Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fessenden Morse: January 31, 1865

Headquarters Second Mass. Inf'y,

RoBeRTSVille, S. C, January 31, 1865.

Since my last letter we have pushed farther into this miserable, rebellious State of South Carolina. We came very slowly, as we had to cut our way for the first ten miles through continuous rebel obstructions; but after that distance, the enemy evidently began to think it was no use trying to stop us, and the fallen trees became fewer and further apart. As we marched on from Purysburg, we gradually got out of the swamps and into rich plantations showing signs of the wealth of their old owners. Just think of single fields comprising at least one thousand acres. In the centre or in some part of each one of these great fields, would stand the universal cotton press and cotton gin. The planters' houses were rather better than the average through Georgia, but none of them were what we should call more than second or third class houses in the North; generally they stand half a mile or a mile back from the road, at the end of a perfectly straight, narrow avenue, in fact, nothing more than a cart path.

The most of them are surrounded by magnificent old live oaks and cypress trees, draped all over with the gray Spanish moss which gives to the deserted mansions a very sombre, funereal appearance. In rear of the houses are the rows of negro quarters, and the various outbuildings required on large plantations. So far, on this march, I have seen only one white male inhabitant and very few negroes. Every place is deserted; the valuables and most of the provisions are carried off; but I went into one house where there were rooms full of fine furniture, a fine piano, marble-topped tables, etc.; there was a valuable library in one room, of four or five thousand volumes. I saw a well bound copy of Motley's Dutch Republic, and a good set of Carlyle's works. This property is, of course, so much stuff strewn along the wayside. Unless there happens to be a halt near by, no one is allowed to leave the column to take anything; but stragglers, wagon-train men, and the various odds and ends that always accompany an army on the march, pick up whatever they want or think they want, and scatter about and destroy the rest, and by the time the last of a column five or six miles long gets by, the house is entirely gutted; in nine cases out of ten, before night all that is left to show where the rich, aristocratic, chivalrous, slave-holding South Carolinian lived, is a heap of smoldering ashes.

On principle, of course, such a system of loose destruction is all wrong and demoralizing; but, as I said before, it is never done openly by the soldiers, for every decent officer will take care that none of his men leave the ranks on a march. But there is no precedent which requires guards to be placed over abandoned property in an enemy's country. Sooner or later, of course, as we advanced and occupied all of the country, it would be taken, and I would rather see it burned than to have it seized and sent North by any of the sharks who follow in the rear of a conquering army. Pity for these inhabitants, I have none. In the first place, they are rebels, and I am almost prepared to agree with Sherman that a rebel has no rights, not even the right to live except by our permission.

They have rebelled against a Government they never once felt; they lived down here like so many lords and princes; each planter was at the head of a little aristocracy in which hardly a law touched him. This didn't content these people; they wanted “their rights,” and now they are getting them. After long deliberation, they plunged into a war in order to gratify their aristocratic aspirations for a Government of their own, and to indulge in their insane hatred for us Yankee mud-sills. The days of the rebellion are coming to an end very fast; even its lying press cannot keep up its courage much longer. For a year they have met with a series of reverses sufficient to break the spirit of the proudest nation, and this next spring will see a combination of movements which must destroy their only remaining bulwark, Lee's army, and then the bubble will burst; and I believe that we shall find that Jeff Davis and other leading Confederates will be abused and hated by men of their own section of country more than they will by the Northerners.

No, I might pity individual cases brought before me, but I believe that this terrible example is needed in this country, as a warning to those men in all time to come who may cherish rebellious thoughts; I believe it is necessary in order to show the strength of this Government and thoroughly to subdue these people. I would rather campaign it until I am fifty years old than to make any terms with rebels while they bear arms. We can conquer a peace, and it is our duty to do it.

This little, deserted town of Robertville we reached two days ago; our whole left wing is close by. We shall fill up again with supplies, and in about two days strike into the country. Barnwell, Branchville, Augusta, Columbia, and Charleston are all threatened. I hope the rebels know as little as we do which one is in the most immediate danger of a visit. Wheeler's cavalry is all around us, but as yet no infantry. A regiment of his command tried to stop our coming into this town. The Third Wisconsin, without firing a shot, charged them, broke them all to pieces, and lost only three men.

SOURCE: Charles Fessenden Morse, Letters Written During the Civil War, 1861-1865, p. 209

Diary of William Howard Russell: May 2, 1861

Breakfasted with Mr. Hodgson, where I met Mr. Locke, Mr. Ward, Mr. Green, and Mrs. Hodgson and her sister. There were in attendance some good-looking little negro boys and men dressed in liveries, which smacked of our host's Orientalism; and they must have heard our discussion, or rather allusion, to the question which would decide whether we thought they are human beings or black two-legged cattle, with some interest, unless indeed the boast of their masters, that slavery elevates the character and civilizes the mind of a negro, is another of the false, pretences on which the institution is rested by its advocates. The native African, poor wretch, avoids being carried into slavery totis viribus, and it would argue ill for the effect on his mind of becoming a slave, if he prefers a piece of gaudy calico even to his loin-cloth and feather head-dress. This question of civilizing the African in slavery, is answered in the assertion of the slave owners themselves, that if the negroes were left to their own devices by emancipation, they would become the worst sort of barbarians — a veritable Quasheedom, the like of which was never thought of by Mr. Thomas Carlyle. I doubt if the aboriginal is not as civilized, in the true sense of the word, as any negro, after three degrees of descent in servitude, whom I have seen on any of the plantations — even though the latter have leather shoes and fustian or cloth raiment and felt hat, and sings about the Jordan. He is exempted from any bloody raid indeed, but he is liable to be carried from his village and borne from one captivity to an other, and his family are exposed to the same exile in America as in Africa. The extreme anger with which any unfavorable comment is met publicly, shows the sensitiveness of the slave owners. Privately, they affect philosophy; and the blue books, and reports of Education Commissions and Mining Committees, furnish them with an inexhaustible source of argument, if you once admit that the summum bonum lies in a certain rotundity of person, and a regular supply of coarse food. A long conversation on the old topics — old to me, but of only a few weeks’ birth. People are swimming with the tide. Here are many men, who would willingly stand aside if they could, and see the battle between the Yankees, whom they hate, and the Secessionists. But there are no women in this party. Wo betide the Northern Pyrrhus, whose head is within reach of a Southern tile and a Southern woman's arm!

I revisited some of the big houses afterwards, and found the merchants not cheerful, but fierce and resolute. There is a considerable population of Irish and Germans in Savannah, who to a man are in favor of the Confederacy, and will fight to support it. Indeed, it is expected they will do so, and there is a pressure brought to bear on them by their employers which they cannot well resist. The negroes will be forced into the place the whites hitherto occupied as laborers — only a few useful mechanics will be kept, and the white population will be obliged by a moral force drafting to go to the wars. The kingdom of cotton is most essentially of this world, and it will be fought for vigorously. On the quays of Savannah, and in the warehouses, there is not a man who doubts that he ought to strike his hardest for it, or apprehends failure. And then, what a career is before them! All the world asking for cotton, and England dependent on it. What a change since Whitney first set his cotton-gin to work in this state close by us! Georgia, as a vast country only partially reclaimed, yet looks to a magnificent future. In her past history the Florida wars, and the treatment of the unfortunate Cherokee Indians, who were expelled from their lands as late as 1838, show the people who descended from old Oglethorpe's band were fierce and tyrannical, and apt at aggression, nor will slavery improve them. I do not speak of the cultivated and hospitable citizens of the large towns, but of the bulk of the slaveless whites.

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 157-8

Young America in England

Georg F. Train, the young Bostonian, who has been introducing the horse railroad system in England, lately made another speech on the American question, taking the secession side of it.  The speech was delivered in the Temple Forum, London, and the following is a specimen of Mr. Train’s advocacy of the South:

The Northerners think they have the very best Constitution in the world, because they have placed their Temple on their four corner stones – Wisdom, Mercy, Justice and Union!  But we in Secessia have based our Constitution and reared our Temple of Despotism on one acknowledged corner stone – Negro Slavery.

Now I never heard of a house with only one corner stone [laughter;] there must of necessity be four, and these are the other three – Perjury!  Robbery!  Treachery!  On these four columns we have raised that edition of Despotism for which I have risen to speak. [Cheers.]  The question of to-night is very strangely expressed.  It asks whether the North or South is right.  This is what I call an open and shut question – it is difficult to tell Blucher from Wellington.  I can answer in the affirmative or the negative. [Laughter.]

I maintain that the North has acted most wrongly by us – that the North was wrong in give us precedence in all matters of State – [hear] – wrong in giving us, as the honorable gentleman from Alabama says, the power to elect nearly all the Presidents – [hear] – that the North was wrong in giving the South all the naval officers – wrong in taking our men to make all the army officers. [Cheers.]

I maintain the North was wrong in allowing us to rob the treasury at Washington – wrong in allowing us to absorb all the Northern spoils – and wrong in allowing us to assume all the civil and military power. [Cheers.]  I tell you that we in Secessia despise the North.  * * *

I say that the South has a right to complain of the way in which the question in debate this night is considered in this country.  [Here Mr. Train, with biting sarcasm, turned his Southern argument on England.]  We blame you for deceiving us in this great issue.  We have to thank you for hastening to acknowledge us as belligerents, but we have a right to blame you for giving all your sympathies to the North.  [Loud applause.]  We blame you because all your press – the London Times and every other of your news journals – has given its voice in favor of the North.  [Loud laughter and cheers, the audience fully entering into the spirit of the sarcasm.]  You cannot spare one single journal to the South.  We blame you for not giving every assistance to our vessel of war (the Nashville) when in Southampton docks!  [Applause, and “Good again.”]  Your affections have been centered on the Tuscarora.  Your affections have been centered on the Tuscarora.  You have never assisted one-half of our enterprising navy – the Sumter – now in the Mediterranean.

I have heard, but I cannot believe it, that the reason the North has not caught her is because the North wishes her left to float on the ocean to show Europe what the North might do with five thousand similar vessels afloat.  [“Oh, Oh,” and cheers.]  We blame you, and we have a right to blame you, that you have not long since admitted the claims of our great Confederacy, as we were led, by unofficial correspondence, to  think you would have done long since.  [Hear, hear.]  Again, we have to complain that you have not sufficiently acknowledged our established valor: have you forgotten how ten thousand of our grand chivalry, after two days’ fighting, drove ninety of the Northern men out of Fort Sumter?  [Applause and laughter.]  Then again, did we not, in open daylight, assassinate in Alexandria their Colonel Ellsworth?  * *

Reference has been made to Bull Run.  It proves, as I told them at Hanley, what I have had much trouble in getting English people to believe – that the American people are never troubled with the gout.  [Laughter.]  But the Northerners are not the only people who have the right of claiming all such laurels.  [Hear.]  You ought to give us some credit on that account also.  Look when the Northerners landed at Port Royal and Beaufort; we showed them powers of pedestrianism throwing even Deerfoot into the shade.  [Laughter and cheers.]  When the Northern hordes landed, the chivalry of Georgia went first, South Carolina next, and the Germans last, until at last there was but one poor old nigger left.  [Loud cheers.]  I have never saw such speed; they reached Charleston in much shorter time that I should have thought possible.

Why did the gentlemen from Secessia omit this praiseworthy fact when alluding to our chivalry?  Then, again, read the papers of Saturday and to-day.  Have you not read how 10,000 men left the field whereon lay the bodies of Zolicoffer and Payton?  They went quickly because they were anxious to fight the battle in Tennessee.  [Confusion.]  Don’t get excited secessionists, for I am to-night on the side of the South.  [Applause and Laughter.]  The word Secessia signifies Revolver – Bowie Knife – Lynch Law – Tar – Feathers, and the noble science of Repudiation – [Hear,] – while the word Unionists or Yankee possesses the mean interpretation of Education – Virtue – Enterprise and Honesty.  [Cheers.]  You are not perhaps aware that in Mobile – in Charleston – in New Orleans – are all the manufactories of America.  [Laughter.]  That all the shipping of the United States comes from the South, and I can tell you that the North have no need to boast of their Eli Whitney and Cotton Gin!  [Laughter, and good.]

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 15, 1862, p. 1

The Pride of Wealth and Lust for Power

FOSTERED BY THE COTTON MONOPOLY, THE CAUSE OF THE REBELLION – TWO CLASSES OF SLAVEHOLDERS – ONE FOR THE UNION – KING COTTON AN INSULT TO GREAT BRITAIN AND FRANCE, AND A CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE COMMERCIAL WORLD.

TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN, President of the United States:

Respected Sir:  I propose to consider in this Letter the causes which have led to impending Rebellion, and to show the advocates of emancipation that they have every reason to be satisfied with the progress that operation is making.

The cause or causes of the rebellion may be summed up in the single phrase, Pride of Wealth and Lust of Power.  These are not peculiar to the South, but have their influence in the North as well.  North and South they pervade, with honorable exceptions, those classes of society which find means to live and enrich themselves without manual labor.  North as well as South the feelings of these classes revolt against a Government controlled by the toiling millions, and would overthrow it if they could.  In the North the attempt would be hopeless, and the aristocratic classes quietly acquiesce in things as they are.  In the cotton region of the South the laborers have no political rights, and the aristocratic classes govern in all that relates to local affairs.  But they are not content with that. – Their pride revolts at association in any government, however mild and beneficent, in which laboring men participate directly or indirectly.  To get rid of such a government, though it has been the chief source of all their prosperity, is the object of the present rebellion.  The avowed design of the South Carolina leaders is the organization of a community composed of gentlemen and laborers, in which the gentlemen shall be the masters and the laborers their slaves. – To this end they were, before the rebellion broke out, avowedly in favor of re-opening the African slave trade and have since submitted with a bad grace to a restriction in the Confederate constitution, dictated by an apprehension that it would not be safe at present so far to outrage the feelings of the civilized world.

But there is a considerable class of slaveholders, especially in the border slave holding states, who do not entertain this antipathy to labor. – It is composed of men of moderate means owning but few slaves.  They are the self-made men, whose industry and economy have enabled them to purchase one or more slaves, and they may often be seen at work in the same field with their own negroes.  They do not sympathize with cotton, rice, and sugar planters, who reckon their slaves by the hundreds, and who never put their own hands to the plow, the hoe, or the axe.  These small slaveholders, numerically probably more numerous than the richer class, have no repugnance to being associated in a Government controlled in part by the laboring men of the North, and they are generally faithful to the Constitution and the Union.  Slavery does not make them rebels.

Cotton is a more prolific element than slavery in generating the “pride of wealth and lust for power” which have produced the rebellion, tho’ both have co-operated.  Had cotton, like wheat and corn, been a product of the North as well as the South, its cultivation would not have been a source of inordinate wealth to Southern planters; for the free labor of the North would then have been brought into direct competition with the slave labor of the South., and the price of the article would have been reduced to a moderate profit.  But climate has given to the South a monopoly of this culture, and it is a monopoly not at all dependent on the existence of slavery.  It would still exist as effectually as it does now if slavery were swept out of existence, and the commercial effect would probably in that event be an enhancement of the price.

The invention of the cotton gin and improvements in manufacturing machinery so cheapened the preparation and manufacture of cotton as to bring it into competition, under most favorable conditions, with every other article used in clothing the human family, and the demand for it so rapidly increased that production could not keep up with it.  The consequence was an increase in the price of the raw material until it has reached a point far above that of any article which can be brought in competition with it in the markets of the world.  This is not the effect of slavery, but in its causes, though not in its effects, it is entirely independent of that institution.  But, by this intervention of the demand for cotton, the slaveholders in South Carolina and a few other States were enabled to employ their negroes in a species of culture peculiar to their climate, the profits of which could not be lessened by general competition.  Though there has been a prodigious increase of production, the consumption has fully kept pace with it, and up to the breaking out of the rebellion, in no part of the earth for the last thirty years, and in no period of history, have the profits of agricultural labor been so great as in cotton growing regions of the United States.  But these profits would have been as great, if not greater, had the Southern production, as is the Northern manufacture, been the proceeds of hired free instead of slave labor.

With the immense profits of the monopoly the cotton planters became intoxicated, and thought that, by means of their cotton, they could rule the world.  “Cotton is King,” they exclaimed; and through his power they aspired to break up the Union and compel Great Britain and France to aid them in the fratricidal operation.  It has seemed strange to me that the rulers of those nations have not seen in this rebellion, or rather in the means by which the leaders proposed to compass success, an insult to their sovereignty and a conspiracy against the commercial world.  Openly they say to those proud nations: “We have the power and intend to use it, by withholding our cotton, to compel you to become our allies under penalty of riot and rebellion among the operatives in your own dominions.”  If they have any such power it is the interest of the world it should be broken, and one would think that the sagacious Napoleon, and the proud Palmerston, instead of meditating their recognition, would say to them: “Lay down your arms, and not only give us your cotton, but restore to us the market of an united and peaceful country, without which your raw material will be comparatively of little value.”

AMOS KENDALL.

February 19, 1862.

– Published in The Burlington Weekly Hawk-Eye, Burlington, Iowa, Saturday, March 8, 1862, p. 1