Circa1865

The Conspiracy Which Brought on the War

The article in this number on the “Sudden Change in Northern Sentiment as to Coercion in 1861,” by Dr. James H. McNeilly of Nashville, shows that there was evidently a deeply laid plan to force the South into making the first hostile demonstration in order to arouse that sentiment which would respond to the call for troops necessary to invade this section. It is well-known that the general sentiment in the North was against making war on the seceding Southern States, but there was a powerful political element which really wanted war and could see the value of forcing the South into making an offensive move. Forcibly illustrating this spirit is the following quotation from a thoughtful writer of the South:

“On February 2, 1861, Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in a letter published in the Memphis Appeal, wrote of the Republican leaders as follows:

‘They are bold, determined men. They are striving to break up the Union under the pretense of serving it. They are struggling to overthrow the Constitution while professing undying attachment to it and a willingness to make any sacrifice to maintain it. They are trying to plunge the country into a cruel war as the surest way of destroying the Union upon the plea of enforcing the laws and protecting public property.’

Shortly after Douglas wrote this letter Senator Zach Chandler of Michigan, wrote to Gov. Austin Blair which proves the conspiracy of the men determined on war. Virginia had solicited a conference of States to see if some plan could not be devised and agreed upon to prevent war and save the Union. Chandler wrote Governor Blair that he opposed the conference and that no Republican State should send a delegate. He implored the governor to send stiff-necked [anti-compromise] delegates or none, as the whole idea of compromise was against his judgement. Chandler added to his letter these sinister words: ‘Some of the manufacturing States think that a war would be awful; without a little bloodletting this Union will not be worth a curse.’”

(The Conspiracy Which Brought on the War. Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXIV, No. 10, October 1916. pg. 436)

“So bitter was Sherman’s feelings against newspapers that he is said to have refused an introduction to Horace Greeley, explain that Greeley’s newspaper had caused him a heavy loss of men in his Carolina campaign of 1865.

By clever feints Sherman had concealed his plans until Confederate General William J. Hardee got hold of a copy of the New York Tribune which contained a most obliging editorial.

At last the editor “had the satisfaction to inform his readers (General Hardee was one of the readers) that Sherman would next be heard from around Goldsboro because his supply vessels from Savannah were known to be rendezvousing at Morehead City.” The disclosure cost the northern commander a fight which he had hoped to avoid.”

(The Newspaper Problem and its Bearing Upon Military Secrecy During the Civil War. James G. Randall. American Historical Review, Vol. XXIII, No. 2. Jan. 1918. pg. 311)

The Efik Chief’s Slave Raids

“Once the native African chiefs saw that they could gain wealth from the sale of slaves to whites – some chiefs possessed European style two-storied wooden houses as early as 1785 – they soon found the means of providing yet more slaves. The Efik of Old Calabar, on the Cross River estuary in what is now the Calabar Province of Nigeria, ‘enslaved those of their own people who were guilty of theft or adultery, and also captured or purchased slaves from neighboring tribes.’

Isaac Parker, a ship-keeper who jumped ship in Duke Town in 1765 and remained there for six months, describes one of these raids. The Efik chief asked him ‘to go to war with him.’

He agreed, and they fitted out and armed the canoes and went upriver, ‘lying under the bushes in the day when they came near a village, and taking hold of everyone they could see. These are handcuffed, brought down to the canoes, and so proceeded up the river till they got to 45 captures. They then returned to Duke Town where the captains of the shipping divided the captives among the ships.

About a fortnight later they went out again for eight or nine days, plundering other villages higher upriver and capturing about the same number of villagers as before.

But the Europeans seldom engaged in the slave raids and used to buy their slaves from native brokers who lived in coastal towns. These slaves might be prisoners of war, criminals condemned to slavery, or debtors sold into slavery to satisfy creditors, or children stolen from a village.”

(The Slaves of Timbuktu. Robin Maugham. Harper & Brothers, 1961, pp. 32-33)

The following is underscored by the words of Gen. U.S. Grant, III in a Sept. 1960 centennial address in Oswego, NY. He refers to the Cambridge Modern History’s assertion that: “between Oct. 26, 1864 & Jan. 1865 it was possible for 8.5 million pounds of meat, 1.5 million pounds of lead, 2 million pounds of saltpeter, 546,000 pairs of shoes, 316,000 blankets, 500,000 pounds of coffee, 69,000 rifles and 43 cannons came into the port of Wilmington alone.” (New York History, Jan. 1961, pg. 49).  

Defeat Did Not Come from Lack of Material

“Despite its obvious economic impact, the north’s naval cordon never really prevented the American Confederacy from acquiring more plentiful supplies of blankets, clothing and armaments than it had men to employ. Stephen Wise, the foremost contemporary expert on the blockade-running trade, concluded unequivocally: “Defeat did not come from a lack of material.”

Confederate States agents operating primarily in England and France under the direction of Ordnance Chief Josiah Gorgas’ specially established Bureau of Foreign Supplies provided a steady stream of wares despite limited means. By 1864 cotton sold at twenty-eight pence per pound compared to only nine pence in 1860. This seller’s market funded a massive Confederate credit line.

During the last six months of 1864, purchasing agents obtained $45,000,000 of credit on the basis of only $1,500,000 of government cotton. As the war continued and Southern resources dwindled, this trade increased in importance to the Confederate States war effort.

During the second half of the war, at least 127 known British-built steamers did much to sustain the South’s war effort. An estimated sixty percent of the Confederate States total small arms, one third of its lead shot, and two thirds of its gunpowder had slipped through the north’s blockade. The most celebrated State-owned and operated vessel, North Carolina’s Ad-Vance, made eight round trips from Nassau between June 1863 and September 1864 before her eventual capture. As a result of this, Tar Heel troops enjoyed better and more plentiful supplies than any other State troops as a direct result.”

(“A Notorious Nest of Offense: Neutrals, Belligerents and Union Jails for Blockade Runners. Samuel Negus, TCU, 2010, pp. 8-9)

“This Class of People”

Of the infamous General Order No. 11, President Jefferson Davis considered Grant’s conduct as an arbitrary abuse of power; the Confederate States never issued any orders which singled out religious groups for discriminatory attack.  

“Speculators were swarming around Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters at Holly Springs, Mississippi, and following his forces in search of cotton to be bought as cheaply as possible and sold in the north. Grant complained to Assistant Secretary of War C.P. Wolcott about “Jews and other unprincipled traders” who flouted Treasury regulations, and ordered his commanding officer at Columbus, Kentucky to deny permits to all Jews who wished to travel south.

In other correspondence he expiated on his unfavorable opinions of Jewish traders with their “carpet sacks” and pockets full of gold.” When Grant’s own father, a leather merchant who came to Holly Springs with some Jewish tradesmen in hopes of making money from the cotton trade, Grant sent him north again and in cold fury issued his notorious General Order 11 of December 17, 1862.

This read: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department and held in confinement within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order. Post commanders will see that this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and anyone returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs for sending them out as prisoners.”

(The Jew in American Politics. Nathaniel Weyl. Arlington House. 1968, pp. 58-59)

To put the below in perspective, the number of Jewish men in the northern army was anywhere between 6,000 to 15,000. The Jewish contribution to the military effort of the Confederacy was significant, and Secretary of War John Seddon’s estimated that there were between 10,000 and 12,000 Jews fighting in grey.

American Jews in Grey

“At the time of the Civil War there were about 150,000 Jews in the United States among a white population of 27 million. Jews thus constituted slightly more than half of one percent of the total.

The intense loyalty of Southern Jews to the Confederacy was to be expected in view of the fact that the South was the first region in the United States to tear down the barriers blocking the political and social advance of Jews. Thus, the first Jew to serve as a State governor was David Emanuel, who, having distinguished himself for valor in the siege of Savannah in the Revolutionary War, was elected Governor of Georgia in 1801. In contrast, the last State to retain discriminatory laws against Jews holding public office was New Hampshire, which did not remove them until 1876.

The first Jew to be elected to the United States Senate was also a Southerner. David Levy Yulee was elected Florida’s first United States Senator in 1845. In Congress he was vociferous in his opposition to federal restrictions on the introduction of slavery into the territories to be acquired from Mexico.

The second Jew to serve in the Senate was Judah P. Benjamin, a man descended from Spanish Jews who were expelled from the peninsula, then ended to England, then to the American South. He left Yale without graduating, arrived in New Orleans with four dollars in his pocket, married into a distinguished Creole family, became an immensely successful lawyer and planter, and pioneered in the mechanization of sugar cultivation.

President Zachary Taylor nominated him for Attorney General; Millard Fillmore nominated him for Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.”

(The Jew in American Politics. Nathaiel Weyl. Arlington House. 1968, pp. 50-51)

Gen. Samuel G. French, a Southern officer born in New Jersey, wrote postwar of the extreme sacrifices Americans in the South had made in their drive for political independence. Speaking to a group regarding their memorial efforts, he said:

“I am not unmindful, ladies, of the power you possess & can exercise in preserving the true story of the war & the memory of the South’s soldiers. Tell the true story to your children. Because if you don’t, their teachers will tell them their version.”

Shaking the Instincts of Our Youth

“She arrived in Wilmington, North Carolina before dawn on December 30, 1866. Had she been superstitious, Amy Bradley might have felt that even the elements were trying to tell her that “the mission was doomed, for “the snow was falling fast, making the prospect cold and cheerless.” Undaunted by her chilly reception in town, she got to work shortly after light.

She first presented a letter of introduction to Rev. S.A. Ashley, a New Englander who represented the interests of the American Missionary Society, the Freedman’s Bureau and who was described to her as “the superintendent of Wilmington Schools.”

Their conference was followed by a tour of Dry Pond, one of the city’s poorest white neighborhoods. Amy then paid formal calls upon several local carpetbag politicians, men of substance who might be empathetic to her “mission,” because of a shared New England background or identification with Republican party politics. These gentlemen, “though courteous in their reception, frankly, told her it was impossible for her to succeed.”

Their pessimism sprang from an understanding of Wilmington’s attitudes rather than any personal distaste for Amy or disdain for her proposed school. However, they knew full well that in the emotional aftermath of defeat and devastation of Reconstruction, Wilmington’s old-line Conservatives would not be so charitable. “Do-gooders from the north were not held in high esteem. As one observer put it:

“Following the destruction of the Southern States by armies of northern radicals, swarms of the riffraff of northern cities, the dregs of northern society, poured into the South. Among them were the female “missionaries,” as they styled themselves, with a “holier than thou” attitude. “How much better it is to do it our way,” said those arrogant New England schoolmarms.”

Amy soon became a familiar Wilmington figure as she went house to house drumming up interest in her proposed school. Despite many town women pulling their skirts aside when she passed, or spat on her, she held her head high and continued the rounds. In early January 1867 one local carpetbagger capitulated to her badgering and gave her the key to the old Dry Pond schoolhouse, abandoned in 1862.  Within four days she had the school cleaned and welcomed the first three students.

After two months Amy had sixty-two members of the Benevolent Society meeting there to sew book satchels for prospective students. On March 1, 1867, she brought in teacher Miss Claribel Gerrish from New Hampshire to assist in school. Amy now had someone to talk to, walk with and share the teaching.

To make it clear that Bradley and company were unwelcome, the Wilmington Dispatch ran a front-page article:

“Equally obnoxious and pernicious is to have Yankee teachers in our midst, forming the minds and shaking the instincts of our youth – alienating them, in fact, from the principles of their fathers and sowing the seeds of their pernicious doctrine upon the un-furrowed soil. The South has heretofore been free from the puritanical schisms and isms New England, and we regret to see the any indication of the establishment here of a foothold by their societies professing the doctrines of Free Love-ism, Communism, Universalism, Unitarianism and all the multiplicity of evil teachings that corrupt society and overthrow religion.”

Although Amy considered herself a woman of the world, she was probably too naïve to realize why her school merited such an attack. Her background as an active member of the Unitarian-Universalist establishment probably made it impossible for her to understand how a religion so well-accepted in Boston was such an anathema to Wilmington. The editorialist’s more accurate charge that she was teaching a doctrine offensive to her pupils’ forefathers did have merit, for Amy never missed an opportunity to promote her political philosophy.”

(Headstrong: The Biography of Amy Morris Bradley. DC Cashman, Broadfoot Publishing, 1990, pp. 159-176).

Doubtful Elections

“All American presidential elections have been contested except for the first, in 1789, and the ninth, in 1820. In the ninth, President James Monroe ran for reelection and won 231 out of 235 electoral votes (with three abstentions and one dissenting vote for John Quincy Adams). That election is evidence of an organic national unity that is now as extinct as the western frontier.

America has also had at least two stolen presidential elections, as well as one that was almost stolen in 1800, and one in 1860 whose outcome was rejected by half the country, leading to a four-year civil war and a geopolitical division that persists to this day. That America “survived” this civil war depends on the meaning of the verb and ignores the obvious implication that what happened once can happen again.

One of the stolen elections happened in 1960, when tow Democrat political machines, one in Texas and the other in Illinois, manufactured enough votes to decide a close election in favor of John F. Kennedy. The closeness of the vote likely made it easier to steal – Kennedy won the popular vote by only 118,000 votes out of 68 million cast. The shift of two States in the Electoral College would have elected Nixon.

The other definitely stolen election, in 1876, is worth examining in detail . . . and about what a party in power will do to stay in power – especially when it is convinced that it deserves to do so. This time it was the Republicans who stole it. After suffering a severe defeat in congressional elections two years before, a Grant administration wracked by scandals and the country still reeling from the financial panic of 1873, the Republicans entered 1876 with a weak hand.

Yet the Republicans won the election with a bold plan to disenfranchise white voters in three Southern States still under military occupation 11 years after the war: Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina.

By midnight of election day, it appeared Democrat Samuel Tilden of New York had defeated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio.

Northern General Daniel Sickles arrived at Republican headquarters and hatched a plan. The defeated Republican governors were instructed to not concede the election; the New York Times was enlisted to promote a narrative of a contested election; and finally, a delegation of Republican leaders, lawyers and bags of Lincoln greenbacks headed for New Orleans, Columbia, Tallahassee and Baton Rouge, to oversee election audits.

Sickle’s strategy for challenging the legitimacy of the result was to have his bagmen allege that white Democrats intimidated freedmen to keep them from voting, which was grounds under reconstruction law for canceling an equal number of white votes.

The morning edition of the New York Times declared the new reality: “A Doubtful Election.” The second morning edition proclaimed not only Oregon but South Carolina and Louisiana for Hayes. As Republican leaders had worked out their plan to steal the 1876 election, they knew their party still controlled all the levers of power and the trappings of legitimacy necessary: the Supreme Court, the White House, the Senate, and most importantly, the State canvassing boards in the three Southern States.”

(“As American as a Stolen Election,” H.A. Scott Trask. Chronicles Magazine, August 2023, excerpts pp. 7-8)

As did George Washington before him, President Jefferson Davis in early 1865 agreed to the enlistment of 300,000 emancipated Africans into the army of the Confederate States. Recognizing that the Constitution he held office under limited federal authority and that he had no power regarding the institution, Davis correctly saw emancipation the purview of those who could – and did – free Africans for military service.

Britain, Slavery and Emancipation

“If the institution of African slavery gained first a foothold, then an entrenched position, the greed of the British crown was largely responsible. As early as 1726, the planters of Virginia became alarmed at the growth of the Negro population and imposed a tax on slave importations. Britain’s Royal African Company interfered and had the law repealed. South Carolina restricted slave imports in 1760 only to be rebuked by London. In 1712 the Pennsylvania legislature moved to curb the increase in Africans, but the law was annulled by the Crown.

Briain’s Queen Anne, who personally held a quarter of the stock of the Royal African Company, the chartered organization which monopolized the slave trade, ordered it to provide New York and New Jersey with Africans and directed the governors of these colonies to give it full support.

Thomas Jefferson charged the British crown with forcing African slavery on the colonies; James Madison asserted that England had checkmated every attempt by Virginia “to put a stop to this infernal traffic”; Bancroft taxed Britain with “steadily rejecting every colonial restriction on the slave trade and instructing the governors, on pain of removal, not to give even a temporary assent to such laws.” In the words of the rabidly anti-Southern historian and politician, Henry Wilson: “British avarice planted slavery in America; British legislation sanctioned and maintained it; British statesmen sustained and guarded it.”

Virginian George Washington, at first opposed permitting Africans, whether slave or free, to serve in the American armed forces. Later, expediency and Alexander Hamilton’s powers of persuasion made him change his mind.”

(The Negro in American Civilization. Nathaniel Weyl. Public Affairs Press, 1960; pp. 25-26)

American colonist protestations against British government importation of unwanted peoples went unheeded until the American Revolution brought an end to it and forced England to turn to Australia as a substitute destination for undesirables.

America the Dumping Ground

“Why then will Americans purchase Slaves? Because Slaves may be as long a Man pleases or has Occasion for their Labour; while hired Men are continually leaving their Masters (often in the midst of his Business) and setting up for themselves.” – Benjamin Franklin

At the time of the Revolution, about half the white population of the Colonies consisted of indentured laborers and their descendants. Some were orphans, debtors, paupers and mental defectives. Others had committed petty crimes. Still others were whores. Children were stolen and spirited off to be sold under indenture.

The Irish in particular were victimized. Oliver Cromwell believed that they were admirably suited for slavery and saw to it that the survivors of Drogheda massacre met their fate in Bermuda. His agents scoured Ireland for children to be sold to planters in the Americas. Between 1717 and 1775, 50,000 English felons were transported to mainland North America.

For the most part, the indentured workers settled in the South where the demand for unskilled labor was greatest. American writers and politicians protested against the use of the Colonies as a dumping ground for the unwanted, the impoverished and, in some cases, the vicious and mentally inferior. Benjamin Franklin compared British emigration policy with sending American rattlesnakes to England to teach them manners.

The importation of Negro slaves became quantitatively significant by the end of the 17^th century. At the eve of the Revolution the black population of Georgia equaled or exceeded the white in Georgia, the Carolinas, Virginia and Maryland. Delaware and Pennsylvania were one-fifth Negro; New York one-sixth or so.

Like some of their Northern counterparts, Federalists in the South openly opposed institution and in 1789 an anti-slavery society was founded in Maryland. Further south, in North Carolina, Hugh Williamson worked against any extension of slave power. Opposition both the African slave trade and to the slave-based plantation economy was grounded partly on moral considerations and partly on the belief that the African was a savage who could not and should not be assimilated into American society. When American rationalists in the late 18^th century spoke about the unalienable rights of man, it was tacitly understood that the African was not included.”

(The Negro in American Civilization. Nathaniel Weyl. Public Affairs Press, 1960; pp. 23-24)