Circa1865

John C. Calhoun – Born March 18, 1782 at Abbeville, South Carolina

The passage below is taken from Dr. Clyde N. Wilson’s Introduction to “John C. Calhoun: American Portrait” by Margaret Coit. (Houghton Mifflin, 1950). Dr. Wilson notes that the outcome of the war of 1861 -1865 “fixed and image of Calhoun as a fanatic” and a defender of African slavery by authors who knew little of the early history of that worldwide institution or the American political system created by the States themselves. In her book, Coit reminds the reader that Calhoun was educated in Connecticut where slavery was still practiced, and Jeffersonian Democracy was still preached by many.

Calhoun the Jeffersonian Democrat

“From 1811 to 1850 – as a representative from South Carolina, secretary of war, vice president, twice a presidential contender, secretary of state, and senator for fifteen years – John C. Calhoun was a central figure in the American experience. He was never predominant in influence, even in the South in his own lifetime, but there was never a time when he was not a major player who had to be taken into account.

Despite the absence of all the hallmarks of political power – large political base and patronage power – Calhoun arrested public attention and influenced public opinion. He had a major if not always decisive influence on every issue of the period – in regard not only to State and federal conflict over authority, but also to free trade and tariff, banking and currency, taxation and expenditures, war and peace, foreign relations, Indian policy, public lands, internal improvements, the two-party system, and the struggle between congressional and presidential power.

Calhoun was part of the Great Triumvirate with Webster and Clay which ‘triangulated the destiny of the nation’ according to Merrill D. Peterson. They were American political life between the time that Jefferson crossed the Potomac going South for the last time, leaving behind a modest federal establishment for a union of the States, and that time when Lincoln, with the help of General Grant and Sherman, forged the modern American state out of blood and fire.”

A Great Evil to the Cause of Human Liberty Itself

“We must remember that by 1860 a “Cold War” had been in progress between the North and the South for some thirty years. There were political and ideological extremists on both sides. If Southern leaders were determined that the US Constitution would be followed to the letter or they would withdraw, Northern extremists were just as determined to dominate the South and force it to remain in the 1789 federation.

Politically the South felt she was being “frozen out” of a voice in the federal government. The Democratic party was split between opposing views of its Northern and Southern wings, and there appeared no way of resolving their differences. The Whig party was dying as an audible voice in government with no hope of recovery. The new Republican party was controlled by radical leaders who were bent upon winning an election with the surest way being the destruction of the South’s labor system of African bondage. This institution was already in its twilight years for in 1860 only 10 percent of Southerners owned slaves. Only one man in the South owned over 1000 slaves with 187,356 owning less than five Negro servants.

However, the great majority of Southerners felt that the Constitution gave no authority to Congress to interfere with a State’s internal labor system – North or South. But if slavery were to be legalized out of existence, there should be some way for the country as a whole to assume the responsibility for dissolving the institution without putting the burden or the stigma upon one section where slave-labor happened to form a basis of its economic system. The slave-labor system was essentially mass-production agriculture and New England mills hummed with the product of this labor system.

That said, the slave-labor system in the South did not arise because the Englishmen who settled Virginia were particularly committed to the enslavement of their fellow human beings. It arose for the same reason and at the same time that the transatlantic slave trade arose in New England – because it was profitable. Slavery came to the South for the same reason that cattle-raising came to Texas, cattle-slaughter to Chicago, the exploitation of Okies to California, and the exploitation of immigrants to Northern factory owners. It came because, in a new and vast land where everyone had come for opportunity. The soil and the climate of the American South were peculiarly adapted to the use of chattel labor imported from the hot climate of Africa.

From 1831 to 1861 Southerners were aroused to defense by the vindictiveness of the fanatics who were as callously indifferent to the means as they were irresponsible for the ends.

To Northern abolitionists, the emancipation of slaves achieved the goal of “freedom”; to all Southerners, four million black people in a society of five and a half million whites created an appalling problem. It was a problem that Lincoln, contrary to the myth of a logical progression toward human liberty, understood very well. He wrote on slavery: “I think no wise man has yet perceived how it could be at once eradicated without producing a great evil even to the cause of human liberty itself.”

(Martin County During the Civil War. James H. McCallum, M.D., Enterprise Publishing Co., 1971, pp. 4-6)

Tale of Two Black Seamen

In early 1864 Brigadier-General Robert F. Hoke was tasked with liberating the enemy-occupied and fortified town of Plymouth on the Roanoke River in northeastern North Carolina. He began formulating his attack with the naval assistance of the still-incomplete ironclad ram CSS Albemarle, which was literally built in a cornfield well upriver from Plymouth.

The unfinished ship had its steam up at early dawn on April 18^th and departed for Plymouth with final construction still ongoing. The Albemarle was instrumental in the enemy’s defeat as it bombarded forts with its 6.4-inch pivot-mounted Brooke guns while Hoke’s brave North Carolinians surrounded and rushed the enemy.

At least one of the black crewmembers on the ironclad was free-black teenager Benjamin H. Gray of Bertie County who was first assigned to the Wilmington Squadron warships and detached in the Spring of 1864 to the Albemarle. His position aboard was carrying bags of gunpowder to the two Brooke guns from the lower magazine. This was not unusual as free-black crewmen were common on Southern vessels; the CSS Chicora at least three black men serving aboard as well as the raider Alabama.

Ship’s carpenter Edward Walsh served on a long string of blockade runners operating between Wilmington and Bermuda. He was captured on the runner Elsie and sent to prison at Baltimore, and after his release made his way to Halifax where he signed aboard the runner Constance, then back to Wilmington where he joined the crew of the runner Annie. By the end of the war, he had run the blockade 16 times, had two ships sunk under him, and was aboard two captured by the enemy.

Dr. Edward Smith of American University has estimated that by February 1865, 1150 free-black seamen served aboard Southern warships, which amounted to about 20 percent of total naval personnel. A postwar resident of Bertie County, Gray was a Confederate pensioner; after his death in 1917 his widow Margaret received it.

Sources:

(Bermuda and the Civil War, C. Diechmann, Bermuda National Trust, 2003; NCDNR)

The passage below records Lincoln’s narrow, sectional view of the reason war came in 1861. The war came not because the black man was in America, but due to Lincoln raising an unconstitutional army with troops from equally guilty Republican governors and invading Virginia. Three months lapsed before Congress met to review what the new president had done without authority, with the latter approving his actions under threat of arrest and confinement by Lincoln’s private military.

Lincoln’s colonization scheme for black “contrabands” who were not wanted in the north, revealed his true feeling toward the black race. This naïve plan ran into difficulty as speculators overextended themselves and as the existing countries of the region threatened war against what they saw as a clever scheme of Yankee imperialism. This scheme of colonization is well-covered in the recent book “Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here” (Thuersam) from Shotwell Publishing.

Lincoln’s Caribbean Colonization Plan

“In August 1862, a committee of free blacks headed by Edward M. Thomas, president of the Anglo-African Institution for the Encouragement of Industry and Art, was invited to the White House. Introduced to Lincoln by the Reverend James Mitchell, the federal Commissioner of Emigration, the committee was there to hear the president’s arguments for black colonization.

Waiving the question of right or wrong, and implying that blacks were as much at fault as whites, Lincoln pointed to the long-standing and apparently permanent antipathy between the races.  Each race, in his opinion, suffered from the presence of the other. Not only were the vast majority of blacks held as slaves, but even free blacks were not treated as equals by white men, not could they ever expect to be. “The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours.”

Overlooking the inability of his own race to confront the reciprocal problems of slavery and equality, Lincoln then blamed the blacks for the fact that whites were “cutting one another’s throats” in a civil war. “But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or another.”

Physical removal seemed the best solution. Urging blacks to emulate George Washington’s sacrifices during the Revolution and asking for colonization leaders “capable of thinking as white men,” Lincoln painted a glowing picture of the attractions of founding a colony in Central America. The region Lincoln had in mind, a site on the Isthmus of Chiriqui in the Caribbean, was far closer to the United States than the original black colony of Liberia in Africa.

The site was thought to contain rich coal deposits to provide jobs for black settlers and profits for the Northern speculators who had an interest in these mines. In what he hoped would clinch his case, Lincoln told his black audience that there would be no color prejudice in racially-mixed Central America and that the climate would be beneficial to what Northerners assumed was the peculiar adaptability of blacks to the tropics.”

(Flawed Victory – A New Perspective on the Civil War. William L. Barney. University Press of America, 1980, pp. 60-62)

Raphael Semmes was captain of the Southern commerce raider Alabama, the first of its kind to be unleashed upon the shipping of a commercial nation. Under Captain Semmes she caused enormous financial loss to the northern business; his unconsummated plan for a raid into New York Harbor to destroy shipping at anchor was audacious in conception and nearly carried out.

Indispensable Servant for Dr. Galt

“On the second day after the capture of the Northern merchant ship Tonawanda, another merchant vessel Manchester of New York and bound for Liverpool was stopped and boarded. After disposing of the prizes I took on board one of the former’s passengers.

This was a likely negro lad named David of about seventeen years of age – a slave until he was twenty-one under the laws of his State, Delaware. He was on his way to Europe in company of his master. He necessarily came to me under the laws of war, and I brought him on board the Alabama where we were in want of good servants and sent him to wait on the ward-room mess.

The boy was a little alarmed at first, but when he saw kindly faces beaming upon him, and heard from his new masters and the servants of the mess, some words of encouragement, he became reassured and in the course of a few days was not only at home but congratulated himself on the exchange he had made.

He became, more especially, the servant of Dr. Galt and there at once arose, between the Virginia gentleman and the slave boy, that sympathy of master and servant, which our ruder people of the North find it so impossible to comprehend. David soon became to Galt as my own servant was to me – indispensable – and the former was really as free as the latter, except only in the circumstances that he could not change masters.

I caused his name to be entered on the books of the ship as one of our crew and allowed him the pay of his grade. In short, no difference was made between him and the white waiters of the mess. His condition was in every respect bettered; though, I doubt not, a howl went up over his capture by the pseudo-philanthropists of the North, who know as little about the negro and his nature as they do about the people of the South.”

(Memoirs of Service Afloat. Raphael Semmes, LSU Press, 1996, original 1868. pp. 464-465)

The following article concerning the late war prisoner exchange cartel was written by Capt. Armand L. Derosset of Wilmington, North Carolina. It appeared on page 455 of the October 1907 issue of Confederate Veteran.

The article raises questions regarding Northern policy – and humanity – toward their own soldiers suffering and perishing in Southern prison camps late in the war. Northern raids into north Florida, Georgia and South Carolina decimated food production which left little for prisoners. Medicines intended for civilians and soldiers (and prisoners) were “contraband” and taken from captured blockade runners. Northern troops from occupied Key West landed at Tampa and drove inland to disrupt cattle production, carrying off beef that was intended for Andersonville prisoners and guards.

Noteworthy is the avoidance of Andersonville by Sherman’s 65,000-man army in late 1864 when prisoners were starving there. Those prisoners could (and should) have been liberated, fed and taken to waiting hospital ships on the Georgia coast. They were not.

Later, Sherman’s right wing passed close to the stockade at Florence, South Carolina in early 1865 and once again ignored the many starving prisoners in blue held there. On February 22, 1865, Northern troops confronted the entrenched Major-General Robert F. Hoke’s division at Forks Road in Wilmington. There Hoke sent a message to the enemy commander requesting he accept 10,000 starving and sick Northern prisoners in an exchange. His offer was initially turned down and nearly a month passed before Northern authorities approved the exchange. How many Northern prisoners died before a humane decision was rendered?

As noted below, it was Grant’s decision to refuse to accept Northern prisoners, many of whom he condemned to death in crowded prison camps with poor sanitation, little food and no medicine.

Capt. Derosset writes in the Confederate Veteran: 

“The officials in the Confederate States in 1863-64 were greatly hampered by the necessity of feeding the large number of federal prisoners, some 270,000, which were distributed throughout the South. The enemy had in prison at various points in the North some 220,000 of our men.

Through correspondence and treaty and interview a conference between the Confederate States and the United States was arranged at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Judge Robert Ould of Richmond was the commissioner of exchange of Southern prisoners and the conference was held aboard a steamer. Present were Lincoln, his Secretary of War Stanton, and Gen. Grant, and perhaps others on one side – Judge Ould and perhaps one or more gentlemen represented the South.

The information that now follows was given to me by Judge Ould in the parlor of a well-known Richmond clubhouse immediately after his return from Hampton Roads. Also present in the clubhouse was Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge and Secretary of the Treasury Mr. Seddon, both of whom I knew well.

The Judge told me in substance that he opened the conference with Mr. Lincoln by representing to him the difficulty the South had in supplying the prisoners with food and medicine, and then tendered to the US authorities the whole 270,000 prisoners in return of the 220,000 Southern men he held as prisoners. Mr. Lincoln seemed pleased with the proposition and was favorably inclined to accept, but was met with a preemptory and flat refusal from Grant. “Well, General,” said Lincoln, “the offer seems reasonable but let us hear your objections.”

Grant replied that “if we get back those 270,000 men not a single one of them will return to the army; but if you return those 220,000 Southerners, every one of them will go back to the ranks and the war will have to be fought all over again.”

This proposition by Mr. Ould being rejected, he then proposed that the US government send South physicians, medicine and food for their men in prison under proper guarantees. This was rejected. He then tendered Lincoln 40,000 of the sick Northern prisoners, which was accepted, and in compliance therewith 10,000 men, the sickest of them all, were delivered to US transports at Savannah and Port Royal.

The US authorities refused to receive any additional sick prisoners; when the batch reached Northern points these sick men were photographed. The conference ended without the accomplishment of any further good.”