Category: Sharp Yankees

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)

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

Jim Fisk’s father, known as “Pop,” was pure Yankee descended from English forbears, an itinerant peddler who left home with a loaded wagon on Mondays to return at week’s end with diminished cargo but thicker wallet. On one peddling trip, he ran out of shawls and had an excess of small, flowered tablecloths, he assured housewives that the tablecloths were the latest Boston style in shawls and sold them all.”

Below, Fisk’s son Jim followed in his father’s footsteps, doing what it took to turn a profit. Once war came, he never “felt any desire to shoulder a musket and help save the Union,” leaving the war to be fought by enthusiastic volunteers and reluctant draftees, and himself more like those who bought their way out.

During the war Jim hired adventurous actress Lottie Hough to wheedle passes through Union lines and her success so complete that she retired postwar with an immense fortune. As Grant closed in on Richmond and sensing the Confederacy’s inevitable demise, he and a small clique sent an agent to London to buy Confederate bonds short to all buyers. The agent arrived two days before news of Lee’s surrender reached England, after making a financial killing for his employers.

The Jordan Marsh enterprise below was founded at Boston in 1841 by Eben Dyer Jordan and Benjamin L. Marsh.

Vast New Merchandising Opportunities

“Unlike most Bostonians, Fisk sensed that the South would not swallow Lincoln, that a war was coming. In the merits of the North-South quarrel he took little interest, but it struck him that whatever they were fighting about would open vast new merchandising opportunities. When Sumter fell and the war did come, he went to Washington to see if the government might be interested in purchasing textiles.

No one entertained with the rollicking bonhomie of James Fisk, Jr., one of the first of the war profiteers. Fisk’s company had several thousand blankets of an unappetizing color and somewhat mildewed. Retailers spurned them but Uncle Sam snapped them up.

In 1862, with cotton rotting in Southern warehouses and hard to come by in the North even at two dollars a pound, he set about to remedy the imbalance. While getting cotton out of the South involved trading with the enemy, violating the blockade, smuggling and possibly other illegalities, he justified on the ground of patriotism, reasoning that it was ridiculous that soldiers should be deprived of essential clothing – and merchants of profit – because of a mere technicality. The details of this bootleg operation, with its essential stratagems and bribes, remain dim, for he said little about it after the war.

Fisk never lacked courage if there was money in it, made several buying trips into the Dixie No Man’s Land . . . sending cotton north by the boatload, cargoes of fabulous value that kept the spindles whirring at Jordan Marsh, now the nation’s biggest enterprise of its kind. One of his biographers solemnly avers that his purchases of contraband cotton reached peaks as high as $800,000 a day.”

(Jim Fisk: The Career of an Unstoppable Rascal. W.A. Swanberg. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959, pp. 17-19

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)

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)

 

Improved Arms for Gold

Since the early 1700s, New England merchants were engaged in the transatlantic slave trade which populated the American South with labor for the plantations. After Eli Whitney’s gin was invented in the 1790s, the owners of New England’s busy cotton textile looms ignored the moral and humane aspects of perpetuating slavery, being more concerned with profit and loss statements. Once war began in 1861, they focused on their government capturing Southern ports to reopen the supply of cotton.

Improved Arms for Gold

“September 6th – We are not increasing our forces as rapidly as might be desired, for the want of arms. We had some 150,000 stand of arms, at the beginning of the war, taken from the arsenals; and the States owned probably 100,000 more. Half of these were flint-locks, which are being altered. None have been imported yet.

Occasionally a letter reaches the department from Nashville, offering improved arms at a high price, for gold. These are Yankees.

I am instructed by the Secretary to say they will be paid for in gold on delivery to an agent in Nashville. The number likely to be obtained in this manner, however, must be small; for the Yankee Government is exercising much vigilance.

Is this not a fair specimen of Yankee cupidity and character? The New England manufacturers are furnishing us, with whom they are at war, with arms to fight with, provided we pay them a higher price than is offered by their own Government! The philosophical conclusion is, that this war will end when it ceases to be a pecuniary speculation.”

(Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate Capital, Volume I. J.B. Jones. J.B. Lippincott & Co. 1866, pg. 78)

Southern Aristocracy?

Greatly concerned in the mid-1700s over their growing African populations, both Virginia and North Carolina petitioned the British Crown to end its slave trade. This was denied while New England’s transatlantic slave trade continued.

Southern Aristocracy?

“That subordination of the black race which was called slavery gave rise to a certain development of society, not at all English, however, bore some features of an aristocracy. But this was by no means so general as might be inferred from much seen lately in print about the subject of the “slave oligarchy” of the South. It was by no means the controlling force. In South Carolina alone, by her peculiar Constitution, could it be correctly said that the slaveholders as a class held the political power.

The anti-slave element was always strong in Virginia; but for external agitation, I have no doubt slavery would have been abolished there long ago, or have been greatly modified. The same is true of North Carolina.

Throughout the South no feeling was more general, none stronger with the voting majority, than a deep-seated detestation of the very name “Aristocracy.” I do not think there was a county in Georgia where a man could have been elected to the State Legislature, or to any other office, upon the principles of an aristocracy, or if he were ever known to favor such a doctrine.

Eight-tenths of the people of Georgia, I believe, were thorough Jeffersonian Republicans and would have been as thorough abolitionists as Jefferson if they could have seen what better they could do with the colored people than they were doing.

They had a hard problem to solve, and the external agitation kept down internal inquiry and discussion as to whether there was any proper and safe solution [to the slaves among them].”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pg. 422)

The African Slave Market

The trade in African slaves long-predated Britain’s American colonies, as it was essential for labor-intensive plantations. By 1705, New England’s own transatlantic slave trade began surpassing England’s. At the time of the Revolution, cotton production was limited to a small scale, but in 1793, Massachusetts tinkerer Eli Whitney’s cotton gin greatly increased production and the demand for more African slaves. By the early 1800s, Massachusetts textile mills competed with England’s own industry – both were deeply responsible for the perpetuation of slavery in America. Even as late as 1860, New York businessmen and Portuguese slave merchants were bribing New York port authorities to allow ships bound for Cuba for outfitting as slavers, which then sailed for Africa to load slaves, thence to Cuba and Brazil to work the sugar cane fields.

The African Slave Market

“. . . in the high Middle Ages numerous Sudanese and Guinean slaves were brought to the African shore of the Mediterranean by [Muslim] trans-Saharan caravans and then sold to Christian merchants who marketed them in eastern Spain, southern France, and Italy.

During the second half of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese re-routed a great part of this trade, as they re-routed much of the trans-Sahara gold trade at the same time. In both instances, from an overland trade with Muslim and Italian intermediaries, they developed a direct maritime trade with West Africa for gold and slaves, exactly as they did in the following century with the spices from the East Indies.”

(The Beginnings of Modern Colonization: Eleven Essays. Charles Verlinden, ed., Cornell University Press. 1970. C.R. Boxer review excerpt, The American Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 1, February 1972, 118)

The North’s War Against Free Trade

The unbridled pursuit of financial gain in America was no surprise to Englishmen and simply “a distasteful feature of democracy.” The British noted the widespread corruption in American political life and the rise of low men to power, while those better educated and unwilling to play the demagogue were not sought out. The British saw, especially in Northern States, an unwholesome tyranny of the democratic mob which eventually would break apart and replaced with an aristocracy or monarchy of better men.

The North’s War Against Free Trade

“The United States Senate, after fourteen Southern members had withdrawn (as their States had withdrawn from the United States), passed with a majority of eleven votes the almost prohibitive Morrill Tariff; the Confederate States adopted a constitution forbidding any tariff except for revenue – a denial, that is, of the principle of protection (for select industries).

From the economic point of view, which to some students of history is the only point of view, a major issue became perfectly clear. The North stood for protection, the South for free trade.

And for Englishmen . . . certain conclusions were obvious. “This [tariff] was the first use the North made of its victory [in the Senate]”, said one Englishman in a pamphlet . . .” The contrast between North and South was real and unambiguous, and so too were England’s free-trade convictions.

With those convictions and after these events, it was natural that many Englishmen . . . should readily embrace the theory of the South’s seceding because of economic oppression – since there had to be a reason for secession and both sides agreed that slavery was not the reason. As one of the ablest of the “Southern” Englishmen, James Spence, said, the South had long been convinced “that the Union was worked to the profit of the North and their own loss. [And] consider that the immediate cause of the revolt of those 13 colonies from this country was a duty of 3d. per pound on tea . . .”

The Confederate States were well aware of the appeal of economic facts. Their Secretary of State instructed James Mason on his mission to England to stress the free trade commitment of his government, as well as the British people’s “deep political and commercial interest in the establishment of the independence of the Confederate States.”

(The Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy. Sheldon Vanauken. Regnery Gateway, 1989. pp. 48-49)

Secession or a War of Rebellion?

Secession or a War of Rebellion?

The Possibility Foreseen by the Continental Congress. W.A. Lederer of Philadelphia.

“The voluntary withdrawal of a State, or group of States, from a Union, or any other political body is generally known as secession, notwithstanding the reasons and procedures leading up to this decision. In 1905, Norway seceded from the Scandinavian Union of some ninety years standing, which act was considered a peaceful separation from Sweden.

In 1776, the thirteen colonies separated from the motherland, which act, being settled with arms, but successfully, is known as the Revolution of ’76, or the first War of Independence. The year 1861 witnessed the outbreak of the second War of Independence, as we may justly name it, which received the offensive name given by the victor, the War of the Rebellion. (Commonly spoken, a revolution is a successful rebellion and thus had the thirteen colonies been unsuccessful, that war would have been known as the War of Rebellion, notwithstanding the causes).

To the truthful and sincere historian, the War of 1861-1865 is known as the War Between the States, its purpose being the prevention of the peaceful separation and secession of the Southern States from the 1789 Union. To the informed and educated American, therefore, secession means the justified act of a peaceful separation of economically two different sections of the Union.”

Mr. Lederer continued his review of the newly independent States and the issue of slavery and the North’s important role in perpetuating the institution. He wrote:

“Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence was “considerate and courteous, yet Voltaire-like as he caustically refers to the slave trade of the pious Yankee, and rather than cause a disruption of the drive for independence, he omitted this” from his final draft. In explaining this omission regarding African slavery: “It was struck out in compliance with South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain slave importation . . . Our Northern brethren also, felt a little tender toward those censures; for tho’ their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they have been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.”

(W.A. Lederer, Confederate Veteran, September, 1930, pp. 337-338)

It Was Not About Slavery

If continued black labor in the South was essential to the economic survival of the region and the ultimate reason for seeking independence, it was equally essential that the economic survival of Northern financial, textile, and manufacturing industry interests. It was not unexpected that after the Confederate States of America was formed in early February 1861 and enacted a modest 10% tariff which would have decimated northern ports, that those northern interests urged war against the South. It was not about slavery.

The following is excerpted from Mark R. Winchell’s posthumous “Confessions of a Copperhead” recently released by Shotwell Publishing. See www.shotwellpublishing.org.

It Was Not About Slavery

“If the North was fighting for an imperial vision of American hegemony rather than for the abolition of slavery, what motivated the South? The statement of South Carolina’s anti-flag scholars quotes several Confederate officials, who declared they were fighting to preserve slavery.

It would perhaps be more accurate to say that the Confederacy was formed to assure the economic survival of the American South. (The revolutionist’s declaration of independence from England was motivated by similar economic considerations.)  In 1861, African labor seemed essential to that survival [just as New England’s poverty-wage slavery held mill workers to their employment.]

Of even greater concern, however, was the agricultural tariff passed by the US Congress on behalf of Northern industrial interests. This tariff made it difficult for Southerners to sell cotton and other crops in European markets. An independent South, free of the tariff, would have prospered among the community of nations. If Lincoln was willing to assure the perpetuation of slavery, this former corporation lawyer was not willing to ease the tariff.”

(Confessions of a Copperhead, Culture and Politics in the Modern South, Mark R. Winchell, Shotwell Publishing, 2022, pg. 183)