Circa1865

From 1863 through 1865, newly recruited and reenlisting northern soldiers received generous cash bonuses which made them quite wealthy as they returned home. In addition to the US government paying some $300 million in bounties during the war, northern State and local governments paid soldiers an equal amount to wear the uniform.  In stark contrast, the Southern soldier on average was an ill-nourished, physical wreck who returned penniless to burned homes and farms – and an empty State treasury from which to assist veterans in rebuilding their lives.

Raiders of the US Treasury

“Like all veterans’ organizations, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) was concerned to a greater or lesser degree with obtaining funds from the public treasury for the relief of its members, many of whom were in need.

The north’s Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) was more determined than the UCV to obtain such largesse from the federal government, although as the organization that represented the victorious Union army and navy, its membership was in much less need than were the Southern veterans.

The UCV was hopeful that the various States would provide for the destitute former soldiers and sailors, but as William W. White wrote in the Confederate Veteran, “it is surprising that a group of veterans with so much political power asked for so little from their State governments . . . They viewed themselves not only as veterans but as common citizens and taxpayers.”

This is in contrast to the GAR, which exercised pressure over the years for more and more pensions for northern veterans. “The Grand Army kept in view a very tangible purpose, cash benefits for veterans,” Dixon Wecter wrote in When Johnny Comes Marching Home.  “Only in private dared a well-known statesman to say, apropos of a pension bill, that the GAR having saved the country, now wanted it,” author Wecter declared. Such sentiments seem to have been widely held.

The Nation spoke for many Eastern liberals when it described the GAR as a political party “formed for the express purpose of getting from the government a definite sum in cash for each member of it.” One writer says that by the nineties . . . anyone who opposed to GAR pensions was, at the very least, ‘unpatriotic and un-American,’ and probably a former rebel or Copperhead.”

A member had warned the organization just before its 1887 encampment against asking for more pensions, and urged it “to make clear that the GAR is not organized for the purpose of raiding the US treasury.”

(The Last Review: The Confederate Reunion, Richmond 1932. Virginius Dabney. Algonquin Books, 1984, pp. 26-27)

“History is not amenable to controlled testing. Consequently, we have no way of knowing if the United States actually won the war for the Allies. My own contention is more modest: without those millions of pounds sterling, those millions of tons of high explosives, and those two million American soldiers, the Allies would have lost the war. In this war there were no victors. If the US wanted to impose a new world order on Europe, it failed abysmally. If France and Great Britain intended to create a new balance of power, they failed as well. That they certainly failed to destroy Germany as a great power is a fact so painfully obvious that it hardly bears mention.” John Mosier

With the war over thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s intervention and cries of “democracy,” the French and British went to work destabilizing Germany with punitive peace terms. One could say with some accuracy that Wilson was instrumental in setting the stage for a nationalist leader who replaced the Kaiser. And the carnage resumed after an 18-year interval.

Killing Fields of the World War

“But in the Great War, about two out of every three German fatalities were caused by artillery fire, and only a little over half the live wounded were caused by rifle and machine gun bullets. Seven out of every ten British casualties and three out of every four French were caused by artillery. For American soldiers, the figures were equally skewed. An American medical report stated that artillery missiles caused more wounds and death in the World War; during the Civil War it was small arms.

The nature of war had changed. It was no longer the numbers of riflemen that counted, it was the guns. The German army was no larger than the French army, but in firepower it had an advantage of somewhere between four to one and twelve to one. When the war began the Germans deployed weapons the Allies did not possess, weapons they had refused to build, and weapons they believed could not be built.

The improved killing range of artillery now made the standard method of fire as indirect, aimed at map coordinates relayed to the gunners by an observer. Once the range was taken for the target, a battery could dump over a hundred rounds on the target in a minute. This left the defenders no time to seek cover, and little warning before a strike. The casualties of course were horrendous:

Allied losses for the first three reporting periods of the war, 1914, and the two six-month periods of 1915, were 982,000, 815,000 and 649,000 respectively. British losses during the Somme campaign from July to November 1916 were just over 498,000. French losses between February and June 1916 amounted to 442,000 men. The stalemate of 1917 cost the lives of 150,000 British and Canadian men – plus 100,000 German lives.

In a five-week period of March-April 1918, the BEF lost almost 150,000 dead and missing: the Germans 105,000 dead and missing. The American cemetery at Belleau Wood holds 2289 graves and commemorates another 1,060 missing. At Meuse-Argonne the AEF had about 5000 soldiers killed outright – by October the number climbed to 22,000. The American cemetery at Romagnes-sous-Montfaucon has 14,240 graves – more than the cemetery at Normandy. The BEF lost 29,000 men killed and missing in September and 44,000 in September-October; the French lost 63,000 killed and wounded. The cemetery at Souain is one of the largest French military cemeteries in the world, with the remains of 30,743 soldiers, while the ossuary of the Navarin up the road, holds another ten thousand.

Champagne-Ardennes, far more than Verdun or Artois, was the graveyard of the French army: 111,659 soldiers are buried there, and another 36,000 are buried in the cemeteries of the Argonne.

With 345,000 men killed or missing, the BEF that had survived third Ypres had perished during the spring and summer of 1918. The same could be said of the French, who had 340,000 men dead or missing in this same period, or about twice the German losses of about 230,000. Nearly 117,000 American soldiers lost their lives after only 200 days in actual combat in 1917 and 1918.  But without Pershing’s two million Americans in Europe, there was no army capable of beating Germany. Wilson’s terms became the Allied terms. Suddenly, the Great War was over. Peace had broken out.”

(The Myth of the Great War: How the Germans Won the Battles and How the Americans Saved the Allies. John Mosier. HarperCollins Publishers, pp. 2; 38-41; 332-333)

Canada Feared Invasion

In the end Great Britain chose the course of neutrality because it realized that to do otherwise gambled with the security of its Canadian possessions. Neutrality offered a diplomatic protection for Canada and assured the Northern States that Canada would have no part to play in support for the South.

By 1864, the fear of northern invasion lingered, and as events would show, it was not unfounded. The Union army had grown from a group of hastily recruited civilians into the largest standing army in the world. As General Sir Charles Hastings Doyle observed in a letter to his Canadian commander Sir Fenwick Williams: “They are formidable. If they persevere, they must ultimately succeed.”

And what of the North won and turned its eye to Canada in anger? Or, if the South won its independence and the North turned to Canada for compensation? Hastings Doyle, who was commander of British Troops Atlantic, which included Bermuda, put this to Williams, relating a conversation he’d had with American military commander Ulysses S. Grant and General George Meade during a visit to the siege of Richmond.

“I sympathize with neither side, for they both hate us cordially,” Hastings Doyle wrote. “I used to chafe them a good deal about when they planned to pay you and I a visit. The reply I invariably received was: ‘Oh, we do not have anything to say to you until we have taken Mexico.’ There is but one feeling. Mexico will be theirs when the war with the South is over.”

(Dixie and the Dominion: Canada, the Confederacy and the War for the Union. Adam Mayers, The Dundurn Group. 2003, pp. 52-53)

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)

Mute Reminders of the Injuries Suffered

“Let these blackened ruins remain untouched. We are not an artistic people as the Yankees claim to be, we have neither the taste nor the money for Gettysburg monuments and amphitheatrical cemeteries. Our dead heroes sleep sweetly in the bosom of the old mother, whom they died to defend, and in her poverty the old mother has not decked their resting places with precious stones and miracles of art.

We have monuments enough left by the invader. The Ionian Greeks would not rebuild the temples which their barbaric enemies destroyed; they allowed the ruins to remain as mute reminders of the injuries suffered; as must appeals to heaven for vengeance. Let us in this spirit refuse to efface these memorials of our savage foes. In after-times it will almost a patent of nobility to have a ruin in the family.”  Basil L. Gildersleeve

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

Grant’s Plan of Depletion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Brown and his 4 surviving co-conspirators were arraigned on October 25, 1859, and the next day indicted for treason against the Commonwealth of Virginia – instigating insurrection and waging war against that State. All were found guilty on November 7^th and sentenced to hang. After Brown was hung at 11:30AM on December 2, 1859, a Virginia militia colonel in the crowd spoke: “So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union! All such enemies of the human race!”

Those States of the north providing troops for Lincoln to wage war against the States of the south, all committed treason as defined below.

What War Did Jefferson Davis Levy?

“Article III, Section 3, of the United States Constitution defines “Treason” – the only crime the Constitution does define. It is limited to two offenses:

“Treason against the United States shall only consist of levying war against Them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

In light of the events of 1861-1865 . . . and considering the attempt to ascribe to the Confederate States President crimes against the internal sovereignty of [a] State, that is, treason – a question arises, one that stumped even the authorities, even the United States Supreme Court, where now Mr. Justice Chase was successor to Roger B. Taney.

What war did Jefferson Davis levy? After all, who perverted the Constitution? Who instigated the break? Who invaded? Who attacked?

Davis failed to obtain a hearing, although the wicked charges against him were never erased but were allowed to lie against him unpurged for “every orator-patriot or penny-a-liner in the North to hurl at his head the epithet “Traitor,” as Mrs. Davis wrote.

And, ‘. . . he had asked only a fair trial on the merits; [had been held on trumped up accusations in] close confinement, with circumstances of unnecessary torture for a year and a half and constrained to live in Fort Monroe for two years, to the injury of his health and the total destruction of his interests, . . . he was denied trial while his captors vaunted their “clemency” in not executing their victim . . . These accusations were either true or false; he asked neither indulgence nor pardon, but urged a speedy trial, constantly expressing an ardent desire to meet it.’

He had been borne, unwillingly enough, to the position of Chief Executive of eight million Americans in the South who understood their rights and thought it incumbent upon them to maintain them. He had been one of the last to yield to the dread necessity of strife, and was last to leave Washington . . .”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts. Russell Hoover Quynn. Exposition Press, 1959, pp. 128-129)

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

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

It was Lincoln Who “Made War”

Jefferson Davis chastised his accusers:

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Mistaken View of Sovereignty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vallandigham (below) had the support of many in the north’s Democratic party such as editor Thomas Beer of Ohio’s Crawford County Forum of 30 January 1863. He wrote: “every dollar spent for the prosecution of this infamous war is uselessly wasted – and every life lost in it is an abominable sacrifice, a murder, the responsibility of which will rest upon Abraham Lincoln and his advisors. Support of this war and hostility to it, show the dividing line between the enemies and friends of the Union. He who supports the war is against the Union.”

Washington the Arch-Rebel

“Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham excoriated Lincoln and his followers on January 14, 1863, in the US House of Representatives by stating: “Yet after nearly two years of more vigorous prosecution of war than ever recorded in history . . . you have utterly, signally, disastrously failed to subjugate ten millions of “rebels”, whom you had taught the people of the North and . . . West not only to hate, but to despise.

Rebels did I say?  Yes, your fathers were rebels, or your grandfathers.  He [Washington] who now before me on canvas looks down so sadly upon us, the false, degenerate and imbecile guardians of the great Republic which he founded, was a rebel.  And yet we, cradled ourselves in rebellion and who have fostered and fraternized with every insurrection in the nineteenth century everywhere throughout the globe, would now . . . make the word “rebel” a reproach.”

(The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham & the Civil War. Frank L. Klement. Fordham University Press, 1998, pg 136)