Gen. Trimble’s View of Gettysburg

The Southern Historical Society was founded in 1868 by Gen. Dabney Herndon Maury and dedicated to the preservation of the history of the Confederate government and its war for independence. Gen. Isaac Trimble was elected vice-president of the Society for the State of Maryland and was very active in attending meetings and contributing essays until his death in 1888 at age 82. The eminent historian Douglas Southall Freeman described Trimble as “a dark handsome man with flaming eye and deep ambition – perhaps disposed to be contentious, certainly a dandy in dress, but of the most conspicuous courage and a furious, insatiable fighter.”

Trimble’s View of Gettysburg

“One of the most-recognized essays written by Gen. Trimble was his recounting of his role at Gettysburg, and analysis of that battle. It is not precisely known when this essay was written, because it was not published until ten years after Gen. Trimble’s death, in 1898. The original manuscript had been in the possession of Major Graham [Daves] of North Carolina, who recounted that Trimble had written it for Veterans’ Associations and had given it to him for safekeeping. It is likely that the essay was originally delivered as a speech.

In the twenty or so years following the War, Gettysburg more than ever came to be seen as the “high water mark of the Confederacy” and virtually everyone with a perspective was contributing their proverbial “two-cents worth”. Trimble was not to be left out of the discussion, for his opinions were strong indeed. He prefaced his comments thusly:

“But it is certain that the Confederate commander never for a moment supposed that he could take a large army into Pennsylvania and continue there many weeks without fighting a great battle somewhere. This, General Lee hoped to do on ground of his own choice, with deliberate plan, and under circumstances entirely favorable to success. We are to see how these reasonable expectations were defeated by adverse circumstances; disobedience of orders by his commander of cavalry and want of concerted action and vigorous onset among his corps commanders at critical moments in the assaults of each of the three days.”

Trimble was of the opinion that the three days’ fighting at Gettysburg were a draw, and certainly the fact of the two armies at rest, facing one another for the day of July 4th, supports his contention. He also opined in his essay that had one of several errors by the Confederates not occurred, the battle could have been a signal victory for Lee.

Trimble specifically enumerated [nine] errors by the Confederate army at Gettysburg, and in so doing gives vent to his old resentments toward Stuart and Ewell [plus Rodes and Longstreet].

Trimble concluded his commentary by the statement that there was “no question” that a victory at Gettysburg “would have secured Southern independence.”

(Furious, Insatiable Fighter: A Biography of Major General Isaac Ridgeway Trimble, CSA. David C. Trimble. University Press of America, 2005, pp. 117-118)

Wendell Phillips on South Carolina’s Independence

Abolitionist Wendell Phillip’s own State of Massachusetts was the first British colony in America to codify African slavery within its borders, and its maritime fleet dominated the transatlantic slave trade in the first half of the eighteenth century. The speaker below was Major Graham Daves, Memorial Day Address presenter at Raleigh, North Carolina, May 10, 1901. All city businesses were virtually closed that afternoon – all banks and most State offices were closed.

Wendell Phillips on South Carolina’s Independence

“It is a matter of interest and worthy of memory, that the right of secession and the duty of the United States Government to withdraw its forces from the seceded territory were admitted by very distinguished abolitionist authority. By no less a person than Wendell Phillips of Massachusetts, the great and able abolitionist, the ‘silver tongued orator,’ distinguished scholar, bold uncompromising foe of the American South and of her institutions.

In a speech delivered at New Bedford, Massachusetts, on April 9th, 1861, just four days before the reduction of Fort Sumter by Confederate forces, he said:

“Here are a series of States girding the Gulf, who believe their peculiar institutions require that they should have a separate government. They have a right to decide that question without appealing to you or me. A large body of the people sufficient to make a nation, have come to the conclusion that they will have a government of a certain form. Who denies them the right?

Standing with the principles of 1776 behind us, who can deny them the right? What is the matter of a few millions of dollars or a few forts? It is a mere drop in the bucket of the great national question. It is theirs as much as it is ours. I maintain on the principles of 1776 that Abraham Lincoln has no right to a soldier in Fort Sumter.”

Those are the words of Wendell Phillips. Can language be more plain or more forcible in support of the belief and action of the people who united in establishing the Confederate States of America?

(Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume XXXII, R.A. Brock, editor, published by the Society, 1904, pg. 283)

Bounties Produce Bounty-Jumpers

By May of 1862, Lincoln demanded more troops from Northern governors who responded that their citizens “had developed an immunity to patriotic appeals,” and some other inducement than oratory was required. This was to begin the North’s descent into the hiring of well-paid mercenaries with which to subdue the truculent American South. During the war, the US government would pay – with its fiat money greenbacks – roughly $750,000,000 in recruitment bounties for soldiers.

Bounties Produce Bounty-Jumpers

“[Northern] governors were finding that Lincoln’s threat of a draft a compelling reason to raise men. An exception, however, was found in Ohio, where blunt Governor John Brough did not face the problem of reelection in 1864. Freed from the political anxieties that weighed upon his colleagues, Brough had time to think of the costs of the recruiting program.

Under the threat of Lincoln’s draft, States, counties and townships had been giving bounties, bidding higher and higher for the lives of men, until it was possible for a potential soldier to obtain a thousand dollars for joining the army. The local communities were bankrupting themselves to avoid the draft of their citizens. The system, as Brough saw it, was destroying the confidence of the people in the government, was compounding corruption and undermining patriotism.

Brough’s solution, however, was political suicide: Let the States fill their quotas by their own drafts and let them agree to a common bounty policy. When Stanton reported to Congress that the governors asked for delays in drafting, Brough hastened to disclaim any such intention. The financial situation was bad, and recruiting had ceased: Brough wanted the draft made promptly.

But more than he wanted a draft, Brough wanted an end to the war. The bounty-bought enlistments did not produce soldiers; they only contributed bounty jumpers.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp. 349-350)

 

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

Credit should be given to New York Governor Horatio Seymour for immediately seeing through Lincoln’s 10-percent plan of “reconstruction” of the United States, that is, creating loyal States out of conquered provinces. Even the Radical Republicans saw that Lincoln’s plan would only increase executive power while restricting their predatory raids on Southern property.

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

“From the night of the October 1863 elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lincoln kept his eyes glued on the coming contest. Two days later he was back in the War Department discussing political prospects.

The first development in the campaign was a Presidential proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for the Southern States. On December 8 Lincoln announced that any person in the South – with the exception of high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy – might be granted amnesty if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Moreover, whenever ten percent of the population of any State had taken the oath, they might hold elections and establish a State government, which the President would recognize.

The political implications of the proclamation were immediately evident to both Radical Republicans and Democrats. Horatio Seymour of New York perceived it as a new assault on popular liberties. In his January message to the legislature, he pointed out that the arbitrary military power of the federal government was growing steadily. Moreover, every measure to pervert the war into a war against private property and personal rights at the South had been paralleled by claims to exercise military power at the North.

He enumerated them: there was the emancipation proclamation for the South, and the suspension of habeas corpus at the North; the Confiscation Act for the South, and arrests, imprisonment and banishment for Northern citizens; the claim to destroy political organizations in the South, and the armed interference in Northern elections.

These acts against Northern liberties had been justified as necessary, but the government had given up no powers when the emergency had passed. In fact, “more prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed as a necessity in days of disaster and danger.” The doctrine of Southern degradation, explained the Governor, “is a doctrine of Northern bankruptcy . . . it is a measure for lasting despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.”

As for Lincoln’s reconstruction program, Seymour saw it as a political device. The minority of one-tenth in reconstructed States would be kept in power by the North’s arms and treasure. There would be no motive, prophesied the Governor, to draw the remaining population into the fold; instead, “there will be every inducement of power, of gain, and of ambition, to perpetuate the condition of affairs.”

Moreover, it would be to the interest of the national administration to continue this system of government. Nine controlled States in the South with 70,000 voting population would balance in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college one half the population of the United States. Fourteen hundred men in Florida would balance New York in the Senate.

Thus, the nine States mentioned in Lincoln’s proclamation, together with Pierpont’s [western] Virginia would constitute a system of rotten boroughs that would govern the nation.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp.-350-353)

The Irish Brigade

Ironically, New York’s Irish Brigade was led by Thomas Meagher, a rebellion leader in the 1848 drive for Irish independence. Captured and sentenced to death – though commuted to life in prison – he escaped to America and organized a unit of New York Irishmen. Many Irish emigres served in the Southern armies, greatly concerned that northern victory would bring a flood of emancipated slaves northward to obtain the low-paying jobs on which they depended.

His brigade was decimated at Fredericksburg in December 1862 while advancing on Lee’s well-defended position at Marye’s Heights with 1600 men and soon retreating with barely 1000 able to walk. After further decimation at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, Meagher’s brigade was reduced to well-under regimental strength with 600 men.

Postwar, Meagher was appointed Secretary of State for the Montana Territory by Andrew Johnson, and later as Territorial Governor. He fell off a steamboat and drowned in 1867 under mysterious circumstances, believed to be intoxication, suicide or possibly a political murder.

Irish Brigade

“At Fredericksburg the Irish Brigade was almost wiped out. When it became apparent to [its] leader that there was no prospect of being allowed to recruit new members for the New York regiments of the brigade, it was decided to consolidate the three regiments with perhaps 300 effective men into a battalion of six companies and muster out [unneeded] officers. General Meagher had previously asked leave to resign, as his brigade no longer existed except in name.

Meagher thought it a mockery to keep up a brigade with the few men left and great wrong to consolidate regiments that had attained great renown. Although its 63rd Regiment served through the Wilderness Campaign – its ranks being recruited by the addition of three new companies and by augmentations – as a distinctive Irish organization it may be regarded as nonexistent after Meagher’s resignation.”

(Foreigners in the Union Army & Navy. Ella Lonn. LSU Press, 1951. p. 122)

 

The Inhuman Struggle

The British officer below had little knowledge of the American South prior to arriving in Virginia for a month’s visit in 1862 – but soon became a staunch advocate of the Confederacy. After returning to England, he penned an article for Blackwood’s Magazine entitled “A Month’s Visit to the Confederate Headquarters” which the following is drawn from. His closing words in the article urged the British Parliament to recognize the Confederate States of America, writing that it was time to put an end “to the most inhuman struggle that ever disgraced a great nation.”

The Inhuman Struggle

“The first British soldier to visit the Confederacy had at one time expected to be fighting against the North. Lieutenant-Colonel Garnet J. Wolseley, a veteran of several of Queen Victoria’s wars, was part of a British force ordered to Canada during the Trent affair of late 1861. After the threat of war soon receded, he traveled to New York City in September 1862 to join London Times correspondent Frank Lawley for a visit to the American Confederacy. By the time the two men crossed the Potomac, General Robert E. Lee’s army was withdrawing from Maryland after the Sharpsburg campaign.

Even as he entered Virginia, Wolseley was favorably disposed toward the Confederacy, ostensibly out of concern for civil liberties in the wartime North. He described residents of Maryland as “stricken . . . with terror” by arrests ordered from Washington. Traveling by train from Fredericksburg to Richmond, Wolseley and Lawley shared accommodations with the wounded from Lee’s Maryland campaign. Their plight impressed even Wolseley, the professional soldier:

“Men with legs and arms amputated, and whose pale, haggard faces assumed an expression of anguish at even the slightest jolting of the railway carriages, lay stretched across the seats – some accompanied by civilian friends who had gone from Richmond to fetch them back, and others by wives or sisters, whose careworn features told a tale of sleepless nights passed in painful uncertainty regarding the fate of those they loved.”

When Wolseley reached Lee’s headquarters, he and Lawley were taken to meet the general. The British officer was impressed: “[Lee] is a strongly built man . . . He is slightly reserved; but he is a person that, whenever seen, whether in a castle or a hovel, alone or in a crowd, must at once attract attention as being a splendid specimen of an English gentleman.”

Wolseley found an appealing lack of pomp and ostentation at Lee’s headquarters, which, he noted, consisted of seven or eight pole tents, pitched on ground so rocky as to be uncomfortable to ride over. Lee’s staff lived two or three to a tent, a nearby stream being the only amenity.

Everywhere he was impressed with the tough, dedicated Confederate soldiers. Could such men be defeated, he would ask, “by mobs of Irish and German mercenaries hired at $15 a month to fight in a cause they know little and care less about?”

(British Observers in Wartime Dixie. John M. Taylor. Military History Quarterly, Winter 2002, pp. 68-69)

Southern Aristocracy?

Greatly concerned in the mid-1700s over their growing African populations, both Virginia and North Carolina petitioned the British Crown to end its slave trade. This was denied while New England’s transatlantic slave trade continued.

Southern Aristocracy?

“That subordination of the black race which was called slavery gave rise to a certain development of society, not at all English, however, bore some features of an aristocracy. But this was by no means so general as might be inferred from much seen lately in print about the subject of the “slave oligarchy” of the South. It was by no means the controlling force. In South Carolina alone, by her peculiar Constitution, could it be correctly said that the slaveholders as a class held the political power.

The anti-slave element was always strong in Virginia; but for external agitation, I have no doubt slavery would have been abolished there long ago, or have been greatly modified. The same is true of North Carolina.

Throughout the South no feeling was more general, none stronger with the voting majority, than a deep-seated detestation of the very name “Aristocracy.” I do not think there was a county in Georgia where a man could have been elected to the State Legislature, or to any other office, upon the principles of an aristocracy, or if he were ever known to favor such a doctrine.

Eight-tenths of the people of Georgia, I believe, were thorough Jeffersonian Republicans and would have been as thorough abolitionists as Jefferson if they could have seen what better they could do with the colored people than they were doing.

They had a hard problem to solve, and the external agitation kept down internal inquiry and discussion as to whether there was any proper and safe solution [to the slaves among them].”

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens: His Diary While Imprisoned. Myra Lockett Avary, ed., LSU Press, 1998 (original 1910), pg. 422)

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson, had been at General Kilpatrick’s headquarters in Durham Station, awaiting an opportunity to get into the Confederate camp. General Joseph E. Johnston had agreed that he might come if he could find means of transportation. Early the next morning . . . Wilson somehow managed to secure a seat in the car with [General William J.] Hardee and [aide-de-camp Thomas B.] Roy and now headed off to Greensboro with them.

Exploiting his opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery, Hardee said:

. . . “I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution . . . For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed [clothe and maintain the health of] these forty to get in order to get the work of the other sixty. The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists . . . feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of a man and woman?

Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

(General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr. LSU Stat University Press. 1965, pg. 297)

“It’s What People Believe Happened That Counts”

The following is an introductory paragraph from the June 2021 Chronicles magazine article by Roger D. McGrath identifying the source of many misunderstood events in history. Too often the culprit is poorly researched government or media-generated reports – or simply propaganda – that soon become “history.” This is followed by teachers who pass this on to their students.
“It’s What People Believe Happened That Counts”
“Arguing with my liberal high school teacher did not endear me to him. It got worse when a day or two after one of these class disagreements I brought to class material demonstrating the teacher had been feeding us a false narrative. The teacher was not doing so intentionally but simply out of ignorance, having accepted a narrative generated by leftists in academe.
However, it soon became evident to me that my liberal teachers were quick to accept a leftist narrative not only because it came from university professors – the putative intelligentsia – but because it made America look bad.
The problem worsened in college. Nonetheless, in those days there still existed a substantial minority of conservative professors. I recall discussing with a conservative history professor a topic of great interest to me. He told me I was right about a particular sequence of events, but then added, “Remember, it is not what actually happened that matters – it’s what people believe happened that counts.”
(The Deliberate Infection Myth of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Roger D. McGrath. Chronicles Magazine, June 2021, pp. 44-45)

The Other Side of the Story

The Other Side of the Story

“As we are more than forty-six years distant from our own Civil War, is it not incumbent on Northerners to endeavor to see the Southern side? We may be certain that the historian of a hundred years hence, when he contemplates the lining up of five and one-half million people against twenty-two millions, their equal in religion, morals, regard for law, and devotion to the common Constitution, will, as a matter course, aver that the question over which they fought for four years had two sides; that all the right was not on one side and all the wrong on the other. The North should welcome, therefore, accounts of the conflict written by candid Southern men.”

(Excerpt, Prefatory Note by James Ford Rhodes: The Abolition Crusade and Its Consequences, Hilary Herbert, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1912, pg. vii – viii.)