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 One, Foreword, Preface

Posted on February 16, 2022February 16, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 4 Comments

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 One
Foreword, Preface

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

IT IS HARD TO BELIEVE this 2005 book was written by journalists in this day and age when so many of them are politicized race-obsessed frauds, but it was; and regardless of its shortcomings, it is a good book and tribute to The Hartford Courant and the authors.

Complicity,¹ when it first came out, was ignored by the New York Times, which prefers pretend history like the 1619 Project with its primary theme that the American Revolution was fought because the Brits were about to abolish slavery. There is not a shred of evidence of that, not a letter, article, speech or statement by anybody. Nothing. But, then, truth and honor are not the standards of the New York Times.

The inside front cover of Complicity states:

Slavery in the South has been documented in volumes ranging from exhaustive histories to bestselling novels. But the North's profit from---indeed, dependence on---slavery has mostly been a shameful and well-kept secret . . . until now. In this starting and superbly researched new book, three veteran New England journalists demythologize the region of America known for tolerance and liberation, revealing a place where thousands of people were held in bondage and slavery was both an economic dynamo and a necessary way of life.

One reason for Complicity's veracity is its extensive use of primary sources rather than the politicized drivel that comes out of most of academia and the news media these days.

Complicity shows how the North's Triangle Trade of "molasses, rum, and slaves" which was run "in some cases by abolitionists" produced great wealth for New England and especially Connecticut.

Northerners brought all the slaves here after buying them from other blacks in Africa such as at Bunce Island off the coast of modern Sierra Leone. Slaves were a commodity, a way for Northerners and the British before them to make money, and they did. It is clear from Complicity that much of the infrastructure of the Old North was built on profits from the slave trade.

Northerners were slave traders well after it was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808. W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his famous work, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, that Boston, Portland and New York were the slave trading capitals of the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States.²

That's one reason New York City, when the South began seceding, threatened to secede from both New York state and the United States. NYC loved its trade with the South. Shipping cotton was much of that trade as well as financing the Northern slave trade and Southern agriculture.

Northerners traded in slaves until Brazil, the last major slave country on earth, outlawed slavery, around 1887.

The book, Complicity, started as a special report to The Hartford Courant which was so good "the Connecticut Department of Education sent [it] to every middle school and high school in the state" and it became required reading in many colleges.

Complicity should be required reading in every state in the union but instead we get the utterly false 1619 Project, which is pushed hard by the NY Times, the Pulitzer Center and other leftists for whom truth is whatever gives the Democrat Party more power.

The Foreword is written by Harvard professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham ³ who writes that "the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the first of the American colonies to give legal recognition to the institution of slavery." Their recognition preceded Virginia's.⁴

She points out the irony:

[C]lergy-led Boston, this seventeenth-century 'city on a hill,' would soon become a bustling port for the trade in human flesh. Religion proved no match for profits. In Rhode Island, in the Narragansett Bay area, large landholdings used sizable numbers of slaves to provision the mono-crop plantations in the Caribbean with foodstuffs. Such cities as Boston, Salem, Providence, and New London, bustled with activity; outgoing ships were loaded with rum, fish, and dairy products, as slaves, along with molasses and sugar, were unloaded from incoming ships. Up until the American War for Independence, the slave trade was a profitable element of the New England economy.⁵

Massachusetts "never formally abolished slavery, but rather left it to acts of private manumission . . .".

Private manumission was also how slavery was dying out in the South and would have ended completely without Lincoln's war that killed a million people and maimed another million.

Higginbotham brings out some good points of history but still virtue-signals with regard to the North and its slave traders and business people who got filthy rich because of slavery. They made huge amounts of money manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. Cotton alone, in 1860, was 60% of U.S. exports. Add to that the other Southern commodities, which all total, were producing the wealth of the United States.

Higginbotham celebrates the anti-slavery societies in the North but does not mention that the South had those too, many more than in the North, until violent abolitionists supporting murderers like John Brown caused the South to close ranks for its safety.

She does point out Northern racism and admits blacks were not welcome in the North. Northerners wanted blacks to leave the North just as Abraham Lincoln wanted blacks to leave the entire country. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement, by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, copyright 2011, first printing 2018).

Higginbotham does not point out that racist Northerners didn't want slavery in the West because they didn't want blacks anywhere near them in the West. This was Lincoln's position too. He made it clear in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that the West was to be reserved for white people from all over the planet. No blacks allowed.

Higginbotham does not seem to realize that abolitionists were hated in the North for much of the antebellum period. Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was murdered in 1837 at age 34 in Lincoln's Illinois. Only around 3% of the Northern electorate were abolitionists.

None of these virtue-signaling abolitionists had a plan for emancipation that would work such as the Northern states, themselves, had used to end slavery. The Northern states ended slavery like every other nation on earth (except Haiti), with gradual, compensated emancipation.

The reason Northerners didn't suggest a plan that could work is because anti-slavery in the North was political, especially during the elections of 1856 and 1860. It was not a movement for the benefit of the black man. It is better described as "anti-South" rather than anti-slavery. It was political agitation against the South for the purpose of rounding up Northern votes so the North could take over the Federal Government and rule the country.

They wanted to continue with their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and high tariffs that took money out of the South and deposited it into Northern pockets. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes but 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

Despite plans for compensated emancipation in place in some Northern states, six slave state still fought for the North in the War Between the States. West Virginia came into the Union as a slave state during the war, ironically, just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation specifically exempted the Union slave states.

Three Northern slave states still had slavery months after the war ended. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment (remember, the first Thirteenth Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever where slavery already existed -- it was supported strongly by Abraham Lincoln and ratified by five Northern states including Lincoln's Illinois before the war made it moot).

The special report "Complicity," that led to the book, came about after The Hartford Courant published a story: "Aetna 'Regrets' Insuring Slaves".

The Courant's journalists started wondering if the Courant, itself, had been complicit in slavery and they found out it had, that it had published ads for the sale of slaves and the capture of runaway slaves.

They wanted to find a slave whom Aetna had insured and write about his or her life.

What they discovered shocked them to their cores. They thought slavery was a Southern evil, that Northerners were the good guys in the war because they had the Underground Railroad and Harriet Beecher Stowe. But now:

[I]t was becoming clear that Connecticut's role in slavery was not only huge, it was key to the success of the entire institution. . . . We were now looking at nothing less than an altered reality.⁶

The more they looked for their ties to slavery, the more "unshakable" was the proof they found:

It became obvious that our economic links to slavery were deeply entwined with our religious, political, and educational institutions. Slavery was part of the social contract in Connecticut. It was in the air we breathed.⁷

They found out there were 5,000 African slaves in Connecticut in 1775 and "in 1790 most prosperous merchants in Connecticut owned at least one slave." So did half of the ministers.⁸

The special report, "Complicity," had gotten enormous interest. The authors received a proposition from a literary agent to "broaden their thesis" and include the entire North and not just Connecticut.

A year-and-a-half later the completed book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, came out.

The preface ends with this:

What was true of Connecticut turned out to be overwhelmingly true of the entire North. Most of what you'll read here was gleaned from older, often out-of-print texts, and from period newspapers, largely in Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts.
We are journalists, not scholars, and want to share what surprised, and even shocked, the three of us. We have all grown up, attended schools, and worked in Northern states, from Maine to Maryland. We thought we knew our home. We thought we knew our country.
We were wrong.⁹

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 Two

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

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

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), 178-80.

³ The inside back cover of Complicity states that Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is co-editor with Henry Louis Gates Jr., of African American Lives.

⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, from the Foreword by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, xii.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xviii.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xix.

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery, by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Posted on February 9, 2022February 13, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 10 Comments

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

ACADEMIA'S ABSOLUTE PROOF that the War Between the States was fought over slavery is based primarily on the declarations of causes for the secession of four of the first seven Southern states to secede: South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Texas.

However, those four declarations prove nothing of the sort.

There were 13 Southern states represented in the Confederate government. That 13 included Missouri and Kentucky, which were divided states that did not actually secede. They remained Union slave states - two of six Union slave states - the entire war (WHAT! UNION SLAVE STATES! I thought the war was fought over slavery with the Union fighting to end slavery! Man, they should have started with their own country).

In fact, three of the six Union slave states - New Jersey, Kentucky and Delaware - had slavery several months after the war. It took the second 13th Amendment in December 1865 for slavery to end in those three Union slave states.

Remember, the first 13th Amendment was the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, in places where slavery already existed. It was passed by the Northern Congress, ratified by several states and strongly supported by Abraham Lincoln before the war made it moot.

The Corwin Amendment was the true feeling of the North on the slavery issue though it is only one small piece of the irrefutable evidence that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

Back to the six Union slave states: The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately exempted them as well as slaves in already captured Confederate territory. That prompted Lincoln's secretary of state, William H. Seward, to state "We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free."

It also gave Charles Dickens a good laugh at Lincoln's phoneyness and hypocrisy, especially since all of Lincoln's life he favored sending blacks back to Africa or into a place they could survive. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

All 13 states represented in the Confederate government produced a legal document such as an ordinance of secession that withdrew the state from the Union. Tennessee's was called a Declaration of Independence.

Most of the ordinances of secession were straight-forward documents referring to a state's ratification of the Constitution then withdrawing the state from it, as well as proclaiming its sovereignty, etc. Alabama and Arkansas did go a little beyond pure legalese in discussing some issues but nothing like a declaration of causes.

Only four of the 13 Confederate states issued declarations of causes. Nine did not.

Those four declarations are the basis for the entire argument against the South because politicized academia and the ignorant news media simply ignore substantial evidence they don't agree with.

They ignore the six Union slave states, the Corwin Amendment, the War Aims Resolution (war is being waged for Union, not to end slavery), Lincoln's very clear statements that the war is about preserving the Union, and a ton of conclusive evidence that slavery was not the cause of the North's invasion of the South.

The North was interested in its economic dominance and wealth, not ending slavery, and Northerners sure did not want a bunch of desperate freed slaves to come North and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws forbidding free blacks from living there or even visiting for long including Lincoln's Illinois.

Anti-slavery in the North in 1856 and 1860 was political, to rally votes so Northerners could control the federal government and continue their bounties, subsidies and monopolies for Northern businesses, and their high tariffs like the Morrill Tariff. Remember, they were the "Federals" in the war because they wanted to establish the supremacy of the federal government over the states, which they would then control with their larger population.

Northern anti-slavery should be labeled, more accurately, "anti-South" - political agitation against the South - not anti-slavery. It was not a moral movement for the benefit of the black man.

Even the slavery in the West issue was based, not on concern for blacks, but the opposite: Northern racism. They didn't want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks near them in the West.

It all started with the Wilmot Proviso. U.S. Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania on Augusut 8, 1846 introduced a proviso prohibiting slavery in the territory won from Mexico after the Mexican War. Wilmot admitted his racist motivation was to keep blacks out of the West. He said, among other things: "The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. Let us keep what remains for ourselves . . . for free white labor."¹

Lincoln said the exact same thing in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, that the West was to be reserved for free white labor from all over the world. No blacks allowed.

The four declarations of causes are statements as to why states seceded, what their grievances were, and such. They are not declarations of war. Southerners expected to live in peace. After all, Yankees threatened to secede five times before Southerners finally did.

Nobody questioned the right of secession, not even Horace Greeley during the time that South Carolina was seceding in December, 1860. Greeley strongly supported the right of secession ("let the erring sisters go") until he realized it would affect his money then he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Wars are always fought over money and power, never because one country does not like the domestic institutions in another. Would you send your precious sons off to die to free servants in another country? Hell no.

Lincoln sent his hostile naval forces to Charleston and Pensacola to start the War Between the States in April, 1861 because a free trade South with European military alliances and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet - cotton - would quickly rise to dominance in North America. The North would not be able to beat the South in a war in such a situation.

That's why Lincoln wanted to use his enormous advantages at that point in history, and fight.

He wanted to establish the North as the dominant cultural and economic region of our great country, and he did. It's been that way for over 150 years though many of the big cities of the North and West today are on a death spiral thanks to woke liberal policies that encourage violent crime and discriminate against the law-biding. Recent mass thefts in San Francisco, New York and other bastions of liberal wokeness by mobs of violent criminals have forced businesses to board up and leave rather than serve the public. That is a clear sign of a sick, decaying culture.

The four declarations of causes all mention several reasons for seceding. All mention the many constitutional violations of the North. The North was untrustworthy.

All mention Northern terrorism against the South such as John Brown who wanted to murder Southern men, women and children with a bloody slave insurrection like they had in Haiti. Brown was funded by the "Secret Committee of Six" out of Massachusetts. They gave him $679,000 in 2017 dollars. Seven of Brown's raiders who escaped Harper's Ferry were protected by Iowa and Ohio whose Republican governors would not extradite them to Virginia to stand trial as the Constitution required. Brown was celebrated and glorified in the North for wanting to murder Southerners.

Of course, this shocked the South and caused it to realize that Northerners were already at war with them, so they debated the issue and voted to secede.²

The most widely quote phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding comes from the Declaration of Independence:

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

South Carolina's Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union, adopted December 24, 1860, is a fascinating constitutional and early American history lesson. It proves South Carolina's sovereignty and the sovereignty of all the states. The caps are in the original document. Here's part of it:

Under this Confederation the war of the Revolution was carried on, and on the 3rd of September, 1783, the contest ended, and a definite Treaty was signed by Great Britain, in which she acknowledged the independence of the Colonies in the following terms: "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." / Thus were established the two great principles asserted by the Colonies, namely: the right of a State to govern itself; and the right of a people to abolish a Government when it becomes destructive of the ends for which it was instituted. And concurrent with the establishment of these principles, was the fact, that each Colony became and was recognized by the mother Country a FREE, SOVEREIGN AND INDEPENDENT STATE.

Georgia's declaration goes into great detail on the economic causes of secession. As Georgia's famous senator, Robert Toombs, said, the North was a suction pump sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it into the North constantly. The Georgia declaration states:

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

That is a powerful statement as to why the Union was critical to Lincoln and the North, but was the opposite of the States' Rights philosophy of the Founding Fathers and the South.

Even Mississippi's declaration that begins with an assertion that it is identified with slavery as the basis of its economic well-being makes several critical points. It affirms the constitutional violations of the North but states about the North:

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. / It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives. / It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. / It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. / It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

Texas's declaration of causes includes:

By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States. / The Federal Government, while but partially under the control of these our unnatural and sectional enemies, has for years almost entirely failed to protect the lives and property of the people of Texas against the Indian savages on our border, and more recently against the murderous forays of banditti from the neighboring territory of Mexico; and when our State government has expended large amounts for such purpose, the Federal Government has refused reimbursement therefor, thus rendering our condition more insecure and harassing than it was during the existence of the Republic of Texas.

Read these declarations and especially know your own state's if you live in South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia or Texas. Northern constitutional violations are extremely important. If you can't trust the North to obey the Constitution, you can't trust them with anything.

Northern support for terrorists like John Brown was a huge issue. The North was already at war with the South. Would you allow yourself to be ruled by people who sent murderers, thieves and arsonists into your peaceful towns to kill your family and neighbors, destroy your property, poison wells, and encourage the unimaginable horror of slave insurrections with rape and murder from which there would be no survivors like in Haiti?

The economic theft also mentioned was huge. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.³

Nobody in the North, ever a single time, suggested a workable plan for gradual, compensated emancipation such as the Northern states, themselves, and all other nations on earth except Haiti, used to end slavery.

The reason why is that Northerners were not about to spend their hard earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North with crime and violence, and be job competition.

They would rather do as they did and just pass laws that forbid black people from settling or even visiting Northern and Western states for long.

The four declarations of causes indicate that slavery was one of the causes of secession for four states, but only for those four.

The other nine did not issue declarations of causes, and four of the Southern states, in which 52.4% of white Southerners lived, unquestionably seceded over nothing to do with slavery.

Those four states --- Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina --- rejected secession at first but after Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, they were horrified by the prospect of violent federal coercion. They were utterly disgusted that the federal government would illegally and unconstitutionally invade sovereign states, kill their citizens and destroy their property to force them to obey a Northern sectional majority.

Another thing that proves the war was not about slavery: when Lincoln called for his immoral invasion, there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy.

There were nine slave states in the Union, soon to be 10 with the admission of West Virginia as a slave state into the Union during the war, ironically, just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect.

There were only seven slave states in the Confederacy.

The nine Union slave states on April 12, 1861 when the war started were Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina.

The seven Confederate states were South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

Nothing the North or dishonest academia or anybody else says matters anyway. The South had the right to secede and did so properly.

Among the conclusive evidence of the right of secession is the reserved right to secede demanded by New York, Rhode Island and Virginia before they acceded to the Constitution. All the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, thus they had it too, since all states entered the Union as exact equals.

Southerners seceded democratically with conventions of the people to decide the one issue of secession just as the Founding Fathers had used conventions of the people to decide the one issue of accepting or rejecting the United States Constitution.

The Founding Fathers established the precedent of using conventions of the people to decide single, important issues. Southerners followed it to the letter.

Southerners wanted to be free to govern themselves just like the colonists had wanted when the British became tyrannical with their taxes that were minuscule compared to the 85% Southerners were paying in 1861, of which 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

Southerners expected to live in peace but, as stated, Lincoln and Northern business leaders and banks knew that a free-trade South with 100% control of King Cotton, and British trade and military alliances, would quickly be unbeatable in a war. The South would then rise to dominance in North America.

Lincoln started his war so he could throw up his naval blockade and chill relations between the South and Europe.

This is confirmed by Lincoln's own commander inside Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, who was at ground zero on April 12, 1861, when the war started.

Of all the participants in the drama, Anderson, alone, was in the best position to judge who started the war.

When Anderson was informed that reinforcements would be sent after the South had been lied to over and over with the false promise that Fort Sumter would be evacuated, he wrote back to Secretary of War Cameron and Lincoln:

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

Major Anderson sees that the war "is to be thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln, president of the North, the first sectional president in American history whom over 60% of even Northerners voted against in 1860.

Lincoln, whose goal was to establish the Northeast as the dominant economic and cultural section of our country, succeeded, though over a million people had to die, which included 750,000 soldiers, with another million maimed.

¹ Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men (Chicago: Open Court, 1996), 90.

² Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 98-101.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 103.

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Fifteen, Conclusion: Chapter XV, The Costs and Results of the War

Posted on February 2, 2022February 2, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV
The Costs and Results of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

MITCHAM OPENS his concluding chapter with "the total number of deaths as a result of the Civil War was about 1,000,000" which includes 750,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of Southerners who "died in the aftermath of the war from starvation, malnutrition, disease, or injury."¹

Always keep in mind that the population of the entire country in those days was only 31.4 million.

During World War II, the population was 133 million and roughly 400,000 died vis-a-vis 1,000,000 in the War Between the States.

Despite being outnumbered four to one, and outgunned maybe 200 to one, Confederate valor is unsurpassed in the history of the world. James McPherson writes in Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War:

[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.²

Southerners fought to the bitter end for independence and lost only after four bloody years because of overwhelming Northern resources, as General Lee said at the end of the war, such as the North's pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world to feed Union armies. That's why 25% of the Union army was not born here.

Blacks suffered enormously at the hands of the Union army. It has now come out that a substantial number of Union blacks were coerced into joining, and when they did, their families back home were not taken care of in the least despite Yankee promises. Many suffered mightily, were cold, ragged and starved to death.

There are accounts of dead blacks being buried by Yankees in mass graves along with dead horses and mules, all thrown together in wagons then thrown into unmarked ditches dug for that purpose. These are documented in Jim Downs' excellent book, Sick from Freedom: African American Death and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction, which Mitcham says "should have won a Pulitzer Prize."³ More below from Downs.

The whole story of blacks in the War Between the States is a half-truth, which makes it a lie. Thousands of Confederate blacks are ignored because that does not suit political liberals in academia and the news media.

Just one irrefutable example proves substantial black participation in combat on battlefields with the Confederate army. A Yankee official, Lewis H. Steiner, M.D., Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed, firsthand, the exodus of Stonewall Jackson's army from Frederick, Maryland in 1862. Steiner writes in his official report:

Wednesday, September 10, 1862: At 4 o'clock this morning the Rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson's force taking the advance. The movement continued until 8 o'clock P.M., occupying 16 hours. The most liberal calculation could not give them more than 64,000 men. Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in the number. They had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and they were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of generals and promiscuously mixed up with all the Rebel horde (emphasis added).

I named a two-DVD set featuring Professor Edward C. Smith, a well-known authority on black Confederates, Mixed Up with All the Rebel Horde, Why Black Southerners Fought for the South in the War Between the States.

Steiner writes that there were "over 3,000 Negroes." That number could be much higher. Steiner was observing from a distance starting in the dark before dawn, and he would not be able to distinguish light-skinned African Americans from white Confederate soldiers.

So it's not unreasonable to think that 3,000 to 5,000 of every 64,000 Confederate soldiers were black meaning, from this one example, there could have been 50,000 or more armed Confederate blacks, at one time or another, marching with whites against the Union army. Of course, thousands of blacks served in the Confederate army in other capacities.

To get at the truth about the past, you have to read the words of the people of the past and make up your own mind. Academia and the news media are so politicized most of them are worthless as historians seeking truth.

Mitcham called the aforementioned book, Sick From Freedom: African American Death and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction, by Jim Downs, "his masterpiece." Mitcham writes and quotes Downs that the war:

'produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century . . . wreaking havoc on the population of the newly freed.' Tens of thousands of freed slaves died due to the 'exigencies of war and the massive dislocation triggered by emancipation.' Downs estimated that 1,000,000 of the 4,000,000 freed slaves suffered serious illness or death. We do not know how many died, but there were tens of thousands of deaths, especially among black children.⁴

As a result of the war, Southerners lost 60% of their capital and "one in four of its [the South's] young men of military age killed; one in four others crippled."⁵

Mitcham's previous assertion that money was the cause of the War Between the States, is backed up.

He writes that the "true value of Southern property fell from $6.3 billion to $4.2 billion. At the same time, the true value of United States' property increased from $16.2 billion to $30.1 billion."⁶

After first supporting the right of secession, by the spring of 1861 Yankees could see their economy crumbling around them as jubilant Southerners thrilled at being out from under greedy Yankee control.

Southerners would now be able to manufacture for themselves and have low tariffs and free trade with the rest of the world. With 100% control of the most demanded commodity on earth, King Cotton, the Southern future was as bright as the Northern future was sinking.

So, for money and control, Lincoln started his war that killed a million people and maimed another million. He knew he had overwhelming advantages at that point in history and he thought he could win easily. He knew that if he could beat the South, a powerful competitor would be destroyed and the North would rule our great country via its political control of the federal government by the larger Northern population. "Northern property values almost doubled." That kind of money is what the North was fighting for.

Before the war, "not a single political party advocated emancipation. And none advanced the ideas of compensation and integration beyond words."⁷

The rot in American history that academia and the news media have given us today, started in the 1960s as Mitcham points out.

Prior to the 1960s, historians "did not believe the war was only about slavery, despite the Myth of the Noble Cause. For most, it was all about restoring the Union and coast-to-coast economic nationalism, controlled by Northern financial and commercial interests."⁸

He points out that "evidence suggests that an independent Confederacy would have ended slavery like other countries in the Western Hemisphere, and race relations in the South and in America would be better than they are now."⁹

Some of his evidence is "that there were more free black people in the South than in the North in 1860. Every other country in the world except Haiti freed its slaves without war."¹⁰

Mitcham believes that "given the history throughout the Western Hemisphere, it was more likely to happen than not" that slavery would have been ended by the South.¹¹

I agree completely because technology created machines in the latter part of the nineteenth century that would pick cotton faster than black people and nobody in his right mind would pay for a slave who came with a birth to death commitment when he could buy machines to pick cotton faster, better and cheaper.

Mitcham writes:

The agitation of abolitionists and the greed of the Northern financial, mercantile, industrial, railroad, and commercial interests were the real roadblocks to freedom. This explosive agitation culminated in the election of the unscrupulous Lincoln and the passage of the punitive Morrill Tariff, which was not replaced until 1913.¹²

Another big reason Northerners did not want to end slavery was because most were racist. Many Northern and Western states had laws preventing blacks from living there. Northerners did not want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks near them in the West. They surely did not want to free the slaves who would then move north and be job competition.

Of course, this argument is ignored by politicized academia and the news media because it does not help them elect Democrats.

Based on the experience of other countries nearby "the Civil War probably ended slavery only thirty to thirty-five years earlier than would have been the case had the institution been allowed to die out organically."¹³

This was Lincoln belief too because he talked about a plan of compensated emancipation that would have freed the slaves by 1900 though he never made a serious proposal. Just talk.

Mitcham points out that had slavery been allowed to die out:

The South (including blacks) would have been spared a brutal war, the scorched-earth policy of certain Union war criminals, plunder, pillage, starvation, military dictatorship, a decade of military occupation, the incredible corruption of Reconstruction, the manipulation of black people by the Republican party to keep itself in power, and the needless deaths of tens of thousands (and probably hundreds of thousands) of freed black people. Millions of people (both white and African-American) would have been spared the crushing poverty of the New South era.¹⁴

Yankees used black people for political gain "but made no provisions for the suddenly displaced African Americans, and indeed, there is no evidence they even thought about them."

The Emancipation Proclamation, which freed no slaves, or few, and left slavery in place in the six Union slave states, was issued "to encourage slave revolts and end the possibility of a diplomatic alliance between the Confederacy, Britain, and France."

Of course, the people of the Northern states that forbid blacks from living there or even visiting looked down on black people:

The Yankee generals dubbed them "contrabands," a derogatory term never used by the Rebels and roughly equal to the word Untermenschen (subhumans), a term the Germans used in the 1930s and 1940s to describe Jews, Slavs, and other people they considered inferior. They tossed them into 'contraband camps,' which were the first modern concentration camps. . . . Able-bodied men were separated from their families and forced to work on plantations, which were under Northern management. They faced being defrauded of their minimum wages or not paid at all.¹⁵

Mitcham goes on:

In some camps there were also multiple rapes of black women by Union soldiers every night.¹⁶

The Union Army leased plantations to "'Carpetbaggers'" who forced blacks to work there but often did not pay them or let them leave. Private Samuel H. Glasgow of the Twenty-Third Iowa wrote that these plantation lessees "'did not have the best interests of the former slave at heart . . . Cotton closes their eyes to justice . . . '".¹⁷

U.S. brigadier general John P. Hawkins said the plantation system was "'nothing but a system of slavery.'" He suggested the army "'send for their former masters and tell each one to claim his slaves, [because] his treatment of them was parental compared to what we now permit.'"¹⁸

Yankee contraband camps were unsanitary and "tens of thousands" died of disease and malnutrition. The U.S. Army made the situation worse by "force-marching some of the camps to new locations, some hundreds of miles away."¹⁹

Suffering in the South continued after the war. In 1866 there were crop failures and 1867 "was a year of famine with mortality rates which Downs described as 'chilling.'"²⁰

Smallpox "raged throughout the South and West from 1862 through 1868. Weakened and malnourished black people were especially susceptible, often dying at rates three or four times higher than Southern whites, who were themselves malnourished. Black children were particularly hard hit. In one six-month period in 1865, 30,000 died in North Carolina and South Carolina alone."²¹

Yankee carpetbaggers and scalawags raised taxes "300 percent to 400 percent higher than they had been in 1860, even though property values had declined significantly." In Mississippi, in 1871, "3,300,300 acres were for sale due to tax defaults" which was "15 percent of all taxable land."²²

None of that tax revenue went to former Confederates or blacks. It all went into the pockets of carpetbaggers and scalawags.

After the war many Southerners admitted slavery was wrong but "they steadfastly denied that it was cruel. The survivors of the antebellum South went to their graves firm in this opinion."²³

It took decades, until World War II, for the South to recover economically. Reconstruction "left behind a system of segregation and peonage (sharecropping) that did not exist before the war."²⁴

Before the war, five Southern states were in the top ten American states for per capita income. After the war, none were.

Of course, as stated, this was the purpose of Lincoln's war. He did not want economic competition from such a powerful region as the South on his Southern border.

Lincoln was president of the North, the first sectional president in American history. He and Northern leaders knew the South would ascend to economic and political dominance with 100 percent control of King Cotton and its low, free trade tariff of 10% vis-a-vis the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher.

The South had other powerful advantages too, like excellent ports and good weather. The South was already producing the wealth of the nation with cotton and other commodities. Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860.

Imagine the revenue that would be turned back on the South. Of course, that same revenue would be denied to the North and Lincoln could not tolerate that.

With European recognition of the Confederacy and subsequent trade and military alliances, the South would be unbeatable by the North very quickly.

Again, Lincoln and Northern leaders knew this and were in a panic over it. With four times the white population of the South and overwhelming manufacturing and shipping at that point in history, they thought it would be easy to win a war.

They found out differently as the old song goes:

Three hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot;
I wish it was three millions
Instead of what we got.²⁵

It is hard to believe Yankees who invaded a peaceful region that just wanted to govern itself and had seceded by a democratic debate and vote, are considered the heroes of American history in this day and age while monuments to Confederates defending their homes and families are toppled by ignorant thugs.

The one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to free the slaves. Three Northern slave states of the six that Lincoln exempted with his Emancipation Proclamation, had slavery months after the war. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment in December, 1865 to finally free the slaves in all the Yankee slave states.

Perhaps the most despicable today are the politicized frauds in academia and the news media who are destroying our country with their racist Critical Race Theory and their fraudulent history like the 1619 Project.

Southerners, fighting for independence like the Founding Fathers in 1776, are the true heroes of American history. The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding comes from the Declaration of Independence:

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

Mitcham's final paragraph states that:

It should be clear by now to any open-minded reader that the war was not just about slavery and certainly not primarily about slavery. It was chiefly about money . . . ²⁶

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Fourteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part Two)

NOTES:

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

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 173.

² Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 174.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 175.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 175-176.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 176.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 176-177.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 177.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 178.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 178-179.

²⁵ Oh I'm a Good Old Rebel, by Hoyt Axton. Many others have done this song. It was created in the 1860s by former Confederate major James Innes Randolph. Here are Axton's lyrics, https://genius.com/Hoyt-axton-oh-im-a-good-old-rebel-lyrics, accessed 2-2-22.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 179.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Fourteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part Two

Posted on January 26, 2022January 26, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fourteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

NEW YORK CITY had voted against Lincoln "two to one" in 1860, which is an even higher percentage than the 60% who had voted against him across the North.¹

New York City before the war was sympathetic to the South because of their trade and economic ties. New York Mayor Fernando Wood had "threatened to secede from both Albany and Washington in 1861" at the thought of losing its trade with the South.

New York and other Northern cities were pressure cookers with much grinding poverty and massive European immigration that made it worse. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are historically accurate. New immigrants such as destitute Irish and Germans arriving penniless and hungry had to compete for the few jobs. There was no social welfare in those days. You figured out how to make money or you died.

Emigration to the West was a huge reason racist Northerners did not want blacks in the West. The West was to be reserved for white people from all over the world as Lincoln had said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

It is more understandable when you realize the West was the pressure release valve for the surplus population of the wild, turbulent North that had many cities busting at the seams with desperate people. Without that release valve, the North could have had a revolution. It had happened in other places with confiscation of the land and property of those who had it, by those who didn't. As Horace Greeley said, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!"

Mitcham points out that "new arrivals were poor and not favorably disposed towards African American men, with whom they were competing for low-wage jobs." Sweatshop employers pitted them against each other and thus "kept wages low for immigrants and blacks alike." They made the Irish and blacks "destitute."²

There wasn't much "white privilege" for the Irish, which dishonest politicized academia and the news media tell us defines American history.

A precursor to the New York City Draft Riots occurred in March, 1863 when "white New York City longshoremen or dock workers were on strike for higher pay." Corporate bosses "brought in black strikebreakers to take their jobs." Strikers attacked 200 of them and there were injuries on both sides but no deaths.³

As I have said many times, Mitcham's narrative is always concise and direct. He writes:

Meanwhile, throughout the North, the allure and romance of the war evaporated under the withering fire of Confederate rifles and muskets. Voluntary Union enlistments slowed to a trickle. Due to his many military defeats and heavy casualties, Lincoln instituted a draft to fill his depleted ranks. Rich people, those who could pay $300 ($6,069.07 in 2017 money), were exempt from conscription. Excused from the draft were African Americans, who were not considered citizens yet. The striking longshoremen were already angry over wages. Now they faced being drafted into the Union Army to, as James Howell Street wrote, 'face death to give freedom to Negro slaves whose cousins had taken their jobs.'⁴

On July 11, 1863, the first drawing of Lincoln's draft took place in New York City, and on July 13 "a crowd of 500 people turned itself into a mob" led by firefighters and longshoremen and began "the most lethal riot in American history" that lasted four days:

Several regiments of Union troops had to be recalled from Pennsylvania; soldiers and police fired into the mob with cannons, muskets, and rifles; the police busted skulls with heavy locust wood clubs, tossed rock throwers off the roofs of buildings, and shot them with revolvers. One authority estimated that more than 2,000 people died and some 8,000 had been injured. Many African Americans were lynched, drowned, tortured, or set on fire.⁵

Riots protesting Lincoln's draft took place that summer not only in New York but to a lesser degree in "Detroit; Buffalo and Troy, NY; Cincinnati; Boston; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Rutland, Vermont; and Wooster, Ohio."⁶

The riots in New York were the "worst in U.S. history. Taken as a whole, the New York Draft Riots witnessed one of the largest mass lynching of innocent blacks in American history."⁷

Mitcham points out a mass hanging going on at the same time: "The Lincoln administration set the record for the largest mass hanging in American history conducted against a minority group in 1862. Following the suppression of an Indian uprising, a military tribunal found 303 Dakota (eastern Sioux) guilty of rape and murder."

The benevolent Lincoln thought 303 "was too many to kill all at once, so he granted clemency to all but thirty-eight; they were hanged at Mankoto, Minnesota, on December 28, 1862."⁸

Lincoln was worried he was going to lose the election of 1864, which might have opened up the possibility of a negotiated end of the war, but Atlanta fell and Lincoln won.

Too bad because the only thing Southerners wanted to do was govern themselves. Their economic prospects and free trade philosophy, however, were too bright and powerful for Lincoln, so the South had to be destroyed.

The barbarism caused by Lincoln's lust for other people's money and for political control was disgusting, for that was all they were fighting for. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, they were not fighting to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation, which didn't free any slaves, came about half way through the war after hundreds of thousands of men were dead. It was a war measure as Lincoln himself said, to keep Europeans from recognizing the South, and to encourage slaves to rise up and slaughter Southern women and children so Confederate men would have to leave the battlefield to go home and defend their families.

If the Emancipation Proclamation had been a serious measure to free the slaves, Lincoln would have first freed the slaves in the six Union slave states that were carefully exempted by the EP as was much of captured Confederate territory. Three of the Union's slave states had slavery even months beyond the war. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment to free them in December, 1865.

Abraham Lincoln, to win his bloody war, embraced the rape of Southern women and murder of children and other civilians under the concept of "total war." Mitcham writes:

It began in April 1862, when Colonel Ival Vasilovitch Turchinoff, a former Russian officer, entered Athens, Alabama, with the Nineteenth and Twenty-fourth Illinois Infantry Regiments. Now going by the alias John B. Turchin, Turchinoff encouraged his men to commit many atrocities aginst the defenseless civilians of the town. Drunk federals robbed stores, broke into private homes, burned, pillaged and raped. Several women---both black and white---were assaulted sexually at bayonet point, and one pregnant woman miscarried after she was gang raped. This went on for some time. When Turchinoff's commanding officer, General Buell, learned what had happened, he had the Russian court-martialed. Found guilty, Turchinoff was dishonorably discharged on August 6, 1862. Lincoln not only set aside the verdict; he promoted the disgraced officer to brigadier general.⁹

Lincoln's behavior is about as disgraceful and characterless as you can get.

Typical outrages such as those on Sherman's march across Georgia occurred all over. A Northerner, living in the South, Mrs. Elizabeth Meade Ingraham, experienced it first hand. She was the sister of Union Major General George G. Meade.

Mitcham writes:

U.S. major general James B. McPherson headquartered at "Ashwood" plantation, the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Meade Ingraham. McPherson refused to protect the place, and his men looted it for days. The general personally took part in the pillaging. He and his staff stole two five-gallon demijohns of whiskey. The men broke into Mrs. Ingraham's home, opened the dining room closet with a hatchet, and took the family's silver and table linen. They stole or broke every pan, pitcher, cup, plate, etc., and stole buggies, wagons, and every horse and mule---except one who was about to foal and refused to move. They shot all the sheep, killed or stole all the cattle, and shot all but four of the hogs. They even made off with dresses, sheets, and blankets. They destroyed all the portraits of deceased family members and even stole her Bibles, although 'What such rascals want with Bibles I can't tell,' Mrs. Ingraham noted caustically in her diary.¹⁰

Lincoln's conquest "was marked by wanton pillaging, malicious cruelty, and rape."

Jacob Thompson's beautiful "Home Place" was pillaged for days then burned. Mrs. Catherine Ann Thompson was given only 15 minutes and she "removed her few remaining valuables" but "As she was leaving, a squad of blue-coated liberators robbed her at gunpoint. She was left with nothing. Other defenseless citizens, black and white, were whipped or sexually molested."

One Yankee recorded a scene that was widespread across the South:

'. . . In fact, where once stood a handsome little country town, now only remained the blackened skeletons of houses, and the smoldering ruins that marked the track of war.'¹¹

U.S. army lieutenant Thomas J. Myers "wrote to his wife in Boston from South Carolina in early 1865" stating "We have had a glorious time in this State." He went on:

'Unrestricted license to burn and plunder was the order of the day. The civility have been stripped of most of their valuables. Gold watches, silver, pitchers, cups, spoons, forks, and so forth are as common in camp as blackberries . . .
Officers are not allowed to join in these expeditions unless disguised as privates. One of our corps commanders borrowed a rough suit of clothes from one of my men and was successful in his place. He got a large quantity of silver among other things . . . and a very fine watch from a Mr. DeSaussure of this place.
. . . I have a quart---I am not joking---I have at least a quart of jewelry for you and the girls and some No. 1 diamond pins and rings among them. General Sherman has gold and silver enough to start a bank.
The damned niggers, as a general thing, preferred to stay at home particularly after they found that we wanted only the able bodied men and to tell you the truth the youngest and best looking women. . . .'¹²

Mitcham compares Lincoln's invasion with a violent abusive husband who beats his long-suffering wife every time she tries to leave. He

grabs her by the throat and beats her until she submits. Here the analogy breaks down, however. An abused wife might be able turn to charities, police authorities, her church, or family for help. The South was on its own. Rather than help, the government was more interest in stealing what remained after the destruction.¹³

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV

The Costs and Results of the War

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Thirteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part One)

NOTES:

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

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 164.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 165.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 166.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 167.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 167-168.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 169.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 169-170.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 170-171.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Thirteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part One

Posted on January 19, 2022January 19, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

ONCE AGAIN, Mitcham's epigraphs are spot on. He quotes the governor of New Jersey, a Union state that still had some slaves in it even after the War Between the States despite its plan of gradual emancipation. New Jersey's slaves remained slaves until the second Thirteenth Amendment finally freed them in December, 1865, eight-and-a-half months after Appomattox.

The first Thirteenth Amendment was the Corwin Amendment in early 1861, which Lincoln strongly supported and which was adopted by five Union states before the war made it moot. The Corwin Amendment left black people in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress where slavery already existed.

Here are Chapter XIV's epigraphs:

Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery.
-----Joel Parker, Governor of New Jersey (1863-66; 1871-74)
The sight of the Confederate battle flag always reminded me of the immense bravery of the soldiers who served under it.
-----Union General Joshua Chamberlain

America's first sectional party immediately passed legislation "enriching Republican fat cats on Wall Street and various corporate headquarters throughout the North."¹

Republicans passed the "highest tax on imports in American history (the Morrill Tariff)" and created a national banking system so that "favored institutions were basically entitled to create money and control the currency and credit of the United States."²

They gave away some land in the West to homesteaders "but most to railroads and mining interests" and they "set up a contract labor law, which came close to enslaving gangs of foreign workers" while it "depressed the wages of U.S. workers."³

There was also the Morrill Act "for 'land grant' colleges, opening the door for federal involvement in education for the first time."⁴

Of course, none of this largesse went to blacks.

Mitcham quotes Rev. A. D. Betts of North Carolina whose sad and sobering quotation shows what was coming:

One day in April, 1861, I head that President Lincoln had called on the State troops to force the seceding States back into the Union. This was one of the saddest days of my life. I had prayed and hoped that war might be averted. I had loved the Union and clung to it. That day I saw war was inevitable. The inevitable must be met. That day I walked up and down my porch in Smithville [now Southport, N.C.] and wept and suffered and prayed for the South.⁵

Rev. Betts "joined his local military company, which became part of the Thirtieth North Carolina Infantry" which "started out with 900 men." Four years later it had only 153 "when it surrendered at Appomattox."⁶

Irish-born Patrick Cleburne, who rose to the rank of Major-General in the Confederate Army before he was killed in the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee) November 30, 1864 at age 36, wrote:

I am with the South in death, in victory or defeat. I believe the North is about to wage a brutal and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the constitution and the fundamental principles of the government. They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed. They are about to invade our peaceful homes, destroy our property, and murder our men and dishonor our women. We propose no invasion of the North, no attack on them, and only ask to be left alone.⁷

Lincoln was not going to leave the South alone with a 10% tariff as compared to his astronomical Morrill Tariff which was 47 to 60% higher. He could see his shipping industry head South overnight, and his manufacturing industry, which existed mostly to sell to its captive Southern market, go bankrupt.

The South, with 100% control of King Cotton and with long-sought-after European free trade and military alliances, would be unbeatable by the North and old Honest Abe knew it. It was fight right then when he had four times the white population of the South and other enormous advantages including maybe 200 times more armaments, or, eventually, be economically buried by the South.

Cleburne also wrote:

It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.⁸

Cleburne in the first quote above wrote:

They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.⁹

That, of course, comes from the American Declaration of Independence, from the phrase that was the most widely quoted in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding:

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

Southerners were fighting for independence and self-government, the exact same as the colonists who fought the British in 1776.

Yankees were fighting to establish the supremacy of the federal government over the states. They were the federals in the war. They planned to control the federal government with their larger population and rule the country.

Yankees were unquestionably not fighting to free the slaves.

Their money was more important to them than freeing slaves who would then move north with enormous social problems and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws forbidding blacks from living there and many forbid them from even visiting for long.

Southerners agreed with Cleburne.

Robert Stiles "was a Yale graduate and a law student at Columbia University in 1861" with a bright career ahead of him. He gladly gave it up to become a private in the Richmond Howitzers in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia rising to the rank of artillery major. He wrote this after the war:

What now of the essential spirit of these young volunteers? Why did they volunteer? For what did they give their lives? . . . Surely, it was not for slavery they fought. The great majority of them had never owned a slave, and had little or no interest in that institution. My own father, for example, had freed his slaves long years before . . . The great conflict will never be properly comprehended by the man who looks upon it as a war for the preservation of slavery.¹⁰

The vast majority of Americans do not properly comprehend the great conflict thanks to the race obsession of academia and the news media with their woke, 100% politicized version of history that is not seeking truth but only political advantage for the left and Democrat Party.

Academia is 100% liberal. I know the actual percentage is closer to 90% but the small number of non-liberals on campuses are not going to say a word and endanger their tenure or have the mob show up at their office. They are petrified of the charge of racism and they regularly dishonor themselves to avoid it.

Also, a good number of our friends in academia have no knowledge of the Southern view of the conflict. They have never heard it or studied it, yet Southerners were right in everything they did including secession. The North threatened to secede many times in the antebellum period.

Esteemed historian, Eugene Genovese, said that what has happened to Southern history since the 1960s is a "cultural and political atrocity." He blamed the atrocity on elites in academic and the media.

Mitcham quotes Dr. Hunter McGuire, "Stonewall Jackson's physician and a future president of the American Medical Association" who wrote:

The Stonewall Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia was a fighting organization. I knew every man in it, for I belonged to it for a long time; and I know that I am in proper bounds when I assert, that there was not one soldier in thirty who owned or ever expected to own a slave. The South fighting for the money value of the negro! What a cheap and wicked falsehood!¹¹

Mitcham brings up Dr. James M. McPherson of Princeton, "no friend of the Confederacy." McPherson, he writes, "researched thousands of original documents, 25,000 personal letters, and 249 diaries." McPherson concludes Southerners were not fighting for slavery, they "were fighting for liberty." ¹²

Of Confederate enlistees, only "6 percent to 7 percent" owned slaves.¹³

Mitcham writes, "As if to prove their point, Abraham Lincoln moved with incredible speed to suppress freedom and constitutional rights in the North." Lincoln's jackboot landed first on the face of Marylanders because of their proximity to Washington, D.C. and because of strong Southern sentiment there:

In April 1861, crowds poured into the streets of Baltimore, the third largest city in the United States. On April 20, the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment showed up and fired on the rioters, a few of whom also shot at the bluecoats. Four soldiers and at least nine civilians were killed.¹⁴

The Maryland legislature rejected a secession convention but its pro-Union governor, Thomas H. Hicks, "called for the immediate and peaceful recognition of the Confederacy and an end of the U.S. military occupation of Maryland, which they denounced as a 'flagrant violation of the Constitution.'" Maryland wanted to stay neutral.¹⁵

Mitcham writes:

Lincoln responded by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which was a constitutional safeguard to prevent unlawful imprisonment or imprisonment without due process. Lincoln, Seward, and their henchmen arrested many prominent Marylanders, including thirty-one legislators, the mayor of Baltimore, the chief of police, all of the Baltimore police commissioners, Henry May, a sitting U.S. congressman, the entire Baltimore city council, and dozens of prominent civic leaders, editors, and publishers. Arrests took place in the dead of night so that there would be fewer witnesses. The victims were usually hauled off to Fort Warren, Massachusetts, or some other hellhole where they were incarcerated in crowded casements. If a prisoner asked for a lawyer or tried to send for his family, he was told that this wold hurt his case. Often, the victim was jailed based not on what he had done but what he might do. Some of them remained in prison until the end of the war.¹⁶

John Merryman was arrested but appealed to Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney, who was a Marylander. Taney wrote a "blistering opinion against Lincoln's actions, ruling his executive order was unconstitutional, null, and void. He ordered a copy of his decision be sent to the Northern president under the seal of the United States Supreme Court."¹⁷

Lincoln wanted to arrest Taney but "couldn't find any Federal marshals who would execute" his unconstitutional order.

Elections were soon held in Maryland but "Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls, arrested those who were not pro-Union, and granted to U.S. soldiers three-day leaves so they could return home and vote Republican. Voter intimidation kept many pro-Southern Maryland voters far away from the polls. The result was a pro-Union legislature."¹⁸

Lincoln's actions should not surprise us in the least. He had just sent five naval missions into the South for the express purpose of starting a war so he could put the new Republican Party on solid ground once and for all. Nothing like a war to solidify political power.

Lincoln had no mandate for any of this. In the election of 1860, over 60% of the country voted against Lincoln.

But the lust for money and control were all Lincoln and the North could think about, along with the fact that they had overwhelming advantages in population, armaments and manufacturing, an existing army and navy, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world to enlarge Northern armies. Of course they were going to fight rather than allow a free trade South to rise up on their southern border.

Take note that there is no mention by Lincoln or anybody else in the North about freeing the slaves. Just the opposite. They were quite willing to leave blacks in slavery forever as long as the South returned to the Union and paid all of Lincoln's taxes and tariffs.

Lincoln's commander in Ohio had Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham arrested, tried by a military court, found guilty and thrown in jail for the rest of the war until Lincoln interceded and had Vallandigham banished from the country. Vallandigham's crime was calling Lincoln "King Lincoln" and denouncing "Wall Street and its war profiteers, as well as the mercantile, manufacturing, and commercial interests" of the North. He had called for an armistice with the Confederates.¹⁹

Lincoln also ordered "the arrest of U.S. senator and former vice president John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky" whose crime was visiting Kentuckians in the hospital who were wounded at First Manassas. Breckinridge was warned and escaped "before Lincoln's thugs could lay their hands on him."²⁰

Mitcham writes:

In all, at least 32,000 political prisoners were thrown in jail, and one authority placed the number as high as 40,000. More than 300 newspapers and journals were also shut down. Frequently, the Lincolnites used federal troops to do the dirty work. Printing presses were often smashed and publisher's offices ransacked.²¹

In addition to Lincoln's totalitarian tyranny against Northerners, his secretary of state, William Seward, "bragged about his power to Britain's ambassador to the U.S., Lord Lyons."

'I can touch a bell on my right hand and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio. I can touch the bell again and order the arrest of a citizen of New York. Can Queen Victoria do as much?'²²

"'No!'" the outraged Lyons snapped: "'Were she to attempt such an act her head would roll from her shoulders.'"²³

Perhaps Lyons should have gone back to Great Britain and insisted they recognize the Confederacy as Lord Acton wished had happened. Acton stated that wish clearly in his 1866 letter to Robert E. Lee.

Lincoln, whom, again, 60% of the country voted against in 1860, "saw immigrants as key to his political future."

Already "one-fourth of the Northern population was immigrants." That's why 25% of the Union army were not born in America. Those enlistment bonuses were mighty enticing to many who arrived with only the shirts on their backs.

Lincoln even bought, secretly, "a German language newspaper to disseminate Republican propaganda to immigrants who were poorly informed about American political issues."²⁴

Lincoln also opened "Union recruiting offices throughout Europe to hire foreign mercenaries" and around "489,200 mercenaries were recruited from fifteen foreign countries, mostly from Ireland (150,000) and Germany (210,000)." Mitcham doubts Lincoln could have won the war without mercenaries.²⁵

Lincoln was not as welcoming toward native born blacks as he was foreigners who would join his army. Many Northern and Western states still had laws forbidding blacks from living there.

A year into the war, Lincoln pushed "a constitutional amendment to buy and deport slaves." He wanted a place they could survive away from the U.S. mainland such as "Haiti, Liberia, New Granada, Ecuador, St. Croix, Surinam, British Guiana, Honduras, and the Amazon."²⁶ Lincoln favored colonization for blacks his entire life. See Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press), 2011, and other books.

The Trent affair, when the USS San Jacinto seized the RMS Trent and took Confederate commissioners James Mason and John Slidell off and imprisoned them, resulted in Lincoln apologizing to the British and freeing Mason and Slidell. The Brits had threatened war and were dead serious.

This caused Lincoln to realize "the threat of a Franco-Anglo-Confederate alliance was a real one."²⁷ To head it off, the "Myth of the Noble Cause to free the slaves" was born with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Not only would it give the North's barbaric unconstitutional invasion supposed morality, it might encourage the slaves to rise up and start slaughtering whites thus forcing the Confederate army to go home to put down insurrections.

The diabolical Lincoln, like the slick lawyer he was, worded the Emancipation Proclamation so that it supposedly freed slaves where Lincoln had no control and left them in slavery where he could have freed them.

The Emancipation Proclamation exempted the six Union slave states (yes, SIX slave states fought for the Union the entire war, and three of them still had slavery after the war, until the second Thirteenth Amendment kicked in, in December, 1865, and freed them).

Those six Union slave states were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which ironically came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

The Emancipation Proclamation also did not free slaves in captured Confederate territory such as the plantations in Louisiana because they "were in the hands of New Englanders, who were in bed with Lincoln politically."²⁸

Nor did the EP free the slaves owned by Ulysses S. Grant (Mrs. Grant owned several slaves and used to take one, Black Julia, with her during many of her husband's battles). William T. Sherman kept his slaves too.

This made Lincoln a laughing stock around the world with influential writers such as Charles Dickens.

Even William H. Seward said:

'We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.'²⁹

Abolitionist Lysander Spooner said basically the same thing.

A popular limerick said it best:

'Lincoln, Lincoln, wily wretch, freed the slaves he couldn't catch.'³⁰

Mitcham writes that in the State of the Union Address of December 1862, "Lincoln offered the Southern states an opportunity to retain their slaves until January 1, 1900, along with financial compensation to any slave owners and a promise to remove all blacks to Africa or Latin America."³¹

Of course, Southerners were fighting for independence and self-government, not slavery. For the South, 1861 was 1776 all over. They were not interested in returning to Lincoln's tyrannical union and being ruled by Northerners.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Twelve: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part Two)

NOTES:

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

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 155.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 156.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 157.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 157-158.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 158.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 158-159.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 159.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 160.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 162.

²⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 163.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Twelve: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part Two

Posted on January 12, 2022January 12, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Twelve

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

WANTED TO MENTION as a side note that Dr. Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. has an article in the latest Confederate Veteran magazine (January/February 2022) entitled "War, By The Numbers," which is outstanding.

The footnotes in "War, By The Numbers" are at the bottom of each page, which I love. You are able to read them as you read the text thus enhancing the text even more.

Here is an example from "War, By The Numbers," which everybody should keep at hand when taking on the historically challenged:

The North had every advantage. The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,443,321. Of this, 9,000,000 people resided in the Southern states. This included 3,500,000 slaves, giving the South 5,500,000 white people from which to field their armies. According to John H. and David J. Eicher, the "Military Population" of the North (white males aged 18 through 45) was 3,954,776, as opposed to 1,064,193 for the South. Another roughly 191,000 black men served in the Union Army, as opposed to 80,000 to 96,000 in the Confederate Army. At their maximum extent, the Northern armies fielded more than 1,000,000 men. During the 1861 to 1865 period, 2,898,304 men served in the Union Army. That was 1,812,121 more troops than served in all of America's other wars combined up until that point. We do not know exactly how many men served in the Confederate Army because many Southern records were lost or destroyed at the end of the conflict. Estimates vary between 600,000 to more than a million, with 800,000 to 850,000 being commonly cited figures. General Cooper and Thornton H. Bowman, however, put the number at 600,000. It is unlikely that President Davis and his generals ever fielded more than 300,000 men at any one time. [This paragraph in Confederate Veteran includes footnotes 4 to 8]

The reason I have done this series on Mitcham's It Wasn't About Slavery is because he covers everything of historical value in a clear, concise manner. Nothing is left out.

People such as SCV seeking truth, have it with Mitcham in a thorough, well-argued narrative, which is highly quotable and powerful for any Southerner arguing against the fraud that comes out of academia and the news media in this day and age, an age defined by ignorant "wokeism" and those who push it (mostly the same ones pushing racist Critical Race Theory and the fraudulent 1619 Project).

BACK TO It Wasn't About Slavery, Chapter XIII, "Over the Edge," Part Two.

The Virginia secession convention was alarmed that "Lincoln's inaugural address had in it hints of coercion and usurpation of power, that Lincoln had rejected the Crittenden Compromise, and that he refused to meet with the Confederate peace delegation sent by President Davis" so they sent a peace commission of their own to meet with Lincoln and find out his views.

Virginia's peace commission was made up of "William B. Preston, Alexander H. H. Stuart, and George W. Randolph," all Union men:

'If our voices and votes are to be exerted farther to hold Virginia in the Union, we must know what the nature of that Union is to be . . . ' Mr. Preston declared. 'If the power of the United States is to be perverted to invade the right of States and of the people, we would support the Federal Government no farther.'¹

On "April 2, the very day Lincoln approved a secret act of war, 'Honest Abe' asked Seward to send Allan B. Magruder, the judge advocate of the U.S. Naval Court" to "confer" with "Stuart, Judge George W. Summers (a highly respected member of the Virginia Convention and a solid Union man), and convention president John Janney."²

Magruder was apparently on a mission to lie and mislead because he "told the Virginians that he was authorized by Seward to inform them that Fort Sumter would be evacuated on Friday of the following week."³

Magruder said Seward wanted Summers, Janney, or Stuart "to come to the White House for a secret meeting" at Lincoln's behest or with his consent, but they sent John B. Baldwin instead.

Baldwin was "smuggled" into Washington in the early morning and "driven to the home of Magruder's brother, Captain John B. Magruder, the future Confederate general, where he ate breakfast."

Allan Magruder "then conducted him by carriage (with windows carefully covered) to Seward, who took him to the White House."⁴

Around 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 4, Colonel Baldwin was told by a White House porter that he probably would not be able to see Lincoln because Lincoln was already meeting with "several important visitors."

The porter returned and "told the guards to admit Baldwin at once."⁵

Lincoln was in a meeting with "three or four elderly men" but ended the meeting "abruptly." Lincoln then

escorted Baldwin upstairs to a private bedroom and closed and locked the door. The president sat on the bed and asked the colonel about the true sentiments of the majority of the Virginia Convention delegates. He spat on the carpet from time to time throughout the interview.⁶

Baldwin told Lincoln Virginia would not secede "if the new administration respected the Constitution and did not abrogate the rights of any state. This would have included taking military action against the cotton states."

The disgusted Lincoln answered:

'your Virginia people are good Unionists, but it is always with an if! I don't like that sort of Unionism.'⁷

Baldwin then explained to Lincoln that "all free men could only be conditional Union men. When Unionism treated groups or sections of people unequally, the benefit of the Constitution was lost."⁸

Virginia had voted against Lincoln but Baldwin assured Lincoln Virginia would be loyal and help Lincoln keep the border states in the Union if he obeyed the Constitution.

Mitcham adds:

Secession, however, was a constitutional right, and Virginia did not believe the federal government had any right to coerce a state by force of arms.⁹

Lincoln continued thinking the South was blowing hot air, "'a game of brag,'" but Baldwin assured him that was not the case.

Lincoln must have been delusional to witness conventions of the people in seven Southern states as they thoroughly debated the one issue of seceding from the Union, then voted to do it. How could Lincoln still think they wanted to remain in his union?

Lincoln saw them set up a brand new nation on this earth, a continuance of the original American republic of the Founding Fathers with arguably a better constitution than the U.S. Constitution.

For example, the Confederate Constitution, in addition to outlawing protective tariffs and establishing a low 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a states' rights nation, also made it unconstitutional to tax one state then spend the money in another.

The Confederate Constitution was committed to free trade and it required bills to be properly labeled. The president would serve one six-year term so he was not constantly running for reelection.

Slavery was not required in the Confederate Constitution. Slavery was up to individual states.

The Confederate Constitution also allowed free states to join the Confederacy, which petrified Lincoln because several, especially along the Mississippi, were highly attracted to the South's low tariff and free trade economic philosophy. Why should those states pay high tariffs to enrich the North at the expense of the rest of the country?

Of course, Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history. He was president of the North and was looking out for the North only.

It is important to point out that while Baldwin was talking to Lincoln, there were more slave states in the Union than the Confederacy. There were nine in the Union, soon to be 10 with the admission of West Virginia as a slave state into the Union, while there were only seven in the Confederacy.

The nine Union slave states in early 1861 were Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee.

The seven Cotton States that seceded and formed the Confederate States of America were South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.

As Baldwin talked, Lincoln's eyes finally opened. Lincoln

slid off the edge of the bed and began nervously pacing back and forth. 'I ought to have known this sooner!' he snapped, clearly perplexed. 'You are too late, sir, too late! Whey did you not come here four days ago, and tell me all this?' There was a look of fury on the chief executive's face. He was now pacing furiously and grasping his hair as if he were about to pull it out by the roots. He was obviously highly agitated.¹⁰

Baldwin said he came as fast as he could but Lincoln said "'Yes, but you are too late, I tell you, too late!'"¹¹

Baldwin

took this to mean that coercion had been decided on within the last four days. Unlike Baldwin, Lincoln knew that there were four war expeditions already sailing south.¹²

Lincoln's advisors had convinced Lincoln that Southerners were so afraid of "servile insurrection" that they would back down and that would "solidify the Republican triumph at the polls" so what Lincoln should do is "force a confrontation."

Baldwin wanted a "'peaceful union proclamation'" that "would paralyze the secession movement"¹³ but Republican greed for money could not be satisfied by words or even blood. Colonel Robert Dabney, D.D.

recalled that 'the policy urged by Colonel Baldwin would have disappointed the hopes of legislative plunder, by means of inflated tariffs, which were the real aims for which free-soil was the mask.'"¹⁴

Lincoln wanted Baldwin to adjourn the Virginia Convention "sine die" since it had already voted down secession three times but Baldwin "rejected the idea out of hand."

He "sensed that Lincoln wanted war and tried to persuade him to let the south go peacefully."

He "pointed out the historical and economic ties it had to the North and predicted that they would eventually lead the Southern states back into the Union."¹⁵

Lincoln responded:

'And open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry with their 10% tariff? What, then, would become of my tariff?'¹⁶

Lincoln was shocked because he knew that "war, made inevitable by his actions, was about to start" unless he backed down.

Until now, he "did not think Virginia would leave and join the fight." Reverend Dabney later wrote that Lincoln "'had not manliness enough to recede.'"¹⁷

Colonel Baldwin lost respect for Lincoln because he realized Lincoln's "purpose in calling the meeting was not peace but to get the convention to adjourn. This would make it easier for the North to win the war by keeping Virginia from seceding with the other border states."¹⁸

The New York Herald saw through Lincoln too. On April 5 it editorialized:

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.¹⁹

Gideon Welles sent his orders to Captain Adams in Pensacola "via a special messenger, Lieutenant J. L. Worden, USN, who traveled by rail from Washington to Richmond to Augusta to Atlanta." Worden memorized Lincoln's war orders then burned them. He arrived midnight April 10 in Pensacola.²⁰

The next day "he met with Braxton Bragg, the Rebel commander in the Pensacola area and assured him he had a verbal message of a "pacific" nature for Captain Adams" so Bragg let him deliver it, which Worden could not do right away, due to bad weather.

Meanwhile, Union commander Israel Vogdes committed an act of war by breaking the armistice between Union and Confederate forces in Pensacola. He reinforced Fort Pickens "with a mixed marine/army battle group."²¹

Worden avoided Bragg and left Pensacola for Montgomery arriving the morning of April 13 where he was arrested. Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter so Bragg knew Worden's message for Adams was not "'pacific.'" Southerners held Worden as a POW and not spy, luckily for him.

Worden later commanded the USS Monitor in her famous battle with the CSS Virginia (aka Merrimac).

Events in Charleston now "raced to their conclusion":

Jefferson Davis, Governor Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, and Confederate brigadier general P. G. T. Beauregard, the commander of Southern forces in Charleston, had about enough of Abraham Lincoln's subterfuges. They were no fools, and they realized Lincoln and Seward were playing for time so that they could get their military forces in position to reinforce Forts Sumter and Pickens. . . .²²

Southern leaders realized Lincoln was determined to start the war: "Lincoln presently had five war expeditions in Southern waters or preparing to enter them."²³ He and Secretary of State Seward continued to lie to Southerners that the Fort Sumter garrison would be removed.

On Monday, April 8, Confederates "intercepted a letter from Major Anderson" Lincoln's commander inside Fort Sumter, to Lincoln through Secretary of War Cameron. Anderson, who was in the best position to know Lincoln's intent, ended his letter with:

'We shall strive to do our duty, though . . . my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.'²⁴

Anderson "sees" that the war is to be "thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln.

Southerners tried to avoid war until the last minute but the insidious Lincoln had arranged things so tightly they could not fail. Even if they had he would have arranged something else because he was determined to start his war. Every minute that went by, the South got stronger and the North got weaker. If Great Britain was to recognize the new Southern nation and offer military aid, the North would not be able to beat the South. Lincoln knew there was no reason whatsoever to wait even one second longer.

At 4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861, with all offers to evacuate rejected by Major Anderson at Lincoln's direction, and with multiple belligerent naval forces on the way to Southern destinations, Fort Sumter was bombarded by Confederates in Charleston Harbor for 34 hours:

Fort Sumter hauled down its flag on April 13. The fort was severely battered but, remarkably, there were no casualties. The formal surrender took place on April 14.²⁵

Anderson later wrote that they "'marched out of the fort Sunday afternoon the 14th instant, with colors flying and drums beating, bringing away company and private property, and saluting my flag with fifty guns.'"²⁶

On Monday, April 15, Abraham Lincoln officially started the War Between the States with "a proclamation declaring that an insurrection had begun . . . ." He "called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the 'rebellion.' This would be the largest military force ever assembled on the North American continent to that date."²⁷

Congress was not in session so the immoral Lincoln, rather than calling them back immediately, set a special session for July 4, almost three months away. He wanted to make sure the war was well underway and unable to be stopped before facing Congress.

The Virginia Peace Commission had gone to the White House April 12 and after a brief meeting with Lincoln were told to come back the next day, which they did. They urged forbearance and the evacuation of Fort Pickens and Fort Sumter but:

Lincoln objected because all the goods from Europe would be imported through the ports of Charleston, etc., and his sources of revenue would dry up. 'If I do that, [Lincoln stated to Commissioner Stuart] what will become of my revenue? I might as well shut up house-keeping at once!'²⁸

Virginia was ordered to "supply five regiments for the Union Army."

Virginia Governor John Letcher wrote to U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron the next day, April 16:

'You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the [Lincoln] Administration has exhibited toward the South.'²⁹

The next day, April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded voting 85 to 55 for secession. She was followed by Arkansas, May 6; North Carolina, May 20; and Tennessee, June 8.³⁰ The issue for these states was unquestionably federal coercion. They were horrified that Lincoln and the federal government would invade peaceful states and murder their citizens, which was clearly unconstitutional.

Mitcham writes that "The Northern public, unaware of what had happened behind the scenes, united behind the flag, just as Lincoln thought they would. Old Glory was fired on! It was time to forget political differences and rally behind the colors!"³¹

Mitcham writes that "President Davis made a serious miscalculation when he ordered his batteries to fire on Fort Sumter. He awakened a sleeping giant, and there would be hell to pay."³²

I must take slight issue with Dr. Mitcham's use of "serious miscalculation." What else was Jefferson Davis going to do? Lincoln was going to force the Cotton States back into the Union or face economic devastation of their own doing with horrible legislation such as the Morrill Tariff. The Morrill Tariff threatened to destroy the Northern shipping industry overnight because ship captains were comparing the South's 10% tariff with the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher, and they were heading South.

Lincoln thought it would be easy to whip the South because he had four times the white population of the South and maybe 200 times the armaments along with other enormous advantages.

Lincoln also knew that the South with British military aid would be unbeatable by the North.

A free trade South on the North's southern border with 100% control of King Cotton would be formidable, even devastating economic competition.

Preventing that was exactly what Lincoln was committed to. Again, Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history. He was president of the North so he was looking out for the North.

He could see that if the North could beat the South in a war, the North would rule the entire country. Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted that any state gaining control of the federal government, such as the North had now done, would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power.

Northern cities such as New York, Boston et al. would be rich as well as the cultural and economic leaders of our great country for all time or at least the foreseeable future, and that has been the exact case. That's what Lincoln and the North were fighting for, certainly not to end slavery.

Mitcham ends this chapter with a powerful illustration.

He asks rhetorically "was the Confederacy responsible for the start of the Civil War? After all, it did fire the first shot."

He then writes:

At 6:37 a.m. on the morning of December 7, 1941, the USS Ward, a 1,267-ton destroyer, spotted a Japanese submarine trying to sneak into Pearl Harbor. She attacked it with her main battle guns and depth charges and sank it. These were the first shots fired in the Battle of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese did not attack the U.S. naval base until 7:48 a.m.
Did the United States start World War II? After all, she did fire the first shot.
The answer to such rhetorical questions is, of course, "No." In each case, the aggressor did not literally fire the first shot, although they did plan for war and decided to launch aggressive actions, such as violating the territorial waters of their foe; . . .³³

Abraham Lincoln got his war and was pleased but "concerned that his friend, G. V. Fox, was depressed that his Fort Sumter mission had failed."

Lincoln wrote Fox on May 1 stating "'I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort Sumter should be the source of any annoyance to you . . . . '"

Lincoln continued:

'You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.'

Charles W. Ramsdell in his famous treatise, "Lincoln and Fort Sumter," gives additional powerful evidence. The usually tight-mouthed Lincoln confessed his entire plot to his friend Orville H. Browning in July, 1861, not knowing Browning would go back to his room later and put it all down in his diary. In his entry for July 3, 1861,³⁴ Browning wrote:

He told me that the very first thing placed in his hands after his inauguration was a letter from Majr Anderson announcing the impossibility of defending or relieving Sumter. That he called the cabinet together and consulted Genl Scott --- that Scott concurred with Anderson, and the cabinet, with the exception of P M Genl Blair were for evacuating the Fort, and all the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled those which intervened between this time and the fall of Sumter. He himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce giving notice of the fact to Gov Pickens of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter --- it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.

Mitcham concludes this outstanding chapter with a dramatic statement by Francis Key Howard, a grandson of Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner." People all over the North who opposed Lincoln's war were being arrested and Howard was one of them.

Mitcham points out that Howard was "ironically . . . incarcerated in Fort McHenry, Maryland" about which Francis Scott Key wrote his famous song. Howard wrote:

'When I looked out . . . I could not help being struck by an odd, and not pleasant coincidence. On that day, forty-seven years before, my grandfather, Mr. F. S. Key, then a prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort M'Henry. When, on the following morning, the hostile fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular throughout the country, 'The Star-spangled Banner' . . . The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving in the same place, over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.'³⁵

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Eleven: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part One)

NOTES:

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

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 143.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 144.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 145.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 146.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 146-147.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 147.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 148.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 149.

²⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 149-150.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 150.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 150-151.

²⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 151.

³⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 152.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid.

³³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 153.

³⁴ Charles W. Ramsdell, "Lincoln and Fort Sumter," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (August, 1937), 259-288. Ramsdell cites Browning's quote as coming from Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill., 1927) 1, 475-76.

³⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 154.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eleven: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part One

Posted on January 5, 2022January 5, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

MITCHAM GIVES US an exciting account in Chapter XIII of how Abraham Lincoln started the War Between the States, which ended up killing 750,000 men and maiming over a million.

Lincoln established the supremacy of the federal government over the states (remember, Yankees were the "federals" in the war) because he wanted the North with its larger population to control the federal government and thus the country.

On Tuesday, November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected and immediately Charlestonians raised the Palmetto flag "instead of the Stars and Stripes." A judge summed up the feeling in Charleston:

'the Temple of Justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is now closed. If it shall never again be opened I thank God that its doors have been closed before its altar has been desecrated with he sacrifices of tyranny.'¹

South Carolina's legislature "met in an unusual Saturday session on November 10" and "passed an act calling for a secession convention to begin in Columbia on December 17." Both of the state's U.S. senators resigned that same day, and the day after, "the South Carolina legislature voted to raise 10,000 volunteers for the defense of the state."²

Secession had been debated the entire previous year across the South but on December 20, 1860 it became reality. The Convention of the People of South Carolina revoked the state's 1788 ratification of the U.S. Constitution and voted 169-0 to secede, which began an ecstatic celebration in Charleston that went on for days.

Earlier, on December 10, "six South Carolina congressmen and President Buchanan met to discuss the military situation in Charleston" and came to a gentleman's agreement that neither would attack the other vis-a-vis the forts. The status quo was to stay the same.

Buchanan's word was no good just as Lincoln and Seward's were no good the following spring. The day after meeting with the South Carolina representatives Buchanan sent Major Don Carlos Buell (later a Union general) who was the War Department representative to meet with Major Anderson then in Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island. Buell told Anderson that "he had permission to abandon Fort Moultrie and transfer the garrison to Fort Sumter."³

Anderson knew Fort Moultrie was indefensible since it faced the harbor and was surrounded by local residences so "he quietly evacuated it on December 26, spiked his obsolete thirty-two-pounder guns, and took his men under cover of darkness to Fort Sumter, which was located on an uninhabited rock island in the middle of Charleston Harbor." Fort Sumter dominated the entrance to Charleston Harbor.⁴

A delegation from South Carolina went to Washington, D.C. at the same time to "obtain a peaceful settlement of all outstanding issues. Among other things, South Carolina was prepared to pay for its share of the public debt."⁵

Anderson's provocative act caused South Carolina forces to take over "the other harbor forts, including Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, on December 27."⁶

Military companies sprang up across the South and began "conducting drills in city parks and on the town squares." Northerners had not believed Southerners would secede but Northern greed and hatred had finally come home to roost. Southerners were "deadly serious."

By year end, and early 1861, Republican political strength plummeted "in the municipal elections. Even in Boston, Wendell Phillips needed police protection to return home."⁷ This is the same virtue-signaling abolitionist hate-monger with no solution for ending slavery, who had proclaimed that the Republican Party was the party of the North pledged against the South and was the first sectional party in American history.

South Carolina wanted Anderson to return to Fort Moultrie and Secretary of War John B. Floyd agreed. He warned that failure to do so "'invited a collision.'"⁸

There were several heated cabinet meetings at the end of the year, then Floyd resigned December 29th. On December 30th "South Carolina volunteers seized the Charleston Arsenal."⁹ President-elect Lincoln "claimed he 'yearned' for peace but took absolutely no steps to secure it."¹⁰

On January 9, 1861 Citadel cadets manning an artillery battery on Morris Island "fired on and drove off" the Star of the West, which had been sent to "reinforce and re-provision Fort Sumter":

The soldiers were hidden below deck [of the Star of the West], but the South Carolinians had been tipped off as to what was really happening by Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson of Mississippi. . . . Anderson continued to draw his supplies from the mainland of South Carolina, but he knew the secessionists could cut them off at any time.¹¹

Meanwhile, one of the greatest expressions of democratic republican government in history occurred as six other states in a landmass nearly the size of Europe called conventions, elected delegates as Unionists or Secessionists, then debated the single issue of secession just as the colonists had debated the single issue of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

They then voted one by one to secede from the federal Union that had become full of hate and tyranny, much more so than the British in 1776. The terrorism of violent criminals like John Brown, which was celebrated in the North, meant Southerners with their wives, children, their families, were targeted for murder, rape, arson, and every other unimaginable horror. Some thought that was the federal government's intent. They had no reason to think overwise.

So:

On January 9, Mississippi voted to secede by a vote of eighty-four to fifteen. The next day, Florida, voted sixty-two to seven to leave the Union. Alabama departed on January 11 by a vote of sixty-one to thirty-nine. Georgia seceded on January 19 after a vote of two hundred eight to eighty-nine. Louisiana left the Union on January 26 after a vote of one hundred thirteen to seven. Texas voted one hundred sixty-six to seven to secede on February 1. Governor Sam Houston tried to obstruct it and prevent Texas from joining the Confederacy. On March 16, he went to work and was shocked to find Lieutenant Governor Edward Clark sitting at his desk. The secession convention had deposed him. Lincoln offered him 50,000 troops to keep Texas in the United States, but like Robert E. Lee, Houston did not care to remain in a union held together by bayonets. He declined the offer and retired.¹²

Those seven states met in convention February 4, 1861 in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to the original American republic of the Founding Fathers with sovereign states in a loose federal union unlike the Northern tyranny that had developed. The most widely used phrase in the secession debate in the South during 1860 came from the Declaration of Independence:

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

On Friday, February 8, 1861 "they adopted a constitution and created the Confederate States of America." It outlawed protective tariffs that had allowed the North to enrich itself at the expense of the South via Robert Toombs's "suction pump" which constantly sucked wealth out of the South and deposited it in the North.

It prohibited internal improvement in one state paid for with tax money from another so never again would Southerners pay 85% of the taxes but have 75% of the tax money spent in the North.

The Confederate Constitution "outlawed the slave trade and allowed for the admission of non-slaveholding states" which petrified Abraham Lincoln since several free states especially along the Mississippi were attracted to the free-trade South with its low 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a states rights nation. This is in comparison to the North's soon-to-be-passed astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher because in a knee-jerk fashion, they had passed it thinking the South would have to pay it as it had in the past. However, the Morrill Tariff fell on Northerners because the South was now an independent nation.

Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi moderate with a distinguished record of service to the country was elected provisional president, and former Unionist, Alexander H. Stephens, "Little Alec," as Robert Toombs called his good friend, was elected provisional vice president. Stephens was a good friend of Lincoln's.

Independence "would give the South more leverage in dealing with domestic terrorism, as advocated by Lysander Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, and others."¹³

The Northern press at first accepted Southern secession and editors like Horace Greeley said "let the erring sisters go." He at first believed in the right of secession and wrote a long emotional editorial in support of it as South Carolina was seceding.

But he soon realized it would affect his money in a dramatic way so he changed his tune and wanted war as did most of the North:

They were told (accurately) that the free trade ports of New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and others would undercut the high duty ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. They predicted that the North would lose at least half of its commerce. The Southern economy was prosperous, and the industrial, commercial, and financial classes of the North did not want it to slip beyond their grasp. Simultaneously, Lincoln was insisting that he must have his tariffs. The withdrawal of the South meant that the federal government lost more than 85 percent of its tax base. Also, an independent South with an economy based on free trade would be devastating competition for the North. . . . Some Northern newspapers began advocating the use of military force to prevent this competitive situation.¹⁴

Lincoln spoke out of both sides of his mouth like a typical corrupt politician. He "spoke of how a house divided against itself could not stand and how the nation could not remain half slave and half free" while supporting the Corwin Amendment which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, where slavery already existed. He spoke of peace while he laid his plans "to trigger war" and he still "insisted on high tariffs."¹⁵ After all, Lincoln was president of the North as Wendell Phillips had proclaimed, not president of the whole country.

There were "two potential flashpoints in the spring of 1861: Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens, the last located on Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola harbor, Florida."

Fort Pickens had federal troops inside and "a naval force" outside but they were "outnumbered by Florida volunteers" who held Pensacola.

Florida could have taken the fort but an armistice "was agreed on January 29 and remained in effect until Lincoln broke the agreement in April":

U.S. Captain Israel Vogdes of the First Artillery Regiment was the commander of a Union force aboard the USS Brooklyn. He and his men were supposed to reinforce the fort but stopped at the Pensacola sandbar. When he learned of the armistice, Vogdes returned to his vessel.¹⁶

The armistice was honored until:

March 12 when, at Lincoln's command, General Scott sent Captain Vogdes an order: 'At the first favorable moment, you will land your company, reinforce Fort Pickens, and hold the same until further orders.' This order was in direct violation of the armistice of January 29 and was an act of war---issued only eight days after Honest Abe became president.¹⁷ (Bold emphasis added.)

Vogdes "did not receivce the order until March 31." He then requested help from Capt. Henry A. Adams of the USS Sabine but Adams knew Lincoln's order would start a war.

Adams wrote to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles:

'I can not take on myself under such insufficient authority as General Scott's order to the fearful responsibility of an act which seems to render civil war inevitable . . . '¹⁸ (Bold emphasis added.)

"In his report to the secretary of the Navy," Adams wrote:

'It would be considered not only a declaration but an act of war, and would be resisted to the utmost.'¹⁹ (Bold emphasis added.)

Adams went on:

'At present both sides are faithfully observing the agreement [armistice] entered into by the U.S. Government and Mr. [Stephen] Mallory and Colonel [William Henry] Chase. This agreement binds us not to reinforce Fort Pickens unless it shall be attacked or threatened. It binds them not to attack it unless we attempt to reinforce it.'²⁰

Huger W. Johnstone later wrote: "'Captain Adams averted open war on April 1, 1861, by refusing to obey this [Lincoln's] order.'"

Mitcham writes that Captain Adams must have "thought Welles did not understand the situation at Pensacola and did not want to start a war. It did not occur to him [Adams] that starting a war was exactly what Welles wanted to do."²¹

On April 6 Welles reprimanded Adams and "made it clear that he and the administration wanted war":

'Your dispatch of April 1 is received,' he wrote. 'The Department regrets that you did not comply with the request of Capt. Vogdes. You will immediately on the first favorable opportunity after receipt of this order, afford every facility to Capt. Vogdes to enable him to land the troops under his command, it being the wish and intention of the Navy Department to co-operate with the War Department, in that object.'²²

The situation at Fort Sumter was perhaps even more ominous.

In Washington, D.C. "on February 6, Lincoln's agent, Gustavus V. Fox, met with Lieutenant Norman J. Hall, who was sent from Fort Sumter by Major Anderson. They discussed relieving the fort."²³

Several more conferences occurred then:

Fox wrote General Scott on March 8, informing him that Hall was bringing the relief plans to Major Anderson if the Rebels would let him back into the fort. The Lincoln administration (including, among others, Lincoln, Fox, Hall, and Montgomery Blair, the newly designated postmaster general) was clearly scheming to relieve Fort Sumter before February 6, and these plans were well advanced by Inauguration Day.²⁴

Confederate commissioners in Washington were lied to and told repeatedly that Fort Sumter would be evacuated though Lincoln's plan all along was to reinforce it, which he knew would start the war. On March 29, Lincoln sent a dispatch to Welles stating:

'I desire that an expedition, to move by sea be got ready to sail as early as the 6th of April . . . ' His memo called for three ships of war (the Pocahontas, the Pawnee, and the Harriet Lane) to enter Confederate territorial waters, carrying 200 reinforcements with one year's stores.²⁵

Lincoln was determined to start the war somewhere so if Fort Sumter failed, of course he had Fort Pickens.

General Scott on April 2, "sent a remarkable order, dated April 1, to Brevet Colonel Harvey Brown at Fort McHenry, Maryland" commanding Brown to "take command of an expedition to reinforce and hold Fort Pickens." It was signed by Winfield Scott and Abraham Lincoln.²⁶

Mitcham writes:

President do not ordinarily approve orders like this from generals, but Scott knew it would violate the truce with the Confederates, who would undoubtedly fire on the ships and inaugurate civil war. It is obvious that he needed or wanted Lincoln's co-signature before he committed an act of war. He wanted future generations to know that the decision to go to war was Lincoln's, not his. Lincoln not only signed the order, but he also issued a second order (also dated April 1) to 'All officers of the Army and Navy' to aide Brown and co-operate with him as needed. The president signed this order himself.²⁷ (Bold emphasis added.)

Five military missions were now "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; and
5) Porter's Expedition, also steaming for Pensacola.²⁸

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Twelve

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part Two

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Ten: Chapter XII, Lincoln and His Agenda)

NOTES:

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

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 131.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 131-132.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 132.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 132-133.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 133.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 134.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 134-135.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 135.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 136-137.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 137.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 137-138.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 138.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 138-139.

²² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 139.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 141.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142.

²⁸ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

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

Posted on December 29, 2021December 29, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 4 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Ten

Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lincoln's contemporaries and associates were frank:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spooner wrote after the war:

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

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

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

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Nine: Chapter XI, The Real Cause of the War)

NOTES:

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

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

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

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

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

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

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

⁸ Ibid.

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

¹⁰ Ibid.

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

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

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

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

¹⁵ Ibid.

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

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

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

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

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

Posted on December 22, 2021December 22, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Nine

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

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

The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.---Charles Dickens, 1862
No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.---Shelby Foote, American historian
For the love of money is the root of all evil. . . .---1 Timothy 6:10

Mitcham opens Chapter XI with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it worked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitcham writes:

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

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Ten

Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

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

NOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

⁶ Ibid.

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

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

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

¹¹ Ibid.

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

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

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

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

¹⁶ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

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

Posted on December 15, 2021December 16, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Eight

Chapter X
The Election of 1860

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Didn't matter. Republicans wanted more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitcham writes:

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

The VP nominee was Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.

The Republican platform:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mitcham writes about the South:

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

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

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

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

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

Mitcham is correct when he writes:

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

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

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

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Nine

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Seven: Chapter IX, John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod)

NOTES:

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

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

² Ibid.

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

⁴ Ibid.

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

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

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

⁸ Ibid.

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

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

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

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

¹⁴ Ibid.

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

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

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 One Foreword, Preface

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV The Costs and Results of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

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

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fourteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV

The Costs and Results of the War

NOTES:

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

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part Two

NOTES:

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

It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Twelve

Chapter XIII Over the Edge Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part One

NOTES:

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

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII Over the Edge Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

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

It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Ten

Chapter XII Lincoln and His Agenda

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII Over the Edge

NOTES:

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

It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

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

Part Nine

Chapter XI The Real Cause of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

Part One
Foreword, Preface

Chapter XV
The Costs and Results of the War

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

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

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

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

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

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part Two

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

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

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part One

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

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge

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

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

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

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

Chapter X
The Election of 1860

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

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

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book