Review of Facts and Falsehoods – Part 2

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.

Part 1.

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Taylor’s Observations of Some Republican Leaders

Taylor’s Observations of Some Republican Leaders

Thomas Allen

In Destruction And Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (1879), Richard Taylor (1826 – 1879), the son of  Zachary Taylor and a Lieutenant General of the Confederate Army, gives his impression of several Republican officials whom he met during his trips to Washington during Reconstruction. Following are his observations of President Johnson, Secretary of State Seward, Secretary of War Stanton, Representative Stevens, Representative Davis, President Grant, Senator Morton, and Secretary of State Fish.

About President Andrew Johnson (1808–1875), he writes:

. . . the President [was] a saturnine man, who made no return to my bow, but, after looking at me, asked me to take a seat. Upon succeeding to power Mr. Johnson breathed fire and hemp against the South, proclaimed that he would make treason odious by hanging traitors, and ordered the arrest of General Lee and others, when he was estopped by the action of General Grant. He had now somewhat abated his wolfish desire for vengeance. . . . (p. 240)

. . . he [President Johnson] always postponed action, and was of an obstinate, suspicious temper. Like a badger, one had to dig him out of his hole; and he was ever in one except when on the hustings, addressing the crowd. Of humble birth, a tailor by trade, nature gave him a strong intellect, and he had learned to read after his marriage. He had acquired much knowledge of the principles of government, and made himself a fluent speaker, but could not rise above the level of the class in which he was born and to which he always appealed. He well understood the few subjects laboriously studied, and affected to despise other knowledge, while suspicious that those possessing such would take advantage of him. Self-educated men, as they are called, deprived of the side light thrown on a particular subject by instruction in cognate matters, are narrow and dogmatic, and, with an uneasy consciousness of ignorance, soothe their own vanity by underrating the studies of others. To the vanity of this class he added that of the demagogue (I use the term in its better sense), and called the wise policy left him by his predecessor “my policy.” Compelled to fight his way up from obscurity, he had contracted a dislike of those more favored of fortune, whom he was in the habit of calling “the slave-aristocracy,” and became incapable of giving his confidence to anyone, even to those on whose assistance he relied in a contest, just now beginning, with the Congress.

President Johnson never made a dollar by public office, abstained from quartering a horde of connections on the Treasury, refused to uphold rogues in high places, and had too just a conception of the dignity of a chief magistrate to accept presents. It may be said that these are humble qualities for a citizen to boast the possession of by a President of the United States. (pp. 242-243)

About William Seward (1801–1872), Secretary of State (1861–1869), he writes:

A loin of veal was the piece de resistance of his dinner, and he called attention to it as evidence that he had killed the fatted calf to welcome the returned prodigal. Though not entirely recovered from the injuries received in a fall from his carriage and the wounds inflicted by the knife of Payne, he was cheerful, and appeared to sympathize with the objects of my mission [to visit Jefferson Davis, who was in prison] — at least, so far as I could gather his meaning under the cloud of words with which he was accustomed to cover the slightest thought. (pp. 240-241)

About Edwin Stanton (1814 – 1869), Secretary of War (1862 – 1868), whom Tayor did not meet, he writes:

A spy under Buchanan, a tyrant under Lincoln, and a traitor to Johnson, this man was as cruel and crafty as Domitian. . . . In the end conscience, long dormant, came as Alecto, and he was not; and the temple of Justice, on whose threshold he stood, escaped profanation. (p. 241)

About Thaddeus Stevens (1792 – 1868), Chairman of the U.S. House Appropriations Committee (1865 – 1868), he writes:

Thaddeus Stevens received me with as much civility as he was capable of. Deformed in body and temper like Caliban, this was the Lord Hategood of the fair; but he was frankness itself. He wanted no restoration of the Union under the Constitution, which he called a worthless bit of old parchment. The white people of the South ought never again to be trusted with power, for they would inevitably unite with the Northern “Copperheads” and control the Government. The only sound policy was to confiscate the lands and divide them among the negroes [sic], to whom, sooner or later, suffrage must be given. Touching the matter in hand, Johnson was a fool to have captured Davis, whom it would have been wiser to assist in escaping. Nothing would be done with him, as the executive had only pluck enough to hang two poor devils such as Wirtz and Mrs. Surratt. Had the leading traitors been promptly strung up, well; but the time for that had passed. (Here, I thought, he looked lovingly at my neck, as Petit Andre was wont to do at those of his merry-go-rounds.) (pp. 243-244)

About Henry Davis (1817–1865), a Republican member of the House of Representatives (1855–1865), he writes:

Like the fallen angel, Davis preferred to rule in hell rather than serve in heaven or on earth. With the head of Medusa and the eye of the Basilisk, he might have represented Siva in a Hindoo temple, and was even more inaccessible to sentiment than Thaddeus Stevens. (p. 244)

About General Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) before he became president, Taylor writes:

The officers of the army on duty at Washington were very civil to me, especially General Grant, whom I had known prior to and during the Mexican war, as a modest, amiable, but by no means promising lieutenant in a marching regiment. He came frequently to see me, was full of kindness, and anxious to promote my wishes [to visit Jefferson Davis]. His action in preventing violation of the terms of surrender, and a subsequent report that he made of the condition of the South — a report not at all pleasing to the radicals — endeared him to all Southern men. Indeed, he was in a position to play a role second only to that of Washington, who founded the republic; for he had the power to restore it. His bearing and conduct at this time were admirable, modest and generous; and I talked much with him of the noble and beneficent work before him. While his heart seemed to respond, he declared his ignorance of and distaste for politics and politicians, with which and whom he intended to have nothing to do, but confine himself to his duties of commander-in-chief of the army. Yet he expressed a desire for the speedy restoration of good feeling between the sections, and an intention to advance it in all proper ways. (p. 244)

About Grant after he became president, Taylor writes:

Before the conventions to nominate candidates for the Presidency met in 1868, I had much intercourse with General Grant, and found him ever modest and determined to steer clear of politics, or at least not permit himself to be used by partisans; and I have no doubt that he was sincere. But the Radical Satan took him up to the high places and promised him dominion over all in view. Perhaps none but a divine being can resist such temptation. He accepted the nomination from the Radicals, and was elected. . . . As ignorant of civil government as of the characters on the Moabitish stone. President Grant begun badly, and went from, bad to worse. The appointments to office that he made, the associates whom he gathered around him, were astounding. All his own relatives, all his wife’s relatives, all the relatives of these relatives, to the remotest cousinhood, were quartered on the public treasury. Never, since King Jamie crossed the Tweed with the hungry Scotch nation at his heels, has the like been seen; and the soul of old Newcastle, greatest of English nepotists, must have turned green with envy. The influence of this on the public was most disastrous. Already shortened by the war, the standard of morality, honesty, and right was buried out of sight. (p. 256) . . . In Boston, July, 1872, . . . President Grant and I met for the first time since he had accepted the nomination from the Radical party. He was a candidate for reelection, and much worshiped; and, though cordial with me, his general manner had something of “I am the State.” (p. 259) . .  .  Of a nature kindly and modest, President Grant was assured by all about him that he was the delight of the Radicals, greatest captain of the age, and saviour of the nation’s life. It was inevitable that he should begin by believing some of this, and end by believing it all. Though he had wasted but little time on books since leaving West Point, where in his day the curriculum was limited, he had found out to the last shilling the various sums voted by Parliament to the Duke of Wellington, and spoke of them in a manner indicating his opinion that he was another example of the ingratitude of republics. The gentle temper and sense of justice of Othello resisted the insidious wiles of Iago; but ignorance and inexperience yielded in the end to malignity and craft. President Grant was brought not only to smother the Desdemona of his early preferences and intentions, but to feel no remorse for the deed, and take to his bosom the harridan of radicalism. As Phalaris did those of Agrigentum opposed to his rule, he finished by hating Southerners and Democrats. (p. 265)

About Senator Oliver Morton (1823–1877) from Indiana (1867–1877), he writes:

. . . my first step in Washington was to call on the leader of the Radicals in the Senate, Morton of Indiana, when a long conversation ensued, from which I derived no encouragement. Senator Morton was the Couthon of his party, and this single interview prepared me for one of his dying utterances to warn the country against the insidious efforts of slave-driving rebels to regain influence in the Government. The author of the natural history of Ireland would doubtless have welcomed one specimen, by describing which he could have filled out a chapter on snakes; and there is temptation to dwell on the character of Senator Morton as one of the few Radical leaders who kept his hands clean of plunder. But it may be observed that one absorbing passion excludes all others from the human heart; and the small portion of his being in which disease had left vitality was set on vengeance. Death has recently clutched him, and would not be denied; and lie is bewailed throughout the land as though he had possessed the knightly tenderness of Sir Philip Sidney and the lofty patriotism of Chatham. (pp. 260-261)

About Hamilton Fish (1808–1893), Secretary of State (1869–1877), he writes:

Of a distinguished Revolutionary race, possessor of a good estate, and with charming, cultivated surroundings, this gentleman seemed the Noah of the political world. Perhaps his retention in the Cabinet was due to a belief that, under the new and milder dispensation, the presence of one righteous man might avert the doom of Gomorrah. (p. 261)

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