Posted on 09/30/2003 12:19:22 PM PDT by sheltonmac
It is a reconstruction of an alleged interview of July 17, 1864, created on Union land, after the fact.
What appears as a continuous conversation in the English article is not.
The author Edmund Kirke and James R. Gilmore are one and the same. Jaquess appears to be officially documented as a member of the Union Secret Service. Jaquess was later with the Freedmen's Bureau. Apparently Honest Abe sanctioned the trip by Kirke/Gilmore and Jaquess.
It was the Rev. Dr. Jaquess, Colonel of the Seventy-Third Regiment of Illinois Volunteers.
The companion of the Rev. Dr. Jaquess appears to be the author Edmund Kirke.
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"Edmund Kirke was a pen name for author James R. Gilmore."
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"Gilmore was a Northern journalist during the American Civil War and author of several books. He also wrote under the pseudonym Edmund Kirke."
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"The 'Boy of Chancellorville' by Edmund Kirke is a very pro-Northern story about a little drummer boy captured at Chancellorville and imprisoned."
At the end of the English article, some of the words attribued to Jaquess appear to belong to Mr. Kirke/Gilmore.
The Atlantic Monthly article, Our Visit to Richmond by Edmund Kirke, begins on page 372 of the September 64 issue. The reconstruction of an interview with Davis and Benjamin begins on page 376 and continues to the end of the article on page 383.
There are a few things that clang in the article.
On page 378:
"I am glad to see you, Gentlemen. You are very welcome to Richmond." And this was the man who was President of the United States under Franklin Pierce, and who is now the heart, soul, and brains of the Southern Confederacy!
On page 376
As we alighted at the doorway of the Spotswood Hotel, the Judge said to the Colonel, --
"Button your outside-coat up closely. Your uniform must not be seen here."
The Colonel did as he was bidden; and, without stopping to register our names at the office, we followed the Judge and the Captain up to No. 60. It was a large, square room in the fourth story, with an unswept, ragged carpet, and bare, white walls, smeared with soot and tobacco-juice. Several chairs, a marble-top table, and a pine wash-stand and clothes-press straggled about the floor, and in the corners were three beds, garnished with tattered pillow-cases, and covered with white counterpanes, grown gray with longing for soapsuds and a wash-tub. The plainer and humbler of these beds was designed for the burly Mr. Javins; the others had been made ready for the extraordinary envoys (not envoys extraordinary) who, in defiance of all precedent and the "law of nations," had just then "taken Richmond."
A single gas-jet was burning over the mantel-piece, and above it I saw a "writing on the wall" which implied that Jane Jackson had run up a washing-score of fifty dollars!
I was congratulating myself on not having to pay that woman's laundry-bills, when the Judge said, --
"You want supper. What shall we order?"
"A slice of hot corn-bread would make me the happiest man in Richmond."
The Captain thereupon left the room, and shortly returning, remarked, --"
The landlord swears you 're from Georgia. He says none but a Georgian would call for corn-bread at this time of night."
On that hint we acted, and when our sooty attendant came in with the supper-things, we discussed Georgia mines, Georgia banks, and Georgia mosquitoes, in a way that showed we had been bit- ten by all of them. In half an hour it was noised all about the hotel that the two gentlemen the Confederacy was taking such excellent care of were from Georgia.
It seems somewhat dubious that Yankees could fool the Virginians into thinking they are from Georgia by discussing Georgia mines, Georgia banks and Georgia mosquitoes. If the lack of a Georgia drawl didn't give it away, Jaquess' uniform should have at least aroused suspicion.
Other quotes attributed to Davis: [not continuous]
"I desire peace as much as you do. I deplore bloodshed as much as you do; but I feel that not one drop of the blood shed in this war is on my hands, -- I can look up to my God and say this. I tried all in my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the war came, and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight his battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self- government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence, -- and that, or extermination, we will have."
"I would give my poor life, gladly, if it would bring peace and good-will to the two countries; but it would not. It is with your own people you should labor. It is they who desolate our homes, burn our wheat-fields, break the wheels of wagons carrying away our women and children, and destroy supplies meant for our sick and wounded. At your door lies all the misery and the crime of this war, -- and it is a fearful, fearful account."
"There are some things worse than hanging or extermination. We reckon giving up the right of self-government one of those things."
[Jaquess] "And slavery, you say, is no longer an element in the contest."
[Davis] "No, it is not, it never was an essential element. It was only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination. It fired the musket which was already capped and loaded. There are essential differences between the North and the South that will, however this war may end, make them two nations."
[Jaquess] "Well, Sir, be that as it may, if I understand you, the dispute between your government and ours is narrowed down to this: Union or Disunion."
[Davis] "Yes; or to put it in other words: Independence or Subjugation."
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[72.1] PEACE FEELERS? * While the war stumbled on as something of a black comedy, voices in the North crying for peace were making their own probes to see if the conflict could be settled by diplomacy instead of more bloodshed. In early July, Horace Greeley wrote the President a characteristically overheated letter, saying that he, Greeley, had been told that Confederate emissaries working in Canada wanted to make proposals for peace. Greeley encouraged Mr. Lincoln to investigate, to spare "new rivers of human blood."
Few people had an excess of confidence in the erratic Horace Greeley, and the covert sound to the Confederate "peace feelers" suggested that there was less to what Greeley saw than was actually there. Mr. Lincoln dropped the whole matter right back in Greeley's lap, sending him a reply that asked him to bring someone to the White House who was empowered to discuss peace terms.
This was an obvious reply, but it seemed to have taken Greeley unaware. He squirmed, knowing that if the whole thing was a fraud he could end up looking very foolish, but he was stuck. He and the President's personal secretary, John Hay, went to the Canadian side of Niagara Falls to talk with the "emissaries", who turned out to be obviously little more than Confederate agents who were trying to muddy the waters in the upcoming Northern election and who had no authority to negotiate for anything.
As Greeley refused to let the President release their correspondence on the matter, Mr. Lincoln was unable to use the incident to show the public the lack of substance in the popular belief that the Confederacy would immediately make peace if given half a chance. In fact, leaks about Greeley's mission did much to enhance that belief.
* The President had another opportunity to fix this matter, however. An Illinois colonel of volunteers named James F. Jaquess, who had been a Methodist minister before putting on Union blue, had seen too much destruction, particularly at Chickamauga, where much of his own regiment had been cut down. He requested a leave of absence to see if he could promote peace on his own. The request was granted.
His efforts made little progress until he linked up with a New York businessman named J.R. Gilmore, who had contacts in both North and South and also wanted to see what he could do to encourage peace. Gilmore contacted Mr. Lincoln and managed to get approval for a visit to the South to talk peace, though the President was clear that the mission was entirely unofficial.
The exercise was perfect from the President's point of view. Jaquess and Gilmore were sensible and conscientious, and they might actually make a breakthrough that could help end the war. More likely, they would find that no breakthrough was at hand, allowing Mr. Lincoln to demonstrate Confederate stubbornness to the Northern public and throw cold water on the idea that the South was going to give up the fight voluntarily.
Jaquess and Gilmore were escorted across Ben Butler's lines on 16 July, and went to speak with Jefferson Davis the next day, 17 July. Jaquess wore his Union colonel's uniform, concealed in a long linen jacket while in transit to avoid difficulties. Davis was cordial and the three men spoke at length, but no matter what tack the two informal emissaries took, the Confederate president always came back to his sole negotiating position: the war would end when the North recognized Southern independence and ceased aggression the Confederacy.
This was clearly a non-negotiating position, and after a time Jaquess and Gilmore recognized further discussion was useless and took their leave. Gilmore spoke to Mr. Lincoln on his return, and the President asked him what he planned to do with the transcript he had written of the discussion. Gilmore replied: "Put a beginning and end to it, sir, on my way home, and hand it to the TRIBUNE."
The TRIBUNE meant Horace Greeley. Mr. Lincoln responded: "Can't you get it into the ATLANTIC MONTHLY? It would have less of a partisan look there."
Gilmore answered that he was sure he could. Since publication in a monthly journal would take a little time, Gilmore agreed to release an excerpted version to the Boston EVENING TRANSCRIPT, and the article appeared on 22 July. The full version appeared in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY a few weeks later, in August.
The articles were widely read, and did much to discourage the belief that the only reason that the war wasn't over already was the pigheadedness of Northern politicians. Now most Northerners saw that Southerners had plenty of pigheadedness of their own, and that the war wouldn't be over soon.
The President had known that all along. Even before publication of Gilmore's short article, on 18 July Mr. Lincoln had gone back to the request for more troops that the Gold Hoax had forced him to shelve in May. Now he asked for 500,000 volunteers instead of 300,000, with a draft to be called after 5 September to make up for any shortfall in volunteers.
There was no way the President could call for more before election day in November. Phrasing it as a request for volunteers was trimming to the wind, as most of the men who were willing to sign up had already done so, and this simply amounted to a call for a draft with a built-in delay. It was what Mr. Lincoln could do, however, and it was still enough to inflame the war-weary North, with editors loudly protesting the action.
The President was also still willing to take extreme measures to see to it that the Union stayed the course. On 5 July, Mr. Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Kentucky, which was facing local elections on 1 August. The commander of the District of Kentucky, General Stephen Burbridge, arrested characters he regarded as disloyal, including many prominent Democrats, whether there was much proof of disloyalty or not. The heavy-handed tactics backfired, as the Democrats swept the election anyway.
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Having rejected the strategy of rephrasing his own peace terms, Lincoln considered smoking out Davis's peace terms by sending an envoy to Richmond. He already had tried such a scheme, though only in an informal way, back in July when he had approved the unofficial mission of John R. Gilmore and James Jaquess to discuss peace terms with Davis. The plan worked perfectly--at least it seemed to--for, according to Gilmore, Davis told the Northerners, "we are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE, and that, or extermination, we will have."(FN35) Urged on by Lincoln and other Republicans, leading Northern newspapers printed Gilmore's account, but the story did little to counteract the effects of Niagara.(FN36) Although Davis never denied making the statement, and leading Confederates confirmed it as authentic, many Northerners were so desperate for pace that they remained convinced that reunion eluded them only because of Lincoln's ultimatum of emancipation, not Davis's ultimatum of independence. That Lincoln's message took the form of a written letter, while Davis's took the form of a secondhand report from an unofficial envoy, helped peace-hungry northerners persist in their delusion. "Lincoln may twist and struggle as much as he pleases," a Northern Democrat crowed, "[but] he cannot get out of the Niagara net."(FN37) To unsnare himself, Lincoln decided, he would do better to send an official envoy to Richmond. Thus, in late August, the president agreed to Henry Raymond's request to serve as a peace commissioner. Raymond planned to propose peace with only the precondition of "restoration of the Union and the national authority." Davis's official rejection of that offer would absolve Lincoln of the sin of Niagara.(FN38) In the end, however, the president left the Raymond mission stillborn. Not only did he fear the appearance of abandoning emancipation, but he also foresaw that, as Henry Winter Davis put it, the Confederate president might turn the ploy against Lincoln by asking Raymond. "What terms are you willing to accept--speak first?"(FN39)
From Lincoln's draft of the letter to Charles D. Robinson and from the Raymond mission, neither of which was sent, some historians have concluded that the president by the end of the summer was genuinely willing to abandon emancipation.(FN40) emancipation.(FN40) In fact, he was no more willing to retreat from emancipation now than he had been during the Niagara episode. Instead, he wanted to expose the peace question as a sham, a product of propaganda disseminated by Confederates and Northern Democrats. Historians have little reason to probe the abstract issue of whether Lincoln might have accepted peace terms that restored the Union but said nothing about emancipation because the president himself, rightly convinced that the Confederates would never make such an offer, did not waste much time in such deliberations. Too often historians, like many of Lincoln's contemporaries, wrongly accept the notion that the Confederates were prepared to accept a peace based on something less than independence, and they compound that fallacy with the misguided notion that Lincoln was equally ready to negotiate on slavery.
35. Boston Evening Transcript, July 22, 1864. Gilmore later gave a fuller account of the mission to Davis in the Atlantic Monthly 14 (Sept. 1864): 372-83, and ibid. (Dec. 1864): 715-26. See Nelson, Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 75-81.
36. CW, 7:461; New York Times, Aug. 14, 20, 1864; New York Herald, July 27, 1864. James Gordon Bennett's New York Herald ran the story but said it was of "no importance." See New York Herald, July 22, 24, 1864 (quotation on p. 4), and July 27, 1864. Bennett himself thought that Gilmore's account "did not amount to much" (CW, 7:461n.1).
37. W. L. G. Smith to Horatio Seymour, Aug. 23, 1864. Horatio Seymour papers, New York State Library, Albany.
38. CW, 7:517-18.
39. Henry Winter Davis to Samuel F. DuPont, Aug. 25, 1864. Samuel Francis DuPont: A Selection from his Civil War Letters (lthaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969). 3:372-75.
40. See, for example, Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York: Hill and Wang, 1958), 240-41; and James A. Rawley, Turning Points of the Civil War (1966; rev. ed., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 186-87. More recently, Lerone Bennett, in Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 1999), has argued that
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"59. (CIVIL WAR). [Gilmore, James R.]. Down in Tennessee, and Back by Way of Richmond. By Edmund Kirke. New York, 1865. 305 p. Cloth"
"Includes an account of Gilmore's and Jaquess's interview with Jefferson Davis as unofficial (and unsuccessful) emissaries of Lincoln."
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"JAQUESS COL. JAMES F., of Freedmen's Bureau"
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Special Collections Department
University Libraries
Virginia Tech
Guy DiCarlo, Jr.
Civil War Research papers
Ms95-015
5. Jaquess, Col James F.--First Mission
Lincoln Herald and collected works
6. Jaquess, Col James F.--Gilmore
war correspondent
7. Jaquess, Col James F.--Horse Soldiers
official records for horse soldiers, chaplains
8. Jaquess, Col James F.--MacMurray College
Secret Service-The First Hundred Years of MacMurry College, English and German Seminary in Quincy Whig
9. Jaquess, Col James F.--Methodism
Secret Service-Methodism, Slavery and The Civil War
10. Jaquess, James F.--Miscellaneous I
Handwritten and typed notes
11. Jaquess, James F.--Miscellaneous II
Letters and Records--Col. James F. Jaquess
12. Jaquess, James F.--Miscellaneous Correspondence
Letters--Col. James F. Jaquess
13. Jaquess, Col James F.--Peace Missions
Secret Service - Greeley Peace mission
14. Jaquess, Col James F.--Preacher Regiment
Notes of Regimental History
15. Jaquess, Col James F.--Secret Service
Senate Reports, book reviews
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Actually, your advanced case of CRS is taking over.
[nc 847 quoting from Non-Seq 834] Instead you would have us believe that he consulted Butler, probably the most inept of the Union commanders.
[nc 847 responding to Non-Seq 834] Perhaps he merely considered Butler a better choice than Ninian W. Edwards whom he utilized on the Chiriqui project. ...
Funny, you left off the links.
The head of the Blair family, Old Man Francis P. Blair, had been friends with Jefferson Davis for two decades, and decided to see if he could make any progress with a strictly unofficial visit. Armed with a pass signed by Mr. Lincoln, Blair had gone to Richmond late in 1864 and spoken with Jefferson Davis in early January. Blair had proposed a far-fetched plan where the North and South would forget their differences, work together to drive the French out of Mexico, and then come to an agreement on reunion.
Davis wasn't impressed with this scheme, thinking it sounded like one of Secretary of State Seward's wild ideas, though Blair denied it. However, Davis was impressed that a Northerner of power and influence such as Old Man Blair was in Richmond at all. Davis gave Blair a letter to take back to Mr. Lincoln that suggested negotiations to end the war between the "two countries" would be appropriate.
Blair presented the letter to Mr. Lincoln on 18 January. The President took one look at the comment about the "two countries" and knew it was more of the same nonsense, but Blair added that he had met many prominent Confederates in Richmond who were perfectly aware that the South would lose the war very soon. Mr. Lincoln decided to respond with a letter of his own, indicating his desire to see peace restored to "our one common country." Old Man Blair returned to Richmond and handed it over to Mr. Davis four days later.
This was of course a nonstarter for Mr. Davis and he immediately dismissed the letter in his own mind. However, Mr. Davis saw it as a good opportunity to put the defeatists, or "submissionists", in the Confederate government in their place, and spoke with his perpetually annoying vice-president, Alexander Stephens, to consider engaging in negotiations.
Following this discussion, on 25 January Davis commissioned Stephens, Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, and Senator R.M.T. Hunter to discuss peace terms with the Union. Mr. Davis carefully specified that they were empowered only to discuss a peace between "the two countries".
A messenger came over to Union lines at Petersburg on 29 January, bearing a letter for General Grant outlining the Confederate peace mission. Grant was down the coast in North Carolina at the time, talking strategy with Schofield, but he returned swiftly on hearing the news, and the three Confederates came across the lines in a carriage on the afternoon of 31 January. The parapets of both the Union and Confederate works were lined with soldiers, and even a good number of the proper ladies of Petersburg, who thought the event meant that peace was at hand. The soldiers cheered resoundingly, shouting "PEACE! PEACE!", and the ladies fluttered their handkerchiefs.
* Grant made his guests comfortable but kept them at arm's length, and in fact he soon got a message from Mr. Lincoln indicating that the presence of the three commissioners was not to be interpreted as a truce of any sort.
The three officials were met on 1 February by Major Thomas Eckert, normally the head of the War Department telegraph office back in Washington, now serving as Mr. Lincoln's personal representative. Eckert had been instructed to review the mission of the three in order to see if their agenda was to determine terms for reunion, or pretend that they could secure a Union agreement to disunion.
Eckert inspected their instructions. He then told them in essence that there was nothing to discuss, and informed Washington DC. However, the next morning, 2 February, Grant sent a long telegram to Secretary Stanton asking the government to consider dealing with the commissioners anyway. Stanton immediately took the message to Mr. Lincoln.
Grant had spoken with Stephens and Hunter and concluded they were in earnest, and at least deserved a fair hearing from somebody who had the authority to deal with them. Grant was not the sort of general, like McClellan, who presumed to give the President advice, and his credibility with the Lincoln Administration was very good. Mr. Lincoln wired back:
SAY TO THE GENTLEMEN I WILL MEET THEM
PERSONALLY AT FORTRESS MONROE AS SOON
AS I CAN GET THERE.
The President left on immediately, and that evening arrived at the steamer RIVER QUEEN, anchored near Fort Monroe. Secretary of State Seward was waiting for him, having arrived two days earlier on expectation of meeting the commissioners.
* The President and Secretary of State Seward met the three men on the RIVER QUEEN on the morning of 3 February. There were old and fond acquaintances among them, and they traded small talk for a time.
Then they got down to business. Responding to a probe on how to resolve the conflict from Stephens, Mr. Lincoln replied: "There is but one way, and that is for those who are resisting the laws of the Union to cease that resistance." In response to further probes along this line, Mr. Lincoln made it absolutely clear that as far as he was concerned the war would only end with the restoration of the Union. Justice Campbell took that as a given, and asked what the policy of the North would be for handling the rebel states once they were returned to the Union. Mr. Lincoln made it clear that slavery was finished, with Seward informing the commissioners of the approval of the Thirteenth Amendment three days earlier.
Mr. Lincoln then added that he would prefer some scheme of compensation for slave-owners, but observed that Congress had shown no enthusiasm for the idea. As for the readmission of a state to Congress, the ultimate authority for such an action rested with Congress itself and was subject to their rules and conditions, though he would encourage them to be flexible. He would also grant executive clemency to rebel officials to the extent that he was able.
The commissioners had clearly been hoping for much more, but Mr. Lincoln was holding all the ace cards and did nothing to pretend otherwise. Robert Hunter finally said: "Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is that not about what your words imply?"
Mr. Lincoln thought it over for a moment, and then answered: "Yes. You have stated the proposition better than I did. That is about the size of it."
The men talked for four hours in all, but the two sides really had nothing to discuss. They finally parted and Mr. Lincoln, not happy about having been able to do so little for his old close friend Alexander Stephens, asked: "Well, Stephens, there has been nothing we could do for our country. Is there anything I can do for you personally?"
Stephens replied: "Nothing ...... unless you can send me my nephew who has been twenty months a prisoner on Johnson's Island."
"I'll be glad to do it. Let me have his name." He was Confederate Lieutenant John A. Stephens, taken prisoner during the Vicksburg campaign and currently locked up on an island in Lake Erie.
As the commissioners set off in a rowboat from the RIVER QUEEN, with the oars handled by a black servant, they were given a basket of champagne as a parting gift by Secretary of State Seward. As they were rowed away, Seward called out to them: "Keep the champagne but return the Negro!"
A week later, Lieutenant Stephens was brought to the White House, where he spoke with Mr. Lincoln and was given a pass through Union lines. Mr. Lincoln also gave him a photograph of himself: "You had better take that along. It is considered quite a curiosity down your way, I believe."
* Confederate die-hards used the futile talks as a basis for calls for sterner resistance. The South still had many men and resources, they pointed out. Some newspaper editors suggested that the Union was not as all-mighty as many Southerners seemed to assume, that Sherman's march through Georgia had been little more than a raid that had come and gone, leaving the land behind them still in Confederate hands.
That was appealing rhetoric, but no more than that. Sherman had gone where he pleased and the Confederacy had been unable to oppose him, in fact was still unable to oppose him now as he marched his army northward for a meeting with Grant. Hood had tried to exploit the "opportunity" and threaten the Union in Tennessee, only to be sent back South in humiliation. Confederate military resistance was crumbling away.
A town meeting was organized in Richmond on 6 February to rouse support for the cause. Robert Hunter was one of the speakers, blasting the arrogance of the Union and their demand for "unconditional submission". Then, much to everyone's surprise, Jefferson Davis, the arch-diehard, showed up unexpectedly and took the podium.
Davis delivered what was regarded as one of the finest, most rousing speeches of his careers, admired even by his enemies in the audience. The text of that speech was not recorded, but it almost certainly repeated elements from speeches Mr. Davis had given elsewhere, mocking the arrogance of "King Abraham The First"; calling for Southerners to rally to the flag, their flag; and claiming that if they showed true courage in the face of disaster, they would prevail. Davis even brought up the topic of arming slaves to help fight for the cause, and the audience accepted it without protest.
Justice Campbell was too demoralized to attend, but Alexander Stephens was there. Stephens, too, was impressed by Mr. Davis's rousing oratory, though looking back on it later Stephens called it "little short of demention". After the meeting broke up, Davis asked Stephens what his plans were. Stephens replied that he would "go home and remain there." He returned to Georgia and quietly waited for the last act of the drama to play itself out.
Davis had reason to be satisfied with how things had gone. He had managed to send annoyances like Stephens packing, and the indignation that flared through the South over Mr. Lincoln's uncompromising attitude united the Confederacy behind the government. Even editors who had done nothing but snipe at Mr. Davis for years rallied to the cause. How long they would stay on board as the water began to wash over the decks of their sinking ship was another question.
Of course, it had not been Mr. Lincoln's intent to stiffen Confederate resistance. He had made it clear that nothing less than reunion would be satisfactory in order to suggest that there was no hope of holding out in expectation of another deal.
At the same time, Robert Hunter's belief that Mr. Lincoln wanted unconditional submission was not quite the truth. The war had grown to the point where the old status quo was absolutely doomed, but even Mr. Lincoln wasn't sure what the new status quo would be. When the Union won the war, as it now surely would, how would the affairs of the South be managed? What would the rights and status of the states so recently in rebellion be in the new order?
The President clearly felt that it would be in the best interests of both sides that the new order be as agreeable as possible given the circumstances. He couldn't give promises, since he wasn't the only person who would establish that new order, but he had a great deal of influence. The Confederate commissioners couldn't see this, wouldn't see it, but they had not stopped the game, just dealt themselves out of it. Even before meeting the commissioners, Secretary Seward had told his wife that "the condition of the South is pitiable, but it is not yet fully realized there."
Soldiers on both sides understood the pitiable condition of the South, and late in the month Generals Ord and Longstreet, meeting between the Petersburg lines to discuss fraternization between pickets and arrange a prisoner exchange, got to talking and came to the idea that maybe the soldiers might do better if they had a few talks among themselves. Longstreet liked the idea and passed it up to Lee, who ran it past Mr. Davis and Secretary of War Breckinridge. They thought it was worth a try, and so Lee sent a message across the lines to Grant on 3 March.
Grant immediately wired Washington DC for instructions, and Mr. Lincoln promptly replied that Grant could deal with Lee to accept the rebel surrender, or on prisoner exchanges and the like, but that political matters were out of his brief. Grant sent a response to Lee, saying that he, Grant, lacked the authority to discuss such matters.
Since Lee had spoken to Davis about the proposal, such discussions would have been futile anyway. Mr. Davis was not would interested in talking about surrender and would never authorized Lee to do so, and surrender was almost the only option left to the Confederacy.
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It's you that is lost in this topic. Of course the IMPORTATION of slaves was prohibited as of 1 Jan 1808. Slavery itself was still legal, as evidenced by the continuation of the practice, and the attempts of Lincoln in 1861 to pass an amendment guaranting that slavery would last forever. Doh!
Nice of you to point out indentured servitude was just as illegal as slavery. Good case to establish that point. Don't you want me to make my case instead of letting you do it? I guess not....
Wrong again. The court held that indentured servitude was slavery, not that slavey was illegal.
By the way, working in a prison is indentured slavery.
Wow, you're 0-3. Justice Jackson, writing for the court in Pollock v. Williams, 322 U.S. 4, 17 (1944) wrote:
'Forced labor, in some special circumstances, may be consistent with the general basic system of free labor. For example, forced labor has been sustained as a means of punishing crime, and there are duties, such as work on highways, which society may compel.'
Illegally, I notice. There you go making my case again.
Not hardly. I did post the answers to your question: Show me where it says 'we legalize slavery, the denial of habeus corpus and the treatment of human beings in the legal category of furniture. SHOW ME. From the resolution:
The State of Illinois passed dehumanizing laws stating that slaves were not persons, but property, and as property the ownership of enslaved Africans was to be fully protected by Illinois law; and WHEREAS, For many years, Black people, free or otherwise, had no legal status as citizens in the State of Illinois.
DeHUMANized. Property. Protected by law. Not persons. No legal rights. Understand?
Good. At least you now condemn that trash traitor rag like any US citizen should always.
I fail to understand why you obsess about someone condemning the US flag. Sure, it was flown over the traitorous ships and troops that invaded the Confederacy, slaughtered innocent men, women and children, black, white and red, but it was also the flag that flew over this country before that. The flags of the Confederacy were the flags of the honourable: delegates in each seceeding state, in a convention of the people not the legislature, ratified acts rescinding their agreement to join the union; acts which the Constitution required to be given "full faith & credit" in the states remaining in the union.
So General Butler can't come down from NYC on the Staten Island Ferry escorted by a few gunboats and conquer your most important port city with a few thousand men.
So much for trusting friends huh? But it wasn't Butler, it was Farragut that captured New Orleans with a fleet of 24 vessels and over 200 guns. Against that stood a small militia force. New Orleans mayor Monroe said: "We yield to physical force alone and maintain allegiance to the Confederate States."
A fairy tale, retold endlessly, is a fairy tale.
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
You forgot the 126 guns mounted in Fort Jackson and Fort St. Phillip, and the 1100 men manning those forts.
free dixie,sw
No it isn't. Bates explicitly said it was to continue work on colonization. The fact that you do not like that will not make it go away any more than your willful ignorance of Butler's documented meeting with Lincoln on April 11th.
Then you are either blind or a liar. Hay's memo documents a meeting scheduled at EXACTLY the same time Butler claimed.
Look it up in his book. I'm simply relating what he did write about and that included a plan to colonize 150,000 of them in panama to dig a canal. He seemed to suggest that the 150,000 number was obtainable using surplus military ships.
Faragutt had over 6,000 men, and it still took 10 days before the Confederates surrendered.
Don't confuse him with facts. His mind can't handle it.
Of which no independently verifiable record exists.
Walt
There were two people present. One died a week later. The other wrote up his recollections of the meeting in detail. No credible reason whatsoever exists as to why those details would be wrong. Live with it.
And the state of Illinois practically looked Christian compared to the barbarisms of the Confederacy.
DeHUMANized. Property. Protected by law. Not persons. No legal rights. Understand?
Uncilivilzed, barbarous, ignorant, stupid, malevolent, evil, illiterate. Underrstand? Burn that trash rag so people don't know you ever had one.
it was Farragut that captured New Orleans with a fleet of 24 vessels and over 200 guns. Against that stood a small militia force. New Orleans mayor Monroe said: "We yield to physical force alone and maintain allegiance to the Confederate States."
Farragut could only scare the city into letting him put up a flag. Common sense to avoid a shelling. In fact, the next day someone tore that flag down and Farrgut could do nothing. He could have sat in the river for the next ten years, and the confederacy would still have run that town. Just as it does today, it takes 'boots on the ground' to control a city, and those boots were under the control of His Excellency, Benjamin Butler. The man who sanitized and civilized New Orleans, the man who put nearly 200,000 Americans of African heritage into arms to fight for their freedom, the man who shut down the original KKK, the man who wrote the laws used in the 1950's and 1960's to finish southern reconstruction, the man who appointed the first Americans of African heritage to West Point, the man who saved Washington, took control of Baltimore and New Orleans on a shoestring, the man who gave Grant the ways and means to beat that piece of garbage slave master Lee, and the man who's Army Corps of Americans of African heritage hwo could knock down Lee's best foul racist bastards, and who took Richmond under the command of officers who were Americans of African heirtage.
I didn't know we had titles of nobility in this country...exempting Saint Abe, of course. Let me guess. You're also proud of Bill Sherman for burning cities across Georgia, Robert Milroy for wantonly executing civilian women in Tennessee, and the prison guards at Point Lookout who used to fire random shots into the camps as a game to see how many they could hit. Aside from being a vile and offensive affront to common decency, mortin, your act around here is getting tired. But go ahead and rant on. Embarrass yourself further and prove just how obnoxious and crude yankees can be. Heck, you might even throw a couple Karl Marx quotes in there for fun!
the beast did NONE of those laudable things.
what he did do was make himself and his cronies RICH on the backs of innocent civilians. that is fact. live with it.
the beast spent most of his time in 1862 New Orleans selling CSA POWs of colour INTO slavery, stealing everything that wasn't too large to move & freighting the looted private property to the NE on government trains.
ben butler was the "scum of the earth". all true southerners of every color,religion & social class applauded his death. too bad it wasn't sooner.
free dixie,sw
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