America Transformed

A War Far, Far Away

The following reminds us of Robert E. Lee’s mid-December 1866 letter to Britain’s Lord Acton, noting that the new highly centralized US government had become despotic at home as well as aggressive abroad.”

The colonial French stronghold of Deinbienphu surrendered to North Vietnamese forces on May 7,1954, leading to the partition of Vietnam into North and South. The latter would be protected by inclusion into the new SEATO defense treaty, which in hindsight was a gross mistake. The author below noted that Eisenhower did “Americanize” the region and commit US prestige to defend a government, which to use Dulles’s phrase, “would lose the support of the people.” It had been Eisenhower himself who predicted the consequences. It would be Eisenhower’s successors who would have to face them.”

A War Far, Far Away

“Still, neither Dulles nor Eisenhower were willing to throw in the towel [in late-April]. They quickly devised an alternative plan by which a United Action coalition could be arranged among France, the ANZUS countries, and the Associated States. Dienbienphu would be lost, but the French could withdraw into defensible enclaves where they could be supported by American air and sea power. The British could join the coalition later. Eisenhower sounded out the Republican leaders.

“There are plenty of people in Asia,” he explained, “and we can train them to fight well. I don’t see any reason for American ground troops to be committed in Indochina, don’t think we need it, but we can train their forces and it may be necessary for us eventually to use some of our planes or aircraft off the coast and some of our fighting craft we have in that area for support.” The essential point was, Eisenhower concluded, “Where in the hell can you let the Communists chip away anymore [sic]. We just can’t stand it.”

“[During a National Security Council meeting on April 29, Eisenhower noted that] the position of the US as the leader of the free world necessitated associates. Without allies “the leader is just an adventurer like Genghis Kahn.” Further, “We would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism . . . [and] be everywhere accused of imperialistic ambitions. A unilateral intervention would mean a general war with China and perhaps the USSR, which the US would have to prosecute separated from its allies.”

(Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the Fifties. R. Melanson; D. Mayers, editors. University of Illinois Press. 1989, pp. 142-143)

Reconstruction Days in Washington

On March 2, 1875, President Grant signed the Civil Rights Bill for which Charles Sumner had labored so many years, and which was a tribute to his memory. Southerners and Democrats in Congress had bitterly contested the Bill, which imposed a $500 fine, upon owners of restaurants, theaters and hotels which refused to accommodate all persons regardless of color. The Bill did not apply to churches nor to schools – and in the South, was held to be an unwarrantable interference with the rights of the individual States, and after a number of test cases in the lower courts, this opinion was sustained by the US Supreme Court.

Reconstruction Days in Washington

“During the Reconstruction period the colored people of Washington were able briefly to enjoy some of those advantages and privileges for which they and their Radical friends had so long struggled. The leaders of the Republican party, well-aware that only the solid support of the colored voters of the South had regained the two-thirds majority of their party in Congress and therefore anxious to preserve their loyalty, treated the colored representatives with a healthy respect.

The largest contingent of Negro congressmen had come from South Carolina, which had been under Republican control since the new state constitution of 1869. The white “Scalawag” members who had been returned to the 41^st Congress had reflected little credit on their state or their party. One of them, B.F. Whittemore, had resigned after his sale of West Point cadetships was revealed. Another, C.C. Bowen, the representative for the Charleston district, was jailed for bigamy after a long and sensational trial in the District courts. Convicted by a mixed jury, Bowen was freed after two weeks in prison; he was not, however, renominated for his congressional seat.

Joseph H. Rainey was a mulatto native of Georgetown, SC and a barber. His scanty formal education had been improved by travel in the West Indies. In an interview, Rainey stated it was hard to find rooms in Washington and that colored congressmen were charged more than white men. At Falf’s Bar, across from the Post Office, he had been obliged to pay fifty cents for a glass of beer, the water freely admitting that the extra charge was account of his color.”

(The Uncivil War: Washington During the Reconstruction: 1865-1878. James H. Whyte, Twayne Publishers, 1958, pp. 237-238; 242)

Florida’s Reconstruction

By order of the Sixth District’s Federal military occupation commander, Major-General John Pope, the election of Florida’s constitutional convention members was to be held on November 14, 15 and 16, 1867. Those chosen to register voter names were noted as “pronounced and bitter Republican partisans,” and holding positions as election officers and poll judges.

The struggles over Reconstruction issues in Florida noted below would revive the State’s prewar Democratic party, as conservative citizens became aware of the Republican scheme to form a “ring” to monopolize the State’s railways with New York funding.

Florida’s Reconstruction

“The native whites were not exhibiting interest in registering [under Reconstruction rule]. From Walton County, West Florida, came the report: “I fear this class (negroes, carpetbaggers and scalawags) will control the county unless a greater interest can be awakened.” What is true of Walton is true of most of the counties in the State,” announced the Floridian.

The mass of the whites had refrained from voting, with only 1,220 white votes cast, of which 203 were against assembling the convention. The Conservative party [of native whites] had succeeded neither in making Conservative voters of the negroes nor in preventing them from voting the Republican ticket.

Forty-six delegates were actually returned in this election: eighteen were negroes, and three of the latter were citizens of other States. Of the twenty-seven whites, one or two were Conservatives, fifteen or sixteen were Radical carpetbaggers from the North, and ten or twelve Southern loyalist or “scalawags.”

What were the obvious characteristics of these delegates chosen by the newly enfranchised? Several of the negro members were unlettered – unable to read or write. Two or three of the blacks had evil reputations and would have done better in jail than in legislative halls. Of the whites, the native Union or loyalist element was made up of men of no particular reputation – good or bad – and of mediocre enlightenment.

The carpetbag or Northern element – composing about one-third of the delegates – contained some men of considerable intelligence and passable education. The most cultured member of the convention, probably, was Jonathan Gibbs, a tall and slightly- built man of color indicating mulatto origin. Born in Philadelphia, educated at Dartmouth College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he was a fairly successful type of an intelligent black subjected to New England culture.

Sent into Florida for philanthropic work among the negroes. He soon entered politics and was ere long in rubbing shoulders with cantankerous and thieving ignorance. He died before the end of Republican rule, ostensibly from eating too heavy a dinner. It was rumored that he was poisoned by fellow Republicans.”

(The Civil War & Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis, Columbia University, 1913, pp. 491-495)

The Great American Misfortune

The Northern States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. The North’s industrial production exploded and made agriculture prosper, while the flood of European immigration more than replaced the men in blue lost by Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. The South was in shambles and soon the North would send its carpetbaggers and Union League organizers to loot anything of value that remained.

The Great American Misfortune

“On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union army landed in Texas. At Galveston he proclaimed, in the name of President Johnson, that the authority of the United States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were free. With him, thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French in Mexico; the others congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the State. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior and most camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the State with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by.

Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as “right.” They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texans were stubborn and prideful people. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy too.

The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The State was placed under military rule and army tribunals replaced the civil courts . . . Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. More galling than the actual atrocities [by Union soldiers], however, was the fact that most Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.

Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.

Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville.

This had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full and lasting effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texas soul.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, 1968, pp. 394-395)

The Deadliest War

The author cited below wrote: “Perhaps it was cold comfort to dismembered Mexico, but the “Mexican Cession” led in the next two decades to the death of a million gringos, as well as to sectional hatreds that persist to the present.” The Compromise of 1850 led to the political rise of Lincoln, John Brown’s violence, the formation of the Republican party, the election of Lincoln, the withdrawal of Southern States and war.

The Deadliest War

“The Deadliest war in American history, in terms of total deaths per thousand who served per year, at last was over. Of the 100,182 soldiers, sailors, marines who participated, only 1548 were killed in action, but 10,970 died from disease and exposure. Thus, the mortality rate was 110 per 1000 per annum (as compared with a Civil War rate of 65; a Spanish-American War rate of 27.79; and a World War I rate of 16. In World War II the death rate was about 3 percent of the total strength of the armed forces.

And the death rate was appallingly high in relation to the length of actual combat, for the conflict with Mexico lasted just twenty-two months (with only seventeen months of actual combat) . . . [and American soldiers] would continue to succumb to diseases contracted in Mexico for the next several decades. J.J. Oswandel, a veteran of the war, wrote in 1885, “After the close of the war we returned home with impaired health . . . with a disease contracted in a strange climate, which, in a few years after the war had taken from their homes more than half of those who returned.”

(North America Divided: The Mexican War, 1846-1848. S. Connor & O. Faulk. Oxford University Press, 1971, pp.170-171)

The Better Men

“Civil wars, like private quarrels, are likely to repeat themselves, where the unsuccessful party has lost the contest only through accident or inadvertence. The Confederates have gone out of this war with the proud, secret, deathless, dangerous consciousness that they are THE BETTER MEN, and there was nothing wanting but a change in a set of circumstances and a firmer resolve to make them the victors.”

(The Lost Cause. Edward A. Pollard. E. B. Treat & Company, Baltimore, Md., L. T. Palmer & Company, 1866. pg. 729)

Devotion to Land, Bible and Constitution

The writer below notes that historians burdened with modern egalitarian standards often “do not grasp the most elementary concept of the sound historian: the ability to appraise the past by standards other than those of the present. They accept a fanatical nationalism which leaves no room for sectional variations.”

Devotion to Land, Bible and Constitution

Jefferson Davis [is condemned by biographers] as a prolonged conspirator against the Union. But the facts show that as late as 1860 he, as a United States senator, was advocating appropriations for the army he was to fight in less than a year. A proper sympathy for the sectional values would perhaps lead to a condemnation of Davis because he did not become a conspirator against the Union soon enough.

Davis was not one of the great revolutionists of history; he was too honorable for that. Unlike William L. Yancy and R. Barnwell Rhett, he was slow in understanding that the North was in a revolutionary conspiracy against the Constitution as he interpreted it and could be answered effectively only by counterrevolution. Allen Tate, the poet, is the only biographer who condemns Davis for not understanding that the aim of the plutocratic democracy of the North was to crush his beloved homeland.

Davis should be praised for finally recognizing the forces arrayed against his section and then heroically defending its concept of truth and justice. Despite physical weaknesses, he maintained a proud but ragged nation for four years against the powers of wealth, progress and patriotism. After defeat he did not repent.

For his failure to repent, historians will not forgive Davis. He did not respond to the new wave of nationalism which came after the Civil War. He was no pragmatist, no evolutionist. Until his death, he remained devoted to his section, the soldier who found greatest virtue in continuing the battle charge after the enemy has inflicted a grievous wound and remained the scholastic who accepted the Bible and the Constitution just as they are written. He was as optimistic in his devotion to the antique values of the South as was Don Quixote to the antique values of an older land.

If the historians of the South were as tolerant of our past as are the European historians of theirs, they would confer on the defeated President of the Confederacy as many honors as have been conferred on the famous Spanish knight.”

Tolerating the South’s Past. Francis Butler Simkins. Journal of Southern History, Vol. XXI, No. 1, February 1955, pp 33-8)

The Radical Star Chamber

The Radical element of the Republican party emerged as a means to direct and control Lincoln’s war against the American South. West Point-graduate General George McClellan was an early casualty of Radical meddling as they strove to ensure that Radicalized military commanders- usually inept – were selected for high command.

The Radical Star Chamber

“It is a sordid story of how the people’s representatives, Sumner, Stevens, Wade, Chandler, Trumbull, Henry Wilson, Henry Winter Davis, and others, undertook to determine the conduct of the war for partisan purposes. They are shown as the representatives of the new “bourgeoisie” who ‘intended to do more than use their new-fledged political power to consolidate an already dominant economic position. They meant to extend the new industrial order to the South and make that section an economic adjunct of the North.’

The most certain way to accomplish this double purpose would be to destroy slavery, and with it the Old South. The Radicals ‘loved the Negro less for himself than as an instrument with which they might fasten Republican political and economic control upon the South.’ Lincoln saw the war as a way to preserve the Union while the Radicals saw it as a way to end slavery and the slave owners’ political power.

Victory must not come, therefore, through Democratic generals like McClellan, nor after a short war which would leave slavery untouched. This was a view which sometimes placed Radicals in the ‘position of regarding Union defeats on the battlefield as helpful to their cause.’ The Radicals would dominate the Republican party, Congress, and the Executive. They would form the President’s Cabinet, shape his policies, select his generals, and control the patronage.

The Committee for the Conduct of the War was hit upon as the Congressional agency over which the President would have no power. It was a Court of Star Chamber in every respect. It developed a refined technique for browbeating witnesses, suppressing testimony, damaging reputations, making oblique attacks upon Lincoln, and all under the guise of impartial investigations designed to mobilize efficiently the forces of victory.

With Washington full of amateur strategists, the army full of politicians, Lincoln indecisive and desperate for sound advice, and the Cabinet a hodge-podge, it is not surprising that the Radicals, with principles too high to let the Constitution stand in the way, soon got the smell of blood in their nostrils and were away in full pursuit. McClellan was fair game but difficult to corner, although some of his subordinates were the victims of pot-shots. Eventually, McClellan’s own weaknesses combined with the Radical sniping caused Lincoln to send him for cover.

The Radicals were adept at picking political generals who could not fight. These usually fell by the way, with never a tear shed by those who had urged them on Lincoln as saviors of the republic. When a general favored by the Radicals lost a battle, the blame was put on a Democratic or conservative subordinate; if a conservative won a battle, as in the case of Meade at Gettysburg, it was carefully explained that the credit should go elsewhere.

Even Grant was assailed as a Democrat until the Radicals decided they wanted to annex him, and Grant was politician enough to want to be annexed.”

(Lincoln and the Radicals, T. Harry Williams. University of Wisconsin Press, 1941. Review by R.H. Woody, Duke University. North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. XIX, No. 4, October 1942, pp. 410-411)

A Common Agent Rather Than a King

Jefferson Davis mused in his magisterial Rise and Fall: “As time rolled on, the General Government gathering with both hands a mass of undelegated powers, reached that position which Mr. Jefferson had pointed out as an intolerable evil – the claim of a right to judge the extent of its own authority.”

A Common Agent Rather Than a King

“In July 1776, the Congress of the thirteen united colonies declared that “these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.” [England’s] denial of this asserted right and the attempted coercion made it manifest that a bond of union was necessary, for the common defense.

In November of the following year, 1777, the Articles of Confederation and perpetual union were entered into by the thirteen States under the style of “The United States of America.” Under the Articles, no amendment to them could be made except by unanimous consent, which hampered the efficient discharge of the functions entrusted to the Congress.

What is the Constitution of the United States?

The whole body of the instrument, the history of its formation and adoption, as well as the Tenth Amendment, added in an abundance of caution, clearly show it to be an instrument enumerating the powers delegated by the States to the Federal Government, their common agent. It is specifically declared that all which was not so delegated was reserved.

On this mass of reserved powers, those which the States declined to grant, the Federal Government was expressly forbidden to intrude. Of what value would this prohibition have been, if three-fourths of the States could, without the assent of a particular State, invade the domain which that State had reserved for its own exclusive use and control?

It [is, I hope], been satisfactorily demonstrated that the States were sovereigns before the formed the Union, and that they have never surrendered their sovereignty, but have only entrusted to their common agent certain functions of sovereignty to be used for their common welfare.”

(Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume I. Jefferson Davis. D. Appleton & Co., 1881, pp. 192; 195-196)

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

In mid-December 1862, Abraham Lincoln dispatched an army of over 122,000 men under Gen. Ambrose Burnside to northern Virginia with orders to defeat Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army of 72,000 near Fredericksburg. The debacle that followed cost Lincoln the lives of nearly 13,000 men, another 10,000 wounded, and the virtual end of voluntary northern enlistments. This forced Lincoln to resort to large financial bounties to attract mercenaries, and substitutes could be bought for northern men to escape conscription.

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

The commander of a Maine regiment wrote of the battle’s aftermath:

“We had to pick our way over a field strewn with incongruous ruin; men torn and broken and cut to pieces in every indescribable way, cannon dismounted, gun carriages smashed or overturned, ammunition chests flung wildly about, horses dead and half-dead still in harness . . .” Col. Joshua Chamberlain

Also, poet Walt Whitman visited the aftermath of Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother George:

“Fredericksburg had turned into a massacre. [General] Burnside sacrificed wave after wave of his troops against the strong Confederate positions – only to be stopped short, again and again, in bloody carnage at a sunken road beneath Marye’s Heights . . . From this chaos came row upon row of cold, stone grave markers still covering acres of highlands over Fredericksburg City. Some 13,000 of Lincoln’s soldiers dead.”

Began my visits among the camp hospitals in Burnside’s army. Outside a house used as a hospital, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the entrance, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. – a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie nearby [with] each covered by a brown woolen blanket. In the dooryard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt.”

“Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face, you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless, extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket. It is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital during the night; [or it might be] a row of three or four corpses covered over. No one makes an ado. There comes a detail of men to bury them; all useless ceremony is omitted. The stern realities of the marches and many battles of a campaign make the old etiquette a nuisance.”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 75-81)