The USA in the Time of James Buchanan
1857-1861
By Mike Donovan
Secession - The Bachelor President – “Old Buck” – Lecompton Constitution –Pennsylvania man – The Sage of Wheatland – “Old Blue Eyes” – Salary $25,000 - VP John C. Breckinridge –Related to composer Stephen Foster - Born in 1791 and died in 1868. – 'Buck and Breck' - Harriet Lane - ‘Take the Buck by the Horns’ - “Jimbo”
“The South has no right to secede, but I have no power to prevent them.”
Buck Buchanan
Buchanan is recalled by history by such words as 'weak' and 'compromising.' He is considered one of the doughface Presidents, a Northerner who was more kindly towards the slave holding aristocracy of the south than to the abolitionists of the north.
As for his legendary bachelorhood, a pal said of him that he was no bachelor; he was married to the Constitution.
James Buchanan was six feet two with blue eyes and a stubborn tuft of white hair at the top of his head. His home in PA was called “Wheatland.” The historians always describe him as “colorless” but I’m pretty sure he was white. One could write a book on the creative and endless ways the historians constantly hurl harpoons through him. Harry S. Truman wrote that Buchanan was a ‘nincompoop.’ Takes one to know one.
James Buchanan was seen in his time (and since by historians) always as an old man president, past his prime and without the physical energy required for the top job in the land. James was 65 when he took office and most of his closest friends said that he was actually born three years earlier than he claimed. This would make his true birth year 1788 and would make Buchanan 68 on his election. JB might not have had the physical strength to handle the secession crisis, let alone the backbone.
Buchanan is blamed for doing nothing to stop the coming of the Civil War. Fine, but not a single historian has yet to spell out exactly what steps he should have taken instead of doing nothing. If James had got tough with the South (almost unthinkable since he was a doughface) it simply would have started the war a few months sooner than it began under Lincoln. If he had catered to all the demands of the South he would have created a backlash in the North he could never have controlled.
In his defense, Buchanan ran in 1856 on a platform of “Save the Union.” He always said he would abide strictly by the Constitution. He never even hinted that he might take a tough stand with the South. James arrived as advertised. That’s who they voted for and that’s the vacillating and compromising approach he gave them: delivered as promised.
Historians chastise Buchanan for not acting like a Lincoln or a Republican. Buchanan had to be Buchanan. I feel sorry for JB because he is such a punching bag for the historians. James was the scorpion that stung the frog that was helping it across the river. Why? Because it was his nature, even though the scorpion would drown with the frog. The country sank with Buchanan because Buchanan had to be true to his nature.
The Constitution, by the way, told James nothing of how to handle secession. Most of the men who have been president before and after him would have been equally stymied in the hot seat that JB sat in. Most historians don't want to think about that because they have too much fun attacking him. It makes them feel so strong to do that.
Perhaps President Buchanan, as the crisis of secession evolved, did not want to make decisions that the next administration would have to answer for. Buck might have been letting Lincoln have room to work with. Buck and Abe were from two different parties and the forced implementation of a Buchanan secession crisis policy while packing up to leave office might be seen as both obstructionist and unfair to the incoming administration.
In the Election of 1856, Buchanan defeated Republican Freemont by a score of 174-114-8. Third Party Fillmore picked up 8 EC votes in Maryland. Fillmore’s strong third party showing made Buchanan a minority President.
Popular vote 1856----------Buchanan D) 1,838,000
Freemont R) 1,341,000
Fillmore W&A) 874,000
The Pennsylvania lawyer Buchanan was a highly qualified man for the highest office by any standard. Buchanan had already been a State Rep, a Washington Congressman, US Minister to Russia, United States Senator, Secretary of State, and minister to England before becoming the 15th President.
If Buchanan had declined the nomination in 1856 he might be thought of today as one of American History’s greatest figures, ‘Instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it,’ to quote Brando from On the Waterfront.
Buchanan’s cabinet
Sec. of State ---------- Lewis Cass (Mich.) 1857-1860
Jeremiah S. Black (PA) 1860-1861
Secretary of War --John B. “Sleepy” Floyd (VA) 1857-1861
Joseph Holt----------1861
Secretary of Treasury -------------Howell Cobb—1857-1860
Phillip F. Thomas-1860-1861
John A. Dix--------1861
Att. General-----------------------Jeremiah S. Black-1857-1860
Edwin M. Stanton-1860-1861
CABNOTES
Howell Cobb resigned in December of 1860 to join the Confederate government.
Stanton would eventually be the cause of the impeachment of President Andy Johnson.
Some historians claim that Louie Cass was senile and incompetent when he was appointed to head the Department of State.
BIO
He was born on the 23rd of April 1791 in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania. Like Jackson and Chet Arthur, Buchanan was the son of Irish immigrants. Daddy B. had only been over from Europe eight years when little Jim was born.
The Buchanans moved to Mercersburg Pa in 1797, where his father set up and owned a general store where the boy helped out. His mother instilled a love of books in the little boy. His two favorites were Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbons, and Fatherhood, by Bill Cosby..
Jim went off to Dickenson College in Carlisle Pa in 1807. In spite of good grades, Dickenson booted him out of school for smoking, drinking, and being disrespectful to his teachers (my man!.) DC allowed ‘Jimbo’ back in on one condition. James had to promise to put a muzzle on his defiant mouth. James kept his cool and graduated 'The Dickens' in 1809 without further reprimands. He then studied to be a lawyer under a Mr. Hopkins of Lancaster, passing the bar in November of 1812 (something very few Irishmen are capable of doing ... passing a bar.)
Buchanan served as a volunteer private in the War of 1812. He organized a band of volunteers for the defense of Baltimore in 1813, but did not see any combat. He also became a candidate for the Maryland state legislature, winning the seat in 1814 as a Federalist. JB served two terms in the Maryland State house and retired undefeated.
In 1816 lawyer James successfully defended a MD state judge in an impeachment trial. This case gave him such a fine reputation that his business boomed and he was able to soon retire wealthy at age 40. He was pulling in $11,000 a year (which adjusted for inflation is more like $12,000 today.)
James fell in love with and became engaged to Ann Coleman, a girl from a family far richer than he. The Coleman family thought that suitor James was both an infidel (he was rumored to be seen dating someone else around town) and a gold digger. Father Coleman evidently convinced Anne too. AC penned a Dear James letter to Buchanan breaking off the engagement.
Ann Coleman was found dead in a hotel in Philly shortly thereafter, and some suspect it was a suicide. Anne's father would not even let James attend the funeral. James was bitter and devastated. “Happiness has fled me forever,” wrote Buchanan. A very elderly Mr. Coleman in 1858 went to the White House to apologize and got a door slammed in his face. We might add that a sister of Anne Coleman was also later engaged to be married and also was found dead, an apparent suicide. Can’t we wonder if the father was maybe a lunatic that killed his daughters rather than lose them to marriage? What are the odds that two daughters in the same family are engaged and then kill themselves?
Buchanan turned his back on romance forever. The image of the devilish bachelor President may be misleading. JB was no ‘swinging bachelor.’ In effect he was almost a widower for life. (After his death the letters to and from Ann were burned pursuant to his expressed wishes. The spicy details are now in the ash heap of history.)
The death of his fiancée Coleman changed Buchanan’s feelings about public versus private life. With no private world to love in, he decided to re-enter politics.
Buchanan was elected to the US Congress as a Federalist in 1820. He later pulled a Jim Jeffords, switching parties while in elected office, (which should be illegal, you should resign in that case,) switching over in 1824 to the Democratic-Republicans under the leadership/spell of the super-popular Andrew Jackson. The Federalist Party was fading out fast and held no hopes for winning. Jimmy jumped off the sinking Fed ship. Jackson remembered and rewarded the supportive gesture later when in 1828 he named Buchanan Minister to Russia.
Buchanan later became an effective and respected Secretary of State under Polk. It may be that Buchanan had a better record at State than he did as President.
Buchanan was a rich dude when he came to the Presidency. His personal fortune was $200,000. Adjusted for inflation that was equal to the President's yearly salary in 1990 but in 1857 $200,000 was some serious doughface dough.
EVENTS
ELECTION OF 1856
DRED SCOTT DECISION
PANIC OF 1857
CHUCK HINTON HELPER
PONY EXPRESS
LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATE 1858
LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION IN KANSAS
DISCOVERY OF OIL IN PENNSYLVANIA
HARPER’S FERRY
59’ERS
THREAT OF SOUTHERN SECESSION
CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE
SOUTHERN SECESSION
ELECTION OF 1856 - ‘BUCK AND BRECK’
By 1856 the Whig party was disintegrating by the day. Many Northern Whig deserters joined the Republican Party. Most Southern Whigs fell back with the Democrats, minus the ‘Conscience Whigs' of course.. The decline and fall of the Whig empire and the rise of the Republicans marked the end of the “second party system” (meaning the second two-party system) in American history and the beginning of the third, which has lasted to the present day. The first party system was the Democratic-Republicans vs. Federalists.
In addition to Whig deserters many ‘Know-Nothings’ joined the Republicans. I know nothing about them.
The Know Nothings were against the enslavement of blacks, but for blackheart reasons. The entire KN political identity was based on hatred of foreigners and Catholics, yet they wanted to support the Republicans, who marched with progressive armbands. This contradiction was a problem for many of the Republican leaders, and Lincoln spoke against these inconsistencies, without asking 'The No-Nos' to leave.
Deserters to the Republicans notwithstanding, the Know Nothings (officially known as the American Party) combined forces with what little was left of the Whigs and together nominated former president Millard Fillmore as a third party candidate in 1856. This was one of the more important third party performances in American presidential election history. The Nothing-Whigs won an important state, Maryland and took almost a fourth of the popular vote.
The Republican Party made its big entrance in 56. It was a patchwork party from the get-go. 'R' began on table-scraps and leftovers from the Whigs, Federalists, anti-slavery Democrats, Free-Soilers, Anti-Masons, and Trostskyites. It was an easy step to add the the Know Nothings. The No-No’s were on the decline overall partly because in regions where they had earlier gained control of state governments they had been unable to implement any of their political goals. They had won the office but had not won change, and the voters were catching on that their rhetoric fell short of reality.
The diversity of the Republican coalition produced many differences of opinion on economic issues. To avoid sparks, many matters were simply left off the party platform, as if they didn't exist. That's quite a cop out. Take the many important and divisive issues and impose the gag rule in order to win party adherents.
The Republican Party was, however, most definite in its position on three items. It was against slavery, and it wanted to stop the Democratic dominance of American politics, and was anti-Masonry. The young Republican Party was passionately anti-Mason.
The chief criticism of the Republican Party was that it was a ‘purely sectional party.’ It opponents said this of it at the time and the historians still say it in an accusatory tone. The RP was going to divide the nation because it was designed to appeal only to the North.
I am so sick of reading this. The Republican Party happened to be against slavery, which happened to be overwhelmingly supported in the South. It wasn’t intentionally a sectional party. It just happened to work out that way. It’s a bogus charge.
And anyway, even if was a sectional party, so what? It's the right of any party in this country to be whatever it wants to be, unless its avowed purpose is the violent overthrow if the US government. No apologies are due. If today's Tea Party bozos all happened to be from the west, I wouldn't have any right to declare them illegitimate.
Sectional support for the Republican Party was a demographic chance result of policy, not a chauvinist regional desire to rule. The Republican platform supported certain principles, not a certain region. Which states and counties came along for the ride was up to those individual places. Mississippi was free to vote Republican if it wanted to. New Hampshire could vote slavery back in if it wanted to. If the Republican Party was sectional, the fault was with the section, not the party. The Democrats of the era have a lot of nerve accusing another party of being sectional. The South and its slavery Democratic Party was sectionalism defined. What was good for the Democrat goose was now evil for the Republican gander. What the South had done for about 60 (maintained sectionalist politics and candidates) years was grounds for secession in 1860 when someone else did it.
As the campaign began for 1856 President Pierce put his handsome hat in the ring for re-nomination. But James Buchanan was already the odds on favorite going into the Demo-Convention in Cincinnati. Stephen Douglas was also in the hunt.
Buchanan led Pierce on the first ballot 135-122 with 35 for Buster Douglas. It took 17 ballots, but in the end it was Buchanan unanimously. Buchanan won because of the Kansas-Nebraska baggage that the others carried. Buchanan had been overseas in the diplomatic service during all of the slavery controversies, the worst of which was over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
This was Jimmy's one powerhouse credential. The Dems needed someone untainted by slavery brawls. This made Buchanan ‘safe.’ He had dodged the gathering slavery storm while downing vodkas in Moscow.
At their Philadelphia Convention the Republicans nominated John Charles Freemont, the California senator, the ‘Pathfinder of the West.” The initial slogan for the Republicans in their first campaign season was “World B. Free”, but it was quickly changed to “Free Soil, Free Land, Free Men and Freemont.”
The South didn’t bother to send a single delegate to the Philadelphia Republican convention of 1856. Border States sent only a token force.
The South was in the Democratic bag from start to finish. The battle for the presidency had to be decided by whether someone could carry the North in overwhelming numbers, and the Republicans came up a Buck short ... this time. The battle lines for 1860 were already formed during the campaign of 1856. The R's would not be a buck short the next time.
The campaign had its usual dirty fighting. James Buchanan was nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other. As a result he tilted his head to one side to favor the better eye. Democrats spread the rumor during the campaign that this quirky head tilt was from a suicide attempt in which he had tried to hang himself, like some deranged poet. Republican Freemont had been born of a woman remarried before her divorce was finalized (like Rachel Jackson) and the Dems did not let the public forget it.
Election Day 1856 was a tempered victory for the Democrats. They had won but the opposition had showed off some scary strength. The Republican Party had been virtually unheard of around the country in 1855. Now in 1856 it lost a close election to a highly respectable candidate of the venerable Democratic Party. The Republicans lost the night, but sensed they had won the future. Conventional wisdom everywhere became convinced of this too. Southerners saw the signs for the future and it was not good. The Fillmore and Fremont vote combined would have won the White House in 1856 without the help of a single Southern electoral or popular vote.
If Freemont had won the Election of 1856 there would have been secession. Or at least most Americans believed so. The North might at this time have been willing to let Dixie leave in peace. But by the next election things had changed. By 1860 there had been so much violent agitation over slavery that a Republican victory equaled both secession and war.
Since the campaign of 1856 was centered on threat of Southern secession, Republican Freemont became a sectional candidate that would incite a civil war. It wasn't fair, but that cost him a lot of scared votes.
The South consistently justified the idea of secession on the grounds that it was tired of Northern tyranny. Congressman Toombs of Georgia shouted in a speech in 1856,
“The object of Fremont's friends is the conquest of the south. I
am content that they should own us when they have conquered
us, and not before.”
Thanks, for the needless belligerence, Mr. T.
The South called Freemont a lot of names implying that he was a bad American who would betray the country. But Freemont was a storied and famous American explorer and military hero. Pathfinder Freemont had crossed the desert and seized California for the USA.
The Southern Democrats had elected Buchanan but that didn't mean they liked him. A lot of Democrat money was poured into Pennsylvania to make sure he carried that state, and the South resented how expensive it had been to buy Buchanan.
The Republicans carried New York, which alarmed the Democrats for 1860. Even Tammany Hall and Twit Tweed couldn't slow the rising tide of Republicanism.
INAUGURATION
A hotel messed up the Buchanan Inaugural.
The National Hotel in Washington D.C. hosted the Inaugural. The weather in the first week in March was so cold that the pipes froze at the National causing the sewage system to back up. The kitchen help got very ill and began passing dysentery around to the guests. James Buchanan had severe diarrhea for his Inaugural. Thanks, National. James had a doctor close beside him for the entire speech just in case. Many of the dignitaries listening to his speech were just counting the minutes until he wrapped it up and they could get to a restroom (which reminds me of a story of a comedian performing at the Tiparary Pub in Worcester .... maybe I'd better not tell that one in this book.)
The slavery question and an impending Supreme Court decision played a major part in Buchanan's Inaugural speech.
The hot controversial question was, did Congress have a right to legislate on slavery in the territories. All agreed that Congress did not have the right to decide on slavery in the states. But what about the territories? (and by the way, read that carefully. All agreed that Congress did not have the right to legislate on slavery in the states – so much for the Southern excuse on secession that the North was trampling on states-rights.)
If it was determined that Congress had no right to legislate on slavery in the territories, then the Missouri Compromise would logically have to be declared invalid. That 1820 ruling had divided the territories into north and south with slavery allowed to the south and prohibited to the North. But many Southern Democrats were prodding the Supreme Court to declare the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. There was a case pending before the Court involving Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in free territory briefly and was now back in slave-country and suing for his freedom.
The Democrats were confident that the Southern-dominated Supreme Court of 1856 would rule against Scott in this specific case. What they weren't sure of was whether they could nudge the judge into ruling in their favor on other slavery matters while they were on the subject. The Dems wanted the Court to void the Missouri Compromise.
Buchanan was hoping that the Court would judge Dred before the Inauguration, so he could avoid the issue by declaring it settled.
Fate intervened a little to delay the Court proceedings, and deny Buchanan his wish. Justice P.V. Daniels of Virginia was going to a boring formal ball with Mrs. Daniels. She wanted to look pretty for the occasion and it was getting a little late. P. V. called upstairs, “Come on honey, we gotta get going!” Then he heard the worst sound in the world. The sound of his wife screaming in terror. Her grand gown had caught fire. The wife of Supreme Court Justice Daniels died before anyone could put her out.
The Supreme Court recessed for several days to honor her memory and his loss. This delay pushed back the Dred Scott decision until after the Buchanan Inaugural.
Buchanan had written to Justice Catron asking anxiously when Scot was going to be settled. He wanted to know which way to write his speech, and that depended on the Court. Buchanan prodded Justice Catron to try and make sure that the court ruled on not only the Missouri Compromise, but on the larger issue of whether Congress had the right to legislate on slavery in the territories. The justices would almost certainly rule in the South's favor if they ruled at all, so Buchanan was trying to get himself off the hook and get Southern support from his first day in office. He wanted the North to know he had nothing to do with it, and he wanted the Court to do it.
But two northern Justices argued on he side of decency, and the Court had to spend many days deliberating before setting down an official decision. More delays.
But Buchanan was by now beginning to realize that he had nothing to worry about. The court was going to rule in his and the South's favor. No one actually tipped him off, as has been written, but he was influential enough that he knew his correspondence with Catron was creating a self-fulfilled prediction. The Court could rule on larger slavery issues because the President-elect was privately prodding it to do so.
Just minutes before the Inaugural address, Chief Justice Taney went over to Buchanan and whispered in his ear. Some history books say that Taney was tipping him off that Dred Scott was in the bag. But Taney was merely instructing Buchanan on some procedural matters during the ceremonies. People at the time thought that Buchanan was making a corrupt deal. The erroneous historians got their cue from them.
If Buchanan was going to make a shady deal with Taney, he certainly would not transact it in front of three thousand people. Buchanan was guilty of collusion, but his deal with the Court was understated.
In his IA Buchanan said of slavery that he would “cheerfully submit” to the decision of the Supreme Court. Those who later thought he had made a pre-speech deal saw this passage as particularly perfidious.
SPOILS SPORTS
One of Buchanan’s first moves was to put a unique twist on the ‘spoils system’ of Andrew Jackson and Will Marcy. It was supposed to be ‘to the victorious party go the spoils.' But Buchanan pillaged the Pierce appointments as if Pierce had been from another party! William Marcy himself was aghast at this cannibalistic twist on this famous dictum, and he was the man who had coined the spoils phrase in the first place.
At first Buchanan announced that he was not going to give in to pressure to reward Party members with jobs they didn't necessarily earn or deserve. But he soon realized that if he wanted to make his Congressional majority effective, he had to play by their rules. And rule one was give out the jobs to Democrats.
CALIFORNIA
California was a young state importing old ideas. There were so many Southern immigrants in California that it was nicknamed 'Virginia's Poorhouse.' We think of California in the Civil War era as a bastion of Union strength, but it was a Southern-fellow traveller in Buchanan's early time in office.
Buchanan gave his decisive support to an anti-slavery man named Broderick for Senator, to appease the liberal wing, but he took all his advice from the pro-slavery California Senator Gwin.
HIGHBROW WHITE HOUSE
Being the bachelor prez, Buchanan’s niece Harriet Lane became hostess at the White House for his four years. With the help of the well to do wives of his cabinet members, the Buchanan White House under Miss Lane was never a down to earth homespun place. Buchanan was a rich lawyer and a dandy.
Harriet was 27 when her uncle took over the nation. He shared his political intimate feelings with her as he did no other person. HL became quite famous in the four years as virtual First Lady. Harriet was good-looking, blonde, and “robust.” Songs, horses, and ships were named after Miss Lane. Her refined manners even made her popular in England whenever she travelled there.
A thousand men a month offered to court her and Harriet consulted with “Unc” before she went out with any of them. Most of them were rich older men looking to improve their position through power marriage. One guy claimed he saw her painting in the newspaper and “It was love at first sight.”
Another regular party guest at the White House was the famed writer and historian Washington Irving. He wrote the Life of Washington, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Rip Van Winkle. Coincidentally, Irving used to fall asleep at parties so often that his snoring presence in the middle of the noisy room was casually accepted by all. I say coincidentally because both RVW and LSH are sleep-themed stories. “Wash” made a profound statement to Buchanan on the frustrations of researching and then trying to write history,
“I take things to pieces and then can’t put them back together again.”
I feel that way whenever I have a huge study session than then try to put what I learned into the body of the chapter concerned.
DRED SCOTT VS SANDFORD AND SON - 3.7.57
Buchanan had been in office one full day when he received news of the bombshell decision of the Supreme Court regarding a Missouri slave named Dred Scott.
The Dred Scott case had lingered since 1854 and the country had followed the case closely. It was a much-anticipated decision that Taney delivered on 3-7-57.
Justice Taney (pronounced Tawny) handed down the final decision. Taney was the group author, although each Justice also wrote a separate opinion. Five of the nine Supreme Court Justices at this time were from the South, and seven of the nine were Democrats.
Mr. Scott was a lowly personal servant slave. An Army surgeon named Emerson had owned him for years. But Emerson master and Scott slave had also lived in the free state of Illinois and in the free territory of Wisconsin. When Scott returned to a slave state and master Emerson died, Scott was passed on as property to a Miss Elizabeth Blow.
Mr. Clarence P. Sanford, who lived in New York State then bought Scott. Mr. Sanford helped Dred Scott sue Mr. Sanford. He did not buy Dred Scott because he needed a house slave. Sanford sought justice by directing a lawsuit at himself!
So Scott's master sued him for his property's freedom with the financial backing of Abolitionists, on the grounds that Dred had become free when he had lived in a free territory.
Slaves had tried several times in the past to sue for their freedom after having gone briefly into free states. But these cases had been decided by the states. Now the same principle was being tested in a federal court because the slave had resided in free federal territory. Dred’s residence in Wisconsin Territory was the key to his case, not the State of Illinois. The decision would decide the future of U.S. slavery.
Judge Taney ruled that the entire Scott case was irrelevant because blacks were not citizens of the United States. He said they were property first and people second and therefore they no right to sue for anything let alone their freedom.
Taney’s ruling was his own but six others backed him. As mentioned, there were two dissenting judges. The racism was spine-chilling unabashed. Of blacks Judge Dred said that the writers of the Constitution believed them to be,
“..so far inferior that they had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect; and that the
negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to
slavery for his benefit.”
It was the courtroom scene from Planet of the Apes,
Dr. Zeus: “You honor, the defendant is clearly not an Ape and therefore has no rights under Ape Law. This creature is not being tried, he is being disposed of.”
The Judge: “Well put Dr. Zeus!”
Even the old Virginia dynasty slaveholder presidents would have regretted Dred Scott Sanford. Even they had at least recognized the rights of free blacks as fully legal citizens. Taney’s Court not only failed to defend an innocent slave, it further demoted all blacks, even those blacks that were free.
Lucifer was now apparently controlling the Supreme Court of the USA. The South was jubilant, the North stunned. For 30 years the momentum in all intellectual currents had been in a progressive anti-slavery direction. Then along came the Dred Scott Decision delivering a hammer-slam in the retardant direction. Progress was spun around on the shoulders of evil and tossed out of the ring while an arena full of Ashley Wilkes cheered and raised a toast to victory.
Taney’s Dred Scott was the equivalent of some powerful German judge ruling a key decision for the Nazis in early 1933.
The historians gang tackle President Buchanan for the Civil War because he did nothing to stop it. Fine. But Taney deserves more blame because he actively did something to start it.
It gets worse. The Supreme Clowns also ruled that the 1820 Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional from the start. Congress could not legislate on the slavery issue, period. The Court declared that both slave and free blacks were not US citizens. The Court specifically declared that the races were not equal. This was now the law of the land.
Unbelievable.
March 6, 1857 was a bad day. As if slavery hadn’t been a crying shame enough with only individual state support and some support in a divided Congress. Now slavery had the firm support of the nation’s judicial branch.
In one key sense the Dred Scott Decision put the Republican Party in an odd position. The Party was founded on the mission of Federal prevention of slavery in the territories. Now the court was saying that this was illegal and impossible. The Republicans solved this by declaring the Dred Scott ruling (or at least most of the extra opinions attached to it) to be “obiter dictum”, a legalese Latin term for something said casually that was not legally binding. The Republicans claimed that the Court had been asked to rule on one case, and had added a lot of pro-slavery extra that was not legally binding,
As for Scott, although he was confirmed a slave by the decision, he was immediately set free after his namesake decision was handed down. His owners were abolitionists (including Liz Blow) hoping to make the courts free him, and when that failed, they freed him instead.
Curtis and McLean were the two judges with the strongest dissenting opinion. They particularly objected to the assertion that the founding fathers had intentionally excluded blacks from the joys and benefits of full citizenship. These two great guys were from Massachusetts.
The Clerk of the Supreme Court misspelled the name of Scott’s owner and the case comes down to history as a spelling error. The true name is Sanford, not the Sandford in most history books.
KANSAS STILL BLEEDING
History shoots a cannon at Buchanan for his stand on the so-called ‘Lecompton Constitution’ of Kansas.
Most of the Northerners who migrated to Kansas were not there because they were opposed to slavery. They were just part of the larger national emigration to the west in search of cheap land. Most of them just happened to be opposed to slavery. So in order to win elections in Kansas the pro-slavery forces would have to send in 'floaters' by the thousands, settlers whose only purpose in moving to Kansas was to promote slavery. In sandlot football we called them 'ringers,' people who played for a neighborhood team that weren't really from the neighborhood. Slavery needed thousands of ringers to conquer Kansas at the polls.
‘Bleeding Kansas’ had settled down a little since the end of the Pierce era but was still a big problem. A pro-slavery group held a constitutional convention in the one-street town of Lecompton and drafted a state constitution. They then submitted only one portion of the document to a referendum. The choice on the ballot was between a constitution that protects future importation of slaves, or another constitution that only protects the form of slavery currently in place in Kansas. Talk about your push-polls!
The tiny temporary territorial capitol sent the pro-slavery constitution to Washington, a patent fraud. The document called the Lecompton Constitution was a fascist joke. There was no participation by the free-soilers, so it was not representative of the true population. TLC did not represent the existence of liberal dissenters, let alone their rights. Buchanan submitted the Lecompton Constitution to Congress for approval. Many moderates were shocked that he did so.
The US Congress rejected the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas. President Buchanan lost political capital and got nothing in return.
In the North, the resentment over Buchanan’s extreme doughface Lecompton policy strengthened opposition to slavery, increased anger towards the South, and increased opposition to his Democratic Party. Buchanan's endorsement of the racist Lecompton Constitution was a political catastrophe for him and his party and contributed to the coming of the Civil War.
In 1858 the Lecompton Constitution was submitted to the voters of all of Kansas and they rejected it 10-1, postponing the admission of Kansas as a state. Kansas did not achieve statehood until January 29, 1861 in the last weeks of the Buchanan Administration. It came in as a free state.
THE IMPENDING CRISIS PUBLISHED 1857
There is a famous story of how the middle of the Civil War President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe and said, “So this is the little lady that started this big war.” He might have been closer to the mark if he had met a Mr. Hinton Helper from South Carolina and said, “So this is the racist Southern author who turned 400,000 men into hamburger helper.”
Helper was raised in North Carolina but had spent most of his adult life in free states and territories of the North and in California.
Hinton wrote that slavery was counterproductive to Southern interests. Helper hinted that the South should abandon slavery for selfish reasons, not because slavery was a moral wrong. Helper did not concede that slavery was wrong. It just had to go. This was the essence of his important 1857 book, The Impending Crisis in the South: How to Meet It - ( copyright 1857, Fox News Publishing.)
Helper was taking a radical position for a Carolinian, and not one likely to endear him to his fellow Southerners. He was like a guy from South Boston writing a memoir about growing up in a racist community he nevertheless still loves, and then getting so many death threats he had to move out (a true story about someone I know, ... well... someone I've met)
Help was a devoted racist and wrote a novel after the Civil War in which he shamelessly used racist lingo to describe what Charlestown was becoming. Let’s just say he referred to Charleston as “Blacksville.” What historians misleadingly say about Lincoln, we can surely say safely about this fellow. Hinton Helper was no abolitionist.
Helper dared to offer sound economic arguments why the South should abandon slavery. HHH (his middle name was Harold) had extensive statistics to back his claims. The South was suffering from a flight of free white labor to the North, departing because they could not compete with slave labor. Immigrants from Europe almost never chose to land in Southern ports for the same reason. Slaves, Hinton argued, were more expensive to maintain than they were worth in production. Care for elderly and infant slaves were a drain. As to the South’s arrogant confidence in the power of “King Cotton,” he contended that the value of the North’s production in hay alone was at least as valuable as the South’s cotton, its so-called ‘white gold.’ An acre of land in South Carolina was worth less than two dollars, and in New Jersey the same acre was worth 28 dollars. Helper said in his hot book what other white Southerners knew but dared not say. Slavery was a counter-productive anachronism, and it was time to end it.
Helper could not have foreseen that his writing would help the Republicans in the ’58 Congressional elections, but it did. 100,000 copies of Helper’s book were given away for free in the North as campaign literature.
The South turned on Helper as if he had betrayed it. To some Dixiecrats, Helpers book was a hindrance, not a helper; not a best-seller, but a “best-sellout.”
9/11 - RELIGIOUS FANATAICS MASACRE INNOCENT AMERICAN CIVILIANS – SEPTEMBER 11, 1857
The Mormons did it. On September 11 1857 Mormon troops from Utah massacred 121 immigrant settlers from Arkansas for the crime of trying to settle in their sacred religious territory. It is known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre and like many shameful incidents in American history, it is not as famous as it should be. You won't hear Mitt Romney of Danny Ainge or Donny Osmond remembering it with pride when a journalist asks them about their Mormon heritage.
Mountains Meadow was incidental to a larger conflict, the 'Utah War' between the US Federal Government and the Mormons of Utah. That's right, the USA in 1857 had a war with the Mormons! It wasn't exactly the Russian Front in 1943, but people did die on both sides, and historians often refer to it without blinking as a “war.”
It all stemmed from the refusal of the political leaders of Utah to accept Federal Judges to rule over them. The Mormons felt that their territory was an independent kingdom of God and that boss Brigham Young was an infallible saint who talked to God directly on a regular basis (pardon me while I throw up.)
The Mormons thought they had cleverly selected an area of the Great America Desert where no one would bother them because it was not on the road to anywhere. But gold changed the map. When the California gold rush erupted, Utah was suddenly right on the path of the 49er pass rush. Soon the Mormons were charging the traveling gold-diggers price-gauging rates for food and shelter. They hit them with tolls just for passing through. The east heard about it and this stirred up resentment and built up the fire towards the 'war' of 1857.
To make matters more tense, the new proposed routes of the transcontinental railroad now led to San Francisco, and often now ran on the map through both Kansas and Utah, dragging the Mormons unwittingly into the Kansas/slavery witches cauldron.
The Feds had earlier appointed a Mormon to govern the Utah Territory. It's more accurate to say the Feds appointed the Mormon to govern the Utah Territory. Brigham Young got the job under Prez Pierce, but the local government was a duality, with federal legislators and judges working side-by-side with Mormons. The feds automatically deferred to the decisions of the Mormons most of the time, but not all of the time and friction resulted. Young went to Washington to protest and was told to go back to Utah and stop thinking he had any right to ask all federal officials to leave Utah. When Young got back to Utah he preached angrily to his people that he was demanding exactly that. All federal officials must leave Utah. Exaggerated reports drifted to Washington of harassment and abuse of Federal officials, and a report of the murder of an eastern prospector by a “pack of Mormons.”
Buchanan got mad. All of a sudden it was shades of the Whiskey rebellion of 1787 in Pennsylvania re-enacted in 1857 Utah. Actually it was more like the the Anti-Whiskey Rebellion. Fundamentalist zealots, fiercely independent locals were resisting national authority and defying the feds to 'do your worst' and the feds answering back, 'as you wish.' Buchanan authorized a punitive federal military expedition of 1,500 Army and militia troops to go to Utah and put Young and his Morons in their place (I hope I didn't just misspell that.)
The troops mustered at Fort Leavenworth Kansas and marched to Utah. When they got there the Mormons harassed them, shot at them from behind fences like terrorists, and drove off their cattle and horses. The US men then had to find emergency sources of food and shelter and had no choice but to pay typical Mormon rip-off prices. The US Congress eventually got a bill from the Army for more than 6 million 1857 dollars, for a mission that never really settled anything except to learn that the Mormons could not be intimidated by a mere 1,500 troops.
It was in the middle of all of this that Mormon militia intercepted and surrounded a wagon train of 132 settlers from Arkansas on their way to California. The Mormons saw them as part and parcel of the federal effort to suppress them and force them out of religious political independence (religious autonomy was not enough for them.) There was a lot of support in the South for the punitive expedition against the Mormons, in part because if a precedent for military suppression of recalcitrant territorial legislatures could be had in Utah, it might then be had in Kansas. After a brief interview in which the travelers naively admitted they they were all pro-slavery, the Mormons started killing them. They allowed any child 8 years of age or less to live and become Mormons like white children kidnapped by Indians. Except for eleven children under the age of nine, the 132 Arkies all died execution style at the hands of the holier-than-thou Mormons. We have to feel bad for the one kid who just had his ninth birthday party the week before.
There's a lot of events in history where I wish I could go back in time and see it happen. This isn't one of them.
PANIC OF 1857
Like all of the dreadful depressions of the 19th century, the Panic of 1857 was brought about by overextension of speculative investment and credit, and by unsound currency. As if Buchanan didn’t have enough to answer for, now he also was faced with an economic free-fall.
P-57 wasn’t as bad as the panics of 1837 or 1893, but it was serious enough.
Part of the problem was inflation caused by the massive influx of gold from California. The tripwire for Panic was the closing of the Ohio Savings and Loans in Cincinnati. Various state banks reacted by calling in outstanding paper notes and demanding specie payment (metal currency) in return. The Panic was on.
The South weathered the Panic storm better than the North because cotton was solid product, not speculative money. But the South overestimated the power and the stability of the cotton factor. Senator J. H. Hammond of South Carolina, a man who owned several plantations spoke of cotton this way in an 1858 speech on the Senate floor. He was responding to Seward of New York and they were in the middle of the argument about Kansas,
“You dare not make war on cotton. No power on
earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.
Until lately, the Bank of England was King.”
In the wake of Hammond's widely reported speech, the expression “King Cotton” got popular. But Cotton was not king. It was more like a powerful duke. The foreign demand for the product caused by the Crimean War (on the North shore of the Black Sea) had helped to keep prices high. When the CW ended and Florence Nightingale and Rudy Kipling returned to England, and Russia retreated from its attempt to reach the Mediterranean, this indirect Southern foreign subsidy deflated like a sliced white balloon.
Cotton was also undependable, subject to good weather years and bad ones. The South would also learn in time that India and other places could grow the stuff in sufficient quantities to depose the King.
CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS
The Democrats barely survived the mid-term elections of 1858, losing some of its lead in both Houses. In the House of Representatives, Democrats still had the most Congressmen but were no longer an absolute majority. The Republicans when combined with the 22 Know-Nothings, created a bloc that could block Democratic (i.e. Southern) legislation.
The results in Pennsylvania, where Democratic candidates lost 11 seats, demonstrated the falling popularity of the PA President. The state legislature dropped from 11 Democrats out of 25 to 4 of 25. Not good for a state whose favorite son was in the White House.
The elections were held on different days in different states. There was no uniformity of years for Congressional elections either. It was difficult to work with national consensus within a given party when the party rarely knew exactly where it stood in strength at any given time.
LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES
In 1858 Abe Lincoln entered the national stage.
The Illinois senate race that year was between the ‘Little Giant,’ Democrat Stephen Douglas, and that upstart lanky country-bumpkin Republican Abraham Lincoln. The debates are more famous than they are exiting to read or hear (C-Span TV recently aired a verbatim re-enactment with costumes. I fell asleep and am glad I did.) All over the nation people read about the debates. Like Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, they were exiting in their time.
Most of the arguments were centered on slavery, but not the moral question. The debates were only about practical legal, political and constitutional slavery issues, never about Seward’s ‘higher law.’ No Northern politician could expect to win even a local election moralizing against slavery.
In the town of Freeport, Lincoln challenged Douglas on the inconsistency of his squatter sovereignty doctrine in the light of the Dred Scott verses Sandford decision. Douglas slipped out of it by saying that local officials could pass laws outlawing slavery, in this way superseding federal and judicial opinion. This became famous overnight as the Douglas “Freeport Doctrine” (even though they had argued the same point a year earlier in the Illinois legislature, long before Freeport.)
In the end, the Giant slew Goliath yet had a great fall. Douglas won the Illinois Senate seat but his positions on slavery had been so exposed and weakened by Lincoln’s arguments that he lost the front-runner spot for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1860. The Dred Scott decision had already nullified the ‘popular sovereignty’ theory of Douglas. The Supreme Court had ruled that only a state could legislate on slavery, and a territory could not. So therefore Stephen Douglas had based his political future on a concept now recognized as illegal.
In cornering Douglas into his Freeport Doctrine box, he separated 'Stevie D' from his Southern support, leaving the Democrats without a national candidate. The Democratic Party would split in 1860 between Douglas running as a Northern Democrat and Breckinridge running as a Southern Democrat. The split vote enabled Lincoln to win. In losing to Douglas for the Senate, Abe made himself a national name and the front-runner for the Republicans in 1860. Defeat created exposure and him as a star. Few had initially attended the debates to see Abraham Lincoln in the flesh.
It is noteworthy that in local elections for the Illinois state legislature, the Republicans won a majority at the same time they were voting Douglas the the US Senate. This would seem to indicate that while Douglas was great enough to carry the day personally, a larger progressive trend towards the eradication of slavery was the greater force in 1858 Illinois.
NORTHERNERS WERE RACISTS TOO
Most history books stress that both Douglas and Lincoln were essentially racists too. They caution the reader 'don’t get it into your head that they were so holy and pure compared to the South.'
Here we have the South covered with evil slavery. The North is drenched in freedom. Whom do the historians call racist? The North. The old redneck history books and the new PC history books stress the same thing; that the North was quite racist too, and the South was misunderstood and felt threatened. All apologism for the South, the guilty party. All condemnation for the North, the not guilty party.
If the truth were a snake it would bite the historians. What’s wrong with these people that they are so afraid of the obvious? There are differences in philosophy and there are differences in degree. The South was 199 times more the racist side because slavery is 199 times more racist that a white Yankee who opposes interracial marriage. Professional historians actually have the audacity to compare social segregation and personal prejudice in the North as being just as despicable if not more so than the slavery of the South. The modern liberal historians take the same position for different reasons, thus in effect backing the position of the Southern fire-eaters of 1860.
It’s all relative to the bell curve of the time. Put it in perspective. The mind of white supremacy is only beginning to stand corrected in my lifetime. When I was born in 1955, segregation still ruled the South; all males except priests and a rare devout religious boy used the n-word in my town, and the Boston Red Sox baseball team had still yet to hire a black ballplayer. The movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which a white woman brings home a prospective black husband to shocked liberal white parents was still 12 years away from being produced. There were no blacks on television except comedic shoeshine men on episodes of Three Stooges re-runs who see a ghost and jump out the window. Several Civil War drummer boys were still alive.
Looking back on how backwards things still were in 1955, how can we look down our historical nose at the whites of the North in 1860 as being racist hypocrites? I submit that relative to the 1860 era, the North was progressive, and were clearly the good guys. And yet we never read praise for the North. All that is ever stressed about the antebellum North is its racism, not its relative freedom.
The Enduring Vision is a 1990 major US History textbook by important authors. Here is what it has to say on the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the Senate race in Illinois,
“Douglas used the debates to portray Lincoln
as a virtual abolitionist and advocate of racial
equality. Both charges were calculated to
doom Lincoln in the eyes of the intensely
racist Illinois voters.
Lincoln compromised his own position by
rejecting both abolition and equality for
blacks. …
Despite the racist leanings of most Illinois
voters, Republican candidates for the state
Legislature won a slightly larger share of the
popular vote than did their Democratic rivals.”
The authors can't stop calling Illinois voters racists, yet they never rip the South for it bluntly even one time in their huge history book.
How can the majority of Illinois voters be intense racists and yet vote a small 'a’ abolitionist party into office statewide? The Republican Party was founded on the legal and gradual eradication of slavery, yet the authors call its constituents racists.
As for the South the same book say this,
“The events of the 1850’s brought a growing
number of southerners to the conclusion that
the North had deserted the true principles of
the Union.”
All sincerity is validated for the southern viewpoint (which is not to say they endorse it) with no scolding for Southern racism or slavery. All insincerity is ascribed to the North, with many reprimands for its intense racism.
Lincoln could never have won in 1860 unless the North had been predominantly and essentially against slavery. The secret ballot elected Lincoln. It wasn't hip to defend the Negro in public in the North, but deep down inside the entire land was having an epiphany and it showed itself on secret-ballot Election Day. Most Americans were churchgoers and Northern churches certainly did not support slavery. The white majority of Northern citizens against slavery never get enough credit, just because they didn't favor extreme capital 'A' Abolitionism.
INDIAN AFFAIRS (WARS) – FOUR LAKES - 9/58
The Northwest Indians by 1858 had plenty of smooth bored muskets to take on the white man with if and when they decided to rebel. But the Injuns didn't have any rifles. These groovy things were just being invented in the land of the long-hairs.
At the Battle of Four Lakes on September 1, 1858, the U.S. Army broke out the new rifles against the angry Indians who were on the warpath. With grooved barrels to increase the projective velocity and improve accuracy the Army guys were able to cut down the Indians long before they even knew what was happening to them. The Indians might have had the superior culture (if we are to believe the new textbooks), but they never had the superior guns. Every time they started to catch up by buying older guns from dealers of the time, the US Army was one new step ahead of them.
PONY EXPRESS
Through snow and sleet and hostile Indians, the postmen still delivered the mail. Beginning in 1858 the famous “Pony Express” delivered mail from Sacramento California to St. Joseph Missouri and back. Individual riders changed horses and kept going. It was a great idea and it worked well, but it was bad timing for these entrepreneurs. In late 1861 the first trans-continental telegraph was completed and two days later the Pony Express closed forever.
If today's postmen had been in charge of the old Pony Express a lot more Indians would have been slain, but for no reason at all.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Buchanans' years were a time of relative peace outside US borders. This was true in spite of him, for James was an ardent expansionist in the tradition of Polk and Jackson. Buchanan was all for the annexation of Cuba or any place else the growing nation could acquire under the banner of ‘manifest destiny’ which was sometimes manifest robbery.
There were few men more qualified than Buchanan in foreign affairs and he couldn’t wait to get his acquisitive hands on the job. But Democratic opposition from the North tied those hands. The country did not grow by so much as a parking lot under Buchanan.
Spain had no interest in selling Cuba, but Buchanan wasted much effort and political capital in rounding up support in Congress for the unfulfilled goal of buying the island. Buchanan was hamstrung in his expansionist goals because all the ripe apples to pluck were due south and this meant the exploitation of the new lands for slavery. His Northern Democrat brothers would never support US expansion to the South in the ante-bellum era. This was the same situation which had prevented President's Tyler and Pierce from expanding the country.
In other foreign affairs the Prince of Wales and his retinue graced the White House with an opulent visit. The president graciously slept on a sofa to make room for his guests.
In other foreign relations news Japan sent its first formal visiting delegation to Washington in May of 1860. The Japanese dropped in on the White House bearing many great gifts and much courtesy. Commodore Perry’s mission had made an impression.
Communications with Great Britain took a giant leap forward when the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858. It was an amazing feat. Unfortunately the thing broke and the cable guy said he couldn’t fix it until some time between the end of the Civil War and the arrival of the next century. The cable would have been useful during the War especially regarding negotiations between London and Washington over Confederate ship raiders being built in England. It might have helped Confederate negotiators in Europe also, so maybe it was a good thing that it snapped.
In China the Europeans fought a second “Opium War” with the Manchu dynasty. The Europeans won. The commander of the combined French-British forces was General Grant.
Most of the fighting took place near Peking. In the settlement that ended the war the Chinese gave Kowloon to the British. This had a profound effect on my life. I now play the Kowloon Comedy Club on a regular basis. It is located in Saugus, Massachusetts.
KNIGHTS OF THE GOLDEN CIRCLE
I always get an angry kick out of these endless people, some of them historians, who claim that the South was planning to gradually eliminate slavery if only it had been left alone to do it. These clowns claim that slavery was not the root cause of the Civil War, and that Northern aggression and Northern self-righteous intolerance was more to blame than Southern slavery for the coming of the Civil War.
The fact is that the South, if left alone, would have not only failed to eliminate slavery, it was planning to expand it, and to expand it big time. Many prominent Southern politicians tried to hide this fact behind a veneer of innocence, while other prominent Southern men actually had the courage to openly admit it.
There was the Knights of the Golden Circle, a highly organized semisecret society dedicated to the goal of a great slave empire based around the center of that circle being the Southern cotton belt of the United States. The slave empire would encompass a golden circle that reached out as far south as Brazil, and would include most of the Caribbean plus all of Mexico and Central America. The KGC had clubs all around the country and in fact, was founded by a Yankee scum from Cincinnati. But naturally, most of the Circle Circus clubs were in the deep South. The Knights agitated for the expansion of slavery while posing as an innocent social club just out for a good time. In many ways, the Knights of the Golden Circle was the foundation for the later Ku Klux Klan. After the Civil War there were many racist organizations hell bent for trouble calling themselves the Knights of something or another and the Klan ended up as the most famous survivor. But it's safe to say that one should beware of any organization in the 19th century that started out by calling themselves Knights of anything. It makes me afraid to take gigs at the Knights of Columbus.
If any of you are unfortunate enough to have sat through the 2008 movie National Treasure 2 about a dopey conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln, you might have spotted a reference to the Knights of the Golden Circle. In this waste of time blockbuster, the Knights were a key part of the John Wilkes Booth gang. The Knights of the Golden Racists were bad enough on their own for what they did and what they stood for without blaming them for something evil they had nothing to do with. This dumb plot movie wasted 22 million dollars that could have saved ten thousand lives in East Africa. At least the actual 1865 plot to kill Lincoln wasn't an insult to my intelligence.
TWO NEW STATES – MN58 - OR59
In the meantime, two new states had joined the Union. Minnesota signed on for the upcoming Civil War on May 11, 1858 and Oregon became America's valentine on Feb 14, 1859. Both came in as free states increasing the margin in the Senate to 18-15 free against slave.
The pro-slavery South now felt that there was no hope for its future in the Union. The admission of these two new states contributed most definitely to the coming of the Great Civil War.
Kansas as noted earlier, entered the USA “freely” in January 1861, making the balance against the slavers that much worse. In Buchanan’s defense it should be said that his determination to gain admission for Kansas as a slave state was motivated primarily by a desire to maintain a balance between slave and free states and thus hold off war. It was not because Mr. B. was pro-slavery.
BLACK AND YELLOW GOLD
In August of 1859 an isolated patch of land in the NW rugged corner of Pennsylvania changed the course of US history. A capitalist entrepreneur named Drake had been drilling for oil and on the 23rd he found it in Titusville. Within weeks the entire area was buzzing with America’s first oil rush. It was a new gold rush for black gold.
Oil was profitable, but not for the same reasons it is today. It was in demand worldwide for lamps, which served the dual purposes of heat and light. Oil had not yet been used in transportation and machinery. The United States would eventually become the largest oil producer in the world.
Meanwhile at Cherry Creek Colorado, 110 kilometers south of Pike’s Peak, a major gold discovery set off a new stampede of western settlers eager to get rich quick. These 59’ers recreated the 49er California Gold Rush in Colorado with the slogan “Pike’s Peak or Bust” inscribed on their Conestoga wagons (the government later decided to forbid the use of apostrophes in place names, so the correct spelling of Pike’s Peak today is Pikes Peak.)
Thousands of busted dreamers would end up returning east with the first three words scratched off. They found out the hard way that it took immense capital and manpower to successfully extract gold from the earth. Few of these independent small time prospectors struck it rich.
Gold rushes broke out over the next few years in Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming. When the mines ran dry the towns that had grown up around them were abandoned, creating the famous “ghost towns” of the American West, large tumbleweed communities of one, two, or zero population, not counting ghosts.
THREAT OF SOUTHERN SECESSION
The Southern threat to leave the Union haunted the United States from 1830 to 1860. With the Underground Railroad developing elaborately, the Fugitive Slave Law being openly defied, with Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas, the slavery issue was coming to a boil.
Tempers were short and were getting shorter. In 1858 Congressman Grow, a Republican from Pennsylvania wandered over to the Democratic section of the House chamber.
“Go back to your seat, sir!” shouted Congressman Keitt of South Carolina.
“You can’t crack me with your negro whip, sir!” shouted back Grow.
In an instant the two were in a full-fledged physical fight. Worse, the factions observing became involved and it was a full-scale brawl in Congress for several minutes. Brooks broke another cane over someone's head, and Sumner’s old desk was ripped out of the floor for a second time.
The Congress was a representative body and at no time did it more serve that purpose than in these violent outbreaks. After the election of Lincoln the Capitol Building became an armed powder keg. Congress in the winter of 1860-61 was fraught with physical danger. By many estimates a majority of members carried either a pistols or a knife. When a New York Representative's pistol fell to the floor one day, the Southerners thought it was a signal for a general fight and they gang jumped him.
One Southern Congressman wrote back to South Carolina to have its militia ready to move on Washington as soon as the fighting broke out. There was a real possibility of a Southern coup centered on a physical battle in the Capitol building. How the North would have reacted to that and what the next sequence of events would have been is for the imagination.
ARKANSAS LAW BANS FREE BLACKS
The degree of racism in the antebellum South is easily seen in the new 1859 law in Arkansas that outlawed the presence of free blacks in the state.
The South so often had defended its system by stressing that there were free blacks who were completely respects, and a that a hard-working responsible slave could one day buy their freedom. But now it was just Nazi world unabashed with laws like this. Arkansas was slave empire, pure and simple.
Obviously from the looks of laws like this, it was time for the issue to be settled. If this law could pass, what could be next? Perhaps new state laws that forbade manumission under any circumstances could follow. Maybe states could start passing laws that made it illegal to use the word ‘Negro.”
HARPER’S FERRY
In the summer of 1859 John Brown, a fanatical violent abolitionist with a messiah complex tried to start a racial rebellion in the South. He had the help of some determined supporters.
The Brown's brigade arrived with a few guns and pikes to start the game with, but they needed to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry Virginia by force. From there they hoped to arm the slaves nearby, and spread the revolution across the Southland.
Brown had approached Frederick Douglass to help him with the armed rebellion, but Douglas called him a nut and told him to “get the hell out of my office!”
There was some bloodshed at the Ferry but the Federal government responded in force. Robert E. Lee led the marine assault on Brown’s position and snuffed out the revolt.
Brown was sent to see the hangman in short order. But before he died he gave several powerful speeches in court and at the gallows against slavery. Brown’s dramatic harangues, in which he embraced his martyr death for a worthy cause, were read all over the country. JB became a cult hero in the North and a detested ‘black-lover’ in the South, although that isn't the term they used.
Before they hung him Brown said that if he had done the same thing to try and free white people or rich people, the state would not be putting him to death.
It’s hard to argue with that. Imagine if Rhode Island had never ratified the Constitution and had been an independent nation that by 1859 held thousands of white people in slavery. Along comes Brown does the same thing he tried at Harper’s Ferry. Would he have swung for trying to save white slaves? Probably not.
The racist historians always say bluntly that John Brown was insane. There was some family history of insanity on his mother’s side. But the historian tone usually implies that 'Brownie' was insane because what sane white person would be crazy enough to do this to help blacks? I read a book of his letters and he doesn’t seem at all insane to me. People who call him insane are motivated by hate for his cause, not for him.
Historian James Truslow Adams calls Brown’s effort “criminal folly which might have entailed the most frightful sufferings on thousands of innocent people.” Adams is such a blind racist that he doesn’t even realize that slavery was already doing that.
Adams was a famous and popularly read historian. James Truslow never once in his histories adds any extra emotion over the plight of the slaves. He remarks in passing that slavery was a wrong but he adds pages of emotional bonus text when Southern white people are hurt or threatened.
Another rather silly orthodox historical take on Harper’s Ferry is that John Brown’s Raid meant the South now had no choice but to leave. According to Professor Whitney the events at Harper’s Ferry, “convinced many Southerners that secession was their only means of protecting themselves from Northern abolitionists.”
Yeah, right.
A violent messiah abolitionist tries to take over a federal arsenal and arm the slaves. He gets none of the spontaneous support he expected, from either side or color, is easily overwhelmed by a small U.S. Army contingent composed of soldiers from both North and South, and then the leader of the failed rebellion is summarily hanged. How can a Southerner conclude from this that the abolitionists are about to successfully destroy the South?
The state of Virginia hung Brown on December 2 1959. Governor Henry Wise expected a violent attempt to rescue him, so there was a full regiment of heavily armed soldiers surrounding the gallows. In that crowd of troops was actor/assassin John Wilkes Booth. Booth was in the militia. Historians often mention that Booth shot Lincoln in 1865 on behalf of a Confederacy he had never fought for.
True, JWB had been in the Virginia militia only, and never did fight in the Rebel Army, but the pencil-pushers misleadingly make it seem as if he was a personal coward when it came to military service, and fail to mention that he had been a volunteer in the militia. I wonder if this event, his witnessing of the hanging of John Brown, had anything psychologically to do with his 1865 deranged decision to shoot Lincoln.
DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTIONS OF 1860
New York was not the most important city in the country in 1860. Charleston, South Carolina was the most important city in the country in 1860. It was the hotbed center of secessionism.
The Democratic Convention was scheduled to place at the height of the controversy in April of 1860. The Democratic Party had foolishly thought that holding the convention in the deep South would help establish a spirit of reconciliation between the Northern and Southern wings of the Party. Think again, nit-wits.
The Southern states wanted to include a plank in the Democratic platform supporting the Jefferson Davis resolutions recently proposed in the Senate forbidding federal interference with slavery in the territories. The Douglas Democrats could never support this and so the Illinois Senator’s Southern delegates walked out of the convention.
The divided Dems agreed to try again a month and a half later in Baltimore. This time it was the Southern states that walked out. They soon nominated their own pro-slavery candidate, Mr. Breckinridge. The Democratic Party was now split. What the dizzy Dems didn’t appreciate in the middle of their squabbling was that they had just handed the Republicans the election. Lincoln would win with only forty per cent of the popular vote.
As expected, the lid blew off the kettle when Lincoln won. The South had insisted for some time now that if a Republican were elected, they would have no choice but to secede from the Union.
That’s pretty unfair, don’t you think? The South would participate in the election but would take its ball and go home if it did not get the desired results. What’s the point in having an election if only one side will agree to honor the result?
SECESSION
On November 11 1860, the two palmetto state Senators James Chestnut and James Hammond resigned their seats in Washington. Two days later the South Carolina state legislature voted to raise 10,000 troops to fight for the defense of its home state (not for the defense of any other state in the south we might add.)
On December 4, 1860 Buchanan in his final State of the Union Message more or less blamed the North for the trouble. “The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern states has at length produced its natural effects.”
Lincoln read this the next day and was very disappointed with Buchanan for blaming the wrong side.
The first official Southern secessions took place under Buchanan, not Lincoln. South Carolina, of course, was the first to go. South Carolina had wanted to secede since 1830 … B.C.
On the 17th of December the secessionists of South Carolina met in Columbia to vote on it. The meeting was held in the Baptist Church, which is ironic. It was ironic to vote for slavery in God’s house.
The Baptist religion had already experienced its own secession. Over the course of the two decades before the Civil War all of the major churches in the South had seen the decent Christians who practiced their true faith leave over slavery. Many Southern Christians had chosen to leave the church of their fathers rather than acquiesce in its support of slavery. Some Baptist, Episcopalian or Methodist parishioners even chose to move north where they might be able to stay on with their original denominations without endorsing slavery.
According to revered Civil War historian Bruce Catton these 170 Columbia delegates at the Secessionist convention were “good men and true.” They “had the kind of courage that keeps forlorn hopes alive.” If you say so, Bruce. I don’t. And I will sacrilegiously say that don't think much of the great Civil War historian Bruce Catton anyway, not after suffering through four of his books to date. His research is prodigious but I don't like his writing, and I don't like his heart. I call him Bruce Cotton.
The vote was unanimous for secession and also to move the convention to Charleston. Smallpox going was around at Columbia and these good and true men wanted to get the hell out of there. Few of these brave old plantation owners died at Gettysburg, by the way.
The slavery-lovers reconvened in Charleston at Institute Hall, a structure that from this night on it would be known fondly by all loyal Southerners as ‘Secession Hall.’ After three days of driving rain the sun came out. Rhett's secession parchment was presented to the delegates who signed it unanimously on December 20. The words were read to the crowd,
“The Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of 'The United States of America' is hereby dissolved.
No other state was allied to 'Southie' and so by its own vantage point South Carolina was now an independent nation.
When the unanimous vote was announced the hall erupted with racist glee. The place went berserk, proving they all were. In the words of one eyewitness, “the cheers of the whole assembly continued for some minutes while every man threw up his hat, & every lady waved her handkerchief.” The new Confederate flag was put on display to more cheering. It had 15 stars. There was great rejoicing on the Charleston streets too. The churches peeled their bells and cannons fired off in celebration. Marching bands led parades through the streets. It was ‘White Supremacy! Yiiii-haaa!’ … Oh, excuse me, ‘States Rights – Yiiii-haaa!’ ”
THE PRESIDENT HEARS THE NEWS
In the late evening on the 20th of December President Buchanan was attending a friend’s wedding in Washington. Many other politicians were there. Jim was sitting in the parlor when suddenly there was a commotion in the hallway. Representative Keitt of South Carolina was heard shouting in a booming voice of delirious joy,
“Thank God! Oh Thank God! South Carolina has seceded! Here’s the telegram. I feel like a boy let out of school.”
Overhearing this scene, President Buchanan summarily summoned his driver, and left the wedding. JB went back to the White House, and Congressman Keitt went back to South Carolina.
The South became quickly acclimated to the concept of secession. At first SC basked in the simple joy of independence. Then it added new goals and dreams. Now there were big positives to be derived from secession. Soon the idea was Southern independence, not just South Carolinian. Not only could the South have slavery, it was now be free to expand as it saw fit. There were dreams of a glorious Southern empire growing to the south, and to the west. (Not to the North of course. The South never imagined it could impose slavery by any means.) When it was time to expand aggressively neither the politicians of Washington, nor the people to be conquered need be consulted for permission. That was refreshing.
Once the South began to salivate over the plausibility of an expanding slave empire, the many attempts at last minute reconciliation became something of a hoax. Georgian leader Al Stephens put it aptly in November of 1860,
“Our leaders do not desire to continue on any terms,
They do not wish any redress of wrongs; they are
disunionists per se.”
It should be said in his defense that Al personally didn't feel that way. He was one Southern leader who was against secession. And yet in 1862 Mr Stephens became the Vice President of the Confederacy.
MERRY RACIST CHRISTMAS – ADDRESS TO THE SLAVE STATES
On Christmas Eve Barnwell Rhett wrote an important letter to the other slave states. The Convention approved it and sent it out the the 15 states under the title of
'An Address to the Slaveholding States.' The missive was a plea to get them all to join in a new nation dedicated to slavery... excuse me ... to states rights.
Rhett's ASS took a few cheap shots at the North, of course, saying that the Yankees favored a cruel system of labor where the little people are treated worse than slaves, and capital and labor are always on the verge of violent conflict. There was some truth to that, not enough to put Rhett in the right, but there was some. On the other hand he claimed that the North was full of so many starving people that they could not increase their population. The men were too sickly to father enough children, that how badly they were paid under Northern capitalism. The Christmas ASS also claimed that Northern workers were completely physically depleted after eight years. That wasn't true, but it does say a lot about the mind-set of the Southern slavers. Their workers lasted from 15 to 60, and then the South was stuck with them under trickle down charity. They saw people like soil. How long would it take to exhaust them as workers before they became a burden on Southern mercy, was a key issue and they couldn't help but frame their criticism of the North in the same way. Northerners didn't even think of people that way, as things that had this or that amount of labor shelf life in them.
THE COTTON IS KING TRIO – RUFF – BARNY - AND YANCY
Al Stephens is now one of the bad guys in American history, but the real villains are less famous than peer pressure Confederates like Stephens, Bob Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
The three leading honky hawk hotheads for Southern secession were all non-officeholders. They were Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, and William L. Yancey of Mississippi. These “fire-eaters” were destructive political entertainers, not constructive legislators.
Yancy, Ruffin & Rhett - The Blood of Shiloh in on Their Hands
Bill Yancey promoted his Neanderthal ideas through the newspapers. He expected that the Deep South would first secede alone and then the upper South could be used as a buffer zone against invasion from the north. Interesting. So in a way the secessions of the upper south made victory easier for the North by eliminating this buffer zone.
Longhaired Edmund Ruffin would personally light the cannon that started the Civil War in Charleston Harbor. Ruffin took his own life when the South surrendered in 65. Good for him.
Robert Barnwell Rhett in November 1860 said that in the year 2000, the historians would be showering the South with compliments for having extended “their Empire down through Mexico to the other side of the great Gulf.”
Wrong, Bobby. We can now thank the South for igniting the American Civil War, which expunged the fascist cancer of slavery from the USA, just as WWII surgically took it out of most of Europe. God only knows what would or could have happened if the South had been allowed to keep slavery and stay in the Union, or if it had been allowed to secede peacefully with slavery.
Six more states soon seceded.
James Buchanan was still President, but the not so magnificent 7 were really seceding against president-elect Lincoln. They were defying an administration that hadn’t been installed yet. Buchanan was like the customer done with his purchase and now the cashier and the next in line are annoyed that he hasn’t wrapped up his stuff and left so they can do business. They felt as ambivalent towards Buchanan as he towards them. As Civil War historian James McPherson puts it, Lincoln now had the responsibility without the power and Buchanan had the power without the responsibility. (McPherson is everything that Catton is not, a great writer and a moralist.)
On January 8, 1860 Congressman W. P. “Buddy” Miles of South Carolina openly admitted that secession was illegal, and that it made no difference. “Call it then revolution,” said Miles.
On Wednesday the 9th of January 1861 Mississippi became the second state to officially secede. South Carolina was no longer alone.
Florida dishonored the elections of 1860 and 1787 on January 10.
Alabama departed the United States of America on the 11th.
On January 19, Georgia held a secessionist convention at Milledgeville, the birthplace of my mother. You know how they voted.
Louisiana became the sixth traitorous state on January 26th, my birthday. I hope that my great great aunt Nell Harper was against secession.
Buchanan now had to decide whether to give up the federal properties within the southern states, and it was over this that the war would ignite. President-elect Lincoln had already indicated that he would not give up Fort Sumter in Charleston, nor forts Pickens and Jefferson on the Gulf Coast. All other federal property in the South had already been requisitioned (stolen) by the seceding states.
James consulted his cabinet, but not his conscience. Cass of State and Attorney General Jerry Black were in favor of sending federal troops to South Carolina to stop secession by force. But Black also concluded that the South must fire the first shot if the North were to legally employ military force.
In January of 1861 Buchanan sent a ship to re-supply the garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. When the Confederate land cannon crews saw the Star of the West approaching the fort on the 9th they fired away. The Wimp of the West turned back. Buchanan cautiously accepted this incident without reaction, as well as the surrender of the federal shipyard at Pensacola to soldiers of the state of Florida on January 12. Old Buck would pass the buck. It would be left up to Lincoln to decide the issue of force.
Blaming Buchanan for inaction is an easy and well-worn path. But it should be remembered that Lincoln after taking office waited five full weeks before even he took any action. Jimbo was in a bad spot, an easy situation for armchair historians to pass judgment on a hundred years later. If only they had been in charge they would not have vacillated.
It was a delicate, precarious, contentious and confused situation and no one knew the future. Buchanan probably believed he was doing the right thing as he saw it. It didn’t mean he was yellow or a shallow fence sitter. He didn’t have the hindsight of 1866 or 2005 to work with. For all he knew, there was not going to be a war, and if his soul was tortured by the thought of all the death that war would bring, who can fault him for that? The old geezer volunteered to defend this country back in 1813, so he had already proven that he wasn’t yellow.
GIVE PEACE A FAT CHANCE
Before Lincoln was inaugurated and after the first 7 secessions, a peace conference was organized with the goal of avoiding disunion. The conference came up with a number of compromise suggestions. There was one small problem; the North would be making all the compromises. Lincoln did not wish to see aggression rewarded. He didn’t see it as fitting that the North should make any concessions at all. The North was stronger and its Party had won a fair election. Why should his side be making all the concessions?
Steven Douglas met with Souther leaders over Christmas dinner and actually proposed the annexation of Mexico as a new slave territory if the South would agree to stay in the Union. Thank God the South said no. The fact that Mexico was not consulted and had long ago abolished slavery and that Christ would not think much of his birthday gift to the South meant little to either party.
One of the compromise measures proposed was a Constitutional Amendment that prohibited any federal interference with slavery for all time in states where it already existed. This idea was actually passed by the Congress and was proposed to be the thirteenth amendment. It was ready to be submitted to the states for ratification when the Civil War broke out.
The real 13th Amendment would be a far more liberal item some years later.
SLAVERY
On the eve of the Civil War most white southerners were not slaveowners. Yet millions of white people supported the fight for the South and for slavery. Why this discrepancy? Because historians like to juggle stats, that why. It’s not really a discrepancy.
One history textbook after another feeds us this jive about how the majority of Southern whites did not really approve of slavery. They stress that in fact, a vast majority of Southern whites did not even own slaves at all. Furthermore, most slave owners only owned one or two slaves and only three thousand owned more than 100. Very few masters were actually “planters”. A planter owned at least ten slaves. You didn't become an ace unless you shot down the freedom of at least ten dark skinned people.
The moral? Most Southern whites were poor, and were merely innocent victims of a system they did not even like or want. Furthermore, if the mass of caucasian Southerners went to war in 1860 it was because of a sectional loyalty, or reaction to aggressive criticism from the North. Moreover, many whites were drafted against their will. Southern thugs intimidated many poor whites who did not want to serve. Vigilante justice was employed against these unsupportive Southern folk. The South went to war against the will of most of its people. The point being that the South were not just a bunch of no-good racist bums like self-righteous Yankees try to paint them as.
These arguments are slightly and deceptively true, which is the same as not true, maybe worse because a simple lie can be disproved, while a slick deception based on selected and carefully coached facts is more difficult to refute.
I'll try to refute this “white” lie.
Why is this lie being told in history books? Because history books have to be approved by every school in the South in order to win a publishing contract. The confining straightjacket of academic orthodoxy muffles the truth. Garrisonian simplicity and moral outrage is not longer admissible in history books. “Slavery is evil! The South is in the wrong!” can be noted as having been the Abolitionist position, but it is not to be adopted by the historian nor the modern day student. That would offend the Southern readers who would prefer an apologist version of the origin of the Civil War.
Here is a representative sample of some intelligent but erroneous writing on the subject from a popular 1970 US History textbook;
“The only hope for the peaceful elimination of
slavery … lay in the willingness of the South’s
business and small farming interests to join the
attack on the institution. But the Southern
groups that lay outside the nexus of the slave
system, whatever their personal convictions,
had too little in common to organize effectively
against those who owned slaves and had a
vested interest in retaining them. It was the
failure of the non-slaveholding elements in the
South to contest the leadership of the planter
minority that permitted the latter to become
the arbiters of the South’s destiny.”
There is wishful thinking going on here. In the name of goodness, historians want to force the facts into a more pleasant box. In the service of being liberal they take the literally liberal position. It’s a lot nicer to think of the South as a place where slavery was only the curse of a few rich whites and that everyone below them, both black and white, were its victims, than it is to think of the South as a place where 98 percent of the whites used the N word as a matter of course and meant it in the most derogatory way possible. By including the phrase “whatever their personal convictions”, the authors seem to believe that whites who were poor or were city businessmen could be theoretically counted on to resist slaveowners, but had failed to come through and so we had the Civil War.
This is the same line of thinking that exonerates the German people for World War II because they were supposedly the victims of a few horrible Nazi leaders, no less victimized than the millions of Jews sent to the camps.
I call this the ‘Nino Brown Syndrome.’ There was a big movie called New Jack City made in 1994. It was a tough movie about the rough world of a black American ghetto. The moral of the movie? That one really really bad black drug kingpin by the name of Nino Brown was dragging down the entire community. If only someone would kill him, the place would be so much better. When bad leaders happen to good people. Don't blame the larger factors, like racism, poverty or your own violent macho value system on the streets, but single out a few bad guys to take the fall for everyone that acquiesced in a bad mentality. I
It’s the same argument of white Southern historian writers from 1866 to this day. The Southern common folk weren’t in the wrong. Just a few bad leaders forced them into it... and the North pushed all the wrong buttons with all their conceited hatreds and set the poor south off like a roman candle, creating a defense of slavery, not a love of it.
Here are the inconvenient facts. The industry of renting out slaves to poor whites was almost as profitable to the slave owner as the work done at the home plantation. The practice was widespread. Slaves commonly traveled about from one plantation to another, large and small to do various tasks. Skilled slaves were lent out as simple laborers, and were rented out to factories by the thousands. Some of these slaves even earned some money for themselves. (Denmark Vescey had hit big on a lottery ticket and purchased his freedom!). Plantation owners with failed crops had to rent out their slaves to other places in order to survive a bad growing season. Slaves were often sent to cities for work in the winter when there was less work to do.
So for every Southern white listed as slave-owner, there were ten who had enjoyed the power end of the slavery experience at one time or another. The statistics mislead. The Charleston factory owner who employed 200 slaves at a fraction of what he would have to pay free labor was not listed as slave-owner. The rent-a-slave industry was huge and is never included in the stats.
Besides, Southern whites that did not own slaves generally wished they did. Whites in Georgia in 1860 were not proud to not own slaves. They were ashamed. They were like the teenager who didn’t own a car. In this way they were still very much part of the white supremacy mindset even if they didn’t own slaves yet. Some fought for the right to own a slave even if they didn’t have enough saved up yet, just like a poor person who votes for the rights of the rich. They vote for the chance to join the group at some later date. It was the same for most non-slave-owning whites. Some day ….Someday…. I’ll have my very own slave.
The slavery mindset was not exclusive to the rich. Poor whites found mental consolation that they were at least superior to Negroes. The slavery system proved that.
Rich and poor, you either owned slaves or wanted to. There were hundreds of free blacks that owned Negro slaves, and some Native American Indians even owned slaves. It was a regional disease and a poisoned mind-set, not an evil decision by a few Nino Browns.
FREE BLACKS
There were no “free blacks” in the North, since all were free. The total number of Blacks in the USA who were not enslaved in 1860 was about 500,000. These were almost evenly divided between North and South. The South of course, had three million others locked up in a holocaust.
The free blacks in the South were in a special position. First of all a black in the South was presumed to be a slave until he or she could prove otherwise. The Virginia Court of Appeals had ruled so. Free B's were given ‘certificates of freedom’, and these were crucial. If they lost their certificate in a windstorm they could be jailed and sold back into slavery.
The mulatto children of white slave masters were often manumitted, for obvious reasons. The percentage of light skinned blacks was five times higher among free blacks in the South as among slaves.
Many skilled slaves saved up enough money to buy their freedom, sometimes even with the encouragement and support of their masters. One slave was allowed to study medicine and not only bought his freedom, but moved to Philadelphia and became one of the most respected doctors in the nation.
There were problems for the free black. Their freedom was precarious. Their position was not entirely dissimilar to that of the free black under the post-war Jim Crow laws. You are free but if you sneeze too loud on the street-corner you’re back in bondage.
It was difficult for a free black to leave a Southern state because each state had laws against the immigration of free blacks. There was nowhere to go. Only a financially solvent master could even be legally allowed to free his slaves and if the solvent master then became indebted, the free black would have to return to the plantation.
BOOKWORMS – DARWIN
One of the most influential books in the history of the world, let alone the country was published in 1859. Origin of the Species is still published today.
Charlie Darwin was challenging the religious perception of the world with a colder harsher proposal of what is reality. His book claimed that life was a struggle for survival among competing organisms at every level and that the weaker specimens were doomed to complete annihilation. What was worse, this was not to be lamented. It was simply the way things were. Natural selection; Survival of the fittest.
The success of Darwin's book is proof of his thesis. It was very well written and if it hadn’t been, Origin of the Species would have been reduced to the junk-pile of book history, exterminated at birth. Instead Charlie's book is still read today and I enjoyed it immensely. If the content was not great and the writing wasn't great too, it would not have been strong enough to survive the competition his great theories would never have mattered one way or another. Like Freud, Darwin’s work is excellent literature, but since it is so intellectually fascinating, that part is generally overlooked.
SOUTHERN VS NORTHERN ECONOMIES
On the eve of the Civil War most of America's exports came from the South the South, but the North made most of the money from it. Cotton alone accounted for more than half of the exports from the United States. But there was such a long chain of middlemen taking a piece of the pie, that by the time the cotton made it to Europe or some other destination and the payments came back to the South, there wasn't much left but bitter crust.
Most of the Southern cotton, rice and sugar had to go North to Baltimore or New York before it was put on large ships and exported. Southern ports weren't capable of handling deep draught ships. Smaller ships made the coastal trip to NYC or Baltimore, taking their percentage of the planter dough before the stuff even got out of the bigger dock.
There were other factors that ate up Southern profits. One of these major factors were factors. A “factor” was a middlemen who loaned money to planters, an advance of the crops. Then these “factors” took on the responsibility of distributing, transporting and selling the produce to New York merchants, among others. Factors had offices and homes throughout the South but they were mostly Yankees and were resented by most of the Southern folk. The planter had to agree to pay a penalty percentage on the dollar for any crops promised but not delivered. Factors made life easier for the planters because they provided a sure market and ready credit. But they took a good percentage of the planter's potential profits, and sometimes the factor factor even put the Southern farmer in the red. Factors were crucial because banks were afraid to lend money directly to plantations, but were quick to grant credit to factors because they trusted factor connections with financial big shots all over the world. The factors could safely provide the credit to the farmer because the banks would always provide credit to the factor.
Southern agriculture was not diversified enough. Tobacco was one of the top crops and it depleted the soil at a rate that hurt the region in the larger picture. If the price of tobacco hit a serious low, there were no fall-back crops in the wings. It was gambling. The upper South was more diversified than the deep South.
In the 25 years before the Civil War the South had a little “Sun Belt” movement of it's own, a miniature version of what happened in America in the 2nd half of the 20th Century . The older Southern states of the eastern seaboard from Virginia to Georgia saw an emigration to the new deep southern states of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas. There was fresh soil there, unworn by careless crop erosion. There was plenty of new and fertile land for beginning entrepreneurs. These new regions could sustain more types of lucrative agricultural product, like sugar and rice, which did not flourish in the soil of Virginia or the hills of upper Piedmont.
In addition to supporting new and more modern products, the deep south could support a new and more modern personal culture. There was a relative wild west freedom from courtly manners in the virgin lands. Texas was a place where a man could chew 'tobacca' and chase women in the hayloft without being quite as ostracized as one would have been on a Virginia Mansion house. It was still the South, but it wasn't the genteel south of James Madison and his descendants at the ball.
The older states began to economic struggle economically as labor, both free and slave began to flee, forced and voluntarily to the more happening Southern new west. One of the reasons that South Carolina started the Civil War ( I make that statement carefully) was because of a bitter resentment over its loss of economic good times. The older states were having trouble just breaking even in a year of good weather, while the barons of Mississippi were making barrels of cash. Yankees were more fun to blame than their sister states to the southern west.
The South needed more railroads to break the Northern lock on the transportation and trade of Southern produce, and while much progress was made, it was pathetic compared to the railroad construction in the north. The South would have seemed to be catching up, if only the North stood still, but it wasn't that way. The advent of the ocean going steamship took away an advantage the South had in the gulf stream. It used to be geographically easier for a sailing ship to make it to London from Savannah than from Philadelphia, even though the distance was longer. That was because of the favorable Gulf Stream winds and tides, but once the North had built a fleet of steam freighters, the combination of nature-defying power and shorter distance made it very tough to ship anything to Europe from the South directly. New Orleans was an exception, as it shipped to the foreign destinations of the Caribbean in the first leg of a a triangular trade route that then took it to Europe, where it was traded for cash and good that went back to New York.
In industrial might, the South by 1860 produced only 15% of the output of the North. And 70% of that 15% Southern industrial strength came from the upper South. So the deep South was in deep mud when it came to trying to compete with the damn Yankees.
LAST MINUTE ATTEMPTS TO AVOID CIVIL WAR
The South had made it clear that if Lincoln were elected, it would mean secession, and most Americans understood that this might mean war over that secession. Many attempts to avoid war were heard.
The New York Herald, “the most influential newspaper in the country,” according to President Buchanan, proposed a way out. The Herald suggested in January 1861 that Lincoln should do the right thing and resign without ever taking office, leaving the Presidency to someone more acceptable to both North and South. If he persisted in going to Washington, said publisher JG Bennett, his name will be remembered side by side with Benedict Arnold. Lincoln would end up, “in a dishonoured grave, driven there perhaps by the hand of an assassin.” Bennet’s Herald was right about the assassin part, but the Arnold part was assassinine.
It was one thing to ask Nixon to resign after failing to abide by his oath of office. It was another to ask Lincoln to resign before he even had a chance to fail.
Many others told Lincoln he had to offer some compromises to the South before he could peacefully take office. This made Lincoln angry. He said he would died first before offering concessions for his right to take office after winning the election fair and square.
Senator Robert Hunter of Virginia offered in Congress a compromise plan to set up a double government system. The country would elect two presidents, one from the South and one from the North. They would each rule for four years, and then one was President the other would be President of the Senate. Hunter didn’t say which one would go first. You can imagine ho far that proposal advanced in the Senate, where people were already carrying knives and pistols into the chamber. Bob Hunter later served in the Confederate cabinet.
SUPREME COURT
Buchanan named one new Supreme Court Justice, Nat Clifford of Maine in 1858. He served until 1881. Critics charged that Clifford wasn’t terribly qualified for the job but made it to the Supreme Court as a political favor.
AFTER OFFICE
Buchanan retired to the Lancaster PA home he called Wheatland. The unpopular fence-sitter was ‘followed by the ill-will of every section of the country.’
He became the first president to publish his memoirs for the general reader. The book was called The Buchanan Administration of the Eve of the Rebellion. It was published in 1866 to not much attention or acclaim. Good luck trying to find a copy of this book today. Heaven forbid we should let him tell his side of the story. But if Hollywood made a movie about him with 400 exaggerations and lies, millions of Americans would suddenly become fascinated wit the life of Jimmy B.
In retirement he had no regrets. “History will vindicate my name,” he wrote. Sorry. History has handed you a relentless beating.
On June 1, 1868 at 8:30 a.m., President Buchanan passed away at Wheatland after an illness of several weeks. His last words were, “I'm going to where there are no more know-it-alls.”
CONCLUSION
Buchanan was true to himself and there was no truth to charges that he conspired with Taney in promoting a Pro-Southern outcome in the Dred Scott case. I am not angry with Buchanan for his performance as president as so many historians are. The Civil War was coming and he missed a chance to stop it. Boo Buchanan. But maybe it was better that it came. Maybe it was accidentally better that we had this vacillator in the White House so that this whole thing could come to a climax and be settled in full once and for all humanity.
What were the true origins of the Great Civil War? That’s a trick question. The italics are to be ignored. I'm going to publish a 901 page book called “The Origins of the Civil War.” The first 899 pages will be blank. The last page will have the word “Slavery.” Page 901 will say the end.
The true origins are the obvious ones. The South was an evil empire that refused to give up African slavery in its strictest form. The 1850’s witnessed a renewed agitation in the South for a re-opening of the overseas slave trade, a core heart of the slave system that had been abolished by the original US Constitution with a future timetable of 1808. The South was now openly preaching the innate inferiority of the African race for the first time. The cards were on the table. War settled it.
All of the complex explanations by all the historians and political writers sophistry somehow sadly evolved into orthodoxy. They tell us that the war was not fought over slavery but rather over states rights, or economics or so the wealthy could further dominate the poor both North and South. There are dozens of brilliant explanations, but a child can look at the facts simply and see the truth.
Are we so willing to insult an entire nation of Americans living in 1860 that we explain now that they all had it wrong back then? That the reasons they all understood the war to be taking place were inaccurate and that future generations finally discovered and explained the real reasons for the Civil War?
I think there were a lot of very smart Americans back then. There were a lot of well-educated souls too, thank you. They smelled the air of the time, we didn't and they knew what was what. Everyone on both sides knew it was about slavery. Now redneck and lefty historians both tell me otherwise. They roll their eyes at those fools who still believe the earth is flat and that the Civil War was fought by moral and courageous whites to free the poor innocent enslaved blacks. But it was. Were those Union soldiers who wrote letters with tears in their eyes saying they knew they were doing God’s work in fighting so that others can be free, were these men just chumps who didn’t know the real story as would be revealed 130 years later by Howard Zinn or Professor Clem Bobby Jo Redneck; that the real reasons for the war were more cynical and convoluted? Were these soldiers that stupid?
The Civil War was the most righteous war in the history of this planet, given the two sides and who won.
SOURCES
Abraham Lincoln, The War Years -1, by Carl Sandburg - c) 1939 (Sanganon Edition)
This is volume three of the six volume history of Lincoln by Sandy. It also gets credit for being volume one of the four books in the series on the War Years, so it is double-represented.
The first 100 pages have a lot to say about Buchanan and the ‘impending crisis.’
This is art and history at the same time.
An American History, by David Saville Muzzey, - The Muzz is a great writer. I enjoyed every page, even though this is a simple story for high school freshmen. No, check that. I enjoyed every page because this is a simple story for High School freshmen.
Gary North wrote this of Murray and the US history textbook,
Frances Fitzgerald's book, America Revisited, surveys twentieth-century public school high school textbooks in history and the social sciences. I know of no other similar attempt. Her book shows how the ideological wheels came off after 1965, when the New Left and new everything else began to undermine the accepted truths and platitudes of the public school textbooks.
She devotes considerable space to David Saville Muzzey. His was never a household name. Yet it would not be far from the truth to say that he, more than anyone else, shaped the thinking of most Americans regarding the history of America. From the first edition of his textbook in 1911 until the final edition in 1961, Muzzey's book was the most widely used American history textbook. In some years, it outsold all others combined.
The American Pageant, A History of the Republic, by Thomas A. Bailey of Stanford – c) 1961 D.C. Heath
Relative to the historian times, Bailey is liberal enough. By today's Noam Choamsky standards, he's a reactionary flag-waver. In any case, TB is always easy to read.
Battle Cry of Freedom, by James McPherson – Although a Civil War book, McPherson dedicates almost one third of the book to the pre-war politics. One of the best books of all time (about anything.) McPherson is way better than Bruce Catton or Shelby Foote, the overrated kings of Civil War historians. Catton is not king, and Shelby cannot shine McPhereson's foote,
I left my copy of Battle Cry in a comedian’s car a few months ago, so if anyone runs into Tim McIntyre, please remind him that he still has my McPherson book.
Update: Now he claims I never left the book in his car and I have to buy another copy after making marginal notes for the first 174 pages.
The Coming Fury, by Bruce Catton, - c) 1961 – This is volume one of his famous trilogy. The Coming Fury won the Pulitzer Prize.
I have read three books by Catton and I don't like his sense of detachment. He never takes a moral stance in favor of the North. To him, both sides were equally to blame and the Civil War was something tragic and sad that just happens to have happened. I think James McPhereson is ten times better.
BC never shows me any real hatred for slavery in any of his books, only a dry determination to put his scholastic nose to the grindstone and hammer out the details. With McPhereson (or Henry Elson to cite another contemporary historian from Catton's era) you get the story plus the spiritual undertone of knowing when and whom to condemn or praise, even though it's done subtly.
Catton considers slavery a tragedy, not an evil. The South is to be pitied for having accidentally embraced it. The Abolitionists were as much to blame as anyone for bringing on the conflict, them and their haughty self-righteousness and lack of understanding for peculiar Southern conditions. The war was an incredible story that is to be told in all its grandeur by this militarian, but no one side was really at fault more than the other. That's his tone in all his books.
A Diplomatic History of the United States, by Samuel Flagg Bemis, Farnam Professor of Diplomatic History in Yale University – c) 1934 Henry Holt
Some academics consider DHUS to be not a diplomatic history of the United States but The diplomatic history of the United States.
Empire for Liberty, the Genesis and Growth of the United States of America, Vol. 1, by Dumas Malone and Basil Rauch – c) 1960
Malone is listed as being of both Columbia University and the University of Virginia. Barnard of of Columbia and Barnard College. I suspect that these two pro-Southern chauvinists met at Columbia in the advanced years of their career, discovered they had something in common, and then collaborated on a proud history textbook that favored the South in the great struggle from 1820-1880.
This is a good book and they are nothing less than great writers, but Empire for Liberty is filled with typical petulant rationalizations defending the South and explaining logical reasons for all of its imperfections, while maximizing in emotional tirades, any offense by the North.
I've read 688 out of 796 pages and do not own volume 2 but would love to.
The Enduring Vision, by Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, Thomas L. Purvis, Harvard Sitkoff, and Nancy Woloch, c) 1990 - A fantastic book that I seem to quarrel with a lot. It's got a major league liberal bias.
The Graphic Story of the American Presidents, by David C. Whitney c) 1972 for the quote on Harpers Ferry Southern fears. I hate to quarrel with Whitney because his book has been a helpful friend.
The Great Republic, by Bailyn & Wood had the best take on many issues in the Buchanan era, especially the Dred Scott Case. Bernard Bailyn usually gets the writer credit for the book in references, but it is a collaborative work by many top scholars.
Thomas A. DeBor wrote a review of this book for Amazon that I agree with completely,
“If you are seeking a balanced yet interpretive and thorough version of the story of America I do not think one can do better than this book. The authors somehow have managed to bring exceptional detail and analysis of how the United States came from early colonization by Europeans right up to the very recent past while leaving out obvious bias and were still able to make the narrative exciting and compelling. I teach history and, although The Great Republic is written at too high of a level to be of much use in my at-risk-kids high school classroom, it has proved itself invaluable to me as a reference work. I read it cover to cover. If you are an American History nut this book belongs in your library.”
It’s sad though, that people who are obsessed with useless pleasures like sports, music, and the movies get flattering names like fans or aficionados. But people who follow politics and history get calls “junkies” and “nuts.” To me, that is nuts.
A History of the American People by Graebner, Fite and White c) 1970
HAP provided the quote on the slavery ‘nexus.’
History of a Free People by Henry W. Bragdon and Samuel P. McCutchen – c) 1954 MacMillan
This high school textbook is tough stuff. If you answered all the quiz and essay and research assignments correctly you would qualify to be a history professor, not a student getting an A on a report card.
History of the United States of America, by Henry Elson, c) 1945 – Elson is the best. This general history for all ages is so good that I wish I could go back in time so I could read it all over again for the first time. In the pre-war years he is very liberal on the bell curve, but during Reconstruction he lets me down, but that is a familiar story with the historians, even the great ones.
The Impending Crisis in the South, How to Meet It, by Hinton Helper – c) 1857 – This is the book that rocked the South and is easily obtainable today. Not a delight to read, but not prohibitively boring either.
The March of Democracy, Vol. 1 – The Rise of the Union, by James Truslow Adams, c) 1934 – I hate this guy. I've read five of his books.
As always, Truslow splits the blame for both slavery and the Civil War even-Thad Stevens. Here's the JT Adams touch on the 1857 book, The Impending Crisis,
“Steps, frequently violent, were taken in the
South to prevent the circulation of Helper’s
book, and perhaps nothing shows more
clearly how impossible any sane consideration
of slavery had become, in either section, than
this refusal of the South to permit a book
written by one of its own citizens … to be
read by its people.”
“In either section.?” So the fascist refusal of the South to allow freedom
of speech is proof that both sides were acting unreasonably. That’s like
saying ‘the bully at work continually insulted Mrs. Jones for no reason, proving that neither person was capable of sane behavior.'
The Negro in the Making of America, by Bernard Quarles – c) 1964 What a pleasure to read.
New American History, by Albert Bushnell Hart c) 1934. Not to be confused with the following book by W. E. Woodward, the Hart book is one of the most liberal for its time, a time when liberals were desperately needed in the field. It is a short history for the high school student and the book is a pleasure. Harvard guy.
A New American History, by W. E. Woodward, c) 1938.
Put 'em up, Woody. Let's go, you and me, right now.
This was a very popular history book in its era and the tone and content are typical of the histories of the time. Woodward takes a biased position against the North throughout the book. I offer criticism at length.
One of the quickest ways to find the guilty party in any dispute is to find the one that is anxious to split the blame. Just ask King Solomon.
Woodward takes the steady position that the South was wrong in some ways and the North was wrong in some ways too. Slavery was wrong but hey, the Abolitionists were wrong too and besides, their agitation was what prevented a fair and peaceful settlement of the slavery problem. He never misses a chance to split the blame for the conflict between the north and the south. Sure, the south was racist but hey, the north was just as racist and has no right claiming that the war was over slavery. The Northern white was no more a friend of the black than was the southern white. Woodward and the historians of his ilk are all too eager to settle the matter by saying that both sides were equally to blame and it was a tragic era.
Nonsense.
Another typical lame trick is to say that the system of factory labor in the North was just as evil as slavery in the South,
“It may seem strange that the Southern planters did not free
their slaves voluntarily and adopt the more profitable
wage-slavery system of the North.”
… the average Southern planter considered the system of
wage slavery as practiced in the Northern states inhuman,
base and cruel.”
I would like to explain to Woodward the difference between literal and figurative, because apparently he has no understanding of grammar school fundamentals on the subject. You see, real “slavery” is when a person has no freedom and live in chains and can be whipped or even murdered with legal impunity by the owners of people as property. That would be an example of the “literal” meaning of a word. On the other hand there is what is called the “figurative” meaning of a word which means it isn’t really what it means but is some sort of fanciful stretch of the meaning outside of the true meaning. “Wage-Slavery of the North” would be an example of the figurative use of a term.
The people in the North were not slave and playing around with terminology does not change the orange into an apple. There was no “wage-slavery” in the north. There were brutal working conditions. But there was no slavery. Zero. None. Nice try. And this bogus term is still used by historians today just as it was in Woodward’s time. Southerners also commonly used it in the ante-bellum South. Fitzhugh, Helper, Hammond, Yancey and all the other writers and orators threw around the epithet of “wage slavery” in the North.
Woodward then gently chides the southern planter for being caught up in the chivalry of,
“the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He was a romantic person –
and full of buncombe, like the abolitionists and nearly
everyone else.”
Come again? The Abolitionists were full of buncombe? Exactly how so? Were they full of it because they demanded freedom and the vote for black people? This is just a typical example of the guilty eager to split the blame. James Truslow tries to slickly tell us that both sides were full of it by slipping it in from the side in the midst of a secondary point. No go, bro. The Abolitionists were not full of buncombe. The Abolitionists were full of courage, wisdom and divine inspiration. How dare you teach my father otherwise in 1938!
Here is what is not ‘buncombe.’ The South started the Civil War, was in the wrong, the war was fought over slavery, secession was treason, and the Civil War was not fought over states rights, the tariffs, or some vague generality called ‘economics,’
Woodward has a right to his North-bashing racist opinions, but he should own up and call his history a New Partisan History. The book drips with a vendetta agenda.
Here are some more disagreeable excerpts as he writes on the slavery crisis on the eve of the Civil War.
“The nature of the abolitionist onslaught was particularly
offensive. These attacks stiffened the Southern backbone
and turned even the halfhearted apologists for slavery into
rabid defenders of the slave system ..
Intelligent people in the South were well informed as to
social conditions in the Northern states. They knew that
the slums of New York City would be considered a
disgrace on any slave plantation; that the workday in
Northern factories was longer than the working hours of
slaves; that the Northern cities were infested by beggars
while there were practically no beggars in the Southern
states.”
I referred earlier to a “box of frogs”. Let me explain the term. There is the fable of the perfidious man. Every time he told a tall tale a frog would leap from his mouth. The object of the truth seeker was to capture the frog and thereby correct the lie. But as the scoundrel kept talking, the amount of frogs became too great to control, and the field had to be left to the victorious liar. I think it is safe to say that the above passage is loaded with frogs. No free man in a slum would prefer to live in bondage in a slightly better shack. That’s just for openers. Truslow is actually boasting that there is no homeless problem on the plantation. Very weak. Reminds me of the Will Rogers line on Russia. ‘There’s no income tax over there. That’s cause there's no income.’
Woodward continues with his 'the South as victim' theme on the banking issue,
“Many of the Northern fortunes had been acquired by sharp
practices, by usury, by semi-fraudulent dealings and chicanery
of one kind or another … one may readily imagine the effect
on the Southern temper.”
So the usury of Northern bankers gets his dander up, but not slavery itself, not ever in fact in any of his books. Slavery was a sad burden that the South had to make the best of to survive.
Sadly, the attitudes expressed by Woodward represented the state of the art in American history from 1900 to about 1965. There were some who were a little more balanced or liberal relative to their decade. But it has to be remembered that Jackie Robinson did not break the color barrier in baseball until 1947 and the first black TV show, Julia, did not air until 1968. The history books had just as much of a slow uphill task as did the nation itself in correcting its inherent racism. America could not properly see its past until the day it could properly see its present.
Today, history books are anything but redneck. There is revisionism. The Abolitionists are no longer reviled as the cause of the Civil War.
But the sinister writings of the past are simply forgotten as though they had never happened. When a past injustice of the historical science is corrected, the change is not noted as of historical significance in itself. The story is simply told in its new and revised form. But the old text did its damage when it was out there and the bad passages in our history books are now an important part of our history, and worth a look/ see. The changes in US historical studies on the same subject is a separate historical subject entirely
New York Times obituary 6-2-1868 for the “ill will” quote on the president’s retirement.
Out of Many, A History of the American People, by John Mack Faragher (Yale); Mary Jo Buhle (Brown), Daniel Czitrom (Mount Holyoke); and Susan Armitage (Washington State), c)1994
Well Written Liberal Propaganda – Even the title is a pushy theme that the nation was not essentially founded and developed primarily by Europeans. Whether that's wrong or right is another issue, but this is the story of the United States. The authors have to be super-politically-correct to get the big school contract and they did big time on both counts. This is what your teenagers are reading in their first year away from home.
Out of Many is a great book. It is beautifully designed and easy to read. The maps are unbeatable. It's a physical masterpiece, worth every penny of the heavy price.
But the text is a standard neo-revisionist liberal interpretation of American history, and should be read with that in mind. The tone is staid, but the content is often an attempt as persuasion as much as it an attempt at education. You should read it side by side with A Patriot's History of the United States by Schweikart and Allen if you want to be a fair and balanced student.
This is only slightly to the right of Howard Zinn, but unlike Zinn, Out of Many pretends to be telling the story objectively.
At least with Zinn you know you are reading a polemic and he owns up to his over the top bias.
The Oxford History of the American People, by Sam Elliot
Morrison, c) 1965 – Poor Samuel. He wrote an old fashioned
take on the Civil War era and in five more years the work was out of step with the new revised version widely accepted. he is, to me, something of a 'doughface' historian but he certainly wouldn't share that opinion of himself. Sam wishes he could accept some of the South's historical fallacies, but cannot. Morrison helps the cause of right when he says the obvious, but something that, sadly, needs to be said by someone with his clout, just for the record,
“Nobody who has read the letters, state papers, newspapers
and other surviving literature of the generation before 1861
can honestly deny that the one main fundamental reason
for secession of the original states which formed the
Southern Confederacy was to protect, expand, and
perpetuate the slavery of the Negro race.”
Thank you, Sam! Morison did the hard work of freedom, the homework of the top-notch historian. Take his word for it. The Civil War was fought to free the slaves and bring the entire USA into step with the rest of the world’s understanding of progress. It is a shame that such an obvious point is still somehow in dispute. Both the extreme right and the extreme left are in total agreement today that the Civil War was not fought over slavery.
If an historian as racist as Morison says it was than it was.
Of the North in the Buchanan years he writes,
“Recent immigrants and native born artisans disliked the Negro, but were repelled by the sneers of Southern Democrats at wage earners.”
It's really Morison who 'dislikes the Negro,” in my opinion. He continues,
“Senator Ben Wade put it thus when a Southern colleague called the Homestead Bill a sop to Northern paupers, 'Is it to be lands for the landless, or niggers for the niggerless?' ”
Its sleazy to write about Southern slave-owners for three chapters and never quote one saying anything horrible about blacks, let alone using the n-word, then he writes of Wade, a Northern fighter for justice and equality who happened to use that word habitually, even though he was a friend of black people and fought the good fight always, and quote him saying the word.
That's not the first time Morison quotes a Northern Radical to the left of Lincoln using the word. The real point isn't the point, its to spotlight Senator Wade using the n-word to prove that Northerners were racists too. The real point is to justify his own deep felt inner racism invoking an innocent man as a racist too, when he wasn't. Any black person in the know in 1860 would forgive Wade for using the word, while plenty of over the top white supremacists (of which Wade was not) did not use the word.
On page 605 Morison renews his obsessive hatred for that n-lover Senator Sumner of Massachusetts. He almost says that Sumner got what was coming to him in 1856 and is lucky he didn't get caned again in 1860,
“Extremists on both sides whipped up hostile sentiment between the sections. Charles Sumner, returning to the Senate after a three-year attempt to cure the injuries inflicted by Preston Brooks, on June 4, 1860 delivered a four-hour oration on 'The Barbarism of Slavery' which was no less offensive than the Kansas speech which provoked the beating. Southerners in general assumed that Sumner 'spoke for the North'; they did not know that, for all his social graces, and noble English friends,, Sumner was ostracized by Boston society. Far closer to Northern sentiment was a letter of Frances Parkman, the historian: 'I would see every slave knocked on the head before I would see the union go to pieces, and would include in the sacrifice as many abolitionists as could conveniently be brought together.' That was pretty much Lincoln's feeling too.”
Spoken like a true fascist.
First of all Mr. Morison, let Lincoln speak for himself. Your extrapolation is obviously based on the famous Lincoln letter to Greely, but you're taking it up a huge notch. Yes, Lincoln assuredly would not interfere with slavery by force if that's what it took to save the Union. He never said anything about giving a half a million black children a concussion with an iron pipe, and then go find us a few liberal whites to keep the beating going. Lincoln had a kind heart and you can't speak for him regarding a suggested act of extreme violence upon 3 million blacks and 20,000 white libs. So Parkman is just as in the wrong as any other racist of his time if he said that.
Sam's point is that Parkman is one of the great and respected historians, so if we can quote him saying that, it must be a good thing to say. I respond by condemning Parkman for saying that, and Morison for invoking the quote.
At least Parkman has an excuse, he lived in a morally corrupt backward time on the race issue. Point taken that Parkman's attitude was mainstream. What's Morison's excuse for feeling the same way in 1965?
And so what if it was mainstream?
If Parkman is right and Sumner was out of the mainstream, then more praise for Sumner. The fact (if it is one) that Senator Sumner was banned in Boston society would make sense and all the more reason to admire him. Sumner took his stand on the Negro question knowing it would cost him his social standing in Boston. This would also explain why Sumner was popular in England. The English were light years ahead of the United States on the race question in the Buchanan era. They had abolished slavery in the 1830's. Charles got treated like King Charles in London, while in Boston he got treated like a leper. Fine. Good for him.
Morison is trying to say that if only those high and mighty liberal do-gooders like Sumner had stayed out of it, there would have been no Civil War. Again, probably so. All the more reason to thank and hail the heroes who took a stand in the name of right and said damn the consequences.
Moral compromise and equivocation in the name of maintaining both slavery and union is a vice. Why is Samuel Eliot Morison advocating it in 1965? And a Harvard man too. What a shame.
Sumner was closer to what was in Lincoln's heart than Parkman or Morison could ever dream of. And Sumner's extremism was a convenient lightning rod for Lincoln. As long as Sumner was advocating hard left policy for the Negro, Lincoln could safely take a moderate liberal step in the direction and not look all that Radical by Northern standards. Lincoln could hold the center in the North while taking baby steps to help the blacks. Without the Radicals on his distant left, Lincoln would have looked like the lefty vanguard, and even small steps might have been blocked. The famous Greely letter was an expedient device to stop Greely from messing up the war. It wasn't the inner Lincoln. Sumner was throwing the incomplete long bombs that set up Lincoln's successful short passing game.
And by the way Sam, Lincoln always had a very good personal relationship with Senator Sumner. You can talk all you want about how many people hated Charlie Sumner. Lincoln liked him just fine and that's good enough for me.
Quarrels That Shaped the Constitution, edited by John Garraty c) 1962 Quarrels contains a chapter by the ubiquitous Bruce Catton on the Dred Scott Case. The never progressive Catton steps over the line with me when he criticizes the personality of Scott in passing, stressing that Scott was
“nobody in particular. … unable to read or write, physically
frail, he was a man without energy, who for a full decade
drifted about in St. Louis as an errand boy … an
unremarkable bondsman.”
I would like to ask the dead Catton exactly how Scott was supposed to make himself fit, educated, stable and energized within the parameters of his life as a slave? How can Catton pass judgment on a slave for being some sort of underachiever? If I were a slave, I doubt if I would be able to make much of myself in life and I would not be eager to even try. In fact, if I were a slave, my goal in life would simply to do as little as possible indefinitely and definitely. As for Dred being ‘nobody in particular’, how exactly was a slave supposed to become a 'somebody in particular?' How many books would Bruce Catton have had published if he had been born in Dred Scott’s burlap shoes? Catton has an issue with a slave being a drifter. And Bruce is not the only historian to have had the audacity to call Dred Scott ‘lazy.’
Rise of the American Nation, by Lewis Paul Todd, and Merle Curti, c) 1958 –My 1972 Southie High textbook – There is a newer edition that includes a third author named Samuel Bryant. Hopefully the new edition is better than this one. I liked it ok in High School, because I didn't have any other history books to compare it to.
A Short History of the American Nation, by John A. Garraty of Columbia University – c) 1977 Harper & Row
This is a shortened revised edition of his 1966 textbook, The American Nation. The book has been published again after he died in 2007 by the same guy who co-edited their famous work, American Historical Biography.
I don't like his tone on the Civil War Era. He is not one of the good guys like James McPherson and Kenneth M. Stampp.
Slavery Defended, The Views of the Old South, edited by Eric L. McKitrick, c) 1963 – This fine collection of the unashamed provide the 1858 speech by slave-owner Senator J. Hammond of South Carolina.
Stephen Douglas, Defender of the Union, by Gerald M. Capers, c) 1959 – with Oscar Handlin – There are only two biographies out there on the “Little Giant” who debated Lincoln and won the Senatorial Seat for Illinois in the mix. Lincoln won the Presidential Election of 1860 from the fame he gathered in is performance against Douglas, but I have a confession to make about Lincoln. I can't stand his funny stories.
I've had two reading this sessions with this book and I can't say I enjoyed it very much. It's perhaps to be expected from a guy whose middle name is actually Mortimer.
Their Tattered Flags, A History of the Confederacy. A disagreeable book which among other things blames Nat Turner’s Rebellion for the demise of the hitherto progressing anti-slavery movement in the South.
There are so many thousands of these angry-white-southern-guy with a vocabulary revisionist histories that it becomes important to avoid them just to preserve time. You don’t want to open that box of frogs. By the way you should have seen how fast the conversation stopped between the used bookstore cashier and me when he came to this one on the stack. This was downtown Boston.
I say this with all sincerity; I wish I had the time to read the three thousand small publishing house books by Southerners explaining the redneck point of view intelligently. But as it stands, I haven’t yet found the time to read 10% of Plato or Twain. It doesn’t look good for these books either.
The United States to 1865, by Michael Kraus of CCNY – c) 1959 University of Michigan Press
Famous historiographer Kraus writes a fine short general history of the US for the monumental University of Michigan History of the Modern World series, all 14 volumes published simultaneously.
He bristles at the South saying things were just as bad in the North,
“Unlike the South, however, where no criticism of slave society was condoned, the North faced the constant barbs of homegrown critics. The evils of life in the factories remained, but they were not sanctioned, as was slavery, as a blessed way of life.”
These Modern Worlds are great looking books, a beautiful design and bind by U-Mich.
The United States, From Colony to World Power, by Oliver Perry Chitwood, Frank Lawrence, Owsley, and H.C. Nixon – c) 1948 – revised edition 1964 – This is one of the most racist history books I have ever read, maybe the worst on Reconstruction ever. I cite an example the better belongs in a post Civil War chapter, but I have to cite an example to back the extreme charge. These guys openly defend the Black Codes passed by the South after the Civil War,
“It will be recalled that in places the majority of Negroes had
abandoned the farms ... It was to meet this situation and force
these ignorant, irresponsible wanderers to settle down to work
that the vagrancy laws were passed.”
For the pre Civil War era we have this account of the attack on Senator Sumner by Preston Brooks. Sumner made a speech against slavery and for this he was nearly beaten to death in a Pearl Harbor sneak attack by the South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks who then received hundreds of new canes to hit more Yankees with and was praised by countless Southern newspapers. Listen to the authors describing the two deeds,
“A shameful exhibition of this ill feeling was a most obnoxious
speech made by Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and
the assault on him by Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina. In
the speech on what he termed “The Crime Against Kansas,”
Sumner used the most abusive expressions and inexcusable
personal allusions, making a violent onslaught on the character
of A.P. Butler, an aged Senator of South Carolina. Brooks, who
was a nephew of Butler and a member of the House of Representatives,
avenged the insult to his relative by attacking Sumner while he was
seated behind his desk in the Senate chamber, beating him over the
head with a gutta-percha cane until he became unconscious. ... This
unfortunate affair strengthened the antislavery and weakened the
proslavery cause ... The abolitionists contended that the South as a
whole acclaimed or at least condoned what they termed a dastardly
act. In this way the incident fanned the flames of hatred against the
South.”
Every sentence can be rebutted, but why bother? These guys are hopeless racists. This book is scholastic Ku Klux Klanism.
And it was clearly distributed in America's schools!
The United States: The History of a Republic, by Richard Hofstadter of Columbia, William Miller co-author of The Age of Enterprise, and Daniel Aaron of Smith College – c) 1957 Prentice-Hall
“Hoffie” is a famous person, Aaron is an old Harvard man (he's 98), but I can't find any info on William Miller. There is a naval historian by the same name, but he was born in 1948 and I don't think a nine year old boy was instructing the women at Smith College in 1957.
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