The "Pretend" Confederacy managed to somehow kill off 300,000 blue thugs in four years. Do you think this guy thought the Confederacy was "pretend"?
Posted on 01/01/2013 6:56:33 AM PST by Kaslin
Editor's Note: This column was coauthored by Bob Morrison.
President Abraham Lincoln had been warned by Gen. George B. McClellan not to interfere with the institution of slavery. McClellan was a “War Democrat,” willing to fight to preserve the Union, but unwilling to do anything about the root cause of the rebellion that threatened the life of the nation.
Ironically, it was McClellan’s victory at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862, that had given Lincoln the opportunity he needed to issue his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In that document, the President warned rebellious states in the South that they would have their slaves freed if they did not cease their insurrection against the federal government and once again obey the laws of the Union.
That hundred-day period had been a difficult one for President Lincoln. There would be political reverses in the mid-term congressional elections that fall. Democrats campaigned on the slogan “The Union as it was and the Constitution as it is.” That meant slavery would be secure in all the states where it then existed. They picked up congressional seats and won key state governorships.
And then, there was the disastrous Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia. Thousands of Union soldiers died in thirteen fruitless charges against Marye’s Heights. An extraordinary appearance of the Northern Lights on the night of that battle led people to say the very heavens were draped in mourning.
Now, on January 1, 1863, Lincoln proved true to his word on Emancipation. But, as he sat down to sign the engrossed copy of the historic document, he noted an error in the text. Lincoln knew that the U.S. Supreme Court was hostile to Emancipation. If there was a single error, Lincoln knew the pro-slavery Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would strike down the Emancipation Proclamation. So he ordered it re-copied for signature later that same day.
Meanwhile, President Lincoln had to stand for hours shaking thousands of hands in the traditional New Year’s Day reception at the White House. When he came back to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, his hand was shaking. As his puzzled colleagues looked on,he exercised his weary arm.
He explained: “If I am remembered for anything, it will be for this act and my whole soul is in it.” He did not want future generations to see a feeble signature and say he hesitated. So he signed it “Abraham Lincoln.” He wrote out his full name, not signing it as he usually did, “A. Lincoln.”
January 1, 2013, the National Archives places the Emancipation Proclamation on rare public display, the text is hardly legible, the victim of age and light. But Abraham Lincoln stands out clearly.
Some cynics today say Lincoln freed no slaves where he had power and all the slaves where he did not. Then, too, the London newspapers adopted a snarky tone: “The high principle of Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation is that a man may not own a man unless he is loyal to Mr. Lincoln’s government.”
That criticism was as ignorant as it was unfair. Lincoln was no despot. He knew that he could not constitutionally deprive loyal citizens of their slaves so long as they obeyed the laws. He pleaded and cajoled the congressmen from the loyal slave states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. They stubbornly refused his offers of compensated emancipation.
Lincoln was an able lawyer who new his brief. He had been a reader of Richmond newspapers for years. When secessionist editors boasted that the South could outlast the North because they could send all their young men into the army, while slaves would work the farms and factories, Lincoln took note.
Because the rebels themselves claimed slavery was a military asset, Lincoln knew he was on solid ground in freeing those slaves. His Emancipation Proclamation was a constitutional exercise of his powers as commander-in-chief of the army and navy. He justified it as an act of military necessity.
Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the Great Emancipator. He knew that the advance of the Union armies would bring freedom to millions.
Lincoln’s bold black signature had done this. And he would do more. As the movie, Lincoln, so clearly shows, the president was the prime mover behind the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. That measure ended slavery in every state. It’s a shame that the able writers and directors of this new movie did not show Lincoln signing that amendment, too. A president’s signature is not necessary for a constitutional amendment, but Lincoln once again had his whole heart and soul in it.
This is the day, January 1, 1863, one hundred fifty years ago, that changed America forever. From that date onward, Father Abraham’s armies, the armies of the United States, became armies of liberation. Those soldiers, black and white, carried freedom in their haversacks.
There were a number of slave owners that were black. Free men of color, even where they were not permitted to own slaves directly, were able to own stock certificates. They formed companies, and their companies purchased slaves, often their wifes and children. After being purchased, such slaves were able to work for wages, pay off their debt to the company, and be free.
North Carolina had permitted free men of color to vote, and after 1835, changed the rules to forbid free men of color from voting. The slave power was all about changing the rules to assure the ascendency of the slave power.
Again, it doesn’t make any difference what the slaves thought about the war. They were the object, not the subject. What makes a difference is what the people who started the war thought. Pretend confederate vice president Alexander Stephens said in his infamous “cornerstone speech”
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
You will note no exeption there for those who served with Bedford Forrest. After the war was over, the former confederates proceeded to murder and terrorize. Worse yet they propagandized so that the murder and terror would continue to the next generation.
If you think Whites are naturally superior, I invite you to try out for the NBA.
Personal liberty laws were passed in northern states in response to slave catchers pretending authority, providing false testimony, and forging documents, and under cover of that pretended authority, kidnapping free blacks from northern states.
Personal liberty laws forced the slave catcher to submit his evidencs to the state officials, and to give black residents of a free state the protection of the law. Since state officials often spotted the slave catchers’ forgeries, spotted inconsitencies in their testimony, and held that others testimony was more reliable, the slave power felt that the laws of civil procedure in free states (which is what personal liberty laws were) infringed on their rights to run the other states.
They were overrulled by the Taney court, in the following way: slave catchers could not demand state officials support in kidnapping alleged runaway slaves, but they could demand support from federal marshals. That issue had been settled long before the rebellion.
Dred Scott also ruled in favor of the slave power: Even when a man was not a runaway, and was brought to a free state, he still, held Taney, had no cause or standing to imagine that the laws of a free state held sway over anyone the slave power wanted to keep from freedom.
And still the slave power complained.
I agree with you about the morality of the situation, but the Constitution says the only thing that is of concern is the law in the state where he is held to be a slave.
Not everything in the Constitution was moral.
The personal liberty laws permitted the law to determine if claims were valid, or invalid, or if the person so claimed had even escaped.
To do otherwise was to have a ‘guilty until proved innocent’ standard for free states, but not for slave states, something the constitution never claimed or asserted.
I figure, per Taney’s interpretation of the constitution, any abolitionist could show up at at slave plantation, and assert that any slave owed him service in his free state.
If that occurred, there was no way that the claim could be denied right? No state court in a slave state could stand in the way of a claim of service, right? That would be unconstitutional, and the slave states were all about the constitution.
Right?
Again, the capital that constituted slave workers was not lost. The ownership of the capital was lost. The banks would have had to loan the money to the black agricultural worker, or to a corporation that had an employment contract with him.
That a bank didn’t want to make a loan didn’t mean that they couldn’t have.
The easiest form of slave revolt was the most common. They left their homes for Yankee lines.
They did that in droves, enough to provide numerous regiments of soldiers to the US Army.
I figure they were bright enough to revolt against slavery in the way that gave them the best chance of success.
That makes them smarter than the average Confederate.
McElmoyle v. Cohen, 38 U.S. (13 Pet.) 312 (1839) established that a states laws of civil procedure had to be followed when an agent came from out of state with a court order.
That case a South Carolina court order was held to be subject to a Georgia civil procedure that enacted a statue of limitations, and so could not be enforced in Georgia.
With that precedent in hand, northern states enacted the personal liberty laws that subjected slave catchers to rules of civil procedure in states that didn’t allow property in human beings.
It was a key fact on the ground when Taney wrote his opinion permitting slave catchers to work with federal marshals but not requiring that state courts and officials work with slave catchers.
Disagree. The capital represented by the slaves disappeared when they were freed, or to put it another way, demonetized.
They no longer represented money, since they could not, for example, be used as collateral for a loan.
If in 1860 a planter owned 100 slaves with average value of $750, he could easily borrow $75,000 using the slaves as collateral. If he defaulted on the loan, the lenders could attach the slaves to get their money back.
In 1865 not one of those slaves would have been able to borrow $750 from the same lender using himself as collateral, since if he defaulted on the loan the lender could not seize and sell him as collateral.
So while the labor of the freedman still had a monetary value, that value could no longer be converted to capital and thus had no capital value. The $3B of capital represented by the slaves disappeared during the war and its immediate aftermath. That had an enormous financial impact on the areas where slaveholding had been most prominent.
Not being a student of economics, I'm probably expressing this idea poorly and without using the correct language, but I'm pretty sure I have the basic idea down properly.
In 1793 Congress passed a Fugitive Slave Act requiring a state to return escaped slaves, as the Constitution required.
In the case you reference, and others, the Court held that rules of civil procedure in the receiving state had to be followed, which in the states with personal liberty laws made the return difficult or impossible. This mightily pissed off the South, which claimed, correctly, that this was a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Constitution.
To circumvent this, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, as part of the Compromise of 1850 that overturned the Missouri Compromise and set the country on course toward war. It is interesting that this FSA was a considerable expansion of federal power intended to limit states’ rights, which rather clashes with the southern revisionist notion that the south always fought for states’ rights and the north to expand federal power.
The FSA of 1850 made the return of slaves a federal responsibility, bypassing the state courts, so the personal liberty laws as such became more or less irrelevant.
Northern resistance to the return of fugitive slaves continued in the form of jury nullification, with juries refusing to convict those who committed crimes in resisting federal authorities trying to return slaves. This paralleled southern juries refusing to convict those who smuggled slaves from Africa into the country..
I think it was the use of force that was monetized. Corporations required willing workers, but willing workers enabled higher productivity. It did take a while for people to realize that.
I wonder how black owned corporations were able get capital before the war to buy slaves (to set them free), but corporations were unable to borrow money after the war?
Part of it may be that with the government borrowing money to finance the war, interest rates were higher.
Some part of it may have been KKK activity, that threatened anyone who did business with freedmen.
My understanding is that most of the "black-owned slaves" were family members bought by free blacks who were not then allowed to free them because of restrictive state laws on emancipation.
I'm really unclear how "corporations" are supposed to fit into this picture. My understanding is that in the first half of the 19th century corporations were few and far between. With no general enabling laws, setting one up usually required a special act of the state legislature, which in southern states doesn't seem very likely for blacks wanting to free slaves. Most business was carried on by sole propietorships or partenerships, not corporations.
The whole issue of whether slavery made sense economically is usually misstated.
Regardless of what some have stated, slavery was wildly profitable for planters. In a good year they made enormous amounts of money. (In bad years, they blamed their troubles on northerners.)
The costs of slavery, and they were enormous, were born by the society as a whole. In essence, slavery was a way of privatizing the profits and socializing the costs of the institution.
But there were corporations owned by free blacks, for the purpose of purchasing slaves. There was a court case that affirmed that free blacks, through not permitted to own slaves were allowed to own shares of the corporation.
Curious time.
Runaway slaves in CSA territory were rare during the war unless the union line was right upon them.
Unless....
Grant’s first campaign pretty much cleared out Tennessee. Tennessee produced most of the pretended confederacy’s pork. The rest of the war rebel soldiers were short on protein.
In response to that, the confederate pseudo government recommended that poultry be grown locally, that enabled extended US Army campaigns that lived off local food, such as Grant at Vickburg and Sherman across Georgia.
The pretended confederacy was incompetent except where it did the wrong thing on purpose. If they had gone to war to prove the incompetence of the slave power, they couldn’t have done a better job.
The "Pretend" Confederacy managed to somehow kill off 300,000 blue thugs in four years. Do you think this guy thought the Confederacy was "pretend"?
The pretend confederacy refused to keep track of its losses. The losses were too high. The confederacy burned many of its cities as they withdrew (Richmond, Atlanta, Savanah).
Most Union casualties were from disease. That gives you an idea of how effective the confederate armed forces were.
They had no legal justification, and to pretend that the ability to kill grants legal justification is to grant sovereignity to every robber, thug, or gangster.
That is what the pretended confederacy was: Robbers, thugs and gangsters- and a fair number deluded by the criminals at the top.
And the Union was a ragtag gang of cutthroats, backstabbers, murderers, rapists, and thugs. Those who were not press-ganged into service were little more than mercenaries who were mostly paid in booty stolen from the areas they razed. The only “equality” that they cared about was that as they raped and pillaged their way across the South they killed blacks and whites equally.
Revisionist history has tried its best to portray the Union armies as honorable and of a high moral caliber. BS! They were and are war criminals, the entire bunch of them.
Yea, and the rebs buggered baby baboons. Jeeze - that was insightful.
Says the guy whose heroes lost to them.
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