Review of Facts and Falsehoods – Part 2
Thomas Allen
Negro Voting
Edmonds reveals the low opinion about Blacks held by the typical Republican. He quotes an 1880 issue of the Lemars (Iowa) Sentinel, which he describes as one of the boldest Republican organs that frankly betrayed its party’s real feeling toward the Negro race, “As an office seeker, the negro [sic] has more brass in a square inch of his face, more rapaciousness for office, than his barbarian masters ever dared to possess. The Southern brigadier wants office and place, but he is willing to fight for them, or vote for them; at the drop of the hat he will shoot and cut for them; he does not whine like a whipped cur, or demand like a beggar on horseback, as the nigger does. Let the nigger first learn to vote before he asks for office. The brazen-jawed nigger is but a trifle less assuming, insolent and imperious in his demands than the lantern-jawed brigadiers; the educated nigger is a more capacious liar than his barbarian masters ever were, or dared to be.
“The greatest mistake the Republican party ever made was taking the nigger at a single bound and placing on his impenetrable skull the crown of suffrage. It is a wrong to him and to us to let him wield the ballot. The nigger is necessarily an ignoramus. The free nigger, we repeat, is a fraud.” (p. 220.)
(The reason for giving the Negro suffrage was to maintain Republican political power. Thus, the reason for the fifteenth amendment, which gave Black males the vote, was to maintain Republican control in the North. This amendment only applied in the Northern States; the Negro already had the vote in all the defunct Confederate States when this amendment was ratified.)
Grant’s Drinking
About Grant’s alcoholism, Edmonds writes, “From early manhood General Grant was afflicted with the drink disease.” (p. 221.) Then he quotes Wendell Phillips, insane hater of the South, and General Don Piatt, an abolitionist (p. 221).
“Phillips said: ‘Grant can never stand before a bottle of whiskey without falling down.’
“General Piatt, in ‘Memories of the Men Who Saved the Union,’ says: ‘Grant’s habit of drink lost us thousands and thousands of patriotic lives. The attempt to conceal this is not only pitiable, but hopeless.’”
Continuing, Edmonds writes, “The terrible slaughter of Union soldiers at Cold Harbor was charged to Grant’s drunkenness. Major-General Wm. F. Smith, in a confidential letter to Senator Foote, July 30, 1864, states that soon after Grant had taken a pledge to drink nothing intoxicating, he (Grant) called at his (Smith's) headquarters, and asked for whiskey, and drank so often he went away drunk, and General Butler saw him. A short while before this Grant had written to Washington asking that General Butler be relieved from that department, because he (Grant) ‘could not trust Butler with the command of the troops in the movements about to be made.’ Instructions were sent to Grant to remove Butler. Butler heard of this and hurried to see Grant. General Smith wrote Senator Foote that he heard direct from Grant’s headquarters, and also from another source, that General Butler threatened Grant that he would expose his drunken habits if the order was not revoked. The order was revoked, and Butler remained in command, although Grant had said he was unfit to be trusted.” (p. 221.)
Some English Views of Reconstruction
Edmonds quotes two English historians on their views of Reconstruction (p. 238).
“Percy Gregg, the English historian, in his history of the United States, says: ‘The reconstruction policy was at once dishonest and vindictive. The Congressional majority (Republican) were animated not merely by selfish designs, but by rabid hatred of the South’s people which had fought so gallantly for what the best jurists of America believed to be their moral and constitutional right.’
“Another English writer of great eminence, Anthony Trollope, was in this country during the reconstruction period, and wrote of it thus: ‘I hold that tyranny never went beyond this. Never has there been a more terrible condition imposed upon a fallen people. For an Italian to feel an Austrian over him, for a Pole to feel a Russian over him, has been bad indeed, but it has been left for the political animosity of the Republicans of the North — men who themselves reject all contact with the negro — to subject the Southern people to dominance from the African who yesterday was their slave. The dungeon chains were knocked off the captive in order that he may be harnessed as a beast of burden to the captive's chariot.’
“We will give another passage from Gregg, the English historian: ‘The devastation of the Pallatine [sic] hardly exceeded the desolation and misery wrought by the Republican invasion and conquest of the South. No conquered nation of modern days, not Poland under the heel of Nicholas, not Spain or Russia under that of Napoleon, suffered from such individual and collective ruin, or saw before them so frightful a prospect as the States dragged by force, in April, 1865. under the “best government in the world.”’ (Page 375, Gregg's History of United States.)” [Palatine was a territory in Germany that lost about 90 percent of its population during the Thirty Years War.]
Not So Random Quotations
Wendell Phillips, an abolitionist:
– “He [Lincoln] is a first-rate second-rate man; that is all of him.”
– “Mr. Lincoln is a politician; politicians are like the bones of a horse’s fore shoulder; not a straight one in it.”
– “The Constitution is a mistake! Tear it to pieces! Our aim is disunion!”
– “The Republican party is in no sense a national party. It is a party of the North, organized against the South.”
– “We confess that we intend to trample on the Constitution of this country. We of New England are not a law-abiding community. God be thanked for it! We are disunionists; we want to get rid of this Union.”
William Lloyd Garrison, a New England abolitionist:
– “The Republican party is moulding public sentiment in the right direction for the dissolution of the Union.”
Rev. Andrew Forbes:
– “There never was an hour when this blasphemous and infamous Union should have been made; now the hour must be prayed for when it will be dashed to pieces.”
Parson Pryiic, a red hot Republican:
“A dissolution of the Union is what a large portion of the Republicans are driving at.”
William H. Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State:
– “Our Constitution is to us of the North a great danger. The Southerners are using it as a shield.”
– “Only a despotic and imperial government can subjugate seceding States.”
– “The attempt to reinforce Sumter will provoke an attack and involve war.”
Ward H. Lamon, Lincoln’s self-appointed bodyguard:
– “As a people, Lincoln thought negroes would only be useful to those who were at the same time their masters, and the foes of those who sought their good.”
– “Lincoln always contended that the cheapest way of getting rid of the negro was for the Nation to buy the slaves and send them out of the country.”
– “He [Lincoln] never at any time favored the admission of negroes into the body of the electors in his State, or in the States of the South.”
General Don Piatt, an abolitionist:
– “Lincoln well knew that the North was not fighting to free slaves, nor was the South fighting to preserve slavery.”
– “I found that Mr. Lincoln could no more feel sympathy for that wretched [Negro] race than he could for the horse he worked or the hog he killed.”
Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio:
– “There is really no Union now between the North and the South. I believe no two nations on earth entertain feelings of more bitter rancor toward each other than these two peoples.”
Senator Stephen Douglas:
– “The fact can no longer be disguised that many Republican Senators desire war and disunion under pretense of saving the Union. For partisan reasons they are anxious to destroy the Union. They want this done without holding them responsible before the people.”
the Lemars (Iowa) Sentinel, a Republican newspaper:
– “The Stalwarts do not care a fig for the Constitution, and will trample it under foot today as did Lincoln and the Union hosts from ’61 to ’65.”
an Iowa editor:
– “Abraham Lincoln kicked the Constitution into the Capitol cellar, and there it remained innocuous until the war ended.”
Judge Yaples, in the Cincinnati Enquirer of 1880:
– “Republican hate is grounded on the fact that the people of the South will not join the Republican party.”
Unknown:
– “The people of Raleigh, N. C, were astonished to find that Sherman’s army were Christian gentlemen.”
George Edmonds:
– “The underlying cause of every conflict between man and man, tribe and tribe, country and country, has been on the one side a craving for power, on the other side an effort to escape that power.”
– “So long had the gospel of hate been preached, those New Englanders had come to hate the South so venomously they wanted to force her out of the Union she loved.”
– “All abolitionists believed in the right of secession. All hated the Union and wanted to break it to pieces.”
– “Before the South seceded, the foremost men in the Republican party openly maintained the right of secession.”
– “Lincoln was the first President who usurped the power to rule the American people.”
– “The whole reconstruction period was a deadly war on Southern people, and the more base and cowardly because waged on unarmed men and women.”
Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Coley Allen.
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