Richard Henry Lee Rails Against England’s Slave Trade

The responsibility for populating its American colonies with enslaved Africans rests with the British, who needed cheap labor for the plantations producing profit for England. Southern colonists, alarmed at the increasing numbers of black slaves arriving in British and New England hulls, repeatedly called for an end to the cruel trade. As Richard Henry Lee (father of Robert E. Lee) suggests below, any and all demands by Virginians and Carolinians to halt the slave-trade were nullified by the British Crown.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Richard Henry Lee Rails Against England’s Slave Trade

“Massachusetts invalidated the British commercial system, which Virginia resisted from abhorrence of the slave-trade. Never before had England pursued the traffic in Negroes with such eager avarice.

The remonstrances of philanthropy and of the colonies were unheeded, and categorical instructions from the [British] Board of Trade kept every American port open as markets for men.

The Legislature of Virginia had repeatedly showed a disposition to obstruct the commerce; a deeply-seated public opinion began more and more to avow the evils and the injustice of slavery itself; and in 1761, it was proposed to suppress the importation of Africans by a prohibitory duty.

Among those who took part in the long and violent debate was Richard Henry Lee, the representative of Westmoreland. Descended from one of the oldest families in Virginia, he had been educated in England and had returned to his native land familiar with the spirit of Grotius and Cudworth, of Locke and Montesquieu; his first recorded speech was against Negro slavery, in behalf of human freedom.

In the continued importation of slaves, he foreboded danger to the political and moral interests of the Old Dominion; an increase of the free Anglo-Saxons he argued, would foster arts and varied agriculture, while a race doomed to abject bondage was of necessity an enemy to social happiness. He painted from ancient history the horrors of servile insurrections. He deprecated the barbarous atrocity of the trade with Africa, and its violation of the equal rights of men created like ourselves in the image of God.

“Christianity,” thus he spoke in conclusion, “by introducing into Europe the truest principles of universal benevolence and brotherly love, happily abolished civil slavery. Let us who profess the same religion practice its precepts, and by agreeing to this duty, pay a proper regard to our rue interests and to the dictates of justice and humanity.”

The tax for which Lee raised his voice was carried through the Assembly of Virginia by a majority of one; but from England a negative followed with certainty every colonial act tending to diminish the [British] slave-trade. South Carolina, also appalled by the great increase of its black population, endeavored by its own laws to restrain the importation of slaves, and in like manner came into collision with the same British policy.”

(History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent, Volume IV; George Bancroft, Brown, Little and Company, 1856, excerpts, pp. 421-422)

“All the Land Belongs to the Yankees Now”

The South laid down their arms with the understanding that political union with the North would be restored, albeit against their will, but their rights in that political union would be as they were before hostilities commenced. This was not to be — punishment and retribution for seeking independence followed the shooting war – the second phase of the war would continue to 1877 and beyond.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

“All the Land Belongs to the Yankees Now”

“Gloom and depression gripped Richmond after the surrender. Thieves, murderers and pickpockets swarmed in the streets. The prevailing feeling of despair was intensified when suspicions were expressed in certain Northern quarters that Jefferson Davis and other Confederate leaders were somehow responsible for Lincoln’s death. This was, of course, absurd, but Northern radicals were looking for an excuse to punish the South to the limit.

Orders were accordingly issued forbidding as many as three former Confederates to stand on any Richmond street corner, lest they engage in further “conspiracies.” No Confederate insignia could be worn, with the result that a former soldier who had only his battered Confederate coat had to cut off the buttons or cover them with cloth. Many citizens talked of emigrating to Canada, Europe or Latin America.

Negroes were flooding into Richmond and other cities from the country districts. An estimated fifteen thousand came to the former Confederate capital, doubling its black population. Many of these newcomers believed vaguely that they would be cared for indefinitely by “Marse Linkum” or his agents.

As one of Emma Mordecai’s former slaves put it: “All de land belongs to de Yankees now, and dey gwine to divide it out ‘mong the colored people . . .” Another ex-slave was heard to say: “Dis what you call freedom! Can’t get no wuck, and got ter feed and clothe yo’sef.”

It was often easier for blacks to get work than whites. Ex-slaves were known to bring their impoverished former masters or mistresses Federal greenbacks and food from the US Commissary. It was clear that there were strong ties of affection between onetime slaves and their erstwhile owners.

Schoolteachers came down from the North to instruct blacks. Those in charge of these activities were idealistic in the extreme, but too frequently were lacking in understanding. Among those in dire need of help were the returning Confederate soldiers who had been confined in Northern prisons. These haggard, weak and often ill men, clad in hardly more than rags, staggered into town after somehow making their slow and tortuous way back to the South.

Fighting between Federal soldiers and Negroes occurred frequently in Richmond. Two soldiers shot a black through the head, leaving him for dead near the old Fair Grounds after robbing him of two watches and five dollars, according to the Dispatch.

The Virginia press was almost unanimous in opposition to Negro suffrage. The Richmond Times, said, for example: The former masters of the Negroes in Virginia have no feeling of unkindness toward them, and they will give them all the encouragement they deserve, but they will not permit them to exercise the right of suffrage, nor will they treat them as anything but “free Negroes.” They are laborers who are to be paid for their services . . . but vote they shall not.”

(Richmond: The Story of a City, Virginius Dabney, Doubleday & Company, 1976, excerpts, pp. 199-202)

 

Sad Result of Britain’s Colonial Labor System

Both colonies, Virginia and North Carolina, feared the growing numbers of Africans working the plantations that enriched far-off England, but pleas to restrict importations of slaves were rebuffed by the King. After the Revolution, sentiment towards solving the slavery problem increased steadily in the South and in 1816 the American Colonization Society was formed with more Virginians active in its affairs than any other State. The object of the group was to colonize Negroes in Liberia and return them to the land from which they were torn.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Sad Result of Britain’s Colonial Labor System

“[In] August 1831 an event in Southampton County, in the southeastern corner of the State near North Carolina, caused the people of Virginia to forget for a time that there was a controversy between the sections. This was Nat Turner’s bloody slave insurrection.

The white population of Richmond and the entire State was filled with alarm when the slave Nat Turner led some sixty blacks in an orgy of killing that took the lives of nearly sixty whites, most of them women and children. Captain Randolph Harrison of Richmond led his troop of light horse to the scene, but was unable to cover the eighty miles to Jerusalem . . . until the day after the massacre. By that time the Negro uprising had been effectively put down.

The bugler for the light horse troop was a free Negro named Dick Gaines. He is described as tall and black, “a fine rider and striking figure as he appeared on horseback, bugle in hand, in his red jacket, sword and helmet, with its crest of white horse-hair falling over his broad shoulders.”

Unrest among Richmond slaves was feared when word of the Turner massacre was received, but the blacks were said to be altogether docile and “as astonished and indignant was were the whites.” However, the white population not only of Richmond but the entire South was alarmed by the events in Southampton.

Turner had been treated well by his master, and had apparently been satisfied with his lot. Yet he and his cohorts not only murdered his master and mistress and their baby, but scores of others. The memory of Gabriel, and his far more extensive plan for wholesale murder, was also on their minds.

It was in this atmosphere that the General Assembly convened in late 1831. The frankest discussion of slavery that had yet occurred took place in that session. Both the Richmond Enquirer and Whig were arguing for the immediate or eventual elimination of the slave system. But the legislature ended by doing little or nothing . . . The time was not felt to be ripe.

Negroes, both slave and free, made up a vital part of Richmond’s labor force, especially in the tobacco factories, the coal mines and the Tredegar Iron Works. In addition, black mechanics had a virtual monopoly in carpentry, masonry, shoemaking, cooperage and other trades prior to the Civil War. Many white artisans left the State rather than compete with them.”

(Richmond: The Story of a City, Virginius Dabney, Doubleday & Company, 1976, excerpts, pp. 109-110)

The Rise and Fall of Emancipation in Petersburg

The American Revolution stirred the idea of emancipating the Africans brought to America on British and New England slave ships, and Virginia’s early emancipation efforts were second to none. But while the Northern States in the early 1800’s had trouble tolerating the few free black people among them, the very large number of free blacks and slaves in the South being influenced by black revolts in the Caribbean created a smoldering powder keg. Virginia had experienced an enemy inciting blacks to massacre white Virginian’s with Lord Dunmore’s 1775 emancipation proclamation; it was feared that New England’s radical abolitionists would do the same.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

The Rise and Fall of Emancipation in Petersburg

“[An] alarming proportion of black families were “matriarchal,” that is, the husband/father was either absent or . . . present but of negligible influence. [Also] the woman-dominant family was unstable and disorganized, at once the symptom and cause of severe social pathology among black people.

Women were prominent among free blacks; they outnumbered the men three to two, they headed more than half of the town’s free black households, and they constituted almost half of the paid free black labor force. Among those free blacks who managed to accumulate property, a high proportion — 40 to 50 percent — were women.

The [Virginia] manumission law of 1782 empowered the owner to set free any slave under the age of forty-five by the stroke of a pen.

For the first time, a substantial proportion of black Virginians would be free people. Petersburg’s free black population more than tripled in the space of twenty years, its size swelled by the high rate of emancipation in the town itself and by the hundreds of newly-freed migrants from the countryside who came in search of kin, work and community.

By 1810, there were more than a thousand free blacks in Petersburg, and they made up close to a third of the town’s free population (31.2%). Free blacks and slaves together outnumbered the whites four to three.

It was the very success of the manumission law that led to its demise. In 1805, Petersburg’s common council begged the General Assembly for some action to halt the growth of the free black population.

The council feared an uprising, and with seeming good reason. Petersburg had welcomed its share of refugees from Saint-Domingue [Haiti], where dissatisfaction among free blacks had touched off protracted [racial] warfare; in 1803, the whites of Saint-Domingue were ousted altogether.

When Petersburg’s officials looked at their own burgeoning free black population, they imagined it happening all over again . . . “a mine sprung in St. Domingo that totally annihilated the whites. With such a population we are forever on the Watch.”

(The Free Women of Petersburg, Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784-1860; Suzanne Lebsock, W.W. Norton, 1984, excerpts, pp. 89-91)

 

American Boys Dying in European Wars

The British faced the peril of 1940 as they faced the peril of 1916, by maneuvering Americans into bailing them out of wars that should have been avoided, or settled with diplomacy and an armistice. Roosevelt critic Burton K. Wheeler knew well that providing loans, equipment and munitions to one belligerent in a conflict makes the United States a target and American financial interests would always seek political assurances that their investments are amply protected. Few American leaders seemed to learn the stern lessons of the Great War.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

American Boys Dying in European Wars

“I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars . . . The purpose of our defense is defense.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had said it during his campaign for re-election in 1940. Wendell Wilkie, the Republican, had made approximately the same pledge that fall. They had made their peace and neutrality covenants with the people that autumn, but now it was January, 1941 – an ominous time . . .

The wind ruffled the bunting on the stand where President Roosevelt took his inaugural oath again. Four years earlier he stood in this same place and spoke of the crisis of the banks, poverty, unemployment, and other agonies of a nation in the spasms of the Depression. That pain was not fully gone and so he referred to it again: “The hopes of the republic cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth.”

The real peril, in a world threatened by aggressors, he said, is inaction. “We risk the peril of isolation,” he told the shivering crowd. Only a few days before, a great new issue had arisen to confront the Seventy-Seventh Congress: Lend-Lease, a program to sustain besieged Britain.

That Roosevelt proposal, Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana had said, means “war – open and complete warfare” which will “plow under every fourth American boy.” Roosevelt was infuriated.

Now Roosevelt’s words . . . told Americans: “In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and perpetuate the integrity of democracy . . .”

[Congressman Henry M.] Jackson voted against the initial Lend-Lease proposal. He held out for a tightening of the original bill: It should have stronger restrictions, he said, to ensure against another national frustration like that which occurred from the unpaid war debts following World War I.”

(A Certain Democrat, Senator Henry M. Jackson, Prochnau and Larsen, Prentice-Hall, 1972, pp. 101-103)

The Rock of a New and More Perfect Union

To secure Lincoln’s reelection, Assistant Secretary of War Charles A. Dana later testified that “the whole power of the War Department was used to secure Lincoln’s reelection in 1864 (Hapgood’s Life of Lincoln).” Dana was a prewar socialist who lived at the notorious Brook Farm commune, hired Karl Marx to write for Greeley’s Tribune, spied on Grant for Lincoln, and was the one who ordered manacles be bolted on President Jefferson Davis at Fortress Monroe.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Rock of a New and More Perfect Union

“Lincoln’s second election was largely committed to the War and Navy Departments of the Federal government, he having been nominated by the same radical Republican Party, practically, that nominated him at Chicago in 1860; and George B. McClellan was the nominee of the Democratic Party.

Lincoln made criticism of his administration treason triable by court-martial, and United States soldiers ruled at the polls. General B.F. Butler’s book gives full particulars of the large force with which he controlled completely the voters of New York City; and McClure’s book, “Our Presidents,” tells “how necessary the army vote was, and was secured”; and Ida Tarbell says: “It was declared that Lincoln had been guilty of all the abuses of a military dictatorship.”

R.M. Stribling’s “From Gettysburg to Appomattox” gives undeniable proof of Lincoln’s conspiracy with his generals to secure his reelection: and Holland’s “Lincoln” says that “when Lincoln killed, by pocketing it, a bill for the reconstruction of the Union which Congress had just passed, Ben Wade, Winter Davis and Greeley published in Greeley’s Tribune (August 6) a bitter manifesto, “charging the President, by preventing this bill from becoming a law, with purposely holding the electoral votes of the rebel States at the discretion of his personal ambition”; and Usher tells how “pretended representatives from Virginia, West Virginia, and Louisiana were seated in Congress;” and (August, 1864) Schouler says: “An address to the people by the opposition in Congress accused Lincoln of the creation of bogus States.”

General [John C.] Fremont, the preceding nominee of Lincoln’s party for the presidency, charged Lincoln with “incapacity, selfishness, disregard of personal rights, and liberty of the press;” also “with feebleness, want of principle, and managing the war for personal ends.”

Lincoln’s success was not won by the North, for a large part of its people were against Lincoln’s policy of coercion. So, seeing voluntary enlistments ceasing, and the draft unpopular, by offering large bounties and other inducements, Lincoln secured recruits as follows: 176,800 Germans, 144,200 Irish, 99,000 English and British-Americans, 74,000 other foreigners, 186,017 Negroes, and from the border States 344,190, making a grand total of 1,151,660 men.

It is readily seen that without this great addition to Lincoln’s Northern army he would have been “in bad,” for, as it was, the North was almost on the point of “quitting” several times.

In an article in the [Confederate] Veteran, October, 1924 (“On Force and Consent”) Dr. Scrugham [states:] ”The United Daughters of the Confederacy have rendered a signal service to the perpetuation of government based on the consent of the governed by keeping alive the memory of the bravery of those who died that such government might not perish from the Southern States. Their work will not be completed till they have convinced the world, after the manner of the Athenian Greeks, that the Greek memorial to Lincoln in Washington, DC is dedicated to the wrong man.”  Amen.

Finally, let it not be forgotten, that this principle of government by the consent of the people was the rock on which our fathers of 1776 built the “new and more perfect” Union of States; and later, was the fundamental principle of the Union of the Southern Confederacy . . .”

(Events Leading to Lincoln’s Second Election, Cornelius B. Hite, Washington, DC, Confederate Veteran, July, 1926, excerpts, pp. 247-248)

 

Ruffin’s Library and Slaves Lost

Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, born in 1794 while Washington was president, committed suicide in his room at Redmoor Farm in Amelia County on 17 June 1865, unwilling and unable to live under a Northern tyranny that had already destroyed his life, family, and way of life. The veteran of the War of 1812 had observed, from 1861 through 1865, what the Northern conqueror was capable of with the invasion of his beloved Old Dominion.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Ruffin’s Library and Slaves Lost 

“One other loss of property occurred during the first occupation at Beechwood [plantation], the result of looting by Union troops: the libraries were destroyed. Ruffin had no inventory of his books. He suspected at first that most of the volumes had been sent by the Union commander to New York for sale. A Union soldier’s letter, which eventually fell into the family’s hands, explained that the libraries had been the objects of looting by Union troops.

Slaves began “absconding” from Marlbourne, Beechwood, and Evelynton very early in the war, just as they did from farms all along the Pamunkey and lower James rivers once [General Geroge] McClellan occupied the peninsula. The level of desertions astonished Ruffin.

Beechwood suffered heaviest losses from slave defections between May and June 1862, when sixty-nine of the slaves still held there fled. “Not a single man is left belonging to the farm,” he noted on 11 June. (One of the absconders, a man Ruffin knew as William and described as “an uncommonly intelligent Negro,” would return in August 1862 to guide Union forces landing in Prince George.)

Events in June 1862 that broke up the slave community at Beechwood and Evelynton demolished Ruffin’s assumptions about slaves and their relationship to his family . . . he decided the notion that black people felt a commitment to their own families was just a false statement.

At Beechwood and Evelynton individual slaves had absconded with no apparent concern for their families left behind — evidence, Ruffin surmised, that they had no such commitment. [In the early summer of 1862, Ruffin sold] twenty-nine troublesome slaves. That sale, Ruffin said, was an ordeal . . . their slaves had forced them to “a painful necessity thus to sever more family ties,’ . . . [but] he had sold to just one buyer, who represented just two plantations; he had tried to break no family tie except those already broken by the slaves themselves.”

(Ruffin, Family and Reform in the Old South, David F. Allmendinger, Oxford University Press, 1990, excerpts, pp. 164-166)

 

 

 

Rule by Unintelligent, Average Men Controlled by Opinions

Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of American democracy, abhorred in Washington’s time but ascendant with the rise of Andrew Jackson, was that “the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers the author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever steps beyond them . . . “ Tocqueville wrote that although one could freely speak their mind, the aftermath will be torment and loud censure by overbearing opponents – he saw clearly that this course of tyranny adopted by democratic republics allowed the body to be free while the soul was enslaved.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Rule by Unintelligent, Average Men Controlled by Opinions

“Some of the criticism of democracy consists chiefly in descriptions of the characteristic imperfections of ordinary men, without reference particularly of their mediocrity in the actual workings of political institutions. Government by popular majorities, it is said, means rule by the average man, who is generally unintelligent, controlled in his opinions and conduct more by emotion than by reason, of limited knowledge, lacking the means of leisure necessary for the acquisition of information and understanding, and suspicious of any superior ability in others.

What political virtue, it is asked therefore, is there in mere superiority of numbers? What standard of judgment can make us believe the opinion of any 55 per cent of the people to be wiser or fairer than that of the other 45 per cent?

What quality has the majority in greater amount or higher value, except the one quality of superior force? Is not majority rule merely rule by greater physical power? What better reason is there that everyone should have equal power in politics than that everyone should have equal power in law or medicine, or in business, farming, bricklaying, or forging?

The critics also contend that democracy shows its actual inexpertness and unfairness in the policies it puts into operation . . . unfriendliness to true scientific and artistic progress, and intolerance of freedom in thought and conduct. Democracies either are undiscriminating or they select for their sympathy the defective and dependent, the incompetent and improvident – those who fall behind in the inevitable competitions of social life.

A short-sighted humanitarianism leads a democracy, in its policies of economic and social reform, into all sorts of artificial and meddlesome schemes for suppressing competition and equalizing wealth and social position.

A democracy is interested not in promoting the worth of exceptional individuals but in increasing the comforts of ordinary individuals. The mediocre majority endeavors constantly to bring individuals of distinctive capacity and achievement down to its own level. Equality is not only democracy’s initial hypothesis but also its constant objective.”

(Recent Political Thought, Francis W. Coker, D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934, excerpt, pp. 309-310)

 

Selling Runaway Slaves in Delaware

The author below records that Virginia slave owners averaged a loss of only about 60 slaves per year between 1800 and 1830, an insignificant number given a total slave population of nearly 470,000 by the latter year. He also notes that “there is little evidence to support the view that the average runaway was motivated by a desire for freedom in the abstract sense. Frequently he wanted to get back to his family, friends, and the place he was reared.”

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Selling Runaway Slaves in Delaware

“The average age of a runaway slave was about twenty-seven years, but their ages ranged from ten to sixty. To run away and remain at large for an extended period of time required considerably agility, ingenuity and bravery. Many times the runaway was forced to “lay up” during the day and move about at night.

Unless aid was forthcoming from friends, the fugitive had to rely entirely on his own wits to obtain food and shelter. This helps explain why so few slave women attempted to escape. Because of the danger and the rigor of such an existence, slave women were reluctant to run away.

The misery of many slaves did not begin until after they had escaped. They had to continually be on the lookout for slave patrols . . . and being returned to his master, if he had one, or sold to pay the jail fees. Jailers were required by law to provide adequate clothing and other basic necessities when needed, but some of the jailers were negligent and their prisoners suffered terribly, particularly in winter.

One such instance of neglect occurred in King William County. The slave brought charges against the sheriff and the latter was fined $400.

The fate of at least twelve runaways, who managed to escape to Wilmington, Delaware, is worth noting. Two Negro couples operated what proved to be a very unprofitable business there. While their husbands were in Maryland and Virginia decoying runaway slaves into the State of Delaware, the wives were enticing into their web certain runaways who were promptly sold. The two women were finally arrested, and at their trial it was revealed that they had sold more than a dozen fugitive slaves back into slavery.”

(Runaway Slaves in Virginia, 1800-1830, Major Stanley W. Campbell, Rockbridge Historical Society, Volume Six of the Proceedings, J.P. Bell Company, 1966, excerpts, pp. 58-61)

Pale Corpse of Murdered Liberty

As Czar Alexander II ruthlessly crushed a rebellion against his oppression in Poland in 1863, French and English newspapers compared it to Lincoln’s war upon Americans in the South who sought independence from his government. In mid-1863 as war seemed imminent between Russia and the French and English allies, Lincoln welcomed two Russian fleets into New York and San Francisco harbors for eight months to forestall European intervention in his war.  Historical orthodoxy today claims European aversion to the Southern slavery they themselves introduced in America as the cause of non-recognition of the Confederacy, when Lincoln’s Russian intrigues were a far more likely reason.

Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com

 

Pale Corpse of Murdered Liberty in America and Europe

“Russia, the most hated nation in Europe, was even more friendless than Lincoln’s government [and her] Polish policy was threatening to embroil her in another European war. She needed America’s support for nonintervention in the Polish insurrection, as much as Lincoln’s government needed Russian support for nonintervention in the rebellion of the Southern States.

US Minister [William L.] Dayton wrote from Paris on February 23, 1863:

“The Polish revolt, which has been smoldering since 1861, broke into a fierce flame, and has driven American affairs out of view for the moment. A disturbance on the continent . . . is so near at hand and touches so many of the crowned heads of these countries, that distant events fall out if sight until these more immediate troubles are settled.”

Russia was ruthless in crushing the insurrection. Thousands of Poles were slain or incarcerated or deported to Siberia. The estates of numerous nobles were confiscated [and the] last remnants of Polish autonomy were extinguished.

Europe was touched by Poland’s plight. France, England and Austria decided to have recourse to diplomatic intervention . . . But the Czar, emulating Lincoln’s stand in the American rebellion, declared that the Polish rebellion was a purely domestic affair and that foreign intervention was unacceptable.

Years before, as a private citizen back in Springfield, Lincoln had not hesitated to take a leading part in protesting against Russia, “the foreign despot,” who “in violation of the most sacred principles of the laws of nature and of nations” had, through unwarranted armed intervention, overwhelmed Hungary when she was striving to throw off the yoke of Austrian tyranny.

[Lincoln] had subscribed to the principle: “That it is the right of any people, sufficiently numerous for national independence, to throw off, to revolutionize, their existing form of government, and to establish such other in its stead as they may choose.”

Now . . . Lincoln declared [the South’s] claim to the right of secession as unconstitutional and sheer treason. Lincoln’s answer [to the South was]:

“The States have their status in the Union, and they have no other legal status. If they break from this, they can only do so against law and by revolution. By conquest or purchase, the Union gave each of them whatever of independence liberty it has . . . Not any of them ever had a State Constitution independent of the Union.”

[Lincoln’s answer in opposing intervention] expressed confidence that the Polish grievances would be righted by the liberalism, sagacity and magnanimity of Czar Alexander II.

America’s refusal to join Russian’s enemies caused the Missouri Republic to declare that “the pale corpse of Poland’s murdered liberty” would haunt Lincoln in the days to come. French journals likened the American Civil War to the Polish insurrection, and pictured Lincoln placing his hand in the bloody hand of Czar Alexander II.

One French editor asked: “Is it right that fifty million Muscovites should unite to retain ten or twelve million Poles under a detested yoke? Is it right that twenty million Northern Germans and Irishmen should unite to impose on eight million Southerners an association they spurn?”

(Lincoln and the Russians, Albert A. Woldman, World Publishing Company, 1952, excerpts, pp. 157-160)