Circa1865

It is estimated that the Civil War cost $8 billion, which, including destruction of property, derangement of the power of labor, pension system and other economic losses, is increased to $30 billion. To this total is added the human cost of 620,000 battlefield deaths – the war killed one out of every four Southern white males between 20 and 40 — and at least 50,000 civilians dead from indiscriminate Northern bombardment of cities, and starvation.

In the immediate postwar and its two million men in blue mustered out, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) became a rich political endorsement as Northern politicians lined up to offer higher pensions in return for votes.  

The Most Costly Price of the Civil War

“War always intrenches privilege in the councils of the nation. The power of the financier is increased. He is called in to rule. Otherwise the state would not go on. Such was our own experience as a result of the Civil War.

Prior to 1861 a democratic spirit prevailed in the nation. Economy was the note in government expenditures. The Civil War ushered on a new era. The need for revenue brought about a merger of the protected interests of Pennsylvania and New England and the banking interests of Wall Street with the Treasury Department, a merger which has continued ever since.

Corruption born of army contracts and war profits penetrated into Congress and the various departments of the government. The public domain of the West was squandered in land grants to the Pacific Railroads with no concern for posterity. The richest resources of the nation were given away. For years after the war, privilege was ascendant and democracy reached to lowest ebb in our history.

Taxes were collected not for the needs of the government, but to maintain a protectionist policy. Revenues were squandered and pork-barrel methods prevailed. Pensions were recklessly granted to prevent a treasury surplus, while appropriations for rivers and harbors, for public buildings, and other purposed became the recognized practice of congressional procedure.

For fifty years the reactionary influences which gained a foothold during the Civil War maintained their control of the government. This was the most costly price of the Civil War, far more costly than the indebtedness incurred or the economic waste involved.”

(Why War? Frederic C. Howe, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1918, excerpt pp. 313-314)

About 400 years before Christ, Athens, was perhaps the first republic overtaken by economic depression with widespread unemployment and many flocking to the Agora seeking aid. First the farmers were granted handouts, then came the laborers and others wanting their share. The ancient racket continues unabated today.

The New Deal: An Old Racket

“It is clear from Plutarch’s account that Pericles, the political ruler of Athens, understood the cause of the trouble. Plutarch describes the character of the workers who thronged into Athens clamoring for relief. They were, he tells us, brass workers, wood workers, smiths, moulders, founders, stonecutters, goldsmiths, ivory workers, and painters. It was perfectly obvious that Athens was in a depression because of the collapse of the building industry and particularly the extensive shipbuilding industry at Piraeus, the port of Athens. In other words, the capital goods industry was in a slump.

Its effects spread to others – to farmers, who were the first to get grants in aid through the munificence of the great man, Pericles. This encouraged the idle workmen to demand attention and they were given a dole amounting to six cents a day.

Pericles tried to lessen the effects of the depression by settling the unemployed in distant colonies. He sent 500 to the Isle of Naxos, 250 to Andros, a thousand to Thrace, and others to various colonies of Attica. And Plutarch observes that he did this “to discharge the city of the idle,” who were, by reason of their idleness, “a busy and meddlesome crowd of people.”

All this brought down the scorn of the wealthy conservative, Thuycidides (not the historian), who estimated that some 20,000 citizens one way or another were on the government payroll – which was something of an exaggeration.

In the end, Pericles tried to deal with the depression by a huge program of public works . . . a diminutive empire caught in the grip of those merciless economic laws which torment the far mightier empires of today. Thus trapped in an economic crisis, he turned to the second remedy of a sick society – borrowing.  Pericles decide to “borrow” [public defense funds guarded in the sacred treasury] to set in motion a big building program.

Pericles, the arch politician, insisted that [the defense funds] were in the hands of Athens to be used as it saw fit. He prevailed, and these funds were used to erect that magnificent collection of buildings on the Acropolis . . . But, in the end, Pericles turned to the third and most destructive and evil of the elements of his Athens New Deal – war.

The war with Sparta and her allies lasted for many years and ended with the downfall and humiliation of Athens and provided the tragic climax of this earliest of New Deals. Depression, caused by collapse of the heavy industries; then government doles paid for with taxes; great building and military enterprises to create work paid for with borrowed funds – in this case misused money – and finally war. Thus ended the New Deal in Athens.”

(The New Deal: An Old Racket; Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn, Gregory P. Pavlik, editor, Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1996, excerpt pp. 55-56)

Shortly after the Bolshevik revolution and consolidation of power in Russia came the Great Depression and the opportunity for a charismatic American politician to introduce his own version of a planned economy, fiat money and social programs funded by deficit financing.

American Welfare State  

“My father was a true liberal as it was defined prior to World War II. He was also a highly regarded and respected liberal, in the forefront of his profession of journalism. At that time, most of those in the newspaper field were staunch supporters of the Constitution as originally adopted; that is, they believed that the role of the federal government was quite limited. And they also believed in the free enterprise system. There were few leftists in their midst.

Since then the term “liberal” has undergone a radical change in meaning, and now means almost the reverse of what it meant when my father was practicing his profession before World War II. Under the present-day meaning of the word “liberal” my father would now be called a conservative. In addition to his strong views about the superior qualities of the free enterprise system and the need for a diminished role for the federal government, he was a firm believer in high standards of morality for the family, and for the communities in which the families lived and raised their children.

In his later years he was subject to heavy criticism, much of it slanderous, but I never heard anyone questioning his integrity. In his search for the truth as a journalist, he had great respect for all obtainable facts and information required for reaching judgmental decisions.

The passage in 1913 of the Constitutional Amendment to tax income greatly increased the power of the federal government to control and regulate the economy, but the exercise of this power was quite modest until the New Deal and World War II. This power, together with the gigantic demands of the war, resulted in an enormous involvement of the federal government in the total economy of the nation.

And with it came much more sympathy by the general public and the media for socialistic and planned governmental programs. Support for these programs also prospered in colleges, universities, and religious groups. The Welfare State was beginning to get a firm foothold on our shores.”

(Forgotten Lessons: Selected Essays of John T. Flynn, Gregory P. Pavlik, editor, Foundation for Economic Education, Inc., 1996, excerpt pp. v-vi)

The fall elections of 1862 witnessed severe setbacks for Lincoln’s party due to several factors. Resistance to arbitrary arrests, illegal suspension of habeas corpus and homeless slaves moving northward all accounted for Democratic victories at the polls. But the emancipation issue and its ramifications were paramount, with Senator John Sherman of Ohio contending that the “ill-timed [emancipation] proclamation contributed to the general result.” The Republican party was never “anti-slavery,” and knew victory at the Northern polls depended upon confining black people to the South.

No Diversity in Illinois

“Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton . . . committed a blunder that partly undermined Republican candidates in the Midwest. Throughout the summer [of 1862] Union troops operating in the Mississippi Valley channeled hundreds of Negro refugees and freedmen to the federal commander at Cairo, the southernmost town in Illinois.  On September 18, 1862, to alleviate this pressure, Stanton authorized the commanding general at Cairo to turn Negro women and children over to committees which would provide them with employment and support at the North.  

This order, which violated the Illinois Negro exclusion law, was greeted with dismay. [Midwestern] Democrats took full advantage of their political windfall. Abusing the black “locusts” from the South and describing them as “the first fruits of emancipation,” they portrayed the emancipation proclamation and the colonization of Illinois as parts of a Republican plot to Africanize the entire Middle West.

Frightened citizens held mass meetings denouncing Stanton’s action and the black inundation. Retreating pell-mell, the Republicans explained that the freedmen would only be in Illinois temporarily and that emancipation offered the best hope for getting the Negroes out of the State.  After the war was over, they would “skedaddle back to the sunny clime of Dixie.”

Leonard Switt, a personal friend of Lincoln and a Unionist candidate for Congress, hastened to say that he was and always had been opposed to the introduction of free Negroes into Illinois. A supporter of the Union party wrote Governor Richard Yates that the “scattering of those black throngs should not be allowed if [it] can be avoided . . . and with confirmed prejudices and opinions of our people against the mingling of the blacks among us we shall always have trouble.”

On October 13, 1862, Yates wired the President, telling him of the damage being done to their cause in Illinois. The next day David Davis, a close friend of Lincoln, advised the President that it was essential that no more Negroes be brought into the State while the elections were pending.” There is danger in the Election here,” he added, “growing out of the large number of Republican voters, who have gone to the war . . . and of the Negroes, coming into the State.”

But Stanton, presumably with Lincoln’s approval, had already acted on October 13 by forbidding further shipments of blacks out of Cairo. Republican journals now happily announced that the Democrats had been deprived of their sole issue.”

(Free, But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War, V. Jacque Voegeli, University of Chicago Press, 1967, excerpts pp. 60-61)

The feudal lord of the manor mentioned below could have been European, Asian, Arab or African owners of serfs or slaves.  A North German serf in Mecklenburg belonged to and worked the land of his lord, owning little more than his clothes and cooking utensils. But he and other serfs were essential to the lord for agricultural production, as in the American South and elsewhere in the world, and thus could not be abandoned.  

Feudal Lords, Modern Capitalists and The Dole

“The feudal lord of the manor was quite as much a property owner as the millionaire under modern capitalism. He had property rights in the tools of production, and often directed the processes of production. But unlike the man of property under modern capitalism, he could never make a decision in respect of his property rights, one of the results of which, would be widespread unemployment and destitution, for, as a practical matter, he could not expel the serf from the land or deny him the use of the land and some elementary capital for the production of food, shelter and clothing.

Modern capitalism is the first important system of property rights to allow property owners to make decisions which result in large scale unemployment. The much vaunted freedom of modern capitalism is largely a matter of the freedom of property owners from social responsibility for the consequences of their economic choices.  It is a matter of the freedom of property owners not to invest their savings if the profit incentive is not considered sufficient.

To say that it is also a matter of the freedom of the worker to abstain from work is to utter a shallow mockery of human necessity. The rich man is, in a practical sense, free to withhold his savings from investment. The poor man is never free in any but a legal sense and absurd sense to withhold his labor from the highest bidder, however low the bid, if, as the principles of sound capitalism require, so to withhold his labor is to starve.

At the present time, one of the fundamental rules of sound capitalism is being violated by the payment of the dole, which prevents a man from starving and thus enables him to withhold his labor from the highest bidder if the bid is not materially higher than the amount obtainable from the dole.”  

 (The Coming American Fascism: The Crisis of Capitalism, Lawrence Dennis, Harper & Brothers, 1936, excerpt pp. 22-23)

The Simcoe Compromise bill of July 1793 did not free any slaves in then-Upper Canada, but did forbid the importation of slaves into that Province. Ironically, once Michigan was incorporated as a US territory in 1805, slaves escaping from Upper Canada were fleeing across the border – by 1806 there were sufficient free blacks in Detroit to form their own militia unit, as would be the case in New Orleans and its all-black Louisiana Native Guards. Mustered into State service in May 1861, the latter was the first black unit to serve in the American Civil War.

Slavery Way Up North

“The history of legalized slavery in [Canada] stretches back to 1628, when the English adventurer David Kirke brought to New France a native of Madagascar. Kirke disposed of him quickly for a handsome profit, making him Canada’s first slave. [It is believed] that by 1760 there were approximately 1,100 slaves residing in New France, most of who lived near Montreal and were either house servants or farm hands.

In the treaty of capitulation [to Britain], 8 September 1760, clause 47 guaranteed the continued servitude of all slaves to their respective masters. This same clause was included in the Treaty of Paris, 1763, and it was left in force when French civil law was restored by the Quebec Act of 1774.

By 1784 there were more than 4,000 blacks living in the British colonies north of the United States, and among them could be counted at least 1,800 slaves. To encourage settlement in British North America, the home government passed the Imperial Act of 1790, which applied to all British subjects still resident in the United States. It allowed them to import “Negroes, household furniture . . . duty free” into the Bahamas, Bermuda, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and any other British territory in North America. [Author] Robin Winks claims that free blacks were discouraged from settling.

Slave owning was widespread among the emerging political and social elite of Upper Canada. Peter Russell, a senior member of the Executive and Legislative councils and the province’s administrator in the absence of [Lt. Governor John Graves] Simcoe, was reputed to be the owner of ninety-nine slaves. Matthew Elliot, Russell’s close friend, may have owned upwards of fifty slaves, many of whom were war trophies taken in border clashes with the Americans.

(Slavery and Freedom in Niagara, Power & Butler, Niagara Historical Society, 2000, excerpts pp. 11-12; 18; 24-25)

The author of the 1928 source below notes that as of that date, “Liberia, the country of free Negroes, there are over two hundred thousand slaves. In Sierra Leone, the other freemen’s colony, slavery was abolished on January 1 of this year, by decree of the Legislative Council.”

A National Institution

“It would be a task of many pages if I attempted to give a full account of the origin and causes of slavery in Africa. As a national institution, it seems to have existed always. Africans have been bondsmen everywhere: and the oldest monuments bear their images linked with menial toils and absolute servitude.

England to-day, with all her philanthropy, sends, under the Cross of St. George, to convenient magazines of lawful commerce on the [African] coast, Birmingham muskets, Manchester cottons, and Liverpool lead, all of which are righteously swapped at Sierra Leone, Acra, and on the Gold Coast, for Spanish or Brazilian bills on London.

Yet what British merchant does not know the traffic on which those bills are founded, and for whose support his wares are purchased?  France . . . dispatches her Rouen cottons, Marseille brandies, flimsy taffetas, and indescribable variety of tinsel geegaws. Germany demands a slice for her looking-glasses and beads; while multitudes of our own worthy [Boston] traders, who would hang a slaver as a pirate when caught, do not hesitate to supply him indirectly with tobacco, powder, cotton, Yankee rum, and New England notions, in order to bait the trap in which he may be caught. It is the temptation of these things, I repeat, which feeds the slave-making wars of Africa, and forms the human basis of those admirable bills of exchange.

Such may be said to be the predominating influence that supports the African slave trade; yet, if commerce of all kinds were forbidden with that continent, the customs and laws of the natives would still encourage slavery as a domestic affair, though of course in a very modified degree.

A slave is a note of hand that may be discounted or pawned; he is still a bill of exchange that carries him to his destination and pays the debt bodily . . . Thus, slavery is not likely to be surrendered by the Negroes themselves as a national institution.”

(Adventures of a Slave Trader: Being an Account of the Life of Captain Theodore Canot, Trader in Gold, Ivory &Slaves on the Coast of Guinea: His Own Story as Told in the Year 1854 to Brantz Mayer, Garden City Publishing, 1928, excerpts pp. 126-128)

In the Aztec culture, war and the priesthood were the only paths “toward prestige, honors and riches,” with free land and slaves given as rewards for valor while subjugating neighbors. In the century prior to Spanish conquest, the merchant class included “slave traders whose centers of operation were in some of the large cities, but who kept purchasing bases in the furthermost cities.”

Slavery existed in all classic period Mesoamerican cultures: in Maya culture, the condition of slavery was passed down from one generation to another, often as punishment for offenses against the ruling class. “The majority of slaves, however, were prisoners of war or foreigners bought from traders. The destiny of these slaves was uncertain, and many must have ended their days as sacrificial victims.”  

Slavery Way Down South

“Aztec conquests always had religious or economic motives . . . in the principal cities of the Aztecs and their allies lived an artisan group who were in constant need of raw materials for the manufacture of consumer goods which were traded among the Aztecs themselves or exchanged for products from their neighbors and tribute-paying subjects.

Equally important was the development of the quasi-feudal system with an increasing demand for agricultural land and serfs for the benefit of the growing nobility. Last but not least was the need for slaves to be sacrificed to the gods as state and religion merged into one unified system.

In the last years of their brief history, the Aztec nation included more than 300 vassal tribes which never amalgamated into a political or administrative entity.

While Aztec merchants traveled the trade routes, transacting business and paving the way for new conquests, the warriors and governors exercised dominion by exacting tribute and gathering the designated quotas of prisoners to be sacrificed to the many gods of the Aztec pantheon.”

(Pre-Columbian Cities, Jorge E. Hardoy, Walker and Company, 1973, excerpts pp. 124; 128; 228)

New York City was the antebellum manufacturing, commercial and shipping center of the United States, and many New York firms found their greatest market in the slave-holding States. This was true of those selling the cheap cotton goods for slave clothing, and luxury items earmarked for the planters. The trade with the South was so great that many companies advertised themselves as “exclusively for the Southern trade.” Manhattan bankers had ready-money at low interest for planters, Northern or Southern, wanting to buy more land to plant cotton for which slaves were needed.

New York passed progressive emancipation bills in the early 1800s and many were sold to Southern planters, but slaves still existed within the State in the 1840s. It is noteworthy that the Duke of York, for whom the city was named, governed the Royal African Company until he took the throne as James II

New York’s Forgotten Past

“In colonial times New York State slave owners were legion, and slavery continued there until just twenty years before the beginning of the Civil War. New York had the largest and most important slave system in colonial times north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The State provided an excellent example of urban slavery, where slaves [worked] next to free whites and acquired a variety of special skills.

The Dutch West India Company introduced slaves into New Netherlands in 1626. They were imported to New York to work on the farms, public buildings, and military works for which free workers were not available. It is doubtful whether New Netherlands would have survived without these slaves, for they provided the labor which ultimately transformed the colony from a shaky commercial outpost into a permanent settlement.

When the British captured New Netherlands in 1664, slavery continued and the slave population multiplied. Slaves were concentrated in New York City and surrounding counties. By 1746 Negro slaves accounted for 15 percent of the total New York population.

[The British occupation of southern New York during the Revolution] thoroughly disrupted slave relations. The British offered freedom to slaves who sought asylum with them . . . [which] undermined the slave system in New York.

In 1790 New York had 21,324 slaves, which increased ten years later to 30,343, the highest number of slaves New York ever possessed. By 1820, New York’s slightly more than 10,000 slaves showed a 33 percent decrease since 1810. By 1830, 75 slaves remained in the State, ten years later there were only four.”

(The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States, William C. Wright, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973, excerpts pp. 165-166)

Johann Most, self-styled anarchist communist found sympathetic ears in New York after arriving in 1882.  He promoted “propaganda of the deed,” acts of violence that would energize the masses. After the assassination of President McKinley, he wrote that it was not a crime to kill a ruler. Most gave a speech at Cooper Union twenty-two years after Abraham Lincoln gave his promoting ideas not found in the Constitution; in the latter’s audience was Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who employed Karl Marx (with Friedrich Engels assisting) as his European correspondent.  

By late 1864, fully a quarter of Lincoln’s army were German immigrants led by expelled revolutionaries of Europe’s 1848 socialist upheavals. Col. Rudolph von Rosa, an early member of the New York Communist Club, led the all-German Forty-sixth New York Regiment.

Planting Anarchism in America

“The failures and disappointments resulting from the series of national elections from 1874 to 1884 at last made an opening for party movements voicing the popular discontent and openly antagonistic to the traditional Constitution.

The Socialist Labor party held its first national convention in 1877. Its membership was mostly foreign; of twenty-four periodical publications then carried on in the party interest, only eight were in the English language; and this polyglot press gave justification to the remark that the movement was in the hands of people who proposed to remodel the institutions of the country before they had acquired its language.

The alien origin of the movement was emphasized by the appearance to two Socialist members of the Reichstag, who made a tour of the country in 1881 to stir up interest in the cause. It was soon apparent that the Socialist party organization was too hindered by the fact that it was too studious and its discussions too abstract to suit the energetic temper of the times. Many Socialists broke away to join revolutionary clubs . . . to fight the existing system of government.

At this critical moment in the process of social disorganization, the influence of foreign destructive thought made itself felt. The arrival of Johann Most from Europe in the fall of 1882 supplied this revolutionary movement with a leader who made anarchy its principle. Originally a German Socialist aiming to make the state the sole landlord and capitalist, he had gone over to anarchism and proposed to dissolve the state altogether, trusting to voluntary association to supply all genuine social needs.

Driven from Germany, he had taken refuge in England, but even the habitual British tolerance had given way under his praise of the assassination of Czar Alexander in 1881 and his proposal to treat other rulers in the same way. He had just completed a term of imprisonment before coming to the United States.

Here he was received as a hero; a great mass meeting in his honor was held at Cooper Union, New York, in December 1882; and when he toured the country he everywhere addressed large meetings.”

(The Chronicles of America Series, Allen Johnson, editor, Yale University Press, 1919, excerpts pp. 135-136)