"The Old South" in the days of the Read and Wauchope families
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Geographically,
"The Old South" is a sub-region of the American South, differentiated
from the Deep South by being limited to those Southern states represented among
the original thirteen British colonies, which became the first thirteen U.S.
states.
Culturally,
"The Old South" is used to describe the rural, agriculturally-based,
pre-Civil War or antebellum economy and society in the Southern United States.
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Henry Grady was the Editor of the Atlanta Constitution and coined the phrase "The New South."
He presented an important speech at the close of the War Between the States, which is presented below, with questions to think about, based on his remarks.
Also included below, is a short film about his life.
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Dr. Brion McClanahan presents the lecture "The Old South and the New South"
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Recent and Recommended for further reading and research on "The Old South"
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"Social Life in Old Virginia" is now in public domain, and can be viewed in the pdf document below:
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A Special Note For
those friends of, or are members of the Hughes, Read, and Wauchope families, who
are looking at this webpage, I cannot apologize for the truth of what is found here, especially in the Special 2017 and 2020 subsections page, with which you
may disagree.
I
was taught to tell the truth and we will continue to do that on this
page. All aspects of the 2020 Election were examined in detail on the Old South sub-section page.
The preponderance of evidence discovered, including how Joe Biden
has lied to the American public (exposed again, as late as December 29, 2020,
when the Ukraine government revealed new tape recordings of Joe Biden's dealings
with their officials and the subsequent graft and corruption, and not just with
his son Hunter) led to conclusions you may disagree with, but they are the
truth, nevertheless.
Let me provide you a recent example of what I'm talking about. In the first week of February, I had a phone conversation with someone who attends my church. It came out during the conversation that they had no idea that the Black Lives Matter organization had been founded by 3 Marxists (read: Communists). This individual was astonished. Yet, that is the trend among those who are wed to what they have been 'spoon fed' by the 'main stream media' for over the year 2020.
Careful historical research led me past the veneer of 'main stream
media' which I avoid like the plague, to the truthfulness of original documents
and other source material.
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A Narrative Introduction
to this web page...........
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As
Professor William Marvel has stated, the accepted role of the historian
is to explain what happened, rather than to guess what might have been.
The most intensely objective historical studies sometimes adopt an
unintentionally narrow perspective through a reluctance to address
alternatives available to the participants.
Historians
unwilling to consider the conditional past tend to present historical
developments as the only possible results of immutable chains of
events.
In professional circles the examination of alternatives
is associated with futile, lowbrow speculation, and indeed the genre of
"counter-factual" history often descends to ludicrous levels of
political science fiction. Nonetheless, the refusal to weigh actions
and events against some measure other than what they actually wrought
leaves the historian functioning too much like an annalist and too
little like an analyst.
It is my hope to present on this page a balanced viewpoint of the Old South in those days gone by, when John Read, who having fought in the War of 1812, lived out his years in Mississippi on a cotton farm. He and his family are discussed in more detail on "The Read Family Story" webpage.
This page has been expanded to present the truth concerning "the fury over the monuments," as Dr. Robertson called it, with a view that we hope, will educate and inform. Several of his lectures are presented toward the end of the special sub-section(s) that deal with the monument problems of 2017 and 2020 which are now included on a new webpage: "The Old South sub-section". I sincerely hope that you, the reader, will take time to examine all the facts and data that are presented there. You may be uncomfortable with several viewpoints which are examined in detail, but it is hoped you will come to an informed conclusion. It is important to you, as it was to the Read and Wauchope families, that each part of the data is examined carefully and in detail. It is a matter of record, that John Read was one of the few heads of households that was reimbursed by the Federal Government after the war was over, for the destruction of his cotton farm. He had remained loyal to the Union and his house located near the Vicksburg campaign, was spared from destruction.
And after the war ended, none of those in the Read, Wauchope, or Hughes families, who served in the Confederacy, ever joined the KKK so far as we know. They supported our American heritage of freedom, not the Marxism and anarchy which is being espoused by many uneducated individuals in the year 2020; movements they have not researched and fully understood. The special sub-sections on the new webpage "The Old South sub-section" will explore that further.
On that new page, you will also be introduced to the false revisionist history of the "1619 Project" which is pure nonsense. It is an attempt to take re-write history and insert it into our Junior and Senior High Schools. Indeed, some schools in our country have started using these materials without any critical examination of them. As a former high school history teacher, I firmly stand against this ideology based on one woman's interpretation of history, which many subject-matter historians in this country have roundly dismissed as fake.
One other Marxist-laden history of our country, which has been around for some time supported by Howard Zinn, a member of the Communist Party, will be examined in depth. I also do not recommend his books.
I attended schools with teachers who emphasized our American Christian values and the freedom we enjoy in our country. Kids today, unfortunately, are not being taught the founding principles of our nation. Some of our schools are now teaching the rubbish like the "1619 Project" which perpetuates lies about how and why our nation was founded.
I grew up in a Christian home. We prayed and read the Bible together as a family. My father and mother came from not well-off circumstances. My father lived on a farm and had to rise early to milk the cow and then after the chores were over, walk some distance to school. My mother grew up during the depression of the 1930s. Her own mother had to pawn her wedding ring to get money to get the children's teeth fixed at the dentist office. Money was extremely tight. Both her grandparents had worked as Missionaries in Indian Territory before Oklahoma was a state (the details of which can be found on "The Read Family Story" webpage).
This family heritage carried over to my brother and I, growing up in a small town. I can remember people who had even less than we, would sometimes come to the back door of our house in South Norfolk, and mother would invite them in to supper with us. That was just who she was; and the color of one's skin meant no difference. Our family always treated everyone with dignity and respect. In my early college years during the turbulent 1960s, I did volunteer work with other students in the inner city area of Berkley in Norfolk, which was a very poor section of the city at that time.
During one Christmas Eve, my brother invited a graduate student from the college we were attending, home for dinner. He was from India and was studying engineering. My mother gave him a Bible; the first time he had ever seen one during the years he had been in our country.
So I hope you understand that from my own background, I have a hard time understanding why folks in our country are not trying to have a rational conversation about the circumstances surrounding the 2017 and 2020 events that are detailed in the new webpage.
Also, please keep in mind, that as you read this page, you will be presented with opposing views from 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st Century sources. They do not, repeat, do not necessarily represent my personal viewpoint. However, keep in mind that no one in my immediate family would ever support a "Democratic Socialist," Socialist, or a Communist-backed organization. Nor would anyone in our immediate family support or vote for any politician who supports such.
Yet, people can be gullible to any passing political philosophical persuasion, when they do not investigate the background of a situation thoroughly; when they 'take as gospel' everything said in a high school or college classroom, as did a great grandchild of one of my deceased Aunts, who is ignorant of American history; who has associated himself with other like-minded individuals, in joining a radical online movement founded by the BLM Marxists, and which, his mother has unfortunately praised on her Facebook, showing her own ignorance.
When I taught History in public and private schools some years ago, I did not teach that subject from a personally-slanted modern day political viewpoint. The students on some occasions would state that, by my teaching any period of history as historical fact, from the primary source materials and documents, they could not figure out which political party I espoused. That is the intent here. I will not tell the reader of this page which party ideology I espouse, except as pertaining to the current 2020 election on the new webpage already mentioned above. I will simply present the facts of the Antebellum period and the Civil War and the accompanying sub-section webpage, as they are.
You
will find good information on this and the new page from unbiased news sources in
England and Australia. Much of what we now call the 'mainstream media' have censored what a viewer on TV may see. Late in the 2020 election, it has been accurately revealed that the 'tech giants' have censored news on Google, Twitter, and Facebook. You will find that I have had to come to the
conclusion, during this 2020 election year, that only one candidate truly
supports the Christian values our family cherished. We live in unusual
times, but we must remain true to what the Bible teaches as truth.
(See Dr. Gary Gallagher, Professor of History Emeritus, UVA, short video below, in which he answers the question concerning how he teaches History).
Did the Read, Wauchope, and Porter
families know what was going on, in the run-up to the Secession Crisis?
Yes they did. Their letters and documents attest to that. They
certainly had newspapers (2 in the Vicksburg/Edwards Depot, MS area, and
2 in the Jackson, MS area) for them to draw upon, as well as friends
and relatives who were in and out of the area prior to the Fort Sumpter
event. These diverse newspapers (which are detailed on this
page) presented the political news of the day from which
to make informed decisions.
You will find that he and his eldest son
Jesse remained loyal to the Union in the antebellum years, as well as
during the Civil War. It is important for any reader to not be "wed" to
any one news source, but read through a wide range of papers and TV
sources to enable one to come to a fair and accurate conclusion.
There was also a railroad depot at the town of Edwards, and
documentation shows Read family members arriving by train, to
visit John Read's plantation. Charles "Savez" Read even visited his
grandfather in the early years of the War Between the States. They didn't have radio and television. They didn't watch the 24 hour news cycle on one of the stations currently broadcasting opposing views. They remind me of a professor I had who didn't have a television in his home, and received all his news either by radio or by reading the newspaper. Today, you cannot be "wed" to one network or another; but must separate the proverbial "wheat from the chaff" when dissecting truth from fiction, and fake news from real news.
-J. Hughes
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Dr. Gary Gallagher answers a question after a lecture at UCLA about teaching history as history:
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The importance of Newspapers to the Read family, 1800-1860
3 Films explain their importance:
1. The American Newspaper: Introduction
2. The City Newspaper
3. The Country Newspaper
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Newspapers John Read "read"
By following from the
early 1830s thru 1860 and beyond, you get a sense of what the people of
Vicksburg, and Hinds and Yazoo Counties Mississippi thought about. These papers
gave detailed information about Cotton and Sugar prices, which directly
affected John Read's plantation. One paper had an article about
"King Cotton" which is discussed further down on this page.
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Mississippi Antebellum Politics
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POLITICS IN
THE VICINITY OF EDWARDS DEPOT, MS
Home of John
Read
The Antebellum Congressional Elections
1846 ELECTION: Won by Patrick W
Tompkins (Whig) with 52.1% of the vote.
1848 ELECTION: Won
by William Mcwillie (Democrat)
with 52% of the vote.
1850 ELECTION: Won by John D
Freeman (Union) with 51.8% of the vote.
1852 ELECTION: Won by Otho R
Singleton (Democrat) with 55.6% of the vote.
1854 ELECTION: Won by William A
Lake (Opposition) with 52% of the vote.
1856 ELECTION: Won by Otho R
Singleton (Democrat) with 54.3% of the vote.
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"Who were the Southern Whigs?" by Charles Grier Sellers, Jr.
adds much to our understanding of the politics in the area where John Read's family lived:
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"The Whig Party and it's Presidents" is an article that throws light on the history of the party:
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The politics of the John Read family
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John Read originally born in Halifax, NC, migrated to Tennessee, where he married Dicey Duke. He eventually moved to Alabama, then to Mississippi and established a plantation there. He and his eldest son, Jesse, born in Alabama, were, in my opinion, not Whigs, but Jacksonian Democrats. They both participated in two wars (Indian and War of 1812) prior to the Civil War. Their objection to participation in the Confederate cause is a typical Jacksonian response. Jesse in particular, refused to put on a Confederate uniform and was conscripted into that army, although was later released after his disability due to involvement to the earlier conflict, which now caused his discharge. This information may be found on the "Read Family Story" web page.
Of course, not all John Read's grandchildren followed suit, as the Read story will explain; with many entering Confederate Army and Naval service.
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Unfortunately, there is much fallacious reasoning that goes on, and the attempt to think 'inside the box' and miss the true story of what
happened during the War Between the States. With so many turbulent
political factions in operation today, we tend to look at our turbulent past as
if they had only two sides, and we tend to give the greater interpretive
deference to whichever side came out on top.
We tend to learn our history of the past as if everything worked out for the
best; that there were no other real alternatives available to the
participants. At every historical juncture, there are alternative courses
of action available. It's almost impossible to argue that things work out
for the best.
Defense of their homeland was the real incentive for a Southerner to volunteer, not slavery. This is evident from reading the original source materials.
At the beginning of the war, in the North, it was not patriotism and selfless devotion that was the real motivation for enlistment. It was money...mercenary motivation. Then as now, many enlistments were found, especially in the first call to the colors, in the poorer sections of the North. There was little sympathy for Abolition; there was a hostility against it.
Most of the Northern population were racist, even as Lincoln was. (Lincoln was an early member of an organization {documentation provided on this page} that wanted to deport black slaves out of the United States; create colonies for them in other countries). This becomes apparent by reading the original documents forward, not reading backward in the sources. Contemporary sources show the real story. Many Northern soldiers' re-enlistments were also for the money. (Professor Bill Marvel has done extensive research/statistical studies on this).
Some who read what is presented here may say this is "revisionist" history. When someone, and especially a historian, casts around the word "revisionist" or "speculation" as epithets, they are demonstrating their hostility to innovative thought, and their ignorance of the very field they have chosen to pursue. The reason we follow history is to see what is new in it. And if there be no revisionism or nothing new in it, then there is no reason to pursue it.
Another newly added section on this web page will deal with the Read and Wauchope families, many of whom were members of the Presbyterian Church, and the split that occurred in that church. We know that John and Dicey Read were members of the Methodist Church in the Edwards Depot, Mississippi area. Charles "Savez" Read was a member of the First Baptist Church, Meridian, Mississippi prior to his death. But John Jeremiah Read, and many of his descendants, were members of the Presbyterian Church. It is the antebellum Presbyterian Church on this page we will examine, concerning how they perceived the coming Civil War.
What you will find on this
web page represents original documentation, much of it never discussed in
current 'popular' history books or in the classroom. Too many books about
the War Between the States deal with all the battles, strategy, politics, and
generalship. You can read about R.E. Lee, Grant, Sherman, Davis, and
Lincoln. But not much is available which focuses on the common soldier or
the civilians. Some books written in the late 1800s were "war stories" invented out of "whole cloth" and totally fiction. An example of that is given further down on this page.
We will examine 6 examples of how the general reading public has been misled by individuals, either by design, or by ineptness.
First, we consider General John Bell Hood's report of his army's retreat after being defeated at the battle of Nashville in December of 1864: "From Pulaski I moved by the most direct road to Bainbridge crossing on the Tennessee River, which was reached on the 25th, where the army crossed without interruption, completing the crossing on the 27th, including our rear guard...After crossing the river the army moved by easy marches to Tupelo, Miss."
In 1880, Hood wrote his post-war memoirs, "Advance and Retreat." He devotes two paragraphs to describing the retreat from Nashville to Tupelo. He DOES NOT mention the cold weather, the rain, the sleet, the lack of rations, or his barefooted and starving troops. He does note that his retreating army "therefore continued...to march leisurely, and arrived at Bainbridge, on the 25th of December." In the next paragraph, he launches into a multi-page explanation of his strategy and defends his handing of the Army of Tennessee during the Atlanta and Franklin-Nashville campaigns.
Perhaps General Hood was on a different retreat than that of his soldiers. Here is how 2 Lt. Samuel Robinson of the 63rd Virginia Infantry saw it: "we have retreated some 200 miles through the wet and cold mud half leg deep and a great many men was entirey barfooted and almost naked. The men marched over frozen ground till their feet was worn out till they could be tracked by the blood and some of them there feet was frosted and swolen till they bursted till they could not stand on there feet."
Yes, many letters have spelling errors and problems with grammar; but as with 2Lt. Robinson, there is absolutely no problem feeling "feet (that) was fropsted and swolen till they bursted till they could not stand...?" You DON'T get the same feeling from General Hood's "easy marches to Tupelo."
(My thanks to Jeff Toalson who has done a superb job of editing many diaries and letters of Confederate soldiers, from which comes the above example).
(For a look at major re-writing of military history done by General Grant in his "Memoirs," see the "Read Family Story" web page for two articles, documentation, and video lectures).
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Second, we consider a brief synopsis of General Grant's
re-write of military history found in his "Memoirs" which were used by many historians in writing various battle histories.
Was Ulysses S. Grant a brilliant and
unparalleled general who won the American Civil War, a magnanimous and
incorruptible man, and an honest and accurate chronicler of history? Or was he
remarkably untruthful, careless, persistent, indolent, aggressive, unjust,
biased, impetuous, and lucky?
A stringent and detailed examination
of Grant’s generalship and character in the war has long been necessary.
Standard histories and biographies, founded on a lengthy succession of biased
and erroneous writings, have much of it wrong.
Many of these inaccuracies
originated with the General himself, in his official reports, in his Personal
Memoirs, and in his other writings. While Grant possessed many positive
attributes and achieved valuable objectives, his reputation as a military
mastermind with a virtuous character is hopelessly exaggerated. Grant Under
Fire: An Exposé of Generalship & Character in the American Civil War,
thoroughly establishes this.
Below are corrections to just a
few of the commonly accepted narratives:
- Contrary
to his later assertion in his Personal Memoirs, Grant did
receive John Frémont’s orders to occupy Paducah (if possible), before he
departed Cairo.
- In
a report revised years after the battle of Belmont—but falsified to look
as if written just ten days later—Grant fabricated communications to cover
up his insubordination in attacking. And he scapegoated Colonel Napoleon
Buford, who had avoided the ensuing rout of the federal expedition by
taking a separate route to the riverbank. Yet, Grant had written a day
after the battle that, “I can say with gratification that every Colonel
without a single exception, set an example to their commands that inspired
a confidence that will always insure victory when there is the slightest
possibility of gaining one.”
- Grant
drank—and got drunk—with the enemy on flag-of-truce boats after the
battle.
- Despite
commendations for honesty, Grant engaged in corrupt practices for the
benefit of friends and family, which at least indirectly helped himself.
Of some fraudulent practices at Cairo, an Assistant Secretary of War wrote
about Grant and his quartermaster, “It appears strange that officers,
having an eye to the interests of the Government, could in such a manner
countenance, much less certify to, such injustice.”
- On
February 15th, when Grant finally arrived on the battlefield at
Fort Donelson after being absent all morning, he initially wanted to pull
the troops back, according to Lew Wallace. This would have facilitated the
enemy’s escape. John McClernand apparently advised a counterattack which
Grant denied hearing. Both subordinates remarked how Grant wanted to
withdraw from the positions gained in the subsequent counter-offensive. On
the other flank, General Charles Smith waited for Grant to give direct
orders before doing anything significant, yet Grant awarded him the honors
over Wallace who insubordinately saved the day for the Union.
- When
the Confederates surprised his almost completely unprepared army at
Shiloh—which he denied to the end of his life—Grant did nothing to
facilitate reinforcement by Don Carlos Buell’s force (pointing “Bull”
Nelson’s division into the swamps without a guide doesn’t count) and he
dispatched Lew Wallace to Sherman’s right (but had to backtrack as the
lines had fallen back), but refused to admit it. Evidently, his only
orders at the brigade or division level during the first day’s fight led
to Benjamin Prentiss’ surrender. When he repeated his instructions for
that officer to hold on, the enemy was outflanking the Hornets’ Nest
position left and right. His Memoirs, instead, blamed Prentiss for
being captured, while he kept changing his accusations in the scapegoating
of Lew Wallace.
- Grant
was often inebriated, although it is impossible to establish the extent to
which his being so affected the war effort. While Grant was on a binge up
the Yazoo River, however, several regiments of raw Black soldiers at
Milliken’s Bend were fighting for their lives with their backs to the
Mississippi, without artillery, and with only serendipitous reinforcement.
Henry Halleck related how the General’s riding accident outside of New
Orleans—where observers witnessed Grant’s intoxication—delayed his
assumption of a larger command at a crucial time in the West. The
General’s defenders often transform these accounts into mere “rumors.”
- Interspersed
with periods of activity, Grant displayed a physical and mental laziness
and confessed to a lifelong
habit of indolence. He showed little interest in map making, signals,
engineering, and other facets of generalship. Many of the staff chosen by
Grant early in the war were not only idlers, but were hard drinkers, as
well.
- Extreme
partiality may have been Ulysses’ greatest character defect. His choice of
officers and even the conduct of operations frequently hinged on personal
feelings, as opposed to pertinent military factors. Favorites, such as
William T. Sherman and Philip Sheridan, could do no wrong, as Grant raised
them up to higher commands. Likewise, he held grudges against fellow
officers for little or no good reason, refusing them opportunity,
promotion, and justice (either in army courts of inquiry or in the courts
of history). Grant’s defenders almost invariably blame everyone else and
make him the victim.
- His
cotton-speculating father, Jesse, is regularly accused of provoking
Grant’s General Orders No. 11, which banished all Jews, as a class, from
his military department. But Ulysses’ intention to discriminate against
members of that religion had been repeatedly expressed. And he permitted
his cotton-speculating friend and financial adviser, J. Russell Jones, to
personally accompany him down the Mississippi.
- Colonel
Robert Murphy was chosen to be the main scapegoat for the destruction of
the Holly Spring’s supply depot, but General Grant committed a series of
mistakes which made it possible. (And Grant had saved Murphy after William
Rosecrans arrested him for abandoning military stores at Iuka.)
- Grant
falsified the history of the Vicksburg campaign by claiming that he placed
no faith in his various failed Delta schemes—which he impetuously
initiated without proper preparations and with insufficient engineering
resources—that his men were as healthy as could be expected, and that he
always meant to pass the Vicksburg batteries. His own contemporary
writings disproved these assertions.
- One
of Grant’s most blatant untruths concerned the spectacular Union charge up
Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga on November 25, 1863. He stole the credit
from the soldiers and subordinate officers, maintaining that his orders
intended them to ascend, when they actually put the men in dire jeopardy
at the lower rifle-pits, sitting ducks for the Confederates. His
subordinate, George H. Thomas, delayed the attack for an hour (as more
brigades of Thomas’ old Army of the Cumberland and from Hooker’s mixed
contingent were getting into position to assault), yet Thomas is somehow
turned into a passive-aggressive incompetent by Grant’s defenders.
- Denying
that his blunder-filled Overland campaign was a catastrophe, General Grant
misrepresented the size of the two armies, their casualties, and the
results. Grant Under Fire relates how: “Each of his four
maneuvers (passing through the Wilderness into open country, reaching
Spotsylvania first, crossing the North Anna, and flanking Lee around Cold
Harbor) failed. Each of his three major engagements ended in defeat. The
stalemating of Grant constituted a major Confederate victory, which was
reflected in Lincoln’s political woes, his potential electoral defeat, and
the high price of gold.”
- After
the ignominious debacle of the charge at Cold Harbor on June 3, 1864,
Grant refused for days to send a flag of truce to rescue his wounded men.
He thought that Meade could send a flag, but didn’t want to do it himself.
This repeated Grant’s failure to request a truce after the May 22nd
assault on Vicksburg a year before. He then implicitly blamed Robert E.
Lee for his own callousness. As to his regretting the attack at Cold
Harbor, he thought about attacking again two days afterward.
- Once
the mine did not ignite when expected at the Battle of the Crater, Grant
ordered the troops to charge right over the time-bomb. Here, as he did
elsewhere, the General tried to keep Black troops to the rear and out of
the fight.
- Grant
assisted Sheridan in the dismissal of corps commander Gouverneur Warren at
the Battle of Five Forks, by preemptively providing authorization to sack
Warren and then supplying incorrect information which made Warren look
bad. As General-in-Chief and as President, he quashed Warren’s repeated
requests for a court of inquiry. Once Grant left office, President
Rutherford B. Hayes appointed a court of inquiry that basically sided with
Warren.
- Although
often portrayed as a principled individual, Grant helped to deprive many
other officers—William Kountz, Lew Wallace, Robert Murphy, John
McClernand, Jacob Lauman, Winfield Hancock, and Stephen Hurlbut—of their
chances to gain justice through a court of inquiry.
- Grant
basically admitted to public corruption for his personal benefit
(subsidizing Adam Badeau’s three-volume Military History of Ulysses S.
Grant) in giving Badeau a temporary grade of Colonel, three grades
beyond his actual rank; unusual access to papers and documents; the
assistance of several staff officers to provide historical and military
information; diplomatic office abroad during which Badeau could finish the
biography; the assistance of other staff officers to furnish information
while he was away; and even contravening regulations by sending national
archives overseas “at the risk of their being lost,” along with a copy of
Grant’s headquarters records.
Hundreds of other such examples
are described in Grant Under Fire: An Exposé of Generalship & Character
in the American Civil War.
Grant had few of the skills
needed to organize and discipline an army. In battle after battle, he showed
little tactical ability. Instructions were often meager, with little
forethought or planning.
The General repeatedly threw his soldiers into
impetuous frontal assaults and against fortifications. Except after crossing
the Mississippi to march on Vicksburg, his operations displayed little of a
much-publicized reputation for strategic genius. Neither did his expressed
methods. These ranged from the simplistic (“find out where your enemy is, get
at him as soon as you can, and strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving
on”), the merely aggressive (“the only way to whip an army is to go out and
fight it”), the unthinkingly aggressive (“When in doubt, fight”), and the
ham-handed (“Oh! I never manœuvre”).
Other officers and the soldiers
fortunately made up for much of his strategic and tactical deficiencies. The
faults of judgment, bias, and performance in the Civil War mirrored the
multitude of errors in his two terms as President. Ulysses S. Grant, the man,
didn’t change. And where was his wife in all of this? In some cases, in the theater of operations with her husband and her "slaves"!
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General Grant had a drinking problem, which in some 21st Century histories of the War, gloss over it and excuse his behavior as either it didn't happen, or he only drank occasionally and it didn't interfere with his supervision of the Union Army. Unfortunately for some historians, the truth is too glaring to overlook: he did drink to excess. Perhaps not a falling down drunk, but he was, in the clinical sense, an alcoholic. We include some information here concerning his problem.
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Grant and Drinking Revisited
-Brooks D. Simpson
Professor Joan Waugh often lectures on the
Civil War and she will discuss the reports of Ulysses S. Grant’s drinking.
It seems to me that too many discussions of
Grant’s relationship with alcohol follow a predictable pattern. We hear
Dr. Waugh proclaim that Grant was never drunk when it counted. That’s a
claim I’ve heard for a long time. In short, whether or not Grant drank,
if he did so, no one was hurt by it, and so what’s the big fuss?
I do not concur with this line of argument.
Let’s highlight three reports of Grant’s
intoxication during the American Civil War where it’s clear something
happened: the Yazoo bender of June 6, 1863; Grant’s fall from a horse at
New Orleans on September 4, 1863; and a report that Grant drank and fell ill
while inspecting the Petersburg lines on June 29, 1864. In each case we
can debate and even disagree on what happened in detail, but’s let’s look a bit
more carefully at these incidents.
As for the Yazoo, Mississippi bender: we know that Grant
had been ailing, that Sherman’s medical director had advised him to take a
drink for relief, and that there had been some drinking at Grant’s headquarters
on June 5, although it’s far from clear whether Grant was drinking, drinking to
excess, drinking to relieve some pain, or not drinking. However, the
journey up the Yazoo the next day was not a pleasure cruise, but an effort to
assess the situation in light of reports that Joseph Johnston was mounting a
relief expedition to attack Grant’s rear. Grant appears to have been ill
that day, and one could conclude that he had indeed taken a drink or two for
relief. That hypothesis receives support from a draft of an manuscript by
James H. Wilson in the Wilson papers at the Library of Congress. So, is
this a story of Grant as irresponsible drunk? Probably not. Is this
an example of the intersection of illness and alcohol? Probably.
Was Grant engaged in doing something important to the security of his
command? Yes. So let’s dismiss the notion that the Yazoo bender,
whatever happened there, was undertaken during a lull in the campaign.
That’s simply not true.
Now let’s turn to New Orleans. Grant
was on a visit to Nathaniel P. Banks to confer about possible operations.
Banks took Grant to review two corps, including the Thirteenth Corps, which was
part of Grant’s own Army of the Tennessee. There was quite a reception
afterward, complete with drinks. We don’t have any evidence that anyone
saw Grant drinking at the reception, but we do have accounts by Banks and
William B. Franklin that Grant was drunk. Other witnesses did not support
that claim. On the way back, Grant’s mount, alarmed by a train whistle,
threw its rider, and Grant fell hard, losing consciousness. His left leg
was seriously injured. He was laid up for weeks, and had not recovered
when he went to Chattanooga six weeks later. Hard to conclude what
exactly happened here, but one could see Grant, feeling a buzz, being a little
careless in handling an unruly horse and suffering the consequences.
Putting a general out of commission with a serious injury certainly ends his
usefulness in the field for a while, and it could have been worse.
Finally, on June 29, 1864, a hot day, Grant,
while inspecting his command, and complaining of a headache, reportedly downed
a few drinks, became sick, and vomited. No, he was not laid up for days,
and the vomiting may have resulted from a combination of the heat and the
alcohol. But we can’t say that this was a lull in campaigning, either, as
Grant was busy dealing with Lee and pondering what to do next. The fact is
that when you are general-in-chief there is no lull in the fighting, because
somewhere someone’s fighting.
Note that I’m setting aside reports of Grant
drinking at Chattanooga because I don’t find enough to craft a compelling
enough case. Besides, highlighting these three cases should be sufficient
to challenge the notion that there’s some sort of cover-up going on (although
there will always be folks who insist that). These three examples should
cause us to set aside the notion that Grant drank when it didn’t matter and
when nothing important was going on. When you are a general in command of
an army, something important is always going on, and it would be bad business
for a general to assume a lull in the fighting to relax before being
surprised. Think Shiloh.
I’ve written before about Grant’s
drinking. Sometimes I suspect that people don’t pay careful attention to
what I’ve written, because the debate seems to be carried on between admirers
and antagonists. I don’t see how that has anything to do with getting the
story straight, or in trying to piece together what happened and why.
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The pattern that Grant‘s drinking assumed during
the Civil War strongly suggests that he was a binge drinker. Binge drinking is
well understood today, as well as carefully defined: five or more drinks in a
single session by a man, four or more drinks by a woman. A heavy binge drinker
is one who experiences three or more such episodes over a two-week period. A
less formal definition of binge drinking is drinking simply to become
intoxicated. If they do their drinking in private, binge drinkers often avoid
detection. When not drinking, although often depressed and angry, they may
function more or less normally, holding down jobs, raising and caring for
families, displaying not only rationality but also discretion and incisiveness.
All of these qualities characterized Grant’s Civil War drinking.
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At
least three times during 1863, Grant became intoxicated while in public,
horrifying those concerned with preserving his position and reputation,
especially his staff officers. Although historians continue to debate the
extent and the effectiveness of his efforts, Grant’s adjutant general, John A.
Rawlins, a zealous cold-water man from Grant’s home state of Illinois, strove
to cover up his boss’s indiscretions and swear him to abstinence. Grant appears
to have given in to his urge to imbibe only on those occasions when Rawlins was
not on hand to ensure his sobriety. Nor did Grant drink when Julia and the
children visited him in the field, rescuing him from lassitude and loneliness.
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Grant reached the pinnacle of his career when
brought to Virginia in the spring of 1864 to accompany the Army of the Potomac
as general-in-chief of United States forces. He is not known to have drunk
during the opening phases of the Overland Campaign, when pressing Robert E.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia toward Richmond via the Wilderness,
Spotsylvania Court House, the North Anna River, and Cold Harbor. But in June
1864, with his offensive bogged down at Petersburg, the lieutenant general went
on a raucous bender that might have ruined his career had his inner circle not
conspired to hush it up and discredit a disgruntled subordinate who tried to
publicize it for personal gain.
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Ulysses S. Grant continued to wrestle with alcohol after
1865. Liquor never caused scandals for him like it did during the War Between
the States, but his occasional relapses ultimately took their toll. Heretofore
his slow, painful death from cancer of the mouth and throat had been assumed to
be the consequence of heavy smoking. But a 1978 Department of Health, Education
and Welfare report of alcoholism concludes that alcohol is "indisputably
involved" in the cause of several types of cancer. Among these are
"cancers of the mouth and pharynx, larynx . . ." Evidently the courageous soldier who
defeated the Confederates lost his longer war with the disease of alcoholism.
(A United Press International description of this HEW
report, complete with Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Joseph
Califano's accompanying statement, is printed in the Rocky Mountain News
[Denver], October 18, 1978, 70.)
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Third, we now consider a book written in the late 1800s by a Civil War Union veteran who filled his memoir with complete untruth.
Many stories have been spun about the American Civil War; some of them better than others. In the modern marketplace, everything from AK-47 wielding Confederates, to a vampire-slaying Lincoln, permeates the battlefields in search of profit. With this as a backdrop, let us re-evaluate the scorned story of one soldier of the Union in "A Load of Buell?"-- Another look at "The Cannoneer."
Park Ranger Bert Barnett leads a talk investigating the fraudulent writings of Augustus Caesar Buell. (Ranger Barnett and the NPS hold the rights to the lecture and notes; film courtesy of the National Park Service).
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Fourth, Consider the long-running Lincoln Forum which meets annually in Gettysburg, PA.
The Forum states on their website the following:
“The Lincoln Forum is an assembly of people who share a deep interest in the life and times of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War era. Through a roster of activities and projects including symposia, tours, student essay competitions, teacher scholarships, a newsletter, and annual awards to recognize special contributions to the field of Lincoln studies, the Forum endeavors to enhance the understanding and preserve the memory of Abraham Lincoln.”
In a recent Forum meeting, an introduction of Professor William C. "Jack" Davis was given by Forum Chairman Frank Davis. Davis stated that Lincoln learned his leadership skills and all about army life, from his service in the Black Hawk War.
That sounds all well and good on the surface, but Lincoln's only military service was 3 months in a local militia during that Black Hawk War of 1832, where all he accomplished was getting demoted from Captain to Private. He never saw action.
Ironically, this war was ended by Second Lieutenant Jefferson Davis (later president of the Confederacy) who personally captured Chief Black Hawk.
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Fifth,
we consider what the general public watches on television and why they
need to sift the "wheat from the chaff" when delving into Civil War
online video lectures and films. I have heard many professors state that they will not use such films as "Gods and Generals" in their classrooms, and consider them as more melodrama than factual.
So-called "Television Documentaries" need to be vetted for accuracy.
Consider the 2015 article, "PBS’s
“The Civil War”: The Mythmanagement of History" by Professor Emeritus Ludwell H. Johnson, College of William and Mary:
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(This piece was originally printed by Southern
Partisan magazine in 1990.)
In the September issue of the American
Historical Association’s newsletter, a rave review predicted that the PBS
production “The Civil War” might become “the Gone With
the Wind of documentaries.” After watching almost all of it, I
would suggest Uncle Tom’s Cabin as its
fictional alter ego. But let us not (like “The Civil War”) be unfair. It is
probably the best of the various kinds of “Civil War” television extravaganzas
to appear so far. As anyone who watched the others will know, this is faint
praise. When Boswell asked that arch-conservative Dr. Samuel Johnson who was
worse, Rousseau or Voltaire, Johnson replied, “Sir, it is difficult to settle
the proportion of iniquity between them.”
On the plus side, the pictures in Ken Burns’
documentary were excellent, as they have always been, whether seen on
television or in the old "Miller Photographic History" or
in the more recent "Image of War" by
William C. Davis. The letters from and to soldiers were interesting and
frequently moving. Shelby Foote’s comments often struck a note of sane
moderation. The background music was well-done if repetitious. There were
occasional though ineffectual attempts at impartiality in the narration.
Now for the minus side. In the first place, a
program like this is inherently incapable of explaining complex historical
events. It can only illustrate the cruelty and suffering of war, the romantic
naivete, the poignancy, pathos, courage, cowardice. But even with the best of
intentions untrammeled by prejudice or ideological imperatives, to attempt to
explain so much by such means is inevitably to distort. When bias, ideology,
and sheer ignorance are loaded onto the inherent limitations, then we have
something like “The Civil War”, a caricature often reminiscent of Republican
postwar “Bloody Shirt” political propaganda.
To turn to some of the larger deformities,
take slavery, both as the cause of the war and as an institution. The mono-causation theory—slavery as the cause—was put forward many years ago by
James Ford Rhodes. That view was the received wisdom among the postwar
generation, but was powerfully challenged by scholars between the two World
Wars.
In the era of the civil rights movement, the
importance of slavery was again strongly emphasized by what some have called
the Neo-abolitionist historians. But even they never completely turned the
clock back to Rhodes, as Mr. Ken Burns has tried to with his popular
documentary. To pluck one factor out of a complex historical matrix and offer
it, clearly but tacitly, as the cause of war is the result, one can charitably
assume, of sheer ignorance.
As for slavery itself, it is likewise torn
from context and held up as a uniquely Southern sin. No mention of those
Africans in Africa who for generations sold their brothers into slavery; or of
the New Englanders who profited for so many years by buying them in Africa and
selling them in America; or of the pervasive anti-black prejudice in the
Northern states so ably documented thirty years ago by Leon Litwack.
Purported mortality statistics for slaves are
presented without comparison to mortality rates among free blacks or whites.
There is no hint of the fact that the growth rate of the country’s black population
was less for seventy years after emancipation than it was before, no awareness
of the latest revisionist studies (by Northern scholars) that contradict the
raw-head-and-bloody-bones vision presented by producer Ken Burns and his
coadjutors.
The handling of Lincoln and the questions of
race and slavery are equally unbalanced. The level of discourse here was
suggested by Shelby Foote’s interviewer, who persisted in believing that
Lincoln was an old-line abolitionist. Foote, who one hopes was embarrassed by a
good deal of what went on during the eleven hours of the program, gently
demurred, but his questioner bulled ahead anyway. In one of those rare and
aberrant bows to ostensible impartiality, it is pointed out that Lincoln
initially opposed only the extension of slavery, and that he said in his first
inaugural he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed
(the adjoining clause in which the Great Emancipator says that neither does he
have any inclination to interfere with it
is delicately omitted) and that he issued orders for the return of runaway
slaves. (Incidentally, Lincoln flatly refused to issue such an order.)
Then after the preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation we are treated to an out-of-context quotation from Lincoln’s
December 1, 1862, message to Congress, including the famous sentence, “we shall
nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” That comment was
made at the end of the second half of his message, which is a plea by Lincoln
for congressional approval of a constitutional amendment that would postpone
emancipation until the year 1900, compensate slave owners and provide funds to
colonize the ex-slaves somewhere outside the United States.
“I cannot make it better known that I
strongly favor colonization.” And to those Northerners who feared the freed
black would “swarm forth and cover the land,” he said they wouldn’t, and if
they tried, “cannot the north decide for itself whether to receive them?” Viewers
of “The Civil War” documentary were never told that this is the context of
“nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth.” It is an excellent
example of the editorial policy of the series.
Nor is the audience told that, at the Hampton
Roads Conference in February 1865, when the Confederacy was collapsing, Lincoln
sat silently by while his Secretary of State invited the Southern negotiators
to bring their states back into the Union and vote down the pending Thirteenth
Amendment; or that Lincoln, when visiting fallen Richmond, himself made the
same offer to Calhoun’s old lieutenant, Duff Green.
As for Lincoln and race, the authors of the
program are evidently wholly ignorant of the categorical white-supremacist
statements Lincoln made repeatedly and publicly during the 1850s, and do not
know that in the late summer of 1862 he told a black delegation that but for
the presence of their race, white men would not be killing each other, and it
would be best for both blacks and whites if blacks left the country.
As another example of distortion by omission,
take the attack on Fort Sumter. In the program, the Confederates suddenly fire
on the Union fort, no reason being given. Nothing is said about the repeated
assurances given Confederate officials by Lincoln’s Secretary of State that the
fort would soon be evacuated, assurances offered even while plans to hold the
fort were being devised. There is no mention of the warnings the Confederate
government began to receive about an expedition being secretly prepared, or of
the fact that when the order to capture the fort was issued by the Davis
administration, they knew that a flotilla of undetermined strength was coming
down the coast, perhaps (as some informants had warned) to capture Charleston.
No, nothing of that—the rebels just attacked, it is implied, without cause or
provocation.
Other subjects are treated with a degree of
unfairness that is bound to raise suspicions as to intent. Space does not
permit more than a sampling. Take Fort Pillow. All we come away with is the assertion
that the Confederates killed black soldiers after they surrendered. Doubtless
some were killed, just as black soldiers sometimes killed Confederates after
they had surrendered. What is not told is that, according to the laws of war,
if a fortified place refused to surrender after being warned that otherwise an
assault would take place, the attackers were entitled to kill all the
defenders. Bedford Forrest’s men did not do this, even though there was never
any formal surrender of the Fort and in spite of the fact that some black soldiers
surrendered and then picked up weapons and shot their captors. Of the 557 men
in the garrison (295 white, 262 black) 336 survived. Forrest took 226
prisoners, 168 whites and 58 blacks. That was the “massacre.”
As for the Battle of the Crater, we are told
that Confederates again shot black soldiers as they attempted to surrender.
Doubtless some did. But we are not told that when the black troops were sent
into the battle they were also shot by Union white soldiers, even as happened
in the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War. And poor old Burnside was
entirely responsible for the disaster at the Crater. Did no one tell the script
writers that a black division had carefully drilled to lead the assault but was
withheld by Grant and Meade at the last moment, and that this was the probable
cause of the failure?
As bad as these examples are, nothing except
perhaps the treatment of slavery approaches the handling of the subject of
prisoners of war. We are transported back to the days of the “Bloody Shirt.”
The horrors of Andersonville are depicted, and horrors there were, and the
living skeletons (emaciated by dysentery, which killed more men than bullets)
that were a staple item in Republican atrocity propaganda are again put on
display. The viewers are not informed of conditions in Northern camps, where a
deliberate policy of deprivation was instituted or of the mortality rate in
those camps, which, despite the vastly superior resources available to the
Lincoln administration, was nearly as high as in the Confederacy. After all,
what more can one expect of a producer (Ken Burns) who characterizes Lee as a
“traitor”?
A similar one-sidedness can be found in the
presentation of Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas. Destruction
of property and robbery, including robbery of the slaves, are conceded: how
could they not be? But there is nothing about the disgusting desecration of
churches, digging up the dead to rob the bodies, nothing of the murder and
torture of civilians, of gang rapes, or of the mass rape of black women. No,
mainly just the destruction of property to show the Southerners the war was
lost and thus save lives — that’s all “Old Cump” and his boys were up to.
As for poor George B. McClellan, who
certainly had his faults, he is made to look bad so that Lincoln can be made to
look good. Just think what that poor man had to put up with! The savaging of McClellan
has been de rigueur among the faithful,
especially since Nicolay and Hay deliberately set out to destroy McClellan’s
reputation in their massive biography of Lincoln. One point will have to
suffice: in the winter of 1861-1862, McClellan (I think this is nearly a direct
quotation from the documentary) “took to his tent with a fever rather than move
his army.” It was a fever, all right, typhoid fever, said his doctors, and he
was in his bed for three weeks.
When all the teachers who have been burning
up their VCRs taping “The Civil War” show it to their classes, one can only
hope that they will linger over a vignette toward the end, one of the
Gettysburg reunion of 1913. It showed those old Confederates retracing their
steps up the slopes of Cemetery Ridge, held again by a handful of their old
adversaries. But before the old Rebs could totter to the crest, they were met
by the old Yanks who rushed down to embrace them. No doubt, to the makers of
the film this was just a pleasing touch of sentimentality; but to those who
know something of the war, it has far more significance.
During the conflict, soldiers from generals
to privates blamed the war on the politicians, and many was the time when Rebs
and Yanks, meeting along the picket line, would say: “if they would just leave
it to us, we could settle it all quickly and peaceably.”
Then as now, the common
soldiers were sent by others to suffer and to die, and the survivors soon began
to wonder how the quarrel got started and whether it could possibly be worth
the agony they saw all around them. But by that time it was too late to stop.
The result is tragedy. And the tragedy is compounded by people like Ken Burns
and his collaborators. Too bad they could not have been as just to the
Confederate soldiers and their Cause as the old Union veterans at Gettysburg in
1913.
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Sixth, we now consider the facts and fiction retold in books written concerning generals in the Civil War, not by the generals themselves, as in the previous example of General Hood, but by 21st Century historians; and we will use General James Longstreet in this example.
In the following 2-part lecture, Park Historian Robert Krick details the facts concerning the controversial career of James Longstreet. The lecture was given on July 2, the second day of the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, on the occasion of the 137th anniversary of that battle.
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"The Civil War and the Forging of Character" A lecture by Dr. Robert K. Krick November 12, 2013
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Yankee Confederates:
New England Secession Movements Prior to the War Between the States
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Contrary to standard
accounts, the birthplace of American secessionist sentiment was not Charleston,
South Carolina in 1860, but the heart of the New England Yankee culture --
Salem, Massachusetts -- more than half a century before the first shot was
fired at Fort Sumter. From 1800 to 1815, there were three serious attempts at
secession orchestrated by New England Federalists, who believed that the
policies of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, especially the 1803
Louisiana Purchase, the national embargo of 1807, and the War of 1812, were so
disproportionately harmful to New England that they justified secession.
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The Protective Tariffs were a real concern to cotton grower, John Read.
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John Read (seen in the
next photo), Charles
"Savez" Read's grandfather (whose life is discussed on the "Read
Family Story" web page), was a soldier in the War of 1812, and later owned
a plantation in Mississippi with slaves. But during the War Between the
States, he remained loyal to the Union cause, and when Federal forces marched
through Mississippi, they occupied his house but did not burn it. He was
a Unionist, but several grandchildren put on the Confederate uniform.
John Read was well aware of the protective tariffs being enacting to protect
Northern business interests. This affected Read's profits on the export
of his cotton which was used by Northern industry. The tariffs of 1828
were called the "Tariffs of Abominations." Designed to protect
American industry from cheaper British commodities, it adversely affected the
Southern planter.
By the time the fighting reached John
Read's plantation in Edwards, MS, he had 3 years worth of cotton stored in a
cotton gin house which had not been sold. The Federals under General
Sherman burned most of it. Some of it was saved when some of his family
and plantation workers were able to put some of it into a nearby creek.
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Protective tariffs:
A Primary cause of the Civil War
Although they opposed permanent tariffs, political expedience in spite of sound economics prompted the Founding Fathers to pass the first U.S. tariff act. For 72 years, Northern special interest groups used these protective tariffs to exploit the South for their own benefit. Finally in 1861, the oppression of those import duties started the Civil War.
In addition to generating revenue, a tariff hurts the ability of foreigners to sell in domestic markets. An affordable or high-quality foreign good is dangerous competition for an expensive or low-quality domestic one. But when a tariff bumps up the price of the foreign good, it gives the domestic one a price advantage. The rate of the tariff varies by industry.
If the tariff is high enough, even an inefficient domestic company can compete with a vastly superior foreign company. It is the industry’s consumers who ultimately pay this tax and the industry’s producers who benefit in profits.
As early as the Revolutionary War, the South primarily produced cotton, rice, sugar, indigo and tobacco. The North purchased these raw materials and turned them into manufactured goods. By 1828, foreign manufactured goods faced high import taxes. Foreign raw materials, however, were free of tariffs.
Thus the domestic manufacturing industries of the North benefited twice, once as the producers enjoying the protection of high manufacturing tariffs and once as consumers with a free raw materials market. The raw materials industries of the South were left to struggle against foreign competition.
Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.
Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track were laid. At their best, these tracks benefited the North. Many rail lines had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.
With most of the tariff revenue collected in the South and then spent in the North, the South rightly felt exploited. At the time, 90 percent of the federal government’s annual revenue came from these taxes on imports.
Historians Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffer found that a few common factors increase the likelihood of secession in a region: lower wages, an economy based on raw materials and external exploitation. Although popular movies emphasize slavery as a cause of the Civil War, the war best fits a psycho-historical model of the South rebelling against Northern exploitation.
Many Americans do not understand this fact. A non-slave-owning Southern merchant angered over yet another proposed tariff act does not make a compelling scene in a movie. However, that would be closer to the original cause of the Civil War than any scene of slaves picking cotton.
Slavery was actually on the wane. Slaves visiting England were free, according to the courts in 1569. France, Russia, Spain and Portugal had outlawed slavery. Slavery had been abolished everywhere in the British Empire 27 years earlier, thanks to William Wilberforce. In the United States, the transport of slaves had been outlawed 53 years earlier by Thomas Jefferson in the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves (1807) and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in England (1807). Slavery was a dying and repugnant institution.
The rewritten history of the Civil War began with Lincoln as a brilliant political tactic to rally public opinion. The issue of slavery provided sentimental leverage, whereas oppressing the South with hurtful tariffs did not. Outrage against the greater evil of slavery served to mask the economic harm the North was doing to the South.
The situation in the South could be likened to having a legitimate legal case but losing the support of the jury when testimony concerning the defendant's moral failings was admitted into the court proceedings.
Toward the end of the war, Lincoln made the conflict primarily about the continuation of slavery. By doing so, he successfully silenced the debate about economic issues and states’ rights. The main grievance of the Southern states was tariffs. Although slavery was a factor at the outset of the Civil War, it was not the sole or even primary cause.
The tariff of 1828, called the Tariff of Abominations in the South, was the worst exploitation. It passed Congress 105 to 94 but lost among Southern congressmen 50 to three. The South argued that favoring some industries over others was unconstitutional.
The South Carolina Exposition and Protest written by Vice President John Calhoun warned that if the tariff of 1828 were not repealed, South Carolina would secede. It cited Jefferson and Madison for the precedent that a state had the right to reject or nullify federal law.
In an 1832 state legislature campaign speech, Lincoln defined his position, saying, “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank ... in favor of the internal improvements system and a high protective tariff.’ He was firmly against free trade and in favor of using the power of the federal government to benefit specific industries such as Lincoln’s favorite, Pennsylvania steel.
The country experienced a period of lower tariffs and vibrant economic growth from 1846 to 1857. Then a bank failure caused the Panic of 1857. Congress used this situation to begin discussing a new tariff act, later called the Morrill Tariff of 1861. However, those debates were met with such Southern hostility that the South seceded before the act was passed.
The South did not secede primarily because of slavery. In Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address, he promised he had no intention to change slavery in the South. He argued it would be unconstitutional for him to do so. But he promised he would invade any state that failed to collect tariffs in order to enforce them. The statement was received from Baltimore to Charleston as a declaration of war on the South.
Slavery was an abhorrent practice. It might have been the cause that rallied the North to win. But it was not the primary reason why the South seceded. The Civil War began because of an increasing push to place protective tariffs favoring Northern business interests and every Southern household paid the price.
David John Marotta is president of Marotta Wealth Management Inc. of Charlottesville. University of Virginia graduate Megan Russell, systems analyst for the company, also contributed to this commentary.
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Jefferson Davis Posthumously Responds to Readers’
Reactions
by David John Marotta and Megan Russell on June 27, 2013:
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Lessons on Tax Effects, Inequality -
The Inherent
Evil of Tariffs, and
Cascading Markups
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When
the Civil War began, Henry C. Carey was the nation's most widely known
political economist. He had published a major three-volume work entitled
Principles of Political Economy which had first established him as a serious
thinker on the subject. His subsequent volume, The Harmony of Interests, set
out a justification for protective tariffs, based mostly on speculative savings
on transportation costs in foreign commerce. That work earned him the adulation
of the men who wanted protective tariffs.
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"True
causes of the Uncivil War: Understanding the Morrill Tariff"
By Mike
Scruggs
(Photo of Justin S. Morrill):
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Most Americans believe the U. S. “Civil
War” was over slavery. They have to an enormous degree been mis-educated. The
means and timing of handling the slavery question were at issue, although not
in the overly simplified moral sense that lives in postwar and modern
propaganda. But had there been no Morrill Tariff there might never have been a
war. The conflict that cost of the lives of 650,000 Union and Confederate
soldiers and perhaps as many as 50,000 Southern civilians and impoverished many
millions for generations might never have been.
A smoldering issue of unjust taxation that
enriched Northern manufacturing states and exploited the agricultural South was
fanned to a furious blaze in 1860. It was the Morrill Tariff that stirred the
smoldering embers of regional mistrust and ignited the fires of Secession in
the South. This precipitated a Northern reaction and call to arms that would
engulf the nation in the flames of war for four years.
Prior to the U. S. “Civil War” there was no
U. S. income tax. In 1860, approximately 95% of U. S. government revenue was
raised by a tariff on imported goods. A tariff is a tax on selected imports,
most commonly finished or manufactured products. A high tariff is usually
legislated not only to raise revenue, but also to protect domestic industry
from foreign competition. By placing such a high, protective tariff on imported
goods it makes them more expensive to buy than the same domestic goods. This
allows domestic industries to charge higher prices and make more money on sales
that might otherwise be lost to foreign competition because of cheaper prices
(without the tariff) or better quality. This, of course, causes domestic
consumers to pay higher prices and have a lower standard of living. Tariffs on
some industrial products also hurt other domestic industries that must pay
higher prices for goods they need to make their products. Because the nature
and products of regional economies can vary widely, high tariffs are sometimes
good for one section of the country, but damaging to another section of the
country. High tariffs are particularly hard on exporters since they must cope
with higher domestic costs and retaliatory foreign tariffs that put them at a
pricing disadvantage. This has a depressing effect on both export volume and
profit margins. High tariffs have been a frequent cause of economic disruption,
strife and war.
Prior to 1824 the average tariff level in the
U. S. had been in the 15 to 20 % range. This was thought sufficient to meet
federal revenue needs and not excessively burdensome to any section of the
country. The increase of the tariff to a 20% average in 1816 was ostensibly to
help pay for the War of 1812. It also represented a 26% net profit increase to
Northern manufacturers.
In 1824 Northern manufacturing states and the
Whig Party under the leadership of Henry Clay began to push for high,
protective tariffs. These were strongly opposed by the South. The Southern
economy was largely agricultural and geared to exporting a large portion of its
cotton and tobacco crops to Europe. In the 1850’s the South accounted for
anywhere from 72 to 82% of U. S. exports. They were largely dependent, however,
on Europe or the North for the manufactured goods needed for both agricultural
production and consumer needs. Northern states received about 20% of the
South’s agricultural production. The vast majority of export volume went to
Europe. A protective tariff was then a substantial benefit to Northern
manufacturing states, but meant considerable economic hardship for the
agricultural South.
Northern political dominance enabled Clay and
his allies in Congress to pass a tariff averaging 35% late in 1824. This was
the cause of economic boom in the North, but economic hardship and political
agitation in the South. South Carolina was especially hard hit, the State’s
exports falling 25% over the next two years. In 1828 in a demonstration of
unabashed partisanship and unashamed greed the Northern dominated Congress
raised the average tariff level to 50%. Despite strong Southern agitation for
lower tariffs the Tariff of 1832 only nominally reduced the effective tariff
rate and brought no relief to the South. These last two tariffs are usually
termed in history as the Tariffs of Abomination.
This led to the Nullification Crisis of 1832
when South Carolina called a state convention and “nullified” the 1828 and 1832
tariffs as unjust and unconstitutional. The resulting constitutional crisis
came very near provoking armed conflict at that time. Through the efforts of
former U. S. Vice President and U. S. Senator from South Carolina, John C.
Calhoun, a compromise was effected in 1833 which over a few years reduced the
tariff back to a normal level of about 15%. Henry Clay and the Whigs were not
happy, however, to have been forced into a compromise by Calhoun and South
Carolina’s Nullification threat. The tariff, however, remained at a level near
15% until 1860. A lesson in economics, regional sensitivities, and simple
fairness should have been learned from this confrontation, but if it was
learned, it was ignored by ambitious political and business factions and
personalities that would come on the scene of American history in the late 1850’s.
High protective tariffs were always the
policy of the old Whig Party and had become the policy of the new Republican
Party that replaced it. A recession beginning around 1857 gave the cause of
protectionism an additional political boost in the Northern industrial states.
In May of 1860 the U. S. Congress passed the
Morrill Tariff Bill (named for Republican Congressman and steel manufacturer,
Justin S. Morrill of Vermont) raising the average tariff from about 15% to 37%
with increases to 47% within three years. Although this was remarkably
reminiscent of the Tariffs of Abomination which had led in 1832 to a
constitutional crisis and threats of secession and armed force, the U. S. House
of Representatives passed the Bill 105 to 64. Out of 40 Southern Congressmen
only one Tennessee Congressman voted for it.
U. S. tariff revenues already fell
disproportionately on the South, accounting for 87% of the total even before
the Morrill Tariff. While the tariff protected Northern industrial interests,
it raised the cost of living and commerce in the South substantially. It also
reduced the trade value of their agricultural exports to Europe. These combined
to place a severe economic hardship on many Southern states. Even more galling
was that 80% or more of these tax revenues were expended on Northern public
works and industrial subsidies, thus further enriching the North at the expense
of the South.
In the 1860 election, Lincoln, a former Whig
and great admirer of Henry Clay, campaigned for the high protective tariff provisions
of the Morrill Tariff, which had also been incorporated into the Republican
Party Platform. Thaddeus Stevens, the most powerful Republican in Congress and
one of the co-sponsors of the Morrill Tariff, told an audience in New York City
on September 27, 1860, that the two most important issues of the Presidential
campaign were preventing the extension of slavery to new states and an increase
in the tariff, but that the most important of the two was increasing the
tariff. Stevens, a Pennsylvania iron manufacturer, was also one of the most
radical abolitionists in Congress. He told the New York audience that the
tariff would enrich the northeastern states and impoverish the southern and
western states, but that it was essential for advancing national greatness and
the prosperity of industrial workers. Stevens, who would become virtually the
“boss’ of America after the assassination of Lincoln, advised the crowd that if
Southern leaders objected, they would be rounded up and hanged.
Two days before Lincoln’s election in
November of 1860, an editorial in the Charleston Mercury summed up the feeling
of South Carolina on the impending national crisis:
“The real causes of dissatisfaction in the
South with the North, are in the unjust taxation and expenditure of the taxes
by the Government of the United States, and in the revolution the North has
effected in this government, from a confederated republic, to a national
sectional despotism.”
With the election of Lincoln and strengthened
Northern dominance in Congress, Southern leaders in South Carolina and the Gulf
states began to call for Secession. Lincoln endorsed the Morrill Tariff in his
inaugural speech and promised to enforce it even on seceding Southern states.
He signed the Act into law a few days after taking office in March of 1861. The
South was filled with righteous indignation.
At first Northern public opinion as reflected
in Northern newspapers of both parties recognized the right of the Southern
States to secede and favored peaceful separation. A November 21, 1860,
editorial in the Cincinnati Daily Press said this:
“We believe that the right of any member of
this Confederacy to dissolve its political relations with the others and assume
an independent position is absolute.”
The New York Times on March 21, 1861,
reflecting the great majority of editorial opinion in the North summarized in
an editorial:
“There is a growing sentiment throughout the
North in favor of letting the Gulf States go.”
Northern industrialists became nervous,
however, when they realized a tariff dependent North would be competing against
a free-trade South. They feared not only loss of tax revenue, but considerable
loss of trade. Newspaper editorials began to reflect this nervousness. Events
in April would engulf the nation in cataclysmic war.
Lincoln met secretly on April 4, 1861, with
Colonel John Baldwin, a delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention. Baldwin,
like a majority of that convention would have preferred to keep Virginia in the
Union. But Baldwin learned at that meeting that Lincoln was already committed
to taking some military action at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. He desperately
tried to persuade Lincoln that military action against South Carolina would
mean war and also result in Virginia’s secession. Baldwin tried to persuade
Lincoln that if the Gulf States were allowed to secede peacefully, historical
and economic ties would eventually persuade them to reunite with the North.
Lincoln’s decisive response was,
“And open Charleston, etc. as ports of entry
with their ten percent tariff? What then would become of my tariff?”
Despite Colonel Baldwin’s advice, on April
12, 1861, Lincoln manipulated the South into firing on the tariff collection
facility of Fort Sumter in volatile South Carolina. This achieved an important
Lincoln objective. Northern opinion was now enflamed against the South for
“firing on the flag.” Three days later Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to
put down the Southern “rebellion”. This caused the Border States to secede
along with the Gulf States. Lincoln undoubtedly calculated that the mere threat
of force backed by a now more unified Northern public opinion would quickly put
down secession. His gambit, however, failed spectacularly and would erupt into
a terrible and costly war for four years.
Shortly after Lincoln’s call to put down the
“rebellion;” a prominent Northern politician wrote to Colonel Baldwin to inquire what Union men in Virginia would do now. His response was:
“There are now no Union men in Virginia. But
those who were Union men will stand to their arms, and make a fight which shall
go down in history as an illustration of what a brave people can do in defense
of their liberties, after having exhausted every means of pacification.”
The Union Army’s lack of success early in the
war, the need to keep anti-slavery England from coming into the war on the side
of the South, and Lincoln’s need to appease the radical abolitionists in the
North led to increasing promotion of freeing the slaves as a noble cause to
justify what was really a dispute over fair taxation and States Rights.
Writing in December of 1861 in a London
weekly publication, the famous English author, Charles Dickens, who was a
strong opponent of slavery, said these things about the war going on in
America:
“The Northern onslaught upon slavery is no
more than a piece of specious humbug disguised to conceal its desire for
economic control of the United States.”
Karl Marx, like most European socialists of
the time favored the North. In an 1861 article published in England, he
articulated very well what the major British newspapers, the Times, the
Economist, and Saturday Review, had been saying:
“The war between the North and South is a
tariff war. The war, is further, not for any principle, does not touch the
question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.”
The Tariff question and the States Rights
question were therefore strongly linked. Both are linked to the broader issues
of limited government and a strong Constitution. The Morrill Tariff dealt the South
a flagrant political injustice and impending economic hardship and crisis. It
therefore made Secession a very compelling alternative to an exploited and
unequal union with the North.
How to handle the slavery question was an
underlying tension between North and South, but one of many tensions. It cannot
be said to be the cause of the war. Fully understanding the slavery question
and its relations to those tensions is beyond the scope of this article, but
numerous historical facts demolish the propagandistic morality play that a
virtuous North invaded the evil South to free the slaves. Five years after the
end of the War, prominent Northern abolitionist, attorney and legal scholar,
Lysander Spooner, put it this way:
“All these cries of having ‘abolished slavery,’
of having ‘saved the country,’ of having ‘preserved the Union,’ of establishing
a ‘government of consent,’ and of ‘maintaining the national honor’ are all
gross, shameless, transparent cheats—so transparent that they ought to deceive
no one.”
Yet apparently many today are still deceived
and even prefer to be deceived.
The Southern states had seen that continued
union with the North would jeopardize their liberties and economic wellbeing.
Through the proper constitutional means of state conventions and referendums
they sought to withdraw from the Union and establish their independence just as
the American Colonies had sought their independence from Great Britain in 1776
and for very similar reasons. The Northern industrialists, however, were not willing
to give up their Southern Colonies.
In addition to the devastating loss of life
and leadership during the War, the South suffered considerable damage to
property, livestock, and crops. The policies of “Reconstruction” and
“carpetbagger” state governments further exploited and robbed the South,
considerably retarding economic recovery. Further, high tariffs and
discriminatory railroad shipping taxes continued to favor Northern economic
interests and impoverish the South for generations after the war. It is only in
relatively recent history that the political and economic fortunes of the South
have begun to rise.
Unjust taxation has been the cause of many
tensions and much bloodshed throughout history. The Morrill Tariff was
certainly a powerful factor predisposing the South to seek its independence and
determine its own destiny. As outrageous and unjust as the Morrill Tariff was,
its importance has been largely ignored and even purposely obscured. It does
not fit the politically correct images and myths of popular American history.
Truth, however, is always the high ground. It will have the inevitable victory.
Had it not been for the Morrill Tariff there
would have been no rush to Secession by Southern states, and very probably no
war. The Morrill Tariff of 1860, so unabashed and unashamed in its
short-sighted, partisan greed, stands as an astonishing monument to the
self-centered depravity of man and to its consequences. No wonder most
Americans would like to see it forgotten and covered over with a more morally
satisfying but largely false version of the causes of the Uncivil War.
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"Lincoln's Tariff War" is explained by Professor of Economics
Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo.
(One can see how it affected the price of
John Read's cotton crop).
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The Confederate leadership
hoped to use Southern cotton production to assist their attempt to persuade
Britain and France to recognize their newly formed government. With huge stockpiles of cotton, the effects
of the Union blockade prevented the previously predicted cotton sales that
would have resulted in credits in Europe for purchases of arms, medicines, and
other supplies. Instead of being able to
sell the large stockpiles of cotton, most Southern cotton was destroyed or sold
to Northern speculators.
John Read, grandfather of
Charles, John and Joe Read, was one who lost money on his cotton, even though
he supported the Union cause. We have documentation that Union soldiers who came through the area during the Vicksburg campaign, indiscriminately burned much of his cotton stored in his cotton gin house.
The very influential 1855
book, “Cotton Is King” by David Christy, was used by politicians to support the idea that the
continued production and stockpiles of cotton would be the leverage to win the
war.
We know that in 1860, the
South was providing 2/3 of the entire world’s supply of cotton….and England was
especially dependent
on it for its textile mills, which had a million workers
employed.
So, with the above mentioned
facts in mind, we find the Confederate politicians seeing an opportunity to
withhold cotton
to drive prices up, thus compelling Europeans to come and help
the Confederate government overcome the Union blockade.
But the Confederacy didn’t
play it’s trump card: instead of selling it’s large surplus of cotton before
the Northern blockade reached it’s zenith, they encouraged an embargo of cotton
shipments and, indeed, many Southerners, (not including John Read) burned many
of their 1861 cotton crop to bolst3r their perceived economic leverage. In the end, King Diplomacy had failed and the
Confederate leadership missed the economic and military support they could have
gained from abroad.
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This collection of publications from
leading members of the pro-slavery movement, provides a valuable insight into
the moral and intellectual world from whence it came. The individual works are
"Cotton is King: Or, Slavery in the Light of Political Economy"
(David Christy), "Liberty and Slavery: Or, Slavery in the Light of Moral
and Political Philosophy" (Albert Taylor Bledsoe, LL.D.), "The Bible
Argument: Or, Slavery in the Light of Divine Revelation" (Thornton
Stringfellow, D. D.), "Slavery in the Light of Social Ethics"
(Chancellor Harper), "Slavery in the Light of Political Science" (J.
H. Hammond), "Slavery in the Light of Ethnology" (S. A. Cartwright,
M. D.), "Slavery in the Light of International Law" (E. N. Elliott,
LL.D.), and "The Bible Argument on Slavery" (Charles Hodge, D.D.).
The leading article is by Christy, who he is often listed as the author of the
entire collection.. Elliott is the editor. The cover features seventh
vice-president John Calhoun, who used his sharp intellect in support of
slavery.
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How the Cotton Gin Changed America:
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Cotton was so important that John Philip Sousa, who lived through the Civil War era, wrote a piece of music called,
"King Cotton March."
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Changing
of Guards May 2016 -
"King Cotton March"
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"King
Cotton March" -
"The President's Own" U.S. Marine Band
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Another cause of the Civil War: Union armies invasion and occupation of the South.
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There is clear written evidence in primary sources that one
young Read boy, William, (seen in the next photo) joined the Confederate troops as the Union forces came
through his hometown. He saw the Confederate soldiers fighting the
Federals near his home; and he picked up a gun that had been dropped by a dead
Confederate....and joined the fight....that's how he got involved.
Thus,
he joined, not because of slavery (he didn't own any; he wasn't even old enough
to enlist) but because the Northern Union forces had invaded his state and
hometown. (Full discussion about him is on the "Read Family Story" web page).
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Clement Eaton's "A History of the Old South; The Emergence of a Reluctant
Nation" 3rd Edition, is one of the standard textbooks on the era under
discussion here. It is clear that young William Read was not of the
planter class, his father did not live in a plantation mansion, but, he is an
example of a vastly larger middle class of yoman farmers and villagers who came
from Colonial origins. He did not live like the privileged planters, but
did absorb something of the spirit and sense of values of the Southern
gentry.
He knew about hospitality, the importance of religion, the importance of the
family cemetery...an important reason for the love of the home-place among
Southerners.
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He had observed his kinsfolk who were distinguished by a remarkable sense of pride; upholding a code of gentlemanly conduct. Honor, both personal and regional, was a talismanic word in the Southern vocabulary, and was an important cause of secession.....not the ownership of slaves.
Out of the original documents I have examined in the Mississippi state and various county archives, written by the Reads and their relatives, I can state that slavery had nothing to do with their support of the Confederacy. One such documented story appears on the "Read Family Story" web page, which concerns Bettie Read and the Union soldiers who came through the Vicksburg area; burning, robbing, and killing innocent civilians. Slavery was not the issue for this Read family. It is simply a historical fact and part of the Read family history. It is not something that should be erased or ignored. It is part of our family history and heritage.
Thus, as we have seen so far, this web page will address "The Old South" where the Read and Wauchope families lived. They were familiar with the racial bias in the North, as well as where they lived in the Southern states. They knew about the Black slave owners in the South, and the rising tariffs on goods coming through the ports, most of which were in the South. Charles "Savez" Read was born in a small village located on the Yazoo River and became very familiar with the commercial trade on the Mississippi River. He was also a personal acquaintance of Jefferson Davis in the Antebellum South. (But, as someone has misstated on another website, he was not a part of the Davis family.)
On this web page, you will find information on: Black slave owners; Native American Indian slave owners; Black slaves and free men of color serving in the Confederate army and navy; the fact that (according to the 1860 Census) 98.8% of people in the Northern free states were white; 96.5% if you include all the the loyal states who had slaves and were white.
And all of these, both North and South, had racist views that offend our modern sensibilities; and those in the North were not in favor of Emancipation except toward the end of the war, when they thought that it would help them defeat the South by getting rid of slavery which supported the South's economic base; the plans of Abraham Lincoln to deport slaves to other countries; and post-war Confederates who left to settle in other countries.....by the thousands; the plan of New York City to secede from the Union; the rampant slavery in the North. One town in up-state New York actually did vote to leave the Union, and didn't rejoin the Union until President Harry Truman was president!
After the war, several in the Read and Porter families (a Porter married John Jeremiah Read) considered moving out of the U.S. into another country. One (Rev. A.A. Porter and one of his children) wrote of their disappointment in seeing the desperate circumstances the Southern civilian population had been left in. Destruction was widespread.
General R.E. Lee had been invited to join in the
exiles who went to Mexico, discussed below, after the war. He
declined. He felt it his duty to stay and influence his former comrades
to work together in harmony for Union.
It is unfortunate that many in our country have not studied
history and learned the facts surrounding the issue of slavery in the early
days of our country, not only in the antebellum South, but in Colonial America, and, I might add, in the North.
The first slave owner in Virginia, was a Black man. This may come to many
as a surprise, but I learned this fact years ago, while studying history at Old
Dominion University.
Then, it may surprise you to learn that many Native American Indians also owned Black slaves. John Jeremiah Read was well aware of this in Indian Territory, after he became a missionary for the Presbyterian Church in that area before Oklahoma became a state. Some of these former Black slaves were later discriminated against, by the Indians, when the 5 Civilized Tribes were re-formed under new Peace Treaties. Some of these treaties were used by one tribe in particular, to enforce discrimination and the continuation of slavery.
A further surprise to some, may be that Abraham Lincoln, had he not been assassinated, planned to deport all Blacks and resettle them in colonies away from the United States.
And still another surprise: all former Confederates or their widows were entitled to U.S. government pensions through the state governments! (On the "Read Family Story" webpage, you will see actual documentation that proves that fact; in addition to samples included on this webpage). (A fact which the website "Snopes" got wrong)!
In addition, families of Confederate veterans can request and receive at no cost, headstones for their loved ones in a cemetery, even now in the 21st Century!!
The recent unfortunate events in New Orleans (2017) concerning the removal, under the cover of darkness, of
Confederate monuments, and the removal in 2020, is representative of blatant Black racial bias. It is an example of politicians who are caught up in the emotional moment; misunderstanding
the history of our American historical memorial landscape. It is a blatant
act of violence, by those who have not "read" history, of trying now to "erase" history. Those City Council members who vote for such removal in that and other cities in our nation, show their ignorance of history.
As the years of the Old South closed, how did the Veterans of North and South view each other after the war? You may be surprised that many fought together in the Spanish-American War. You may also be surprised that many who survived, came together in reunions. Also, one of the major monuments to the Confederate dead in Arlington National Cemetery was put there by Union veterans. Two videos further down on this page, represent what they thought of each other, and how they lived out their days.
This
was the closing period of the Old South and the beginning of the New
South. It was in this context that John Jeremiah Read and members of the
Wauchope family, would minister to various Native American tribes in Indian
Territory, which later became the state of Oklahoma. Some members of the
Wauchope family were actually doing missionary work among Native Americans
before the War Between the States, and had to leave once it started. Some
Census records reveal that several Wauchope families before Reconstruction had
"house servants" who lived with them. Some of these are
discussed on the "Wauchope Family Story" web page. The
Wauchopes would discover, as did Rev. John J. Read, that many Indians willingly
or unwillingly, as the case may be, served as soldiers and scouts in both the
Union and Confederate armies.
The
reader should also note, that the author/compiler of information on this
particular page does not subscribe to only one "cause" which started
the War Between the States. Several issues were involved in a very
radioactive mix. It has only been in the last 10 years that more
information has been discovered which proves the case of Lincoln as a confirmed
racist, and his plans to deport all Blacks, both slave and free, out of the
United States. Although, much of this information was previously known, it
is now getting greater publicity in new books and articles.
-J.
Hughes
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A fresh look at why young men enlisted in the Confederate Army is provided by Civil War graduate student, Adam Matthew Jones of Virginia Tech, in his study "Enlistment Motivations for Civil War Soldiers in Montgomery County Virginia," which can be read in the PDF file below, in it's entirety:
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The "States' Rights" Dilemma: another cause of the Civil War
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Gibbons v. Ogden: a prelude to the issue of states' rights, and the issue of slavery.
GIbbons v. Ogden presents a conflict between the States and
Congress over the authority to regulate commerce. In this case, which linked
States' authority to license steamboats in federal waters with a seemingly
unrelated issue, slavery, Chief Justice Marshall interpreted the Constitution
to give the Federal Government the duty to determine the rules of commerce and
established how to lay the foundation for an American common market nearly a
century before Europe enjoyed it. The following film is part of the series, "Equal Justice Under Law."
The
Committee on the Bicentennial of Independence and the Constitution
The Judicial Conference of the United States
Co-Chairmen
Chief Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr.
Chief Judge Edward J. Devitt
Coordinator
Chief Judge Howard T. Markey
Consultants
Professor William Swindler, College of William and Mary
Professor Anthony Penna, Carnegie-Mellon University
Professor Robert Potter, University of Pittsburgh
Professor Richard Seeburger, University of Pittsburgh
Professor Irving Bartlett, Carnegie-Mellon University
Art Direction, Sets and Costumes
In cooperation with the drama department of Carnegie-Mellon University
Metropolitan Pittsburgh Public Broadcasting, Inc.
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"The Classical Liberal States' Rights Tradition" -Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo
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Slavery was not the primary cause for Virginia leaving the Union. One needs to first understand that the 10th Amendment of the Constitution guaranteed the right of U.S. Citizens to own slaves.
Several states, primarily Virginia, did not see itself as a secessionist state. In fact, in the run up to the final state-wide voting on the issue, even Jubal Early, who later became a Confederate General, was a staunch Unionist and was against secession.
Professor William Marvel has done an excellent job of outlining, in his book, "Mr. Lincoln Goes to War" the reasons why Virginia was pushed into voting for secession.
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On page 72, he states the obvious about Lincoln's uncharacteristically clumsy response to the secession crisis: as psychological impulse rather than by political imperative.
When Lincoln called for the call-up of militia, that act, in itself, laid down the gauntlet at the feet of all Virginians, large numbers of whom would have preferred to remain in the Union, if not asked to take up arms against the seceded states.
We need to understand that the Virginia convention had voted only tentatively to secede, pending ratification by a vote by the public at large.
But the disdain that Lincoln's mobilization order showed for states' rights had so infuriated Virginia citizens, that they voted overwhelmingly to leave the Union.
Dr. Marvel has correctly analyzed the voting totals and by locality to draw the correct conclusion. Only in some of the westernmost counties did Union sentiment prevail. Secession won by lopsided margins in the interior counties, particularly in Southside Virginia, where some counties voted unanimously to leave the Union. Even in the border regions like Loudoun County, which had heavy concentrations of Quakers, loyal Germans, and conservative Whigs, formed a substantial Unionist stronghold, secessionists outnumbered the Union faction better than two to one.
The implied threat of and subsequent invasion by Federal troops settled the question for Clinton Hatcher and his family, the only child of an older couple who farmed a place near Purcellville, Virginia.
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Clinton Hatcher (in above photo), had come home from Columbian College (now George Washington University) in the District of Columbia, at the news of Lincoln's militia proclamation, and within a month, his correspondence had assumed a relentlessly hostile tone. Keep in mind that Hatcher was a Quaker.
On May 23rd, he participated in his first election, voting in favor of the secession ordinance. Then, after persuading his mother to withdraw her objections, he backed up that vote by signing the roll of a local rifle company. Scores of his neighbors had already enlisted; they did their voting in military encampments around the county.
Prior to the secession crisis, he was, at 6 feet 7 inches, conspicuous as a student at Columbian College. He even met President Lincoln at a White House reception shortly after the inauguration. Probably out of modesty, Hatcher tried to avoid a meeting, but Lincoln stopped him, explaining, "Whenever I see a man taller than me I make it a point to shake hands with him." (The March 9, 1861 "Sunday Star" newspaper noted, Lincoln was 6 feet 4 inches.)
The meeting supposedly was civil enough, but young Hatcher did not become a Lincoln fan. As the secession crisis deepened, the young Quaker who would become a soldier, became an ardent Southern "fire-eater," ready to watch Yankees slain at the earliest opportunity.
He studied the then current soldiers' manual of arms, "Hardee's Tactics," and participated in the Battle of First Manassas. He described in one letter of being unable to wait "until he can bayonet a Yankee," observing, "I never felt whole days if there were a possibility of a ball's striking me. I had a kind of pre-sentiment that I would not be killed." ("Fire-eaters" were radical southern secessionists who had long been committed to the dissolution of the United States).
Unfortunately, Sgt. Thomas Clinton Lovett Hatcher fell at age 21, on October 21, 1861, during the Battle of Ball's Bluff, and as an unarmed color-bearer (which was the same assigned field position as that of Joseph Read).
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Thus, we have in this story, a Quaker whose family did not believe in war-making, who went from being a pacifist against secession, to voting for secession due to Lincoln's disregard of Virginia's states' rights.
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According to
studies done by Professors Fellman, Gordon, and Sutherland, defense of home was
a strong motivation for Confederates, especially since Union armies were "invading"
their new nation. Proving one's manhood, too, was a powerful influence
that combined with many other factors, such as duty, patriotism, and defense of
home, to inspire enlistment. Others joined because there was communal or
peer pressure to do so, and staying behind would have been far too
embarrassing. Money also played a role in luring men to enlist,
especially in the North, where bounties were higher.
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Curiously,
slavery, which was an underlying cause of the war, was not the cause for which
most Civil War soldiers volunteered to serve. To be sure, Confederate
soldiers believed firmly that they had to protect their "way of life"
and beat back the hated Yankee aggression, but they seldom enlisted to defend
slavery per se. For most of the Southern aristocracy who owned the slaves, it was about the right to import slavery into the new territories and states. Similarly, Union white soldiers, especially in 1861, although
convinced that they faced a "slaveocracy" that threatened their
free-labor economy, were none too keen on the notion of emancipation, let alone
racial equality. There were, of course, true abolitionists in the ranks
of the Union from the war's start, but their number was always a minority, even when the war became one to end slavery.
There are literally hundreds and thousands of soldiers letters and diaries located in archives. In looking over many of these one finds verification of the Union soldier's racist comments and the fact that they had not enlisted for any Abolitionist cause.
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Serene white mansions, aristocratic planters, ladies descending graceful staircases
in crinoline skirts, slave gangs singing in the cotton fields, and the
fragrance of moonlit gardens form a tenacious stereotype of the Old
South.
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Such scenes of glamour and ease for the privileged class actually existed in those areas of the South possessing rich soil and accessibility to markets. This romantic stereotype, however, omits from the landscape the large middle class of farmers, the barefoot women, the log cabins, and the sweaty toil of white men under the hot sun.
In actuality, 3/4 of the white population of the antebellum South, which included the Read and Wauchope families (except John Read in the Vicksburg area of Mississippi who did own slaves), did not belong to slaveholding families, and the typical home was not a Mount Vernon or a Tara Hall, but a log cabin or a modest frame cottage or house. The stereotype has taken certain real aspects of Southern society, especially the life of the small class of large planters, and has generalized and exaggerated them so that they appear to be typical of the South as a whole.
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The romantic image of the Old South is a creation of a number of forces, not the least of which is the contribution by the Abolitionists with their propaganda that represented the land of Dixie as inhabited chiefly by haughty aristocrats, debased "poor whites," and black slaves.
The 1860 Census indicates something else:
the South of slavery days was predominantly a region of small independent farmers. Indeed, the social pyramid bulged greatly at the sides, and the social structure was flexible enough to permit the movement of the sons of numerous poor men to a higher economic and social status.
At the top of the social pyramid were the planters and according to the arbitrary classification of the census bureau the planter status was based on the ownership of 20 or more slaves engaged in agriculture. The accurate definition of a planter, however, should also include the ownership of a considerable acreage of land, a minimum of between 500 and 1,000 acres, of which at least 200 were in cultivation.
The Census of 1860 reported a surprisingly small number of "planters," only 46,274 persons, most of whom were heads of families, owning as many as 20 slaves. Out of this privileged group, only 2,292 persons belonged to the large planter classification, that is, persons owning as many as 100 slaves.
Green Mont plantation in eastern Virginia is an example of a small planter with 50 slaves raising crops of wheat and corn. The father was a doctor and justice of the peace. The son worked on the plantation, plowed with the slave hands and did other work on the plantation. His relations with the Negroes were friendly and informal, for slavery at Green Mont was a paternal institution.
Religion played an important role in the life of this family that had departed the Episcopal faith of earlier generations to join the Baptist church. The Fleet family combined the Puritan with the Cavalier traditions. Fond of visiting, hospitable, enjoying dances, home-made wine and the reading of novels, they were nevertheless strong supporters of the church.
Benny Fleet, who grew up on the plantation, has an interesting diary which begins on January 9, 1860, when he was 13 years old and ends when he was killed in Confederate uniform at the age of 17. This family had the Southern idea of honor, which made them look down upon those who were forced into the army by draft, and they made quite a distinction between "gentlemen" and the common people.
In the whole land of Dixie, the Census officials of 1860 reported finding only 1 slaveholder, an individual in South Carolina, having as many as 1,000 slaves, and only 13 persons owning between 500 and 1,000 slaves.
Thus, the large slaveholders were very few in number and comparable to the millionaires of modern America. And I can state categorically, that the Reads and Wauchopes, although they lived in The Old South, were not at the top of the aristocratic planter class.
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Slavery in the North before and during the War Between the States?
Yes; and many white people who live in the North today are in denial about it; some have been openly resentful that several historians have recently reported and published books about it.
Several programs are included on this page which explain this is detail.
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Cotton is still grown on land close to the original plantation of John Read seen in this picture taken by Joe Hughes, a descendant of John Read, near Edwards Depot, Mississippi, in 2016.
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(For information about the fradulent '1619 Project' history, see "The Old South sub-section" webpage).
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Slavery..........in the beginning...............
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Stereotyping
the Old South
As we approach the 150th anniversary of
the American Civil War, the war over that conflict's meaning is less civil
today than ever. Jack Hunter explains:
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Where did African Slavery originate in North America?
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Plantation System In Southern Life
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America's Castles: Plantation Era
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Life
in Old Louisiana (1830-1850)
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Moonlight and Magnolia: A History of the Southern Plantation
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The Colony of Virginia founded in 1607
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Native American Indian ownership of Black slaves is
discussed in the documentary
"Black Slaves, Red Masters."
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PROFESSOR MARSHALL C. EAKIN, VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY, GAVE AN EXCELLENT LECTURE ON "THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE" FROM THE TEACHING COMPANY COURSE, "CONQUEST OF THE AMERICAS." Here are 3 excerpts from that lecture, courtesy of The Teaching Company:
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Indians in the Civil War Era
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Indians owned Black Slaves
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From the late eighteenth century
through the end of the War Between the States, Choctaw and Chickasaw Indians bought, sold,
and owned Africans and African Americans as slaves, a fact that persisted after
the tribes' removal from the Deep South to Indian Territory.
The tribes
formulated racial and gender ideologies that justified this practice and
marginalized free black people in the Indian nations well after the War Between the States
and slavery had ended. Through the end of the nineteenth century, ongoing
conflicts among Choctaw, Chickasaw, and U.S. lawmakers left untold numbers of
former slaves and their descendants in the two Indian nations without
citizenship in either the Indian nations or the United States. In this
groundbreaking study, Barbara Krauthamer rewrites the history of southern
slavery, emancipation, race, and citizenship to reveal the centrality of Native
American slaveholders and the black people they enslaved.
Krauthamer's examination of slavery and emancipation highlights the ways Indian
women's gender roles changed with the arrival of slavery and changed again
after emancipation and reveals complex dynamics of race that shaped the lives
of black people and Indians both before and after removal.
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"The role of black Indians,
largely omitted from or distorted in conventional history books, is traced by William
Katz with careful and committed research. . . . he integrates their general
history with brief individual biographies, including leaders, army scouts and
soldiers, frontiersmen and explorers, (and) dangerous outlaws".--Booklist.
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Slavery existed in North America long before the first
Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian
era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed,
adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's path-breaking book takes a
familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans
at the center of her engrossing story.
Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans,
Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and
gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political
crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African
Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves
in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although
the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors
hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the
inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of
captivity.
Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like
Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives
like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George,
a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals
within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples,
Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the
American past.
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In The Native Ground, Kathleen DuVal
argues that it was Indians rather than European would-be colonizers who were
more often able to determine the form and content of the relations between the
two groups. Along the banks of the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers, far from
Paris, Madrid, and London, European colonialism met neither accommodation nor
resistance but incorporation. Rather than being colonized, Indians drew
European empires into local patterns of land and resource allocation,
sustenance, goods exchange, gender relations, diplomacy, and warfare. Placing
Indians at the center of the story, DuVal shows both their diversity and our
contemporary tendency to exaggerate the influence of Europeans in places far
from their centers of power. Europeans were often more dependent on Indians
than Indians were on them.
Now the states of Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas,
and Colorado, this native ground was originally populated by indigenous
peoples, became part of the French and Spanish empires, and in 1803 was bought
by the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Drawing on archaeology and oral
history, as well as documents in English, French, and Spanish, DuVal chronicles
the successive migrations of Indians and Europeans to the area from precolonial
times through the 1820s. These myriad native groups—Mississippians, Quapaws,
Osages, Chickasaws, Caddos, and Cherokees—and the waves of Europeans all
competed with one another for control of the region.
Only in the nineteenth century did outsiders
initiate a future in which one people would claim exclusive ownership of the
mid-continent. After the War of 1812, these settlers came in numbers large
enough to overwhelm the region's inhabitants and reject the early patterns of
cross-cultural interdependence. As citizens of the United States, they
persuaded the federal government to muster its resources on behalf of their
dreams of landholding and citizenship.
With keen insight and broad vision, Kathleen
DuVal retells the story of Indian and European contact in a more complex and,
ultimately, more satisfactory way.
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Late in April 1861, President Lincoln
ordered Federal troops to evacuate forts in Indian Territory. That left the
Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and
Seminoles—essentially under Confederate jurisdiction and control. The
American Indian and the End of the Confederacy, 1863–1866, spans the
closing years of the War Between the States, when Southern fortunes were waning, and the
immediate postwar period.
Annie Heloise Abel shows the extreme
vulnerability of the Indians caught between two warring sides. "The
failure of the United States government to afford to the southern Indians the
protection solemnly guaranteed by treaty stipulations had been the great cause
of their entering into an alliance with The Confederacy, "she writes. Her
classic book, originally published in 1925 as the third volume of The
Slaveholding Indians, makes clear how the Indians became the victims of
uprootedness and privation, pillaging, government mismanagement, and, finally,
a deceptive treaty for reconstruction.
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5 Native American Communities who Owned Enslaved Africans
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Indian
Slavery/Slaveries in early
Eastern North America
Kristofer Ray, Dartmouth College,
“Constructing a Discourse of Indian Slavery, Freedom, and Sovereignty in
Anglo-Virginia, 1600–1830”
Margaret Newell, Ohio State University, “‘As
good if not better then Moorish Slaves’: Region and Ethnicity in slavery—the
case of New England”
Hayley Negrin, New York University,
“Interconnected Regimes: The Indian Slave Trade in Carolina and Plantation
Slavery in Virginia after the Westo War of 1679”
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Dr. Yarbrough in her book, "Choctaw Confederates" estimates that 3,100 Choctaw Indians served in the Confederate Army.
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NATIVE AMERICANS ACROSS AMERICA WHO OWNED SLAVES
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In America’s Long History of Slavery, New England
Shares the Guilt
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Here
is a picture of Puritan New England far different from the “city upon a hill”
that John Winthrop hoped he and the other first settlers would leave for
posterity. It opens with the kidnapping of a Patuxet Indian. It closes with one
of the wealthiest men in Massachusetts justifying the enslavement and sale of
Africans. In between, Wendy Warren, an assistant professor of history at Princeton,
scatters massacres, a rape, beheadings, brandings, whippings and numerous
instances of forced exile. The behavior of New England settlers differed less
from that of their contemporaries who established plantation colonies in the
Chesapeake and the Caribbean than might be assumed.
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Warren’s
theme in “New England Bound” — the place of slavery in the making of colonial
New England — echoes preoccupations of the moment in the writing of American
history, as the pervasive influence of slavery on the nation, its institutions
and its cultures attains wider recognition. In time, perhaps, this perspective
will no longer surprise, and even now, few familiar with colonial American
history will be astonished by Warren’s account. She builds on and generously
acknowledges more than two generations of research into the social history of
New England and the economic history of the Atlantic world. But not only has
she mastered that scholarship, she has also brought it together in an original
way, and deepened the story with fresh research.
The
economic ties between early New England and the Caribbean deserve to be better
known. Prominent merchant families like the Winthrops and the Hutchinsons made
their fortunes by linking New England farmers and fishermen to West Indian
markets, by sending food to the sugar colonies, where, in the 17th century, the
real wealth lay. Enslaved Africans came to New England through these same
merchant networks, as one of several imports from the English Caribbean. These
forced migrants never became more than 10 percent of the population. Still,
many New England households soon kept a captive African or two.
Slave
ownership reached down the social scale and into New England’s hinterland.
African captives helped replace the Native-American communities displaced by
English colonists. As enslaved Africans came in, New England merchants sent
Indian captives out, banishing them to Barbados or somewhere else beyond the
seas.
This
economic dependence on West Indian slavery and the routine exploitation of
Indian and African captives drew little comment from English colonists at the
time. Warren finds some “wincing in the face of .?.?. cruelty,” but
acknowledges that doubts about slavery ran no more deeply in New England at the
turn of the 18th century than in any of the other European colonies in the
Americas. The emergence of the antislavery North lay more than a century off.
What
is most fascinating here is the detailed rendering of what individual enslaved
men and women experienced in New England households. “New England Bound”
conveys the disorientation, the deprivation, the vulnerability, the occasional
hunger and the profound isolation that defined the life of most African exiles
in Puritan New England, where there was no plantation community. Though the
surviving record allows limited access to their thoughts, Warren effectively
evokes their feelings. Ripped from kin on the far side of the Atlantic,
“dreaming of other people and other places,” but unable to go home, the lost
tried and sometimes succeeded in making meaningful connections with others
suffering a similar fate. For this was the ordinary pain and sorrow of slave
life in New England: Belonging to someone often meant having no one to belong
to.
(Review written by Christopher
L. Brown is a professor of history, director of the Society of Fellows and vice
provost for faculty affairs at Columbia University.)
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Colonial America Depended on the
Enslavement of Indigenous People
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Slavery in New England....a PowerPoint program:
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Forging New Communities: Indian Slavery and Servitude in Colonial New England, 1676-1776
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Colonists shipped Native Americans abroad as Slaves
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Indian Slavery in New England
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Dr. Margaret
Newell:
New England Indians, Colonists, & the Origins of American Slavery (A discussion on Ben Franklin's World podcast)
Did you know that one of the earliest practices of slavery
by English colonists originated in New England?
In fact, Massachusetts issued the very first slave code in
English America in 1641. Why did New Englanders turn to slavery and become the
first in English America to codify its practice?
Margaret Ellen Newell, a professor of history at The Ohio
State University and the author of Brethren By Nature: New England Indians,
Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery, joins us to investigate these
questions and issues.
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Dr. Margaret Ellen Newell
presents a lecture on "Brethren by
Nature:
New England Indians, Colonists,
and the Origins of American Slavery."
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Dr. Margaret Ellen Newell presents another lecture: The Influence of the Colonists’ Relations with American Indians
Native Americans shaped the colonial project in
many ways. Indians made European colonization possible by supplying food,
trade, technology, labor, and other resources –sometimes voluntarily, and
sometimes involuntarily– that powered the North American economy. Indians
incorporated Europeans into trade and military alliance networks that became
essential to imperial power in North America. Indian affairs and wars dominated
the affairs of colonial states and, later, of the U.S. government, for
centuries. Indigenous actions influenced milestone events like the American
Revolution, the Mexican-American War and the U.S. Civil War. Intercultural
exchange was part of this story, and we will discuss mutual influences and
cultural clashes.
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Dr. Gary Gallagher, University of Virginia, in an excerpt from a lecture, "The
Real Lost Cause," discusses why too many read history from the end instead
of at the beginning; why the majority of people in the North were racist; why
the Civil War could have ended with a victorious Union Army, and............ with slavery intact:
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Problematic 'Political Correctness'
Political correctness and historical objectivity cannot coexist in the same textbook on the War Between the States. Unfortunately, as Sam Mitcham recently stated in a new book on the battle at Vicksburg, political correctness and intellectual dishonesty are all too often synonymous.
I have found, all to often, that the 'politically correct' party line is: the war was all about slavery; that selfless, valiant, morally pristine Northern army (which was supposedly full of holy and righteous indignation) launched a holy crusade against the evil Southern slaveholders, and defeated them because of their superior military skills, selfless valor, and overwhelmingly great mental prowess. That would be funny if so many people didn't believe it.
Many today have no idea that ONLY 6-7% of the Confederate Army was made up of slaveholders.
Even those who do not read, but watch television and have seen the movie "Gettysburg" should ask themselves, "Why would anybody go through that hell so somebody else could keep their slaves?" The inescapable conclusion is they would not. So, why did the Southerner fight?
There were several major causes of the war, with slavery as one; but it was not the only one. Money was a big one; perhaps the most significant, as will be detailed later on this page, reference the tariff issue.
There was no income tax in the Antebellum South or North; the major source of income for the government was the tariff.
Consider: .......that the Southern plantation owner and yeoman farmer produced more than 75% of the world's cotton .......the South, which contained 30% of the nation's population, was paying more than 85% of its taxes .......at the same time, approximately 3/4 of that money was being spent on internal improvements in the North.
That is why, when asked why he didn't just let the South go, Lincoln cried, "Let the South go? Let the South go? From where then would we get our revenues?"
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Then, many self-ordained 'politically correct' individuals never mention the fact that the American slaves were originally enslaved by black Africans, not by white men on horseback who scooped up African warriors, as depicted in one movie.
They sold them to Northern or Arab (Muslim) flesh peddlers. The slave fleets headquartered in Boston, Mass, and Providence, R.I., not in Charleston, New Orleans, and Savannah.
Yankee flesh peddlers then transported them across the ocean and sold them to Southerners and various other Americans...or at least what was left of them.
Of the 24 to 25 million slaves transported to the Western Hemisphere, only 20 million arrived alive.
4-5 million died in what was called the "Middle Passage." (So much for Northern compassion).
6% of the survivors ended up in the colonies of the United States.
Slave fleets continued to operate throughout the Civil War. They did not stop until 1885, when Brazil became the last country to outlaw the slave trade.
It is unfortunate that history is so vulnerable to those who want to dictate the present and control the future by changing the past. And many 'politically correct' historians swell up in righteous indignation if you even bring up these inconvenient facts.
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What was "Triangle Trade?"
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What countries were involved in the triangle trade?
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How do scholars get information about slave trading voyages?
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The Cuban Slave Trade Connection:
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Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade:
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Rhode Island.....Slave Trading Hub:
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Slavery in Massachusetts:
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February 26, 1638: First Slaves Arrive in Massachusetts
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Forgotten History: How The New England Colonists
Embraced The Slave Trade
American
slavery predates the founding of the United States. Wendy Warren, author of New England Bound, says the early colonists imported
African slaves and enslaved and exported Native Americans.
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Interview with Wendy Warren on NPRs "Fresh Air" June 21, 2016:
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The Presbyterian Church and the Coming
Civil War
This presentation delves into religion
and the American Civil War. Understanding religion and its importance for the
Civil War era is too often a neglected topic in a period that is so often
defined by cataclysmic political and military events.
With Ranger Zach Siggins.
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Presbyterian Church publications dealing with the Civil War:
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Rev. Isaac W. Handy, Presbyterian clergyman, preaching to POWs in Fort Delaware:
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SLAVERY: Dirty Secrets Exposed
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Anthony Johnson: First Slave Owner in America (in Northampton County, Virginia).....and he was Black.
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In 1640, five
years after being freed from slavery himself, Anthony Johnson (born in Angola,
Africa), acquired a black slave named John Casar (sometimes spelled Casor or Gesorroro).
In 1648, Johnson, who had come to the Eastern Shore in the 1620s, purchased
four head of livestock from four different planters. Two years later he was
given a patent for an isolated 250-acre tract of land on the north side of
Nandua, where he settled with his wife Mary (who had arrived from Africa in
1622) and proceeded to build a livestock business. A patent was a legal claim
to land given by the government in exchange for bringing dependents (called
"headrights") into the colony. In 1654, he acquired a second slave,
Mary Gersheene. Over the next few years, the Johnson's sons, John and Richard,
accumulated 650 acres adjacent to their parents' land.
The
accumulation of several hundred acres of land, a herd of cattle, and a few
slaves constituted a singular economic achievement for a free black family in
mid-seventeenth-century Virginia. Historians have pointed to Anthony Johnson as
proof that in the early and mid-1600's at least, Virginia's free blacks
sometimes operated on an equal footing with whites. It is true that during the
17th-century free black men occasionally purchased not only black
slaves, but indentured white servants, and they sometimes married white women.
They established profitable farms and livestock businesses, and successfully
sued whites in court.
But more recent
investigations into the lives of free blacks on the Eastern Shore suggest that
while colonial blacks had relatively more opportunity and freedom than their
descendants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they too suffered at
the hands of the white majority.
The Johnsons,
for example, were harassed by two of their white neighbors, George and Robert
Parker, who connived to lure John Casar away from the Johnson household in
early 1655. Johnson successfully petitioned the court for Casar's return,
ironically setting an early legal precedent for slavery in Virginia. A white
planter attempted to defraud the Johnsons out of their land in 1653, and in
1658 another planter, Matthew Pippen, succeeded in taking land away from Richard
Johnson.
Perhaps seeking
an atmosphere more congenial for free blacks, the Johnson family moved north to
Somerset County, Maryland in 1665, where Anthony Johnson leased 300 acres and
founded a tobacco farm that he called Tories Vineyards. But their Virginia
troubles were not over. In 1667, Edmund Scarburgh, the Shore's most prominent
planter and politician, cheated Johnson out of more than 1,300 pounds of
tobacco. And in the greatest injustice of all, in 1670 a jury of white men
decided that "because he was a Negroe and by consequence an alien,"
the Virginia land originally held by Johnson should revert to the Crown.
Anthony Johnson
died on his estate in Somerset before the 1670 decision was handed down. Mary
Johnson died there 10 years later. Only one son, Richard Johnson, born about
1632, remained on the Eastern Shore, on 50 acres given to him by his father. In
the next generation this property was inherited by Anthony's grandson, John
Johnson Jr., who named the farm “Angola” as a tribute to his grandfather's
birth country. John Johnson was unable to pay the taxes on the property and
subsequently lost ownership. He died in 1721.
The Johnson
family's economic success is a tribute to their hard work and resourcefulness,
but the attempts by their white neighbors to ruin them are indicative of the
severe obstacles to success placed in the path of blacks even during colonial
times. (Source: Virginia
Foundation for the Humanities, “Site of 17th Century Estate of Anthony and Mary
Johnson,” African American Historic Sites Database.)
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The First Official Slave and Slave Owner in (North) America...from "Stolen History, Part 2":
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William Ellison: Largest African American Slave Owner and Breeder in South Carolina..... and he was Black
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William Ellison's plantation:
The Borough Plantation
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By 1860, William “April” Ellison was
South Carolina's largest Negro slave owner; and in the entire state, only five
percent of the people owned as much real estate as did William Ellison. His
wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites.
Ellison also owned more slaves than did 99% of the South's slaveholders.
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"Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South" is the complete documented history of William Ellison, Jr., a black man who was among the top 10% of all slaveholders and landowners in Sumpter county, S.C. In the entire state of South Carolina, only 5% of the population owned as much real estate as Ellison. Only 3% of the state's slaveholders owned as many slaves. Thus, compared to the mean wealth of white men in the entire South, Ellison's was 15 times greater. 99% of the South's slaveholders owned fewer slaves than he did.
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William Holmes Ellison, Jr. "April"
a Black (mulatto) Slave Owner in South Carolina
In 1800, the South Carolina legislature had set out in detail
the procedures for manumission. To end the practice of freeing unruly slaves of
"bad or depraved" character and those who "from age or
infirmity" were incapacitated, the state required that an owner testify
under oath to the good character of the slave he sought to free. Also required
was evidence of the slave's "ability to gain a livelihood in an honest
way." On June 8, 1816, William Ellison of Fairfield County appeared before
a magistrate (with five local freeholders as supporting witnesses) to gain permission
to free his slave, April, who was at the time 26 years of age. April was
William Ellison, Jr. of Sumter County.
At birth, William Ellison, Jr. was given the name of "April." It was
a popular practice among slaves of the period to name a child after the day or
month of his or her birth. It is known that between the years 1800 and 1802
April was owned by a white slave-owner named William Ellison, son of Robert
Ellison of Fairfield County in South Carolina. It is not documented as to who
his owner was before that time. It can only be assumed that William Ellison, a
planter of Fairfield district was either the father or the brother of William
Ellison, Jr., freedman of Sumter County. April had his name changed to William
Ellison by the courts, obviously in honor of William Ellison of Fairfield.
At the age of 10, William "April" Ellison was apprenticed and he was
trained as a cotton gin builder and repairer. He spent six years training as a
blacksmith and carpenter and he also learned how to read, write, cipher and to
do basic bookkeeping. Since there are no records showing the purchase of April
(later William Ellison of Sumter) by William Ellison of Fairfield, it is
unknown as to how long April was owned by William Ellison. It is known that
William Ellison of Fairfield inherited a large estate from his father Robert,
and that the slaves of the estate, named in the will were left to his siblings.
It is possible that Robert Ellison gave several slaves to his son before his
death, so they would not have needed to have been mentioned in his will.
William owned several slaves according to the census records. Both Robert and
William were of an age to have been able to be the father of April.
April was trained as a machinist and he became a well known cotton gin maker.
Upon receiving his freedom he decided to pursue his expertise in Sumter County,
South Carolina where found an eager market for his trade. He is well known for
perfecting the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney.
William Holmes "April"
Ellison was born in 1790, in Fairfield, SC, which was 40 miles NW of the High
Hills, to William Holmes Ellison and Mary Harrison. He married a woman named
Matilda and together they had the following children: Aliza Ann, Marie, Henry,
William Holmes III, and Reuben Ellison. He had an illegitimate child named
Maria Ellison that he sold. "April" was a slave owner and one time
slave himself. It was told that he was hard on his slaves and interestingly
none of his slaves were Mulattoes, they were all black. When he was 26 he
became a free man and 3 years later at the Sumter District courthouse he had
his name changed to William. William was the name of his former master (William
Holmes Ellison I). He changed his name from April because it was tied to
slavery.
He was known for being a Cotton Gin Maker. In 1822, he built his
Cotton gin shop on an acre of land that he purchased for $375 from General
Thomas Sumter. This shop would be operated by William and even his grandsons
for many decades. The shop was located at the NW corner of a busy intersection
of the roads of Charleston-Camden and Sumterville-Columbia, SC. Now at the Holy
Cross Episcopal Church were he attend services, William rose in respectability.
His family became so respected that they were the only colored family allowed
to worship on the main floor. William Ellison was permitted to place a Bench
under the Organ Loft for the use of himself and family. William Ellison died on
December 5, 1861 in Statesburg, SC, and was buried with his wife, Matilda. His
tombstone was placed in the first row of the family's graveyard.
------------------------------------
Additional Bio Info provided by Art Wells:
In 1800 the South Carolina legislature had set out in detail the procedures for
manumission. To end the practice of freeing unruly slaves of "bad or
depraved" character and those who "from age or infirmity" were
incapacitated, the state required that an owner testify under oath to the good
character of the slave he sought to free. Also required was evidence of the
slave's "ability to gain a livelihood in an honest way." On June 8,
1816, William Ellison of Fairfield County appeared before a magistrate (with
five local freeholders as supporting witnesses) to gain permission to free his
slave, April, who was at the time 26 years of age. April was William Ellison,
Jr. of Sumter County.
At birth, William Ellison, Jr. was given the name of "April." It was
a popular practice among slaves of the period to name a child after the day or
month of his or her birth. It is known that between the years 1800 and 1802
April was owned by a white slave-owner named William Ellison, son of Robert
Ellison of Fairfield County in South Carolina. It is not documented as to who
his owner was before that time. It can only be assumed that William Ellison, a
planter of Fairfield district was either the father or the brother of William
Ellison, Jr., freedman of Sumter County. April had his name changed to William
Ellison by the courts, obviously in honor of William Ellison of Fairfield.
At the age of 10, William "April" Ellison was apprenticed and he was
trained as a cotton gin builder and repairer. He spent six years training as a
blacksmith and carpenter and he also learned how to read, write, cipher and to
do basic bookkeeping. Since there are no records showing the purchase of April
(later William Ellison of Sumter) by William Ellison of Fairfield, it is
unknown as to how long April was owned by William Ellison. It is known that
William Ellison of Fairfield inherited a large estate from his father Robert,
and that the slaves of the estate, named in the will were left to his siblings.
It is possible that Robert Ellison gave several slaves to his son before his
death, so they would not have needed to have been mentioned in his will.
William owned several slaves according to the census records. Both Robert and
William were of an age to have been able to be the father of April.
April was trained as a machinist and he became a well known cotton gin maker.
Upon receiving his freedom he decided to pursue his expertise in Sumter County,
South Carolina where found an eager market for his trade. He is well known for
perfecting the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney.
In 1816, April, now known as William Ellison, Jr. arrived in Stateburg where he
initially hired slave workers from their local owners. By 1820 he had purchased
two adult males to work in his shop. On June 20, 1820, April appeared in the
Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville. Described in court papers submitted
by his attorney as a “freed yellow man of about 29 years of age,” he requested
a name change because it “would yet greatly advance his interest as a
tradesman.” A new name would also “save him and his children from degradation
and contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name April.”
Because “of the kindness” of his former master and as a “Mark of gratitude and
respect for him” April asked that his name be changed to William Ellison. His
request was granted.
The Ellison family joined the Episcopalian Church of the Holy Cross in
Stateburg and on August 6, 1824, William Ellis was the first black to install a
family bench on the first floor of the church, among those of the other wealthy
families of Stateburg. The poor whites and the other black church members, free
and slave, sat in the balcony of the church.
Gradually, Ellison built up a small empire, purchasing slaves in increasing
numbers as the years passed. He became one of South Carolina's major cotton gin
manufacturers and sold his machines as far away as Mississippi. He regularly
advertised his cotton gins in newspapers across the state. His ads may be found
in historic copies of the Black River Watchman, the Sumter Southern Whig, and
the Camden Gazzette.
By 1830, he owned four slaves who assisted him in his business. He then began
to acquire land and even more slaves. In 1838 Ellison purchased 54.5 acres
adjoining his original acreage from former South Carolina Governor Stephen
Decater Miller. Ellison and his family moved into a large home on the property.
(The house had been known as Miller House but became known as Ellison House.)
As his business grew, so did his wealth and by 1840, Ellison owned 12 slaves.
His sons, who lived in homes on the property, owned an additional nine slaves.
By the early 1840s, he was one of the most prosperous men in the area. By the
year 1850, he was the owner of 386 acres of land and 37 slaves. The workers on
Ellison's plantation produced 35 bales of cotton that year.
In 1852, Ellison purchased Keith Hill and Hickory Hill Plantations which
increased his land holdings to over 1,000 acres. By 1860 William Ellison was
South Carolina's largest Negro slave owner and in the entire state, only five
percent of the people owned as much real estate as did William Ellison. His
wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites.
Ellison also owned more slaves than did 99% of the South's slaveholders.
When War Between the States broke out in 1861, William Ellison, Jr. was one of
the staunchest supporters of the Confederacy. His grandson joined a Confederate
Artillery Unit, and William turned his plantation over from cotton cash crop
production to farming foodstuff for the Confederacy.
William Ellison, Jr. died on 5 December 1861, at the age of 71 and per his
wishes, his family continued to actively support the Confederacy throughout the
war. Aside from producing corn, fodder, bacon, corn shucks, and cotton for the
Confederate Army, they contributed vast amounts of money, paid $5000 in taxes,
and invested a good portion of their fortune into Confederate Bonds which were
worthless at the end of the war.
William Ellison, Jr. had died with an estate appraised at $43,500, consisting
of 70 slaves. His will stated that his estate should pass into the joint hands
of his daughter and his two surviving sons. He bequeathed $500 to a slave
daughter he had sold. At his death he was one in the top 10% of the wealthiest
people in all of South Carolina, was in the top 5% of land ownership, and he
was the third largest slave owner in the entire state.
In 1816, April, now known as William Ellison, Jr. (not to be confused with one of his own sons, whom he would name William Ellison, Jr.) arrived in Stateburg where he
initially hired slave workers from their local owners. By 1820, he had purchased
two adult males to work in his shop. On June 20, 1820, "April" appeared in the
Sumter District courthouse in Sumterville. Described in court papers submitted
by his attorney as a “freed yellow man of about 29 years of age,” he requested
a name change because it “would yet greatly advance his interest as a
tradesman.” A new name would also “save him and his children from degradation and
contempt which the minds of some do and will attach to the name April.” Because
“of the kindness” of his former master and as a “Mark of gratitude and respect
for him” April asked that his name be changed to William Ellison. His request
was granted.
The Ellison family joined the Episcopalian Church of the Holy Cross in
Stateburg and on August 6, 1824, William Ellis was the first black allowed to
install a family bench on the first floor of the church, albeit in the back of the church, among those of the
other wealthy families of Stateburg. The poor whites and the other black
church members, free and slave, sat in the balcony of the church.
Gradually, Ellison built up a small empire, purchasing slaves in increasing
numbers as the years passed. He became one of South Carolina's major cotton gin
manufacturers and sold his machines as far away as Mississippi. He regularly
advertised his cotton gins in newspapers across the state. His ads may be found
in historic copies of the Black River Watchman, the Sumter Southern Whig, and
the Camden Gazette.
By 1830, he owned four slaves who assisted him in his business. He
then began to acquire land and even more slaves. In 1838, Ellison purchased 54.5
acres adjoining his original acreage from former South Carolina Governor
Stephen Decater Miller. Ellison and his family moved into a large home on the
property. (The house had been known as Miller House but became known as Ellison
House.) As his business grew, so did his wealth and by 1840, Ellison
owned 12 slaves.
His sons, who lived in homes on the property, owned an
additional nine slaves. By the early 1840s, he was one of the most prosperous
men in the area. By the year 1850, he was the owner of 386 acres of land and 37
slaves. The workers on Ellison's plantation produced 35 bales of cotton that
year.
In 1852, Ellison purchased Keith Hill and Hickory Hill Plantations which
increased his land holdings to over 1,000 acres. By 1860 William Ellison was
South Carolina's largest Negro slaveowner and in the entire state, only five
percent of the people owned as much real estate as did William Ellison. His
wealth was 15 times greater than that of the state's average for whites.
Ellison also owned more slaves than did 99% of the South's slaveholders.
And how did he treat his slaves? The records found in "Black Masters," tell us "He had a reputation as a harsh master. His slaves were said to be the district's worst fed and worst clothed. Hungry for more land and slaves, Ellison and his family lived frugally, and he probably was even more tightfisted in providing food, clothing, and housing for his slaves. Harsh treatment could have stemmed from Ellison's need to prove to whites that, despite his history and color, he was not soft on slaves. A reputation for harshness was less dangerous than a reputation for indulgence."
Did he pay for "slave catchers" to find his runaway slaves? Yes, the record is clear on that point.
He was also a slave "breeder" who sold off black slave girls to help raise the large sums he needed to buy more adult slaves and more land. To him, slaves were a source of labor, and the laborers he needed most were adult men who could work in his gin shop and cotton fields. Rather than accumulate slaves he could not exploit, it is seen that he sold twenty or more girls, retaining only a few who could eventually have more children, and in some cases, work in his home as domestics. If Ellison sold twenty slave girls for an average price of $400, he obtained an additional $8,000 cash, a sum large enough to have made a major contribution to the land and slave purchases that made him a planter. Thus, Ellison's economic empire was in large part constructed by slave labor and paid for by the sale of slave girls. And from the local records available, local tradition is silent about Ellison's slave sales, but outspoken about his reputation as a harsh master. In summary, his slaves were said to be the district's worst fed and worst clothed.
When War Between the States broke out in 1861, William Ellison, Jr. was one of
the staunchest supporters of the Confederacy. His grandson joined a Confederate
Artillery Unit, and William turned his plantation over from cotton cash crop
production to farming foodstuff for the Confederacy.
William Ellison died on 5 December 1861, at the age of 71 and per
his wishes, his family continued to actively support the Confederacy throughout
the war. Aside from producing corn, fodder, bacon, corn shucks, and cotton for
the Confederate Army, they contributed vast amounts of money, paid $5000 in
taxes, and invested a good portion of their fortune into Confederate Bonds
which were worthless at the end of the war.
William Ellison, Jr. had died with an estate under-appraised at $43,500,
consisting of 70 slaves. His will stated that his estate should pass into the
joint hands of his daughter and his two surviving sons. He bequeathed $500 to a
slave daughter he had sold. At his death he was one in the top 10% of the
wealthiest people in all of South Carolina, was in the top 5% of land
ownership, and he was the third largest slave owner in the entire state.
Slave records show that Ellison owned by year and number:
1820: 2, 1830: 4, 1840: 30, 1850: 36, and 1860: 63.
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