Shocking and Sad Commentary

by Jeff Dantre'

Historian and Yale Professor Dr. Jay Winik's recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal, "Security Comes Before Liberty" (read it with the lights on), shows an excellent grasp of history but fails and frightens in its conclusions. Each of the American leaders mentioned in the article pushed the country further and further away from the original concept of the United States. Unlike what Dr. Winik maintains, civil rights in this country were not returned to their previous levels after they had been curtailed in the name of national security. Each time there was a small erosion of our rights and monumental growth in the scope and breadth of our government. Our country, which has become an empire, was not built in a day but with one small step at a time. As with wartime taxes, social programs, the institution of executive orders and the like, our government has shown a remarkable inability to keep itself in check.

The greatness of this country comes from the people and not from the government. Dr. Winik is certainly correct in his analysis of the dictatorships of each of these presidential regimes. But I believe his ultimate conclusion indicates a true lack of understanding about the foundations of this country. His words should scare any liberty loving American to death. Dr. Winik seems to believe that the preservation of this country should be accomplished at all cost and that we must trust the government to do whatever needs to be done in its self-preservation. I believe the preservation of this country means nothing when compared to the individual liberties believed by our founders to be as necessary as breathing.

Dr. Winik also seems to postulate that somehow the acts of our Presidents should be revered, that simply because they're history they take on an almost gospel like reverence. I would answer that each of these Presidents violated the law and could and should have been tried and convicted of treason.

The thought of placing your life in the hands of any human being should be a scary prospect. Trusting our Presidents with the ultimate care of each of us is a dangerous game. The reason: concentration of power breeds corruption and ultimately dictators. Our founders knew this and that is why we have three governmental branches, not just one.

The sole area of Dr. Winik's commentary that I agree with has to do with the rights of those who are not citizens of this country but are living within our boarders- those on visas, green cards, etc. Our immigration policy should reflect concern for our citizens and not non-citizens. Certainly no one should be abused in any sense. They should simply be deported. But again, this action concerns "non-citizens".

As with gun control laws, law-abiding citizens are the ones that will ultimately pay the price for increased restrictions on civil liberties. There has been no information presented to the public which proves the just passed homeland security measures would have done anything to prevent the September terrorist attack. What would have aided their apprehension is tighter immigration control which does not impede the rights of citizens. This, coupled with a balanced foreign policy toward the Middle East, should have been the first steps taken by our government to ensure our future safety. Unfortunately our leaders don't seem to have the stomach to stem the flow of new human fodder for the voting booth or the willingness to occasionally say NO to Israel.

As with Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt, today's leaders will opt to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers and the liberties of our citizens before they would begin to question whether we actually did something to precipitate the attacks. At very least our policies created an environment which provided moldable masses eager to be led by a nut like Bin Laden. But there is no self-examination when you are infallible, the greatest, the best and above reproach.

I actually owe Dr. Winik a debt of gratitude. He has provided an accurate assessment of a few of America's best-known leaders who were willing to put themselves and the government ahead of the people. Thank, indeed.

The naivete of Dr. Winik's analysis amazes me. He has accepted the actions of each of these men on their face instead of reflecting on the myriad of issues involved in World War II or the War Between the States for example. The actions of these leaders cannot be analyzed in a historic vacuum. And this is what he has done. Bottom line: His commentary left me with a lingering chill. Perhaps, though, his thoughts will propel others as it did me to further speak, shout and thrash about as much as necessary to ensure the United States is still a country worthy of our citizenship.

Targeting Civilians

Sherman himself admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged for the things he did. But in war the victors always write the history

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

One hundred thirty-six years after General Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Americans are still fascinated with the War for Southern Independence. The larger bookstores devote an inordinate amount of shelf space to books about the events and personalities of the war; Ken Burns’s "Civil War" television series and the movie "Gettysburg" were blockbuster hits; dozens of new books on the war are still published every year; and a monthly newspaper, Civil War News, lists literally hundreds of seminars, conferences, reenactments, and memorial events related to the war in all 50 states and the District of Columbia all year long. Indeed, many Northerners are "still fighting the war" in that they organize a political mob whenever anyone attempts to display a Confederate heritage symbol in any public place.

Americans are still fascinated by the war because many of us recognize it as the defining event in American history. Lincoln’s war established myriad precedents that have shaped the course of American government and society ever since: the centralization of governmental power, central banking, income taxation, protectionism, military conscription, the suspension of constitutional liberties, the "rewriting" of the Constitution by federal judges, "total war," the quest for a worldwide empire, and the notion that government is one big "problem solver."

Perhaps the most hideous precedent established by Lincoln’s war, however, was the intentional targeting of defenseless civilians. Human beings did not always engage in such barbaric acts as we have all watched in horror in recent days. Targeting civilians has been a common practice ever since World War II, but its roots lie in Lincoln’s war.

In 1863 there was an international convention in Geneva, Switzerland, that sought to codify international law with regard to the conduct of war. What the convention sought to do was to take the principles of "civilized" warfare that had evolved over the previous century, and declare them to be a part of international law that should be obeyed by all civilized societies. Essentially, the convention concluded that it should be considered to be a war crime, punishable by imprisonment or death, for armies to attack defenseless citizens and towns; plunder civilian property; or take from the civilian population more than what was necessary to feed and sustain an occupying army.

The Swiss jurist Emmerich de Vattel (1714-67, author of The Law of Nations, was the world’s expert on the proper conduct of war at the time. "The people, the peasants, the citizens, take no part in it, and generally have nothing to fear from the sword of the enemy," Vattel wrote. As long as they refrain from hostilities themselves they "live in as perfect safety as if they were friends." Occupying soldiers who would destroy private property should be regard as "savage barbarians."

In 1861 the leading American expert in international law as it relates to the proper conduct of war was the San Francisco attorney Henry Halleck, a former army officer and West Point instructor whom Abraham Lincoln appointed General-in-Chief of the federal armies in July of 1862. Halleck was the author of the book, International Law, which was used as a text at West Point and essentially echoed Vattel’s writing.

On April 24, 1863, the Lincoln administration seemed to adopt the precepts of international law as expressed by the Geneva Convention, Vattel, and Halleck, when it issued General Order No. 100, known as the "Lieber Code." The Code’s author was the German legal scholar Francis Leiber, an advisor to Otto von Bismarck and a staunch advocate of centralized governmental power. In his writings Lieber denounced the federal system of government created by the American founding fathers as having created "confederacies of petty sovereigns" and dismissed the Jeffersonian philosophy of government as a collection of "obsolete ideas." In Germany he was arrested several times for subversive activities. He was a perfect ideological fit with Lincoln’s own political philosophy and was just the man Lincoln wanted to outline the rules of war for his administration.

The Lieber Code paid lip service to the notion that civilians should not be targeted in war, but it contained a giant loophole: Federal commanders were permitted to completely ignore the Code if, "in their discretion," the events of the war would warrant that they do so. In other words, the Lieber Code was purely propaganda.

The fact is, the Lincoln government intentionally targeted civilians from the very beginning of the war. The administration’s battle plan was known as the "Anaconda Plan" because it sought to blockade all Southern ports and inland waterways and starving the Southern civilian economy. Even drugs and medicines were on the government’s list of items that were to be kept out of the hands of Southerners, as far as possible.

As early as the first major battle of the war, the Battle of First Manassas in July of 1861, federal soldiers were plundering and burning private homes in the Northern Virginia countryside. Such behavior quickly became so pervasive that on June 20, 1862 – one year into the war – General George McClellan, the commanding general of the Army of the Potomac, wrote Lincoln a letter imploring him to see to it that the war was conducted according to "the highest principles known to Christian civilization" and to avoid targeting the civilian population to the extent that that was possible. Lincoln replaced McClellan a few months later and ignored his letter.

Most Americans are familiar with General William Tecumseh Sherman’s "march to the sea" in which his army pillaged, plundered, raped, and murdered civilians as it marched through Georgia in the face of scant military opposition. But such atrocities had been occurring for the duration of the war; Sherman’s March was nothing new.

In 1862 Sherman was having difficulty subduing Confederate sharpshooters who were harassing federal gunboats on the Mississippi River near Memphis. He then adopted the theory of "collective responsibility" to "justify" attacking innocent civilians in retaliation for such attacks. He burned the entire town of Randolph, Tennessee, to the ground. He also began taking civilian hostages and either trading them for federal prisoners of war or executing them.

Jackson and Meridian, Mississippi, were also burned to the ground by Sherman’s troops even though there was no Confederate army there to oppose them. After the burnings his soldiers sacked the town, stealing anything of value and destroying the rest. As Sherman biographer John Marzalek writes, his soldiers "entered residences, appropriating whatever appeared to be of value . . . those articles which they could not carry they broke."

After the destruction of Meridian Sherman boasted that "for five days, ten thousand of our men worked hard and with a will, in that work of destruction, with axes, sledges, crowbars, clawbars, and with fire.... Meridian no longer exists."

In The Hard Hand of War historian Mark Grimsley argues that Sherman has been unfairly criticized as the "father" of waging war on civilians because he "pursued a policy quite in keeping with that of other Union commanders from Missouri to Virginia." Fair enough. Why blame just Sherman when such practices were an essential part of Lincoln’s entire war plan and were routinely practiced by all federal commanders? Sherman was just the most zealous of all federal commanders in targeting Southern civilians, which is apparently why he became one of Lincoln’s favorite generals.

In his First Inaugural Address Jefferson said that any secessionists should be allowed to "stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it." But by 1864 Sherman would announce that "to the petulant and persistent secessionists, why, death is mercy." In 1862 Sherman wrote his wife that his purpose in the war would be "extermination, not of soldiers alone, that is the least of the trouble, but the people" of the South. His loving and gentle wife wrote back that her wish was for "a war of extermination and that all [Southerners] would be driven like swine into the sea. May we carry fire and sword into their states till not one habitation is left standing."

The Geneva Convention of 1863 condemned the bombardment of cities occupied by civilians, but Lincoln ignored all such restrictions on his behavior. The bombardment of Atlanta destroyed 90 percent of the city, after which the remaining civilian residents were forced to depopulate the city just as winter was approaching and the Georgia countryside had been stripped of food by the federal army. In his memoirs Sherman boasted that his army destroyed more than $100 million in private property and carried home $20 million more during his "march to the sea."

Sherman was not above randomly executing innocent civilians as part of his (and Lincoln’s) terror campaign. In October of 1864 he ordered a subordinate, General Louis Watkins, to go to Fairmount, Georgia, "burn ten or twelve houses" and "kill a few at random," and "let them know that it will be repeated every time a train is fired upon."

Another Sherman biographer, Lee Kennett, found that in Sherman’s army "the New York regiments were . . . filled with big city criminals and foreigners fresh from the jails of the Old World." Although it is rarely mentioned by "mainstream" historians, many acts of rape were committed by these federal soldiers. The University of South Carolina’s library contains a large collection of thousands diaries and letters of Southern women that mention these unspeakable atrocities.

Shermans’ band of criminal looters (known as "bummers") sacked the slave cabins as well as the plantation houses. As Grimsley describes it, "With the utter disregard for blacks that was the norm among Union troops, the soldiers ransacked the slave cabins, taking whatever they liked." A routine procedure would be to hang a slave by his neck until he told federal soldiers where the plantation owners’ valuables were hidden.

General Philip Sheridan is another celebrated "war hero" who followed in Sherman’s footsteps in attacking defenseless civilians. After the Confederate army had finally evacuated the Shenandoah Valley in the autumn of 1864 Sheridan’s 35,000 infantry troops essentially burned the entire valley to the ground. As Sheridan described it in a letter to General Grant, in the first few days he "destroyed over 2200 barns . . . over 70 mills . . . have driven in front of the army over 4000 head of stock, and have killed . . . not less than 3000 sheep. . . . Tomorrow I will continue the destruction."

In letters home Sheridan’s troops described themselves as "barn burners" and "destroyers of homes." One soldier wrote home that he had personally set 60 private homes on fire and opined that "it was a hard looking sight to see the women and children turned out of doors at this season of the year." A Sergeant William T. Patterson wrote that "the whole country around is wrapped in flames, the heavens are aglow with the light thereof . . . such mourning, such lamentations, such crying and pleading for mercy [by defenseless women]... I never saw or want to see again."

As horrific as the burning of the Shenandoah Valley was, Grimsley concluded that it was actually "one of the more controlled acts of destruction during the war’s final year." After it was all over Lincoln personally conveyed to Sheridan "the thanks of the Nation."

Sherman biographer Lee Kennett is among the historians who bend over backwards to downplay the horrors of how Lincoln waged war on civilians. Just recently, he published an article in the Atlanta Constitution arguing that Sherman wasn’t such a bad guy after all and should not be reviled by Georgians as much as he is. But even Kennett admitted in his biography of Sherman that:

Had the Confederates somehow won, had their victory put them in position to bring their chief opponents before some sort of tribunal, they would have found themselves justified...in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.

Sherman himself admitted after the war that he was taught at West Point that he could be hanged for the things he did. But in war the victors always write the history and are never punished for war crimes, no matter how heinous. Only the defeated suffer that fate. That is why very few Americans are aware of the fact that the unspeakable atrocities of war committed against civilians, from the firebombing of Dresden, the rape of Nanking, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the World Trade Center bombings, had their origins in Lincoln’s war. This is yet another reason why Americans will continue their fascination with the War for Southern Independence.

September 17, 2001

Thomas J. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. His book, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, will be published next March.

EMANCIPATING SLAVES,

ENSLAVING FREE MEN

More Trouble for the Lincoln Cartel

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

The majority of academic historians have as their first and foremost goal remaining a member in good standing of their profession. This means never seriously challenging the template of ideas that is closely guarded by the gatekeepers of the profession – the "senior scholars" who edit the journals, make recommendations for jobs and research grants, sit on editorial boards of university presses, review books in the New York Times and other prominent newspapers, and even appear frequently on cable television documentaries. These are people who have built reputations and careers on perpetuating their view of history, and they do all they can to protect their "human capital." "Academic freedom" is not all that it’s cracked up to be.

September 7, 2004

Thomas J. DiLorenzo  is the author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, (Three Rivers Press/Random House). His latest book is How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold Story of Our Country’s History, from the Pilgrims to the Present (Crown Forum/Random House, August 2004).

 

Lincoln’s Presidential Warrant to Arrest Chief Justice Roger B. Taney
'A Great Crime' or a Fabrication?

by Charles Adams
by The account of the warrant to arrest the Chief Justice cannot be found in any of the innumerable Lincoln biographies or accounts of the early days of the Civil War. Since it only recently surfaced, Lincoln historians and biographers have never mentioned the storyCharles Adams

        

Frederick S. Calhoun, the Chief Historian for the United States Marshal’s Service, at the Department of Justice, recently wrote a 200 year history of Federal Marshals, entitled, The Lawmen: United States Marshals and their Deputies, 1789–1989 (Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C. 1989). This historical study gives a detailed account of an arrest warrant, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, in the early days of his administration. The warrant was to arrest the Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney, following his opinion in the case of Ex parte Merryman (May, 1861). The account is found in the chapter entitled, "Arrest of Traitors and Suspension of Habeas Corpus." It was taken from the private papers of the Federal Marshall, Ward Hill Laman, at the Huntington Library in Pasadena:

Taney’s opinion seriously embarrassed Lincoln and his advisers. Southern sympathizers and Northern opponents of the war praised Taney as a partisan of civil liberties standing alone against military tyranny. Taney’s opinion exacerbated the delicate situation in Maryland, a border state yet undecided in its commitment to the Union. According to Marshal Lamon, "After due consideration the administration determined upon the arrest of the Chief Justice." Lincoln issued a presidential arrest warrant for Taney, but then arose the question of service. "Who should make the arrest and should Taney be imprisoned?"

It was finally determined to place the order of arrest in the hands of the United States Marshal for the District of Columbia. Laman then recalls that "Lincoln gave the warrant to him, instructing Lamon to "use his own discretion about making the arrest unless he should receive further orders."

The account of the warrant to arrest the Chief Justice cannot be found in any of the innumerable Lincoln biographies or accounts of the early days of the Civil War. Since it only recently surfaced, Lincoln historians and biographers have never mentioned the story, probably because it has been outside the main stream of historical information, and hence has not been known. Once it surfaced, Lincoln apologists and Civil War gatekeepers, have been quick to attack the account as a fabrication, because Lincoln would never have done such a thing; and, it would have set off "a political firestorm," so they say; and hence, it is just too preposterous to be true.

It does seem too preposterous to be true, probably because of all the grave errors and wrongs allegedly committed by Lincoln’s administration, this would rank at the top of the list. It would have destroyed the separation of powers; destroyed the place of the Supreme Court in the Constitutional scheme of government. It would have made the executive power supreme, over all others, and put the President, the military, and the executive branch of government, in total control of American society. The Constitution would have been at an end.

But as outrageous as this may appear, during those chaotic first months of the Civil War, it would not have been so unthinkable to arrest and silence Taney. The military arrested people in all walks of life. Charles W. Smith, a biographer of Taney (1973), gives this account of the scope of the arrests of civilians:

Without the sanction of law the federal government arrested men by the thousands and confined them in military prisons. The number of such executive arrests was certainly over 13,000, and it has been estimated to have been as high as 38,000 (Columbia Law Review, XXI, 527–28, 1921). This policy was bitterly criticized in some quarters, but it is generally assumed that the people as a whole supported the arrest policy.

Taney’s Ex parte Merryman decision, if followed by the executive branch of the government, would have given comfort to the enemy, so it was claimed, by letting an accused traitor go free. His decision was condemned, "steeped in the crown of treason," wrote one editor. The New York Times wrote that he used "the powers of his office to serve the cause of traitors." The editor of The Missouri Democrat, went so far as to suggest that getting rid of Taney "will be a good riddance for the country." Northern editors for weeks after the decision enflamed their readers with hate for Chief Justice Taney. But this attack was just plain nonsense. All the Merryman decision did, was to require the government to follow the ancient rule of English liberty – which was set forth in the Constitution – that only the Congress could take away the right of habeas corpus. That would have required Lincoln to call Congress into session, and ask Congress to suspend the right to habeas corpus. How was that so bad?

Thus Merryman decision, it was erroneously claimed, loomed as a serious obstacle to the government’s policy of stamping out secessionists and secessionist sympathizers. If Lincoln obeyed the Court’s order thousands of those arrested illegally would have been freed. Lincoln and most Northerners, during the war, accepted the Machiavellian doctrine that the end justified the means, when the end was to preserve the Union, and was to be achieved regardless of the Constitution and rulings of the Supreme Court. Lincoln expressed that policy to a Chicago clergyman:

"As commander in chief of the army and navy, in time of war, I suppose I have a right to take any measure which may best subdue the enemy."

Taney continued to irritate the Lincoln administration after his Ex parte Merryman decision. When Lincoln was ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling, Taney sent copies of his opinion to other judges, urging them to issue writs of habeas corpus, and many of them did, even enforcing writs against military arrests of civilians. In his circuit in Maryland, Taney delayed a number of treason trials, as it was his right to do controlling the docket, because with the passion of the times, he doubted a fair trial could be had.

No doubt Taney’s obstructionism reached the ears of the President. And it was then that the plan was hatched to arrest and silence old Justice, who just wouldn’t shut up. Lincoln sent a letter to Taney following his decision in the Merriman case, but the letter has never been found. (New York Herald, June 2, 1861). But that could explain why Taney told others, "The government had considered the possibility of arresting him." Someway, he got the word.

The near-arrest of the Chief Justice is not just found in the history of the United States Marshal’s Service. Until recent research, there was a second account supposedly corroborating the story of the Federal Marshal Laman. This second account was in a footnote in Professor Harold Hyman’s A More Perfect Union (1973), p. 86, n. 15, citing the private papers of Frances Lieber, also at the Huntington Library. Lieber wrote the Lieber Code which became the Laws of War for Northern armies. That should have been enough proof, with two independent sources. Unfortunately, the Curator at the Huntington Library reports that the Lieber papers contain no reference to Lincoln’s warrant to arrest the Chief Justice. That left only the papers of Ward Hill Laman. When this became known, Laman’s character was attacked by the gatekeepers, to support the theory that the whole story was a fabrication. It seems he was a heavy drinker. Lincoln’s apologist could relax and maintain the whole account was a fabrication by the Federal Marshal.

Unfortunately, for Lincoln’s apologists, research recently unearthed two other solid sources to corroborate the account set forth in the private papers of the Federal Marshal, Laman.

In 1887, George W. Brown, the mayor of Baltimore, later a Supreme Court judge for Baltimore, wrote in his book, Baltimore and the Nineteenth of April, 1861: A Study of War, (John Hopkins University, 1887) p. 90, of a conversation he had with Taney following the Merryman decision:

"Mr. Brown, I am an old man, a very old man, (he had completed his 84^th year) but perhaps I was preserved for this occasion." I replied, "Sir, I thank God that you were."

He then told me that he knew his own imprisonment had been a matter of consultation, but the danger had passed, and he warned me from information he had received, that my time would come.

It did.

Eight years before in 1879, The Memoirs of Benjamin Robbin Curtis’s were published. Justice Curtis was one of the most prominent lawyers in that period. He represented President Johnson in his trial before the Senate following his impeachment. Most important, he served as a Justice on the Supreme Court. He wrote the dissenting opinion in Dred Scott, which Lincoln carried in his pocket while debating with Stephen A. Douglas. He resigned from the Court after a dispute with Taney over that case. Yet he admired the Chief Justice for his Merryman decision, and makes reference to the plan to arrest Taney, calling it a "great crime."

If he had never done anything else that was high, heroic, and important, his noble vindication of the writ of habeas corpus and the dignity and authority of his office against the rash minister of State who, in the pride of a fancied executive power, came near to the commission of a great crime, will command the admiration and gratitude of every lover of constitutional liberty so long as our institutions endure. Vol. 1, p. 240.

Commenting on this, Mayor Brown wrote 8 years later:

"The crime referred to was the intended imprisonment of the Chief Justice. Although this crime was not committed, a criminal precedent had been set and was ruthlessly followed."

Brown then cites the oft quoted remark by Secretary Seward to Lord Lyons (British ambassador to the United States), boasting of his power to imprison just about anyone.

Finally, it was Secretary of State, William Seward, who signed the executive orders suspending the right of habeas corpus throughout the war, when it should normally have been the President. Curtis’s account refers to "the rash minister of State," who could be none other than William Seward. History shows that it was Seward who urged the President to embark on a policy of unrestrained arrests of private citizens by the military. Most likely it was Seward who urged the President to sign the warrant to arrest Taney, and most likely on second thought, Lincoln did not permit the arrest to take place. Chief Justice Taney and Seward were bitter enemies. So much so that Taney said, if Seward were elected President, he would not administer the oath of office to him. So arresting and imprisoning Taney would have been Seward’s final triumph over the Chief Justice.

And so the case stands, the Presidential warrant to arrest the Chief Justice is on solid ground. It represents just one more tough nut the apologists and gate keepers have to live with; it cannot be swept under the rug, so to speak, as a fabrication.

January 5, 2004

Charles Adams

---

Mr. Chairman, in the Constitution of the United States, which the other day we swore to support, and by the authority of which we are here assembled now, it is written, "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." It is further written, also, that the Congress to which all legislative powers granted, are thus committed: "Shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press." And, it is yet further written, in protection of Senators and Representatives, in that freedom of debate here, without which there can be no liberty that: "For any speech or debate in either House they shall not be questioned in any other place."
         Holding up the shield of the Constitution, and standing here in the place, and with the manhood of a Representative of the people, I propose to myself, to-day, the ancient freedom of speech used within these walls, though with somewhat more, I trust, of decency and discretion than have sometimes been exhibited here. Sir, I do not propose to discuss the direct question of this civil war in which we are engaged. Its present prosecution is a foregone conclusion; and a wise man never wastes his strength on a fruitless enterprise. My position shall, at present, for the most part, be indicated by my votes, and by the resolutions and motions which I may submit. But there are many questions incident to the war and to its prosecution, about which I have somewhat to say now.
         Mr. Chairman, the President, in the message before us, demands the extraordinary loan of $400,000,000 -- an amount nearly ten times greater than the entire public debt, State and Federal, at the close of the Revolution, in 1783, and four times as much as the total expenditures during the three years' war with Great Britain, in 1812.
         Sir, that same Constitution which I again hold up, and to which I give my whole heart, and my utmost loyalty, commits to Congress alone the power to borrow money, and to fix the purposes to which it shall be applied, and expressly limits army appropriations to the term of two years. Each Senator and Representative, therefore, must judge for himself, upon his conscience and his oath, and before God and the country, of the justice and wisdom and policy of the President's demand; and whenever this House shall have become but a mere office wherein to register the decrees of the Executive, it will be high time to abolish it. But I have a right, I believe, sir, to say that, however gentlemen upon this side of the Chamber may differ finally as to the war, we are yet firmly and inexorably united in one thing, at least, and that is in the determination that our own rights and dignities and privileges, as the Representatives of the people, shall be maintained in their spirit, and to the very letter. And, be this as it may, I do know that there are some here present who are resolved to assert, and to exercise these rights with becoming decency and moderation, certainly, but, at the same time, fully, freely, and at every hazard.
         Sir, it is an ancient and wise practice of the English Commons, to precede all votes of supplies by an inquiry into abuses and grievances, and especially into any infractions of the Constitution and the laws by the Executive. Let us follow this safe practice. We are now in Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union; and in the exercise of my right and my duty as a Representative, and availing myself of the latitude of debate allowed here, I propose to consider the present State of the Union, and supply, also, some few of the many omissions of the President in the message before us. Sir, he has undertaken to give us information of the state of the Union, as the Constitution requires him to do; and it was his duty, as an honest Executive, to make that information full, impartial, and complete, instead of spreading before us a labored and lawyerly vindication of his own course of policy -- a policy which has precipitated us into a terrible and bloody revolution. He admits the fact; he admits that, to-day, we are in the midst of a general civil war, not now a mere petty insurrection, to be suppressed in twenty days by a proclamation and a posse comitatus of three months' militia.
         Sir, it has been the misfortune of the President, from the beginning, that he has totally and wholly under-estimated the magnitude and character of the revolution with which he had to deal, or surely he never would have ventured upon the wicked and hazardous experiment of calling thirty millions of people to arms among themselves, without the counsel and authority of Congress. But when, at last, he found himself hemmed in by the revolution, and this city in danger, as he declares, and waked up thus, as the proclamation of the 15th of April proves him to have waked up, to the reality and significance of the movement, why did he not forthwith assemble Congress, and throw himself upon the wisdom and patriotism of the Representatives of the States and of the people, instead of usurping powers which the Constitution has expressly conferred upon us? Ay, sir, and powers which Congress had but a little while before, repeatedly and emphatically refused to exercise, or to permit him to exercise? But I shall recur to this point again.
         Sir, the President, in this message, has undertaken also to give us a summary of the causes which have led to the present revolution. He has made out a case -- he might, in my judgment, have made out a much stronger case -- against the secessionists and disunionists of the South. All this, sir, is very well, as far as it goes. But the President does not go back far enough, nor in the right direction. He forgets the still stronger case against the abolitionists and disunionists of the North and West. He omits to tell us that secession and disunion had a New England origin, and began in Massachusetts, in 1804, at the time of the Louisiana purchase; were revived by the Hartford convention, in 1814, and culminated, during the war with Great Britain, in sending commissioners to Washington to settle the terms for a peaceable separation of New England from the other States of the Union. He forgets to remind us and the country, that this present revolution began forty years ago, in the vehement, persistent, offensive, most irritating and unprovoked agitation of the slavery question in the North and West, from the time of the Missouri controversy, with some short intervals, down to the present hour. Sir, if his statement of the case be the whole truth, and wholly correct, then the Democratic party, and every member of it, and the Whig party, too, and its predecessors, have been guilty, for sixty years, of an unjust, unconstitutional, and most wicked policy in administering the affairs of the Government.
         But, sir, the President ignores totally the violent and long-continued denunciation of slavery and slaveholders, and especially since 1835 -- I appeal to Jackson's message for the date and proof -- until at last a political anti-slavery organization was formed in the North and West, which continued to gain strength year after year, till, at length, it had destroyed and usurped the place of the Whig party, and finally obtained control of every free State in the Union, and elected himself, through free State votes alone, to the Presidency of the United States. He chooses to pass over the fact that the party to which he thus owes his place and his present power of mischief, is wholly and totally a sectional organization; and, as such, condemned by Washington, by Jefferson, by Jackson, Webster, and Clay, and by all the founders and preservers of the Republic, and utterly inconsistent with the principles, or with the peace, the stability, or the existence even, of our Federal system. Sir, there never was an hour, from the organization of this sectional party, when it was not predicted by the wisest men and truest patriots, and when it ought not to have been known by every intelligent man in the country, that it must, sooner or later, precipitate a revolution, and the dissolution of the Union. The President forgets already that, on the 4th of March, he declared that the platform of that party was "a law unto him," by which he meant to be governed in his administration; and yet that platform announced that whereas there were two separate and distinct kinds of labor and forms of civilization in the two different sections of the Union, yet that the entire national domain, belonging in common to all the States, should be taken, possessed, and held by one section alone, and consecrated to that section which, by mere numerical superiority, had chosen the President, and now has, and for some years past has had, a majority in the Senate, as from the beginning of the Government it had also in the House. He omits, too, to tell the country and the world -- for he speaks, and we all speak now, to the world, and to posterity -- that he himself, and his prime minister, the Secretary of State, declared, three years ago, and have maintained ever since, that there was an "irrepressible conflict" between the two sections of this Union; that the Union could not endure part slave and part free; and that the whole power and influence of the Federal Government must henceforth be exerted to circumscribe and hem in slavery within its existing limits.
         And now, sir, how comes it that the President has forgotten to remind us, also, that when the party thus committed to the principle of deadly hate and hostility to the slave institutions of the South, and the men who had proclaimed the doctrine of the irrepressible conflict, and who, in the dilemma or alternative of this conflict, were resolved that "the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina, and the sugar plantations of Louisiana, should ultimately be tilled by free labor," had obtained power and place in the common Government of the States, the South, except one State, chose first to demand solemn constitutional guarantees for protection against the abuse of the tremendous power and patronage and influence of the Federal Government, for the purpose of securing the great end of the sectional conflict, before resorting to secession or revolution at all? Did he not know -- how could he be ignorant -- that, at the last session of Congress, every substantive proposition for adjustment and compromise, except that offered by the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Kellogg] -- and we all know, how it was received -- came from the South? Stop a moment, and let us see.
         The Committee of Thirty-three was moved for in this House by a gentleman from Virginia, the second day of the session, and received the vote of every Southern Representative present, except only the members from South Carolina, who declined to vote. In the Senate, the committee of thirteen was proposed by a Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Powell], and received the silent acquiescence of every Southern Senator present. The Crittenden propositions, too, were submitted also by another Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Crittenden], now a member of this House; a man, venerable for his years, loved for his virtues, distinguished for his services, honored for his patriotism; for four and forty years a Senator, or in other public office; devoted from the first hour of his manhood to the Union of these States; and who, though he himself proved his courage fifty years ago, upon the battlefield against the foreign enemies of his country, is now, thank God, still for compromise at home, to-day. Fortunate in a long and well-spent life of public service and private worth, he is unfortunate only that he has survived a Union, and, I fear, a Constitution, younger than himself.
         The border States propositions, also, were projected by a gentleman from Maryland, not now a member of this House, and presented by a gentleman from Tennessee [Mr. Etheridge], now the Clerk of this House. And yet all these propositions, coming thus from the South, were severally and repeatedly rejected by the almost united vote of the Republican party in the Senate and the House. The Crittenden propositions, with which Mr. Davis, now President of the Confederate States, and Mr. Toombs, his Secretary of State, both declared, in the Senate, that they would be satisfied, and for which every Southern Senator and Representative voted -- never, on any occasion, received one solitary vote from the Republican party in either House.
         The Adams or Corwin amendment, so-called -- reported from the Committee of Thirty-three, and the only substantive amendment proposed from the Republican side -- was but a bare promise that Congress should never be authorized to do what no sane man ever believed Congress would attempt to do -- abolish slavery in the States where it exists; and yet, even this proposition, moderate as it was, and for which every Southern member present voted -- except one -- was carried through this House by but one majority, after long and tedious delay, and with the utmost difficulty -- sixty-five Republican members, with the resolute and determined gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Hickman] at their head, having voted against it and fought against it to the very last.
         And not this only, but, as a part of the history of the last session, let me remind you that bills were introduced into this House, proposing to abolish and close up certain Southern ports of entry; to authorize the President to blockade the Southern coast, and to call out the militia, and accept the services of volunteers -- not for three years merely -- but without any limit as to either numbers or time, for the very purpose of enforcing the laws, collecting the revenue, and protecting the public property -- and were passed, vehemently and earnestly, in this House, prior to the arrival of the President in this city, and were then -- though seven States had seceded, and set up a government of their own -- voted down, postponed, thrust aside, or in some other way disposed of, sometimes by large majorities in this House, till, at last, Congress adjourned without any action at all. Peace, then, seemed to be the policy of all parties.
         Thus, sir, the case stood, at twelve o'clock on the 4th of March last, when, from the eastern portico of this capitol, and in the presence of twenty thousand of his countrymen, but enveloped in a cloud of soldiery, which no other American President ever saw, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office to support the Constitution, and delivered his inaugural -- a message, I regret to say, not written in the direct and straightforward language which becomes an American President and an American statesman, and which was expected from the plain, blunt, honest man of the North-west -- but with the forked tongue and crooked counsel of the New York politician leaving thirty millions of people in doubt whether it meant peace or war. But, whatever may have been the secret purpose and meaning of the inaugural, practically, for six weeks, the policy of peace prevailed; and they were weeks of happiness to the patriot, and prosperity to the country. Business revived; trade returned; commerce flourished. Never was there a fairer prospect before any people. Secession in the past, languished, and was spiritless, and harmless; secession in the future, was arrested, and perished. By overwhelming majorities, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Missouri -- all declared for the old Union, and every heart beat high with hope that, in due course of time, and through faith and patience and peace, and by ultimate and adequate compromise, every State could be restored to it. It is true, indeed, sir, that the Republican party, with great unanimity, and great earnestness and determination, had resolved against all conciliation and compromise. But, on the other hand, the whole Democratic party, and the whole Constitutional-Union party, were equally resolved that there should be no civil war, upon any pretext: and both sides prepared for an appeal to that great and final arbiter of all disputes in a free country -- the people.
         Sir, I do not propose to inquire, now, whether the President and his Cabinet were sincere and in earnest, and meant, really, to persevere to the end in the policy of peace; or whether, from the first, they meant civil war, and only waited to gain time till they were fairly seated in power, and had disposed, too, of that prodigious horde of spoilsmen and office-seekers which came down, at the first, like an avalanche upon them. But I do know that the people believed them sincere, and cordially ratified and approved of the policy of peace -- not as they subsequently responded to the policy of war, in a whirlwind of passion and madness -- but calmly and soberly, and as the result of their deliberate and most solemn judgment; and believing that civil war was absolute and eternal disunion, while secession was but partial and temporary, they cordially indorsed, also, the proposed evacuation of Sumter, and the other forts and public property within the seceded States. Nor, sir, will I stop, now, to explore the several causes which either led to a change in the apparent policy, or an early development of the original and real purposes of the Administration. But there are two which I can not pass by. And the first of these was party necessity, or the clamor of politicians, and especially of certain wicked, reckless, and unprincipled conductors of a partisan press. The peace policy was crushing out the Republican party. Under that policy, sir, it was melting away like snow before the sun. The general election in Rhode Island and Connecticut, and municipal elections in New York and in the western States, gave abundant evidence that the people were resolved upon the most ample and satisfactory Constitutional guarantees to the South, as the price of a restoration of the Union. And then it was, sir, that the long and agonizing howl of defeated and disappointed politicians came up before the Administration. The newspaper press teemed with appeals and threats to the President. The mails groaned under the weight of letters demanding a change of policy; while a secret conclave of the Governors of Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and other States, assembled here, promised men and money to support the President in the irrepressible conflict which they now invoked. And thus it was, sir, that the necessities of a party in the pangs of dissolution, in the very hour and article of death, demanding vigorous measures, which could result in nothing but civil war, renewed secession, and absolute and eternal disunion were preferred and hearkened to before the peace and harmony and prosperity of the whole country.
         But there was another and yet stronger impelling cause, without which this horrid calamity of civil war might have been postponed, and, perhaps, finally averted. One of the last and worst acts of a Congress which, born in bitterness and nurtured in convulsion, literally did those things which it ought not to have done, and left undone those things which it ought to have done, was the passage of an obscure, ill-considered, ill-digested, and unstatesmanlike high protective tariff act, commonly known as "The Morrill Tariff." Just about the same time, too, the Confederate Congress, at Montgomery, adopted our old tariff of 1857, which we had rejected to make way for the Morrill act, fixing their rate of duties at five, fifteen, and twenty per cent. lower than ours. The result was as inevitable as the laws of trade are inexorable. Trade and commerce -- and especially the trade and commerce of the West -- began to look to the South. Turned out of their natural course, years ago, by the canals and railroads of Pennsylvania and New York, and diverted eastward at a heavy cost to the West, they threatened now to resume their ancient and accustomed channels -- the water-courses -- the Ohio and the Mississippi. And political association and union, it was well known, must soon follow the direction of trade and interest. The city of New York, the great commercial emporium of the Union, and the North-west, the chief granary of the Union, began to clamor now, loudly, for a repeal of the pernicious and ruinous tariff. Threatened thus with the loss of both political power and wealth, or the repeal of the tariff, and, at last, of both, New England -- and Pennsylvania, too, the land of Penn, cradled in peace -- demanded, now, coercion and civil war, with all its horrors, as the price of preserving either from destruction. Ay, sir, Pennsylvania, the great key-stone of the arch of the Union, was willing to levy the whole weight of her iron upon that sacred arch, and crush it beneath the load. The subjugation of the South -- ay, sir, the subjugation of the South! -- I am not talking to children or fools; for there is not a man in this House fit to be a Representative here, who does not know that the South can not be forced to yield obedience to your laws and authority again, until you have conquered and subjugated her -- the subjugation of the South, and the closing up of her ports -- first, by force, in war, and afterward, by tariff laws, in peace -- was deliberately resolved upon by the East. And, sir, when once this policy was begun, these self-same motives of waning commerce, and threatened loss of trade, impelled the great city of New York, and her merchants and her politicians and her press -- with here and there an honorable exception -- to place herself in the very front rank among the worshipers of Moloch. Much, indeed, of that outburst and uprising in the North, which followed the proclamation of the 15th of April, as well, perhaps, as the proclamation itself, was called forth, not so much by the fall of Sumter -- an event long anticipated -- as by the notion that the "insurrection," as it was called, might be crushed out in a few weeks, if not by the display, certainly, at least, by the presence of an overwhelming force.
         These, sir, were the chief causes which, along with others, led to a change in the policy of the Administration, and, instead of peace, forced us, headlong, into civil war, with all its accumulated horrors.
         But, whatever may have been the causes or the motives of the act, it is certain that there was a change in the policy which the Administration meant to adopt, or which, at least, they led the country to believe they intended to pursue. I will not venture, now, to assert, what may yet, some day, be made to appear, that the subsequent acts of the Administration, and its enormous and persistent infractions of the Constitution, its high-minded usurpations of power, formed any part of a deliberate conspiracy to overthrow the present form of Federal-republican government, and to establish a strong centralized Government in its stead. No, sir; whatever their purposes now, I rather think that, in the beginning, they rushed, heedlessly and headlong into the gulf, believing that, as the seat of war was then far distant and difficult of access, the display of vigor in re-enforcing Sumter and Pickens, and in calling out seventy-five thousand militia, upon the firing of the first gun, and above all, in that exceedingly happy and original conceit of commanding the insurgent States to "disperse in twenty days," would not, on the one hand, precipitate a crisis, while, upon the other, it would satisfy its own violent partisans, and thus revive and restore the failing fortunes of the Republican party.
         I can hardly conceive, sir, that the President and his advisers could be guilty of the exceeding folly of expecting to carry on a general civil war by a mere posse comitatus of three-months militia. It may be, indeed, that, with wicked and most desperate cunning, the President meant all this as a mere entering-wedge to that which was to rive the oak asunder; or, possibly, as a test, to learn the public sentiment of the North and West. But however it may be, the rapid secession and movements of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, taking with them, as I have said, elsewhere, four millions and a half of people, immense wealth, inexhaustible resources, five hundred thousand fighting men, and the graves of Washington and Jackson, and bringing up, too, in one single day, the frontier from the Gulf to the Ohio and the Potomac, together with the abandonment, by the one side, and the occupation, by the other, of Harper's Ferry and the Norfolk navy-yard; and the fierce gust and whirlwind of passion in the North, compelled either a sudden waking-up of the President and his advisers to the frightful significancy of the act which they had committed, in heedlessly breaking the vase which imprisoned the slumbering demon of civil war, or else a premature but most rapid development of the daring plot to foster and promote secession, and then to set up a new and strong form of government in the States which might remain in the Union.
         But, whatever may have been the purpose, I assert here, to-day, as a Representative, that every principal act of the Administration since has been a glaring usurpation of power, and a palpable and dangerous violation of that very Constitution which this civil war is professedly waged to support. Sir, I pass by the proclamation of the 15th of April, summoning the militia -- not to defend this capital -- there is not a word about the capital in the proclamation, and there was then no possible danger to it from any quarter, but to retake and occupy forts and property a thousand miles off -- summoning, I say, the militia to suppress the so-called insurrection. I do not believe, indeed, and no man believed in February last, when Mr. Stanton, of Ohio, introduced the bill to enlarge the act of 1795, that that act ever contemplated the case of a general revolution, and of resistance by an organized government. But no matter. The militia thus called out, with a shadow, at least, of authority, and for a period extending one month beyond the assembling of Congress, were amply sufficient to protect the capital against any force which was then likely to be sent against it -- and the event has proved it -- and ample enough, also, to suppress the outbreak in Maryland. Every other principal act of the Administration might well have been postponed, and ought to have been postponed, until the meeting of Congress; or, if the exigencies of the occasion demanded it, Congress should forthwith have been assembled. What if two or three States should not have been represented, although even this need not have happened; but better this, a thousand times, than that the Constitution should be repeatedly and flagrantly violated, and public liberty and private right trampled under foot. As for Harper's Ferry and the Norfolk navy-yard, they rather needed protection against the Administration, by whose orders millions of property were wantonly destroyed, which was not in the slightest danger from any quarter, at the date of the proclamation.
         But, sir, Congress was not assembled at once, as Congress should have been, and the great question of civil war submitted to their deliberations. The Representatives of the States and of the people were not allowed the slightest voice in this, the most momentous question ever presented to any government. The entire responsibility of the whole work was boldly assumed by the Executive, and all the powers required for the purposes in hand were boldly usurped from either the States or the people, or from the legislative department; while the voice of the judiciary, that last refuge and hope of liberty, was turned away from with contempt.
         Sir, the right of blockade -- and I begin with it -- is a belligerent right, incident to a state of war, and it can not be exercised until war has been declared or recognized; and Congress alone can declare or recognize war. But Congress had not declared or recognized war. On the contrary, they had, but a little while before, expressly refused to declare it, or to arm the President with the power to make it. And thus the President, in declaring a blockade of certain ports in the States of the South, and in applying to it the rules governing blockades as between independent powers, violated the Constitution.
         But if, on the other hand, he meant to deal with these States as still in the Union, and subject to Federal authority, then he usurped a power which belongs to Congress alone -- the power to abolish and close up ports of entry; a power, too, which Congress had, also, but a few weeks before, refused to exercise. And yet, without the repeal or abolition of ports of entry, any attempt, by either Congress or the President, to blockade these ports, is a violation of the spirit, if not of the letter, of that clause of the Constitution which declares that "no preference shall be given, by any regulation of commerce or revenue, to the ports of one State over those of another."
         Sir, upon this point I do not speak without the highest authority. In the very midst of the South Carolina nullification controversy, it was suggested, that in the recess of Congress, and without a law to govern him, the President, Andrew Jackson, meant to send down a fleet to Charleston and blockade the port. But the bare suggestion called forth the indignant protest of Daniel Webster, himself the arch enemy of nullification, and whose brightest laurels were won in the three years' conflict in the Senate Chamber, with its ablest champions. In an address, in October, 1832, at Worcester, Massachusetts, to a National Republican convention -- it was before the birth, or christening, at least of the Whig party -- the great expounder of the Constitution, said:

We are told, sir, that the President will immediately employ the military force, and at once blockade Charleston. A military remedy -- a remedy by direct belligerent operation, has thus been suggested, and nothing else has been suggested, as the intended means of preserving the Union. Sir, there is no little reason to think that this suggestion is true. We can not be altogether unmindful of the past, and, therefore, we can not be altogether unapprehensive for the future. For one, sir, I raise my voice, beforehand, against the unauthorized employment of military power, and against superseding the authority of the laws, by an armed force, under pretense of putting down nullification. The President has no authority to blockade Charleston.

Jackson! Jackson, sir! the great Jackson! did not dare to do it without authority of Congress; but our Jackson of to-day, the little Jackson at the other end of the avenue, and the mimic Jacksons around him, do blockade, not only Charleston harbor, but the whole Southern coast, three thousand miles in extent, by a single stroke of the pen.
         "The President has no authority to employ military force till he shall be duly required" -- Mark the word: "required so to do by law and civil authorities. His duty is to cause the laws to be executed. His duty is to support the civil authority."
         As in the Merryman case, forsooth; but I shall recur to that hereafter:

His duty is, if the laws be resisted, to employ the military force of the country, if necessary, for their support and execution; but to do all this in compliance only with law and with decisions of the tribunals. If, by any ingenious devices, those who resist the laws escape from the reach of judicial authority, as it is now provided to be exercised, it is entirely competent to Congress to make such new provisions as the exigency of the case may demand.

Treason, sir, rank treason, all this to-day. And, yet, thirty years ago, it was true Union patriotism and sound constitutional law! Sir, I prefer the wisdom and stern fidelity to principle of the fathers.
         Such was the voice of Webster, and such too, let me add, the voice, in his last great speech in the Senate, of the Douglas whose death the land now mourns.
         Next after the blockade, sir, in the catalogue of daring executive usurpations, comes the proclamation of the 3d of May, and the orders of the War and Navy Departments in pursuance of it -- a proclamation and usurpation which would have cost any English sovereign his head at any time within the last two hundred years. Sir, the Constitution not only confines to Congress the right to declare war, but expressly provides that "Congress (not the President) shall have power to raise and support armies;" and to "provide and maintain a navy." In pursuance of this authority, Congress, years ago, had fixed the number of officers, and of the regiments, of the different kinds of service; and also, the number of ships, officers, marines, and seamen which should compose the navy. Not only that, but Congress has repeatedly, within the last five years, refused to increase the regular army. More than that still: in February and March last, the House, upon several test votes, repeatedly and expressly refused to authorize the President to accept the service of volunteers for the very purpose of protecting the public property, enforcing the laws, and collecting the revenue. And, yet, the President, of his own mere will and authority, and without the shadow of right, has proceeded to increase, and has increased, the standing army by twenty-five thousand men; the navy by eighteen thousand; and has called for, and accepted the services of, forty regiments of volunteers for three years, numbering forty-two thousand men, and making thus a grand army, or military force, raised by executive proclamation alone, without the sanction of Congress, without warrant of law, and in direct violation of the Constitution, and of his oath of office, of eighty-five thousand soldiers enlisted for three and five years, and already in the field. And, yet, the President now asks us to support the army which he has thus raised, to ratify his usurpations by a law ex post facto, and thus to make ourselves parties to our own degradation, and to his infractions of the Constitution. Meanwhile, however, he has taken good care not only to enlist the men, organize the regiments, and muster them into service, but to provide, in advance, for a horde of forlorn, worn-out, and broken-down politicians of his own party, by appointing, either by himself, or through the Governors of the States, major-generals, brigadier-generals, colonels, lieutenant-colonels, majors, captains, lieutenants, adjutants, quarter-masters, and surgeons, without any limit as to numbers, and without so much as once saying to Congress, "By your leave, gentlemen."
         Beginning with this wide breach of the Constitution, this enormous usurpation of the most dangerous of all powers -- the power of the sword -- other infractions and assumptions were easy; and after public liberty, private right soon fell. The privacy of the telegraph was invaded in the search after treason and traitors; although it turns out, significantly enough, that the only victim, so far, is one of the appointees and especial pets of the Administration. The telegraphic dispatches, preserved under every pledge of secrecy for the protection and safety of the telegraph companies, were seized and carried away without search-warrant, without probable cause, without oath, and without description of the places to be searched, or of the things to be seized, and in plain violation of the right of the people to be secure in their houses, persons, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. One step more, sir, will bring upon us search and seizure of the public mails; and, finally, as in the worst days of English oppression -- as in the times of the Russells and the Sydneys of English martyrdom -- of the drawers and secretaries of the private citizen; though even then tyrants had the grace to look to the forms of the law, and the execution was judicial murder, not military slaughter. But who shall say that the future Tiberius of America shall have the modesty of his Roman predecessor, in extenuation of whose character it is written by the great historian, avertit occulos, jussitque scelera non spectavit.
         Sir, the rights of property having been thus wantonly violated, it needed but a little stretch of usurpation to invade the sanctity of the person; and a victim was not long wanting. A private citizen of Maryland, not subject to the rules and articles of war -- not in a case arising in the land or naval forces, nor in the militia, when in actual service -- is seized in his own house, in the dead hour of the night, not by any civil officer, nor upon any civil process, but by a band of armed soldiers, under the verbal orders of a military chief, and is ruthlessly torn from his wife and his children, and hurried off to a fortress of the United States -- and that fortress, as if in mockery, the very one over whose ramparts had floated that star-spangled banner immortalized in song by the patriot prisoner, who, "by dawn's early light," saw its folds gleaming amid the wreck of battle, and invoked the blessings of heaven upon it, and prayed that it might long wave "o'er the land of the free, and the home of the brave."
         And, sir, when the highest judicial officer of the land, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, upon whose shoulders, "when the judicial ermine fell, it touched nothing not as spotless as itself," the aged, the venerable, the gentle, and pure-minded Taney, who, but a little while before, had administered to the President the oath to support the Constitution, and to execute the laws, issued, as by law it was his sworn duty to issue, the high prerogative writ of habeas corpus -- that great writ of right, that main bulwark of personal liberty, commanding the body of the accused to be brought before him, that justice and right might be done by due course of law, and without denial or delay, the gates of the fortress, its cannon turned towards, and in plain sight of the city, where the court sat, and frowning from its ramparts, were closed against the officer of the law, and the answer returned that the officer in command has, by the authority of the President, suspended the writ of habeas corpus. And thus it is, sir, that the accused has ever since been held a prisoner without due process of law; without bail; without presentment by a grand jury; without speedy, or public trial by a petit jury, of his own State or district, or any trial at all; without information of the nature and cause of the accusation; without being confronted with the witnesses against him; without compulsory process to obtain witnesses in his favor; and without the assistance of counsel for his defense. And this is our boasted American liberty? And thus it is, too, sir, that here, here in America, in the seventy-third year of the Republic, that great writ and security of personal freedom, which it cost the patriots and freemen of England six hundred years of labor and toil and blood to extort and to hold fast from venal judges and tyrant kings; written in the great charter of Runnymede by the iron barons, who made the simple Latin and uncouth words of the times, nullus liber homo, in the language of Chatham, worth all the classics; recovered and confirmed a hundred times afterward, as often as violated and stolen away, and finally, and firmly secured at last by the great act of Charles II, and transferred thence to our own Constitution and laws, has been wantonly and ruthlessly trampled in the dust. Ay, sir, that great writ, bearing, by a special command of Parliament, those other uncouth, but magic words, per statutum tricessimo primo Caroli secundi regis, which no English judge, no English minister, no king or queen of England, dare disobey; that writ, brought over by our fathers, and cherished by them, as a priceless inheritance of liberty, an American President has contemptuously set at defiance. Nay, more, he has ordered his subordinate military chiefs to suspend it at their discretion! And, yet, after all this, he cooly comes before this House and the Senate and the country, and pleads that he is only preserving and protecting the Constitution; and demands and expects of this House and of the Senate and the country their thanks for his usurpations; while, outside of this capitol, his myrmidons are clamoring for impeachment of the Chief Justice, as engaged in a conspiracy to break down the Federal Government.
         Sir, however much necessity -- the tyrant's plea -- may be urged in extenuation of the usurpations and infractions of the President in regard to public liberty, there can be no such apology or defense for his invasions of private right. What overruling necessity required the violation of the sanctity of private property and private confidence? What great public danger demanded the arrest and imprisonment, without trial by common law, of one single private citizen, for an act done weeks before, openly, and by authority of his State? If guilty of treason, was not the judicial power ample enough and strong enough for his conviction and punishment? What, then, was needed in his case, but the precedent under which other men, in other places, might become the victims of executive suspicion and displeasure?
         As to the pretense, sir, that the President has the Constitutional right to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, I will not waste time in arguing it. The case is as plain as words can make it. It is a legislative power; it is found only in the legislative article; it belongs to Congress only to do it. Subordinate officers have disobeyed it; General Wilkinson disobeyed it, but he sent his prisoners on for judicial trial; General Jackson disobeyed it, and was reprimanded by James Madison; but no President, nobody but Congress, ever before assumed the right to suspend it. And, sir, that other pretense of necessity, I repeat, can not be allowed. It had no existence in fact. The Constitution can not be preserved by violating it. It is an offense to the intelligence of this House, and of the country, to pretend that all this, and the other gross and multiplied infractions of the Constitution and usurpations of power were done by the President and his advisors out of pure love and devotion to the Constitution. But if so, sir, then they have but one step further to take, and declare, in the language of Sir Boyle Roche, in the Irish House of Commons, that such is the depth of their attachment to it, that they are prepared to give up, not merely a part, but the whole of the Constitution, to preserve the remainder. And yet, if indeed this pretext of necessity be well founded, then let me say, that a cause which demands the sacrifice of the Constitution and of the dearest securities of property, liberty, and life, can not be just; at least, it is not worth the sacrifice.
         Sir, I am obliged to pass by for want of time, other grave and dangerous infractions and usurpations of the President since the 4th of March. I only allude casually to the quartering of soldiers in private houses without the consent of the owners, and without any manner having been prescribed by law; to the subversion in a part, at least, of Maryland of her own State Government and of the authorities under it; to the censorship over the telegraph, and the infringement, repeatedly, in one or more of the States, of the right of the people to keep and to bear arms for their defense. But if all these things, I ask, have been done in the first two months after the commencement of this war, and by men not military chieftains, and unused to arbitrary power, what may we not expect to see in three years, and by the successful heroes of the fight? Sir, the power and rights of the States and the people, and of their Representatives, have been usurped; the sanctity of the private house and of private property has been invaded; and the liberty of the person wantonly and wickedly stricken down; free speech, too, has been repeatedly denied; and all this under the plea of necessity. Sir, the right of petition will follow next -- nay, it has already been shaken; the freedom of the press will soon fall after it; and let me whisper in your ear, that there will be few to mourn over its loss, unless, indeed, its ancient high and honorable character shall be rescued and redeemed from its present reckless mendacity and degradation. Freedom of religion will yield too, at last, amid the exultant shouts of millions, who have seen its holy temples defiled, and its white robes of a former innocency trampled now under the polluting hoofs of an ambitious and faithless or fanatical clergy. Meantime national banks, bankrupt laws, a vast and permanent public debt, high tariffs, heavy direct taxation, enormous expenditures, gigantic and stupendous peculation, anarchy first, and a strong government afterward -- no more State lines, no more State governments, and a consolidated monarchy or vast centralized military despotism must all follow in the history of the future, as in the history of the past they have, centuries ago, been written. Sir, I have said nothing, and have time to say nothing now, of the immense indebtedness and the vast expenditures which have already accrued, nor of the folly and mismanagement of the war so far, nor of the atrocious and shameless peculations and frauds which have disgraced it in the State governments and the Federal Government from the beginning. The avenging hour for all these will come hereafter, and I pass by them now.
         I have finished now, Mr. Chairman, what I proposed to say at this time upon the message of the President. As to my own position in regard to this most unhappy civil war, I have only to say that I stand to-day just where I stood upon the 4th of March last; where the whole Democratic party, and the whole Constitutional Union party, and a vast majority, as I believe, of the people of the United States stood too. I am for peace, speedy, immediate, honorable peace, with all its blessings. Others may have changed -- I have not. I question not their motives nor quarrel with their course. It is vain and futile for them to question or to quarrel with me. My duty shall be discharged -- calmly, firmly, quietly, and regardless of consequences. The approving voice of conscience void of offense, and the approving judgment which shall follow "after some time be past," these, God help me, are my trust and my support.
         Sir, I have spoken freely and fearlessly to-day, as became an American Representative and an American citizen; one firmly resolved, come what may, not to lose his own Constitutional liberties, nor to surrender his own Constitutional rights in the vain effort to impose these rights and liberties upon ten millions of unwilling people. I have spoken earnestly, too, but yet not as one unmindful of the solemnity of the scenes which surround us upon every side to-day. Sir, when the Congress of the United States assembled here on the 3rd of December, 1860, just seven months ago, the Senate was composed of sixty-six Senators, representing the thirty-three States of the Union, and this House of two hundred and thirty-seven members -- every State being present. It was a grand and solemn spectacle -- the ambassadors of three and thirty sovereignties and thirty-one millions of people, the mightiest republic on earth, in general Congress assembled. In the Senate, too, and this House, were some of the ablest and most distinguished statesmen of the country; men whose names were familiar to the whole country -- some of them destined to pass into history. The new wings of the capitol had then but just recently been finished, in all their gorgeous magnificence, and, except a hundred marines at the navy-yard, not a soldier was within forty miles of Washington.
         Sir, the Congress of the United States meets here again to-day; but how changed the scene! Instead of thirty-four States, twenty-three only, one less than the number forty years ago, are here, or in the other wing of the capitol. Forty-six Senators and a hundred and seventy-three Representatives constitute the Congress of the now United States. And of these, eight Senators and twenty-four Representatives, from four States only, linger here yet as deputies from that great South which, from the beginning of the Government, contributed so much to mold its policy, to build up its greatness, and to control its destinies. All the other States of that South are gone. Twenty-two Senators and sixty-five Representatives no longer answer to their names. The vacant seats are, indeed, still here; and the escutcheons of their respective States look down now solemnly and sadly from these vaulted ceilings. But the Virginia of Washington and Henry and Madison, of Marshall and Jefferson, of Randolph and Monroe, the birthplace of Clay, the mother of States and of Presidents; the Carolinas of Pinckney and Sumter and Marion, of Calhoun and Macon; and Tennessee, the home and burial-place of Jackson; and other States, too, once most loyal and true, are no longer here. The voices and the footsteps of the great dead of the past two ages of the Republic linger still -- it may be in echo -- along the stately corridors of this capitol; but their descendants, from nearly one-half of the States of the Republic, will meet with us no more within these marble halls. But in the parks and lawns, and upon the broad avenues of this spacious city, seventy thousand soldiers have supplied their places; and the morning drum-beat from a score of encampments, within sight of this beleaguered capitol, give melancholy warning to the Representatives of the States and of the people, that amid arms the laws are silent.
         Sir, some years hence -- I would fain hope some months hence, if I dare -- the present generation will demand to know the cause of all this; and, some ages hereafter, the grand and impartial tribunal of history will make solemn and diligent inquest of the authors of this terrible revolution.

---

This article was extracted from Clement Laird Vallandigham, Abolition, the Union, and the Civil War (Columbus, Ohio: J. Walter and Company, 1863).

The Gettysburg Address: Inventing a New Nation

Few actors in history have been hallowed in as many points of the political compass as Abraham Lincoln. During the 1930s, portraits of Lincoln appeared at New York City rallies of American fascists and in the publications of American Communists. He was also the favourite of the most reactionary industrialists and the most advanced liberals of the time. «Getting Right with Lincoln», as the historian David Donald has described it, has been requisite for all political elements in the United States. (1)
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is widely regarded as the definitive description and rationale of American nationhood and is the cornerstone of his fame. It has been memorized and declaimed by generations of schoolchildren. Its cadenced phrases are part of the American vernacular and have moved millions around the world.
One might wonder why this short and rather abstract composition, hardly remarked upon at the time it was given at Gettysburg a few months after the great battle there, has acheived such importance. Part of the answer is surely Lincoln's great rhetorical skill. In the Gettysburg Address (and other orations) he performs successfully the difficult feat of having it both ways. He appears in the famous brief oration as both the conservator of the sacred old Union and the herald of «a new birth of freedom». Rhetorically, he encompasses right and left, the revered past and the longed-for ideal future.
Santification of the Address has not gone entirely unchallenged in America, however. The iconoclastic Henry Louis Mencken, writing in 1920, described Lincoln as «the American solar myth, the chief butt of American credulity and sentimentality». Of the Gettysburg Address, Mencken wrote:

It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – «that government of the people, by the people, for the people», should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. (2)

Edgar Lee Masters, a poet who immortalized his and Lincoln's home region of Illinois in Spoon River Anthology, was so troubled by the Lincoln legacy that he devoted an entire book to it (1931), Of the Address, Masters wrote:

Lincoln carefully avoided one half of the American story. […] The Gettysburg oration, therefore, remains a prose poem, but in the inferior sense that one must not inquire into its truth. […] One must read it apart from the facts. […] Lincoln dared not face the facts at Gettysburg. […] He was unable to deal realistically with the history of his country, even if the occasion had been one where the truth was acceptable to the audience. Thus we have in the Gettysburg Address that refusal of the truth which is written all over the American character and its expressions. The war then being waged was not glorious, it was brutal and hateful and mean minded. (3)

Mencken and Masters were reflecting, in part, revulsion at the American entry into World War I, which had been blessed by Lincolnian rhetoric as a crusade «to save the world for democracy». (4)
«Difficult to imagine anything more untrue». «Refusal of the truth».
These are strong charges. Coming from a poet and a cultural critic, rather than from patriotic orators, political advocates, or nationalist historians, they deserve consideration.
One would think that the Address should be considered less important and less definitive than the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. These were, after all, not just the words of one man, but solemn acts of the whole American people. Indeed important events in world history. But, in fact, the Declaration has come to be
perceived and valued in American public discourse wholly through the interpretation that Lincoln put upon it at Gettysburg. The Declaration has been absorbed into the Address. The Declaration itself is seldom read beyond the first sentences and Americans are often surprised to see what it actually says and to have pointed out what it actually signalled in historical events.
«Four score and seven years ago», a «new nation» was «brought forth» (note Lincoln's biblical and almost mystical language). This new nation, «conceived in liberty», had been dedicated to a «proposition» of equality. By this formulation, since the new nation was «brought forth» in 1776, the Constitution adopted in 1787-1789 is merely an unfolding of the «proposition» in the Declaration. The Declaration and the Constitution are now conflated. The Constitution is merely the implementation of the Declaration – subservient to the proposition to which the new nation had already been dedicated. (5)
The two documents actually do not depend on or convey any dedication of a people to equality, either in text or context. They reflect, for the most part, the language and spirit of Anglo-American legal and parliamentary traditions. The Declaration created no new nation. It was an agreed-upon statement of why the thirteen united colonies «are and of right ought to be, free and independent states».
Its operative premise is not the equality of all men but that governments should rest upon «the consent of the governed». It was a Declaration of Independence, not a Declaration of the Rights of Man, having more in common with Magna Carta than with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What the Constitution established might in some sense be called a nation, but it was customarily referred to before Lincoln (and even in Lincoln's earlier public documents) as a «Union».
Something had happened to the Declaration between the American founding and Lincoln at Gettysburg – the French Revolution. The transition was perfectly illustrated by Karl Marx, who in January 1865 wrote an address in praise of Lincoln for an “International Conference of Workers”. Marx described the American war as a contest between «the labor of the emigrant» and the agrression of «the slave driver» and lamented that an evil rebellion had sprung up in the «one great democratic republic whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued». (6)
(A different European reaction to the American war occurred in the same month that Lincoln gave his Address. Father John B. Bannon, chaplain in the Confederate Army, had a series of audiences with Pius IX. Father Bannon emphasized the justice and conservatism of the Southern cause, the religious devotion of the Southern people, and their friendly reception of Catholics in contrast to the bitterly hostile Protestant North. His efforts resulted in a kindly papal letter to President Jefferson Davis and a mission to Ireland to preach against Northern recruiting of cannon fodder there, something which is glimpsed in the recent film Gangs of New York) (7)
Lincoln begins the Address with language that is directly patterned on the King James Bible so familiar to his audience. «Four score and seven years» rather than "eighty-seven"; «brought forth» rather than "established". Thus he invokes the ancient and sacred: the American Union as a special manifestation of God's plan for the improvement of humanity.
The first Puritan settlers of Massachusetts had named themselves «a City upon a Hill» and «a beacon to all mankind».
As historians have shown abundantly in recent decades, this theme, projected rhetorically to an ideal America, was already well-developed in the post-Puritan culture of the North, especially in New England and New Englander settled areas of the West. (8) It is amply displayed in such highbrow places as the writings of Emerson and in such lowbrow places as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The notion of the special role of the United States in history has become a powerful and lasting motivation and rationalization. It has appeared in countless sermons down to the present day and in the rhetoric of President George W. Bush in the 21st century.
Lincoln thus, in practical terms, rhetorically nailed down one of the the two most important and dedicated of his constituencies and one of the two most forceful ideological elements of the North. The second, like the first, disdained the Jeffersonian limited government ideals of the Confederacy and of Lincoln's Northern opponents. The second group, which Lincoln must capture and merge with the first to make a success of the Address, is made up of Marx's “emigrants”.
Historians have long noted the influence of German refugees from the revolutions of 1848 in the founding of the Republican Party and in Lincoln's election, but usually without allowing its true weight.
Between 1840 and 1860 the total free American population increased by one-third from immigrants alone – including at least a million and a half Germans. These settled mainly in Lincoln's Midwest and in 1860 made up from 8 percent to 17 per cent of the population of the Midwestern states. (9)
Lincoln recognized this constituency early on by secretly purchasing a German language newspaper and subsidizing others. German delegates were prominent in the convention that nominated Lincoln and in the campaign orators who stimulated the grassroots on his behalf. It appears that these immigrants tipped the balance, swinging the traditionally Democratic Midwest into the Republican column and making Lincoln's election possible.
The German revolutionaries brought with them an aggressive drive to realize in America the goals that had been defeated in their homeland. Their drive was toward «revolution and national unification» in the words of the Party of the Left at the Frankfurt Convention. The most prominent among them, Carl Schurz, expressed disappointment at the non-ideological nature of American politics and vowed to change that. (10)
The Germans brought into to the American regional conflict and into Republican rhetoric a diagnosis of class conflict (crusade to overthrow the "slave drivers") and a revolutionary elan. They also contributed out of proportion to the Northern military effort. Freidrich Engels remarked: «Had it not been for the experienced soldiers who had entered America after the European revolution, especially from Germany, the organization of the Union army would have taken still longer than it did». (11)
Thus Lincoln consolidated his base, justified and sanctified the Northern cause and victory both as preservation of the hallowed old and a birth of the new. He created an image of the United States that has had and continues to have incalculable effects on American public life and, indeed, on the world.
That Lincoln's accomplishment was a revolution and not a «preservation of the Union» (whether one finds the revolution pleasing or troubling) is beautifully illustrated by an incident in Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War, the Civil War memoir of Confederate General Richard Taylor. Taylor was a learned man acquainted in the highest circles, an able though not a professional soldier. He also possessed an active sense of humour.
In May 1865, after the surrender of the main Confederate armies and the capture of his brother-in-law Jefferson Davis, Taylor found himself in command of a small army in Alabama. He opened surrender negotiations with the nearest Union commander, General Canby. With one staff officer Taylor went to meet Canby in a hand-driven railroad sled under a flag of truce. The formalities of capitulation completed, courteous federal officers invited the hungry Confederates to join them at dinner. Taylor relates what happened next:

There was, as ever, a skeleton at the feast, in the person of a general officer who had recently left Germany to become a citizen and soldier of the United States. This person, with the strong accent and idioms of the Fatherland, comforted me by assurances that we of the South would speedily recognize our ignorance and errors […] and rejoice in the results of the war. […] I apologized meekly for my ignorance, on the ground that my ancestors had come from England to Virginia in 1608, and, in the short intervening period of two hundred and fifty-odd years, had found no time to transmit to me correct ideas of the duties of American citizenship. Moreover, my grandfather, commanding the 9th Virginia regiment in our Revolutionary army, had assisted in the defeat and capture of the Hessian mercenaries at Trenton, and I lamented that he had not, by association with these worthies, enlightedned his understanding. My friend smiled blandly, and assured me of his willingness to instruct me. (12)

Modestly, Taylor did not mention that his father had been President of the United States.

Clyde N. Wilson

Clyde N. Wilson, Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, is the author or editor of over thirty books, most recently From Union to Empire: Essays in the Jeffersonian Tradition. He recently completed editing a 28-volume series of The Papers of John C. Calhoun. He is a contributing editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and Director of the League of the South Institute for Southern Culture and History.

Sherman in the Swamp

by Joseph R. Stromberg

  

FLORIDA IN THE EMPIRE

I would like to add a little footnote to Tom DiLorenzo’s recent treatment of General William Tecumseh Sherman and the Indians. This "footnote" is actually a "prequel" to Sherman’s famous "march" through Georgia and South Carolina, during the late Unpleasantness, and his later Indian-fighting activities after that not very "civil" war. It is my duty as a patriotic Floridian to describe this part of the Sherman saga and, anyway, it helps us better understand his attitude toward warfare.

I refer of course to Sherman’s unhappy days in the subtropics, 1840–1841. Of course putting those days – which added up to just under a year and a half – in context requires me to say a few things about the Second Seminole War (1835–1842). Now, as far back as the American Revolution, American leaders coveted Florida – then under British rule. This was for obvious reasons of political geography. Alas, it was not to be, and the Treaty of Paris (1783), which concluded the Revolutionary War, saw Florida handed back to Spain, after twenty years of British rule.

By this time, secessionist elements of the Creek nation, the Seminoles, had established a presence in Florida. Already present, too, were backcountry Scots-Irish frontiersmen, chiefly from Georgia, who had infiltrated down into northern Florida in increasing numbers. These were "los crackeres," whom the outgoing Spanish Governor, Don Vicente Manuel de Zéspedes y Velasco, described in a memo to his successor in 1790. He could only compare these hardy Anglo-Celtic intruders to the nomadic Berbers, just across the water from Spain.¹

Sundry forces were in play, that sealed Florida’s political fate. One was the constant leakage of runaway slaves into Florida. These runaways, who "went Indian," represented a loss of property to planters, but also menaced the system of slavery by their bad example.

The Spanish administration in Florida was not up to solving the problems of escaping slaves and cross-border raids by Seminoles to the satisfaction of the United States. As the Seminoles saw it, they had never ceded any lands by treaty, whatever the Creeks might have done or said. The US and Spain might imagine that some kind of line ran through the lands that Seminoles occupied, but this did not matter much to the latter. Soon enough, General Andrew Jackson, under color of orders to punish raiders, effectively expelled Spanish power from Florida in 1817–1818, in what is called the First Seminole War.

John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State under President James Monroe, wrote a famous White Paper justifying Jackson’s actions – a paper in which handled the truth with great economy. To regularize the international situation, Adams negotiated the Adams-Onís, or Transcontinental Treaty, concluded in 1822. Leaving the vexatious matter of Texas to one side, he secured Spain’s agreement with respect to the boundaries of the Louisiana Territory, thereby giving the US a wide window on the Pacific. This was urgent to those like Adams who were already looking ahead to American domination of the China trade.²

THE SEMINOLE MODE OF PRODUCTION

With Florida safely in US hands, settlers trickled in, mostly from nearby states, and a cotton and plantation economy sprang up in formerly undeveloped central areas. This was the rise of Middle Florida. Under the territorial government, the usual causal suspects – land speculators with political pull, less-than-honest government contractors, and the like – did their thing, though perhaps no more than on any frontier of expansion.³

Of course the Indians remained. In addition, territorial government was not a cure-all for the problem of slaves running off to live with Indians under some relation of dependency.

George Kos writes:

"Blacks living with the Seminoles became a point of contention for whites because the Seminole system of slavery was not as harsh or rigid as the Anglo-American system…. A Seminole was more a patron than a master, for the Seminole slave system was akin to tenant farming."⁴

Kenneth Wiggins Porter writes:

"The Negroes lived in separate villages of well-built houses, raised crops of corn, sweet potatoes, other vegetables, and even cotton, and possessed herds of livestock; their masters, or rather protectors, never presumed to meddle with any of this property so long as they received a reasonable ‘tribute’ at harvest and butchering time."⁵

Major General Edmund Pendleton Gaines characterized this population as the Seminoles’ "black vassals and allies."⁶

Whatever the exact nature of these relations of production (so to speak), the "Indian Negroes" evidently saw themselves as freer, when living alongside the Seminoles, than in their former location. It is a case of what an Austrian School economist would call demonstrated preference.

No one was getting rich in the Seminole territories by hunting, fishing, and small-scale agriculture, although some parties – as far down the Gulf Coast as Pine Island – had a kind of informal free trade relationship with Havana. From the standpoint of wealth, no one had much reason to envy the Seminoles their way of life. Some did want their lands, however.

In addition, armed clashes occurred between Indians and settlers from time to time, and sorting out the right and wrong of those would take a long time. To make matters worse, runaway slaves had friends and relations working on plantations, which added to planters’ headaches. Uniquely in US history, here was a frontier where slaves could escape to friends and allies – a circumstance which undermined the peculiar institution itself.

These problems soon intersected with Indian Removal – a policy meditated upon as far back as Thomas Jefferson’s administrations, and which was now going forward under President Jackson, the old Indian-fighter. US Indian agents urged sundry "treaties" upon Seminole leaders in 1833. As happened in many such situations, large numbers of Indians denied that those signing the agreements had spoken for them. While a majority of Seminoles were in fact "removed" to the Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), a sizeable minority of militants chose to stand and fight. Allied with them were the "Indian Negroes" who had little choice but to fight, given the alternatives.

There is no space here to sketch in detail the Second Seminole War, which broke out in 1835. Suffice it to say that settlements were raided and innocents killed on either side, with small numbers of Seminoles and Indian Negroes able to tie up large numbers of regular US troops and territorial militia. It was not a big war, by any standard, but it proved very expensive for the US taxpayer.

SHERMAN IN THE WANING WAR

We come now to Lieutenant Sherman, who served in the last phase of the war, arriving at St. Augustine in October 1840, and then going on to Fort Pierce. From this small outpost, the unit with which Sherman served would patrol up and down the coast, raiding inland when they found signs of Indians. Fights were small-scale, and captives would be sent to St. Augustine.

Sherman soon came to despise the local militia, which was "‘good for nothing’ except to protect their homes and immediate surroundings."⁷ This is typical of regulars, who never seem to realize that this is precisely what militias are for. On the other hand, Sherman was no dummy when it came to grasping the war’s origins. As he put it, US Indian wars followed a pattern: "A treaty for removal is formed by a few who represent themselves as the whole; the time comes, and none present themselves. The Government orders force to be used; the troops in the territory commence, but are so few that they all get massacred. The cowardly inhabitants, instead of rallying, desert their homes and sound the alarm-call for assistance. An army supposed to be strong enough is sent, seeks and encounters the enemy at a place selected by the latter, gets a few hundred killed. The Indians retreat, scatter, and are safe. This may be repeated ad infinitum."⁸

This was a good summary; Sherman was getting the hang of guerrilla warfare. With commanders and tactics being changed repeatedly around him, Sherman persevered in his part of the war. His unit, he bragged, "had caught more Indians and destroyed more property in a fair method than the rest of the army."⁹ One might well believe him.

As Jane F. Lancaster writes, "Sherman gradually developed his own ideas about war. He thought that the War Department should fill Florida with troops, declare martial law, and fight to exterminate the enemy. According to Sherman, this was the most economical plan. The ‘present method will not do,’ he declared. ‘Experience has shown it – persons who have not seen this country should not blame the army…."¹⁰

Lancaster concludes that "Sherman also learned the difficulties associated with using volunteer armies and with invading a country and destroying resources to defeat the enemy."¹¹ Indeed he did. The notions of total war appropriate to Indian wars stayed with him in his big war and afterwards. There is some kind of post-colonial theme in here, but I will leave it alone.

Counter-insurgency, winning the war on "the most economical plan," war against the other side’s means of subsistence – I think we have seen these themes played out in more than one US war.

UNSATISFACTORY OUTCOMES FOR SOME

Such were the lessons Sherman – seconded by Max Boot, had he been there – took from this little war. What lessons might we take from it? There seem to be several.

One might be: don’t seize a province before you can populate it with settlers who will defend it themselves. (This was the basis of Lincoln’s famous objections to the Mexican War: conquest of those territories was premature.) Another might be: sort out the other side’s system of representation before you conjure up any "treaties" allegedly binding on all of them. Don’t get drawn into a war with guerrillas unless you don’t mind running up enormous costs. In Florida, a couple thousand insurgents (at the most) exploited favorable terrain and held down US forces for seven years of sporadic fighting and raiding, all at a cost of twenty million dollars, back when that was real money.

One oddity was that, given the extensive coastline, the Navy played an important role in this Indian war, in a kind of microscopic preview of Vietnam.¹²

Another lesson might well be to have political goals that are consistent with one another. That was a real problem in the Second Seminole War. In this war, the short-run interests of settler-planters had to be sacrificed to larger goals. General Thomas S. Jesup cut the Gordian knot in this way: to encourage "Indian Negroes" to surrender, he had to certify them as "property" of the Seminoles – to be sent west. Planters able to prove claims of ownership received federal money in lieu of their servants. This was a bit irregular, but it worked well enough.¹³

As for the Seminoles who refused to go west, they won effective freedom to live in the lower half of the state. Despite persistent efforts to remove them, including another small war in the 1850s, a minority of Seminoles retreated further into the swamps and "rivers" (where alligators live and where, somewhat later, Mr. Watson¹⁴ was famously killed) and outlasted all their foes except for the climate itself. Whether or not the EPA can get them for living in wetlands, I cannot say.

At the end of the war, General Walker K. Armistead complained of the ingratitude of the white Floridians. On the other hand, many of the latter were glad enough to see the Army go.¹⁵

A BIG PICTURE ALMOST TOO BIG TO CONTEMPLATE

Recurring to the beginning of the whole business – Jackson’s seizure of Florida and John Quincy Adams’s rationalization of it – William Earl Weeks writes that "the executive branch of the government emerged from the Monroe presidency with substantially greater power than was envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The expansion of presidential power represented by Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase was augmented considerably during Monroe’s two terms. In several key respects it can be said that Monroe’s administration marked the birth of the ‘Imperial Presidency.’"¹⁶

Congress acquiesced in Monroe’s and Adams’s forward policies and the "de facto military conquest of Florida definitively established that undeclared war would be a foreign policy tool available to the president." No later president "seriously believed that the international state system could be based on any foundation other than force and violence." War thus became "a central part of the national mythology and an indispensable cultural bonding agent" – interwoven with the messianic themes of "virtue, mission, and destiny."¹⁷

Anyone who is looking for the decisive turn toward full executive freedom to make undeclared war need not wait for the Mexican affair. Florida was first. And there it was that Sherman had time to reflect on the characteristic methods of such wars, when he wasn’t otherwise busy, raising chickens and catching green turtles at Fort Pierce.

One could brood a bit on this, but all this institutional drift and other strife did at least make possible that wonderful fiddle tune, "The Orange Blossom Special," once the locomotive of history took material form. That’s worth a little something.

Notes:

1. James A. Lewis, "Cracker – Spanish Florida Style," Florida Historical Quarterly, 63: 2 (October 1984), pp. 184-204.
2. See William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), pp. 127-145. For a rather caustic account, see Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian Hating and Empire Building (New York: Schocken Books, 1990), pp. 103-116.
3. See Canter Brown, Jr., "The Florida Crisis of 1826-1827 and the Second Seminole War," Florida Historical Quarterly, 73: 4 (April 1995), esp. pp. 421-428.
4. George Kos, "Blacks and the Seminole Removal Debate, 1821-1835," Florida Historical Quarterly, 68: 1 (July 1989), p. 58.
5. Kenneth Wiggins Porter, "Negroes and the Seminole War," Journal of Southern History, 30: 4 (November 1964), p. 428.
6. Quoted, ibid.
7. Jane F. Lancaster, "William Tecumseh Sherman’s Introduction to War, 1840-1842: Lesson for Action," Florida Historical Quarterly, 72: 1 (July 1993), pp. 65-66.
8. Ibid., p. 65.
9. Ibid., p. 69.
10. Ibid., p. 62.
11. Ibid., p. 72.
12. For this comparison, see Charlton W. Tebeau and William F. Marina, A History of Florida, 3^rd edition (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1999), p. 154, as well as the whole chapter (11): "The Wars of Indian Removal," pp. 137-156.
13. On Jesup’s pragmatic solution, see Porter, "Negroes and the Seminole War," pp. 444-446.
14. Peter Matthiessen, Killing Mister Watson (New York: Random House, 1990).
15. James M. Denham, "‘Some Prefer the Seminoles’: Violence and Disorder Among Soldiers and Settlers in the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842," Florida Historical Quarterly, 70: 1 (July 1991), pp. 38-54.
16. Weeks, John Quincy Adams, p. 181.
17. Ibid., pp. 181-184.

• LIFE & STYLE
• AUGUST 28, 2009, 10:42 P.M. ET

The Torching of Atlanta

A vow to 'make Georgia howl' proved to be a Civil War turning point

By WINSTON GROOM