Category: New England History

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)

 

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

Virginia’s historic colonial capital, Williamsburg, was established upon the former Middle Plantation in 1699 and named in honor of England’s King William III. In 1722, the town was granted Royal Charter as a “city incorporate” which is believed to be the oldest charter in the United States. The College of William and Mary is older than the town, founded in 1693 under royal charter issued by King William III and Queen Mary II. It is the second-oldest institution of higher learning in the US and ninth oldest in the English-speaking world.

Wartime Destruction at Williamsburg

“The early morning of February 6th [1864] found us in line, and we marched into Williamsburg. [Our column] was comprised of 139th and 118th New York regiments, two regiments of colored troops, and I believe a single battery, all under command of Col. Samuel Roberts.

As we marched through the town it was plain to be seen that it had suffered from the effects of the war; few inhabitants were left, many houses deserted and many burned. William and Mary, one of the oldest colleges in America, had also been destroyed by Union soldiers in revenge, it was said, for having been fired on from its windows. Though the walls were mostly standing, it was completely ruined.

Our picket line extended from the York to the James Rivers, about four miles; and with gunboats on either flank was a strong one. The object of the expedition seems to have been making a stand at Bottom’s Bridge while the cavalry made a dash at Richmond and burning the city if possible.

One of the pickets posted at Williamsburg was at the old brick house one occupied by Governor Page of Virginia. It was built of brick imported from England. The library in the mansion was a room about eighteen by twenty feet, and the walls had been covered with books from floor to ceiling; but now the shelving had been torn down, and the floor was piled with books in wretched disorder – trampled upon – most pitiful to see. In the attic of this old house the boys found trunks and boxes of papers of a century past – documents, letters, etc.

Among the latter were those bearing the signatures of such men as Jefferson, Madison, Richard Henry Lee; and one more signed by Washington.”

(25th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Samuel H. Putnam. Putnam, Davis and Company, Publishers. 1886, pp. 245-250)

Opposing Slave Imports to Virginia

Robert E. Lee’s father “Light-Horse” Harry was a first-cousin to Richard Henry Lee, a prominent Virginian elected to the House of Burgesses in 1758, an office he held virtually the rest of his life. His first speech assailed the transportation of slaves into Virginia, stating “the importation of slaves into this Colony . . . has been and will be attended with effects dangerous both to our political and moral interests.” “Lay so heavy a tax upon the importation of slaves as effectually to put an end to that iniquitous and disgraceful traffic within the Colony,” he told the Burgesses.” North Carolina proposed the same.

Opposing Slave Imports to Virginia

“Massachusetts invalidated the British commercial system, which Virginia resisted from abhorrence of the slave-trade. Never before had England pursued the traffic in Negroes with such eager avarice.

The remonstrances of philanthropy and of the colonies were unheeded, and categorical instructions from the Board of Trade kept every American [colonial] port open as markets for [African slaves]. The legislature of Virginia had repeatedly showed a disposition to obstruct the commerce; a deeply seated public opinion began more and more to avow the evils and injustice of slavery itself; and in 1761, it was proposed to suppress the importation of Africans by a prohibitory duty.

Among those who took part in the long and violent debate was Richard Henry Lee (1732-1794), the representative from Westmoreland. Descended from one of the oldest families in Virginia, he had been educated in England and had returned to his native land familiar with the spirit of Grotius and Cudworth, of Locke and Montesquieu; his first recorded speech was against Negro slavery and in behalf of human freedom.

In the continued importation of slaves, Lee foreboded danger to the Old Dominion; an increase of the free Anglo-Saxons, he argued, would foster arts and varied agriculture, while a race doomed to abject bondage was of necessity an enemy to social happiness. He painted from ancient history the horrors of servile insurrections. He deprecated the barbarous atrocity of [England’s and New England’s] trade with Africa, and its violation of equal rights of men created like ourselves in the image of God.

The [slave importation] tax for which Lee raised his voice was carried through the Assembly of Virginia by a majority of one; but from England a negative followed with certainty every colonial act tending to diminish the slave-trade.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 421-422)

 

New England’s Slave Past

African slaves existed in colonial New England as early as 1634 – well before any were in what became the American South – and by 1774 New England’s slave population totaled over 16,000. Interestingly, New England clergymen, merchants and lawyers then commonly owned at least one slave; in 1774 Connecticut’s slave population totaled over 5,000. Earlier in that century New England had surpassed England as the center of the nefarious transatlantic slave trade, which carried African slaves first to the West Indies to live and likely die as sugar cane laborers, then back to New England with sugar to make more rum with which to trade to African tribes for their slaves.

New England’s Slave Past

“[New England’s early inhabitants] were of homogenous origin, nearly all tracing their descent to English emigrants of the reigns of Charles the First, and Charles the Second. Along the seaside, wherever there was a good harbor, fishermen . . . gathered in hamlets; and each returning season saw them with an ever-increasing number of mariners and vessels, taking the cod and mackerel, and sometimes pursuing the whale into the icy labyrinths of the Northern seas; yet loving home, and dearly attached to their modest freeholds.

Of [African] slavery there was not enough to affect the character of the people, except in the southeast of Rhode Island, where Newport was conspicuous for engaging in the [transatlantic] slave trade, and where, in two or three towns, Negroes composed even a third of the inhabitants.”

(History of the United States, From the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. IV. George Bancroft. Little, Brown & Company. 1856. pp. 149-150)

 

Father of the Revolution – Samuel Adams

As described below, New England political agitation brought about the avoidable secession from England and war; the same occurred some 80 years later “as Massachusetts agitators and men of letters had done their best to see that there should be thousands, and tens of thousands” joining them in denouncing their union with the South. The uncompromising Puritan moral crusade against the very African slavery which ironically enriched their own section, would now be put to work to destroy the 1789 union. The agitation pushed the hand of Lincoln in April 1861 to confront now-independent South Carolina over the question of tariff revenue – which predictably resulted in gunfire and war. Those defending their State were denounced in the north as “rebels” intent upon destroying the union.

Father of the Revolution – Samuel Adams

“It is a great mistake to think of public opinion as united in the colonies and as gradually rising against British tyranny. Public opinion was never wholly united and seldom rises to a pitch of passion without being influenced – in other words, without the use of propaganda. The Great War [of 1914-1918] taught that to those who did not know it already.

From the first, [John] Adams and those working with him had realized the necessity of democratic slogans in the creation of a state of mind. [He] at once struck out boldly to inflame the passions of the crowd by threatening that it was to be reduced to the “miserable state of tributary slaves,” contrasting its freedom and moral virtue with the tyranny and moral degradation of England. He proclaimed that the mother country was bent on bringing her colonies to a condition of “slavery, poverty and misery,” and on causing their utter ruin, and dinned into the ears of the people the words “slavery and tyranny” until they assumed a reality from mere reiteration.

His political philosophy was eagerly lapped up by a populace smarting under hard times and resentful of colonial even more than imperial conditions of the moment. The establishment of government by free consent of all had become imbedded in the mind of the average man, as an essential part of the American dream. Adams himself had seen the vision but had glimpsed it with the narrowness and bitterness with which the more bigoted Puritans had seen the vision of an unloving and revengeful Hebrew Jehovah.

Such talk as this could only make England fearful of how far the people might try to put such precepts into practice. The upper classes of the colonies also began to be uneasy. Up to 1770, when their own grievances were redressed, they might allow such ideas to be disseminated, considering themselves in control of the situation, but after that it became clear that they were losing control . . . [as] Sam Adams and the lesser radicals worked harder than ever to keep public opinion inflamed.

With the upper classes [becoming] lukewarm or hostile to his continued propaganda [despite] the obnoxious legislation repealed or modified, [Sam Adams] had to trust to generalizations and emotional appeal.

A good example of his use of the latter was the affair called the “Boston Massacre.” As part of the general imperial policy following the [French and Indian] war, the British government had stationed some regiments in Boston. They were under good officers and good discipline, and there was no more reason why they should have made trouble there, than in any provincial garrison town of England. Sam Adams, however, was continually stirring up the public mind against them; John Adams reported finding Sam one Sunday night ‘preparing for the next day’s newspaper – a curious employment, cooking up paragraphs, articles and [incidents], working the political engine.’

Finally, one March evening, as a result of more than usual provocation given by taunting boys to soldiers on duty, an unfortunate clash occurred. There was confusion, a rioter’s shout to fire” was mistaken for an officer’s command, and several citizens were killed. The officer surrendered to civilian authorities, was tried, defended by John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., and acquitted.

But Samuel Adams at once saw the value of the incident. Every emotion of the mob was played upon. The affair was termed a “massacre,” and in the annual speeches given for a number of years to commemorate its anniversary the boys and men who had taken part in the mobbing were described as martyrs to liberty and the soldiers as “bloody butchers.”

(The Epic of America. James Truslow Adams. Little, Brown and Company. 1932, pp. 83-84).