The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 3

Two attacks on slavery occurring just before the election season of 1860 raised the nation’s emotional intensity. The first, as we have seen, was the raid led by John Brown on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, widely regarded by contemporaries as the first step in a deliberate program to attack and end slavery. In the second event, which began just as Virginia executed Mr. Brown, a contest for the speakership of the House of Representatives made the United States Congress yet again the forum in which the passions over the issue of slavery were broadcast to the nation – including the threat that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would lead to secession.

The Harper’s Ferry raid showed northern antislavery zealots actively promoting servile insurrection. Although John Brown denied that was his aim – he claimed to encourage escape rather than rebellion – southerners perceived an increase in danger from their slave property. The Washington Constitution, regarded as the public voice of the Buchanan administration, referred to the Harper’s Ferry raid as the first fruit of Senator Seward’s “dogma of ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding States”.

In late February 1860, two months after John Brown was hanged, Abraham Lincoln, speaking at the Cooper Union in New York City, denied that the Republican Party was in any sense responsible for the man’s violence. He said, “John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise…Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied,” he continued, “with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves.”

The absurdity of John Brown’s effort, Mr. Lincoln declared, “that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough that it could not succeed”, and they refused to participate. “An enthusiast broods,” said Mr. Lincoln, “over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.”

Senator Seward, addressing the United States Senate, said much the same thing two days later:

While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown and his associates acted on earnest though fatally erroneous convictions, yet all good citizens will nonetheless agree, that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion, involving servile war, was an act of sedition and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and life.

Senator Seward said the Republicans were exonerated of the charge of hostility toward the south, but he accused the Democrats of making an assault upon the union. “The menace of disunion”, he said, “are made, though not in its name, yet in its behalf. It must avow or disavow them.” Notwithstanding the ardent abolitionist beliefs that individual members of the Republic Party might have held, the official party line was that the Republicans opposed the spread of slavery into the territories where, by their view, it did not legally exist. The party also maintained that it did not seek to challenge the existence of slavery in the states where it existed legally. No doubt this subtlety was understood and rejected out of hand. The militant defenders of slavery were increasingly unwilling to accept any restriction upon it. To the extent that they saw the restriction of the spread of slavery as detrimental to its economic well-being and to the extent that they saw the restriction of slavery detrimental to its political protection within the federal union, they were opposed.

John Brown was both a murderous inciter of servile rebellion and an abolitionist hero and martyr to his contemporaries. In the context of 1860 those perceptions were more important than any underlying reality.

Shortly after John Brown’s raid, a second attack on slavery seized national notice. The source was a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Written by a man of southern birth, the book argued that as a result of slavery, the slaveholding states were poorer than the nonslaveholding states, and nonslaveholding residents of the slave states were poorer than residents of the free states. It urged the nonslaveholders to organize and actively oppose the continuation of slavery. The Impending Crisis gained little notice when it was appeared in 1857, but the Republican Party planned to circulate a shortened version as campaign literature in the 1860 election, and 68 members of the Republican Party endorsed the book. Among them was John Sherman, a Republican representative from Ohio who was the leading candidate to be speaker of the House in December 1859. Congressman Sherman’s endorsement was brought to the attention of the House after the first vote. Numerous representatives from slave states rose during the debates to denounce as unfit for public office anyone who would endorse such incendiary material.

The Republicans held the largest bloc of seats in the House, but without a clear majority they could not construct a coalition that would elect Congressman Sherman. Similarly, the Democrats could not construct a coalition to elect a speaker from their party. The effort dragged on through many ballots from December 5, 1859, until February 1, 1860, when Congressman Sherman withdrew his name, and another Republican congressman was elected. During this extended contest, the possibility of the southern states’ secession upon the election of a Republican president was spoken of openly on the floor of House of Representatives and the Senate and published in newspapers across the nation.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 2

Year of Meteors

If Walt Whitman had been more politically minded, he might have extended his “Year of Meteors” back to the political season of 1858. William H. Seward, a United States senator from New York, gave a speech in Rochester, New York, that apparently was intended to solidify his claim to leadership of the Republican Party. Senator Seward had previously served as his state’s governor and was spoken of as a leading contender for the party’s presidential nomination in 1860. In his address Senator Seward said the free-labor system and the slave-labor system were mutually antagonistic, and they were being brought into ever closer contact by the growing power of the railroads and other means of internal commerce. From this intimacy collision resulted.

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is…the work of opposing or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts to final compromise between the slave and free states, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.

Senator Seward continued by saying that to escape the designs of the slaveholders, “The democratic party must be permanently dislodged from the government.” He reviewed the history of the Democratic Party in the United States with respect to slavery – in the admission of Texas to the union precipitating the war with Mexico, in the acquisition of Mexican lands, in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and in the attempt to admit Kansas as a slave state. He continued:

Such is the democratic party…It is positive and uncompromising in the interest of slavery – negative, compromising, and vacillating, in regard to everything else. It boasts its love of equality, and wastes its strength, and even its life, in fortifying the only aristocracy known in the land…It magnifies itself for conquests in foreign lands, but it sends the national eagle forth always with chains, and not the olive branch, in his fangs.

By contrast and in conclusion, Senator Seward said the strength of the Republican Party and the secret of its assured success

lies in the fact that it is a party of one idea; but that idea is a noble one – an idea that fills and expands all generous souls, the idea of equality – the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.

I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun, I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty senators and a hundred representatives proclaim boldly in congress to-day sentiments and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free state, dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the government of the United States, under the conduct of the democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and castle after another to slavery, the people of the United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound and over throw by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the constitution and freedom forever.

The phrase Senator Seward used – “irrepressible conflict” – would become key in the 1860 political season.

Earlier in the 1858 political season, Abraham Lincoln, the newly nominated Republican candidate to run against incumbent Illinois senator Stephan A. Douglas, had said much the same thing:

In my opinion, [the agitation to end slavery] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.

When he made these remarks, Mr. Lincoln was a Republican politician little known outside of Illinois and the surrounding states. He had served one term as a Whig congressman in the United States House of Representatives. He would obtain some national notoriety of running against and debating Senator Douglas, although much of the contemporary political interest in the race grew from the quarrel between Senator Douglas and President Buchanan over Kansas and the president’s efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to defeat Senator Douglas’ bid for reelection.

By contrast Senator Seward possessed national prominence, and what he said had national repercussions. His strong proabolitionist statements and criticism of the Democrats’ proslavery allegiance in Rochester brought criticism not only from Democrats but also from Republicans who had been Democrats, and he tried to moderate that statement several days later in a speech in Rome, New York, in which he argued that the Republicans’ quarrel was not with slaveholders but with the proponents of slavery within the free states. This was patent nonsense. A Boston correspondent of the New York Times offered the following observation:

The attacks that have been made on Mr. Seward, because of his Rome and Rochester speeches, are having a good effect on that gentleman’s prospects here. Those who thought he had been making some truculent assault on the Union, and demanding that it should be dissolved, and served up in a slaveholder’s sauce, are astonished on reading his Rome speech to find it a moderate and concise statement of the true nature of the contest that now divides the country, and differing from other men’s speeches only in its superior ability and luminous clearness.

Later in 1858 Jefferson Davis, a United States senator from Mississippi, speaking before that state’s legislature, acknowledged that the abolitionists and their allies would have control of the next House of Representatives, although he expressed his faith that the president would veto acts in violation of the Constitution. If, however, an abolitionist president were elected, Senator Davis said that “such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of Government would be destroyed and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect.” He went on to observe:

The master mind of the so-called Republican party, Senator Seward, has in a recent speech at Rochester, announced the purpose of his party to dislodge the Democracy from the possession of the federal Government, and assigns as a reason the friendship of that party for what he denominates the slave system. He declares the Union between the States having slave labor and free labor to be incompatible, and announces that one or the other must disappear. He even asserts that it was the purpose of the framers of the Government to destroy slave property, and cites as evidence of it, the provisions for amendment of the Constitution. He seeks to alarm his auditors by assuring them of the purpose on the part of the South and the Democratic party to force slavery upon all the States of the Union. Absurd as all this may seem to you, and incredulous as you may be of its acceptance by any intelligent portion of the citizens of the United States, I have reason to believe that it has been inculcated to no small extent in the Northern mind…

I say to you…if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barriers of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through the process of revolution.

When the southern states seceded and formed the Confederate government, Senator Davis was chosen as its president. History has observed that the fire-eaters propelled the revolution that became secession and has further observed that the selection of Jefferson Davis as the first president marked the ascendancy of the moderates over the radicals. However moderate Senator Davis might have been, by the fall of 1858 he had adopted the position espoused by the fire-eaters that the election of a Republican president was cause sufficient for the slave states to secede from the union. The essence of Senator Davis’ remarks were reported to the nation. The New York Times reprinted an article from the Vicksburg Whig and ran it under the headline “A Blood-Thirsty Fire-Eater”.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 1

The subtext of most elections is change – the need for change when times are bad or the direction of the country is troubling and the need to resist change when times are good. Each voter’s assessment of the temper of the times and thus his decision whether to select one candidate over another are often discussed as rational acts, but they contain an emotional component as well, touching that voter’s hopes and fears. Our times have shown us that election campaigns seek to make both rational and emotional connections with individual voters.

Although the rhetoric of campaign speeches presents itself as reasoned discourse, the overall election experience is an appeal to emotions, and in the election of 1860 this meant catchphrases, slogans, songs, rallies, and torchlight parades. Even though a political speech in 1860 might go on for more than an hour, the more successful speakers did not attempt to educate their listeners so much as they tried to entertain and engage them. Politics in 1860 was a form of popular entertainment, and the purpose of the election campaign was as much to rally the party faithful as it was to reach out to the undecided.

The pattern of most successful election campaigns is a crescendo of emotion that peaks just before the vote, and in the normal course of events the outcome prompts elation among supporters of the victors and disappointment among supporters of the defeated candidates, each of which generally subsides in a short time and gives way to acceptance of the results. The normal course of events did not occur in 1860. The election was emotionally charged due to the decades of political controversy over slavery, which intensified just before and during the election season, and the often repeated proposition that the election of a Republican candidate as president of the United States would be sufficient cause for the southern states to secede from the federal union. Whereas southern anxiety, fear, and anger might have subsided following the election of Abraham Lincoln, it remained whipped up as the states of the lower South called secession conventions and held a second set of elections to select delegates to them. These circumstances kept emotions charged as much as the just-completed presidential election and converted southern anxiety, fear, and anger into hope, righteousness, and determination.

The prior chapters have examined the resources, capabilities, products, and processes that existed in the United States in 1860 and treated the year as a point in time, the sequence of events having relatively little importance in the discussion. When we turn to politics in 1860, and in particular to the presidential election, sequence becomes significant for two reasons. First, an election is an event that occurs at a fixed point in time: the events that precede the vote influence the result, and the election tally affects the events that follow. Second, the election of a Republican as president in 1860 was the precipitating cause of the of the secession movement. The causal connection between the election result and the Civil War is less proximate but nonetheless direct: without a Republican victory, the secession movement would not have occurred, and without a secession movement, the war would not have occurred. President Lincoln’s statement in his second inaugural address – that he “accepted” war rather than let the nation perish – is a strained interpretation of the events culminating in the attack on Fort Sumter. As discussed below, President Lincoln took a high-stakes, low-risk gamble on the predictability of human nature that brought the war.

Accordingly we will examine the sequence of several periods of time leading up to the 1860 election and from it to the start of the Civil War. These include the preliminary events to distinguish the 1860 presidential election from those that preceded it and that reinforced the conditions that led to war; the campaign preliminaries in which the political parties chose their candidates; the election campaigns that involved advocacy on behalf of the four candidates as well as agitation for secession if the Republican won; and the balloting and the election result that immediately gave rise to the secession movement and, shortly thereafter, to the formation of the Confederacy and the start of the war.

A Temporary Leave-Taking

I'm going to be taking a holiday from my social media platforms and blog. The purpose of this absence is to dedicate my time and energy to the completion of a new book project for which the working title is “With All Possible Despatch” - The Civil War on Coastal Waters.

I have been fascinated by the Civil War era for years, and the naval aspects of that war afford an opportunity to explore the effects of technology on the course of history. My new project is very much like my first book, Four Score and Four - America in 1860, as it investigates many aspects of the central topic in order to provide the context that permits a fuller understanding of the whole.

 In Four Score and Four, I wrote about agriculture, industry, media, various aspects of society, business, and the nation’s military preparedness as a prelude to look at the sweep of events in 1860 that led to the election of Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth president, the secession of the cotton states, and the attack on Fort Sumter.

In “With All Possible Despatch”, I discuss:

●       the changed and changing technologies of steam, weapons and defenses

●       the process by which the Federal Navy Department mounted and maintained the naval blockade of the Confederate coast

●       the evolving tactics that squadron commanders developed when they discovered that pre-existing ideas of naval blockades had ceased to be effective in the age of steam

●       the tactics that the Confederates used to counter the Federals’ ability to bring massed firepower to bear such, as ironclads, torpedoes and torpedo boats

●       the evolution of blockade running from a continuation of incidental trade into an industry that sought to minimize the risks of capture and loss while maximizing the profits of the venture

●       the tactics that the blockade runners used to evade the blockade

●       the dealings of the Confederates and the Federals with foreign governments that sought to use the Civil War to advance their own interests and sought to protect the interests of their nationals who were engaged in blockade running

●       the joint Federal operations that closed the Confederate ports and their effect upon blockade running

I have enjoyed speaking with you, hearing from you, following you, and being followed by you.  I take this opportunity to say “Thanks” to my friends at EMSI who have been helping me in these efforts.

TTFN

Harper's Ferry Revisited

On a recent weekend my wife and I visited Harper's Ferry.  The National Park Service does a wonderful job of interpreting historic sites.  The visit was not our first, and I recalled that on a prior visit, I had recorded some impressions of a newly awakened appreciation for the place and its history.  Having just located those notes, I was surprised to see that they are over 14 years old.  They are as follows:

Harpers Ferry

July 5, 2001

I volunteer at the Hagley Museum, just north of Wilmington, Delaware.  Two or three weekend days each month, I explain and demonstrate the operations of nineteenth century machine tools.  Prior to my volunteering, I had only the vaguest notion of what a machine tool was.  The experience has awakened a deep interest in mid-nineteenth century manufacturing, the related tools and materials and in how all of these had an effect on history, especially the American Civil War.  Barbara and Madeleine (wife and child, respectively) are indulgent as I pour myself into books about arms manufacture, gunpowder, millwrighting, iron and steel metallurgy, railroads, clock making and Civil War battle tactics.  Barbara observes that I read books "with schematics, not plots".

When Barbara and I decided to spend a couple of days in Frederick, Maryland this summer, I insisted (nicely) that we visit Harpers Ferry, which was the site of one of two federal armories established in the early days of the United States, a place where startling technological innovations had been made.  And so we went.

The visit was a disappointment.  The effects of the war, periodic floods and post-war rebuilding had swept most of the physical evidence of the industrial past.  The National Park Service, which operates the site, has created an number of vest pocket displays in the surviving buildings of the lower town that give a many faceted impression of the history of the town, although focused heavily upon John Brown's raid in 1859.  The display about the armory consisted of a couple of machines in a small room with a video showing what the machine looked like when they were operating.  We wandered away from the restoration and followed a trail that passed among the ruined foundations of factories and millraces, some in the process of being excavated but most barely noticeable in the woods.

The day was hot, we had been rained on, and we were tired from having walked up and down the steep hillside that the town is set against.  I had given up hope of squeezing any insight from the experience, when I saw a group of people gathering in the shade of some trees nearby.  Barbara agreed to see what it was about, although the body language said, "Both you and I know that I am being a Very Good Sport about this, Buster."

A National Park Service Ranger, dressed in the uniform of a Union soldier and holding a musket across his shoulder, was greeting a crowd of about two dozen people who were seated on benches.  Not long after we arrived he launched into his presentation about Harpers Ferry during the Civil War.  He spoke for a few minutes and then moved on to another site in the lower town, where he stopped and spoke again.  Each time he moved he had gathered into his audience another dozen people.

It was spectacular.

In what follows I have tried to recreate the first quarter of the Ranger's tour.  As you read it, try to imagine that you are there, that the Ranger is outdoors, raising his voice to be heard by his growing audience and that, every so often, a slow freight train rumbles by several dozen yards away.  At points in his interpretation, the Ranger pauses and looks around at his audience, nodding as if in agreement with the statement he had just made.

The Ranger greeted the two dozen visitors who had shown up for the two o'clock tour.  When he had their attention, he began.

"The beauty of this place is compelling, with large green trees, the Shenandoah River behind me flowing into the Potomac River, and the Loudon Heights and Maryland Heights towering above.  In 1860 the picture is somewhat different.  Look anywhere around you and imagine a building, you are probably right.  The availability of large amounts of water power made Harpers Ferry a major industrial center.  Factories lined the banks of both rivers.  Rivers, railroads and canals running through Harpers Ferry made it a major crossroads as well.  The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad ran 60 trains a day through here at all hours of the day and night.  Between the factories – with their machinery, trip hammers and forges – and the railroad – rumbling through and belching steam – this was a busy, noisy, smelly, unpleasant place.

"The reason why all of this was here, was this:

The Ranger raised the musket that he had been holding across his shoulder, and he shook it slightly.

"The Federal Government made these in the armory that stretched along the banks of the Potomac, just over there.  The armory is the largest employer in town, and the prosperity of the town depends upon the armory.  An armory is a factory where weapons are made.  The arsenal buildings were just over there, along the banks of the Shenandoah.  An arsenal is a warehouse where weapons are stored.

"In 1859, John Brown and his followers staged a raid on Harpers Ferry in the hopes of sparking an uprising among the slaves.  They made Harpers Ferry their target for the purpose of gathering weapons from the Federal arsenal to arm their supporters.  They failed.  Brown's men were killed or captured, and Brown was executed after a highly publicized trial.  The raid and the trial heightened the tensions that already existing between the northern and southern states.

"In November of 1860, Abraham Lincoln, the Republic party candidate, was elected President of the United States.  The Republican Party was a new political party, united around its opposition to slavery.  Lincoln didn't win the vote in any of the southern states.  The Democratic Party splintered during the election, and three different Democratic Party candidates ran for president.  Almost immediately after the election, the southern states started seceding from the Union.  South Carolina was first to go, and others followed. 

"Come with me and find out what happened next.

The Ranger, having reshouldered his musket, turned to his right and walked off to an open lawn.  Flat stones, showing through the grass, outlined a large rectangle that easily contained about a dozen low benches.

"Lincoln took office in March of 1861.  In 1861 Harpers Ferry was a part of the state of Virginia.  This part of Virginia became the state of West Virginia and was admitted to the Union in 1863.  Virginia is a southern state, and it calls a convention to consider whether to secede from the Union like most of the other states have done.  On April 12 the Confederate forces on Charleston, South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter, an island fortress in the harbor manned by a small Federal garrison.  On April 14 the Fort surrendered.

"On April 18 Virginia voted to secede from the Union. Loyalties in Harpers Ferry were divided – some people felt loyalty to the state, but the livelihood of many people in the community was tied to the Federal armory. The news that Virginia had left the Union caused rioting here.

"After John Brown's raid, the Federal government posted a contingent of 50 soldiers to protect the armory and the arsenal.  Immediately after Virginia seceded, there were rumors that hundreds or even thousands of Virginia militia men were on their way and would arrive the next day to seize the arsenal, which contained 15,000 rifles and muskets ready for use.  There was no way that the garrison of 50 could defend the armory against hundreds or thousands.  Under cover darkness, the Federal soldiers filled a mattress cover with gunpowder and dragged it into the main arsenal building, which is where you are sitting, and the smaller arsenal, which is just over there.  The explosion set both buildings on fire, destroying the buildings and all the weapons stored in them.

"The noise of the explosion brought the towns people running, and regardless of their loyalties, they did what they could to put out the fire and keep it from spreading.  In the nineteenth century fire was a common enemy.  If a building wasn't made entirely out of wood, it had a wooden roof.  Sparks from any blaze threatened everyone.

"They put out the fire.  The arsenals and all the finished weapons were destroyed, but the armory buildings along the Potomac River and all the machinery in them remained intact.  The rumors turned out to be essentially true.  A contingent of about 350 Virginia militia arrived the next day and seized the armory.

"Now, come with me, and let's look at the strategic situation.

The Ranger turned again to his right and walked out to a point of land about 50 feet above where two rivers joined together and flowed as one off into the distance.  He turned to face his audience, who stood looking into the distance where the river flowed.  On the far side of both rivers, rocky hills rose up over a thousand feet.

"Down there to your left is the Potomac River, and to your right is the Shenandoah River, which flows into the Potomac.

"Upon leaving the Union, Virginia becomes a part of the Confederate States of America.  The Potomac River divides Virginia from Maryland.  Maryland remains in the Union and is a part of the United States of America.  From the point of view of Virginia, the Potomac River has just become an international boundary with a hostile neighbor, shots having already been fired.  Is this a good place for an armory?  No.

"Let's think about this another way.

The Ranger pointed down into the Shenandoah River.

"Those boulders, where the Shenandoah flows into the Potomac, mark the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, which runs southwest between two mountain ranges deep into Virginia.  An army moving through that Valley is essentially invisible to anyone outside of the Valley.  That is an invasion route into the South.

The Ranger pointed behind him to where the Potomac River disappeared into the folds of the landscape.

"You are looking east.  Sixty miles in that direction as the crow flies is the Federal capital.  They called it Washington City in those days.  For the armies of those times that distance is about three days' march.  That is an invasion route to the northern capital.

"In 1861, this has become an important place.

"The Virginia government brought in Thomas J. Jackson, a professor of artillery at the Virginia Military Institute, and they asked him how they could make Harpers Ferry secure from invasion.  Jackson, the foremost authority on artillery of the day, knew that artillery on the highest point of land controls the surrounding country side.  Harpers Ferry is surrounded by heights on three sides.  Bolivar Heights rises above the town behind where you are standing.  Loudon Heights rises up there …

he pointed up, across the Shenandoah …

"but the highest of the three …

he pointed up on the other side …

"is Maryland Heights, which rises across the Potomac.

"Bolivar Heights and Loudon Heights are in Virginia.  Maryland Heights is in Maryland.  Maryland is part of a foreign country, and taking control of Maryland Heights means invading a foreign country.  In April of 1861 the Confederacy was not ready to do that.   Jackson said, if I can't control Maryland Heights, I can't secure Harpers Ferry.  We will have to evacuate.

The Ranger led his audience back to the foundations of the arsenal building.

"The machinery in the Federal armory for making muskets and rifles was state of the art.  The Confederacy knew that it would be important to keep the machinery in order to make rifles and muskets for the war they knew was coming, but they lacked the means to move it to a place of safety.

"Although Virginia has seceded from the Union, the situation remained fluid, and Baltimore and Ohio Railroad continued to send 60 trains a day across the river through Harpers Ferry, between Virginia and Maryland, at all hours of the day and night.  Thomas J. Jackson, who was now in charge of the Confederate garrison at Harpers Ferry, wrote a letter to Mr. John Garrett, the President of the Railroad, and said, Mr. Garrett, your trains coming through Harpers Ferry at all hours of the day and night are disturbing my troop and interrupting their sleep.  In order to prevent these disturbances, I will cut off passage through Harpers Ferry unless the trains are limited to a two-hour period during the daytime.

"The Railroad agreed, and for a couple of weeks 60 trains ran through Harpers Ferry during a fixed two-hour period.  Then Jackson sprung his trap.  He held up the trains bound for Virginia into Maryland while permitting the trains coming from Maryland to pass into Virginia.  The two-hour windows was so brief that, before anyone knew what was happening, Jackson had bottled up 50 locomotives and over 300 cars.  He loaded the armory machinery onto these trains and shipped it south on another rail line that ran into the town.

"With the armory gone, the reason for Harpers Ferry to be a town was gone.  In 1860 about thirty-five hundred people lived in Harpers Ferry.  Most left, according to their loyalties.  Some armory workers and their families went north to the other principal Federal armory located in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Others followed Jackson's trains south to the armories in Richmond, Virginia and in Fayetteville, North Carolina.  Almost overnight, what had been a thriving and productive community was devastated – an early casualty of the war."

The Ranger turned and led his audience up one of the back streets of the lower town.

By the time the Ranger was done, about an hour after he started, he had collected an audience of about 75 people.  Distant thunder that had started to rumble about mid-way through his tour kept drawing closer, and rain started to sprinkle as the Ranger collected his people onto the covered back porch of the house from which Union General Phil Sheridan directed the 1865 campaign in the Shenandoah Valley.  The Ranger rested the butt of his musket on the ground and talked about Harpers Ferry at the end of the war while the rain fell more heavily with lightning and thunder. 

When he was done, the Ranger reshouldered his musket, turned and marched away, the sound of our applause melting into the sound of the rain.

Echoes From the Past

As we have seen in the news recently on a daily basis, the American Civil War means different things to different people today.

For some, it was the heroically tragic failed attempt of Southern nationalists to protect their civil liberties by declaring themselves independent of a nation whose government they feared would impinge upon their rights.  Their attempt to assert and defend their political independence was no less principled – and no less illegal – than the acts of the American colonials asserting their independence from Britain in 1776.

For others, the creation and defense of the Confederate nation was an attempt to preserve the institution of racially based slavery from the political and historical forces that threatened its existence.  Quite understandably from today's perspective, those who hold this latter view consider any claim that the Confederacy was based upon notions of liberty to be corrupted by the vileness of slavery.

That we now engage in a heated public debate over the propriety of the public display of the Confederacy battle flag, a topic that a generation ago would have received little if any notice, is an indication of how we, as a nation, are changing – in our notions of fairness and equality and in the makeup of the national polity.

The long view of history helps us understand just how dramatic this change has been.  In 1860, slavery was a robust institution in the southern portion of the United States, and most of the Negro population was held in bondage.  Slavery had not withered, as had been hoped in the early days of the republic, but rather it took on new vigor as the world's appetite for cotton grew.  By 1860, cotton states of the American south produced roughly 80 percent of the global crop.

Abolitionists, who futilely demanded an immediate end to slavery, represented a distinctly minor point of view and were indeed criticized for provoking the pro-slavery advocates and the southern nationalists, who were known a "fire eaters".  The Republican Party, which formed in the early 1850s, was united principally by the desire to prevent the spread of slavery into the federal territories.  Although some members of the party held abolitionist and antislavery views (in the jargon of the day, the former was a more extreme version of the latter), it cannot be asserted that the motives of the party as a whole were to achieve political freedom and social equality for the Negro in the United States.  Nonetheless, the Republicans' opponents charged that this was in fact the case, and emphasized the point by referring to the Republicans as "Black Republicans".

The tiny free Negro population lived under legal restrictions and conditions of social inequality in both the north and the south, although as is inevitable in so large a nation, conditions and circumstances varied from place to place and given the individuals involved.  Some whites were prepared to deal with Negroes on the basis of social equality, but many were not.

When the Civil War came, people understood that although the triggering cause had been the election of a Republican as president, the root cause was slavery.  The stated Federal war aim was to restore the union, and it is unlikely that the northern states would have fought if the purpose of the war was to end slavery.  President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was intended to make the destruction of slavery a tool of the war to defeat the Confederacy – its claim to legal validity as a war-powers measure rested upon its impact upon the conduct of the war – but inevitably some critics and supporters of the Federal war effort would regard it as making the abolition of slavery an aim of the war.  The Confederates propaganda machine chose to depict it as an act of desperation in which the Federals sought to encourage servile rebellion.  Some British observers scoffed at the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation (published shortly after the Battle of Antietam in 1862, it provided that it would become effective as of January 1, 1863) as the offer of a corrupt bargain in which the southerners who ceased their rebellion before that date could retain their slaves and the institution of slavery.  That is a fair reading of the instrument.  Yet the fact remains that despite the intent of the original document, once the Final Emancipation Proclamation was issued, President Lincoln effectively refused to retreat from the steps taken toward abolition, which made it – from that point – a goal of the Federals in waging the war.

When assessing the history of the Civil War era, given the many attitudes about race, slavery, union and secession – and given the possible change of those attitudes given the passage of time and the reaction to events – the most accurate statement about the effect of the Civil War upon slavery is that the Civil War resulted in the end of slavery, and the demise of slavery was in the nature of collateral damage.  That's not the story that we teach children as grade school history, and even people who have a more sophisticated knowledge of American history are less informed about the decades that followed the Civil War.

Although the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution put a formal end to slavery as a lawful institution, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were intended to secure the political rights and citizenship of Freedmen and free Negroes, a terrible repression ultimately set in under color of law that separated the races and denied large portions of the Negro population equality under law or the opportunity for economic advancement.

After the end of World War II, Winston Churchill spoke of an iron curtain falling across Europe.  Something comparable happened in the United States after the Civil War.  For a time the radicals in the Republican Party attempted to impose a political and social revolution on the Confederate south – a period of time known as Reconstruction – and for a time the powers of the federal government, including the Army, were employed for that purpose.  But as the years passed the radicals grew old, the nation grew tired on the constant conflict and the effort of maintaining the policies of Reconstruction became a political liability.  The national government became more interested in protecting big industry from the growth of big labor.  The Supreme Court eviscerated the Civil War amendments.

In 1877, Ulysses S. Grant, having served two terms as President and engaged in a European tour, wrote in a private letter to a friend:

For the last eight weeks I have seen but few American papers, and am consequently behind in home news.  The foreign papers, however, have been full of the great railroad strike, and no doubt exaggerated it, bad as it was.  The United States should always be prepared to put down such demonstrations promptly and with severe consequences to the guilty.  I hope good may come out of this, in pointing out the necessity of having the proper remedy at hand  in case of need.  "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."  One thing struck me as a little queer.  During my two terms of office the whole Democratic press, and the morbidly honest and "reformatory" portion of the Republican press, thought it horrible to keep U.S. troops stationed in the Southern States, and when they were called upon to protect the lives of negroes – as much citizens under the Constitution as if their skins were white – the country was scarcely large enough to hold the sound of indignation belched forth by them for some years.  Now, however, there is no hesitation about exhausting the whole power of the government to suppress a strike on the slightest intimation that danger threatens.  All parties agree that this is right, and so do I.  If a negro insurrection should arise in South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana, or if the negroes in either of these States – where they are in a large majority  – should intimidate whites from going to the polls, or from exercising  any of the rights of American citizens, there would be no division of sentiment as to the duty of the President.  It does seem the rule should work both ways.

Over time the courts and social consciousness of the people at large started to reverse the trend and started to chip away at segregation and political and social discrimination.

The story of the decade immediately after the war is told in Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.  The longer view is considered in C. Vann Woodward's The Strange Career of Jim Crow and John Hope Franklin's From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans.  The national politics in the period immediately after the war is the subject of W.R. Brock's An American Crisis: Congress and Reconstruction 1865-1867 – a very thoughtful analysis of the evolution of policy into law and inaction, enhanced by a understanding of the practical dynamics of American politics.

Woodward suggested that the growing awareness of the treatment of minorities in Europe before World War II made a number of white Americas more conscious about the treatment of minorities at home.

The recent publication of Go Set a Watchman has brought renewed attention to Harper Lee's  To Kill a Mockingbird.  The latter, published in 1960 and made into a movie in 1962, depicts events in a small southern town in 1936, which include the threatened lynching of a black man accused of raping a white woman.  The attempt is turned aside by the courage of the accused man's white lawyer and the guilelessness of the lawyer's 10 year old daughter.  Although the events of the story are set in the 1930s, the book and the movie reflect rather the attitudes of America in the 1960s – a turbulent time in which old habits and attitudes clashed with changing ideas.

Something of the difference between the 1930s and the 1960s is reflected in a poem called "Strange Fruit" that was written by Abel Meeropol, published in 1937 (the time of the story told by To Kill a Mockingbird) and recorded as a song by Billie Holliday in 1939.  The first verse reads as follows:

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

(Several recordings are on YouTube.)

In the current controversy about how we should regard America's Confederate past, we need to keep in mind that, at the time of the Revolution, slavery existed throughout the American colonies, and only by 1860 had it become primarily a southern institution.  The legacy of slavery is not a southern burden but rather a legacy of the nation as a whole.  Discrimination based upon race and other personal attributes has marred all parts of the country.

The ugly legacies of an ugly past remain with us.  Progress to better conditions in society has been slow and uncertain, but the progress has been real, and it is a reason for hope.

Viral Civil War Video at Prager University

I have viewed Professor Ty Seidule's video on Slavery as the Cause of the Civil War that was posted on the Prager University website, and I applaud him for having summarized as accurately as possible in a five minute video for a popular audience so complex a historical issue. Any fair analysis of the facts leads to the conclusion that slavery was the root cause of the Civil War. Anyone who believes otherwise in this day and age either has not acquainted himself with the facts objectively or is pursuing an agenda that puts belief above the facts. America in 1860 was not America in 2015 only without cellphones, the internet and automobiles. Although there were similarities with life today, attitudes and prejudices were very different. The world was very different. The Civil War would set America on a different road – President Lincoln described it as a "new birth of freedom" – although for many in this country the effects of that freedom would not start to be felt until late in the twentieth century and, in part, aspects of that freedom remains only a distant dream today. I explore the nature of the country before the Civil War in Four Score and Four: America in 1860. In the book I describe the culture, the agriculture, the industry, the media, the technology, the arts and the politics of the day – all of it as context to help the reader understand more fully what the times were like and why the war occurred. I am able to cover a bit more ground in several hundred pages than Professor Seidule can in a five minute video, but I come to the same conclusion. If you want to see the evidence that leads to the conclusion, I invite you to take a look.