Category: New England History

Brownson’s Various Conversions

Vermont-born Orestes Brownson, 1803-1876, was initially raised Presbyterian but by age nineteen, like many New Englanders, was immersed in “a speckled crowd of sectaries, Universalists, deists, atheists, “nothingarians,” as they were called, as well as those professing no particular form of religion. By 1824 he became a Universalist though soon afterward declared it a “false theology” – then was drawn to Unitarianism.

Brownson’s Various Conversions

“On August 3, 1836, the Anti-Slavery Society of Boston attempted to celebrate the anniversary of the emancipation of British West Indies Island slaves, a mob gathered around the building where the Society was to assemble, which forced the landlord to bar the entrance. The Society repaired to a private residence to hear Brownson deliver a prayer, and the Society dispersed afterward. It was reported that the “mob” which had interfered was made up mainly of very respectable Southern gentlemen and Boston merchants.

It was the Great Depression of 1837 which brought Brownson for the first time into practical politics . . . [he thought brought on] by the wickedness of the banks, in refusing to pay their debts, and the moral obtuseness of the community which could tolerate, nay defend, in these moneyed corporations, conduct which would have been severely punished in the case of private individuals. [He now felt] compelled to align himself more closely with the Democratic party. For him, Jacksonian democracy had neither been sufficiently radical nor earnest in carrying out the true principles of what he called social democracy. But with the extra session of Congress then called by President Van Buren, he thought he saw the Democratic party on the eve of adopting, on the one hand, the States’ rights doctrines of the South – to which he had become a convert by the famous Senate debate between Webster and Hayne – and of accepting, on the other hand, the Locofoco doctrines of equal rights for all with a corresponding campaign against all privileges and monopolies of banks and banking, and other corporations.

Brownson came to understand the dangers of democracy in the United States, as did John C. Calhoun. He wrote: “[But] when the Federal Government has succeeded in getting under its control, directly or indirectly, nearly all the internal affairs of the States, and is able to make its act, like the frogs of Egypt, reach our domestic hearths, and to come up in our sleeping chambers and kneading troughs, we may be assured that the first barriers to a consolidated despotism have been leaped.”

(Orestes A. Brownson. A Definite Biography. Thomas Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, Inc. 1976, pp. 114; 119-120, 131)

New England History

In May of 1637 the Puritan militia attacked a Pequot community near today’s Mystic, Connecticut, killing many and pursuing the remaining men, women, and children across southern New England. The Pequot men captured were killed, with women and children enslaved as spoils of war. Others were shipped to the Caribbean islands and worked to death on sugar cane fields.

New England History

“To the modern reader who has accepted the sectional misrepresentations of the last half-century as historical verities a comparison of the Northerner with the Southerner will be unsatisfactory unless it locates the responsibility for African slavery in the United States, since that has been regarded as the Pandora’s box which was opened when the thirteen States entered into a federal compact.

Hence, omitting references to the South’s well-known responsibilities in the premises, I present here the evidence on which a fair decision can be based:

  1. In 1638 the Salem slave ship, the Desire, brought into Massachusetts a number of Negroes, and found ready sale for them. This “was not a private individual speculation,” says Moore (Notes on the History of Slavery in Massachusetts); “it was the enterprise of the authorities on the colony.”
  2. In 1639 an African queen had been brought across the waters and sold to “Mr. Maverick,” as we are informed in Joselyn’s Account of Two Voyages to New England; and Mr. Maverick undertook to compel her to raise him an improved breed of slaves. “This she took in high disdain beyond her slavery.”
  3. In 1643 the Colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven formed a Confederation, agreeing among other stipulations to mutually surrender fugitive slaves.
  4. In 1641, say Hildreth, “Massachusetts adopted her Body of Liberties, which “recognized and authorized the slavery of such strangers as are sold to us.”
  5. 1676 was the year when Wappanoag Sachem Massasoit’s nine-year-old grandson was shipped to Bermuda and sold as a slave.
  6. In 1796 John Dorsey advertised two runaway slaves in Young and Mims Boston Mercury, stating that the reward offered for their capture and return to him should include “what the law allows.” This was sixteen years after the “powerful civilization” of Massachusetts, as was arrogantly asserted by Senator Sumner in his debate with Senator Butler of South Carolina, in June, 1854, had “exterminated every vestige of slavery within her borders.”

 

But African slaves proved to be unprofitable in the Northern States . . . and the boasted superior humanity of that section is disproved by the fact that much of the shipping of the Northern States was employed in the slave trade from 1638 to 1862. In 1861 the ship Nightingale, of Boston, commanded by Francis Bowen, was captured on the African coast with 951 Negroes on board and “expecting more.”

(The South’s Burden: The Curse of Sectionalism in the United States. Benjamin Franklin Grady. Nash Brothers, 1906, pp. 19-20)

Slavers and Opium Clippers

Frederick Douglass was employed in two Baltimore shipyards, Gardner’s and Prices, for at least eight months, a city with a large population of free black and one of every six black men holding a skilled occupation.

Slavers and Opium Clippers

“Unknown to Frederick Douglas working at Price’s [Baltimore], shipyard, he helped complete the slavers Delorez, Teayer, and Eagle in 1836 and 1837. In the spring of 1838, as a young journeyman, he worked on the slaver Laura at the nearby Butler & Lamdon yard.

Continued foreign orders for slavers helped the Gardners’ business survive the financial panic of 1837. In July 1838, William Gardner launched the 465-ton Venus while Frederick Douglass likely watched this from Price’s shipyard, only three hundred yards away.

The Venus first sailed for Africa where here exploits as a slaver would bring international recognition to the Gardners – and, ultimately, an order for two opium clippers from John and George Dixwell of Augustine Heard & Company. The latter became the third largest firm in China in the mid-nineteenth century, while importing large quantities of opium to the United States.

The 140-ton schooner Frolic was laid down at Gardner’s yard in April 1844 and dispatched to the Far East on September 1st for Malwa opium runs between Bombay and Canton.”

(The Voyage of the Frolic. New England Merchants and the Opium Trade. Thomas N. Layton. Stanford University Press. 1997, pp. 49-51)

 

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

Jim Fisk’s father, known as “Pop,” was pure Yankee descended from English forbears, an itinerant peddler who left home with a loaded wagon on Mondays to return at week’s end with diminished cargo but thicker wallet. On one peddling trip, he ran out of shawls and had an excess of small, flowered tablecloths, he assured housewives that the tablecloths were the latest Boston style in shawls and sold them all.”

Below, Fisk’s son Jim followed in his father’s footsteps, doing what it took to turn a profit. Once war came, he never “felt any desire to shoulder a musket and help save the Union,” leaving the war to be fought by enthusiastic volunteers and reluctant draftees, and himself more like those who bought their way out.

During the war Jim hired adventurous actress Lottie Hough to wheedle passes through Union lines and her success so complete that she retired postwar with an immense fortune. As Grant closed in on Richmond and sensing the Confederacy’s inevitable demise, he and a small clique sent an agent to London to buy Confederate bonds short to all buyers. The agent arrived two days before news of Lee’s surrender reached England, after making a financial killing for his employers.

The Jordan Marsh enterprise below was founded at Boston in 1841 by Eben Dyer Jordan and Benjamin L. Marsh.

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

“Unlike most Bostonians, Fisk sensed that the South would not swallow Lincoln, that a war was coming. In the merits of the North-South quarrel he took little interest, but it struck him that whatever they were fighting about would open vast new merchandising opportunities. When Sumter fell and the war did come, he went to Washington to see if the government might be interested in purchasing textiles.

No one entertained with the rollicking bonhomie of James Fisk, Jr., one of the first of the war profiteers. Fisk’s company had several thousand blankets of an unappetizing color and somewhat mildewed. Retailers spurned them but Uncle Sam snapped them up.

In 1862, with cotton rotting in Southern warehouses and hard to come by in the North even at two dollars a pound, he set about to remedy the imbalance. While getting cotton out of the South involved trading with the enemy, violating the blockade, smuggling and possibly other illegalities, he justified on the ground of patriotism, reasoning that it was ridiculous that soldiers should be deprived of essential clothing – and merchants of profit – because of a mere technicality. The details of this bootleg operation, with its essential stratagems and bribes, remain dim, for he said little about it after the war.

Fisk never lacked courage if there was money in it, made several buying trips into the Dixie No Man’s Land . . . sending cotton north by the boatload, cargoes of fabulous value that kept the spindles whirring at Jordan Marsh, now the nation’s biggest enterprise of its kind. One of his biographers solemnly avers that his purchases of contraband cotton reached peaks as high as $800,000 a day.”

(Jim Fisk: The Career of an Unstoppable Rascal. W.A. Swanberg. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959, pp. 17-19

Invading North Carolina

The high point of General Burnside’s 1862 invasion of the Outer Banks and culminated with the capture of New Bern. When the 44th Massachusetts Regiment of nine-month men arrived they were treated with disdain by 3-year enlistees who received no favorable enlistment term.

Lincoln’s first proconsul at occupied New Bern, Edward Stanly, noted the ships offloading blue-clad troops returned north loaded with libraries, artwork and furniture liberated from New Bern homes.

Invading North Carolina   

“Abandoned by their owners upon the approach of the Union army, the elegant homes of New Bern’s merchant and professional class were now occupied by Federal officers. Several hundred blacks were employed, if not conscripted, to build fortifications at New Bern and other coastal points. [General] Burnside directed that they be paid eight dollars a month, given one ration a day and clothing.

[The New England soldiers] held many anti-black sentiments. One Maine soldier reflected the anti-black view of many New England troops in eastern North Carolina when he wrote that slavery “is wrong, a curse,” but that he “could not bear” the sight of blacks. Along with others in General [John G.] Foster’s army, this soldier favored emancipation as a wartime measure designed to weaken the Confederacy, and only secondly as an act of humanity for the slaves. Such men did not hesitate to exploit black refugees, forcing them to work as servants for little compensation.

In April [1863] the War Department authorized Col. Edward Wild to raise a brigade of blacks in North Carolina. Wild began recruiting in May [but] had to recruit in eastern Virginia in order to raise some of the troops for the 2nd and 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteer regiments. Even before the recruitment had been completed, the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment joined the three North Carolina regiments to form Col. Wild’s African Brigade.

During the summer Wild’s brigade participated in the unsuccessful Federal campaign against Charleston and later, in an independent action, raided a guerilla stronghold in northeastern North Carolina, [carrying off] 2,500 slaves, seizing arms and provisions, and burning four rebel camps.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. Civil War Reports of a Massachusetts Corporal. William C. Harris, ed., University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 12-13; 28-29)

Nine-Month Men

Lincoln spent much of 1862 in efforts to colonize the many contrabands coming within advancing Northern lines, using his emancipation edict to solve the question of ownership. Both the Danes and Dutch were interested in taking them for labor on their Caribbean sugar plantations.

But after several bloody defeats in1862, few white northern men stepped forward to enlist. Massachusetts Republican Governor John Andrew, fearful of losing reelection due to an angry electorate, asked Lincoln to allow his regiments to serve nine-month terms and especially in non-lethal regions. Also, Lincoln allowed the counting of black non-residents against his quota which began a rush of agents to the occupied South to credit contrabands to their particular State. This competition led to the formation of US Colored Troops in early 1863.

It is noted below that the Boston Irish were “hostile to blacks” which the author did not clarify. The Irish were among the poorest segment of Massachusetts society who feared contrabands would migrate northward and depress wages.

Nine-Month Men     

“June 6, 1863, the happy day of departure for home, finally came for the nine-month troops of the 44th Massachusetts. General Foster tried to persuade “the boys” to reenlist at New Bern in a new artillery regiment, but most wanted to go home before considering serving again. Of the regiment’s 1,018 original members, 902 returned to civilian life – casualties were eight men who died of actual battle wounds, and twenty-four who succumbed to disease – including the regiment’s surgeon. Three men had deserted.

The 44th Regiment’s service in the State militia continued until the end of the war. Indeed, a month after their return from the South, in mid-July, Governor Andrew called out the 44th regiment, along with other militia units, to prevent violence in Boston and nearby towns at the time of New York City’s Draft Riot. Upon the Governor’s request, Federal troops in nearby garrisons were brought into the city.

As in New York, the enforcement in July of the Federal conscription law, combined with Lincoln’s emancipation policy, inflamed thousands of men and women in the North who opposed the war, particularly Irish Democrats in the eastern cities who opposed the war and [were] hostile to blacks. In Boston, an angry mob of nearly 5,000 citizens, including women, stormed the armory on Cooper Street where a unit of Federal troops awaited them inside the building. The troops fired into the crowd killing eight and wounding many others.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. William C. Harris, editor. University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 29-31)

 

Colonial Versus British Law

Between 1680-1688 England operated 249 slave ships; from 1713, for twenty years, 15,000 slaves were annually shipped to America; by 1786, England had brought over 97,000 slaves. Though Liverpool was the chief port for this trade, Bristol was a close second. New England was not slow in this nefarious system – by 1725 it had become the center of the transatlantic slave trade. After the Pequot tribe was vanquished in the latter 1630s, Puritans sold captive men, women and children into West Indies slavery.

Colonial Versus British Law

“Slavery [in American colonies] simply evolved in practice, as a custom, and then received statutory recognition. Actually, the process of “recognition” was implicit, involving no articulation of first principles. In 1636 the governor and council of Barbados decreed that “Negroes and Indians, that come here to be sold, should serve for Life, unless a Contract was made before to the contrary.” A Rhode Island statute of 1652 cited “the common course practiced among English men to buy Negars, to that end that they may have them for service or slaves forever.”

The famous Fundamental Constitutions, drawn up by John Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury in 1669 for the nascent South Carolina colony, guaranteed that “Every Freeman of South Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over Negro Slaves.” [And] the reality is that slavery was principally acknowledged in law by an extensive set of police measures.

Chief Justice Sir John Holt reasoned that “as soon as a negro comes to England, he becomes free; one may be a villein in England, but not a slave.” Yet in an earlier opinion he concluded to the contrary that Africans were indeed commodities; yet in no case did the common law ever meddle with, ratify, reject or otherwise directly address slavery in the colonies, as opposed to England, other than as the apparent custom of the colonies.

In fact, there are many reported cases concerning the English slave-trading monopoly, indebted tobacco or sugar planters, the duties charged on various plantation commodities, and trade to Africa and America, all matters whose circumstances frequently involved black slaves.”

(Slavery and the Law, Paul Finkelman, ed., Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, pp. 382; 388-389)

Daniel Webster’s View of the Constitution

In his 1881 “Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government”, Jefferson Davis revisits the words of New England orator and statesman Daniel Webster (1782-1852) regarding the sovereignty of the American States.

Daniel Webster’s View of the Constitution

“Mr. Webster held the views which were presented in a memorial to Congress of citizens of Boston, December 15, 1819, relative to the admission of Missouri as a State, drawn up and signed by a committee of which he was chairman, and which also included among its members Mr. Josiah Quincy.

Mr. Webster speaks of the States as enjoying “the exclusive possession of sovereignty” over their own territory, calls the United States “the American Confederacy” refers to them “the only parties to the Constitution, contemplated by it originally, [and who] were the “thirteen confederated States.”

In letters written and addresses delivered during the Administration of Mr. [Millard] Fillmore, he repeatedly applies to the Constitution the term “compact” which, in 1833, he had so vehemently repudiated. In his speech at Capon Springs, Virginia, in 1851, he says:

“If the South were to violate any part of the Constitution intentionally and systematically, and persist in doing year after year, and no remedy could be had, would the North be any longer bound to the rest of it? And if the North were, deliberately habitually, and of fixed purpose, to disregard one part of it, would the South be bound any longer to observe its other obligations?

How absurd it is to suppose that, when different parties enter into a compact for certain purposes, either can disregard any one provision and expect, nevertheless, the other to observe the rest!”

“I have not hesitated to say, and I repeat that, if the Northern States refuse, willfully and deliberately, to carry into effect that part of the Constitution which its respects the restoration of fugitive slaves, and Congress provide no remedy, the South would no longer be bound to observe the compact. A bargain cannot be broken on one side and still bind the other side.”

(Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Volume I. Jefferson Davis. D. Appleton & Co., 1881, pp. 166-167)

 

Crafty Draft Dodger

The letter below was sent to Mary’s brother-in-law, Corporal Josiah H. Sturtevant of the 17th Maine Regiment, who was offered an officer’s commission in the 80th US Colored Troops regiment in March 1863. As few white officers would accept service in a colored regiment, an effective strategy was to offer a white enlisted men receiving $15 per month a pay increase to $105 as a second lieutenant. Ironically, Sturtevant continued receiving enlisted pay while incurring the expenses of an officer through the end of the war and not receiving restitution until 25 years after the war.

The letter also refers to the $300 commutation which bought a substitute for conscripted Northern men – and reveals the great interest in colored troops serving in place of white Northern citizens who wished to remain at home.

Mount Vernon, N.Y., January 3, 1864

Dear Brother Josiah:

“Mr. Lee, the patriotic Dutch Reformed Minister, was drafted. He has always said if he was drafted, he should certainly go. After he was drafted, he said: “The Lord had given him a loud call to go, and if he didn’t give him a louder one to stay at home, he should go. He whined and griped around till he begged $300 to pay his commutation.

What did he do but pay $100 for a Town bond that draws 10% interest, cooly pockets the other $200, and at the end of the year gets the other $100 and so the $300 eventually comes out of the town taxpayers.

Now I say such a rascal ought to be roasted over a slow fire, at least till the war is over, and I would willingly gather faggots to keep it burning till my arms were worn off my shoulders.

I have always contended that the African, give him an equal chance, will make as good if not better soldiers than his white brother, and I believe we shall see the day that nine-tenths of our standing army will be composed of the freed men of the Nation.

Yours,

Mary”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 114; 115)

The South’s Great Fear

By the early 1700s, Liverpool’s dominance in slave ship construction had been surpassed by Providence, Rhode Island, with New England prospering greatly from trading Yankee notions for slaves held by African tribes. These ships returned to the Western Hemisphere with their human cargo for West Indies and British American plantations.

Then came the cotton gin which increased the speed that cotton fibers were separated from the seeds – invented and patented in 1794 by Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney. This new device increased the need for more laborers in the South to harvest more cotton to be sold to Northern and European markets. Before the gin, cotton separation was a slow process which restricted the harvesting to local farm clothing usages, which likely would have doomed the American slave economy in a peaceful manner.

The South’s Great Fear

“Only three years before the Whitney invention, an event occurred which caused tremors in plantations across America and caused many slave owners to seriously rethink the safety of owning slaves. This tragedy was the bloody uprising of African slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue, or Santo Domingo, and known today as Haiti.

This uprising of some 500,000 Africans was led by a voodoo priest named Boukman in a revolt against the French colonists and possibly inspired by the bloody French Revolution of the same time. On Saint Domingue, about 5,000 white colonists, men, women and children, were butchered in massive riots that swept the island. White men were beheaded, drowned or burned to death; women were raped, butchered and disemboweled, and if pregnant their babies were torn out of their wombs. White children were impaled on spears and carried through the streets as symbol of the revolt.

After two months of this living hell, over 1,000 farms and sugar plantations had been burned to the ground. After news of this revolt reached American shores, relations between white and black took a new turn with daily slave patrols becoming the norm, and every slave uprising in America, real or imagined, would be compared to Santo Domingue.”

(Countdown to Manassas, The Antebellum Chronology: July 4, 1776-July 21, 1861. Ken Drew; Ken Drew Publisher, pg. 8; 10)