Monthly Archives: December 2021

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Ten: Chapter XII, Lincoln and His Agenda

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A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Ten
Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Chap-XII-MAIN-pict0001-44K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XII.

LINCOLN'S AGENDA after he was inaugurated March 4, 1861 was "more centralized government, more power to the chief executive, more money from the South to benefit the North and the West, and the prohibition of slavery in the territories to stop the spread of black people."1

Mitcham writes that Lincoln is probably the "most overrated man in American history" because:

The real Lincoln was a reservoir of dirty jokes and well as Yankee stories. . . . He had many humorous tales, anecdotes, yarns, and stories about the New England religious hypocrites and their dishonest peddlers. . . . Of the twenty-three preachers in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, only three supported Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860.2

Lincoln's closest friends did not believe him a Christian though he had memorized enough Bible passages to use them when needed. His law partner William Herndon did not believe Lincoln was a "believer" and Ward Hill Lamon stated Lincoln "'was not a Christian.'"3 He did, however, value clerical support:

Later, during the war, in areas occupied by the Union army, Union generals forced Southern preachers to pray for him [Lincoln]. Failure to pray led to arrest, often by being dragged from the pulpit, and preachers were held in jail indefinitely, so Lincoln did received support from the clergy, even if it was under duress.4

Lincoln was the son of a "shiftless farmer" who moved often. He grew up around "uneducated and often coarse men and women" and "used foul language." He became a "'a self-made man'" and "great public speaker and debater." He became a lawyer where:

He represented big corporations and big business against the little man. At various times, he represented the Illinois Central Railroad, the Chicago & Alton Railroad, the Ohio & Mississippi, and the Rock Island Railroad. Erastus Corning offered him the job of chief general counsel for the New York Central Railroad at $10,000 a year (about $265,000 in 2017 dollars), but Lincoln turned it down. He probably couldn't afford the pay cut.5

Slavery was used by Northern demagogues to rally Republican votes using hatred of white Southerners, but there was no concern for black people. Lincoln and company didn't want slavery in the West because they didn't want blacks near them in the West.

Lincoln's appointment of Salmon P. Chase as secretary of the treasury is revealing as to Lincoln, Chase, and most other abolitionists' feelings about the black man:

In 1857, William D. Chadick of Alabama visited Ohio. He was searching for a home for a group of slaves liberated by the will of the late Samuel Townsend, and he thought Chase (then governor of Ohio) would be deeply interested in the project. On December 27, he met with him, and Chadick recalled Chase saying, 'he would rather never see another free negro set his foot upon Ohio soil.' Astonished, the Alabama man asked why. 'Because their moral influence is degrading,' Chase answered. Chadick pointed out the 'glaring inconsistency' in him and other abolitionists, who wanted to free the slaves but did not want them living amongst them. 'I do not wish to have the slave emancipated because I love him,' the governor responded, 'but because I hate his master.'6

Lincoln later appointed Chase chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Of course, Lincoln's statements in the Lincoln-Douglas debates reveal his true feelings about blacks which, in fairness to Lincoln, were typical and widespread in the 19th century. Ignorant people today who apply 21st century standards to earlier eras are appalled but people in the past must be judged by the standards of their own time. That is how you understand the past.

Applying today's stupid woke standards to the past prevents understanding the past, which is the goal of the woke anyway. Their goal is political agitation via the liberal fraud news media and the cowardly mob in academia, not truth or understanding.

In Charleston, Illinois on September 18, 1858, Lincoln said:

'I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about, in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to inter-marry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.' General Piatt, a fervent abolitionist, recalled: '[Lincoln] could no more feel sympathy for that wretched race [Negroes] than he could for the horse he worked or the hog he killed.' 7

Lincoln favored, his whole life, sending black people back to Africa or into a place they could survive. See black scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr.'s excellent book, Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000); and Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page's Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); and numerous other books and articles.

The deification of Lincoln occurred only after his death. Numerous books, too many to list, attest to Lincoln's true character such as Larry Tagg's The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, The Story of America's Most Reviled President (NY and CA: Savas Beatie, 2009).

Even James McPherson, who adores Lincoln, said: "'Being assassinated when he was in a moment of victory made it possible to forget all the criticism of him, the failures and the frustrations of the war years, and to see only the martyr.'" He admits Lincoln "'is now romanticized" though he was "'an often ruthless man.'"

Lincoln's contemporaries and associates were frank:

Abolitionist Wendell Phillips called him 'A huckster in politics . . . a first-rate second rate man.' General John C. Fremont said he had an 'incapacity and selfishness, with disregard of personal rights, with violation of personal liberty and liberty of the press, with feebleness and want of principle.'8

Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who despised Lincoln, went further:

Lincoln had been called in as a legal consultant on the McCormack Reaper patent infringement case. He [Stanton] called Lincoln a 'giraffe' to his face and threatened to throw up his briefcase and leave if he joined the legal team. ' . . . he treated me so rudely I went out of the room,' Lincoln recalled. McCormack appealed to Stanton, who replied: 'I will not associated with such a damned gawky, long-armed ape!' Lincoln, who was in the next room, heard every word. When McCormack returned, Lincoln refunded his fee and left for home.9

Other words used by Stanton about Lincoln were 'orangutan', 'baboon' and 'low, cunning clown.'10

It appeared few of Lincoln's close associates respected him and included not only Chase, Fremont, Phillips, but also:

Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, Secretary of State Seward, . . . Senator Sumner, Senator Lyman Trumbell of Illinois, Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, Thaddeus Stevens, Senator Zack Chandler of Michigan, Henry Ward Beecher, . . . and Horace Greeley. On February 23, 1863, Richard H. Dana wrote to Thomas Lathrop: '. . . the lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed . . . He has no admirers . . . '11

Mitcham writes that "The Thirty-Sixth Congress met in December 1860, preoccupied with solving the secession crisis" and of the "more than 200 resolutions" and "fifty-seven constitutional amendments" three stand out: "the Southern peace commissioners, the Crittenden Compromise, and the Corwin Amendment."12

The three Southern peace commissioners were Martin J. Crawford of Georgia, John Forsyth of Alabama, and Andre B. Roman of Louisiana but Lincoln refused to meet with them and his secretary of state, William H. Seward, lied to them repeatedly.

Seward promised to remove the Union garrison in Fort Sumter at the same time that Lincoln was plotting to send a naval force to Charleston and Pensacola to reinforce the forts, which he knew would start the war.

Major Robert Anderson, Lincoln's commander inside Fort Sumter, confirms Lincoln's intent to start the war. When Anderson was informed that Lincoln was going to reinforce Fort Sumter, Anderson wrote Lincoln and secretary of war Cameron and stated:

. . . a movement made now when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country. . . . We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced. . . . (Emphasis added.)13

Anderson sees that the war "is to be thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln, who had to hurry up and get it started or soon the South with European trade and military alliances would be unbeatable.

The Crittenden Compromise showed great promise. It revived the old Missouri Compromise line (36 degrees, 30 minutes) that prohibited slavery above it but allowed slavery below it. It had worked beautifully for 30 years and would most likely have worked in 1861 but Lincoln and racist Republicans refused to consider it.

They had forbid the extension of slavery into the West in their platform because they wanted the West for themselves and their white political allies. They did not want blacks anywhere near them in the West so slavery in the West, the Crittenden Compromise and its revival of the old Missouri Compromise line, were out.

Of the three attempts to deal with secession, the Corwin Amendment "won traction":

In December, 1860, President Buchanan asked Congress to set up a committee to draft an "explanatory amendment" vis-a-vis slavery. In the House, Thomas "Black Tom" Corwin of Ohio was chosen as the chairman. Corwin was a veteran politician who, at various times, was a state legislator, congressman, governor, U.S. senator, and congressman again. His amendment would forever prevent the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it existed.14

Lincoln supported it. He mentioned it in his inaugural. He wrote letters to governors in support of it.

The House "approved it one hundred thirty-three to sixty-five on February 28, and the Senate adopted it on March 2 by a vote of twenty-four to twelve." It got the two-thirds it needed.

Buchanan signed it and it was ratified by "Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Illinois" but the war made it moot.15 The Corwin Amendment was the true feeling of Lincoln and the North toward slavery. It left blacks in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, where slavery already existed.

Republicans could then agitate to keep the West white by prohibiting blacks from being there as slaves or freemen.

Some abolitionists were disgusted with Lincoln's support for the Corwin Amendment. Lysander Spooner, "a conspirator with John Brown" who "advocated violence and guerrilla warfare against the slave states," wrote:

'On the part of the North, the war was  carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.'16

Spooner was an astute observer who believed the "moneyed interests in the North" greatly influenced the government:

Their interest, he wrote, was 'to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South . . . '17

Spooner wrote after the war:

'. . . these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These---and not any love of liberty of justice---were the motives on which the money was lent by the North.'18

The Corwin Amendment failed to persuade the Cotton States to return, which is understandable. Southerners had an insatiable desire for independence and their own powerful, free-trade nation where states were supreme and the federal government was weak and subservient. In the South, 1861 was 1776 all over. They knew their glorious history and their Revolutionary sires. They were not about to return to tyranny and the Northern yoke, just as the Colonists were not about to return to tyranny and the British yoke, thus:

[I]t became clear to the president and his cronies that they had two choices: 1) let the Confederacy go in peace and deal with the ensuing economic disaster or 2) go to war with the South.19

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Eleven
Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Nine: Chapter XI, The Real Cause of the War)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 121.

2 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 122.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 123.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 123-124.

7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 124.

8 Ibid.

9 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 125.

10 Ibid.

11 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 125-126.

12 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 127.

13 Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston and James Island: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014), 91-93.

14 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 127.

15 Ibid.

16 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 128.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 129.

 

It Wasn't About Slavery,
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It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine: Chapter XI, The Real Cause of the War

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A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Nine
Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Chap-XI-MAIN-PICT-69K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XI.

MITCHAM'S EPIGRAPHS are perfect. Chapter XI's are:

The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.---Charles Dickens, 1862

No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.---Shelby Foote, American historian

For the love of money is the root of all evil. . . .---1 Timothy 6:10

Mitcham opens Chapter XI with:

And now we come to the real cause of the war: money. Most wars have been about money or the transfer of riches and territory, which also equates to money, eventually. This economic factor should never be ignored.1

The North has been benefiting from the federal government since the beginning of the country. Once they realized they could take over the federal government in 1860 because of their larger population and exploit the rest of the country, they were determined like a pack of snarling wolves about to tear a lamb to bits, thus legendary Yankee greed was born.

Georgia noted it in her declaration of causes for secession which is regularly ignored by most of the Marxist historians in academia who are not interested in truth but only the political advantage of the left:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all.

Yankees were the "federals" in the war who established the supremacy of the federal government over the states.

Mitcham points out that shortly after the Revolutionary War, all state debt was transferred to the federal government which greatly benefited the North because Southerners had to pay most of that debt via tariffs.

Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri who was anti-slavery said to the Senate in 1828:

Before the Revolution, it [the South] was the seat of wealth, as well as hospitality. Money, and all it commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed.2

Benton asked himself why and his answer was "Federal legislation":

Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense in supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually, furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. . . . the South must be exhausted of its money, and its property, by a course of legislation, which is forever taking away, and never returning anything. Every new tariff increases the force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens imposed upon them.3

This is an important chapter and Mitcham explains the "symbiotic economic relationship" between South and North with clarity:

When the Southerners bought their slaves from the Yankee flesh peddlers, they were using money loaned to them by Northern banks. The worldwide industrial revolution was based largely on textile manufacturing, which required enormous amounts of cotton. The South produced more than 75 percent of the world's cotton. The New England textile industry was built on this cotton, which was mostly planted, cultivated, picked, and ginned by slaves. Cotton, produced by slaves, built the North's prosperity like that of the Deep South.4

These are the EXACT themes of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. They are the themes of many excellent books by authors such as Mike Scruggs, Phil Leigh, Charles Adams, Thomas DiLorenzo, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and others BUT it really started in 1860 with Thomas Prentice Kettell, the most preeminent economist of the time.

Kettell's famous book, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, proves conclusively that Southerners were producing the wealth of the country with agricultural commodities, but Yankees were making all the money with federal legislation that gave them bounties, subsidies, and monopoly status for their businesses as well as tariffs.

And Northerners manufactured for the South and shipped Southern cotton all over the world. Kettell's analysis is solid and he was observing everything first hand in real time.

Mitcham writes that Wall Street and Yankee bankers were indirectly dependent on "cotton and slavery":

Cotton was America's number one economic product, accounting for more than half of all exports. The export value of cotton alone stood at $161,434,923 in 1859. That same year, the total value of all exports from the North stood at only $78,217,202. In other words, the value of one Southern product accounted for more than twice the value of all Northern exports combined.5

Incredibly, "80 to 90 percent of federal revenue came from the Southern export trade, which was largely built on slavery." Mitcham writes:

Here we see the real reason Abraham Lincoln and the more moderate Republicans did not wish to disturb slavery in the South: from its establishment up until 1861, the United States government was mostly funded by Southern agriculture and especially the cotton industry, much of which depended on slave labor. If slavery were abolished, federal funding would be eliminated with it. Thus Lincoln and his allies only opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories.6

So funny and ironic but this was a double-win for Republicans because they could support slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed as they did by supporting the Corwin Amendment, but stand against slavery in the territories which they did --- not because they were against slavery --- but because they were against blacks living anywhere near them in the West.

The Morrill Tariff introduced by Vermont Representative Justin Smith Morrill "would have raised the average dutiable ad valorem tax on imports from just under 20 percent in 1860 (under the Tariff of 1857) to more than 36 percent in 1862----and a whopping 47 percent within three years."7 But:

Predictably, some of the protected Northern industries and corporations needed to import specific items, so these were classified as non-dutiable (not taxed).8

As has been observed over and over, federal legislation was enriching the North and robbing the South blind, and Southerners in 1860 would no longer be able to protect themselves from this blatant theft being forced on them by the Northern majority. That is a primary reason they seceded from the Union.

Would you allow yourself to be robbed blind by a region that hated your guts and sent murdering terrorists into your peaceful towns and villages to poison wells and incite slave insurrections where your women and children would be raped and murdered in the night as happened in Haiti?

It is easy to see why Lincoln and the North feared Southern economic power, especially when allied with Europe and specifically Great Britain. Southerners:

[A]ccounted for close to 82 percent of U.S. export business and for more than 83 percent of American tariff revenues even before the Morrill Tariff. About 80 percent of these revenues went to public works projects, railroads, and industrial subsidies in the North, enriching Northerners at the expense of the South. The Morrill Tariff would make this unhealthy situation even worse.9

Imagine turning all that money back on the South. Imagine the growth and increase in standard of living. After all, it was Southern money. Many prominent Southerners during the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding pointed that out.

But for each dollar of Southern money that stayed in the South, it meant the same dollar not going into Northern pockets.

Raising tariffs meant Northern manufacturers could raise their prices up to the level of the tariff:

If the Northern industrial special interests could raise the tariffs on imports from Britain, they could sell Northern products at a higher price and thus reap higher profits. This is what Calhoun was trying to block when he demanded to know what business the government had picking the winners and losers in the private sector.10

Mitcham writes about the passage of the Morrill Tariff after seven Southern states had seceded and their senators and representatives were out of the U.S. Congress:

It is worth noting that the tariff bill had priority even before excluding slavery from the territories.11

Henry Clay's "America System was now the law of the land" but:

[I]t only helped the North. The Constitution allowed the federal government to collect the tariffs to fund itself, but it had never been meant to enrich some people at the expense of others. Now the Constitution was irrelevant. Turned on its ear, it no longer served as an instrument to limit federal power.12

Just as we saw with the transcontinental railroad route chosen to go through the North to the West, the sectional Republican Party as Wendell Phillips had proudly stated, was fulfilling the desires of the North and its Northern president, Abraham Lincoln, against the rest of the country, and the writing was on the wall.

Southerners with their Jeffersonian belief in the sovereignty and supremacy of their states, would hereafter be outvoted by the Northern majority pushing Northern economic interests every single time. Robert Toombs called the federal government a "suction pump" sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it in the North, and it would now have unlimited power, forever.

This Union was now for the benefit of the North as Alexis de Tocqueville and others had warned could happen. De Tocqueville had said if any one state got the power to control the federal government it would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power, and now, the Northern states had that power with their majority and the sectional Republican Party, the party of the North pledged against the South as Wendell Phillips stated.

This is what Lincoln was fighting for when he started his war by sending his hostile naval force against Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens in 1861.

And it worked.

The North has been the center of money, power and culture since Appomattox, though it is in great decline today with massive crime as we see out West and in New York City as Yankees flee the horribly-governed woke North for the South where folks are friendly and the region is dynamic, free, supports law enforcement, and is well-governed by leaders like Ron DeSantis in Florida.

DeSantis governs one of the freest states in the country yet has the lowest COVID problems in sharp contrast to much of the locked-down, masked-up, "show me your vaccination papers" North.

Mitcham points out that Southern wealth was not limited to the planter class:

Dixie had 33 percent of the nation's railroad mileage and was ahead of every other country in the world except, of course, the United States as a whole. It also had navigable rivers that did not freeze, several excellent ports, and a per capita income 10 percent higher than all the states west of Pennsylvania. . . . It also had a large, highly industrious class of yeoman farmers. Most of them did not own slaves. Only about 6 to 7 percent of the Confederate enlistees had slaves. Slaveholding yeoman farmers usually had only one or two. They labored in the cotton fields right beside their chattels.13

Many Northern newspapers at first supported the right of secession. Horace Greeley famously said "let our erring sisters go." He wrote in his New-York Tribune: "The South has as good a right to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain." Even the Northwest Daily Tribune, a pro-Lincoln newspaper, said that if the South opted to form an independent nation, "they [would] have a clear moral right to do so."14

But soon they realized that Southern secession meant the collapse of the Northern economy. Northern manufacturing was based mostly on selling to their captive market in the South at high prices jacked up by tariffs. Secession meant Southerners could buy better goods from Europe at much lower prices as they had always wanted to do plus they would manufacture for themselves. They were chomping at the bit to do it.

Southerners outlawed protective tariffs and made them unconstitutional. They also put in law that each state would fund the internal improvements it wanted itself. Southern states would never be taxed again then have the tax money spent in the North.

Northerners were going to lose their shipping industry too, and overnight. The Morrill Tariff was like pumping gasoline into an already blazing fire. It meant the rest of the world would have to pay 47 to 60% to ship into the North, or pay 10% to ship into the South because Southerners felt that "if 10 percent was good enough for God" it was good enough for them!15

Nobody would be shipping into the North at Morrill Tariff rates so Northern ship captains were heading South to Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans where goods would be put on the Mississippi River and railroads and distributed to the rest of the country.

Secession meant a complete shift of economic power from North to South, and overnight.

To boot, Southerners had 100% control of King Cotton, the most demanded commodity on the planet that had been 60% of U.S. exports alone in 1860.

No wonder Lincoln and greedy Republicans started their war. They were not about to tolerate a free trade nation on their Southern border allied with Europe militarily and via trade alliances.

Lincoln knew he had four times the white population of the South and maybe 200 times the armaments at that point in history so in his Republican mind there was no reason to wait a second longer. He was anxious to set up his blockade and chill European negotiations and treaties with the South.

Mitcham writes:

It was now clear that many of the Northern politicians had seriously miscalculated the depths of Southern feelings about the tariffs, Northern hypocrisy, disrespect for the rule of law, hate-filled abolitionist propaganda, slavery, protecting terrorists, encouraging servile insurrection, corporate welfare, cultural arrogance, and a host of other matters that provoked secession.16

 

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Ten

Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Eight: Chapter X, The Election of 1860)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 111.

2 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 111-112.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 112.

4 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 112.

5 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 113.

6 Ibid.

7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 114.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 115.

11 Ibid.

12 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 116.

13 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 118.

14 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 119.

15 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 120.

16 Ibid.

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It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eight: Chapter X, The Election of 1860

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A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Eight
Chapter X
The Election of 1860
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Chap-X-MAIN-PICT-67K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter X.

Mitcham's epigraph for Chapter X is by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:

The War between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch on the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.

DISHONEST ACADEMIA and the news media will ignore statements like that from their man, Karl Marx. They will use the Marxist tactic of just ignoring powerful evidence that they don't agree with. However, those of us seeking truth will not ignore it and will put it in their faces, front and center.

Mitcham opens by pointing out the North's casual attitude about obeying the Constitution because they were following a "higher law" as New York Senator William H. Seward stated. Seward also believed an "irrepressible conflict" was coming between North and South.

If you can't trust the North to obey the Constitution, what good are they as fellow countrymen? Mitcham points out that "Under Seward's Higher Law Theory, God Himself had to be a Radical Republican."1

The sectional Republican Party was demanding a huge tariff increase yet "The South, which had less than 30 percent of the population, was already paying more than 85 percent of the taxes."2

Didn't matter. Republicans wanted more.

Some abolitionist newspapers "blared that the South deserved economic crushing, for its sins. Southerners should pay because the North---especially New England---had a divine right to tariff income and could disperse it to railroads and banks as they chose."

That is what the Founding Fathers meant by "tyranny of the majority." It was a concept warned about in the secession debate in the South prior to the South seceding.

George Washington warned about "sectional" political parties. It would mean the end of the country, he said. Political parties should be national but radical Republican abolitionist Wendall Phillips proudly stated that the Republican Party was the "party of the North pledged against the South."

Southerners watched this Northern sectional party make gains across the North and as Mitcham points out, "This trend may not have been in every case an endorsement of servile insurrection," but the South interpreted it that way, especially after John Brown and Harper's Ferry in 1859, and before that, with Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South in 1857. Republicans endorsed Helper's book and used it as a campaign document in the election of 1860. They printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them coast to coast though it called for slaves to rise up in the night and slit the throats of Southern men, women and children.

It is important to note that the most prominent economist alive around the time of the War Between the States, Thomas Prentice Kettell, blasted Helper's economic statistics and said they were absurd. Kettell wrote the brilliant Southern Wealth and Northern Profits establishing that the South was producing the wealth of the United States with cotton and other Southern commodities but Northerners were making all the money by shipping cotton, manufacturing and banking for the South, and with tariffs, taxes, bounties, subsidies, and monopoly status for their businesses from the federal government.

In other words, Northerners were dependent on the federal government and the South. Without the South, Northerners were dead economically whereas without the North, Southerners were in great shape with 100% control of King Cotton.

That's why Lincoln refused to let the South go and instead started a war that killed 750,000 men and maimed over a million. He could have removed his troops from sovereign South Carolina and Florida soil and all of us live in peace, but the rise of the free trade South on his southern border guaranteed to end Northern economic dominance and Lincoln and the Republicans could not stand for that.

Mitcham writes that "The South reacted to the rise of the Republicans by becoming a one-party region" influenced by "'Fire-eaters' such as Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, William L. Yancey of Alabama, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, and John A. Quitman of Mississippi"3 who "joined the Democratic party and began urging separation as a way to put an end of Washington's political corruption and economic exploitation of the South."4

Fire-eaters had more and more influence in the South as Republicans made gains in the North. Mitcham writes that "The antebellum Washington establishment danced its last dance in 1860 in a troubled atmosphere. Everyone had a sense of foreboding."5

The Democratic party National Convention was held in Charleston, South Carolina in April 1860 with Stephen Douglas the frontrunner. Because of a platform dispute, "fifty-one Southern delegates walked out, led by William L. Yancey." They included all the delegates from the first seven states to secede within the year --- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas --- as well as "three of Arkansas' four delegations and one delegate from Delaware."6

The convention deadlocked and Democrats tried again on June 18 at the Front Street Theater in Baltimore. Mitcham gives all the positions and details but the bottom line is that 110 Southern delegates walked out this time and a rump convention nominated Douglas.

Right after the walk-out in Baltimore, a second Democratic convention in Baltimore nominated John C. Breckinridge "for president and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon for vice president."7

The Republicans met in Chicago in mid-May 1860 with Seward "the leading contender, but his radicalism, open anti-Southern bigotry, and well-known lack of integrity worked against him." Lincoln was next "followed by Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri."8

Mitcham writes:

Except for Lincoln, the GOP candidates had serious political baggage. The Republicans also knew they would have to carry the West to win the election, and Lincoln was popular there. Greeley dropped the non-entity Bates and backed "Honest Abe," who secured the nomination on the third ballot.9

The VP nominee was Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.

The Republican platform:

[F]eatured extremely high tariffs, no slavery in the territories, and subsidies for a transcontinental railroad that, of course, would go through the North, and that would exclude the South from any economic benefit of this massive, federal-supported, internal improvement.10

The centrist Constitutional Union Party that "had been formed from remnants of the defunct Know-Nothing and Whig Parties" was strict constructionist and nominated John Bell for president and Edward Everett as VP, also in Baltimore. Mitcham writes that "This ticket showed surprising strength, and it might have been better for the country if it had won, but it was a centrist party (like the Northern Democrats), and no centrist was going to win in 1860."11

Lincoln needed 152 electoral votes to win and he got 180 carrying 18 states, though his popular vote total was only 1,865,908 or 39.8 percent.

Douglas got 1,380,202 or 29.5 percent but won only one state, Missouri. He had 12 electoral votes.

Breckinridge got 848,019 votes or 18.1 percent and carried 11 states with 72 electoral votes.

John Bell got 590,901 or 12.6 percent and carried three states with 39 electoral votes.

To sum up the popular vote, Lincoln got 1,865,908, but 2,819,122 voted against him.

Mitcham writes about the South:

They had had the presidency for forty-nine of the seventy-two years it existed (more than two-thirds of the time) and had played the most prominent role in writing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. They had supplied twenty-four of the thirty-six speakers of the House and twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices, giving them a majority in the court always. Twenty-five of the thirty-six presidents pro tempore of the Senate had been Southerners.12

Because of the hate pouring out of the North so they could rally their votes to win, Southerners had had enough and were not about to be ruled by people who supported John Brown's terrorism and Hinton Helper's call for slaves to rise up and slit the throats of Southerners as they slept. These were the same people who were robbing the South blind with tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopoly status for Northern businesses, so much so that Southerners were paying 85% of the country's taxes, yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North. Some were worried the federal government "might encourage or even instigate slave revolts."13

Southerners began setting dates for conventions to debate seceding from the Union and prominent in their speeches and articles was the Declaration of Independence and this phrase:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Mitcham quotes Dr. Don Livingston who said the South "did not secede to protect slavery from a national plan of emancipation because no national political party proposed emancipation."14

Mitcham is correct when he writes:

The states which mentioned slavery in their ordinances were reacting to the irresponsible attacks of the abolitionists and their embrace of terrorism and servile insurrection as legitimate means of gaining their objectives. The South feared (with considerable justification) that the Republican party was a revolutionary party that wanted to destroy the federation of states (as favored by Jefferson) in favor of a dominant central government funded by the South but controlled by the North.15

Here is radical Republican Wendell Phillips' entire statement about the Republican party being a party of the North pledged against the South. It came right after Lincoln's election:

No man has a right to be surprised at this state of things. It is just what we have attempted to bring about. It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face, and calls itself national; but it is not national---it is sectional. The Republican party is a party of the North pledged against the South.16

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Nine
Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War
(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Seven: Chapter IX, John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 103.

2 Ibid.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 104.

4 Ibid.

5 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 104-105.

6 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 105.

7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 106.

8 Ibid.

9 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 107.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 108.

13 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 109.

14 Ibid.

15 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 109.

16 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 109-110.

 

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book
Chap-X-Mitcham's-Notes-1-11

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven of Ten: Chapter IX, John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

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A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Seven of Ten
Chapter IX
John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part-Seven--MAIN-PICT-93K
Part-Seven--MAIN-PICT-2---Harper's Ferry 68K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter IX.

ON MONDAY, October 17, 1859 in Arlington, Virginia Colonel Robert E. Lee was "working on the financial accounts of his late father-in-law, George Washington Custis" who had died and left Lee executor of his "unprofitable and entangled mess" of an estate.

Of course that estate would later become our nation's most sacred burial ground, Arlington National Cemetery.

Lee was surprised to see Lieutenant James E. B. "Jeb" Stuart who was not clean shaven as he had been in the 1850s at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Lee was superintendent and Stuart was one of his favorite cadets.1

Stuart's father had been a "lawyer who was famous locally as a bon vivant and heavy drinker" but Stuart was a "teetotaler and devout Episcopalian."

Stuart and his wife had each been given a slave but the "Stuarts did not believe in slavery and quickly freed both of the African Americans."2

Stuart fought the Cheyenne in Kansas and took a bullet in the chest but recovered. He also did peacekeeping between "John Brown and other abolitionists hooligans and the Missouri "Border Ruffians."3

Stuart and Lee were both on leave in 1859 and Stuart had a lot he wanted to do including trying to sell his invention, "Stuart's Lightning Horse Hitcher," to the War Department. It was a device to attach a saber "to a horseman's belt."

Instead, he was given orders to "go to Arlington to fetch Colonel Lee" because there was serious trouble at Harper's Ferry. On hearing, Lee left immediately for Washington without even putting on his uniform.4

President Buchanan and Secretary of War John Floyd said a man named Smith "and some 'Kansas "Free-Staters"' were inciting a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry" and had already "seized the government arsenal." State militiamen, a battalion of troops, detachment of Marines and ninety sailors were heading to Harper's Ferry and Lee was to take command and put the "revolt" down:

Lieutenant Stuart offered to serve as a volunteer aide, and Colonel Lee accepted. The two future Rebel generals left D.C. by a special train at five o'clock p.m.5

Smith was actually John Brown, a failure in life, who "'in ordinary times he would have been interesting mainly in a clinical sense'" according to Dr. Ludwell H. Johnson.6 Brown was "born in Connecticut in 1800" and descended from Puritans. Mitcham writes:

He became a fanatical abolitionist and recruited a small following. After securing funding in New England and Ohio, Brown went west, where he and his people took part in the turmoil that was "Bleeding Kansas," and murdered five men in cold blood, most hacked to death by swords in front of their screaming wives and children.7

Brown and his gang became robbers then "fled Kansas for New England, where he obtained funding for a terrorist attack in Virginia" which he planned to make into a multi-state "slave rebellion throughout the South" as they gathered followers.

Of course, Brown's New England funding violates the Constitution which is supposed to "insure domestic tranquility" and not murder and rape against fellow citizens.

Where is New England's plan for gradual, compensated emancipation, the way they "ended slavery" in New England? Ended slavery is in quotes because they didn't really end it there.

It is provable conclusively that most New Englanders sold their slaves back into slavery in the South just as they were to be freed, such as before the slave's 21st birthday. New Englanders just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one as noted by contemporaries such as Charles Dickens. See Black Bondage in the North by Edgar J. McManus (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973), and Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (NY: Ballantine Books, 2005), and other works.

The hypocrisy of New England and the North and many historians today with their "woke" history defending New England and the North, is breathtaking.

New England brought virtually all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process. They built much, perhaps most, of the infrastructure of the Old North with profits from the slave trade, and they are directly responsible, with the British before them, for forcing the horrendous Middle Passage on poor Africans.

On the Middle Passage, Africans were chained to decks in filthy stinking slave ships with feces, vomit, dead people, all baked in a stifling hot oven with no air circulation in the bowels of slave ships for months on end. They had been sold into slavery in Africa by their fellow black Africans.

So rather than work on a plan of emancipation that would work --- and, as stated, New Englanders knew how to do it --- they supported a terrorist and murderer to murder fellow citizens in the South.

The North was already at war with the South. By seceding, Southerners were protecting themselves.

Mitcham writes that Brown tried to recruit Frederick Douglas and others but Douglas thought better.

Brown also approached Harriett Tubman who "consented to help Brown and recruited slaves in southern Ontario to join the invasion. (Brown liked her and called her 'General Tubman.')". But Tubman disappeared and did not participate.8

Brown miscalculated because the blacks around Harper's Ferry were not "badly treated compared to those on some of the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations of the Deep South." They "were house servants and free people of color. They would not be enthusiastic about joining a dubious revolt."9

Brown going by "'Isaac Smith'" gathered up 22 men and his weapons "four miles north of Harper's Ferry" and on Sunday, October 16, at night, "he struck." They captured Colonel Lewis Washington's plantation but his slaves were not interested in joining Brown. That should have told Brown he was in trouble.10

Next, they seized the Harper's Ferry arsenal:

The first casualty occurred when Hayward Shepherd, a highly respected free man of color and a baggage master for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, realized what was happening. Rather than join the raiders, he tried to run away, so Brown's men shot him in the back. Shepherd died of his wounds. Also murdered was Thomas Boerly, an arsenal worker on his way to work.11

The incredibly ignorant Brown captured a B&O train but let it go so naturally it spread the alarm that terrorists had captured Harper's Ferry:

Individual militia companies from nearby communities quickly assembled and joined the fray. Local black people refused to join the battle, but local whites did---against Brown.12

More civilians were killed "including the unarmed mayor, Fontaine Beckham, and George W. Turner, who had attended West Point with Robert E. Lee." Brown "and his  men took refuge in the armory, which was soon surrounded by local farmers and shopkeepers" who quickly realized Brown didn't have much of a force. They "recaptured the arsenal and loosely surrounded the terrorists in the nearby fire engine house."13

At 10 p.m. Lee and Stuart got there and "walked across the dark railroad bridge to the armory where Colonel Lee decided to wait until daylight to attack. He sent Jeb Stuart to demand "Smith" surrender. Stuart entered the engine room, startled at what he saw. 'Why, aren't you old Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, whom I once had there as my prisoner?'"

Brown would not surrender so, "At first light on October 18, Stuart again advanced to the engine house double doors under a flag of truce. 'Are you ready to surrender, and trust to the mercy of the government?' he asked."14

Brown said no but wanted to negotiate safe passage out, promising to release his hostages later.

Stuart refused:

Several of the hostages and captured workmen cried out to Lee and Stuart, urging them not to use force or Brown would kill them. Above their voices came the roar of Colonel Washington: 'Never mind us! Fire!'

'The old Revolutionary blood does tell,' an admiring Robert E. Lee remarked. He was sitting on a horse, about fifteen yards from the firehouse.15

Stuart "stepped aside and dropped his hat---the signal for the attack" and "A dozen Marines rushed forward" but heavy hammers didn't work so they rammed the doors "with a heavy ladder" and that splintered them.

Marine Lieutenant Israel Greene rushed in with his men and two were shot dead immediately. Colonel Washington pointed out Brown to Greene and Greene rushed him "and swung his saber hard, intent on splitting Brown's skull" but Brown dodged then stood up and "the lieutenant gave him an under-thrust with his sword midway up his body, lifting him completely off the ground" but it hit Brown's belt buckle which broke the ceremonial sword Greene was carrying.16 Greene had not been told they were assaulting terrorists this day. He had thought they were attending a ceremonial function:

If he had been carrying his combat sword, Brown's splattered insides would have been all over the fire engine house's floor. There would never have been a John Brown trial....17

Mitcham points out that had there not been a John Brown trial, Southerners might not have realized the effectiveness of abolitionist propaganda and Northern hatred toward them thus might not have reacted to Lincoln's election by seceding.

Brown was badly wounded and other terrorists killed or they surrendered:

The marines hauled Brown and his surviving men outside to the grass and treated their wounds. In all, ten abolitionists were dead---including two of Brown's sons---three were immediately captured, four were captured later, and five escaped. Six civilians died and nine were wounded, as were two marines, one fatally. There were militia casualties as well, but their exact numbers are not known.18

The bloody hands of the New Englanders who financed Brown's terrorism includes hundreds of thousands more deaths because Brown's raid and the North's adoring attitude toward Brown helped greatly to bring on the War Between the States.

Those same hypocritical Yankees would have been better off developing a realistic plan to end slavery but that was never the North's desire. They didn't want slavery ended then all the slaves move to the North and be job competition.

They wanted to hurt the South. They were drooling for political control of the country so they could keep taxing the South and spending the South's money in the North. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet over 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

All of this agitation and the war itself were about political power and money like all wars are. There was nothing whatsoever moral about the North's war against the South. Contemporaries like Charles Dickens knew it and stated it clearly.

Mitcham writes:

Following the raid, investigators examined the Kennedy Farm. They found Brown's correspondence with the Secret Six, a.k.a. the Secret Committee of Six---the abolitionists who funded John Brown. They also discovered maps of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The maps had notes pasted to the margins showing the black population. Counties with predominantly African-American populations had been highlighted. They also found the provisional Constitution for Brown's new government and 900 pikes.19

Edmund Ruffin "got hold of some of the pikes and sent one to the legislature of each Southern state with the inscription: 'Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethern.'"20

Brown's trial began October 27, 1859. Brown "was defended by a team of New England lawyers, led by Massachusetts abolitionist John Albion Andrew." On October 30 Brown was found guilty of "treason, conspiring with and telling slaves to escape and revolt, and first-degree murder." He was sentenced to death and hanged December 2, 1859.21

The North's worship of terrorist Brown woke the South up and shocked it:

Church bells rang in his honor, women wore black mourning clothes, men wore black armbands, politicians lauded him, businesses closed, and ladies cried on the day of his execution. Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Phillips praised him, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson and the rest of the New England literary elite.22

Emerson said Massachusetts prison inmates "were superior human beings to the leaders of the South" and Thoreau compared Brown to Jesus Christ. Brown's lawyer, John Albion Andrew, "was elected governor of Massachusetts."23

This "proved to the South that the Republican party was not distancing itself from its extremist members but was embracing them" and apparently "endorsing anti-Southern violence and servile insurrection."

The Secret Six cowards who when safe in Massachusetts with their compound interest on their money from the slave trade safely in their pockets mostly ran rather than face their crimes:

The Secret Six who funded Brown were Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Steams. Brown's captured documents and subsequent investigations of him revealed that they had financed the Harper's Ferry Raid, perhaps to the tune of $25,000 ($679,000 in 2017 dollars).24

Frederick Douglas fled to Canada since he knew about the planned attack.

Higginson stayed in Massachusetts where he knew he would not be prosecuted.

The "Republican governors of Iowa and Ohio refused to extradite" the seven of Brown's raiders who escaped. This proved to Southerners that the North was not going to obey the law. To these Northerners, Southerners were already the enemy, and "To many [in the South], it was a harbinger of what to expect under Republican rule."25

South Carolina, Georgia and Texas mentioned this Northern harboring of terrorists in their declarations of causes for seceding.

The South had become certain it could not depend on a Republican administration to obey the law and protect them from those who wanted the slaves to rise up and slaughter them in the night as had happened in Haiti. Thomas Jonathan Jackson of VMI and others began thinking seriously about secession and "Many Southern moderates started to believe the 'fire-eaters' had been right all along."26

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Eight of Ten

 

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Six: Chapter VII, Agitation and Compromise; Chapter VIII, The Chasm Grows)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 91.

2 Ibid.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 91-92.

4 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 92.

5 Ibid.

6 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 92-93.

7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 93.

8 Ibid.

9 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 94.

10 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 94-95.

11 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 95.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 96.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 97.

18 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 97-98.

19 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 98.

20 Ibid.

21 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 99.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 100.

25 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 100-101.

26 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 101.

 

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book
Part-Seven--ENDNOTES-1-112K
Part-Seven--ENDNOTES-2-111K

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six of Ten: Chapter VII, Agitation and Compromise; Chapter VIII, The Chasm Grows

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A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Six of Ten
Chapter VII
Agitation and Compromise
Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Main-Pict-Pt-Six-52K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapters VII and VIII.

MITCHAM OPENS CHAPTER VII, Agitation and Compromise, with "William Lloyd Garrison was the son of an alcoholic sailor who abandoned his family. He grew into a staunch Baptist and a vitriolic, harsh, hateful man---an odd combination for a Christian."

Garrison denounced the Constitution as "A covenant with death and an agreement with Hell." The fanatical Garrison to his credit wanted the North to secede from the United States so he did not have to be associated with slavery. Georgia's Robert Toombs said Garrison, while an extremist, was a man of conviction who believed what he preached unlike so many for whom anti-slavery was a political position, not a moral one.

Most abolitionists were not pro-black but were anti-black. They were anti-slavery because they did not want blacks anywhere near them, especially in the West.

Garrison, with Arthur Tappen, organized the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Garrison had published The Liberator since 1831.

His heart might have been in the right place --- to him, at any rate --- but his radical tactics did not hasten the end of slavery. They entrenched it. Mitcham writes:

The abolitionists' extreme rhetoric had a polarizing effect, in both North and South, which developed with remarkable speed. Virginia---which narrowly defeated a law abolishing slavery within the state only three years before---enacted a law in 1836 making it a crime to advocate abolition. The Georgia legislature offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him south to stand trial.1

Mitcham points out that earlier generations of Southerners were like Thomas Jefferson who "denounced slavery in 1776" and thereafter but like so many others was stuck in the system that even Lincoln acknowledged would never be started up today (during Lincoln's lifetime). Lincoln also said if he had been born into a slave society, he would not know how to end it either.

Before virtue-signaling radical abolitionists, who never once had a realistic plan to end slavery, Southerners themselves wanted to end it. George Washington said "'It is among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery may be abolished by law.'"

James Madison, Father of the Constitution, was a slaveholder but admitted it was wrong.

The abolitionist demand for immediate, uncompensated emancipation was absurd. It would destroy the economies of the South and North because the Northern economy was based on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton.

It would also create a dangerous social problem because how would former slaves live? Already it was against the law in several Northern and Western states for free blacks to live there or even visit. To survive they had to steal or commit other crimes.

Slavery could have ended with a plan that dealt with all those problems but there was no will for that, especially in the racist North where freed slaves would go and be job competition. The demand for such a thing was ridiculous and I suspect that many virtue-signaling abolitionists knew it was ridiculous but just didn't care.

Rev. Nehemiah Adams of Massachusetts acknowledged the danger of "the propaganda of abolitionist societies." They encouraged slave insurrections which were murderous bloody affairs such as happened in Haiti. Adams writes "'husbands and fathers at the South considered that whatever might be true of slavery as a system, self-defence, the protection of their households against a servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they broke into the post-office, and seized and burned abolition papers; indeed, no excesses are surprising, in view of the perils to which they saw themselves exposed.'"

Southerners attacked Northerners for "'wage slavery'" and Mitcham writes that "In 1850, near the end of his life, Daniel Webster lamented that the debates leading up to the Compromise of 1850 would have led to the South gradually eliminating slavery had it not been for the frenzy stirred up by the abolitionists."2

The virtue-signalers, then and today, might feel good about themselves but their hands are usually dripping with blood.

Mitcham covers in detail every election, politician, political party, tariff, issue, date, percentage, and their significance in the entire antebellum period and he does it with a clarity and smoothness that makes it a pleasure to read.

The balance of power between North and South was huge because Northern states wanted high protective tariffs and large expenditures for public works in their states, while Southern states wanted low tariffs and free trade, the opposite of what the North wanted.

Mitcham writes:

A major factor in the Whigs' defeat was the Tariff of 1842, which they managed to push through Congress and persuaded a reluctant President Tyler to sign. Called the Black Tariff, it raised the rates from 20 percent to nearly 40 percent. The tariff hamstrung the economy so severely that total tariff revenues declined. As a result, the Whigs lost both branches of Congress in 1844.3

The U.S. soon annexed Texas then war broke out with Mexico (1846-48) "in which the United States Army pushed to the Pacific and captured California and the modern Southwest."

Rep. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania on August 8, 1846 introduced his famous "Wilmot Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the "territory annexed from Mexico." Like so many anti-slavery virtue-signalers who were definitely not pro-black, Wilmot admitted his racist motivation was to keep blacks out of the West.

The entire issue of slavery in the West was political posturing. Slavery was not going to work in the West ever. Huge territories at one time or another were open for slavery yet there were never over a handful of slaves anywhere.

Mitcham writes:

Senator James G. Blaine of Maine recalled: 'The whole controversy over the Territories, as remarked by a witty representative from the South, related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place.'4

Mitcham believes Southerners should not have fought the battle over slavery in the West since slavery could not work there.

However, it was a huge point of honor because Southerners, as Mitcham points out, had largely conquered the western territory. More Southern blood and treasure than Northern was used in the Mexican War so to then be told they could not take slaves there, even if a Southerner didn't own any slaves, was too much of an insult.5

The election of 1848 "was close and heated." The racist Wilmot had more to say. Mitcham writes:

The Southern slaveholders were called the 'Lords of the Lash,' while their opponents (northern textile manufacturers) were dubbed the 'Lords of the Loom.' Many of the Free Soil Democrats wanted to keep the west open for free white laborers. Congressman Wilmot told one rally: 'The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. Let us keep what remains for ourselves . . . for free white labor.'6

There's gold in them there hills!

In 1848, gold was discovered in California and its population increased dramatically. That led to California wanting to be admitted as a state, which meant the South would be forever outvoted in the U.S. Senate.

On March 4, 1850, in his last speech when he was so ill that James Mason of Virginia had to read it, John C. Calhoun "warned that an overbearing North was dissolving the ties that held the states together. The United States, he declared, could not hold together by cries of 'Union, Union, glorious Union,' any more than a physician could save a seriously ill patient by crying 'Health, health, glorious health.'"7

Mitcham paraphrases Calhoun who stated that "compromise with Yankees was useless. The North would use it as a stepping-stone to greater concessions later."

The Northern majority had already begun to construe the Constitution to increase federal power and diminish states' rights, to minimize Southern influence at the national level. To avert disunion, the North had to stop its attacks and agree to a constitutional amendment to protect the Southern minority. It if would not or could not, the South should leave in peace.8

Mitcham writes that Calhoun would have gone down as one of our greatest political thinkers behind only Jefferson but for his "full-throated embrace of slavery."

Even so, John F. Kennedy ranked him among the top five senators ever. Had the South listened to Calhoun, the Civil War would have been fought a decade earlier, when the South was stronger. During the next ten years, due to immigration and the development of the West, the North grew stronger while Southern strength lagged. The South had a much better chance of winning in 1850 than it did in 1861, and even then, it was a near-run thing.9

Northerners knew they had the majority and were anxious to force their will on the rest of the country. Mitcham writes:

Webster made his final speech three days after Calhoun. He endorsed Clay's compromise. The anti-slavery Whigs, led by Senator William H. Seward of New York, were disappointed. Seward, meanwhile, became metaphysical. He spoke of obeying a 'higher law' than the Constitution---the kind of argument that could justify anything.10

Seward's "higher law" comment was warned about many times in the secession debate in the South in the year leading up to Southern states seceding. It is a perfect example of why Southerners did not trust Northerners to obey the Constitution, so how can you be in a country with them?

Sounds like woke liberals today who despise our history and the Constitution. Many are from the same blue state area that Seward was in the 1860s.

Seward also had another inflammatory comment that Southerners heard loud and clear in 1858 when he said an "irrepressible conflict" was coming between North and South.

In June 1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was "world class propaganda" in the form of fiction, came out. Tom's "cruel master, Simon Legree, who is a Northerner by birth, tried to break him of his religious faith. When he fails, Legree beats Tom to death out of frustration."11

Soon after, in 1856, pompous Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made an insulting speech about slavery and Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler was related to Rep. Preston Brooks, also of South Carolina.

Brooks, unable to challenge Sumner to a duel because that was something you did with gentlemen, and Sumner was considered a dog, entered the Senate chambers and beat Sumner unconscious with a gutta percha cane while Brooks' friend, Rep. Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina, kept Sumner's friends at bay.

Brooks was the perfect example of the hostilities of North and South. He was hated in the North but adored in the South and his cane, which had shattered into pieces in the attack on Sumner, became valuable as each piece was begged for as a sacred relic.

Brooks was sent a replacement cane on which were the words: Hit Him Again.

I was once commander of the Preston Brooks Camp, SCV, out of Columbia, South Carolina and our excellent newsletter, which I edited and published, was entitled, of course, "Hit Him Again!"

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

Mitcham includes so many fascinating stories in this chapter it is a delight to read, though some are quite sad.

Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852. Mitcham writes:

History often turns on a dime. One such turn occurred on January 6, 1853. The President-elect and his wife were traveling from Boston when their train derailed. It rolled down an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts. Pierce and his wife survived, but their only living child, Benjamin or "Benny," was crushed to death and nearly decapitated. Pierce could not prevent his wife from seeing the body. Afterward, both Pierces suffered from depression, Jane greatly. She wondered if Benny's death was God's punishment for her husband's seeking high office. A cloud came over their marriage and Pierce's incoming administration. His son's death and Jane's constant depression continued to trouble Franklin and materially contributed to the failure of his administration. Pierce was already a heavy drinker; after, he drank even more. It would eventually kill him. Franklin Pierce die of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869. His wife died of depression six years before him.12

The fight over the route of the transcontinental railroad began with Jefferson Davis, Pierce's secretary of war, "ordering two routes surveyed, one north and one south." The Southern route had land and right-of-ways settled but the Northern faced all kind of problems including unorganized territory, Indians and mountains.

Stephen A. Douglas "pressured President Pierce into supporting" the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to organize them as territories with "popular sovereignty" in place with respect to slavery. This repealed the Missouri Compromise, which forbid slavery north of parallel 36o 30' (except for Missouri).

Douglas did this because he needed Southern support for his bill to use the northern route for the transcontinental railroad despite the enormous problems when compared to the Southern route.

In a statement that proves that most anti-slavery in the North was political and not moral or pro-black, Mitcham writes:

Horace Greeley, an abolitionist leader and the editor of the New York Tribune, later commented that the [Kansas-Nebraska] act created more abolitionists in two months than William Lloyd Garrison produced in twenty years." (Bold emphasis added.)

It produced more abolitionists because so much money and political power was involved with having a northern route for the transcontinental railroad going through Chicago that suddenly Northerners, who had not given a damn about slavery before, became abolitionists to get that money and power.

That kind of greed for money was the cause of the War Between the States.

When Southerners left the Union seeking self-government as promised in the Declaration of Independence with "Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...", it meant the South would rise to dominance in North America with control of King Cotton and European trade and military alliances, and that is something Lincoln and the North could not tolerate. It had nothing to do with Northern morality or desire to end slavery but rather with Northern immorality, hypocrisy, and lust for other people's money.

As Lincoln said, it's about Union, the source of Northern wealth and power, and if he could free no slaves, or one slave, or all of them to preserve the Union, he was going to do it.

In 1854, "The American or 'Know Nothing' Party, which was formed out of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant elements, went from zero to fifty-one seats." They allied with "the anti-slavery Opposition Party and a few smaller parties, which held a handful of seats."

The Whig Party collapsed and:

Most of the former Northern Whigs joined the Republicans, which became the first genuinely regional party in the United States. It was a big government, big business party from the beginning. It advanced the ideas of Hamilton, who believed these policies would bring national growth through a powerful centralized government and government intervention through government regulation, subsidies, and high tariff policies, rather than through free-market solutions.13

George Washington warned that sectional parties would destroy the country but abolitionist Republican Wendell Phillips bragged that the Republican Party was sectional: the party of the North pledged against the South.

Of course Washington was right. This was the "tyranny of the majority" that the Founding Fathers warned about. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about it too. Northerners were determined to rule with their majority and pass legislation that robbed the rest of the country and sent money from the South into the North.

The "political winds were shifting, the political chameleons naturally changed with them."

Abraham Lincoln, for example, became less moderate. As an attorney, he had represented a slave owner and argued to have his client's slaves, who had fled to Illinois, returned to him. (He lost the case.). He had been silent on the issue of slavery, he had supported the Black Codes, and he was a big believer in African colonization. In 1854, he was an extraordinarily successful and wealthy corporate attorney, but his political career was at a low point. He demonized the South and said they were likely to expand slavery to the West. This claim was absurd and Lincoln had to know it (there were only eighty-fives slaves in Kansas at its peak), but being the political opportunist that he was, he joined the chorus anyway.14

The national atmosphere was tense and emotional. The "Border War" began. "In May 1856, 700 pro-Southern men descended on Lawrence, Kansas, and pillaged the place. Shortly thereafter, fanatical abolitionist John Brown retaliated by torturing and murdering five Southerners. They were not slave holders and had not taken part in the Lawrence Raid."15

That summer began barn and house burnings, "ambushes, and bushwhacking. At least 200 people were killed." This would continue until 1865.16

In the election of 1856, "The Republican platform called for high tariffs and for slavery to be excluded from the territories. This would keep them from the "troublesome presence of free Negroes," as Lincoln said.17

Mitcham writes that there were no moral considerations at all among Northerners: "The motives were purely to protect the economic and political interests of the North and West at the expense of the South."18 Their strategy was "to spread alarm in the North by proclaiming that 'slave Power' or the 'slaveocracy' intended to gain control of the government."

First, it would (somehow) conquer the territories; then it would spread slavery to the North. It would make every state a slave state. This was absurd, of course, but hysteria can work.19

Dred Scott, a slave who had been taken by his master into Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, sued for his freedom "but on March 6, 1857, [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and his colleagues ruled in favor of the slave owner. Speaking for the majority, Judge Taney declared that because he was black, Scott was not a person under the U.S. Constitution; he was the property of his owner, and property could not be taken from anyone without due process of law."20

Taney also ruled that "the Missouri Compromise's prohibition on slavery was unconstitutional. Congress had no right to exclude slavery from any of the territories".21

Again, Abraham Lincoln remarked "that the South would not embrace slavery today (i.e., 1858) if it were not already economically entrenched there."22

The 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate included the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates, seven of them:

Douglas attacked Lincoln's racist credentials. He accused Lincoln of thinking the black was his equal and hence his brother. Douglas himself pointedly remarked that the African American was not his equal and certainly not his brother.

Lincoln responded that he was not and never had been in favor of the equality of the races. He believed that so long as the two races lived together, there must be one superior race and one inferior race. 'I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race,' he declared.23

Douglas won. He was appointed Illinois senator by the legislature despite Lincoln winning the popular vote. Senators were not elected directly by voters in those days. They were appointed by state legislatures until the Seventeenth Amendment changed all that in 1913.

But "As a result of the election, Lincoln rose to national prominence. Also, slavery became a major issue."24

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.
Part Seven of Ten
(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Five: Chapter VI, Cultural Differences)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 62.

2 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 63-64.

3 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 66.

4 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 68.

5 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 67.

6 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 69.

7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 70.

8 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 70-71.

9 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 71.

10 Ibid.

11 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 73.

12 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 79.

13 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 82.

14 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 83.

15 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 84.

16 Ibid.

17 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 86.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

20 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 87-88.

21 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 88.

22 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 89.

23 Ibid.

24 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 90.

 

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book
Notes-Chapter-VII-105K
Notes-Chapter-VIII-103K