South Carolina Secession, the Powder Keg
Carolinian slaveholders played a crucial role in the rise of southern separatism and proslavery thought. Carolinian planter politicians articulated the rationale for southern independence. Secession was a departure from politics as usual and the people of South Carolina exhibited an exceptional commitment to the politics of secession.[1195] Southern politicians, planters and slaveholders led the secession movement. Small slaveholding farmers and the yeomen living in the plantation belt followed the elite planters in South Carolina. Yeomen did not instigate the secession or formulate the political ideology behind it.[1196] Thomas Cooper, a Jacobin from Manchester, England, influenced those elite planters decades before they actually implemented secession.
Cooper supported the French Revolution (1789-1799) and pledged solidarity with Robespierre, a
Freemason.[1197] The revolution had its foundation within the Bavarian Illuminati, which “combined
doctrine” with a bloody revolution. The Jacobins advocated that same pattern thereafter.[1198] Robespierre,
a disciple of Weishaupt, allegedly belonged to one of the Illuminati lodges founded by Weishaupt and
embraced his objective of a widespread social revolution and considered disorder and anarchy as a
means to restructure society according to a system known later as Socialism.[1199] Jacobin clubs found great
popularity in France among the so-called enlightened elite. According to author Douglas Reed, the
Jacobins “presided over the Reign of Terror” and “like the Russian revolution 130 years later, those
organizing the revolution in France then displayed their hatred of religion, the poor and the defenseless
more than they detested the rich.[1200] The Jacobin Club had thousands of chapters throughout France with at
least 420,000 members. This secret society is notorious among the more astute students of history for
implementing the Reign of Terror, characteristic of the Revolution, and the September Massacres (1792).
[1201]
Robespierre was a member of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, also known as the secretive Jacobin Club,[1202] formed in 1786 with such early members as Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, Abbé Sieyès, Antoine Barnave, Jérôme Pétion, the Abbé Grégoire, Charles Lameth (Society of Thirty[1203]), and Alexandre Lameth, all allegedly part of the Illuminati.[1204] Thomas Cooper was an honorary member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, founded in 1781 in Manchester.[1205] Thomas Walker and Cooper co-founded the Manchester Constitutional Society, perhaps an Illuminati front, modeled after the Jacobins. Cooper, a born agitator, was a brilliant barrister and a research chemist in the Manchester textile industry.[1206]
Walker sent Cooper and James Watt to Paris to establish a relationship with other constitutional societies. [1207] On April 13, 1792, Cooper and Watt, during their four-month visit, addressed a meeting of the Society of Friends of the Constitution in Paris. The Jacobins sent an appreciation letter to the Manchester Constitutional Society the following day.[1208] On April 30, 1792, Edmund Burke addressed the House of Commons and revealed that Walker had sent two traitorous English agents, referring to Cooper and Watt, to France to enter into a federation with the “iniquitous” Club of Jacobins.[1209] Authorities tried Walker and other members for treason in April 1794.[1210]
Cooper, a British Jacobin, had visited America for a few months in 1793 and in 1794, he returned with his family, settling in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. In 1795, he became a citizen and officials admitted him to the Northumberland Bar. Between 1793 and 1798, according to the French consular estimates, as many as 25,000 Jacobins found refuge in the U.S. Concurrently, Irish Freemasons also flocked to America. Some Americans perceived this massive immigration as dangerous to the nation, which generated the Naturalization Act of 1798. It extended the required period of residence for citizenship. The Alien Act allowed the President the power to expel foreigners.[1211] On April 9, 1800, authorities indicted Cooper and vigorously prosecuted him under the Sedition Act of July 14, 1798. Federalist Supreme Court Judge Samuel Chase found Cooper guilty on May 1, 1800. Judge Chase fined him $400 and imprisoned him for six months. His wife died while he was in a federal prison.[1212] [1213] Judge Chase, then an Anti- Federalist, was a signatory on the Declaration of Independence. He was the main architect of Maryland’s 1776 constitution. He lost his seat, along with his reputation, in the Continental Congress because he attempted to monopolize the flour market in 1778 during the time that Congress authorized the purchasing of flour for the troops.[1214]
A decade later, on August 7, 1811, Cooper became head of the chemistry department at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He also taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1818-1819). By 1820, Dr. Cooper moved to South Carolina where he taught at the South Carolina College, now the University of South Carolina. In 1821, the board of trustees elected him president of the college. He remained president until 1834 when others began opposing his liberal religious views, actually for being an atheist. Though he had earlier opposed slavery, he soon began to defend rather than apologize for it, saying that it was beneficial to both master and slave.[1215] This atheist justified slavery because it “is encouraged throughout the whole of the Scriptures from beginning to end.”[1216] Cooper influenced many future South Carolina politicians, including two governors – William Henry Gist and Francis W. Pickens,[1217] both members of the secretive Clariosophic Literary Society, founded on February 21, 1806. John C. Calhoun was also a member. Other significant names in the club included Huger, Porcher, Miles, Bonham, Richardson, Lowndes, Boyce, Simkins, and Carroll.[1218] Often literary societies were allegedly Illuminati front groups. Pickens was a staunch defender of slavery and a radicalized activist for state’s rights and asserted that whatever action, including war, was preferable to a “government of unlimited powers.”[1219] Pickens and other students studied states’ rights ideology under Cooper and embraced his dogma.[1220] Pickens would later address the Clariosophic Society on February 2, 1827 during which he said, “The great talents of the nation are drawn into politics. There is nothing that has so strong a charm for ambition as power in government.”[1221]
The South Carolina College was a veritable spawning ground of the state’s planter politicians. Cooper’s students were well versed in the tenets of pro-slavery, states’ rights, and free trade. Cooper, an avowed atheist, even used the scriptures to justify slavery.[1222] He was quick to point out that Jefferson was a slaveholder. He also argued that the founders did not intend to apply the principles of the Declaration to the “black race,” a premise evidenced by the reality of their circumstances.[1223]
Cooper, now a planter, and Robert J. Turnbull, linked the tariff to slavery and were early proponents of
southern nationalism. Cooper claimed, with some justification, that the tariffs were a conspiracy to destroy the South and led the opposition against Congress’s revenue policy.[1224]
Cooper denounced the prohibitive taxes of the Tariff Act of 1824, engineered through Congress by Henry Clay. It imposed taxes upon the South which made the agrarian residents, producers of raw materials, into “colonists and tributaries” for the manufacturing interests. Clay promoted the American System, a yoke upon the South, comprised of high protective tariffs, a national bank and government-funded roads and canals for the North, all financed by the subservient South with no resultant benefits. Cooper argued that according to the Constitution, Congress has a right to regulate commerce but that did not justify the “gross inequities of the protective system,” designed to price-protect certain industries and foster retaliation from foreign nations. Cooper wished the northern manufacturers well but reiterated that they did not warrant any special advantages.[1225]
Cooper justifiably maintained that the North was seizing wealth and power. He gave a premature disunion speech wherein he stated that the South, in an unequal alliance, had always been the loser.[1226] At the anti- Woolens tariff meeting in Columbia, South Carolina in July 1827, Cooper asked, “Is it worth our while to continue this Union of States, where the North demands to be our masters and we are required to be their tributaries?”[1227] Cooper characterized the tariff issue as a struggle between the elite planters of the South and the manufacturers of the North. He cautioned that, not only were the southerners shifting their wealth to the North but also their political power. He said, “We shall ‘ere long be compelled to calculate the value of our union; and to enquire what use to us is this most unequal alliance? By which the south has always been the loser, the north always the gainer?”[1228] Author William Freehling referred to Thomas Cooper as the Professor of Revolution as he had supported the organizers of the French Revolution. As an influential college professor and president, Cooper, the experienced anarchist, inculcated the senior class in revolutionary philosophy and trained them to become “young rebels.” This European émigré declared that a revolution was brewing down South that “might rival the French.”[1229]
On October 5, 1860, South Carolina Governor William H. Gist, a Cooper disciple, sent confidential letters to all of the cotton state governors except Texas stating that his state would likely secede if Lincoln won the election. He asked for their support. His letters included a definitive comparison of the resources of the north and the south by category: the number of acres, livestock, slaves, cotton, food crops, population, males of military age, and manufacturers. The statistical realities were definite factors when considering secession and southern independence.[1230]
In November 1860, after Lincoln’s election, a crowd of citizens gathered in Crawfordville, Georgia to dissent against a potential war. Lincoln’s election did not justify disunion or secession. Mass meetings in other southern areas reflected the same sentiments. Regardless, secessionists continued to promote their cause against all opposition. The “plain folk” objected. However, those with influence and a voice, like Georgia Senator Toombs who said “but whoever waited for the common people when a great move was to be made – we must make the move and force them to follow.” The majority of the south was unsupportive but the secessionists had the power, money and influence and often hired thuggish, intimidating provocateurs to disrupt meetings assembled by the opposition.[1231]
Before January 1861, the New York Tribune declared, “The South Carolina secessionists openly proclaim their intention of treading the stars and stripes under foot. The only security the President can have that Fort Moultrie will not be violently seized upon is the presence of a force sufficient to protect it.”[1232] The South had not exhibited a shred of violence. South Carolina was not representative of the south. Its peculiarly anti-democratic political structure, statewide plantation belt, and lack of a two party political system set it apart from other southern states. These features placed the state’s slaveholding aristocracy at the top of southern separatism – leading proponents of a slave-based identity and preeminent propagandists for secession. Carolinian planter politicians were not in the political mainstream, but as separatist agitators, they defined the issues of sectional crisis.[1233]
A small number of elite planters owned most of the slaves. In subsequent years, the concentrated ownership of slaves encouraged northern Republican leaders to underestimate the popularity of secession and Southern independence. This was also true during and especially after the war when the North verbally battered the South with antislavery sentiments as the Union’s great humanitarian rationale. The North used hypocritical rhetoric to counter opposition to Lincoln’s 10% plan for Reconstruction and his plans for land and resource confiscation and other forms of federal interference in the South.[1234]
The Confederate Constitutional Convention opened in February 1861. People called Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina the “Father of Secession” for initiating his state’s secession. Southern manufacturers resisted the states’ rights proponents as the South did a big business with the North. In February 1861, individuals drafted the Southern Confederate constitution in Montgomery and called for “no encouragement to domestic industry.”[1235] The Confederate leadership was composed of cotton planters who were so blinded by their resentment of Northern commercialism that they failed to recognize their inabilities to adequately feed and clothe Confederate troops. Therefore, on February 26, 1861, the Confederacy established the position of Quartermaster General, charged with disbursing monies designated to equip men for warfare. Abraham Charles Myers, the first Quartermaster General devised strict regulations and policies for Southern manufacturers.[1236]
Myers, with his increasing power and authority, held a “guardianship” over all Southern manufacturing. Such government power over the private sector bordered on “military socialism” with Myers, approved by Congress, as the dominant factor in assuming “control of all workers of military age.” He exempted workers, imposed price and profit controls on manufacturers and impressed commodities and livestock. In the fall of 1862, with the repeal of the Commutation System, he took control of almost all military supplies in the confederacy.[1237] The Commutation System had mandated that soldiers procure their own uniforms, either locally or nationally, and the Confederate Government would reimburse the cost.
Access to northern markets ended with secession as the Union quickly imposed an economic blockade. All banks, except those in Louisiana, suspended specie payments.[1238] By spring 1862, the Confederate government requested New Orleans banks to use Confederate currency and send their specie out of the city.[1239] Senator Toombs, a Freemason, a lawyer and a slaveholding planter, was in the Georgia House of Representatives (1838, 1840-1841, 1843-1844), and in the U.S. House of Representatives (1844-1853). Up until Lincoln’s election, Toombs, a former Whig, was a Unionist totally opposed to secession. Two days after South Carolina seceded; he sent a telegram to officials in Georgia, “secession by the 4th of March next should be thundered forth from the ballot-box by the united voice of Georgia.”
Seven states declared their secession before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, South Carolina (December 20, 1860), Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Four more states seceded after the events at Fort Sumter, on April 12, 1861, and Lincoln’s subsequent call for troops on April 15 – Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. In order to assist him in his reelection bid in 1864, Lincoln allowed the northwestern portion of Virginia to secede from Virginia, joining the Union as the new state of West Virginia on June 20, 1863.
Harriet’s Hateful Propaganda
Authors Anthony Pratkanis and Elliott Aronson, in The Age of Propaganda wrote, “Propaganda involves the dexterous use of images, slogans and symbols that play on our prejudices and emotions; it is the communication of a point of view with the ultimate goal of having the recipient of the appeal come to ‘voluntarily’ accept this position as if it were his or her own.”[1240] Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, fomented hatred between the North and South with her highly volatile, prejudicial and unsubstantiated novel. Yes, it was a novel, not a documentary examination of the South and the institution of slavery. What was the deep-seated motivation behind her passion-filled, colloquialized literary efforts? Revealingly, large banking houses in the U.S. and Europe paid for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s vicious pen.[1241]
Novels, like many television shows or Hollywood movies, are the most benign form of propaganda yet they have functioned very effectively as propaganda because people subconsciously accept fiction, portrayed in a novel or movie, as if their writers and producers had based their creation on absolute fact. While there might be a modicum of truth or accuracy in some novels, shows or movies, we must remember that there is no such thing as valueless entertainment; everything, whether non-fiction and especially fiction has an objective. Unfortunately, people, when enjoying something purportedly entertaining, have their guard down and do not expect people to manipulate their values and dispense false information. Writers compose books, articles, essays, novels with a particular agenda. It is up to the reader to dispassionately accept or reject certain portions or an entire work or to be a critical student and discern the truth through his/her own investigation and conclusions.
So-called documentaries or fact-based movies attest to this human peculiarity in contemporary society. Novels that portray fiction based on fact include Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Contemporary novels that have accelerated hatred include Dr. Miklos Nyiszli’s Auschwitz, a Doctor’s Eyewitness Account that, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, editors initially serialized in a popular newspaper. To gain popular support, effective propaganda transforms a controversy into a “cause” and then recruits role-model-style backers.[1242]
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father, Lyman Beecher, was a theological innovator who attended Yale Divinity School as a Calvinist Timothy Dwight protégé. In 1832, Reverend Beecher moved his family from Boston to Cincinnati where he became the first president of Lane Theological Seminary, established in the Walnut Hills section of Cincinnati in 1829 to teach Presbyterian ministers. By 1833, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, wealthy New York merchants, were financially backing Lane Theological Seminary. Their trustees were “conservative” Cincinnati merchants with financial interests in the south. Blacks wishing to settle in Bucktown, a black Cincinnati community were required to pay a $500 bond within thirty days to guarantee their good behavior. When several black new arrivals asked for an extension of this relatively huge fee, the whites rampaged through Bucktown, the site of the riots in 1829. Outraged citizens killed one black individual and injured dozens of others. Almost half the community left for Canada.
In 1834, when Reverend Beecher, Calvin E. Stowe and other faculty members were absent the students debated the controversial race issue, a subject that had been banned by the Executive Committee. Seminary administrators fired Professor John Morgan because he was sympathetic to the students. Thirty- nine dissenting students left Lane Theological to attend Oberlin College, about 200 miles away. Oberlin agreed to hire John Morgan to teach the History of the Christian Church, (1835-1837), as requested by the Lane students. The Lane administrators hired Charles Grandison Finney, a Freemason, to teach theology at Lane Theological.[1243]
Oberlin residents protested this incursion of students who felt that blacks should have educational equality. While many applauded and supported abolition, they were not interested in actually socializing, attending school or in having blacks live in their community. They also did not believe or advocate
political or social equality for the blacks. There was one black resident in Lorain County in 1834 and no black ever applied for admission to Oberlin. It was one thing to grant blacks certain legal protections and to view slavery as a sin. However, local white residents saw blacks as unequal to whites in intelligence, physical stamina and ambition.[1244]
Reverend Beecher’s primary ambition was to persuade other Ohio residents to his point of view regarding morality and a particular style of education. He said, “The moral destiny of our nation, and all its institutions and hopes, and the world’s hopes, turns on the character of the West...and the competition now is for that of preoccupancy in the education of the rising generation, in which Catholics and infidels havegotthestartofus.”[1245] In1835,BeecherwroteAPleafortheWest,warningProtestantsofaCatholic conspiracy to dominate the Mississippi Valley.[1246]
In 1836, Reverend Beecher’s daughter, Harriet married widower Calvin E. Stowe, a graduate of Andover Theological Seminary and a hypochondriac biblical scholar who taught at Lane Theological Seminary (1830-1840). He advocated a public school system and urged Ohio to adopt a state-backed compulsory educational system like Prussia’s, as described in John Griscom’s book A Year in Europe (1819) in which Griscom praised the Prussian school system and the ideas of Pestalozzi, the Illuminist.[1247] Pestalozzi’s “illuminati-inspired” teaching methods, perpetuated by his many students, greatly affected “the Western educational establishment.”[1248]
Ohio Governor Robert Lucas, a Freemason[1249], commissioned Stowe to travel to Europe to examine and evaluate the Prussian school system. He left in June 1836, was gone for eight months, and attended classes in Württemberg and Prussia.[1250] He would visit Germany again in 1853.[1251] While in Germany, he visited with scholars and theologians, researched the Prussian school system, and then compiled his conclusions in the Report on Elementary Instruction in Europe, which the state government sent to every school district in Ohio. Stowe also purchased eight boxes of books, 5,000 volumes, for the Lane Seminary library. Many of the books were about German theology. He was absolutely enthralled with Germany and German customs[1252] and greatly influenced by Germany’s religious liberalism, a product of the enlightenment. His father-in-law, Reverend Beecher, was similarly impressed with the Prussian school model. Protestant theologians intended to use the system to maintain the Protestant character of American culture against what they viewed as the influence of the onslaught of Catholic immigration.[1253] Stowe, in his report, urged Ohioans to dismiss sectarian disparities and unite against the Catholics.[1254]
During the Stowe family’s eighteen years in Cincinnati, they associated with many of the local anti- slavery leaders including Salmon P. Chase who supported the establishment of a national non-partisan anti-slavery group. Chase, a Dartmouth graduate, had moved to Cincinnati from Washington in 1830 after studying law under U.S. Attorney General William Wirt.[1255] Reverend Beecher officiated at the marriage ofCatherineJaneGarnissandSalmonP.ChaseonMarch4,1834.[1256] Unfortunately,Catherinediedayear later in childbirth.[1257]
Apparently, to augment the family’s meager income, Harriet Beecher Stowe began writing, focusing on inculcating moralistic Christian values.[1258] She based her first attempt at writing on a fictionalized character named Sam, Immediate Emancipation: a Sketch, which appeared in the New York Evangelist on January 2, 1845. To avoid antagonizing Southerners by obvious personal attacks, Stowe used dramatically vivid, emotionally charged fiction to convince her audience that what she was writing was factual.[1259] She consistently employed skillfully crafted literary devices to evoke outrage and absolute empathy in her readers for the fictitious characters she created. She allegedly based her next anti-slavery effort, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, on the memoirs of Reverend Josiah Henson, a Freemason.
Chase persuaded Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, a lecturer of physiology at Lane Theological Seminary, to become the editor of a national anti-slavery Washington-based newspaper, The National Era, which began
publication in January 1847. Bailey used the newspaper to advocate Chase’s concept of a new anti- slaverysocietycoalition.[1260] ThenewspaperhelpedradicalizetheNorthernabolitionmovement.
Reverend Stowe resigned his position at Lane Theological Seminary and moved his family to Brunswick, Maine where he had accepted the assignment of teaching religion at Bowdoin College (1850-1852) where Harriet began writing in Bowdoin’s Appleton Hall. In 1852, Reverend Stowe then accepted a position at Andover Theological Seminary (1852-1864), co- founded by Timothy Dwight in 1807. Dr. Bailey, after the Stowe’s arrival in Maine, sent a note and $100 to Harriet Stowe asking her to write a serialized anti- slavery story for The National Era, the newspaper that was financed by Lewis Tappan, a Chase crony.[1261] The first part in the series appeared on June 5, 1851 and the last part appeared on April 1, 1852. He thought the series would consist of three or four parts but it ended with forty-one installments.[1262] When Stowe completed the series, Bailey paid her an additional $100 for a total of $400, a little over three times the yearly expense of renting the house in Brunswick ($125).[1263]
Apparently, given the publication date, another publishing opportunity, in addition to The National Era, was already in process. J. P. Jewett Company (John) of Boston published Stowe’s serial, Uncle Tom’s Cabin on March 20, 1852. Southerners hated the mass-marketed novel because it was sensationalized fiction, and a flawed portrayal of Southern slavery designed to provoke a predictable response. This highly emotional, atrocity story also created numerous negative stereotypes about black people.[1264] Topsy, Eliza, Uncle Tom, and the despicable and sadistic slave driver Simon Legree, and the slave executioners Sambo and Quimbo deceptively characterized all Southerners. Stowe became a national and international celebrity who later helped found the prestigious Atlantic Monthly magazine.[1265]
Salmon P. Chase financially assisted Bailey when his health and finances failed. He also persuaded other antislavery allies to make “loans” to Bailey to cover his $5,000 indebtedness. He continued these efforts, in the widow’s behalf, after Bailey’s death in mid-1859 after the National Era discontinued publication. [1266] As late as June 8, 1863, he instructed Jay Cooke to add $1,000 to the $4,500 he had already given to Mrs. M. L. Bailey, the widow of Dr. Bailey.[1267]
Author John Remington Graham wrote, “Mrs. Stowe was a blatant propagandist. If she was sincere, she
was misguided. If she was motivated by altruism, she found it lucrative, for she earned fabulous
royalties.” Her unscholarly book revealed her “intestinal hatred” for Southerners. She depicted rare
exceptions of slave abuse as “the normal, approved and routine practice of the South,” a place she had
never even visited. Her book convinced Northerners “that slavery was a system of whipping, selling out
families, cruel murder, heinous brutality, impotent virtue, triumphant evil, in short an unending hell which
was suffered by poor blacks at the hands of sadistic whites.” The outraged Northerners forgot all about
Uncle Tom but were inflamed by “damaging falsehoods.”[1268] In her melodramatic climax, she had the
sadistic Simon Legree murder the kindly Uncle Tom who pleads, Mas’r, if you was sick, or in trouble, or
dying, and I could save ye, I’d give ye my heart’s blood...O, Mas’r, don’t bring this great sin on your soul.[1269]
Reader response to Stowe’s book was robust from the beginning. Booksellers sold about 305,000 copies
by the first anniversary of the book’s publication. She wanted her readers to feel outrage and injustice,
which many of those soldiers who enlisted in the Union Army exhibited during the bloodiest war in U.S.
history. Her novel was possibly the most decisive tear-jerking, emotion-provoking propaganda novel ever
written.[1270] Evidently, Calvin Stowe made substantial contributions to his wife’s novel. He was quite
familiar with Hegelian dialecticism, perhaps because of his eight-month trip to Prussia in 1836. Author
W. B. Allen claims that a thorough reading of Calvin Stowe’s work indicates his familiarity with Hegel.
[1271]
Upon meeting Harriet Stowe at the White House, Lincoln said, “Why, Mrs. Stowe, right glad to see you!”
Then with a humorous twinkle in his eye, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!”[1272] Harriet Stowe wrote in her memoirs, “Probably no ruler ever made a more profoundly and peculiarly Christian impression on the mind of the world than Lincoln. In his religious faith two leading ideas were prominent from first to last – man’s helplessness, both as to strength and wisdom, and God’s helpfulness in both.”[1273]
Under the direction of this faux “Christian” ruler, at least 622,000 people died needlessly and over a million people suffered serious wounds. The public debt in 1860 was $75,985,299, about the same as the debt incurred by the Revolutionary War. By the end of the war, the public debt was about $4,000,000,000 with interest of about $292,000,000 or 7.3%.[1274]
The Forty-Eighters, Marxists in America
On October 13, 1843, in Sinsheimer’s Café in New York City, three years before the Mexican-American War and almost twenty years before the second revolution in America, the one people call the Civil War, a small group of German immigrants, many of them Freemasons, organized the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith (Sons of the Covenant), one of the oldest operating Jewish organizations in the world. By 1855, they had established twenty lodges in various sections of the country. They stopped using German as the official language at their meetings, as they wanted an Americanized membership and program.[1275] Those Freemasons were Henry Jones, Isaac Rosenbourg, William Renau, Reuben Rodacher, Henry Kling, Isaac Dittenhoefer, Jonas Hecht and a few other German-Jewish immigrants. Some of their “noble” objectives were to secure equal treatment of everyone (who was Jewish) and to end criticism and discrimination in America. In October 1913, through the instrumentality of Sigmund Livingston, a Jewish attorney, the B’nai B’rith founded the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), headquartered in New York, an international non-governmental organization (NGO), to thwart criticism and discrimination on an international basis. They founded it just before they created the Federal Reserve and just prior to World War I, again to inhibit criticism of their activities.
About 500,000 Germans immigrated to the U.S. following the unsuccessful socialist revolutions in 1848 and 1849. Unlike the Germans who had immigrated some fifty or more years before, the majority of the Germans who arrived in the U.S. after 1848 were former Marxist revolutionaries and socialists who embraced his revolutionary philosophy and the Jacobean ideas popularized before and during the French Revolution. Some of the new immigrants had actually participated in the revolutions. Two are quite notable, Carl Schurz and Joseph Goldmark, Louis Brandies’ father-in-law. Schurz became a Union Army General, a U.S. Senator from Missouri (1869-1875) and later, the Secretary of the Interior (1877-1881).
Most German immigrants prior to 1848 were mainly composed of farmers, a mixture of Lutherans and various small sects, most of whom were pious Christians. Conversely, the radical Forty-Eighters came to the U.S. for its socialist promises, such as free land as was represented by the Homestead movement. The majority of these new immigrants settled in cities, were rootless, with no particular attraction for a homeland. They were urban, more educated, less willing to work and more apt to look to the welfare state. They were often irreligious and even atheistic and they were intent on converting their fellow German-Americans, those who had previously settled in the U.S. to their socialistic way of thinking.[1276]
Many of the Forty-Eighters were intimately associated with Marx and endorsed his leadership. These included Fritz Anneke, Gottfried Theodore Kellner, Hermann Meyer, Friedrich Adolph Sorge, and Joseph Weydemeyer and others. They found their niche in U.S. radicalism. Gottfried Theodore Kellner received his Ph.D. from Göttingen University. Since many were highly educated, they established newspapers like Der Kommunist (1852) in Cleveland; Milwaukee Volksfreund; the Die Revolution in New York; Turnzeitung of New York; and the Neu England Zeitung of Boston; the Illinois Staatszeitung; Neue Zeit in St. Louis; Die Republik der Arbeiter
in New York; the Westfälisches Dampfboot, the Triersche Zeitung, Die Reform, and the Philadelphia Demokrat and the Staatszeitung in Chicago, the New Yorker-Abendzeitung. Mathilde Anneke started the feminist newspaper the Deutsche Frauen-Zeitung and opened a progressive girl’s school. Being an incessant social reformer, she joined with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.[1277]
In 1859, Fritz Anneke went to Switzerland and joined Giuseppe Garibaldi, a noted guerrilla fighter and Italian protagonists of the Risorgimento, the Italian unification movement between 1820 and 1870. Giuseppe Mazzini influenced Garibaldi. Mazzini envisioned a united Europe, a “Europe of nations,”[1278] possibly like the contemporary European Union, seemingly unrelated to communistic revolutions.
Joseph Weydemeyer, formerly a lieutenant in the Prussian artillery, wrote for the New York Tribune. In November 1851, he arrived in New York, along with his wife and two children with a letter of introduction to Charles A. Dana from Marx, a regular contributor to the New York Tribune.[1279] Marx and Engels’ book, The Civil War in the U.S. is composed of collected articles and dispatches from the Tribune. Weydemeyer also had an introductory letter to Dana from Ferdinand Freiligrath, a member of the Communist League, a close associate of Marx and apparently someone Dana respected. Marx commissioned Weydemeyer to publish the first edition of the Communist Manifesto in the U.S. and retain all sales profits.[1280]
Weydemeyer functioned as a “literary agent for Marx and Engels,” by placing their articles with the New
York Tribune and radical German-language papers. In June 1852, he organized the Proletarian League of
New York with the blessings of the London Marxists. This group became the nucleus of the Marxist
movement in the U.S. He participated in the German labor movement of the 1850s, especially during the
New York strikes in 1853. He made a living through free-lance writing and lecturing on English Chartism.
[1281]
The refugees immediately became involved in the German-American labor movement. Wilhelm Weitling was a member of the League of the Just, one of the Paris-based secret societies. He wrote his first treatise, Die Menschheit wie sie IST und wie sie sein sollte (Mankind as it is and as it should be) and attempted to merge the rising labor movement with communism.[1282] Weydemeyer, a union organizer, disseminated Marxism and labored to reinforce U.S. trade unionism. He educated his associates on the value of political action. He maintained, “There should be no division between economics and politics.”[1283]
Weitling left Hamburg in August 1849, arrived in the U.S. and settled in New York. He revived the League of Emancipation as the Workingmen’s League, which may have had as many as 4,000 members at one time. In 1851, he developed the utopian community of Communia, Iowa, which other German Communists had established four years earlier.[1284] Radical social reformers like Weitling, Sorge, and Weydemeyer promoted a comprehensive social and military revolution according to their own plan for Utopia or Marxian theology.[1285]
Freidrich Kapp, with a law degree from the University of Berlin, arrived in the U.S. in 1850, and became active in the abolitionist movement and the Republican Party and helped garner the German vote for Lincoln. He was a presidential elector for Lincoln in 1860, along with many other Forty-Eighters. During a speech in New York’s Union Square in April 1861, he argued that liberty was “indivisible,” a view shared by Marx and that disunion would be a curse to the U.S., just as it had been to Germany.[1286]
Marx and Engels were adamantly pro-Union and anti-Southern and their followers echoed their sentiments. Marx’ later followers, the Soviets, would do the same. Soviet historian, Dim Biriuk Petrov, commemorated the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth by writing his biography, Avraam Linkol’n, in Moscow in 1959. He said, “Lincoln sincerely sympathized with the workers and sought the fulfillment of their most important demands.” In 1960, R. F. Ivanov denounced the Confederacy in his The Civil War in
the USA, the official Soviet history. According to Ivanov, the secessionist slaveholders “vigorously suppressed” all opposition because secession was an “anti-peoples movement.”
Hermann Meyer, a German Jew, was a radical pamphleteer who arrived in New York in 1852 and, like Gottlieb Kellner, quickly associated with Weydemeyer. Meyer promoted the Socialist agenda in Milwaukee and St. Louis where he ultimately organized German chapters of the First International.[1287] Kellner supervised an adult evening school.[1288]
In 1853, Engels wrote to Weydemeyer to describe the revolutionary progress made in Germany. He wrote, “Clear the way for us, such as a single and indivisible republic,” which was the first step in establishing a communistic nation. The dissolution of the U.S. through the secession of the South was anathema to the communist agenda, the reason the Forty-Eighters, who had fought to establish an indivisible Germany, were now willing to fight to preserve the Union – as a foundation for communism.[1289]
In a letter, Marx congratulated Lincoln on his presidential reelection. He reiterated the Communist conviction that the war was as essential to the advancement of the working class. The eradication of slavery opened the floodgates to class warfare. The war functioned to destroy the middle class through the burden of a monstrous national debt placed upon them. Prices would rise higher and faster than wages for unskilled and skilled labor. Poverty increased faster than population. The working classes’ suffering would accelerate with future wars. Lincoln’s War freed the slave and gave impetus to a growing class movement. A second war, unsanctioned by a transcendent objective or social necessity would fashion the chains of the free instead of removing those of the slave. The abject misery remaining would give the capitalists the motive and opportunity to sever the working class from its aspirations via the utilitarian sword of a standing army.[1290]
German Socialists and the 1860 Election
Carl Schurz (1829-1906), the son of a Jewish schoolmaster, studied at the Jesuit Gymnasium of Cologne, then entered the University of Bonn where he co-founded, with Professor Gottfried Kinkel, the Bonner Zeitung, devoted to revolutionary activities. He progressed as a revolutionary through his association with Professor Kinkel and the Franconia Fraternity (Burschenschaft Franconia), an organization originally composed of students who had taken part in the revolts against local German authorities. Other members included Friedrich von Spielhagen, Johannes Overbeck, Julius Schmidt, Carl Otto Weber, Ludwig Meyer and Adolf Strodtmann. Schurz later associated with Franz Sigel, Alexander Schimmelfennig, Fritz Anneke, Friedrich Beust, Ludwig Blenker and others, many of whom would emigrate and later join the Union Army during the war.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the German philosopher, proposed the first meeting of this group whose motto was Ehre, Freiheit, Vaterland (honor, freedom, fatherland). Germans seeking a unified nation joined in secret societies, like the Burschenschaft, present at all higher scholastic institutions in Germany.[1291] Individuals founded the original society, the Urburschenschaft on June 12, 1815 at Jena. On September 20, 1819, Austrian Minister of State Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich and the Bundesversammlung (German Confederation), through the Carlsbad Decrees, prohibited all such groups because a liberal, radical student, Karl Ludwig Sand, had murdered the writer August von Kotzebue on March 23, 1819 due to the influence of the secret society.
The revolts in numerous European countries in 1848 were not liberation wars as historians and editors have depicted. Radicals ignited these rebellions to dismantle and usurp localized government autonomies and replace them with powerful, centralized omnipotent, indivisible government structures, an indissoluble power that once entrenched in the body politic would metastasize like a cancer. America, Germany, Italy, France, and Hungary were all countries composed of smaller autonomous states.[1292]
Individuals established many monopolistic movements promoting “unification” in the Italian and German speaking areas of Europe in the early 1840s. The Carbonari or Young Italy thrived in Italy and the Tugenbund or Burschenschaft emerged in Germany. The initial objectives were, (1) create totalitarian centralized governments (2) destroy the sovereignty of individual confederated states and (3) decrease religious, particularly Christian, influence.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels enumerated the initial and foremost goal out of the seventeen objectives – they wanted to restructure Germany as “a single and indivisible republic.”[1293] Do not let the word “republic” fool you. Marx’s use of the word actually means a socialistic democracy. The “indivisible republic” was the overriding principle of the Illuminated French Jacobinism – the “nation une et undivisible.” Essentially, when individuals forcefully seize autonomy from local government entities and deliver it to federal tyrants, it will be undeviating and permanent – indivisible, never to be divided among the states and their citizenry.
Marx and Engels, in addition to an “indivisible republic,” demanded universal suffrage; abolition of all feudal privileges; the expropriation of all large, landed estates, banks, means of transportation, natural resources without just compensation; comprehensive financial and educational restructuring; and a people’s armed militia.[1294] They recognized that they or others could not achieve Germany’s unification, with the elimination of local power in favor of an indivisible republic with equal citizenship, without a bloody revolution, in Germany, or elsewhere. Those special interests unified Germany in 1871.[1295]
Carl Schurz met Marx when he attended a Democratic congress in Cologne in the summer of 1848 with ProfessorKinkel.[1296] SchurzparticipatedintheRevolutionof1848,inwhichradicalsattemptedtodepose Frederick William IV of Prussia. The authorities tried and imprisoned him but he escaped through a storm sewer and fled to Zurich. He went to Paris, then London where he married Margarethe Meyer, the sister of another exile on July 10, 1852. The newlyweds left for the U.S. in August 1852. Her substantial financial assets, allowed Carl to avoid the poverty and unemployment experienced by some refugees.[1297] Her father was Heinrich Meyer, a prosperous Jewish merchant.[1298] They remained in Philadelphia long enough for Schurz to learn English, and join the Freemasons.[1299] Within two years of his U.S. arrival, he visited with several senators and President Franklin Pierce, a fellow Freemason. They advised him about political opportunities in the Midwest. Schurz and his wife moved to Watertown, Wisconsin in 1854.[1300]
By 1856, other relatives arrived in Watertown, Schurz’s parents and his two sisters.[1301] Individuals organized the Republican Party in 1854-1855, ostensibly to prevent the expansion of slavery and as a successor to the Whig Party, which advocated, among other things, a powerful central government. Thousands of refugees who fought for German unification, known as the Forty-Eighters, were immediately attracted to the Republican Party.[1302] The Forty-Eighters coordinated their campaign efforts to create a network of stump speakers enlisted from among their fellow revolutionaries, reinforced by individuals who had immigrated earlier like Gustav Körner, Friedrich Münch, and Francis Lieber. Reinhold Carl Ernst Friedrich Solger was a former member of the Young Hegelians at the University of Halle, and a former associate of Mikhail Bakunin. He traveled to Paris and participated in revolts there, then returned to Germany for the Baden uprising.[1303] After the dissolution of the Prussian National Assembly on November 14, 1848, Solger, a skilled linguist, fled Prussia for the U.S. and settled in the east. He became a professor at West Point, was eminent among the Forty-Eighters, worked for the Treasury Department and wrote The States-System of Europe in 1854.
Nineteen German-Americans were delegates to the first Republican convention in Philadelphia on June 17, 1856. George Schneider devised the tenth plank in the Republican platform espoused at this convention. The resolution condemned all proscriptive legislation. It openly challenged the nativistic elements within the party. In the presidential campaign that followed the convention, the Forty-Eighters
campaigned tirelessly for John Charles Frémont, the Republican nominee. The Republicans failed to win the election despite the approximately 300,000 Germans from the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio who voted for Frémont.[1304]
In 1858, officials admitted Schurz to the Wisconsin bar and he set up a law practice in Milwaukee and immersed himself in antislavery activities.[1305] Schurz, upon arriving in Wisconsin, took a leading role in Wisconsin’s Republican Party. He was against the Fugitive Slave Law and allegedly favored state’s rights. He gave a speech, mostly in German, during the Illinois presidential campaign between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas. For the Germans, this assured Lincoln’s victory over Douglas.
Lincoln called Schurz the “foremost among the Republican orators of the nation,” and one of the most influential German Republicans. He was a member of the National Committee and managed its foreign department during which he employed German, Scandinavian, and Dutch speakers and agents to circulate a pamphlet about the prospective Republican homestead bill, Vote Yourself a Farm, printed in a number of foreign languages. The concept of getting something-for-nothing was very popular among foreign-born Socialists. Friedrieh Hassaurek participated in the student legion in the 1848 revolution in Germany then came to the U.S. and settled in Cincinnati where he practiced law, and engaged in journalism and politics. He enlisted Republican support in Cleveland and Cincinnati. August Thieme, editor of the Wächter am Erie, campaigned for Lincoln throughout Ohio. Friedrich Hecker campaigned in New York and Philadelphia.[1306] Apparently, influential Forty-Eighters positioned themselves strategically throughout the country, to do in America what they failed to accomplish in Europe.
Seward of New York was the favorite candidate of the Germans. His forthright stand, during a long
career, against all forms of nativism, and his high intellectual qualifications had endeared him to the
German element, and he had the support of influential papers like the Illinois Staatszeitung and the
Baltimore Wecker. The Wächter am Erie assumed that most Germans favored Ben Wade for the
nomination. However, Lincoln, the shrewd politician attempted to learn a bit of the German language. He
bought the German Illinois Staatszeitung in Springfield, Illinois, for $400 and hired Dr. Theodore
Canisius as editor, to promote his political objectives. Lincoln, by invitation, spoke to the Chicago
German community on July 4, 1858 where he referred to his fellow citizens of German origin as genuine
“lovers of liberty, not for special classes of men, but for all men.” German workingmen thought of him as
the “champion of free labor and free homesteads.” The Baltimore Turnzeitung endorsed Lincoln in early 1860.[1307]
Immigrant Germans, who were often well educated, learned English, established newspapers, promoted Lincoln and propagated their socialistic views to indoctrinate earlier German immigrants. August Willich, a former member of the Communist League who took an active role in the revolution of 1848–1849 in Germany, edited the Cincinnati Republican. Gustav Körner and George Schneider were very influential in Illinois and Indiana. Henry P. Scholte was the editor of the Pella Gazette. However, Schurz’s influence was nationwide.[1308] The refugees comprehended the essentials of the abolitionist movement and its effect on the U.S. Schurz, Gustav Körner, Franz Hoffmann, Friedrich Hecker, Judge John Bernhard Stallo, and others immersed themselves into the campaign to elect Lincoln.[1309] Many refugees published German- language newspapers all over the Union, especially in the Midwest. The Illinois Staats-Zeitung was virulently anti-Southern. Lincoln realized the power of the Germans in this region. Lincoln realized that the German vote was essential in the election of 1860. Schurz chaired the Wisconsin delegation to the Republican Convention in Chicago and was a member of the Republican National Committee.
In 1860, German-born residents in the northern states made up 5.74% of the total population, a sufficient percentage to act as a deciding factor in close elections. Schurz estimated that over 10,000 German voters would pick Lincoln. He campaigned for Lincoln in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and other states with a
high concentration of German immigrants. Even the Germans who had arrived in the U.S. decades before changed their allegiances after they heard him speak.[1310] Schurz alone traveled an astounding 21,000 miles speaking on behalf of Lincoln, for whom he promised and delivered 300,000 German votes.
Officials chose Chicago for the Republican convention. Each of the Northwestern states had foreign representatives among delegations. There was no proscription of foreign birth. Their respective state officials authorized Scholte, Stallo, Hassaurek, Körner, and Schurz to attend the convention. The Missouri delegation included Henry Boernstein, the editor of Der Anzeiger des Westens, Judge Arnold Krekel, and Frederick Münch. As soon as officials notified Lincoln of his nomination, the German-born leaders initiated a vigorous campaign to elect him. Hassaurek and Schurz, of the notification committee, spoke to huge crowds at Springfield. Both were very optimistic that he would receive the immigrant vote. The Republican Party approved of the German plank. The Chicago Press and Tribune and The Staats Zeitung, also published in Chicago, had a national circulation among the Germans. These newspapers reported Schurz’s speech.[1311]
In 1860, forty-two of the delegates to the Chicago Republican Convention who nominated Lincoln were native Germans, most of who had settled in the Midwest. They wanted a definitive statement on the equality of native and foreign-born Americans. The German delegates, 1848 refugees who were now lawyers and journalists, met at Chicago’s German House before the National Republican Convention to formulate “the Dutch plank” which the party adopted. The pre-convention group included prominent Forty Eighters, Kapp, Douai, Solger, Professor Johannes Gambs, Elias Peissner, Heinrich Vortriede, Dr. Adolph Wiesner, Karl Dänzer, August Becker, Jakob Müller; Dr. Hermann Kiefer; Bernhard Domschke; Dr. Johannes Georg Günther, Robert Blum, Karl Röser, Dr. Wilhelm Hoffbauer; and Carl Rotteck. Adolf Douai and Caspar Butz acted as secretaries. The delegates demanded a free Kansas, free homesteads, and were ready to support Seward, Chase, Lincoln or Wade for the presidency. Hassaurek and Schurz spoke at the Convention. Schurz claimed that 300,000 German votes hinged on whether the party incorporated the “Dutch plank” into the platform.[1312]
From the time delegates nominated Lincoln on May 19, 1860, socialists Charles A. Dana and Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune worked day and night until November 6, 1860 promoting Lincoln. On October 13, 1860 the newspaper declared, “The Union will in no case be shattered. It will not even be seriously shaken. It is a rock on which thousands may make shipwreck of their own hopes, fortunes, and even lives, but which will itself be unaffected by their criminal madness. Parties will rise and fall, factions may rave and cabals plot; but Saratoga and Yorktown are parts of our common country, and so will remain forever!”[1313]
In Germany, Schurz had been more involved in politics than in the military. After Lincoln won the 1860 election, he rewarded Schurz for his efforts with a diplomatic mission to Madrid during which Schurz succeeded in discouraging Spanish officials from supporting the South. However, after the war started, Schurz returned from Spain in January 1862 and requested a commission in the army. Lincoln obliged his influential friend and gave Schurz command of the Germans of the Eleventh Corps.[1314] In addition to Schurz, the Eleventh Corps was composed of von Gilsa, Schimmelfennig, Krzyzanowski, and von Steinwehr who all displayed good military skills.[1315] According to Schurz, the Federals were “ready and eager to march and fight.”[1316]
During his brief stay in Spain, Schurz concluded that many European countries would side with the Confederacy. He thought that Lincoln should shift the war to a crusade against slavery. He received a commission as a brigadier-general in the volunteers in April. In June, he assumed the command of a division under John C. Frémont, and then later he fought under General Franz Sigel, another former German revolutionary, in the Second Battle of Bull Run. The military promoted Schurz to a major general
on March 14, 1862, and he fought at the Battle of Chancellorsville. He was at Gettysburg and at Chattanooga.
Schurz resigned from the volunteer service in May 1865. In 1866, he founded the Detroit Post. He was a senator from Missouri (1869-1875), and Secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881, and editor of the New York Evening Post from 1881 to 1884. He also became editor and joint proprietor with Emil Praetorius of the Westliche Post (Western Post) of St. Louis. He went to Germany in the winter of 1867- 1868 and interviewed Otto von Bismarck.
Schurz was the main correspondent for the Washington Bureau of the New York Tribune during the winter of 1865. He assumed the job as editor-in-chief at the Detroit Post, where he remained until 1867. He relocated St. Louis, Missouri where he worked for the Westliche Post. He continued to be active in the Republican Party by campaigning for Grant. In 1868, citizens elected him to the Senate, as the first German American. He served as Senator from Missouri between 1869 and 1875. President Hayes appointed him as Secretary of the Interior. He implemented many progressive policies. He retired from the Department of the Interior in 1881. He worked as an editor of the Evening Post from 1881-1885, and as an editorial writer for Harper’s Weekly. Schurz published a number of writings, including a volume of speeches, a biography of Henry Clay, an essay on Abraham Lincoln, and his Reminiscences.
In the American Historical Review, July 1911, William Dodd concluded that the Republican’s effort to capture the German immigrant votes, with their support of high tariffs and free homesteads, was very successful. If not for Carl Schurz, Gustav Körner, and the editors of the Staats-Zeitung of Chicago, Douglas might have won.
Fort Sumter – Deliberate Provocation
Socialist Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “When it looked as if the nation would be dismembered, pulverized into its original elements, the attack on Fort Sumter crystallized the North into a unit, and the hope of mankind was saved.”[1317]
The New York City directory (1786) listed Hyman Isaac Long as a physician when he apparently resided there. On January 11, 1795, in Kingston, Jamaica, Moses Cohen appointed Hyman Isaac Long as a Deputy Inspector General in a Freemasonry organization that was a predecessor of the Scottish rite. Long later participated in Masonic activities in Virginia and South Carolina. On November 12, 1796, Hyman Isaac Long elevated seven French Masons in Charleston to the rank of Deputy Inspector General. These men were refugees from the slave
rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. In 1797, Charleston was the center of American high degree Masonry when Hyman Isaac Long opened a Sublime Grand Council of Princes of the Royal Secret. Charleston was significant; it is located at the 33rd degree northern latitude. On May 31, 1801, Freemasons organized the First Highest Masonic Council there under the leadership of Hyman Isaac Long.[1318]
The states and the federal government co-owned, in equal partnership, the forts located in each of the states. The federal government functioned as the general agent and each state constructed a fort or forts for that state’s exclusive protection. If a state withdrew from the Union, for whatever reason, that state automatically acquired the ownership of any forts within the state. In 1805, South Carolina ceded territory in Charleston Harbor, only on the stipulation that the central government repair or replace the existing facility within three years. If the central government failed to complete their stated obligations, then the state of South Carolina could legally cancel their contract with the federal government. In 1829, twenty- one years after they were supposed to repair or replace the fort, the federal government finally began work on the fort but they still had not completed the work by 1860. The fort had been unoccupied for over thirty years. Upon secession, South Carolina became liable to the government for any work completed on the fort and offered to pay just compensation to the government.
The South had commandeered several forts, according to the agreements they held with the federal
government. Fort Sumter, the unmanned fort at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, a major Atlantic port,
would inevitably be next. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union. On December
26, 1860, Major Robert Anderson, a West Point graduate and a Winfield Scott protégé, moved his 126-
man garrison from Fort Moultrie, also in the harbor, to Fort Sumter. He and Scott were both Freemasons.
[1319] [1320]
General Winfield Scott led troops in the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Black Hawk War, and the Second Seminole War. During the war, Lincoln invoked “executive privilege,” and refused to give the War Department certain dispatches he had sent to Anderson.[1321] After Major Anderson moved his men, the following warning appeared in The New York Tribune on December 28, 1860, “Let us entreat all who meditate treason to pause ere it is too late, and avoid at once the traitor’s crime and his doom.”[1322]
In January 1861, to provoke a response from the South, lame duck President Buchanan, a Freemason, authorized sending military supplies and reinforcements to the fort. The U.S. Navy chartered a civilian merchant ship, the Star of the West, on which they concealed additional troops bound for the fort. Marshall O. Roberts owned the ship, for which the government paid $1,250 per day. After Lincoln initiated war against the South, Roberts, a railroad and steamship magnate, sold the Union several ships, all known to be dangerously un-seaworthy. In that process, he swindled the U.S. Treasury out of millions of dollars.[1323]
John McGowan, the ship’s captain, took on supplies in New York in early January 1861. McGowan then picked up 200 military recruits on Staten Island. Their destination was supposed to be a secret but a New York newspaper reported on January 7 that the ship was bound for Charleston.[1324] Someone sent telegrams to South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens warning him that a relief ship was en route. On January 9, 1861, Pickens, a Thomas Cooper disciple, directed cadets at the Morris Island Battery to fire upon the Star of the West as it entered Charleston Harbor. When there was no response from the fort, McGowan retreated. His superiors sent him to Texas to pick up seven companies of Union troops.
However, the ship went aground near Indianola and Earl Van Dorn and other Confederates rowed out to the ship and convinced Elisha Howes, the ship’s master that a large contingent of men was prepared to blow the Star of the West out of the water. Howes surrendered; the Confederates re-named the ship CSS St. Philip and placed it into service on May 4. In early 1862, prior to the Union’s invasion, the Confederates transferred gold and other valuables from New Orleans to Vicksburg for safekeeping. They sent the Star up the Yazoo River to Yazoo City, Mississippi and then they stripped it and scuttled in the Tallahatchie River in an effort to immobilize Union vessels moving toward the Yazoo River, Vicksburg’s back door.[1325]
On February 22, 1861, before his inauguration, Lincoln addressed an audience at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. He said, “I am filled with deep emotion at finding myself standing here, in this place...have never had a feeling...that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence ...It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies from the motherland; but that sentiment in
the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time...I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. Now, in my view of the present aspect of affairs, there need be no bloodshed or war.”[1326]
In his inaugural address on March 4, 1861, Lincoln maintained that the purpose of the Constitution was “to form a more perfect union.” He professed that he had no intentions to invade the southern states, a prospect many people would not have even imagined. However, he implied that he intended to use force to maintain possession of what he considered federal property.[1327] Because the federal government had defaulted in its contractual obligations, the unoccupied fort was not federal property, despite his claim. He also said, “In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence; and there shall be none, unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me, will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts (an imposed tax); but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against, or among the people anywhere.”[1328]
On March 15, 1861, Stephen Douglas recommended the withdrawal of all the troops within the states that had seceded. He stated, “We certainly cannot justify the holding of forts there, much less the recapturing of those which have been taken, unless we intend to reduce those States themselves into subjection. I take it for granted, no man will deny the proposition, that whoever permanently holds Charleston and South Carolina is entitled to the possession of Fort Sumter.”[1329]
Officials appointed P. G. T. Beauregard, a student of Robert Anderson at West Point, as superintendent of that facility, beginning on January 23, 1861. His brother-in-law, Senator John Slidell pulled some strings to get Beauregard the appointment. Now a resident of Louisiana, Slidell was a native New Yorker and August Belmont’s Democrat Party mentor. Beauregard, a Freemason, had been an engineer under General Scott during the Mexican War. When Louisiana seceded on January 26, 1861, his superiors obviously revoked Beauregard’s orders and he became the first Confederate general on March 1, 1861. He arrived in Charleston on March 3, 1861 where he met with Governor Pickens to inspect the harbor’s defenses and take command of South Carolina forces in Charleston. On April 5, 1861, Beauregard cut off the daily supply of food to Anderson’s men at Fort Sumter from local merchants in Charleston.
For sanitization purposes, on May 6, 1861, the Cincinnati Daily Commercial claimed that the troops at Fort Sumter had been starving and were in desperate need of food. Lincoln, per John Nicolay’s advice, had to send troops, supposedly a humanitarian effort. They repeatedly used this assertion after the war. The troops at Fort Sumter, since December 1861, had purchased their food at local suppliers.[1330]
When Lincoln asked General Winfield Scott’s opinion of the situation at Fort Sumter, Scott said let it go. Lincoln was dissatisfied with that response and put it to members of his cabinet. Then General Scott, revising his earlier opinion, along with other soldiers, thought that Lincoln should recruit 5,000 regulars and 20,000 volunteers for six to eight months. However, War Secretary Simon Cameron, knowing that food would be running out by April 15, 1861 suggested abandonment of the fort.[1331]
Postmaster Montgomery Blair, a radical hot-tempered West Point graduate and a founding leader of the Republican Party, wanted aggressive action and threatened to resign unless the fort was re-provisioned. Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase (1861-1864) wanted to retain the fort, as it was his duty to protect the tax revenue.[1332]
Between his inauguration on March 4, and April 12, Lincoln goaded the South into making a mistake. He notified them that he was going to replenish supplies, an indication of a longer military occupation of Fort Sumter by Anderson’s garrison. Confederate President Jefferson Davis met with his cabinet on April 9,
1861 during which some members urged him to take action. Secretary of State Robert Toombs said, “The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has ever seen. Mr. President, if this is true, it is suicide, it is murder, and will lose us every friend in the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet’s nest, which extends from mountains to ocean; and legions, now quiet, will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.” Other cabinet members disagreed. Lincoln wanted the South to make the first move,[1333] which he provoked by sending, not one, but several ships, supposedly to bring supplies. One ship had been adequate in January. The additional ships were to trigger a response.
All negotiations failed and Beauregard demanded Anderson’s surrender. On April 12, 1861, at 4:30 a.m. when Beauregard saw the Union ships approaching, he ordered the shelling of Fort Sumter from nearby Fort Johnson. The Confederates, as predicted, viewed the numerous ships as an act of aggression. The offensive lasted for 34 hours. On April 14, 1861, Anderson surrendered as they were out of food and ammunition. On April 18, 1861, he sent a formal surrender message after boarding the steamship Baltic. No one was injured in what looked like a July 4 fireworks display. Anderson and his troops returned home. Northern commercial interests quickly came to Lincoln’s aid. The North, perhaps because of damaged pride, was ready to spend money and sacrifice lives over the Fort Sumter incident in which, like the Tonkin incident, almost 100 years later, no one was hurt.[1334]
On the evening of the Fort Sumter bombardment, Lincoln was exceptionally jovial at a reception. Without the Fort Sumter incident, it would have been impossible for him to raise an army. The news of the bombardment was particularly good news and well received by the Republican Party.[1335] On April 15, 1861, Lincoln issued a proclamation to all Union governors for a militia of 75,000 volunteers to serve for three months.[1336] He said, “Whereas the laws of the United States have been for some time past and now are opposed, and the execution thereof obstructed in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law.”[1337]
He covered his actions under the Act of Congress of 1795, February 28, 1795, which allowed the President to use military force to put down an insurrection or foreign invasion within a state. Thus, he bypassed Congress, the only body that can constitutionally declare war (Article 1, Section 8). However, there was neither a foreign invasion nor an insurrection. He may have been aware that his actions were illegal and unconstitutional. Ultimately, during the length of the war, more than 1.5 million men served in the Union army and over 300,000 fought for the South.[1338]
On April 17, 1861, Governor John Letcher of Virginia sent this message to Lincoln, “I have only to say that the militia of Virginia will not be furnished to the powers of Washington for any such use or purpose as they have in view. Your object is to subjugate the Southern states and the requisition made upon me for such an object in my judgment not within the purview of the constitution or the Act of 1795, will not be complied with. You have chosen to inaugurate civil war; having done so we will meet you in a spirit as determined as the administration has exhibited toward the South.”[1339] When the war ended in April 1865, the government jailed Letcher in Washington for almost seven weeks.[1340] In 1864, General David Hunter’s Union troops torched Letcher’s home.
A militia is a call for citizens to arm themselves and perform as a police power. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee responded by seceding from the Union. They committed to fight with the Confederacy against the Union. Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri maintained strong allegiances to the Union and did not secede. In Missouri, a battle erupted between those who aligned themselves with Governor Jackson, an ardent secessionist, and Union loyalists. The Union depended on the loyalty of the large German population. As the war began, Lincoln claimed that his primary objective
was “preserving the Union.”[1341]
Lincoln imposed naval blockades on April 19, 1861 to halt the shipment of food and military equipment
to the rural South. Opportunists used private ships to run the blockades to smuggle in supplies. Thomas W.
House (Huis), a Freemason, amassed a fortune smuggling supplies. His son, Edward Mandell House
would be President Wilson’s chief advisor. The South had to purchase warfare implements abroad in
England and France. Secretary of State William H. Seward wanted to keep these nations out of the war
and warned the British government “If any European power provokes war, we shall not shrink from it.”
He also warned the French that support of the confederacy would result in warfare with the United States.
[1342]
Anderson’s “bravery” at Fort Sumter immediately elevated him to hero status. His superiors promoted him to Brigadier General Anderson on May 15, 1861. Before he left Fort Sumter, he had instinctively thought to retrieve the U.S. flag, which people displayed at a “patriotic” recruiting rally in New York’s Union Square. After his participation in New York, he recruited troops throughout the North. The government then assigned him as the Commander of the Department of Kentucky, a neutral border state. Ill health forced his resignation. On October 6, 1861, General William T. Sherman would replace him. Exactly four years later, Anderson returned to Charleston to raise the flag during a jubilant ceremony at the recaptured fort.
On July 3, 1861, Lincoln spoke with Senator Orville Browning, a close friend of twenty years and revealed that he had intended to provoke an incident. He wrote in his diary, “He told me the very first thing placed in his hands after his inauguration was a letter from Major Anderson announcing the impossibility of defending or relieving Sumter. That he called the cabinet together and consulted General Scott – that Scott concurred with Anderson, and the cabinet, with the exception of Post Master Blair were for evacuating the Fort...He himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce, giving notice of the fact to South Carolina Governor Pickens. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter – it fell, and thus, did more service than it otherwise could.”[1343]
Original correspondence between Lincoln and former Naval Captain Gustavus V. Fox, Assistant Navy Secretary, suggests that he willfully provoked the military officials in South Carolina into firing on Fort Sumter. It was politically essential that the South fire the first shot so that he could claim that the Confederacy started the war.[1344] Fox was with Commodore Perry in Asia and knew all about how to provoke an incident that erupted into premeditated violence and bloodshed.
Rushmore G. Horton wrote, “And it was a cunning trick, precisely worthy of Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln, to cause the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in order to ‘fire up the Northern heart,’ as they called it...The war was gotten up with as much trick and skill in management as a showman uses...Our whole country was placarded all over with war posters of all colors and sizes. Drums were beating and bands playing at every corner...the ministers of the Gospel were praying and preaching to the horrible din of the war music, and the profane eloquence of slaughter.”[1345] Horton continues, “There was little chance for any man to exercise his reason, and if he attempted such a thing he was knocked down and sometimes murdered. If an editor ventured to appeal to the Constitution, mobs destroyed his office, or his paper suspended by ‘the order of the Government.’ The moment the war opened for the emancipation of the Negroes, the liberty of the white man was suspended. The historian of these shameful and criminal events needs no other proof that the managers of the war knew that they were perpetrating a great crime than the fact that they refused to allow any man to reason or speak in opposition to their action. The cause of truth and justice always flourishes most with all the reasoning that argument and controversy can give it. Whenever men attempt to suppress argument and free speech, we may be sure that they know their cause to be a bad one.”[1346] Like other war presidents, historians and numerous others have lauded Lincoln as a
decisive leader for his quick military response to the Confederate “attack” of the fort.
America’s Socialist Revolution Lincoln and the American System
No comments:
Post a Comment