Circa1865

The “Big Four” of Central Pacific Railroad fame included Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford, both of New York. While the War Between the States raged in the East, they made a fortune through generous government subsidies usually obtained by bribery or special treatment for Republican Party donors. While that party claimed to be waging war against the American South to eradicate slavery, the government-supported railroad companies used virtual slave labor for construction crews. The railroad crews used white supervisors of Chinese laborers in the same manner as Northern regiments of colored troops were led by white officers.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Chinese Labor for the Central Pacific Railroad    

“Early in January 1865 Crocker’s agents scoured Sacramento, Stockton, and San Francisco for laborers . . . [but many] quit when they had earned enough money to pay stage fare to Virginia City. But children, too, were scarce in the foothills and for months the labor shortage remained acute. In the company’s new San Francisco office [Leland] Stanford . . . petitioned the War Department to send out five thousand Rebel prisoners to be put to work under the guard of a few companies of Union soldiers. But the war ended and the scheme had to be shelved.

A plan of importing, under contract, thousands of peons from Sonora and other Mexican states never got beyond the discussion stage . . . [but another] dubious possibility remained – the lowly Chinese. There were already thousands of them on the Coast . . . crowded into the wretched warrens of a score of “Chinatowns.”

A threatened strike of his white crews proved the deciding point. [Fifty] Chinese were herded on freight cars in the Sacramento yards and hauled to the end of the track. By sunrise they went to work with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows. At the end of their first twelve hours of prodding industry Crocker and his engineers viewed the result with gratified astonishment.

Another gang of fifty was hired at once, then a third. Finally all doubt vanished and the Chinatowns of the state were searched for every able-bodied male who could be tempted by the bait of steady work and forty dollars a month.

Of course the white laborers of the Coast resented the affront. To counteract this injury, railroad spokesmen were presently referring to the Chinese as “the Asiatic contingent of the Grand Army of Civilization,” and Stanford was incorporating into company reports long defense for them . . . To charges that the Chinese were held in a state of virtual serfdom by the labor contractors with whom the company dealt, Stanford stated: “No system similar to slavery . . . prevails . . . Their wages . . . Paid in coin at the end of each month, are divided among them by their agents . . . in proportion to the labor done by each . . . These agents are generally American or Chinese merchants, who furnish them with supplies of food, the value of which they deduct monthly . . .”

By the end of 1865 the company was committed to the use of Chinese for most of their labor, and Stanford was hopeful that the force might be increased to fifteen thousand during the coming year. Of course no such supply was available in California . . . [but accordingly] boats from Canton were presently tying up at San Francisco piers, their rails swarming with yellow faces, while labor leaders predicted economic ruin for the Coast and threatened reprisals.

The advent of the Chinese relieved white men of pick and shovel work; many became gang foremen, others were promoted to teamsters, powdermen, or stone-workers. Moreover, the Chinese lived in their own camps, cooked their own meals, and knew their place. Thus the superiority of the Caucasian was undiminished, his dignity enhanced. Harmony reigned in the Sierra canyons and real progress began to be made.”

(The Big Four, The Story of the Building of the Central Pacific, Oscar Lewis, Borzoi Books, 1938, excerpts, pp. 69-72)

The existence of African slaves in the American South was largely the result of foreign interests and New England slavers importing already-enslaved black people from Africa. With the agricultural expansion of the United States enabled by the Louisiana Purchase, large numbers of laborers were required to work the fields.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Foreign Slave Trade in Antebellum Mobile

“An illicit market in Mobile supported foreign slave trade despite the federal prohibition against it since 1808. Reports appeared occasionally of African natives working in the city. In March 1859, according to the British consul, “twenty wild African Negroes” worked in Mobile. Since these slaves spoke only their native dialect, residents concluded that the slaves were recently imported. Their appearance sparked excitement among the citizens about the foreign slave trade.

Later in 1859 the schooner Clotilde, owned by the Northern-born steamboat builder Timothy Meagher, transported what was reputedly the last cargo of contraband slaves from Africa to the United States. Slavers then transported 116 survivors of this voyage to John Dabney’s plantation on the Alabama River a few miles north of Mobile. Some slave-owners in the area secretly purchased some of the Africans, and the shipowner and captain retained the rest.

Slave ownership remained confined to a small proportion of the free population of Mobile, slightly less than 6 percent in 1830 and 1840. Masters and mistresses came from widely different backgrounds and occupations. In 1860, New Englanders like Thaddeus Sanford, a newspaper publisher turned farmer; Gustavus Horton, a cotton broker; and William, Rix, a merchant, owned slaves. So did foreign-born Mobilians like Israel I. Jones and Jonathan Emanuel, [both] English-born merchants; Ann Yuille, a Scottish baker’s widow; and Albert Stein, a German-born hydraulic engineer.

In 1850, 191 women owned 807 slaves. Women made up nearly 10 percent of large slaveholders, those with 11 or more slaves, in 1850. By renting some of their slaves to local employers, widows received good incomes.

Sarah Barnes, sixth largest slaveowner in Mobile in 1850, presumably rented some of her 52 slaves to others. So did two other women with large slaveholdings in the 1857 city tax book. Eliza Goldthwaite, widow of a former State judge, who claimed 17 slaves, and Sarah Walton, widow of a former mayor of Mobile and mother of Octavia Walton Levert, owned 20 slaves.”

(Cotton City, Urban Development in Antebellum Mobile, Harriet E. Amos, University of Alabama Press, 1985, excerpt, pp. 87-89)

Fairfield, Connecticut’s black population, both free and enslaved, helped load the ships with Yankee notions, barrel staves, foodstuffs, and rum destined for Africa to trade for yet more slaves. The transatlantic slave trade that New England dominated by 1750 helped the region build and maintain its affluence.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Slaves of Connecticut

“Connecticut conducted another census in 1774. With a population of 4863, Fairfield was the eleventh largest town in Connecticut in 1774. The 4863 persons included 4544 whites and 319 blacks, giving Fairfield the highest percentage of black population in the colony.

Fairfield’s growing trade encouraged the growth of its black population. Approximately three out of every four blacks in Fairfield in the 1770’s were slaves. Most of them were men who worked as laborers or household servants; a smaller number of women were household servants; and even a smaller number were children.

Most slaves were denied the pleasure of residing, with or without the benefit of marriage, with a member of the opposite sex. Captain David Judson owned a married couple and their child, but more typical was Hezekiah Gold, who owned four men, “a wench,” a young man, and two boys. Slavery was a luxury that Fairfield came to afford as it became more affluent. Most free blacks in Fairfield worked as laborers, either on the docks or on board ship.”

(Fairfield, The Biography of a Community, Thomas J. Farnham, Fairfield Historical Society, 1988, excerpts, pp. 71-72)

Well aware that the perilous “wolf by the ears” predicament facing the United States in his time was greatly the fault of New England’s penchant for slave trading profits, Jefferson saw the North sell its slaves southward and then proclaim themselves “free States” and morally superior to the South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Jefferson’s View of the North’s Slave Trade

“Mr. Jefferson’s opposition to slavery was known then, as it is now. Undoubtedly appreciating the fact that slavery, as prevalent then in the South, was extremely expensive to the masters, far more than “slavery” subsequently maintained by the Northern manufacturer, he stated his grievance upon this matter in the original draft of the Declaration [of Independence], but subsequently crossed out this paragraph.

In a courteous, yet Voltaire-like manner, he caustically refers to the slave-trade of the pious Yankee, and, rather than cause a disruption, he omitted that clause from his draft. Thus, while there was chance of earning a few dollars, the North was fully willing to accept the conditions and to continue the [slave] trade. Indeed, when certain Southern States prohibited the importation of slaves, it was New England which arose in defense of that trade.

“Times change and we with them.” After selling their slaves into the South, the same people suddenly changed their minds as to slavery, and, lifting up their hands in horror, described the Southern slave owner as an inhuman brute, a cruel oppressor, etc. The abolition societies and various fanatics, sincere and insincere, voluntary fanatics and paid fanatics, suddenly discovered supposedly crying needs of the “poor, downtrodden black brother,” and by various means and devices, attempted his emancipation. No crime and injustice was omitted in their acts.

And yet, simultaneously, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, white too, were held in a more inhuman bondage in the North than the black man down South. Living under the most deplorable and miserable conditions, working long hours with hardly enough food to keep body and soul together, that mob of inhumanity was called free!

Truly they were free, free to die!”

(Secession, W.A. Lederer, Philadelphia, Confederate Veteran Magazine, September 1930, excerpt, pg. 338)

New York is properly referred to as a former slave State — slaveholding there did not end until the late 1820’s, though the children of slaves remained in bondage for many years after. Rather than lose their investment, New Yorkers sold their chattel to plantations in the South before the deadline. Additionally, the small free-black population which remained in New York found themselves proscribed by Jim Crow laws which erected a minimum property ownership in order to vote, which effectively disenfranchised them.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

New York Slaveholding Brought Comfort and Prestige

“New York was slow in drawing white settlers until after mid [18^th] century, and the shortage of labor led to a considerable use of slaves; indeed it is possible that in the early Dutch days it was slave labor that enabled the colony to survive. Most of the first slaves were not from Africa but were re-imported from Curacao in the Dutch West Indies.

It was a profitable system: in the 1640’s it cost only a little more to buy a slave than to pay a free worker’s wage for a year. After the English took control of New Netherland in 1664, a brisk and highly profitable trade in skilled slaves was carried on. Most slaveholders in the province were flourishing small farmers or small artisans who, in the absence of an adequate supply of free labor, needed moderately skilled help, and were able to pay the rising prices for slaves.

A partial census of 1755 showed a widely diffused slave population, most owners having only one or two slaves, only seven New Yorkers owning ten or more. Among the largest lots held were those of the elder Lewis Morris with 66 slaves on his large estate and the first Frederick Philipse, an affluent landowner, with about 40.

Such men could work gangs of slaves on their manors, but slaves were also sought by other wealthy men for the comfort and prestige a substantial staff of domestic servants would bring. William Smith, for example, was reputed to keep a domestic staff of 12 or more to run his New York City household, and other leading citizens travelled with Negro footmen.

From the first the competition of black labor was resented by whites. Competition in the labor market was intensified by the slave owners’ widespread practice of putting out their slaves for hire, under-cutting white laborers who were paid twice the slaves’ wages.

Slave controls, reflecting persistent nervousness in the white population, were quite rigid. Aside from private punishments that could be administered by masters, such public controls were meant to put sharp limits on the temptations slaves would face. After 1702, flogging was prescribed if three slaves gathered together on their own time . . . nor could they engage in trade without their master’s consent.”

(America at 1750, a Social Portrait, Richard Hofstadter, Vintage Books, 1973, excerpt, pp. 99-101)

Many Puritans departed New England for the South to avoid the oncoming rush of secular Unitarianism. These New Englanders were no strangers to slavery; they had previously conquered and enslaved the Pequot tribe while appropriating their lands, and sent expeditions to the Cape Fear in the late 1600’s. After befriending local Indians who entrusted their children to Puritan care – the children were sent to West Indian slave markets.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

New England Puritans and Slavery

“Into this rich coastal strip came Puritan settlers establishing a remarkable community.  It seemed a strange place for Puritans – one usually thinks of them along New England’s rocky shore or among snow covered valleys – but these Puritans had been wanderers, restlessly seeking the right place for their commonwealth.  Their ancestors had left Dorchester, England, in 1630 for Massachusetts, settling there for five years before moving on to Connecticut where they had remained for sixty years.

In 1695 a colony had left for South Carolina.  There beneath the great oaks and beside the black waters of the Ashley River they had laid out their village and built their meetinghouse.  As with most good Puritans, they had prospered – in spite of a sickly climate – so that within two generations there had been a need for new land.

Commissioners were sent to Georgia and, after some negotiations, a grant of over 31,000 acres had been secured.  In this way a colony of 350 whites accompanied by their 1,500 slaves began in 1752 a southward trek to what would become Liberty County.

These wandering Puritans found the Georgia coast a good place to settle and to at last send down deep roots.  The rich soil and the tidal rivers offered ample opportunity for the cultivation of rice and sea-island cotton.  Yet as God-fearing Calvinists, they were aware of the seductions of such a rich wilderness, and they immediately set about establishing an organized community.

They declared that they had a “greater regard to a compact Settlement and Religious Society than future temporal advantages.”  “We are sensible,” they wrote in the Articles of Incorporation, “to the advantages of good order and social agreement, among any people, both for their Civil and Religious Benefit . . .”

They would not be lonely pioneers facing the wilderness on their own, but members of a well-ordered community.  For these Puritan settlers, the government of such a community would consist of two coordinate branches: the Church and the Society.  The Church would be governed by the male communing members who would administer spiritual affairs; the Society would be composed of all males who would subscribe to the Articles of Incorporation, whether they were communing members of the Church or not, and would administer temporal affairs.

If this were not a “Holy Commonwealth,” it was clearly a Christian Society they wished to establish on the Georgia coast – and not, incidentally, it was just as clearly a society to be governed by white males.”

(“Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country,” Erskine Clarke, University of Alabama Press, 1999, excerpts, pp 4-5)

The following extract is from Robert Y. Hayne’s 1830 debate with Daniel Webster of the slave-trading State of Massachusetts, on the nature of the federal union. As is seen below, Hayne distinctly delineates the origin of African slavery in the Southern States, who profited from the nefarious trade, and those who did their Christian best with what they had inherited from the British colonial labor system.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

An 1830 View of Slavery in the South

“Sir, when arraigned before the bar of public opinion on this charge of slavery, we can stand up with conscious rectitude, plead not guilty, and put ourselves upon God and our country. We deal in no abstractions. We will not look back to inquire whether our fathers were guiltless in introducing slaves to this country.

If an inquiry should ever be instituted in these matters, however, it will be found that the profits of the slave trade were not confined to the South. Southern ships and Southern sailors were not the instruments of bringing slaves to the shores of America, nor did our merchants reap the profits of that “accursed traffic.” But, sir, we will pass over all this.

If slavery, as it now exists in this country be an evil, we of the present found it ready made to our hands. Finding our lot cast among a people, whom God had manifestly committed to our care, we did not sit down to speculate on abstract questions of theoretical liberty. We met it as a practical question of obligation and duty.

We resolved to make the best of the situation in which Providence had placed us, and to fulfill the high trust which had developed upon us as the owners of slaves, in the only way in which such a trust could be fulfilled without spreading misery and ruin throughout the land.

We could not send them back to the shores from whence their fathers had been taken; their numbers forbade the thought, even as we did not know that their condition here is infinitely preferable to what it possibly could be among the barren sands and savage tribes of Africa . . .

[With the false philanthropy of Northern abolitionists and the] shedding of tears over sufferings which had existence only in their own sickly imaginations, these “friends of humanity” set themselves systematically to work to seduce the slaves of the South from their masters.

By means of missionaries and political tracts, the scheme was in great measure successful. Thousands of these deluded victims of fanaticism were seduced into the enjoyment of freedom in our Northern cities. And what has been the consequence?

Go to these cities now, and ask the question. Visit the dark and narrow lanes, and obscure recesses, which have been assigned by common consent as the abodes of those outcasts of the world — free people of color. Sir, there does not exist, on the face of the whole earth, a population so poor, so wretched, so vile, so loathsome, so utterly destitute of all the comforts, conveniences and comforts of life as the unfortunate blacks of Philadelphia, and New York and Boston.

Sir, I have had some opportunities of making comparisons between the condition of the free Negroes of the North and the slaves of the South . . . Sir, I have seen in the neighborhood of one of the most moral, religious and refined cities of the North, a family of free blacks, driven to the caves of the rock, and there obtaining a precarious subsistence from charity and plunder.”

(Speech of Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, January 25, 1830; The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union, Herman Belz, Editor, Liberty Fund, 2000, excerpts, pp. 44-46.)

Alabamian John Moncure Daniel was appointed charge’ to Sardinia by President Franklin Pierce in July, 1853, a post he would hold until early 1861. His conversation with Jeremiah Black (below) reveals the murky nature of Northern war aims as Black later claimed that slavery abolition was the pure cause of the war, despite his known hostility toward abolition fanatics.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Slavery is But an Accident in this Quarrel

“John Moncure Daniel had one last official duty to perform in Washington: a farewell visit to the Department of State, to which he had reported for almost eight years. His mission to Italy had formally ended on January 28 [1861], when President [James] Buchanan had signed the warrant for his recall.

One day in February Daniel paid a call on the new secretary of state, Jeremiah Black, a Northerner who had taken office only two months earlier, after the resignation of Lewis Cass. Black had been the U.S. attorney general and a successful lawyer in Pennsylvania. Daniel’s great-uncle considered him the ablest member of Buchanan’s cabinet.

Three years after their 1861 meeting, John Daniel recalled that he had expressed Southern sentiments to the new secretary of state. The two had talked about the troubles that were approaching, and Daniel had alluded to the matter of slavery. According to Daniel, Black had replied:

“Sir, slavery is but an accident in this quarrel. Slavery is only the John Doe and Richard Doe case, in which this mooted question is to be decided – whether your States shall continue their sovereignty and self-government, or the Northern majorities shall govern you and all of you as they please and according to their own separate interest. If they had not the point of slavery convenient, they would try it on other points just the same.”

(Pen of Fire, John Moncure Daniel, Peter Bridges, Kent State University Press, 2002, excerpt page 161)

Southern uneasiness regarding slavery agitation had its origins in the murderous Haitian and Santo Domingo slave revolts, and Northern abolitionist encouragement of slave insurrection in the South, culminating in Nat Turner’s 1831 terrorism and John Brown’s attack. In contrast to their strenuous efforts to incite violent slave uprisings, the abolitionists never advanced a peaceful and practical solution to the slavery they abhorred.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Slaves and the South

“Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rude plenty prevailed on the average plantation.

“The best preventative of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian. Kindliness and patience, frequently extended even to a tolerance of slackness in every concern not vital to routine, created a degree of contentment among the slaves to keep them docile. Although Jefferson had declared “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,” Harriet Martineau sympathized with the masters.

She wrote: “Nothing struck me more than the patience of the slave-owners . . . with their slaves.” Travelers often wondered who were the actual victims of the slave system.

Despite abolitionist allegations to the contrary, flights and revolts were infrequent. Fear that they should become general led the South to introduce ruthless laws for the apprehension of the absconders and federal legislation to protect their institution.

Actually, however, the thousands of slaves who ran away formed but a slight portion comprising the total slave population. During the several decades of its existence only some 75,000 Negroes used the underground railroad, which was organized to aid them in their attempt to reach Canada.

Flights were prompted by various causes. Some slaves undoubtedly ran away because they were talented or sensitive mulattoes who desired freedom. Others wished to escape from barbarous punishments peculiar to the slave system. Many fled . . . not to escape slavery but to return to their families and former homes. Some strayed for reasons not associated with slavery; they became tramps or vagabonds or fugitives from deserved punishments and crimes. Most slaves, unlike migratory free Negroes of a later generation, did not move from their original homes.”

(The South Old and New, A History, 1820-1947, Francis Butler Simkins, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, pp. 46-47)

The traitors and misfits who terrorized North Carolinians during the war, called “Buffaloes,” were a by-product of the Northern invader. General Pickett and Hoke, during their attempts to liberate northeastern North Carolina in 1863-64, dealt severely with local men who aided and abetted the enemy. The Fort Branch mentioned below, was named in honor of Brigadier-General Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, a native of nearby Enfield, NC who was killed in action at Sharpsburg in mid-1862.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Treason in Wartime North Carolina

“The Tenth North Carolina Regiment was encamped near Fort Branch (about five miles east of Hamilton on the Roanoke River), and was awaiting the Federals, in December 1864. A force of Federals . . . were known to be advancing from Plymouth, reaching the vicinity of Fort Branch in the night of December 11.

“The enemy, piloted by some buffaloes (traitors) crossed the creek below (the east) and took our troops at the bridge in the rear. We had turned off from the main road from Tarboro to Williamston in order to come in by Hamilton to reinforce from the rear our troops at Butler’s Bridge.”

The term buffaloes, commonly referred to renegade bands in eastern North Carolina, composed of armed Negroes, native Union bushwhackers, and criminally-intentioned local misfits. They preyed on the prosperous and poor alike, relying on brutality for their success.”

(A Tarheel Confederate and His Family, Robert Garrison Elliott, RGE Publications, 1989, excerpts, pp. 51; 60)