Day 5. March 5, 1862.
5
veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them….
March Wensday 5 1862
Quite cold and icy this morning. I found myself* in Cumberland. I was up street I meet [illeg.] Plimpton from Water Street. I was glad to hear from home they were all well. I went up to the Rail Road Station and got into the cars at 3oclock and did not get off until 6 ¼ oclock arrived down to Paw Paw Station at 7 ½ I got out to the Head Quarters in good time
*This expression of his will appear several times, as if he continued to be baffled, disoriented, as if someone switched last night’s lay of the land with scenery from somewhere else.
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 48
“7a.m. 24; 2p.m. 41; 9p.m. 30.”
Note: I read in the last 4 years, god only knows where, that McPherson disincludes 1/22/61 NYT stand in favor of slavery in his book The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times. I need to reget the book & check for myself. Anyone know? Because this would be a strange exclusion in a book on the NYT. Anyone know offhand?
The Most Fearful Ordeal: Original Coverage of the Civil War by Writers and Reporters of the New York Times Introduction and Notes by James McPherson P. viii
“Those who experienced the Civil War were well aware that they were living through the most important events in the nation’s history to date. “These are fearfully critical, anxious days,” wrote the prominent New York lawyer George Templeton Strong in May 1864, in which “the destinies of the continent for centuries will be decided.” Looking back a few years after the war, Mark Twain described the conflict as having “uprooted institutions that were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of two or three generations.”
The intensity of the war experiences seemed to alter the very consciousness of time and space for its participants. For both soldiers and civilians, time seemed either to stand still or to rush forward at lightning speed as they fought great battles or gathered anxiously outside the telegraph offices of newspapers waiting for newspapers waiting for news from the front. “The excitement of the war, and interest in its incidents, have absorbed everything else,” wrote Virginia’s fire-eating secessionist Edmund Ruffin in August 1861. “We think and talk of nothing else.”* Three days later and five hundred miles to the north, Ruffin’s words were echoed by the Yankee philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson: “The war… has assumed such huge proportions that it threatens to engulf us all—no preoccupation can exclude it, no hermitage hide us.” Another Northern civilian wrote that the conflict had “crowded into a few years the emotions of a lifetime.” And from as far away as London, where he served as secretary to his father in the American legation, young Henry Adams wondered “whether any of us will ever be able to live contented in times of peace and laziness. Our generation has been stirred up from its lowest layers and there is that in its history which will stamp every member of it until we are all in our graves. We cannot be commonplace…. One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.’”
Note: Little reminder that the NYT, on January 22, 1861, came right out & said it was opposed to abolition. https://www.nytimes.com/1861/01/22/archives/the-union-and-slaverysuggestions-for-a-southern-policy.html Excerpt: “We do not believe that it is either just or wise to introduce into the discussions of the day any schemes for the abolition of Slavery. It must be distinctly understood that we of the North have nothing to do with that subject, — that we propose no Congressional action upon it, — but that we regard it as exclusively under the jurisdiction and control of the Slaveholding States. We have a right, doubtless, to suggest for their consideration measures which we think would renew their loyalty, promote their interests and secure their safety; but even this should be done in a friendly spirit and without needlessly disturbing their fears or their pride.
In the exercise of this right, we have more than once called attention to the obvious duty and policy of the South in regard to Slavery. We have admitted the impossibility and the folly of the immediate abolition of Slavery, and pointed out the ruin certain to flow from the sudden release of four millions of ignorant slaves from the dependence and control of masters, to whose care they have been accustomed for generations to look for the means of subsistence. We believe that the negro is susceptible of civilization, and capable of self-support; but time will be necessary to prepare him for these responsibilities. Slavery, by compelling him to labor, has ingrained into him the seeds and roots of civilization; but that arbitrary system, as it has heretofore existed in this country, by denying mental culture, and every other right, is utterly inconsistent with the development of the germ which compulsory labor has thus planted.
The South cannot hold itself guiltless, nor be at peace with the world, nor rest secure in its position, while Slavery remains what it is. The great need of the South is a modification and amelioration of her system of Slavery. We believe that there is not a people under the sun, enlightened, civilized, barbarous or savage, except the slaves of the South, among whom matrimony is not a lawful institution. But with a majority of the people of South Carolina and Mississippi, and with a third of the aggregate population of the Northern Slave States, this fundamental basis of all Christian as well as heathen society, has no existence. There is no law for the marriage of slaves. The union of the sexes, whether long or short, may be severed at any time at the will of the master. This state of things is simply monstrous. It would be a compliment to style it barbarous or even savage; since the comparison would imply that it was no worse than what prevails in other parts of the world. Southern men have admitted the enormity of the evil, and that a remedy should be applied; but from year to year the monstrosity is tolerated, and no one proposes a remedy. Families are separated and their members sold on the auction block, without mercy, and without shame.”
Note: And two years earlier, the New York Times, Wednesday, January 19, 1859, NYT editorial, excerpt priming the public to align with their antiabolition stance:
“The Abolition of Slavery”
“The very best thing that could possibly be done towards the abolition of Slavery would be for the North to stop talking about it. Ten years of absolute silence would do more than fifty of turmoil and hostility, towards a peaceful removal of the evil. It is quite possible that the Abolition crusade may force a bloody and violent termination of the system, but this no sane man desires : and any other solution of the problem is infinitely retarded by the incessant intermeddling of parties who have neither responsibility not power in regard to the subject. The great necessity is to let the South alone,—to leave them leisure to think of their own affairs,—to throw upon them the necessity of studying their own condition and of looking into their own future. So long as we engross their thoughts by alarming their fears, they have neither time nor inclination to examine the question except from this single point of view.
Emancipation, whenever it comes, must be the work of the Slave States themselves. They must adopt it from a conviction of its necessity to their own well-being.
The Slavery question will continue to be discussed in the North ;—Abolitionists will continue to denounce, menace and alarm the South ;—the Southern people will always find their attention completely engrossed by this resistance against invasion from without, and will give no steady, intelligent, dispassionate thought to the necessities of their own position ;—and Emancipation, if it ever comes under such circumstances, will come like a thief in the night—without warning or preparation—the result of some bloody catastrophe, and do more harm than good to everybody concerned.”
www.nytimes.com/1859/01/19/archives/the-abolition-of-slavery
Note: Because 400 years of thinking about this evil, enforcing this evil, leeching off this evil throughout four centuries of free labor wasn’t centuries enough, no, get a few more. Really, they’d never have had this issue if they’d simply eschewed transplanting millions, force-migrating Africans across the pond in the first place, but shhh, unless abolitionists don’t start walking on eggshells, a “bloody catastrophe” could end this evil, & “everybody concerned,” meaning the whites, don’t want that to happen to their evil that they, again, began with that ship situation… Couldn’t the whites have planted & harvested their own cotton, sugar, tobacco without shooting ships over to west Africa & back?
And anyway, what business is it, really, to patriots in any other part of the country what happens to “evil” in the most southern latitude, say, past the 39 degrees and 43 minutes parallel? Because to stop talking about it has been instrumental in the amelioration of the world’s problems, don’t you know.
The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat Earl J. Hess P. 19-20
“Henry M. Cross of Massachusetts groped for the proper way to express his feelings of surprise and disgust after experiencing his own introduction to war. “A battle is a horrid thing. You can have no conception of its horrors. I never did before.” These veterans now had something in common. They had crossed over the gulf of experience, leaving behind relatives and friends who could not know what had happened to them.
Once they got through the searing experience of combat, survivors found themselves set apart from other people, even those closest to them. Daniel Holt, surgeon of the 121st New York, wrote to his wife about Chancellorsville and grew impassioned as he struggled to make her understand.
“You have asked me to give a description of a field after the Angel of Death has passed over it; but I can no more do so than I can give you an idea of anything indescribable. You must stand as I have stood, and hear the report of battery upon battery, witness the effect of shell, grape and canister– you must hear the incessant discharge of musketry, see men leaping high in the air and falling dead upon the ground– others without a groan or a sign yielding up their life from loss of blood– see the wounded covered with dirt and blackened by powder– hear their groan– witness their agonies, see the eye grow dim in death, before you can realize or be impressed with its horrors.”
Note: George Meade’s horse Baldy (cost $150, named for his white face) dies in 1882 at 30 years old. Wounded “five to fourteen times” in the war, I only know from a picture that you can visit his preserved head at the GAR museum in Philadelphia, floating out of a plaque in a case surrounded by words you have to glance past on both sides of his head to read, brown with white marking in a line that widens out to his nostrils on a nose that was hit by artillery at First Bull Run & you look, think of the 60 seconds it takes for blood to travel the body. He runs, falls, gets up again until words begin radiating to either side of this case in a Philly museum in some future century. He gets left for dead after Antietam. At another point, he gets shot through the stomach with a bullet that first goes through Meade’s pant leg. Baldy walks in Meade’s funeral procession. In 2009, a ceremony was held after Philadelphia Orphan’s Court decision ensured he will remain at the GAR museum. Someone ask Waskie about it?
*We think and talk of nothing else…. Edmund Ruffin: He fired some of the very first shots of the 3,340 on Sumter (as if they could count each last hole & bullet that did or didn’t take), but later draped himself in the CSA flag & shot his head off. Popular culture holds that Sumter started it all but the actual first (cannon) shots of the war went toward the Star of the West, the steamship that came to resupply the fort on 1/9/61 as it entered the harbor, just as the sun started rising, 20 days after South Carolina seceded. Instead of changing course, as the Rebels expected, the unarmed sailors hoisted the American flag & kept moving through the channel. “The people of Charleston pride themselves upon their hospitality” a crew member told the New York Evening Post, “but it exceeds my expectations. They gave us several balls before we landed.” Star of the West turned around, sailing back into open waters, & Rebels tailed it almost 3 hours but gave up as it approached its armed escort ship. But after the war the taste of blood in the house & the size of his Devil too much at last, known for “firing the first shot of the Civil War” and “revolutionizing Southern agriculture” (I’ll say!), this same Edmund Ruffin, right after the war, in June, wrapped himself in the Stars & Bars, waved around a loaded shotgun, then blew his head clean off. Because let’s face it: his troops got within five miles of the White House, yes they did, & still he couldn’t clinch it. Had it occurred to him, or anyone, that maybe they were just lazy motherfuckers down there? That secession had nothing to do with new-nationalist anything? “Yankee Rule” my ass. Here’s his suicide note:
“And now with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will [be] near to my latest breath, I here repeat, & would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule—to all political, social and business connections with Yankees, & to the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race.”
Except the percussion cap was a dud so the rifle didn’t fire. Daughter-in-law heard it, but by the time she rushed upstairs, Ruffin had reloaded and success! He was 71. Note as well: That Ruffin literally wrapped himself in a flag his final moments was a subsequent fake news account. There is no evidence. He may as well have.
Note: At least 2,200 Pennsylvanians fought in the Confederacy. As the crow flies, Gettysburg was only 30 miles from Ephraim’s farm, which meant he heard the battle, because reports came in from as far as 120 miles away about the sound. It must have been like someone walking over his grave. (There were at least 350 cannons going, mainly 12 pound Napoleans, some of which still dot the land there. On July 3, 150 went off at once on Cemetery Ridge, considered the largest firepower ever in the Western Hemisphere.) Ephraim must have been afraid, along with other Pennsylvanians, throughout June as it was well-known Rebels were set to cross the river then invade SE PA. soon. According to Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War the state was divided. Ephraim’s area had a lot of Secesh, including the editors at his local newspaper, Harrisburg’s daily The Patriot & Union, a four-page broadsheet with six columns of news on each page. It was a copperhead-run, anti-Lincoln paper. Four journalists were taken to D.C. under Henry Halleck’s (Lincoln’s General-in-Chief) orders and imprisoned without hearing for sedition in August, 1862. “Their offense? The Patriot & Union’s print shop had printed a handbill– a hoax that got posted all around Harrisburg– that announced abolitionist James Lane was in town to recruit local Black men for the Union Army. According to a recent article in America’s Civil War by Barrett’s great-great-grandson Doug Stewart, “If taken seriously, the handbill might have sparked a race riot.” The announcement promised:
“Arms, equipments, uniforms, pay, rations, and bounty the same as received by White Soldiers, and no distinction will be made.”
Black recruitment and black equality were incendiary topics in Pennsylvania– especially in midstate– in 1862. The newspaper men claimed that the handbill was a practical joke “got up by frolicsome printer boys without knowledge of the editors or proprietors.”
Ha, ha, ha? Jesus.
(Donald Gilliland pennlive.com “Living on the Wrong Side of History? The Harrisburg Patriot & Union’s notorious ‘review’ of the Gettysburg Address”)
Likely Ephraim also read the Hollidaysburg Register, the Blair County Weekly News, plus the Huntingdon Journal, Huntingdon’s Globe, and the Altoona Tribune, plus any papers he could get his hands on out of Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia, or even New York. Ephraim’s main paper The Daily Patriot and Union said of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address: “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of.”
It will take until 2013 for the paper to retract the editorial. No word yet on the handbill.
Note: The 272 word “silly remarks”:
Storm over the Land: A Profile of the Civil War Carl Sandburg 1939 P. 220-221
“Having read Everett’s address, Lincoln knew when the moment drew near for him to speak. He took out his own manuscript from a coat pocket, put on his steel-bowed glasses, stirred in his chair, looked over the manuscript, and put it back in his pocket. Ward Hill Lamont rose and spoke the words “The President of the United States,” who rose, and holding in one hand the two sheets of paper at which he occasionally glanced, delivered the address in his high-pitched and clear-carrying voice….”
www.archives.gov Note: “The address is on view on the 2nd floor of the White House, in Lincoln’s bedroom. There are five copies, plus two Lincoln had drafted, one of which was probably the copy he had folded in his pocket, then took out and read from.”
Note: To see a handwritten Gettysburg Address in Dr. Hays’ papers stored at the U.S. Heritage and Education Center:
https://emu.usahec.org/alma/multimedia/184586/20182819MN000024.pdf “Authentic Replica of the Copy in the Library of Congress: Includes Lincoln’s Signature” An excerpt that introduces the speech: “Lincoln wrote the first draft and the beginning of a second draft of his speech in Washington, which he completed in Gettysburg the night before its delivery. The words “under God” were not in the first drafts and the missing words seem to have been extemporaneously included in the speech as he spoke. Lincoln made five copies of his speech after the delivery. This replica in his handwriting with his signature is his fifth copy.”
Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle field of that war.we have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate— we can not hallow, this ground—the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, for above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.
It is rather for us, the living, [“to stand here” is next but crossed out] we here be dedicated
Note: This is where the archives’ page ends. The rest is at www.ourdocuments.gov
to the great task remaining before us—that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
P. 221
“The applause, according to most of the responsible witnesses, was formal and perfunctory, a tribute to the occasion, to the high office, to the array of important men of the nation on the playform, by persons who had sat as an audience for three hours. Ten sentences had been spoken in five minutes, and some were surprised that it should end before the orator had really begun to get his outdoor voice.”
Note: The speaker right before Lincoln was Edward Everett, who went on for two whole hours, & after hearing Lincoln’s 272 words, told him, “I wish that I could flatter myself that I had come as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.” This is Lincoln, right after he spoke! https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/tag/gettysburg-address/
The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War Daniel Aaron P. 232
“As for the cultural and intellectual prospects of the new nation, every sign seemed propitious. Secession silenced Northern dictation “on all points of literature and art,” and in the general euphoria of the first weeks of the War, magazines and newspapers rang with expostulations on the grand destiny of of the Confederacy, the sovereignty of King Cotton, the benevolence of slavery, Southern womanhood, and the military prowess of the “Southron.” Once again polemicists quashed Yankee claims of cultural superiority, sneered a New England’s “rotten and phosphorescent literature” tinged with “unbelief and infidelity,” and contrasted invidiously the celebrated “smartness” of the North with the “public intelligence” of the South. Yankees were “Imitators, counterfeiters, forgers on all things and at all times,” an anonymous South Carolinian charged, and nothing illustrated “their native baseness” more egregiously than “those contemptible, puerile, worthless productions, which they complacently styled their ‘literature.’”
Note: Some Northern states pass resolutions that deny the South’s right to secede but Lincoln stays silent with the darkness of his closed mouth while he rides to D.C. There is stupefaction; citizens watch scenes of confetti falling on the President & they don’t know where to put their face while the country’s future is clearly uncertain:
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 186
“Moreover, Lincoln, the President-elect, gave few indications during the winter that he took the secession movement seriously. After the election many Southern Unionist papers had professed restrained confidence in Lincoln. From November to February, however, the President-elect said almost nothing publicly about the sectional crisis, and Unionist papers of the upper South began to criticize him for his policy of silence. A word from the head of the Republican party, said the Lynchburg Virginian, “will do more to conciliate the South, and tranquilize the country, than all else at present.” Another Virginia paper wrote: “The conduct of Mr. Lincoln, the President elect, in not writing or saying something to assist in quelling the present agitation and indignation excited by the election of a sectional candidate by a sectional party, cannot be justified.’”
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis Donald E. Reynolds P. 187-188
“Unionist newspapers of the upper South also were angered by Lincoln’s cavalier treatment of Southern demands and by his apparent inability to grasp the seriousness of the sectional crisis. Many now admitted that their former confidence in the “Black Republican” leader had been misplaced, and some now hurled at Lincoln insults that would have been worthy of Robert Barnwell Rhett. The Charlotte North Carolina Whig reported Lincoln’s speeches and wrote: “Famous as Kentucky has ever been for the size and quality of her live stock, she evidently overdone herself when she gave birth to Abraham Lincoln…. We have heard of small men, and seen some, but the ‘rail-splitter’ is a little in advance of any that we have ever seen or read of.” Tennessee’s Clarksville Chronicle called Lincoln a “soulless and brainless demagogue” and likened him to Nero, who fiddled while Rome burned. That paper further asserted: “If he be an honest man… he must be a consummate fool; and if he be a man of talents, then he is a consummate knave.” Continuing in the same vein, the Staunton (Virginia) Vindicator wrote of Lincoln:
“His speeches on his tour… have been a display of the most vulgar and ill-bred tastes, more alike to buffoonery of the clown than the logic of the statesman. In stead of rising to the dignity of his exalted position, he indulges in the most disgusting and silly electioneering harangues, and exposes his ignorance both of the science of letters as well as the rules of rhetoric. When the people so far forget themselves as to place such a man at the head of a great nation like ours, we almost become skeptical as to their capacity for self-government.” (February 22, 1861)
On inauguration eve most Unionist editors of the upper South were greatly discouraged. The lower South was gone, and a “reconstruction” involving the seceded states seemed impossible. The best hopes for compromise had virtually vanished, and the incoming President was so oblivious to the danger that he was telling jokes on his way to Washington. A North Carolina journal expressed the feeling of many Unionist papers of the upper South when it said: “We are unable to give our readers any hope this week for the preservation of the Union. So far as we can see there is not the least hope left that the Peace Conference will do any thing at all.” Few such editors expected much reassurance of their fading faith in the Union from Lincoln’s inaugural address. Fewer still shared the optimism of the Raleigh Register which, on March 3, stated its belief that Lincoln would yet disappoint the abolitionists of his party and grasp “the awful responsibility of the position in which he is placed, and the opportunity which he has of being the savior instead of the destroyer of this great nation.’”
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era James McPherson P. 258
“….the new Confederacy containing scarcely 10 percent of the country’s white population and 5 percent of its industrial capacity—desperately needed the allegiance of the upper South….”
Note: On Lincoln’s infamous silence about the impending crisis, the following 19 excerpts from Lincoln’s daily life illustrate the slow dawn on Lincoln, the evolution of his denial (“equanimity”) that the South would ever secede. Includes his writing for fun, a stop to purchase cocaine, & his being “not a bit alarmed,” his ongoing silence even in the face of NYT requests to go on record, his appearing haggard, his fear the fort would be seized, his call for the hanging of Buchanan, & his surprise at surviving his first months in office. Still, “he is observed not to lose his sense of humor” as disunion events speed up in late 1860:
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume II: 1849-1860 C. Percy Powell P. 288
“August 15, 1860: Lincoln writes to John B. Fry that he receives many assurances from South “that in no probable event will there be any very formidable effort to break up the Union.” Note: John Brown’s raid was 10 months prior, on 10/16/1859.
P. 293
September 29, 1860: Lincoln enjoys himself by composing, in pencil, imaginary dialogue between Douglas and Breckinridge.
P. 294
October 12, 1860: Lincoln writes to William H. Seward about Seward’s recent speeches. “It now really looks as if the Government is about to fall into our hands. Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana have surpassed all expectation.” He buys tonic, cocaine, and powder at his drug store.
P. 294
October 15, 1860: To L. Montgomery Bond of Philadelphia Lincoln explains his attitude toward South: “I certainly am in no temper, and have no purpose, to embitter the feelings of the South; but whether I am inclined to such a course as would, in fact, embitter their feelings, you can better judge by my published speeches, than by anything I would say in a short letter.
P. 295
October 27, 1860: To G.T.M. Davis of Alton Lincoln refuses to make public statement of his views. He would repeat his intent of noninterference with slavery in slave states “a thousand times, if there was no danger of encouraging bold bad men to believe they are dealing with one who can be scared into anything.”
P. 295-296
October 31, 1860: Lincoln is convinced that his attitude of silence is proper. “Allow me to beg you that you will not live in much apprehension of my precipitating a letter upon the public.”
P. 296
November 6, 1860: Election day. Lincoln spends most of it at his state house office. About 3 P.M. he walks quietly to polling place in courthouse. Crowd gives him ovation. After cutting his own name from ballot, he votes straight ticket. Evening he spends in telegraph office, getting returns. Shortly after midnight he and Mrs. Lincoln attend supper, and soon go home.
P. 296
November 9, 1860: Late returns forecast Trumbull’s re-election. Lincoln reads dispatch that he has been hanged in effigy at Pensacola, Florida. Correspondent reports: “I am told that Mr. Lincoln considers the feeling at the South to be limited to a very small number, though very intense.”
P. 296-297
November 10, 1860: To Truman Smith Lincoln reiterates his determination to make no public declaration. “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print, and open for the inspection of all.” If commerce has slumped, let the “respectable scoundrels” who caused it “go to work and repair the mischief of their own making.” He buys tonic and “Hair Balsam” at his drug store.
P. 297
November 12, 1860: Reporter writes “The news from the South produces no perceptible effect here, and fails to induce the least change in Mr. Lincoln’s determination to withhold all intimations as to his policy….
P. 297
November 13, 1860: Another reporter finds Lincoln studying nullification and Jackson’s 1832 proclamation. He “is not a bit alarmed by the aspect of affairs.” “Rest fully assured,” Lincoln writes Haycraft, “that the good people of the South who will put themselves in the same temper and mood towards me which you do, will find no cause to complain of me.”
P. 298
November 18, 1860: “The exciting news from the South does no appear to disturb Mr. Lincoln’s equanimity. Without underrating its bearing, he still adheres to the opinion that actual secession will not be attempted. He avoids discussing this delicate question in the presence of visitors, but when referring to it his words are said to indicate a firm and settled opinion against the right to secede.”
P. 298
November 20, 1860: Republicans hold “ratification” meeting at which Trumbull delivers principal address. Lincoln writes part of his speech. Keynote of his contribution is that “each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their affairs . . . as they have ever been under any administration.” Wide-Awake parade stops at Lincoln’s house en route to Wigwam for Trumbull’s speech, calls for Lincoln, who addresses them briefly in similar vein.
P. 299
November 28, 1860: Lincoln answers demand of H.J. Raymond of N.Y. “Times” for policy statement: “On the 20th. Inst. Senator Trumbull made a short speech which I suppose you have both seen and approved. Has a single newspaper, heretofore against us, urged that speech [upon its readers] with a purpose to quiet public anxiety? Not one, so far as I know.”
P. 300
December 10, 1860: Lincoln writes Trumbull again: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Pop. Sov. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter.”
P. 301
December 14, 1860: “The appearance of Mr. Lincoln has somewhat changed for the worse within the last week,” “Herald” reporter writes. “He . . . looks more pale and careworn . . . . But . . . the vigor of his mind and steadiness of his humorous disposition are obviously unimpaired.”
P. 302
December 22, 1860: Informed of rumor that Buchanan has instructed Major Anderson to surrender Fort Sumter if attacked, Lincoln exclaims, “If that is true they ought to hang him!” He adds that he has just written to Washburne “to tell General Scott confidentially that I wished him to be prepared, immediately after my inauguration, to make arrangements at once to hold the forts, or, if they had been taken, to take them back again.” Lincoln writes Major David Hunter that he thinks forts must be retaken, if they fall.
P. 303
December 29, 1860: Lincoln is convinced that Gulf states will secede, and is watching border states “with daily increasing interest.’”
Note: Before Lincoln ever steps on the Springfield train to D.C. (2/11/61), Davis, well, he’s 9 months off from being elected…. on 11/6/61. He ran with no opposition on a six-year term. It will take until May 5, 1865, for the Confederate government to officially dissolve. After that? 10K Confederates will run to places like Brazil, where slavery was still legal. Confederados. Then the turn of the century will see a great citizen exodus: 28 million head North. The next 100 years the South will have the status of “American outlier.” But back to 1861, & Jeff’s wet dreams:
Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 51
July 3, 1861: (In conversation with Sen. Orville H. Browning, Ill.) “Browning, of all the trials I have had since I came here, none begin to compare with those I had between the inauguration and the fall of Fort Sumpter [sic]. They were so great that could I have anticipated them, I would not have believed it possible to survive them.”
Note: Lincoln comments on John Brown, in Lincoln’s February, 1860 Cooper Union speech: “John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate. In fact, it was so absurd that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough it could not succeed. That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.”
America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation David Goldfield P. 195-196
“From his reading of the Constitution, secession was illegal. The states derived their status from membership in the Union; they possessed no legal status apart from the Union. “By conquest, or purchase,” Lincoln explained, “the Union gave each of them whatever of independence and liberty it has. The union is older than any of the States; and, in fact, it created them as States.’”
Note: Newspapers as agent provocateurs. Nothing has changed, just the mode of delivery. Soon after the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which sent the FCC to hell in a handbasket, it came down to six MegaCorporations running 90% (surely a low number) of all U.S. media by 2011: Disney, GE/Comcast, CBS, Viacom, News Corp, & AT&T. But Vice, owned by Disney, can upload, daily, an episode of “under-reported” whatever, & before 20 minutes are up, get 20 million clicks. And imagine a Civil War Joe Rogan, averaging 11 million an episode, compared to legacy media like CNN, with just an 0.82% share; only the Super Bowl attracts more of us now. As well, independent actors like Anonymous act in the people’s interest, not the state’s, by doing data drops, organizing operations like keeping .ru government websites offline to help Russian citizens steer clear of state censorship during war, while simultaneously ensuring Ukrainians stay connected online. And Google can censor search results, migrate facts, do all the perception management they want, but the population is figuring out alternative venues are accessible. For now.
Note: One year ago today Anderson asks Lincoln in a letter to send supplies to Fort Sumter. Sumter was often spelled at the time Sumpter (you can still find it).
Note: Kentucky ratifies the 13th Amendment in 1976. This is the State that made famous the “Cornbread Mafia,” a late 1980s name for America’s largest marijuana cartel, or CCE, ‘career criminal enterprise….’ Apparently over 100 Kentuckians arrested never snitched, & some spent decades in the clink. President Obama commuted Les Berry’s sentence, an original Cornbread ringleader. In 2022, marijuana is not legal even for medical use there.
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I was glad to hear from home….
War as a white-lit romantic ether, a whoosh-off into the stars…. You’d simply…. evaporate into a Victorian fainting spell, zoom up to heaven, resurrect in a white cotton room in the sky; it’d be bloodless, out of the original book, it would be redemption, then resurrection.
A crisp flag with all the States gently lodged into your plot, decorative ribbons, banners, some form of an angel close by, wings etched into a headstone, & a band playing, TAPS perhaps, & shots fired a certain number of times in the air as you get lowered into your final repose. The stuck-in-the-dirt Grand Army of the Republic star would stay stabbed in while you had sweet dreams, stuck in somewhere over your torso area of the old six-sided casket & your hands to your heart. Thereafter, your name would get said down the centuries. Never forgotten.
Except it wouldn’t. Nor would you be. Guaranteed. If it’s true you get remembered to the extent your name is said aloud, most of these names have not been said out loud in well over a century. So we can’t reach them now, they’re well past dead, & they’re past hearing us now. Yet all we have are the names to go from, a regiment number. And those names designate to a face most times only for commanders. So the mass of those who sacrificed their lives remain pictureless, name-free to history. Yet they are why America exists. Men like Ephraim.
Ephraim Burket. That he did it for God and Country wasn’t his cliche, because he had no cliche. He had God & he had country, in that order. He is only remembered now because he left a diary behind. No one will say his name. They will continue to say Sherman’s, Jackson’s, Lee’s, but not his.
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