Circa1865

Republican party manager and future Senator Mark Hannah spent vast sums to ensure the election of William McKinley to the presidency in 1896, and was known as McKinley’s “political master.” It  was common in the postwar for the Republican president to have little or no say in selecting their own cabinet as these positions were already promised to party hacks and wealthy campaign contributors.  So desperate were the Republicans to maintain political hegemony after 1865 that only Democrat Grover Cleveland briefly served two terms before Woodrow Wilson in 1912.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Democracy Controlled with Machine Money

“[William Howard] Taft’s career would owe much to Mark Alonzo Hanna’s control of Ohio politics. Hanna, a former grocery clerk in Cleveland, had become a great merchant whose fleets transported tonnages of coal and iron ore along the Great Lakes. He was often portrayed in the press as a bully, smoking a big cigar, drinking whiskey, and stamping on the skeletons of working class women and children.

A big man, he was once described as looking like a “well-fed merchant prince from an old Dutch masterpiece.” Above all, he was the new man in party politics, the businessman who constructed a well-run machine that forced out the political adventurers who had come into Ohio after the Civil War and who were often personally corrupt and willing to prey on the rich as well as the poor.

Once Hanna became wealthy, he turned over his business to his brother and concentrated all his efforts on creating the “business state.” As he once remarked to a group of dinner companions, “All questions of government in a democracy [are] questions of money.” Eventually he became chairman of the Republican National Committee, and the most powerful boss in Republican politics. His signal triumph was putting Ohio’s governor William McKinley into the presidency in 1896, and a year later he himself served as a senator from Ohio until his death in 1904.

Will Taft was not particularly close to Hanna, but after Hanna became the dominant force in Ohio politics after 1888, Taft was responsive to the new order and backed McKinley. A telling factor that connected the Taft family to Hanna was the willingness of Taft’s brother Charles to join a “syndicate,” organized by Hanna to pay off McKinley’s debts when the governor found himself in serious trouble after endorsing large sums of notes owned by a ruined business associate. (Several future cabinet members and ambassadors were also in the “syndicate.”)

Under Hanna’s direction, political professionalism was allied to financial capitalism, whose mantra was high tariff protectionism for industry coupled with “sound money,” tying the dollar to gold. Under these conditions, foreign monies soon flowed into the United States, making the country independent of European capital markets and one of the great creditor nations of the world.”

(1912, Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft & Debs, The Election That Changed the Country, James Chace, Simon & Shuster, 2004, pp. 24-25)

A large democracy, in James Fenimore Cooper’s view, allow the people to “become the dupes of demagogues and political schemers” with “most of the crimes of democracies arising from the faults and designs of men of this character.”  Democracy’s ever-present manipulation of public opinion, inflamed by narrow and self-serving interests, is too often a substitute for the rule of law.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Democracy and Its Privileged Classes:

“The dogma of political equality produces the dogma of majority rule, and the old monarchical claim to arbitrary power is transferred to the popular majority. Hence the danger almost inevitably arises in a democracy that the state will be perverted to “a system of favoring a new privileged class of the many and the poor.”

On the other hand, there is the equally grave danger that the modern representative state will be captured by the capitalist class and transformed into a plutocracy. As the nineteenth century has progressed, democracy has found it more and more difficult to resist these twin tendencies, either of which would be fatal to the regime of economic liberty . . . [A] class conflict between capitalism and the proletariat will soon write and end to centuries of societal development.

Democracy has also led increasingly to a new and degraded form of political decision-making. Inevitably, “the consequence [of legislators at the mercy of clamorous factions] is the immense power of the lobby, and the legislation comes to be an affair of coalition between interests to make up a majority.”

(American Conservatism, In the Age of Enterprise, 1865-1910, Robert Green McCloskey, Harper, 1951, pp. 58-60)

Zebulon B. Vance of North Carolina, former colonel, wartime governor and later United States Senator, explained to his Senate colleagues in 1879 by what manner the Southern States became solidly Democratic after the war.  Vance,  a prewar Unionist, was astonished at the temper of the Republican party victors and that they would subvert all law and civil governments in the South for the purpose of party supremacy.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Reasons for the Solid South

“Mr. President, who made the South solid?

The answer is as plain and unmistakable as it is possible to make anything to the human intellect: the Republican party is responsible for this thing. At the beginning of the late war almost the entire Whig party of the South, with a large and influential portion of the Democratic, were in favor of the Union and deprecated with their whole souls the attempt at its destruction, but through love of their native States and sympathy with their kindred and neighbors they were drawn into the support of the war.

Their wisdom in opposing it was justified by the ruinous results; their patriotism and courage were highly appreciated, and when peace came this class were in high favor at the South, while the secessionists as the original advocates of a disastrous policy were down in public estimation.

If you gentlemen of the North had then come forward with liberal terms and taken these men by the hand, you could have established a party in the South that would have perpetuated your power in this Government for a generation, provided you had listened to the views of those men, and respected their policy on questions touching their section.

But you pursued the very opposite course, a course which compelled almost every decent, intelligent man of Anglo-Saxon prejudices and traditions to take a firm and determined stand against you; a course which consolidated all shades of political opinion into one resolute mass to defend what they conceived to be their ancient forms of government, laws, liberties and civilization itself. By confiscation and the destruction of war, you had already stripped us of property to the extent of at least $3,000,000,000 and left our land desolate, rent and torn, our homes consumed with fire, and our pleasant places a wasted wilderness.

Peace then came – no, not peace, but the end of war came – no, not the end of war, but the end of legitimate, civilized war, and for three years you dallied with us. One day we were treated as though we were in the Union, and as though we had legitimate State governments in operation; another day we were treated as though we were out of the Union, and our State governments were rebellious usurpations. It was a regular game of “Now you see it and now you don’t.” We were in the Union for all purposes of oppression; we were out of it for all purposes of protection.

Finally, seeing that we still remained Democratic, the Union was dissolved by act of Congress and we were formally legislated outside in order that you might bring us into the Union again in such a way as to guarantee us a Republican form of government – that is, that we should vote the Republican ticket; and you cited Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution as your authority to do this.

You deposed our State governments and ejected from office every official, from Governor to township constable, and remitted us to a State of chaos in which the only light of human authority for the regulation of human affairs and the control of human passions was that which gleamed from the polished point of the soldier’s bayonet.

You disenfranchised at least ten per cent of our citizens, embracing the wisest, best and most experienced. You enfranchised our slaves, the lowest and most ignorant; and you placed over them as leaders a class of men who have attained the highest positions of infamy known to modern ages.

In order to preserve the semblance of consent, conventions were called to form new [State] constitutions, the delegates to which were chosen by this new and unheard of constituency, The military counted the votes, often at the headquarters in distant States, the general in command determining the election and qualifications of the delegates.

Perhaps the annals of the [Anglo-Saxon] race from which we spring, with all its various branches spread throughout the world, cannot furnish such a parody upon the principles of free government based upon the consent of the governed.

[So constituted], the new governments went to work, and in the short space of four years they plundered those eleven Southern States to the extent of $262,000,000; that is to say, they took all that we had that was amenable to larceny, and they would have taken more, doubtless, but for the same reason that the weather could not get any colder in Minnesota, as described by a returned emigrant from that State.

And now recalling these facts and a hundred more which I cannot now name, can any candid man wonder that we became solid? Can he wonder that old Whigs and Democrats, Union men and secessionists, should unite in a desperate effort to throw off the dominion of a party which had inflicted these things upon them? And your military interference, your abuse, and your denunciations continue unto this day.

The Negro alone is your friend and very few whites . . . [though] One by one the Northern adventurers who led them have packed their carpet-bags and silently stolen back to the slums of Northern society whence they originated, and the lonely Republican makes his solitary lair in some custom-house or post-office or revenue headquarters. The broad, free, bright world outside of these retreats in all the South is Democratic, thanks to you, the Republican party of the North.”

(Life of Zebulon B. Vance, Clement Dowd, Observer Printing and Publishing House, 1897, pp. 226-229)

It was Plato who observed that “Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” One of the greatest fears of American statesman John C. Calhoun was that democracy in the United States would evolve into a class warfare system whereby the taxpaying class would be perpetually looted by the tax-consuming class.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Democracy’s Demagogic Plutocracy

“The late Vilfredo Pareto – although recognizing that the democratic dogma, like other political myths, has important practical consequences in impelling men to act in certain ways – maintained that all the terms we use to distinguish forms of political rule are worthless “from the logico-experimental point of view.”

In other words, actual power is never where we imply that it is when we describe a given state as a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. Almost everywhere “there is a not very numerous governing class, which keeps itself in power partly by force and partly by consent of the much more numerous class of the governed.” The proportions of force and consent and the ways in which they are applied vary in different communities, but the variations do not follow the differences in the legal or theoretical forms of the state.

Behind the parliaments of so-called democracies, as well as behind all public despots, there is a minority that plays the major part in the real decisions of government. At times, it is true, the actual rulers have to do obeisance to the whims of princes and parliaments, but not for long; soon they resume their power and exercise it with a greater effectiveness than that of the occasional power wielded by the formal government.

In democracies the people are permitted to believe that the official government is actually controlled by their will. The ruling minority concedes to the populace a formal right to decide “general” questions, to which the proper officials may only give “concrete” application; but in the exercise of this latter function, the officers have all the freedom they need to make any sort of application which they, or the minority whom they serve, desire.

“A governmental system in which the “people” expresses its “will” (if we could suppose that the people has a will), without factions, intrigues and cliques, exists only in the state of the pious desires of theorists. Our democracies in France, Italy, England and the United States tend more and more to be demagogic plutocracies. [Pareto]”

(Recent Political Thought, Francis W. Coker, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934, pp. 328-329)

Far from being a sterling example of democracy exported from the US, South Korea has been “an unrepresentative and unpopular dictatorship since the early days of American occupation.” Author Bruce Cumings (The Origins of the Korean War) suggests that the claimed North Korean surprise attack in June 1950 was in fact an armed response to frequent border incursions by the American-appointed puppet Syngman Rhee’s military. Not content with ruling only South Korea for his American friends, instigating war with the North could increase his realm.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Korea’s Temporary American Intervention

“America’s three-decade intervention in Korea has shattered an ancient East Asian society. Millions were killed and wounded; millions more became refugees separated from their families and birthplaces. Twenty-nine years after World War II and twenty-one years after the Korean War, the Korean people and peninsula are still divided into two hostile regimes.

The consequences for the United States have also been grave. America suffered casualties of 33,629 killed and 150,000 wounded in the Korean War and has spent tens of billions of dollars for the security and economic development of the Republic of Korea (ROK). The belief that US policies in Korea were a successful model for resisting communism in Asia led directly to the US intervention in Vietnam.

Ironically, although American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam . . . the US expeditionary force remains in South Korea to “ensure stability in Northeast Asia,” a hostage to strategies and ambitions of the cold war past.

American involvement in Korea occurred at a moment of singular renaissance for the Korean people. Japan’s crushing defeat in 1945 meant political and cultural liberation [and a chance] to re-establish the Korean nation after thirty-five years of harsh Japanese colonial rule . . . Korea was a unified country when it lost independence to Japan in 1910. A homogenous population speaking a common language lived on a distinct geographical unit, the Korean peninsula, where they had lived for over a thousand years.

The American forces that landed at Inch’on, Korea, in September 1945 . . . were a harbinger of America’s new role in postwar Asia. The US-USSR agreement in August 1945 on a temporary zonal division of the peninsula to accept the surrender of Japanese forces gave America a limited “temporary” responsibility for southern Korea. Since 1948 the United States has paid directly a large percentage of the ROK’s annual budget and has trained, armed and supplied its military forces.

The post-World War II involvement in Korea differs from areas where US power was traditionally paramount. No United Fruit Company dabbled in Korean politics. The Korean peninsula lacked natural resources and market potential . . . Congress might have limited the US involvement, but instead it passively and indifferently acquiesced to executive branch policies.

The most striking instance was allowing President Harry S. Truman to go to war in Korea in June 1950 without a declaration of war by the Congress, as required by the Constitution. This fateful lapse contributed to the plunge into Vietnam a decade later.

The US intervention in Korea to block the Soviet Union overlooked one factor: the Koreans. Whether the Korean demands for immediate self-government and reforms were communist-inspired or advocated by non-communist radicals and liberals, the US command would not risk a potential challenge to its control [and] Washington ruled that there could be no retreat.

The United States intervention [in June, 1950] prolonged the war [between Korean political factions] by more than three years, bringing an estimated 4.5 million Korean, Chinese and American casualties. The United States attained its objective of keeping the southern half of the peninsula non-communist, but the Koreas remain divided almost three decades later.”

(Without Parallel, The American-Korean Relationship Since 1945, Frank Baldwin, Pantheon Books, 1971, excerpts, pp. 3-16)

The French Revolution’s promise of equality ended with anarchy and Bonaparte in France; the lofty experiment of equality in St. Domingo terminated not in freedom, but military despotism after a fearful destruction of human life. After all the horrors of their bloody revolution, the blacks in Haiti only effected a change of masters. “The white man had disappeared, and the black man , one of their own race and color, had assumed his pace and his authority.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

French Experiment with Equality

“[We shall quote] from the language of Dr. [W.E.] Channing, the scholar-like and the eloquent, though visionary, advocate of British [slave] emancipation. Even as early as 1842, in an address delivered on the anniversary of that event, he burst into the following strain of impassioned eulogy: “Emancipation works well, far better than could have been anticipated . . . Freedom, simple freedom, is in my estimation just, far prized above all price.”

In these high-sounding praises, which hold up personal freedom as “our proper good,” as “our end,” it is assumed that man was made for liberty, and not liberty for man. It is, indeed, one of the fundamental errors of the abolitionist to regard personal freedom as a great substantive good, or as in itself a blessing, and not merely as a relative good.

It may be, and indeed often it is, an unspeakable benefit, but then it is so only as a means to an end. The end of our existence, the proper good, is the improvement of our intellectual and moral powers, the perfection of our rational and immortal natures.

When freedom subserves this end, it is a good; when it defeats this end, it is an evil. Hence there may be a world of evil as well as a world of good in “this one word.”

The wise man adapts the means to the end. It were the very height of folly to sacrifice the end to the means. No man gives personal freedom to his child because he deems it always and in all cases a good. His heart teaches him a better doctrine when the highest good of his child is concerned. Should we not be permitted then, to have something of the same feeling in regard to those who Providence has placed under our care, especially since . . . they stand in utmost need of guidance and direction?

Few of the abolitionists are disposed to offer any substitute for our method. They are satisfied merely to pull down and destroy, without the least thought or care in regard to consequences.

But what is meant by the freedom of the emancipated slaves, on which so many exalted eulogies have been pronounced? Its first element, it is plain, is a freedom from labor – freedom from the very first law of nature. In one word, its sum and substance is a power on the part of the freed black to act pretty much as he pleases. Now . . . would it not be well to see how he would be pleased to act?

This kind of freedom, it should be remembered, was born in France and cradled in the revolution. May it never be forgotten that the “Friends of the Blacks” at Boston had their exact prototypes in “les Amis des Noirs” of Paris. Of this last society Robespierre was the ruling spirit, and Brissot the orator. By the dark machinations of the one, and the fiery eloquence of the other, the French people . . . were induced, in 1791, to proclaim the principle of equality to and for the free blacks of St. Domingo. This beautiful island . . . thus became the first of the West Indies in which the dreadful experiment of a forced equality was tried.

The authors of that experiment were solemnly warned of the horrors into which it would inevitably plunge both the whites and the blacks of the island. Yet firm and unmovable as death, Robespierre sternly replied, then “Perish the colonies rather than sacrifice one iota of our principles.”

The atrocities of this awful massacre have had . . . no parallel in the annals of human crime. “The Negroes,” says Alison, “marched with spiked infants on their spears instead of colors; they sawed asunder the male prisoners, and violated the females on the dead bodies of their husbands.” The work of death, thus completed with such outbursts of unutterable brutality, constituted and closed the first act in the grand drama of Haytian freedom.

But equality was not yet established. Equality had been proclaimed, and anarchy produced. In this frightful chaos, the ambitious mulattoes, whose insatiable desire for equality had first disturbed the peace of the island, perished miserably beneath the vengeance of the very slaves whom they had roused from subjection and elevated into irresistible power. Thus ended the second act of the horrible drama.”

(An Essay on Liberty and Slavery, Albert Taylor Bledsoe, J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1856, pp. 269-278; available from www.confederatereprint.com)

Wanting to depart Boston should New England ever “surrender to the slave trade,” the idealistic abolitionist Ralph Waldo Emerson must have forgotten that Massachusetts was the linchpin in the transatlantic slave trade and that Lowell Mills was amassing a fortune processing slave-produced raw cotton. Emerson was ready for the secession of New England from the Union if Buchanan won election in 1856 instead of Fremont.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Emerson the Northern Secessionist              

“The events of the fifties confirmed Emerson’s fears of Southern political power. It was “the ascendancy of Southern manners” that drew public men into the support of the South. At the same time, his attitude toward the North grew more sentimental and less critical. He drew more sharply the line between the slave states and the free states. Expressions such as “party of darkness” versus “party of light,” “aristocracy” versus “plebian strength” began to appear in his journals and addresses. Like his fellow-abolitionists, he assumed that the goodness of the individual was simply lost in the badness of the slavery system.

Emerson maintained that no slaveholder could be free. He fell into the abolitionist assumption that nobility and sincerity were inevitable concomitants to the Negro’s ignorance and simplicity. Those who ran away were fleeing from plantation whips and hiding from hounds.

Those who cooperated with the South were stigmatized. Any judge who obeyed the Fugitive Slave Law by returning a runaway slave to the South made of his bench an extension of the planter’s whipping post. Emerson’s anger over [Preston] Brooks assault on [Charles] Sumner led him to exaggerate uncritically his account of both Northern and Southern values:

“Life has not parity of value in the free state and in the slave state. In one, it is adorned with education, with skillful labor, with arts, with long prospective interests, with sacred family ties, with honor and justice. In the other, life is a fever; man is an animal, given to pleasure, frivolous, irritable, spending his days in hunting and practicing with deadly weapons to defend himself against his slaves and against his companions brought up in the same idle and dangerous way. Such people live for the moment, they have properly no future, and readily risk on every passion a life which is of small value to themselves or others.”

Emerson’s letter to his brother William in June of 1856 revealed the extent of his pessimism. He stated that he was looking at the map to find a place to go with his children when Boston and Massachusetts should surrender to the slave trade. “If the Free States do not obtain the government next fall, which our experience does not entitle us to hope, nothing seems left, but to form a Northern Union, & break the old.”

(The South in Northern Eyes, 1831-1861, Howard R. Floan, McGraw-Hill, 1958, pp. 57-59)

Northern authorities reported in May 1864 that Grant had 141,160 effective troops and a reserve of 137,672 men arrayed against General Robert E. Lee’s ragged force of 50,000 with little or no reserve. Though speaking of humanity regarding prisoners, Grant revealed no moral dilemma in hurling his limitless supply of recruits in suicidal charges – losing the equivalent of Lee’s full strength at the Wilderness.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Grant Abandons His Suffering Prisoners

“Jefferson Davis made several proposals for the exchange of prisoners, but his plea met deaf ears in the North. Grant, who had paroled 29,000 Confederate prisoners at Vicksburg on their word alone, did a turnabout on Davis’ question and was heartily opposed. During the mid-summer of 1864 Grant wrote an indirect reply to Davis:

“On the subject of exchange of prisoners, however, I differ from General [E.A.] Hitchcock. It is hard on our men held in Southern prisons not to exchange them, but it is humanity to those left in the ranks to fight our battles. Every man released on parole, or otherwise, becomes an active soldier against us at once either directly or indirectly. If we commence a system of exchange, which liberates all prisoners taken, we will have to fight on until the whole South is exterminated. If we hold on to those caught, they amount to no more than dead men. At this particular time to release all rebel prisoners North would insure Sherman’s defeat, and would compromise our safety here.”

As it appeared to Davis, able-bodied prisoners need not be exchanged. To relieve the Confederacy of the responsibility of taking care of the sick and wounded prisoners, Davis offered to return without equivalents, 15,000 sick and badly wounded prisoners at an arranged meeting place at . . . the Savannah River. This offer would stand if transportation were supplied by the North.

In the meantime pictures by the Confederate photographers of the conditions at Andersonville were sent to the Northern government to stimulate action on Davis’ proposal. An eyewitness to the taking of these photographs was a soldier of the North . . . [who] wrote: “I was a prisoner of war in that place during the summer of 1864 and I well remember seeing a photographer with his camera in one of the sentinel boxes near the south gate during July or August . . . I have often wondered in later years what success this photographer had and why the [Northern] public never had the opportunity of seeing a genuine photograph of Andersonville.”

The pictures were sent to Washington. Who received them, or for what purpose they were to be used, was never made public. There is no record of them in Northern journals. But that they were used is indicated by Jefferson Davis who in writing about the incident states:

“The photographs were terrible indeed, but the misery they portrayed was surpassed by some of those we received in exchange in Savannah. Why was this delay between summer and November in sending vessels for sick and wounded, for whom no equivalents were asked? Were the Federal prisoners left to suffer, and afterward photographed to aid in firing the popular heart of the North?”

(Mr. Lincoln’s Camera Man: Matthew B. Brady, Roy Meredith, Dover Publications, 1974, pp. 187-188)

The late Southern conservative M.E. Bradford understood that the centrality of freedom was the core of Southerners’ insistence on their right to govern their private and local affairs in their own way, and the same for citizens of all other States. He held that “the only equality Americans can universally approve is accidental, a corollary of liberty or simple equality before the law with limited scope.” Bradford made his readers aware of Lenin’s belief that the only way to make men equal is to treat them unequally.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Beware Demagogues Seducing the Gullible

“The wrath [Bradford] directed against Lincoln, like the wrath he directed against Julia Ward Howe, the authors of the Reconstruction amendments, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and all those who had imposed the teleological will of an instrumental government and judiciary upon an unsuspecting nation, had little to do with personal animosity.

It stemmed from his indignation against people he viewed as so intellectually blind as to be incapable of understanding the enormity they had wrought or so morally blind as not to care, provided only that they accomplished their immediate ends. Such attitudes, for Bradford, embodied the reverse – indeed the repudiation – of the obligations of stewardship and amounted to the despoiling of the children as well as the desecration of the fathers.

Bradford refused to apologize for the severity of his message – that the Northern victory had extracted a terrible cost from the country and its culture. Rejecting the cult of equality as the opiate of the intellectuals, Bradford rejected the fashionable identification of the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution, referring to “the Great Divide of the War Between the States.”

He explained: “it has been more and more the habit of our historians, jurists, and political scientists to read the Continental Enlightenment, and the Age of Revolution that was its political consequence, back into the beginnings of our national beginnings by way of an anachronistic gloss upon the Declaration of Independence.”

He constantly reminds his readers that the Constitution, not the Declaration, embodies the country’s law, which it exists to articulate and protect. Thus, he argues in an uncharacteristically optimistic vein, the “Constitution makes it difficult or even impossible for us to alter our political identity on whim or when momentarily carried away by the adjuration of demagogues.”

By the time Bradford died [in 1993], he had reason to know that the American political identity he cherished was under formidable assault, primarily at the hands of the Supreme Court justices – those supposed custodians and interpreters of the Constitution itself.

Experience and history taught Bradford, as he believed they had taught the Framers, that in politics one must conjoin the “caution of David Hume and the pessimism of Saint Paul,” especially with respect to the seductive promises of demagogues. In the time of the Framers, as in our own, he insisted, caution and pessimism should lead to a deep mistrust of the myths of equality with which demagogues love to seduce the more gullible of the citizenry, and he approvingly quoted Rufus King of Massachusetts, “the unnatural Genius of Equality [is] the arch Enemy of the moral world.”

(M.E. Bradford’s Historical Vision, EF & ED Genovese; A Defender of Southern Conservatism, M.E. Bradford and His Achievements, Clyde N. Wilson, editor, University of Missouri Press, 1999, pp. 79-82)

Though abolitionists found much of their strength in New England, Democrats in that region sided with the South in its determination of be free of the North. After this editorial of the Bangor Democrat appeared, a pro-Lincoln mob burned the news offices and printing presses. The editorial was re-printed in the New York Evening Day-Book of 18 April 1861.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.circa1865.org

Northern Opponents of Lincoln’s Jacobins

“Throughout the broad land of the fair South, the rising sun is no longer welcomed with the cheerful song of the husbandman wending his way to the toil of his peaceful field, but is greeted with the drum-beat that summons to arms the gathering hosts of war. From Carolina to the Rio Grande all is hasty preparation for a fearful conflict of arms.

There, to-day, are no peaceful, happy and quiet homes, for the invader is on their soil, and the government which was created to protect and defend them, has ruthlessly turned its guns against their altars and firesides.

Gray-headed fathers, stout-hearted husbands, and fair-cheeked youths, are taking a tearful adieu of their wives, their children, their mothers and their sisters, and buckling on their armor, and hastening away to the battle-fields from which many, many may never return to gladden their homes again.

This, reader, is no fanciful picture; it is a stern reality. To-morrow, in thousands of homes, wives, mothers, daughters, and little children will gather in mournful silence around the family board no longer cheered by the presence of their natural guardians and protectors.

Why is all this?

It is because that old Tory party, which under a multitude of names and disguises, first resisted the independence of America, and after its Government had become an established fact, has been unceasing in its efforts to get possession of it, and after having gained possession of it, by hypocritically assuming the garb of freedom, it has undertaken to convert the Government into an instrument of tyranny, and to use all its powers to overturn the very bulwarks of liberty itself – the Sovereignty of the States.

Yes, Abraham Lincoln, a Tory from his birth, is putting forth all the powers of government to crush out the spirit of American liberty. Surrounded by gleaming bayonets at Washington, he sends forth fleets and armies to overawe and subdue the gallant little State which was the first to raise its voice and arm against British oppression.

DEMOCRATS OF MAINE! The loyal sons of the South have gathered around Charleston as your fathers of old gathered about Boston, in defense of the same sacred principles of liberty – principles which you have ever upheld and defended with your vote, your voice and your strong right arm. Your sympathies are with the defenders of the truth and the right. Those who have inaugurated this unholy and unjustifiable war are no friend of yours – no friends of Democratic Liberty. Will you aid them in their work of subjugation and tyranny?

When the Government at Washington calls for volunteers or recruits to carry on their work of subjugation and tyranny under the specious phrases of “enforcing the laws,” “retaking and protecting the public property,” and “collecting the revenue,” let every Democrat fold his arms and bid the minions of Tory despotism [to] do a Tory despot’s work.

Say to them fearlessly and boldly in the language of England’s great Lord, the Earl of Chatham, whose bold words in behalf of the struggling Colonies of America in the dark hours of the revolution, have enshrined his name in the heart of every friend of freedom, and immortalized his fame wherever the name of liberty is known – say in his thrilling language:

“If I were a Southerner, as I am a Northerner, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I would never lay down my arms – never, never, NEVER!”

(Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait, Herbert Mitgang, editor, UGA Press, 1989, pp. 256-257)