Confederate Catechism by Lyon Gardiner Tyler 1853-1935

Y'all, I recently (May of 2005) acquired a fascinating
pamphlet called A Confederate Catechism, The War for Southern
Self-Government. It is the Seventh Edition: Enlarged, July, 1935 and
last reprinted in 1984. I propose to share it with the viewers of the
forum for their consumption and possible discussion. There are 46
questions and answers and an addenum. And I will send one question and
answer daily. Below is a brief biographical sketch of L.G. Tyler. Lyon
Gardiner Tyler, 1853-1935. He began his career as a lawyer, but only
practiced law for a few years. He earned a reputation as a writer and
educator. In 1885, he published a two-volume work, "The Letter and
Times of the Tylers." In this and other books, he worked to vindicate
his father's presidency and career as well as the South in general. He
was a professor of literature at the College of William and Mary. He
served as President of the College of William and Mary from 1888 until
1919. He was the 13th son of John Tyler, the 10th President of the
United States. One of the last acts of his presidency, on his last day
in office, was to sign in Florida as the 27th State.

1. What was the cause of secession in 1861? It was the yoking together of two jarring
nations having different interests which were repeatedly brought to the
breaking point by selfish and unconstitutional acts of the North. The
breaking point was nearly reached in 1786, when the North tried to give
away the Mississippi River to Spain; in 1790, when the North by
Congressional act forced the South to pay the Revolutionary debts of
the North; in 1801, when they tried to upset the presidential ticket
and make Aaron Burr President; and in 1828 and 1832, when they imposed
upon the South high protective tariffs for the benefit of Northern
manufacturers. The breaking point was finally reached in 1861, when
after flagrant nullification of the Constitution by personal liberty
laws and underground railroads, resulting in John Brown's
assassinations, a Northern President was elected by strictly Northern
votes upon a platform which announced the resolve never to submit to a
decision of the highest court in the land. This decision (the Dred
Scott Case, 1856), in permitting Southern men to go with their slaves
into the Territories, gave no advantage to the South, as none of the
territorial domain remaining was in any way fit for agriculture, but
the South regarded the opposition to it of the Lincoln party as a
determination on the part of the North to govern the Union thereafter
by virtue of its numerical majority, without any regard whatever to
constitutional limitations. The literature of those times shows that
such mutual and mortal hatred existed as in the language of Jefferson
to "render separation preferable to eternal discord."

2. Was slavery the cause of secession or the war? No. Slavery existed previous to the
Constitution, and the Union was formed in spite of it. Both from the
standpoint of the Constitution and sound statesmanship it was not
slavery, but the vindictive, intemperate antislavery movement that was
at the bottom of all the troubles. The North having formed a union with
a lot of States inheriting slavery, common honesty dictated that it
should respect the institutions of the South, or, in case of a change
of conscience, should secede from the Union. But it did neither. Having
possessed itself of the Federal Government, it set up as its particular
champion, made war upon the South, freed the negroes without regard to
time or consequences, and held the South as conquered territory.
<>

3. Was the extension of slavery the purpose of secession? No.
When South Carolina seceded she had no certainty that any other
Southern State would follow her example. By her act she absolutely shut
herself out from the territories and thereby limited rather than
extended slavery. The same may be said of the other seceding States who
joined her. <>

4. Was secession the cause of the war? No. Secession is a mere civil
process having no necessary connection with war. Norway seceded from
Sweden, and there was no war. The attempted linking of slavery
and secession with war is merely an effort to obscure the issue - "a
red herring drawn across the trail." Secession was based (1) upon the
natural right of self-government, (2) upon the reservation to the
States in the Constitution of all powers not expressly granted to the
Federal government. Secession was such a power, being expressly
excepted in the ratifications of the Constitution by Virginia, Rhode
Island, and New York. (3) Upon the right of the principal to recall the
powers vested in the agent; and upon (4) the inherent nature of all
partnerships, which carries with them the right of withdrawal. The
States were partners in the Union, and no partnership is irrevocable.
The "more perfect Union" spoken of in the Preamble to the Constitution
was the expression merely of a hope and wish. No rights of sovereignty
whatever could exist without the right of secession. <>

5. What then was the cause of the war? The cause of the war was (1) the
rejection of the right of peaceable secession of eleven sovereign
States by Lincoln, and (2) the denial of self-government to 8,000,000
of people, occupying a territory half the size of Europe. Fitness is
necessary for the assertion of the right, and Lincoln himself said of
these people that they possessed as much moral sense and as much
devotion to law and order as "any other civilized and patriotic
people." Without consulting Congress, Lincoln sent great armies to the
South, and it was the war of a president elected by a minority of the
people of the North. In the great World War Woodrow Wilson declared
that "No people must be forced under sovereignty under which it does
not choose to live." When in 1903 Panama seceded from Colombia, the
United States sided with Panama against Colombia, thereby encouraging
secession.

6. Did the South fight for slavery or the extension of
slavery ? No; for had Lincoln not sent armies to the South, that
country would have done no fighting at all.

7. Did the South fight for the overthrow of the United States Government? No; the South fought to
establish its own government. Secession did not destroy the Union, but
merely reduced its territorial extent. The United States existed when
there were only thirteen States, and it would have existed when there
were twenty States left. The charge brought by Lincoln that the aim of
the Southerners was to overthrow the government was no more true than
if King George III had said that the secession of the American colonies
from Great Britain had in view the destruction of the British
Government. The government of Great Britain was not destroyed by the
success of the American States in 1783. Nor would the government of the
United States have been destroyed if the Southern States had succeeded
in repelling the attacks of the North in 1861- 1865. Had the North
refrained from conquest, its example would have been felt by Germany
and there would have been no World War costing millions of lives. A
group of Northern States in 1861-65 assumed the imperialistic attitude
of Great Britain in 1776 and Germany in 1914, and substituted the armed
fist for the American principle of self government. Universal peace
will never ensue till the principle of self- government, which requires
no armies to maintain it, is recognized throughout the world.

8. What did the South fight for? IT FOUGHT TO REPEL INVASION AND FOR SELF-
GOVERNMENT, JUST AS THE FATHERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION HAD DONE.
Lincoln himself confessed at first that he had no constitutional right
to make war against a State, so he resorted to the subterfuge of
calling for troops to suppress "combinations" of persons in the
Southern States "too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary"
processes. It is impossible to understand how the Southern States could
have proceeded in a more regular and formal manner than they did to
show they acted as States and not as mere "combinations." It shows the
lack of principle that characterized Lincoln when later he referred to
the Southern States as "insurrectionary States." If the Federal
Government had no power to make war
upon a State, how could it be called insurrectionary? <>

9. Did the South in firing on Fort Sumter begin the war? No. Various
hostile acts had been committed before this took place. The first
hostile act was committed by the Federal government when Major Robert
Anderson secretly removed his garrison at night from Fort Moultrie, a
weak fort in Charleston harbor, to Fort Sumter, a very strong fort.
Shortly after, the government, under James Buchanan, sent the Star of
the West with troops and supplies to Fort Sumter, but she was driven
off. If South Carolina had a right to secede, she had a right to all
the public buildings upon her territory, saving her responsibility for
the cost of construction, which she readily recognized. She took over
Fort Moultrie and other buildings and she was joined by other Southern
States. Nevertheless no one was hurt, there was no war, and Virginia
interposed with her Peace Conference, originated and presided over by
John Tyler. After Lincoln came in, the peace apparently continued for four or five weeks, but secretly Lincoln took means to bring on war.. Despite the assurances of Seward, the
Secretary of State, assurances made with Lincoln's full knowledge,*
that the status would not be disturbed at Fort Pickens, and in
violation of a truce existing there between the Federals and
Confederates, Lincoln sent secret orders for the landing of troops, but
Adams, the Federal commander of the squadron before Fort Pickens,
refused to land the troops, declaring that it would be a breach of
faith to do so, and that it would bring on war. This was before Sumter
was fired on, and Fort Sumter was fired on only when an armed squadron,
prepared, also with great secrecy, was dispatched with troops to supply
that fort also. <>But firing upon Fort Sumter did not in any case
necessarily mean war. No one was hurt by the firing, and Lincoln knew
that all the Confederates wanted was a fort that commanded the
Metropolitan city of South Carolina - a fort which had been erected for
the defense of that city. He knew that they had no desire to engage in
a war with the United States. Not every hostile act justifies war, and
in the World War this country submitted to having its flag filled full
of holes and scores of its citizens destroyed before it went to war.
Lincoln, without any violation of his views of government, had an
obvious alternative in putting the question of war up to Congress,
which could have been called in ten days. But he did not do it, and
assumed the powers of Congress in making laws, besides enforcing them
as an executive. By his mere authority he enormously increased the
Federal army, marched it to the South, blockaded Southern ports, and
declared Southern privateersmen pirates. Every clause of Jefferson's
tremendous indictment against King George in 1776 was true of Lincoln
in 1861-1865. *See J.C. Welling, New York Natton, Vol. XXIX. p. 383.

10. Why did Lincoln break the truce at Fort Pickens and precapitate the
war by sending troops to Fort Sumter? Lincoln did not think that war
would result by sending troops to Fort Pickens, and it would give him
the appearance of asserting the national authority. But he knew that
hostilities would certainly ensue if he attempted to reinforce Fort
Sumter. He was, therefore, at first in favor of withdrawing the troops
from that Fort, and allowed assurances to that effect to be given out
by Seward, his Secretary of State. But the deciding factor with him was
the tariff question. In three separate interviews, he asked what would
become of his revenue if he allowed the government at Montgomery to go
on with their ten per cent tariff. He asked, "What would become of his
tariff (about 90 per cent on the cost of goods) if he allowed those
people at Montgomery to go on with their ten per cent tariff." (See
authorities cited in Tyler, Tyler versus Lincoln, p. 4.) Final action
was taken when nine Governors of high tariff States waited upon Lincoln
and offered him men and supplies. The protective tariff had almost
driven the country to war in 1833; it is not surprising that it brought war in 1861. Indeed, this
spirit of spoliation was so apparent from the beginning that, at the
very first Congress, Grayson, one of our two first Virginia Senators,
predicted that the fate reserved to the South was to be "the milch-cow
of the Union." The New York Times, after having on March 21, 1861,
declared for separation, took the ground nine days later that the
material interests of the North would not allow of an independent
South! <>

11. Did Lincoln carry on the war for the purpose of freeing the slaves?
No; he frequently denied that that was his purpose in waging war. He
claimed that he fought the South in order to preserve the Union. Before
the war Lincoln declared himself in favor of the enforcement of the
fugitive slave act, and he once figured as an attorney to drag back a
runaway negro into slavery. When he became President he professed
himself in his inaugural willing to support an amendment guaranteeing
slavery in the States where it existed. Wendell Phillips, the
abolitionist, called him a "slave hound." Of course, Lincoln's proposed
amendment, if it had any chance at all with the States, did not meet
the question at issue. No one except the abolitionists disputed the
right of the Southern people to hold slaves in the States where it
existed. And an amendment would not have been regarded by the
abolitionists, who spit upon the Constitution itself. The immediate
question at issue was submission to the decision of the Supreme Court
in relation to the territories. The pecuniary value of the slaves cut
no figure at all, and Lincoln's proposed amendment was an insult to the
South. <>

12. Did Lincoln, by his conquest of the South, save the Union?
No. The old Union was a union of consent; the present Union is
one of force. For many years after the war the South was held as a
subject province, and any privileges it now enjoys are mere concessions
from its conquerors, not rights inherited from the Constitution. The
North after the war had in domestic negro rule a whip which England
never had over Ireland. To escape from it, the South became grateful
for any kind of government. The present Union is a great Northern
nation based on force and controlled by Northern majorities, to which
the South, as a conquered province, has had to conform all its policies
and ideals. The Federal authority is only Northern authority. Today
(1935) the Executive, the Cabinet, the Supreme Court, the Ministers at
foreign courts are all Northern men. The South has as little share in
the government, and as little chance of furnishing a President, as
Norway or Switzerland. <>

13. Could Lincoln have "saved" the Union by some other method than war?
<> Yes. If he had given his influence to the resolutions offered
in the Senate by John J. Crittenden, the difficulties in 1861 would
have been peaceably settled. These resolutions extended the line of the
Missouri Compromise through the territories, but gave nothing to the
South, save the abstract right to carry slaves to New Mexico. But most
of New Mexico was too barren for agriculture, and not ten slaves had
been carried there in ten years. The resolutions received the approval
of the Southern Senators and, had they been submitted to the people,
would have received their approval both North and South. Slavery in a
short time would have met a peaceful and natural death with the
development of machinery consequent upon Cyrus H. McCormick's great
invention of the reaper. The question in 1861 with the South as to the
territories was one of wounded pride rather than any material
advantage. It was the intemperate, arrogant, and self-righteous
attitude of Lincoln and his party that made any peaceable constructive
solution of the Territorial question impossible. In rejecting the
Crittenden resolutions, Lincoln, a minority president, and the
Republicans, a minority party, placed themselves on record as virtually
preferring the slaughter of 400,000 men of the flower of the land and
the sacrifice of billions of dollars of property to a compromise
involving a
mere abstraction. This abstraction did not even contemplate a real
object like New Mexico, for Lincoln in a private letter admitted that
there was no danger there. Lincoln stirred up a ghost and professed to
find in the annexation of Cuba a pretext for imperiling the Union. It
is needless to say that no such ghost could ever have materialized in
the presence of Northern majorities in both the Senate and the House of
Representatives. (Nicolay and Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln,
I, pp. 664, 669.)

14. Does any present or future prosperity of the
South justify the War of 1861-1865? No; no present or future prosperity
can make past wrong right, for the end can never justify the means. The
war was a colossal crime, and the most astounding case of
self-stultification on the part of any government recorded in history.
The war itself was conducted on the most barbarous principles and
involved the wholesale destruction of property and human lives. That
there must be no humanity in war was, according to Charles Francis
Adams, "the accepted policy of Lincoln's government during the last
stages of the war." (Adams, Studies Military and Diplomatic, p. 266.)
<>

15. Had the South gained its independence, would it have proved a
failure? <> <> No. General Grant has said in his Memoirs
that it would have established "a real and respected nation." The
States of the South would have been bound together by fear of the great
Northern Republic and by a similarity of economic conditions. They
would have had laws suited to their own circumstances, and developed
accordingly. They would not have lived under Northern laws and had to
conform their policy to them, as they have been compelled to do. A low
tariff would have attracted the trade of the world to the South, and
its cities would have become great and important centers of commerce. A
fear of this prosperity induced Lincoln to make war upon the South. The
Southern Confederacy, instead of being a failure, would have been a
great outstanding figure in the affairs of the world. The statement
sometimes made that the Confederacy "died of too much States Rights,"
as instanced in the opposition to President Davis in Georgia and North
Carolina, fails to notice that Lincoln's imperialism did not prevent
far more serious opposition to Lincoln in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
And yet at the time the South was under much greater pressure than the
North. <>

16. Were the Southerners "rebels" in seceding from the Federal Union?
The term "rebel" had no application to the Southern people, however
much it applied to the American colonists. These last called themselves
"Patriots," not rebels. Both Southerners in 1861 and Americans in 1776
acted under the authority of their State governments. But while the
colonies were mere departments of the British Union, the American
States were creators of the Federal Union. The Federal government was
the agent of the States for the purposes expressed in the Constitution,
and it is absurd to say that the principal can rebel against the agent.
President Jackson threatened war with South Carolina in 1833, but
admitted that in such an event South Carolinians taken prisoners would
not be "rebels" but prisoners of war. The Freesoilers in Kansas and
John Brown at Harper's Ferry were undoubtedly "rebels," for they acted
without any lawful authority whatever in using force against the
Federal Government, and Lincoln and the Republican party, in approving
a platform which sympathized with the Freesoilers and bitterly
denounced the Federal Government, were rebels and traitors at heart.

17. Did the South, as alleged by Lincoln in his messages and in his
Gettysburg speech, fight to destroy popular government throughout the
world? No; the charge was absurd. Had the South succeeded, the United
States would still have enjoyed all its liberties, and so would Great
Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and all other peoples.
The danger to popular government came from Lincoln himself. In
conducting the war, Lincoln talked about "democracy" and "the plain
people," but adopted
the rules of despotism and autocracy, and under the fiction of "war
powers" virtually abrogated the Constitution, which he had sworn to
support.

18. Was Lincoln's proclamation freeing the slaves worthy of
the praise which it has received? No; his proclamation was a war
measure merely. He had no humanitarian purpose in view, and only ten
days before its issuance he declared that "the possible consequences of
insurrection and massacre in the Southern States" would not deter him
from its use, whenever he should deem it necessary for military
purposes. (Nicolay and Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, I/, p.
235.)

19. Is there any truth in the statement that the South seceded
from the Union because it saw itself menaced with the loss of the rule
which it had enjoyed from the beginning? None whatever. The Southerners
never ruled the Union in any real sense. They controlled the executive
department, but this department was confined to giving directions to
the foreign relations and to executing the laws made by Congress. And
this body, the lawmaking - the real ruler - was managed by the North
from the very start. With the aid of a few delinquent Southern votes
the North could always count upon a majority in Congress. The revenue
was chiefly levied on the products of the South, and it was mainly
disbursed in the North. Never once did the South use the machinery of
the Federal Government to enrich herself at the expense of the North.
The funding of the National debt, the assumption of the State debts,
the bounties for shipping, tonnage duties, bounties for the fishermen,
the restrictions on foreign trade, the National bank, the tariff, the
pensions, land grants, internal improvement, etc., were all in interest
of the North. And this one-sided development remains today [1935]
exactly like it was of old. The South is still "the milchcow of the
Union."

20. What has been the effects of the abolition of slavery?
<>The negro question has been one of much exaggeration
<>and slighting of facts. The wicked method in which abolition
was accomplished was a terrible injury both to whites and blacks. It
raised race animosities that have not yet passed away. It threw the
South back a hundred years. All the Northem States had rid themselves
of slavery by laws contemplating gradual emancipation, and Lincoln at
Peoria in 1854 admitted that, "if all earthly power was given him, he
would not know what to do as to the existing institution." His action,
therefore, in 1862 in trying suddenly to abolish slavery without regard
to time or consequences made him self-convicted as a great criminal. As
a war measure it involved the danger of massacre and insurrection, and
was, therefore, for- bidden by the international law, that massacre did
not occur does not lessen the guilt of Lincoln. Ten days before his
proclamation he declared that he would not be deterred from its use by
apprehension of massacre or insurrection. We are told by Gideon Welles,
Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy, that the North had the belief that "a
civil war would inevitably lead to servile insurrection, and that the
slave owners would have their hands full to keep the slaves in
subjection after hostilities commenced," (Welles,Diary,!!, p. 278.)
Lincoln undoubtedly shared in this expectation, and six days after the
issuance of the proclamation he wrote to Hannibal Hamlin: "The time for
its effect southward has not come, but northward its effect should be
instantaneous." It appears that he was looking to some effect in the
South. What "effect" could this have been save a saturnalia of murder,
arson and rape and atrocities unspeakable? Lincoln, by the abolition in
the manner done, was the true parent of reconstruction, legislative
robbery, negro supremacy, cheating at the polls, rapes of white women,
lynching, and the acts of the Ku Klux Klan. <><>

21. How has the abolition of slavery affected the labor system? <>It is
absurd to say that slavery was a failure as a labor system. The
military system is a fonn of slavery in which the best results ensue
when the discipline is strictest.
Freedom is not necessarily a panacea. The negro's idea of freedom is to
do as little work as possible. One works now (1935) where five worked
before the war. All that has been accomplished in the South since the
war has been by the white people, but it has been at the expense of
that splendid leisure that enabled the South to take the lead in
Congress and in the Nation. What statesmen have we now to compare with
the statesmen of old? None. What scientist to compare with McCormick,
Maury, or Ruffin? None. What magazines to compare with the Southern
Quarterly Review, the Southern Literary Messenger, Ruffin's Farmers'
Register, and DeBow's Economic Review? None. <>

22. Did Lincoln at any time offer any terms of peace? None except absolute submission.
He refused to see formally or informally the Southern commissioners
sent to Washington before the war began on the childest legalism that
they claimed to be agents of an independent power, thus mimicking the
arrogant attitude of the British Commissioners in 1776 who refused to
treat with Congress as a political authority. <>This attitude was
not kept up by the British but was persevered in by Lincoln to the end.
Congress breathed out threatenings of death and confiscations to all
concerned in the Confederacy, and Lincoln in a paper December 8, 1863,
pretending to be a proclamation of pardon, but which was much more a
menace than a pardon, left under the penalties imposed by Congress
everybody of any consequence in the South. This was in contrast to the
British proclamations during the American Revolution which made
absolutely no exceptions.

23. Did the South make any efforts for peace
during this time? <> The South made several efforts to open peace
negotiations with the authorities in Washington, but were rudely
repulsed. <> But by August, 1864, the Northern people had become
tired of Lincoln and the war, and the unhappy President had to change
to some extent his policy. He addressed a letter to his Cabinet that he
had no hope of a reelection. There was a general cry for peace, and
Lincoln gave permission to various persons, at their eager
intercession, to visit Richmond to ascertain the views of President
Davis. <>Shortly afterwards came the victories of Sherman and
Sheridan which ensured Lincoln's election, and Lincoln's spirit rose
again. In his annual message December 6, 1864, Lincoln said: "On
careful consideration of all the evidence accessible, it seems to me
that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgents could result in any
good." <> But the South was not conquered, and the prospect of
war for some indefinite time induced him to listen favorably to the
renewed solicitations of the Confederates for negotiations. It took,
however, the added influence of General Grant in favor of peace to
induce him to come himself to Old Point in person on February 3rd, to
meet the Confederate Commissioners, Alexander H. Stephens, R.M. T.
Hunter and John A. Campbell. <>

24. What happened at the meeting at Old Point? At this meeting Mr. Lincoln's course was exactly the
reverse of the humane attitude of the British commissioners in 1778.
They proposed an armistice and the concession to the Americans of
everything short of independence. Lincoln would consent to no
suspension of hostilities and declined to make any stipulations. There
must be absolute submission, and a trust in his mercy, but even this
mercy was confined to an expression of his disposition (no promise) to
execute in a very liberal manner the laws of Congress, denouncing
death, imprisonment and confiscation of property on all Rebels.

25. Was any importance to be attached to Lincoln's assurances? None. As a
matter of fact Lincoln as President had very little authority, as
pitted against his Cabinet and Congress. And he had not the backbone of
Andrew Johnson. How very little could be expected of him was amply
illustrated at a meeting of the Cabinet a few days later. The President
repeated a proposition of Horace Greely to pay the Southern States
$400,000,000 if they would stop fighting and come back into the
Union. Lincoln's proffer was only a war measure, though of a different
turn, from his Emancipation Proclamation. There was no suggestion of
kindness or mercy, nothing save the practical arithmetical calculation
that the war was costing $3,000,000 a day, besides all the lives, and a
hundred days more of war would cost nearly the sum proposed. But the
Cabinet unanimously refused to agree to the proposition, and Lincoln
readily submitted. If he meant it why did he not stand up resolutely
for it? What Congress would have done had the proposal been made to
them is scarcely in doubt. They had been too long accustomed to taxing
the South for the benefit of the North to turn around and tax the North
for the benefit of the South. The vindictiveness of the leaders in
Congress was so great that voluntary submission would never have saved
the South from the horrors of reconstruction, and Lincoln would have
submitted as he had done before. Lincoln is claimed to have had a keen
insight into human nature, but he did not show it in this proposal to
pay the Southern people for their slaves. They would have scorned his
proposal to pay them, as they were not fighting for the money value of
slaves, but in defense of their Fatherland and self-government. Had he
had the bravery to promise to protect the Southern States by his veto
against vindictive legislation interfering with their local government,
however futile the promise may have been, the war at this time may have
been brought to an end. The very last act of Lincoln showed how absurd
is the idea that Lincoln was a friend of the South. Whatever he may
have said, he always continued to line up with the worst enemies of the
South. Upon the evacuation of Richmond, Lincoln made haste to visit the
city which had defied him so long. In his joy over the event he gave
permission for the old Virginia Legislature to assemble. But when he
got back to Washington he was met with the determined opposition of
Sumner and his Cabinet, whereupon, at the vehement protest of Stanton,
he sent a telegram in the very words that Stanton suggested withdrawing
his permission. (Connor, Life of John A. Campbell, p. 182.) It is
claimed that Lincoln would have made things easy for the South after
the war. But does not this instance show that he was too feeble a man
to have dared such a thing?

26. What was the condition of things in the
South in 1861? The South was very flourishing. The most prosperous
decade in the history of the South was the decade between 1850 and
1860. Up to 1850 the South lived in a Union hostile to her development.
But during this decade the South enjoyed the advantage of a free trade
tariff and of the Independent Treasury, which divorced the government
from the control of the Northern banks. It was the first time that the
South had a fair deal in finance. It was a period in which the South
took the lead in using improved machinery and improved methods of
farming. Great sums of money were spent on highways, canals, and
railroads. Factories in which white labor was wholly employed began to
spring up all over the South, thus affording ample opportunities of
employment for the poorer classes of white people. The census shows
that in this decade Virginia increased 84 per cent in wealth, South
Carolina 90 per cent, and Georgia 92 per cent, while Massachusetts
increased only 42 per cent and. New York 71 per cent. Dr. Avery Odell
Craven, Professor of History in the University of Chicago, declares in
his work on "Soil Exhaustion" in Maryland and Virginia that in no
section of the nation and in no period of its history were greater
agricultural advances made or greater difficulties overcome than in
Virginia and Maryland. The future was bright with hope, but Lincoln, by
his war and the sudden emancipation of the slaves without regard to
time or consequences, put back the South 100 years. This is readily
shown by comparing the census of 1860 with that of 1920. If we make
allowance for the depreciation of money (4 to 1) and the increase in
the population (about 3 to 1) there is less of wealth per head
today than in 1860, counting the negro in the population and excluding
him from the property. There is no evidence whatever that if slavery
had continued, the South would have fewer factories and spindles than
it has today. Before 1860 it had been found that negroes free or
slaves, were not fitted for the mills. There is no evidence that the
industrial system might not have developed side by side with the
plantation system.

27. Did the South ever try to dictate to any
territory whether it should have slavery or not? No. All that the
Southerners ever asked was to be permitted to go into the Territories
with their slaves, subject to the action of the citizens there, when
they formed a State Constitution. The Supreme Court decided in the Dred
Scott case in 1856 that such was their right. The Northern speakers
spoke of this as an "extension" of slavery, and the word was unfairly
used to imply an increase in the number of slaves, but, of course, this
would not have added a single slave to the number already in the United
States. It was merely a transfer of population.

28. Was it superior humanity that actuated the Northern people in 1861? No. There was no
reason whatever to suppose that the Northern people were more humane
than the Southern people. During the war for Southern independence the
Northern generals everywhere disregarded the international law. The
policy everywhere was cruel imprisonment, waste and destruction. Unlike
General Lee, Lincoln reveled in using hard language - "Rebels,"
"Insurgent Rebels," "Insurgents," etc., occur everywhere in his
speeches, letters, and messages. Because these terms are recognized as
insulting, the present generation of enlightened Northern people has
abandoned the use of them. Such words were greatly objected to by our
Revolutionary fathers, and a committee of the Continental Congress
imputed to this habit of the British the licentious conduct of the
British soldiers. They were taught by these words to look down upon the
Americans, to despise them as inferior creatures. And the same
influences operated upon the Northern soldiers, who plundered the
South. Lincoln taught them. The North having no just cause for the
invasion and destruction of the South, which only asked to be let
alone, has ceaselessly tried to hide its crime by talking "slavery."
But logically flowing from this attitude is the idea that slavery
deprived the South of every right whatever, which was the doctrine of
the assassin, John Brown. General Sheridan's philosophy of war was "to
leave to the people nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war."
General Sherman's, "to destroy the roads, houses, people, and
repopulate the country." General Grant's to leave the Valley "a barren
waste" and shoot "guerrillas without trial"; and President Lincoln's
the adoption of "emancipation and every other policy calculated to
weaken the moral and physical forces of the rebellion." (Nicolay and
Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, II, p. 565.) The damage done by
the German troops in France was a trifle compared with the damage done
by the Northern troops in the South.

29. Was it love that controlled the North in its attitude toward the negro? No. The New England
shipping was the chief sinner in bringing negroes to the South. And
when the constitution was formed in 1787, New England delegates voted a
continuance of the slave trade for twenty years. This fixed slavery on
the South. The feelings of Virginia in opposition were voiced by John
Tyler, Sr. (father of ex-President John Tyler), in the State Convention
(1788) that "he wanted it handed down to posterity that he opposed that
wicked clause permitting the slave trade." There was a sectional
rivalry from the first which manifested itself in such dissimilar
measures as the location of the National Capital, the assumption of the
State debts, the navigation of the Mississippi, the national bank, etc.
Agitation in 1820 over the admission of Missouri with slavery was only
a new form of this antagonism, and it is a mistake to suppose that it
arose out of any particular sympathy for the negro. It was rather an expression of the hatred which the free labor system of the North had begun to have for the rival system of
negro labor in the South. The former system persuaded itself that slave
labor placed free labor at a disadvantage. Slave labor asked no wages
and remained quiet and peaceable, which was in contrast to the turmoil
in the North, where there was a riot of some sort nearly every year.
Then the Northern politician, observing the leisure enjoyed by his
Southern competitor which gave the latter superior opportunities for
culture and education, became exceedingly jealous. Their able speakers
pleaded morality and humanity, but that this must not be taken
seriously is shown by the fact that none of the so-called free States
of the West permitted the presence of the negroes there, and there was
not one of the Northern States that treated the negroes on an equality
with the whites. They do not do so even now.

30. Has the decision of the great Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott case ever been
overruled? No. When the case was decided, the Northern States resorted
to every form of nullification of the Federal laws and Constitution,
and there was no limit to their abuse of the Supreme Court. But the
principles of the case both as to the original status of the negro as
property and the application of the general clauses in the Constitution
to the Territories have been reaffirmed by the Supreme Court over and
over again. See Osgood vs. Nicholson (1871), 13 Wallace, p. 661; Bryce
vs. Tabb (1873), 18 Wallace, p. 546; White vs. Hart, 13 Wallace, p.
649, and see Ewing, Legal and Historical Status of the Dred Scott Case,
pp. 180, 181, etc.

31. Would Lincoln have saved the South from the
horrors of Reconstruction if he had survived? I. The North has become
ashamed of the manner in which the South has been treated and it is now
pretty unanimous in calling Reconstruction "a dark blot upon the
history of the country," but it tries to win over the South to
recognizing Lincoln as a national hero by claiming that Lincoln was a
friend of the South and that if Lincoln had survived the war, the South
would have had no trouble. This claim is based on mere words - passages
in his messages and reported conversations, but no one of his admirers
has been able to produce any real act of kindness done by Lincoln. And
words with Lincoln were mere playthings. As a matter of fact, Lincoln's
speeches, addresses, and conversations are scarcely more than a
collection of sophisms in which a flourish of words is substituted for
the truth. He was a word juggler and tried to fool people instead of
convincing them by sound logic. Some examples may be given. Lincoln
argued that "the States have their status in the Union and they have no
other legal status. If they break from this, they can do so only
against law and by revolution. The Union is older than the States and
it indeed created them as States." In this remarkable casuistry Lincoln
makes the Union a corporate entity which, of course, it was not, but a
mere condition or cooperation of certain thirteen unities, each
independent of the other. If thirteen slaves united to resist their
master and by their joint efforts achieved their independence, could it
be said that they had individually no right to their liberty, and, like
the Siamese twins, were inseparably joined together forever? II. Again
Lincoln argued: "If one State may secede, so may another, and when all
shall secede, none is left to pay the debts of the Union. Is this quite
fair to creditors?" Of course, it did not follow that all the States
would secede if one did, nor that any State was relieved of its share
of the public debt by secession. Any schoolboy could have told Lincoln
that the States would have been obligated to pay the debts even if all
did secede. No more wicked violation of the Constitution was ever
devised than the creation of West Virginia out of the territory of the
Commonwealth of Virginia. To justify his course, Lincoln got off this
grotesque stunt: "It is said that the admission of West
Virginia is secession and only tolerated because it is our secession.
Well, if we call it by that name, there is still difference enough
between secession for the Constitution and secession against the
Constitution." Lincoln had declared secession "anarchy," and it seems
that anarchy had no terrors when it sub served his purposes. As a real
truth, there was no such thing as either secession for the Constitution
or secession against it. There was action in accordance with the
Constitution and action in violation of it, and undoubtedly Lincoln's
action was in gross violation of his oath to act in accordance with it.
Lincoln was simply trifling, and just as trifling in its essential
character was his Gettysburg speech. Because the words have a resonance
about them that appeals to the ear and the imagination, it has been
glorified beyond anything. Truthfully speaking, it is a mere rhetorical
flourish based upon a dishonest assumption implied and not directly
expressed. That assumption is that if the South had succeeded,
"government of the people, by the people, and for the people would have
perished from the earth." Nothing is more absurd. The real danger came
from Lincoln himself. The Gettysburg address was a gilded fraud. No
true fame can be had unless founded on TRUTH. The suspicion that words
in the mouth of Lincoln had little or no weight is proved by his second
inaugural, which, next to his Gettysburg address, has caught most the
fancy of his admirers. In this paper, while professing "malice to none
and charity to all," he showed the greatest malice and uncharitableness
possible in describing the slave owner as an incarnate demon, who did
nothing but lash his slaves, without giving the least requital for
their service of 250 years! The negroes were the most spoiled domestics
in the world. The Southerners took the negro as a barbarian and
cannibal, civilized him, supported him, clothed him, and turned him out
a better Christian than Abraham Lincoln, who was a free thinker, if not
an atheist. Booker T. Washington admitted that the negro was the
beneficiary rather than the victim of slavery. His successor, Moton,
just the other day declared that contact with the white race has been
of the greatest advantage to the negro. The fact is that the South's
taking ignorant negroes and making them work was no more criminal
violation of democracy or self-government than the government is guilty
of today (1935) in keeping the Porto Ricans and Filipinos under
political slavery. The excuse of the present United States Government
is exactly that of the old slave masters: "The Porto Ricans and
Filipinos are not fit for freedom."

32. It is often said that Lincoln, in sending armies to the South, acted only in obedience to his oath "to take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed."
Is this true? I. No. The Constitution required him to take an oath "to
execute the office of President," and, "to the best of his ability, to
preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."
Now the Southern States were either in the Union or out of it. If the
ordinances of secession were void, then the President was limited by
the acts of Congress, which, under the Constitution, had the whole
military power. Now the only act which authorized him to employ the
militia or the regular army to suppress obstruction to the laws was the
act of 1807, which required that he must "first observe all the
prerequisites of law in that respect." These were the issuance of a
writ by a United States judge and a call from the marshal, if he found
it impossible to execute the writ. But no call was made upon Lincoln,
and only Congress could supply defects in the law. Lincoln, therefore,
not only sent the troops without authority, but in raising the army far
above the limit fixed by Congress, in declaring a blockade, and in
denouncing Confederate privateersmen as pirates, he usurped the powers
of Congress. His action, therefore, instead of being in conformity with
his oath "to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United
States," was in plain violation of it. (See speech of Stephen A.
Douglas, Congressional Globe, Part 2, 36th Cong., 2nd Session, p.
1455.) On the other hand, if the secession ordinances were valid, and
the States were out of the Union, then his acts were acts of war, and
he as plainly violated his oath, for only Congress can declare war and
make the laws necessary thereto. Lincoln claimed that his duty was to
preserve the Union, but he had taken no oath to do that, and a Union
apart from the Constitution was never thought of by the Fathers. Worse
than that, Lincoln admitted in Seward's official letters to the United
States Ministers at London and Paris (April 10 and April 22, 1861) that
the government had no power to war upon a State; so to justify his
employment of troops, he invented the idea of "a combination of
persons" resisting the laws, though it was impossible to show how the
Southern people could have proceeded more formally than they did to
show that they were acting as States; but as the war progressed he
spoke of "insurrectionary States," thus exposing his own insincerity.
II. Lincoln attempted to excuse himself at the beginning by asking
(Message, July 4,1861): "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted and
the government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?" The
answer is that the Constitution was a chain of power and the breaking
of one link left the chain as inefficient as if a dozen links had been
broken. There was the additional fact that Lincoln knowingly violated
his oath, while the Southerners thought they had conscientiously
absolved themselves from any obedience to it by secession. Of course,
the success of the South did not mean a dissolution of the government
of the United States. As a matter of fact, Lincoln throughout his
administration treated the Constitution as a door-mat and wiped his
feet upon it. On the other hand, there are the facts displayed, first,
in his beginning an unnecessary war, and, second, in conducting it with
a ruthlessness which has never been surpassed. His proclamation of
December 8, 1862, which has been called an amnesty proclamation, was
more like one of menace and threat of punishment, for instead of
offering pardon to everyone who would submit as the British General
Howe had done when American affairs in 1776 were at their lowest ebb,
Lincoln excepted from his pardon everyone of any acknowledged
consequence in the South. When Richmond fell, Lincoln had an
opportunity to show real statesmanship by inviting all the leading men
in the South to aid him in restoring peace to the distracted South.
This is what the British did in South Africa. But this never occurred
to him, and such a man as Lee, who would have contributed most to heal
the wounds of the country, was not asked to assist. Neither did it
occur to Johnson, who issued a proclamation like Lincoln had done. But
beyond this it is absurd to ascribe Andrew Johnson's policy of
reconstruction to Lincoln, for Lincoln in his proclamation of July 8,
1864, declared that he was not bound up to any fixed plan whatever, and
Woodburn, in his Life of Thaddeus Stevens, states his belief that "no
doubt Lincoln would have cooperated with Congress and the States in
carrying out such plan as Congress had proposed if a change of
circumstances had made his cooperation desirable." III. Indeed, the
character of the men with whom Lincoln was most familiar is an
overwhelming argument against the idea that he would have stood up for
the South against any serious opposition in Cabinet or Congress. One of
these was Benjamin Butler, commonly known as "Beast Butler," and the
other was Edwin M. Stanton, his Secretary of War. Both wanted to treat
the South as conquered territory. Dr. John Fiske said of Butler that
"he could not have understood in the faintest degree the feelings of
gentlemen." Nevertheless Lincoln wanted Butler to run on the same
ticket with him as Vice President. According to Welles, Lincoln spent
most of the time in Stanton's room in the War Department. It is to the
honor of President Johnson that he kicked this ruffian out of his
cabinet. It is inconceivable that Lincoln would have done so. Johnson
was far from an ideal, and he blackened his first year as President in
wickedly consenting to the murder of Mrs. Surratt and Major Henry Wirz
by courts martial sitting after all hostilities had ceased, and to the
shackling of President Davis. But there were things about him that
command some respect. In spite of his coarseness and animosities, he
showed a nerve in resisting the program of reconstruction that placed
him far above Lincoln. He had a superior sense of honor. When informed
by Dana of Lincoln's buying votes in Congress, he declared that such
conduct "tended to immorality." (Dana, Recollections of the War, pp.
173-178.)

33. What were the main features of Lincoln's "friendship" for
the South? A statement of the main features is as follows: (1) The
sacking and burning of homes and towns, and the general destruction of
fences, crops, stock, and farm implements; (2) the expulsion from their
homes of all persons, including women and children and non-combatants,
unless an oath of allegiance was taken. This was as if the German
commanders in the World War had required every Frenchman in the
occupied territory to swear allegiance to the Kaiser. Sherman drove the
white population from Atlanta without even allowing this alternative.
Not even the British in the Revolution ever issued any order like this.
They exacted paroles of the inhabitants, it is true, but this, though a
violation of the international law, acknowledged the Americans as
enemies, not merely Rebels. (3) The precipitation upon the South of
emancipation with apparently absolute indifference whether it created
massacre or not, and (4) the subordination of the lives of prisoners to
military success which occasioned the deaths of thousands of poor
fellows on both sides. The volume of suffering covers the whole war,
and there is not a particle of evidence of the humanitarian
intervention of Lincoln with either his Cabinet officers or generals in
the field. The truth is the Reconstruction era was the logical result
of the Lincoln era, when the Chief Justice, in standing by the
Constitution, apprehended his own arrest by the minions of the
President.

34. Explain more fully the course of Lincoln as to
Exchanges. Lincoln's friends have tried to hold the Confederates
responsible for deaths in Southern prisons. But it was clearly by the
action of Lincoln that this mortality occurred. His policy was to
starve the South by the blockade, a measure involving women and
children; to destroy all the grain, stock, and farming utensils; to
take from the people of the South and from their own prisoners all
protection from disease by making medicines and medical appliances
contraband of war; to force the crowding of prisoners into remote
prisons by the continual advance of his armies, before other prisons
could be erected; and then, by refusing all exchanges - not even taking
the sick when offered free or permitting the admission of medicines for
them- to hold the South responsible for the sufferings of prisoners!
Such a friend of the South was Lincoln that his government visited upon
the helpless prisoners of the South in the North punishment for the
result of its own policy in the South. He humiliated them by appointing
negro soldiers as their guards, who reviled and insulted them. The fare
of prisoners was reduced 20 per cent; all but the sick were deprived of
coffee, tea, and sugar, and all supplies by gift or purchase were
prohibited. (Rhodes, History of the United States, V, p. 505.) To my
knowledge there were no such orders issued by the Germans in the World
War. The Northern historian, Rhodes, says: "The fact stands out
conspicuously that in 1864 the Confederate authorities were eager to
make exchanges, their interest being on the side of humanity."

35. What were the results of Lincoln's policy as to Confederate prisoners? The
result was that owing to this policy of "retaliation" urged upon
Lincoln by many newspapers, the sufferings of the Confederate prisoners
in a land of plenty was simply incredible, and the mortality, as shown by the
reports of Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, and Surgeon General
Barnes, of the United States Army, was far greater than the mortality
of Federal soldiers in the South. Lincoln threw every obstacle in the
way of exchanges by appointing Benjamin F. Butler Commissioner of
Exchanges, a man whom the Confederates had outlawed for base conduct at
New Orleans, and by appointing General Grant as his successor, who was
opposed to all exchanges, on the ground apparently of the superior
patriotism of the Southern men, who, he thought, if exchanged, would
hasten to rejoin their regiments. The question for history to decide is
whether it was not Lincoln and Grant who should have been hanged
instead of the unfortunate Major Henry Wirz, who did all he could for
his prisoners. (Read "Andersonville Prison," by Page and Healey, two
Federal soldiers.) In this matter, General Grant presented a marked
contrast to another Northern man, Nathaniel Greene, of Rhode Island,
whose name is dear to all in the South! This noble General of the
Revolution had the same problem as to exchanges presented to him as
General Grant. He knew that any American freed would go home, his term
having expired; but all the British prisoners would join the British
army. Nevertheless he scorned to win success, as desirable as success
was in his great necessity, by keeping the American prisoners in the
dreadful British prison ships, and agreed to a cartel of exchange, with
'all the advantages against him. (Johnson, Life of Nathaniel Greene.)
This was, the course taken by Washington, and the Americans of 1776 are
free from censure as to the treatment of prisoners, except in
connection with the Saratoga prisoners.

36. What was the personal attitude of Lincoln on this policy of Grant in regard to exchanges?
Lincoln's personal attitude was shown by his non-interference and a
letter which he wrote to Grant, when his Secretary of the Navy, Gideon
Welles, who was a man of some humanity, though of not much personal
force, negotiated with the Confederate Government an exchange of all
Marine prisoners. (War of Rebellion Records, Series II, Vol. VII, p.
924.) In this letter Lincoln admitted that he did not see any objection
to Welles' exchanges, but that Welles had acted without his authority
and that he, Grant, was at liberty to set aside the whole operation.
His attitude was further shown when a delegation of Andersonville
prisoners, with the permission of President Davis, arrived in
Washington to pray, in behalf of the 30,000 prisoners at Andersonville,
that exchanges might be resumed. Their heartrending petition was
published in the New York and Washington papers, but Lincoln, unwilling
to interfere with Grant's inhuman determination, turned a deaf ear. On
the whole subject of exchanges the language of Charles A. Dana, the
Assistant Secretary of War, ought to be conclusive. He was the man who,
in order to celebrate the triumph of his government, did the
inconceivably mean act of putting fetters upon Jefferson Davis, who,
for four years representing the great Southern people, met in combat
the vastly superior forces of the United States. It was this man,
certainly no friend of the South, who said that "the evidence proves
that it was not the Confederates who insisted on keeping our prisoners
in distress, want and disease, but the commander of our armies."
(Treatment of Prisoners During the War Between the States, Southern
Historical Papers, Vol. I, pp. 112.327.) The Southern Government gave
their prisoners the same rations as it gave its own soldiers, and there
is absolutely no proof, except that of violent enemies, that the
Southern officials were guilty of any inhumanity to Federal soldiers.

37. Was Lincoln a hero? I. The thing next most remarkable to posing
Lincoln as a friend of the South is the attempt to pose him as a hero.
This, however, had been attempted in favor of John Brown, whose hands
were red with the blood of innocent people. In those days, when Lincoln
was first coming to the front, hatred of the South was so extreme that, as Wendell Phillips tells us, the first words of everybody in Massachusetts, of every party, that was met by
him in the streets or street-cars, on the occasion of the news at
Harper's Ferry, were that "they were sorry that he (Brown) had not
succeeded" (Phillips, p. 280), and Welles tells us, as we have seen,
that negro insurrections were counted on at the North, when the war
began, as something certain to keep the Southern soldiers engaged. That
a great negro uprising would occur was undoubtedly the expectation of
Lincoln and his Cabinet when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.
Lincoln was not personally a murderer, though his actions brought death
to thousands of poor people in both the North and the South. But was he
a hero? His early life is set forth by his friends, Lamon and Herndon,
and it is impossible to see in it anything else than the very reverse
of a hero. Beginning with his passing counterfeit money at 19 (Lamon,
p. 71) and sewing up hogs' eyes for a more ready transportation of them
across the river at 21 (Lamon, p. 82; Herndon and Weik, I, p. 74), we
are told of his writing anonymous letters at 33, and when challenged to
a duel by the man whom he thus secretly defamed, violated all codes by
insisting on a weapon that left his brave and honorable opponent at a
fatal disadvantage (Lamon, p. 260). He is pictured by these and other
friends as slipshod, slovenly, and shiftless to such an appalling
degree that some of his debts remain still unpaid. We are told by them
of Lincoln's passion for funny stories, particularly for dirty ones; of
a repellent poem he wrote, a salacious wedding burlesque too indecent
to quote; of a letter that he wrote to a Mrs. Browning, shamelessly
burlesquing a woman to whom he had proposed and by whom he had been
rejected (this at the age of 28, an age when William Pitt and James
Madison had already attained high honors and distinction); of his
scoffing at the Bible, etc. According to these friends, Lincoln's
tactics as legislator were certainly not of an heroic nature. He
log-rolled and traded in the offices (Sandbergh, p. 194) and joined in
tricking a Democratic paper into publishing an article which Lincoln
was foremost in denouncing after the publication (Herndon, II, p. 370).
There are a thousand other details reflecting upon Lincoln that have
been verified by Albert J. Beveridge and set out in his incomplete Life
of Abraham Lincoln. (See Major Rupert Hughes' Review of Beveridge's
Work in the Chicago Tribune, December 8, 1928.) II. Nor did the
responsibilities of high office raise Lincoln above these objectionable
habits. Chandler, in his Life of Governor Andrew, relates a story how
the war governor of Massachusetts, in pressing a matter upon Lincoln,
was put off with a smutty joke, and Hugh McCulloch, who was Lincoln's
Secretary of the Treasury, is a witness to the unrefined conduct of the
President in a stormy contest with Randall, his Postmaster General
after the report of Sheridan's victory in the Valley was received
(Rice, Reminiscences, p. 419). His trading in the offices was kept up
to the last. Both Lamon (p. 450) and Herndon (III, p. 471) declare his
nomination as President was secured by his managers through promises of
cabinet appointment which Lincoln afterwards fulfilled. To secure the
admission of Nevada, he promised in return for heir votes to three
Democratic Congressmen lucrative appointments - one worth $20,000 a
year (C.A. Dana, Recollections of the War, pp. 175-178), and to get rid
of Salmon P. Chase, his chief competitor for the presidency, he
appointed him Chief Justice, who, though a good financier, had no great
reputation as a lawyer at the time (McClure, Lincoln and Men of
Wartime, p. 123; Warden, Life of Chase; Rhodes, History of United
States, Vol. V, p. 45; Pierce, Sumner, IV, p. 207). Lincoln strictly
enforced the draft which forced other people's sons into the army but
kept his own son at college till near the end of the war. Then his
(alleged) letter of November 21, 1864 John Hay really wrote it), to
poor Mrs. Bixby, who lost five dear boys in the war* appears a positive
cruel mockery after reading Lincoln's letter to General Grant of
January 19, 1865, about keeping his own (Lincoln's) son out of the
ranks. III United with high moral qualities a hero should have
exceptional ability; but Lincoln, though a shrewd trader in votes and
political trickery, had nothing of the sort. No constructive measure
stands to his credit at any period in his history. He signed important
papers without reading them (Welles, Diary, I, pp. 16-32), and John Hay
states that he trusted to him the answering of his correspondence. Hay
states that Lincoln was exceedingly "unmethodical" (Hay, in Herndon and
Weik's Life of Lincoln, II/, p. 515). Welles shows that there was
absolutely no system during his presidency in the administration of
affairs, and every cabinet officer was practically independent of the
other and of the President, for whom they had no great opinion,
especially Stanton, Seward, and Chase. At the cabinet meetings Seward
took the lead, and Lincoln was treated as a kind of junior partner in
the concern. Instead of expediting the war he put it back by bad
appointments and constant interference with his generals in the field.
One instance alone is sufficient to show Lincoln's incapacity: Upon the
retreat of General McClellan to Harrison's Landing on James River,
General Lee marched with most of his army to attack Pope, who was
advancing from Washington. This left Richmond with only 30,000 men.
McClellan had 100,000, and he asked permission to attack that city. But
Lincoln, fearful for his capital, refused, through Halleck, to grant
permission, and soon after removed McClellan and recalled his army,
when it had attained the best possible position for future operations.
Unfriendly as the historian Rhodes is to the memory of McClellan, he is
compelled to confess that the move proposed by McClellan was "the most
promising strategy of the whole campaign, both for the security of
Washington and for possible results." Lincoln by this act put back the
war two years. Lincoln had behind him a population four times greater
than the South, an old established government which had the recognition
of the powers of the world, an established army and navy, credit with
the bankers, etc., and yet to win success he had to hire thousands of
foreigners and to force the Southern negroes into his army. He was
reduced to the ignominious confession that without the 200,000 negroes
he had in his army, he would have "to abandon the war in three weeks."
(Nicolay and Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, II, p.562.)
Contrasted with this was the great ability shown by Mr. Davis and his
cabinet, who out of nothing created an organization that for four years
carried on a war that their own enemies were forced to confess was up
to that time the greatest war of all the ages. General Lee said of Mr.
Davis that "few men could have done as well and none could have done
better." Nevertheless had a really competent President like Andrew
Jackson, been in the place of Lincoln, with a cabinet led by an Edward
Livingston or William L. Marcy, instead of such marplots as Seward and
Stanton, the South would have been suppressed in eighteen months.

38, What importance should be placed upon the statements of Rhett, Yancey,
and other Southern extremists? None. Their talk was purely defensive,
and had a fair set off in the ravings of the abolitionists who declared
that the Constitution was "a covenant with death and an agreement with
hell." In no official declaration did the Southern Confederacy ever say
that its purpose was to perpetuate slavery, or establish a slave
empire. At all times and all places it proclaimed its purpose was to
establish its independence and exercise the right of self-government.
It is a curious fact that in 1833, in a solemn judicial opinion, Judge
Henry Baldwin, a Pennsylvanian, and Justice of the Supreme Court of the
United States, declared that "the cornerstone of the American Union was
slavery ."

39. Was it Lincoln s desire to preserve the Union that influenced him
in violating the Constitution and resorting to barbarous methods of
warfare? No. If the preservation of the Union had been the controlling
idea with Lincoln he would have encouraged the efforts of John J.
Crittenden and John Tyler to compromise the issues. But he was a
thorough sectional party man, and he did not dare to offend those who
had made him President. The turning point of his policy was the tariff,
a thorough sectional measure, and he determined to make war in order to
fix the tariff for protection forever on the South. Having begun the
war, he knew that he would be a ruined politician if he failed, hence
his acquiescence in the barbarous policy by which he destroyed the
Constitution of the Fathers and erected the present Northern Nation on
its ruins. It is ridiculous to say that Lincoln preserved the Union.
The only way to preserve it was by strict adherence to the
Constitution, and Lincoln violated the Constitution constantly. As a
matter of fact, the condition of the Southern people is not as free as
that of the Porto Ricans and Filipinos, who are held as dependent
provinces (1935). In two of the great departments of the government the
South has no representation whatever, and in the third the
representation being a minority, affords no real protection.

40. Were the terms of surrender granted by Grant, Sherman, and other Federal
generals anything extraordinary? Not at all. These generals had no
excuse for devastating the South and destroying its people, save the
sentimental idea of Union. They never alleged any other. When
opposition ceased, even that excuse failed them. The South had never
done the North any harm. The terms consisted in giving the Confederates
a meal, paroling them, and turning them loose to shift for themselves
as best they could in a country "raided of all supplies," as Grant
himself said. There was nothing gracious in that! The captor is
expected to feed his prisoners. The officers were allowed their
sidearms, baggage, and horses, but this has been customary in all
surrenders. It is true that this exemption as to horses was extended to
the few broken-down animals possessed by the cavalry and artillerymen,
but Grant says in his Memoirs that this suggestion originated with
General Lee, and that he consented to it because he thought that "this
would be the last battle of the war," and "the United States did not
want them." Was this magnanimity? The terms did not compare with those
allowed by General Horatio Gates to General John Burgoyne at Saratoga
October 17,1777. In this case the British were allowed to march out of
their trenches with "all the honors of war," drums beating, flags
flying, and bands playing. (No such privilege was allowed the
Confederates by General Grant.) The British officers were allowed their
sidearms, baggage, and horses, and the men were allowed rations and
promised care and safe return to England, on parole not to serve again
in North America till exchanged. Congress, it is true, shamelessly
violated the articles and detained the British troops in America till
the end of the war, but that was not the fault of General Gates. The
Confederates, who fully expected, from the barbarous manner in which
Grant had waged war, that the whole army would be hanged, or kept in
imprisonment for an indefinite time, were grateful at being let go on
any terms, but the terms allowed by the Federal generals were poor set
off against the desolation committed during the war. And as to General
Grant, he approved the Reconstruction measures as President and
enforced negro suffrage to the limit, doing infinite harm to the South.
George Washington himself, who had approved guerrilla warfare in the
Revolution, would have fared badly had he fallen into the hands of
General Grant, who telegraphed Sheridan "to hang Mosby's men without
trial." Obedient to this order, six of Mosby's men were shot or hung,
and Mosby retaliated by shooting or hanging seven of Sheridan's men,
which put a stop to this horrible mode of punishment.

41. What is Lincoln's present reputation founded upon? It is founded
upon his assassination, the need of the North for a hero, his faculty
of juggling with words, and the luminous propaganda put out in his
favor. Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Madison, Calhoun, and Webster
attracted the admiration and recognition of the people from their
earliest manhood, but in the opinion of his contemporaries Lincoln
never rose above the ordinary politician, and throughout his
administration he was subject to bitter and remorseless criticism.
Nothing was more bitterly denounced in the North than Lincoln's
suspension of the writ of habeas comps in States of the North where the
courts were in full operation, and the arrest under his authority of
thousands of people who were confined for months in gloomy dungeons,
without charge, without trial, and without being allowed counsel.
Because of this, Wendell Phillips pronounced Lincoln "a more unlimited
despot than the world knows this side of China." The claim that Lincoln
was a democrat, that he restored the Union, that he was a friend of the
South, is the purest fiction imaginable. The deification of Lincoln
commenced with his assassination, and has assumed all the forms of hero
worship, without any regard for truth or even probability. The most
audacious of these claims is that Lincoln was a friend of the South.

42. Was nullification a Southern doctrine? No. The South as a whole
never held to this doctrine. Only two Southern States, Georgia and
South Carolina, ever did, and they resorted to it to make void
unconstitutional acts, as an alternative to secession. It was not only
threatened by Northern States, but practiced by them in the War of
1812, and through the personal liberty laws and the other measures in
the decade from 1850 to 1860. The notion of a league implies no such
idea of a State suspending a law of the Confederacy, and remaining a
member thereof. But what makes the case of the North exceedingly ugly
is that they were willing enough in 1833 to destroy the lives of South
Carolinians, find resorted to the nullification policy in 1850-1860, in
clear defiance of constitutional provisions, for a mere idea and
without any sense of personal injury. The men of New England were
wholly averse to fighting foreign soldiers like Englishmen in
1812-1814, and Mexicans in 1846, but were among the first in the field
to punish their brethren, the Southerners, in 1861.

43. What was the true nature of the Union in 1861? I. In May, 1777, the Legislature of
Virginia passed an act requiring all free-born male citizens, above the
age of 16 years, to "swear allegiance to the Commonwealth of Virginia
as a free and independent State," and the other States, or most of them
certainly, passed similar laws. No one was required by any authority to
swear allegiance to the United States, or its government. In 1781, the
Articles of Confederation, adopted that year, called the Union "a firm
league of friendship," and provided that each State "retained its
sovereignty, freedom and independence." In the treaty of peace (1783),
Great Britain recognized the United States, mentioning the thirteen
States by name, as "free, sovereign and independent States."
Nevertheless, Lincoln, with characteristic sophistry, tried to fool
people into thinking that the States had never been sovereign. But
against his views may be placed the facts, and the opinion of another
man of national ideas, far his superior in every way - John Marshall -
who in a noted case (Gibbons versus Ogden), declared the Union previous
to 1787 a league. II. John Marshall never resorted to rhetoric or
dishonest sophistical argument like Lincoln, but his intense party
spirit led him often unto untenable positions. As a member of the
Federalist party, he espoused the British doctrine, "once a citizen,
always a citizen," denied the Jeffersonian slogan "free ships make free
goods," wanted, like the other Federalists, to make the common law a
part of the law of the United States, and stood for aristocracy,
instead of democracy, as the correct principle of government. All
Marshall's views on these subjects stand
repudiated by even the present intensely consolidated government of the
United States. So when in the same case (Gibbons vs. Ogden) he reasoned
that under the new constitution the Union lost the character of a
league, he simply spoke as father to the thought, and .appeared to
forget that, if the Union was a league of sovereign States anterior to
1787, as he said it was, the States could not lose that character
without some express provision in the new constitution to that effect.
It is a fundamental provision of public law that in construing grants
from sovereign States, nothing can pass by mere implication or
inference (Brown's Legal Maxims, p. 260); Vattel, 2nd Book, chapter
SVII, sect. 305-308). And this is especially true when the grant
concerns so serious a matter as the sovereignty of the State. Now no
one can show any express revocation of sovereignty in the constitution,
and Marshall's argument proceeds by way of implication or inference
from powers in the constitution which may be explained wholly
otherwise. To reason that from a mere change in the operation of the
government or distribution of the powers, the sovereignty can be
destroyed, is absurd. There is no real antagonism between a Federal
government of despotic power and a Union of sovereign States, and the
difference between the articles of Confederation and the Constitution
of 1787 lies not in the nature of the Union but in the grants of power.
To render this perfectly plain, suppose there was a clause added to the
present constitution, "And this Union is a league from which each State
may peaceably withdraw," how would this provision interfere with the
operation of the Federal government, as long as the States chose to
remain together? The Confederate Constitution was a mere copy of the
Federal Constitution, created "a government proper," but no one has
denied that its object was to establish a league of sovereign States.
III. Not only was there no express provision in the constitution or the
amendments by which the States surrendered their sovereignty, but there
were provisions in it which declare and defend that sovereignty. The
seventh article declares that the parties to this constitution are "the
States so ratifying the same," and the tenth amendment repels all
implications hostile to sovereignty by declaring that "the powers not
delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited to
the States are reserved to the States or the people respectively." No
one was ever required by the Constitution to swear allegiance to the
Federal government or the United States.

44. How was secession connected with sovereignty? As members of a league, each State, in the
exercise of its sovereignty, by which its will is meant, had a right,
under the law of nations, to withdraw from the Union at any time, for
reasons to be judged of by itself. But this did not relieve it from its
share of the public debt or other obligations incurred as a member of
the league, and these were the proper subjects of negotiation. The
denial of the right of secession was a denial of sovereignty, and
secession was an obvious power reserved to the States under the tenth
amendment. Indeed, three States - Virginia, Rhode Island, and New York
- in their ratification of the constitution expressly reserved the
right of secession, and this reservation, according to the rules of
law, enured to the benefit of the other States as well. William Rawle,
who stood at the head of the bar of Philadelphia, published in 1825 a
book on the Constitution, in which he showed very conclusively the
constitutionality of secession, and this book was used as a textbook to
teach the young officers at West Point. (Tyler's Quarterly, XII, p.
87.)

45. How was the right to secede connected with self- government?
I. Not only had the Southern States the constitutional right to secede,
but the natural right to do so. The basis on which the United States
was established was the right of self-government, as set out in the
Declaration of Independence. The South sought to establish its own
government, and was not permitted to do so. A right is independent of circumstances, and if
there ever was a time when the great American principle was applicable,
it was in the case of the South in 1861. What are the facts? Lincoln
himself described the Union as "a house divided against itself." The
two sections viewed each other with abhorrence. The South had a country
as large as Great Britain, France, and Germany. Lincoln said in his
message July 4, 1861, that its population was as "patriotic and
civilized as any other people." The South had not only a highly
organized government, but it showed that it was capable of fighting
what General Grant styled was "one of the greatest wars that was ever
made." (Personal Memoirs, II, p. 544.) Horace Greeley, in November,
1860, put the case exactly: "If the Cotton States consider the value of
the Union debatable, we maintain that they have a perfect right to
discuss it; nay, we hold with Jefferson to the inalienable right of
communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have been
oppressive or injurious, and if the Cotton States decide that they can
do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in
peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists
nevertheless, and we don't see how one party can have a right to do
what another has a right to prevent." To defend the North for its war
in 1861, its writers have necessarily to deny the right of
self-government, and to hold that the British had a perfect right to
whip the Americans in 1776. II. In all international contests, the
smaller country is more apt to be right than the larger, for while the
larger has the big fist to fall back upon, the latter has only the
truth with its conscience-compelling power. Most people of the North
have a way of talking about the Union when they mean the North only. If
things were reversed, if it was the South that dominated the Union, how
differently they would talk! It would be no longer the language of the
big fist, but the language of truth. But having the power, force, the
weapon of tyrants, is the principle they appeal to, and not the old
American principle of consent and self-government.

46. Would the principle of secession have been fatal to the success of the
Confederacy as an independent power? I. Knowing that the North had no
just cause for its terrible war of 1861, its defenders have sought to
lessen the odium of its crime by arguing that the doctrine of secession
would have proved fatal to the success of the Confederacy, even if it
had established its independence. This is another question entirely,
and does not affect the right or wrong of the people in 1861. But such
persons may be asked what do they know of the future? They deal in
surmises, and should be reminded of the surmises entertained in this
country about the Russian Soviet government. The papers were unanimous
in the opinion that the new Russian government would not last six
months, but it has lasted thirteen years (1935), and gives no sign of
breaking up. The Russian government is one of the working classes; the
United States government one of Northern millionaires, and, for all we
know, the Russian government may be the more permanent of the two. II.
Such writers speak of the troubles Mr. Davis had in North Carolina and
Georgia, and the threats that some people made of impeaching him, of
the lack of a Supreme Court and various other matters, but they fail to
speak of Lincoln's troubles in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, where
Lincoln's administration did not escape the danger of a hostile
Confederacy. And how about the great riot in New York, when Lincoln had
to send troops to put down these new rebels? Was Stephens worse than
Vallandigham? Did Mr. Davis find it necessary to put 38,000 of
suspected citizens in jail as Lincoln did? Was not Lincoln also
threatened with impeachment? So great was the dissatisfaction with
Lincoln in 1864 that he wrote to his cabinet that he had no chance of
reelection, and he said, moreover, that without the 200,000 negroes
taken from the South into his army he would
have to give up the war in "three weeks." There is no doubt that if
Sherman and Sheridan had not won victories at this time, and the army
had not been used at the polls to frighten people away, Lincoln would
have lost the election, or been driven from the government. How can it
be doubted that if the North had been subjected to a blockade and
invaded by great Southern armies, Lincoln's imperialism would have
shown far more dangerous symptoms of disintegration than Davis' States
rights. It is absurd to say, as Lincoln did, that the essence of
secession was anarchy. People do not break up a government just for a
theory. There must be profound dissatisfaction, and no government,
Republican, Imperialistic or Democratic, is safe when that
dissatisfaction rises. France overturned its royal government, its
imperial government. Russia, the strong powered government of the
Czars, and Germany became a Republic. The most enduring principle on
which to build a nation is not force, but affection and interest. IV. ·
How was the case of the South as unfavorable as that of the Americans
during the eighteenth century? There were plenty of people then to
argue against the permanence of the Union. There were no United States
courts. Two of the States actually withdrew from the operation of its
laws, and it was only by repeated amendments, all tending to restrict
the powers of the Federal Government, that the States contrived to live
together. Why refuse the Southern Confederacy the privilege of
correcting weaknesses by subsequent amendments? But there were much
stronger arguments for the permanence of the Confederacy than that of
the Union in 1776. The States of the South would have been bound
together by fear of the great Northern Republic, whose tyrannical
disposition they had long experienced. They would have had laws suited
to their own circumstances, and developed accordingly. They would not
have had to live under Northern laws, compelled to pay pensions to
Northern soldiers and debts to Northern creditors, contracted for their
own undoing. It is a sufficient reply to this kind of backhanded
argument to repeat what General Grant said in his Memoirs, that the
South, if successful, would have established "a real and respected
nation. " · ·

47. Some additions. a. Words. Webster, in his speech
against Hayne in 1830, without pretending to originality said that
"words were things," pointing out that by the adroit use of words in
addressing the highly wrought feelings of mankind a just conclusion is
often avoided or a false one reached. Taking the hint, the Northern
speakers applied to the Southern policy or Southern men, in the absence
of any just argument against them, such terms as "Slavery Extension,"
"Fire-eaters," Rebels, "Border Ruffians," "Slavocrats," "Slave
Breeders," and other offensive terms to distract the attention from the
true points at issue. Lincoln for this purpose used rhetoric and
sophistry. b. Exchanges (see Query 34). In the American Revolution, as
in the War for Southern Independence, there were mutual complaints
between the parties at war as to ill treatment of prisoners. And
Washington in a letter to Congress December 27, 1781, said (Gordon,
American Revolution, III, p. 268): "I know of no method so likely to
put an end to the mutual complaints of both sides as that of having all
prisoners given up to the commissary general to be by him exchanged."
Thus Washington favored exchanges, while Lincoln opposed them. In this
connection it may be well to remember that the Federals burnt sixty
towns or more in the South and that the mortality at Elmira was greatly
in excess proportionately of that at Andersonville (Keily, In
Vinculis.) And as for the humanity of Lincoln, in his congratulating
Sherman for his march to the sea, and Sheridan for his campaign in the
Valley of Virginia, his talk of "charity for all" immediately after
was, in the language of Edward Lee Masters, "a perfect blasphemy
against human nature." It is a telling fact in favor of Major Henry
Wirz that, when the committee representing the prisoners at
Andersonville reached the North and were free to talk as they pleased,
they said nothing in their published statement of any murders done by
Wirz, but spoke of him as a kind man, and of General Winder, Wirz's
superior officer, they had nothing but praise for his kindness. c.
Rebels (see Query 28). It was because of indignation at being called a
rebel that the wounded General Mercer, the hero of Princeton, January
3, 1777, lost his life. (Stryker, The Battles .of Trenton and
Princeton, p. 282.) This term, as used by the British as well as by
Lincoln, meant not merely a political offender but a moral one which
ranked the person with thieves and cutthroats, and the use of the word
in this sense was kept up by Northern Presidents long after the war. Of
a far superior character was the action of the loyalist Legislature of
Virginia, who in 1677, immediately after Bacon's Rebellion, imposed a
fine of 400 pounds of tobacco on any .one who would call another a
rebel, traitor, or other name calculated to stir up the "old quarrels"
and "heart burnings." In a letter of Washington to Lord Howe, January
13, 1777, the American commander, after referring to the cruel
treatment visited upon the American prisoners on board the British
prison ships, wrote: "You may call us rebels and say we deserve no
better treatment, but remember, my Lord, supposing us rebels we still
have feelings equally as keen and sensible as loyalists and will, if
forced to it, most assuredly retaliate upon those upon whom we look as
the unjust invaders of our rights, liberties and properties." The great
kindness of heart that distinguished President Davis prevented him from
resorting to the system of retaliation threatened by Washington. He was
charged by many Confederates with merely threatening and never carrying
out his threat. But the threat, in one case at least, was effective
when Lincoln, after having proclaimed Confederate privateersmen
pirates, proceeded to carry out his threat in two cases. The
privateersmen captured were loaded with irons and treated as felons.
Their execution being contrary to the international law, as pointed out
by a member of the British Parliament, would have made of Lincoln a
murderer, but he (Davis) saved him from the consequences of his act by
threatening to put to death an equal number of Federal prisoners.
Justly humiliated, Lincoln desisted. Later General Grant affected to
place the gallant partisans of Colonel Mosby in the same category with
the Confederate privateersmen, and six fine young men of Mosby's
command were hung or shot by order of General Custer in Sheridan's
command in accordance with orders telegraphed by Grant. But Mosby,
unlike President Davis, acted first and threatened afterward to put to
death seven prisoners who served as soldiers under General Custer. · d.
Sumner and Brooks. The beating of Charles Sumner by Preston S. Brooks,
of South Carolina, and the latter's reelection, after resignation, to
his seat in Congress were ascribed, by New England writers especially,
to the demoralizing influence of slavery. Were then the burnings of
Catholic churches in Philadelphia and other places in 1854, and the
assassinations of John Brown at Pottawattomi in Kansas in 1855 and at
Harper's Ferry in 1859 due to the demoralizing influences of freedom?
Of course not. These events were due to the highly wrought passions of
men brought to a white heat by personal antagonism. Neither slavery nor
freedom was responsible for them. Madame Roland, the French patriot,
when taken to the guillotine, exclaimed: "Oh, Liberty, how many crimes
have been committed in thy name!" The remarkable point is that New
England set the example for Sumner's flagellation. In 1798 Roger
Griswold, a high-strutting Federalist of Connecticut, grossly insulted
Matthew Lyon, a Democratic Republican of Vermont, and Lyon spat in his
face. A motion was made to expel Lyon, but his party in Congress, while
condemning his conduct, thought that he had great provocation and
refused to vote for it. Thereupon after several weeks Griswold attacked
Lyon, while writing at his desk, with a thick hickory cane, rather a
contrast to the small guttapercha stick employed by Brooks, which was
hollow and broke to pieces in Brooks' hand. Lyon was, like Sumner,
caught in his seat, but he managed with his arm to protect his head
from injury and, releasing himself, gallantly charged his opponent. The
friends of Brooks believed that Sumner feigned inability to release
himself and pretended unconsciousness, and it does seem rather queer
that a man of his huge frame could not have disengaged himself from his
seat. Both Griswold and Brooks approached from the front. The House
refused to expel either Griswold or Lyon, and by vote of their New
England constituents both were returned to Congress at the next
election in 1800. Were their constituencies necessarily degraded on
this account? e. Jefferson Davis. It would be derogatory to the
character of General Lee to suppose that he did not mean exactly what
he said in praise of President Davis (see page 39), but his evidence is
supported by General Grant, who could not be presumed to have any favor
for Mr. Davis. Grant declared that no one could have saved the South.
"Davis did all he could and all any man could for the South. . . .
Davis is entitled to every honor bestowed on the South for gallantry
and persistence. The attacks upon him from his old followers are
ignoble." The criticism sometimes met with that Lee should have been
given control of the whole military situation is founded in ignorance.
By commission March 13, 1862, Davis put Lee in command of all the
Confederate forces, and on June 1, 1862, he added the special command
of the Army of Northern Virginia. But Lee absolutely refused to take
both commands, and Davis, thinking that Lee's presence at the head of
the army which defended the Capital was the most important, yielded
unwillingly to his wishes and relieved him of the general command.
Repeatedly he urged Lee to permit him to extend his authority and Lee
would not consent. (Davis' Reply to the General Assembly of Virginia.)
When Congress, in February, 1865, conferred the general command again
on Lee, Lee could not resist the universal demand, but it does not
appear that beyond issuing a proclamation to encourage his soldiers, he
asserted his authority anywhere except in his own immediate army.
Probably he recognized that it was too late. So near was Davis'
government to success that if Lee had been able to continue his retreat
another day, Grant would have been so far from his base that he would
have been compelled to abandon the pursuit, and the protraction of the
war another year would have resulted in Southern independence. So said
General Grant in a conversation during his "Tour Around the World." The
failure of the South was the worst thing possible for that people.
Disguise it as we may, the South, since 1865, has been virtually a
dependent province of the North and has lost that high moral character
which made it such a force in the world prior to 1865. Ashamed of its
course in the past, the North's present attitude to the South is that
of "benevolent assimilation." J. Abolition. The means are far more
Important than the result. To praise Lincoln for freeing 4,000,000
slaves, as President Hoover did in his recent speech on Lincoln's
birthday, is to exalt the act over the means, which were highly
disreputable. Had Lincoln tried to effect abolition in the way that the
wise statesmen of the North went about it in New York, Pennsylvania,
New Jersey, and other Northern States, by gradual emancipation and with
a careful provision by law against any shock to society, there would
have been some sense in President Hoover's remarks; but with abolition
proclaimed as it was, in the first instance, simply as a means to
breaking up the Confederate armies and without regard to time or
consequences, his words show no sense at all. Besides the confiscation
of several billions of dollars, as the value of the slaves and the
instigation to massacre of Southern women and children, Lincoln's
action promised, as actually occurred during Reconstruction, to
dislocate Southern society politically, socially, morally, and
financially; and a high military authority declared that upwards of a
million negroes - 25 per cent of the whole - enticed from their homes
with the promise of freedom and plenty, perished during the war or
shortly after it of neglect, disease; and starvation. (George Lunt, of
Boston, Origin of the Late War, p.88, note.) In his speech at Peoria in
1854, Lincoln had professed his absolute inability to deal with the
question of slavery in the Southern States and his resort to force
during the war was a confession on his part of bankruptcy in
statesmanship. g. Southern outrages. It is not pretended that there
were not individual cases of outrage committed by Confederate soldiers,
but these were without the sanction and against the orders of the
Confederate authorities, while exactly the reverse was true as to the
Federal authorities. Upwards of sixty towns were destroyed in the South
and the country laid waste from the Potomac to the Rio Grande.
Chambersburg was burned by the Confederates, but this was in legitimate
retaliation for the vandalism of General Hunter in the Valley of
Virginia, whose conduct in burning private houses and destroying
private property was denounced by General Halleck, the Federal
commander-in-chief, as "barbarous." But this burning was not done till
General Early had given the people of Chambersburg an opportunity of
saving their town by the payment of $100,000 in gold, or $500,000 in
greenbacks, equal to only a small part of the damage done by General
Hunter. The Germans in the World War would have smiled at such a small
indemnity, but the authorities of Chambersburg, believing that succor
was speedily coming, refused. Indeed, the greatest surprise was
expressed by officers from the Austrian, Prussian, and English armies
that in the presence of the unparalleled ruthlessness and wantonness of
the Federal armies and the dislocation of society attendant upon
Lincoln's negro policy, the Southern people should have shown such
remarkable forbearance, patience, and humanity. Compare the orders of
General Grant with those of General Lee, and note the difference.
(McGuire and Hunter, The Confederate Cause and Conduct of the War
Between the States.) When it is remembered that Republican speakers had
affected to regard the South as utterly corrupted, demoralized by
slavery, the contract is astonishing. h. Lincoln's Tenderness. Lincoln
wrote to General McClellan: "Can you get near enough [to Richmond] to
throw shells into the city?" (McCIellan's Own Story, p. 368.) The
dreadful massacre of Burnside's troops at Fredericksburg is ascribed to
his orders to that unfortunate general, who was visited by Lincoln in
his encampment shortly before the battle. Burnside nobly kept the
President's responsibility to himself. (Dr. William E. Dodd, Lincoln or
Lee, p. 87; statement of Major W. Roy Mason in Battles and Leaders of
the Civil War, III, p. 101.) General Don Piatt, who knew Lincoln
intimately, denies the claim that he was of a kind and forgiving
disposition. In his book, Reminiscences of Lincoln, p. 483, he shows
Lincoln's extraordinary insensibility to the ills of his fellow
citizens and soldiers when the misery of war was at its worst. His
consent to the policy of refusing to exchange takes from him all claim
to real humanity. i. Character of the War. The war was not a
"rebellion," because the action of the South was that of free,
independent, and sovereign States. Lincoln, at the beginning, admitted
as much when Seward, his Secretary of State, wrote to the United States
Minister in England and said, in the President's name, that the Federal
government could not war against a State. It was not a "Civil War," for
that implies the existence of a single State; nor was it a "War Between
the States," for the Federal government had erected a despotism over
the Northern States and asked them no odds. It was clearly a war of
invasion by the Federal government and a war for self- government by
the Southern States. 48. If then this is a mere Northern government, how may the old Union
of the Fathers be restored? It may be restored readily enough by the
United States reaffirming the doctrine of self-government, expressing
sorrow for its war of conquest in 1861-65, admitting the South into a
proper share of all the functions of the government, and joining the
League of Nations in banishing armies and navies, and war. The South
has no vindictiveness. All it wants is truth and justice.

SECTIONAL AMBITION: THE CAUSE OF THE WAR IN 1861 Holdcroft, Va., November 28,
1934. Dear Mr._______ I have read your article and think it too
controversial, as you suggest. It leaves the issue too muddled up. So
please don't get offended because I return it. I don't see how it is
possible to fail to recognize certain "broad matters about the War of
1861-1865. Certainly secession was not the cause of the War. It did not
necessarily involve war. Norway seceded from Sweden and there was no
war. Even Lincoln did not make secession in itself a cause of the War,
but the firing on Fort Sumter. He tried to make people believe that the
South was anxious to fight the North, overthrow the government, etc.
This was, of course, a mere pretext, for he himself admitted that he
sent the squadron to Fort Sumter expecting the Southerners to fire.*
After the same spirit he raised great armies without the authority of
Congress and marched them South, thereby plunging the North into a war
with the South under the false cry of "Union and the flag." Relieved of
all technicalities and subleties, the War was simply a war of the North
against the South, having in view the absolute subjugation of the
latter. *.On May I. 1861, Lincoln wrote to G. V. Fox: "You and I both
anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making
the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is
no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by
the result." (Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies,
Series I, Vol. IV, pp. 224-251.) Nicolay and Hay in Abraham Lincoln,
Vol. IV, p. 44, say: "That he (Lincoln) by this time expected
resistance is reasonably certain. The presence of armed ships with the
expedition, and their instructiohs to fight their way to the Fort in
case of opposition show that he believed the arbitrament of the sword
to be at hand." Then the question arises, what was the cause of the War
back of this pretext? Undoubtedly it was the desire of the Republicans
to dominate the country. This did not take one line only. It was not
wholly a selfish money feeling, for otherwise they would not have
goaded the South to the extent they did. They became inordinately
jealous of the superiority of talent in Southern men and women in
politics and society. But having driven the South out of the Union by
all kinds of abuse, violations of the Constitution, and instigations to
massacre, they were anxious to get it back again, when they considered
what the result of an independent South would be. They could not
reconcile themselves to win back the Southern States by conforming to
the views of the Supreme Court and accepting the Crittenden Compromise,
which left the extension of slavery a mere theoretical issue, as
Lincoln himself admitted,(1) but war, with all its attendant horrors,
was preferred. (1) Lincoln said in his speech at Peoria in 1855 and in
his letter to Horace Greeley in 1862 that to his mind the Union was
paramount to any question of slavery, and yet as President-elect he
made the slavery question paramount to the Union. He instructed his
lieutenants to refuse all compromises. In rejecting the Crittenden
Resolutions, Lincoln, a minority President, and the Republicans, a
minority party, placed themselves on record as preferring the slaughter
of 400,000 men of the flower of the land, and the sacrifice of billions
of dollars of property to a compromise involving a mere
abstraction. The Crittenden Compromise left open to slavery extension
only New Mexico, and this was already open to slavery under the
Compromise of 1850. It was wholly unfitted for the growth of cotton
and tobacco, the products of slave labor, and during the ten years from
1850 to 1860 not ten slaves had entered the territory. Lincoln in a
private letter to William H. Seward admitted that he saw no danger
there." (Nicolay and Hay, Complete Works of Abraham Lincoln, I, pp.
664, 669.) What then? Lincoln stirred up a ghost and was willing to
risk the safety of the Union on the bare possibility that the South
might, at some future time, secure the annexation of slave-holding
Cuba! It seems needless to say that no such ghost could have
materialized in the presence of the great Northern majorities in the
Senate and House of Representatives. But even so, Lincoln put slavery
ahead of the Union at this critical time, and so did his party. The
possible effects of the tariff were the chief impelling force to this
result. It was feared that an independent South might put such
restrictions upon the exportation of cotton North as to ruin the
textile factories. Lincoln was told that grass would grow in the
streets of New York. Then, the accepted theory being that exports
abroad came back by exchange in the form of imports, these imports,
because of the low tariff, would be limited to Southern ports alone for
distribution North and South. Thus the Northern government, dependent
upon the high tariff, would be deprived of its revenue. The export of
cotton amounted in 1859 to $161,434,923, and the total exportations of
everything from the North were only $ 78,217 ,202. Lincoln realized the
difficulty, and in three interviews defending his employment of
troops, asked what would become of his revenue if the Southern States
were allowed to set up an independent government with their ten per
cent tariff.(2) (2)These three occasions were: (I) when Colonel Baldwin
had an interview with Linculn on April 4, 1861; (2) when the
Commissioners, William B. Preston, A.H.H. Stuart, and George W.
Randolph, sent by the Virginia Convention, interviewed Lincoln on April
12th; (3) when Dr. Fuller and the deputations from each of the five
Christian Associations of Baltimore saw Lincoln on April 22. On March
16th Stanton, who had been a member of Buchanan's Cabinet and had not
yet taken sides with the Republicans, wrote of the alarm of these
people regarding the tariff situation, which they feared "would cut off
the trade of New York, build up New Orleans and the Southern ports, and
leave the government no revenue." Tyler, History of Virginia,
1763-1861. (Being Vol. II, History of Virginia, by American Historical
Society. Cotton did not have a fair opportunity to show its power.
During the War the North obtained lots of cotton by capture and
purchase by underground methods, and much cotton was grown in parts of
the South subject to their authority, so the deprivation was not felt
to as great an extent as some thought it would be. But prices of things
were very high in the North, and the after effects were terrible as
seen in a great war debt and a succession of financial panics. The
North got its revenue in the War not wholly by duties but by direct
taxes, high licenses, treasury notes, floating large loans and piling
up a huge debt. Southerners counted upon the interference of England,
and here again the deprivation of cotton was not so keenly felt as
justly assumed. Great quantities went to England by the blockade
runners and through the indirect channels of the North. Cotton, which
would have been a King in case of an independent South, was more or
less crippled by war. The government of the United States, during the
war and 'since, reversed itself on every measure of the Revolution -
even to the use of the word "rebel," which their ancestors had objected
to so strongly. Lincoln claimed the right, despite the Constitution, to
free the negroes under an exercise of the war powers. Of the contrary
view was John Quincy Adams, of Massachusetts, Secretary of State to
James Monroe, who in 1820 declared that "the emancipation of the
enemy's slaves is not among the acts of legitimate war"; "that the
right of putting to death all prisoners in cold blood and without
special cause might as well be pretended to be a law of war.(3)
Washington based the Union upon the Democratic principle of free
consent. Lincoln ridiculed the idea and asserted that force was the
only sound principle of government. (3)Moore, International Law Oigest,
VIII, p. 305: "Address of the Confederate Congress to the people of the
Confederate States" in Southern Historical Papers, I, p. 32. It is a
remarkable fact that while this country has thus stultified itself, the
Russian government, once the embodiment of autocracy, has placed within
its fundamental Constitution the right of peaceful secession on the
part of any of its constituent members. Of course when I refer to "the
North," I refer particularly to the Republican Party, which got
possession of the Executive in 1861 and administered the government for
long years in the grossest sectional manner. As to the Democrats of the
North, they were simply dragged into the War. Douglas, Black, Seymour,
etc., blamed the Republicans for the War, but on the plea of keeping
the territory of the United States intact joined in coercing the South.
When the War