Posted on 11/02/2002 11:20:01 AM PST by Aurelius
"Civil War" is at best a misleading name for that conflict. Many Southerners avoid using it because of the implication that there were factions in every locality. "Civil" means "relating to the people within a community." The term describes only one aspect of the event, and subtly discredits Southerners defending home and country, rather than fomenting a political coup.
The typical Southern community was not divided at all. Dixie was that community, and the consensus in Dixie was to defy strangers and meddlers from the North who insisted on ruling and intended to invade. The typical Southerner fought for independence. There were (and still are) more differences between Yankees and Southerners than between Yankees and English-speaking Canadians.
It was a civil war, but not on the battlefield. It was a civil war in New York City when a draft protest turned into a rampaging mob of 70,000. That civil war lasted four days because all the available troops were at Gettysburg, fighting soldiers from another land. It was a civil war when they returned and fired into this New York crowd, killing nearly 2,000 of their own divided "community."
It was a civil war when Illinois' Governor Yates reported an "insurrection in Edgar County. Union men on one side, Copperheads on the other. They have had two battles." It was a civil war for the Union Army when the 109th Illinois had to be disbanded because its men were Southern sympathizers. It was a civil war in Indiana when thousands of draft resisters hid in enclaves. From the governor: "Matters assume grave import. Two hundred mounted armed men in Rush county have today resisted arrest of deserters . . . southern Indiana is ripe for revolution."
The governors of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York reported that they could not enforce the draft without 10-20,000 troops in each state. Violent opposition struck in Wisconsin and Michigan. Four thousand Pennsylvanians refused to march south. Sherman wrote: "Mutiny was common to the whole army, and it was not subdued till several regiments, or parts of regiments had been ordered to Fort Jefferson, Florida, as punishment."
It was not a civil war in those parts of the South removed from the border regions. Had it been a civil war, Lincoln's government could have leveraged local support to subdue those states brutally, as it did in Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia. Union policy was to treat border state combatants as renegades under martial law instead of as legitimate armed forces.
Marylanders were similar to Virginians strongly Southern, but cautious. However, when Lincoln called for troops to coerce the states, Virginia seceded.
Immediately, Lincoln moved to secure Maryland. Habeus corpus was suspended and Southern sympathizers arrested in Baltimore. General Banks dissolved the Baltimore police board. Secretary of War Cameron wrote him: "The passage of any act of secession by the legislature of Maryland must be prevented. If necessary all or any part of the members must be arrested." Arrests were sufficient to prevent a vote. The mayor of Baltimore, most of the city government, and newspaper editors were jailed. One of those editors was the grandson of the author of The Star Spangled Banner. Francis Key Howard wrote of his imprisonment: When I looked out in the morning, I could not help being struck by an odd and not pleasant coincidence. On that same day forty-seven years before, my grandfather, Mr Francis Scott Key, then prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort McHenry. When on the following morning the hostile fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular. . . . As I stood upon the very scene of that conflict, I could not but contrast my position with his, forty-seven years before. The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving at the same place over the victims of as vulgar and brutal despotism as modern times have witnessed.
Documents of the period show more than 38,000 political prisoners in northern jails. In The Life of William H. Seward, Bancroft wrote: The person "suspected" of disloyalty was often seized at night, borne off to the nearest fort. . . . Month after month many of them were crowded together in gloomy and damp case mates, where even dangerous pirates captured on privateers ought not to have remained long. Many had committed no overt act. There were among them editors and political leaders of character and honor, but whose freedom would be prejudicial to the prosecution of the war. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus everywhere, arrested candidates, and banished Ohio congressman Vallandigham from the country. More than 300 newspapers were closed. Secretary of War Stanton told a visitor, "If I tap that little bell, I can send you to a place where you will never again hear the dogs bark." Neither habeas corpus nor freedom of the press were ever suspended in the South, even in the most desperate of times. The Raleigh News and Observer wrote after the war "It is to the honour of the Confederate government that no Confederate secretary could touch a bell and send a citizen to prison."
Yankee power was most unrestrained in Missouri. From its initial defiant movement of troops, the Union routinely escalated hostilities. They encouraged atrocities, insidiously veiled behind a facade of inept negligence. They exhibited arrogance and contempt for law, their own constitution, Southerners, and life itself.
The authorities entered private homes without warrant or provocation, seizing arms and other properties. They required written permits for travel. Random "drive-by" shootings of citizens from trains by soldiers were commonplace. Citizens were fined, jailed, banished, and even executed for as little as expressing dissent, or upon the accusation of a government informer.
Authorities called citizens to their door in the middle of the night and shot them or took them away. Amnesty was promised to partisans, but many who attempted to surrender were executed. Men like Frank and Jesse James witnessed these things and vowed never to accept a pardon from such a government.
Senator Jim Lane, known as "the grim chieftain of Kansas," ravaged Missouri. Halleck wrote McClellan: "I receive almost daily complaints of outrages committed by these men in the name of the United States, and the evidence is so conclusive as to leave no doubt of their correctness . . . Lane has been made a brigadier-general. I cannot conceive of a more injudicious appointment . . . offering a premium for rascality and robbing." McClellan gave the letter to Lincoln. After reading it, Lincoln turned it over and wrote on the back, "An excellent letter, though I am sorry General Halleck is so unfavourably impressed with General Lane."
September 1862 brought executions for refusing to swear allegiance to the U.S. In October at Palmyra, Missouri, ten political prisoners and POWs were executed because a Union informer disappeared. Soon afterwards, Lincoln promoted to brigadier-general the man responsible.
In 1863 General Ewing imprisoned as many wives, mothers, and sisters of Quantrill's Confederate partisan band as could be found. The building housing most of them collapsed in August, killing many. Ewing had been warned that the building was in danger of collapse, and the guerrillas believed that it had been deliberate. In retaliation Quantrill sacked and burned Lawrence, Kansas. Ewing then issued an order forcing all persons in four counties of western Missouri living more than a mile from a military base to leave the state. They were forced from their homes at gunpoint and escorted away. Then all property was destroyed. Cass County, which had a population of 10,000 was reduced to 600 by this "ethnic cleansing." Union Colonel Lazear wrote his wife that the ensuing arson was so thorough that only stone chimneys could be seen for hundreds of miles. "It is heart sickening to see what I have seen since I have been back here. A desolated country, men, women, and children, some of them almost naked. Some on foot and some in wagons. Oh God."
Loyalty oaths and bonds were required of all citizens. If guerrillas attacked, property in the area was confiscated and sold at auction. Suspects were imprisoned and by 1864 the mortality rate of Union-held prisoners had reached fifty percent. Union Surgeon George Rex reported: Undergoing the confinement in these crowded and insufficiently ventilated quarters are many citizen prisoners, against whom the charges are of a very trivial character, or perhaps upon investigation . . . no charges at all are sustained.
The Union implemented Sherman's philosophy of war against civilians. He wrote: "To the petulant and persistent secessionist, why, death is mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of the better. . . . There is a class of people . . . who must be killed or banished before you can hope for peace and order." To General Sheridan, Sherman wrote: ". . . the present class of men who rule the South must be killed outright rather than in conquest of territory. . . a great deal of it yet remains to be done, therefore, I shall expect you on any and all occasions to make bloody results."
To General Kilpatrick he wrote: "It is petty nonsense for Wheeler and Beauregard and such vain heroes to talk of our warring against women and children. If they claim to be men they should defend their women and children and prevent us reaching their homes." In a moment of candor he wrote Grant: "You and I and every commander must go through the war justly chargeable with crimes."
While ransacking Georgia, Sherman removed two thousand women, children, and elderly to Ohio where they were forced to work in Union war factories. Families were separated, property confiscated, and even wedding bands taken from their hands. The U.S. never tried to reunite them.
Crimes were committed on both sides, but the Confederate offenses were a fraction of the Federals'. The Southern leadership spoke and acted against abuses, while Lincoln ran a "loose ship" of administration, under which authorities could tacitly countenance abuses while professing to be against them. Lincoln once asked McClellan if he could get close enough to Richmond to shell the civilian population of the city.
When Jefferson Davis was urged to retaliate in kind, and adopt a cruel war policy like the U.S., cabinet member Judah P. Benjamin said "he was immovable in resistance to such counsels, insisting that it was repugnant to every sentiment of justice and humanity that the innocent should be made victims for the crimes of such monsters."
America lost the "civil war" because she lost her soul. You opine that those were necessary war measures? Then why were they never employed by the Confederacy even in the dark days of imminent defeat? It was because the South still adhered to the transcendence of principle. The South did not believe that the end justified the means. Most Southerners believed that right and wrong and truth were God-given, and not man's creation.
Therefore, man had to submit to them. It was not man's place to decide that principles could be abandoned when expedient. Robert E. Lee said it best: "There is a true glory and a true honour; the glory of duty done the honour of the integrity of principle."
Transcendence means "above and independent of, and supreme." To recognize the transcendence of principle is to recognize that there are absolutes, and that absolutes must come from a Creator. It is to acknowledge that these absolutes are not social constructs that have evolved over time or situational posits that can be altered when fashionable. This humility leads men to respect authority, honor their heritage, and submit to the wisdom that has preceded them, acknowledging their own dependence, and not imagining that they are autonomous, without accountability.
It is chiefly social and familial accountability, enabled by the presence of law written in the conscience of humanity, which restrains the evil that is present within man, thereby establishing civilization. The reality of evil within humanity is evident in the corrupting effect of power, since power is of itself neither good nor evil. Power, in its simplest form, is the lack of restraint, while restraint is accountability in some form. Enduring and benevolent civilizations have recognized this and embraced restraints to ensure that human power would not be concentrated to their detriment. The Constitution was a codified restraint of this kind.
Restraints on the central government are as necessary to protect us from tyranny as the balance between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The limits are proportional to the power retained by the states, because the states are the only entities capable of enforcing meaningful restraint upon the federal government. Although they originally delegated limited power to that government, it has usurped all the power. That usurpation became unstoppable after the South lost, because the tenth amendment became a dead letter, and all the states lost. The possibility of secession was the only deterrent sufficient to guarantee states the sovereignty necessary to hold the central power accountable.
The victors justified themselves to the world and history by brute force and sly obfuscation. The elimination of slavery was trumpeted as the justifying crown of victory. As to saving the Union, is that not like preserving a marriage by beating the wife into submission?
The result is the humanist monster-state, and activist judges who reinvent what the constitution means. They have lost the ability to understand and receive it, since they have abandoned the transcendence of principle. They will always find a way to make themselves the final authority. New amendments designed to strengthen the plain intent of the Founding Fathers will eventually fail, because no loophole can be drawn so tight as to eliminate a scoundrel.
Both sides lost. The U.S. lost its character and began the abandonment of transcendent foundations. Dixie lost its will to live. Yet where principles remain- under cold ashes, deeply buried remains an ember of hope. And where there is a smoldering hope, the fire may yet burn again.
Mr. Rudulph is the SL Southwest Alabama District Chairman.
HOME
Or by anyone who wants to tear down America and everything it stands for -- like you.
Walt
So what are you suggesting? That we should refrain from telling the truth if, in the minds of jingoistic chauvanistic idiots like yourself, the truth might be seen as having a negative reflection on our nation.
We often hear a partial quote "My country, right or wrong." which appeals to people of your mentality. But the full quote states a principle that genuine patriots hold. "My country right or wrong, when right, to be kept right, when wrong, to be made right."Thus endeth the lesson for today, sad to say it is probably more than you can absorb.
To whom is this quote attributed?
Walt
So what are you suggesting? That we should refrain from telling the truth if, in the minds of jingoistic chauvanistic idiots like yourself, the truth might be seen as having a negative reflection on our nation.
Would you say that George Washington was able to accomplish anything good in his life?
Walt
What in the Hell is the point of that question? Are you following this discussion? Do you actually read my posts before you respond? It certainly doesn't appear so. Did I ever say anything to suggest that I did not regard George Washington as a great man with enormous accomplishments to his credit? All that I have tried to do is to point out that he wasn't a saint and that his utterances were not infallible. You seem unable to distinguish between that and completely trashing him - which I certainly never had the intention of doing.
Just like Non-Sequitur, you seem unable to read my posts and comprehend what I say, but rather you filter them through some preconceived notion of what a person such as your own ideologically determined vision of what I must be like would say. In short, you are delusional. It is unfortunate because it makes meaningful dialogue impossible. You don't respond to what I have posted, you respond to what your own ideological image of the kind of person I muist be would have posted on the subject.
You inhabit a world that exists only in your head.
It is attributed to Carl Schurz, before the U.S. Senate, Feb. 29, 1872. (I thought it was much earlier and European - see, even I can be wrong sometimes.)
The correct quote (I didn't have that right either) is:
"My country right or wrong: when right, to keep her right; when wrong, to put her right."
SOURCE It's down a bit so you might search on "Carl Shurz" to find it.
In re: "his plans of white-separatism, repatriation and a divided continent."
I have cited numerous speeches (by Lincoln) inumerable times - his fear of amalgamation, his speech before a group of blacks in the White House (documented in the New York papers, Basler and others). How many times does one have to quote the man?
I simply request that you provide documentaion of your original assertion - that a slave-owner could MURDER their slave with impunity, and to receive recompense from the state for doing so. A law stating such would be a start. IIRC, a descendant of founding father Richard Henry Lee was executed for killing a slave, and I have read of at least one trial where a slave-owner was sentenced to life for murdering a slave.
It is not being "slow or half witted", or an "irrational, obsessive and compulsive compunction". It is a request for documentation for your assertion.
Dang. You sound just like Major Owens. Try some real history instead of your Lost Cause Myhts for a change.
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The antebellum argument that New England slavers fastened the practice on the South is a myth. To the contrary, British ships from London, Bristol, and Liverpool introduced most of the slaves, with New England vessels contributing only in a small way to mainland trade.
The leading North American carrier was Newport, the fifth largest colonial port. Rhode Islanders, who were at a disadvantage competing with the more advanced economies of Europe in textiles, metalwares, and guns, had one product of superior quality - the rum they distilled. Often trading the liquor directly with Africans instead of Europeans, Rhode Islanders successfully plied the trade for a century, transporting over 106,000 Africans by 1808.
Rhode Island slavers supplied West Indian markets in far greater proportion than those on the mainland. Before the American Revolution Barbados was their most important destination, and after 1783 Cuba took half of their slave cargoes. The mainland market never averaged more than a third of the Rhode Island trade. New York, which sent out 151 voyages, and other ports, including Boston, Philadelphia, and Charleston, shared in transporting slaves. In general, southerners did not engage in the carrying business.
South Carolina and Virginia were the main markets, the first receiving about seventy thousand slaves between 1735 and 1775, and the second about the same number between 1699 and 1775. The trade virtually ceased during the American Revolution, but South Carolina afterward intermittently imported slaves in large numbers until 1808.
The Middle Passage, as the trip across the Atlantic was called, was undoubtedly horrible, with the frightened Africans mercilessly shackled, stowed, and sometimes cruelly handled and driven to suicide. Modern investigators, however, have lightened a little the grim picture painted by abolitionists by pointing out that traders had a financial stake in delivering slaves alive and healthy. It has been shown that white mortality on ocean voyages, especially in the tropics, was also heavy. Rhode Island averaged a 12 percent loss of slaves, higher than the English rate.
The slave trade came under attack in the egalitarian and anti-British atmosphere of the American Revolution. But in deference to certain objectors, drafters of the Declaration of Independence dropped a proposed condemnation of the practice in that document, and the Framers of the Constitution compromised on the issue. It was agreed that the trade could be abolished as early as 1808, an agreement that was fulfilled with a minimum of dissent. Efforts to end the subsequent illegal traffic were hampered for over half a century by southern objections as well as friction with the British, some of whom were crusading to suppress the traffic entirely. During the Civil War, with southerners out of Congress and an antislavery administration in power, the United States signed a treaty with Great Britain that led to ending the traffic.
The Constitution did not contemplate a ban on interstate slave trading, leaving the issue to the states. The federal government, however, prohibited trade in the District of Columbia and set regulations regarding the size of ships used in coastal trade. The exhaustion of soil in the older states, expansion of the cotton kingdom, and suppression of the foreign trade combined to encourage domestic trading. Many slaves migrated westward with their masters, and others were sold through a system that was well established by the early nineteenth century. The seaboard and border states exported an estimated twenty-five thousand slaves a year, with Virginia the largest source.
Large-scale traders in the Upper South maintained agencies and representatives in the Lower South. Although water transport was used, slaves more commonly were marched overland, in coffles, to markets where they commanded prices that at least quadrupled between 1800 and 1860. At first only erratically regulated by the states and then unregulated altogether by 1850, the trade led to the breakup of families, which became the particular target of antislavery writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Source: http://www.myhistory.org/historytopics/articles/slave_trade.html
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So it turns out Virginia did more slave trading in a few years than the "Yankees" managed in over a century. How about that.
Shhhhhhhhhhh...........how dare you expose the myth of the slave power? Don't you know the neo-rebs are trying to get the CBF more exposure? Setting the record straight doesn't serve that goal.
Walt
In re: "his plans of white-separatism, repatriation and a divided continent."
I have cited numerous speeches (by Lincoln) inumerable times - his fear of amalgamation, his speech before a group of blacks in the White House (documented in the New York papers, Basler and others). How many times does one have to quote the man?
You have little that supports your premise. Although Lincoln might well have been glad to snap his fingers and have all negroes resettled elsewhere, that wasn't going to happen. He began to clear the way -- as you well know -- for full civil right for them. He did this with both his public proclamations and private letters:
"...peace does not appear as distant as it did. I hope it will come soon, and come to stay; and so come as to worth the keeping in all future time. It will have then been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost. And then, there will be some black men, who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet they have helped mankind on to this great consumation; while, I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, have strove to hinder it."
A. Lincoln
8/23/63
"When you give the Negro these rights," he [Lincoln] said, "when you put a gun in his hands, it prophesies something more: it foretells that he is to have the full enjoyment of his liberty and his manhood
...By the close of the war, Lincoln was reccomending commissioning black officers in the regiments, and one actually rose to become a major before it was over. At the end of 1863, more than a hundred thousand had enlisted in the United States Colored Troops, and in his message to Congress the president reported, "So far as tested, it is difficult to say they are not as good soldiers as any." When some suggested in August 1864 that the Union ought to offer to help return runaway slaves to their masters as a condition for the South's laying down its arms, Lincoln refused even to consider the question.
--"Lincoln's Men" pp 163-64 by William C. Davis
Also:
"I know as fully as one can know the opinions of others that some of the commanders of our armies in the field who have given us some of most important successes, believe the emancipation policy and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt the rebellion, and that at least one of those important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers....I submit these opinions as being entitled to some weight against the objections, often urged, that emancipation, and arming the blacks, are unwise as military measures, and were not adopted, as such, in good faith. You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you then, exclusively to save the Union... negroes, like other people act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive--even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept....
"it is also unsatisfactory to some that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers."
4/11/65
Lincoln had been setting the stage for equal rights for at least a year -- as you well know.
Private
General Hunter
Executive Mansion
Washington D.C. April 1, 1863
My dear Sir:
I am glad to see the accounts of your colored force at Jacksonville, Florida. I see the enemy are driving at them fiercely, as is to be expected. It is mportant to the enemy that such a force shall not take shape, and grow, and thrive, in the south; and in precisely the same proportion, it is important to us that it shall. Hence the utmost caution and viglilance is necessary on our part. The enemy will make extra efforts to destroy them; and we should do the same to perserve and increase them.
Yours truly
A. Lincoln
_________________________________________________________ Hon. Andrew Johnson
Executive Mansion,
My dear Sir:
Washington, March 26. 1863.
I am told you have at least thought of raising a negro military force. In my opinion the country now needs no specific thing so much as some man of your ability, and position, to go to this work. When I speak of your position, I mean that of an eminent citizen of a slave-state, and himself a slave- holder. The colored population is the great available and yet unavailed of, force for restoring the Union. The bare sight of fifty thousand armed, and drilled black soldiers on the banks of the Mississippi, would end the rebellion at once. And who doubts that we can present that sight, if we but take hold in earnest? If you have been thinking of it please do not dismiss the thought.
Yours truly
______________________________________________
Private
March 13, 1864
Executive Mansion
Washington
Hon. Michael Hahn
My dear sir,
I congratulate you on having fixed your name in history as the first free-state Governor of Louisiana. Now you are about to have a convention which among other things, will probably define the elective franchise. I barely suggest for your private consideration, whther some of the colored people may not be let in -- as for instance the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in oyr ranks. They would probably help, in some trying time to come, to keep the jewll of liberty within the family of freedom. But this is only a suggestion, not to the public, but to you alone.
Yours truly
Lincoln meant to expand equal rights to black soldiers because his inate sense of justice could allow no less.
Lincoln was -not- a white separatist any more than he was a white supremacist. You backed off that line, and you'll back off this one too.
Walt
Funny thing about the neo-rebs is how they can get all weepy over the honorable bold cavaliers (who could easily have triumphed, but I digress) but then will tell any kind of lie themselves.
Walt
And why on earth shouldn't I? I am nothing like you.
And now let's put an end to this. You have now definitely gone over the edge with your irrational hostility.
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