Circa1865

Southern historian Shelby Foote explained that “the best historical reading is the source material . . . written by people who saw it.” And he recognized that the people who made up the Confederacy, especially the yeoman farmers, were fiercely independent. “He was not only convinced that he was as good as you were, but if you questioned it, he would shoot you off your horse.” Men like these made for a fearless army few wanted to contend with.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Importance of a Good Death

“You don’t want to overlook something that the [South] did have and that was tremendous courage. I’ve studied and studied hard the charge at Gettysburg, the charge at Franklin, the charge at Gaines Mill, or the Northern charge at Fredericksburg, wave after wave, and I do not know of any force on God’s earth that would have got me in any one of those charges.

It absolutely called for you to go out there and face certain death, practically. Now, I will do any kind of thing like that under the influence of elation and the adrenalin popping; it’s just inconceivable to us nowadays that men would try tactics that were fifty years behind the weapons.

They thought that to mass your fire, you had to mass your men, so they suffered casualties. Some battles ran as high as 30 percent. Now that’s just unbelievable, because 4 or 5 percent is very heavy casualties nowadays. You go into a battle and suffer 30 percent . . . at Pickett’s charge, they suffered 60 percent and it’s inconceivable to us . . . the stupidity of it, again.

Originally, the South had a big advantage. They were used to the castes of society and did not take it as an affront that a man had certain privileges. They didn’t think it made him any better than they were. But those privileges came his way, and they were perfectly willing for him to have them as long he didn’t think he was any better than they were.

But the Northern soldiers, they weren’t putting up with any privileges. A Massachusetts outfit spent its first night in the field and damn near had a revolution because the officers wanted to put their bedrolls out of the line. Well, the Southerners never had that problem. It seemed to them sensible that the officers should be over here, and the men there.

Of course, 99.9 percent of that war was fought by home folks. The fighting men were of very high quality, too. You see, those units were together for four years, many of them, and they became superb fighting machines.

You take an outfit like the Twenty-third Virginia: after four years and large numbers of casualties great battles, it becomes a very skillful military instrument. They never went home. Very few furloughs were given – some during the winter months to a few people.

The Civil War was an interesting time. It was very important to make what was called a “good death.” When you are dying, the doctor says you are dying, he [says] you will die about 9 o’clock tonight. You assemble your family around you and sing hymns, and you are brave and stalwart and tell the little woman that she has been good to you and not to cry. And you tell your children to be good and mind their mother. Daddy’s fixing to go away.

That was called a good death, and it was important. It was of tremendous importance.”

(Conversations with Shelby Foote, William C. Carter, editor, University Press of Mississippi, 1989, excerpts pp. 29-31)

As the secession crisis increased in intensity, the Fredericksburg Herald editor wrote in early January 1860: “Newspapers and Telegraphs have ruined the country. Suppress both and the country could be saved now.” The Northern press influenced vast numbers, including newly-landed immigrants; in New York alone the circulation of newspapers and periodicals was triple that in the entire South. And Massachusetts could claim about the same. As those newspapers counseled war against the South, they could also have sought compromise and a peaceful settlement of the issues dividing the country.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Newspapers Fuel the War

“In mid-April 1860, virtually all newspapers of the future Confederate States believed in preserving the Union, provided that Southern “rights,” as they conceived them, could be protected. One year later all but a handful of the same journals had endorsed the Confederacy. During most of the intervening twelve months, the Southern press was divided on the question of secession.

Papers which believed that the Union was salvageable held the upper hand in the pre-election period. But a combination of events – notably the alleged abolitionist conspiracy in Texas, the election of Lincoln, the secession of South Carolina and the lower South, and the failure of compromise – shifted the initiative to the disunion publicists and led to a gradual breakdown of Unionist journalism, until, with few exceptions, the press in eleven States became a unit in favor of withdrawal.

Like their Southern-rights counterparts, Unionist editors feared a Republican administration, though some failed to realize the depth of their fears until after the election. In the days following Lincoln’s triumph at the polls, as some Northern journals taunted and threatened the South and as the States of the lower South took firm, irrevocable steps preparatory to leaving the Union, Southern Unionist papers increasingly found it necessary to decide between the Confederacy and the Union.

Most Southerners regarded the election of a Republican president by Northern votes as a direct, calculated insult to their section. With the South’s honor allegedly at stake, most Southern Unionist editors soon forgot their earlier quarrel with secessionists over the legality of secession.  Moreover, Southerners were convinced that abolition would be but the first in a chain of events that would spell disaster for the South.

A Tennessee journal showed exceptional insight when, at the height of the sectional crisis, it blamed the alienation of the sections upon the newspapers. “. . . [E]ach indulges in constant crimination and labors incessantly to mislead and prejudice the people of the respective sections. And even now, when the country is trembling on the verge of dissolution, the warfare of misrepresentation and abuse is carried on with redoubled violence by the vultures who thrive and fatten on popular prejudice. We would rather be the lowest thing that crawls the earth than rear our children on bread obtained by such means.”

(Editors Make War, Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis, Donald E. Reynolds, Vanderbilt University Press, 1966, excerpts pp. 210-217)

Southern Baptist Public Relations Stunt

“Last summer [2016], the Southern Baptist Convention [SBC] leadership sparked controversy within the church’s declining ranks by erecting a Golden Calf of political correctness. [It] launched an all-out offensive against many of the church’s members by repudiating the Confederate Battle Flag. The attack was orchestrated by two of the SBC’s clergy . . . Dr. James Merritt and Dr. William Dwight McKissic, Jr . . . I have no reason to doubt that these two men truly love God; but they are lousy historians.

Instead of [Dr. McKissic suggesting] a moment of silence or performing an act of Christian charity (e.g., making a monetary donation to the family of the victims), he came to the conclusion that it would better to insult tens of thousands of faithful members of the SBC.

The connection between Resolution 7 [“On Sensitivity and Unity Regarding the Confederate Battle Flag”] and the murder of the Charleston Nine is this thin: Dylann Roof posed for a photograph with a Confederate flag.

Of course, it is ridiculous to think that any SBC member, including those who honor their dead and the cause of Southern independence, would hesitate to condemn Roof’s actions in unequivocal terms.

Charlton Heston gave a speech at Brandeis University in 2000 in which he observed, “Political correctness is tyranny, just tyranny with manners.”  I think if Mr. Heston were alive today, he would agree that the proponents of political correctness have lost their manners.

Present-day ideologues forget that the act of secession was peaceful. However, President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South was indeed an act of war – a hostile act that caused other States to secede.

Nearly all of the documentary evidence indicates that Southern men volunteered in order to fight a second American revolution against a tyrannical centralized power. And the average Union soldier fought to save the Union.

In reviewing the evidence, even James M. McPherson, a prominent, mainstream Civil War historian, admitted that “the letters and diaries of many Co0nfederate soldiers bristled with the rhetoric of liberty and self-government and the expressions of a willingness to die for the cause.” Novelist and historian Shelby Foote was more direct: “No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.”

I called many of [the SBC leadership to give an interview and discuss the details of the resolution], but only one was willing to speak to me . . . if he was granted anonymity. When I asked him what he thought about the resolution, he told me he thought it was just a public-relations stunt, an attempt to get attention. Since the resolution was not binding on the churches, it amounted to nothing more.

If the SBC refuses to obey the commandment to “Honor thy father and thy mother,” in order to appease people who have no desire to understand the SBC’s living connection to the South, what other compromises will its leaders be willing to make? What sort of gesture would please anyone who would demand that Southern Baptists dishonor their ancestors?

We only want to recognize the sacrifices of our family members who fought simply to defend their homes. For them and for us, the battle flag has been a symbol of rebellion against an overweening centralized government. It has nothing to do with racism.”

(Southern Baptists Versus the South, S.A. Litteral, Chronicles, March 2017, excerpts pp. 39-40)

Early New York newspapermen James Gordon Bennett and Moses Beach both recognized the power of the telegraph on news they could sell in their Herald and Sun, respectively, and both sought that “mass market” which was shortly to become the Holy Grail of American industry. The revolutionary-minded reporters they sent to Kansas in 1856 greatly helped light the fuse for the coming war; the election of a purely sectional president in 1860 finished their work.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Mass Market Sensationalism and Kansas

“The appearance of the telegraph [in 1835] unlocked the door to the entire country for the newspaperman. Until it came, current news was the property only of the city room . . . while the steam locomotive sliced helpfully into the mailbag’s travel time, it could not keep up with the dots and dashes.

“This agency,” wrote James Gordon Bennett at the time, “will be productive of the most extraordinary effects on society, government, commerce and the progress of civilization.”

The Herald . . . [was] soon blooming with police-court reports, details of murders and offenses against morality of an interesting nature, blow-by-blow write-ups of bare-knuckle prize fights, stock market reports, gossip, and the most up-to-date news that money could procure.

In 1841, Bennett wrote to Henry Clay, asking for the distinguished Senator’s help in removing [a rule barring non-Washington reporters from House and Senate galleries]. Clay, a master politician, perhaps guessed that already the Herald was useful to have on one’s side. He went to work and the rule fell . . . [soon] the solons rapidly accustomed themselves to orating for a national audience.

National elections came in 1856 – automatically a year ripe for trouble. At the very beginning of it, ominous stories were appearing from the territory of Kansas, opened to settlement since 1854. There had been elections for a legislature, bad blood between factions divided on the inescapable issue of slavery, angry claims of fraud, and then shootings.

Editors swung around in their chairs and scribbled notes; reporters boarded trains and steamboats and headed West to cover Kansas.

They wrote as actors, not spectators, and many believed that truth could be put to flight in a free and open encounter unless it received at least some assistance [from them].

They sallied forth to depict a contest between freedom and tyranny in the impressive arena “beyond the Mississippi.” The results boded ill for the caving Union.”

(Reporters for the Union, Bernard A. Weisberger, Little, Brown and Company, 1953, excerpts pp. 17-18; 20; 22-23)

The fledgling Northern press tagged themselves as the “Bohemian Brigade,” which fit their tattered existence and life “on the periphery of a society which scarcely understood their function.” The so-called reporters were suspected as spies, and their penchant for either reporting, or fabricating, what they saw or heard, caused consternation in Lincoln’s regime. The South had few real newspapers, as paper to print them on was scarce.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Stonewall and the British Reporter

“A more baffling problem of [press] coverage arose when Stonewall Jackson staged his Shenandoah campaign . . .  routing [Gen. Nathaniel] Banks at Front Royal and Winchester, threatening Washington, and making good his escape while Union armies converged on him from three directions.

When Jackson struck . . . G.W. Clarke, a Britisher representing the [New York] Herald, was “musing over the dullness of the war” in the hotel at Front Royal. [Northern] Colonel John R. Kenly, commanding a detachment of nine hundred men there, dispatched Clarke to cut the rope ferry across the Shenandoah [River]. Clarke won a citation in Kenly’s report, but he was captured [by Jackson’s forces] in the brisk skirmish that followed. He was introduced to the Confederate commander.

“Jackson reached his hand and caught mine, remarking he was glad to see anyone connected with the American Thunderer. “I am very glad to see you under the circumstances, General,” I said, “and I hope you will be good enough to pass me out of your lines as soon as possible.”

At this the General’s face changed slightly. He remarked that he had not time to attend to that just then, and rode off.

Clarke wrote to the General as a British subject to demand his release. At Winchester, Jackson granted him an interview.

“This time [Jackson] wore a blue military overcoat. “General, I suppose you will restore me my horse and clothes?”

“Oh,” replied he, “it was taken in the camp and must be considered contraband of war.”

“But . . . I stand as a neutral, and you know it to be the law of nations that a neutral flag covers neutral goods.”

“Yes,” said the rebel chieftain; “but the Southern Confederacy is not recognized by neutral nations, and, consequently cannot by bound by neutral laws.”

Clarke was released two weeks later at New Market – minus his goods. The other correspondents, for all their efforts to report Jackson’s whirlwind campaign, might just as well have been captured too.

Charles Henry Webb of the [New York] Times [was] . . . among the first to comprehend the genius of Thomas J. Jackson. “We may run the mountain fox to death yet . . . The correspondents of some papers claim it as a victory [over Jackson] . . . is it always necessary to pander to the [public] appetite that demands victory in all cases, an assurance that the enemy lost at least one more than we? One thing is certain, Jackson is equally eminent as a strategist and tactician. He handles his army like a whip . . . This retreat of his, if retreat it can be called, has been conducted with marvelous skill. He has not much mercy on his men, but he gets extraordinary marches out of them on very short commons.”

(Bohemian Brigade, Civil War Newsmen in Action; Louis M. Starr, University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, excerpts, pp. 119-122)

At the battle of First Manassas, a young Major Bryan Grimes served on the field and staff of the Fourth North Carolina Regiment under the command of Colonel George B. Anderson. Though Grimes did not participate in the battle, his view of how to treat the enemy was clear: “If my wishes could be consulted and followed I should say, raise the black flag and give no quarter to invading foes.” Witnessing the death and destruction caused by the enemy invasion of a formerly peaceful landscape hardened him to the grim task ahead.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Horror and Bitter Cost of War

“The month near the front impressed the major and altered his views on several matters. “Fighting from my opinion, is the least of the soldier’s exposures,” he observed. “The danger of battle is nothing in comparison to the risks from exposure to which he is subjected in camp life.”

His proximity to the July 21^st action allowed him to absorb firsthand the grim reality and harsh aftermath of the Manassas battle: “The stench now arising from the putrefaction of the dead is intolerable,” described the North Carolinian in a letter home.

“A [handkerchief] full of whiskey and an extra bottle to keep it full is the only means by which you can visit the severely contested spots on the battleground.”

Taking an interest in where his fellow Tarheels had fought during the engagement, Grimes sought out the spot where Col. Charles Fisher and the Sixth North Carolina was engaged. Fisher was killed during the action and the unit had suffered heavily.

Although the bodies had been removed, “at least fifty horses in an area the diameter of which is perhaps forty yards,” were rotting under the hot July sun. In addition to the flotsam of battle, burial sites littered the devastated landscape. “Near a church I saw eight freshly dug holes and one of the wounded (still at the church used as a hospital) informed me that he counted seventy dead bodies thrown into one of the pits.”

Clearly the aftermath of the fighting at Manassas had deeply affected the young officer. “If only you could visit our hospitals you would feel in all its horror the bitter cost of war. And if one drop of milk of human kindness toward them weren’t permitted to exhibit itself, you couldn’t be a true Southern man at heart.”

(Lee’s Last Major General: Bryan Grimes of North Carolina, T. Harrell Allen, 1999, Savas Publishing Company, excerpts pp. 31-34)

Northern prisoners, especially conscripted recent immigrants, had time to reconsider where their loyalties lay while awaiting exchange. William Irwin of Maine and 1700 others decided to enlist in the Eighth Confederate Battalion (formerly the Second Foreign Battalion) while imprisoned at Salisbury Prison in North Carolina. After the prison was overrun by Northern forces in April 1865, Irwin saw it wise to reestablish his spoken loyalty to Lincoln’s government.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Rethinking Loyalty

“As early as 1862 Union prisoners were joining the Confederate forces. This process continued with varying intensity throughout the war but saw its greatest results toward the end.

On 21 August 1864 the adjutant and inspector general issued General Order 65, which spelled out a new policy of encouraging enemy prisoners, particularly aliens, and most particularly Irish Catholics, to enlist with Confederate forces. In late 1864 Colonel Zebulon York established a camp about three miles west of the prison at Salisbury to which prisoners enlisting were taken to be trained and organized into Confederate units.

After the war the U.S. government compiled a list of prisoners who had sworn allegiance to the Confederacy based on the records of Salisbury prison . . . [and] the list contains some two thousand names. Most of the men were of Irish extraction.

Of 2,072 names on the list believed to be unique, nearly half (48 percent) were from units recruited in New York. The next largest was from Pennsylvania (15 percent), followed by Massachusetts (9 percent), the border States (6 percent), New Hampshire (4 percent), the regular army (4 percent), with the remaining 13 percent coming from twelve other States, including the District of Columbia.

[Colonel York’s] “Galvanized Yankees,” as they were called, gave a good account of themselves in defending the Yadkin /river bridge against General George Stoneman’s cavalry in April 1865. In summary, it would appear that the Confederate handling of prisoners of war deprived the Union of several thousand soldiers and made a modest addition to Confederate manpower.

There is no way of knowing how many Union prisoners agreed to serve as Confederate agents on their return north [when officially exchanged], but undoubtedly some did. In addition to direct recruitment, the Confederacy also exploited the exchanges to plant its own agents under assumed identities.”

(Come Retribution, the Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln, William A. Tidwell, University of Mississippi Press, 1988, excerpts pp. 121-124)

In 1960, liberal Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against John F. Kennedy, citing the latter’s Catholicism as an issue – and his campaign was known to have mailed anti-Catholic literature to Humphrey supporters. Though defeated two to one by Kennedy in the West Virginia primary and eventually dropping out of the race, Humphrey reappeared as Lyndon Johnson’s running mate in 1964. The resurgent Klan of 1915 was nationalistic, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and marched throughout the country under its flag of choice, the Stars and Stripes.  It should be noted that West Virginia was considered a “Northern” State during the 1861-65 conflict, and ruled by Lincoln’s proconsuls.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Liberal Roars of Prejudice and Bigotry 

“[Kennedy] assured his audience he “was not the Catholic candidate for President. Do not expect me to explain or defend every act or statement of every Pope or priest . . . if there is bigotry in this country, then so be it . . .”

The [Hubert] Humphrey forces were also not above using the religious issue [against Kennedy]. Reporter Joseph Alsop was more explicit. After sampling voter sentiment, the liberal columnist reported that:

“Sen. Humphrey owes to prejudice well over half his support in the four places polled . . . if Sen. Humphrey wins the West Virginia primary, as he may well do, he will owe his victory to the Ku Klux Klan-minded voters. He will also win with powerful help from an admitted ex-Kluxer, Sen. Robert C. Byrd.”

“The mystery of the West Virginia primary,” Alsop wrote later, “is the role of Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. Here is a hot, crucial Democratic contest, in which naked religious prejudice is the demonstrated source of at least half the voter support for Sen. Humphrey, the liberal enemy of prejudice in all forms.”

In an intensive statewide survey, Alsop reported, the Wall Street Journal’s Alan L. Otten found that “at least seven out of ten” prospective Humphrey voters were animated by prejudice. The New York Times William H. Lawrence wrote: “There are few voters intending to vote for him who identify themselves as “for” Humphrey. Most simply say they are “anti-Kennedy,” primarily on religious grounds.”

In similar circumstances, said Alsop, if Kennedy’s opponent were Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, “the acknowledged voices of American liberalism would be making the National Welkin ring with their roars of indignation. Actually, the Liberals have held off, because Sen. Humphrey is one of their own.”

(Hubert, an Unauthorized Biography of the Vice-President, Allan H. Ryskind, Arlington House, 1968, excerpts pp. 249-250)

The message sent to us today when reading the biography and accomplishments of Jefferson Davis of Mississippi include the following: West Point graduate, married to Sarah Knox Taylor, daughter of General and President Zachary Taylor, colonel of Mississippi Volunteers in the Mexican War, served in both the United States House and Senate, Secretary of War, pleaded for peace between North and South in 1860-61 as a Unionist, and served as president of the Confederate States of America, 1861-65. Few Americans exhibited as distinguished a career as Davis.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

A Great Intellectual Silence

“So the anti-Confederate backlash has come to Dallas . . . but, then, maybe not. Maybe that isn’t fundamentally what happened when the Dallas school board, in June [1999], voted to rename mostly black and Hispanic Jefferson Davis Elementary School for Barbara Jordan, the late Houston congresswoman.

Here, likely, is what happened: Within the community at large, a failure of nerve occurred, a moral power outage, leaving residents plunged in darkness. The same failure of nerve afflicted New Orleans over a year ago, when the name of infamous slaveowner George Washington was removed from an elementary school, to be replaced with – I don’t recall and don’t care to; Sojourner Truth or some like luminary.

You could say, and I wouldn’t argue the point, that on both occasions the antebellum South received deliberate kicks in the groin, and that this form of reprisal was unfortunate and unjust. Davis, Washington: prisoners in a kangaroo court, due to peripheral association with the peculiar institution of slavery. Malarkey!

Also, you can bet your bottom dollar this species of malarkey is sure to spread, two large Southern cities having capitulated so cravenly.

Now, to begin with, we’re talking here about education. Well, about public schools at least. You might expect, in the context of a controversy over the naming of a school, some attention to historical accuracy. Ah, no.

“The name sends a very bad message,” says Se-Gwyn Tyler, who represents the city council district in which ex-Jefferson Davis Elementary is located. Well, ma’am, do you really know that?

Ever read a biography of Davis? Know where he lived, what posts he held before the war? How historians evaluate him? If this is the standard of knowledge regnant at the decision-making level in Dallas, how can one be sure the Davis critics are right that Barbara Jordan is the ideal role model?

Are we to sit quietly while a dead man is vilified and misrepresented? While history itself is distorted? We’re not to utter a peep or reproach? Not so much as a civil objection? That would seem the case.

The major fault in the Davis matter, it seems to me, doesn’t attach to those who sought a name change. The major fault attaches to those who sat through the name-change procedure with eyes and mouths resolutely closed, believing apparently that expiation was a larger public good than truth. Failure of nerve indeed! Cowardice on the half-shell. Hush, we mustn’t offend.

Well, actually, it’s all right to offend those who retain some reverence for the dead; we just mustn’t offend members of cultures and subgroups arguing for affirmation.

A great intellectual silence descends over modern society. We can’t talk about everything; we certainly can’t talk in a spirit of honesty. And we know it. This is what rankles: We know we can’t, and we pass it off as of no great or immediate consequence. Failure of nerve.”

(Roll, Jordan, Roll; Letter from Texas, William Murchison, Chronicles, October 1999, excerpts pg. 37)

The idea of States withdrawing from the Union was not new in 1860, the first being New England’s desire for independence once the Louisiana Purchase was contemplated, and afterward during the War of 1812, and as other territories were added. It is said that John C. Calhoun learned his concept of secession from the New Englanders. In 1850, as described below, the withdrawal of the South from the Union was well along and only a matter of time.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Impassable Breach in 1850

“[Silver Bluff], 17 March 1850

“The Session of Congress has been stormy and thus far nothing has been done but to debate Slavery and the Union. The South has threatened dissolution through many Representatives, in doing which [Robert] Toombs of [Georgia] and [Thomas] Clingman of [North Carolina], both Whigs, have taken the lead. [South Carolina] rather silent.

In the Senate [Jeremiah] Clemens of [Alabama], [Solomon] Downs of [Louisiana], [Henry] Foote and [Jefferson] Davis of [Mississippi have been the most violent. Many calculations have been paraded showing the advantage of disunion to the South. On the other hand threats of coercion have been made freely by minor men. There have been some terrible scenes in the House.

The North has given up the Wilmot proviso for the present, on the avowed ground that that Slavery is naturally excluded from the newly acquired Territories. The main question is on the admission of California as a State – the adventurers there having without any of the usual forms, made a Constitution, excluding Slavery, and asked for admission into the Union.

[Henry] Clay has brought in a long string of what he calls compromise resolutions, which surrender everything in issue to the North. He has denounced the South bitterly and prophesied, if not threatened, Civil war and coercion.

The South contends that the admission of California [as a free State] destroys her equality in the Senate – already merely nominal there, for Delaware belongs to the North. That deprived of equality there [in the number of slave vs. free States] and already in a vast minority in the House and Electoral College, she will be undone.

Mr. [John C.] Calhoun has made an admirable speech, showing that the equilibrium between the North and South is utterly annihilated, and must be restored or we must separate. As such a restoration is well known to be an impossibility – his proposition is plainly – Disunion.

Webster followed with a most eloquent speech, denouncing the free-soil and anti-fugitive [slave] movements, but denouncing slavery and yielding nothing. At this moment, however, my impression is that they will enter into another fatal truce and stave off the difficulty for the present.

I have had drawn up for a month . . . many resolutions which I had intended to proposed there, if I could get backing. They are short and to the effect that Conventions should be immediately called in the Slave States to send Delegates to a General Congress, empowered to dissolve the Union, form a new Constitution, and organize a new Government, and in the meantime appoint a Provisional Government until the Constitution could go into operation.”

(Secret and Sacred, the Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder; Carol Bleser, editor, Oxford University Press, 1988, excerpts pp. 197-198)