From: Connecticut Committee of Correspondence
(Committees of Correspondence were early revolutionary cells, specifically organized for revolutionary reeducation, for the manipulation of opinion, so to lay the groundwork for resistance to the globe’s greatest imperialist power, the British Empire. “Sam Adams was the promoter of the first local committees on November 12, 1772, and within three months, Governor Hutchinson reported that there were eighty such committees in Massachusetts.” Committees of Correspondence formed the basis for the soon to follow Committees of Public Safety, as the road to revolution unfolded. See page 217, “Committees of Correspondence,” Concise Dictionary of American History, Editor, Wayne Andrews.)
* * * * *
Reply to a Student
By Mark Albertson
* * * * *
Recently, a student from a class I had been teaching for the spring semester for the Lifetime Learners Institute at Norwalk Community College[1] emailed a concerted disagreement as to the following:
“Mark,
“Respectfully, your assertion that the American Civil War was fundamentally a Jeffersonian (agrarian) v. Hamiltonian (industrial-financial) conflict is a severe over-simplification and, I submit, deeply flawed. Yes, those economic themes were real, but your thesis ignores the profound moral conflict about slavery that animated and informed the war. Your view is an outlier and contrary to the consensus amongst mainstream academic historians. You should present this view as opinion, not established fact.”
Dear student,
Thank you for your concerted criticism and desire to offer same. I do appreciate such contact because it demonstrates you are paying attention. Too, you are willing to debate issues and to defend a presently held position and/or accept or decline an intruding mindset. And three, a free thinking/critical thinking individual with opposing points of view is always welcome in my class; which by the way, serves to bolster an observation made by Felix Frankfurter, “Those who begin the coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating the dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”[2]
* * * * *
Land has been a cause for war down through the centuries. Perhaps it is because of what is on the land, in the land or, is it the strategic position of the disputed piece of real estate that beings contending armies to the field; watered as it will be with that liquid fertilizer of blood which enriches the weeds of dominance and control. Especially since War is Man’s locomotive of change.
With the dawning of the American Republic, land was the founding principle. Ownership of Private Property. Economic Liberty. Such is what thinkers such as Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke; John Locke; Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu; Jean Jacques Rousseau with his Social Contract, . . . land was an important factor, indeed, the decisive factor, in constructing the American Republic.
Yet right from the beginning, Americans violated one of Baron de Montesquieu’s precepts for a functioning Republic:
“It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are trusts too considerable to be placed in any single subject; he has interests of his own; he soon begins to think that he may be happy and glorious, by oppressing his fellow-citizens; and that he may raise himself to grandeur on the ruins of his country.
“In an extensive republic, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand points of view; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abused have less extent, and of course are less protected.”[3]
Yet right from the get-go, elements of the Founding Generation planted the seeds for demise. Take Sam Adams, considered by many a liberal among that most dynamic generation of the American epic urged the advancement beyond the thirteen colonies for the acquisition of Canada, Nova Scotia, Florida. . . “We shall never be upon a solid footing till Britain cedes to us what nature designs we should have; or, till we wrest it from her.”[4]
Nova Scotia and Canada will remain beyond the American grasp, but not Florida; but in consequence will construct a contiguous empire across a great and wondrous land, upon which to govern same as a Republic. But even out of the starting gate, two separate nations were beginning to emerge, as each will be based on one of two doctrines that will challenge for the coveted position of dominance:
The Jeffersonian notion of the agrarian as the salt of the earth championed those who dug in the dirt as being that prophylactic or best protector of limited, Republican elective government. The opposing viewpoint was that of Alexander Hamilton, that of industrialization and finance. For the Industrial Revolution was maturing and proceeding in rapid fashion. The evolution of technology, too, was keeping pace with the growth of the factory system. All funded by Capitalism. An economic system that will change economies, cultures, societies, and, the waging of war or Levee en Masse.[5]
The agrarian system of feudalism/serfdom was being consigned to the dustbin of history; though in Eastern Europe it stubbornly held on with the Boyars or Landed Gentry of Czarist Russia; an agrarian system that will retard the industrialization of Mother Russia. It will not be until Joseph Stalin that the Russian Bear will launch a concerted effort to correct its inferior economic position. And to the extent that Soviet industrial production in the second chapter of Man’s greatest industrialized war will be one of the biggest secrets for Allied victory by 1945.
Hamilton believed, too, in a stratified society, Britain being a model here. For as he observed: All societies divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the wellborn, then the mass of the people. . . . The people are turbulent and changing: they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct share in the government. They will forever check the unsteadiness of the second class, and as they cannot receive any advantage by change, they therefore will ever maintain good government.[6]
And a stratified society America will have. The Rich and the Wellborn will dominate in the end. Down South, the plantation owners, who control America’s cash crops—Cotton, Tobacco, Sugar and Rice—will prostitute Jefferson’s notion of the farmer as the salt of the earth so as to not be that best protector of limited, Republican elective government; but rather become an Aristocracy of the Landed, the practitioners of Agrarian Capitalism, controlling Southern politics from a rural setting; whereby the plantations—besides being concentration camps—enable the few plantation owners to dominate Southern politics and will consign industrialization to little better than a tepid growth as opposed to the North. This clique of American Boyars feared, and properly so, the Urbanization that would be their demise and that of the Gulag system of economic and political control upon which their power was based.
In the North, the Hamiltonian notion of industrialization and finance will become fruitful and multiply. Certainly many farmers will grow and sell their crops. But a Working Class will show signs of vibrancy and therefore take root and grow. In addition to the fact that the hub of the finance system was in the North. Control of most of the nation’s resources will be in the North. The majority of the population was in the North. By comparison government was urbanized providing greater central power. Yet on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line, stratified societies became the norm. Down South, the plantation owners, business owners, a fledgling working class and small farmers and, of course at the bottom, the slave. The last named had no rights. No access to education. No citizenship. Merely living and breathing property, they were trapped in the hopeless bondage of a cruel, supremacist state.
In the North were the rudiments of a modern economy and society, emblematic, of course, with a growing bourgeoisie of businessmen and bankers, small businessmen, traders and farmers and a growing working class with urbanization. Indeed, of the top ten cities in the United States by 1860, just one Southern city made the cut, New Orleans, 168,675 people.[7]
Yet ruralization strengthened slavery. Slaves laboring in towns and cities were not consigned to the ruinous subjection that marked the harsh toiling in the fields of a plantation. In addition, they sometimes mixed with free blacks who spread the poison of freedom. With, for the most part, a rural society and economy, the overwhelming majority of slaves were consigned to the gulag, where they were under tight and indeed, a pervasive control. But this came at a cost.
Ruralization was that prophylactic to industrialization that retarded modernity in the South. Following the script of the aforementioned Boyars in Czarist Russia, a script dying a slow death as the Industrial Revolution proceed apace, can be seen by 1860 when comparing the North and South with regards to such aspects as education and per capita income:
“In 1836, Arkansas and Michigan entered into the Union with approximately the same population. Yet by 1850 Arkansas had 162,189 whites vs. 395,071 whites in Michigan. Arkansas had 9 newspapers vs. 58 in Michigan. Only 1 public library as opposed to 280 in Michigan. Arkansas had 353 schools compared to 2,714 in Michigan.”[8] Unlike the North, the the South neglected a functioning public education system. And most European immigrants went North, not South. The result was that keeping not only slaves, but the majority of the white population as well deaf, dumb and stupid, virtually assured the Southern Aristocracy that dominate position with regards to Making Society Work for the Few.
The economic domination of the few can be seen with the average wealth of the purveyors of Cotton Capitalism: The plantation owners average wealth was $24,748, as opposed to non-slave owning southerners at $1,781. Indeed these gulag commanders controlled 93.1 percent of the South’s agricultural wealth.
Comparison with industry in 1860: The South had 20,631 factories staffed by 110,720 workers. Capital invested: $95,976,000; with an annual value of production: $155,531,000. As opposed to the North: 110,843 factories staffed by 1,147,906 workers. Capital invested: $986,753,000; with an annual value of production: $1,655,594,000.[9]
In 1860, the South produced $4,000,000 in leather goods; the North, $59,000,000. The South had $1,300,000 invested in woolen mills; the North, $35,000,000. The South produced 76,000 tons of iron ore; the North, 2,500,000 tons.[10]
Much of the South’s industrial capacity serviced the region’s agricultural products. For instance, sawmills, gristmills, processing plants for sugar and tobacco . . . Indeed, nearly all the cotton produced was shipped north for weaving and processing. Too, it was northern lenders and bankers, insurers and shippers that provided those elements of financing, protection and transportation that made Agrarian Capitalism work.
Regardless of the economic and societal backwardness of the South, “the hegemonic hold of slaveholding interests over Southern politics was the simple numerical preponderance of slaveholders in Southern governments . . . In Alabama for example, the proportion of state legislators who owned slaves increased from 66.4 percent in 1850 to at least 76.3 percent in 1860. A majority of legislators in every slave state except Missouri, Arkansas and Delaware were slave owners in 1860; typically, about three-quarters of deep-South legislators and two-thirds of upper-South legislators owned slaves. At the gubernatorial level, slaveholding was virtually universal.”[11]
Besides the economic aspects of the Revolt of the Planters there were the political justifications, with both sides marching in concert to war in the face of causes that they themselves had set in motion. Plantation owners, prostituting the Jefferson ideal of the farmer at the same time the businessman and banker worked to effect the Hamiltonian trend towards corporatism needed to gain control of Congress. For it is here where the political power resided. The competitive nature of both participants for political and therefore economic advantage will span from the Republic’s founding to Fort Sumter.
Gaining control of Congress meant having control of the greater percentage of those states when the addition of senators and representatives are tallied. The latter is particularly useful here since the math is never predictable on an individual basis as it is with the Senate, with each state—large or small—having two senators each. Not so the House of Representatives. Size, population, makes a difference, leaving some states having more representation than others, which adds to their electoral vote count. But whichever side controlled the math virtually assures that its legislation gets passed first.
The South was more than holding its own to 1850. During the sixty years since 1790, of 12 presidents, 9 were from the South; as were ten of the eighteen Secretaries of State. With the Missouri Compromise, together with the three-fifths compromise agreed to in the Constitution, the South seemed to have a solid chance to win control of Congress and perhaps even dominate government.[12]
But on March 1, 1845, the annexation of Texas by a Joint Resolution of the Congress of the United States assured the uncertain times to come. For as per the Constitution, Article IV, Section 4, the upcoming State of Texas will be guaranteed a Republican form of constitution.[13] This seems a prelude to the Mexican-American War, 1846-1848; to which the land-hungry Republic ruthlessly pursued Manifest Destiny.[14]
A multitude of acreage was added to the United States, with much of it in the southwest. Yet here for the Southerners was an issue: Much of this new territory was hardly conducive to slavery, such as New Mexico, California (basic impediment here was gaining effective control of this prized piece of real estate) and certainly not the Oregon Territory to the north. But then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Here Senator Stephen Douglas brought to the floor a bill that divided the territory west of Missouri—a slave state—into two territories: Nebraska and Kansas. Free staters saw this as a violation of the Missouri Compromise, since Nebraska and Kansas were above the 36 degrees 30 minutes demarcation line agreed to in the Missouri Compromise.[15] At this time, too, many Northerners were becoming convinced that Southerners were belligerently pushing slavery into free territories. This will motivate an influx of free staters and slave staters, resulting in “Bloody Kansas,” a tune up for Fort Sumter every bit as much as the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War was a tune up for Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the resulting second chapter of the Great War.
Owing to such developments as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, fissures, splits and cracks appeared to rend the Democratic Party, pitting some Northern representatives and senators against their Southern brethren. Indeed, to many Northerners, the Southerners seemed again to be pushing slavery into “free territories.” This begs a return to the issue of Kansas, or “Bloody Kansas” as it was known. Indeed a functioning system of government was being put to the test, what with the growing Balkanization of Democrats while the Whigs were, by this time, a moribund political affiliation. But there were the upstart Republicans who were seeking to fill the developing political vacuum.
And the abolitionists? Many Northerners, though, not fans of slavery, were not overwhelming supporters of the abolitionists either. By 1836, there were some 500 chapters of abolitionists boasting of some 150,000 members and supporters. But the overwhelming amount of Northerners thought them not only extreme but even absurd.
The decisive factors were political and economic. During the 1850s, the four presidents elected to 1860 were all from the North. Six of the seven Secretaries of State were from the North. And Congress? Read Paul Finkelman in his study of the Dred Scott decision:
“Seats in the House of Representatives are based on population. The North, with its much larger population, had more seats in the House than the South. In the Senate each state had two seats, and throughout this period the North and South usually had either the same amount of Senate seats or one section had an advantage of two or four seats for a short time. For example, in 1845 both Texas and Florida entered the Union giving the South a four-seat advantage in the Senate until 1846 and 1848, when Iowa and Wisconsin entered the Union. The admission of California in 1850 gave the North a permanent advantage in the Senate.[16] Yet, there was the Supreme Court.
The Dred Scott Decision is one which will turn the growing divide between North and South into a canyon. “In this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. The opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a Federal territory.
“In 1846, an enslaved black man named Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom in the St Louis Circuit Court. They claimed that they were free due to their residence in a free territory where slavery was prohibited.”[17]
In a vote of 7 to 2, precedent in lower courts such as in Mississippi and Missouri bestowing slaves freedom in related situations was thrown out. Dred Scott was to remain a slave, as was his wife. Indeed, all blacks were considered not citizens and therefore not eligible for Constitutional protections. In addition, overruling Congress, slavery could be opened into any American territory. Such was explained by Chief Justice Robert Taney in his opinion. Part of his opinion, that blacks are not citizens, was based on what he saw as historical precedent. For instance, in Massachusetts, a law was passed in 1786 forbidding the marriage of any white person to a “negro,” Indian or mulatto. Connecticut, 1833, passed another law “which made it penal to set up or establish any school in that State for the instruction of persons of the African race not inhabitants of the State, or to instruct or teach in any school or institution or board or harbor for that purpose, any such person, without previous consent in writing of the civil authority of the town in which such school or institution might be. . . .
“By the laws of New Hampshire . . . no one was permitted to be enrolled in the militia of the State, but free white citizens, and the same provision is found in subsequent collection of laws made in 1855.”[18] Such a repudiation of blacks by the South and the North demonstrates the fraudulent nature of the so-called morality of both sections of a nation which had produced documents boasting of Consent of the Governed. Both, more or less, concur: The black race is inferior to the white race. For instance . . .
. . . during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Senator Stephen A. Douglas, affirmed his predilection for supremacy with his speech at Chicago, July 9, 1858: “He (Lincoln) objects to the Dred Scott decision because it does not put the negro in the possession of the rights of citizenship on an equality with the white man. I am opposed to Negro equality. I repeat that this nation is a white people—a people composed of European descendants—a people that have established this government for themselves and their posterity, and I am in favor of preserving not only the purity of blood, but the purity of the government from any mixture or amalgamation with inferior races. I have seen the effects of this mixture of superior and inferior races—this amalgamation of white men and Indians and negroes; we have seen it in Mexico, in Central America, in South America, and in all the Spanish-American states, and its result has been degeneration, demoralization, and degradation below the capacity for self-government.
“I am opposed to taking any step that recognizes the Negro man or Indian as the equal of the white man. I am opposed to giving him a voice in the administration of the government. I would extend to the Negro, and the Indian, and to all dependent races every right, every privilege, and every humanity consistent with the safety and welfare of the white races; but equality they should never have, either political or social, or in any other respect whatever. . . . “[19]
His opponent, Abraham Lincoln, was hardly the emancipator of black people as is commonly regarded by many Americans; at least not purely in the moral sense.
“I will say here, while upon the subject, that I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political or social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two which in my judgment will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas, he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowments. But in the right to eat bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas and the equal of every living man.[20]
* * * * *
The election of 1860 marked the end of the political struggle for dominance following the ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Abraham Lincoln of the upstart Republicans garnered 17 states, 180 electoral votes, 1,886,000 popular votes. Democrat John C. Breckinridge from Kentucky, President Buchanan’s vice president, took 11 states, 72 electoral and 848,000 popular votes. John Bell, from the Constitutional Union Party, three states, totaling 39 electoral and 593,000 popular votes. And bringing up the rear was a northern Democrat, Stephen Douglas, with just one state, 12 electoral and 1,383,000 popular votes. The arithmetic no longer proved attractive for the Southern Aristocracy. And in December 1860, South Carolina exited the Union and began an exodus of those mosquito republics that would form the Confederacy. The Revolt of the Planters had begun. It was a revolution from the Right, not the Left. A revolution to preserve white supremacy and maintain agrarian capitalism in an era of the decline of the Landed Gentry; a decline that was accelerating in the face of the growth of industrial-finance capitalism.
The war itself will become an industrialized, corporatized conflict: Levee en Masse, the conscription of entire populations and economies for war. A nation of farmers will eventually be crushed by a nation of wrench-turners by comparison. This will become America’s first industrialized conflict. Indeed, the first major industrialized war in the modern era. And by April 1862, the South had introduced conscription or the draft. The North will follow suit in 1863.
But now with the United States at war with an enemy nation, the issue of slavery, despite pronouncements to the contrary became more of an economic and military issue, translating into a weighty political concern. A concern that will reduce the so-called moral issue, to which same was never truly of overriding signiciance. For the idea was to win the war. And to accomplish this, the industrialized North will have to be transformed from a peacetime to a wartime economy. For the North’s economic advantage was its trump card.
To start with, Republicans in Congress got passed a bill that would provide compensation to slave owners in the District of Columbia for the emancipation of their slaves in 1861. This is the commencement of a trend that will see to the attack on the engine of agrarian capitalism, the slave. Indeed, slave owners in Delaware and Maryland, concerned that this action by Republicans may cause an uprising on their plantations began to sell their slaves to the Southerners. The Republicans did not stop here with their economic agenda.
With Southern opposition in Congress no longer that nagging impediment, the Homestead Act was passed. Settlers were promised 160 acres of land in the west. The Morrill Act, which pledged to states public lands for land-grant colleges. The Pacific Railroad Act. The transcontinental railroad was no longer a dream. The 37th Congress hastened the development of the war economy with the Legal Tender Bill, the famous “greenback.” In addition, the Internal Revenue Service was now added to the masthead of the Treasury Department.[21] The seeds of that eventual amalgamation of Industrial-Finance Capitalism and Big Government were being planted here starting in 1861.
Yet Lincoln’s attempt to win the war in 1862, though, came to naught. General George B. McClellan’s huge amphibious landing and consequential offensive failed, due in part, to the sluggish nature of the Union advance and McClellan’s generalship. The Southerners will rebound and under Robert E. Lee’s generalship the war will go on for another three long years.
Economic and military value of the slave to the Confederates was apparent here. This was free labor that dug trenches and built emplacements and strongpoints. They served as cooks, hospital aids and moved supplies to the front. On the home front, slaves freed up white men on the plantations and farms so as to fill out Confederate uniforms. More and more it was becoming apparent to the North that the way to weaken the Southern economy and crimp the Confederate Army of its teamsters and stevedores was to take away the engine of agrarian capitalism, the black man.
Lincoln was no longer inhibited by Constitutional protections such as the 3/5s compromise. He was now the Union’s Commander-in-Chief. Yet Secretary Stanton certainly understood the economic aspects, urging the transfer of the slaves from the Confederate economy to that of the Union. Slaves would not only prove invaluable in moving supplies, but filling out Union Army uniforms. And by the end of the war, 186,000 black men had served in blue uniforms.[22]
And so the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1863 was more of a business deal. The economic reality of industrialized war held primacy over the so-called moral issue against slavery. Economic war was waged against the Southern economy with virulence and skill.[23] Sherman’s march from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic coast, a sixty mile wide path of destruction that tore into the heart of agrarian capitalism and eliminated a competitor for the control of a contiguous empire across this wondrous American landmass, as observed by Brian Holden Reid: “As for the devastation inflicted on the South, this was enormous. The Southern economy was totally ruined and that damage was to linger for over a century, not to recover fully until our own day in the guise of the ‘Sun Belt.’ In 1861-5 the total capital of the South, agricultural and industrial, shrank 46 percent. Northern capital, by contrast, grew by 50 percent. In 1860, the slave states contained 30 percent of the total wealth of the United States; by 1870 this figure had fallen to a mere 12 percent. There can be no doubting the war’s political significance either. Succession as a political issue was ended once and for all. Slavery was destroyed and the power of the Federal Government greatly augmented.”[24]
The Hamiltonian notion of America emerged the victor. Setting the stage for the most powerful nation on earth by 1945. That road to the future American Corporate State was being paved in 1865. And what was once the Republic exists now in name only, resulting in Pax Americana.[25]
And the black man? He was sold out by Republicans with a fictions known as the XIII and XV Amendments. The Republican attempt to dominate the postwar South by enlisting 2,000,000 black Republicans failed in face of such impediments as Jim Crow laws, the Ku Klux Klan, voting restrictions and lynching. The ultimate sell out of the black man, voters, and Constitutional Law was the result of the election of 1876. Candidates for president, Samuel J. Tilden, Democrat, and Rutherford B. Hayes, Republican. 185 electoral votes were required. Tilden had 184 versus Hayes’ 165. Three southern states—Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina—all had suspect tallies as to the winner in each state. Without the required electoral votes, the decision should have been thrown back into the House of Representatives where each state’s delegation get a single vote so as to decide the outcome, as per Rule of Law. But the corrupting nature of the human condition dictated otherwise. Southerners were desirous of federal troops leaving Southern streets and were willing to offer the presidency to the Republicans. Rutherford B. Hayes became President, federal troops left the south and Reconstruction came to an abrupt halt in 1877. The white man sold out the black man again. Both Lincoln’s and Douglas’ prophecies have been proven correct: Difference in the color of the skin between the white and black races has never been overcome and perhaps never will. For racism is a stain in the American fabric that no detergent of humanity has ever been able rinse.
Endnotes
[1] The course in question, Legislation of History/Legislation of Consent.
[2] “Notable Quotes That Denote the Theme of this Work,” On History, A Treatise, by Mark Albertson.
[3] See page 56, “16, Distinctive Properties of a Republic,” Book VIII: Of the Corruption of the Principles of the Three Governments, The Spirit of the Laws, by Charles, de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. The words of Montesquieu accurately forecast the political-economic course to be charted by the plantation owners of the American Gulag as well as the northern businessmen and bankers in what will eventually become the American Corporate State.
[4} See page 2, Chapter 1, “The Myth of Morality,” The Forging of the American Empire, by Sidney Lens.
[5] The conscription of entire populations and economies for war. Such was forged by Lazare Carnot, August 1793 as Revolutionary France battled for its very existence in a continent-wide Total War against the monarchs of Europe. This conflict will set the pattern of war out to and including 1945. Industrialized war, Total War, to which America’s first taste will be what is popularly known as the Civil War.
[6] See page 51, “Three,” Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, by Gore Vidal.
[7] See page 93, Chapter 5, “Cotton to Cannon: The Economic Revolution,” The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, by Emory M. Thomas.
[8] See page 55, Chapter III, “Slavery and Abolition,” The Civil War in America, by Alan Barker.
[9] See pages 44 and 144, Alan Barker.
[10] See pages 80 and 93, Chapter 5, “Cotton to Cannon, The Economic Revolution,” The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, by Emory M. Thomas.
[11] See page 184, Chapter 6, “The White South: Society, Economy, Ideology,” American Slavery, 1619-1877, by Peter Kolchin.
[12] 1818, there were eleven free states and eleven slave states. That same year, Missouri put in to join the Union as a slave state. This would have upset the balance in favor of the South. Debates ensued for two years until Maine entered the Union as a free state, enabling Missouri to maintain balance as a slave state. Henry Clay, as well, agreed to a prohibition of slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36 degrees 30 minutes line. Such would help to maintain the “peace” between sparring sections for the next thirty years.
[13] See page 78, “Constitution of the United States of America,” Founding Character, by Kirk Ward Robinson and Christopher Eaton.
[14] Manifest Destiny was a terminology coined by John L. O’Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, July-August 1845. Describes the continual expansion of the White Man and his building of a contiguous empire. See page 580, “Manifest Destiny,” Concise Dictionary of American History, edited by, Wayne Andrews.
[15] Consult the National Archives, “Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854),” www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/kansas
[16] See page 44, “Law as Politics,” Part One: Introduction: The Dred Scott Case, Slavery, and the Politics of Law, Dred Scott v. Sandford, by Paul Finkelman.
The North will eventually come to control such border states as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and later even, Tennessee.
[17] See page 1, “Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), National Archives, www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott…
[18] See page 65, “State Laws Founding Era Used to Interpret the Constitution,” Paul Finkelman.
[19] See page 201, “Stephen A. Douglas, Speech at Chicago, Illinois, July 9, 1858,” Finkelman.
[20] See page 32, “Speech at Columbus. Ohio,” September 16, 1859, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865, The Library of America.
At the beginning of the stanza chosen for our discussion, Lincoln refers to “the institution of slavery,” not merely slavery. To this he is correct, for it had been institutionalized for many, many more years under the Stars and Stripes then it will ever be under the Stars and Bars. He is also underscoring the engine of agrarian capitalism as practiced by his future enemy and will eventually go to great lengths to destroy same. But, of course, his regard for the black man is not all that different than Stephen Douglas.
In concurrence with Douglas, he maintains the Anglo-Saxon distain for the lower breeds, considering blacks not to be his social, racial or political equal.
But with Lincoln’s election, the growing political disparity enjoyed by the North in D.C., in addition to the cavernous mismatch in economic power in favor of the North, left the South with no other alternative—as they saw it–than to bolt, creating the Confederacy. The term Confederacy, itself, does not ring with a degree of permanence. For States Rights is paramount in the South. Certainly a government will be formed with a constitution, and one seen as a weak central government by comparison to the North. But owing to the demands of Levee en Masse by April 1862, the trappings of a totalitarian state, complete with a military draft, martial law, governmental control of various aspects of the Southern economy will grip the Confederacy.
[21] George S. Boutwell, a Massachusetts lawyer, was the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue, July 17, 1862. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue will be established in the Treasury Department on August 1, 1862. See page 30, “1869-1865: Rebellion and War: Creative Financing Creates Lasting Legacies,” IRS Historical Fact Book: A Chronology, 1646-1992, by Shelley I. Davis. ,
[22] See page 150, Chapter Four, “The Civil War: Confederate Collapse, 1864-5,” The Civil War and the Wars of the 19th Century, by Brian Holden Reid.
[23] “The Confederates proclaimed themselves aliens, and thereby disbarred themselves of all right to claim protection under the Constitution of the United States, [becoming] like people of any foreign state who make war upon an independent nation,” Ulysses Simpson Grant. See page 186, Chapter 3, “Grant and Unheroic Leadership,” The Mask of Command, by John Keegan.
[24] See pages 179 and 180, Chapter Four, “The Civil War: The Confederate Collapse, 1864-5,” The Civil War and the Wars of the 19th Century, by Brian Holden Reid.
[25] Representative government and Empire are opposing poles on the bar of irreconcilability. No nation for long can practice both; since the latter will eventually corrupt the former; subjugating constitutional government, transferring power to a privileged elite while at the same time, reducing the citizenry to a spiritless, pigeon-hearted mass, capable of little more than following the dictates of its masters. . . Mark Albertson, 2015.
Bibliography
Albertson, Mark, On History: A Treatise, Tate Publishing & Enterprises, LLC, Mustang, Oklahoma, 2008.
Andrews, Wayne, Concise Dictionary of American History, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1962.
Annexation of Texas, Joint Resolution of Congress of the United States, March 1, 1845, 28th Congress Second Session, The Avalon Project: Documents in Law History and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, Lilian Goldman Law Library.
Barker, Alan, The Civil War in America, Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York, 1961.
Davis, Shelley I., Historian, IRS Historical Fact Book: A Chronology, 1646-1992, IRS Historical Studies, Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, December 27, 1993. archive.org/details/irshistoricalfac00unit
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), National Archives and Records Administration or N.A.R.A., www/archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott…
Finkelman, Paul, Dred Scott v. Sandford, Bedford/St. Martin’s, Boston, Massachusetts, 1997.
Garraty, John A., The American Nation: A History of the United States to 1877, Fourth Edition, Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., New York, NY., 1979.
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), National Archives and Records Administration or N.A.R.A. www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/kansas
Keegan, John, The Mask of Command, Penguin Books, Viking Penguin, Inc., New York, NY., 1987.
Kolchin, Peter, American Slavery, 1619-1877, Hill and Wang, division of Ferrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1993.
Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865, The Library of America, Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, NY., 1989.
Linder, Professor Douglas O., Famous Trials, “Text of Missouri Compromise of 1820,” University of Missouri-Kansas City, famous-trials.com/dredscott/2552-text-of…
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de, The Spirit of Laws, Editor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Great Books of the Western World, The University of Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., Twenty-Second Printing, Chicago, 1978. Originally published, 1952.
Potter, David M., The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., New York, NY., 1976,
Reid, Brian Holden, The Civil War and the Wars of the 19th Century, Smithsonian History of Warfare, Smithsonian Books, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY, 2006
Robertson, Kirk Ward and Eaton, Christopher, Founding Character: The Words and Documents That Forged a Nation, Roan Adler Publishers, Nashville, Tennessee, 2003.
Thomas, Emory M., The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1971.
Vidal, Gore, Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Yale University Press, New Haven & London, 2003.
Vorenberg, Michael, The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents, Bedford/St. Martins, Boston, Massachusetts, 2010.
