Circa1865

British colonial administrator John Yeamans (1611-1674) served as governor of the Province of Carolina and founded the first permanent settlement in April 1670. He imported 200 African slaves from the Barbados to work his plantation, thus inaugurating the slavery in North America which former Confederate Attorney-General George Davis lamented 200 years later.

Davis was an eminent mid-nineteenth-century Wilmington attorney and acclaimed orator. Edward Everett of Massachusetts considered Davis to have “no peer in eloquence and logic.”

John Yeamans Did Not Foresee

“[But] we recall the fact that it was not until after the slave traders of the North had received full value of their human merchandise from their Southern brethren that our neighbors [to the North] began to realize the enormity of the institution.

And yet our people who were impoverished by its downfall would not, if they could, deprive the Negro of his freedom.

With reference to the introduction of slavery into Carolina by the Colonial Governor, Yeamans, from Barbados in 1671, the late, lamented George Davis said:

“This seems to be an announcement of a very commonplace fact: but it was the little cloud no bigger than a man’s hand. It was the most portentous event of all our early history. For he carried with him from Barbados his Negro slaves; and that was the first introduction of African slavery into Carolina.

If, as he sat by the camp-fire in that lonely Southern wilderness, he could have gazed with prophetic vision down the vista a two hundred years, and seen the stormy and tragic end of that of which he was then so quietly inaugurating the beginning, must he not have exclaimed with Ophelia, as she beheld the wreck of her heart’s young love: “ ‘O, woe is me! To have seen what I have seen, see what I see’ “!

(Tales and Traditions of the Lower Cape Fear, James Sprunt, LeGwin Brothers Printers, 1896)

The Constitution’s ratification is said to be the result of a series of illegal acts, with some revolutionary in character. And it is difficult to imagine exactly who would have pressed charges against the framers for subverting the Articles of Confederation while circumventing their own State legislatures in the process.

The Federalists, who favored increased centralization of power, were well-aware of their inability to defend the abandonment of the Confederation legally – though James Madison weakly observed in Federalist 40 that “in all great changes in established governments, forms ought to give way to substance.”

A Great Consolidation of Government

“After June 25, 1788, three States remained outside the new Union: New York, whose convention came to order in Poughkeepsie on June 17; North Carolina, whose delegates would meet in late July; and Rhode Island, to whose fate most Federalists were indifferent.

[New York anti-Federalists searched] for a formula for conditional ratification that would keep the State in the Union while preserving the right to withdraw subsequently should its amendments not be adopted. So opposed were Federalists to any form of conditional ratification that [Alexander] Hamilton even wondered whether they should agree that New York could reserve a right to “recede” from the Union should its desired amendments not be adopted . . .

Anti-Federalists insisted that North Carolina was not rejecting the Constitution outright, and they further intimated that the State would somehow remain in the Union – if not its new government – because the compact of the [Articles of] Confederation could be dissolved only with the consent of ALL its parties. Remarkably, Anti-Federalists even challenged the right of the convention to abandon the Confederation, or to substitute “We the people” as the source of federal legitimacy for “we the States.”

[James Madison’s Federalist 39 described the Constitution]: “In its foundation it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of government are drawn, it is party federal and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal; in the extent of them, again, it is federal, not national; and finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal nor wholly national.”

Such distinctions hardly assured the anti-Federalists who knew that the Constitution would form the States into a new Leviathan. “We may be amused if we please, by a treatise of political anatomy,” Patrick Henry warned the Virginia ratifiers, rebutting a speech in which Madison restated this argument. “In the brain it is national: the stamina are federal – some limbs are federal – others are national.”

“But what signifies it to me, that you have the most curious anatomical description of it in its creation?” Henry asked. “To all the common purposes of Legislation it is a great consolidation of Government.”

(Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, Jack N. Rakove, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, excerpts pp. 125-126; 161-162)

Feeling that the Old South had been “engulfed by the great maelstrom of bourgeois liberalism and capitalism, Frederick A. Porcher (1809-1888) and other Charlestonian began rebuilding their sense of community and political order after the war. 

An 1828 Yale graduate, he was a prewar planter who failed in that business and went to teaching at the College of Charleston. He served several terms in the South Carolina Legislature and counted among his many friends author William Gilmore Simms.

The Opening Wedge of Revolution

“Following the Civil War, Frederick Porcher continued to teach in Charleston, where it seemed that the Old South, his world, was unmistakably gone . . . “To the old Carolinian, everything was strange — he looked bewildered around him and about him, he felt he had become a stranger, that he had no home.”

Porcher’s fellow conservatives countered nascent black political organization with meetings and announcements of their own. A November 1867 convention of conservatives in Charleston outlined the postwar conservative beliefs. Local rule through States’ rights . . . and the fear of democracy all survived the war. The convention also gave hints of a developing industrial-age conservatism cherishing property rights and accepting as inevitable the labor/capital antagonism of a capitalist economy.

In its postwar defense of the States’ rights philosophy, the conservative convention granted that the emergency of war necessitated that the federal government reign “supreme.” But, as the Charleston Daily Courier reported, “Is this law, or is this usurpation? Is this good government, or is it revolution?”

A strong central government during a crisis of war was one thing. Conservatives asked if South Carolinians were now willing to endorse “so monstrous a proposition into our government polity.” Calhoun could not have stated any clearer the States’ rights view that conservative South Carolinians still held in 1867: To admit as a fact, as has been assumed to be the result of the war, that the Government of the United States is supreme, and that the States have no rights; or, if they have rights, that they are subordinate to the will of a majority having control of the Government, is to admit the abrogation of the Constitution, and to ignore the facts of history.”

Centralization of political power at the national level, especially with the inclusion of black voters, was the opening wedge leading to other revolutions. The Reconstruction Acts, conservatives argued, placed the power to tax “in the hands of those who own no property,” while it took power away from “those who hold the property and must pay the taxes.” To them, this was not just a bad idea, but a dangerous one.

Porcher used his history lectures to address the new political power of the black community. “A great experiment,” Porcher observed, “is now making in this country to commit the highest responsibilities of civilization to a race which in its native soil has never shown any capacity for improvement. You who hear me will be able to witness the result.”

[He] guided his young students with the strong suggestion that it too, would fail: “Civilization is an Innate Faculty, not an acquired Habit. It is a gift of God, not the result of human teaching.”

(In The Great Maelstrom: Conservatives in Post-Civil War South Carolina, Charles J. Holden, University of South Carolina Press, 2002, excerpts pp. 30-37) 

The infamous Union League movement originated in the secret fraternities of mid-1850s anti-immigrant Know Nothing lodges, later becoming a political party and which merged with the Republicans. New members had to be voters and recite a pledge of allegiance in elaborate rituals of burning incense, US flags and the Bible. Each swore to “sustain the existing [Republican] administration in putting down the enemies of the government and to thwart the designs of “traitors and dis-loyalists.”

Prior to Lincoln’s reelection in 1864, the Republican party disguised itself as a “Union” party to paint Democratic opposition with disloyalty. The Union League later moved into the occupied and conquered South to organize freedmen into the League and Republican party.

That freedmen vote enabled Grant’s slim victory over Democrat Horatio Seymour in 1868, and helped maintain Republican political hegemony.

Immaculate Patriots and Crude Partisans

“The first Union League was founded in Pekin, Illinois by a Republican Party activist, George F. Harlow. As war weariness deepened, and the restraint that had held back dissenters in the early months of the war fell away, loyal Republicans became alarmed by the resurgence in support for the Democratic Party.

To combat this, they formed a secret society “whereby true Union men could be known and depended on in an emergency.” The new movement gained the support of Illinois Governor Richard Yates . . . Traveling agents administered the league’s oath to local political leaders and provided the new councils with league chapters. By the end of 1864 the Leagues claimed more than a million members.

In the face of what many [Lincoln] administration supporters saw as organized disloyalty from the Democratic Party and its allies, the leagues put into practice the exhortation from John Forney’s Philadelphia Press. In May 1863, the Press urged that the North unite “by any means” and called on Unionists to “silence any tongue that does not speak with respect of the cause and the flag.” The League’s existed, they proclaimed, “to bind together all Loyal men, of all trades and professions, in a common union to maintain the power, glory and integrity of the Nation.”

A nonpartisan style colored every utterance of these organizations . . . [pledging] that their only object is to unite to support the National Government in its efforts to suppress the rebellion now being waged against its authority by a portion of the people of the Union, and not to create a political party.

Union Leagues institutionalized the denial of legitimate partisanship by conflating political opposition to the Union Party with disloyalty to the United States. [The] Leagues quickly established themselves as a powerful political force [to advance] a radical agenda. “The triumph of the Union League is complete,” concluded an editorial in the Chicago Tribune after the Union League of America persuaded Lincoln to remove a conservative general, John M. Schofield, from command of the western Department.

The League’s construction of a patriotic national community – the claim to be the “real” nation – alienated their opponents as surely as it enthused their supporters. Samuel J. Tilden, a wealthy New York railroad lawyer . . . complained to a correspondent in June 1863 that the Union League’s were creating a climate in which it was impossible for normal political campaigns to take place.

Another Democrat, David Turnure, also resented the administration’s demand that he should give “unhesitating fealty to and unquestioning endorsement of all their acts.” To him, the “immaculate patriots” who carped about loyalty were simply crude partisans, who had “abolitionized” the government and were now subverting the Constitution “under the sacred mantle of patriotism.”

Even stronger words came from Maryland Democrat, Severn Teackle Wallis . . . [who wrote to Republican] Senator John Sherman in early 1863. “You have . . . borrowed from the vocabulary of despotism the name “disloyalty,” he thundered. Such a word was “not known to free institutions” but had been created by Unionists to describe the activities of those who “question . . . the wisdom . . . or, if need be, resist the corruption and usurpation of those who temporarily hold and prostitute power.”

(No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North, Adam I. P. Smith, Oxford University Press, 2006, excerpts pp. 68-71)

After a successful revolt against the British Empire and its standing army, the former colonists recalled their experience with George III’s regulars, not to mention the known abuses of standing armies under Cromwell and James II. The latter’s corrupt army allowed him to “invade and destroy both” the constitution and interest of the public, and standing armies have been sources of trouble since the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome.

The Boston Massacre was fresh in the minds of the Founders as they wrestled with the question of a military force at the disposal of a president, and all knew they were “tangibly dangerous entities that could act against the liberties of innocent people.” So universally contemptible was a British standing army in the colonies that a grievance against universal standing armies was included in the Declaration of Independence, and question was roundly debated in the State ratifications that followed.

Only seventy two years later, the Founders’ republic ended when a newly-elected president raised his own army with the help of several State governors and waged war upon dissident States. At the end of that war, Robert E. Lee predicted that “the consolidation of the States into one vast empire, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of ruin which has overwhelmed all that preceded it”

Policing the Imperial Realm

“The US government has approximately 6,000 military bases and/or warehouses located within US territory, and another 737 military bases in 63 countries. Unofficially, the number of overseas bases is thought to exceed 1,000. This gives the US Defense Department control of a vast extent of territory – over 30 million acres of land worldwide conservatively estimated at $658.1 billion.

Its manpower consists of 1.4 million active-duty military personnel, another 1.1 million in the National Guard and Reserves, 718,000 civil service personnel, and approximately 200,000 local hires. Over 450,000 military personnel, their dependents, and Defense Department civilian officials are stationed in 156 countries.

Often they are exempt from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court by immunity agreements negotiated by Washington with host governments.

As Chalmers Johnson noted in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic: “Interestingly enough, the thirty-eight large and medium-sized American facilities spread around the globe in 2005 – mostly air and naval bases for our bombers and fleets – almost exactly equals Britain’s thirty-six naval bases and army garrisons at it imperial zenith in 1898.

The Roman Empire at its height in 117 AD [sic] required thirty-seven major bases to police its realm from Britannia to Egypt, from Hispania to Armenia. Perhaps the optimum number of major citadels and fortresses for an imperialist aspiring to dominate the world is somewhere between thirty-eight and forty.”

(Imperial Dusk, Joseph E. Fallon, Chronicles, June 2012, excerpt pg. 45)

The Founders rejected any thoughts of invading, coercing and subjugating a State within the proposed union; any such action by the other States or the agent created by the States would be war and grounds for dissolution of the agreement.

In fact, to prevent the federal agent and its officers from engaging in an attack upon a State, Article III, Section 3 states that “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving the Aid and Comfort.”  Note the word “them,” meaning the States.

Prohibiting Secession

“One of the better summaries of the prevalent Constitutional theory at that time (December 1861-May 1861] has been made by black scholar, professor and prolific author Dr. Walter Williams. Here is what he writes in one of his columns:

“During the 1787 Constitutional Convention, a proposal was made that would allow the federal government to suppress a seceding State. James Madison rejected it, saying, “A union of the States containing such an ingredient seemed to provide for its own destruction. The use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might be bound.”

In fact, the ratification documents of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island, explicitly said they held the right to resume powers delegated should the federal government become abusive of those powers. The Constitution never would have been ratified if States thought they could not regain their sovereignty – in a word, secede.

On March 2, 1861, after seven States seceded and two days before Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin proposed a constitutional amendment that read: “No State or any part thereof, heretofore admitted or hereafter admitted to the union, shall have the power to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the United States.”

Several months earlier, Reps. Daniel E. Sickles of New York, Thomas B. Florence of Pennsylvania, and Otis S. Ferry of Connecticut proposed a constitutional amendment to prohibit secession.

Here is a question for the reader: Would there have been any point of offering these amendments if secession were already unconstitutional?”

(The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage, Boyd D. Cathey, Scuppernong Press, 2018, excerpt pg. 7)

Rather than end the carnage that had already, by mid-1862, claimed the lives of thousands of Americans, Lincoln instead confiscated the property of those who sought liberty in a more perfect union, and advanced a plan to incite a race war as was done by emulating Virginia’s Royal Governor Dunmore who in November 1775 emancipated all slaves “who would repair to His Majesty’s banners.”

Lincoln’s measure freed no slaves: none under his control, and none in States where he had no control. It is important to note that Americans in the South had been freeing African slaves by deed and will since the end of the Revolution, which created a large population of freedmen. This large population would have grown without the war.

Last Measure of an Exhausted Government

“While [Lincoln] thought that more evil than good would be derived from the wholesale arming of Negroes, yet he was not unwilling that that [Northern] commanders arm, purely for defensive purposes, those slaves who came within Union lines. But the President had reached a decision on the correlated policy of emancipation with which it appears that his cabinet was not in accord.

They were surprised when he read to them the first draft of a proclamation warning the rebels of the penalties provided by the Confiscation Act . . . The Cabinet was somewhat “bewildered by the magnitude and boldness of this proposal.” Only two members of the cabinet concurred in the proposal.

Secretary [Salmon P.] Chase favored this plan of military emancipation, but would not approve the method of execution. [Montgomery] Blair, the Postmaster General, deprecated this policy on the grounds that it would cost the administration the fall elections.

Secretary [of State William] Seward approved it and yet questioned the expediency of its issue at that stage of the war, owing to the depression of the public mind and the repeated reversals for the Union armies. He further deemed it to be a last measure of an exhausted government that was crying for help, stretching forth its arms to Ethiopia instead of awaiting a reverse appeal from Ethiopia. Consequently he urged a postponement of the issue . . . until the country was supported by military success.

Military reversals made the situation more serious for the President’s supporters . . . The Radicals and conservatives, resorted to incessant criticism, railing against him and his policy. Horace Greeley attacked Lincoln unmercifully in The New York Tribune and accused him of being responsible for the deplorable results coming from his failure to enforce the Confiscation Act.

Lincoln, on the contrary, lost no time in replying to Greeley, and declared that he intended to save the Union . . . “that his paramount object . . . was to preserve the Union and not either to preserve or destroy slavery; that he would save the Union, either without liberating any slaves, or by freeing all the slaves, or by freeing some and leaving others in servitude; that, at any rate, he would save the Union . . .”

The expected easy victory did not follow; but, on the contrary, came [the] sad and humiliating defeat of [General John] Pope [at Second Manassas] in August 1862.

On September 13, he informed a Chicago delegation that he was unable to free slaves by the Constitution, especially when the Constitution could not be enforced in the rebel States, and declared that any emancipation proclamation would at that time be as effective and operative as “the Pope’s bull against the comet.”

(Lincoln’s Emancipation Plan, Harry S. Blackiston; The Journal of Negro History, Vol. VII, No. 3, Carter G. Woodson, editor, July 1922, excerpts pp. 274-276)

It is very easy to draw a line from the intense European immigration after 1848 which brought many refugees to the North from the failed Marxist revolutions and who supported Lincoln’s invasion of the South, to their many fellow-travelers who came to American shores by the end of the century. Many watched the Bolsheviks in Russia attain power, and wanted to emulate this in the United States.

This set the stage for communist-inspired political and labor unrest, and a very predictable response which included a new nativist Klan, blossoming after 1920. As the original Klan carried no flag, this new version marched proudly in many Northern cities under the Stars & Stripes and with no relation to the American Confederacy.

Those Were the Days Up North

“If the American people turned a deaf ear to Woodrow Wilson’s plea for a League of Nations during the early years of the Post-war decade, it was not simply because they were too weary of foreign entanglements and noble efforts to heed him. They were listening to something else.

They were listening to ugly rumors of a huge radical conspiracy against the government and institutions of the United States. They had their ears cocked for the detonation of bombs and the tramp of Bolshevist armies. They seriously thought – or at least millions of them did, millions of otherwise reasonable citizens – that a Red revolution might begin in the United States the next month or the next week, and they were less concerned with making the world safe for democracy than with making America safe for themselves.

Those were the days when column after column of the front pages of the newspapers shouted the news of strikes and anti-Bolshevist riots; when rioters shot down Armistice Day paraders in the streets of Centralia, Washington, and in revenge the patriotic citizens took out of the jail a member of the [International Iron Workers] – a white American, be it noted – and lynched him by tying a rope around his neck and throwing him off a bridge; when properly-elected members of the Assembly of New York State were expelled (and their constituents thereby disenfranchised) simply because they had been elected as members of the venerable Socialist Party; when a jury in Indiana took two minutes to acquit am man for shooting and killing an alien because he had shouted, “to hell with the United States.”; and when the Vice-President of the nation cited as a dangerous manifestation of radicalism in the women’s colleges the fact that the girl’s debaters of Radcliffe had upheld the affirmative in an intercollegiate debate on the subject: “Resolved, that the recognition of labor unions by employers is essential to successful collective bargaining.”

It was an era of lawless and disorderly defense of law and order, of unconstitutional defense of the Constitution, of suspicion and civil conflict – in a very literal sense – a reign of terror.

The Socialist party, watching the success of the Russian Revolution, was flirting with the idea of violent mass-action. And there was, too, a rag-tag and bobtail collection of communists and anarchists, many of them former Socialists, nearly all of them foreign-born, most of them Russian, who talked of still going further, who took their gospel direct from Moscow, and, presumably with the aid of Russian funds, preached it aggressively among the slum and factory-town population.”

(Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties, Frederick Lewis Allen, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1931, excerpts pp. 45-48)

The presidential election of 1868, between General Ulysses Grant and former-Governor Horatio Seymour of New York, was decided by a mere 300,000 votes out of nearly 6 million.

A brilliant Radical Republican strategy designed to keep the defeated South in political vassalage was enacting black male suffrage in occupied Southern States, while disenfranchising as many white males as possible. This enabled Grant to defeat Seymour with an all-important swing vote provided by 500,000 freedmen.   

Shilling for voting blocs was not new in America by Grant’s time: Lincoln himself purchased a Springfield, Illinois German-language newspaper with which to hawk his campaign and corner the German vote. One hundred years later, Kennedy’s party used a voting bloc to defeat Richard Nixon.

Fine Election Strategies

“The finest election strategies,” John F. Kennedy remarked after the 1960 campaign, “are usually the result of accidents.”

One further consequence of the Nixon/McCarthy attack [on Democrat Adlai Stevenson] could not have been more brilliant had it been planned. On October 24 . . . [Dwight] Eisenhower said that if elected, he would “go to Korea.” Implicit therein was the promise to seek a negotiated end to the Korean War. It was electrifying.

As always in the United States there was a real difference between the vocal commitment to the heroic and warlike stance and the deeper commitment to peace. Meanwhile, so frozen was the Democratic position by now that we did not even recognize the power of the Eisenhower initiative. And the response [by Stevenson], when it came, was pathetic in its stereotype. “The root of the Korean problem does not lie in Korea. It lies in Moscow . . .”

[Regarding the later election campaign of John F. Kennedy in 1960, author Galbraith states further:] “During the campaign that year Martin Luther King had been jailed in Georgia, and there was much favorable reaction when, at the urging of staff members, Kennedy promptly telephoned Mrs. King and Robert Kennedy as promptly telephoned the judge” (Ambassador’s Journal, 1969, pg. 6).

Kennedy’s phone call “received considerable attention in the African-American community, and some commentators argue that the impact on African-American voters helped Kennedy with the election.”

It is reported that Robert Kennedy called the judge and berated him – King was released the next day. Both Kennedy brothers had expressed concerns about King’s association with known-communist like Bayard Rustin, who served as King’s mass demonstration organizer.

(A Life in Our Times, A Memoir: John Kenneth Galbraith, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, excerpts pg. 299)

Canadian-born, Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith was a young Harvard-trained New Deal liberal who later served Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He also served as US ambassador to India.

The latter taught him an understanding of far-off cultures, and to oppose post-WW2 American warhawks who clamored for endless military interventions around the globe.

Galbraith may have understood what Robert E. Lee saw in the defeat and subjugation of the American South in 1865 — the lost conservative balance which Southern statesmen provided against a liberal, revolutionary North: “the consolidation of our States into one vast republic, [is] sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home.”

Losing Exported Lost Causes

“South Vietnam is exceedingly bad. Unless I am mistaken, [Ngo Dinh] Diem has alienated his people to a far greater extent than we allow ourselves to know. This is our old mistake. We take the ruler’s word and that of our own people who have become committed to him. [Their] opponents are thieves and bandits; the problem is to get the police. I am sure the problem in Vietnam is to preserve law and order. But I fear we have one more government which, on present form, no one will support.

In September, back in Washington, I pressed my concerns directly with [President] Kennedy and later added a more marginal thought:

“When I wake up at night I worry that in our first year in office we will be credited with losing Laos which we did not have, losing East Berlin which we did not have, losing East Berlin which we did not have and (touchy point) with failing to persuade the world that Formosa is China. As an extreme idealist I am in favor of lost causes. But I wonder if we should lose our lost causes more than once.”

I had little doubt of Kennedy’s agreement. It was nearly complete. The problem, as ever, was the political pressure of those clamoring of action, those wishing to do something, anything, at the price of doing wrong things. Reference to the Bay of Pigs and the acceptance of a neutral Laos, [Kennedy] said: “You have to realize that I can only afford so many defeats in one year.”

My opposition to the Vietnam policy of [the Nixon] administration was less than absolute. I never wavered in the belief that the Vietnamization of the war was a fraud. The Saigon government and armed forces were, one knew, far too incompetent, much too commercially committed, to stand on their own.

To burden such a government and army, as later in Iran, with complicated weapons and their associated requirements in repair, logistics and sophisticated organization enlarges greatly the opportunities for graft. And in the end it ensures a more resounding collapse.

Weaponry, we will one day learn, must be related in its complexity to the sophistication and competence of the country that seeks to use it. The fraud of Vietnamization, however, like my own earlier arguments for the enclaves, was political cover for the larger goal of getting out. This being so, no one could object.”

(A Life in Our Times, A Memoir: John Kenneth Galbraith, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, excerpts pp. 468-469;