Circa1865

Always fearful of slave revolts as the black population steadily grew, and shaken by reality in the Nat Turner massacre of women and children, Southerners logically erected anti-emancipation laws to control slave populations. The constant agitation of slave revolt by Northern abolitionist fanatics, culminating in John Brown’s 1859 crime in Virginia, was an effective means to end even voluntary emancipation in the South. Peaceful emancipation initiatives from the North would have had a better effect and avoided war.

Bernhard THuersam, www.circa1865.org

Emancipation Sentiment in 1845 South Carolina

“In 1840 there came up to the Court of Appeals the noted Carmille case. A slaveowner, Carmille, had died leaving a will which with reference to his slaves provided that they should be set free if possible . . . or conveyed in trust to certain trustees who would allow them to hire their time, paying only a nominal sum to the trustees.

This was unquestionably in conflict with the policy of the [South Carolina] statutes on the subject of emancipation. [A] court held that the will of the testator was not contrary to the principles of the act of 1820 and was not in violation of the State’s policy toward the Negro, and that the will ought to be carried out.

The decision . . . aroused the sentiment of the legislature and caused the passage of the sweeping act of 1841. The act of 1841 was intended apparently to close every avenue of approach to emancipation. These laws are always of course to be taken as a final indication of public sentiment. There was evidently a large class of persons who honestly desired to see a less severe policy pursued. Their views cannot be better expressed than in the clear and rugged style of Justice O’Neall. In 1845 he said:

“I think its policy [i.e., of the legislature against emancipation] so questionable that it ought to be repealed. A law, evaded as it is, and against which public sentiment, within and without the State, is so much arrayed, ought not to stand. It is better by far, that a wise and prudent system of emancipation, like that of 1800, should exist, rather than that unlicensed emancipation according to private arrangement should take place.

What is there in the policy of South Carolina to forbid emancipation by an owner, of a faithful, honest, good slave? Have we anything to fear from such a liberal and humane course?

Until fanaticism and folly drove us from that position of the law our State had uniformly favored emancipation by owners, of their slave property, with such limitations and guards as rendered the free Negro not a dangerous, but a useful member of the community, however humble he may be. It is time we should return to it and say to all at home and abroad, we have nothing to fear from occasional emancipation.”

(Control of Slaves in South Carolina, H.M. Henry, PhD Dissertation Vanderbilt University, 1914, pp. 173-174)

Today’s progressive religion of empathy with oppressed peoples worldwide emulates that of the antebellum abolitionist, who expressed deep concern with people he had never met, could not understand, and whose world was alien to him. To salve their own guilt and difficult grasp of reality, the abolitionist fomented a bloody conflict which unleashed forces no one could control, and an oppressive result we live with today.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Emancipation Regardless of Consequences

“Most Northerners before the Civil War, and indeed many slaveholders, were “against” slavery.” The abolitionists recognized also that they must continually reinforce their own commitment to their cause. The frequent meetings and intra-group journals of any movement for change serve an indispensable function even when they repeatedly pass the same resolutions and proclaim familiar truths to the already committed.

The twin tasks of refreshing the commitment of abolitionists and of converting outsiders’ passive disapproval of slavery into active opposition differed only in emphasis, especially after the movement had grown from a handful of pioneers into a network of societies with thousands of members.

In propaganda aimed at both groups, the abolitionists relied heavily on the same arguments: among others, that slavery denied the humanity of the Negro and prevented the slave from having normal family relations and religious life, that the North shared the slaveowners’ guilt, that absolute power of one individual over another encourages atrocities, that slavery was responsible for the degraded condition of Northern free Negroes . . . ”

[William Lloyd Garrison] deliberately [pictured] himself in the place of the oppressed. On the first anniversary of his marriage, he wrote to his brother-in-law describing his happiness and extolling the institution of marriage; and he added, how horrible it would be if he and Helen were slaves and were separated by sale. All the more reason, then, to rededicate his life to the abolition of slavery.

This theme, which for convenience will be referred to as “empathy,” appears repeatedly in abolitionists’ private discourse and public propaganda, in exhortations among themselves to increase their zeal and in efforts to induce complacent whites to imagine themselves in the place of the slaves.

But the abolitionist movement comprised mainly white men and women, most of whom had never been in the South. The empathy theme can thus be seen, perhaps, as a substitute for direct involvement in the suffering that movement was dedicated to end. It appeared in other forms as well. When Abby Kelley Foster was asked how she could leave her baby with others, to travel the abolitionist lecture circuit, she replied, “For the sake of the mothers who are robbed of all their children.” Beriah Green . . . [said]: You can act as if you felt that you were bound with those who are in bonds, as if their cause was all your own . . .”

Abolitionist propaganda reiterated that Northern whites were in fact indirectly “bound with” the slaves. Paradoxically, the North was not only an accessory to the enslavement of the Negroes; it was at the same time a secondary victim of the slaveowners. With their strong religious motive for proclaiming the duty of emancipation regardless of the consequences, the abolitionists could not in good conscious appeal to the North solely or chiefly on the basis of interest.

The empathy theme enabled them in a remarkable way to combine interest with principle, for if a Northern white could be made to feel bound with the slave he would fight the slave power to defend himself, as Beriah Green suggested, as well as to exculpate himself. To free the slave would be to free himself of both guilt and bondage; the two motives would become one.”

(Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, Aileen S. Kraditor, Pantheon Books, 1967, pp. 235-238)

“Delta Is Ready When You Are”

“When the 1992 presidential primaries moved South, the media was full of references to “the Bubba vote.” Yet, when the primaries were in the East, nobody referred to the “Loud-talking Yankee vote.” When they went to the Midwest, there was no mention of “the Frozen Fools vote.” When it was time for the California primary, there was nothing said about “the Nut and Fruit vote.”  Just the South. And I’m always a “Southern columnist,” or “Southern humorist,” or “that redneck from Atlanta.”

Ever hear of Mike Royko being referred to as a “mid-western columnist”? Or Dave Barry, of The Miami Herald, a “Cuban columnist”?

If you’re Southern, it’s always going to be mentioned. “Why don’t you people forget the Civil War?” I’ve heard so often from Northerners. Well, why don’t y’all leave us the hell alone and stop thinking of the South as an odd appendage? How about stopping with the stereotyping already? The “Bubba vote,” indeed.

I had a man write me a letter years ago . . . He had been called “Bubba” by family and friends for thirty-five years. He came from a small Georgia town and had gone to work with a large national firm in Atlanta. His boss . . . had been transplanted from New York [and said he] could no longer use the name “Bubba.’ “He said it sounded too “Southern and ignorant.”

[I] was incensed that the son of a bitch from New York City would say he was “too Southern and ignorant.” What if the man had been named “Booker T.”? would that have been too “black and ignorant”? What if he had been named “Dances with Fat girls”? “Too Indian and insensitive to persons of size?”

So I told the Bubba who wrote the letter to tell the jerk who wanted him to drop his name to kiss his ass and see if he could find a job with a firm that wasn’t being run by a lot of Yankees who looked down on Southerners and had their heads in their asses (cranial rectitus).

Another wrote, “I was transferred to Atlanta from New York six years ago. Every time I return to Atlanta on an airplane, I expect the stewardesses to say, “Welcome to Atlanta. Set your watch back two decades.” A woman wrote, “You Bubbas are all alike. All you can think about is football, beer swilling, and hillbilly music.”

My response to the first writer was, “Oh yeah? Every time I fly into New York, I expect the stewardess to say, “Welcome to New York. Get off the plane at your own risk.” To the other, I responded, “Read this: Delta is ready when you are.”

“Too Southern and ignorant . . .“ It makes my blood boil.”

(I Havent Understood Anything Since 1962, And Other Nekkid Truths, Lewis Grizzard, Villard Books, 1992, pp. 146-147)

Confronted with a Democratic party platform nearly identical to theirs, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in early 1944 formally dissolved as a political party and perennial CPUSA presidential candidate Earl Browder announced his support of President Roosevelt for a fourth term. Browder’s vice-presidential running mate in 1936 and 1940 was James W. Ford, the first black man on a presidential ticket.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

American Democrats and the CPUSA Platform

“[The] historic Democratic party is no more, that it has been transformed into a labor party so completely that there is nothing left of it but the name. The process by which [the] transformation . . . was brought about had its beginnings during the period of “crisis government” established by Franklin D. Roosevelt and his “brain trust” in 1933. Measures having far-reaching application and effect were drafted by the President’s “advisors” and were jammed through Congress, frequently without most of the members having an opportunity to read them.

Mr. Roosevelt had been elected in 1932 by an electoral majority of eight to one . . . In such circumstances, Congress practically abdicated. It became literally a “rubber stamp” Congress. And Republican Senators and Representatives, with the majority of their constituents supporting President Roosevelt, were careful not to show too much opposition to measures which he favored. That’s why is was so easy to junk the Democratic platform of 1932 and to enact so many measures that violated the most fundamental principles of the historic Democratic party without protest from Southern Democrats, and even with their support.

One sequence [of the transformation] began during the period from 1935 to 1937, or at the very height of what Eugene Lyons has called “The Red Decade,” when it was fashionable in certain circles in New York, Los Angeles and Washington to glorify all things Russian and to affect a “revolutionary” attitude toward all existing institutions in the United States. It was a time when literally dozens of organizations with high-sounding names were set up in this country by the Communists to attract innocent “fellow travelers” and when The Daily Worker undertook to popularize the slogan “Communism is the Americanism of the Twentieth Century.”

In February, 1935, Joseph Stalin announced that the Russian Constitution would be democratized; in June, 1936, the first draft of the new Soviet Constitution was completed and published, [and adopted December 5, 1936]. It was promptly translated into English and by February, 1937, copies of it in the form of a five-cent pamphlet were available throughout this country. It immediately became the leading topic of discussion among the so-called “liberals” in the United States.

[The] Soviet Bill of Rights . . . guarantees every citizen a job . . . the right to material security in old age and also in case of illness and loss of capacity to toil . . . [and] “The equal rights of citizens of the USSR, independent of their nationality and race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural and public-political life is unalterable law. Any direct or indirect limitation of rights, or conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect preferences of citizens dependent on their racial and national membership, as well as all preaching of national exclusiveness, or hate and contempt, is punishable by law.”

[In late January, 1944] President Roosevelt revealed that the [New Deal] was being replaced by a streamlined post-war program. Here is what President Roosevelt said:

“As our nation had grown in size and stature, however – as our industrial economy expanded – [our previous life and liberty] political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident.

We have accepted, so to speak, a second bill of rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all – regardless of station, race or creed. Among these are: The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or mines of the nation; The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; The right of every business man, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad; The right of every family to a decent home; The right of adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health; The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; The right to a good education.”

The striking resemblance which this whole passage bears to the . . . Soviet Bill of Rights need not be dwelt upon.

In his message to Congress on September 6, 1945, President Truman said: “The objectives for our domestic economy which we seek in long-range plans were summarized by the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt over a year and a half ago in the form of an Economic Bill of rights. Let us make the attainment of those rights the essence of post-war American economic life.”

Notably, he issued a “salute to labor” on Labor Day, 1946, and more recently on June 28, 1947 . . . he discussed the subject in an address to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People at Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In his “salute to labor,” President Truman said:

“Labor, perhaps more than any other group, has consistently supported [FDR’s] “Economic Bill of Rights.” We must now move forward to full achievement of these objectives: useful and remunerative jobs for all; income high enough to provide adequate food, clothing and recreation; freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopoly; adequate health protection; more effective social security measures, and educational opportunities for all.”

In his more recent address to the [NAACP], by coupling these “economic” rights with other civil rights, he stated clearly . . . that it is the responsibility of the federal government to guarantee and to enforce these new rights. “The extension of civil rights today means not protection of the people AGAINST the government, but protection of the people BY the government.”

(The South’s Political Plight, Peter Molyneaux, Calhoun Clubs of the South, Inc., 1948, pp. 56-57, 67-70, 75-77, 81-84,)

With his war bankrupting the national treasury and consuming available gold reserves, Lincoln’s solution was to create a national banking system controlled from Washington, claiming military necessity as the reason for printing paper currency of questionable value and legality. Radical Ohio Senator John Sherman knew national banking “would centralize power in Washington” and he urged congressional colleagues to “nationalize as much as possible,” even the currency, so as to “make men love their country before their States.” All private interests, all local interests, all banking interests, the interests of individuals, everything, should be subordinate now to the interest of the Government.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Revolutionary War Financing Precedes the Federal Reserve

“At the time of the Civil War the [United States did not have a nationalized] system of banking and banknote currency, and one of the important matters of [Northern] war finance was the creation of such a system.

“[Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase] . . . in his report of December, 1862 . . . outlined his plan for national banks and national bank currency. What Chase proposed was a system of national banking associations under Federal supervision, which would issue bank notes based upon United States bonds and guaranteed by the Federal government.

It became law on February 25, 1863; but this law had certain defects, so that Congress faced the whole problem afresh and reframed the statute. It is therefore to the law of June 3, 1864, that one must turn for the legislative basis of the national banking system as it emerged from the Civil War. Other provisions of the act were concerned with the maintenance of a required reserve against both banknotes and deposits; the depositing of such reserve in “reserve cities” (which permitted the concentration of bankers’ funds in New York City); . . . and the use of banks as depositaries and financial agents for the government.

As a method of stimulating, or rather forcing, the sale of United States bonds, the national bank act became an essential feature of Civil War finance. After the war (1866) a tax was placed on State banknotes in order to tax them out of existence, so that national banks possessed a monopoly of banknote currency.

To think of the national banking system as a purely fiscal measure innocent of politics and free from exploitation would indeed be a naïve assumption. Investigation shows that it soon “developed into something that was neither national nor a banking system.

Instead it was a loose organization of currency factories designed to . . . [serve] commercial communities and confined…almost entirely to the New England and Middle Atlantic States.” One of the chief injustices of the system as actually administered was the favoritism shown after the war to the eastern States which received the lion’s share of the $300,000,000 of banknote circulation assigned by law as the maximum for the whole country.

As explained by George LaVerne Anderson, each State in the New England and Middle Atlantic regions obtained an amount of banknotes in excess of its quota, while not a State in the South received an amount equal to its quota.

“Massachusetts (writes Anderson) received the circulation which would have been necessary to raise Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas to their legal quotas . . . The little State of Connecticut had more national bank circulation than Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky and Tennessee . . . Massachusetts had more than the rest of the Union exclusive of New England and Middle Atlantic States.

[An] interesting comparison [he continues] can be made between comparatively small New England towns and the Southern States. Thus Woonsocket, Rhode Island, had more national bank circulation than North and South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas; Waterville, Maine, had nearly as much as Alabama; New Haven, Connecticut, had more than any single Southern State.

If it be said in answer to these facts that distributing according to population is absurd . . . it should be kept in mind that not a single Southern State had obtained, by October 1869, its legal share of the $150,000,000 which was to have been apportioned according to existing banking capital, wealth and resources.”

With some modification [this] national banking system continued for half a century. Though it had some merit, it created an inelastic currency, tended toward the concentration of bank resources in New York, opened the way for serious abuse in the speculative exploitation of bank funds, and contributed to the sharp financial flurry of 1907. Proving inadequate as a nationwide control of currency and banking, it was tardily superseded by an improved plan in the federal reserve act of 1913.”

The Civil War and Reconstruction, J.G. Randall, D.C. Heath and Company, 1937, pp. 455-458)

Crucial to the success of Lincoln’s creation of fiat money and bond-sales was master publicist and financier Jay Cooke. The latter “subsidized editors and columnists of most of the important papers of the nation” whose journalists were still receiving bribes from him when he pushed for bond redemption in gold. At the end of the war, Cooke worked hard to convince the Northern populace that their onerous debt was justified and “His efforts were supplemented by the Loyal Publications League, which was resuscitated in 1868 in order “to spread throughout the country correct views upon the subject of taxation and currency.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Radical Ideology Printed on “Lincoln Green”

“The cruel quandary which the effort to rein in the lower classes created for radicalism became enmeshed in the debate over the greenback currency. Despite all its complexities, the currency question typified the fate of Radical doctrines, for here the Republican party repudiated its own radical handiwork.

Both the plan for a managed fiat currency and the rhetoric subsequently used in its defense were the offspring of the Radical wing of the Republican party. The legal tender bill was taken up by Congress at the end of 1861 because gold loans floated by the Treasury had exhausted the coin supply of the banks and forced them to suspend specie payments.

The Union was confronted by the prospect of runaway bank-note inflation and the sale of bonds below par value, either of which would have raised the cost of prosecuting the war toward a prohibitive level. At this juncture, Elbridge Spaulding, a Buffalo banker and Republican congressman, proposed a solution in defiance of the national traditions of States’ rights, hard money, and bank control of currency: that the federal government should issue its own interest-free notes receivable for all public dues and legal tender for all private transactions.

The value of these notes was to be stabilized by permitting their conversion into government bonds bearing 6 per cent interest, which were payable in five years and redeemable in twenty, commonly known as 5-20s’.

This majestically simple scheme met with furious opposition from the Democrats and many bankers. Pendleton, Vallandigham, Conkling and Justin Morill stood shoulder to shoulder against the bill; but its Radical supporters, led by Thaddeus Stevens, enlisted enough Conservative (and even banker) support for the scheme as a temporary war measure for it to pass the House 93 to 59. Senate opponents were strong enough to graft on an amendment providing for payment of interest on the 5-20 bonds in coin.

This action created the problem of how to raise the promised gold. [but compromise established a dual-currency system]: gold for the importer [tariffs] and bond-holder, greenbacks for everyday domestic purposes.

As the war continued and governmental needs for borrowed funds soared, both the currency supply and the debt structure grew ever more complex. By the war’s end the country was faced with rampant inflation, constant manipulation of gold prices by speculators, a morass of different bond issues, and four major forms of currency – greenbacks, specie, national bank notes, and State bank notes. The task of unraveling the mess fell on Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch . . . [and] with authority granted by Congress in March 1866, [he] initiated a steady withdrawal of greenbacks from circulation, and redemption of short-term notes.

[A] bill introduced by Robert Schenck to force a halt to the Treasury’s contraction policy enlisted the support not only of Stevens, Butler and Logan, but also Senator Sherman and Jay Cooke, and of numerous Democrats. The measure swept the House by a vote of 127 to 14, and in the Senate only four Conservative Republicans voted against it. The Conservative economic program had been thoroughly defeated.

Hard money advocates characterized their own position as scientifically sound and moral, and that of their [fiat money] foes as demagogic and dishonest. Speaking for Spaulding’s bill in 1862, Henry Wilson had described the debate as “a contest between brokers and jobbers, and moneychangers on the one side, and the people of the United States on the other.”

Not to be outdone, John Bingham charged the bill’s foes with misconstruing the Constitution for “the purpose of denationalizing the people . . . [and stripping] the power of the people over their monetary interests in this hour of national exigency.”

Here was the Radical ideology in its purest form, printed, as it were, on bills of “Lincoln green.” Understandably, Henry Carey attributed both the economic vigor and the patriotic spirit of the nation to protection and greenbacks . . . Thaddeus Stevens [had] judged the whole national banking system as a “mistake,” [and] declared: “Every dollar of paper [money] in circulation ought to be issued by the Government of the United States.” [Republican editor Benjamin Bannon of Pennsylvania] devised a scheme for the circulation of greenbacks as the exclusive currency of the nation, with national banks serving as distribution centers only.

From the tariff of 1846 until the Republican legislative triumphs of 1862, Bannan argued, nonproductive capital had ruled the land, and now it was again “striving to gain the ascendancy.”

(Beyond Equality, Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872, David Montgomery, University of Illinois Press, 1981, pp. 340-345)

The first disputed presidential election occurred in 1796 with John Adams elected only “by the whim of two Southern electors” — one from Virginia and one in North Carolina – and both voted for Jefferson as Vice President. This electoral result and victory for the monarchical Adams spurred Jefferson and Madison to formulate the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, whose spirit was that State governments were the foundation of the American political system, and their power unlimited except for strictly delegated and enumerated functions.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

The Old and New Republican Party

“The Democratic-Republican Party . . . was the political party whose theory was aimed at the increase of direct popular control over the Government, the widening of the right of suffrage, the limitation of the powers of the Federal Government, and the conservation of the powers reserved to the State governments by the Constitution. It is therefore a strict construction party and has always operated as a check upon the nationalization of the United States.

It at first (1792-3) took the name of the Republican party, which more properly belongs to its present possessors, and was generally known by that name until about 1828-30. Upon its absorption of the French or Democratic faction, in 1793-6, it took the official title of the Democratic-Republican party.

About 1828-30 its nationalizing portion having broken off and taken the name of “National Republican,” the particularist residue assumed the name of “Democrats,” which had been accepted since about 1810 as equivalent to “Republicans,” and by which the have since been known. Some little confusion therefore, has always been occasioned by the similarity in name between the strict construction Republican party of 1793 and the broad construction Republican party of 1856.

[During the formative period, 1789-93 period, the forces] which have always tended to the complete nationalization of the American Union were in operation at the adoption of the Constitution, [and their] influence was as yet by no means general. The mass of the people was thoroughly particularist, interested mainly in the fortunes of their State governments, and disposed to look at the new Federal Government as a creature of convenience only, to be accepted under protest until the exercise of its functions should prove burdensome or unpleasant.

The planters of the South, and particularly of Virginia, had generally supported the change in government [from the Articles of Confederation] and the early measures of the Federal party, induced partly by the influence of Madison and partly by the compromises by which the Constitution had been made acceptable to them.

When Hamilton, early in 1790, finally, and almost from sheer necessity, fell back upon commercial interest as the stock upon which to graft his nationalizing measures, he necessarily alienated the whole South, which was not only particularist but exclusively agricultural, except in a few isolated spots on the seaboard. The difference between the two sections was as yet only in degree, not in kind.

Both were mainly agricultural; both were particularist; neither possessed manufactures; but the South, which had far less banking and commerce than the North, and therefore in Jefferson’s words, “owed the debt while the North owned it,” first felt repulsion to the Hamiltonian policy.

The opposition to his plan for settling the public debt was mainly to its commercial aspect; the opposition to his project of a national bank in the following year was of a distinct party nature, and was based upon that strict construction of the Constitution which was always afterward to be the party’s established theory.

In 1791-2, therefore, we may consider the Anti-Federal party, which had so warmly opposed the adoption of the Constitution, as rehabilitated into a party, as yet without a name, which was to maintain the binding force of the exact and literal language of the Constitution, and to oppose any enlargement of the Federal Government’s powers by interpretation.

The first authoritative claim of the party name occurs in Jefferson’s letter of May 13, 1792, to Washington, in which he says:

“The Republican party, who wish to preserve the government in its present form, are fewer in number [than the monarchical Federalists]. They are fewer even when joined by the two, three or half-dozen Anti-Federalists, who, though they dare not avow it, are still opposed to any general government; but being less so to a republican to a monarchical one, they naturally join those whom they think pursuing the lesser evil.”

Before the close of the year 1792 we must regard the Republican party as fairly formed. Its general basis was a dislike to the control exercised by any government not directly affected by the vote of the citizen on whom the laws operated; a disposition to regard the Federal Government . . . as possibly a second avatar of royalty; and an opposition to the Federalist, or Hamiltonian, measures of a national bank, a national excise [tax], a protective tariff, a funding system for the debt, and to all measures in general tending to benefit the commercial or creditor classes.”

(American Political History, 1763-1876, Alexander Johnston, Volume I, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905, pp. 208-212)

H.L. Mencken famously held that it is hopeless to look for the real man in biographies as they tend toward distortion and sentimentalism. Regarding the authors he added: “Nearly all our professional historians are poor men holding college posts, and they are ten times more cruelly beset by the ruling politico-plutocratic-social oligarchy than ever the Prussian professors were by the Hohenzollerns. Let them diverge in the slightest form from what is the current official doctrine, and they are turned out of their chairs with a ceremony suitable for the expulsion of a drunken valet.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Lincoln and a Few Gourds of Corn Aboard

“Even Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book. The Nicolay-Hay work is quite impossible; it is not a biography, but simply a huge storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever can read it can also read the official Records of the Rebellion.

So far as I can make out, no genuinely scientific study of the man has ever been attempted. The amazing conflict of testimony about him remains a conflict; the most elemental facts are yet to be established; he grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year.

One would think that, by this time, the question of his religious views (to take one example) ought to be settled, but apparently it is not, for no longer than a year ago there came a reverend author, Dr. William E. Barton, with a whole volume on the subject, and I was as much in the dark after reading it as I had been before I opened it. All previous biographers, it appeared by this author’s evidence, had either dodged the problem or lied.

The official doctrine, in this as in other departments, is obviously quite as unsound. One hears in the Sunday-schools that Abe was an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of God in whispers . . . [and] that he was a shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue.

Imagine a man getting on in American politics, interesting and enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other politicians, elbowing his way through the primaries and conventions, by the magic of virtue!

Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing. I like to think of him as one who defeated such politicians as Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with their own weapons – deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pulling their noses, magnificently ham-stringing and hornswoggling them – in brief, as a politician of extraordinary talents, who loved the game for its own sake, and had the measure of the crowd.

His official portraits, both in prose and daguerreotype, show him wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged; one never sees him smiling. Nevertheless, one hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany [Hall] Nietzsche.

(Roosevelt: An Autopsy, Prejudices, A Selection, H.L. Mencken, Johns Hopkins Press, 1996, pp. 48-49)

Southern General Thomas C. Hindman was among many who believed that the Confederacy should enlist black troops, and this initiative led to the Confederate Congress approving the enlistment of 300,000 black men in March 1865. The resistance from President Jefferson Davis stemmed from his belief that the South needed the African for its agricultural production, and that they should not serve as cannon-fodder or replacements for white troops who would not fight – as in the North.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Emancipation in Return for Determined Bravery

“Any hope of Confederate success in the field, [Hindman] asserted, rested on the principles that “the entire white male population” be placed in military service for the duration of the war and that exemptions be limited to essential employees of the Confederate and State governments.

Faced with a struggle for life itself, the Confederacy could not afford to overlook a single resource. “The ghosts of legions of Southern heroes . . . [would] haunt our pillows” if the Confederacy did not employ its “ultimate strength.” To those who would argue that property rights in slaves must remain inviolate, he stated that . . . white men in the army were the property of God, themselves, and their families. Was property in slaves “any more sacred,” he rhetorically asked.

To those who would claim that blacks would not fight, he pointed out the similar remarks about Northerners had been proved false. Blacks, he contended, were courageous and endured “pain and hardship” as well as whites. If they were put “by the side of white Southern soldiers,” . . . and assured of “freedom for good conduct,” he was confident that they would “display a determined bravery” in fighting for the Confederacy and their homes. Although a slave owner himself . . . he now was ready to support emancipation for blacks who would agree to fight in the Confederate army.

The idea of arming and enlisting slaves did not originate with him. As early as 17 July 1861, William S. Turner, a prosperous farmer from Hindman’s hometown of Helena [Arkansas], had written Secretary of War L.P. Walker and enquired in “Negro regiments . . . could be “received” for Confederate service. According to Turner, at least one man near Helena was willing to provide his son as a captain and “arm 100 of his own” slaves.

{Friend and former law partner General Patrick Cleburne] . . . proposed guaranteeing “freedom within a reasonable time to every slave in the South” who “remain[ed] true to the Confederacy.” In addition, “a large reserve of the most courageous of our slaves” must be trained for military service. With freedom for themselves and their families, black men, he predicted, would fight valiantly for the South.

Great Britain would respond with moral “support and material aid,” while Northerners, stripped of their “most powerful and honestly entertained plank in their war platform,” would soon tire of the fight. The presentation generated instant controversy . . . [and at its close, Generals William J.] Hardee and [Joseph E.] Johnston seemed “favorably disposed” . . . [and] Hindman was convinced that blacks must be enrolled as soldiers, and he risked his career to advance the concept.

On 16 January, he wrote a personal letter to [President Jefferson] Davis discussing the issue and other matters relating to the state of affairs in the army. According to his calculations, if “Negroes were allowed as teamsters, cooks, hospital attendants, laborers, and for the pioneer companies of divisions and engineer companies of the army, it would swell our ranks, at once, [by] about 20,000 men.” Such a revitalization of the armies “ought to ring in the ears of [every] Congressman” like the oratory of Cato.”

(Lion of the South, General Thomas C. Hindman, Diane Neal and Thomas Kremm, Mercer University Press, 1993, pp. 184-190)

The Confederate government consistently maintained that the emancipation of African slaves was the province of the  individual  States, as it had no authority to do so delegated to it by the Constitution.  The Cofederate Constitution was identical to the United States Constitution on this question.  As the war ground on and the North used captured Africans as labor and troops, it was obvious that the Confederacy should muster black troops, if emancipated by their owners and they voluntarily enlisted. This was done in March, 1865.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Emancipation in Exchange for Recognition

“It has been said that the Confederate agents always found among all classes in England and France a fixed and unrelenting hostility to slavery, but that in England, except among a relatively small part of the population, this hostility had no bearing upon their sympathies, which were largely in favor of the South. In their [Yancey-Rost-Mann mission] note to Russell of August 14, 1861, while they assured the [British] Foreign Minister that the war was one of conquest on the part of the North rather than a war to free the slaves, the commissioners acknowledged “the anti-slavery sentiment so universally prevalent in England.”

The reply to this European criticism and hostility to slavery was finally embodied in a circular sent to all the agents, January 15, 1863, in which [Confederate Secretary of State Judah] Benjamin . . . [instructed them to answer that] this domestic institution was one which only the individual States could deal with. The Confederate government, wrote Benjamin, “unequivocally and absolutely denies its possession of any power whatever over the subject and cannot entertain any propositions in relation to it.”

But this solid front against the discussion of abolishing slavery began to break in the Confederacy under the hostile attitude of Europe and the military necessity at home. After Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation thousands of Negro troops joined the Federal armies. With 400,000 or 500,000 foreigners and over 200,000 Negroes added to the Federal armies the small white population of the South began to feel itself overwhelmed by the weight of mere number; and finally it was urged that Negroes who could be enlisted in the Confederate armies should be freed.

This agitation culminated in the early winter of 1864-65 . . . [and] the Confederate government determined to capitalize in its diplomacy upon the idea of emancipation. On December 27, 1864, Benjamin wrote dispatches to Mason and Slidell to put the question squarely up to England and France whether slavery was and had been the obstacle to recognition. Duncan Kenner of Louisiana, member of Congress and chairman of the Ways and Means Committee . . . was appointed as special envoy to carry these instructions and to act with Mason and Slidell in case negotiations [to emancipate the slaves in exchange for recognition] should follow.

The optimistic Benjamin was in profound despair and he was now desperate. The freeing of the slaves was to hazard black supremacy, and all the horrors of Haiti. His note is worthy of extensive quotation: “The Confederate States have now for nearly four years resisted the utmost power of the United States with a courage and fortitude to which the world has accorded its respect and admiration.

No people have ever poured out their blood more freely in defense of their liberties and independence, nor have endured sacrifices with greater cheerfulness than have the men and women of these Confederate States. They accepted the issue which was forced on them by an arrogant and domineering race, vengeful, grasping and ambitious. They have asked nothing, [and] fought for nothing but for the right of self-government, for independence.”

But this was an inadequate picture of that heroism, for, in fact, the Confederacy, outnumbered by the North three to one, had been fighting Europe as well as the North. England and France had aided the United States by “the abandonment by those two powers of all rights as neutrals,” that is, he said . . . “their countenance of a blockade which, when declared, was the most shameless outrage on international law that modern times have witnessed . . . .[and] their indifference to the spectacle of a people [while engaged in an unequal struggle for defense] exposed to the invasion not only of the superior numbers of their adversaries, but of armies of mercenaries imported from neutral nations to subserve the guilty projects of our foes.

While engaged in defending our country on terms so unequal, the foes whom we are resisting profess the intention of resorting to the starvation and extermination of our women and children (Sherman’s march) as a means of securing conquest over us. In the very beginning of the contest they indicated their fell purpose by declaring medicines contraband of war, and recently have not been satisfied with burning granaries and dwellings and all food for man and beast.

They have sought to provide against any future crop by destroying all agricultural implements, and killing all animals that they could not drive from the farms, so as to render famine certain among the people.”

[The] Richmond Sentinel [of] January 19, 1865 . . . stated concisely the grounds upon which the South should free the slaves and use them as soldiers. “It is a question,” said the paper, “simply whether we give for our own uses, or whether the Yankees shall take for theirs. Subjugation means emancipation and confiscation . . . it would be far more glorious to devote our means to our success than to lose them as spoils to the enemy.”

[The] Richmond Enquirer of the same date [supported] warmly the idea of emancipation. “[We] must convince the world that we are fighting for the self-government of the whites and not for the slavery of the blacks; that the war has been forced upon us by the enemy for the purpose of spoliation and subjugation . . . and if that liberation [of the blacks] can be made to secure our independence, we believe that the people of these States would not hesitate to make that sacrifice.”

(King Cotton Diplomacy, Frank Lawrence Owsley, University of Chicago Press, 1931, pp. 530-536)