Circa1865

Jefferson Davis referred to Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation in early 1863 as affording “our whole people the complete and crowning proof of the true nature of the designs of the party which elevated to power the present occupant of the Presidential chair at Washington and which sought to conceal its purpose . . .” Davis, like others familiar with the United States Constitution, saw that only the individual States could emancipate, not the government created by the States. And waging war upon the States was an act of treason under that same Constitution.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

For What are They Waging War?

January 5, 1863

“Friends and Fellow Citizens . . .

I am happy to be welcomed on my return to the Capital of our Confederacy – the last hope, as I believe, for the perpetuation of that system of government which our forefathers founded – the asylum of the oppressed and the home of true representative liberty.

Anticipating the overthrow of that Government which you had inherited, you assumed the right, as you fathers had done before you, to declare yourselves independent, and nobly have you advocated the assertion which you have made. You have shown yourselves in no respect to be degenerate sons of your fathers.

Men who were bound to you by the compact which their fathers and themselves had entered into the secure to you the rights and principles not only guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence, but rights which Virginia wisely and plainly reserved in her recognition of the government in which she took a part, now come to you with their hands steeped in blood, robbing the widow, destroying houses, seizing the grey-haired father, and incarcerating him in prison because he will not be a traitor to the principles of his fathers and the land that gave him birth.

Every crime which could characterize the course of demons has marked the course of the invader. The Northern portion of Virginia has been ruthlessly desolated – the people not only deprived of the means of subsistence, but their household property destroyed, and every indignity which the base imagination of a merciless foe could suggest inflicted, without regard to age, sex or condition.

In like manner their step has been marked in every portion of the Confederacy they have invaded.

They have murdered prisoners of war; they have destroyed the means of subsistence of families, they have plundered the defenceless, and exerted their most malignant ingenuity to bring to the deepest destitution those who only offence is that their husbands and sons are fighting for their homes and their liberties. Every crime conceivable, from the burning of defenceless towns to the stealing of our silver forks, and spoons, has marked their career.

It is in keeping, however, with the character of the people that seeks dominion over you, claim to be your masters, to try to reduce you to subjection – give up to a brutal soldiery your towns to sack, your homes to pillage and incite servile insurrection.

They have come to disturb our social organizations on the plea that it is military necessity. For what are they waging war? They say to preserve the Union.

Can they preserve the Union by destroying the social existence of a portion of the South? Do they hope to reconstruct the Union by striking at everything which is dear to man? BY showing them so utterly disgraced that if the question was proposed to you whether you would combine with hyenas or Yankees, I trust every Virginian would say, give me the hyenas.”

(Jefferson Davis, the Essential Writings, William J. Cooper, Jr., editor, Modern Library, 2003, excerpts, pp. 285-287)

Lincoln erroneously saw Unionist Clement Vallandigham as aiding the Confederacy when the former Ohio congressman was actually aiding the Union and preserving the integrity of the United States Constitution in his dissent on Lincoln’s unconstitutional acts. Joseph Holt, Lincoln’s Judge Advocate General, was a Kentuckian and Secretary of War during James Buchanan’s administration and warm to the Radical Republicans taking power. It was he who authorized the ill-fated Star of the West expedition to resupply Fort Sumter in early January, 1861, as well as later prosecuting former Ohio Congressman Vallandigham for alleged treason for his dissent.  The latter is called a “Copperhead,” which was not a Southern supporter, but a Unionist who opposed Lincoln’s draconian methods.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

No Dissent in Lincolnian America

“In early 1863, a military commission prosecuted and convicted Clement Vallandigham, a former congressman, of treason. There is a consensus that this trial ranks among the most important in American history. The twentieth century’s leading scholars of the nation’s legal history, Lawrence Friedman, Kermit Hall and Melvin Urofsky, have all articulated that the Vallandigham trial and eventual Supreme Court determination in the case, is a rare landmark.

But in none of the treatise’s does Holt’s role as Vallandigham’s “prosecutor,” or the participating judge advocates emerge. Indeed, as recently as 2008, a well-researched study on Lincoln’s relationship to the Supreme Court only briefly notes Holt’s role in the entire process.

Melvin Urofsky summed up the Judge Advocate General’s role as, “simply informing the [Supreme Court] that it could inhibit neither Congress nor the President in prosecuting the War.” This is an oversimplification and the importance of Holt’s participation in Vallandigham’s trial is more than symbolic.

Holt, an officer in the War Department argued the case to Supreme Court, rather than the attorney general. This reflected how militarized the law had become and how politicized the Judge Advocate General’s Department was becoming.

[Gen. Burnside’s General Order 38 regarding treason contained] controversial prohibitions aimed at stifling dissent to the war. Most problematic was a section which stated: “The habit of declaring sympathies for the enemy will not be allowed in this department. Persons committing such offenses will be at once arrested, with the view toward being tried as above stated, or sent beyond our lines into the lines of their friends.”

This part of the order conflicted with the Bill of Rights’ recognition of freedom of speech as an inalienable right. [Burnside] intended to ferret out the leaders of subversive organizations [as there were] already acts of public discontent within the Ohio Department . . .

[Burnside’s judge advocate aide Major James Cutts included] allegations [that] Vallandigham referred to the war as “wicked, cruel and unnecessary,” and that the war was “fought for the freedom of the blacks and enslavement of the whites.” [Vallandigham] had publicly accused the [Lincoln] administration of negotiating with the South in bad faith . . . [and] that Lincoln planned to “appoint military marshals in every district and restrain the people of their liberties, to deprive them of their rights and privileges.”

On his own, Lincoln arrived at a novel solution. If, he reasoned, Vallandigham aided the Confederacy, he should be expelled from the Union and reside with them. Holt approved of this course of action.”

(Law in War, War as Law: Brigadier General Joseph Holt and the Judge Advocate General’s Department in the Civil War and Early Reconstruction, 1861-1865, Joshua E. Kastenberg, Carolina Academic Press, 2011, excerpts, pp. 103-106; 110)

During the French and Indian War New England merchants carried on illicit trade with the French West Indies; during the War of 1812 New England merchants did the same with the British, withheld troops from United States forces, and threatened secession at its Hartford Convention of 1814.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Tradition of Trading with the Enemy

“As the [French and Indian] war progressed and the price of goods and provisions rose, the temptation [for smuggling] became greater. The routes and methods of forwarding cargoes became as varied and devious as were the dealings with officials, and the wrath of the [British] military and naval authorities increased proportionately as they saw their efforts thwarted and neutralized by the acts of colonial merchants.

In the latter part of 1759 General Crump wrote to Pitt that in the previous eight months not a single vessel had been able to reach the French West Indies from Europe, and that the islands were sustained wholly by the illegal American [New England] trade. Admiral Coates called this trade “iniquitous, and Commodore Moore described those who were engaged in it as “traitors to their country.”

It has been asserted that the commercial supremacy in the West Indies was the central point of Pitt’s policy . . . [though] the fruits of the war he had waged so brilliantly could not be gathered unless the French possessions in the islands were conquered, and what prevented them from falling into his hands was the support they received from the colonists – to a great extent, the New Englanders.

Its only cure seemed to be the enforcement of the act of 1733, and in 1760 he sent a circular letter to the colonial governors stating that the enemy was “principally, if not alone, enabled to sustain, and protract, this long and expensive war” by means of “this dangerous and ignominious trade,” and calling upon them to take every lawful step to bring the offenders to “exemplary and condign punishment.”

Although the trade was notorious, and although at the very time, a few months previously, when Wolfe was battling for Quebec, Boston merchants were ferreting out a new way of trading with the enemy through New Orleans, a committee of the Massachusetts Council reported on Pitt’s dispatch that “they cannot find that there is any illegal trade . . . Governor Fitch of Connecticut wrote that he had been unable to find any evidence of trade with the enemy among his people.”

(The History of New England, Vol. II; Revolutionary New England, 1691-1776, James Truslow Adams, Little, Brown and Company, 1941, pp. 267-268)

Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 defined a traitor as one who “betrays his allegiance to his country” and “who aids an enemy in conquering his country.” Lt. Snelling, described below, deserted his Georgia regiment and guided the enemy army through his home State.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Lt. Snelling Returns Home to Georgia

“Sunday, November 20, 1864 was a day of unprecedented excitement in the capital of Georgia. Members of the legislature had already departed in haste for their homes. The governor and Statehouse officers were in flight, and many citizens of the town were following the example set by them. In the afternoon distant cannon fire was heard in the direction of Macon, some thirty miles away.

Just before sunset a small group of blue-coated cavalrymen were seen lingering on the outskirts of the town . . . They cut telegraph wires, seized a few horses, and then made a hurried exit. They were the first of more than thirty thousand enemy soldiers who were to enter Milledgeville within the next four days.

With flags unfurled, the band at the head of the column playing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and other martial airs . . . [the enemy army occupied the town and Sherman] learned that he was occupying a plantation belonging to General Howell Cobb and forthwith issued orders for its complete destruction.

On the same evening he ordered a special guard to protect the property of Andrew J. Banks whose farmhouse stood a short distance away. Banks, a North Carolinian by birth, was known to be of strong Unionist sentiment.

It is doubtful if Sherman’s intelligence channels had ever been more effective than on this particular occasion. His knowledge of the country which he had entered, and of the varying sentiments of the inhabitants, he owed largely to David R. Snelling, the twenty-six year-old cavalry lieutenant who commanded his escort. Snelling had been born a few miles from Cobb’s plantation and, until the war began, had always lived in the community to which he was now returning as a conquering enemy.

He had left the county early in 1862 as a member of Captain Richard Bonner’s company of the 57^th Georgia Regiment. Never an enthusiastic rebel, he deserted at Bridgeport, Alabama, in July. Later he became a member of a Unionist regiment made up of defecting Southerners. He was now a first lieutenant in the 1^st Alabama (Union) Cavalry and assigned to Sherman’s personal escort where his knowledge of the people and of the country through which they were marching made his services invaluable to the commanding general who kept him close by his side.

While [Sherman and Snelling] were seated around the [evening] fire, a Negro slave . . . recognized Snelling and greeted him as “Massa Dave.” According to [an observer], the slave fell on the floor, hugged the lieutenant around his knees, and expressed mixed feelings and astonishment and thankfulness at seeing his former master in the uniform of the invading army. The slave who greeted him had belonged [to David Lester, Snelling’s] uncle, in whose home the lieutenant had lived as an orphan since boyhood.

That evening Sherman granted . . . Snelling’s request to ride six miles ahead to visit his relatives at the Lester plantation. In his memoirs, the general noted that Snelling returned that night on a fresh horse from his uncle’s stable [and that the visit had been] social in nature. The David Lester plantation book, however, indicates that Snelling was accompanied on his visit by a squad of Federal cavalrymen and the group conducted a raid on the plantation, burned the ginhouse, and pillaged the premises.

Whether Snelling’s unusual conduct was an attempt to prove his loyalty to the Union army or the result of an old grudge he bore against his affluent uncle perhaps may never be determined.”

(Sherman at Milledgeville in 1864, James C. Bonner, Journal of Southern History, Volume XXII, Number 3, August, 1956, pp. 273, 275-277)

Officers in the US military are sworn to defend the Constitution, not the government or flag of the government, the latter mentioned below as a justification for loyalty. William Rawle’s “View of the Constitution” which supported the idea of political secession, was a West Point text at least until 1840, when George H. Thomas graduated, and he was well aware of the seat of loyalty in the Constitution.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Treason Against His Native State — Virginia?

“We have collected the most conclusive proof that General [George H.] Thomas had at first fully decided to come South and cast his lot with his own people . . . But, in the meantime, it may be as well to put into our records the testimony of Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania, in his speech in the United States Senate on the bill for the relief of General Fitz John Porter. Mr. Cameron, in the course of his defense of General Porter said:

“It became my duty to take charge of the railroad from Harrisburg to Baltimore, and while so engaged an incident occurred in my office which impressed me greatly at the time, and which it has always seemed to me should atone to a great extent for any errors General Porter may have committed . . . It was to a great extent through him, in my judgment, that the services of General George H. Thomas were secured to the side of the Union. General Thomas, then Major Thomas, was stationed at the Carlisle Barracks.

The capital of the nation was menaced by an enemy camping within a few miles of it, and had but a handful of men for its protection. Porter . . . selected Thomas from . . . three Majors and ordered him to report to him at my office in Harrisburg, that being Porter’s headquarters.

When informed of the duty to be performed, Thomas hesitated, then began a conversation between the two officers which continued until morning and made a lasting impression on my mind. Thomas argued against the war taking the ground that the trouble had been brought upon the country by the abolitionists of the North, and that while deploring it as sincerely as any man could, the South had just cause for complaint.

Porter took the position that he, Thomas, as a soldier, had no right to look at the cause of the trouble, but as an officer of the United States army it was his duty to defend his flag whenever it was attacked, whether by foes from without or from within. Porter pleaded as zealously, as eloquently, as I have ever heard any man plead a cause in which his whole heart was engaged, and it was this pleading which caused Thomas to arrive at a decision.

“I do not say that Thomas refused to obey his orders, but I do say that he hesitated and would much have preferred that the duty had devolved upon another. Thomas was a Virginian, and had, as many other good and patriotic men had, great doubts as to the ability of the government to coerce the States back into the Union that had, by their legislatures, formally withdrawn . . . ”

(Did George H. Thomas Hesitate to Draw His sword Against His Native State — Virginia? Notes and Queries, Southern Historical Papers, Volume XII, R.A. Brock, Editor, pp. 568-570)

The Constitution’s definition of treason against the United States (Article III, Section III) states: “shall consist of levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Note that levying war is against “them”; John Brown was tried for treason against the State of Virginia. The Confederate Constitution was identical, defining treason as against a State, not a government or nation. Anyone going over to the enemy, black or white, for whatever reason, was guilty of treason and faced the fatal consequences.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Consequences of Treason

“I was sitting on my horse near General [JEB] Stuart, who had put in the skirmishers, and was now superintending the fire of his artillery, when a cavalry-man rode up and reported that they had just captured a deserter.

“Where is he?” was Stuart’s interrogatory.

“Coming yonder, General.”

“How do you know he is a deserter?”

“One of my company knew him when he joined our army.”

“Where is he from?”

“_____ county.” And the man mentioned the name of a county of western Virginia.

“What is his name?”

“M____.” (I suppress the full name. Some mother’s or sister’s heart might be wounded.)

“Bring him up,” said Stuart coldly, with a lowering glance from the blue eyes under the brown hat and black feather. As he spoke, two or three mounted men rode up with the prisoner. He was a young man, apparently eighteen or nineteen years of age, and wore the blue uniform, tipped with red, of a private in the United States Artillery.

“You say he is a deserter?”

“Yes sir; acknowledges that he is M___, from that county,; and after joining the South he deserted.”

A kinder-hearted person than General Stuart never lived; but in all that appertained to his profession and duty as a soldier, he was inexorable. Desertion, in his estimation, was one of the deadliest crimes of which a human being could be guilty; and his course was plain – his resolution immovable.

“Where are you from?” [said Stuart].

“I belonged to the battery that was firing at you, over yonder, sir.”

“Did you belong to the Southern army at any time?”

“Yes sir.”

“So you were in our ranks, and you went over to the enemy?” he said with sort of a growl.

“Yes sir,” was the calm reply.

Stuart turned to an officer, and pointing to a tall pine near, said in brief tones:

“Hang him on that tree.”

(Outlines from the Outpost, John Esten Cooke, Richard Harwell, editor, Lakeside Press, 1961, pp. 301-305)

The 1876 United States Centennial observance brought forth embarrassing realities to Americans, both North and South. Southerners could hardly celebrate independence after being bludgeoned by war into second-class citizens under Reconstruction governments.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Death’s Head at the Banquet

“The . . . celebration of the birth of the American nation — was held in Philadelphia in 1876. An occasion so completely engaging the attention of the country and participated in so widely drew forth much discussion in the South.

Some Southern leaders opposed their section taking part; they still felt that the country was not theirs and that it might be less than dignified in themselves, and lacking in respect for their heroic Revolutionary ancestors, to go to Philadelphia and be treated as less than equals in a union which those ancestors had done a major part to found.

Former [South Carolina] Governor Benjamin F. Perry saw in the Centennial an effective way to drive home to the country the similarity of principles of the rebellion that became the Revolution, and the rebellion that became the “Lost Cause.”

[He wrote:] “This Centennial celebration of the rebels of ’76 cannot fail to teach the Northern mind to look with more leniency on Confederate rebels who only attempted to do in the late civil war what the ancestors of the Northern people did do in the American revolution . . . It shows a want of sense as well as a want of principle, and a want of truth, to call the rebels of 1776 patriots and heroes, and the rebels of 1861, “traitors.”

Only one contingency would induce a Virginian not to take part. The Grand Army must not be represented: “It would be the death’s head on the board; the skeleton in the banquet hall.”

(The History of the South, Volume VIII, E. Merton Coulter, LSU Press, 1947)

Considered one of Wilmington, North Carolina’s antebellum architectural treasures, the Dr. John D. Bellamy mansion was seized by Northern General Joseph R. Hawley in February 1865 for use as his headquarters while occupying the city — ironically, Hawley was a native North Carolinian. Bellamy’s daughter Ellen was a young girl at the time and later recalled vivid memories of the enemy invasion.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Northern Vandals Liberate Wilmington Furniture

“The Federal troops captured Wilmington on February 21, 1865; they took possession of our home, which we had temporarily vacated, and it remained General Hawley Headquarters a long time, even after Lee’s surrender. It was very galling . . .”

[Mother] came up to own dear house, accompanied by a friendly neighbor . . . who was related to General Hawley, and had offered to introduce her. It was most humiliating, and trying, to be entertained by Mrs. Hawley, in her own parlor. Mrs. Hawley showed her raising by “hawking and spitting” in the fire, a most unlady-like act. During the call she offered Mother some figs (from Mother’s own tree) which Aunt Sarah had picked — our own old cook, who had been left there in charge of the premises.

My father made several trips to . . . Washington City before they would grant him his “Pardon.” For what? For being a Southern Gentlemen, a Rebel, and a large Slave Owner! The slaves he had inherited from his father, and which he considered a sacred trust. Being a physician, he guarded their health, kept a faithful overseer to look after them (his home being a regular drug store), and employed a Methodist minister, Rev. Mr. Turrentine, by the year, to look after their spiritual welfare.

Although the war was practically over seven months, we did not get possession of our home ‘till September. [T]he beautiful white marble mantles in the two parlors were so caked with tobacco spit and garbs of chewed tobacco, they were cleaned with great difficulty; indeed, the white marble hearths are still stained . . . No furniture had been left in the parlors . . . On leaving here, the Yankees gave [the] furniture to a servant . . .” In our sitting room, our large mahogany bookcase was left, as it was too bulky for them to carry off; but from its drawers numerous things were taken, among them an autograph album belonging to me brother Marsden.

A number of years later, when my brother John was in Washington as a member of Congress, this same Hawley, then a senator from Illinois, told him of the album “coming into his possession” when he occupied our house, and said he would restore it to him. However, he took care not to do it, although repeatedly reminded.”

(Back With The Tide, Memoirs of Ellen D. Bellamy, Bellamy Mansion Museum 2002, pp. 5-8)

The victorious North installed a native proconsul in 1865 to rule North Carolina, who acceded to the various constitutional fictions emanating from the radical Northern Congress. That proconsul acted as if no military overthrow of free government had taken place in his own State, and committed treason by adhering to the enemy. North Carolina and the South were ruled by “Vichy” regimes emanating from Washington, as France later be ruled from Berlin.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Vichy Rule in North Carolina

“In obedience to the proclamation of Provisional Governor [William] Holden, the State Convention met at noon on Monday, the 2^nd instant [2 October 1865]. The permanent President is Honorable E.G. Reade, of Person County. He is regarded as one of the best jurists in the State, was a Whig and an opponent of secession and State rights, and is now provisional judge of the eighth circuit by appointment of the Governor.

The Governor’s message came in on the second day. He takes it for granted that the Convention will recognize the abolition of slavery, provide that it shall not be re-established, and submit the amended Constitution to a vote of the people. [Governor Holden stated:]

“North Carolina attempted, in May 1861, to separate herself from the Federal Union. This attempt involved her, with other slaveholding States, in a protracted and disastrous war, the result of which was a vast expenditure of blood and treasure on her part, and the practical abolition of domestic slavery. She entered the Rebellion a slaveholding State, and emerged from it a non-slaveholding State. In other respects, so far as her existence as a State and her rights as a State are concerned, she has undergone no change.

Allow me to congratulate you, gentlemen, upon the favorable circumstances which surround you, while engaged in this great work of restoring the State to her former and natural position. It is my firm belief that the policy of the President in this respect, which is broad, as liberal, and as just as the Constitution itself, will be approved by the great body of the people of the United States . . . our State will enjoy, in common with the other States, the protection of just laws under the Constitution of our fathers.”

(The South Since the War: As Shown by Fourteen Weeks of Travel and Observation in Georgia and the Carolinas, Sidney Andrews, Ticknor and Fields, 1866, pp. 133-134)

“Roosevelt the First,” as Mencken referred to Theodore, seemed unaware that his own party was responsible for the national malady he spoke against – it was the Republican Party’s marriage of government and business in the 1860s that unleashed the Gilded Age as the conservative South was no longer there to resist the government corruption and scandal. As he asserted new powers for the president, Roosevelt was creating new authority beyond what the United States Constitution confers upon the executive branch, his New Nationalism was indeed a refuge for “presidential lawbreakers.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism”

“[Former President Roosevelt] arrived in New York on June 18 [1910], after visiting courts and other interesting scenes in Europe. In all these places he received great honor, and his landing in New York called forth a demonstration worthy a world hero.

The public was curious to see whether Roosevelt would side with his old friend [William H. Taft], now the President . . . Shortly after landing he visited Taft and outwardly all seemed harmonious. In all he said openly he did not criticize Taft, but he did not abate his opposition to big business in politics.

Then suddenly he hurled a thunderbolt. Speaking on August 31 at Osawatomie, Kansas, he announced a political program, which he called “New Nationalism.” Government by the people, he said, was threatened by wealth in national politics, and the power of the nation should be so extended over it that it could not do what it is doing.

To reach this end he would give the federal government all needed power. If the Constitution was not strong enough he would amend it. He denounced what he called the “twilight zone” between federal and State authority, “a refuge for lawbreakers, and especially for lawbreakers of great wealth, who can hire the vulpine legal cunning which will teach the way to avoid both jurisdictions.”

“New Nationalism,” he added, regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare, rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than one class or section of the people.” From the individualism of [Grover] Cleveland to the “New Nationalism” of Roosevelt was a long step.”

(Expansion and Reform, 1889-1926, John Spencer Bassett, Kennikat Press, 1971 (original 1926), pp. 175-176)