Circa1865

In 1960, liberal Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey ran for the Democratic presidential nomination against John F. Kennedy, citing the latter’s Catholicism as an issue – and his campaign was known to have mailed anti-Catholic literature to Humphrey supporters. Though defeated two to one by Kennedy in the West Virginia primary and eventually dropping out of the race, Humphrey reappeared as Lyndon Johnson’s running mate in 1964. The resurgent Klan of 1915 was nationalistic, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, and marched throughout the country under its flag of choice, the Stars and Stripes.  It should be noted that West Virginia was considered a “Northern” State during the 1861-65 conflict, and ruled by Lincoln’s proconsuls.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Liberal Roars of Prejudice and Bigotry 

“[Kennedy] assured his audience he “was not the Catholic candidate for President. Do not expect me to explain or defend every act or statement of every Pope or priest . . . if there is bigotry in this country, then so be it . . .”

The [Hubert] Humphrey forces were also not above using the religious issue [against Kennedy]. Reporter Joseph Alsop was more explicit. After sampling voter sentiment, the liberal columnist reported that:

“Sen. Humphrey owes to prejudice well over half his support in the four places polled . . . if Sen. Humphrey wins the West Virginia primary, as he may well do, he will owe his victory to the Ku Klux Klan-minded voters. He will also win with powerful help from an admitted ex-Kluxer, Sen. Robert C. Byrd.”

“The mystery of the West Virginia primary,” Alsop wrote later, “is the role of Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. Here is a hot, crucial Democratic contest, in which naked religious prejudice is the demonstrated source of at least half the voter support for Sen. Humphrey, the liberal enemy of prejudice in all forms.”

In an intensive statewide survey, Alsop reported, the Wall Street Journal’s Alan L. Otten found that “at least seven out of ten” prospective Humphrey voters were animated by prejudice. The New York Times William H. Lawrence wrote: “There are few voters intending to vote for him who identify themselves as “for” Humphrey. Most simply say they are “anti-Kennedy,” primarily on religious grounds.”

In similar circumstances, said Alsop, if Kennedy’s opponent were Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, “the acknowledged voices of American liberalism would be making the National Welkin ring with their roars of indignation. Actually, the Liberals have held off, because Sen. Humphrey is one of their own.”

(Hubert, an Unauthorized Biography of the Vice-President, Allan H. Ryskind, Arlington House, 1968, excerpts pp. 249-250)

The South acquiesced to the inauguration of “His Fraudulency,” Rutherford B. Hayes, in the notorious national election of 1876 with the withdrawal of Northern troops from the South as well as promises of federal aid to Southern railroads. This election was a continuation of Republican election fraud in the South which herded freedmen to the polls while intimidating white Democratic voters. In order to win elections, the Democratic Party was to become as corrupt as their even worse political adversaries.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

“Visiting Statesmen” in Florida

“The smallest tadpole in the dirty pool of Secession,” as the New York Herald had described Florida in the war, had become something very different to The New York Times in 1876. Early in the morning after the election, that strong Republican paper, after accounting politically for every State in the Union but Florida, announced: “This leaves Florida alone still in doubt. If the Republicans have carried that State, as they claim, they will have 185 votes, a majority of one.”

The situation was not quite that simple, but Florida’s vote was that important. “Visiting statesmen” of both parties hastened to Tallahassee. Local partisans were active too. Some of the Republicans who came were . . . Governor Edward F. Noyes, of Ohio, who presented the Republican case and was said to have made some remarkable Republican promises . . .

Lew Wallace, the politician and novelist . . . described the Florida situation in a letter to his wife: “It is terrible to see the extent to which all classes go in their determination to win. Conscience offers no restraint. Nothing is so common as the resort to perjury . . . Money, intimidation can obtain the oath of white men as well as black to any required statement . . . if we [Republicans] win, our methods are subject to impeachment for possible fraud.

Fraud was national. It applied to the Presidency as well as railroad bonds. “Visiting statesmen” who came late showed no more scruples that carpetbaggers who came early or the scalawags whom they found.

The Republicans secured the vote of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina. But the Florida vote remains more significant in view of Dr, Vann Woodward’s statement that the consensus of recent historical scholarship is that “Hayes was probably entitled to the electoral votes of South Carolina and Louisiana, and that Tilden was entitled to the four votes of Florida, and that Tilden was therefore elected by a vote of 188 to 181.”

(The Prince of Carpetbaggers, Jonathan Daniels, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1958, excerpts pp. 282-283)

Tammany Hall was the infamous New York political machine of the Democratic Party in the mid-1800s, and responsible for defrauding that State’s taxpayers of up to $200 million through political corruption. William M. “Boss” Tweed was its ringleader, also known as the “Grand Sachem.” Tammany raged against Lincoln’s draft in 1863, warning that Republican victories at the polls meant the Southern Negro would come North and compete against white labor. In 1868, the total votes cast in New York City exceeded the number of possible voters by more than eight percent.  The frauds perpetrated by Tweed were so blatant that even the ruling Republican party in DC, no stranger to election fraud itself, initiated an investigation as most election frauds were directed against Republican candidates.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Tammany Welcomes New Voters in New York

“The 1868 election was almost certainly the most crookedest in the city’s history, either before or since. In preparation for the event, Tammany Hall had opened up its treasury and allotted $1,000 to each election district (of which there were 327 in the city, for a total of $327,000) for electioneering.

More than six weeks before the election [Tammany] embarked on a massive campaign to naturalized recent immigrants, a drive that was for the most part illegal and that yielded a total of 41,112 new voters – of whom probably 85 percent dutifully voted the straight Tammany ticket in November.

In preparation for [the election], Tweed’s New York Printing Company ran off 105,000 blank application forms and 69,000 certificates of naturalization. [Tammany] opened offices throughout the city where foreigners could fill out their applications and where witnesses were available to swear to anyone’s eligibility on receipt of a token fee.

“There are men in New York,” said one investigator, “whom you can buy to make a false oath for a glass of beer.” One witness for hire, James Goff, swore to the “good moral character” of no fewer than 669 applicants; two days later he was arrested for stealing.

So eager was Tammany Hall to bring in new citizens that it authorized free-lance naturalization brokers to act in its name. [One] operator told an undercover agent that he alone had obtained citizenship for seven thousand persons.

In 1866 Judge Albert Cardozo had performed nobly for Tammany, often granting naturalization papers to as many as eight hundred persons a day, most of them sight unseen; most of the citizenships were questionable (in one five-minute period he naturalized thirteen persons).

New citizens had to register, and many of them were listed at preposterous addresses: no fewer than forty-two newly made voters were said to be resident of 70 Greene Street, which was a well-known brothel.

On election day, finally, the usual instances of repeating occurred. One man testified that he voted twenty-eight times, but he was not sure about the number because he had been so drunk most of the day. At the end of the day, poll clerks tallied the vote by virtually inventing the totals.

As Tweed himself described the process in his testimony years later, the technique was to “count the ballots in bulk, or without counting them announce the result in bulk.” One estimate held that more than fifty thousand illegal votes were cast in New York City. “The ballots made no result,” Tweed said. “The counters made the result.” Suffice it to say that [Horatio] Seymour carried New York State (while losing to Grant nationwide), and [Tammany’s John] Hoffman was handily elected governor.”

(The Tiger, the Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall, Oliver E. Allen, Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1993, excerpts pp. 103-104)

Strom Thurmond’s break with the Democratic Party was symbolized by his absence at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention. He admired Barry Goldwater’s vote against Lyndon Johnson’s Civil Rights Bill, his strong military stance, strict interpretation of the Constitution, and his ardent anti-communism.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

“The Party of Our Fathers’ is Dead”

“[Meeting on September 12, 1964, Strom Thurmond] wasted no time, telling Goldwater, “I have three choices open to me. I can keep quiet [as a Democrat], I can come out for you and remain a Democrat, or I can come out for you and go all the way to the Republican Party. I’ll do what will help you most.”

[Thurmond would publicly castigate] the Democrats as an evil group who no longer represented “the people.” In addressing “My Fellow South Carolinians” that Wednesday night, Thurmond said:

“The Democratic Party has abandoned the people . . . It has repudiated the Constitution of the United States. It is leading the evolution of our nation to a socialist dictatorship. The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses, and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors . . . The Democratic Party has invaded the private lives of the people by using the powers of government for coercion and intimidation of individuals.

The Democratic Party has rammed through Congress unconstitutional, impractical, unworkable, and oppressive legislation which invades inalienable personal and property rights of the individual . . . The Democratic Party has encouraged, supported and protected the Supreme Courts in a reign of judicial tyranny . . .

The [Democrat] party of our fathers is dead. Those who took its name are engaged in another reconstruction, this time not only of the South, but of the entire nation. If the American people permit the Democratic Party to return to power, freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed, and individuals will be destined to lives of regulation, control, coercion, intimidation, and subservience to a power elite who shall rule from Washington . . .”

(Ol’ Strom, an Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond, Jack Bass & Marilyn W. Thompson, Longstreet Press, 1999, excerpts pp. 200-205)

The early United States was an agricultural country with import tariffs at a low 5%. As Northern industrialism grew by 1808, the next 24 years saw the protective tariff as the most contentious debate in Congress. Anti-tariff leaders argued that protective duties were ultimately paid by consumers in the form of higher prices for manufactured products, and thus more oppressive for Southern consumers, who received no compensating benefits, than for northern consumers, who enjoyed higher incomes.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

No Treason in Resisting Oppression

“Jackson and Calhoun differed almost as much on governmental policies as on constitutional principles. In 1828 the Vice-President was vehemently against the protective tariff and mildly in favor of the national bank. The President, as did [Martin] Van Buren, mildly approved of the tariff and detested the bank.

Calhoun considered the tariff a crucial issue because he regarded the conflict between North and South as the overriding national problem. But Jackson was more disturbed by the monster bank because he was distressed about the capitalists and stock jobbers who supposedly made profits by spewing forth paper money instead of producing a material product. The President was determined to stop rich, moneyed interests from using government funds to secure paper profits at the expense of the people.

The early ideological differences between Calhoun and Jackson became particularly evident on the question of distributing the federal surplus to the States after the national debt was paid. Jackson vigorously favored distribution; Calhoun adamantly opposed it.

For Jackson, retiring the debt, and thereby stopping the moneyed interests from employing the peoples’ funds, was an important end in itself. For Calhoun, on the other hand, retiring the debt was only a means of lowering the tariff. Once the debt was repaid, expanding federal surpluses would force the government to cut taxes. But if the surplus was distributed, the federal government would retain an excuse for high tariffs. Distribution would destroy the reason for repayment.

To Jackson, equal division [of the surplus] meant division according to population. But Calhoun considered distribution according to population completely unequal. The majority North would continue to drain away the wealth of the minority South. Jackson’s distribution would institutionalize the worst evils of Adams’ nationalism.

The increasing tension between Calhoun and Jackson became blatantly public at the April 13, 1830, Jefferson Day dinner. Glaring at Calhoun, signaling the boisterous crowd to rise, the President toasted “Our Federal Union – It must be preserved!” [Calhoun’s] reply, when it came, was an anticlimax: “The Union – Next to our liberties most dear.”

Moments later, George McDuffie was more blunt: “The memory of Patrick Henry: the first American statesman who had the soul to feel, and the courage to declare, in the face of armed tyranny, that there is no treason in resisting oppression.”

(Prelude to War, the Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836; William W. Freehling, Harper & Row, 1965, excerpts pp. 190-192)

Theodore Roosevelt’s mother was Martha Bulloch (1835-1884), who grew up near today’s Roswell, Georgia on her father’s plantation worked by thirty-one slaves. Her two brothers James and Irvine had illustrious careers serving the Confederacy, and it is said that those patriotic uncles served as exemplary role models for him later in life. When he became president, TR labored in vain to entice Southern Democrats away from their party, as the damage done by the Republican party to the South seemed irreparable.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Roosevelt’s Progressive Party and the South

“When by accident Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, he entered that office with a desire to revise the political map of the country, for he was positive that a change in the traditional Republican attitude toward the Southern white voter would go far to break the Democratic political monopoly of the solid South.

Accordingly, in his early appointments and in his public speeches he attempted to pursue a course of conciliation calculated to entice the white citizen of the South away from the Democratic party.

After his departure from the Republican party in June 1912, however, Roosevelt realized at once that perhaps this was his chance to break the political monopoly of States below the Ohio River by organizing a rival party designed to appeal to Southern whites.

It was upon [growing] discontent [with Democratic leadership in the South] that Theodore Roosevelt proposed to found the new Progressive party in the South, which, freed of the incubus of the Republican label, would be “without one touch of sectional feeling,” and which therefore could offer the first serious opposition to Southern Democracy since the days of the old Whigs.

Yet the leader of the Progressive party was well aware that if a strong, permanent party were to be built in the South it would necessarily have to be organized upon a “lily white” basis.

[Roosevelt defined his position on race with], in the North there were numerous intelligent and honest Negroes who could be incorporated into the party machinery to the mutual good of both the individual and the party. The situation in the South, however, was a different matter. In this opinion, Roosevelt declared, he stood not on theory but upon actual observation.

For forty-five years the Republican party had been trying to build a successful organization there based upon black participation, and the result for a variety of reasons had been “lamentable from every standpoint.”

To repeat the experiment, he felt, would make a Progressive party victory impossible in the South, and would do nothing for the Negro except “to create another impotent little corrupt faction of would-be office holders, of delegates whose expenses had to be paid, and whose votes sometimes had to be bought.”

In conclusion, he maintained that the only man who could help the Negro in the South was his white neighbor; and therefore he hoped the Progressive party would put the leadership of the South into the hands of “intelligent and benevolent” white men who would see to it that the Negro got a measure of justice, something which the Northerner could not obtain for him, and something he could not obtain himself. Thus, Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens were publicly disavowed by a former Republican president.”

(The South and the Progressive Lily White Party of 1912, George E. Mowry, Journal of Southern History, VI, May 1940, excerpts, pp. 237-242)

Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of American democracy, abhorred in Washington’s time but ascendant with the rise of Andrew Jackson, was that “the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers the author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever steps beyond them . . . “ Tocqueville wrote that although one could freely speak their mind, the aftermath will be torment and loud censure by overbearing opponents – he saw clearly that this course of tyranny adopted by democratic republics allowed the body to be free while the soul was enslaved.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Rule by Unintelligent, Average Men Controlled by Opinions

“Some of the criticism of democracy consists chiefly in descriptions of the characteristic imperfections of ordinary men, without reference particularly of their mediocrity in the actual workings of political institutions. Government by popular majorities, it is said, means rule by the average man, who is generally unintelligent, controlled in his opinions and conduct more by emotion than by reason, of limited knowledge, lacking the means of leisure necessary for the acquisition of information and understanding, and suspicious of any superior ability in others.

What political virtue, it is asked therefore, is there in mere superiority of numbers? What standard of judgment can make us believe the opinion of any 55 per cent of the people to be wiser or fairer than that of the other 45 per cent?

What quality has the majority in greater amount or higher value, except the one quality of superior force? Is not majority rule merely rule by greater physical power? What better reason is there that everyone should have equal power in politics than that everyone should have equal power in law or medicine, or in business, farming, bricklaying, or forging?

The critics also contend that democracy shows its actual inexpertness and unfairness in the policies it puts into operation . . . unfriendliness to true scientific and artistic progress, and intolerance of freedom in thought and conduct. Democracies either are undiscriminating or they select for their sympathy the defective and dependent, the incompetent and improvident – those who fall behind in the inevitable competitions of social life.

A short-sighted humanitarianism leads a democracy, in its policies of economic and social reform, into all sorts of artificial and meddlesome schemes for suppressing competition and equalizing wealth and social position.

A democracy is interested not in promoting the worth of exceptional individuals but in increasing the comforts of ordinary individuals. The mediocre majority endeavors constantly to bring individuals of distinctive capacity and achievement down to its own level. Equality is not only democracy’s initial hypothesis but also its constant objective.”

(Recent Political Thought, Francis W. Coker, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934, excerpt, pp. 309-310)

The Russian diplomat to Washington during the war was Baron Edouard de Stoeckl, who wrote detailed letters of American politics to his government in St. Petersburg.  A born aristocrat, Stoeckl blamed America’s plight and tragedy on its “ultra-democratic system.” He pointed out that “only a handful of demagogues were able to accomplish this work of destruction.” He never ceased deploring the rule of the mob and warned that this tragic result of democracy should be a warning to Europe.  It should be noted that he never overlooked an opportunity to offer his services as a conciliator between North and South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Foreigner’s Observations of America’s War

“This revolution has undermined the foundation of pure democracy as it existed in the United States. The Constitution is now an empty shell. Step by step the President has assumed more and more discretionary powers. Universal suffrage is practiced here today more or less as it exists in certain parts of Europe. The writ of habeas corpus has been suspended [and] the rights of States have been almost annulled, and military authority is absolute in every part of the country. In Europe the revolutionists, the Utopians and the other restless spirits are agitating to upset the whole order of things and to substitute for them democratic institutions. In America, these same institutions seem to have run their course. The military regime is taking root more and more, not only in governmental affairs, but even in the day to day activities of the American people.”

Regarding Lincoln’s Re-election in 1864, he noted that the election campaign continued in an atmosphere of military excitement.

“In spite of all the efforts which the administration is making to conceal the true state of affairs from the public, these last [Union] defeats have not produced an unfavorable impression about the party in power. However, Mr. Lincoln and his adherents are sure of winning the forthcoming presidential election.”

Democrats denounced the War Department for turning its power into the service of Lincoln’s re-election. They rightly claimed that thousands of Republican soldiers were furloughed to return to doubtful districts and vote, while few Democrats were granted leaves.

This caused the Russian minister to write: “If the vote were free, the chances would certainly be in favor of General [George B.] McClellan, but with the powers which the government possesses, it will find the means of controlling the election. Universal voting is as easily managed here as anywhere else.”

Of Radical Republicans Stoeckl wrote:

“The Republicans demand the subjugation of the South without realizing the obstacles which two years of fighting have demonstrated so clearly. The Democrats contend that a compromise based on the federal compact is today more possible than the conquest of the South. So, the Americans seem to be rushing blindly into a state of anarchy which will be the inevitable consequence of the war if it continues much longer.”

“Peace, no matter what the terms, is the only way of resolving this situation. But leaders in charge of affairs do not want it. Their [radical Republican] slogan is all-out war. Any compromise would endanger their political existence. They are politicians of low caliber — men without conscience, ready to do anything for money, individuals who have achieved rank in the army and others who still have hopes of obtaining high commissions.

They constitute the swarm of speculators, suppliers of material, war profiteers through whose hands pass a large portion of the millions of dollars spent daily by the federal government. Aside from these and some fanatics, practically everybody desires the cessation of hostilities. But unfortunately, few dare to protest, and those who have the courage and patriotism to express their opinions, are too few in number to make their influence felt.”

“The conservatives want peace. They say now that Northern honor is saved, the time is at hand to start negotiations with the Confederates for their re-entry into the Union on an equal footing with Northern States. On the other hand the radical Republicans are demanding that the government should continue the vigorous prosecution of the war and that it should not lay downs arms until the South is completely subjugated. Unfortunately the administration is completely dominated by the radicals.”

(Lincoln and the Russians, Albert A. Woldman, World Publishing Company, 1952, excerpts)
 

The Original Confederacy

The original governing document after the British colonies seceded from England was titled the Articles of Confederation, adopted on November 15, 1777, but not formally ratified by all thirteen States until March, 1781. Hence, the original American government was “Confederated,” the people (and their military arm) referred to as “Confederates,” and the flag they flew was a Confederate flag.

Interestingly, many of the Revolutionary leaders who formed this confederated government were not advocates of what they then knew as “democracy,” and they were unwilling to accept the idea that the Articles of Confederation were an expression of any eighteenth century democratic philosophy.

These leaders and creators of the Articles created a “separation of powers” which is often equated with today’s view of democracy and liberty. To James Madison and John Adams the purpose of such an instrument was to give both men of property and those without a voice in government as well as a check upon one another. Their fear was, that without this check, society could not prevent the exploitation which would probably ensue if either one got control of the government.

Also, the Articles were considered to be the constitutional expression of the philosophy of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, and what was considered to be “democracy” was written into the revolutionary State constitutions regarding legislative supremacy, governors and the judiciary subservient to legislatures, and churches losing their past privileges.

John Adams wrote in 1817 of those romanticizing the Revolution and forgetting the mighty political battles that took place then and afterward. “There is,” he wrote, “an overweening fondness for representing this country as the scene of liberty, equality, fraternity, union, harmony and benevolence. But let not your sons or mine deceive themselves. This country, like all others, has been a theater of parties and feuds for near two hundred years.”

That Revolutionary generation of English colonists had experienced the rule of the Mother Country for all their lives, and the newspapers of 1775-76 were rife with essays distrusting office-holders, insisting on annual elections, rotation in office and constitutional restrictions on holding political office. Americans of that time were lectured upon that men in power naturally lusted for more power and that restraints were needed on officeholders lest the peoples’ liberties be put in danger.

In 1787’s convention Edmund Randolph pointed out that the authors of the Articles of Confederation were wise and great men, but that “human rights were the chief knowledge of the time.” He followed this by stating that our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions . . . that the powers of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches . . . [and that none] of the [State] constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.”

As the governing document, or “constitution” of the United States from 1781 to 1789, the Articles simply dissolved (though deemed “perpetual” when ratified) in the latter year as 11 States then bound to it voluntarily seceded and formed a more perfect union – but initially without Rhode Island and North Carolina whose people were suspicious of the new constitution’s grant of additional power to the central government in Washington.

After those two States withdrew from the Articles and joined the other eleven, this new Constitution passed through serious ruptures such as New England’s threats of secession in 1814 and serious tariff crises, until finally collapsing in war between North and South in 1861.”

Bernhard Thuersam

Historians record Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) leader General John Logan of Illinois as a creative political opportunist: a prewar Stephen Douglas Democrat who favored conciliatory measures toward the South to prevent war — but correctly sensing Radical Republican power he allied with them to keep his political star ascendant. Feeling slighted as West Point-educated commanders refused him promotions he developed an aversion to that institution; in the postwar he was known for his “bloody-shirt” oratory and catering to the pension desires of GAR veterans, serving as their commander for three terms. Logan’s postwar writings underscore the Republican Party ideology of containing slaves, and later freedmen, in the South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Speaking the Language of Monuments

“In short, the Grand Army [of the Republic] memory of the war represented the persistence into peacetime of the millennial, republican vision prevalent in the North before 1860 . . . [and this] older ideology of republicanism lived blissfully on in the campfires of the GAR until at least 1900.

In that view, the virtuous nation, saved until [Fort] Sumter from the ordinary travails of history, had come through the war purified of the blot of slavery and ready to lead the rest of the world into the sunshine of universal democracy. Despite the painfully obvious failure of Gilded Age America to live up to that vision, the Grand Army of the Republic (the name of the order itself is highly significant) strained to see the nation in those terms.

The past was the past, With the Republic secure, the saviors could return to lives as simple citizens. “There is not in human history, a case cited except ours, in which a million soldiers were, in a day, removed from belligerent to peaceful life,” Logan told the 1869 national encampment. “Probably, there is no government on earth, except our own, that would have dared try the experiment. I am confident there is no other in which such trial would be safe.”

These were not the words of realists trying to come to grips with a bloody and divisive war, nor those of militarists with a present-day political agenda. The members of the Grand Army had no such words in their vocabulary. Instead, the spoke the language of monuments.

[Logan announced] that “that the late war between the American States was the legitimate climax of several cooperating forces.” The North American continent, he wrote, was reserved for European civilization through “a marvelous ordering of events.” The Revolution, though it “arrested the attention of the world,” was actually the product of trends dating back “forty centuries.”

The Civil War, by removing the blot of slavery, had rendered the Declaration of Independence “the Magna Carta of all mankind, destined to last while the human race endures.” The main threat to [Logan’s] yeoman’s paradise was “class distinction,” both in the slaveholding South and at “aristocratic” West Point . . . [and] argued that the Southern slave system had been the legitimate child of monarchy.” Once cured, the country presumably could return to its pristine state, provided that “class distinction” did not come back to ravage it.” To avoid that fate, Logan wrote, the “restrictive, inadequate, and wholly un-American” military academies need to be overhauled in the interests of democracy.”

(Glorious Contentment, the Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900; Stuart McConnell, UNC Press, 1992, excerpts, pp. 192-198)