Part 2, Conclusion, of The King Street Riot of 1876, The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston During Reconstruction

Posted on August 27, 2020August 27, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

Part 2, Conclusion, of

The King Street Riot of 1876¹

The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston
During Reconstruction

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

(Continued from Part 1. It is best to read Part 1 first to
get the background. At the end of Part 1 is a link to Part 2.
Click here to go to Part 1.)

The King Street Riot

The next night, Wednesday, September 6, 1876, the Democratic Hampton and Tilden Colored Club of Ward 4 met at Archer's Hall, corner of King and George Streets. The meeting was conducted by black Democrat J. B. Jenkins, vice-president, with some whites present. White lawyer Joseph W. Barnwell spoke as did several blacks including Jenkins himself, Isaac B. Rivers and J. W. Sawyer. There had been a threat made that two black Republican gangs, the Live Oak and Hunkidory Clubs, planned to break up the meeting and kill the black Democrats, so when the meeting adjourned around 10:15 p.m., each black Democrat was put in the middle of six or seven whites² and the line headed out onto King Street led by Joseph Barnwell.³

Joseph Walker Barnwell, atty, served SC House & Senate, chair SC Democr. Prty, a pres. of the SC Historical Society. Undated photo.

Alfred B. Williams writes:

The Hunkidories and Live Oaks, negro Radical Republican secret organizations, had gathered their forces and were massed, waiting, in King Street armed with pistols, clubs and sling shots, the last made with a pound of lead attached to a twelve inch leather strap and providing a deadly weapon at close range.⁴

On both sides of King Street there were jeers and taunts as the line of whites and black Democrats marched quietly up King Street toward Citadel Green (Marion Square). When they got to the German church, St. Matthews, "a mob of 150 negroes, armed with staves, clubs and pistols, came yelling after them, hurrahing for Hayes and Wheeler."⁵

Currier & Ives campaign poster for 1876 Republican ticket, Ohio Gov. Hayes, and VP Wheeler.

St. Matthew's German Evangelical Lutheran Church, the way it looked in 1876 (1883 photo).

The whites leading the line stopped, a black rioter ran up and "knocked the first white man he met in the head with a 'slung shot,' and the crowd immediately behind him fired a pistol into the crowd of whites, shouting that they would have the colored Democrats out even if they had to kill every man in the crowd to do it."⁶ Several whites shot over the heads of the mob to cover other whites who quickly took the black Democrats to the federal troops stationed at the Citadel where they were safe. All the shooting had attracted more black rioters and instantly there were 300 "yelling and shouting and breathing threats of violence."⁷

The 45 or so whites in the crowd "retreated backwards up King Street, facing the negroes and keeping them off as well they could by returning the fire from the pistols of the mob." Just as the whites reached John Street "the negro mob was reinforced by another multitude of blacks who swept out of John Street and cut off the retreat of the whites." These reinforcements were yelling "Blood!"⁸ The whites were now completely surrounded and outnumbered some 500 to 45. Things were desperate and it quickly became a hand to hand fight with pistols going off rapidly.⁹

Drie 1872 map, route down King St. from George to John where 2nd black mob cut off the whites.

Earlier, whites had somehow gotten word to the police at Broad and Meeting and finally four or five arrived though they were "powerless to restrain the infuriated mob."¹⁰ A black policeman, Charles Green, with Justice Reed and "a white man named Plaspohl, then came up and called on a posse of citizens white and black to assist him." The rioters kept yelling "Blood!" though it appeared for a moment the mob might be quieted as curses and threats seemed to get fewer, then a "skirmish" broke out between a white man and black on the outskirts and that started it all over. Green was surrounded and pistols "were going off every moment, and amid the firing Policeman Green fell shot through the abdomen." Soon, the police "were reinforced by members from the upper and lower Guardhouses, and succeeded in separating the whites from the blacks."¹¹

A detail left to take the wounded to the stationhouse "and the fighting immediately began again." White men "by this time numbered only about fifteen" as there were "large numbers of them (at least 30) having been knocked senseless with clubs and palings." Fifteen minutes later, the negroes "had complete mastery of the field." Policeman Green "was the only colored man up to that time who was hurt, and he was shot it is believed by one of the negro mob, who attempted to fire at a white man he was protecting." Other blacks had been knocked down and some had "bad gashes over the head" but none was seriously hurt.

There is no question the black Democrats would have been brutally beaten or murdered by the Republican mobs had it not been for the white men who risked their lives protecting them. One young white man with a wife and child at home did lose his life in the melee. The planners of this ambush must not have taken into account that the black Democrats could be turned over to federal troops there at the Citadel for protection; or maybe something went wrong with the timing of the ambush which gave the whites a single fleeting chance to get the black Democrats to safety, which they did successfully.

It is entirely possible that the timing element that went wrong for the planners of the ambush was the whites stopping to face the first mob. The ambush's planners probably figured the whites, when faced with the first angry mob of 150 armed blacks, would break and run, or their formation would fall apart, or they would at least continue up King Street. The whites, stopping, composed and determined, was probably the last thing the ambush's planners figured would happen.

It is a certainty that if the whites and black Democrats had advanced just a block further up King Street, the whites would not have been able to get the black Democrats to safety with the federal troops at the Citadel and all of them, most likely, would have been murdered.

The black Republican rioters then gathered "in crowds of forty and fifty at each corner along King Street, extending from Calhoun street to the Upper Guardhouse" (located to the north on the opposite end of King from the main police station at Broad and Meeting). At that upper guardhouse, another infuriated black mob threatened to break in and beat to death all the wounded whites who had been taken there.¹²

Upper police guardhouse on King near Woolfe St. See Num. 7 on map.

Any poor white man who happened along was beaten as reported by the News and Courier:

White men on the street were scarce, and as soon as one turned a corner or came along on his way home, the crowd in his immediately vicinity would give a yell and go for him with brickbats, stones and pistol shots. The crowds at the corners above and below them, hearing the pistol shots, would close up, and in a few moments the unfortunate as surrounded by a pack of over two hundred negroes, who did everything but kill him. They would knock him down with brickbats, and as soon as he would get up to run they would fire pistol shots at him and over his head, while the crowd ahead would rearrest him and give him another beating.¹³

A reporter observed "a mob of negroes chasing a white man, who had hardly a vestige of clothing upon his person, and covered with blood from a dozen wounds." The poor man "was knocked down several times with brickbats or clubs, and several pistol shots were fired at him." A police Lt. Gouldin with two other policemen rescued the man and carried him home "in an almost lifeless condition."¹⁴

The driver of one of the railway cars, Edward Salters, was chased down King Street to his home. He barely made it but the mob chasing and firing pistols at him stayed outside and cursed and threw brickbats for a half hour. They broke out most of the windows and "almost every bannister in the piazzas." The howling mob left only after spotting another victim.¹⁵

By midnight, the riot was over though isolated violence continued all night. White men had been "compelled to stay in their homes with shivering and terror stricken families because any white man venturing on the street alone invited death uselessly."¹⁶

The wounded inside the upper police stationhouse "presented a sickening sight, men lying drenched in blood over the yard and in the hospital." The white man shot in the abdomen, Mr. J. M. Buckner, a bookbinder by trade, 26 years old with a wife and child at home, had been one of the escorts of the black Democrats. He was on a stretcher in excruciating pain, groaning, having been "shot just in the pit of the abdomen." He died the next day.

Another shooting victim, Policeman Charles Green, was also in bad shape but he survived. Two doctors worked all night on the injured, a Dr. Joe Yates and a Dr. Aldrich. Yates had taken off his own shirt and torn it to pieces to make bandages.¹⁷

A few of the others who were injured illustrate the types of injuries sustained:

. . . Policeman Lloyd, colored, was lying senseless with a huge gash in the back of his head caused by some stray brickbat or the sharp edge of a paling.
Mr. John Holmes, son of Prof. Francis Holmes, was beaten very badly in the head and body, and spit up quantities of blood.
W. S. White, white, was shot in the back with a pistol ball, but not seriously.
Mr. E. M. Reeder, a white lad of about eighteen years of age, was beaten terribly, his head and forehead being covered with contusions and his clothing being saturated with blood. He fainted twice in the Stationhouse. This young man was rescued and his life saved by Private Lee, of the police force . . . ¹⁸

There were far more white casualties than black. The white man killed, Buckner, had reportedly been shot accidentally by another white. Over 50 whites had been severely injured as opposed to a handful of blacks. Among policemen, four white and two black were injured.¹⁹

The only rifle company that had assembled the night of the riot was the Carolina Rifle Battalion, no more than 75 strong that night, commanded by Major Theodore G. Barker. They were marched to Hibernian Hall and stood in formation for an hour and a half, listening to the distant sounds of the riot and dying to get into action.

The next day Major Barker took some criticism for not going into action. He had deliberately waited because he had been told the riot was almost over, then over. He published his justification in the paper the next day and admitted they could have killed several black rioters that night, but it would have restarted the riot and brought mobs into the lower end of the city.

Like all Democrat leaders during the 1876 campaign, he knew whites killing blacks would bring the Northern press down on them which would cause President Grant to "fasten the reconstruction government on the state more strongly and cruelly than ever," so that was another reason he held back. As it turned out, with the only death being a white man and few negro arrests, the press accounts around the country were very favorable to the Democrats.²⁰

In giving a more detailed report that Friday, September 8, the News and Courier reported that the riot had raged almost a mile along King Street between Cannon, on the upper end, and Wentworth, on the lower.²¹

That same day, large notices appeared in the newspaper from Charles H. Simonton, Chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee. The first, dated September 7, 1876, stated that "some colored men, citizens of this County, in the exercise of an unquestionable right, have connected themselves with the Democratic party." It goes on with:

. . . Because of threats made against them that, being colored men, they are Democrats, they have asked the Democratic party to protect them, and they have received from our party promise of such protection.
During the evening of the 6th instant, after a respectable and orderly meeting, the colored men who spoke at that meeting in favor of the Democracy were attacked on their way to their homes by an armed mob of colored people and barely escaped with their lives. Such an occurrence disgraces our community. Its repetition would be a stain upon our manhood.
We call upon all citizens, whatever may be their party or race, to unite with us with every means in their power in affording to these Colored Democrats the most ample protection in the exercise of their rights and citizens to select their own party and to advocate their principles. . . .²²

The second, dated September 5, 1876, orders the rifle clubs to defend black Democrats:

The Democratic Party of South Carolina having appealed to the colored citizens to unite with them in the determined effort which is being made to rescue the Government from the Republicans, who have prostituted and degraded it, and having pledged protection to all colored citizens, who, by reason of their uniting with the Democrats, may be subjected to violence or exposed to danger.
The Executive Committee of Charleston County directs that the several Democratic Clubs and organizations throughout the County do promptly organize proper and efficient means for securing to all colored citizens within their respective precincts, who shall unite with them, adequate protection from all violence or injury to which they may be exposed during the canvass and election. The several Clubs will report to this Committee the means which they adopt, and this Committee will afford them all the aid it can command in perfecting the arrangements and redeeming the pledges of protection. . . .

There was also a warning to the local Radical Republican leadership in an article entitled "The Riot and the Remedy," on the editorial page. It ends with:

. . . And now, a word of advice to the men who are at the bottom of all this turbulence and trouble in our usually quiet city. They are well known, though they do not figure at the head of any of the black gangs who have spread alarm and disorder in the community. It is known, also, how easily and absolutely they can control, whenever they choose, the poor ignorant rabble who make up "the party." It is time for them, for their own sakes, to exercise this control, in the interest of public peace and order. It will no doubt be a highly proper thing for them to deplore the consequences of another riot, after it is too late to avert them. But we warn them that this may be not enough to satisfy the citizens whose homes and families are endangered.

The day after the riot, a show of strength included a thousand white members of the Butler Guards and Charleston Light Dragoons assembled to protect black Democrats. The Charleston Light Dragoons began patrolling the streets of Charleston that night. Previously, they had told authorities they were available to assist at any time. Now, they were taking no chances on a poor or ineffective effort by authorities in any future riot. An elaborate communication network was set up and within two hours, 2,000 white men could be assembled. From then until after the election in November "the sound of the hoofs of their horses plodding the streets from nine o'clock to sunrise, in all weathers, was listened for in every part of town and carried to troubled hearts comforting assurance that all might sleep safely, watched over by tireless vigilance and faithfully guarded from danger."²³

Charleston Light Dragoon, 1888 sketch by Edward Laight Wells.

Charleston Light Dragoons may have been organized as early as 1706. Fought in all wars incl. WWI. Ended 1948.

There were two other violent racial confrontations in the Charleston area during Reconstruction. The first took place at Cainhoy, 12 miles up the Wando River from Charleston during a joint meeting Monday, October 16, 1876, some five weeks after the King Street Riot, and there is strong evidence that it was a black Republican ambush of the Democrats, just like the King Street Riot. There is evidence that the speech of a black Democrat named Delany was the signal for the black Republicans to begin the massacre. The white Democrats, who had a few black Democrats with them, were taken completely by surprise. They were low on ammunition from having shot much of it pleasurably during the boat ride. They had few weapons anyway, just some pocket pistols. The black Republicans apparently had muskets and numerous other weapons hidden and when the trouble started they grabbed them and had an easy time with the whites. Around 40 whites were wounded along with three black Democrats.

One young white man was brutally beaten and had his right eye torn out but survived. Five of the wounded whites were murdered. They had been beaten, hacked, mutilated, then robbed of valuables and clothing. The only black Republican casualty at Cainhoy was an old man killed. No Republican blacks were wounded at Cainhoy.

The last violent race riot of Reconstruction was the Broad Street Riot Wednesday, November 8, 1876, the day after the election, three weeks after Cainhoy, and eight weeks after King Street. It was unplanned and happened due to the volatility of the situation. Blacks and whites were in Broad Street armed, as always, and a shot was accidentally fired causing panic, rumor and a race riot to start. Casualties on Broad Street were: one white man killed, 12 wounded; among black Republicans, none were killed, but 12 were also wounded.

It was during this riot that some black policemen joined the Republican rioters and began shooting at whites from behind the columns of the main police stationhouse at Meeting and Broad.²⁴ One such policeman shot and killed Endicott H. Walter, son of prominent Charleston businessman George H. Walter. They had been returning to work on Adger's Wharf from dinner and apparently had no weapons that were visible.²⁵

Adger's Wharf, 19th century.

Bales of cotton on Adger's Wharf in 19th century.

Main Chas. Police Station at Broad and Meeting, where the US Post Office is today. This photo after 1886 earthquake.

The Mississippi Plan and the determined efforts of white and black Democrats got former Confederate General Wade Hampton, III elected governor, though the election was challenged by Republican Chamberlain well into the next year. As part of the deal for receiving South Carolina's electoral votes, Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes removed federal troops in April, 1877, and that secured Hampton's victory and ended Reconstruction in the last, most long-suffering Southern state.²⁶

President Rutherford B. Hayes, winner of the 1876 US presidential election.

Gov. Wade Hampton, III, winner 1876 SC gubernatorial election signifying the end of Reconstruction in SC.

NOTES:

¹ This paper was written 22 years ago and turned in May 2, 1998 for a Victorian Charleston history course taught by Professor Robert P. Stockton at the College of Charleston when I was a middle-age student. The parallels between the violent leftists of the Democrat Party today, and the violent Republican Party during Reconstruction, are striking. Both used (and Democrats today are still using) racial hatred, division, and violence, to stay in power.

² The accounts of the exact formation of the whites as they protected the black Democrats differ. One says a single black Democrat was put in the middle of six or seven whites, leading one to believe that there were several groups of these whites with a black in the middle, all in a line, since there were several black Democrats at this meeting. Other accounts say that all the blacks were in the middle of a single larger group of whites.

³ "A Bloody Outbreak." News and Courier, Thursday, September 7, 1876; Alfred B. Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, South Carolina's Deliverance in 1876 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Company, Publishers, 1935), 120-22; Melinda Meek Hennessey, "Racial Violence During Reconstruction: The 1876 Riots in Charleston and Cainhoy," South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 2 (April, 1985), 105.

⁴ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 121.

⁵ "A Bloody Outbreak.", News and Courier, Thursday, September 7, 1876.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Williams, Hampton and His Redshirts, 121.

⁹ "A Bloody Outbreak.", News and Courier, Thursday, September 7, 1876.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ "A Night of Excitement.", News and Courier, Friday, September 8, 1876.

¹⁶ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 122.

¹⁷ "A Bloody Outbreak.", News and Courier, Thursday, September 7, 1876.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Hennessey, "Racial Violence During Reconstruction," 106.

²⁰ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 123-26.

²¹ "A Night of Excitement.", News and Courier, Friday, September 8, 1876.

²² "Democratic Executive Committee.", News and Courier, Friday, September 8, 1876.

²³ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 126-27.

²⁴ For an excellent photograph of this building with its six large columns facing Broad Street, see Robert P. Stockton, The Great Shock, The Effects of the 1886 Earthquake on the Build Environment of Charleston, South Carolina (Easley, SC: Southern HIstorical Press, Inc., 1986), photograph #5 in the photo section following page 22. It shows damage to the top of the building from the earthquake of 1886, but none to the six large stately doric columns. It was from behind one of these columns that a black policeman shot and killed Endicott H. Walter during the race riot of November 8, 1876.

²⁵ John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865-1877 (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1905; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 391-92; Hennessey, "Racial Violence During Reconstruction," 110-11.

²⁶ Louis B. Wright, South Carolina, A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., and Nashville: American Association for State and Local History, 1976), 195.

Part 1 of The King Street Riot of 1876, The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston During Reconstruction

Posted on August 20, 2020August 27, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

Part 1 of

The King Street Riot of 1876¹

The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston
During Reconstruction

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

The sidewalks along Meeting Street in Charleston, South Carolina were jam packed with exuberant people from Broad to Marion Square just after dark, Friday, August 25th, 1876, two weeks before a violent race riot would rage on King Street.

Bystanders this night numbered around 7,500 and they were cheering an impressive torchlight parade, part of a Democratic Party rally that had started at Broad Street "amid the clash of drums," the hissing of rockets and Roman candles, and music. As far as one could see, Meeting Street was "a perfect blaze of light with torches, transparencies, lanterns, blue lights and rockets" moving steadily toward Marion Square, called "Citadel Green" back then.²

The parade itself was over 6,000 strong led by 500 men on horseback. Every window "along the line of march was crowded with ladies and children, who waved their handkerchiefs in response to the cheers of the men."

As they passed the Meeting Street ice house "a shower of rockets" went up, and in front of the Charleston Hotel "there was a perfect fusillade of Roman candles, bombs and rockets which lit up the street from Hasel to Broad" and made it "almost as bright as day." The "handsome stores of Messrs. W. Carrington & Co. and J. R. Read & Co. were brilliantly illuminated with Chinese lanterns of variegated colors" that "provoked a yell from the torch bearers which was responded to by a shower of rockets from the occupants of the building, and a general flutter of pocket handkerchiefs from the ladies."

Passing Von Santen's, "a half dozen of his clerks were sent out with an unlimited supply of rockets, whose brilliant coruscations served to reveal the handsome and cheery faces of hundreds of the fair sex who thronged the windows of the Masonic Temple." Some of the ladies were so excited "as to hold a Roman candle."³

Charleston in 1872 by prominent map maker C. N. Drie.

As the cheering procession turned left on Calhoun Street and poured onto Citadel Green, a battery of cannons manned by the Washington Artillery opened up rapid fire, a deafening BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, while over King Street "there was sent up as brilliant a flight of rockets as was ever seen in Charleston."⁴

They marched across the square to a grand stand in front of The Citadel. The platform was 10 feet high and 30 feet by 25 and around it "was a substantial balustrade 8 feet high and surrounded by fifty gas jets, which lit up the scene for yards around, the names of Tilden and Hendricks being painted on the globes." The lower part of the platform was "fringed with Centennial bunting."⁵

The Citadel in 1865, the year the War Between the States ended. It overlooks Citadel Green, today's Marion Square.

The transparencies (apparently some kind of placards) carried by those marching had on them messages that were often funny but dead serious. A triangular one "had the picture of a diminutive carpet-bagger retreating from an immense shoe in his rear."

Another had "Hampton will Wade in," and another had two crossed rifles "with bayonets, cartridges and bowie knives" labeled "Agricultural Implements."⁶

Many signs carried messages appealing to blacks, like "'Let the Republicans name a Democrat who has ever cheated the colored man.'"

Another featured a wagon loaded with bales of cotton and "drawn by a white and black man, and underneath was the motto, 'Together we'll redeem the State and live in peace.'"

Another, more pointed, said "'No intimidation of colored Democrats.'"

Others mimicked the Freedman's Bank scandal or proclaimed "straight-out."⁷

The speeches were just as uplifting as the parade. All of Charleston's leading citizens were there and included John A. Wagener, George Walton Williams, C. T. Lowndes, A. G. Magrath, E. T. Legare, C. Kerrison, Jr., Henry Buist, J. Ancrum Simons, W. C. Courtenay, James Cosgrove, W. L. Trenholm, W. W. Sale and George H. Walter.⁸ Mr. Walter's son, Endicott, would be shot dead in a race riot on Broad Street two and a half months later and Mr. Walter himself would be wounded.⁹

Col. Edward McCrady was one of the first speakers and this excerpt is typical of the others:

. . . The Republicans claim to own the 30,000 negro votes. They claim that "negro" and "Republican" mean the same thing. That all negroes are Republicans. We do not admit this. We know that very few of the negroes understand the difference between Democrats and Republicans. They are told to this day that they are still voting for Lincoln when they vote the Republican ticket, and that the Democratic party will put them back into slavery. But in this campaign we intend that they shall hear from us our true position, . . . We intend to have no Republican intimidation in the coming election. . . . (great applause).¹⁰

Lt. Col. Edward McCrady in 1876, later Gen. McCrady. In the war he served with Gregg's Regiment.

Major Theodore G. Barker denounced the racial hatred promoted by the Republican Union League early in Reconstruction as it sought to consolidate the black vote. He continued:

. . . If the counsels of corrupt Republican leaders, from the very highest and most cultivated to the coarsest and lowest dog in the Radical kennel, had been followed, blood and hate would have marked the history of the State for eleven years past. To the natural kindliness between the native white and the blacks which has always existed in South Carolina - to the refusal of both the former master and the former slave to suffer themselves to be arrayed in strife against each other by miserable carpet-baggers of both races - and to this alone is due the fact that to-day we are at peace . . .¹¹

Flat Rock, NC grave of Maj. Theodore Gaillard Barker, who organized the Carolina Rifle Club in 1869.

These two excerpts exemplify the themes of the many speakers and the frustration of whites. South Carolina Democrats had been "whipped dogs" since 1868 when Congressional Reconstruction began. They had not even called themselves "Democrats" instead hiding behind the label "conservatives." Some of this had to do with the backlash of the War Between the States which caused Lincoln's Republicans to ascend and Democrats to be discredited, but most had to do with pure hopelessness. South Carolina whites saw no end to Republican corruption which was pervasive as was public thievery and the promotion of virulent racial hate. Whites saw an entrenched carpetbag government that had at its disposal the state militia and treasury, the courts, the national Republican Party, the Northern press, the White House, and it was all backed up by federal troops. Whites knew they were a minority in a state run by outsiders whose political power base was the black majority.

Those outsiders had to maintain absolute control over black voters and the most effective way to do that was racial distrust and hate. Republican leaders told blacks, among other things, that if whites got back in power they would reestablish slavery. There were also constant threats of violence against any black too friendly with whites, or who dared not vote Republican, as well as other modes of ostracism within the black community.¹²

The Hamburg Riot of July 8th, seven weeks earlier, changed all that.

It gave Democrats a big surge of confidence, not because of the blood that was shed but because whites began realizing they were not impotent. They could fight back. Whites felt that the situation was no longer tolerable and the Republicans had to go even if it meant bringing a military government on themselves, which they figured would at least protect them and not rob the state blind. They did have a great fear that a military intervention would simply be put under command of the corrupt state government, but by the election of 1876, they were ready to chance it. The efforts at "fusion" with the untested reform branch of the Republican Party gave way to a "straight-out" Democratic ticket and a political fight to the finish.¹³

Adoption of the Mississippi Plan

Another speaker at the Charleston rally of August 25th was Gen. S. W. Ferguson, "a Carolinian born, residing in Mississippi." He told how they had gotten rid of carpetbag rule the year before in Mississippi, which had been in a similar situation as South Carolina with a large population of blacks under tight Republican control.

Brigadier General Samuel Wragg Ferguson.

South Carolina Democrats quickly adopted the exact same strategy, which included, as a key element, face to face confrontation of Republicans at Republican meetings. This tactic became known as the "joint meeting" with "division of time."

Gen. Ferguson said that in Mississippi they went to every Republican meeting and when Republicans lied, Democrats "clinched them then and there" to their faces and "denounced the corrupt leaders" calling them "liars and thieves." Mississippi Democrats spoke to blacks "as residents of the same country with the same interests at stake" and "told them how they (blacks) had been cheated and duped by their leaders," and Democrats "promised to protect them if they wished to vote the Democratic ticket."¹⁴

Gen. Ferguson said there had been little violence but he stressed that Democrats should "be there in numbers strong enough to enforce if necessary, their demand" for equal time. He said to instill in blacks "the truth that their interest and the interest of the white man were the same." Democrats, he said, "should promise to protect them (black Democrats), and carry out their promise." Gen. Ferguson ended saying there was no need to resort to violence, that if Democrats were "prepared for violence" then "no violence would come."¹⁵

The Democratic strategy at joint meetings was simple: talk to blacks honestly, face to face, man to man, without patronizing or building them up with false promises. Democrats would simply tell the truth about Republican corruption and thievery. This, they reasoned, would gain them a manly respect. Democrats were confident that most Republican leaders were so corrupt they could not answer the Democrats face to face, and none could defend the party's record.¹⁶

Democrats were right. Republicans ran from this tactic the whole campaign falling back on their old standby of racial hatred and violence to maintain control.¹⁷

Even in the race for governor, Democrat Hampton many times challenged Republican carpetbagger Chamberlain, from Massachusetts, to debate him "on the stump," which was the custom, but Chamberlain refused. One reason for Chamberlain's refusal was that he might not have been able to face the heat. Though he ended up well thought of and he himself ended up respecting South Carolina Democrats (he admitted this years later, not during the campaign), he was still attorney general during the most corrupt days of Reconstruction and there were questions about why he didn't prosecute more of the public thieves. There was an implication that he too had personally benefited from his government office.¹⁸

Gen. Wade Hampton, III, rescued SC from corrupt Reconstruction by winning the governorship, was later a senator.

There is also a sort of funny reason why Chamberlain would not debate Hampton. Journalist Alfred B. Williams described Hampton as a warm, good humored, confident fellow who would talk with anybody. On the campaign trail, a man came up to Hampton and said "Say, Gin'ral, they tell me you're kind of a dog man. I wisht you'd come over there an' look at somethin' I've got."

Gov. Wade Hampton, III, winner 1876 SC gubernatorial election signifying the end of Reconstruction in SC.

Hampton "joined him and they tramped together to where there was a litter of new hound puppies and through the next hour were in deep, confidential debate on the breeds and builds of hounds and the possibilities of rescuing a young dog wanted for 'possum purposes from the soul destroying vice of going off after rabbit trails.'"¹⁹

Chamberlain was the "diametrically opposite type, more of the student and scholar than a handler of real things." He "was forty-one years old in 1876, absolutely and conspicuously bald except for fringes of hair around his ears and the back of his head and wore a dark mustache." He was an indoor person and "His features were good" and "His manners, dress and personal habits were those of the New Englander." Chamberlain's "speeches and writings were models of style and diction, polished." On the stump, however, he:

. . . toiled diligently to build elegant addresses, admirably suited for cultivated audiences, to be delivered to people who wanted, enjoyed and understood nothing but rant, shrieks, howls, arm waving, foot stamping and funny stories about hogs and mules and hound dogs.²⁰

Daniel Henry Chamberlain, carpetbag governor of SC during Reconstruction, defeated by Wade Hampton.

Chamberlain aside, there was more to the Mississippi Plan, like boycotts of Republican businesses and putting pressure on black employees of Democrats, the same tactics Republicans had been using for eight years. However, at no time did Democrats encourage black women to ostracize or refuse to live with black men who supported the whites, as the Republicans had done, nor did Democrats promise blacks free land or threaten them with whippings for not following Democratic dogma, nor did they tell blacks they would be sold back into slavery if the Republicans won. Republicans had used all these tactics of lies and hate to intimidate and trick blacks and keep them voting Republican.

The key to the success of the Mississippi Plan was the direct confrontation afforded by the joint meeting. Over and over, throughout the campaign, joint meetings proved to average blacks that Democrats were right about Republican corruption and deception. Joint meetings gained Democrats the respect of thousands of blacks and led finally to the collapse of the Republican strategy, which was to control the lower classes of blacks with racist appeals and violence, to bribe the mulattos, and to control whites with the army and machinery of the government."²¹

Strawberry Ferry
A Typical Joint Meeting with Division of Time

Democrats employing the Mississippi Plan got a joint meeting and division of speaking time with Republicans at Strawberry Church, located at Strawberry Ferry, a Republican stronghold dominated by Christopher Columbus Bowen, sheriff of Charleston County and corrupt Republican leader. It took place Thursday, August 31st, 1876, a week after the Marion Square rally. A boat was chartered and the 40 mile trip up the Cooper River was made by approximately 100 white men who were joined at Strawberry Church by the Hampton Mounted Social Club and the Mount Pleasant Mounted Club, together totaling over 50 riders. Another 150 white men came on their own so that whites totaled 300 and blacks had about the same number, though voters in this area were 600 to 700 black, to 25 whites. Blacks were "armed with old muskets, rifles, shot guns and swords" and "some carried bayonets stuck on the end of a stout hickory stick, and others bore scythes, reaping hooks, clubs and sabers." Most whites and blacks also carried pistols as was the custom.²²

Strawberry Chapel, near the Cooper River in Berkeley County, built in 1725.

The meeting "held under the cool shade of the venerable oaks which surrounded the Strawberry Church" started and each speaker was given a half hour. A Republican spoke then a Democrat who among other things said that Gen. Hampton had spoken to blacks in Columbia and said: "We have lived together peaceable in the past, let us now go on together in the same path."²³

Republican Bowen spoke and denounced Democrats as "the oppressor of the poor men of both races," among other things.

Christopher Columbus Bowen from R.I., CSA Coast Guard, Repub. 2-term US Rep., corrupt sheriff of Chas. County after 1872.

Next was Major Barker who "did not mince matters" but denounced a Republican black who "has told lies about me and my father in my absence." He went on to accuse Bowen of setting himself up as a "God" before the blacks, and he chastised them saying "Are you sunk so low that you are willing to take any living being as your God?" Barker denounced Bowen over and over in Bowen's presence then said "I charge him (Bowen) with giving George Sass the programme (sic) for carrying out the strike the other day."²⁴

Bowen responded that he knew nothing of the strike and Barker answered, "that other god," meaning Bowen, "said to the women and children and cowardly men that they must not work for less than sixty cents a task under a penalty of fifty lashes each." Col. Barker went on "you are slaves or freemen just as your courage or cowardice makes you slaves or freeman." He ended saying "I repeat that there was a conspiracy here to inflict fifty-five lashes upon the bare back of any man, woman or child who dared to work for less than sixty cents a task - that is who dared to exercise their rights as freemen. No democratic party ever taught this doctrine."²⁵

The next speaker was an old black fellow who said he was opposed to the Democrats "on general principles," and he "couldn't vote for a Democrat, but, if he ever got into trouble, he would want a Democratic lawyer to defend him, and a Democratic jury to try him, because then he knew that he would get justice."²⁶

This old black gentleman's statements seem to support Democratic assertions that most of the time there were good feelings between blacks and whites until carpetbaggers arrived.

The meeting ended with Bowen giving a long, ineffective talk and being confronted time to time by Major Barker. Bowen pretended he missed his ride and would have to stay the night at Strawberry Ferry, but Major Barker and the whites knew Bowen wanted to stay to undo the good that had been promoted this day so they insisted that they would be glad to give Bowen a ride back to town, and they made sure he got on their boat with them.²⁷

The Short Chain of Events
Leading to the King Street Riot

The Mississippi Plan showed immediate success. Republican leaders "noted with growing dismay and fury the slow but steady additions to the number of negroes enrolling in Democratic clubs, for one reason or another." Republican frustration was demonstrated by "a riotous attack" made "on the negro club at Mout Pleasant."²⁸

Republican frustration was also obvious in the short chain of events leading to the King Street Riot. Those events began on Friday, September 1st, the day after the Strawberry Ferry meeting, and the day a detailed story came out in the newspaper with the headline:

"NO INTIMIDATION."

---------------

BOWEN CONFRONTED BY DEMOCRATS

IN ONE OF HIS STRONGHOLDS.

---------------

A Notable Meeting at Strawberry Church -
How the Freedom of the Ballot is to be
Secured to the Colored Voters of Charleston
County - The Speeches - A Lively Time.²⁹

That night, the Democratic club of Ward 8 "met in the old carriage factory, Spring Street near Rutledge Ave." It was "invaded by a number of boisterous negroes who interrupted and demanded and were accorded division of time." They put up a speaker but it soon became apparent that their mission was to "injure Isaac Rivers, a huge black man and an effective speaker, working for the Democrats, and J. W. Sawyer, another colored speaker." Rivers and Sawyer spoke as did Major Theodore G. Barker, Joseph W. Barnwell and R. S. Tharin. While speaking and after, "Rivers and Sawyer were hustled, threatened and cursed, but escaped uninjured."³⁰

On September 4, the News and Courier reported on the incident in an editorial entitled "An Example and a Warning." They compared the peaceful Strawberry Church meeting with the "riotous and dangerous" Ward 8 meeting and concluded that Strawberry Church had been well planned for danger, while Ward 8 had not been expecting danger therefore was unprepared. They ventured "the prediction that the meeting in Ward 8 is the last of its kind that will ever occur in Charleston" implying that from then on the Democrats would be more prepared. It continued by inviting Republicans to share speaking time on which it commented:

The trickery of the Republican leaders, the miserable falsehoods which they tell to the Democracy, the wretched characters which most of the Republican speakers themselves bear, may all be exposed with profit to Democrats and Republicans of both races.³¹

The editorial also suggested that nobody "under the influence of liquor" should be admitted, and that the halls should not become overcrowded. It reiterated the Democratic vow to protect black Democrats from black Republicans:

In every case a committee, and, if necessary, a 'committee of the whole' should conduct Democratic colored speakers and voters to and from their homes, if they have any fear of violence. Do the Democrats of Charleston know that, owing to a want of adequate precaution of their part, two colored speakers on the Democratic side were in danger of serious harm on Friday night?³²

The editorial ends with a warning that "the campaign in this country is to be a fight against Republican knavery and ruffianism in the country and in the city" and that the two most recent meetings were clearly "an example and a warning." The Strawberry Church meeting had been a good example of a fair joint meeting with both sides accorded plenty of time to speak in a peaceful atmosphere, while the Ward 8 trouble was a clear and ominous warning of what would happen if Republican racial hatred of black Democrats got out of hand.³³

The next day, September 5, another editorial had a short paragraph that started with "The Eighth Ward Bullies," in which it chastised the police for not making any arrests but admitted it was dark and the black Democrats "Rivers and Sawyer could not identify their assailants." It goes on to say that "even if they had done so, and the rascals had been arrested, they would probably have been bailed out by the men who sent them to the meeting." It ends saying "There is only one way to stop this kind of thing. The white Democrats absolutely must protect black Democrats from Republican violence and intimidation."³⁴

Both articles, "An Example and a Warning" of September 4, and "The Eighth Ward Bullies" of September 5, point out Republican efforts to disrupt black Democratic meetings and do violence to black Democrats. Republican leaders knew that if blacks started voting Democratic, their days at the public trough were numbered. Republicans had to make blacks so terrified of voting Democratic that they would stay home or vote Republican. If Republicans could murder the leading black Democrats, that would send a chilling message to all blacks that if they vote Democratic, they and their families can not be protected and can be brutalized or murdered at will.

On the eve of the King Street Riot, black Democrat Rivers "attended and spoke at a meeting of the Democratic club of Ward 5, describing what had occurred in Ward 8." Outside, "a mob of negroes packed the street around the entrance to the meeting." They had been "encouraged by the partial success in Ward 8" four days before. To get the black Democrats to safety "white men formed a square, with Rivers and other negro Democrats in the middle, and marched into King Street through a roar of jeers and curses." The police were there and the disturbance ended.³⁵

GO TO:

Part 2, Conclusion, of
The King Street Riot of 1876
The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston
During Reconstruction.

NOTES:

² "To Live and Die in Dixie!", News and Courier, August 26, 1876, front page.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Melinda Meek Hennessey, "Racial Violence During Reconstruction: The 1876 Riots in Charleston and Cainhoy," South Carolina Historical Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 2 (April, 1985), 111.

⁹ "To Live and Die in Dixie!", News and Courier, August 26, 1876.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² David Duncan Wallace, South Carolina, A Short History, 1520 - 1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1951), 572.

¹³ Alfred B. Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, South Carolina's Deliverance in 1876 (Charleston, SC: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Company, Publishers, 1935), 37-41.

¹⁴ "To Live and Die in Dixie!", News and Courier, August 26, 1876.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Claude G. Bowers, The Tragic Era, The Revolution after Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1929), 513-14.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ John S. Reynolds, Reconstruction in South Carolina, 1865-1877 (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1905; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 507-08.

¹⁹ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 91.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 116-117.

²² "'No Intimidation'," News and Courier, September 1, 1876.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 120.

²⁵ "'No Intimidation'," News and Courier, September 1, 1876.

²⁶ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 120.

²⁷ "An Example and a Warning.", News and Courier, September 4, 1876, editorial page.

²⁸ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 120.

²⁹ "'No Intimidation'," News and Courier, September 1, 1876.

³⁰ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 120.

³¹ "An Example and a Warning.", News and Courier, September 4, 1876, editorial page.

³² Ibid.

³³ Ibid.

³⁴ "The Eighth Ward Bullies," News and Courier, September 5, 1876, editorial page.

³⁵ Williams, Hampton and His Red Shirts, 120.

The Introduction to Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument.

Posted on August 13, 2020August 14, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

Around 60.1% of the electorate voted against Abraham Lincoln in 1860. The loser in the next five presidential elections got more popular votes than Lincoln.

The Introduction to

Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States,
The Irrefutable Argument.¹

(enhanced with captioned photographs)

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Slavery was and is a horrible institution. There is nothing in this book, whatsoever, that defends slavery in any way, form or fashion.

The War Between the States is the central event in American history and, by far, our bloodiest war. It is important to know exactly what caused it and why.

In Part I of this book, I argue that slavery was not the cause of the War Between the States. There is absolute, irrefutable proof that the North did not go to war to free the slaves or end slavery. The North went to war to preserve the Union as Abraham Lincoln said over and over.

The reason Lincoln needed to preserve the Union was because, without it, the North faced economic annihilation, the magnitude of which easily made war preferable. Economic problems multiply geometrically. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861 there was gloom, despair and panic in the North with thousands of business failures, hundreds of thousands of people out of work, serious trouble with the stock market, threatened runs on banks, and Northern ship captains heading South because of the South's low tariff. There was no talk whatsoever of ending slavery. Just the opposite. There were guarantees galore of preserving slavery forever.

Just use common sense. If your house is on fire, you don't care about your neighbor's barking dog or anything your neighbor is doing. You have to put out the fire or lose your house. It's just that simple.

The North's economic house caught fire in the winter of 1860 to 61 when the first seven Southern States seceded. The North quickly discovered that manufacturing and shipping for the South were the sources of most of its employment, wealth and power. Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860. Without the South, the North was headed for bankruptcy. By the spring of 1861, the North's house was a raging inferno.

The latest death statistics for the War Between the States have raised it from 620,000, to between 650,000 and 850,000. These are the widely accepted statistics of historian J. David Hacker of Binghamton University. He splits the difference and uses 750,000.² I believe it was on the higher end of his range so I use 800,000 in this book.

The wounded usually end up, statistically, as a multiple of deaths. For example, in WWII we lost 405,399 and had 670,846 wounded, which is 1.65.³ Sometimes the multiplier is higher, sometimes lower, and I realize that a higher percentage died of disease in the War Between the States, but the number of wounded would still be astronomical, well over a million to add to the 800,000 dead.

If the soldiers of World War II were killed at the same rate as the War Between the States, we would have lost 3,870,000 instead of 405,399; and we would have had 6,385,500 wounded instead of 670,846.

That the South, with less than 1/4th the white population of the North, did not hesitate to fight for its rights and liberty, says everything about the courage of Southerners and their desire for independence.

Especially when one considers the other huge advantages of the North such as 100-to-1 in weapon manufacturing, 19-to-0 in marine engine manufacturing, a merchant marine fleet, a standing army, a substantial navy with fleets of war ships, and a functioning government over 60 years old that had relationships with most of the countries on the earth.

The North also had access to unlimited immigration, and 25% of Union soldiers ended up being foreign born.⁴

The War Between the States was a completely unnecessary war.

Historians know that the Crittenden Compromise (late 1860) would almost certainly have prevented the war. It was based on the old Missouri Compromise line that had worked well for 30 years. Slavery had been prohibited north of the line and allowed south of it.⁵

Sen. John Jordan Crittenden of Kentucky, 1855 portrait by Matthew Brady.

The Crittenden Compromise had widespread support, North and South, from good men trying to prevent war, but Abraham Lincoln shot it down. Lincoln had political allies to pay back so he would not compromise on slavery in the West. He had no problem with slavery where it existed. He just didn't want it "extended," so he supported the Corwin Amendment, which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, where slavery already existed.

The defeat of the Crittenden Compromise at the behest of the partisan Lincoln is a major tragedy of world history, and more bitterly so because slavery was not extending into the West. There were few slaves in the West after being open to slavery for 10 years. Esteemed historian David M. Potter writes that the Crittenden Compromise had widespread support from Southerners as prominent as Robert Toombs as well as strong support in the North and West, and "if these conclusions are valid, as the preponderance of evidence indicates, it means that when Lincoln moved to defeat compromise, he did not move as the champion of democracy, but as a partisan leader."⁶ Potter's choice of words is far too kind.

Abraham Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history.

Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the day of his Cooper Union speech. Photo by Matthew Brady.

Around 60.1% of the electorate voted against him. The loser in the next five presidential elections got more popular votes than Lincoln.

Of the total 4,682,069 votes cast in 1860, Lincoln received 1,866,452, which is 39.9%. The eighteen states voting for him were all above the Mason-Dixon line plus California and Oregon. He received no electoral votes in fifteen of the thirty-three states. His name was not even on the ballot in ten Southern states. Lincoln's opponents together totaled 2,815,617, which was almost a million votes more than he got.

Potter makes it clear that Lincoln had absolutely no voter mandate to not compromise with the South at this critical juncture in our country's history. With a large majority of voters, excluding slavery from the territories was a non-issue. Potter writes:

[A] majority, not only of the voters as a whole, but even of the voters in states which remained loyal to the Union, regarded the exclusion of slavery from the territories as non-essential or even undesirable, and voted against the candidate who represented this policy. When Lincoln was inaugurated, the states which accepted him as President were states which had cast a majority of more than a half a million votes against him, and even when the outbreak of war caused four more states to join the Confederacy, the remaining Union still contained a population in which the majority of the electorate had opposed the Republican ticket.⁷

Potter notes that part of Lincoln's uncompromising position was political fear that any compromise on slavery in the territories, after campaigning on it, meant the dissolution of the Republican Party, which was made up loosely of so many diverse groups of non-related voters such as those who wanted a tariff or bounty or subsidy for their business, or free land, or were Northern racists who didn't want blacks near them in the West.

It is a tragedy of unfathomable proportion that Lincoln killed the Crittenden Compromise. The Crittenden Compromise would have prevented the war and 800,000 deaths and over a million wounded, and would have given the country time to work on ending slavery.

Most other nations on earth, as well as the Northern States, used gradual, compensated emancipation to end slavery. The Northern capital, Washington, DC, freed its slaves a year into the war with compensated emancipation, which proves slavery could have been abolished quickly and bloodlessly if the will had been there, North and South.

It is a regrettable fact, but slaves were property and governments that wanted to end slavery in their countries were glad to compensate slaveowners for the loss of their property.⁸

It is not just racial either. One of the largest slaveowners in South Carolina was William Ellison, the famous cotton gin maker in Sumter County, who was black. There were a lot of black slaveowners and I'm sure they would want to be compensated along with whites.

William "April" Ellison, Jr., successful African American, owned 60 slaves. He died Dec. 5, 1861.

Gradual, compensated emancipation was Lincoln's strong belief and desire as well, as he stated in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation with respect to the Union slave states.⁹ Lincoln talked and wrote about gradual compensated emancipation at many other times and places as well.

But ending slavery was not the goal of the Republican Party in 1856 and 1860. Taking over the government so they could rule the country for their own benefit and aggrandizement was their goal.

George Washington had warned that sectional political parties would destroy the country but Wendell Phillips proudly proclaimed that the Republican Party is the first sectional party in American history and is the party of the North pledged against the South.

A daguerrotype of abolitionist Republican Wendell Phillips in his 40s, by Matthew Brady.

For the entire decade of the 1850s, Republicans used the most virulent hatred against the South to rally their votes. Republicans celebrated John Brown's terrorism and murder of Southerners, and Republicans endorsed Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South as a campaign document. Helper's book

urged class agitation against slavery or, failing that, the violent overthrow of the slave system by poorer whites. Helper concluded that slaves would join with nonslaveholders because 'the negroes . . . in nine cases out of ten, would be delighted with the opportunity to cut their masters' throat.'¹⁰

Hinton Rowan Helper from North Carolina wrote, in 1857, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It.

Title page of Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet it.

William H. Seward, soon to be Lincoln's secretary of state, said "I have read the 'Impending Crisis of the South' with great attention. It seems to me a work of great merit, rich yet accurate in statistical information, and logical in analysis."

William Henry Seward was U.S. Secty of State, 1861 to 1869, and earlier governor of NY and U.S. Senator.

Lincoln's predecessor, President James Buchanan, in an article he wrote entitled "Republican Fanaticism as a Cause of the Civil War," said The Impending Crisis "became at once an authoritative exposition of the principles of the Republican Party. The original, as well as a compendium, were circulated by hundreds of thousands, North, South, East, and West."¹¹

James Buchanan Jr., from Pennsylvania, served as the 15th president of the United States (1857–1861).

Southerners would have been crazy not to secede from a country now ruled by a party that called for their throats to be cut. Republicans were not a great political movement trying to solve the difficult slavery issue with good will. Most people in the North (95 to 98% according to historians Lee Benson and Gavin Wright) were not abolitionists.¹² They did not care about freeing the slaves who would then come North and be job competition.

No Republican could be elected in the North on the platform of directly ending slavery but they could agitate on slavery in the West with good results. It was a hot political issue driven as much by rallying votes -- vote Republican: 'Vote yourself a farm,' 'Vote yourself a tariff!' -- as it was by Northern racism. Lincoln himself stated in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates that the West was to be reserved for white people from all over the earth.

The West was important in the presidential campaigns of 1856 and 1860 because the North needed the West for its surplus population, as both Horace Greeley and Lincoln stated. "Go West, young man!" said Horace Greeley.

Lincoln added that he wanted those white Northerners and immigrants to reach the West with Northern institutions in place, which meant no blacks allowed. Period. Neither slaves nor free blacks were welcome in Lincoln's West.

Horace Greeley, hypocrite extraordinaire.

Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, believed in the right of secession and wrote passionately about it until he realized it would affect his money, then he wanted war.

Slavery in the West was a bogus issue anyway, as stated earlier. Slavery was not going beyond the Mississippi River and they all knew it.

Republican James G. Blaine said that slavery in the West was "related to an imaginary Negro in an impossible place."

James G. Blaine, Republican from Maine, Spkr of House, Senator, Secty. of State twice, a charismatic speaker.

Lincoln scholar Richard N. Current writes that "Lincoln and his fellow Republicans, in insisting that Congress must prohibit slavery in the West, were dealing with political phantoms."

He points out that Congress "approved the organization of territorial governments for Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota without a prohibition of slavery" because they did not think it was necessary.

In 1860, there were only two slaves in Kansas and 15 in Nebraska, and that was after being open to slavery for 10 years. As stated above, Current did not believe slavery would have lasted another generation, even in the deep South.¹³

Charles W. Ramsdell wrote an article entitled "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion" and he also concluded "that slavery had about reached its zenith by 1860 and must shortly have begun to decline, for the economic forces which had carried it into the region west of the Mississippi had about reached their maximum effectiveness. It could not go forward in any direction and was losing ground along its northern border."¹⁴

The New Mexico territory had also been open to slavery for ten years and there were only twenty-nine there in 1860, though that figure was challenged by William H. Seward. He said there were twenty-four.¹⁵

It is a great irony that Northern anti-slavery was mostly economic or racist. Paraphrasing historian David Potter, Northern anti-slavery was in no sense a pro-black movement but was anti-black and designed to get rid of blacks.

Many Northern and Western States had laws on the books forbidding free black people from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's own Illinois. If a black person stayed too long in Illinois he was subject to arrest and imprisonment by the sheriff.

In 1859, Oregon, which, as stated, voted for Lincoln in 1860, became the 33rd state and this was part of its constitution:

No free negro, or mulatto, not residing in this state at the time of the adoption of this constitution, shall ever come, reside, or be within this state, or hold any real estate, or make any contract, or maintain any suit therein; and the legislative assembly shall provide by penal laws for the removal by public officers of all such free negroes and mulattoes, and for their effectual exclusion from the state, and for the punishment of persons who shall bring them into the state, or employ or harbour them therein.¹⁶

In Part II of this book, I argue the right of secession. No American who believes in the Declaration of Independence -- in the just powers of the government coming from the consent of the governed -- can doubt the right of secession. Horace Greeley certainly didn't. He believed in it thoroughly until he realized it was going to affect his money.

The secession conventions of the South and the creation of the Confederate States of America are the greatest expression of democracy and self-government in the history of the world.

In state after state, in a landmass as great as Europe, Southerners rose up against what they viewed as a dangerous, economically confiscatory government now run by people who hated them and whose campaign documents called for their throats to be cut.

The Southern states called conventions to decide the one issue: Secession. A convention to decide one issue is closer to the people than even their legislatures.

That's why the Founding Fathers in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 decided that conventions of the people in each state would be used to ratify the Constitution. That's where the convention precedent started, with the Founding Fathers and the ratification of the Constitution.

Southerners followed suit with their conventions to decide secession. They debated the issue fiercely then elected delegates as Unionists and Secessionists who went into their state conventions and debated more.

Seven states voted to secede, then they formed a democratic republic that was the mirror image of the republic of the Founding Fathers of 1776 but with States' Rights strengthened and an economic system based on free trade. Southerners had always wanted free trade with the world as opposed to the heavy protectionist tariffs that had benefited the North to the detriment of the South the entire antebellum period.

Slavery was not the cause of the War Between the States. Once you understand the true cause -- the imminent economic annihilation of the North which was coming fast -- all other actions taken by Lincoln and everybody else make infinitely more sense.

Abraham Lincoln needed to start his war as quickly as he could. He needed the blockade of the South in place as fast as possible to keep Europeans and especially the English from forming trade and military alliances with the South, which the South had been aggressively pursuing.

Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

In Part III, Charles W. Ramsdell's famous treatise, Lincoln and Fort Sumter, shows in magnificent detail how Lincoln started the war in Charleston Harbor.

I hadn't read this brilliant piece in several years but had to type in every word for this book and I am deeply pleased that every single word written by Mr. Ramsdell strongly supports the argument of this book -- that the inevitable economic annihilation of the North is the reason Abraham Lincoln had to have his war and get it started as quickly as he could.

Justin S. Morrill authored the Morrill Tariff that threatened the Northern shipping industry with annihilation.

Harper's Weekly Apr 13 1861, caption "The New Tariff on Dry Goods."

Mr. Ramsdell states also that the North's gaping self-inflicted wound, the Morrill Tariff, kicked in and greatly added to the panic and call for war in the North as the Northern shipping industry faced rerouting away from the high-tariff North and into the low-tariff South where protective tariffs were unconstitutional.

Arguing history is very much like arguing a case in a court of law. All you can do is present your evidence in as persuasive a manner as possible and hope the jury agrees with you.

My argument is thoroughly documented and I believe it is irrefutable.

Gene Kizer, Jr.
Charleston, South Carolina
October 31, 2014

Abraham Lincoln is executed for killing 800,000 people & destroying the republic of the Founding Fathers.

NOTES:

¹ Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston and James Island, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014).

² Rachel Coker, "Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead," published September 21, 2011, Binghamton University Research News -- Insights and Innovations from Binghamton University, http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html, accessed July 7, 2014.

³ United States military casualties of war,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war, accessed August 1, 2014.

⁴ James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 606.

⁵ The Missouri Compromise was superseded by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which opened up the territory north of the Missouri Compromise line (latitude 36--30' north) to slavery. This made the Missouri Compromise irrelevant.

⁶ David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942; reprint, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 200.

⁷ Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, 200.

⁸ As stated, ending slavery did not have to be too gradual as long as compensation to slaveowners was included. The successful Washington, DC 1862 compensation program proved it could work and be more immediate than gradual, although that is a small example. There would definitely need to be programs in place to help the new freedmen incorporate into society but that could have been done and is what serious people, as opposed to fanatics, were pushing. It was certainly Lincoln's position most of his life. Historian Richard N. Current believed slavery would not last another generation, and that seems a reasonable assessment.

⁹ Paragraph two of Abraham Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued September 22, 1862 "By the President of the United States of America" reads:

That it is my purpose, upon the next meeting of Congress to again recommend the adoption of a practical measure tendering pecuniary aid to the free acceptance or rejection of all slave States, so called, the people whereof may not then be in rebellion against the United States [Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky and later West Virginia] and which States may then have voluntarily adopted, or thereafter may voluntarily adopt, immediate or gradual abolishment [sic] of slavery within their respective limits; and that the efforts to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued. (Emphasis added.)

¹⁰ Ronnie W. Faulkner, 2006, "The Impending Crisis of the South," NCpedia sketch on Hinton Rowan Helper's book, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857). NCpedia is the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, The University of North Carolina Press: http://ncpedia.org/print/2723, accessed July 31, 2014. The article also states that Hinton Helper was "A racist to the core, he advocated white supremacy."

¹¹ The quotations of William H. Seward and President James Buchanan come from an article by Buchanan, "Republican Fanaticism as a Cause of the Civil War," an essay in Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., The Causes of the American Civil War (Boston: D.C. Heath and Company, 1961), 62.

¹² Lee Benson, "Explanations of American Civil War Causation" in Toward the Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), 246, 295-303, in Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South, Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 136.

¹³ Richard N. Current, The Lincoln Nobody Knows (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1958), 95-97.

¹⁴ Charles W. Ramsdell, "The Natural Limits of Slavery Expansion" in Edwin C. Rozwenc, ed., The Causes of the American Civil War (Boston: D. C. Heath and Company, 1961), 150-162

¹⁵ For an excellent report on an in-depth conversation between U. S. Supreme Court Justice John A. Campbell, William H. Seward, Stephen A. Douglas, John J. Crittenden and others on the extension of slavery, see Honorable John A. Campbell, "Memoranda Relative to the Secession Movement in 1860-61," in the "Papers of Honorable John A. Campbell - 1861-1865.," Southern Historical Society Papers, New Series - Number IV, Volume XLII, September, 1917, (Reprint: Broadfoot Publishing Company and Morningside Bookshop, 1991), 3-45.

¹⁶ Taliaferro P. Shaffner, The War in America: being an Historical and Political Account of the Southern and Northern States: showing the Origin and Cause of the Present Secession War (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1862), 337-38.

Our Confederate Ancestors: The Confederate Gun-Boat “Arkansas” by Capt. Isaac Newton Brown

Posted on August 6, 2020August 6, 2020 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Series on the Daring Exploits of Our Confederate Ancestors in the War Between the States.

. . . I received a severe contusion on the head, but this gave me no concern after I had failed to find any brains mixed with the handful of clotted blood which I drew from the wound and examined. . . .

The Confederate Gun-Boat "Arkansas."¹

By Her Commander, Isaac Newton Brown, Captain, C.S.N.²

After the Appomattox capitulation, the observance of which, nobly maintained by General Grant, crowns him as the humane man of the age, I took to the plow, as a better implement of reconstruction than the pen; and if I take up the latter now, it is that justice may be done to the men, and the memory of the men, of the Arkansas.

On the 28th of May, 1862, I received at Vicksburg a telegraphic order from the Navy Department at Richmond to "proceed to Greenwood, Miss., and assume command of the Confederate gun-boat Arkansas, and finish and equip that vessel without regard to expenditure of men or money."

Capt. Isaac Newton Brown, C.S.N., Commander of the Confederate Ram CSS Arkansas.

I knew that such a vessel had been under construction at Memphis, but I had not heard till then of her escape from the general wreck of our Mississippi River defenses. Greenwood is at the head of the Yazoo River, 160 miles by river from Yazoo City.

It being the season of overflow, I found my new command four miles from dry land. Her condition was not encouraging. The vessel was a mere hull, without armor; the engines were apart; guns without carriages were lying about the deck; a portion of the railroad iron intended as armor was at the bottom of the river, and the other and far greater part was to be sought for in the interior of the country.

Taking a day to fish up the sunken iron, I had the Arkansas towed to Yazoo City, where the hills reach the river. Here, though we were within fifty miles of the Union fleets, there was the possibility of equipment.

Within a very short time after reaching Yazoo City we had two hundred men, chiefly from the nearest detachment of the army, at work on the deck's shield and hull, while fourteen blacksmith forges were drawn from the neighboring plantations and placed on the bank to hasten the iron-work.

Extemporized drilling-machines on the steamer Capitol worked day and night fitting the railway iron for the bolts which were to fasten it as armor. This iron was brought from many points to the nearest railroad station and thence twenty-five miles by wagons.

The building of the Confederate ironclad ram, Arkansas.

The trees were yet growing from which the gun-carriages had to be made--the most difficult work of all, as such vehicles had never been built in Mississippi.

I made a contract with two gentlemen of Jackson to pay each his own price for the full number of ten. The executive officer, Mr. Stevens, gave the matter his particular attention, and in time, along with the general equipment, we obtained five good carriages from each contractor.

This finishing, armoring, arming, and equipment of the Arkansas within five weeks' working -time under the hot summer sun, from which we were unsheltered, and under the depressing thought that there was a deep channel, of but six hours' steaming between us and the Federal fleet, whose guns were within hearing, was perhaps not inferior under all the circumstances to the renowned effort of Oliver Hazard Perry in cutting a fine ship from the forest in ninety days.

CSS Arkansas, 165 ft long, 35 ft wide, ram at bow, 10 guns, 232 men.

We were not a day too soon, for the now rapid fall of the river rendered it necessary for us to assume the offensive without waiting for the apparatus to bend the railway iron to the curve of our quarter and stern, and to the angles of the pilot-house.

Though there was little thought of showing the former, the weakest part, to the enemy, we tacked boilerplate iron over it for appearance' sake, and very imperfectly covered the pilot-house shield with a double thickness of one-inch bar iron.

Our engines' twin screws, one under each quarter, worked up to eight miles an hour in still water, which promised about half that speed when turned against the current of the main river.

We had at first some trust in these, not having discovered the way they soon showed of stopping on the center at wrong times and places; and as they never both stopped of themselves at the same time, the effect was, when one did so, to turn the vessel round, despite the rudder. Once, in the presence of the enemy, we made a circle, while trying to make the automatic stopper keep time with its sister-screw.

The Arkansas now appeared as if a small seagoing vessel had been cut down to the water's edge at both ends, leaving a box for guns amidships. The straight sides of the box, a foot in thickness, had over them one layer of railway iron; the ends closed by timber one foot square, planked across by six-inch strips of oak, were then covered by one course of railway iron laid up and down at an angle of thirty-five degrees.

CSS Arkansas drawing by crew member S. Milliken.

These ends deflected overhead all missiles striking at short range, but would have been of little security under a plunging fire. This shield, flat on top, covered with plank and half-inch iron, was pierced for 10 guns -- 3 in each broadside and 2 forward and aft.

The large smoke-stack came through the top of the shield, and the pilot-house was raised about one foot above the shield level. Through the latter led a small tin tube by which to convey orders to the pilot.³

The battery was respectable for that period of the war: 2 8-inch 64-pounders at the bows; 2 rifled 32s (old smooth-bores banded and rifled) astern; and 2 100-pounder Columbiads and a 6-inch naval gun in each broadside,--10 guns in all, which, under officers formerly of the United States service, could be relied on for good work, if we could find the men to load and fire.

We obtained over 100 good men from the naval vessels lately on the Mississippi, and about 60 Missourians from the command of General Jeff Thompson. These had never served at great guns, but on trial they exhibited in their new service the cool courage natural to them on land.

They were worthily commanded, under the orders of our first lieutenant, by Captain Harris. Our officers were Lieutenants Stevens, Grimball, Gift, Barbot, Wharton, and Read, all of the old service, and Chief Engineer City, Acting Masters Milliken and Phillips, of the Volunteer Navy, and Midshipmen Scales,⁴ R. H. Bacot, Tyler, and H. Cenas.

The only trouble they ever gave me was to keep them from running the Arkansas into the Union fleet before we were ready for battle.

On the 12th of July we sent our mechanics ashore, took our Missourians on board, and dropped below Satartia Bar, within five hours of the Mississippi. I now gave the executive officer a day to organize and exercise his men.

The idea exists that we made "a run," or "a raid," or in some way an "attack by surprise" upon the Union fleet. I have reason to think that we were expected some hours before we came.⁵

On Monday A.M., July 14, 1862, we started from Satartia.

Fifteen miles below, at the mouth of Sunflower River, we found that the steam from our imperfect engines and boiler had penetrated our forward magazine and wet our powder so as to render it unfit for use.

We were just opposite the site of an old saw-mill, where the opening in the forest, dense everywhere else, admitted the sun's rays. The day was clear and very hot; we made fast to the bank, head down-steam, landed our wet powder (expecting the enemy to heave in sight every moment), spread tarpaulins over the old saw-dust and our powder over these.

By constant shaking and turning we got it back to the point of ignition before the sun sank below the trees, when, gathering it up, we crowded all that we could of it into the after magazine and resumed our way, guns cast loose and men at quarters, expecting every moment to meet the enemy.

I had some idea of their strength, General Van Dorn, commanding our forces at Vicksburg, having written to me two days before that there were then, I think he said, thirty-seven men-of-war in sight and more up the river.

Near dark we narrowly escaped the destruction of our smoke-stack from an immense overhanging tree. From this disaster we were saved by young Grimball, who sprang from the shield to another standing tree, with rope's-end in hand, and made it fast.

John Grimball, lieutenant on the CSS Arkansas in 1862, later of the Shenandoah. This photo circa 1864.

We anchored near Haynes's Bluff at midnight and rested till 3 A.M., when we got up anchor for the fleet, hoping to be with it at sunrise, but before it was light we ran ashore and lost an hour in getting again afloat.

At sunrise we gained Old River---a lake caused by a "cut-off" from the Mississippi; the Yazoo enters this at the north curve, and, mingling its deep waters with the wider expanse of the lake, after a union of ten miles, breaks through a narrow strip of land, to lose itself finally in the Mississippi twelve miles above Vicksburg.

Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1863, one yr. after the daring exploits of the CSS Arkansas.

We were soon to find the fleet midway between these points, but hid from both by the curved and wooded eastern shore. As the sun rose clear and fiery out of the lake on our left, we saw a few miles ahead, under full steam, three Federal vessels in line approaching. These, we afterward discovered, were the iron-clad Carondelet, Captain Henry Walke, the wooden gun-boat Tyler, Lieutenant William Gwin, and a ram, the Queen of the West, Lieutenant James M. Hunter.

Directing our pilot to stand for the iron-clad, the center vessel of the three, I gave the order not to fire our bow guns, lest by doing so we should diminish our speed, relying for the moment upon our broadside guns to keep the ram and the Tyler from gaining our quarter, which they seemed eager to do.

I had determined, despite our want of speed, to try the ram or iron prow upon the foe, who were gallantly approaching; but when less than half a mile separated us, the Carondelet fired a wildly aimed bow gun, back round, and went from the Arkansas at a speed which at once perceptibly increased the space between us.

The Tyler and ram followed this movement of the iron-clad, and the stern guns of the Carondelet and the Tyler were briskly served on us.

Grimball and Gift, with their splendid sixty-fours, were now busy at their work, while Barbot and Wharton watched for a chance shot abeam. Read chafed in silence at his rifles.

The whole crew was under the immediate direction of the first lieutenant, Henry Stevens, a religious soldier, of the Stonewall Jackson type, who felt equally safe at all times and places.

I was on the shield directly over our bow guns, and could see their shot on the way to the Carondelet, and with my glasses I thought that I could see the white wood under her armor. This was satisfactory, for I knew that no vessel afloat could long stand rapid raking by 8-inch shot at such short range.

We soon began to gain on the chase, yet from time to time I had to steer first to starboard, then to port, to keep the inquisitive consorts of the Carondelet from inspecting my boiler-plate armor.

This gave the nearer antagonist an advantage, but before he could improve it he would be again brought ahead.

While our shot seemed always to hit his stern and disappear, his missiles, striking our inclined shield, were deflected over my head and lost in air.

I received a severe contusion on the head, but this gave me no concern after I had failed to find any brains mixed with the handful of clotted blood which I drew from the wound and examined.

A moment later a shot from the Tyler struck at my feet, penetrated the pilot-house, and, cutting off a section of the wheel, mortally hurt Chief Pilot Hodges and disabled our Yazoo River pilot, Shacklett, who was at the moment much needed, our Mississsippi pilots knowing nothing of Old River.

James Brady, a Missourian of nerve and equal to the duty, took the wheel, and I ordered him to "keep the iron-clad ahead."

All was going well, with a near prospect of carrying out my first intention of using the ram, this time at a great advantage, for the stern of the Carondelet was now the objective point, and she seemed to be going slow and unsteady.

Unfortunately the Tyler also slowed, so as to keep near his friend, and this brought us within easy range of his small-arms.

I saw with some concern, as I was the only visible target outside our shield, that they were firing by volleys.

I ought to have told Stevens to hold off Grimball and Gift from the inon-clad till they could finish the Tyler, but neither in nor out of battle does one always do the right thing.

I was near the hatchway at the moment when a minie-ball, striking over my left temple, tumbled me down among the guns.

I awoke as if from sleep, to find kind hands helping me to a place among the killed and wounded.

I soon regained my place on the shield. I found the Carondelet still ahead, but much nearer, and both vessels entering the willows, which grew out on the bar at the inner curve of the lake. To have run into the mud, we drawing 13 feet (the Carondelet only 6), would have ended the matter with the Arkansas.

CSS Arkansas gets the best of the USS Carondelet, July 15, 1862.

The Carondelet position could only be accounted for by supposing her steering apparatus destroyed.⁶ The deep water was on our starboard bow, where at some distance I saw the Tyler and the ram, as if awaiting our further entanglement.

I gave the order "hard a-port and depress port guns." So near were we to the chase that this action of the helm brought us alongside, and our port broadside caused her to heel to port and then roll back so deeply as to take the water over her deck forward of the shield.

Our crew, thinking her sinking, gave three hearty cheers.

In swinging off we exposed our stern to the Carondelet's broadside, and Read at the same time got a chance with this rifles. The Carondelet did not return this fire of our broadside and stern guns. Had she fired into our stern when we were so near, it would have destroyed or at least have disabled us.

Though I stood within easy piston-shot, in uniform, uncovered, and evidently the commander of the Arkansas, no more notice was taken of me by the Carondelet than had been taken of my ship when, to escape running into the mud, I had exposed the Arkansas to being raked.

Their ports were closed, no flag was flying, not a man or officer was in view, not a sound or shot was heard. She was apparently "disabled."

We neither saw nor felt the Carondelet again, but turned toward the spiteful Tyler and the wary ram. As these were no longer a match for the Arkansas, they very properly took advantage of a speed double our own to gain the shelter of their fleet, the Tyler making good practice at us while in range with her pivot gun, and getting some attention in the same way from our bows.

Under the ordinary circumstances of war we had just got through with a fair hour's work; but knowing what was ahead of us, we had to regard it in the same light as our Missouri militia did, as "a pretty smart skirmish."

On gaining the Mississippi, we saw no vessels but the two we had driven before us. While following these in the direction of Vicksburg I had the opportunity of inspecting engine and fire rooms, where I found engineers and firemen had been suffering under a temperature of 120 degrees to 130 degrees.

The executive officer, while attending to every other duty during the recent firing, had organized a relief party from the men at the guns, who went down into the fire-room every fifteen minutes, the others coming up or being, in many instances, hauled up, exhausted in that time; in this way, by great care, steam was kept to service gauge, but in the conflict below the fire department broke down.

The connection between furnaces and smoke-stack (technically called the breechings) were in this second conflict shot away, destroying the draught and letting the flames come out into the shield, raising the temperature there to 120 degrees, while it had already risen to 130 degrees in the fire-room.

It has been asked why the Arkansas was not used as a ram. The want of speed and of confidence in the engines answers the question. We went into action in Old River with 120 pounds of steam, and though every effort was made to keep it up, we came out with but 20 pounds, hardly enough to turn the engines.

Aided by the current of the Mississippi, we soon approached the Federal fleet---a forest of masts and smoke-stacks---ships, rams, iron-clads, and other gun-boats on the left side, and ordinary river steamers and bomb-vessels along the right. To any one having a real ram at command the genius of havoc could not have offered a finer view, the panoramic effect of which was intensified by the city of men spread out with innumerable tents opposite on the right bank.

We were not yet in sight of Vicksburg, but in every direction, except astern, our eyes rested on enemies.

I had long know the most of these as valued friends, and if I now had any doubts of the success of the Arkansas they were inspired by this general knowledge rather than from any awe of a particular name.

It seemed at a glance as if a whole navy had come to keep me away from the heroic city,--- six or seven rams, four or five iron-clads, without including one accounted for an hour ago, and the fleet of Farragut generally, behind or inside of this fleet.

The rams seemed to have been held in reserve, to come out between the intervals. Seeing this, as we neared the head of the line I said to our pilot, "Brady, shave that line of men-of-war as close as you can, so that the rams will not have room to gather head-way in coming out to strike us."

In this way we ran so near to the wooden ships that each may have expected the blow which, if I could avoid it, I did not intend to deliver to any, and probably the rams running out at slow speed across the line of our advance received in the smoke and fury of the fight more damage from the guns of their own men-of-war than from those of the Arkansas.

CSS Arkansas takes on most of the Federal fleet in the Mississippi, July 15, 1862.

As we neared the head of the line our bow guns, trained on the Hartford, began this second fight of the morning (we were yet to have a third one before the day closed), and within a few minutes, as the enemy was brought in range, every gun of the Arkansas was at its work.

It was calm, and the smoke settling over the combatants, our men at times directed their guns at the flashes of those of their opponents.

As we advanced, the line of fire seemed to grow into a circle constantly closing. The shock of missiles striking our sides was literally continuous, and as we were now surrounded, without room for anything but pushing ahead, and shrapnel shot were coming on our shield deck, twelve pounds at a time, I went below to see how our Missouri backwoodsmen were handling their 100-pounder Columbiads.

CSS Arkansas singlehandedly fighting the Federal fleet in the Missisippi, July 15, 1862.

At this moment I had the most lively realization of having steamed into a real volcano, the Arkansas from its center firing rapidly to every point of the circumference, without the fear of hitting a friend or missing an enemy.

I got below in time to see Read and Scales with their rifled guns blow off the feeble attack of a ram on our stern. Another ram was across our way ahead.

As I gave the order, "Go through him, Brady!" his steam went into the air, and his crew into the river. A shot from one of our bow guns had gone through his boiler and saved the collision.

We passed by and through the brave fellows struggling in the water under a shower of missiles intended for us.

CSS Arkansas singlehandedly fighting the Yankee fleet in the Mississippi above Vicksburg, July 15, 1862.

It was a little hot this morning all around; the enemy's shot frequently found weak places in our armor, and their shrapnel and minie-balls also came through our port-holes.

Still, under a temperature of 120 degrees, our people kept to their work, and as each one, acting under the steady eye of Stevens, seemed to think the result depended on himself, I sought a cooler atmosphere on the shield, to find, close ahead and across our way, a large iron-clad displaying the square flag of an admiral.

Though we had but little head-way, his beam was exposed, and I ordered the pilot to strike him amidships. He avoided this by steaming ahead, and, passing under his stern, nearly touching, we gave him our starboard broadside, which probably went through him from rudder to prow. This was our last shot, and we received none in return.

We were now at the end of what had seemed the interminable line, and also past the outer rim of the volcano.

I now called the officers up to take a look at what we had just come through and to get the fresh air; and as the little group of heroes closed around me with their friendly words of congratulations, a heavy rifle-shot passed close over our heads; it was the parting salutation, and if aimed two feet lower would have been to us the most injurious of the battle.

We were not yet in sight of Vicksburg, but if any of the fleet followed us farther on our way I did not perceive it.

The Arkansas continue toward Vicksburg without further trouble. When within sight of the city, we saw another fleet preparing to receive us or recede from us, below: one vessel of the fleet was aground and in flames.

With our firemen exhausted, our smoke-stack cut to pieces, and a section of our plating torn from the side, we were not in condition just then to begin a third battle; moreover humanity required the landing of our wounded---terribly torn by cannon-shot---and of our dead.

We were received at Vicksburg with enthusiastic cheers. Immediate measures were taken to repair damages and recruit our crew, diminished to one-half their original number by casualties, and by the expiration of service of those who had volunteered only for the trip to Vicksburg.

We had left the Yazoo River with a short supply of fuel, and after our first landing opposite the city-hall we soon dropped down to the coal depot, where we began coaling and repairing, under the fire of the lower fleet, to which, under the circumstances, we could make no reply.

Most of the enemy's shot fell short, but Renshaw, in the Westfield, made very fine practice with his 100-pounder rifle gun, occasionally throwing the spray from his shot over our working party, but with the benefit of sprinkling down the coal dust.

Getting in our coal, we moved out of range of such sharp practice, where, under less excitement, we hastened such temporary repairs as would enable us to continue the offensive.

We had intended trying the lower fleet that evening, but before our repairs could be completed and our crew reenforced by suitable selections from the army, the hours of night were approaching, under the shadows of which (however favorable for running batteries) no brave man cares from choice to fight.

About sunset of the same day, a number of our antagonists of the morning, including the flag-ship Hartford and the equally formidable Richmond, were seen under full steam coming down the river.

Before they came within range of the Arkansas, we had the gratification of witnessing the beautiful reply of our upper shore-batteries to their gallant attack.

Confederate 18-pounder at Vicksburg nicknamed "Whistling Dick" for the sound made by its projectiles.

Unfit as we were for the offensive, I told Stevens to get under way and run out into the midst of the coming fleet. Before this order could be executed one vessel of the fleet sent a 160-pound wrought-iron bolt through our armor and engine-room, disabling the engine and killing, among others, Pilot Gilmore, and knocking overboard the heroic Brady, who had steered the Arkansas through our morning's work.

William Gilmore, pilot on the CSS Arkansas, killed July 15, 1862.

This single shot caused also a very serious leak, destroyed all the contents of the dispensary (fortunately our surgeon, Dr. Washington, was just then away from his medicines), and, passing through the opposite bulwarks, lodged between the wood-work and the armor.

Stevens promptly detailed a party to aid the carpenter in stopping the leak, while our bow and port-broadside guns were rapidly served on the passing vessels. So close were these to our guns that we could hear our shot crashing through their sides, and the groans of their wounded; and, incredible as it now seems, these sounds were heard with a fierce delight by the Arkansas's people.

Why no attempt was made to ram our vessel, I do not know. Our position invited it, and our rapid firing made that position conspicuous; but as by this time it was growing dark, and the Arkansas close inshore, they may have mistaken us for a water-battery.

We had greatly the advantage in pointing our guns, the enemy passing in line ahead, and being distinctly visible as each one for the time shut out our view of the horizon.

And now this busy day, the 15th of July, 1862, was closed with the sad duty of sending ashore a second party of killed and wounded, and the rest which our exhaustion rendered necessary was taken for the night under a dropping fire of the enemy's 13-inch shells.

Actual picture of the CSS Arkansas after fighting Yankees all day on the Mississippi by Vicksburg.

During the following week we were exposed day and night to these falling bombs, which did not hit the Arkansas, but frequently exploded under water near by.

One shell, which fell nearly under our bows, threw up a number of fish. As these floated by with the current, one of our men said: "Just look at that, will you? Why the upper fleet is killing fish for the lower fleet's dinner!"

In time we became accustomed to this shelling, but not to the idea that it was without danger; and I know of no more effective way of curing a man of the weakness of thinking that he is without the feeling of fear than for him, on a dark night, to watch two or three of these double-fused descending shells, all near each other, and seeming as thought they would strike him between the eyes.

In three days we were again in condition to move and to menace at our will either fleet, thus compelling the enemy's entire force, in the terrible July heat, to keep up steam day and night.

An officer of the fleet writing at this time, said: "Another council of war was held on board the admiral's [flag-ship] last night, in which it was resolved that the Arkansas must be destroyed at all hazards, a thing, I suspect, much easier said than done; but I wish that she was destroyed, for she gives us no rest by day nor sleep by night."

We constantly threatened the offensive, and our raising steam, which they could perceive by our smokestack, was the signal for either fleet to fire up.

As the temperature at the season was from 90 degrees to 100 degrees in the shade, it was clear that unless the Arkansas could be "destroyed" the siege, if for sanitary reasons alone, must soon be raised.

The result of our first real attempt to resume the offensive was that before we could get within range of the mortar fleet, our engine completely broke down, and it was with difficulty that we regained our usual position in front of the city.

The timely coming of the iron-clad Essex, fresh from the docks, and with a new crew, enabled the Union commander to attack us without risk to his regular or original blockading force.

They could not have taken us at a more unprepared moment.

Some of our officers and all but twenty-eight of our crew were in hospitals ashore, and we lay helplessly at anchor, with a disabled engine.

I made known to the general commanding at Vicksburg the condition of our vessel, and with great earnestness personally urged him to give me, without delay, enough men to fight my guns, telling him that I expected an attack every hour.

I was promised that the men (needed at the moment) should be sent to me the next day.

The following morning at sunrise the Essex, Commodore William D. Porter, with the Queen of the West, no doubt the best ram of the Ellet flock (though as far as my experience went they were all ordinary sheep and equally harmless), ran down under full steam, regardless of the fire of our upper shore-batteries, and made the expected attack.

We were at anchor and with only enough men to fight two of our guns; but by the zeal of our officers, who mixed in with these men as part of the guns' crews, we were able to train at the right moment and fire all the guns which could be brought to bear upon our cautiously coming assailants.

With a view perhaps to avoid our bow guns, the Essex made the mistake, so far as her success was concerned, of running into us across the current instead of coming head-on with its force. At the moment of collision, when our guns were muzzle to muzzle, the Arkansas's broadside was exchanged for the bow guns of the assailant; a shot from one of the latter struck the Arkansas's plating a foot forward of the forward broadside port, breaking off the ends of the railroad bars and driving them in among our people; the solid shot followed, crossed diagonally our gun-deck, and split on the breech of our starboard after-broadside gun.

This shot killed eight and wounded six of our men, but left us still half our crew.

What damage the Essex received I did not ascertain, but that vessel drifted clear of the Arkansas without again firing, and after receiving the fire of our stern rifles steamed in the face and under the fire of the Vicksburg batteries to the fleet below.

Had Porter at the moment of the collision thrown fifty men on our upper deck, he might have made fast to us with a hawser, and with little additional loss might have taken the Arkansas and her twenty men and officers.

We were given time by the approaching ram to reload our guns, and this second assailant, coming also across instead of with the current, "butted" us so gently that we hardly felt the shock. The force of this blow was tempered to us no doubt by the effect of our three broadsides guns, which were fired into him when he was less than fifty feet distant.

Apparently blinded by such a blow in the face, he drifted astern and ran ashore under the muzzles of Read's rifles, the bolts from which were probably lost in the immense quantity of hay in bales which seemed stowed over and around him.

Getting clear of the bank, the ram wore round without again attempting to strike the Arkansas, and steamed at great speed up the river, receiving in passing a second broadside from our port battery, and in the excitement of getting away neglecting the caution of his advance, he brought himself within the range of our deadly bow guns, from which Grimball and Gift sent solid shot that seemed to pass through him from stem to stern.

As he ran out of range he was taken in tow and was run up into the Davis fleet.

Thus closed the fourth and final battle of the Arkansas, leaving the daring Confederate vessel, though reduced in crew to twenty men all told for duty, still defiant in the presence of a hostile force perhaps exceeding in real strength that which fought under Nelson at Trafalgar.

The conduct of our men and officers was on this occasion, as on every former trial, worthy of the American name.

Moving quickly in a squad, from gun to gun, reloading, and running out each one separately, and then dividing into parties sufficient to train and fire, they were as determined and cheerful as they cold have been with a full crew on board.

The closeness of this contest with the Essex may be inferred from the circumstance that several of our surviving men had their faces blackened and were painfully hurt by the unburnt powder which came through our port-holes from the assailant's guns.

It was perhaps as much a matter of coal as of cannon, of health as of hostility, that the Union commanders had now to decide upon.

If the Arkansas could not be destroyed, the siege must be raised, for fifty ships, more or less, could not keep perpetual steam to confine one little 10-gun vessel within her conceded control of six miles of the Mississippi River.

It was, indeed, a dilemma, and doubtless the less difficult horn of it was chosen.

Soon after our contribution to the Essex's laurels, and between sunset and sunrise, the lower fleet started for the recuperative atmosphere of salt-water, and about the same time the upper fleet---rams, bombs, and iron-clads---steamed for the North.

Thus was dissipated for the season the greatest naval force hitherto assembled at one time in the New World.

Vicksburg was now without the suspicion of any immediate enemy.

I had taken, with my brave associates, for the last sixty days, my share of labor and watchfulness, and I now left them for four days, only, as I supposed to sustain without me the lassitude of inaction.

Important repairs were yet necessary to the engines, and much of the iron plating had to be refastened to her shattered sides.

This being fairly underway, I called, Thursday P.M., upon General Van Dorn, commanding the forces, and told him that, having obtained telegraphic permission from the Navy Department to turn over the command of the vessel temporarily to the officer next in rank, First Lieutenant Stevens, I would go to Grenada, Miss., and that I would return on the following Tuesday A.M., by which time the Arkansas, I hoped, would be ready once more to resume the offensive.

Almost immediately on reaching Grenada I was taken violently ill, and while in bed, unable, as I supposed, to rise, I received a dispatch from Lieutenant Stevens saying that Van Dorn required him to steam at once down to Baton Rouge to aid in a land attack of our forces upon the Union garrison holding that place.

I replied to his with a positive order to remain at Vicksburg until I could join him; and without delay caused myself to be taken to the railroad station, where I threw myself on the mail-bags of the first passing train, unable to sit up, and did not change my position until reaching Jackson, 130 miles distant.

On applying there for a special train to take me to Vicksburg, I learned that the Arkansas had been gone from that place four hours.⁷

Van Dorn had been persistent beyond all reason in his demand, and Stevens, undecided, had referred the question to a senior officer of the Confederate navy, who was at Jackson, Miss., with horses and carriages, furnished by Government in place of a flag-ship, thus commanding in chief for the Confederacy on the Mississippi, sixty miles from its nearest waters.

This officer, whose war record was yet in abeyance, had attained scientific celebrity by dabbling in the waters of the Dead Sea, at a time when I was engaged in the siege of Vera Cruz and in the general operations of the Mexican war.

Ignorant or regardless of the condition of the Arkansas, fresh from Richmond on his mission of bother, not communicating with or informing me on the subject, he ordered Stevens to obey Van Dorn without any regard to my orders to the contrary.

Under the double orders of two commander-in-chief to be at Baton Rouge at a certain date and hour, Stevens could not use that tender care which his engines required, and before they completed their desperate run of three hundred miles against time, the starboard one suddenly broke down, throwing the vessel inextricably ashore.

This misfortune, for which there was no present remedy, happend when the vessel was within sight of Baton Rouge.

Very soon after, the Essex was seen approaching under full steam.

CSS Arkansas, engines ruined, is evacuated and destroyed by acting cmdr Lt. Stevens as the USS Essex approaches.

Stevens, as humane as he was true and brave, finding that he could not bring a single gun to bear upon the coming foe, sent all his people over the bows ashore, remaining alone to set fire to his vessel; this he did so effectually that he had to jump from the stern into the river and save himself by swimming; and with colors flying the gallant Arkansas, whose decks had never been pressed by the foot of an enemy, was blown into the air.

CSS Arkansas explodes August 6, 1862, but not before achieving immortality.

NOTES:

¹ Isaac N. Brown, C.S.N., Commander, CSS Arkansas, “The Confederate Gun-Boat ‘Arkansas’,” in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Grant-Lee Edition, Being for The Most Part Contributions by Union and Confederate Officers. Based Upon “The Century War Series.” Edited by Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, of the Editorial Staff of “The Century Magazine”, 4 vols. (New York: The Century Co., 1884-1888), Vol. III, Part II, 572-580; Facsimile Reprint Edition from The Century Edition of 1887-1888 by The Archive Society, 1991.

² Isaac Newton Brown (May 27, 1817 - September 1, 1889) was born in Caldwell County, Kentucky and was a naval officer in both the US and CS Navy. He served as a lieutenant in the US Navy in the Mexican War and later commanded the famous Confederate ironclad ram, the CSS Arkansas, in the War Between the States. As a result of his bold action on the Arkansas, he was promoted to commander and, for the rest of the war - 1863 to 1865 - served as captain of the CSS Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. After the war he farmed in Mississippi then moved to Texas. He died at Corsicana and is buried in Oakwood Cemetery. The Sons of Confederate Veterans awarded him the Confederate Medal of Honor around 1977 when that program started.

³ In this action 68 shot-holes were made in the stack, and 4 minie-balls passed through the tin tube.--I.N.B.

⁴ Dabney M. Scales was from the Naval Academy at Annapolis; he distinguished himself afterward in the Shenandoah, and is now a prominent lawyer of Memphis.---I.N.B. [This was written circa 1888.]

⁵ A Federal letter relating to the Arkansas, and evidently press correspondence, was captured by Confederates at Greenville, Miss. It began by saying, "Last night at 10 o'clock [it seems to have been written on the day of the combat] two deserters from Grandpre's sharp-shooters at the Yazoo, who had stolen a skiff, came alongside the admiral's ship, the Hartford, and reported that the Arkansas had cut the raft and would be down at daylight to attack the fleet. Upon this a council of war was immediately [that night] called on board the Hartford," etc., etc. The same letter, bearing every internal evidence of truth and sincerity, went on to say, "At daylight [following the night council] the little tug which [Admiral] Davis had sent up the Yazoo as a lookout came down like a streak of lightning, screaming, 'The Arkansas is coming! The Arkansas is coming!'' and then follows the account of excitement and preparation. Now all this may have been only in the imagination of the correspondent, but there was a detachment of our sharp-shooters under Captain Grandpre at the raft, and we did cut and pass through it as stated. [See also p. 556.]---I.N.B.

⁶ Such was the fact.---Editors.

⁷ I was entirely cured by this intelligence, and immediately hurried to Pontchatoula, the nearest approach by rail to Baton Rouge, and thence arrived nearly in time to see the explosion of the Arkansas.---I.N.B.

FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE:

https://css-arkansas.com/

The King Street Riot of 18761

The King Street Riot

The King Street Riot of 18761

The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston During Reconstruction

Adoption of the Mississippi Plan

The Introduction to

Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument.1

(enhanced with captioned photographs)

The Confederate Gun-Boat "Arkansas."1

The King Street Riot of 1876¹

The King Street Riot of 1876¹

The Most Violent Race Riot in Downtown Charleston
During Reconstruction

Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States,
The Irrefutable Argument.¹

The Confederate Gun-Boat "Arkansas."¹