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.

Harper's Ferry: The Senate Select Committee Investigation

On December 14, 1859, the United States Senate passed a resolution to establish a select committee to inquire into the invasion of Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and the seizure of public property that occurred there during October of that year. As directed by the resolution, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, the presiding officer of the Senate, appointed as members of the committee James. M. Mason, a Democrat from Virginia (chairman); Jefferson Davis, a Democrat from Mississippi; Graham N. Fitch, a Democrat from Indiana; Jacob Collamer, a Republican from Vermont; and James R. Doolittle, a former Democrat turned Republican from Wisconsin. After holding hearings and examining witnesses, the committee delivered its majority and minority reports on June 15, 1860.

On October 16, 1859, John Brown and 17 others entered Harper's Ferry for the purpose of capturing the federal arsenal located there. John Brown and his sons and sons-in-law had been active in the violence over slavery in The Territory of Kansas, and he had become acquainted with some of his associates there. They took hostages, detained and then released a mail train en route to Baltimore, and in the process killed three white men and one free Negro.

Local citizens attacked the raiders, and John Brown along with some of his men and some hostages, took shelter in an engine house. A contingent of United States Marines stormed the engine house, killing some of the raiders and capturing others, including John Brown. Four other men were to bring a store of weapons from John Brown's base of operations in nearby Maryland, but they did not arrive in Harper's Ferry and fled the scene.

The weapons included 200 Sharps rifled carbines, 200 revolver pistols and 1,000 pikes – each a steel knife blade riveted to the end of a five foot wooden handle. After his capture, John Brown stated that his purpose was to arm the slaves and use them as a military force in Virginia. Of the 22 raiders, ten were killed in Harper's Ferry, 10 were executed, and five escaped – one of the raiders who entered Harper's Ferry and the four who remained in Maryland.

The committee divided along party lines. Although the majority and the minority did not differ as to the facts, they split over the breadth of the committee's inquiry, the context in which it was evaluated and the implications it held for the future. In addition to exploring the facts of the raid, the committee was charged with advising whether the Congress should enact legislation to deal with any such future invasion of a state.

Both reports agreed that no such legislation was called for. The minority argued that the inquiry should have stopped with that conclusion and complained that the majority went beyond the committee's mandate to inquire into the actions and beliefs of certain abolitionists who had aided John Brown although without knowing – so they claimed and in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary – that he planned a campaign of violence.

The majority clearly believed otherwise, owing in part to John Brown's reputation from the Kansas violence and the cavalier way in which the abolitionists had entrusted 200 rifles to him for safekeeping. In this connection the committee elicited from some of the witness strong statements about their desire to end slavery and about their belief in a "higher law" that empowered them to challenge slavery.

The majority concluded that John Brown and his colleagues were "lawless ruffians" against whom the laws of the states were proof and that the United States was without the power to legislate. The majority warned that "If the several states, whether from motives of policy or a desire to preserve the peace of the Union, if not from fraternal feeling, do not hold it incumbent on them, after the experience of the country to guard in future by appropriate legislation against occurrences similar to the one here inquired into, the committee can find no guarantee elsewhere for the security of peace between the States of the Union."

The minority took a different tack, observing that "It is almost astonishing that in a country like ours, laden with the rich experience of the blessings of security under the protection of law, there should still be found large bodies of men laboring under the infatuation that any good object can be affected by lawlessness and violence." And as illustration of this view they referred to the filibusters who invaded neighboring countries for the apparent purpose of bringing such lands under American dominion for the expansion of slavery, those who violated the laws against engaging in the slave trade and the border ruffians who entered the Kansas Territory for the purpose of securing the permanence of slavery there.

The minority continued, "While this act of violence and treason, and the alarm, suspicion, suffering and death it involves are so deplorable, we cannot but see that the lessons which it teaches furnish many considerations of security against its repetition", not the least of which was that the ages might not produce another John Brown and provide him with resources.

An interesting footnote to the committee's hearing and dueling reports is that, shortly after the Senate adopted the resolution to establish the select committee, Senator William Bigler, Democrat from Pennsylvania, offered a bill, designated S. 72, that empowered that the President to summon and employ the militia "whenever the United States, or any State or Territory thereof, shall be invaded, or be in in imminent danger of invasion, from any place whatever, whether external or internal, to the United States". The bill was referred to the select committee on the invasion of Harper's Ferry. When Senator Mason offered the committee's report to the Senate, he also moved that the committee be relieved of any further obligation to consider Bill S. 72.

When after the 1860 election the states of the deep south began to secede, President James Buchanan lamented that, although he believed that secession was unlawful, he lacked to authority to take action against it. Had Bill S. 72 become law, it might have provided the legal authority that the president said he lacked based upon the argument that the secession governments constituted domestic invasions. If it had been enacted and provided the power, the question remains whether President Buchanan would have had the backbone to use it.

President Buchanan has never rank highly within the pantheon or American deities, so it is easy to think ill of him. President Buchanan had sent a vessel to Charleston with supplies for the garrison at Fort Sumter, but Confederate batteries at the mouth of the harbor fired on it and drove it away. President Lincoln advised the Confederates that he was sending food to Fort Sumter, but if the expedition was fired upon it would put ashore additional troops and ammunition. General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, in commend of Confederate forces at Charleston, regarded Fort Sumter, if held by an adequate force, a perfect Gibraltar. The situation forced the Confederates to fire on the fort before it was strengthened. When the Confederates fired on the national flag, they largely unified northern public opinion in favor of using force to preserve the Union, a luxury that President Buchanan did not enjoy.

The Panic of 1857

Until now, the Chinese government has been widely applauded for its deftness in managing economic matters. For instance, its massive stimulus program launched in late 2008 helped the Chinese economy weather the global financial crisis.

It also saddled the economy with debt, a property bubble and wasteful projects throughout the country. As part of a strategy to help the companies unwind the debts they had taken on in that push, policy makers encouraged stock investing.

"Chinese Government Struggles in Attempt to Stem Distress in Stock Market", Lingling Wei, Wall Street Journal Online, July 8, 2015 9:42 a.m. ET

When you cut through a lot of the mumbo jumbo, and if you ignore the body of laws and regulations that have grown up since 1860 that affect banks and other financial institutions, the business of being a banker is not very difficult. You as a banker have a stock of money that comes from two sources – the capital provided by the owners of the bank, and the deposits that come from people who have given you their money for safekeeping. The world is filled with people who want to use your money, and you lend it them for a fee.

If you are careful about who you lend to, most of the people who borrow from you will pay you back, but a few will not. Taking this into account, you set the fee for the use of your money so that it will cover the costs of your doing business (including your salary and the interest you have promised to pay your depositors), reimburse you for the losses you will suffer from those who don't pay you back, and provide a profit so that you can pay a dividend to the owners who provided the capital.

When we think about banking in the United States before the Civil War, we need to keep in mind the fact that two types of money (as currency) were in use. One type was specie – gold and silver coins minted by the government. The other type was banknotes – pieces of paper issued by commercial banks that represented the issuing bank's promise to pay the bearer a specified amount of money in the form of gold and silver coins.

The law required the banks to keep in their vaults an amount of specie – the "reserves" – that represented a percentage of their banknotes that were in circulation. Of course, because the reserves represented only a portion of the banknotes in circulation, it would not be sufficient to repay all the notes if the holders sought to redeem them all at once. But since a paper banknote is redeemable at will for an equivalent amount of coin, most of the time an individual will be indifferent as to whether he holds a banknote or coin.

So, if you are a banker looking at the balance sheet for you bank, you have certain assets, including the cash (specie) in your vaults and the money you have loaned and that you expect to receive back from your borrowers, and you have certain liabilities, including the amounts that your depositors have given you for safekeeping and the banknotes you have issued that represent their right to demand from you the payment in specie.

If you are an experienced banker who has learned the business of banking from other experienced bankers you will understand that your business goes through seasonal cycles. The amount of loans, deposits, banknotes in circulation, and reserves of coin in the vault will rise and fall, but so long as they remain within the rough relationship to one another that they have maintained over time, all should go smoothly and profitably.

In 1857 New York City possessed the largest concentration of banks in the United States making it the financial capital of the nation. For the convenience of their respective business, the banks had formed a clearinghouse organization in which representatives of all the banks met at the end of each business day and settled their accounts. It not only promoted the efficiency of their business, but provided the members with insight into each other's financial condition. The advantage to you as a banker is that you knew not only the condition of your own balance sheets but also the condition of the balance sheet of every other major bank in the city.

In late summer of 1857, a substantial number of the bankers in New York City woke up to the realization that they were operating outside of their comfort zone. Summer was a peak lending time. The aggregate amount of loans outstanding for the New York banks was nearly a third larger than it had been in any of the recent years, and the combined amount of banknotes in circulation and deposits at the banks – both representing claims against the banks' reserves – also was substantially larger than in prior years. At the same time, the aggregate amount of reserves had declined.

The banks reacted by demanding repayment of loans then due – a portion of the loans were "demand" loans that permitted to lender to require repayment at any time – and by refusing to renew existing loans or make new loans. Needless to say, these actions caused substantial distress as people who needed money to operate their businesses and ventures could not get it. People who had borrowed money to buy securities and other assets were forced to sell, and the flood of selling pushed prices down. Business that could not pay their bills failed. The telegraph and newspapers spread the story – and the panic – across the nation. The failure of a major financial institution in Ohio increased the alarm. Depositors and holders of banknotes sought to redeem their claims for specie, but the banks, acting as a group, refused to honor their requests.

What does all this have to do, as we used to say, with the price of tea in China? What is the relevance of the Panic of 1857 to the conditions in the United States in the twenty-first century?

To sort this out, let's look at what has changed and what has not. First, the money is different. Banknotes and specie are a thing of the past. Starting with the introduction of greenbacks during the Civil War and culminating with the birth and grown of the Federal Reserve System, the United States now has a national currency that is not directly dependent upon the financial health of any one bank. Second, many bank deposits are insured, which has made bank runs as scarce of hens' teeth. In fact, the only exposure to a bank run that most people have nowadays consists of a few scenes in the 1946 Frank Capra movie "It's a Wonderful Life" starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. Bank failures still occur, but the collateral damage is reduced when individual banks implode. Third, we have the Federal Reserve System that oversees the money supply and acts as a lender of last resort. In 1791 and again in 1816 the United States gathered the political will to establish the Bank of the United States, which acted as the fiscal agent for the national government and imposed some discipline upon the banking industry, much to the displeasure of the industry. The first Bank of the United States was permitted to expire, and President Andrew Jackson killed the second one. Fourth, the amount of regulation and regulatory apparatus has grown from virtually nothing into multiple state and federal institutions with broad mandates, broad powers and overlapping jurisdictions.

In spite of all that has changed, major financial dislocations still occur and are likely to occur in the future. No one fact causes a major financial dislocation, and while specific underlying facts differ from one event to another, the general causal trends seem to be a growing consensus that the debt load in some part of the economy or the world is larger than can be readily repaid because of the amount of the debt, changing economic conditions or worries that the assets purchased using credit – like stocks in 1929 or houses in 2008 – might be substantially overvalued.

Let's look at how the aggregate debt load might become excessive. The marketplace has thousands of potential lenders, all of whom are in the business of renting money to people who believe they can use the money to turn a profit. If you are a loan officer, you have a choice between making the incremental loan and earning your bonus or failing to make the loan and getting fired. If you are the bank president, you look at the balance sheet of your institution and the financial conditions generally, and then you decide whether it is prudent for your institution to take on the additional risk of the incremental loan. Even if the bank president is considering the aggregate amount of similar loans being made by all the lenders in the marketplace, his inclination will be to keep lending because failing to do so means foregoing the incremental profit.

But at some point the bank president becomes worried. He reads the economic statistics; he sees some leading indicators weaken; he recalls that he has authorized the consummation of some slightly aggressive loans (compensated, of course, by a correspondingly higher rate of interest); and he begins to wonder how his bank's loan portfolio might fare if conditions go south. And, of course, there is always some Cassandra predicting that the next crash or recession is just around the corner – from time to time one of them will be right.

If one bank president has cause to become worried, perhaps a dozen come to the same conclusion, and without coordinate action among them, but reacting to the same general indicators, their previous optimism becomes clouded over by prudence, and they scale back their incremental lending and stop rolling over their more worrisome credits. The fact that they are doing so inevitably becomes known, and the fact becomes an additional – and additionally persuasive – factor that other bank presidents and other market participants will weigh in the mix.

The foregoing discussion has spoken about "loans", but it could easily have focused on other assets. If one became persuaded that the stock market was exhibiting "irrational exuberance", one might be prudent to reduce one stock portfolio before the market tanked. If one became persuaded that housing prices were overstated, one might unload one's portfolio of collateralized mortgage obligations before the default rate spiked and exceed the rate assumed when the instruments were originally sold. In either case, the selling itself becomes an economic fact of which others will take note and contribute to the tipping of greed into fear.

Greed and fear are, of course, the primary economic motivators. They are selfish motivators that focus primarily upon one's own profit and one's own safety. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this since we expect our commercial institutions to be profitable and we expect them to behave rationally to that end. There are always unintended or collateral consequences. Although Adam Smith's "invisible hand" may produce a greater overall benefit in many cases and under ordinary circumstances, it does not do so in every case and certainly not in emergency situations. When conditions start to go bad, those who act first to protect themselves are most likely to suffer the least injury, although their precipitous actions may result in injury to others.

In a perfect world we would be able to eliminate panics and market disturbances by preventing the aggregate debt in any part of the national or the world economy from becoming excessive, by curbing "irrational exuberance" before it becomes irrational or exuberant and by preventing supply and demand from pushing the market price of assets in excess of their "real" value – whatever that may be. Based upon what we know, what we believe and what we reasonably can foresee, nothing like this is ever going to happen.

Since we have not been able to achieve the impossible, we have tried alternative approaches. One such is to require institutions to become more robust and therefore capable of withstanding the consequences of the market's folly by restricting the institution from certain lines of business that are considered too risky and imposing requirements and limitations on how its business operates. The judgment is that of a governmental regulator and not of the institution's manager so the limits will not be tailored to the needs of the institution's business and will probably be contrary to the institution's profit interest. Moreover, insofar as making the institution sufficiently robust to withstand the next economic crisis, the institution's vulnerability to the effects of that crisis will depend upon the nature of the crisis. If the institution's portfolio is not heavily exposed to the assets that are being hammered in the crisis, it is less likely to be at risk. I don't see where a regulator has a better chance of making that call correctly than does a manager.

In 1857 the traditions and ideas about the duties of government left regulation of banks to the states, and even there the hand of government rested lightly. Government has grown to be more intrusive, but that does not mean that it has become more effective, and I am fearful – when I hear government officials speak about institutions that are too big to fail and too big to jail – that much of the actions taken by the government are window dressings, intended largely to persuade the public that it has the problem is well in hand.

Humor as Social Commentary

Quality, value, style, service, selection, convenience,
Economy, savings, performance, experience, hospitality,
Low rates, friendly service, name brands, easy terms,
Affordable prices, money-back guarantee.

George Carlin - “Advertising”

I recently listened to a George Carlin monologue called “Advertising” on YouTube. The first two minutes of the nine minute piece consisted of a litany of advertising buzzwords and phrases. Typical of George Carlin, the monologue flipped to social commentary with language that is unsuitable for a family audience.

George Carlin was a national treasure, holding up to ridicule things that he found stupid and ugly, but he was only one of a number of people who have risen to prominence using humor as their medium and, in the process, delivered sharp social commentary. They appear and appeared on television and radio, on the vaudeville stage and in the pages of newspapers across the decades, adapting to the changing communications media to reach their audiences. Will Rogers performed on the stage and in the movies, wrote a newspaper column and spoke on the radio. Fanny Brice was a headliner as a comedienne in the Ziegfeld Follies.

Barbra Streisand played Fanny Brice in the movie “Funny Girl”. In the movie, Florence Ziegfeld (played by Walter Pidgeon) required Miss Brice to sing a number about being a beautiful bride in the Follies’ finale that featured a lot of showgirls in bridal attire. Miss Brice acquiesced (she was no beauty) and started the song on opening night, costumed in a wedding gown, but she turned sideways after few bars into the number and appeared in profile as if she was enormously pregnant.

The line of noted American humorists and comedians, as near as I can determine, stretches back to the Civil War, but apparently not before. This is not to say that humor did not exist in America before the Civil War, only that no writer or entertainer well known to history appears to have made humor the mainstay of his work. Mark Twain, regarded as the quintessential American humorist, did not begin his work until after the war. David Ross Locke, writing as Petroleum V. Nasby, portrayed himself as a Democrat and Copperhead during the war. Robert Henry Newell, writing as a would be politician named Orpheus C. Kerr [office seeker], also started writing during the war. Most humor is not enduring, and very few of those who enjoyed prominence for their humor in their day, like Mr. Locke and Mr. Newell, are well remembered by history but not the general public.

The pre-Civil War writers who were known for their humor are not well known today. The writers who remain well known used humor as an element in their work rather than as its principal thrust. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has its humorous passages and episodes. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story entitled “The Celestial Railway”, which was a parody of The Pilgrim’s Progress in which the railroad circumvents all the obstacles awaiting the pilgrim who travels on foot – the Slough of Despond and the Valley of the Shadow of Death – only to deposit the passenger in Hell. Fanny Fern is not well known today, but was popular for her wit, as illustrated by the following sample, entitled “A Gentle Hint”:

In most of the New York shop windows, one reads: “Here we speak French;” “Here we speak Spanish;” “Here we speak German;” “Here we speak Italian.” I suggest an improvement -- “Here we speak the Truth."

Somewhat more in the nature of George Carlin, however, was Charles Farrar Browne who wrote in the fictional persona of Artemus Ward, a low rent and semi-literate version of the already famous showman Phineas T. Barnum. Artemus Ward hailed from Indiana (as George Carlin remarked in “Advertising”, “Void where prohibited by law, except in Indiana”), and he made his first appearances in 1858 while Mr. Browne was working for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. As a result of the newspaper exchange that permitted newspapers to be sent free through the mails to other newspapers, his items were picked up and reprinted in newspapers and periodicals.

Artemus Ward visited with the Shakers, the Mormons, the advocates of free love, those who communicated with the spirits of the dead, the opera singer Adelina Patti, the Prince of Wales and the proponents of women’s rights. As related in a piece entitled “Ossawatomie Brown”, Artemus Ward told of seeing a play in New York City based upon the actions of John Brown and described the show's finale as follows:

Kansis to Harper’s Ferry. Picter of a Arsenal is represented. Soljers cum & fire at it. Old Brown comes out & permits hisself to be shot. He is tride by soops in milingtery close, and sentenced to be hung on the gallus. Tabloo -- Old Brown on a platform, pintin upards, the staige lited up with red fire. Goddis of Liberty also on platform, pintin upards. A dutchman in the orkestry warbles on a base drum. Curtin falls. Moosic of the Band.

His commentary on visiting Oberlin College, notorious at the time for admitting Negro students, was the first Artemus Ward letter to be widely reprinted. It used a derogatory version of the word Negro, but the newspapers of the day did not hesitate to print the word in that context and many others. When an expanded version of the piece was reprinted in book form in 1862, the word “Ethiopian” was substituted.

This shift in the choice of language occurred also in a piece that was written during the secession crisis in which Artemus Ward addressed his neighbors in Indiana about the causes of the crisis. The background is a bit convoluted in that it pulls together some diverse and ugly threads. In 1859 Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in Britain, and the next year it was published in the United States where it raised scientific and religious interest and controversy. In 1860, Phineas T. Barnum, who operated a “museum” in New York City with authentic and doubtful curiosities, opened a new attraction called the "What Is It". It featured a diminutive dark skinned man-like creature purportedly captured in Central Africa. One of the New York newspapers said that the "What Is It" might be “the link supposed by philosophers to exist between the human race and the brutes.”

Indeed, in addressing the secession crisis, Artemus Ward stated,

The origernal cawz in Our Afrikan Brother. I was into Barnum’s Moozeum down to New York the other day & saw that exsentric Etheopian, the What Is It. Sez I, “Mister What Is It, you folks air raisin thunder with this grate country. You’re gettin to be ruther more numeris than interestin. It is a pity you coodent go orf sumwhares by yourselves, & be a nation of What Is Its ….

The "What Is It" laughed in his face. That got Artemus Ward hot under the collar, but his angry speech brought the same reaction. In reflecting upon the crisis afterward more coolly, Artemus Ward concluded that the Negro “wooden’t be sich a infernal noosanse if white peple would let him alone.”

The dramatic situation of the encounter is intrinsically demeaning, but it is also clear that the "What Is It" gets the better of it. As a result of interview, however, given the predominant racial attitudes in the United States in 1860, held both north and south, the conclusion that Artemus Ward drew about race relations in the United States generally is quite subversive.

It is impossible to say whether the use of the term “Etheopian” in the place of the vulgar word reflected either a social judgment or an artistic choice. As noted above, the vulgar word appeared often in the newspapers of the day, indicating that it was accepted as a part of common speech. The author’s election not to use it in the reprint of the Oberlin piece and in the original crisis piece moderates, if only slightly, the overtly pejorative impact of the dramatic situation. Most Americans in 1860 were aware that the term was at least vulgar, and I would assume that the author thought that his readers were white.

Shortly after the secession crisis ripened into war, another letter from Artemus Ward told of his adventures in the Confederacy and his brief encounter with a Negro. The original version used the vulgar term, and it was not altered when reprinted in book form in 1862, suggesting a deliberate decision to use and then retain it – it is the only use of the term that I found in the book. Unlike the interview with the "What Is it", the dramatic situation is not intrinsically demeaning, and unlike either the Oberlin piece or the crisis piece, the setting is in the deep south. In addition, while the "What Is It" got the upper hand in the exchange with Artemus Ward in the crisis piece, the Negro speaker in this piece is permitted a particularly sharp reply that was addressed to the whites of the nation as a whole. Whatever the reasons behind the choice, the encounter with Artemus Ward goes as follows:

I saw a [Negro] sittin on a fence a-playin on a banjo. “My African Brother,” sed I, coting from a Track I onct red, “you belong to a very interesting race. Your masters is going to war excloosively on your account.”

“Yes, boss,” he replied, “an’ I wish ‘em honorable graves!” and he went on playin the banjo, larfin all over and openin his mouth wide enuff to drive in an old-fashion 2 wheeled chaise.