Circa1865

A bronze equestrian monument of Maj. Gen. John F. Hartranft stands majestically outside the capitol building at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This memorial still stands today despite Hartranft waging war against Americans in the South who fought for political independence as did their ancestors in 1776. Under the Constitution Hartranft swore fealty to, Article III, Section 3 is clear regarding treason as waging war against a State.

After the death of Lincoln, Hartranft served as a special provost marshal during the show trial and predictable convictions, including that of Mary Surratt. He afterward personally led these Americans to the gallows in early July 1865.  In 1872 he became governor of Pennsylvania governor and won a second term in 1876 despite being accused of bribing leaders of the Molly Maguires to induce members to vote for him.

Monument to a War Hero Politician

Just prior to the battle of First Manassas in July 1861, the enlistment period of then-Col. Hartranft’s Pennsylvania regiment had expired, and they returned home. Assigned as an aide to another command during the battle, he was unsuccessful in his attempt to stem the wholesale retreat of Northern soldiers. For this latter action Hartranft was to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in 1886.

In April 1862, Hartranft was colonel of the 51^st PA regiment during Gen. Burnside’s invasion of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The resulting occupation of the islands and afterward New Bern was marked by the wholesale looting and pillaging of businesses and civilians.

In May 1863, Hartranft’s 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment was near Jackson, Mississippi as Grant approached Vicksburg. At that time, the Lieber Code which would govern the conduct of northern armies in the field was being promulgated – it forbade the waging of war against innocent civilians.

At Jackson, one of Hartranft’s officers later wrote in 1866 of the 51^st Pennsylvania troops who “broke ranks and ransacked the town of Jackson for tobacco, whiskey and valuables . . . Grocery, dry goods, hat, shoe, millinery and drug stores were broken open and “cleaned out” of every vestige of their contents: private dwellings entered and plundered of money, jewelry and all else of any value were carried off; crockery, chinaware, pianos, furniture, etc., were smashed to atoms; hogsheads of sugar rolled into the street and heads knocked in and contents spilled . . . and soon some very splendid buildings were reduced to ashes.”

The writer continues: “As the 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment was marching out [of town] it made quite a ludicrous appearance, for the men were clad in female attire, some with hats having crowns a foot high, some with masks on, shawls, frock skirts, with crinoline all over instead of underneath . . . marching with bonnet and bandboxes in their hands.

They were followed by the colored females, screaming with delight and begging the “Yankees” to “gib us dat bonnit,” and “Massa, do please gib me dat frock.” By the time they reached their destination the colored ladies were in possession of nearly every particle of female wear which the men had stolen.”

(History of the Fifty-first Regiment, Pennsylvania Volunteers. Thomas H. Parker, King & Baird, Printers, 1869, pp. 85; 363-365).

Historian Richard Weaver wrote that at the close of the Civil War “the side which more completely abjured the rules of chivalric combat won, and the way was cleared for modernism, with its stringency, abstractions, and its impatience with sentiment.” He added that here the Americans “proved pioneers in a field whose value to civilization is dubious.” He reminds the reader of General Sheridan’s postwar visit to the Prussian staff and suggestion that “noncombatants be treated with the utmost rigor” and opinion that the people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” It then seemed but an easy step from the military policies of Sherman and Sheridan to the blitzkrieg of the Nazi’s.

The Task of Conquering the American South

“Realization that the North as a whole did not propose to regard the war as a game came as a shock to the Southern people, who had always counted the Yankees out of chivalry, but who seemingly had never reckoned what this would mean in practice.

For the north had already become industrial, middle-class and bourgeois, and if it began the war with old-fashioned conceptions, they vanished after the removal of the dramatic and colorful George B. McClellan. Thereafter the task of conquering the South became a business, an “official transaction,” which cost a great deal more in dollars and lives than had been anticipated, but which was at length accomplished by the systematic marshalling of equipment and numbers. When Gen. John Pope’s Virginia campaign gave the South its first intimation that the north was committed to total war, the reaction was indignation and dismay.

Perhaps it is not too fanciful to read in Lee’s brief sentence, “Pope must be suppressed,” a feeling that he was fighting not so much against an individual enemy as an outlawed mode of warfare. And when Sherman, Sheridan and Hunter began their systematic ravaging and punishing of civilians, it seemed to the old-fashioned South that one of the fundamental supports of civilization had been knocked out, and that warfare was being thrown back to the barbarism from which religion and chivalry had painfully raised it in the Middle Ages.

The courtly conduct of Lee and his officers to the Dutch farm wives of Pennsylvania had been perhaps too much sentimentalized, but the fact remains that these men felt they were observing a code, which is never more needful than in war, when fear and anger blind men and threaten their self-control. Sherman’s dictum that war is hell was answered by E. Porter Alexander’s remark that it depends somewhat on the warrior.

Naturally the thought of being beaten came hard to Americans priding themselves on their martial traditions, but . . . what has done more than anything else to support the unreconstructed attitude is the thought that an enemy, while masking himself under pious pretensions and posing as the representative of “grand moral ideas” dropped the code of civilization in warfare and won in a dishonorable manner.”

(Southern Chivalry and Total War. Richard M. Weaver. Sewanee Review, Vol. LIII, 1945, pp. 8-9)

Mute Reminders of the Injuries Suffered

“Let these blackened ruins remain untouched. We are not an artistic people as the Yankees claim to be, we have neither the taste nor the money for Gettysburg monuments and amphitheatrical cemeteries. Our dead heroes sleep sweetly in the bosom of the old mother, whom they died to defend, and in her poverty the old mother has not decked their resting places with precious stones and miracles of art.

We have monuments enough left by the invader. The Ionian Greeks would not rebuild the temples which their barbaric enemies destroyed; they allowed the ruins to remain as mute reminders of the injuries suffered; as must appeals to heaven for vengeance. Let us in this spirit refuse to efface these memorials of our savage foes. In after-times it will almost a patent of nobility to have a ruin in the family.”  Basil L. Gildersleeve

In 1863 Republican Senator John Sherman recalled that it was William H. Seward rather than Lincoln who ordered the seizure of Maryland’s legislators in 1861, that “the high-handed proceeding was the work of Mr. Seward, of his own mere motion, without the knowledge of Lincoln.” Seward later told a British official that the arrests had been made to influence coming Maryland elections as well. Frederick (below) was Seward’s son.

Lincoln & Seward’s Military Coup

“The Lincoln administration believed, according to Frederick Seward, that “a disunion majority” in the Maryland State house would pass an ordinance to withdraw from the Union in September 1861. Lincoln had resolved to keep that from happening. Seward recalled: “[The military was] instructed to carefully watch the movements of members of the [Maryland] Legislature . . . Loyal Union members would not be interfered with . . . but “disunion” members would be turned back toward their homes and would not reach Frederick City at all. The views of each member were well-known . . . so there would be little difficulty, as Mr. Lincoln remarked, in “separating the sheep from the goats.”

[Seward continued]: “When the time arrived . . . it was found that not only was no secession ordinance likely to be adopted, but that there seemed to be no Secessionists to present one. The two generals had carried out their instructions faithfully, and with tact and discretion . . . No ordinance was adopted, Baltimore remained quiet, and Maryland stayed in the Union.”

Many arrests of northerners at that time involved freedom of speech and freedom of the press with Seward’s State Department records citing “treasonable language, “Southern sympathizer,” secessionist” and “disloyalty” as standard reasons for arrest and confinement. Additionally, even more serious-sounding arrest reasons were vague and sometimes denoted offensive words rather than deeds: “aiding and abetting the enemy,” threatening Unionists,” or “inducing desertion,” for example. A man in Cincinnati was arrested for selling envelopes and stationery with Confederate mottoes printed on them.

When an old associate of Seward came to Washington to plead for the release of a political prisoner from Kentucky held in Fort Lafayette, the secretary of state readily admitted that no charges were on file against the prisoner. When asked whether he intended to keep citizens imprisoned against whom no charge had been made, Seward apparently answered: “I don’t care a d—n whether they are guilty or innocent. I saved Maryland by similar arrests, and so I mean to hold Kentucky.”

(The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties. Mark E. Neely, Jr. Oxford University Press. 1991, pp. 15-16; 27-30)

Yankees in Georgia

“I . . . reached Halifax, my sister’s place, in two and a half hours at 9AM. She unlocked the door, looked at me with a terrified air [and] all overwhelmed with distress for my danger, for they too believed the Yankees were still in the county.

Then followed the sad recital of their sufferings and losses at the hand of the Yankees. The evidences were on every side. Broken trunks, smashed bureaus, overturned wardrobes – everything topsy-turvy just as the Yankees had left them. No use to put things in order to be again disturbed. But worse, far worse than all the mental agony from fear of personal violence and insult.

The Yankees had entered the house every day for nearly two weeks. Every separate gang ransacked the house afresh, entering every room and taking whatever they desired. The mental suffering of these three ladies and of my child only fourteen-years-old during these two weeks can never be told.

As soon as I could get a word in edgewise, I told them my reasons for believing the Yankees had left the county, but at the same time my grave fears that they were returning or had already returned. If they desired to go out, they must do so immediately, [and] the wagons would be here tonight. Anything was preferable to a repetition of the dreadful suspense through which they had passed.

In the afternoon I walked over to my own place to see Calder, the overseer. I received from him a detailed and most doleful account of [my] losses and the behavior of the negroes. Every living thing taken or destroyed, all the horses, the mules, the hogs (of which there were 100 head), cattle, chickens, ducks, every wheeled vehicle, also much corn, but none of the rice and cotton.

The negroes throughout the country he represents as in a state of complete insubordination – no work of any kind done. The Yankees had not only stripped him, Calder, of everything but had personally maltreated him and his family. They have treated overseers everywhere, I hear, harshly, and the negroes too take the opportunity of showing their dislike. To me and Sister’s family the negroes are extremely kind and considerate, even affectionate. Sister and her family are served as usual, and even more kindly and faithfully than usual.”

(‘Ware Sherman: A Journal of Three Months Personal Experience in the Last Days of the Confederacy. Joseph LeConte. LSU Press, 1999. Original 1937. pp. 29-32)

What is termed “total war” can be said to begin with the birth of the modern state, in which war became an instrument of national policy. Though the north’s “Lieber Code” of early 1863 clearly protected civilians from the barbarous acts of invading northern armies, senior officers such as Sherman had evolved their own personal philosophy of war clearly at variance with official pronouncements. Despite the “Code”, Sherman’s brutal conduct found no opposition from Lincoln or Grant.

Americans Civilians Suffer Total War

“The march of the Federals into our State,” says a writer in the Columbia [South Carolina] Phoenix, “was characterized by such scenes of license, plunder and conflagration as showed that the threats of the northern press, and that of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as mere brutum fulmen.

Daily, long trains of fugitives lined the roads, with wives and children, and horses and stock and cattle, seeking refuge from their pursuers. Long lines of wagons covered the highways. Half-naked people cowered from the winter under bush-tents in the thickets, under the eaves of houses, under the railroad sheds and in old cars left along the route. All these repeated the same story of suffering, violence, poverty and nakedness. Habitation after habitation, village after village – one sending up its signal flames to the other, presaging for it the same fate – lighted the winter and midnight sky with crimson horrors.

“No language can describe, not can any catalogue furnish, an adequate detail of the widespread destruction of homes and property. Granaries were emptied, and where the grain was not carried off, it was strewn to waste under the feet of the [Yankee] cavalry, or consigned to the fire which consumed the dwelling. The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing. The roads were covered with butchered cattle, hogs, mules, and the costliest furniture. Valuable cabinets, rich pianos, were not only hewn to pieces, but bottles of ink, turpentine, oil, whatever could efface or destroy, were employed to defile and ruin. Horses were ridden into the houses.

“The beautiful homesteads of the parish country . . . were ruined; ancient dwellings of black cypress, one hundred years old, which had been reared by the fathers of the Republic – men whose names were famous in Revolutionary history – were given to the torch as recklessly as were the rude hovels; choice pictures and works of art from Europe, select and numerous libraries, were all destroyed.

The inhabitants, black no less than white, were left to starve, compelled to feed only upon the garbage to be found in the abandoned camps of the northern soldiers. The corn scraped up from the spots where the horses fed has been the only means of life left to thousands but lately in affluence.”

(The Desolate South, 1865-1866. John T. Trowbridge; Gordon Carroll, ed. Little, Brown and Company, 1956, pp. 294-296)

A Land as Silent as a Graveyard

“The raids and rumors of raids were so traumatic to Clarissa Bowen that the tired, terrified woman miscarried. “All was over and we knew that God had taken from us the desire from our hearts – our much prayed for and longed for treasure,” the South Carolinian wrote in her journal, June 1865. “O, it was hard, very, very hard to give up . . . My recovery had been slow, being constantly retarded by fear of the Yankees.”

“Still another batch of Yankees . . .,” a weary Eliza Andrews scribbled in her diary. “One of them proceeded to distinguish himself at once, by ‘capturing’ a Negro’s watch. They carry out their principles by robbing impartially, without regard to race, color or previous condition. Ginny Dick has kept his watch and chain hid ever since the bluecoats put forth this act of philanthropy, and . . . old Maum Betsy says that she has “knowed white folks all her life an’ some mighty mean ones, but Yankees is de fust ever she seed mean enough to steal from n******.”

Not surprisingly, after suffering through several such visits, most plantations and farms had little more to offer. “We were left almost destitute,” said one stunned and suddenly impoverished lady. “Our poverty,” noted another victim, “is now our protection.”

Eventually, the highways of the South began to resemble scenes from antiquity and the plundering hordes of Mongolia. Observed one man:

“The road was filled with an indiscriminate mass of armed men on horseback and on foot, carts, wagons, cannon and caissons, rolling along in most tumultuous disorder, while to the right and to the left, joining the mass, and detaching from it, singly and in groups, were hundreds [of soldiers] going empty-handed and returning laden. Country carts, horses, mules and oxen, followed by Negro men, women and even children, (who were pressed into service to carry plunder) laden with every conceivable object, were approaching and mingling in mass from every side.

When the blue tide finally receded and moved off to garrison the cities and towns of the South, it left behind in its wake a land “as silent as a graveyard.”

(The Day Dixie Died – Southern Occupation 1865-1866. Thomas and Debra Goodrich. Stackpole Books, 2001, pp. 100-101)

The public mind of the North from April through the summer of 1865 was one of vengeance, blood and death to the “rebels.” The South was roundly blamed for “treason” as well as the horrors of Andersonville, though it was Grant – with Lincoln’s approval – who refused Southern offers of food, medicines and medical care for Northern prisoners.

The War Secretary’s Government

“The secret papers of the Lincoln administration had been kept sealed at the request of his heirs until certain persons named therein were dead. It is difficult to understand why Lincoln’s family wished to protect those at whom the finger of suspicion would have pointed by disclosure of these papers after his murder. For the papers indicated that Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, had prior knowledge of the reported plot of John Wilkes Booth and others at Mrs. Surratt’s boarding house in Washington, but had failed to either warn Lincoln or give him special protection.

It was obvious to observers at the time that the real beneficiary, should the plot have succeeded in killing the Vice-President and Secretary of State also would have been the Secretary of War – Stanton himself – who would have been next in line for the Presidency. Moreover, the Radical Republicans had refused to support Lincoln at the 1864 party convention, and this was the faction supported by and supporting Stanton in the disputes following Andrew Johnson’s accession.

Immediately following Lincoln’s assassination, Stanton was in full control of the government through martial law and was in charge of the trials of the so-called conspirators. While the hanging of so many persons without a civil trial did not arouse much comment abroad, the execution of Mrs. Surratt, because Booth had lodged at her house, was the subject of considerable discussion.

It is revealed in official testimony that Mrs. Surratt was offered her life if her son would give himself up. An effort was made by high members of the US government, including members of Congress, to obtain a civil trial for her. But the War Secretary refused on grounds that the executions were necessary to avert panic among the populace. This would indicate, of course, that the outcome of the military trial was predetermined.

Newspapers in France and Mexico began to refer to the Washington government as the “murderers of Mrs. Surratt.” The North’s bitterness against her son, Johnny Surratt, was heightened by the rumor that he was one of the leaders in the Confederate raid on St. Albans, Vermont, from Canada. A reward of $50,000 was offered for his apprehension but was never collected.”

(The Saga of Felix Senac: Legend and Life of a Confederate Agent in Europe. Regina Rapier, Bulletin of Art & History, No. 1, 1972. pp. 182-183)

“This Class of People”

Of the infamous General Order No. 11, President Jefferson Davis considered Grant’s conduct as an arbitrary abuse of power; the Confederate States never issued any orders which singled out religious groups for discriminatory attack.  

“Speculators were swarming around Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s headquarters at Holly Springs, Mississippi, and following his forces in search of cotton to be bought as cheaply as possible and sold in the north. Grant complained to Assistant Secretary of War C.P. Wolcott about “Jews and other unprincipled traders” who flouted Treasury regulations, and ordered his commanding officer at Columbus, Kentucky to deny permits to all Jews who wished to travel south.

In other correspondence he expiated on his unfavorable opinions of Jewish traders with their “carpet sacks” and pockets full of gold.” When Grant’s own father, a leather merchant who came to Holly Springs with some Jewish tradesmen in hopes of making money from the cotton trade, Grant sent him north again and in cold fury issued his notorious General Order 11 of December 17, 1862.

This read: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department and held in confinement within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order. Post commanders will see that this class of people be furnished passes and required to leave, and anyone returning after such notification will be arrested and held in confinement until an opportunity occurs for sending them out as prisoners.”

(The Jew in American Politics. Nathaniel Weyl. Arlington House. 1968, pp. 58-59)

New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour, a Democrat, firmly believed that conscription was unconstitutional as the federal government was to depend upon the States to furnish needed troops. He charged Lincoln’s draft with bringing disgrace upon the American name and shamed his administration. Seymour further declared that neither the President nor the Congress had a right ‘to force men to take part in the ungodly conflict which is distracting the land.’ Seymour also charged – and proved – that Lincoln levied higher draft quotas upon New York’s Democratic voting districts as part of a ‘manifest design to reduce the Democratic majority of voters.’ In short, the draft was designed, it appeared to Seymour, ‘to take Democrats into the army and exempt Republicans.’

New York City’s bloody draft riot which began July 11, 1863, ended the lives of some 120 residents as blue-coated soldiers hurried from Gettysburg opened fire on them with muskets and cannon. At least five black men were hung as demonstrators denounced Lincoln’s emancipation war. Strong anti-draft riots occurred across the State to include Buffalo, and throughout the north.

In Boston, though the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Colored Regiment was available, Gov. John Andrew feared that the sight of colored soldiers might excite his white citizenry. This colored regiment contained nearly 400 men enticed mostly from Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania to count toward Massachusetts troop quota and leave white residents at home. Only 22 soldiers were Massachusetts residents; 3 were Canadians. The black soldiers were hurried away and replaced with white men.

The governor’s fears were realized on July 14, 1863, when nearly a thousand angry residents – many of them women and children – gathered in front of the city’s Cooper Street Armory. After they hurled paving bricks at the wooden doors, a nervous officer inside ordered a field cannon loaded with grapeshot wheeled to the door and opened fire on the crowd, killing at least 14 and maiming many more.

This senseless slaughter of civilians recalled the massacre just over 93 years earlier, when British soldiers fired into a crowd of three hundred jeering and rock-throwing Boston residents. Eight were killed and five wounded. The post-riot investigation featured future US president John Adams representing the British soldiers.

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf. 1948, pg. 305)