Quotes from the book


Facts and Falsehoods concerning the War on the South 1861-1865


George Edmonds, Spence Hall, 1904

* * *
"Amid the universal din of praise that it has become the fashion to sing of Lincoln, only the student remembers the real facts, only the student knows not only that the Lincoln of the popular imagination of today bears little or no resemblance to the real Lincoln, but that the deification of Lincoln was planned and carried out by the members of his own party, by men who but a few short hours before Booth's bullet did its deadly work at Ford's theater, were reviling him as a buffoon, a coarse, vulgar jester. History affords no stranger spectacle than this, that today, nearly forty years after his death, the American people, North and South, have come to regard a lmost as a god a man who, when living, and up to the very hour of his death, was looked upon with contempt by nearly every man of his own party who intimately knew him, even by members of his Cabinet, by Senators, Congressmen, preachers and plain citizens."
[Facts and Falsehoods, p.2]

* * *

""For days and nights after the President's death it was considered treason to be seen in public with a smile on your face. Men who ventured to doubt the ineffable purity and saintliness of Lincoln's character, were pursued by mobs of men, beaten to death with paving stones, or strung up by the neck to lamp posts until dead."
[idem p. 10]

* * *

"At that time, as all through the dreadful four years' war, the word "traitor" was by Republicans only applied to men who did not advocate the war of conquest on the South. The slightest word indicating a belief that the war was not just or was unnecessarily cruel, was enough to brand a man as a traitor deserving a dungeon cell. Among the distinguished men who distrusted Lincoln's ability, who scorned and reviled him, were Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, Secretary of State Seward. Fremont. Senators Sumner, Trumbull. Ben Wade, of Ohio, Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, Thaddeus Stevens. Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phil- lips. Winter Davis, Horace Greeley, Chandler of Michigan. and hosts of others- Yet all of these (with the exception of Greeley) immediately after the apotheosis ceremony deemed it for the good of their party and themselves to bury out of sight every "venomous detraction" they had lavished on the living President and forthwith to put themselves into a reverential attitude toward the dead man and force upon the world the belief that Lincoln had been their wise and trusted ruler, their guide, their head, their Moses who had led them out of the awful Wilderness of War. So far as I can discover. Greeley was the only Republican who did not make a sudden jump from distrust and contempt to adoration."
[idem p. 11]

* * *

"On an official visit to Washington, February 23, 1863, Richard H. Dana wrote Thomas Lathrop as follows: "I see no hope but in the army ; the lack of respect for the President in all parties is unconcealed. The most striking thing is the absence of personal loyalty to the President. It does not exist. He has no admirers. If a convention were held tomorrow he would not get the vote of a single State. He does not act or talk or feel like the ruler of an empire. He seems to be fonder of details than of principles, fonder of personal questions than of weightier matters of empire. He likes rather to talk and tell stories with all sorts of people who come to him for all sorts of purposes, than to give his mind to the many duties of his great post. This is the feeling of his Cabinet. He has a kind of shrewd common sense, slip-shod, low-leveled honesty that made him a good Western lawyer, but he is an unutterable calamity to us where he is. Only the army can save us." This was the way Mr. Dana and many other Republicans saw Mr. Lincoln before the apotheosis ceremony. "
[idem p.13]

* * *

"Lamon gives the same account of Lincoln's political character. Lamon speaks of Lincoln's "burning ambition for distinction," which never abated, never ceased till life ceased. Yet neither Herndon or Lamon even hint that any higher, less selfish motive than desire to lift himself in the world inspired Lincoln's struggle for office. We are not told that Lincoln had plans or dreamed dreams that if he attained high place he would use it for the benefit of unfortunate humanity, of the downtrodden. Since Lincoln's death his apotheosizers attribute high motives to him, but there is no proof. Those who best knew him saw no such motives, and, in fact, themselves did not seem to know such motives were desirable or expected. Modern Republicans call Lincoln the "martyr" President, and say "he fell a martyr in the cause of negro freedom." Those who well knew him assert he was wholly indiflferent to the fate of the negroes. Piatt testifies that Lincoln "had no more sympathy for the negro race than he had for the horse he worked or the hog he killed." In all history I know of no public man who possessed less of the stuff martyrs are made of than Lincoln. Was ever a martyr "eager for worldly honors?" Did any man with three drops of martyr blood in his heart deem "popularity the greatest good in life?" Would any man, zealous in the cause of negro freedom, run out of the town to avoid speaking on the subject? Self-seeking politicians are too common for one to wonder at Mr. Lincoln's self-seeking nature; such traits might be passed quietly by but for the fact that he is held up before the youth of this country as the model man whom they must emulate and revere."
[idem p.44]

* * *

"The customs of civilized people forbid, in wars, the destruction of growing vines and crops, and the wanton burning of private homes. These customs or laws were trampled under foot by the Republican party and its invading legions, and Lincoln exultantly congratulated his generals for the cruel work they did. The generals of the army were expressly ordered to destroy everything, to make the Southland a desert waste. While Sheridan was engaged in this remorseless work, Grant telegraphed him. "Do all the damage you can. Destroy the crops. We want the Shenandoah Valley a barren waste. We want Virginia clear and clean, so that a crow flying over it will have to carry his ration or starve to death," For one whole month Sheridan and his legions carried on this cruel work, and at last when the valley indeed was a desert waste, and thousands of women and children wandered in the woods and fields, homeless and hungry. Lincoln, the tender-hearted (God save the mark!) gleefully sent a telegram of congratulation to Sheridan.

"I tender you and your brave army my thanks," said Lincoln, "and the thanks of the Nation, and my personal admiration for your month's operation in Shenandoah Valley, and especially for the splendid work." The "especially splendid work" that pleased Lincoln was the cruel work of burning homes and turning women and children out into the devastated fields to starve and die. Lincoln took it upon himself, as all despots do, to speak for the Nation. If by the "Nation" is meant the great body of people, the large majority, Mr. Lincoln had no right to assume that the Northern Nation thanked Sheridan for his remorseless work. The Nation's sympathies at that time were with the South"
[idem p.50]

* * *

"It is quite possible that many true and trustworthy men have been unbelievers in the Bible as the word of God. Many men have doubted and denied the divinity of Christ. Good men have claimed that Jesus was only a good man whose sublime moral teachings brought on Him the wrath of rulers. Mr. Lincoln's unbelief was more aggressive than the ordinary infidel's; he dis- liked and despised Christianity as if it were an enemy to humanity. He had no appreciation for the sublime truths taught by Jesus of Nazareth. Since the apotheosis ceremony, and especially since the contemporaries of Mr. Lincoln have nearly all passed away, it has become the custom of biographers to show up Mr. Lincoln as a very religious man. Mr. Holland, Noah Brooks and Miss Tarbell take the lead of all romancers on this subject. These writers throw facts to the wind, and, as Gen. Piatt puts it, fill their pages with "pious lies." Pious lies of this nature greatly annoyed Herndon and Lamon. Both Herndon and Lamon took time and labor trying to kill these pious lies, but after Herndon's and Lamon's death pious lies became more numerous, bold and audacious than ever.

In his suppressed "Life of Lincoln" Herndon says:

"Lincoln was a deep-grounded infidel. He disliked and despised churches. He never entered a church except to scoff and ridicule. On coming from a church he would mimic the preacher. Before running for any office he wrote a book against Christianity and the Bible. He showed it to some friends and read extracts. A man named Hill was greatly shocked and urged Lincoln not to publish it. Urged it would kill him politically. Hill got this book in his hands, opened the stove door, and it went up in flames and ashes. After that, Lincoln became more discreet, and when running for office often used words and phrases to make it appear that he was a Christian. He never changed on this subject. He lived and died a deep-grounded infidel."

Lamon, who was very intimate with Lincoln during the latter's Presidency, as well as before, says he never changed. Nicolay and Hay say the same. Yet since Lincoln's deification nearly every eulogist, lecturer and biographer of Lincoln assert that he was a sincere Christian. Many of Lincoln's relations and friends testify that he scoffed and derided religion and the Bible. On the subject of Mr. Lincoln's religious ideas, Lamon, who, during Lincoln's four years in the White House, was closer to him than any other man, wrote as follows in 1872: "No phase of Mr. Lincoln's character has been so persistently misrepresented as this of his religious belief. Not that the conclusive testimony of many of his intimate associates and relations relative to his frequent expressions on such subjects have ever been wanting, but his great prominence in history, his extremely general expressions of religious faith called forth by the exigencies of his public life, or indulged in on occasion of private condolence have been distorted out of relation to their real significance or meaning to suit the opinion or tickle the fancy of individuals or parties."
[idem p. 52-53]

* * *

"Every few years something occurred which made New England declare it was high time for her to get out of the Union. When Louisiana Territory was purchased, and again when Louisiana was made a State, New England declared it was time for her to quit the Union. During the whole two years this country was waging its second war with Great Britain, New England preachers, newspapers, and politicians were anxious for secession, declaring it was high time New England was out of the Union, anxious for New England to make a separate treaty of peace with old England. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in his life of Webster, says :

"It is safe to say there was no man in this country, from Washington and Hamilton on the one side to George Clinton and George Mason on the other, who regarded our system of Government, when first adopted, as anything but an experiment entered upon by the States, and from which each and every State had the right to peaceably withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised."

A convention in Ohio in 1859 declared the Constitution was a compact to which each State acceded as a State, and as an integral part, and that each State had the right to judge for itself of infractions and of the mode and measure of redress, and to this declaration Joshua Giddings, Wade, Chase and Dennison assented.
[idem p.101-102]

* * *

Had the New England secessionists succeeded in 1796, or in 1804, or in 1814, to get New England out of the Union, and had they formed of her States a Northeastern Confederacy, in all human probability no gulf would have been dug between the Southern and Northern States, no gulf filled with the blood and bones of slaughtered men. No Democratic President would have resorted to bloody coercion. President Madison, in 1814, was not ignorant of the secession work going on in New England during the time this country was in the throes of war with a powerful foe, but Madison took no step to punish or stop New England's secession. As a true Democrat, he knew if the people of New England chose to secede they had the right. Secession failed in 1796, because, as the secessionists themselves put it, "the common people did not feel power slipping from their grasp, as the leaders did."
[idem, 101-104]

* * *

Democracy was always the object of New England's hate. "A Democracy," wrote Dennis' Portfolio, "is scarcely tolerable at any period. It is on trial here and the issue will be civil war."
The war came in the 60s ; Democracy on one side. Imperialists on the other. Fisher Ames said:
"Our country is too big for Union, too sordid for patriotism, too Democratic for liberty."

"Mr. Powell says: "In all these efforts to sever the Union there was no anti-slavery sentiment." Nor was any anti-slavery sentiment mixed with all their hate of the South. Federal hate of the Union and desire to secede was based on fear and hate of Democracy.
Powell says:
"It must be borne in mind that not once in all this plotting of 1803 and 1804 was the right of a State, or of a group of States, to secede questioned. The only argument any one made against secession was the unripeness of the common people. Not one flash of loyalty to the Central Government. Their intent was to create an oligarchy."

Why should there have been a flash of loyalty to the Central Government? No party in America at that time thought that more loyalty was due to the Union Government than to the State Governments. This doctrine was never declared until Lincoln inaugurated war on the South, on the pretext that she was disloyal to the Union. Up to the very hour of that war Lincoln's own party held that the South had the right to secede, the right to independence. Lincoln, Seward, Wade of Ohio, Philips of Massachusetts, and hosts of other hign Republican speakers had publicly declared the South's right to secede..."
[idem p. 107]

* * *

"The Republican party had inherited from its progenitor, the Federal, the idea of the South's feeble debility. Members of that party invited United States Senators and Congressmen to take their wives and daughters out to see the first fight of the war, especially to "see the rebels run at sight of Union soldiers." Everybody knows how the rebels ran at Bull Run.

Republican officers of the Union army have expressed their opinion of the South's "feeble debility." General Don Piatt, a Union officer, on this subject has this:

"The true story of the late war," wrote General Piatt, in 1887, "has not yet been told. It probably never will be told. It is not flattering to our people; unpalatable truths seldom find their way into history. How rebels fought the world will never know; for two years they kept an army in the field that girt their borders with a fire that shriveled our forces as they marched in, like tissue paper in a flame. Southern people were animated by a feeling that the word fanaticism feebly expresses. (Love of liberty expresses it.) For two years this feeling held those rebels to a conflict in which they were invincible. The North poured out its noble soldiery by the thousands, and they fought well, but their broken columns and thinned lines drifted back upon our capital, with nothing but shameful disasters to tell of the dead, the dying, the lost colors and the captured artillery. Grant's road from the Rapidan to Richmond was marked by a highway of human bones. The Northern army had more killed than the Confederate Generals had in command." "We can lose five men to their one and win," said Grant. The men of the South, half starved, unsheltered, in rags, shoeless, yet Grant's marches from the Rapidan to Richmond left dead behind him more men than the Confederates had in the field !

General Piatt speaks as follows of the "feeble debility" of a Virginian General:
"It is strange," says Piatt, "what magic lingers about the mouldering remains of Virginia's rebel leaders. Lee's very name confers renown on his enemies. The shadow of Lee's surrendered sword gives renown to an otherwise unknown grave." (Grant's.)
[idem 117-118]

* * *

"Because of these fancied wrongs New England hated Democrats, hated the South, hated the Union, was eager to leave it, and fiercely wanted to war on the Southern people. Up to that hour not one particle of anti-slavery sentiment was mingled with New England's animosity, or with her desire to secede from the Union. Up to the year 1815, with New England's insane hatred of the Southern whites, she had not yet mixed an insane love for Southern blacks. Up to that year New England's political speakers, press and preachers, when referring to negroes, called them "stupid Africans." "senseless blacks," or other names conveying contempt and belief in negro inferiority.

In his work, "Nullification and Secession," E. P. Powell says : "It is very partial partisan reading of American history not to see that from the acceptance of the Constitution in 1790 there has been a tendency to assert the rights of States, and the rights of States to sever relation to the Union. New England, in 1803-04, tried to get five States to secede, New York, New Jersey and the New England States. In 1812-14 New England practically withdrew from co-operation with the Union."
[idem p.122]

* * *

"S. D. Carpenter, a close and critical student of political events, in his invaluable work, The Logic of History, published in 1864, says:

"The Northeastern States early sought to create prejudice and disunion, not on account of any existing facts, but to array section against section, to stimulate hatred and discord for the purpose of accelerating their darling object, dissolution of the Union and the establishment of a Northeastern Confederacy. For years the disunionists of the North have manifested the boldness of a Cromwell, the assiduity of beavers, the cunning of a fox and the malignity of Iscariot."

Do not the extracts I have laid before the reader show determination to arouse hatred of the Southern people? The reader must never lose sight of the fact that Federal and Republican hatred sprung from hatred of Democracy. The Union was hated because the majority of men in the Union elected too many Democratic Presidents. These Presidents, Washington, Jefferson, Monroe and Madison, were hated and called the "Virginia dynasty." A New Englander was the first man in the American Congress to threaten disunion. January 11, 1811, Josiah Quincy, of Massachusetts, from the floor of Congress declared:

"The purchase of Louisiana and the admission of that State into the Union would be a virtual dissolution of the Union, rendering it the right of all, as it becomes the duty of some men to prepare definitely for the separation of the States, amicably if they might, forcibly if they must."
[idem p.123]

* * *

"Even in 1796, while still engaged in the slave traffic, while still bringing cargoes of negroes from Africa and sending them South to be sold to rice and cotton planters, this self-righteous New England had the gall to proclaim the lying charge that the people of the South were barbarians, were a "race of demons," and would "enjoy killing and eating negroes if they liked the taste of black flesh" - eating negroes they, the pious Puritans of New England, had stolen from Africa and brought to this Western continent!"
[idem 130-131]

* * *

"The following extract, page 145, from one of a series of pamphlets issued for circulation in Massachusetts in 1852, shows New England's unabated animosity to the Union:

"Fidelity to the cause of human freedom and allegiance to God require that the existing national compact should be instantly dissolved; that secession from the Government is a religious and a political duty."

In another paragraph of this same paper is the following emphatic declaration: "To continue this disastrous alliance longer is madness." In 1854 the dismembered Federals of New England and the disorganized Whigs united and formed the Republican party. These old disunionists under their new name took up the fight on the three objects of New England's hate - Democracy, the Union and the South - exactly where the Federals had ceased their open fight in 1815. So far from New England's sentiments having softened since that time, her three hates, under the lead of Republicans, assumed the force and fury of insanity, as may be seen in reports of speeches, sermons and lectures. Men of New England who emigrated West carried with them all three hates, and when the Republican party was organized they made haste to enter its ranks and take up the work of disunion and secession.

These men of the new party possessed more zeal, more audacity, more duplicity and less candor than their progenitors, the Federals. These latter had always fought Democracy in the open; the more astute Republicans saw that they could never win the suffrages of the common people if they exposed their imperialistic features, therefore from the day of their organization they fought behind a mask. The Republican party never at any period took the people into their confidence. But they affected high moral ideas and benevolent principles, which won many to their ranks.

The old Federals had always spoken of negroes in contemptuous terms. Republicans saw what an engine of power they could make of slavery to batter, beat down and cover with false charges and malignant calumnies the three objects of their hatred, and most effective use they made of that engine. They either forgot or ignored the fact that their own New England States were chiefly responsible for the existence of that black curse on this Western continent. Men of Massachusetts scrupled at no subterfuge, no deception, no falsehood, in efforts to make the world believe their own States were and ever had been free from the sin of slavery. They pushed back out of sight the hideous fact that Massachusetts men had built ships and sent them to Africa to bring back cargoes of negroes, which they sold either in the West Indies, the Bermudas or to Southern planters. The dreadful word, "Middle Passage," with all its horrors, was seldom or never uttered or written by a Massachusetts man. Men of New England affected to believe only the Southern States were guilty of the sin of slavery. Lecturers, historians and senators joined in this deceptive work, and to this day falsehoods are told on this subject. Instance the address delivered by Ambassador to England Choate a few months ago to the Philosophic Society of Edinburg, Scotland. Branching off from the main line of his address, Ambassador Choate seized the occasion to enlighten the members of that philosophical society on the subject of slavery in America.

"Negro slavery," said the Ambassador, "was firmly estab- lished in the Southern States at an early period of their history. In 1619 a Dutch ship discharged a cargo of African slaves at Jamestown, Virginia. All through the colonial period their importation continued. A few negroes found their way up into the Northern States."

This is the way New England men "make and take their history." "A few negroes found their way up into the Northern States," and this from a descendant of Puritans who carried on the slave traffic, importing negroes from Africa for over a hundred years. The careful way Ambassador Choate phrases his sentences to make them bear false witness is something to wonder at, and the dishonesty involved is something to blush for. What are the plain facts of history?

A Dutch ship did stop at Jamestown in 1619 and leave, not a cargo, but eleven slaves, not one of which remained on Virginia soil. Those eleven negro slaves had been brought from the Earl of Warwick's plantation, on the Isle of Summers, one of the Bermudas. Their owner, the Earl of Warwick, had them carried back as soon as possible to his plantation on the Isle of Summers.

If the importation of negroes continued all during the colonial period, New England ships carried on that importation, and New England State kept up that importation until the year 1808. Massachusetts went into the slave traffic as early as 1637. Chief Justice Parsons declared from the bench that - "Slavery was introduced into Massachusetts soon after its first settlement."
Is it possible that Ambassador Choate is ignorant of these facts?
George H. Moore, L.L.D., librarian of the New York Historical Society, afterwards superintendent of the Lenox Library, in "Notes on History of Slavery in Massachusetts," says: "I charge nearly all the orators, historians, lawyers, clergymen and statesmen of Massachusetts with either ignorance of the facts of history or evading and falsifying them." Mr. George W. Williams, Judge Advocate of the Grand Army of the Republic of Ohio, in his "History of the Negro Race in America," calls attention to the above charges of Mr. Moore and comments thus:

"Despite the indisputable evidence of the legalized existence of slavery in Massachusetts, the historians, lawyers, clergymen, orators and statesmen of New England continue to assert that slavery, though it did creep into the colony of Massachusetts and did exist, it was not by force of any law, as none such is known to have existed."

Moore says: "Massachusetts' first code of laws established slavery in that colony, and, at the very birth of the foreign commerce of New England, the African slave trade became a regular business."

Yet in spite of indisputable evidence, showing that New England from 1637 to 1808 was actively engaged in the slave traffic, and that New England ships brought over cargoes of negroes from Africa, discharged those left alive from the horrors of the "Middle Passage" at New England ports, there to recuperate before sending them South to be sold to the cotton and rice planters, in spite of all this evidence, Ambassador Choate had the hardihood to represent to his Scotch audience that the Northern States were guiltless of the sin of slavery, and only a "few negroes found their way up to Northern States." On June 28, 1854, Charles Sumner, a son of Massachusetts, from the Senate floor, made the false assertion that-
"In all her annals no person was ever born a slave on the soil of Massachusetts."
I charge that men making such assertions were and are either disgracefully ignorant of the facts of history or disgracefully dishonest. In Elliott's "Debates in the Convention of 1787," Vol. I, pages 264-5, may be found the following story illustrative of Massachusetts character:
"The original committee of thirteen in 1787 recommended that the constitutional license to the slave traffic should cease at the period of 1800."
This not suiting some of New England's States at that time engaged in the slave traffic, it was moved and seconded to amend the report of the committee of eleven, entered on the journal of August 21, 1787, as follows:
"To strike out the words eighteen hundred and insert the words eighteen hundred and eight."
"This motion was seconded; the vote stood as follows:
"Yeas - New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia." "Nays - New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and Vir- ginia." (See Carpenter's Logic of History.) By this it is seen that Massachusetts and two other New England States, by their votes, procured the continuance of the damnable slave traffic eight years longer than Virginia wanted it to continue.

Dr. Dabney of Virginia states that it is estimated that in the years from 1787 to 1808 new England's slave ships brought from Africa and sold either to the South's planters or in the West Indies one million slaves. Yet from that year, 1787, from the very hour New England's three States voted to continue the slave traffic, Massachusetts has held close about her her robe of self-righteousness, scornfully saying to Virginia, "Stand back! I am holier than thou!"
[idem 132-135]

* * *

"Hamilton's monarchic principles certainly made Lincoln's work possible. Lincoln put in practice what Hamilton had advocated. Hamilton made no concealment of his monarchic principles; he preferred a monarchy such as England has, but failing that he wanted a President for life and the Governors of States appointed by the President. Until seated in the White House, Lincoln talked Democracy and affected great esteem for Jefferson's Democratic principles.

As soon as he held in his grip the machinery of government, he schemed for absolute power, and as soon as he was commander in chief of nearly 3,000,000 armed men, no imperial despot in pagan time ever wielded more autocratic power than did Abraham Lincoln, and Republican writers of today are so imbued with imperialism they laud and glorify Lincoln for his usurpation of power.
Although well informed Republicans know that the war on the South was waged neither to save the Union nor to free slaves, it does not suit that party to be candid on this subject.

Now and then, however, some Republican forgets the party's policy of secrecy and tells the truth. That boldly imperialistic Republican journal, the Globe-Democrat, of St. Louis, in its issue of April 9, 1900, had an article which uncovers facts, even to the foundation stones, on which rested the war of the 60's. Consider the following:

"Lincoln, Grant and the Union armies gave a victory to Hamiltonism (Monarchy) when it subjugated the Confederates (Democrats) in the South. (This is strictly true; it was a victory over Democracy by Monarchy.) The cardinal doctrines of Democracy are the enlargement of the power of the States. All the predigious energies of the war could not extinguish these. The lesson of the war was extreme and extraordinary, and yet in a sense ineffective."

Ineffective, because it did not crush out the very life of Democracy. Monarchists always appear to be ignorant of the fact that there is a streak of divinity in Democracy which can not be killed. Monarchy a thousand and ten thousand times has fancied it has forever put an end to Democracy, but sooner or later it rises up, fronts and fights for the rights of humanity with all its power. "The Democrats," continues the Globe-Democrat, "have been since the war more strenuous than before in insisting on the preservation of the power of the States."
[idem 136-137]

* * *

"August 23rd, 1851, the New Hampton, Massachusetts, Gazette announced that a petition was circulating in that region for the dissolution of the Unon, and that more than one hundred and fifty names of legal voters had signed it. In 1854 New England sent to Congress a petition, numerously signed, praying for the dissolution of the Union, using these words:

"We earnestly request Congress to take measures for the speedy, peaceful and equitable dissolution of the Union."

In 1854 John P. Hale, Chase and Seward voted to receive and consider a petition demanding the dissolution of the Union.

These three men had long been anxious to break the Union to pieces.

In 1848 Seward voted to receive a petition to dissolve the Union, yet Seward was the man who urged Lincoln to begin war, on the pretext of saving the Union. In 1857 a meeting was held in Massachusetts, during which the question of war on the South was discussed. Gerritt Smith, an ardent disunion Republican, said:

"The time has not yet come to use physical force on the South."

Mr, Langdon of Ohio in a speech said:

"Why preserve the Union? It is not worth preserving. I hate the Union as I hate hell!"

Carpenter's Logic of History says in 1852 a series of pamphlets were issued advocating disunion, from which is taken the following:

"To longer continue this disastrous alliance (the Union) is madness. Allegiance to God and fidelity to the cause of freedom requires that the national compact shall be instantly dissolved. Secession from the Government is a religious and political duty."
[idem 140-141]

* * *

"At a meeting in Boston, May, 1849, Wendell Phillips blazed out in these words:
"We confess that we intend to trample on the Constitution of this country. We of New England are not a law-abiding community. God be thanked for it! We are disunionists; we want to get rid of this Union." (Democratic Handbook, page 72.)
At South Farmington, on July 5th, 1854, the United States Constitution was publicly burned. Mr. Seward despised the Constitution and called it a paper kite. Beecher jeeringly called the Constitution a sheep-skin Govern- ment.
May 16, 1863, resolutions passed by the Essex County mass- meeting contained this:

"Resolved, That the war prosecuted to preserve a Union and a Constitution which should never have existed and which should be at once overthrown, is but a wanton waste of property and a dreadful sacrifice of human life."

Horace Greeley said:
"All nations have their superstitions ; that of our people is the Constitution."
Henry Ward Beecher said:
"A great many people raise a cry about the Union and the Constitution. The truth is, it is the Constitution that is the trouble; the Constitution has been the foundation of our trouble."
The Boston Liberator, April 24, 1863, said:
"No act of ours do we regard with higher satisfaction than when several years ago, on the 4th of July, in the presence of a great assembly, we committed to the flames the Constitution of the United States and burned it to ashes."
During Garfield's campaign, that outspoken Republican paper, the Lemars (Ia.) Sentinel, voiced Republican principles as follows:

"The Stalwarts do not care a fig for the Constitution, and will trample it under foot today as did Lincoln and the Union hosts from '61 to '65.
"The Constitution of the United States has been little beside a curse and a hindrance. It is so today as much as it has been at any time since it was framed. It is the barrier now to the pathway of the nation."
The Wakefield (Kansas) Semi-Weekly, a Republican paper, in August, 1880, wanted to destroy the Constitution, "Let us," (said the Semi-Weekly) "tear up the present Constitution by the roots, wipe out the same and the laws and so-called Constitutions of every State in this Union. Let the Stalwarts now make their grand attack on the United States Senate, which is the bulwark of State sovereignty." Seward despised the Constitution, but was careful not to proclaim it to the people. Seward said to General Piatt:
"We are all bound by tradition to the tail end of a paper kite called the Constitution. It is held up by a string."
"Why, Mr. Senator," said Piatt, in some heat, "you don't believe that of our Constitution?"
"I certainly do," replied Seward, "but I generally keep it to myself. Our Constitution is to us of the North a great danger. The Southerners are using it as a shield."
[idem, 146-147]

* * *

General Piatt relates the following story, which illustrates Lincoln's want of reverence for the Constitution. When Amasa Walker, a distinguished New England financier, thought of a scheme by which could be filled the Government treasury, Mr. Davis Tailor went to Secretary Chase and laid before him Amasa Walker's scheme. Chase heard him to the end and then said:

"That is all very well, Mr. Tailor, but there is one little obstacle in the way which makes the plan impracticable, and that is the United States Constitution."

Mr. Tailor then went to President Lincoln and laid the matter before him.
"Tailor," said Lincoln, "go back to Chase and tell him not to bother himself about the United States Constitution..."
[idem, p. 20-21]

* * *

"Even before the organization of the Republican party, Mr. Lincoln proclaimed his faith in the right of secession. On the 13th day of January, 1848, from the floor of Congress, Mr. Lincoln declared for the right of States to secede from the Union.

"Any people anywhere," said Mr. Lincoln, "being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and to form one that suits them better. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people that can, may make their own of such territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority intermingling with or near them who oppose their movements." - Appendix to Congressional Globe, 1st Session 30th Congress, page 94.

These words ring with the spirit of 1776. The South's secession fulfilled every requirement laid down by Lincoln. The South had the right and she exercised it with decency and dignity. She did not rise up and shake off the Union Government in a turbulent manner; she quietly withdrew. She did not, as New England did in 1814, select a time to withdraw when it might endanger the Union. She bade her old political associates a sorrowful farewell. She assured them of her desire to remain at peace, and respectfully asked them to make a just settlement of their partnership affairs. Buchanan received those overtures in a friendly spirit; so did the great body of the North's people. How did Lincoln receive them? For six weeks Lincoln and Seward pursued an ambiguous, deceitful course; they did not take the people of the North into their confidence; they strove to deceive; they made speeches now looking toward war, now toward peace. Lincoln afterward said the hardest work he ever did was making these speeches intended to deceive. Not until Lincoln was ready to strike the first blow of war did he cry out to the South, "Rebel! Traitor!" When he called for 75,000 armed men on the pretense of defending his Capitol, he falsely asserted and deceived the people of the North into the belief that the South was eager for war, and intended to invade the North. Lincoln's war on the South began with falsehoods and was run on falsehoods to the bitter end.
[idem, p. 149]

* * *

"Senator Wade of Ohio was one of the highest lights in the Republican party. Wade, as emphatically as Lincoln had done, declared the right of secession, December 4th, 1856, from the Senate floor Senator Wade of Ohio proclaimed the South's right to secede as follows:

"I am not one," said Senator Wade, "to ask the South to continue in such a Union as this. It would be doing violence to the platform of the party to which I belong. We have adopted the old Declaration of Independence as the basis of our political movement, which declares that any people, when their government ceases to protect their rights, have the right to recur to original principles, and if need be to destroy the government under which they live, and to erect on its ruins another conducive to their welfare. I hold that the people of the South have this right. I will not blame any people for exercising this right whenever they think the contingency has come. You can not forcibly hold men in the Union, for the attempt to do so would subvert the first principles of the Government under which we live." - Con. Globe, 3d Session 34th Congress, page 25.

In all the long and woeful story of man's treachery to man is there an instance of treachery blacker than this of which the Republican party was guilty in the 60's? For more than 60 years that party, first as Federals then as Republicans, had preached and prayed for secession, had urged the South to secede, had invited the South to aid it to break the Union asunder, had hated and denounced the Union as a covenant with hell, yet, when at last the Southern people, to escape the hate so long poured upon them, peacefully, quietly withdrew from the Union, that same Republican party turned on them with a fury, a vindictive ferocity, a hellish animosity, not even savage and enraged tigers could surpass.
[idem p. 150-151]

* * *

"With a treachery blacker than Benedict Arnold's, knowingly, deliberately, these two men, Seward and Lincoln, determined to change the American Government from a free Republic to an imperial despotism. During the first month of Lincoln's Presidency the question of war or peace was freely discussed in the Cabinet. Few members were in favor of war. Chase strongly opposed war. Chase always had been a disunionist; he welcomed disunion and wanted to let the South possess the peace and independence that was hers by right. Not one single member of the Cabinet was ignorant of the fact that an attempt to reinforce Fort Sumter would be the first blow of war. In a discussion of this question in the Cabinet, Seward said:

"The attempt to reinforce Sumter will provoke an attack and involve war. The very preparation for such an expedition will precipitate war at that point. I oppose beginning war at that point. I would advise against the expedition to Charleston. I would at once, at every cost, prepare for war at Pensacola and Texas. I would instruct Major Anderson to retire from Sumter."

Lincoln preferred to open the war at Sumter. If there is a man in America so ignorant as to believe the falsehood put forth by these unscrupulous men that the South began the war, that Lincoln was averse to war, that he called for 75,000 armed men to protect Washington City, let him consider the story found in Miss Tarbell's Life of Lincoln, page 144, Vol. II.

Medill, of the Chicago Tribune, tells the story, and Miss Tarbell puts it in her book. It is a very valuable item of history, for it kills the old, old lie so often told that the South began the war of the 60's.

"In 1864," relates Medill, "when the call for extra troops came, Chicago revolted. Chicago had sent 22,000 and was drained. There were no young men to go, no aliens except what was already bought. The citizens held a mass meeting and appointed three men, of whom I (Medill) was one, to go to Washington and ask Stanton (the War Secretary) to give Cook County a new enrollment. On reaching Washington we went to Stanton with our statement. He refused. Then we went to President Lincoln. 'I can not do it,' said Lincoln, 'but I will go with you to Stanton and hear the arguments of both sides.' So we all went over to the War Department together. Stanton and General Frye were there, and they both contended that the quota should not be changed. The argument went on for some time, and was finally referred to Lincoln, who had been silently listening. When appealed to, Lincoln turned to us with a black and frowning face: 'Gentlemen', he said, with a voice full of bitterness, 'after Boston, Chicago has been the chief instrument in bringing this war on the country. The Northwest opposed the South, as New England opposed the South. It is you, Medill, who is largely responsible for making blood flow as it has. Yon called for war until you had it. I have given it to you. What you have asked for you have had. Now you come here begging to be let off from the call for more men, which I have made to carry on the war you demanded. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Go home and raise your 6,000 men. And you, Medill, you and your Tribune have had more influence than any other paper in the Northwest in making this war. Go home and send me those men I want.' "

Medill says that he and his companions, feeling guilty, left without further argument. They returned to Chicago, and 6,000 more men from the working classes were dragged from their homes, their families, forced into the ranks to risk limbs and lives in a war they had no part in making, while the men that forced that war on an unwilling people remained at home in comfort and safety, and made enormous fortunes by the war.

Is it any wonder educated workingmen often become anarchists and hate all governments?
Reflect, oh, reader, on Lincoln's words:

"You, Medill called for war. I have given you war. What you asked for you have. You demanded war. I (Lincoln) have given you what you demanded, and you, Medill, are largely responsible for all the blood that has flowed."
[idem, p. 160-162]

* * *

"It is related that the last utterance that fell from Lincoln's lips was a gibe at the crushed and conquered South.
"Shall the orchestra play Dixie?" he was asked as he sat in his box in Ford's theatre that fatal night. "We have conquered the South," returned Lincoln gleefully, "we may as well take her music."
[Idem, p. 162]

* * *

"McClure says:
"Greeley's Tribune was the most widely read Republican paper in the country, and was more potent in moulding Republican sentiment."
In a letter to Robert J. Walker, Lincoln said: "Greeley is a great power: to have him firmly behind me would be equal to an army of 100,000 men."
At no time did Lincoln have Greeley behind him. It is said - Greeley was always a thorn in Lincoln's side. He was a very large thorn in opposing the war, and after the war was on, Greeley was a severe critic of Lincoln's methods of management. Any Democrat as outspoken as Greeley would promptly have been sent to prison. Before it was certain that Lincoln meant coercion, day in and day out Greeley opposed coercion. In one issue of his Tribune, Greeley said:
"If the cotton States decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace."
In another issue Greeley said:
"If eight States, having 5,000,000 people, choose to separate from us, they cannot be permanently prevented by cannon."
Greeley did not then dream it was the purpose of Lincoln and Seward to change the form of the Union Government from the principles of '76 to the monarchic strong Central Government advocated by Hamilton, which would enable them forcibly to hold the South in the Union. On December 17, i860, the Tribune had this:
"The South has as good a right to secede from the Union as the colonies had to secede from Great Britain. I will never stand for coercion, for subjugation. It would not be just."
This was good Democratic doctrine, but not yet was Lincoln ready to arrest and imprison men for such utterances. In the New York Tribune, December 17, i860, three days before South Carolina seceded from the Union, Greeley had this:
"If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession from the British Empire of 3,000,000 of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of Southerners from the Federal Union in 1860."
Democracy of this sort was hard to bear, but still Lincoln and Seward were silent. In the Tribune of February 23. 1861, five days after Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Southern Confederacy, Greeley's Tribune had this:
"If the cotton States or the gulf States choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so. If the great body of the Southern people have become alienated from the Union and wish to escape from it, we will do our best to forward their views."

When Greeley wrote these articles, in his heart was a strong sense of Democratic justice. Greeley knew that for over twenty years his own party had done and said everything the bitterness of hate could devise to alienate the Southern States and drive them out of the Union. He knew that his party, day in and day out, for years had been hurling on Southern men and women every species of calumny and insult the English language could convey. He knew his party was extremely anxious to have the South secede. He knew that the foremost men of his party had publicly invited the men of the South to join them in measures to break up the Union. Democratic doctrines of this nature daily appearing in the Republican party's most influential paper greatly annoyed and alarmed Lincoln and Seward, but not yet had the time arrived to apply the thumb screws of force. The Tribune continued to give forth what war Republicans called Democratic screeches.

On November 5, 1860, in his Tribune, Greeley said:

"Whenever a considerable section of our Union is resolved to go out of the Union, we shall resist all coercive measures to keep them in. We hope never to live in a Republic when one section is pinned to another by bayonets. Those who would rush on carnage to defeat the separation demanded by the popular vote of the Southern people would clearly place themselves in the wrong."

On March 2, 1861, in the Tribune, Greeley had this:



"We have repeatedly said, and we once more say, the great principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence, that Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just. If the Southern people choose to secede and found an independent government of their own, they have the moral right to do so."

This was the last trumpet-toned blast from Greeley. Lincoln and Seward were now ready to act. "This must be stopped or it will stop us," muttered the man whose foot was on the step of the first American throne. "Give me a little bell," returned his high chief counselor, "and I'll ring for the arrest of every Democratic screecher." What measures were used to silence Greeley, or rather to make him sing an entirely different tune, may never be known, but they were effective. The change was made in a single night. On the morning following his strongest Democratic utterance, Greeley completely reversed his position, and thenceforth the pages of the Tribune were freely besprinkled with words grown obsolete under Democracy's rule - words native to kingly climes - rebel, traitor, treason, loyal, disloyal, truly loyal, etc. Under cover of darkness Greeley cut loose forever from the principles of 1776, and fled to the camp of the men who represented the dogmas of George III of England. He became not only the advocate of those dogmas, but the ally and servitor of the men who rushed on carnage. He not only upheld the wrong he had so eloquently denounced, but viciously turned on the victims of that wrong, traduced and maligned them to excuse his own ignoble and cowardly abandonment of sacred principles.

After the war ended Greeley wrote a book called the "American Conflict," and as if to justify his change from the principles of '76 to the doctrine of imperialism, he affected to believe that the South had fought for slavery and the Republican party to destroy slavery. No man in America better than Greeley knew that the South fought for precisely the same principles for which the colonies of '76 had fought - independence. No man better than Greeley knew that Lincoln inaugurated war from precisely the same motives which made George III of England wage war on the colonies - conquest. To sustain the falsehood that the South fought for slavery, Greeley plentifully besprinkled the pages of his book with words intended to convey the idea that slavery was the animus, the germ of the war. The words "rebels, traitors, slave-holders' rebellion, slave-holders' war, slave-holders' treason," stare out from every page of Greeley's book. No man better than Greeley knew it was no more the slave-holders' war than was the war of '76. Greeley knew that the great body of the South's people almost to a unit wanted independence, and fought to gain it. He knew that the great body of the South's people were not slave-holders. Blair, of Maryland, a close friend of Lincoln, on this subject said:
"It is absurd to say this is the slave-holders' war. In all the South are only about 250,000 slave holders. These rich men are not too eager for war. It is the Southern people's war. The people want independence and mean to get it if they can."
[idem, p. 163-166]

* * *

Instance the Gettysburg Address, now thought to be the finest specimen of American oratory. Lamon, who heard it, describes its effect on Lincoln's audience as follows:

"Mr. Lincoln," says Lamon in his "Recollections of Lincoln," said to me, 'I tell you, Lamon, that speech was like a wet blanket on the audience. I am distressed about it.' "

On the platform, the moment after Mr. Lincoln's speech was concluded, Mr. Seward asked Mr. Everett, the orator of the day, what he thought of the President's speech. Mr. Everett replied: "It is not what I expected. I am disappointed. What do you think of it, Mr. Seward?" The response was, "He has made a failure." In the face of these facts it has been repeatedly published that this speech was received by the audience with loud demonstrations of approval, that - "Amid the tears, sobs and cheers it produced in the excited throng, the orator of the day (Mr. Everett) turned to Mr. Lincoln, grasped his hand and exclaimed, "I congratulate y ou on your success," adding in a transport of heated enthusiasm, "Mr. President, how gladly would I give my hundred pages to be the author of your twenty lines!" Nothing of the kind ever occurred. The silence during the delivery of the speech, the lack of hearty demonstrations of approval after its close, were taken by Mr. Lincoln as certain proof that it was not well received. In that opinion we all shared. I state it as a fact and without fear of contradiction, that this famous Gettysburg speech was not regarded by the audience to whom it was addressed, or by the press and people of the United States, as a production of extraordinary merit, nor was it commented on as such until after the death of Mr. Lincoln."
— Lamon's Recollections of Lincoln, p. 173.

It is now said that Lamon's "Life of Lincoln" is fast disappearing from the face of the earth; that the same agency which swept out of existence Herndon's "Life of Lincoln" is fast pursuing the same course with Lamon's book. Is this because Republicans do not want their apotheosizing romances about Mr. Lincoln exposed and corrected, as Lamon exposed and corrected the twaddle about the Gettysburg speech?
[idem, p. 175-176]

* * *

Not until after Lincoln and Seward held in their grip all the machinery of Government, and felt certain they could carry out their purpose of conquering the South, did the Republican party begin to use the words:
Rebel! Rebellion! Traitor! Treason!
The great numbers of the North's people who opposed the war suddenly became traitors; any and every word of opposition became treason; arbitrary arrests and imprisonments began, and a pall of blackest despotism spread over the land. Greeley's Tribune April 15, 1861, had this:

"The day before Sumter was surrendered two-thirds of the newspapers in the North opposed coercion in any shape or form, and sympathized with the South. These papers were the South's allies and champions. Three-fifths of the entire American people sympathized with the South. Over 200,000 voters opposed coercion, and believed the South had the right to secede."

Think of this, men of America! Think how easy it is for an American President elected to serve and carry out the will of the people; how easy it is to make himself the master of the people, and force them to do his will, contrary to their own.
[Idem p.181]

* * *

The Journal of Commerce fought coercion until the United States mail refused to carry the papers, in 1861. The New York Daily News continued to denounce the Republican party as a blood-thirsty set, advocating wholesale murder, as vultures gloating over carnage, until the freedom of the press was suppressed. John A. Logan, in Great Conspiracy, page 551, describes a gathering at Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln's home, in June of 1863, of nearly 100,000 anti-war Democrats, which utterly repudiated the war. There was open and avowed hostility to Lincoln in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and of strong opposition in New Jersey. So violent was the hostility to war in Massachusetts and New York, the call for volunteers was unheeded, and when the Government demanded a draft, the people gathered in crowds and fearful riots ensued. In New York City the opposition was so violent, the rioters so numerous, the city was terrified for days and nights. The houses in which the draft machines were at work were wrecked and then burned to ashes. The police were powerless to restrain the immense gatherings of men and women who walked the streets day and night. The order for the draft was rescinded by the Washington Government, the people urged to disperse and retire to their homes, which they did, as they thought, on the promise that there would be no more drafting. But that treacherous Government, as soon as the people returned to their daily work, sent a large body of soldiers to overawe them, and again the accursed machines were set to work, and again the wheels began to turn, until the required number of men were secured. In this way men were forced to fight a people toward whom they had no animosity, and for a Government they knew was blackly despotic.
[idem p. 181-182]

Lincoln's troops put down fellow-Yankees rioting in New York

* * *

In 1864 the opposition to the war and to Lincoln was violent and bitter, and almost universal. Tarbell describes the people's feelings of that year as follows:
"In 1864 the awful brutality of the war came upon the people as never before. There was a revolution of feeling against the sacrifice going on. All the complaints that had been urged against Mr. Lincoln broke out afresh; the draft was talked of as if it were the arbitrary freak of a tyrant. It was declared that Lincoln had violated constitutional rights, declared that he had violated personal liberty, and the liberty of the press. It was said that Lincoln had been guilty of all the abuses of a military dictatorship. Much bitter criticism was made of his treatment of the South's peace commissioners. It was declared that the Confederates were anxious to make peace. It was declared that Lincoln was so blood-thirsty he was unwilling to use any means but force. The despair, the indignation of the country in this dreadful time was all centered on Mr. Lincoln."

Republican writers give positive evidence that every one of the above charges was true. President Lincoln -
Had violated personal liberty.
Had violated constitutional rights.
Had violated the liberty of the press.
Had been guilty of all the abuses of a military dictator.
Had repulsed the Confederate peace commissioners.
Had refused to use any means except bloody force to attain peace.
No man who reads Republican history can deny one of the above charges.
[idem p. 186-187]

* * *

Lalor's Encyclopedia states that the records of the Provost Marshal's office in Washington show that 38,000 political prisoners filled the bastiles of America. These men were accused of no crime, of no offense known to the law of the land. They were Democrats. All Democrats were "suspects." Stanton and Seward were commissioned by Lincoln to arrest and imprison "suspects." Rhodes thinks Lalor's estimate of 38,000 is exaggerated, but when one considers it was the nature of Seward and Stanton to revel in the use of power, and that neither of these men ever gave one sign of possessing the quality of mercy, pity or justice, one can more easily believe that Lalor underrates more than overrates the number of victims.
[idem p.190]

* * *

E. C. Ingersoll, candidate for Congress during Lincoln's life, in a public speech, joyously announced the advent of despotism and the overthrow of American liberty, using the following words:

"President Lincoln is now clothed with power as full as that of the Czar of Russia. It is now necessary for the people of this country to become familiar with that power and with Lincoln's right to use it."

The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher welcomed despotism with a broad, smiling face and open arms. In a public address this so-called follower of the Christ, who taught the Democratic doctrine of equal rights, spoke as follows:

"I know it is said President Lincoln is not the Government, that the Constitution is the Government. What! A sheep-skin parchment a government? President Lincoln and his Cabinet are now the Government, and men have now got to take their choice whether they will go with their Government or against it."
[idem p. 193]

* * *

When the people in the Northern States became alarmed at President Lincoln's bold usurpation of power and began to loudly murmur at his arbitrary arrests of influential citizens and their imprisonment in distant forts, John W. Forney, Secretary of the Senate and close friend of Lincoln's, through the Philadelphia Press, spurred on Lincoln to further outrages on the people's liberties. As a sample of Forney's advice, I give the following from the Philadelphia Press:

"Silence every tongue; seal every mouth that does not speak with respect of our cause (conquest of the South) and of our flag. Let us cease to talk of safeguards, of laws and restrictions, of dangers to liberty."

In Bancroft's Life of Seward, published in 1899, he gives some account of Mr. Seward's illegal arrests. On page 276, Bancroft says:
"Arbitrary arrests and imprisonments were made to prevent, rather than to punish treason. Of course it would have been unsafe to be frank about such a thing"
Despots never think it safe to be frank about their deeds of despotism. Men were not arrested and imprisoned for what they had done, but for what possibly they might do.
[idem p. 196]

* * *

Mr. Bancroft says: "The least excusable feature of these arrests was the treatment of the prisoners. Month after month they were crowded together in gloomy, damp casemates, where even the dangerous pirates captured on the South's privateers (the South had no pirates) and the soldiers taken in battle ought not to have remained long. Many had committed no overt act. Many were editors and politicians of good character and honor. It (the power to make illegal arrests) offered rare opportunities for the gratification of personal enmity and the display of power by United States Marshals and military officers. Seward cannot be blamed for this."

Bancroft here assumes that Seward, Stanton and Lincoln were not as likely to abuse the power of arrest as United States Marshals and military officers. The assumption is worthy of a simpleton. Every arrest ordered by Seward, Stanton and Lincoln was inspired by personal or political spite. These three men were peculiarly vindictive toward any man they even suspected of opposing their cruel war policy. General Piatt, who well knew this triumvirate of despots, said of two of them:

"Seward and Stanton fairly rioted in the enjoyment of power. They reveled in the use of power. Stanton was more vindictive in his dislikes than any man ever called to public station."
[idem p. 197]

* * *

"The person arrested," says Mr. Bancroft, "was usually seized at night. It was found best to take prominent men far from friends and sympathizers. They were usually taken to Fort Warren or other remote places. In some cases from one to three months elapsed before the case of the arrested man was looked at. As a rule prisoners were not told why they were arrested. The arrested men were deprived of their valuables, money, watches, rings, etc., and locked up in casemates usually crowded with men who had similar experiences. If any prisoner wished to send for relatives, friends, or an attorney, they were told that any prisoner who sought the aid of an attorney would greatly prejudice his case. Appeals to Seward, Lincoln or Stanton a second, third or fourth time were all useless."
[idem p. 198]

* * *

On August 8, 1862, Stanton issued an order under which many thousand men were kidnapped, hurried off to the nearest military post or depot, and placed on military duty. The expense of the arrest, the conveyance to such post, also the sum of five dollars reward to the men who made the arrest, were deducted from the arrested man's poor pay while serving in the ranks. Is it any wonder that, as Stanton told Piatt, there was great dissatisfaction in the Union army, and great dislike of Lincoln among the common soldiers?
[idem p. 199]

* * *

In 1863 the New York Herald advocated Grant for the Presidency. The great majority of the Republican leaders wanted a change. Lincoln knew of all these efforts. "The despair, the indignation of the country in this dreadful year (1863) all centered on Lincoln. The Republicans were hopeless of re-electing him. Amid this dreadful uproar of discontent, one cry alarmed Lincoln - the cry that Grant should be presented for the Presidency."
[idem p 202]

* * *

Lincoln himself believed he would be defeated. On August 23, 1864. Lincoln, fully understanding the danger, put on record his belief that he would be defeated. In a speech bitterly denouncing Lincoln at a Republican meeting in Boston, Wendell Phillips went so far as to say, "Lincoln and his Cabinet are treasonable. Lincoln and Stanton should be impeached."

The Chicago Tribune denounced Lincoln as the author of the negro riots. So eager was Lincoln for a second term, so intense his anxiety, it showed in his face. Miss Tarbell describes his looks during that period, 1863-4:
"Day by day," says Miss Tarbell, "he grew more hag- gard, the lines in his face deepened, it became ghastly gray in color. Sometimes he would say, 'I shall never be glad again.' When victory was assured a change came at once. His form straightened up, his face cleared; never had he seemed so glad."

Yet in the face of all this evidence of Lincoln's unpopularity, it now suits Republicans to assert that Lincoln was trusted and beloved during his lifetime.
[idem p. 203]

* * *

The election day was November 8, 1864. Lincoln had sent agents to New York City to spy out and report how the election would go. The report boded ill for Lincoln's success; in fact, indicated that New York would give a large majority for General McClellan. Lincoln, Seward and Stanton were alarmed. The latter instantly telegraphed General Butler to report to him at once. Butler rushed to Washington, and Stanton explained the situation at New York.
"What do you want me to do?" asked Butler.
"Start at once for New York, take command of the Department of the East, relieving General Dix. I will send you all the troops you need."
"But," returned Butler, "it will not be good politics to relieve General Dix just on the eve of election."
"Dix is a brave man," said Stanton, "but he won't do anything; he is very timid about some matters."
This meant that General Dix was too honorable to use the United States Army to control and direct elections.
"Send me," suggested the shrewd Butler, "to New York with President Lincoln's order for me to relieve Dix in my pocket, but I will not use the order until such time as I think safe. I will report to Dix and be his obedient servant, and coddle him up until I see proper to spring on him my order, and take supreme command myself."
"Very well," assented Stanton; "I will send you Massachusetts troops."
"Oh, no!" objected the shrewder Butler, "it won't do for Massachusetts men to shoot down New Yorkers."

Stanton saw this also would be bad politics, so Grant was ordered to send Western troops — 5,000 good troops and two batteries of Napoleon guns — for the purpose of shooting down New Yorkers should New Yorkers persist in the evil intention of voting for McClellan. When the citizens of New York saw Butler and his escort proudly prancing their horses on the streets and saw the arrival of 5,000 Western troops and the Napoleon guns, there was great agitation and uneasiness over the city. Newspapers charged that these warlike preparations were made to overawe citizens and prevent a fair election. Butler was virtuously indignant at such charges. General Sanford, commanding the New York State militia, called on Butler and told him the State militia was strong enough to quell any disturbance that might occur and he intended to call out his militia division on election day. Butler arrogantly informed General Sanford that he (Butler) had no use for New York militia; he did not know which way New York militia would shoot when it came to shooting.
[idem, p 204-205]

* * *

In the Albany address reference was made to the suspension of the habeas corpus. To this Mr. Lincoln replied as follows:

"The suspension of the habeas corpus was for the purpose that men may be arrested and held in prison who cannot be proved guilty of any defined crime "

Reflect on these words, O, you men of America! You who forget that "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." You who, with child-like innocence, rest in the belief that the future has no dangers for American liberties. But even the above declaration of Lincoln's is not the worst.

"Arrests," wrote President Lincoln to that Albany committee of Democrats, "are not made so much for what has been done as for what possibly might be done. The man who stands by and says nothing when the peril of his Government is discussed cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered (by arrest, imprisonment, or death) he is sure to help the enemy."

Is it any wonder under rulings like this that 38,000 arbitrary arrests threw 38,000 innocent men and women into American bastiles to languish for months or years, and many therein to die?
[idem p. 212]

* * *

"Much more," wrote the President of the United States, "if a man talks ambiguously, talks with 'buts' and 'ifs' and 'ands' he cannot be misunderstood. If not hindered (by imprisonment or death) this man will actively commit treason. Arbitrary arrests are not made for the treason defined in the Constitution, but to prevent treason."

In "Recollections of the War," page 236, Charles A. Dana records the arbitrary arrest, by order of President Lincoln, in one day, of ninety-seven of the leading citizens of Baltimore, and their imprisonment, mostly in solitary confinement. Not one of these men had committed or was charged with having committed any offense known to the law of the land. Nor is there the least evidence showing that any one of the ninety-seven men had used the "ifs" and "ands" and "buts" so offensive to Mr. Lincoln's sensitive soul. The fear that they might possibly at some future time mutter or speak aloud the dangerous "ifs" and "buts" and "ands" caused the arrest and imprisonment of the ninety-seven men of Baltimore. In the darkest days of President Lincoln's despotic rule, Governor Seymour, of New York, had the courage to condemn and denounce that rule. In a speech referring to arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, Seymour said :

"In Great Britain the humblest hut is to its occupant a castle impregnable to the monarch. In our country the most unworthy underling of power is licensed to break within the sacred precincts of our homes and drag men out and cast them in dungeon cells."

The men who wielded this power reveled in its possession. Seward is the man who, with a sardonic smile, said to Lord Lyons:

"My Lord, I can touch the bell at my right and order the arrest of a man in Ohio; I can again touch the bell and order the arrest of a man in New York, and no power on earth save that of the President can release them. Can the Queen of England do as much?"
"No," replied the astonished Englishman. "Were she to attempt such an act her head would roll from her shoul- ders."

These three men - Lincoln, Seward and Stanton - proudly boasted that they held more power over the people of America than any monarch since the reign of the Stuarts had wielded over the English people. No man need be surprised at the Republican party's open and insolent usurpation of power. A thousand times had the speakers of that party publicly declared their contempt and hatred of the Union, of the Constitution, of the laws of the land.

The New York Evening Post reported that the great Republican preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, in a speech, said to his audience:
"I believe that Sharp's rifle is a truly moral agency. There is more moral power in one of these instruments than in a hundred Bibles."
[idem 213-214]

* * *

As illustrative of Mr. Lincoln's peculiar character I give the following story: When almost in despair of re-election Lincoln wrote General McClellan an autograph letter, which he sent by Mr. Blair, proposing to pay him (McClellan) roundly if he would withdraw from the canvass and leave the field clear for Lincoln's running. The compensation Lincoln offered was the immediate appointment of McClellan General of the army, and the appointment of McClellan's father-in-law, Mr. Marcy, Major General, and the substantial recognition of the Democratic party. This was a brilliant bait, but the fish did not bite. General McClellan promptly refused. The story of the affair is related in Lamon's Recollections of Lincoln, edited by his daughter Dorothy. McClellan was the chosen nominee of the Democratic party at that time; the times boded success to Democracy. Neither Lincoln or Lamon seemed to perceive the baseness involved in the transaction which Lincoln proposed. If Lincoln believed that McClellan was the best man to be at the head of the army, was it not base to make his appointment a matter of bargain and sale? Was not Lincoln's offer to bribe McClellan to betray the trust his own party had put in him when it nominated him for the Presidency as gross an insult as one man could offer another? Instead of seeing this, poor Lamon laments that General McClellan had not the patriotism to accept Lincoln's offer.
[idem p. 215]

* * *

Those who best know Mr. Lincoln assert that he not only was indifferent to the future of the African race, but disliked negroes as a race, and had little or no faith in their capability of development. At no period of his life was he in favor of bestowing upon them political or social equality with the white race. General Don Piatt, a fervent Abolitionist, sounded Mr. Lincoln on this question:

"I found," says Piatt, "that Mr. Lincoln could no more feel sympathy for that wretched race than he could for the horse he worked or the hog he killed. Descended from the poor whites of the South, he inherited the contempt, if not the hatred, held by that class for the negro."

In his Life of Lincoln, page 236, Lamon says, in 1846, in a speech, Mr. Lincoln-
"Imputed to Van Buren, a Democrat, the great sin of having voted in the New York State Convention for negro suffrage with a property qualification. Douglas denied the imputation, but Lincoln proved it to the injury of Van Buren."

On page 334 of Lamon's Life of Lincoln is this:

"None of Mr. Lincoln's public acts, either before or after he became President, exhibit any special tenderness for the African race, or commiseration of their lot. On the contrary he invariably, in words and deeds, postponed the interest of the negro to the interest of the whites. When from political and military considerations he was forced to declare the freedom of the enemy's slaves, he did so with avowed reluctance; he took pains to have it known he was in no wise affected by sentiment. He never at any time favored the admission of negroes into the body of the electors in his State, or in the States of the South. He claimed that those negroes set free by the army were poor spirited, lazy and slothful; that they could only be made soldiers by force, and would not be ever willing laborers at all; that they seemed to have no interest in the cause of their own race, but were as docile in the service of the rebellion as the mule that ploughed the fields or drew the baggage trains. As a people, Lincoln thought negroes would only be useful to those who were at the same time their masters, and the foes of those who sought their good. He wanted the negro protected as women and children are. He had no notion of extending the privilege of governing to the negro. Lincoln always contended that the cheapest way of getting rid of the negro was for the Nation to buy the slaves and send them out of the country."

General Don Piatt says:
"Lincoln well knew that the North was not fighting to free slaves, nor was the South fighting to preserve slavery. In that awful conflict slavery went to pieces."

Lincoln himself gives testimony on this slavery question. Herndon said when Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation there was no heart in it. Every one remembers Lincoln's letter to Greeley, in which he frankly declared that whatever he did for or with negroes, he did to help him save the Union; that is, to conquer the South.

"My paramount object," wrote Lincoln to Greeley, "is to save the Union, and not either destroy or save slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing the slaves, I would do it. If I could save the Union by freeing some and leaving others in slavery, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all, I would do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union."

Yet this man had been put in office by a party which hated and despised the Union. On another occasion Lincoln wrote:
"I have no purpose to introduce political or social equality between the white and black race. There is a physical difference between the two which probably will forever forbid their living together on the same footing of equality. I, as well as any other man, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary."

Simon Cameron. Lincoln's first Secretary of War, wrote General Butler, then in New Orleans:
"President Lincoln desires the right to hold slaves to be fully recognized. The war is prosecuted for the Union, hence no question concerning slavery will arise."

In his inauguration Lincoln said:

"I have no lawful right to interfere with slavery directly or indirectly; I have no inclination to do so."

Mr. Wendell Phillips said that Lincoln was badgered into issuing the emancipation proclamation, and that after it was issued, Lincoln said it was the greatest folly of his life. That much lauded instrument speaks for itself. It plainly proves that its writer had not the least heart in the business of freeing slaves. Had he taken any joy in the work, would he have bestowed the boon of freedom only on those negroes still under the rule of the Confederacy, leaving the large number in those States and parts of States under his own control in the bondage they were born in?

When General Grant was Colonel of the Twenty-first Illinois Infantry he expressed himself plainly on the negro question:

"The sole object of this war," said Grant, "is to restore the Union. Should I become convinced it has any other object, or that the Government designs using its soldiers to execute the wishes of the Abolitionists, I pledge you my honor as a man and a soldier I would resign my commission and carry my sword to the other side."
— Democratic Speaker's Handbook, p. 33.

On May 29, 1863, Mr. F. A. Conway, Congressman from Kansas, wrote to the New York Tribune, as follows:

"The independence of the South is now an established fact. The war for the future becomes simply an instrument in the hands of the political managers to effect results to their own personal ends unfavorable to the cause of freedom. It is now assumed that the Union is the object paramount over every other consideration. Every institution is now of small importance. Slavery must give way, or not give way; must be strangled, or given new lease of life with increased power, just as the exigencies of the North may require. This has now become the doctrine of life-long Abolitionists. Gerritt Smith, Raymond and other men want power and care for nothing else. For the sake of power they would kill all the white people in the South, or take them to their arms. They would free all the slaves or make their bondage still more helpless; they would do anything wicked for the sake of power."

Never were truer words spoken or written than these by that zealous Abolition Congressman Conway of Kansas. In Herndon's suppressed Life of Lincoln, he said:
"When Lincoln issued the proclamation to free the slaves there was no heart in the act."
[idem p. 217-220]

* * *

The Reconstruction Period - Hate and Cruelty. The full horrors of this dreadful period have never been portrayed. God knows the South was hated enough before and during the war, but after the conquest, as she lay disarmed at the feet of her conquerors, wounded almost unto death, the vengeful ferocity of Republicans was something to wonder at. The events of that period deserve a volume to themselves.

Does the reader want to know how the sub-despots appointed by Grant ruled the people of the South? To this day that rule is referred to as the "horrors of the reconstruction period." After the military had full possession of all the offices of the civil courts, from the highest down, malignant bullies everywhere in power, a reign of terror set in almost equal to the awful days of the French Revolution. Every day numbers of the best citizens arrested on the most frivolous charges, or no charge whatever, hands and feet fettered as felons, dragged hundreds of miles away from homes and friends, were thrown into dungeon cells, in which they lay months or years in solitary confinement unless death ended their suffering. These prisoners were not permitted to see friends, relatives or counselor-at-law. During their long imprisonment, miserably fed, cursed, abused by jailers, tried by military commissioners, many died, many were condemned and sentenced for life to the Dry Tortugas - condemned on evidence no court of justice would have received. It was noticed that the military courts seemed to feel special antipathy to young men, to beardless boys - sons of the best citizens. The suffering of these youths in prison, their tortures in the Dry Tortugas, they knew would inflict the keenest anguish on the hearts of parents and relatives. The Montgomery (Ala.) Mail, speaking of the large number of innocent young men sent to the Dry Tortugas, thus describes that place of torment:

"At the Dry Tortugas the prisoners' heads are shaved. They have to labor under a torrid sun upon a sand bank in the midst of the ocean, with balls and chains about their legs. The men who command the prisoners are amenable to the laws of neither God or man. Col. Grental, a soldier, was tied up by his thumbs, and treated with every species of cruelty and barbarity. The laws are silent and newspapers dumb. The prisoner who enters the Dry Tortugas leaves liberty, justice, hope, behind him. Large numbers of young Southern men, for any or no offense, in what is called the reconstruction period, are arrested, go through the farce of a drumhead trial, presided over by men who take a fiendish delight in torturing any Southern man or woman, nearly always found guilty, and sentenced for life to the Dry Tortugas. The lips of the Alabama journals are pinned together with bayonets. Our hands are fastened in iron cuffs. We dare not speak the whole truth. If we did our paper would be suppressed, our business ruined, our wives and children brought to want."

Neither the despot Grant nor his sub-despots ever forgot the press. Every officer and private in that army of despotism kept a sharp eye on newspapers, and were quick to apply the muzzle if any paper dared make public their evil deeds. Despotism is a noxious plant, which hates the light and flourishes only in dark places. A few samples will show how despots muzzled the press in the South: On November 15, 1867, a file of soldiers entered the office of the Vicksburg Times, arrested the editor, dragged him to jail. McArdle's offense was having reported in the paper a despotic order made by General Ord, and comparing the situation of the South with that of Poland. McArdle was tried by a military commission (always organized to convict) and condemned. Being a man of talent he took an appeal, but all the influence of the military was against him. The case dragged on for years before a final decision, which I have failed to find.

Early on the morning of August 8, 1867, a body of soldiers forced their way into the office of the Constitutional Eagle, published at Camden, Ark., seized, carried off and destroyed all the material of the office. Col. C. C. Gilbert, the small despot commanding the Union soldiers at Camden, justified the acts of his men, saying to the editor:

"An article in your paper unnecessarily exasperated my soldiers. The press may censure the servants of the people, but the military are not the servants of the people, but their masters. It is a great impertinence for a newspaper in this State to comment on the military under any circumstances."
— The Democratic Speaker and Handbook.

The comment which unnecessarily exasperated the soldiers was a statement that when drunk the soldiers were in the habit of indecently exposing their persons on the street when ladies were passing. The National Intelligencer of Washington City commented on the rule of the military satraps in the South, as follows:

"Without any proof whatever four respectable citizens were arrested and confined in separate cells in Atlanta, denied all communication with friends, save under military surveillance, denied all opportunity to confer with legal counsel. Two white men in Fort Pulaski were confined in cells and denied all access to friends or legal counsel. These six men were brought out of their dungeons, hurried to trial for their lives before a military commission, one of those institutions, Mr. Webster said, always organized to convict. The statement of facts is sufficiently horrible and damnable to every officer and agent concerned in it. But this is only a part of the infamous record. While these men are immured in dungeons, cut off from all access to friends or counsel, their enemies, with artful and incessant malice, have been busy in procuring false testimony, and the uniform of the nation is degraded by the military arrest of ignorant negroes, dragging them by force before a military board, and then by threats and curses, starvation and solitary confinement, endeavor to extort from them false testimony upon which the lives of innocent men may be taken away. The testimony we publish to-day establishes these facts, and shows the character of the government under which the people of the South now live."
— Democratic Handbook and Speaker, page 162.

These military lords permitted the farce of elections, if carried on under military control. Armed battalions of negroes and Federal white men surrounded the voting places. In vain Democrats issued protests against these outrages. In the House of Congress Mr. Brooks, in behalf of the Democratic members, offered a powerful protest.

"The military," said the protest, "have been used to destroy States. The General of the army (Grant), representing the sword, and only the sword (he represented a whiskey bottle also), has been exalted by acts of Congress above the constitutional Commander in Chief (the President) of the Army and Navy, in order to execute these military decrees and root out every vestige of constitutional law and liberty. To prolong and perpetuate this military rule in the North and West, as well as the South, this same General of the army (Grant) has been elected at the Chicago Convention to head the electoral votes for the Presidency in ten States of this Union, which are as much under his feet as Turkey is under the Sultan's, or Poland under the Czar of Russia."

If the protests from Northern Democrats did not stem the tide of despotism, they at least showed that a spark of the old fire of liberty yet existed in this corrupted Union. At one stroke of the pen Sheridan, Grant's sub-despot, disfranchised thirty thousand white men in Louisiana. Grant was responsible for every criminal act done by the military. The New York Herald said of Grant's brutality in the South:

"Every personal right of the citizen is invaded at once. Without any process of law whatever, a man is deprived of his liberty and thrust into a cell at the mere bidding of a political or military bully. The secrecy of the telegraph and post office is violated as no man would dare violate them in despotic France."

At that time France was ruled by an Emperor. The South was ruled by the despotism of hate. No Christian Emperor, King or Kaiser was ever so cruel, so bitter, so vindictive as the hate despotism imposed by Grant upon the people of the South. By bogus elections carpetbaggers went to Congress. It seemed that the chief aim of these bogus Congressmen was to obtain additional power to rob, oppress and torment the people of the South. The excuse for seeking Congressional aid was the ready lie that the people of the South were on the eve of another rebellion. On the 23d of July a bill to send more soldiers and munitions of war to the Southern States was up for discussion. A man by the name of Stokes, who claimed to represent a Tennessee Congressional district, spoke as follows:

"If you do not send us guns and powder and bayonets and cannon, and send 'em quick, Forrest and his rebel crew of Democrats will be down on us like — like a thousand devils! I want ten thousand stand of arms for my own district. Unless you send on these arms all the truly loyal negroes will be overrun and the Republican party killed in Tennessee."

Mr. Washburn, of Illinois, seemed to be very anxious to send guns and bayonets down to the loyal negroes and carpetbaggers, but he was afraid.

"Sir," said Mr. Washburn, "sir, I believe that in most of the States not ten days after these arms are sent South to the loyal negroes they will be in the hands of the rebels."

Congress saw the danger. Never before was any Congress in so painful a quandary. Anxious, yet afraid, to arm loyal negroes and carpetbaggers. A man named Dewees, claiming to represent the people of North Carolina (he might as well have claimed to represent the people in the moon or the farthest star), added to the distress and perplexity of Congress.

"If you don't give us arms," cried Mr. Dewees, pale and anxious, "before six months the Ku-Klux-Klan, the Rebels and the Copperheads will be ruling the whole South."

Ku-Klux, Rebels and Copperheads were a trinity of devils. Hades had no worse. Still, Congress was afraid to send to the loyal negroes and carpetbaggers munitions of war, which seems a little strange to us of this generation, knowing, as all now know, that the Ku-Klux or Rebels in the South had no arms or munitions of war, while the loyal negroes and carpetbaggers were well armed. A Democrat named Woodward ventured to ask if the reconstruction government in the South could be maintained in no other way than by the bayonet. This question aroused Mr. Dewees' indignation.
"No!" he roared. "We can only sustain our Govern- ment by arms! Arms we must have, or Ku-Klux, Rebels and Copperheads will wipe us out and rule the South."

At this one or two Copperheads (Northern Democrats) were imprudent enough to laugh, which had the effect of stirring Mr. Dewees up to the very highest flight of oratory. Mr. Dewees was short, thick set, and very ruddy, so to speak; every pore of his body broke out into a glow and gush and roar of eloquence, and the whole House on both sides became convulsed with laughter. "Come on!" shouted the man claiming to represent North Carolina; "I say, come on when you feel disposed! Stretch out your traitorous hands to touch again one fold of the old flag, and representatives of four million of men with black skins, but loyal hearts, will dash themselves a bulwark between you and the loyal governments in the South, and you will only live in sad memories of bad events. Come on! Come on!"

No one seemed disposed to come on, though entreated so fervently. Never before was Congress in such a higgledy-piggledy state of mind. If they sent arms to negroes and carpetbaggers the rebels would get every gun within ten days. Mr. Washburn said so. If they didn't send arms the rebels would get every negro and carpetbagger in ten days. Mr. Dewees said so.
[idem p. 224-228]

* * *

Well informed Englishmen well knew how savage was the hate Republicans felt toward the South. The London Telegraph tersely put it thus:

"The North simply demands blood, blood, blood. Dominion, spoliation, confiscation."

At a Republican meeting in Cadiz, Wisconsin, March 26, 1863, the following was unanimously passed:

"Resolved, That we hail any policy of our Government toward the South, be it annihilation, extermination, starva- tion or damnation."
What virulence of hate lies in these words!
Cassius Clay said in a public speech:

"I find fault with Lincoln, not because he suspended the habeas corpus, but instead of doing it by a dash of the pen, he did not do it by 'ropes around the necks of the rebels.'"

"We'll hang 'em yet!" cried out a voice from the crowd.
"Yes," rejoined Clay, "the hanging of such men as Seymour and Wood will be true philanthropy."
[idem p. 235]

* * *

While the war was fiercely raging a meeting was called in New York City for the relief of the sick and wounded Union soldiers. Parson Brownlow made a speech which elicited from the Republicans frequent and loud applause. The following extract will show the spirit of hate that ruled the hour:

"If I had the power," said Brownlow, 'I would arm and uniform in the Federal habiliments every wolf and panther and catamount and tiger and bear in the mountains of America; every crocodile in the swamps of Florida and South Carolina; every negro in the Southern Confederacy, and every devil in hell, and turn them on the rebels in the South, if it exterminated every rebel from the face of God's green earth - every man, woman and child south of Mason and Dixon's line. I would like to see Richmond and Charleston captured by negro troops commanded by Butler, the beast. We will crowd the rebels into the Gulf of Mexico, and drown the entire race, as the devil did the hogs in the Sea of Galilee."
{Long and loud applause.)

After this fine burst of ferocity Lincoln, Seward and Stanton thought it would be a good thing to have Parson Brownlow Governor of Tennessee, from which vantage ground he could harass and torture the white people of that State at his leisure. By Federal aid the negroes and carpetbaggers in Tennessee put Brownlow in the Governor's office, which he abused by cruelties, rascalities and oppressions of every sort. English writers make frequent mention of the bitter hate Republicans felt toward the conquered South. From an English work, published in 1891, called "Black America" I take the following:

"In spite of the fact that all resistance to Federal authority had ceased, and that according to Mr. Justice Nelson of the Supreme Court, the States in which the civil government had been restored under the pacific Presidential plan were entitled to all the rights of States in the Union, in spite of these facts Congress solemnly decided that the war was not over, and in March, 1867, Congress passed the reconstruction act, over President Johnson's veto. These acts annulled the States' government, then in peaceful operation, divided the States into military districts, and placed them under martial law; enfranchised the negroes, disfranchised all white men, whether pardoned or not, who had participated in the war against the Union, if they had previously held any executive, legislative or judicial office under the State or Federal Government."

* * *

So bitter, blinding venomous was Republican hate, high men in that party openly and gleefully exulted in the cruelty of the so-called reconstruction acts. Garfield was one of this sort.

"This bill," said Garfield joyfully, "first sets out by laying its hand on the rebel States' governments, and taking the very breath of life out of them. In the next place it puts a bayonet at the breast of every rebel in the South. In the next it leaves in the hands of Congress utter and absolute power over the people of the South."

Percy Gregg, the English historian, in his history of the United States, says:

"The reconstruction policy was at once dishonest and vindictive. The Congressional majority (Republican) were animated not merely by selfish designs, but by rabid hatred of the South's people which had fought so gallantly for what the best jurists of America believed to be their moral and constitutional right."

For what the foremost men in the Republican party had declared their right. Another English writer of great eminence, Anthony Trollope, was in this country during the reconstruction period, and wrote of it thus:

"I hold that tyranny never went beyond this. Never has there been a more terrible condition imposed upon a fallen people. For an Italian to feel an Austrian over him, for a Pole to feel a Russian over him, has been bad indeed, but it has been left for the political animosity of the Republicans of the North - men who themselves reject all contact with the negro - to subject the Southern people to dominance from the African who yesterday was their slave. The dungeon chains were knocked off the captive in order that he may be harnessed as a beast of burden to the captive's chariot."
[idem p. 236-238]

* * *

Before going to the Philadelphia convention Brownlow made a speech to the carpetbaggers and negroes of Nashville, Tenn. The following extract will show its spirit:

"I am one of those," said Brownlow, "who believe the war has ended too soon. We have whipped the rebels, but not enough. The loyal masses constitute an overwhelming majority of the people of this country, and they intend to march again on the South, and intend this second war shall be no child's play. The second army of invasion will, as they ought to, make the entire South as God found the earth, without form and void. They will not, and ought not to, leave one rebel fence-rail, outhouse, one dwelling, in the eleven seceded States. As for the Rebel population, let them be exterminated. When the second war is wound up, which should be done with swift destruction, let the land be sur- veyed and sold out to pay expenses."

This speech so highly pleased Republicans that the Philadelphia convention gave Brownlow a boisterous welcome. The following extract is from Brownlow's address to the convention:

"I mean to have something to say about the division of your forces the next time you march on the South. I would divide your army into three grand divisions. Let the first be armed and equipped as the law requires, with small arms and artillery. Let them be the largest division, and do the killing. Let the second division be armed with pine torches and spirits of turpentine, and let them do the burning! Let the third and last division be armed with surveyors' compasses and chains, that will survey the land and settle it with loyal people."

Brownlow's speech so much pleased Republicans they invited him to go about repeating his speech to stir up the old soldiers to the fury of a second war on the South. Governor Yates of Illinois was at that convention, also eager for a second war on the South. In his speech Yates said:

"Illinois raised 250,000 troops to fight the South, and now we are ready to raise 500,000 more to finish the good work."

In another speech Brownlow exhorted the soldiers to march down on the South, to "burn and kill! burn and kill!" until the whole rebel race was exterminated. These sentiments were praised as "truly loyal." These two words, "truly loyal," were so prostituted by Republicans during the war, and for years after, not for a thousand years will they regain their purity of meaning.

Not a man of the Republican party, not a paper condemned (so far as I can discover) these rabid utterances. On the contrary, the more rabid and malignant a man was, the higher he rose in Republican favor. Richard Busted, a carpetbagger from New York, who was playing the part of Judge in Alabama "Territory," in a speech made in New York City, spoke as follows:

"I would keep the rebels out in the cold till their teeth chattered to the music of the Union. (Applause). Keep them out in the cold till they learn that treason is the greatest crime of the century! I would keep them there till the last trumpet sounded! I say, better a boundless waste of territory, filled with owls and bats, than that the Southern States should be occupied with such men! (Cheers). I tell you, although there may be forgiveness before God for the crime of the South, there can be no forgiveness before men." (Long applause).

The carpetbagger, Hamilton, who was playing the part of despot-governor over Texas, was eager to have another army sent down on the devastated South. In his speech at the Philadelphia convention, the carpetbagger, Hamilton, said:

"Prepare your hearts, and your guns, and your swords, for another conflict. It is bound to come. Get yourselves ready." "We are ready," shouted back a blood-thirsty Re- publican. "We are ready ! We'll march down and finish the Rebs!"

About the same time a convention was held in Syracuse, New York, in which a second war on the South was urged. Lyman Tremaine was president. In his address Mr. Tremaine said of that second war:

"At the very first tap of the drum an army of veteran troops capable of overwhelming all opposition will come to the rescue."

Rescue of what? Of whom? Who, what was in danger?

Were these men absolutely insane with hate? Was it possible they still apprehended danger from the disarmed South? They well knew if they sent another army on the South it would not be against armed men; they knew, as Brownlow had declared, all their army would have to do would be to "kill and burn! kill and burn!" to the dreadful end.

"Traitors," continued President Tremaine, "must be punished. Our soldiers will proceed to punish them. This time it will be effectually done by our soldiers without the intervention of President Johnston, or Congress, judge or jury."
[idem 239-242]

* * *

It seemed as if Republicans lay awake at night devising new ways of manifesting hate toward the people of the South. On May 25, 1866, a man by the name of Bond, in the House of Representatives, gave notice as follows:

"I will introduce a bill to adopt the gray uniform of the so-called Confederate States to be the uniform of the convicts in the State penitentiaries, and that the prisoner convicted of manslaughter be entitled to wear the ensign of rank of a Colonel, and so on down to the lowest grade in crime."

In the summer of 1863 the Washington Chronicle reported a speech made by Jim Lane, Republican Senator from Kansas, in Washington City:

"I would like," said Senator Lane, "to live long enough to see every white man in South Carolina in hell, and the negroes inheriting their territory. (Loud applause.) It would not any day wound my feelings to find the dead bodies of every rebel sympathizer pierced with bullet holes, in every street and alley in Washington City. (Applause.) Yes; I would regret the waste of powder and lead. I would rather have these Copperheads hung and the ropes saved for future use. (Loud applause.) I would like to see them dangle until their stinking bodies would rot and fall to the ground piece by piece." (Applause and laughter.)

Nothing done by the Republicans after the war ended manifested more malignant hatred than the way they treated and lied on the President of the Southern Confederacy. This western continent has nroduced no man of whom it has more reason to be proud than Jefferson Davis. Brave, gentle, kindly, a true Christian in every walk of life, a patriot of the truest type, an ardent lover of the liberty which inspired the men of '76, Davis should be held up before the youth of America as deserving esteem, reverence, emulation. When the war ended the Republicans selected Mr. Davis as the chief object on which to pour foul streams of hate. The English language was ransacked in search of vile epithets to throw upon him; human ingenuity was taxed to invent base falsehoods to defame him. The murder of Mr. Lincoln was seized as a pretext to charge him with the crime of assassination. Without the faintest shadow of evidence Republicans made haste to proclaim to the world that in their bureau of military justice they had proof that Mr. Davis was guilty of the assassination of Lincoln. $100,000 were offered for his arrest. When arrested he was cast into prison and treated as a felon. Every species of indignity and insult was heaped upon him. Though old, feeble, sick, and strictly guarded, brutal men were ordered to enter his cell, throw him down and weld iron chains and balls on his ankles, ordered by the present Lieutenant-General Nelson A Miles. In vain Mr. Davis requested to be taken into open court and tried on the charges made. They dared not try him in any court. They knew they had no particle of evidence on which to convict him. Were he tried for Lincoln's murder, they would be proved guilty of lying, not Mr. Davis of murder. Were he tried for treason, not Mr. Davis, but the whole Republican party, would be proved guilty of treason - treason to the Constitution - treason to the principles of '76. Not daring to try Mr. Davis, too venomously cruel to restore him to freedom, they kept him in prison two years and every day of those two years, and almost every day afterward for more than a dozen years, Republicans continued to pour out on Mr. Davis' name streams of sulphuric hate.

When Republicans proclaimed that Mr. Davis and other distinguished men of the South had assassinated Lincoln, there was not a human on earth outside of the hate-crazed Republican party who believed that charge. Earl Russell, from the floor of Parliament, voiced the sentiment of all England when he said:

"It is not possible that men who have borne themselves so nobly in their struggle for independence could be guilty of assassination."
[idem p. 242-243]

* * *

Not only did Republicans pour out the virulence of hate on the South's men, her women came in for a share, and a large share they received. A few specimens will show the women of this generation how their mothers were hated in the past.

Harper's Weekly, October 12th, 1861, has this:

"The ladies of the South ought to be sent to the alms- houses and made to nurse pauper babies, and put to wash tubs under Irish Biddies."

In the year 1865, June 4th, Harper had this little nugget of pure hate:

"The women of the South are lovely and accomplished to look at, but their bold barbarity has de-humanized them; they are like the smooth-skinned wives and daughters of the ogres in fairy tales — hyenas and wolves in woman's shape."

The lies of hate are not all dead yet; as late as June, 1894, a little paper called the Picket Guard, run in the interest of the Grand Army of the Republic of St. Louis, published the following wanton falsehood on the women of the South:

"The mothers of the South," said the Picket Guard, "systematically taught their children to be cruel. During the war it was the custom of Southern ladies, accompanied by their little boys and girls, to walk through the prison hospitals and tear bandages from the wounds of the Union prisoners, to exult in the pain they witnessed."

Not a paper in St. Louis denounced this hate-born lie. On the contrary, a Republican daily paper, the Star, of that city, reproduced the lie in its columns, as a warning to the Society of the Daughters of the Confederacy to keep silent on the war of the 60's.
[idem p. 245-246]

Of the malignant as well as foolish lies in this extract, it is only necessary to notice the biggest of them all, the assertion that the South murdered 60,000 Union soldiers in her prisons. Secretary of War Stanton left on record the number of men on both sides who were made prisoners during the war, and the number who died in prison.

In Northern prisons were Southern soldiers. . . .220,000
Of those died in Northern prisons...................... 26,000
In the South's prisons were Union soldiers... . . .270,000
Of those who died in Southern prisons............... 23,576

These figures show that Mr. Shellabarger's figures exceed Stanton's by 36,424. If only 23,576 Union soldiers died in the South's prisons, how did it happen that she starved to death 60,000 in her prisons?
[idem p. 246]

* * *

In 1876, eleven years after the South surrendered, Mr. James G. Blaine of Maine stood up in Congress and poured out a lot of hate-born lies as malignant as human tongue ever uttered or human brain ever concocted:

"Mr. Davis," cried Blaine, "was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murders and crimes at Andersonville. And I here, before God, measuring my words, knowing their full extent and import, declare that neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the Low Country, nor the massacre of St. Bartholomew, nor the thumb-screws and other engines of torture of the Spanish Inquisition, began to compare in atrocity with the hideous crimes of Andersonville."

When his speech was concluded Mr. Blaine's admirers rushed up to congratulate him. Mr. B.H. Hill of Georgia rose to his feet and confronted them with Stanton's figures.

"If," said Mr. Hill, "cruelty killed the 23,500 Union sol- diers who died in the South's prisons, what killed the 26,000 Confederate soldiers who died in the North's prisons? In other words, if the nine per cent of men in the South's prisons were starved and tortured to death by Mr. Jefferson Davis, who tortured to death the twelve per cent of the South's men who died in the North's prisons?"

Mr. Blaine and his friends were dumfounded. Stanton was an authority whose figures they dared not assail; they, as Shellabarger, had not chanced to see Stanton's figures.

Mr. Blaine made no reply to Hill for several days. Finding the figures had been quoted correctly, he did not venture to deny their accuracy, but attempted to weaken their force; he had not magnanimity enough to admit an error, to regret a wrong. His explanation was lame, but it was the best he could frame.

"Our men," said Mr. Blaine, "when captured were in full health; they came back wasted and worn. The rebel prisoners in large numbers were emaciated and reduced from having been ill-fed, ill-clothed, so they died rapidly in our prisons - died like sheep."

This excuse was accepted by Republicans, and the lie that the South starved prisoners to death was kept alive, and to this day is often told.
[idem 247-248]

* * *

During all those twenty-seven years the lie that Mr. Davis had willfully starved and tortured Union soldiers to death was told and retold a hundred thousand times. All that time Butler knew the statement was false, but he did not choose to say so until he wrote his book in 1892.

In that book, page 610, Butler says:

"In the matter of starvation of prisoners the fact is incontestible that a soldier of our army would easily have starved on the rations which in the latter days of the war were served out to the Confederate soldiers before Petersburg. I examined the haversacks of many Confederate soldiers captured on picket during the summer of 1864, and found therein, as their rations for three days, scarcely more than a pint of kernels of corn, none of which were broken, but only parched to blackness by the camp fires, and a piece of raw bacon about three inches long by an inch and a half wide, and less than half an inch thick. No Northern soldier could have lived three days on that. With regard to clothing, it was simply impossible for the Confederates, at that time and months before, to have any sufficient clothing on the bodies of their own soldiers. Many went bare-footed all winter. Necessity compelled the condition of food and clothes given by them to our men in their prisons. It was not possible for the Confederate authorities to supply clothes and food." — Butler's Book, page 610.
[idem p. 248]

* * *

While Mr. Davis lay in a dungeon cell in Fortress Monroe, and while the whole air of the North was thick with the cries, "Hang him! Hang him! Hang him!" a number of the leading men of the Republican party consulted together, and decided to settle the question decisively, was Davis guilty, as charged, of cruelty to the Union soldiers in prison? Gov. Jno. A. Andrew of Massachusetts, Horace Greeley, Thaddeus Stevens, Henry Wil- son, then Vice-President of the United States, and Gerritt Smith were of the number who were willing secretly to admit they did not believe Mr. Davis guilty as charged - secretly, not one had the fairness to say so openly. However, in the first week of Congress, 1866, these men sent Chief Justice George Shea of the Marine Court to Canada to inspect the official records of the Confederate Government. Judge Shea saw General John C. Breckenridge, then in Canada, and through his influence was placed in Judge Shea's hands the official records of the Confederate Government, which Judge Shea carefully examined, especially all the messages and acts of the Executive and Senate in secret sessions, concerning the care and exchange of prisoners. Judge Shea found that the inhuman and unwarlike treatment of the South's soldiers in Northern prisons was a most prominent and frequent topic during those secret sessions. From those documents, not meant to meet the public eye, it was manifest that the people of the South had reports of the cruel treatment of their loved ones in Northern prisons, and through representatives in Richmond had pressed Mr. Davis, as the Executive and the Commander-in-Chief of the South's Army and Navy, instantly to try active measures of retaliation, to the end that the cruelties to prisoners should be stopped. Judge Shea, in his report of the investigation, said:

"It was decisively manifest that Mr. Davis steadily and unflinchingly set himself in opposition to the demands made for retaliation, and this impaired his personal influence and brought much censure upon him from Southern people. These secret sessions show that Mr. Davis strongly desired to do something which would secure better treatment to his men in Northern prisons, and would place the war on the footing of wars waged by people in modern times, and divest it of a savage character; and to this end Mr. Davis commissioned Alexander Stevens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, to proceed to Washington as military commissioner. This project was prevented by Lincoln and Seward, who denied permission for Mr. Stevens to approach Washington. After this effort to produce a mutual kindness in the treatment of prisoners failed, the Southern people became more unquiet on the matter, yet the secret records show that Mr. Davis did not yield to the continual demand for retaliation."
— Southern Historical Papers.

Although this report, made in 1866, completely exonerated Mr. Davis from the vile charge of having tortured and starved prisoners to death, such was the despotism of the party in power, such was the bitter hate Republicans in the North felt toward the South, this report was not given to the public until nearly eleven years after Judge Shea's report was made. All these eleven years every Republican engine, newspapers, magazines, lecturers, politicians, were hard at work villifying Mr. Davis and repeating the lie that he was guilty of torturing and starving prisoners to death; and this, although Horace Greeley, Senator Wilson, Gov. Jno. A. Andrew of Massachusetts, Gerritt Smith and other high Republicans knew these charges were absolutely false. Was this Shea investigation kept secret from Blaine?
[idem p. 248-250]

* * *

Garfield [presidential candidate] was a speaker at that meeting. Garfield's speech and Colonel Streight's had been cast in the same mould. The following is an extract from Garfield's reported speech:

"The Southern Senators lie like traitors, as they are!" shouted Garfield, "when they say our men were treated as well in their prisons as the rebels were treated in our prisons. Hill of Georgia stands up in Congress and lies when he says the rebel chiefs took as good care of our men in their prisons as they could. Yes, deep down in his throat he lies. They were human fiends. Hill is a liar. There is no peace with rebels! They are very anxious to forget and forgive. Are we to be friends with traitors? No! No! Never! We have proof that Jefferson Davis was guilty of torturing our men in his prisons to death! It was his policy to make idiots of our men by tortures. Southern cruelty never before in all the world had its parallel for atrocity. Never can we forgive them ! Never will I be willing to imitate the loving kindness of Him who planted the green grass on the battlefields."

And all this, twelve years after Judge Shea had made his report!

Garfield seldom missed an opportunity to give vent to his animosity. In a speech in Chicago he said:

"Never will I consent to shake hands with the South until she admits she was wrong, eternally wrong, and the North was right, eternally right."

In 1879 and 1880, during the Garfield campaign, Republican hate became a howling insanity. Judge Yaples, in the Cincinnati Enquirer of 1880, said:

"Republican hate is grounded on the fact that the people of the South will not join the Republican party."

How could they be expected to join a party which, from its birth, had wronged and hated them ?

Garfield's champions boldly declared that when he was elected the South would be territorialized, so that the whole country could be Africanized, and negroes put in rule over whites and upheld by military power.
[idem p. 251-252]

* * *

During Mr. Hayes' campaign, Mr. Howard Kutchins, editor of the Fon-du-lac (Wis.) Commonwealth, two weeks before election day inserted in his paper the following address to Republican voters:

To Arms, Republicans!
"Men! Work in every town in Wisconsin for men not afraid of fire-arms, of blood, or dead bodies. To preserve peace and prevent the administration of public affairs from falling into the hands of obnoxious men, every Republican in Wisconsin should go armed to the polls on next election day. The grain stacks, houses and barns of all active Democrats should be burned to the ground, their children burned with them, their wives outraged, that they may understand the Republican party is the one which is bound to rule, and the one which they should vote for or keep their stinking carcasses away from the polls. If they persist in going to the polls and voting for Jenkins (Democrat), meet them on the road, in the bush, on the hill, anywhere, night or day, and shoot every one of the base cowards and agitators. If they are too strong in any locality and succeed in putting their opposition votes into the ballot boxes, break open the boxes, tear to shreds their discord-breeding ballots, and burn them to ashes. This is the time for effective work. These agitators must be put down. Whoever opposes us does so at his peril. Republicans, be at the polls in accordance with the above directions, and do not stop for a little blood."

Hayes became President; in reward for so much party zeal he nominated the bloodthirsty Kutchins for the Internal Revenue Collectorship in the Third District of Wisconsin. So far as I can learn, not a man or woman in the Republican party made any objection to Kutchins' savage advice to voters. Yet this is the party which to this day weeps tears of sympathy over any negro man whose vote is not cast and counted in the South.
[idem p. 253]

* * *

Brevet Major George W. Nichols, aide-de-camp to General Sherman when he made that vainglorious march to the sea, wrote a book called "The Story of the Great March."

Nichols says:

"History will in vain be searched for a parallel to the scathing and destructive effect of the invasion of the Carolinas. Aside from the destruction of military things, there were destructions overwhelming, overleaping the present generation - even if peace speedily come, agriculture, commerce cannot be revived in our day. Day by day our legions of armed men surged over the land, over a region forty miles wide, burning everything we could not take away. On every side, the head, center and rear of our columns might be traced by columns of smoke by day and the glare of flames by night. The burning hand of war pressed on these people, blasting, withering."

In Sherman's report to Halleck he evidently takes great pride in the wanton destruction he has wrought:

"I estimate," writes Sherman, "that the damage to Georgia alone is $100,000,000 - $98,000,000 was simple destruction - two millions have inured to our advantage. Our soldiers have done the work with alacrity and cheerfulness unsurpassed."

In Sherman's report to Halleck of the burning of Columbia, in 1865, Sherman charged that crime to General Wade Hampton. That lie went traveling over the Northern States for ten years. In 1875, Appleton and Co. published Sherman's Memoirs, written by himself. In volume 2, page 287, Sherman, without a blush of shame, admits the lie, using the following words:

"In my official report of the conflagration of Columbia, I distinctly charged it to General Wade Hampton, and confess I did so pointedly to shake the faith of his people in him."
[idem p.261-262]

* * *

Shortly after the South surrendered, Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's Secretary of the Treasury, made a flying visit down the Atlantic States. On his return, newspapers reported Mr. Chase's opinion of the whites and blacks in these States:

"I found," said Chase, "the whites a worn-out, effete race, without vigor, mental or physical. On the contrary, negroes are alive, alert, full of energy. I predict in twenty-five years the negroes of the South will be at the head of all affairs, political, religious, the arts and sciences."
[idem p. 262]

* * *

We have shown that in the year 1796 certain New England Federalists, to attain a certain object they had in view, set themselves to work to promulgate the gospel of hate toward the people of the South. By dint of teaching hate the teachers developed that feeling in their own hearts. As the teaching went on, the feeling increased in intensity until it became an insanity, a monomania utterly beyond the control or the influence of reason. Finally it came to pass that from this insanity of hate there sprung an insanity of love. The former was directed toward the white people of the South, the latter toward the negroes. Without evidence from the papers and publications of that day, the white men of this generation will not be able to believe that New England, as well as large numbers of the Republican party, came to admire and respect the negro race as morally and mentally superior to the white. At first this strange insanity only held that the negroes in the South were far superior in every way to Southern whites; but as time passed the insanity took on a more violent form, and those so afflicted believed and taught that as a race the negro was greatly superior, morally and mentally, to the whole Caucasian race, and not only this, they came to admire every peculiar quality of the negro, the blackness of their skins, their woolly hair. Their whole makeup New England orators and writers dwelt on with a sort of worshiping rapture and urged intermarriage between blacks and whites, not to elevate the former, but the latter.

Extracts from speeches and papers will throw light on this subject. In the early stages of his insanity Wendell Phillips was fond of announcing to his audiences that "negroes are our acknowledged equals. They are our brothers and sisters." As time went on Mr. Phillips' distemper became more heated. He was not satisfied with asserting that "negroes are our equals;" he made the startling announcement that-

"Negroes are our Nobility !"

And began to clamor that special privileges be granted to "our nobility." He wanted all the land in the Southern States divided and bestowed on "our nobility" and their heirs forever. What "our nobility" had done to deserve this rich reward Mr. Phillips did not explain. Perhaps he thought the fact that negroes had been brought from Africa in a savage state, and had acquired in the hard school of slavery some of the arts of civilization, fitted them to become a noble class.

Governor Stone of Iowa, in a speech made at Keokuk, August 3, 1863, was certainly in the first stages of this insanity when he said to his audience:

"I hold the Democracy in the utmost contempt. I would rather eat with a negro, drink with a negro, and sleep with a negro than with a Copperhead" (meaning a Democrat).

The disease certainly had struck Mr. Morrow B. Lowry, State Senator of Pennsylvania, when at a large meeting in Philadelphia, in 1863, he said to his audience:

"For all I know the Napoleon of this war may be done up in a black package. We have no evidence of his being done up in a white one. The man who talks of elevating a negro would not have to elevate him very much to make him equal to himself."

The faithful old New York Independent sorrowfully wailed over the long delayed coming of the Black Napoleon, which all the insane negro-worshipers confidently looked for.

"God and negroes," said the Independent, "are to save the country. For two years the white soldiers of this country have been trying to find a path to victory. The negroes are the final reliance of our Government. Negroes are the keepers and the saviors of our cause. Negroes are the forlorn hope of our Republican party."

James Parton, the noted biographer, was strongly touched with the prevailing disease - insane love of negroes.

"Many a negro," wrote James Parton, in 1863, "stands in the same kind of moral relation to his master as that in which Jesus Christ stood to the Jews, and not morally only, for he stands above his master at a height which the master can neither see nor understand."

J. W. Phelps, General in the Republican army, thought the negro race much better adapted to receive Christianity than the white.

"Christianity," said Phelps, "is planted in the dark rich soil of the African nature. Negroes are as intelligent and far more moral than the whites. The slaves appeal to the moral law, clinging to it as to the very horns of the altar; he bears no resentment, he asks for no punishment for his master."

A little work, ably written, titled "Miscegenation," was published in 1863 or 1864. Before this work was out a white woman, Miss Annie Dickinson, called by Republicans "The Modern Joan of Arc" became a convert to the doctrine of intermarriage between whites and blacks and an eloquent expounder of the same. Miss Dickinson lectured over the Northern States. It was said at the time that President Lincoln and his Cabinet attended her lectures in Washington City. Miss Dickinson wrote a novel called "What Answer?" the purpose of which was to illustrate the beauty and utility of marriage between negro men and white women, and negro women and white men. The characters in "What Answer?" are negroes and whites. They fall in love and marry in a way to affright and disgust people not up to date on such doctrines. The title, "What Answer?" was supposed to indicate that the author's argument could not be refuted.

On the night Miss Dickinson was to lecture at Cooper Institute, New York City, she was late in appearing; the impatient audience was quieted by the distribution of circulars advertising the new work, "Miscegenation," just published.

George Sala, correspondent of the London Telegraph, was then in Washington City, and wrote his paper as follows:

"Miss Dickinson comes accredited by persons of high authority. She is handed to the rostrum by the second personage in the North. The Speaker of the House is her gentleman usher. The Chief of the State (Lincoln) and his ministers swell the number of her auditors. She is the goddess of Republican idolatry."

February, 1863, the correspondent of the London Times wrote from New York describing Republican love of the negro race:

"It has been discovered here," wrote the Times correspondent, "that in many important respects the negro is su- perior to the whites; that if the latter do not forget their pride of race, and blood, and color, and amalgamate with the 'purer and richer blood' of the blacks, they will die out and wither away in unprolific skinniness. The first to give tongue to the new doctrine were Theodore Tilton and the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The latter a few months ago declared that it was good for white women to marry black men, and that the passion and emotional nature of the blacks were needed to improve the white race. Mr. Wendell Phillips has often hinted the same thing."

The London Times of February 5, 1862 or 1863, I am not certain which, contained copious extracts from "Miscegenation," as samples of the love-insanity for the negroes which at that time afflicted the Republican party. I also offer a few extracts from "Miscegenation:"

"All that is needed," says the author of "Miscegenation," "to make us the finest race on earth is to engraft upon our stock the negro element which Providence has placed by our side upon this continent. (The Providence were New England's slave-stealers who imported negroes from Africa and sold them to the South's planters). Of all the rich treasures of blood vouchsafed to us, that of the negro is the most precious. By mingling with negroes we will become powerful, progressive and prosperous. By refusing to do so we will become feeble, unhealthy, narrow-minded, unfit of noble offices of freedom and certain of early decay. White people are perishing for want of flesh and blood; they are dry and shriveled, for lack of the healthful juices of life. Their cheeks are sunken, their lips are thin and bloodless, their under jaws narrow and retreating, their noses sharp and cold, their teeth decayed, their eyes small and watery, their complexion of a blue and yellow hue, their heads and shoulders bent forward, hair dry and straggling. The waists of white women are thin and pinched, telling of sterility and consumption; their whole aspect is gaunt and cadaverous; they wear spectacles and paint their faces. The social intercourse between the sexes is acetic, formal, unemotional. How different is an assembly of negroes! Every cheek is plump, the teeth are white, the eyes large and bright, every form is stalwart, every face wears a smile. American white men need contact with warm-blooded negresses to fill up the interstices of their anatomy. I plead for amalgamation, not for my own individual pleasure, but for my country, for the cause of progress, for the world, for Christianity. It is a mean pride unworthy of an enlightened community that will deny the principle of amalgamation. This principle has touched a chord in humanity that vibrates with a sweet, strange, marvelous music, awakening the slumbering instincts of the Nation and the world. It would be a sad misfortune if this war should end without a black general in command. We want an American Touisant l'Overture. It is in the eternal fitness of things that the South should be conquered by black soldiers. After that the land of the South must be divided among negroes."
[idem p. 266-269]

* * *

Time has proved how little the Republican party understood the Caucasian or the African race. No Touisant l'Overture appeared on the scene. No black general came forward to "fill the eternal fitness of things." On the contrary, all during the war the negroes in the South were amiable servitors, docile and obedient to their white mistresses while their masters were at the front fighting the armed invaders of their country.
[idem p. 270]