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The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Five, GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE, General Orders, No. 9, Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, CSA, April 10, 1865

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A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Five
General Robert E. Lee
General Orders, No. 9
Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, CSA
April 10, 1865
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.
General Robert E. Lee, actual picture during the war, fall, 1864, on Traveller, Petersburg, VA.
General Robert E. Lee, actual picture during the war, fall, 1864, on Traveller, Petersburg, VA.

Hd. Qrs. Army of N. Va.
General Orders
No. 9

After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.

I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them; but feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.

By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection. With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.

R.E. Lee, Genl.1

 

ROBERT EDWARD LEE TOOK COMMAND of the Confederate army defending Richmond in the spring of 1862 following the wounding of Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Fair Oaks. Almost immediately, Lee changed the name of his command to the Army of Northern Virginia, and, as such, it would win enduring fame as a staunch military organization. Within a few weeks the men of the ANVa, as it was styled in dispatches, formed a personal bond with their commanding officer, a bond more intense than that shared by the soldiers of any other command with their leader.

The confidence of the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia in their general was unbounded. If Lee“Marse Robert” was their affectionate nickname for himsaid “do this,” they did it without question, confident that their well-being and the success of their cause required it.

Lee was a realist and had told the Confederate government many months before that if the struggle became a siege of Petersburg and Richmond, the war would be lost. The South simply did not have the resources to win a protracted fight of that nature. Still, Lee and his men endured, looking for any opening to avoid the seemingly inevitable.

On April 9, 1865, the inevitable became reality. Following a brief exchange of notes, Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant, commander of all U.S. forces, at the house of Wilmer McLean at Appomattox Court House and signed the terms of surrender, which ended the existence of the Army of Northern Virginia. That same night Lee instructed his adjutant, Colonel Charles Marshall, to write an order to the army bidding them farewell. The address written by Marshall reflects the grace and style of writing produced by a classical education as well as the directness expected in a military communication.

On the morning of April 10, the weather was rainy and a constant stream of visitors to Lee's headquarters tent prevented Marshall from concentrating on his task. About ten o'clock, Lee ordered Marshall to get into Lee's personal ambulance so he could work without interruption. When the first draft, in pencil, was finished, it was taken to Lee who struck out an entire paragraph, made one or two other minor changes, and then instructed Marshall to have it copied in ink with copies going to all Corps commanders. These were all signed in person by Lee and then issued to the appropriate officers. During the day many people made their own copies and brought them to Lee and he signed many of them.

The “original” of General Orders, No. 9 was the pencil draft which Lee amended and it was most certainly destroyed when the copies in ink were made. There is no record of the contents of the paragraph Lee edited out of Marshall's first draft but one may assume Lee thought it might encourage continued bitter feeling. President John F. Kennedy admired Lee for that sentiment when he wrote:

[A]s a New Englander, I recognize that the South is still the land of Washington, who made our Nation - of Jefferson, who shaped its direction - and of Robert E. Lee who, after gallant failure, urged those who had followed him in bravery to reunite America in purpose and courage.2

“General Orders, No. 9” became a regular part of the meetings of the United Confederate Veterans, especially those “Bivouacs,” as the local groups were styled, made up of veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia. A hundred years later, at the time of the Civil War Centennial, a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee made a recording of the farewell address. This recording was released at Appomattox on April 10, 1965.

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, the character and reputation of Lee have come under attack. It has been alleged that Lee lost the war for the South because he was too aggressive, losing lives in attacks instead of husbanding his numbers. Such criticism ignores the military realities of the situation. It may sound wise to remain on the defensive until one's opponent makes a mistake and only then attack. But, what if one's opponent does not make a major mistake that would allow for a successful attack? The point to be defended will be lost. Joseph Johnston used the “passive-aggressive” model in the Atlanta Campaign and every reader of the history of the war knows how that ended. Lee had little choice but to aggressively make his openings.

Much has been made of late that Lee owned slaves. That is not true. Lee was made the executor of the will of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington and step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington. Custis was the owner of the Arlington Estate, which he passed to his daughter, Mary Anna, wife of Robert E. Lee. Today, that estate is our nation's most sacred burial ground: Arlington National Cemetery.

As executor,3 Lee was responsible for the settlement of Custis's will, and among Custis's possessions were slaves. The executor is not the owner of Custis's property. Lee, like all responsible executors, carried out the stipulations of the will he was executing. These stipulations included the provision that all the Arlington slaves be set free within five years. Lee did this, completing the process in 1862. Lee had labeled slavery a moral problem in 1856 but he saw no ready solution to the matter. At any rate, being administrator of the will of his father-in-law does not make Lee the “owner” of his father-in-law's slaves.

Lee has also been accused of fostering the rise of the “Myth of the Lost Cause” and is claimed to have begun this process in his farewell address. Although called a myth, there is a great deal of truth in the arguments presented under the name “Lost Cause.”

The “Lost Cause” argues that secession, not slavery, caused the war. This is true. If no Southern state had left the Union, who, in the North, would have called for a war to end slavery? The answer is obvious.

This so-called myth argues that the war was fought over States' Rights, i.e., state sovereignty and supremacy over the Federal Government, which had been created as the agent of the states for certain highly limited purposes of government. This was the belief of the Founding Fathers and it is clearly proclaimed in the secession documents of the Southern States. Most foreigners such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and the British historian, Sir John Dalberg Acton,4 later Lord Acton, agreed. Acton wrote this to Lee a year-and-a-half after Appomattox:

Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison's and Hamilton's papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. . . . Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.5

Not surprisingly, States' Rights had recently been upheld by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case (1857) with respect to slavery.

The point at which Lee is accused specifically of fostering the Lost Cause position is “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” A look at the 1860 census of the United States shows that Lee was right. The population of the nation in that year was 31,443,321. Of this number 22,000,000 (round figures) lived in the states which remained in the Union, 9,000,000 in the states which seceded. Of the 9,000,000 people in the South almost 4,000,000 were slaves. While the African American population gave strength to the Southern economy and war effort through its labor, it was not a major source of manpower for the armies although some free people of color became Confederate soldiers. The 5,000,000 white population was divided in its loyalties and a significant number of white Southerners joined the U.S. forces.

So, in critical manpower, it was over 22,000,000 white Northerners versus less than 5,000,000 white Southerners. Obviously, the South did face overwhelming numbers. This does not detract from the military accomplishments of the U.S. Army but it does show the “Lost Cause Myth” is no myth.

Lee also had a very clear grasp of the infrastructure which supported both armies. The 1860 census shows that 80% of the country's manufacturing and most of the existing railroad mileage were in states that remained in the Union. The United States also had a stable monetary system based on bullion and a well-functioning government that had been in place for over 60 years. It had an army, navy, merchant marine fleet and relationships with most of the governments of the world.

The South had none of that. The South did not expect war when they seceded. They expected to go on peacefully in their new republic that derived its "just powers from the consent of the governed" as the Declaration of Independence established in 1776. When it became obvious that they were not going to be able to leave in peace, they had to start everything from scratch.

In addition to the North's greater than four-to-one advantage in white population, it also had a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world with which to feed Union armies continually. While 25% of the Union army were foreign-born immigrants, James McPherson points out that 30% of military age men in the Union states were foreign-born, thus the 25% in the Union army underrepresented the general foreign-born population in the North.6

This may be true but later in the war, when enlistments were low and a real problem for both sides, lavish financial inducements and bounties brought tens of thousands of foreigners into the Union army. All total, "a half-billion dollars" was spent by the North on bounties, and "the conscription-substitute-bounty system produced three-quarters of a million new men." Many foreigners had come for the express purpose of "joining the army to cash in on bounties or substitute fees."7

The South had no such pipeline of manpower at this critical hour with its money virtually worthless and its harbors bottled up by the Union blockade.

The ability to sustain an extended military effort as well as the population to do so, was heavily weighted toward the North. “Overwhelming numbers and resources” is a solid fact, not a myth.

Lee does not deal with the causes of the conflict directly in his farewell address, but, for him, the overriding issue was that of serving his home, his state. That was made clear in 1861 when, after being offered command of the U.S. Army by President Lincoln, he instead resigned and offered his services to Virginia.

The idea that soldiers on both sides saw themselves fighting to defend their homes is born out by James M. McPherson in For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought In The Civil War. McPherson concludes that slavery was not the issue that caused most men to fight. Protection of home was.8

Lee's farewell address acknowledges the great love Lee's men had for their leader, and it shows the love and respect Lee had for his men. They were ready to continue the war despite the odds.

The address is poignant. It reflects the character of the man who issued it, a man who was strong but humble and who thought “duty” the most sublime word in the English language.

Like President Kennedy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had great respect for Gen. Lee and appreciated his efforts to bind up the nation's wounds after its bloodiest war. On August 9, 1960, Eisenhower answered an angry letter from a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, who had written eight days earlier and questioned why he kept a picture of Gen. Lee in his White House office.

Dr. Scott wrote:

I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.

The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes.9

President Eisenhower wrote:

Dear Dr. Scott:

Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.

General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.

From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation's wounds once the bitter struggle was over, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.

Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.

Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower10

 

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Six

A Critical Look at
General Ulysses S. Grant
Address to the Soldiers of the Armies of the United States, USA
June 2, 1865

 

NOTES:

1 Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), Vol. 4, 154-55.

2 John F. Kennedy, Speech of Senator John F. Kennedy, Raleigh, NC, September 17, 1960, Coliseum Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/speech-senator-john-f-kennedy-raleigh-nc-coliseum, accessed 5/3/2020.

3 According to FindLaw, the world's leader in online legal information for consumers and small businesses, here's what the executor of a will does: "By definition, an executor is entrusted with the large responsibility of making sure a person's last wishes are granted with regard to the disposition of their property and possessions. / When it boils down to essentials, an executor of a will is responsible for making sure that any debts and creditors that the deceased had are paid off, and that any remaining money or property is distributed according to their wishes." See https://estate.findlaw.com/estate-administration/what-does-an-executor-do.html, accessed May 10, 2020.

4 John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (born 1834, died 1902), is perhaps best known for the aphorism "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." See his biography at https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Emerich-Edward-Dalberg-Acton-1st-Baron-Acton, accessed May 3, 2020.

5 John Dalberg Acton to Gen. Robert E. Lee, November 4, 1866, The Acton-Lee Correspondence, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/09/no_author/famed-libertarian-writes-robert-e-lee, accessed May 3, 2020.

6 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 606.

7 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 600-606.

8 McPherson, For Cause & Comrades, 6.

9 Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

10 Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Four: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four of Four, Conclusion

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A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Four
Prologue, Setting the Stage
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part Four of Four,
Conclusion
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part Three)

AS A MATTER OF RECORD, the British bought and sold black people legally until 1807, and New Englanders and New Yorkers bought and sold black people legally until 1808.

New Englanders and New Yorkers then carried on an illegal slave trade until well after the War Between the States.

Here's how the 2005 book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, written by three New England journalists then with the Hartford Courant, described New York's illegal slave trade:

New York City's bustling seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive Africans, the vessels often outfitted with crates of shackles and with the huge water tanks needed for their human cargo. A conservative estimate is that during the illegal trade's peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships---each built to hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves---left lower Manhattan every month.1

W. E. B. Du Bois in his famous book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870, writes that Boston, New York and Portland, Maine were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States:

'The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.'2

The North's addiction to slave trading should come as no surprise. Much of the infrastructure of New England and New York was built with the enormous profits from their slave trading.

Five out of six New England states were vigorous slave trading states. Little Rhode Island was a dynamo and America's transatlantic leader in the eighteenth century

launching nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic. The captains and crews of these ships were often the veteran seamen of America: New Englanders.3

Rhode Island's Reverend Samuel Hopkins admits the slave trade was Newport, Rhode Island's "first wheel of commerce" but it was not just Newport's first wheel of commerce, it was all of New England and New York's first wheel of commerce:

'The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share of this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended.'4

Another famous Rhode Island slave trader, John Brown, whose family founded Brown University, said in a Providence newspaper in 1789:

'there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.'5

Like the drug trade today, the slave trade was lucrative. When you can buy a slave in Africa perhaps a warrior that had himself been on a mission to capture slaves but instead got captured for $50 and sell him for $1,000, that is a huge profit even today, much less back then.6

Harvard professor, Bernard Bailyn, "dean of colonial historians," wrote:

[T]he main factor in New England's phenomenal economic success, 'the key dynamic force,' was slavery.7

Black tribal chieftains in Africa were the starting point of global slavery and the African diaspora. For centuries, slaves were Africa's chief export. They were the unfortunate captives of tribal warfare, gathered up and waiting in around 40 slave forts built by the British and other Europeans up and down the African coast because they needed labor in their colonies.

Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in a New York Times article, "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game," quotes Boston University historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood who estimated "that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders."

Gates gets into specifics:

[T]he sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asanta Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming that they had violated her new Christian precepts.8

Gates writes about the shocking but admirable display by some African leaders today who have begged African Americans to forgive them for selling their ancestors into slavery:

In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americas' forgiveness for the "shameful" and "abominable" role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou's bold example.9

Captives in Africa were held sometimes for months, chained and shackled in pens inside slave forts on Africa's coast, waiting for European, New York and New England slave traders.

They would then be placed into the bowels of scorching hot slave ships that were filled to capacity with Africans on their backs, chained side by side to the decks below, where there was no ventilation, no fresh air.

Poor slaves had to endure the stench of vomit, urine, feces and death cooked together in ovenlike heat for months through the Middle Passage. No description of Hell could be worse than a New England or New York slave ship, or a British or Portuguese or Spanish slave ship before them.

The North, especially New England and New York, with Europeans, own the cruelty and brutality of the slave trade, which was more brutal than slavery itself because slave traders did not have to live with their slaves. All they had to do was deliver them and collect their money.

In the American slave trade, New England and New York own the stench and horror of slavery's Middle Passage.

Academia may be shocked to find out but nobody was disappointed that slavery was over, though it was not yet over for three of the six Union slave states that had slavery months after the war, until the Thirteenth Amendment ended it in December, 1865.

As Lincoln himself said, he didn't know how to end slavery and if he had been born into it as Southerners were, he would do no different than  they.

Southerners would have unquestionably ended slavery in a better way than what happened with almost a million blacks dying from disease and exposure after the War Between the States10 followed by a century of second class citizenship. It was in the South's best interest to end slavery with peace, opportunity and good will for all.

Slavery existed in the South but blacks and whites did not hate each other. They got along better than anywhere in America, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, because the South was a bi-racial nation. There were more free blacks in the South, around 250,000, out of their population of nine million, than there were black people in the entire North out of their population of twenty-two million.

What did Northerners know about blacks except that they had made huge fortunes selling them, and they hated them and didn't want them in the North as job competition or in the West as neighbors.

Literary colossus Charles Dickens, in addition to his many novels and short stories, published a periodical, All the Year Round. He was on top of current events and our American war. Dickens wrote:

Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.11

Jim Crow was born in the North as C. Vann Woodward states in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and he lived in the North a long time before moving South.

All nations ended slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation and we could have too but there was no plan by virtue signaling abolitionists, and, of course, there was no offer from the North to contribute from the treasury to buy the freedom of black slaves in the South who would then come North and be job competition.

Several Northern and Western states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Five

General Robert E. Lee

General Orders, No. 9
Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, CSA

April 10, 1865

NOTES:

1 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

2 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article "The Slave-Trade in New York."

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99-100.

5 John Brown, in United States Chronicle, March 26, 1789, in Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 110.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48.

8 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game," the New York Times, April 22, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html, accessed 5-21-22.

9 Ibid.

10 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).

11 Charles Dickens, letter to W. W. De Cerjat 16 March 1862, in Graham Storey, ed., The Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Vol. Ten, 1862-1864, 53-54.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Three: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three of Four

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A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Three
Prologue, Setting the Stage
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part Three of Four
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part Two)

GREAT BRITAIN was the dominant economic and military power on earth in the 1860s. The cotton gin, short for "cotton engine," had revolutionized cotton production, which had led to an ironclad relationship between the South and Great Britain:

By the eve of the Civil War, Great Britain was largely clothing the Western world, using Southern-grown, slave-picked cotton.1

All Southerners had to do was establish formal trade and military treaties with Great Britain, with whom they already had an "ironclad" relationship because of cotton, and the North would not be able to beat the South in a war.

Lincoln knew all this and was not going to allow the free-trade Confederate States of America to rise to power on his southern border.

He knew that the future of the American nation for at least the next century, maybe forever, was at stake right then.

That's why, with four times the white population of the South, enormous weapon manufacturing capability, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world with which to feed Union armies (25% of the Union army was foreign born), an army, navy and other advantages at that point in history, he sent five hostile military missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861 to start a war.2

Several Northern newspapers such as the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post saw exactly what Lincoln was doing. In an editorial entitled "WHY?" published the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, it wrote:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

The New York Herald eight days earlier wrote:

We have no doubt Mr. Lincoln wants [President Davis] to take the initiative in capturing . . . forts in its waters, for it would give him the opportunity of throwing [to the South] the responsibility of commencing hostilities.3

One gets little debate in Woke academia or the idiot news media on the cause of the war because vigorous debate is impossible. Those institutions are virtually 100% liberal and tow the Woke liberal line so the enraged mob doesn't show up at their office or, God forbid, accuse them of being a racist.

Forty years ago, historian Joe Gray Taylor wanted to examine the causes of the war but quickly concluded that esteemed historian David H. Donald was "correct when he said in 1960 that the causation of the Civil War was dead as a serious subject of historical analysis" and that "A 'Southern' point of view on the secession crisis no longer exists among professional historians."4

Without a "'Southern' point of view on the secession crisis" you can never get to the truth of American history. You can not have a debate with only one side presented. The Bible in Proverbs 18:17 says "The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him."

In the 1960s, academia and the news media went from truth as their standard, to the political advantage of the left as their standard, because, as stated, they are virtually 100% liberal.

Like the political operatives they are, so much of their history is filthy politics, not truth. They want to control the past so they can control the future, like Orwell said:

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.5

To have a debate and get at the truth both sides need to be represented 50/50 so they can challenge each other to the full extend of their intelligence, knowledge and passion and see who has the stronger argument.

Politicized academia and the idiot news media are 100/0 so truth is impossible yet if you don't agree with their Woke history, you are a racist hatemonger who deserves to die and certainly not have a career.

Esteemed historian Eugene Genovese (Roll Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made, et al.) said 30 years ago that to speak positively about the Old South

is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage . . . 6 (Bold emphasis added)

The destruction of century old historic monuments to Southern war dead is also a cultural and political atrocity, and it is immoral.

Those monuments are gifts from the people of the past to the people of the future. Their destruction denies the people of the future the opportunity to gaze on them and read the inscriptions and ponder for themselves what happened in the past.

Much has been written in the past 40 years on the politicization of our history and its unavoidable result, the falsification of our history. Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, confirms that "humanities and social science departments within universities [where History resides] had abandoned objectivity and truth and become hopelessly politicized."7

David Harlan, in his book The Degradation of American History, explains how it began. He says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist. He writes that academia wanted to expose the complicity of white men "in the violence and brutality that now seemed to be the most important truth about American history." They "feel no need to say what is good in American history."8

Keith Windschuttle, in The Killing of History, writes that most young people today are "taught to scorn the traditional values of Western culture - equality, freedom, democracy, human rights - as hollow rhetoric used to mask the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful. This teaching, Bloom argued, had bred a cynical, amoral, self-centered younger generation who lacked any sense of inherited wisdom from the past."

Windschuttle points out that for 2,400 years history has ranked "with philosophy and mathematics as among the most profound and enduring contributions that ancient Greece made, not only to European civilization, but to the human species as a whole." History's "essence" has been to "tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened" but today, in much of academia and the news media, "these assumptions are widely rejected."9

Many in the humanities and social sciences "assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past" because "we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us."

Because of this, supposedly, the entire point of history is no longer valid therefore "there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth" or between "fiction and non-fiction."10

In other words, nothing exists except what Woke political liberals in academia and the idiot news media tell us exists.

Academia's hate is having their desired effect. Dr. Edward M. Gilbreth noted in his Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) column on July 15, 2021 that in the demographic of 18-24 year olds, a recent Issues and Insights poll finds that only "36 percent of them say they are very or extremely proud to be Americans."

In contrast, that same poll finds that "68 percent of adults say they are 'very' or 'extremely' proud to be an American, with another 15 'moderately' proud." The 18-24 demographic was the only one less than 50%.

Dr. Gilbreth concludes that "attempts to describe the country as corrupt, racist, unfair and in need of 'transformation' have not had much impact on the general population" but it has on young people.

Distinguished professor emeritus of History of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Clyde N. Wilson, states:

[D]espite the thirst for history and the centrality of historical thinking in our consciousness, academic historians have never been more irrelevant, incestuous, and unreadable.11

We are living in Orwell's Oceania, where, as James S. Robbins writes in Erasing America, Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past:

Progressives seek to demean and demolish, elevating the victims of the past as an indictment of the present. They wield history as a weapon on behalf of the aggrieved, never gratified by the progress made. Indeed, as one supposed injustice after another is rectified, their attacks become fiercer, their complaints more numerous, . . .12

Somebody needs to tell race-obsessed academia that this is 2022 and not 1922 or 1822. We have had a Civil Rights Movement in America. There is unlimited opportunity for everybody. If you fail in America, it's your own fault.

There is not a single law in the entire country discriminating against non-whites because of skin color, which is why millions break our laws every month to come here.

In fact, there is often discrimination against whites and Asians in such things as college admissions (of course, where else but academia would you find such obvious discrimination).

We don't want academia's identity politics and racist hate like Critical Race Theory, or the news media's fake history like the 1619 Project.

The primary theme of the 1619 Project is that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery. That is a complete fraud, an invention without a shred of evidence. Not a single letter, speech, document, nothing.

Peter W. Wood states in 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:

The 1619 Project aligns with the views of those on the progressive left who hate America and would like to transform it radically into a different kind of nation.13

Wood points out that Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, has stated many times her goal is reparations. He concludes there is "only bitterness and anger" in the 1619 Project, that it "is a bucket lowered into the poisoned well of identity politics."14

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Four

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Four of Four, Conclusion

NOTES:

1 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10. Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin in 1794.

2 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142. Mitcham states that by the first of April, 1861, the following five military expeditions were "in, steaming toward, or about to sail for Southern territorial waters:

1) the Welles-Fox Expedition, heading for Charleston;

2) the Rowan Expedition, also heading for Charleston;

3) Captain Adams' ships, lurking off Santa Rosa Island;

4) Colonel Brown's Expedition, heading for Pensacola;

5) Porter's Expedition, also steaming for Pensacola."

3 Editorial, New York Herald, April 5, 1861, in Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 147.

4 Joe Gray Taylor, "The White South from Secession to Redemption," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, Interpreting Southern History, Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 162-164.

5 George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1950), 32. This was one of the slogans of Big Brother's English Socialist Party of Oceania, INGSOC.

6 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi-xii.

7 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 10.

8 David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv. This paragraph, written by me, comes verbatim from the Introduction to my book, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, Volume One: His Best Work (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017).

9 Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 1-2.

10 Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 2, 7.

11 Clyde Wilson, February 12, 2019 Review of Historical Consciousness or the Remembered Past by John Lukacs (Schocken Books, 1985) in The Abbeville Review, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/historical-consciousness, accessed February 12, 2019. Dr. Wilson taught in the History Department at the University of South Carolina for over 30 years. He is primary editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun and author or editor of over 30 books and over 600 articles, essays and reviews.

12 James S. Robbins, Erasing America, Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2018), 3.

13 Peter W. Wood, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 3.

14 Wood, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, 172.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Two: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Four

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A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Two
Prologue, Setting the Stage
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part Two of Four
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by historian Michael R Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part One)

THAT IS WHY ABRAHAM LINCOLN said over and over and over that the war was being fought for the preservation of the Union, not to end slavery.

Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley August 22, 1862, sixteen months into the war, and again made that clear. The italics are Lincoln's:

. . . My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do thatWhat I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help the Union.1

To Southerners, the Union had become a violent, lawless threat to their safety. Northerners financed John Brown and sent him and his murderers into the peaceful communities of the South to rape, destroy and kill then hailed him as a hero when brought to justice.

The Republican Party printed Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South as a campaign document, which called for the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night. Republicans printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them coast to coast.

George Washington warned that sectional political parties would destroy the country but Wendell Phillips proudly stated that the Republican Party

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.2

Northerners began realizing how critical the Union was to their well being. Editorials like "The Value of the Union" began appearing all over the North. New York City threatened to secede from New York State over its enormous trade with the South.

Horace Greeley acknowledged the right of secession and self-government in a long emotional editorial entitled "The Right of Secession"3 in which he quoted the Declaration of Independence stating "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government."

That was the most widely quoted phrase in the South in the secession debate that took place in the year prior to states seceding.

Greeley went on: "We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood" and

if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.

Greeley says "we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred" and we should "Let Them Go!" but when this sniveling hypocrite realized Southern secession would affect his money, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Northerners were pouring drool like a pack of starving wolves before tearing a lamb to bits to win the election of 1860, control the Federal Government and rule the country with their larger population.4

That is exactly the "tyranny of the majority" the Founding Fathers warned about, but as South Carolina stated:

[W]hen vast sectional interests are to be subserved, involving the appropriation of countless millions of money, it has not been the usual experience of mankind, that words on parchments can arrest power.5

So many of the politicized "historians" in academia and the idiot news media today proclaim that slavery was the cause of the war but one can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

All Northern documents before and up to two years into the war after hundreds of thousands of men had been killed strongly supported slavery.

Six slave states, or 25% of Union states, fought for the North the entire war.6 That, alone, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

If the North was fighting a war to end slavery, they would have first ended it in their own country by passing a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

Instead, they passed the Corwin Amendment, which would have left black people in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed.

Lincoln strongly supported the Corwin Amendment and lobbied the governors to pass it in their states. He said in his first inaugural, "holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." Five Union states ratified the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.7

The Northern War Aims Resolution passed in July, 1861, three months into the war stated:

. . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . . 8 (Bold emphasis added)

Even the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued September 22, 1862, just weeks before the actual Emancipation Proclamation, states in the first paragraph:

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the States, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be, suspended or disturbed. (Bold emphasis added)9

There are legion statements by Abraham Lincoln out there supporting slavery such as this one in his first inaugural made before he stated his support for the Corwin Amendment:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

The proof is overwhelming and conclusive that the North did not go to war to free the slaves.

The North went to war because its economy was dependent on Southern cotton and without it they were headed for economic annihilation.

In 1860, the South was "producing 66 percent of the world's cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than half [over 60% alone] of all U.S. exports."10

The American cotton industry before the war was awesome to behold. The New York Tribune agriculture editor, Solon Robinson, in 1848, wrote about "'acres of cotton bales'" on the docks in New Orleans:

Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water; and as the boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine sticking up out of the centre.11

King Cotton was "the backbone of the American economy" and "the North ruled the kingdom."12 Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams  of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.13

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "'Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.'"14

Without the South, the North was in serious economic trouble. Southerners had made protective tariffs unconstitutional. They had a 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States' Rights nation.

At the same time, economically ignorant Northerners passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 37 to 50% higher. It threatened to reroute the Northern shipping industry into the South overnight because nobody was going to ship into the North and pay a 47 to 60% tariff when they could ship into the South and pay 10%.

The Morrill Tariff meant that Northern ship captains would have a hard time getting cargoes in the North but in the South they would be guaranteed all the cargoes they could handle of cotton and other valuable Southern commodities to transport around the world.

Those same ship captains would then be able to bring cargoes back from around the world and into warm water Southern ports where they would be put on boats in the Mississippi, and on railroads, and shipped to all parts of the Union.

Northerners could have passed a tariff competitive with the South but they didn't.

Because of Northern greed and economic stupidity, the Morrill Tariff threatened to give Southerners a gift of much of the commerce of the entire country.

The Northern manufacturing industry faced obliteration too because over half of its market was its captive market in the South. Independent Southerners would not be buying overpriced goods from people who sent murderers into their country to kill them.

Southerners had for decades wanted free trade with Europe so they could get out from under extortionate Northern prices for inferior goods jacked up by Yankee tariffs and monopolies.

South Carolina almost seceded thirty-three years earlier over the Tariff of Abominations, and should have.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Three

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Three of Four

NOTES:

1 Letter, A. Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) V:388.

2 Wendell Phillips quotation in Albert Taylor Bledsoe Is Davis A Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to The War of 1861? (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866); reprint, (North Charleston, SC: Fletcher and Fletcher Publishing, 1995), 250. Lincoln, whom over 60% of the country voted against, "was the first and only sectional president in American history." See Donald W. Livingston, "The Secession Tradition in America" in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 27.

3 "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

4 Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that if any one state got control of the federal government it would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power and that is exactly what  happened except it wasn't one state but all the close-knit Northern states with their commercial-industrial interests.

5 "Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States," adopted 24 December 1860 by the South Carolina Secession Convention, Charleston, S.C., in John Amasa May and Joan Reynolds Faunt, South Carolina Secedes (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1960), 82-92.

6 The Union slave states were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation exempted all six Union slave states as well as Confederate territory already under Union control.

7 Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment are "Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Illinois." See Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 127.

8 The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John. J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: The Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861 and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed April 19, 2022.

9 The next paragraph of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation expressed another of Lincoln's beliefs, that black people should be shipped back to Africa or into a place they could survive: ". . . the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued." See "Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22,1862" at https://www.archives.gov/

exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/transcript_

preliminary_emancipation.html, accessed 4-12-22.

10 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 37.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Comprehensive Summary, Part One: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part One of Four

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The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.
Prologue
Setting the Stage

To understand the past you have to look at the past the way the people who lived in the past looked at it. It was the present to them just as today is our unfortunate present. So-called historians and journalists judging the past by the goofy standards of today falsify history and feed us political propaganda. They aren't seeking truth. Read the words of the people of the past, study the conditions of their lives and make up your own mind.

by Gene Kizer, Jr.,
Charleston Athenaeum Press

Lieutenant T. J. Cureton of Company B, the Waxhaw Jackson Guards, fought all three days at the Battle of Gettysburg in the famous Twenty-sixth North Carolina Regiment. They were nearly wiped out the first day and survivors were in Pickett's Charge two days later on July 3, 1863.

Cureton describes the charge that third day in a letter after the war stating that Union artillery opened on them "a half mile of the works" but Confederate lines "crossed the lane in splendid order when about two hundred yards from their works the musketry opened on us."1

By the time those North Carolina boys got to within forty yards through booming cannons, smoke and murderous fire with dead and mangled bodies all around "our regiment had been reduced to a skirmish line" but still kept "closing to the colours."2

Through the confusion he heard a cry from Davis's Mississippi Brigade to the left and turned to see it wiped off the face of the earth by artillery fire like "chaff before a 'whirl wind'"3

He sums it up:

[T]he gallant old 26th Regiment had sixty-seven muskets and three officers present on the night July 3 1863 of the eight hundred and fifty carried in the fight July 1st 1863.4

Death 'reigned with universal sway' in the War Between the States.5

In the book This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War, historian Drew Gilpin Faust writes:

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the United States embarked on a new relationship with death, entering into a civil war that proved bloodier than any other conflict in American history, a war that would presage the slaughter of World War I's Western Front and the global carnage of the twentieth century.6

Dead soldiers in the War Between the States

were equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War combined.7

Faust writes that 620,000 died. Those are the long-accepted figures of Union officer William F. Fox who, in the 1890s, counted losses regiment by regiment.8

Fox knew his numbers were low because of incomplete records from the devastated South and other problems with undercounting.

Fox's numbers were updated in 2011 by historian J. David Hacker who analyzed census records for three decades, the decades before, during and after the war, using techniques such as comparing female survival rates with male, to come up with a range of 650,000 to 850,000 deaths. The midpoint, 750,000, has become widely accepted. James McPherson calls that number "plausible."9

That number is more horrifying when one considers that there were only 31.4 million people in the country when the war started.10

Compare the 750,000 dead of the War Between the States with the 419,400 dead of World War II out of a national population of 132,164,569.

Consider the carnage. Faust quotes historian James McPherson:

[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.11

Historian Phil Leigh writes:

At least five percent of the white population of the eleven Confederate states, from which the government drew her soldiers, were killed during the Civil War. If America were to go to war presently and suffer the same death ratio [as the South], the number of killed would total seventeen million. That is more than forty times the number of American deaths during World War II.12

Leigh is making the point that:

Given the magnitude of such losses, nobody with common sense could believe that the prime motive to erect and display memorials to seventeen million dead . . . would be anything other than to honor their memory.13

The War Between the States was not only bloody, it changed our government forever. It is commonly referred to as the central event in American history.

We went from the republic of the Founding Fathers in which states were supreme and sovereign,14 to a consolidated national government that was supreme over the states.

Southerners had wanted their states supreme and sovereign forever: States' Rights. The Preamble to the Confederate Constitution makes that clear:

We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character, in order to form a permanent federal government, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity invoking the favor and guidance of Almighty God do ordain and establish this Constitution for the Confederate States of America. (Bold emphasis added)

But Northerners wanted the federal government supreme. They were the "Federals" in the war.

They wanted to control the country's economy, banking, money, commerce, taxes, tariffs and wealth by controlling the federal government.

Federal legislation giving Northerners monopolies, bounties and subsidies for their businesses that were always paid out of the national treasury had made them rich and powerful. Georgia's declaration of causes for its secession had accurately stated:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all.15

Yet, Southerners were producing the wealth of the country with their agriculture. Southern agricultural commodities "accounted for close to 82% of [the] U.S. export business"16 in a global plantation economy. Cotton alone was over 60% of U.S. exports in 1860.

And Southerners were paying 83% of the country's taxes while 80% of the tax money was being spent in the North.17

To show what was truly at stake in the country just before the war, contrast these Northern and Southern statements within three weeks of each other starting with Georgia Senator Robert Toombs who gives us a perfect analogy - the North as a suction pump sucking money out of the South - via

bounties and protection to every interest and every pursuit in the North, to the extent of at least fifty millions per annum, besides the expenditure of at least sixty millions out of every seventy of the public expenditure among them, thus making the treasury a perpetual fertilizing stream to them and their industry, and a suction-pump to drain away our substance and parch up our lands.18

Here is The Daily Chicago Times in abject panic December 10, 1860, a week before South Carolina's secession convention was to convene:

In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not complete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment. (Bold emphasis added)19

The title of the editorial above is "The Value of the Union," which shows why the Union was the lifeblood of the North. It had given them all their wealth and power. Without it their economy was dead. (to be continued - scroll down for NOTES)

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Two

Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Four

NOTES:

1 Letter from T. J. Cureton to Colonel J. R. Lane, 22 June 1890, Lane Papers, in Archie K. Davis, Boy Colonel of the Confederacy, The Life and Times of Henry King Burgwyn, Jr. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985), Appendix, 351.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid. The Twenty-sixth North Carolina Regiment covered itself in glory at Gettysburg. William F. Fox, in Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, states that it suffered "the severest regimental loss during the war."

5 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xiii. The statement was made by a Confederate soldier.

6 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xi.

7 Ibid.

8 William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (Albany, N.Y.: Joseph McDonough, 1898).

9 Rachel Coker, "Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead," published September 21, 2011, Binghamton University Research News - Insights and Innovations from Binghamton University, http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html, accessed July 7, 2014. See also Bob Zeller, "How Many Died in the American Civil War?", January 6, 2022, https://www.history.com/news/american-civil-war-deaths, accessed 3-8-22; and Jennie Cohen, "Civil War Deadlier Than Previously Thought?", https://www.history.com/news/civil-war-deadlier-than-previously-thought, accessed 3-8-22.

10 The United States Census Bureau on their website lists 31,443,321 as the population of the United States in 1860 according to the "Eighth Census under the Secretary of the Interior." https://www.census.gov/history

/www/through_the_deades/fast_facts/1860_fast_facts.html, accessed 3-7-22.

11 Faust, This Republic of Suffering, xii. She cites James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 3, 177, n. 56.

12 Phil Leigh, "Ketanji Jackson and the Confederate Flag," Civil War Chat,

Ketanji Jackson and the Confederate Flag

accessed 3-22-22.

13 Ibid.

14 The Treaty of Paris at the end of the Revolutionary War stated in Article 1: "His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz: New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATES; that he treats with them as such; and for himself his heirs and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof." (Emphasis used by Christopher Memminger in the "Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union," adopted December 24, 1860 in S.C.'s secession convention, from where this quotation was taken.).

15 Report on the Causes of the Secession of Georgia adopted by the Georgia Secession Convention, Tuesday, 29 January 1861, in the Journal of the Georgia Convention, in The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1900); reprint, Historical Times Inc., 1985, Series IV, Volume 1.

16 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 114.

17 Ibid.

18 Robert Toombs, "Secessionist Speech, Tuesday Evening, November 13" delivered to the Georgia legislature in Milledgeville November 13, 1860, in William W. Freehling and Craig M. Simpson Secession Debated, Georgia's Showdown in 1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 38.

19 Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, Vol II (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1964), 573-574.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, now available in ebook, softcover and hardback

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The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, back cover.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. : In the past few weeks, we have expanded our distribution network to include, not only Amazon, but the Ingram Book Company, the largest wholesale book distributor in the world. We'll be in select bookstores, libraries, universities (they NEED it!) and retail outlets - bricks and mortar, and online - worldwide. We are extremely proud to announce that historian Michael R. Bradley's outstanding new book, The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, is our first title on both Ingram and Amazon and is now also available here on our website as an ebook, softcover and hardback.

When Dr. Bradley first approached me with the idea for The Last Words, I immediately knew it would be an important book in this day and age of nauseating politicized historians and journalists whose idea of historical truth comes from the New York Times and Communist Manifesto.

Dr. Bradley had dug out the seventeen extant farewell addresses of commanders on both sides - eight Confederate and nine Union - so that readers can see and hear in their own minds the actual words of the men who fought the war. They knew exactly what they were fighting for and they said so.

Over the next few weeks, I will publish on the blog the Prologue, Epilogue and Appendices to The Last Words and many of the farewell addresses with Dr. Bradley's analysis.]

From the Introduction to The Last Words by the author:

Never mind that anyone touring a battlefield cannot find a single monument to Union soldiers which boasts that the men fought to end slavery. They all honor the bravery of those who fought and died, and speak of preserving the Union. Perhaps this emphasis on preserving the Union is why historians almost always call the United States forces the “Union Army” despite the fact that this name displaces slavery as the central factor supposedly causing the war.

From the Prologue by Gene Kizer, Jr. :

Dr. Michael R. Bradley has given us the words of some of the most important participants in the War Between the States at a critical point in American history, when the republic of the Founding Fathers died and the federal government became supreme over the states.

Lee had surrendered and the war was nearly over but units were still on battlefields and had not yet broken up. Not all commanders addressed their men. Many just broke up and started home as best they could.

The seventeen extant farewell addresses Bradley has dug out are an excellent representative for all the other soldiers in the war. They tell us exactly what men on both sides were feeling after all that death and destruction, and why they had fought.

The addresses also talk about the future in our reunited country.

As one might imagine there was jubilation on the Northern side at their victory, and deep disappointment on the Southern but not despair. There was a manly, dignified acceptance of the loss, and pride in their victories that were more impressive because Southerners were outnumbered four to one by a well-armed, well-fed, well-clothed invader whose army was 25% foreign born, while they, themselves, were often hungry and ragged.

Southerners were ecstatic to fight for their sacred cause of independence and die for it, and hundreds of thousands had.

Basil Gildersleeve, a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina, states well the feeling in the hearts of the Southerners. He wrote this in his book, The Creed of the Old South, published 27 years after the war:

All that I vouch for is the feeling; . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.

One of the best orations was given by perhaps the greatest soldier of the War Between the States on either side, Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who is often attacked by academia's jealous, politicized historians, but his address, like his deeds and life, is towering and speaks for itself.

One of the sweetest and saddest was from Confederate Major General Robert F. Hoke who writes that the Southern "star has set in blood, but yet in glory."

The address by the white officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Tyler Trowbridge of the United States Colored Troops, from Morris Island in Charleston where they were stationed, is fascinating. Bradley gives us much detail about the USCT. Black units were always commanded by white officers because blacks were not permitted to rise higher than sergeant. Often black troops and officers were looked down on by other Union soldiers. Nathan Bedford Forrest is often accused of atrocities at Fort Pillow but the USCT has a record of the same type atrocities during the attack on Petersburg, Virginia in 1864. Bradley points out that many of the Union's black troops were not volunteers but were rounded up and coerced, or a "loyal" (Union) slaveholder would enlist his slave and receive the enlistment bonus. Trowbridge, himself, was arrested and court-martialed for murder in Newberry, South Carolina but found "not guilty" by a friendly court, which brought a harsh rebuke from Major General Charles Devens who had brought the charges against him. Despite often poor officers, Bradley writes that the USCT "generally" fought well as noted by a Confederate officer paying his enemy a compliment at the Battle of Nashville.

Michael Bradley is a distinguished historian with an impressive educational background including an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. See "About the Author" for a complete biography.

He is from the Tennessee-Alabama state line region near Fayetteville, Tennessee and his love of home and its history are obvious and a pleasure to read. One always writes best on what one loves most and is most fascinated by.

Many of his books are about the War Between the States in Tennessee, or Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men, but he has written on topics ranging from the Revolutionary War to death in the Great Smoky Mountains.

He taught United States History at Motlow College near Tullahoma, Tennessee for thirty-six years.

In 1994 he was awarded the Jefferson Davis Medal in Southern History, and in 2006 he was elected commander of the Tennessee Division, SCV. He was also appointed to Tennessee's Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission.

Michael Bradley has given us biographical information on the seventeen commanders giving the farewell addresses, and exciting narrative history researched in minute detail on each unit and their battles. If you love history, it does not get better than this.

You will thoroughly enjoy this book and learn a great deal about why men on both sides fought in the War Between the States and what they planned to do afterward.

I am very proud to be Michael Bradley's publisher and friend.

Gene Kizer, Jr.
May 10, 2022

Please order The Last Words on www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com and take advantage of SPECIALS that include The Last Words with Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Another Special includes The Last Words, and Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument., AND the two-DVD set on black Confederates, Mixed Up with All the Rebel Horde, Why Black Southerners Fought for the South in the War Between the States, featuring national authority on black Confederate soldiers, esteemed Professor Edward C. Smith.

July 15, 2022 is the release date for Michael R. Bradley’s outstanding new 400 page book, The Last Words, published by Charleston Athenaeum Press.

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The-Last-Words_FRONT-COVER-for-BLOG-650-pix-111K

Charleston Athenaeum Press will resume regular weekly blog posts later this month.

From the Introduction to The Last Words by the author:

"Never mind that anyone touring a battlefield cannot find a single monument to Union soldiers which boasts that the men fought to end slavery. They all honor the bravery of those who fought and died, and speak of preserving the Union. Perhaps this emphasis on preserving the Union is why historians almost always call the United States forces the “Union Army” despite the fact that this name displaces slavery as the central factor supposedly causing the war."

From the Prologue by Gene Kizer, Jr.:

Dr. Michael R. Bradley has given us the words of some of the most important participants in the War Between the States at a critical point in American history, when the republic of the Founding Fathers died and the federal government became supreme over the states.

Lee had surrendered and the war was nearly over but units were still on battlefields and had not yet broken up. Not all commanders addressed their men. Many just broke up and started home as best they could.

The seventeen extant farewell addresses Bradley has dug out are an excellent representative for all the other soldiers in the war. They tell us exactly what men on both sides were feeling after all that death and destruction, and why they had fought.

The addresses also talk about the future in our reunited country.

As one might imagine there was jubilation on the Northern side at their victory, and deep disappointment on the Southern but not despair. There was a manly, dignified acceptance of the loss, and pride in their victories that were more impressive because Southerners were outnumbered four to one by a well-armed, well-fed, well-clothed invader whose army was 25% foreign born, while they, themselves, were often hungry and ragged.

Southerners were ecstatic to fight for their sacred cause of independence and die for it, and hundreds of thousands had.

Basil Gildersleeve, a Confederate soldier from Charleston, South Carolina, states well the feeling in the hearts of the Southerners. He wrote this in his book, The Creed of the Old South, published 27 years after the war:

All that I vouch for is the feeling; . . . there was no lurking suspicion of any moral weakness in our cause. Nothing could be holier than the cause, nothing more imperative than the duty of upholding it. There were those in the South who, when they saw the issue of the war, gave up their faith in God, but not their faith in the cause.1

One of the best orations was given by perhaps the greatest soldier of the War Between the States on either side, Confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who is often attacked by academia's jealous, politicized historians, but his address, like his deeds and life, is towering and speaks for itself.

One of the sweetest and saddest was from Confederate Major General Robert F. Hoke who writes that the Southern "star has set in blood, but yet in glory."

The address by the white officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Tyler Trowbridge of the United States Colored Troops, from Morris Island in Charleston where they were stationed, is fascinating. Bradley gives us much detail about the USCT. Black units were always commanded by white officers because blacks were not permitted to rise higher than sergeant. Often black troops and officers were looked down on by other Union soldiers. Nathan Bedford Forrest is often accused of atrocities at Fort Pillow but the USCT has a record of the same type atrocities during the attack on Petersburg, Virginia in 1864. Bradley points out that many of the Union's black troops were not volunteers but were rounded up and coerced, or a "loyal" (Union) slaveholder would enlist his slave and receive the enlistment bonus. Trowbridge, himself, was arrested and court-martialed for murder in Newberry, South Carolina but found "not guilty" by a friendly court, which brought a harsh rebuke from Major General Charles Devens who had brought the charges against him. Despite often poor officers, Bradley writes that the USCT "generally" fought well as noted by a Confederate officer paying his enemy a compliment at the Battle of Nashville.

Michael Bradley is a distinguished historian with an impressive educational background including an M.A. and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University. See "About the Author" for a complete biography.

He is from the Tennessee-Alabama state line region near Fayetteville, Tennessee and his love of home and its history are obvious and a pleasure to read. One always writes best about what one loves most and is most fascinated by.

Many of his books are about the War Between the States in Tennessee, or Nathan Bedford Forrest and his men, but he has written on topics ranging from the Revolutionary War to death in the Great Smoky Mountains.

He taught United States History at Motlow College near Tullahoma, Tennessee for thirty-six years.

In 1994 he was awarded the Jefferson Davis Medal in Southern History, and in 2006 he was elected commander of the Tennessee Division, SCV. He was also appointed to Tennessee's Civil War Sesquicentennial Commission.

Michael Bradley has given us biographical information on the seventeen commanders giving the farewell addresses, and exciting narrative history researched in minute detail on each unit and their battles. If you love history, it does not get better than this.

You will thoroughly enjoy this book and learn a great deal about why men on both sides fought in the War Between the States and what they planned to do afterward.

I am very proud to be Michael Bradley's publisher and friend.

Gene Kizer, Jr.
May 10, 2022

 

Thank You! You can PURCHASE COPIES from our website soon:

www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com

 

1 Basil L. Gildersleeve, The Creed of the Old South, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1915; reprint: BiblioLife, Penrose Library, University of Denver (no date given), 26-27. Gildersleeve is known as one of the greatest classical scholars of all time.

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Fourteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part Two

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A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
_The_Pro-Slavery_Riot_on_November_7_1837_Death_of_Rev_E_P_Lovejoy--Alton-Illinois-Wikimedia-Commons-59K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Eight. The picture comes from Wikimedia Commons.

ABOLITIONIST ELIJAH P. LOVEJOY WAS KILLED BY A MOB in Lincoln's Illinois twenty-four years before the War Between the States.

He had been a "schoolteacher and minister from Maine" educated "at Colby College and Princeton" who early on was more concerned about "the evils of blasphemy and drinking" than slavery.1 In those years, he was living in St. Louis, Missouri and described himself as: not in favor of immediate emancipation, and not an abolitionist.

That changed in April, 1836 when Lovejoy saw the charred remains of a free black man, Francis McIntosh, "a porter on a ship docked in St. Louis," who had been drinking and killed a policeman after an altercation following a fight between two whites.2

McIntosh had been taken to jail but a mob formed that night and came for him. The sheriff "fled, leaving McIntosh alone and locked in a cell." The mob

broke in, carried McIntosh to a locust tree on the commons, and tied him to the tree with a chain. Rails, planking, and wood shavings were piled around his legs. Some of the wood was wet, chosen so it would not burn too quickly.3

An "elderly black man was given 75 cents to keep the fire burning through the night."4

The next day Minister Lovejoy "went to the scene" and a few days later, on May 5, 1836, the headline of his newspaper, the Observer, was: "Awful Murder and Savage Barbarity." In the article he wrote:

'We stood and gazed for a moment or two upon the blackened and mutilated trunk---for that was all which remained---of McIntosh before us, and as we turned away, in bitterness of heart, we prayed that we might not live.'5

Lovejoy did not question McIntosh's guilt but did not like the mob violence.

A judge whose name was "Luke Lawless," believe it or not, was in charge of an investigation and blamed violent black men and "publications like the Observer." Nobody was charged.6

Lovejoy was converted and "began his campaign, calling for the emancipation of all enslaved people, and despite growing public outrage, he would not stop."7

St. Louis was a "booming frontier town" and Missouri was a slave state, one of six slave states that would later fight for the Union the entire war.

There was much strong Confederate support in Missouri and duel governments; and Missouri was represented in the Confederate Congress, and had a star in the Confederate flag, but did not secede.

Lincoln and the North were glad to have six slave states fight for them. Three of those Union slave states still had slavery months after the war ended. Those three did not end slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment kicked in, in December, 1865.

The six Union slave states prove the war was not fought over slavery. If it was, the North would have abolished slavery in the Union slave states immediately but they did the opposite. They supported the Corwin Amendment, which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in the places where slavery already existed. Illinois was one of the five Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.

The other Union slave states besides Missouri, were Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state, ironically, within weeks of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The owners of the Observer had asked Lovejoy to stop his antislavery rants but he refused. After several attacks on his home and offices, the owners encouraged him to move "his family and the newspaper across the Mississippi River to Alton, in the free state of Illinois" which he did. He arrived with his family safely but while the Observer's press was on the docks "a small group crossed the river from St. Louis and dumped it into the river."8

A "former sea captain from Massachusetts spearheaded the effort to replace the press."9

There is a bit of farce in a sea captain from Massachusetts helping to replace Lovejoy's abolitionist press at a time when Boston, Massachusetts was one of the largest slave trading ports on the planet along with New York, and Portland in Lovejoy's home state of Maine. All were carrying on a vigorous illegal slave trade and still making huge fortunes as they had when the slave trade was legal.

W.E.B. Du Bois writes in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870:

'The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.'10

The above quotation refers to 1862, which was a year into the War Between the States, and 54 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the United States Constitution.

Subscriptions to the Observer increased and Lovejoy received money from other abolitionists around the country. He was now a full-fledged radical abolitionist:

He sent letters to leading newspapers throughout the United States asking for their positions on slavery, then published their answers with his own critical commentary. He published a passionate letter he had written in the voice of a slave. He attacked Alton's Fourth of July festivities with a bitter editorial that anticipated Frederick Douglass's famous address, 15 years later, "What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?" He editorialized against the slave trade in Washington, D.C., saying that slavery in the nation's capital made every man a slaveholder. He became secretary of a local antislavery group, and he proposed establishing an antislavery society in Illinois. A rumor circulated that from his pulpit one Sunday he had sworn that if his wife died, he would 'marry a black woman before Saturday.'11

What is missing from a virtue-signaling abolitionist like Elijah Lovejoy is a realistic plan to end slavery. Even Lincoln admitted he did not know how to end slavery at that time.

Northern states purported to phaseout slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation but most Northern slaves were sold back into slavery in the South just as they were to be freed, such as before the slave's 21st birthday. This is a disgraceful but absolute fact. Alexis de Tocqueville joked that Northerners did not end slavery. They just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one.

The 1830s was a time of violence against abolitionists who were denounced as "'amalgamationists, dupes, fanatics, foreign agents, and incendiaries,'" according to Leonard L. Richards, "author of a study of antiabolitionist mob action in Jacksonian America."12

William Lloyd Garrison "was dragged through Boston at the end of a rope" in 1835. He luckily was rescued by some individuals and put in jail for the night for his own protection.13

Alton, Illinois was in a financial crisis in 1837 but Lovejoy showed no sympathy for them. He charged them with being speculators and said we have "'become a nation of gamblers.'" Other publications editorialized against Lovejoy.14

On September 5, 1837 Lovejoy wrote to his mother that "'my press has again been mobbed down.'"15

Before dawn on November 7, 1837 "a new press for the Observer arrived on the steamboat Missouri Fulton." It was guarded as "it was hoisted to the top floor of a stone warehouse."16

That night "about 60 volunteers again guarded the warehouse" but things were quiet so most left after a while.17

At 10 p.m. the mob arrived: "'We want that printing press!'"

The mob threw rocks and battered the warehouse door. Many were drunk and firing guns. A man was killed which added to the mob's fury.18

A "makeshift" ladder outside the warehouse allowed James Rock to climb and "set fire to the wooden roof" with flaming pitch. As it burned

Lovejoy and Royal Weller ran from the building and aimed up at Rock, but Dr. Thomas Hope and Dr. Horace Beale, covered by darkness, had perfect sight of the open door, and they shot both.19

Weller survived but "Lovejoy took five bullets, including three in his chest and one in his stomach. He staggered back into the warehouse and fell dead at the feet of his defenders."20

The fire was put out and the press pushed into the street and destroyed.

By the wee hours, the crowd was mostly gone, and at daylight, Lovejoy's dead body was carried home in a wagon that was mocked by bystanders the whole way.

Two days later, at age 34, Lovejoy was "buried in Alton between two oak trees. A cold, heavy rain fell on the small group that gathered for the funeral."21

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Fifteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Three

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Thirteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part One)

 

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 163.

2 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 164.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 165.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article "The Slave-Trade in New York."

11 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 166.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 167.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 168.

20 Ibid.

21 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 169.

 

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

Chap-Eight-NOTES-1-80k
Chap-Eight-NOTES-2-95K
Chap-Eight-NOTES-3-52K

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Thirteen, Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes, Part One

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A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Chap-Eight-MAIN-5-11-22-84K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Eight. The picture comes from page 162.

DESPITE HOW GOOD COMPLICITY IS in proving the North's slave trading and barbarism toward its insurrectionist slaves such as burning them at the stake or tying them to a wagon wheel and beating them to death with crow bars, this book is still written by virtue signaling New Englanders who are determined to establish that the War Between the States was fought over slavery.

It never occurs to those people that their book, Complicity, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

The authors show in great detail that the North was utterly dependent on Southern cotton, "the backbone of the American economy." Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:1

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams  of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.2

But it never occurs to them that without Southern cotton their country was dead. The imminent economic devastation already had Northerners calling for war, which Lincoln was glad to give them in March and April, 1861, when he sent five hostile naval missions to Pensacola, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina to get it started.

Several Northern newspapers such as the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post saw exactly what Lincoln was doing. In an editorial entitled "WHY?" published the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, it wrote:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

Northerners were about to lose their shipping industry because most of it was cotton, and they would lose their manufacturing industry because most of it manufactured for its captive market in the South.

Southerners wanted to buy higher quality goods from Europe at competitive market prices and not be forced to buy overpriced Northern goods from Northern monopolies with prices jacked up by Yankee tariffs.

So, Complicity's Chapter Eight opening statement that "The start of the Civil War as a political war over slavery..." is as false as their previous statement that America was founded in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620.

I am proud to say that America was founded at Jamestown, Virginia in the South in 1607, thirteen years before the Puritans finally got around to coming here.

Complicity gets back on track stating that immediate abolition of slavery like William Lloyd Garrison wanted "would mean social and economic chaos."3

In 1831

the only kind of abolitionism that had popular support was that promoted by the American Colonization Society, which had chapters in the North and the South. The society's goal was to send freed blacks to Africa. Few white people in America, no matter how strongly they felt about slavery, thought that blacks and whites could or should ever coexist in the same society.4

Abraham Lincoln supported the American Colonization Society and believed all his life that blacks should be sent back to Africa or into a climate they could survive. See Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); and Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln's White Dream by Lerone Bennett, Jr. (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000).

This chapter's "Hated Heroes" are radical abolitionists such as Prudence Crandall, Elijah Lovejoy, and John Brown, though John Brown is a murderer who did more than anybody else to cause a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed.

One of the major reasons for Southern secession was the North's support of Brown's violence and plans for wide-scale murder in the South. Their celebrating him as a hero convinced Southerners they would not be safe in a Union dominated by supporters of John Brown.

Nor would they be safe in a Union controlled by the Republican Party. The Republican Party printed hundreds of thousands of Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis, which called for the throats of Southerners to be slit in the night. It distributed them coast to coast as a campaign document in the election of 1860.

Prudence Crandall in 1831 was a twenty-eight year old Quaker who "opened a school in Canterbury, Connecticut, to which she would soon welcome black girls and, by doing so, invite its destruction."5

Crandall's school started all white but a young black woman, Sarah Harris, asked to be admitted and after soul searching, Crandall admitted her.

Whites started leaving Crandall's school so she threw out the remaining whites and advertised in Garrison's Liberator that "her school would reopen 'for the reception of young ladies and little misses of color.'"6

Most in Canterbury opposed Crandall:

Andrew Harris, a doctor who lived nearby, refused to treat her black students. A week after the Liberator ad appeared, gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Judson, also a close neighbor and, like Harris, a former trustee of Crandall's school, spoke at a hastily called town meeting. No school for 'nigger girls' would ever stand across the street from his house, he reportedly vowed, promising that if black students did show up he would use a colonial law to have them arrested as paupers.7

Two abolitionists wanted to speak but were shouted down and "confronted with 'fists doubled in their faces' and driven from the church where the meeting was held."8

In the next year there were attempts to "crush the school" that went from "town meetings to court trials to the appeals court" and

Crandall and her students increasingly became targets of community anger. Local merchants would not do business with the school, and the stage driver refused to transport its students. Boys threw manure into the school's well; neighbors refused requests for pails of fresh water. Rotten eggs and rocks were thrown at the school building---Crandall kept one of the rocks on her mantel---and its students were followed through the streets, hooted at and harassed.9

There was hostility to black education across the North.

The Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire opened in March 1835 and by the summer a "demolition crew hitched a long train of oxen to the academy and dragged it off its foundation" reportedly with students still inside.10

In New Haven, Connecticut in September 1831, residents "voted 700-4 against allowing a school for young black men to open near Yale." Their rationale was:

'What benefit can it be to a waiter or coachman to read Horace, or be a profound mathematician?'11

In May 1833 "The Connecticut legislature passed the 'Black Law,' making it illegal for out-of-state students of color to attend a school without local permission."12

Legislators

called in a Hartford phrenologist, an expert in the then-credible "science" of determining character from the shape of a person's skull. The phrenologist testified that Negroes could not be educated beyond a certain level and could never be fit citizens. Although the committee report that backed the law decried the 'horrid traffic' in human slavery and admitted a need to help 'the unhappy class of beings, whose race has been degraded by unjust bondage,' it concluded: 'We are under no obligations, moral or political, to incur the incalculable evils of bringing into our own state colored immigrants from abroad.'13

Canterbury's "citizens rang church bells, fired guns, and lit bonfires to celebrate the new law" then a month later "on June 27, 1833, authorities arrested Crandall and her younger sister Almira, who had joined her as a teacher, for breaking the law."14

Almira was let out as a minor and Crandall was offered bail by numerous supporters but she would not accept it and dared them to put her in jail.

She only spent one night because "Respectable white women did not go to jail." Townspeople

complained bitterly that abolitionists spread the lie that Crandall had been placed in the cell that a notorious wife strangler had recently occupied. Later, Crandall explained that she'd been put in a room that the condemned man had stopped in on his way to being hanged.15

She said the jailer had been "'very polite.'"

There were two more court actions. In the first, there was a hung jury.

In the second, Crandall was found guilty, but appealed.

Prominent citizens were part of the trial on both sides and it ended up being an important case because it was decided that blacks could not be citizens. It was quoted later as a precedent in the Dred Scott case.

There was much rhetoric in the appeal in July 1834. The law was called "'obnoxious'" by Crandall's lawyer, William W. Ellsworth, because, supposedly, only Southern states had laws like it: "'It rivets the chains of grinding bondage and makes our State an ally in the unholy cause of slavery itself.'"

The hypocrisy of New Englanders even in this time period is breathtaking. Apparently Ellsworth did not know that Connecticut and the rest of New England were enthusiastic slave traders who had, until recently, been sending their ships to Africa to return with poor Africans chained to their decks in vomit and feces to make the money that built New England and the North.

And after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808, New Englanders carried on a vigorous illegal slave trade, so much so that W.E.B. Du Bois said Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.

Also Ellsworth, on his hypocritical high horse, apparently hadn't heard about the Northern and Western states that had "obnoxious" laws forbidding blacks from even visiting much less living there.

Ellsworth's opposing attorney, chief prosecutor Andrew Judson said:

'The consequences will inevitably destroy the government itself, and this American nation---this nation of white men---may be taken from us and given to the African race!'16

The Appeals Court dismissed the case on technicalities.

Crandall "held on to her school" during the trials. After she lost she said:

'It is my opinion that the colored scholars under my care made as good, if not better progress than the same number of whites taken from the same position in life.'17

Crandall had a lot of courage and determination but:

On the night of September 9, 1834, Crandall, her husband, and some of her students were inside the Canterbury schoolhouse when they heard loud voices outside and then banging on the doors. Glass was shattered and windows were ripped from their frames. Men invaded the first floor of the school and started overturning furniture.18

The attackers "may have tried to set the building on fire."

Crandall gave up and moved west "following in the path of her father, who, threatened for supporting her and her school, had already moved west."

She settled in Elk Falls, Kansas, and died in 1890.19

 

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

COMPLICITY

How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery

by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant

Part Fourteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part Two

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Twelve, Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

2 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 155.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 157.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 158.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 159.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 160.

16 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 161.

17 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 163.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

Complicity,
Actual Citation from Book

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Chap-Eight-NOTES-2-95K
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Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Twelve, Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad

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A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Twelve
Chapter Seven: The Other Underground Railroad
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
5-5-22-Blog-Pict-125K

At the end of this article beneath the notes I have cited is "Actual Citation from Book," Complicity's notes from Chapter Seven. The picture come from page 138.

NORTHERN KIDNAPPING GANGS were "organized gangs who, like outlaws from the Old West, became legends in their own time."1 Their prey were free blacks in the North whom they would kidnap in various ways and sell into slavery in slave states.

One of the most notorious gangs was led by a woman, Patty Cannon, "said to be so strong she could jerk a 300-pound sack of grain to her shoulders, or a grown man off his feet." Her chief accomplice was her son-in-law identified as "'the celebrated Joseph Johnson, negro trader.'"2

They operated "from the Delmarva Peninsula of Maryland and Delaware, both [Union] slaves states, to free Pennsylvania where the Philadelphia waterfront was one of their favorite hunting grounds."3

Kidnappers, like slave ship captains, murdered their victims when they thought they needed to. In April, 1829, "the skeletons of one adult and three children were discovered on a farm that Patty Cannon had occupied. One of the children, thought to be about seven years old, had a crushed skull."4 Cannon had clubbed "the child to death in an effort to get rid of incriminating evidence" according to the testimony of a former gang member.5

In New York, in 1835, kidnappings "led to the creation of the first important black self-defense association." It was led by David Ruggles who later provided "the most famous fugitive slave in American history, Frederick Douglass" shelter.6

The Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850, "gave new federal protections to slave catchers and, by extension, better cover to kidnappers posing as slave catchers." As a result, many free blacks in the North left for Canada.

Another gang, the vigilante "'Gap Gang'" in Lancaster, Pennsylvania "terrorized free blacks for years" and participated in an 1851 gun battle known as the Christiana Riot that left a slave owner and three blacks dead.7

The opposition to the Gap Gang was led by William Parker, an escaped slave, who had lived in Pennsylvania for a decade and "had begun to fight back against the Gap Gang." In his memoir, he wrote:

Kidnapping was so common . . . that we were kept in constant fear. We would hear of slaveholders or kidnappers every two or three weeks; sometimes a party of white men would break into a house and take a man away, no one knew where; again a whole family might be carried off. There was no power to protect them, nor prevent it.8

Parker thought most whites in the area were "'negro-haters' who didn't much care who the Gap Gang seized."9

In Cincinnati in January 1856:

[A] Kentucky slave owner and federal agents cornered a group of fugitives, including a mother named Margaret Garner who had vowed never to let her children return to slavery. As the agents broke into their hiding place, Garner cut her young daughter's throat and was trying to kill two of her boys.10

A "federal magistrate ruled that Garner and her surviving children should be returned to their owner" who sold them South. Tragically:

On the journey, literally down the river into slavery, Garner's youngest child died along with two dozen other people in a boat accident. Garner eventually was sold in New Orleans.11

More common methods of kidnapping were to lure victims "under the guise of law. Kidnappers might accuse their victims of petty crimes or enlist accomplices to testify, falsely, that they were escaped slaves." Blacks "accused of being runaways had almost no legal recourse."12

Blacks in Philadelphia in 1799:

felt sufficiently threatened by kidnappings that they submitted a petition to Congress equating them with the African slave trade. Callous men, it said, 'are employed in kidnappings those of our Brethren that are free' and 'these poor, helpless victims like droves of cattle are seized, fettered and hurried into places provided for this horrid traffic, such as dark cellars and garrets, as is notorious at Northurst, Chester-town, Eastown and divers other places.13

Patty Cannon, mentioned earlier, "became locally famous as 'the fascinating hostess' at the tavern owned by her daughter's second husband, Joe Johnson." A Cannon biographer wrote that "'Patty Cannon was fond of music, dancing and sensual pleasures'" and was "'As strong as a man, she was witty, black-eyed and the reputed brains and accomplice of a notorious kidnapping ring.'"14

Her husband, Jesse Cannon, "was rumored to have been sentenced to have his ears nailed to a pillory, and upon release to have his earlobes cut off."15

In 1826, Joseph Watson, mayor of Philadelphia:

received letters from two plantation owners in Rocky Springs, Mississippi. A man named Ebenezer Johnson had shown up there weeks earlier trying to sell several youths. One of the plantation owners, John Hamilton, told the mayor he'd become suspicious of Johnson after sixteen-year-old Samuel Scomp secretly told him he'd been kidnapped from Philadelphia. As proof, Scomp removed his shirt to show Hamilton the scars from beatings he said he'd suffered on his journey south.16

Hamilton got a magistrate "who demanded to see Johnson's ownership papers" which consisted of a bill of sale from his brother Joe. Both Johnsons were part of the Cannon gang.17

The Mississippians, "more suspicious than ever"

let Ebenezer leave, supposedly to get better proof of ownership. But Hamilton kept the young slaves and, while Johnson was gone, he and a neighbor questioned them more closely. They took a sworn statement from Scomp and included it in their letter to Mayor Watson, urging him to publish the details and start an investigation. Watson did both, and later took his own deposition from Scomp.18

Scomp said he was never a slave but an apprentice in New Jersey who ran away to Philadelphia to find work.

A "mulatto man" named Smith offered him a quarter to "help unload watermelons."

Scomp was led to a sloop where two other men tied his hands. One said Scomp was an escaped slave. The other was Joseph Johnson, a member of the Cannon gang and Smith's accomplice in this scheme.19

Smith brought in four more captives that day, and that night, the sloop sailed. A woman was added and the now-six captives ended up at Patty Cannon's house then on another ship for Alabama then headed 600 miles to Mississippi.

Along the way a small boy died from frostbite and beatings.

Hamilton could easily have kept all the captives but he was a wealthy planter who "disapproved of illegal slave dealings."

Mayor Watson, in Philadelphia, "obtained indictments against the Johnson brothers and two accomplices" but back in Mississippi, Ebenezer Johnson sued Hamilton for the return of his supposed property.

Ultimately, Scomp and "another of the originally kidnapped boys" got back to Philadelphia.

In December, 1826, Mayor Watson "received another letter from Mississippi, this one from Natchez, sent by former governor David Holmes and a friend. It said new slaves in the neighborhood were claiming to have been kidnapped from Philadelphia by Joseph and Ebenezer Johnson. Enclosed was a statement from  one of the victims, a boy named Peter Hook."20

Hook's story mirrored Scomp's.

Hook said "he was born in Philadelphia and in June 1825 had been lured aboard Joe Johnson's boat by a black man. He'd soon found himself chained in the hold with four other boys" and later "they were chained to the floor of an attic." Two girls were captives "elsewhere in the attic."

They were in the attic for six months.

Hook said he was sold in the Natchez area with three other boys "for $450 apiece."

Watson "got more arrest warrants" but by 1828, "only 10 of the three dozen kidnap victims eventually identified had been returned."21

The black man who had lured Scomp and Hook onto Johnson's boat was John Purnell. He was convicted of "two counts of kidnapping," fined $4,000 and "sentenced to 42 years in jail." Another black man died waiting on his trial.

The Johnson brothers escaped with their kidnapping loot to start their own plantations.

Patty Cannon stayed in the area but the skeletons of some of her victims were discovered on her former farm.

She was indicted with Joe and Ebenezer but only Patty was jailed. She died "amid rumors that she'd poisoned herself." One account said she had admitted to "killing 11 people with her own hands, and to poisoning her husband."

In 1841, in a book The Narrative and Confessions of Lucretia P. Cannon, the "first murder was of an infant girl killed in April 1822. In its formal language, the indictment noted, 'Patty Cannon with both her hands about the neck of the said infant . . . did choke and strangle, of which said choking and strangling the said female child . . . then and there instantly died.'"22

Cannon "was buried in a pauper's grave," her body exhumed later and "her skull studied by phrenologists." Her skull was later "passed on to the public library in Dover, Delaware."23

Other kidnapping gangs continued to operate such as George V. Alberti's that was "more cunning."

Alberti was eventually convicted of fraud because he tried to deliver a victim "to an apparently honest slave owner" who said the victim was not who Alberti said he was.

That didn't end his career but later he was convicted in another case and the judge said at his sentencing:

'Think for a moment how great the magnitude of stealing an infant, born in a free state, and binding it in the galling chains of slavery for a little money . . .  This case is without parallel in atrocity, and is the most aggravated, legally, of any of its kind that has been presented to an American court of justice.'24

He was fined $1,000 and sentence to ten years hard labor but later the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania, William Bigler, pardoned him.

Alberti "said that he'd captured more than 100 blacks" in his kidnapping career.

 

Next Week:
A Comprehensive Review of
COMPLICITY
How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery
by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank
of The Hartford Courant
Part Thirteen
Chapter Eight: Hated Heroes
Part One

 

(Click Here to go to last week's blog article:

Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of The Hartford Courant - A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eleven, Chapter Six: New York's Slave Pirates, Part Two)

NOTES:
(Scroll down for:
Complicity, Actual Citation from Book)

1 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 139.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 139-140.

6 Ibid.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 141-142.

8 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 142.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Ibid.

12 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 142-43.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 143.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 145.

15 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 146.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 147.

19 Ibid.

20 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 148.

21 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 149.

22 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 151.

23 Ibid.

24 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 152.

 

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