Circa1865

It became clear in the postwar that both Grant and Lincoln were responsible for the excessive mortality in the South’s prison camps, especially Camp Sumter – aka-Andersonville. But northern politicians still “waved the bloody shirt” in 1876 with James Blaine of Maine claiming Jefferson Davis “was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.” Benjamin Hill of Georgia replied to him: “If nine percent of the [northern] men in Southern prisons were starved to death by Mr. Jefferson Davis, who tortured to death the twelve percent of the Southern men in Northern prisons?”

Prior to his release from postwar captivity, former Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was asked himself about the conditions at Camp Sumter, also known as the Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

The Horrors of Andersonville

“Regarding treatment of prisoners at Andersonville and other places, which was brought up, I said that the matter had caused me deep mortification and pain. From all I had heard, the sufferings of prisoners were terrible. I had no idea, however, that these sufferings were by design or system on the part of Mr. Davis and other authorities at Richmond. Something akin to what might be styled indifference or neglect toward our own soldiers on the wounded and sick lists I have witnessed with distress. To this subject I have given a great deal of attention.

I had never seen in Mr. Davis any disposition to be vindictive toward prisoners of war. I had no idea that there was any settled policy of cruelty on his part to prisoners.

In all my conversations with him on the subject of prisoners, he put the blame of non-exchange on the authorities at Washington: he always expressed earnest desire to send home all we held upon getting in exchange our men equally suffering in northern prisons. Our prisoners, it was said, were treated as well as they could be under the circumstances; those at Andersonville were crowded into such a miserable pen because we had no other place in which to secure them. They had the same rations as our soldiers, who, to my own knowledge, suffered greatly themselves from food shortages, not only in our hospitals, but also in the field.

The advice I had given was to release all our prisoners on parole of honor, whether the authorities at Washington exchanged theirs or not. I had advised such a course as one of humanity and good policy.

Against it was urged that if we were to release all our prisoners, our men would be held and treated not as prisoners of war but as traitors and would be tried and executed as such; our authorities must hold northern soldiers as hostages for ours.  And I could not, after looking over the whole matter, come to any other conclusion than that some blame rested on the authorities at Washington.

War is at best a savage business; it never had been and never would, perhaps, be waged without atrocities on all sides. Hence, my earnest desire during the late conflict to bring about pacification by peaceful negotiations at the earliest possible moment.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 444-446)

After the absolute rout of the enemy at Chancellorsville, Lee rode into a clearing “where his soldiers rushed around him, waving their hats in celebration of the victory.” Some were in tears of worship, reaching out to touch him and his horse Traveller. Lee’s aide described the scene as “one long, unbroken cheer, in which the feeble cry of those who lay helpless on the earth blended with the strong voices of those who still fought, rose high above the roar of battle, and hailed the presence of the victorious chief.” The aide mused that “it must have been from such a scene that men in ancient times rose to the dignity of gods.”

Two American Generals with Such Perfect Rapport

“If Lee, outnumbered and initially outmaneuvered, had been someone else, he might have tried anything else than a venture so dangerous. After all, there was a prudent alternative and honorable under the circumstances: retreat to a more defensible position.

Instead of that, he chose to risk disaster – because he was Lee, and because the man beside him was Jackson. Whether it was because his opponent was Joe Hooker is less clear. Lee had known Hooker in Mexico, where the young officer earned his reputation before he earned his nickname. But Hooker had not been in a command position there – instead, he was the eager executor of others’ decisions. Yet Hooker’s record since as an aggressive division and corps commander should have told any sensible opponent that it was foolish to chance destruction in detail by his powerful force.

For Lee, however, Hooker’s performance in the previous two days, twice pulling back on Chancellorsville when his generals wanted to drive on, must have outweighed the rest of that war record. If Lee had not firmly concluded that Hooker would stay behind his fortified lines, he was willing to gamble on it. The clinching reason was Stonewall Jackson.

American history offers no other pair of generals with such perfect rapport., such sublime confidence in each other. Jackson had said, “Lee is the only man I know whom I would follow blindfolded.” Lee, from the beginning, had insisted that he was fighting to protect the Virginia of his fathers; Jackson could say he was fighting now to recover his own Virginia, the mountain land that was cut off as a new federal State.

But Lee upped the ante at Chancellorsville when he proposed going all the way around to hit Hooker’s army from its far flank. Jackson, as if challenged, upped it again when he told Lee he not only would go, but he would also take all three of his divisions along to do it right. Lee, fully realizing that this would leave him to hold Hooker’s overwhelming force with about one-fifth its number, met that challenge when he said calmly, “Well, go on.”

This was the climax of two great military careers, each made greater by the other.”

(Chancellorsville, 1863: The Souls of the Brave. Ernest B. Furgurson. Random House, 1992, p. 146)

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed the “Dependent Pension Bill” which sought to reward a favored Republican constituency, the North’s veterans of the Civil War. Since 1865, the Republican party had created and expanded a virtual national welfare program to attract their votes. Viewing this bill as simply a “raid on the US Treasury” benefitting the Republican party, Cleveland incurred the wrath of Northern veterans as he believed it was charity, and his veto the honorable path to take.

The Daily Advertiser of Boston in early September 1865 contained the letter of an astute resident who advised the public to give veterans work and a full share of public offices. Otherwise, he feared, “we shall guarantee a faction, a political power, to be known as the soldier vote . . . I wonder if our State politicians remember that 17,000 men can give the election to either party.”

America’s First Welfare Program

Lincoln’s government initiated a military pension system in mid-July 1862 and included a $5 fee for Claim Agents who assisted veterans; attorneys could charge $1.50 if additional testimony and affidavit were required. The House of Representatives set this latter amount given the temptation for unscrupulous attorneys to take undue advantage of the pensioners. With this Act passed, practically every member of Congress became anxious to provide for soldiers, sailors and their dependents – more than a few began to take advantage of the political power that lay in the hands of the “soldier vote.” A Mr. Holman, representing Indiana in Congress, praised the 5,000 Indiana men “who gave up the charmed circle of their homes to maintain the old flag of the Union.”

As the war continued into 1864 and the spirit of revenge in the North increased, it was officially proposed to create a large pension fund for Northern soldiers by confiscating Southern property.  In September 1865, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a former slave-State, “proposed a plan whereby he hoped the government would realize over three and a half billions of dollars by confiscating Southern property. Although no such a measure ever became law, it reveals the attitude which several members of the House had toward the question of pensions.”

The abuse of the pension system by 1875 caused the commissioner, Henry Atkinson, to state that “the development of frauds of every character in pension claims has assumed such magnitude as to require the serious attention of Congress . . .”

(History of the Civil War Military Pensions, 1861-1865. John William Oliver. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 844, Vol. 4, No. 1. pp. 11-12; 14; 20; 41)

The men of the 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment, mostly of Harrisburg, mustered in late 1861 to help “save the Union.” Their early service was at North Carolina’s Outer Banks through the capture of New Bern in March of 1862, where blue-coated soldiers ransacked homes and businesses. Afterward, empty troopships returning northward were said to be loaded with stolen furniture, paintings, libraries, jewelry and antiques. It is recalled that Willam Penn and his Quakers were slaveholders, and in the early 1700s were kidnapping Tuscarora children in North Carolina for slavery in Pennsylvania.

In mid-July 1863, the 51st Regiment was attached to Gen. W.T. Sherman’s army. Ordered to destroy anything considered “military or commercially related” at Jackson, the regiment first helped themselves to the possessions of the citizenry.

The Sacking of Another American City

“After the 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment under Col. John Hartranft planted its colors in the front of Mississippi’s State Capitol at Jackson, it stacked arms in the street. A detail was made to guard the stacks and another to guard prisoners who had been paroled at Vicksburg.

The remainder of the regiment not on special duty then broke ranks and ransacked the town for tobacco, whiskey and such valuables as had been left behind by the fleeing citizens on the retreat of Gen. Joe Johnston. Tobacco warehouses had been broken open, and the invaders freely supplied themselves with the weed of the very best brands; none other suited them now. Whiskey was the next thing to be sought out, and a copious supply was found and used. After supplying themselves to repletion with the above, then private property had to suffer.

Grocery, dry goods, hat, millinery and drug stores were broken open and “cleaned out” of every vestige of their contents; private dwellings entered and plundered of money, jewelry and all else of any value was carried off; crockery, chinaware, pianos, furniture, etc., were smashed to atoms; hogsheads of sugar rolled into the street and the heads knocked in and contents spilled.

About noon the Pennsylvania regiment was ordered to occupy a large fort near the city. As the regiment was marching out it made quite a ludicrous appearance, for the men were dressed in the most laughable and grotesque habiliments that could be found. Some clad in all female attire, some with hats having crowns a foot high, shawls, sunbonnets, frock skirts, with crinoline over all instead of underneath; in fact, everything was put on that a head, hand, arm, body, a foot or feet could get into, and . . . carrying bonnets and bandboxes in their hands.

They were followed by the colored females, yelling and screaming with delight, and begging the “Yankees” to “gib us dat bonnit” and “Massa, do please gib me dat frock.” By the time the regiment arrived at the fort the colored ladies were in possession of nearly every particle of female wear which the men had.”

(History of the Fifty-first Regiment of Pennsylvania Volunteers. Thomas H. Parker, King & Baird Printers, 1869. Pp. 363-365)

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)

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)

Grant’s disaster at Cold Harbor in June of 1864 earned him the moniker “Butcher” from his own men – after a battle better known for its mindless slaughter. Grant later admitted that he should not have ordered the all-out attack on General Robert E. Lee’s well-entrenched troops. A staff officer in grey referred to the one-sided Southern victory as “perhaps the easiest ever granted to Southern arms by the folly of northern commander.” To deepen the anger of northern troops for their general as Grant’s delay in allowing a truce for the wounded to receive medical attention as well as burial details. He finally agreed to a truce after the dead and wounded had lain for four and half days in the oppressive June heat.

Lincoln’s New General

“But to the average citizen what was Grant’s situation? Though having odds [over Gen. Lee], practically two to one in his favor, in three terrific battles within a month, he had been always thwarted & had lost 50,000 men. And he was no nearer Richmond at the end than his ships might have landed him at the beginning, without loss of a man. He was indeed consuming the Southern male population, but beside the cost of over two million dollars a day, he was paying more than man-for-man in northern blood.

In Georgia, Sherman, with over 100,000 men against Johnston’s 45,000, had advanced as far as Kennesaw Mountain, near Marietta, but had gained no advantage over Johnston and had fought no serious battle. Nowhere were the Federal armies accomplishing any success of importance, and in Virginia, it looked as if their greatest army was being wrecked. And by the general sentiment of both parties, it was in Virginia that the issue was to be settled.

In [William] Swinton’s [History of the Army of the Potomac] he writes of this period: “War is sustained quite as much by the moral energy of the people as by its material resources, [and it has not] infrequently occurred that, with abundant resources, a nation has failed in war by the sapping of the animating principle in the minds of its citizens. Now, so gloomy was the military outlook after [Grant’s] action on the Chickahominy, that there was at this time great danger of a collapse of the [northern war effort]. The history of this conflict truthfully written will show this. The archives of the State Department, when one day made public, will show how deeply the Government was affected by the want of military success, and to what resolutions [Lincoln] had in consequence. Had not success elsewhere come to brighten the horizon, it would have been difficult [for Lincoln] to have raised new [recruits for] the Army of the Potomac, which, shaken in its structure, its valor quenched in blood, and thousands of its ablest officers killed and wounded, was the Army of the Potomac no more.”

Of the condition of Lee’s army at the same time he says:

“The Confederates, elated at the skillful manner in which they had constantly been thrust between Richmond and the Union army, and conscious of the terrible price in blood they had exacted from the latter, were in high spirit, and the morale of Lee’s army was never better that after the battle of Cold Harbor.”

(Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander. Gary Galagher, ed.  UNC Press, 1989, pp. 416-417)

Lincoln’s New America

“The Civil War ennobled no one, except perhaps its central figure, but it brought enormous and probably inevitable changes in the north. Those States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. War manufactures exploded industrial production, made agriculture prosper, and a flood of immigration from Europe more than replaced the blood and bone buried in the South.

Until 1861, the full effect of the Industrial Revolution had been held in check by the powerful agronomists from Virginia to Texas. With this check removed, the industrial States consolidated their gains swiftly.

While the war itself was moving political power irresistibly toward the federal capital in Washington, money power was centralized in New York through the wartime Currency Acts. And an enormous centralization, through economic expansion, was going on [with] Businesses and enterprises formed that soon transcended the States themselves.

The removal of real power to a national capital was the first necessity for an expanded transportation and industrial complex that lay across many States. The concentration of fiscal power in New York broke the monetary freedom of State legislatures. As business enterprise became more and more national and spread on rails, old boundaries were, and had to be, meaningless. All this would, in quick time, forge a new society.

The old American of a huge farming, small holder class with a tiny mercantile and professional elite was not gone; vast islands of it remained. But it was submerged in flooding money and roaring steam.

If the men and interests behind the rise of the new industrial America did not realize fully where they were going, they understood their basic imperatives well enough. They needed certain things from government: high tariffs on industrial products; business subsidies and the diversion of public finances to railroads; centralized money control; continued massive immigration to curb native workers and create a labor pool; and a hard money policy, without which a solid financial-industrial complex was difficult to build.

The political instrument of this new force was the new Republican party . . . [where] refugees from Whiggery found a home. As virtually all foreign observers have seen, the erection of the immense American politico-industrial-financial machine in 1861 was not pure destiny; it took a certain kind of genius.

[But] the new wealth was more monstrously maldistributed than it had ever been. Millions of northern workers were little better off, in grimy tenements and working long, tedious days, than Texas slaves; many, in fact, were cared for worse. Native-born workers, who had enjoyed decades of scarcity and demand, begged for a limit to flooding immigration as they were drowned.  In the 19^th century they were hardly sustained by the 20^th century illusion that they rose on each succeeding wave.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, pp. 403-405)

On April 12, 1864, Fort Pillow, located north of Memphis on the Mississippi River, was surrounded by some 1,500 troops under Gen’s. Nathan Bedford Forrest and James Chalmers. After sending an ultimatum to surrender or suffer “no quarter” and the enemy rejecting capitulation, Forrest’s men attacked and caused most of the enemy’s 600 soldiers to flee into the river. As northern colored troops were half of the fort’s garrison, they suffered great loss along with their white counterparts, and the usual cries of “massacre” were heard from northern reporters anxious to sell newspapers to a gullible public. The Radical Republicans were also quick to establish a congressional committee to investigate Fort Pillow for political purposes.

This pattern was repeated late in the war as the northern public was fed atrocity stories of Georgia’s Andersonville prison stockade. Missing from the stories were the pleas of President Davis and other Southern leaders for prisoner exchanges, including safe passage for medical supplies and food to sustain the inmates. These were all refused by Grant, with Lincoln’s approval.

Conquest, Not Union

“What exactly did the [Committee on the Conduct of the War] uncover and how objective was its investigation? Critics have assumed that the committee deliberately exaggerated Southern atrocities to smear Forrest’s reputation, inflame public sentiments, and serve its own narrow partisan agenda.

The committee’s most thorough historian, T. Harry Williams, for instance, argues that Benjamin Wade used this investigation, as well as previous atrocity reports, as a means to create a consensus for an even more radical reconstruction. By deliberately exaggerating Rebel brutalities, he would cause the public to support a reconstruction policy that would treat the South as a conquered territory.

There is little doubt that the issue of reconstruction was on the minds of committee members and other Republicans during the Fort Pillow investigation. George Julian, chairman of the House Committee on Public Lands, was already busy sponsoring legislation to confiscate the large holdings of Rebel planters and redistribute them to veterans of the Union armies, both white and black.

In remarks to the House of Representatives shortly after Fort Pillow, Julian castigated the Confederates as “devils” and argued that the [alleged] massacre provided additional reasons to support the program of confiscating [Southern property].

Even before the war, there were many in the North who viewed the South as backward and in need of radical reordering along the outline of Northern free labor institutions. The war accelerated such beliefs. “The war is quickly drawing to an end,” the Continental Monthly predicted in the summer of 1862, “but a greater and nobler task lies before the soldiers and free men of America – the extending of civilization into the South.”

In formulating its Fort Pillow findings, the committee reflected Northern opinion as much as it sought to shape it.”

(“These Devils Are Not Fit to Live on God’s Earth”: War Crimes and the Committee on the Conduct of the War, 1864-1865”. Bruce Tap. Civil War History – A Journal of the Middle Period, John Hubbell, ed. Kent State University Press, June 1996, Vol. XLII, No. 2, pp. 121-122)