Circa1865

Listing allegedly revolutionary changes between Fort Sumter in 1861 and Reconstruction, in 1867 Ohio Democratic Congressman George H. Pendleton assembled the following catalogue.

The Old Republic:

1. Equality of States.
2. Federal government limited to national and internal affairs only.
3. Equal branches of the federal government.
4. Reverence for Constitutional rights.
5. Delegated powers.
6. The Constitution and fundamental law.
7. Plain, simple, cheap government; army limited to 15,000 men.
8. Freedom of thought.
9. Freedom of reason.
10. Internal peace.
11. Freedom of debate in Congress.

The New Republic:

1. Ten States blotted out . . .
2. Federal government touches even private affairs.
3. Congress omnipotent.
4. Non-existent; viz., military arrests and suspension of the [habeas corpus] writ.
5. Federal government now has all power.
6. The United States Constitution now a dead letter.
7. Huge public debt and standing army of 100,000.
8. No freedom of thought.
9. No freedom of reason.
10. No internal peace.
11. Congress now ruled by caucus.

(A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution. Harold M. Hyman. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1975, pg. 293)

The outcome of “the war to end all wars” was punitive peace terms against Germany, the rise of German communism and the forced abdication of the Kaiser. This created a vacuum which was filled by a German nationalist intent upon retaliation for his country’s humiliation at Versailles. And so came another war.

Woodrow Wilson’s duplicity recalls Robert E. Lee’s late-1866 letter to Lord Acton: “I consider the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, to be the certain precursor to ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”

Wilson, it should be noted, won the presidency in 1912 in a three-way race with only 42% of the popular vote – 3% more than Lincoln accomplished in 1860.

Woodrow Wilson’s Great Race to War

“America believed itself to have declared war on Germany in April 1917 for noble reasons. To make the world safe for democracy, as the slogan went.

At bottom, however, the Allies had manipulated the American government with the same expertise they had shown from the start of the war. President Wilson, a Germaphobe long before 1914, was already predisposed to aid Great Britain. Although scrupulously neutral in public (Irish Americans being an important part of any Democratic politician’s constituency), in private he was unabashedly partisan. His administration did nothing to stop the Allies from borrowing large sums to finance their war efforts.

Loans were only one part of the complex pattern of aid extended before 1917. American manufacturers made war materials to Allied specifications and shipped them to Europe. To name two obvious examples: Winchester and Remington arms and ammunition, as well as Midvale Steel and Ordnance howitzers. In this and many other ways, the Allied armies of 1915 and 1916 were as heavily dependent on American war production as the Allied governments were on American cash.

Neither Allied apologists nor American defenders of President Wilson have been anxious to draw attention to the massive level of American support, since it invariably claimed that the US was provoked into going to war by German actions against American citizens.

From the German point of view, the issue was not if America would join with Great Britain, but when this would happen, and what effect it would have on the war. Could America get an army into the field before the Germans could win the war in the West outright? It had taken Great Britain, which in its own estimation had the most professional army in the world in 1914, nearly two years before it was able to deploy a force big enough to mount a sustained offensive effort.

Germany and the United States embarked on what can only be described as a great race to determine the war’s outcome.

(The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I. John Mosier. HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 303-305)

Lincoln fully approved of Grant’s plan to simply deplete Southern forces through constant attacks, regardless of the cost in human lives. Generous enlistment bonuses, impressing immigrants and colored men – plus conscription could fill the ranks 1864-65 and hammer the South into submission. It was Grant who stopped prisoner exchanges and was responsible for the deaths of northern prisoners as the South was being starved and denied medical supplies.

Grant’s Plan of Depletion

“If Grant can effect, with every assault on our lines, not an equal but proportionate depletion of our ranks, then the satisfactory solution to the problem is, from his point of view, a mere question of arithmetic, a mere matter of time.

He would cooly throw away the lives of a hundred thousand of his men if, by that means, he could put fifty thousand of ours hors de combat. He believes that we are on our last legs . . . and once hamstrung, good night to the Southern Confederacy. So, Grant will not yield until he is fairly exhausted, and he means more than most Yankee generals do by their bravado, when he declares he will not re-cross the river while he has a man left.

But Grant is not the sole manager of the campaign [against Lee]. There is another question besides the subjugation or independence of the South – a question of far more importance to certain people in Washington and their partisans. What is to be the name of the first Prince-President, or Stadtholder, or Emperor of the United States? Is it to be biblical or classical? Is it to be Abraham or Ulysses? And this is a matter in which Lincoln is profoundly interested.

Now, Lincoln has shown, in the plainest way, that he will not scruple to use any device, to invent any falsehood, to shed any quantity of blood . . . if he can perpetuate his power. We think it tolerably evident that he is afraid of the tool which fortune has thrust into his hands, and no one would rejoice more sincerely than he if Grant were to expire in the arms of victory, or, that alternative failing, he was to perish politically, crushed under the odium of an utter defeat.

Grant has perspicuity enough to see through Lincoln’s benevolent intentions, and self-reliance enough to push on regardless of Lincoln’s designs. Lincoln’s plan is that Grant shall do all the fighting and [Benjamin] Butler shall get all the glory. Butler is Lincoln’s representative in the field; and they both hope that the capture of Richmond will repeat the capture of New Orleans . . . and Butler is to make a triumphant entry into our capital without having exposed his precious carcass to the bullets of the audacious rebels.

Like many shrewd men, Lincoln a touch of superstition and it is evident that he believed in Butler’s star. [If] Richmond is to pass into Butler’s hands, Lincoln has nothing to fear from any glory which he may acquire . . . [and] the north would hardly be willing to hail him as their official chief. [B]orn satrap that he is, Butler would be satisfied with the position of Viceroy of the Southern provinces under His Majesty Abraham the First, by the Device of the Devil, Emperor of all the Yankees.”

(Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War. Ward W. Brigg, Jr. University Press of Virginia. 1998; pp. 315-316)

Along with his family, Jefferson Davis was captured by northern troops in the Georgia pines on May 10, 1865, while enroute to join Southern forces in the trans-Mississippi. The military odds were now ten to one, and northern troops were armed with Spencer-magazine repeaters against the Southern muzzle loaders. This was turning the war into mass murder. Author Russell Quynn writes:

“During the four years of war the northern armies had been replenished with more than 720,000 immigrant males from Europe, who were promised bounties and pension that the South afterwards largely had to pay. (See Union Department of War Records). The armies of the South at peak strength never exceeded 700,000 men. Imported “Hessians” were thus used by Lincoln to crush Americans of the South whose fathers had served in the armies of Washington, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor, to make a nation, to found its renown!”

It was Lincoln Who “Made War”

Jefferson Davis chastised his accusers:

“. . . by reiteration of such inappropriate terms as “rebellion,” treason” and the asseveration of that the South was levying war against the United States, those ignorant of the nature of the Union and the reserved powers of the States, have been led to believe that the Confederate States [of America] were in the condition of revolted provinces, and that the United States were forced to resort to arms for the preservation of its existence . . .

The Union was formed for specific enumerated purposes, and the States had never surrendered their sovereignty . . . It was a palpable absurdity to apply to them, or to their citizens when obeying their mandates, the terms “rebellion” and “treason”; and, further, the Confederate States, so far from making war or seeking to destroy the United States, as soon as they had an official organ, strove earnestly by peaceful recognition to equitably adjust all questions growing out of the separation from their late associates.

It was Lincoln who “made war.” Still another perversion, Davis thought:

“Was the attempted arraignment of the men who participated in forming the Confederate States and bore arms in its defense, as “instigators of a controversy leading to disunion.” Of course, it was a palpable absurdity, but part of the unholy vengeance, which did not cease at the grave.”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts. Russell Hoover Quynn. Exposition Press, 1959, pp. 126-127)

The following was written by John W. Burgess, born in 1844 to Rhode Island parents living in middle Tennessee. Being confirmed nationalist Whigs, his parents raised him to believe the United States government was above the States themselves in political sovereignty. When war came, he committed treason against Tennessee by fleeing to the enemy invaders and waging war against that State.

A Mistaken View of Sovereignty

“Personally, I never had regarded the union under the Constitution of 1787 as a confederation of sovereign States. Even during my boyhood in the South, I had learned from my [Henry] Clay whig father and grandfather to look upon it as a nation holding exclusive sovereignty and exercising government through two sets of organs, each having its own constitutional sphere of action and limitation. I had been taught to consider that this was the advance made in our political system from the [Articles of] Confederation of 1781 to the [Constitution] of 1787.

But I can well remember that this was not the view taken by the vast majority of the people, in rank and file, at the time when I first became cognizant of these questions. The South, by an overwhelming majority, regarded the United States as a confederation of sovereign States; and a very large portion, perhaps a majority, of the people of the North held the like opinion.

The opposition by the New England Federalists to the War of 1812 with England, led by the Federalist [Daniel] Webster, who not only opposed entering upon it, but also opposed to supporting it, and who considered conscription as warranted constitutionally only in resistance to invasion, made the Federalists a State Rights party. One the whole, therefore, the change from Federalism to Republicanism was one which advanced the States Rights doctrine of the Union at the expense of the national doctrine.

[The] slave labor system of the South made it impossible to develop manufacture there and condemned that section to agriculture, chiefly cotton raising, and how the consciousness of this fact by Southern leaders moved them to seek some constitutional principle to defend themselves against the Whig tariff majority. The principle, as Calhoun elaborated it, was nullification, namely, the right of a State to suspend the operation of an act of Congress within its limits until the legislatures of, or conventions in, three-fourths of the States should approve it.

The idea in this doctrine was that the United States government could not determine the extent of its own powers, since that would make its own determinations, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers – in other words, would make it autocratic.”

Despite writing this understanding of the nature of the American political structure, the author wrote of Lincoln’s July 4, 1861, address to a special session of Congress. By this time Lincoln had raised an army and declared war which only Congress can do, he also waged war against States which Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution defines as treason. He additionally had suspended habeas corpus and arrested political adversaries which overawed any political opposition. Lincoln then absurdly claimed that “The Union is older than any of the States, and in fact, created them as States . . . [and that not] one of them ever having been a State out of the Union.”

After Lincoln and his military were victorious in war in 1865, the States were now mere “provinces of a completely centralized government.”

(Reminiscences of an American Scholar, John W. Burgess, Columbia University Press, 1934; pp. 294-297; 306)

Lincoln’s New America

“The Civil War ennobled no one, except perhaps its central figure, but it brought enormous and probably inevitable changes in the north. Those States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. War manufactures exploded industrial production, made agriculture prosper, and a flood of immigration from Europe more than replaced the blood and bone buried in the South.

Until 1861, the full effect of the Industrial Revolution had been held in check by the powerful agronomists from Virginia to Texas. With this check removed, the industrial States consolidated their gains swiftly.

While the war itself was moving political power irresistibly toward the federal capital in Washington, money power was centralized in New York through the wartime Currency Acts. And an enormous centralization, through economic expansion, was going on [with] Businesses and enterprises formed that soon transcended the States themselves.

The removal of real power to a national capital was the first necessity for an expanded transportation and industrial complex that lay across many States. The concentration of fiscal power in New York broke the monetary freedom of State legislatures. As business enterprise became more and more national and spread on rails, old boundaries were, and had to be, meaningless. All this would, in quick time, forge a new society.

The old American of a huge farming, small holder class with a tiny mercantile and professional elite was not gone; vast islands of it remained. But it was submerged in flooding money and roaring steam.

If the men and interests behind the rise of the new industrial America did not realize fully where they were going, they understood their basic imperatives well enough. They needed certain things from government: high tariffs on industrial products; business subsidies and the diversion of public finances to railroads; centralized money control; continued massive immigration to curb native workers and create a labor pool; and a hard money policy, without which a solid financial-industrial complex was difficult to build.

The political instrument of this new force was the new Republican party . . . [where] refugees from Whiggery found a home. As virtually all foreign observers have seen, the erection of the immense American politico-industrial-financial machine in 1861 was not pure destiny; it took a certain kind of genius.

[But] the new wealth was more monstrously maldistributed than it had ever been. Millions of northern workers were little better off, in grimy tenements and working long, tedious days, than Texas slaves; many, in fact, were cared for worse. Native-born workers, who had enjoyed decades of scarcity and demand, begged for a limit to flooding immigration as they were drowned.  In the 19^th century they were hardly sustained by the 20^th century illusion that they rose on each succeeding wave.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, pp. 403-405)

Colonel Benjamin Harrison’s “boys in blue” were the 70^th Indiana Regiment and part of Sherman’s army which waged war upon defenseless women, children and old men in Georgia. Sent to Tennessee to temporarily command a brigade of northerners in 1864, he found them “quite unfit for duty in the field” – some hardly recovered from wounds, others just back from sick leave, and a large number of raw recruits, including many European immigrants unable to speak English.”

The mortal fear of New Yorker Horatio Seymour as president in 1868 and Democrat opposition to generous Union soldier benefits and pensions, Republicans quickly enfranchised 500,000 black men. This would give Grant his slim 300,000 margin of victory and thus assured “truly loyal governments in the South.”

Key to a Successful Post-Civil War Peace

“Harrison and . . . other northerners were determined that at the war’s such carnage had bought not merely a surcease from fighting but a true and lasting peace. Southern rebels, they believed, should willingly accept the new political and social order that emancipation and defeat had wrought.

White Southerners were determined to salvage as much of their old order as possible. As early as August 1865, Harrison warned an audience of returning soldiers in Indianapolis that their Southern foes were “just as wily, mean, impudent and devilish as they ever were . . . Beaten by the sword, they will now fall back on ‘the resources of statesmanship,’”

Politics would now be the new battleground where ex-rebels and their sympathizers in the northern Democratic party would strive to undo what Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, as well as Harrison and the Hoosier boys in blue, had accomplished.

Harrison did not advocate the immediate enfranchisement of the former slaves, but if white Southerners remained recalcitrant, he thought that the adoption of black suffrage offered the only way to produce truly loyal governments in the South. The key to a successful peace was to keep the rebels and “their northern allies out of power. If you don’t,” Harrison warned, “they will steal away, in the halls of Congress, the fruits won from them at the point of a glistening bayonet.”

To prevent that loss of the peace became the cardinal purpose of Harrison and most other Republicans in the immediate postwar years.”

(Benjamin Harrison. Charles W. Calhoun. Henry Holt and Company, 2005, pp. 26-27)

By 1863, Congress had sanctioned Lincoln’s illegal suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and absolved him of the northern Democrats charge of “usurpation.” The latter charged that his “suspension of the writ justifies arrests without warrant, without oath, and even without suspicion of treason or other crime.” Howard, below, was editor of Baltimore’s Daily Exchange which was supportive of the South’s decision for political independence.

Francis Key Howard’s “Middle Passage”

“Frances Key Howard, grandson of Francis Scott Key, author of the Star-Spangled Banner, had been among the Baltimoreans arrested in September of 1861. By December 1862, he had finished a manuscript about his prison experiences, and the little book made its appearance in print early in 1863.

Like others in this genre of protest writing, Howard’s work made a special point “to show . . . how men, who were guiltless . . ., were treated in this age, and in this country” and stressed the crowded conditions and spartan hardships of prison life.

In a protest letter written to President Lincoln and reprinted in Howard’s book, he and other prisoners of state likened the conditions at Fort Lafayette to those on “a slave ship, on the middle passage.”

(The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. Mark E. Neely, Jr. Oxford University Press. 1991, p195)

Many European observers saw Lincoln’s early proclamation of September 1862 as simply imitating the actions of Virginia’s Royal Governor Lord Dunmore eighty-six years earlier. In the face of “insurrection,” Dunmore demanded loyalty oaths from colonists while proclaiming African slaves “free.” A desperate Lincoln did the same.

Lincoln’s Dark Days

“The war had indeed approached a crisis in late July [1861]. There had been little encouraging news from the Western theater since April, when the victory at Shiloh had been followed by the occupation of New Orleans. These victories were disappointing in that they seemed to be leading nowhere. The high hopes accompanying McClellan’s advance up the peninsula below Richmond had been cruelly dashed.

Waiting for victories, [Lincoln’s] Cabinet received news in late August of the most humiliating defeat of the entire war. General John Pope allowed his army to be trapped at Manassas, Virginia, practically on the doorstep of the Capitol, between the armies of Longstreet and Jackson; it was hurled back toward Washington in a retreat that was actually a rout.

When the full impact of this latest disaster was at last known in the North, a real desperation gripped the public. “That we are in serious danger of being whipped cannot be denied” wrote Edward Atkinson, “and there is scarce a man now in Boston, who would not thank God to hear of a serious insurrection among the slaves, such a change has this disaster wrought.”

Dr. Milton Hawks, perhaps the most fanatical missionary at Port Royal [South Carolina], repeated his belief that, unless emancipation were the goal of the war, the South would establish her independence. “The greatest kindness that a man could do this government today,” he wrote furiously, “would be to assassinate Pres. Lincoln – He stands directly in the way.”

Lincoln’s course was mysterious to the general public [but after the dubious victory at Antietam], the President seized the slim occasion for his [preliminary emancipation] Proclamation . . .”

(Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Willie Lee Rose. Oxford University Press, 1964, pp. 184-185)

Martial Law is the Absence of Law

A review of the martial law imposed upon the island of Key West 1861-1865 was recently presented by a local college history teacher, and as a part of the North’s comprehensive military strategy during the Civil War. The audience was a local Civil War Roundtable (CWRT) group.

The lecturer noted the military takeover of the civilian government on the island in mid-January 1861 as the local commander, Capt. James Brannan surreptitiously barricaded his 44 men in the nearly completed Fort Zachary Taylor and turned its guns on the town. Overnight, the US military’s local friends and neighbors became an enemy to be treated with suspicion and contempt. Now fearing bombardment of their homes from the nearby fort, the residents became prisoners in their homes.

The reason cited for Brannan’s warlike action was overhearing “secession” talk among the residents as well as Florida’s recent decision to formally withdraw from the United States federation and become an independent State. Florida was to remain independent until it formally voted to join the Confederate States of America on April 22, 1861.

The arrival in March 1861 of more Northern troops increased armed patrols roaming the town and surveilling citizens. Arbitrary arrests were common, and Fort Taylor became an American bastille to hold prisoners of conscience. Locals, especially merchants with inventories to sell, sought favor with the military as willing informants, reporting on anyone complaining of military rule. Elected officials who disagreed with the military faced arrest and confinement, and new elections of approved candidates were held under armed supervision. Those considered “dangerous secessionists” were deported to the mainland.

What Capt. Brannan accomplished with his unilateral action, and unfortunately not pointed out by the lecturer, was to wage war against a State which is the very definition of treason in the US Constitution – Article III, Section 3. Though Brannan was applauded by his fellow officers and eventually promoted for his act, this does not absolve him of treason.

It was highly likely that Brannan was emulating Major Robert Anderson at Charleston as news of the Fort Sumter seizure could have reached him at Key West in early January. As Anderson suffered no adverse consequences for his fort seizure, Brannan perhaps saw a green light to do the same but should have been more circumspect as he certainly was aware that John Brown was hung in 1858 for waging war against Virginia – the crime being treason. Noteworthy is that Brown was tried and convicted in Virginia, where he committed his crime.

Though this speaker outlined how the island was placed under military rule, no adequate or honest discussion was provided regarding how or why military rule had suddenly materialized, how it was justified under American law, or who specifically ordered it. Martial law is generally considered to be the absence of law with arrests and detentions made at the discretion of the military commander, or those commanded by him. Missing was any explanation of how easily Northern commanders could ignore habeas corpus which was so deeply rooted in Anglo-American jurisprudence. But importantly, as Lincoln ignored the Constitution and approved the repressive actions of those like Brannan, it only encouraged more violations of the law.

The seizure of Fort Taylor came at the whim of a local military commander who was sworn to uphold the United States Constitution – and who should have clearly understood the definition of treason. Though simplistically following orders to protect the fort he was charged with commanding, the withdrawal of the State of Florida and its relationship with the United States government at Washington took precedence. After being officially advised of Florida’s decision to formally declare independence, and lacking any reason to remain on the island, which was no longer part of the United States, Capt. Brannan should have sought Florida officials to provide him with receipts for all equipment left behind before departing with his command. Though he likely would have been court-martialed for doing this, he would have been true to his oath to support the United States Constitution.

The above indicates that there is more than one viewpoint regarding this particular topic, and a more well-versed history teacher should have been able to present all credible perspectives beyond their own. In this particular case, the audience deserved a far better explanation of how military rule quickly overwhelmed a peaceful American town. The listeners were unfortunately left with a partial and limited view of this important and most revealing topic.

(For more information on this topic, see: “Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here.” John Bernhard Thuersam – Shotwell Publishing and available on Amazon)