Red Alert:

"POLICE Disarming Citizens BY FORCE in Connecticut NOW!

What I KNOW to be truth:

The true bloods of the South are a distinct ethnic people, they are also Confederate American by birth. Dixie is a conquered nation, being conquered does not change the above truths!! They tried to destroy our Southern culture during the infamous reconstruction implemented by Congress, which imposed martial law in the Southern States, from 1866 to 1877... eleven years!!! And we became the empires subjects by force, not choice!

They have chosen the Southern white as the focal scapegoat of our time. This in, politics, media, comics, literature, film and television; dealing with religion, race relations, work and lifestyle in defining Southern whites. The Southron which represents faith, country, pride of heritage, hard work, kinship loyalty, traditional values and way of life is being trampled on by "those people" that hate us so...With all this hate, why don't they just let us go!!!

America's South is losing it's regional distinctiveness by progress, the PC crowd and appeasement of minorities. Society is demoralizing the Southern people through typecasting as stupid, rednecks and hillbilly's. Yet America is destroying a part of itself that should have been left alone, let go, explored and listened to. Because of the guilt and questioning which his/her existence creates in the world of the un-Godly, do-gooders and PCer's. Many Southron feel inadequate and orphaned in their own land!!!

"Those people" preach we should practice tolerance. Well I think we have practiced too much tolerance for too long!!! We have been so tolerant we are losing our past and future! We have let our children become second class citizens in their schools. They have been forced to be ashamed of themselves and their heritage! If we do not correct this, they will grow-up never knowing the truth and our future as a distinct ethnic people is doomed! ~ PoP Aaron

Taking Liberty by Taking Property

Same-Sex Marriage Creates Healthier Queers?

Gay marriage 'improves health'
Maybe so.... But it damns their souls!! PoP


How often or at all do you see a MAN & woman act like these queers in public!?
Sickening Story HERE

Whenever the Bible mentions marriage, it is between a male and a female. The first mention of marriage, Genesis 2:24, describes it as a man leaving his parents and being united to his wife. In passages that contain instructions regarding marriage, such as 1 Corinthians 7:2-16 and Ephesians 5:23-33, the Bible clearly identifies marriage as being between a man and a woman. Biblically speaking, marriage is the lifetime union of a man and a woman, primarily for the purpose of building a family and providing a stable environment for that family.

The Bible condemns homosexuality as an immoral and unnatural sin. Leviticus 18:22 identifies homosexual sex as an abomination, a detestable sin. Romans 1:26-27 declares homosexual desires and actions to be shameful, unnatural, lustful, and indecent. First Corinthians 6:9 states that homosexuals are unrighteous and will not inherit the kingdom of God. Since both homosexual desires and actions are condemned in the Bible, it is clear that homosexuals “marrying” is not God’s will, and would be, in fact, sinful.

Parasites are devouring the host culture

Thanks to SWR's Hamp

Obama Asserts His Dictatorship

“I’m here to say that we can’t wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won’t act, I will” ~ obama

Read it HERE

White Supremacist Northerners, Reformers and Collectivists

The Northern worker as well as European immigrant wanted no emancipation of African slaves as they feared a flood of cheap labor coming into the North and the territories. Included in the 1854 and 1860 Republican party platforms were white supremacy planks that restricted the black man to the South while holding the western territories for white settlers. And ironically, while the abolitionists saw only evil in the South, many overlooked the plight of children and women enslaved in Northern factories, with many of the latter forced into prostitution.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
========

“When abolitionists attempted to induce empathy with the Negro in Northern whites who opposed slavery only passively, they were consciously trying to meet the greatest challenge to their cause, the widespread fear that emancipation would bring social equality in its wake. According to one student of Northern opinion, “the key to the explanation of anti-abolition is race prejudice.”

Most Northerners, he explains, were opposed at the same time to slavery and to race equality and therefore supported the American Colonization Society. Abolitionists, realizing this, always saw their struggle to discredit colonization as part of their fight against racism. In fact, their slogan of immediate and unconditional emancipation ought itself to be understood as, among other things, an assertion of the equality of the races.

White supremacist Northerners at the time understood this better than modern historians who have assumed that the slogan represented a naïve call for a revolutionary transformation they thought could come in the near future.

The [Northern] labor reformers stressed interest where the abolitionists stressed principle, talked of classes where the abolitionists talked of individuals, urged reform in institutions where abolitionists preached repudiation of sin. It is this conflict in philosophy…that explains why the two movements were not allied. Some abolitionists did in fact sympathize with underpaid American workers, starving Irish peasants, and disenfranchised English factory operatives.

George Henry Evans, editor of Young America…in an editorial [stated]: “If it be true, as I most firmly believe it is, that wages slavery, in its legitimate results of crowded cities, debasing servitude, rent exactions, disease, crime, and prostitution, as they now appear in England and our Northern Eastern States, are even more destructive of life, health and happiness than chattel slavery, as it exists in our Southern States, then the efforts of those who are endeavoring to substitute wages for chattel slavery are greatly misdirected…”

Evans was seconded by another National Reformer, William West, of Boston…[who stated that] the progress of slavery can never be arrested and reversed until monopoly of the soil was abolished. Abolitionists must therefore unite with the National Reformers to limit the amount of land an individual might own…[and] Slaveowners would have to free their slaves because enormous plantations would disappear.

The following March [1846], [William Lloyd] Garrison, back from Europe [said] “The evil in society…is not that labor receives wages, but that the wages given are not generally in proportion to the value of the labor performed.” A few months later it was Wendell Phillips turn. “A wiser use of public lands, a better system of taxation, disuse of war and military preparation, and more than all, the recognition of the rights of woman…will help the classes much.”

(Means and Ends in American Abolition, Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850, Aileen S. Kraditor, Pantheon Books, 1969, pp.242-250)

Financing the Northern War Machine

In the summer of 1864 the Union cause was in disarray and the Northern public depressed over the appalling casualty rate and worker strikes. Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase had become a critic and political opponent of Lincoln and was replaced by Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden, a radical antislavery Whig. Lincoln appointed him to the Treasury post for his close links to prominent northeastern capitalists, and to “find sufficient funds to pay for a vicious and expensive war that showed no signs of ending.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Financing the Northern War Machine:

“It would be easy to condemn Fessenden for his employment of a private banker [Jay Cooke] sell vast amounts of public securities. The secretary himself was uneasy about the idea. The Union was in a desperate financial condition for most of his term in office. [Former Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase] told Jay Cooke in September 1864 that Fessenden’s reluctance to employ the agency system was probably due to his unwillingness to encounter public criticism. “I hardly blame him,” wrote Chase bitterly. “What did I get – what did anybody get prefer[r]ing country and duty to private interests & compliant favor?”

The secretary’s treatment of financial questions was essentially pragmatic – informed by a characteristically Whiggish view of the economy and society but conditioned primarily by the urgent need for cash to finance the Northern war machine…

Beginning in July 1861 Congress passed a series of laws heavily restricting trade with areas outside the loyal States and giving the secretary of the Treasury and his network of agents wide-ranging powers…The system proved controversial, particularly in border-State communities traditionally reliant on trade with the South, and fostered widespread corruption centered on the smuggling of cotton from the Confederacy.

Cotton prices were increasing dramatically because of the war and a multiplicity of Treasury employees, military officials, and private citizens were soon caught up in the illicit trade. In the summer of 1864 President Lincoln endorsed the view of a Boston businessman, Edward Atkinson, that the government should procure as much Confederate cotton as possible in order to prevent the South from exploiting sales of its valuable staple. On July 2, the day before Fessenden entered the cabinet, Congress gave the secretary of the Treasury exclusive power over all trade in the Rebel States, the aim being to establish a government monopoly over the cotton trade and thereby increase the national revenue at the enemy’s expense.

On September 24 Fessenden issued new trade regulations….These permitted persons claiming to control cotton beyond Union lines to sell their product to an appointed Treasury agent at three-quarters of the current cotton price in New York. A complementary executive order broadened the possibilities for intersectional trade by allowing cotton sellers to purchase goods up to one-third of the price received and take them back across the lines.

Fessenden had grave reservations about this morally dubious trade….[but] Lincoln signed around forty special orders before December 1 authorizing favored individuals to bring out Southern cotton. Vast fortunes awaited those with sufficient political clout to secure the necessary permits or Treasury appointments.”

(The Grave of All My Comforts, William Pitt Fessenden, Robert Cook, Civil War History, John T. Hubbell, editor, Kent State University Press, September 1995, pp. 216-219)

Rebellion??

''No matter how hard the conservative and leftist media may try to twist the minds of the American people, they have a mind of their own. And, as of today, that mind is on rebellion against the government, at all costs.'' ~ Unknown

A (very) Short History of the Southern Cause

By Ron Hammon

When the Founding Fathers created the Constitution of the United States of America, they intended the United States to be just that, a confederation of independent, sovereign states. The Federal government was meant to be similar to the European Union today, an association of fellow "States", assembled for mutual defense, unfettered commerce, and only a very limited amount of cooperation in other areas. To join, individual states had to agree to abide by a number of over reacting principles, such as freedom of speech and the right to bear arms.

Spain is still considered sovereign today, even though it is a member of the European Union. Spain is also, (as far as we know) able to resign from that union as it wishes. In 1859, a citizen of the "State" of Virginia was assumed to be a citizen of the "COUNTRY" of Virginia, NOT a citizen of the United States, no less than a citizen of the country of Spain is NOT a "citizen" of the European Union today. This is why Robert E. Lee felt compelled to serve his beloved Virginia, his home "country", when it resigned from the corrupting Union. Lee had nothing to gain from the false, today-touted reason of maintaining slavery as THE cause of the Great War. Slavery was dying out all over the world. There was never any need for a war over it. Lee, the head of the Army of Virginia, had no slaves, nor did the vast majority of Southerners who fought for the Confederacy.

Despite the efforts of a few of the Founding Fathers, like Alexander Hamilton, to form a strong empire, rather than a confederation of sovereign states, the original idea of "United States" rather than a "United STATE" held true for almost a whole century. Then, a fresh movement arose. The Northern states (those that had already given up their former practice of widespread slavery, like New York), because of greater voting population, could out-vote the South and pass special taxes and tariffs to be paid primarily by the South but spent by the North, a redistribution of wealth, fleecing the South. Less than a century earlier, this sort of "Taxation without Representation" fueled the FIRST American Revolution against British tyranny. Today, virtually every American feels that this first attempt to split away from an oppressive, over lording government was justified and noble. However, in the last century, the Union government has managed to blind most Americans to the noble effort of the much more free and independent Southern states to separate from that central government, a government which had changed into an empire and became far more oppressive to the South than King George had been to the colonies.

The brand new political party in 1860, the Republican party (which replaced the Whigs) was dedicated to the drastic change to a dominant, centralized Federal government, a true empire, to overlord the individual states. This single "nation", with uniform rules that the whole "nation" MUST follow was a drastic change into a completely different frame of government. The centralized form, as opposed to smaller, distributed government, closer to the people, was spearheaded by Alexander Hamilton and resisted bitterly by Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Completely different ideals splintered the opposition party, the Democratic party, into different factions. Because of a severe FOUR-way split among the other candidates, the new, radical Republican party won the presidency with its first Presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, a strong advocate of the new, bastardized idea of U.S. government envisioned by Henry Clay and Alexander Hamilton, a strong central government with subjugated states bowing to the whims of a distant overlord.

The REAL "United States", as originally conceived by Thomas Jefferson, was doomed. Lincoln, and his handlers, had a grand plan for empire building and would let nothing stop the forging of a strong, centralized, global power, not even the U.S. Constitution! For example, the Constitution states that only states can coin money. This didn't stop the "lawyer", Ol' "Honest Abe" from outlawing the practice and delivering the production of all money over to the Federal government. The Southerner Andrew Jackson, while President, had infuriated big bankers by squashing their power of a National Bank. But, the Yankee President Lincoln and the young Republican party did the exact opposite. They made banking and money-making a Federal operation since whoever controls the money controls the people. (The European Union is pissed that Great Britain refuses to stop printing its own money. Sound familiar?) They intended to utterly shift control away from local oversight and balance, as designed by the Founding Fathers, to Washington, D.C. The day of "Big Brother", the overreaching and overbearing centralized power, was born.

We now suffer the inevitable results of Lincoln's change to a "Big Brother" centralized power. There may be no stopping the impending collapse. (to continue, go to top right) The REAL U.S. patriots in the South decided that the only reasonable course was to cut away this diseased corruption of the principles of freedom and local control designed by and promised by the Founding Fathers. Some states forfeited their membership in the crumbling Union to form a fresh Confederation of states that would abide by the principles of the original U.S. Constitution. After South Carolina tried to clear a stronghold of stubborn, Northern military occupation, in blatant defense of it's sovereignty, the young Confederation WAS ATTACKED by a vengeful Lincoln. The North would not give up the expected tax windfall from the South without a fight. (A sad part of the story is that gold and silver mines discovered out West more than replaced all money lost from not fleecing the Southern states!)

In direct violation of the U.S. Constitution, Lincoln raised an army without consent of Congress to combat these "rebels". Contrary to popular opinion, Lincoln's cause was so unpopular in the North that one forth of all Union troops were constantly diverted to put down rebellions in the streets of northern cities, newspaper editors were imprisoned, and Lincoln even (illegally) suspended Habeas Corpus.

This "Second American Revolution" was even more popular than the original American Revolution at the time. The South was almost totally non-industrialized, so the Union expected to squash this "rebellion" in just a few months. But, they totally underestimated the hearts, minds, grit and resolve of Southerners. In a few months, the Army of Northern Virginia almost took the District of Columbia itself! An escape plan was ready in case the Confederate Army managed to rout the Northern Army and seize the Capitol. Early in the conflict, Lincoln imprisoned the Maryland legislature to prevent their even having a chance to vote to join the Confederacy thereby surrounding Washington.

The South was right, and the whole world knew it. (That is, if the first American Revolution was right, then the second American Revolution was also right.) France, England, and most of nations of the world were on the side of the Confederacy, at least in principle. This wasn't just because they needed cotton, as has been told. It was generally realized that this was the American Revolution, Act II. But this time, the overreaching, overbearing, tyranny was Washington, not King George across the Atlantic. This time, despite our very best efforts, "right" finally lost. If the South had known how it would be victimized after rejoining the union, Lee would never have surrendered, he said so.

Southern Generals, as well as the Southern people in general, still believed in honor. This put them at a further disadvantage in the "total war" advocated by the top Northern Generals and approved by Lincoln. The Northern shelling of civilians and the destruction of civilian property to demoralize the enemy was later studied by Hitler. One of Lincoln's Commanders even went so far as to suggest that EVERY "rebel" (CSA citizen) should be killed! Fighting honorably against an enemy who employs every trick in the book (like offering citizenship to potential immigrants to come and join their army), dooms the honorable side to eventual failure without an overwhelming superiority.

Was "The War" about slavery, as we were taught by an educational system supervised by the U.S. government? No way! Even General Grant, the future President, said, during the war, that if he thought that the war was to free slaves, he would resign immediately. Old "Honest Abe" himself, the "Great Emancipator", said that if he could win the war without freeing a single slave, he would. In fact, he said that "we should be separated" and there was "a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races". Lincoln was NOT an advocate of black equality! Had Lincoln not been assassinated, his plan was to remove all blacks off of the continent to either the Caribbean or Liberia. The African nation of Liberia was CREATED by the U.S. for just such a plan. Lincoln never desired an integrated society.

Dixie became an occupied country after Lee's surrender. Many Yankee's even demanded that Jefferson Davis be executed for treason. (This was probably because Davis, unlike most "fair-weather" friends of the South, NEVER professed that the actions of the Confederacy were wrong.) For a generation, Federal troops were stationed all over the South, lurking, stealing, abusing, raping, all with a wink and a nod from Washington. After all, the nasty, unkempt, drunkard, former Union Army General Grant, whose slovenliness was so conspicuous compared to Lee, had become the U.S. President! This shameful period AFTER the war spawned the "damned Yankee" sentiment, not the war itself. There were Northern "carpetbaggers" crawling out from under every rock to con Southerners out of what few treasures they still had. Since the Yankee Army formed the acting police, little was done to those "punishing" the former "Rebels", and all knew it.

So, be proud, ye Southern born! Our forefathers were the keepers of truth and law, keepers of humanity, and keepers of the grand plan, the Constitution of the Founding Fathers. We did more than our best. We exhausted our meager resources and ourselves in a hopeless fight, simply because we were right. Yankee lies can't hide the truth.
Yankees can never take our pride. We can still be PROUD REBELS!

Blacks On Reservations

After his release from Fort Warren in October 1865, former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens met with President Andrew Johnson in Washington. Here he found that the Northern hatred for the black race, after their use as soldiers in blue to save the lives of white Northerners, could lead to their removal to reservations as a logical conclusion to the "free soil" platform of the prewar Republican party.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net


Black On Reservations:
"The President came in. We held an interview of about an hour and a half. He directed his secretary to leave us, and we had the interview to ourselves. I gave him my own views very fully and freely upon the subject of Negro suffrage. I told him the adjustment of that question belonged exclusively to the States separately, but in my judgment the States ought not to exclude the blacks entirely from the polls. As things are, I thought the principle should be established of allowing
the franchise to such members of the black race as could come up to a proper standard of mental and moral culture with the possession of a specified amount of property. Such an arrangement would be right in duty.

Our talk was civil and agreeable. My inference from the conversation was that his policy was to have the Negroes, as soon as possible, removed from the country as the Indians were. He was very evidently desirous to have the proposed [Thirteenth] Amendment to the Constitution of the U.S. adopted by the South [abolishing slavery]. I could see no purpose for this but the ultimate removal under this Amendment of the Negroes by Congress."

(Recollections of Alexander H. Stephens, Myra L. Avary, LSU Press, 1998,
pp. 536-537)

Vindication for the South

The South in the late antebellum period remembered and understood the Constitution of the Founders, and the compromises required by both sections to enable it to work. The agricultural South could not forever contain the political radicalization of the North, and departed the American union in 1860-61 with Constitution in hand. They would peacefully leave the North to its own devices, pleased with the great contributions made to the former union.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

Vindication for the South:

“At some future day, when the actors have passed away, a true and impartial history of the great Civil War and its causes will be written, for it was too notable an event to remain as a mere item in the course of God’s providence. Then the truth, and the whole truth, will appear, and the world will be surprised to learn how much the South has been misrepresented, the motives and doctrines of her public men distorted, and even the private life and social habits of her people caricatured for political purposes.

Those who were inimical to the South, or were, at least, instigated by motives of political necessity to misstate the facts or to suppress a part of the truth, have had the opportunity to publish their statements and to impress them upon the public mind of the present generation, with hardly an effort of retort or correction on behalf of the Southern people.

But the history of the past cannot be wholly forgotten. It must be and is known that in the pure days of the Republic, before the tyrannous “caucus” and the iniquitous “machine” had usurped the control and direction of the public will – when men were judged upon their merits, and political parties were separated by honest diversity of opinion, and not by sectional – the South, though greatly inferior in voting power, furnished four out of five consecutive Presidents. She has given such men as Clay, Calhoun, Crittenden, Crawford, and Forsyth to the public service since the great struggle for independence, and the greatest of the chief justices was a Southerner.

She has contributed many gallant and able men to the army and navy. The “Father of the Country” was a Virginia planter, and even Farragut, who made his reputation in helping to defeat the South…was by birth, by early training, by marriage, by all the domestic and social associations of life, a Southern man…”

I have mentioned but a small number of the Southerners who helped elevate the national fame before dissention and distrust had alienated the two sections, and I feel sure the day will come when justice will be done to the Southern leaders of 1861-65, and that an impartial posterity will by its verdict free their names from the calumnies which have been spoken against them, and will pronounce a retributive censure upon their traducers.”

(The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe, James D. Bulloch, Sagamore Press, 1959, pp. 349-351)

Undermining the Northern Myth

Southern historian and author Frank L. Owsley dedicated his professional life to righting the revisionist history of postwar Northern textbooks and relating an honest appraisal of why the War Between the States was fought. His concerns about defeated and conquered “New Southerners” leading the section 78 years ago are relevant today, as political leadership in the South does the bidding of masters north of Mason and Dixon’s line.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

Undermining the Northern Myth:

“In describing the writings of one New Southerner, Frank Owsley wrote Allen Tate on February 29, 1932: “He is the typical “New Southerner,” the defeated [and] conquered…American. Dodd [William E. Dodd, Frank’s major professor at Chicago] remarked to me that it did not hurt him so much to be whipped! Or to see the South whipped! What broke his heart was to see the South conquered…he says it is the most completely defeated and conquered people of all history.”

Frank continued: “I believe that the spiritual and intellectual conquest of the South, which Dodd laments, is superficial. The leadership is in the hands of [these New Southerners]…and the history textbooks have been written by Yankees. The purpose of my life will be to undermine by “careful” and “detached,” “well-documented,” “objective” writing the entire Northern myth from 1820-1876. My books will not interest the general reader. Only the historians will read them, but it is the historians who teach history classes and write textbooks and they will gradually and without their own knowledge be forced into our position. There are numerous Southerners sapping and mining the Northern position by objective, detached books and Dodd is certainly one of the leaders. By being critical first of the South itself, the Northern historian is disarmed, and then Dodd hits where it will do the most good…[Dodd told Davidson] that the younger Southern writers were making the Northern writers look unimportant.”

Frank’s essay in I’ll Take My Stand, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” concerned “the eternal struggle between the agrarian South and the commercial and industrial North to control the government, either in its own interest, or negatively, to prevent the other section from controlling it in its interests.” At the time the Union was formed, the two sections were evenly balanced both in population and in number of States. The conflict worsened as the balance of power began to change. Slavery was an element of the agrarian society, but not an essential one. Even after the war, when there was no slavery, the South was an agrarian section. The irrepressible conflict was not a conflict between slavery and freedom, nor was it merely a protest against industrialism. It was equally a protest against the North’s brazen and contemptuous treatment of the South “as a colony and as a conquered province.”

(Frank Lawrence Owsley, Historian of the Old South, Harriet C. Owsley, Vanderbilt University Press, 1990, pp. 78-81)

Two of Seven Wounds:

British traveler and Scottish missionary David MacRae (1837-1907) toured the American South in 1867-68 to survey the postwar desolation and poverty. His most noteworthy meetings were with General Robert E. Lee and Admiral Raphael Semmes, and being struck by the former’s “Christian character revealing itself almost unconsciously in his manners and conversation.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

Two of Seven Wounds:

“I was struck with the remark made by a Southern gentleman in answer to the assertion that Jefferson Davis had culpably continued the war for six months after all hope had been abandoned. “Sir,” he said, “Mr. Davis knew the temper of the South as well as any man in it. He knew if there was to be anything worth calling peace, the South must win; or, if she couldn’t win, she wanted to be whipped – well whipped – thoroughly whipped.”

The further South I went, the oftener these remarks came back upon me. Evidence was everywhere that the South had maintained the desperate conflict until she was utterly exhausted. At its outbreak she had poured her best men into the field. Almost every man I met at the South, and especially in North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia, seemed to have been in the army; and it was painful to find how many even of those who had returned were mutilated, maimed or broken in health by exposure.

When I remarked this to a young Confederate officer in North Carolina, and said that I was glad to see that he had escaped unhurt, he said, “Wait ‘til we get to the office, sir, and I will tell you more about that.” When we got there, he pulled up one leg of his trousers, and showed me that he had an iron rod there to strengthen his limb, and enable him to walk without limping, half of his foot being off. He showed me on the other leg a deep scar made by the fragment of a shell; and these were but two of seven wounds which had left their marks upon his body. When he heard me speak of relics, he said, “Try to find a North Carolina gentleman without a Yankee mark on him”

In Mobile I met a brave little Southern girl who had gone barefooted the last year of the war, that the money intended for her shoes might go to the poor soldier. When medicines could no longer be sucked into the South through the rigorous blockade, the Confederate Government called upon the women and children, who went into the woods and swamps and gathered horehound, boneset, wild cherry bark, dogwood, and everything that could help supply the want. When there was a danger of any place falling into the hands of the enemy, the people with unflinching hand, dragged out their last stores of cotton, tobacco, and turpentine, and consigned them to the flames. The people said, “we did it all, thinking the South would win…”

(Exhaustion of the South, David MacRae, America Through British Eyes, Allan Nevins, editor, Oxford University Press, pp. 345-346)

British “Sherman” Visits New York

The British invasion of New York during the American Revolution was a foretaste of the treatment Northern General W.T. Sherman and others would use against their fellow Americans some 88 years later. In both cases, the brutality was used against Americans seeking political liberty and independence.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

British “Sherman” Visits New York:

“New York suffered even more severely. In April, 1775, the British warship Asia fired some random shots into the town; two weeks afterward at least one-third of the citizens had fled with their household goods; and when General Charles Lee arrived with the vanguard of the American Army in 1776, he met scores of refugees hastening north.

The city heard nothing but the rumbling of carts over the pavements, the shouts of men, and the sounds of flight. New York was nearly deserted, most of the housed empty and locked. By and by the British moved in; despite orders, the soldiers broke into the houses of the rich, and as one reporter wrote: “Oh, the houses in New York, if you could but see the insides of them, occupied by the dirtiest people on the continent. If the owners ever get possession again, I am sure they must be years in cleaning them.”

In that year a fire broke out that destroyed one-quarter of the city – the estimate is 500 houses – and could not be controlled because there were no fire brigades; and in 1778 another fire destroyed 64 house and [250,000 pounds] of property. Trinity Church burned, so did others; most of the remaining churches, the college and the public buildings were occupied by cavalry horses or served as hospitals or as prisons.

British soldiers broke into the New York City Hall, where the books and apparatus of King’s College (Columbia) had been stored, and plundered it; the president, Myles Cooper, had fled in May, 1775, before the Sons of Liberty. [During]…the siege of Boston [Harvard’s buildings] were commandeered for military purposes…in New York, besides the loss of the college library, the collections of the Corporation Library, the New York Society Library, and the Union Library were scattered.”

(O Strange New World, American Culture, The Formative Years, Howard Mumford Jones, Viking Press, 1952, pp. 320-321)

Self-Preservation Compelled Secession:

While incessant slavery agitation was a prominent reason for the secession of Southern States in 1860-1861, it followed the deadly intent of Northern abolition fanatics made clear by Nat Turner in 1831 and John Brown in 1859. The brutal slave uprisings and massacres of Santo Domingo were still in the memory of Southerners who feared what may happen to them and their families should the North continue its agitation for race war.


Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

Self-Preservation Compelled Secession:

“What mighty force lay back of this Southern movement, which by the beginning of February, 1861, had swept seven States out of the Union? An explanation early accepted and long held by the North made it simply the South’s desire to protect slavery. Forty years of wrangling over this subject, fortified by many statements Southerners had made about it….[and] South Carolina in her secession declaration had made the North’s interference with slavery her greatest grievance, and the subject appeared equally large in other seceding States.

Yet simple answers are never very satisfying, and in this case it was too simple to say that Southerners seceded and fought a four-year war for the surface reason of merely protecting their property in slaves. Had not the South spurned the Corwin Amendment, which guaranteed slavery in the States against all interference by Congress? And what happened to the subject of slavery in the territories, which had loomed so big in the 1850’s? Now it was forgotten by both the North and the South.

Slavery was undoubtedly a potent cause; but more powerful than slavery was the Negro himself. It was the fear of what would ultimately happen to the South if the Negro should be freed by the North, as the abolitionists seemed so intent on doing – and Southerners considered Republicans and abolitionists the same. This fear had worried Calhoun when he wrote in 1849 “The Address of Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents.” It was not the loss of property in slaves that the South feared so much as the danger of the South becoming another Santo Domingo, should a Republican regime free the slaves. And it is no argument to say that Lincoln would never have tried to do this. The South believed his party would force him to it if he did not do so of his own volition. If he were not himself an abolitionist, he had got his position by abolition votes. A friend of Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, told him that the South’s knowledge of what happened in Santo Domingo and “Self-preservation had compelled secession.”

(A History of the South, Volume VII, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865, E. Merton Coulter, LSU Press, 1950, pp. 8-10)

Casting Out Yankeeism

The author below predicted that had the American Confederacy won its independence, “it would have undoubtedly developed more toward a conservative aristocracy” and more like the Founders’ intended republic. Its aversion to the mob-rule democracy of the North was another reason the South left the Union to strike out on its own.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net


Casting Out Yankeeism:

“There was a growing opinion among Southerners that a proper concept of eternal law was the bulwark of all liberty. Universal suffrage would never be able to discover and conserve this law. Universal suffrage in the North was “organized confiscation, legalized violence and corruption…a moral disease of the body politic.”

It was mob government, radical democracy, “the willing instrument of consolidation in the hands of an abolition oligarchy,” which had perverted the old Union. It was this the South was fighting against. The individual must be buried in the institution. The mob did not know what it was voting for, except to obtain money for doing it or to get a drink of whiskey. [John C.] Calhoun had recognized the tyranny of majorities and had sought remedies against them.

The South had never believed in democracy; it had worked with the Democrats in the north only to secure a place of power in the government. Most [government] positions should be appointive and not remunerative. Officers would serve without pay, if they were patriots. Now every petty sheriff, whiskey-drinking constable, and justice of the peace must be elected and get a fee. All of this is Yankeeism, which the South should cast out – all this universal suffrage – elective Judges – biennial Legislatures – and many other features of policy – all tending to degrade government and corrupt the people.”

In line with its conservatism, the Confederacy debated much the abolition of the naturalization laws which it had inherited from the old Union and which made possible the infiltration of masses of foreigners with their “dangerous European radical ideas.” Especially they would exclude Yankees. Representative John B. Clark of Missouri declared that he would “as soon admit to citizenship a devil from hell.” He advocated a law banishing any Southerner who should marry a Yankee.”

(A History of the South, Volume VII, The Confederate States of America, 1861-1865, E. Merton Coulter, LSU Press, 1950, pp. 64-67)

Trading New England Indians for Africans

The Puritan settlers of New England found early prosperity with the African slave trade, second only to the Royal African Company of England. And all the commercial nations of Europe were deeply involved in supplying enslaved Africans to the American colonies – including Spain, Portugal, France and the Dutch.


Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net


Trading New England Indians for Africans:

“The planting of the commercial States of North America began with the colony of Puritan Independents at Plymouth, in 1620, which was subsequently enlarged into the State of Massachusetts. The other trading colonies, Rhode Island and Connecticut, as well as New Hampshire (which never had an extensive shipping interest) were offshoots of Massachusetts.

They partook of the same characteristics and pursuits; and hence, the example of the parent colony is taken here as a fair representation of them. The first ship from America, which embarked in the African slave trade, was the Desire, Captain Pierce, of Salem; and this was among the first vessels ever built in the colony.

The promptitude with which the “Puritan Fathers” embarked in this business may be comprehended, when it is stated that the Desire sailed upon her voyage in June, 1637. The first feeble and dubious foothold was gained by white man at Plymouth less than seventeen years before; and as is well known, many years were expended by the struggle of the handful of settlers for existence. So that it may be correctly said, that the commerce of New England was born of the slave trade; as its subsequent prosperity was largely founded upon it. To understand the growth of the New England slave trade, two connected topics must be a little illustrated. The first of these is the enslaving of Indians. The pious “Puritan Fathers” found it convenient to assume that they were God’s chosen Israel, and the pagans about them were Amalek and Amorites. They hence deduced their righteous title to exterminate or enslave the Indians, whenever they became troublesome.

As soon as the Indian wars began, we find the captives enslaved. The ministers and magistrates solemnly authorized the enslaving of the wives and posterity of their enemies for the crimes of the fathers and husbands in daring to defend their own soil. In 1677, the General Court of Massachusetts ordered the enslaving of the Indian youths or girls “of such as had been in hostility with the colony, or had lived among its enemies in the time of war.”

By means of these proceedings, the number of Indian servants became so large, that they were regarded as dangerous to the Colony. They were, moreover, often untamable in temper…Hence the prudent and thrifty saints saw the advantage of exporting them to the Bermudas, Barbadoes, and other islands, in exchange for Negroes and merchandise; and this traffick, being much encouraged, and finally enjoined, by the authorities, became so extensive as to substitute Negroes for Indian slaves, almost wholly in the Colony. Among the slaves thus deported were the favourite wife and little son of the heroic King Philip.”

(A Defence of Virginia, and Through Her, The South, Robert Louis Dabney, E.J. Hale & Son, 1867, pp. 32-35)

Myth of an Illiterate Antebellum South:

A literate population is usually hailed as a goal of the soft communism called democracy, though literacy is no measure of education. The view of Southern theologian Robert L. Dabney was that “if all you mean by education is teaching people to read and write, then all you accomplish is to create a mass market for trash literature.” Even de Tocqueville saw through the veil of base and common literacy as serving “the ever increasing volume of readers and their continual craving for something new [to] ensure the sale of books that nobody much esteems.”

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
www.cfhi.net

Myth of an Illiterate Antebellum South:

“The first thing to observe is that the common folk of the South obviously received relatively more schooling than has generally been supposed. By comparing the illiteracy of the Southern people with that if the people of New England, where for well-known reasons a common school system had long existed, the South has been made to appear as a land where mass ignorance prevailed. In 1850, for example, the census showed that only 1.89 per cent of the white population of New England above twenty years of age could not read; but in the South 8.27 per cent of this age group were illiterate.

Just how illiterate, however, is the 8.27 per cent of the South…[And] in comparison with the situation in most countries of the world at that time the Southern folk were one of the most literate major groups of the entire world. In 1846, for example, of all the couples throughout England and Wales who got married, 32.6 per cent of the men and 48.1 per cent of the women affixed their marks instead of their signatures to applications for licenses. In the French army of 1851, of 311,218 conscripts 34 per cent could neither read nor write.

Literacy is not education; however, if college attendance is any test of an educated people, the South had more educated men and women in proportion to population than the North, or any other part of the world. According to the 1860 census, out of a white population of 7,400,000 there were 25,882 students enrolled at Southern colleges, whereas in the North, with a white population of over 19,000,000, there were only 27,408 students in college; and quite a large number of these were from the South. That is, there was one college student for each 247 white persons in the South and one in 703 in the North.”

(Plain Folk of the Old South, Frank L. Owsley, LSU Press, 1949, pp.146-148)

Illustrating Little Regard for the Union

Any serious student of the causes of the War Between the States is left with many unanswered questions. If the war was truly fought over the secession of States from the voluntary union, who or what caused that secession to take place, and who resisted compromise to hold the union together? As suggested below, why did the North sign on to the Compromise of 1850 when it had no intentions of abiding by it?

If the African slavery they once had among them in the North (and their New England slave trade) was so evil, what prevented Northern agitators and their financiers from finding a peaceful and effective solution to slavery in the South? If slavery’s demise was desired by the philanthropic British and New England abolitionists, why didn’t they press peaceful solutions as they did for themselves? Why was fratricidal war and the loss of a million lives necessary?

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

Illustrating Little Regard for the Union:

“In the North, sincere if fanatical abolitionists and opportunists alike used the slavery issue for political advancement. In the South, the voices…grew more passionate in their crusades for independence. Northern agitators gave them the ammunition. When the Southern States had adopted the Compromise of 1850, the Georgia legislature summarized the attitude of them all. Serving notice that the preservation of the Union depended on the Northern States’ faithfully abiding by the terms of the Compromise, the Georgia delegates stressed its particular application to the federal laws regarding fugitive slaves.

This was a very real issue to the planters, and nothing so impressed the individual Southerner with Northern hostility as the protection given runaways in the North and the actual attacks on federal officials trying to enforce the laws on stolen property. On this last point, the Georgians stated, “It is the deliberate opinion of this convention that upon the faithful execution of the fugitive-slave bill depends the preservation of our much-loved Union.”

Yet in the North, many people continued to repudiate and defy the fugitive slave laws, which constituted about the only thing the South got out of the Compromise. To the Southerners trying to promote secession, this breach of faith served to illustrate the little regard in which the North held Union. Then Northern literature erupted into what amounted to an anti-Southern propaganda mill. In 1851 appeared Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that inflammable work of the imagination, to start the decade in a spirit of recriminations. With the pamphlets and literature which took up where Mrs. Stowe left off, newspapers joined in the denunciations of their fellow Americans. To support the fictional pictures of the benighted Southerners, the New York Tribune stated flatly that plantations were “little else than Negro harems,” and that, of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Tyler (who was still living) “hardly one has failed to leave his mulatto children.”

Even Virginia, which produced these Presidents, had been brought to ruin by “pride and folly and…[Negro] concubinage…” while south Carolina, with its “chivalry-ridden inhabitants,” like the other States, “is a full thousand years behind the North in civilization.” Emerson and Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier, the new literary pillars of that civilization, conjured up pictures of the vileness of their Southern neighbors.”

(The Land They Fought For, The Story of the South as the Confederacy, 1832-1865, Clifford Dowdey, Doubleday and Company, 1955, pp. 44-45)

Slaveholding for Comfort and Prestige

New York’s experience in slaveholding did not end until the late 1820’s and many citizens would sell their chattel to plantations in the South before the deadline rather than lose their investment. The small free-black population which remained found themselves proscribed by Jim Crow laws which erected a minimum $250 property ownership in order to vote, and pertaining only to black New Yorkers.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute


Slaveholding for Comfort and Prestige:

“New York was slow in drawing white settlers until after mid [18th] century, and the shortage of labor led to a considerable use of slaves; indeed it is possible that in the early Dutch days it was slave labor that enabled the colony to survive. Most of the first slaves were not from Africa but were re-imported from Curacao in the Dutch West Indies.

It was a profitable system: in the 1640’s it cost only a little more to buy a slave than to pay a free worker’s wage for a year. After the English took control of New Netherland in 1664, a brick and highly profitable trade in skilled slaves was carried on. Most slaveholders in the province were flourishing small farmers or small artisans who, in the absence of an adequate supply of free labor, needed moderately skilled help, and were able to pay the rising prices for slaves.

A partial census of 1755 showed a widely diffused slave population, most owners having only one or two slaves, only seven New Yorkers owning ten or more. Among the largest lots held were those of the elder Lewis Morris with 66 slaves on his large estate and the first Frederick Philipse, an affluent landowner, with about 40. Such men could work gangs of slaves on their manors, but slaves were also sought by other wealthy men for the comfort and prestige a substantial staff of domestic servants would bring. William Smith, for example, was reputed to keep a domestic staff of 12 or more to run his New York City household, and other leading citizens travelled with Negro footmen.

From the first the competition of black labor was resented by whites. Competition in the labor market was intensified by the slave owners’ widespread practice of putting out their slaves for hire, under-cutting white laborers who were paid twice the slaves’ wages.

Slave controls, reflecting persistent nervousness in the white population, were quite rigid. Aside from private punishments that could be administered by masters, such public controls were meant to put sharp limits on the temptations slaves would face. After 1702, flogging was prescribed if three slaves gathered together on their own time….nor could they engage in trade without their master’s consent.”

(America at 1750, a Social Portrait, Richard Hofstadter, Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 99-101)

A Victory of Superior Numbers

Prior to his election as Governor in 1862, New York’s Horatio Seymour warned his electorate of the true cause of the war, and that the North’s triumph would be the result of superior numbers and munitions of war.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

A Victory of Superior Numbers:

“It was [Seymour’s] belief, he declared, that if people asked themselves why the United States had split asunder in civil war, they had only to read Washington’s Farewell Address for their answer and find out how completely they had neglected the warning of their first President. Men who were loyal to nothing less than the whole Union both North and South would have to fight the spirit of both North and South alike, for people who made their prejudices and passions “higher” laws than the laws of the land were by no means confined to the eleven States which had arrogated to themselves the dangerous right to secede.

A majority of the American people, he reminded his hearers, had not preferred Lincoln for President, and a large part of the voters had deplored his election as a calamity, but Lincoln had been chosen constitutionally and deserved a “just and generous support” – as long as he kept himself within the limits of that very Constitution by which he was entitled to his office.

What would it profit the North to conquer the South if it destroyed the compact of government in the process? Alexander Stephens, though he disapproved of secession, had followed his Georgia out of the Union; Seymour, though he disapproved of abolition and did not vote for Lincoln, stayed in the Union with New York.

Yet the war was a fact, and because the decision of it would depend on might, the men of the North would be most unwise to call the victory they fought for “right.” “We are to triumph,” Seymour warned his hearers, “only by virtue of superior numbers, of greater resources, and a juster cause.” The arrangement of his words is significant.

Slavery, he insisted, was not the cause of the Civil War, for slavery had always existed in the land; it was present when the Union was formed, and the people had prospered before it became a matter of dispute. Causes and subjects were frequently distinct: the main cause of the war was the agitation and arguments over slavery. [Seymour stated] “If it is true that slavery must be abolished to save this Union then the people of the South should be allowed to withdraw themselves from that government which cannot give them the protection guaranteed by its terms.” To grant immediate freedom to four million uneducated Africans would disorganize, even if it did not destroy, the Southern States.”

(Horatio Seymour of New York, Stewart Mitchell, Harvard University Press, 1938, pp. 238-239)

Treatment of Prisoners During the War

VICE-PRESIDENT ALEX. H. STEVENS, in his "War Between the States," declared that the efforts which have been made to "fix the odium of cruelty and barbarity" upon Mr. Davis and the Confederate authorities "constitute one of the boldest and baldest attempted outrages upon the truth of history which has ever been essayed." After briefly, but most conclusively, discussing the general question, Mr. Stevens continues as follows in reference to the Federal prisoners sent South:

Large numbers of them were taken to Southwestern Georgia in 1864, because it was a section most remote and secure from the invading Federal armies, and because, too, it was a country of all others then within the Confederate limits, not thus threatened with an invasion, most abundant with food, and all resources at command for the health and comfort of prisoners.They were put in one stockade for the want of men to guard more than one. The section of country, moreover, was not regarded as more unhealthy, or more subject to malarious influences, than any in the central part of the State. The official order for the erection of the stockade enjoined that it should be in "a healthy locality, plenty of pure water, a running stream, and, if possible, shade tress, and in the immediate neighborhood of grist and saw mills." The very selection of the locality, so far from being, as you suppose, made with cruel designs against the prisoners, was governed by the most humane considerations.

Your question might, with much more point, be retorted by asking, why were Southern prisoners taken in the dead of winter with their thin clothing to Camp Douglas, Rock Island and Johnson's Island - icy regions of the North - where it is a notorious fact that many of them actually froze to death?

As far as mortuary returns afford evidence of the general treatment of prisoners on both sides, the figures show nothing to the disadvantage of the Confederates, notwithstanding their limited supplies of all kinds, and notwithstanding all that has been said of the horrible sacrifice of life at Andersonville.

It now appears that a larger number of Confederates died in Northern than of Federals in Southern prisons or stockades. The report of Mr. Stanton, as Secretary of War, on the 19th of July, 1866, exhibits the fact that, of the Federal prisoners in Confederate hands during the war, only 22,576 died; while of Confederate prisoners in Federal hands 26,436 died. This report does not set forth the exact number of prisoners held by each side respectively. These facts were given more in detail in a subsequent report by Surgeon General Barnes, of the United States Army. His report I have not seen, but according to a statement editorially, in the National Intelligencer - very high authority - it appears from the Surgeon General's report, that the whole number of Federal prisoners captured by the Confederates and held in Southern prisons, from first to last during the war, was, in round numbers, 270,000; while the whole number of Confederates captured and held in prisons by the Federals was, in like round numbers, only 220,000. From these two reports it appears that, with 50,000 more prisoners in Southern stockades, or other modes of confinement, the deaths were nearly 4,000 less! According to these figures, the per centum of Federal deaths in Southern prisons was under nine! while the per centum of Confederate deaths in Northern prisons was over twelve! These mortality statistics are of no small weight in determining on which side was the most neglect, cruelty
and inhumanity!

But the question in this matter is, upon whom does this tremendous responsibility rest of all this sacrifice of human life, with all its indescribable miseries and sufferings? The facts, beyond question or doubt, show that it rests entirely upon the authorities at Washington! It is now well understood to have been a part of their settled policy in conducting the war not to exchange prisoners. The grounds upon which this extraordinary course was adopted were that it was humanity to the men in the field, on their side, to let their captured comrades perish in prison, rather than to let an equal number of Confederate soldiers be released on exchange to meet them in battle! Upon the Federal authorities, and upon them only, with this policy as their excuse, rests the whole of this responsibility. To avert the indignation which the open avowal of this policy by them only, with this policy as their excuse, rests the whole of this responsibility. To avert the indignation which the open avowal of this policy by them at the time would have excited throughout the North, and throughout the civilized world, the false cry of cruelty towards prisoners was raised against the Confederates. This was but a pretext to cover their own violation of the usages of war in this respect among civilized world, the false cry of cruelty towards prisoners was raised against the Confederates. This was but a pretext to cover their own violation of the usages of war in this respect among civilized nations.

Other monstrous violations of like usages were not attempted to be palliated by them, or even covered by a pretext. These were, as you must admit, open, avowed and notorious! I refer only to the general sacking of private houses - the pillaging of money, plate, jewels and other light articles of value, with the destruction of books, works of art, paintings, pictures, private manuscripts and family relics; but I allude, besides these things, especially to the hostile acts directly against property of all kinds, as well as outrages upon non-combatants - to the laying waste of whole sections of country; the attempted annihilation of all the necessaries of life; to the wanton killing, in many instances, of farm stock and domestic animals; the burning of mills, factories and barns, with their contents of grain and forage, not sparing orchards or growing crops, or the implements of husbandry; the mutilation of county and municipal records of great value; the extraordinary efforts made to stir up servile insurrections, involving the wide spread slaughter of women and children; the impious profanation of temples of worship, and even the brutish desecration of the sanctuaries of the dead!

All these enormities of a savage character against the very existence of civilized society, and so revolting to the natural sentiments of mankind, when not thoroughly infuriated by the worst of passions, and in open violation of modern usages in war - were perpetrated by the Federal armies in many places throughout the conflict, as legitimate means in putting down the rebellion, so-called! - War Between the States, vol. 2, pp. 507-510.

SOUTHERN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PAPERS
Vol. I. Richmond, Va., March, 1876.
No.3. March - Pages 123 -125

Spirit of Hate in Rochester

The vigilante justice of lynching was not confined to the South as it is common to believe, and race relations in the North, before and after the war, were not as harmonious as abolitionists and advocates of the mythical underground railroad pronounced. Frederick Douglass was no stranger to hate: he was one of those who encouraged the hate-enraged John Brown toward Harpers Ferry in 1859, afterward hiding in Canada to avoid extradition to Virginia for punishment. The blood of a million Americans stained Douglass’s hands.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

Spirit of Hate in Rochester:

“After his Rochester, New York, home was burned to the ground by incendiary on June 1, 1872, Frederick Douglass expressed his anger in his weekly New National Era: “Was it for plunder, or was it for spite? One thing I do know and that is, while Rochester is among the most liberal of Northern cities, and its people are among the most humane and highly civilized, it nevertheless has its full share of the Ku-Klux spirit…It is the spirit of hate, the spirit of murder.”

Race relations were often contentious in Rochester due in part to Douglass’s strong civil rights voice. By 1870, although Rochester’s African-American population was minute – just 427 out of a total population of 62,386 – racial tension, especially over employment, prompted concern by whites.

On Saturday, December 30, 1871, the [Rochester Daily] Union’s third edition published the city’s first report of the rape of an eight-year-old German girl by a black man after she had returned from a church event. News of the crime “spread like wild fire” after the child was returned to her parents. She had been brutally beaten but described her attacker to the police who began a frantic search for him.

Early Monday morning officers arrested William Edward Howard, and he was identified as the rapist by the girl at her home. Her father later “apologized to [a] reporter for not having killed the Negro when he was in the house.” Howard was not a stranger to the city’s police. In early 1871, he was arrested for voting illegally, and he served six months in jail. At the time of his arrest for rape, there was a warrant for his arrest for stealing from a local German woman.

Douglass’s son, Charles, who worked with his father on New National Era, wrote to his father on January 20: “That Howard boy was in my company in the 5th Cavalry. He came to the regiment as a [paid] substitute, and asked to be in my Co. I had to tie him up by the thumbs quite often. His offence was stealing.”

Outside the jail an agitated mob assembled….composed mainly of Germans, was intent on taking the law into its own hands, and the jail became Howard’s fortress. The [Rochester Daily] Union’s reportage was most descriptive: “Threats were made to lynch him and matters looked serious…four or five hundred people in the assemblage…[and cries of] “kill the nigger, give us the nigger” were loud and frequent.” [Judge R. Darwin Smith pronounced] “The sentence of the Court is that you be confined to Auburn State Prison for the period of twenty years at hard labor. The law formerly punished your crime with death.”

At the prison entrance, Howard turned toward [an angry crowd of several hundred men] and with his free hand placed his thumb on his nose and waved his fingers to mock them. Once in jail, Howard renounced his guilty plea, and professed his innocence.”

(“The Spirit of Hate” and Frederick Douglass, Richard H. White, Civil War History, A Journal of the Middle Period, Volume 46, Number 1, March 2000, pp. 41-47)

Pestiferous Carpetbag Ulcers

After crushing the political liberty of Americans in the South militarily, the victorious North sent adventurers to subvert and control State elections, using corrupt local political sycophants to ensure loyalty to the Republican regime in Washington. Anyone elected with the consent of the governed was quickly replaced with someone more acceptable to the regime. To read more of Milton Littlefield, see “Prince of Carpetbaggers,” Jonathan Daniels, J.B. Lippincott, 1958.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

Pestiferous Carpetbag Ulcers:

“With only a ninth of the South’s population, North Carolina had furnished a fifth of all the soldiers who fought, and a fourth of all that died in action. In that dying, the South learned a bitter but important lesson. It is possible to believe in a cause strongly, fight for it heroically – and lose.

The days of heroism were definitely past; valor had given way to venality. The very methods and conditions of warfare had obliterated the ideas for which it had been waged. There is as little chance of discovering high idealism in post-war generations as there is in finding a high sense of tragedy in an undertaker. Facing death is one thing. Disposing of corpses is another.



In North Carolina the State debt had soared in a few years from sixteen to forty million dollars. President Andrew Johnson, himself a native of Raleigh had appointed William Holden provisional governor. Pandora’s box was open.

By repudiating all past State debt, the 1865 Convention wrought havoc with colleges, banks, and all who held State bonds. When an angry citizenry voted to make Jonathan Worth, rather than Holden, governor, Northerners took this as a sign of continuing disloyalty. Organizing carpetbaggers and Negroes, the Republicans reinstated Holden.

The 1868 State convention saw one hundred and seven Republican run roughshod over the thirteen Democrats…[and] Corruption was most blatant in education and railroads. In the year of Lee’s visit [1870], State schools received only $38,000 of the $136,000 allotted to them. George Swepson, [scalawag] president of the Western North Carolina Railroad, paid [former Northern General] Milton Littlefield $240,000 to influence the legislature.

Later on Holden would be impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” found guilty and removed from office. Staunch Republican H.R. Helper admitted: “One of the greatest evils affecting society in North Carolina is the incompetent and worthless State and federal officials now in power. They are for the most part pestiferous ulcers feeding upon the body politic.”

(Lee After the War, Marshall W. Fishwick, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963, pp. 187-189)

Washington College Was Not Spared:

It is with great difficulty today that we realize the cause of the wanton desolation in Virginia was simply the decision to no longer associate with the Northern States in a fraternal and federated Union. Once the Virginians bowed obedience to central authority, their homes would not be burned – but the threat of the troops return would hang over their heads should their thoughts turn again to independence. It is noteworthy that the Lexington College desecrated by Northern soldiers below was the one General George Washington made a generous gift of canal stock to, and the grateful recipients changed the name of Liberty Hall Academy to Washington Academy in 1798, and to Washington College in 1813.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute


Washington College Was Not Spared:

“But no one could hide the scars of the recent struggle. “The whole country from the Blue Ridge to the North Mountain has been made untenable for a rebel army,” Sheridan had informed Washington. If a crow wanted to fly across the area, he would have to carry rations. Trees were down. Fields were gutted. Fences, mills, barns, bridges, crops and stock had been destroyed. Instead of wheat, corn, and barley, the fields were overrun with briars, nettles and weeds.

The fields could be improved in a season; the people’s tempers and bitterness not for generations. Sectional antagonism went back far before the war. “We do not set any claims to public spirit in the matter of internal improvement,” a Rockbridge County historian admitted as early as 1852, “and are shamefully content to let all the glory that appertains there go to the go-ahead Yankees.” When the Yankees laid waste to the Shenandoah Valley, Virginians turned from sarcasm to denunciation.

People did not quickly forget the fate of towns like Scottsville, where every shop, mill and store was burned. Canal locks were dismantled. Records and books were wantonly scattered. The little town lay in its blackened pall, a returning soldier wrote “like a mourner hopelessly weeping.” If the small towns were bad, the cities were worse. The closest major city to Lexington was Lynchburg, a transportation and manufacturing center fifty-four miles to the southeast. In 1865, life there was paralyzed. Stores were vacant. The tobacco business was ruined. Property everywhere declined in value. The occupying soldiers were a rowdy, rough and drunken set. Robberies occurred nightly.

Sixteen months before General Lee came to Lexington alone, [Northern] General David Hunter had come – with an army. His orders were to…destroy all supplies and burn all houses within five miles of the spot where resistance occurred….on June 6, 1864, Hunter took Staunton and headed for Lexington…crossed the bridge and burned the Virginia Military Institute, and looted the area. Annie Broun echoed the natives reaction in the helpless undefended town: “Can I say “God forgive him?” Were it possible for human lips to raise his name heavenward, angels would thrust the foul thing down again. The curses of thousands will follow him through all time, and brand upon the name Hunter infamy, infamy.”

Atop the bluff near the river stood the charred and blackened ruins of the “West Point of the South” – Virginia Military Institute. Along the streets were piles of rubble and brick. At the edge of town stood Washington College, desecrated and silent. Planks were nailed over smashed windows. Obscenities were scribbled on the walls.”

(Lee After the War, Marshall W. Fishwick, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1963, pp. 67-77)

In June 1864, during the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1864, Union general David Hunter entered Lexington and ransacked the college.
(Encyclopedia Virginia)

Southern Terms of Reunion:

he unofficial peace overtures of mid-1864 coming through leading citizens of the North to Confederate officials in Toronto and Niagara Falls led to much speculation, but all saw that the obstacle to peace was in Lincoln himself. Backed by a fanatical war party and hands already dripping with the blood of so many, Lincoln would never agree to Americans in the South determining their own form of free government, and with the consent of the governed.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute
Cape Fear Historical Institute

Southern Terms of Reunion:
“We never proposed, suggested or intimated any terms of peace, to any person, that did not embrace the independence of the Confederate States. We have not dispelled the fond delusion of most of those with whom we have conversed, that some kind of common government might at some time hereafter be re-established. But we have not induced or encouraged this idea.

On the contrary, when obliged to answer the question – “Will the Southern States consent to reunion?” – I have answered, “Not now. You have shed so much of their best blood, have desolated so many homes, inflicted so much injury, caused so much physical and mental agony, and have threatened and attempted such irreparable wrongs, without justification or excuse, as they believe, that they would now prefer extermination to your embraces as friends and fellow citizens of the same government. You must wait till the blood of our slaughtered people has exhaled from the soil, till the homes which you have destroyed have been rebuilt, till our badges of mourning have been laid aside, and the memorials of our wrongs are no longer visible on every hand, before you propose to rebuild a joint and common government.”

If we can credit the assertions of both peace and war Democrats, uttered to us in person or through the presses of the United States, our correspondence with Mr. [Horace] Greeley has been promotive of our wishes. It has impressed all but fanatical Abolitionists with the opinion that there can be no peace while Mr. Lincoln presides at the head of the Government of the United States. All concede that we will not accept his terms…They see that he can reach peace only through the subjugation of the South…through the seas of their own blood as well as ours; through anarchy and moral chaos – all of which is more repulsive and intolerable than even the separation and independence of the South. “

(Correspondence of Confederate State Department, Hon. C.C. Clay, Jr. to Hon. J.P. Benjamin, August 11, 1864; Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume VII, Broadfoot Publishing, 1990, pp. 335-336)

A Northerner’s View of Slavery in 1911

The son of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dr. Charles E. Stowe spoke at Fisk University in Nashville in 1911. Though he stated that the Northern and Southern States were equally responsible for African slavery here, he must have been aware that slavery was a British colonial labor system, a system both sections inherited after secession and independence from England. He would also be aware that previous to Massachusetts tinkerer Whitney’s invention, cotton was a laborious and unprofitable crop on a large scale, and that New England mills profited greatly from this invention, slave-produced cotton and a slave trade their brethren would not cease.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

A Northerner’s View of Slavery in 1911:

“This much must be conceded, that the Northern States were just as responsible for the existence of slavery as were the Southern States…and it grew stronger in the Southern States after the invention of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, simply because it was enormously profitable, and property and slaves correspondingly valuable.

Sometimes the question is asked, “Were not the slaves better off under slavery than they are now under freedom?” I think a candid answer to that question demands us to say than some were better off under slavery than they are under freedom. The abolition of slavery acted on the colored race like a wedge, forcing some down and some up. Those who were fit for freedom, prepared to embrace and make the most of the opportunities offered them as free man, rose. But some were not fit for freedom. Now that is no reflection upon the colored race. We have a very large proportion of the white race that are not fit for freedom. We have innumerable numbers of men and women that we are compelled to confine in institutions and keep as wards of the State, or they destroy themselves and everybody else.

If slavery was an utterly evil institution, with no alleviating features, how are we to account for the fact that when the Confederate soldiers were at the front fighting, as they thought, for their independence, the Negroes on the plantations took care of the women and children and old people, and nothing like an act of violence was ever known among them?

I have seen at Charleston, S.C., a monument erected by former slaveholders and their descendants in grateful acknowledgment of the fidelity of those slaves who remained upon the plantations and cared for their women and children while they were at the front, and I understand that the Confederate veterans are also to erect another such monument. Certainly such kindly feeling between master and slave shows that there must have been something good in the institution of slavery. So we should not look back at the institution of slavery as a reign of unalleviated wickedness and horror, but remember that it had within itself, in spite of its many abuses and intolerable horrors, much that was good.

A letter from President Taft was also read by Dr. Stowe:
The White House, Washington, D.C.

“I am not one of those who believe that it is well to educate that mass of Negroes with academic or university education. On the contrary, I am firmly convinced that the hope of the Negro is in his industrial education throughout the South and in teaching him to be a better farmer, a better carpenter, a better machinist, and a better blacksmith than he is now, and to make more blacksmiths and more good farmers than there now are among the Negroes.”

(Honest Confession Good for the Country, Son of Harriet Beecher Stowe Makes Address at Fisk University, Nashville. Confederate Veteran, July, 1911, pp. 326-327)

Treason Committed by the Invader

Once arbitrary interpretation of the US Constitution by Northern radicals became the norm after 1861, even the definition of treason became nonsensical. In the Founders’ constitutional understanding of treason, it was the levying of war against a State, which is precisely what the Northern government in Washington was doing in Tennessee and other States. The grand jury (below) had Northern bayonets pressed against their backs -- Forrest’s allegiance was to his State and defending Tennessee from invasion was expected of him as an American.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute


Treason Committed by the Invader:

“But perhaps the most sincere tribute to the effectiveness of his operations came from the other side, when the grand jury of the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of West Tennessee, meeting in Memphis for the September 1864 term, returned an indictment against Nathan B. Forrest for treason.

Reciting the existence of “an open and public rebellion, insurrection and war with force of arms…against the government and laws of the United States of America by divers persons…styling themselves “the Confederate States of America,” one of the persons being Nathan B. Forrest, “late of said District aforesaid, “ the grand jurors declared that he, on the twenty-first day of August, 1864, “and on divers other days and times as well as before that day…not weighing the duty of his said allegiance but wickedly devising the and intending the peace and tranquility of the said the United States of America to disturb, and to stir, move, excite, aid and assist in said Rebellion, insurrection and war…with force and arms unlawfully, falsely, maliciously and traitorously did raise and levy war…with a great multitude of persons whose names to the grand jurors aforesaid are unknown…armed and arrayed in a warlike manner…with guns, swords, pistols, and other warlike weapons as well offensive as defensive…did…in a hostile and warlike manner array and dispose themselves against the United States of America…most wickedly and maliciously and traitorously did ordain, prepare and levy war against the said the United States of America, contrary to the duty of the allegiance and fidelity of the said Nathan B. Forrest…” and so on and on.

To all of which the Marshall of the United States Court, in whose hands there was placed the capias for the arrest of “the said Nathan B. Forrest,” made return with unintentional humor – “Defendant not to be found in my district.”

(“First With the Most,” Forrest, Robert Selph Henry, Mallard Press, 1991, pp. 343-344)

Selling to the Enemy

UNION COTTON TRADE
Selling to the Enemy

If the Confederate government was able, albeit partially and belatedly, to gain control over the cotton trade with Europe, it had much less success in curtailing the cotton trade with the Union. On May 21, 1861, the Confederate Congress prohibited the sale of cotton to the North. Yet an illicit trade across military lines flourished between Southern cotton farmers and Northern traders. President Abraham Lincoln gave licenses to traders, who followed the Union army into the South. On March 17, 1862, the Confederacy gave state governments the right to destroy any cotton that might fall into the hands of the Union army. Some devoted Confederates burned their own cotton to keep it out of enemy hands. Other Southerners, however, discovered that Union agents were willing to pay the highest prices in over half a century for cotton or offered badly needed supplies as barter. Ironically, valuable currency for cotton from the North saved some small Southern farmers from starvation. But this selling of cotton to the North undermined Confederate Nationalism, as did the official Confederate trading of cotton with the North conducted in the last years of the war.

As the price of foodstuffs reached astronomical heights and Confederate currency became worthless with inflation, the smuggling of cotton out of the South to the North increased. Women whose husbands had been killed or were away at the battlefield or in prison were heavily involved in forming these caravans. Rich planters and factors also made large deals with Federal officials. The situation became totally absurd when cotton was sold to Federal troops to get supplies for the Confederate army. Even President Lincoln approved an arrangement to send food for Robert E. Lee's Troop at Petersburg in exchange for cotton for New York. Ulysses S. Grant stopped this exchange because he was attempting to cut off Lee's supplies, but other such exchanges occurred through the Civil War.

Source: "The Confederacy" A Macmillan Information Now Encyclopedia, article by Orville Vernon Burton and Patricia Dora Bonnin.

The South’s Heritage of Conservatism:

The address below was delivered during an economic depression like the one today, and the author encourages his listeners to recall the adversity faced by the postwar generation of Americans in the South – those who suffered the horrors of Reconstruction. He also notes the predictable result of the South’s conservative restraint being removed from the federal agent in Washington: speculation, graft, greed, corruption – and the worship of progress.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

‘To those who fought and suffered during the long and fearful years of the War Between the States a tribute is always due. To the survivors of that momentous conflict – in which the South displayed unequaled bravery and marvelous determination –sincere reverence cannot too often be paid. The young men and women who lived in the South after 1865 were tragic figures. They were the lost generation of the South, who led hard, bare and bitter lives, when young people of the South before and since were at play and in school.

That Tragic Era from 1865 to 1880 was a period when the Southern people were put to torture –so much so that our historians have shrunk from the unhappy task of telling us the truth. That was a black and bloody period – when brutality and despotism prevailed – a period which no American can point with pride. To the generation of Southerners who struggled in the years after the war in the sixties we owe the redemption of the South and the preservation of its society.

[The War and Reconstruction] cost the South heavily – but they also cost the nation. The South paid for theirs in an economic collapse and carpetbag domination extending over a period of nearly thirty years. But the nation also paid its price – it lost the powerful influence of the conservative Southern tradition. In antebellum times the South had steadied the nation’s western expansion by its conservatism, but when the South was broken and destroyed, we saw a period of western expansion, of European immigration, of speculation, of graft, and of greed – unknown before in the annals of our history.

The nation after the war – especially the North and West – entered into an era of expansion, of worship for the new, of so-called progress, for which we still pay the price in our periodic overproduction. We should learn that economic wealth may be amassed, yet the fickle turns of business fortune can destroy it in a few years. Witness the economic collapse of our nation in the last few years after a period of unrivaled business growth. The eternal national values are then those intangible contributions to national life such as the old South gave – not wealth, not progress, but those great qualities of tradition and conservatism and individuality which neither Depression nor hard times can destroy.

May the faith of the old South be ours, so that we can rebuild our State and Nation – and as we do so may we add the South’s contribution to American life not only its heritage of conservatism, of tradition and individuality, but also that spirit of silent strength in the hours of adversity – that spirit shown during the War and Reconstruction.”

(The Tragic Era (excerpt), Dr. Julian S. Waterman, Dean, University of Arkansas Law School, Memorial Day speech at Fayetteville, Confederate Veteran Magazine, July, 1931, pp. 275-277)

The Northerners Fundamental Mistake:

The average Northerner’s image of the antebellum American South was based primarily on the exaggerations and fiction of writers who either had not journeyed southward in their lives, or knew by firsthand accounts what they were writing about.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

The Southern legend was unique…[and] begun innocuously by a young Baltimorean, John P. Kennedy. After visiting the plantation of his mother’s Virginia kin, he wrote a charming book called Swallow Barn (1832) – a series of sketches of a past time on plantations as it had come down to him through the pathos of distance and sentiment. Kennedy went on back North [and] the byplay of his imagination became the genesis of that glamorous plantation world that never was. From this model grew a body of glowing literature whose composite impression soon passed into folklore.

Writing even more from imagination than had Kennedy, the abolitionist authors drew a gaudy picture of harems of bright-skinned girls from the Potomac to the Gulf, being slavered over by a goateed colonel with a whip in one hand and a julep in the other. A composite character developed of this colonel, a sort of Cottonfield Caligula, who lived in imperious and splendid sin. The colonel was invariably lazy and proud, self-indulgent and quick-tempered, pleasure-loving and courtly, an utterly thriftless wastrel who squandered the wealth (which, despite these traits he had somehow acquired) in ostentatious and ruinous hospitality.

The apogee was reached in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1851, and the figures of Mrs. Stowe’s vivid imagination entered American folklore on the other side. From the enemy’s side, the worst was attributed to all. Much that European travelers found charming, Northern observers found deplorable, invariably attributing the conditions to lack of Southern lack of get-up-and-go and a slothful incapacity for material well-being.

The Northerners made a fundamental mistake: they measured the South by the yardstick they brought from home. To the Northerner, his factories represented “progress.” Upon this industrial progress were based the standards of an acquisitive competitive society which valued material possessions, the physical symbols of success – “conspicuous consumption” – and the traits and habits that directed a life toward these things. The observers, unable to conceive of a people without those values, cited the lack of factories as indicating backwardness and judged the people as failures for not achieving something they never wanted. As with Americans ever since, they could not believe that people different from themselves actually liked their own way of life.

While in the capitalistic North power fed on power – men who made money pooling their wealth with other money men, formed combines of power for wider spheres of exploitation, toward the ultimate goal of government control – the Southern planter wanted to enjoy what he had. To him the doctrine that “time is money” would have been incomprehensible and monstrous. Time belonged to man, not to the bank: it was his heritage from God.

Where Northern leaders regarded the Union as a nation of people, Southerners regarded it as a confederation of semiautonomous principalities. In their confederation with other States, no member of the ruling class ever dreamed of placing a strongly centralized government over himself. Even Jefferson, when old and dying, wrote his highest praise to Judge Spencer Roane for his outraged stand against a central government which presumed to encroach on the rights of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

(The Land They Fought For, Clifford Dowdey, Doubleday & Company, 1955, pp. 11-13)

Meaning of plantation:
The planting, or setting in the earth for growth by farmers.

Most Southern Plantation/Farm homes look like this. Not like those in movies.

War to Keep the Southern States in the Union

The observances of memorial days rightfully honor those who gave their lives in war in defense of their firesides and country; yet usually missing is a full accounting of the political intrigues, avarice and hidden reasons for those lives lost and money spent. In the case of the War Between the States, if the eradication of slavery had truly been the reason for war, the wealth expended by the North for that noble objective could have purchased the freedom of every African slave five times over, and without firing a shot in 1861. There must have been another reason for war.

Bernhard Thuersam, Director
Cape Fear Historical Institute

War to Keep the Southern States in the Union:

"An interesting clipping taken from the New York Sun in May 1893 and recently sent to the (Confederate) Veteran by Comrade L.D. Davis of El Paso, Arkansas goes into much accurate detail as to the tremendous cost to the Union of the War of the States. The writer of the article does not take up what he calls "consequential damages" of the war, such as the paralysis of certain branches of business, the suspension of trade with the Southern States, and the extinction of a large part of the country's maritime commerce, but discusses only such facts as are afforded by official records, stating that when the figures are mere estimates they are well within bounds.

The losses considered are:

1. The current war expenses paid during the four years by the United States government with money raised by taxation or borrowed upon the nation's credit.

2. The bounties paid to the volunteers by the States or from sources other than the Federal government.

3. The money raised and expended by organizations of citizens for the alleviation of the soldiers' condition.

4. The direct loss to the nation's wealth resulting from the employment in military service of citizens who otherwise would have been producers.

5. The war claims paid by act of Congress since the war for destruction of property or any other reasons.

6. The interest on the war debt to the present time, and then the expenditure on the pensions to date.

According to this statement, when the matter is conservatively estimated so that the figures arrived at represent the minimum amount of cost, the result is something only a little less than eight and one-half billion dollars. "These figures," says the clipping, "stagger the imagination." What does it really mean when we say that the money cost of the war to the North alone was that unimaginable amount?

To raise money enough to pay the bill in one lump sum, every voter in the United States at the time this article is written would (each) have to contribute more than $600. If the burden (of war debt) were to be distributed among the whole earth's population, every human being alive anywhere to-day would be taxed about $6.

"But," continues the article, "there is a simpler and more striking way at arriving at the significance of these figures. It cost the North $8,425,185,017 to keep the Southern States in the Union; while by the census of 1860 the estimated value of the eleven Confederate States, counted State by State, was $5,202,166,207.

Thus it appears that to keep these eleven States under the flag, the North paid out three billion dollars more than the entire valuation of all the property in all the seceding States."

(What The War Cost, Confederate Veteran Magazine, February 1913, page 51)