Month: October 2026

The Corruption of Land

The term “cronyism” appears several times in the American political scene and after the independence of the American South in 1861 the new Republican party ramped it up. Absent Southern State opposition in Congress:

“northern Republicans possessed sufficient power to force through domestic planks of the American System: transcontinental land grants, protectionist tariffs to benefit Northern industries, and quasi-central-banking regulations. These special favors were the building blocks for a government structure of widespread restrictions and subsidies, and they were up for sale to the interest groups willing to fight for them.”

The Corruption of Land

“The fate of the infant United States initially hinged on the battle between free-market Jeffersonian Republicans and interventionist Hamiltonian Federalists. After Thomas Jefferson won the presidency in 1800 and rolled back the judicial bureaucracy, taxes and military expenditures, his desire to establish a limited confederation ran aground on the tantalizing opportunity to purchase France’s Louisiana Territory. Jefferson, though recognizing that the acquisition conflicted with his constitutional scruples, could not refuse five hundred million acres.

He then embarked upon his own brand of favoritism to keep the swollen empire from breaking apart, including payments to land speculators, centralization of internal, improvements, tariffs and mercantile protection, and plans to conquer Canada and Florida. By the War of 1812, Jefferson’s Republicans were indistinguishable from the Federalists they previously fought.

An “Era of Corruption” ensued in the following decade as the new National Republicans devised an American System of central banking, [tariff] protectionism, public works largesse, federal abrogation of settlers’ rights, and foreign aggression. By 1825 the situation had gotten so deplorable that Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and Speaker of the House Henry Clay bribed congressmen in an overtime House election to steal the presidency from the frontrunner, Senator Andrew Jackson, and give it to Adams.

In the face of such flagrant corruption, Jackson allied with the politico Martin Van Buren to create a new Democratic Party devoted to restoring the old Jeffersonian laissez-faire ideology to counter the National Republicans’ growing cronyism.

The Jacksonian Democrats’ free-market reforms reduced government barriers to entry and other economic interventions. This enabled businesses to better allocate the country’s domestic pool of workers, new waves of immigrants, abundant natural resources, and growing levels of savings toward producing goods that consumers valued. Relatively freer competition in banking led to safer and more efficient banks compared to federal and State chartered monopolies. The new institutional groundwork for a new Industrial Revolution had been laid.”

(Cronyism: The Rise of the Corporatist State: 1849-1929. Patrick Newman. Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2026, pp. 31-32; 56)

 

Prewar Immigration Fears

Orestes Brownson, 1803-1876, was born in Vermont, raised Calvinist and later Catholic convert. As an antebellum political activist, he saw the two-great political parties, Whig and Democrat as nearly equally balanced in most regions of the country. But he also saw immigration as introducing both parties to bidding for the “foreign vote,” which he saw as truly ruling the country.

Prewar Immigration Fears

“[Brownson] explained that from the years 1820-1845 the flow of immigration into the country had been principally Catholic, and hence sufficiently conservative in nature to exert a wholesome moral and religious influence on the country. But since 1845, and especially since 1849, the character of the immigration has been entirely different.

The reaction to the revolutionary movement on the continent of Europe that began in 1849 had poured a still larger immigration onto our shores in which an infidel and anarchical element predominated, and which currently seemed likely to predominate.

He confessed that he was opposed, not to the coming of such to our shores, but rather to their ready admission into the bosom of American political society. He feared that the support such an element would bring into the filibustering, ultra-democratic fanatical tendencies of some of his countrymen would only tend to undermine genuine republicanism as it was conceived in the minds of the Founding Fathers.

He simply did not believe that such immigrants were entitled to political citizenship since they were “to a fearful extent banded together in secret societies, affiliated to the terrible secret societies of Europe, and directed by foreign demagogues and revolutionists, such as Kossuth and Mazzini.” Such immigrants showed no intention of becoming quiet, orderly and loyal American citizens. Hence, Brownson concluded:

“As an American citizen and as an American republican, we cannot but be opposed to their naturalization, and a fortiori as a Catholic; for they are the worst enemies of the Church in this country, are hand and glove with the [anti-immigrant] Know-Nothings taken generally and may be regarded as the real instigators and the most effective supporters of the Know-Nothing movement. Know-Nothingism is no Yankee invention, no American production, but a combination of Irish Orangeism, German radicalism, French socialism, and Italian astuteness and hate.”

In speaking of “Italian astuteness and hate,” Brownson was of course referring particularly to the notorious apostate priest Alessandro Gavazzi, who with the dregs of Italian and German revolutionists fomented the “Bendini Riots” through the country on the occasion of the visit of Archbishop Bendini to the United States in 1853. When, on this tour, he reached Cincinnati, an organized attempt was made to hang him and destroy the cathedral there.

Brownson emphasized that American citizenship is a boon or a grant, not a natural or indefeasible right. As it is the right of every sovereign society to open or close to whom it will, so it is the right of every nation to close its political citizenship, if it sees proper, to all foreign-born immigrants that might prove a danger, or that it would bring no advantage to it.”

(Orestes A. Brownson. A Definite Biography. Thomas Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 1976, pp. 470-471)

 

A Final Dash to Supply Lee’s Army

As the end of the war approached, Confederate Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory planned a desperate mission to supply General Lee’s army after its retreat from Richmond. Mallory dispatched Lt. J. Pembroke Jones to locate Capt. John Newland Maffitt at Matamoras or Havana and organize the supply attempt.

Both Maffitt and Jones likely knew each other in the prewar at Wilmington, North Carolina, as Maffitt was a US Navy Lt. surveying the coast adjacent to the Cape Fear River, and Lt. Jones was often in Wilmington where his wife resided. Jones served aboard the CSS Virginia at Hampton Roads in 1862; he commanded the ironclad CSS Raleigh in April 1864 which scattered the enemy blockading fleet off Wilmington.

A Final Dash to Supply Lee’s Army

“Shortly after the Owl departed Galveston [approximately mid-March 1865], Lt. J. Pembroke Jones, assigned to special service, passed through Galveston from Richmond in search of Maffitt. [Secretary of the Navy Stephen] Mallory had ordered Jones to make his way out of the Confederacy as best he could, report to Maffitt, purchase two steamers to take supplies to Lee on an urgent basis, one for a run up [Virginia’s] York River, the other up the James River. Jones had with him money in specie checks and was accompanied by pilots for the Virginia river trips, but when they reached the Mississippi headed for Texas, Lt. Jones heard of the end of the war in the East.

Jones sent the pilots home, continued alone to Galveston, and conferred with General John B. Magruder, who informed him the war would not be continued in Texas. Jones decided to continue to Matamoras, where he took a steamer to Havana and found Maffitt. Lt. Jones probably brought with him the well-known 24 February 1865 letter from Navy Secretary Mallory. It was the last from Mallory to Maffitt, and desperation was now apparent.”

High Seas Confederate. The Life and Times of John Newlsnd Maffitt. Royce Shingleton. University of South Carolina Press, 1994, pp. 97-98)

Economic Purposes of Reconstruction

The capture and occupation of New Orleans and South Carolina’s Sea Islands early in the war energized Northern Radicals. This brought both Southern cotton into their near bankrupt treasury and brought forth measures designed to destroy the South’s economic system to include the destruction of plantations to include crops, livestock and equipment, and also carry off Southern farm workers. For Radicals, they represented a potential new electorate, and source of troops.

Economic Purposes of Reconstruction

“[Gen. Benjamin] Butler’s course in New Orleans was far removed from Lincoln’s conciliatory efforts to find and organize a loyal population of the South, but it met enthusiastic response from the Radicals in Congress and their supporters in the Union League. The measures designed to destroy the Southern economic system met warm approval, while the organization of a potential new electorate appealed to the ambitions of aspiring politicians. Not least among the latter was Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase.

Butler’s administration in [occupied] New Orleans, the Secretary informed the General, had given “the greatest satisfaction” to all his friends. Lincoln, said Chase, had put Butler in an embarrassing position by having no fixed policy in regard to slavery. But Butler should make his own position clear: “Let it be understood that you are no pro-slavery man.” In fact, Chase could find but one admonition to give. Rumors abounded that Butler and his officers had been engaged in “mercantile speculation” and this, thought Chase, sounded the only sour note in an otherwise excellent administration.

In the Confederate vocabulary, [Butler’s men] were looting . . . In the idiom of a later generation, they were engaged in “black market” activities . . . acquiring cotton and shipping it northward. At Ship Island, General Neal Dow, author and defender of Maine’s prohibition law, diverted a government vessel to carry the contents of several plantation homes to his own house in Portland. Butler’s brother, favored by cotton trading permits, grew rich in the Crescent City. The military government in New Orleans was giving a crude but a vivid and well-understood lesson in the economic purposes of Reconstruction.

[In November 1861, South Carolina’s Sea Islands] containing 195 plantations and about ten thousand slaves, fell into Union hands. When the troops arrived, they found a large store of cotton, and Chase immediately sent agents to collect it. By June 1862, Sea Island cotton shipped to New York had brought $724,984, of which more than half a million, went into the US Treasury.

[Gen. David] Hunter in January 1863 began to force Negroes into the army, [but] they took flight. The Northern plantation superintendents and foremen found the Negroes unwilling to work. Younger ones roamed the islands while the older ones lazed indoors and neglected the fields. They had, to the astonishment of the Yankees, no concept of wages, expected provisions to be furnished them, and worked only under compulsion.”

(Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction. William B. Hesseltine. Peter Smith Publishing, 1963, pp. 82-85)

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

The notorious “Union League” organization, working in concert with the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a postwar enforcement arm of northern Radicals which shepherded enfranchised freedmen to the polls to vote Republican and also discourage Southern white voters. Grant depended on 500,000 black votes to gain the presidency in 1868 – and thus began the tradition of a solid black Republican voting bloc of voters through the end of the century.

In 1867, arms were secured for League members in military companies “which became a menace to peace and good order in North Carolina communities. The most common of the graver outrages committed by the Negroes was barn-burning, which for a white farmer meant complete ruin and absolute want of food.” (Hamilton, pg. 339).

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

“The postwar North Carolina Convention met in October of 1865; and was composed, for the most part of men who had already been prominent in public life in North Carolina, and of others who were destined to become so. The Convention provided for an election to be held for Governor and members of the legislature. To fill the former position Jonathan Worth was duly elected; and a legislature composed of the best element of the State was chosen.

This legislature met on 12 December, when Worth was inaugurated, and all the machinery of a full State government at once put in operation. An able judiciary was also chosen, and Wm. A. Graham, the most illustrious of her many distinguished sons, was sent at the head of the North Carolina delegation to Washington to take the State back to her place in the Union.

But alas! the wild fanaticism of the North, which had driven the State from the Federal government was not sufficiently appeased, nor had the State and her people been sufficiently humiliated. Till that was done, there was no place for her around the old hearthstone. Her people must yet go through the “hell” of Congressional reconstruction, and drink deep of its fiery broth, before her Senators and Representatives could be admitted to their seats.

This legislature recognized the changed status of the Negro, and enacted laws appropriate to his new condition, giving him such civil rights and duties as that condition justified. County, town and city governments were reorganized, courts were regularly held and presided over by able and just men; the law was once more asserting itself and its invigorating influences were seen in the more hopeful demeanor of all classes of people. Had this state of affairs been allowed to continue, the dark pages of the Reconstruction regime might have never been written, and the name of the Ku-Klux Klans might never have appeared in the pages of National or State history.

But this was not to be. A prominent Northern politician had declared that the States which had been guilty of the crime of rebellion should be kept within the grasp of war for thirty years. The dark valley and shadow of death lay once more before the people of North Carolina.

The State was again put under military rule and the conquerors were not only to plant their heels upon the necks of the men who had been overcome in war, but were urged to press with all the vigor of their conquering power.

Though President Andrew Johnson asserted that the States had never having been separated from the Union, and had lost their Constitutional rights only while engaged in rebellion, and that on the laying down of arms and the renewal of allegiance to the United States Government, they had resumed their ante-bellum attitude and condition and should at once be recognized as a part of the Union. This policy aroused a frenzy at the North, scarcely less savage than the abolition craze, and it found fierce utterance in the Congress assembled at Washington. A controversy of intense partisan bitterness was then inaugurated between Johnson and the Radicals.

The vindictive House of Representatives affirmed, with redoubled emphasis, that, by the act of secession, the States recently engaged in war, had forfeited all their rights under the Constitution – and not having acknowledged their rebellion until they were forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, they should be relegated to the condition of territorial possessions, to be governed by Congress till the latter should deem them sufficiently humbled; and until new Constitutions should be framed and adopted by a vote of all the people, including the recently freed Negro. Most of the seceding States were formed into military districts, subject to the will of a Major General, and to be ruled by tyros and neophytes in government; —the standard of loyalty being the color of the skin, or an acknowledged membership in the Union League.”

(The Conditions That Led to the Ku Klux Klans, Mrs. T.J. Jarvis. North Carolina Booklet, May, 1901, No. 1, pp 13-14) (Reconstruction in North Carolina, J.G. Hamilton, Books for Libraries Press, 1971, pp. 337)