Circa1865

In his May 1, 1861 message to the North Carolina General Assembly, Governor John Ellis of referred to the “Northern Government” and that “they have drawn the sword against us and are now seeking our blood. They have promised to partition our property and the earnings of our people among the mercenary soldiers after our subjugation shall be effected. All fraternity of feeling is lost between us and them. We can no longer live with them. There must be a separation at once and forever.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

“In Defense of Their Traditional Liberties”

“Although North Carolina had soon after the adoption of the Federal constitution taken steps to prevent the importation of Negroes, not only from abroad but from any other State, yet in the progress of time the system of slavery became strongly engrafted on her social structure, and the agitation of slavery question excited her people greatly.

Periodically this agitation stirred the people and animated them to maintain with steadfastness the right to manage their own domestic, local concerns in their own way.

At length when it was declared that an “irrepressible conflict” had arisen, and that the “Union could not exist half slave and half free,” it came to be regarded that the limitations of the Federal constitution were no longer to be observed, and that the abolition party would seek to abolish slavery. This led South Carolina and other commonwealths to the South to withdraw from the Union.

The question of holding a convention for the purpose of withdrawing was submitted to the people of North Carolina in the spring of 1861, but so conservative were they and so attached to the Union, that they separated themselves from their Southern brethren and refused to call the convention. The difference between the votes was, however, small — only about 250 in the poll of the entire State.

Such was the situation, when in April 1861, Fort Sumter was bombarded and President Lincoln called on North Carolina to furnish her quota of troops to coerce the seceding States. These events changed the aspect of affairs in North Carolina instantaneously. All differences ceased.

Union men, who, like George E. Badger, did not hold to the right of secession, united now in the declaration that North Carolinians must [now] share in the fortunes of their Southern kindred. Then amid the excitement of that period came the rapid preparations for the inevitable conflict — the marshaling of troops, the formation of armies, the strenuous endeavors to equip and maintain our citizen [soldiers] and make defense of our unprotected coast.

Never was there a finer display of patriotic ardor; never did peaceable ploughboys more quickly assume the character of veteran soldiers. It was if a common inspiration possessed the souls of all the people and animated them to die, if need be, in defense of their traditional liberties.

During the four years of strife that followed, the people of North Carolina bore themselves with an unparalleled heroism. With a voting population of 112,000, North Carolina sent to the army 125,000 soldiers.

Strenuous efforts were made to provide food for the soldiers and the poor, and while salt works were erected along the sea coast, vast quantities of cards were imported for the women to use at home, and other supplies were brought through the blockade.

[Life then] was accompanied, however, by straits and hardships, suffering and mourning, the separation from husbands and fathers from their families and the pall of death that fell upon every household. What awful experiences were crowded into four years of heroic and grand sacrifice — how trying the vicissitudes, how calamitous the dire result!”

(Cyclopedia of Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas of the 19^th Century, Volume II, Brant & Fuller, 1892, pp. 35-36)

Richmond’s bronze statue of Gen. Stonewall Jackson was dedicated on October 26, 1875 before a crowd of 50,000; the oration was delivered by the Rev. Moses D. Hoge of Richmond’s Second Presbyterian Church.  Gen. Joseph E. Johnston served as Chief-Marshal; attending were Generals D.H. Hill, W.H.F. Lee, Fitzhugh Lee, and 500 members of the Old Stonewall Brigade.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Principles Essential to the Perpetuation of the Union

“For, when we ask what has become of the principles in defense of which Jackson imperiled and lost his life, then I answer: A form of government may change, a policy may perish, but a principle may never die. Circumstances may so change as to make the application of the principle no longer possible, bits it innate vitality is not affected thereby. The conditions of society may be so altered as to make it idle to contend for a principle which no longer has any practical force, but these changed conditions of society have not annihilated one original truth.

The application of these postulates to the present situation of our country is obvious. The people of the South maintained, as their fathers maintained before them, that certain principles were essential to the perpetuation of the Union according to its original Constitution.

Rather than surrender their convictions, they took up arms to defend them. The appeal was in vain. Defeat came, they accepted it, with its consequences, just as they would accepted victory with its fruits.

But it is idle to shut our eyes to the fact that this consolidated empire of States is not the Union established by our fathers. No intelligent European student of American institutions is deceived by any such assumption. We gain nothing by deceiving ourselves.

And if history teaches any lesson, it is this: that a nation cannot long survive when the fundamental principles which gave it life, originally, are subverted. [Remember] Jackson’s clear, ringing tone . . . :

“What is life without honor? Degradation is worse than death. We must think of the living and of those who are to come after us, and see that by God’s blessing we transmit to them the freedom we have enjoyed.”

(Oration of Rev. Moses D. Hoge, Unveiling of the Statue of Stonewall Jackson, Richmond, Virginia; Stonewall Jackson, A Military Biography, D. Appleton and Company, 1876, excerpt pp. 564)

In July 1861, Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware spoke in the United States Senate and compared “the language of Lincoln and the Republicans to statements by the British Crown and Parliament during the American Revolution.” He saw it as irrational that after a devastating war between the sections, there would remain no bond to cement the people to one another, and that war would ruin both North and South.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Delaware the Southern State

“In 1861, an optimistic Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs stated “all fifteen States of the South will have severed the bonds which have bound them to the late Federal Union and will have joined the Confederate States.” This statement is remarkable for two reasons.

First, Toombs expected, as did many Southerners, that every slave State would bond itself to the new southern Confederacy. Second, Delaware was included in Toombs’ fifteen States of the South. Most Southerners do not view Delaware in this light, but based on historical evidence, Delaware was actually more Southern than middle, and positively more Southern than Northern. Delaware, then, is the perfect case study for what Abraham Lincoln called “the fire in the rear.”

She had a large pro-Southern population, a congressional delegation that favored at minimum peaceful separation if not secession, a State government that was split between pro-war Republicans and pro-South Democrats, and Delaware was occupied by the Union army several times during the war. It would be no stretch to say that if not for military occupation and the inability of Delaware to secede, Delaware may have endeavored to cast its lot with the South.

Both United States Senators from Delaware in 1860 – James A. Bayard the younger and Willard Saulsbury, Sr., were Democrats . . . Delawareans had long supported Southern rights in the United States Congress, but by 1860, the State’s geographic position exposed its property and material well-being to the abuses of the federal government, thus forcing its citizens to adopt a more cautious approach to the sectional conflict.

[In the 1860 presidential election, those] candidates who were diametrically opposed to Lincoln received over seventy-six percent of the total popular vote . . . [and] Democrats retained a five to four majority in the State Senate . . .

In March [1861], the [Delaware] Gazette unleashed its harshest condemnation of the federal government with a stinging editorial supporting State’s rights. The paper thought the impending crisis would settle the issue of location of sovereignty in the republic. “If a government has a right to subjugate a State then freedom must mourn until other countries and other peoples establish what we had hoped had been done by Washington and Jefferson and their compeers.”

On 19 July 1861, Bayard rose in the Senate to deliver a two-hour speech entitled “Executive Usurpation” in response to a joint resolution of Congress . . . to “approve and confirm certain act of the President of the United States for suppressing insurrection and rebellion,” most notably the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, the raising of troops, and the blockade of Southern ports.

[Bayard stated] “I am attached to the Union as any man who claims a set in this body . . .” But the course of the administration and the Republican Party, Bayard asserted, “was the reduction of the States to “provinces, and the military power to become the dominant power in the representative Republic . . . for the purpose of conquest and subjugation.”

(The Avenger Without Mercy: Delaware Under the Federal Heel; Brion McClanahan; Northern Opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s War, D. Jonathan White, editor, Abbeville Institute Press, 2014, excerpts, pp. 116; 120; 127; 136-137)

Wartime Republican Lt. Gov. of Ohio, Benjamin Stanton, severely criticized Generals Grant, Prentiss and Sherman after the Battle of Shiloh, concluding that the first two should be court-martialed and shot. Massachusetts-born, Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade was a prewar Whig and one of the most radical of Republicans by 1861. However, they both were of the opinion in early 1861 that the American South’s independence should be recognized.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

“I am Disposed to Recognize That Independence”

“Mr. Speaker, when there were fifteen slaveholding States acknowledging allegiance to the Federal Government, and therefore, having in their hands the power to protect themselves against any invasion of their rights on the part of the Federal Government, it was a matter of very little consequence whether such an amendment as that was incorporated into the Constitution or not.

But the state of the country is now radically and essentially changed. Seven or eight States now deny their allegiance to this Government, have organized a separate Confederacy, and have declared their independence of this Government.

If they shall maintain their position, and sustain the authorities there for a year or two to come, so as to show that nothing but a war of subjugation and conquest can bring them back, I, for one, am disposed to recognize that independence.”

(Ohio Republican Lt. Governor Benjamin Stanton (Congressional Globe, February 23, 1861, page 1285)

“You Cannot Hold Men Forcibly in This Union”

“And Southern gentlemen stand here, and in almost all their speeches, speak of the dissolution of the Union as an element of every argument — If they do not feel interested in upholding this Union, if it really trenches on their rights, if it endangers their institutions to such an extent that they cannot feel secure under it, if their interests are violently assailed by means of this Union, I am not one of those who expect that they will long continue in such a Union.

It would be doing violence to the platform of the [Republican] party to which I belong.

We have adopted the old Declaration of Independence as the basis of our political movement, which declares that any people, when their government ceases to protect rights, when it is so subverted from the true purposes of government as to oppress them, have the right to recur to fundamental principles, and if need be, to destroy the government. I hold that they have this right.

I will not blame any people for exercising it, whenever they think the contingency has come. You cannot hold men forcibly in this Union, for the attempt to do so, it seems to me, would subvert the first principles of the Government under which we live.”

(Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Congressional Globe, third session, 34th Congress, page 25)

Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts spoke the following in 1811 and was keenly aware of the States being sovereign and federated in a voluntary political Union that did not authorize adding territory to it. His State opposed the War of 1812 and refused troops while trading with the enemy – the latter it had done in 1759 when British Gen. James Wolfe confronted the French on the Plains of Abraham. Like other Americans of the antebellum era, Quincy found his own native State to be his home and country.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Josiah Quincy, States-Rights Yankee

“Mr. Speaker, The bill, which is now proposed to be passed [to form Louisiana into a State], has this assumed principle for its basis: that the three branches of this national government, without recurring to conventions of the people, in the States, or to the legislatures of the States, are authorized to admit new partners to a share of the political power, in countries out of the original limits of the United States.

Now, this assumed principle, I maintain to be altogether without any sanction in the constitution. I declare it to be a manifest and atrocious usurpation of power; of a nature, dissolving, according to undeniable principles of moral law, the obligations of our national compact; and leading to all the awful consequences, which flow from such a state of things . . .

Sir, what is this power, we propose now to usurp?

Nothing less than a power, changing all the proportions of the weight and influence, possessed by the potent sovereignties composing this Union. A stranger is to be introduced to an equal share, without their consent. Upon a principle, pretended to be deduced from the constitution, this government, after this bill passes, may and will multiply foreign partners in power, at its own mere motion; at its irresponsible pleasure; in other words, as local interests, party passions, or ambitious views may suggest . . . This is not so much a question, concerning the exercise of sovereignty, as it is who shall be sovereign.

[Is] there a moral principle of public law better settled, or more conformable to the plainest suggestions of reason, than that the violation of a contract by one of the parties may be considered as exempting the others from its obligations?

Do you suppose the people of the Northern and Atlantic States will, or ought to look on with patience and see representatives and senators from the Red River and Missouri, pouring themselves upon this and the other floor, managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles, at least, from their residence?

It is the part of a wise man to foresee danger and to hide himself. This great usurpation, which creeps into this House, under the plausible appearance to giving content to that important point, New Orleans; starts up a gigantic power to control the nation.

With respect to this love of our union . . . It grows out of the affections; and has not, and cannot be made to have, anything universal in its nature. Sir, I confess it, the first public love of my heart is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. There is my fireside; there are the tombs of my ancestors. The love of this union grows out of this attachment to my native soil, and is rooted in it.

I cherish it, because it affords the best external hope of her peace, her prosperity, her independence. The bill, if it passes, is the death blow to the Constitution. It may, afterwards, linger; but lingering, its fate will, at no distant period, be consummated.”

(Speech on the Passage of the Bill to Enable the People of the Territory of Orleans to Form a Constitution and State Government, Josiah Quincy, January 14, 1811; American History Told by Contemporaries, Volume III, Albert Bushnell Hart, editor, Macmillan Company, 1901, pp. 410-414)

Illinois politician Stephen A. Douglas thought the solution to the sectional divide in 1860 was finding compromise with Republicans through amendments to the Constitution. Douglas’s Senate speech in early 1861 listed three eventualities he saw ahead, and knew the last would end the union – as Alexander Hamilton presciently observed many years earlier. Formerly a man of compromise, after Fort Sumter, Douglas implored Lincoln to raise “thrice as many” volunteers, despite his witnessing the subjugation of Americans and the end of the Union.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Stephen Douglas on the Alternatives

“In a speech in the Senate, March 15, 1861, Mr. Douglas had reduced the situation to the following three alternative points:

1. The Restoration and Preservation of the Union by such Amendments to the Constitution as will insure domestic tranquility, safety and equality of all the States, and thus restore peace, unity and fraternity to the whole country.
2. A Peaceful Dissolution of the Union by recognizing the Independence of such States as refuse to remain in the Union without such Constitutional Amendments, and the establishment of a liberal system of commercial and social intercourse with them by treaties of commerce and amity.
3. War, with a view to the subjugation and military occupation of those States which have Seceded or may Secede from the Union.”

As a thorough Union man, he could never have agreed to “A Peaceful Dissolution of the Union.” On the other hand he was equally averse to War, because he held that “War is Disunion. War is final, eternal separation.” Hence all his energies and talents were given to carrying out his first-stated line of policy.”

(The Great Conspiracy, John A. Logan, A.R. Hart & Company, 1886, excerpt, pg. 271)

Not recognizing the withdrawal of States from the voluntary Union in 1861, English-born Sen. Edward D. Baker of Oregon responds below to former Vice President and then-Senator John Breckenridge of Kentucky. Baker reportedly appeared in the Senate that day in the uniform of a Northern colonel, riding whip and saber in hand, claiming that secession was rebellion and that South Carolina was to be subjugated into loyalty. This, ironically from a man born in England, was what George III attempted some 85 years earlier.  Baker was mortally wounded at Ball’s Bluff in October 1861.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Subjugating Rebellion into Loyalty

“The senator from Kentucky stands up here in a manly way in opposition to what he sees is the overwhelming sentiment of the Senate, and utters reproof, malediction, and prediction combined. Well sir, it is not every prediction that is prophesy.

I confess Mr. President, that I would not have predicted three weeks ago the disasters which have overtaken our arms; and I do not think [if I were to predict now] that six months hence the senator will indulge in the same tone of prediction which is his favorite key now. I would ask him what would you have us do now — a Confederate army within twenty miles of us, advancing, or threatening to advance, to overwhelm your government; to shake the pillars of the Union; to bring it down around your head in ruins if you stay here?

Are we to stop and talk about an uprising sentiment in the north against the war? Is it not the manly part to go on as we have begun, to raise money, and levy armies, to organize them, to prepare to advance; when we do advance, to regulate that advance by all the laws and regulations that civilization and humanity will allow in time of battle? To talk to us about stopping is idle; we will never stop. Will the senator yield to rebellion? Will he shrink from armed insurrection? Will his State justify it? Shall we send a flag of truce?

When we subjugate South Carolina, what shall we do? We shall compel its obedience to the Constitution of the United States; that is all. Why play upon words? We do not mean, we have never said, any more. If it be slavery that men should obey the Constitution their fathers fought for, let it be so.

We propose to subjugate rebellion into loyalty; we propose to subjugate insurrection into peace; we propose to subjugate Confederate anarchy into constitutional Union liberty. When the Confederate armies are scattered; when their leaders are banished from power; when the people return to a late repentant sense of the wrong they have done to a government they never felt but benignancy and blessing — then the Constitution made for us all will be felt by all, like the descending rains from heaven which bless all alike.

Sir, how can we retreat? What will become of constitutional government? What will become of public liberty? What of past glories? What of future hopes? No sir; a thousand times no, sir! We will rally . . . we will rally the people, the loyal people, of the whole country. They will pour forth their treasure, their money, their men, without stint, without measure.”

(Edward D. Baker, Senate speech of August 1, 1861. The World’s Famous Orations, W.J. Bryan, editor, Funk & Wagnall’s, 1906, pp. 3-8)

“. . . Edward A. Pollard, a Virginia critic of [Jefferson] Davis, chronicler of the war and bewailer of the “lost cause,” took courage in 1868 to write his most significant book, The Lost Cause Regained.

The folly of politicians, he said, had made the South defend slavery seemingly “as a property tenure, or as a peculiar institution of labour; when the true ground of defense was as of a barrier against a contention and war of the races.” [Pollard wrote:]

“It has been curiously reserved for the South to obtain AFTER the war the actual experience of oppression, and of that measure a despotism which would have amply justified the commencement of hostilities. If it fought, in 1860, for principles too abstract, it has superabundant causes for rebellion now, which although they may not, and need not produce another war, yet have the effect to justify, in a remarkable way, the first appeal to arms.”

(The Central Theme of Southern History, Ulrich B. Phillips; Slavery As A Cause of the Civil War, E. Rozwenc, DC Heath and Company, 1949, pp. 25-26)

As asserted below, Americans in general seem unaware of the enormity of the Southern experience 1861-1865 and the aftermath of devastating defeat and subjugation. The author’s analogy brings needed perspective to an unnecessary war and death of a million Americans, counting military and civilian casualties.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Suppressing the Consent of the Governed

“Imagine America invaded by a foreign power, one that has quadruple the population and industrial base. Imagine that this enemy has free access to the world’s goods as well as an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder from the proletariat of other countries, while America itself is tightly blockaded from the outside world.

New York and Cincinnati have been taken. For months, Boston and Chicago have been under constant siege, the civilian population driven from their homes. Enemy forces roam over large parts of the country burning the homes, tools and food of the noncombatants in a campaign of deliberate terrorism.

Nearly eighty-five percent of the nation’s able-bodied men (up to 50 years of age) have been called to arms. Battlefield casualties have run to 39 percent and deaths amount to half of that, far exceeding those from any other war.

On the other hand, the enemy, though its acts and domestic propaganda indicate otherwise, is telling the American population that it only wants peace and the restoration of the status quo antebellum. Lay down your arms and all will be as before. What would be our state of morale in such conditions? Americans have never suffered such misfortune, have they?

Alas, they have. This was the experience of the Southern people from 1861-1865 in their lost War for Independence.

How hard the Southerners struggled for independence from the American Empire has been, and continues to be, suppressed by a nationalist culture that can only wonder: How could any group possibly have dissented from the greatest government on earth? But a very large number of Americans did no consent that government (the regime, after all, was supposed to be founded on the consent of the governed).

They were willing to put their dissent on the line in a greater sacrifice than any large group of Americans has ever been called on to make. Until finally, as a disappointed Union officer quoted by [author Gary] Gallagher remarked: “The rebellion [was] worn out rather than suppressed.”

(An Honorable Defeat, Clyde Wilson, Chronicles, October 1998, pg. 28)

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)