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“Thou Wicked Servant”

Though opposed to Lincoln’s violations of the Constitution in his war against the American South, Northern Democrats saw the need to crush secession, which was a manifestation of the Tenth Amendment and inherent right of the people of a State to withdraw from a federal compact to which they conditionally assented. Those Northern Democrats did not see that due to the vast differences between the sections by 1861, peaceful separation was the only logical solution for the Southern people to pursue free, representative government. Connecticut Senator William C. Fowler (below) was born in 1793, during Washington’s presidency – living long enough to see the end of Washington’s Union.

“Thou Wicked Servant”

“Expressing opposition to secession, [Northerners Clement] Vallandigham, [Samuel S.] Cox, [Stephen D.] Carpenter, and Fowler maintained that they desired not an independent Confederacy but simply a restoration of the “Constitution as it is” and the “Union as it was.” They declared they were in favor of a constitutional war to crush secession, but they charged that Lincoln was waging a battle for the conquest and subjugation of the South and that he was conducting it in a despotic fashion, subverting the constitutional liberties of individuals and the rights of States.

Opposing military conscription, they also criticized the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus and declared that freedom of speech had been abolished in the Union.

In particular, they attacked Lincoln’s policy of emancipation. Spurning the argument that emancipation was a legitimate measure adopted to aid the prosecution of the war, they pictured it as an unconstitutional act by which the President had changed the war aims of the North from the preservation of the Union to abolition of slavery.

“If,” said Fowler in the Connecticut State Senate in 1864, “the President should avow the fact that he has violated the Constitution, in order to save the Union, as the President did in a letter to Mr. Hodge, let us say to him “out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.”

The peace advocates placed special blame for war upon the abolitionists of the North, stating repeatedly that it was not the institution of slavery but the agitation of the slavery question by the abolitionists that had caused hostilities.

For the immediate outbreak of fighting, the three Midwesterners placed responsibility upon Lincoln and the Republicans because of their refusal to compromise with Southerners in the crisis of 1860-1861.”

(Americans Interpret Their Civil War, Thomas J. Pressly, 1954, Princeton University Press, excerpts pp. 131-133)

The Real Cause of Secession

The protectionist Morrill Tariff passed the Senate on March 2, 1861, with many Southern members already having resigned their seats due to their States no longer being part of the United States. In response, Virginia Senator Roger Pryor delivered a blistering tirade against the Northern protectionists: “The importune protectionists of Pennsylvania . . . after higgling successively with every party for a stipend from the Treasury, at last caught the Republicans in a moment of exigent need, and from their lust for place, extorted the promise of a bounty to iron. This bill is the issue of a carnal coalition between the Abolitionists of New England and the protectionists of Pennsylvania.” The low, free trade tariff passed by the Confederate Congress would be ruinous to high-tariff Northern ports.

The Real Cause of Secession

“Southern agrarians had made known their intense hostility to protective [import] duties which they considered a burdensome tax upon their enterprise for the benefit of Northern manufacturers. It was the issue that drove South Carolina to the edge of rebellion thirty years before, and ever since 1846 Southern influence had kept tariff schedules at low levels.

But a tariff increase had been one of the major planks in the Republicans’ Chicago [party] platform. Its appeal had won them many votes in the East, especially in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Accordingly they were determined to redeem their pledge without delay; indeed they were warned repeatedly that failure to act would ruin them in Pennsylvania.

[Republican Simon] Cameron’s correspondence made it evident that conservative Pennsylvanians were determined to have a higher tariff regardless of the consequences; that this was not an issue which they regarded as properly open to compromise. Harry C. Carey of Philadelphia, the doctrinaire protectionist who was ready to concede almost anything else to the South, comforted his sympathizers with a unique diagnosis of the secession crisis which absolved them of any responsibility. In begging Northern congressmen to raise the tariff, he argued that free trade was actually “the cause of the discord with which we are troubled.” Only protection [of Northern manufacturers] could form a sound foundation for a prosperous and harmonious Union.

In any event, Republicans wasted no time in bringing the tariff question before Congress. A bill sponsored by Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, which provided substantial protection for Pennsylvania iron and other Northern manufactures, had passed the House at the previous session. Cameron pressed for its consideration in the Senate as early as the second day of the new session.

Senator Hunter of Virginia, defending the rights of farmers and consumers, led the opposition to the new tariff . . . [as to] Virginia and the rest of the South this bill would be ruinous. “I know that we here are too weak to resist or to defend ourselves; those who sympathize with our wrongs are too weak to help us . . . No sir, this bill will pass. And let it pass into the statute-book; let it pass into history, that we may know how it is that the South has been dealt with when New England and Pennsylvania had the power to deal with her interests.”

A week later an amended version of the Morrill Tariff passed the Senate by a vote of 35 to 14, the opposition coming exclusively from Southerners and western Democrats. Representative [Daniel] Sickles of New York City reflected the views of the merchants when he protested that this bill would further alienate the South from the Union, for “our Southern friends perceive that . . . you intend . . . to tax them on the necessaries of life in order to enrich the manufacturing classes of the North . . .”

(And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861, Kenneth M. Stampp, LSU Press, 1950, excerpts pp. 161-164)

Banishing Confederate Symbols

One cannot fully understand the cultural Marxist ideology present in America today without reviewing the Bolshevik consolidation of power in post-WW1 Russia – and its feat of social engineering led by an iconoclastic youth movement directed against bureaucratic authority. A rigid communist, Stalin instituted a new Inquisition in Russia which “forced thinking people to desist from their independent thoughts to desist from their independent thoughts and moral principles and to identify with a party and with policies felt to be unacceptable or questionable. . . or else be declared treasonable.” Doubting official Marxist ideology equaled treason. Highly recommended is Sheila Fitzpatrick’s “Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928-1931,” Indiana University Press, 1984.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

Banishing Confederate Symbols

“It goes without saying that each generation interprets the past – its past – to enhance, justify and confirm its view of itself. Certainly, the politically correct, cultural Marxist Left, which spearheads the effort to “cleanse” our society of Confederate symbolism, has erected its own set of symbols, totems and myths to legitimize its present activities and its extreme revolutionary zeal.

Thus in the place of Lee, Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, we witness the rising cults of Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, “the Secret Six” abolitionists, and the rehabilitation and virtual canonization of the bloody thirsty fanatic, John “Pottawatomie “Brown.

In the America of 2017 we have a whole new set of martyrs and saints, whose message is carefully massaged and congealed, and then presented as models for us and our children. And the can be no dissent from this new imposed vision.

The historical profession, almost to a man, has joined in, with the likes of Stalinist historian, Eric Foner, now heralded as the nation’s “leading historian on slavery and the War.”

Everything revolves around slavery and racism as the sole causes of the War, and an almost unexpungable stain each generation must strive to overcome. Put very simply, it was historic white oppression that had to be defeated and destroyed as part of the advancing historical process, a process which is posited as inevitable and irreversible. It is represented as the latest conquest of the “Idea of Progress.”

And that campaign, that ideological narrative for the Left, continues with the present efforts to banish symbols honoring anything to do with the Confederacy and its leaders, even if morally irreproachable individuals like Robert E. Lee are included in the crosshairs.

What distinguishes the cultural Marxist historians’ narrative from earlier views is not just its social omnipresence, but its rigid dogmatism brooks no disagreement, no opposing views.”

(The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, Boyd D. Cathey, Scuppernong Press, 2018, excerpts pp. 105-106)

Recognizing Valor

Recognizing Valor

“It is not the battle itself which is being celebrated, but the heroism of the men who took part in it. The battle itself was an abominable thing . . . In all its crimson horror . . . Not a thing to celebrate . . .

At Gettysburg thousands died in utmost agony . . . Good and gentle women were widowed and the happiness of homes was destroyed . . . We are not celebrating the battle . . . but the valor of the men who faced, without flinching, a thing that was infernal.”

(Charleston News & Courier editorial, July 4, 1913.)

Grant Versus Lee at the Wilderness

Popular histories of Gettysburg proclaim that Lee suffered a great defeat at the hands of Meade and that the Confederacy’s strength was on the wane; however, Colonel Thomas L. Livermore of the US Army wrote: “After Gettysburg, the Confederacy had the same capacity for recruiting armies and supplying them as before, and the morale of the Army of Northern Virginia was just as good.  In the autumn of 1863, Lee crossed the Rapidan to attack Meade, and in December he came out of his entrenchments along Mine Run to attack, but failed to come to blows because Lee had retreated across the Rapidan in the night.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Grant Versus Lee at the Wilderness

“In referring to the opening of the campaign in May 1864, Colonel Tyler, of the Thirty-seventh Massachusetts, wrote: “The Army of the Potomac had never won a decisive victory on Southern soil . . . The Army of Northern Virginia . . . against great odds had achieved victory after victory, and hardly tasted defeat.”

In May 1864 came General Grant with the prestige of his success in the southwest, and with the vast resources of the North and West at his call, confident that his 118,649 “present for duty equipped,” could defeat Lee’s 61,953.

But Grant was meeting Lee – “the greatest of all the great Captains that the English speaking people have brought forth,” whose name, says General Sir Frederic Maurice, must be added to the select group of the world’s greatest commanders named by Napoleon – Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugene, and Frederick the Great.

[Northern] General [Morris] Schaff says . . . [in] the two days of deadly [at the Wilderness] encounter every man who could bear a musket had been put in; Hancock and Warren repulsed; Sedgewick routed, and now on the defensive behind breastworks; the cavalry drawn back; the [supply] trains seeking safety beyond the Rapidan.

Colonel T.L. Livermore estimates that the numbers engaged were: Federals, 101,895; and Confederates, 61,025. The total Federal losses in the Wilderness battles were 17,666. The Confederate losses were reported in only 70 out of 183 regiments; Livermore says, “it is not extravagant to estimate the Confederate losses at a total of 7,750.”

(A Colonel at Gettysburg: Life and Character of Colonel Joseph N. Brown, Varina D. Brown; The State Company, 1931, excerpts pp. 237; 244-245)

 

Creating Engines for Political Security

The “glittering prize” of political party victory was control of the distribution of political offices, and Lincoln astutely arranged the patronage to control his party as well as keep jealous competitors at bay. The Collectors of Customs posts were most important, and were decisive in Lincoln’s decision for war rather than lose his tariff money and appointing powers.  Count Gurowski, the Polish immigrant and political gadfly mentioned below, believed in the European tradition that “treason” was simple opposition to royalty. In the United States, however, Article III, Section 3, defines treason only as waging war against “them,” the States, or adhering to their enemies.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Creating Engines for Political Security

“The arduous task of cabinet-making was far from completed before Lincoln was beset with a swarm of office-seekers. Indeed, Washington was a veritable mecca for patronage mongers bent upon securing consulships, Indian agencies, postmaster-ships, or anything else in the gift of the appointing power [of the President].

Those who witnessed the rush of job hunters could not easily forget the spectacle. Wrote home a Michigan Congressman: “The City is overwhelmed with a crowd of rabid, persistent office-seekers – the like never was experienced before in the history of the Government.”

An Indiana member reminisced later: “I met at every turn a swarm of miscellaneous people, many of them looking as hungry and fierce as wolves, and ready to pounce upon members [of Congress] as they passed, begging for personal intercessions, letters of recommendations, etc. . . . the scuffle for place was unabated.”

And the eccentric Count Adam Gurowski, viewing the scene, confided to his diary in this same month of March 1861 his impressions:

“What a run, a race for offices. This spectacle likewise new to me. The Cabinet Ministers, or, as they call them here, the Secretaries, have old party debts to pay, old sores to avenge or to heal, and all this by distributing offices, or by what they call it here, the patronage. They, the leaders, hope to create engines for their own political security, but no one seems to look over Mason and Dixon’s line to the terrible and with lightning-like velocity spreading fire of hellish treason.”

Politically and financially, the collectors of customs posts were among the most important at the disposal of the Administration. That at the metropolis of the Empire State was the most lucrative. “There is no situation in the U. States which enables the incumbent to exert such influence . . . as the Collectorship of New York,” one political observer had written in the 1840’s; to another this position was second only in influence to that of Postmaster-General.”

Under the caption “Fat Offices of New York,” Horace Greeley’s Tribune informed its readers in 1860 that ranking first in importance and revenue was the collectorship, with its fixed salary of $6,340, and some $20,000 more in the form of “pickings and fees.” Before Lincoln’s first administration had run its four years, the Surveyor of the Port estimated the number of employees in the New York Custom House at 1,200 and the assessment on their salaries for political party purposes at 2 percent.”

(Lincoln and the Patronage, Harry J. Carman & Reinhard H. Luthin, Peter Smith, 1864, excerpts pp. 53-54; 59-60)

 

Cotton Profiteering on the Red River

The official intent of the early 1864 Red River Campaign was to forcibly restore the US flag to Texas soil and thus serve as a warning to Louis-Napoleon and Maximilian, though the real motivation was the seizure of vast quantities of Southern cotton needed by New England mills and export to England at high profit. As prior to the war, neither New England mill owners, Manhattan banks nor the British, the latter being firmly responsible for planting African slavery upon American shores, experienced any moral qualms regarding cotton produced by the labor of African bondsmen. In the words of historian E. Merton Coulter: “Business morality reached a very low ebb.”  The C.A. Weed Company below has been described as “either commission merchants or US Treasury agents, acting for several others.” General Banks was reportedly offered a $100,000 bribe to ensure maximum cotton bale acquisition.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Cotton Profiteering on the Red River

“Interest in upper Louisiana cotton and an expedition up the Red River was reignited [in January 1864] by the arrival of three thousand bales of cotton in [occupied] New Orleans from upriver Natchez, Mississippi. Michael Hahn, who would soon be elected governor of the Lincoln-loyal Louisiana State government, wrote the president that the arrival from Natchez “produced such a sensation as to cause a large number of persons to take the oath of allegiance in order to resume their business.”

Within a few months, a US marshal in Louisiana wrote Lincoln, “Commerce is still King. You have it in your power to reduce the price of gold, pacify the clamor for cotton from abroad, make friends for yourself and country and put into the exchequer from this department some $30-$40 million.”

On January 23, 1864, General [Nathaniel] Banks replied to a letter from General in Chief Halleck that [he] had completely accepted Halleck’s view regarding the merits of an advance up the Red River [to seize additional Southern cotton]. Earlier that month, Banks learned that two Confederate officers were willing to be bribed in order to ensure that massive quantities of cotton were not burned ahead of an advancing Union army, as otherwise required by Confederate law.

Banks was an ambitious politician with eyes on the White House. He knew that if he could deliver sizable quantities of cotton to England, powerful politicians would be influenced to look favorably on a Banks candidacy. As described by author Robert Kerby [Kirby Smith’s Confederacy, 1972]:

“[In the Trans-Mississippi theater, whenever] a river steamboat churned from Shreveport or Alexandra, Louisiana, with a cargo of cotton consigned to New Orleans, it was fairly obvious that responsible people were permitting trade across the lines. Rebel customs officials collected the duties due on smuggled shipments . . . while New York financiers openly dealt in shares of Confederate cotton.

Swarms of Northern cotton buyers, bearing licenses signed by Lincoln himself, endured the rude hospitality of Shreveport, while agents dispatched by [General] Kirby Smith . . . became accustomed to the amenities of New Orleans and Washington.

Banks gathered a total of only about four thousand cotton bales, of which twenty-five hundred went to C.A. Weed & Company in New Orleans. Earlier, Weed had been a business partner of General [Benjamin] Butler’s shady older brother, Andrew. [Also, Northern Admiral David] Porter is estimated to have collected over $90,000 before [the US Congress altered cotton seizure protocols].”

As Confederate Major-General Richard Taylor, whose army pursued Banks, remembered: “In [the enemy’s army’s] rapid flight from Grand Ecore to Monette’s Ferry, a distance of forty miles, the Federal burned nearly every house on the road. In pursuit we passed the smoking ruins of homesteads, by which stood weeping women and children.”

(Trading with the Enemy; The Covert Economy During the American Civil War, Philip Leigh, Westholme, 2014, excerpts pp. 112-113; 122)

 

The Milk of the Cocoanut

Between 1808 and 1832, tariff protection for New England shipping interests was the most important economic debate in the country. Though by 1860 constant resistance by the Southern States had kept rates relatively in check — and this was the primary income of the federal government — after sufficient States had seceded, the new Northern congressional majority raised tariff rates to near 50 percent. Once the new Confederate States Congress voted a virtual free tariff in early March, 1861, the “slave-importing shippers” of New England decided upon war against the South. The following was delivered by Lloyd T. Everett of the Washington [DC] Camp of the United Confederate Veterans on February 10, 1914.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

The Milk of the Cocoanut

“Mark well this fact: In the debates in Congress on the tariff dispute of 1833, John Quincy Adams, ex-President of the United States and then a member of the House of Representatives, uttered this significant remark from the floor of the House:

“But protection might be extended in different forms to different interests . . . In the Southern and Southwestern portion of the union, there exists a certain interest [by which Adams meant Negro slavery] which enjoys under the Constitution and the laws of the United States an especial protection, peculiar to itself” [i.e., return of fugitive slaves escaping from one State to another].

He referred to the slaves of the Southern States as “machinery,” and added: “If they [the Southern States] must withdraw protection from the free white labor of the North [the protection of a high tariff, Adams meant], then it ought to be withdrawn from the machinery of the South.”

Ah – here we have the milk in the cocoanut . . . In the framing of the Constitution, the North and the South – rather, New England and the far Southern States – arranged a quid pro quo, by which the shipping interests of New England obtained control, and permanent control, of commercial regulations by a mere majority vote, instead of a two-thirds majority vote, in the Congress, and the South (together with the slave-importing shippers of this same New England) defeated the possibility of prohibition of the continued importation of Negroes, temporarily, or for some nineteen years.

And now, her darling of sectional customs “protection” in danger from South Carolina’s firm stand, through John Adams as her spokesman, gave warning, in 1833, that tariff “protection,” although not guaranteed by the Constitution, and slavery protection, which was expressly guaranteed by that instrument, must be held as twin special interests, to stand or fall together.

In this light, then, these remarks of Adams, of Massachusetts, should be carefully marked and constantly borne in mind in connection with the subsequent growth and course of anti-Southern agitation, under the guise of an anti-slavery crusade, from the time – this time South Carolina’s Nullification stand and the resultant tariff reduction of 1833 – that a definite check was placed upon high tariff, North-favoring legislation.”

(Living Confederate Principles, Lloyd T. Everett, Southern Historical Society Papers, No. II, Volume XL, September 1915; Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1991, excerpts pp. 21-22)

Understanding the War Between the States

The following is taken from Dr. Clyde Wilson’s “Expansion and Conflict of the Northern and Southern Cultures in 1860” which traces the emerging and deepening fissures in the young American republic. Central to this conflict was the original and traditional American constitutional system of laws well-understood in the South, versus New England’s developing industry and the flood of immigrants into the North and Midwest, with little or no understanding of that American constitutional system of laws. The source book is available online at www.Amazon.com, and via free download from www.southernhistorians.org.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Understanding the War Between the States

“The economic conflict between North and South . . . was important and was present from the beginning. It was the root of the disagreement between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson that was the first serious political conflict of the Union. But the undoubted importance of economics was no more central to the conflict than the persisting and evolving differences in values and ways of life.

Southerners had first developed the Midwest by settling the southern parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. As time went on, this region changed character as industry and great cities developed and as New Englanders and European immigrants swarmed in. From the 1840s large numbers of impoverished Irish came to the US and settled everywhere, especially in the cities.

After the failed revolutions of 1848 many Germans and other central Europeans came, and settled largely in the Midwest. They had strong, centralist, progressive and authoritarian attitudes and knew nothing of the South or American constitutional traditions. They would be zealous supporters of the Republican Party and the Federal Army.

Abraham Lincoln secretly bought a German language newspaper [the Springfield Zeitung] to support his presidential candidacy. By the 1850s a majority in the Midwestern States no longer identified with and voted with the South as they had traditionally . . . [and] The Northern people were one-fourth foreign born.

It must be understood that Northern abolitionists had little sympathy for black people – they considered them an obstacle to what they wanted as American “progress.” Most Northern States denied rights to the few black people who lived there. In Lincoln’s Illinois, before and during the War Between the States, were not even allowed to move into the State.

If slaves were freed in the South, as abolitionists demanded, they were still not allowed to move North. The majority of free black people in the US were in the South and demonstrably better off than those in the North. For a long time New Englanders made the “racist” boast that they were “pure Anglo-Saxons” and thus superior to other Americans.

It is simply wrong to thing that antislavery was for racial equality. It was against black people and even more against those who held them as bonded labor. To assume otherwise is to make the mistake of reading the later 1900s back into that time. Abolition had little to do with the actual life lived by people, white or black, in the South. No abolitionist ever made any constructive suggestion [regarding peaceful or practical emancipation].”

(Understanding the War Between the States, A Supplemental Booklet, Clyde N. Wilson, Howard White, et al, 2015, excerpts Chapter 6)

Hamilton’s Nation at War with Itself

What arch-Federalist Alexander Hamilton thought was merely a bad dream and impossible, achieved reality with the sixteenth person to occupy the Oval Office. Lincoln converted the republic into a government which made “war and carnage the only means of supporting itself – a government that can exist only by the sword.” Those States which enabled Lincoln to gain a plurality victory as president willingly provided the troops who marched into other States intent upon subjugation. Hamilton and his contemporaries never imagined a future president ruling with dictatorial powers and an army of two million under his command.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.org

 

Hamilton’s Nation at War with Itself

“Remember, this is the arch-Federalist speaking, the man whose name is associated more than any other in the Constitutional Convention with the authority of the federal government. He paints a picture of the country without this [coercive] power, and of a State refusing a federal requisition:

“It has been observed, to coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised. A failure of compliance will never be confined to a single State. This being the case, can we suppose it wise to hazard a civil war?

Suppose Massachusetts, or any large State, should refuse, and Congress should attempt to compel them, would they not have influence to procure assistance, especially from those States which are in the same situation as themselves? What picture does this idea present to our view? A complying State at war with a non-complying State; Congress marching the troops of one State into the bosom of another; this State collecting auxiliaries, and forming, perhaps, a majority against the federal head.

Here is a nation at war with itself. Can any reasonable man be well-disposed towards a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself – a government than can exist only by the sword.

Every such war must involve the innocent with the guilty. This single consideration should be sufficient to dispose every peaceable citizen against such a government. But can we believe one State will ever suffer itself to be used as an instrument of coercion? The thing is a dream; it is impossible.”

(The Legality of Secession, excerpt, www.etymonline.com)