Category: Race and the North

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)

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

In mid-December 1862, Abraham Lincoln dispatched an army of over 122,000 men under Gen. Ambrose Burnside to northern Virginia with orders to defeat Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army of 72,000 near Fredericksburg. The debacle that followed cost Lincoln the lives of nearly 13,000 men, another 10,000 wounded, and the virtual end of voluntary northern enlistments. This forced Lincoln to resort to large financial bounties to attract mercenaries, and substitutes could be bought for northern men to escape conscription.

Fredericksburg’s Field of Death

The commander of a Maine regiment wrote of the battle’s aftermath:

“We had to pick our way over a field strewn with incongruous ruin; men torn and broken and cut to pieces in every indescribable way, cannon dismounted, gun carriages smashed or overturned, ammunition chests flung wildly about, horses dead and half-dead still in harness . . .” Col. Joshua Chamberlain

Also, poet Walt Whitman visited the aftermath of Fredericksburg in search of his wounded brother George:

“Fredericksburg had turned into a massacre. [General] Burnside sacrificed wave after wave of his troops against the strong Confederate positions – only to be stopped short, again and again, in bloody carnage at a sunken road beneath Marye’s Heights . . . From this chaos came row upon row of cold, stone grave markers still covering acres of highlands over Fredericksburg City. Some 13,000 of Lincoln’s soldiers dead.”

Began my visits among the camp hospitals in Burnside’s army. Outside a house used as a hospital, at the foot of a tree, within ten yards of the entrance, I noticed a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, etc. – a full load for a one-horse cart. Several dead bodies lie nearby [with] each covered by a brown woolen blanket. In the dooryard, towards the river, are fresh graves, mostly of officers, their names on pieces of barrel staves or broken boards stuck in the dirt.”

“Death is nothing here. As you step out in the morning from your tent to wash your face, you see before you on a stretcher a shapeless, extended object, and over it is thrown a dark gray blanket. It is the corpse of some wounded or sick soldier of the regiment who died in the hospital during the night; [or it might be] a row of three or four corpses covered over. No one makes an ado. There comes a detail of men to bury them; all useless ceremony is omitted. The stern realities of the marches and many battles of a campaign make the old etiquette a nuisance.”

(Josiah Volunteered. A Collection of Diaries and Letters. Arnold H. Sturtevant. 1977, pp. 75-81)

 

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)

 

The South’s Manpower Advantage

In his efforts to overwhelm the American South’s resistance, Grant ended prisoner exchanges with soldiers returning to the South’s ranks while those in blue went home. He knew the late war, poor-quality conscripts and diseased substitutes he received wouldn’t fight and would desert at the first opportunity. This reality accelerated the capture and removal of colored laborers who represented an important part of the Southern war effort.

The South’s Manpower Advantage

“The responsibility for effectively assembling Negro manpower became that of the Virginia lawmakers and the Confederate Congressmen. Speaking on this point, President Jefferson Davis stated, “much of our success was due to the much-abused institution of African servitude.”

This opinion was shared by General Ulysses S. Grant who was well-aware of the need to remove from the South her vast army of noncombatants. Grant said, “the 4,000,000 colored noncombatants are equal to more than three times their number in the North, age for age, sex for sex.” Both Grant and Davis early recognized that the mobilization of the Negro constituted an extremely valuable resource.

At the call to repel the Yankee invaders, for example, Virginia looked to its Negro population as a major source of civilian workers. [The majority] of Negroes employed by the quartermaster, ordnance, niter and mining bureaus, and military hospitals were hired through voluntary contracts with free Negroes and the owners of bondsmen.

In February 1862 the State legislature passed an act which required local courts to register all male free Negroes within their jurisdiction between the ages of 18 and 50. The selected free persons were not required to serve longer than 180 days without their consent, and entitled to compensation, rations, quarters and medical attention. Their pay, rations and allowances were borne by the Confederate States.

[In early 1863, and in response to Lincoln’s so-called emancipation decree,] the Richmond Examiner asserted that the North had discovered from this war the value of the slave to the South as a military laborer, and “Lincoln’s proclamation is designed to destroy this power in our hands.”

(The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865. James H. Brewer. University of Alabama Press, 1969, pp. 6-7; 14)

Seddon’s View of Black Southern Troops

By 1856 the new Republican party had acquired control of most northern State governments, while being denounced as the chief “disunionists” of the country for reintroducing slavery agitation as a party tactic.

Its party platform in 1860 was very clear on the territories, favoring subsidies for immigrant homesteaders, and a transcontinental railroad crossing Indian lands in the way of rail lines carrying Northern goods westward. Once Southern members departed Congress in early 1861, Republicans created a Federal corporation, the Union Pacific, which extinguished Indian titles and any defense of their land when driven off by military force.  The Indian tribes were to be progressively eliminated as obstacles to settlement and industrial expansion, and before the Civil War ended this policy was in full force.

As the South’s colored population fell into their hands as plantations were overrun, they were designated “contrabands” and utilized as hard labor battalions. As US Colored Troops, they were used as prison guards or cannon fodder in futile assaults and rightly assumed they would suffer the same fate as the Indians under northern rule.

Seddon’s View of Black Confederate Troops

“Hon. James A. Seddon, Confederate Secretary of War, in his report, supplemented Mr. Davis’s message with some still stronger recommendations of his own. The slaves, he said, had an even stronger interest in the victory of the Confederacy than did the white people. The latter risked their political independence, but the former their very existence as a race.

If the eternal enemies of the South should triumph, they would extinguish the negroes in a few years, as they had already extinguished the Indians. He recommended that the States which had absolute and exclusive control of the matter, should legislate at once with a view to the contingency of negro enlistments.

On the 15th [of March 1865] the subject of enlistments came up in the Virginia legislature . . . and on the 27th instructed its Senators to vote for the [negro] enlistment measure in the Confederate Congress. [About this time] a letter of General Lee’s was published looking to approval, considering it “not only expedient but necessary.” If the Confederates did not make use of the slaves, the Federals would.

The vote in the Senate on the final passage of the bill, March 7, 1865, the President was authorized to ask for and accept from slave owners the services of as many able-bodied slaves as he thinks expedient; to the same to organized by the commander-in-chief under instructions from the War Department, and to receive the same rations and compensation as other troops.

Mr. Lincoln did not think much of the impressment and enlisting of slaves. He said, in a speech made at Washington on the 17th of March, that the negro could not stay at home and make bread and fight at the same time, and he did not care much for which duty was allotted to him by the Confederate government. “We must now see the bottom of the rebels; resources.”

(Confederate Negro Enlistments. Edward Spencer. Annals of the War, Written by the Leading Participants, North and South. 1879, pp. 547-552)

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)

 

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)

Democrat Dilemma in 1868

The Republican party’s 1861-1865 war not only subjugated the American South, but the North as well. By virtue of this and contrary to the assertion below in 1868, the US Constitution had become a dead letter when a President ordered the invasion and overthrow of States in 1861, and Congress acquiesced.

For their 1868 presidential candidate, the Radicals selected Gen. Grant. Of the latter, the National Intelligencer of 9 June, 1868 wrote:

“General Grant is . . . nothing but a convenient instrument in the hands of Radical wirepullers. He knows nothing of civil affairs, the political history of the country, and cares nothing for either one or the other. He is a fortunate soldier, and no more, with limited capacity, and an absence of all training for the administration of government.”

“To support Grant, Radical leaders formed “Loyal Leagues” in the South who drilled members to vote Republican. They catered to the fancy of the Negro voter by promises of land and mules, elaborate initiation ceremonies, and the use of rituals and passwords in their secret meetings. Organizations of such a nature in the ranks of the white and Negro populace of the South were bound to result in riots and disorder in the campaign. This would be to the advantage of the Radical Republicans as they could say to Northern the voters that their plan f reconstruction was necessary in the South”.

Below is a letter from vice-presidential nominee General Francis Blair on June 30, 1868, to Col. James O. Brodhead of Missouri.

Democrat Dilemma in 1868

The reconstruction policy of the [Republican] Radicals will be complete before the next election; the [Southern] States so long excluded will have been admitted, Negro suffrage established, and the carpetbaggers installed in their seats in both branches of Congress.

There is no possibility of changing the political character of the Senate, even if the Democrats should elect their presidential candidate and hold a majority of the popular branch of Congress. We cannot, therefore, undo the Radical plan of reconstruction by congressional action; the Senate will continue to bar its repeal.

Must we submit to it? How can it be overthrown?

It can only be overthrown by the authority of the Executive, who is sworn to maintain the Constitution, and will fail to do his duty if he allows the Constitution to perish under a series of congressional enactments which are in palpable violation of its fundamental principles.

There is but one way to restore the government and the Constitution, and it is for the President-elect to declare these Reconstruction acts null and void, compel the US Army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpetbag State governments, allow the white people to re-organize their own governments, and elect Senators and Representatives. The House of Representative will contain a majority of Democrats from the North, and they will admit the Representatives elected by the white people of the South, and with the cooperation of the President, it will not be difficult to compel the Senate to submit once more to the obligations of the Constitution.

What can a Democratic president do if Congress is controlled by carpetbaggers and their allies? He will be powerless to stop the supplies by which the Negroes are organized into political clubs – by which an army is maintained to protect these vagabonds in their outrages upon the ballot. We must have a president who will execute the will of the people by trampling into dust the usurpations of Congress known as the reconstruction acts.

Your friend, Frank P. Blair.”

(Political Campaign and Election of General Grant in 1868. George A. Olson. Master’s Thesis excerpt, pp. 44-46; 56. 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).