Socialist Revolutionaries in the Union Army
For the average Southerner, the war was about liberty, states’ rights and resisting an invasion by the North. The elite, using the media, had stoked the average Northerner with propaganda while numerous vociferous, socialistic ministers who should have been the first anti-war protestors, promoted the war. The northerners thought they were fighting evildoers. For some Yankees, it was about empire, confiscating southern property for pennies on the dollar, maintaining their financial investments, and imposing a centralized government to appropriate control over everyone’s lives, the foundational ideology of Marxist Socialists.
The Communist Manifesto, declared, “A specter is wandering over Europe today, the specter of communism.” The manifesto was timely. Revolts erupted throughout Europe a short time later. Some people in the U.S. heard about the 1848-49 German revolution and, not understanding the motives of the participants, viewed it as an attempt to depose tyranny as the patriots had done in 1776.[1467]
Communists, Socialists and Marxists who had immigrated to America from failed revolutions in Europe fought on the side of the Union during Lincoln’s War. Fritz Anneke was the chief of artillery under General John A. McClernand. Louis Blenker claimed he could raise an army of thousands of German troops for the national government who had participated in the wars in Europe. It appears that Blenker was not interested in defending the constitution and individual liberties. Rather, he was just interested in defending the Union.[1468]
German, Hungarian and Polish revolutionary refugees immigrated to the U.S. at different times during the late 1840s and into the late 1850s, still promoting their socialist objectives and ideologies. They found commonality with the Republican Party and Lincoln and quickly enlisted when he asked for volunteers. General Franz Sigel even designed the uniforms for his Third Regiment of Missouri to look like those of the German revolutionaries in 1848.[1469]
Many of the foreign-born Union Army generals saw military action in their native countries during the revolutions in several European countries, especially in Germany. The following were German-born unless noted – Ludwig (Louis) Blenker; August Kautz; Julius H. Stahel-Számwald (Hungary); Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski (Polish); Karl Leopold Matthies; Peter J. Osterhaus; Frederick C. Salomon; Alexander Schimmelfennig; Albin Francisco Schoepf (Poland); Carl Schurz; Franz Sigel; Ivan Turchaninov (Russia); Adolph von Steinwehr; August Willich; and Godfrey Weitzel. Osterhaus assisted General William T. Sherman in his March to the Sea. They each held top-level positions in the Union. There were few foreign-born generals in the Confederate Army. One remarkable Confederate officer was Johann August Heinrich Heros von Borcke who arrived in Charleston on a Confederate blockade-runner in May 1862. He made his way to Richmond, joined the Confederate Army, and became a captain on June 1, 1862. His superiors assigned him to J. E. B. Stuart who quickly recognized his military skill, made him an aide and the two became close friends. Following the end of the bloody war, von Borcke returned to Prussia where he resumed his military career.
Not all of the former European revolutionaries served as Union generals. Many served as officers including Lt. Colonel Carl Gottfried Freudenberg, Lt. Colonel Ernest Fahtz, Dr. Friedrich Hecker, Col. George von Amsberg, Colonel Adolf Dengler, Colonels Joseph Gerhardt, Carl Eberhard Salomon,
Wilhelm Heine, Konrad Krez, Henry Flad, Fritz Anneke, Franz Mahler, Adolf von Hartung, Edward Kapff, August Mersey, Friedrich Poschner, Franz Wutschel, Rudolf von Rosa, Joseph Weydemeyer and others. All of them were socialists. There were at least fifty German-born majors. Most of these officers came from the Midwestern states of Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin.
In 1860, there were approximately 1,204,075 Germans within the states that remained in the Union. During the war, approximately 100,000 additional Germans entered, making about 1,300,000 Germans living in the Union. About 118,402 would have been subject to military service. According to estimates, around 216,000 actually served which means that Germans were over-represented by nearly 100,000 men. Of the total, at least 36,000 served under German officers. If there were 216,000 German troops and we accept that the total of all foreign-born troops was nearly 500,000, about 25% of all Union troops, then as many as one in every four Union troops was apt to be a German. This is an astonishing statistic, and bears out the widely held Confederate belief that they were fighting an army of Hessians.
The preponderance of German-born officers and volunteers actually employed Hessian rules of war. Dr. Franz (Francis) Lieber, a native of Berlin, and Columbia University law professor drafted the Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, General Order #100, also known as Lieber Code, dated April 24, 1863. President Lincoln signed papers sanctioning these instructions, which dictated how soldiers should behave during wartime. E. D. Townsend, the Secretary of War sanctioned the order.[1470] He designed the code to accommodate a reciprocal relationship between the occupied civilian population and the Army. If the population resisted military authority, by taking up arms, engaging in or supporting guerrilla activities then they could have fines imposed, have property confiscated or destroyed, face imprisonment and/or expulsion, face mass relocations, be taken as a hostage, or be immediately executed. Additionally, the code authorized the shooting on sight of all persons not in uniform but functioning as soldiers and those committing, or attempting to commit, sabotage. This is obviously an open-ended authorization to perpetuate war crimes against any civilian population and the government has justified the code in every U.S. military activity since its inception.
Joseph Weydemeyer, a former a member of the Communist League in Germany, was a colonel in the Union Army.[1471] As a socialist, he advocated the congressional passage of a Homestead Law whereby individuals could acquire public lands. Because of his surveying experience as a Prussian military officer, he joined General John C. Frémont’s staff as a technical aide. Frémont, very popular with the Forty-Eighters, was the commander of the Department of the West. Weydemeyer supervised the construction of ten forts in the St. Louis area. When Frémont left that position in November 1861, Weydemeyer was elevated to a lieutenant colonel, and commanded the Missouri Volunteer Artillery regiment and led the assault against Confederate guerilla activity in southern Missouri in 1862.
After the Communist League dissolved, August von Willich arrived in America where he was a Union general.[1472] On September 10, 1862, Marx wrote to Engels informing him that Willich, a former Prussian Army officer, was a Major General in the Union Army.[1473] Willich, a future brigadier of the Ninth Ohio and the 32nd Indiana was an ardent follower of Karl Marx. People knew him for his regimental drills even after 20-mile marches and often lectured his men on the virtues of communism. He was one of the Ohio Hegelians, followers and advocates of the ideas of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Julius Stahel, born in Hungary on November 5, 1825, fought in the Hungarian Revolution under Louis Kossuth in 1848 then came to the U.S. in 1856. He fought on the Union side in the war and saw action at Bull Run. He was with General Frémont’s army in the Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln sent for him on March 13, 1863 and assigned him to serve in Washington. In 1884, Lincoln appointed him as consul at Yokohama, Japan and at Shanghai, China. He was awarded a Medal of Honor on November 4, 1893, for leading his division after he was severely wounded. He was a member of the Pilgrims Society in 1903.[1474]
Edward S. Salomon came to the U.S. when he was seventeen, settled in Chicago and became a lawyer. When war erupted, he enlisted and became a captain in the Eighty-second Illinois, the regiment that participated with Sherman in the notorious march from Atlanta to the sea. President Grant later awarded him with the governorship of Washington Territory.[1475]
Alexander von Schimmelfennig fled to Switzerland and then immigrated to the U.S. in 1854. He became a Brigadier General in the Union Army and commanded the District of Charleston, while Sherman was making his infamous March to the Sea. Max von Weber (1824-1901) enlisted in May 1861, raised an entire German regiment known as the Turner Rifles and ultimately became a Brigadier General. He participated in the slaughter at the Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. Union losses totaled 12,401 men – 2,108 dead and 9,540 wounded and 753 missing. Confederate losses totaled 10, 406 – 1,546 dead, 7,752 wounded and 1,108 missing. Following the war, Weber was U.S. Counsel in Nantes, France.
The enlisted Germans, most of who fought in the revolutionary armies in Europe in 1848 and 1849, were countless. Just in New York City alone, thousands of Germans volunteered right after Fort Sumter. The state of New York had ten regiments composed entirely of German immigrants. These regiments included the Steuben Rifles, Blenker’s Eighth NY, the Astor Rifles, the German Rifles No. 5, the SchwarzeJager, and the German Rifles No. 3. Gen. In June 1861, General Winfield Scott and Lincoln reviewed Blenker’s Regiment during which Scott referred to them as “the best regiment we now have.”
On May 6, 1862, Marx wrote to Engels with the exciting news that their comrade, Carl Schurz, was now a Brigadier General in the Union army. After the war, the president appointed Schurz as the U.S. Secretary of the Interior (1877-1881).[1476]
Charles A. Dana, a Socialist in the War Department
Charles A. Dana, though poor, attended Harvard University where Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Ripley, Theodore Parker and others influenced him. In the winter of 1840, Ripley, a Unitarian minister and avid socialist, left his ministry and established Brook Farm, an experiment in cooperative socialism in West Roxbury, a Boston suburb. In 1841, Dana left Harvard and lived at Brook Farm from September 1841 until March 6, 1846, when a blazing fire destroyed it.[1477] Author George B. Lockwood wrote, “As Owenism was the forerunner of Fourierism, so New Harmony was the forerunner of Brook Farm.”[1478]
Dana wanted to study in Germany, a humanistic haven, and then go into the ministry but poor health at the time altered his plans. While at Brook Farm, he helped edit, with George Ripley, The Harbinger, the voice of American Socialists, which also covered the political movements in Europe. The Brook Farm wasaUnitarian,humanitarianandSocialisticexperiment.[1479] TheHarbingerpublishedarticleswrittenby James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Horace Greeley, George Ripley and Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
Late in 1846, Dana was in New York where he was preparing to start his new job, in February 1847, as the City editor for The New York Tribune, a Collectivist newspaper that Horace Greeley established. Dana had, for a time, also worked as an editor at the New York Sun. Prior to joining the Tribune; he was also on the staff of the Chronotype, a paper advocating social reforms, edited by Elizur Wright.[1480] Greeley, a Freemason who people suspected of being a member of the Illuminati,[1481] had earlier served as editor for a Whig campaign publication, The Jeffersonian. A year later, he edited the Log Cabin, which helped elect William Henry Harrison as president on the Whig ticket. In 1841, Greeley merged those papers into The New York Tribune. About five years before, Dana had met Greeley, a man who had political ambitions and who helped found the Republican Party. They may have met at Brook Farm where
Greeley was a frequent visitor.[1482]
The New York Tribune soon sent Dana to Europe to evaluate the revolutionary activities. He met Karl Marx in Cologne and found they had much in common. Both men were horribly disappointed when the revolution ended without the meeting their hoped-for objectives. Dana would not forget about the fiery revolution when he returned to America, nor did he forget Marx.[1483] Dana worked as a correspondent for The Harbinger, the Chronotype, the Philadelphia American, the New York Commercial Advertiser and The New York Tribune during his time in Europe. He corresponded with each paper once a week and reported on his evaluations of the political situation while he solidified his socialist leanings.[1484]
After Dana returned from Europe in March 1849, he became a shareholder and managing editor of The Tribune.[1485] He assembled a staff of writers – George Ripley, George William Curtis, and Margaret Fuller. The Tribune and its owners and shareholders played a major role in strengthening the Republican Party.[1486] In August 1851, Dana invited Karl Marx to become a New York Tribune correspondent, which delighted Marx, as he desperately needed the money to try to maintain his family and a housekeeper in their hovel in a London slum. Marx did not know English well enough to compile an article and initially relied on Friedrich Engels to write the articles under Marx’s name. He soon learned English and used his rhetorical skills for a New World audience.[1487] Both Marx and Engels were European correspondents for The Tribune in the early 1850s.[1488]
On June 1, 1861, The New York Tribune’s headlines read, “The Nation’s war-cry, Forward to Richmond! Forward to Richmond! The Rebel Congress must not be allowed to meet there on July 20th! By that date the place must be held by the National army!” Editors constantly reiterated “Forward to Richmond” in The Tribune’s columns.[1489] Dana, the master of reiteration, always seemed to be in the midst of radical ideas and actual revolutions, was The Tribune’s managing editor.
Horace Greeley, who owned only three/twentieths of the paper,[1490] and Dana both praised Ulysses S. Grant and endorsed the replacement of the current War Secretary Simon Cameron with Edwin M. Stanton on January 13, 1862. Quite unexpectedly and without reason, Dana received notice from the Board of Trustees asking for his resignation. The trustees of The Tribune association assured him by letter, dated March 28, 1862, that “their keen sense of his many noble and endearing qualities...of his conscientious devotion to the duties of his post for so many years... that he still holds the highest place in their esteem and affection... and that his salary would be continued for six months longer.”[1491]
Marx would continue writing for The New York Tribune until April 1862, over ten years, when he received notice that the newspaper was terminating his services because the newspaper needed to focus on U.S. war news. He was the last foreign correspondent that The Tribune dismissed. His sponsor at The Tribune, Dana, had left the newspaper the month before and would presently take a position with the War Department. The two maintained a correspondence after they left the paper.[1492]
After the Battle of Shiloh, on April 6–7, 1862, Grant abandoned the idea of saving the Union, except by “complete conquest,” not merely occupation but the total destruction of the Confederate armies. Lincoln agreed and instructed General George B. McClellan, before Antietam, “Destroy the Rebel Army.” McClellan was unable or unwilling to do that so Lincoln removed him from command.[1493] On November 5, 1862, Lincoln replaced McClellan with Ambrose E. Burnside because McClellan did not pursue Lee after Antietam and he had a moderately successful Peninsula Campaign in 1862. Burnside, who worked under General Grant’s direction, had perfect vision, operational skills, and intuitive knowledge and spatial sense of the land, all very advantageous in waging a total war.[1494]
McClellan responded in a letter, “It should not be a war looking to the subjugation of the people...Neither confiscation of property...or forcible abolition of slavery should be contemplated for a moment...a
declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present armies.” McClellan had been against enforced emancipation.[1495]
Author Alexander K. McClure depicted Dana as one of the few men who enjoyed Lincoln’s complete
confidence. He trusted him in the most delicate matters political and military.[1496] As early as June 16,
1862, Dana traveled for the War Department supervising army contracts and working closely with
Lincoln, the War Secretary Stanton and General Henry W. Halleck in planning campaigns. Halleck, a West
Point graduate, wrote Elements of Military Art and Science in 1846, which emphasized the importance of
occupation of enemy territory, concentration of forces, command of strategic position, and fortifications.
[1497]
Dana, once quite satisfied at The Tribune, obtained a position with the U.S. War Department where he would become a close confidant of Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War.[1498] Soon after the war erupted, Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, leader of the Free-soilers and Republicans in Congress,[1499] had specifically suggested that Dana join the administration. Most of the cabinet knew him very well, especially Seward and Chase.[1500] On March 12, 1863, Dana became a troubleshooting spy for Stanton’s Secret Service, organized to detect disloyal practices against the government. Dana assumed the supervision of this agency, which he vigorously performed.[1501] He later took Scott’s place as the Assistant Secretary of War (1863-1865).[1502]
People have referred to General William T. Sherman as the inventor of total warfare. He said, “We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”[1503] Sherman reported to General Henry W. Halleck in October 1862, almost two years before his army’s horrendous march from Atlanta to the sea from November to December 1864, “we can make war so terrible...that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it.” While Sherman was marching to the sea, Sheridan and his army were destroying everything in their path in the Shenandoah Valley. Lincoln sanctioned total war as the only way to victory.[1504]
Dana telegraphed General Grant on December 21, 1863 telling him that they had approved of his plan for the winter campaign in Alabama. Stanton told Dana, “If it succeeds, Bragg’s army will become prisoners of war without our having the trouble of providing for them.” After Dana’s message, Grant headed for Mobile.[1505]
Lincoln referred to Dana as the “eyes of the administration.” He spent a lot of time at the front and submitted frequent reports to Stanton. The War Department was concerned about Grant’s alleged alcoholism. Dana and Grant became close friends and Dana assuaged the administration’s concerns over Grant’s alcohol use. Dana, after witnessing the Vicksburg Campaign, the Battle of Chickamauga and the Third Battle of Chattanooga urged the administration to promote Grant to the Supreme Command of all the armies.
Ulysses S. Grant, who would be the first four-star general in U.S. history, was appointed to lead the war efforts against the South. On March 12, 1864, he was appointed General in Chief of the Armies of the United States. Grant, Halleck’s subordinate, replaced Major General Henry W. Halleck, lawyer and future land developer. Halleck had been a senior commander in the war against the Indians in the Western Theater. They assigned him to a desk job in Washington.
Grant also took command of the Army of the Potomac in May 1864 and assigned Sheridan and 13,000 Union cavalry to move east. Sherman, who had been in the Western Theater warring against the Indians, would now do battle near Atlanta against the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Grant would battle against General Lee’s soldiers who were defending Richmond.
Lincoln restated his determination to impose unconditional surrender during the winter of 1864-1865. He authorized and skillfully propagated the total war ideologically, politically and militarily and demanded unconditional surrender from the Confederacy.[1506] In executing total warfare, Lincoln and his military enforcers abandoned traditional warfare principles regarding non-combatants that others, even Napoleon, abided. He meant to exhaust the South’s resources.
Lincoln’s War introduced the concept of unconditional surrender as evidenced at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. With this new technology and capacity to kill and destroy, there emerged a new military strategy and a different view of the relationship between the soldier and the non-combatant citizen in addition to when the victor considered that the war was over. Grant could have coined the phrase “unconditional surrender.” The concept of total war apparently requires unconditional surrender. Lincoln did not initially require unconditional surrender but the 1864 Republican platform did.[1507]
Generals Grant and Sherman implemented total war and unconditional surrender as they both viewed the war experience as one between peoples, not limited to the armies, but rather total war in which the “fighting left nothing untouched or unchanged.” Lincoln, a micro-manager with counsel from Dana, recognized the very destructive character of the war that the Union waged and he sanctioned it. The war against the South intentionally destroyed their financial ability to either defend their land or wage a comparable war against their northern invaders. The North claimed they were attempting to heal a breach in the country but their actions reflected just the opposite and created generational bitterness.[1508] Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, both West Point graduates who had resigned their pre-war commissions, obtained their commands through their numerous family and political connections.[1509]
After the war, in late December 1867 or early January 1868, Socialist Charles A. Dana bought part ownership in The New York Sun in which he continued to promote a socialist agenda. He supported Grant as a general in the war and he used the newspaper to promote him for president, apparently a war hero, in the November 1868 elections.[1510]
“We Never Would Have Come up There”
The Northern Invasion of the South
Regarding the defeated civilians in the South, General Philip Henry Sheridan said that they “must be left
with nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.”[1511]
Lincoln’s War, a watershed event, foreshadowed the devastating global wars that followed and operated as a turning point in the military, cultural, political and economic history of America. Recent industrialization revolutionized that war and the very nature of warfare. They had rapid-fire weapons, ironclad ships, crude machine guns, and even airships. It was now possible to supply and move armies over vast areas via the use of railroads and steam-driven transports. New weapons technology changed battlefield strategies and led to the development of trench warfare. Most unfortunate of all, the Union subjected non-combatant citizens to calculated military assault.[1512] Lincoln’s War, not unlike the later bombings of Japan, served as a gigantic testing ground for assorted, enhanced weapons. They replaced swords, though they still used them, with new rifles, which caused massive deaths. Bullets, bayonets and shell fragments caused most of the war-related deaths. A Confederate general, after the loss of 2,000 of his 6,500 men during just one skirmish said, “It was not war, it was murder.” There were a greater number of American soldiers killed during this war, 622,000, than in World War I and II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined.[1513]
William T. Sherman wrote, “If the people raise a howl against my barbarity and cruelty, I will answer that war is war, and not popularity-seeking.”[1514] He further wrote, “I attach more importance to these deep
incisions into the enemy’s country, because this war differs from European wars in this particular: we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.”[1515]
Abraham Lincoln, a consummate micro-manager with questionable connections, and the amalgamated personalities of Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, designed the brutal war with the intention of destroying the southern people and their culture. Hegel characterized such individuals as “world historical individuals” – people who bring about cataclysmic circumstances without actually comprehending their significance. These three individuals, with a radical ideology that incorporated powerful centralization, altered the nature of warfare. Lincoln manipulated the newly established Republican Party to increase and advance the executive power and that of the federal government over the states and he did it under the deceptive guise of freeing the slaves. Grant and Sherman were his brutal military enforcers.[1516]
Author Frank S. Meyer wrote, “Nor, once battle was engaged, did Lincoln wage the war in a manner calculated to bring about the conditions of reconciliation. He waged it to win at any cost – and by winning he meant the permanent destruction of the autonomy of the states. We all know his gentle words, ‘with malice toward none, with charity for all,’ but his actions belie this rhetoric.”[1517]
Experts define a civil war as two opposing factions within a country that forcefully attempt to seize control of the government. That does not accurately describe the bloody battle fought in America between 1861 and 1865. One cannot correctly describe that dreadful war as a civil war because it was a war between two fully functioning governments. Some have called it the War for Southern Independence or the War of Northern Aggression.[1518] I call it Lincoln’s War because of his malicious machinations behind the scenes. It was a total war because he directed it against the civilians of the South. All but two of the major battles took place in the Confederate States where people estimate that the Union Army killed at least 50,000 Southern civilians.[1519]
Only two battles occurred within the Union, at Antietam and Gettysburg, in Maryland and Pennsylvania respectively. The military fought the Battle of Antietam (also known at the Battle of Sharpsburg), on September 17-18, 1862, near Sharpsburg, Maryland, by Antietam Creek. It was the first of the two battles that they fought in the North and many consider it the bloodiest battle of the whole war. There were approximately 23,000 casualties, including my second great grandfather, John Phelps, a poor North Carolina farmer with three small children. He enlisted on October 31, 1861 in Catawba County, North Carolina as a member of General William D. Pender’s Brigade, which Union sharpshooters fired upon for afullday,onSeptember18,1862.[1520] IalsohadancestorswhofoughtwiththeUnionArmy.
During another bloody, deadly confrontation, the Battle of Shiloh, on April 6–7, 1862, the Union utterly vanquished the Confederacy. It took place in southwestern Tennessee, in Hardin County. Following the lethal conflict, carnage littered the battlefield; there were dead, wounded and dying horses and men all mangled together. There were so many bodies that there was hardly a place for any survivors or Union soldiers to step. A Union captain came across a mortally wounded and dying Confederate soldier, hardly more than a boy. Blood, his and others near him, covered him. He had rested his head upon the dead body beside him. The dying boy said, “Oh, God! What made you come down here to fight us? We never would have come up there.”[1521]
Union troops, like many victors, though the local press remains silent about such things, began stealing private property, raping both black and white females of every age and status, and wantonly slaughtering animals as early as the summer of 1861. They plundered and torched the homes of the rich and the poor, slave quarters, plantations and frequently burned down entire towns, leaving hundreds homeless and vulnerable to starvation. They burned barns and outbuildings, destroyed horses and mules and food sources, cows, pigs, and chickens. They destroyed all food production by burning fields. They cut well
ropes to cause unbearable hardship. This was the Union Army’s strategy, devised at the very top, of waging economic, psychological and physical warfare against their fellow citizens. The distinguishing feature of total war is the assault against civilians through outright slaughter or by starvation through the interruption of food production and/or distribution. It was a calculated device to demoralize and depopulate the South. The Union viewed civilians as legitimate military targets.
On August 1, 1861, federal troops forcibly removed from office, Claiborne Jackson, the pro-Confederate governor of Missouri, a neutral state. Most of the people in western Missouri, though sympathetic to the South, had been pro-Union until Lincoln introduced his policy of military oppression and began usurping theresponsibilitiesofthestates.[1522] OnAugust18,1863,GeneralThomasEwingissuedOrder#10,which mandated that the families of known Confederate guerrillas or any women found assisting them would be required to leave the state. On August 25, 1863, following the Lawrence, Kansas raid, Major General John M. Schofield directed General Ewing to deport every individual, regardless of their loyalties, who were residing in Jackson, Cass and Bates Counties and thereafter confiscate all of their properties, whatever the residents could not carry away when they fled. Ewing issued General Order #11 authorizing this deportation within fifteen days. The territory involved comprised of 3,000 square miles and affected more than 20,000 people who would soon be homeless. Upon vacating their homes, the Union militia plundered their houses, barns and outbuildings and then torched them. Thereafter, people called that area theBurntDistrict.[1523] [1524]
In 1863, Lincoln wrote to Major General Joseph Hooker, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy; he wrote, “I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying that both the army and the government needed a dictator.” Hooker apparently did not consider Lincoln and his illegalities dictatorial enough. Hooker, the potential leader of a Radical coup, wanted to make certain that the North won and he was adamant that the South pay dearly for their so-called treasonous rebellion. People often referred to the Radical Republicans as “Jacobins,” the Illuminati group that purportedly provoked the French Revolution.[1525]
When the war started, West Point graduate Mansfield Lovell, a native of Washington DC and a Freemason left the capital, went south and joined the Confederacy. Southern leaders, happy to have his military expertise, appointed him a Major General on October 7, 1861, and immediately gave him command of the Confederate troops in New Orleans. The Mississippi River, then adjacent to the city of New Orleans, facilitated the Union Army’s easy invasion of that city. Major General Lovell, obviously not an authentic defector from the North, ordered the immediate evacuation of his southern troops as soon as Union soldiers arrived on April 26, 1862, relinquishing the historic New Orleans and leaving the city’s vulnerable citizens completely unprotected.[1526] Abandoning civilians to the enemy’s brutality is not an anomaly but, in fact, may be a tactical maneuver as military leaders have often used it. Chiang Kai-Shek, coincidentally another Freemason, abandoned all of North China when he removed his troops from Nanking in December 1937, which triggered China’s fall to Communism.
During the Mexican War, Lovell had been an aide to General John A. Quitman, Grand Master of the Mississippi Freemasons. Lovell then retired from the military to take command of Quitman’s failed Cuba invasion. He left the military in 1854 and worked for New York’s city street commission. After the Mexican War, he lived, for a time, on a plantation in Savannah, Georgia and then returned to New York City.[1527] Lovellwashighlycriticizedbutnooneeverformallyreprimandedhimforevacuatingthecityand allowing Union Admiral David Farragut, who, coincidentally, was also a Freemason, to capture it.
General Benjamin F. Butler, a Freemason and a lawyer, accompanied Admiral Farragut’s invasion of New Orleans and then occupied the city as the Federal commander. Admiral Farragut directed the Union troops to hoist the U.S. flag over the U.S. Mint Building. A twenty-one year old southern man, William B.
Mumford, offended by the presence of an enemy flag, removed it before a cheering crowd.[1528] The citizens of New Orleans, once a very prosperous city, suffered from hunger and high prices, even for essential items if one could even find them. The banks had suspended all specie payments. Yet, despite the destitution, the city’s population remained loyal to the Confederacy.[1529]
General Butler, soon known as “Beast Butler,” had the young man, Mumford incarcerated for taking the flag down and despite the pleas from the New Orleans community, and soldiers in the Union Army quickly executed him. In December 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis issued General Order #111, which charged Butler as a felon for his war crime. Butler, to show contempt for the Southerners, retaliated and issued General Order #28 on May 15, 1862. He, in his Order, instructed his men to treat the women of New Orleans as prostitutes. In addition, Butler sent women and members of the clergy, without the benefit of a trial, to prison for their opposition to the oppressive occupation. He closed churches and shut down newspapers.[1530]
Butler also confiscated $800,000 of Mexican silver that belonged to Hope & Company, the Amsterdam banking house. For safekeeping, a liquor dealer named Amadié Couturié had taken it from the vaults of the Bank of Louisiana before the arrival of the federal troops. Couturié reported this seizure of the silver to the Netherlands legation in Washington. Seward allegedly appointed a special commissioner to examine the matter.[1531] Of course, “special commissions,” under numerous administrations have repeatedly proven that they are wholly ineffective and used to silence people who want answers, and are therefore not so “special.”
In June 1864, Louisiana Governor Henry Watkins Allen appointed reliable commissioners to gather eyewitness testimonies regarding the countless atrocities committed by the Union Armey during its barbaric invasion of his state. Governor Allen later published The Conduct of Federal Troops in Louisiana during the Invasions of 1863 and 1864: Official Report, a well-documented account. Authors James and Walter Kennedy point out two apparent facts regarding the Union’s conduct in Louisiana, (1) “The invader felt that nothing Southerners owned or cared for was to be held beyond the Yankee’s hate. This would include not only homes, furniture, clothes, crops, food, and the tools of food production, but also churches and even tombs of the recent dead and; (2) the invader had a strong preconceived notion of what life ‘down south’ was like and would not allow contrary facts to change his mind.”[1532]
Philip Henry Sheridan, infamous for slaughtering Indians in the west, directed the Army of the Shenandoah from August to October 1864. Brigadier General Wesley Merritt and Brigadier General George Custer also participated. Custer took the west side and Merritt took the east side. Their men were to burn all barns, mills, haystacks and then they began to torch the homes so there was nothing left but ashes. Merritt, apparently very competitive, glanced to the west and noted Custer’s trail by the black smoke drifting skyward. Merritt was irritated when it appeared that Custer might be surpassing his destructive efforts, including all and any form of food production in the once beautiful area. Despite the pleas of the women and children who begged for a bit of flour, Merritt and his men continued to burn all property that might be of value. The desperate residents would have to flee north to keep from starving as winter approached. Sheridan said, “The work of incineration was continued and clouds of smoke marked the passage of the federal troops.”[1533]
Sheridan later reported to Grant, “I have destroyed over 2,000 barns, filled with wheat, hay, and farming implements, along with over 70 mills filled with flour and wheat.” He had perpetrated this work of death in less than two weeks.[1534]
Union Atrocities against the Blacks
Many resentful Union soldiers blamed, not just slavery, but also the slaves themselves for the war. Black
women were particularly vulnerable to rape, the most under-reported offense in the war, especially when the victims were black. Union military officials did not view crimes against blacks as serious enough to investigate. Soldiers, for amusement, randomly shot at blacks in the street. Black children were often the victims of cruel mistreatment, revealing a widespread attitude in the North towards the blacks. Illinois and Indiana actually amended their laws to prevent blacks from even entering their states, let alone take up residence. Several counties in Iowa, either through the law or by mob force, vowed to drive all blacks from their counties.[1535] There was a labor shortage in the North during the war and many unemployed black refugees were willing to move north. However, Lincoln had decided by the “end of 1862 ... that whatever the fate of the former slaves, it would be in the South.” The vast majority of the blacks preferred to stay in the South.[1536]
The atrocities committed by the Union against the Southern blacks during the war were rarely, if ever, discussed. Blacks experienced starvation after Union soldiers pillaged and plundered the homes of free blacks and slaves. They regularly killed black women who resisted rape. Soldiers in the Union Army had preconceived notions about the relationships of slave owners to their female slaves. They believed that black female slaves willingly acquiesced to the sexual seduction of their plantation owners. Not only did the Union soldiers have virulent hatred of the blacks but they also had no appreciation for the actual moral valuesthattheblackstraditionallyheld.[1537] SevenFederalsoldiersgangrapedablackwoman.Thereafter, they held her face down in a nearby puddle of water until she drowned. In Columbia, South Carolina, Union soldiers’ gang raped “scores of slave women.” Frequently, southern black men developed extreme bitterness towards the Union because of the way the soldiers treated the female members of their families, a source of anger, which could have erupted into vengeance.[1538]
These brutal acts were not isolated, random acts of sexual violence. They were Union policy designed to demoralize and debauch the women of the South, those so-called traitors who thought they had a moral right to make choices about their loyalties. War Secretary Simon Cameron received a letter dated August 13, 1861 regarding the Union rapes against the blacks. He received another letter dated May 2, 1862 revealing the attempted rape and killing of a servant girl. As far as the Yankee soldiers were concerned, there was no difference between the Southern whites and the blacks. The Union soldiers treated all of them inhumanely, pillaged, and plundered their personal properties. They seized their food and left the people to struggle and potentially, to starve.[1539]
During Sherman’s March to the Sea, Union troops raped vulnerable females whose husbands were away fighting in the war. Southern women especially found it difficult to discuss the very sensitive and personal issue of rape and often concealed the fact that it had happened to them. However, the University of South Carolina has a large collection of poignant personal and eyewitness accounts of the Union’s debauchery. Union troops frequently threatened slaves to intimidate them in divulging the hiding places of valuables. [1540] Sometimes slaves followed the Union Army, thinking that they would be cared for after the soldiers had destroyed their homes. About 2,000 of those slaves perished between May 21 and June 29, 1863. Between May 1863 and March 1864, 8,000 slaves left the more certain security of their homes to follow the Union Army and at least half of them perished.[1541] In both instances, this was due to starvation, neglect and abuse at the hands of the Union troops, their alleged liberators.
Federal troops were utterly surprised to find that there were many free blacks residing in the South, people who owned their own homes, had jobs and had acquired private possessions and savings. Union soldiers did not hesitate to pillage everything of value from these individuals; every Southerner was a target, black, white, free or slave. In Louisiana, they pillaged and torched plantations owned by light- skinned blacks who spoke French. In as much as the Union Army had repeatedly confiscated horses and mules, Major General Nathaniel P. Banks, thinking to fill in his military ranks asked, “Why not negroes?”
Alternatively, the army could place former female slaves in confiscated plantations and they could earn money working as prostitutes.[1542] The North viewed slaves as contraband per the Confiscation Act of 1861, approved on August 6, 1861. This law stated that Union forces could confiscate any property used by the Confederate military. The Union Army enslaved many of the “freed” slaves who ended up laboring for it.
Lincoln recognized the potential problems with refugee slaves on September 22, 1862, just before issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. He feared an impending influx of refugees. With all of these emancipated slaves, the federal government had the challenge of feeding and caring for them – not up North but in the South. The concept of contraband camps emerged, administered by a new agency the government called the Freedman’s Bureau. The refugee camps or concentration camps provided free housing, which the residents constructed from supplies provided by the paternalistic federal government. The resident’s food, in small rations, came from military stores. However, bureaucratic red tape often impeded the food supplies. There was overcrowding, separation of family units, starvation, disease, and an extremely high mortality rate in the contraband camps. In 1864, Congress stopped funding the medical care of contrabands through the military budget. Contraband hospitals, even when they existed, were unsanitary, inadequate and understaffed.[1543]
Horrible conditions existed in the contraband camps. James Yeatman, of the Western Sanitary Commission wrote, “It would seem, now, that one-half are doomed to die in the process of freeing the rest.” The Union took care of the freed slaves who showed evidence of critical health issues. However, given the war was still raging when the government instituted the contraband camps, the freed black population were at the bottom of the rung as far as continued access to proper food, shelter and clothing. Consequently, mortality rates were high. From the contraband camps, a terrible name in and of itself, the black population typically moved into older segregated neighborhoods where they suffered from poverty and illiteracy. The white population refused to employ, educate or even associate with the blacks.[1544]
James Yeatman wrote a letter to President Lincoln describing the appalling conditions in the camp in the Mississippi Valley. Yeatman wrote that there were at least 50,000 people, mainly women and children. The Union had made no “adequate provision” for them. He wrote, “The majority of them have no shelter but what they call ‘brush tents,’ fit for nothing but to protect them from night dews. They are very poorly clad – many of them half-naked – and almost destitute of beds and bedding – thousands of them sleeping on the bare ground. The Government supplies them with rations, but many unavoidable delays arise in the distribution so that frequent instances of great destitution occur. The army rations (beef and crackers) are also a kind of diet they are not used to; they have no facilities of cooking, and are almost ignorant of the use of wheat flour; and even when provisions in abundance are supplied, they are so spoiled in cooking as to be neither eatable nor wholesome. Add to these difficulties, the helplessness and improvidence of those who have always been slaves, together with their forlorn and jaded condition when they reach our lines, and we can easily account for the fact that sickness and death prevail to a fearful extent. No language can describe the suffering, destitution and neglect which prevail in some of their ‘camps.’ The sick and dying are left uncared for, in many instances, and the dead unburied.”[1545]
For all the commotion about freeing the slaves from the terrible southern taskmasters, the northerners relegated them to new contraband camps called ghettos.
Sherman’s Scorched-Earth March to the Sea
William T. Sherman’s father died in 1829 leaving a widow, seven children and no inheritance. Neighbor and friend Thomas Ewing, the father of Thomas Ewing, an attorney, a Congressman from Ohio, and a Union General, raised Sherman.
In 1863, Sherman wrote to Henry W. Halleck, Chief-of-Staff, and noted expert in military studies, “Can we whip the South? If we can, our numerical majority has both the natural and constitutional right to govern them. If we cannot whip them, they contend for the natural right to select their own government... our officers, marshals, and courts, must penetrate into the innermost recesses of their land...we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper...we will not account to them for our acts.”[1546] In a letter to his wife, Sherman explained his war objectives – extermination of both soldiers and citizens. His like- minded wife agreed that the war should be a war of extermination where the Union would drive all of the Southerners into the sea like swine.[1547] To cover his bureaucratic behind, Sherman generated a sufficient number of memos to his subordinates admonishing them against pillaging, simply to go on record as a responsible military leader who simply could not prevent his soldiers plunder and violence.[1548] Sherman, with regard to pillage, robbery, and violence, later claimed, “...these acts were exceptional and incidental.”[1549]
After Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign (May 7 to September 2, 1864), General Grant, the Union’s top general and future U.S. president (1869-1877) and Sherman collaborated on the Savannah Campaign, known as Sherman’s March to the Sea. In the Vicksburg Campaign (March to July 1863), Grant officially implemented the scorched earth policy – the troops lived off the land and destroyed infrastructure, manufacturing facilities and agriculture around Vicksburg, Mississippi. The policy, defined in Special Field Order #120, dated November 9, 1864, called for burning all crops, killing all livestock, consuming or destroying all supplies, and destroying all civilian infrastructures like railway lines along their path. Sherman would do the same thing from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia, about 300 miles, with his 62,000 troops divided into two wings; in an estimated forty-mile wide path, they would destroy approximately $100 million dollars of public and private property including railroads, bridges, and telegraph lines.[1550] Sherman’s troops seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle, 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder.
On November 11, 1864, Sherman and his troops arrived in Atlanta, a city they had heavily shelled three
months before. Demolition teams had already been at work for a week setting charges and burying
explosives in strategic places. Then on November 14, 1864, they lit the charges and Atlanta exploded into
flames destroying about 37% of the city and about 5,000 buildings.[1551] The Confederate soldiers had
already vacated Atlanta so this fiery destruction was not a military necessity. Atlanta’s remaining
residents were now homeless and winter was imminent. Union General Henry Warner Slocum led his
troops from Atlanta on the morning of November 15, 1864 and headed east by Decatur and Stone
Mountain, toward Madison. Sherman remained in Atlanta to direct the loading of trains and complete the
destruction of the important buildings, the buildings that housed important records. Sherman left on
November 16, headed southeast towards Jonesboro and Slocum. The two groups would assault Mason
and Augusta simultaneously. The next objective was Milledgeville, Georgia’s capital, about seven days away.[1552]
Since the march began in November, the southern farmers had already harvested and gathered all the crops and stored them in the barns, ready for use. The pillaging soldiers predictably found the barns filled with grain, fodder, and peas. Outbuildings contained huge stores of cotton. Hogs, chickens, and turkeys roamed within fenced yards. Sherman was intent on the total destruction of everything in the Union’s path to the sea. His men entered homes and took everything of value – jewelry, silver, and clothes, before torching the dwelling. They killed thousands of hogs, sheep, and poultry and family pets. They took the best horses and mortally wounded the rest, many suffering horrifically before dying. The point of this wanton killing was the economic and cultural destruction of the South. The troops torched and destroyed numerous towns and cities, including Columbia, the capital of South Carolina with its buildings and
official records. The most efficient way to destroy a supposed enemy’s culture is to destroy their historical records, their buildings, and their artwork whether we are considering the southern states of America, or currently, the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Sherman’s campaign also included a senseless “war on dogs” wherein all dogs were shot, bayoneted or beaten to death with the butts of a gun to save ammunition. Routinely, dogs were the first victims of brutality when the Yankees broke into a residence. Terrified children, who cherished their beloved pets, frequently witnessed these wanton acts of cruelty. This viciousness was not restricted to dogs. In one yard, a hen escaped death but the soldiers chased her chicks, grabbing them and squeezing them to death. [1553] The extermination policy was that “no dog (hound) shall be left alive.” This included puppies because “pups would soon be dogs if not killed.”[1554]
When they reached North Carolina, federal soldiers appropriated horses, mules, and wagons from the inhabitants, “freely and without limit.”[1555] Federal forces seized all means of transportation, including that used to pull farm implements. The federal troops did not need all of these animals, about 1,000 horses and mules. Therefore, they used two killing fields to destroy them, one adjacent to the Cape Fear River and the other a corral in Fayetteville. The poor animals were shot and left where they fell. The terrified animals near the river often bolted and plummeted to their deaths into the water.[1556]
As many as 20,000 slaves living in Georgia fled, as they had in other areas, to the occupying Union forces. Many of the slaves who followed Sherman and his army were “quickly disappointed.” On December 3, 1864, with Confederate troops hot on their trail, Sherman’s troops blew up the bridge after crossing Ebenezer Creek close to Savannah and left over 500 frightened black refugees stranded on the other side. The Union soldiers shot some of the refugees; some with children clinging to them, jumped into the creek and drowned. Others, who had always counted on their owners for basic essentials, returned to their homes.[1557]
In his annual message to Congress on December 6, 1864, before the end of Sherman’s hellish campaign, Lincoln said, “The most remarkable feature in the military operations of the year is General Sherman’s attempted march of three hundred miles directly through the insurgent region. It tends to show a great increase of our relative strength that our General-in-Chief Grant should feel able to confront and hold in check every active force of the enemy, and yet to detach a well-appointed large army to move on such an expedition. The result not yet being known, conjecture in regard to it is not here indulged.”[1558] Sherman’s march ended with the capture of the port of Savannah on December 21, 1864.
With conscription, mandatory military service, General Grant had absolutely no reluctance in sending thousands of Union soldiers into bloody warfare and to their possible deaths. Lincoln, in that same message to Congress, bragged that the Union army and navy were superior to any in the world and that the northern population and war production were increasing. He said, “We are not exhausted nor in process of exhaustion; that we are gaining strength and may if need be maintain the contest indefinitely. This as to men. Material resources are now more complete and abundant than ever.”[1559] Grant, perhaps like Kissinger, thought that military men were just dumb stupid animals, expendable and easily replaced.
Author Thomas DiLorenzo maintains that this war was a war of attrition because Grant recognized that he could replace those who perished. About 300,000 people were slaughtered at the hands of people like Grant. The Republican Party dogma of relentless massacre to abolish slavery, as a war measure, and save the Union was a sham and a fraud. Walt Whitman reportedly said, “The war taught America that a nation cannot be trifled with.” In other words, oblige us or we will shoot you.[1560]
Financing the Bloodbath, 1861-1865, a Pattern for the Future
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