Category: America Transformed

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)

 

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)

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

Jim Fisk’s father, known as “Pop,” was pure Yankee descended from English forbears, an itinerant peddler who left home with a loaded wagon on Mondays to return at week’s end with diminished cargo but thicker wallet. On one peddling trip, he ran out of shawls and had an excess of small, flowered tablecloths, he assured housewives that the tablecloths were the latest Boston style in shawls and sold them all.”

Below, Fisk’s son Jim followed in his father’s footsteps, doing what it took to turn a profit. Once war came, he never “felt any desire to shoulder a musket and help save the Union,” leaving the war to be fought by enthusiastic volunteers and reluctant draftees, and himself more like those who bought their way out.

During the war Jim hired adventurous actress Lottie Hough to wheedle passes through Union lines and her success so complete that she retired postwar with an immense fortune. As Grant closed in on Richmond and sensing the Confederacy’s inevitable demise, he and a small clique sent an agent to London to buy Confederate bonds short to all buyers. The agent arrived two days before news of Lee’s surrender reached England, after making a financial killing for his employers.

The Jordan Marsh enterprise below was founded at Boston in 1841 by Eben Dyer Jordan and Benjamin L. Marsh.

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

“Unlike most Bostonians, Fisk sensed that the South would not swallow Lincoln, that a war was coming. In the merits of the North-South quarrel he took little interest, but it struck him that whatever they were fighting about would open vast new merchandising opportunities. When Sumter fell and the war did come, he went to Washington to see if the government might be interested in purchasing textiles.

No one entertained with the rollicking bonhomie of James Fisk, Jr., one of the first of the war profiteers. Fisk’s company had several thousand blankets of an unappetizing color and somewhat mildewed. Retailers spurned them but Uncle Sam snapped them up.

In 1862, with cotton rotting in Southern warehouses and hard to come by in the North even at two dollars a pound, he set about to remedy the imbalance. While getting cotton out of the South involved trading with the enemy, violating the blockade, smuggling and possibly other illegalities, he justified on the ground of patriotism, reasoning that it was ridiculous that soldiers should be deprived of essential clothing – and merchants of profit – because of a mere technicality. The details of this bootleg operation, with its essential stratagems and bribes, remain dim, for he said little about it after the war.

Fisk never lacked courage if there was money in it, made several buying trips into the Dixie No Man’s Land . . . sending cotton north by the boatload, cargoes of fabulous value that kept the spindles whirring at Jordan Marsh, now the nation’s biggest enterprise of its kind. One of his biographers solemnly avers that his purchases of contraband cotton reached peaks as high as $800,000 a day.”

(Jim Fisk: The Career of an Unstoppable Rascal. W.A. Swanberg. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959, pp. 17-19

Shapers of Opinion

Those around Lincoln in mid-1864 were unsure of his reelection as emancipation was far from being popular, Grant’s casualty lists were endless and heartbreaking, and the draft was universally hated. Even Lincoln believed he would be replaced. To the rescue came   insiders like Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, the former editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Dana wrote: “All the power and influence of the War Department was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln.” Some 200,000 soldiers were furloughed to go home and vote, as well as patrol the polls to ensure Republican ballots were being cast. (Prince of Carpetbaggers, Jonathan Daniels. JB Lippincott Co., 1958, p. 105)

Shapers of Opinion

“Dana’s Chicago Republican, as the name implied, was strictly partisan, as was nearly every other contemporary newspaper. If the truth be told, editors of that era generally saw their job as more of shaping of opinion than the providing of news. And if they had to stretch the truth to get results? Well, that came with the territory.

From the hour I first occupied the position of editor to the present time,” a retiring journalist confessed, I have been solicited to lie on every given subject, and can’t remember ever having told a wholesome truth without diminishing the subscription list or making an enemy . . . Having a thorough contempt for myself, I retire in order to recruit my moral constitution.”

Except for subscribers to large metropolitan dailies, Americans interested in politics got their news from the partisan press and that press depended on party coffers and official funding. Editors acquired tremendous power, and far too often politicians awarded contracts and patronage because of that power. They also listened if an editor recommended someone for office, especially if that someone was the editor himself.”

(The General and the Journalists: Grant, Greeley and Dana. Harry Maihafer. Brassey’s Inc., 1998, p. 87; 222)

 

Preserving Peace and Good Order

It should be kept in mind that the so-called 14th Amendment was never ratified by the requisite number of States in 1868 and merely declared in force. In that year there were 37 States in the union – a three-fourths vote needed for amendment passage would require 28 States to the positive. Only 22 States had actually ratified the amendment when it was declared passed. Since irregularities were so obvious, Congress then passed a concurrent resolution declaring the amendment to be a part of the Constitution. It was passed in haste, not referred to any committee and discussion was restricted.

Preserving Peace and Good Order

“In 1883 the Supreme Court declared the conspiracy clause of the Congressional Ku Klux Act of 1871 unconstitutional and restricted the application of the law to acts of a State through its officers and not to private citizens. In the same year it declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as invalid.

The act made it criminal for any person to deny to any citizen on account of race or color the full and equal enjoyment of inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places of amusement. The act finally reached the Supreme Court as a result of a hotel hotel-manager in the South having refused accommodations to Negroes, and the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to laws enforcing the amendment, but not the power to regulate internal domestic affairs.

The decision contained the principle upon which the [Southern States have] rested their right to set up social barriers between themselves and Negroes. The principle was that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited State governments from discriminating between whites and blacks in its general legislation, but that this by no means prevented a hotel keeper from or theater-manager from making such a discrimination, nor did the amendment give to Congress any power to regulate theaters or hotels. This power, the Court insisted, still remained in the control of the States.

The Court opinions thus far reveal that the tribunal considered that the Fourteenth Amendment merely aimed to protect the Negro’s civil and political rights, but that it dii not give him a social status, equal, superior or otherwise. The matter of giving him whatever status he may have, therefore, has been left to the individuals in the States . . .

The Court summed up its whole attitude on the subject in the case of Plessy vs. Ferguson in 1896. The State of Louisiana had required that railway companies in the State provide equal but separate accommodations for white and Negro passengers. Plessy was ejected from a white compartment and arrested for violating State law.

He protested and finally got his protest before the Supreme Court, but the Court held that law was constitutional since it did not interfere with the civil or political equality of the races but was intended rather to preserve peace and good order. The law, the Court said, did not stamp the colored race with any badge of inferiority unless the race chose to put that construction upon it, and equal rights could not be secured to the Negro by an enforced comingling of the two races.”

(The Changing South. William J. Robertson. Boni and Liveright Publishers, 1927, pp. 82-84)

Invading North Carolina

The high point of General Burnside’s 1862 invasion of the Outer Banks and culminated with the capture of New Bern. When the 44th Massachusetts Regiment of nine-month men arrived they were treated with disdain by 3-year enlistees who received no favorable enlistment term.

Lincoln’s first proconsul at occupied New Bern, Edward Stanly, noted the ships offloading blue-clad troops returned north loaded with libraries, artwork and furniture liberated from New Bern homes.

Invading North Carolina   

“Abandoned by their owners upon the approach of the Union army, the elegant homes of New Bern’s merchant and professional class were now occupied by Federal officers. Several hundred blacks were employed, if not conscripted, to build fortifications at New Bern and other coastal points. [General] Burnside directed that they be paid eight dollars a month, given one ration a day and clothing.

[The New England soldiers] held many anti-black sentiments. One Maine soldier reflected the anti-black view of many New England troops in eastern North Carolina when he wrote that slavery “is wrong, a curse,” but that he “could not bear” the sight of blacks. Along with others in General [John G.] Foster’s army, this soldier favored emancipation as a wartime measure designed to weaken the Confederacy, and only secondly as an act of humanity for the slaves. Such men did not hesitate to exploit black refugees, forcing them to work as servants for little compensation.

In April [1863] the War Department authorized Col. Edward Wild to raise a brigade of blacks in North Carolina. Wild began recruiting in May [but] had to recruit in eastern Virginia in order to raise some of the troops for the 2nd and 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteer regiments. Even before the recruitment had been completed, the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment joined the three North Carolina regiments to form Col. Wild’s African Brigade.

During the summer Wild’s brigade participated in the unsuccessful Federal campaign against Charleston and later, in an independent action, raided a guerilla stronghold in northeastern North Carolina, [carrying off] 2,500 slaves, seizing arms and provisions, and burning four rebel camps.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. Civil War Reports of a Massachusetts Corporal. William C. Harris, ed., University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 12-13; 28-29)

Nine-Month Men

Lincoln spent much of 1862 in efforts to colonize the many contrabands coming within advancing Northern lines, using his emancipation edict to solve the question of ownership. Both the Danes and Dutch were interested in taking them for labor on their Caribbean sugar plantations.

But after several bloody defeats in1862, few white northern men stepped forward to enlist. Massachusetts Republican Governor John Andrew, fearful of losing reelection due to an angry electorate, asked Lincoln to allow his regiments to serve nine-month terms and especially in non-lethal regions. Also, Lincoln allowed the counting of black non-residents against his quota which began a rush of agents to the occupied South to credit contrabands to their particular State. This competition led to the formation of US Colored Troops in early 1863.

It is noted below that the Boston Irish were “hostile to blacks” which the author did not clarify. The Irish were among the poorest segment of Massachusetts society who feared contrabands would migrate northward and depress wages.

Nine-Month Men     

“June 6, 1863, the happy day of departure for home, finally came for the nine-month troops of the 44th Massachusetts. General Foster tried to persuade “the boys” to reenlist at New Bern in a new artillery regiment, but most wanted to go home before considering serving again. Of the regiment’s 1,018 original members, 902 returned to civilian life – casualties were eight men who died of actual battle wounds, and twenty-four who succumbed to disease – including the regiment’s surgeon. Three men had deserted.

The 44th Regiment’s service in the State militia continued until the end of the war. Indeed, a month after their return from the South, in mid-July, Governor Andrew called out the 44th regiment, along with other militia units, to prevent violence in Boston and nearby towns at the time of New York City’s Draft Riot. Upon the Governor’s request, Federal troops in nearby garrisons were brought into the city.

As in New York, the enforcement in July of the Federal conscription law, combined with Lincoln’s emancipation policy, inflamed thousands of men and women in the North who opposed the war, particularly Irish Democrats in the eastern cities who opposed the war and [were] hostile to blacks. In Boston, an angry mob of nearly 5,000 citizens, including women, stormed the armory on Cooper Street where a unit of Federal troops awaited them inside the building. The troops fired into the crowd killing eight and wounding many others.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. William C. Harris, editor. University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 29-31)

 

Better to Emulate the Wise Romans

British stateman Benjamin Disraeli viewed the United States as a “territorial democracy,” divided into a personal democracy in the South, and a socialistic and humanitarian democracy in the North. The latter was represented mainly by the abolitionists who saw their cause as transcending all laws or constitutions of state and had its counterpart in European Jacobinism or red republicanism.

At the end of the Civil War, Brownson emphasized that the general government “cannot itself reorganize a State; it has no authority to purge the electoral people and to say who may or may not vote, for the whole question of suffrage and qualifications is left to each State and can be settled neither by an act of Congress nor executive proclamation.”

Better to Emulate the Wise Romans

“[Brownson] maintained that neither the [Lincoln] administration nor Congress ever took, distinctly and decisively, a ground on which the war was defensible . . . for neither party understood where, under our system, the sovereign power is lodged.

But whatever the inner superior merit of the American Constitution, its interpretation is quite another thing altogether. If the [Southern] States had not held the States to be severally sovereign and maintained that the United States are only an agreement or compact, they would not have seceded; and had not the [Northern] States confounded the Union with the general government and manifested a tendency to make it the whole national government, the South would have had no occasion or excuse for secession.

[Brownson] expressed deep regrets over President Andrew Johnson’s proclamation of May 29, 1865, disenfranchising the pars sanior of the whole white Southern society. Of that he wrote:

It exceeded anything ever issued in any age by the most barbarous chieftain. It virtually disenfranchised and outlawed nearly the whole Southern people, certainly every man who could render any efficient service in reorganizing Southern society, and in repairing the disasters of the war.”

This he proscribed as a wholly calamitous policy. What was most needed was to bring about a speedy restoration of the Southern people to citizenship and thus bring the North and South together in friendly and loyal cooperation in binding up the nation’s wounds. To inflict upon the Southern people unnecessary and ill-timed pains and penalties would only be to disgrace the whole American character . . .

“The wise Romans,” he reminded the Northern victors, “never allowed a triumph to a Roman general for victories, however brilliant, won over Romans.”

(Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography. Thomas R. Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, 1976, p. 647; 649-650; 654; 659)