Showing posts with label Propaganda. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Propaganda. Show all posts

Sunday, July 23, 2023

Charles Sumner to Richard Cobden, July 9, 1850

The slaveholders are bent on securing the new territories for slavery, and they see in prospective an immense slave nation embracing the Gulf of Mexico and all its islands, and stretching from Maryland to Panama. For this they are now struggling, determined while in the Union to govern and direct its energies; or if obliged to quit, to build up a new nation slaveholding throughout. They are fighting with desperation, and have been aided by traitors at the North. Webster's apostasy is the most barefaced. Not only the cause of true antislavery is connected with the overthrow of the slave propaganda, but also that of peace. As soon as it is distinctly established that there shall be no more slave territory, there will be little danger of war. My own earnest aim is to see slavery abolished everywhere within the sphere of the national government,—which is in the District of Columbia, on the high seas, and in the domestic slave-trade; and beyond this, to have this government for freedom, so far as it can exert an influence, and not for slavery. When this is accomplished, then slavery will be taken out of the vortex of national politics; and the influences of education and improved civilization, and of Christianity, will be left free to act against it in the States where it exists.

SOURCE: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Vol. 3, p. 216-7

Sunday, May 19, 2013

A letter from a Union prisoner now at Richmond . . .

. . . dated the first days of May, describes with graphic force the terrible barbarities inflicted upon our men now in rebel hands.  A Fegee [sic] cannibal would blush to have such charges made of his behavior towards his human food.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, June 7, 1862, p. 1

Friday, January 14, 2011

Northern Sympathisers With Traitors

Parson Brownlow says:

If I owed the devil a debt and it was to be discharged by the rendering up to him of a dozen of the meanest, most revolting and god forsaken wretches that ever could be culled from the ranks of depraved human society, and I wanted to pay that debt and get a premium on the payment, I would make a tender to his Satanic Majesty of twelve Northern men who sympathized with this infernal rebellion. – {Great cheering.}  If I am severe and bitter in my remarks. {Cries of “no, no; not a bit of it.”}  If I am, gentlemen, you must consider that we in the South make a personal matter of this thing {laughter.}  We have no respect or confidence in any Northern man who sympathises [sic] with this infernal rebellion – {Cries of good, good,} – nor should any be tolerated in walking Broadway at any time.  Such men ought to be ridden upon a rail and ridden out of the North.  {Good, good.}  They should either be for or against the “mill dam,” and I would make them show their hands.

Parson Brownlow said in his recent New York speech:

The soldiers brought with them from the battle of Manassas, the heads of Union men that were killed, and held them by the beards and waved them, and showed them as the heads of the d----d Yankees they had captured.  This is the Secession spirit of the South.  The spirit of the vile untutored savage.  The spirit of hell and yet you have men at the North who sympathise with these murderers.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 24, 1862, p. 2

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Awful Rebel Outrages

Just above where we are lying, on the Tennessee shore, in Lauderdale county, resides a family formerly of Iowa, who lived there for the past four of five years and have witnessed the workings of secession in this vicinity. They say that immediately after the declarations that Tennessee had gone out of the Union, bands of armed men went prowling about the country, robbing whomsoever they chose, insulting women, and forcing loyal citizens into the rebel service at the point of a bayonet. They committed the greatest outrages everywhere, and the family of which I speak were deprived of everything valuable in the house, while the head of the household was compelled to fly from home and hide in the woods at least six or seven times to avoid impressment.

A number of Union men refused to embrace treason even when threatened with death, and those brave spirits were carried off and executed by the mob. The wife of the Iowa man, says a great many were hanged, and that she herself knows of six who were suspended from a tree within two miles of her own dwelling, and left a prey to the buzzards and crows. Their bodies were afterward taken down and buried, but not before the rebel outlaws were at a safe distance, as the people were fearful, and without reason, that had it been known the rights of sepulture had been given the poor martyrs, those who performed that common act of charity would probably have shared their fate.

The woman says that one of the Union men who had been impressed and afterward deserted more perhaps because he believed his family were starving than from his abhorrence of joining so unholy a cause, was captured in Lauderdale county while on his way home, and was actually nailed to a tree and left their to perish by inches. The man was found there a week after, merely by accident, as he had been gagged to prevent his outcries, and thus deprive him of all hope of release, and taken to the house of a neighbor. The unfortunate victim was still alive, but so much exhausted from exposure, famine and pain, that he died on the second day after his release, notwithstanding every effort was made to save his life. This story seem most improbably; [too] horrible for belief; but the woman, who has no motive for misrepresentation, declares it true, and I can see no good reason for discrediting her account of the unnatural, cruel and entirely monstrous transaction. – {Ft. Pillow Cor. Of N. Y. Tribune.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 10, 1862, p. 3

Monday, June 21, 2010

Rebel Outrages on the dead

WASHINGTON, April 30. – The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War made a lengthy report regarding the treatment by the rebels at Manassas of the remains of Federal officers and soldiers killed there. They say the facts disclosed are of painful, repulsive and shocking character – that the rebels have crowned this rebellion by the perpetration of deeds unknown even to savage warfare. Investigations have established this beyond controversy. The witnesses called before us were men of undoubted veracity and character; some of them occupy high positions in the army, and some of them high positions in civil life. Differing in political sentiments, this evidence proves a remarkable concurrence of opinion and judgment of our own people and foreign nations, and must with one accord, however they have differed heretofore, consign to lasting odium of the authors of crimes which, in their details, exceed the worst excesses of the Sepoys in India. The outrages on the dead will revive the recollections of the cruelties to which savage tribes subject their prisoners. They were buried, in many cases with their faces downward – they were left to decay in the open air, their bones being carried off as trophies, sometimes, as the testimony proves, to be used as personal ornaments; and one witness deliberately avows that the head of one of our most gallant officers was cut off by a Secessionist to be used as a drinking cup on the occasion of his marriage.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 3, 1862, p. 3

Sunday, May 23, 2010

The Punishment of Traitors

EXTRACTS FROM THE SPEECH OF SCHUYLER COLFAX, OF INDIANA, ON THE CONFISCATION BILL.

The Catilines who sat here in the Council Chambers of the Republic, and who, with the oath on their lips and in their hearts to support the Constitution of the United States plotted treason at night – as has been shown by papers recovered at Florida, particularly the letter of Mr. Youlee, describing the proceedings of the midnight conclaves of these men to their confederates in the Southern States – should be punished by the severest penalties of the law, for they have added to their treason perjury, and are doubly condemned before God and man. Never, in any land, have there been more guilty and more deserving of the extremest errors of the law. The murderer takes but a single life, and we call him infamous. – But these men wickedly and willingly plunged a peaceful country into the horrors of a civil war, and inaugurated a regime of assassination and outrage against the Union men in their midst, hanging, plundering, and imprisoning in a manner that throws into the shade the atrocities of the French Revolution. Not content with this they aimed their blows at the life of the Republic itself; and on many a battle-field, in a carnival of blood, they sought not only to destroy the Union itself, but to murder its defenders. Plunging into still darker crimes they have bayoneted the wounded on the field of carnage, buried the dead that fell into their ands with every possible ignominy, and then to gloat their revenge, dug up their lifeless remains from the tomb, where even savages would have allowed them to rest, and converted their skulls into drinking cups – a barbarism that would have disgraced the Visigoths of Alaric, the barbarian, in the dark ages of the past. – The blood of our soldiers cries out against them. Has not forbearance ceased longer to be a virtue? We were told a year ago that lenicy [sic] would probably induce them to return to their allegiance, and to cease this unnatural war; and what has been the result? Let the bloody battle-fields of the conflict answer.

When I return home I shall miss many a familiar face that has looked in past years with the beaming eye of friendship upon me. I shall see those who have come home with constitutions broken down by exposure and wounds and disease, to linger and to die. I shall see women whom I have seen Sabbath after Sabbath leaning on a beloved husband’s arm as they went to the peaceful sanctuary, clothed now in widow’s weeds. I shall see orphans destitute, with no one to train them into paths of usefulness. I shall see the swelling hillock in the grave-yard – where, after life’s fitful fever, we shall be gathered, betokening that there, prematurely cut off by a rifle ball aimed at the life of the Republic, a patriot soldier sleeps. I shall see desolate and hearthstones and anguish and woe on every side. Those of us who come here from Indiana and Illinois know too painfully the sad scenes that will confront us amid the circles of our constituents.

Nor need we ask the cause of all this suffering, the necessity of all these sacrifices? They have been entailed on us as part of the fearful cost of saving our country from destruction. – But what a mountain of guilt must rest upon those who by their efforts to destroy the government and the Union, have rendered these terrible sacrifices necessary.

Why do we hesitate? These men have drawn the sword and thrown away the scabbard. – They did not hesitate in punishing the Union men within their power. They have confiscated their property, and have for a year past, without any of the compunctions that troubles us here. They imprisoned John M. Botts, for silently regaining a lingering love for the union in his desolate home. They hang Union men in East Tennessee for bridge burning, refusing them even the sympathy of a chaplain to console their dying hours. They persecute Brownlow because faithful among the faithless, he refused, almost alone, in his outspoken heroism, to bow the knee to the Baal of their worship. Let us follow his counsel by stripping the leaders of this conspiracy of their possessions, and outlawing them hereafter from the high places of honor and of trust they have heretofore enjoyed.

In no other way can we more effectually be felt throughout all the region where treason rears its blackened crest. The loyal Union men of all these regions will see in this legislation, and in the concurrent advance of our armies toward the Gulf, that we have put our hands to the plow, determined not to look back; that we have resolved that every man who raises his hand against the Union shall be punished; that those who remain loyal to the nation shall be protected; and that the retribution which shall follow the leaders of this rebellion for life, shall be so thorough and severe that no reptile flag of disunion will ever again be reared on the soil of this Republic. And they will at last all realize that the inducement to sympathize with secession (so as to save their property from rebel confiscation and to claim at the same time Union protection) no longer exists; that the time for this misplaced lenity has expired; that the property of the rebels is to be confiscated, and the armies of the republic sustained thereon in the regions which treason requires them to occupy.

Mercy to traitors, it has been well said, is cruelty to loyal men. I would not imitate their crimes or their barbarity, but I would imitate their resolution. The gentleman from Kentucky nearest me (Mr. Grider) told us, a month or two ago, that the rebel army had run off $300,000 worth of slaves of Union men from counties near his residence, and they have confiscated and taken slaves as sweepingly as anything else claimed or held by these men. Their own slaves work on their fortifications, from cannon, behind which our soldiers are mercilessly slain; they perform their camp drudgery, thus increasing the power of their army; they raise the produce that feeds their troops, and the crops on the faith of which their scrip is rendered current. If we wish to break the power of the rebellion let us strike it wherever we can weaken it, and strike it boldly and fearlessly as the justice of our cause fully warrants. And let us if there are but fifty or five hundred loyal men in a State, resolve that they shall be protected by the whole power of the Government, and clothed with all the advantages hereafter that their unfaltering allegiance during these dark hours so richly merits.

None of the confiscation bills before us are ex post facto in their operation. They operate only against those who, having been engaged in this rebellion continue in arms after this long legislative forbearance. I can vote for nearly every one of them, variant as their provisions are. Any of them is preferable to none. The clerk of this House, (Mr. Etheridge,) recently returned from Tennessee, tells us that in an extensive inquiry, he heard of but a single slaveholder of that State who was a private in the rebel army. This is a striking and significant fact. With that single exception, the slaveholders were either in office, civil or military, or at home. I have no doubt that four-fifths of all the slaves held by rebels belong to officers, civil or military under the rebel government. And we cannot longer doubt that there are thousands upon thousands of men who prefer the Union who have been absolutely forced by threats, by terror, by delusions, or by conscription, into the armies of the rebellion.

I am willing, therefore, to go for the bill known as Senator Sherman’s which confiscates the property and discharges the slaves of all the leaders of the rebel government; of all who had ever taken the oath to support the Constitution and had violated it, which would include all postmasters, mail contractors, Congressmen, Governors, members of the State Legislature, judges, &c.; all of who have taken an oath of any office of any kind under the rebel authority; and of all officers of the rebel army and navy. As to our manifest, palpable duty as to all these classes, it seems to me there can be no question. Another provision in his bill I favor strongly which declares that all persons, high and low, officers and privates, who continue in arms against the Union for sixty days after the passage of the act, shall be declared infamous, and shall never hold an office of trust, honor or profit within the United States. This bill cannot be considered extreme. It runs no hazard of injuring any one whose heart is not callous with treason. It gives the privates all the benefit of a doubt as to the willingness of their enlistment. It makes allegiance to the Union the test, not only of protection under the law, but of official advancement hereafter. It prevents the conspirators of this rebellion from returning to occupy seats here. And I cannot see why a majority cannot unite on this bill, if they cannot on any other more stringent and sweeping in its provisions.

But I am not wedded to the details of any bill. I will very cheerfully support Senator Trumbull’s bill, now pending in the Senate. – I plead only for action. Let our legislation respond to the appeal of Brownlow; and let us not by a conflict between bills looking to the same end fail to strike the blow that hundreds of thousands of patriot hearts demand at our hands.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, May 3, 1862, p. 2

Thursday, March 18, 2010

From McDowell’s Division

Herald’s Special.

NEW YORK, April 26.

A Fredericksburg date of the 23d states that Gen. McDowell’s force occupied that city, his headquarters being the house of Mr. Lacey, and aid to the rebel Gen. Smith.

The flotilla succeeded in clearing the Rappahannock of obstructions, and reached Fredericksburg on Saturday.

Work has commenced on the Aquia Creek and Fredericksburg RR., which will soon be in running order. The RR. Bridge over the Rappahannock can be immediately rebuilt.

Much valuable information, relative to the course and condition of the roads south of us has been obtained from the contrabands and residents of Alexandria.

In immense amount of flour remains in Fredericksburg, and over a thousand bushels of corn are now at the mills, being ground for the use of the troops. The cotton factory at Falmouth continues to run as usual.

The reports of barbarities perpetrated upon our men at Bull’s Run [sic] have not been exaggerated. The rebels dug up the remains of our soldiers and made spurs of their jaw bones, cutting up their skeletons into every conceivable form and sending the trinkets home to their friends.

The rebel army is reported as being greatly demoralized by the present Union victories – the news of which the rebel authorities in vain endeavor to suppress. The rebels quartered in Fredericksburg last week moved off towards Gordonsville, and it is believed are encamped but a short distance from this place.

Contrabands are flocking in by scores; - many of them possessing valuable information. From them we learn that the rebels had a regiment of mounted negroes, armed with sabres as Manassas, and that the regiment is still in service near Gordonsville.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Monday Morning, April 28, 1862, p. 1

Friday, March 12, 2010

Latest from Yorktown

HEADQUARTERS ARMY OF THE POTOMAC,
NEAR YORKTOWN, April 24th, 1862.

The weather is again pleasant, and roads are beginning to improve.

The preparations for carrying out the plans of the Commander-in-Chief are being rapidly pushed forward to completion.

Deserters from the 6th Alabama regiment, came in our lines yesterday. They represent the rebel forces at 100,000, and that they are busily engaged in constructing works in the rear of their present lines.

They had no knowledge of the arrival of Jeff Davis.

On Tuesday the rebels came out from their rifle pits in front of Lee’s Mills, killing one of our pickets. After he was dead about 30 of them fired their pieces into his head, completely riddling it with bullets. The officer then commanding the reserve ordered his men to charge on the rebels which was willingly responded to, resulting in several of them being killed and taken prisoners. Two men were killed on our side and one mortally wounded.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Saturday Morning, April 26, 1862, p. 2

Friday, September 4, 2009

The Tone of the [Rebels] a Year Ago

The Columbia, (S. C.) Guardian just bout a year ago, had an article which was generally copied and approved by the secesh press, showing how easy it would be for the Confederates to whip and destroy the soldiers of the Union. We quite the following:

Months ago the minds of our people had settled resolvedly to meet any issue. Now the people of the North are in all the wild panic and confusion of war’s first alarms. We confront them, a cool. Collected foe, that will never give them time to recover from their surprise. We are ready for action – they are getting ready to prepare to act. They may raise plenty of men – men who prefer enlisting to starvation, scurvy fellows from the back slums of cities, whom Falstaff would not have marched through Coventry with – but these recruits are not soldiers, least of all the soldiers to meet the hot-blooded, thoroughbred, impetuous men of the South. Trencher soldiers, who enlisted to war on their rations, not on men, they are – such as marched through Baltimore – squalid, wretched, ragged and half-naked, as the newspapers of that city report them. Fellows who do not know the breech of a musket from the muzzle, and had rather filch a handkerchief than fight an enemy in manly open combat. White slaves, peddling wretches, small change knaves and vagrants, the off-scourings of the populace – these are the levied “forces” whom Lincoln suddenly arrays as candidates for the honor of being slaughtered by gentlemen – such as Mobile sent to battle yesterday. Let them come South, and we will put our negroes to the dirty work of killing them. But they will not come south. Not a wretch of them will [illegible] on this side of the border longer than it will take us to reach the ground and drive them over.

Mobile is sending forth to wage this war of independence the noblest and bravest of her sons. It is expensive, extravagant to put such material against the riff raff mercenaries whom the Abolition power has called out. We could almost hope that a better class of men would fall into the Northern ranks that our gentlemen might find foemen worthy of their steel, whom it would be more difficult to conquer, and whom conquering would be more honorable. For the present, however, we must not expect to find any foe worth fighting, with the exception of a few regiments, for the North is just getting ready, and will likely be whipped before it is ready.

This was public opinion among the rebels a year ago. They are probably undeceived as to the stuff of which Union soldiers are composed by this time.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 26, 1862, p. 2

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Cases of Hardship

On the 25th of December, the Tribune gave an account of Charles Spencer, of Syracuse, N.Y. who lost $15,000 in property in Hickman last year; how his wife and daughter were taken from him and carried away prisoners, and how he escaped and came to Cairo, where he was long suspected, but at last righted by Gen. Grant. Recently he went to Hickman, now in possession of our troops, where he found his wife and daughter, from whom he had been separated eight months.

A few years ago, Charles Green, from the vicinity of Lafayette, Indiana, removed to Scott county, Missouri, where, as a blacksmith, he was doing well. Last summer he was shot in his own door yard, in the cool of the evening, after working all day, and while he was holding his youngest child and singing to it. This was done by one of Jeff. Thompson’s men, who was his near neighbor. Yesterday, I saw his wife, with her children, on their way to Indiana. She had not been able to reach Cairo before. The sight of this woman called for sympathy and assistance, which she will get. She has six children, all girls but one, and the oldest not over thirteen years of age. By saving a little money which her husband had left, and by selling off everything the rebels spared, she managed for over six months to support her children, and at last to dress the girls in calico frocks and white bonnets. They were very neat and clean, but they had scarcely any other clothes, as she told me. The boy, a very bright fellow, five years old, and evidently her pride, was decently clothed and wore a smart military cap. Her husband was worth about $1,200. All that was left her was – her children.

A C. O’Donnel came from Iowa to Arkansas and was engaged in merchandising and general trading with a large capital, and he is an enterprising and wealthy man. Of course they took away his property, this partly was the trouble with him; and he started, with what house keeping and small valuable articles he could save, for Memphis, hoping to get up the river. His wife was sick, and had a young child. He was unable to get a house; he could not even get a shed. They lived out doors, but made a tent of bed quilts. The weak mother and tender babe took to congestive chills. He sold a note calling for $150 for $15, and his wife’s valuable gold watch for $30, Confederate scrip. It was difficult for him to keep what provisions he bought, because the soldiers would steal them, and they boldly carried off a sack of flour. He went up to Columbus, still meeting the same hardships. Here the little baby died. While they were getting ready to bury it, and he stood with his children by the grave, he was told that the cars were ready, and that he must leave. – He was obliged to go, and they hastened away, leaving the little coffin on the ground the grave still open.

He went to Mayfield, and there giving two feather beds, he got his [family] hauled to Paducah, smuggling through the lines. Here he sold his wife’s shawl. Then he went to work as a common laborer at $15 a month. At the end of the month he went to Cairo, and with six dollars commenced life again. Mr. O’Donnel is now a Commissary in the [60th] Regiment at Jonesboro’, Illinois. He talks bitterly, and this anecdote is here to the point.

During the Kansas troubles a gentleman saw an old acquaintance talking somewhat profanely in company, in the town of Topeka. This acquaintance was a Vermonter, and the gentleman had known him as a Methodist minister, very pious and exemplary. When their eyes caught they were glad to learn of each other, and to talk of old times. At last the gentleman says: “How is it that when we used to know you we all thought you a truly pious man, and now I hear you using very strange language.” The preacher promptly answered: “If you had suffered and seen what I have you would not be a bit surprised.”

School teaching is supposed to be profitable in the slave States. Albert Salisbury went from Tioga county, Pennsylvania, to Arkansas, and engaged in school teaching. Two years ago he married a young lady, a Miss Dickey, from near Bloomington, Illinois, who also had been teaching in the vicinity of Pine Bluff, in a planter’s family. Mr. Salisbury had bought a small farm above Pikeville, and laboring on it during his leisure hours, had created a beautiful home, and they lived in a nice style. Both were will liked by their neighbors previous to the war. – Of course his school was broken up. Of course he was ordered to leave. It is not an easy matter to drive a native of Northern Pennsylvania from his own farm.

Last August the Rebels approached his house through a corn field, and fired at him while he was eating his dinner. They shot through the back door, he ran out of the front door and gained the woods. He was slightly wounded in his shoulder. Toward midnight he came back. He wife lay dead on the bed, she neither had been shot nor beaten. Her husband knew how she died. Her ear-rings had been pulled from her hears and her gold breast-pin was gone. – She had not yet been a mother. When last I saw him he was a scout bound for Arkansas with the great expedition. With that terrible weapon, Sharp’s rifle, slung at his side and a black plume shading his uneasy eyes he looked as though he meant to get to work. He is not choice in his use of the English language.

Recently a well dressed old man of good information, and named Symonds, came to Cairo from his plantation on the lower waters of the St. Francis river, back of New Madrid. He is a native of Tennessee. He owned four slaves which the rebels took from him. As he came up from the boat he led by one hand a young and handsome woman, his daughter, and by the other a little boy, her son and his grandchild. The boy’s father and the lady’s husband went the way of all the rest. While the old man told his story he frequently extend his hand and stopped, because he could not think of the right word, but when it did come, the by-standers cried – “That’s it.” He has money and he is going to buy a farm in Southern Illinois. He hopes to get something from his wreck.

We gather from the receding waves of Rebellion, that there is no cannibal Island containing such bloody inhuman monsters as exist this day in the Southern States. Of course, not all the people are so, but enough are to frighten and to give character to the rest. They have been made what they are, by “dealing in the souls and bodies of men,” by whipping, hanging, and burning human victims. Nor are there ten in a hundred of those Northern men, talking of compromise, whom they would not butcher in cold blood, in their own homes, if they could get a chance. – {Tribune.

– Published in the Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, April 19, 1862

Sunday, February 22, 2009

A correspondent of the Utica Observer . . .

. . . writing from Missouri, speaks of the discovery of diverse interesting relics found in the rebel camp. Among others two human ribs, bearing the following inscription: - “The ribs of a New York Zuave, July 21, 1861,” soup dishes made of human skulls, &c. In a railway car on a road running out of Macon, Georgia, hangs or did hang a human skull, purporting to be that of a Yankee soldier killed at Bull Run. It is useless to talk about southern society declining towards barbarism – it is already there.

– Published in the Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Wednesday, April 9, 1862