Circa1865

“Bill Arp” was the nom de plume of Georgia writer and politician Charles Henry Smith (1826-1903), who enjoyed educating Atlanta Constitution readers unfamiliar with the history of New England.  As a Confederate major during the War Between the States, he served on the staff of several generals including Francis Bartow. Below, he answers a letter to the editor from a Northerner castigating Georgians for the sin of slavery.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Bill Arp on New England History

“Now, here is a gentleman of more than ordinary intelligence and education who does not know that the sin of slavery began in New England among his forefathers — not ours — and from there was gradually crowded Southward until it got to Georgia, and that Georgia was the first State to prohibit their importation. See Appleton’s Cyclopedia (Slavery and the Slave Trade.)

He does not know that long after New England and New York had abolished slavery, their merchantmen continued to trade with Africa and sold their cargoes secretly along the coast, and . . . one, the “Wanderer,” was seized and confiscated and its officers arrested. The “Wanderer” was built at Eastport, Maine, was equipped as a slaver in New York and officered there and a crew employed.

He does not know that Judge Story, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, when presiding in Boston in 1834, [stated to a] Grand Jury that although Massachusetts had freed their slaves, yet the slave trade was still going on and Boston merchants and Boston Christians were steeped to their eyebrows in its infamy. He does not know that when our national existence began the feeling against slavery was stronger in the Southern States than in the Northern.

Georgia was the first to prohibit it, but later on the prohibition was repealed. New England carried on the traffic until 1845 — and is doing it yet if they can find a market and can get the rum to pay for them. The last record of a slaver caught in the act was in 1861, off the coast of Madagascar, and it was an Eastport vessel. The slave trade with Africa was for more than a century a favorite and popular venture with our English ancestors.

King James II and King Charles II and Queen Elizabeth all had stock in it, and though Wilberforce and others had laws passed to suppress it, they could not do it. New England and old England secretly carried it on (see Appleton) long after slavery was abolished in the colonies. They could afford to lose half their vessels and still make money. 

It is sad and mortifying that our young and middle-aged men, and our graduates from Southern colleges know so little of our antebellum history. The Northern people are equally ignorant of the origin of slavery and the real causes that precipitated the civil war. Most of them have a vague idea that slavery was born and just grew up in the South — came up out of the ground like the seventeen-year-old locusts—and was our sin and our curse.

Not one in ten-thousand will believe that the South never imported a slave from Africa, but got all we had by purchase from our Northern brethren. I would wager a thousand dollars against ten that not a man under fifty nor a schoolboy who lives North of the line knows or believes that General Grant, their great military hero and idol, was a slaveholder and lived off the hire and their services while he was fighting us about ours.

Lincoln’s proclamation of freedom came in 1863, but General Grant paid no attention to it. He continued to use them as slaves until January, 1865. (See his biography by General James Grant Wilson in Appleton’s Encyclopedia.) General Grant owned these slaves in St. Louis, Missouri, where he lived.

How many of this generation, North or South know, or will believe, that as late as November, 1861, Nathaniel Gordon, master of a New England slave ship called the Erie, was convicted in New York City of carrying on the slave trade? (See Appleton.)

Just think of it! In 1861 our Northern brethren made war upon us because we enslaved the Negroes we had bought from them; but at the same time they kept on bringing more from Africa and begging us to buy them. How many know that England, our mother country, never emancipated her slaves until 1843, when twelve millions were set free in the East Indies and one hundred millions of dollars were paid to their owners by act of Parliament?

It is only within the last half-century that the importation of slaves from Africa has generally ceased. Up to that time every civilized country bought them and enslaved them. English statesmen and clergymen said it was better to bring them away than to have them continue in their barbarism and cannibalism.

(From The Uncivil War to Date, 1865 to 1903, Bill Arp, Hudgins Publishing Company. 1903, pp 347-353)

To destroy President Andrew Johnson’s postwar program, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction was established by Congress in early December 1865, chaired by the sinister and vindictive Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania who made no secret of his aim to firmly plant Republican political control in the South, which he considered conquered territory. General Robert E. Lee was interrogated for two hours by the Committee on 17 February 1866.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

The Postwar Radical Inquisition:

“[Radical Republican] Senator Jacob M. Howard [of Michigan] resumed his questions . . . “While you were in command at Richmond, did you know of the cruelties practiced toward the union prisoners at Libby Prison and Belle Isle?”

[Lee answered] “I never knew that any cruelty was practiced, and I have no reason to believe that it was practiced. I can believe, and have reasons to believe, that privations may have been experienced among the prisoners. I know that provisions and shelter could not be provided for them.”

[Howard] “Were you not aware that men were dying from cold and starvation?”

Aware? Was I aware? The questions must have bitten like strong acid. In those vivid and unspoken images that crowded through Lee’s mind that moment and on other days, what did he see, what did he feel? The historian cannot rightly draw upon reverie; but to think that the real marrow of the hearing got into the stenographer’s notes is to be more naïve than one might want to be.

When the opportunity arose, Lee said quietly, “I had no control over the prisoners, once they had been sent to Richmond. I never gave an order about it . . . No report was ever made to me about them. There was no call for any to be made to me. Prisoners suffered from the want of ability on the part of the Confederate States to supply their wants. As far as I could, I did everything in my power to relieve them, and urged the formation of a cartel.

Pushed further, Lee told of specific proposals made to Grant, and of the work of his Christian Committee. “Orders were that the whole field should be treated alike . . . We took in Federal wounded as well as ours on every field.”

Weeks later the Joint Report of the Committee would lash out at the South . . . “The Rebels heaped every imaginable insult and injury upon our nation . . . They fought for four years with the most determined and malignant spirit . . . and are today unrepentant and unpardoned.” [The editor of the Lexington, Virginia Gazette wrote that the] “devilish iniquity and malignant wickedness” of the Committee’s report he found “so monstrous that no Southern man can read it without invoking the righteous indignation of heaven.” How long was the South to suffer from such wretched injustice and perfidy?

Signs of rebellion began to crop up again. Confederate flags were peddled openly in a dozen cities and were called “sacred souvenirs” by Alabama Governor Parsons. “Stonewall Jackson” soup” and “Confederate hash” appeared on hotel menus. In Richmond, a magazine called The Land We Love began to glorify the “Lost Cause.”

Open conflicts between racial groups spread. Three days of rioting in Memphis, beginning on April 30, left forty-six Negroes dead and scores of homes, churches and schools burned. Summer riots in New Orleans saw sensational and unsavory actions go unchecked. Murder degenerated into massacre. “The hands of the rebel are again red with loyal blood,” proclaimed the New York Tribune.”

(Lee After the War, The Greatest Period in the Life of a Great American, Marshall W. Fishwick, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963, excerpts, pp. 122-126)

Abolitionist hatred of Americans in the South seemed boundless with people like Wendell Phillips desiring their near-extermination, and Parson Brownlow preaching that “We will crowd the rebels into the Gulf of Mexico, and drown the entire race, as the devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee.” The South was only asking for political independence.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Abolitionists Drunk on the Fumes of Blood

“Wendell Phillips, who, before the blood began to flow, eloquently declared that the South was in the right, that Lincoln had no right to send armed men to coerce her, after battles begun seemed to become drunk on the fumes of blood and mad for more than battlefields afforded. In a speech delivered in [Henry Ward] Beecher’s church, to a large and presumably a Christian congregation, Phillips made the following remarkable declaration:

“I do not believe in battles ending this war. You may plant a fort in every district of the South, you may take possession of her capitals and hold them with your armies, but you have not begun to subdue her people. I know it seems something like absolute barbarian conquest, I allow it, but I do not believe there will be any peace until 347,000 men of the South are either hanged or exiled (Cheers).”

Why the precise number, 347,000, does not appear. If the hanging at one fell swoop of 347,000 men and women seemed to Phillips something like barbarian conquest, it would be interesting to know what would have appeared truly barbarian. History records some crimes of such stupendous magnitude, even to this day men shudder at their mention.”

(Facts and Falsehoods, Concerning the War on the South, George Edmonds, Spence Hall Lamb, 1904, pp. 235-236)

The Northern abolitionists and the African slave met for the first time at Beaufort, South Carolina, and the former came face to face with what Jefferson Davis earlier pondered regarding what to do with the emancipated slave. The planters warned their hands “that the Yankees would treat them as slaves and sell them to Cuba,” a prediction that nearly became true.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

New Masters from New England

“The revolution began with considerable destruction of property. The Negroes on many plantations . . . broke the cotton gins [and] in other cases they began looting their master’s houses and furniture, and activity which the federal soldiers took up enthusiastically . . .

The [Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase’s] correspondence during the months following the fall of Port Royal showed him that the government would gain the support of an ever-increasing segment of the public through sterner war measures: “Wagons, cattle, Horses, Provisions, Negroes not excepted, in short everything useful to our army ought to be appropriated . . . advised one correspondent, who sharply criticized the government for looking “more to a peace through compromise, than to a . . . . victory of arms.”

Certainly [President Lincoln’s] cautious treatment of the issue in his message to Congress offered little encouragement. He threw the problem of defining the new status of the Negroes at Port Royal and others in their situation into the lap of Congress, and then asked that provisions be made to colonize the liberated Negroes “in a climate congenial to them.” Small wonder it was that Chase turned his first attention to contraband cotton rather than to contraband Negroes.

The rapid change in their status was not working to the advantage of many Sea Island Negroes . . . as the [Northern] army had made free use of plantation food stores, leaving many in the slave communities with little to eat. Commodore DuPont reported than numbers of the nearly ten thousand Negroes on the islands were by late winter “almost starving and some naked or nearly so . . .

Having no place to turn, they flocked to the neighborhood of the army camps [where] they were as often treated badly as offered employment and help. The New York Tribune’s correspondent reported that one enterprising and unscrupulous [Northern] officer was caught in the act of assembling a cargo of Negroes for transportation and sale in Cuba, thus giving one example of to bolster the late slave-masters’ prediction.

Something had to be done. If the land should lie fallow and the Negroes idle for long past the middle of February, there would be no cotton in 1862, and the Negroes would have to be supported by the government or charity, thus giving the opponents of emancipation a very good argument.

[Some saw in the Northern oversight of continued cotton production] arrangements the outlines of a typical graft opportunity, to achieve its classic form in the “company store” of a later day . . . and it was “of the utmost importance” that [the Negroes] should be kept busy “at the work which they have been accustomed to do . . . “

[One Northern agent] reported that the Sea Island Negroes knew all the steps involved in the cotton culture and that the great majority of them were ready to work, “with proper inducements.” They needed the help and protection of white men, however, in [his] opinion, and a good system of management. The Negroes were no longer slaves . . . Although they were “as yet in large numbers unprepared for the full privileges of citizens . . . “

(Rehearsal for Reconstruction, The Port Royal Experiment, Willie Lee Rose, Vintage Books, 1964, excerpts, pp. 16; 18-25; 29)

The aristocratic landholders who were unwilling to share the vote in Rhode Island were among those who made their fortunes in the slave trade of Providence and Bristol, exchanging New England rum for African slaves on the Ivory Coast. They saw their ill-gotten fortunes and all public monies become the target of the newly-enfranchised democrats, both natives and recent immigrants. Neither wealthy or poor-white Rhode Islanders viewed free black citizens as worthy of voting rights.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Aristocratic, Undemocratic, Intolerant Rhode Island:

“[April 17, 1842]:  I was struck with the lively interest he [William Ellery Channing, Unitarian minister, of Boston] took in the political affairs of Rhode Island, — a neighboring State, containing about 110,00 inhabitants, and now convulsed by a revolutionary movement [the Dorr Rebellion] in favor of an extension of the suffrage. The sympathies of Dr. Channing appeared to lean strongly to the popular party, which, in his opinion, had grievances to complain of, however much, by their violent proceedings they had put themselves in the wrong.

Although the State has been flourishing, it is entirely free from debt, a large majority of the people have, for the last forty years, called loudly on the privileged landholders to give up their exclusive right to voting, and to extend the suffrage to all adult males, in accordance with the system established in all the neighboring States. Their demands did not differ very materially from those which the legislature was willing to concede, except that the democrats claimed the suffrage, not only for every American-born citizen, but also for the new-comers, or the settlers of a few years standing. Both parties agreed to exclude the free blacks.”

(Sir Charles Lyell, Travels in North America in the Years 1841-1842, (New York, 1845), I, pp. 83-84)

Abolitionists of the Old North were agitating for equality more than the end of African slavery. Their strategy was not to compromise and find a peaceful and practical solution to the riddle; the goal of their radical Republican brethren who aided and abbetted them was to destroy the Southern economy and Southern political influence in national councils, no matter the cost in human lives and misery.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Agitating for Equality Rather Than Peace

“To have dropped the demand for immediate emancipation because it was unrealizable at the time would have been to alter the nature of the change for which the abolitionists were agitating. That is, even those who would have gladly accepted gradual and conditional emancipation had to agitate for immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery because that demand was required by their goal of demonstrating to white Americans that Negroes were their brothers. Once the nation had been converted on that point, conditions and plans might have been made.

Before the war, they refused to be drawn into discussions on the problem that sudden emancipation might create or on “plans” for easing the transition to freedom, for implicit in such discussions, they felt, was an assumption that Negro inferiority rather than white racism would produce the problems. This would not be so if the discussions were carried on by a society free of racism but merely anxious for the change in the Negro’s status be as smooth as possible.

But among whites unready to accept the Negro as inherently their equal, any such debate would feed the prevalent prejudice and provide an anesthetic for consciences that were beginning to hurt.

This is why [William Lloyd] Garrison’s first great campaign was to discredit colonizationism; that movement diverted attention from the principle of equality and had proved an adequate salve on potential antislavery consciences. That is also why some abolitionists could not accept free-soilism as a tactic to strangle slavery to death in the Southeast; while they might recognize the practical utility of the tactic, they could not admit the legitimacy of slavery in any part of the country without denying their movement’s fundamental principle [of equality].

To criticize the agitator for not trimming his demands to the immediately realizable – that is, for not acting like a politician – is to miss the point. The demand for a change that is not politically possible does not stamp the agitator as unrealistic. For one thing, it can be useful to the political bargainer; the more extreme demand of the agitator makes the politician’s demand seem acceptable and perhaps desirable in the sense that the adversary may prefer to give up half a loaf rather than the whole. Also, the agitator helps define the value, the principle, for which the politician bargains.”

(Means and Ends in American Abolitionism, Aileen S. Kraditor, Pantheon Books, 1967, pp. 27-28)

Anti-abolition sentiment was often found north of Mason and Dixon’s line and evidenced by incidents like the 1837 shooting death of abolitionist Elija Lovejoy in Alton, Ohio.  The local citizenry tried to convince Lovejoy of his unpopularity by throwing his presses into the Mississippi River three times before resorting to the fatal measure.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Northern Resistance to Abolitionists

“One of the earliest newspapers of Niagara Falls [New York], The Niagara Falls Daily Recorder, had brief but somewhat volatile tenure becoming involved in the hot-button issue of slavery in the 1830’s. The story of early newspapers was related in a 1937 article by city historian Edward T. Williams, himself a longtime journalist and newspaper owner.

The Recorder issue of April 8, 1839, contained a two-column account of a public abolitionist meeting in the downtown union chapel, located near the “Eagle Tavern on the south side of Falls street.” The article, the editor pointed out, was published as an advertisement “paid for jackass and all.” The story had a picture of a jackass at the head.

The meeting was called by a Mr. Pickard, described as an itinerant abolitionist. It was agreed after he spoke one hour that members of the opposition would be allowed to reply. Apparently there was a lot of opposition to slavery abolition in the village, including the Recorder, which was owned by one W. Law.

Williams said the newspaper report “was evidently made up for those opposed to Mr. Pickard, and the abolitionist received little consideration, being called “used up.” The group then passed a couple resolutions against abolition. One said:

Resolved: that the doctrine of the present abolitionists is a far greater evil than slavery as it now exists.”

Another resolution said:

Resolved: that all further attempts to lecture upon the subject of slavery in this village deserves to be met with the most spirited opposition until abolition lecturers become like angel’s visits, few and far between.”

(History of Falls Newspapers Complex, Bob Kostoff, www.niagarafallsreporter.com, Jan. 18, 2011)

Abolitionists like Wendell Phillips admitted that “our unpopularity is no fault of ours, but flows necessarily and unavoidably from our position” and that public acceptance of their beliefs mattered not.  They were convinced of the righteousness of their cause, and the death of a million people in a war they helped cause left them unmoved.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Prophets Rebuking Endless Sins

“Wendell Phillips . . . characterized Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as “the slave-hound of Illinois,” and said that John Brown “carried letters of marque from God.” But like his fellow champion in the abolition cause [Garrison], he early lost whatever love of the Negro he might have had in an egotistic hatred of his white, Southern opponents.

After the [War Between the States], Wendell Phillips sought new outlets for his persuasive, self-assured energies in the causes of women’s rights and the claims of labor, but William Lloyd Garrison slipped slowly into the background, supported by the charity of his admirers, emerging on occassion to play the aging hero before a younger generation of reform-minded folk, and constant in his role as irritant to the body politic.

In all their activities, both Garrison and Phillips represented a tendency in American life which has never much appealed to observers from the Old World — in which self-appointed guardians of public morals rise up like the Old Testament prophets to rebuke sins as they see it, and in the most intemperate terms.”

(Mr. Lincoln’s Contemporaries, Roy Meredith, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1951, page 32)

The African slavery imposed upon the American colonies by a British colonial system eventually became the proverbial “holding the wolf by the ears”;  the North ended slavery within its borders but not its transatlantic slave trade. With a large alien population living amongst them, Southerners lived with a submerged fear of the worst: an American version of a Santo Domingo-style massacre. Once the depth of Northern involvement in encouraging and financing John Brown became apparent, the South had little use for its Northern brethren.  Violence and blood was the North’s method rather than peaceful solutions.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Abolitionist Threat to the South:

“On the wall of my study hangs one of the John Steuart Curry etchings of old John Brown of Ossawattomie, sword and revolver belted at his waist, a suppliant Negro face close to the grim holster, and behind him a Kansas cyclone knifing down from the darkling sky. The imagery is noble, heroic. But my Grandfather Carter would not admire it, were he alive, for he was one of the nervous young militia-men from near-by Charles Town, who circled the Harpers Ferry arsenal and waited for Robert E. Lee and the marines to come and drag out John Brown’s body.

To my grandfather, John Brown was an insane murderer and the father of murdering sons, who sought to loose an old horror upon the Virginia countryside; the horror of the slave revolt, the burning dwelling, the ravished wife, and the slain householder. John Brown was no hero, no martyr to my grandfather who sniped at the arsenal windows. Inside as prisoner was Colonel Washington, the first president’s great nephew and the kindliest gentleman of northern Virginia.

Dead in Harpers Ferry were three other citizens, kindly, decent men too, and one of them a free mulatto. This was no test of the rightness of slavery, this was murder and rapine; and behind old John Brown’s handful of white and Negro followers blew a dank wind from the North, the breath of the Abolitionists, Higginson, Sanborn, Smith, Parker Douglas, and the evil rest, whispering rebellion in the night. These men of New England had encouraged and given money for muskets and sabers to John Brown of bloody Kansas, and now the red, fallen leaves of the Virginia October were redder still. So believed my grandfather, no defender of slavery but of his hearth and State; nor did his opinion change throughout life.

Southern anger and mistrust did not begin or end with Harpers Ferry. A thousand slaves might be docile, but there would always be one to listen to the uncertified stranger; and the Southern white man, counting up the more than two hundred slave uprisings through which the Negro protested his chains, remembered that half of them had been incited by a white conspirator, the fanatic from beyond.

For slavery there is no defense, and long ago there were ardent spokesmen for freedom even within the slave South. But rebellion was not academic; rebellion was Denmark Vessey aloose on the flaming countryside, and Gabriel enrolling his thousands in the woods beyond Richmond, and Charles Deslondes, the free mulatto of San Domingo, killing and burning on the road to New Orleans.

Rebellion lurked behind the whisper of a stranger, the tract of the abolitionist, the speech in Washington; Southern mistrust of the intervener was born and nurtured in an armed camp. If they would just leave us alone, said the moderate men and the worried men of the South together; if they would just leave us alone we would work out our own salvation. But not with a pistol at our heads and a torch at the door.

But the South was not let alone and war is not an abstraction of justice when it is fought among the ruins of a man’s home. My grandfather’s mistrust of the Yankees, vindicated at Harpers Ferry, was not lessened by the bullet that maimed him at Harpers Ferry. Nor was it lessened for anyone in the South, anywhere.”

(Southern Legacy, Hodding Carter, LSU Press, 1950, pp. 120-122)

The abolitionist Republicans of the mid-1850s had dark origins in the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party, and were quick to deny rights to those unlike them. President Franklin Pierce appointed Mexican War hero Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as his Secretary of War.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Abolitionists Religious Intolerance in New Hampshire

“In late 1848, Pierce’s law practice brought him before the State legislature to defend the Shakers against an attempt to pass a law restricting their religious activities. The “United Society of True Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing” known as the Shakers, were being accused by former members of the society of a range of charges including the breakup of families, confiscation of personal property, and child abuse. The Shakers existed in New Hampshire since the 1790’s. By 1848 there were some 275 Shakers living in two communities, Canterbury . . . and Enfield.

Over the years, disgruntled former Shakers had periodically petitioned the legislature to take action against the sect. In December, 1848, Asa Fowler, State representative from Concord and Pierce’s former law partner, who was now an active antislavery advocate, presented four different petitions signed by nearly five hundred persons asking for a law to be passed “prohibiting the boarding of minor children to the Shakers . . .”

The Shakers wisely chose Franklin Pierce as their lead attorney . . . Pierce was able to establish that most of the reports of child abuse were secondhand and had not been experienced or observed by the witnesses. Pierce declared the accusations unfounded and unproven and the proposed legislation punitive. [The Committee on the Judiciary] led by chairman Moses Norris, Jr. . . concluded that “Here then, in the free State of New Hampshire, where we boast of our civil and religious freedom . . . it is seriously proposed to visit upon the free exercise of the rights of conscience, a penalty more severe than is visited upon the most hardened and desperate villain now within the walls of the State prison.”

That Pierce was willing to defend, in such a public forum, such an unpopular fringe religion, none of whose members voted, demonstrates his courage for standing up for the rights of all citizens. Equally noteworthy is the role played by the antislavery leaders of the legislature in attacking the Shakers. No doubt they saw a parallel between the closed society of the Shakers and the slavery they so opposed . . . and the attacks on them can only be seen today as a sign of ignorance and intolerance. Considering what he had experienced from the antislavery politicians who supported temperance legislation, restrictions on Catholics and Shakers, and denial of voting rights to immigrants, Pierce equated all of the (abolitionist) reform agenda as an intolerant movement by some to deny rights to others, including of course, Southerners . . . ”

(Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire’s Favorite Son, Peter A. Wallner, Plaidswede Publishing, 2004, pp. 161-166)