Stealing the Name of the Klan

The Ku Klux Klan had two reincarnations since being organized after the War. The W.J. Simmons Klan of 1915 was a nativist organization concerned about the influx on European immigrants and their effect upon American institutions; the most recent Klan of few numbers and many government informants has little if any resemblance to the original. The 1915 Klan can be compared to the strongly anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s – many of whose members joined Lincoln’s sectional Republican Party.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Stealing the Name of the Klan

“[An] event that may surprise many persons who think of the Ku Klux Klan as a bigoted organization opposed to Catholics, Jews and Negroes. They forget that a generation earlier there was another Klan, from which the Klan of the present century stole the name, and that the objective of the earlier Klan, while quite without sanction of law, were scarcely comparable.

Bernard and [brother] Hartwig were rummaging in their attic at Camden. Opening an old trunk they found the regalia of a Knight of the Ku Klux Klan. It belonged to their father, in whose veins according to family records, flowed nothing but Jewish blood.

Their mother, who had followed the boys up the attic steps to see what they were doing, froze with fear when she saw them unearth the regalia. Dr. Baruch would certainly pay with his life if his membership in the Klan should be disclosed. She swore them to secrecy, and, as usual, they obeyed her commands.

In telling this story, years later, Baruch remarked that, far as he had ever heard, no member of the Klan was ever betrayed. Who were members of that organization of Reconstruction days was one of the best kept secrets in all history.”

(Bernard Baruch, Park Bench Statesman, Carter Field, Whittlesey House, 1944, pp. 2-3)

Today’s Tower of Babel

Like Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations — the victors imposing their order on defeated and newly-created ethnic “nations” in a utopian fashion — the later United Nations goal was to create the same and prevent future wars. Wilson naively believed that the League could prevent unethical behavior by states and use force to control them which did nothing but spark future wars. Today, formerly Christian nations in Europe have shed their historical identities to become merely market collectives with no borders, and populations of multi-ethnic tribes warring against each other.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Today’s Tower of Babel

“[Western] nations are obviously evolving into godless societies; they hail not the sovereignty of God but of man, and claim that religious beliefs are essentially detrimental to peace. But it takes only common sense to realize that atheism goes hand in hand with unfettered individualism.

Modern times are times of hostility to religion; it is no happenstance that they have also seen the birth of radical individual freedom. Epicurus long ago taught that there could be no society among men but that which obtains among small circles of friends; it is no happenstance that he also taught that there are no gods.

Inasmuch as a nation is a cohesive body whose members are the individual citizens, it needs some sort of cementing mortar to bridge the gap that the freedom of each unavoidably creates between them, and all the more as such freedom becomes absolute. Building such a bridge presupposes that all citizens participate in something . . . [that] transcends them all . . . binding them without oppressing them.

And since this is the very definition of a religious belief, it must be concluded that no nation exists that is not upheld by some religious faith. Nations are terrestrial vessels anchored in the skies.

But Europe used to believe in a religion that (even though the passions of men led them too often to ignore it) preached a love of one’s neighbor that did not imply hatred of foreigners. Indeed, classic orthodox Christianity always taught men to love their own countries together with all men, irrespective of their nationalities. But then it meant that, just as is the case for individuals, nations – though distinct entities – felt they were parts of the same world; not a political one, since they all retained some sort of independence, but a spiritual one, whose unity was manifested at the time by their common compliance with one spiritual authority.

Today, we have something paradoxically called the United Nations, whose more or less goal is to unite mankind in a worldwide society built on the ruins of all nations. It is our Tower of Babel.”

(The Agony of Nations in the West, Claude Polin, Chronicles, February 2016, excerpts, pg. 13)

Stephen Douglas on the Alternatives

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)

Striving to Maintain the Union

The departure of Southern States from the fraternal Union came as no surprise to many, and those like Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia forecast disunion to President James Buchanan if he would not end his warfare with Stephen Douglas. Noting the refusal of Republicans to compromise and not wanting to return to Congress to witness the death of the Union, Stephens returned Georgia to await the unfolding events.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Striving to Maintain the Union

“The [Cincinnati] speech was intended as a solemn warning not only to his constituents and people of the South, but the whole country, that in his opinion the peace and prosperity of the country depended upon a strict and inflexible adherence to the principles of the adjustment measures of 1850 upon the subject of slavery, as carried out and expressed in the Democratic Baltimore platform of 1852, with the additional plank inserted in the Cincinnati Convention of 1856.

It was well known then that Mr. Stephens had serious apprehensions that those principles would be departed from in the next Democratic Convention to be held in Charleston the following year. It was also known that he did not finally determine to withdraw from Congress until after a personal interview with Mr. [James] Buchanan, in which he had urged the President to cease his warfare against Mr. [Stephen] Douglas, and the support of the paper known as his organ in Washington in insisting upon the insertion of a new plank in the next Convention, asserting it to be the duty of Congress to pass acts to protect slavery in the Territories, and not to leave that subject, as the Cincinnati platform had done, with the people of the Territories.

Mr. Stephens most urgently urged the President that if he continued to pursue the line of policy he was then following there would be a burst-up at Charleston, and with that burst-up of the Union – temporary or permanent – “as certainly as he would break his neck if he sprang from that window” [of the reception-room at the White house, in which they were conversing] “or as the sun would set that night.”

Mr. Buchanan seemed surprised at this opinion, but was unshaken in his determination to adhere to the policy he was then following. Mr. Stephens, in taking leave, told the President that his object in seeking the interview was to know if his purpose was as stated, and if that was so, his own intention was, not to be allowed to return to the next Congress.

He had spent sixteen years of life in striving to maintain the Union upon the principles of the Constitution; this he thought could be done for many years to come upon the principles set forth in the Cincinnati platform. The Government administered on these principles he thought the best in the world; but if it was departed from, he saw nothing but ruin ahead. He did not wish to be in at the death; but if disunion should come in consequence of this departure, he should go with the people of his own State.

Another fact connected with the retirement of Mr. Stephens from Congress may be noted here. When leaving Washington, with a number of other Southern members, on the beautiful morning of the 5th of March, 1859, he stood at the stern of the boat for some minutes, gazing back at the Capitol, when someone jocularly said, “I suppose you are thinking of coming back to those halls as a Senator.” (It was known that he had announced his intention not to return as a Representative.)

Mr. Stephens replied, with some emotion, “No; I never expect to see Washington again, unless I am brought here as a prisoner of war.” This was literally fulfilled in the latter part of October 1865, when he passed through Washington on his way to his home as a paroled prisoner from Fort Warren.”

(Life of Alexander H. Stephens, R.M. Johnston & W.H. Brown, J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1883, excerpts, pp. 347-348)

 

 

Stereotyping the South Up North

The 1861-65 war destroyed the American South’s economic, legal, political and social systems, and afterward ruled the region with proconsuls dispatched from Washington. From this aftermath of war came the invented view of the desolated South – a section known in antebellum times for providing the majority of presidents and exemplary political thinkers — as an uncouth and backward region steeped in laziness and illiteracy.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Stereotyping the South Up North

“Strange notions have developed about the South. It is taken for granted that Southerners are a slow and lazy people. The Abolitionists and Radical Reconstructionists conveyed the impression — and fiction has augmented it — that plantation whites lived in idleness and ease while black hands did labor and chores for them.

The white women of the South are still thought to be lazy, pampered, helpless, spoiled creatures. All this comes out in fiction, shows, movies, and in street corner and parlor conversations. A conventional Southerner has evolved. He is tall, lanky, lazy, slow — except with the trigger finger — speaks with a drawl, says “you all” even to one person, and possesses a sort of insolent dignity.

The South is regarded as a backward, ignorant, hot-tempered and violent section, especially in its dealing with Negroes. Extravagant fictional treatments of the extremes of Southern life are quite generally accepted as accurate cross-section views of the South. In one of the most violent scenes of “Tobacco Road,” as played in a New York theater, an intelligent-looking woman remarked to her companion: “That’s just like the South.” Asked what part of the South she was from, she squirmed in her seat and soon left the theater.

Mud on the Stars, a lurid and patently preposterous story about life in Alabama, was well-received by New York critics. One reviewer said that it is from such men as the author of this filthy story, who incidentally is a self-confessed rake that we must look for information about the real South.

When Stars Fell on Alabama, a grotesque portrayal of life in Alabama appeared, it was widely acclaimed in the North, but when the same author wrote a similar book – Genesee Fever – about a certain community in New York State, the reviewers and commentators of New York were quick to point out that it represented a purely local and extreme situation in the State, and that it contained extravagant overtones and distortions for the purpose of literary effect.”

(One Hundred Years of Reconstruction, A.B. Moore, 1943, Southern Historical Society Addresses)

Utilizing the Enemy’s Commissary

Viscount Garnet Wolseley wrote in his “English View of the American Civil War” that when he was with Lee’s army at Winchester, Virginia in the autumn of 1862 that “the soldiers in every camp laughingly spoke of General John] Pope as “Stonewall Jackson’s Commissary,” so entirely had Jackson in the “Pope Campaign” depended upon capturing from that General everything he required for his men” (page 139).

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Utilizing the Enemy’s Commissary

“The battle of Gettysburg will, no doubt, rank as the turning point of the war though perhaps it may better be called the breaking point of the South’s resources. For months our men had been on rations such as no troops ever campaigned on and did a tithe of the work ours were called on to do.

Corn meal and damaged bacon were the staples, often so damaged that to live on them inured disease. Medicines, chloroform especially, had got so scarce that small operations as painful as great ones were done without it. Much of that which was used was of such bad quality that it was used as only a choice of evils.

Delicacies for the sick were unheard of. They lived on damaged bacon or lean beef or went hungry. Clothes and shoes were scant and insufficient, except for those which were taken from our friends, the enemy. Overcoats would have been almost unknown but for them, though for that matter we would have fared badly for everything but for their contributions.

Certainly half our muskets and two-thirds our artillery were forced contributions from them, while [General N. P.] Banks, who commanded United States troops in the [Shenandoah] Valley in 1862, was better known as and better deserved the title of [Stonewall] Jackson’s commissary than as commander of his troops.

The state of affairs would appear to give compelling reasons for the much-criticized advance into Pennsylvania. With our railroad lines worn out, our ports blockaded, and the field of operations stripped by both armies, and burned and desolated by the enemy, who at last openly declared that their policy would be, as Sheridan later boasted, to leave the country so that a crow flying over it would have to carry his rations, the capture of arms, clothing, medicine, and even food, which earlier had added to our comfort, now came to be a necessity.

It looked easier to go to the enemy’s homes to get it, and to leave our poor people a chance to rest and to gather together the fragments left them.”

(The Haskell Memoirs, Govan and Livingood, editors, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1960, excerpts, pp. 54-55)

 

Subjugating Rebellion into Loyalty

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)

 

Success of the Confederate Privateers

Early in the war, Alabamian Raphael Semmes evaluated the South’s naval dilemma of not having a navy to speak of, and advised the use of privateers to prey upon the North’s merchant marine. His record with the CSS Sumter was exemplary, as was the career of the CSS Alabama he later captained. His protocol when capturing Northern commerce was in accordance with the laws of war: “We were making war upon the enemy’s commerce, but not upon unarmed seamen.”  Semmes and other Confederate privateers like John Newland Maffitt and John Wilkinson virtually destroyed the North’s merchant marine.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Success of the Confederate Privateers

“The advance [of American merchant ships] continued to 1855, when American steam-shipping amounted to 115,000 tons. From that time a retrograde movement set in, and the steam-tonnage of the United States was less in 1862 than it was seven years before. The civil war which intervened accelerated the decline, and prevented attention from being devoted to the subject, which might possibly have given a different direction to events.

American commerce was, in a measure, driven from the seas by Confederate cruisers and their allies, and American shipping was sold to foreigners on account of the special risks to which its use was subjected. Attention was turned away from ship-building for commercial purposes, and from the fostering of commercial interests in general, and the heavy burdens imposed upon the country in order to raise war revenues had the effect of restricting foreign intercourse and trade.

Accordingly, when the war was over, the American merchant marine was well-nigh destroyed. The wooden sailing vessels had largely disappeared, there had been no increase in steam-tonnage, and the slight revival which followed the return of peace affected the coasting-trade mainly, if not wholly.”

(Merchant Marine of the United States, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia, 1882, Appleton & Company, page 522)

A Suffering Devotion to the Cause of Independence

The winter of 1864-1865 at Petersburg found Pickett’s Division cold, hungry, and opposed by a well-fed and equipped war machine. Unable to defeat the starving American army that resembled Washington’s at Valley Forge, the North resorted to propaganda leaflets.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

A Suffering Devotion to the Cause of Independence

“The cold winter winds began to be felt in the close of the November days . . . The men were not only thinly-clad, but some, at least, had but little clothing of any kind and a large number were without shoes; and when the first blasts of winter came numbers could be seen shivering over the small fires they were allowed to kindle.

Famine stared them in the face; the ration being from one-eighth to one-fourth of a pound of bacon and one pint of unsheived corn meal a day, and occasionally a few beans or peas. With empty stomachs, naked bodies and frozen fingers, these men clutched their guns with an aim so steady and deadly that the men on the other side were exceedingly cautious how they lifted their heads from behind their sheltered places.

[T]hese heroic men, who loved their cause better than life stood to their posts, and defied the enemy to the last. The enemy, by general orders and circular letters which they managed to send and scatter among the Confederate soldiers, offered all manner of inducements to have them desert their country; but, as a rule, such offers were indignantly spurned.

The consecration of the Southern women to the cause for which their husbands, sons, brothers, and sweethearts struggled and suffered, is beyond the power of the pen to describe. The hardships of these women were equal to, and often greater than that of the shivering, freezing and starving soldier in the field.

They had not only given these men to the cause, but, in fact, themselves too; for they remained at home and labored in the fields, went to the mill, the blacksmith shops, lived on cornbread and sorghum molasses, and gave practically every pound of meat, flour and all the vegetables they could raise to the men in the army, whom they encouraged to duty in every possible way.

They manufactured largely their own clothing, out of material that they had produced with their own hands; and would have scorned any woman who would wear northern manufactured goods . . .”

Through this long, cold, dreary winter, Pickett’s Division — less than five thousand strong — held the line which, in length, was not less than four miles; being not many beyond one thousand men to the mile; only a good skirmish line; over which the enemy, by a bold, determined charge, could at any time have gone.

It is certain that if the Federal line in front of Pickett’s men had been as weak, and held by as few men as that of Pickett, they would have either been prisoners before the 1st day of January 1865, or have been driven into the James River and drowned.”

(A History of Middle New River Settlements and Contiguous Territory, David E. Johnston, Standard Printing, 1906, pp. 285-288)

 

The Cornerstone of New England’s Prosperity

Author Walter D. Kennedy writes in his “Myths of American Slavery” (Pelican, 2003): “For all practical purposes, the history of slavery in the North lasted approximately 225 years,” and that New England’s involvement with enslaving others began with the Pequot tribe of Indians whose land they were confiscating. Those unfortunate Pequot’s were shipped to the West Indies to work the sugar cane fields. The triangular slave trade across the Atlantic was a New England enterprise.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

The Cornerstone of New England’s Prosperity

”She lay alongside Captain Jim DeWolfe’s wharf that day in 1802, a smart, trim topsail schooner, nearly ready for sea. On her stern was lettered her name, “Sukey,” and below it, Bristol, Rhode Island. As usual, the Bristol waterfront buzzed with feverish activity that day, especially on Captain Jim’s wharf.

Heavy ox carts laden with last minute cargo lumbered slowly across the cobblestones of Thames Street that edged the wharf, and then onto it. Captain Jim and some of his brothers owned the carts and oxen, the distillery on Thames Street from which most of the Sukey’s outward cargo had come, and the countinghouse that was the headquarters for their business.

In the West Indies, or Sugar Islands as they were often called in those days, the deWolfe’s owned plantations to provide the cargo the Sukey would bring back to Bristol on the homeward part of her long voyage. And they owned the Sukey and other ships that sailed in the evil trade in which they were engaged. The Sukey had no trouble getting her clearance papers after an inspection by the Bristol surveyor. [Although the Rhode Island State Assembly had forbid the slave trade, her] trade and that of many another Bristol vessel brought too much prosperity to too many people.

There were the Bristol sailmakers and carpenters, the caulkers who sealed the ships joints with oakum and tar, the ship chandlers who sold provisions and an endless variety of wares needed aboard a vessel, and the owners and workers of the ropes that made cordage — the great number of ropes used in holding, hoisting, lowering and controlling the sails of a ship. And there were many people who depended upon the Bristol ship owners for profit and wages.

If a vessel [returning] from the Sugar Islands was discharging her cargo, there would be [boys who] most Bristol wharf owners would let have their taste of the sweet molasses. But on deWolfe’s wharf that day, when you came close enough to the schooner, there was another smell — a smell that seemed to make your very insides curl up.

It was a smell so vile and horrible that you wondered how the Sukey’s crew could possibly stand it. “You can smell a slaver five miles downwind,” they say on the Guinea Coast. And the Sukey was a slaver.

Probably a fair-sized crowd of the crew’s family and friends were gathered on deWolfe’s wharf as the Sukey sheered gently away, “people on the wharf cried huzza!” and waved their hats. The Sukey was off on her voyage.

In West Africa, she would work her way down the Guinea Coast, probably finding it necessary to stop at port after port as she exchanged her trade goods and precious rum for even more precious black slaves, and perhaps also for gold dust, ivory, ebony and other African products.

At last she would head west, crossing the Atlantic over the infamous Middle Passage to the West Indies. In the islands the slaves would be landed and sold. Then Captain Almy would fill the Sukey chockablock with hogsheads of molasses to be distilled into more rum at Bristol.

This was the evil, cruel business known as the Triangular, or Three-Cornered Trade. It was the cornerstone of much of New England’s prosperity in the 18th and 19th centuries. It made many men rich, but it was part of what was to bring disgrace upon white [British and New England] men, misery and oppression upon black people, and untold trouble upon the world.”

(Rum, Slaves and Molasses, Clifford L. Alderman, Crowell-Collier Press, 1972, pp. 1-12)