The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Two: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Four

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Two

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Two of Four

(Continued from Part One)

THAT IS WHY ABRAHAM LINCOLN said over and over and over that the war was being fought for the preservation of the Union, not to end slavery.

Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley August 22, 1862, sixteen months into the war, and again made that clear. The italics are Lincoln’s:

. . . My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do thatWhat I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help the Union.¹

To Southerners, the Union had become a violent, lawless threat to their safety. Northerners financed John Brown and sent him and his murderers into the peaceful communities of the South to rape, destroy and kill then hailed him as a hero when brought to justice.

The Republican Party printed Hinton Helper’s The Impending Crisis of the South as a campaign document, which called for the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night. Republicans printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them coast to coast.

George Washington warned that sectional political parties would destroy the country but Wendell Phillips proudly stated that the Republican Party

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.²

Northerners began realizing how critical the Union was to their well being. Editorials like “The Value of the Union” began appearing all over the North. New York City threatened to secede from New York State over its enormous trade with the South.

Horace Greeley acknowledged the right of secession and self-government in a long emotional editorial entitled “The Right of Secession”³ in which he quoted the Declaration of Independence stating “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government.”

That was the most widely quoted phrase in the South in the secession debate that took place in the year prior to states seceding.

Greeley went on: “We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood” and

if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.

Greeley says “we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred” and we should “Let Them Go!” but when this sniveling hypocrite realized Southern secession would affect his money, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Northerners were pouring drool like a pack of starving wolves before tearing a lamb to bits to win the election of 1860, control the Federal Government and rule the country with their larger population.⁴

That is exactly the “tyranny of the majority” the Founding Fathers warned about, but as South Carolina stated:

[W]hen vast sectional interests are to be subserved, involving the appropriation of countless millions of money, it has not been the usual experience of mankind, that words on parchments can arrest power.⁵

So many of the politicized “historians” in academia and the idiot news media today proclaim that slavery was the cause of the war but one can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

All Northern documents before and up to two years into the war after hundreds of thousands of men had been killed strongly supported slavery.

Six slave states, or 25% of Union states, fought for the North the entire war.⁶ That, alone, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

If the North was fighting a war to end slavery, they would have first ended it in their own country by passing a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

Instead, they passed the Corwin Amendment, which would have left black people in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed.

Lincoln strongly supported the Corwin Amendment and lobbied the governors to pass it in their states. He said in his first inaugural, “holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” Five Union states ratified the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.⁷

The Northern War Aims Resolution passed in July, 1861, three months into the war stated:

. . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . . ⁸ (Bold emphasis added)

Even the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued September 22, 1862, just weeks before the actual Emancipation Proclamation, states in the first paragraph:

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the States,and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be, suspended or disturbed. (Bold emphasis added)⁹

There are legion statements by Abraham Lincoln out there supporting slavery such as this one in his first inaugural made before he stated his support for the Corwin Amendment:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

The proof is overwhelming and conclusive that the North did not go to war to free the slaves.

The North went to war because its economy was dependent on Southern cotton and without it they were headed for economic annihilation.

In 1860, the South was “producing 66 percent of the world’s cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than half [over 60% alone] of all U.S. exports.”¹⁰

The American cotton industry before the war was awesome to behold. The New York Tribune agriculture editor, Solon Robinson, in 1848, wrote about “‘acres of cotton bales'” on the docks in New Orleans:

Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water; and as the boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine sticking up out of the centre.¹¹

King Cotton was “the backbone of the American economy” and “the North ruled the kingdom.”¹² Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams  of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves—in the South.¹³

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “‘Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.'”¹⁴

Without the South, the North was in serious economic trouble. Southerners had made protective tariffs unconstitutional. They had a 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States’ Rights nation.

At the same time, economically ignorant Northerners passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 37 to 50% higher. It threatened to reroute the Northern shipping industry into the South overnight because nobody was going to ship into the North and pay a 47 to 60% tariff when they could ship into the South and pay 10%.

The Morrill Tariff meant that Northern ship captains would have a hard time getting cargoes in the North but in the South they would be guaranteed all the cargoes they could handle of cotton and other valuable Southern commodities to transport around the world.

Those same ship captains would then be able to bring cargoes back from around the world and into warm water Southern ports where they would be put on boats in the Mississippi, and on railroads, and shipped to all parts of the Union.

Northerners could have passed a tariff competitive with the South but they didn’t.

Because of Northern greed and economic stupidity, the Morrill Tariff threatened to give Southerners a gift of much of the commerce of the entire country.

The Northern manufacturing industry faced obliteration too because over half of its market was its captive market in the South. Independent Southerners would not be buying overpriced goods from people who sent murderers into their country to kill them.

Southerners had for decades wanted free trade with Europe so they could get out from under extortionate Northern prices for inferior goods jacked up by Yankee tariffs and monopolies.

South Carolina almost seceded thirty-three years earlier over the Tariff of Abominations, and should have.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Three

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Three of Four

NOTES:

¹ Letter, A. Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) V:388.

² Wendell Phillips quotation in Albert Taylor Bledsoe Is Davis A Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to The War of 1861? (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866); reprint, (North Charleston, SC: Fletcher and Fletcher Publishing, 1995), 250. Lincoln, whom over 60% of the country voted against, “was the first and only sectional president in American history.” See Donald W. Livingston, “The Secession Tradition in America” in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 27.

³ “The Right of Secession,” The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

⁴ Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that if any one state got control of the federal government it would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power and that is exactly what  happened except it wasn’t one state but all the close-knit Northern states with their commercial-industrial interests.

⁵ “Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States,” adopted 24 December 1860 by the South Carolina Secession Convention, Charleston, S.C., in John Amasa May and Joan Reynolds Faunt, South Carolina Secedes (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1960), 82-92.

⁶ The Union slave states were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation exempted all six Union slave states as well as Confederate territory already under Union control.

⁷ Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment are “Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Illinois.” See Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 127.

⁸ The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John. J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: The Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861 and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed April 19, 2022.

⁹ The next paragraph of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation expressed another of Lincoln’s beliefs, that black people should be shipped back to Africa or into a place they could survive: “. . . the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued.” See “Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22,1862” at https://www.archives.gov/

exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/transcript_

preliminary_emancipation.html, accessed 4-12-22.

¹⁰ Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

¹⁴ Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 37.