Circa1865

As the year 1864 wore on, and despite increased Southern territory being overrun by Northern armies, the Northern people were war-weary and appalled at Lincoln and Grant’s mounting casualty numbers. Lincoln’s re-election platform called for the unconditional surrender of the South, and an unpopular constitutional amendment to abolish slavery – referred to as Lincoln’s “rescript” of war aims. Lincoln’s narrow election victory was attributed not only to mass army furloughs of men sent home to police the polls, but also that Assistant Secretary of War “Charles A. Dana testifies that the whole power of the War Department was used to secure Lincoln’s reelection in 1864.” Clement C. Clay, Jr., below, was one of three Confederate Commissioners sent to Canada in April 1864 to find a means to spark a Northern front, draw enemy troops from the South, and nurture the growing peace movement in the North.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Lincoln and Peace in 1864

Saint Catherine’s, Canada West, September 12, 1864.

To: Hon. J.P. Benjamin, Secretary of State, Richmond Virginia, C.S.A.

“Sir – I addressed you on the 11^th August last in explanation of the circumstance inducing, attending and following the correspondence of Mr. [James P.] Holcombe and myself with Hon. Horace Greeley. Subsequent events have confirmed my opinion that we lost nothing and gained much by that correspondence. It has, at least, formed an issue between Lincoln and the South, in which all her people should join with all their might and means.

All of the many intelligent men from the United States with whom I have conversed, agreed in declaring that it had given a stronger impetus to the peace party of the North than all other causes combined, and had greatly reduced the strength of the war party.

Indeed, Judge [Jeremiah] Black [of Pennsylvania], stated to us that [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton admitted to him that it was a grave blunder, and would defeat Lincoln [in 1864] unless he could . . . [demonstrate his] willingness to accept other terms – in other words, to restore the Union as it was.

Judge Black wished to know if Mr. [Jacob] Thompson would go to Washington to discuss the terms of peace, and proceed thence to Richmond; saying that Stanton desired him to do so, and would send him safe conduct for that purpose. I doubt not that Judge Black came at the instance of Mr. Stanton.

You may have remarked that the New York Times maintains, as by authority, that the rescript declares one mode of making peace, but not the only one. The abler organs of the Administration seize this suggestion and hold it up in vindication of Lincoln from the charge that he is waging war to abolish slavery, and will not agree to peace until that end is achieved.

Mr. [William] Seward, too, in his late speech at Auburn [New York], intimates that slavery is no longer an issue of the war, and that it will not be interfered with after peace is declared. These and other facts indicate that Lincoln is dissatisfied with the issue he has made with the South and fears its decision.

I am told that [Lincoln’s] purpose is to try to show that the Confederate Government will not entertain a proposition for peace that does not embrace a distinct recognition of the Confederate States, thereby expecting to change the issue from war for abolition to war for the Union.

It is well enough to let the North and European nations believe that reconstruction is not impossible. It will inflame the spirit of peace in the North and will encourage the disposition of England and France to recognize and treat with us.

At all events, [Lincoln’s opponent, Democrat George McClellan] is committed by the platform to cease hostilities and to try negotiations. An armistice will inevitably result in peace – the war cannot be renewed if once stopped, even for a short time. The North is satisfied that war cannot restore the Union, and will destroy their own liberties and independence if prosecuted much longer.

The Republican papers now urge Lincoln to employ all of his navy, if necessary, to seal up the port of Wilmington, which they say will cut us off from all foreign supplies and soon exhaust our means for carrying on the war . . . I do not doubt, whether we could support an army for six months after the port of Wilmington was sealed.

[The North] will not consent to peace without reunion while they believe they can subjugate us. Lincoln will exert his utmost power to sustain Sherman and Grant in their present positions, in order to insure his reelection. He knows that a great disaster to either of them would defeat him.

I have the honor to be, &c., &c.,

C. C. Clay, Jr.”

(Correspondence, Confederate State Department; Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume VII, Rev. J. W. Jones, Broadfoot Publishing Company, 1990, excerpts pp. 338-340; 342)

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a Unitarian minister in Massachusetts who identified with disunion and militant abolitionism during the 1840s and 1850s. He was deeply involved with the funding and arming of John Brown, was jubilant when Lincoln invaded the South, and became colonel of a black regiment of slaves taken from Southern plantations overrun and burned by Northern troops. In the postwar, Higginson came to realize what his prewar revolutionary zeal had unleashed, and to the chagrin of the Radical Republicans whose power then depended primarily on the freedmen’s ballot.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Republicans Bloody Shirt

“During the [1884] Massachusetts campaign Republicans frequently denounced the [Southern] Bourbons. [Senator George F.] Hoar stressed that his party was the true friends of the South. Republicans had sponsored bills to educate the section’s illiterates, had passed tariffs to protect its infant industries, and had adopted the war amendments to free all Southerners from the shackles of slavery . . . In a like tone Henry Cabot Lodge argued that the highest Republican duty was to preserve “the freedom and purity of the ballot box.”

In an open letter on “The Suppressed Negro Vote,” Higginson explained that he and other abolitionists . . . had studied “the Southern question apart from the bias of politics” and had come to the conclusion that colored men neither needed nor desired Northern aid.

After having corresponded with and talked to many of the South Carolina, Georgia and Florida Negroes who had served in his Civil War regiment . . . most of them admitted that they did not vote simply because they were uninformed and not interested in politics.

Higginson even condoned the enactment of complicated Southern election laws designed to confuse illiterate Negroes, such as the Eight-Box act requiring separate ballots and receptacles for each office being voted upon. Since only educated men could comprehend involved methods, these measure amounted to a literacy test and achieved what many Northern States decreed directly.

“The Massachusetts way,” Higginson went on, “is more honorable, no doubt; but suppose an attempt were made to import our system into South Carolina, it would at once be denounced as an outrage almost worthy of Mississippi.”

To Republicans, this reasoning was detestable. Former Governor John D. Long of Massachusetts had little use for “Col. Higginson and the Boston Advertiser [who] say “education should be on top.”

Asked why it so vigorously opposed the use of the war issues [to denounce the South], the New York Evening Post answered it was because Northern politicians had “never discoursed upon the suppression of the suffrage at the South, except as an argument for keeping themselves in power, and as a reason why the country should not be disgusted by the gross abuses in administration which the Republican party practiced, permitted and connived at.”

In the 1870’s [Republican party] Stalwarts had employed the theme “to reconcile us to the whiskey thieves and the knavish Cabinet officers of the Grant administration, and to the general corruption of the party in power.”

Under [Rutherford B.] Hayes, they had invoked it “to reconcile us next . . . to the abandonment by that statesman of even the slightest attempt to reform the civil service with which he began his Administration.”

Though last not least, [John] Blaine had stressed sectionalism during his 1884 campaign. “In short,” the Post announced, “during a period of fully fifteen years, whenever the Republican party was called to account for any shortcoming,” its sole answer was the bloody shirt.”

(Farewell to the Bloody Shirt: Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1912, Stanley P. Hirschson, Indiana University Press, 1962, excerpts pp. 132-134)

As General Samuel G. French suggests below, presidential expedients not found in the United States Constitution were invented for initiating war against the South, and for the prosecution of that war. French believed that the New England-armed men in Kansas were responsible for firing the first shot of the war; others have postulated that the war began when the Star of the West left its New York moorings in early January 1861, carrying armed men below decks to South Carolina – when Fort Sumter’s guns were turned against the Americans it was built to protect.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Constitution Inadequate to the Conduct of the War

“Sherman — the fell destroyer — had burned the city of Jackson, Mississippi, and the ruins reminded me of Pompeii. In walking one of the streets I passed a canvas shanty, from which I was hailed by an Israelite with “Good morning General; come in.” He had been in the army and knew me; he had some goods and groceries for sale. When I was leaving, he asked: “General, cant I do something for you? Here are fifty dollars, just take them; maybe you can pay me back sometime.”

I thought the angel of mercy was smiling down on us . . . I thanked him kindly, and the day came when I had the pleasure of repaying the debt. The servants I had in Columbus had been nominally “confiscated” and set free; so they came to me, almost daily, begging me to take them back to the plantation in Mississippi. As I was not able to do this, I applied to some “bureau,” that had charge of the “refugees,” for transportation of these Negroes, and to my surprise it was granted. As soon as possible they were put on the cars and started for the plantation.

When we reached home we found most of the old servants there awaiting our arrival. To feed and clothe about a hundred of these people, and to plant a crop of cotton in the spring, clothing, provisions, mules, wagons, implements, harness, etc., had to be procured. To obtain funds to purchase the articles enumerated — to commence again — I went to Philadelphia and New York (by special permission of the government) in November.

. . . War is the most uncertain of all undertakings of a nation, and, like the tempest, cannot be controlled, and seldom or never ends as predicted. The North proclaimed that this “little rebellion” would end in sixty days!

It lasted four years, and ended as no one had foreseen. It had to suppress rebellions caused by people who entertained Southern opinions in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati and other cities; muzzle the press, prohibit free speech, banish prominent individuals, arrest men without warrant, and imprison them without charges made known to them; and violated nearly every resolution and pledge made in the beginning relating to the South; they cast aside constitutional law, and substituted martial law, under which the South became a scene of desolation and starvation.

My own opinion is that the first gun was fired, at the instigation of a number of prominent men North, by John Brown at Harper’s Ferry, and for which he was apotheosized and numbered among the saints.

Mr. Lincoln said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. Our case is new. We must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save the country.”

These words indicate that the powers of the Constitution were inadequate to the conduct of the war, and henceforth the war must be conducted as occasion deemed expedient. In other words, the executive must be declared greater than the power that made it, or the creature greater than the Creator, and with dictatorial methods the war was conducted. Avaunt, Constitution, avaunt! We are fighting for the Union, for dominion over the Southern territory again, and so the Constitution was folded up, etc.”

(Two Wars, Samuel G. French, Confederate Veteran Press, 1901, excerpts, pp. 320-327)

The North’s Republican Party was solely responsible for the postwar Solid South which opposed their Reconstruction efforts, and the former utilized the newly-enfranchised freedmen to establish a Southern wing to maintain their national hegemony. To hold Northern votes the Republicans waved “the bloody shirt”; at the same time they swayed the black voter with warnings of newly-elected Democrats re-enslaving them.  Below, the home State of Carl Schurz was not Missouri, he was a socialist revolutionary from Erftstadt, Germany, and elevated by Lincoln to attract German immigrant support for his war.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Republicans and the Freedmen’s Role

“One of the first [Northerners] to change his mind about the freedmen was Carl Schurz. In 1865, after a Southern tour, he had recommended that the Negro be enfranchised, disregarding the fact that “the [white] masses are strongly opposed to colored suffrage.” But in 1870, when he realized that uneducated Negroes were an easy prey for spoilsmen, Schurz admitted that he had erred.

To his disgust the [Republican] machine politicians in Missouri, his home State, dominated the scene by manipulating ignorant, but enfranchised, Negroes. Henceforth, Schurz steadfastly opposed all legislation designed to aid the colored man. And he assumed that anyone who tried to stir up sectional passions had yielded to the worst elements in the Republican organization.

Although the transition in the thinking of George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, was far different, he eventually reached the same conclusion. Like Schurz, Curtis after the war favored Negro suffrage. He argued that the freedmen had proven their loyalty and deserved the ballot. Admittedly, many of them were ignorant, but so were “great masses of Northern voters. Education,” he wrote, “is a good thing; but it appears some of the staunchest patriots in the land cannot read, and that some of the basest traitors are highly educated.”

During the 1880 campaign Harper’s Weekly vigorously denounced the Solid South. He then said that the Southern question was dead. The federal government could do nothing more to help the Negro. After that, Curtis joined Schurz in resisting all attempts to stir up the race issue.

A third distinct case was Edwin L. Godkin of the Nation. Although he begrudgingly advocated the enfranchisement of the Negro after the Civil War, he never abandoned the conviction that white Anglo-Saxons were inherently superior to “ignorant foreigners” and atavistic colored men. “I do not oppose the admission [to suffrage] of such Negroes as shall prove their fitness,” Godkin wrote in 1865. “. . . What I ask, and meant to ask, was not that the blacks shall be excluded as blacks, but simply that they shall not be admitted to the franchise simply because they are blacks and have been badly treated.”

Godkin recommended the disenfranchisement of all Negroes who could not learn to read or write within two years. Only by developing his intelligence could the colored man distinguish between “statesman and demagogue; between honest public men and knavish public men; between his own real friends and his real enemies.”

Although Godkin originally supported the Radical plan of Reconstruction, which provided for military enforcement of Negro suffrage, he was convinced by 1871 that this adventure had failed.

“We owe it to human nature to say that worse governments have seldom been seen in a civilized country,” the editor admitted. “They have been composed of trashy whites and ignorant blacks.” Control of Southern affairs should be returned to those “who have most influence and knowledge.” The simple truth was that the freedmen were unfit for the role the Republicans desired them to play: “Any party in which the Negro is in the majority, cannot help having its policy, if not shaped, greatly influenced by their political ignorance and incapacity.”

(Farwell to the Bloody Shirt, Northern Republicans and the Southern Negro, 1877-1912, Stanley P. Hirshson, Indiana University Press, 1962; excerpts pp. 126-128)

The following was written by historian H.V. “Bo” Traywick, Jr., author of “Empire of the Owls, Reflections on the North’s War Against Southern Secession” (2103, Dementi Milestone Publishing).  In his frontpiece of that volume, Traywick presents a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America: “If the Union were to undertake to enforce by arms, the allegiance of the confederate States by military means, it would be in a position very analogous to that of England at the time of the War of Independence.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A MONUMENTAL SPIN

By H. V. Traywick, Jr.

“Yea, they would pare the mountain to the plain to leave an equal baseness.” – Tennyson

The crusade against Confederate monuments is nothing more than political posturing and virtue signaling based upon a colossal lie known as The Myth of American History, which proclaims that “The Civil War was all about slavery, the righteous North waged it to free the slaves, and the evil South fought to keep them. End of story. Any questions?”

Well, yes. Something doesn’t compute, here. If the North were waging a war on slavery, why didn’t she wage war on New England cotton mills and their profits from slave-picked cotton? Or on New York and Boston, the largest African slave-trading ports in the world according to the January 1862 New York Journal of Commerce?

Or on Northern shipyards that outfitted the slave ships? Or on New England distilleries that made rum from slave-harvested sugar cane to use for barter on the African coast? Or on the African slavers themselves, such as the Kingdom of Dahomey, who captured their fellow Africans and sold them into slavery in the first place?

And why did Abraham Lincoln launch the bloodiest war in the history of the Western Hemisphere to drive Southern slavery back into the Union? And why did his Emancipation Proclamation – a desperate war measure that did not free a single slave not behind Confederate lines, and which was not issued until halfway through the war when the South was winning it – say that slavery was alright as long as one was loyal to his government?

And why did he – an avowed and documented White Supremacist – work until the day he died trying to deport to South America those Blacks who were freed by it? And why was slavery legal in the United States throughout the war?

Do not make the common mistake of confusing the many causes of secession – including the slavery issues – with the single cause of the war, which was secession itself! That, was what the war was “about”! With the South’s agrarian “Cotton Kingdom” out of the Union and set up as a free trade Confederacy on her doorstep, the North’s industrial “Mercantile Kingdom” would collapse!

So Lincoln launched an armada against Charleston Harbor to provoke South Carolina into firing the first shot, and got the war he wanted to drive the “Cotton Kingdom” back into the Union at the point of the bayonet.

Virginia, “The Mother of States and of Statesmen,” had stood solidly for the voluntary Union of sovereign States to which she had acceded, but when Lincoln called for Virginia troops to carry out his unholy errand of coercion and conquest, Virginia refused, indicted Lincoln for inaugurating civil war, immediately seceded on principle, and joined the Southern Confederacy. The rest is history, although it has been perverted into what Voltaire called “the propaganda of the victorious.”

Results? For the North? “The Gilded Age.” For the South? Grinding poverty in a land laid waste. For the Blacks? Recently uncovered documents show that between 1862 and 1870 estimates of as many as a million ex-slaves, or twenty-five percent of the population, died or became seriously ill from disease, starvation, and neglect under their Northern “liberators”!

Freed from their master’s care, Lincoln, “The Great Emancipator,” had told them to “root hog, or die.” Black enfranchisement, like Black emancipation, was not the North’s objective, but merely an incidental tool to secure the North’s conquest and political power, and once secured, the North abandoned her Black puppets to the upheaval she had wrought in Southern society and turned her attention to the Plains Indians, who were in the way of her trans-continental railroads. Freedom?

Union at the point of the bayonet is slavery to an imperialist government. Equality? Chronic Black riots in segregated Northern ghettos speak for themselves, but they keep Desperate White Liberals busy with crusades designed to divert Black attention onto Southern scapegoats.

The latest are attacks on Confederate monuments honoring men who defended our homeland against invasion, conquest, and a coerced political allegiance to a perverted government – just as their fathers had done in 1776 when the thirteen slaveholding colonies, from Massachusetts to Georgia, seceded from the British Empire.

But know the Truth: You may tear down every Confederate monument on the planet and it won’t change a thing.

So then what? Who will be the next target for these Perpetually Aggrieved Crusaders? This essay offers some suggestions, but the Truth of our history expressed herein evidently does not comport with their agenda, nor with the politics of our multi-cultural Empire.”

SOURCES

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951; Cleveland and New York: World/Meridian, 1962.

Bennett, Lerone, Jr. Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000.

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1970.

Bowers, Claude G. The Tragic Era: The Revolution after Lincoln. Cambridge: The Riverside P, 1929.

DiLorenzo, Thomas J. The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. New York: Three Rivers P, 2002, 2003.

Downs, James. Sick from Freedom. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2012. Reviewed by Jennifer Schuessler in “Liberation as a Death Sentence,” New York Times, June 10, 2012.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1896.

Farrow, Anne, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank of The Hartford Courant. Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery. New York: Ballentine Books, 2006.

Flaherty, Colin. White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore it. Washington, DC: WND Books, 2013.

—. Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry: The Hoax of Black Victimization and How We Enable It. 2015.

Fleming, Walter Lynwood, ed. Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational and Industrial, 1865 to 1906. 2 vols. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1906.

—. The Sequel of Appomattox: A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States. Textbook Edition. The Chronicles of America Series. Ed. Allen Johnson. Gerhard R. Lomer and Charles W. Jefferys, assistant editors. New Haven: Yale UP, 1919.

Holy Bible. Exodus 20:16; Ecclesiastes 7:13; St. John 8:7.

Hurston, Zora Neal. Dust Tracks on a Road. 1942; New York: Arno P and The New York Times, 1969.

Kettell, Thomas Prentice. Southern Wealth and Northern Profits: As Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures. New York: George W. & John A. Wood, 1860.

Leigh, Philip. Southern Reconstruction. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing, 2017.

Ortega y Gasset, Jose. Revolt of the Masses. Trans. Anon. 1930; New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1993.

Pace, Charles T. Southern Independence. Why War? The War to Prevent Southern Independence. Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2015.

Sale, Kirkpatrick. Emancipation Hell: The Tragedy Wrought by the Emancipation Proclamation 150 Years Ago. 2012; Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2015.

Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson. 1892; New York and London: MacMillan & Co., 1911.

Tilley, John Shipley. Lincoln Takes Command. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1941.

Traywick, H. V., Jr. Empire of the Owls: Reflections on the North’s War against Southern Secession. Manakin-Sabot, VA: Dementi Milestone Publishing, 2013.

—. Virginia Iliad: The Death and Destruction of “The Mother of States and of Statesmen.” Manakin-Sabot, VA: Dementi Milestone Publishing, 2016.

One of the outcomes of the devastation and destruction was a need for Southern men to find employment and rebuild their impoverished section, and this most often meant working under the direction of the conqueror. Though Lee refused “to accept a sinecure from a Northern business concern,” many former Confederate officers became the agents or attorneys of the invading capitalists and “took action that had all the earmarks of scalawagism”, in the words of the author below.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The South and Northern Finance Imperialism

“One of the prices the South pays for its progressive industrialization is increasing servitude to Northern capital. New York has grown into the most autocratic city-state of modern times, with the Southern province of the United States as one of its important colonies.

The great financial houses of that and kindred cities control most of the region’s strategic industries, having sent out a second and third generation of carpetbaggers to found factories or to purchase those already existing. The Southern industries owned and controlled by outsiders include the region’s railroads, its coal fields, its iron reserves, its electric power, and its gas, Sulphur, and oil sources.

The existence of Northern patent monopolies and the absence of local machine manufacturing permit outside direction even of industries locally owned. The South manufactures its own cast-iron pipes, steel rails and bridges, and oils, but not its hardware, locomotives, automobiles, clocks, radios, dynamos, drugs, and many other finished products requiring the highest skill to produce and bringing in the highest profits.

Retail profits are siphoned out of the section by Northern-owned chain stores. The Southern businessman usually is a mere factor or agent of Northern principals, who control both production and distribution. His function is to sell [Northern articles] endeared to the Southern public through advertising. Some of these articles are as worthless as the wooden nutmegs the Yankee peddler is said to have imposed upon the public in ante-bellum times.

In 1937, economist David Coyle estimated that the South was paying out a billion dollars annually in excess of its income. It balanced its credit by selling property to investors from other sections of the country, by borrowing, by going bankrupt, and by destroying forests and lands to secure immediate incomes.

The possibility of the South revolting against its debtor status, in the manner of the Revolutionary planters against their British creditors, is ruled out by the outcome of the Civil War. That Southern leaders are able to reconcile the sons and grandsons of those who followed Robert E. Lee and William Jennings Bryan to the economic domination of the North caused Benjamin Kendrick to cry out bitterly in 1942:

“We are confronted by a paradox more amazing and ironical than any ever conjured by the imagination of Gilbert and Sullivan. The people of the South, who all their lives have suffered deprivation, want, and humiliation from an outside finance imperialism, followed with hardly a murmur of protest, leaders who, if indirectly, were nonetheless agents and attorneys of the imperialists.” What was true in 1942 is truer thirty years later.”

(The Everlasting South, Francis Butler Simkins, LSU Press, 1963, excerpt pp. 55-57)

When the orphaned and penniless Maunsel White arrived in New Orleans in 1801 from his native Ireland, it was a small town controlled by Spain. Only thirteen, he clerked in a counting-house for sixteen dollars a month, half of which he paid to a French teacher to learn the language. He later explained his son that “I had a proud spirit” and let no obstacle stand in his way. That son later wrote of his deceased father that as a great merchant, “he first made a name & his name made the money – none stood higher for integrity – his word was inviolable as an oath.” White was proud of his sugar plantations and purchased the best machinery from New York manufacturers, and envisioned strong political and commercial ties between the South and the developing West, a union Northern which northern political interests could not abide.  White did not live to see the devastation and defeat of the South,  passing peacefully at his Deer Range Plantation on December 17, 1863.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Maunsel White, Irish Immigrant

“Behind the highest pile of oyster shells of any of the patrons of the old Gem Restaurant in New Orleans could frequently be found the great merchant, Maunsel White. With the gourmet’s taste for oysters, he concocted a peppery sauce which his Negro servant carried with his when the entered his favorite restaurant. Called the “Maunsel White Sauce,” it later received the name of tabasco sauce.

Gradually Maunsel White established himself as a reliable and successful factor in selling crops of the planters and forwarding plantation supplies to them. An important step in this was to secure the cotton business of Andrew Jackson. Jackson had become acquainted with the young merchant when White served as the captain of a volunteer company under him at the Battle of New Orleans.

To the task of superintending his four plantations, White brought a keen sense of business and great energy. “I am up at [3 to 4 o’clock] in the morning, and all day at the Sugar House or Field,” he wrote during the grinding season of 1847 when he was sixty-four years old.

When one of his female slaves died from an accident at the sugar mill which crushed her hand and arm, he wrote to the Northern manufacturer of the mill, “this melancholy accident has caused myself and family the most sincere sorrow, as we view our Slaves almost in the same light as we do our children.” Although he bought many slaves, he refused to sell any of his own servants, explaining, “I have made myself a solemn promise never to sell a Negro – it is a traffic I have never done, I had rather give them their liberty than sell them.”

While his fortune was intact, White made generous gifts to the recently founded University of Louisiana at New Orleans . . . [and] was elected a member of its first board of administrators. In September 1847 he announced that he would donate to the infant university and endowment of lands to provide an income of one thousand dollars a year.

He became one of the early advocates of home education for Southern youths and the opponent of sending them to schools and colleges in the North, where they would be exposed to [alien doctrines].

White advised his son [Maunsel, Jr.] not to think about becoming a politician, because he questioned the happiness of politicians. He was particularly incensed by the Wilmot Proviso, which he thought was calculated “to do more injury & make a wider breach between the North & the South than any other subject ever brought forth in our political strife.” Although he declared himself to be a Democrat, White also stated that he would never sell himself to any party.

When he invested money in a cotton mill at Cannelton, Indiana, in 1849, he wrote that he wished to see the interests of the South and West united so that nothing on earth might separate them. Though he affirmed his attachment to “the perpetuity of the glorious union,” he said it must be “a Union of equals, jealous of their own & each other’s rights and submitting to no infractions of the constitutional compact as it was framed by our Republican Fathers.”

He developed a strong prejudice against Yankees as a result of sectional strife . . . On May 16, 1848, he wrote to his Richmond factor that he suspected that the Yankee captains of the ship which carried his molasses and sugar were dishonest, adding “Curse the Whole Race of Yankee Captains.” He advised his factor in Philadelphia to who he consigned his sugar crop to watch the captain of the ship carefully, for he was a shrewd Yankee.”

(The Mind of the Old South, Clement Eaton, LSU Press, 1964, excerpts pp. 69-73; 75-77; 80-84; 87 )

With respect to the initiation of modern total war against a civilian population, the author below argues that after a century or two of civilized warfare between European combatants, “total war did in fact appear, beginning with the American Civil War, and has been the form of war in the twentieth century.” Lincoln’s general, Sherman, seems to have absorbed Allan Ramsey’s view of war against civilians, and was driven by his belief that Americans in the South could in no manner oppose the will of his government — to do so meant fire and sword used to bring them to subjection – after which his fury would cease. Sherman continued his total war against the Plains Indians; a young Spanish officer named Valeriano Weyler visited the North during the War, observed Sherman’s art of warfare, and used this to devastating effect against Cuban civilians in the mid-1890s.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The British Version of Sherman

“Although [David] Hume presented the specter of total war against the civilian population as a reduction to absurdity of British policy on both moral and practical grounds, his good friend Allan Ramsey embraced it as the only way to win the war. But what is most important about Ramsey’s proposal in the moral justification he offered for it.

Allan Ramsey was a court [portrait] painter to George III . . . [and] also a political theorist of some merit and wrote a number of pamphlets on political topics . . . [arguing in 1778] that the war is being lost because the British have not followed a proper strategy. The war must be turned against the civilian population.

Ramsey proposes that a garrison be established in New York . . . to serve as a rendezvous point for all British operations. Ten thousand troops are then to embark on transports to any province that is vulnerable and important . . . [and] to carry away all “that may be useful to the public service” and then “burn and destroy the houses, magazines, and plantations . . . sparing the lives of all the persons who do not attempt by arms to prevent them.” The troops are then to embark for some other province “where the like may be repeated.”

Washington’s army could not match the mobility of the British navy, and one could expect the colonial army to melt away as men returned to their devastated provinces to assist their families. Should the people remain obstinate, their scorched and impoverished land could be occupied by loyal immigrants.

Ramsey recognized that “such a scheme . . .” would be rejected as barbarous by “the more human, and more respectable part of the community.” But to this he had an ingenious reply.

[As] the American people claim to be sovereign; thus the people themselves are in a state of war with the King’s forces. “[The] inhabitants of America . . . with the express purpose of making war upon England, have formed themselves into a Government . . . where every man may be said, in his own individual person, to have bid defiance to the King of Great Britain; so that he must thank his own folly and temerity, if, at any time, he should come off short from so unequal a contest.”

We have here the germ of the twentieth-century rationale for total war: war aimed at the people of a nation, scorched-earth strategy, the bombing of civilian populations, massive deportations of peoples, and the enslavement of the vanquished.

Total war is not unique to the twentieth century, nor is it due to “technology,” which has merely made its implementation more practicable and terrible. Modern total war is possible only among “civilized” nations. It is shaped and legitimated by an act of reflection, a way of thinking about the world whereby an entire people become the enemy.

Happily the rules [of civilized warfare] were still in force for Lord North and George III, who did not follow Ramsay’s advice to wage total war against the colonists. The complete domination of reflection over moral sentiment, which is the mark of the barbarism of refinement, had not yet occurred.”

(Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium, Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy, Donald W. Livingston, University of Chicago Press, 1998, excerpts pp. 296-301)

While a North Carolina State Legislator in 1902, Locke Craig debated North Carolina’s Republican US Senator Jeter Pritchard at Charlotte and denounced the Republican practice of rewarding those who had committed treason against North Carolina during its struggle for political independence.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

No Pension for Deserters

“[The Republicans complain that] two hundred thousand dollars went to pension the Confederate soldiers. We will take care of these old veterans, we owe them a debt of gratitude. In the wreck and ruin of war we were rich in the priceless heritage of their memory.

“These were men whom death could not terrify, whom defeat could not dishonor.” They glorified the fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives and by the heroism of their death. They have cast over the South the glamour or an immortal chivalry and consecrated the cause of Dixie with the blood of an immortal sacrifice. It was devotion like this that made the South, though torn and bleeding, beautiful and splendid in her desolation, and in her woe.

For forty years they have been the builders of the New South and the projectors of her larger destiny. The Federal Government provides for the soldiers that followed its flag. That is right. We will provide for the soldiers of the armies of the “storm-cradled nation that fell.”

When Senator Pritchard was a member of the Legislature in 1895 he and his party voted against giving one cent of pension to the needy heroes that had hobbled home on crutches from Appomattox.

There is one class of men whom we do not believe in pensioning – the deserter. There are men here who remember the last two years of the war. The world was against us. Armies were crashing down upon us like a ring of fire. Sherman was marching to the sea and leaving behind him ashes and desolation. In that time there were men whose courage never faltered.

Ragged and hungry and bleeding they stood in the trenches around Richmond and Petersburg. They stood with an unfailing devotion, though sometimes they knew that their little ones at home were living on the corn they picked up from the wagon ruts of the invading armies. They died remembering Dixie like the Greeks remembering Argos – in the language of the old song: “While one kissed a ringlet of thin gray hair and one kissed a lock of brown.”

But there were some who did not stand. Traitors and deserters they were. They turned their backs upon the only home and country that they ever had. They sneaked through the lines. They threw away their old gray uniform and put on the blue. They came back to shoot and kill, to rob the defenseless wives and mothers of their comrades who were fighting and dying at the front; to burn their homes and to murder the innocent.

To these men Senator Pritchard has given a royal pension. He said to the hero of the Confederacy that he might starve, but with the money of the honest people he feeds and clothes the deserter.

Yes, I denounce this in the name of the forty thousand sons of North Carolina who sleep tonight beneath the sod in the battle-scarred bosom of old Virginia. I denounce it in the name of the men who rushed defiant of death through the storm of Chickamauga and Gettysburg. In the name of every Confederate soldier I denounce it. In memory of the women who were robbed and the men who were murdered I denounce it. In the name of all brave men who love courage and despise cowardice, who believe in fidelity to comrades and in love for home and in loyalty to a great cause, I denounce this infamous act. I do not stand alone.

Here is the resolution of the last Reunion of Confederate Veterans of North Carolina:

“Resolved, That we condemn and denounce the Act of Congress which rewards treachery and perfidy in giving pensions to Confederate deserters for fighting against their former flag and comrades.”

The judgment of the South is that the party that starves the soldier and pensions the deserter should be accursed forever.

The child has not yet been born in North Carolina that will see the day when the party that has degraded our people . . . will be restored to power. The new day has dawned, but the judgment has been pronounced against this Republican party. Democracy, united, enthusiastic and steadfast in its purpose to guard the welfare of all the people, to protect North Carolina from the hand of the despoiler, to promote the upbuilding of this great State, marches forward with victorious assurances.”

(Speech (excerpt) of Hon. Locke Craig, Joint Debate with Sen. Jeter Pritchard, October 9, 1902, Memoirs and Speeches of Locke Craig, Hackney & Moale Company, 1923, pp. 85-88)

Add to the sectional tariff issues below the irony of Northern abolitionist agitators, many of whom were the sons and grandsons of those who had grown wealthy through New England’s slave trade which populated the South with laborers, who fomented race war in the South. It was New England slave ships which brought slaves from Africa; New England mills were busy consuming slave-produced cotton; and Manhattan banks were eager to lend Southern plantation owners money at low interest to buy more land to produce more cotton.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Disappearance of Wealth from the South

“The South maintained that the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1833 were unconstitutional, since Congress had the power to levy taxes only for revenue and the taxes have to be uniform. The act then passed was sectional, since by it, the South, while she had only one-third of the votes, paid two-thirds of the custom duties . . .

[And] as our government was a compact, the government could not be superior to the States – so Congress was overstepping its powers, and [the South] contended that a tax on one part of the country could not be laid to protect the industries of another part. (United States Constitution – Section VIII., Clause 1)

What had the North to say to this?

When Thomas Hart Benton, of Missouri, in referring to the Tariff Acts, said:

“Under Federal legislation the exports of the South have been the basis of the Federal revenues – everything goes out and nothing is returned to them in the shape of Federal expenditures. The expenditures flow North. This is the reason why wealth disappears from the South and rises up in the North. No tariff has yet included Georgia, Virginia or the two Carolinas [in its largesse], except to increase the burdens imposed upon them.

The political economists of the North, Carey, Elliott, Kettel and others who have studied the source of National wealth in America, said: “Mr. Benton is right in the explanation given of the sudden disappearance of wealth from the South.”

Then the editor of “Southern Wealth and Northern Profits,” a Northern man, said:

“It is a gross injustice, if not hypocrisy, to be always growing rich on the profits of slave labor; and at the same time to be eternally taunting and insulting the South on account of slavery. Though you bitterly denounce slavery as the “sum of all villainies,” it is nevertheless the principal factor (by high tariff) of your Northern wealth, and you know it.”

(Truths of History, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, Southern Lion Books, 1998 (originally published 1920), excerpts pp. 84-85)