Why Annihilate State Rights?

Marylander Montgomery Blair’s loyalty to the President and ambition for another post beyond Postmaster General remained undimmed. He unsuccessfully sought Mr. Lincoln’s nomination as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. On December 6, 1864, Blair wrote Lincoln his views on the progress of reconstruction and Radical Republican policies.

Why Annihilate State Rights?

“In compliance with your request I commit to writing the views to which I referred in a recent conversation. The gradual suppression of the rebellion renders necessary now a persistence in the policy announced in your amnesty proclamation, with such additional provisions as experiment may have suggested – or its repudiation and the adoption of some other policy. For my part I recognize the plan already initiated by you as consonant with the constitution – well calculated to accomplish the end proposed, and as tending to win over the affections of a portion of the disaffected citizens to unite with all the loyal to aid the work of the military power wielded by you. You have repeatedly driven out the rebel power, enabling the loyal people of the State to restore and reinvigorate their constitutional authority without the intervention of Congress.

The military force of the United States has expelled rebel armies and their allies within the South. Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana are embracing the amnesty proclamation, stepping into the Union under its provisions. They come recognizing the validity of your proclamation – slavery being discarded and so it is manifest, that just as soon as the military power of the Rebellion is driven out, the reign of the US Constitution will resume. The whole country hails your fundamental proclamation of freedom made universal by the vote of three-fourths of the States confirming it by constitutional amendment to secure forever the freedom of the slaves.

What then is the motive for annihilating State rights? It is certainly unnecessary to maintain Mr. Sumner’s “doctrine of State suicide” “State forfeiture State abdication” – the doctrine “that the whole rebel region is tabula rasa, or a clean slate, where Congress under the Constitution may write laws” in order to secure the extirpation of slavery.

Yet Mr. Sumner seems to confine his purpose of reducing States to territories to the object of bringing slavery within the grasp of Congress, and argues, “Slavery is impossible within the exclusive jurisdiction of the National Government.” For many years I’ve had this conviction and have constantly maintained it. I am glad to believe that it is implied in the Chicago platform. Mr. Chase is known to accept it sincerely. Then if slavery in the Territories is unconstitutional and under the exclusive jurisdiction of the national government, then slavery would be impossible there.

It follows that if slavery is no longer in question, why are the States to be disfranchised and denied their municipal right? What then is the purpose of Mr. Chase’s idea of disfranchising the States, turning them into territories and giving to Congress the power of making their local laws. This would be depriving States of their former unquestioned right of regulating suffrage. The States have heretofore made laws denying the suffrage to underage citizens, females, Negroes, Indians, unnaturalized aliens and others incapacitated by moral or physical defects.

If the States resume their places in the Union under your proclamation and the loyal votes of the people accepted, certainly they may assert the political sovereignty as it stood before the war.

The plan of throwing those States out of the Union grows out of the ambition of a class of usurpers to seize the occasion of depriving the States of their indubitable municipal rights . . . The object is undoubtedly to disfranchise the white race who had created the State governments of the South, and who contributed their full share in asserting national independence and creating the government of the United States. This is to be accomplished by the imposition of conditions by Congress on the readmission of those States into the Union which forfeits those municipal rights heretofore exerted by all States in their internal government.

An object now avowed is to enable Congress to constitute a State government by exacting conditions on admission which shall put blacks and whites on equality in the political control of a government originally created by the white race for themselves.

This is not merely manumission from masters, but it may turn out that those who have been held in servitude may become themselves the masters of the government created by another race. This revolutionary scheme looks to the establishment of a new control over the municipal rights of the State governments in the South, which has you well know been a favorite one of the late Secretary. You will remember that Mr. Chase suggested the modification of your amnesty and reconstruction proclamation, so as to allow all loyal citizens to vote, which included all the freedmen while excluding all the whites who had been engaged in the Rebellion. This would probably have thrown the governments of those states into the hands of the African race, as constituting the majority who had not borne arms against the government.”

(Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress. Transcribed and Annotated by the Lincoln Studies Center, Knox College. Galesburg, Illinois. (Letter from Montgomery Blair to Abraham Lincoln, December 6, 1864).

African Slavery, North and South

African Slavery, North and South

“It will not be charged by the greatest enemy of the American South that it was in any way responsible, either for the existence of slavery, or for inaugurating that vilest of traffics – the African slave trade. On the contrary, history attests that African slavery was forced upon the colonies by England, against the earnest protests of those both North and South. Also, the very first statute establishing African slavery in America is to be found in the infamous Code of Fundamentals, or Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony of New England, adopted in December 1641.

Additionally, the “Desire,” one of the very first vessels built in Massachusetts, was fitted out for carrying on the slave trade; “that the traffic became so popular that great attention to it was paid by the New England shipowners, and that they practically monopolized it for a number of years.” (The True Civil War, pp. 28-30).

And history further attests that Virginia was the first State, North or South, to prohibit the slave traffic from Africa, and that Georgia was the first to incorporate that prohibition in her Constitution.

And it is easy to show that as long as the people of the North were the owners of slaves, they regarded, treated and disposed of them as “property” just as the people of England had done since 1713, when slaves were held to be “merchandise” by the twelve judges of that country, with the venerable Holt at their head.

We could further show that slavery existed at the North just as long as it was profitable to have it there; that the moral and religious sense of that section was only heard to complain of that institution after it was found to be unprofitable. and after the people of that section had for the most part sold their slaves to the people of the South; and that, after [Eli] Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which wrought such a revolution in cotton production at the South as to cause slave labor greatly to increase in value, and which induced many Northern men to engage in that production; these men almost invariably purchased their slaves for that purpose, and many of these owned them when the war broke out.

But so anxious are our former enemies to convince world that the South did fight for the perpetuation of slavery that some of them have, either wittingly or unwittingly, resorted to misrepresentation or misinterpretations of some of the sayings of our representative men to try to establish this as a fact.”

(Report of the UDC History Committee, (excerpt). Judge George L. Christian. Confederate Veteran, Vol. XV, No. 7, July 1907, pg. 315)

 

The Fate of Hereditary Monarchs

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the following the right of kings to rule the world was regarded by nearly the entire human race as a divine right from the Creator of the universe. His populist views were looked upon in Europe with much dread and hostility, though it became clear to Jefferson in later life that political factions and the democratic urge would upend his experiment in government.

The Fate of Hereditary Monarchs

“While I was in Europe, I often amused myself with contemplating the character of the then-reigning sovereigns of Europe. Louis XVI was a fool of my own knowledge, and despite of the answers made for him at his trial. The king of Spain was also a fool, as was the king of Naples. They passed their lives in hunting and dispatched two couriers a week some one thousand miles to inform one another what game they killed in the preceding days. All were Bourbons.

The queen of Portugal, a Braganza, was an idiot by nature, and so was the king of Denmark. I hear their sons, as regents, really exercised the powers of government. The king of Prussia, successor to Frederick the Great, was a mere hog in body as well as in mind. Gustavus of Sweden and Joseph of Austria were really crazy, and George of England, as you know, was in a straight waistcoat. There remained, then, none but old Catherine of Russia, who we have learned of late to have lost her common sense.

In this state Bonaparte found Europe, and it was in this state its rulers lost all with barely a struggle. These rulers had become without minds and therefore powerless, and so will every hereditary monarch be after a few generations.”

(Forty Years of Oratory, Daniel W. Voorhees Lectures, Addresses and Speeches. Vol. 1. Harriet C. Voorhees. Bowen-Merrill Company, 1898, pg. 70)

Grant’s Request for a Confederate Commission

The following is extracted from October and November 1907 issues of Confederate Veteran. While Derosset’s assertion that U.S. Grant requested a commission from President Davis was questioned in subsequent issues, that of Farragut and Thomas, both Southern men, were provable. In Grant’s case it should be pointed out that he resigned his US Army commission in early 1854 at Fort Humboldt, north of San Francisco. The charge was being inebriated while supervising pay call and it was carried out by Col. Robert C. Buchanan, the half-brother of Franklin Buchanan. Grant was given the choice of immediate resignation or courts-martial; he chose the former though his reputation as an inebriate became widespread, in the military and publicly.

The early months of 1861 found Grant a broken, disheveled and near destitute man who left a long trail of failed business ventures depending upon charity to feed his family. After Fort Sumter, his letters requesting US military commissions were ignored. At his deepest despondence about May-June 1861, he may have written to President Jefferson Davis – the man who as US Secretary of War in 1854 duly signed Grant’s resignation letter.

Grant’s Request for Confederate Commission

“Mr. [Franklin] Pierce was elected President of the United States in 1852, and appointed Mr. Jefferson Davis his Secretary of War. Later, at the suggestion of Mr. Davis, for good reasons then-Captain Ulysses S. Grant resigned from the United States Army and lived in afterwards in Illinois.

Upon the secession of the Southern States in January 1861, former-Captain Grant applied to the Governor of Illinois for a military commission to raise a regiment to serve in the U.S. Army, war then being the talk. His request for a commission was ignored at that time.

He then wrote to Mr. Jefferson Davis, newly inaugurated Provisional President of the Confederate States at Montgomery, Alabama, asking for a commission in the army of the Confederate States of America.

While in New Orleans a little while ago I mentioned this incident to Colonel Chalaron, Custodian of the Louisiana Historical Association, who has charge of the State Museum. He told me the information regarding Grant’s commission request was correct, and that he had then possession of the original letter from Grant, late of the U.S. Army, to President Davis and making the request; but in accordance with the terms of Mr. Davis’s will, the correspondence could not be published until two years after the death of Mrs. Davis.

Further, the Colonel informed me that he also held letters to President Davis requesting Confederate States military commissions from David Farragut of Tennessee and George H. Thomas of Virginia, later United States admiral and major-general, respectively. I am informed that the wife of each man either dissuaded or objected to the resignation of these officers from federal service.”

(Interesting Statement by Judge Robert Ould. Capt. A.L. Derosset, Confederate Veteran, Vol. XV, No. 10, October 1907, pg. 456)

Derosset Letter – Explanatory

Captain A.L. Derosset of Wilmington, N.C. writes in explanation and correction of his article in the Veteran for October concerning the application of Generals Grant and Thomas and Admiral Farragut to President Davis for commissions in the Confederate Army and Navy:

“I wrote that Mr. Davis’s correspondence could not be published until two years after his widow’s death. So, it is now apparent to me that I wholly misunderstood Col. Chalaron, for in writing me he said, ‘that very likely letters from them [Grant, Farragut and Thomas] and others might be found among the Davis papers in my keeping,’ and did not positively assert it.

As far as Thomas is concerned, Dr. J. William Jones had testified to the fact of a letter in his possession acknowledging that he had applied to President Davis for service. As to Farragut, I have conclusive testimony that in the Spring of 161, at the residence of Col. Gaston Meares, on Twenty-first Street, New York City, he emphatically stated that nothing could induce him to raise his sword against the South. My whole regret is about the article is in relation to the conversation with Col. Chalaron.”

(The Derosset Letter – Explanatory. Capt. A.L. Derosset, Confederate Veteran, Vol. XVI, No. 1, January 1908, pg. xii)

That Was the Problem We Inherited

Below, John Randolph Tucker reviews the constitutional issues which brought war 1861-1865, and poses the question:

“Was slavery so bad that the Constitution which shielded it, was violated in order to destroy it? That is the question which has been answered by the roar of artillery in the affirmative. But can that answer by force be justified in the forum of morals? If a solemn compact can be violated in order to destroy that which the compact guaranteed, what value is there in a written Constitution? It only awaits a new fanatical sentiment to justify a new crusade upon its integrity.” 

That Was the Problem We Inherited

“The [North’s] crusade not only destroyed slavery but entailed upon the South a social condition for which the crusaders suggest no relief, and a condition which seems to be without the hope of peaceful solution. Those who had no interest in the relation [of black and white] have inoculated the South with a social and political disease for which their statesmen have provide no remedy and can find no panacea. These were the issues upon which the Southern States seceded, and defended their imperiled rights with a valor, constancy and fortitude which has made them immortal.

We cannot be placed in the false position of having fought to hold men in slavery. The American South never made a free man a slave and never took from Africa one human being to shackle him with servitude. The South inherited the institution which had been put upon us by the cupidity of European and New England slave traders against the protests of our colonial fathers. That was the problem we inherited.

Shall they remain slaves and how long? Or be at once emancipated and then be put into possession of equal power with the white man to direct a common destiny?

Shall our constitutional power, our inherent natural right to regulate this special interest, be wrested from us and vested in aliens to that interest, to be exercised by them to create social and political relations never known in the history of civilized man, and for the right regulation of which no prophecy could forecast a law, and our sad experience has been unable to devise a remedy? To put it forensically, the South did not plead to the issue of slavery or no slavery, but to the proper jurisdiction. To create the jurisdiction was to, by force, give up self-government.

Let no censorious criticism suggest a doubt of our faithful devotion to the Constitution and Union of today because we honor and revere the patriotism of those who died for the lost cause of political independence. The heroic purpose failed; our Confederacy sank beneath the political horizon in clouds which could not blacken history.  The sun of the Confederacy illuminated them of its own transcendent glory. The fame of its American heroes, of their genius for leadership, of their fortitude, marital prowess and devotion to duty, all Americans will one day claim to be the common heritage of the Union.”

(Address of John Randolph Tucker, Vanderbilt University, June 1893, (excerpt). Confederate Veteran, August 1893, pg. 238)

 

Honor for the South

The impressive monument to American President Jefferson Davis was erected at the intersection of Monument and Davis Avenues in Richmond, designed by architect William C. Noland and noted sculptor Edward Valentine. It was unveiled, along with a monument to Gen. “Jeb” Stuart, to a vast crowd on the President’s birthdate, June 3, 1907. The article below was published in January 1893.

Honor for the South

“The impulse to build to Jefferson Davis a monument typical of the South in the war, was so universal when the great hero died that a general agreement was had in a few hours by telegraph. The movement was inaugurated by the Southern Press Association, and it is cooperated in by Confederate veterans everywhere. The Jefferson Davis Monument Association at Richmond, chartered under the laws of Virginia, has special charge of the work. The active cooperation of every newspaper and periodical in the South is sought on behalf of this Fund. It is very desirable to procure name and post office of every contributor of $1 or more.

Let every Southerner and friend of his people look at the situation, and he or she will want to do something. In our National Capital there is an equestrian bronze statue at every turn, to some hero or the war, but none of them represent our side. Proud patriots want for this final tribute not less than $250,000. Twice as much as this has been raised at the North for one individual monument. Shall we stop short of half as much for one symbolic of our cause?

Here are extracts from the thousands that have been published:

“C.A. Read, editor Lewisville, Texas Times: “Mr. Davis deserves a monument as lasting as our native hills, for the splendid record he made in the cause of liberty. As an exemplar his character should be held up to the youth of the country; as an embodiment of everything good in human nature.”

An ex-Union soldier, popular humorist and lecturer, said: “Think of that man’s integrity, of what he accomplished with the resources at hand – he was an American!”

A beautiful sensation occurred at a reunion of ex-Confederates of Tennessee at Winchester, Gen. G.W. Gordon, of Memphis, in an oration, said: “We cannot forget him who has left to his countrymen and to posterity one of the noblest examples of unfaltering devotion to truth and principle, of which the political history of the human race gives an account. I trust we will erect a monument so magnificent and imposing that it will have no equal upon the vast shores of America – a monument that will tell the world that he was a patriot and that cause for which we fought, and our comrades died was constitutional, right and just. Let the monument be built!

The men and women who fought for the Confederacy, and their descendants, must quarry this monument and out of their heart’s blood if need be.”

(Honor for the South. S.A. Cunnigham, Confederate Veteran, Vol. I, No. 1, January 1893, pg. 2)

The Negro Must Be Enfranchised

In the immediate postwar the North’s Radical Republicans consolidated their victory over both the Constitution and the South and set their eyes on victory in the 1868 presidential election. They saw their path as disenfranchising those in the South who fought for independence, and giving the vote to the former slave. Some 500,000 of the latter voted for Republican U.S. Grant in 1868, which provided the thin 300,000 vote margin of victory over New York’s Governor Horatio Seymour.

The Negro Must Be Enfranchised

“Many Northerners were perfectly frank about the matter. The Negro must be enfranchised, they said, to counteract Southern white votes which would most certainly be given to Democrat party candidates. If this were not done, wrote a friend of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, it would produce evils “fearful to contemplate’ – ‘a great reduction of the Tariff doing away with its protective features [for Northern industry] – perhaps Free Trade to culminate with Repudiation, – for neither Southerners nor Northern Democrats have any bonds or many Greenbacks.”

The abolitionist-founded Nation opposed “the speedy re-admission of the Southern States” because of the effect it would have on government securities, and the New York Tribune was equally uncertain that “the cotton-planters,” educated by Calhoun “to the policy of keeping the Yankees from manufacturing,” would “vote solid to destroy the wealth-producing industry of the Loyal States.”

No wonder Governor Horatio Seymour of New York insisted that the radical talk of making the South over into the likeness of New England simply meant an acceptance of its “ideas of business, industry, money-making, spindles and looms.”

(The Price of Union, Avery Craven. The Pursuit of Southern History, George Brown Tindall, ed., LSU Press, pg. 272)

 

Admirably Suited for Slavery

Admirably Suited for Slavery

“At the time of the Revolution, about half the white population of the colonies consisted of indentured laborers and their descendants. Some were orphans, debtors, paupers, mental defectives. Others had committed petty crimes and many women were whores. Children were stolen and spirited off to be sold under indenture.

The Irish in particular were victimized. Oliver Cromwell believed that they were admirably suited for slavery and saw to it that the survivors of the Drogheda massacre met that fate in Bermuda. His agents scoured Ireland for children to be sold to planters in the Americas. Between 1717 and 1775, 50,000 English felons were transported to mainland North America. For the most part, the indentured workers settled in the South where the demand for unskilled plantation labor was greatest.

American writers and politicians protested against the use of the colonies as dumping grounds for the unwanted, the impoverished and in some cases, the vicious and mentally inferior. These protests went unheeded, and deportation continued until the American Revolution stopped it, forcing England to turn to Australia as a substitute destination.

If the institution of Negro slavery in America first gained a foothold, then an entrenched position, the greed of the British crown was largely responsible. As early as 1726, Virginia planters became alarmed at the growth of the Negro population and imposed a tax on slave imports. Britain’s Royal African Company, chartered by the Crown to monopolize the slave trade, interfered and had the law repealed. South Carolina restricted slave imports in 1760 only to be rebuked by London. In 1712, the Pennsylvania legislature moved to curb the increase in Negroes, but the law was annulled by the British Crown. Britain’s Queen Anne personally held a quarter of Royal African Company stock, ordered it to provide New York and New Jersey with Negroes and asked the Royal governors to provide full support.

Thomas Jefferson charged the British with forcing Negro slavery upon the colonies; James Madison asserted that England had checkmated every attempt by Virginia “to put a stop to this infernal traffic.”

In the words of the rabidly anti-Southern historian and politician, Henry Wilson: “British avarice planted African slavery in America; British legislation sanctioned and maintained it; British statesmen sustained it and guarded it.”

(The Negro and the Constitution. The Negro in American Civilization, Nathaniel Weyl. Public Affairs Press, 1960, pp 23-24)

“We Are for Peace”

Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois urged the maintenance of peace as a motive for evacuating forts in Southern States which had withdrawn ratification of the US Constitution, and in doing so was no doubt aware of the full force of his words. He knew that their continued occupation was virtually a declaration of war.

“We Are for Peace”

“On March 15, 1861, Stephen Douglas of Illinois offered a resolution recommending the withdrawal of the US garrisons within the limits of States which had withdrawn from the United States, except Key West and the Dry Tortugas. In support of this resolution, he said:

‘We certainly cannot justify the holding of forts there, much less the recapturing of those already taken, unless we intend to reduce those States themselves into subjection. I take it for granted, no man may deny the proposition, that whoever permanently holds Charleston and South Carolina is entitled to the possession of Fort Sumter.

It is true that Forts Taylor and Jefferson, at Key West and Tortugas, are so situated as to be essentially national, and therefore important to us without reference to our relations with the seceded States. Not so with Moultrie, Johnson, Castle Pinckney and Sumter, in Charleston Harbor; not so with Pulaski, on the Savannah River; not so with Morgan and other forts in Alabama; not so with those other forts that were intended to guard the entrance of a particular harbor for local defense.

We cannot deny that there is a Southern Confederacy, de facto, in existence, with its capital at Montgomery. We may regret it. I regret it most profoundly; but I cannot deny the truth of the fact, painful and mortifying as it is . . . I proclaim boldly the policy of those with whom I act. We are for peace.’”

(Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, Jefferson Davis, Vol I. DaCapo Press, 1990, (original 1889), pp. 242-243)

An Infernal Traffic Originating in Avarice

The State of Virginia held one-third of the entire slave population of the Union within her borders in 1787, brought by British crown and New England traders – and despite her protests to cease importation. Georgia originally banned slaves under James Oglethorpe but British avarice eventually overcame his vision of a free colony.

An Infernal Traffic Originating in Avarice

“The supreme opportunity for suppressing the importation of slaves and thus hastening the day of emancipation came with the adoption of the Federal Constitution. [With] every increase in the number of slaves [imported] the difficulties and dangers of emancipation were multiplied. The hope of emancipation rested in stopping their further importation and dispersing throughout the land those who had already found a home in our midst.

To put an end to “this pernicious traffic” was therefore the supreme duty of the hour, but despite Virginia’s protests and appeals the foreign slave trade was legalized by the Federal Constitution for an additional period of twenty years.

The nation knew not the day of its visitation – with blinded eye and reckless hand it sowed the dragon’s teeth from which have sprung the conditions and problems which even to-day tax the thought and conscience of the American people.

The action of the [constitutional] convention is declared by Mr. Fiske, to have been “a bargain between New England and the far South.”

“New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut,” he adds, “consented to the prolonging of the foreign slave trade for twenty years, or until 1808; and in return South Carolina and Georgia consented to the clause empowering Congress to pass Navigation Acts and otherwise regulate commerce by a simple majority of votes.”

Continuing, Mr. Fiske says, “This compromise was carried against the sturdy opposition o Virginia.” George Mason spoke the sentiments of the Mother-Commonwealth when in a speech against this provision of the constitution, which reads like prophecy and judgment, he said:

“This infernal traffic originated in the avarice of British merchants. The British Government constantly checked the attempts of Virginia to put a stop to it. The present question concerns, not the importing States alone, but the whole Union . . . Maryland and Virginia, he said, had already prohibited the importation of slaves expressly. North Carolina had done the same in substance. All this would be in vain if South Carolina and Georgia were at liberty to import.

The Western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands; and will fill that country with slaves if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia.

Slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. They prevent the emigration of whites, who really enrich and strengthen a country. They produce the most pernicious effect on manners. Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of Heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of cause and events, Providence punishes National sins by National calamities.

He lamented that some of our Eastern [New England] brethren had, from a lust of gain, embarked in this nefarious traffic.”

“But these prophetic words of George Mason,” adds Mr. Fiske, “were powerless against the combination of New England and the far South. Governor Randolph and Mr. Madison earnestly supported their colleague . . . and the latter asserting: “Twenty years will produce all the mischief that can be apprehended from the liberty to import slaves. So long a term will be more dishonorable to the American character than to say nothing about it in the constitution.

Thus it was by the votes of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, and against the votes of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia, that the slave trade was legalized by the National Government for the period from 1787 to 1808.”

(Virginia’s Attitude Toward Slavery and Secession, Beverly B. Mumford, L.H. Jenkins, 1909, pp. 29-31)