Why Were The Radical Republicans Radical?

[My Name Is Kate]

It seems there is no middle ground when it comes to Lincoln: he is portrayed as either a saint or a devil.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p319_Dickson.html

After reading the above article, and if what is said in the article is true, I can see why the South didn't trust Lincoln. It does appear that he was committed to ending slavery before he was ever elected President, and he also wanted to impose even higher tariffs on the South, to the North's financial advantage. Was his commitment to end slavery also at least partially motivated by a desire to economically and politically (loss of their 3/5 slave "vote" advantage) subjugate the South to the North?

Is this true (at the beginning of section 4. Lincoln's Conduct of the War)?

"Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the nation. He assumed the power to close newspapers and in fact closed hundreds of them in the North which dared criticize his policies. He arrested elected officials, including former members of Congress, who opposed him..."

"...In Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, Northern troops fired on pro-Southern demonstrators, dispersed legislatures, expelled elected officials and otherwise demonstrated that no respect for constitutional rights or liberties would be shown during the course of the war..."

"...General Ewing's General Order Number 11 in Missouri was merely a taste of what was to come throughout the South. The most famous and widely known example of Northem atrocities was the campaign of General William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia. No portion of this country has ever felt the scourge of war like the State of Georgia experienced it..."

"...On November 15, 1864, the march of the Northern troops across Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah began. Sherman created a charred avenue over 40 miles wide, destroying all railroads, seizing all provisions, pillaging, plundering and burning. There was no military force available to obstruct his course."

Is it true that the majority of the deaths of Union soldiers held at the Andersonville Prison in Georgia were due to the North's refusal to allow food and medicine to be delivered to the prisoners? Was the North afraid that the South would use the provisions for their own soldiers?

[Thomas Thorne]

I must disagree with Liz about her idea of the military being "the chief way" out of the Southern economy and the only significant means of upward social mobility prior to the Civil War. A comparison to the rapidly industrializing North blinds us to the much more modest but real progress the South was making in industrialization particularly in railroads which I just discovered to my surprise in a recent book about Civil War railroads. NB I will post the title tomorrow.

The prewar military establishment was too small to generate substantial numbers of officers. We read of West Point graduating classes of future Civil War generals consisting of 40-60+ persons. There is no doubt that Southern culture had a greater affinity to the martial virtues associated with military life than did the North. Officers like Winfield Scott displayed favoritism toward Southern officers in the prewar army. I believe the number of talented middle aged and younger Southern officers is a huge factor in explaining why the Confederacy lasted longer than a purely quantitative analysis might suppose. I do not believe a Union victory was inevitable.
Tom

[Eva Elisabeth]

Did the South have a sufficient arms industry or did they depend on import or (contraband) trade?
Thomas, do you possibly have an answer to the question wether or how many abolitionists favoured race equality?

[Thomas Thorne]

Dear Eva
Please call me Tom

The Confederacy established a manufacturing base to create a sufficient number of small arms but had significant problems with making artillery. It is estimated that 2/3 of Confederate artillery pieces were captured from Union forces or taken from Union armories. Confederate artillery increasingly suffered from poor quality of metals and inferior fuses. One Southern officer said the "combination of Yankee artillery with Rebel infantry would make an army that could be beaten by no one."

It is distressing to report that not that many abolitionists or anyone else believed in modern concepts of racial equality. Sure Congress passed the civil rights acts, Reconstruction laws and constitutional amendments. But the enforcement of civil rights encountered increasing resistance by Southern whites,exhausted indifference by Northern whites and outright sabotage by the courts.

This culminated in the compromise of 1877. To resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876-which by comparison makes the 2000 election seem like a lovefest-Southern Democrats successfully demanded withdrawal of Federal troops from the few remaining states with Reconstruction governments in return for their accepting the election of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president.

Everyone except the former slaves and their children benefited from the overwhelming desire to have the White North and White South reconcile. Both sides now agreed that slavery and disunion were wrong but how the South handled its internal affairs was its own business.
Tom.

[JMadonna]

(05-01-2013 07:49 AM)Thomas Thorne Wrote:  This culminated in the compromise of 1877. To resolve the disputed presidential election of 1876-which by comparison makes the 2000 election seem like a lovefest-Southern Democrats successfully demanded withdrawal of Federal troops from the few remaining states with Reconstruction governments in return for their accepting the election of the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president.

I believe that Southern Control was the gist of the agreement between Breckenridge & Sherman that would have ended the war in 1865

[Laurie Verge]

I am loving this thread! It is very refreshing to see give-and-take that includes a view of the issues from both sides taken in the context of the era (not interpreted by our modern political beliefs). This is what I call history lessons...

[Liz Rosenthal]

(05-01-2013 07:49 AM)Thomas Thorne Wrote:  Everyone except the former slaves and their children benefited from the overwhelming desire to have the White North and White South reconcile. Both sides now agreed that slavery and disunion were wrong but how the South handled its internal affairs was its own business.
Tom.

Tom, I assume you mean by "both sides" agreeing on the South managing its own affairs is that that's how people felt at the time (1877), and that that is not how people generally look at it today.

With respect to my statement regarding military service being the chief way out of the slave economy, I would recommend, if you haven't already read it, The Militant South: 1800-1861 by John Hope Franklin. He makes an excellent case with regard to southern militancy; other books I've read about the era seem to support Franklin's general thesis.

I didn't mean to suggest that southerners relied on going to West Point to make it in the military; there was an enormous militia culture in the South, too, along with a proliferation of military colleges, which I believe were much more numerous than non-military colleges. Militia drills in southern town squares were a prime form of public entertainment.

Also, while I agree that the South had railroads, I'm sure you will agree that the South nevertheless seriously lagged behind the North in development of railroads. In general, the South lagged behind the North in just about every area of economic development. This is exactly why they had to rely on theft of northern armaments (before and during the war) and blockade running in order to keep their armies supplied. I think there was only one major armaments factory in the entire Confederacy.

Eva: I do think that the North's military victory was inevitable, so long as whoever was in charge was committed to bringing the full power of the North to bear against the South during the Civil War. To me, it was a matter of will. Lincoln provided the necessary will. Not just anyone would have done so. Look at Seward, who seemed obsessed, early on, with starting a foreign war that would allegedly bring the North and South back together. Look at McClellan, who seemed to favor a negotiated peace that would have preserved slavery.

Eva, for a general overview of the war, I would recommend the fascinating Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson. The book also gives you a superb review of American history leading up to the war by showing how different political and social elements developing over several decades led up to the crisis of 1860-61.

[HerbS]

I just finished a "letter home" from a son to his mother.He asked her,"Is dad becoming one of those Radical Republicans?"This Soldier was from The Finger Lakes Region of New York State.The more I read,the more I am learning that the-Upstate,Central,and Western New Yorkers were not fond of Lincoln at all.I think we have all thought that the "Anti-Lincoln"feeling just came from New York City.

[Eva Elisabeth]

(05-01-2013 09:34 AM)Laurie Verge Wrote:  I am loving this thread! It is very refreshing to see give-and-take that includes a view of the issues from both sides taken in the context of the era (not interpreted by our modern political beliefs). This is what I call history lessons...

Laurie, I agree. And thanks to Liz and Tom for your elaborated replies (that's generally great here) and the book recommendation (sounds good). This thread also gives an idea of the endless number of "what-would-have-happened-if games" that indicates the impact of timing, chance, fate, fortune (whatever one may call it) and even weather conditions on history.
Liz, surely Lincoln provided the necessary will, and from the very beginning he wanted to bring in the full power of the North against the rebellions. But if he had been more successfull in urging and pressing his generals during 1861/62, do you think the war would have come to an earlier end? And what would have happened to slavery then? (Certainly there might have been and still be endless speculation on this, but I'm curious on personal opinions.)

[Liz Rosenthal]

(05-01-2013 02:43 PM)Eva Elisabeth Wrote:  Liz, surely Lincoln provided the necessary will, and from the very beginning he wanted to bring in the full power of the North against the rebellions. But if he had been more successfull in urging and pressing his generals during 1861/62, do you think the war would have come to an earlier end? And what would have happened to slavery then? (Certainly there might have been and still be endless speculation on this, but I'm curious on personal opinions.)

It might have come to an earlier end... and the great question is, as you stated, would slavery have remained intact? In a way, General McClellan did Lincoln, the abolitionists and the slaves a great favor in being such a timid military leader. If the war had ended in mid-1862, Lincoln wouldn't have had the authority, as Commander-in-Chief, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as a war measure. Meanwhile, he was trying to persuade the border states to get rid of the institution, but wasn't getting any cooperation.

The most that might have happened was Lincoln ensuring that slavery did not spread to the territories, which is the reason he came to political prominence in the first place.

I'm just speculating here, but perhaps, if Lincoln had been luckier with his generals earlier, the war might have ended a year or two sooner, but not necessarily in 1862. After all, success in Virginia may or may not have led the rebel government to surrender. In that case, Lincoln would still have needed his troops in the West to move eastward, conquering the rebel army as they went. That was going to take time. So, while Lincoln might have issued his Emancipation Proclamation, there might have been little chance to push for the 13th Amendment.

By the way, Eva, I just finished reading Tad Lincoln's Father, which I'm sure you'll love. In fact, anyone interested in gathering genuine snatches of Lincoln's personality would love this book. It's unfortunate, though, that the author, Julia Taft Bayne, who wrote the book as a senior citizen sometime in the 1920s (I believe), still used much of the terminology to refer to African-Americans that people had done in the mid-19th century. The book contained many references to "darkies," and she even referred to one of her family's black servants as "our yellow girl," by which I assume she meant a light-skinned black woman. So, if one can get past that cringe-worthy stuff, the book is quite an enjoyable read.

One more comment on Tad Lincoln's Father, though. I wonder how accurate a lot of the dialog among the children really was. For one thing, Julia gave Tad such a starring role that you would have thought he was the cleverest and most loquacious kid around! As he was only about eight years old at the time, and spoke with a severe impediment, I question whether Tad said all the things that Julia had him saying. I would have thought brother Willie, with his gifted intellect and more mature age, might have been the one to offer most of the entertaining observations. But I suppose that's a minor quibble; presumably, the incidents described in the book really happened, regardless of who did he talking.

[Bill Richter]

Now that all of the neo-abolitionists have had their say, let one poor, misguided, ignorant Southerner have his.

It is true that the South had great difficulty in growing industry during the pre-Civil War years. But it was not that there was little industry. It is that industry in the South was different in scale than in the North. One of the biggest was tobacco products. It was the South that grew and manufactured into useable products, cigars, plug tobacco, and flavored twists of tobacco. Popular brand names included Wedding Cake, Cherry Ripe, Nature's Ultimatum, and Diadem of Virginia. This was the tobacco that Yankee soldiers traded coffee for during the war.

Southern cotton mills began before the war, but they tended to manufacture cheaper grades of goods, sheerings, osnaburgs, yarn, and what was called "Negro" cloth for plantation use. Mills sprang up along the so-called fall line in all of the Southeastern states. Two of the biggest manufacturing areas were in the South Carolina Piedmont, Alamance Creek in North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia.

One of the most important industries in the South was iron-making. The second growth area in Virginia that became the heart of battlefields in the East, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Chancellorsville was made possible by the harvesting of the opriginal hardwoods for iron "furnaces" as they were called. These were much like Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens' New Caledonia Ironworks Near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, destroyed by Lee's invasion army in 1863. Major iron companies were Tredegar in Richmond, Shelby's in Alabama, and Maramec in Missouri. Tredegar and Shelby were major distributors to the Confederacy during the war. The last great Union cavalry raid was Randal MacKenzie's on the Shelby works. The great iron producing veins at Birmingham were not discovered until after Redemption (throwing the North out of the military occupation of the South, know as Reconstruction).

The milling of wheat and corn was a big enough industry that Southern mills around Richmond sent most of their product to Brazil's slave plantations.

Naval Stores (tars, pitches, turpentines) in the Carolina Piedmont was a big industry from colonial times. In addition Southern yellow pine provided the lumber that built balloon frame houses and stores all over the nation. Barrels, oak for ships, cypress for frames and foundation (termite resistant), also came from Southern forests, where trees were raised and harvested much like ordinary crops because the growing season was long and warm.

In the upper South of Kentucky and Missouri, hemp was a big product used for rope and cotton bagging. Ropewalks, as the factories were called, were so important to Missouri that the section north of Kansas City along the Missouri River, known as the Platte was added to the state in 1838, advancing slavery west above the 36-30 line with no opposition in Congress.

Another industry no often thought of as Southern was gold manufacture. The original American gold rush took place in the Southern Appalachian foothills in the Carolinas and Georgia (at Dalonega). Why do you think it was so important to get the Cherokee out of there? It took the massive California gold rush to make us all forget that fact. Ever hear of the Panic of 1857? It was caused by the sinking of the gold from California off Cape Hatteras headed to the New York market.But what happened to railroads, the biggest investment in the North before the war? Why did the South not invest its money here as the Yanks did? At 6% it was the greatest annual return one could make above the Mason Dixon Line and the Ohio. But the South did not need railroads as did the North. It had all those big, deep rivers. They invested in steamboats. But even more important, slavery was unbelievably profitable to Southerners. The historical debate on slave profitability has been long and hard. But in the end, slavery returned 14% as an investment. And contrary to what used to be "fact" slave labor has recently been called more efficient than free labor. The discrepancy was in the slaveholders' own account books. They often counted assets as liabilities. These historians that find slavery profitable are often called Cliometricians, historians who rely on mathematics.

We have not begun to explore the use of slave labor in western mines, a practice of the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru at the towns in both nations named Potosi.

As for HR Helper, he was an anomaly. Most Southerners wanted to get into slave ownership, not avoid it. Those areas that did not like slavery became the Benedict Arnolds of the Confederacy, led by Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second vice president.

Did the South have inferior canon? I do not know about that but they had inferior fuses. The North used a newer fuse that was more accurate in its artillery shells. It was that difference that cost Lee part of his Second Corps Artillery Reserve when Lattimer's Battalion was destroyed by Yankee counter-battery fire on July 2 at Gettysburg. But no Civil War battle was lost because of a lack of ammunition on either side. McClellan had his faults as a field general, but remember, he forged the Union Army of the Potomac that withstood years of defeat and incompetence to win in the field in the end.

In reality, Lincoln came as close to losing the war in 1864 when Jubal Early advanced on Washington as at any other time. The issue was not industry, railroads, or cannons. The issue was war weariness. That was the same issue that finally defeated Lee at Petersburg, too. There is more than one way to skin a cat or win a fight. Or an agricultural nation can win a war against and industrial one. But all things being equal such an event is a rarity.

[L Verge]

And that's why I would have loved to have been in one of Bill Richter's college classes...

[Eva Elisabeth]

(05-01-2013 12:13 AM)My Name Is Kate Wrote:  It seems there is no middle ground when it comes to Lincoln: he is portrayed as either a saint or a devil.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v07/v07p319_Dickson.html

After reading the above article, and if what is said in the article is true, I can see why the South didn't trust Lincoln. It does appear that he was committed to ending slavery before he was ever elected President, and he also wanted to impose even higher tariffs on the South, to the North's financial advantage. Was his commitment to end slavery also at least partially motivated by a desire to economically and politically (loss of their 3/5 slave "vote" advantage) subjugate the South to the North?

Is this true (at the beginning of section 4. Lincoln's Conduct of the War)?

"Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus throughout the nation. He assumed the power to close newspapers and in fact closed hundreds of them in the North which dared criticize his policies. He arrested elected officials, including former members of Congress, who opposed him..."

"...In Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, Northern troops fired on pro-Southern demonstrators, dispersed legislatures, expelled elected officials and otherwise demonstrated that no respect for constitutional rights or liberties would be shown during the course of the war..."

"...General Ewing's General Order Number 11 in Missouri was merely a taste of what was to come throughout the South. The most famous and widely known example of Northem atrocities was the campaign of General William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia. No portion of this country has ever felt the scourge of war like the State of Georgia experienced it..."

"...On November 15, 1864, the march of the Northern troops across Georgia from Atlanta to Savannah began. Sherman created a charred avenue over 40 miles wide, destroying all railroads, seizing all provisions, pillaging, plundering and burning. There was no military force available to obstruct his course."

Is it true that the majority of the deaths of Union soldiers held at the Andersonville Prison in Georgia were due to the North's refusal to allow food and medicine to be delivered to the prisoners? Was the North afraid that the South would use the provisions for their own soldiers?

Sorry, I feel a bit guilty as the previous discussion overran your requests, and fairness should require to turn focus back. Since my "knowledge" of the whole topic is few and unprofessional, I'll just try a brief reply to your first question and hope that someone of the well-informed will take over.
On April 19,1861 (seven days after Fort Sumpter) seccessionists attacked Union troops in Baltimore that were travelling to Washington by rail. The major of Baltimore and other politicians were arrested without warrant, as Lincoln suspended suspended the writ of habeas corpus. This was the beginning of what is stated in your quote.

[Liz Rosenthal]

(05-01-2013 06:04 PM)william l. richter Wrote:  The historical debate on slave profitability has been long and hard. But in the end, slavery returned 14% as an investment. And contrary to what used to be "fact" slave labor has recently been called more efficient than free labor. The discrepancy was in the slaveholders' own account books. They often counted assets as liabilities. These historians that find slavery profitable are often called Cliometricians, historians who rely on mathematics.

...

As for HR Helper, he was an anomaly. Most Southerners wanted to get into slave ownership, not avoid it. Those areas that did not like slavery became the Benedict Arnolds of the Confederacy, led by Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's second vice president.

Regarding the "efficiency" of slave labor, if we must address such a notion at all, it's funny how the slaves were nevertheless called "lazy" by their owners and by whites in general at every opportunity.

While southerners like Helper were rare, I think calling him an anomaly is a bit of an exaggeration. My reading of the book, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South, by 20th century southerner Clement Eaton, is that while southern society successfully clamped down on dissent, there were numerous attempts at publishing writings critical of the institution of slavery.

There were plenty of court cases throughout the South in which individuals were prosecuted for speaking or writing critically of slavery. A poor, white woman was even prosecuted for teaching a small group of black slaves to read and write. For that, she received a month in prison.

But, by far, it was the Upper South where most of the anti-slavery publications tested the tolerance of the courts and the public. (It's interesting to note that the Upper South, which, for the most part, stayed in the Union during the Civil War, or, in one case, broke off from a seceded State to become a new state to join the Union, also provided a formidable amount of the manufacturing existent in the slave states.)

Clement Eaton devotes an entire chapter on the point of anti-slavery speech in the Upper South, concentrating on Kentucky, where most of the anti-slavery press seems to have been situated. He writes extensively of Cassius M. Clay, an abolitionist whose paper, True American, was eventually suppressed.

Eaton says of Clay: "[An object of True American]... was the organization of the non-slaveholders as a class against the wealthy slaveholders. In this attempt, Clay was a forerunner of Hinton R. Helper, the author of The Impending Crisis."

While it's true that the general belief among poor whites in the South was that someday, they, too, might own a slave or two, they acquired this notion from the ruling aristocracy - the planters. It was a clever way to keep poor whites from resenting the state of economic opportunity in the South, and the concentration of almost all of the wealth of the South in the hands of a very few.

Here is an interesting little observation by Clement Eaton about the poor whites: "The poor whites of the ante-bellum South bore a remarkable resemblance to the Connecticut bumpkins of the eighteenth century, who had been denied the privileges of education and of a normal intercourse with society. Indeed, the most deplorable effect of isolation on the ante-bellum South was that it prevented the education of the masses."

Ignorance tends to breed acquiescence.

[Thomas Thorne]

I won the book about Civil War railroads "The Iron Way:Railroads,the Civil War and the Making of Modern America" by William G. Thomas at a Lincoln Group of New York raffle.

I was always very uneasy about the Charles Ramsdell climate thesis which held that antebellum Southern slavery could not exist outside of cotton growing areas. Being Americans I feel they could be relied on to come up with some clever ideas to use slaves in an unconventional manner. Slavery antedated the cotton kingdom and in various often unsuspected ways persisted long after its demise in the United States-think of the Soviet Gulags.

Reading Thomas I discovered that Southern railroads rented and even bought slaves for railroad work. 14,000 slaves worked for railroads in 1860. No plantation at that date employed more than 1200 slaves. I might prefer being a slave at Tara to being a slave of the Virginia Central given the horrible treatment that railroad slaves endured. I wonder if intellectuals who justified slavery were cognizant of the industrial treatment of actual slaves when bemoaning the effects of yankee wage slavery.

We have the interesting paradox that the South increased its railroad mileage by a higher percentage than the North in the 1850's but was compelled to cannibalize its railroads when war came. The Confederacy when retreating often would destroy its own railroads not figuring on the demonic energies of the US Military Railroads which rebuilt the Confederate lines,converted them to their own gauge and used them to supply advancing Union armies.

I find it difficult to see how the Union could have won the war if a Southern rail network did not already exist.
Tom