Quotes from the book
Facts and Falsehoods concerning the War on the South 1861-1865
George Edmonds, Spence Hall, 1904
* * *
"Amid the universal din of praise that it has become the fashion to sing of Lincoln, only the
student remembers the real facts, only the student knows not only
that the Lincoln of the popular imagination of today bears little
or no resemblance to the real Lincoln, but that the deification
of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the members of his
own party, by men who but a few short hours before Booth's
bullet did its deadly work at Ford's theater, were reviling him
as a buffoon, a coarse, vulgar jester. History affords no stranger
spectacle than this, that today, nearly forty years after his
death, the American people, North and South, have come to regard a
lmost as a god a man who, when living, and up to the very
hour of his death, was looked upon with contempt by nearly every
man of his own party who intimately knew him, even by members
of his Cabinet, by Senators, Congressmen, preachers and plain citizens."
[Facts and Falsehoods, p.2]
* * *
""For days and nights after the President's death it was
considered treason to be seen in public with a smile on your
face. Men who ventured to doubt the ineffable purity and
saintliness of Lincoln's character, were pursued by mobs of
men, beaten to death with paving stones, or strung up by the
neck to lamp posts until dead."
[idem p. 10]
* * *
"At that time, as all through the
dreadful four years' war, the word "traitor" was by Republicans
only applied to men who did not advocate the war of conquest
on the South. The slightest word indicating a belief that
the war was not just or was unnecessarily cruel, was enough to
brand a man as a traitor deserving a dungeon cell. Among the
distinguished men who distrusted Lincoln's ability, who scorned
and reviled him, were Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P.
Chase. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Vice President Hannibal
Hamlin, Secretary of State Seward. Fremont. Senators Sumner,
Trumbull. Ben Wade, of Ohio, Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts,
Thaddeus Stevens. Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phil-
lips. Winter Davis, Horace Greeley, Chandler of Michigan. and
hosts of others- Yet all of these (with the exception of Greeley)
immediately after the apotheosis ceremony deemed it for the
good of their party and themselves to bury out of sight every "venomous
detraction" they had lavished on the living President and
forthwith to put themselves into a reverential attitude toward the
dead man and force upon the world the belief that Lincoln had
been their wise and trusted ruler, their guide, their head, their
Moses who had led them out of the awful Wilderness of War. So
far as I can discover. Greeley was the only Republican who did
not make a sudden jump from distrust and contempt to adoration."
[idem p. 11]
* * *
"On an official visit to Washington, February 23, 1863, Richard
H. Dana wrote Thomas Lathrop as follows:
"I see no hope but in the army ; the lack of respect for
the President in all parties is unconcealed. The most striking
thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President.
It does not exist. He has no admirers. If a convention were
held tomorrow he would not get the vote of a
single State. He does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of
an empire. He seems to be fonder of details than of principles,
fonder of personal questions than of weightier matters
of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all
sorts of people who come to him for all sorts of purposes,
than to give his mind to the many duties of his great post.
This is the feeling of his Cabinet. He has a kind of shrewd
common sense, slip-shod, low-leveled honesty that made him a
good Western lawyer, but he is an unutterable calamity to
us where he is. Only the army can save us."
This was the way Mr. Dana and many other Republicans
saw Mr. Lincoln before the apotheosis ceremony. "
[idem p.13]
* * *
"Lamon gives the same account of Lincoln's political character.
Lamon speaks of Lincoln's "burning ambition for distinction,"
which never abated, never ceased till life ceased. Yet
neither Herndon or Lamon even hint that any higher, less selfish
motive than desire to lift himself in the world inspired Lincoln's
struggle for office. We are not told that Lincoln had plans or
dreamed dreams that if he attained high place he would use it
for the benefit of unfortunate humanity, of the downtrodden.
Since Lincoln's death his apotheosizers attribute high motives
to him, but there is no proof. Those who best knew him saw no
such motives, and, in fact, themselves did not seem to know such
motives were desirable or expected. Modern Republicans call
Lincoln the "martyr" President, and say "he fell a martyr in the
cause of negro freedom." Those who well knew him assert he
was wholly indiflferent to the fate of the negroes. Piatt testifies
that Lincoln "had no more sympathy for the negro race
than he had for the horse he worked or the hog he killed."
In all history I know of no public man who possessed less of the
stuff martyrs are made of than Lincoln. Was ever a martyr
"eager for worldly honors?" Did any man with three drops of
martyr blood in his heart deem "popularity the greatest good in
life?" Would any man, zealous in the cause of negro freedom,
run out of the town to avoid speaking on the subject? Self-seeking
politicians are too common for one to wonder at Mr.
Lincoln's self-seeking nature; such traits might be passed quietly
by but for the fact that he is held up before the youth of this
country as the model man whom they must emulate and revere."
[idem p.44]
* * *
"The customs of civilized
people forbid, in wars, the destruction of growing vines
and crops, and the wanton burning of private homes. These customs
or laws were trampled under foot by the Republican party
and its invading legions, and Lincoln exultantly congratulated
his generals for the cruel work they did. The generals of the
army were expressly ordered to destroy everything, to make the
Southland a desert waste. While Sheridan was engaged in this
remorseless work, Grant telegraphed him. "Do all the damage
you can. Destroy the crops. We want the Shenandoah Valley
a barren waste. We want Virginia clear and clean, so that a
crow flying over it will have to carry his ration or starve to
death," For one whole month Sheridan and his legions carried
on this cruel work, and at last when the valley indeed was a
desert waste, and thousands of women and children wandered
in the woods and fields, homeless and hungry. Lincoln, the tender-hearted
(God save the mark!) gleefully sent a telegram of
congratulation to Sheridan.
"I tender you and your brave army my thanks," said
Lincoln, "and the thanks of the Nation, and my personal
admiration for your month's operation in Shenandoah Valley,
and especially for the splendid work."
The "especially splendid work" that pleased Lincoln was
the cruel work of burning homes and turning women and children
out into the devastated fields to starve and die. Lincoln
took it upon himself, as all despots do, to speak for the Nation.
If by the "Nation" is meant the great body of people, the large
majority, Mr. Lincoln had no right to assume that the Northern
Nation thanked Sheridan for his remorseless work. The Nation's
sympathies at that time were with the South"
[idem p.50]
* * *
"It is quite possible that many true and trustworthy men have
been unbelievers in the Bible as the word of God. Many men
have doubted and denied the divinity of Christ. Good men have
claimed that Jesus was only a good man whose sublime moral
teachings brought on Him the wrath of rulers. Mr. Lincoln's
unbelief was more aggressive than the ordinary infidel's; he dis-
liked and despised Christianity as if it were an enemy to humanity.
He had no appreciation for the sublime truths taught by
Jesus of Nazareth. Since the apotheosis ceremony, and especially
since the contemporaries of Mr. Lincoln have nearly all passed
away, it has become the custom of biographers to show up Mr.
Lincoln as a very religious man. Mr. Holland, Noah Brooks and
Miss Tarbell take the lead of all romancers on this subject. These
writers throw facts to the wind, and, as Gen. Piatt puts it, fill
their pages with "pious lies." Pious lies of this nature greatly
annoyed Herndon and Lamon. Both Herndon and Lamon took
time and labor trying to kill these pious lies, but after Herndon's
and Lamon's death pious lies became more numerous, bold and
audacious than ever.
In his suppressed "Life of Lincoln" Herndon says:
"Lincoln was a deep-grounded infidel. He disliked and
despised churches. He never entered a church except to
scoff and ridicule. On coming from a church he would
mimic the preacher. Before running for any office he wrote
a book against Christianity and the Bible. He showed it to
some friends and read extracts. A man named Hill was
greatly shocked and urged Lincoln not to publish it. Urged
it would kill him politically. Hill got this book in his hands,
opened the stove door, and it went up in flames and ashes.
After that, Lincoln became more discreet, and when running
for office often used words and phrases to make it appear that
he was a Christian. He never changed on this subject. He
lived and died a deep-grounded infidel."
Lamon, who was very intimate with Lincoln during the latter's
Presidency, as well as before, says he never changed. Nicolay
and Hay say the same. Yet since Lincoln's deification nearly
every eulogist, lecturer and biographer of Lincoln assert that he
was a sincere Christian. Many of Lincoln's relations and friends
testify that he scoffed and derided religion and the Bible.
On the subject of Mr. Lincoln's religious ideas, Lamon, who,
during Lincoln's four years in the White House, was closer to
him than any other man, wrote as follows in 1872:
"No phase of Mr. Lincoln's character has been so persistently
misrepresented as this of his religious belief. Not
that the conclusive testimony of many of his intimate associates
and relations relative to his frequent expressions on
such subjects have ever been wanting, but his great prominence
in history, his extremely general expressions of religious
faith called forth by the exigencies of his public life,
or indulged in on occasion of private condolence have been
distorted out of relation to their real significance or meaning
to suit the opinion or tickle the fancy of individuals or
parties."
[idem p. 52-53]
* * *
"Every few years something occurred which made New
England declare it was high time for her to get out of the
Union. When Louisiana Territory was purchased, and again
when Louisiana was made a State, New England declared it was
time for her to quit the Union. During the whole two years
this country was waging its second war with Great Britain, New
England preachers, newspapers, and politicians were anxious
for secession, declaring it was high time New England was out
of the Union, anxious for New England to make a separate
treaty of peace with old England. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge,
in his life of Webster, says :
"It is safe to say there was no man in this country, from
Washington and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton
and George Mason on the other, who regarded our system
of Government, when first adopted, as anything but an
experiment entered upon by the States, and from which
each and every State had the right to peaceably withdraw,
a right which was very likely to be exercised."
A convention in Ohio in 1859 declared the Constitution was
a compact to which each State acceded as a State, and as an integral
part, and that each State had the right to judge for itself
of infractions and of the mode and measure of redress, and
to this declaration Joshua Giddings, Wade, Chase and Dennison
assented.
[idem p.101-102]
* * *
Had the New England secessionists succeeded in 1796, or
in 1804, or in 1814, to get New England out of the Union, and
had they formed of her States a Northeastern Confederacy, in
all human probability no gulf would have been dug between the
Southern and Northern States, no gulf filled with the blood and
bones of slaughtered men. No Democratic President would
have resorted to bloody coercion.
President Madison, in 1814, was not ignorant of the secession
work going on in New England during the time this country was
in the throes of war with a powerful foe, but Madison took no
step to punish or stop New England's secession. As a true
Democrat, he knew if the people of New England chose to secede
they had the right. Secession failed in 1796, because, as the
secessionists themselves put it, "the common people did not
feel power slipping from their grasp, as the leaders did."
[idem, 101-104]
* * *
Democracy was always the object of New England's hate.
"A Democracy," wrote Dennis' Portfolio, "is scarcely
tolerable at any period. It is on trial here and the issue will
be civil war."
The war came in the 60s ; Democracy on one side. Imperialists on the other.
Fisher Ames said:
"Our country is too big for Union, too sordid for patriotism, too Democratic for liberty."
"Mr. Powell says:
"In all these efforts to sever the Union there was no
anti-slavery sentiment."
Nor was any anti-slavery sentiment mixed with all their hate
of the South. Federal hate of the Union and desire to secede
was based on fear and hate of Democracy.
Powell says:
"It must be borne in mind that not once in all this plotting
of 1803 and 1804 was the right of a State, or of a group
of States, to secede questioned. The only argument any
one made against secession was the unripeness of the common
people. Not one flash of loyalty to the Central Government.
Their intent was to create an oligarchy."
Why should there have been a flash of loyalty to the Central
Government? No party in America at that time thought that
more loyalty was due to the Union Government than to the State
Governments. This doctrine was never declared until Lincoln
inaugurated war on the South, on the pretext that she was
disloyal to the Union. Up to the very hour of that war Lincoln's
own party held that the South had the right to secede, the
right to independence. Lincoln, Seward, Wade of Ohio, Philips
of Massachusetts, and hosts of other hign Republican speakers
had publicly declared the South's right to secede..."
[idem p. 107]
* * *
"The Republican party had inherited from its progenitor, the
Federal, the idea of the South's feeble debility. Members
of that party invited United States Senators and Congressmen
to take their wives and daughters out to see the first fight of the
war, especially to "see the rebels run at sight of Union soldiers."
Everybody knows how the rebels ran at Bull Run.
Republican officers of the Union army have expressed their
opinion of the South's "feeble debility." General Don Piatt, a
Union officer, on this subject has this:
"The true story of the late war," wrote General Piatt,
in 1887, "has not yet been told. It probably never will be
told. It is not flattering to our people; unpalatable truths
seldom find their way into history. How rebels fought the
world will never know; for two years they kept an army
in the field that girt their borders with a fire that shriveled
our forces as they marched in, like tissue paper in a flame.
Southern people were animated by a feeling that the word
fanaticism feebly expresses. (Love of liberty expresses it.)
For two years this feeling held those rebels to a conflict in
which they were invincible. The North poured out its noble
soldiery by the thousands, and they fought well, but their
broken columns and thinned lines drifted back upon our
capital, with nothing but shameful disasters to tell of the
dead, the dying, the lost colors and the captured artillery.
Grant's road from the Rapidan to Richmond was marked
by a highway of human bones. The Northern army had
more killed than the Confederate Generals had in command."
"We can lose five men to their one and win," said Grant.
The men of the South, half starved, unsheltered, in rags, shoeless,
yet Grant's marches from the Rapidan to Richmond left
dead behind him more men than the Confederates had in the
field !
General Piatt speaks as follows of the "feeble debility" of a
Virginian General:
"It is strange," says Piatt, "what magic lingers about
the mouldering remains of Virginia's rebel leaders. Lee's
very name confers renown on his enemies. The shadow of
Lee's surrendered sword gives renown to an otherwise unknown
grave." (Grant's.)
[idem 117-118]
* * *
"Because of these fancied wrongs New England hated Democrats,
hated the South, hated the Union, was eager to leave it,
and fiercely wanted to war on the Southern people. Up to that
hour not one particle of anti-slavery sentiment was mingled with
New England's animosity, or with her desire to secede from the
Union. Up to the year 1815, with New England's insane hatred
of the Southern whites, she had not yet mixed an insane love for
Southern blacks. Up to that year New England's political
speakers, press and preachers, when referring to negroes, called
them "stupid Africans." "senseless blacks," or other names conveying
contempt and belief in negro inferiority.
In his work, "Nullification and Secession," E. P. Powell says :
"It is very partial partisan reading of American history
not to see that from the acceptance of the Constitution in 1790
there has been a tendency to assert the rights of States, and
the rights of States to sever relation to the Union. New
England, in 1803-04, tried to get five States to secede, New
York, New Jersey and the New England States. In 1812-14
New England practically withdrew from co-operation with
the Union."
[idem p.122]
* * *
"S. D. Carpenter, a close and critical student of political
events, in his invaluable work, The Logic of History, published
in 1864, says:
"The Northeastern States early sought to create prejudice
and disunion, not on account of any existing facts, but to
array section against section, to stimulate hatred and discord
for the purpose of accelerating their darling object, dissolution
of the Union and the establishment of a Northeastern Confederacy.
For years the disunionists of the North have manifested the boldness
of a Cromwell, the assiduity of beavers,
the cunning of a fox and the malignity of Iscariot."
Do not the extracts I have laid before the reader show determination
to arouse hatred of the Southern people? The reader
must never lose sight of the fact that Federal and Republican
hatred sprung from hatred of Democracy. The Union was hated
because the majority of men in the Union elected too many Democratic
Presidents. These Presidents, Washington, Jefferson,
Monroe and Madison, were hated and called the "Virginia dynasty."
A New Englander was the first man in the American
Congress to threaten disunion. January 11, 1811, Josiah Quincy,
of Massachusetts, from the floor of Congress declared:
"The purchase of Louisiana and the admission of that
State into the Union would be a virtual dissolution of the
Union, rendering it the right of all, as it becomes the duty of
some men to prepare definitely for the separation of the
States, amicably if they might, forcibly if they must."
[idem p.123]
* * *
"Even in 1796, while still engaged in the
slave traffic, while still bringing cargoes of negroes from Africa
and sending them South to be sold to rice and cotton planters,
this self-righteous New England had the gall to proclaim the lying
charge that the people of the South were barbarians, were a
"race of demons," and would "enjoy killing and eating negroes
if they liked the taste of black flesh" - eating negroes they, the
pious Puritans of New England, had stolen from Africa and
brought to this Western continent!"
[idem 130-131]
* * *
"The following extract, page 145, from one of a series of
pamphlets issued for circulation in Massachusetts in 1852, shows
New England's unabated animosity to the Union:
"Fidelity to the cause of human freedom and allegiance
to God require that the existing national compact should be
instantly dissolved; that secession from the Government is a
religious and a political duty."
In another paragraph of this same paper is the following emphatic
declaration: "To continue this disastrous alliance longer is
madness." In 1854 the dismembered Federals of New England and
the disorganized Whigs united and formed the Republican party.
These old disunionists under their new name took up the fight
on the three objects of New England's hate - Democracy, the
Union and the South - exactly where the Federals had ceased their
open fight in 1815. So far from New England's sentiments
having softened since that time, her three hates, under the lead of
Republicans, assumed the force and fury of insanity, as may be
seen in reports of speeches, sermons and lectures. Men of New
England who emigrated West carried with them all three hates,
and when the Republican party was organized they made haste to
enter its ranks and take up the work of disunion and secession.
These men of the new party possessed more zeal, more audacity,
more duplicity and less candor than their progenitors, the Federals.
These latter had always fought Democracy in the open;
the more astute Republicans saw that they could never win the
suffrages of the common people if they exposed their imperialistic
features, therefore from the day of their organization they fought
behind a mask. The Republican party never at any period took
the people into their confidence. But they affected high moral
ideas and benevolent principles, which won many to their ranks.
The old Federals had always spoken of negroes in contemptuous
terms. Republicans saw what an engine of power they could
make of slavery to batter, beat down and cover with false charges
and malignant calumnies the three objects of their hatred, and
most effective use they made of that engine. They either forgot or
ignored the fact that their own New England States were chiefly
responsible for the existence of that black curse on this Western
continent. Men of Massachusetts scrupled at no subterfuge, no
deception, no falsehood, in efforts to make the world believe their
own States were and ever had been free from the sin of slavery.
They pushed back out of sight the hideous fact that Massachusetts
men had built ships and sent them to Africa to bring back
cargoes of negroes, which they sold either in the West Indies, the
Bermudas or to Southern planters. The dreadful word, "Middle
Passage," with all its horrors, was seldom or never uttered or
written by a Massachusetts man. Men of New England affected
to believe only the Southern States were guilty of the sin of
slavery. Lecturers, historians and senators joined in this deceptive
work, and to this day falsehoods are told on this subject. Instance
the address delivered by Ambassador to England Choate
a few months ago to the Philosophic Society of Edinburg, Scotland.
Branching off from the main line of his address, Ambassador
Choate seized the occasion to enlighten the members of that
philosophical society on the subject of slavery in America.
"Negro slavery," said the Ambassador, "was firmly estab-
lished in the Southern States at an early period of their history.
In 1619 a Dutch ship discharged a cargo of African
slaves at Jamestown, Virginia. All through the colonial
period their importation continued. A few negroes found
their way up into the Northern States."
This is the way New England men "make and take their
history." "A few negroes found their way up into the Northern
States," and this from a descendant of Puritans who carried on
the slave traffic, importing negroes from Africa for over a hundred
years. The careful way Ambassador Choate phrases his
sentences to make them bear false witness is something to wonder
at, and the dishonesty involved is something to blush for. What
are the plain facts of history?
A Dutch ship did stop at Jamestown in 1619 and leave, not
a cargo, but eleven slaves, not one of which remained on Virginia
soil. Those eleven negro slaves had been brought from the Earl
of Warwick's plantation, on the Isle of Summers, one of the Bermudas.
Their owner, the Earl of Warwick, had them carried
back as soon as possible to his plantation on the Isle of Summers.
If the importation of negroes continued all during the colonial
period, New England ships carried on that importation, and
New England State kept up that importation until the year 1808.
Massachusetts went into the slave traffic as early as 1637. Chief
Justice Parsons declared from the bench that -
"Slavery was introduced into Massachusetts soon after
its first settlement."
Is it possible that Ambassador Choate is ignorant of these
facts?
George H. Moore, L.L.D., librarian of the New York Historical
Society, afterwards superintendent of the Lenox Library,
in "Notes on History of Slavery in Massachusetts," says:
"I charge nearly all the orators, historians, lawyers,
clergymen and statesmen of Massachusetts with either ignorance
of the facts of history or evading and falsifying them."
Mr. George W. Williams, Judge Advocate of the Grand
Army of the Republic of Ohio, in his "History of the Negro Race
in America," calls attention to the above charges of Mr. Moore
and comments thus:
"Despite the indisputable evidence of the legalized existence
of slavery in Massachusetts, the historians, lawyers,
clergymen, orators and statesmen of New England continue
to assert that slavery, though it did creep into the colony of
Massachusetts and did exist, it was not by force of any law,
as none such is known to have existed."
Moore says: "Massachusetts' first code of laws established
slavery in that colony, and, at the very birth of the foreign
commerce of New England, the African slave trade became a
regular business."
Yet in spite of indisputable evidence, showing that New
England from 1637 to 1808 was actively engaged in the slave
traffic, and that New England ships brought over cargoes of negroes
from Africa, discharged those left alive from the horrors
of the "Middle Passage" at New England ports, there to recuperate
before sending them South to be sold to the cotton and rice
planters, in spite of all this evidence, Ambassador Choate had the
hardihood to represent to his Scotch audience that the Northern
States were guiltless of the sin of slavery, and only a "few negroes
found their way up to Northern States." On June 28, 1854,
Charles Sumner, a son of Massachusetts, from the Senate floor,
made the false assertion that-
"In all her annals no person was ever born a slave on
the soil of Massachusetts."
I charge that men making such assertions were and are
either disgracefully ignorant of the facts of history or disgracefully dishonest.
In Elliott's "Debates in the Convention of 1787," Vol. I, pages
264-5, may be found the following story illustrative of Massachusetts character:
"The original committee of thirteen in 1787 recommended
that the constitutional license to the slave traffic should
cease at the period of 1800."
This not suiting some of New England's States at that time
engaged in the slave traffic, it was moved and seconded to amend
the report of the committee of eleven, entered on the journal of
August 21, 1787, as follows:
"To strike out the words eighteen hundred and insert
the words eighteen hundred and eight."
"This motion was seconded; the vote stood as follows:
"Yeas - New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts,
Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia."
"Nays - New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Vir-
ginia." (See Carpenter's Logic of History.)
By this it is seen that Massachusetts and two other New England
States, by their votes, procured the continuance of the damnable
slave traffic eight years longer than Virginia wanted it to
continue.
Dr. Dabney of Virginia states that it is estimated that in the
years from 1787 to 1808 new England's slave ships brought from
Africa and sold either to the South's planters or in the West
Indies one million slaves. Yet from that year, 1787, from the
very hour New England's three States voted to continue the slave
traffic, Massachusetts has held close about her her robe of self-righteousness,
scornfully saying to Virginia, "Stand back! I am
holier than thou!"
[idem 132-135]
* * *
"Hamilton's monarchic principles certainly made Lincoln's
work possible. Lincoln put in practice what Hamilton had advocated.
Hamilton made no concealment of his monarchic principles;
he preferred a monarchy such as England has, but failing
that he wanted a President for life and the Governors of States
appointed by the President. Until seated in the White House,
Lincoln talked Democracy and affected great esteem for Jefferson's Democratic principles.
As soon as he held in his grip the machinery of government,
he schemed for absolute power, and as soon as he was commander in chief
of nearly 3,000,000 armed men, no imperial despot in
pagan time ever wielded more autocratic power than did Abraham
Lincoln, and Republican writers of today are so imbued with
imperialism they laud and glorify Lincoln for his usurpation of
power.
Although well informed Republicans know that the war on
the South was waged neither to save the Union nor to free
slaves, it does not suit that party to be candid on this subject.
Now and then, however, some Republican forgets the party's
policy of secrecy and tells the truth. That boldly imperialistic
Republican journal, the Globe-Democrat, of St. Louis, in its issue
of April 9, 1900, had an article which uncovers facts, even to the
foundation stones, on which rested the war of the 60's. Consider
the following:
"Lincoln, Grant and the Union armies gave a victory
to Hamiltonism (Monarchy) when it subjugated the Confederates
(Democrats) in the South. (This is strictly true; it
was a victory over Democracy by Monarchy.) The cardinal
doctrines of Democracy are the enlargement of the power
of the States. All the predigious energies of the war could
not extinguish these. The lesson of the war was extreme
and extraordinary, and yet in a sense ineffective."
Ineffective, because it did not crush out the very life of
Democracy. Monarchists always appear to be ignorant of the
fact that there is a streak of divinity in Democracy which can not
be killed. Monarchy a thousand and ten thousand times has
fancied it has forever put an end to Democracy, but sooner or
later it rises up, fronts and fights for the rights of humanity with
all its power.
"The Democrats," continues the Globe-Democrat, "have
been since the war more strenuous than before in insisting
on the preservation of the power of the States."
[idem 136-137]
* * *
"August 23rd, 1851, the New Hampton, Massachusetts, Gazette
announced that a petition was circulating in that region for
the dissolution of the Unon, and that more than one hundred and
fifty names of legal voters had signed it. In 1854 New England
sent to Congress a petition, numerously signed, praying for the
dissolution of the Union, using these words:
"We earnestly request Congress to take measures for
the speedy, peaceful and equitable dissolution of the Union."
In 1854 John P. Hale, Chase and Seward voted to receive
and consider a petition demanding the dissolution of the Union.
These three men had long been anxious to break the Union to
pieces.
In 1848 Seward voted to receive a petition to dissolve the
Union, yet Seward was the man who urged Lincoln to begin war,
on the pretext of saving the Union. In 1857 a meeting was held
in Massachusetts, during which the question of war on the South
was discussed. Gerritt Smith, an ardent disunion Republican,
said:
"The time has not yet come to use physical force on the
South."
Mr, Langdon of Ohio in a speech said:
"Why preserve the Union? It is not worth preserving.
I hate the Union as I hate hell!"
Carpenter's Logic of History says in 1852 a series of pamphlets
were issued advocating disunion, from which is taken the
following:
"To longer continue this disastrous alliance (the Union)
is madness. Allegiance to God and fidelity to the cause of
freedom requires that the national compact shall be instantly
dissolved. Secession from the Government is a religious and political duty."
[idem 140-141]
* * *
"At a meeting in Boston, May, 1849, Wendell Phillips blazed
out in these words:
"We confess that we intend to trample on the Constitution of this country.
We of New England are not a law-abiding community. God be thanked for it!
We are disunionists;
we want to get rid of this Union." (Democratic Handbook,
page 72.)
At South Farmington, on July 5th, 1854, the United States
Constitution was publicly burned.
Mr. Seward despised the Constitution and called it a paper
kite. Beecher jeeringly called the Constitution a sheep-skin Govern-
ment.
May 16, 1863, resolutions passed by the Essex County mass-
meeting contained this:
"Resolved, That the war prosecuted to preserve a Union
and a Constitution which should never have existed and
which should be at once overthrown, is but a wanton waste
of property and a dreadful sacrifice of human life."
Horace Greeley said:
"All nations have their superstitions ; that of our people
is the Constitution."
Henry Ward Beecher said:
"A great many people raise a cry about the Union and
the Constitution. The truth is, it is the Constitution that is the
trouble; the Constitution has been the foundation of our
trouble."
The Boston Liberator, April 24, 1863, said:
"No act of ours do we regard with higher satisfaction
than when several years ago, on the 4th of July, in the presence
of a great assembly, we committed to the flames the Constitution
of the United States and burned it to ashes."
During Garfield's campaign, that outspoken Republican
paper, the Lemars (Ia.) Sentinel, voiced Republican principles as
follows:
"The Stalwarts do not care a fig for the Constitution, and
will trample it under foot today as did Lincoln and the Union
hosts from '61 to '65.
"The Constitution of the United States has been little
beside a curse and a hindrance. It is so today as much as
it has been at any time since it was framed. It is the barrier
now to the pathway of the nation."
The Wakefield (Kansas) Semi-Weekly, a Republican paper,
in August, 1880, wanted to destroy the Constitution,
"Let us," (said the Semi-Weekly) "tear up the present
Constitution by the roots, wipe out the same and the laws
and so-called Constitutions of every State in this Union. Let
the Stalwarts now make their grand attack on the United
States Senate, which is the bulwark of State sovereignty."
Seward despised the Constitution, but was careful not to
proclaim it to the people. Seward said to General Piatt:
"We are all bound by tradition to the tail end of a
paper kite called the Constitution. It is held up by a string."
"Why, Mr. Senator," said Piatt, in some heat, "you don't
believe that of our Constitution?"
"I certainly do," replied Seward, "but I generally keep
it to myself. Our Constitution is to us of the North a great
danger. The Southerners are using it as a shield."
[idem, 146-147]
* * *
General Piatt relates the following story,
which illustrates Lincoln's want of reverence for the Constitution.
When Amasa Walker, a distinguished New England financier,
thought of a scheme by which could be filled the Government
treasury, Mr. Davis Tailor went to Secretary Chase and laid before
him Amasa Walker's scheme. Chase heard him to the end
and then said:
"That is all very well, Mr. Tailor, but there is one little
obstacle in the way which makes the plan impracticable, and
that is the United States Constitution."
Mr. Tailor then went to President Lincoln and laid the matter
before him.
"Tailor," said Lincoln, "go back to Chase and tell him
not to bother himself about the United States Constitution..."
[idem, p. 20-21]
* * *
"Even before the organization of the Republican party, Mr.
Lincoln proclaimed his faith in the right of secession. On the
13th day of January, 1848, from the floor of Congress, Mr. Lincoln
declared for the right of States to secede from the Union.
"Any people anywhere," said Mr. Lincoln, "being inclined
and having the power, have the right to rise up and
shake off the existing government and to form one that
suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in
which the people of an existing government may choose to
exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may make
their own of such territory as they inhabit. More than this,
a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize,
putting down a minority intermingling with or near them
who oppose their movements." - Appendix to Congressional
Globe, 1st Session 30th Congress, page 94.
These words ring with the spirit of 1776. The South's secession
fulfilled every requirement laid down by Lincoln. The South
had the right and she exercised it with decency and dignity. She
did not rise up and shake off the Union Government in a turbulent
manner; she quietly withdrew. She did not, as New England did
in 1814, select a time to withdraw when it might endanger the
Union. She bade her old political associates a sorrowful farewell.
She assured them of her desire to remain at peace, and respectfully
asked them to make a just settlement of their partnership
affairs. Buchanan received those overtures in a friendly spirit;
so did the great body of the North's people. How did Lincoln
receive them? For six weeks Lincoln and Seward pursued an
ambiguous, deceitful course; they did not take the people of the
North into their confidence; they strove to deceive; they made
speeches now looking toward war, now toward peace. Lincoln
afterward said the hardest work he ever did was making these
speeches intended to deceive. Not until Lincoln was ready to
strike the first blow of war did he cry out to the South, "Rebel!
Traitor!" When he called for 75,000 armed men on the pretense
of defending his Capitol, he falsely asserted and deceived the
people of the North into the belief that the South was eager for
war, and intended to invade the North. Lincoln's war on the
South began with falsehoods and was run on falsehoods to the
bitter end.
[idem, p. 149]
* * *
"Senator Wade of Ohio was one of the highest lights in the
Republican party. Wade, as emphatically as Lincoln had done,
declared the right of secession, December 4th, 1856, from the
Senate floor Senator Wade of Ohio proclaimed the South's right
to secede as follows:
"I am not one," said Senator Wade, "to ask the South to
continue in such a Union as this. It would be doing violence
to the platform of the party to which I belong. We have
adopted the old Declaration of Independence as the basis
of our political movement, which declares that any people,
when their government ceases to protect their rights, have
the right to recur to original principles, and if need be to
destroy the government under which they live, and to erect
on its ruins another conducive to their welfare. I hold that
the people of the South have this right. I will not blame
any people for exercising this right whenever they think the
contingency has come. You can not forcibly hold men in
the Union, for the attempt to do so would subvert the first
principles of the Government under which we live." - Con.
Globe, 3d Session 34th Congress, page 25.
In all the long and woeful story of man's treachery to man
is there an instance of treachery blacker than this of which the
Republican party was guilty in the 60's? For more than 60 years
that party, first as Federals then as Republicans, had preached
and prayed for secession, had urged the South to secede, had
invited the South to aid it to break the Union asunder, had hated
and denounced the Union as a covenant with hell, yet, when at
last the Southern people, to escape the hate so long poured upon
them, peacefully, quietly withdrew from the Union, that same
Republican party turned on them with a fury, a vindictive ferocity,
a hellish animosity, not even savage and enraged tigers could
surpass.
[idem p. 150-151]
* * *
"With a treachery blacker than Benedict Arnold's, knowingly,
deliberately, these two men, Seward and Lincoln, determined
to change the American Government from a free Republic to
an imperial despotism. During the first month of
Lincoln's Presidency the question of war or peace was freely
discussed in the Cabinet. Few members were in favor of war.
Chase strongly opposed war. Chase always had been a disunionist;
he welcomed disunion and wanted to let the South possess
the peace and independence that was hers by right. Not one
single member of the Cabinet was ignorant of the fact that an
attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter would be the first blow of war.
In a discussion of this question in the Cabinet, Seward said:
"The attempt to reinforce Sumter will provoke an attack
and involve war. The very preparation for such an expedition
will precipitate war at that point. I oppose beginning
war at that point. I would advise against the expedition to
Charleston. I would at once, at every cost, prepare for war
at Pensacola and Texas. I would instruct Major Anderson
to retire from Sumter."
Lincoln preferred to open the war at Sumter. If there is
a man in America so ignorant as to believe the falsehood put
forth by these unscrupulous men that the South began the war,
that Lincoln was averse to war, that he called for 75,000 armed
men to protect Washington City, let him consider the story found
in Miss Tarbell's Life of Lincoln, page 144, Vol. II.
Medill, of the Chicago Tribune, tells the story, and Miss Tarbell puts it in
her book. It is a very valuable item of history, for it kills the
old, old lie so often told that the South began the war of the 60's.
"In 1864," relates Medill, "when the call for extra troops
came, Chicago revolted. Chicago had sent 22,000 and was
drained. There were no young men to go, no aliens except
what was already bought. The citizens held a mass meeting
and appointed three men, of whom I (Medill) was one, to
go to Washington and ask Stanton (the War Secretary)
to give Cook County a new enrollment. On reaching Washington
we went to Stanton with our statement. He refused.
Then we went to President Lincoln. 'I can not do it,' said
Lincoln, 'but I will go with you to Stanton and hear the
arguments of both sides.' So we all went over to the War
Department together. Stanton and General Frye were
there, and they both contended that the quota should not be
changed. The argument went on for some time, and was
finally referred to Lincoln, who had been silently listening.
When appealed to, Lincoln turned to us with a black and
frowning face: 'Gentlemen', he said, with a voice full of
bitterness, 'after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument
in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest
opposed the South, as New England opposed the South.
It is you, Medill, who is largely responsible for making
blood flow as it has. Yon called for war until you had it.
I have given it to you. What you have asked for you have
had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call
for more men, which I have made to carry on the war you
demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Go
home and raise your 6,000 men. And you, Medill, you
and your Tribune have had more influence than any other
paper in the Northwest in making this war. Go home and
send me those men I want.' "
Medill says that he and his companions, feeling guilty, left
without further argument. They returned to Chicago, and
6,000 more men from the working classes were dragged from
their homes, their families, forced into the ranks to risk limbs
and lives in a war they had no part in making, while the men
that forced that war on an unwilling people remained at home
in comfort and safety, and made enormous fortunes by the war.
Is it any wonder educated workingmen often become anarchists
and hate all governments?
Reflect, oh, reader, on Lincoln's words:
"You, Medill called for war. I have given you war.
What you asked for you have. You demanded war. I
(Lincoln) have given you what you demanded, and you, Medill,
are largely responsible for all the blood that has flowed."
[idem, p. 160-162]
* * *
"It is related that the last utterance that fell from Lincoln's lips was a gibe at the
crushed and conquered South.
"Shall the orchestra play Dixie?" he was asked as he sat
in his box in Ford's theatre that fatal night. "We have conquered the South,"
returned Lincoln gleefully, "we may as well take her music."
[Idem, p. 162]
* * *
"McClure says:
"Greeley's Tribune was the most widely read Republican
paper in the country, and was more potent in moulding Republican sentiment."
In a letter to Robert J. Walker, Lincoln said:
"Greeley is a great power: to have him firmly behind me
would be equal to an army of 100,000 men."
At no time did Lincoln have Greeley behind him. It is said -
Greeley was always a thorn in Lincoln's side. He was a very
large thorn in opposing the war, and after the war was on,
Greeley was a severe critic of Lincoln's methods of management. Any
Democrat as outspoken as Greeley would promptly have been
sent to prison. Before it was certain that Lincoln meant coercion,
day in and day out Greeley opposed coercion. In one issue
of his Tribune, Greeley said:
"If the cotton States decide that they can do better out of
the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace."
In another issue Greeley said:
"If eight States, having 5,000,000 people, choose to
separate from us, they cannot be permanently prevented by
cannon."
Greeley did not then dream it was the purpose of Lincoln
and Seward to change the form of the Union Government from
the principles of '76 to the monarchic strong Central Government
advocated by Hamilton, which would enable them forcibly to
hold the South in the Union.
On December 17, i860, the Tribune had this:
"The South has as good a right to secede from the
Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain.
I will never stand for coercion, for subjugation. It would
not be just."
This was good Democratic doctrine, but not yet was Lincoln
ready to arrest and imprison men for such utterances.
In the New York Tribune, December 17, i860, three days before
South Carolina seceded from the Union, Greeley had this:
"If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession
from the British Empire of 3,000,000 of colonists in
1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession
of 5,000,000 of Southerners from the Federal Union in
1860."
Democracy of this sort was hard to bear, but still Lincoln
and Seward were silent.
In the Tribune of February 23. 1861, five days after Jefferson
Davis was inaugurated President of the Southern Confederacy, Greeley's Tribune had this:
"If the cotton States or the gulf States choose to
form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right
to do so. If the great body of the Southern people have
become alienated from the Union and wish to escape from
it, we will do our best to forward their views."
When Greeley wrote these articles, in his heart was a strong
sense of Democratic justice. Greeley knew that for over twenty
years his own party had done and said everything the bitterness
of hate could devise to alienate the Southern States and
drive them out of the Union. He knew that his party, day in
and day out, for years had been hurling on Southern men and
women every species of calumny and insult the English language
could convey. He knew his party was extremely anxious
to have the South secede. He knew that the foremost men of
his party had publicly invited the men of the South to join them
in measures to break up the Union. Democratic doctrines of this
nature daily appearing in the Republican party's most influential
paper greatly annoyed and alarmed Lincoln and Seward, but
not yet had the time arrived to apply the thumb screws of force.
The Tribune continued to give forth what war Republicans called Democratic screeches.
On November 5, 1860, in his Tribune, Greeley said:
"Whenever a considerable section of our Union is resolved
to go out of the Union, we shall resist all coercive
measures to keep them in. We hope never to live in a Republic
when one section is pinned to another by bayonets.
Those who would rush on carnage to defeat the separation
demanded by the popular vote of the Southern people would
clearly place themselves in the wrong."
On March 2, 1861, in the Tribune, Greeley had this:
"We have repeatedly said, and we once more say, the
great principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence,
that Governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed, is sound and just. If the Southern
people choose to secede and found an independent
government of their own, they have the moral right to do
so."
This was the last trumpet-toned blast from Greeley. Lincoln
and Seward were now ready to act. "This must be stopped
or it will stop us," muttered the man whose foot was on the
step of the first American throne. "Give me a little bell," returned
his high chief counselor, "and I'll ring for the arrest of
every Democratic screecher." What measures were used to
silence Greeley, or rather to make him sing an entirely different
tune, may never be known, but they were effective. The
change was made in a single night. On the morning following
his strongest Democratic utterance, Greeley completely reversed
his position, and thenceforth the pages of the Tribune
were freely besprinkled with words grown obsolete under Democracy's
rule - words native to kingly climes - rebel, traitor,
treason, loyal, disloyal, truly loyal, etc. Under cover of darkness
Greeley cut loose forever from the principles of 1776, and
fled to the camp of the men who represented the dogmas of
George III of England. He became not only the advocate of
those dogmas, but the ally and servitor of the men who rushed
on carnage. He not only upheld the wrong he had so eloquently
denounced, but viciously turned on the victims of that wrong,
traduced and maligned them to excuse his own ignoble and cowardly
abandonment of sacred principles.
After the war ended
Greeley wrote a book called the "American Conflict," and as if to
justify his change from the principles of '76 to the doctrine of
imperialism, he affected to believe that the South had fought for
slavery and the Republican party to destroy slavery. No man
in America better than Greeley knew that the South fought for
precisely the same principles for which the colonies of '76 had
fought - independence. No man better than Greeley knew that
Lincoln inaugurated war from precisely the same motives which
made George III of England wage war on the colonies - conquest.
To sustain the falsehood that the South fought for
slavery, Greeley plentifully besprinkled the pages of his book
with words intended to convey the idea that slavery was the
animus, the germ of the war. The words "rebels, traitors,
slave-holders' rebellion, slave-holders' war, slave-holders'
treason," stare out from every page of Greeley's book. No
man better than Greeley knew it was no more the slave-holders'
war than was the war of '76. Greeley knew that the great
body of the South's people almost to a unit wanted independence,
and fought to gain it. He knew that the great body of the
South's people were not slave-holders. Blair, of Maryland, a
close friend of Lincoln, on this subject said:
"It is absurd to say this is the slave-holders' war. In
all the South are only about 250,000 slave holders. These
rich men are not too eager for war. It is the Southern
people's war. The people want independence and mean to
get it if they can."
[idem, p. 163-166]
* * *
Instance the Gettysburg Address, now thought
to be the finest specimen of American oratory. Lamon, who
heard it, describes its effect on Lincoln's audience as follows:
"Mr. Lincoln," says Lamon in his "Recollections of
Lincoln," said to me, 'I tell you, Lamon, that speech was
like a wet blanket on the audience. I am distressed about
it.' "
On the platform, the moment after Mr. Lincoln's speech
was concluded, Mr. Seward asked Mr. Everett, the orator of the
day, what he thought of the President's speech. Mr. Everett
replied: "It is not what I expected. I am disappointed. What
do you think of it, Mr. Seward?" The response was, "He
has made a failure." In the face of these facts it has been repeatedly
published that this speech was received by the audience
with loud demonstrations of approval, that -
"Amid the tears, sobs and cheers it produced in the excited
throng, the orator of the day (Mr. Everett) turned to
Mr. Lincoln, grasped his hand and exclaimed, "I congratulate y
ou on your success," adding in a transport of heated
enthusiasm, "Mr. President, how gladly would I give my
hundred pages to be the author of your twenty lines!" Nothing
of the kind ever occurred. The silence during the delivery
of the speech, the lack of hearty demonstrations of
approval after its close, were taken by Mr. Lincoln as certain
proof that it was not well received. In that opinion we
all shared. I state it as a fact and without fear of contradiction,
that this famous Gettysburg speech was not regarded
by the audience to whom it was addressed, or by the press
and people of the United States, as a production of extraordinary
merit, nor was it commented on as such until after the
death of Mr. Lincoln."
— Lamon's Recollections of Lincoln, p. 173.
It is now said that Lamon's "Life of Lincoln" is fast disappearing
from the face of the earth; that the same agency which
swept out of existence Herndon's "Life of Lincoln" is fast pursuing
the same course with Lamon's book. Is this because Republicans
do not want their apotheosizing romances about Mr.
Lincoln exposed and corrected, as Lamon exposed and corrected
the twaddle about the Gettysburg speech?
[idem, p. 175-176]
* * *
Not until after Lincoln and Seward held in their grip all
the machinery of Government, and felt certain they could carry
out their purpose of conquering the South, did the Republican
party begin to use the words:
Rebel! Rebellion! Traitor! Treason!
The great numbers of the North's people who opposed the
war suddenly became traitors; any and every word of opposition
became treason; arbitrary arrests and imprisonments began, and
a pall of blackest despotism spread over the land. Greeley's
Tribune April 15, 1861, had this:
"The day before Sumter was surrendered two-thirds of
the newspapers in the North opposed coercion in any shape
or form, and sympathized with the South. These papers
were the South's allies and champions. Three-fifths of the
entire American people sympathized with the South. Over
200,000 voters opposed coercion, and believed the South had
the right to secede."
Think of this, men of America! Think how easy it is for
an American President elected to serve and carry out the will of
the people; how easy it is to make himself the master of the people,
and force them to do his will, contrary to their own.
[Idem p.181]
* * *
The Journal of Commerce fought coercion until the United
States mail refused to carry the papers, in 1861. The New York
Daily News continued to denounce the Republican party as a
blood-thirsty set, advocating wholesale murder, as vultures gloating
over carnage, until the freedom of the press was suppressed.
John A. Logan, in Great Conspiracy, page 551, describes a
gathering at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's home, in June of
1863, of nearly 100,000 anti-war Democrats, which utterly repudiated
the war. There was open and avowed hostility to Lincoln
in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and of strong opposition
in New Jersey. So violent was the hostility to war in
Massachusetts and New York, the call for volunteers was unheeded,
and when the Government demanded a draft, the people
gathered in crowds and fearful riots ensued. In New York City
the opposition was so violent, the rioters so numerous, the city
was terrified for days and nights. The houses in which the draft
machines were at work were wrecked and then burned to
ashes. The police were powerless to restrain the immense gatherings
of men and women who walked the streets day and night.
The order for the draft was rescinded by the Washington Government,
the people urged to disperse and retire to their homes,
which they did, as they thought, on the promise that there would
be no more drafting. But that treacherous Government, as soon
as the people returned to their daily work, sent a large body
of soldiers to overawe them, and again the accursed machines
were set to work, and again the wheels began to turn, until the
required number of men were secured. In this way men were
forced to fight a people toward whom they had no animosity, and
for a Government they knew was blackly despotic.
[idem p. 181-182]
Lincoln's troops put down fellow-Yankees rioting in New York
* * *
In 1864 the opposition to the war and to Lincoln was violent
and bitter, and almost universal. Tarbell describes the people's
feelings of that year as follows:
"In 1864 the awful brutality of the war came upon the
people as never before. There was a revolution of feeling
against the sacrifice going on. All the complaints that had
been urged against Mr. Lincoln broke out afresh; the draft
was talked of as if it were the arbitrary freak of a tyrant.
It was declared that Lincoln had violated constitutional
rights, declared that he had violated personal liberty, and
the liberty of the press. It was said that Lincoln had been
guilty of all the abuses of a military dictatorship. Much
bitter criticism was made of his treatment of the South's
peace commissioners. It was declared that the Confederates
were anxious to make peace. It was declared that Lincoln
was so blood-thirsty he was unwilling to use any means
but force. The despair, the indignation of the country in
this dreadful time was all centered on Mr. Lincoln."
Republican writers give positive evidence that every one
of the above charges was true. President Lincoln -
Had violated personal liberty.
Had violated constitutional rights.
Had violated the liberty of the press.
Had been guilty of all the abuses of a military dictator.
Had repulsed the Confederate peace commissioners.
Had refused to use any means except bloody force to attain
peace.
No man who reads Republican history can deny one of the
above charges.
[idem p. 186-187]
* * *
Lalor's Encyclopedia states that the records of the Provost Marshal's
office in Washington show that 38,000 political prisoners filled
the bastiles of America. These men were accused of no crime,
of no offense known to the law of the land. They were Democrats.
All Democrats were "suspects." Stanton and Seward
were commissioned by Lincoln to arrest and imprison "suspects."
Rhodes thinks Lalor's estimate of 38,000 is exaggerated, but
when one considers it was the nature of Seward and Stanton to
revel in the use of power, and that neither of these men ever
gave one sign of possessing the quality of mercy, pity or justice,
one can more easily believe that Lalor underrates more than overrates
the number of victims.
[idem p.190]
* * *
E. C. Ingersoll, candidate for Congress during
Lincoln's life, in a public speech, joyously announced the advent
of despotism and the overthrow of American liberty, using the
following words:
"President Lincoln is now clothed with power as full as
that of the Czar of Russia. It is now necessary for the people
of this country to become familiar with that power and
with Lincoln's right to use it."
The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher welcomed despotism with
a broad, smiling face and open arms. In a public address this
so-called follower of the Christ, who taught the Democratic doctrine
of equal rights, spoke as follows:
"I know it is said President Lincoln is not the Government,
that the Constitution is the Government. What! A
sheep-skin parchment a government? President Lincoln and
his Cabinet are now the Government, and men have now
got to take their choice whether they will go with their Government or against it."
[idem p. 193]
* * *
When the people in the Northern States became alarmed at
President Lincoln's bold usurpation of power and began to loudly
murmur at his arbitrary arrests of influential citizens and their
imprisonment in distant forts, John W. Forney, Secretary of
the Senate and close friend of Lincoln's, through the Philadelphia
Press, spurred on Lincoln to further outrages on the people's liberties.
As a sample of Forney's advice, I give the following from
the Philadelphia Press:
"Silence every tongue; seal every mouth that does not
speak with respect of our cause (conquest of the South)
and of our flag. Let us cease to talk of safeguards, of laws
and restrictions, of dangers to liberty."
In Bancroft's Life of Seward, published in 1899, he gives
some account of Mr. Seward's illegal arrests. On page 276, Bancroft says:
"Arbitrary arrests and imprisonments were made to
prevent, rather than to punish treason. Of course it would
have been unsafe to be frank about such a thing"
Despots never think it safe to be frank about their deeds of
despotism. Men were not arrested and imprisoned for what
they had done, but for what possibly they might do.
[idem p. 196]
* * *
Mr. Bancroft says:
"The least excusable feature of these arrests was the
treatment of the prisoners. Month after month they were
crowded together in gloomy, damp casemates, where even
the dangerous pirates captured on the South's privateers
(the South had no pirates) and the soldiers taken in battle
ought not to have remained long. Many had committed
no overt act. Many were editors and politicians of good
character and honor. It (the power to make illegal arrests)
offered rare opportunities for the gratification of personal
enmity and the display of power by United States
Marshals and military officers. Seward cannot be blamed
for this."
Bancroft here assumes that Seward, Stanton and Lincoln
were not as likely to abuse the power of arrest as United States
Marshals and military officers. The assumption is worthy of
a simpleton. Every arrest ordered by Seward, Stanton and Lincoln
was inspired by personal or political spite. These three
men were peculiarly vindictive toward any man they even suspected
of opposing their cruel war policy. General Piatt, who
well knew this triumvirate of despots, said of two of them:
"Seward and Stanton fairly rioted in the enjoyment of
power. They reveled in the use of power. Stanton was
more vindictive in his dislikes than any man ever called to
public station."
[idem p. 197]
* * *
"The person arrested," says Mr. Bancroft, "was usually
seized at night. It was found best to take prominent men far
from friends and sympathizers. They were usually taken
to Fort Warren or other remote places. In some cases from
one to three months elapsed before the case of the arrested
man was looked at. As a rule prisoners were not told why
they were arrested. The arrested men were deprived of their
valuables, money, watches, rings, etc., and locked up in
casemates usually crowded with men who had similar experiences.
If any prisoner wished to send for relatives,
friends, or an attorney, they were told that any prisoner who
sought the aid of an attorney would greatly prejudice his
case. Appeals to Seward, Lincoln or Stanton a second,
third or fourth time were all useless."
[idem p. 198]
* * *
On August 8, 1862, Stanton issued an order under which
many thousand men were kidnapped, hurried off to the nearest
military post or depot, and placed on military duty. The expense
of the arrest, the conveyance to such post, also the sum of five dollars
reward to the men who made the arrest, were deducted from
the arrested man's poor pay while serving in the ranks. Is it
any wonder that, as Stanton told Piatt, there was great dissatisfaction
in the Union army, and great dislike of Lincoln among
the common soldiers?
[idem p. 199]
* * *
In 1863 the New York Herald advocated Grant for the Presidency.
The great majority of the Republican leaders wanted
a change. Lincoln knew of all these efforts.
"The despair, the indignation of the country in this
dreadful year (1863) all centered on Lincoln. The Republicans
were hopeless of re-electing him. Amid this dreadful
uproar of discontent, one cry alarmed Lincoln - the cry that
Grant should be presented for the Presidency."
[idem p 202]
* * *
Lincoln himself believed he would be defeated. On August
23, 1864. Lincoln, fully understanding the danger, put on record
his belief that he would be defeated. In a speech bitterly denouncing
Lincoln at a Republican meeting in Boston, Wendell
Phillips went so far as to say, "Lincoln and his Cabinet are
treasonable. Lincoln and Stanton should be impeached."
The Chicago Tribune denounced Lincoln as the author of
the negro riots. So eager was Lincoln for a second term, so
intense his anxiety, it showed in his face. Miss Tarbell describes
his looks during that period, 1863-4:
"Day by day," says Miss Tarbell, "he grew more hag-
gard, the lines in his face deepened, it became ghastly gray
in color. Sometimes he would say, 'I shall never be glad
again.' When victory was assured a change came at once.
His form straightened up, his face cleared; never had he seemed so glad."
Yet in the face of all this evidence of Lincoln's unpopularity,
it now suits Republicans to assert that Lincoln was trusted
and beloved during his lifetime.
[idem p. 203]
* * *
The election day was November 8, 1864. Lincoln
had sent agents to New York City to spy out and report how the
election would go. The report boded ill for Lincoln's success;
in fact, indicated that New York would give a large majority for
General McClellan. Lincoln, Seward and Stanton were alarmed.
The latter instantly telegraphed General Butler to report to him
at once. Butler rushed to Washington, and Stanton explained
the situation at New York.
"What do you want me to do?" asked Butler.
"Start at once for New York, take command of the Department
of the East, relieving General Dix. I will send you
all the troops you need."
"But," returned Butler, "it will not be good politics to
relieve General Dix just on the eve of election."
"Dix is a brave man," said Stanton, "but he won't do
anything; he is very timid about some matters."
This meant that General Dix was too honorable to use the
United States Army to control and direct elections.
"Send me," suggested the shrewd Butler, "to New York
with President Lincoln's order for me to relieve Dix in my
pocket, but I will not use the order until such time as I think
safe. I will report to Dix and be his obedient servant, and
coddle him up until I see proper to spring on him my order,
and take supreme command myself."
"Very well," assented Stanton; "I will send you Massachusetts troops."
"Oh, no!" objected the shrewder Butler, "it won't do for
Massachusetts men to shoot down New Yorkers."
Stanton saw this also would be bad politics, so Grant was
ordered to send Western troops — 5,000 good troops and two
batteries of Napoleon guns — for the purpose of shooting down
New Yorkers should New Yorkers persist in the evil intention
of voting for McClellan.
When the citizens of New York saw Butler and his escort
proudly prancing their horses on the streets and saw the arrival
of 5,000 Western troops and the Napoleon guns, there was great
agitation and uneasiness over the city. Newspapers charged that
these warlike preparations were made to overawe citizens and
prevent a fair election. Butler was virtuously indignant at such
charges. General Sanford, commanding the New York State
militia, called on Butler and told him the State militia was strong
enough to quell any disturbance that might occur and he intended
to call out his militia division on election day. Butler arrogantly
informed General Sanford that he (Butler) had no use for New
York militia; he did not know which way New York militia
would shoot when it came to shooting.
[idem, p 204-205]
* * *
In the Albany address reference was made to the suspension of the habeas corpus.
To this Mr. Lincoln replied as follows:
"The suspension of the habeas corpus was for the purpose
that men may be arrested and held in prison who cannot
be proved guilty of any defined crime "
Reflect on these words, O, you men of America! You who
forget that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." You who,
with child-like innocence, rest in the belief that the future has no
dangers for American liberties. But even the above declaration
of Lincoln's is not the worst.
"Arrests," wrote President Lincoln to that Albany committee
of Democrats, "are not made so much for what has
been done as for what possibly might be done. The man
who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government
is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered
(by arrest, imprisonment, or death) he is sure to help
the enemy."
Is it any wonder under rulings like this that 38,000 arbitrary
arrests threw 38,000 innocent men and women into American bastiles
to languish for months or years, and many therein to die?
[idem p. 212]
* * *
"Much more," wrote the President of the United States,
"if a man talks ambiguously, talks with 'buts' and 'ifs' and
'ands' he cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered (by imprisonment or death)
this man will actively commit treason.
Arbitrary arrests are not made for the treason defined in the
Constitution, but to prevent treason."
In "Recollections of the War," page 236, Charles A. Dana
records the arbitrary arrest, by order of President Lincoln, in one
day, of ninety-seven of the leading citizens of Baltimore, and
their imprisonment, mostly in solitary confinement. Not one of
these men had committed or was charged with having committed
any offense known to the law of the land. Nor is there the
least evidence showing that any one of the ninety-seven men had
used the "ifs" and "ands" and "buts" so offensive to Mr. Lincoln's
sensitive soul. The fear that they might possibly at some
future time mutter or speak aloud the dangerous "ifs" and "buts"
and "ands" caused the arrest and imprisonment of the ninety-seven men
of Baltimore. In the darkest days of President Lincoln's
despotic rule, Governor Seymour, of New York, had the
courage to condemn and denounce that rule. In a speech referring
to arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, Seymour said :
"In Great Britain the humblest hut is to its occupant a
castle impregnable to the monarch. In our country the most
unworthy underling of power is licensed to break within the
sacred precincts of our homes and drag men out and cast
them in dungeon cells."
The men who wielded this power reveled in its possession.
Seward is the man who, with a sardonic smile, said to Lord
Lyons:
"My Lord, I can touch the bell at my right and order the
arrest of a man in Ohio; I can again touch the bell and order
the arrest of a man in New York, and no power on earth save
that of the President can release them. Can the Queen of
England do as much?"
"No," replied the astonished Englishman. "Were she to
attempt such an act her head would roll from her shoul-
ders."
These three men - Lincoln, Seward and Stanton - proudly
boasted that they held more power over the people of America
than any monarch since the reign of the Stuarts had wielded
over the English people. No man need be surprised at the Republican
party's open and insolent usurpation of power. A thousand
times had the speakers of that party publicly declared their
contempt and hatred of the Union, of the Constitution, of the
laws of the land.
The New York Evening Post reported that the great Republican
preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, in a speech, said to his audience:
"I believe that Sharp's rifle is a truly moral agency.
There is more moral power in one of these instruments than
in a hundred Bibles."
[idem 213-214]
* * *
As illustrative of Mr. Lincoln's peculiar character I give the
following story: When almost in despair of re-election Lincoln
wrote General McClellan an autograph letter, which he sent by
Mr. Blair, proposing to pay him (McClellan) roundly if he would
withdraw from the canvass and leave the field clear for Lincoln's
running. The compensation Lincoln offered was the immediate
appointment of McClellan General of the army, and the appointment
of McClellan's father-in-law, Mr. Marcy, Major General,
and the substantial recognition of the Democratic party. This
was a brilliant bait, but the fish did not bite. General McClellan
promptly refused. The story of the affair is related in Lamon's
Recollections of Lincoln, edited by his daughter Dorothy. McClellan
was the chosen nominee of the Democratic party at that
time; the times boded success to Democracy. Neither Lincoln or
Lamon seemed to perceive the baseness involved in the transaction
which Lincoln proposed. If Lincoln believed that McClellan
was the best man to be at the head of the army, was it not base to
make his appointment a matter of bargain and sale? Was not
Lincoln's offer to bribe McClellan to betray the trust his own
party had put in him when it nominated him for the Presidency
as gross an insult as one man could offer another? Instead of
seeing this, poor Lamon laments that General McClellan had not
the patriotism to accept Lincoln's offer.
[idem p. 215]
* * *
Those who best know Mr. Lincoln assert that he not only
was indifferent to the future of the African race, but disliked
negroes as a race, and had little or no faith in their capability of
development. At no period of his life was he in favor of bestowing
upon them political or social equality with the white race.
General Don Piatt, a fervent Abolitionist, sounded Mr. Lincoln
on this question:
"I found," says Piatt, "that Mr. Lincoln could no more
feel sympathy for that wretched race than he could for the
horse he worked or the hog he killed. Descended from the
poor whites of the South, he inherited the contempt, if not the
hatred, held by that class for the negro."
In his Life of Lincoln, page 236, Lamon says, in 1846, in a
speech, Mr. Lincoln-
"Imputed to Van Buren, a Democrat, the great sin of
having voted in the New York State Convention for negro
suffrage with a property qualification. Douglas denied the
imputation, but Lincoln proved it to the injury of Van Buren."
On page 334 of Lamon's Life of Lincoln is this:
"None of Mr. Lincoln's public acts, either before or after
he became President, exhibit any special tenderness for the
African race, or commiseration of their lot. On the contrary
he invariably, in words and deeds, postponed the interest of
the negro to the interest of the whites. When from political
and military considerations he was forced to declare the freedom
of the enemy's slaves, he did so with avowed reluctance;
he took pains to have it known he was in no wise affected by
sentiment. He never at any time favored the admission of
negroes into the body of the electors in his State, or in the
States of the South. He claimed that those negroes set free
by the army were poor spirited, lazy and slothful; that they
could only be made soldiers by force, and would not be ever
willing laborers at all; that they seemed to have no interest in
the cause of their own race, but were as docile in the service
of the rebellion as the mule that ploughed the fields or drew
the baggage trains. As a people, Lincoln thought negroes
would only be useful to those who were at the same time their
masters, and the foes of those who sought their good. He
wanted the negro protected as women and children are. He
had no notion of extending the privilege of governing to the
negro. Lincoln always contended that the cheapest way of
getting rid of the negro was for the Nation to buy the slaves
and send them out of the country."
General Don Piatt says:
"Lincoln well knew that the North was not fighting to
free slaves, nor was the South fighting to preserve slavery.
In that awful conflict slavery went to pieces."
Lincoln himself gives testimony on this slavery question.
Herndon said when Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation
there was no heart in it. Every one remembers Lincoln's
letter to Greeley, in which he frankly declared that whatever he
did for or with negroes, he did to help him save the Union; that
is, to conquer the South.
"My paramount object," wrote Lincoln to Greeley, "is to
save the Union, and not either destroy or save slavery. If I
could save the Union without freeing the slaves, I would do
it. If I could save the Union by freeing some and leaving
others in slavery, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing
all, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the colored
race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."
Yet this man had been put in office by a party which hated
and despised the Union. On another occasion Lincoln wrote:
"I have no purpose to introduce political or social equality
between the white and black race. There is a physical
difference between the two which probably will forever
forbid their living together on the same footing of equality.
I, as well as any other man, am in favor of the race to which
I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary."
Simon Cameron. Lincoln's first Secretary of War, wrote
General Butler, then in New Orleans:
"President Lincoln desires the right to hold slaves to be
fully recognized. The war is prosecuted for the Union, hence
no question concerning slavery will arise."
In his inauguration Lincoln said:
"I have no lawful right to interfere with slavery directly
or indirectly; I have no inclination to do so."
Mr. Wendell Phillips said that Lincoln was badgered into
issuing the emancipation proclamation, and that after it was
issued, Lincoln said it was the greatest folly of his life. That
much lauded instrument speaks for itself. It plainly proves that
its writer had not the least heart in the business of freeing slaves.
Had he taken any joy in the work, would he have bestowed the
boon of freedom only on those negroes still under the rule of the
Confederacy, leaving the large number in those States and parts
of States under his own control in the bondage they were born in?
When General Grant was Colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois
Infantry he expressed himself plainly on the negro question:
"The sole object of this war," said Grant, "is to restore
the Union. Should I become convinced it has any other object,
or that the Government designs using its soldiers to execute
the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge you my honor
as a man and a soldier I would resign my commission and
carry my sword to the other side."
— Democratic Speaker's Handbook, p. 33.
On May 29, 1863, Mr. F. A. Conway, Congressman from
Kansas, wrote to the New York Tribune, as follows:
"The independence of the South is now an established
fact. The war for the future becomes simply an instrument
in the hands of the political managers to effect results to their
own personal ends unfavorable to the cause of freedom. It is
now assumed that the Union is the object paramount over
every other consideration. Every institution is now of small
importance. Slavery must give way, or not give way; must
be strangled, or given new lease of life with increased power,
just as the exigencies of the North may require. This has
now become the doctrine of life-long Abolitionists. Gerritt
Smith, Raymond and other men want power and care for
nothing else. For the sake of power they would kill all the
white people in the South, or take them to their arms. They
would free all the slaves or make their bondage still more
helpless; they would do anything wicked for the sake of
power."
Never were truer words spoken or written than these by that
zealous Abolition Congressman Conway of Kansas. In Herndon's
suppressed Life of Lincoln, he said:
"When Lincoln issued the proclamation to free the slaves
there was no heart in the act."
[idem p. 217-220]
* * *
The Reconstruction Period - Hate and Cruelty.
The full horrors of this dreadful period have never been portrayed.
God knows the South was hated enough before and during
the war, but after the conquest, as she lay disarmed at the
feet of her conquerors, wounded almost unto death, the vengeful
ferocity of Republicans was something to wonder at. The
events of that period deserve a volume to themselves.
Does the reader want to know how the sub-despots appointed
by Grant ruled the people of the South? To this day that rule
is referred to as the "horrors of the reconstruction period."
After the military had full possession of all the offices of the
civil courts, from the highest down, malignant bullies
everywhere in power, a reign of terror set in almost
equal to the awful days of the French Revolution. Every
day numbers of the best citizens arrested on the
most frivolous charges, or no charge whatever, hands
and feet fettered as felons, dragged hundreds of miles away from
homes and friends, were thrown into dungeon cells, in which they
lay months or years in solitary confinement unless death ended
their suffering. These prisoners were not permitted to see
friends, relatives or counselor-at-law. During their long imprisonment,
miserably fed, cursed, abused by jailers, tried by military
commissioners, many died, many were condemned and sentenced
for life to the Dry Tortugas - condemned on evidence no court of
justice would have received. It was noticed that the military
courts seemed to feel special antipathy to young men, to beardless
boys - sons of the best citizens. The suffering of these youths in
prison, their tortures in the Dry Tortugas, they knew would inflict
the keenest anguish on the hearts of parents and relatives.
The Montgomery (Ala.) Mail, speaking of the large number of
innocent young men sent to the Dry Tortugas, thus describes that
place of torment:
"At the Dry Tortugas the prisoners' heads are shaved.
They have to labor under a torrid sun upon a sand bank in
the midst of the ocean, with balls and chains about their legs.
The men who command the prisoners are amenable to the
laws of neither God or man. Col. Grental, a soldier, was tied
up by his thumbs, and treated with every species of cruelty
and barbarity. The laws are silent and newspapers dumb.
The prisoner who enters the Dry Tortugas leaves liberty,
justice, hope, behind him. Large numbers of young Southern men,
for any or no offense, in what is called the reconstruction
period, are arrested, go through the farce of a
drumhead trial, presided over by men who take a fiendish delight
in torturing any Southern man or woman, nearly always
found guilty, and sentenced for life to the Dry Tortugas. The
lips of the Alabama journals are pinned together with bayonets.
Our hands are fastened in iron cuffs. We dare not
speak the whole truth. If we did our paper would be suppressed,
our business ruined, our wives and children brought
to want."
Neither the despot Grant nor his sub-despots ever forgot the
press. Every officer and private in that army of despotism kept
a sharp eye on newspapers, and were quick to apply the muzzle
if any paper dared make public their evil deeds. Despotism is a
noxious plant, which hates the light and flourishes only in dark
places. A few samples will show how despots muzzled the press
in the South: On November 15, 1867, a file of soldiers entered
the office of the Vicksburg Times, arrested the editor, dragged
him to jail. McArdle's offense was having reported in the paper
a despotic order made by General Ord, and comparing the situation
of the South with that of Poland. McArdle was tried by a
military commission (always organized to convict) and condemned.
Being a man of talent he took an appeal, but all the influence
of the military was against him. The case dragged on for years
before a final decision, which I have failed to find.
Early on the morning of August 8, 1867, a body of soldiers
forced their way into the office of the Constitutional Eagle, published
at Camden, Ark., seized, carried off and destroyed all the
material of the office. Col. C. C. Gilbert, the small despot commanding
the Union soldiers at Camden, justified the acts of his
men, saying to the editor:
"An article in your paper unnecessarily exasperated my
soldiers. The press may censure the servants of the people,
but the military are not the servants of the people, but their
masters. It is a great impertinence for a newspaper in this
State to comment on the military under any circumstances."
— The Democratic Speaker and Handbook.
The comment which unnecessarily exasperated the soldiers
was a statement that when drunk the soldiers were in the habit
of indecently exposing their persons on the street when ladies
were passing. The National Intelligencer of Washington City
commented on the rule of the military satraps in the South, as
follows:
"Without any proof whatever four respectable citizens
were arrested and confined in separate cells in Atlanta, denied
all communication with friends, save under military surveillance,
denied all opportunity to confer with legal counsel.
Two white men in Fort Pulaski were confined in cells and denied
all access to friends or legal counsel. These six men
were brought out of their dungeons, hurried to trial for their
lives before a military commission, one of those institutions,
Mr. Webster said, always organized to convict. The statement
of facts is sufficiently horrible and damnable to every
officer and agent concerned in it. But this is only a part of
the infamous record. While these men are immured in dungeons,
cut off from all access to friends or counsel, their enemies,
with artful and incessant malice, have been busy in procuring
false testimony, and the uniform of the nation is degraded by
the military arrest of ignorant negroes, dragging
them by force before a military board, and then by threats
and curses, starvation and solitary confinement, endeavor to
extort from them false testimony upon which the lives of
innocent men may be taken away. The testimony we publish
to-day establishes these facts, and shows the character
of the government under which the people of the South
now live."
— Democratic Handbook and Speaker, page 162.
These military lords permitted the farce of elections, if carried
on under military control. Armed battalions of negroes and
Federal white men surrounded the voting places. In vain Democrats
issued protests against these outrages. In the House of Congress
Mr. Brooks, in behalf of the Democratic members, offered
a powerful protest.
"The military," said the protest, "have been used to destroy
States. The General of the army (Grant), representing
the sword, and only the sword (he represented a whiskey bottle
also), has been exalted by acts of Congress above the
constitutional Commander in Chief (the President) of the
Army and Navy, in order to execute these military decrees
and root out every vestige of constitutional law and liberty.
To prolong and perpetuate this military rule in the North and
West, as well as the South, this same General of the army
(Grant) has been elected at the Chicago Convention to head
the electoral votes for the Presidency in ten States of this
Union, which are as much under his feet as Turkey is under
the Sultan's, or Poland under the Czar of Russia."
If the protests from Northern Democrats did not stem the
tide of despotism, they at least showed that a spark of the old
fire of liberty yet existed in this corrupted Union. At one stroke
of the pen Sheridan, Grant's sub-despot, disfranchised thirty
thousand white men in Louisiana. Grant was responsible for
every criminal act done by the military. The New York Herald
said of Grant's brutality in the South:
"Every personal right of the citizen is invaded at once.
Without any process of law whatever, a man is deprived
of his liberty and thrust into a cell at the mere bidding of a
political or military bully. The secrecy of the telegraph and
post office is violated as no man would dare violate them in
despotic France."
At that time France was ruled by an Emperor. The South
was ruled by the despotism of hate. No Christian Emperor,
King or Kaiser was ever so cruel, so bitter, so vindictive as the
hate despotism imposed by Grant upon the people of the South.
By bogus elections carpetbaggers went to Congress. It seemed
that the chief aim of these bogus Congressmen was to obtain
additional power to rob, oppress and torment the people of the
South. The excuse for seeking Congressional aid was the ready
lie that the people of the South were on the eve of another
rebellion. On the 23d of July a bill to send more soldiers and munitions
of war to the Southern States was up for discussion. A
man by the name of Stokes, who claimed to represent a Tennessee
Congressional district, spoke as follows:
"If you do not send us guns and powder and bayonets
and cannon, and send 'em quick, Forrest and his rebel crew of
Democrats will be down on us like — like a thousand devils!
I want ten thousand stand of arms for my own district. Unless
you send on these arms all the truly loyal negroes will be
overrun and the Republican party killed in Tennessee."
Mr. Washburn, of Illinois, seemed to be very anxious to send
guns and bayonets down to the loyal negroes and carpetbaggers,
but he was afraid.
"Sir," said Mr. Washburn, "sir, I believe that in most
of the States not ten days after these arms are sent South to
the loyal negroes they will be in the hands of the rebels."
Congress saw the danger. Never before was any Congress in
so painful a quandary. Anxious, yet afraid, to arm loyal negroes
and carpetbaggers. A man named Dewees, claiming to represent
the people of North Carolina (he might as well have claimed to
represent the people in the moon or the farthest star), added to
the distress and perplexity of Congress.
"If you don't give us arms," cried Mr. Dewees, pale and
anxious, "before six months the Ku-Klux-Klan, the Rebels
and the Copperheads will be ruling the whole South."
Ku-Klux, Rebels and Copperheads were a trinity of devils.
Hades had no worse. Still, Congress was afraid to send to the
loyal negroes and carpetbaggers munitions of war, which seems a
little strange to us of this generation, knowing, as all now know,
that the Ku-Klux or Rebels in the South had no arms or munitions
of war, while the loyal negroes and carpetbaggers were
well armed. A Democrat named Woodward ventured to ask if
the reconstruction government in the South could be maintained
in no other way than by the bayonet. This question aroused Mr.
Dewees' indignation.
"No!" he roared. "We can only sustain our Govern-
ment by arms! Arms we must have, or Ku-Klux, Rebels
and Copperheads will wipe us out and rule the South."
At this one or two Copperheads (Northern Democrats) were
imprudent enough to laugh, which had the effect of stirring Mr.
Dewees up to the very highest flight of oratory. Mr. Dewees was
short, thick set, and very ruddy, so to speak; every pore of his
body broke out into a glow and gush and roar of eloquence, and
the whole House on both sides became convulsed with laughter.
"Come on!" shouted the man claiming to represent
North Carolina; "I say, come on when you feel disposed!
Stretch out your traitorous hands to touch again one fold of
the old flag, and representatives of four million of men with
black skins, but loyal hearts, will dash themselves a bulwark
between you and the loyal governments in the South, and
you will only live in sad memories of bad events. Come on!
Come on!"
No one seemed disposed to come on, though entreated so
fervently. Never before was Congress in such a higgledy-piggledy
state of mind. If they sent arms to negroes and carpetbaggers
the rebels would get every gun within ten days. Mr. Washburn
said so. If they didn't send arms the rebels would get every
negro and carpetbagger in ten days. Mr. Dewees said so.
[idem p. 224-228]
* * *
Well informed Englishmen well knew how savage was the
hate Republicans felt toward the South. The London Telegraph
tersely put it thus:
"The North simply demands blood, blood, blood. Dominion, spoliation, confiscation."
At a Republican meeting in Cadiz, Wisconsin, March 26,
1863, the following was unanimously passed:
"Resolved, That we hail any policy of our Government
toward the South, be it annihilation, extermination, starva-
tion or damnation."
What virulence of hate lies in these words!
Cassius Clay said in a public speech:
"I find fault with Lincoln, not because he suspended the
habeas corpus, but instead of doing it by a dash of the pen,
he did not do it by 'ropes around the necks of the rebels.'"
"We'll hang 'em yet!" cried out a voice from the crowd.
"Yes," rejoined Clay, "the hanging of such men as Seymour
and Wood will be true philanthropy."
[idem p. 235]
* * *
While the war was fiercely raging a meeting was called in
New York City for the relief of the sick and wounded Union soldiers.
Parson Brownlow made a speech which elicited from the
Republicans frequent and loud applause. The following extract
will show the spirit of hate that ruled the hour:
"If I had the power," said Brownlow, 'I would arm and
uniform in the Federal habiliments every wolf and panther
and catamount and tiger and bear in the mountains of America;
every crocodile in the swamps of Florida and South Carolina;
every negro in the Southern Confederacy, and every
devil in hell, and turn them on the rebels in the South, if it
exterminated every rebel from the face of God's green earth - every
man, woman and child south of Mason and Dixon's
line. I would like to see Richmond and Charleston captured
by negro troops commanded by Butler, the beast. We will
crowd the rebels into the Gulf of Mexico, and drown the
entire race, as the devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee."
{Long and loud applause.)
After this fine burst of ferocity Lincoln, Seward and Stanton
thought it would be a good thing to have Parson Brownlow Governor
of Tennessee, from which vantage ground he could harass
and torture the white people of that State at his leisure. By Federal
aid the negroes and carpetbaggers in Tennessee put Brownlow
in the Governor's office, which he abused by cruelties, rascalities
and oppressions of every sort. English writers make frequent
mention of the bitter hate Republicans felt toward the conquered
South. From an English work, published in 1891, called
"Black America" I take the following:
"In spite of the fact that all resistance to Federal authority
had ceased, and that according to Mr. Justice Nelson of
the Supreme Court, the States in which the civil government
had been restored under the pacific Presidential plan were
entitled to all the rights of States in the Union, in spite of
these facts Congress solemnly decided that the war was not
over, and in March, 1867, Congress passed the reconstruction
act, over President Johnson's veto. These acts annulled
the States' government, then in peaceful operation, divided
the States into military districts, and placed them under martial
law; enfranchised the negroes, disfranchised all white
men, whether pardoned or not, who had participated in the
war against the Union, if they had previously held any executive,
legislative or judicial office under the State or Federal
Government."
* * *
So bitter, blinding venomous was Republican hate, high men
in that party openly and gleefully exulted in the cruelty of the
so-called reconstruction acts. Garfield was one of this sort.
"This bill," said Garfield joyfully, "first sets out by laying
its hand on the rebel States' governments, and taking the
very breath of life out of them. In the next place it puts a
bayonet at the breast of every rebel in the South. In the next
it leaves in the hands of Congress utter and absolute power
over the people of the South."
Percy Gregg, the English historian, in his history of the
United States, says:
"The reconstruction policy was at once dishonest and
vindictive. The Congressional majority (Republican) were
animated not merely by selfish designs, but by rabid hatred
of the South's people which had fought so gallantly for what
the best jurists of America believed to be their moral and
constitutional right."
For what the foremost men in the Republican party had declared
their right. Another English writer of great eminence, Anthony
Trollope, was in this country during the reconstruction
period, and wrote of it thus:
"I hold that tyranny never went beyond this. Never
has there been a more terrible condition imposed upon a fallen
people. For an Italian to feel an Austrian over him, for
a Pole to feel a Russian over him, has been bad indeed, but
it has been left for the political animosity of the Republicans
of the North - men who themselves reject all contact with the
negro - to subject the Southern people to dominance from the
African who yesterday was their slave. The dungeon chains
were knocked off the captive in order that he may be harnessed
as a beast of burden to the captive's chariot."
[idem p. 236-238]
* * *
Before going to the Philadelphia convention
Brownlow made a speech to the carpetbaggers and negroes of
Nashville, Tenn. The following extract will show its spirit:
"I am one of those," said Brownlow, "who believe the
war has ended too soon. We have whipped the rebels, but
not enough. The loyal masses constitute an overwhelming
majority of the people of this country, and they intend to
march again on the South, and intend this second war shall
be no child's play. The second army of invasion will, as
they ought to, make the entire South as God found the earth,
without form and void. They will not, and ought not to,
leave one rebel fence-rail, outhouse, one dwelling, in the
eleven seceded States. As for the Rebel population, let them
be exterminated. When the second war is wound up, which
should be done with swift destruction, let the land be sur-
veyed and sold out to pay expenses."
This speech so highly pleased Republicans that the Philadelphia
convention gave Brownlow a boisterous welcome. The following
extract is from Brownlow's address to the convention:
"I mean to have something to say about the division of
your forces the next time you march on the South. I would
divide your army into three grand divisions. Let the first be
armed and equipped as the law requires, with small arms and
artillery. Let them be the largest division, and do the killing.
Let the second division be armed with pine torches and spirits
of turpentine, and let them do the burning! Let the third and
last division be armed with surveyors' compasses and chains,
that will survey the land and settle it with loyal people."
Brownlow's speech so much pleased Republicans they invited
him to go about repeating his speech to stir up the old soldiers to
the fury of a second war on the South. Governor Yates of Illinois
was at that convention, also eager for a second war on the South.
In his speech Yates said:
"Illinois raised 250,000 troops to fight the South, and
now we are ready to raise 500,000 more to finish the good
work."
In another speech Brownlow exhorted the soldiers to march
down on the South, to "burn and kill! burn and kill!" until the
whole rebel race was exterminated. These sentiments were
praised as "truly loyal." These two words, "truly loyal," were
so prostituted by Republicans during the war, and for years after,
not for a thousand years will they regain their purity of meaning.
Not a man of the Republican party, not a paper condemned (so
far as I can discover) these rabid utterances. On the contrary,
the more rabid and malignant a man was, the higher he rose in
Republican favor. Richard Busted, a carpetbagger from New
York, who was playing the part of Judge in Alabama "Territory,"
in a speech made in New York City, spoke as follows:
"I would keep the rebels out in the cold till their teeth
chattered to the music of the Union. (Applause). Keep them
out in the cold till they learn that treason is the greatest crime
of the century! I would keep them there till the last trumpet
sounded! I say, better a boundless waste of territory, filled
with owls and bats, than that the Southern States should be
occupied with such men! (Cheers). I tell you, although there
may be forgiveness before God for the crime of the South,
there can be no forgiveness before men." (Long applause).
The carpetbagger, Hamilton, who was playing the part of
despot-governor over Texas, was eager to have another army
sent down on the devastated South. In his speech at the Philadelphia
convention, the carpetbagger, Hamilton, said:
"Prepare your hearts, and your guns, and your swords,
for another conflict. It is bound to come. Get yourselves
ready." "We are ready," shouted back a blood-thirsty Re-
publican. "We are ready ! We'll march down and finish the
Rebs!"
About the same time a convention was held in Syracuse, New
York, in which a second war on the South was urged. Lyman
Tremaine was president. In his address Mr. Tremaine said of
that second war:
"At the very first tap of the drum an army of veteran
troops capable of overwhelming all opposition will come to
the rescue."
Rescue of what? Of whom? Who, what was in danger?
Were these men absolutely insane with hate? Was it possible
they still apprehended danger from the disarmed South? They
well knew if they sent another army on the South it would
not be against armed men; they knew, as Brownlow had declared,
all their army would have to do would be to "kill and burn! kill
and burn!" to the dreadful end.
"Traitors," continued President Tremaine, "must be
punished. Our soldiers will proceed to punish them. This
time it will be effectually done by our soldiers without the intervention
of President Johnston, or Congress, judge or
jury."
[idem 239-242]
* * *
It seemed as if Republicans lay awake at night devising new
ways of manifesting hate toward the people of the South. On
May 25, 1866, a man by the name of Bond, in the House of Representatives,
gave notice as follows:
"I will introduce a bill to adopt the gray uniform of the
so-called Confederate States to be the uniform of the convicts
in the State penitentiaries, and that the prisoner convicted of
manslaughter be entitled to wear the ensign of rank of a
Colonel, and so on down to the lowest grade in crime."
In the summer of 1863 the Washington Chronicle reported a
speech made by Jim Lane, Republican Senator from Kansas, in
Washington City:
"I would like," said Senator Lane, "to live long enough
to see every white man in South Carolina in hell, and the
negroes inheriting their territory. (Loud applause.) It would
not any day wound my feelings to find the dead bodies of
every rebel sympathizer pierced with bullet holes, in every
street and alley in Washington City. (Applause.) Yes; I
would regret the waste of powder and lead. I would rather
have these Copperheads hung and the ropes saved for future
use. (Loud applause.) I would like to see them dangle until
their stinking bodies would rot and fall to the ground piece by
piece." (Applause and laughter.)
Nothing done by the Republicans after the war ended manifested
more malignant hatred than the way they treated and lied
on the President of the Southern Confederacy. This western
continent has nroduced no man of whom it has more reason to be
proud than Jefferson Davis. Brave, gentle, kindly, a true Christian
in every walk of life, a patriot of the truest type, an ardent
lover of the liberty which inspired the men of '76, Davis should
be held up before the youth of America as deserving esteem,
reverence, emulation. When the war ended the Republicans selected
Mr. Davis as the chief object on which to pour foul streams
of hate. The English language was ransacked in search of vile
epithets to throw upon him; human ingenuity was taxed to invent
base falsehoods to defame him. The murder of Mr. Lincoln was
seized as a pretext to charge him with the crime of assassination.
Without the faintest shadow of evidence Republicans made haste
to proclaim to the world that in their bureau of military justice
they had proof that Mr. Davis was guilty of the assassination of
Lincoln. $100,000 were offered for his arrest. When arrested
he was cast into prison and treated as a felon. Every species of
indignity and insult was heaped upon him. Though old, feeble,
sick, and strictly guarded, brutal men were ordered to enter his
cell, throw him down and weld iron chains and balls on his ankles,
ordered by the present Lieutenant-General Nelson A Miles. In
vain Mr. Davis requested to be taken into open court and tried on
the charges made. They dared not try him in any court. They
knew they had no particle of evidence on which to convict him.
Were he tried for Lincoln's murder, they would be proved guilty
of lying, not Mr. Davis of murder. Were he tried for treason,
not Mr. Davis, but the whole Republican party, would be proved
guilty of treason - treason to the Constitution - treason to the
principles of '76. Not daring to try Mr. Davis, too venomously
cruel to restore him to freedom, they kept him in prison two years
and every day of those two years, and almost every day afterward
for more than a dozen years, Republicans continued to pour
out on Mr. Davis' name streams of sulphuric hate.
When Republicans proclaimed that Mr. Davis and other distinguished
men of the South had assassinated Lincoln, there was
not a human on earth outside of the hate-crazed Republican party
who believed that charge. Earl Russell, from the floor of Parliament,
voiced the sentiment of all England when he said:
"It is not possible that men who have borne themselves
so nobly in their struggle for independence could be guilty of
assassination."
[idem p. 242-243]
* * *
Not only did
Republicans pour out the virulence of hate on the South's men,
her women came in for a share, and a large share they received.
A few specimens will show the women of this generation how
their mothers were hated in the past.
Harper's Weekly, October 12th, 1861, has this:
"The ladies of the South ought to be sent to the alms-
houses and made to nurse pauper babies, and put to wash
tubs under Irish Biddies."
In the year 1865, June 4th, Harper had this little nugget of
pure hate:
"The women of the South are lovely and accomplished
to look at, but their bold barbarity has de-humanized them;
they are like the smooth-skinned wives and daughters of the
ogres in fairy tales — hyenas and wolves in woman's shape."
The lies of hate are not all dead yet; as late as June, 1894, a
little paper called the Picket Guard, run in the interest of the
Grand Army of the Republic of St. Louis, published the following
wanton falsehood on the women of the South:
"The mothers of the South," said the Picket Guard,
"systematically taught their children to be cruel. During the
war it was the custom of Southern ladies, accompanied by
their little boys and girls, to walk through the prison hospitals
and tear bandages from the wounds of the Union prisoners,
to exult in the pain they witnessed."
Not a paper in St. Louis denounced this hate-born lie. On
the contrary, a Republican daily paper, the Star, of that city,
reproduced the lie in its columns, as a warning to the Society
of the Daughters of the Confederacy to keep silent on the war of
the 60's.
[idem p. 245-246]
Of the malignant as well as foolish lies in this extract, it
is only necessary to notice the biggest of them all, the assertion
that the South murdered 60,000 Union soldiers in her prisons.
Secretary of War Stanton left on record the number of men on
both sides who were made prisoners during the war, and the
number who died in prison.
In Northern prisons were Southern soldiers. . . .220,000
Of those died in Northern prisons...................... 26,000
In the South's prisons were Union soldiers... . . .270,000
Of those who died in Southern prisons............... 23,576
These figures show that Mr. Shellabarger's figures exceed
Stanton's by 36,424. If only 23,576 Union soldiers died in the
South's prisons, how did it happen that she starved to death
60,000 in her prisons?
[idem p. 246]
* * *
In 1876, eleven years after the South surrendered, Mr.
James G. Blaine of Maine stood up in Congress and poured
out a lot of hate-born lies as malignant as human tongue ever
uttered or human brain ever concocted:
"Mr. Davis," cried Blaine, "was the author, knowingly,
deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders
and crimes at Andersonville. And I here, before God, measuring
my words, knowing their full extent and import, declare
that neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the Low
Country, nor the massacre of St. Bartholomew, nor the
thumb-screws and other engines of torture of the Spanish
Inquisition, began to compare in atrocity with the hideous
crimes of Andersonville."
When his speech was concluded Mr. Blaine's admirers
rushed up to congratulate him. Mr. B.H. Hill of Georgia rose
to his feet and confronted them with Stanton's figures.
"If," said Mr. Hill, "cruelty killed the 23,500 Union sol-
diers who died in the South's prisons, what killed the 26,000
Confederate soldiers who died in the North's prisons? In
other words, if the nine per cent of men in the South's
prisons were starved and tortured to death by Mr. Jefferson
Davis, who tortured to death the twelve per cent of the
South's men who died in the North's prisons?"
Mr. Blaine and his friends were dumfounded. Stanton was
an authority whose figures they dared not assail; they, as Shellabarger,
had not chanced to see Stanton's figures.
Mr. Blaine made no reply to Hill for several days. Finding
the figures had been quoted correctly, he did not venture to
deny their accuracy, but attempted to weaken their force; he
had not magnanimity enough to admit an error, to regret a
wrong. His explanation was lame, but it was the best he could
frame.
"Our men," said Mr. Blaine, "when captured were in
full health; they came back wasted and worn. The rebel
prisoners in large numbers were emaciated and reduced
from having been ill-fed, ill-clothed, so they died rapidly in
our prisons - died like sheep."
This excuse was accepted by Republicans, and the lie that
the South starved prisoners to death was kept alive, and to this
day is often told.
[idem 247-248]
* * *
During all those twenty-seven years the lie that Mr. Davis had
willfully starved and tortured Union soldiers to death was told
and retold a hundred thousand times. All that time Butler knew
the statement was false, but he did not choose to say so until he
wrote his book in 1892.
In that book, page 610, Butler says:
"In the matter of starvation of prisoners the fact is incontestible
that a soldier of our army would easily have
starved on the rations which in the latter days of the war
were served out to the Confederate soldiers before Petersburg.
I examined the haversacks of many Confederate soldiers
captured on picket during the summer of 1864, and
found therein, as their rations for three days, scarcely more
than a pint of kernels of corn, none of which were broken,
but only parched to blackness by the camp fires, and a piece
of raw bacon about three inches long by an inch and a half
wide, and less than half an inch thick. No Northern soldier
could have lived three days on that. With regard to clothing,
it was simply impossible for the Confederates, at that
time and months before, to have any sufficient clothing on the
bodies of their own soldiers. Many went bare-footed all
winter. Necessity compelled the condition of food and
clothes given by them to our men in their prisons. It was
not possible for the Confederate authorities to supply clothes
and food." — Butler's Book, page 610.
[idem p. 248]
* * *
While Mr. Davis lay in a dungeon cell in Fortress Monroe,
and while the whole air of the North was thick with the cries,
"Hang him! Hang him! Hang him!" a number of the leading
men of the Republican party consulted together, and decided to
settle the question decisively, was Davis guilty, as charged, of
cruelty to the Union soldiers in prison? Gov. Jno. A. Andrew of
Massachusetts, Horace Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, Henry Wil-
son, then Vice-President of the United States, and Gerritt Smith
were of the number who were willing secretly to admit they did
not believe Mr. Davis guilty as charged - secretly, not one had
the fairness to say so openly. However, in the first week of
Congress, 1866, these men sent Chief Justice George Shea of the
Marine Court to Canada to inspect the official records of the Confederate
Government. Judge Shea saw General John C. Breckenridge,
then in Canada, and through his influence was placed in
Judge Shea's hands the official records of the Confederate
Government, which Judge Shea carefully examined, especially all
the messages and acts of the Executive and Senate in secret
sessions, concerning the care and exchange of prisoners. Judge
Shea found that the inhuman and unwarlike treatment of the
South's soldiers in Northern prisons was a most prominent and
frequent topic during those secret sessions. From those documents,
not meant to meet the public eye, it was manifest that the
people of the South had reports of the cruel treatment of their
loved ones in Northern prisons, and through representatives in
Richmond had pressed Mr. Davis, as the Executive and the
Commander-in-Chief of the South's Army and Navy, instantly to try
active measures of retaliation, to the end that the cruelties to
prisoners should be stopped. Judge Shea, in his report of the
investigation, said:
"It was decisively manifest that Mr. Davis steadily and
unflinchingly set himself in opposition to the demands made
for retaliation, and this impaired his personal influence and
brought much censure upon him from Southern people.
These secret sessions show that Mr. Davis strongly desired
to do something which would secure better treatment to his
men in Northern prisons, and would place the war on the
footing of wars waged by people in modern times, and divest
it of a savage character; and to this end Mr. Davis commissioned
Alexander Stevens, Vice-President of the Confederacy,
to proceed to Washington as military commissioner. This
project was prevented by Lincoln and Seward, who denied
permission for Mr. Stevens to approach Washington. After
this effort to produce a mutual kindness in the treatment of
prisoners failed, the Southern people became more unquiet
on the matter, yet the secret records show that Mr. Davis did
not yield to the continual demand for retaliation."
— Southern Historical Papers.
Although this report, made in 1866, completely exonerated
Mr. Davis from the vile charge of having tortured and starved
prisoners to death, such was the despotism of the party in power,
such was the bitter hate Republicans in the North felt toward the
South, this report was not given to the public until nearly eleven
years after Judge Shea's report was made. All these eleven
years every Republican engine, newspapers, magazines, lecturers,
politicians, were hard at work villifying Mr. Davis and repeating
the lie that he was guilty of torturing and starving prisoners
to death; and this, although Horace Greeley, Senator Wilson,
Gov. Jno. A. Andrew of Massachusetts, Gerritt Smith and other
high Republicans knew these charges were absolutely false. Was
this Shea investigation kept secret from Blaine?
[idem p. 248-250]
* * *
Garfield [presidential candidate] was a speaker at that meeting. Garfield's speech and
Colonel Streight's had been cast in the same mould. The following
is an extract from Garfield's reported speech:
"The Southern Senators lie like traitors, as they are!"
shouted Garfield, "when they say our men were treated as
well in their prisons as the rebels were treated in our prisons.
Hill of Georgia stands up in Congress and lies when he
says the rebel chiefs took as good care of our men in their
prisons as they could. Yes, deep down in his throat he lies.
They were human fiends. Hill is a liar. There is no peace
with rebels! They are very anxious to forget and forgive.
Are we to be friends with traitors? No! No! Never! We
have proof that Jefferson Davis was guilty of torturing our
men in his prisons to death! It was his policy to make idiots
of our men by tortures. Southern cruelty never before in all
the world had its parallel for atrocity. Never can we forgive
them ! Never will I be willing to imitate the loving kindness
of Him who planted the green grass on the battlefields."
And all this, twelve years after Judge Shea had made his
report!
Garfield seldom missed an opportunity to give vent to his
animosity. In a speech in Chicago he said:
"Never will I consent to shake hands with the South
until she admits she was wrong, eternally wrong, and the
North was right, eternally right."
In 1879 and 1880, during the Garfield campaign, Republican
hate became a howling insanity. Judge Yaples, in the Cincinnati
Enquirer of 1880, said:
"Republican hate is grounded on the fact that the people
of the South will not join the Republican party."
How could they be expected to join a party which, from its
birth, had wronged and hated them ?
Garfield's champions boldly declared that when he was elected
the South would be territorialized, so that the whole country
could be Africanized, and negroes put in rule over whites and
upheld by military power.
[idem p. 251-252]
* * *
During Mr. Hayes' campaign, Mr. Howard Kutchins, editor
of the Fon-du-lac (Wis.) Commonwealth, two weeks before
election day inserted in his paper the following address to Republican voters:
To Arms, Republicans!
"Men! Work in every town in Wisconsin for men not
afraid of fire-arms, of blood, or dead bodies. To preserve
peace and prevent the administration of public affairs from
falling into the hands of obnoxious men, every Republican in
Wisconsin should go armed to the polls on next election
day. The grain stacks, houses and barns of all active Democrats
should be burned to the ground, their children burned
with them, their wives outraged, that they may understand
the Republican party is the one which is bound to rule, and
the one which they should vote for or keep their stinking carcasses
away from the polls. If they persist in going to the
polls and voting for Jenkins (Democrat), meet them on the
road, in the bush, on the hill, anywhere, night or day, and
shoot every one of the base cowards and agitators. If they
are too strong in any locality and succeed in putting their
opposition votes into the ballot boxes, break open the boxes,
tear to shreds their discord-breeding ballots, and burn them
to ashes. This is the time for effective work. These agitators
must be put down. Whoever opposes us does so at his
peril. Republicans, be at the polls in accordance with the
above directions, and do not stop for a little blood."
Hayes became President; in reward for so much party zeal
he nominated the bloodthirsty Kutchins for the Internal Revenue
Collectorship in the Third District of Wisconsin. So far as I can
learn, not a man or woman in the Republican party made any objection
to Kutchins' savage advice to voters. Yet this is the party
which to this day weeps tears of sympathy over any negro man
whose vote is not cast and counted in the South.
[idem p. 253]
* * *
Brevet Major George W. Nichols, aide-de-camp to General
Sherman when he made that vainglorious march to the sea,
wrote a book called "The Story of the Great March."
Nichols says:
"History will in vain be searched for a parallel to the
scathing and destructive effect of the invasion of the Carolinas.
Aside from the destruction of military things, there
were destructions overwhelming, overleaping the present
generation - even if peace speedily come, agriculture,
commerce cannot be revived in our day. Day by day our legions
of armed men surged over the land, over a region forty
miles wide, burning everything we could not take away. On
every side, the head, center and rear of our columns might
be traced by columns of smoke by day and the glare of flames
by night. The burning hand of war pressed on these people,
blasting, withering."
In Sherman's report to Halleck he evidently takes great
pride in the wanton destruction he has wrought:
"I estimate," writes Sherman, "that the damage to
Georgia alone is $100,000,000 - $98,000,000 was simple
destruction - two millions have inured to our advantage. Our
soldiers have done the work with alacrity and cheerfulness
unsurpassed."
In Sherman's report to Halleck of the burning of Columbia,
in 1865, Sherman charged that crime to General Wade Hampton.
That lie went traveling over the Northern States for ten years.
In 1875, Appleton and Co. published Sherman's Memoirs, written
by himself. In volume 2, page 287, Sherman, without a blush of
shame, admits the lie, using the following words:
"In my official report of the conflagration of Columbia,
I distinctly charged it to General Wade Hampton, and
confess I did so pointedly to shake the faith of his people
in him."
[idem p.261-262]
* * *
Shortly after the South surrendered, Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's
Secretary of the Treasury, made a flying visit down the
Atlantic States. On his return, newspapers reported Mr. Chase's
opinion of the whites and blacks in these States:
"I found," said Chase, "the whites a worn-out, effete
race, without vigor, mental or physical. On the contrary,
negroes are alive, alert, full of energy. I predict in twenty-five
years the negroes of the South will be at the head of all
affairs, political, religious, the arts and sciences."
[idem p. 262]
* * *
We have shown that in the year 1796 certain
New England Federalists, to attain a certain object they had in
view, set themselves to work to promulgate the gospel of hate
toward the people of the South. By dint of teaching hate the
teachers developed that feeling in their own hearts. As the
teaching went on, the feeling increased in intensity until it
became an insanity, a monomania utterly beyond the control or the
influence of reason. Finally it came to pass that from this
insanity of hate there sprung an insanity of love. The former
was directed toward the white people of the South, the latter
toward the negroes. Without evidence from the papers and
publications of that day, the white men of this generation will not be
able to believe that New England, as well as large numbers of
the Republican party, came to admire and respect the negro race
as morally and mentally superior to the white. At first this
strange insanity only held that the negroes in the South were far
superior in every way to Southern whites; but as time passed the
insanity took on a more violent form, and those so afflicted believed
and taught that as a race the negro was greatly superior, morally
and mentally, to the whole Caucasian race, and not only this, they
came to admire every peculiar quality of the negro, the blackness
of their skins, their woolly hair. Their whole makeup New England
orators and writers dwelt on with a sort of worshiping rapture
and urged intermarriage between blacks and whites, not to elevate
the former, but the latter.
Extracts from speeches and papers will throw light on this
subject. In the early stages of his insanity Wendell Phillips
was fond of announcing to his audiences that "negroes are our
acknowledged equals. They are our brothers and sisters." As
time went on Mr. Phillips' distemper became more heated. He
was not satisfied with asserting that "negroes are our equals;" he
made the startling announcement that-
"Negroes are our Nobility !"
And began to clamor that special privileges be granted to "our
nobility." He wanted all the land in the Southern States divided
and bestowed on "our nobility" and their heirs forever. What
"our nobility" had done to deserve this rich reward Mr. Phillips
did not explain. Perhaps he thought the fact that negroes had
been brought from Africa in a savage state, and had acquired
in the hard school of slavery some of the arts of civilization, fitted
them to become a noble class.
Governor Stone of Iowa, in a speech made at Keokuk,
August 3, 1863, was certainly in the first stages of this insanity
when he said to his audience:
"I hold the Democracy in the utmost contempt. I would
rather eat with a negro, drink with a negro, and sleep with
a negro than with a Copperhead" (meaning a Democrat).
The disease certainly had struck Mr. Morrow B. Lowry,
State Senator of Pennsylvania, when at a large meeting in
Philadelphia, in 1863, he said to his audience:
"For all I know the Napoleon of this war may be done
up in a black package. We have no evidence of his being
done up in a white one. The man who talks of elevating a
negro would not have to elevate him very much to make him
equal to himself."
The faithful old New York Independent sorrowfully wailed
over the long delayed coming of the Black Napoleon, which all
the insane negro-worshipers confidently looked for.
"God and negroes," said the Independent, "are to
save the country. For two years the white soldiers of this
country have been trying to find a path to victory. The negroes
are the final reliance of our Government. Negroes are
the keepers and the saviors of our cause. Negroes are the
forlorn hope of our Republican party."
James Parton, the noted biographer, was strongly touched
with the prevailing disease - insane love of negroes.
"Many a negro," wrote James Parton, in 1863, "stands
in the same kind of moral relation to his master as that in
which Jesus Christ stood to the Jews, and not morally only,
for he stands above his master at a height which the master
can neither see nor understand."
J. W. Phelps, General in the Republican army, thought the
negro race much better adapted to receive Christianity than the
white.
"Christianity," said Phelps, "is planted in the dark rich
soil of the African nature. Negroes are as intelligent and
far more moral than the whites. The slaves appeal to the
moral law, clinging to it as to the very horns of the altar; he
bears no resentment, he asks for no punishment for his
master."
A little work, ably written, titled "Miscegenation," was
published in 1863 or 1864. Before this work was out a white woman,
Miss Annie Dickinson, called by Republicans "The Modern
Joan of Arc" became a convert to the doctrine of intermarriage
between whites and blacks and an eloquent expounder of the
same. Miss Dickinson lectured over the Northern States. It
was said at the time that President Lincoln and his Cabinet
attended her lectures in Washington City. Miss Dickinson wrote
a novel called "What Answer?" the purpose of which was to
illustrate the beauty and utility of marriage between negro men
and white women, and negro women and white men. The
characters in "What Answer?" are negroes and whites. They fall in
love and marry in a way to affright and disgust people not up to
date on such doctrines. The title, "What Answer?" was
supposed to indicate that the author's argument could not be refuted.
On the night Miss Dickinson was to lecture at Cooper Institute,
New York City, she was late in appearing; the impatient audience
was quieted by the distribution of circulars advertising the
new work, "Miscegenation," just published.
George Sala, correspondent of the London Telegraph, was
then in Washington City, and wrote his paper as follows:
"Miss Dickinson comes accredited by persons of high
authority. She is handed to the rostrum by the second
personage in the North. The Speaker of the House is her
gentleman usher. The Chief of the State (Lincoln) and his
ministers swell the number of her auditors. She is the
goddess of Republican idolatry."
February, 1863, the correspondent of the London Times
wrote from New York describing Republican love of the negro
race:
"It has been discovered here," wrote the Times
correspondent, "that in many important respects the negro is su-
perior to the whites; that if the latter do not forget their
pride of race, and blood, and color, and amalgamate with
the 'purer and richer blood' of the blacks, they will die out
and wither away in unprolific skinniness. The first to give
tongue to the new doctrine were Theodore Tilton and the
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The latter a few months ago
declared that it was good for white women to marry black
men, and that the passion and emotional nature of the
blacks were needed to improve the white race. Mr. Wendell
Phillips has often hinted the same thing."
The London Times of February 5, 1862 or 1863, I am not
certain which, contained copious extracts from "Miscegenation,"
as samples of the love-insanity for the negroes which at that time
afflicted the Republican party. I also offer a few extracts from
"Miscegenation:"
"All that is needed," says the author of "Miscegenation,"
"to make us the finest race on earth is to engraft upon
our stock the negro element which Providence has placed
by our side upon this continent. (The Providence were
New England's slave-stealers who imported negroes from
Africa and sold them to the South's planters). Of all the
rich treasures of blood vouchsafed to us, that of the negro is
the most precious. By mingling with negroes we will become
powerful, progressive and prosperous. By refusing to
do so we will become feeble, unhealthy, narrow-minded,
unfit of noble offices of freedom and certain of early decay.
White people are perishing for want of flesh and blood; they
are dry and shriveled, for lack of the healthful juices of life.
Their cheeks are sunken, their lips are thin and bloodless,
their under jaws narrow and retreating, their noses sharp
and cold, their teeth decayed, their eyes small and watery,
their complexion of a blue and yellow hue, their heads and
shoulders bent forward, hair dry and straggling. The waists
of white women are thin and pinched, telling of sterility and
consumption; their whole aspect is gaunt and cadaverous;
they wear spectacles and paint their faces. The social
intercourse between the sexes is acetic, formal, unemotional.
How different is an assembly of negroes! Every cheek is
plump, the teeth are white, the eyes large and bright, every
form is stalwart, every face wears a smile. American white
men need contact with warm-blooded negresses to fill up the
interstices of their anatomy. I plead for amalgamation, not
for my own individual pleasure, but for my country, for the
cause of progress, for the world, for Christianity. It is a
mean pride unworthy of an enlightened community that will
deny the principle of amalgamation. This principle has
touched a chord in humanity that vibrates with a sweet,
strange, marvelous music, awakening the slumbering instincts
of the Nation and the world. It would be a sad misfortune
if this war should end without a black general in
command. We want an American Touisant l'Overture. It is
in the eternal fitness of things that the South should be
conquered by black soldiers. After that the land of the South
must be divided among negroes."
[idem p. 266-269]
* * *
Time has proved how little
the Republican party understood the Caucasian or the African
race. No Touisant l'Overture appeared on the scene. No black
general came forward to "fill the eternal fitness of things." On
the contrary, all during the war the negroes in the South were
amiable servitors, docile and obedient to their white mistresses
while their masters were at the front fighting the armed invaders
of their country.
[idem p. 270]