Lincoln’s Desperate Search for Troops

By June 1862 Lincoln found enlistments near nonexistent, and it was time to find new sources of recruits as Northern men resisted war service.  Bounty money was offered to help solve this, and the Homestead Act had the dark purpose of attracting foreign-born troops promised bounties and public land to subjugate Americans seeking political self-determination.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Lincoln’s Desperate Search for Troops

“The summer of 1862 brought more gloom to the Union cause. Stonewall Jackson’s heroics in the Shenandoah Valley were followed by McClellan’s withdrawal from his lines before Richmond . . . and the North’s setbacks in the field weighed heavily on the secretary of state. [Seward] had [earlier] watched the Army of the Potomac embark at Alexandria; he had considered it united and unbeatable.

In June of 1862 following the collapse of McClellan’s Peninsular Campaign, Lincoln had sent Seward to New York to stimulate recruiting. The secretary carried with him a confidential letter, explaining the danger and noting that the capital itself was once again in danger under the threat from the rebels. Seward, in New York City, contemplated issuing a new call form the president for volunteers.

On reflection, however, he concluded that for Lincoln to initiate the call would have overtones of panic. Instead he prevailed on most of the Northern governors to request that Lincoln issue a new call for volunteers. The upshot was that Lincoln, seemingly in response to appeals from the Northern governors, was able to issue a proclamation calling for an additional three hundred thousand men.

Seward continued his proselytizing on his return to Washington. He persuaded Secretary of War Stanton to offer new recruits an immediate bounty of twenty-five dollars when their regiments were mustered into service.

Congress had just enacted the Homestead Act, providing that any citizen or alien could acquire title to 160 acres of public land by residing on and cultivating the land for a period of five years. This was just the sort of stimulus to immigration that Seward would have favored under any conditions, but now it included a vital military dimension as well.

He sent copies of the legislation to US envoys with the covering memorandum calling the Homestead Act “one of the most important steps ever taken by any government toward a practical recognition of the universal brotherhood of nations.”

The resulting publicity assured a continuing flow of military manpower to the North from Ireland and northern Europe. John Bigelow, the US consul in Paris, would write that Seward’s circular was important for “the light I throws on the mysterious repletion of our army during the four years of war, while it was . . . being so fearfully depleted by firearms, disease and desertion.”

In addition to his military problems, Lincoln had to deal with the touchy question of war aims. Publicly he continued to argue against general emancipation, telling Horace Greeley in his famous letter of August 1862 that if he could save the Union without freeing a single slave he would do it.

Indeed, Lincoln had no authority to confiscate “property” in the North, and no ability to enforce any Federal edict in territory controlled by the Confederacy. [But as] commander in chief, Lincoln argued that he could surely seize slaves belonging to the enemy just as he could capture their railroads.

[Seward thought issuing the] proclamation following a string of defeats on the battlefield . . . would hint of desperation – “the Government stretching forth its hands to Ethiopia, instead of Ethiopia stretching forth her hands to the Government.” He feared a slave uprising would turn the war for the Union into a class war . . . and that emancipation would destroy the South’s economy, raising the specter of intervention boy Britain or France to protect its supply of raw cotton.”

(William Henry Seward, Lincoln’s Right Hand, John M. Taylor, Harper Collins, 1991, pp. 200-202)

Lincoln’s Cry of Military Necessity

The population and vast resources of the Northern States in 1861 made the claim of “military necessity” by Lincoln fall on many deaf ears. By late 1862 the military situation was critical and Lincoln withheld Northern casualty numbers at Fredericksburg from the public. Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation — patterned after that of Lord Dunmore in 1775 and Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane in 1814 – was to encourage insurrection and race war behind Southern lines, and put black men in blue uniforms as white Northern soldiers resisted enlistment.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Lincoln’s Cry of Military Necessity

“On January 1, 1863, another proclamation was issued by the President of the United States declaring the emancipation [of slaves] to be absolute within the Confederate States, with the exception of a few districts. The closing words of the proclamation were these:

“And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.”

Let us test the existence of the military necessity here spoken of by a few facts.

The white male population of the Northern States was then 13,690,364. The white male population of the Confederate States was 5,449,463. The number of troops which the United States had called to the field exceeded one million men. The number of troops which the Confederate government had then in the field was less than four hundred thousand men.

The United States government had a navy which was only third in rank in the world. The Confederate government had a navy which at the time consisted of a single small ship on the ocean. The people of the United States had a commerce afloat all over the world. The people of the Confederate States had not a single port open to commerce.

The people of the United States were the rivals of the greatest nations of the world in all kinds of manufactures. The people of the Confederate States had few manufactures, and those were of articles of inferior importance.

The government of the United States possessed the treasury of a union of eighty years with its vast resources. The Confederate States had to create a treasury by the development of financial resources. The ambassadors and representatives of the former were welcomed at every court in the world. The representatives of the latter were not recognized anywhere.

Thus the consummation of the original antislavery purposes was verbally reached; even that achievement was attended with disunion, bloodshed, and war.

It is thus seen what the United States government did, and our view of this subject would not be complete if we should omit to present their solemn declarations of that which they intended to do. In his proclamation of April 15, 1861, calling for seventy-five thousand men, the President of the United States government said:

“In any event, the utmost care will be observed, consistently with the objects aforesaid, to avoid any devastation, and destruction or interference with property, or any disturbance of peaceful citizens in any part of the country.”

On July 22, 1861, Congress passed a resolution relative to the war, from which the following is an extract:

“That this war is not waged on our part in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those [Confederate] States; but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that, as soon as these objects are accomplished, the war ought to cease.”

(The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jefferson Davis, Volume II, D. Appleton & Company, 1881, pp. 187-189)

 

 

Canadian Slavery Amnesia

Very few recall that African slavery existed in Canada until 1833, and that between 1787 and 1800 fugitive slaves fled south to New England and the Northwest (Michigan) Territory. Throughout the 1800s Canadians segregated schools and communities, as well as military units.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Canadian Slavery Amnesia

“Canadian comments about American racial problems are further colored by the fact that few Canadians are well informed on Canada’s own Negro record. Cowper, in celebrating Justice Mansfield’s decision, thought that “Slaves cannot breathe in England: if their lungs receive our air, that moment they are free.” This was adequate poetry but inaccurate current events, for “Mansfield” decision freed no substantial body of slaves, even in England, and in Imperial Britain they remained enslaved until 1834.

Yet today most Canadians assume that slavery in British North America was struck down unilaterally by colonial assemblies which, in fact, lacked power to move against such Imperial laws. A standard account of Ontario’s history, published in 1898, concluded that because of the passage of Simcoe’s Bill (which prohibited the import of slaves) in 1793, “Canadians can therefore claim the proud distinction for their flag….that it has never floated over legalized slavery.”

An extensive guidebook to Canada credits the entire Negro population of Nova Scotia to men “who came north as slaves from the British West Indian colonies . . ,” ignoring totally the Maroon and Refugee elements. An attempt to plumb the character of Canadians found that the Negroes of the Maritime Provinces – 15,000 in all – were descendants of runaway slaves, when in truth not even half are such.

And one of Canada’s leading students of race relations, in writing specifically of discrimination against the Negro, asserts that slavery did not exist in British North America in the Nineteenth Century, although slavery was in fact legal until 1833. In short, there is no accurate historical memory in Canada of British North America’s own experiences with the Negro, and even a clouded awareness of an earlier Negro presence is slight.

In truth, only Canada West [Ontario] served to any considerable extent as a haven for fugitive slaves, but the whole of the Canadian nation later accepted a mythology arising from but one of its units.”

Canadian Jim Crow

The popular legend of an underground creates the impression that escaped slaves found freedom and social equality in Canada, and standard historical accounts lead Canadians to believe that passage of Simcoe’s Bill in 1793 ended slavery there, but slavery actually remained legal in British North America until 1833. Author Robin Winks of Yale University wrote: “Canadians did give refuge to thousands of fugitives, and the mythology of the underground railway, the North Star, and the lion’s paw naturally fed the later Canadian assumption that Negroes fared better in Canada than elsewhere.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Canadian Jim Crow

“Canadian law drew no distinction between black and white in matters of citizenship, of which education was one. In practice, however, there were not infrequently some distinctions likely to be drawn, the whites preferring that Negroes should have schools of their own. When Benjamin Drew visited [Amherstburg, Ontario] in 1854 he found the Negro separate school having neither blackboard nor chairs. The whole interior was comfortless and repulsive. The teacher was a colored woman, apparently doing the best she could under the discouragement of poor surroundings and frequent absences of her pupils.

The coming of so many people of another race and color into southwestern Ontario was not pleasing to all the white inhabitants. Deep prejudice manifested itself at times and an occasional outburst in some newspaper reflected the feelings of an element of the population. The Amherstburg Courier of October 27, 1849, prints a resolution of the district council passed on October 8 of that year, protesting vigorously against the proposed Elgin settlement which was planned by Reverend William King as a home for fugitives from slavery.

This resolution, which appears to have been instigated by a local politician, Larwill, resident in Chatham, declared that “there is but one feeling, and that is of disgust and hatred, that they (the Negroes) should be allowed to settle in any township where there is a white settlement.”

The resolution proceeded to ask for a disallowance of sale of lands to Negroes, suggested a poll tax on Negroes entering the country, asked for an enactment against amalgamation and a requirement that Negroes shall furnish good security that they will not become a burden. It was also suggested that it would be well to ascertain whether it would be impolitic to allow them the suffrage.

Dr. Samuel G. Howe, who visited [Amherstburg] in 1863 to investigate conditions….[was told by a Mr. Park of the town] that the Negroes were part of them indolent and part industrious. They tended to neglect their own poor and begged more than the whites. A Captain Averill who was interviewed said that the Negroes were satisfactory as sailors, “the very best men we have,” but they were never made mates and none owned ships of their own.”

(Amherstburg, Terminus of the Underground Railroad, Fred Landon, The Journal of Negro History, Vol. X., No. 1, January 1925, pp. 5-8)

 

Radical Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage

The victorious Radicals in the North were faced with a practical dilemma as they punished the South for seeking political independence. Should the freedmen be left alone with their former masters they would vote with them and possibly remove the Republicans from power. The infamous Union League was then unleashed on Southern blacks to hold their white neighbors in contempt and vote against their interests – a sad result still in evidence today. In 1868, Grant was narrowly elected over Democrat Samuel Tilden with 500,000 freedmen-provided  votes.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Radical Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage

“The reconstruction of the Southern States . . . is one of the most remarkable achievements in the history of government. As a demonstration of political and administrative capacity, it is no less convincing than the subjugation of the Confederate armies as an evidence of military capacity.

The Congressional leaders – Trumbull, Fessenden, Stevens, Bingham and others – who practically directed the process of reconstruction, were men of as rugged a moral and intellectual fiber as Grant, Sherman and the other officers who crushed the material power of the South.

In the path of reconstruction lay a hostile white population in the South, a hostile executive at Washington, a doubtful if not decidedly hostile Supreme Court, a divided Northern sentiment in respect to Negro suffrage and an active and skillfully-directed Democratic Party.

With much the feelings of the prisoner of tradition who watched the walls of his cell close slowly in from day to day to crush him, the Southern whites saw in the successive developments of Congress’ policy the remorseless approach of Negro rule. The fate of Southern whites, like that of the prisoner of tradition, may excite our commiseration; but the mechanism by which the end was achieved must command an appreciation on its merits.

The power of the national government to impose its will upon the rebel States, irrespective of any restriction as to means, was assumed when the first Reconstruction Act was passed, and this assumption was acted upon to the end.

That the purpose of reconstruction evinced as much political wisdom as the methods by which it was attained, is not clear. To stand the social pyramid on its apex was not the surest way to restore the shattered equilibrium in the South.

The enfranchisement of the freedmen and their enthronement in political power was as reckless a species of statecraft as that which marked “the blind hysterics of the Celt,” in 1789-95. But the resort to Negro suffrage was not determined to any great extent by abstract theories of equality.

Though Charles Sumner and the lesser lights of his school solemnly proclaimed, in season and out, the trite generalities of the Rights of Man, it was a very practical dilemma that played the chief part in giving the ballot to the blacks.

By 1867 it seemed clear that there were three ways available for settling the issues of the war in the South: first, to leave the [Andrew] Johnson governments in control and permit the Southern whites themselves, through the Democratic Party, to determine either chiefly or whole the solution of existing problems; second, to maintain Northern and Republican control through military government; and third, to maintain Northern and Republican control through Negro suffrage.

The first expedient was . . . grotesquely impossible. The choice had to be made between indefinite military rule and Negro suffrage. It was a cruel dilemma. The traditional antipathy of the English race toward military rule determined resort to the second alternative. It was proved by the sequel that the choice was unwise. The enfranchisement of the blacks, so far from removing, only increased, the necessity for military power.

Seven unwholesome years [to 1877] were required to demonstrate that not even the government which had quelled the greatest rebellion in history could maintain the freedmen in both security and comfort on the necks of their former masters. ”

(Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and Related Topics, William A. Dunning, The Macmillan Company, 1898, pp. 247-252)

The Imprint of the War Between the States

The American South fought for its rightful place on these shores and when denied parity in the Union of the Founders’, it would have it in its own American nation and as envisaged in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. The energetic resort to arms by Southerners was the response of a free people defending their ancient political rights as Englishmen.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

The Imprint of the War Between the States

“The people of the South,” wrote George Fort Milton, of Tennessee, historian of the Confederate War and its aftermath, “probably have the closest contact with the true fundamentals of democracy of any portion of our national citizenship. We have had fewer lush days to lead us into forgetfulness of the early faiths.”

Senator Burnet R. Murbank, of South Carolina, agreed. “An instinctive patriotism,” he called it, “an immutable determination vigorously to defend the security of their country and their sovereign rights against unjust and unwanted inroads from any quarter . . . These characteristics are not engendered by any adverse material or educational conditions.”

Senator Lister Hill, of Alabama, made a similar point after mentioning the English stock and tradition and the “imprint of the War Between the States.” He thought “Southerners are more belligerent not just about this war [against Germany] but about everything that pertains to their rights and their country . . . not merely because they are a people quick to action once their emotions are aroused but because they are willing to make a great sacrifice in this struggle for democracy just as their forebears risked their lives.”

Chancellor Oliver Cromwell Carmichael, of Vanderbilt University, believed that “the great belligerence of the South towards this war is due to its greater abhorrence of dictatorship and greater love of liberty and freedom. The spirit of . . . Robert E. Lee is still reflected in the background and thinking of the mass of Southern peoples and expresses itself in the vitality of its opposition to tyrannical systems.”

There is the remembrance that in the war the ruling class in England sided with the Southern cause . . . [and So Red the Rose author Stark] Young [mentions] a theory that modern German methods of invasion and destruction [are] derived from ones used against the South in the Confederate War. “Many a Southerner, reading news of the German war over England, has by inheritance a certain added perception of its impact.” He quoted James Truslow Adams’ “America’s Tragedy”:

“In 1870, when Germany was fighting France, [Union army General] Sheridan had gone over as a private observer but was received by Bismarck and other high officials, both civil and military. Dr. Busch, the biographer of Bismarck, notes that at a dinner given by the Chancellor the discussion turned to the recent conduct of some of the German forces, and Councillor Abeken thought that war should be conducted in a more humane fashion.

Sheridan denied this, says Busch, and expressed himself roughly as follows:

“The proper strategy consists in the first place in inflicting as telling blows as possible upon the enemy’s army, and then in causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force their government to demand it. The people must be left with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”

The German noted in his journal: “Somewhat heartless it seems to me, but perhaps worthy of consideration.” During the [First] World War the Bishop of London, in an address quoted the words of the American general but attributed them to the Kaiser.”

(The Fighting South, John Temple Graves, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1943, pp. 9-12)

 

Wendell Phillips Hands Drenched in Blood

Author Howard R. Floan noted the “tendency, stubbornly persistent even in our own time, to mistake the planter aristocracy for the entire South, to envision the Southerner simply as the slaveholder.” His study of the New England abolitionist aristocracy shows a radical, idealistic clique of utopians divorced from reality who had little, if any understanding of the slavery inherited from the English colonists. Their hands would be stained by the blood of a million Americans who perished in the war they did much to ignite.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Wendell Phillips Hands Drenched in Blood

“In the job of molding public opinion, [William Lloyd] Garrison needed help. The need of a platform personality to carry the cause directly to the people was answered, unsolicited, by Wendell Phillips. At a meeting in 1837, young Phillips rose from the audience, denounced the murderers of Elijah Lovejoy, the antislavery editor, of Alton, Illinois . . . A Bostonian once reported that during a Phillips speech he had heard a man in the audience applauding, stamping his feet, and exclaiming enthusiastically, “The damned old liar! The damned old liar!

Phillips strove to foster a public opinion hostile to slaveholding . . . Phillips battleground was the Northern mind. His eye was on the North, though his shots appeared to be aimed at the South. To arouse Northern awareness of danger, Phillips emphasized the political threat of the South by pointing to its wealth and its continued success in Washington.

For all practical purposes, Phillips said, the slave power was the South; there could be no other South until the North created one. The image of the South which Phillips labored to evoke in the Northern mind embodied deformities that were designed to call up repugnance, anger and fear. It violated the cherished ideals of the North. He conjured up a land of whipping posts and auction blocks, a feudal society in which newspapermen, politicians, and clergymen were vassals. “The South is the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.”

Phillips . . . often spoke of the possibility of armed rebellion in the South. “I can imagine the scenes of blood through which a rebellious slave-population must march to their rights.”

The agitator must continually intensify his attack if he is to maintain the appearance of vitality. With the years, Phillips grew more vitriolic. In 1853, surveying the achievements of the abolition movement, he said: “To startle the South to madness, so that every step she takes in her blindness, is one more step toward ruin, is much. This we have done.”

Nothing shows more clearly that Phillips had become a victim of his own program. BY this time he could summarize his view of the South in one image: the South was “one great brothel where half a million women are flogged to prostitution, or, worse still, are degraded to believe it honorable.”

By the time of the [John Brown] Harpers Ferry incident, Phillips was able to say that Brown had more right to hang [Virginia] Governor Wise than the Governor had to hang Brown. As Phillips grew more outspoken, some of his listeners became indignant, and the abolitionists were forced to form bodyguards.”

(The South in Northern Eyes, 1831 to 1861, Howard R. Floan, McGraw-Hill, 1958, pp. 11-14)

What is Wrong With America?

What Is Wrong With America?

“There was once indeed a time when Americans plumed themselves on their individualism; but the fine trait of self-help is not so common now, and what we hear nowadays is rather the enervating cry, “Let the government do it.”

So obsessed are the people with politics, so omnipotent in action and so all-sufficing in providence do they deem the government that to some of them it seems either that legislative statutes are a substitute for moral principles, or that virtue can be legislated into persons whether they want it or not.

This acceptance of legislation as a species of miracle-performing leads to remarkable consequences. If legality can be substituted for morality, it follows that no one need have any character; and, if an individual could be terrorized into goodness by the penalties of man-made laws, why should a person put forth any effort to acquire the habits of goodness?

But the law cannot make the people good; it can only make them pretend to be.

Puritanical blue laws defeat their own object; the futility and perniciousness of such laws are the evidence of their essential quackery . . . There are many credulous Americans who can be interested in the League of Nations, for such a league of governments appears to afford an alternative to the duty of cultivating intelligence and morality and might work a miracle by the quick and east way of erecting more political machinery. Apparently therefore, it is not the saints, not the teachers, but the politicians who are going to save mankind.

Although it was the statesmen who did nothing to prevent, but everything they could to bring about, the World War, yet such is the incurable gullibility of some Americans that they will doubtless enjoy the brief but false security when, by entrance into the League, the American masses are persuaded to imagine that they have succeeded in shifting off their own shoulders and onto the shoulders of a group of secret diplomatists, the responsibility of maintaining peace.

Thus the adoption of a panacea will provide a welcome inducement to abandon the slow and hard work, [and] only adequate method, which is to go to the root of a matter and remove all the causes of the trouble.”

(Editorial, What Is Wrong With America? The Libertarian Magazine, March 1924)

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Lincoln Accomplished

What Lincoln Accomplished

“The world claims now, and rightly, that Lincoln made the United States of America a “government of the people, by the people and for the people.” Lincoln found the United States of America a government of the States, by the States and for the States. He changed it by force of a four-year war into a nation.

Up to 1861, the Federal government was a republic of sovereign States of such wisdom and power as to win the respect and love of all true lovers of political liberty, but too wise and not powerful enough to coerce sovereign States.

Now, since 1861, we are a nation with sovereign States reduced to provinces, State rights gone (for what rights have they who dare not strike for them?); a nation, admired still by the world, but feared and mistrusted as a nation boastful and overbearing, ready and willing to regulate, if not to rule, the world like old Rome. O what a fall was there, my countrymen!”

(What Lincoln Accomplished, Berkeley Minor, Charlottesville, VA, Confederate Veteran, September 1926, page 324)

Lincoln’s Cotton Dilemma

To underscore that the war was fought by the North against secession – not to end slavery – Lincoln and his Secretary of State William Seward early sought the capture Southern ports to restore tariff collection and supply slave-produced cotton for starved New England mills. Also, if the ports were opened by force and cotton exported once again, the chance of European recognition of the new American republic was further diminished.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Lincoln’s Cotton Dilemma

“During the winter of 1861-62 Seward assured Britain and France that a significant volume of cotton would soon be exported to Europe through Confederate ports captured by Union forces. Lincoln thought that the United States should “show the world we were fair in this matter favoring outsiders as much as ourselves.”

Although he was “by no means sure that [the planters] would bring their cotton to the port after we opened it, it would be well to show Europe that it was secession that distressed them and not we.”

The Confederates soon demonstrated that they would rather burn their cotton than allow it to fall into Yankee hands. The French consul estimated that about a quarter of a million bales were burned at New Orleans just prior to its capture by Union forces in April 1862. In August of that year the British consul in Charleston estimated that “about 1,000,000 bales have been destroyed at various places to prevent them falling into the hands of Federals.”

The unsuccessful Federal effort to promote cotton exports through captured Confederate ports was described in a pamphlet published in England in 1862:

“No sooner did the Government succeed in regaining possession . . . of cotton markets, than it made provision for reopening of the cotton trade. The blockade . . . was removed from the ports of Beaufort in North Carolina, Port Royal in South Carolina, and New Orleans in Louisiana on the 12th of May 1862. Cotton agents accompanied the armies of the North, who were licensed to purchase cotton . . . The United States Government assured the British government of their anxiety to grant every facility for the obtaining of cotton, and gave the rebels every facility to sell it. But the net result has been what? Simply an order from Jefferson Davis to burn the cotton and starve the English.”

Seward was delighted by the increased cotton production in other countries: “The insurrectionary cotton States will be blind to their own welfare if they do not see how their prosperity and all their hopes are passing away, when they find that Egypt, Asia Minor and India supplying the world with cotton.”

Nevertheless, cotton exports made a major contribution to the Confederate economy and war effort. Lincoln’s frustration with the Union’s inability to eliminate this trade is indicated in a letter he wrote in December 1864:

“By the external blockade, the [cotton] price is made certainly six times as great as it was. And yet the enemy gets through at least one sixth part as much in a given period . . . as if there were no blockade, and receives as much for it as he would for a full crop in time of peace. The effect . . . is that we give him six ordinary crops, without the trouble of producing any but the first and . . . leave his fields and laborers free to produce provisions . . . This keeps up his armies at home and procures supplies from abroad.”

(One War at a Time, The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, Dean B. Mahin, Brassey’s, 1999, pp. 85-86; 90-91)