Day 14. March 14, 1862.
14
their owners would see to it that they had no chance….
March Friday 14 1862
Quite gloomy this morning and fogy and looks as like it would rain some but has not rained today. This is the day of sale of stock and farming utensils at my place and I am now in the Army and in Frederick Co. Va. 3 ½ miles from Winchester camped. The 3 Brigade consist of 7 & 29 Ohio 7 Va. and 110th Penn Volunteers and we are drawing 3 days rations of provision. Today there is a grate deal of excitement all the time. We heard heavy cannonading this morning and we have not heard where it was* and I hope that it is to some good affect. There was another Regiment 66 Ohio** Regt camping here. I don’t know that we will soon make one in case we don’t use it. We had no mail today. I am looking for a letter. Forces in the advance was givng the rebels some shell and ball today
*Imagine what it was like hearing fire & not knowing where it was, what was happening on either side, & whether it was coming in your direction, & if so, how fast it would get there, then what would happen? Will I last through today? Or will tomorrow be the day?
**This is William Brand’s regiment (who described the first train going over Back Creek Bridge, as did Ephraim, on 3/10).
A Virginia Yankee in the Civil War The Diaries of David Hunter Strother David Hunter Strother P. 14-15
“MARCH 14, FRIDAY.— Out of town I met John Wall, who told me of the arrest of Union citizens by Jackson on leaving there. He says it was the most humiliating sight he has ever seen since the opening of the war. Grey-haired and prominent citizens marched like felons through the streets, tramping through mud and rain between files of soldiers. He says the act has done more to kill Secession sentiment here than anything else. He says retaliation would be impolitic, especially as there is no proper material upon whom to retaliate.
Arrived at Berryville I found Adam alone at the Topographical Quarters. With him was a Negro named Bob, late a servant in the Southern army. Bob was sharp and a great wag. He says Jackson had the boats on the Potomac to cross his brigade more effectually to destroy the canal dams. The destruction of the canal seemed to be a great desire with them. They attempted it with all their force and strategy but were continually foiled by the massive strength of the works and the superior fire of the Federal guards. He seemed to think Jackson’s brigade had very little idea of fighting at all. They took positions, outraged Union citizens, and as soon as the Federal troops approached they packed and fled. On the retreat from Bath he says they lost at least a hundred horses. When a wagon stuck, the load was taken out and burnt. When one upset it, it was burnt with its cargo. The troops froze because Jackson prohibited fires for fear the enemy would see them. Bob says it was well we lost the battle of Bull’s Run. It opened our Old Uncle Sam’s** eyes, made him see things clear. At the same time it made the South stark mad. Their self-confidence and credulity knew no bounds. They really believed their own extraordinary boastings, that they could whip the Yankees, five to one. Bob has made up his mind that they won’t fight anywhere.”
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life Barbara J. Fields, Karen Elise Fields P. 121-122
NOTE: I HAVE ZERO CLUE WHY I CAN’T FIX DOUBLE-SPACING IN ANY POST. “I HAVE TRIED SO VERY, VERY HARD.” WORDPRESS IS SATANIC.
“Virginia foundered during its early years and survived only through the good will and, when the colonists had exhausted that, the extorted tribute of the Indigenous Indians. But during the second decade of the seventeenth century, Virginia discovered its vocation: the growing of tobacco. The first boom in what would eventually become the United States took place during the 1620s, and it rested primarily on the backs of English indentured servants, not African slaves. Not until late in the century, after the boom had passed, did landowners begin buying slaves in large numbers, first from the West Indies and then, after 1680, from Africa itself. During the high years of the boom it was the “free-born” Englishman who became, as one historian put it, “a machine to make tobacco for somebody else.’”
Indentured servants served longer terms in Virginia than their English counterparts and enjoyed less dignity and less protection in law and custom. They could be bought and sold like livestock, kidnapped, stolen, put up as stakes in card games, and awarded– even before their arrival in America– to the victors in lawsuits. Greedy magnates (if the term is not redundant) stinted the servants’ food and cheated them out of their freedom dues, and often out of freedom itself, when they had served their time. Servants were beaten, maimed, and even killed with impunity. For expressing opinions unfavorable to the governor and the governing council, one man had both his arms broken and his tongue bored through with an awl, while another lost his ear and had to submit to a second seven-year term of servitude to a member of the council that had judged his case.
Whatever truths may have appeared self-evident in those days, neither an inalienable right to life and liberty nor the founding of government on the consent of the governed was among them. Virginia was a profit-seeking venture, and no one stood to make them a profit growing tobacco by democratic methods. Only those who could force large numbers of people to work tobacco for them stood to get rich during the tobacco boom. Neither white skin nor English nationality protected servants from the grossest forms of brutality and exploitation. The only degradation they were spared was perpetual enslavement along with their issue in perpetuity, the fate that eventually befell the descendants of Africans.
P. 125
Much more important: Africans and Afro-West Indians had not taken part in the long history of negotiation and contest in which the English lower classes had worked out the relationship between themselves and their superiors. Therefore, the custom and law that embodied that history did not apply to them. To put it another way: when English servants entered the ring in Virginia, they did not enter alone. Instead, they entered in company with the generations who had preceded them in the struggle; and the outcome of those earlier struggles established the terms and conditions of the latest one. But Africans and Afro-West Indians did enter the ring alone. Their forebears had struggled in a different arena, which had no bearing on this one. Whatever concessions they might obtain had to be won from scratch, in unequal combat, an ocean away from the people they might have called on for reinforcements.
Africans and Afro-West Indians were thus available for perpetual slavery in a way that English servants were not.”
Note: Not to mention the language & cultural gaps. Note too: Countries such as Benin may have benefited as much as Britain from their slave trade: “What is clear is that slaving was at least as important to the rise of Britain, and very probably considerably more so. Ova Ovonramwen was at the pinnacle of the Kingdom of Benin’s pyramid of exploitation.” www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/18/will-woke-crowd-address-history-slavery-africa and www.wsj.com/amp/articles/when-the-slave-traders-were-african-11568991595 and www.bbc.co.ukworldservice/africa/features/storyofafrica/9chapter2
Note: Footnote 16, page 122, in Racecraft: “Edmund S. Morgan estimates that Virginia’s black population numbered fewer than 500 in 1645 and fewer than 2,000 in 1660. See Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 298.”
Note: President Lincoln, December 3, 1861, in his “First Annual Message” (to Congress, which is made up of both the Senate and the House of Representatives): (Excerpts)
“A disloyal portion of the American people have during the whole year been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union. A nation which endures factious domestic division is exposed to disrespect abroad, and one party, if not both, is sure sooner or later to invoke foreign intervention.
It continues to develop that the insurrection is largely, if not exclusively, a war upon the first principle of popular government—the rights of the people.
In my present position I could scarcely be justified were I to omit raising a warning voice against this approach of returning despotism.
It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.
Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.” Note: To read the full text, how he repeats the word disloyal 4 times, insurgents, 8; insurrection, 15, see https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-3-1861-first-annual-message
Lincoln and Prevention of War: Which ‘Blundering Generation’? What ‘Irrespressible Conflict’? An Interpretation of the Lincolnian View 1953 Ralph G. Lindstrom P. 2
“The “revisionist” school would re-write history to show that the Civil War was occasioned solely by a “blundering generation”; that slavery would soon have ended, anyway, as an uneconomic labor system.
The “irrepressible conflict” school consists of those who feel that occasionally mankind works itself into a political or civic “log jam” which can only be dislodged by an explosion, the explosion being an “irrepressible conflict.” Since modern thermo-nuclear violence would dislodge much more than the log jam, the question or controversy would seem due for review.
P. 24
Why, then, did we have Civil War? War came because some Northerners, in the smugness of “Garrisonian” and “Phillipsian” abolitionism, would set aside the Constitutional and federal plan for ultimate extinction of slavery. Instead, they asserted that righteousness was somewhat of a sectional thing, with exclusive residence in the North, and must be imposed from without on the slave states. This was met by counter-absurdity from South Carolina, describing slavery as a divinely ordained institution which slave owners could export for external application anywhere and everywhere, as of right, and under the slave laws of their own state.
Lincoln knew that, “when social conflicts embody great moral issues, “the way to keep the family of man from a log-jam to be burst by the violence of inevitable war is to recognize that “faith in the full rationality and perfectibility” of human beings is to “overrate man’s (human) capacity.” Therefore, Lincoln saw that the Federal Union established a safe law basis for homo sapiens.”
VIRGINIA
“Dilapidated, fenceless, and trodden with war as Virginia is, wherever I move across her surface, I find myself rous’d to surprise and admiration. What capacity for products, improvements, human life, nourishment, and expansion. Everywhere that I have been in the Old Dominion, (the subtle mockery of that title now!) such thoughts have fill’d me. The soil is yet far above the average of any of the northern States. And how full of breadth and scenery, everywhere distant mountains, everywhere convenient rivers. Even yet prodigal in forest woods, and surely eligible for all the fruits, orchards, and flowers. The skies and atmosphere most luscious, as I feel certain, from more than a year’s residence in the State, and movements hither and yon. I should say very healthy, as a general thing. Then a rich and elastic quality, by night and by day. The sun rejoices in his strength, dazzling and burning, and yet, to me, never unpleasantly weakening. It is not the panting tropical heat, but invigorates. The north tempers it. The nights are often unsurpassable. Last evening (Feb. 8,) I saw the first of the new moon, the outlined old moon clear along with it; the sky and air so clear, such transparent hues of color, it seem’d to me I had never really seen the new moon before. It was the thinnest cut crescent possible. It hung delicate just above the sulky shadow of the Blue mountains. Ah, it might prove an omen and good prophecy for this unhappy State.” Whitman Poetry and Prose Walt Whitman Penguin Putnam Inc. P. 742
The South: A Tour of its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People, 1867 J.T. Trowbridge, J.H. Segards, Editor P. 102-103
“In the case of Virginians, I think that the mere name of the State has also something to do with their pride in her. To hear one of them enunciate the euphonious syllables when asked to what portion of the Union he belongs, is wonderfully edifying; it is as good as eating a peach. “V-i-r-g-i-n-i-a,” he tells you, dwelling with rich intonations on the luscious vowels and consonants,—in his mind doubtless the choicest in the alphabet; and he seems proudly conscious, as he utters them, of having spoken a charm which enwraps him in an atmosphere of romance. Thenceforth he is unapproachable on that verdurous ground, the envy and despair of all who are so unfortunate as to have been born elsewhere. Thus a rich word surrounds itself with rich associations. But suppose a different name: instead of Virginia, Stubland, for example. It might indeed be the best State of all, yet, believe me, Stubland would have in all its borders no soil fertile enough to grow the fine plant of State pride.
“I believe,” said I, “there is but one State as proud as Virginia, and that is the fiery little State of South Carolina.”
“I have less respect for South Carolina,” said he, “than for any other State in the Union. South Carolina troops were the worst troops in the Confederate army. It was South Carolina’s self-conceit and bluster that caused the war.”
(So State pride in another State than Virginia was only “self-conceit.”)
“Yes,” said I “South Carolina began the war; but Virginia carried it on. If Virginia had thrown the weight of her very great power in the Union against secession, resort to arms would never have been necessary. She held a position which she has forfeited forever, because she was not true to it. By seceding she lost wealth, influence, slavery, and the blood of her bravest sons; and what has she gained? I wonder, sir, how your State pride can hold out so well.’”
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859-1864 Edward Ayers P. 141
“With Lincoln’s proclamation came Virginia’s decision. It came with stunning rapidity, given all the months, all the years of talk and vacillation that had come before. The decision came from what seemed to many white Virginians the unavoidable logic of the situation: Virginia was a slave state; the Republicans had announced their intention of limiting slavery; slavery was protected by the sovereignty of the state; an attack on that sovereignty by military force was an assault on the freedom of property and political representation that sovereignty embodied. When the federal government protected the freedom and future of slavery by recognizing the sovereignty of the states, Virginia’s Unionists could tolerate the insult the Republicans represented; when the federal government rejected that sovereignty, the threat could no longer be denied even by those who loved the Union.
P. 142
After Virginia’s decision everything shifted with the upper South. North Carolina and Tennessee left the Union after Virginia despite their even stronger Unionism. The geopolitics of slavery and of warfare demanded as much. Now the white people of the upper South suddenly professed to know where they belonged, what they must do. Earlier words of Union and peace had to be disavowed, denied, forgotten.”
American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia Edmund Morgan P. 380-81
“It was one thing to be on familiar terms with the lower classes, but did Virginia’s patricians wish to promote their own demise? Did not the exhortations to equality invite slaves, servants, and small farmers to turn them out?
The question occurred later to an astute English diplomat, who served in Washington during Jefferson’s presidency. During his tour of duty Sir Augustus John Foster visited both the northern and the southern states was was surprised to find in the North a greater attention to social distinctions than in the South. Virginians above all others seemed bent on reducing all men to an equal footing. “Owners of slaves.” he observed, “among themselves, are all for keeping down every kind of superiority”; and he attributed this affectation in part to their “being rivals in their own states for the voice of the people, whom they court by dressing and looking like them as much as they can.” But he had a further explanation why the South could outdo the North in its zeal for equality. The Virginians, he said, “can profess an unbounded love of liberty and of democracy in consequence of the mass of the people, who in other countries might become mobs, being there nearly altogether composed of their own Negro slaves….”
There it was. Aristocrats could more safely preach equality in a slave society than in a free one. Slaves did not become leveling mobs, because their owners would see to it that they had no chance to. The apostrophes to equality were not addressed to them. And because Virginia’s labor force was composed mainly of slaves, who had been isolated by race and removed from the political equation, the remaining free laborers and tenant farmers were too few in numbers to constitute a serious threat to the superiority of the men who assured them of their equality. Moreover, the small farmers had been given a reason to see themselves as already the equals of the large. The majority of households in Virginia, as we have seen, contained more than one tithable, and in such cases the working members of the household, other than the head, were probably by this time slaves. The small planter’s small stake in human property placed him on the same side of the fence as the large man, whom he regularly elected to protect his interests. Virginia’s small farmers could perceive a common identity with the large, because there was one, even more compelling than those we have already noticed. Neither was a slave. And both were equal in not being slaves.
This is not to say that a belief in republican equality had to rest on slavery, but only that in Virginia (and probably in other southern colonies) it did. The most ardent American republicans were Virginians, and their ardor was not unrelated to their power over the men and women they held in bondage, in the republican way of thinking as Americans inherited it from England, slavery occupied a critical, if ambiguous, position: it was the primary evil that men sought to avoid for society as a whole by curbing monarchs and establishing republics. But it was also the solution to one of society’s most serious problems, the problem of the poor. Virginians could outdo English republicans as well as New England ones, partly because they had solved the problem: they had achieved a society in which most of the poor were enslaved.”
Note: “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Another version: “And its hands would weave the entrails of the priest/For the lack of a cord with which to strangle kings.” Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg 1954 P. 321
“The press and Premier Palmerston and the voices of the ruling class of England could not hope to change the basic instinct of the masses, now deeper in response to the Lincoln Government as against that of Davis at Richmond. In the inner circles of the ruling class it was admitted that now there would be increased difficulty for any European government to recognize the South.
A wave of fury swept the South. Lincoln was breaking the laws of civilized warfare, outraging private-property rights, inviting Negroes to kill, burn and rape, said statesmen, orators, newspapers. The Richmond Inquirer fumed, “What shall we call him? Coward, assassin, savage, murderer of women and babies? Or shall we consider them all as embodied in the word fiend, and call him Lincoln, the Fiend?”
Lincoln had warned nearly a year back that the contest might develop into “remorseless, revolutionary warfare.” The awful responsibility of carrying on and finishing a war of conquest lay ahead.”
The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 15
Section title “The Claims of the Legend”
“Slavery Was Not the Sectional Issue. According to the legend, slavery was not the critical issue between the sections. Slavery was trivialized as the cause of the war in favor of such things as tariff disputes, control of investment banking and the means of wealth, cultural differences, and conflict between industrial and agricultural societies. In all events, the South had not seceded to protect slavery!
Kenneth M. Stampp observes that Southern spokesmen “denied that slavery had anything to do with the Confederate cause,” thus decontaminating it and turning it into something that they could cherish. “After Appomattox, Jefferson Davis claimed that ‘slavery was in no wise the cause of the conflict’ and Vice President Alexander Stephens argued that the war ‘was not a contest between the advocates or opponents of that Peculiar Institution.’” The denial that slavery protection had been the genesis of the Confederacy and the purpose of secession became “a cardinal element of the Southern apologia,” according to Robert F. Durden. He finds that “liberty, independence and especially states rights were advanced by countless Southern spokesmen as the hallowed principles of the Lost Cause.” And James L. Roark notes that postwar Southerners manifested “a nearly universal desire to escape the ignominy attached to slavery.’”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 128
“The growth of the Southern legend was even more sentimental than it was grandiloquent; it moved, more powerfully even than it moved toward splendor and magnificence, toward a sort of ecstatic, teary-eyed vision of the Old South as the Happy-Happy Land. This legend is most perfectly rendered in the tone of Thomas Nelson Page’s Billy as he dreams of the old plantation.
And of course the sentimentality waxed fat on the theme of the Confederate soldier and the cause for which he had fought and died. This soldier, I suggest, was in sober truth a proper subject for any people’s pride. And men (Western men, at least) have everywhere and eternally sentimentalized the causes of their wars, and particularly the causes that were lost. All of them have bled for God and Womanhood and Holy Right; not one has ever died for anything so crass and unbeautiful as the preservation of slavery. But I doubt that the process has ever elsewhere been carried to the length to which it was carried in the South in this time; that ever elsewhere the laurel and the rue were so heaped upon a tomb; that ever elsewhere any soldier became so identical with Galahad, the cause for which he fought with the quest for the Sangraal.
The South’s perpetual need for justifying its career, and the will to shut away more effectually the vision of its mounting hate and brutality toward the black man, entered into the equation also and bore these people yet further into the cult of the Great Southern Heart. The Old South must be made not only the happy country but the happy country especially for the Negro. The lash? A lie, sir; it had never existed. The only bonds were those of tender understanding, trust, and loyalty. And to prove it, here about us in this very hour of new freedom and bitter strife are hundreds of worn-out Uncle Toms and black mammies* still clinging stubbornly to the old masters who can no longer feed them, ten thousand Jim Crows still kicking their heels and whooping for the smile of a white man. Such is the Negro, sir, when he is not corrupted by meddling fools. Hate him? My good friend, we love him dearly—and we alone, for we alone know him.”
Note: The trope of ‘The Acceptable Negro.’ James Baldwin, Letter From a Region in my Mind, 11/9/1962, excerpt:
“There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.” www.newyorker.com/magazine.1962/11/17/letter-from-a-region-in-my-mind
Note: Baldwin wrote this essay: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-antisem.html
“ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS REWARD— For the delivery of BRAZILE, in either of the city prisons. He ran away last July; has been seen dressed in genteel male-apparel; he is a regular attendant of the balls, speaks French and English, is about 21 years old, a dark mulatto or copper color, has a Roman nose, rather slender, genteel person. He formerly belonged to Henry Hopkins, Esq., of this city. He came from Charleston, South Carolina, five years ago, and uses the Charleston brogue when speaking English. Inquire at No. 73 Baronne street.
GEO. A. BOTTS”
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 22-23
“Ex-slaves later recalled poor white neighbors as “one of our biggest troubles.” Those poor whites would encourage slaves to steal and then cheat them in trade; would steal themselves and blame slaves; would seduce impressionable young slave girls; and above all, provided the backbone of the hated slave patrols,**** which whipped and terrorized slaves caught without passes after curfew. And besides, the slaves regarded the poor whites as the laziest and most dissolute people on earth; it was probably the slaves who dubbed the poor whites “trash.”
But, the slaveholders could go only so far in encouraging their slaves’ contempt for the poor whites, for it quickly became a safe vehicle for expressing contempt for all whites.”
The Mind of the South W. J. Cash (1941) P. 67
“The implications here are extensive. But what concerns us now is that this solidification of feeling and interest in the South involved the final development of the paternalistic pattern (although the term is more than half wrong, I use it for the sake of convenience). Yeoman and cracker turned to the planter, waited eagerly upon his signal as to what to think and do, not only for the reasons I have already set down but also, and even more cogently, because he was their obviously indicated captain in the great common cause. “The stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery… believe whatever the slaveholders tell them; and thus are cajoled into the notion that they are the freest, happiest, and most intelligent people in the world,” wrote the bitter Helper, gazing in baffled anger upon the scene.”
Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 371-372
Note: Regarding Hinton Helper:
“He is seething with class resentment. Coming himself from all but the lowest stratum, Helper is arguing the case of what he calls the “non-slaveholding whites,” who, he says, though they make up seven-tenths– that is, five million– of the white population of the South, are entirely at the mercy of of the 347,000 planters and persons engaged in the commerce in slaves. “The magistrates in the villages, the constables in the districts, the commissioners of the towns, the mayors of the cities, the sheriffs of the counties, the judges of the various courts, the members of the legislatures, the governors of the states, the representatives and senators in Congress– are all slaveholders.” “The lords of the lash are not only absolute masters of the blacks, who are bought and sold, and driven about like so many cattle, but they are also the oracles and arbiters of all non-slaveholding whites, whose freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is purposely and fiendishly perpetuated. How little the ‘poor white trash,’ the great majority of the Southern white people, know of the real condition of the country is, indeed, sadly astonishing. The truth is, they know nothing of public measures, and little of private affairs, except what their imperious masters, the slave-drivers, condescend to tell, and that is but precious little, and even that little, always garbled and one-sided, is never told except in public harangues; for the haughty cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs will not degrade themselves by holding private converse with those who have neither dimes nor hereditary rights in human flesh.”
Nor does it matter whether these whites are not “trash” but decent and industrious men. “In the South, unfortunately, no kind of labor is either free or respectable. Every white man who is under the necessity of earning his bread, by the sweat of his brow, or by manual labor, in any capacity, no matter how unassuming in deportment, or exemplary in morals, is treated as if he was a loathsome beast, and shunned with the utmost disdain. His soul may be the very seat of honor and integrity, yet without slaves– himself a slave– he is accounted as nobody, and would be deemed intolerably presumptuous, if he dared to open his mouth, even so wide as to give faint utterance to a three-lettered monosyllable, like yea or nay, in the presence of an august knight of the whip and the lash.” And these men are made to serve in local guards for the purpose of protecting against slave revolt a class with whom they have no interests in common.
How, then, should these white men act? Though an individual slaveholder here and there might be moved to liberate his slaves, one had to face the fact that the planter class could no more be expected to abolish slavery than one might “expect to hear highway men clamoring for a universal interdict against travelling.’”
Note: Regarding Hinton Helper (author of the influential The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, published in 1857), Edmund Wilson, in Patriotic Gore (P. 379): “By 1909, when Helper was eighty, he had apparently become quite insane, and he ended by killing himself in a cheap rooming house in Washington, where he had given a false name. When he was last seen alive by his friends, the last thing he had been heard to say was, “there is no justice in this world.”
To such mental and moral confusion were the thinkers of the South, reduced by their efforts to deal rationally with the presence among them of four million kidnapped and enslaved Africans of a different color of skin and on a different cultural level from their own.”
Note: Three days before lighting out for the Peninsula, McClellan tells the men:
“However strange my actions may appear to you…. For a long time I have kept you inactive….I will bring you now face to face with the rebels….Only pray that God will defend the right….The moment for action has arrived….I am to watch over you as a parent over his children….your general loves you from the depths of his heart….The period of inaction has passed….You will willingly follow me to our graves….I would not have you think that our aim is to be attained without a manly struggle….We can ask no higher honor than the proud consciousness that we belonged to the Army of the Potomac….God smiles upon us….”
And Note:
“I have loved you, how very much I have tried my best to give you the good life. I tried to give it to you. I’ve laid down my life, practically, I’ve practically died every day to give you peace. For months I’ve tried to keep this thing from happening but I now see it’s the will… it’s the will of Sovereign Being that this happened to us. That we lay down our lives in protest against what’s been done. I tried so very, very hard. Please, please. Can we hasten, can we hasten with that medication. You don’t know what you’ve done… (pause) …I’ve tried. (clapping in the background)… (unintelligible words)… They saw it happen and ran in the bush and dropped the machine guns, I never in my life… But there’ll be more… (music and humming in background). You’ve got to move. Are you gonna get that medication here? You’ve got to move… It’s never been done before you say? It’s been done by every tribe in history, every tribe facing annihilation. The vat, with the green CN please. Bring it here so the adults can begin…. beg you, don’t, don’t fail to swallow my advice, you’ll be sorry… you’ll be sorry… Must trust, you have to step across…”
One guess to fit the name in today’s 5 letter Wordle. https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=29081
wesclark.com/jw/enoch_t_baker
“Paw Paw, Morgan Co. Va. March 14, 1862 My Dear Wife,
I write to let you know that i am well at present and hope that this will find you and the children the same. Our Company has been left here with two companies of horsemen to guard the railroad and stores at this place while all the rest of the Division has gone on and are now in Winchester which place they took without firing a gun. i have not got any letter from you since the 1st of March and don’t know how soon i will, as the mails are very uncertain at this point. What letters you have sent to me, i suppose, are with the rest of the regiment and i will get them when we get where they are.
Capt. McNight has detailed me at the store and i have been very busy for the last 10 days and nights, for all the provisions for our Division pass through his hands and it takes something to feed 30 thousand men and 4 thousand horses. We commence to serve out at 8 o’clock in the morning and it is 11 or 12 at night when we get done. So you may know what rest we get, this is the first chance i have had to write to you and the way i come to get this is (that) one of the cars broke down on the track we load on. My Dear Wife, i have not been paid off yet, and do not know when i will be but as soon as i get my money i will send you some on to you as i know you must want it.
In my last letter i told you that i got the box you sent me. i was very glad to get it and everything in it was very nice. i have your likeness that you sent me in it, as good as the day you had it taken.
No more at present
Excuse this writing and dirty papers, as i am in too much hurry to get better
From you husband to his Dear Loving Wife
To Sarah A. Baker from Enoch T. Baker”
Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Carl Sandburg 1954 P. 321-322
Note: After Antietam:
“Toward the end of this sad September Lincoln wrote a riddle that beset his mind, haunted his heart. He left it on his desk. It was not for publication. John Hay made a copy of it: “The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party; and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are the best adaptation to effect his purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true; that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere great power on the minds of the new contestants, he could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun, he could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.’”
Note: “Slavery a Divine Trust: Duty of the South to Preserve and Perpetuate the Institution as it Now Exists” was Benjamin Morgan Palmer’s 1861 20 page sermon-pamphlet– 30k of which blanketed everywhere south of the Mason-Dixon– & now available on Amazon under “fiction” for the low, low price of $15.90 (no reviews quite yet). Selected lines: “That any other than a tropical race must faint and wither beneath a tropical sun? We know better than others that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature, the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system. Last of all, in this great struggle, we defend the cause of God and religion. The abolition spirit is undeniably atheistic.” Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition…. because America is its own religion. Both sides figured heaven to be smiling down, their ideology bathed in clear white light, that in a short time– “60 suns”– their form of liberty’d come to fruition. Holy war on both sides against the Beast on the other. That our sins caused the cross, the nails through the palms, but not the tree, the palms that put the people swinging & posing in smiling photos afterward. None of those Rutherfords thought about the trees.
****You could get branded with “SS” on your hand for helping a slave escape (ss=slave stealing). There were over one thousand anti-slave societies by 1840 in the free states. 1820 saw the Missouri Compromise become law, which saved the Union. 1820 is an underappreciated year. See “Missouri Compromise: Primary Documents in American History” at the Library of Congress. See https://freedomonthemove.org for over 32 thousand more runaway ads.
Note: The last weeks of March 1864, more than 400 boats and ships were on the water, and 75k men were on the move.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness Michelle Alexander P. 210 (I can’t recommend this book enough)
“The predicament African Americans find themselves in today is not altogether different from the situation they faced during Jim Crow. Jim Crow, as oppressive as it was, offered a measure of security for blacks who were willing to play by its rules. Those who flouted the rules or resisted them risked the terror of the Klan. Cooperation with the Jim Crow system often seemed far more likely to increase or maintain one’s security than any alternative. That reality helps explain why African American leaders such as Booker T. Washington urged blacks to focus on improving themselves rather than on challenging racial discrimination. It is also why the Civil Rights Movement initially met significant resistance among some African Americans….
P. 180
More African American adults are under correctional control today—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. The mass incarceration of people of color is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. The absence of black fathers from families across America is nor simply a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time watching Sports Center. Thousands of black men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed by whites.”
Note: See the works of prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore & others on Reconstruction, the Southern Strategy, carceral geography, the Shadow State, ongoing judicial cover, & the prison industrial complex. Cory Booker: “Don’t lecture me about Jim Crow. I know this is not 1965. That’s what makes me so outraged. It’s 2022, and they’re blatantly removing more polling places from the counties where Blacks and Latinos are overrepresented. I’m not making that up. That is a fact.”
there is a grate deal of excitement all the time….
It’s all the same American Dream. Yet, nyet. Like a word with two faces, liberty contains the shadow of its opposite. The paper is a certain size. You abide by that, the top dermis of skin a layer of cells thinner than a sheet of paper and when you can fake something with so little as a piece of paper, a note, scanty & white as camphor, anything can go. They knew when they dragged & lined the letters up beside each other for the Constitution that words can slip their meanings like something killed at a different location from where its body was found. Like dragged bodies that get taken somewhere else, places where words don’t go combining sentences, the ghost words of American slavery, like something buried in a shallow grave then run from. Eventually we come to the end of what can be said, something wheeled away on a gurney past our seeing.
The Constitution.
Like something stillborn.
That it can be given no ordinary description is the description, the laid out bones on an exam table forming a partial skeleton only. Dry mummified tissue & closed seams. Iron grating rusted shut. Or like something that had been born with a caul.
A caul.
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