PART TWO OF THE LINCOLN SPEECH:

What started this argument between slaves, freedmen, families and everyone alive at the time on earth that read papers?

 

The Constitution is the first player in this family squabble. The South believed that the Union formed under the Constitution was of consent and not force. The states were not beholden to the government, it was the reverse. The government must always answer to the people. No war without the consent of the states, because the states were the creators of government, not its creatures. The South felt it had earned its independence from England, were granted by England their freedom and sovereignty and had not surrendered these on entering the union. They stated that there was nothing in the Constitution that gave anyone the power to invade a state or use force of any kind against it.

 

For Lincoln and the federalists, the union was perpetual. The unit could not be divided. The right of self preservation that every nation on earth had so did the union.

 

Period.

 

When I say the name Abraham Lincoln you have an image in your mind. That image looms large over our terrain and remains a potent image for everything from restaurant signs to poetry to paintings to furniture sales, statues in the park, his face on our coins and bills.

 

There is no such image when I say Jefferson Davis. You can't get more erased out of history. So let me tell you about him and the times he lived so that I when I mention his name you'll have an idea of the man who doesn't have hundreds of books, TV shows, films, statues and mythology.

 

The south itself in the 1850's had a period of unprecedented prosperity. The laws of how long a slave could be a slave before being freed were in effect, and more and more blacks were becoming free. In Charleston homes in white neighborhoods were bought by blacks and rented to whites. One group of black speculators held properties worth $500,000 in 1850's money- a mind boggling amount today. About 25% of freed blacks owned slaves in the south- some to free other family members, some to make money and some did both. Freed slaves could open bank accounts, run stores and shops and in the case of New Orleans, actually participate in the local government.

 

The north has a different story. The north was being hurt- industrialization was expensive. So was building homes and buildings to continue growth. It was running out of money to change itself, and higher tariffs on the south were used to get that money. There was another way. Cheap labor could have been brought in. But blacks were barred from the states that were trying to grow, Irish tradesmen in the north kept the cheaper labor force out. So the North needed more money and the south felt angry as the tariffs rose.

 

Jefferson Davis is among the names of the somewhat eccentric or colorful people who make up the story. There was also Judah Benjamin the Jew in charge of the treasury, Colonel Benavides from Mexico and General Stand Waite- a Native American who was actually the last southern general to surrender at the end of the war- whom Southern mythmakers would replace with Lee and Grant- even though that Appomattox surrender document was reversed and dropped later.

 

Davis had told states that wanted to re-introduce slavery no way. He adopted a black child that he raised as his own. Taken prisoner by Union soldiers who beat and clubbed him with their rifles when they arrested him, his black child ran out and lay on top of him, absorbing the blows from the soldiers. Yelling for them not to hit his daddy. Which, by the way stunned the soldiers. But did not stop the beating. 

 

Held in prison without charges for two and a half years after the war, he was kept in solitary confinement and was not allowed visits from family or lawyers. The Pope made a crown of thorns with his own hands, cutting himself in the process, and sent it to President Johnson urging him to either charge Davis or let him go. Davis was finally freed after the President received the bloodied crown.

 

The issue of slavery was a cloud over tariffs and the Constitution. Yet it would eventually replace all the original reasons for the war.

 

The north killed more slaves in inhuman conditions than the south. It brought the slaves here to New York and New England and did not start selling them in the south until the market in the north was saturated. The slaves built New York City and were instantly forgotten for having done so.

 

Lincoln let it be known he opposed citizenship for Blacks. He wanted to gather them together, and we are talking about people who had been here a few generations, and send them back to Africa . He did not bar slave states from entering the union; he did nothing to free slaves in northern states still mostly agricultural. The companies trafficking in slaves during the war staid in New England, and their offices paid tariffs all through the war!

 

Davis argued that slavery was winding down everywhere. He argued that only by welcoming the freed slaves into the community could the south survive. That played a role in his legal adoption. Robert E. Lee freed his family slaves before the war because he said, "he wanted no one to say he fought for slavery instead of the right for a state to leave the union."  Article 1 section 9 of the Confederate Constitution outlawed the slavery trade. No more buying and selling.

 

Blacks could not open bank accounts, own property or work in most of the states in the north. They could in the south. Alex deTocqueville had earlier expressed shock after seeing all white builders and tradesmen in the north when he saw black and white tradesmen working side by side in the south!

 

South Carolina was the first to leave the Union after Lincoln's election, a half dozen states followed suit. Which at the time included Mississippi, the number one cash making state in the country. And the highest tariff payer.

 

West Virginia in an irony lost in time. It was created illegally by Lincoln by succeeding it from Virginia. That's right. The man who argued the South had no right to leave the union, he could divide up states if he wanted. West Virginia was allowed to keep their slaves! General Grant took some of his slaves with him into battle, as did his troops.  So succession and slavery was wrong unless it was done by the Northern government!

 

 

For decades southern racists have insisted that the south's black soldiers saw little combat, and are insignificant. The truth of the matter is that years before the south called up Blacks to fight for the cause and before slavery had become the issue, many blacks served unofficially. Dr. Lewis Steiner was a Yankee that was in Frederick Maryland when he saw the rebel troops on their way to Sharpsburg. Here is the message he sent to the union forces:

 

THE MOVEMENT (OF TROOPS) CONTINUED UNTIL 8:00 PM, OCCUPYING 16 HOURS. THE MOST LIBERAL CALCULATION COULD NOT GIVE THEM NORE THAN 65,000 MEN. OVER 5000 NEGROES MUST BE INCLUDED IN THAT NUMBER BRANDISHING ARMS, RIFLES, MUSKETS, SABERS, BOWIE KNIVES. THEY CARRY KNAPSACKS, WATER CANTEENS AND SLEEPING MATERIALS ISSUED BY THE CSA. MORE NEGROES COULD BE SEEN DRIVING WAGONS, RIDING ON CAISONS, IN AMBULANCES, WITH THE STAFF OF GENERALS AND PROMISCUOSILY MIXED IN WITH THE WHITE TROOPS.

 

In all the decades of civil war art, not one painting has ever included the black troops that fought the north at Sharpsburg. Perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised that we have changed out attitudes so radically over time about the war, when the attitudes and meaning of the war were changed half way through the war as well.

 

That happened with a failed propaganda piece called the EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION.

 

First, hidden from us, is the fact that the 1862 Confiscation Act had already freed the slaves in the southern states by declaring them "forever free"! The Confiscation Act also authorized the seizure of land, homes and businesses that assisted the rebellion. It led to shutting down newspapers, jailing reporters without charges, and abuses far beyond anything done with our Patriot Act.

 

Lincoln never mentioned or wrote on the First Amendment. He is in fact the only President we ever had that never mentioned it. In all his speeches on liberty, you will find no mention of free speech or a free press.

 

Lincoln suspended habeus corpus. The confiscation act was used to silence any newspaper that called on the North to use the courts against the south. In fact, if you even told a joke about Lincoln you would lose your home and go to jail.

 

More than 10,000 were arrested and held without trial or charges. He secretly paid newspaper publishers, and wrote articles praising his actions under assumed names.

 

There is far more to Lincoln than "Honest Abe".

 

The Proclamation itself was meant to encourage the slaves in the slave states to rebel. They didn't. They remembered what happened to the slaves that had joined the British, and decided to just sit it out. The proclamation however, was a much cleaner paper than the Confiscation Act which freed the same slaves, yet left embarrassing questions about Constitutional abuse away from the prying eyes of historians.

 

Here in Chicago the Sun Times was shut down. Camp Douglas was a prison for Confederate soldiers in Chicago. Black confederates were shot on the spot upon entry to the camp. The guards would actually fire into the crowd of prisoners to hit the Blacks. If they had to take down white Confederates to get them, well that just added to the fun. Food for the prisoners was allowed to rot to "punish them". When some Chicagoans signed a petition to allow doctors and food into the camp, all that signed it were arrested and sent to Camp Douglas without a trial.

 

Southerners began re-writing the war in the 1870's. To explain the loss of life, the confederate soldier was praised. Duty and honor was what the south came to see as the reasons for fighting the war.

 

By the war of 1896 the Spanish- American War the courage of southerners in battle was praised nationally, and even the North looked with delight at these folks who couldn't let the old south, which never existed, go. Lee became a national hero, blue and grey re-unions would become the order of the day.

 

The absence of concern for Black people made it easy for the entire nation to romanticize the old south. Interesting that blacks stopped going to the re-unions after the first one. As they heard the story being changed, they wanted nothing to do with it. 

 

Today we are just as wrong in our analysis of the war. A great northern migration to the south is currently happening, and northern blacks get angry when they see the Confederate flags and monuments. Yet as long as the story of the period ignores all the other issues save one, as long as the role of Blacks and Indians in the war is ignored, the wounds will remain open, the quest for what happened, unending.

 

CLOSING STATEMENT

 

As a lover of history, it pains me to say that the bromide, THOSE WHO DON'T KNOW THEIR HISTORY ARE DOOMED TO REPEAT IT is both true and false when it comes to the Civil War.

 

We haven't known the actual acts of Lincoln, the reasons for the war, or the attitudes of the day for over a century yet still we muddle through.

 

Yet, perhaps the reason the crowd went beserk recently when a hate group showed up with a Confederate battle flag, perhaps the reason the Civil Rights battle was so long and bloody was because the Jim Crow era south had erased those 5000 black soldiers from the memory of Sharpesberg. Perhaps by only telling the winners embellished side, we have perpetuated the problems and issues that existed even then.

 

Today in America, we speak of the race card. Yet no one speaks of race anymore. Qualms and questions whites have can no longer be expressed in the open. I contend that has not made them go away, no matter how smug and politically correct we are.

 

We are kidding ourselves when we believe racism is conquered. So in a way the statement about forgetting the past and perpetually re-living it is correct.

 

Perhaps the reason issues such as state's rights, red and blue states, race relations all remain unresolved, is this war. Perhaps it is why Asian and Hispanics won't vote for Obama, and no press will dare ask why. Perhaps it's because by Lincoln using the bullet instead of the law, none of the arguments were ever resolved and from state's rights to our present wars the old wounds never heal.

 

By not knowing our past, we are doomed to reshape, twist and forget it.

 

And continue the arguments of old.