Circa1865

A great irony of history is Massachusetts adopting in 1837 the first of the so-called personal liberty laws, ostensibly to protect free Negroes in the United States, given that Massachusetts stood in the front rank of those responsible for bringing enslaved Africans to American shores. No such laws were necessary until the rise of the New England abolitionists, and their incessant agitation, which eventually brought on a war which claimed a million lives, both black and white.

The Slaves of New England

“At the time the Constitution was adopted, slavery existed in every one of the thirteen States except Massachusetts, though in some other acts had been passed providing for its gradual abolition.

It was deemed essential, therefore, to the peaceful relations of the several States as well as the legal rights of slaveholders that some provision should be inserted into the Federal Constitution dealing with the return of fugitive slaves as well as fugitives from justice.

The necessity, as well as the justice, of fugitive slave laws was recognized almost contemporaneously with the introduction of slavery into this country. Thus, in the Article of Confederation adopted in 1643, between the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Haven, it was provided:

“If any servant runn away from his master into any other of these Confederated Jurisdiccons, that in such case upon the Certiyficate of one Magistrate in the Jursidiccon out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proofe, the said servant shall be delivered either to his master or any other that pursues and brings such certyficate or proofe.”

Provisions of like character were incorporated in many of the treaties between the various colonies and the Indian tribes, and later between the United States Government and the Indians.

On the 12th of February, 1793, Congress passed an act providing for the method of carrying into effect the section of the Constitution relating to fugitives from justice and fugitive slaves. It passed both houses of Congress by practically unanimous votes – Washington approving the bill with his signature.

With respect . . . to fugitive slaves, the authority and burden of dealing with their return was placed upon officers of the Federal Government as well as upon certain State officials. But with the rise of the Abolitionists at the North, difficulties in executing the law began to appear – especially as to fugitive slaves. The Abolitionists, by every form of suggestion and appeal, incited and assisted slaves to desert their masters, while the Underground Railroad provided increasing facilities for accomplishing the result.

Professor A.B. Hart, of Harvard University, says:

“The Underground Railroad was not a route but a network; not an organization, but a conspiracy of thousands of people banded together for the deliberate purpose of depriving their Southern neighbors of their property and of defying the Fugitive Slave Laws of the United States.”

(Virginia’s Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession, Beverley B. Mumford, L.H. Jenkins Publisher, 1909, excerpts pp. 201-205)

In its State Convention in 1851, Massachusetts radicals resolved that “the constitution which provides for slave representation and a slave oligarchy in Congress, which legalize slave catching on every inch of American soil . . . that the one great issue before the country is the dissolution of the Union . . . therefore, we have given ourselves to the work of “annulling this covenant with death,” as essential to our own innocency, and the speedy and everlasting overthrow of the slave power.”

Apparently, there were those in Massachusetts at that time who had forgotten the locally-produced rum sailing for the coast of West Africa on Massachusetts-built, captained and provisioned ships. The African slaves would not be in the South without the help of New England, and its infamous transatlantic slave trade.

Abolition Secessionist Motives and Pretexts

“Gen. Jamison, one of the Abolition marplots of Kansas, made a speech to his soldiers on the 22nd of January, 1862, which appeared in the Leavenworth Conservative, in which he shows that the firing on Sumter was not the beginning of the war.

“For six long years we have fought as guerillas, what we are now fighting as a regiment. This war is a war which dates away back of Fort Sumter. On the cold hill side, in swamps and ferns, behind rocks and trees, ever since ’54 we have made the long campaign. Away off there we have led the ideas of this age, always battling at home, and sometimes sending forth from among us a stern old missionary like John Brown, to show Virginia that the world does move.”

Parson Brownlow, in his debate with Parson Pryne, in Philadelphia in 1858, said:

“A dissolution of the Union is what a large portion of the Northern Abolitionists are aiming at.” (see Brownlow and Pryne’s debates).

Thurlow Weed, for penning the following truth, was, as he avers, was driven from the editorial chair of the Albany [New York] Journal.

“The chief architects of the rebellion, before it broke out, avowed that they were aided in their infernal designs by the ultra-Abolitionists of the North. This was too true, for without said aid the South could never have been united against the Union. But for the incendiary recommendations, which rendered the otherwise useful [Hinton] Helper book, a fire brand, North Carolina could not have been forced out of the Union. And even now, the ultra-Abolition Press and speech makers are aggravating the horrors they helped to create, and thus by playing into the hands of the leaders of the rebellion, are keeping down the Union men of the South, and rendering reunion difficult, if not impossible.” But hatred of slavery was not the moving cause of these Abolitionists. They were secessionists, per se, and only used the slavery ghost to frighten unsuspecting and otherwise well-disposed person into their schemes.

And so it was in 1814, when the secessionists of [New England’s] Hartford Convention made opposition to slavery one of the cornerstones of their disunion edifice . . . disunion, as the motive, was in the background, and slavery, as the shibboleth or pretext, in the foreground.”

(Progress and Evidence of the Northern Conspiracy, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XI, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, excerpts pp. 54-55)

The war of 1861-1865 created a new union of the North and a forced South, with the mercantile former dictating terms, policies and allegiance to the latter as an economic colony. The Republican party oligarchy then ushered in the Gilded Age of political bosses, bought politicians and a vote-rigging press. The Founders’ Union of equal and sovereign States was but a distant memory.

The South Forced to Obey the New Union

“Remember money breeds money, which in turn brings more,” said Benjamin Franklin. “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” wrote Thomas Jefferson.

If these two attitudes may be considered the respective mainstream philosophies of the North and the South, then it becomes obvious there can be no way to blend the two into a single national spirit ant more than Cain could live by Abel’s side. “We the people,” as famous a phrase as it may be, is a dupery.

Understanding it as such seems to me the key to the history of the United States both before and after 1865.

When the American colonists started debating their merging into a single political unit, the obviously central issue was that of States’ rights – i.e., what sovereignty would be left to the States once a federal power, endowed with a sovereignty of its own, had been established.

Since none of their representatives appears to have called for the States to forfeit their sovereignty entirely, it seems obvious that the new union, it tighter than the one obtaining under the Articles of Confederation, was nevertheless to be that of a federation in which the federal power was rigorously construed, strictly limited, and States’ rights sternly asserted. Such a view was never unanimous.

The Federalists, men of the North already, opposed it immediately, (hence the Tenth Amendment) and never relented until they overcame at the price of open war. In between they had constantly waged one by other means, kindling the fires of conflict with self-interested issues (internal improvements, tariffs, a central bank), the last of which was the rather contrived issue of slavery. (The South ended up fighting as one man while the only a fourth of Southern households actually owned slaves . . . As for the Yankees, once victorious they abandoned the freed slaves to a rather dubious fate.)

So the fateful war was fought, and union proclaimed to have been restored.

A scurrilous claim: It is symbolic that the South could be reinstated as a member of the Union only after a team of Northern generals had razed it. The new union, instead of resulting from the regulated intercourse of political bodies, was forced down the throats of half of them, and the unity prevailing between Americans became that which obtains between colonizers and colonized.

Lincoln showed himself to be a faithful disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s method for regenerating France: “to prevent the union from being an empty word, it must be disposed that whoever is rebellious to the people’s will must be forced to obey it, which only means forcing him to be free. From such deviousness was born a new type of nation, indeed.”

(1865: The True American Revolution, Claude Polin, Chronicles, April 2015, excerpts pg. 14; www.chroniclesmagazine.org)

After an abolitionist mob disrupted an 1854 Chicago speech by Stephen A. Douglas, the New York Herald wrote: “Here we find the members of [the Republican] party which has inscribed on its banners the motto “free speech – free labor – free men,” uniting to put down the exercise of a right guaranteed by the Constitution, and adopted as one of their own cardinal points of faith.” The Illinois State Register had already noted that the mob disruptions at Douglas speaking events as “characteristic of abolitionism,” and “It is but natural that men who deny who deny the people of the Territories privileges which they claim for themselves, should deny, by mob action, the privilege of free speech to those who differ with them in matters of public policy.” As Douglas prophesied below, the Republicans did get rid of the Southern States and held a near permanent majority until Woodrow Wilson, with only Grover Cleveland interrupting their political dominance.

Evidence of the Northern Conspiracy

“Stephen A. Douglas understood the secret designs of the leading Republicans, as well as any other living man, and he thus gave utterance to his honest convictions, in the United States Senate, December 25, 1860: “The fact can no longer be disguised that many of the Republican Senators desire war and disunion, under pretext of saving the Union.

They wish to get rid of the Southern States, in order to have a majority in the Senate to confirm the appointments, and many of them think they can hold a permanent Republican majority in the Northern States, but not in the whole Union; for partisan reasons they are anxious to dissolve the Union, if it can be done without holding them responsible before the people.”

(Progress and Evidence of the Northern Conspiracy, The Logic of History, Five Hundred Political Texts, Chapter XI, Stephen D. Carpenter, 1864, S.D. Carpenter, Publisher, pg. 53)

Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the democratic revolution in America was an irresistible one, and that to attempt to stop it “would be to resist the will of God.” The elevation of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1829 pushed the democratic revolution forward – in the North the friction became one between the commercial-financial aristocracy and the working men, and in the South the planters and the yeoman farmers. Against simple majority rule and “the tyranny of king numbers” stood John C. Calhoun and Abel P. Upshur in the South, as well as James Kent, Joseph Story and Orestes Brownson of the North.

Broadening the Base of Democracy

“To what extent was aristocracy weakened and democracy strengthened by the work of the [State constitutional] conventions of the 1830s? In the first place, property qualifications for voting were abolished . . . except Virginia, North Carolina, [New Jersey and Rhode Island], and with Louisiana [Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Ohio] still requiring the payment of taxes. The last of the religious restrictions were also abolished.

In still another way these changes broadened the base of democracy. For the first time the people had been consulted as to the revision and amendment of their constitutions. The conventions were called directly or indirectly by action of the people. The revised constitutions were in turn submitted back to them for ratification or rejection.

In one matter there was a definite reactionary movement. This was the issue of Negro suffrage. Delaware, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania took the ballot from the Negro. And New York in 1821 limited Negro suffrage by requiring that he possess a freehold valued at two-hundred fifty dollars over and above all indebtedness. Hence only five of the Northern States granted equal suffrage to Negroes.

Whether or not Jefferson, Mason, and other Revolutionary proponents of natural rights philosophy intended to include Negroes in the statement that “all men are created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights” is a debatable question; but in actual practice the American people had decided by their constitutional provisions that Negroes were not included in the political people.”

(Democracy in the Old South, Fletcher M. Green; The Journal of Southern History, Volume XII, Number 1, February 1946, excerpts pp. 15-16)

The Liberty party held its convention at Aurora, Illinois in January 1844, with spin-off tours sweeping the State afterward. At a rally in Lake County the following month, free colored man William Jones accompanied the speakers to tell of being robbed and kidnapped in Chicago. “It soon became the custom for the abolition orators to take around with them on their campaigns former slaves, or free Negroes whom slaveholders’ agents had attempted kidnap. The stories of these Negroes never failed to be received with telling effect.”

The antislavery Liberty and Free Soil parties had a brief life during the 1848 election cycle, but became a political cipher until being absorbed into the new Republican party of 1854. They made two more patches of the myriad quilt of that new party, of which the radical abolitionists became the more vocal, and the leaders of the rush to war with Americans in the South. As described below, the Free Soil party platform was at odds with the United States Constitution, which delegated no power whatsoever to the federal agent to control labor relations within an existing State, or to inhibit free access and enjoyment of all territories belonging to all citizens of all States.

Had the Free Soil advocates sought peaceful and practical solutions to the colonial labor system inherited from the British and perpetuated by slave-produced cotton hungry New England mills, peaceful relations with the South might have prevailed.

A Radical Free Soil Party Formed in 1848

“The result of the August convention at Buffalo is well known. It was a complete victory for the Free Soil advocates. Van Buren was nominated for President, and Charles Francis Adams for Vice-President. A new antislavery organization, called the Free Soil party, was organized . . . with the approval of all the delegates – Barn-Burners, Conscience Whigs, and Libertymen alike.

The main points in this platform were: the declaration that the Federal Government must exert itself to abolish slavery everywhere within the constitutional limits of its power; the demand that Congress should prohibit slavery in all territory then free . . . “No more slaves – no more slave territory.” [The] Liberty party placed the names Van Buren and Adams [on their banner] . . . They are for a total divorce of the government from slavery, and [a new] antislavery administration. A new principle had been established – “Union without compromise – Fraternization.”

In the [1848] State elections the Democrats were, as usual, victorious. The Democratic nominee, Governor French, was . . . elected without serious trouble. The period from 1849 to 1851 was a time of disintegration and depression in the Illinois antislavery forces. The Free Soil organizations . . . dissolved as soon as [the 1848 elections were] over.”

(Negro Servitude in Illinois, and of the Slavery Agitation in That State, 1719—1864, N. Dwight Harris, Haskell House Publishers, 1969 (original 1904), excerpts pp. 166-167; 174)

Nearly always missing in a discussion of slavery in North America is the question of how Africans arrived and who conveyed them – and it was not slave ships flying the Confederate Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.

The responsibility for African slavery begins with the African tribes themselves who enslaved each other, then the Portuguese, Spanish, French and British who needed labor for their New World colonies, and the New England slavers who ruled the transatlantic slave trade in the mid-1700s. By 1750, Providence, Rhode Island had surpassed Liverpool as the center of slave-ship construction, with the latter departing for Africa’s west coast laden with rum and Yankee notions, trading these for already-enslaved men, women and children, transporting them to the West Indies to be traded for molasses, and then returning to New England to distill more rum from the molasses. Add to this New England’s textile mills of the early 1800s whose fortunes depended upon slave-produced cotton.

African Slavery in America

“There are three important points to keep in mind in the study of the African-American population of the 1850s. First, we should avoid presentism. Attitudes toward working people of all races were different at that time than those we find acceptable today.

The Dutch did keelhauling of sailors as late as 1853 and the British did no ban the flogging of soldiers until 1860. The working classes in industrialized areas such as Manchester, England, worked under conditions that left many crippled and maimed from injuries of breathing dust from textile mills and mines. This left most unfit for work at 40 years of age and almost none at 50. Children as young as 7 or 8 worked up to 12 hours [a day], some “seized naked in bed by the overlookers, and driven with blows and kicks to the factory.”

Second, regardless of good treatment, being a slave has many costs which few of us would be willing to pay. Third, trying to have a realistic understanding of slavery is not an apology. It is a mistake to oversimplify slavery to chains, whips, and division of families; it is likewise a mistake to say that they were better off as slaves. The objective should be to understand as best we can.

A difficulty is finding objective writings at a time when Northern writers emphasized the horrors of slavery in a continuing regional attack, Southern writers emphasized slavery’s benefit to the African, and the bonded people themselves left few written records. The slave narratives collected by the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s offer the best testimony we have by the slaves themselves, although, of course, memories of 70 years ago have problems of certainty.

Many Americans, including Abolitionists, advocated that Africans be sent to Africa or some place in the New World where they would be removed from American society. Toward this goal, the American Colonization Society, to which many prominent Northern and Southern Americans belonged to, established the western African nation of Liberia.

The attitude of most Americans of the time was summed up by Abraham Lincoln during the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, “I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . . I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

It would not be until January of 1863 that the North would allow black men to serve in the Union army, and then in segregated units at lower pay and with white officers. U.S. “Colored Troops” were often used as labor or in “forlorn hopes,” such as fighting at the Crater and Battery Wagner.”

(Characteristics of the African-American People During the 1850s: American History for Home Schools, 1607-1885, with a Focus on the Civil War, Leslie R. Tucker, Society of Independent Southern Historians, 2018, excerpts Chapter 10)

Slaveholding among the Cherokees had greatly increased in the years after 1839, and by 1860 there were nearly 4000 African slaves among 21,000 Cherokee — with 10 percent owning more than one slave. Had the Cherokee sided with the North in 1861, they would have kept their slaves.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Cherokee Slaves

“The institution of black slavery among the Cherokees had a major impact on their economic growth after 1839 as well as on the emerging division between full-bloods and mixed bloods. It also dealt a fatal blow to Cherokee sovereignty after 1861, forcing the nation to choose between siding with the Union or the Confederacy.

While Indian tradition had for centuries allowed a form of slavery for captured enemies, the southeastern Indians never had much economic use for Indian captives. Probably as many captives were adopted into the tribe of their captors as were enslaved, and more were simply killed in rituals of tribal vengeance.

Prior to 1794 the cheap labor of Africans had been of small use to a people whose chief income came from skill in hunting furs and hides and whose agricultural needs were easily provided by the communally cultivated farms tended by women, children and old men. From 1794 to 1822, the federal government gave the men plows, hoes and seeds . . . [Those] who could afford it found that owning slaves provided many advantages, especially in a free-market, profit-oriented economy.

[A new] creation myth developed among the southeastern Indians after 1790 that explained that when the Great Spirit first created red, white and black people, he had given bows and arrows to the red man, paper and pens to the white man, and hoes and axes to the black man. This myth legitimized the servant role for blacks in southeastern Indian culture; it smoothed the transition for Indian males from warriors to slave masters. Being true to Cherokee ethnic values was the paramount issue; they never viewed Africans as their brothers.

After removal to the West, Cherokees who owned slaves found it far easier to resettle than those who had no slaves. Slave labor built their new homes, cleared their land, fenced their gardens and pastures, cultivated their fields, planted and gathered their crops, and tended their herds of cattle, horses and sheep.”

(After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokee Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880, William McLoughlin, UNC Press, 1993, excerpts pp. 121-125)

President James Buchanan should receive higher marks for his presidency as he rightfully admitted having no authority to wage war against a State, despite holding personal views against secession. Being a diplomat, he saw a peaceful Constitutional Convention of the States as preferable to military force to settle the crisis. Buchanan also well understood Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution which reads: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” His successor violated this section inserted by the Founders.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The South Loyal to that Which No Longer Exists

“[The] onrushing revolution distressed President Buchanan and most of his Northern supporters, who had long proclaimed the North altogether wrong in the sectional controversy that now they were caught in their own emotional fixations. The Northerners who wrote Buchanan were chiefly men who had acquired their mental patterns decades earlier, and could regard the present scene in the light of the past.

For example, Judge Woodward, of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, who regarded himself “a Northern man of common sense,” believed slavery was “a special blessing to the people of the United States,” and wrote Attorney General [Jeremiah] Black that he “could not, in justice, condemn the South for withdrawing from the Union.” The truth was that the South had been “loyal to the Union formed by the Constitution – Secession was not disloyal to that, for that no longer exists – the North has extinguished it.”

The Administration should urge the Southern States “to bear and forbear a little longer,” but if they would not do so, “let them go in peace – I wish Pennsylvania could go with them.” The Attorney-General read this letter to the Cabinet, where it “excited universal admiration and approbation for its eloquence and its truth,” and the President was anxious to publish it to the world.

The fact that Buchanan applauded such views, added to his irresolution, led Radical Republicans to say that he was almost as much involved in Secession as were Cobb, Thompson, Slidell and Yancey.

These critics seldom gave sufficient weight to the inherent difficulties of Buchanan’s situation. As Black saw it in November [1860], if the President made any show of force, the Cotton States would “all be in a blaze instantly.” If no show of force were used, and the early seceders could show the other Slave States “the road to independence and freedom from Abolition rule without fighting their way,” each Slave State would before long secede.

The North had already turned against Buchanan, and the South would do so as quickly as he refused to “abandon his sworn duty of seeing the laws fully executed.”

But probably ineptitude more than turpitude bottomed Buchanan’s course from Lincoln’s election to inauguration. While his hatred of Douglas had made him the chief architect of the Democratic ruin, Buchanan never admitted his own part in it, for the dead hand of the past directed the mind of the President.

On November 9, at a Cabinet meeting . . . [he] suggested a plan for calling a general Constitutional Convention to propose some compromise. Should the North decline, the “South would stand justified before the whole world for refusing longer to remain within a Confederacy where her rights were so shamefully violated.”

(The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War, George Fort Milton, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934, excerpts pp. 505-507)

Abraham Lincoln repeatedly stated that he was opposed to the political and social equality of the races, that he was not an abolitionist, and was supportive of colonizing black people from the United States to elsewhere. Lincoln himself admitted that his invasion of the South in 1861 was to “save the Union,” not to end slavery. His own State of Illinois amended its constitution to prohibit the emigration of black people, and Illinois Senator Lyman Trumbull, a Lincoln confidante, expressed the Republican Party’s position on the expansion of slavery into the Territories: “All the occupied territory shall be preserved for the benefit of the white Caucasian race – a thing that cannot be except by the exclusion of slavery.” Trumbull further identified his party as “the white man’s party” and pledged that he would never consent to “Negro equality” on any terms.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

The Real Abraham Lincoln

“Ask any school child: “Who freed the slaves?” and he’ll answer, “Abraham Lincoln.” But few school children are taught that in 1847 Lincoln defended a Kentucky slave owner, Robert Matson, in his attempt to recover runaway slaves. He was under no compulsion to take the case; he did so willingly.

Lincoln believed that the white and black races could not live together because blacks were inferior. In addition, he was obsessed for years with the idea of repatriating the slaves to Africa. He was following in the footsteps of his political mentor, Henry Clay, who championed the return of slaves to their native land.

One colonization plan was attempted to Haiti under Lincoln’s direction, which ended in disaster. Eliminating all Negroes from American soil would be a “glorious consummation,” Lincoln proclaimed on July 6, 1852, during a speech delivered in the Illinois State House. In 1857, as an Illinois legislator, he urged his colleagues to appropriate money to remove all freed Negroes from the State.

In 1860, he advocated the peaceful departure of all blacks so that “their places be . . . filled by free white laborers.” To denounce Lincoln as a racist is too easy, since the vast majority of whites North and South, were racists by today’s standards. The misconception today is that racism was exclusive to the South.

While practicing law in Illinois in 1847, Lincoln was hired to represent slave owner Robert Matson in the return of fugitive slaves Jane Bryant and her four children. His partner in the case was Usher Linder, who as attorney general of Illinois gave an anti-abolition speech in 1837, which resulted in the murder of abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy. [Lincoln] came down squarely in favor of slavery by seeking the return of Jane Bryant and her four children to slavery.

The man whom history has enshrined as the Great Emancipator not only spoke in support of slavery, but also actively worked for a slave owner to recover his runaways.

Lincoln apologists have tried to explain away his behavior in this case by claiming that his business was law, not morality. And that somehow the conduct of attorney Lincoln with his pragmatic approach to the law excused this attempt to send a mother and her children back into slavery.

Lincoln’s indifference to the fate of Jane Bryant and her children in hopes of a legal fee foreshadowed his indifference to the enormous loss [of life] in a war that he could have easily prevented, or ended at any time. Nearly every other country in the world ended slavery peacefully during the 19^th century through compensated emancipation.”

(Lincoln’s Defense of Slavery, J.D. Haines, Southern Mercury, May/June 2005, excerpts pp. 14-15)