Circa1865

Many Puritans departed New England for the South to avoid the oncoming rush of secular Unitarianism. These New Englanders were no strangers to slavery; they had previously conquered and enslaved the Pequot tribe while appropriating their lands, and sent expeditions to the Cape Fear in the late 1600’s. After befriending local Indians who entrusted their children to Puritan care – the children were sent to West Indian slave markets.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

New England Puritans and Slavery

“Into this rich coastal strip came Puritan settlers establishing a remarkable community.  It seemed a strange place for Puritans – one usually thinks of them along New England’s rocky shore or among snow covered valleys – but these Puritans had been wanderers, restlessly seeking the right place for their commonwealth.  Their ancestors had left Dorchester, England, in 1630 for Massachusetts, settling there for five years before moving on to Connecticut where they had remained for sixty years.

In 1695 a colony had left for South Carolina.  There beneath the great oaks and beside the black waters of the Ashley River they had laid out their village and built their meetinghouse.  As with most good Puritans, they had prospered – in spite of a sickly climate – so that within two generations there had been a need for new land.

Commissioners were sent to Georgia and, after some negotiations, a grant of over 31,000 acres had been secured.  In this way a colony of 350 whites accompanied by their 1,500 slaves began in 1752 a southward trek to what would become Liberty County.

These wandering Puritans found the Georgia coast a good place to settle and to at last send down deep roots.  The rich soil and the tidal rivers offered ample opportunity for the cultivation of rice and sea-island cotton.  Yet as God-fearing Calvinists, they were aware of the seductions of such a rich wilderness, and they immediately set about establishing an organized community.

They declared that they had a “greater regard to a compact Settlement and Religious Society than future temporal advantages.”  “We are sensible,” they wrote in the Articles of Incorporation, “to the advantages of good order and social agreement, among any people, both for their Civil and Religious Benefit . . .”

They would not be lonely pioneers facing the wilderness on their own, but members of a well-ordered community.  For these Puritan settlers, the government of such a community would consist of two coordinate branches: the Church and the Society.  The Church would be governed by the male communing members who would administer spiritual affairs; the Society would be composed of all males who would subscribe to the Articles of Incorporation, whether they were communing members of the Church or not, and would administer temporal affairs.

If this were not a “Holy Commonwealth,” it was clearly a Christian Society they wished to establish on the Georgia coast – and not, incidentally, it was just as clearly a society to be governed by white males.”

(“Wrestlin’ Jacob: A Portrait of Religion in Antebellum Georgia and the Carolina Low Country,” Erskine Clarke, University of Alabama Press, 1999, excerpts, pp 4-5)

The following extract is from Robert Y. Hayne’s 1830 debate with Daniel Webster of the slave-trading State of Massachusetts, on the nature of the federal union. As is seen below, Hayne distinctly delineates the origin of African slavery in the Southern States, who profited from the nefarious trade, and those who did their Christian best with what they had inherited from the British colonial labor system.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

An 1830 View of Slavery in the South

“Sir, when arraigned before the bar of public opinion on this charge of slavery, we can stand up with conscious rectitude, plead not guilty, and put ourselves upon God and our country. We deal in no abstractions. We will not look back to inquire whether our fathers were guiltless in introducing slaves to this country.

If an inquiry should ever be instituted in these matters, however, it will be found that the profits of the slave trade were not confined to the South. Southern ships and Southern sailors were not the instruments of bringing slaves to the shores of America, nor did our merchants reap the profits of that “accursed traffic.” But, sir, we will pass over all this.

If slavery, as it now exists in this country be an evil, we of the present found it ready made to our hands. Finding our lot cast among a people, whom God had manifestly committed to our care, we did not sit down to speculate on abstract questions of theoretical liberty. We met it as a practical question of obligation and duty.

We resolved to make the best of the situation in which Providence had placed us, and to fulfill the high trust which had developed upon us as the owners of slaves, in the only way in which such a trust could be fulfilled without spreading misery and ruin throughout the land.

We could not send them back to the shores from whence their fathers had been taken; their numbers forbade the thought, even as we did not know that their condition here is infinitely preferable to what it possibly could be among the barren sands and savage tribes of Africa . . .

[With the false philanthropy of Northern abolitionists and the] shedding of tears over sufferings which had existence only in their own sickly imaginations, these “friends of humanity” set themselves systematically to work to seduce the slaves of the South from their masters.

By means of missionaries and political tracts, the scheme was in great measure successful. Thousands of these deluded victims of fanaticism were seduced into the enjoyment of freedom in our Northern cities. And what has been the consequence?

Go to these cities now, and ask the question. Visit the dark and narrow lanes, and obscure recesses, which have been assigned by common consent as the abodes of those outcasts of the world — free people of color. Sir, there does not exist, on the face of the whole earth, a population so poor, so wretched, so vile, so loathsome, so utterly destitute of all the comforts, conveniences and comforts of life as the unfortunate blacks of Philadelphia, and New York and Boston.

Sir, I have had some opportunities of making comparisons between the condition of the free Negroes of the North and the slaves of the South . . . Sir, I have seen in the neighborhood of one of the most moral, religious and refined cities of the North, a family of free blacks, driven to the caves of the rock, and there obtaining a precarious subsistence from charity and plunder.”

(Speech of Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina, January 25, 1830; The Webster-Hayne Debate on the Nature of the Union, Herman Belz, Editor, Liberty Fund, 2000, excerpts, pp. 44-46.)

Loosely meaning “the way” or “the path,” Taosim originated in prehistoric China and has exerted a strong influence over Chinese thinking for ages. During China’s cultural revolution of 1966-1976, many Taoist temples were desecrated and monks sent to hard labor camps. Nonetheless, the Taoist view of historic places and memorials to the past resonate today.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The Tao on Historic Places

“Autumn trees swept with dawn,

Look as if they’ve been lacquered,

Rooted around an old battlefield,

The mists linger here like ghosts.”

There are still places where you can walk and feel a profound gloom. Such is the case with old battlefields. People died there. The force of their determination still resonates.

You can find such places in every country. Often, no one builds anything there, even when land is dear. We say that we do not want to forget our dead. We say there should be a memorial. Others say that the disturbance there is so great that the living cannot abide with the dead.

History is essential to our understanding of the present. Unless we are conscious of the way in which we came to this point in time as a people, then we shall never fully be able to plan the present and the future. We need to know what roots are still alive.

We need to know how things came to be so that we can project from here. We also need to know the failures of the past so that we can avoid repeating them.

History is not always glorious. Sometimes our history is melancholy. We must accept that. This life is terrible and people do terrible things to each other. If we are to live for the sake of the good and strong, then we should have as much of a background as possible.”

(365 Tao, Daily Meditations, Deng Ming-Dao, Harper San Francisco, 1992, pg. 278)

Alabamian John Moncure Daniel was appointed charge’ to Sardinia by President Franklin Pierce in July, 1853, a post he would hold until early 1861. His conversation with Jeremiah Black (below) reveals the murky nature of Northern war aims as Black later claimed that slavery abolition was the pure cause of the war, despite his known hostility toward abolition fanatics.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Slavery is But an Accident in this Quarrel

“John Moncure Daniel had one last official duty to perform in Washington: a farewell visit to the Department of State, to which he had reported for almost eight years. His mission to Italy had formally ended on January 28 [1861], when President [James] Buchanan had signed the warrant for his recall.

One day in February Daniel paid a call on the new secretary of state, Jeremiah Black, a Northerner who had taken office only two months earlier, after the resignation of Lewis Cass. Black had been the U.S. attorney general and a successful lawyer in Pennsylvania. Daniel’s great-uncle considered him the ablest member of Buchanan’s cabinet.

Three years after their 1861 meeting, John Daniel recalled that he had expressed Southern sentiments to the new secretary of state. The two had talked about the troubles that were approaching, and Daniel had alluded to the matter of slavery. According to Daniel, Black had replied:

“Sir, slavery is but an accident in this quarrel. Slavery is only the John Doe and Richard Doe case, in which this mooted question is to be decided – whether your States shall continue their sovereignty and self-government, or the Northern majorities shall govern you and all of you as they please and according to their own separate interest. If they had not the point of slavery convenient, they would try it on other points just the same.”

(Pen of Fire, John Moncure Daniel, Peter Bridges, Kent State University Press, 2002, excerpt page 161)

Southern uneasiness regarding slavery agitation had its origins in the murderous Haitian and Santo Domingo slave revolts, and Northern abolitionist encouragement of slave insurrection in the South, culminating in Nat Turner’s 1831 terrorism and John Brown’s attack. In contrast to their strenuous efforts to incite violent slave uprisings, the abolitionists never advanced a peaceful and practical solution to the slavery they abhorred.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Slaves and the South

“Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rude plenty prevailed on the average plantation.

“The best preventative of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian. Kindliness and patience, frequently extended even to a tolerance of slackness in every concern not vital to routine, created a degree of contentment among the slaves to keep them docile. Although Jefferson had declared “the whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions,” Harriet Martineau sympathized with the masters.

She wrote: “Nothing struck me more than the patience of the slave-owners . . . with their slaves.” Travelers often wondered who were the actual victims of the slave system.

Despite abolitionist allegations to the contrary, flights and revolts were infrequent. Fear that they should become general led the South to introduce ruthless laws for the apprehension of the absconders and federal legislation to protect their institution.

Actually, however, the thousands of slaves who ran away formed but a slight portion comprising the total slave population. During the several decades of its existence only some 75,000 Negroes used the underground railroad, which was organized to aid them in their attempt to reach Canada.

Flights were prompted by various causes. Some slaves undoubtedly ran away because they were talented or sensitive mulattoes who desired freedom. Others wished to escape from barbarous punishments peculiar to the slave system. Many fled . . . not to escape slavery but to return to their families and former homes. Some strayed for reasons not associated with slavery; they became tramps or vagabonds or fugitives from deserved punishments and crimes. Most slaves, unlike migratory free Negroes of a later generation, did not move from their original homes.”

(The South Old and New, A History, 1820-1947, Francis Butler Simkins, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, pp. 46-47)

The central African city of Timbuktu (Timbuctoo) continued as a market for slaves long after the British had abolished their transatlantic slave trade — which had more to do with destroying French colonial commerce than philanthropy. The Captain writes below of how the British action simply forced native African slave traders to the interior of the Dark Continent, and the trade flourished nonetheless as slaves were a traditional African medium of exchange. In his 1961 book “The Slaves of Timbuktu” (Harper & Brothers), author Robin Maugham found that slavery still existed among the African tribes in the late 1950’s. He was the brother of author Somerset Maugham.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

“Slaves, Don Teodore, Are Our Money”

“[Mahometan Foulah] Mami had visited many of the European colonies and Moorish kingdoms on the north coast of Africa, so that he was not stupefied by the untrammeled ignorance of Africans who consider Timbuctoo a combination of Paris and paradise. Indeed, he did not presume, like most of the Mandingo chiefs, to prefer it to Senegal or Sierra Leone. He confessed that the royal palace was nothing but a vast enclosure of mud walls, built without taste or symmetry, within whose labyrinthine mesh were numerous buildings for the wives, children, and kindred of the sovereign.

The markets of Timbuctoo, alone, secured his admiration. Every week they were thronged with traders, dealers, peddlers and merchants, who either dwelt in the neighboring kingdoms, or came from afar with slaves and produce. Moors and Israelites from the northeast were the most eminent and opulent merchants; and among them he counted a travelling class crowned with peculiar turbans, whom he called “Joseph’s-People,” or in all likelihood, Armenians.

However, in spite of its despotic rulers, Timbuctoo was a great central mart for exchange, and commercial men as well as the innumerable petty kings, frequented it not only for the abundant mineral salt in its vicinity, but because they could exchange their slaves for foreign merchandise. I asked the Foulah why he preferred the markets of Timbuctoo to the well-stocked stores of regular European settlements on the coast which was reached with so much more ease than this core of Africa?

“Ah!,” said the astute [slave] trafficker, “no market is a good one for the African in which he cannot openly exchange his slaves for whatever the original owner or importer can sell without fear! Slaves, Don Teodore, are our money.”

(Adventures of an African Slaver, Captain Theodore Canot, Star Books, 1928, pp. 135-136)

This detached foreign opinion of antebellum New Englanders reveals the deep cultural chasm between the sections in antebellum times, and somewhat persistent to this day as the North has nearly accomplished its avowed postwar purpose of repopulating the South with its people, mannerisms and traditions.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

Sly, Grinding, Selfish and Tricking People

“I heard an Englishman, who had been long resident in America, declare that in the following, in meeting, or in overtaking, in the street, on the road, or in the field, at the theatre, the coffee-house, or the home, he had never overheard Americans conversing without the word DOLLAR being pronounced between them. Such unity of purpose, such sympathy of feeling, can, I believe, be found nowhere else, except perhaps in an ant’s nest.

The result is exactly what might be anticipated. This sordid object, forever before their eyes, must inevitably produce a sordid tone of mind, and, worse still, it produces a seared and blunted conscience on all questions of probity. I know not a more striking evidence of the low tone of morality which is generated by this universal pursuit of money than the manner in which the New England States are described by Americans.

All agree in saying that they present a spectacle of industry and prosperity delightful to behold, and this is the district and the population most constantly quoted as the finest specimen of their admirable country; yet I never met a single individual in any part of the Union who did not paint these New Englanders as sly, grinding, selfish, and tricking.

The Yankees (as the New Englanders are called) will avow these qualities themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on earth can match them in over-reaching in a bargain. I have heard them unblushingly relate stories of their cronies and friends, which, if believed among us, would banish the heroes from the fellowship of honest men forever . . . yet the Americans declare that “they are the most moral persons on earth.”

(America Through British Eyes, Allan Nevins, editor, Oxford University Press, 1948, excerpt, pp. 136-137)

After fighting Sherman’s army of invaders to a standstill with one-quarter of their strength, Joe Johnston’s revived Army of Tennessee marched in review and under the gaze of the assembled North Carolina citizens. Gen. Thomas L. Clingman of North Carolina, exhorted his chief to allow his men to fight the invading host to the last, surpass the Greeks and gain everlasting immortality.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Splendid Body of American Soldiers

“After the battle of Bentonville, General [Joseph E.] Johnston retired his army to Smithfield, where he remained confronting [the enemy] for three weeks. While here General Johnston held a review 6 April, at which many ladies and civilians of Raleigh, including Governor Vance and officers of the State and Confederate Government were present. The army presented a fine appearance and the men were in excellent spirits.

There were in this army remnants of commands who under Albert Sidney Johnston won the first day’s battle of Shiloh, and nearly annihilated Grant’s army. Men who under Bragg, had won the battles of Murfreesboro and Chickamauga, and under Johnston had confronted Sherman from Dalton to Atlanta; the men who under Hood, had been in the disastrous battle of Franklin; who had followed [Generals Nathan Bedford] Forrest and [Joe] Wheeler and [Wade] Hampton and had successfully defended Fort Sumter for four years against the combined land and sea forces of the United States, and the brigades of [General Robert F.] Hoke’s Division, who had won endearing renown in the Army of Northern Virginia.

Here also were assembled those regiments of Junior Reserves, who under Colonels Hinsdale, Anderson, Broadfoot and Walter Clark emulated the heroism of their veteran comrades, and who on the battlefields of Kinston and Bentonville had shown they were of the same [mettle] as their sires and deserving of imperishable record in the history of their country.

It was a splendid body of American soldiers; survivors of a hundred battlefields; and as they marched proudly in review before their General, they were conscious of duty nobly done and nerved for any future service that might be required of them in defense of their country.

General Clingman visited his brigade while in camp at Smithfield, and though on crutches, asked of General Johnston the honor of commanding the rear guard. This was denied him, as he was physically unable to perform such duty, and he addressed the Southern commander as follows:

“Sir, much has been said about dying in the last ditch. You have left with you here thirty thousand of as brave men as the sun ever shone upon. Let us take our stand here and fight the two armies of Grant and Sherman to the end, and thus show to the world how far we can surpass the Thermopylae of the Greeks.”

(Histories of the Several Regiments and Battalions from North Carolina in the Great War 1861-65, Walter Clark, editor, Volume IV, Nash Brothers, 1901, excerpt, pp. 498-499)

At the unveiling of Jefferson Davis’ bronze figure in Statuary Hall, Hon. Pat Harrison spoke: “Few men in the history of the Nation rendered more signal service for the country in peace or in war than did Davis. He is not among strangers . . . Over there are clay, Webster, Benton, Cass and Calhoun, his idol, with whom he served in the Senate of the United States.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

A Soldier and Statesman Who Served His State

An impressive scene was that in Statuary Hall of the Capitol at Washington, on June 2 [1931], when the State of Mississippi presented to the nation the bronze figure of her adopted son, Jefferson Davis, soldier and statesman.

As the cord holding the huge United States flag about the statue was drawn by Miss Adele Hayes-Davis, great grand-daughter of Jefferson Davis, another son of Mississippi, Hon. Pat Harrison, stepped to the front and delivered an eloquent tribute to the man who had served his State and nation in high places, yet had died without a country.

Fitting indeed that he should be now be known and recognized for that high service, as he has stood for long in the love and esteem of his people of the South, so now he stands in the Nation’s Valhalla of those who gave it greatest service. Of high character and blameless life, no more distinguished citizen of Mississippi could have been thus honored, and few there be who will feel but that Jefferson Davis has at last come into his own.

Commenting upon the feeling that would have been aroused by the placing of this statue in the Capitol some years back, the Boston Transcript concludes in a lengthy editorial: “The name of Jefferson Davis is justly revered in the South today, and there is no reason why it should not be honored in the North.”

In his address, Edgar S. Wilson, of Mississippi – who was a pallbearer at the Davis funeral in New Orleans – recounted scenes in the last days of Mr. Davis, “particularly when the Mississippi legislature called him before it to demonstrate to him the love and affection of the people of the State, although he walked among them a disenfranchised man.”

(In the Nation’s Capitol, Confederate Veteran Magazine, July 1931, excerpt, page 244)

Count Herman Keyserling (1880-1946) was born in Estonia and married the granddaughter of Otto von Bismarck. He was an aristocrat who interested himself in philosophy and the natural sciences; Keyserling deeply believed that gifted individuals were born to rule.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

The South is America’s Hope

“Count Herman Keyserling, philosopher and psychologist, world traveler and author, writes in the November Atlantic Monthly that the South is the hope of America, and proceeds, from the philosopher’s and ethnologist’s standpoint, to prove his assertion.

Count Keyserling sets up the contention that the theory of the North and East is that success comes through dynamics, through working feverishly; that if one only works a little harder, one will be more successful.

The Southerner, upon the other hand, fulfills the dictum that man is essentially the child of the earth, even though he rules it; that the Southerner realizes that there is no lasting happiness for man unless he is in harmony with the rhythm of the earth and that the only state that can endure is one which is comparatively static. That is, the restless, feverish dynamic state is apt to fade from the earth.

Alexander and Napoleon were vanquished; the Huns died out in a short while; the Normans overran Europe and even England, but the Norman culture was absorbed into the Anglo-Saxon culture of England, and the Angles and Saxons predominate to-day in England. It is not, therefore, the feverish and restless people who predominate in the end, but the more static people. “Speed is not an expression of strength and vitality,” it is an expression “merely of neurotic restlessness.”

The Northerner will continue to exist, Count Keyserling grants, but “in days to come he will be recognized as the poorest, the least superior type; he will mean to America at large what the most narrow type of Prussian means within the German nation. The Middle West will in all likelihood continue to represent America’s national foundation. But if a culture develops and the stress is laid on culture, then the hegemony will invariably pass over to the South. There alone can there be a question of an enduring culture.” (Macon Telegraph)

In this compliment to the South there is much for sober thought. There is a strong movement to commercialize the South, to create here the same money-seeking atmosphere, to change her distinctiveness into a likeness of other sections, in fact, to destroy those characteristics upon which our “culture” depends. Such effort should be combated and the South should remain distinctive among the sections. In that is distinction and culture and hope for the future.”

(“The South – America’s Hope,” Confederate Veteran Magazine, February, 1930, pp. 63-64)