Circa1865

The British officer below had little knowledge of the American South prior to arriving in Virginia for a month’s visit in 1862 – but soon became a staunch advocate of the Confederacy. After returning to England, he penned an article for Blackwood’s Magazine entitled “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters” which the following is drawn from. His closing words in the article urged the British Parliament to recognize the Confederate States of America, writing that it was time to put an end “to the most inhuman struggle that ever disgraced a great nation.”

The Inhuman Struggle

“The first British soldier to visit the Confederacy had at one time expected to be fighting against the North. Lieutenant-Colonel Garnet J. Wolseley, a veteran of several of Queen Victoria’s wars, was part of a British force ordered to Canada during the Trent affair of late 1861. After the threat of war soon receded, he traveled to New York City in September 1862 to join London Times correspondent Frank Lawley for a visit to the American Confederacy. By the time the two men crossed the Potomac, General Robert E. Lee’s army was withdrawing from Maryland after the Sharpsburg campaign.

Even as he entered Virginia, Wolseley was favorably disposed toward the Confederacy, ostensibly out of concern for civil liberties in the wartime North. He described residents of Maryland as “stricken . . . with terror” by arrests ordered from Washington. Traveling by train from Fredericksburg to Richmond, Wolseley and Lawley shared accommodations with the wounded from Lee’s Maryland campaign. Their plight impressed even Wolseley, the professional soldier:

“Men with legs and arms amputated, and whose pale, haggard faces assumed an expression of anguish at even the slightest jolting of the railway carriages, lay stretched across the seats – some accompanied by civilian friends who had gone from Richmond to fetch them back, and others by wives or sisters, whose careworn features told a tale of sleepless nights passed in painful uncertainty regarding the fate of those they loved.”

When Wolseley reached Lee’s headquarters, he and Lawley were taken to meet the general. The British officer was impressed: “[Lee] is a strongly built man . . . He is slightly reserved; but he is a person that, whenever seen, whether in a castle or a hovel, alone or in a crowd, must at once attract attention as being a splendid specimen of an English gentleman.”

Wolseley found an appealing lack of pomp and ostentation at Lee’s headquarters, which, he noted, consisted of seven or eight pole tents, pitched on ground so rocky as to be uncomfortable to ride over. Lee’s staff lived two or three to a tent, a nearby stream being the only amenity.

Everywhere he was impressed with the tough, dedicated Confederate soldiers. Could such men be defeated, he would ask, “by mobs of Irish and German mercenaries hired at $15 a month to fight in a cause they know little and care less about?”

(British Observers in Wartime Dixie. John M. Taylor. Military History Quarterly, Winter 2002, pp. 68-69)

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson, had been at General Kilpatrick’s headquarters in Durham Station, awaiting an opportunity to get into the Confederate camp. General Joseph E. Johnston had agreed that he might come if he could find means of transportation. Early the next morning . . . Wilson somehow managed to secure a seat in the car with [General William J.] Hardee and [aide-de-camp Thomas B.] Roy and now headed off to Greensboro with them.

Exploiting his opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery, Hardee said:

. . . “I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution . . . For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed [clothe and maintain the health of] these forty to get in order to get the work of the other sixty. The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists . . . feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of a man and woman?

Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

(General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr. LSU Stat University Press. 1965, pg. 297)

The following is an introductory paragraph from the June 2021 Chronicles magazine article by Roger D. McGrath identifying the source of many misunderstood events in history. Too often the culprit is poorly researched government or media-generated reports – or simply propaganda – that soon become “history.” This is followed by teachers who pass this on to their students.

“It’s What People Believe Happened That Counts”

“Arguing with my liberal high school teacher did not endear me to him. It got worse when a day or two after one of these class disagreements I brought to class material demonstrating the teacher had been feeding us a false narrative. The teacher was not doing so intentionally but simply out of ignorance, having accepted a narrative generated by leftists in academe.

However, it soon became evident to me that my liberal teachers were quick to accept a leftist narrative not only because it came from university professors – the putative intelligentsia – but because it made America look bad.

The problem worsened in college. Nonetheless, in those days there still existed a substantial minority of conservative professors. I recall discussing with a conservative history professor a topic of great interest to me. He told me I was right about a particular sequence of events, but then added, “Remember, it is not what actually happened that matters – it’s what people believe happened that counts.”

(The Deliberate Infection Myth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Roger D. McGrath. Chronicles Magazine, June 2021, pp. 44-45)

Below, Alexander Stephens reviews the constitutional dilemma Abraham Lincoln faced when formulating his plan to resist the American South’s decision for political independence from the industrialized north.

Congress Alone Has the Power

“[Mr. Lincoln had] sworn to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” and “faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States.” This oath imposed a solemn obligation on him not to violate the Constitution, or to exercise, under color of his office, any power not conferred upon him by that instrument. He was required to see to the faithful execution of the laws of the United States, as passed by the Congress of States, and as construed by the Judiciary.

He said in the first of these proclamations that he made a call for the militia “in virtue of the power vested in him by the Constitution and the laws.”

But no such power was vested in him by the Constitution, nor was there any law authorizing him “to set on foot” the naval blockade as he did in the second of these proclamations. He said he did this in pursuance of law, but there was no such law.

In reference to the first proclamation, Congress alone has power, under the Constitution, to declare war and raise armies. Congress alone has the power to provide by law, for calling out the militia of the several States.

The President under the Constitution has no power to call out [State] militia to suppress an insurrection in a State, except “on application of the Legislature or the Governor, when the Legislature cannot be convened.” This was one of the provisions of the United States Constitution which Mr. Lincoln swore to “preserve, protect and defend.”

That clause of the Constitution is amongst the mutual covenants between the States guaranteeing to each a “Republican Form of Government” and protection against invasion and domestic violence.” This contemplated and authorized no interference whatsoever on the part of the Federal authorities with the internal affairs of the several States, unless called upon for that purpose, unless specifically requested by a State.

On this point, Mr. Stephen Douglas, in his speech of March 15^th, in the U.S. Senate, in the policy of withdrawing Federal troops from the forts in seceded States, was so clear, conclusive and unanswerable. Mr. Douglas said:

“But we are told that the President is going to enforce the laws in the seceded States. How? By calling out the militia and using the army and navy!? These terms are used as freely and flippantly as if we were in a military government where martial law was the only rule of action, and the rule of the Monarch was the only law to the subject.

Sir, the President cannot use the Army or the Navy, or the militia, for any purpose not authorized by law; and then he must do it in the manner, and only in the manner, prescribed by law. It must be requested by the State’s legislature, or Governor.”

(A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, Vol. II. Alexander H. Stephens Sprinkle Publications, 1994 (original 1870), pp. 397-402)

In late-March 1861 it was believed by most Americans in the South – even those devoted to political independence from the north – that the policy of secession was the surest way of securing a redress of grievances from northerners – and hopefully bring them back to respecting constitutional principles. Lincoln’s proclamations of war came instead, backed by troops from northern States.

A Northern Conspiracy

“In late March 1861 the understanding in Washington was that the newly inaugurated president had determined to withdraw all United States forces from the limits of the newly formed Confederate States.

It was at this juncture, however, that seven Northern Governors hastened to Washington, and then and there organized their “Conspiracy,” and by appeals to Mr. Lincoln, and tendering to him their organized military forces, caused him to change his policy and to adopt theirs, which aimed at an entire overthrow of the Constitution of the United States and the federative principles of government upon which it was based.

It was by and through its active agency that Mr. Lincoln’s policy was changed, though not communicated to the Confederate States commissioners who were left with peaceful assurances from Lincoln’s Secretary of State, Seward.”

(A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, Vol. II. Alexander H. Stephens Sprinkle Publications, 1994 (original 1870), p. 354)

It became clear in the postwar that both Grant and Lincoln were responsible for the excessive mortality in the South’s prison camps, especially Camp Sumter – aka-Andersonville. But northern politicians still “waved the bloody shirt” in 1876 with James Blaine of Maine claiming Jefferson Davis “was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville.” Benjamin Hill of Georgia replied to him: “If nine percent of the [northern] men in Southern prisons were starved to death by Mr. Jefferson Davis, who tortured to death the twelve percent of the Southern men in Northern prisons?”

Prior to his release from postwar captivity, former Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia was asked himself about the conditions at Camp Sumter, also known as the Andersonville prisoner of war camp.

The Horrors of Andersonville

“Regarding treatment of prisoners at Andersonville and other places, which was brought up, I said that the matter had caused me deep mortification and pain. From all I had heard, the sufferings of prisoners were terrible. I had no idea, however, that these sufferings were by design or system on the part of Mr. Davis and other authorities at Richmond. Something akin to what might be styled indifference or neglect toward our own soldiers on the wounded and sick lists I have witnessed with distress. To this subject I have given a great deal of attention.

I had never seen in Mr. Davis any disposition to be vindictive toward prisoners of war. I had no idea that there was any settled policy of cruelty on his part to prisoners.

In all my conversations with him on the subject of prisoners, he put the blame of non-exchange on the authorities at Washington: he always expressed earnest desire to send home all we held upon getting in exchange our men equally suffering in northern prisons. Our prisoners, it was said, were treated as well as they could be under the circumstances; those at Andersonville were crowded into such a miserable pen because we had no other place in which to secure them. They had the same rations as our soldiers, who, to my own knowledge, suffered greatly themselves from food shortages, not only in our hospitals, but also in the field.

The advice I had given was to release all our prisoners on parole of honor, whether the authorities at Washington exchanged theirs or not. I had advised such a course as one of humanity and good policy.

Against it was urged that if we were to release all our prisoners, our men would be held and treated not as prisoners of war but as traitors and would be tried and executed as such; our authorities must hold northern soldiers as hostages for ours.  And I could not, after looking over the whole matter, come to any other conclusion than that some blame rested on the authorities at Washington.

War is at best a savage business; it never had been and never would, perhaps, be waged without atrocities on all sides. Hence, my earnest desire during the late conflict to bring about pacification by peaceful negotiations at the earliest possible moment.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myrta Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 444-446)

Below, Alexander Stephens explains the original intent of citizenship of the United States being first State citizenship. Stephens wrote the following from a Fort Warren jail cell after his arrest in 1865 for an unknown crime.

Citizenship as Intended

“Eight weeks today [July 6, 1865] I have been a prisoner; six weeks in this place; all without the slightest intimation of the cause. Seized by an armed force, sent here by an armed force, kept in close confinement, guarded by an armed force, deprived of all means of appealing to judicial power for redress; and yet Eagle-orators and reverend rhetoricians scream and shout about the glorious freedom we Americans enjoy.

PM – [A newspaper] article on naturalization in the cyclopedia attracted my attention. It is strange what errors have crept into vogue and pass without scrutiny or question, especially on naturalization and its sequence, citizenship of the United States. The subject is treated as if Congress were empowered by the Constitution to confer upon aliens’ citizenship of the United States distinct from citizenship of particular States and Territories.

The truth is, Congress has no power to naturalize or to confer citizenship of the United States. Its only power is to establish a uniform rule to be pursued by the respective States and Territories on admitting aliens to their own citizenship.

Before the Constitution was adopted, each State possessed the right as an Independent Sovereign Power to admit to citizenship whom she pleased, and on such terms as she pleased. All that the States did on this point in accepting the Constitution was to delegate to Congress the power to establish a uniform rule so that an alien might not be permitted to become a citizen of one State on different terms from what might be required in another; especially, as in one part of the Constitution it is stipulated that the citizens of each State shall be entitled in all the rest to the rights and privileges of their citizens.

But no clause of the Constitution provides for or contemplates citizenship of the United States as distinct from citizenship of some particular State or Territory. When any person is a citizen of one of the States united, he thereby, and thereby only, becomes and can be considered a citizen of the United States.

Errors in the public mind on this question are radical and fundamental and have the same source as many others equally striking.

I was first struck with these on the annexation of Texas. How could her representatives, it was asked, take their seats in Congress, not having been citizens of the United States for the term of years required by the Constitution? The answer, upon the true principles of the Constitution and the only citizenship it contemplates, was plain: members and senators could not present themselves until the State was itself one of the United States; then, whoever might present himself as a member, having been seven years a citizen of Texas, would, in the terms and meaning of the Constitution, have been seven years a citizen of the United States, so constituted.”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pp. 312-313)

In the judgement of George Washington, the government of the US was in form and nature a “Confederated, or Federal Republic” and all States within were small republics themselves. Further, the federal agent of the States was not a “republic,” but only the assigned agent of these individual republics. Montesquieu affirmed that in a confederation, the States do not forfeit or part with their individual sovereignty. Philosopher and diplomat Emmerich de Vattel asserted as well that “several sovereign and independent States may unite themselves together by a perpetual Confederacy without ceasing to be, each individually, a perfect State, and together constitute a federation.

Abraham Lincoln ended this original intent of the Founders in 1861 with his war upon States wishing to voluntarily depart the 1789 agreement. Alexander H. Stephens wrote postwar that the 1861-1865 conflict was the result of Lincoln’s abuse of powers and forced national consolidation.

Washington’s Confederate Republic

“In the popular mind in the post-Revolution time, those representing the citizens of the States at large, each acting for themselves in their sovereign capacities.

“[The various] demonstrations, devices, mottoes and symbols, clearly showed how the great mass of people, in all the States, understood the new Constitution. It was nothing but a more perfect bond of union between the States. “Federal” was the watchword of the day in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond and Charleston. It was the grand symbolized idea throughout the whole length and breadth of the land. There can be no doubt that the people thought they were adopting a Federal Constitution – forming a federated union.

Now then, what is the meaning of this word “federal,” which entered so deeply into the thoughts, hearts and understandings of the people of that day?

Dr. Johnson, the highest authority of that day, in his Dictionary, thus defines the word: Federal – (Foedus, Lat.)  relating to a League or Contract. Federate, he defines (Federatus, Lat.) leagued, joined in a Confederacy. The great American lexicographer Noah Webster, says of this word “Federal,” that it is derived from the Latin word “Foedus” which means a League. A League he defines to be “an Alliance or Confederacy between Princes or States for their mutual aid or defense.” And in defining the meaning of the word “Federal,” he uses this language: “Consisting of a Compact between States or Nations; founded on alliance by contract of mutual agreement; as, a Federal Government, such as that of the United States.”

Federal, from its very origin and derivation, therefore, has no meaning and can have none, disassociated from a Compact or Agreement of some sort, and it is seldom ever used to qualify any Compacts or Agreements except those between States or Nations. So that Federal and Confederate mean substantially the same thing.

Washington, in one of his letters which I have just read, spoke of the new Government as “a Confederacy.” In another, to Sir Edward Newenham, dated the 20^th of July, 1788, he speaks of the new Government then ratified by enough States to carry it into effect as a “Confederated Government.” In . . . 1789 he expressed his conviction that “his happiness . . . that “the Senate would at all times cooperate in every measure which may tend to promote the welfare of “this Confederated Republic.” These are the terms by which he characterized “the union” after the present Constitution was formed and after it was in operation. There is no difference between the words Federal and Confederated as thus used and applied. We see that Washington used them both, at different times, to signify the same thing, that is, the Union of the American States under the Constitution.”

(A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States, Alexander H. Stephens. Sprinkle Publications, 1994 (Original: S.A. George, Printers, 1868), pp. 167-170)

General Lee visited Wilmington briefly in early 1870 after visiting father’s gravesite in coastal Georgia. This son of Gen. “Lighthorse Harry” Lee also fought bravely for political independence and led brave American soldiers who venerated him.

In a postwar address to the Association of the Army of Northern Virginia, Col. Charles Marshall alluded to Gen. Lee’s “wonderful influence over troops under his command, saying that that such was the love and veneration of the men for him that they came to look upon the cause, [the struggle for political independence] as General Lee’s cause, and they fought for it because they loved him. To them he represented cause, country and all.”

America’s Greatest Military Leader

“April 30, 1870.

At Wilmington, they spent a day with Mr. & Mrs. George Davis. His coming there was known only to a few persons, as its announcement was by private telegram from Savannah, but quite a number of ladies and gentlemen secured a small train and went out on the Southern Road to meet Lee. When they met the regular passenger train from Savannah which Lee was aboard, he was taken from it to the private one and welcomed by his many friends. He seemed bright and cheerful and conversed with all. Lee spoke of his health not being good, and on this account begged that there would be no public demonstration on his arrival, nor during his stay at Wilmington.

On reaching that place, he accompanied Mr. George Davis to his home and was his guest during Lee’s sojourn in the city. Mrs. Davis was the daughter of Dr. O. Fairfax of Alexandria, Virginia. They had been and were very old and dear friends and neighbors.

There was a dinner given to my father that day at Mr. Davis’s home, and a number of gentlemen were present.  He was looking very well, but in conversation said that he realized there was some trouble with his heart, which he was satisfied was incurable.

The next day, May 1^st, Lee left by train for Norfolk, Virginia.”

(Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee. Robert E. Lee, II. Garden City Publishing, 1904. pp. 400-401)

Despite their formerly-invincible political influence waning in the early 1890s, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) took aim at school textbook authors who suggested that the American South may have fought for the same independence and liberty their forefathers had in 1776 – branding it “disloyal history.”

School book authors mentioned below are John Fiske (1842 – 1901), born in Hartford, Connecticut; and Daniel H. Montgomery (1837-1928), a graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island. Both States dominated the colonial transatlantic slave trade.

GAR War Upon “Disloyal History”

“Another phase of their patriotic campaign was the Grand Army’s intensified textbook warfare, in which the Confederate Veteran’s finally took up cudgels for the authors and point of view of their own section. Union veterans, feeling the general public reaction against liberality to old soldiers after the pension gift of 1890, sought some explanation for their declining prestige.

The GAR veterans concluded that it lay in the growing tendency of literature and textbooks to minimize the American South’s “crime.” The Boston Grand Army Record asserted:

“It is often spoken of in [Grand Army] Post meetings and at Camp Fires and on other public occasions that the general public opinion is not so favorable to the surviving Union soldiers as it formerly was . . . voters who have studied School Histories since 1865 have no idea what the Union Army contended for, what sacrifices they endured . . . [and] the present emasculated public opinion regarding the Right and Wrong of the Rebellion is the natural fruit of these emasculated School Histories. The indifference regarding the duties of the present generation to the surviving Union soldiers is the legitimate product of False School histories written by Professor Fiske and Reverend Montogomery imported from England. Englishmen helped the Rebels when the United States was in what seemed its death throes. We do not now need the services of Englishmen to write up the Rebellion in our School History.”

While national and State GAR headquarters showered educational institutions with angry complaints, local GAR committees paid grim calls upon school superintendents. These committees made scathing reports on textbooks by Southern writers and wrote even more bitter reviews of those produced in the north for national sale.

A typical expression was that of the Massachusetts GAR that many histories were “open to the suspicion that that they had “soothed the wounded spirit of secession for the sake of Southern trade.”  They give over-prominence and over-praise to the  leaders and movements of the secession forces, and so treat the events of the war period as to leave the impression upon the youthful mind that the war was merely a quarrel between two factions, in which both were equally to blame.”

(Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR. Mary R. Dearing. LSU Press, 1952. p. 480-481)