Circa1865

In the immediate postwar the North’s Radical Republicans consolidated their victory over both the Constitution and the South and set their eyes on victory in the 1868 presidential election. They saw their path as disenfranchising those in the South who fought for independence, and giving the vote to the former slave. Some 500,000 of the latter voted for Republican U.S. Grant in 1868, which provided the thin 300,000 vote margin of victory over New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour.

The Negro Must Be Enfranchised

“Many Northerners were perfectly frank about the matter. The Negro must be enfranchised, they said, to counteract Southern white votes which would most certainly be given to Democrat party candidates. If this were not done, wrote a friend of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, it would produce evils “fearful to contemplate’ – ‘a great reduction of the Tariff doing away with its protective features [for Northern industry] – perhaps Free Trade to culminate with Repudiation, – for neither Southerners nor Northern Democrats have any bonds or many Greenbacks.”

The abolitionist-founded Nation opposed “the speedy re-admission of the Southern States” because of the effect it would have on government securities, and the New York Tribune was equally uncertain that “the cotton-planters,” educated by Calhoun “to the policy of keeping the Yankees from manufacturing,” would “vote solid to destroy the wealth-producing industry of the Loyal States.”

No wonder Governor Horatio Seymour of New York insisted that the radical talk of making the South over into the likeness of New England simply meant an acceptance of its “ideas of business, industry, money-making, spindles and looms.”

(The Price of Union, Avery Craven. The Pursuit of Southern History, George Brown Tindall, ed., LSU Press, pg. 272)

Admirably Suited for Slavery

“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, mental defectives. Others had committed petty crimes and many women 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 the Drogheda massacre met that 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 plantation labor was greatest.

American writers and politicians protested against the use of the colonies as dumping grounds for the unwanted, the impoverished and in some cases, the vicious and mentally inferior. These protests went unheeded, and deportation continued until the American Revolution stopped it, forcing England to turn to Australia as a substitute destination.

If the institution of Negro slavery in America first gained a foothold, then an entrenched position, the greed of the British crown was largely responsible. As early as 1726, Virginia planters became alarmed at the growth of the Negro population and imposed a tax on slave imports. Britain’s Royal African Company, chartered by the Crown to monopolize the slave trade, 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 Negroes, but the law was annulled by the British Crown. Britain’s Queen Anne personally held a quarter of Royal African Company stock, ordered it to provide New York and New Jersey with Negroes and asked the Royal governors to provide full support.

Thomas Jefferson charged the British with forcing Negro slavery upon the colonies; James Madison asserted that England had checkmated every attempt by Virginia “to put a stop to this infernal traffic.”

In the words of the rabidly anti-Southern historian and politician, Henry Wilson: “British avarice planted African slavery in America; British legislation sanctioned and maintained it; British statesmen sustained it and guarded it.”

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

Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois urged the maintenance of peace as a motive for evacuating forts in Southern States which had withdrawn ratification of the US Constitution, and in doing so was no doubt aware of the full force of his words. He knew that their continued occupation was virtually a declaration of war.

“We Are for Peace”

“On March 15, 1861, Stephen Douglas of Illinois offered a resolution recommending the withdrawal of the US garrisons within the limits of States which had withdrawn from the United States, except Key West and the Dry Tortugas. In support of this resolution, he said:

‘We certainly cannot justify the holding of forts there, much less the recapturing of those already taken, unless we intend to reduce those States themselves into subjection. I take it for granted, no man may deny the proposition, that whoever permanently holds Charleston and South Carolina is entitled to the possession of Fort Sumter.

It is true that Forts Taylor and Jefferson, at Key West and Tortugas, are so situated as to be essentially national, and therefore important to us without reference to our relations with the seceded States. Not so with Moultrie, Johnson, Castle Pinckney and Sumter, in Charleston Harbor; not so with Pulaski, on the Savannah River; not so with Morgan and other forts in Alabama; not so with those other forts that were intended to guard the entrance of a particular harbor for local defense.

We cannot deny that there is a Southern Confederacy, de facto, in existence, with its capital at Montgomery. We may regret it. I regret it most profoundly; but I cannot deny the truth of the fact, painful and mortifying as it is . . . I proclaim boldly the policy of those with whom I act. We are for peace.’”

(Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jefferson Davis, Vol I. DaCapo Press, 1990, (original 1889), pp. 242-243)

The State of Virginia held one-third of the entire slave population of the Union within her borders in 1787, brought by British crown and New England traders – and despite her protests to cease importation. Georgia originally banned slaves under James Oglethorpe but British avarice eventually overcame his vision of a free colony.

An Infernal Traffic Originating in Avarice

“The supreme opportunity for suppressing the importation of slaves and thus hastening the day of emancipation came with the adoption of the Federal Constitution. [With] every increase in the number of slaves [imported] the difficulties and dangers of emancipation were multiplied. The hope of emancipation rested in stopping their further importation and dispersing throughout the land those who had already found a home in our midst.

To put an end to “this pernicious traffic” was therefore the supreme duty of the hour, but despite Virginia’s protests and appeals the foreign slave trade was legalized by the Federal Constitution for an additional period of twenty years.

The nation knew not the day of its visitation – with blinded eye and reckless hand it sowed the dragon’s teeth from which have sprung the conditions and problems which even to-day tax the thought and conscience of the American people.

The action of the [constitutional] convention is declared by Mr. Fiske, to have been “a bargain between New England and the far South.”

“New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut,” he adds, “consented to the prolonging of the foreign slave trade for twenty years, or until 1808; and in return South Carolina and Georgia consented to the clause empowering Congress to pass Navigation Acts and otherwise regulate commerce by a simple majority of votes.”

Continuing, Mr. Fiske says, “This compromise was carried against the sturdy opposition o Virginia.” George Mason spoke the sentiments of the Mother-Commonwealth when in a speech against this provision of the constitution, which reads like prophecy and judgment, he said:

“This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British merchants. The British Government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns, not the importing States alone, but the whole Union . . . Maryland and Virginia, he said, had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be in vain if South Carolina and Georgia were at liberty to import.

The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands; and will fill that country with slaves if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia.

Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of cause and events, Providence punishes National sins by National calamities.

He lamented that some of our Eastern [New England] brethren had, from a lust of gain, embarked in this nefarious traffic.”

“But these prophetic words of George Mason,” adds Mr. Fiske, “were powerless against the combination of New England and the far South. Governor Randolph and Mr. Madison earnestly supported their colleague . . . and the latter asserting: “Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the American character than to say nothing about it in the constitution.

Thus it was by the votes of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, and against the votes of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia, that the slave trade was legalized by the National Government for the period from 1787 to 1808.”

(Virginia’s Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession, Beverly B. Mumford, L.H. Jenkins, 1909, pp. 29-31)

Well before the Dred Scott case of 1857 was the question brought before Connecticut Judge David Daggett, chief justice of the court of errors, in October 1833 raising the validity of a State law which “forbid any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruction of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State.” The law was in place as the State’s colored schools tended to “greatly increase the colored population of the State and thereby to the injury of the people.” The defendant, a free Negro, insisted that the law was unconstitutional as it was in violation of the United States Constitution regarding the equal rights of citizens of all States.”

Regarding “citizens,” only the 1789 Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2 states: “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.”  The Dred Scott case of 1857 rested upon this, and the question before the Court was simply whether Scott was a citizen of a State, as argued below.

To underscore the validity of the Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2, the victorious Republican party was forced to follow the amendment route as it sought manipulation of the South’s black vote.

From Connecticut to Dred Scott

“Are slaves citizens? At the adoption of the Constitution of the United States [in 1789], every State was a slave State . . . We all know that slavery is recognized in that Constitution; it is the duty of this court to take that Constitution as it is, for we have sworn to support it . . . Then slaves were not considered citizens by the framers of the Constitution.

“Are free blacks citizens? . . . to my mind it would be a perversion of terms, and the well-known rules of construction, to say that slaves, free blacks or Indians were citizens, within the meaning of that term as used in the Constitution. God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound, by my duty, to say that they are not citizens.”

In the case of Hobbs vs Fogg the State of Pennsylvania furnished another strong precedent for the decision of the [Dred] Scott case. At the election of 1835 a negro offered to vote. Solely on account of his color, the judges of election refused the privilege. The Negro insisted that “as a freeman and citizen of the State” the provisions contained in the State constitution and laws entitled him to the right of suffrage. The judges justified themselves on the ground “that a free Negro or mulatto is not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution and law of the United States, and of the State of Pennsylvania, and, therefore, is not entitled to the right of suffrage . . .” The chief justice delivered the opinion, to which there was unanimous assent [to declare] “that no colored race was party to our social compact. Our ancestors settled the province as a community of white men; that the blacks were introduced into it as a race of slaves; whence an unconquerable prejudice of caste, which has come down to our day . . .” This is followed by “Yet it is proper to say that [Article 2, section 4] of the Federal Constitution, presents an obstacle to the political freedom of the Negro, which seems to be insuperable.”

Now then, in addition to the presumption that [those] of pure African blood whose ancestors had been American slaves, was presumed to have been born and to have continued a slave, these laws show that all the States had given to the Federal Constitution, from the days of its ratification down to the Dred Scott decision, a practical interpretation agreeing unanimously that a Negro, though free and a native of a State, was not a person as the word ‘citizen’ defines as that word was used by the framers of the Constitution.”

(The Legal and Historical Status of the Dred Scott Decision. Elbert William R. Ewing. Cobden Publishing Company, 1909, pp. 67-69)

Correcting the Record

“The Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion prints the following letter:

Beauvoir, Mississippi

June 20, 1885

Dear Sir, – Among the less-informed persons at the North there exists an opinion that the negro slave at the South was a mere chattel, having neither rights nor immunities protected by law or public opinion. Southern men knew such was not the case, and others desiring to know could readily learn the fact.

On that error the lauded story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was founded, but it is strange that a utilitarian and shrewd people did not ask why a slave, especially valuable, was the object of privation and abuse? Had it been a horse they would have been better able to judge and would most probably have rejected the story for its improbability. Many attempts have been made to evade and misrepresent the exhaustive opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the ‘Dred Scott’ case, but it remains unanswered.

From the statement in regard to Fort Sumter, a child might suppose that a foreign army had attacked the United States – [and] certainly could not learn that the State of South Carolina was merely seeking possession of a fort on her own soil and claiming that her grant of the site had become void.

The tyrant’s plea of necessity to excuse despotic usurpation is offered for the unconstitutional act of emancipation, and the poor resort to prejudice is invoked in the use of the epithet ’rebellion,’ a word inapplicable to the States generally, and most especially so to the sovereign members of a voluntary union. But alas for their former ancient prestige, the States have even lost the plural reference they had in the Constitution . . . such language would be appropriate to an imperial government, which in absorbing territories required the subject inhabitants to swear allegiance to it.”

(Letter from President Davis on States’ Rights. Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. XIV, January – December 1886, Rev. J. William Jones, D.D., pp. 408-409)

Early Spencer carbine-investor, Maine congressman (later Senator) James G. Blaine was an avid Lincoln supporter and determined to find more advanced weaponry with which to subdue the South’s drive for political independence. The incessant drive for more destructive death machines did much to develop the North’s burgeoning arms industry.

Postwar, Blaine was implicated in the Credit Mobilier scandal during the Grant administration, whereby railroad companies bribed federal officials to turn a blind eye to fraudulent contracts which overcharged the federal government by millions of dollars.

To More Effectively Kill Americans

“Christopher M. Spencer, inventor of the Spencer Carbine, after much difficulty in getting his product before [Northern] officials, finally got a hearing from Lincoln himself. An amusing incident occurred typical of both arms merchant and the famous rail-splitter. Spencer set up a shingle against a tree, fired a few shots at it, then handed the gun to the President who took aim and got results less satisfactory than did the inventor. Lincoln handed the gun back to the inventor with the remark: “When I was your age I could do better.”

But Spencer had won the President, and he left with an order for all the guns he could furnish.

Spencer at once proceeded to organize a company of which James G. Blaine was a stockholder, who was a then-congressman from Maine, later a Senator from the same State, Secretary of State in two cabinets, and 1880 presidential candidate of his party.

As stockholder in the Spencer Arms Company, he was apparently not very comfortable, since he inscribed on the letters which he wrote to the company secretary a note reading: “Burn these letters.” This little-known side of Blaine’s life harmonizes very well with his other shady dealings with western railroads and schemes, for which even his own partisans bitterly denounced him.”

(Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry. H.C. Englebrecht, F.C. Hanighen. Dodd, Meade & Company. 1934, pp. 67-68)

Since the early 1700s, New England merchants were engaged in the transatlantic slave trade which populated the American South with labor for the plantations. After Eli Whitney’s gin was invented in the 1790s, the owners of New England’s busy cotton textile looms ignored the moral and humane aspects of perpetuating slavery, being more concerned with profit and loss statements. Once war began in 1861, they focused on their government capturing Southern ports to reopen the supply of cotton.

Improved Arms for Gold

“September 6^th – We are not increasing our forces as rapidly as might be desired, for the want of arms. We had some 150,000 stand of arms, at the beginning of the war, taken from the arsenals; and the States owned probably 100,000 more. Half of these were flint-locks, which are being altered. None have been imported yet.

Occasionally a letter reaches the department from Nashville, offering improved arms at a high price, for gold. These are Yankees.

I am instructed by the Secretary to say they will be paid for in gold on delivery to an agent in Nashville. The number likely to be obtained in this manner, however, must be small; for the Yankee Government is exercising much vigilance.

Is this not a fair specimen of Yankee cupidity and character? The New England manufacturers are furnishing us, with whom they are at war, with arms to fight with, provided we pay them a higher price than is offered by their own Government! The philosophical conclusion is, that this war will end when it ceases to be a pecuniary speculation.”

(Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate Capital, Volume I. J.B. Jones. J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1866, pg. 78)

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

Gov. Orval Faubus’ Message to Arkansas:

“On Tuesday, September 24, 1957 . . . the cleverly conceived plans of the US Justice Department under Republican Herbert Brownell, were placed in execution. One thousand two hundred troops of the 101^st Airborne Division were flown in from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to occupy Little Rock’s Central High School.

At the same time, the entire Arkansas National Guard and Air guard were federalized and are now a part of the US Army and Air Force. We are now an occupied territory.

Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in the unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls – in the backs of students – and in the bloody face of a railroad worker, who was bayoneted and then felled by the butt of a rifle in the hands of a sergeant of the 101^st Airborne Division. This man, on private property, as a guest in a home two blocks from the school, has been hospitalized. Others have suffered bayonet wounds from the hands of the US Army soldiers. Your New York newspapers also show the scenes.

Up until the time the injunction was issued against me by the imported federal judge, the peace had been kept in Little Rock by as few as 30 National Guardsmen. Not a blow was struck, no injury inflicted on any person, and no property damage sustained. I wish to point out that no violence broke out in the city until after the injunction was issued by the imported federal judge, and the National Guardsmen were withdrawn. And I might add here, all we have ever asked for is a little time, patience and understanding, as so often expressed by President Eisenhower himself, in solving this problem.

In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish – what is happening in America? Is every right in the United States Constitution now lost? Does the will of the people, that basic precept of our republic, no longer matter? Must the will of the majority now yield, under federal force, to the will of the minority, regardless of the consequences?

If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative . . . we no longer have a union of States under a republican form of government. If this be true, then the States are mere subdivisions of an all-powerful federal government, these subdivisions being nothing more than districts for the operation of federal agents and federal military forces – forces which operate without any regard for the rights of a sovereign State or its elected officials, and without due regard for personal and property rights.

The imported federal comes from a State a thousand miles away with no understanding whatsoever of the difficulties of our problems in the field of race relations.”

(Another Tragic Era: Gov. Faubus Gives His Side of the Arkansas Story. US News & World Report, October 4, 1957, pp. 66-67)

Late-war and early postwar Northern propaganda attributed the basest motives to the American Confederacy as the Republican Radicals prepared their punishments for the defeated. They asserted that “it was not merely the Southern people . . . they were abetted by their government . . . a congressional investigation reported that “there was a fixed determination on the part of the rebels to kill the Union soldiers who fell into their hands.” The US Sanitary Commission declared that “the conclusion is unavoidable . . . that these privations and sufferings [in prison camps] have been designedly inflicted by the military and other authorities of the rebel government.” Both reports were publicized by the North’s infamous “Loyal League.

Shaping the Demand for Revenge

“Northern opinion was thus rigidly shaped in the belief that “tens of thousands of national soldiers . . . were deliberately shot to death, as at Fort Pillow, of frozen to death at Belle Island, or starved to death at Andersonville, or sickened to death by swamp malaria, as in South Carolina.” Horror passed into fury and fury into a demand for revenge.

The New York Times insisted that “every rebel official who had been concerned, directly or indirectly, in the torturing and murdering of our prisoners” should be excluded from the terms of presidential pardon. Secretary of War Stanton ordered officers of armies advancing into the South to arrest the “inhuman monsters” most prominent in management of prisons. The archfiend of iniquity, for so the North considered him, Major Henry Wirz, was hanged as a murderer.

It was not until 1876 that the publication of R. R. Stevenson’s “The Southern Side, or Andersonville Prison” and J.W. Jone’s “The Confederate View of the Treatment of Prisoners” gave to such unbiased minds as might wish to know an adequate exposition of the Southern side. It was not difficult to find, however, material in these years that indicates the South received the Northern charge with sullen hatred. Typical is an article contributed to the Southern Review of January 1867:

“The impartial times to come will hardly understand how a nation, which not only permitted but encouraged its government to declare medicines and surgical instruments contraband of war, and to destroy by fire and sword the habitations and food of non-combatants, as well as the fruits of the earth and the implements of tillage, should afterwards have clamored for the blood of captive enemies, because they did not feed their prisoners out of their own starvation and heal them in their hospitals [devoid of medicines].

[When the facts of the deliberate and inexorable non-exchange of prisoners and refusal of food and medicines for Andersonville prisoners is realized], men will wonder how it was that a people, passing for civilized and Christian, should have consigned a Jefferson Davis to a cell, while they tolerated Edwin M. Stanton as a cabinet minister.”

So, the endless argument continued. The wounds remained unhealed festering their poison in unforgiveness. While Northerners blamed the evil genius of slavery for the war, Southerners pointed the finger of responsibility to “those men who preached the irrepressible conflict to the Northern people” and “helped to bring on that unlawful and unholy invasion of the South.”

(The Road to Reunion, Paul H. Buck. Little, Brown and Company, 1937, pp. 46-48)