Circa1865

Listing allegedly revolutionary changes between Fort Sumter in 1861 and Reconstruction, in 1867 Ohio Democratic Congressman George H. Pendleton assembled the following catalogue.

The Old Republic:

1. Equality of States.
2. Federal government limited to national and internal affairs only.
3. Equal branches of the federal government.
4. Reverence for Constitutional rights.
5. Delegated powers.
6. The Constitution and fundamental law.
7. Plain, simple, cheap government; army limited to 15,000 men.
8. Freedom of thought.
9. Freedom of reason.
10. Internal peace.
11. Freedom of debate in Congress.

The New Republic:

1. Ten States blotted out . . .
2. Federal government touches even private affairs.
3. Congress omnipotent.
4. Non-existent; viz., military arrests and suspension of the [habeas corpus] writ.
5. Federal government now has all power.
6. The United States Constitution now a dead letter.
7. Huge public debt and standing army of 100,000.
8. No freedom of thought.
9. No freedom of reason.
10. No internal peace.
11. Congress now ruled by caucus.

(A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution. Harold M. Hyman. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1975, pg. 293)

“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)

The outcome of “the war to end all wars” was punitive peace terms against Germany, the rise of German communism and the forced abdication of the Kaiser. This created a vacuum which was filled by a German nationalist intent upon retaliation for his country’s humiliation at Versailles. And so came another war.

Woodrow Wilson’s duplicity recalls Robert E. Lee’s late-1866 letter to Lord Acton: “I consider the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, to be the certain precursor to ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”

Wilson, it should be noted, won the presidency in 1912 in a three-way race with only 42% of the popular vote – 3% more than Lincoln accomplished in 1860.

Woodrow Wilson’s Great Race to War

“America believed itself to have declared war on Germany in April 1917 for noble reasons. To make the world safe for democracy, as the slogan went.

At bottom, however, the Allies had manipulated the American government with the same expertise they had shown from the start of the war. President Wilson, a Germaphobe long before 1914, was already predisposed to aid Great Britain. Although scrupulously neutral in public (Irish Americans being an important part of any Democratic politician’s constituency), in private he was unabashedly partisan. His administration did nothing to stop the Allies from borrowing large sums to finance their war efforts.

Loans were only one part of the complex pattern of aid extended before 1917. American manufacturers made war materials to Allied specifications and shipped them to Europe. To name two obvious examples: Winchester and Remington arms and ammunition, as well as Midvale Steel and Ordnance howitzers. In this and many other ways, the Allied armies of 1915 and 1916 were as heavily dependent on American war production as the Allied governments were on American cash.

Neither Allied apologists nor American defenders of President Wilson have been anxious to draw attention to the massive level of American support, since it invariably claimed that the US was provoked into going to war by German actions against American citizens.

From the German point of view, the issue was not if America would join with Great Britain, but when this would happen, and what effect it would have on the war. Could America get an army into the field before the Germans could win the war in the West outright? It had taken Great Britain, which in its own estimation had the most professional army in the world in 1914, nearly two years before it was able to deploy a force big enough to mount a sustained offensive effort.

Germany and the United States embarked on what can only be described as a great race to determine the war’s outcome.

(The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I. John Mosier. HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 303-305)

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

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

What War Did Jefferson Davis Levy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Colonel Benjamin Harrison’s “boys in blue” were the 70^th Indiana Regiment and part of Sherman’s army which waged war upon defenseless women, children and old men in Georgia. Sent to Tennessee to temporarily command a brigade of northerners in 1864, he found them “quite unfit for duty in the field” – some hardly recovered from wounds, others just back from sick leave, and a large number of raw recruits, including many European immigrants unable to speak English.”

The mortal fear of New Yorker Horatio Seymour as president in 1868 and Democrat opposition to generous Union soldier benefits and pensions, Republicans quickly enfranchised 500,000 black men. This would give Grant his slim 300,000 margin of victory and thus assured “truly loyal governments in the South.”

Key to a Successful Post-Civil War Peace

“Harrison and . . . other northerners were determined that at the war’s such carnage had bought not merely a surcease from fighting but a true and lasting peace. Southern rebels, they believed, should willingly accept the new political and social order that emancipation and defeat had wrought.

White Southerners were determined to salvage as much of their old order as possible. As early as August 1865, Harrison warned an audience of returning soldiers in Indianapolis that their Southern foes were “just as wily, mean, impudent and devilish as they ever were . . . Beaten by the sword, they will now fall back on ‘the resources of statesmanship,’”

Politics would now be the new battleground where ex-rebels and their sympathizers in the northern Democratic party would strive to undo what Lincoln, Grant and Sherman, as well as Harrison and the Hoosier boys in blue, had accomplished.

Harrison did not advocate the immediate enfranchisement of the former slaves, but if white Southerners remained recalcitrant, he thought that the adoption of black suffrage offered the only way to produce truly loyal governments in the South. The key to a successful peace was to keep the rebels and “their northern allies out of power. If you don’t,” Harrison warned, “they will steal away, in the halls of Congress, the fruits won from them at the point of a glistening bayonet.”

To prevent that loss of the peace became the cardinal purpose of Harrison and most other Republicans in the immediate postwar years.”

(Benjamin Harrison. Charles W. Calhoun. Henry Holt and Company, 2005, pp. 26-27)

After the Japanese capitulation in 1945 the US government stymied an already-existing pan-Korean government, albeit leftist, in favor of installing Syngman Rhee, who ruled the south as a virtual dictator. The latter used former Japanese soldiers as police and government officials, with the support of the Americans. The 1950 war, which many believe was initiated by Rhee, cost the lives of a million Koreans and virtually leveled the country with bombing. Today, North Korea is the real Korea and ruled by Koreans; and South Korea remains a US-controlled colony.

“This Country Splitting Business”

“Senator Stuart Symington: ‘We go into this country splitting business . . . First, we split Germany. Then we split China. We stay with billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people in the case of Germany; China we stay with billions and billions of dollars and thousands of people. Then we split Korea and stay there with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of military [troops], all at heavy cost to the American taxpayer. Then we split Vietnam . . . now we split Laos . . . Do you know of any other country we plan to split pretty soon?

Mr. [William J.] Porter (US Ambassador to South Korea): No sir.

Senator Symington: This has been quite an interesting policy, hasn’t it, over the years? Our allies don’t do [this], nor do our possible enemies. We do it all over the world . . . ‘

(Hearings before the Subcommittee on US Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 91^st Congress, 2^nd Session, 1970, pp. 1579-82)

Author Josh Doggrell provides an exceptional synopsis of George Wallace’s political career and his positions which appeared in the December issue of Chronicles Magazine. This periodical provides some of the finest commentary on American culture today and is highly recommended.

Doggrell posits that “In the poisonous political climate of the 21^st century, it is nearly impossible to have rational conversations about the social issues of the 1950s and 1960s. Nearly sixty years later, not only have the wheels not fallen off that bus, but the bus has become a revenge locomotive surging ahead at full speed.”

The author identifies “two main takeaways from the life and impact of George Wallace. He failed to improve his legacy as “those on the Right cannot seem to learn that trying to win points with the Left and win battles on their home turf playing by the Left’s warped rules is an exercise in futility.” No matter what, the Left still reviles him as much as the unfortunate Trent Lott who groveled in front of Jesse Jackson.

Second, Wallace won enormous support from the people. He said that “Reagan ran on everything I ran on . . . He even used some of the same phrases I used.” The author suggests that the George Wallace’s populist revolution of the 1960s made possible the Reagan revolution of the 1980s.

Reassessing George Wallace  

“One can study the texts of [George] Wallace’s inaugural address and his schoolhouse-door speech from 1963 and see the consistent themes of federal overreach, State sovereignty, Yankee dissimulation, constitutionalism, free enterprise and regional pride.

Virtually ignored in the popular history of this event is that in the following three days Wallace received over 40,000 letters and telegrams, the vast majority supportive and over half coming from outside the South.

Barry Goldwater became the first presidential candidate to echo, if not incorporate wholesale, the views of candidate Wallace when Goldwater became the Republican nominee in 1964. In 1968 Richard Nixon won the presidency by sounding a lot like Wallace without a Southern accent.  The “Southern strategy” was born.

Nixon took the populist threat of Wallace very seriously, instructing his personal attorney Herbert Kalmbach to make secret payments to his opponent’s campaign.

It is easy for us to forget just how well Wallace was doing in the 1972 presidential race, before calamity struck. He was riding high in the polls just before he was shot five times in Laurel, Maryland. Before entering the 1972 Florida Democratic primary, he said: “I have no illusions about the ultimate outcome. But we gonna shake up the Democratic party. We gonna shake it to its eye-teeth.”

Wallace would go on to win more Democratic primaries than anyone except the nominee, George McGovern, in a five-way race. Wallace’s popular vote was less than two points behind McGovern’s.

Nixon went on to win by a landslide – and we are left only to imagine the entertainment spectacle of a Nixon-Wallace debate.”

(Reassessing the Legacy of George Wallace. John Doggrell, Chronicles Magazine, December 2021, pp. 39-40)

What Congress Is Doing to Curb the Supreme Court

“Bills to counter recent Supreme Court rulings are starting to make their way through Congress. How much further will Congress go? Everything about the Court – how it operates, terms of judges, scope of rulings – is about to get a thorough review, the first in decades.

US News & World Report – July 12, 1957 – Congress is starting to strike back at the Supreme Court. A score of bills have been introduced to curb the Court’s power and to sidestep the effects of controversial decisions. It is clear that a growing number of Congressmen are convinced that new laws must be passed to overcome the effects of these decisions. Other Congressmen propose to go much further and trim the powers of the Court itself.

Senator Herman Talmadge (Dem.) of Georgia, for example, proposes to amend the code of laws to remove public schools from the jurisdiction of federal courts. Others have offered amendments to the Constitution giving States the exclusive power to regulate schools and all other matters relating to health and morals.

Limits on Tenure? Court decisions during the recent term have produced a rash of bills to make Supreme Court Justices less safe in their lifetime jobs. Senator Russell Long (Dem.) of Louisiana, offered a constitutional amendment to require reconfirmation of a justice by the Senate after 12 years on the bench.  Senators Olin D. Johnston (Dem.) of South Carolina, and James O. Eastland (Dem.) of Mississippi propose amendments to require reconfirmation every 4 years.

Behind all the proposals affecting the appointment of Justices is the objection in Congress that recent decisions have been more political than judicial in purpose and in effect.

To promote full debate, Senator Talmadge also is sponsoring a bill to require the Court to give a full hearing, with oral argument, on any case it decides. His contention is that the Court acted in at least ten cases during the recent term without hearing arguments.

All of these bills, in effect, are telling the Court that it is asserting too much power over Congress, the President and the States.”

Policemen in School Corridors?

The US News & World Report, December 6, 1957, pg. 94.

“Juvenile crime in New York public schools no becomes so serious that a grand jury wants to put police inside each school. “Blackboard jungles,” mostly in Negro and Puerto Rican areas, give most difficulty. Crime complaints exceed 2100 this year. Must schools be policed? A top official says, “We do not want Little Rock in New York City.” Yet trouble is mounting.”

NEW YORK CITY – Serious trouble in the public schools of the nation’s largest city broke into the open last week with a recommendation for drastic action.

Delinquency of all kinds had been growing with 1280 arrests made on New York City school grounds thus far this year. These had been for offenses ranging from petty thievery to rape and murder. A special grand jury investigating lawlessness in Brooklyn’s public schools came up on November 25 with this terse recommendation:

“This grand jury recommends that a uniformed New York City policeman be assigned to all schools throughout the city to patrol the corridors, the stairways and the recreation yards as a preventative measure.”

Reaction to the proposal was swift. New York City Superintendent of Schools William Jansen called it “unthinkable.”

Nevertheless, there was agreement that the situation was serious and close to being out of hand. The judge presiding over the grand jury, Samuel Leibowitz stated that “conditions were alarming and that school authorities have been utterly incapable of coping with the situation.”

Most of the “difficult” schools as listed by the city’s Board of Education are situated in predominantly Negro and Puerto Rican neighborhoods. Student achievement levels there are generally below the average for the city and discipline is a major problem. Teachers are reported to be frequently defied by pupils and, in some instances, to be threatened with physical harm by gang members who invade the classrooms.

The at-school crime that finally touched off the grand jury probe occurred in September at Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn. There, a 17-year-old Negro boy hurled a bottle of lye into a classroom, partially blinding one boy and splattering 18 other pupils and the teacher.

Fear of being assigned to a difficult school has hurt teacher recruiting efforts although the extent of the damage cannot be measured. The facts now coming to light about New York’s school problem indicate that troubles here run deep, and serious school problems, it appears, are not confined to the American South.”

By the end of 1941 over 800 tanks and 873 combat aircraft had been delivered to Russia. In May 1942 Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov arrived in Washington to sign a mutual aid agreement with Roosevelt for $1 billion of war materiel.

When the Future of Mankind Was at Stake

“Entire factories have also been exported to the Soviet Union. Among them were a tire plant, an aluminum rolling mill, and two pipe-fabricating mills. Plants have also been built or were under construction for the manufacture of wall board, nitric acid and hydrogen gas. A block-signal system designed to increase the carrying capacity of existing facilities was installed on Soviet railways. Various projects for the provision of electric power were also approved by the US government.

Under Lend-Lease, General Electric and Westinghouse developed a “power-train” which proved to be extremely effective in putting idle Russian plants to work. As soon as local utilities are functioning again, the train moves on to “spark” another area. Some sixty-odd trains have been supplied and the Soviets have put them to good use.

Both factories and power trains fitted into the scheme of helping the Soviets to help themselves. It took ingenuity and imagination and guts to fulfill the needs of our Soviet ally during those grim days when the future of mankind was at stake.”

(Lend-Lease is a Two-Way Benefit, Francis Flood, National Geographic Magazine, June 1943, pp. 506)