Circa1865

A bronze equestrian monument of Maj. Gen. John F. Hartranft stands majestically outside the capitol building at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This memorial still stands today despite Hartranft waging war against Americans in the South who fought for political independence as did their ancestors in 1776. Under the Constitution Hartranft swore fealty to, Article III, Section 3 is clear regarding treason as waging war against a State.

After the death of Lincoln, Hartranft served as a special provost marshal during the show trial and predictable convictions, including that of Mary Surratt. He afterward personally led these Americans to the gallows in early July 1865.  In 1872 he became governor of Pennsylvania governor and won a second term in 1876 despite being accused of bribing leaders of the Molly Maguires to induce members to vote for him.

Monument to a War Hero Politician

Just prior to the battle of First Manassas in July 1861, the enlistment period of then-Col. Hartranft’s Pennsylvania regiment had expired, and they returned home. Assigned as an aide to another command during the battle, he was unsuccessful in his attempt to stem the wholesale retreat of Northern soldiers. For this latter action Hartranft was to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1886.

In April 1862, Hartranft was colonel of the 51^st PA regiment during Gen. Burnside’s invasion of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The resulting occupation of the islands and afterward New Bern was marked by the wholesale looting and pillaging of businesses and civilians.

In May 1863, Hartranft’s 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment was near Jackson, Mississippi as Grant approached Vicksburg. At that time, the Lieber Code which would govern the conduct of northern armies in the field was being promulgated – it forbade the waging of war against innocent civilians.

At Jackson, one of Hartranft’s officers later wrote in 1866 of the 51^st Pennsylvania troops who “broke ranks and ransacked the town of Jackson for tobacco, whiskey and valuables . . . Grocery, dry goods, hat, shoe, millinery and drug stores were broken open and “cleaned out” of every vestige of their contents: private dwellings entered and plundered of money, jewelry and all else of any value were carried off; crockery, chinaware, pianos, furniture, etc., were smashed to atoms; hogsheads of sugar rolled into the street and heads knocked in and contents spilled . . . and soon some very splendid buildings were reduced to ashes.”

The writer continues: “As the 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment was marching out [of town] it made quite a ludicrous appearance, for the men were clad in female attire, some with hats having crowns a foot high, some with masks on, shawls, frock skirts, with crinoline all over instead of underneath . . . marching with bonnet and bandboxes in their hands.

They were followed by the colored females, screaming with delight and begging the “Yankees” to “gib us dat bonnit,” and “Massa, do please gib me dat frock.” By the time they reached their destination the colored ladies were in possession of nearly every particle of female wear which the men had stolen.”

(History of the Fifty-first Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers. Thomas H. Parker, King & Baird, Printers, 1869, pp. 85; 363-365).

The author below records that when Gen. Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac in late-Jan. 1863, desertions were occurring at a rate of several hundred a day – with about 25 per cent of his assumed strength missing. Senator Henry Wilson stated on the Senate floor in March 1864 that some 40,000 soldiers had already deserted despite executions occurring almost daily in that army.

Northern Desertions, 1863

“Perhaps Lee and the commanders in the South saw with the eyes of the Union scout who wrote from Virginia on November 20, 1862, that desertions form Union lines were so frequent as to be disgusting to Southerners as well.

It is about this time that Lincoln recognized and presented the situation in realistic terms. He pointed out to a group of women calling upon him that while Gen. McClellan was constantly calling for more and more troops, that deserters and furloughed men outnumbered the new recruits; and that while that general had 180,000 men on the rolls for the Antietam battle, he had had only some 90,000 with which to enter the fight, as 20,000 men were in hospitals and the rest “absent,” and that within two hours after the battle, some 30,000 had straggled and deserted.

Northern General Pope in September of that year had reported the straggling as so bad that unless something were done to restore tone to the army, it would “melt away before you know it.”

No less a figure than Gen. Halleck charged that not a few Northern soldiers voluntarily surrendered to the enemy in order to be paroled as prisoners of war. Even the vigilance of escorts and guards was materially affected by the alluring thought that captivity meant liberty and relaxation. Many Northern soldiers, according to Generals Meade and McClellan, dispersed and left during the Antietam battle.

Every Northern defeat was marked by a long line of stragglers and deserters, who, if the outcome had been different, would probably have remained to press on the advantage. And the number absent without leave in late December 1862, after Gen. Burnside’s disaster at Fredericksburg, worsened the losses and the demoralization of Lincoln’s army was complete.”

(Desertions During the Civil War. Ella Lonn. University of Nebraska Press, 1998, pg. 144-145. (original American Historical Association, 1928)

The following is noted as “a summary of the report made by Tyler to Virginia Gov. Letcher on his return from Washington. The text of this report, with the letters passing between Tyler & Buchanan, was published in the Richmond Daily Dispatch, February 1861.”     The fortress was built to protect Virginia, not wage war upon it.

American Citizens Targeted

“Tyler left Washington on January 29 with the expectation of returning to the Washington Peace Convention, which was to assemble on February 4. On the day before leaving, he sent another letter to President James Buchanan, in lieu of a call which other engagements prevented. In this letter he expressed appreciation of the courtesies that had been shown him and pleasure at hearing the President’s message read in the Senate.

Tyler’s letter also spoke of a rumor that at Fortress Monroe the cannon had been put on the landward side and pointed inland. His comment of this report was “that when Virginia is making every possible effort to redeem and save the Union, it is seemingly ungenerous to cannon leveled at here bosom.”

To this letter Buchanan sent a very courteous reply, stating that he would inquire into the rumors with reference to Fortress Monroe’s cannon.”

(John Tyler, Champion of the Old South. Oliver Perry Chitwood. American Political Biography Press, 1939 – pg. 438)

Yankee Deserters

“The rigor of treating Yankee deserters as prisoners of war appears to have relaxed during the winter of 1862-1863 when so large a number of them had accumulated in the military prisons that the Secretary of War gave instructions to allow such of them as were willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Confederate States of America, and then to permit them to seek work where it could be found.

Accordingly, a number were employed by a director of the Tredegar Works at Richmond, who forwarded them to labor in Rockbridge County, Virginia, where their presence duly alarmed the Confederate House of Representatives.

Somewhat more than a year later, in June 1864, an enrolling officer attempted to conscript some Yankee deserters, who, under an oath of neutrality, preferable to an oath of allegiance as it could not be broken by conscription, had secured work near Salisbury, North Carolina, where their conduct had been unexceptional, against the protest of the captain commanding the post.

The War Department, as consistency demanded, discharged the men as protected by their oath of neutrality. But at the same time there were deserters from the northern army who preferred to be treated as prisoners of war.

Beginning with the middle of 1862 a distinct effort was made by Confederate State authorities to encourage desertion from the north’s armies. It was at first directed to the inhabitants of Tennessee in the hope of detaching the State from northern strength to at least neutrality.

General Lee was not mistaken in believing that the Confederacy’s offer of stimulating deserters with release to the north – many printed in German – so that they may spread the story of kind treatment from Southerners.

Grant admitted in a statement that bounty and substitute men had been deserting immediately upon their arrival at the front to take advantage of the Confederacy’s offer to send them through the lines. The Richmond papers on September 4, 1864, announced that several hundred Federal deserters had already availed themselves of the offer and were waiting to be sent north. It may possibly have affected several thousand soldiers all told.

(Desertion During the Civil War, Ella Lonn. Bison Books, 1998 (original 1928). pp. 184-185; 190-191)

The Washington Peace Conference was urged on by Southern States as a last-ditch effort to salvage political union with the north through compromise – and they could rightly be referred to as the true “Unionists.” Working against Southern efforts for peace was Lincoln, who feared any compromise would weaken his minority party and limit his power.

Party Above Union

Early in the session (February 7^th) the Washington Peace Conference paid its respects to the outgoing President James Buchanan as a body. The members were received in the East Room of the White House and presented to the Buchanan by former-President John Tyler.

A similar courtesy was extended to Lincoln when he arrived in Washington on February 23^rd. As Tyler presented several distinguished delegates to him, Lincoln made brief comments, some of which were of a jocular character. His humor, however, was not particularly happy and hardly in keeping with the occasion. It may be said that Lincoln was using this method to ward off any embarrassing questions that might be asked. If this were his object, he was successful, as no commitments were made.

The strained amenities and the simulated courtesies exchanged between the ex-President and the President-elect were in the nature of a little drama typifying the end of one era and the beginning of another. Or, it might be regarded as a pleasing, trivial curtain raiser to that awful tragedy that marked the transition from the Second to the Third Republic. For the Second Republic was soon to undergo the pangs of death and the Third Republic to experience the painful throes of birth.

There was also the striking contrast in the personalities of the two men. In the case of Lincoln, tradition has so exaggerated his virtues and covered up his faults that one of the most human characters in history has been idealized into a demigod. With Tyler, on the other hand, his virtues have been so minimized and defects so magnified that the reputation of a refined and well-meaning gentleman has been handed down to us as that of a wicked renegade.”

(John Tyler: Champion of the Old South. Oliver Perry Chitwood. American Political Biography Press. 1939, pp. 448-449)

The political development of the United States has passed through three stages since independence from England. The stages are characterized as those of the First Republic (1776-1789); the Second Republic (1789-1861); and the Third Republic (since 1861).

Lincoln’s Great Blunder

“Former-President John Tyler wrote his wife the day after Virginia’s withdrawal from the 1789 Constitution.

“The die is cast and Virginia’s future is in the hands of the god of battle.” The contest will be one full of peril, but “there is a spirit abroad in Virginia which cannot be crushed until the life of the last man is trampled out. The numbers opposed to us are immense; but twelve thousand Grecians conquered the whole power of Xerxes [Darius] at Marathon, and our fathers, a mere handful, overcame the enormous power of Great Britain. Do, dearest, live as frugally as possible in the household, – trying times are before us.”

Tyler regarded the conflict between the North and the South as a great blunder, the chief blame for which must be laid at the door of Lincoln. For by reinforcing Fort Sumter, he had brought on a clash which could have been avoided. Lincoln had made the terrible mistake of “having weighed in the scales the value of a mere local fort against the value of the Union itself.” He even accused the new president of acting not from patriotic motives but from a desire to consolidate behind him his faction of the Republican party.

The South, he implied, was justified in its attack on Fort Sumter. “If the Confederate States have their own flag, is anyone so stupid as to suppose that they will suffer the flag of England or France or of the northern States to float over the ramparts in place of their own?

As Tyler believed in the sovereignty of the States, he considered that under existing circumstances secession was legal and coercion revolutionary. The breakup of the union was not caused by the secession of the South but by the nullification practiced by the North. The latter section’s disregard of the fugitive slave law, its rejection of decision of the United States Supreme Court, and the commission of other unconstitutional acts had really destroyed the union of 1789. If there was any rebellion involved in this dissolution of the partnership, the “rebels” were not the Southerners, but the Northerners.

For the former had been true to the principles of the Constitution and the latter had violated them. The North had thus pulled down the house and the South had only left its ruins.”

(John Tyler: Champion of the Old South. Oliver Perry Chitwood. American Political Biography Press. 1939, pp. 455-456)

Historian Richard Weaver wrote that at the close of the Civil War “the side which more completely abjured the rules of chivalric combat won, and the way was cleared for modernism, with its stringency, abstractions, and its impatience with sentiment.” He added that here the Americans “proved pioneers in a field whose value to civilization is dubious.” He reminds the reader of General Sheridan’s postwar visit to the Prussian staff and suggestion that “noncombatants be treated with the utmost rigor” and opinion that the people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” It then seemed but an easy step from the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan to the blitzkrieg of the Nazi’s.

The Task of Conquering the American South

“Realization that the North as a whole did not propose to regard the war as a game came as a shock to the Southern people, who had always counted the Yankees out of chivalry, but who seemingly had never reckoned what this would mean in practice.

For the north had already become industrial, middle-class and bourgeois, and if it began the war with old-fashioned conceptions, they vanished after the removal of the dramatic and colorful George B. McClellan. Thereafter the task of conquering the South became a business, an “official transaction,” which cost a great deal more in dollars and lives than had been anticipated, but which was at length accomplished by the systematic marshalling of equipment and numbers. When Gen. John Pope’s Virginia campaign gave the South its first intimation that the north was committed to total war, the reaction was indignation and dismay.

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to read in Lee’s brief sentence, “Pope must be suppressed,” a feeling that he was fighting not so much against an individual enemy as an outlawed mode of warfare. And when Sherman, Sheridan and Hunter began their systematic ravaging and punishing of civilians, it seemed to the old-fashioned South that one of the fundamental supports of civilization had been knocked out, and that warfare was being thrown back to the barbarism from which religion and chivalry had painfully raised it in the Middle Ages.

The courtly conduct of Lee and his officers to the Dutch farm wives of Pennsylvania had been perhaps too much sentimentalized, but the fact remains that these men felt they were observing a code, which is never more needful than in war, when fear and anger blind men and threaten their self-control. Sherman’s dictum that war is hell was answered by E. Porter Alexander’s remark that it depends somewhat on the warrior.

Naturally the thought of being beaten came hard to Americans priding themselves on their martial traditions, but . . . what has done more than anything else to support the unreconstructed attitude is the thought that an enemy, while masking himself under pious pretensions and posing as the representative of “grand moral ideas” dropped the code of civilization in warfare and won in a dishonorable manner.”

(Southern Chivalry and Total War. Richard M. Weaver. Sewanee Review, Vol. LIII, 1945, pp. 8-9)

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)

Undoubtedly the cause of the 1861 war was the purely sectional Republican party which emerged from the ashes of the Whig party, anti-immigrant Know Nothings, and Transcendentalists. Though it lost the 1856 national election, it would win in 1860 by a plurality with the addition of a high protective tariff which pleased the protectionist New England States. Though several Southern States which had not departed before February 1861 attended the Washington Peace Conference in an attempt to save the federal union, Lincoln had instructed his Republican attendees to avoid compromise.

War Millionaires of America

“The [Civil] war, author Charles Beard held, was an important determinant of industrial change after 1865 because of the manner in which industrial interests made use of the political power they had won. In Beard’s view, the ascendant Republican party was the tool of the new capitalist class. These capitalists were united in subscribing to the basic proposition that the government ought to foster industrial expansion. Successive Republican congresses duly accomplished this by enacting the national banking law, a high protective tariff, a contract labor law, lavish land grants to railroads, and the Homestead Act which in addition to giving land to settlers also expanded the domestic market.

One of the [Civil] war’s main effects was its contribution to “the extraordinary growth of heavy industry (iron, machinery, agricultural implements, lumber, clay products)” – a trend which characterized the whole period 1850-1880. While economic forces generated by the war worked to the advantage of heavy industry, [Louis] Hacker wrote [Triumph of American Capitalism, 1940], “the young industrial capitalism had by 1860 already formulated its political program for continued growth – “protectionism, a well-guarded banking system, and adequate labor supply, and expanding domestic market made possible by a federally-supported public works program.”

By the time the war had ended in 1865, Congress had virtually enacted this program, taking “a long step forward in placing the services of the state at the command of private enterprise.” The economic legislation of the war and Reconstruction periods comprised “a new and vital force” that shaped the course of postwar change. “The progress of industrial capitalism was at last being rendered secure,” Hacker concluded, and it was being done in the halls of Congress.

Mechanization was undertaken in response to heavy demands generated by the war, and in order to do this successfully, ever larger capital outlays were necessary for industrialists. This came from large-scale organizers who could tap “the reservoir of credit” produced by wartime profits and flotation of federal securities.

The result was a basic structural transformation – “the concentration of manufacturing capital in fewer hands than before, the construction of larger plants, and the appearance of a new class of war millionaires.”

(Economic Change in the Civil War: An Analysis of Recent Studies. Harry N. Scheiber. Civil War History, Vol. 11, No. 4, December 1965. pp. 398-400)