It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Fifteen, Conclusion: Chapter XV, The Costs and Results of the War

Posted on February 2, 2022February 2, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV
The Costs and Results of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XV.

MITCHAM OPENS his concluding chapter with "the total number of deaths as a result of the Civil War was about 1,000,000" which includes 750,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of Southerners who "died in the aftermath of the war from starvation, malnutrition, disease, or injury."¹

Always keep in mind that the population of the entire country in those days was only 31.4 million.

During World War II, the population was 133 million and roughly 400,000 died vis-a-vis 1,000,000 in the War Between the States.

Despite being outnumbered four to one, and outgunned maybe 200 to one, 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.²

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, such as the North's pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world to feed Union armies. That's why 25% of the Union army was not born here.

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 Mitcham says "should have won a Pulitzer Prize."³ More below from Downs.

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.

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, 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 in the dark 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 historians seeking truth.

Mitcham called the aforementioned book, Sick From Freedom: African American Death and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction, by Jim Downs, "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.⁴

As a result of the war, Southerners lost 60% of their capital and "one in four of its [the South's] young men of military age killed; one in four others crippled."⁵

Mitcham's previous assertion that money was the cause of the War Between the States, is backed up.

He writes that the "true value of Southern property fell from $6.3 billion to $4.2 billion. At the same time, the true value of United States' property increased from $16.2 billion to $30.1 billion."⁶

After first supporting the right of secession, by the spring of 1861 Yankees could see their economy crumbling around them as jubilant Southerners thrilled at being out from under greedy Yankee control.

Southerners would now be able to manufacture for themselves and have low tariffs and free trade with the rest of the world. With 100% control of the most demanded commodity on earth, King Cotton, the Southern future was as bright as the Northern future was sinking.

So, for money and control, Lincoln started his war that killed a million people and maimed another million. He knew he had overwhelming advantages at that point in history and he thought he could win easily. He knew that if he could beat the South, a powerful competitor would be destroyed and the North would rule our great country via its political control of the federal government by the larger Northern population. "Northern property values almost doubled." That kind of money is what the North was fighting for.

Before the war, "not a single political party advocated emancipation. And none advanced the ideas of compensation and integration beyond words."⁷

The rot in American history that academia and the news media have given us today, started in the 1960s as Mitcham points out.

Prior to the 1960s, historians "did not believe the war was only about slavery, despite the Myth of the Noble Cause. For most, it was all about restoring the Union and coast-to-coast economic nationalism, controlled by Northern financial and commercial interests."⁸

He points out that "evidence suggests that an independent Confederacy would have ended slavery like other countries in the Western Hemisphere, and race relations in the South and in America would be better than they are now."⁹

Some of his evidence is "that there were more free black people in the South than in the North in 1860. Every other country in the world except Haiti freed its slaves without war."¹⁰

Mitcham believes that "given the history throughout the Western Hemisphere, it was more likely to happen than not" that slavery would have been ended by the South.¹¹

I agree completely because technology created machines in the latter part of the nineteenth century that would pick cotton faster than black people and nobody in his right mind would pay for a slave who came with a birth to death commitment when he could buy machines to pick cotton faster, better and cheaper.

Mitcham writes:

The agitation of abolitionists and the greed of the Northern financial, mercantile, industrial, railroad, and commercial interests were the real roadblocks to freedom. This explosive agitation culminated in the election of the unscrupulous Lincoln and the passage of the punitive Morrill Tariff, which was not replaced until 1913.¹²

Another big reason Northerners did not want to end slavery was because most were racist. Many Northern and Western states had laws preventing blacks from living there. Northerners did not want slavery in the West because they did not want blacks near them in the West. They surely did not want to free the slaves who would then move north and be job competition.

Of course, this argument is ignored by politicized academia and the news media because it does not help them elect Democrats.

Based on the experience of other countries nearby "the Civil War probably ended slavery only thirty to thirty-five years earlier than would have been the case had the institution been allowed to die out organically."¹³

This was Lincoln belief too because he talked about a plan of compensated emancipation that would have freed the slaves by 1900 though he never made a serious proposal. Just talk.

Mitcham points out that had slavery been allowed to die out:

The South (including blacks) would have been spared a brutal war, the scorched-earth policy of certain Union war criminals, plunder, pillage, starvation, military dictatorship, a decade of military occupation, the incredible corruption of Reconstruction, the manipulation of black people by the Republican party to keep itself in power, and the needless deaths of tens of thousands (and probably hundreds of thousands) of freed black people. Millions of people (both white and African-American) would have been spared the crushing poverty of the New South era.¹⁴

Yankees used black people for political gain "but made no provisions for the suddenly displaced African Americans, and indeed, there is no evidence they even thought about them."

The Emancipation Proclamation, which freed no slaves, or few, and left slavery in place in the six Union slave states, was issued "to encourage slave revolts and end the possibility of a diplomatic alliance between the Confederacy, Britain, and France."

Of course, the people of the Northern states that forbid blacks from living there or even visiting looked down on black people:

The Yankee generals dubbed them "contrabands," a derogatory term never used by the Rebels and roughly equal to the word Untermenschen (subhumans), a term the Germans used in the 1930s and 1940s to describe Jews, Slavs, and other people they considered inferior. They tossed them into 'contraband camps,' which were the first modern concentration camps. . . . Able-bodied men were separated from their families and forced to work on plantations, which were under Northern management. They faced being defrauded of their minimum wages or not paid at all.¹⁵

Mitcham goes on:

In some camps there were also multiple rapes of black women by Union soldiers every night.¹⁶

The Union Army leased plantations to "'Carpetbaggers'" who forced blacks to work there but often did not pay them or let them leave. Private Samuel H. Glasgow of the Twenty-Third Iowa wrote that these plantation lessees "'did not have the best interests of the former slave at heart . . . Cotton closes their eyes to justice . . . '".¹⁷

U.S. brigadier general John P. Hawkins said the plantation system was "'nothing but a system of slavery.'" He suggested the army "'send for their former masters and tell each one to claim his slaves, [because] his treatment of them was parental compared to what we now permit.'"¹⁸

Yankee contraband camps were unsanitary and "tens of thousands" died of disease and malnutrition. The U.S. Army made the situation worse by "force-marching some of the camps to new locations, some hundreds of miles away."¹⁹

Suffering in the South continued after the war. In 1866 there were crop failures and 1867 "was a year of famine with mortality rates which Downs described as 'chilling.'"²⁰

Smallpox "raged throughout the South and West from 1862 through 1868. Weakened and malnourished black people were especially susceptible, often dying at rates three or four times higher than Southern whites, who were themselves malnourished. Black children were particularly hard hit. In one six-month period in 1865, 30,000 died in North Carolina and South Carolina alone."²¹

Yankee carpetbaggers and scalawags raised taxes "300 percent to 400 percent higher than they had been in 1860, even though property values had declined significantly." In Mississippi, in 1871, "3,300,300 acres were for sale due to tax defaults" which was "15 percent of all taxable land."²²

None of that tax revenue went to former Confederates or blacks. It all went into the pockets of carpetbaggers and scalawags.

After the war many Southerners admitted slavery was wrong but "they steadfastly denied that it was cruel. The survivors of the antebellum South went to their graves firm in this opinion."²³

It took decades, until World War II, for the South to recover economically. Reconstruction "left behind a system of segregation and peonage (sharecropping) that did not exist before the war."²⁴

Before the war, five Southern states were in the top ten American states for per capita income. After the war, none were.

Of course, as stated, this was the purpose of Lincoln's war. He did not want economic competition from such a powerful region as the South on his Southern border.

Lincoln was president of the North, the first sectional president in American history. He and Northern leaders knew the South would ascend to economic and political dominance with 100 percent control of King Cotton and its low, free trade tariff of 10% vis-a-vis the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher.

The South had other powerful advantages too, like excellent ports and good weather. The South was already producing the wealth of the nation with cotton and other commodities. Cotton alone was 60% of U.S. exports in 1860.

Imagine the revenue that would be turned back on the South. Of course, that same revenue would be denied to the North and Lincoln could not tolerate that.

With European recognition of the Confederacy and subsequent trade and military alliances, the South would be unbeatable by the North very quickly.

Again, Lincoln and Northern leaders knew this and were in a panic over it. With four times the white population of the South and overwhelming manufacturing and shipping at that point in history, they thought it would be easy to win a war.

They found out differently as the old song goes:

Three hundred thousand Yankees
Is stiff in Southern dust;
We got three hundred thousand
Before they conquered us.
They died of Southern fever
And Southern steel and shot;
I wish it was three millions
Instead of what we got.²⁵

It is hard to believe Yankees who invaded a peaceful region that just wanted to govern itself and had seceded by a democratic debate and vote, are considered the heroes of American history in this day and age while monuments to Confederates defending their homes and families are toppled by ignorant thugs.

The one thing you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to free the slaves. Three Northern slave states of the six that Lincoln exempted with his Emancipation Proclamation, had slavery months after the war. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment in December, 1865 to finally free the slaves in all the Yankee slave states.

Perhaps the most despicable today are the politicized frauds in academia and the news media who are destroying our country with their racist Critical Race Theory and their fraudulent history like the 1619 Project.

Southerners, fighting for independence like the Founding Fathers in 1776, are the true heroes of American history. The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding comes from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Mitcham's final paragraph states that:

It should be clear by now to any open-minded reader that the war was not just about slavery and certainly not primarily about slavery. It was chiefly about money . . . ²⁶

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Fourteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part Two)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 173.

² Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering, Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), xii.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 174.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 175.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 175-176.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 176.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 176-177.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 177.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 178.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 178-179.

²⁵ Oh I'm a Good Old Rebel, by Hoyt Axton. Many others have done this song. It was created in the 1860s by former Confederate major James Innes Randolph. Here are Axton's lyrics, https://genius.com/Hoyt-axton-oh-im-a-good-old-rebel-lyrics, accessed 2-2-22.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 179.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Fourteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part Two

Posted on January 26, 2022January 26, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Fourteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XIV.

NEW YORK CITY had voted against Lincoln "two to one" in 1860, which is an even higher percentage than the 60% who had voted against him across the North.¹

New York City before the war was sympathetic to the South because of their trade and economic ties. New York Mayor Fernando Wood had "threatened to secede from both Albany and Washington in 1861" at the thought of losing its trade with the South.

New York and other Northern cities were pressure cookers with much grinding poverty and massive European immigration that made it worse. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are historically accurate. New immigrants such as destitute Irish and Germans arriving penniless and hungry had to compete for the few jobs. There was no social welfare in those days. You figured out how to make money or you died.

Emigration to the West was a huge reason racist Northerners did not want blacks in the West. The West was to be reserved for white people from all over the world as Lincoln had said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.

It is more understandable when you realize the West was the pressure release valve for the surplus population of the wild, turbulent North that had many cities busting at the seams with desperate people. Without that release valve, the North could have had a revolution. It had happened in other places with confiscation of the land and property of those who had it, by those who didn't. As Horace Greeley said, "Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!"

Mitcham points out that "new arrivals were poor and not favorably disposed towards African American men, with whom they were competing for low-wage jobs." Sweatshop employers pitted them against each other and thus "kept wages low for immigrants and blacks alike." They made the Irish and blacks "destitute."²

There wasn't much "white privilege" for the Irish, which dishonest politicized academia and the news media tell us defines American history.

A precursor to the New York City Draft Riots occurred in March, 1863 when "white New York City longshoremen or dock workers were on strike for higher pay." Corporate bosses "brought in black strikebreakers to take their jobs." Strikers attacked 200 of them and there were injuries on both sides but no deaths.³

As I have said many times, Mitcham's narrative is always concise and direct. He writes:

Meanwhile, throughout the North, the allure and romance of the war evaporated under the withering fire of Confederate rifles and muskets. Voluntary Union enlistments slowed to a trickle. Due to his many military defeats and heavy casualties, Lincoln instituted a draft to fill his depleted ranks. Rich people, those who could pay $300 ($6,069.07 in 2017 money), were exempt from conscription. Excused from the draft were African Americans, who were not considered citizens yet. The striking longshoremen were already angry over wages. Now they faced being drafted into the Union Army to, as James Howell Street wrote, 'face death to give freedom to Negro slaves whose cousins had taken their jobs.'⁴

On July 11, 1863, the first drawing of Lincoln's draft took place in New York City, and on July 13 "a crowd of 500 people turned itself into a mob" led by firefighters and longshoremen and began "the most lethal riot in American history" that lasted four days:

Several regiments of Union troops had to be recalled from Pennsylvania; soldiers and police fired into the mob with cannons, muskets, and rifles; the police busted skulls with heavy locust wood clubs, tossed rock throwers off the roofs of buildings, and shot them with revolvers. One authority estimated that more than 2,000 people died and some 8,000 had been injured. Many African Americans were lynched, drowned, tortured, or set on fire.⁵

Riots protesting Lincoln's draft took place that summer not only in New York but to a lesser degree in "Detroit; Buffalo and Troy, NY; Cincinnati; Boston; Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Rutland, Vermont; and Wooster, Ohio."⁶

The riots in New York were the "worst in U.S. history. Taken as a whole, the New York Draft Riots witnessed one of the largest mass lynching of innocent blacks in American history."⁷

Mitcham points out a mass hanging going on at the same time: "The Lincoln administration set the record for the largest mass hanging in American history conducted against a minority group in 1862. Following the suppression of an Indian uprising, a military tribunal found 303 Dakota (eastern Sioux) guilty of rape and murder."

The benevolent Lincoln thought 303 "was too many to kill all at once, so he granted clemency to all but thirty-eight; they were hanged at Mankoto, Minnesota, on December 28, 1862."⁸

Lincoln was worried he was going to lose the election of 1864, which might have opened up the possibility of a negotiated end of the war, but Atlanta fell and Lincoln won.

Too bad because the only thing Southerners wanted to do was govern themselves. Their economic prospects and free trade philosophy, however, were too bright and powerful for Lincoln, so the South had to be destroyed.

The barbarism caused by Lincoln's lust for other people's money and for political control was disgusting, for that was all they were fighting for. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, they were not fighting to free the slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation, which didn't free any slaves, came about half way through the war after hundreds of thousands of men were dead. It was a war measure as Lincoln himself said, to keep Europeans from recognizing the South, and to encourage slaves to rise up and slaughter Southern women and children so Confederate men would have to leave the battlefield to go home and defend their families.

If the Emancipation Proclamation had been a serious measure to free the slaves, Lincoln would have first freed the slaves in the six Union slave states that were carefully exempted by the EP as was much of captured Confederate territory. Three of the Union's slave states had slavery even months beyond the war. It took the second Thirteenth Amendment to free them in December, 1865.

Abraham Lincoln, to win his bloody war, embraced the rape of Southern women and murder of children and other civilians under the concept of "total war." Mitcham writes:

It began in April 1862, when Colonel Ival Vasilovitch Turchinoff, a former Russian officer, entered Athens, Alabama, with the Nineteenth and Twenty-fourth Illinois Infantry Regiments. Now going by the alias John B. Turchin, Turchinoff encouraged his men to commit many atrocities aginst the defenseless civilians of the town. Drunk federals robbed stores, broke into private homes, burned, pillaged and raped. Several women---both black and white---were assaulted sexually at bayonet point, and one pregnant woman miscarried after she was gang raped. This went on for some time. When Turchinoff's commanding officer, General Buell, learned what had happened, he had the Russian court-martialed. Found guilty, Turchinoff was dishonorably discharged on August 6, 1862. Lincoln not only set aside the verdict; he promoted the disgraced officer to brigadier general.⁹

Lincoln's behavior is about as disgraceful and characterless as you can get.

Typical outrages such as those on Sherman's march across Georgia occurred all over. A Northerner, living in the South, Mrs. Elizabeth Meade Ingraham, experienced it first hand. She was the sister of Union Major General George G. Meade.

Mitcham writes:

U.S. major general James B. McPherson headquartered at "Ashwood" plantation, the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Meade Ingraham. McPherson refused to protect the place, and his men looted it for days. The general personally took part in the pillaging. He and his staff stole two five-gallon demijohns of whiskey. The men broke into Mrs. Ingraham's home, opened the dining room closet with a hatchet, and took the family's silver and table linen. They stole or broke every pan, pitcher, cup, plate, etc., and stole buggies, wagons, and every horse and mule---except one who was about to foal and refused to move. They shot all the sheep, killed or stole all the cattle, and shot all but four of the hogs. They even made off with dresses, sheets, and blankets. They destroyed all the portraits of deceased family members and even stole her Bibles, although 'What such rascals want with Bibles I can't tell,' Mrs. Ingraham noted caustically in her diary.¹⁰

Lincoln's conquest "was marked by wanton pillaging, malicious cruelty, and rape."

Jacob Thompson's beautiful "Home Place" was pillaged for days then burned. Mrs. Catherine Ann Thompson was given only 15 minutes and she "removed her few remaining valuables" but "As she was leaving, a squad of blue-coated liberators robbed her at gunpoint. She was left with nothing. Other defenseless citizens, black and white, were whipped or sexually molested."

One Yankee recorded a scene that was widespread across the South:

'. . . In fact, where once stood a handsome little country town, now only remained the blackened skeletons of houses, and the smoldering ruins that marked the track of war.'¹¹

U.S. army lieutenant Thomas J. Myers "wrote to his wife in Boston from South Carolina in early 1865" stating "We have had a glorious time in this State." He went on:

'Unrestricted license to burn and plunder was the order of the day. The civility have been stripped of most of their valuables. Gold watches, silver, pitchers, cups, spoons, forks, and so forth are as common in camp as blackberries . . .
Officers are not allowed to join in these expeditions unless disguised as privates. One of our corps commanders borrowed a rough suit of clothes from one of my men and was successful in his place. He got a large quantity of silver among other things . . . and a very fine watch from a Mr. DeSaussure of this place.
. . . I have a quart---I am not joking---I have at least a quart of jewelry for you and the girls and some No. 1 diamond pins and rings among them. General Sherman has gold and silver enough to start a bank.
The damned niggers, as a general thing, preferred to stay at home particularly after they found that we wanted only the able bodied men and to tell you the truth the youngest and best looking women. . . .'¹²

Mitcham compares Lincoln's invasion with a violent abusive husband who beats his long-suffering wife every time she tries to leave. He

grabs her by the throat and beats her until she submits. Here the analogy breaks down, however. An abused wife might be able turn to charities, police authorities, her church, or family for help. The South was on its own. Rather than help, the government was more interest in stealing what remained after the destruction.¹³

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV

The Costs and Results of the War

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Thirteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part One)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 164.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 165.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 166.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 167.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 167-168.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 169.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 169-170.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 170-171.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Thirteen: Chapter XIV, Tyranny and Emancipation, Part One

Posted on January 19, 2022January 19, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XIV.

ONCE AGAIN, Mitcham's epigraphs are spot on. He quotes the governor of New Jersey, a Union state that still had some slaves in it even after the War Between the States despite its plan of gradual emancipation. New Jersey's slaves remained slaves until the second Thirteenth Amendment finally freed them in December, 1865, eight-and-a-half months after Appomattox.

The first Thirteenth Amendment was the Corwin Amendment in early 1861, which Lincoln strongly supported and which was adopted by five Union states before the war made it moot. The Corwin Amendment left black people in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress where slavery already existed.

Here are Chapter XIV's epigraphs:

Slavery is no more the cause of this war than gold is the cause of robbery.
-----Joel Parker, Governor of New Jersey (1863-66; 1871-74)
The sight of the Confederate battle flag always reminded me of the immense bravery of the soldiers who served under it.
-----Union General Joshua Chamberlain

America's first sectional party immediately passed legislation "enriching Republican fat cats on Wall Street and various corporate headquarters throughout the North."¹

Republicans passed the "highest tax on imports in American history (the Morrill Tariff)" and created a national banking system so that "favored institutions were basically entitled to create money and control the currency and credit of the United States."²

They gave away some land in the West to homesteaders "but most to railroads and mining interests" and they "set up a contract labor law, which came close to enslaving gangs of foreign workers" while it "depressed the wages of U.S. workers."³

There was also the Morrill Act "for 'land grant' colleges, opening the door for federal involvement in education for the first time."⁴

Of course, none of this largesse went to blacks.

Mitcham quotes Rev. A. D. Betts of North Carolina whose sad and sobering quotation shows what was coming:

One day in April, 1861, I head that President Lincoln had called on the State troops to force the seceding States back into the Union. This was one of the saddest days of my life. I had prayed and hoped that war might be averted. I had loved the Union and clung to it. That day I saw war was inevitable. The inevitable must be met. That day I walked up and down my porch in Smithville [now Southport, N.C.] and wept and suffered and prayed for the South.⁵

Rev. Betts "joined his local military company, which became part of the Thirtieth North Carolina Infantry" which "started out with 900 men." Four years later it had only 153 "when it surrendered at Appomattox."⁶

Irish-born Patrick Cleburne, who rose to the rank of Major-General in the Confederate Army before he was killed in the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee) November 30, 1864 at age 36, wrote:

I am with the South in death, in victory or defeat. I believe the North is about to wage a brutal and unholy war on a people who have done them no wrong, in violation of the constitution and the fundamental principles of the government. They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed. They are about to invade our peaceful homes, destroy our property, and murder our men and dishonor our women. We propose no invasion of the North, no attack on them, and only ask to be left alone.⁷

Lincoln was not going to leave the South alone with a 10% tariff as compared to his astronomical Morrill Tariff which was 47 to 60% higher. He could see his shipping industry head South overnight, and his manufacturing industry, which existed mostly to sell to its captive Southern market, go bankrupt.

The South, with 100% control of King Cotton and with long-sought-after European free trade and military alliances, would be unbeatable by the North and old Honest Abe knew it. It was fight right then when he had four times the white population of the South and other enormous advantages including maybe 200 times more armaments, or, eventually, be economically buried by the South.

Cleburne also wrote:

It is said slavery is all we are fighting for, and if we give it up we give up all. Even if this were true, which we deny, slavery is not all our enemies are fighting for. It is merely the pretense to establish sectional superiority and a more centralized form of government, and to deprive us of our rights and liberties.⁸

Cleburne in the first quote above wrote:

They no longer acknowledge that all government derives its validity from the consent of the governed.⁹

That, of course, comes from the American Declaration of Independence, from the phrase that was the most widely quoted in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Southerners were fighting for independence and self-government, the exact same as the colonists who fought the British in 1776.

Yankees were fighting to establish the supremacy of the federal government over the states. They were the federals in the war. They planned to control the federal government with their larger population and rule the country.

Yankees were unquestionably not fighting to free the slaves.

Their money was more important to them than freeing slaves who would then move north with enormous social problems and be job competition. That's why so many Northern and Western states had laws forbidding blacks from living there and many forbid them from even visiting for long.

Southerners agreed with Cleburne.

Robert Stiles "was a Yale graduate and a law student at Columbia University in 1861" with a bright career ahead of him. He gladly gave it up to become a private in the Richmond Howitzers in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia rising to the rank of artillery major. He wrote this after the war:

What now of the essential spirit of these young volunteers? Why did they volunteer? For what did they give their lives? . . . Surely, it was not for slavery they fought. The great majority of them had never owned a slave, and had little or no interest in that institution. My own father, for example, had freed his slaves long years before . . . The great conflict will never be properly comprehended by the man who looks upon it as a war for the preservation of slavery.¹⁰

The vast majority of Americans do not properly comprehend the great conflict thanks to the race obsession of academia and the news media with their woke, 100% politicized version of history that is not seeking truth but only political advantage for the left and Democrat Party.

Academia is 100% liberal. I know the actual percentage is closer to 90% but the small number of non-liberals on campuses are not going to say a word and endanger their tenure or have the mob show up at their office. They are petrified of the charge of racism and they regularly dishonor themselves to avoid it.

Also, a good number of our friends in academia have no knowledge of the Southern view of the conflict. They have never heard it or studied it, yet Southerners were right in everything they did including secession. The North threatened to secede many times in the antebellum period.

Esteemed historian, Eugene Genovese, said that what has happened to Southern history since the 1960s is a "cultural and political atrocity." He blamed the atrocity on elites in academic and the media.

Mitcham quotes Dr. Hunter McGuire, "Stonewall Jackson's physician and a future president of the American Medical Association" who wrote:

The Stonewall Brigade of the Army of Northern Virginia was a fighting organization. I knew every man in it, for I belonged to it for a long time; and I know that I am in proper bounds when I assert, that there was not one soldier in thirty who owned or ever expected to own a slave. The South fighting for the money value of the negro! What a cheap and wicked falsehood!¹¹

Mitcham brings up Dr. James M. McPherson of Princeton, "no friend of the Confederacy." McPherson, he writes, "researched thousands of original documents, 25,000 personal letters, and 249 diaries." McPherson concludes Southerners were not fighting for slavery, they "were fighting for liberty." ¹²

Of Confederate enlistees, only "6 percent to 7 percent" owned slaves.¹³

Mitcham writes, "As if to prove their point, Abraham Lincoln moved with incredible speed to suppress freedom and constitutional rights in the North." Lincoln's jackboot landed first on the face of Marylanders because of their proximity to Washington, D.C. and because of strong Southern sentiment there:

In April 1861, crowds poured into the streets of Baltimore, the third largest city in the United States. On April 20, the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment showed up and fired on the rioters, a few of whom also shot at the bluecoats. Four soldiers and at least nine civilians were killed.¹⁴

The Maryland legislature rejected a secession convention but its pro-Union governor, Thomas H. Hicks, "called for the immediate and peaceful recognition of the Confederacy and an end of the U.S. military occupation of Maryland, which they denounced as a 'flagrant violation of the Constitution.'" Maryland wanted to stay neutral.¹⁵

Mitcham writes:

Lincoln responded by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, which was a constitutional safeguard to prevent unlawful imprisonment or imprisonment without due process. Lincoln, Seward, and their henchmen arrested many prominent Marylanders, including thirty-one legislators, the mayor of Baltimore, the chief of police, all of the Baltimore police commissioners, Henry May, a sitting U.S. congressman, the entire Baltimore city council, and dozens of prominent civic leaders, editors, and publishers. Arrests took place in the dead of night so that there would be fewer witnesses. The victims were usually hauled off to Fort Warren, Massachusetts, or some other hellhole where they were incarcerated in crowded casements. If a prisoner asked for a lawyer or tried to send for his family, he was told that this wold hurt his case. Often, the victim was jailed based not on what he had done but what he might do. Some of them remained in prison until the end of the war.¹⁶

John Merryman was arrested but appealed to Supreme Court Chief Justice Taney, who was a Marylander. Taney wrote a "blistering opinion against Lincoln's actions, ruling his executive order was unconstitutional, null, and void. He ordered a copy of his decision be sent to the Northern president under the seal of the United States Supreme Court."¹⁷

Lincoln wanted to arrest Taney but "couldn't find any Federal marshals who would execute" his unconstitutional order.

Elections were soon held in Maryland but "Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls, arrested those who were not pro-Union, and granted to U.S. soldiers three-day leaves so they could return home and vote Republican. Voter intimidation kept many pro-Southern Maryland voters far away from the polls. The result was a pro-Union legislature."¹⁸

Lincoln's actions should not surprise us in the least. He had just sent five naval missions into the South for the express purpose of starting a war so he could put the new Republican Party on solid ground once and for all. Nothing like a war to solidify political power.

Lincoln had no mandate for any of this. In the election of 1860, over 60% of the country voted against Lincoln.

But the lust for money and control were all Lincoln and the North could think about, along with the fact that they had overwhelming advantages in population, armaments and manufacturing, an existing army and navy, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world to enlarge Northern armies. Of course they were going to fight rather than allow a free trade South to rise up on their southern border.

Take note that there is no mention by Lincoln or anybody else in the North about freeing the slaves. Just the opposite. They were quite willing to leave blacks in slavery forever as long as the South returned to the Union and paid all of Lincoln's taxes and tariffs.

Lincoln's commander in Ohio had Ohio Congressman Clement Vallandigham arrested, tried by a military court, found guilty and thrown in jail for the rest of the war until Lincoln interceded and had Vallandigham banished from the country. Vallandigham's crime was calling Lincoln "King Lincoln" and denouncing "Wall Street and its war profiteers, as well as the mercantile, manufacturing, and commercial interests" of the North. He had called for an armistice with the Confederates.¹⁹

Lincoln also ordered "the arrest of U.S. senator and former vice president John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky" whose crime was visiting Kentuckians in the hospital who were wounded at First Manassas. Breckinridge was warned and escaped "before Lincoln's thugs could lay their hands on him."²⁰

Mitcham writes:

In all, at least 32,000 political prisoners were thrown in jail, and one authority placed the number as high as 40,000. More than 300 newspapers and journals were also shut down. Frequently, the Lincolnites used federal troops to do the dirty work. Printing presses were often smashed and publisher's offices ransacked.²¹

In addition to Lincoln's totalitarian tyranny against Northerners, his secretary of state, William Seward, "bragged about his power to Britain's ambassador to the U.S., Lord Lyons."

'I can touch a bell on my right hand and order the arrest of a citizen of Ohio. I can touch the bell again and order the arrest of a citizen of New York. Can Queen Victoria do as much?'²²

"'No!'" the outraged Lyons snapped: "'Were she to attempt such an act her head would roll from her shoulders.'"²³

Perhaps Lyons should have gone back to Great Britain and insisted they recognize the Confederacy as Lord Acton wished had happened. Acton stated that wish clearly in his 1866 letter to Robert E. Lee.

Lincoln, whom, again, 60% of the country voted against in 1860, "saw immigrants as key to his political future."

Already "one-fourth of the Northern population was immigrants." That's why 25% of the Union army were not born in America. Those enlistment bonuses were mighty enticing to many who arrived with only the shirts on their backs.

Lincoln even bought, secretly, "a German language newspaper to disseminate Republican propaganda to immigrants who were poorly informed about American political issues."²⁴

Lincoln also opened "Union recruiting offices throughout Europe to hire foreign mercenaries" and around "489,200 mercenaries were recruited from fifteen foreign countries, mostly from Ireland (150,000) and Germany (210,000)." Mitcham doubts Lincoln could have won the war without mercenaries.²⁵

Lincoln was not as welcoming toward native born blacks as he was foreigners who would join his army. Many Northern and Western states still had laws forbidding blacks from living there.

A year into the war, Lincoln pushed "a constitutional amendment to buy and deport slaves." He wanted a place they could survive away from the U.S. mainland such as "Haiti, Liberia, New Granada, Ecuador, St. Croix, Surinam, British Guiana, Honduras, and the Amazon."²⁶ Lincoln favored colonization for blacks his entire life. See Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press), 2011, and other books.

The Trent affair, when the USS San Jacinto seized the RMS Trent and took Confederate commissioners James Mason and John Slidell off and imprisoned them, resulted in Lincoln apologizing to the British and freeing Mason and Slidell. The Brits had threatened war and were dead serious.

This caused Lincoln to realize "the threat of a Franco-Anglo-Confederate alliance was a real one."²⁷ To head it off, the "Myth of the Noble Cause to free the slaves" was born with the Emancipation Proclamation.

Not only would it give the North's barbaric unconstitutional invasion supposed morality, it might encourage the slaves to rise up and start slaughtering whites thus forcing the Confederate army to go home to put down insurrections.

The diabolical Lincoln, like the slick lawyer he was, worded the Emancipation Proclamation so that it supposedly freed slaves where Lincoln had no control and left them in slavery where he could have freed them.

The Emancipation Proclamation exempted the six Union slave states (yes, SIX slave states fought for the Union the entire war, and three of them still had slavery after the war, until the second Thirteenth Amendment kicked in, in December, 1865, and freed them).

Those six Union slave states were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which ironically came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued.

The Emancipation Proclamation also did not free slaves in captured Confederate territory such as the plantations in Louisiana because they "were in the hands of New Englanders, who were in bed with Lincoln politically."²⁸

Nor did the EP free the slaves owned by Ulysses S. Grant (Mrs. Grant owned several slaves and used to take one, Black Julia, with her during many of her husband's battles). William T. Sherman kept his slaves too.

This made Lincoln a laughing stock around the world with influential writers such as Charles Dickens.

Even William H. Seward said:

'We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.'²⁹

Abolitionist Lysander Spooner said basically the same thing.

A popular limerick said it best:

'Lincoln, Lincoln, wily wretch, freed the slaves he couldn't catch.'³⁰

Mitcham writes that in the State of the Union Address of December 1862, "Lincoln offered the Southern states an opportunity to retain their slaves until January 1, 1900, along with financial compensation to any slave owners and a promise to remove all blacks to Africa or Latin America."³¹

Of course, Southerners were fighting for independence and self-government, not slavery. For the South, 1861 was 1776 all over. They were not interested in returning to Lincoln's tyrannical union and being ruled by Northerners.

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Twelve: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part Two)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 155.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 156.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 157.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 157-158.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 158.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 158-159.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 159.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 160.

²⁵ Ibid.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 162.

²⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 163.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Twelve: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part Two

Posted on January 12, 2022January 12, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Twelve

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XIII.

WANTED TO MENTION as a side note that Dr. Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. has an article in the latest Confederate Veteran magazine (January/February 2022) entitled "War, By The Numbers," which is outstanding.

The footnotes in "War, By The Numbers" are at the bottom of each page, which I love. You are able to read them as you read the text thus enhancing the text even more.

Here is an example from "War, By The Numbers," which everybody should keep at hand when taking on the historically challenged:

The North had every advantage. The population of the United States in 1860 was 31,443,321. Of this, 9,000,000 people resided in the Southern states. This included 3,500,000 slaves, giving the South 5,500,000 white people from which to field their armies. According to John H. and David J. Eicher, the "Military Population" of the North (white males aged 18 through 45) was 3,954,776, as opposed to 1,064,193 for the South. Another roughly 191,000 black men served in the Union Army, as opposed to 80,000 to 96,000 in the Confederate Army. At their maximum extent, the Northern armies fielded more than 1,000,000 men. During the 1861 to 1865 period, 2,898,304 men served in the Union Army. That was 1,812,121 more troops than served in all of America's other wars combined up until that point. We do not know exactly how many men served in the Confederate Army because many Southern records were lost or destroyed at the end of the conflict. Estimates vary between 600,000 to more than a million, with 800,000 to 850,000 being commonly cited figures. General Cooper and Thornton H. Bowman, however, put the number at 600,000. It is unlikely that President Davis and his generals ever fielded more than 300,000 men at any one time. [This paragraph in Confederate Veteran includes footnotes 4 to 8]

The reason I have done this series on Mitcham's It Wasn't About Slavery is because he covers everything of historical value in a clear, concise manner. Nothing is left out.

People such as SCV seeking truth, have it with Mitcham in a thorough, well-argued narrative, which is highly quotable and powerful for any Southerner arguing against the fraud that comes out of academia and the news media in this day and age, an age defined by ignorant "wokeism" and those who push it (mostly the same ones pushing racist Critical Race Theory and the fraudulent 1619 Project).

BACK TO It Wasn't About Slavery, Chapter XIII, "Over the Edge," Part Two.

The Virginia secession convention was alarmed that "Lincoln's inaugural address had in it hints of coercion and usurpation of power, that Lincoln had rejected the Crittenden Compromise, and that he refused to meet with the Confederate peace delegation sent by President Davis" so they sent a peace commission of their own to meet with Lincoln and find out his views.

Virginia's peace commission was made up of "William B. Preston, Alexander H. H. Stuart, and George W. Randolph," all Union men:

'If our voices and votes are to be exerted farther to hold Virginia in the Union, we must know what the nature of that Union is to be . . . ' Mr. Preston declared. 'If the power of the United States is to be perverted to invade the right of States and of the people, we would support the Federal Government no farther.'¹

On "April 2, the very day Lincoln approved a secret act of war, 'Honest Abe' asked Seward to send Allan B. Magruder, the judge advocate of the U.S. Naval Court" to "confer" with "Stuart, Judge George W. Summers (a highly respected member of the Virginia Convention and a solid Union man), and convention president John Janney."²

Magruder was apparently on a mission to lie and mislead because he "told the Virginians that he was authorized by Seward to inform them that Fort Sumter would be evacuated on Friday of the following week."³

Magruder said Seward wanted Summers, Janney, or Stuart "to come to the White House for a secret meeting" at Lincoln's behest or with his consent, but they sent John B. Baldwin instead.

Baldwin was "smuggled" into Washington in the early morning and "driven to the home of Magruder's brother, Captain John B. Magruder, the future Confederate general, where he ate breakfast."

Allan Magruder "then conducted him by carriage (with windows carefully covered) to Seward, who took him to the White House."⁴

Around 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 4, Colonel Baldwin was told by a White House porter that he probably would not be able to see Lincoln because Lincoln was already meeting with "several important visitors."

The porter returned and "told the guards to admit Baldwin at once."⁵

Lincoln was in a meeting with "three or four elderly men" but ended the meeting "abruptly." Lincoln then

escorted Baldwin upstairs to a private bedroom and closed and locked the door. The president sat on the bed and asked the colonel about the true sentiments of the majority of the Virginia Convention delegates. He spat on the carpet from time to time throughout the interview.⁶

Baldwin told Lincoln Virginia would not secede "if the new administration respected the Constitution and did not abrogate the rights of any state. This would have included taking military action against the cotton states."

The disgusted Lincoln answered:

'your Virginia people are good Unionists, but it is always with an if! I don't like that sort of Unionism.'⁷

Baldwin then explained to Lincoln that "all free men could only be conditional Union men. When Unionism treated groups or sections of people unequally, the benefit of the Constitution was lost."⁸

Virginia had voted against Lincoln but Baldwin assured Lincoln Virginia would be loyal and help Lincoln keep the border states in the Union if he obeyed the Constitution.

Mitcham adds:

Secession, however, was a constitutional right, and Virginia did not believe the federal government had any right to coerce a state by force of arms.⁹

Lincoln continued thinking the South was blowing hot air, "'a game of brag,'" but Baldwin assured him that was not the case.

Lincoln must have been delusional to witness conventions of the people in seven Southern states as they thoroughly debated the one issue of seceding from the Union, then voted to do it. How could Lincoln still think they wanted to remain in his union?

Lincoln saw them set up a brand new nation on this earth, a continuance of the original American republic of the Founding Fathers with arguably a better constitution than the U.S. Constitution.

For example, the Confederate Constitution, in addition to outlawing protective tariffs and establishing a low 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a states' rights nation, also made it unconstitutional to tax one state then spend the money in another.

The Confederate Constitution was committed to free trade and it required bills to be properly labeled. The president would serve one six-year term so he was not constantly running for reelection.

Slavery was not required in the Confederate Constitution. Slavery was up to individual states.

The Confederate Constitution also allowed free states to join the Confederacy, which petrified Lincoln because several, especially along the Mississippi, were highly attracted to the South's low tariff and free trade economic philosophy. Why should those states pay high tariffs to enrich the North at the expense of the rest of the country?

Of course, Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history. He was president of the North and was looking out for the North only.

It is important to point out that while Baldwin was talking to Lincoln, there were more slave states in the Union than the Confederacy. There were nine in the Union, soon to be 10 with the admission of West Virginia as a slave state into the Union, while there were only seven in the Confederacy.

The nine Union slave states in early 1861 were Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina and Tennessee.

The seven Cotton States that seceded and formed the Confederate States of America were South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas.

As Baldwin talked, Lincoln's eyes finally opened. Lincoln

slid off the edge of the bed and began nervously pacing back and forth. 'I ought to have known this sooner!' he snapped, clearly perplexed. 'You are too late, sir, too late! Whey did you not come here four days ago, and tell me all this?' There was a look of fury on the chief executive's face. He was now pacing furiously and grasping his hair as if he were about to pull it out by the roots. He was obviously highly agitated.¹⁰

Baldwin said he came as fast as he could but Lincoln said "'Yes, but you are too late, I tell you, too late!'"¹¹

Baldwin

took this to mean that coercion had been decided on within the last four days. Unlike Baldwin, Lincoln knew that there were four war expeditions already sailing south.¹²

Lincoln's advisors had convinced Lincoln that Southerners were so afraid of "servile insurrection" that they would back down and that would "solidify the Republican triumph at the polls" so what Lincoln should do is "force a confrontation."

Baldwin wanted a "'peaceful union proclamation'" that "would paralyze the secession movement"¹³ but Republican greed for money could not be satisfied by words or even blood. Colonel Robert Dabney, D.D.

recalled that 'the policy urged by Colonel Baldwin would have disappointed the hopes of legislative plunder, by means of inflated tariffs, which were the real aims for which free-soil was the mask.'"¹⁴

Lincoln wanted Baldwin to adjourn the Virginia Convention "sine die" since it had already voted down secession three times but Baldwin "rejected the idea out of hand."

He "sensed that Lincoln wanted war and tried to persuade him to let the south go peacefully."

He "pointed out the historical and economic ties it had to the North and predicted that they would eventually lead the Southern states back into the Union."¹⁵

Lincoln responded:

'And open Charleston, etc., as ports of entry with their 10% tariff? What, then, would become of my tariff?'¹⁶

Lincoln was shocked because he knew that "war, made inevitable by his actions, was about to start" unless he backed down.

Until now, he "did not think Virginia would leave and join the fight." Reverend Dabney later wrote that Lincoln "'had not manliness enough to recede.'"¹⁷

Colonel Baldwin lost respect for Lincoln because he realized Lincoln's "purpose in calling the meeting was not peace but to get the convention to adjourn. This would make it easier for the North to win the war by keeping Virginia from seceding with the other border states."¹⁸

The New York Herald saw through Lincoln too. On April 5 it editorialized:

We have no doubt Mr. Lincoln wants [President Davis] to take the initiative in capturing . . . forts in its waters, for it would give him the opportunity of throwing [to the South] the responsibility of commencing hostilities.¹⁹

Gideon Welles sent his orders to Captain Adams in Pensacola "via a special messenger, Lieutenant J. L. Worden, USN, who traveled by rail from Washington to Richmond to Augusta to Atlanta." Worden memorized Lincoln's war orders then burned them. He arrived midnight April 10 in Pensacola.²⁰

The next day "he met with Braxton Bragg, the Rebel commander in the Pensacola area and assured him he had a verbal message of a "pacific" nature for Captain Adams" so Bragg let him deliver it, which Worden could not do right away, due to bad weather.

Meanwhile, Union commander Israel Vogdes committed an act of war by breaking the armistice between Union and Confederate forces in Pensacola. He reinforced Fort Pickens "with a mixed marine/army battle group."²¹

Worden avoided Bragg and left Pensacola for Montgomery arriving the morning of April 13 where he was arrested. Confederates had fired on Fort Sumter so Bragg knew Worden's message for Adams was not "'pacific.'" Southerners held Worden as a POW and not spy, luckily for him.

Worden later commanded the USS Monitor in her famous battle with the CSS Virginia (aka Merrimac).

Events in Charleston now "raced to their conclusion":

Jefferson Davis, Governor Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, and Confederate brigadier general P. G. T. Beauregard, the commander of Southern forces in Charleston, had about enough of Abraham Lincoln's subterfuges. They were no fools, and they realized Lincoln and Seward were playing for time so that they could get their military forces in position to reinforce Forts Sumter and Pickens. . . .²²

Southern leaders realized Lincoln was determined to start the war: "Lincoln presently had five war expeditions in Southern waters or preparing to enter them."²³ He and Secretary of State Seward continued to lie to Southerners that the Fort Sumter garrison would be removed.

On Monday, April 8, Confederates "intercepted a letter from Major Anderson" Lincoln's commander inside Fort Sumter, to Lincoln through Secretary of War Cameron. Anderson, who was in the best position to know Lincoln's intent, ended his letter with:

'We shall strive to do our duty, though . . . my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced.'²⁴

Anderson "sees" that the war is to be "thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln.

Southerners tried to avoid war until the last minute but the insidious Lincoln had arranged things so tightly they could not fail. Even if they had he would have arranged something else because he was determined to start his war. Every minute that went by, the South got stronger and the North got weaker. If Great Britain was to recognize the new Southern nation and offer military aid, the North would not be able to beat the South. Lincoln knew there was no reason whatsoever to wait even one second longer.

At 4:30 a.m. April 12, 1861, with all offers to evacuate rejected by Major Anderson at Lincoln's direction, and with multiple belligerent naval forces on the way to Southern destinations, Fort Sumter was bombarded by Confederates in Charleston Harbor for 34 hours:

Fort Sumter hauled down its flag on April 13. The fort was severely battered but, remarkably, there were no casualties. The formal surrender took place on April 14.²⁵

Anderson later wrote that they "'marched out of the fort Sunday afternoon the 14th instant, with colors flying and drums beating, bringing away company and private property, and saluting my flag with fifty guns.'"²⁶

On Monday, April 15, Abraham Lincoln officially started the War Between the States with "a proclamation declaring that an insurrection had begun . . . ." He "called for 75,000 volunteers to suppress the 'rebellion.' This would be the largest military force ever assembled on the North American continent to that date."²⁷

Congress was not in session so the immoral Lincoln, rather than calling them back immediately, set a special session for July 4, almost three months away. He wanted to make sure the war was well underway and unable to be stopped before facing Congress.

The Virginia Peace Commission had gone to the White House April 12 and after a brief meeting with Lincoln were told to come back the next day, which they did. They urged forbearance and the evacuation of Fort Pickens and Fort Sumter but:

Lincoln objected because all the goods from Europe would be imported through the ports of Charleston, etc., and his sources of revenue would dry up. 'If I do that, [Lincoln stated to Commissioner Stuart] what will become of my revenue? I might as well shut up house-keeping at once!'²⁸

Virginia was ordered to "supply five regiments for the Union Army."

Virginia Governor John Letcher wrote to U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron the next day, April 16:

'You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and having done so, we will meet it in a spirit as determined as the [Lincoln] Administration has exhibited toward the South.'²⁹

The next day, April 17, 1861, Virginia seceded voting 85 to 55 for secession. She was followed by Arkansas, May 6; North Carolina, May 20; and Tennessee, June 8.³⁰ The issue for these states was unquestionably federal coercion. They were horrified that Lincoln and the federal government would invade peaceful states and murder their citizens, which was clearly unconstitutional.

Mitcham writes that "The Northern public, unaware of what had happened behind the scenes, united behind the flag, just as Lincoln thought they would. Old Glory was fired on! It was time to forget political differences and rally behind the colors!"³¹

Mitcham writes that "President Davis made a serious miscalculation when he ordered his batteries to fire on Fort Sumter. He awakened a sleeping giant, and there would be hell to pay."³²

I must take slight issue with Dr. Mitcham's use of "serious miscalculation." What else was Jefferson Davis going to do? Lincoln was going to force the Cotton States back into the Union or face economic devastation of their own doing with horrible legislation such as the Morrill Tariff. The Morrill Tariff threatened to destroy the Northern shipping industry overnight because ship captains were comparing the South's 10% tariff with the North's astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher, and they were heading South.

Lincoln thought it would be easy to whip the South because he had four times the white population of the South and maybe 200 times the armaments along with other enormous advantages.

Lincoln also knew that the South with British military aid would be unbeatable by the North.

A free trade South on the North's southern border with 100% control of King Cotton would be formidable, even devastating economic competition.

Preventing that was exactly what Lincoln was committed to. Again, Lincoln was the first sectional president in American history. He was president of the North so he was looking out for the North.

He could see that if the North could beat the South in a war, the North would rule the entire country. Alexis de Tocqueville had predicted that any state gaining control of the federal government, such as the North had now done, would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power.

Northern cities such as New York, Boston et al. would be rich as well as the cultural and economic leaders of our great country for all time or at least the foreseeable future, and that has been the exact case. That's what Lincoln and the North were fighting for, certainly not to end slavery.

Mitcham ends this chapter with a powerful illustration.

He asks rhetorically "was the Confederacy responsible for the start of the Civil War? After all, it did fire the first shot."

He then writes:

At 6:37 a.m. on the morning of December 7, 1941, the USS Ward, a 1,267-ton destroyer, spotted a Japanese submarine trying to sneak into Pearl Harbor. She attacked it with her main battle guns and depth charges and sank it. These were the first shots fired in the Battle of Pearl Harbor. The Japanese did not attack the U.S. naval base until 7:48 a.m.
Did the United States start World War II? After all, she did fire the first shot.
The answer to such rhetorical questions is, of course, "No." In each case, the aggressor did not literally fire the first shot, although they did plan for war and decided to launch aggressive actions, such as violating the territorial waters of their foe; . . .³³

Abraham Lincoln got his war and was pleased but "concerned that his friend, G. V. Fox, was depressed that his Fort Sumter mission had failed."

Lincoln wrote Fox on May 1 stating "'I sincerely regret that the failure of the late attempt to provision Fort Sumter should be the source of any annoyance to you . . . . '"

Lincoln continued:

'You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.'

Charles W. Ramsdell in his famous treatise, "Lincoln and Fort Sumter," gives additional powerful evidence. The usually tight-mouthed Lincoln confessed his entire plot to his friend Orville H. Browning in July, 1861, not knowing Browning would go back to his room later and put it all down in his diary. In his entry for July 3, 1861,³⁴ Browning wrote:

He told me that the very first thing placed in his hands after his inauguration was a letter from Majr Anderson announcing the impossibility of defending or relieving Sumter. That he called the cabinet together and consulted Genl Scott --- that Scott concurred with Anderson, and the cabinet, with the exception of P M Genl Blair were for evacuating the Fort, and all the troubles and anxieties of his life had not equaled those which intervened between this time and the fall of Sumter. He himself conceived the idea, and proposed sending supplies, without an attempt to reinforce giving notice of the fact to Gov Pickens of S.C. The plan succeeded. They attacked Sumter --- it fell, and thus did more service than it otherwise could.

Mitcham concludes this outstanding chapter with a dramatic statement by Francis Key Howard, a grandson of Francis Scott Key, author of "The Star-Spangled Banner." People all over the North who opposed Lincoln's war were being arrested and Howard was one of them.

Mitcham points out that Howard was "ironically . . . incarcerated in Fort McHenry, Maryland" about which Francis Scott Key wrote his famous song. Howard wrote:

'When I looked out . . . I could not help being struck by an odd, and not pleasant coincidence. On that day, forty-seven years before, my grandfather, Mr. F. S. Key, then a prisoner on a British ship, had witnessed the bombardment of Fort M'Henry. When, on the following morning, the hostile fleet drew off, defeated, he wrote the song so long popular throughout the country, 'The Star-spangled Banner' . . . The flag which he had then so proudly hailed, I saw waving in the same place, over the victims of as vulgar and brutal a despotism as modern times have witnessed.'³⁵

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Eleven: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part One)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 143.

² Ibid.

³ Ibid.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 144.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 145.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 146.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 146-147.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 147.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 148.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 149.

²⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 149-150.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 150.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 150-151.

²⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 151.

³⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 152.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid.

³³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 153.

³⁴ Charles W. Ramsdell, "Lincoln and Fort Sumter," The Journal of Southern History, Vol. 3, Issue 3 (August, 1937), 259-288. Ramsdell cites Browning's quote as coming from Theodore Calvin Pease and James G. Randall (eds.), The Diary of Orville H. Browning, 2 vols. (Springfield, Ill., 1927) 1, 475-76.

³⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 154.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eleven: Chapter XIII, Over the Edge, Part One

Posted on January 5, 2022January 5, 2022 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 1 Comment

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XIII.

MITCHAM GIVES US an exciting account in Chapter XIII of how Abraham Lincoln started the War Between the States, which ended up killing 750,000 men and maiming over a million.

Lincoln established the supremacy of the federal government over the states (remember, Yankees were the "federals" in the war) because he wanted the North with its larger population to control the federal government and thus the country.

On Tuesday, November 6, 1860, Lincoln was elected and immediately Charlestonians raised the Palmetto flag "instead of the Stars and Stripes." A judge summed up the feeling in Charleston:

'the Temple of Justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is now closed. If it shall never again be opened I thank God that its doors have been closed before its altar has been desecrated with he sacrifices of tyranny.'¹

South Carolina's legislature "met in an unusual Saturday session on November 10" and "passed an act calling for a secession convention to begin in Columbia on December 17." Both of the state's U.S. senators resigned that same day, and the day after, "the South Carolina legislature voted to raise 10,000 volunteers for the defense of the state."²

Secession had been debated the entire previous year across the South but on December 20, 1860 it became reality. The Convention of the People of South Carolina revoked the state's 1788 ratification of the U.S. Constitution and voted 169-0 to secede, which began an ecstatic celebration in Charleston that went on for days.

Earlier, on December 10, "six South Carolina congressmen and President Buchanan met to discuss the military situation in Charleston" and came to a gentleman's agreement that neither would attack the other vis-a-vis the forts. The status quo was to stay the same.

Buchanan's word was no good just as Lincoln and Seward's were no good the following spring. The day after meeting with the South Carolina representatives Buchanan sent Major Don Carlos Buell (later a Union general) who was the War Department representative to meet with Major Anderson then in Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island. Buell told Anderson that "he had permission to abandon Fort Moultrie and transfer the garrison to Fort Sumter."³

Anderson knew Fort Moultrie was indefensible since it faced the harbor and was surrounded by local residences so "he quietly evacuated it on December 26, spiked his obsolete thirty-two-pounder guns, and took his men under cover of darkness to Fort Sumter, which was located on an uninhabited rock island in the middle of Charleston Harbor." Fort Sumter dominated the entrance to Charleston Harbor.⁴

A delegation from South Carolina went to Washington, D.C. at the same time to "obtain a peaceful settlement of all outstanding issues. Among other things, South Carolina was prepared to pay for its share of the public debt."⁵

Anderson's provocative act caused South Carolina forces to take over "the other harbor forts, including Moultrie and Castle Pinckney, on December 27."⁶

Military companies sprang up across the South and began "conducting drills in city parks and on the town squares." Northerners had not believed Southerners would secede but Northern greed and hatred had finally come home to roost. Southerners were "deadly serious."

By year end, and early 1861, Republican political strength plummeted "in the municipal elections. Even in Boston, Wendell Phillips needed police protection to return home."⁷ This is the same virtue-signaling abolitionist hate-monger with no solution for ending slavery, who had proclaimed that the Republican Party was the party of the North pledged against the South and was the first sectional party in American history.

South Carolina wanted Anderson to return to Fort Moultrie and Secretary of War John B. Floyd agreed. He warned that failure to do so "'invited a collision.'"⁸

There were several heated cabinet meetings at the end of the year, then Floyd resigned December 29th. On December 30th "South Carolina volunteers seized the Charleston Arsenal."⁹ President-elect Lincoln "claimed he 'yearned' for peace but took absolutely no steps to secure it."¹⁰

On January 9, 1861 Citadel cadets manning an artillery battery on Morris Island "fired on and drove off" the Star of the West, which had been sent to "reinforce and re-provision Fort Sumter":

The soldiers were hidden below deck [of the Star of the West], but the South Carolinians had been tipped off as to what was really happening by Secretary of the Interior Jacob Thompson of Mississippi. . . . Anderson continued to draw his supplies from the mainland of South Carolina, but he knew the secessionists could cut them off at any time.¹¹

Meanwhile, one of the greatest expressions of democratic republican government in history occurred as six other states in a landmass nearly the size of Europe called conventions, elected delegates as Unionists or Secessionists, then debated the single issue of secession just as the colonists had debated the single issue of the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

They then voted one by one to secede from the federal Union that had become full of hate and tyranny, much more so than the British in 1776. The terrorism of violent criminals like John Brown, which was celebrated in the North, meant Southerners with their wives, children, their families, were targeted for murder, rape, arson, and every other unimaginable horror. Some thought that was the federal government's intent. They had no reason to think overwise.

So:

On January 9, Mississippi voted to secede by a vote of eighty-four to fifteen. The next day, Florida, voted sixty-two to seven to leave the Union. Alabama departed on January 11 by a vote of sixty-one to thirty-nine. Georgia seceded on January 19 after a vote of two hundred eight to eighty-nine. Louisiana left the Union on January 26 after a vote of one hundred thirteen to seven. Texas voted one hundred sixty-six to seven to secede on February 1. Governor Sam Houston tried to obstruct it and prevent Texas from joining the Confederacy. On March 16, he went to work and was shocked to find Lieutenant Governor Edward Clark sitting at his desk. The secession convention had deposed him. Lincoln offered him 50,000 troops to keep Texas in the United States, but like Robert E. Lee, Houston did not care to remain in a union held together by bayonets. He declined the offer and retired.¹²

Those seven states met in convention February 4, 1861 in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to the original American republic of the Founding Fathers with sovereign states in a loose federal union unlike the Northern tyranny that had developed. The most widely used phrase in the secession debate in the South during 1860 came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

On Friday, February 8, 1861 "they adopted a constitution and created the Confederate States of America." It outlawed protective tariffs that had allowed the North to enrich itself at the expense of the South via Robert Toombs's "suction pump" which constantly sucked wealth out of the South and deposited it in the North.

It prohibited internal improvement in one state paid for with tax money from another so never again would Southerners pay 85% of the taxes but have 75% of the tax money spent in the North.

The Confederate Constitution "outlawed the slave trade and allowed for the admission of non-slaveholding states" which petrified Abraham Lincoln since several free states especially along the Mississippi were attracted to the free-trade South with its low 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a states rights nation. This is in comparison to the North's soon-to-be-passed astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 47 to 60% higher because in a knee-jerk fashion, they had passed it thinking the South would have to pay it as it had in the past. However, the Morrill Tariff fell on Northerners because the South was now an independent nation.

Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi moderate with a distinguished record of service to the country was elected provisional president, and former Unionist, Alexander H. Stephens, "Little Alec," as Robert Toombs called his good friend, was elected provisional vice president. Stephens was a good friend of Lincoln's.

Independence "would give the South more leverage in dealing with domestic terrorism, as advocated by Lysander Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridley Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, George Luther Stearns, and others."¹³

The Northern press at first accepted Southern secession and editors like Horace Greeley said "let the erring sisters go." He at first believed in the right of secession and wrote a long emotional editorial in support of it as South Carolina was seceding.

But he soon realized it would affect his money in a dramatic way so he changed his tune and wanted war as did most of the North:

They were told (accurately) that the free trade ports of New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and others would undercut the high duty ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. They predicted that the North would lose at least half of its commerce. The Southern economy was prosperous, and the industrial, commercial, and financial classes of the North did not want it to slip beyond their grasp. Simultaneously, Lincoln was insisting that he must have his tariffs. The withdrawal of the South meant that the federal government lost more than 85 percent of its tax base. Also, an independent South with an economy based on free trade would be devastating competition for the North. . . . Some Northern newspapers began advocating the use of military force to prevent this competitive situation.¹⁴

Lincoln spoke out of both sides of his mouth like a typical corrupt politician. He "spoke of how a house divided against itself could not stand and how the nation could not remain half slave and half free" while supporting the Corwin Amendment which left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, where slavery already existed. He spoke of peace while he laid his plans "to trigger war" and he still "insisted on high tariffs."¹⁵ After all, Lincoln was president of the North as Wendell Phillips had proclaimed, not president of the whole country.

There were "two potential flashpoints in the spring of 1861: Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens, the last located on Santa Rosa Island in Pensacola harbor, Florida."

Fort Pickens had federal troops inside and "a naval force" outside but they were "outnumbered by Florida volunteers" who held Pensacola.

Florida could have taken the fort but an armistice "was agreed on January 29 and remained in effect until Lincoln broke the agreement in April":

U.S. Captain Israel Vogdes of the First Artillery Regiment was the commander of a Union force aboard the USS Brooklyn. He and his men were supposed to reinforce the fort but stopped at the Pensacola sandbar. When he learned of the armistice, Vogdes returned to his vessel.¹⁶

The armistice was honored until:

March 12 when, at Lincoln's command, General Scott sent Captain Vogdes an order: 'At the first favorable moment, you will land your company, reinforce Fort Pickens, and hold the same until further orders.' This order was in direct violation of the armistice of January 29 and was an act of war---issued only eight days after Honest Abe became president.¹⁷ (Bold emphasis added.)

Vogdes "did not receivce the order until March 31." He then requested help from Capt. Henry A. Adams of the USS Sabine but Adams knew Lincoln's order would start a war.

Adams wrote to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles:

'I can not take on myself under such insufficient authority as General Scott's order to the fearful responsibility of an act which seems to render civil war inevitable . . . '¹⁸ (Bold emphasis added.)

"In his report to the secretary of the Navy," Adams wrote:

'It would be considered not only a declaration but an act of war, and would be resisted to the utmost.'¹⁹ (Bold emphasis added.)

Adams went on:

'At present both sides are faithfully observing the agreement [armistice] entered into by the U.S. Government and Mr. [Stephen] Mallory and Colonel [William Henry] Chase. This agreement binds us not to reinforce Fort Pickens unless it shall be attacked or threatened. It binds them not to attack it unless we attempt to reinforce it.'²⁰

Huger W. Johnstone later wrote: "'Captain Adams averted open war on April 1, 1861, by refusing to obey this [Lincoln's] order.'"

Mitcham writes that Captain Adams must have "thought Welles did not understand the situation at Pensacola and did not want to start a war. It did not occur to him [Adams] that starting a war was exactly what Welles wanted to do."²¹

On April 6 Welles reprimanded Adams and "made it clear that he and the administration wanted war":

'Your dispatch of April 1 is received,' he wrote. 'The Department regrets that you did not comply with the request of Capt. Vogdes. You will immediately on the first favorable opportunity after receipt of this order, afford every facility to Capt. Vogdes to enable him to land the troops under his command, it being the wish and intention of the Navy Department to co-operate with the War Department, in that object.'²²

The situation at Fort Sumter was perhaps even more ominous.

In Washington, D.C. "on February 6, Lincoln's agent, Gustavus V. Fox, met with Lieutenant Norman J. Hall, who was sent from Fort Sumter by Major Anderson. They discussed relieving the fort."²³

Several more conferences occurred then:

Fox wrote General Scott on March 8, informing him that Hall was bringing the relief plans to Major Anderson if the Rebels would let him back into the fort. The Lincoln administration (including, among others, Lincoln, Fox, Hall, and Montgomery Blair, the newly designated postmaster general) was clearly scheming to relieve Fort Sumter before February 6, and these plans were well advanced by Inauguration Day.²⁴

Confederate commissioners in Washington were lied to and told repeatedly that Fort Sumter would be evacuated though Lincoln's plan all along was to reinforce it, which he knew would start the war. On March 29, Lincoln sent a dispatch to Welles stating:

'I desire that an expedition, to move by sea be got ready to sail as early as the 6th of April . . . ' His memo called for three ships of war (the Pocahontas, the Pawnee, and the Harriet Lane) to enter Confederate territorial waters, carrying 200 reinforcements with one year's stores.²⁵

Lincoln was determined to start the war somewhere so if Fort Sumter failed, of course he had Fort Pickens.

General Scott on April 2, "sent a remarkable order, dated April 1, to Brevet Colonel Harvey Brown at Fort McHenry, Maryland" commanding Brown to "take command of an expedition to reinforce and hold Fort Pickens." It was signed by Winfield Scott and Abraham Lincoln.²⁶

Mitcham writes:

President do not ordinarily approve orders like this from generals, but Scott knew it would violate the truce with the Confederates, who would undoubtedly fire on the ships and inaugurate civil war. It is obvious that he needed or wanted Lincoln's co-signature before he committed an act of war. He wanted future generations to know that the decision to go to war was Lincoln's, not his. Lincoln not only signed the order, but he also issued a second order (also dated April 1) to 'All officers of the Army and Navy' to aide Brown and co-operate with him as needed. The president signed this order himself.²⁷ (Bold emphasis added.)

Five military missions were now "steaming toward, or about to sail for Southern territorial waters:"

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.²⁸

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Twelve

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part Two

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Ten: Chapter XII, Lincoln and His Agenda)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 131.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 131-132.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 132.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 132-133.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 133.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 134.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 134-135.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 135.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 136-137.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 137.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 137-138.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 138.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 138-139.

²² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 139.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 141.

²⁶ Ibid.

²⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142.

²⁸ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Ten: Chapter XII, Lincoln and His Agenda

Posted on December 29, 2021December 29, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 4 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Ten

Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XII.

LINCOLN'S AGENDA after he was inaugurated March 4, 1861 was "more centralized government, more power to the chief executive, more money from the South to benefit the North and the West, and the prohibition of slavery in the territories to stop the spread of black people."¹

Mitcham writes that Lincoln is probably the "most overrated man in American history" because:

The real Lincoln was a reservoir of dirty jokes and well as Yankee stories. . . . He had many humorous tales, anecdotes, yarns, and stories about the New England religious hypocrites and their dishonest peddlers. . . . Of the twenty-three preachers in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, only three supported Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860.²

Lincoln's closest friends did not believe him a Christian though he had memorized enough Bible passages to use them when needed. His law partner William Herndon did not believe Lincoln was a "believer" and Ward Hill Lamon stated Lincoln "'was not a Christian.'"³ He did, however, value clerical support:

Later, during the war, in areas occupied by the Union army, Union generals forced Southern preachers to pray for him [Lincoln]. Failure to pray led to arrest, often by being dragged from the pulpit, and preachers were held in jail indefinitely, so Lincoln did received support from the clergy, even if it was under duress.⁴

Lincoln was the son of a "shiftless farmer" who moved often. He grew up around "uneducated and often coarse men and women" and "used foul language." He became a "'a self-made man'" and "great public speaker and debater." He became a lawyer where:

He represented big corporations and big business against the little man. At various times, he represented the Illinois Central Railroad, the Chicago & Alton Railroad, the Ohio & Mississippi, and the Rock Island Railroad. Erastus Corning offered him the job of chief general counsel for the New York Central Railroad at $10,000 a year (about $265,000 in 2017 dollars), but Lincoln turned it down. He probably couldn't afford the pay cut.⁵

Slavery was used by Northern demagogues to rally Republican votes using hatred of white Southerners, but there was no concern for black people. Lincoln and company didn't want slavery in the West because they didn't want blacks near them in the West.

Lincoln's appointment of Salmon P. Chase as secretary of the treasury is revealing as to Lincoln, Chase, and most other abolitionists' feelings about the black man:

In 1857, William D. Chadick of Alabama visited Ohio. He was searching for a home for a group of slaves liberated by the will of the late Samuel Townsend, and he thought Chase (then governor of Ohio) would be deeply interested in the project. On December 27, he met with him, and Chadick recalled Chase saying, 'he would rather never see another free negro set his foot upon Ohio soil.' Astonished, the Alabama man asked why. 'Because their moral influence is degrading,' Chase answered. Chadick pointed out the 'glaring inconsistency' in him and other abolitionists, who wanted to free the slaves but did not want them living amongst them. 'I do not wish to have the slave emancipated because I love him,' the governor responded, 'but because I hate his master.'⁶

Lincoln later appointed Chase chief justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Of course, Lincoln's statements in the Lincoln-Douglas debates reveal his true feelings about blacks which, in fairness to Lincoln, were typical and widespread in the 19th century. Ignorant people today who apply 21st century standards to earlier eras are appalled but people in the past must be judged by the standards of their own time. That is how you understand the past.

Applying today's stupid woke standards to the past prevents understanding the past, which is the goal of the woke anyway. Their goal is political agitation via the liberal fraud news media and the cowardly mob in academia, not truth or understanding.

In Charleston, Illinois on September 18, 1858, Lincoln said:

'I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about, in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to inter-marry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.' General Piatt, a fervent abolitionist, recalled: '[Lincoln] could no more feel sympathy for that wretched race [Negroes] than he could for the horse he worked or the hog he killed.' ⁷

Lincoln favored, his whole life, sending black people back to Africa or into a place they could survive. See black scholar Lerone Bennett, Jr.'s excellent book, Forced into Glory, Abraham Lincoln's White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 2000); and Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page's Colonization After Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011); and numerous other books and articles.

The deification of Lincoln occurred only after his death. Numerous books, too many to list, attest to Lincoln's true character such as Larry Tagg's The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln, The Story of America's Most Reviled President (NY and CA: Savas Beatie, 2009).

Even James McPherson, who adores Lincoln, said: "'Being assassinated when he was in a moment of victory made it possible to forget all the criticism of him, the failures and the frustrations of the war years, and to see only the martyr.'" He admits Lincoln "'is now romanticized" though he was "'an often ruthless man.'"

Lincoln's contemporaries and associates were frank:

Abolitionist Wendell Phillips called him 'A huckster in politics . . . a first-rate second rate man.' General John C. Fremont said he had an 'incapacity and selfishness, with disregard of personal rights, with violation of personal liberty and liberty of the press, with feebleness and want of principle.'⁸

Lincoln's secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, who despised Lincoln, went further:

Lincoln had been called in as a legal consultant on the McCormack Reaper patent infringement case. He [Stanton] called Lincoln a 'giraffe' to his face and threatened to throw up his briefcase and leave if he joined the legal team. ' . . . he treated me so rudely I went out of the room,' Lincoln recalled. McCormack appealed to Stanton, who replied: 'I will not associated with such a damned gawky, long-armed ape!' Lincoln, who was in the next room, heard every word. When McCormack returned, Lincoln refunded his fee and left for home.⁹

Other words used by Stanton about Lincoln were 'orangutan', 'baboon' and 'low, cunning clown.'¹⁰

It appeared few of Lincoln's close associates respected him and included not only Chase, Fremont, Phillips, but also:

Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, Secretary of State Seward, . . . Senator Sumner, Senator Lyman Trumbell of Illinois, Senator Ben Wade of Ohio, Thaddeus Stevens, Senator Zack Chandler of Michigan, Henry Ward Beecher, . . . and Horace Greeley. On February 23, 1863, Richard H. Dana wrote to Thomas Lathrop: '. . . the lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed . . . He has no admirers . . . '¹¹

Mitcham writes that "The Thirty-Sixth Congress met in December 1860, preoccupied with solving the secession crisis" and of the "more than 200 resolutions" and "fifty-seven constitutional amendments" three stand out: "the Southern peace commissioners, the Crittenden Compromise, and the Corwin Amendment."¹²

The three Southern peace commissioners were Martin J. Crawford of Georgia, John Forsyth of Alabama, and Andre B. Roman of Louisiana but Lincoln refused to meet with them and his secretary of state, William H. Seward, lied to them repeatedly.

Seward promised to remove the Union garrison in Fort Sumter at the same time that Lincoln was plotting to send a naval force to Charleston and Pensacola to reinforce the forts, which he knew would start the war.

Major Robert Anderson, Lincoln's commander inside Fort Sumter, confirms Lincoln's intent to start the war. When Anderson was informed that Lincoln was going to reinforce Fort Sumter, Anderson wrote Lincoln and secretary of war Cameron and stated:

. . . 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. . . . 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. . . . (Emphasis added.)¹³

Anderson sees that the war "is to be thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln, who had to hurry up and get it started or soon the South with European trade and military alliances would be unbeatable.

The Crittenden Compromise showed great promise. It revived the old Missouri Compromise line (36 degrees, 30 minutes) that prohibited slavery above it but allowed slavery below it. It had worked beautifully for 30 years and would most likely have worked in 1861 but Lincoln and racist Republicans refused to consider it.

They had forbid the extension of slavery into the West in their platform because they wanted the West for themselves and their white political allies. They did not want blacks anywhere near them in the West so slavery in the West, the Crittenden Compromise and its revival of the old Missouri Compromise line, were out.

Of the three attempts to deal with secession, the Corwin Amendment "won traction":

In December, 1860, President Buchanan asked Congress to set up a committee to draft an "explanatory amendment" vis-a-vis slavery. In the House, Thomas "Black Tom" Corwin of Ohio was chosen as the chairman. Corwin was a veteran politician who, at various times, was a state legislator, congressman, governor, U.S. senator, and congressman again. His amendment would forever prevent the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it existed.¹⁴

Lincoln supported it. He mentioned it in his inaugural. He wrote letters to governors in support of it.

The House "approved it one hundred thirty-three to sixty-five on February 28, and the Senate adopted it on March 2 by a vote of twenty-four to twelve." It got the two-thirds it needed.

Buchanan signed it and it was ratified by "Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Illinois" but the war made it moot.¹⁵ The Corwin Amendment was the true feeling of Lincoln and the North toward slavery. It left blacks in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress, where slavery already existed.

Republicans could then agitate to keep the West white by prohibiting blacks from being there as slaves or freemen.

Some abolitionists were disgusted with Lincoln's support for the Corwin Amendment. Lysander Spooner, "a conspirator with John Brown" who "advocated violence and guerrilla warfare against the slave states," wrote:

'On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.'¹⁶

Spooner was an astute observer who believed the "moneyed interests in the North" greatly influenced the government:

Their interest, he wrote, was 'to monopolize the Southern markets, to maintain their industrial and commercial control over the South . . . '¹⁷

Spooner wrote after the war:

'. . . these Northern manufacturers and merchants lent some of the profits of their former monopolies for the war, to secure to themselves the same, or greater, monopolies in the future. These---and not any love of liberty of justice---were the motives on which the money was lent by the North.'¹⁸

The Corwin Amendment failed to persuade the Cotton States to return, which is understandable. Southerners had an insatiable desire for independence and their own powerful, free-trade nation where states were supreme and the federal government was weak and subservient. In the South, 1861 was 1776 all over. They knew their glorious history and their Revolutionary sires. They were not about to return to tyranny and the Northern yoke, just as the Colonists were not about to return to tyranny and the British yoke, thus:

[I]t became clear to the president and his cronies that they had two choices: 1) let the Confederacy go in peace and deal with the ensuing economic disaster or 2) go to war with the South.¹⁹

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Nine: Chapter XI, The Real Cause of the War)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 121.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 122.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 123.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 123-124.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 124.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 125.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 125-126.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 127.

¹³ Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston and James Island: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014), 91-93.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 127.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 128.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 129.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Nine: Chapter XI, The Real Cause of the War

Posted on December 22, 2021December 22, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | No Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Nine

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter XI.

MITCHAM'S EPIGRAPHS are perfect. Chapter XI's are:

The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.---Charles Dickens, 1862
No soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves.---Shelby Foote, American historian
For the love of money is the root of all evil. . . .---1 Timothy 6:10

Mitcham opens Chapter XI with:

And now we come to the real cause of the war: money. Most wars have been about money or the transfer of riches and territory, which also equates to money, eventually. This economic factor should never be ignored.¹

The North has been benefiting from the federal government since the beginning of the country. Once they realized they could take over the federal government in 1860 because of their larger population and exploit the rest of the country, they were determined like a pack of snarling wolves about to tear a lamb to bits, thus legendary Yankee greed was born.

Georgia noted it in her declaration of causes for secession which is regularly ignored by most of the Marxist historians in academia who are not interested in truth but only the political advantage of the left:

The material prosperity of the North was greatly dependent on the Federal Government; that of the South not at all.

Yankees were the "federals" in the war who established the supremacy of the federal government over the states.

Mitcham points out that shortly after the Revolutionary War, all state debt was transferred to the federal government which greatly benefited the North because Southerners had to pay most of that debt via tariffs.

Senator Thomas H. Benton of Missouri who was anti-slavery said to the Senate in 1828:

Before the Revolution, it [the South] was the seat of wealth, as well as hospitality. Money, and all it commanded, abounded there. But how is it now? All this is reversed.²

Benton asked himself why and his answer was "Federal legislation":

Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia may be said to defray three-fourths of the annual expense in supporting the Federal Government; and of this great sum, annually, furnished by them, nothing, or next to nothing is returned to them, in the shape of Government expenditures. . . . the South must be exhausted of its money, and its property, by a course of legislation, which is forever taking away, and never returning anything. Every new tariff increases the force of this action. No tariff has ever yet included Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, except to increase the burdens imposed upon them.³

This is an important chapter and Mitcham explains the "symbiotic economic relationship" between South and North with clarity:

When the Southerners bought their slaves from the Yankee flesh peddlers, they were using money loaned to them by Northern banks. The worldwide industrial revolution was based largely on textile manufacturing, which required enormous amounts of cotton. The South produced more than 75 percent of the world's cotton. The New England textile industry was built on this cotton, which was mostly planted, cultivated, picked, and ginned by slaves. Cotton, produced by slaves, built the North's prosperity like that of the Deep South.⁴

These are the EXACT themes of my book, Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. They are the themes of many excellent books by authors such as Mike Scruggs, Phil Leigh, Charles Adams, Thomas DiLorenzo, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel and others BUT it really started in 1860 with Thomas Prentice Kettell, the most preeminent economist of the time.

Kettell's famous book, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits, proves conclusively that Southerners were producing the wealth of the country with agricultural commodities, but Yankees were making all the money with federal legislation that gave them bounties, subsidies, and monopoly status for their businesses as well as tariffs.

And Northerners manufactured for the South and shipped Southern cotton all over the world. Kettell's analysis is solid and he was observing everything first hand in real time.

Mitcham writes that Wall Street and Yankee bankers were indirectly dependent on "cotton and slavery":

Cotton was America's number one economic product, accounting for more than half of all exports. The export value of cotton alone stood at $161,434,923 in 1859. That same year, the total value of all exports from the North stood at only $78,217,202. In other words, the value of one Southern product accounted for more than twice the value of all Northern exports combined.⁵

Incredibly, "80 to 90 percent of federal revenue came from the Southern export trade, which was largely built on slavery." Mitcham writes:

Here we see the real reason Abraham Lincoln and the more moderate Republicans did not wish to disturb slavery in the South: from its establishment up until 1861, the United States government was mostly funded by Southern agriculture and especially the cotton industry, much of which depended on slave labor. If slavery were abolished, federal funding would be eliminated with it. Thus Lincoln and his allies only opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories.⁶

So funny and ironic but this was a double-win for Republicans because they could support slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed as they did by supporting the Corwin Amendment, but stand against slavery in the territories which they did --- not because they were against slavery --- but because they were against blacks living anywhere near them in the West.

The Morrill Tariff introduced by Vermont Representative Justin Smith Morrill "would have raised the average dutiable ad valorem tax on imports from just under 20 percent in 1860 (under the Tariff of 1857) to more than 36 percent in 1862----and a whopping 47 percent within three years."⁷ But:

Predictably, some of the protected Northern industries and corporations needed to import specific items, so these were classified as non-dutiable (not taxed).⁸

As has been observed over and over, federal legislation was enriching the North and robbing the South blind, and Southerners in 1860 would no longer be able to protect themselves from this blatant theft being forced on them by the Northern majority. That is a primary reason they seceded from the Union.

Would you allow yourself to be robbed blind by a region that hated your guts and sent murdering terrorists into your peaceful towns and villages to poison wells and incite slave insurrections where your women and children would be raped and murdered in the night as happened in Haiti?

It is easy to see why Lincoln and the North feared Southern economic power, especially when allied with Europe and specifically Great Britain. Southerners:

[A]ccounted for close to 82 percent of U.S. export business and for more than 83 percent of American tariff revenues even before the Morrill Tariff. About 80 percent of these revenues went to public works projects, railroads, and industrial subsidies in the North, enriching Northerners at the expense of the South. The Morrill Tariff would make this unhealthy situation even worse.⁹

Imagine turning all that money back on the South. Imagine the growth and increase in standard of living. After all, it was Southern money. Many prominent Southerners during the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states seceding pointed that out.

But for each dollar of Southern money that stayed in the South, it meant the same dollar not going into Northern pockets.

Raising tariffs meant Northern manufacturers could raise their prices up to the level of the tariff:

If the Northern industrial special interests could raise the tariffs on imports from Britain, they could sell Northern products at a higher price and thus reap higher profits. This is what Calhoun was trying to block when he demanded to know what business the government had picking the winners and losers in the private sector.¹⁰

Mitcham writes about the passage of the Morrill Tariff after seven Southern states had seceded and their senators and representatives were out of the U.S. Congress:

It is worth noting that the tariff bill had priority even before excluding slavery from the territories.¹¹

Henry Clay's "America System was now the law of the land" but:

[I]t only helped the North. The Constitution allowed the federal government to collect the tariffs to fund itself, but it had never been meant to enrich some people at the expense of others. Now the Constitution was irrelevant. Turned on its ear, it no longer served as an instrument to limit federal power.¹²

Just as we saw with the transcontinental railroad route chosen to go through the North to the West, the sectional Republican Party as Wendell Phillips had proudly stated, was fulfilling the desires of the North and its Northern president, Abraham Lincoln, against the rest of the country, and the writing was on the wall.

Southerners with their Jeffersonian belief in the sovereignty and supremacy of their states, would hereafter be outvoted by the Northern majority pushing Northern economic interests every single time. Robert Toombs called the federal government a "suction pump" sucking wealth out of the South and depositing it in the North, and it would now have unlimited power, forever.

This Union was now for the benefit of the North as Alexis de Tocqueville and others had warned could happen. De Tocqueville had said if any one state got the power to control the federal government it would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power, and now, the Northern states had that power with their majority and the sectional Republican Party, the party of the North pledged against the South as Wendell Phillips stated.

This is what Lincoln was fighting for when he started his war by sending his hostile naval force against Fort Sumter and Fort Pickens in 1861.

And it worked.

The North has been the center of money, power and culture since Appomattox, though it is in great decline today with massive crime as we see out West and in New York City as Yankees flee the horribly-governed woke North for the South where folks are friendly and the region is dynamic, free, supports law enforcement, and is well-governed by leaders like Ron DeSantis in Florida.

DeSantis governs one of the freest states in the country yet has the lowest COVID problems in sharp contrast to much of the locked-down, masked-up, "show me your vaccination papers" North.

Mitcham points out that Southern wealth was not limited to the planter class:

Dixie had 33 percent of the nation's railroad mileage and was ahead of every other country in the world except, of course, the United States as a whole. It also had navigable rivers that did not freeze, several excellent ports, and a per capita income 10 percent higher than all the states west of Pennsylvania. . . . It also had a large, highly industrious class of yeoman farmers. Most of them did not own slaves. Only about 6 to 7 percent of the Confederate enlistees had slaves. Slaveholding yeoman farmers usually had only one or two. They labored in the cotton fields right beside their chattels.¹³

Many Northern newspapers at first supported the right of secession. Horace Greeley famously said "let our erring sisters go." He wrote in his New-York Tribune: "The South has as good a right to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain." Even the Northwest Daily Tribune, a pro-Lincoln newspaper, said that if the South opted to form an independent nation, "they [would] have a clear moral right to do so."¹⁴

But soon they realized that Southern secession meant the collapse of the Northern economy. Northern manufacturing was based mostly on selling to their captive market in the South at high prices jacked up by tariffs. Secession meant Southerners could buy better goods from Europe at much lower prices as they had always wanted to do plus they would manufacture for themselves. They were chomping at the bit to do it.

Southerners outlawed protective tariffs and made them unconstitutional. They also put in law that each state would fund the internal improvements it wanted itself. Southern states would never be taxed again then have the tax money spent in the North.

Northerners were going to lose their shipping industry too, and overnight. The Morrill Tariff was like pumping gasoline into an already blazing fire. It meant the rest of the world would have to pay 47 to 60% to ship into the North, or pay 10% to ship into the South because Southerners felt that "if 10 percent was good enough for God" it was good enough for them!¹⁵

Nobody would be shipping into the North at Morrill Tariff rates so Northern ship captains were heading South to Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans where goods would be put on the Mississippi River and railroads and distributed to the rest of the country.

Secession meant a complete shift of economic power from North to South, and overnight.

To boot, Southerners had 100% control of King Cotton, the most demanded commodity on the planet that had been 60% of U.S. exports alone in 1860.

No wonder Lincoln and greedy Republicans started their war. They were not about to tolerate a free trade nation on their Southern border allied with Europe militarily and via trade alliances.

Lincoln knew he had four times the white population of the South and maybe 200 times the armaments at that point in history so in his Republican mind there was no reason to wait a second longer. He was anxious to set up his blockade and chill European negotiations and treaties with the South.

Mitcham writes:

It was now clear that many of the Northern politicians had seriously miscalculated the depths of Southern feelings about the tariffs, Northern hypocrisy, disrespect for the rule of law, hate-filled abolitionist propaganda, slavery, protecting terrorists, encouraging servile insurrection, corporate welfare, cultural arrogance, and a host of other matters that provoked secession.¹⁶

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Ten

Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Eight: Chapter X, The Election of 1860)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 111.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 111-112.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 112.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 112.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 113.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 114.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 115.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 116.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 118.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 119.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 120.

¹⁶ Ibid.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Eight: Chapter X, The Election of 1860

Posted on December 15, 2021December 16, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 3 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eight

Chapter X
The Election of 1860

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter X.

Mitcham's epigraph for Chapter X is by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels:

The War between the North and the South is a tariff war. The war is further, not for any principle, does not touch on the question of slavery, and in fact turns on the Northern lust for power.

DISHONEST ACADEMIA and the news media will ignore statements like that from their man, Karl Marx. They will use the Marxist tactic of just ignoring powerful evidence that they don't agree with. However, those of us seeking truth will not ignore it and will put it in their faces, front and center.

Mitcham opens by pointing out the North's casual attitude about obeying the Constitution because they were following a "higher law" as New York Senator William H. Seward stated. Seward also believed an "irrepressible conflict" was coming between North and South.

If you can't trust the North to obey the Constitution, what good are they as fellow countrymen? Mitcham points out that "Under Seward's Higher Law Theory, God Himself had to be a Radical Republican."¹

The sectional Republican Party was demanding a huge tariff increase yet "The South, which had less than 30 percent of the population, was already paying more than 85 percent of the taxes."²

Didn't matter. Republicans wanted more.

Some abolitionist newspapers "blared that the South deserved economic crushing, for its sins. Southerners should pay because the North---especially New England---had a divine right to tariff income and could disperse it to railroads and banks as they chose."

That is what the Founding Fathers meant by "tyranny of the majority." It was a concept warned about in the secession debate in the South prior to the South seceding.

George Washington warned about "sectional" political parties. It would mean the end of the country, he said. Political parties should be national but radical Republican abolitionist Wendall Phillips proudly stated that the Republican Party was the "party of the North pledged against the South."

Southerners watched this Northern sectional party make gains across the North and as Mitcham points out, "This trend may not have been in every case an endorsement of servile insurrection," but the South interpreted it that way, especially after John Brown and Harper's Ferry in 1859, and before that, with Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South in 1857. Republicans endorsed Helper's book and used it as a campaign document in the election of 1860. They printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them coast to coast though it called for slaves to rise up in the night and slit the throats of Southern men, women and children.

It is important to note that the most prominent economist alive around the time of the War Between the States, Thomas Prentice Kettell, blasted Helper's economic statistics and said they were absurd. Kettell wrote the brilliant Southern Wealth and Northern Profits establishing that the South was producing the wealth of the United States with cotton and other Southern commodities but Northerners were making all the money by shipping cotton, manufacturing and banking for the South, and with tariffs, taxes, bounties, subsidies, and monopoly status for their businesses from the federal government.

In other words, Northerners were dependent on the federal government and the South. Without the South, Northerners were dead economically whereas without the North, Southerners were in great shape with 100% control of King Cotton.

That's why Lincoln refused to let the South go and instead started a war that killed 750,000 men and maimed over a million. He could have removed his troops from sovereign South Carolina and Florida soil and all of us live in peace, but the rise of the free trade South on his southern border guaranteed to end Northern economic dominance and Lincoln and the Republicans could not stand for that.

Mitcham writes that "The South reacted to the rise of the Republicans by becoming a one-party region" influenced by "'Fire-eaters' such as Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, William L. Yancey of Alabama, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, and John A. Quitman of Mississippi"³ who "joined the Democratic party and began urging separation as a way to put an end of Washington's political corruption and economic exploitation of the South."⁴

Fire-eaters had more and more influence in the South as Republicans made gains in the North. Mitcham writes that "The antebellum Washington establishment danced its last dance in 1860 in a troubled atmosphere. Everyone had a sense of foreboding."⁵

The Democratic party National Convention was held in Charleston, South Carolina in April 1860 with Stephen Douglas the frontrunner. Because of a platform dispute, "fifty-one Southern delegates walked out, led by William L. Yancey." They included all the delegates from the first seven states to secede within the year --- Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas --- as well as "three of Arkansas' four delegations and one delegate from Delaware."⁶

The convention deadlocked and Democrats tried again on June 18 at the Front Street Theater in Baltimore. Mitcham gives all the positions and details but the bottom line is that 110 Southern delegates walked out this time and a rump convention nominated Douglas.

Right after the walk-out in Baltimore, a second Democratic convention in Baltimore nominated John C. Breckinridge "for president and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon for vice president."⁷

The Republicans met in Chicago in mid-May 1860 with Seward "the leading contender, but his radicalism, open anti-Southern bigotry, and well-known lack of integrity worked against him." Lincoln was next "followed by Salmon P. Chase of Ohio and Edward Bates of Missouri."⁸

Mitcham writes:

Except for Lincoln, the GOP candidates had serious political baggage. The Republicans also knew they would have to carry the West to win the election, and Lincoln was popular there. Greeley dropped the non-entity Bates and backed "Honest Abe," who secured the nomination on the third ballot.⁹

The VP nominee was Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.

The Republican platform:

[F]eatured extremely high tariffs, no slavery in the territories, and subsidies for a transcontinental railroad that, of course, would go through the North, and that would exclude the South from any economic benefit of this massive, federal-supported, internal improvement.¹⁰

The centrist Constitutional Union Party that "had been formed from remnants of the defunct Know-Nothing and Whig Parties" was strict constructionist and nominated John Bell for president and Edward Everett as VP, also in Baltimore. Mitcham writes that "This ticket showed surprising strength, and it might have been better for the country if it had won, but it was a centrist party (like the Northern Democrats), and no centrist was going to win in 1860."¹¹

Lincoln needed 152 electoral votes to win and he got 180 carrying 18 states, though his popular vote total was only 1,865,908 or 39.8 percent.

Douglas got 1,380,202 or 29.5 percent but won only one state, Missouri. He had 12 electoral votes.

Breckinridge got 848,019 votes or 18.1 percent and carried 11 states with 72 electoral votes.

John Bell got 590,901 or 12.6 percent and carried three states with 39 electoral votes.

To sum up the popular vote, Lincoln got 1,865,908, but 2,819,122 voted against him.

Mitcham writes about the South:

They had had the presidency for forty-nine of the seventy-two years it existed (more than two-thirds of the time) and had played the most prominent role in writing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. They had supplied twenty-four of the thirty-six speakers of the House and twenty of the thirty-five Supreme Court justices, giving them a majority in the court always. Twenty-five of the thirty-six presidents pro tempore of the Senate had been Southerners.¹²

Because of the hate pouring out of the North so they could rally their votes to win, Southerners had had enough and were not about to be ruled by people who supported John Brown's terrorism and Hinton Helper's call for slaves to rise up and slit the throats of Southerners as they slept. These were the same people who were robbing the South blind with tariffs, bounties, subsidies and monopoly status for Northern businesses, so much so that Southerners were paying 85% of the country's taxes, yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North. Some were worried the federal government "might encourage or even instigate slave revolts."¹³

Southerners began setting dates for conventions to debate seceding from the Union and prominent in their speeches and articles was the Declaration of Independence and this phrase:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Mitcham quotes Dr. Don Livingston who said the South "did not secede to protect slavery from a national plan of emancipation because no national political party proposed emancipation."¹⁴

Mitcham is correct when he writes:

The states which mentioned slavery in their ordinances were reacting to the irresponsible attacks of the abolitionists and their embrace of terrorism and servile insurrection as legitimate means of gaining their objectives. The South feared (with considerable justification) that the Republican party was a revolutionary party that wanted to destroy the federation of states (as favored by Jefferson) in favor of a dominant central government funded by the South but controlled by the North.¹⁵

Here is radical Republican Wendell Phillips' entire statement about the Republican party being a party of the North pledged against the South. It came right after Lincoln's election:

No man has a right to be surprised at this state of things. It is just what we have attempted to bring about. It is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face, and calls itself national; but it is not national---it is sectional. The Republican party is a party of the North pledged against the South.¹⁶

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Nine

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Seven: Chapter IX, John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 103.

² Ibid.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 104.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 104-105.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 105.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 106.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 107.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 108.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 109.

¹⁴ Ibid.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 109.

¹⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 109-110.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Seven of Ten: Chapter IX, John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

Posted on December 8, 2021December 10, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Seven of Ten

Chapter IX
John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part-Seven--MAIN-PICT-2---Harper's Ferry 68K

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapter IX.

ON MONDAY, October 17, 1859 in Arlington, Virginia Colonel Robert E. Lee was "working on the financial accounts of his late father-in-law, George Washington Custis" who had died and left Lee executor of his "unprofitable and entangled mess" of an estate.

Of course that estate would later become our nation's most sacred burial ground, Arlington National Cemetery.

Lee was surprised to see Lieutenant James E. B. "Jeb" Stuart who was not clean shaven as he had been in the 1850s at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point when Lee was superintendent and Stuart was one of his favorite cadets.¹

Stuart's father had been a "lawyer who was famous locally as a bon vivant and heavy drinker" but Stuart was a "teetotaler and devout Episcopalian."

Stuart and his wife had each been given a slave but the "Stuarts did not believe in slavery and quickly freed both of the African Americans."²

Stuart fought the Cheyenne in Kansas and took a bullet in the chest but recovered. He also did peacekeeping between "John Brown and other abolitionists hooligans and the Missouri "Border Ruffians."³

Stuart and Lee were both on leave in 1859 and Stuart had a lot he wanted to do including trying to sell his invention, "Stuart's Lightning Horse Hitcher," to the War Department. It was a device to attach a saber "to a horseman's belt."

Instead, he was given orders to "go to Arlington to fetch Colonel Lee" because there was serious trouble at Harper's Ferry. On hearing, Lee left immediately for Washington without even putting on his uniform.⁴

President Buchanan and Secretary of War John Floyd said a man named Smith "and some 'Kansas "Free-Staters"' were inciting a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry" and had already "seized the government arsenal." State militiamen, a battalion of troops, detachment of Marines and ninety sailors were heading to Harper's Ferry and Lee was to take command and put the "revolt" down:

Lieutenant Stuart offered to serve as a volunteer aide, and Colonel Lee accepted. The two future Rebel generals left D.C. by a special train at five o'clock p.m.⁵

Smith was actually John Brown, a failure in life, who "'in ordinary times he would have been interesting mainly in a clinical sense'" according to Dr. Ludwell H. Johnson.⁶ Brown was "born in Connecticut in 1800" and descended from Puritans. Mitcham writes:

He became a fanatical abolitionist and recruited a small following. After securing funding in New England and Ohio, Brown went west, where he and his people took part in the turmoil that was "Bleeding Kansas," and murdered five men in cold blood, most hacked to death by swords in front of their screaming wives and children.⁷

Brown and his gang became robbers then "fled Kansas for New England, where he obtained funding for a terrorist attack in Virginia" which he planned to make into a multi-state "slave rebellion throughout the South" as they gathered followers.

Of course, Brown's New England funding violates the Constitution which is supposed to "insure domestic tranquility" and not murder and rape against fellow citizens.

Where is New England's plan for gradual, compensated emancipation, the way they "ended slavery" in New England? Ended slavery is in quotes because they didn't really end it there.

It is provable conclusively that most New Englanders sold their slaves back into slavery in the South just as they were to be freed, such as before the slave's 21st birthday. New Englanders just changed the slave's master from a Northern to a Southern one as noted by contemporaries such as Charles Dickens. See Black Bondage in the North by Edgar J. McManus (NY: Syracuse University Press, 1973), and Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (NY: Ballantine Books, 2005), and other works.

The hypocrisy of New England and the North and many historians today with their "woke" history defending New England and the North, is breathtaking.

New England brought virtually all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process. They built much, perhaps most, of the infrastructure of the Old North with profits from the slave trade, and they are directly responsible, with the British before them, for forcing the horrendous Middle Passage on poor Africans.

On the Middle Passage, Africans were chained to decks in filthy stinking slave ships with feces, vomit, dead people, all baked in a stifling hot oven with no air circulation in the bowels of slave ships for months on end. They had been sold into slavery in Africa by their fellow black Africans.

So rather than work on a plan of emancipation that would work --- and, as stated, New Englanders knew how to do it --- they supported a terrorist and murderer to murder fellow citizens in the South.

The North was already at war with the South. By seceding, Southerners were protecting themselves.

Mitcham writes that Brown tried to recruit Frederick Douglas and others but Douglas thought better.

Brown also approached Harriett Tubman who "consented to help Brown and recruited slaves in southern Ontario to join the invasion. (Brown liked her and called her 'General Tubman.')". But Tubman disappeared and did not participate.⁸

Brown miscalculated because the blacks around Harper's Ferry were not "badly treated compared to those on some of the cotton, tobacco, and rice plantations of the Deep South." They "were house servants and free people of color. They would not be enthusiastic about joining a dubious revolt."⁹

Brown going by "'Isaac Smith'" gathered up 22 men and his weapons "four miles north of Harper's Ferry" and on Sunday, October 16, at night, "he struck." They captured Colonel Lewis Washington's plantation but his slaves were not interested in joining Brown. That should have told Brown he was in trouble.¹⁰

Next, they seized the Harper's Ferry arsenal:

The first casualty occurred when Hayward Shepherd, a highly respected free man of color and a baggage master for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, realized what was happening. Rather than join the raiders, he tried to run away, so Brown's men shot him in the back. Shepherd died of his wounds. Also murdered was Thomas Boerly, an arsenal worker on his way to work.¹¹

The incredibly ignorant Brown captured a B&O train but let it go so naturally it spread the alarm that terrorists had captured Harper's Ferry:

Individual militia companies from nearby communities quickly assembled and joined the fray. Local black people refused to join the battle, but local whites did---against Brown.¹²

More civilians were killed "including the unarmed mayor, Fontaine Beckham, and George W. Turner, who had attended West Point with Robert E. Lee." Brown "and his men took refuge in the armory, which was soon surrounded by local farmers and shopkeepers" who quickly realized Brown didn't have much of a force. They "recaptured the arsenal and loosely surrounded the terrorists in the nearby fire engine house."¹³

At 10 p.m. Lee and Stuart got there and "walked across the dark railroad bridge to the armory where Colonel Lee decided to wait until daylight to attack. He sent Jeb Stuart to demand "Smith" surrender. Stuart entered the engine room, startled at what he saw. 'Why, aren't you old Osawatomie Brown of Kansas, whom I once had there as my prisoner?'"

Brown would not surrender so, "At first light on October 18, Stuart again advanced to the engine house double doors under a flag of truce. 'Are you ready to surrender, and trust to the mercy of the government?' he asked."¹⁴

Brown said no but wanted to negotiate safe passage out, promising to release his hostages later.

Stuart refused:

Several of the hostages and captured workmen cried out to Lee and Stuart, urging them not to use force or Brown would kill them. Above their voices came the roar of Colonel Washington: 'Never mind us! Fire!'
'The old Revolutionary blood does tell,' an admiring Robert E. Lee remarked. He was sitting on a horse, about fifteen yards from the firehouse.¹⁵

Stuart "stepped aside and dropped his hat---the signal for the attack" and "A dozen Marines rushed forward" but heavy hammers didn't work so they rammed the doors "with a heavy ladder" and that splintered them.

Marine Lieutenant Israel Greene rushed in with his men and two were shot dead immediately. Colonel Washington pointed out Brown to Greene and Greene rushed him "and swung his saber hard, intent on splitting Brown's skull" but Brown dodged then stood up and "the lieutenant gave him an under-thrust with his sword midway up his body, lifting him completely off the ground" but it hit Brown's belt buckle which broke the ceremonial sword Greene was carrying.¹⁶ Greene had not been told they were assaulting terrorists this day. He had thought they were attending a ceremonial function:

If he had been carrying his combat sword, Brown's splattered insides would have been all over the fire engine house's floor. There would never have been a John Brown trial....¹⁷

Mitcham points out that had there not been a John Brown trial, Southerners might not have realized the effectiveness of abolitionist propaganda and Northern hatred toward them thus might not have reacted to Lincoln's election by seceding.

Brown was badly wounded and other terrorists killed or they surrendered:

The marines hauled Brown and his surviving men outside to the grass and treated their wounds. In all, ten abolitionists were dead---including two of Brown's sons---three were immediately captured, four were captured later, and five escaped. Six civilians died and nine were wounded, as were two marines, one fatally. There were militia casualties as well, but their exact numbers are not known.¹⁸

The bloody hands of the New Englanders who financed Brown's terrorism includes hundreds of thousands more deaths because Brown's raid and the North's adoring attitude toward Brown helped greatly to bring on the War Between the States.

Those same hypocritical Yankees would have been better off developing a realistic plan to end slavery but that was never the North's desire. They didn't want slavery ended then all the slaves move to the North and be job competition.

They wanted to hurt the South. They were drooling for political control of the country so they could keep taxing the South and spending the South's money in the North. Southerners were paying 85% of the taxes yet over 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North.

All of this agitation and the war itself were about political power and money like all wars are. There was nothing whatsoever moral about the North's war against the South. Contemporaries like Charles Dickens knew it and stated it clearly.

Mitcham writes:

Following the raid, investigators examined the Kennedy Farm. They found Brown's correspondence with the Secret Six, a.k.a. the Secret Committee of Six---the abolitionists who funded John Brown. They also discovered maps of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The maps had notes pasted to the margins showing the black population. Counties with predominantly African-American populations had been highlighted. They also found the provisional Constitution for Brown's new government and 900 pikes.¹⁹

Edmund Ruffin "got hold of some of the pikes and sent one to the legislature of each Southern state with the inscription: 'Sample of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethern.'"²⁰

Brown's trial began October 27, 1859. Brown "was defended by a team of New England lawyers, led by Massachusetts abolitionist John Albion Andrew." On October 30 Brown was found guilty of "treason, conspiring with and telling slaves to escape and revolt, and first-degree murder." He was sentenced to death and hanged December 2, 1859.²¹

The North's worship of terrorist Brown woke the South up and shocked it:

Church bells rang in his honor, women wore black mourning clothes, men wore black armbands, politicians lauded him, businesses closed, and ladies cried on the day of his execution. Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Phillips praised him, as did Ralph Waldo Emerson and the rest of the New England literary elite.²²

Emerson said Massachusetts prison inmates "were superior human beings to the leaders of the South" and Thoreau compared Brown to Jesus Christ. Brown's lawyer, John Albion Andrew, "was elected governor of Massachusetts."²³

This "proved to the South that the Republican party was not distancing itself from its extremist members but was embracing them" and apparently "endorsing anti-Southern violence and servile insurrection."

The Secret Six cowards who when safe in Massachusetts with their compound interest on their money from the slave trade safely in their pockets mostly ran rather than face their crimes:

The Secret Six who funded Brown were Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Steams. Brown's captured documents and subsequent investigations of him revealed that they had financed the Harper's Ferry Raid, perhaps to the tune of $25,000 ($679,000 in 2017 dollars).²⁴

Frederick Douglas fled to Canada since he knew about the planned attack.

Higginson stayed in Massachusetts where he knew he would not be prosecuted.

The "Republican governors of Iowa and Ohio refused to extradite" the seven of Brown's raiders who escaped. This proved to Southerners that the North was not going to obey the law. To these Northerners, Southerners were already the enemy, and "To many [in the South], it was a harbinger of what to expect under Republican rule."²⁵

South Carolina, Georgia and Texas mentioned this Northern harboring of terrorists in their declarations of causes for seceding.

The South had become certain it could not depend on a Republican administration to obey the law and protect them from those who wanted the slaves to rise up and slaughter them in the night as had happened in Haiti. Thomas Jonathan Jackson of VMI and others began thinking seriously about secession and "Many Southern moderates started to believe the 'fire-eaters' had been right all along."²⁶

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eight of Ten

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Six: Chapter VII, Agitation and Compromise; Chapter VIII, The Chasm Grows)

NOTES:

(Scroll down for:
It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book)

¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 91.

² Ibid.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 91-92.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 92.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 92-93.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 93.

⁸ Ibid.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 94.

¹⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 94-95.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 95.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 96.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 97.

¹⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 97-98.

¹⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 98.

²⁰ Ibid.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 99.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 100.

²⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 100-101.

²⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 101.

It Wasn't About Slavery,
Actual Citation from Book

It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. – A Comprehensive Review by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Six of Ten: Chapter VII, Agitation and Compromise; Chapter VIII, The Chasm Grows

Posted on December 2, 2021December 3, 2021 by Gene Kizer, Jr. | 2 Comments

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Six of Ten

Chapter VII
Agitation and Compromise

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

At the end of this article, beneath the notes I have cited, is "Actual Citation from Book," Mitcham's endnotes for Chapters VII and VIII.

MITCHAM OPENS CHAPTER VII, Agitation and Compromise, with "William Lloyd Garrison was the son of an alcoholic sailor who abandoned his family. He grew into a staunch Baptist and a vitriolic, harsh, hateful man---an odd combination for a Christian."

Garrison denounced the Constitution as "A covenant with death and an agreement with Hell." The fanatical Garrison to his credit wanted the North to secede from the United States so he did not have to be associated with slavery. Georgia's Robert Toombs said Garrison, while an extremist, was a man of conviction who believed what he preached unlike so many for whom anti-slavery was a political position, not a moral one.

Most abolitionists were not pro-black but were anti-black. They were anti-slavery because they did not want blacks anywhere near them, especially in the West.

Garrison, with Arthur Tappen, organized the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Garrison had published The Liberator since 1831.

His heart might have been in the right place --- to him, at any rate --- but his radical tactics did not hasten the end of slavery. They entrenched it. Mitcham writes:

The abolitionists' extreme rhetoric had a polarizing effect, in both North and South, which developed with remarkable speed. Virginia---which narrowly defeated a law abolishing slavery within the state only three years before---enacted a law in 1836 making it a crime to advocate abolition. The Georgia legislature offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who would kidnap Garrison and bring him south to stand trial.¹

Mitcham points out that earlier generations of Southerners were like Thomas Jefferson who "denounced slavery in 1776" and thereafter but like so many others was stuck in the system that even Lincoln acknowledged would never be started up today (during Lincoln's lifetime). Lincoln also said if he had been born into a slave society, he would not know how to end it either.

Before virtue-signaling radical abolitionists, who never once had a realistic plan to end slavery, Southerners themselves wanted to end it. George Washington said "'It is among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery may be abolished by law.'"

James Madison, Father of the Constitution, was a slaveholder but admitted it was wrong.

The abolitionist demand for immediate, uncompensated emancipation was absurd. It would destroy the economies of the South and North because the Northern economy was based on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton.

It would also create a dangerous social problem because how would former slaves live? Already it was against the law in several Northern and Western states for free blacks to live there or even visit. To survive they had to steal or commit other crimes.

Slavery could have ended with a plan that dealt with all those problems but there was no will for that, especially in the racist North where freed slaves would go and be job competition. The demand for such a thing was ridiculous and I suspect that many virtue-signaling abolitionists knew it was ridiculous but just didn't care.

Rev. Nehemiah Adams of Massachusetts acknowledged the danger of "the propaganda of abolitionist societies." They encouraged slave insurrections which were murderous bloody affairs such as happened in Haiti. Adams writes "'husbands and fathers at the South considered that whatever might be true of slavery as a system, self-defence, the protection of their households against a servile insurrection, was their first duty. Who can wonder that they broke into the post-office, and seized and burned abolition papers; indeed, no excesses are surprising, in view of the perils to which they saw themselves exposed.'"

Southerners attacked Northerners for "'wage slavery'" and Mitcham writes that "In 1850, near the end of his life, Daniel Webster lamented that the debates leading up to the Compromise of 1850 would have led to the South gradually eliminating slavery had it not been for the frenzy stirred up by the abolitionists."²

The virtue-signalers, then and today, might feel good about themselves but their hands are usually dripping with blood.

Mitcham covers in detail every election, politician, political party, tariff, issue, date, percentage, and their significance in the entire antebellum period and he does it with a clarity and smoothness that makes it a pleasure to read.

The balance of power between North and South was huge because Northern states wanted high protective tariffs and large expenditures for public works in their states, while Southern states wanted low tariffs and free trade, the opposite of what the North wanted.

Mitcham writes:

A major factor in the Whigs' defeat was the Tariff of 1842, which they managed to push through Congress and persuaded a reluctant President Tyler to sign. Called the Black Tariff, it raised the rates from 20 percent to nearly 40 percent. The tariff hamstrung the economy so severely that total tariff revenues declined. As a result, the Whigs lost both branches of Congress in 1844.³

The U.S. soon annexed Texas then war broke out with Mexico (1846-48) "in which the United States Army pushed to the Pacific and captured California and the modern Southwest."

Rep. David Wilmot of Pennsylvania on August 8, 1846 introduced his famous "Wilmot Proviso" prohibiting slavery in the "territory annexed from Mexico." Like so many anti-slavery virtue-signalers who were definitely not pro-black, Wilmot admitted his racist motivation was to keep blacks out of the West.

The entire issue of slavery in the West was political posturing. Slavery was not going to work in the West ever. Huge territories at one time or another were open for slavery yet there were never over a handful of slaves anywhere.

Mitcham writes:

Senator James G. Blaine of Maine recalled: 'The whole controversy over the Territories, as remarked by a witty representative from the South, related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place.'⁴

Mitcham believes Southerners should not have fought the battle over slavery in the West since slavery could not work there.

However, it was a huge point of honor because Southerners, as Mitcham points out, had largely conquered the western territory. More Southern blood and treasure than Northern was used in the Mexican War so to then be told they could not take slaves there, even if a Southerner didn't own any slaves, was too much of an insult.⁵

The election of 1848 "was close and heated." The racist Wilmot had more to say. Mitcham writes:

The Southern slaveholders were called the 'Lords of the Lash,' while their opponents (northern textile manufacturers) were dubbed the 'Lords of the Loom.' Many of the Free Soil Democrats wanted to keep the west open for free white laborers. Congressman Wilmot told one rally: 'The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent. Let us keep what remains for ourselves . . . for free white labor.'⁶

There's gold in them there hills!

In 1848, gold was discovered in California and its population increased dramatically. That led to California wanting to be admitted as a state, which meant the South would be forever outvoted in the U.S. Senate.

On March 4, 1850, in his last speech when he was so ill that James Mason of Virginia had to read it, John C. Calhoun "warned that an overbearing North was dissolving the ties that held the states together. The United States, he declared, could not hold together by cries of 'Union, Union, glorious Union,' any more than a physician could save a seriously ill patient by crying 'Health, health, glorious health.'"⁷

Mitcham paraphrases Calhoun who stated that "compromise with Yankees was useless. The North would use it as a stepping-stone to greater concessions later."

The Northern majority had already begun to construe the Constitution to increase federal power and diminish states' rights, to minimize Southern influence at the national level. To avert disunion, the North had to stop its attacks and agree to a constitutional amendment to protect the Southern minority. It if would not or could not, the South should leave in peace.⁸

Mitcham writes that Calhoun would have gone down as one of our greatest political thinkers behind only Jefferson but for his "full-throated embrace of slavery."

Even so, John F. Kennedy ranked him among the top five senators ever. Had the South listened to Calhoun, the Civil War would have been fought a decade earlier, when the South was stronger. During the next ten years, due to immigration and the development of the West, the North grew stronger while Southern strength lagged. The South had a much better chance of winning in 1850 than it did in 1861, and even then, it was a near-run thing.⁹

Northerners knew they had the majority and were anxious to force their will on the rest of the country. Mitcham writes:

Webster made his final speech three days after Calhoun. He endorsed Clay's compromise. The anti-slavery Whigs, led by Senator William H. Seward of New York, were disappointed. Seward, meanwhile, became metaphysical. He spoke of obeying a 'higher law' than the Constitution---the kind of argument that could justify anything.¹⁰

Seward's "higher law" comment was warned about many times in the secession debate in the South in the year leading up to Southern states seceding. It is a perfect example of why Southerners did not trust Northerners to obey the Constitution, so how can you be in a country with them?

Sounds like woke liberals today who despise our history and the Constitution. Many are from the same blue state area that Seward was in the 1860s.

Seward also had another inflammatory comment that Southerners heard loud and clear in 1858 when he said an "irrepressible conflict" was coming between North and South.

In June 1851 Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was "world class propaganda" in the form of fiction, came out. Tom's "cruel master, Simon Legree, who is a Northerner by birth, tried to break him of his religious faith. When he fails, Legree beats Tom to death out of frustration."¹¹

Soon after, in 1856, pompous Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts made an insulting speech about slavery and Sen. Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler was related to Rep. Preston Brooks, also of South Carolina.

Brooks, unable to challenge Sumner to a duel because that was something you did with gentlemen, and Sumner was considered a dog, entered the Senate chambers and beat Sumner unconscious with a gutta percha cane while Brooks' friend, Rep. Laurence M. Keitt of South Carolina, kept Sumner's friends at bay.

Brooks was the perfect example of the hostilities of North and South. He was hated in the North but adored in the South and his cane, which had shattered into pieces in the attack on Sumner, became valuable as each piece was begged for as a sacred relic.

Brooks was sent a replacement cane on which were the words: Hit Him Again.

I was once commander of the Preston Brooks Camp, SCV, out of Columbia, South Carolina and our excellent newsletter, which I edited and published, was entitled, of course, "Hit Him Again!"

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

Mitcham includes so many fascinating stories in this chapter it is a delight to read, though some are quite sad.

Franklin Pierce won the election of 1852. Mitcham writes:

History often turns on a dime. One such turn occurred on January 6, 1853. The President-elect and his wife were traveling from Boston when their train derailed. It rolled down an embankment near Andover, Massachusetts. Pierce and his wife survived, but their only living child, Benjamin or "Benny," was crushed to death and nearly decapitated. Pierce could not prevent his wife from seeing the body. Afterward, both Pierces suffered from depression, Jane greatly. She wondered if Benny's death was God's punishment for her husband's seeking high office. A cloud came over their marriage and Pierce's incoming administration. His son's death and Jane's constant depression continued to trouble Franklin and materially contributed to the failure of his administration. Pierce was already a heavy drinker; after, he drank even more. It would eventually kill him. Franklin Pierce die of cirrhosis of the liver in 1869. His wife died of depression six years before him.¹²

The fight over the route of the transcontinental railroad began with Jefferson Davis, Pierce's secretary of war, "ordering two routes surveyed, one north and one south." The Southern route had land and right-of-ways settled but the Northern faced all kind of problems including unorganized territory, Indians and mountains.

Stephen A. Douglas "pressured President Pierce into supporting" the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to organize them as territories with "popular sovereignty" in place with respect to slavery. This repealed the Missouri Compromise, which forbid slavery north of parallel 36^o30' (except for Missouri).

Douglas did this because he needed Southern support for his bill to use the northern route for the transcontinental railroad despite the enormous problems when compared to the Southern route.

In a statement that proves that most anti-slavery in the North was political and not moral or pro-black, Mitcham writes:

Horace Greeley, an abolitionist leader and the editor of the New York Tribune, later commented that the [Kansas-Nebraska] act created more abolitionists in two months than William Lloyd Garrison produced in twenty years." (Bold emphasis added.)

It produced more abolitionists because so much money and political power was involved with having a northern route for the transcontinental railroad going through Chicago that suddenly Northerners, who had not given a damn about slavery before, became abolitionists to get that money and power.

That kind of greed for money was the cause of the War Between the States.

When Southerners left the Union seeking self-government as promised in the Declaration of Independence with "Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...", it meant the South would rise to dominance in North America with control of King Cotton and European trade and military alliances, and that is something Lincoln and the North could not tolerate. It had nothing to do with Northern morality or desire to end slavery but rather with Northern immorality, hypocrisy, and lust for other people's money.

As Lincoln said, it's about Union, the source of Northern wealth and power, and if he could free no slaves, or one slave, or all of them to preserve the Union, he was going to do it.

In 1854, "The American or 'Know Nothing' Party, which was formed out of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant elements, went from zero to fifty-one seats." They allied with "the anti-slavery Opposition Party and a few smaller parties, which held a handful of seats."

The Whig Party collapsed and:

Most of the former Northern Whigs joined the Republicans, which became the first genuinely regional party in the United States. It was a big government, big business party from the beginning. It advanced the ideas of Hamilton, who believed these policies would bring national growth through a powerful centralized government and government intervention through government regulation, subsidies, and high tariff policies, rather than through free-market solutions.¹³

George Washington warned that sectional parties would destroy the country but abolitionist Republican Wendell Phillips bragged that the Republican Party was sectional: the party of the North pledged against the South.

Of course Washington was right. This was the "tyranny of the majority" that the Founding Fathers warned about. Alexis de Tocqueville warned about it too. Northerners were determined to rule with their majority and pass legislation that robbed the rest of the country and sent money from the South into the North.

The "political winds were shifting, the political chameleons naturally changed with them."

Abraham Lincoln, for example, became less moderate. As an attorney, he had represented a slave owner and argued to have his client's slaves, who had fled to Illinois, returned to him. (He lost the case.). He had been silent on the issue of slavery, he had supported the Black Codes, and he was a big believer in African colonization. In 1854, he was an extraordinarily successful and wealthy corporate attorney, but his political career was at a low point. He demonized the South and said they were likely to expand slavery to the West. This claim was absurd and Lincoln had to know it (there were only eighty-fives slaves in Kansas at its peak), but being the political opportunist that he was, he joined the chorus anyway.¹⁴

The national atmosphere was tense and emotional. The "Border War" began. "In May 1856, 700 pro-Southern men descended on Lawrence, Kansas, and pillaged the place. Shortly thereafter, fanatical abolitionist John Brown retaliated by torturing and murdering five Southerners. They were not slave holders and had not taken part in the Lawrence Raid."¹⁵

That summer began barn and house burnings, "ambushes, and bushwhacking. At least 200 people were killed." This would continue until 1865.¹⁶

In the election of 1856, "The Republican platform called for high tariffs and for slavery to be excluded from the territories. This would keep them from the "troublesome presence of free Negroes," as Lincoln said.¹⁷

Mitcham writes that there were no moral considerations at all among Northerners: "The motives were purely to protect the economic and political interests of the North and West at the expense of the South."¹⁸ Their strategy was "to spread alarm in the North by proclaiming that 'slave Power' or the 'slaveocracy' intended to gain control of the government."

First, it would (somehow) conquer the territories; then it would spread slavery to the North. It would make every state a slave state. This was absurd, of course, but hysteria can work.¹⁹

Dred Scott, a slave who had been taken by his master into Illinois and the Wisconsin territory, sued for his freedom "but on March 6, 1857, [Chief Justice Roger] Taney and his colleagues ruled in favor of the slave owner. Speaking for the majority, Judge Taney declared that because he was black, Scott was not a person under the U.S. Constitution; he was the property of his owner, and property could not be taken from anyone without due process of law."²⁰

Taney also ruled that "the Missouri Compromise's prohibition on slavery was unconstitutional. Congress had no right to exclude slavery from any of the territories".²¹

Again, Abraham Lincoln remarked "that the South would not embrace slavery today (i.e., 1858) if it were not already economically entrenched there."²²

The 1858 campaign in Illinois for the Senate included the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates, seven of them:

Douglas attacked Lincoln's racist credentials. He accused Lincoln of thinking the black was his equal and hence his brother. Douglas himself pointedly remarked that the African American was not his equal and certainly not his brother.
Lincoln responded that he was not and never had been in favor of the equality of the races. He believed that so long as the two races lived together, there must be one superior race and one inferior race. 'I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race,' he declared.²³

Douglas won. He was appointed Illinois senator by the legislature despite Lincoln winning the popular vote. Senators were not elected directly by voters in those days. They were appointed by state legislatures until the Seventeenth Amendment changed all that in 1913.

But "As a result of the election, Lincoln rose to national prominence. Also, slavery became a major issue."²⁴

Next Week:

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Seven of Ten

(Click Here to go to previous week: Part Five: Chapter VI, Cultural Differences)

NOTES:

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¹ Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 62.

² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 63-64.

³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 66.

⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 68.

⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 67.

⁶ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 69.

⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 70.

⁸ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 70-71.

⁹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 71.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 73.

¹² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 79.

¹³ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 82.

¹⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 83.

¹⁵ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 84.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 86.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Ibid.

²⁰ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 87-88.

²¹ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 88.

²² Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 89.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 90.

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV The Costs and Results of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

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A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Fourteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Fifteen, Conclusion

Chapter XV

The Costs and Results of the War

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A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part Two

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Twelve

Chapter XIII Over the Edge Part Two

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Thirteen

Chapter XIV Tyranny and Emancipation Part One

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A Comprehensive Review of

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Part Eleven

Chapter XIII Over the Edge Part One

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Actual Citation from Book

A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Ten

Chapter XII Lincoln and His Agenda

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

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It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eleven

Chapter XIII Over the Edge

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A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Nine

Chapter XI The Real Cause of the War

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

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A Comprehensive Review of

It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr.

Part Eight

Chapter X The Election of 1860

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Next Week:

Chapter XV
The Costs and Results of the War

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Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

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Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part Two

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It Wasn't About Slavery,
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Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part Two

Chapter XIV
Tyranny and Emancipation
Part One

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Chapter XIII
Over the Edge
Part One

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It Wasn't About Slavery,
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Chapter XII
Lincoln and His Agenda

Chapter XIII
Over the Edge

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Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

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Chapter X
The Election of 1860

Chapter XI
The Real Cause of the War

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Chapter IX
John Brown, Terrorist and Lightning Rod

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Chapter VII
Agitation and Compromise

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

Chapter VIII
The Chasm Grows

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