Circa1865

Following Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theater in April 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton ordered all roads from the city closed except the road south to Port Tobacco, the route Booth would most likely use for his escape. It was not until four hours after the shooting that Stanton released any official news to the newspapers, and without identifying the assassin.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Removing Mr. Lincoln

“None can doubt today that Lincoln was removed to prevent the reconciliation of North and South and the consolidation of the Union. Though the wound did seem later to heal, the events of today show it still to be raw, so that the conspirators’ aims of 1865 cannot yet be said, in 1950, to have failed. Time has yet to show this result, with all others.

Lincoln’s killer, John Wilkes Booth, escaped for awhile. The circumstances of Lincoln’s murder speak for themselves. The door of the box was unlocked, but on the inner side of it someone had placed a wooden bar and a mortice, so that Booth could ensure that none entered it after himself! At the door should have been Lincoln’s armed bodyguard . . . recently enlisted, called John F. Parker. Only his empty chair was there and no word survives in the records to say why he was not in it! Three years later he was . . . charged with dereliction, dismissed, and at that point vanishes from history!

The motive today seems as clear as the organization behind it remained, and remains, obscure. It was to remove Mr. Lincoln because he was an obstacle to the destruction of the South. To the collapsing South, he was the destroyer; to the North, he was the enemy of further destruction.

Today’s traveler may perceive a great flaw in the array of memorials erected to Lincoln in his country. Suggestively, they commemorate him as the slayer of slavery, first and foremost. It is the continuation of a falsehood; that was not his primary aim, as he was against violent demagogic actions, preferring judicial gradualness, and had at heart only the unity of the Union.

Thus his memory is misused today in the further pursuit of ulterior schemes; the false issue, the falsity of which he saw, is raised in his name and his words and monuments are presented [in the same manner].

Among high persons of that time the eye of today’s curiosity falls chiefly on Edwin Stanton. As Secretary of War in a country at war he was almost supremely powerful. All communications were under his personal censorship. All acts tending to deflect Booth’s pursuit, or after Booth’s death to obscure the trail, seem traceable to him and the Leftists around him.

Within a few hours of the murder he wrote to the American minister in London of “evidence obtained” to show that the murder was “deliberately planned and set on foot by rebels, under pretense of avenging the South.” Just so did Goering claim to have proof that the communists fired the Reichstag, while it still burned.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts, pp. 48-53)

A City Filled with the Work of Great Southerners

“Of Athens, Cicero said that its glories in stone delighted him less than the thought of the great men who lived, worked, debated, disputed, died and were buried there. In Washington the feeling of a group of great men, Washington, Jefferson, Lee and Lincoln, is tangible and the buildings express their quality. The question marks at the end of them is equally palpable. Great presidents may make a great republic, but what happens if the noble breed gives out?

The four-yearly election is not merely that of a prime minister, but of a head of state. Henry Adams thought “the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant is almost enough in itself to upset the whole Darwinian theory,” and Mr. Albert Jay Nock in 1943 added: “Had Adams lived to see the succession extended to the present time he would perhaps say it was quite enough.” Mr. Nock did not see the events of 1944-1950; he died calling himself “A Superfluous Man” in an American era which alarmed him.

Despite the still living echoes of Northern armies tramping along Pennsylvania Avenue to crush the South, Washington remains a Southern city; the memory of great Southerners and their work fills it.

[The] corrosive influence [political corruption and influence peddling displays] itself in curious ways, alien to the Christian principles on which the Republic was founded. Washington was filled with a kind of whispered, muttered tumult, that of the world’s conflicting political ambitions, nearly all pursued behind the cloak of other purposes.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts, pp. 42-45)

The Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769 petitioned the King to curtail his importation of slaves to the colony, arguing that slavery “greatly retards the Settlement of the Colonies.” With no other means of dependable labor for their plantations, Virginia slaveholders like Robert Carter rewarded those who worked on Sunday when needed, provided them measured independence, and allowed them to build their own quarters and supervise his plantation enterprises. The reward for faithful service was often emancipation by deed and will.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Robert Carter’s Deed of Gift

“On September 5, 1791, Robert Carter III of Nomony Hall, one of Virginia’s wealthiest slaveholders, delivered to the Northumberland District Court a document he called a “Deed of Gift.” It was a dry document . . . [which] signaled Carter’s intent to free his slaves, more than four hundred fifty in number, more American slaves than any American slaveholder had ever freed, more American slaves than any American slaveholder would ever free.

Carter lived next to the Washington’s and the Lee’s on the Northern Neck of Virginia, he was friend and peer to Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and other members of the Revolutionary elite.

No monuments honor him, nor the Deed of Gift. No published map exists that can direct you to the patchwork ruins of his house and plantation; no stone wall tells exactly where his body lies. Sweep through the great bestselling histories of the Revolution and the founders, and you will rarely find even a footnote mentioning Robert Carter.

Eugene D. Genovese, in his classic “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” refers to Carter three times, once as an example of a slaveholder who consulted his slaves on the performance of their overseers, once as an example of a slaveholder who allowed his slaves to practice medicine, and once as a slaveholder who believed that slavery was unprofitable.

In the summer of 1791 . . . as Robert Carter composed the Deed of Gift, the private emancipation of slaves in the State of Virginia had been lawful for almost a decade. Such emancipations were difficult financial propositions, but certainly feasible: before Robert Carter freed his slaves, small slaveholders across Virginia had liberated almost ten thousand of their black servants, and entire States with significant slave populations, such as New Jersey, were learning how to finance emancipations on a public scale.

Similarly, like many slaveholders before him, Carter provided financial support and sponsorship that eased the transition to freedom, provided for disabled and indigent freed slaves, and laid the groundwork for an interracial republic, challenging in numerous small instances the notion that young America would fall apart if blacks and whites were free at the same time.”

(The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter, Andrew Levy, Random House, 2005. Excerpts pp. xi-xviii)

Radical Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania saw the defeated South not as Americans, but simply “foreign enemies subject under international law to the will of the conqueror . . .” He also contemplated executing the South’s leaders and confiscating their property as well as that of all who supported the independence of the American South. He was anxious to pass radical reconstruction amendments for purely partisan reasons – to disenfranchise white men in the South while enfranchising black men who could be counted upon to ensure the ascendancy of the Republican Party. This had to be accomplished while the military ruled the South, and before civilian courts were reinstated.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

To Secure Perpetual Ascendancy to the Republican Party

“The day after Lincoln’s death, Ben Butler was appointed Secretary of State. That was a clear omen; he was the Northern general who ordered his troops at New Orleans in 1862 to treat as common prostitutes any white woman there who “by word, gesture or movement insulted or showed contempt” for them.

Outside the government, real power in the Republican Party passed to Thaddeus Stevens, a dying and malignant man. Club-footed, bald but bewigged, of indeterminate origins, clamant for blood and ruin, he was of the type of Marat, Goebbels, Dzherzinsky or Szameuly. Stevens pointed the way: “Hang the leaders, crush the South, arm the Negroes, confiscate the land.”

The vote should be taken from the whites and given to the Negroes. Attacking “racial discrimination” he forced through Congress a bill “establishing for the security of the colored races safeguards which went infinitely beyond what the government has ever provided for the white race.” (President Lincoln’s successor, Mr. [Andrew] Johnson, vetoed this bill and narrowly escaped arrest at General Butler’s demand).

From the Negro-less North these white men raved for the extermination of the Southern whites. They tried to suspend trial by jury and, when the Supreme Court resisted, to pack this with compliant judges (President [Franklin] Roosevelt was the next to try that).

When the victorious General Grant became president the military commander in Louisiana, General Sheridan, telegraphed asking him to declare the whites there “banditti,” saying “no further action need be taken except that which will devolve on me.”

The real aim of all this was, as Stevens said, “to secure the perpetual ascendancy to the Republican Party.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts pp. 27)

Author Douglas Reed writes of the South’s defeat and radical Republican rule that “The wonder is that the South ever lifted itself from that prostration, and by its own bootstraps.” And Truslow Adams said of the twelve years of postwar reconstruction that “There is no parallel for the situation in the history of modern civilized nations, and it is almost incredible that it happened in our own country.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Atlanta Compared to Warsaw and Budapest

“So strong is the memory of what the Republicans did after the war that Southerners still automatically vote Democratic. The most their representatives can do, when they reach Congress, is somewhat to retard the new campaign against the South; on the whole they promote the aim of the new immigration to “take over the future of America.”

The clear trail from the Civil War to the present [1951] was the first of my surprises in America. Like most Europeans, probably, I was ignorant of that war and when I studied it felt like an archaeologist who finds the original of the Communist Manifesto in Greek ruins.

What went with that wind was more than the political power of the South; what came with the new one was the enslavement of white men by Soviet methods. Only the particular spirit of the South prevented that condition from becoming permanent.

“That the Southern people were put to the torture is vaguely understood” (wrote Mr. Claude G. Bowers in 1929 in The Tragic Era), “but even historians have shrunk from the unhappy task of showing us the torture chambers . . . It is impossible to grasp the real significance of the revolutionary proceedings of the rugged conspirators working out the policies of Thaddeus Stevens without making many journeys among the Southern people and seeing with our own eyes the indignities to which they were subjected.”

The key-words are “revolutionary” and “conspirators” and they fit today’s situation like a glove. That the North, with its newly-discovered gold, growing industry, command of the sea and increasing population would win that war was plain to clear heads in the South from the start, and did not deter them from a war which, they believed, had to be fought. The way to the South was opened to persons recognizable today as the revolutionary conspirators we know as Communists.

Of the twelve years that followed, the miracle is that the South survived. Mr. John Gunther . . . says, “If you read the history of those days . . . Atlanta on the 1870s must have startingly resembled Warsaw or Budapest under the Nazis in the 1940s . . . Chopping up the South and ruling it by an absolute dictatorship of the military, while every kind of economic and social depredation was not only allowed but encouraged, is so strikingly like what is going on in Germany at present that the imagination staggers.

Slightly different comparisons might be more correct. The sufferings of the South compare more closely with those of Budapest, Warsaw and all of Eastern Europe under the communists after the 1939-1945 war ended than even under the Nazis in 1940.”

(Far and Wide, Douglas Reed, CPA Books, 1951, excerpts pp. 25-26)

Lincoln’s initial choice to lead his War Department was Senator Simon Cameron, described as “the Pennsylvania opportunist, and successively Democrat and Know Nothing before affiliating with the Republicans.” Lincoln was under intense pressure from Pennsylvania Republicans to appoint Cameron to the cabinet, though the latter’s troubled past warned against it. In 1838, Cameron was appointed to settle claims of the Winnebago tribe in Wisconsin and “besides other irregularities Cameron had given to the red men depreciated notes on his own bank – all of which brought against him the first of many charges of dishonorable dealing and earned for him the derisive sobriquet of the “Great Winnebago Chief.” Indeed, “Cameron” and “corruption” became synonymous terms.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Lincoln’s War Department

“The most flagrant malfeasance was in the War rather than Navy Department, for the War office had at its disposal many fat army contracts. Conditions in this department were made even worse by the fact that the code of political ethics of Secretary of War Simon Cameron made it impossible for him to play the role of crusader in eliminating sharp practices.

Indeed, his handling of the financial affairs of the department were scandalous in the extreme. The most glaring favoritism was shown. Some manufacturers could get contracts while others could not. Middlemen abounded and easily obtained lavish contracts, which they sold to manufacturers at high profit.

One gun manufacturer endeavored in vain to secure business from the War Department, but got orders for 200,000 guns from middlemen who, though unable to manufacture the guns, knew how to get contracts. Many contracts went to subcontractors.

Either through criminal negligence or criminal collusion on its part, the War Department under Cameron permitted and even encouraged fraud of the grossest character. Moreover, contractors frequently besieged Republican leaders with appeals to intercede for them with Cameron in the award of contracts.

Cameron conducted the War Department as if it were a political club house; he used contracts freely to pay off old political debts and to shower additional favors upon his henchmen.

Representative Henry L. Dawes, of Massachusetts . . . declared that Cameron used fat contracts to win political support at meetings “where the hatchet of political animosity was buried in the grave of public confidence and the national credit was crucified between malefactors.”

(Lincoln and the Patronage, Harry J. Carman and Reinhard H. Luthin, Peter Smith, 1964, excerpts pp. 147-148; 150)

The following passage refers to Lincoln’s “lost speech” at the 1856 Bloomington, Illinois Republican party convention, where he reportedly fixated on keeping slaves in States where they lived while keeping the Kansas-Nebraska violence inflamed – the issues which his new party fed upon. The politically-ambitious Lincoln narrowly lost the vice-presidential nomination to William Dayton of New Jersey shortly after the Illinois convention, but then became what the author below refers to as a “Messiah-in-waiting” and coveting the presidency.  His plurality election in 1860 was the death knell of the United States Constitution.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Republican’s Avenue to Power

“The 1856 presidential election was pivotal in Lincoln’s formation as a foe of the South. It now appeared that the Republicans, not the “Know-Nothings,” would inherit the Northern Whig voters. Illinois Republicans [organized in Bloomington with] . . . all sorts of political leaders gathered there. Their common attribute was non-membership in the Democratic Party. They were Whigs, abolitionists, Free-Soilers, anti-Douglas Democrats, bolting Democrats, Know-Nothings – a collection of politicians of any stripe outside the Democratic Party. It was a political gathering . . . a group of people clubbed together to seek power.

They had only one common issue – the need, as they saw it, to attack slavery. The people they represented did not want slaves (or free Negroes) admitted to their State or territory of interest. The Northern and foreign immigrants did not want Negroes where they lived. They wanted to keep them out, to make them stay in the South. The politicians were going to use that popular attitude as an avenue to power.

In 1856, [Lincoln] accepted election as a delegate to the convention in Bloomington . . . meant to organize a State Republican party. He stood up with a show of reluctance . . . [and] spoke from scribbled notes. When he finished, and hour and a half after beginning, “a mob of frenzied men churned around him, congratulating him, praising him, pumping his hand.”

(Lincoln As He Really Was, Charles T. Pace, Shotwell Publishing, 2018, excerpts pp. 139-140)

Early is his career, Sherman displayed a careless attitude toward his own casualties, either learned from Grant or his own habits rubbing off on the latter and explaining Grant’s later massed assaults in Virginia and tremendous losses of men. Even bounty-enriched foreign “volunteers” balked at Grant’s orders to advance, believing it futile stepping over the maimed and dead of previous assaults and only to be killed themselves – and lose the balance of their enlistment bounty money.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Political Devices Keeping the War Spirit Alive

“It was the twenty-fifth of May, three days after the assault on Vicksburg. Federal dead between the lines were “swelling to the stature of giants” and were making the air so unbearable that Confederates had sent out the request that they be buried.

Under a white flag soldiers threw dirt on their late comrades, while in their midst Sherman and a Confederate officer, Captain S.H. Lockett, had come out to gather information . . . [and the latter noted that to] all appearance, Sherman was callous toward death. In reality, [Sherman’s] days and nights were full of resentment against the [Lincoln] Administration for what he believed was its indifference towards boys’ lives.

When reinforcements had been sent to the front during the last winter, the regiments had averaged 900 men, now they had been reduced by disease and bullets – principally the former – to around 300 per regiment, and were thinner than veteran organizations that had seen eighteen months more of service.

Sherman knew that if the War Department had used most of these recruits as replacements in older regiments, many youths now dead would be alive. Politics, however, demanded that volunteers be gathered in new regiments so that officers could be appointed by State governors, or elected by the men. Jobs must be made for deserving patriots. Sherman refused to admit that Lincoln was forced to employ many political devices to keep the war spirit alive in faint-hearted sections of the North.

When newspapers announced the passage of a new Conscription Law . . . [which sent the majority to new regiments, Sherman thought this] proved Lincoln unintelligent, and he sent Grant a plea to start work against so reckless a scheme . . . [to wife Ellen he] railed against the scheme:

“If the worst enemy of the United States were to devise a plan to break down our army, a better one cannot be attempted . . . It may be that the whole war will be turned over to the Negroes, and I begin to believe that they will do as well as Lincoln and his advisors.”

(Sherman: Fighting Prophet, Lloyd Lewis, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932, excerpts pp. 284-286)

The author quoted below, US Navy Captain and Virginia-native Russell Quynn, was a veteran of both World Wars and a member of the Virginia bar since 1941. He writes that against the North, “the armies of the South at peak strength never exceeded 700,000 men,” and that “imported “Hessians” were used “by Lincoln to crush Americans of the South whose fathers had served in the armies of Washington, Jackson, Taylor, to make the nation, to found its renown.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

“It Was Lincoln Who Made War”

“Jefferson Davis, with his family, was captured in the Georgia pines on May 10, 1865, while en route to the Trans Mississippi, where he had hoped forces were still intact to continue the struggle Johnston and Beauregard had given up to Sherman at Durham, North Carolina . . . The odds now were ten to one; the North was being armed with Spencer-magazine repeating rifles, against the Confederates muzzle-loaders, to turn the war into mass murder.

During the four years of war the Northern armies had been replenished with large-scale inductions of more than 720,000 immigrant males from Europe; who were promised bounties and pensions that the South afterwards largely had to pay (see the Union Department of War records).

Charged with detestable crimes that, it was only too well known, he could not be guilty of, Davis was unable to obtain a hearing, and finally was released. A bail bond of $100,000 had been posted for him, oddly enough, by some of the men who had been his bitterest enemies – Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, Vanderbilt, and others among the twenty men who pledged $5,000 each in federal court.

Davis himself thought that “. . . by reiteration of such inappropriate terms as “rebellion” and treason,” and the asseveration that the South was levying war against the United States, those ignorant of the nature of the Union, and of the reserved powers of the States, have been led to believe that the Confederate States were in the condition of revolted provinces, and that the United States were forced to resort to arms for the preservation of their existence . . . The Union was formed for specific enumerated purposes, and the States had never surrendered their sovereignty . . . It was a palpable absurdity to apply to them, or to their citizens when obeying their mandates, the terms “rebellion” and “treason”; and, further, the Confederacy, so far from making war or seeking to destroy the United States, as soon as they had an official organ, strove earnestly by peaceful recognition, to equitably adjust all questions growing out of the separation from their late associates.”

It was Lincoln who “made war.” Still another perversion, Davis thought, “was the attempted arraignment of the men who formed the Confederacy, and who bore arms in its defense, as “instigators of a controversy leading to disunion.” Of course, it was a palpable absurdity, and but part of the unholy vengeance, which did not cease at the grave.”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts, Russell H. Quynn, Exposition Press, 1959, excerpts pp. 126-128)

Like many if not most Northern general officers who had not gone over to the Radicals, who saw future Republican votes and political hegemony in the freedmen, Sherman held black field hands in low esteem and predicted their demise if freed. Connecticut native Frederick Law Olmstead, who travelled through much of the South in the early 1850s found the slaves “a very poor and a very bad creature, much worse than I had supposed before. The people thus burthened [with black servants] would have need to provide systematically for the physical wants of these poor creatures, else that the latter would be liable to prey with great waste upon their substance.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Another Northern General’s View of the Negro

“General William T. Sherman, who conducted one of the most disgraceful dragonnades of modern history through the Carolinas and Georgia (January 1864-April 1865) “freeing” every Negro in sight, nevertheless had written his brother, Senator John Sherman, in July 1860: “All the Congresses on Earth cannot make the Negro anything else than what he is; he must be subject to the white man, or he must amalgamate or be destroyed . . . Two such races cannot live in harmony save as master and slave.”

Six months earlier, in December 1859, when the Abolitionists were roaring in high fettle, stamping on the floors and pounding on the desks in both houses of Congress, he had said: “I would not if I could abolish or modify slavery.”

Having stated opposite views on the matter in previous weeks, Lincoln in a different milieu, looking South with apparent sympathy, could say: “I cannot blame the Southerners for not doing what I should not know how to do myself . . . Were all earthly powers given me I would not know what to do as to the existing institution.”

Yet some years later, as if indeed all earthly powers had been given him, he took it upon himself – and wholly outside the Constitution – to declare forever “free” nearly four million uneducated, childlike blacks, not one in a thousand of whom had the least notion of what it was all about. They were suddenly propelled into a highly organized white civilization that moved and existed by the means of money, hired labor, production, consumption, and where sentiment was incongruous if not grotesque.

This was all done by a juvenile moral stature, accomplished by an outrageous ukase that no Czar of . . . [Russia] would have dared to utter.”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts, Russell H. Quynn, Exposition Press, 1959, excerpts pp. 85-86)