Mankind’s War Fetish

 

English author and commentator H.G. Wells began writing newspaper articles in August 1914 commenting upon what was to be termed the “World War”; the articles would become assembled in a book entitled The War That Will End War. Arguing that the Central Powers led by Germany and Italy commenced the war, he saw that only the destruction of German militarism could end the conflagration.

American intervention – pursued by a president who was elected on a promise of keeping us out of the war – was decisive as cash advances to Britain, France and Russia amounting to some $9.6 billion stoked the fires. Postwar, America became the world’s banker with net foreign assets of around $11 billion by the end of 1919.

In 1918, Germany was defeated, its Kaiser banished, and punitive peace terms burdened the German people. Predictably, a nationalist arose within Germany who rebuilt his country’s military and ironically with French assistance through the Czech’s Skoda Works. Only twenty years after the Versailles Treaty, it was back to war. What is called World War Two – more accurately called the second half of the World War – led to an estimated 56 million military and civilian deaths, and an additional 38 million dead from war-related disease and famine.

Below, author Emil Ludwig cites the costs of the war to end war.

Mankind’s War Fetish

“The World War, which was on the verge of breaking out in the very first opening years of the opening century, is the great liquidation of debts created in the previous era and we desire and demand that it be associated with the nineteenth century. The second Hague Conference of 1907 was only a farce. During the weeks for which the third meeting was set in the summer of 1915, oratory could no longer be heard in The Hague due to the nearby thundering of cannon in Europe.

The cost of armament during the years from 1910 to 1914 amounted to 1.8 billions of dollars for Austria and Germany together and 2.4 billions for France and Russia – more than 4 billion. Yet these were small sums compared with those piled up by the War. On land and sea and in the air, 12,990,570 soldiers were killed in the World War. The war cost the combined combatants 250,000,000 billions of dollars – half of their combined national wealth. Thus, within four years, for no reason and without any essential consequences, Europe had sent up in smoke half of all it had gathered together during the preceding centuries. How should we characterize an act of this kind on the part of a large bank or a powerful family?

In so far as the victorious powers are concerned, France was a creditor nation to the extent of 30 billions before the war and a debtor to the extent of 31 billions afterward. During the struggle, the French national wealth decreased by a third; that of England by one fourth. Even the United States government had to expend during two years more than it had laid out in the course of over a century; and if in spite of this fact it remains today the creditor of the world, the reason is not participation in the second half of the war but rather abstention during the war’s first half. The smaller countries which remained neutral are in a relatively better position than any of the imperialist states.

With the exception of America, all the warring countries lost millions of men and billions of money; and any territory gained in the process at the expense of the conquered peoples is of intrinsic worth only in the case of new states established at the end.

Even the single positive result of the World War – the destruction of four realms anachronistically ruled by emperors, and the creation of eleven republics – was therefore purchased at a price which, in civil life, only an insane person would pay.”

“We punish an individual guilty of assault or murder, but the massacre of a people is considered a glorious deed.” Seneca

“Standing armies should in time cease to be, for they constitute a perennial threat of war to other states . . .”  Immanuel Kant

(Whither Mankind: A Panorama of Modern Civilization. Charles A. Beard, editor. Longmans, Green & Company, 1928, pp. 178-179)

 

Lincoln Chooses War

 

“The interval of eighty days between [Sumter] and the assembling of Congress gave Lincoln a virtual monopoly on emergency powers. Between his attempt to reinforce and resupply Fort Sumter – the latter odd since its garrison obtained food from Charleston markets – and the meeting of Congress in July, Lincoln had a virtual monopoly on assuming claimed “emergency powers.” After several States solemnly withdrew from the 1789 Constitution, Lincoln declared an “insurrection” to exist in seven States and called forth 75,000 militia to suppress this claim. On April 19, 1861, Lincoln proclaimed a naval blockade – an act of war – of all States bordering the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, including North Carolina which remained within the Union at that time. In his July 1861 message to Congress, Lincoln explained his clearly unconstitutional actions while asserting that “this issue embraces more than the fate of these United States. It presents to the whole family of man the question whether a constitutional republic or democracy . . . can . . . maintain its territory against its own domestic foes.” It is clear that he was not familiar with Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution, for “waging war against Them [the States] or aiding and abetting their enemies.”

Lincoln Chooses War

“. . . the South considered secession a peaceable act, while according to the [Northern] point of view such secession was null and required a defensive attitude on the part of the federal government with a readiness to strike in retaliation for any act of resistance to the national authority. This drifting policy, accompanied by conditions in the social mind which can only be described as pathological, had led to the Sumter crisis; and war was upon the country with each side protesting that its actions were purely defensive, and that the opponent was the aggressor.

Lincoln took many other war measures. He issued two proclamations of blockade . . . He decreed an expansion of the regular army on his own authority [with] a further call on May 3rd for recruits to the regular army beyond the total authorized by law. Increasing the regular army is a congressional function, with Sen. John Sherman stating that “I never met anyone who claimed that the President could, by proclamation, increase the regular army.”

Lincoln’s message to Congress on July 4th, 1861, stated: “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand and public necessity; trusting . . . that Congress would readily ratify them.” In a word, the whole machinery of war was set in motion by Lincoln, with all that this meant in terms of federal effort, departmental activity, State action and private enterprise.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction. James G. Randall. D.C. Heath & Company. 1937, pp. 360-366)

Opposing Slave Imports to Virginia

Robert E. Lee’s father “Light-Horse” Harry was a first-cousin to Richard Henry Lee, a prominent Virginian elected to the House of Burgesses in 1758, an office he held virtually the rest of his life. His first speech assailed the transportation of slaves into Virginia, stating “the importation of slaves into this Colony . . . has been and will be attended with effects dangerous both to our political and moral interests.” “Lay so heavy a tax upon the importation of slaves as effectually to put an end to that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic within the Colony,” he told the Burgesses.” North Carolina proposed the same.

Opposing Slave Imports to Virginia

“Massachusetts invalidated the British commercial system, which Virginia resisted from abhorrence of the slave-trade. Never before had England pursued the traffic in Negroes with such eager avarice.

The remonstrances of philanthropy and of the colonies were unheeded, and categorical instructions from the Board of Trade kept every American [colonial] port open as markets for [African slaves]. The legislature of Virginia had repeatedly showed a disposition to obstruct the commerce; a deeply seated public opinion began more and more to avow the evils and injustice of slavery itself; and in 1761, it was proposed to suppress the importation of Africans by a prohibitory duty.

Among those who took part in the long and violent debate was Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), the representative from Westmoreland. Descended from one of the oldest families in Virginia, he had been educated in England and had returned to his native land familiar with the spirit of Grotius and Cudworth, of Locke and Montesquieu; his first recorded speech was against Negro slavery and in behalf of human freedom.

In the continued importation of slaves, Lee foreboded danger to the Old Dominion; an increase of the free Anglo-Saxons, he argued, would foster arts and varied agriculture, while a race doomed to abject bondage was of necessity an enemy to social happiness. He painted from ancient history the horrors of servile insurrections. He deprecated the barbarous atrocity of [England’s and New England’s] trade with Africa, and its violation of equal rights of men created like ourselves in the image of God.

The [slave importation] tax for which Lee raised his voice was carried through the Assembly of Virginia by a majority of one; but from England a negative followed with certainty every colonial act tending to diminish the slave-trade.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 421-422)

 

New England’s Slave Past

African slaves existed in colonial New England as early as 1634 – well before any were in what became the American South – and by 1774 New England’s slave population totaled over 16,000. Interestingly, New England clergymen, merchants and lawyers then commonly owned at least one slave; in 1774 Connecticut’s slave population totaled over 5,000. Earlier in that century New England had surpassed England as the center of the nefarious transatlantic slave trade, which carried African slaves first to the West Indies to live and likely die as sugar cane laborers, then back to New England with sugar to make more rum with which to trade to African tribes for their slaves.

New England’s Slave Past

“[New England’s early inhabitants] were of homogenous origin, nearly all tracing their descent to English emigrants of the reigns of Charles the First, and Charles the Second. Along the seaside, wherever there was a good harbor, fishermen . . . gathered in hamlets; and each returning season saw them with an ever-increasing number of mariners and vessels, taking the cod and mackerel, and sometimes pursuing the whale into the icy labyrinths of the Northern seas; yet loving home, and dearly attached to their modest freeholds.

Of [African] slavery there was not enough to affect the character of the people, except in the southeast of Rhode Island, where Newport was conspicuous for engaging in the [transatlantic] slave trade, and where, in two or three towns, Negroes composed even a third of the inhabitants.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 149-150)

 

Father of the Revolution – Samuel Adams

As described below, New England political agitation brought about the avoidable secession from England and war; the same occurred some 80 years later “as Massachusetts agitators and men of letters had done their best to see that there should be thousands, and tens of thousands” joining them in denouncing their union with the South. The uncompromising Puritan moral crusade against the very African slavery which ironically enriched their own section, would now be put to work to destroy the 1789 union. The agitation pushed the hand of Lincoln in April 1861 to confront now-independent South Carolina over the question of tariff revenue – which predictably resulted in gunfire and war. Those defending their State were denounced in the north as “rebels” intent upon destroying the union.

Father of the Revolution – Samuel Adams

“It is a great mistake to think of public opinion as united in the colonies and as gradually rising against British tyranny. Public opinion was never wholly united and seldom rises to a pitch of passion without being influenced – in other words, without the use of propaganda. The Great War [of 1914-1918] taught that to those who did not know it already.

From the first, [John] Adams and those working with him had realized the necessity of democratic slogans in the creation of a state of mind. [He] at once struck out boldly to inflame the passions of the crowd by threatening that it was to be reduced to the “miserable state of tributary slaves,” contrasting its freedom and moral virtue with the tyranny and moral degradation of England. He proclaimed that the mother country was bent on bringing her colonies to a condition of “slavery, poverty and misery,” and on causing their utter ruin, and dinned into the ears of the people the words “slavery and tyranny” until they assumed a reality from mere reiteration.

His political philosophy was eagerly lapped up by a populace smarting under hard times and resentful of colonial even more than imperial conditions of the moment. The establishment of government by free consent of all had become imbedded in the mind of the average man, as an essential part of the American dream. Adams himself had seen the vision but had glimpsed it with the narrowness and bitterness with which the more bigoted Puritans had seen the vision of an unloving and revengeful Hebrew Jehovah.

Such talk as this could only make England fearful of how far the people might try to put such precepts into practice. The upper classes of the colonies also began to be uneasy. Up to 1770, when their own grievances were redressed, they might allow such ideas to be disseminated, considering themselves in control of the situation, but after that it became clear that they were losing control . . . [as] Sam Adams and the lesser radicals worked harder than ever to keep public opinion inflamed.

With the upper classes [becoming] lukewarm or hostile to his continued propaganda [despite] the obnoxious legislation repealed or modified, [Sam Adams] had to trust to generalizations and emotional appeal.

A good example of his use of the latter was the affair called the “Boston Massacre.” As part of the general imperial policy following the [French and Indian] war, the British government had stationed some regiments in Boston. They were under good officers and good discipline, and there was no more reason why they should have made trouble there, than in any provincial garrison town of England. Sam Adams, however, was continually stirring up the public mind against them; John Adams reported finding Sam one Sunday night ‘preparing for the next day’s newspaper – a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles and [incidents], working the political engine.’

Finally, one March evening, as a result of more than usual provocation given by taunting boys to soldiers on duty, an unfortunate clash occurred. There was confusion, a rioter’s shout to fire” was mistaken for an officer’s command, and several citizens were killed. The officer surrendered to civilian authorities, was tried, defended by John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., and acquitted.

But Samuel Adams at once saw the value of the incident. Every emotion of the mob was played upon. The affair was termed a “massacre,” and in the annual speeches given for a number of years to commemorate its anniversary the boys and men who had taken part in the mobbing were described as martyrs to liberty and the soldiers as “bloody butchers.”

(The Epic of America. James Truslow Adams. Little, Brown and Company. 1932, pp. 83-84).

The Other Side of the Story

The Other Side of the Story

“As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side?

We may be certain that the historian of a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as a matter course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other.

The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.”

(Excerpt, Prefatory Note by James Ford Rhodes: The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences, Hilary Herbert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, pg. vii – viii)

What Slavocracy?

Maj. Gen. Samuel G. French, born in New Jersey in 1808, was a Mexican War veteran and served the American Confederacy in the eastern theater as well as in the Army of Tennessee. Below he comments on the unfortunate postwar view that the South was a “slavocracy.”

What Slavocracy?

“The white population of [the Southern States] was, in 1860, was about 8,300,000, which included some 346,000 white people who owned African slaves. These figures represent and include men of all ages, widows and minors; as well as young married women who owned a servant given to them. Only one person in twenty-four was a slaveowner in 1860,” and this doesn’t account for women, orphans and old men who owned Africans. He follows this with a computation that in a regiment of 1000 men, there might have been forty men who owned slaves; in the entire Southern army of 600,000 there might have been only 24,000 men who owned slaves.

So let it be known that the Confederate army was not an army of slaveholders but mainly composed of men free from the interests of African slavery as were the men living in sight of Bunker Hill. These Southern men were contending for an object far dearer to them than any arising from African slavery.

They had seen the accumulated funds of the United States treasury expended annually in making harbors for towns on the great northern lakes and appropriations for little creeks called rivers, while the harbors of Southern cities were neglected.

Then, again, the tariff almost invariably discriminated against the South, even to the extent of nullification by South Carolina some thirty years prior to the War. The Fugitive Slave Act was openly nullified by the laws of northern States, and “underground railroad” was a term used to express how African slaves, enticed from their owners, were conveyed northward under cover of the night.

Further, the North openly declared that the United States Constitution was a “compact made with the devil,” and that the hatred of the North and the immigrant-settled West was so widespread that through a purely sectional party vote they elected a President with only 39% of the popular vote and antagonistic to the American South. As an example, North Carolina with less than a 1% foreign-born population gave its 10 electoral votes to Democrat John C. Breckenridge.

When Lincoln determined upon his policy of coercion against the political independence of the homogenous South, the latter mobilized some 576,000 soldiers who for four years fought for the right of their people to govern themselves in their own way. Their deeds are now a matter of history that will, by them, be recorded, contrary to the past rule, that the conquerors always write history.”

Appomattox only terminated the shooting war – it was not a court to adjudicate the right of political secession – but its sequence established the fact that secession was not treason or rebellion, and that it yet exists, restrained only by the question of expediency.

The charge that slaveholders, so few in number, forced secession, or that 576,000 non-slave holders who constituted the South’s army fought and died to maintain slavery, is a popular error.”

(Two Wars: The Autobiography and Diary of Gen. Samuel G. French. Confederate Veteran, 1901. pp. 356-357)

 

 

The Bitterness of Surrender

Like other defeated American soldiers in the South mid-1865, Gen. Bryan Grimes dealt with illness and “grief of surrender” amid constant rumors of pending retribution at the hands of the Yankee governors. One was “a report that they would hang all officers above the rank of captain and all their property confiscated,” his wife Charlotte recalled. “We were living in a “Reign of Terror.”

The Bitterness of Surrender

“Grim scenes abounded as homeward-bound North Carolinians rode south for home [after Appomattox]. One event in particular must have made him wonder what was in store for him as a defeated soldier without the means to fight back. According to Grimes’ astute traveling companion, Thomas Devereux:

“[We came upon] an old man, Loftin Terrel, his house was on the roadside, and he was knee-deep in feathers where [Sherman’s bummers] had ripped open the beds in search of valuables. A yearling and a mule colt were lying dead in the lot, they had been wantonly shot. Old man Terrel was sitting on his doorstep, he said there was not a thing left in the house and every bundle of fodder and grain of corn had been carried off; that he had been stripped of everything he owned and had not a mouthful to eat. They had even killed his dog which was lying dead near the house.”

On Sunday, April 16, 1865, Grimes rode into Raleigh atop his trustful horse Warren. Charlotte was “delighted to see him under any conditions,” but recalled that, “he would reproach me for want of patriotism when I said so, he was so miserable over [General Joseph Johnston’s] the surrender.”

The Federals garrisoning [Raleigh] issued orders forbidding former Confederates from wearing their uniforms. For many this directive presented a dilemma, for they had no other clothes to wear and no money to purchase new one. Charlotte responded to the order by covering her husband’s brass uniform buttons with bootblack, a ruse Grimes described made him look as though he was “in mourning for the Confederacy.” The ever-resourceful Charlotte, despite Grimes’ protestations, sold several of her silk dresses for $100 and used the money to purchase his civilian clothes. “It seemed to hurt him to have to use this money,” she explained, “but I would take no denial.”

Raleigh was a very different town from the one Grimes left four years earlier. The victorious Yankees seemed everywhere . . . [and he] no money, no income . . . [and] not a cent in the world, explained Charlotte, “except for a few gold pieces he had carried all through the war.” Fortunately, Grimes’ brother William was in a position to assist the destitute couple [and] gave them “two hundred dollars in gold quilted in a belt under my corsets,” wrote Charlotte.”

(Lee’s Last Major General: Bryan Grimes of North Carolina. T. Harrell Allen. Savas Publishing, 1999, pp. 258; 260)

 

The Tenth Amendment

Christopher Gustav Memminger was born in 1803 in the Dukedom of Wurtemberg, the son of a Prince-Elector’s Foot Jaegers. His mother fled Napoleon’s ravaging of the German States after the death of her soldier-husband, finding refuge at Charleston, South Carolina. She then succumbed to fevers soon after their arrival and left him an orphan. The future American statesman was then admitted to Charleston’s Asylum for Orphans, entered South Carolina College at the age of 12, and graduated second in his class at age 16. Memminger passed the bar in 1825, became a successful lawyer, and served in the South Carolina Legislature from 1836 to 1860. From 1861 to 1864 he was a presidential cabinet member.

An esteemed Charleston lawyer by the 1840s, he was retained by a local synagogue to represent them in an internal quarrel, and did so very successfully and without a fee, that he received “an elegant and richly chased silver pitcher of the Rebecca pattern, nearly two feet in height, and a massive silver waiter, eighteen inches in diameter.”

This valuable memento, with other personal property, was plundered from his residence by invading soldiers of the Federal army. Notwithstanding its well-marked and unmistakable evidence of ownership, it is still held somewhere at the North as a “trophy,” or has been converted into bullion and sold by some remorseless thief.”

In opposing an offensive Massachusetts-originated House of Representatives resolution, in 1835, Mr. C. G. Memminger of South Carolina reminded his colleagues of the limitations the States placed upon the United States Constitution of 1789.

The Tenth Amendment

“The Union of these States was formed for the purpose, among other things, of ensuring domestic tranquility and providing for the common defense; and in consideration thereof, this State yielded the right to keep troops or ships of war in time of peace without the consent of Congress; but while thus consenting to be disarmed, she has, in no part of the constitutional compact, surrendered her right of internal and police; and, on the contrary thereof, has expressly reserved all powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States.”

(Life and Times of C.G. Memminger, Henry D. Capers, A.M. Everett Waddey Co., Publishers 1893, pg. 190)

Lincoln’s RMS Trent Blunder

What is known as the “Trent Affair” occurred on November 8, 1861, when a US warship intercepted and boarded the British mail ship RMS Trent in international waters. On board were two envoys of the new Confederate States of America, James M. Murray and John Slidell, who were enroute to England, and later France. This seizure of diplomats was seen as a violation of England’s neutrality which of course sparked a serious diplomatic crisis.

Lincoln had little government and no international experience as he had served 8 years as a county representative in Illinois, and only 2 years as an Illinois State representative in the US Congress. His first reaction was to celebrate the seizure of the South’s envoys and refuse their release, until a wiser and internationally experienced William Seward convinced Lincoln of the imminent danger created by a foolish US sea captain.

Lincoln’s RMS Trent Blunder

“A British diplomat Lincoln met with on December 4 [1861] wrote his government that despite Lincoln’s simple assurance of no desire for trouble with England, he could not ignore the strong impression that the policy of the US government “is so subject to popular impulse that no assurance can or ought to be relied upon under present circumstances.” Lincoln, in his upcoming message to Congress avoided mention of the Trent Affair, but relying upon [Treasury] Secretary Cameron’s estimate of quickly enlisting 3 million men, boasted of showing the world that he could easily quell disturbances at home while protecting ourselves from foreign threats.

Despite northern braggadocio, Lincoln’s rickety war financing and knowing New York banks were about to suspend specie payments, the Trent Affair contributed greatly to the virtual collapse of his war financing which depended upon public confidence. By mid-January 1862, Lincoln was forced to issue “greenback” fiat currency, as his government was simply out of money.

By the end of the war in 1865, the north had become burdened with rampant inflation, the constant manipulation of gold prices by speculators, a morass of different bond issues and four major forms of currency – national bank notes, specie, greenbacks and individual bank notes. And the last were to be simply taxed out of existence.

In mid-December 1861, Lincoln and his cabinet discussed the serious ramifications of war with England: the threatened breaking of the blockade to reopen the cotton trade, and the blockade of northern ports. He was distressed as well by the new French monarchy in Mexico and French diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.

And should the Confederacy achieve its independence, northern capitalists feared widespread smuggling of British goods into the north across the long border with the Confederacy and thereby crippling northern manufacturing. It could not have been lost on Lincoln and his cabinet that the American republic they now governed would not have existed without French intervention in 1781, which clearly made the difference between the American colonists’ success or failure.

In the meantime, Britain was reinforcing Canada with troops, planning invasions of the US from British Columbia and Canada West (Ontario) while US troops were occupied in the American South. Additionally, British ships would cripple northern shipping by its blockade and preying upon northern merchantmen, and not necessarily in cooperation with the South’s navy. Additionally, modern ‘Laird Rams’ being built in England posed a very serious threat as their submerged iron prows could wreak havoc with the north’s wooden blockading fleet. Though the north’s fleet was growing by late 1861, its newer ships were ‘improvised merchantmen’ for blockade duty and not steam or sail warships.

The British military sent provisional orders during the first two weeks of the Trent crisis to quickly establish an offensive base at Bermuda from which to attack the north’s blockading force. Another fleet located at Havana under Commodore Dunlop would neutralize the northern ships at Pensacola Bay while Key West and Fort Jefferson would be left to the powerful British West Indies Squadron.”

(Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here. John Bernhard Thuersam. Shotwell Publishing LLC, 2022, pp. 206-207)