right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings….

Ephraim had two entries for May 15, and this is the second instance in his diary this occurred (the first was May 5).

May Thursday 15 1862

Quite (note: word wet is stricken out) cloudy this morning. We packed our things on the waggons and got ready to march too up the line of march at 9½ ocklock for the Gaines Cross Roads. We had good roads. It was not mudy until it rained some towards afternoon. The two Brigades come on and the Artillary also came some cavalry. I have not saw any good farms today. We came out 10 miles today. We camped near a mill. It was quite wet this evening and will be very disagreeable to camp out. We got a mail this morning. I received two letters this morning and one paper. It is raining quite fast this evening. We are in among the hills and mountains and rather broken land. We have water handy and camped on side of the hill– or fort rather

Note: The second May 15 entry appears in the first few pages of the diary, and he used pencil. This is the sole pencil entry in the diary (the remainder are in ink). This is also the only entry to be apart in chronological order. Not sure what to make of this second entry, as the writing is a bit larger than the first May 15 entry; perhaps more than a function of using pencil rather than ink), and the writing slants more straight up, whereas the first entry has rather smaller words and very noticeable slanted to-the-right penmanship.

extinguish the capacity to see the light….

May Thursday 15 1862

Today the Magor of the 1^st Va. who is Magor Chamberlin* who was making (note: the words “a charge” appear with a strike through both words) something of advance. He was cut off by 11 Rebel cavalry. He drew his sword and held it out until (note: illeg. Hes or Lees) came near them and he put spurs to his horse and made a dash through them. They fired on him but did come off Victorious. Our cavalry had a small skirmish with the enemy today near Flint Town. It is said that this cavalry is Stewarts cavalry. Bully** for him

Note: On the page opposite this entry are written the following place names; they are the only words written on that page, and also appear in pencil: Rockingham Co Va Page Co of Lorain Warren Co. Frountroyal Raphannock Co Washington Franguier Co

*Major Benjamin F. Chamberlain of the 1^st West Virginia Cavalry Regiment, which was called 1^st Regiment of Loyal Virginia Volunteer Cavalry until 1863, when the State of West Virginia was formed. It was organized in Wheeling, West Virginia with men from West Va., Pa, Ohio, and Va. According to ipfs.io, in 1864 the regiment was “Involved in a surprise attack and defeat of two Confederate cavalry brigades led by General John McCausland. This Union victory ruined the Confederate cavalry in the Shenandoah Valley, and it was never again the dominant force it once was.” (1st West Virginia Volunteer Cavalry Regiment accessed 7/4/19). According to Loyal West Virginia From 1861 to 1865 by Theodore Lang, 1895, Chamberlain’s date of commission was November 11, 1861, and resignation accepted October 1863. “Regimental records lost in field.” He was in command of his regiment from November 1861 until May, 1862. “Western Virginia; in the Defenses of Washington, D.C., and about Centreville, Va., covering the approaches to the Capital, June, 1862, to June, 1863; and in the Pennsylvania Campaign, June to October, 1863. Honorably Discharged (SICK) October 26, 1863 Civil History– Unknown, nothing authentic having been received.” Died December 26, 1871, at Newark, New Jersey, aged 44.” For more about today’s battle, see Loyal West Virginia, P. 159.

At Kernstown (March 23, 1862), when asked by an Ohio horseman (waiting in an open knoll to the right of the Federal line and watching the fight) which way to ride, Chamberlain answered, “Anywhere– off to the right. Go in, Captain, charge them.” When the soldier insisted “Please direct us Major where to go” he answered “No, I must go back and bring up my own men.”

**Bully for him– good for him.

Conquering the Valley Robert K. Krick P. 46

(Note: General Carroll of the 110^th)

“Colonel Carroll ordered Major Benjamin F. Chamberlain, who commanded the three-company detachment, to cross the South River into the village and then to “Rush down and take possession of the bridge.” The men Chamberlain and Keogh led were not well armed by Civil War standards. They carried sabers and “old flintlock horse pistols altered to percussion, with a portable shoulder stock.”

P. 56

“‘Carroll’s orders to dash into town foundered for a time on the question of leadership. Major Chamberlain, the ranking line officer, chose this inopportune moment to be thrown from his mount and injured.’”

Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson S.C. Gwynne P. 268

“On May 15, six days after the battle, Jackson’s troops had passed over the last high ridges of the Alleghenies and descended back into the valley, which in their absence had finally burst into glorious spring. “The old valley looked like paradise,” recalled an artillerist. “Cherry and peach trees were loaded with blooms, the fields covered with rank clover.’”

Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer Jedediah Hotchkiss P. 45

“Thursday, May 15^th. We heard of the evacuation of Norfolk, the blowing up of the Ram Virginia, or Merrimac, and that the enemy was within 12 miles of Richmond. Gloom all around us, but we trust in God.”

Letters to Catherine Beecher Angelina E. Grimke 1837 (Excerpt from Letter VI.)

“Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and annihilate the mind of this portion of our race, we have never yet been able to do it? What man or woman of common sense now doubts the intellectual capacity of the colored people? Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and ‘annihilate the mind of this portion of our race,’ we have never yet been able to do it?”

The South in History and Literature: A Hand-book of Southern Authors from the Settlement of Jamestown, 1607, to Living Writers Mildred Rutherford P. 42

Introduction.

“There had been few stricken consciences** as to the God-given right to own slaves up to this time. It is true William Penn in 1677 became convinced that it was unchristian, and wrote an article against the custom of owning human lives as negotiable property, but many in his own State laughed at his position as absurd and unbiblical, and Pennsylvania as a State paid little heed to him.

P. 45-46

The block was harped upon as a great evil, and it was, but selling negroes on the block was only resorted to in extreme cases, and the owners regretted the necessity more than anyone else. In the settlement of a will it often became a necessity. But the readers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”* could never be made to believe this. They could only see the bloodhounds tracking the poor black slaves through dismal swamps–could only see mother and child torn from each other’s arms, and cruel overseers lashing the bare backs of slaves, and other horrible and unjust misrepresentations. So inflamed were the passions of men North and South by reading this book that neither side could be brought to see wherein one was unjust to the other.

P. 49-50

Jealousy was the real cause that led to the war. Interference with the right of a State to hold slaves, and a refusal to protect the property of the slaveholder was a result of this jealousy and the injustice of it fired the minds of the Southern people. Lincoln’s election**** proved that the people of the North did not wish to act justly by the South. Then when the States seceded, the minds of the North were inflamed, and the balance of the power would, they saw, be given to the South, if the Union were dissolved. Force was used to hold the States in the Union and the South was unwilling to be coerced.

This is the story: The South never violated the Constitution. That instrument conceded to each State the right to control its own affairs. The Constitution was violated by the North, as the many amendments necessary after the war proved. How these amendments can hold good without the voice of the South which had been forced back into the Union and yet was allowed no representation at this time is strange.

When the war ended and President Davis and others were taken to be hanged as traitors, the United States Supreme Court judges said that if the case should ever come to trial, it would convict the North, not the South, and further stated that the very text-book used by the government authorities at West Point– the one from which Davis, Lee, Johnson, Stonewall Jackson and others had been taught: “William Rawle’s Views of the Constitution”– would stand as testimony against the North, for it distinctly stated that if the Union should ever be dissolved, showing that there was no reason why it could not be, allegiance reverted to the State, and it was this training that caused Lee, when the conflict came, to stand by his native state although a Union man, and it is this that will keep him and others from ever being branded as traitors and rebels.

John Quincy Adams, while President, in a speech to the West Point Cadets, said that each state had a right to secede from the Confederated Union. Daniel Webster admitted the right, and other fair-minded men at the North admitted it.

This and more the young of our land should be taught, for no history yet written gives all the facts.

The war was not a Civil War as it is so often incorrectly called. A civil war is one carried on by two parties in the same state, as the war between Charles I. And his Parliament in England. Ours was a War between States, not a war in any one state but in many states, and the moment it is conceded to have been a civil war the question of States rights is yielded.”

P. 354-355 EXTRACT FROM THE LAW OF SLAVERY. Thomas R.R. Cobb.

In mental and moral development slavery, so far from retarding, has advanced the negro race. The intelligence of the slaves of the South compares favorably with the negro race in any country, but more especially with their native tribes. While, by means of this institution, the knowledge of God and his religion has been brought home, with practical effect, to a greater number of heathen than by all the combined missionary efforts of the Christian world. But remove the restraining and controlling power of the master, and the negro becomes, at once, the slave of his lust, and the victim of his indolence, relapsing, with wonderful rapidity, into his pristine barbarism. Hayti and Jamaica are living witnesses to this truth; and Liberia would probably add her testimony, were it not for the fostering care of philanthropy, and the annual leaven of emancipated slaves.

The history of Africa is too well known to require of us an argument or an extended notice to show that left to themselves the negro races would never arrive at any high degree of civilization. In the words of an intelligent French writer: “Ni les sciences de ”Egypt, ni la puissance commerciale de Carthage, ni la domination des Romains en Afrique, n’ont pu faire penetrer chez eux la civilisation.” We have neither space nor inclination to prove the fact, well known to naturalists and ethnologists, that the Abyssinians and others, exhibiting some faint efforts at civilization, are not of the true negro race, but are the descendants of the Arabs and other Caucasian tribes.

While this fact may be admitted, we are told that after, by means of slavery and the slave trade, the germs of civilization are implanted in the negro, if he is then admitted to the enjoyment of liberty, he is capable of arriving at a respectable degree of enlightenment. Charles Hamilton Smith, an Englishman, and an acute observer, says: “They have never comprehended what they have learned, nor retained a civilization taught them by contact with more refined nations, as soon as that contact had ceased.” The emancipated slaves of the French and English West Indies have corroborated this statement. Hayti, once “la plus belle colonie” of France, despite the apologies made for her excesses, is to-day fast retrograding to barbarism. Jamaica and the other English islands, notwithstanding the care and deliberation to avoid the shock of too sudden liberty, have baffled the skill and ingenuity of the master minds of the British government. In a preliminary historical sketch, we have examined the facts in detail. The important truth is before us from history, that contact with the Caucasian is the only civilizer of the negro, and slavery the only condition on which that contact can be preserved.

The history of the negro race, then, confirms the conclusion to which an inquiry into the negro character had brought us: that a state of bondage so far from doing violence to the law of his nature, develops and perfects it; and that, in that state, he enjoys the greatest amount of happiness, and arrives at the greatest degree of perfection of which his nature is capable. And, consequently, that negro slavery, as it exists in the United States, is not contrary to the law of nature. Whatever the laws regulating their condition and relations enforce or allow a rigor, or withdraw a privilege without a corresponding necessity, so far they violate the natural law, and to the removal of such evils should be directed the efforts of justice and philanthropy. Beyond this philanthropy becomes fanaticism, and justice withdraws her shield.

That the system places the negro where his natural rights may be abused is true; yet this is no reason why the system is in itself wrong. In the words of an enlightened contemporary, “It becomes us, then, to estimate the value of the declamations of those who oppose the institution of slavery in the Antilles and the United States, on account of the partial abuses which sometimes happen. Judicial records are filled with processes for adultery; yet we should not, for that, destroy marriage. Every day our tribunals visit with severity parents who abuse their children; yet we would not, for that, abolish the paternal power. Every system has its abuses and excesses. It becomes us to correct the excesses, punish the abuses and ameliorate the system. If we should deliberately compare the evils of colonial slavery with its beneficial effects, in civilization, agriculture and commerce, we should be quickly convinced upon which side the balances would fall.”

Note: Henry Berry, in his speech to the Virginia Legislature, in 1832:

“We have, as far as possible, closed every avenue by which light might enter their [the slaves’] minds. If we could extinguish the capacity to see the light, our work would be completed; they would then be on a level with the beasts of the field, and we should be safe. I am not certain that we would not do it, if we could find out the necessary process, and that on the plea of necessity.”

For the full text of “The Speech of Henry Berry, (of Jefferson,) in the House of Delegates of Virginia, on the abolition of slavery” find it on archive.org: https://bit.ly/3KIuKRR

Note: Why no, there are no Confederates buried at West Point Cemetery. George Washington Cullum, writing of West Point Confederate graduates, & especially RE Lee “forgot the flag under which they were educated, to follow false gods.” See Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause Ty Seidule P. 194-195 for Benjamin O. Davis Jr.’s experience as a Black cadet at West Point in the 1930s, where he describes his life as “a prisoner in solitary confinement” due to racists.

Note: People sometimes mistake Lincoln having been in debate with FREDERICK Douglass. Lincoln never debated FD. This is Lincoln in debate with Stephen Douglas October 15, 1858. And though Trump briefly considered Frederick for a White House post, “Based on what Betsy said about him. we could really use Fred’s energy around here” FD died in 1895. Then when informed of that, Trump lashed back with “That’s a nasty thing to say about someone who is alive and doing a great job. This is why the press is failing and it’s failing very, very badly.” My God. (See The New Yorker, 2/2/17)

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War (1962) Edmund Wilson P. 113

“It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it. No matter what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”

The War that Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters James McPherson (2015) P. 120

“Lincoln’s statements expressing opposition to social and political equality, Oakes maintains, were in fact part of his antislavery strategy. Extreme racism was at the core of the proslavery argument: If the slaves were freed, they would aspire to equality with whites; therefore slavery was the only bulwark of white supremacy and racial purity. Lincoln “wanted questions about race moved off the table,” writes Oakes, and “the strategy he chose was to agree with the Democrats” in opposition to social equality. Lincoln understood that most Americans– including most Northerners– believed in white supremacy, “and in a democratic society such deeply held prejudices cannot be easily disregarded.” Thus the most effective way to convert whites to an antislavery position, Lincoln believed, was to separate the issue of bondage from that of race.”

Conversations with Shelby Foote Edited by William C. Carter P. 262

“‘I think it was Thomas Carlyle who said the Civil War was an argument between people one of whom believed in hiring their servants for life and the other believed in hiring them by the week. [Laughs] I’m not defending slavery, incidentally.’”

Note: The ‘those were the times’ argument, the appeal to historical epochs– that slavery reflected the cultural (whose culture?) mores of the times– doesn’t hold water. At its base it leaves out the entire population of African-Americans. At the base level of the argument, it leaves out the entire African-American population.

Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War Edmund Wilson P. 108

Note: Writing of Lincoln:

“He did not approve of slavery, but he did not much resent the slaves’ masters, and he was accustomed to say that if they of the North had found themselves in their opponents’ situation they would undoubtedly have behaved like the planters.”

Samuel Hopkins to Thomas Cushing, 29 December 1775: (excerpt)

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-03-02-0196

“They have indeed manifested much wisdom and benevolence in advising to a total stop of the slave trade, and leading the united American Colonies to resolve not to buy any more slaves, imported from Africa. This has rejoiced the hearts of many benevolent, pious persons, who have been long convinced of the unrighteousness and cruelty of that trade, by which so many Hundreds of thousands are enslaved. And have we not reason to think this has been one means of obtaining the remarkable, and almost miraculous protection and success, which heaven has hitherto granted to the united Colonies, in their opposition to unrighteousness and tyranny, and struggle for liberty?

But if the slave trade be altogether unjust, is it not equally unjust to hold those in slavery, who by this trade have been reduced to this unhappy state? Have they not a right to their liberty, which has been thus violently, and altogether without right, taken from them? Have they not reason to complain of any one who withholds it from them? Do not the cries of these oppressed poor reach to the heavens? Will not God require it at the hands of those who refuse to let them go out free? If practising or promoting the slave trade be inconsistent with what takes place among us, in our struggle for liberty, is not retaining the slaves in bondage, whom by this trade we have in our power, equally inconsistent? And is there not, consequently, an inconsistence in resolving against the former, and yet continuing the latter?”

Note: To contrast with Aristocratic fawning over Kings & Queens as expected in other areas of the world in 1860:

Lincoln Day by Day: A Chronology 1809-1865 Volume III: 1861-1865 C. Percy Powell P. 292

“September 26, 1860: Prince of Wales passes through Springfield. Lincoln tells reporter that he wanted to see royal visitor, but that action on his part would have been inconsistent with dignity. So he remains at state house, where he met “so many sovereigns during the day that really the Prince had come and gone” before he knew it.”

Memory and American History David Thelen P. 140

“The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions.” David Lowenthal

“Other peoples remain essentially unchanged over centuries, if not millenia. The distinction stems largely from WASPish racial ascription. American concepts of traditional backwardness have the same nineteenth-century roots as British relegation of native races to permanent, childlike dependency. Up to the fifteenth (1950) edition of his standard history of architecture, Sir Banister Fletcher dismissed non-Western buildings as unimportant, because “non-historical.” Fletcher’s views live on in the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper’s imprimatur:

Perhaps, in the future, there will be some African history to teach. But at present, there is none, or very little….The history of the world, for the last five centuries, in so far as it has significance, has been European history.

In America, the technological advances of the twentieth century are held to be “separat[e] modern man once and for all from his primitive ancestors”—and also from still-surviving primitive peoples.

Archetypal images in the National Geographic magazine highlight the contrasting stereotypes of progress and stagnation. In images illustrating our own “evolutionary progress… by contrast with the evolutionary arrest of Others,” American archaeologists are shown next to traditional peoples closely resembling their remote forebears who crafted the treasures (in National Geographese, all relics are treasures) that the archaeologists have recovered. The primitive lineal descendants appear unchanged or degenerated from the ancestral type: “Though kingdoms rise and fall, these Kurdish ferrymen carry on”; “Across the gulf of countless generations, the Minoan love of dance still finds expression in Crete.” The emphasis is always on the changelessness of backward peoples. Joan Gero and Dolores Root note the reiterated equation “between what is unearthed and (contemporary) native material culture, between the indigenous technology and what was practised millennia before, between a modern physiognomy and physical characteristics depicted in antiquity.” It is only we who continually evolve– an evolution that ironically enables us to unearth their past and reveal how timelessly unaltered is their presence.”

Note: Uncle Tom’s Cabin got banned throughout the Southern states.

*I think the whole look through the White eyes at the time they lived is actual BS. We can judge past mores through contemporary lens. How could they not have known they were human? That they were men, women? If they were so decrepit, why let Black folks near their infants, much less suckle them? What kind of nutrition was that? If they were ‘lesser’? They tell on themselves with this.

**“few stricken consciences”: That says it. It’s all right there. That’s one sentence. And so on, & on. And on then again, on into the 2020s. Good old Mildred meant that she believed slaves had no thoughts on the matter. And there still exist people walking the Earth at this moment who think they have the right to do anything to another human being by invoking “God’s Will.” Michelangelo having painted Adam & God White in the Sistine Chapel was just one more brick in the wall on the way to here, to a woman like Rutherford, having all the right bloodlines, or so she thought.

***Calhoun, who argued the primitive mythology before the Senate in 1837 that slavery improved the condition of the enslaved. “nanananananananaheyheyheygoodbye,” the crowd sang-shouted when Calhoun lifted so easily up & away off his pedestal in Marion Square in Charleston, SC., June, 2020.

****80k votes would have lost Lincoln the election in 1864. 48% of White males didn’t “want to” vote for Lincoln. 212 electoral votes compared to McClellan’s 21. McClellan won N.J., KY., DE. Lincoln was overwhelmingly defeated in NYC & only took Andrew Johnson as a VP only because he was the sole Senator to stay Union loyal out of the entire South, a man who didn’t even know how to read until his fiance taught him. This pick was a deadly mistake. Trivia; Johnson wrote asking Lincoln if he could skip the inauguration. When Lincoln said no, Johnson showed up wasted, drunk at his own inauguration, & “mortified the entire audience.” Johnson was later impeached for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” (Vote was 1 short for conviction at 35-19.) That said, this deserves mentioning: Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War Elizabeth R. Varon P. 56-57: “Johnson’s Unionism was rooted in the class resentments of nonslaveholding yeomen farmers against elite planters, and in the cultural differences between the mountainous, “upcountry” regions of the South (such as Johnson’s own East Tennessee) and low-country plantation districts. Johnson would persistently press Lincoln to launch a campaign to liberate East Tennessee from the Confederates and would publicize the sufferings of East Tennesseans at the hands of the “military despotism of Jeff Davis” when such a campaign– which was logistically daunting, as the region was shielded by the Cumberland Mountains– failed to materialize.”

The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan, Editors (2000) P. 197 “The Immortal Confederacy.” Lloyd A. Hunter

“Unlike Lee’s apotheosis, Jefferson Davis’s began long before his death. His countrymen bitterly attacked him when the Confederacy collapsed, but his arrest and lengthy imprisonment in Fort Monroe spurred Southerners to respond to his plight with sympathy and renewed devotion. By the time of his release in May 1867, the former chief executive had become a heroic martyr—the crucified Christ of the Southern people who had suffered on their behalf. When in 1886 Henry Grady summoned the ex-president from his self-styled exile at Beauvoir to appear at the unveiling of the Hill memorial in Atlanta, Davis’s journey became “a continuous ovation.” A veteran described the scene in Atlanta in words reminiscent of another triumphal entry: “Along the streets and sidewalks. . . hobbled the veterans of the Confederate Army and thronged the carriage in which rode their defeated king and kissed its very wheels, while little children threw flowers before his horse’s feet, and women. . . bowed their heads and wept. This was the triumph of the victim.” To the special car that later bore Davis from Atlanta to Savannah was affixed the inscription, “He Was Manacled For Us.” Davis’s role as a sacred symbol had been assured.”

Note: Imagine it: Jeff in his jumpsuit, eating jail food off a tray slipped under the bars. Fast-forward to soon, almost tomorrow, Lost Cause nitwits like Rutherford, neatly like an executioner rolling out textbook phrases that come down to a paragraph in a Kentucky textbook with never-ending terms like servant, institution, way of life. Saying it wasn’t so, slavery, saying it wasn’t so bad if it was so, & the so becomes a line looped in during post-production, a ideological line edit, predictive programming so truth becomes anything-shaped-everything. You say it that way in those words. And it becomes that way in those words. A dead hand reaches from. The last God in an already anthologized sky from a carefully curated media channel.

he drew his sword and held it out….

She had a quiet malice, that one. The May Queen Betty Cracker type. Blood on her teeth. It’s the women you have to watch out for, not the men. She wants to get her hands bloody but can’t quite, dahling, so sends all the males in sight. Of course some women just want to watch the world burn. Sit by with a Wedgewood bowl of popcorn. They float through cleared out rooms then out onto verandahs if there were any, white of the gown, dark of the cast shadow. Did they know they were already marked sitting on the ruined verandah? She has drawn the fatal short straw. You hope she kept the receipt for that tiara. Her hands are in a prayer position, stuck between her legs, shut out of the mansion, learning that no matter what she has, it’s about to go to flame. The women’d just have to wait for their men to return, if they did, holding empty greenbacks, what’s left in nonsequential bills. Thin-lipped Master with his Monopoly set steadily losing pieces, wailing like a sham mourner out of the 14^th century, the plastic property & the hotels & high rises, the low rises gone now. If they did, walking back up past the Black Sambo hitching post “ornament” crouched holding a light at the entrance to the plantation. Deteriorating eerie lawn art lantern, eroding as it was conceived, a goddamn calamity.

FAIR USE NOTICE. Terms of Use. This non-profit, non-commercial, for educational purposes only website contains copyrighted material for the purpose of teaching, learning, research, study, scholarship, criticism, comment, review, and news reporting, which constitutes the Fair Use of any such copyrighted material as provided for under Section §107 of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976.