Circa1865

“The Greeks and Romans had no standing armies, yet they defended themselves. The Greeks by their laws, and the Romans by the spirit of their people, took pains to put into the hands of their rulers no such engine of oppression as a standing army. Their system was to make every man a soldier and oblige them to repair to the standard of his country whenever that was raised. This made them invincible; and the same remedy will make us so.”  Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Cooper, March 1814

Fear of Standing Armies

After the HMS Leopard seized American sailors in mid-1807 amid deteriorating relations with England, Congress began debating an increase in the US military. Though Thomas Jefferson’s administration had severely cut troop numbers in 1802, in 1808 the strength in men was only 6500.

“In 1811, Secretary of War William Eustis asked for 10,000 men to be added to the regular army. Senator William Branch Giles, a Virginia Democrat but violently anti-Madison, proposed 25,000 instead of 10,000.

Now began a lively debate in Congress between supporters and detractors of standing forces. Supporters insisted that a regular army of 30,000 could not possibly endanger civilian control of the military.

Detractors, on the other hand, drew upon history to prove that standing armies had more often than not overthrown free governments. Some detractors wanted to see the regular army abolished, for them the country would be forced to engage in nothing more than defensive military operations.

Neither geographical origin not party seemed wholly to govern the way men voted on the choice between regulars and militia. Federalists from Massachusetts and Connecticut reliance on militia because of the excellence of their own citizen soldiery, while Federalists from most other States usually spoke in favor of regulars. New York representative Peter B. Porter favored both types; he called the militia the shield of the nation and regulars the sword. His metaphor displeased most Democrats who did not want the nation brandishing a sword.

In the end all Senate Federalists joined with some Democrats to enact Giles’ augmentation – with Henry Clay and Porter pushing the Senate bill through the House, becoming law on 11 January 1812. The result was 10 regiments of infantry, 2 of artillery, and 1 of light dragoons – though the ranks were never more than half-filled. The new law made provision for two major-generals and five brigadiers, but not for a general-in-chief to give professional advice to the civilian secretary of war.

Twice in four years, in 1808 and again in 1812, Congress had tripled the size of the regular army on paper. One month after the second tripling it gave the President permission to alert 50,000 volunteers, appropriated $1 million to support them, and if called into federal service, to serve for one year.

Major-General Henry Dearborn requested militia from Connecticut in June 1812, got he got instead a note from Acting-Governor John Cotton Smith. The State council and concluded that the request was unconstitutional on two grounds: (1), the President had not indicated that there existed any of the three exigencies stipulated in the Constitution – an invasion, an insurrection, or a combination to break the laws – and (2), Connecticut militia could not be placed under the immediate command of federal officers when proper State officers were already designated for them.

The US Secretary of War, entering the dialogue, insisted that an invasion did exist or was imminent. The governor countered that neither a declaration of war nor the nearby cruising of a hostile fleet constituted an invasion or even the threat of one. He would send no State troops.”

(The War of 1812. John K. Mahon. Da Capo reprint, University of Florida Press, 1972, pp. 3-4; 32)

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)

The author below was born in Ireland in 1822 and 9 years later came with his family to Philadelphia. He later studied law and theology before moving to Iowa in 1843 and was admitted to the bar in 1847. Politically active, Mahony was elected to the Iowa House of Representatives twice; co-founded the Dubuque Herald in 1852 and elected twice as Dubuque County sheriff.

He was arrested in mid-1862 for criticism of Lincoln’s government, held in Old Capitol Prison, and released in November after signing a document stating that he would “form an allegiance to the United States and not bring charges against those who had arrested and confined him.”

It was Lincoln’s predecessor, James Buchanan, and his Attorney General Black, who both determined that to wage war against a State and adhere to its enemies was the Constitution’s very definition of treason.

Lincoln’s War Proclamation

“One of the most flagrant acts of Executive violation of the United States Constitution was the proclamation of the third of May 1861, providing for the increase in number of the regular army and navy, and prescribing that volunteers called into the service of the United States under that proclamation should serve for a period of three years if the war might continue during that period. As part of the history of the subversion of the government, this proclamation is referred to as evidence of fact.

The United States Constitution, in the most positive, express and unequivocal terms, delegates to Congress the sole authority both to raise armies and to make rules for their government, as well as those of the naval force. This Constitutional provision was disregarded by the President in his proclamation of the third of May. He assumed the power in that proclamation which the Constitution had vested in Congress alone, and which no one ever supposed that a President had a right to exercise.

Thus, by almost the first official act of Lincoln did he violate the Constitution, which, little more than a month previous he had taken an oath to “preserve, protect and defend.” This oath, it seems, he has since construed so that it does not require him to obey the Constitution, as if he could both preserve, protect and defend it by the same act which disobeys it.

It was in vain that the Constitution vested in Congress only the power to raise and support armies, to provide and maintain a navy, and to make rules for the governing of the land and naval forces. Lincoln by his proclamation assumed the right and power to do all this – a right which scarcely any monarch, if a single one, would dare to assume, and a power which no one but a usurper would attempt to exercise.”

(Prisoner of State. Dennis A. Mahoney. Addressed to Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton and entered by Act of Congress in the year 1863. Published by Crown Rights Book Company, 2001, pp. 29-31)

In 1887, President Grover Cleveland vetoed the “Dependent Pension Bill” which sought to reward a favored Republican constituency, the North’s veterans of the Civil War. Since 1865, the Republican party had created and expanded a virtual national welfare program to attract their votes. Viewing this bill as simply a “raid on the US Treasury” benefitting the Republican party, Cleveland incurred the wrath of Northern veterans as he believed it was charity, and his veto the honorable path to take.

The Daily Advertiser of Boston in early September 1865 contained the letter of an astute resident who advised the public to give veterans work and a full share of public offices. Otherwise, he feared, “we shall guarantee a faction, a political power, to be known as the soldier vote . . . I wonder if our State politicians remember that 17,000 men can give the election to either party.”

America’s First Welfare Program

Lincoln’s government initiated a military pension system in mid-July 1862 and included a $5 fee for Claim Agents who assisted veterans; attorneys could charge $1.50 if additional testimony and affidavit were required. The House of Representatives set this latter amount given the temptation for unscrupulous attorneys to take undue advantage of the pensioners. With this Act passed, practically every member of Congress became anxious to provide for soldiers, sailors and their dependents – more than a few began to take advantage of the political power that lay in the hands of the “soldier vote.” A Mr. Holman, representing Indiana in Congress, praised the 5,000 Indiana men “who gave up the charmed circle of their homes to maintain the old flag of the Union.”

As the war continued into 1864 and the spirit of revenge in the North increased, it was officially proposed to create a large pension fund for Northern soldiers by confiscating Southern property.  In September 1865, Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, a former slave-State, “proposed a plan whereby he hoped the government would realize over three and a half billions of dollars by confiscating Southern property. Although no such a measure ever became law, it reveals the attitude which several members of the House had toward the question of pensions.”

The abuse of the pension system by 1875 caused the commissioner, Henry Atkinson, to state that “the development of frauds of every character in pension claims has assumed such magnitude as to require the serious attention of Congress . . .”

(History of the Civil War Military Pensions, 1861-1865. John William Oliver. Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 844, Vol. 4, No. 1. pp. 11-12; 14; 20; 41)

Listing allegedly revolutionary changes between Fort Sumter in 1861 and Reconstruction, in 1867 Ohio Democratic Congressman George H. Pendleton assembled the following catalogue.

The Old Republic:

1. Equality of States.
2. Federal government limited to national and internal affairs only.
3. Equal branches of the federal government.
4. Reverence for Constitutional rights.
5. Delegated powers.
6. The Constitution and fundamental law.
7. Plain, simple, cheap government; army limited to 15,000 men.
8. Freedom of thought.
9. Freedom of reason.
10. Internal peace.
11. Freedom of debate in Congress.

The New Republic:

1. Ten States blotted out . . .
2. Federal government touches even private affairs.
3. Congress omnipotent.
4. Non-existent; viz., military arrests and suspension of the [habeas corpus] writ.
5. Federal government now has all power.
6. The United States Constitution now a dead letter.
7. Huge public debt and standing army of 100,000.
8. No freedom of thought.
9. No freedom of reason.
10. No internal peace.
11. Congress now ruled by caucus.

(A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution. Harold M. Hyman. Houghton Mifflin Company. 1975, pg. 293)

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

War Millionaires of America

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

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

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

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

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

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

“History is not amenable to controlled testing. Consequently, we have no way of knowing if the United States actually won the war for the Allies. My own contention is more modest: without those millions of pounds sterling, those millions of tons of high explosives, and those two million American soldiers, the Allies would have lost the war. In this war there were no victors. If the US wanted to impose a new world order on Europe, it failed abysmally. If France and Great Britain intended to create a new balance of power, they failed as well. That they certainly failed to destroy Germany as a great power is a fact so painfully obvious that it hardly bears mention.” John Mosier

With the war over thanks to Woodrow Wilson’s intervention and cries of “democracy,” the French and British went to work destabilizing Germany with punitive peace terms. One could say with some accuracy that Wilson was instrumental in setting the stage for a nationalist leader who replaced the Kaiser. And the carnage resumed after an 18-year interval.

Killing Fields of the World War

“But in the Great War, about two out of every three German fatalities were caused by artillery fire, and only a little over half the live wounded were caused by rifle and machine gun bullets. Seven out of every ten British casualties and three out of every four French were caused by artillery. For American soldiers, the figures were equally skewed. An American medical report stated that artillery missiles caused more wounds and death in the World War; during the Civil War it was small arms.

The nature of war had changed. It was no longer the numbers of riflemen that counted, it was the guns. The German army was no larger than the French army, but in firepower it had an advantage of somewhere between four to one and twelve to one. When the war began the Germans deployed weapons the Allies did not possess, weapons they had refused to build, and weapons they believed could not be built.

The improved killing range of artillery now made the standard method of fire as indirect, aimed at map coordinates relayed to the gunners by an observer. Once the range was taken for the target, a battery could dump over a hundred rounds on the target in a minute. This left the defenders no time to seek cover, and little warning before a strike. The casualties of course were horrendous:

Allied losses for the first three reporting periods of the war, 1914, and the two six-month periods of 1915, were 982,000, 815,000 and 649,000 respectively. British losses during the Somme campaign from July to November 1916 were just over 498,000. French losses between February and June 1916 amounted to 442,000 men. The stalemate of 1917 cost the lives of 150,000 British and Canadian men – plus 100,000 German lives.

In a five-week period of March-April 1918, the BEF lost almost 150,000 dead and missing: the Germans 105,000 dead and missing. The American cemetery at Belleau Wood holds 2289 graves and commemorates another 1,060 missing. At Meuse-Argonne the AEF had about 5000 soldiers killed outright – by October the number climbed to 22,000. The American cemetery at Romagnes-sous-Montfaucon has 14,240 graves – more than the cemetery at Normandy. The BEF lost 29,000 men killed and missing in September and 44,000 in September-October; the French lost 63,000 killed and wounded. The cemetery at Souain is one of the largest French military cemeteries in the world, with the remains of 30,743 soldiers, while the ossuary of the Navarin up the road, holds another ten thousand.

Champagne-Ardennes, far more than Verdun or Artois, was the graveyard of the French army: 111,659 soldiers are buried there, and another 36,000 are buried in the cemeteries of the Argonne.

With 345,000 men killed or missing, the BEF that had survived third Ypres had perished during the spring and summer of 1918. The same could be said of the French, who had 340,000 men dead or missing in this same period, or about twice the German losses of about 230,000. Nearly 117,000 American soldiers lost their lives after only 200 days in actual combat in 1917 and 1918.  But without Pershing’s two million Americans in Europe, there was no army capable of beating Germany. Wilson’s terms became the Allied terms. Suddenly, the Great War was over. Peace had broken out.”

(The Myth of the Great War: How the Germans Won the Battles and How the Americans Saved the Allies. John Mosier. HarperCollins Publishers, pp. 2; 38-41; 332-333)

The outcome of “the war to end all wars” was punitive peace terms against Germany, the rise of German communism and the forced abdication of the Kaiser. This created a vacuum which was filled by a German nationalist intent upon retaliation for his country’s humiliation at Versailles. And so came another war.

Woodrow Wilson’s duplicity recalls Robert E. Lee’s late-1866 letter to Lord Acton: “I consider the consolidation of the States into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, to be the certain precursor to ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.”

Wilson, it should be noted, won the presidency in 1912 in a three-way race with only 42% of the popular vote – 3% more than Lincoln accomplished in 1860.

Woodrow Wilson’s Great Race to War

“America believed itself to have declared war on Germany in April 1917 for noble reasons. To make the world safe for democracy, as the slogan went.

At bottom, however, the Allies had manipulated the American government with the same expertise they had shown from the start of the war. President Wilson, a Germaphobe long before 1914, was already predisposed to aid Great Britain. Although scrupulously neutral in public (Irish Americans being an important part of any Democratic politician’s constituency), in private he was unabashedly partisan. His administration did nothing to stop the Allies from borrowing large sums to finance their war efforts.

Loans were only one part of the complex pattern of aid extended before 1917. American manufacturers made war materials to Allied specifications and shipped them to Europe. To name two obvious examples: Winchester and Remington arms and ammunition, as well as Midvale Steel and Ordnance howitzers. In this and many other ways, the Allied armies of 1915 and 1916 were as heavily dependent on American war production as the Allied governments were on American cash.

Neither Allied apologists nor American defenders of President Wilson have been anxious to draw attention to the massive level of American support, since it invariably claimed that the US was provoked into going to war by German actions against American citizens.

From the German point of view, the issue was not if America would join with Great Britain, but when this would happen, and what effect it would have on the war. Could America get an army into the field before the Germans could win the war in the West outright? It had taken Great Britain, which in its own estimation had the most professional army in the world in 1914, nearly two years before it was able to deploy a force big enough to mount a sustained offensive effort.

Germany and the United States embarked on what can only be described as a great race to determine the war’s outcome.

(The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War I. John Mosier. HarperCollins, 2001, pp. 303-305)

Lincoln fully approved of Grant’s plan to simply deplete Southern forces through constant attacks, regardless of the cost in human lives. Generous enlistment bonuses, impressing immigrants and colored men – plus conscription could fill the ranks 1864-65 and hammer the South into submission. It was Grant who stopped prisoner exchanges and was responsible for the deaths of northern prisoners as the South was being starved and denied medical supplies.

Grant’s Plan of Depletion

“If Grant can effect, with every assault on our lines, not an equal but proportionate depletion of our ranks, then the satisfactory solution to the problem is, from his point of view, a mere question of arithmetic, a mere matter of time.

He would cooly throw away the lives of a hundred thousand of his men if, by that means, he could put fifty thousand of ours hors de combat. He believes that we are on our last legs . . . and once hamstrung, good night to the Southern Confederacy. So, Grant will not yield until he is fairly exhausted, and he means more than most Yankee generals do by their bravado, when he declares he will not re-cross the river while he has a man left.

But Grant is not the sole manager of the campaign [against Lee]. There is another question besides the subjugation or independence of the South – a question of far more importance to certain people in Washington and their partisans. What is to be the name of the first Prince-President, or Stadtholder, or Emperor of the United States? Is it to be biblical or classical? Is it to be Abraham or Ulysses? And this is a matter in which Lincoln is profoundly interested.

Now, Lincoln has shown, in the plainest way, that he will not scruple to use any device, to invent any falsehood, to shed any quantity of blood . . . if he can perpetuate his power. We think it tolerably evident that he is afraid of the tool which fortune has thrust into his hands, and no one would rejoice more sincerely than he if Grant were to expire in the arms of victory, or, that alternative failing, he was to perish politically, crushed under the odium of an utter defeat.

Grant has perspicuity enough to see through Lincoln’s benevolent intentions, and self-reliance enough to push on regardless of Lincoln’s designs. Lincoln’s plan is that Grant shall do all the fighting and [Benjamin] Butler shall get all the glory. Butler is Lincoln’s representative in the field; and they both hope that the capture of Richmond will repeat the capture of New Orleans . . . and Butler is to make a triumphant entry into our capital without having exposed his precious carcass to the bullets of the audacious rebels.

Like many shrewd men, Lincoln a touch of superstition and it is evident that he believed in Butler’s star. [If] Richmond is to pass into Butler’s hands, Lincoln has nothing to fear from any glory which he may acquire . . . [and] the north would hardly be willing to hail him as their official chief. [B]orn satrap that he is, Butler would be satisfied with the position of Viceroy of the Southern provinces under His Majesty Abraham the First, by the Device of the Devil, Emperor of all the Yankees.”

(Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War. Ward W. Brigg, Jr. University Press of Virginia. 1998; pp. 315-316)

Along with his family, Jefferson Davis was captured by northern troops in the Georgia pines on May 10, 1865, while enroute to join Southern forces in the trans-Mississippi. The military odds were now ten to one, and northern troops were armed with Spencer-magazine repeaters against the Southern muzzle loaders. This was turning the war into mass murder. Author Russell Quynn writes:

“During the four years of war the northern armies had been replenished with more than 720,000 immigrant males from Europe, who were promised bounties and pension that the South afterwards largely had to pay. (See Union Department of War Records). The armies of the South at peak strength never exceeded 700,000 men. Imported “Hessians” were thus used by Lincoln to crush Americans of the South whose fathers had served in the armies of Washington, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor, to make a nation, to found its renown!”

It was Lincoln Who “Made War”

Jefferson Davis chastised his accusers:

“. . . by reiteration of such inappropriate terms as “rebellion,” treason” and the asseveration of that the South was levying war against the United States, those ignorant of the nature of the Union and the reserved powers of the States, have been led to believe that the Confederate States [of America] were in the condition of revolted provinces, and that the United States were forced to resort to arms for the preservation of its existence . . .

The Union was formed for specific enumerated purposes, and the States had never surrendered their sovereignty . . . It was a palpable absurdity to apply to them, or to their citizens when obeying their mandates, the terms “rebellion” and “treason”; and, further, the Confederate States, so far from making war or seeking to destroy the United States, as soon as they had an official organ, strove earnestly by peaceful recognition to equitably adjust all questions growing out of the separation from their late associates.

It was Lincoln who “made war.” Still another perversion, Davis thought:

“Was the attempted arraignment of the men who participated in forming the Confederate States and bore arms in its defense, as “instigators of a controversy leading to disunion.” Of course, it was a palpable absurdity, but part of the unholy vengeance, which did not cease at the grave.”

(The Constitutions of Abraham Lincoln & Jefferson Davis: A Historical and Biographical Study in Contrasts. Russell Hoover Quynn. Exposition Press, 1959, pp. 126-127)