Circa1865

The Death’s Head on the Board

“The . . . celebration of the birth of the American nation — was held in Philadelphia in 1876. An occasion so completely engaging the attention of the country and participated in so widely drew forth much discussion in the South.

Some Southern leaders opposed their section taking part; they still felt that the country was not theirs and that it might be less than dignified in themselves, and lacking in respect for their heroic Revolutionary ancestors, to go to Philadelphia and be treated as less than equals in a union which those ancestors had done a major part to found.

Former [South Carolina] Governor Benjamin F. Perry saw in the Centennial an effective way to drive home to the country the similarity of principles of the rebellion that became the Revolution, and the rebellion that became the “Lost Cause.”

[He wrote:] “This Centennial celebration of the rebels of ’76 cannot fail to teach the Northern mind to look with more leniency on Confederate rebels who only attempted to do in the late civil war what the ancestors of the Northern people did do in the American revolution . . . It shows a want of sense as well as a want of principle, and a want of truth, to call the rebels of 1776 patriots and heroes, and the rebels of 1861, “traitors.”

Only one contingency would induce a Virginian not to take part. The Grand Army must not be represented: “It would be the death’s head on the board; the skeleton in the banquet hall.”

(The History of the South, Volume VIII, E. Merton Coulter, LSU Press, 1947)

New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, firmly believed that conscription was unconstitutional as the federal government was to depend upon the States to furnish needed troops. He charged Lincoln’s draft with bringing disgrace upon the American name and shamed his administration. Seymour further declared that neither the President nor the Congress had a right ‘to force men to take part in the ungodly conflict which is distracting the land.’ Seymour also charged – and proved – that Lincoln levied higher draft quotas upon New York’s Democratic voting districts as part of a ‘manifest design to reduce the Democratic majority of voters.’ In short, the draft was designed, it appeared to Seymour, ‘to take Democrats into the army and exempt Republicans.’

New York City’s bloody draft riot which began July 11, 1863, ended the lives of some 120 residents as blue-coated soldiers hurried from Gettysburg opened fire on them with muskets and cannon. At least five black men were hung as demonstrators denounced Lincoln’s emancipation war. Strong anti-draft riots occurred across the State to include Buffalo, and throughout the north.

In Boston, though the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiment was available, Gov. John Andrew feared that the sight of colored soldiers might excite his white citizenry. This colored regiment contained nearly 400 men enticed mostly from Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania to count toward Massachusetts troop quota and leave white residents at home. Only 22 soldiers were Massachusetts residents; 3 were Canadians. The black soldiers were hurried away and replaced with white men.

The governor’s fears were realized on July 14, 1863, when nearly a thousand angry residents – many of them women and children – gathered in front of the city’s Cooper Street Armory. After they hurled paving bricks at the wooden doors, a nervous officer inside ordered a field cannon loaded with grapeshot wheeled to the door and opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 14 and maiming many more.

This senseless slaughter of civilians recalled the massacre just over 93 years earlier, when British soldiers fired into a crowd of three hundred jeering and rock-throwing Boston residents. Eight were killed and five wounded. The post-riot investigation featured future US president John Adams representing the British soldiers.

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf. 1948, pg. 305)

The Morrill Tariff War

The United States House and Senate passed on March 2, 1861, a pro-slavery amendment by the required 2/3 vote which received the endorsement of newly elected President Abraham Lincoln. This would prohibit the United States government from ever interfering with the domestic institution of African slavery in any State. The amendment was ratified by at least three States prior to Lincoln’s ill-advised attempt to reinforce and supply Fort Sumter in mid-April, after which he began raising an army which a president is forbidden to do.

The amendment, as a clear assessment of northern political feeling at the time, indicates that the ensuing war was not prosecuted by the north for emancipation. If the American South’s only interest was “preserving slavery” it need only remain in the 1789 union and join the other States in ratifying the amendment.

At the very same time in early March the northern-dominated Congress passed the oppressive Morrill Tariff Act, which imposed a 40% sales tax on imported goods shipped primarily to the Southern States. This Act protected northern commercial interests.

The only way the American South could avoid the tariff was to withdraw from political union with the north, and initially the northern press supported this. Editor Horace Greeley wrote of “erring sisters” departing the union but entitled to determine their own political future – and not “pinned to the other States with a bayonet.”

In early March 1861 the Confederate States Congress convened and passed a minor 10% tariff which would bring the world’s shipping traffic to Southern ports instead of high-tariff northern ports. This sent a veritable shock wave through the commercial north as it would bankrupt those ports and business interests.

The north’s attitude of letting the “erring sisters” enjoy their political independence changed to invasion and conquest as the only remaining path to collecting their all-important tariff.  Hence, all Southern ports from Virginia to Texas had to be brought under northern control.

As only Congress is authorized to raise and supply an army and would not convene until July, it looked the other way while State governors in the north supplied Lincoln with troops after the provocation at Fort Sumter.

The election of Democrat Grover Cleveland ended the reign of the Republican party since Abraham Lincoln plunged the country into a war from which it has never recovered. The following was written postwar by Ohio Congressman Samuel “Sunset” Cox, a painful thorn in the side of Lincoln during the war.

The Political Result of the War

“On June 9, 1882, Cox delivered a ringing denunciation of the Republican party in the House of Representatives. He referred to it as “the defiled party of moral ideas and immoral deeds,” responsible for “plutocratic usurpation of . . . the federal government . . . unscrupulous fealty to corporate wealth, fast becoming the main, and only, and the all-sufficient qualification for the high offices of state.” A power behind the Republican party “has grown up within the last twenty-five years under national charters, cash subsidies, land grants . . . and the excessive profits of indirect tariff taxes” and “has now almost exclusive control of the entire floating wealth of the nation . . . and the great bulk of the fixed wealth.”

Cox asserted that the cause of the Republican excesses was “plainly the continued extravagance of the war times, when the foundations of most of the present colossal fortunes were laid in great contracts and cemented with the blood, tears and cruel taxation of the people.”

In early December, some 800 New York Democratic leaders gathered at the Manhattan Club to greet President-Elect Grover Cleveland. Cox wrote of the Democratic triumph:

“At length peace has come. Slavery, the bête noir of our politics, is no more.”

(Sunset Cox: Irrepressible Democrat. David Lindsey. Wayne State University Press, pp. 235-238)

Ohio congressman Samuel S. Cox stood out in the north as one who repeatedly challenged Lincoln’s wartime policies. A prewar Ohio newspaper editor in Columbus, he entered Congress in 1857 and served through 1865. As a War Democrat who wanted to somehow preserve the union, his efforts were directed toward effecting a rapid conclusion of the war before extreme bitterness had cut too deeply – and conciliation might still be possible.

Northern Democrat Thorn in Lincoln’s Side

“In the postwar, Cox said in retrospect: Could not this union have been made permanent by a timely settlement, instead of being cemented by fraternal blood and military rule? By an equitable adjustment of the territory this was possible . . . the Crittenden proposition . . . the Republican Radicals denounced . . . They were determined to prevent a settlement. Those who thought to counteract the schemes of secession were themselves checkmated by the extreme men of the Republican party.

Early in January 1862 Cox wanted to obtain from Lincoln his view regarding prisoner exchanges with the South. Asking if he would look to the safety of captured northern soldiers & sailors, Lincoln replied “You will have me recognize those [Southern] pirates as belligerents?” This was, then, the sum of his reasoning against the exchange or prisoners. It had in it no element of humanity or international law. With Cox’s prodding, an official agreement was established with the Confederacy in mid-1862.

By the spring of 1862 the tempo of fighting had increased along with the temper of northern politics, as the Radical Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania pressed for the confiscation of Southern property and emancipation of the South’s slaves. Congress had already in August 1861 enacted a confiscation act for property used for “insurrectionary purposes.” Stevens now wanted confiscation of the property of all “enemies,” slaves of all persons supporting the rebellion to be “forever free of servitude.” Cox denounced this proposal on June 3rd and urged Lincoln to reassure the public mind as to the purpose of the war. Playing upon the fears of the northern fears of freedmen flooding northward he asked: “will Ohio troops fight at all if the result should be the movement of the black race by the millions to their own State?”

Pressing his point, he said: “I would protect against this ambiguous policy” of professing a war to preserve the union but actually fighting a war to abolish slavery.  As for the cause of the war, he argued: “Slavery is the occasion, but not the cause . . . but slavery agitation, north and South, is the cause.”

Rep. Cox noted that “Indiana and Illinois, the latter Lincoln’s home State, already forbade the entrance of Negroes into their States. Ohio Republican legislators, resenting Cox’s obstructionist attacks on Lincoln’s administration, proceeded to redistrict the State under the new federal reapportionment act that cut Ohio’s representation from 21 to 19. Cox’s district was redrawn to make his reelection impossible.

The October 1862 Republican congressional defeats can be traced to waning enthusiasm for Lincoln’s stalemated war, waning enlistments and threatened conscription, arbitrary arrests of citizens and newspaper editors, and fear that his emancipation crusade would flood the north with freedmen in search of cheap wages. The Democrats were victorious in 14 of the Republican-redrawn 19 congressional seats.

Cox, outraged by Republican charges of disloyalty against northern Democrats, retorted: “Who brought on this war and then dragooned Southern Negroes to fight battles in which they would not even risk their own lives? How many abolitionists were hiding from the draft or paying for substitutes to fight for them?

In a mid-December 1862 speech Cox blamed Lincoln’s administration for the Radical rule that had resulted in a divided country, a national debt of $2,500,000,000, a tariff paying “millions into the pockets of capitalists from consumers,” the destruction of “the rights of personal liberty,” and the deaths of “at least 150,000 of the best youth of the country.”

During 1863 congressional Democrats steadily opposed the actions of Lincoln’s Administration, citing New England’s responsibility for the war, the unconstitutionality of federal emancipation, and the arbitrary despotism of the President.”

(Sunset Cox: Irrepressible Democrat. David Lindsey. Wayne State University Press, 1959, pp. 52-70)

By the end of 1862 a total of 164,000 American had been killed or maimed over the decision of several Southern States to gain independence as the American founders had done. Given the carnage to that date, it is astonishing that an American president – who was encouraged by his predecessor to convene a constitutional convention to settle differences peacefully – chose to continue the slaughter of civilians and soldiers alike.

Fearing a severe public backlash after his army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in mid-December 1862, Lincoln ordered news reports of the loss suppressed.

“Victory Rested on Our Banners”

“On Wednesday, December 10^th, [1862], clothing was issued to the [Sixteenth Connecticut] regiment. Shoes were very much needed. In the evening a pontoon [wagon] train went down towards the Rappahannock River, but no unusual notice or remarks were made about it, and both officers and men went to sleep that night without suspecting the least that early on the morrow a heavy battle would be raging.

The next morning the troops were early aroused by the tremendous discharge of two mortars, and simultaneously the opening of our batteries of nearly two hundred pieces. Nearly the entire day the batteries poured incessantly their deadly fire of shot and shell into the city with terrible rapidity. During the afternoon the firing gradually ceased and at sundown victory rested on our banners.

During the day three days rations and sixty rounds of cartridges were issued to the men. The next day the Sixteenth advanced to the river early in the morning and lay on the banks all day, watching the fighting on the other side of the stream. In the evening they crossed the pontoon bridge and went into the city of Fredericksburg. After stacking arms on Main Street most of the men went into houses to sleep.

The effects of this short siege were awful to contemplate. Some portions of the city were completely battered down. Buildings in various parts of the city were burning, and during the night fresh fires were continually breaking out. Although the enemy had carried away most of their wounded and dead, still a few remained in the city.

Our men found ten women and a child, all dead, in a cellar; they had gone there for protection from our shells but one of them struck there, and bursting, killed them all.”

(History of the Sixteenth Connecticut Volunteers, B.F. Blakeslee, Case, Lockwood and Brainard Printers, 1875, pp. 27-28)

In the postwar Grant admitted his regret for sending so many of his men to their deaths at Cold Harbor, stating that “no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained.” In the first few days at Cold Harbor in early June 1864, he lost some 3,000 men in fruitless attacks on Gen. Lee. In his last assault on the 4^th at least 4,000 of his soldiers were killed or maimed in the first thirty minutes of the attack.

Slaughter at Cold Harbor

“Under an enfilade fire from enemy skirmishers we retired to a point about one mile to our rear and threw up such hasty breastworks during the night as could be done with the poor facilities at hand. They were made mostly with the aid of bayonets, tin plates, etc. This was to be the attacking point of the bloody battle of the second Cold Harbor, known in history as one of the most sanguinary conflicts of the war.

Grant’s attack was made on Clingman’s Brigade of Gen. Robert F. Hoke’s Division of North Carolinians about 3 PM on June 1, 1864. The enemy advanced not only in line of battle but on our left wing in heavy column, masked by the line of battle in front. This attack was signally and repeatedly repulsed with great loss to the enemy, in the entire front of our (Clingman’s) Brigade. On the left flank of the brigade was the 8th NC Regiment, then the 51st NC Regiment, then the 31st NC Regiment, and the 61st NC Regiment, from left to right, as designated; the heaviest attack was on our left, where the enemy attacked in column. There was an interval between our brigade and a brigade on our left, in consequence of a swamp intervening between the two, which was considered impassable, therefore not protected by breastworks or troops. In this interval the enemy’s heavy columns pressed forward and effected a lodgement, which then enfilading our line, compelling the 8th and 51st NC Regiments to fall back.

They were, however, quickly re-formed in line of battle parallel to the original one in an open field while under constant fire from the enemy. While it was so doing the 27th Georgia Regiment of Gen. Alfred H. Colquitt’s Brigade came up from our right and advanced with us; the enemy were then, after a hard struggle, driven back and the whole of our original line was re-occupied.

The following is taken from President Jefferson Davis’ History of Confederate States, p. 400:

“The carnage on the Federal side,” writes General Richard Taylor, “was fearful. I well recall having received a report from General Hoke after the assault and whose Division had reached the army just prior to the battle.

The ground in his entire front, over which the enemy had charged, was literally covered with their dead and wounded and up to that time Hoke had not had a single man killed. No wonder that when the command was given to renew the assault, the enemy soldiers sullenly and silently declined. The order was issued through officers to their subordinate commanders, and from them through the wonted channels; but no man stirred, the immobile lines thus pronouncing a verdict, silent, yet emphatic, against further slaughter. The loss on the Union side in this sanguinary action was over 13,000, while on the part of the Confederates it is doubtful whether it reached that many hundred.

 General Grant asked for a truce to bury his dead, after which he abandoned his chosen line of operation, and moved his army so as to secure a crossing to the south side of James River.”

(www.carolana.com; Thirty-first North Carolina Regiment)

As true then as it is today, it is not “treason” to question the autocratic actions of a republican form of government, especially through the citizen’s elected representatives. Lincoln and his sectional party wrongly considered any criticism of their policies and actions “treason.” The US Constitution defines treason in Article III, Section 3: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” It is very clear who levied war against the States, adhered to their enemies, plus gave them aid and comfort.

As he levied war against Virginia, it was Grant (with Lincoln’s approval) who directed Sheridan to lay absolute waste to the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, sufficient to starve any crows flying above and in search of food – likewise for Virginia’s citizens. Below he congratulates his underling for his violent act of treason while referring to Virginians as “the enemy.”

As is well-known, Grant went on to win the presidency only with the help of recently enfranchised freedmen marched to the polls with Republican ballots; he is afterward known as the most corrupt president in the history of the United States.

Grant and Treason

“Now one of the main objects of the expedition began to be accomplished. Sheridan went to work with his command, gathering in all the crops, cattle and everything in the upper part of the Shenandoah Valley required by our troops; and especially taking what might be of use to the enemy. What he could not take away he destroyed so that the enemy would not be invited to return. I congratulated Sheridan upon his recent great victory and had a salute of one-hundred guns fired in honor of it, the guns being aimed at the enemy around Petersburg.

I had reason to believe that the Lincoln administration was a little afraid to have a decisive battle fought at that time, for fear it might go against us and have a bad effect on the November elections. The convention which had met and made its nomination of the Democratic candidate for the presidency had declared the war a failure.  Treason was talked as boldly in Chicago at that Democratic convention as ever it had been in Charleston. It was a question of whether the government would then have had the power to make arrests and punish those who thus talked treason.”

(Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, Vol. II. Charles L. Webster & Company, 1886, pp. 331-332)

The American war of 1861-1865 revealed the depth of the irreparable schism between the sections as well as the unusual sectional allegiances it produced. None was more unusual than Mystic, Connecticut born brothers Asa and Nelson Tift who arrived on the island of Key West with their parents and siblings in 1826. Asa remained on the island to run the family chandlery business while Nelson departed in 1830 to pursue his fortune in Georgia. They were both well-acquainted with Stephen Mallory who would become Confederate Secretary of the Navy, and with whom they helped develop the South’s ironclad navy.

Ironclad designer Nelson Tift became south Georgia’s antebellum economic prosperity machine – Tift County and the city of Tifton are namesakes. Asa returned to Key West postwar to rebuild his business and in 1876 constructed a “West Indian Creole” mansion at 907 Whitehead Street complete with an ironclad-shaped planter in the entrance walkway. The home was later purchased by Ernest Hemingway about 1931.

The following is excerpted from “Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here.” The book is available from Shotwell Publishing,  www.maryjanesclosetfloridakeys.com and www.amazon.com.

Rebel Shipbuilders: The Brothers Tift

How two Mystic, Connecticut natives came to put their lives and fortunes on the line for the American South can be explained only through the culture they adopted, families and many friendships made over time. Nelson, Asa and Charles all had profited greatly in business while absorbing and coming to understand the rich, patriarchal culture around them. With Southern wives and families, they all risked their lives and fortunes in defense of the South and were among the many who deeply believed that secession could be accomplished peacefully. After all, President James Buchanan opposed the withdrawal of States but was aware that his constitutional powers did not include waging war against any of “them,” as stated in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution.  Like their Southern neighbors who surrounded them, Asa, Nelson and Charles all understood that the citizens of a sovereign State, North or South, had every right to decide its own political future.

Nelson designed a simple green-pine vessel with triangular ends that could be cheaply built along the South’s coast, armed with 16-cannon, 8 per side, and one end reinforced for ramming. He and Asa travelled to Richmond in August 1861 to present a scale-model for review by Key West-friend and now Secretary of the Navy, Stephen Mallory, and the Confederate Navy’s Board of Naval Officers, which included chief naval constructor John L. Porter and his engineer. The brothers received resounding approval and support.

In a letter to Mallory in late August the brothers proposed to superintend construction of Nelson’s warship employing ordinary carpenters who could be easily found, pledging to cede their ironclad invention to the Confederacy without compensation or profit other than reimbursement for their material and labor expenses, and travel costs, which was approved.

Arriving at New Orleans in mid-September 1861 with brother Charles attending to Nelson’s business interests at Albany after late October, the Tift brothers went to work on their ship, the CSS Mississippi, locating their shipyard – which had to be created with a sawmill, blacksmith shop, hull berths, and sheds for workers – on the Mississippi’s left bank above New Orleans at Jefferson City. Likely through Mallory’s influence former-US Navy paymaster Felix Senac from Key West was assigned as paymaster for both ironclads.

Fully aware that the CSS Mississippi was nearly complete, Capt. David Porter of the US Navy thought her “strong enough to drive off the whole Union fleet,” as it was “the most splendid specimen . . . the world had ever seen (a sea-going affair), and had she been finished and succeeded in getting to sea, the whole American navy would have been destroyed.”

(Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here.” John Bernhard Thuersam. Shotwell Publishing, 2022. Excerpts pp. 114-119)

John C. Calhoun – Born March 18, 1782 at Abbeville, South Carolina

The passage below is taken from Dr. Clyde N. Wilson’s Introduction to “John C. Calhoun: American Portrait” by Margaret Coit. (Houghton Mifflin, 1950). Dr. Wilson notes that the outcome of the war of 1861 -1865 “fixed and image of Calhoun as a fanatic” and a defender of African slavery by authors who knew little of the early history of that worldwide institution or the American political system created by the States themselves. In her book, Coit reminds the reader that Calhoun was educated in Connecticut where slavery was still practiced, and Jeffersonian Democracy was still preached by many.

Calhoun the Jeffersonian Democrat

“From 1811 to 1850 – as a representative from South Carolina, secretary of war, vice president, twice a presidential contender, secretary of state, and senator for fifteen years – John C. Calhoun was a central figure in the American experience. He was never predominant in influence, even in the South in his own lifetime, but there was never a time when he was not a major player who had to be taken into account.

Despite the absence of all the hallmarks of political power – large political base and patronage power – Calhoun arrested public attention and influenced public opinion. He had a major if not always decisive influence on every issue of the period – in regard not only to State and federal conflict over authority, but also to free trade and tariff, banking and currency, taxation and expenditures, war and peace, foreign relations, Indian policy, public lands, internal improvements, the two-party system, and the struggle between congressional and presidential power.

Calhoun was part of the Great Triumvirate with Webster and Clay which ‘triangulated the destiny of the nation’ according to Merrill D. Peterson. They were American political life between the time that Jefferson crossed the Potomac going South for the last time, leaving behind a modest federal establishment for a union of the States, and that time when Lincoln, with the help of General Grant and Sherman, forged the modern American state out of blood and fire.”