Historical Accuracy

Opposing Slave Imports to Virginia

Robert E. Lee’s father “Light-Horse” Harry was a first-cousin to Richard Henry Lee, a prominent Virginian elected to the House of Burgesses in 1758, an office he held virtually the rest of his life. His first speech assailed the transportation of slaves into Virginia, stating “the importation of slaves into this Colony . . . has been and will be attended with effects dangerous both to our political and moral interests.” “Lay so heavy a tax upon the importation of slaves as effectually to put an end to that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic within the Colony,” he told the Burgesses.” North Carolina proposed the same.

Opposing Slave Imports to Virginia

“Massachusetts invalidated the British commercial system, which Virginia resisted from abhorrence of the slave-trade. Never before had England pursued the traffic in Negroes with such eager avarice.

The remonstrances of philanthropy and of the colonies were unheeded, and categorical instructions from the Board of Trade kept every American [colonial] port open as markets for [African slaves]. The legislature of Virginia had repeatedly showed a disposition to obstruct the commerce; a deeply seated public opinion began more and more to avow the evils and injustice of slavery itself; and in 1761, it was proposed to suppress the importation of Africans by a prohibitory duty.

Among those who took part in the long and violent debate was Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), the representative from Westmoreland. Descended from one of the oldest families in Virginia, he had been educated in England and had returned to his native land familiar with the spirit of Grotius and Cudworth, of Locke and Montesquieu; his first recorded speech was against Negro slavery and in behalf of human freedom.

In the continued importation of slaves, Lee foreboded danger to the Old Dominion; an increase of the free Anglo-Saxons, he argued, would foster arts and varied agriculture, while a race doomed to abject bondage was of necessity an enemy to social happiness. He painted from ancient history the horrors of servile insurrections. He deprecated the barbarous atrocity of [England’s and New England’s] trade with Africa, and its violation of equal rights of men created like ourselves in the image of God.

The [slave importation] tax for which Lee raised his voice was carried through the Assembly of Virginia by a majority of one; but from England a negative followed with certainty every colonial act tending to diminish the slave-trade.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 421-422)

New England’s Slave Past

African slaves existed in colonial New England as early as 1634 – well before any were in what became the American South – and by 1774 New England’s slave population totaled over 16,000. Interestingly, New England clergymen, merchants and lawyers then commonly owned at least one slave; in 1774 Connecticut’s slave population totaled over 5,000. Earlier in that century New England had surpassed England as the center of the nefarious transatlantic slave trade, which carried African slaves first to the West Indies to live and likely die as sugar cane laborers, then back to New England with sugar to make more rum with which to trade to African tribes for their slaves.

New England’s Slave Past

“[New England’s early inhabitants] were of homogenous origin, nearly all tracing their descent to English emigrants of the reigns of Charles the First, and Charles the Second. Along the seaside, wherever there was a good harbor, fishermen . . . gathered in hamlets; and each returning season saw them with an ever-increasing number of mariners and vessels, taking the cod and mackerel, and sometimes pursuing the whale into the icy labyrinths of the Northern seas; yet loving home, and dearly attached to their modest freeholds.

Of [African] slavery there was not enough to affect the character of the people, except in the southeast of Rhode Island, where Newport was conspicuous for engaging in the [transatlantic] slave trade, and where, in two or three towns, Negroes composed even a third of the inhabitants.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 149-150)

Father of the Revolution – Samuel Adams

As described below, New England political agitation brought about the avoidable secession from England and war; the same occurred some 80 years later “as Massachusetts agitators and men of letters had done their best to see that there should be thousands, and tens of thousands” joining them in denouncing their union with the South. The uncompromising Puritan moral crusade against the very African slavery which ironically enriched their own section, would now be put to work to destroy the 1789 union. The agitation pushed the hand of Lincoln in April 1861 to confront now-independent South Carolina over the question of tariff revenue – which predictably resulted in gunfire and war. Those defending their State were denounced in the north as “rebels” intent upon destroying the union.

Father of the Revolution – Samuel Adams

“It is a great mistake to think of public opinion as united in the colonies and as gradually rising against British tyranny. Public opinion was never wholly united and seldom rises to a pitch of passion without being influenced – in other words, without the use of propaganda. The Great War [of 1914-1918] taught that to those who did not know it already.

From the first, [John] Adams and those working with him had realized the necessity of democratic slogans in the creation of a state of mind. [He] at once struck out boldly to inflame the passions of the crowd by threatening that it was to be reduced to the “miserable state of tributary slaves,” contrasting its freedom and moral virtue with the tyranny and moral degradation of England. He proclaimed that the mother country was bent on bringing her colonies to a condition of “slavery, poverty and misery,” and on causing their utter ruin, and dinned into the ears of the people the words “slavery and tyranny” until they assumed a reality from mere reiteration.

His political philosophy was eagerly lapped up by a populace smarting under hard times and resentful of colonial even more than imperial conditions of the moment. The establishment of government by free consent of all had become imbedded in the mind of the average man, as an essential part of the American dream. Adams himself had seen the vision but had glimpsed it with the narrowness and bitterness with which the more bigoted Puritans had seen the vision of an unloving and revengeful Hebrew Jehovah.

Such talk as this could only make England fearful of how far the people might try to put such precepts into practice. The upper classes of the colonies also began to be uneasy. Up to 1770, when their own grievances were redressed, they might allow such ideas to be disseminated, considering themselves in control of the situation, but after that it became clear that they were losing control . . . [as] Sam Adams and the lesser radicals worked harder than ever to keep public opinion inflamed.

With the upper classes [becoming] lukewarm or hostile to his continued propaganda [despite] the obnoxious legislation repealed or modified, [Sam Adams] had to trust to generalizations and emotional appeal.

A good example of his use of the latter was the affair called the “Boston Massacre.” As part of the general imperial policy following the [French and Indian] war, the British government had stationed some regiments in Boston. They were under good officers and good discipline, and there was no more reason why they should have made trouble there, than in any provincial garrison town of England. Sam Adams, however, was continually stirring up the public mind against them; John Adams reported finding Sam one Sunday night ‘preparing for the next day’s newspaper – a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles and [incidents], working the political engine.’

Finally, one March evening, as a result of more than usual provocation given by taunting boys to soldiers on duty, an unfortunate clash occurred. There was confusion, a rioter’s shout to fire” was mistaken for an officer’s command, and several citizens were killed. The officer surrendered to civilian authorities, was tried, defended by John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., and acquitted.

But Samuel Adams at once saw the value of the incident. Every emotion of the mob was played upon. The affair was termed a “massacre,” and in the annual speeches given for a number of years to commemorate its anniversary the boys and men who had taken part in the mobbing were described as martyrs to liberty and the soldiers as “bloody butchers.”

(The Epic of America. James Truslow Adams. Little, Brown and Company. 1932, pp. 83-84).

The Other Side of the Story

The Other Side of the Story

“As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side?

We may be certain that the historian of a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as a matter course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other.

The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.”

(Excerpt, Prefatory Note by James Ford Rhodes: The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences, Hilary Herbert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, pg. vii – viii)

What Slavocracy?

Maj. Gen. Samuel G. French, born in New Jersey in 1808, was a Mexican War veteran and served the American Confederacy in the eastern theater as well as in the Army of Tennessee. Below he comments on the unfortunate postwar view that the South was a “slavocracy.”

What Slavocracy?

“The white population of [the Southern States] was, in 1860, was about 8,300,000, which included some 346,000 white people who owned African slaves. These figures represent and include men of all ages, widows and minors; as well as young married women who owned a servant given to them. Only one person in twenty-four was a slaveowner in 1860,” and this doesn’t account for women, orphans and old men who owned Africans. He follows this with a computation that in a regiment of 1000 men, there might have been forty men who owned slaves; in the entire Southern army of 600,000 there might have been only 24,000 men who owned slaves.

So let it be known that the Confederate army was not an army of slaveholders but mainly composed of men free from the interests of African slavery as were the men living in sight of Bunker Hill. These Southern men were contending for an object far dearer to them than any arising from African slavery.

They had seen the accumulated funds of the United States treasury expended annually in making harbors for towns on the great northern lakes and appropriations for little creeks called rivers, while the harbors of Southern cities were neglected.

Then, again, the tariff almost invariably discriminated against the South, even to the extent of nullification by South Carolina some thirty years prior to the War. The Fugitive Slave Act was openly nullified by the laws of northern States, and “underground railroad” was a term used to express how African slaves, enticed from their owners, were conveyed northward under cover of the night.

Further, the North openly declared that the United States Constitution was a “compact made with the devil,” and that the hatred of the North and the immigrant-settled West was so widespread that through a purely sectional party vote they elected a President with only 39% of the popular vote and antagonistic to the American South. As an example, North Carolina with less than a 1% foreign-born population gave its 10 electoral votes to Democrat John C. Breckenridge.

When Lincoln determined upon his policy of coercion against the political independence of the homogenous South, the latter mobilized some 576,000 soldiers who for four years fought for the right of their people to govern themselves in their own way. Their deeds are now a matter of history that will, by them, be recorded, contrary to the past rule, that the conquerors always write history.”

Appomattox only terminated the shooting war – it was not a court to adjudicate the right of political secession – but its sequence established the fact that secession was not treason or rebellion, and that it yet exists, restrained only by the question of expediency.

The charge that slaveholders, so few in number, forced secession, or that 576,000 non-slave holders who constituted the South’s army fought and died to maintain slavery, is a popular error.”

(Two Wars: The Autobiography and Diary of Gen. Samuel G. French. Confederate Veteran, 1901. pp. 356-357)

The Tenth Amendment

Christopher Gustav Memminger was born in 1803 in the Dukedom of Wurtemberg, the son of a Prince-Elector’s Foot Jaegers. His mother fled Napoleon’s ravaging of the German States after the death of her soldier-husband, finding refuge at Charleston, South Carolina. She then succumbed to fevers soon after their arrival and left him an orphan. The future American statesman was then admitted to Charleston’s Asylum for Orphans, entered South Carolina College at the age of 12, and graduated second in his class at age 16. Memminger passed the bar in 1825, became a successful lawyer, and served in the South Carolina Legislature from 1836 to 1860. From 1861 to 1864 he was a presidential cabinet member.

An esteemed Charleston lawyer by the 1840s, he was retained by a local synagogue to represent them in an internal quarrel, and did so very successfully and without a fee, that he received “an elegant and richly chased silver pitcher of the Rebecca pattern, nearly two feet in height, and a massive silver waiter, eighteen inches in diameter.”

This valuable memento, with other personal property, was plundered from his residence by invading soldiers of the Federal army. Notwithstanding its well-marked and unmistakable evidence of ownership, it is still held somewhere at the North as a “trophy,” or has been converted into bullion and sold by some remorseless thief.”

In opposing an offensive Massachusetts-originated House of Representatives resolution, in 1835, Mr. C. G. Memminger of South Carolina reminded his colleagues of the limitations the States placed upon the United States Constitution of 1789.

The Tenth Amendment

“The Union of these States was formed for the purpose, among other things, of ensuring domestic tranquility and providing for the common defense; and in consideration thereof, this State yielded the right to keep troops or ships of war in time of peace without the consent of Congress; but while thus consenting to be disarmed, she has, in no part of the constitutional compact, surrendered her right of internal and police; and, on the contrary thereof, has expressly reserved all powers not delegated to the United States, nor prohibited by it to the States.”

(Life and Times of C.G. Memminger, Henry D. Capers, A.M. Everett Waddey Co., Publishers 1893, pg. 190)

Lincoln’s RMS Trent Blunder

What is known as the “Trent Affair” occurred on November 8, 1861, when a US warship intercepted and boarded the British mail ship RMS Trent in international waters. On board were two envoys of the new Confederate States of America, James M. Murray and John Slidell, who were enroute to England, and later France. This seizure of diplomats was seen as a violation of England’s neutrality which of course sparked a serious diplomatic crisis.

Lincoln had little government and no international experience as he had served 8 years as a county representative in Illinois, and only 2 years as an Illinois State representative in the US Congress. His first reaction was to celebrate the seizure of the South’s envoys and refuse their release, until a wiser and internationally experienced William Seward convinced Lincoln of the imminent danger created by a foolish US sea captain.

Lincoln’s RMS Trent Blunder

“A British diplomat Lincoln met with on December 4 [1861] wrote his government that despite Lincoln’s simple assurance of no desire for trouble with England, he could not ignore the strong impression that the policy of the US government “is so subject to popular impulse that no assurance can or ought to be relied upon under present circumstances.” Lincoln, in his upcoming message to Congress avoided mention of the Trent Affair, but relying upon [Treasury] Secretary Cameron’s estimate of quickly enlisting 3 million men, boasted of showing the world that he could easily quell disturbances at home while protecting ourselves from foreign threats.

Despite northern braggadocio, Lincoln’s rickety war financing and knowing New York banks were about to suspend specie payments, the Trent Affair contributed greatly to the virtual collapse of his war financing which depended upon public confidence. By mid-January 1862, Lincoln was forced to issue “greenback” fiat currency, as his government was simply out of money.

By the end of the war in 1865, the north had become burdened with rampant inflation, the constant manipulation of gold prices by speculators, a morass of different bond issues and four major forms of currency – national bank notes, specie, greenbacks and individual bank notes. And the last were to be simply taxed out of existence.

In mid-December 1861, Lincoln and his cabinet discussed the serious ramifications of war with England: the threatened breaking of the blockade to reopen the cotton trade, and the blockade of northern ports. He was distressed as well by the new French monarchy in Mexico and French diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy.

And should the Confederacy achieve its independence, northern capitalists feared widespread smuggling of British goods into the north across the long border with the Confederacy and thereby crippling northern manufacturing. It could not have been lost on Lincoln and his cabinet that the American republic they now governed would not have existed without French intervention in 1781, which clearly made the difference between the American colonists’ success or failure.

In the meantime, Britain was reinforcing Canada with troops, planning invasions of the US from British Columbia and Canada West (Ontario) while US troops were occupied in the American South. Additionally, British ships would cripple northern shipping by its blockade and preying upon northern merchantmen, and not necessarily in cooperation with the South’s navy. Additionally, modern ‘Laird Rams’ being built in England posed a very serious threat as their submerged iron prows could wreak havoc with the north’s wooden blockading fleet. Though the north’s fleet was growing by late 1861, its newer ships were ‘improvised merchantmen’ for blockade duty and not steam or sail warships.

The British military sent provisional orders during the first two weeks of the Trent crisis to quickly establish an offensive base at Bermuda from which to attack the north’s blockading force. Another fleet located at Havana under Commodore Dunlop would neutralize the northern ships at Pensacola Bay while Key West and Fort Jefferson would be left to the powerful British West Indies Squadron.”

(Key West’s Civil War: Rather Unsafe for a Southern Man to Live Here. John Bernhard Thuersam. Shotwell Publishing LLC, 2022, pp. 206-207)

War Was Not the Only Path

War between North and South was not a foregone conclusion in early 1861 as President James Buchanan encouraged and awaited peaceful legislative settlements of the existing sectional issues. Buchanan, a seasoned diplomat and negotiator with previous service as US Minister to England under President Pierce, Secretary of State under President Polk, and Minister to Russia for President Jackson. In contrast, Lincoln served in the Illinois House 1835-1842 and served a mere 2 years as US Representative from Illinois.

War Was Not the Only Path

In the eighty-three years since the election of Lincoln, there has been a compression of events which places the firing upon Fort Sumter, April 12, 1861, hard upon the heels of the Republican victory on November 6, 1860. The magnitude of the Civil War itself has tended to telescope the important 150 days of possible compromise which intervened. Yet there is good reason to believe that President James Buchanan, as well as many other leaders, expected to avoid open conflict. The mood of the country had sobered at the realization that a sectional party had elected a president. Public opinion, in general, was entirely remote from the thought of war.

In the Ohio Valley, for example, the hour of decision was still half a year away. South of the Ohio the tier of border states which had voted for John Bell was ready to work desperately for compromise and Union. It is, of course, now well known that no complete consolidation of opinion ever occurred either in the North or the South.

The mass of opinion in the country found expression, therefore, on December 3, 1860, when Buchanan clearly enunciated his position as chief executive and, in constitutional terms, called upon the legislative branch of government to assume its responsibility for effecting a peaceful solution of the crisis. Forty years of public service, in both houses of Congress, in the cabinet and the courts of Europe, suggested arbitration to Buchanan. Schooled in constitutional debate, the technique of conciliation, and the adjustment of minority rights, as had occurred notably in 1820, 1832, and 1850, this Scotch-Irish Presbyterian president had carefully examined his own soul and the Constitution of the United States, and found that Congress, and Congress alone, had the power to arbitrate or to act. War, he believed, “ought to be the last desperate remedy of a despairing people, after every other constitutional means of conciliation had been exhausted.”

A month later, when South Carolina had, on December 20, voted to secede, and Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were on the point of secession, Buchanan remained firm in his conviction that “justice as well as sound policy requires us still to seek a peaceful solution.” The prevailing sentiment of the country for adjustment, which found expression in such bodies as the Virginia-led Washington Peace Convention of February 1861, and the Crittenden Compromise, was strong and unchanged, though less articulate than the extremists on both sides. If the tall shadow of the president-elect lay across every discussion, then it will be remembered that Lincoln remained, during this period, a shadow indeed, without voice of assurance or warning.

Buchanan’s conciliatory stand has, until recently, been buried under the avalanche of post-war attitudes which show him only as the inept and weak man who stepped down for Lincoln’s administration. Not until the early decades of this century has a critical use of prejudiced sources and a body of new evidence indicated a revision. Was the Civil War necessary to save the Union, historians have now begun to ask. An able scholar of the new school, James G. Randall, comments succinctly:

“If . . . preservation of the Union by peaceable adjustment was possible, then unionists were not faced with a choice of war or disunion, but rather a choice between a Union policy of war and a Union policy in the Virginia sense of adjustment and concession.”

Especially suggestive to students of the period is Randall’s recent statement that “the wars that have not happened” should be studied. Judged in the light of “historical relativity” rather than in the concept of the “irrepressible conflict,” Buchanan’s policy, particularly as outlined in his December 3rd address to the nation, is subject to fresh interpretation. For its revelation of the gradually evolving picture of James Buchanan, as it has been influenced by changing methods of historical scholarship, and as a chronological picture of a state of public opinion which only gradually has permitted objectivity, a roll call of representative historians is of value.

The Southerner who foresaw that “to the South’s overflowing cup would be added the bitter taste of having the history of the war written by Northerners,” for at least fifty years, was not far wrong. A literary historical method which “saw history as primarily the achievements of great men, engaged in the grand manner, in sublime episodes, of political and military strife,” and made to order for the New England, or nationalist, school of historical writers who, until well past the turn of the century, dominated the field. American historical scholarship was, for that matter, still in its infancy. By 1880 there were still only eleven professors of history in the United States. The German seminar and the scientific methods of objective appraisal, which began to be felt in this country during the 1870’s, only gradually influenced these “prosecuting historians.”

Centering their attack on Buchanan’s December 3rd address, and the four eventful months of a “lame-duck” period, they have often contented themselves with easy, if theoretical, post-judgments. The shades of Jackson and Clay have been called to witness that forceful action would have saved the day. At the same time, accepting Seward’s thesis of the “irrepressible conflict,” Buchanan’s critics have clouded the hopes for peaceful settlement and the continuous efforts and proposals toward this end. The fact that these hopes were shared by such contemporary leaders as John Tyler, John Bell, John Floyd, John C. Breckinridge, Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, and many others, as well as by the average citizen, has not always been indicated.

On the basis of a careful study of manuscript and periodical sources which reflect the mood of the times, historian David M. Potter concludes that Lincoln and his party were unaware of the real threat of secession. His discussion of “Lincoln’s Perilous Silence” (pp. 134-55) is based on the fact that from the Cooper Institute speech in February 1860, to the date of his First Inaugural in March 1861, Lincoln made no definitive speeches.”

(James Buchanan and the Crisis of the Union. Frank W. Klingberg. Journal of Southern History, Vol. 9, No. 4, Nov. 1943, pp. 455-474).

Secessionist Abolitionists

Any serious historical review of the war’s cause in early 1861 cannot overlook President James Buchanan’s realization, undergirded by his Attorney General Jeremiah Black, that to wage war against a State was the very definition of treason against the United States (Article III, Section 3). Lincoln would not be constrained by this.

Secessionist Abolitionists

“From the 1830s on, abolitionists argued for the secession of the North from the Union and the American Anti-Slavery Society passed the following resolution:

“That the Abolitionists of this country should make it one of the primary objects of this agitation to dissolve the American Union.”

This was also the view of the Douglass Monthly, printed by Frederick Douglass. Fellow abolitionist Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune wrote on February 23, 1861, the day after Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America:

“We have repeatedly said . . . that the great principle embodied by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their powers from the consent of the people, is sound and just; and that, if the Cotton States or the Gulf States, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so. Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of Southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union, and anxious to escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views.”

(Was Davis a Traitor, or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Fletcher & Fletcher, 1995 (original 1866), p. 149)

Historical Propaganda

The author below wrote that “propaganda is not necessarily dishonest, but it is necessarily one-sided and is almost certain to be strongly prejudiced.” Most if not all of the newspaper reporters sent to mid-1850s Kansas were New Englanders, a place which framed its own history and much at odds with the facts. As an example, the “Boston Massacre” was in truth a street brawl between common British soldiers and town toughs, followed by nearly two years of peace and the popular leaders defending the soldiers’ actions. This event was later resurrected to help save the revolutionary cause and given a high-sounding name for effect.

Historical Propaganda

“The great posthumous fame of John Brown is partly the product of propaganda and partly the result of accident. There were a number of hot-headed abolitionists who went to Kansas Territory as correspondents for northern newspapers and whose chief business was to send back sensational accounts of conditions that obtained in the Territory. These men were naturally drawn into Brown’s camp, partly by their sympathies and partly by their desire for news. Men who are “good copy” are almost always popular with reporters.

After Brown’s execution, one of these men, James Redpath, published a Life of John Brown, which proved a “bestseller” during the presidential campaign of 1860. The next important addition to the literature of John Brown was the Life and Letters published in 1885 by Frank B. Sanborn. Sanborn was an eastern accomplice of Brown’s, and his book was therefore quite as much a defense of himself as of Brown. Finally, there was published in 1910 Oswald Garrison Villard’s John Brown Fifty Years After. Mr. Villard is the grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. His defense of Brown was not only following the promptings of his heart but vindicating the honor of the family.

A brilliant response to Mr. Villard was written by Hill P. Wilson under the title John Brown, Soldier of Fortune. A Critique (Cornhill Company, 1916), which has been almost ignored by historical scholars. Mr. Wilson enjoyed the advantage of a thorough familiarity with the frontier and its type of criminals. In his view, Brown was a common horse thief who used the slavery issue as a cloak to cover his nefarious practices. This I know was the opinion at the time of some of the free State leaders who knew Brown personally. His apotheosis was undoubtedly worked by the accident of the John Brown song, which became a marching song of the northern armies in the early war years and resulted in Brown’s canonization.

The notion that Brown was the liberator of Kansas is the most absurd pretention ever foisted upon a gullible public, and his attack upon Harpers Ferry greatly widened the breach with the South and rendered a peaceful settlement impossible.”

(Propaganda as a Source of American History. Frank Heywood Hodder, Mississippi Valley Review, Vol. IX, No. 1, June 1922, pp. 16-18).