Circa1865

When the Articles of Confederation were put to the States for ratification in November, 1776, the preparatory debates revealed very strong warnings of sectionalism. These clear and distinct divisions eventually produced threats of New England secession in 1814, economic fissures by the 1820s, talk of Southern secession by 1850, and eventually an all-out shooting-war in 1861 which ended the experiment in free government.

The South Delivered Up to the Care of the North

“The Congress debated the Articles throughout the summer of 1776. There were three main arguments. One was on whether each colony should have a single vote, and issue of large versus small States. The second was States’ rights, whether the confederation had authority to limit territorial expansion of individual States. Third was the method of apportioning taxation. The North wanted to tax according to total population. The South was opposed to taxing slaves.

The latter issue began one of the enduring sectional debates of the first American century. Were slaves part of the general population? Or were they property? The South held for property and Rutledge of South Carolina said that if ownership of slaves was to be taxed, then so should the ownership of the Northern ships that carried the slaves.

There were several strictly sectional votes on the subject with the bloc of seven Northern States lined up against the six-State Southern bloc. It was finally compromised that taxes would be apportioned according to the private ownership of land and the improvements thereon.

In November 1776 the Articles were sent to the States for ratification. The hottest opposition came from the Southern States (with the exception of Virginia) . . . The reaction of William Henry Drayton, chief justice of South Carolina, was typical of the eighteenth-century South. Drayton felt the Articles gave too much power to the central government and States’ rights would be run over roughshod. He observed that there was a natural North-South division among the States, arising “from the nature of the climate, soil and produce.”

He felt the South’s opportunities for growth would be crippled by the Articles because “the honor, interest and sovereignty of the South, are in effect delivered up to the care of the North.”

(The Natural Superiority of Southern Politicians, David Leon Chandler, Doubleday and Company, 1977, pg. 74)

The following is excerpted from “One Good Man, Reverend John Lamb Pritchard’s Life of Faith, Service and Sacrifice,” originally written by Rev. J.D. Hufham in 1867, and edited in 2007 by Jack Fryar, Dram Tree Books. Rev. Hufham directed the proceeds of his book to Mrs. Pritchard for the education of their six children.

Rev. Pritchard, born in Pasquotank County, North Carolina in 1811, became pastor of First Baptist Church in Wilmington in early 1856. There he remained with his flock until his death from yellow fever.

Wilmington Wrapped in Gloom

“In July 1862, the dashing little Kate, formerly a Confederate packet-boat, steamed boldly through the Northern fleet blockading the mouth of the Cape Fear River, and brought to the wharves of Wilmington a valuable cargo from Nassau. She rapidly unloaded, as rapidly re-loaded with cotton, and departed on her second voyage. But she left behind her that which brought to Wilmington many a sad day, and before which even the horrors and excitement of a great war were forgotten. She left behind the seeds of the dreadful scourge, the yellow fever.”

By mid-September it was conceded that yellow fever was indeed here, and by mid-October there were some 431 cases in town and a total of 102 deaths. These grew until nearly 500 had died of the fever, plus the death of 150 black residents was reported.  Wilmington clergymen who perished were Rev. John L. Pritchard and Rev. Dr. Robert Drane, plus Dr. James Dickson who was one of the North Carolina’s most eminent surgeons and President of the NC Medical Society. Dr. T.C. Worth, brother of the Governor, and James S. Green, Treasurer of the Wilmington & Weldon Railroad both succumbed to the fever. Before his death, Rev. Pritchard wrote often to his wife in Richmond, who had departed with the children to visit relatives a few months earlier.

Sept. 22, 1862: “Dear Wife: I do not think there is any visible abatement in the disease. There have been so many deaths, but don’t be alarmed as we are just as near to God here, as anywhere out of Heaven. Let us humble ourselves and pray to God for his protection. I feel calm and resigned and pray that God will bless you all.” 

The streets had become deserted after residents not-stricken abandoned town, and harbor traffic came to a standstill as word spread on the high seas and adjacent ports. The black smoke of tar barrels filled the air with soot, somehow thought to clear the air of the contagion.

In answer to appeals for provisions and medicines – home remedies from long ago had to suffice due to the North’s blockade of medical supplies – towns up the Wilmington & Weldon tracks and beyond sent much-needed supplies. A local charitable association was formed by Mayor John Dawson to assist the families of those afflicted.

September 29^th, 1862 : “Dear Wife: It is no longer the Wilmington you left. But the Lord is still with us and still will be. I have heard of several deaths this morning, several others expected to die. You cannot conceive of the desolation of our town. We find that many who have left have died. It is thought that it is safer to remain than to leave. I cannot reconcile it to myself to leave the many who must suffer, if someone does not attend them, and I try to be much in prayer. Let no one think me reckless of life, or regardless of my wife and children. No indeed, I yield to no one in my love of life or of my family. But must a minister fly from disease and danger and leave poor people to suffer for want of attention? How can he more appropriately die, than when facing disease and death for Christ’s sake?

Rev. Pritchard’s last letter to his wife was begun on October 14, 1862:

Dear Wife: Heard that Dr. Drane died . . . such a night my poor sister had: perfect prostration and utter weakness. I sat up some time . . . and listened to her plaintive moan. Well, my dear wife, do you ask me, how I feel in view of never meeting my loved ones again on earth? I cannot tell you. I must not conceal from you the true state of the case by which we are surrounded. I am sick now. My poor back and head ache, the true symptoms of fever. This is my bodily condition. I have no other trust but the precious Redeemer and He is precious to me. Though it may be feverish excitability, I am not afraid to commit you and my dear six children to Him.”

The hand of the destroyer was upon him as he wrote. After lingering nearly a month, though the fever’s grip on Wilmington was abating, Rev. Pritchard passed away on November 13^th, 1862.

“Daniel Webster has said, and very justly as far as these United States are concerned: “The sovereignty of government is an idea belonging to the other side of the Atlantic. No such thing is known in North America. Our governments are limited. But with us all power is with the people. They alone are sovereign, and they erect what governments they please, and confer on them such powers as they please.” Jefferson Davis

The Pursuit of Liberty

“If any lingering doubt could have existed as to the reservation of their entire sovereignty by the people of the several States when they organized the federal Union, it would have been removed by the Tenth Amendment . . . the particular one in which they substantially agreed, and upon which they most urgently insisted. Indeed, it is quite certain that Constitution would never have received the assent and ratification of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina and perhaps other States, but for a well-grounded assurance that the substance of the Tenth Amendment would be adopted. The amendment is in these words:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

To have transferred sovereignty from the people to a Government would have been to have fought the battles of the Revolution in vain – not for the freedom and independence of the States, but for a mere change of masters. Such a thought or purpose could not have been in the heads or hearts of those who molded the Union.

The men who had won at great cost the independence of their respective States were deeply impressed with the value of union, but they could never have consented, like “the base Judean,” to fling away the priceless pearl of State sovereignty for any possible alliance.”

(Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jefferson Davis, D. Appleton and Company, 1881, pp. 146; 156)

Michigan Senator Lewis Cass was born in New Hampshire in 1782 and quite possibly had seen President George Washington as a young man. A lifelong Democrat and devoted Northwestern man who watched the latter territory develop, he longed to see the sectional troubles developing in the 1850’s resolved with faithful compromise. The nascent Republican party was not to be compromised with, and after electing its first president with a small plurality in 1860, plunged the country into a war it never recovered from.

Passing in 1866, he lived long enough to witness Washington’s republic perish in the flames of sectional warfare.

Republicans, Sectionalism and War

During the deliberations of the Compromise of 1850, Lewis Cass believed slavery to be a misfortune to the South, but only “the passage of ages” could bring about emancipation without the destruction of both races.

On the date July 6, 1854, the Whigs and Free-Soilers, or the “Free Democracy” of Michigan, met and formed a new party. The name Republican was adopted with old party trammels soon cast aside and all bent to the task of forming a party upon the cornerstone of unionism and freedom. This new party was opposed to State sovereignty as well as constitutional interpretations which were contrary to their views, and gave their strength to this party which advocated nationalism.

Though claiming to be a party of Americans for America, its absorption of the fiercely anti-Catholic Know-Nothings meant that only Protestants were to be tolerated.

It was a source of regret to Cass that a party with a “sectional” aim should find support in the country. For above all else he loved the Union, hoping against hope that harmony would be restored. But Michigan, so long faithful to him gave Fremont a popular plurality and elected a Republican legislature with an overwhelming majority.

“You remember, young man,” Lewis Cass said to James A. Garfield in 1861, “that the Constitution did not take effect until nine States had ratified it. My native State [of New Hampshire] was the ninth. So I saw the Constitution born, and I fear I may see it die.”

Though only nine of thirteen States ratified the third Constitution in June, 1788, the others remained fully independent States. And logically, should conventions of any of the thirteen (or subsequent States admitted) revoke or rescind their ratifications to resume their full-independent status and pursue another political arrangement, any lover of freedom and liberty would applaud this.

Lewis Cass, Andrew C. McLaughlin, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1891, pp. 301-324)

A Surgeon in a Unionist Prison

Dr. Joseph C. Shepard, born on Topsail Island, North Carolina, became Post Surgeon at Fort Fisher in 1864, and oversaw an earthen hospital beneath the Pulpit Battery of the massive fortress. During the second battle in mid-January 1865 against a massive Northern fleet with more cannon on its flagship than the entire fort contained, he dressed the leg wounds of Cape Fear District Gen. W.H.C. Whiting, and a short time later the left chest wound of fort commander Col. William Lamb.

After Gen. Whiting arrived at the fort before the second attack, he told Col. Lamb that he had come to share his fate as Gen. Braxton Bragg had “sacrificed’ the fort and its garrison.  No reinforcements would be forthcoming.

Dr. Shepard was imprisoned at Governors Island at New York for six weeks, then exchanged and sent to Greensboro, North Carolina. There he cared for the wounded at a Presbyterian church converted to a hospital, and rejoined his family at Scott’s Hill, north of Wilmington, after Gen. Johnston’s surrender at Durham.

He wrote the following from his Governors Island cell:

“I suppose it was inevitable – the War, that is. Our customs were different from those of the North. But who is to say which way was right, which way was wrong. All I know is that as I sit here in this Unionist prison on Governor’s Island, I wonder if I will ever see my family again.

Confined to these prison walls, I have nothing to do but think.  I cannot bear to think of the past several years and the ugliness of the War, so my mind drifts back to the year 1855. I had just graduated from the University of North Carolina and was preparing to study medicine in New York.  Life was so simple then.

A smile embraces my lips when I think back to May 8th, 1861, my wedding day, and envision my beautiful bride Mrs. Henrietta Foy Shepard. Although a happy day for us both, my wife was in mourning over the death of her father, Joseph Mumford Foy of Poplar Grove Plantation, who died just one month earlier. A great man he was, Mr. Foy. His death was a great loss to us all.

I had great reservations about leaving my wife so soon after our wedding, but my burning desire to further my education in medicine took me to Paris, France. Shortly thereafter, war erupted between the States back home and my loyalty to the South compelled me to return and offer my services.

Although I had originally enlisted for twelve months, an act of Confederate Congress dated April 16, 1862, extended my period of enlistment to three years or the duration of the war. Isn’t it interesting that the war came to an end exactly three months before the end of the extended enlistment period.

Oh, this cell is so cold and damp. How I wish I were with Henrietta and my daughter, Gertrude, basking in the heat of a warm, glowing fire. God willing, that day will come.

War is hell. And the ravages seem hardly reparable. But it is over. God only knows what’s in store for us now. Time will tell. I have once again read the surrender of General Lee to Lt. General Grant. We lost – but at least it’s over.

I’ve heard rumor that the failure of General Braxton Bragg to send in replacement troops was responsible for the fall of Fort Fisher. I don’t know if there is truth to this, but still, it’s over. Praise be to God Almighty with a prayer that our families will never have to endure this living hell again.”

(Reflections of Dr. Joseph Christopher Shepard, Surgeon, CSA, Governors Island Prison, Winter 1865)

1964 Presidential candidate Goldwater was the last Old Right conservative to emerge after the marginalization of Robert A. Taft by the leftist Rockefeller wing of the Republican party, who cheered on political-waif Eisenhower as their candidate. Ike’s contribution after eight years as president was to appoint Earl Warren Chief Justice as a political payoff, and warning Americans of the military-industrial complex he helped create.

Civil, Human and Natural Rights

“[The authority of individual States] are easy enough to define. The Tenth Amendment does it succinctly: “The powers not delegated to the United States [government] by the Constitution nor prohibited by it to the States are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Civil rights should be no harder. In fact, however, thanks to extravagant and shameless misuse by people who ought to know better – it is one of the most badly understood concepts in modern political usage.

“Civil rights” is frequently used synonymously with “human rights” – or with “natural rights.” As often as not, it is simply a name for describing an activity that somebody deems politically or socially desirable. A sociologist writes a paper proposing to abolish some inequity, or a politician makes a speech about it – and behold, a new “civil right” is born! The Supreme Court has displayed the same creative powers.

A civil right is a right that is asserted and is therefore protected by some valid law . . . but unless a right is incorporated in the law, it is not a valid civil right and is not enforceable by the instruments of the civil law.

There may be some rights – “natural” or “human”, or otherwise, that should also be civil rights. But if we desire to give such rights the protection of the law, our recourse is to a legislature or to the amendment procedures of the US Constitution. We must not look to politicians, or sociologists – or to the courts – to correct the deficiency.”

(The Conscience of a Conservative, Barry Goldwater, Victor Publishing Company, 1960, excerpt pp. 32-33)

The British eventually subjugated the Boers in the same manner as the Northern States under Lincoln subjugated the American South, with overwhelming military and economic might, but not superior fighting ability or leadership. Within twenty years of their victory over the Boers, the British were again fighting in a desperate war which cost a total of 40 million lives. Of that number, nearly 900,000 British and colonial troops died in trench warfare, hopeless infantry charges against machine guns and terrifying artillery barrages. With American assistance, the British and French were victorious, imposed a punitive defeat upon Germany, and set the stage for a nationalist leader to seek revenge for his defeated country.

Machine Guns and Poor Tactics

“Almost a year after the successful conclusion of the Sudan campaign, the British Army found itself at war again in Africa, right at the other end of the continent, and this time the enemy was not natives armed with spears and a grasp of tactics which was straight out of the Dark Ages, but Europeans with Mauser repeating rifles and Maxims of their own, who proved themselves to be masters of mobile warfare.

This is considered the first time machine-gun-armed armies had faced each other . . . and it was, as Rudyard Kipling was to comment presciently in The Captive, published in 1903, ‘A dress parade for Armageddon.’

The Boers 37mm ‘pom-pom’ Maxims proved to be particularly effective against British field artillery detachments, often reducing them completely before they could get into action.

British infantry sent into the set-piece battles such as Magersfontein, Colenso and Paderberg with no better tactics (though considerably better discipline) than the Khalifa’s Dervishes had employed against them in the Sudan; they advanced over open ground with fixed bayonets, and were cut down in swathes by the machine guns of defenders they couldn’t even see.

The tactics of close-quarter battle which General James Woolf had devised after Culloden in 1746 and used so successfully against the French in Canada, and which successive British generals had adopted throughout the nineteenth century, were finally beaten, though few in London – or, indeed, in any of the other capital cities of the world – would yet acknowledge the fact, and it was to take further decade and the bloodiest, most costly war the world had ever seen to drive the message firmly home.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is incredible that the British Army, which had been instrumental in obtaining proof that the machine gun was absolutely lethal when deployed in defensive positions, had not itself learned the lessons it had taught so widely and so effectively, but that was true not only in 1899, but also in 1914.”

(The World’s Great Machine Guns: 1860 to the Present, Roger Ford, Barnes & Noble Books, 1999, pp. 32-33)

Gideon Welles on Grant, Republicans and Conscription

Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles (1802-1878), was Connecticut-born, a Democrat until 1848, left for the Free-Soil party and then joined the nascent Republicans in 1854. Claiming to be anti-slavery, his father had been a Connecticut shipping merchant and very likely participated in New England’s transatlantic slave trade. He was appointed to Secretary of the Navy by Lincoln as a reward for past party support.

The following is excerpted from The Diary of Gideon Welles.

August 2, 1864, Tuesday: “[Grant is reticent] and, I fear, less able than he is credited. Admiral Porter has always said there was something wanting in Grant, which Sherman could always supply, and vice-versa, as regards Sherman, but that the two together made a very perfect general officer and [they] ought never to be separated. Grant relies on others but does no know men – can’t discriminate. I feel quite unhappy over this Petersburg [Crater battle] – less however from the result, bad as it is, than from an awakening apprehension that Grant is not equal to the position assigned him.

God grant that I may be mistaken, for the slaughtered thousands of my countrymen who have poured out their rich blood for three months in the soil of Virginia from the Wilderness to Petersburg. Under his generalship[, and who] can never be atoned in this world or the next if he without Sherman prove a failure. A nation’s destiny almost has been committed to this man, and if it is an improper committal, where are we?”

August 27, Saturday: Much party machinery is just at this time in motion. No small portion of it is a prostitution and abuse. The Whig element is venal and corrupt, to a great extent. I speak of the leaders of that party now associated with the Republicans. They seem to have very little political principle, they have no belief in public virtue or popular intelligence, they have no self-reliance . . . [and] little regard for constitutional restraint. Their politics and their ideas of government consist of expedients, and cunning management with the intelligent, and coercion and subordination of the less-informed.”

August 31, 1864, Wednesday: The complaints in regard to recruiting are severe and prolonged. They come in numbers. The impending draft of the army indirectly benefits the Navy, or induces persons to enter it. Their doing so relieves them and their localities from the draft. Hence the crowd and competition. Then come in the enormous bounties from the State and municipal authorities over which naval officers have no control, and which lead to bounty-jumping and corruption.”

(Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, Volume II, Howard K. Beale, editor, W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 92; 122; 129)

No Equality Other Than Political

Mr. Justice [Henry] Brown, after stating the facts in the forgoing language, delivered the opinion of the court in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)

“This case turns upon the constitutionality of an act of the general assembly of the State of Louisiana, passed in 1890, providing for separate railway carriages for the white and colored races. (Acts 1890, No. 111, p. 152).

The constitutionality of this act is attacked upon the ground that it conflicts with both the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except a punishment for crime, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits certain restrictive legislation on the part of States.

One: That it conflicts with the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery . . . is too clear for argument. In the Civil Rights cases, it was said that the act of a mere individual, the owner of an inn, a public conveyance or place of amusement, refusing accommodations to colored people, cannot justly be regarded as imposing any badge of slavery or servitude upon the applicant, but only as involving an ordinary civil injury, property cognizable by the laws of the State, and presumably subject to redress by those laws until the contrary appears. ‘It would be running the slavery question into the ground,’ said Mr. Justice [Joseph P.] Bradley, “to make every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theater, or deal with in matters of intercourse or business.”

A statute which implies merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished form the other race by color, has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or re-establish a state of involuntary servitude. Indeed, we do not understand [why] the Thirteenth Amendment is strenuously relied upon by the plaintiff in this connection.

Two: the object of the Fourteenth Amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but, in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a comingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either. Laws permitting, and even requiring, their separation, in places where they are liable to be brought into contact, do not necessarily imply the inferiority of one race to the other, and have been generally, if not universally, recognized as within the competency of the State legislatures in the exercise of their police power.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist of the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by the reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.  The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the Negro except by an enforced comingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition.

If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits, and a voluntary consent of individuals.

Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts, or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences, and the attempt to do so can only result in accentuating the difficulties of the present situation. If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.”

(www.statesrightsjournal.com, accessed April 24, 2004)

Loyalty to Brave Men

“We are told by the historians of an earlier age that whenever the renowned men of the Roman commonwealth looked upon the statues of their ancestors, they felt their minds vehemently excited to virtue.

It could not have been the bronze or marble that possessed this power, but the recollection of great actions which kindled a generous flame in their souls, not to be quelled until they also, by virtue and heroic deeds, had acquired equal fame and glory.

When a call to arms resounds throughout the land and a people relinquish the pleasant scenes of tranquil life and rally to their country’s call, such action is the result of an honest conviction that the act is commendable. In recalling such an epoch, the wish that a true record of the deeds done should be transmitted to posterity must dominate every patriot heart.

Loyalty to brave men, who for four long years of desolating war – years of undimmed glory – stood by each other and fought to the bitter end with the indomitable heroism which characterized the Confederate soldier, demands from posterity a preservation of the memories of the great struggle.

We cannot find in all the annals of history a grander record or prouder roll of honor, nor more just fame for bravery, patient endurance of hardships, and sacrifices.”

(Military History of Florida, Col. J.J. Dickison, Confederate Military History, Volume XI, Confederate Publishing Company, 1899, page 3)