Memorial to the Victors at Plymouth

Memorial to the Victors at Plymouth

The following is an extract from the address by Josephus Daniels, June 19, 1928, at the unveiling of the Confederate Memorial Marker on the site of the Battle of Plymouth, North Carolina.

“If the man from Mars should seek to learn how the Confederate army, poorly equipped and poorly-fed, kept at bay superior forces for four long years, the answer would be” “Look at the character, resourcefulness, and courage of the men who led the armies and who followed them in battle.”

Every army is judged by the oncoming generation, not by its victories or defeats, but by the spirit and life of its personnel. By that standard the battalions of the South have stood the test of threescore and more years.

While the survivors of those who wore the grey cannot take their sons to Gettysburg or to Appomattox and say, “Upon these battlefields we overpowered our opponents and carried our standards to victory,” they can indeed point to success after success won against superior odds, almost in the very shadow of Washington, DC, and on a hundred fields of battle. Among these splendid victories that attest to the glory of the brave men who achieved them stands out in bold relief the battle of Plymouth. It is fitting, therefore, that we should stand here today with the thin line of the immortals with bowed heads, in honor of the victor of Plymouth, as there is unveiled here a memorial to their valor and their success.

Many battles surpassed the one waged and won here by Southern troops, for the most part North Carolinians, in the number of troops or in far-reaching results. It has, however, one distinction that is without parallel in that the victory was so highly esteemed by President Jefferson Davis that he promoted Brig-Gen. Hoke to the rank of Major General by telegraph immediately after the news reached him.

This was the only promotion made directly by President Davis on the field of battle during the war.”

(“Two Illustrious Roberts of the Southern Confederacy.” Confederate Veteran, September 1912, pg. 437)

 

Old Men and Boys Defend Marianna

The raid upon the peaceful town of Marianna, Florida in late September 1864 was led by Brig-Gen. Alexander Asboth, a refugee from the failed 1848 Hungarian socialist revolution. Earlier in the Civil War he fought under Fremont in Missouri and Arkansas along with other European revolutionaries, following nomination as brigadier by Abraham Lincoln. In 1863 he commanded the district of West Florida and led raids to suppress armed resistance. During his attack on Marianna, Asboth was severely wounded by two bullets, one shattering his left arm and another lodged under his right cheek.

Old Men and Boys Defend Marianna

“September 18-October 4: General Asboth leaves Barrancas at the head of 700 picked mounted troops- black and white – and several artillery pieces. They cross Pensacola Bay and move the fifty miles to East Pass. Here the raiders take on supplies from their steamer Lizzie Davis and then march rapidly northeast into Washington and Walton counties.

At daybreak on September 23, a surprise attack is made on the town of Eucheanna plundering homes, gathering horses and mules, and taking fifteen citizens as prisoners. The raiding column then moves toward Jackson County while news of their approach quickly reaches the town of Marianna, the county seat. Defense reparations are hastily made there with the few depleted companies of irregular Confederate troops in and about the town. Also, old men and boys are armed with available weapons such as shotguns and squirrel rifles. The defenders erect a barricade where the road forks within the town, and there some 300 men and boys await the enemy’s arrival.

The raiders come up rapidly and sweep aside the barricade with artillery and follow this with a determined charge by the 2nd Maine Cavalry. The defending force is dispersed with some withdrawing to the Chipola River bridge, and many taking refuge in the nearby Episcopal Church and continue firing from its windows. The enemy then sets fire to the church, and its defenders are shot down as they run into the graveyard, falling amid its headstones. Some of the boys are burned to death inside the church. The enemy advance is finally checked at the Chipola Bridge.

In this raid the enemy lost a total of 39 killed and wounded, and before leaving town they plundered stores and homes, taking with them 81 prisoners, 200 horses, 600 Negroes and 400 cattle.”

(The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis. Columbia University, 1913, pp. 311-312)

Henry Timrod on the 4th of July

Henry Timrod (1828-1867) was an American poet born to a family of German immigrants – his father a veteran of the Seminole Wars. Henry was educated first in Classical schools and in 1847 attended the University of Georgia at Athens.
Henry was a member of Charleston’s literati and often in the company of Basil Gildersleeve and William Gilmore Simms.
 Henry Timrod on the 4th of July
“We have no inclination to deprive [this] day of its just honors on which was, for the first time, effectively and solemnly enunciated – ‘the right of the people to alter and abolish a form of Government, deriving it’s just powers from the consent of the governed.’ This is the principle for which we are even now contending, and which we have never violated; and, therefore, whatever associations are connected with that mid-summer day in the year of our Lord 1776, ought to be peculiarly and perpetually cherished by the citizens and citizen-soldiers of these Confederate States of America.
When the time and our means permit, we shall be glad to see renewed, with every return of the occasion, the bonfires and rejoicings with which it used to be celebrated, and we shall read, with hardly less pleasure than in the season of our boyhood, the familiar but ever fresh truths appropriate to the day written by the art of the pyrotechnist in letters of emerald and crimson against the dusk evening sky.
Yet while we advocate the celebration of the 4th by ourselves, we don’t know what right the Yankees have to regard it with like respect. It is one of the most remarkable proofs of their effrontery as a nation that they would dare to take the name of that day in vain. The impudence of the thing almost surpasses belief. But it is a piece of the bold hypocrisy of a people who represent themselves as the philanthropists of the world while they are engaged in a crusade of extermination against another.”

The Great American Misfortune

The Northern States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. The North’s industrial production exploded and made agriculture prosper, while the flood of European immigration more than replaced the men in blue lost by Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. The South was in shambles and soon the North would send its carpetbaggers and Union League organizers to loot anything of value that remained.

The Great American Misfortune

“On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union army landed in Texas. At Galveston he proclaimed, in the name of President Johnson, that the authority of the United States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were free. With him, thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French in Mexico; the others congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the State. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior and most camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the State with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by.

Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as “right.” They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texans were stubborn and prideful people. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy too.

The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The State was placed under military rule and army tribunals replaced the civil courts . . . Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. More galling than the actual atrocities [by Union soldiers], however, was the fact that most Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.

Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.

Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville.

This had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full and lasting effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texas soul.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, 1968, pp. 394-395)

 

The Deadliest War

The author cited below wrote: “Perhaps it was cold comfort to dismembered Mexico, but the “Mexican Cession” led in the next two decades to the death of a million gringos, as well as to sectional hatreds that persist to the present.” The Compromise of 1850 led to the political rise of Lincoln, John Brown’s violence, the formation of the Republican party, the election of Lincoln, the withdrawal of Southern States and war.

The Deadliest War

“The Deadliest war in American history, in terms of total deaths per thousand who served per year, at last was over. Of the 100,182 soldiers, sailors, marines who participated, only 1548 were killed in action, but 10,970 died from disease and exposure. Thus, the mortality rate was 110 per 1000 per annum (as compared with a Civil War rate of 65; a Spanish-American War rate of 27.79; and a World War I rate of 16. In World War II the death rate was about 3 percent of the total strength of the armed forces.

And the death rate was appallingly high in relation to the length of actual combat, for the conflict with Mexico lasted just twenty-two months (with only seventeen months of actual combat) . . . [and American soldiers] would continue to succumb to diseases contracted in Mexico for the next several decades. J.J. Oswandel, a veteran of the war, wrote in 1885, “After the close of the war we returned home with impaired health . . . with a disease contracted in a strange climate, which, in a few years after the war had taken from their homes more than half of those who returned.”

(North America Divided: The Mexican War, 1846-1848. S. Connor & O. Faulk. Oxford University Press, 1971, pp.170-171)

The Better Men

“Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence. The Confederates have gone out of this war with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN, and there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances and a firmer resolve to make them the victors.”

(The Lost Cause. Edward A. Pollard. E. B. Treat & Company, Baltimore, Md., L. T. Palmer & Company, 1866. pg. 729)

“Rebels and Patriots”

The following address was delivered to those attending the annual Confederate Memorial Day observance in Columbus County, North Carolina.

“Rebels and Patriots”

In this cemetery today we honor brave American patriots who defended their families, hearths & country against an invading enemy 1861-1865, many of whom died doing so. Many also remain in distant unmarked graves, and whose families waited and waited for their return. Their tombstones are the many granite monuments erected all across the South.

Let us never cease to remember that these patriots were no different than the patriots of 1776, as both fought for freedom, political independence and self-government. They both proclaimed that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. And it is most important for us today to recognize that the very root the 1776 -1783 war was secession from England; and the very root of the 1861-1865 war was secession from the United States.

Today’s good news is that more are coming to recognize that the 1861 war was simply another American war of independence, though there are some holding onto their long monopoly of the narrative who do not like competition.

During the 1776-1783 Revolution, local men of the militia – mostly farmers and laborers – fought Tories & Loyalists who adhered to the British crown. This militia fought bravely at several engagements not far from this spot where we are today.

Please allow me to pose this question to you: What difference existed between the patriots at the Moore’s Creek battle in 1776, and the patriots defending Fort Fisher in January 1865? We know in both cases they defended the very same thing – political independence – with their homes, farms and families behind them. They both were there to repel an invader whose intent was to deny them political independence.

Then how is it that we are told incessantly that the patriots of 1776 fought for political independence from England, but the “rebels” of 1861-1865 were “defending slavery?”

Let’s examine the facts.

In June of 1775 a desperate North Carolina Royal Governor, Josiah Martin, proclaimed African slaves free and armed those who adhered to his authority. Only 4 months later, an equally desperate Virginia Royal Governor, Lord Dunmore, creating a black “Corps d’Afrique” to assist in subduing the “rebels.” From this point on, and as Washington did not enlist slaves, the “rebels” were fighting the emancipators.

Eighty-seven years later, when Americans in the South sought political independence from what they viewed as an oppressive government, a desperate Abraham Lincoln called them “rebels” and then followed the royal example of proclaiming African slaves free – but only within the new Confederacy.

In mid-January 1863, Ohio’s “Copperhead” US Congressman Clement Vallandigham excoriated his fellow northern congressmen for denouncing “Southern rebels,” stating:

“After 2 years of brutal warfare the North has failed to subjugate 10 million “rebels” you say. And you call them “rebels? “Your own fathers & grandfathers were “rebels.” The large canvas portrait of General Washington looking down upon us in this chamber was a “rebel.” Yet we, sitting here today, and cradled in rebellion, make the word “rebel” a reproach.”

You have every right to honor annually the “rebels” buried around us and hold them up as worthy of emulation. In 1861, your local “rebels” formed several companies to join North Carolina regiments, and as the war took its toll, your Junior Reserves did their part in the ranks.  We must also recognize the supreme dedication of the ladies at home – “rebels” as well – who formed Soldiers’ Aid Societies to collect supplies and maintain roadside hospitals.

As a last word, I want to emphasize that the “rebels” we honor today fought a just cause defending the sacred 10th Amendment – simply interpreted as home rule and “States rights” – without which the United States Constitution would not have been ratified by North Carolina.

Deo Vindice!

John Bernhard Thuersam, Historian and Author

www.circa1865.org

 

Devotion to Land, Bible and Constitution

The writer below notes that historians burdened with modern egalitarian standards often “do not grasp the most elementary concept of the sound historian: the ability to appraise the past by standards other than those of the present. They accept a fanatical nationalism which leaves no room for sectional variations.”

Devotion to Land, Bible and Constitution

Jefferson Davis [is condemned by biographers] as a prolonged conspirator against the Union. But the facts show that as late as 1860 he, as a United States senator, was advocating appropriations for the army he was to fight in less than a year. A proper sympathy for the sectional values would perhaps lead to a condemnation of Davis because he did not become a conspirator against the Union soon enough.

Davis was not one of the great revolutionists of history; he was too honorable for that. Unlike William L. Yancy and R. Barnwell Rhett, he was slow in understanding that the North was in a revolutionary conspiracy against the Constitution as he interpreted it and could be answered effectively only by counterrevolution. Allen Tate, the poet, is the only biographer who condemns Davis for not understanding that the aim of the plutocratic democracy of the North was to crush his beloved homeland.

Davis should be praised for finally recognizing the forces arrayed against his section and then heroically defending its concept of truth and justice. Despite physical weaknesses, he maintained a proud but ragged nation for four years against the powers of wealth, progress and patriotism. After defeat he did not repent.

For his failure to repent, historians will not forgive Davis. He did not respond to the new wave of nationalism which came after the Civil War. He was no pragmatist, no evolutionist. Until his death, he remained devoted to his section, the soldier who found greatest virtue in continuing the battle charge after the enemy has inflicted a grievous wound and remained the scholastic who accepted the Bible and the Constitution just as they are written. He was as optimistic in his devotion to the antique values of the South as was Don Quixote to the antique values of an older land.

If the historians of the South were as tolerant of our past as are the European historians of theirs, they would confer on the defeated President of the Confederacy as many honors as have been conferred on the famous Spanish knight.”

Tolerating the South’s Past. Francis Butler Simkins. Journal of Southern History, Vol. XXI, No. 1, February 1955, pp 33-8)

The Radical Star Chamber

The Radical element of the Republican party emerged as a means to direct and control Lincoln’s war against the American South. West Point-graduate General George McClellan was an early casualty of Radical meddling as they strove to ensure that Radicalized military commanders- usually inept – were selected for high command.

The Radical Star Chamber

“It is a sordid story of how the people’s representatives, Sumner, Stevens, Wade, Chandler, Trumbull, Henry Wilson, Henry Winter Davis, and others, undertook to determine the conduct of the war for partisan purposes. They are shown as the representatives of the new “bourgeoisie” who ‘intended to do more than use their new-fledged political power to consolidate an already dominant economic position. They meant to extend the new industrial order to the South and make that section an economic adjunct of the North.’

The most certain way to accomplish this double purpose would be to destroy slavery, and with it the Old South. The Radicals ‘loved the Negro less for himself than as an instrument with which they might fasten Republican political and economic control upon the South.’ Lincoln saw the war as a way to preserve the Union while the Radicals saw it as a way to end slavery and the slave owners’ political power.

Victory must not come, therefore, through Democratic generals like McClellan, nor after a short war which would leave slavery untouched. This was a view which sometimes placed Radicals in the ‘position of regarding Union defeats on the battlefield as helpful to their cause.’ The Radicals would dominate the Republican party, Congress, and the Executive. They would form the President’s Cabinet, shape his policies, select his generals, and control the patronage.

The Committee for the Conduct of the War was hit upon as the Congressional agency over which the President would have no power. It was a Court of Star Chamber in every respect. It developed a refined technique for browbeating witnesses, suppressing testimony, damaging reputations, making oblique attacks upon Lincoln, and all under the guise of impartial investigations designed to mobilize efficiently the forces of victory.

With Washington full of amateur strategists, the army full of politicians, Lincoln indecisive and desperate for sound advice, and the Cabinet a hodge-podge, it is not surprising that the Radicals, with principles too high to let the Constitution stand in the way, soon got the smell of blood in their nostrils and were away in full pursuit. McClellan was fair game but difficult to corner, although some of his subordinates were the victims of pot-shots. Eventually, McClellan’s own weaknesses combined with the Radical sniping caused Lincoln to send him for cover.

The Radicals were adept at picking political generals who could not fight. These usually fell by the way, with never a tear shed by those who had urged them on Lincoln as saviors of the republic. When a general favored by the Radicals lost a battle, the blame was put on a Democratic or conservative subordinate; if a conservative won a battle, as in the case of Meade at Gettysburg, it was carefully explained that the credit should go elsewhere.

Even Grant was assailed as a Democrat until the Radicals decided they wanted to annex him, and Grant was politician enough to want to be annexed.”

(Lincoln and the Radicals, T. Harry Williams. University of Wisconsin Press, 1941. Review by R.H. Woody, Duke University. North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. XIX, No. 4, October 1942, pp. 410-411)

 

Seward and the Freedman

William H. Seward was a prewar Whig Governor of New York and after conversion to the nascent Republican party, served as Secretary of State 1861-1869. A prewar friend of Jefferson Davis and his wife, both privately considered Seward a man who lacked principle. Postwar, it was Seward as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who warned against trying Davis for treason as he sufficiently understood the Constitution to see it was Lincoln who actually committed the crime by waging war upon States.

Seward and the Freedman

“But Seward viewed the Black Codes as an issue of secondary importance. He was now more concerned with reconciliation between the white majorities, North and South, than he was with the fate of the blacks, for whom the war had already brought freedom. In April 1866 he gave an interview to Charles Eliot Norton and Edward Godkin, publishers of the influential magazine Nation. The fact that Godkin was a critic of President Johnson’s policies may account for some of the testiness of Seward’s remarks, but the secretary’s statements, as set down by Norton, are revealing.

According to Seward, there should be no question about readmitting the South to full representation in Congress; it had as much a right to representation as did the North. He then responded to a question about the blacks:

“The North has nothing to do with the Negro. I have no more concern for them than I have for the Hottentots. They are God’s poor; they always have been and always will be so everywhere . . . the laws of political economy will determine their position and the relations of the two races.”

(William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Right Hand. John M. Taylor. HarperCollins, 1991, p260)