Category: Republican Party

Economic Purposes of Reconstruction

The capture and occupation of New Orleans and South Carolina’s Sea Islands early in the war energized Northern Radicals. This brought both Southern cotton into their near bankrupt treasury and brought forth measures designed to destroy the South’s economic system to include the destruction of plantations to include crops, livestock and equipment, and also carry off Southern farm workers. For Radicals, they represented a potential new electorate, and source of troops.

Economic Purposes of Reconstruction

“[Gen. Benjamin] Butler’s course in New Orleans was far removed from Lincoln’s conciliatory efforts to find and organize a loyal population of the South, but it met enthusiastic response from the Radicals in Congress and their supporters in the Union League. The measures designed to destroy the Southern economic system met warm approval, while the organization of a potential new electorate appealed to the ambitions of aspiring politicians. Not least among the latter was Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase.

Butler’s administration in [occupied] New Orleans, the Secretary informed the General, had given “the greatest satisfaction” to all his friends. Lincoln, said Chase, had put Butler in an embarrassing position by having no fixed policy in regard to slavery. But Butler should make his own position clear: “Let it be understood that you are no pro-slavery man.” In fact, Chase could find but one admonition to give. Rumors abounded that Butler and his officers had been engaged in “mercantile speculation” and this, thought Chase, sounded the only sour note in an otherwise excellent administration.

In the Confederate vocabulary, [Butler’s men] were looting . . . In the idiom of a later generation, they were engaged in “black market” activities . . . acquiring cotton and shipping it northward. At Ship Island, General Neal Dow, author and defender of Maine’s prohibition law, diverted a government vessel to carry the contents of several plantation homes to his own house in Portland. Butler’s brother, favored by cotton trading permits, grew rich in the Crescent City. The military government in New Orleans was giving a crude but a vivid and well-understood lesson in the economic purposes of Reconstruction.

[In November 1861, South Carolina’s Sea Islands] containing 195 plantations and about ten thousand slaves, fell into Union hands. When the troops arrived, they found a large store of cotton, and Chase immediately sent agents to collect it. By June 1862, Sea Island cotton shipped to New York had brought $724,984, of which more than half a million, went into the US Treasury.

[Gen. David] Hunter in January 1863 began to force Negroes into the army, [but] they took flight. The Northern plantation superintendents and foremen found the Negroes unwilling to work. Younger ones roamed the islands while the older ones lazed indoors and neglected the fields. They had, to the astonishment of the Yankees, no concept of wages, expected provisions to be furnished them, and worked only under compulsion.”

(Lincoln’s Plan of Reconstruction. William B. Hesseltine. Peter Smith Publishing, 1963, pp. 82-85)

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

The notorious “Union League” organization, working in concert with the Freedmen’s Bureau, was a postwar enforcement arm of northern Radicals which shepherded enfranchised freedmen to the polls to vote Republican and also discourage Southern white voters. Grant depended on 500,000 black votes to gain the presidency in 1868 – and thus began the tradition of a solid black Republican voting bloc of voters through the end of the century.

In 1867, arms were secured for League members in military companies “which became a menace to peace and good order in North Carolina communities. The most common of the graver outrages committed by the Negroes was barn-burning, which for a white farmer meant complete ruin and absolute want of food.” (Hamilton, pg. 339).

Ensuring Radical Hegemony

“The postwar North Carolina Convention met in October of 1865; and was composed, for the most part of men who had already been prominent in public life in North Carolina, and of others who were destined to become so. The Convention provided for an election to be held for Governor and members of the legislature. To fill the former position Jonathan Worth was duly elected; and a legislature composed of the best element of the State was chosen.

This legislature met on 12 December, when Worth was inaugurated, and all the machinery of a full State government at once put in operation. An able judiciary was also chosen, and Wm. A. Graham, the most illustrious of her many distinguished sons, was sent at the head of the North Carolina delegation to Washington to take the State back to her place in the Union.

But alas! the wild fanaticism of the North, which had driven the State from the Federal government was not sufficiently appeased, nor had the State and her people been sufficiently humiliated. Till that was done, there was no place for her around the old hearthstone. Her people must yet go through the “hell” of Congressional reconstruction, and drink deep of its fiery broth, before her Senators and Representatives could be admitted to their seats.

This legislature recognized the changed status of the Negro, and enacted laws appropriate to his new condition, giving him such civil rights and duties as that condition justified. County, town and city governments were reorganized, courts were regularly held and presided over by able and just men; the law was once more asserting itself and its invigorating influences were seen in the more hopeful demeanor of all classes of people. Had this state of affairs been allowed to continue, the dark pages of the Reconstruction regime might have never been written, and the name of the Ku-Klux Klans might never have appeared in the pages of National or State history.

But this was not to be. A prominent Northern politician had declared that the States which had been guilty of the crime of rebellion should be kept within the grasp of war for thirty years. The dark valley and shadow of death lay once more before the people of North Carolina.

The State was again put under military rule and the conquerors were not only to plant their heels upon the necks of the men who had been overcome in war, but were urged to press with all the vigor of their conquering power.

Though President Andrew Johnson asserted that the States had never having been separated from the Union, and had lost their Constitutional rights only while engaged in rebellion, and that on the laying down of arms and the renewal of allegiance to the United States Government, they had resumed their ante-bellum attitude and condition and should at once be recognized as a part of the Union. This policy aroused a frenzy at the North, scarcely less savage than the abolition craze, and it found fierce utterance in the Congress assembled at Washington. A controversy of intense partisan bitterness was then inaugurated between Johnson and the Radicals.

The vindictive House of Representatives affirmed, with redoubled emphasis, that, by the act of secession, the States recently engaged in war, had forfeited all their rights under the Constitution – and not having acknowledged their rebellion until they were forced to do so at the point of the bayonet, they should be relegated to the condition of territorial possessions, to be governed by Congress till the latter should deem them sufficiently humbled; and until new Constitutions should be framed and adopted by a vote of all the people, including the recently freed Negro. Most of the seceding States were formed into military districts, subject to the will of a Major General, and to be ruled by tyros and neophytes in government; —the standard of loyalty being the color of the skin, or an acknowledged membership in the Union League.”

(The Conditions That Led to the Ku Klux Klans, Mrs. T.J. Jarvis. North Carolina Booklet, May, 1901, No. 1, pp 13-14) (Reconstruction in North Carolina, J.G. Hamilton, Books for Libraries Press, 1971, pp. 337)

Shapers of Opinion

Those around Lincoln in mid-1864 were unsure of his reelection as emancipation was far from being popular, Grant’s casualty lists were endless and heartbreaking, and the draft was universally hated. Even Lincoln believed he would be replaced. To the rescue came   insiders like Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana, the former editor of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Dana wrote: “All the power and influence of the War Department was employed to secure the re-election of Mr. Lincoln.” Some 200,000 soldiers were furloughed to go home and vote, as well as patrol the polls to ensure Republican ballots were being cast. (Prince of Carpetbaggers, Jonathan Daniels. JB Lippincott Co., 1958, p. 105)

Shapers of Opinion

“Dana’s Chicago Republican, as the name implied, was strictly partisan, as was nearly every other contemporary newspaper. If the truth be told, editors of that era generally saw their job as more of shaping of opinion than the providing of news. And if they had to stretch the truth to get results? Well, that came with the territory.

From the hour I first occupied the position of editor to the present time,” a retiring journalist confessed, I have been solicited to lie on every given subject, and can’t remember ever having told a wholesome truth without diminishing the subscription list or making an enemy . . . Having a thorough contempt for myself, I retire in order to recruit my moral constitution.”

Except for subscribers to large metropolitan dailies, Americans interested in politics got their news from the partisan press and that press depended on party coffers and official funding. Editors acquired tremendous power, and far too often politicians awarded contracts and patronage because of that power. They also listened if an editor recommended someone for office, especially if that someone was the editor himself.”

(The General and the Journalists: Grant, Greeley and Dana. Harry Maihafer. Brassey’s Inc., 1998, p. 87; 222)

 

Nine-Month Men

Lincoln spent much of 1862 in efforts to colonize the many contrabands coming within advancing Northern lines, using his emancipation edict to solve the question of ownership. Both the Danes and Dutch were interested in taking them for labor on their Caribbean sugar plantations.

But after several bloody defeats in1862, few white northern men stepped forward to enlist. Massachusetts Republican Governor John Andrew, fearful of losing reelection due to an angry electorate, asked Lincoln to allow his regiments to serve nine-month terms and especially in non-lethal regions. Also, Lincoln allowed the counting of black non-residents against his quota which began a rush of agents to the occupied South to credit contrabands to their particular State. This competition led to the formation of US Colored Troops in early 1863.

It is noted below that the Boston Irish were “hostile to blacks” which the author did not clarify. The Irish were among the poorest segment of Massachusetts society who feared contrabands would migrate northward and depress wages.

Nine-Month Men     

“June 6, 1863, the happy day of departure for home, finally came for the nine-month troops of the 44th Massachusetts. General Foster tried to persuade “the boys” to reenlist at New Bern in a new artillery regiment, but most wanted to go home before considering serving again. Of the regiment’s 1,018 original members, 902 returned to civilian life – casualties were eight men who died of actual battle wounds, and twenty-four who succumbed to disease – including the regiment’s surgeon. Three men had deserted.

The 44th Regiment’s service in the State militia continued until the end of the war. Indeed, a month after their return from the South, in mid-July, Governor Andrew called out the 44th regiment, along with other militia units, to prevent violence in Boston and nearby towns at the time of New York City’s Draft Riot. Upon the Governor’s request, Federal troops in nearby garrisons were brought into the city.

As in New York, the enforcement in July of the Federal conscription law, combined with Lincoln’s emancipation policy, inflamed thousands of men and women in the North who opposed the war, particularly Irish Democrats in the eastern cities who opposed the war and [were] hostile to blacks. In Boston, an angry mob of nearly 5,000 citizens, including women, stormed the armory on Cooper Street where a unit of Federal troops awaited them inside the building. The troops fired into the crowd killing eight and wounding many others.”

(In the Country of the Enemy. William C. Harris, editor. University Press of Florida, 1999, pp. 29-31)

 

Intruders Within States

It is essential to understand that the word “union” was merely a convenient word to describe the agreement between 13 independent States (as referred to by the 1783 Treaty of Paris and the Articles of Confederation), who in 1789 agreed to a newer governing covenant between them. Of course, this in no way transferred a State’s population and territory into what was referred to as “the Union.” Below, the word “conquered” below reveals all. Hamilton noted in his 1789 Federalist opinion that a war between member States would mean the Constitution was at an end.

Rev. Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) was a Vermont-born preacher who “inclined to the view of his friend, John C. Calhoun, holding that the united States are a confederation of sovereign or independent States,” which was in line with the 1783 Treaty of Paris as England listed each former colony as an independent State.

Intruders Within States

“It was apparent on this theory – that no State could secede – that Lincoln built his executive plan for reorganizing the rebellious States as States in the Union in December 1863.

Brownson objected to the plan primarily as it was a distinctly executive plan [but] in no case, he maintained, did it come within the jurisdiction of the President to institute either military of civil governments in the conquered States or territories. [He] looked upon Lincoln’s plan or reorganization as a dangerous and revolutionary assumption of power contrary to our Constitution and republican form of government. He exposed sharply the equally discrediting alternatives in volved in Lincoln’s plan:

“If the States are still in the Union, the President violates their constitutions, and wars against the essential principle of every State constitution [no right to interfere]; if they are not States in the Union, but, as we maintain, population and territory belonging to the Union, then he transcends his province as executive of the government and attempt to do on executive authority what only Congress can do.”

If the States are still in the Union, as the administration claims, by what right, Brownson wanted to know, had Lincoln appointed Andrew Johnson as governor of Tennessee; Col Hamilton governor of Texas; Mr. Phelps governor of Arkansas; Eli Thayer as governor of Florida; Edward Stanly as governor of North Carolina; and Col. Shepley as governor of Louisiana. If these respective territories are States in the Union, then these so-called governors are intruders, without any constitutional authority, for under the American Constitution the right to choose its own officers is reserved to the State, “and there is no authority in the President or Congress to appoint a single State officer, not even a constable.” The error of the Lincoln administration, is denying that a State can secede.”

(Orestes A. Brownson: A Definitive Biography. Thomas R. Ryan. Our Sunday Visitor, 1976, p. 635)

A War Far, Far Away

The following reminds us of Robert E. Lee’s mid-December 1866 letter to Britain’s Lord Acton, noting that the new highly centralized US government had become despotic at home as well as aggressive abroad.”

The colonial French stronghold of Deinbienphu surrendered to North Vietnamese forces on May 7,1954, leading to the partition of Vietnam into North and South. The latter would be protected by inclusion into the new SEATO defense treaty, which in hindsight was a gross mistake. The author below noted that Eisenhower did “Americanize” the region and commit US prestige to defend a government, which to use Dulles’s phrase, “would lose the support of the people.” It had been Eisenhower himself who predicted the consequences. It would be Eisenhower’s successors who would have to face them.”

A War Far, Far Away

“Still, neither Dulles nor Eisenhower were willing to throw in the towel [in late-April]. They quickly devised an alternative plan by which a United Action coalition could be arranged among France, the ANZUS countries, and the Associated States. Dienbienphu would be lost, but the French could withdraw into defensible enclaves where they could be supported by American air and sea power. The British could join the coalition later. Eisenhower sounded out the Republican leaders.

“There are plenty of people in Asia,” he explained, “and we can train them to fight well. I don’t see any reason for American ground troops to be committed in Indochina, don’t think we need it, but we can train their forces and it may be necessary for us eventually to use some of our planes or aircraft off the coast and some of our fighting craft we have in that area for support.” The essential point was, Eisenhower concluded, “Where in the hell can you let the Communists chip away anymore [sic]. We just can’t stand it.”

“[During a National Security Council meeting on April 29, Eisenhower noted that] the position of the US as the leader of the free world necessitated associates. Without allies “the leader is just an adventurer like Genghis Kahn.” Further, “We would in the eyes of many Asiatic peoples merely replace French colonialism with American colonialism . . . [and] be everywhere accused of imperialistic ambitions. A unilateral intervention would mean a general war with China and perhaps the USSR, which the US would have to prosecute separated from its allies.”

(Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy in the Fifties. R. Melanson; D. Mayers, editors. University of Illinois Press. 1989, pp. 142-143)

 

Reconstruction Days in Washington

On March 2, 1875, President Grant signed the Civil Rights Bill for which Charles Sumner had labored so many years, and which was a tribute to his memory. Southerners and Democrats in Congress had bitterly contested the Bill, which imposed a $500 fine, upon owners of restaurants, theaters and hotels which refused to accommodate all persons regardless of color. The Bill did not apply to churches nor to schools – and in the South, was held to be an unwarrantable interference with the rights of the individual States, and after a number of test cases in the lower courts, this opinion was sustained by the US Supreme Court.

Reconstruction Days in Washington

“During the Reconstruction period the colored people of Washington were able briefly to enjoy some of those advantages and privileges for which they and their Radical friends had so long struggled. The leaders of the Republican party, well-aware that only the solid support of the colored voters of the South had regained the two-thirds majority of their party in Congress and therefore anxious to preserve their loyalty, treated the colored representatives with a healthy respect.

The largest contingent of Negro congressmen had come from South Carolina, which had been under Republican control since the new state constitution of 1869. The white “Scalawag” members who had been returned to the 41st Congress had reflected little credit on their state or their party. One of them, B.F. Whittemore, had resigned after his sale of West Point cadetships was revealed. Another, C.C. Bowen, the representative for the Charleston district, was jailed for bigamy after a long and sensational trial in the District courts. Convicted by a mixed jury, Bowen was freed after two weeks in prison; he was not, however, renominated for his congressional seat.

Joseph H. Rainey was a mulatto native of Georgetown, SC and a barber. His scanty formal education had been improved by travel in the West Indies. In an interview, Rainey stated it was hard to find rooms in Washington and that colored congressmen were charged more than white men. At Falf’s Bar, across from the Post Office, he had been obliged to pay fifty cents for a glass of beer, the water freely admitting that the extra charge was account of his color.”

(The Uncivil War: Washington During the Reconstruction: 1865-1878. James H. Whyte, Twayne Publishers, 1958, pp. 237-238; 242)

Florida’s Reconstruction

By order of the Sixth District’s Federal military occupation commander, Major-General John Pope, the election of Florida’s constitutional convention members was to be held on November 14, 15 and 16, 1867. Those chosen to register voter names were noted as “pronounced and bitter Republican partisans,” and holding positions as election officers and poll judges.

The struggles over Reconstruction issues in Florida noted below would revive the State’s prewar Democratic party, as conservative citizens became aware of the Republican scheme to form a “ring” to monopolize the State’s railways with New York funding.

Florida’s Reconstruction

“The native whites were not exhibiting interest in registering [under Reconstruction rule]. From Walton County, West Florida, came the report: “I fear this class (negroes, carpetbaggers and scalawags) will control the county unless a greater interest can be awakened.” What is true of Walton is true of most of the counties in the State,” announced the Floridian.

The mass of the whites had refrained from voting, with only 1,220 white votes cast, of which 203 were against assembling the convention. The Conservative party [of native whites] had succeeded neither in making Conservative voters of the negroes nor in preventing them from voting the Republican ticket.

Forty-six delegates were actually returned in this election: eighteen were negroes, and three of the latter were citizens of other States. Of the twenty-seven whites, one or two were Conservatives, fifteen or sixteen were Radical carpetbaggers from the North, and ten or twelve Southern loyalist or “scalawags.”

What were the obvious characteristics of these delegates chosen by the newly enfranchised? Several of the negro members were unlettered – unable to read or write. Two or three of the blacks had evil reputations and would have done better in jail than in legislative halls. Of the whites, the native Union or loyalist element was made up of men of no particular reputation – good or bad – and of mediocre enlightenment.

The carpetbag or Northern element – composing about one-third of the delegates – contained some men of considerable intelligence and passable education. The most cultured member of the convention, probably, was Jonathan Gibbs, a tall and slightly- built man of color indicating mulatto origin. Born in Philadelphia, educated at Dartmouth College and Princeton Theological Seminary, he was a fairly successful type of an intelligent black subjected to New England culture.

Sent into Florida for philanthropic work among the negroes. He soon entered politics and was ere long in rubbing shoulders with cantankerous and thieving ignorance. He died before the end of Republican rule, ostensibly from eating too heavy a dinner. It was rumored that he was poisoned by fellow Republicans.”

(The Civil War & Reconstruction in Florida, William Watson Davis, Columbia University, 1913, pp. 491-495)

 

The Deadliest War

The author cited below wrote: “Perhaps it was cold comfort to dismembered Mexico, but the “Mexican Cession” led in the next two decades to the death of a million gringos, as well as to sectional hatreds that persist to the present.” The Compromise of 1850 led to the political rise of Lincoln, John Brown’s violence, the formation of the Republican party, the election of Lincoln, the withdrawal of Southern States and war.

The Deadliest War

“The Deadliest war in American history, in terms of total deaths per thousand who served per year, at last was over. Of the 100,182 soldiers, sailors, marines who participated, only 1548 were killed in action, but 10,970 died from disease and exposure. Thus, the mortality rate was 110 per 1000 per annum (as compared with a Civil War rate of 65; a Spanish-American War rate of 27.79; and a World War I rate of 16. In World War II the death rate was about 3 percent of the total strength of the armed forces.

And the death rate was appallingly high in relation to the length of actual combat, for the conflict with Mexico lasted just twenty-two months (with only seventeen months of actual combat) . . . [and American soldiers] would continue to succumb to diseases contracted in Mexico for the next several decades. J.J. Oswandel, a veteran of the war, wrote in 1885, “After the close of the war we returned home with impaired health . . . with a disease contracted in a strange climate, which, in a few years after the war had taken from their homes more than half of those who returned.”

(North America Divided: The Mexican War, 1846-1848. S. Connor & O. Faulk. Oxford University Press, 1971, pp.170-171)

Hoosier Col. Benjamin Harrison

A fervent prewar Republican, Benjamin Harrison was first elected in 1860 as reporter for the Indiana Supreme Court. In 1862, he gained appointed as an officer and served under Sherman in the Atlanta campaign.

In the early postwar, Harrison warned Indiana audiences that “the Southern foe remained just as wily, mean and impudent as ever, and politics would be the new battleground against ex-rebels.” Though he didn’t advocate immediate enfranchisement for former slaves,” he insisted that “should white Southerners remained recalcitrant, the adoption of black suffrage offered the only way to produce truly loyal governments in the South.” The key to a successful peace was to keep the rebels and “their northern allies out of power. If you don’t,” Harrison warned, “they will steal away, in the halls of Congress, the fruits won from them at the glistening point of the bayonet.”

As the Republican national standard bearer in 1888 against Grover Cleveland, Harrison lost the popular vote but lavish Republican campaign spending in crucial swing States bought him victory in the Electoral College. A lasting blot on his presidency was the American-led coup of Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani in 1893.

Hoosier Col. Benjamin Harrison

“Atlanta fell to Sherman in early September 1864 and ten days later Harrison headed home under orders to report to Governor Morton for “special duty.” That duty included recruitment of news soldiers and more important, campaigning for the Republican ticket in the fall election.

After Harrison entered the army in 1862, Hoosier Democrats had secured a court order declaring the supreme court reporter office vacant, and in a special election, Democrat Michael Kerr had defeated an ineffectual Republican candidate. In 1864 the Republicans nominated Harrison again for the position. He stumped the State vigorously, adjuring voters to stand by the Republicans and the war effort, while accusing Democrats of halfhearted resistance to, if not outright sympathy for, the rebellion.” Further, he condemned the Democrats’ notion of State sovereignty as a “deadly poison to national life.”

Moreover, defying the widespread Negrophobia within Indiana, Harrison fervently defended the Emancipation Proclamation and extolled the courageous service of blacks in the effort to suppress the rebellion. Harrison and the entire State ticket triumphed, and Lincoln carried Indiana.

Immediately after the election, Harrison headed for Georgia to rejoin his men [but] received orders to take command of a brigade forming in Tennessee to block a Confederate counteroffensive. He found the brigade a mongrel outfit with many men “quite unfit for duty in the field” – some hardly recovered from wounds, others just back from sick leave, and a large number of raw recruits, including many European immigrants unable to speak English.”

(Benjamin Harrison. Charles W. Calhoun. Henry Holt and Company. 2005, pp. 24-25)