Circa1865

It is said that the United States fought the Japanese in World War II to protect English and French colonial interests in the Far East, and the United Nations was viewed as a safeguard to future wars. Few Americans in 1950 knew how much of their money was going to prop up the French colonial regime in Indochina saved from the Japanese, never imagining that over 55,000 Americans would later die in Vietnam for a still-elusive object.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Funding the French in Indochina:

“Whatever the formula for peace, the French Government recognized that it was no longer entirely a free agent in Viet Nam. Even in 1953, at the time of the Viet Minh invasion of Laos which occasioned so much alarm abroad, when certain members of the French Cabinet were reported to favor a request to the United Nations for help, they were overruled – partly to avoid foreign discussion and intervention in the affairs, not only of Indochina, but of the French Union generally; and partly out of fear that the United Nations intervention would precipitate Chinese intervention on the side of the Viet Minh, creating a situation similar to that which had prevailed in Korea.

At the same time, however, the French Government sought and received aid from its allies (from the signatories to the North Atlantic Treaty in 1952 and from the British and American Governments on various occasions and at Bermuda in 1953) an endorsement of its war effort as vital to the defense of the free world. And it also sought and received substantial military and economic aid, mostly from the United States.

Certain highly-placed French officials were once reported as fearful of allowing American aid to reach fifty percent of the total French military effort in Indochina, on the theory that the United States would then be in “the zone of political demands.”

By 1954, the American Government was paying about eighty percent of the total French military expenditures in the Associated States. American aid, which began in 1950, had averaged $500 million annually and included ammunition, vehicles, aircraft, naval vessels, small arms and automatic weapons, hospital supplies and technical equipment, which were delivered directly to the French Union forces under the supervision of an American Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG).

In 1953, on the basis of military plans drawn up by General Navarre and a French pledge “to intensify prosecution of the war” and make “every effort to break up and destroy regular enemy forces in Indochina,” the United States promised France an extra $385 million.”

(The Struggle For Indochina, Ellen J. Hammer, Stanford University Press, 1954, pp. 313-314)

The old Soviet Constitution provided the “Equality of rights of citizens of the USSR irrespective of their nationality or race; in all spheres of economic, government, cultural, political and other public activity”; the Constitution of the United States mentions nothing of the kind, and no evidence exists that any delegates to the 1787 convention believed in a doctrine of human equality.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Equality Ends at Birth

“[The] “basis and foundation” of the first free government in America [Virginia] was equality of freedom and independence, while the [Thomas] Jefferson perversion was equality at creation. The Declaration of Independence does not say that all men are equal. It says that they were created equal. There equality ends.

All America thought alike on the subject in 1776. Benjamin Franklin, a few days after the Declaration was promulgated, helped to write a Declaration of Rights for the State of Pennsylvania. He copied [George] Mason’s original Virginia Declaration of Rights almost verbatim. His first paragraph was:

“That all men are born equally free and independent, and have certain natural, inalienable rights, amongst which are, the enjoying and defending Life and Liberty, acquiring, possessing and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

So the basis and foundation of Franklin’s government was the same as that of Mason’s Virginia. It was equality of freedom and independence.

The Massachusetts Declaration of Rights contains the phrase “All men are born free and equal . . .” The Writings of John Adams (Volume 4, page 220) reveal that the original draft prepared by the Committee of which John Adams was chairman, in 1779, exactly copied George Mason’s original with the words “That all men are born equally free and independent.”

Before the Massachusetts Declaration was officially adopted John Adams embarked for France and on the twenty-ninth day of September, 1779, the Convention struck out the word “equally” and the word “independent” and substituted for the word “independent” the word “equal” making the clause read as it now reads: “All men are born free and equal.” John Adams was embittered by the change and, as we shall later see, had he been present it would not have occurred.

No other State adopted a human equality clause of any character until after 1835.  New Hampshire and North Carolina also copied Mason’s original while not one of the thirteen copied from the Declaration of Independence.

When the United States Constitution was under discussion at the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 not one delegate from any of the twelve States represented suggested that “all men are equal” either at creation or in life. On June 26, 1787, on the floor of the convention Alexander Hamilton, the patron saint of the Republican Party, said:

“Inequality will exist as long as liberty exists. It unavoidably results from that very liberty itself.”

Apparently every mind in the Convention assented, because not a word may be found in all the Notes of Debates to indicate that any delegate believed in the doctrine of human equality in 1787.

So far as we have found, the doctrine of human equality was not suggested by anyone in the battle that raged over ratification and a bill of rights. In the South Carolina Ratifying Convention of 1788, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, a member of the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, explained that one of the reasons why no bill of rights was adopted in Philadelphia which “. . . weighed particularly, with the members from this state” was that “such bills generally begin by declaring that all men are by nature born free.

Now, we should make the declaration with a very bad grace, when a large part of our property consists in men who are actually born slaves.” If “born free” was rejected in Philadelphia, what chance would one expect for “created equal”?

The Constitution proclaims in its preamble that it was established “to . . . insure domestic tranquility . . . and secure the blessings of liberty.” Nowhere does it hint a purpose to insure or impose equality of men or things. The due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which render liberty and property immune from attack except by the orderly processes fixed by law, insures that American governments may not impose equality.”

(Equality Versus Liberty, The Eternal Conflict, R. Carter Pittman, American Bar Association Journal, August 1960)

The United States Constitution guarantees the right of all men to equal justice under law, but propagandists have carried the doctrine beyond equality of rights to equality of things, and “men are heard to proclaim human equality who would revolt at the suggestion that all birds, all fish, all cattle, all dogs or all race horses are equal.” All men are not created equal any more than animals. And even if they are created equal, that creation ends when life begins.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

The Naïve Argument of Socialists

“Surely it is plain that to vest the legal title of residual ownership in the community has no necessary connection with the beneficial use of the property by the whole community. If it did, there would be no such thing as militarism in armies, as bureaucracy in governing departments, as profiteering by corporate officials and controlling minorities, as favoritism and patronage in the public services, as legalized raids on the public treasuries.

It is because soldiers, who do not own the army, develop special interests of their own that we have the phenomenon of militarism. It is because officials use the government service as a vested interest, though they do not own it, that we have a phenomenon of bureaucracy. It is because corporate officials and financiers and minorities use corporate property for their own benefit, though the residual owners are shareholders, that we have the phenomenon of corporate mismanagement.

None of these evils is presented by the fact that the beneficiaries do not possess the title deeds. The legal title does not even indicate how the property is to be administered for the beneficial advantage of the residual owners. Yet the whole promise of socialism rests on the assumption that property held in trust for others will be administered faithfully and wisely in their highest interest.

Though it is evident from all experience that there is no warrant for this assumption –though it is evident that property held in trust is not necessarily administered in the highest interest of the residual owner — the socialist naively argues that if all property were held in trust for all the people, all property would as a matter of course be administered in the highest interest.

And what is the communist conception of how collective propaganda should be administered? There is a “socialist” formula, declared in the present Russian constitution, which is “from each according to his ability, to each — according to his toil.” But this is regarded officially as a transitional formula to the true communist principle: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” But how are “needs” to be determined?

Since inequality has, on the Marxian premise, provoked all class struggles, the answer must be that the “classless” state will be one in which there is nothing to struggle for. The communists are driven to the notion that only if worldly possessions were “equally” distributed would men cease to struggle for more than their allotted share.

The whole premise of communism — that it can end class war, imperialism, national war, personal aquisitiveness and possessiveness — rests upon two suppositions: that equality of reward can be calculated and administered, and that it will be acceptable. So the correct way to state the communist theory is not that it means to abolish the private ownership of productive capital — that is merely a means to the end — but that it promises to administer productive capital according to the principle of “equal” rewards.

The fulfillment of this promise is of course dependent upon the ability of the rulers of a communist state to define equality in actual practice, to administer the economy by offering equal rewards, and to discourage, suppress, re-educate and if necessary, exterminate those who demand more than an equal reward.

Now it is no easy problem to deduce from the general principle of equal rewards the criteria by which they can be determined. I use the term “rewards” because it is evident the hypothesis could not be satisfied if all incomes derived from useful labor were equal in terms of money. Identical money wages would merely enhance the desirable advantages of inequality in other things.

In an army all private soldiers are paid the same wage, but it makes a vast difference to the soldier whether he is paid for service in the front line trenches or for being the chauffeur for the minister of war. It must be obvious, particularly to the communists who pride themselves on having a realistic appraisal of human selfishness, that only total and absolute equality of reward could, according to their theory, end the struggle for privilege.

The total satisfactions, the real income, measured not only in money, not only in goods, but also in place, power, repute, safety, adventure, interest, relief from monotony, would have to be equally divided that no one would wish to have any other job than the one that is open to him.

But though the communist diagnosis demands it, equality in this sense cannot be defined in theory or arranged in practice. The reason is that equality of reward has only a subjective meaning, whereas wage schedules, occupational requirements, the recruitment of labor, and the selection of managers and officials are objective decisions. The two cannot be reduced to a common denominator.

Thus if money incomes are equal, how shall the pleasure and pain of the effort expended be equalized? How many hours in a coal mine are equal to how many hours in a commissar’s office?”

(The Good Society: An Inquiry Into The Principles of, Walter Lippman, Little, Brown and Company, 1937, pp. 74-77)

Democracy and equal opportunity were unknown in America’s new conquest, and in 1912 William Howard Taft warned his countrymen “that only 3 percent of the Filipinos voted and only 5 percent read the public press; to confer democracy on such a society was to subject the great mass to the dominance of an oligarchical and exploiting minority.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Circ1865

Democracy Comes to the Philippines

“On July 4, 1901, William Howard Taft took the oath of office as the first Governor-General of the Philippines, and control of the islands passed from the military arm of the government. Not all the problems [of converting the islands] had been solved.

Philippine society remained ill suited to the concept of representative democratic government, primarily because it is not one culture, but several. An election in Zamboanga was decided by which Filipino shot the other candidates first.

The Filipinos in the northern islands were Tagalog Christians, those in the south were Moro’s (meaning “Mohammedan”) who had long resisted Tagalog encroachment. A tribal people, they were fiercely jealous of their semi-savage freedom. Wisely, the Spaniards had left them to their own devices; but the Americans wanted to clean up and educate everybody.

So the [American] army established a garrison at Balangiga, on Samar, in he south where Magellan had sighted the Philippines and where he was to die at the hands of natives. On September 1, 1901, the natives from the surrounding hills of Balangiga fell on the American garrison, and in a devastating surprise littered the street with the heads, brains and intestines of the soldiery.

This was the beginning of a religious war with the Moros, one that took longer to settle than the war against Aguinaldo’s insurrectos. The fight became a struggle to win the minds and hearts of the villagers, who supplied the guerrilla bands and offered them bases and sanctuaries.

What was called for [to control the Moros], Pershing decided, was to disarm the entire Moro Province, to confiscate or buy every rifle, pistol, campilan, bolo and krise on the islands. It was not an original idea.

General Leonard Wood, who left the Philippines in 1910 to become Chief of Staff advised Perching: “You cannot disarm the people. It means they will bury their best arms and turn in a few poor ones, especially some who want to make a show of obedience.”

Moros who surrendered their arms were victimized by those who had not . . . it is as hard to disarm a people as it is to make them give up a religious belief.

In a letter to Avery D. Andrews, (General) Pershing put succinctly the apostolic creed to which he himself subscribed:

“It has been urged by some people at home that the Filipinos should be given their independence. Such a thing would result in anarchy. To whom should we over the government? Tagalog, Viscayan, Igorrote, Macabebe or Moro? No one can answer that any of these tribes represents the people in any sense, any more than the Sioux represents all the Indians in America. There is no national spirit, and except for the few agitators, these people do not want to try independence. They will have to be educated up to it and to self government as we understand it, and their education will take some time and patience. It is a grand work cut out for us from which there should be no shirking.”

The Americans stayed on, Pershing said, because “the American people being obsessed with the idea of maintaining their new position as a world power, insisted on keeping the flag flying over a territory once it was in our possession.

In the long run, the only advantage the United States or the Philippines realized from the occupation was the military mission. The archipelago was never destined to become a great way station to exploit trade with the Orient. America and the world economy were finding uses for Philippine products, especially hemp, sugar, timber and minerals. But as the world was discovering these products, the Filipinos were discovering corruption.

By 1920, Wall Street learned that the directors of the [Wall Street-capitalized Philippine National] bank had dealt out so many unsecured loans that $24 million had simply evaporated. The bank’s reserves, which should have been retained in New York, had also vanished in alarming fashion. Similarly, American rail industries had capitalized the Manila Railroad Company, which piled up astronomical losses in only eight years.

By 1921, the islands were insolvent.

“The idea that public office is a public trust,” Taft said, “has not been planted in the Filipino mind by experience and the conception that an officer who fails in his duty by embezzlement and otherwise is violating an obligation is difficult to grasp.”

(Pipe Clay and Drill; John J. Pershing, Richard Goldhurst, Readers Digest Press, 1977, excerpts, pp 100-153)

“Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a two-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.

And when the drums of war have reached a fever-pitch, and the blood boils with hate, and the mind is closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all their rights unto their leader and gladly so.”    Julius Caesar.

Fears of Descending into Democracy 

One of John C. Calhoun’s greatest fears 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.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by dictatorship.”

Alexander Fraser Tytler, 1787, on the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic

“…He announced that democracy itself had created a new tyrant—public opinion. Tocqueville saw the powers of this strange new democratic monster. “The majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause, and there are certain truths which the Americans can learn only from strangers or from experience. Democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the trading classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature. The ever increasing crowd of readers and their continuing craving for something new ensures the sale of books that nobody much esteems.”

Daniel Boorstin, Introduction to Democracy in America.

“Our real disease…is democracy.”

Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804)

“Democracies have even been spectacles of great turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10.

“Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that found between order and chaos.”

John Marshall, US Supreme Court Chief Justice.

“In the strict sense of the term, a true democracy has never existed, and never will exist.”

Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, III, 1762.

“In the degenerate state to which democracy never fails to reduce a nation, it is almost impossible for a good man to govern, even if he could get into power, or for a bad man to govern well.”

Gouverneur Morris, May, 1812, to DeWitt Clinton.

“Morris spoke out against democracy in every branch of government. This was not an unusual position at the (Constitutional) Convention: “The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy,” Elbridge Gerry said roundly during the Convention’s first week. But Morris added a twist of his own. A broad franchise across the board would empower the rich, who would control poor or fickle voters. “The people never act from reason alone. The rich will take advantage of the passions and make these the instrument for oppressing them. Give the votes to people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich who will be able to buy them.”

(Gentleman Revolutionary, Gouverneur Morris, The Rake Who Wrote The Constitution)

“The United States, by trying to survive as a republic, was defying one of the most certain laws of history. As thinkers then interpreted the past, republics seemed sure to die because self-government could last only as long as the populace possessed enough virtue to voluntarily sacrifice private interest for the public good. The example of previous republics showed that a free people would eventually grow selfish and prefer their own ease to vigilance on behalf of liberty.

Thus the people would become corrupt, and economic dependence would lead to political subjugation and to tyranny. Republics, like people, had an ineluctable life progression, and with the onset of corruption, liberty began to die. Americans had no guarantee that their new republic would not repeat this familiar cycle.”

(Light Horse Harry Lee, the Legacy of the American Revolution, Charles Royster, 1981)

“Besides the unsuitableness of the republican form to the genius of the people, America is too extensive for it. That form may do well enough for a single city, or small territory; but would be utterly improper for such a continent as this. America is too unwieldly for the feeble, dilatory administration of democracy. Rome had the most extensive dominions of any ancient republic. But it should be remembered that very soon after the spirit of conquest carried the Romans beyond the limits that were proportioned to their constitution, they fell under the despotic yoke. A very few years had elapsed from the time of their conquering Greece and first entering Asia, till the battle of Pharsalia, where Julius Caesar put an end to the liberties of the country.”

Anonymous, The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, 1776.

“We are now forming a republican government. Real liberty is neither found in despotism or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate governments.”  Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804) Debates of the Federal Convention, June 26, 1787.

“One of the worst forms of government is a pure democracy, that is, one in which the citizens enact and administer the laws directly. Such a government is helpless against the mischiefs of faction.” James Madison, The Federalist Papers, 1787.

“The known propensity of a democracy is to licentiousness which the ambitious call, and ignorant believe to be, liberty.” Fisher Ames (1758-1808) Speech in the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, January 15, 1788.

“When a people shall have become incapable of governing themselves, and [are] fit for a master, it is of little consequence from what quarter he comes.” George Washington (1732-1799) Letter to Marquis de Lafayette, April 28, 1788.

“It has been observed by an honorable gentleman that a pure democracy, if it were practicable, would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position in politics is more false than this. The ancient democracies, in which the people deliberated, never possessed one feature of good government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure, deformity. When they assembled, the field of debate presented and ungovernable mob, not only incapable of deliberation, but prepared for every enormity.”

Alexander Hamilton, New York Ratification Convention, June 21, 1788

“The republican is the only form of government which is not eternally at open or secret war with the rights of mankind.”

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to William Hunter, March 11, 1790.

“When the Constitution was framed, no respectable person called himself or herself a democrat.” Charles Beard

“Washington, Jefferson and Hamilton were republicans, but never democrats. Hamilton openly repudiated any democratic affiliation; Washington did not go that far but he was frankly distrustful of democracy; Jefferson accepted its principle and argued eloquently for the theory, but his conception of democracy was fantastically far removed from the ideas of his successors. It never occurred to Jefferson to doubt that while the people should rule, they should exercise their power through representatives drawn form the gentry—not indeed gentlemen by heredity, but those who had earned the title by their own demonstrated quality. Jefferson believed in an aristocracy of brains and character, not of blood; but he believed in aristocracy.”

Gerald W. Johnson, American Heroes and Hero Worship, 1941.

“It is the almost universal mistake of our countrymen, that democracy would be mild and safe in America. They charge the horrid excesses of France not so much to human nature, which will never act better when the restraints of government, morals and religion are thrown off, but to the characteristic cruelty and wickedness of Frenchmen.

The truth is, and let it humble our pride, the most ferocious of animals, when his passions are roused to fury and are uncontrolled, is man; and of all governments, the worst is that which never fails to excite, but was never found to restrain those passions, that is, democracy.

It is an illuminated hell, that in the midst of remorse, horror and torture, rings with festivity; for experience shows that one joy remains to this most malignant description of the damned, the power to make others wretched.”

Fisher Ames, The Dangers of American Liberty, 1805.

“A democracy cannot last. Its nature ordains that its next change shall be into military despotism, of all known governments, perhaps, the most prone to shift its head and the slowest to mend its vices.

The reason is, that the tyranny of what is called the people, and that by the sword, both operate alike to debase and corrupt till there are neither men left with the spirit to desire liberty, nor morals with the power to sustain justice.”

Fisher Ames, The Dangers of American Liberty, 1805.

“Remember, democracy never lasts long . . . There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy.”

John Adams, Letter to John Taylor, April 15, 1812.

The first emancipation proclamation in America was issued by Lord Dunmore in 1775 to acquire needed troops and incite race war among the American colonists and African slaves.  The second emancipation proclamation in America was issued by Vice-Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane on 2 April, 1814 for the same purpose. The third came from Abraham Lincoln who was probably aware of the first two.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

The First Emancipation Proclamation in America

“John Murray, Earl of Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia . . . In April, 1775, when a patriot throng was threatening to seize a store of ammunition in Williamsburg . . . suggested that slaves who rose up against their patriot masters and bore arms for the king might gain their freedom. “By the living God, if an insult is offered to me or those who have obeyed my orders,” the governor warned, “I will declare freedom to the slaves and lay the town in ashes.”

A recurring fear among wealthy landowners of the South was that a ferocious slave rebellion would explode across the region. Janet Schaw commented in the summer of 1775 that the Whigs were insisting that the British had promised “every Negro that would murder his Master and family that he should have his Master’s plantation.” In June of that year the Wilmington Committee of Safety sent out “Patroles to search for & take from Negroes all kinds of Arms whatsoever.”

On November 7, 1775, safely aboard ship in Norfolk Harbor, the governor issued a proclamation announcing that all able-bodied, male slaves in Virginia who abandoned their Whig masters and took up arms for the king would be free . . . ”Negroes and others (appertaining to Rebels) free, that are able to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s Troops as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper sense of duty to His Majesty’s crown and dignity . . . ” “Hell itself could not have vomited anything more black than this design of emancipating our slaves,” wrote a patriot newspaper correspondent.

In May 1775 . . . South Carolina [Whigs] reported that word had arrived from friendly sources in London that the British were concocting a slave uprising and an Indian assault against the colonists. “Words, I am told, cannot express the flame that this occasioned amongst all ranks and degrees; the cruelty and savage barbarity of the scheme was the conversation of all companies,” proclaimed William Bull, Royal governor of South Carolina.

Moderates such as Robert Carter Nicholas in Virginia, who had been most reluctant to sever his ties with Great Britain, became convinced of the need for separation because of Lord Dunmore’s disregard for the right of property . . . Even the yeoman farmers of Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, most of who had no expectation of owning slaves, were now more likely to accept characterizations of the Virginia governor as a sneering, leering tyrant who epitomized the insolent, uncaring British bureaucrat.”

(Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution, Dan L. Morrill, N&A Publishing, 1993, pp. 31-33)

The following is excerpted from a Tuesday, 31 May 1892 address by Col. Alfred Moore Waddell of Wilmington, before the Alumni Association of the University of North Carolina. His address was entitled “The Life and Character of William L. Saunders,” and Waddell described the postwar experience administered to the South.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

 
The Shameful Period of Reconstruction

“[Reconstruction] constitutes the one indelible and appalling disgrace of the American people—the one chapter of their history which contains no redeeming feature to relieve it from the endless execration of the civilized world.

A distinguished orator from a Northern State declared in Congress in 1872 that one-third of the boundaries of this Republic had been filled “with all the curses and calamities ever recorded in the annals of the worst governments known on the pages of history,” and attacking the authors of these calamities, he exclaimed:

“From turret to foundation you tore down the governments of eleven States. You left not one stone upon another. You rent all their local laws and machinery into fragments, and trampled upon their ruins. Not a vestige of their former construction remained.” And again he said: “A more sweeping and universal exclusion from all the benefits , rights, trusts, honors, enjoyments, liberties, and control of government was never enacted against a whole people, without respect to age or sex, in the annals of the human race. The disgraceful disabilities imposed against the Jews for nearly eighteen hundred years by the blind and bigoted nations of the earth were never more complete or appalling.”

Those old enough to remember that most shameful period of our history will readily recall the degradation, the crimes against civilization, and the terrorism which then prevailed, and how, amidst the general dismay, the faint-hearted stood helpless and silent before the arbitrary and reckless power exercised over them.”

Georgian Alexander H. Stephens saw evil in the nativist and anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party, just coming into notice in late 1854.  He was opposed to secret organizations in a free republic, “where,” he says, “every man ought to have his principles written on his forehead.” Below he writes on 1 December 1854:

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Riotous Living Out of the Public Treasury

“Public sentiment in this country is in a transition state, so far as the principle of party organization is concerned. Old parties, old names, old issues, and old organizations are passing away.

A day of new things, new issues, new leaders, and new organizations is at hand. The men now in power, holding their positions by the foulest coalition known in our history, seem not to foresee that doom which evidently awaits them.

Standing upon no policy but the division of the spoils, their time is taken up in revelry and riotous living out of the public treasury. But like Belshazzar at the feast, they have the handwriting on the wall, whether they can read it or not.”

(Life of Alexander H. Stephens, Richard M. Johnston & William Hand Browne, J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1883, pg. 286)

Sherman’s strategy of subduing the American South included starvation and wanton destruction to dissuade them from independence. Before beginning his Meridian, Mississippi campaign in early 1864, he wrote his wife, “We will take all provisions, and God help the starving families.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Colonizing the American South de Novo

“Copied from the “Washington Evening Star”:

United States Commissioner A.J. Williams, of Cleveland, Ohio, a member of the Loyal Legion, recently gave out for publication the following letter written by Gen. Sherman to his brother, Senator John Sherman, in 1862.

Memphis, Tenn., Aug. 13, 1862

My Dear Brother,

“ . . . At last I got here and found the city contributing gold, arms, powder, salt and everything the enemy wanted. It was a smart trick on their part thus to give up Memphis that the desire of gain to our Northern merchants should supply them with the things needed in war. I have one man under sentence of death for smuggling arms across the lines, and hope Mr. Lincoln will approve it.

But the mercenary spirit of our people is too much and my orders are reversed and I am ordered to encourage the trade in cotton, and all orders prohibiting gold, silver and notes to be paid for it are annulled by orders from Washington. But what are the lives of our soldiers to the profits of the merchants?

After a whole year of bungling, the country has at last discovered that we want more men. Now 1,300,000 men are required when 700,000 was deemed absurd before.

Of course I will approve the confiscation act, and would be willing to revolutionize the government so as to amend that Article of the Constitution which forbids the forfeiture of land to the heirs. My full belief is, we must colonize the country de novo, beginning with Kentucky and Tennessee, and should remove 4,000,000 of our people at once south of the Ohio River, taking the farms and plantations of the Rebels.

I deplore the war as much as ever, but if the thing has to be done, let the means be adequate.

Don’t expect to overrun such a country or subdue such a people in one, two or five years. It is the task of half a century. We must colonize and settle as we go South . . . enemies must be killed or transported to some other country.

Your affectionate brother, W.T. Sherman”

(Gen. Sherman’s Colonization Scheme, His Comment on Men and Measures in August 1862, Confederate Veteran, November 1896, pg. 37)

Many noted Sherman’s mental instability early in the war, and while in command at Memphis he was greatly disturbed by Southern cavalry attacks on his forces there.  While unable to thwart these constant attacks, he would take his anger out on defensless Southern civilians while rationalizing that they were responsible for his dilemma.

Bernhard Thuersam, Circa1865

Setting Stark Starvation Loose Upon the Land

“Fort Sumter was fired upon, and now the sulking Achilles came out to fight; and with him blood and iron would play a part from the very beginning. In May [1861] he declared: “the greatest difficulty in the problem now before the country is not to conquer, but so conquer to impress upon the real men of the South a respect for their conquerors.” As the war got under way Sherman became hypnotized by it . . . and refused to be diverted by those who would minimize the task or mollify it by soft considerations of the claims of humanity or too close adherence to the rule book.

As condemnation of his prodigality in the use of men began to come in, he replied that the war could not be fought with breath, but that hundreds of thousands of lives must perish, and he added, “Indeed do I wish I had been killed long since.”   [He] began “to regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash – and it may be well that we become so hardened.”

[In 1862 he wrote] the Secretary of the Treasury, “The Government of the United States may now safely proceed on the proper rule that all the South are enemies of all in the North.”

As to the large number of people who were being arrested [for disloyalty] in Kentucky, he would send them “to the Dry Tortugas, or Brazil, every one of those men, women and children, and encourage a new breed.”

“To secure the navigation of the Mississippi River [to Northern shipping] I would slay millions. On that point I am not only insane, but mad.” For every shot fired at a [Northern] river steamer he would return “a thousand 30-pound Parrotts into every helpless town on Red, Ouchita, Yazoo, or wherever a boat can float or a soldier march.”

But for no reason beyond the fact that the South was opposing the North, he would set stark starvation loose upon the land. Before beginning his Meridian campaign early in 1864, he wrote his wife, “We will take all provisions, and God help the starving families.”

[In 1863 he insisted] on war, pure and simple, with no admixture of civil compromises . . . [and] considered it unwise at that time “or for years to come” to give the Southern people “any civil government in which the local people have much to say . . . All the Southern States will need a pure military Government for years after resistance has ceased.”

By the summer of 1864 . . . [Sherman] offered this advice to General Sheridan, who might find it useful in the Shenandoah Valley: “I am satisfied, and have been all the time, that the problem of this war consists in the awful fact that the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in the conquest of territory . . . Therefore I shall expect you on any and all occasions to make bloody results.”

He wrote Grant his well-known article of faith, “Unless we can repopulate Georgia it is useless to occupy it; but the utter destruction of roads, houses and people will cripple their military resources . . . After he had reached Savannah he wrote to Halleck, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and we must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”

When he found himself on one of Howell Cobb’s plantations in Georgia, he instructed his army “to spare nothing,” and on the march through South Carolina, one chilly night he consumed in the blazing fireplace the furniture of “one of those splendid South Carolina estates where the proprietors had formerly dispensed hospitality that distinguished the regime of that proud State.”

His first disagreement with the Radical reconstructionists grew out of his long-standing attitude toward the Negro. He had spurned abolitionism in 1861, and during the war he had shown his contempt for Negro soldiers. He wrote in May, 1865, “. . . I do not favor the scheme of declaring the Negroes of the South, now free, to be loyal voters, whereby politicians may manufacture just so much more pliable electioneering material . . . they are no friends of the Negro who seek to complicate him with new prejudices.”

Sherman set down as an article of faith, “The white men of this country will control it, and the negro, in mass, will occupy the subordinate place as a race.”

[His postwar belief regarding Radical Reconstruction is summed up with] “The South is ruined and appeals to our pity. To ride the people down with persecutions and military exactions would be like slashing away at the crew of a sinking ship.”

(Sherman and the South, E. Merton Coulter, North Carolina Historical Review, Volume VIII, Number 1, January 1931, excerpts, pp. 46-53)