Category: America Transformed

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)

 

Intruders Within States

It is essential to understand that the word “union” was merely a convenient word to describe the agreement between 13 independent States (as referred to by the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the Articles of Confederation), who in 1789 agreed to a newer governing covenant between them. Of course, this in no way transferred a State’s population and territory into what was referred to as “the Union.” Below, the word “conquered” below reveals all. Hamilton noted in his 1789 Federalist opinion that a war between member States would mean the Constitution was at an end.

Rev. Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) was a Vermont-born preacher who “inclined to the view of his friend, John C. Calhoun, holding that the united States are a confederation of sovereign or independent States,” which was in line with the 1783 Treaty of Paris as England listed each former colony as an independent State.

Intruders Within States

“It was apparent on this theory – that no State could secede – that Lincoln built his executive plan for reorganizing the rebellious States as States in the Union in December 1863.

Brownson objected to the plan primarily as it was a distinctly executive plan [but] in no case, he maintained, did it come within the jurisdiction of the President to institute either military of civil governments in the conquered States or territories. [He] looked upon Lincoln’s plan or reorganization as a dangerous and revolutionary assumption of power contrary to our Constitution and republican form of government. He exposed sharply the equally discrediting alternatives in volved in Lincoln’s plan:

“If the States are still in the Union, the President violates their constitutions, and wars against the essential principle of every State constitution [no right to interfere]; if they are not States in the Union, but, as we maintain, population and territory belonging to the Union, then he transcends his province as executive of the government and attempt to do on executive authority what only Congress can do.”

If the States are still in the Union, as the administration claims, by what right, Brownson wanted to know, had Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson as governor of Tennessee; Col Hamilton governor of Texas; Mr. Phelps governor of Arkansas; Eli Thayer as governor of Florida; Edward Stanly as governor of North Carolina; and Col. Shepley as governor of Louisiana. If these respective territories are States in the Union, then these so-called governors are intruders, without any constitutional authority, for under the American Constitution the right to choose its own officers is reserved to the State, “and there is no authority in the President or Congress to appoint a single State officer, not even a constable.” The error of the Lincoln administration, is denying that a State can secede.”

(Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography. Thomas R. Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, 1976, p. 635)

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 41st 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)