Circa1865

In the postwar Rutherford B. Hayes was twice-governor of Ohio and retired to private life after his second term. In early 1875 Republicans encouraged the vain Hayes to run again for a third term, assuring him that it would not require him to give up his private business – and that he would be the most prominent candidate for president in 1876. Hayes viewed anti-Catholicism as a shrewd campaign strategy and it is interesting to note that the Republicans depended greatly upon German Protestants in their war against the South, with their anti-Catholicism being a plus. Also, the Republican party had absorbed the anti-Catholic Know Nothing party in 1854.

The Anti-Catholic Party

“The day after his nomination [for governor, Hayes] wrote of the approaching contest: “The interesting point is to rebuke the [Democrats] by a defeat for subserviency to Roman Catholic demands.” It need not be thought that Hayes himself was necessarily a bigot; but he certainly intended to exploit the bigotry of others.

Earlier in the year the Democratic legislature had adopted the so-called Geghan bill to permit Catholic priests to minister to the spiritual needs of inmates of the Ohio Penitentiary and other State institutions, whereas previously only the officially appointed chaplains, Protestants always, had possessed the privilege. Hayes proposed to capitalize on the situation by refocusing that fear onto an institution much closer to home than the State prison.

The strategy of the campaign was really quite simple. An ambitious lawyer in Canton, Ohio, named William McKinley, explained it best: “We have here a large Catholic population which is thoroughly Democratic, a large German element that hitherto have been mainly Democratic, they hate the Catholics – their votes we must get.”

Throughout the campaign Hayes adjured his supporters: “We must not let the Catholic question drop out of sight. If they do not speak of it, we must attack them for their silence. If they discuss it, refer to it, they can’t help getting into trouble.” Hayes personally supervised the preparation of leaflets on the subject.

Hayes was elected by a plurality of about five thousand votes out of half a million cast. The professional politicians of the Republican party promptly discovered the “Catholic question” in Pennsylvania and other northern States.

Just as his friends had prophesied, the new governor of Ohio was immediately spoken of as a presidential candidate.

(The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction, Keith Ian Polakoff, LSU Press, 1973, excerpts pp. 34-36)

The scramble to organize the Republican party in the conquered States in 1867-68 was critical to maintain party ascendancy – the black man was to be enfranchised and told that voting Democratic would return them to the chains of slavery – their Republican friends would keep them free with Grant elected in 1868. Thus the freedmen were turned against their friends and neighbors by the infamous Union League in return for minor patronage positions for those delivering the black vote to the Republican party. Grant won the presidency against Horatio Seymour of New York by only 300,000 votes – a narrow victory achieved with 500,000 black votes.

Party Above Country

“Immediately after the war there a brief period of uncertainty [in Republican ranks] about the course to follow in reconstruction the Union. However, when several of the lately seceded States refused to accept in complete good faith Andrew Johnson’s plan of restoration, the Republicans were all but unanimous in imposing a much more stringent set of terms designed to remake the entire electoral system of the South. Purely political considerations were undoubtedly a factor.

The three-fifths clause of the Constitution having become a dead letter with the abolition of slavery, the Southern States stood to gain thirteen seats in the House of Representatives and thirteen votes in the Electoral College. Were the “solid South” to join just two Northern States – New York and Indiana – voting Democratic, the party of [Stephen] Douglas, [James] Buchanan and Jefferson Davis would recapture the presidency and resume control of the nation’s destiny.

It was an appalling prospect for any sincere Republican to contemplate; so the party had no choice but to follow the lead of Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens on the questions of Reconstruction.

[Conservatives] within the party, who in no way shared the Radicals concern with equal political rights for Negroes, accepted black suffrage in 1867 and 1869 because the exigencies of the situation seemed to demand it [if Republicans were to maintain political dominance].”

(The Politics of Inertia: The Election of 1876 and the End of Reconstruction, Keith Ian Polakoff, LSU Press, 1973, excerpts pp. 14-15)

The slaves of Middle Ages Britain were not African, nor were the slaves of the Church in Europe. In Anglo-Saxon England the slaves and peasants lived in great squalor, in small windowless thatched-roof huts with refuse dump-floors. An open-hearth fire vented to a hole in the roof. Most English slaves were reduced to that state as punishment for crimes, failure to pay fines or for being in debt. Also, children born of slaves of any origin were declared to be slaves as well. What is described below was medieval England, not the American South of 1860.

British Slaves, Serfs and Human Loot

“There were true slaves in the Middle Ages, of course, men who worked like domestic animals, doing whatever kind of labor the lord demanded, and for whatever length of time he ordered. Many had begun their slavery as captives of war. After the Anglo-Saxons invaded England in the fifth century A.D., the word for the person without freedom was “Welshman” – the name of the native Britons that they enslaved.

“Welsh” eventually came to mean slave. (It was what would happen later when the word for “slave” itself was taken from Slav – the name of the Slavic peoples captured and sold into slavery in great numbers).

Until the Normans conquered the country in 1066, many Englishmen were sold abroad in the slavemarkets of Europe and the East. William the Conqueror permitted domestic slavery to continue, but he banned the sale of English slaves overseas.

The slaves who remained at home often saw their children and grandchildren melt into the condition of serfdom. The serfs worked the lord’s lands, but were left time enough to cultivate their own plots, out of which they paid dues and taxes, in money or in goods. They were obliged to be on call with their labor to build castles, bridges and roads. And in some times and places, they were liable for arbitrary taxes, imposed by the lord whenever “necessary.” Unfree to one degree or another, such a peasant was called “serf,” a name taken from the old Roman word for slave – servus.

For many centuries, popes and bishops, churches and monasteries owned slaves. Pope Gregory I (590-814) used hundreds of slaves on the papal estates. Early in the eighth century, the Abbey of St. Germain des Pres near Paris had 8,000 slaves and St. Martin of Tours had 20,000.

It was just before 800 [A.D.] that the Vikings began to raid the coasts of the British Isles. The natives they captured were of little use in their own service, so they traded most of them to Constantinople (the Byzantium of earlier days and now Istanbul) or Islamic Spain. In those markets the human loot was converted into gold, silks, wine and weapons.

A glimpse into an English slave’s life is given in the writings of Bishop Aelfric of the late tenth century. A plowman in one of his works says:

“I go out at dawn driving the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plough. It is never so harsh a winter that I dare lurk at home for fear of my master, but when the oxen have been yoked and the ploughshare and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough each day a full acre or more . . . I must fill the oxen’s manger with hay, and water them, and clear out the dung . . . It is heavy work, because I am not free.”

(The Medieval Slave; Slavery: A World History, Milton Meltzer, Da Capo Press, 1993, excerpts pp. 209-211; 213)

The “Code Noir” issued by Louis XIV to establish governance in relation to African slaves in French colonial possessions was far more humane than what came before. Slaves had no rights at all under Roman law, Old Testament law only distinguished between Hebrew and non-Hebrew slaves, and the New Testament only spoke of the obedience of slaves to their masters. Further, most saw none if any difference between serfs and slaves, and used the terms interchangeably. Above all, the African was not alone in slavery as the term “slave” has its origins in the Slavic regions of Eastern Europe. Slavs were taken into slavery by Spanish Muslims during the Ninth Century A.D.; the texts of Islam, Judaism and Christianity all recognize slavery, and the Aztec and Mayan cultures kept slaves. In Africa prior to the arrival of Europeans, several kingdoms and societies kept their own brethren as slaves.

Jesuits and the Code Noir

“The Jesuits were the first missionary order to settle in the French West Indies, coming to Martinique in 1640. It was Jesuits who started the first sugar plantation on Martinique, and by 1650 they had become the second largest slaveholder on the island.

Given that the Church in France had long supported itself with the labor of slaves and serfs, it is not surprising that religious orders in France’s Caribbean colonies used slave labor to support their activities. Father Labat, a Dominican priest who directed a slave plantation in Martinique, did not seem at all embarrassed at being a slave owner, but he became extremely upset when people accused him of dabbling in commerce.

The earliest draft of the Code Noir, submitted by the governor of France’s Caribbean colonies on May 20, 1682, dealt with issues of slave subsistence, policing, judgments, and punishment, but did not mention religion at all. Later that year the Jesuits of Martinique submitted a memorandum to King Louis XIV warning him about the harmful religious influences that Jews and Protestants were exerting on slaves in the islands.

The Jews, the Jesuits charged, “have in their own homes a great number of slaves whom they introduce to Judaism, or at least divert from Christianity.” As for the Protestants, the Jesuits urged, “they should not be allowed to practice their religion in any way.”

When the Code Noir was issued by Louis XIV in March 1685, its religious emphasis was obvious. The preamble specified that its primary purpose was “to maintain the discipline of the Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church . . .” [and] required that all slaves should be baptized and given instruction in the Catholic religion . . . and ordered all subjects to observe all Catholic holidays.

The Jesuits saw the Code Noir as a humanitarian document that curbed some of the worst abuses of slaveholders. It set minimum food and clothing rations for slaves, forbade masters from murdering their slaves, and made provision for their manumission. At the same time, however . . . it [declared] the slaves moveable property and stating that any personal property possessed by the slave belonged to his or her master.

(The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade, Robert Harms, Basic Books, 2002, excerpts pp. 25-26)

A great irony of history is Massachusetts adopting in 1837 the first of the so-called personal liberty laws, ostensibly to protect free Negroes in the United States, given that Massachusetts stood in the front rank of those responsible for bringing enslaved Africans to American shores. No such laws were necessary until the rise of the New England abolitionists, and their incessant agitation, which eventually brought on a war which claimed a million lives, both black and white.

The Slaves of New England

“At the time the Constitution was adopted, slavery existed in every one of the thirteen States except Massachusetts, though in some other acts had been passed providing for its gradual abolition.

It was deemed essential, therefore, to the peaceful relations of the several States as well as the legal rights of slaveholders that some provision should be inserted into the Federal Constitution dealing with the return of fugitive slaves as well as fugitives from justice.

The necessity, as well as the justice, of fugitive slave laws was recognized almost contemporaneously with the introduction of slavery into this country. Thus, in the Article of Confederation adopted in 1643, between the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, it was provided:

“If any servant runn away from his master into any other of these Confederated Jurisdiccons, that in such case upon the Certiyficate of one Magistrate in the Jursidiccon out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proofe, the said servant shall be delivered either to his master or any other that pursues and brings such certyficate or proofe.”

Provisions of like character were incorporated in many of the treaties between the various colonies and the Indian tribes, and later between the United States Government and the Indians.

On the 12th of February, 1793, Congress passed an act providing for the method of carrying into effect the section of the Constitution relating to fugitives from justice and fugitive slaves. It passed both houses of Congress by practically unanimous votes – Washington approving the bill with his signature.

With respect . . . to fugitive slaves, the authority and burden of dealing with their return was placed upon officers of the Federal Government as well as upon certain State officials. But with the rise of the Abolitionists at the North, difficulties in executing the law began to appear – especially as to fugitive slaves. The Abolitionists, by every form of suggestion and appeal, incited and assisted slaves to desert their masters, while the Underground Railroad provided increasing facilities for accomplishing the result.

Professor A.B. Hart, of Harvard University, says:

“The Underground Railroad was not a route but a network; not an organization, but a conspiracy of thousands of people banded together for the deliberate purpose of depriving their Southern neighbors of their property and of defying the Fugitive Slave Laws of the United States.”

(Virginia’s Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession, Beverley B. Mumford, L.H. Jenkins Publisher, 1909, excerpts pp. 201-205)

Republican opposition to compromise efforts brought forth by Democrats thwarted attempts to truly “save the Union.” Ohio Democrats Samuel S. Cox and John A. Crittenden formed a committee in late December 1860 to craft compromises more palatable to Lincoln and his Republican cohorts. By February 4, 1861, Republican party intransigence triumphed over peace as the Crittenden Compromise emitted a dying gasp. It was then clear which party was “disloyal” to the Union and Constitution, and who was to blame for bringing on a war destined to kill a million Americans.

Lincoln Versus “20 Millions of Secesh”

“If what the abolition disunionists say be true [that] no power on earth can prevent its success, and let us see why. They declare that all who vote the Democratic ticket are disloyal to our Government – “sympathizers” with the rebellion, etc. If this be true, let us see how strong the rebels are. The vote of 1860 developed about seven inhabitants to every voter in the land.

Now, there are in the loyal States the following numbers that vote the Democratic ticket, which will not probably vary 5,000 either way – near enough to meet the argument: 1,685,000.

Here, then, right in the loyal States, are one million, six hundred and eighty-five thousand votes that “sympathize with the rebellion,” according to Abolition say-so. Multiply this by seven, and you have 11,795,000 persons here at the North who are in “open sympathy with the rebels.”

Add this vast number to the 10,000,000 in the rebel States, and its gives 21,795,000 “traitors,” which, subtracted from the 30,000,000 of the entire white population of the whole Union, and it leaves only 8,205,000 “loyal” people to contend against over twenty millions of “secesh.”

This argument is not ours. It is only the presentation of the Abolition “argument,” and the bare statement shows the malicious absurdity of the Abolition asservation. Let the Administration once throw out the “copperhead” element, and it will find itself in a woefully decimated dilemma.”

(Miscellaneous Facts and Figures, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XXXVII, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 305-306)

No Union Saved

“The notion that Lincoln “saved the Union” is as naïve as the notion that he “freed the slaves.” The Union he saved was not the one he set out to save. The Civil War destroyed the “balance or powers” between the States and the federal government which he had promised to protect in his 1861 inaugural address.

This was not Lincoln’s intention, but it is the reason many of his champions praise him. James McPherson celebrates Lincoln’s “second American Revolution”; Gary Wills exults that Lincoln “changed America” with the Gettysburg Address, which he admits was a “swindle” (albeit a benign one).

In other words, Lincoln’s war destroyed the original constitutional relation between the States and the federal government. His own defenders say so – in spite of his explicit, clear and consistent professed intent to “preserve” that relation.

The Civil War wasn’t just a victory of North over South; it was a victory for centralized government over the States and federalism. It destroyed the ability of the States to protect themselves against the destruction of their reserved powers.

Must we all be happy about this? Lincoln himself – the real Lincoln, that is, – would have deprecated the unintended results of the war. Though he sometimes resorted to dictatorial methods, he never meant to create a totalitarian state.

It’s tragic that slavery was intertwined with a good cause, and scandalous that those who defend that cause today should be smeared as partisans of slavery. But the verdict of history must not be left to the simple-minded and the demagogic.”

(Slavery, No; Secession, Yes, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, March 2001, Volume 8, Number 3, excerpts pg. 9)

Though Lincoln initially acted unilaterally to launch his war against Americans in the South, he did seek absolution when Congress convened in July 1861 – though the threat of arrest and imprisonment became common for those who opposed his will. In his treatment of what he or his minions believed to be “disloyal” practices, Lincoln carried his authority far beyond the normal restraints of civil justice, and in violation of fundamental concepts of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.

Republican Tyranny in Indiana

“Before Abraham Lincoln ordered a national draft, which would cause insurrections throughout the North, the President put into law the involuntary call-up of each State’s militia. Indiana inducted 3,090 men into the national army this way, but this caused a major backlash of violent resistance. More significantly, the Democrats won substantial victories in both houses of the Indiana Assembly in the fall of 1862.

With the loss of Republican power, [Governor] Oliver P. Morton became more emotionally unbalanced. He saw treason everywhere, and expected a revolution at any moment. At the beginning of 1863, Indiana’s Democrats voted for peace negotiations with the Confederacy. Simultaneously, many Republican army officers, appointed by Morton, resigned their commissions over Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the governor’s support of this radical document, which would destroy State sovereignty. Army recruitment stagnated and desertions increased.

[Morton] blamed “organized conspirators” — meaning Democrats. Under his orders, Indiana soldiers threatened Senator Thomas Hendricks and Daniel Voorhees, both leading Democrats. Then these troops destroyed Democratic newspapers in Rockport and Terre Haute.

On January 8, 1863, amidst military failures and malignant partisanship, the Indiana legislature began its bi-annual session. Morton telegraphed Secretary of War [Edwin] Stanton that the legislature intended to recognize the Confederacy, implying that the federal army’s interference was required to arrest the “traitors” in the Assembly, as had been done in Maryland [in April 1861].

The Republican members determined to withdraw from the House . . . thus the legislature came to an end . . . [and] Morton would administer the State all alone. His first problem was to secure the money to rule as a tyrant for the next two years [and] with the President’s approval collected $90,000 “for ammunition for the State arsenal.” The Republican Indiana State Journal triumphantly announced that this money would really be used to carry on the functions of government.

Governor Morton quickly exhausted these funds. Once again he met with . . . Lincoln . . . An appropriation of 2.3 million dollars had need made by Congress in July 1862, to be expended by the President “to loyal citizens in States threatened with rebellion,” and in organizing such citizens for their own protection against domestic insurrection.

When Stanton placed [Lincoln’s] order in Morton’s hands, both men appreciated the great risk they were incurring. “If the cause fails, we shall both be covered in prosecutions,” Morton said. Stanton replied, “if the cause fails, I do not wish to live.”

(Northern Opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s War, D. Jonathan White, editor, Abbeville Institute Press, 2014, excerpts pp. 217-221)

Lincoln the Tragic Hero

“[Lincoln’s] favorite play was Macbeth. He had read it often, he wrote to the actor James Hackett, “perhaps as frequently as any unprofessional reader . . . I think nothing equals Macbeth. It is wonderful.” He had seen Booth in that role too.

Lincoln’s fascination with this play is itself interesting. He knew that much of the country saw him as a Macbeth – a tyrant, a usurper, a murderer, and his conscience may have promoted him to ask whether he could reasonably be seen in that light. He had expected a quick end to the “rebellion,” but the war had dragged on for years, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives.

Many Northerners clamored for a peace settlement. If the war was not justified, Lincoln had much to answer for, infinitely more than he could have imagined at the beginning.

Apart from the scale of violence against the South, including its civilian population and their property, Lincoln aroused angry opposition in the North. “Saving the Union” had required him to transgress against the Constitution and civil liberties; he acted as a dictator, assuming both legislative and executive powers.

An Illinois newspaper accused him of “seeking to inaugurate a reign of terror in the loyal States by military arrests . . . of citizens without a trial, to browbeat all opposition by villainous and false charges of disloyalty against whole classes of patriotic citizens, to destroy all constitutional guarantees of free speech, a free press, and the writ of habeas corpus.”

His biographer David Donald notes: “Editors feared that they might be locked up in Fort Lafayette or in the Old Capitol Prison in Washington if they voiced their criticisms too freely, and even writers of private letters began to guard their language.”

As the ghastly war continued inconclusively, Lincoln must have pondered Macbeth’s words:

“I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far, that should I wade no more

Returning were as tedious as go o’er”

In scale of character, in eloquence, and in impact on his country, Lincoln had the dimensions of a Shakespearean tragic hero. Aristotle wrote in his Poetics that tragic action must have “magnitude”; and Lincoln’s action certainly had that quality. He also displayed the tragic flaw of rash judgment; despite his deliberation, he had ignored the advice of his cabinet by launching war over Fort Sumter, failing to foresee the madly disproportionate violence that would ensue from a legalistic dispute over secession.

The tragic hero is neither saint, villain, nor passive victim: he is the cause of his own and his society’s ruin, in spite of his own intention. As Aristotle says, the ruin of a purely innocent man is not tragic, it is injustice. That of a purely evil man is not tragedy, but justice.

Lincoln was driven to meditate on the events he had set in motion. By the fall of 1862 he was reflecting: “In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party.” In 1864 he wrote: “I claim not to have controlled events, but plainly confess that events have controlled me.”

Was he trying to disclaim responsibility? He always insisted that the South “began” the war, which, even if true, would not necessarily mean that the South bore the guilt for what the war became. Perhaps sensing this, he referred the problem to Providence, which had allowed the war to continue and spread.”

(America’s Tragic Hero, Joseph Sobran, Sobran’s Real News of the Month, March 2001, Volume 8, Number 3, excerpts pp. 4-5)

Lincoln soon realized that his war to save the union was an impossible dream and that the only way to victory was invasion and capturing slaves to deny the agricultural South of its needed labor force. Additionally, he allowed State governors to recruit homeless blacks in areas overrun by Northern troops and credit them to State quotas – thus relieving white Northerners of having to fight in an unpopular abolition war. William Milo Stone (1827-1893) below was a native of New York who moved to Iowa and served as captain in a State regiment. He was captured at Shiloh and paroled by President Jefferson Davis to help facilitate a prisoner exchange.

Another Myth of Saving the Union

“Col. [William M.] Stone, the Governor of Iowa, in canvassing that State in the summer of 1863, in his speech in Keokuk on the 3rd of August, said:

“Fellow citizens – I was not formerly an abolitionist, nor did I formerly suppose I would ever become one, but I am now [and] have been for the last nine months, an unadulterated abolitionist. Fellow citizens – the opposition charge that this is an abolition war. Well, I admit that this is an abolition war. It was not such at the start, but the administration has discovered that they could not subdue the South else than making it an abolition war, and they have done so . . . and it will be continued as an abolition war as long as there is one slave at the South to be made free. Never, never can there be peace made, nor is peace desirable, until the last link of slavery is abolished . . .”

Morrow B. Lowry, an abolition State Senator in Pennsylvania, at a [Union] League meeting in Philadelphia in 1863 said:

“This war is for the African and his race . . . When this war was no bigger than my hand, I said that if any Negro would bring me his disloyal master’s head, I would give him one hundred and sixty acres of his master’s plantation (Laughter and applause).

[A] Washington correspondent of the Chicago Tribune said through that sheet . . . “For years the disunionists of the North have manifested the boldness of Cromwell, the assiduity of beavers, the cunning of foxes, [and] the malignancy of Iscariots. Their money has been poured out free as water, in publishing and circulating Abolition tracts, speeches, inflammatory and incendiary appeals – not to national honor and pride, but to the passions and hot bed sentimentalities that fester in the breasts of malcontents.

In 1852, a series of pamphlets were issued for Massachusetts, entitled, “The United States Constitution and its Pro-Slavery Compromises.” From the “Third edition, enlarged,” of this treasonable publication we take the following:

“If, then, the people and the courts of a country are to be allowed to determine what their own laws mean, it follows that at this time, and for the last half-century, the Constitution of the United States has been, and still is a pro-slavery instrument, and that anyone who swears to support it, swears to do pro-slavery acts, [thus] violates his duty both as a man and as an Abolitionist.”

(Progress of the Northern Conspiracy (Continued)., The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XII, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 59-60)