Posted on 06/05/2013 7:52:32 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Decades ago, the distinguished Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald coined the phrase “getting right with Lincoln” to describe the impulse people feel to appropriate Lincoln for their own political agendas. Anyone who has watched Barack Obama, who as a senator wrote an essay for Time magazine entitled “What I See in Lincoln’s Eyes” and swore the oath of office as president on Lincoln’s Bible, will be familiar with the phenomenon. Democrats like to claim Lincoln as, in effect, the first Big Government liberal, while Republicans tout him as the founder of their party.
But the reflex identified by Donald isn’t universally felt. A portion of the Right has always hated Old Abe. It blames him for wielding dictatorial powers in an unnecessary war against the Confederacy and creating the predicate for the modern welfare state, among sundry other offenses against the constitutional order and liberty.
The anti-Lincoln critique is mostly, but not entirely, limited to a fringe. Yet it speaks to a longstanding ambivalence among conservatives about Lincoln. A few founding figures of this magazine were firmly in the anti-Lincoln camp. Libertarianism is rife with critics of Lincoln, among them Ron Paul and the denizens of the fever-swamp at LewRockwell.com. The Loyola University Maryland professor Thomas DiLorenzo has made a cottage industry of publishing unhinged Lincoln-hating polemics. The list of detractors includes left-over agrarians, southern romantics, and a species of libertarians — “people-owning libertarians,” as one of my colleagues archly calls them — who apparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery. They are all united in their conviction that both in resisting secession and in the way he did it, Lincoln took American history on one of its great Wrong Turns.
The conservative case against Lincoln is not only tendentious and wrong, it puts the Right crosswise with a friend. As I argue in my new book, Lincoln Unbound, Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the foremost proponent of opportunity in all of American history. His economics of dynamism and change and his gospel of discipline and self-improvement are particularly important to a country that has been stagnating economically and suffering from a social breakdown that is limiting economic mobility. No 19th-century figure can be an exact match for either of our contemporary competing political ideologies, but Lincoln the paladin of individual initiative, the worshiper of the Founding Fathers, and the advocate of self-control is more naturally a fellow traveler with today’s conservatives than with progressives. In Lincoln Unbound, I make the positive case for Lincoln, but here I want to act as a counsel for the defense. The debate over Lincoln on the Right is so important because it can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or — in this hour of its discontent — dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program of opportunity and uplift consistent with its limited-government principles. A conservatism that rejects Lincoln is a conservatism that wants to confine itself to an irritable irrelevance to 21st-century America and neglect what should be the great project of reviving it as a country of aspiration.
The fundamental critique of Lincoln is that he was “the Great Centralizer,” as columnist and George Mason economist Walter Williams puts it. He earned this pejorative sobriquet, first and foremost, by resisting secession, which “remained a reserved right of the states,” in the words of Thomas Woods in his Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. In defending secession, Lincoln-haters often revert to the brilliant 19th-century South Carolina politician and thinker John C. Calhoun, although he’s a dubious source of wisdom about the Constitution. (I draw particularly on the excellent work of Thomas Krannawitter in his Vindicating Lincoln and Daniel Farber in his Lincoln’s Constitution in what follows.)
Calhoun didn’t want to preserve the constitutional order, but to change it to afford even more protections for the slave states. Historian Richard Hofstadter called him “The Marx of the Master Class.” He disdained the Federalist Papers. Believing that the Constitution represented only a loose “compact” between the states, he thought the country had gone wrong from the very first Congress, which had set the country on a nationalist path “from which it has never yet recovered.” He wanted to substitute his own constitutional scheme — involving nullification by the states under his doctrine of “concurrent majority” — for that of the Founders.
Calhoun’s theories got a test run in the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, when South Carolina “nullified” the so-called 1828 Tariff of Abominations before backing down in the face of President Andrew Jackson’s fierce reaction (a compromise was forged over tariff policy). Then came the South’s secession after Lincoln’s election in 1860, which was defended in Calhounite terms by Jefferson Davis himself. He said “that each State was, in the last resort, the sole judge as well of its wrongs as of the mode and measure of redress. Indeed, it is obvious that under the law of nations this principle is an axiom as applied to the relations of independent sovereign States, such as those which had united themselves under the constitutional compact.”
There is nothing in the text of the Constitution to suggest that it is a treaty among independent nations, and the right to secession shows up nowhere. You don’t need to embrace Lincoln’s robust nationalism — he thought the Union had existed prior to the Constitution and the states, and argued that “perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments” — to reject nullification and secession. You need only go to the Father of the Constitution, James Madison.
Madison held something of a middle position. He explained in Federalist 39 that we have “neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both,” or, as he said elsewhere, “a new Creation — a real nondescript.” That didn’t mean that the union wasn’t a nation. “What can be more preposterous,” Madison asked, “than to say that the States as united, are in no respect or degree, a Nation, which implies sovereignty; altho’ acknowledged to be such by all other Nations & Sovereigns, and maintaining with them, all the international relations, of war & peace, treaties, commerce, &c.” In the 1869 case of Texas v. White, the Supreme Court nicely stated a Madisonian view of the question: “The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union, composed of indestructible States.”
Madison considered Calhoun’s views dangerous. If the states had the power to decide whether or not to abide by federal law, it would lead to clashes between state and federal officials “in executing conflicting decrees, the result of which would depend on the comparative force of the local posse.” It put “powder under the Constitution and Union, and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure.” Secession was “the twin” of nullification, and Madison urged in 1832, “It is high time that the claim to secede at will should be put down by the public opinion.”
It hasn’t been entirely put down yet. In his anti-Lincoln tract The Real Lincoln, Thomas DiLorenzo argues that secession is as American as apple pie. “The United States were founded by secessionists,” he insists, “and began with a document, the Declaration, that justified the secession of the American states.” No. The country was founded by revolutionaries and the Declaration justified an act of revolution. No one denies the right of revolution. Madison said that revolution was an “extra & ultra constitutional right.” Even Lincoln, in his First Inaugural Address, concedes the point: “If, by the mere force of numbers, a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution — certainly would, if such right were a vital one.”
The friends of secession aren’t eager to invoke the right to revolution, though. For one thing, when a revolution fails, you hang. For another, the Declaration says a revolution shouldn’t be undertaken “for light and transient causes,” but only when a people have suffered “a long train of abuses and usurpations.” What was the train in 1860 and 1861? Seven southern states left the Union before Lincoln was inaugurated. The South had dominated the federal government for decades. Abuses and usurpations? It’s more like lose an election and go home.
As Thomas Krannawitter points out, the Founders thought revolution was justified in the case of a violation of natural rights. The Confederates, in contrast, wanted to wage a revolution to ensure no interference with their violation of the natural rights of slaves.
This gets to another element of the anti-Lincoln case, which involves denying or downplaying the role of slavery in secession and the Civil War. DiLorenzo says, for example, that Lincoln’s cause was “centralized government and the pursuit of empire.” Walter Williams addressed the issue in a column aptly titled “The Civil War Wasn’t about Slavery.” Charles Adams, author of When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, pins the war on “economic and imperialistic forces behind a rather flimsy façade of freeing slaves.” The pro-secessionists typically fasten on the tariff as the cause of all the unpleasantness.
This is laughable. The tariff wasn’t anything new, and in fact was the main source of revenue for the federal government. Tariff rates bumped up and down. When South Carolina got the ball rolling on secession in December 1860, the tariff was at its lowest level since 1816, thanks to southern and western success at dropping rates in 1857. The Morrill tariff, steeply hiking rates and supported by Lincoln, passed the House in May 1860. But it didn’t pass the Senate until early the next year, its cause aided by the departure of southern senators who were no longer there to vote against the measure that some of their chronologically challenged latter-day apologists would hold responsible for their exit.
There’s no doubt that the South had reason to be aggrieved by high tariff rates favoring northern manufacturers, and the issue came up in its justifications for leaving the Union. But it was decidedly secondary to the primary issue: slavery, slavery, and slavery. South Carolina’s declaration of secession complained, first of all, that northerners had become maddeningly lax about returning fugitive slaves to bondage. The second sentence of the Georgia declaration was: “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Mississippi avowed with refreshing frankness: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
Even DiLorenzo concedes that slavery was the initial cause of secession, but he does it almost by way of an aside, so that he can keep his focus on the tariff and economics. But slavery was the South’s prism for everything. Some southerners worried that if the federal government could impose a tariff, it could interfere with slavery. The South’s commitment to federalism was highly situational. It insisted on a federal Fugitive Slave Act to tighten the screws on anyone in the northern states who was insufficiently zealous about returning runaways. Southern Democrats walked out of the 1860 Democratic convention when the party couldn’t forge a consensus on a platform demanding federal protection for slavery in the territories.
Lincoln’s forceful response to the dissolution of his country is another count against him for his critics. They, of course, call him a “dictator,” among other choice names. Economist Paul Craig Roberts called him “an American Pol Pot, except worse.” For DiLorenzo, he was “a glutton for tyranny.” These Lincoln-haters are real sticklers for the Constitution yet have no use for the admonition in Article II that the president take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
They come up with fanciful alternatives to military conflict. Ron Paul wonders why Lincoln didn’t forestall the war by simply buying up and freeing the slaves. With his usual sense of realism, Paul ignores the fact that Lincoln repeatedly advanced schemes for just such a compensated emancipation. Lincoln argued for these proposals as “the cheapest and most humane way to end the war.” But except in the District of Columbia, they went precisely . . . nowhere. The border states weren’t selling, let alone the South. Even little Delaware, which was selected as a test case because in 1860 it had only 587 slaveholders out of a white population of 90,500, couldn’t be persuaded to cash out of slavery. One plan proposed by Lincoln would have paid $400 or so per slave and achieved full abolition by 1893. A version of the scheme failed in the state’s legislature.
The bottom line is that the South created a national emergency, and, ever since, its apologists have excoriated Lincoln for responding with emergency powers. After the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, Lincoln replied with every lever at his disposal — and then some. He called out the militia. He blockaded southern ports. He called for volunteers to increase the size of the regular army and expanded the navy. He directed that $2 million be forwarded to private citizens in New York for expenditures related to the national defense (he suspected the loyalty of the federal bureaucracy). He did all of this without consulting Congress, which wasn’t in session. Lincoln, who wanted to control the early response to the war, didn’t call it back until July 4.
There was no doubt about his power to call out the militia. For the rest, he fell back on the authority of Congress. “These measures, whether strictly legal or not,” he said in his July 4 message to Congress, “were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting, then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.” Expanding the military and appropriating funds without Congress can’t pass constitutional muster, but Congress did indeed bless all his military measures retroactively — in the bill’s language, “as if they had been issued and done under the previous express authority and direction of the Congress of the United States.”
Most controversial is Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus. He first suspended it between Washington and Philadelphia in April 1861 after troops heading to the undefended capital from the north were attacked by a mob in Baltimore, after which Baltimore railroad bridges and telegraph lines were cut. This was a genuine crisis of a government beset by enemies on all sides. Article I, section 9 of the Constitution says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” The circumstances certainly justified suspension, but the placement of this provision in Article I suggests it is a congressional power.
Congress rendered the question moot in 1863 when it passed a law saying the president had the power to suspend. As the suspension covered the entire country, the military arrests and trials brought inevitable overreaching and abuses. They earned Lincoln a rebuke from the Supreme Court after the war, when it ruled against military trials where civilian courts were still open. Some high-profile arrests, most famously of the anti-war Democrat Clement Vallandigham of Ohio — in 1863, without Lincoln’s prior knowledge — have proven embarrassments for the ages. But in his careful, Pulitzer Prize–winning study of civil liberties during the war, Mark Neely gives a basically exculpatory though hardly uncritical verdict on the Lincoln record.
Overall, according to Neely, arrests “were of less significance in the history of civil liberties than anyone ever imagined.” He points out that even Lincoln-administration officials often used the term “political prisoner” for any civilian held by the military, a highly misleading label. “A majority of the arrests,” he writes, “would have occurred whether the writ was suspended or not. They were caused by the mere incidents or friction of war, which produced refugees, informers, guides, Confederate defectors, carriers of contraband goods, and other such persons as came between or in the wake of large armies. They may have been civilians, but their political views were irrelevant.”
Lincoln wasn’t a dictator; he was a wartime president operating at the outer limits of his power in dire circumstances when the existence of the country was at risk, and — inevitably — he made mistakes. Lincoln didn’t try to put off elections, including his own in 1864, which he was convinced for a long stretch of time that he would lose.
Yet another favorite count against Lincoln on the Right is that he was the midwife for the birth of the modern welfare state — a false claim also made by progressives bent on appropriating him for their own purposes. The war necessarily entailed the growth and centralization of the state, but this hardly makes Lincoln a forerunner to FDR or LBJ. The income tax required to fund the war, instituted in 1861 and soon made into a progressive tax with higher rates for the wealthy, was a temporary measure eliminated in 1872. Wars are expensive. In 1860, the federal budget was well under $100 million. By the end of the war, it was more than $1 billion. But the budget dropped back down to $300 million, excluding payments on the debt, within five years of the end of the war.
To see in any of this the makings of the modern welfare state requires a leap of imagination. In the midst of the war, the State Department had all of 33 employees. The famous instances of government activism not directly related to the war — the subsidies to railroads, the Homestead Act — were a far cry from the massive transfer programs instituted in the 20th century. The railroads got land and loan guarantees but were a genuinely transformational technology often, though not always, providing an economic benefit. The Homestead Act, as Lincoln historian Allen Guelzo argues, can be viewed as a gigantic privatization of public lands, which were sold off at a cut rate to people willing to improve their plots.
In the North during the war, historian Richard Franklin Bensel points out, the industrial and agricultural sectors ran free of government controls. The labor force, although tapped for manpower for the war, was relatively unmolested. The government became entangled with the financial system, but that system was also becoming more modern, sophisticated, and free of European influence. Given its vitality and wealth, the North could wage the war without subjecting itself to heavy-handed command-and-control policies. Compared with the overmatched Confederacy, it was a laissez-faire haven.
It was, rather, the southern political economy that came to depend most heavily on bureaucratic control and government expropriation, as Bensel notes. An extensive conscription law effectively subjected the entire labor force to centralized direction. The government had the discretionary power to exempt certain occupations and to detail men to civic duties deemed necessary; private concerns, therefore, depended on the government for workers. Despite a constitutional prohibition, the government subsidized the construction of railroads and by the end of the war assumed control of them and, by extension, the supply of raw materials.
The Confederacy “impressed” property from manufacturers, farmers, and railroads to supply the military. The system led to wide-ranging price controls. One Confederate congressman complained of the government agents who were “as thick as locusts in Egypt.” Under pressure from the Union blockade, the government eventually prohibited the importation of luxuries and took control of a vast array of exports. It imposed a more progressive income tax than the North did. In short, the Confederates pioneered a program of war socialism back when Woodrow Wilson — the progressive president who would run the country’s economy on a similar basis during World War I — was still in knee-pants.
Lincoln’s economics are hardly invulnerable to criticism. He was indeed a government activist, though at a time when government was different from what it is today — vastly less extensive and obstructive, with the wealth transfers of the modern welfare state nowhere in sight. Throughout his career he supported internal improvements (i.e., transportation projects), a protective tariff, and sound, duly regulated banking. These policies were associated with their share of waste and corruption. On the other hand, wherever canals and railroads touched, they brought the competitive pressure of the market with them; the tariff was a support to the growth of industry; the banks produced a reliable paper currency necessary for a cash economy. They all tended to create a vibrant, diverse economy open to men of various talents. Here is where Lincoln is guilty as charged: The agrarians are right that he sought to end the simpler, agricultural America in favor of a modern commercial and industrial economy.
There is one final indictment against Lincoln. It is said that he elevated the Declaration and the principle of equality that it enshrines over the Constitution. NR’s venerable senior editor Frank Meyer worried that he had loosed a free-floating, abstract commitment to equality throughout the land that supported the leveling tendencies of modern liberalism. But Lincoln’s equality was the equality of natural rights, not results. “I take it,” he said in 1860, “that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don’t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good.” He warned a delegation of workingmen during the war of the peril of a “war on property, or the owners of property”: “Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself.”
Lincoln thought the purpose of the Constitution was to protect the inalienable rights enunciated in the Declaration; but this did not downgrade the Constitution. Despite his opposition to slavery, he honored the Constitution’s protections for it, even as his abolitionist allies bridled at them. In his final speech of the 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen Douglas, he said, “I have neither assailed, nor wrestled with any part of the Constitution. The legal right of the Southern people to reclaim their fugitives I have constantly admitted. The legal right of Congress to interfere with the institution in the states, I have constantly denied.” When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he did it as an inherently limited war measure. Allen Guelzo notes how he never lost sight of its prospective legal vulnerability once the war ended. He finally looked to the 13th Amendment — a completely constitutional measure — as the “King’s cure for all the evils.”
I think it is important to clear away the anti-Lincoln flotsam so that conservatives can appreciate what Lincoln has to teach them, especially in this moment when opportunity in America is under threat from stultifying and wrongheaded policies and from an ongoing cultural breakdown. Notwithstanding the Right’s ambivalence about Lincoln, he has always had friends in unexpected places. The great traditionalist Russell Kirk, despite devoting a chapter to Calhoun in his classic The Conservative Mind, admired Lincoln. “In his great conservative end, the preservation of the Union, he succeeded,” Kirk wrote, noting “the charity and fortitude of this uncouth, homely, melancholy, lovable man.” The formidable agrarian Richard Weaver also has a brilliant chapter on Lincoln in his book The Ethics of Rhetoric. He argues, “With his full career in view, there seems no reason to differ with [Lincoln law partner William] Herndon’s judgment that Lincoln displayed a high order of ‘conservative statesmanship.’”
Then there is William F. Buckley Jr., who didn’t always agree with his friend Frank Meyer. Buckley wrote a letter to the editor dissenting from one of Meyer’s anti-Lincoln blasts in the 1960s. “Some conservatives have a Thing on Lincoln, including, unfortunately, my esteemed colleague Mr. Frank Meyer.” Buckley especially regretted the charge that Lincoln was “anti-humanitarian”: “It seems to me that this is worse than mere tendentious ideological revisionism. It comes close to blasphemy.” So many decades later, tendentious revisionism and blasphemy are still favorite tools of the anti-Lincoln Right.
We should reject them now, as Buckley did then, and re-discover the Lincoln who told the 166th Ohio regiment during the war that it was “through this free government” that they had “an open field and fair chance for [their] industry, enterprise, and intelligence,” and “equal privileges in the race of life, with all its desirable human aspirations.” He concluded, “The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.” That jewel still needs to be secured, and it is still worth fighting for.
– Rich Lowry is editor of National Review. Parts of this essay are drawn from his new book Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again, coming out this month from Broadside Books.
Didn’t Lincoln celebrate the death of Southern soldiers?
Lincoln couldn’t do anything during Reconstruction, being dead.
Reconstruction politics changes several times, in response to conditions on the ground.
In questioning Lincoln, I would also question all would be Federalists. I wonder if Alexander Hamilton should be regarded as a Federalist tyrant?
In this case yes, I know of no file closing event where stragglers were shot. Then again once formed in a line of battle the Southern troops usual would not straggle.
That order was issued Feb 22nd '65. The troops were dug in trenches around Petersburg so forming a classic line of battle and attacking was not happening very often if at all.
Attempts by the Confederate government to do so, along with other efforts to suppress dissent in the seceded states—including intimidation by Confederate soldiers, militia, conscription and impressment agents, and “watchful secessionist neighbors”—often erupted into guerrilla warfare carried out against not only pro-government civilians but also Rebel military units.
Neely examined the records of the arrest and detention of over 4,000 civilians and concluded that the Confederate restrictions on the rights of civilians were at least equal to those of the Union. And the restriction began early. Indeed, Confederate authorities arrested a Florida newspaper correspondent on the same day Fort Sumter was fired upon and held him without trial. “There would never be a day during the Civil War when Confederate military prisons did not contain political prisoners.”
The Lost Cause narrative has portrayed Southerners as ardent supporters of individual rights above all else. But in the South, as in the North, most civilians accepted restrictions on their liberties because they believed the restrictions constituted temporary, necessary measures that ensured stability and would help win the war. Southern society was not nearly as “obsessive about liberty” as previously thought.
Neely’s most important sources are the records of the “habeas corpus commissioners,” a semi-official group of civilian lawyers who worked for the Confederate War Department. Operating with virtually no supervision or guidelines, the commissioners reviewed the cases of the civilian prisoners in Confederate military prisons, determining whether to release them, send them to a civilian court for trial, or leave them in jail indefinitely. Neely concludes that these commissioners in effect operated as “mobilization officers” by subjecting disloyal civilians to military service if possible and otherwise keeping them out of the way.
http://ashbrook.org/publications/oped-owens-07-civilliberty/
That would be Thomas Jackson, CSA.
So, I expect your apology shortly.
In what way?
Pickett was fairly famous for killing deserters, which was why he was sent to New Bern NC in the first place.
Rather like the bloods and Crips.
THE FLIGHT OF UNION MEN. – The Union men of the border counties in Virginia continue to seek refuge in Maryland from the frightful tyranny which the rebels are practicing in that State. – Within the last week upwards of fifth have crossed the river from Berkeley and Morgan counties, leaving behind them their families and homes, to avoid being pressed into service. One of the number brought with him the following notice which he took from a blacksmith shop in Morgan county: -
NOTICE. – All the militia belonging to the 89th Regiment V.M., are ordered to meet at Oakland, on Monday next, as early as they can, in order to march to head-quarters, Winchester, forthwith and I would make a friendly request of those men that failed to go before for them to turn out now, like true-hearted Virginians, and what they have done will be looked over, but if they do not regard this call they will work their own ruin. They can never be citizens of Virginia, and their property will be confiscated. The General will send troops of horse to Morgan as soon as we leave, and all those men that fail to do their duty will be hunted up, and what the consequences will be I am unable to say.
Sam’l Johnston,
July 24, 1861 Col. 89th Regiment V.M.
Less than half of the Waterford company obeyed the call to be mustered into rebel service. The company at Lovettsville sent ten men, and but four men went from the Hoysville company. Those that refused to array themselves under the rebel banner were Union men and courted the displeasure of the secessionists, and must be severly disciplined. A bitter war of ostracism and revenge was resorted to. Quite a number of Union men had been particularly demonstrative and had not hesitated to express themselves for the Union and its flag on every occasion. This class was threatened with punishment or arrest.
It will be remembered that a large portion of the citizens of Loudoun County were intensely loyal to the National Government. Many of them were willing to and some did suffer death rather than take up arms against the United States. They were generally comfortably situated, by industry and economy had accumulated a fair share of this world’s goods, and in maintaining their unswerving loyalty to the Union necessarily indicated a self sacrifice on their part of their property.
From Union citizens, who preferred to leave the State and all that was near and dear to them rather than go into the rebel army, their property, excepting their lands, was generally taken by that army.
They left their families in Loudoun, and if ever found visiting them they would be arrest and cast into a Southern prison, where their chances of lifer were very poor.
In December, 1861, William Smith, Armistead Magaha, Emanuel Ruse, and Isaac C. Slater had come from Maryland to visit their families, and on returning had got to the ferry opposite Berlin (now Brunswick), where they were arrested as spies, taken to Richmond and confined in Libby prison, where they almost starved to death. Slater, who was young and delicate, was reduced almost beyond recognition, and was years after his release regaining his health and strength.
In April, 1861, the galling yoke of secession was made still more oppressive to the Union citizens of Loudoun. The Loudoun Cavalry (Confederate) visited the farmers in the German and Quaker settlements, taking teams for the Confederate army. From many farmers a team of four horses and a wagon were taken, but where farmers were found with less than that number, one or two horses, or even one horse would be taken, and a wagon from others; thus making a complete four horse team from one or two small farmers. This property was taken with the promise that it would be returned, but this promise, like other promises of the Confederacy, was never fulfilled, neither did any of the citizens receive any compensation for the property thus taken, and taken at a time when the Confederacy had money to pay for supplies, if they had been actuated by honest motives.
http://cenantua.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/confederate-oppression-there-seems-to-be-a-trend-here/
Patrick Cleburne, a fiercely effective general in the Army of Tennessee, had broached the idea of arming slaves in exchange for emancipation in a memo that he read to an officers’ caucus in early January 1864. Cleburne’s suggestion received no support from Jefferson Davis’s administration; indeed, Cleburne was ordered to drop the matter. Yet by the fall of 1864, the Confederate government reconsidered the proposal in the face of battlefield setbacks, particularly William Tecumseh Sherman’s devastating march through Georgia and subsequent conquering of South Carolina, Abraham Lincoln’s reelection, and growing desertion from even Robert E. Lee’s army and consequent manpower shortages. The ensuing debate over emancipating and arming slaves took place in letters, newspaper editorials, and speeches from Confederate luminaries, such as Judah P. Benjamin, and Levine artfully mines these sources.
The proposal to enlist black slaves in the army excited considerable criticism, and that criticism, Levine points out, illustrated the contradictions inherent in the entire enterprise of the slave republic. Critics charged that in enlisting slaves the central purpose for which the Confederacy had been created—to preserve a slave-based society—would be abandoned. Further, for decades, Southern quack intellectuals had argued that black slaves were docile and content with bondage, even loyal and devoted to masters. The plan to arm slaves directly contradicted the myth of docility, while the necessity to offer freedom as an incentive to fight vitiated the myth of contentment.
Levine correctly notes the slaves’ own agency in their eventual freedom from bondage, for the debate within the Confederacy on arming the slaves was strongly influenced by wartime acts of slaves themselves. To those who argued that slaves would not fight, advocates pointed to the thousands of escaped slaves who had enlisted in the Union army and fought with valor and distinction. Further, Levine argues that growing black resistance on Southern plantations and farms prompted some to insist that home front safety demanded clapping slaves into the army. Just as the reality of thousands of escaped slaves crossing into the lines of the Union army forced the Lincoln administration and Congress to act, so, too, did the subsequent distinguished service of black Union troops force reconsideration of old assumptions regarding slave behavior in the South.
Perhaps most important, Levine dismisses a number of the arguments of Lost Cause adherents. After the war’s conclusion, Confederate devotees suggested that the willingness to abandon slavery proved that a desire for liberty from Northern tyranny and oppression motivated the formation of the Confederate government, not a desire to preserve slavery. Further, so the argument went, Cleburne, Lee, and Davis had all endorsed black Confederate troops and emancipation because slavery had never been central to their struggle. Yet Levine convincingly argues that only the exigencies of a failing war effort compelled the Confederate government and its principal officials to embrace emancipation as a tool to entice slaves into the army. Men like Lee and Davis continued to maintain that slavery worked for blacks and whites, and indeed intended to create a social and labor system as close to de facto slavery as possible in the post-emancipation South. Although J. D. B. De Bow and others initiated and perpetuated the “loyal slave” myth, Levine notes that the slaves’ evident thirst for freedom forced the Southern government to reluctantly offer emancipation as incentive to military service. Even then, few slaves took up arms for the Confederacy at the end of the war.
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14657
This provocative new study proves the existence of a de facto Confederate policy of giving no quarter to captured black combatants during the Civil War—killing them instead of treating them as prisoners of war. Rather than looking at the massacres as a series of discrete and random events, this work examines each as part of a ruthless but standard practice.
Author George S. Burkhardt details a fascinating case that the Confederates followed a consistent pattern of murder against the black soldiers who served in Northern armies after Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. He shows subsequent retaliation by black soldiers and further escalation by the Confederates, including the execution of some captured white Federal soldiers, those proscribed as cavalry raiders, foragers, or house-burners, and even some captured in traditional battles.
Further disproving the notion of Confederates as victims who were merely trying to defend their homes, Burkhardt explores the motivations behind the soldiers’ actions and shows the Confederates’ rage at the sight of former slaves—still considered property, not men—fighting them as equals on the battlefield.
http://www.amazon.com/Confederate-Rage-Yankee-Wrath-Quarter/dp/B007K4U52M
Of course not. We have this little group of I guess paid dissers who come on every confederate thread and create chaos. I’m sure you and I don’t really care except for playing with them. They are provacateurs.
I mean who in the South really cares? They will be in the first die off when the SHTF as I feel confident none of them have an extra can of chili in the cupboard. But they will go out raging agains’t the old South. We are the new South and we are prepared. My only concern is that none of them wise up and try to move here. :-)
Good article. And surprisingly uncontroversial.
I saw part of the Bill Murray movie last week.
I don't want to give anything away but it gives a whole new meaning to the idea that Roosevelt created "work for idle hands".
I'll never think of him again without getting a little queasy.
Still waiting for proof about this statement.
So Lee’s own orders are not good enough? What, I have to show you rotten mean through the computer screen?
Have you found that cotton tax that you said was the cause of the secession yet?
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