Letters To The Editor

Originally published June 2016 · pp. 3–4

Civil War Monuments Located Double-Teamed Concerning In Georgia Under Threat Expansion Of Slavery Letter TO THE EDITOR: It is sad to learn in the news article by Messrs. Hagler and Davis that Southern Memorials to the Civil War soldiers in the South are being dis-respected. Perhaps concerned folks in the South could re-dedicate the old Memorials to the Confederate and Union soldiers and sailors who lived in the monuments’ neighborhoods. According to the National Tribune published in October 1895 there were 54,137 white troops and 63,571 black troops in the Union Army from eight of the 11 seceded states between 1861 and 1865. These figures do not include any Union soldiers from Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina. (West Virginia is also excluded.) The Civil War really did pit brother against brother. Perhaps now is the time for the South to acknowledge its many Unionist sons who bore arms in the struggle, and re­dedicate the memorials to all the sons of the South regardless of politics and race. Peter B. Whelpton South Sutton, N.H.

Genological Journey Thanks TO MIKE KENT: I am a twenty year plus reenactor with the 150th New York State Volunteer Infantry Regiment who always felt a deep connection with the Civil War but never really understood why. Now that I think I do, I want to thank you for your outstanding column in the May 2016 Civil War News, and also to empathize with you on the task you undertook since I did the same thing a couple years ago. My mother’s family roots are deeply embedded in New England so my journey took a Union perspective. Ancestry.com and Fold3.com provided me with seven great great uncles and one of their sons who served in three Vermont and four Massachusetts regiments. The four from Massachusetts were brothers. Three of them (two from Vermont and one from Massachusetts) were captured and paroled and one was wounded at Gettysburg. Their various engagements and battles included Bayou des Allemands and Port Hudson in Louisiana, Antietam, Gettysburg, Winchester, Cedar Creek, Savage Station, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, Resaca, and

REINFORCEMENTS MAKE ALL THE DIFFERENCE!!!

numerous others. The journey to find them was well worth the effort. I have a much deeper appreciation for their courage and fortitude and am proud to be their descendant. I know exactly how you feel! I hope that your fine column inspires many others to take the trip! Rick Schisler KENT’S RESPONSE TO RICK: Thanks for the kind words! This is only the second article I have ever published and I was amazed to see that someone read it and cared enough to actually send me an e-mail! It was an exciting journey as you know and answered many lingering questions I had about my ancestry. From your email, it appears that one of your relatives may have been eyeball to eyeball with one of my relatives at Gettysburg! My great-great-great uncle John Gilbert Harris Kent fought with Company E, 22nd Georgia Infantry (also known as the Wool Hat Boys) at Gettysburg, was captured on July 3 and sent to the prison at Point Lookout, MD and was exchanged on February 18, 1865. Isn’t it amazing that this journey we both undertook connected our relatives 153 years ago in the small town of Gettysburg where they both witnessed one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War? It was great to hear from you and I hope the article will inspire others to take he same journey you and I took. Mike Kent Monroe, Ga.

TO THE EDITOR: I’m looking forward to the Gettysburg issue. You folks are doing a bang-up job with the paper. Quality of print and content are much improved. I even read some articles in the most recent issue, something I hadn’t been doing in a while. Glad you decided to stick with the newspaper format. You are clearly breathing new life into this publication and it is nice to see. Bedford Hayes Standish, Maine

TO THE EDITOR: I must say I got double-teamed pretty badly in the May issue by Mr. Bonekemper and Mr. Middlebrooks concerning the expansion of slavery. The great bone of contention between the North and the South for forty years before the war was the issue of slavery in the territories. It is therefore not unreasonable that the Confederate Constitution would have left no more doubts in the future about the Confederate States’ “rights in the territories” by spelling it out in plain English in the new Constitution. The Southern economy was built primarily on staple crop agriculture. Before the advent of mechanized agriculture (which would have ended the practice) African slavery was the primary labor system for this type of agriculture. As the North was bursting at the seams to expand its economy from “sea to shining sea,” it should come as no shock to consider that the South was likewise interested in growth. Such growth, however, had to be in regions that would support the great Southern staples of tobacco, cotton, rice, and sugar cane. Expansion would be for the sake of spreading this type of agriculture, not for the sake of spreading slavery – a rather fine point, admittedly. If the South had its eyes on Cuba or Central America as having potential for expanding its economy, would preparing for that hypothetical potential in the Confederate Constitution be any more worthy of moral condemnation than the North’s actual extermination of the plains Indians by Sherman, Sheridan, and Custer to make way for the continental railroads and expansion to the Pacific? Or for that matter - in later years - of the Boston-based United Fruit Company’s creation of plantations that exploited the “Banana Republics” of Central America? As for the Confederate invasion of the southwest during the war, it was not to “expand slavery.” The Confederacy was fighting for its self-preservation, and with her ports blockaded and Mr. Lincoln’s armies marching across the land engaging in total war against her, the Confederacy was starving for resources. The objective of the failed Confederate campaign had been to gain control of the Colorado silver mines – which in that war would have been just as much a legitimate military objective as the Union army’s attack on the Confederate salt mines in southwest Virginia – and certainly far more legitimate than the wanton destruction of homes and cities and farms perpetrated by the likes of Sherman, Sheridan, Custer, Pope and Hunter. As for the Ordinances of Secession being all about slavery and white supremacy, I think it is fair to say that slavery and white supremacy were present everywhere in varying degree when the thirteen sovereign States entered into the compact known as the Union. Until the Missouri debates in 1820, the two sections – the commercial North and the agricultural South - got along pretty well, for they complimented each other economically, and they had recently shared in the War for Independence. If I remember correctly, the administrations of Madison and Monroe were known as “The Era of Good Feelings.” But then the Missouri question arose. Washington had warned against the dangers of agitating sectionalism in his Farewell Address, and in 1820 Jefferson heard the “fire bell in the night.” He said the Missouri debates were the knell of the Union, and he was right. The Northerners had practiced slavery until Adam Smith showed them that free labor was more economical. A slaveholder had to take care of his people from the cradle to the grave, whether the plantation made ends meet or not, but an employer of free labor was under no such constraints. If his business went broke, all he had to do was shut the door to the concern, “emancipate” his employees, and let them all go beg, borrow, steal, or starve - or live off of the taxpayers of the welfare state if one happened to be around by then. So the Northerners, seeing this path to greater prosperity, became thoroughgoing Abolitionists and abolished slavery in their respective States – but, as Tocqueville observed, not before they sold their slaves South, thus ridding themselves both of an undesirable labor system and an undesirable population at the same time. But this did not extend to the African slave trade. When Lincoln was elected, New York, Boston, and Portland were the three largest African Slave-trading ports in the world. Nor did the North give up the manufacture of slave-picked cotton, or of the manufacture of rum from slave-harvested sugar cane for trade on the African coast, or of the manufacture of shackles and chains and slave ships. The foundation of wealth today in New York and New England runs deep into slavery. With the coming of the steam engine and the Industrial Revolution, the North industrialized and – with her growing sectional majorities - began sucking the wealth out of the South with her protectionist tariffs, and agitating for a powerful centralized government that would support her industrial and financial ambitions. The South, which insisted on maintaining the limited, federative nature of the Union, was their political stumbling block. Therefore, in order to drum up Northern votes against the federative South and turn them to the party of consolidationists in the North, the issue of slavery in the territories was agitated. “Free soil for free men” was the cry of the newly-formed Republican Party – which wanted to keep “slavery”

(blacks) out of the territories and leave them “free” for the white man. The Lincoln-Douglas debates offer some interesting reading on these points But the abolitionist agitation bred fanatics in the land of the Puritans, and soon fiery tracts – such as Garrison’s “Liberator” – were being published and found their way into the South. Soon after, Nat Turner (a religious visionary) and his band slaughtered fifty or so people – mostly women and little girls – in Virginia. Then John Brown - with organized backing from the North - tried to effect the same results on a grander scale. Religious fanatics who do things like that today are called “terrorists,” but the people of the North at that time called him a martyred saint. So is it any wonder that the Southern States wanted to sever their political relationship with people who would love nothing better than to see them with their throats cut in the middle of the night? What sort of Union is that? So at the election of Lincoln, the South saw the handwriting on the wall. The seven “Cotton States” each called conventions, and each respectively seceded from the Union by the same means they had acceded to it. Mr. Middlebrooks calls it “treason” – which is what Lord North and King George III called it, also. I guess it depends upon from whom one is seceding. Evidently seceding from Old England is patriotism whereas seceding from New England is treason. After the war there was a clamor for trying Jefferson Davis for treason, but those in the legal know put a stop to the idea, knowing he would be acquitted for the record, embarrassing the U.S. Government and leaving “Court Historians,” canting demagogues, and the spurious “propaganda of the victorious” with no leg to stand on. Mr. Middlebrooks says the North fought and sacrificed to preserve the Union for altruistic reasons. Waging a war to drive eleven States back into a Union that they had no longer a desire to be in, and killing a half-million American boys to do it, would seem to refute his assertion. Wars are not fought over ideals. If one digs deeply enough, one will always find that they are fought for survival or for the control of resources, which often amount to the same thing. Wars fought for the control of one’s own resources are wars of independence. Wars fought over the control of the resources of others are wars of conquest. The South was fighting to defend herself from invasion, conquest, and coerced political allegiance. The North may cloak its interests in robes of morality, but the Confederacy was the American Empire’s first conquest. H. V. Traywick, Jr. Richmond, Virginia

In Response To Traywick’s Letter Southerners Already Paid Reparations TO THE EDITOR: The Supreme Court, in 1869 Texas v. White, held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States. However, that can be argued as simply being just an interpretation and of much the same Constitution as had existed in 1860. When I read letters like Mr. Traywick’s, my first thought is to wonder whether or not these letter writers believe that secession is legal today. If they do not believe it is legal today, what written change (not necessarily interpretive decision) in the Constitution since 1860 would they point to outlines this illegality? Nonetheless, I would point to the actions and words taken by two southern-born Presidents: Washington and the Whiskey Rebellion and Jackson during the Nullification Crisis. Jackson, “The Constitution … forms a government not a league … To say that any State may at pleasure secede from the Union is to say that the United States is not a nation.” It’s quite a stretch to believe that the Founding Fathers would create an anarchic nation that was little more than a loose collection of states. James Madison, “What can be more preposterous than to say that the States as united, are in no respect or degree, a Nation, which implies sovereignty; altho’ acknowledged to be such by all other Nations & Sovereigns, and maintaining with them, all the international relations, of war & peace, treaties, commerce…” As Edward Everett stated, “the states, all their officeholders, took an oath to the Constitution that empowered the U.S. government; the government did not take an oath to the states.” Is the federal government an agency to the states or vice versa? The Framers of the Constitution insured that the Constitution would derive its authority directly from the people, rather than from state governments. For this reason, requirement for ratification belonged with state conventions rather than state legislatures. As for Lincoln “provoking a war,” he sent a ship to Ft. Sumter with provisions and instructions not to engage in a fight unless it or Ft. Sumter was fired upon. This hardly forced the South to fire first. The Confederacy’s Robert Toombs, fearing aggressive response on the part of the South: “Mr. President, at this time it is suicide, murder, and will lose us every friend at the North.” What Major Anderson and the United States did at the federally owned forts Sumter and Moultrie and further south at Ft. Pickens were their right and their business. If Hawai’i had decided to join the Empire of Japan in 1941, would we have just let them go and take the naval base and ships with them? Regarding the expansion of slavery, quoting Albert Gallatin Brown, Senator from Mississippi: “I want Cuba…I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.” The South did want to expand slavery and I would add that they didn’t mind a bigger central government when it came to enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. Chris Shelton Indianapolis, Ind.

TO THE EDITOR: As the Sesquicentennial of Reconstruction progresses and the popular press debates whether slavery merits reparations, few students of the era realize that Southerners have already paid a form of reparations; if not for slavery, then as a penalty for the war. As the table below illustrates, for at least twenty-five years after the war three items represented more than half of the federal budget: (1) budget surpluses to repay federal war debt, (2) interest on federal war debt, and (3) Union veterans pensions. Former Confederates derived no benefit from such items, yet they had to pay their share of federal taxes to fund them. If the Confederacy had been an independent defeated foe such payments would have been reparations. But the table does not tell the whole story. First, in 1869 the Republican-controlled federal government passed an act that required federal debt be redeemed in gold. But during the war the great majority of investors used paper money, which traded at a discount to gold, to buy the bonds. The discount got as high as 63%— meaning that a paper dollar was worth only thirty-seven cents—after Grant sustained heavy casualties in the 1864 overland campaign only to be stalled at Petersburg. In short, gold redemption was a huge windfall for the bondholders, almost none of whom were Southerners. Most of the bonds were held by national banks which were required to buy them as monetary reserves under the 1863 National Banking Act, but other Northerners also owned the bonds. It should be noted that bond interest also had to be paid in gold—another windfall to Northerners. Second, Union veterans pensions did not stop growing until 1921, which was fifty-five years after the war ended. Moreover, the total amount paid was about twice as much as the combined federal and Northern state governments spent to fight the war. By 1893 Union veterans pensions represented 40% of federal spending. Philip Leigh Tampa, Fla.