[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - To be completed and posted later this week.
First published on the Abbeville Institute Blog March 25, 2020
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - This outstanding, exciting article by Neil Kumar reminds me of something Douglas Southall Freeman might have written about Robert E. Lee or George Washington. It is in-depth with insightful biographical commentary and many firsthand accounts during the war that take you into Forrest's Command and show you what it was like to follow one of the greatest military leaders of all time in battle. It is inspirational and motivational. It shows you what kind of man Forrest was and how committed he was to winning the war.
This was first published on the Abbeville Institute Blog March 25, 2020. Neil has written several excellent pieces such as:
The Battle of Athens, Tennessee
John Brown's Body (a review of The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement, by Otto Scott)
The Fire Eater (Edmund Ruffin)
The Seventeenth Amendment and the Siren Song of Democracy (a review of The Road to Mass Democracy: Original Intent and the Seventeenth Amendment, by C. H. Hoebeke)
The Shame of Bentonville
God's Country Shall Not Be Damned
The South Lives Yet
An Environmental Right
Charge! And Remember Jackson
To the Southern Soldiers
Dixieland Despite]
THE FIRST THING I LEARNED about Lieutenant-General Nathan Bedford Forrest was that he had twenty-nine horses shot out from under him in battle; in my fifth-grade social studies class, I remember thinking to myself that the most dangerous thing one could be was one of Forrest’s horses. The unconquerable Tennessean was bold, severe, and uncompromising in the discharge of his duties for our Cause. He was born in direst poverty on the Duck River settlement, the son of a blacksmith, heir to, in John Wyeth’s words, “that restless race of pioneers who in search of home and fortune had followed close upon the heels of the savages, as these were driven farther and farther towards the setting sun.” From this obscurity on the frontier, Forrest attained a position of prominence in Memphis through his own determined struggle. He was animated by a rigid code of honor and was known for his fierce, yet judicious, temperament. He was seen to drink only after sustaining serious wounds; when invited to take a drink, he often declined, saying, “My staff does all my drinking.” His friends said that without any affectations of piety, “Forrest was by nature deeply reverent and religious.”
On one occasion, a lynch mob threatened the jail to kill an imprisoned murderer; Forrest interposed himself between the prisoner and the inflamed crowd, brandishing a knife and promising to kill any man who dared lay a hand on the man. He spontaneously broke into an oration, appealing to the better angels of their nature, and successfully persuaded the mob to leave and let the legal system run its course. Forrest met his beloved wife when he found her carriage stuck in the mud; at once, he assisted in extricating the carriage. There were two men standing by on horseback, doing nothing, and Forrest’s repugnance at their unchivalrous apathy was such that rather than assist his future wife back into her carriage, he confronted the two loafers. He asked them why they had not helped the damsel in distress, and added that if they did not depart forthwith, he would “give them such a thrashing [that] they would never forget it.”
Of Forrest, Wyeth asked, “By what mysterious alchemy did the elements in him combine to lift him to the stars, while we who just as earnestly…strive to reach the realms of the immortals, stumble and fall, perish and are forgotten?” What catapulted this unschooled, unlettered, and iconoclastic “left-handed scion of the American pioneer”, with no military education, into “not only…one of the most remarkable and romantic personalities of the War, but…one of the ablest soldiers of the world”? Known as the Wizard of the Saddle, “the fertile imagination of a Walter Scott could scarcely conjure up a tale more romantic” than Forrest’s ascendance to legend.
General Johnston considered Forrest to be the greatest soldier of the War. General Beauregard remarked that the man’s “capacity for war seemed only to be limited by the opportunities for its display.” Even the demonic Sherman conceded that Forrest “was the most remarkable man our War produced on either side…he had never read a military book in his life…but he had a genius for strategy that was original, and to me incomprehensible. There was no theory or art of war by which I could calculate with any degree of certainty what Forrest was up to. He seemed always to know what I was doing, or intended to do, while…I could never form any satisfactory idea of what he was trying to accomplish.” Lord Wolseley, remarking upon Forrest’s fearlessness, marveled that he, “nature’s soldier…by sheer force of character alone, became the great fighting leader…his military career teaches us that the genius which makes men great soldiers is not to be measured by any competitive examination in the science or art of war. ‘In war’, Napoleon said, ‘men are nothing; a man is everything.’”
Forrest’s maxim was that “war means fighting, and fighting means killing”; he was acutely aware of what victory would require, and was willing to achieve it at any cost. He devoted his energy and his personal fortune totally to our Cause, and would happily have lain down his life for the Confederacy. To the consummation of this end, “everything must be subordinated.” This devotion extended well beyond his own life and his own finances; his only child left college to serve under him, and was wounded. After ensuring that the wound was not grievous, Forrest ordered him to return to the front. He never lost sight of his purpose, and never let him his men forget theirs. In one address congratulating his men for driving a force thrice greater than their own from the country, he urged them to “achieve your independence or perish in the attempt.” Upon leaving Lieutenant-General Taylor’s command, Forrest told the man, “I know not how long we are to labor for that independence for which we have thus far struggled in vain, but this I do know, that I will never weary in defending our cause, which must ultimately succeed. Faith is the duty of the hour. We will succeed. We have only to work and wait.”
One address to his “unconquerable band of heroes” against the “boasted minions of despotism” captures the struggle beautifully: “Soldiers! Amid your rejoicing do not forget the gallant dead upon these fields of glory. Many a noble comrade has fallen, a costly sacrifice to his country’s independence. The most you can do is to cherish their memory and strive to make the future as glorious as you and they have made the past…You have done much, but there is still work for you to do…The enemy is again preparing to break through the living wall erected by your noble bosoms and big hearts. In the name and recollections of ruined homes, desolated fields, and the bleaching bones of your martyred comrades, you are appealed to again. The smoke of your burning homesteads, the screams of your insulted women, and the cries of starving children will again nerve your strong arms with strength. Your fathers of ’76 had much to fight for, but how little and unimportant was their cause compared with yours. They fought not against annihilation, but simply to be independent of a foreign yet a constitutional and free government. You are struggling against the most odious of all tyranny, for existence itself, for your property, your homes, your wives and children, against your own enslavement, against emancipation, confiscation, and subjugation, with all their attendant horrors…brilliant prospects…everywhere pervade our cause. The independence of the Confederate States is a fixed, accomplished, immutable fact. The ray of peace is glimmering like bright sunshine around the dark clouds. Be true to yourselves and your country a little while longer and you will soon be enabled to return to your desolate homes, there to collect together once more your scattered household gods.”
After the ruinous Nashville Campaign, his men suffering starvation and exposure, their country laid waste, men falling by the wayside “never to rise again”, Forrest took stock of their situation. Hood’s army was demoralized, Lee’s in dire straits in the war of attrition at Petersburg, Sherman’s unresisted, running amok on a grand path of murder and rapine. The devastated country was preyed upon by scavenging guerrilla depredations and marauding deserters, providing the basis of Federal justifications for further atrocities against civilians. Forrest was well aware of the hopelessness which afflicted our Cause from all sides, seeing as Belshazzar and comprehending as Daniel the writing on the wall; to Major Ellis, he admitted, “To my mind it is evident that the end is not far off; it will only be a question of time as to when General Lee’s lines at Petersburg will be broken, for Grant is wearing him out; with unlimited resources…he must ultimately force Lee to leave Virginia or surrender. Lee’s army will never leave Virginia…and that will end the war.”
Notwithstanding this darkness, he did not allow the light to fail, and thus addressed his command: “If your course has been marked by the graves of patriotic heroes who have fallen by your side, it has, at the same time, been more plainly marked by the blood of the invader. While you sympathize with the friends of the fallen, your sorrows should be appeased by the knowledge that they fell as brave men battling for all that makes life worth living for…During [this] respite prepare for future action…by a remembrance of the glories of your past career, your desolated homes, and, above all, by the memory of your dead comrades, to…buckle on your armor anew…Bring with you the soldier’s safest armor- a determination to fight while the enemy pollutes your soil; to fight as long as he denies your rights; to fight until independence shall have been achieved; to fight for home, children, liberty, and all you hold dear. Show to the world the superhuman and sublime spirit with which a people may be inspired when fighting for the inestimable boon of liberty. Be not allured by the siren song of peace, for there can be no peace save upon your separate, independent nationality. Be patient, obedient, and earnest, and the day is not far distant when you can return to your homes and live in the full fruition of freemen around the family altar.” Forrest urged steadfast faith to the Cause and to the women and children relying so fully upon their efforts; when rumors of Lee’s surrender began to circulate, he implored his men to “preserve untarnished the reputation you have so nobly won, and leave results to Him who in wisdom controls and governs things.”
As the Reverend Kelley, one of Forrest’s officers, remembered, it was “his single will, impervious to argument, appeal, or threat, which was ever to be the governing impulse in their movements. Everything necessary to supply their wants, to make them comfortable, he was quick to do, save to change his plans, to which everything had to bend.” Forrest had enlisted as a private, but influential citizens of Memphis petitioned to obtain a command; when he took charge, his men were woefully underprepared, with a majority of them armed only with the shotguns they had brought from home. Forrest used his own fortune to secure the necessary supplies, and marshalled his indomitable will to whip his troops into shape. Lord Wolseley noted that “he always knew what he wanted, and consequently there was no weakness or uncertainty in his views or intentions, nor in the orders he gave to have those intentions carried out.”
Forrest was born to lead, never to follow; from childhood, he had depended entirely on his own action. As such, he occasionally butted heads with his inferior commanders. Before a second attack on Fort Donelson to capture the Dover garrison, he raised objections before General Wheeler; he had had a premonition of catastrophe. He made his protestations known to his chief-of-staff, instructing him that, “If I am killed in this fight, you will see that justice is done me by officially stating that I protested…that I am not willing to be held responsible for any disaster that may result.” After the predicted disaster materialized, resulting in a dismal defeat, Forrest approached General Wheeler and told him that “nothing you can now say or do will bring back my brave men lying dead or wounded and freezing around that fort tonight. I mean no disrespect…you can have my sword if you demand it, but…I will be in my coffin before I will fight again under your command.”
Wheeler and Forrest healed their breach, but Forrest held General Bragg in nothing but well-deserved disdain. En route to a conference with President Davis, Forrest openly stated “that he would not serve longer under Bragg…not competent to command any army.” After Chickamauga, Forrest saw the opportunity to pursue the demoralized Federals and capture them. He sent multiple couriers to Bragg and received no reply, then rode to see Bragg himself, finding him asleep. Forrest urged pursuit, and Bragg obfuscated with nonsensical comments regarding supplies; Forrest immediately dispelled these concerns, and Bragg “made no reply”. Disgusted, Forrest made his departure.
To refer to Forrest as a rigid disciplinarian would be quite an understatement. A common refrain to his subordinates was the order, “Shoot any man who won’t fight!” There was nothing that he held in greater ignominy than cowardice. Unfamiliar with the artillery manual, he mistook one soldier’s movement for a retreat: “Get back to where you belong, or by God I’ll kill you!” When he realized his mistake, however, he apologized just as promptly. Before the retreating men of Armstrong’s brigade, Forrest “threw himself in front of the frightened, panic-stricken men, and ordered them to halt and fall in line”; when his orders were paid no heed, “he seized a double-barrel shotgun from one of his men, and emptied both barrels into a squad of dismayed troopers.” This measure turned them around at once. On a reconnaissance of Murfreesboro, the infantry panicked and ran; amidst the stampede, Forrest rode in, up and down the lines to restore order, crying, “Rally, men! For God’s sake, rally!” He ordered a fleeing color-bearer to halt, and, when his command was not obeyed, “drew his pistol and shot the retreating soldier down. Dismounting, Forrest took the colors, remounted his horse, and, riding in front of the soldiers, waved the colors at them and finally succeeded in rallying them to their duty.”
General Chalmers recounted a time when, seeing a fleeing soldier, Forrest “checked up his horse, dismounted quickly, threw the bridle-reins to [an] orderly…and, rushing at the demoralized soldier, seized him by the collar, threw him down, dragged him to the side of the road, and, picking up a piece of brush that was convenient, proceeded to give him one of the worst thrashings I have ever seen a human being get.” After the beating, Forrest turned the man back in the proper direction and thundered, “Now, damn you, go back to the front and fight: you might as well be killed there as here, for if you ever run away again you will not get off so easy.” The tale of this incident spread far and wide, eventually appearing in illustrated form in a Northern paper, under the title, “Forrest breaking in a conscript.”
Near Blountsville, a scout told Forrest that a heavy detachment of Yankee cavalry was nearby. Forrest asked if the scout had seen this with his own eyes, and he replied that the information was secondhand; he had “scarcely delivered himself of this piece of information when Forrest, with both hands, seized the astonished soldier by the throat, dragged him from his horse, and, shoving him against a tree near the roadside, proceeded to bump his head vigorously against the rough bark of the trunk. Having sufficiently punished the unreliable scout…[he] said: ‘Now, damn you, if you ever come up to me again with a pack of lies, you won’t get off so easily!’”
Crossing the Tennessee River, one lieutenant “took no part in the labor”; when Forrest asked the man why he did not pick up an oar or pole and do his fair share, he replied that that sort of work was below his station. As Forrest himself was rowing at this time, “he flew into a rage, and, holding the pole in one hand, with the other he gave the unfortunate lieutenant a slap on the side of the face which sent him sprawling over the gunwale and into the river. He was rescued by catching hold of the pole held out to him and was safely landed in the boat, when the irate general said to him: ‘Now, damn you, get hold of the oars and go to work! If I knock you out of the boat again, I’ll let you drown.’” This sense of duty extended after the War as well; when his train, bound for Jackson, Mississippi, derailed, he took charge of the repairs. Some passengers stayed on the train, not deigning to help or even to exit the cars, and Forrest shouted, “If you damned rascals don’t get out of here and help get this car on the track, I will throw every one of you through the windows.”
He was, however, not without mercy. At Chickamauga, Forrest whipped out his six-shooter to ‘take care’ of a frightened private in flight, when Major Anderson intervened, asking him to think. Forrest thought, lowered his pistol, and let the man go; years later, Anderson quipped that had he directly told Forrest not to do it, “he would have killed the man without a doubt, and I might have gotten a turn too.” In his Western Tennessee command, twenty malcontents attempted to desert under cover of darkness; the men were captured, condemned, seated upon coffins, and driven to their open graves. Just as the firing squad was assembled, “Forrest rode to the spot and announced to the offenders that if they would promise to serve as faithful soldiers of the Confederacy, he would pardon them…but that if any further desertion or disobedience of orders occurred…he would not again show such leniency.”
Forrest shed tears over dying men, and fastidiously served as the guardian of, in Wyeth’s words, “female virtue and the sanctity of dependent homes and unprotected families”; these are those to whom Forrest’s mercy was always extended. When a close friend was found guilty of indecency with a woman, Forrest immediately dismissed him, stating, “I will not have any man about me who will be guilty of such conduct to a woman.” His ruthless blitzkrieg was nothing but the highest expression of his love and mercy for his Southron brethren. On his forty-first birthday, Forrest captured Murfreesboro, demanding unconditional surrender “as prisoners of war, or I will have every man put to the sword.” He led the rescue after a Federal prison guard set fire to the prison, attempting to burn the Confederate prisoners alive; Forrest asked the men to “point out” the men who treated them so inhumanly. Captain Richardson pointed out the arsonist, and when roll was called a few hours later, no one answered when the guard’s name was called. Forrest said, “Pass on, it’s all right.”
No one-eyed jack, the two sides of Forrest’s face were the same. His tenderness and his brutality were both expressions of the love that suffused his soul, just as the First Crusaders theorized violence as expressions of charitable love, or agape, for their beleaguered Christian brethren. When angered, Forrest’s face turned scarlet in a savage gaze, whereby “everything that was suggestive of kindly feeling or tenderness seemed to vanish from his nature as thoroughly as if his heart had never throbbed with human sympathy”, his eyes smoldering “like those of a panther about to spring upon its prey.” Yet it is the same man who, when the ladies of Huntsville, Alabama, presented him with a fine horse, spoke softly and tearfully of “his confidence in his mother’s prayers”. Near Franklin, Tennessee, the Fourth U.S. Cavalry took Forrest’s Captain Freeman captive and then shot him down in cold blood when he couldn’t keep up the desired pace; a bitter Forrest knelt over Freeman’s body and cried, “Brave man; none braver!”
During Sherman’s Meridian Expedition, at the Battle of Okolona, Colonel Jeffrey Forrest, the youngest of Bedford Forrest’s brothers, was killed with a shot through his neck. Jeffrey had been born four months after the death of their father, and Forrest, by Wyeth’s account, “looked upon him as his special charge. Naturally of a gentle and affectionate disposition, exhibiting to those in pain or distress the tenderness of a woman, he had cared for this child with the most loving attention. As…the clouds of poverty began to break, when the hope of plenty for all he loved and struggled for became a reality, and Bedford Forrest was a man of fortune, he saw to it that at least this member of his family should have the advantages…of which he and the others had been deprived.” When Forrest saw his young brother felled from his horse, he was overwhelmed with bottomless grief; he dismounted, and, kneeling over Jeffrey’s body, “held the lifeless form in his arms, and called him several times by name…choking with anguish…he kissed him on the forehead, laid him gently down again upon the earth…and with tears in his eyes asked his faithful adjutant to take charge of his brother’s remains.” Even in this slough of despond, in the abysmal rage of grief, he made sure that a petrified mother and her six children were escorted to safety.
Forrest’s men knew that love lay underneath all of his actions; for this, they were wholly devoted to him, and, according to Wyeth, “seemed never to tire in speaking of his kind treatment of them, his sympathetic nature as a man, his great personal daring, and especially of his wonderful achievements.” His exacting discipline paid massive dividends; upon entering Western Tennessee, a majority of his men were armed with nothing but flintlock muskets, shotguns, and squirrel rifles; when his expedition was ended, “every soldier of his command had a modern and effective weapon, with abundant ammunition, and was well supplied…furnished by the enemy.” Forrest, to the great consternation of the quartermaster, always ensured that his men, who made the captures, secured “the best guns and equipment for themselves”, turning over only the discarded remnants.
On one raid, Forrest collected and organized the scattered remnants of sixteen different commands, and, in the words of one Northern paper, he, “with less than four thousand men, has moved right through the Sixteenth Army Corps, has passed within nine miles of Memphis, carried off a hundred wagons, two hundred beef cattle, three thousand conscripts, and innumerable stores; torn up railroad-tracks, destroyed telegraph-wires, burned and sacked towns, ran over pickets with a single derringer pistol, and all in the face of ten thousand men.” During Sherman’s Meridian Expedition, Forrest, “with a command which at no time in action exceeded three thousand newly organized and insufficiently armed troops, confronted, defeated, and pursued for more than fifty miles seven thousand of the best cavalry in the Union army, backed by twenty pieces of artillery, and equipped with Colt’s repeating rifles and pistols and modern carbines, the most effective weapons then known to warfare.”
Forrest imparted some of his own relentlessness into his men; at Tishomingo Creek, after Brice’s Cross-Roads, his artillery, suffered so intensely from thirst that “they drank the blackened, powder-stained water from the sponge-buckets, which were being used to cleanse and cool the guns, rather than send one needed man away. Even…the wounded refused to go to the rear.” As one lieutenant recalled, “We had that confidence in him which I imagine the Old Guard had in Napoleon. On one occasion, while we were supposed to be in a very dangerous position, with the enemy all about us, we were ordered to go into camp for the night…some new recruits…said, ‘You don’t expect to lie down and go to sleep with the enemy all around you, do you?’ The answer was: ‘Of course we do; General Forrest told us to do it.’”
Forrest reciprocated by ceaselessly defending his men from all reproach. When a jealous General Van Dorn accused Forrest’s staff of writing honorific articles in the press, Forrest furiously challenged, “I know nothing of the articles you refer to, and I demand from you your authority for this assertion. I shall hold him responsible and make him eat his words, or run my sabre through him; and I say to you as well, that I will hold you personally responsible if you do not produce the author.” Though he did place the utmost faith in his men, he also gave careful scrutiny to all aspects of each operation to maintain efficiency, even going so far as to personally ensure that the horses were treated properly. If a scout did not provide enough detail, Forrest would say, “Is that all you know? Then I’ll go there and find out for myself.”
His strict regimen did not sit well with at least one artillerist; after holding the man responsible for the loss of his guns at Day’s Gap, Forrest transferred him out of his command. The artilleryman, a lieutenant, met with Forrest weeks later in Columbia, Tennessee. The lieutenant demanded that Forrest, who was providentially twirling a small penknife in his hand, reinstate him, and upon his stern refusal, drew a pistol. Forrest reacted instantly, but the pistol was fired into him before he could grasp it. As Wyeth recounts, “With his left hand, he grasped the right hand of his assailant, in which the pistol was held, and thus prevented a second shot. Deliberately with the right hand he carried the penknife to his mouth, and, holding the handle between his fingers, with his teeth he opened the largest blade and quickly thrust it into the abdomen of his assailant…inflicting a mortal wound.” The wounded lieutenant fled, and Forrest staggered onto the street, seizing a pistol. He vowed, “Get out of my way; he has mortally wounded me, and I intend to kill him before I die…damn him, he has killed me, and I am determined he shall die too.” Over the following days, Forrest recovered, and the lieutenant faded; on his deathbed, he requested to see Forrest. He came, and, again in Wyeth’s recitation, “the officer took the general by the hand…saying, ‘General, I shall not be here long, and I was not willing to go away without seeing you in person and saying to you how thankful I am that I am the one who is to die and that you are spared to the country. What I did, I did in a moment of rashness, and I want your forgiveness.’ Forrest leaned over…told him he forgave him freely, and that his own heart was full of regret that the wound he had inflicted was fatal…Forrest wept like a child.” One observer noted that “it was the saddest of all the sad incidents of the long and bitter War I witnessed.”
Forrest pointed to a childhood incident as the source of the lesson by which he had “learned…the value of a bold attack, even when he knew he was inferior in strength to the enemy.” An unbroken colt had tossed the young Forrest into the yard of two ferocious dogs; fully expecting that he would be torn to shreds, he leapt up when he hit the ground and ran. To his surprise, “the dogs had fled and left him master of the field. The animals…were evidently taken with panic at having such a thing as a boy of this size hurled at them through the air, and had sought safety in flight.” Forrest’s offensive “brag and bluff” philosophy was similar to Jackson’s: “Whenever you meet the enemy, no matter how few there are of you or how many of them, show fight. If you run away, they will pursue and probably catch you. If you show fight, they will think there are more of you, and will not push you half so hard.” Another of Jackson’s maxims that Forrest emulated: “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy if possible. When you strike and overcome him, never give up the pursuit as long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half its number.”
As Yankee General Hurlbut said, Forrest “will lead his men farther than anyone I know.” Pursuing Streight’s raiders at Sand Mountain, Forrest’s orders were to “shoot at everything blue, and keep up the scare.” At Black Creek, the sixteen-year-old Emma Sansom led Forrest to an unguarded ford, thereby facilitating his capture of Streight; Sansom recalled that “he quickly stepped between me and the Yankees, saying: ‘I am glad to have you for a pilot, but I am not going to make breastworks of you.’” Through four consecutive all-night marches in perpetual motion over one hundred and fifty miles, with no sleep and less food, he ran Streight’s men ragged such that they fell asleep in line of battle; even the rebel yell could not arouse them from their slumber. As Streight said, “The man of iron had worn them out.”
Attacking the stockade at the Harpeth railroad bridge, Forrest demanded unconditional surrender, or “I’ll blow hell out of them in five minutes and won’t take one of them alive if I have to sacrifice my men in storming their stockade.” His reputation preceded him on one of his rare retreats; as Bragg fell back from Chattanooga, Forrest’s cavalry passed through Cowan, Tennessee, to a gap in the Cumberland Mountains. As Wyeth recounts, “As the general, among the last in retreat, was passing a house, he noticed a woman who was berating his soldiers for not turning on the Yankees and ‘whipping them back.’ Shaking her fist at Forrest, the stars on whose collar she was too angry to observe or too near-sighted to see, she shrieked out: ‘You great big cowardly rascal; why don’t you turn and fight like a man, instead of running like a cur? I wish old Forrest was here, he’d make you fight!’ The general, unable to control himself, burst into a laugh…when telling this incident, he said that he would rather have faced a battery than that fiery dame.”
Forrest practiced precisely what he preached. As the Reverend Kelley recalled, he was so daring, so disregardful of his life, so “reckless in personal exposure”, that the men initially thought him insane. They quickly learned, however, that “his genius in action rose to every emergency; he always did what the enemy least expected him to do, and when…others would have counted defeat, he was more fertile in resources, more energetic in attack, more resistless in his fiery onset than when the action began.” When notified of the commanding general’s unnecessary capitulation at Fort Donelson, early in the War, Forrest’s answer was, “I cannot and will not surrender my command or myself.” At Shiloh, when his superior hesitated to order a charge, Forrest replied, “Then I’ll do it.” At Chickamauga, General Ector sent two consecutive messengers to Forrest, expressing concern over the right, and then the left, flanks; he sent the messenger back on his way: “Tell General Ector that, by God, I am here, and will take care of his left flank as well as his right.” At Parker’s Cross-Roads, a worried Colonel Carroll notified Forrest that “we are between two lines of battle. What shall we do?” His answer: “We’ll charge them both ways.”
After Shiloh, Forrest usually fought on foot, horses merely a means of transportation by which he could “throw his men on the enemy before they dreamed of his proximity”. In hand-to-hand combat, he killed or disabled over thirty Yankees; as Lieutenant-General Taylor put it, “I doubt if any commander since the days of the lion-hearted Richard killed as many enemies with his own hand.” On one occasion, Forrest found himself surrounded by six slashing Federals, and fought them off with nothing but one six-shooter. He was typically the first horseman of the line, and, according to Colonel Barteau, “one of his many peculiarities was that in battle he never seemed to touch his saddle, but stood up in his stirrups, an attitude which gave him the appearance of being a foot taller than he actually was.” As Forrest was over six feet tall, this must have made quite the scene. As Wyeth recounts, one of his most incredible exploits occurred as Forrest moved toward Chattanooga with an advance-guard of Armstrong’s brigade. When Armstrong and Forrest encountered Federal rear-guard cavalry, Forrest challenged, “Armstrong, let’s give them a dare.” As he charged at full speed, his horse was shot in the neck, and “the blood spurted from the divided vessel, seeing which Forrest leaned forward from the saddle, inserted the index-finger of his hand into the wound, and thus, stanching the hemorrhage, the animal was still able to carry his rider onward with the troops pursuing the Federals. As soon as the field was cleared, Forrest, removing his finger from the wound, dismounted, when his noble charger sank to the earth and was soon lifeless.”
Forrest mystified the Enemy by always doing “what was least expected”. He successfully obscured his location and plans with an unparalleled system of scouts; his hand-picked escorts often ‘deserted’ to ‘give themselves up’ and give false reports. His brilliance, however, was not appreciated by the authorities at Richmond until it was too late. As Christ tells us in Mark 6:4, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. No less than President Davis himself admitted this at Forrest’s funeral, acknowledging, “I saw it all after it was too late.” The depraved Sherman and the butcher Grant, along with their superiors at Gehenna, gave Forrest more of his due than the men at Richmond. Union War Secretary Stanton was perpetually “anxious” to ascertain Forrest’s whereabouts, as were officers as far afield as Cincinnati; a ubiquitous refrain, “what have you from Forrest?” Never able to locate him, Sherman constantly received wildly irreconcilable reports, including such from Cincinnati: “Forrest has been in disguise alternately in Chicago, Michigan City, and Canada…at midnight, he will seize…Chicago, release prisoners there, arm them, sack the city, shoot down all Federal soldiers, and urge concert of action with Southern sympathizers.”
Grant asserted that “neither army could present a more effective officer.” To Sherman, he was “that devil Forrest”. He offered a Major-General’s commission to any brigadier that could kill Forrest, urging that “it must be done, if it costs ten thousand lives and breaks the Treasury”. Consistently surprised at Forrest’s ability to rout troops vastly superior in both numbers and equipment, Sherman sighed, “Forrest is the devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under cower…there will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead! We must destroy him.” Sherman ordered the Tupelo Expedition solely “to pursue Forrest on foot, devastating the land over which he has passed, or may pass, and to make the people of TN and MS feel that although a bold, daring, and successful leader, he will bring ruin and misery on any country where he may pass or tarry. If we do not punish Forrest and the people now, the whole effect of our vast conquest will be lost.”
Our Cause was inestimably diminished by the Confederacy refusing to listen to Forrest’s many brilliant plans and by hampering him with a small force; he should have been placed in command of the Army of the Tennessee. One such unfulfilled scheme was a masterful strategy to close the Mississippi River to Grant; the incompetent General Bragg refused to sign off on it, and thus it was dismissed by President Davis. They did not comprehend the incredible damage Forrest would have inflicted if left to his own devices, and the opportunity was lost forever; After Chickamauga, Davis eventually did grant Forrest his independent command in Western Tennessee, but far too little and far too late.
Perhaps the greatest blunder of the entire War, though, was committed when Davis did not accede to the requests of Generals Johnston, Wheeler, and Cobb, as well as Georgia Governor Brown, that Forrest be given command of the Army of the Tennessee’s cavalry to wreak havoc of Sherman’s supply and communication lines. Eventually Davis gave the green light, but yet again, a day late and a dollar short. If this had been done in time, Forrest might have destroyed Sherman’s entire army; more importantly, however, Forrest would have hamstrung Sherman such that the satanic March to the Sea would have been staved off or even canceled. So, had Davis given Forrest his due, one of the greatest war crimes in human history might never have been allowed to happen. That indelible, ineradicable scar upon the Southern psyche, our cities annihilated, our farms fallowed and forests eviscerated, our animals slaughtered, and our wives, mothers, and daughters unspeakably violated and traumatized, might never have happened. One wonders if, had this ultimately demoralizing this coup de grâce never happened, our Cause might never have been lost.
One of Forrest’s paramount triumphs, perhaps his greatest achievement, was the capture of Fort Pillow. Characteristically, Forrest, despite his utmost confidence in his men, reconnoitered the topography and the fort himself; Major Anderson begged him to dismount, to which Forrest replied that he was “just as apt to be hit one way as another.” He “was after success first, and with the smallest possible loss of men. Hard fighter as he was, and even reckless of all when occasion demanded, he took infinite pains to shield his faithful soldiers when he could.” Forrest moved his men into position, surrounding the fort. He had flags of truce raised, and demanded that the fort surrender. Steamers were spotted coming upstream toward the front, and, informed that they were Federal reinforcements, Forrest took the precaution of moving two detachments back to previously secured positions. The steamers showed no signs of halting, nor of seeing or respecting the flags of truce. Fort Pillow itself still had the Union flag raised, and did not signal to the steamers, loaded with artillery and infantry, to desist.
Within the Fort, filled with mixed but predominantly black soldiers alongside many Unionist local traitors avoiding conscription, the situation was positively bacchanal. Major Booth had been killed hours before by a sharpshooter, and his successor, the scandalously inept Major Bradford, had allowed the garrison free rein with the liquor stores. As a result, nearly all of the Yankees were supremely inebriated. They replied to Forrest’s demand by requesting an hour to consider, and signed the request as the deceased Booth; this was subterfuge, designed to allow the reinforcement boats to arrive. While this message was being drafted, the drunken troops of Fort Pillow were obscenely abusive, shouting at and cajoling the Confederates. Forrest replied to the request for one hour by offering twenty minutes; to this, the Fort declined, refusing to surrender. With respect to the boats, Forrest ordered his men to “shoot everything blue betwixt wind and water until their flag comes down.”
He ordered the charge on the fort. Gaus blew his battered bugle, riddled with bullet holes, and the rebel yell erupted, rending the air. Forrest’s men were “no ordinary marksmen, these grandsons of the backwoods riflemen who played such havoc with the British at New Orleans.” The marvelous scene, a testament to the indomitable Southron spirit, a paean to the animating spirit of our Cause, was epic; by Wyeth’s account, “to rush through a blaze of musketry and cannon and gain that ditch, jump into it and clamber out, halt for a minute on the base of the embankment, and in one solid line from all sides spring over the parapet ablaze with the flash of powder from the very muzzles of the muskets of the garrison, still reserving their fire, then to leap in among them and grapple hand to hand in mortal combat, took these daredevil horsemen less time to do than it takes to tell of it.”
The garrison at Fort Pillow had determined to die rather than surrender; likewise, the Confederates were there to capture the fort or perish in the attempt. As grey overcame blue, the gunboats deserted their men and the besotted Yankees lost their minds. Some of them attempted to surrender, while intermingled with these poor men were those who, driven by drink to be “reckless and indifferent to danger or death”, continued to fire long after their situation became untenable. Consequently, some who attempted to surrender were killed; as Wyeth gathered from all eyewitness accounts, “but for the insane conduct of their drunken and desperate comrades, a great many of those who perished would have escaped.” Colonel Barteau swore that “some, even, who had thrown down their arms, took them up again and continued firing.” Part of the blame for the suicidal behavior of the garrison lies with the incompetent Yankee commanders, whom the prisoners freely indicted; many of them told Barteau that “they had been led to believe that if they surrendered they would be killed by Forrest, and they were surprised and gratified at their humane treatment.” Colonel McCulloch did “not hesitate to say we never made a more manly or fairer fight.” As soon as Forrest was sure that the fort was taken, he ordered a ceasefire; in fact, the Union flag might still have been flying when the order was given. Only one soldier was found to have fired after the ceasefire, and this man was promptly arrested.
Forrest placed McCulloch in charge of the Federal prisoners, and the prisoners were tasked with burying their dead. If, as Yankee propaganda alleged, any of the wounded were buried alive, they were buried so by their own men, perhaps being so intoxicated as to appear lifeless. The Confederates quickly departed, a rear-guard encamped two miles away; thus, if any of the fabricated and outlandish Yankee allegations of atrocities did occur, these excesses were committed after dark “by guerrillas, robbers, and murderers, with which this section…was then infested, and who, following in the wake of either army like hyenas, preyed without mercy upon the weak and defenseless.” No Confederates were nearby at the time these supposed excesses occurred, and eighteen of the seventy-eight ‘witnesses’ called by the Yankee Congress to ‘testify’ were nowhere in the vicinity of the fort; the most harrowing ‘testimony’ came from among these. Moreover, given that Sherman and Grant initiated no retaliation, even after conducting their own investigations, it is clear that the ‘Fort Pillow massacre’ never happened.
Had Forrest intended a merciless massacre, there were no obstacles to prevent him from doing so. Forrest himself had no racial animus to speak of. He was known in Memphis for his kind treatment of his slaves; he went to great lengths to ensure families were never separated. His policy favored the return of blacks to their owners, not killing them. Those who were killed at Fort Pillow died because they were either firing or caught among the alcohol-fueled last stands of comrades that “even after escape was hopeless continued to fire”. The operation must be contextualized; there was never an official surrender, the Federal flag was not stricken, and Yankees continued firing even after ‘surrendering’. Forrest had promised that no quarter would be given were there no surrender; one cannot reason with desperately inebriated men who have taken leave of their senses. In the previous days, members of Forrest’s cavalry had been arrested, tortured, and murdered; one of these men had been, in Forrest’s own words, “left to die after cutting off his tongue, punching out his eyes, [and] splitting his mouth on each side to his ears.” Widespread horrors were being perpetrated against the civilian population, and other war crimes committed against prisoners, such as Sherman’s use of Confederate prisoners to explode torpedoes. The United States refused to exchange prisoners, “thus condemning to a lingering death those of its own and the enemy’s soldiers.”
The civilians within the fort had been given the opportunity to leave, so it must be assumed that those who remained did so in order to fight. Women and children were removed under escort. Colonel Wisdom, noting that Forrest ordered the ceasefire while the Union flag still flew, remarked that “it seems strange that the man who took most pains to secure the surrender of this garrison without loss of life, guaranteeing protection…as prisoners of war before storming the fort, and who took such prompt measures to compel his troops to stop shooting after the success of the assault was assured, even when their flag was still flying…should have been assailed as a murderer and a barbarian; and this, too, in the face of his treatment of the negro troops captured 60 days later at Brice’s Cross-Roads, who had on their knees at Memphis taken an oath to show no quarter to Forrest’s men.”
Forrest ordered every building burnt but the hospital, even leaving a Federal surgeon with the wounded men, whom he paroled, along with a week’s worth of medicine and provisions. Even the maniacal Sherman attested that he was told “by hundreds of our men…that he was usually very kind to them.” It was invidious and vile Yankeedom that treated its prisoners to a regimen of starvation and violence; Forrest, according to one of his prisoners, treated them “as a true soldier would”. One Federal chaplain, captured by Forrest and sure he would be executed, was surprised when the general invited to him to ask the blessing, later releasing him with an escort. Sending the chaplain off, Forrest said, “Parson, I would keep you here to preach for me if you were not needed so much more by the sinners on the other side.” After Forrest’s cavalry raided his native Memphis, his younger brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Jesse Forrest, captured Yankee Major-General Washburn’s uniform and personal effects, giving them to his elder brother as a trophy. Under flag of truce, Forrest had them returned; as a thanks, Washburn sent him by courier “a handsome suit of Confederate gray which had been made by Forrest’s old tailor in Memphis”.
For political purposes, the U.S. Congress gave the Battle of Fort Pillow “a bloody coloring”; its ‘investigative’ committee was a war measure, fueled by embellished, fabricated, and self-contradictory ‘testimony’. As Wyeth astutely concludes, “Forrest had become a man of great importance in the mighty struggle the South was making. The opportunity [that] now presented itself to injure his reputation and blacken his character and that of his men was not to be lost…to further excite the indignation of the Northern people and of the civilized world…and further to impress upon the minds of the negroes who were then flocking to the ranks of the Union army that in future battles they could not expect quarter, and must therefore fight with desperation to the last.” Forrest saw things as they were, lamenting that his “bloody victory [was] made a massacre only by dastardly Yankee reporters.”
The capture of Fort Pillow was a glorious achievement, one that deserves to be hallowed in the great annals of our history alongside Pickett’s Charge; it was simply astounding “for a small force of cavalry, one-half of whom were recruits of four months’ service, and badly armed, to storm a stronghold deemed impregnable, the garrison of which was thoroughly well equipped with the most modern and effective small arms, with six pieces of artillery, and these aided by a gunboat…So perfectly secure did this garrison feel that, during the truce, while the surrender was being demanded, they jeered and laughed at the Confederates for their presumption in thinking their capture possible.” As Wisdom declared, it was a marvelous accomplishment that the fort, “considered at that time impregnable [was] stormed by the Confederates with unsurpassed bravery, and no stain should rest upon their gallant leader.” It should stand as an heroic memory, but the Yankees have successfully tarnished it with a shadow that has yet to be shed light upon and cast away; for just one of the innumerable examples, the third paragraph of Forrest’s Wikipedia page states, “In April 1864, in what has been called ‘one of the bleakest, saddest events of American military history’,troops under Forrest’s command massacred Union troops who had surrendered, most of them black soldiers along with some white Southern Tennesseans fighting for the Union, at the Battle of Fort Pillow. Forrest was blamed for the massacre in the Union press and that news may have strengthened the North’s resolve to win the war.”
Informed of both Lee and Johnston’s surrenders, as well as Taylor’s negotiations to follow suit, Forrest persuaded his men to do the same: “That we are beaten is a self-evident fact, and any further resistance…would be justly regarded as the very height of folly and rashness…The cause for which you have so long and manfully struggled, and for which you have braved dangers, endured privations and sufferings, and made so many sacrifices, is today hopeless. The government which we sought to establish and perpetuate is at an end. Reason dictates and humanity demands that no more blood be shed…it is your duty and mine to lay down our arms, submit to the powers that be, and to aid in restoring peace and establishing law and order…war, such as you have just passed through, naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. It is our duty to divest ourselves of all such feelings…to cultivate friendly feelings…The attempt made to establish a separate and independent confederation has failed, but the consciousness of having done your duty faithfully and to the end will in some measure repay for the hardships you have undergone…I have never on the field of battle sent you where I was unwilling to go myself, nor would I now advise you to a course which I felt myself unwilling to pursue…preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous.”
Forrest did not speak idly; he, as per usual, practiced what he preached. General Maury notified him that Admiral Semmes had been arrested, his parole disregarded, and urged Forrest to flee to Europe. Rather than tuck tail, he calmly presented himself to authorities and inquired as to whether plans existed for his arrest. En route to the 1868 Democrat Convention, a local ruffian boarded the train and challenged Forrest; rather than run, he approached the buffoon, saying, “I am Forrest. What do you want?” The bully took one look at him and fled. Forrest worked toward reconciliation, toward the healing of the grievous wounds, including the racial divide, that still oozed during Reconstruction. In his last will, “he bequeathed his sword to his son with the expressed wish that, should occasion offer, he, as his father would have done, would use it under the Stars and Stripes with the same devotion and earnestness that it had been wielded for the Southern Confederacy.” He never forgot his men; for the rest of his days, and then those of his wife, what little money remaining to his name was spent to alleviate the crushing misery of wounded and destitute Confederate veterans, as well as their widowed and orphaned families.
When Forrest urged his men to surrender and integrate themselves once more into the country that they had just lost the War to, he could not have known how mistaken he was in assuming the magnanimity of the Federal conquerors. He could not have known of the dark despotism that would suck the lifeblood from the South, the depredations of the tyrannical black Republicans, or the carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Union Leagues that would run roughshod over the liberties of a people already reduced to rubble. Little did Forrest know the demons that Reconstruction would unleash, whose ramifications echo to this day in the death of the America that our fathers built. Had he known, we must imagine that he would agree with General Lee’s remark to Texas Governor Stockdale: “Governor, if I had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - There is no primary source evidence that Nathan Bedford Forrest was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and there IS primary source evidence that he was not. The Congressional Joint Select Committee in its 1872 KKK report, after lengthy testimony by Forrest and others, concluded that Forrest was not a member and not the Grand Wizard of the Klan. There is even substantial circumstantial evidence that Forrest was no racist at all. Documented evidence includes numerous major incidents and not just that thousands of blacks loved Forrest and attended his funeral. Stay tuned for more from historian Michael R. Bradley and Charleston Athenaeum Press on this topic.]
When the horrors of Reconstruction were made manifest, Forrest did take action for the defense of his prostrate country. Against a backdrop in which United Confederate Veterans meetings were decried, as if the War was to erupt again were veterans allowed to congregate, Forrest joined the Ku Klux Klan to restore law and order in the vacuum inculcated by a terrorist ruling class. General John Gordon, seeking a strong leader for the decentralized organization, approached Lee, but in his failing health, Lee recommended Forrest for a leadership position; independently, Forrest had approached his former artillerist, Captain John Morton.
Wyeth correctly describes Forrest’s involvement with the early Klan as stemming from his yearning “to relieve his people from the terrible and oppressive conditions under which they so grievously suffered”. The Klan was “created to counteract and hold in some sort of check the insolence of the Loyal League…and the unscrupulous greed of the carpetbaggers. Secret associations of this character do not exist without some real and strong reason…they never trouble communities in which law is impartially administered and the rights of all citizens respected. No candid man who is familiar with the…conditions then obtaining in the Southern States will deny that [the Klan] was perfectly justified, or that the evils such abnormal conditions were producing could be met or remedied in any other way…the Southern whites-with the exception of that renegade class which was more vicious and virulent than the carpetbaggers themselves- were deprived of all rights, civil and political, and subjected, with no means or hope of legal protection, to every outrage and oppression the malice of their opponents could devise. Such a people would never tamely submit…and, in the absence of every other method of redress, naturally-indeed, inevitably- employed force.”
Whatever became of the Klan, we must acknowledge that Forrest’s Klan was not responsible for the excesses and brutalities committed by lawless criminal gangs that exploited the situation. Nature, after all, abhors a vacuum. Forrest’s Klan was made up of prominent citizens, all of whom were veterans, and its animating mission called for “chivalry, humanity, mercy, and patriotism…to relieve and assist the injured, oppressed, suffering, and unfortunate, especially the widows and orphans of Confederate veterans…and to support the United States Constitution.” Rapine and plunder, both by marauding bands of freedmen and government agents, ravaged the already wasted land; state Treasuries were looted and land expropriated, with unaccountable military tribunals (having replaced the dissolved civilian governments) giving color of law to the genocidal reign of terror against the plain folk of Dixie.
Women were assaulted in broad daylight, the night full of darker terrors still. In Chicot County, Arkansas, Forrest personally witnessed a black gang brutalize and rob a white family and torch their home at gunpoint; he received dozens of letters every day, detailing outrages perpetrated by military authorities and criminals, often one and the same, against the innocent men and women that he had pledged his sword to protect. Tennessee Governor Brownlow, a rampant carpetbagger, declared, “I am one of those at the South who believe this War has closed out two years too soon! The rebels have been whipped, but not whipped enough. The loyal masses constitute an overwhelming majority of the people in this country, and they intend to march again on the South, and [this] second war shall be no child’s play. The second army of invasion will, as they ought to do, make the entire South as God formed the earth, without form or void…as for the rebel population, let them be exterminated.” When the Klan had restored order, maintaining peace until Southrons recaptured control of their state governments, Forrest disbanded the original Klan, denouncing any criminal elements that had coopted the loose organization.
What would Forrest do today, were he to see the wretched fate that has befallen his beloved country, were he to know that that selfsame stranglehold of an ancient evil chains his people in thralldom once more as it did so long ago? The answer seems clear. The only difference is in the extreme intensification of the power and the determination of our emboldened Enemy. Lord Wolseley eulogized that “Forrest had fought like a knight-errant for the Cause he believed to be that of justice and right. No man who drew the sword for his country…deserves better of her; and as long as the chivalrous deeds of her sons find poets to describe them and fair women to sing of them, the name of this gallant general will be remembered with affection and sincere admiration. A man with such a record needs no ancestry.” After the battle at Old Town Creek at Harrisburg, Forrest lamented the losses his command had sustained: “In unselfish devotion to the Cause and high courage they leave no superiors among men. Their noble natures and ardent patriotism, it is to be hoped, will find in the soldier’s grave that peace for which their country has thus far struggled in vain, and for the achievement of which they have sacrificed their lives. Future generations will never weary of hanging garlands upon their graves.”
Forrest’s own Memphis has fallen, just as every single one of our once-great Southern cities have. Our imploded civilization, if one may call it by such a name, has forced the Sons of Confederate Veterans to disinter Forrest and his wife, moving them to the grounds of the new National Confederate Museum, where they will be safe from desecration. Though sad that it has come to this, we must rejoice that there are still those of us who will honor him. I hope to see you all there. The New South devoured the Old. The Global South consumed the New. The Solid South is no more, just as America is no more. Our South still exists, and not only in our own hearts; dotted throughout the former Confederacy lie pockets of that Edenic idyll our ancestors fought so bitterly to preserve. Accessible by backroad, I can still go back to my mother’s childhood church, to the graves of my lineage, to primeval wilderness and unsullied waters. The salon where my mother got her hair done as a little girl still stands, as do the dirt roads that she raced her Mustang on. Confederate battle-flags still fly on many homes.
But what little of this South that remains to us is receding, vanishing, unable to withstand the onslaught. Realizing Forrest’s worst nightmares, we have wearied in hanging garlands upon our forebears’ vaunted graves; the graveyard is defiled and vandalized, a stumbling-block in the path of Progress. My grandmother’s pecan tree has been cut down, as has the hundreds-of-years-old tree guarding her church. All of the industry that once supported her town has sold out to the Babel of globalism. Methadone clinics, boarded-up windows, and bail bondsmen have taken the place of the burger joint and the movie theater. The groves where I walked and dreamed with my first love have been razed, made way for the interstate. The hills that I hiked have been blasted, the land gouged and poisoned. The cancer of Leftism, a scourge extinguishing faith and family from our lives, has infiltrated every one of our communities. Across from the defaced Confederate monument on our town square stand glittering, trendy restaurants, tattooed and pierced genderfluid hipsters manning the bars. Deracinated children follow not after their fathers, but after ephemeral will-o’-the-wisps glimmering in outer darkness; they have been told that they must leave their benighted and provincial homes behind to seek individuated misery in the putrid squalor of the city, that they must sign away their birthrights in exchange for the sumptuous luxury of studio apartments with flickering lights, festering fast food wrappers, and hypodermic needles.
As Forrest told Taylor, “Faith is the duty of the hour. We will succeed. We have only to work and wait.” Just as time has proven the righteousness of our Cause, so too shall we be vindicated. The South is dying, not dead; as President Putin once retold a Russian adage, “There’s always hope, until they wheel your body into the graveyard.” But even then, there is still hope; the South may yet survive, with more hope for success than the United States presently have. We will overcome. We know and trust in God that we will prevail. We have only to “keep up the scare”, and “be not allured by the siren song of peace, for there can be no peace” save upon the consummation of the independence that our forefathers fell short of achieving. We must gird our loins, for it will not be easy. Our Revolutionary ancestors took up arms against the greatest army the world had ever seen, and triumphed. Their Confederate grandchildren and great-grandchildren marched exultantly into the mouth of Hell, crying a full-throated rebel yell. What have we to lose? As Christ tells us in Luke 9:62, No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.
Neil Kumar
Neil Kumar is a law student who lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Sons of the American Revolution, with blood that has been Southern since the seventeenth century
Forrest is the devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under cower. . . . I will order them to make up a force and go out to follow Forrest to the death, if it costs ten thousand lives and breaks the Treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead! - Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - Nathan Bedford Forrest is one of the greatest military leaders of all time. His tactics on the battlefield have been studied around the world since the end of the war. He has been a powerful inspiration to generations of American warriors especially from the South, where patriotism and military service are sacred traditions. Until Biden and Harris came along and devastated military recruiting with racist DEI and weak, uninspiring leadership, 44% of our military was recruited in the South.
This account of the June 10, 1864 Battle of Brice's Cross Roads in Lee County, Mississippi comes verbatim from John Allan Wyeth's famous book, Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest.i No words were changed but a handful of spelling/grammar improvements were made. The endnotes are exactly as Wyeth wrote them.]
By ten o'clock, when Lyon had thrown out his skirmishers, Forrest in person had come up with his escort, took command of Lyon's troops, which numbered eight hundred riflemen, and opened the famous battle of Brice's Cross-Roads, which took place in Lee County, Mississippi, on the 10th of June, 1864. It has passed into history as one of the most signal victories of the Civil War, considering the forces engaged. On this field General Forrest displayed not only that bull-dog tenacity of purpose which characterized his aggressive method of warfare, but his remarkable ability as a strategist and those original methods of fighting which then won success and have since attracted the closest attention of students of military science.
The contending forces were: On the Union side, 3,200 cavalry and 4,500 infantry, with 22 pieces of artillery, commanded by General Samuel D. Sturgis; on the Confederate side, 4,713 mounted troops, with 12 pieces of artillery, under General N. B. Forrest [Note in book: "The artillery companies are not included in this enumeration. These would bring the Union strength to about 8,000, and the Confederate to about 4,875."]
At Brice's the main highway, leading from Memphis to Ripley, and on in a direction slightly east of south to Fulton in Mississippi, intersects almost at a right angle another important road leading from Corinth through Rienzi, Booneville, Baldwyn, and in a southwesterly direction to Pontotoc.
With the exception of two or three cleared patches of land, not exceeding six acres in extent, immediately around Brice's house, the country, which is only slightly undulating, for a mile in every direction was at the time of the battle not only heavily timbered, but there was an undergrowth of black-jack and scrub-oak so dense that in places the troops could with difficulty force their way through, and, being then in full leaf, it was possible to approach within a few yards without being seen.
About one mile northeast of Brice's, the Corinth road, with a worm-fence on either hand for about a quarter of a mile, passed through a field, to the outskirts of which on all sides the dense undergrowth extended. This field was enclosed by a heavy rain-fence reinforced on top with poles and brushwood.
About the same distance on the highway leading from Brice's towards Ripley and Memphis the road-bed descended some twenty feet into the Tishomingo Creek bottom, along which stream there was a large cornfield, at that time in cultivation, and here this sluggish stream was spanned by a small wooden bridge.
Grierson, satisfied that the Confederates were in considerable strength, dismounted Waring's brigade (1,450 strong), which he posted behind the fence in the edge of the dense timber, about equally divided on the north and south side of the road along which Forrest was advancing. Two rifle guns and two howitzers were thrown into position on a slight elevation just behind his line, and 100 picked men armed with revolving rifles were sent forward and concealed in the fence corners of the lane about a hundred yards in advance of his main line.
To the right of Waring was dismounted Grierson's other brigade under Winslow (numbering 1,750), and the extreme right of this portion of the Union line was slightly "refused," or drawn back, in the direction of Brice's house.
It will be seen that at this critical moment (for General Forrest) General Grierson had on the field 3,200 cavalry with four pieces of artillery in position and six others in reserve, confronted four hundred yards away by 800 mounted troops of Lyon's brigade, with the escort company of 85 men, and Gartrell's company, 50 strong, and with no Confederate artillery within eight miles.
Forrest was naturally an offensive fighter. He rarely stood to receive an attack. If his troops were mounted and the enemy moved first upon him, he always advanced to meet their charge. In a memorable interview with a Federal officer he said he would "give more for fifteen minutes of bulge on the enemy than for a week of tactics." He believed that one man in motion was worth two standing to receive an attack.
When he realized how strong the enemy in his immediate front was, his chief anxiety was that they might charge in force and run over this small command. Rucker was still two miles in the rear and Johnson was yet behind him. He immediately had Lyon's troops dismounted and thrown into line, and their position behind the fence strengthened by brush and logs.
To prevent Grierson from attacking, it was important to make a show of force, and with characteristic effrontery, having alternate panels of the worm-fence thrown down, he ordered Lyon to make a demonstration by advancing from the edge of the woods into the open field. Lyon threw out a double line of skirmishers and marched boldly towards the enemy's position.
That Forrest's advance was "pure bluff" should have been clear to Grierson, for Lyon's right just reached the Baldwyn road, while his left extended only a little beyond the junction of Waring's and Winslow's brigades. He was thus widely overlapped on either flank. Major E. Hunn Hanson, of Waring's brigade, says of this movement: "The Confederate line advancing was shorter than our own, their left ending in front of the left and centre of Winslow's brigade."ii
With artillery and small arms the Union line opened upon the Confederates, who kept up their feigned attack for about an hour, then they withdrew without confusion to the edge of the woods from which they had started, and there resumed their position behind the layouts. Major Hanson (above quoted) says: "The Confederates retired with but little disorder to the edge of the woods and kept up a skirmish fire at long range for some time."
It was at this moment that Colonel E. W. Rucker, with his brigade of 700 mounted men, came on the scene. When within two miles of Lyon's position, hearing the cannonade, he put spurs to his horse and went rapidly forward with his hardy riders to the relief of his chieftain.
Forrest at once dismounted the Seventh Tennessee regiment and Chalmer's Eighteenth Mississippi battalion of Rucker's command, placing them in line to the left of Lyon's troops, opposing the centre of Winslow's brigade. The Eighth Mississippi, under Duff, was kept mounted, and thrown well over to the left toward the Guntown road to protect that flank of the Confederates from being turned. All told, the Confederates now had on the field 1,635 men, with Grierson's division, 3,200 strong, in line of battle opposing them.
Forrest again ordered his lines forward, with the same purpose for which the original attack was made, and after some sharp firing, although not at close range, the Confederates again retired. Chalmer's battalion, mistaking the object of the movement, had advanced too far to the front and received an enfilading fire from the right of Winslow's line, which threw them into confusion, but they rallied on the main Confederate lines.
As the troops came back a second time, Colonel W. A. Johnson arrived with 500 Alabamians, being that portion of his brigade whose horses had not given out in the forced march they had just made from northern Alabama. These troops Forrest directed to dismount, take position on Lyon's right, and move forward to engage the attention of the left of the Union line.
After some desultory fighting, lasting not longer than five minutes, Johnson also retired. Major Hanson says of this incident: "Later, about three hundred Confederates advanced against Waring's extreme left, but were easily repulsed."iii
It was now about eleven o'clock, and although Bell's brigade, which numbered more than the Confederates troops at the front, and the artillery under Morton were not within supporting distance, Forrest determined to close in with Grierson in deadly earnest.
He rode hurriedly along his entire line with words of encouragement to his troops, telling them that he expected every man to move forward when the signal was given. It was not to be a feint, but desperate work, and at close quarters.
At the sound of the bugle the dismounted troopers sprang from the edge of the timber, leaped through the fence, and with a wild yell rushed into the open space towards the Union line. Such was their eagerness that the commands seemed to vie with each other as to which should first reach their antagonists. The men of Waring and Winslow seemed imbued with the same desperate purpose, for they stood their ground right manfully, their repeating-rifles crackling away in deafening roar, first at a distance, and then, as the lines came clashing together, into the very faces of the Confederates.
It fell to Rucker to make the first impression upon the Union position. At the head of the Seventh Tennessee and Chalmer's battalion, he swept onward with such impetuosity that he carried his part of the line fully one hundred yards in advance of Lyon and Johnson.
Concentrating his fire on this part of the Confederate line, Waring had hoped to check or break it here, and when, under the fearful ordeal, it wavered for a moment, he sprang forward with two of his regiments to drive it from the field. To make assurance doubly sure, this vigilant officer brought up the Second New Jersey and the Seventh Indiana to fill the gap made by his counter-charge and to reinforce his line.
It was a brave and desperate venture, and worthy of the brave Waring. But Rucker's men were not to be denied. Stubborn of will and apt pupil of his great commander, he had already won the confidence of his faithful soldiers. As the Union troops rushed forward, he shouted to his Southerners to draw their six-shooters and close with them hand to hand, and in one of the most fiercely contested short encounters of the war the Federals were finally forced to retire.
The desperate character of this attack, and the obstinate resistance with which it was met, may be appreciated from an account by a participant, in J. P. Young's History of the Seventh Tennessee Cavalry:
The Federals occupied a wood on the far side of the field behind a rail-fence, greatly strengthened with logs and brush piled up against it. It was very hot and sultry when the command was given, and as we approached, the fence seemed ablaze with crackling breech-loaders.
The fire was so terrific that the regiment staggered for a moment, and some of the men fell flat upon the earth for protection. They again pushed forward, reached the fence, and began to pull the brush away in order to close with the Federals. So close was this struggle guns once fired were not reloaded, but used as clubs, and pistols were brought into play, while the two lines struggled with the ferocity of wild beasts.
Never did men fight more gallantly for their position than did the determined men of the North for this black-jack thicket on that hot June day. Sergeant John D. Huhn, of Company B, being a few feet in advance, came face to face with a Federal, presented his gun, and ordered the Union soldier to throw his weapon down.
Several Federal soldiers rushed to the rescue of their comrade. With clubbed guns they broke Sergeant Huhn's arm and struck him over the head until he fell senseless. Privates Lauderdale and Maclin, of the Seventh Tennessee, ran to his aid, shot two of his stout-hearted assailants, and drove the others away with clubbed guns.
Of these attacks Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., says: "They were exceedingly fierce. The first assault was repulsed. The second one, after a hand-to-hand fight, was successful, and forced back my right, although the whole Second New Jersey and the Seventh Indiana were brought into action. After falling back a short distance I succeeded in forming a second line, which was held until the infantry came up to relieve my command, the men being much fatigued and out of ammunition."iv
Of this incident Major E. Hunn Hanson, of the Fourth Missouri Cavalry (Waring's regiment), says: "The line of the enemy in view did not exceed twenty-five hundred, and was somewhat shorter than our cavalry in position. They advanced and were repulsed, and with little disorder fell back. Again marching upon the cavalry, when within fifty yards of Waring's line, the centre of that command slowly gave way."v
Forrest had only 2,080 men on the field at the moment, and as every regiment but one was fighting dismounted, deducting the troops left with the horses, he had actually engaged in this fierce and successful attack not more than 1,700 troops. He had strengthened his centre, and, while the enemy's flanks were strongly assailed, he had broken through the Union line at this point. Just as this was accomplished, Johnson and Lyon, with equal courage, had closed in with the left of the Federal forces, while Duff's Mississippi regiment, mounted, on the extreme Confederate left, was vigorously engaged in holding the attention of the extreme right of Grierson's line.
As Waring's centre gave way, the gallant W. A. Johnson and his Alabamians advanced so rapidly and eagerly that he had gained a point fully half-way between his original position and the road leading from Ripley to Brice's, along which the infantry coming to reinforce Grierson was now advancing.
Still pushing onward, Rucker, leading this brilliant assault mounted, was too fair a target to escape. Several bullets passed through his clothing; his horse, five times wounded, fell at last from a mortal shot. His rider received a bullet in the abdomen, which, though painful, was fortunately not fatal; nor did he yield his position at the head of his troops until the field was won.
The Union cavalry was now beaten at all points of the line, and by 12:30 Forrest had carried out the first part of his program, namely, that he would have their cavalry whipped by the time the infantry could get up.
At ten o'clock in the morning, when Forrest came on the field, he dispatched Major Charles W. Anderson of his staff, towards Booneville with the order, "Tell Bell to move up fast and fetch all he's got," and for Morton to bring the artillery on at a gallop.
Nor had he forgotten the famous movement upon the flank and rear of his opponent which he always employed, and which in all probability was one of the chief factors in this wonderful success.
He directed General A. Buford (his division commander) to take Colonel C. R. Barteau's Second Tennessee regiment of Bell's brigade, when it should have arrived within five miles of the battlefield, and to proceed across the country through the woods and by-ways until he struck the road over which Sturgis would pass from Stubbs's to the cross-roads. Barteau says: "My instructions were to take my regiment, numbering then 250 men, across the country by out-of-the-way routes, to slip in upon the Federal flank and rear, and to attack them in co-operation with Forrest's force in front."vi
How well Barteau did his work and what commotion he caused in the Union lines will appear in the course of the narrative.
When the Confederates were first encountered, General Grierson had sent a courier to Sturgis, who was then some six miles back, for reinforcements, and this request was repeated with greater urgency when Rucker and Johnson came on the field and joined hands with Lyon in their desperate onslaught. It was, however, not until twelve o'clock that the Union commander in person came upon the scene, and more than an hour later when the head of the infantry column began to appear. These had been urged forward as fast as the condition of the road and the extreme heat would permit.
Colonel Hoge, who led the advance brigade of infantry, says: "It was impossible to keep up the rapid gait. I received a peremptory order to move forward rapidly, as the enemy was gaining ground, and the only thing that would save us was the infantry. Three-quarters of a mile from the field I received an order from Colonel McMillen in person to move forward at double quick, which was done."vii
Coming upon the scene, Hoge's brigade, the One Hundred and Thirteenth, One Hundred and Eighth, Ninety-fifth, and Eighty-first Illinois Infantry, with Battery B of the Second Illinois Artillery (four guns), were immediately thrown into line, their battery being placed at Brice's house.
These reinforcements had not all formed in line before the first brigade, under Colonel A. Wilkin, also arrived. The Ninety-fifth Ohio, One Hundred and Fourteenth Illinois, Ninety-third Indiana, and Seventy-second Ohio Infantry were thrown into line at points most needed while Mueller's section of the Sixth Indiana battery, reinforced by Chapman's full battery, were posted on an eminence in the rear of Brice's house. Battery E, of the First Illinois Light Artillery, and the Nineteenth Minnesota Artillery, were held in reserve at the cross-roads.
Thirty-six hundred Union infantry, who as yet had not fired a shot, with three batteries of artillery additional, had come upon the scene reinforcing Grierson's division, which Forrest had already beaten, and this entire force was confronted by the two thousand Confederates which General Forrest had at hand.
Behind this bulwark of infantry the Federal troopers, exhausted and beaten, mounted their horses and took refuge, some even quitting the field, as the official records show, "without orders." Still back of these, and then in sight, was another infantry brigade of colored troops, with artillery under Colonel Bouton held in reserve.
In crescentic line, and this in some portion of double formation, the Federal army now extended from well north of the Baldwyn road across to, and some two hundred yards beyond or west of, the road from Ripley to Guntown.
At this propitious moment for the success of Forrest's battle, just as the Federal infantry were swinging into line, Morton came up with the artillery, and at his heels were Generals Buford and Tyree H. Bell, with the latter's full brigade of fresh troops, which within the last six months had been recruited within the Union lines in west Tennessee. The artillery consisted of Morton's and Rice's battery, which had traveled eighteen miles since daylight over roads so muddy that for much of the distance it was with great difficulty the horses could drag the pieces along. For the last six miles it required the most vigorous urging with whip and spur to push them forward in a trot.
To the right of the road from Baldwyn, as Morton advanced in rear of Lyon's position, his batteries were brought into action and opened with telling effect. General Sturgis says of this particular period of the engagement: "Finding that our troops were being hard pressed, I ordered one section to open on the enemy's reserve. Their artillery soon replied, and with telling accuracy, every shell bursting over and in the immediate vicinity of our guns."viii
With fatal precision scarcely excelled by the sharp-shooter with his Whitworth globe-sighted rifle, Captain John W. Morton, the famous young artillerist who had celebrated his twenty-first birthday on the bloody field of Chickamauga, with clear eye and steady heart was sending his shells with deadly purpose right to the spot.
Placing Buford in command of the right wing, where Johnson and Lyon were operating, Forrest, with Bell's troops, moved to the Confederate left and dismounted to the left of Rucker, extending his now strengthened line westward of the road leading from Brice's to Guntown.
Still farther to the Confederate left, mounted and guarding that wing and ready to swoop around and upon the Union flank and rear, were two companies of Kentuckians, upon which, under their dashing leader Captain H. A. Tyler, Forrest knew he could rely on most desperate work when the occasion offered.
The other mounted companies, his famous escort under Captain Jackson, and Gartrell's Georgians on headquarters duty with Forrest, were kept immediately with the general.
The two opposing armies now faced each other for the supreme effort.
About eight thousand Federal soldiers, with twenty-two pieces of artillery, confronted Forrest, who, with an audacity born of supreme confidence in this men as well as in himself, moved forward to attack them. As most of the Confederates fought dismounted, deducting those left with the horses in the rear, the Confederate commander could not have carried into action in this desperate encounter over thirty-three hundred troops with twelve pieces of artillery
, a proportion of less than one to two.
For some thirty minutes the sounds of war had ceased. A rifle here and there from some sharp-shooter or venturesome skirmisher spoke out in vicious challenge, but the wild fusillade and the crackle and roar of hundreds and thousands of guns no longer swept to and fro along the double rainbow of men in deadly earnest for the undoing of each other. It was the calm before the storm, the ominous silence which precedes the cloud-burst and the angry onslaught of the winds. The atmosphere was heavy with humidity, the day depressing and intensely hot. Not a cloud was in the sky to shield friend or foe from the burning rays of the sun. Nothing but the thick foliage intervened and this was motionless, for not a breath of air was stirring.
Forrest, in apt phraseology, more forcible than elegant, had measured the heat when he said to Rucker that morning, in his forecast of the fight and of the day, "It is going to be hot as hell." The troops, and animals as well, in both contending armies had suffered extremely, and a goodly number had fallen from exhaustion and sunstroke.
On the Union side, Grierson's cavalry had been fighting steadily from ten until two, and fighting is terribly exhausting work. They had been roughly handled to boot, and had a right to be wearied and worried.
On the Confederate side, Johnson's, Rucker's, and Lyon's men, who had "knocked out" Waring's and Winslow's brigades, were equally fatigued. Bell's famous brigade, which had just arrived, had traveled twenty-five miles to reach the battlefield, and for the last fourth of the journey their horses had been urged to the full limit of their endurance and speed.
The Union infantry had also suffered much, in fact, more than any of the troops upon the field. They had marched nine miles since seven o'clock, and under the urgent appeals of Grierson and Sturgis the last three miles had been made at a trot, and the final mile at double-quick.
Forrest was fully alive to the conditions which, in spite of his numerical weakness, favored him. He had no thought of giving his enemy an opportunity to "catch their wind."
He had informed Buford that everything was ready on the left and that he must push his end of the line (the right) and engage as much as possible the attention of the enemy in that direction. He added that they were massing in front of him, and that their left would not offer as much resistance as he and Bell would encounter. Johnson, on the extreme right of the Confederate line, was urged to crowd in as closely as possible on the road leading from Ripley to Brice's.
The two Federal brigades of infantry under Hoge and Wilkins had scarcely effected their alignment when over to their left the rifles of Johnson and Rucker told them the fight had reopened, and at this moment everything in the Confederate line of battle moved to the front.
There was now no open country except a few acres immediately about Brice's house. Through the thick and almost impenetrable undergrowth, just where Hoge had formed his sturdy Westerners in double array, both ranks lying prone upon the ground for concealment as well as protection, there came with guns trailing and bodies bent as close to the earth as possible the rustling sound of a moving body of men among the foliage as with difficulty they pushed their way forward.
These were the Tennesseeans, as stanch and brave a set of men as every served in war, under Tyree H. Bell, the Blücher of this hard-fought field.
When within only a few paces of the Federal line, which as yet they could not see, the rifles of Hoge's infantry burst forth, a withering flash and murderous roar into the very faces of the Confederates.
Under this fierce and sudden fire, which inflicted serious loss, a part of Bell's men gave way. Taking quick advantage of the momentary confusion he had caused, Hoge, with great gallantry, believing that the entire line of the enemy would yield if a general advance was made, ordered his whole force forward, directing his attack principally on the right of Bell and the left of Rucker's position.
Forrest, knowing the heavy fighting would be just at this point, had remained with the troops, and, seeing the disaster which now threatened him, dismounted from his horse, called to his two escort companies to dismount and hitch their horses to the bushes, and with these daring fighters gathered about him he rushed into the thickest of the fray, pistol in hand, to take his place in the front rank with his men.
With equal dash and courage, Bell did the same; and with such examples and under such leadership the Tennesseeans quickly rallied, and, being reinforced by Lieutenant-Colonel D. M. Wisdom, who with 280 men of Newsom's regiment had been held in reserve behind this portion of the line, they checked the retreat and advanced again upon the enemy.
Arrested in front of Bell, the Federal infantry pushed on in gallant style against the thinner line of Rucker; but this sturdy fighter had no notion of yielding the position he had won after such a fierce struggle. He knew from the way the rifles were cracking on his left that Forrest was hard at work there and was holding his own.
As the Federal infantry came on with bayonets fixed, Rucker shouted, "Kneel on the ground, men, draw your six-shooters, and don't run!"
Against this plucky wall the onrushing Federals struck hard, but rebounded. They could not break through it, and in fierce and bloody hand-to-hand combat the bayonet was no match for the repeating-pistol, and the Union troops gave way as the whole Confederate line rushed forward with irresistible force.
As the centre of Hoge's line crumbled away in this terrific onslaught, Johnson, with Lyon's prompt aid, had pushed back the extreme left of McMillen's line until it was now doubled back upon the Ripley road.
At this important juncture Forrest received a message from the ever-watchful Buford, which was invaluable to him. From the open position occupied by this officer on the extreme right, he had observed a sudden movement of the Union cavalry from near Brice's house to the rear, and could now distinguish musketry off to his right in the direction of Tishomingo Creek. Barteau was there with the Second Tennessee. He had arrived just in the nick of time and had struck the rear and flank of Sturgis's column.
The brilliant strategy of Forrest was now to prove its value in deciding the fate of the Union army. Of this moment Colonel Barteau says:
I succeeded in reaching the Federal rear just as the fighting seemed heaviest in front. I at once deployed my men in a long line, had my bugler ride up and down sounding the charge at different points, and kept up as big a show as I could and a vigorous fire upon the Federals until their complete route was evident. I was in the flank and rear of their position when Waring's and Winslow's brigades came back.ix
This brilliant movement, executed with vigor and precision, had, at this crisis of the battle, not only thrown the reserve brigade of infantry and the train-guard into commotion, but had withdrawn from Forrest's immediate front practically all of Grierson's cavalry that could offer him effectual resistance.
Forrest's perception told him that the crisis of the day had come and that now the battle must be won or lost. It was past four o'clock. How swiftly and unheeded is the flight of time when the storm of battle is raging! For more than two hours these desperate men of either army had been in murderous strife at close range since Bell and Morton had arrived. With savage fierceness, against heavy odds, Forrest's men had fought, and it seemed that the extreme of human endurance had been reached.
Riding along the rear of the line, encouraging his troops by telling them that the enemy were giving way, that their rear was attacked by Barteau, and that only one supreme effort was necessary to sweep them from the field, he hastened to the position of Morton with the artillery, upon whom at this moment he greatly depended.
As he rode up to Morton, whose guns were then in action, the position being one at close range to the enemy and of great exposure, the artillerist ventured to say to his general that it was too dangerous a place for him, and suggested that he should go to the rear a short distance, where it was safer. He noticed that Forrest was much exhausted and was surprised that he yielded to the advice of his subordinate.
Riding back some thirty or forty yards, he called Morton to him as he laid himself upon the ground at the root of a big tree. Here he said to the artillerist that he believed he had the enemy beaten, and that while they were still holding on with considerable stubbornness near the cross-roads, he felt convinced that one more vigorous charge along the whole line, in which the artillery should take an active part, would be successful.
He said that he would order his charge within ten minutes, and directed him to take four guns, double-shotted with canister, and, as soon as the bugler sounded the charge, to hitch the horses to them, gallop forward as close as possible to the enemy, and open upon them at close range. The signal for Morton was the heavy firing on the right.
Forrest then rode farther over to the right to give Buford his final instructions. General Buford said that Forrest told him what part Morton was to play he suggested that it would be dangerous to send the guns forward without any support; but Forrest replied, "Buford, all the Yankees in front of us cannot get to Morton's guns."
After the battle and pursuit were over, and two days later when the artillerist was returning with his pets, Forrest rode up to him, laid his hand on his shoulder, and said, "Well, John, I think your guns won the battle for us."
Flushing with pride at this great praise from the man he idolized, Morton said, "General, I am glad you think so much of our work, but you scared me pretty badly when you pushed me up so close to their infantry and left me without protection. I was afraid they might take my guns."
To this Forrest replied as he rode away, "Well, artillery is made to be captured, and I wanted to see them take yours."
Hurrying back to Bell, he ordered Tyler, with his two companies of Kentuckians, Captain Jackson of the escort, and Captain Johnson, with Gartrell's Georgians, that when the firing became general along the line they must charge around the Federal right flank and into their rear, rush in and engage at pistol-range any Federal troops between their right and the Tishomingo Creek bridge.
Forrest's famous tactics were now to be demonstrated, namely, the fierce onslaught from the front, with a charge upon both flanks and in the enemy's rear by a few well-chosen and desperate horsemen. As Gaus's bugle sounded the charge, Buford and Lyon and Johnson went forward with the right of the Confederate line.
In the face of a tremendous discharge of small arms and artillery, and amid the wild yells of the successful Confederates, the Federal line gave way stubbornly, for a little space, and then yielded in disorder.
Morton, with his horses hitched to the guns, swept forward along the country road, so narrow that only four pieces could be employed, with such boldness that in all probability the Federal commander at this point felt he was heavily supported, and when within short range of the centre and right of the Union line he made his double-shotted canister tell on their ranks with frightful effect. Rucker's final charge on the centre and Bell's quick rush to the left carried away the last vestige of organization on the part of the Federals and their line was at last irreparably broken.
Colonel McMillen, commanding the [Federal] infantry, says:
As the enemy on our right were being driven back by the Ninth Minnesota and Ninety-third Indiana, I directed Captain Fitch to put one section of his artillery into position on the Guntown road and sweep it with grape and canister. Soon after the left and left-centre gave back in considerable confusion, the rebels (Johnson and Lyon) following them in force up to the road over which we had advanced, and from which they were kept by the Seventy-second Ohio and Mueller's battery. I endeavored to rally the different regiments and get them to advance to their original position, but failed. I sent word to General Sturgis I was hard pressed, and unless relieved I would be obliged to abandon my position. I was informed that he had nothing to send me. I therefore determined to retire and form another line a short distance in the rear, to keep the enemy from the cross-roads until the artillery could be moved.
As the Federals retired, Lieutenants Haller and Mayson, under orders from Morton, pushed their guns still farther by hand along the narrow roadway to the front, firing as they advanced. Coincident with this, Buford, Lyon, and Rucker closed in from all directions upon the Union forces, now in confusion, crowding them to the cross-roads at Brice's house, where three pieces of artillery were captured and turned upon the fleeing enemy.
General Sturgis, referring to this period of the engagement, says:
I now endeavored to get hold of the colored brigade which formed the guard of the wagon-train. While traversing the short distance to where the head of that brigade should be found, the main line began to give way at various points. Order soon gave way to confusion, and confusion to panic. . . . The army drifted towards the road and was beyond control. The road became crowded and jammed with troops. Wagons and artillery sank into the deep mud and became inextricable. No power could check the panic-stricken mass as it swept towards the rear.
The panic of the troops was not without effect upon the Union commander. Colonel D. C. Thomas testifies that General Sturgis at this period in the fight proposed to save himself by taking the Nineteenth Pennsylvania Cavalry as an escort, to turn off into some by-way and make his escape.x
About one-quarter of a mile north of the cross-roads, where the Fourth Iowa Cavalry of Winslow's brigade had dismounted, sent their horses across Tishomingo Creek, and were making a final and desperate stand, Colonel McMillen endeavored to stem the current of disaster by throwing the Fifty-fifth Colored Infantry across the line of retreat. The Fifty-ninth Colored Infantry and Lamberg's section of artillery were placed somewhat in rear of them, and for the same purpose.
But the on-sweeping tide of the Confederates was running high and could not be withstood. The brave General Buford, with boldness and ability, had pushed Johnson's Alabamians so far forward on the extreme Confederate right that they struck the flank of Bouton's Africans from the direction of Tishomingo Creek; and at the same moment, upon the extreme left of the Confederate line, the troopers of Forrest's escort, under Jackson and Gartrell, with Tyler's two Kentucky companies mounted, with dare-devil recklessness, swept around the right of the Federal line and rode squarely into the colored infantry with their six-shooters just as Johnson's troops came in range and opened upon them from the other side.
To add to their discomfiture, Morton and Rice, pushing their guns by hand, were crowding along the main road from Brice's to the bridge, and now, within gunshot range, rattled away with their charges double shotted with canister.
Nothing could surpass the desperate earnestness of these heroic men who stood to their work throughout this hot and depressing day. Suffering so intensely with thirst, they drank the blackened, powder-stained water from the sponge-buckets, which was being used to cleanse and cool the guns, rather than send one needed man away. Even some of the wounded refused to go to the rear.xi
McMillen's forlorn hope was demolished so quickly that he scarcely checked the onward rush of Forrest's men.
Rearward of this position, across the sluggish Tishomingo Creek, there was a narrow wooden bridge which had become hopelessly blocked by the overturning of a wagon and the impaction behind this of several other vehicles. On to this bridge, clambering over the wreckage of wagons and the fallen horses struggling to free themselves mad with fright, the fugitives rushed pell-mell, the soldiers pushing each other off into the stream on either side in their wild efforts to escape. Others, seeing the hopelessness of attempting to cross by the bridge, threw themselves into the creek and waded or swam across while many were drowned or shot as they were floundering in the water.
The Union loss was fearful. Reaching the creek, the Confederates cleared the bridge by pushing the wagons and the dead or wounded animals into the stream.
Meanwhile a detachment of Forrest's escort under Lieutenant George L. Cowan had effected a crossing about a quarter of a mile below the bridge, and, sweeping around upon the flank of the enemy, charged boldly in among the panic-stricken crowd of fugitives and cut off and captured a large number of prisoners and some wagons. So far was Cowan within the Federal lines that he came in range of Morton's relentless guns, and it was only when the battle-flag of the escort was waved that he was recognized and the firing in that direction ceased.
The sun was now just above the western horizon, but Forrest had no idea of calling off the chase. The men who had been detailed as horse-holders and were therefore comparatively fresh, were hurried to the front, and under the personal leadership of Forrest and Buford, went forward upon the heels of the beaten army.
Two miles from the battle-field McMillen succeeded in rallying a portion of the first and second brigades under the command of the brave Colonel A. Wilkin, who later fell on the bloody field of Harrisburg. This line, however, could not stand longer than to permit Bouton to pass through with his Africans for Morton came upon the scene with two of his pieces, and after a single round, the Federals vanished. From this point on resistance practically ceased.
Of the result of the fighting, until after twelve o'clock, Colonel Waring says:
It was seen at half-past twelve that our ammunition was reduced to five rounds per man; and when our battery had fired it last shot the infantry began to arrive, and then they came a regiment at a time, or only so fast as the Forrest mill could grind them up in detail. Little by little the enemy pressed upon us, gaining rod after rod of our position, until finally our last arriving troops, a splendid colored regiment, reached the field of battle at double quick, breathless and beaten by their own speed, barely in time to check the assault until we could cross the creek and move towards the rear.
The retreat was but fairly begun when we came upon our train of two hundred wagons piled pell-mell in a small field and blocked in beyond the possibility of removal. The train was our tub to the whale; and while Forrest's men were sacking our treasures we had time to form for the retreat, more or less orderly according as we had come early or late upon the field.xii
[Union] Major E. H. Hanson reports:
All through the night the beaten army kept on their way, reaching Ripley, twenty-two miles from the battle-field, on the morning of June 11th. During the retreat the enemy captured fourteen pieces of artillery, our entire train of two hundred and fifty wagons loaded with ammunition and ten days' rations. At Ripley an attempt was made to reorganize our troops into companies and regiments, but the enemy appeared on two sides before this could be accomplished, and we were only able to check them until the retreat could be resumed. It continued in this way to Collierville, Tennessee.
The bitter humiliation of this disaster rankles after a quarter of a century. The enemy may have numbered three thousand five hundred or four thousand, but it must be reluctantly confessed that not more than this number is believed to have been in action. If there was during the war, another engagement like this, it is unknown to the writer; and in its immediate result there was no success, among the many won by Forrest, comparable to that of Guntown.xiii
An amusing incident of the flight of Sturgis's command is given by Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., who says: "Grierson ordered me to prevent the pushing ahead of the stragglers of the other brigades, who were to be recognized, he remined me, by their wearing hats (mine wore caps). The order was peremptory and was to be enforced at the cost of cutting the offenders down. We were all sleeping more or less of the time, but constantly some hatted straggler was detected pushing towards the front, and ordered back. Close to my right, and pushing slowly to the front, came a gray horse with a hatted rider, an India-rubber poncho covering his uniform. I ordered him back, and the adjutant, eager for the enforcement of the order, remonstrated at the man's disobedience. I ordered him again, but without result. The adjutant ejaculated, 'Damn him, cut him down!' I drew my sabre, and laid it flat, on one long stinging welt, across that black poncho. ------- Who are you hitting? Then we both remembered that Grierson, too, wore a hat, and I tender him here my public acknowledgment of his good-nature and generous silence."xiv
Forrest's men, who had done the fighting on foot, were allowed to rest until one o'clock, while the horse-holders kept hammering away at the fleeing enemy, to give them no respite.
At 3 a.m. Buford in force came upon their rear in the Hatchie bottoms, and here the balance of the wagon-train and fourteen pieces of artillery additional fell into the hands of the gallant Kentuckian. Four miles from Ripley, Grierson had rallied a forlorn hope, but, with the escort and the Seventh Tennessee alone, Forrest, leading the charge in person, attacked them and after a feeble resistance scattered them "like chaff before the winds."
All through the day and until nightfall on the 11th the pursuit was continued, and only closed when, near Salem, in sight of the home of his youth, Forrest, completely exhausted, was seized with a fainting-spell, fell from his horse, and remained unconscious for nearly an hour, to the great alarm of his devoted followers.
The battle at Brice's Cross-Roads demonstrated the truth of the adage that "the battle is not to the strong." The Federals were not defeated for lack of courage, as the fighting qualities of these men, when properly handled, was in a succeeding engagement fully proven.
From ten until four, beneath the fierce heat of a Southern sun, the men of Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Tennessee had struggled in desperate and often hand-to-hand conflict with the sturdy soldiers of Indiana, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and New Jersey; while there can be no doubt that great credit was due to the splendid fighting qualities of the men under Forrest and to his officers, as determined and courageous as himself, nothing on that day, and against such odds, could have saved his army from defeat and destruction but the marvelous genius of the "unlettered soldier."
He had fought on the field a body of veteran troops which greatly outnumbered him, and, withal, advantageously posted, as he had been the assailant from the beginning. To reach the battlefield the Federals had only nine miles to march; the greater portion of Forrest's command had covered twenty-five miles, and his artillery had made eighteen miles before they came into action.
The vigorous and tireless pursuit was as wonderful as the victory on the field. It seems almost incredible that men could have endured what this little army of Forrest's endured on those two days of June.
The artillery of Morton and Rice had started from Booneville at 5 a.m. on the 10th, had marched eighteen miles, and then for five hours had been engaged without intermission in desperate conflict; had followed the enemy from the field until well into the night, and, after seven hours of rest, pushed onward, keeping up with, and at times even in front of, the advance-guard of Forrest's cavalry; had reached Salem on the night of the 11th, making sixty-one miles in thirty-eight hours, besides fighting for five hours of that time, a record possibly without a parallel in artillery fighting. So energetic had been Morton's pursuit that fifteen horses fell dead in harness from exhaustion.
Bell's brigade, at 4 a.m. on the 10th, had left Rienzi, marched twenty-five miles to the battlefield, fought from 2 p.m. until 5 p.m., pursued the enemy from the field until 7, and at 8 p.m. on the night of the 11th, camped at Davis's Mill, twelve miles north of Salem, having made eighty miles in forty hours.
No wonder the army of Sturgis had melted away in a wild stampede, until it was every one for himself. Few escaped, excepting those who had horses, or who cut them loose from the wagons and the artillery. The infantry suffered most heavily in killed and captured, while the colored troops, believing that no quarter would be shown them, scattered in all directions, taking to the woods and bottoms for safety.
On the morning of the 11th, at Ripley, General Sturgis writes: "Nothing was left but to keep in motion." On the 12th he was at Collierville, after a run of forty-eight hours with scarcely a halt, and on the 13th, at 9 a.m., a fragment of his fleeing command was at White's station. It had taken his army nine days to march from this point to Brice's Cross-Roads. The return trip was made in sixty-four hours.
General Washburn says: "The expedition left the railroad terminus on June 1st, and reached Brice's Cross-Roads on June 10th. The force that escaped returned to this point in one day and two nights."
The Confederates lost heavily in killed and wounded. The report of the chief surgeon, Dr. J. B. Cowan, gives 493 killed and wounded. In Rucker's brigade the loss was twenty-three percent, and in Lyon's command over twenty percent were killed and wounded.
General Sturgis, in his official report, made on the 24th of June, gave his loss of killed, wounded, and missing, as 2,240. The detailed reports of his brigade and regimental commanders show his loss to have been 2,612.
General Forrest captured 250 wagons and ambulances, 18 pieces of artillery, 5,000 stands of small arms, 500,000 rounds of small-arm ammunition, and all the enemy's baggage and supplies.
That the Federals threw away everything which would impede their flight is evident from the reports of the subordinate officers. Colonel George B. Hoge gives the original strength of his brigade at 1,674, of which 748 were killed, wounded, and missing.xv Of the remaining 926 who escaped, only 267 had not thrown away their guns!
Wilkins's regimental commanders report 1,003 lost in the second brigade. The Ninth Minnesota lost 287 out of 665. Bouton's colored regiments lost 528 out of a total of 1,200. Wring's cavalry brigade lost 207, and Winslow's 126. Total Federal loss, 2,612.
In his official report General Sturgis says: "I need hardly add that it was with feelings of the most profound pain and regret that I found myself called upon to record a defeat and the loss and suffering incident to a reverse. Yet there is some consolation in knowing that the army fought nobly while it did fight, and only yielded to overwhelming numbers. The strength of the enemy is estimated by the most intelligent officers as fifteen to twenty thousand men."xvi He adds: "A very intelligent sergeant who was captured says the enemy had actually engaged, 12,000 men, and had two divisions of infantry in reserve."
The overthrow of Sturgis caused scarcely less anxiety at the headquarters of Generals Grant and Sherman, and at Washington, than was felt by General Washburn at Memphis. Grant says, in his Memoirs: "Farther west, also, the troubles were threatening. Some time before, Forrest had met Sturgis, in command of some cavalry in Mississippi, and handled him very roughly, gaining a great victory over him. This left Forrest free to go almost where he pleased, and to cut the roads in rear of Sherman, who was then advancing. Sherman was abundantly able to look after the army that he had immediately with him, and all of his military division, so long as he could communicate with it, but it was my place to see that he had the means with which to hold his rear. Two divisions, under A. J. Smith, had been sent to Louisiana some months before. Sherman ordered these back with directions to attack Forrest."xvii
General Sherman, who on the 23d of May addressed the governors of Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin, calling for militia to be sent to Memphis to co-operate with him in preventing Forrest and Lee from swinging over against his communicationsxviii was now more than ever upset. The anxiety which he felt is shown in a dispatch to General Thomas dated June 9th, which says: "I cannot hear of Forrest, though I believe the expedition which left Memphis June 1st, composed of three thousand cavalry and five thousand infantry, will give him good employment." Again, on the 13th to Halleck, he insists that "there are troops enough in Tennessee to watch Forrest, should he make his appearance there, as Johnston doubtless calculates."
Stanton, Secretary of War, on June 14th telegraphed General Sherman that he had just received the report of the battle between Sturgis and Forrest, "in which our forces were defeated with great loss. Washburn estimates our loss at not less than three thousand. Forrest is in pursuit."xix
Sherman replied that he had just received the same news of the defeat of Sturgis, "whose chief object was to hold Forrest there to keep him off our road. Of course it is to be deplored, but we must prepare for all contingencies. I have ordered A. J. Smith not to go to Mobile, but to go to Memphis and defeat Forrest at all cost. Forrest has only his cavalry; I cannot understand how he could defeat Sturgis with eight thousand men."
On the 15th he adds to Stanton:
I will have the matter of Sturgis critically examined, and if he should be at fault he shall have no mercy at my hands. I cannot but believe he had troops enough. I know I would have been willing to attempt the same task with that force; but Forrest is the devil, and I think he has got some of our troops under cower. I have two officers at Memphis who will fight all the time
: A. J. Smith and Mower. The latter is a young brigadier of fine promise, and I commend him to your notice. I will order them to make up a force and go out to follow Forrest to the death, if it costs ten thousand lives and breaks the Treasury. There will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead!
And with an evident air of satisfaction this bloody-minded warrior closes this dispatch by saying: "We killed Bishop Polk yesterday and have made good progress to-day."xx
The disturbance of the various plans of campaign which were then in operation as the result of this victory of Forrest's is further shown from General McPherson's dispatch to General Dodge on the 15th of June saying that, on account of the defeat of Sturgis by Forrest, Colonel Howe would remain at Decatur with his brigade until further orders.
Sherman, on the 16th of June, dispatched Stanton that he would send as large a force as he could get on Forrest's trail and harass him and the counties through which he passed. "We must destroy him if possible." On the 20th of this month he telegraphed to Rousseau, at Nashville, that he had determined to wait to see what Forrest would do, adding: "I propose to keep him occupied from Memphis. He whipped Sturgis fair and square, and now I have got against him A. J. Smith and Mower, and will let them try their hands."
At the close of this campaign, on the 28th of June, General Forrest issued an address to his soldiers, recapitulating their achievements in the defeat of William Sooy Smith, the successful expedition into west Tennessee, with the capture of Union City and Fort Pillow, and the overthrow of Sturgis's command at Tishomingo Creek.
While these were triumphs of which any general might well feel a great and just pride, between the lines of this eloquent address one can recognize the cleverness of the diplomatist. Lauding to the skies their past performances, this skillful leader of men no doubt intended to stimulate his soldiers to further effort under his command.
It has a touch of the old-fashioned Fourth of July oratory which was in vogue in the Southern States in the period preceding the Civil War. General Forrest was remarkable for his ready command of language. This address, as well as all of his reports and addresses, was dictated by him to Major Charles W. Anderson, or some other member of his staff.
Major Anderson states that often after the first draft of a report or address was made it would be read over to the general, who, although a man of limited education, would not only quickly detect a grammatical error, but would criticize and correct a phrase improperly constructed. His usual remark was, "That hasn't got the right pitch."
"Headquarters Forrest's Cavalry,
"Tupelo, Mississippi, June 28, 1864.
"SOLDIERS,After a long and laborious campaign, the major-general commanding deems it an appropriate occasion to address you a few words of recapitulation, acknowledgment, and congratulation. About the 15th of February last the campaign which so gloriously terminated at Tishomingo Creek was inaugurated. Major-General Sherman, with a large and well appointed army, undertook to penetrate the central counties of Alabama and Mississippi. His object was avowedly to capture Selma and Mobile, and to desolate that productive region of country from which the granaries of a large section of the Confederacy were supplied. Generals Smith and Grierson had their duties assigned them, and were to act a conspicuous part in the work of spoliation and piracy. With a large co-operating cavalry force, thoroughly armed and equipped, they were to descend through northern Mississippi, carrying fire and sword with them. On they came like a blighting sirocco. At West Point you met them. There you threw yourselves across the right prairies, a living bulwark, to stay the desolating tide. Compared with the enemy, you were but few in numbers, but every man became a hero, for all seemed impressed with the importance of the momentous struggle. You proved yourselves equal to the expectations of the country. You met the proud and exultant enemy. The result is known to the world; you drove him howling back in ignominy and shame, broken and demoralized. Sherman's campaign was thus brought to an abrupt conclusion, and Mississippi and Alabama saved. The victory was a glorious one, and with heartfelt pride the general commanding acknowledges your unexampled gallantry. This great work was accomplished by Colonel Bell's brigade, commanded by Colonel Barteau, Colonel McCulloch's and Colonel Forrest's brigades. But great as was this victory, it is not without its alloy. The laurel is closely entwined with the cypress, and the lustre of a brilliant triumph is darkened by the blood with which it was purchased. It was here that Colonel Barksdale gave up his life, a willing sacrifice, upon the altar of his country. He fell in front of the battle, gallantly discharging his duty. He sleeps but his name is imperishable. Here, too, fell the noble brother of the general commanding, Colonel Jeffrey E. Forrest. He was a brave and chivalrous spirit, ever foremost in the fight. He fell in the flower of his youth and usefulness, but his dying gaze was proudly turned upon the victorious field which his own valor had aided in winning. Peace to the ashes of these gallant young heroes.
"After a short repose you were called to a new theatre of action. By long and rapid marches, which you endured without murmur or complaint, you found yourselves upon the waters of the Ohio, sweeping the enemy before you wherever you met him, capturing hundreds of prisoners, valuable and needed stores in the quartermaster's and ordnance departments, while securing for yourselves a character for endurance, valor, and efficiency which might well excite the envy of the most famous legions in military history. At Fort Pillow you exhibited the same conspicuous gallantry. In the face of a murderous fire from two gunboats and six pieces of artillery on the fort, you stormed the works and either killed or captured the entire garrison, a motley herd of negroes, traitors, and Yankees. This noble work was accomplished by parts of Chalmer's and Buford's divisions, composed of Bell's and McCulloch's brigades, commanded by Brigadier-General Chalmers; and for his gallantry on this and other occasions General Chalmers deserves the enduring gratitude of his countrymen. For the exhibitions of high soldiery bearing on these fields you have earned from your country and its government the most grateful and well-deserved plaudits. Congress has voted you complimentary resolutions of thanks and tendered you a nation's homage.
"But the crowning glory of your great deeds has yet to be named. Tishomingo Creek is the brightest leaf in your chaplet of laurel. General Grierson, not satisfied with his test of your prowess, united with General Sturgis at the head of one of the best-appointed forces ever equipped by the Yankee nationcomplete in infantry, cavalry, artillery, and supply-trains. They came forth with threats of vengeance towards you and your commander for the bloody victory of Fort Pillow, made a massacre only by dastardly Yankee reporters. Again you responded bravely to your general's call. You met the enemy and defeated him. Victory was never more glorious, disaster never more crushing and signal. From a proud and defiant foe, en route to the heart of your country, with declarations both by negro and white troops of 'no quarter to Forrest or his men,' he became an enemy beaten, defeated, routed, destroyed. You drove the boasted minions of despotism in confused flight from the battlefield. Seventeen guns, 250 wagons, 3,000 stand of arms, 2,000 prisoners, and killed and wounded 2,000 more are the proud trophies which adorn your triumphant banners. The remainder is still wandering in the bushes and bottoms, forever lost to the enemy. There were not over three thousand of you who achieved this victory over ten thousand of the enemy. Had you never before raised an arm in your country's cause, this terrible overthrow of her brutal foe would entitle you to her deepest gratitude. Again your general expresses his pride and admiration of your gallantry and wonderful achievements. You stand before the world an unconquerable band of heroes. Whether dismounted, and fighting shoulder to shoulder like infantry veterans, or hurling your irresistible squadrons on the flying foe, you evinced the same courageous bravery.
"Soldiers! amid your rejoicing do not forget the gallant dead upon these field of glory. Many a noble comrade has fallen, a costly sacrifice to his country's independence. The most you can do is to cherish their memory and strive to make the future as glorious as you and they have made the past.
"To Brigadier-General Buford, commanding division, my obligations are especially due. His gallantry and activity on the field were ever conspicuous, and for the energy displayed in pursuing the enemy he deserves much of his government. He has abundant cause to be proud of his brigade commanders, Colonels Lyon and Bell, who displayed great gallantry during the day. Colonel E. W. Rucker was prompt in the discharge of every duty. His brigade displayed conspicuous steadiness during the fight. Colonel W. A. Johnson, commanding brigade from General Roddey's command, merits notice for his coolness and bravery on this occasion, and for the valuable services rendered by his troops. Nor can the general commanding forget to mention the efficient aid rendered by the artillery, commanded by Captain John W. Morton. He moved rapidly over the roughest ground and was always in action at the right time, and his well-directed fire dealt destruction in the masses of the enemy. The general commanding also takes pleasure in noticing the intelligent alacrity with which Major C. W. Anderson, Captain W. H. Brand, Lieutenants Otey, Donelson, Titus, and Galloway, of my staff, conveyed order to all parts of the field. They were ever near my person, and were prompt in the discharge of every duty. Soldiers! you have done much, but there is still work for you to do. By prompt obedience to orders and patient endurance you will be enabled to repeat these great achievements. The enemy is again preparing to break through the living wall erected by your noble bosoms and big hearts. In the name and recollections of ruined homes, desolated fields, and the bleaching bones of your martyred comrades, you are appealed to again. The smoke of your burning homesteads, the screams of your insulted women, the cries of starving children will again nerve your strong arms with strength. Your fathers of '76 had much to fight for, but how little and unimportant was their cause compared with yours. They fought not against annihilation, but simply to be independent of a foreign yet a constitutional and free government. You are struggling against the most odious of all tyranny, for existence itself, for your property, your homes, your wives and children, against your own enslavement, against emancipation, confiscation, and subjugation, with all their attendant horrors.
"In conclusion, your commanding general congratulates you on the brilliant prospects which everywhere pervade our cause. The independence of the Confederate States is a fixed, accomplished, immutable fact. The ray of peace is glimmering like bright sunshine around the dark clouds. Be true to yourselves and your country a little while longer and you will soon be enabled to return to your desolate homes, there to collect together once more your scattered household gods.
"By order of Major-General N. B. Forrest.
"C. W. Anderson, Assistant Adjutant-General."xxi
i John Allan Wyeth, M.D., Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1899), 402-429; reprint, That Devil Forrest, Life of General Nathan Bedford Forrest (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
ii Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. iv. p. 420.
iii Ibid.
iv Official Records, vol. xxxix. part i. p. 132.
v Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. iv. p. 420.
vi Diary of Colonel C. R. Barteau, in possession of the author.
vii Official Records, vol. xxxix. part i. p. 119.
viii Official Records, vol. xxxix. part i. p. 92.
ix Manuscripts in possession of the author.
x Official Records, vol. xxxix. part i. p. 171.
xi James Moran, a mere lad, who was badly wounded, when told by Captain Morton to go to the hospital, replied: "Captain, I don't want to go; I can stand it until we run 'em away."
xii Whip and Spur.
xiii Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, vol. iv.
xiv Whip and Spur.
xv Official Records, vol. xxxix. part i. p. 120.
xvi Ibid. p. 95.
xvii Memoirs of U. S. Grant, vol. ii. p. 306.
xviii Official Records, vol. xxxviii. part iv.
xix Ibid. p. 474.
xx Ibid. p. 480.
xxi Official Records, Series I. vol. xxxix. p. 228.
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - My camp, Secession Camp 4, hosted the SCV Annual Reunion in July and I was honored to speak at a fine dinner on the first night.
Below, is the text I spoke from, which was originally printed in 16 point type. All 39 endnotes are included below, though were not mentioned in the talk. I had capitalized certain words throughout for speaking emphasis and left them capitalized.
The United Confederate Veterans had held their Ninth Reunion in Charleston May 10-13, 1899, and our July 16-20, 2024 SCV Reunion was its proud descendant.]
Good evening and WELCOME to God's Holy City of Charleston, South Carolina, where the Ashley and Cooper Rivers come together to FORM the Atlantic Ocean!
It's also where the FIRST Ordinance of Secession passed 169 - 0 on December 20, 1860, and where our great War for Southern Independence started a few weeks later, on April 12, 1861!
My name is Gene Kizer, Jr. of Charleston Athenaeum Press, member of Secession Camp No. 4, author of several books including: Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument.
It's AN HONOR to talk to you this evening about one of the most important battles of the War Between the States, the Battle of Secessionville.
First, let me say that you could not be in a more enchanting place than right here in Charleston! Last week Travel + Leisure magazine announced the results of their annual survey and they awarded Charleston the TOP DESTINATION to visit in our entire country for the 12th consecutive year.
Here is what the Post and Courier wrote July 10th:
Charleston . . . edged out Santa Fe, N.M., for the top U.S. spot, with the 'unbeatable' dining scene mentioned as a key factor. . . . [also] sights, landmarks, culture, cuisine, friendliness, shopping and overall value. . . . One reader said Charleston could 'compete with any European capital for its arts, entertainment, active lifestyle and food.'
Charleston was also the only place in the United States "named among the 25 best cities in the world."
So plan on enjoying every second of your visit to the city that Lord Proprietor Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, called his "Little Darling!"
There are some folks here from the organization Defend Arlington who, along with the SCV, fought HARD this past year-and-a-half to keep the Confederate Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. The monument was removed late last December in the most DISHONORABLE, DISGRACEFUL ACT in American history.
Its removal has DEFILED the graves of 518 Confederate soldiers and family that are arranged in concentric circles out from the former monument and it has DESECRATED Arlington National Cemetery itself.
Those Confederate graves were invited into Arlington National Cemetery by President William McKinley, a former Union soldier, as part of the reconciliation of our country after the War Between the States. Their placement in Arlington was approved by Congress, and several contemporary presidents participated in the establishment of the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial.
A century of other presidents sent annual memorial wreaths including Barack Obama.
Veterans, North and South, spoke at its dedication.
The removal of the Confederate Monument has added greatly to our military recruiting crisis since traditionally, 44% of the United States military is recruited in the South where Confederate ancestors and military service are revered.
Of course the American military is inspired by examples of valor, especially when it comes from the blood of ancestors, which is the SAME blood coursing through OUR veins.
Men like Audie Murphy of Texas, the most highly decorated American soldier of World War II, whose grandfather was a Confederate soldier.
I could go on all day with examples like Nathan Bedford Forrest, III, who joined the United States Army Air Force in World War II and rose to the rank of Brigadier-General. He was killed in action over the North Sea after a bombing raid in Germany in September, 1943.
In the War Between the States, there was no greater valor in the history of the world than that displayed by Confederate soldiers. Historian James McPherson writes in his book, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam:
[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.i
I want to read that again:
[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.ii
Think about that.
The presidents supporting the Confederate Monument started with McKinley who, right after the Spanish American War set the stage: (QUOTE)
. . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and South prompts this gracious act and if it needed further justification it is found in the gallant loyalty to the Union and the flag so conspicuously shown this past year by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.
President William Howard Taft spoke and was warmly received at the UDC ceremony the evening the cornerstone was laid.
President Woodrow Wilson gave the dedication address June 4, 1914.iii
President Theodore Roosevelt sent the first memorial wreath that started an annual tradition.
President Warren G. Harding sent a long message of condolence that was read at the funeral of the monument's acclaimed Jewish sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, who was a VMI Confederate soldier. Here is an excerpt published Wednesday, March 30, 1921:
Every line and curve and expression carries the plea for a truly united nation that may be equal to the burdens of these exacting times. It speaks to us the ardent wish, the untiring purpose, to help make our people one people, secure in independence, dedicated to freedom . . . Its long-drawn shadows of earliest morn and latest evening will always fall on sacred soil. . . .
That soil is not sacred today.
It has been desecrated by hypocrite Elizabeth Warren, fake Indian from Massachusetts, whose Boston, in 1862, DURING the War Between the States, was the SLAVE TRADING CAPITAL of the earth along with New York according to W. E. B. Du Bois.
New England had been slave trading just about the entire existence of the country. Much of the infrastructure of Old New England was built by profits from the slave trade.
In 1862, when Du Bois wrote about it, Boston and New York had been slave trading ILLEGALLY for 54 years since the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution in 1808.
But in 1862, Boston and New York were the slave trading capitals of the earth.
We can not allow Arlington National Cemetery to remain desecrated. The Confederate Reconciliation Memorial must be restored.
It is clear that Elizabeth Warren, Ty Seidule of the naming commission who submitted a historically fraudulent report on the Confederate Memorial, have hurt military recruiting.
Go by and talk to Defend Arlington in the vendor's area and join the fight. They have some great items including commemorative coins and medals. I'm wearing one here that says Deo Vindice, the Latin phrase on the Great Seal of the Confederacy.
The Battle of Secessionville took place exactly 162 years and one month ago today, on June 16, 1862.
It is one of the most important battles in the War Between the States. It kept the Yankees out of Charleston in mid-1862 and, had Charleston fallen then, it unquestionably would have changed the course of the war and of American history.
The battle site at Fort Lamar Heritage Preserve on James Island, which is on the way to Folly Beach, is well preserved though somewhat grown up. You can still walk all around it and see the front parapet of the earthen battery where bloody hand-to-hand combat took place.
It is the second most historic site in South Carolina, second only to Fort Sumter. You can do a Google search and pull up directions. Your GPS will get you there.
Brigadier General Johnson Hagood, in charge of Confederate Advanced Forces in the battle as a colonel, wrote after the war that the Battle of Secessionville was "one of the DECISIVE engagements of the war."iv
The battle covered Charleston in GLORY for all time because it was one of the most savagely fought battles despite smaller numbers of troops engaged. A Confederate soldier IN the battle, R. deTreville Lawrence of Marietta, Georgia wrote in Confederate Veteran magazine:
Many years after, I met at the Confederate Home of Georgia, a Mr. Jordan, who had been in the engagement in the battery, and subsequently in a number of battles in Virginia, and he told me that the one at Secessionville was the closest and hardest fought of any.v
Many of the defenders were native Charlestonians. The prize being fought over - magnificent Charleston - which the North hated and wanted to conquer as bad as Richmond, made the stakes astronomical.
Charleston was important to both sides as a symbol, since both secession and the war had started here, but it was also a critical Confederate port for shipping cotton and importing arms, and it was a vital railroad connection to the rest of the South.
Charleston was NOT CONQUERED in the War Between the States, despite the South being outnumbered four to one and massively outgunned.
The brand new Confederate States of America was up against what distinguished historian Paul Kennedy said was "an economic giant" and what became QUOTE "the greatest military nation on earth before its post-1865 demobilization."vi
But there was NO military surrender in Charleston.
In February 1865, Confederate authorities ordered Charleston's defenders to evacuate the UNCONQUERED city and head off to other battlefields to continue the war. Charleston was turned over to the Union Army by a city alderman.vii
B. A. O. Norris of Graham Texas, a member of the Confederate 1st South Carolina Regiment who was in action in Charleston, said in Confederate Veteran magazine after the war:
I think I am right when I state that this was the only place besieged that DID NOT YIELD to the forces besieging it. It was stronger and abler to repel any attack on the day that it was evacuated than ever before.viii
Some 750,000 died and over a million were maimed in the War Between the States. The industrial North with its enormous shipping and manufacturing capability had unlimited resources.ix There were dozens of marine engine factories in the North, ZERO in the South. Toward the end, Gen. Robert E. Lee's sick, emaciated horses could barely pull the artillery, so, OFTEN, he was not able to factor it into battle plans.
Confederate cavalry horses were fed on ONE-TENTH what Yankee horses were fed,x and Confederate soldiers were often hungry and ragged while the Union Army, of which 25% was FOREIGN BORN, was always well fed, well clothed and well armed.
The South, with 100% control of King Cotton, threatened the North's economic domination. Secession meant no more Southern tariff money for Northern industry, but more importantly, it meant that that same money would now be turned inward on the South to grow its own industries. Southerners were as driven to succeed and make money as Northerners but the enormous success of Southern agriculture kept the focus on that, and not industrializing, until the late antebellum period. Per capita income in the South and North was roughly equal.
Southerners had long been supplying the federal treasury with most of its revenue. Cotton alone, in 1860, was 62% of American exports and that was before adding in other Southern commodities. The world's economy in 1860 was plantation based and agricultural. Southerners were producing the wealth of the country yet three-fourths of the federal treasury was being spent in the North. The most prominent national economist in 1860 was Thomas Prentice Kettell. He proves that the South was producing the wealth of the country in his famous book, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits.xi
Without the North, the South had a shining future able to buy better, lower-priced, non-tariffed goods from Europe and to start manufacturing for itself.
Southerners believed in free trade, and established in the Confederate Constitution a low tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States Rights nation.
They also made protective tariffs UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and they prohibited spending money out of the federal treasury for internal improvements in individual states.
Confederates believed if a state wanted to spend money, good, spend it yourself. Same with slavery. It was not required and Southerners encouraged free states to join the Confederacy.
That petrified Lincoln, of course.
Without the South, the North was dead.
It would lose its manufacturing and shipping markets overnight. Great Britain was the greatest manufacturing country on earth in the antebellum era, not the North. The North grew to great wealth and power manufacturing mostly for the South and shipping Southern agricultural products.
Southerners had great warm water ports and the Mississippi. They had a great trade relationship with Great Britain. They did not need the North and were sick of New England hatred and hypocrisy, just like we, today, are sick of fake Indian Elizabeth Warren's hatred and hypocrisy.
The South was an integrated, bi-racial society. It was in the South's best interest to end slavery with good will and help for newly freed slaves.
Most blacks knew that they were HATED in the North. Several Northern and Western states had laws prohibiting blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.
Alexis de Tocqueville made it clear in Democracy in America that despite slavery, race relations were better in the South than anywhere in the country. He said they were WORST in New England.
It was not ending slavery that caused the war, but the North's desire for economic domination of our country with all the Western lands and markets WAITING to be conquered and exploited. Lincoln and Northern leaders knew of their enormous advantages at that point in history, not just their population and pipeline of poor immigrants from Europe to serve in their armies, but their ability to manufacture rifles, cannons, ammunition, uniforms, saddles, ships, etc.
Paul Kennedy writes:
In 1860 the North possessed 110,000 manufacturing establishments to the South's 18,000; the Confederacy produced only 36,700 tons of pig iron, whereas Pennsylvania's total alone was 580,000 tons; New York State manufactured almost $300 million worth of goods--well over four times the production of Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi combined. This staggering disparity in the economic base of each belligerent steadily transformed itself into real military effectiveness.xii
Lincoln was a man 40 feet tall armed to the teeth with modern weaponry facing a man five feet tall carrying a musket.
Of course Lincoln was going to goad the South into a fight so he could use his enormous advantages. That why he did not remove his troops from Fort Sumter in Charleston, and Fort Pickens near Pensacola, Florida.
By April, 1861, with the Confederacy getting stronger every day and the Union facing massive economic problems, Lincoln sent five military missions into the South to get the war started.xiii
He had lied to Confederates for months and misled his own commander in Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson, implying that he was soon going to remove the fort's garrison and disarm the explosive situation in the country.
When Anderson was informed by letter dated April 4, 1861 from Secretary of War Simon Cameron that he would be resupplied and possibly reinforced, he knew immediately what that meant.
He wrote back to Cameron and said he had been strongly assured that Fort Sumter would be evacuated and QUOTE "a movement made now, when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country."
Anderson ended with:
We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.xiv
Anderson SEES that the war is to be THUS COMMENCED by Abraham Lincoln.
Several Northern newspapers agreed with Anderson including the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post that wrote the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter: "We are to have civil war . . . because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to INAUGURATE CIVIL WAR without appearing in the character of an aggressor."xv
The directives to defend Charleston were clear.
Gen. Lee summed it all up when he wrote in early 1862 to Maj. Gen. John C. Pemberton, then in command of the area, and said that the city is QUOTE "to be fought street by street and house by house as long as we have a foot of ground to stand upon."xvi
Both sides realized that James Island was the key to taking Charleston so by 1862, Confederates had tightened their lines. They evacuated the area around Stono Inlet and the mouth of the Stono River except for pickets, and built a battery near the little community of Secessionville, approximately two miles further inland.
The Secessionville community was so named, not because of anything to do with secession from the Union, but, as legend has it, because a group of younger planters seceded from the older planters and built summer homes there.
John Johnson in his great book The Defense of Charleston Harbor, writes that the battery on the Secessionville peninsula was Col. L. M. Hatch's idea "who also constructed it with the labor of his regiment of Rifles."xvii
It was strategically chosen because little Secessionville is at the seaward end of a peninsula shaped like an oblong hourglass and flanked by saltwater pluff mud creeks. Hatch chose the narrowest part of the hourglass, which was only 125 yards across, for his battery. A 75 foot observation tower was built, so the battery became known as Tower Battery.
Most of James Island was cleared for agriculture so an observer could climb the tower with field glasses and see all over the entire area including the mouth of the Stono River.
Confederates built a defensive line of batteries across James Island from Battery Pringle on the Stono River to Tower Battery.
Further up the Stono near Wappoo Cut in today's Riverland Terrace, was powerful Fort Pemberton.
Tower Battery was a mile in advance of the main Confederate line.
A FOOTBRIDGE was constructed perhaps a mile across the marsh to connect the main Confederate line with Secessionville. The footbridge was capable of men and horses and was far enough back that it was protected from Yankee shelling, though they tried to hit it during the battle. Confederate reinforcements stepping off the footbridge had a straight sprint 600 yards into the back of Tower Battery.
This was a brilliant bit of planning that won the battle for the South. Badly outnumbered Confederates received JUST enough reinforcements across the footbridge in JUST the nick of time to turn the tide of the battle.
When the battle began, it was 6,600 Yankees against 300 Confederates later reinforced to a grand total of 750, yet the Yankees were soundly beaten by those 750 Confederates and suffered 683 casualties compared to 204 Confederate.xviii
The priest-cap design of the front of the fort was two redans, side by side, so together they looked like the letter "M." Imagine a giant M in front of you then push it forward onto the ground. That's what the front of the fort looked like. It was as high as 16 feet in some places with a ditch fronting the walls. That design forced attackers into the center of the M so defenders could shoot an enfilading fire on them from both sides.
Two other two-gun batteries were positioned a mile away to enfilade the approach to Tower Battery. The two batteries were extremely effective in the battle enfilading attackers in the front of the fort and later pouring fire into the Third New Hampshire after it took up a position across Simpson's Creek.xix
The ground was already difficult for attacking troops because it was farmland and had furrows every foot or so.
The approach to the fort narrowed steadily as it got closer to Tower Battery, which would slow an attacker's advance and make it hard to maneuver. Confederates had also felled trees and used abattis, and dug a huge ditch across the front approach so that attacking troops would be bunched together and perfect targets for grapeshot and canister.
Another big part of Charleston's defenses was the Charleston and Savannah Railroad. It's tracks ran along today's West Ashley Greenway, which is a long linear park for running and walking. Confederates never had enough men so whichever city needed men, the other was to send them on the Charleston and Savannah Railroad.
A hundred miles of track had to be defended the entire war and it WAS despite being attacked constantly by Union troops including the day before the battle. Robert E. Lee himself had designed much of its defenses.
Tower Battery was armed with one 8" Columbiad in the center flanked by two 24 pound rifled cannons. On each side of the fort were two 18 pounders. There was one mortar, which was further back. A magazine, bomb proof and rifle pits were in that area too.
From early on, Tower Battery shelled everything that moved at the mouth of the Stono River. No question that this constant shelling gave the artillerists great skill with their guns.
The Yankees landed June 2nd and tried to set up a secure camp at the mouth of the Stono but between mosquitoes and Confederate fire, could not do it. They knew they had to destroy Tower Battery or leave the area.
The Battle of Secessionville took place Monday, June 16, 1862 before dawn on a dark, drizzly morning. The earthen fort was not finished despite feverish activity around the clock and between artillery barrages.
Sunrise was 5:14 a.m. but three hours before that, at 2 a.m., 3,500 Union troops formed the first of two columns, and 3,100 formed the second. Attackers were to "advance in silence and make the attack at 'first light' with the bayonet."xx
There were around 300 Confederates in the fort at the time. Col. Thomas G. Lamar was in command and had pushed his men to exhaustion. He had allowed them to sleep at 3 a.m., but not for long.
Four Confederate pickets at the Rivers House were surprised and captured around 4 a.m. by the Yankee Forlorn Hope companies but not before getting a handful of shots off and drawing Yankee blood.
Other winded Confederate pickets made it and alerted Tower Battery.
Sgt. James M. Baggett fired a 24 pounder and a split second later Col. Lamar fired the Columbiad. The roar of the guns sprung the garrison to life as grape tore into the oncoming Yankees a hundred yards away.
This was 4:30 a.m., 45 minutes before sunrise, and the Battle of Secessionville was ON.xxi
A number of Yankees reached the parapet and fought hand-to-hand with Confederate defenders despite a "devastating fire from the thoroughly aroused garrison . . . of grape, cannister, chain, nails, and broken glass."
Milby Burton writes in The Siege of Charleston:
The Eighth Michigan fell back and re-formed; around 5:10 with the aid of the Second Brigade they charged under fire for 1000 yards, assaulted the works, and again gained a foothold. After more fierce hand-to-hand fighting, they were again pushed back.xxii
The Yankee perspective tells us the most about the devastating effectiveness of the Southerners. Confederate Major-General Samuel Jones in his 1911 book The Siege of Charleston, writes:
While the regiments of the leading brigade were forming forward into line in double-quick time a storm of grape and canister from the Confederate guns crashed through the center of the line and continued tearing through the ranks with great rapidity, severing the line, . . .xxiii
Union Lt. Col. Frank Graves writes:
Still the regiment moved rapidly on, preserving their order and leaving the ground in their rear strewn with their dead and wounded, and did not stop until they gained the parapet and delivered their fire upon the enemy in his works.xxiv
In brutal hand-to-hand fighting, Confederates drove them from the parapet. They withdrew "and, being unsupported for a considerable time, they fell back slowly, contesting every inch of ground" while under fire. They scattered after losing many officers.xxv
The Yankee regiments became tangled up with each other then:
QUOTE - When within two or three hundred yards of the Confederate works the Seventh Connecticut 'came obliquely upon an unforeseen ditch and morass,' crowding and doubling up the regiment toward the center. At this moment a terrific fire of grape and musketry swept through the ranks. 'The line was inevitably broken,' . . .xxvi
The Twenty-eighth Massachusetts advanced but the regiment in front of it fell back and threw it into confusion. The way was also blocked by a fallen tree and "an impassable marsh . . . and abattis of dense brush . . .".xxvii
At the same time, "the Seventy-ninth Highlanders, leading the Second Brigade, was ordered to the right to assail the work." It was led by Lt. Col. David Morrison who writes that, as he gained the parapet:
I received a wound in the head, which, though slight, stunned me for the time being; but still I was able to retain command. With me many mounted the works, but only to fall or to receive their wounds from the enemy, posted in rifle-pits in rear of the fort. . . . From the ramparts I had a full view of their works. They were entrenched in a position well selected for defensive purposes and upon which our artillery seemed to have little effect, save driving them into their retreats, and in attempting to dislodge them we were met with a fierce and determined opposition, but with equal if not superior determination and courage were they met by our forces, and had I been supported could have carried their works, . . . for we virtually had it in our possession.xxviii
Morrison was ordered to fall back and said he QUOTE "did in good order, leaving behind about forty killed or badly wounded, many of whom fell on the ramparts. I brought back with me six killed and about sixty wounded."
Union Col. Daniel Leasure, Brigade Commander, rushed forward with his staff to lead another assault. They got to within three hundred yards of the Confederate works when:
QUOTE We entered the range of a perfect storm of grape, canister, nails, broken glass, and pieces of chains, fired from three very large pieces on the fort, which completely swept every foot of ground within the range, and either cut the men down or drove them to the shelter of the ravine on the left. I now turned to look after and lead up the One Hundredth Pennsylvania Regiment and found its center just entering the fatal line of fire, which completely cut it in two . . . xxix
He adds that the Eighth Michigan, which had led the attack, had been decimated QUOTE "by the murderous fire through which we all had to pass."xxx
They were also hit by friendly fire from their own artillery and gunboats.
The Third New Hampshire and Third Rhode Island were across what was then known as Simpson's Creek, on the right hand side of the Confederate defenders on the parapet. Those two Yankee units had advanced so far forward that they were behind the fort and started pouring fire into the back of the fort causing the Confederate artillerists on the parapet to abandon their guns and pick up their rifles. This was around 5:25 a.m.
Union Colonel John H. Jackson, regiment commander, wrote that "he found no artillery on that part of the Confederates works" and could have easily gone into the fort: QUOTE
If . . . I could have crossed a stream between me and the earthworks about twenty yards in width, with apparently four or five feet of water, and the mud very soft; the men therefore could not cross. The enemy soon opened on me from a battery about two hundred yards in our rear, throwing grape into the ranks, from which we suffered severely. In a short time they opened fire with rifles and infantry. At the same time a battery about a mile north of us opened on us with shot and shell.xxxi
Col. Jackson apparently never heard of pluff mud but Confederate Col. L. M. Hatch who designed the fort, sure had.
Jackson saw reinforcements, the Fourth Louisiana Battalion of Colonel J. McEnery, around 260 men, advancing over the footbridge and into Secessionville then into the back of Tower Battery. Those reinforcements had given the Confederates their largest number of defenders during the battle, which was around 750. The battle had started with 300 Confederates in the fort up against 6,600 Yankees.
Here is an account by a soldier IN the Fourth Louisiana Battalion, H. J. Lea of Winnsboro, Louisiana, who had advanced across the footbridge:
I was a member of Capt. J. W. Walker's company, which enlisted and went out from Monroe, Louisiana March 2, 1862. We went to Savannah, Ga. and there were attached to and made part of the 4th Louisiana Battalion, commanded by Col. John McEnery. . . .
At the break of day on the morning of the 16th, firing was heard up in the front of the fort, the alarm given and the long roll beat. The line was quickly formed with orders to march in double-quick time. . . . Just before the head of our line reached the fort, the Yankee regiment, having formed on the opposite side of [Simpson's] Creek, about one hundred yards distant, opened fire on us. We were ordered to halt, face to the right, and fire. This continued but a short time; the storming party in front was crowding in and we were ordered to face to the left and rush to the fort, where the Yankees were scrambling for the top of the parapets crowding forward in great numbers with a desperate determination to capture the fort. We arrived just at the critical moment; a few minutes later would have been too late. They were repulsed, routed, and fled in the same quick time that they came, with our rifles and artillery playing on them to the extreme range.
It seemed that every man there in defense of the fort felt as though the whole responsibility of holding the fort rested on him for it would have been impossible for any force of the same size to have done more. As soon as the storming party in front gave way and fled, the flanking party across the creek also fled hurriedly, for had they remained, even for a short time, they would have been cut off and captured or killed.xxxii
Lea goes on in great detail outlining the gallant career of the Fourth Louisiana then he ends with:
General Lee's army surrendered April 9, and General Johnston's a few days later, and, other organizations rapidly following, the Confederate government merged into history. I have not been back since, but remain an unreconstructed Confederate.xxxiii
ME TOO, Brother Lea.
To sum it up:
It was 6,600 Yankees against 300 Confederates who were reinforced to a grand total of 750, so 750 Confederates with their guts and ingenious Col. Hatch's fort and footbridge, defeated the Union Army's 6,600 soldiers and the Union Navy's armada of gunboats on the Stono River.
The Yankees had 683 casualties with 107 dead.
Confederates had 204 casualties with 52 dead, most of them the troops who defended the guns on the parapet and fought hand-to-hand with the Yankees.
Most of the Union dead were buried in a mass grave somewhere near Tower Battery.
Yankees learned their lesson and left James Island within two weeks with their commander, Brigadier General Henry W. Benham, under arrest.
As stated, Charleston was NEVER CONQUERED but stronger on the day it was evacuated than ever before.
During the battle, Col. Thomas G. Lamar was wounded in the neck and passed command to Lieutenant Colonel Peter C. Gaillard who soon was wounded in the knee. He passed command to Lt. Col. T. M. Wagner.
Wagner was killed the next year when a gun exploded at Fort Moultrie so, in his honor, an important battery on Morris Island was named Battery Wagner. It was where another Confederate victory against a much larger Yankee force took place: the battle featured in the movie Glory.
Tower Battery was renamed Fort Lamar in honor of Col. Thomas G. Lamar, Tower Battery's commander. Today's Fort Lamar Road cuts right through the original fort on its way to the original community of Secessionville.
Colonel Johnson Hagood, commanding the Advanced Forces, was instrumental in the victory because there were no Confederate generals directly involved. Hagood, later governor of South Carolina and for whom the football stadium of his alma mater, The Citadel, is named, wrote a report on the Battle of Secessionville June 18, 1862.xxxiv
Hagood received the following commendation from Brigadier-General William Duncan Smith:
Headquarters James Island,
June 22, 1862Colonel Hagood, Commanding Advanced Line, East Division, James Island:
Colonel,--In the absence of General Evans, first in command on the 16th instant, allow me to thank you for your distinguished services on that day, and through you to thank Colonel Stevens, Colonel Simonton and the other gallant officers and men under your command, for their noble and gallant service at that time. Please make known my views to your command.
Very respectfully, sir, your obedient servant,
Wm. Duncan Smith,
Brigadier-General Commanding.xxxv
Warren Ripley writes in Siege Train, The Journal of a Confederate Artilleryman in the Defense of Charleston:
. . . just as the Southerners had discovered the power of the U.S. Navy at Port Royal, Fort Lamar taught the Yankees a valuable lesson - don't tangle with the Confederate Army beyond protective range of the warships' guns. These two principles were to color military thinking in the Charleston area for the remainder of the war.xxxvi
Milby Burton writes:
When the news of the repulse of the Federal forces reached Charleston, the citizens were elated, but when the casualty list arrived including the names of many Charlestonians, one commentator wrote: 'a Gloom has been cast over our City by the death of many fine young men.'xxxvii
After the battle, the Confederate Congress passed this resolution:
That the thanks of Congress are due and are hereby tendered to Colonel Thomas G. Lamar and the officers and men engaged in the gallant and successful defense of Secessionville against the greatly superior numbers of the enemy on the 16th day of June, 1862.xxxviii
Confederate soldier R. deTreville Lawrence also said after the battle:
The troops which had reinforced the command of General Gist on James Island were returned to their former stations on the coast and at Savannah, and the heroes of Secessionville were toasted on every hand.xxxix
Fort Lamar today, though battered by age, is still there in its entirety and much the way it was June 16, 1862. You will recognize the front parapet where so much hand-to-hand fighting took place, and know that behind it was the magazine, bombproof, observation tower and rifle pits where Confederates shot down Yankees that reached the parapet.
You can look down Fort Lamar Road toward the Secessionville community and imagine the 4th Louisiana advancing at double-quick across the footbridge over the marsh to Secessionville then into the back of Tower Battery in just the nick of time.
It is a beautiful and quiet place today. Go out there and walk those hallowed grounds and contemplate our magnificent Southern history then leave with an even greater determination to promote the TRUTH about it far and wide, and forever.
Thank you.
NOTES:
i Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.----James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3, 177 n. 56.
ii Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.----James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 3, 177 n. 56.
iii The fake news Washington Post covered up the fact that President Woodrow Wilson gave the dedication address at the Confederate Memorial's dedication, June 4, 1914. In their article "Majority of House GOP, including 3 Black Republicans, vote for failed Confederate memorial measure" by Gillian Brockell, June 14, 2024, all the Washington Post said was: "It was installed in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a ceremony attended by President Woodrow Wilson, who was noted even at the time for his racist view." The Washington Post is noted today for ITS racist, bigoted views in addition to its fake news as it proved by its malicious, fraudulent story against Covington Catholic High School's Nicholas Sandmann. Sandmann sued the Washington Post and other fake news outlets like CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. See "Washington Post settles lawsuit with family of Kentucky teenager" by Paul Farhi, July 24, 2020.
iv Johnson Hagood, Memoirs of the War of Secession, U.R. Brooks, ed. (Columbia, SC, 1910), 96.
v R. deTreville Lawrence, Marietta, Georgia, "In the Battle of Secessionville." Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXX, No. 11, November, 1922.
vi Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 178-182.
vii Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, (O.R.), LIII, 61, in E. Milby Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 319. Burton also used the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies extensively.
viii B.A.O. Norris, Graham, Texas, "Confederate Artillery Regiments." Confederate Veteran, Vol. XV, No. 12, Dec. 1907; Reprint: Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Publishing Co., 1987, 1988.
ix Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 178-182.
x Charles W. Ramsdell, "General Robert E. Lee's Horse Supply, 1862-1865" in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017), 250. The quotation is from the OR, ser. I, v XXIX, pt. 2, 664-665. See also the North's overwhelming advantage with the railroads, "Railroads In The Civil War: Facts and Statistics (North vs South)," https://www.american-rails.com/civil.html, accessed 3-23-21; and Charles W. Ramsdell, "The Confederate Government and the Railroads," in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, 300.
xi Thomas Prentice Kettell, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits as Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures: Showing the Necessity of Union to the Future Prosperity and Welfare of the Republic (New York: Geo. W. & John A. Wood, 1860; Reprint: University: University of Alabama Press, 1965).
xii Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 180.
xiii Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 142. The five military missions were: 1) the Welles-Fox Expedition, heading for Charleston; 2) the Rowan Expedition, also heading for Charleston; 3) Captain Adams' ships, lurking off Santa Rosa Island; 4) Colonel Brown's Expedition, heading for Pensacola; and 5) Porter's Expedition, also steaming for Pensacola.
xiv W. A. Swanberg, First Blood, The Story of Fort Sumter (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957), 280-282. Both Cameron's letter of April 4, 1861 to Anderson, and Anderson's reply to Cameron of April 8, 1861, that was intercepted by Confederate Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard in Charleston, are included.
xv "WHY?", Providence (R.I.) Daily Post, April 13, 1861.
xvi Official Records, (O.R.), XIV, 524, in Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 98.
xvii John Johnson, The Defense of Charleston Harbor Including Fort Sumter and the Adjacent Islands, 1863-1865. (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans & Cogswell Co., Publishers, 1890); Reprint: Germantown, Tennessee: Guild Bindery Press, 1994, Chapter 1, Note 1, 25.
xviii Two thousand Confederate reinforcements were to be sent but had not arrived when the battle began. John Johnson in his magisterial work, The Defense of Charleston Harbor, Including Fort Sumter and the Adjacent Island, 1863-1865., previously cited, writes: "Brigadier-General H. W. Benham . . . attacked the works at Secessionville with two divisions and a brigade (7000 men) early on the morning of June 16, 1862. The Confederates, under Colonel T. G. Lamar, Second South Carolina Artillery, were nearly surprised and worsted at the onset, but, resisting bravely and being reinforced to about 750 men, they successfully repelled four charges of the enemy, inflicting on them a disastrous repulse and a reported official loss of 683 men, the Confederate loss being 204, of which 32 were in the defense of the right by Brigadier-General Hagood."; Johnson Hagood wrote in his Memoirs of the War of Secession, previously cited, on page 96: "The Federals, by their own showing, had 6,000 men engaged and 1,500 in reserve (part of this reserve being the Third Rhode Island). Colonel Hagood might have found Hamilton's Battery on his flank had he advanced without first sending a force against the position first occupied by it. There were engaged on the Confederate side, in the fort and out of it, not exceeding 1,300 men, of which 450 were with Colonel Hagood."
xix Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 107.
xx Official Records, XIV, 524, in Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 105.
xxi Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 104-105.
xxii Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 106.
xxiii Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 104.
xxiv Ibid.
xxv Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 105.
xxvi Ibid.
xxvii Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 106.
xxviii Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 106-107.
xxix Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 108.
xxx Ibid.
xxxi Jones, The Siege of Charleston, 110.
xxxii H. J. Lea, Winnsboro, Louisiana. "The Fourth Louisiana Battalion at the Battle of Secessionville, S. C." Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXXI, No. 1, January, 1923.
xxxiii Ibid.
xxxiv Battle of Secessionville, Report of Colonel Johnson Hagood., Headquarters Advanced Forces, James Island, June 18, 1862., in Rev. J. William Jones, D. D., Richmond, VA: Southern Historical Society Papers, Vol. XII, January to December, 1884, 63-66.
xxxv Ibid.
xxxvi Warren Ripley, ed., Siege Train, The Journal of a Confederate Artilleryman in the Defense of Charleston (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press), Published for the Charleston Library Society, 1986, ix, x.
xxxvii Burton, The Siege of Charleston, 110.
xxxviii Ibid.
xxxix R. deTreville Lawrence, "The Battle of Secessionville," Confederate Veteran, Vol. XXX, No. 10, October, 1922.
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - You would expect a United States Army brigadier general to be analytical and clear in his writings and that is exactly what you get in the above treatise published on the Abbeville Institute blog July 19, 2024.
When I first read BG Scales piece I could not help but think how far above academia the Abbeville Institute has risen in recent years. You can go to their website www.AbbevilleInstitute.org and search for any topic and find dozens of articles as well as books, podcasts, lectures, videos, etc. by accomplished scholars from all walks of life.
Now, the Abbeville Institute is going on the offensive as they should with their new book, Virginia First, The 1607 Project (Brion McClanahan, Editor), and their dazzling new one-hour-and-27-minute film of the same name. If you think I'm pulling your leg about the film, go here: www.1607Project.com.
America was founded in Virginia, capital of the Confederacy, and Virginia established our American character and culture. The back cover of Virginia First states that Virginia:
was the home of presidents, jurists, statesmen, explorers, adventurers, and some of the greatest military heroes in American history. Her sons established the first permanent English foothold in America, blazed trails to the West, mapped the seas, drafted the founding documents, crafted our debates over the powers of the Supreme Court and the general government, provided the foundation of the Bill of Rights, established representative government, dominated the origins of American music, the writing of history, and birthed the first American heroes.
Meanwhile, New England did not exist and wouldn't for another 13 years.
Gen. Scales has written a Number of Books and has a PhD and six patents. He grew up in Huntsville, Alabama and still lives there. An NPR bio included:
John R. Scales retired from Special Forces as a brigadier general. He served more than 30 years which included tours in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Scales has a Ph.D. in Engineering and worked in this field after retiring from the military. Scales previously served as president of the Tennessee Valley Civil War Roundtable and continues to lead tours in Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia.
His treatise, in effect, is the Lost Cause versus the (Self)-Righteous Cause in which he addresses all the self-righteous "tenets of the 'Pious'" such as: "1. Secession was illegal and treasonous."
For example, after a comprehensive discussion that includes the 1869 Supreme Court case Texas v. White, Scales writes:
It is certain, though, that secession was not understood to be illegal in 1860-61, as many states, particularly in the Northeast, had bruited about the idea as early as 1803 (in opposition to the Louisiana Purchase)i and had seriously discussed it in 1814 (in opposition to the War of 1812)ii – and it wasn’t argued against at the time. Radical abolitionists advocated secession before the war (Garrison’s The Liberator used the slogan “No Union with Slaveholders” on its masthead until the war).iii
So, why is the legality of secession important? It goes to the issue of treason. Many call Southerners “traitors”, citing Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” This seems clearcut, as the Confederacy did levy war against some of “them” – the Northern states as represented by their elected federal government. Of course, that government levied war against the Confederate states first (by sending naval flotillas to ports in what was another country, uninvited). Before Fort Sumter, the Confederacy had sent a peace commission to Washington to settle any and all matters, hoping to prevent war.iv If secession was in fact not legal (Mr. Lincoln’s theory), then by their acts the Northern states could be considered treasonous in attacking Southern states (note the Important word in the Constitutional phrase is not “it” but rather “them”). But the argument is on the other side; secession appears by all logic legal and certainly the seceding states had no reason to doubt it when they did so.
Gen. Scales' treatise is comprehensive. Among the other "tenets of the 'Pious'" are:
- The North fought to free the slaves.
- The South fought to preserve slavery.
- Slavery in the U.S. was the most vicious that ever existed anywhere in history.
- John Brown was a hero.
- Union soldiers were courageous in battle and respected the rights of civilians.
Gen. Scales' narrative under the pious tenet "The South fought to preserve slavery" is powerful and concludes that the South did not fight to preserve slavery. They fought because they were invaded and because they viewed their war for independence the same as the patriots of the American Revolution, as a war against tyranny. They also wanted to protect their families. He quotes James McPherson's stats that only 20% of Southern letters even mentioned pro-slavery views.
So, Gen. Scales is unambiguous that Southerners were not fighting to preserve slavery.
I do disagree with one statement, that the first seven Southern states "seceded in great part to preserve slavery from potential actions of the federal government."
The first seven Southern states seceded because they wanted independence in every sense of the word, especially financial independence.
Only four of the 13 states represented in the Confederate government issued Declarations of Causes. Nine did not.
The four who did were among the first seven - South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas - but they mention numerous reasons for seceding, not just slavery.
All mention the many constitutional violations of the North.
All are extremely concerned about Northern terrorism against the South, which was a huge reason for seceding as Gen. Scales makes clear.
Scales concludes, and I agree 100%, that John Brown's attempt to start a slave insurrection was perhaps the primary cause of secession. Southerners had widespread visions of murder, mutilation, rape, as had happened in Haiti. Southerners knew that Brown was funded by the "Secret Committee of Six" out of Massachusetts. Northerners encouraged Brown then made a martyr out of him when brought to justice. Southerners did not trust the North and viewed the North as already at war with them. They were not about to be ruled by people who wanted their wives raped and children murdered.
South Carolina's declaration goes on for pages before even mentioning slavery.
Georgia's declaration goes into detail on economic causes and includes: "The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all."
Mississippi states right off the bat that slavery is important to them and is the basis of their economic well-being but it adds much more including these brilliant truths about the North:
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better. / It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives. / It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security. / It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system. / It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purpose; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leave us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
Mississippi may not have realized it at the time but they articulated the exact cause of the War Between the States when they acknowledged the North's intent "to prostrate our industrial pursuits".
Southerners were producing the wealth of the nation. Cotton alone was 62% of U.S. exports and Southerners controlled King Cotton 100%.
The free-trade South had made protective tariffs unconstitutional and had set their tariff at around 10% for the operation of a small federal government in a States Right nation, versus the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff of 47 to 60%. The South was set to take over the trade of the whole country in one fell swoop because nobody was going to pay Northerners 47 to 60% more for the pleasure of shipping into the North when they could ship into the South for 10% then have their goods sent up the Mississippi River and into every part of the Union.
Southerners were dying to begin industrializing and the moment Great Britain recognized the Confederate States of America and established trade relationships and treaties, the North would not be able to beat the South in a war. Northerners knew this and were in a panic.
That's why Lincoln sent five military missions into the South in March and April, 1861 to get the war started. He wanted to throw up his blockade and chill European recognition of the Confederacy then let his much larger population and resources wear out the South.
Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
But, back to the declarations of causes.
Texas's declaration includes:
By the disloyalty of the Northern States and their citizens and the imbecility of the Federal Government, infamous combinations of incendiaries and outlaws have been permitted in those States and the common territory of Kansas to trample upon the federal laws, to war upon the lives and property of Southern citizens in that territory, and finally, by violence and mob law, to usurp the possession of the same as exclusively the property of the Northern States.
Texas has much more about Indian attacks and the North as "sectional enemies."
So, I disagree that the first seven states seceded primarily because of slavery. Only four of the first seven issued declarations of causes for their secession and three out of those four were clear that numerous other issues were more important to them than slavery.
Remember, when the first seven seceded there were more slave states in the Union than the Confederacy. There were nine slave states, soon to increase by one, in the Union. There were only seven in the Confederacy.
See my article "The Four Declarations of Causes for Secession Do Not Prove the War Was Fought Over Slavery."
Gen. Scales' treatise is outstanding, thoroughly documented and a first rate analysis of the Lost Cause vis-à-vis the (Self)-Righteous Cause. It goes well with historian Clyde Wilson's recent book, African American Slavery in Historical Perspective. Click Here for my review of Dr. Wilson's book.]
IT IS COMMON in Civil War circles to hear about the so-called “Lost Cause”, variously termed a myth or a narrative. Are those two terms synonymous? Let’s look. Dictionary.com defines myth as: “a traditional story, especially one concerning the early history of a people or explaining some natural or social phenomenon, and typically involving supernatural beings or events.”
On the other hand, using Oxford Languages, a narrative is defined as: “a spoken or written account of connected events; a story.”
The difference between the two is the connotation of “myth” as false or supernatural, while “narrative” lacks such a connotation even though it may skip many pieces of the story or emphasize (or deemphasize) certain aspects of that story – thus it may be misleading in some respects. So, given that many of the tenets of the “Lost Cause” are true or mostly true,v while the less desirable aspects of the Confederacy (principally involving slavery) were downplayed or not mentioned at all, it fits solidly in the realm of narrative rather than myth. The unfortunate aspect of the use of the word “myth” (other than it is inappropriate as it implies complete falsity) is the term is often used as an attempt to shut down critical thinking or analysis as if saying “Lost Cause Myth” about a point of history immediately destroys the side trying to make the point – no matter whether the point is objectively true or not.
So, the Lost Cause narrative is often presented as at best misleading, while today’s “standard” interpretation, often taught in history classes even at universities, is enshrined as the “TRVTH”, whose plinth before which all must bow down. (apologies to B.C.) But does the “standard” interpretation bear objective scrutiny, or is it just another narrative, with a lot of facts but a lot of factors skipped or downplayed? Let’s look at some of the things that are often taught; call them tenets of the “Pious” or the “Self-Righteous” Cause narrative.
1. Secession was illegal and treasonous.
There could be three sources of illegality for secession: the courts, the laws passed by Congress, and the Constitution. Before 1869 (that is, before the end of the war), there was no federal court case addressing secession, so that’s ruled out.vi Congress had passed no law addressing secession either. That leaves the Constitution. You may search the entire Constitution and will find no mention of secession anywhere. Specifically, the Constitution delegates no power to the federal government to set conditions as to if and how a state may decide to leave the Union. Nor does it prohibit the power of secession to any state. This means that, under Amendment X, the states retained the power to secede unilaterally.vii In fact, the principal constitutional texts of the time (one by Joseph Story and the other by William Rawle) either did not mention it (Story) or, in the latter case, stated it was constitutional under certain conditions. Rawle’s words were:
The secession of a state from the Union depends on the will of the people of such state. The people alone as we have already seen, hold the power to alter their constitution. … A matter so momentous, ought not to be entrusted to those who would have it in their power to exercise it lightly and precipitately upon sudden dissatisfaction, or causeless jealousy, perhaps against the interests and the wishes of a majority of their constituents.
But in any manner by which a secession is to take place, nothing is more certain than that the act should be deliberate, clear, and unequivocal. The perspicuity and solemnity of the original obligation require correspondent qualities in its dissolution.viii
The course taken by the various states that seceded was to essentially unwind their original ratification of the Constitution by means of its Article VII. That is, each state (except Tennessee, which held a popular vote on the issue directly) had popular elections for a convention, separate from the legislature, that would consider the matter in a deliberate, clear, and unequivocal manner. These conventions adopted rules, debated various texts, and eventually came to resolutions that removed reference to the United States from their constitutions and declared their independence. In at least three states (Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee) these resolutions were subjected to popular vote – and they passed by large majorities.ix The issue was contentious in many states (e.g., Alabama 61-39 for secession, Virginia 88-55 for secession) but it carried in eleven states, which then formed the Confederacy.
Given all of this, how did the Supreme Court, in the case Texas v. White (1869), find that secession had not legally occurred? There are two reasons that should be considered:
1. The Court members had all supported the Union during the war and were reluctant to allow secession to be considered legal because that would have implied the federal government fought a war of aggression and conquest. Five of the justices, including Chief Justice Samuel Chase, had been appointed to the court by President Lincoln. Chase wrote the opinion himself.
2. Chase’s finding is in paragraph 6 of the decision, as follows:
The union between Texas and the other States was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original States. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation, except through revolution or through consent of the States.x
His reasoning is in paragraph 4:
The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form, and character, and sanction, from the Articles of Confederation. By these the Union was solemnly declared to “be perpetual.” And, when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained ‘to form a more perfect Union.’xi
Initially, this seems a cogent argument, as the Articles make quite a point of the words “Perpetual Union”. The word perpetual is used six times in the document itself (counting the title), but the most relevant part is in Article XIII:
ARTICLE XIII. Every state shall abide by the determinations of the united states in congress assembled, on all questions which by this confederation are submitted to them. And the Articles of this confederation shall be inviolably observed by every state, and the union shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a congress of the united states, and be afterward confirmed by the legislatures of every state. [my emphasis]
The citation of one of the Constitution Preamble’s phrases, “a more perfect Union”, at first seems superfluous, but in fact what Chase seems to have intended is to imply that somehow the Constitution makes the Union even more perpetual – a contradiction in terms. The Framers of the Constitution had the Articles before them as they debated, and certainly they could have inserted “perpetual” into the Constitution in any number of places, but they chose against that option. This choice can only be deliberate and not an oversight as every word of the document was gone over many times. One is forced to assume the omission is a feature – that is, intended – and not a bug.
Now, as to the applicability of the Articles in 1860-61, it is hard to argue they were in any way applicable for several reasons.
1. It appears in no legal context except as a superseded historical document, uncited in any court cases as a law, in any laws subsequent to the adoption of the Constitution, or in the Constitution itself (within which one would expect a mention if the latter was intended to be an amendment to the Articles) – until Mr. Lincoln chose to cite it in his first inaugural address as part of his logic for declaring secession illegal.
2. The states that joined after the original 13 were not represented in or by the Articles and never acceded to them.
3. The adoption of the Constitution itself violated the Articles, in that its ratification did not follow Article XIII at all, there being no agreement by Congress except that it be submitted to the states, and no approval by legislatures. Rather, the procedure for ratification of the Constitution given in Article VII was followed: popularly elected conventions, and instead of unanimous agreement only nine states had to agree to bring the Constitution into effect.
So, the Court ruling in Texas v. White, currently case law in the United States, not only did not exist in 1860-61, it could be easily challenged in court today by a willing state (California, anyone?) and potentially overturned by a modern Supreme Court on the basis of the arguments above.
There are other, less serious arguments against secession based on the text of the Constitution. The first is by citing Article VI, the “Supremacy Clause”. Unfortunately for those who bring it up, if secession is legal under Amendment X, as it appears to be, once a state has seceded, the Constitution no longer applies. Nor, for that matter, do any of the arguments based in Article I, Section 10 apply, by the same reasoning.
It is certain, though, that secession was not understood to be illegal in 1860-61, as many states, particularly in the Northeast, had bruited about the idea as early as 1803 (in opposition to the Louisiana Purchase)xii and had seriously discussed it in 1814 (in opposition to the War of 1812)xiii – and it wasn’t argued against at the time. Radical abolitionists advocated secession before the war (Garrison’s The Liberator used the slogan “No Union with Slaveholders” on its masthead until the war).xiv
So, why is the legality of secession important? It goes to the issue of treason. Many call Southerners “traitors”, citing Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” This seems clearcut, as the Confederacy did levy war against some of “them” – the Northern states as represented by their elected federal government. Of course, that government levied war against the Confederate states first (by sending naval flotillas to ports in what was another country, uninvited). Before Fort Sumter, the Confederacy had sent a peace commission to Washington to settle any and all matters, hoping to prevent war.xv If secession was in fact not legal (Mr. Lincoln’s theory), then by their acts the Northern states could be considered treasonous in attacking Southern states (note the Important word in the Constitutional phrase is not “it” but rather “them”). But the argument is on the other side; secession appears by all logic legal and certainly the seceding states had no reason to doubt it when they did so.
However, if the strict words of the Constitution were applicable, the US would have prosecuted all prisoners in all wars as they clearly levied war against the US. That did not happen because the law that puts the constitutional provision in action, currently 18 US Code 2381, caveats the provision as follows: “Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or imprisoned and fined, and incapable of holding any U.S. office.”xvi [my emphasis] Thus, if the states legally seceded, then their citizens no longer owed allegiance to the United States and could not be guilty of treason. This was the argument Jefferson Davis planned to make should he be tried for treason and, in fact, no Confederate was ever so tried, at least partially because it was feared that this would be the finding of any fair jury.xvii
So, it would seem that this tenet of the Self-Righteous Cause, that secession was illegal and the Southerners traitors, would be fairly characterized as “false”.
1. Secession was carried out by a small number of very rich people and the common people of the South did not support it.
This is a tenet that has some truth and some misinformation, but it also was the belief of President Lincoln – the basis of his initial belief that the Confederacy would collapse with a show of force or at most one battle. It is true that many of the prominent people who served in legislatures and other elected offices were well off, but the same could be said of the North.xviii However, the conventions were chosen by popular vote and the delegates ran on their views towards secession. As mentioned in the previous section, wealth or lack of it and land ownership or none were not disqualifying. So, the conventions could be expected to reflect majority views – and they did.
| For Secession | Against Secession | Percentage For | |
| Alabamaxix | 61 | 39 | 61% |
| Arkansasxx | 65 | 5 | 93% |
| Floridaxxi | 62 | 7 | 90% |
| Georgiaxxii | 208 | 89 | 70% |
| Louisianaxxiii | 113 | 17 | 87% |
| Mississippixxiv | 83 | 15 | 91% |
| North Carolinaxxv | 112 | 0 | 100% |
| South Carolinaxxvi | 169 | 0 | 100% |
| Tennessee | Referendum only | 70% | |
| Texasxxvii | 166 | 8 | 95% |
| Virginiaxxviii | 88 | 55 | 62% |
Further, in those states which held referenda, the votes were (as listed in the last section):
| For Secession | Against Secession | Percentage For | |
| Tennesseexxix | 108,274 | 47,247 | 70% |
| Texasxxx | 46,153 | 14,747 | 76% |
| Virginiaxxxi | 125,950 | 20,373 | 86% |
Less than 33% of the 1,027,267 households in the eleven states owned slaves, so most voters were not rich enough to own slaves or did not care to.xxxii
Another gauge of the popularity of secession is the number of men who volunteered for and were accepted by the Confederate Army before any conscription was passed, 326,768 by December 1861.xxxiii This amounts to 6% of the entire free population of the South, black or white, man, woman, and child, or about 1 in 3 of every free, military-aged (20 – 50) men.xxxiv Given the numbers of infirm and vital workers in such jobs as weapons and equipment manufacturing, railroading, salt works, clothing and shoes, mining, government officials, etc., plus those Virginians who became West Virginians, this is a formidable percentage to join the army over a period of about eight months. It certainly indicates broad approval for protecting the Confederacy against invasion.
1. The North fought to free the slaves.
This is one of those tenets that was absolutely not true in the first year of the war except for a small percentage of people who were active abolitionists, estimated at around 2%.xxxv It later became somewhat true during the war as Northern soldiers became aware of how much slaves contributed to the South’s ability to fight. But initially, there was no widespread movement towards abolition – in fact four states that did not secede were slave states while, during the war, West Virginia was carved out of Virginia (in defiance of the Constitution, Article IV, Section 3) as another slave state.
A couple of quotes:
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so…. I hold that in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination…. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.xxxvi
Not only did President Lincoln in his first inaugural address on 4 March 1861 deny abolition, he gave his reasons for entering into war: preserve the Union (without regard to the wishes of many of its constituent states as expressed by their voters), keep possession of federal properties in those states, and to collect “duties and imposts” (tariffs). There are quotations from the period that seem to highlight loss of tariff revenue and the potential relocation of trade to the South because of lower tariffs as a, or even the, major concern in the months leading up to war.
“It [my policy] sought only to hold the public places and property not already wrested from the Government and to collect the revenue.”xxxvii [my emphasis]
A group of New York prominent merchants met with President Lincoln in March 1861 and afterwards talked to reporters, expressing their concern that the lower tariffs mandated by the Confederacy, contrasted with the high rates in the US, would result in the diversion of trade away from them and to Southern ports. Sample quotes:
Can New York afford not only to lose its trade with the South, now amounting to more than 200 million a year, but hazard the loss of the trade of eight millions of inhabitants of the Northwestern states?xxxviii [due to diversion of trade to New Orleans and the Mississippi]
It is now a question of national existence and commercial prosperity and the choice cannot be doubtful.xxxix
In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. . .. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. . .. millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment.xl
It is also worth remembering that cotton alone constituted half of all US exports. The proceeds from the sale of these exports were used to buy goods to be brought back in the same ships, but upon arriving those goods were subject to tariffs. Southerners opposed protective (high) tariffs for two reasons: they allowed domestic manufacturers (mostly based in the Northeast) to charge higher prices, and the necessity of paying the tariff before goods entered meant a portion of the profits of the Southerners’ exports had to be set aside to cover the tariff, and that portion was not in all probability going to be made up to the planter by the shipper.
To reinforce Lincoln’s actions in the interval between his inauguration and July but to distance themselves from any thought of abolition, Congress passed what was essentially a declaration of war against the Confederacy on 25 July 1861. It stated:
Resolved by the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States, That the present deplorable civil war has been forced upon the country by the disunionists of the southern States now in revolt against the constitutional government, and in arms around the capital.
That in this national emergency, Congress, banishing all feelings of mere passion or resentment, will recollect only its duty to the whole country; that this war is not waged on their part in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.xli
Thus, Congress reiterated Lincoln’s war aims, explicitly not including abolition. Even today, if one surveys the many monuments to Union soldiers erected on courthouses lawns in the North, one sees only their reason to fight: to “Save the Union” or “Preserve the Union.” So, the bottom line is Northerners indeed fought for Union, often for altruistic purposes on the part of ordinary soldiers, but also for the purposes of commercial gain and government revenue from tariffs (which in 1860 comprised 94.9% of the total) on the part of some – and not to free the slaves.xlii
1. The South fought to preserve slavery.
The other side of the coin is to discover why Southerners fought. The usual tenet says they fought to preserve slavery. This is true only by transference. That is, the Southern states (at least, the first seven of them) seceded in great part to preserve slavery from potential actions of the federal government, now controlled by a party that not only contained virtually every abolitionist, but also persons who had made up the supporters of John Brown.xliii The latter had tried to cause a slave insurrection that would have resulted in great slaughter and potentially in genocide. The Southern states seceded, then formed the Confederacy, but they fought only as a response to invasion – initially against naval flotillas off two major ports that were to resupply and reinforce forts controlling the harbors, useful for collecting tariffs from what was now a different nation. Soon, however, land incursions occurred by federal forces, first into Virginia and then into Kentucky, which had declared neutrality and tried to stay out of it.xliv
As further proof, Pulitzer Prize-winning author James McPherson in his For Cause and Comrades, containing his analysis of thousands of letters and diaries of soldiers of both sides, stated that only 20% of Southern soldiers expressed pro-slavery views at any time – even though his sample was disproportionately weighed towards slaveowners. He attributes this, probably correctly, to the fact that the existence of slavery was not really in question in the South at the time, but if it was actually what they were fighting for one would expect some affirmation. Instead, Southern soldiers cited the American Revolution (a fight against tyranny) and independence as their cause.xlv Of course, as the war progressed, some despaired while many reacted to reports from areas occupied by the Union army and vowed to exert every effort to protect their families and communities from those they viewed as vandals or worse. Independence and the protection of their families, homes, and communities certainly explain why most Southerners fought without reference to any other reason.
1. Slavery in the US was the most vicious that ever existed anywhere in history.
Slavery was a terrible condition for people to impose upon others, and an even more terrible condition to have imposed upon one. Chattel slavery, defined as “the enslaving and owning of human beings and their offspring as property, able to be bought, sold, and forced to work without wages, as distinguished from other systems of forced, unpaid, or low-wage labor also considered to be slavery”, is an extreme form of slavery – but not the most extreme.xlvi
Addressing only the slavery of the 18th and 19th Centuries and of slavery only as it pertains to the Western Hemisphere (ancient times and the Eastern Hemisphere could be much worse), there are at least two areas where it was worse than in the US: slave ships and slavery in the West Indies and Brazil.
Slave ships were terrible places. The “Middle Passage” lasted an average of 80 days (later shortened to 45 or so as sailing technology advanced), during which male slaves were kept in chains and females kept separately, all crowded so closely that they could barely move.xlvii Note that almost all slave ships that called British America and America home actually called New England and New York home.xlviii The West Indies was also terrible; they had to import slaves constantly to merely maintain their labor force because the death rate was so high, while in what became the US the number of slaves grew due to natural increase.xlix
Mortality. Death rates on slave ships were very high, estimated to be 17.7% to North America – implying the equivalent to an annual mortality rate of 60% while aboard.l White immigrants from Europe also died at a high rate on their voyage but in lesser amounts, around 10%. Once in North America and after a period of “seasoning” which saw some additional deaths, the rate of natural increase of the US slave population hovered between 1.5 and 2%. It was lower than that of the white population until 1825, then slightly higher afterwards, while in Jamaica, Brazil, and the French West Indies there was a significant actual annual decrease rather than increase in the slave population up to that date (no good data afterwards), implying a higher death rate than birth rate. Slave life expectancies in the US were impacted by high infant (24%) and child death rates (12%), both somewhat higher than that for white families, but a slave reaching age 14 in the US could look forward to living almost as long as a white person (two years or so fewer).li This was not true elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, where slaves’ lives were shorter.
Rape. Slave ships were notorious for exploiting female slaves. An article concerning French slave ships yields the following paragraph:
Most seamen chose to believe the old European myth that African women were sexually permissive with insatiable sexual appetites. This common portrayal of black female slaves as licentious beings justified mistreatment of black women and the black race. Advocates of slavery maintained that black women simply could not be raped because they were so promiscuous. And ships’ officers and crew took full advantage of their beliefs. One young French officer reported that seamen usually selected favourites from among the women, giving them additional rations in exchange for sexual availability. These slaves, so the thinking went, also “adjusted better” to the journey because they bonded with the sailors. Another eyewitness, the captain of the Jeannette, a Nantes slave ship, allowed his sailors access to the slaves, “given the custom among them that each one should have a woman.lii
Of course, the sexual exploitation of slave women or unmarried underclass women was not uncommon in the US, North and South, but it was certainly not universal. Analysis of the 1860 Census revealed that approximately 10% of slave children were mulatto.liii Although some of them were, of course, the result of mulatto slaves (perhaps even mulattos who had been sired on a slave ship!) having sex with other slaves, a significant proportion must be attributed to white owners or their sons, particularly on smaller plantations or in cities. However, this did not rise to the level seen on slave ships.
Diet. Perhaps some of the most surprising data lies in the dietary area. The average US slave consumed 179 pounds of meat (pork, beef, mutton) in 1860, as contrasted to the average white’s 186 pounds. The slave on average had 119 pounds of dairy, 247 pounds of potatoes, 35 pounds of peas and beans, and 673 pounds of grain; a total over three pounds a day.liv As a further indicator of an adequate diet, US slaves (ages 25-45) had an average height of 67.2”, white Northerners 68.2”, British town artisans 66.3”, Cuban slaves 63.6”, and Guyana slaves 64.1”.lv That is, they apparently ate better than middle-class Englishmen, not to mention those in the Caribbean.
Households. An interesting table concerning the living arrangements of slaves is in Fogel, p. 150, and is reproduced below with an additional column taken from current data:
| Trinidad | Jamaica | Bahamas | US | USlvi | |
| Year | 1813 | 1825 | 1822 | 1850 | 2023 |
| Nuclear Families | 24 | 37 | 71 | 64 | 47 |
| Single-parent families | 26 | 40 | 13 | 21 | 17 |
| Non-family Households | 50 | 13 | 15 | 15 | 36 |
The dates are reflective of when the data was gathered, in each case (except the last) 10 – 15 years before the slaves were freed. This rather refutes the allegation by many that slaves in the US were not allowed to have a family life. The data says otherwise and in fact, it compares favorably with the present-day US averages, although comparable, separate data on current families identifying as black was not located.
Work. Slaves worked many more hours than people do today, when 1,892 hours of work a year is the average.lvii In contrast, the average slave worked about 2,860 hours per year; that is, about 51% longer.lviii However, in the US in 1880 (for example), the average work week was around 61 hours, implying over 3,000 hours per year – more than a slave worked in the 1850s!lix
There were many terrible aspects of slavery as practiced in the US, among them the possibility of corporal punishment (which was also applied to whites, especially in the military, but by law rather than an owner’s whim), lack of freedom, rape, and the possibility of involuntary family separation. However, it should be clear that it was not as bad as slavery in some other places and circumstances in comparable times in the Western Hemisphere, and in a few respects (diet and workload) it was little different from that experienced by white families.
1. John Brown was a hero.
John Brown was born on May 9th, 1800, in Connecticut. Raised in an abolitionist family in the Western Reserve area of Ohio, he wished to become a minister first, but his eyes became inflamed, so he turned to tannery. In 1825 he moved to Pennsylvania and bought property and built a house, outbuildings, and a tannery, all of which he used to cover his status as an important station on the Underground Railroad. In 1836 he moved back to Ohio and continue his work while prospering for a while but eventually fell into bankruptcy. In 1846 he moved to Springfield, Massachusetts and became more deeply involved in the abolitionist movement, founding a group that opposed the Fugitive Slave Act by force. After two years there he moved to New York state. Had he stayed in New York or returned to Ohio or Massachusetts and refrained from violence, he would have been a minor but praiseworthy figure in American history.
Instead, he moved to Kansas in 1855, joining several of his sons. Kansas was already embroiled in struggle between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions due to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act which proposed to allow the settlers to decide on the legality of slavery. There had been eight murders attributed to the struggle in the preceding 14 months, but Brown decided to get revenge for the last two and on May 25th, 1856, he and his sons killed five men (who were pro-slavery but who did not own any) at night in cold blood.lx After more fighting, Brown fled, pursued by federal warrants for his arrest.
It turned out that he had planned to incite a slave insurrection for many years, and, leaving Kansas, he returned to friends he had made in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York to gather funds and followers. He returned to Iowa to meet his other followers and discussed his ideas before going east. He obtained more donations and weapons, refining his plans (which included a new constitution) to seize the Harpers Ferry Armory in Virginia. He traveled extensively for a number of months and participated in a raid into Missouri. On October 16th, 1859, he led 20 others from their mission support site in Maryland to the armory and seized control. During the raid and the ensuing counterattack, four townspeople and one Marine were killed. Most of Brown’s men were killed or later executed; five escaped.lxi During the trial, his plans to arm the slaves and lead an expedition through the South, freeing slaves and killing anyone opposed, all came out as evidence. His plan was not well founded in most respects (perhaps reflecting his mental deterioration), but he calmly contemplated the deaths of a great many, black and white, potentially numbering into the millions. Although his raid was unsuccessful, it was perhaps the single act most responsible for the death and destruction of the Civil War.
John Brown, whatever his mental state and thoughts at the time, was in 1855 a hero in the fight to oppose slavery. However, at some time, then or before, he crossed the line between opposition and fanaticism, between life-affirming care and death-dealing terrorism. As such, he resembles most a version of a later, more successful terrorist, Osama bin Laden. Both were very religious, both worked to support the oppressed, then crossed over into hatred and the worship of death and destruction. On balance, John Brown was brave but no hero despite his earlier works.
1. Union soldiers were courageous in battle and respected the rights of civilians.
Both Union and Confederate soldiers at times exhibited the highest levels of courage. One cannot contemplate Fredericksburg, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor, or Franklin without marveling at the bravery of the men that carried out these almost suicidal attacks. It is true that soldiers on both sides sometimes failed to meet these standards, but overall, most American soldiers on both sides scaled the heights of valor.
However, there occurred a very large number of issues with respect to protecting the civilian populace from the ravages of war. Guerrillas on either side conducted raids against supporters of their opponents; theft, robbery, rape, and murder were common. Unfortunately, at times members of the armies did likewise. Due perhaps to the fact that most of the war took place in the South, the majority of such crimes were perpetrated by Northern soldiers, sometimes as a matter of policy.
Perhaps the most egregious examples of official military policy leading to what today would be war crimes took place in Missouri. On August 25th, 1863, Brigadier General Thomas Ewing, brother-in-law to General Sherman, issued General Order 11:
“All residents in Jackson, Cass, Bates and northern Vernon counties were required to leave their homes within 15 days. … All grain and hay found in the fields or under shelters before Sept. 9 would be confiscated and taken to military stations. Grain and hay found after Sept. 9 would be destroyed.”lxii
As military-aged men were almost all in one army or the other, this order primarily fell on women and children. “After confiscating whatever supplies and livestock they needed, the Union troops burned nearly every farmstead and field in the 3½-county area. Scorched ground could be seen for miles.”lxiii
Another instance is Major General Sheridan’s destruction of the lower Shenandoah Valley. According to the National Park Service:
Sheridan commenced a dramatic war on the countryside on September 26,1864 that would last for thirteen days. The destruction would begin in Staunton and head down the Valley, northward to Strasburg, covering a length of 70 miles and a width of 30 miles. This destruction infamously became known for generations simply as ‘The Burning.’ Sheridan ordered his men to move fast, destroy everything that could be useful to the enemy, then move on quickly to new targets.lxiv
The depredations of Sherman’s forces, particularly in South Carolina, are too well known to be detailed, but perhaps of even more impact was the constant low-level crimes and horrors visited upon farms and towns throughout areas occupied or marched through by the Union army. Such crimes ranged from theft of all the food at a farm to rape of a slave girl up to burning of a small town (example, Ripley, Mississippi).
In some contrast, there are only two significant charges of crimes against civilians leveled against Confederate field armies: the roundup of blacks by Jenkins’ Cavalry Brigade in Pennsylvania in 1863,lxv and McCausland’s destruction of Chambersburg in 1864.lxvi The latter was announced as a reprisal for previous Union destruction.lxvii
So, this tenet would have to be “partially true” – Union soldiers were often brave and certainly some respected civilian property – but a great many did not.
Much of the received and taught “history” accepts these tenets uncritically and the current generation seems to believe them, even though there is a lot of misinformation and falsehood contained therein. Why did such things become part of the narrative? Just as the “Lost Cause” narrative was put together to make Southerners feel better about their losses, the “Self-Righteous Cause” narrative was manufactured incrementally so as to downplay a large number of inconvenient facts that belied the Manichean view adopted by many Northerners. It is easier to demonize others rather than face the fact that one waged a war of aggression and committed many war crimes (albeit before such things were formally articulated in international conventions). It was also put in place to counter the “Lost Cause” advocates as they were thought to have too much credibility,lxviii undermining those Northerners who desired to feel righteous – hence the name.
Both narratives have a mixture of truth and falsity. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the people of the United States, more than 150 years after the war, still mostly refuse to face the actual facts and data.
[1] https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/lost-cause-definition-and-origins accessed 19 November 2023. For instance, tenets that are mostly true are the Confederacy was defeated by numbers, Confederate soldiers were heroic, Lee was an able soldier and devout Christian, and Southern women supported the cause.
[2] Some will interrupt here and point out Article VI of the Constitution, which establishes federal supremacy in certain areas. That issue is addressed later.
[3] In its entirety, Amendment X reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The word “respectively” is defined as “separately or individually” – Oxford Languages online, 31 October 2023.
[4] William Rawle, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, Chapter XXII, Philadelphia (1902 version, originally 1825), 302. As of 2023 Rawle and Henderson, LLC, is the oldest law firm in the US still operating.
[5] Texas 46,153 for, 14,747 against. Virginia 125,950 for, 20,373 against. Tennessee 108,274 for, 47,247 against. Women, children, and blacks could not vote just as they could not in the Northern states at the time, but there were no property or literacy requirements to vote in those states then. There was no secret ballot in any state, so all voters (North and South) were somewhat subject to public pressure or even intimidation.
[6] Texas v. White, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 700 (1869). (accessed 18 October 2023)
[7] Ibid.
[8] Timothy Pickering, who had been Washington’s second Secretary of State and was a senator in 1803, proposed the creation of a Northern Confederacy that would separate from the South. He was not alone (Rufus King, another prominent Northerner was a part of the discussion) https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/timothy-pickering/ (accessed 18 October 2023)
[9] https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/artifact/proceedings-convention-delegates-hartford-state-connecticut-december-15-1814-hartford#:~:text=The%20Hartford%20Convention,-New%20England’s%20Federalist&text=Meeting%20in%20Hartford%2C%20Connecticut%2C%20in,controls%20over%20commerce%20and%20militias. (accessed 18 October 2023)
[10] https://www.masshist.org/features/boston-abolitionists/no-union-with-slaveholders#:~:text=William%20Lloyd%20Garrison%20and%20his,the%20masthead%20of%20The%20Liberator. (accessed 18 October 2023)
[11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_peace_commission accessed 31 October 2023.
[12] https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/federal-treason#:~:text=18%20U.S.C.,of%20holding%20any%20U.S.%20office.%E2%80%9D (accessed 18 October 2023)
[13] This was the feeling of General Lee as documented in: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction (1866), Part II, Page 133. Accessed at https://encyclopediavirginia.org/12528-92398e366e712ff/ on 19 November 2023.
[14] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w17634/w17634.pdf p. 44, accessed 24 October 2023. table 2A shows for the 1850s that the average wealth of Democrats seeking election to Congress was $13,458 (median of $4,500), Whigs, almost all of whom gravitated to the Republicans in the latter half of the decade $19,599 (median of $7,250), and Republicans $7,307 (median of $3,000). In the 1860s the medians of Republicans and Democrats were identical. The average total wealth across the US in 1860 was $3,289 and the median $1,153.
[15] https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/alabama-constitution-of-1861/
[16] https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/secession-convention-6304/#:~:text=On%20May%206%2C%201861%2C%20a,military%20defeat%20of%20the%20Confederacy.
[17] https://www.floridamemory.com/learn/classroom/learning-units/civil-war/documents/secession/
[18] https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/georgia-secession-convention-of-1861/
[19] https://64parishes.org/entry/louisianas-secession-from-the-union-adaptation
[20] https://docsouth.unc.edu/imls/missconv/missconv.html
[21] https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/secession/
[22] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-ushistory1ay/chapter/the-election-of-1860-and-secession/#:~:text=South%20Carolina%20acted%20almost%20immediately,Union%20with%20the%20United%20States.
[23] https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/texas-secedes
[24] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Secession_Convention_of_1861#:~:text=Most%20of%20the%20Convention’s%20Conditional,after%20the%20Henry%20Wise%20remonstrance.
[25] https://votearchive.com/tn-sec-ref-1861/
[26] https://www.tshaonline.org/texas-day-by-day/entry/588
[27] https://archive.wvculture.org/history/statehood/statehood06.html
[28] http://www.civilwardata.com/dbstatus.html
[29] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_States_Army#:~:text=The%20War%20Department%20asked%20for,for%20one%20or%20three%20years. Referenced on 22 October 2023. Conscription was not passed until four months later.
[30] Eighteen year-olds could serve, but in general those over 45 were not accepted at the time unless they had relevant military experience. It is assumed the lack of the teenagers is balanced by the inclusion of 40-50 year-olds.
[31] https://wwnorton.com/college/history/america7_brief/content/multimedia/ch15/research_01.htm
[32] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp
[33] https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-4-1861-july-4th-message-congress
[34] William J. Cooper, We Have the War Upon Us, Randon house, New York: 2012, p. 248.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Daily-Chicago Times, December 10, 1860
[37] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden%E2%80%93Johnson_Resolution#:~:text=The%20first%20branch%20read%3A%20%22Resolved,around%20the%20capital.%22%20This%20branch Note the House passed these two sentences separately, but the Senate combined them into one document. The resolution was rescinded in December 1861.
[38] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_in_United_States_history (accessed 10 November 2023)
[39] The last four states to secede did not do so until after President Lincoln called upon them for troops to be used against the seven. This was viewed as unconstitutional and a prelude to further unconstitutional acts or even the establishment of a dictatorship.
[40] It is common to cite Confederate General Polk’s seizure of Columbus, KY, on 3 September 1861 as the first violation of Kentucky neutrality. However, Camp Dick Robinson was established by Union officers for training members of the Union army well before that. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Dick_Robinson Note also by way of contrast, the Kentucky Confederate units formed up and trained at Camp Boone in Tennessee so as to respect Kentucky’s neutrality.
[41] https://www.amazon.com/Cause-Comrades-Why-Fought-Civil/dp/0195124995 (Kindle version, pages 109-110)
[42] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/chattel-slavery#google_vignette (accessed 31 October 2023)
[43] https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-middle-passage.htm#:~:text=The%20Middle%20Passage%20itself%20lasted,15%25%20grew%20sick%20and%20died.
[44] Anne Farrow et. al. Complicity, Ballantine Books: New York (2005) pp. 95, 132.
[45] Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, W. W. Norton: New York (1989), 123-25. This book is a very intensive, wide-ranging view of the economics of slavery, and it won the Nobel Prize in economics for Fogel. The paragraph on mortality is based on this data.
[46] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070565/middle-passage-death-rate-by-destination-1501-1866/
[47] Fogel, pp. 114-132.
[48] https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/22043/25579 Although this article is specifically about French ships, it is not hard to find accounts of British ships doing the same. Interestingly, it is more difficult to find such accounts of American ships. Perhaps this is because almost all such ships were home ported in the Northeast, where the Puritan ethos repressed talking or writing about sexual matters, although it’s highly doubtful that the ethos extended so far as to prevent them!
[49] Fogel, p. 182.
[50] Fogel, p. 135.
[51] Fogel, p. 141.
[52] https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2022/demo/families/cps-2022.html Table H1.
[53] https://clockify.me/working-hours#:~:text=A%20full%2Dtime%20employee%20in%20the%20United%20States%20works%201%2C892,more%20than%20other%20OECD%20countries.
[54] Fogel, p. 162.
[55] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
[56] https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/1995summer_watts.pdf, p. 126.
[57] https://www.charlestownwv.us/about/john-browns-raid/ (accessed 1 November 2023)
[58] https://www.cjonline.com/story/news/local/2015/07/14/stub-1118/16621464007/ (accessed 1 November 2023)
[59] Ibid.
[60] https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/the-burning-shenandoah-valley-in-flames.htm#:~:text=Thirteen%20Days%20of%20Destruction,a%20width%20of%2030%20miles. (accessed 1 November 2023)
[61] https://emergingcivilwar.com/2020/05/06/the-confederate-slave-hunt-and-the-gettysburg-campaign/ (accessed 1 November 2023)
[62] http://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/documents/1776-1865/chambersburg-war-damages.html#:~:text=On%20July%2030%2C%201864%2C%20Confederate,troops%20to%20burn%20the%20town. (accessed 1 November 2023)
[63] Reprisals are legal under international law in certain circumstances, even today. However, reprisals against civilians are now thought of as illegal. See https://guide-humanitarian-law.org/content/article/3/reprisals/#:~:text=In%20times%20of%20conflict%2C%20reprisals,at%20combatants%20and%20military%20objectives. Accessed 9 November 2023.
[64] See, for instance https://smithsonianassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/myth-of-lost-cause or https://www.quora.com/How-would-you-counter-The-Lost-Cause-myth-of-the-Civil-War
His District Includes Arlington National Cemetery
What Is the Character of a Person That Supports the Removal of a 110 Year Old Monument Surrounded by the Graves of 518 Soldiers and Family in a Sacred Cemetery After a War in Which 750,000 Died and Over a Million Were Maimed?
Beyer Wants Virginia to Hang Her Head in Shame but His Woke Hatred and Abject Ignorance of Virginia History Are What's Shameful
ON JUNE 13, 2024, an amendment to the 2025 NDAA entitled "Relocation of Reconciliation Memorial to original location in Arlington National Cemetery" was voted on by the United States House of Representatives. It was submitted by Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia. The amendment lost 230 to 192 with 15 not voting. No Democrat voted for it because they stick together; 24 Republicans gave the middle finger to their voters and joined with Democrats to defeat the amendment.
Rep. Clyde is an American hero because he knows, as it stands right now, Arlington National Cemetery has been desecrated and the graves of 518 Confederate soldiers and family, who are by law American soldiers, are dishonored, and so are their descendants.
Those Confederate descendants have bled and died for our country since reconciliation after the Spanish-American War, and have traditionally made up 44% of our military. The Wall Street Journal confirmed the Southern plurality in our military by explaining how the Army met its recruiting goals in the past:
It did so by relying heavily on veterans and military families to develop the next generation of recruits, especially in the region known in the military as the "Southern Smile," a curving region from the mid-Atlantic and down across the southern U.S.i
Because of leftist extremists like Don Beyer who contributes to our recruiting crisis by supporting the destruction of monuments in cemeteries, many veterans are not recommending military service. It goes directly back to Biden's Wokeness in the military, DEI, CRT and other divisive hate. It is not fair to those serving today who have to carry a larger burden because of recruiting shortfalls. See the Wall Street Journal, Ben Kesling, "The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Families to Join, Pentagon scrambles to retain the main pipeline for new service members as disillusioned families steer young people away," June 30, 2023.ii
Also my article, "Elizabeth Warren and her naming commission add to military recruiting crisis". Woke Rep. Beyer, whose pronouns are "He/Him/His," posted the following on X along with this link to his two-and-a-half minutes of pablum on the House floor:
Republicans are pushing an amendment to the NDAA, supposedly a national security bill, to put a Confederate monument back in Arlington National Cemetery after it was removed. Congress has better things to do with our time and your money than honoring treason in defense of slavery.
Beyer knows there were no treason trials after the war so he is a liar. If there had been trials of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee or anybody else, it would have proven the right of secession and the North's guilt in starting a war for the economic domination of the country. That's why smart Northerners were not about to lose in a court of law what they had won on the battlefield.
The part about slavery is pretty silly too. No Northern official said they were fighting a war to free the slaves. In their official documents like Lincoln's First Inaugural, they said the opposite and supported things like the Corwin Amendment, which would have left blacks in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress. Lincoln supported Corwin along with sending blacks back to Africa or into a climate they could survive.
It was always about Union for Lincoln and the North because their wealth and power depended on it. Here is the War Aims Resolution that passed the Northern Congress in July, 1861, three months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter:
. . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . .iii
The case Virginia Rep. Beyer makes specifically against Virginia - that it was fighting for slavery - is false beyond the shadow of a doubt as the historical record shows. A shallow person like Beyer is not too familiar with the historical record but he doesn't care because he knows the leftist news media will regurgitate anything he says so truth is not necessary. All good Marxists know this.
Virginia entered the War Between the States for the most noble reasons imaginable and they had nothing to do with slavery.
When the war started, there were more slave states in the Union than the Confederacy and Virginia was one of them. There were eight slave states in the Union, soon to increase by one,iv and only seven in the Confederacy.v Some war to end slavery, huh.
When Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, only then did Virginia secede and the issue was clearly its disgust with Lincoln's declaration of war and unconstitutional, immoral invasion of sovereign sister states. Virginia's response was immediate.
On April 12, 1861, with Lincoln's warships and reinforcements almost to Charleston, the Confederates gave Lincoln's garrison every chance to evacuate Fort Sumter but they refused so it was bombarded.
On April 13, Fort Sumter surrendered.
On April 15, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South.
On April 17, Virginia seceded.
Virginia was followed over the next few weeks by the secession of Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina. In these four Confederate states were 52.4% of white Southerners, so a majority of white Southerners seceded over nothing to do with slavery.
Also, and importantly, Virginia was one of three states that had reserved the right of secession before acceding to the United States Constitution. The other two were New York and Rhode Island.
The acceptance of the reserved right of secession of Virginia, New York and Rhode Island, gave that right to all the other states as well because they all joined the Union as equals with the exact same rights.
In Virginia's ordinance of secession, she quoted her reserved right of secession.
So, contrary to what Rep. Beyer says, Virginia did not commit "treason in defense of slavery" nor did any Southern state. They all had numerous grievances and voted peacefully and democratically to leave the Union they had voluntarily joined. The South was creating the wealth of the nation with cotton but was paying most of the country's taxes, then three-fourths of the tax money was being spent in the North. Robert Toombs called this arrangement a "suction pump" sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it in the North.
They were all disgusted with Northerners sending terrorists into the South like John Brown to rape, murder and steal.
They were fed up with the Republican Party printing hundreds of thousands of copies of Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis as a campaign document and distributing them coast to coast. It called for the throats of white Southerners to be sliced open in the night.
I wonder how long Rep. Beyer would put up with paying three-fourths of the taxes while three-fourths of his tax money was spent on his neighbors?
We can not allow virtue signalers like Beyer, Elizabeth Warren and Ty Seidule to cherry-pick events in history that help them politically but devastate the rest of the country.
We can not allow these hatemongers to repeal the reconciliation that the country was so proud of after the bloody war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed.
Despite being outnumbered four to one and massively outgunned, Confederate valor is unsurpassed in the history of the world. James McPherson writes in Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War:
[T]he overall mortality rate for the South exceeded that of any country in World War I and that of all but the region between the Rhine and the Volga in World War II.vi
Click HERE to view 28 official United States Army photographs of the magnificent Confederate Memorial. Looking at these stunning photographs for one second shows you clearly that destruction of this monument was a barbaric, uncivilized act that only an extremist like leftist vice chair of the naming commission, Ty Seidule, along with fake Indian Elizabeth Warren and shallow Don Beyer, could be in favor of.
Seidule hated the Confederate Memorial, and the reconciliation of North and South after the bloody war, and said so in his screed, Robert E. Lee and Me.
The Confederate Memorial was NOT in the naming commission's remit, as they falsely claimed, nor did Congress specifically mandate its removal.
The naming commission's unverified report deliberately left out the primary history of the Confederate Monument, which is the reconciliation of North and South after the War Between the States. The reconciliation theme is irrefutable and stated repeatedly in Arlington National Cemetery's own application for its Historic District to be on the National Register of Historic Places. (download my PDF white paper "The Reconciliation of North and South After the War Between the States as Symbolized by the Confederate Memorial 'New South' in Arlington National Cemetery")
The Confederate Memorial symbolized peace, love, patriotism and the reunification of the United States of America. It does not commemorate the Confederacy.
The Confederate Memorial is one of the most significant monuments on earth, not only for its symbolism of reconciliation after a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed, but because of its magnificence. Again, look at the Army Photographs and ask yourself what kind of person would want to destroy a monument like that?
Click HERE to view a United States Army video of the Confederate Memorial.
Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that:
. . . no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art.
Esteemed British art critic and historian, Alexander Adams, wrote in his "Testimony regarding Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial submitted to the Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery Open Session," 7-8 November, 2022 (download PDF):
Having viewed a large amount of public statuary from the beaux-arts era (1850-1914), it is my professional opinion that the Memorial is a serious, iconographically complex and technically accomplished piece of art. In my view, it is a handsome sculpture and an entirely appropriate funerary monument. I consider it an internationally significant piece of art of its type and era. Any nation should be proud to host such a magnanimous and dignified monument.
The inscription “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” provides a Biblical guidance to turning from war to peace. This is echoed by the personification of the South, which holds the wreath of glory and touches the plough of peaceful prosperity. The frieze below depicts the contributions of those who supported the war effort.
Here is some of the massive amount of history that the naming commission left out of their fraudulent report.
The monument was the idea of Union soldier and later president, William McKinley, after enthusiastic Southern participation in the Spanish-American War, and it was approved by Congress.
McKinley said:
. . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and South prompts this gracious act and if it needed further justification it is found in the gallant loyalty to the Union and the flag so conspicuously shown in this year just passed by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.
President William Howard Taft spoke and was warmly received at the UDC ceremony the evening the cornerstone was laid.
President Woodrow Wilson (download PDF photograph) gave the dedication speech June 4, 1914 (download Wilson's address).vii
President Theodore Roosevelt sent the first memorial wreath that started an annual tradition observed by all presidents including Barack Obama.
President Warren G. Harding sent a message of condolence (download PDF here) that was read at the funeral of the monument's acclaimed Jewish sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, who was a VMI Confederate soldier. Here are some of Harding's comments from The Evening Star, Washington, D.C., Wednesday, March 30, 1921:
'Ezekiel will be remembered,' the President wrote, 'as one who knew how to translate the glories of his own time and people into that language of art which is common to all peoples and all times. He served his state in the conflict that threatened to divide and that at last served to unify our country. He accepted the verdict of the civil war's arbitrament with all the fine generosity that has been characteristic of both the north and south; and the splendid product of his art, that here testifies to our nation's reunion, will stand from this day forth as guardian over his ashes.
'Every line and curve and expression carries the plea for a truly united nation that may be equal to the burdens of these exacting times. It speaks to us the ardent wish, the untiring purpose, to help make our people one people, secure in independence, dedicated to freedom, and ever ready to lend the hand of confident strength in aid of the oppressed and needy. Its long-drawn shadows of earliest morn and latest evening will always fall on sacred soil. The genius that produced, the love that gave, the devotion that will cherish it will forever be numbered among our ennobling possessions.
'[H]e wrought them into works which compelled the recognition of the chief art schools and won the honors of nations and cities that boasted of being the homes of sculpture's best traditions. Crowned with these honors, he turned his thoughts to his own country, and as the final and finest product of his talents gave to us the monument that from this day will mark his resting place. It is the memorial of reunited America the testimony to the tradition of indissoluble union, the shrine to which we are gathered today, and will gather through the years to come, those who would dedicate themselves to the ideal of unselfish, enlightened, upstanding Americanism as a force for our country's maintenance and all humanity's betterment.' (bold emphasis added)
You can not read President Harding's message without knowing that the Confederate Memorial represented reconciliation, peace, love and patriotism, all things the naming commission left out of its fraudulent, unverified report, and are things a historically ignorant leftist like Don Beyer can't comprehend.
Ezekiel created the Confederate Memorial in the City of Rome, Italy and was buried next to his monument before it was removed, along with two other Confederate soldiers and a Confederate sailor, which made the monument their grave marker as President Harding stated in his funeral message.
Grave markers were prohibited, in Warren's legislation, from being destroyed. Removal of the Confederate Memorial was ILLEGAL.
Rep. Beyer said an enslaved mammy was on the monument and another enslaved man was following his master to war.
That is a lie. There is no evidence that either of those blacks on the monument were slaves. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel did not state whether they were slaves or free. There were more free blacks in the South than in the North so the blacks on the Confederate monument were probably free, especially the black Confederate soldier.
Beyer, in his ignorance of history, does not know that several Northern and Western states had laws prohibiting blacks from living there or even visiting for more than a few days, and if they stayed longer, they were subject to arrest and whipping by the sheriff. Lincoln's Illinois was one of them.
Beyer does not understand that the South was an integrated bi-racial society unlike the North that was white supremacist and is where Jim Crow began. Jim Crow began in the North and was there for years before moving South at the end of the nineteenth century.
Blacks did fight for the Confederacy in large numbers so Beyer's support for the Confederate Memorial's removal and against its reinstallation is racist against them. Beyer is a racist. So is Elizabeth Warren and Ty Seidule. They are racist against black Southerners who voluntarily, of their own free will, marched off to war to defend their homes in the South. There were always blacks at Confederate Veteran Reunions and many drew state pensions.
Just one irrefutable example proves substantial black participation in combat on battlefields with the Confederate army. A Yankee official, Lewis H. Steiner, M.D., Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed, firsthand, the exodus of Stonewall Jackson's army from Frederick, Maryland in 1862. Steiner writes in his official report:
Wednesday, September 10, 1862: At 4 o'clock this morning the Rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson's force taking the advance. The movement continued until 8 o'clock P.M., occupying 16 hours. The most liberal calculation could not give them more than 64,000 men. Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in the number. They had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and they were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of generals and promiscuously mixed up with all the Rebel horde (emphasis added).
I named a two-DVD set featuring Professor Edward C. Smith, who, before he passed, was a well-known authority on black Confederates, Mixed Up with All the Rebel Horde, Why Black Southerners Fought for the South in the War Between the States.
Steiner writes that there were "over 3,000 Negroes." That number could be much higher. Steiner was observing from a distance starting well before dawn and he would not be able to distinguish light-skinned African Americans from white Confederate soldiers.
So it's not unreasonable to think that 3,000 to 5,000 of every 64,000 Confederate soldiers were black meaning, from this one example, there could have been 50,000 or more armed Confederate blacks, at one time or another, marching with whites against the Union army. Of course, thousands of blacks served in the Confederate army in other capacities.
To get at the truth about the past, you have to read the words of the people of the past and make up your own mind. Academia and the news media are so politicized, most of them are worthless as historical sources.
Southerners fought to the bitter end for independence and lost only after four bloody years because of overwhelming Northern resources, as General Lee said at the end of the war; resources such as the North's pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world to feed Union armies. Some 25% of the Union army was not born here.
The truth is, blacks suffered enormously at the hands of the Union army. It has now come out that a substantial number of Union blacks were coerced into joining, and when they did, their families back home were not taken care of in the least despite Yankee promises. Many suffered mightily, were cold, ragged and starved to death.
There are accounts of dead blacks being buried by Yankees in mass graves along with dead horses and mules, all thrown together in wagons then thrown into unmarked ditches dug for that purpose. These are documented in Jim Downs' excellent book, Sick from Freedom: African American Death and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction, which Samuel Mitcham says "should have won a Pulitzer Prize."viii
The whole story of blacks in the War Between the States is a half-truth, which makes it a lie. Thousands of Confederate blacks are ignored because that does not suit political liberals in academia and the news media, and ignorant racist politicians like Don Beyer, Elizabeth Warren and Ty Seidule.
Sam Mitcham called Downs' book "his masterpiece." Mitcham writes and quotes Downs that the war:
'produced the largest biological crisis of the nineteenth century . . . wreaking havoc on the population of the newly freed.' Tens of thousands of freed slaves died due to the 'exigencies of war and the massive dislocation triggered by emancipation.' Downs estimated that 1,000,000 of the 4,000,000 freed slaves suffered serious illness or death. We do not know how many died, but there were tens of thousands of deaths, especially among black children.ix
As a result of the war, Southerners lost 60% of their capital and "one in four of its young men of military age killed; one in four others crippled."x
For Americans to forgive each other and come together for the good of the nation made America exceptional in world history, which is the opposite of the Woke hatred of Elizabeth Warren, Ty Seidule, and Don Beyer. Woke hatred guarantees our country will be divided forever. Democrats think hate and chaos will benefit them politically because they have enough of the news media to regurgitate anything they say. They have given up on political ideas that benefit the entire country, which is why they have imported 20 million new Democrat voters across our open southern border since Biden took office.
Rep. Clyde wrote a good piece June 11th that appeared in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It explains the Confederate Memorial's history and his motivation for wanting that world class monument by Moses Ezekiel back in Arlington National Cemetery. Ezekiel was one of the greatest sculptors in history.
Here is Rep. Clyde's piece:
June 11, 2024
By Andrew Clyde
As a 28-year Navy combat veteran, it pains me to see the fabric of our nation unraveling and the history of our country crumbling by the day. Many founding principles and symbols that make the United States the greatest country in the world have been demonized to sow discord for nefarious political gain.
After all, it is far easier to divide and conquer when the values, history and liberties that unite us are destroyed.
A powerful example of this deliberate division is the recent removal of the Reconciliation Monument from Arlington National Cemetery.
Following the Spanish-American War — where Union and Confederate veterans fought side-by-side under one flag — President William McKinley declared that the U.S. government would commit to properly burying Confederate soldiers. In 1898, McKinley passionately asserted, “Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag waves over us in peace with new glories.”
In this spirit, Congress authorized Confederate remains to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1900. Six years later, Secretary of War William Howard Taft permitted the construction of a memorial honoring our country’s new shared reconciliation from its troubled divisions. Finally, in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the new memorial of national unity. Designed by a Jewish American sculptor, the monument is topped with a woman crowned by an olive wreath to symbolize peace.
Prior to the completion of the monument, President Theodore Roosevelt sent a floral arrangement to the Confederate section of Arlington National Cemetery. This established a tradition of sending a wreath to the Reconciliation Monument, a custom that has been carried out by nearly every U.S. president — including President Barack Obama.
Unfortunately, the now-disbanded Naming Commission, which was authorized by Congress through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021, recommended the removal of the Reconciliation Memorial. The Naming Commission was charged with recommending the removal of “all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America.”
[Publisher's Note: See my article "Naming commission's report on the Confederate Memorial is a historical FRAUD", https://www.charlestonathenaeumpress.com/naming-commissions-report-on-the-confederate-memorial-is-a-historical-fraud/]
However, the Reconciliation Monument does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; it honors and commemorates national unity. Additionally, the Naming Commission’s authority explicitly prohibited the desecration of grave sites. I simply cannot fathom how removing the monument built to recognize our country’s journey to reconciliation does not desecrate the hundreds of graves encircling the marker.
For these reasons, I led an amendment to the fiscal year 2024 Defense Appropriations bill to prohibit the Department of Defense from using funds to remove the Reconciliation Memorial. Notably, my amendment passed by voice on the House floor and was included in the House-passed Defense spending bill.
Regrettably, my amendment was stripped out during budget negotiations with the Senate, and the memorial was removed from Arlington National Cemetery.
In a renewed attempt to protect the memorial and bolster its intended purpose of national unity, I recently introduced an amendment to the fiscal year 2025 Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies bill to return the Reconciliation Monument to Arlington National Cemetery.
My effort to preserve a structure representing the United States’ healing from a dark chapter in history drew outlandish but unsurprising ire. Specifically, my work to honor and safeguard this period of reconciliation led critic Jamie Dupree to label me as “the unofficial champion of the Confederacy on Capitol Hill.”
This is dishonest, disingenuous and patently false.
Mind you, support for the Reconciliation Monument is not partisan. Former Secretary of the Navy and former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), a decorated Marine Corps officer who served combat tours in Vietnam, published an inspiring piece detailing his opposition to removing the memorial.
Is Webb also an “unofficial champion of the Confederacy”? No. He is a patriot who loves his country. Though we bear different political stripes, we share the same concern of erasing our nation’s history — especially our history of reconciliation from deep, divisive wounds.
National unity should not be controversial. As bad actors revel in tearing our country apart, it is up to patriotic Americans to stand firm in preserving our history, protecting our freedoms and promoting a more perfect union.
NOTES:
i Ben Kesling, "The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Families to Join, Pentagon scrambles to retain the main pipeline for new service members as disillusioned families steer young people away," June 30, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/articles/military-recruiting-crisis-veterans-dont-want-their-children-to-join-510e1a25, accessed 6-30-23.
ii Ibid.
iii The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861, and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed March 29, 2014.
iv The eight Union slave states when the guns of Fort Sumter sounded were Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland and Delaware. There were still some slaves in New Jersey but I'm not counting New Jersey. West Virginia came into the Union in early 1863 as a slave state, ironically, just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. Lincoln did not require West Virginia to abolish slavery before joining his Union.
v The seven states that seceded and formed the Confederate States of America were South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Texas.
vi Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.
vii The fake news Washington Post covered up the fact that President Woodrow Wilson gave the dedication address at the Confederate Memorial's dedication, June 4, 1914. In their article "Majority of House GOP, including 3 Black Republicans, vote for failed Confederate memorial measure" by Gillian Brockell, June 14, 2024, all the Washington Post said was: "It was installed in 1914, almost 50 years after the Civil War ended, by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in a ceremony attended by President Woodrow Wilson, who was noted even at the time for his racist view." The Washington Post is noted today for ITS racist, bigoted views in addition to its fake news as it proved by its malicious, fraudulent story against Covington Catholic High School's Nicholas Sandmann. Sandmann sued the Washington Post and other fake news outlets like CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. See "Washington Post settles lawsuit with family of Kentucky teenager" by Paul Farhi, July 24, 2020.
viii Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 174.
ix Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 175.
x Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 174.
An imagined history of African Americans is the dangerous rock rolling down hill and smashing everything in its path. (page 67)
One of Shotwell Publishing's latest books is Dr. Clyde Norman Wilson's 80 page African American Slavery in Historical Perspective (Amazon, softcover, $11.95; Kindle, $4.99).
This is an extremely important book because putting slavery in historical perspective puts the lie to the worthless presentist history regurgitated ad nauseam by academia and the fake news media. You can not learn from history when the history being taught is a fraud.
Few, if any, have done more for American history than Clyde Wilson, who is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of History with a 35 year career at the University of South Carolina. He is primary editor of the voluminous The Papers of John C. Calhoun and just finished editing an acclaimed 28-volume edition. He is author or editor of over 30 other books and over 800 articles, essays, reviews, etc. He has lectured all over the world. I have had the pleasure of attending many of them.
His professional accomplishments and awards are too many to list here but include founding director of the Society of Independent Southern Historians, the Bostick Prize for Contributions to South Carolina Letters, the Robert E. Lee Medal of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, founding dean of the SCV's Stephen D. Lee Institute, co-founder of Shotwell Publishing, and the M. E. Bradford Distinguished Professor of the Abbeville Institute.
A book like this has been badly needed for a long time. Everybody knows how pathetic and lacking the study of history is, in this day and age. The degradation of American History began in the 1960s when truth as the standard for history, began being replaced by leftist politics, as Marxists began their long march through the institutions.
That replacement is largely complete today with academia 100% liberal, and free speech and inquiry non-existent on so many campuses run by mediocre DEI appointees like Harvard's Claudine Gay, and the racists at Columbia who allow Jewish students to be attacked or prevented from going to class by violent mobs. Those mobs support terrorists and are driven by hate-America agitators from around the world.
I know the actual number of liberals in academia is closer to 90% but the few independent thinkers, especially in the humanities, are not going to speak up and have the screaming mob come to their office, or lose their chance for tenure. The entire atmosphere is sick and twisted, as always happens when woke politics takes over.
Academia, much of the time, does not promote knowledge or wisdom for young people. It interprets almost everything according to leftist, anti-white racist precepts such as Critical Race Theory, DEI and other Marxist imperatives.
Dr. Wilson states that slavery today is still a powerful, emotional force in public life and many have weaponized the word slavery though they "have no knowledge or understanding of what life was like in past times" thus "historical perspective is needed."
That is exactly right because the prime problem today is idiotic leftist standards such as 1) men can menstruate and get pregnant, and 2) it is fair for men to compete in women's sports because, if they say they are women, they really are women. That's all it takes to become a woman.
Biden just signed an Executive Order changing Title IX so bigger, stronger men can compete with girls and women though that puts women in danger (think rugby, lacrosse, basketball, and everything else). It is outrageous and degrading for women and girls to have to endure that along with men snooping around their bathrooms when they are most vulnerable, giving them no privacy or respect.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, governor of Arkansas, praised legislation just passed in Arkansas, that negates Biden's absurdity. She said:
Biden thinks anybody can be a woman just because they say so. As a woman, the mother of a daughter and our state's first chief executive to give birth … I can't think of anything more offensive or dismissive of the very real, very scientific traits that all women share and that no man does.
To understand the past you have to view the past the way people who lived in the past viewed it. It was not the past to them. It was their present.
Wilson writes that "before the invention of labour-saving machinery, beginning [with] Britain in the late 1700s, the master-servant relationship was normal in almost every human society. . . . Servitude was the everyday condition of great numbers of people who did most of the world's hard and dirty work." (p1)
There was slavery in the Bible though Christians "were urged to be good masters and good servants."
There was slavery in ancient Greece and Rome in their greatest days, slavery everywhere in the Islamic world including of whites, slavery in Asian civilizations, and for 500 years, Europe's serfs and peasants had "little more freedom from labour and inferior status than African American slaves." (p2)
Black Africans themselves were the source of most of the slavery of their black brothers and sisters.
African tribal chieftains waging never-ending warfare caused slavery in Africa to flourish "longer than any other part of the world" and it still exists there today.
The plantation economy of the pre-industrial world needed labor and black slaves were Africa's largest export for perhaps a millennium:
There is scarcely an African American person in the New World whose ancestors had not originally been enslaved by fellow Africans. (p2)
That is an amazing statistic. Only 5% of blacks in the African Diaspora came to the United States.
Read the famous African American anthropologist, Zora Neale Hurston, in her book, Barracoon, from my article "The Washington Poop, I mean Post: Fake News AND Fake History," when she discovered it was fellow blacks in Africa selling her ancestors into slavery. Slaves did not voluntarily go onto slave ships because the slavers waved a red handkerchief and the blacks were curious and got captured.
Black slaves were captured by other blacks in incessant tribal warfare then shackled and held behind bars for months in slave forts on Africa's coast such as Bunce Island off today's Sierra Leone, waiting on the slave trader to pull up. Those slave traders were mostly New Englanders and New Yorkers and, before them, Europeans.
Then poor slaves faced months through the Middle Passage, chained side by side in the bowels of scorching hot slave ships with no ventilation, in vomit, feces, and the stench of death.
It might make DEI racists sad but:
No movement against slavery and the slave trade ever arose in Africa. Slavery was abolished due to the efforts of [white] European soldiers, officials, and missionaries, often against stiff native resistance. (p2)
For the South-haters out there, Dr. Wilson writes:
. . . as John Adams point out to Thomas Jefferson, "slave" was just a word while the condition of the labouring poor in the North could scarcely be differentiated from that of Southern blacks. Despite the false information conveyed by television, John Adams was never an abolitionist. Adams and Jefferson agreed that American slaves, despite their situation, were in a far happier condition that the lower classes in Britain. The abolitionist Wendell Phillips discovered a boy working in a stable in Boston who did not know that he was a slave. (pp2-3).
The population increase of blacks in the United States is some proof of their condition, especially when black slaves in the Caribbean and other places did not increase at all. Mortality was high in the Caribbean because their lives were brutal. New slaves had to be brought in constantly, which caused many insurrections non-existent in the American South:
In North America the black population from the beginning increased abundantly, at a rate almost equal to the white, suggesting relatively good conditions. In 1780 the African American population was 566,000. In 1860 it was 4.4 million. (p3)
Even in the North, when "Slaves were 10 per cent of the New York population and household slaves were commonplace" Yale president Timothy Dwight "wrote a long poem about how much happier the slaves were in Connecticut than elsewhere." (p3)
Even though the slave trade was outlawed in 1808 by the United States Constitution, New Englanders, who loved the lucrative profits, carried on an illegal slave trade until after the War Between the States. See W. E. B. Du Bois's famous book, The Suppression of the African Slave-trade to the United States of America, 1838-1870. On page 179, he writes:
The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.
The New England Yankee attitude toward slave trading is stated well by John Brown, the founder of Brown University, not the infamous John Brown of Harpers Ferry but John Brown, American patriot of Providence, Rhode Island:
[T]here was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.
That quotation comes from the excellent book by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company).
Dr. Wilson gives us a prime example of the North versus the South on slavery:
In 1860 a U.S. Navy vessel near the coast of Cuba intercepted a slave ship, the Echo from Providence, Rhode Island. There were 400 Africans on board, in miserable condition, the mortality rate on the voyage having been 30%. The U.S. vessel that captured the slave ship was commanded by John N. Maffitt who a few short years later would be an outstanding Confederate Navy officer. The captain and owner of the Echo was Edward Townsend, an educated man from an affluent Rhode Island family. (p6)
Townsend said he had "saved the Africans from death in their own land, which may well have been true." He was to make $130,000 on this trip which was a huge sum back then.
The Southerner Maffitt took the slave-trading criminal Yankee Townsend to the Northern-born U.S. judge in Key West. That judge refused to take jurisdiction over the Echo for its U.S. and international crime and directed the case to Boston, the supposed point of origin of the voyage. Townsend had "friends" and the Boston judge allowed him to walk free. (p6)
The Echo with its 400 Africans was sent to Charleston, South Carolina "where they were received sympathetically and provided with food and clothing." Dr. Wilson continues:
I once read an ignorant leftist novel which portrays Charlestonians chortling crudely over having new slaves. But that is not what happened. The U.S. Attorney James Conner, who was later to lose a leg fighting in the Confedrate army, was unable to get hold of Townsend who had been sent to Boston to be freed, but prosecuted the crew of the slave ship. One "historian" falsely states that the Africans were made slaves in South Carolina. In fact they were returned to their homeland, though most did not want to go. In Charleston they were treated well and supplied with their needs. (pp6-7)
Over time, many "believed that entering into Western Civilisation and Christianity, even in a subordinate status, was a net benefit for Africans." The Spanish Bishop of the Indies in the 1500s, Las Casas:
preached against the enslavement of Indians but thought that slavery was a benefit for Africans. The Episcopal bishop of Vermont wrote just before the war that never in history had so much been done for the uplift of Africans as by the American South. (p7)
White Southerners had a relationship with black Southerners "that was not entirely negative" while blacks were "virtually absent" from the rest of the United States. That is one reason why so many blacks were enthusiastic to become Confederate soldiers.
Dr. Lewis H. Steiner, Inspector of the United States Sanitary Commission, observed the exit of Stonewall Jackson's army from Frederick, Maryland in 1862. He wrote in his report:
Wednesday, September 10, 1862: At 4 o'clock this morning the Rebel army began to move from our town, Jackson's force taking the advance. The movement continued until 8 o'clock P.M., occupying 16 hours. The most liberal calculation could not give them more than 64,000 men. Over 3,000 Negroes must be included in the number. They had arms, rifles, muskets, sabers, bowie-knives, dirks, etc. They were supplied, in many instances, with knapsacks, haversacks, canteens, etc., and they were manifestly an integral portion of the Southern Confederacy army. They were seen riding on horses and mules, driving wagons, riding on caissons, in ambulances, with the staff of generals and promiscuously mixed up with all the Rebel horde.
There could have been many more blacks than "over 3,000" since Dr. Steiner began observing at 4:00 a.m., before light, and could have missed many light-skinned blacks.
Steiner's is only one small example.
Contrast that to the laws in numerous Northern states that forbid blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.
Six slave states fought for the North the entire war. West Virginia came into the Union as a slave state in 1863, ironically just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed no slaves or few. The EP exempted all the Union slave states and all Southern territory already captured by the Union army.
Dr. Wilson writes that "Western civilization, the greatest achievement of mankind so far, was white." They believed in white supremacy. "Non-whites they encountered were either savages or of very strange cultures." This was reality and "People in those days did not feel a drive to 'fix' it." Wilson writes:
The only disagreement was over whether the superiority was permanent or could be changed, a subject of speculation by Jefferson. Southerners were guided by everyday experience - abolitionists by puritan rage against the sins of Southern white people. The welfare of black people was not a strong motive for them. (p8)
Abraham Lincoln believed in white supremacy. He said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates he wanted the West reserved for white people from all over the world. That was the driving force behind the "no expansion of slavery into the West" argument. It was not concern for black people. Indeed, they did not want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks in the West.
All of the above, except for my additions, comes from just the Introduction. Dr. Wilson sets the stage for the rest of the book with this:
Slavery involved several million people over 10 or so generations and a vast territory, the great part of what was the antebellum United States. You can find an example of anything you want to find. However, it is proper for our understanding to consider the general life of Southern blacks and whites at a particular time rather than chosen examples. (p8)
In Chapter 2, Antebellum Bondage, Wilson writes:
The definitive work on slavery in antebellum America, largely ignored since its appearance in 1975, is Time on the Cross by Robert W. Fogel, a Nobel Laureate, and Stanley L. Engerman. These economic historians, neither of whom can be accused of sympathy with slavery or the South, showed that in general antebellum slaves fared well in nutrition, housing, leisure - superior to the norm for the working poor in the North and Europe and were, contrary to Northern claims, more productive than Northern workers. They reported that Southern slaves received a 90% lifetime return on their labour. . . . (p12)
He writes that "Plantations had no barbed wire, watchtowers, or attack dogs, or even very many locks. . . . Corporal punishment was used on the plantation, although not as often as alleged. It was also common in the army, navy, merchant marine, factories, as punishment for crime, and in nearly every family." (p13)
About day-to-day life, Wilson writes:
The plantation was a place where people lived and grew crops, often over several generations. African Americans were part of a joint enterprise where all rose or fell together. Incentive rewards were normal. Work was directed by black foremen more often than by hired white overseers. A significant portion of the slave population could be classified as skilled artisans, necessary to run the self-sufficient community, of immense value to them after emancipation. African Americans commonly had their own garden plots with produce to consume or sell. Northern soldiers were shocked to find that slaves had watches and fine clothes and spending money. There were puritanical Yankee visitors who thought Southern slaves were undisciplined, rowdy, and had too much freedom. (pp13-14)
Wilson writes that "history is the sad record of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind, antebellum American bondage was an evil not near the top of the list." Southerners, white and black:
made a livable society that had the moral resources for evolution toward a better society than that created by invasion and conquest and rivers of blood. (p17)
In contrast, Northern society was cold and hard:
In New York City in 1860 there were women and children working 16-hour days for starvation wages, 150,000 unemployed, 40,000 homeless, 600 brothels (some with girls as young as 10), and 9,000 grog shops where the poor could temporarily drown their sorrows. Half the children in the city did not live past the age of five (unlike slave children in the South). (p17)
Wilson points out that economic control of the country is what Northerners were fighting for. They had huge advantages and thought they could win easily. They saw the Western lands as markets to exploit, railroads to build, wealth that would flow back to New York, Boston and the entire North.
I could write volumes about the foaming-at-the-mouth determination of the North to control the taxes and tariffs of the country but here is one quote from the Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, 10 days before South Carolina voted unanimously 169-0 in a Convention of the People to secede from the Union. It comes from my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States: The Irrefutable Argument. Here is what secession and an independent Southern republic meant to the North, and this is why Abraham Lincoln sent five naval missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861, to start a war:
In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue, and these results would likely follow. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not compete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment.
Concern for the black man was nowhere in their minds, as Dr. Wilson continues:
Abolitionists spewed hatred at the south without ever once suggesting any steps toward a gradual and practical solution. (p24)
Said Emerson, "The abolitionist wishes to abolish slavery because he wishes to abolish the black man." (p24)
Much abolition propaganda "was also a disguised form of closet pornography for puritans, dwelling on illicit sex, brandings, whippings, and the like." (p24)
Democrat New Jersey governor, Joel Parker, said:
'Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery.' (p25)
About blacks during the war, Wilson quotes Allan Nevins in The War for the Union, "long the standard mainstream history of this period":
The story of the freedmen in wartime is one of gross mismanagement and neglect. The problem was neither vigilantly foreseen by the government nor dealt with vigorously and promptly ... The abolitionists who had called for so long for emancipation should have seen that the mere ending of slavery was far from a solution ... All too often squalor, hunger, and disease haunted the refugees, the camps becoming social cancers that were a reproach to the North ... Deaths were frequent, disease was universal, and the future so bleak that many of the refugees talked of returning to their slave masters. And some did so.
.... Many [of the Union officers and soldiers] had an instinctive dislike of Negroes.... (p40)
Wilson writes that the following is from the "official history of the 24th Massachusetts Regiment":
...the men had a spell of that almost universal horseplay known in those days as "tossing niggers" in a blanket .... Of course the poor victims screamed and yelled, but the louder the cries, the greater the fun for the lusty fellow at the blanket's edge ... (p41)
Wilson quotes Frederick Douglas, "the foremost African American spokesman of the 19th century" who later said that "everything Lincoln did was for white people. Any benefit to black people was incidental. He [Douglas] acknowledged twenty-five years after the war that blacks were worse off than under slavery and that the fault was mainly with the central government in relation to which the black man is":
a deserted, a defrauded, a swindled, and an outcast man - in law free, in fact a slave. I here and now denounce his so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud - a fraud upon him, a fraud upon the world. (p43)
Nathan Bedford Forrest's "elite headquarters company contained several black men." Forrest
took 30 of his men with him to the war, promising freedom if they served faithfully. All but one did. Black Confederates were welcomed at veterans' reunions and received pensions from Southern States. (p43)
The words of former slaves are powerful evidence of their lives. Wilson writes:
The best evidence we have from the slaves themselves is contained in the library of Congress's multi-volume Slave Narratives: A Folk History of American Slavery. The narratives contain over 2,300 interviews with surviving slaves made 1936-1938. These materials have been criticized in various ways, but they cover every State and are fairly consistent in what they tell. Some terrible stories are told, but in general the narratives show no great resentment against slavery and masters, and many complain of the decline in the living standards after emancipation. (p44)
One of the former slaves said:
The Yankees done a lot of mischief. I knows because I was there. They robbed the folks and a whole lot of darkies who ain't never been whipped by the master got a whipping from the Yankees. (p45)
Wilson quotes Jim Downs's, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (2015). Downs said the black death toll was 1,000,000 and "We must also take account of the postwar toll of malnutrition, homelessness, and debilitation from wounds, leading to early death. There were in 1866-1867 epidemics in the South recalling the death toll of the Spanish Flu after World War I." (p48)
About Reconstruction, Wilson writes:
The primary description of Reconstruction, long and almost universally accepted, was as an era of corruption and oppression. A common motif of current historians is that Reconstruction was a noble effort to raise the black people to first-class citizenship. Much of later interpretation is based on that proposition, but it is a lie. This assumes that Northerners had dedicated themselves to a crusade for equality, a goal that never existed. That is not what Reconstruction and giving the vote to the freedmen was about. (p52)
In Chapter 6, Conclusion, Wilson writes:
In the long run of history, the story of America is the settlement by Europeans of a continental wilderness and their establishing of free institutions and a widespread prosperity that has been the envy of the world. African American slavery is a sidebar to this history, not the main feature. (p59)
Wilson is right when he writes:
The subject of slavery is today so entwined with unhealthy and present-centered emotions and motives - guilt, shame, hypocrisy, projection, prurient imagination, propaganda, vengeance, extortion, virtue signaling - as to defy normal historical discussion. (p59)
About the comparison of the South to Nazism, Wilson writes:
The proper analogy to Nazism is with the U.S. government and its war of conquest to punish disobedience to centralized government. If Americans knew anything real about the faction who forced through and carried out the war against the South other than a few pretty phrases from Lincoln's speeches, they would see how strong the motivation was related to greed and the will to power and how little to humanitarian thought and action.
'The Righteous Union Myth' is falser, stronger, and more destructive than the supposed 'Lost Cause Myth.' (p62)
Wilson writes that "Those who want the war to be about slavery and nothing but slavery are often hateful, disdainful, ignorant, and unwilling to engage in honest discussion. Reason, evidence, and fair discussion do not enter the question for them." And:
Even worse are the professors, plutocrats, politicians, and even high-ranking military officers who have taken a recent occasion to announce that Robert E. Lee was 'a traitor.' One wonders why Eisenhower had a portrait of Lee in the Oval Office while people without any observable merit of accomplishment, intellect, or character gloat over destroying his monuments. Fortunately, Lee is so much greater than his current critics that in the long view of history he will always stand tall.
People who reduce the complexities of American history to 'Lee, a traitor,' as many of high rank are doing . . . are pygmies and clowns in intelligence, ethics, and patriotism to anybody who is familiar with Lee and the leaders of his time and earlier. (p64)
Clyde Wilson's African American Slavery in Historical Perspective helps one understand history and see things the way the people of the past saw them. That is how you truly understand the past.
He points out George Orwell's statement that "'The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.'" (p67)
Today's politicized "emphasis on slavery has less to do with the real feelings of African Americans than with the deluded minds of white people seeking cheap virtue." Elizabeth Warren, Ty Seidule and Nikki Haley top the list.
This outstanding books ends with:
Critical investigation and examination of history has been a hallmark of Western man, not present in other civilisations. . . . We are now getting close to a Soviet-style official interpretation of the nature and meaning of our history, where anything not serving the rulers is suppressed and even punished. An imagined history of African Americans is the dangerous rock rolling down hill and smashing everything in its path. (p67)
In the future, the South will remain the moral master, because the ultimate defense of American and Western Civilization will be soldiered by stalwart Southerners more than anyone else.
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - It is hard to argue with James Atticus Bowden's title for his piece that appeared on the Abbeville Institute Blog June 22, 2023, for the simple reason that people are moving into the South in droves to escape places where civilization is collapsing.
In San Francisco, violent mobs created by liberal laws that encourage theft, ransack department stores and put employees at risk. Of course, that can not go on for long. No business can lose money and stay in business. They might squander their capital for a while but they are screwing their shareholders and showing their customers how stupid, cowardly and immoral they are for allowing this barbarism.
New York is the most corrupt place in American history where leftist politicians like AG Letitia James promise to use the law to "get Trump." "Too male, too pale and too stale" is her racist chant until she gets in front of patriotic New York firemen who boo her and shout "Trump! Trump! Trump!"
The blatant destruction of blind justice makes New York a fascist tyranny with its mouthpiece, the racist NY Times and its fraudulent 1619 "history."
The New York legal system is corrupt to the core as Alvin Bragg, NY County DA, shows us daily in his trumped-up case against President Trump but New York Governor Kathy Hochul assures us WE won't be prosecuted for having the wrong politics. It is only Trump they are after, in the most obvious case of election interference in history, directed by Biden's White House.
If you can't beat them in a fair election, invent a crime and prosecute them. Like Stalin said through his secret police, "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
Hochul recently called out 750 National Guardsmen to patrol the unridable subway system and if you try to help people threatened with violence, as U.S. Marine veteran Daniel Penny did, you will be prosecuted like the older bodega worker who was attacked by a young thug and had to fight for his life. He luckily picked up a knife and killed the assailant only to find himself charged with murder by Alvin Bragg and sent to Rikers Island.
Public outrage finally resulted in dropped charges and justice for this crime victim of Bragg's ideology and incompetence.
Your Natural Right to self defense does not exist in Bragg's New York. You submit to the criminals or Alvin Bragg will step away from his political prosecutions to put you in jail.
The good people of New York who are fed up with corruption, tyranny and taxes head South to Florida, Texas, South Carolina and places where they can breathe free air, where law and order, Jesus and the Second Amendment, are in charge, and criminals are not.
Fortunately, the majority of people fleeing places like New York and moving South are conservatives whose politics aligns well with most Southerners.
THE REMOVAL of the 109 year old Confederate Reconciliation Memorial from Arlington National Cemetery last December has desecrated Arlington National Cemetery for all time and must be restored.
Kirk Lyons of the Southern Legal Resource Center writes in an April update that a joint Appellant Brief of Defend Arlington and the SCV will be filed by May 22, 2024. Lyons states:
. . . we are advancing two VERY important national issues: 1. Protecting a national treasure from WOKE bureaucrats; and 2. Preserving "Judicial Review" over bureaucratic acts "mandated" by Congress. In its briefing, the Department of Justice lawyers basically told the judge that she, as a representative of the judiciary, had NO authority to review Secretary of Defense Austin's order to dismantle the 1914 Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery because the order was mandated by Congress.
Lyons goes on:
This case is nationally important and sets a very ominous precedent when a court agrees with the executive branch that a judge cannot review the legality or the constitutionality of the act of an agent of the executive branch . . .
This question goes to the heart of "judicial review" and the constitutional checks and balances . . .
Go to DefendArlington.org where you can help with fundraising by buying a beautiful coin on which one side shows the world class Confederate Memorial and the other, Jewish sculptor and Confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel. It is $25, and they also have a beautiful symbolic medal with the coin attached for $40, and the medal says "Deo Vindice" (see picture above). Buy both of these beautiful pieces and add some extra so that your donation is an even $100. It will be money well spent.
You can also donate on my donation page HERE.
Bowden's biography on the Abbeville Institute website states:
James Atticus Bowden holds advanced degrees from Harvard and Columbia Universities and is a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. He is an independent historian and Chairman of the Board of Directors at the Virginia First Foundation.
See Bowden's biography on his LinkedIn page HERE.]
(first published on the
Abbeville Institute blog,
June 22, 2023)
THE SOUTH is morally superior. It always has been and, looks like, likely will be. It all started when the Yankees showed up in 1620 to be the second English-speaking people here. The pilgrims were absolutist, stiff-necked, uncompromising, dissenting Puritans. They were different from the start. They mostly came from East Anglia and the ancient Danelaw. The Puritan’s religion, ideas, attitude, and accent were different from Virginia from day one. Virginia, where America and the South began, was more about individual rights and ‘live and let live’. The South had a better culture and way of life.
Two separate sub-cultures became the first four basic American cultures – Puritan New England, Quaker and Mennonite Mid-Atlantic, Anglican Tidewater, and Presbyterian, Scot-Irish Frontier. For almost 250 years the cultures evolved broadly into the regional ‘South’ and the ‘North’. Neither region was homogeneous. Diversity abounded, but core cultures created two separate regions. And the South was the moral master with greater freedoms and opportunities.
The year Yankeedom just began in the North was a year after representative democracy started in the South – in a church.
Also, it was a year after slavery started in the English-speaking colonies. Yet, the moral stain of slavery went north fast. The Yankee slave ships made a lot of money, as Yankee banks financed more slavery, and, later, Yankee factories got rich using slave-produced cotton and other raw materials. There were fewer slaves in the North because of climate and agriculture, not from any moral sense of right and wrong. The sin of slavery was all-American.
New towns were planned in New England with careful care that no one settler got more than another. In the South, if you worked hard you could buy more land and provide for your family with wealth a commoner could never get back in England.
By the time of the Revolution, the regions had grown apart independently enough, for the Father of the Country, George Washington, to express his immediate distaste and disgust for the North when he went to Boston for the first time – to command all the Patriot soldiers.
Right after the Revolution, Virginia led, as usual, to change the state right of religion to separate church and state. The Massachusetts legislature was last.
The state right for chattel slavery was ended over a period of decades where it was easiest first. Canada and some places in the North offered refuge for escaped slaves, but the Northern states didn’t offer for the wholesale migration of almost 4 million persons to their home. The abolitionists didn’t offer a path, or to pay for the means, to elevate humans up from slavery. Some Southerners, like Stonewall Jackson, taught slaves to read and write. Some abolitionists advocated wholesale murder, like Nat Turner – killing babies in the crib, women and old people.
No one in power had a plan to end slavery well. Just as no one really has a satisfactory plan for 20 million illegal immigrants in America today. And, as today’s advocates for open borders and amnesty demand the insanity of America’s suicide with great moral preening, abolitionists pushed murder in the name of freedom. Interestingly enough, even the Leftist icon, W.E.B. DuBois, said that slavery wouldn’t have lasted in the South because Southerners held too great of an innate sense of fairness and justice. Culture commands.
Then, awful war came.
The South truly earned its moral laurels during its heroic defense against invasion. April’s celebration of Confederate History Month is all about valiant Confederate soldiers and their families. Southerners who know their ancestors’ names and regiments – enriched by tales of oral history – take pride in their courage, honor, and fidelity. Winston Churchill wrote the most profoundly Christian army that ever marched was the Army of Northern Virginia.
People who defend their homes against invading, robbing, looting, burning soldiers have the moral high ground. Pretending the Recent Unpleasantness was a moral crusade all about slavery, all the time, bar everything else in conflict and sad step-by-step political stumble into war, is like saying WW II in the Pacific was because of the “Rape of Nanking” by the Japanese. No, the Japanese invaded and the Germans invaded in WW II. The Yankees invaded the South.
After the Yankees won, the Union Army occupied the South for 10 years. They stole everything they could. Oddly enough, they didn’t invite all the freed slaves to move North. Go figure.
Reconstruction begat Jim Crow segregation. This second American moral stain, segregation, falsely makes the South the perpetual tar baby, like slavery, because of de jure segregation. Yet, the real vicious, personal racism of de facto segregation thrived in the North. The last riots over racial integration of schools were in Boston, Massachusetts in 1974. Racism doesn’t have a regional home, it lives in the hearts of all kinds of people.
The victory of the Civil Rights movement, inspired by a Christian Southerner, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his ideas of non-violence, transformed the Nation. Today, the South is different from other regions of America. The better universities offer courses on Southern literature, art, music, history, politics, etc. And, the South is better. Why else, would so many Yankees move south to overwhelm too many, formerly Southern communities?
The absolutist, self-righteous, our-way-only, Puritan culture of the North slowly walked away from the God of the Bible after The War. Today, the Yankees who worship the small god of “Self” and cherish the liberal trinity of race, class, and genders are dangerous Human Secular Totalitarians. The Sissy Christians still up North who support them are their useful fools. The ideas changed over 150 years, but the culture is the same. The North is a pushy, money-grubbing, rude, arrogant, historically ignorant, tribal and socialist, absolutist culture. Yet, many good Americans live there, no thanks to the culture.
The Bible belt is buckled in the South. A Southern, Biblically-based, moral majority culture cherishes the Rule of Law, not men. Southern Conservatism holds dearly to the same ideas as the American Revolution. Southern culture is family-family-family, faith, and freedom. It’s still live and let live. It still places personal and family honor highly. In fact, the differences in culture are too many for this piece. Yet, some bad Americans live there, no thanks to the culture.
In the future, the South will remain the moral master, because the ultimate defense of American and Western Civilization will be soldiered by stalwart Southerners more than anyone else. Conversely, while the defense of Christianity against Islamist Totalitarianism may come from Africa, Eastern Europe, Western Europe – if a miracle happens, or Asia, Southerners will be prominent among Americans willing to fight the good fight for generations.
God save the South!
Just as an overview, though, real historiography starts with the evidence and then logically derives conclusions. But professional Lincoln Studiers work backwards. They start with a few standard assertions — Lincoln Was A Hardy Pioneer Youth, Lincoln Saved The Union, Lincoln Freed The Slaves, Lincoln Was The Greatest President, that sort of thing. Of course there’s not a shred of evidence confirming any of those conclusions — no, there really isn’t — that’s the point — and every shred that we have left to us confirms just the opposite.
Kevin Orlin Johnson,
from the article below
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - The two articles, below, by distinguished scholars of the Abbeville Institute, shine a great deal of light on the Lincoln fabrication, which is what so much of Lincoln scholarship is.
Kevin Orlin Johnson's 680 page 2023 book, The Lincolns in the White House, Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln's Slave Trading Revealed (nominated for the Lincoln Prize) is based on irrefutable primary sources and is powerfully written by a distinguished scholar.
Johnson's "Lincoln Studies and a Stacked Deck" is a blistering assessment of Lincoln scholarship and why much of it is a fraud, a myth.
Clyde Wilson's review of Johnson's The Lincolns in the White House - "Lincoln Sells His Slaves" - follows and concludes that Johnson's book is "a stellar contribution to the growing body of sound scholarship about the real Lincoln."
Johnson's The Lincolns in the White House is not to be confused with a book of the same name by Jerrold M. Packard. Packard's book is on Amazon but Johnson's is not.
Go to the publisher, Pangaeus, to order Kevin Orlin Johnson's book: https://www.pangaeus.com/the-lincolns-in-the-white-house.
An appeal of the decision that led to the removal of the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery has been filed. The removal of that 109 year old world class monument to peace and patriotism has desecrated Arlington National Cemetery, which will remain desecrated and dishonored until the Confederate Memorial is restored. For an update go to www.DefendArlington.org and please contribute.]
BACK IN 1949, two researchers, J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, wanted to sort out the relationship between what we see and how we interpret what we see. They did a proper study of it — “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm”, Journal of Personality, 18:206 ff. (1949), if you want to look it up.
Bruner and Postman asked people to identify playing cards flashed before them for a fraction of a second. But they’d put in a few trick cards — a red six of spades, for instance, or a black four of hearts. The idea was that the trick cards would delay the response time as the subjects paused to figure them out.
It didn’t work. The subjects went at it knowing for a fact that a deck of cards has four and only four descriptive classifications — red hearts, red diamonds, black spades and black clubs. That presumption overcame observation, and the subjects immediately described the cards as they expected cards to be, not as those particular cards really were.
Bruner and Postman let the test subjects look longer and even asked leading questions, but still none of them could see the reality right there in front of their eyes. If forced to think about it, they became visibly confused and uncomfortable. “Oh, I don’t know what it is!” one shouted. “Take it away!”
And so it is, Bruner and Postman concluded, “either a very sick organism, an overly motivated one, or one deprived of the opportunity to ‘try-and-check,’ which will not give up an expectancy in the face of a contradictory environment. It would be our contention, nonetheless, that for as long as possible and by whatever means available, the organism will ward off the perception of the unexpected, those things which do not fit his prevailing set.”
That is, people honestly cannot perceive anything that doesn’t fit their expectation. That affects any investigation at least a little, but Lincoln Studies rather depends upon it.
Recently a few studies have pointed that out. In 2002 Thomas DiLorenzo published his The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, which he followed in 2006 with his Lincoln Umasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe.
In 2009 John Avery Emison gave us Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America. Now there’s my own little effort, The Lincolns in the White House: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed. It has plenty of details and documentation of how Lincoln Studies goes wrong, a whole chapter on their method, in fact. And there’s lots more to come.
Just as an overview, though, real historiography starts with the evidence and then logically derives conclusions. But professional Lincoln Studiers work backwards. They start with a few standard assertions — Lincoln Was A Hardy Pioneer Youth, Lincoln Saved The Union, Lincoln Freed The Slaves, Lincoln Was The Greatest President, that sort of thing. Of course there’s not a shred of evidence confirming any of those conclusions — no, there really isn’t — that’s the point — and every shred that we have left to us confirms just the opposite. So for the past 150 years or so Lincoln Studiers have trimmed and tucked those shreds to fit those categories because those are the only categories possible, as far as they can see.
Sometimes they just paraphrase the document into its reverse, which is understandable as an honest report of what the Lincoln Studier got out of reading it. Bruner and Postman might have had more to say about it when the interpretation flatly contradicts the original document quoted right there on the same page.
They might be hard pressed to explain how documents get lifted from their context and set into another series of events altogether. It’s like forcing a puzzle piece into the wrong place because you know for certain that the picture is supposed to be different from the one on the box, the one into which all of the other pieces fit perfectly.
Sometimes professors of Lincoln Studies have to cut out significant passages to make a document fit, so sometimes what’s left makes no more grammatical than historical sense. But in fact altering original documents to fit those preconceptions is so normal in the field that it’s difficult to get to real evidence about Lincoln.
Sometimes even the most prominent Lincoln Studiers edit a document just a little to say what its author must have actually meant, because nobody could actually mean what that author wrote about Lincoln. That’s why, as you read along, you might be puzzled by an added “not” or a missing one. One recent prize winner inserted “[Mrs.]” in front of Lincoln’s name to deflect an insult from The Emancipator to Mary Todd, whom he frankly despises — you always have to check the originals.
That’s another problem, though. The violence to the originals is often so astonishing in its scope that it can’t be accidental. For example, the son of Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles thoroughly re-wrote his father’s diaries before publishing them with the promise that “the text of the diary has been in no way mutilated or revised… No other evidence can be more sacred than a diary.”
The official editions of Lincoln’s own writings, even Roy P. Basler’s Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (Rutgers 1955) — eight volumes, index, supplement and all — silently correct Lincoln’s habitual misspellings and his constant grammatical solecisms, but that way it all fits into the picture better.
Still, rewriting documents can only go so far. So from the beginning the giants in the field have simply gathered up and burned any documents within their grasp that said otherwise — and it all said otherwise. Notably, Henry Horner, Vice President of the Abraham Lincoln Association and Governor of Illinois; Oliver R. Barrett, President of the Board of Trustees of the Illinois State Historical Library and greatest Lincoln collector of them all; and of course Robert Todd Lincoln himself are all on record as ordering some of the greatest collections of primary Lincoln documents ever known consigned to the flames. Or just burning them, themselves.
That’s why you’ll notice in the Lincoln literature that no new evidence is brought forward, no new information is added to our understanding. Generations of Lincoln Studiers haven’t had any choice but to play the cards that they’re dealt, and shuffle them over and over again.
Kevin Orlin Johnson
Kevin Orlin Johnson holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the History of Architecture, a Master’s degree in Art History, and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History; he has also fulfilled the requirements for a Bachelor’s degree in History. His publications in his principal field, on topics as varied as Louis XIV’s first designs for Versailles or the design of the Chapel of the Most Holy Shroud in Turin, are considered definitive by many scholars here and abroad. He is the author of The Lincolns in the White House (Pangaeus Press, 2022).
“The literature on Abraham Lincoln is vast, but it isn’t very good.” You have to love a book with a first sentence like that! The book is Kevin Orlin Johnson’s The Lincolns in the White House. While he has some interesting history of the Executive Mansion (the White House) the author is not limited to that one place and short time period, as indicated by the subtitle: Slanders, Scandals, and Lincoln’s Slave Trading Revealed. He presents a fresh and highly original social and political portrayal of the whole Lincoln era.
Probably people will find most interesting Lincoln’s direct order in 1850 to SELL the slaves of his father-in-law’s estate. It is plainly there in the documents, which somehow the host of Lincoln scholars have previously failed to notice. Not surprising, since other Northern heroes, Steven Douglas and U.S. Grant, also got slaves from the wife’s families and like Lincoln considered it a routine matter.
Johnson is eloquent, precise, and definitive in his exposure of the large and well rewarded class of “historians” he calls the Lincolnolators. In chapter and verse he shows how they have misinterpreted documents and suppressed others and counted undocumented third person gossip long after the fact as if it were conclusive evidence. Johnson contributes a needed revelation about the state of American historianship these days.
Lincoln was not personally corrupt in the White House but he apparently enjoyed considerable “honest graft” from gifts and insider information. When he died there were found in his office uncashed cheques and bonds worth more the $1.5 million in today’s money. He was certainly the first President to leave the White House richer than he entered it.
But that was routine in administration built on corruption. Most of Lincoln’ major appointments became millionaires—an interesting sidelight on the holy cause of Union. To Johnson this meant the permanent establishment of what he calls “the Party,” the exploitation of the taxpayers by the combination of capitalists and party politicians that has been the American regime from Lincoln to this day.
I am happy to see the evidence that corrects two erroneous assumptions that I had gathered from the literature:
1) Lincoln was not really a highly successful lawyer. He certainly was not nobly defending the humble. He was best-known for diverting juries by tricks and irrelevant story telling. During the Springfield years the house was bought and living expenses were paid out of Mary Todd Lincoln’s inheritance. What he earned (nothing in the last two years before his election) he spent on himself and politicking.
2) Mary Todd Lincoln was not a bad woman. She is pervasively portrayed in the literature as a shrewish spendthrift who embezzled government funds and became insane. Just another burden that St. Abraham patiently bore. In fact, as a Southern lady she was a first-rate hands-on housekeeper even with the extreme demands on a President’s lady dealing with irregular and inadequate support. Unlike most of those around her, she never did anything illegal. She was committed to an asylum, it is true. Her son Robert, truly an evil man, through greed had two thugs physically rob her of the bonds that were her main property and thrust her into an institution where she was heavily drugged, causing suffering for the rest of her life.
Dr. Johnson adds to his merit by a sprightly style and touches of satire. This is a stellar contribution to the growing body of sound scholarship about the real Lincoln, something America badly needs.
Clyde Wilson
Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source for unreconstructed Southern books.
[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - Google's Gemini accidentally pulled back the curtain and revealed a hideous, racist, grotesque Google standing there naked for all the world to laugh at and NOBODY to ever trust again.
Google and other cheats have interfered in elections by manipulating search results so Woke leftists get top billing while people with far more talent and honesty are never found.
Google has just confirmed that AI is nothing but a way to magnify leftist politics by a trillion and put it everywhere on the planet so truth can never be found. "Truth" is now what Google reveals in every search on everybody's computer from now to kingdom come.
Nathan Leamer in "Disastrous Gemini Rollout Exposes Leftist Rot Permeating All of Google" writes:
The recent rollout of Google's Gemini AI was an absolute disaster by any measure. Over the course of several hours, users across the internet quickly realized the large language model developed by Google had erased white people. The AI model wasn't just prejudiced based on skin color, but would only give far-left ideological answers to various questions. For example, Gemini refused to acknowledge the shortcomings of communism when prompted. It was able to articulate, however, a diatribe about the folly of capitalism.1
Leamer writes that the people behind Google's AI "fueled the large learning model with nothing but their liberal tears. A cursory look at the team behind Gemini shows a crew of individuals who have quite a bit of angst against white people, merit, or the capitalist society that made them uber-rich Silicon Valley tycoons paid to build a racist internet tool."
One good thing noted by Leamer as a result of the disastrous Gemini rollout:
Consumers are hungry for products not informed by the extreme ideology on display at Google, but one that fosters free thought and encourages open discourse. There is clearly a market for this, as described by the near-universal backlash to Gemini. This would greatly contrast with Google, OpenAI, and others trying to lock in the regulatory regime to bolster their supremacy - as Marc Andreessen describes, "a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition."
This is EXACTLY why the government wants to be the one to decide what is misinformation and disinformation. They want to push their authoritarian tyranny on the public and obliterate every other idea.
How about do as Thomas Jefferson said and let a true free press and free speech reign supreme and let the people decide what is B_ll Sh_t and what is not. That's why our white founders, who Google hates, put all those protections in the First Amendment to the greatest document every written, the United States Constitution.
It might be time, now that Google has been exposed as Claudine Gay was, that it gets the same treatment as she did.
A NOTICE OF APPEAL has been filed with regard to the Confederate Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. The magnificent 109 year old world class memorial was removed last December because of the Woke naming commission's historically fraudulent report. See my articles on www.CharlestonAthenaeumPress.com including "Naming commission's report on the Confederate Memorial is a historical FRAUD":
We are hoping a successful Appeal will order the monument to be restored to all its glory in our nation's most sacred burial ground.
Other things are in the works too such as our many allies in Congress adding an amendment to the 2024 NDAA requiring the Confederate Memorial to be reconstructed.
The removal of the monument desecrated 500 graves in concentric circles emanating out from where the monument once stood.
Those Confederate graves of soldiers and family members are, by law, the same as the graves of any other American soldier. Laws were passed in the early 1900s out of patriotism and love as our great country came back together after the bloody War Between the States, which was fought by the South for independence and the right of sovereign states to govern themselves as our Founding Fathers intended.
It was fought by the North for economic control of a country that promised to be the greatest in history.
Please go to my Donation Page to make a donation today. We can not allow Arlington National Cemetery to remain as desecrated as all the other places where Woke mobs destroyed ancient monuments to valor and patriotism:
https://www.memberplanet.com/campaign/sshfl/defendarlington/GeneKizerJr2
Dr. Clyde Wilson is one of the most consequential and accomplished historians of the past century.
His article, below, was published on the Abbeville Institute Blog February 28, 2024. Please visit and join the Abbeville Institute: www.AbbevilleInstitute.org.]
“I am heir to the greatest civilization the world has ever known. I’d like to defend it but I wouldn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.” –Alice Teller
“By 2050—earlier probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed….shall exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.”–Orwell, 1984
Taught these days to IBM employees: “Greeks came to Africa as students to discover what Africans already knew. Writing, science, medicine, and spirituality were already a part of African civilizations.” Accompanied by a picture of a sub-Saharan black instructing Greeks.
This is being taught in your schools and colleges today. There are two very large lies here. 1) That the classical Greeks who initiated Western Civilisation got their knowledge from Egyptians, and 2) that Egyptians were black Africans. This distorts the history of the human race, not only destroying knowledge but contaminating all public discourse in our own time.
There is now a large grievance literature, apparently widely believed, that Europeans not only stole civilisation from blacks but they maliciously and deceitfully suppressed giving credit where it was due.
The simple truth (which many scholars are lavishly funded to disguise) is that black, sub-Saharan Africa was outside the European/Asian sphere of civilisations, existing in a most primitive state. Except for a few encountered by Egyptians, quickly enslaved, black people were nearly unknown and marginal to the civilized world until daring and skilled Portuguese sailors touched the west and east coasts of Southern Africa in the 1500s, while Arabs begin to extend Islam and the slave trade to East Africa.
For the classical world “Africa” meant the Southern shores of the Mediterranean inhabited by white Egyptians and Phoenicians, and from Alexander’s time on heavily inhabited by Greeks and Romans. We now have everything that is called “African” ascribed to the sub-Saharan black tribes who had little relation to North Africa.
The mass media and “educational” establishment are now busy destroying Western civilization–destroying you and me and our descendants. We now have regular portrayals of the Egyptians (including Cleopatra) and the Phoenicians as black, as well as a Viking Queen, a Persian emperor, and Roman centurions. And according to some, Socrates drew all his wisdom at the feet of African geniuses.
The Renaissance does not escape. The great Queen Elizabeth I is now black, as are some Scottish nobles. One of the Three Musketeers is black and another is in love with a black woman.
Later on, Audubon is portrayed as black artist and scientist because he was called a ‘Creole,” the word for a white Frenchman born in the colonies. Slaves not born in Africa were called “Creole Blacks.” Blacks now inhabit portrayals of Jane Austen’s country gentry.
It seems to have entirely escaped consciousness that the African slave trade depended entirely on Africans enslaving and selling other Africans. A number of significant colonial instances in which blacks helped defeat slave revolts have been ignored.
More recent times do not escape distortions. Portrayals have black combat leaders in the then segregated U.S. army. Very recently I saw a show in which a black ship commander with a mostly black crew was in combat with German ships. There are similar treatments of Vietnam.
I have the memoir of a World War II combat captain from Michigan. He was in action from Normandy to Germany. He writes that the worst time he had in the war was dealing with the black support soldiers encountered while he was in port waiting for return home.
In a recent film, “12 Strong”, the first Special Forces men into Afghanistan are portrayed. One is a black soldier sympathetically and prominently displayed with more attention than anyone except the team leader. Such a man does not exist.
In every European television series, even including Iceland, superior and sympathetic blacks are portrayed, whether they fit in or not–not to mention a president of Finland and Yorkshire farmers.
There are doubtless people who think they are doing good deeds with these lies perpetrated on a historically ignorant people. In other cases it may be malicious ignorance. But telling lies is never a good thing. This denies rightful credit to other people.
History in the proper sense is a Western achievement–the rational review and understanding of evidence and meaning in the past life of humanity. There will always be disagreement in interpretations, which is a good thing, but does not vindicate fabrication. Despite oppression by whites, Africans are major beneficiaries of Western civilisation.
Like so much else History as an intellectual discipline begins with the Greeks. Advanced China and Japan did not have this phase of intellect. To seek the truth of the past, as best we can, does not require disrespect or lack of sympathy and charity for any of our fellow creatures. Rather it recognises the diversity of our Creator’s work. Lying is almost never a good thing. To deliberately falsify the facts is a blow against civilisation itself. It thwarts our efforts to understand fully the history of our mysterious human species.
Clyde Wilson
Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of South Carolina where he was the editor of the multivolume The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is the M.E. Bradford Distinguished Chair at the Abbeville Institute. He is the author or editor of over thirty books and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews and is co-publisher of www.shotwellpublishing.com, a source for unreconstructed Southern books.
1 Nathan Leamer, "Disastrous Gemini Rollout Exposes Leftist Rot Permeating All of Google," The Federalist, February 28, 2024. https://thefederalist.com/2024/02/28/disastrous-gemini-roll-out-exposes-leftist-rot-permeating-all-of-google/. Accessed 2-29-24. The article states that: Leamer is CEO of Fixed Gear Strategies and Executive Director of the Digital First Project. He previously worked as a Policy Advisor to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and on Capitol Hill as a legislative aide.