Category: Northern Culture Laid Bare

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)

A Distinguishing Mark of Gentle Nurture

A Distinguishing Mark of Gentle Nurture

“Of course, what was to all true Confederates beyond a question a “holy cause,” “the holiest of causes,” this fight in defence of “the sacred soil” of our native land, was to the other side “a wicked rebellion” and “damnable treason,” and both parties to the quarrel were not sparing of epithets which, at the distance of time, may seem to our children unnecessarily undignified; and not doubt some of these epitheta orantia continue to flourish in remote regions, just a pictorial representations of Yankees and rebels in all their respective fiendishness are still cherished here and there.

At the Centennial Exposition of 1876, by way of conciliating the sections, the place of honor in the “Art Annex” was given to Rothermel’s painting of the battle of Gettysburg, in which the face of every dying Union soldier is lighted with a celestial smile, while guilt and despair are stamped on the wan countenances of the moribund rebels. At least such is my recollection of the painting; and I hope that I may be pardoned for the malicious pleasure I felt when informed of the high price the State of Pennsylvania paid for that work of art. The dominant feeling was amusement, not indignation.

But as I looked at it, I recalled another picture of a battle-scene, painted by a French artist, who had watched our life with an artist’s eye. One of the figures in the foreground was a dead Confederate boy, lying in the angle of a worm fence. His uniform was worn and ragged, mud-stained as well as blood-stained; the cap which had fallen from his head was a tatter, and the torn shoes were ready to drop from his stiffening feet; but in the buttonhole of his tunic was stuck the inevitable toothbrush, which continued even to the end of the war to be the distinguishing mark of gentle nurture – the souvenir that the Confederate soldier so often received from fair sympathizers in border towns.

I am not a realist, but I would not exchange that homely toothbrush for the most angelic smile that Rothermel’s brush could have conjured up.”

(The Creed of the Old South. Basil L. Gildersleeve. The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915, pp. 17-19)

Northern Recruiters in Canada

In late 1863, Lt. John Wilkinson of the famed blockade runner Robert E. Lee was ordered to Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Montreal and Lake Erie on a mission to overwhelm the crew of the USS Michigan guarding the infamous Johnson’s Island prison. He and his small force planned to free the 2500 Southern officers held there.

Northern Recruiters in Canada

“I had been furnished, before leaving Richmond, with letters to parties in Canada, who, it was believed, could give valuable aid to the expedition. To expedite matters, a trustworthy agent and canny Scotsman who had long served under my command, was dispatched to Montreal, via Portland [Ontario], to notify these parties that we were on our way there. Our emissary, taking passage on a steamer bound for Portland, passed safely through United States territory, while the rest of us commenced our long and devious route through the British Provinces [of Canada].

Wherever we travelled, even through the remotest settlements, recruiting agents for the United States army were at work, scarcely affecting to disguise their occupation; and the walls of the obscurest country taverns bristled with advertisements like the following:

‘Wanted for a tannery in Maine, 1000 men to whom a large bonus will be paid, etc.”

Many could not resist the allurements, but it was from this class of and similar ones, no doubt, that the “bounty jumpers” sprang. It has been asserted, by those who were in a position to form a correct estimate, that the British Provinces alone, contributed one hundred thousand men to the Federal army.”

(The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner. John Wilkinson. Valde Books, 2009 (original Sheldon & Company, 1877), pp. 72-73)

 

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward promised the cotton-dependent British an early end to war with “Northern victories releasing the raw cotton” of the South to England. Seward’s claim that New Orleans would soon be under his control was quickly dashed, and all were aware that Southern plantation owners would sooner burn their cotton bales than allow them to fall into enemy hands.  A desperate Seward then followed Virginia’s Royal Governor’s (Lord Dunmore) November 1775 edict to incite race war in the South, threatening both Britain and France that any aid to the American Confederacy would unleash a bloody slave uprising there. This would not only destroy Europe’s cotton source but also repeat the Haitian massacres of the early 1790’s which saw the slaughter of 4,000 white men, women and children. In retaliation, some 15,000 Africans were killed by the French.

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

“Fearing the growth in England, especially, of an intention to intervene, Seward threatened a Northern appeal to the slaves, thinking of the threat not so much in terms of an uncivilized and horrible war as in terms of the material interests of England. In brief, considering foreign attitude and action in relation to Northern advantage – to the winning of the war – he would use emancipation as a threat of servile insurrection, but he did not desire emancipation itself for fear it would cause that very intervention which it was his object to prevent.

On May 28, 1862, Seward wrote to US diplomat Charles Francis Adams, emphasizing two points: first, US diplomats abroad were now authorized to state that the war was, in part at least, intended for the suppression of slavery, and secondly, that the North if interfered with by foreign nations would be forced to unleash servile war in the South.

Such a war, Seward argued, would be “completely destructive of all European interests” and a copy of this was given to Britain’s Lord Russell on June 20th . . . and that any attempts a European mediation of the conflict would result in servile war unleashed upon the South. On July 13, Lincoln told Seward and [Gideon] Welles of the planned [gradual and compensated] emancipation proclamation and that this was his first mention of it to anyone.

On July 28, after Lord Russell reviewed Seward’s arguments, commented on the fast- increasing bitterness of the American conflict which was disturbing and unsettling to European governments, and wrote: “The approach of servile war, so much insisted upon by Mr. Seward in his dispatch, only forewarns us that another element of destruction may be added to the slaughter, loss of property, and waste of industry, which already afflict a country so lately prosperous and tranquil.”

(Great Britain and the American Civil War. Ephraim Douglas Adams. Alpha Editions, 2018 (original manuscript 1924), pg. 388-390)

Secessionist Abolitionists

Any serious historical review of the war’s cause in early 1861 cannot overlook President James Buchanan’s realization, undergirded by his Attorney General Jeremiah Black, that to wage war against a State was the very definition of treason against the United States (Article III, Section 3). Lincoln would not be constrained by this.

Secessionist Abolitionists

“From the 1830s on, abolitionists argued for the secession of the North from the Union and the American Anti-Slavery Society passed the following resolution:

“That the Abolitionists of this country should make it one of the primary objects of this agitation to dissolve the American Union.”

This was also the view of the Douglass Monthly, printed by Frederick Douglass. Fellow abolitionist Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune wrote on February 23, 1861, the day after Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederate States of America:

“We have repeatedly said . . . that the great principle embodied by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their powers from the consent of the people, is sound and just; and that, if the Cotton States or the Gulf States, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so. Whenever it shall be clear that the great body of Southern people have become conclusively alienated from the Union, and anxious to escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views.”

(Was Davis a Traitor, or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to the War of 1861, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, Fletcher & Fletcher, 1995 (original 1866), p. 149)

 

Republicans Appeal to War Hatred in 1868

Republicans Appeal to War Hatred in 1868

“While the financial issue [concerning wartime Greenbacks] was at its height previous to the 1868 State election in Maine, the New York Tribune of 10 September 1868 gave this warning:

“We can lose by allowing Republicans to believe this campaign is merely or mainly a question of finance, of dollars and cents, and that the taxpayers will be enriched by repudiation [of debts]. It is the cohorts of the Rebellion, forming again for the capture, not merely for the seat of the Government, but of the Government itself.”

The following paragraph was printed in the New York Tribune of 9 October 1868, reprinted from the New York World. It showed a Democratic newspaper’s view of the Republicans using the War for campaign purposes:

“The Republicans are making the late war the hinge of the presidential campaign, invoking all the bitter animosities and sectional hatred prevailing when we were conscripting soldiers to fight the South. To accuse the Democratic party of slackness in the war seems their best electioneering weapon. To denounce the Southern people as Rebels is thought the best justification of the Republican party, and the subjugation and humiliation of the South is as much their aim now as it was six years ago.

It is not a policy of peace, but of passion, revenge and domination. The symbol of the canvass on the Republican side is the sword. Their leader is a man who knows no trade except war, selected because the old feeling of hostility would more naturally rally around him than a civilian statesman.”

Reference after reference could be made concerning the Republican appeal to the war hatred of the masses of the North.”

(Political Campaign and Election of General Grant in 1868. George A. Olson. Thesis excerpt, pp. 66-67. University of Kansas, 1928)

 

An Important Sectional Irritant

One of American history’s greatest ironies is that the Southern colonies, and later States were populated with Africans who were transported in the holds of English and New England ships, both growing prosperous and wealthy through this iniquitous maritime trade. The result was a million American dead by mid-1865.

An Important Sectional Irritant

Antebellum anti-slavery Republicans, in criticizing Southern anti-abolitionist literature policies, linked the laws making the education of Negroes a crime with other violations of freedom of speech. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, the egalitarian radical, early in his career attacked the Southern States for rifling the mails to destroy anti-slavery publications emanating from the North. A Republican colleague of Sumner criticized the restrictions “as being uncivilized.” In 1860, Sen. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi responded in the United States Congress:

“When men employ their time in writing tracts, in publishing newspapers, to indoctrinate crime into the Negroes – to teach them to commit arson, theft and murder – then there is reason growing out of the crimes of our neighbors which it imposes it upon us, as a duty of self-protection, to prevent the Negroes from reading, as the means of shutting out your unholy work . . . that, I imagine, is the foundation of all the objection which has existed to their being taught to read.” (Congressional Globe, 1687, 1860).

“In Georgia the circulation of any newspaper, pamphlet, or circular inciting insurrection, revolt, conspiracy or resistance by slaves, free Negroes or colored persons, was made punishable by death. Louisiana punished any writings designed to produce discontent or insubordination among Negroes, slave or free, with death or life imprisonment.

Not only did Virginia punish the making of abolitionist speeches or writings, but the State required every postmaster to notify a local justice of any mail with abolitionist literature and then burn this mail. And, if the addressee of the abolitionist material had subscribed to it, knowing its character, he was guilty of a crime.

These laws were constantly the subject of discussion in Congress and constituted an important sectional irritant. Northern members of Congress attacked them as violating freedom of speech, while the South defended them as essential to forestall slave revolts and bloody massacre of white Southerners. The specter of the early 1790’s massacre of Haiti’s white population was an ever-present fear in the American South.”

(School Segregation and History Revisited. Alfred Avins, PhD, Cambridge University. The Catholic Lawyer, Vol. 15, No. 4, Autumn 1969, pp. 311-312)

 

Why Annihilate State Rights?

Marylander Montgomery Blair’s loyalty to the President and ambition for another post beyond Postmaster General remained undimmed. He unsuccessfully sought Mr. Lincoln’s nomination as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. On December 6, 1864, Blair wrote Lincoln his views on the progress of reconstruction and Radical Republican policies.

Why Annihilate State Rights?

“In compliance with your request I commit to writing the views to which I referred in a recent conversation. The gradual suppression of the rebellion renders necessary now a persistence in the policy announced in your amnesty proclamation, with such additional provisions as experiment may have suggested – or its repudiation and the adoption of some other policy. For my part I recognize the plan already initiated by you as consonant with the constitution – well calculated to accomplish the end proposed, and as tending to win over the affections of a portion of the disaffected citizens to unite with all the loyal to aid the work of the military power wielded by you. You have repeatedly driven out the rebel power, enabling the loyal people of the State to restore and reinvigorate their constitutional authority without the intervention of Congress.

The military force of the United States has expelled rebel armies and their allies within the South. Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana are embracing the amnesty proclamation, stepping into the Union under its provisions. They come recognizing the validity of your proclamation – slavery being discarded and so it is manifest, that just as soon as the military power of the Rebellion is driven out, the reign of the US Constitution will resume. The whole country hails your fundamental proclamation of freedom made universal by the vote of three-fourths of the States confirming it by constitutional amendment to secure forever the freedom of the slaves.

What then is the motive for annihilating State rights? It is certainly unnecessary to maintain Mr. Sumner’s “doctrine of State suicide” “State forfeiture State abdication” – the doctrine “that the whole rebel region is tabula rasa, or a clean slate, where Congress under the Constitution may write laws” in order to secure the extirpation of slavery.

Yet Mr. Sumner seems to confine his purpose of reducing States to territories to the object of bringing slavery within the grasp of Congress, and argues, “Slavery is impossible within the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government.” For many years I’ve had this conviction and have constantly maintained it. I am glad to believe that it is implied in the Chicago platform. Mr. Chase is known to accept it sincerely. Then if slavery in the Territories is unconstitutional and under the exclusive jurisdiction of the national government, then slavery would be impossible there.

It follows that if slavery is no longer in question, why are the States to be disfranchised and denied their municipal right? What then is the purpose of Mr. Chase’s idea of disfranchising the States, turning them into territories and giving to Congress the power of making their local laws. This would be depriving States of their former unquestioned right of regulating suffrage. The States have heretofore made laws denying the suffrage to underage citizens, females, Negroes, Indians, unnaturalized aliens and others incapacitated by moral or physical defects.

If the States resume their places in the Union under your proclamation and the loyal votes of the people accepted, certainly they may assert the political sovereignty as it stood before the war.

The plan of throwing those States out of the Union grows out of the ambition of a class of usurpers to seize the occasion of depriving the States of their indubitable municipal rights . . . The object is undoubtedly to disfranchise the white race who had created the State governments of the South, and who contributed their full share in asserting national independence and creating the government of the United States. This is to be accomplished by the imposition of conditions by Congress on the readmission of those States into the Union which forfeits those municipal rights heretofore exerted by all States in their internal government.

An object now avowed is to enable Congress to constitute a State government by exacting conditions on admission which shall put blacks and whites on equality in the political control of a government originally created by the white race for themselves.

This is not merely manumission from masters, but it may turn out that those who have been held in servitude may become themselves the masters of the government created by another race. This revolutionary scheme looks to the establishment of a new control over the municipal rights of the State governments in the South, which has you well know been a favorite one of the late Secretary. You will remember that Mr. Chase suggested the modification of your amnesty and reconstruction proclamation, so as to allow all loyal citizens to vote, which included all the freedmen while excluding all the whites who had been engaged in the Rebellion. This would probably have thrown the governments of those states into the hands of the African race, as constituting the majority who had not borne arms against the government.”

(Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. (Letter from Montgomery Blair to Abraham Lincoln, December 6, 1864).

From Connecticut to Dred Scott

Well before the Dred Scott case of 1857 was the question brought before Connecticut Judge David Daggett, chief justice of the court of errors, in October 1833 raising the validity of a State law which “forbid any school, academy, or literary institution for the instruction of colored persons who are not inhabitants of this State.” The law was in place as the State’s colored schools tended to “greatly increase the colored population of the State and thereby to the injury of the people.” The defendant, a free Negro, insisted that the law was unconstitutional as it was in violation of the United States Constitution regarding the equal rights of citizens of all States.”

Regarding “citizens,” only the 1789 Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2 states: “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States.”  The Dred Scott case of 1857 rested upon this, and the question before the Court was simply whether Scott was a citizen of a State, as argued below.

To underscore the validity of the Constitution’s Article 4, sec. 2, the victorious Republican party was forced to follow the amendment route as it sought manipulation of the South’s black vote.

From Connecticut to Dred Scott

“Are slaves citizens? At the adoption of the Constitution of the United States [in 1789], every State was a slave State . . . We all know that slavery is recognized in that Constitution; it is the duty of this court to take that Constitution as it is, for we have sworn to support it . . . Then slaves were not considered citizens by the framers of the Constitution.

“Are free blacks citizens? . . . to my mind it would be a perversion of terms, and the well-known rules of construction, to say that slaves, free blacks or Indians were citizens, within the meaning of that term as used in the Constitution. God forbid that I should add to the degradation of this race of men; but I am bound, by my duty, to say that they are not citizens.”

In the case of Hobbs vs Fogg the State of Pennsylvania furnished another strong precedent for the decision of the [Dred] Scott case. At the election of 1835 a negro offered to vote. Solely on account of his color, the judges of election refused the privilege. The Negro insisted that “as a freeman and citizen of the State” the provisions contained in the State constitution and laws entitled him to the right of suffrage. The judges justified themselves on the ground “that a free Negro or mulatto is not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution and law of the United States, and of the State of Pennsylvania, and, therefore, is not entitled to the right of suffrage . . .” The chief justice delivered the opinion, to which there was unanimous assent [to declare] “that no colored race was party to our social compact. Our ancestors settled the province as a community of white men; that the blacks were introduced into it as a race of slaves; whence an unconquerable prejudice of caste, which has come down to our day . . .” This is followed by “Yet it is proper to say that [Article 2, section 4] of the Federal Constitution, presents an obstacle to the political freedom of the Negro, which seems to be insuperable.”

Now then, in addition to the presumption that [those] of pure African blood whose ancestors had been American slaves, was presumed to have been born and to have continued a slave, these laws show that all the States had given to the Federal Constitution, from the days of its ratification down to the Dred Scott decision, a practical interpretation agreeing unanimously that a Negro, though free and a native of a State, was not a person as the word ‘citizen’ defines as that word was used by the framers of the Constitution.”

(The Legal and Historical Status of the Dred Scott Decision. Elbert William R. Ewing. Cobden Publishing Company, 1909, pp. 67-69)

 

Improved Arms for Gold

Since the early 1700s, New England merchants were engaged in the transatlantic slave trade which populated the American South with labor for the plantations. After Eli Whitney’s gin was invented in the 1790s, the owners of New England’s busy cotton textile looms ignored the moral and humane aspects of perpetuating slavery, being more concerned with profit and loss statements. Once war began in 1861, they focused on their government capturing Southern ports to reopen the supply of cotton.

Improved Arms for Gold

“September 6th – We are not increasing our forces as rapidly as might be desired, for the want of arms. We had some 150,000 stand of arms, at the beginning of the war, taken from the arsenals; and the States owned probably 100,000 more. Half of these were flint-locks, which are being altered. None have been imported yet.

Occasionally a letter reaches the department from Nashville, offering improved arms at a high price, for gold. These are Yankees.

I am instructed by the Secretary to say they will be paid for in gold on delivery to an agent in Nashville. The number likely to be obtained in this manner, however, must be small; for the Yankee Government is exercising much vigilance.

Is this not a fair specimen of Yankee cupidity and character? The New England manufacturers are furnishing us, with whom they are at war, with arms to fight with, provided we pay them a higher price than is offered by their own Government! The philosophical conclusion is, that this war will end when it ceases to be a pecuniary speculation.”

(Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate Capital, Volume I. J.B. Jones. J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1866, pg. 78)