Circa1865

Well before the Dred Scott case of 1857 was the question brought before Connecticut Judge David Daggett, chief justice of the court of errors, in October 1833 raising the validity of a State law which “forbid any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruction of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State.” The law was in place as the State’s colored schools tended to “greatly increase the colored population of the State and thereby to the injury of the people.” The defendant, a free Negro, insisted that the law was unconstitutional as it was in violation of the United States Constitution regarding the equal rights of citizens of all States.”

Regarding “citizens,” only the 1789 Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2 states: “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.”  The Dred Scott case of 1857 rested upon this, and the question before the Court was simply whether Scott was a citizen of a State, as argued below.

To underscore the validity of the Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2, the victorious Republican party was forced to follow the amendment route as it sought manipulation of the South’s black vote.

From Connecticut to Dred Scott

“Are slaves citizens? At the adoption of the Constitution of the United States [in 1789], every State was a slave State . . . We all know that slavery is recognized in that Constitution; it is the duty of this court to take that Constitution as it is, for we have sworn to support it . . . Then slaves were not considered citizens by the framers of the Constitution.

“Are free blacks citizens? . . . to my mind it would be a perversion of terms, and the well-known rules of construction, to say that slaves, free blacks or Indians were citizens, within the meaning of that term as used in the Constitution. God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound, by my duty, to say that they are not citizens.”

In the case of Hobbs vs Fogg the State of Pennsylvania furnished another strong precedent for the decision of the [Dred] Scott case. At the election of 1835 a negro offered to vote. Solely on account of his color, the judges of election refused the privilege. The Negro insisted that “as a freeman and citizen of the State” the provisions contained in the State constitution and laws entitled him to the right of suffrage. The judges justified themselves on the ground “that a free Negro or mulatto is not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution and law of the United States, and of the State of Pennsylvania, and, therefore, is not entitled to the right of suffrage . . .” The chief justice delivered the opinion, to which there was unanimous assent [to declare] “that no colored race was party to our social compact. Our ancestors settled the province as a community of white men; that the blacks were introduced into it as a race of slaves; whence an unconquerable prejudice of caste, which has come down to our day . . .” This is followed by “Yet it is proper to say that [Article 2, section 4] of the Federal Constitution, presents an obstacle to the political freedom of the Negro, which seems to be insuperable.”

Now then, in addition to the presumption that [those] of pure African blood whose ancestors had been American slaves, was presumed to have been born and to have continued a slave, these laws show that all the States had given to the Federal Constitution, from the days of its ratification down to the Dred Scott decision, a practical interpretation agreeing unanimously that a Negro, though free and a native of a State, was not a person as the word ‘citizen’ defines as that word was used by the framers of the Constitution.”

(The Legal and Historical Status of the Dred Scott Decision. Elbert William R. Ewing. Cobden Publishing Company, 1909, pp. 67-69)

Correcting the Record

“The Jackson (Mississippi) Clarion prints the following letter:

Beauvoir, Mississippi

June 20, 1885

Dear Sir, – Among the less-informed persons at the North there exists an opinion that the negro slave at the South was a mere chattel, having neither rights nor immunities protected by law or public opinion. Southern men knew such was not the case, and others desiring to know could readily learn the fact.

On that error the lauded story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was founded, but it is strange that a utilitarian and shrewd people did not ask why a slave, especially valuable, was the object of privation and abuse? Had it been a horse they would have been better able to judge and would most probably have rejected the story for its improbability. Many attempts have been made to evade and misrepresent the exhaustive opinion of Chief Justice Taney in the ‘Dred Scott’ case, but it remains unanswered.

From the statement in regard to Fort Sumter, a child might suppose that a foreign army had attacked the United States – [and] certainly could not learn that the State of South Carolina was merely seeking possession of a fort on her own soil and claiming that her grant of the site had become void.

The tyrant’s plea of necessity to excuse despotic usurpation is offered for the unconstitutional act of emancipation, and the poor resort to prejudice is invoked in the use of the epithet ’rebellion,’ a word inapplicable to the States generally, and most especially so to the sovereign members of a voluntary union. But alas for their former ancient prestige, the States have even lost the plural reference they had in the Constitution . . . such language would be appropriate to an imperial government, which in absorbing territories required the subject inhabitants to swear allegiance to it.”

(Letter from President Davis on States’ Rights. Southern Historical Society Papers. Vol. XIV, January – December 1886, Rev. J. William Jones, D.D., pp. 408-409)

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

Gov. Orval Faubus’ Message to Arkansas:

“On Tuesday, September 24, 1957 . . . the cleverly conceived plans of the US Justice Department under Republican Herbert Brownell, were placed in execution. One thousand two hundred troops of the 101^st Airborne Division were flown in from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to occupy Little Rock’s Central High School.

At the same time, the entire Arkansas National Guard and Air guard were federalized and are now a part of the US Army and Air Force. We are now an occupied territory.

Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in the unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls – in the backs of students – and in the bloody face of a railroad worker, who was bayoneted and then felled by the butt of a rifle in the hands of a sergeant of the 101^st Airborne Division. This man, on private property, as a guest in a home two blocks from the school, has been hospitalized. Others have suffered bayonet wounds from the hands of the US Army soldiers. Your New York newspapers also show the scenes.

Up until the time the injunction was issued against me by the imported federal judge, the peace had been kept in Little Rock by as few as 30 National Guardsmen. Not a blow was struck, no injury inflicted on any person, and no property damage sustained. I wish to point out that no violence broke out in the city until after the injunction was issued by the imported federal judge, and the National Guardsmen were withdrawn. And I might add here, all we have ever asked for is a little time, patience and understanding, as so often expressed by President Eisenhower himself, in solving this problem.

In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish – what is happening in America? Is every right in the United States Constitution now lost? Does the will of the people, that basic precept of our republic, no longer matter? Must the will of the majority now yield, under federal force, to the will of the minority, regardless of the consequences?

If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative . . . we no longer have a union of States under a republican form of government. If this be true, then the States are mere subdivisions of an all-powerful federal government, these subdivisions being nothing more than districts for the operation of federal agents and federal military forces – forces which operate without any regard for the rights of a sovereign State or its elected officials, and without due regard for personal and property rights.

The imported federal comes from a State a thousand miles away with no understanding whatsoever of the difficulties of our problems in the field of race relations.”

(Another Tragic Era: Gov. Faubus Gives His Side of the Arkansas Story. US News & World Report, October 4, 1957, pp. 66-67)

Late-war and early postwar Northern propaganda attributed the basest motives to the American Confederacy as the Republican Radicals prepared their punishments for the defeated. They asserted that “it was not merely the Southern people . . . they were abetted by their government . . . a congressional investigation reported that “there was a fixed determination on the part of the rebels to kill the Union soldiers who fell into their hands.” The US Sanitary Commission declared that “the conclusion is unavoidable . . . that these privations and sufferings [in prison camps] have been designedly inflicted by the military and other authorities of the rebel government.” Both reports were publicized by the North’s infamous “Loyal League.

Shaping the Demand for Revenge

“Northern opinion was thus rigidly shaped in the belief that “tens of thousands of national soldiers . . . were deliberately shot to death, as at Fort Pillow, of frozen to death at Belle Island, or starved to death at Andersonville, or sickened to death by swamp malaria, as in South Carolina.” Horror passed into fury and fury into a demand for revenge.

The New York Times insisted that “every rebel official who had been concerned, directly or indirectly, in the torturing and murdering of our prisoners” should be excluded from the terms of presidential pardon. Secretary of War Stanton ordered officers of armies advancing into the South to arrest the “inhuman monsters” most prominent in management of prisons. The archfiend of iniquity, for so the North considered him, Major Henry Wirz, was hanged as a murderer.

It was not until 1876 that the publication of R. R. Stevenson’s “The Southern Side, or Andersonville Prison” and J.W. Jone’s “The Confederate View of the Treatment of Prisoners” gave to such unbiased minds as might wish to know an adequate exposition of the Southern side. It was not difficult to find, however, material in these years that indicates the South received the Northern charge with sullen hatred. Typical is an article contributed to the Southern Review of January 1867:

“The impartial times to come will hardly understand how a nation, which not only permitted but encouraged its government to declare medicines and surgical instruments contraband of war, and to destroy by fire and sword the habitations and food of non-combatants, as well as the fruits of the earth and the implements of tillage, should afterwards have clamored for the blood of captive enemies, because they did not feed their prisoners out of their own starvation and heal them in their hospitals [devoid of medicines].

[When the facts of the deliberate and inexorable non-exchange of prisoners and refusal of food and medicines for Andersonville prisoners is realized], men will wonder how it was that a people, passing for civilized and Christian, should have consigned a Jefferson Davis to a cell, while they tolerated Edwin M. Stanton as a cabinet minister.”

So, the endless argument continued. The wounds remained unhealed festering their poison in unforgiveness. While Northerners blamed the evil genius of slavery for the war, Southerners pointed the finger of responsibility to “those men who preached the irrepressible conflict to the Northern people” and “helped to bring on that unlawful and unholy invasion of the South.”

(The Road to Reunion, Paul H. Buck. Little, Brown and Company, 1937, pp. 46-48)    

Credit should be given to New York Governor Horatio Seymour for immediately seeing through Lincoln’s 10-percent plan of “reconstruction” of the United States, that is, creating loyal States out of conquered provinces. Even the Radical Republicans saw that Lincoln’s plan would only increase executive power while restricting their predatory raids on Southern property.

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

“From the night of the October 1863 elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lincoln kept his eyes glued on the coming contest. Two days later he was back in the War Department discussing political prospects.

The first development in the campaign was a Presidential proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for the Southern States. On December 8 Lincoln announced that any person in the South – with the exception of high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy – might be granted amnesty if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Moreover, whenever ten percent of the population of any State had taken the oath, they might hold elections and establish a State government, which the President would recognize.

The political implications of the proclamation were immediately evident to both Radical Republicans and Democrats. Horatio Seymour of New York perceived it as a new assault on popular liberties. In his January message to the legislature, he pointed out that the arbitrary military power of the federal government was growing steadily. Moreover, every measure to pervert the war into a war against private property and personal rights at the South had been paralleled by claims to exercise military power at the North.

He enumerated them: there was the emancipation proclamation for the South, and the suspension of habeas corpus at the North; the Confiscation Act for the South, and arrests, imprisonment and banishment for Northern citizens; the claim to destroy political organizations in the South, and the armed interference in Northern elections.

These acts against Northern liberties had been justified as necessary, but the government had given up no powers when the emergency had passed. In fact, “more prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed as a necessity in days of disaster and danger.” The doctrine of Southern degradation, explained the Governor, “is a doctrine of Northern bankruptcy . . . it is a measure for lasting despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.”

As for Lincoln’s reconstruction program, Seymour saw it as a political device. The minority of one-tenth in reconstructed States would be kept in power by the North’s arms and treasure. There would be no motive, prophesied the Governor, to draw the remaining population into the fold; instead, “there will be every inducement of power, of gain, and of ambition, to perpetuate the condition of affairs.”

Moreover, it would be to the interest of the national administration to continue this system of government. Nine controlled States in the South with 70,000 voting population would balance in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college one half the population of the United States. Fourteen hundred men in Florida would balance New York in the Senate.

Thus, the nine States mentioned in Lincoln’s proclamation, together with Pierpont’s [western] Virginia would constitute a system of rotten boroughs that would govern the nation.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp.-350-353)

Below, Alexander Stephens explains the original intent of citizenship of the United States being first State citizenship. Stephens wrote the following from a Fort Warren jail cell after his arrest in 1865 for an unknown crime.

Citizenship as Intended

“Eight weeks today [July 6, 1865] I have been a prisoner; six weeks in this place; all without the slightest intimation of the cause. Seized by an armed force, sent here by an armed force, kept in close confinement, guarded by an armed force, deprived of all means of appealing to judicial power for redress; and yet Eagle-orators and reverend rhetoricians scream and shout about the glorious freedom we Americans enjoy.

PM – [A newspaper] article on naturalization in the cyclopedia attracted my attention. It is strange what errors have crept into vogue and pass without scrutiny or question, especially on naturalization and its sequence, citizenship of the United States. The subject is treated as if Congress were empowered by the Constitution to confer upon aliens’ citizenship of the United States distinct from citizenship of particular States and Territories.

The truth is, Congress has no power to naturalize or to confer citizenship of the United States. Its only power is to establish a uniform rule to be pursued by the respective States and Territories on admitting aliens to their own citizenship.

Before the Constitution was adopted, each State possessed the right as an Independent Sovereign Power to admit to citizenship whom she pleased, and on such terms as she pleased. All that the States did on this point in accepting the Constitution was to delegate to Congress the power to establish a uniform rule so that an alien might not be permitted to become a citizen of one State on different terms from what might be required in another; especially, as in one part of the Constitution it is stipulated that the citizens of each State shall be entitled in all the rest to the rights and privileges of their citizens.

But no clause of the Constitution provides for or contemplates citizenship of the United States as distinct from citizenship of some particular State or Territory. When any person is a citizen of one of the States united, he thereby, and thereby only, becomes and can be considered a citizen of the United States.

Errors in the public mind on this question are radical and fundamental and have the same source as many others equally striking.

I was first struck with these on the annexation of Texas. How could her representatives, it was asked, take their seats in Congress, not having been citizens of the United States for the term of years required by the Constitution? The answer, upon the true principles of the Constitution and the only citizenship it contemplates, was plain: members and senators could not present themselves until the State was itself one of the United States; then, whoever might present himself as a member, having been seven years a citizen of Texas, would, in the terms and meaning of the Constitution, have been seven years a citizen of the United States, so constituted.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 312-313)

In the judgement of George Washington, the government of the US was in form and nature a “Confederated, or Federal Republic” and all States within were small republics themselves. Further, the federal agent of the States was not a “republic,” but only the assigned agent of these individual republics. Montesquieu affirmed that in a confederation, the States do not forfeit or part with their individual sovereignty. Philosopher and diplomat Emmerich de Vattel asserted as well that “several sovereign and independent States may unite themselves together by a perpetual Confederacy without ceasing to be, each individually, a perfect State, and together constitute a federation.

Abraham Lincoln ended this original intent of the Founders in 1861 with his war upon States wishing to voluntarily depart the 1789 agreement. Alexander H. Stephens wrote postwar that the 1861-1865 conflict was the result of Lincoln’s abuse of powers and forced national consolidation.

Washington’s Confederate Republic

“In the popular mind in the post-Revolution time, those representing the citizens of the States at large, each acting for themselves in their sovereign capacities.

“[The various] demonstrations, devices, mottoes and symbols, clearly showed how the great mass of people, in all the States, understood the new Constitution. It was nothing but a more perfect bond of union between the States. “Federal” was the watchword of the day in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond and Charleston. It was the grand symbolized idea throughout the whole length and breadth of the land. There can be no doubt that the people thought they were adopting a Federal Constitution – forming a federated union.

Now then, what is the meaning of this word “federal,” which entered so deeply into the thoughts, hearts and understandings of the people of that day?

Dr. Johnson, the highest authority of that day, in his Dictionary, thus defines the word: Federal – (Foedus, Lat.)  relating to a League or Contract. Federate, he defines (Federatus, Lat.) leagued, joined in a Confederacy. The great American lexicographer Noah Webster, says of this word “Federal,” that it is derived from the Latin word “Foedus” which means a League. A League he defines to be “an Alliance or Confederacy between Princes or States for their mutual aid or defense.” And in defining the meaning of the word “Federal,” he uses this language: “Consisting of a Compact between States or Nations; founded on alliance by contract of mutual agreement; as, a Federal Government, such as that of the United States.”

Federal, from its very origin and derivation, therefore, has no meaning and can have none, disassociated from a Compact or Agreement of some sort, and it is seldom ever used to qualify any Compacts or Agreements except those between States or Nations. So that Federal and Confederate mean substantially the same thing.

Washington, in one of his letters which I have just read, spoke of the new Government as “a Confederacy.” In another, to Sir Edward Newenham, dated the 20^th of July, 1788, he speaks of the new Government then ratified by enough States to carry it into effect as a “Confederated Government.” In . . . 1789 he expressed his conviction that “his happiness . . . that “the Senate would at all times cooperate in every measure which may tend to promote the welfare of “this Confederated Republic.” These are the terms by which he characterized “the union” after the present Constitution was formed and after it was in operation. There is no difference between the words Federal and Confederated as thus used and applied. We see that Washington used them both, at different times, to signify the same thing, that is, the Union of the American States under the Constitution.”

(A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, Alexander H. Stephens. Sprinkle Publications, 1994 (Original: S.A. George, Printers, 1868), pp. 167-170)

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed the “Dependent Pension Bill” which sought to reward a favored Republican constituency, the North’s veterans of the Civil War. Since 1865, the Republican party had created and expanded a virtual national welfare program to attract their votes. Viewing this bill as simply a “raid on the US Treasury” benefitting the Republican party, Cleveland incurred the wrath of Northern veterans as he believed it was charity, and his veto the honorable path to take.

The Daily Advertiser of Boston in early September 1865 contained the letter of an astute resident who advised the public to give veterans work and a full share of public offices. Otherwise, he feared, “we shall guarantee a faction, a political power, to be known as the soldier vote . . . I wonder if our State politicians remember that 17,000 men can give the election to either party.”

America’s First Welfare Program

Lincoln’s government initiated a military pension system in mid-July 1862 and included a $5 fee for Claim Agents who assisted veterans; attorneys could charge $1.50 if additional testimony and affidavit were required. The House of Representatives set this latter amount given the temptation for unscrupulous attorneys to take undue advantage of the pensioners. With this Act passed, practically every member of Congress became anxious to provide for soldiers, sailors and their dependents – more than a few began to take advantage of the political power that lay in the hands of the “soldier vote.” A Mr. Holman, representing Indiana in Congress, praised the 5,000 Indiana men “who gave up the charmed circle of their homes to maintain the old flag of the Union.”

As the war continued into 1864 and the spirit of revenge in the North increased, it was officially proposed to create a large pension fund for Northern soldiers by confiscating Southern property.  In September 1865, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a former slave-State, “proposed a plan whereby he hoped the government would realize over three and a half billions of dollars by confiscating Southern property. Although no such a measure ever became law, it reveals the attitude which several members of the House had toward the question of pensions.”

The abuse of the pension system by 1875 caused the commissioner, Henry Atkinson, to state that “the development of frauds of every character in pension claims has assumed such magnitude as to require the serious attention of Congress . . .”

(History of the Civil War Military Pensions, 1861-1865. John William Oliver. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 844, Vol. 4, No. 1. pp. 11-12; 14; 20; 41)

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)