Circa1865

The Puritans and New England’s Slave Trade

The New England Puritans warred upon and sold into West Indian slavery the local inhabitants they didn’t kill in the process. The native inhabitant’s land was forfeited and divided among the victors, whose later prosperity was largely the result of a profitable triangular slave trade with Africans shipped to the West Indies sugar plantations. New England slave ship construction was highly profitable and lured many Liverpool shipwrights away from home, and during one period the little village of Newport, Rhode Island was the haven for 150 slave-trade vessels. From Delaware to Georgia, each State was indebted to New England for its slave labor.

In the 1820s the Puritan descendants discovered a “Higher Law” and denounced the 1789 compact they then agreed to as “a covenant with Death and an agreement with Hell.” This was heard despite the millions in profits made by New England textile mills fed by the cotton picked by slaves they had sold to Southern planters – a process made more efficient and profitable by a 1790’s invention of Massachusetts inventor Eli Whitney.

(The Puritans. Thomas Manson Norwood, 1875. Virginia Heritage Foundation, pp. 63-65)

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)

The American military of 1860 was one still restricted by the view that a standing army was a threat to peace and liberty. Sensing danger after the John Brown violence at Harpers Ferry, Americans in the South formed local militia units and Safety Committees reminiscent of those in 1776 days. Lincoln’s seizure of power after Fort Sumter was enabled by a recessed Congress which would not convene until July; the demonstrated threat of anyone opposing his will; and Republican governors who provided him with troops.

Indeed, the matters of national versus State powers WERE studied in law schools and universities and West Point – the federal agent was left intentionally weak by the Founders who feared a strong central authority which would threaten and overpower the States.

Lincoln had no “war powers” as commander in chief as Congress had not declared war as required by the US Constitution. Additionally, and as the latter stipulated in Article III, Section 3, treason was waging war against “Them,” the States. This was the Framers way of dealing with possible civil war in the future, and those responsible sharing the fate of John Brown.

The following excerpt ignores the hidden economic and political machinations for war against the American South in 1861, and naively claims that northern officials in 1861 were forced to meet the South’s departure with novel ideas. The answers were found in the Constitution.

Wartime Ways

“Almost totally civilian in habits and local orientation, American were simply unready for the spectacle of “national” soldiers – even hastily uniformed neighbors – performing police functions. From the days after [Fort] Sumter all through 1861, arrests of civilians by soldiers and suspension of the revered though little understood privilege of habeas corpus were the most visible evidence of war.

Unrestrained journalism, unfettered communications, and unsubdued opposition politics attended to the “arbitrary arrests” and the “prisoners of state,” and their incarcerations in “American Bastilles.” There, military commissions pronounced ferocious penalties under the unknown and therefore doubly worrisome tenets of martial law.

Debate shifted to the habeas corpus suspensions, to the scope of “war powers” and of the commander-in-chief functions, the basic question of whether what was going on was a war between nations or a civil war, to altering configurations of national-State relationships, to the applicability of the Bill of Rights to wartime ways, and to the role of the national and State’s judiciaries in supplying answers to war-born uncertainties.

A hundred years ago, these matters were unstudied in law schools, ignored in universities, and unknown in West Point’s curriculum. Among government officials, ignorance about them was all but complete. Legal literature on such themes was inadequate if not irrelevant. After Sumter, persons who sought guidance on internal security matters found themselves in an everyman’s-land of assumptions, conjectures and surmises. Precise questions did not exist, much less answers. It was all novel and startling.”

(A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution. Harold M. Hyman. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1975, pp. 65-66)

Democracy and King Numbers

“Thwarted by the aristocratic minority in calling legitimate conventions, the democratic majority in the old States now threatened to take the matter into their own hands and call extra-legal conventions. Mass meetings were held in Georgia, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland; pools were conducted in various counties, all of which voted overwhelmingly for calling conventions; grand jury presentments called attention to the need for reform and recommended direct action if the legislatures failed to act; the voters in many counties instructed their representatives in the legislature to support a bill calling a constitutional convention; and hundreds of petitions went to the legislatures demanding relief.

Typical of the sentiment for calling extra-legal conventions is the statement of a North Carolinian that if the legislature failed “to comply with the wishes of a great majority of the State,” the “a convention will be assembled in the west and the constitution amended without the concurrence of the east; and this being the act of a majority, and the legal act will consequently be obligatory on the whole State. The constitution will be amended.  

The North Carolina legislature capitulated and called a convention to meet at the same time and place as that called extra-legally. In like manner the legislatures of Virginia, Mississippi and Tennessee, at the demand of the people, called conventions to revise their constitutions. This was one of the most signal victories for majority or popular rule in American history. Democracy had won a victory over aristocracy.

John C. Calhoun, Abel P. Upshur and other aristocratic leaders of the South openly denied the Jeffersonian ideal of equality of all men and bitterly condemned majority rule as the tyranny of king numbers; and they had their supporters in the north among such men as James Kent, Joseph Story and Orestes Brownson. The less famous and little- known leaders of democracy just as boldly proclaimed the doctrine of political equality.

For the first time the people had been consulted as to the revision and amendment to their constitutions. In the issue of Negro suffrage, Virginia and North Carolina joined Maryland and Kentucky in taking from the free Negro the ballot he had heretofore possessed. In like manner all new States of the period, North as well as South, denied suffrage to free Negroes. And New York in 1821 limited Negro suffrage by requiring that he possess a freehold valued at 250 dollars over and above all indebtedness.

In actual practice, the American people had decided by their constitutional provisions that Negroes were not included in the political people.”

(Democracy in the Old South. Fletcher M. Green. Journal of Southern History, Vol. XII, No. 1, February 1946, pp -16.

New York City in 1712

[The population of New York City in 1741] “numbered only about ten thousand, one-fifth of which [were] negroes, who were slaves. Their education being wholly neglected, they were ignorant and debased, and addicted to almost every vice. They were besides, restive under their bondage and the severe punishments often inflicted upon them., which caused their master’s a great deal of anxiety.

Not isolated as an inland plantation, but packed in a narrow space, they had easy communication with each other and worse than all, with the reckless and depraved crews of the vessels that came into port.

It is true, the most stringent measures were adopted to prevent them from assembling together; yet, in spite of every precaution, there would now and again come to light some plan or project that would fill white New Yorkers with alarm. They felt half the time as though walking on the crust of a volcano, and hence were in a state of mind to exaggerate every danger and give credit to every sinister rumor.

Only thirty years before occurred such an outbreak as they now feared. On the 7^th of April 1712, the house of Peter Van Tilburgh was set on fire by negroes, which was evidently meant as a signal for a general revolt.

The cry of “fire” roused the neighboring inhabitants, and the rushed out toward the blazing building. They saw . . . in the red light of the flames, a band of negroes armed with guns and knives . . . who fired and then rushed on them with their knives, killing several on the spot. The rest, leaving the building to the mercy of the flames, ran to the fort on the Battery and roused the Governor who ordered a cannon to be fired from the ramparts to alarm the town. The soldiers hurried forward towards the fire while more negroes joined the rioters, who stood firm until the gleam of bayonets and a single musket volley forced them to flee toward what is now Wall Street.

The scattered white inhabitants the rioters encountered were attacked with their knives, killing and wounding several as the black mob made for the nearby woods and swamps. Some, finding themselves closely pressed and all avenues of escape closed off, deliberately shot themselves, preferring such a death to the one they knew awaited them. How many [colored] were killed and captured during the morning, the historian does not tell us. We can only infer that the number must have been great, from the statement he incidentally makes, that “during the day nineteen more were taken, tried and executed – some that turned State’s evidence were transported. Eight or ten whites had been murdered,” and many more wounded.

It was a terrible event and remembered by the present inhabitants with horror and dismay. Many middle-aged men, in 1741, were young men at the time and remembered the fearful excitement that prevailed then.”

(The Great Riots of New York: 1712 to 1873. Joel Tyler Headley. Dover Publications, pp. 26-28)

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)

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)

The following commentary regarding past slavery in the United States is excerpted from a recent editorial from the editors of Chronicles Magazine. It is an excellent review and consideration of America’s past with a proper dose of perspective added.

American Slavery Reconsidered

“Some historical perspective may be helpful here. When the United States came into being in the late 18^th century, human slavery existed in much of the world, including in the British and French empires, and perhaps most brutally in Africa, from whence most of America’s slave came.

If slavery were a collective sin, it existed everywhere since the dawn of humanity as a desirable form of labor. The American South did not produce a slave system of unsurpassed brutality, but one that allowed the slave population to multiply at an unsurpassed rate for servile labor. We may point this out even when speaking about an institution that we are well rid of.

We’ve never bought the argument that slavery was especially wicked on these shores because of the passage in the Declaration of Independence about all men being equal. The French proclaimed their Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens in August 1789 but still maintained a vast slave population in the West Indies. Robert Paquette, a leading historian of slavery in the western hemisphere, raises the rhetorical question:

Does anyone think that a slave in 19^th century Virginia would have preferred being relocated to a sugar plantation in Cuba or Brazil, or to becoming a serf in Russia or China? Unlikely.

Paquette also finds it remarkable that the data he learned as a university student from a Jewish Marxist professor, Robert Fogel, about the relatively benign condition of slaves in the American South (relative to other places where slavery was practiced) can no longer be discussed even in supposedly conservative journals.

Jefferson wanted slaves gradually freed and colonized outside the United States. Although Lincoln changed course [in later 1862 to obtain black troops], he too long favored the settlement of manumitted slaves in Haiti or Central America.

There is also no evidence that most of those who died in the Civil War gave their lives specifically to rid this country of slavery. It is also inconceivable that slavery would not have disappeared even without the bloodbath that Lincoln’s invasion of the Southern States brought about. Slavery disappeared elsewhere without the catastrophe that befell the United States in the 1860s.”

(Chronicles Magazine, April/May 2021, pp. 5-6)

In early October 1765 the proposed convention of delegates from Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and South Carolina met in New York. They all agreed upon a declaration of principles and asserted the right of Britain’s colonies to be exempted from all taxes imposed without their consent.

While leading the other colonies into secession from England, Massachusetts began a long tradition of “seceding” from political compacts it had joined. In 1804 the State seriously considered secession rather than accept President Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase; the same in response to Jefferson’s embargo of trade in 1808; and again in 1812 opposing President Madison’s War – and while trading with the enemy. John Quincy Adams and others opposed the annexation of Texas in 1846 and threatened secession. New England abolitionists agitated for secession from the 1830s through 1860 over the South’s labor system for which they were largely responsible with their profitable transatlantic slave trade.

The Rebels of New England

“About this time there arose a society known as the “Sons of Liberty” which took strong ground against the usurpation of Parliament. They exerted great influence as the merchants of New York, Boston, Philadelphia and many other places agreed not to buy or import any British goods until the Stamp Act was repealed.

The British government heard of these proceedings with anger and alarm. The new ministry, at the head of which was the Marquis of Rockingham, saw that the Stamp Act must be repealed or the colonists compelled by force of arms to comply. He preferred the former. After a long and angry debate, the Act was repealed.

In February 1768, the General Court of Massachusetts led the agitation with other colonies to demand a redress of grievances from the Crown, preferred charges against the Royal Governor and petitioned the King for his removal. The Governor then dissolved the Massachusetts Assembly and in early October British troops arrived to overawe the colonists.

In 1769, Parliament censured the treasonous conduct of Massachusetts, approved the employment of additional troops to put down the rebellious, and asked the King to authorize the Governor to arrest the traitors and have them sent to England for trial. The following year came the Boston “massacre” in which three Bostonians were killed and several wounded after confronting British troops. After 1774’s Boston tea party Parliament closed the port of Boston and dissolved the House of Burgesses. The latter formed itself into a committee to agitate the other colonies into rebellion against the British Crown.

In May of 1775, Royal Governor and General Thomas Gage fortified Boston Neck, seized the military stores at Cambridge and Charlestown and conveyed them to Boston.”

(History of the United Statesfrom the Earliest Settlements to 1872. Alexander H. Stephens. E.J. Hales & Son, Publisher. New York, 1872, excerpts pp. 163-167)