over and fight it, but it is not our war.”

[Wheeler said on the radio:] “The lend-lease program is the New Deal’s triple-A foreign policy; it will plow under every fourth American boy.”

Joe Kennedy, a friend since the early 1920s, shared my concern about our avoiding the war. He once told me that he liked Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain better than Winston Churchill because Chamberlain was interested in working out a peaceful solution. If this was so, I asked him, why did Britain let itself get involved in a war. Kennedy said it was “pressure from the United States.”

(Yankee From the West, Burton K. Wheeler, Paul F. Healy, editor, Doubleday & Company, 1962, pp. 24-27)

In postwar North Carolina the Loyal Leagues, Union League, etc., of the North’s Republican party were regarded as hostile organizations and designed to instill hatred in the freedmen against their white neighbors – for political purposes. During 1869 “there was an epidemic of barn-burnings in several counties of the State” charged to the Leagues as they encouraged blacks to destroy the agricultural livelihood of white farmers who were Democrats. Southern leaders advised Northern Republicans that if they disbanded their Loyal Leagues, the Klan would immediately disappear.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Loyal Leagues, Klans and Precedents

“The part played by the Loyal Leagues and similar organizations [Union League] in provoking the Southern people to defensive expedients was recognized by fair-minded Northern newspapers, and when in April, 1868, General [George G.] Meade issued an order for the suppression of the Ku Klux Klan, the New York Herald commented:

“The order of General Meade . . . will meet with the approval of all who espouse the cause of order and good government. But the General must not exercise his power on that organization alone. He must rigorously suppress the secret “Loyal Leagues” of Negroes; for they are equally, if not more, pernicious in their influence than the white man’s society.

The arrogance of the Negroes and their attempt to reduce the whites of the South to political vassalage by means of the “Loyal Leagues,” and the many other outrages that have been committed by these same Leagues, are equally as dangerous to the peace and safety of society as are the retaliatory actions of the Ku Klux Klan.”

An Alabama paper in an editorial denouncing the Loyal League said: “The League is nothing more than a [black] Ku Klux Klan . . . Let [their carpetbagger leader] break up the League and thus remove all temptation from the Kluxes to come here.”

It was the usual practice for the Leagues, when they held their meetings, to throw out armed pickets in all directions about the building . . . [a white resident commented that] “The Negroes acted here just like an invading army after they had conquered everything and were going rough-shod over everything. They thought they were the big dogs in the ring.”

Even so prejudiced an observer as the carpetbagger Judge [Albion] Tourgee said: “There is no doubt about this feeling, taken in connection with the enfranchisement of the blacks, induced thousands of good citizens to ally themselves with the Ku Klux Klan upon the idea of that they were acting in self-defense in so doing, and especially that they were securing the safety of their wives and children thereby.”

In such a state of affairs . . . throughout the South there began spontaneously to spring up local defensive groups, generally in the form of secret societies, designed primarily to offset the aggressiveness of the Loyal Leagues.

The members of the Boston Tea Party – and the members of the Ku Klux Klan – were but following a precedent set for them in earlier days in other lands. England had known the Moss Troopers, who took drastic means of manifesting their disapproval of the iron rule of the Normans; the misrule of Louis XI of France had resulted in the formation of that powerful and mysterious organization known as the Free Companions; Italy had its Carbonari during the Napoleonic wars.

Freedom loving people everywhere, when overwhelmed by oppression against which they have no their defense, have never hesitated to resort to secret and, if needs be, violent organizations for relief.”

(The Invisible Empire, The Story of the Ku Klux Klan, 1866-1871, Stanley F. Horn, Houghton-Mifflin, 1939, pp. 26-30)

Southern President Jefferson Davis described Bismarck’s Prussians as the “arrogant robbing Yankees of Europe” who appropriated their small sister states into a centralized and oppressive regime. By 1864, fully 25% of Lincoln’s war machine was comprised of German soldiers and US war bonds found many subscribers in the Fatherland.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Grasping Yankee Prussians Against the South

“ . . . Southerners insisted that slavery was not a cause of the war in the sense of being a source of an irrepressible conflict between North and South. They ascribed [Northern attacks on slavery] . . . not to any humanitarian or ideological considerations which indicated divergent opinions on the morality of slavery, but to the desires of ambitious politicians and selfish manufacturers for political power and economic gain.

They charged that Northern majorities in Congress had passed legislation for the benefit of their section’s commercial and manufacturing interests and at the expense of the Southern States. The Yankees had become grasping and aggressive, and Jefferson Davis, drawing a parallel to the contemporary Franco-Prussian War, compared the Yankees of the 1850’s to the Prussians of the 1870’s . . .

Not slavery, but the North’s unjustifiable assaults upon the Southern States had caused secession and war, in the view of Confederates . . . the primary reasons for the North’s hostility to the Southern States lay in the fact that the Northern and Southern States had differing, antagonistic and competing ways of life. The Southern way of life was generally defined by former Confederates in terms of an agricultural economy, locally controlled and conservative in its social and political customs.

[They] emphasized in particular that the ante-bellum South had differed from the North in that its civilization had been essentially conservative. It was conservative, they asserted, in its concept of constitutional liberty, centering around the sovereignty of States, and opposed both to national centralization and to extreme doctrines of the “natural rights” of individuals.

It was conservative also, they stated, in its aristocratic principles, opposing mere majority rule, opposing what the former Confederate Secretary of State, R.M.T. Hunter called the “despotic majority of numbers” in the North.

D.H. Hill, A.T. Bledsoe, and R.L. Dabney took the lead in describing the antagonism between Southern “conservatism” and Northern “radicalism.” The North, they declared, had abandoned the system of government prescribed in the Constitution and had adopted radical, democratic, European “isms,” based upon principles of equal rights for all individuals and rule by the majority.

These doctrines stemmed from the French Revolution; they were held, implied General Jubal Early, by the men who had crucified Jesus Christ. Against Northern Jacobinism the Confederacy had fought the whole world’s battle; the South, asserted [Gen. Daniel H.] Hill, was the Vendee of the United States and had waged a similar fight for “conservatism against lawlessness, infidelity, irreverence towards God and man, radicalism.”

(Americans Interpret Their Civil War, Thomas J. Presley, Princeton University Press, 1954, pp. 119-121)

Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the men who followed Lee and other Southern generals was their steadfast determination in the face of overwhelming odds. Rarely after mid-1863 were there even odds and most often Lee fought successfully against foes two or three times his own number.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The Grandest Soldiers That Ever Marched

“It is quite a mistaken idea that the Yankees were poor soldiers and easily whipped. Any Confederate soldier who met them often in battle will testify that they were hard and tenacious fighters, especially those from the Great North West.

The Confederates could claim very little credit for holding at bay such a mighty host armed with the most improved weapons and devices of warfare for four long, dreary years, and defeating them so often and disastrously, with odds often greatly against them, had the Northern army been merely a disorganized mob and rabble.

Yes, the Northern army was a fine one, well equipped and well officered, with all the resources at hand that could be desired for great and aggressive warfare; but it had to meet an army of Southern troops composed of the grandest soldiers that ever marched to martial music, or fought in defense of country!

Just to think, that the Southern army of six hundred thousand men, poorly armed and equipped, ridiculously clad and meagerly fed, without tents, without medicine, without pay, checkmating, baffling, repulsing and often humiliating and disastrously defeating the Northern army of 2,778,304 men armed with the most improved engines of warfare, well paid, well fed, abundantly clothed; backed by all the resources of a great nation, for four long, dreary years, staggers the credulity of man to contemplate.

In a letter to General [Jubal] Early shortly after the close of the war, General Robert E. Lee wrote: “It will be difficult to get the world to understand the odds against which we fought.” From the number drawing pensions from the United States government today, fifty years since the close of hostilities, there might have been a million more soldiers in the Union Army than given in the figures named above.”

(Sketch of the War Record of the Edisto Rifles, William V. Izlar, The State Company, 1914, pp. 98-100)

With the war nearly over and nothing to gain from destroying private homes and property, Lincoln’s Grand Army added salt to the wounds in a State which was rightly driven from the Union four years earlier by his inability to compromise and avoid war. In 1865 began reconstruction and twelve years of misrule, robbery and outrage in the American South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Grand Army of the Republic of Thieves

“Glen Burnie, [North Carolina] March 21, 1865

My Dear Cousin,

Well Pattie, I have seen the Yankees at last, and I earnestly pray that I may never see them again. The 9^th of March will ever be remembered by me. The vagabonds appeared here early that morning, we had no idea they were within fifty miles of here . . . There was a hundred fifty men in the first squad that came here, and such a yell as they gave when they rode in the gate, mortal never heard.

Papa ran to the swamp as soon as he saw them coming, and they were almost frantic with rage when they found he had left and started in the woods to find him and swore by all the saints in heaven that they would kill him if they found him.

The rascals all came in, and in less than ten minutes the house was stripped of almost everything. Pa had the night before fortunately concealed his two watches and your jewelry in a very nice place . . . One of them came to me to know where they were, I of course refused to tell, he them immediately presented a pistol to my head and swore he would take my life if I did not tell him . . .” They carried off every earthly thing we had to eat, did not leave a grain of corn or coffee, or anything that would sustain life one day, and they found all our silver and took every knife, fork and spoon we had in the world.

They set the Piney Woods on fire all around us. Tell Aunt Jenny they set on fire all the rosin she saw, and turned day into night. They carried off a great many of our clothes, have not left me a cloak or shawl of any kind, tore the silk you gave Jenny all to flinders, and carried off my best dresses, and two of Mama’s silks. Have not one blanket in the house, have only a half dozen quilts. The Yankees burned our barn and swore they would burn our house over our heads, but Providence saved it. I can’t tell you how.

Well Pat, I must close by telling you that the Yanks never caught Papa and that we are not quite starved to death, though we came very near it, we went five days without a mouthful of bread. You will excuse the paper I know as it is all the Yankees left in the house, and ‘tis a wonder they left this.

Oh how I do hate the very name of Yankee! May the chilling blight of heaven fall on their dark and doomed souls. May all the powers of earth and heaven combine to destroy them, may their land be one vast scene of ruin and desolation as ours is. This is the blessing of the innocent and injured one. I forgive them? May heaven never!   Nellie”

(A Goodly Heritage, Emma Woodward MacMillan, Wilmington Printing Company, 1961, pp. 65-

Scholars like Richard Weaver are known for influencing “the revival of philosophical conservatism in the American academy as well as deepening and enriching Southern studies and the discipline of rhetoric.”  The agrarian South traditionally was close to the soil while the North was immersing itself in commercialism and the false god of science, a reality persisting to this day.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Graceful Aims of Southern Scholarship

“Wishing to be complimentary, a forthright city editor of a Manhattan newspaper once proclaimed that young men from the South make excellent reporters provided they can rid themselves of malaria and gentility. This characterization may be accepted as a fair statement of the reputation of Southerners abroad in the land. By malaria the city editor meant not so much the pathological state induced by the mosquito’s sting, as that dreamy and miasmic attitude of mind usually associated with the disease.

And by gentility the editor intended to imply a false assumption of gentlemanly graces and immunities, especially an immunity from a conscience which holds steady work to be a duty. From his own point of view the Manhattan journalist of course spoke with accuracy.

But from the point of view of the indigenous Southerner he was altogether wrong. For the terrestrial aims of the Southerner are not the same as those of the New Yorker or New Englander. To be properly appreciated for his native qualities, the honest Southern person should stay at home.

When I went North to college, a dean, after learning the region of my nativity, asked in a tone of slight facetiousness what I considered the aim of Southern scholarship. Did I also think Southern scholars had to do nothing but sit pleasantly on a vine-covered back porch and drink lemonade?

I shall always feel that one of the tragic failures of my experience was that I did not, to our common astonishment, say, “Yes – provided the scholarly conversation is graceful, well-mannered, and leisurely enough.”

(Culture in the South, Middle Class and Bourbon, Clarence Cason, UNC Press, 1934, pp. 478-481)

The occupation troops of Northern General Ambrose Burnside at New Bern in mid-1862 not only loaded their empty transports with furniture, carpets and jewelry for the return trip North, but also found New Bern cemeteries full of coffins to appropriate.  Even Lincoln’s hand-picked proconsul, Edward Stanly, who was appointed “governor” of North Carolina, resigned in disgust after observing the looting by Northern soldiers.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The Governor’s Coffin

Richard Dobbs Spaight (1796-1850), son of a Revolutionary War veteran who was also a member of the North Carolina Legislature, United States Congressman and delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, served as governor of The Old North State from 1835 to 1837.

He was born in New Bern, and prior to being governor, he served in the State Legislature from 1819 to 1822, and again from 1825 to 1834. Spaight was the last governor to be elected by the legislature, and was a member of the 1837 Constitutional Convention which transferred the gubernatorial election to popular vote. During the War Between the States, Northern occupation troops used the Stevenson House (corner Pollock & George Streets) in New Bern as a hospital for wounded soldiers.

In a truly unbelievable act of barbarism, “the body of Governor Spaight was dug up by Northern soldiers, the skull placed on a gate post, and the metal coffin used to send the body of a federal soldier back North.”

(A New Geography of North Carolina, Bill Sharpe, Sharpe’s Publishing Company 1961, page 1232)

Southern commanders like James Longstreet expected their Northern counterparts to embrace the conviction that enemies no less than comrades merited honorable treatment, from officers down to enlisted men. To encourage a Southern soldier to desert was unthinkable; A letter from a Southern woman in 1862 stated that “the black title of tory and deserter will cling to them, disgracing their children’s children.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Longstreet Finds Adversaries Lacking Honor

Letter from General Longstreet to General [J.G.] Foster:

“Headquarters, Confederate Forces, East Tennessee, Jan. 3, 1864:

To the Commanding General, United States Forces, East Tennessee –

Sir – I find the proclamation of President Lincoln, of the 8^th of December last, in circulation in handbills among our soldiers. The immediate object of this proclamation seems to be to induce our soldiers to quit our ranks and take the oath of allegiance to the United States government.

I presume, however, that the great object and end in view is to hasten the day of peace. I respectfully suggest, for your consideration, the propriety of communicating any views that your government may have upon this subject through me, rather than by handbills circulated amongst our soldiers.

The few men who may desert under the promise held out in the proclamation, cannot be men of character or standing. If they desert their cause, they disgrace themselves in the eyes of God and man. They can do your cause no good, nor can they injure ours.

As a great nation, you can accept none but an honorable peace. As a noble people, you could have us accept nothing less.

I submit, therefore, whether the mode that I suggest would not be more likely to lead to an honorable end than such a circulation of a partial promise of pardon.

I am, sir, very respectfully, your most obedient servant,

J. Longstreet, Lieutenant-General, Commanding

Headquarters, Confederate Forces, East Tennessee, Jan. 11, 1864:

“Sir – I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 7^th of January, with its inclosures, etc.

The disingenuous manner in which you have misconstrued my letter of the 3d, has disappointed me. Let me remind you, too, that the spirit and tone of my letter were to meet honorable sentiments.

I have read your order announcing the favorable terms on which deserters will be received. Step by step you have gone on in violation of the laws of honorable warfare. Our farms have been destroyed, our women and children have been robbed, and our houses have been pillaged and burnt. You have laid your plans and worked diligently to produce wholesale murder by servile insurrection. And now, the most ignoble of all, you propose to degrade the human race by inducing soldiers to dishonor and forswear themselves.

Soldiers who have met your own on so many honorable fields, who have breasted the storm of battle in defence of their honor, their families, and their homes, for three long years, have a right to expect more of honor, even in their adversaries. I beg leave to return the copies of the proclamation, and your order.

I have the honor to renew to you the assurance of great respect, your obedient servant,

J. Longstreet, Lieutenant-General, Commanding.”

(Lee and His Generals, Profiles of Robert E. Lee and Seventeen other Generals of the Confederacy, Captain William P. Snow, Gramercy Books, 1867/1996, pp. 333-334)

The following are excerpts from a Gov. Thomas E. Dewey speech delivered in April 1950 regarding how a sectional political party in this country is “a menace to responsible government.” He viewed the Democrat party as a liberal and radical party, with policies similar to Lenin’s.  Ironically, he denounces sectional parties as a menace with no legitimate role in a free society, though his own party originated as such in 1854.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Gov. Thomas E. Dewey on Big Government, Circa 1950

“Big Government: New Trend in US” Lecture on Political Science by Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York.

“Although the United States is the youngest of the great nations, ours is one of the oldest free republics on earth. Its durability has persisted in the face of wars and the inevitable frailty of human beings who conduct government. Our political history has been the history of a two-party system in action. From the early days of the republic our basic political arrangement has been the same — one party in power and one party in opposition.

The Democratic party would be the liberal to radical party. The Republican party would be the conservative to reactionary party.

Now is there a legitimate role for third parties in this country? The answer depends on whether the third party is national in character with intellectual breadth and a broad base of popular support, or whether it is narrowly local in nature.

Such sectional or local parties are, basically, only splinter movements. They have proved to be a menace to responsible government here, just as they have to responsible governments elsewhere. I see no legitimate place for hem in a free system such as ours.

On Big Government Lenin has said that socialized medicine is the “keystone of the arch” of communism. Socialized medicine today is a major part of the President’s legislative program.

In the same way last year, Mr. Truman called for power to use federal funds to build factories which would compete with privately-owned factories. It is fundamental that no citizen can successfully compete against his government . . .

Why has Big Government made such a successful appeal to our people these last 17 years? I think it is because many millions of Americans have been persuaded that Big Government is the alternative to depression and insecurity. The offer of Big Government today is to protect its people against the hazards of life. Its method, for the present, is to socialize incomes through taxation and to socialize risks. Government which pretends to take the risks out of life is fraudulent. All it does is remove the rewards.

And if the final result is total leisure in the form of continuous paid unemployment, the result will not be a richer life but a national last illness. Big Government, like dictatorships, can continue only by growing larger and larger. It can never retrench without admitting failure. It feeds on the gradual obliteration of State and local governments as elements of sovereignty and tends to transform them into districts and prefectures.

By adsorbing more than half of all the taxing power of the nation, Big Government now deprives the State and local governments of the capacity to support the programs they should conduct. In place of their own taxing powers, it offers them in exchange the counterfeit currency of federal subsidy.”

(“Big Government: New Trend in US,” Lecture on Political Science by Thomas E. Dewey, Governor of New York, April 1950)

In this unique book from 1887, Marxist author Edward Bellamy of Massachusetts travels to an American socialist utopia in the year 2000 and converses with a fictitious Dr. Leete who explains government ownership of various industries, including publishing. All citizens are employed in the industrial army and each is paid according to his or her need. To gain the public eye and ear, aspiring authors would need government approval but suffer from absolutely no censorship.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The American Socialist Utopia of 2000

“I judge then, that there has been some notable literature produced in this century?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Leete. “It has been an era of unexampled intellectual splendor. Probably humanity never before passed through a moral and material evolution, at once so vast in scope and brief in its time of accomplishment, as that from the old order to the new in the early part of this century…”

“By the way,” said I, “talking of literature, how are books published now? Is that also done by the nation?”

“Certainly.”

“But how do you manage it? Does the government publish everything that is brought it as a matter of course, at the public expense, or does it exercise a censorship and print only what it approves?”

“Neither way. The [government] printing department has no censorial powers. It is bound to print all that is offered it, but prints it only on the condition that the author defray the first cost out of his credit. He must pay for the privilege of the public ear, and if he has any message worth hearing we consider that he will be glad to do it.

Of course, if incomes were unequal, as in the old times, this rule would enable only the rich to be authors, but the resources of citizens being equal, it simply measures the strength of the author’s motive. The book, on being published, is placed on sale by the nation.”

“If you have newspapers at all, they must . . . be published by the government at public expense, with government editors, reflecting government opinions.”

“Not as with you, certainly,” replied Dr. Leete, “but nevertheless in one way. The price of every book is made up of the cost of publication with a royalty for the author. The author fixes this royalty at any figure he pleases. If his book be moderately successful, he has thus a furlough for several months, a year, two or three more years, and if he in the mean time produces other successful work, the remission of service is extended so far as the sale of that may justify.  [In this manner] there is no such thing as favoritism of any sort to interfere with the recognition of true merit. Every author has precisely the same facilities for bringing his work before the public tribunal.

The newspaper press is organized so as to be a more perfect expression of public opinion than it could possibly could be in your day, when private capital controlled and managed it primarily as a money-making business, and secondarily only as a mouthpiece for the people.

The subscribers to the paper now elect somebody as editor . . . Instead of paying a salary to him, as in your day, the subscribers pay the nation an indemnity equal to the cost of his [personal] support for taking him away from the general support [of the nation]. When an editor’s services are no longer desired, if he cannot earn the right to his time by other literary work, he simply resumes his place in the industrial army.”

(Looking Backward, 2000-1887, Edward Bellamy, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1887, pp. 161-168)