Circa1865

Horatio Seymour of New York always refused to consider any aspect of African slavery as a paramount issue in the country; He felt that “for seventy years the Union had existed with slavery; it need not perish overnight because of it.” He rightly saw anti-slavery rhetoric against the South as designed to divert attention from speculation and corrupt politics in the North.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Virtue More Dangerous Than Vice

“As one looks back at the antics of the abolitionists – Garrison burning a copy of the Constitution in a public square; Gerrit Smith playing “possum” at an asylum while the John Brown he had encouraged was found guilty of treason and hauled out to be hanged; self-righteous ranters pleading from their pulpits for the export of rifles to Kansas; industrious Mrs. Stowe embalming the slippery sentimentality of her half-truths in the lachrymose pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; even Democratic David Wilmot trying to repair with his famous proviso the political fences he had broken down with his vote for a lower tariff . . .

[T]here comes to mind the words of the ancient philosopher which a president of Yale was always happy to remember”: “Virtue is more dangerous than vice because the excesses of virtue are not always subject to the restraints of conscience.”

(Horatio Seymour of New York, Stewart Mitchell, Harvard University Press, 1938, pp. 229-230)

Major Henry W. Conner (1793-1866) of Lincoln County, North Carolina was a democrat of the Nathaniel Macon type, and observed the growth of fanatic abolitionism in the North with great trepidation. His son, Lt. Charles T. Conner, was killed by Northern soldiers in 1865.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Wading Through Blood of Men, Women and Children

“The following excerpts from the address made by Major [Henry W.] Conner in his campaign for reelection to Congress in 1839 show how the smoldering fires of anti-slavery sentiment were beginning to blaze in the North. Referring to it he said:

“Abolitionism, when I last addressed you seemed to be confined to a few fanatics only, and so absurd seemed their views and pretensions that serious apprehension could not reasonably be entertained, but such has been their rapid growth in a short time, that in several of the States they hold the balance of power in politics, and abolitionism has, therefore, become a political question with the avowed object of striking at the rights and property of the South, and there is reason to believe they will not be particular in the mode of carrying out their plans, whether peacefully, or by wading through blood of men, women and children.

The desks of abolition members (especially John Quincy Adams and Slade) are loaded with thousands of antislavery petitions which have be presented within the last two years, asking Congress to interfere with your rights and property. This heartless and unjustifiable policy must and will be met by the South at the proper time with manly determination to protect and defend our rights and privileges at all hazards.”

(The Annals of Lincoln County, North Carolina, William L. Sherrill, Regional Publishing, 1972, pp. 188-189)

Reverend H. Melville Jackson warned his Richmond audience in 1882 that there will come a day when the victor’s literature and monuments shall crowd out remembrances of the Southern patriots who fought and perished in the cause of independence.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Warning of Things To Come

“It is been said of General Robert E. Lee that he often expressed the fear lest posterity should not know the odds against which he fought. [The] daily witness of incredible heroism, daily spectator of the dauntless courage with which a decimated army faced undismayed an overwhelming foe, the chieftain of your armies, gentlemen, feared lest the examples of knightly valor and splendid fortitude, which you have exhibited to the ages, might, through the incapacity or incredulity, or venal mendacity of the historian, be finally lost to the human race.

And there is, I will venture to say, scarcely a soldier of the Confederacy who does not share this apprehension that posterity may not do justice to the cause for which he fought. Soldiers, you cannot bear to think that your children’s children shall have forgotten the fields on which you have shed your blood. You cannot think with equanimity that a day will come when Virginia shall have suffered the fame of her heroes to be lost in obscurity, and the valorous achievements of her sons to fade from memory.

And if you thought, to-night, that the muse of history would turn traitor to your cause, misrepresent the principles for which you fought, and deny to you the attributes of valour, fortitude and heroic devotion you have grandly won, your souls would rise up within you in immediate and bitter and protesting indignation.

This apprehension is thought by some to be not altogether groundless. The North, it is said, is making the literature of these times, has secured the ear of the age and will not fail to make the impression, unfavorable to you, which time will deepen rather than obliterate.

Diligent fingers are carving the statues of the heroes of the Northern armies, writing partizan and distorted versions of their achievements, altering, even in this generation, the perspective of history, until, at no distant day, they shall have succeeded in crowding out every other aspirant of fame and beguiled posterity into believing that the laurels of honor should rest, alone and undisturbed, upon the brows of your adversaries.”

(Our Cause in History, Address of Reverend H. Melville Jackson of Richmond. Given at the Richmond Howitzer’s Banquet, December 13, 1882. From the Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume XI, pp. 26-30)

Lemuel Burkitt (1750-1807) was a Baptist preacher and member of the 1788 Hillsborough Convention which considered the new union proposed by Alexander Hamilton. A devout anti-Federalist, he demanded a maximum of State rights and the preservation of individual liberties, and thus was highly suspicious of Hamilton’s centralization of power schemes.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Washington Will Be a Fortified City

“At the sessions of the courts, at county militia musters, in the taverns, wherever men gathered, the main topics of conversation [in 1787] were the Constitution and its framers. In the heat of argument no man’s character was above attack and no past political or military service could overcome party animosity. Thomas Person, a general of the Revolution and patriot of undoubted sincerity, denounced Washington as “a damned rascal and traitor to his country for putting his hand to such an infamous paper as the new Constitution.”

Willie Jones, leader of the [North Carolina] anti-federalists, found it necessary to deny in the public press that he had “called the Members of the Grand Convention, generally, and General Washington and Col. Davie, in particular, scoundrels” . . . William Lenoir of Wilkes county said later in the debates in the convention that his constituents had instructed him to oppose the adoption of the Constitution. William Lancaster of Franklin [county] said that his own feelings and his duty to his constituents induced him to oppose the adoption of the Constitution, since he believed every delegate was bound by his instructions.

Lemuel Burkitt, a Baptist preacher strongly opposed to ratification, was a [convention] candidate in Hertford county. In explaining the selection of an area ten square miles [to be] the seat of the [federal] government, Burkitt said: “This my friends, will be walled in or fortified. Here an army of fifty thousand, or perhaps, a hundred thousand men, will be finally embodied, and will sally forth, and enslave the [American] people, who will be gradually disarmed.”

[Hugh] Williamson . . . did not consider paper currency as honest tender because of its rapid depreciation. However convenient depreciated paper appeared to those who used it to discharge their debts, he contended that the credit and finances of the State had been injured by it. No part of the North Carolina debt of North Carolina had been discharged by the operations of paper money, “the whole advantage of depreciation being a mere juggle,” by which one citizen was injured for the convenience of another.”

So great were the evils of paper money that the dignity of government was wounded by declaring it legal tender, industry languished, the orphan was defrauded, and the most atrocious frauds were practiced under the sanction of the law.”

(The Ratification of the Federal Constitution in North Carolina, Louisa Irby Trenholme, Columbia University Press, pp. 107-110; 117)

This excerpt from a July 2000 Samuel Francis article traced the Leninist origins of and predictable conclusion of the political correctness phenomenon already in stride by the turn of the century.  Dr. Francis wrote that “the whole strategy of the revolution today known as “political correctness” relies on the distorted title of Lenin’s [1904] pamphlet,” One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.”  Lenin’s goal was “the seizure of total power, in particular power over culture, the forms and structures of human thought and judgment.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

From PC to the New Public Orthodoxy

“The term “political correctness” is now more than ten years old, and no sooner had it come into vogue than it began to excite the kind of ridicule that it deserved. Tales of college classes where elementary facts of history, science, literature and philosophy were deliberately butchered or silenced in order to suit the sexual, class, or racial obsessions of blatantly unqualified teachers became commonplace.

Students and even faculty were disciplined and sometimes punished with expulsion or threats of violence for the slightest verbal deviation from the “codes” imposed at distinguished universities.

For some years after its appearance, the battle against “political correctness” served as a major theme of almost all conservatives, paleo or neo, not a few of them made their reputations as writers in exposing the p.c. farce.

Once the radicals retired [from universities] in the next ten or twenty years, [a prominent neoconservative] predicted, the political correctness cult would disappear. As usual, the neoconservatives were wrong.

What has actually happened is that p.c. took its degree and graduated into the larger society. Today, not only universities but corporations and even town and city councils maintain codes of speech and behavior often far more draconian than anything ever concocted at Berkley of Madison.

The common response of most conservatives and even of the most sensible liberals to political correctness is to treat it as a joke, a silly excess of ignoramuses and intolerant mediocrities unable to master the traditional curricula or abide by standards of conduct that prevail in real schools and universities. Unfortunately, that response largely misses the larger point about political correctness, which is that it represents an actual revolution.

The experimental, university phase of the revolution lasted for about five or six years – the end of the 1980s and the first part of the 1990s – before the speech codes imposed by the first generation of revolutionaries began to be dismantled and replaced by more “moderate” ones.

That the revolution has now entrenched itself well outside the English departments and dormitories of academe ought to be clear enough. In 1999, the famous incident of the use of the word “niggardly” by a white Washington, D.C., city worker led to the worker’s dismissal for using racially inflammatory and insulting language.

The point is that it is not the act of offense that is being punished, it is the language used and the ideas invoked. To use a word that even points toward forbidden subjects is not a breach of etiquette; it is an act of subversion.

What is happening is that one set of icons, symbols, and (in the cant of the day) “role models” created and established by the old American culture is being replaced by another set of icons and symbols created and established by another culture that has found a new master race: The Virginian Confederate heroes of Richmond’s Monument Avenue are displaced by a statue of black tennis star Arthur Ashe; a mural of Lee in Richmond is altered to suit black demands but is later firebombed and vandalized with the slogan “Kill the white demons”; names of Confederate generals on the city’s bridges are changed to names of local “civil rights” leaders.

The revolution will probably not finish as radically as it began . . . [and] will allow the “conservatives” who defend the old culture to save face a bit and boast of how moderate they are and how they are willing to accept change. But the premises – that the old nation and culture are so evil that their symbolism must be altered or discarded and that the new dominant race and culture are so good that theirs must be saluted and worshipped as part of the new public orthodoxy, the new political formula that justifies the new ruling class – have already been conceded.”

(The Revolution Two-Step, Dr. Samuel Francis, Chronicles, July 2000, excerpts, pp. 32-33)

To many the abolition crusade recalls brave Northerners standing tall for the liberty of African slaves and the Rights of Man. Upon closer inspection the North was a region unfriendly to both the black man and abolitionists – the latter evident with the mob-murder of Elijah Lovejoy in antebellum Illinois. Daniel Webster saw these sectionalists for what they were, and what evil they might accomplish.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The South Was the Conservative Party

“The story of Daniel Webster and his great speech in 1850 has been told at some length because it is instructive. The historians who have set themselves to the task of upholding the idea that it was the aggressiveness of the South, during the controversy over slavery, and not that of the North, that brought on secession and war, could not make good their contention while Daniel Webster and his speech for “the Constitution and Union” stood in their way. They, therefore, wrote the great statesman “down and out” as they conceived.

But Webster and that speech still stand as beacon lights in the history of that crusade. The attack came from the North. The South, standing for its constitutional rights in the Union, was the conservative party. Southern leaders, it is true, were, during the controversy over slavery, often aggressive, but they were on the defensive—aggressive, just as Lee was when he made his campaign into Pennsylvania for the purpose of stopping the invasion of his own land.

Mr. Webster in his great speech for “the Constitution and the Union,” as became a great statesman, pleading for conciliation, measured the terms in which he condemned “personal liberty” laws and Abolitionism. But afterward, irritated by the attacks made upon him, he naturally spoke out more emphatically.

McMaster quotes several expressions from his speeches and letters replying to these assaults, and says: “His hatred of Abolitionists and Free-Soilers grew stronger and stronger. To him these men were a “band of sectionalists, narrow of mind, wanting in patriotism, without a spark of national feeling, and quite ready to see the Union go to pieces if heir own selfish ends were gained.” Such, if this was a fair summing up of his views, was Webster’s final opinion of those who were carrying on the great anti-slavery crusade.”

(The Abolition Crusade and its Consequences, Hilary A. Herbert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, pp. 125-126)

British public opinion of the North’s war upon the South was informed by their newspapers. The conservative London Dispatch viewed the true motives of the war as “the continuance in power of the North to tax the industry of the South and the consolidation of a huge confederation to sweep every other power from the American continent, to enter into the politics of Europe with a Republican propaganda, and to bully the world.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Lincoln a Talented Farmer and Stump Speaker

“The British aristocrats’ negative view of the U.S. system of government was enhanced by their negative reaction to Abraham Lincoln as president. His immediate predecessors – [Franklin] Pierce and [James] Buchanan – had had backgrounds that seemed familiar to those of British cabinet ministers. Pierce had been a congressman, a major-general in the Mexican War, and a senator while Buchanan had been a senator, secretary of state, and minister to Britain.

But in 1860 the nation had elected a man from the frontier whose only experience in the national government was a single two-year term in Congress.

The British minister in Washington, Lord Lyons, reported in May 1860 that the Republican nominee for president was “a rough Westerner, of the lowest origins and little education.” Two months later he still referred to Lincoln as a “rough farmer who began life as a farm laborer and got on by a talent for stump speaking.”

British journalists who met the president in 1861 and 1862 emphasized his rustic and ungainly appearance. Edward Dicey, correspondent for the Spectator and Macmillan’s Magazine, wrote a similar description in 1862 and added that “you would never say he was a gentleman.”

[Dicey] wrote that Lincoln “works hard . . . does little, and unites a painful sense of responsibility to a still more painful sense, perhaps, that his work is too great for him to grapple with.” Alexander J. Beresford-Hope, a wealthy ultraconservative, remarked that “nobody in this county, clever as he might be at rail-slitting, at navigating a barge, or at an attorney’s desk, would, without other qualifications, ever become prime minister of England, let alone county court judge.”

Richard Cobden, an important Radical leader in Parliament and a stout friend of the North, thought . . . [after] the emancipation proclamation [that] “Lincoln had a certain moral dignity, but is intellectually inferior.” A London correspondent reported to Die Presse in Vienna that Lincoln was “a plebian, who made his way from rail splitter to representative in Illinois, a man without intellectual brilliance, without special strength of character, not exceptionally impressive – an ordinary man of goodwill.” The correspondent’s name was Karl Marx.

A British scholar, Martin Crawford, described the [London Times] persistent belief that the North could not win the war and that continued separation of North and South was inevitable:

“The longer the [war] lasted, the more convinced The Times became that Lincoln’s government should accept disunion for what it was, a sad and irrevocable fact . . . Britain’s leading newspaper had established itself as a committed opponent of the [Northern] cause . . . “

(One War at a Time, The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, Dean B. Mahin, Brassey’s, 1999, pp. 28-29)

In May of 1882 Delaware’s Senator Bayard recalled the meaning of the Mecklenburg Resolves and warned against the continuing expenditure of public tax dollars on projects unrelated to a strictly “public objects and ends.” Americans then were witnessing a federal government, unrestrained since 1861, complicit in subsidies to private businesses and pursuing vast imperial ambitions.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Taxes Only for Public Objects and Ends

“The commemorative celebration of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence took place at Charlotte on May 20^th [1882]. The streets were fairly decked with flags and banners, filled with citizen soldiers in bright uniforms, and at least 20,000 people from the surrounding country.

Governor [Thomas] Jarvis and his staff, Senators Vance, [Matt] Ransom, Wade Hampton and [Thomas] Bayard were present. The Mecklenburg Declaration was read by Senator Ransom, and Senator Vance introduced the orator of the occasion, Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware. The address was enthusiastically received, especially the sentiments contained in the following extract:

“I wish I could impress upon you gentlemen, and not upon you only but upon our fellow-countrymen everywhere, the fatal fallacy and mischief that underlies and inheres to every proposition to use the money of the people — drawn from them by taxation, the powers of the government, the force of their government, under any name or pretext — for any other than really public objects and ends.

I include the maintenance of the public honor, dignity, and credit, the protection of American citizenship everywhere, among the just objects for the exercise of governmental powers; but I wish to deny . . . the rightfulness of involving the welfare and happiness of the 50,000,000 men, women, and children of the country, whether by laying taxes upon them which are not needed for the support of their government, or paying bounties and subsidies to maintain lines of private business which are too unskillfully or unprofitably conducted otherwise to sustain themselves, or promising the presence of our fleets or armies, or risking the issue of peace or war, or shedding the blood of our soldiers and sailors in aid of schemes of private greed or personal ambition under the guise of claims foreign or domestic.”

(North Carolina, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia, 1882, New Series Vol VII, D. Appleton and Company, 1883, page 634)

Jefferson wrote in 1792: “As the doctrine is that a public debt is a public blessing, so they think a perpetual one is a perpetual blessing, and therefore wish to make it so large that we can never pay it off.” Prior to 1861 it as common for American presidents to view that indebting future administrations was both immoral and unconscionable.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Generations Living Off Future Generations

“On September 6, 1789, Jefferson admonished James Madison from Paris that the country should get straight, “at the threshold of our new government,” how we are to keep the debt from destroying the democracy. Jefferson’s premise, which he believed to be “self-evident,” is that one generation cannot – either morally or in fact – bind another.

It follows that “No generation can contract debts greater than may be paid during the course of its own existence.” The “earth belongs in usufruct [trust] to the living . . . [T]he dead have neither powers nor rights over it.” If one generation can charge another for its debts, “then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation.”

Jefferson continued: “The conclusion then, is, that neither the representatives of a nation, nor the whole nation itself assembled, can validly engage debts beyond what they can pay in their own time.”

Madison wrote back that he generally agreed but thought debt was justifiable if it built a project that benefited the future taxpayer – a useful bridge, for example. Jefferson answered that the power to borrow was too dangerous to allow exceptions – any exception would expand or destroy the prohibition.

Madison’s argument seemed plausible, but Jefferson’s camel’s-nose-under-the-tent concern was right. No government will stay within Madison’s exception. World War II, the last time this country could make any kind of legitimate case for a benefit to future generations, was in fact financed 47 percent by pay as you go taxes, which provided $137 billion out of a total cost of $304 billion.

Jefferson could not get his 1798 amendment adopted, but the country got more chances to adopt Jeffersonian principles in 1994, 1995, and 1996 when Sen. Sam Nunn (D., GA) proposed a Balanced Budget Amendment. At the time, the national debt was large (about four trillion dollars) but could have been dealt with. It was not yet a perpetual debt.

Senator Nunn called his legislation the “Jefferson Amendment.” It required that Congress balance expenses with revenues [and] the public constantly supported Nunn’s amendment by 75-percent margins. But he was defeated by the Clinton Cabinet, which argued that the economy would crash if the federal government couldn’t borrow.

A New York senator said the amendment’s passage could “lead to the devastation of the banking industry.” With the defeat of the Nunn Amendment, the boat sailed for the Republic.”

(Just One More Thing, William J. Quirk, Can the Republic Be Restored?, Chronicles, May 2009, pg. 15)

As the North had done earlier, the American South could have dealt with African slavery – a relic of the British colonial labor system and perpetuated by Northern slave traders – in its own time and its own way. Regretfully, no peaceful or practical solutions to the riddle of slavery were forthcoming from the North.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Wilmot the Hatchet Man

“At the time of the Missouri Compromise, anti-slavery Thomas Jefferson, old and dying in his debt-ridden hilltop mansion, had warned the Southerners in Washington that they were making a mistake. Jefferson said that if the South allowed a precedent which admitted the restriction of slavery anywhere, a principle would have been established and the north would use it in gradual encroachments for the restriction of slavery everywhere.

Only sixteen years later, his prophesy came true over the admission of Texas and with the rise of an anti-slavery bloc in Washington.

The Westerners thought [President James] Polk had been less aggressively interested in their expansions, in Oregon and California, than in the Southerners’ movements in the Southwest. The Westerners held a long resentment anyway, because the Southerners chronically opposed internal improvements at government expense for the Midwest and free lands to the immigrants. To retaliate, the Westerners made a new issue over slavery in order to create trouble for Southern projects.

As their hatchet man the Westerners selected David Wilmot, and you will look in vain for national monuments to this political hack from Pennsylvania. Yet, with one unexplainable gesture, he contributed more to the sectional war than any dedicated patriot. As Wilmot had been an administration wheel horse, his independent act is obscure as to motive, except that he was aware of carrying out the Westerners spitefulness.

Specifically (in 1846), to an appropriations bill for the purchase of territory from Mexico, the former wheel horse attached a “proviso” which forbade slavery in any of the new territory to be obtained from Mexico . . . in the Senate only the aroused Southerners narrowly prevented its becoming law.

This Wilmot Proviso alarmed and enraged Southerners of all persuasions. It showed the most Union-loving Nationalists that they were in a fight against containment. The Southern States were to be restricted to their present territory while the North gained new States which would give it majority power.”

(The Land They Fought For, Clifford Dowdey, Doubleday & Company, 1955, pp. 31-32)