Targeting Civilians

The Bitterness of Surrender

Like other defeated American soldiers in the South mid-1865, Gen. Bryan Grimes dealt with illness and “grief of surrender” amid constant rumors of pending retribution at the hands of the Yankee governors. One was “a report that they would hang all officers above the rank of captain and all their property confiscated,” his wife Charlotte recalled. “We were living in a “Reign of Terror.”

The Bitterness of Surrender

“Grim scenes abounded as homeward-bound North Carolinians rode south for home [after Appomattox]. One event in particular must have made him wonder what was in store for him as a defeated soldier without the means to fight back. According to Grimes’ astute traveling companion, Thomas Devereux:

“[We came upon] an old man, Loftin Terrel, his house was on the roadside, and he was knee-deep in feathers where [Sherman’s bummers] had ripped open the beds in search of valuables. A yearling and a mule colt were lying dead in the lot, they had been wantonly shot. Old man Terrel was sitting on his doorstep, he said there was not a thing left in the house and every bundle of fodder and grain of corn had been carried off; that he had been stripped of everything he owned and had not a mouthful to eat. They had even killed his dog which was lying dead near the house.”

On Sunday, April 16, 1865, Grimes rode into Raleigh atop his trustful horse Warren. Charlotte was “delighted to see him under any conditions,” but recalled that, “he would reproach me for want of patriotism when I said so, he was so miserable over [General Joseph Johnston’s] the surrender.”

The Federals garrisoning [Raleigh] issued orders forbidding former Confederates from wearing their uniforms. For many this directive presented a dilemma, for they had no other clothes to wear and no money to purchase new one. Charlotte responded to the order by covering her husband’s brass uniform buttons with bootblack, a ruse Grimes described made him look as though he was “in mourning for the Confederacy.” The ever-resourceful Charlotte, despite Grimes’ protestations, sold several of her silk dresses for $100 and used the money to purchase his civilian clothes. “It seemed to hurt him to have to use this money,” she explained, “but I would take no denial.”

Raleigh was a very different town from the one Grimes left four years earlier. The victorious Yankees seemed everywhere . . . [and he] no money, no income . . . [and] not a cent in the world, explained Charlotte, “except for a few gold pieces he had carried all through the war.” Fortunately, Grimes’ brother William was in a position to assist the destitute couple [and] gave them “two hundred dollars in gold quilted in a belt under my corsets,” wrote Charlotte.”

(Lee’s Last Major General: Bryan Grimes of North Carolina. T. Harrell Allen. Savas Publishing, 1999, pp. 258; 260)

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward promised the cotton-dependent British an early end to war with “Northern victories releasing the raw cotton” of the South to England. Seward’s claim that New Orleans would soon be under his control was quickly dashed, and all were aware that Southern plantation owners would sooner burn their cotton bales than allow them to fall into enemy hands. A desperate Seward then followed Virginia’s Royal Governor’s (Lord Dunmore) November 1775 edict to incite race war in the South, threatening both Britain and France that any aid to the American Confederacy would unleash a bloody slave uprising there. This would not only destroy Europe’s cotton source but also repeat the Haitian massacres of the early 1790’s which saw the slaughter of 4,000 white men, women and children. In retaliation, some 15,000 Africans were killed by the French.

Seward Insists Upon Servile War

“Fearing the growth in England, especially, of an intention to intervene, Seward threatened a Northern appeal to the slaves, thinking of the threat not so much in terms of an uncivilized and horrible war as in terms of the material interests of England. In brief, considering foreign attitude and action in relation to Northern advantage – to the winning of the war – he would use emancipation as a threat of servile insurrection, but he did not desire emancipation itself for fear it would cause that very intervention which it was his object to prevent.

On May 28, 1862, Seward wrote to US diplomat Charles Francis Adams, emphasizing two points: first, US diplomats abroad were now authorized to state that the war was, in part at least, intended for the suppression of slavery, and secondly, that the North if interfered with by foreign nations would be forced to unleash servile war in the South.

Such a war, Seward argued, would be “completely destructive of all European interests” and a copy of this was given to Britain’s Lord Russell on June 20^th . . . and that any attempts a European mediation of the conflict would result in servile war unleashed upon the South. On July 13, Lincoln told Seward and [Gideon] Welles of the planned [gradual and compensated] emancipation proclamation and that this was his first mention of it to anyone.

On July 28, after Lord Russell reviewed Seward’s arguments, commented on the fast- increasing bitterness of the American conflict which was disturbing and unsettling to European governments, and wrote: “The approach of servile war, so much insisted upon by Mr. Seward in his dispatch, only forewarns us that another element of destruction may be added to the slaughter, loss of property, and waste of industry, which already afflict a country so lately prosperous and tranquil.”

(Great Britain and the American Civil War. Ephraim Douglas Adams. Alpha Editions, 2018 (original manuscript 1924), pg. 388-390)

The Authority to Define and Suppress Treason in Ohio

Ambrose Burnside was the same northern commander who, when invading the Outer Banks and northeastern North Carolina, proclaimed that “We come to give you back law and order, the Constitution, your rights under it, and to restore peace.” What soon followed was looting, property seizure and destruction, and oppression.

When Burnside arrived at his new Department of the Ohio command at Cincinnati in early 1863, Lincoln’s commander of the Department of Indiana apprised him of extreme discontent and that Illinois and Ohio seemed “on the edge of a volcano” after Lincoln’s clamp down on dissent. Treason against the United States is succinctly defined in Section III, Article 3 of the U.S. Constitution as waging war against them, the States, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

The Authority to Define and Suppress Treason in Ohio

“[In April 1863,] Major-General Ambrose E. Burnside became acquainted with his new duties as commander with headquarters in Cincinnati. His defeat at Fredericksburg the previous December still rankled him, affecting his disposition as well as his reputation.

General Burnside had no understanding of the reasons for the widespread disaffection in the upper Midwest. As a military general, and a discredited one at that, he understood only the law of force. He read the editorials and news stories in the Cincinnati Gazette and the Cincinnati Commercial but was incapable of recognizing their partisan slant. He accepted the Republican-sponsored interpretation that James J. Faran of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Logan of the Dayton Empire and Samuel Medary of the Crisis played a traitorous game. He believed they sowed the dragon’s teeth of discontent, aided the rebels of the South, and discouraged enlistments at the North.

Thus Burnside, in a rash moment, issued “General Orders, No. 38” on April 13, 1863. It was a military edict intended to intimidate Democratic critics of President Lincoln and the war. The “habit of declaring sympathy for the enemy,” Burnside stated, would no longer be tolerated in the Department of the Ohio; persons “committing such offenses” would be arrested and subject to military procedures – that is, be denied rights in the civil courts.

The indiscreet general thus set himself up as a censor to draw the fine line between criticism and treason and decide when a speaker or an editor gave aid and comfort to the enemy. He established his own will as superior to the civil courts, usurping for the military the right to define and judge, to determine the limits of dissent. Worse than that, his proclamation implied that criticism of Lincoln’s administration, in any form, was treason and that civil officials and civil courts had failed to do their duty by not eliminating it.

Speaking at a Republican political rally in Hamilton, halfway between Dayton and Cincinnati, Burnside gave clear evidence of his poor judgment. To the applause of partisans, he declared that he had the authority to define and suppress treason.”

(The Limits of Dissent – Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War. Frank L. Klement. Fordham University Press, 1998, pp. 148-150)

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

“We Are Now an Occupied Territory”

Gov. Orval Faubus’ Message to Arkansas:

“On Tuesday, September 24, 1957 . . . the cleverly conceived plans of the US Justice Department under Republican Herbert Brownell, were placed in execution. One thousand two hundred troops of the 101^st Airborne Division were flown in from Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to occupy Little Rock’s Central High School.

At the same time, the entire Arkansas National Guard and Air guard were federalized and are now a part of the US Army and Air Force. We are now an occupied territory.

Evidence of the naked force of the federal government is here apparent in the unsheathed bayonets in the backs of schoolgirls – in the backs of students – and in the bloody face of a railroad worker, who was bayoneted and then felled by the butt of a rifle in the hands of a sergeant of the 101^st Airborne Division. This man, on private property, as a guest in a home two blocks from the school, has been hospitalized. Others have suffered bayonet wounds from the hands of the US Army soldiers. Your New York newspapers also show the scenes.

Up until the time the injunction was issued against me by the imported federal judge, the peace had been kept in Little Rock by as few as 30 National Guardsmen. Not a blow was struck, no injury inflicted on any person, and no property damage sustained. I wish to point out that no violence broke out in the city until after the injunction was issued by the imported federal judge, and the National Guardsmen were withdrawn. And I might add here, all we have ever asked for is a little time, patience and understanding, as so often expressed by President Eisenhower himself, in solving this problem.

In the name of God, whom we all revere, in the name of liberty we hold so dear, in the name of decency, which we all cherish – what is happening in America? Is every right in the United States Constitution now lost? Does the will of the people, that basic precept of our republic, no longer matter? Must the will of the majority now yield, under federal force, to the will of the minority, regardless of the consequences?

If the answers to these questions are in the affirmative . . . we no longer have a union of States under a republican form of government. If this be true, then the States are mere subdivisions of an all-powerful federal government, these subdivisions being nothing more than districts for the operation of federal agents and federal military forces – forces which operate without any regard for the rights of a sovereign State or its elected officials, and without due regard for personal and property rights.

The imported federal comes from a State a thousand miles away with no understanding whatsoever of the difficulties of our problems in the field of race relations.”

(Another Tragic Era: Gov. Faubus Gives His Side of the Arkansas Story. US News & World Report, October 4, 1957, pp. 66-67)

Not a War of Oppression

Gen. Henry Halleck told his invasion forces in 1861 that Southerners “have been warned that we come to oppress and plunder. By our acts we will undeceive them.”

In November 1861, Gen. John Dix prepared his invasion of Virginia’s eastern shore and spoke of “giving [Virginians] them the strongest assurances of kind treatment and protection . . . they may be gained over without bloodshed.” Dix added that Virginians “have got it in their heads that we want to steal and emancipate their Negroes.” Despite these pronouncements of deliverance from despotic “rebel” rule, the reality told a different story.

A colonel of the 20^th NY Volunteers at the Outer Banks of North Carolina wrote his commanding officer: “I regret to be compelled to state that the conduct of the men and some officers of my command has been that of vandals.” The descent into total war had begun.

Not a War of Oppression

“Few northerners sought the overthrow of slavery, for although most considered the institution morally corrupting and economically stifling and wanted to halt its spread, they deemed blacks unfit for freedom in a republic.

The northern-dominated U.S. Congress of July 1861 affirmed the narrow goals of the Crittenden Resolution, which it passed with hardy a dissenting vote. It declared “that this war was waged, on our part, in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of these States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union, . . . as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.”

These last twelve words reflected a fear that a prolonged war might rage out of control, burst its bonds and devour the very ideals and institutions it was meant to preserve. Lincoln himself worried that an extended conflict would “degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”

(When the Yankees Came: Conflict & Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865. Stephen V. Ashe. UNC Press, 1995, pp. 25-27)

America’s Home Front, 1861-1865

On April 19, 1861, Lincoln began his blockade of Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico ports to deny imports to Americans in the South. This included much-needed medical supplies which would have saved the lives of thousands of civilians, young and old. Below, President Davis’s wife Varina writes of an imprisoned soldier’s fear for his family at home.

America’s Home Front, 1861-1865

“Our soldiers fought for the love they bore for their country, though it was a desperate fight. They had to contend against far more dreadful foes than the federal army. They fought cold, heat, starvation, and the knowledge that their families at home were enduring the same privations.

One poor fellow at Johnson’s Island, Ohio’s prison camp, who was dying of the want endured there, wrote and asked if I might write to his wife of his last hours and give her his love. “I have a letter from my wife,” he said. “She walked my little girl – who was just a month old when I saw her last – up and down, up and down, tried willow-tea and every other remedy she could think of for the baby’s chills; but the doctor said nothing but quinine could save her. And Madam, my wife did not have that so my three-year-old baby died, and now I am dying and my poor, starving wife will have nothing to comfort her. But, he wrote, “If our folks can remain freemen, it is alright.”

This spirit of devotion was manifested by the soldiers and officers of the Confederate States of America everywhere, and when their hearts failed them from brooding over the needs of their helpless families, the women choked back their tears, tried to forget their bare feet, their meagre fare, their thousand alarms by night, and all the grinding want that pressed them out of their youth and life, and wrote of the cheer our victories gave them, of their prayers for our success, and their power to resist unto the end.”

(Jefferson Davis: A Memoir by His Wife, Volume II. Varina Davis. Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company of America. 1990 (originally published 1890), pp. 495-496)

The Sacking of Another American City

The men of the 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment, mostly of Harrisburg, mustered in late 1861 to help “save the Union.” Their early service was at North Carolina’s Outer Banks through the capture of New Bern in March of 1862, where blue-coated soldiers ransacked homes and businesses. Afterward, empty troopships returning northward were said to be loaded with stolen furniture, paintings, libraries, jewelry and antiques. It is recalled that Willam Penn and his Quakers were slaveholders, and in the early 1700s were kidnapping Tuscarora children in North Carolina for slavery in Pennsylvania.

In mid-July 1863, the 51st Regiment was attached to Gen. W.T. Sherman’s army. Ordered to destroy anything considered “military or commercially related” at Jackson, the regiment first helped themselves to the possessions of the citizenry.

The Sacking of Another American City

“After the 51^st Pennsylvania Regiment under Col. John Hartranft planted its colors in the front of Mississippi’s State Capitol at Jackson, it stacked arms in the street. A detail was made to guard the stacks and another to guard prisoners who had been paroled at Vicksburg.

The remainder of the regiment not on special duty then broke ranks and ransacked the town for tobacco, whiskey and such valuables as had been left behind by the fleeing citizens on the retreat of Gen. Joe Johnston. Tobacco warehouses had been broken open, and the invaders freely supplied themselves with the weed of the very best brands; none other suited them now. Whiskey was the next thing to be sought out, and a copious supply was found and used. After supplying themselves to repletion with the above, then private property had to suffer.

Grocery, dry goods, hat, 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 was carried off; crockery, chinaware, pianos, furniture, etc., were smashed to atoms; hogsheads of sugar rolled into the street and the heads knocked in and contents spilled.

About noon the Pennsylvania regiment was ordered to occupy a large fort near the city. As the regiment was marching out it made quite a ludicrous appearance, for the men were dressed in the most laughable and grotesque habiliments that could be found. Some clad in all female attire, some with hats having crowns a foot high, shawls, sunbonnets, frock skirts, with crinoline over all instead of underneath; in fact, everything was put on that a head, hand, arm, body, a foot or feet could get into, and . . . carrying bonnets and bandboxes in their hands.

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

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

Monument to a War Hero Politician

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).

The Task of Conquering the American South

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

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