Tilley Rebuttal

The book is organized into 28 (unnumbered) short “chapterlets” (my terminology), most consisting of only a page or two. There is no bibliography, no footnotes, which is entirely appropriate for a book targeted at young readers. (Although my own modest effort in this regard did include a bibliographic essay.) After a brief overview, we will go through each “chapterlet” in turn.

In general, the book gives a fairly standard “Lost Cause” vision of the Civil War, which tries to paint the Confederates as victims of an overpowering and avaricious North, intent on “subjugating” the pure and noble South. Slavery is acknowledged as an issue, but an attempt is made to deflect this on to the North for supposedly selling the slaves to Southern planters. Lincoln is a conniving and duplicitous politician, while Jefferson Davis is the noble advocate of a pure and doomed effort, and Robert E. Lee was opposed to slavery.

The first chapterlet is titled, “HOW OUR NATION WAS BORN,” and there is very little to dispute here. He claims that “ten of the first sixteen Presidents of the United States were sons of the South.” Now, there is no denying that the South dominated the antebellum Federal government, not just in Presidential terms, but also in other offices. However, Tilley’s claim about the first sixteen presidents would of course include Lincoln. What other “Northern men” served as president? My list over that period would be as follows:

· Millard Fillmore (New York, 1850—1853; succeeded to the office upon the death of Louisianan Zachary Taylor);

By my count, that is seven “northerners” out of the first sixteen, so only nine of the first sixteen were from the south. (The only way to make Tilley’s claim true is to count Lincoln, born in Kentucky, as a southerner. Tilley appears to be counting William Henry Harrison, elected from Ohio, but born in Virginia, in precisely this way.)

Of the fifteen men who were president before Lincoln, however, only John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams, could be called truly anti-slavery. Both Pierce and Buchanan were known as “doughfaces,” men of northern birth who were willing to do what the South wanted done in order to advance, politically. Van Buren and Fillmore both were beholden to the (Southern) Presidents they had served as Vice-President, but van Buren also dabbled in anti-slavery politics after leaving the Presidency: he ran for President in 1848 as the nominee of the Free Soil Party.

If we count Van Buren and Fillmore as Northerners, along with Lincoln and the Adamses, but put Pierce and Buchanan in with the Southerners whose interests they served, then my arithmetic says that a Southern or Southern-allied man was President for 58 years prior to the Civil War, and a Northern man was President for only 15 years (I counted Taylor and Fillmore each for two years, and gave Lincoln credit for a full year, even though he had been in office for slightly more than a month when Fort Sumter was attacked).

But let’s not quibble at length over minor points. Tilley points to the South’s domination of the Presidency as some kind of validation of Southern superiority. I would point to it as, well, domination.

The second chapterlet is titled, “WAS THE WAR OF THE SIXTIES FOUGHT OVER THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY?” to which the historical answer is an unequivocal “YES.” Tilley, however, immediately shifts the issue by reframing the question: “Did the North fight the war to free the slaves?” It is a subtle but important shift, and many others have used it. The two questions that Tilley poses have different answers:

· Was the war of the sixties fought over the issue of slavery?—The answer here is an absolute “yes,” based on numerous documents from the period, most written by Southern men. (Details below.)

· Did the North fight the war to free the slaves?—Certainly not at first. There is a Congressional resolution on this point from July, 1861 (the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution), which states, in part:

“That in this national emergency, Congress, banishing all feelings of mere passion or resentment, will recollect only its duty to the whole country; that this war is not waged on their part in any spirit of oppression, or for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, or purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution, and to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired; and that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease.”

Thus, in July of 1861, Congress was on record that restoration of the Union was the only object of the war. However, an attempt to re-affirm the resolution in December of 1861 was defeated in the House by the efforts of Thaddeus Stevens, a noted abolitionist Congressman from Pennsylvania.

· So the war was fought (by the North, in the beginning) to preserve the Union of the states, but slavery was THE issue that led to the secession (which is what led to the war), as can be seen by looking at a multitude of documents and comments from that time:

o From the so-called “Cornerstone Speech,” given by Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”

o The most notable compromise proposal (to bring the seceded states back into the Union), the Crittenden Compromise, is entirely about slavery.

o Most of the original seven states of the Confederacy sent out “commissioners” to the other slave states, for the purpose of entreating them to join in secession. (They sent no such commissioners to any state that did not have slavery.) There is an excellent book on these commissioners (it is a very brief read) and many of their speeches and correspondence are online.

o Henry Benning and Howell Cobb were prominent politicians in Georgia, and both would serve as generals in Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. In July of 1849, Benning wrote a lengthy letter to Cobb, saying, “First then, it is apparent, horribly apparent, that the slavery question rides insolently over every other everywhere—in fact that is the only question which in the least affects the results of the elections.” Then, at a later point in the same letter, he adds, “I think then, 1st, that the only safety of the South from abolition universal is to be found in an early dissolution of the Union”.

o Stephen Dodson Ramseur was a West Point cadet in 1856 when he wrote a letter to a friend, saying (in part) “An overwhelming majority [in the 1856 elections] for a renegade, a cheat & a liar, only because he declared himself in favour of Abolishing Slavery, the very source of our existence, the greatest blessing both for Master & Slave that could have been bestowed upon us.” (Ramseur became a Major General in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and was mortally wounded in late 1864.)

o Mississippi Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, from a speech he gave in 1858: “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.”

o The Rt. Rev. Stephen Elliott, the Episcopal Bishop of Georgia, gave a sermon on June 13, 1861. A couple of quotes from that sermon are here:

§ “We can find that interest only in the institution of slavery which was the immediate cause of this revolution.”

§ “The great revolution through which we are passing certainly turns upon this point of slavery, and our future destiny is bound up with it.”

o William Grimball to Elizabeth Grimball, Nov. 20, 1860: “A stand must be made for African slavery or it is forever lost.” Grimball served in a South Carolina artillery battery. See James McPherson’s For Cause and Comrades, p. 20.

o William Nugent to Eleanor Nugent, Sept 7, 1863: “This country without slave labor would be completely worthless. We can only live & exist by that species of labor; and hence I am willing to fight for the last.” Nugent was a lieutenant in the 28^th Mississippi Cavalry. See For Cause and Comrades, p. 107.

o Gov. Henry Rector of Arkansas, speaking at that state’s March, 1861 Secession Convention, said “The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South.”

o Thomas F. Goode, a delegate to Virginia’s Secession Convention, said “Sir, the great question which is now uprooting this Government to its foundation—the great question which underlies all our deliberations here, is the question of African slavery...”

Tilley also quotes Lincoln a couple of times here, and it is worth looking at those.

· “I declare that I have no intention, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the states where it exists.”

· When a delegation of Republican Senators urged Lincoln to take action against slavery, Tilley quotes Lincoln as saying, “Gentlemen, I can't do it ... But I’ll tell you what I can do; I can resign in favor of Mr. Hamlin. Perhaps Mr. Hamlin could do it.”

Tilley then poses the rhetorical question: “Was Mr. Lincoln, then, in favor of slavery? He was not. He believed it to be wrong and was opposed to allowing it to expand into new states; but, he thought he had no right to interfere with it in the states in which it already existed.”

So, what is this all about? The first quote, from Lincoln’s 1861 Inaugural Address, simply reflects the fact (accepted by both major political parties) that neither Congress nor the President had the authority, in ordinary circumstances, to do away with slavery within any of the States.

The second quote from Lincoln has a more complicated background and context. On May 9, 1862, Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commanding the Federal Department of the South, issued General Order No. 11, which declared the emancipation of all of the slaves in the three states composing his department (FL, GA, SC). Ten days later, Lincoln issued a proclamation rescinding Hunter’s order. In late June, Lincoln met with a number of Republican senators to discuss the possibility of arming freed slaves under provisions of a recently passed piece of legislation known as the Militia Act of 1862. The quote given by Tilley apparently comes from this meeting (it can be found in a 1909 biography of Lincoln written by Ida Tarbell, who claims to have obtained the account from Iowa Senator James Harlan).

What Tilley leaves out is the underlying context. At the time of his meeting with the Senators, Lincoln was already thinking of using his authority as Commander-in-Chief to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. The idea that slavery could be abolished by Presidential order in a time of war was not new with Lincoln, and he had been slowly coming around to taking this step. In August of 1862, Lincoln had a public exchange of letters with newspaper editor Horace Greeley on the subject of emancipation. At that moment, the first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation was already written, and Lincoln was waiting to issue it in the wake of a military success, which came with the Battle of Antietam, on Sept. 17, 1862.

The third chapterlet is titled, “DID THE SOUTHERN ARMIES FIGHT TO PRESERVE SLAVERY?,” and the answer is, again, an unequivocal yes. Tilley quotes Gen. Robert E. Lee and Lt. Gen. T.J. “Stonewall” Jackson in ways that make them appear to be opposed to slavery (actually, he does not quote Jackson, he just asserts without any proof that Stonewall would agree with Lee). There are arguments to be made that might undercut Tilley’s quotes from Lee—for example, Lee thought it was “a moral and political evil” largely because of its effects upon the white man, there are also the issues raised below; and the best biography of Jackson, while agreeing that Jackson “probably opposed the institution,” makes it clear that Jackson owned several slaves while living in Lexington, Virginia, and teaching at the Virginia Military Institute. But all this is really beside the point.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that a victory by the Confederate armies would have resulted in anything other than the establishment of a slave-holding republic within the former southern United States. It therefore follows that every Confederate soldier, from the lowest private to the highest general (including both Lee and Jackson) was fighting for slavery. This is simple logic; a victory by Confederate arms would mean the perpetuation of the institution. Regardless of anyone’s personal opinion, to fight for the Confederacy was to fight for slavery.

Tilley asserts, correctly, that “there were fewer than 350,000 Southern slave-owners.” But he leaves out that each one of those slaveowners represented an entire family. (When the Census counted slaveowners, they only counted one per household, even if, within that family, certain slaves were considered owned by the head of the household, certain others by various sons, etc.) Tilley wants the reader to believe that slavery had a small footprint in the South. In fact, nearly 31% of the families in the Confederacy owned slaves. As a point of comparison, only 2% of Americans owned stocks in the 1950s; thus, slave ownership was far more widespread in the antebellum South than was stock ownership in 1950s America. (Today, stock ownership is much higher than in the 50s.) In addition, many who did not own slaves benefitted from the institution. Many small yeoman farmers rented slaves from nearby large plantations, for example.

Tilley goes on to assert, without providing any evidence, that a majority of Virginians, including Robert E. Lee and Gov. Henry Wise, “were sincerely opposed to slavery.” Modern scholarship (not available to Tilley before he died) strongly suggests this is certainly incorrect (or at least much more complicated) regarding Lee. During the late 1850s, while serving as executor of his late father-in-law's will (and on leave from the U.S. Army), Lee was obliged to actually manage the enslaved people at Arlington. When some of them—believing they had been freed by the terms of the old man's will—ran away, Lee had them returned to Arlington and whipped for running away. See this website for some details. (This story is also covered in Reading the Man—A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters, by the late Elizabeth Brown Pryor.)

Regarding Wise, when he returned to Virginia in 1849 (after serving as Minister (ambassador) to Brazil), he made plans to sell his 19 enslaved people, rather than simply emancipate them. But his plan was to sell them in California, where the market price was roughly triple that of Virginia. California’s admission as a free state scrapped this plan. (See pages 35--37 of The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War, by Leonard Richards.) I have no idea what the basis is for Tilley’s assertion regarding “a majority of Virginians.”

Next, Tilley quotes the great Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster as saying that the leading men of the South regarded slavery to be “an evil, a blight, a scourge, and a curse.” In doing so Tilley engages in (perhaps inadvertent) falsification of the record. Webster makes this statement in his famous speech on the Compromise of 1850, which begins, “I wish to speak to-day, not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American.” The speech was delivered on March 7, 1850, and may be found online and as a published pamphlet. The quote in question comes in the first part of the speech, after Webster has gone through an historical review of sorts on slavery in the colonies and the early National Period. It is in this context that he makes his statement, i.e., the leading men of the South in that time (say, 1607--1800) regarded (note: past tense) slavery to be “an evil, a blight, a scourge, and a curse.” Webster was not talking about the leading Southern men of 1850, one of whom—sitting in the Senate that very day—was an outspoken defender of slavery (Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who died just a few weeks after Webster’s speech). It might be worth noting that the correspondence between the Georgians Howell Cobb and Henry Benning, both “leading men” in their state, which has been previously cited here, is dated July 1, 1849. Similarly, a speech by Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, given in Congress on Feb. 13--14, 1850, declares that “A large part of the non-slaveholding States have declared war against the institution of slavery. They have announced that it shall not be extended, and with that annunciation have coupled the declaration that it is a stain upon the Republic ...” Davis was certainly a “leading [man] of the South.”

My apologies to the late Mr. Tilley, but I do not think it is true that “the leading spirits of the South regarded it [slavery] as ‘an evil, a blight, a scourge, and a curse,’” certainly not in 1850, nor in 1860.

The fourth chapterlet is titled, “WHO IMPORTED THE SLAVES FROM AFRICA?,” and embarks on an epic journey in rationalization and “excuse-making,” along with a non-trivial amount of historical and economic distortion. Since Tilley’s treatment is so brief and factually suspect, mine will be more in-depth. An outstanding (but aged and imperfect) source on the subject is The Slave Trade, by Hugh Thomas, published in 1997. (Because that book is nearly 30 years old at this writing, I have supplemented it with more recent online sources.)

There is simply no doubt that the international slave trade was horrendously cruel, and is a blot on the historical record of any nation or state or institution or family that participated in it. That list of nations would include the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the English, and the Americans—all of the Americans, Southern as well as Northern. Yes, there were slave trading efforts based in the South (as is detailed below), most especially in South Carolina. It is also true that substantial slave-trading ventures were based in New England and especially New York City. The international slave trade was considered piracy under American law (as of 1820), but this was so poorly enforced that the only man hanged for violating this law—Nathaniel Gordon, of Maine—was hanged by the Lincoln Administration on Feb. 21, 1862. Tilley does not mention this, of course. (See below for the details.)

It is difficult to obtain exact figures, but Thomas (op. cit., pp. 804—05) says that ships based in British North America (i.e., the American colonies) or the United States made 1,500 voyages, bringing in 300,000 slaves. In contrast, the Portuguese (including Brazil) made 30,000 voyages, transporting 4,650,000 slaves.

Tilley refers to a “New York City slave-ship [that] secretly landed 420 slaves on the coast of Georgia” in late 1858. This is almost surely a reference to the Wanderer, a schooner which was built as a racing yacht for a member of the New York Yacht Club, but Tilley’s (false) reference to the ship as a “New York City slave-ship” obscures much of her backstory.

The Wanderer was indeed built by a Long Island shipyard at the behest of a member of the New York Yacht Club. But that member, John D. Johnson, was a Louisiana sugar baron of immense wealth. The yacht was launched in 1857, and Johnson eventually took her on an extended tour of the South (where she won several races) before selling her to Captain William C. Corie, of South Carolina, also a member of the New York Yacht Club. Corie was approached by Charles Augustus Lafayette Lamar, representing Savannah business interests, with a proposition to convert the Wanderer into a slave smuggling ship. (Lamar was rumored to have smuggled in slaves in a steamer that he owned, the E.A. Rawlins; he may have had an ownership interest in the Wanderer.) Some of the conversion (installation of large water tanks) was done at a Long Island shipyard, but most was done in Charleston, South Carolina, or after reaching the Portuguese protectorate of Kongo (present-day Democratic Republic of Congo), where she was modified with shelves and pens for holding enslaved people. A “cargo” of between 490 and 600 people was taken on board before she left for the Americas. When the Wanderer made landfall on Jekyll Island, Georgia, in late November/early December (accounts differ), 1858, some 300--400 enslaved people were still alive. The men involved in this voyage were tried in Federal Court in Savannah, but all were acquitted. There are suggestions that this was the Wanderer’s second or third slave smuggling voyage, all sponsored by the same investment group, or that it might not have been her last. (This account is taken largely from Thomas, op. cit., pp. 766—77, supplemented by some online materials.)

The Clotilda was the last known slave ship to actually land a “cargo” in the United States. Built in the mid-1850s for the lumber trade along the Gulf Coast, she was owned (and built) by Timothy Meaher (or Meagher) of Mobile, and captained by William Foster. Supposedly Meaher had wagered a wealthy New Orleans businessman that he could smuggle a “cargo” of Africans into the American South despite the prohibition against it. Foster sailed from Mobile on March 4, 1860, and reached the African port of Whydah (or Ouidah) in the nation of Dahomey (now Benin) on May 15. They left port with 100 Africans in the hold, and reached the Bahamas on June 30. From here, they could sail along the American coast and claim to be engaged in the “internal slave trade,” shipping enslaved people who had been sold by one American enslaver to another. The ship reached the Mobile area on July 9, 1860. The “cargo” was off-loaded and the ship towed up the Alabama River (one of the tributaries of Mobile Bay), where it was burned to the waterline and left. The remains were discovered and verified in 2019. After the Civil War, many of the survivors, together with other freedpeople, founded Africatown, a small town just north of Mobile on the Mobile River. The town grew to as large as 12,000 people in the immediate post-World War Two period, but then declined as industries closed down in the postwar contraction, and the population fell to about 2,000. Most of the town was eventually absorbed into Mobile; in 2012 the Africatown Historic District was recognized and listed on the National Register of Historic Places, along with the town’s cemetery. Many in the community held to their native African customs and language into the 1950s. (This account is based almost entirely on online sources; Thomas, op. cit., p. 771, mentions the vessel as the Clotilde, and suggests the story is a hoax.)

In August of 1860, Nathaniel Gordon of Maine, in charge of the Erie, was detained by the U.S.S. Mohican off the west coast of Africa, with some 900 slaves on board. The slaves were taken to Liberia and set free, but Gordon and his crew were taken to the United States, and Gordon, his first and second mates, and four crewmen were put on trial. The four ordinary seamen were eventually tried in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and given minor sentences for “voluntarily serving on a slave ship.” The onset of the Civil War delayed proceedings against the officers; indeed, Gordon’s first trial in June, 1861, resulted in a hung jury. The second trial returned a verdict (November 9, 1861) of guilty and resulted in a sentence of death by hanging, which President Abraham Lincoln, despite many appeals for mercy, refused to commute (he did stay it, briefly, in order to allow Gordon to prepare himself for the “awful change” awaiting him); the sentence was carried out on February 21, 1862. Gordon’s officers were allowed to plead guilty to lessor offences and received very light sentences. (Thomas, op. cit., p. 774.) There is a book on Nathaniel Gordon’s career (which I have not read, yet.)

Our Man in Charleston is a 2015 book which details the efforts of Robert Bunch, Great Britain’s consul in Charleston, to get South Carolina to rescind its “Negro Seaman Law,” which mandated that any Negro seaman on any ship (flying the flag of any nation) that docked in Charleston must be bound over to the city jail while the vessel was in port. This was an obvious afront to the British government when applied to British ships. While Bunch was unable to get the Negro Seaman Law repealed, he was able to keep the British government informed about Southern plans (well, plans by certain South Carolinians) to re-open the international slave trade should the Confederacy become an independent nation.

Author Tilley makes two serious errors in his brief presentation. First, he overstates the extent of Northern involvement in the slave trade (he also ignores the Southern involvement); simply put, Yankee involvement in the slave trade, while non-trivial (especially after 1807), was dwarfed by that of many European nations. (See the comparative figures given above, about the Portuguese slave trade vs. the British North America/American slave trade.) Considerable smuggling was continued after the international slave trade was banned in 1807, and enforcement of that ban was lax, of this there is little doubt. Second—and of more importance—he ignores basic economic principles, such as the fundamental notion of supply and demand. Those who engaged in the slave trade—be they Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, English, or American—did not create the demand for slave labor, they only took advantage of that demand to earn their fortunes. Those who bought the slaves—whether American, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch or British—created the demand by their own willingness to use slave labor in their pursuits. The slave traders were villains, of that there is no doubt; but they were only needed because of the existence of slavery, itself. Eliminate slavery, and there is no need for a slave trade.

The fifth chapterlet is “WERE SOUTHERN MASTERS BRUTAL TO THEIR SLAVES?” Part of the Lost Cause mythology that was created after the Civil War and brought down through the 1940s as some kind of unbiased truth is that Southern “masters” were not cruel to their human property. Of course, definitions matter. Typically, Southern apologists define “not cruel” as a lack of severe corporal punishment (whipping and other physical punishments), and totally ignore the inherent cruelty of simply holding slaves. To “own” another human being is, in and of itself, an act of cruelty. To break families apart—sell husband from wife, sister from brother, children from parents—is an act of cruelty. To compel another man or woman to work entirely for your benefit, with the threat of physical punishment (even unto death, potentially), is an act of cruelty. To force women under your total control to submit themselves to your carnal lusts—which was known to be extremely common in the South—is an act of depraved cruelty. Mary Chesnut, the noted Southern diarist, put it well:

“Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos ones sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”

It is true that many plantation owners tried to minimize the more physical punishments for misbehavior and some instituted practices (like not selling families apart) that softened the edges of the institution. But this was fundamentally like putting lipstick on a pig: it’s still a pig. Slavery is slavery. One person owns another, and that “other” must do what their “owner” requires, or else suffer the consequences. And there were few protections within the laws of the states to protect the slaves.

The sixth chapterlet is “THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION,” and here the author goes into disinformation overdrive. He asks the rhetorical question, “If the Proclamation was a heaven-born movement, why were the slaves in the ‘excepted parts’ left out?” Nobody has claimed the Proclamation was a “heaven-born movement,” so this is essentially a straw man, but Tilley spent the previous paragraph explaining, fairly accurately, precisely why the Emancipation Proclamation exempted certain regions from its effects.

The Proclamation was a military measure, enacted in order to help put down the rebellion. It could only apply to those parts of the country that were actively in rebellion. The Border slave states (DE, MD, KY, MO) had never been in rebellion (many residents of Missouri might disagree, but let’s not go down that rabbit-hole), so they were not affected. The parts of Virginia and Louisiana that Tilley mentions had been occupied by Federal forces, so they were no longer in rebellion. West Virginia was not in rebellion, so it was not affected. (Tilley neglects to mention that West Virginia emancipated its slaves as a condition of admission into the Union.) The remark which Tilley quotes, by Lord Palmerston, is a nice quip, but it misses the point and actually shows that Lord Palmerston did not know what he was talking about: Wherever the Union army and navy went after Jan. 1, 1863, those slaves became free.

Tilley tries to suggest that one reason Lincoln issued the Proclamation was because Britain and France were on the verge of recognizing the Confederacy. There are several problems with this assertion. The most obvious are that Lincoln had been working on the Proclamation for more than a few months, and he did not know about the exchange of letters between the British Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary which might suggest that some kind of recognition of the Confederacy was in the offing. A second problem is that Britain’s interest in Confederate recognition is often over-stated. The men in the British government, for the most part, were interested in taking such a step, true, but this was an issue of geopolitical interests. On the other hand, the British working class were opposed to recognition, and Britain was receiving information that elements within the Confederacy were interested in re-opening the international slave trade (see the book, Our Man in Charleston, mentioned previously) and that would have been a deal-breaker on any recognition.

The Emancipation Proclamation was indeed a political document, designed to achieve a political end—to put down the Rebellion. And it succeeded in that regard: Tens of thousands of slaves were freed in the Mississippi Valley area by Grant’s 1863 Vicksburg Campaign, and many of these joined U.S.C.T. regiments to fight for the Union, along with others raised elsewhere.

The seventh chapterlet is “THE GREAT EMANCIPATOR'S ESTIMATE OF THE NEGRO,” which somehow is revealed in a discussion on colonization. Which might beg the question: What is colonization all about?

Colonization was the idea of removing freed slaves from the United States and settling them elsewhere. The underlying assumption was that the two races could not live together peacefully. The great Whig politician, Henry Clay of Kentucky, was a strong proponent of colonization, and Lincoln, a great admirer of Clay, was also.

We need to be clear about what is involved here. This is not a forced deportation scheme, it was entirely voluntary. But it was also impractical; there simply was no way to accomplish the task of sending 4,000,000 freed slaves across the ocean to remake their lives in Africa or anywhere else. Lincoln indeed toyed with the idea of colonization during his Presidency; a few “pilot projects” were set up in Central American and the Caribbean, but these did not thrive and were discontinued. Almost all of the freed slaves had lived their entire lives in the United States and were more interested in staying here. Exactly when Lincoln gave up on colonization as a policy is a tad controversial. According to the diary of John Hay, one of his secretaries, Lincoln had “sloughed off” of colonization by mid-1864, a date that is consistent with the idea that his 1863 meeting with a group of free black pastors had convinced him that the (potentially) freed slaves might consider themselves Americans (most had lived here for all of their lives) and so would prefer to remain in the United States. The memoir of Union General Ben Butler, himself a very controversial figure, suggests that Lincoln was still interested in colonization as late as April of 1865. An article ("Abraham Lincoln and black colonization: Ben Butler's spurious testimony," Civil War History, vol. 25, no. 1 (1979), pp. 77-83.) by Mark Neely strongly suggests that Butler’s account is suspect, but a more recent article by Phillip Magness pokes a slight (but not definitive) hole in Neely’s argument. The bottom line is that we simply do not know, from the historical record, when Lincoln gave up on colonization. We do know that Lincoln’s last public speech, given to a crowd gathered outside the White House, contained a proposal to allow certain black men (military veterans, mostly) the right to vote. Among the audience to this speech, according to some accounts, was one John Wilkes Booth, who said, "That is the last speech he will make."

The eighth chapterlet is “WHY THE PLANTERS FOUGHT TO KEEP TIIEIR SLAVES.” Tilley’s basic thrust here is to justify Southern resistance to abolition on the grounds that it would (in modern terms) destroy the business model employed by the planters. Except that abolition was not on the table in 1860 or 1861—as Mr. Tilley has already pointed out. In the absence of the rebellion, there was little that Lincoln could do. Almost surely, slavery would have been abolished in the District of Columbia—or at least the attempt would have been made. (However, it is worth noting that President-elect Lincoln, in a letter to North Carolina Congressman John Gilmer, says he would not attempt to abolish slavery in Washington. Not sure if the votes existed in the Senate with the South present in full force.) There would have been an attempt to overturn the Dred Scot decision by an act of Congress; again, I am not sure if the votes existed to pass such a bill in the Senate with the South fully present.

Some folks like to bring up tariff issues, and point to the passage of the Morrill Tariff at the end of the Buchanan Administration. But the Morrill Tariff would not have passed if the Southern Senators had been present. (It might not have passed even under the new Congress that came into office on March 4, 1861.)

With the 14 Southern Senators who left between December, 1860, and March, 1861, still sitting in their seats, the incoming Lincoln Administration would not have been able to accomplish much. He might not have been re-elected in 1864; he might not even have been renominated. (No President had even sought a second term since Andrew Jackson in 1832.)

What does this tell us? Slavery was not under any grave threat because of Lincoln’s election. However, Southern leadership was offended that a man opposed to slavery on moral grounds had been elected to the highest office in the land. Rather than live with that for four years and work to elect someone more in line with their views, they decided to precipitate a bloody rebellion, which, ironically, destroyed their economic system much faster than would have happened if they had just let Lincoln take office without any fuss.

The ninth chapterlet is titled “WHAT ARE STATES’ RIGHTS?” Much of it is devoted to a flawed recounting of the history of the immediate post-Revolutionary period in United States history. The Treaty of Paris (1783) which granted independence to the colonies does indeed list each one individually. That’s because each one was a separate entity in the eyes of the British, so the Sovereign (King George III) had to make plain that he was renouncing possession of each one. The fact that they had formed a nation called “the United States of America” was not relevant to what the King needed to do to make their independence legal. The rest of the treaty refers to “the United States,” and the Congress is implored to urge the states to provide restitution for property lost by “real British subjects.” In other words, the British understood they were making a treaty with a nation, not thirteen separate entities.

Under the Confederation government, the individual states indeed had much more power (too much, in fact) and sovereignty. The whole point of the movement that resulted in the drafting of the Constitution was that this precise issue was realized to be a problem, and the nation needed a stronger central government.

The tenth chapterlet is titled “NORTHERN VIOLATION OF STATES’ RIGHTS.” Tilley begins by writing, “REMEMBER THAT THE Southern owners neither stole nor captured their slaves. They bought them largely from Northern slave-importers.” We have already seen that this is a false statement. In fact, of the 4,000,000 enslaved people living in the United States (in 1860), the vast majority had been born in the United States. So the author is not starting off well. It gets worse, though: The rest of the text here complains about policies (emancipation of the slaves) that were neither on the table nor politically possible in 1860, or events (various slave uprisings) that no Northern state had anything to do with. This really is a very poorly done section of the book. It does have an amusing attempt at re-writing the standard historical terminology, by using “fire-eaters” to refer to extreme abolitionists, in contradiction of its usual usage as the men who led the effort in the South towards secession.

There were things done by some Northern states that angered the South and might be reasonably referred to as “violations of states’ rights.” These would be the “personal liberty laws” passed by several state legislatures, mostly in the 1850s. The precise details varied from state to state, but the general idea was to make it harder for Southern men to reclaim escaped slaves who had been recaptured in these states. As a matter of law, these acts were without legal force, as the Federal statutes on fugitive slaves would govern such matters, but in practice these laws did result in some hindrance of recovery efforts, and of course were seen as an afront to “Southern rights” by the slave-holding states; they were mentioned often in the growing sectional disputes of the 1850s. I’m frankly surprised that Tilley did not mention them.

This is a complex question, much moreso than Tilley allows. Treason—something the Founding Fathers were very much afraid of as a charge that could be abused—is the only crime defined in the text of the United States Constitution:

“Article III, Section 3, Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

So, looking at the text, secession in-and-of-itself is not treason. However, simple common sense should dictate that secession is not going to be well-received by the national government, that the national government is likely to cast secession as “rebellion” to national authority, and thus when the national authority attempts to put down that rebellion, war will break out (as did, in fact, happen) and the secessionist faction will be in the position of “levying War against [the United States],” which is treason.

So, the secessionists became traitors once they resisted the national authority with force. All of them. Lee, Jackson, Davis, etc. Traitors all.

Tilley argues that secession was not treason by quoting (far out of context) something Lincoln said during his term in Congress in opposition to the Mexican War, then citing the Declaration of Independence, followed up by several threats of secession by New England politicians at different times. All of this misses the essential point and distinction, that the Southern secessionists went to war with the United States, but the unhappy New England politicians never did.

The 12^th chapterlet is titled “WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON A TRAITOR?” And the answer is an unequivocal YES—Washington was most certainly a traitor to the British Crown. So were Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and everyone else who signed the Declaration of Independence and fought against Great Britain in the Revolutionary War. Franklin’s oft-quoted aphorism from after the passage of Jefferson’s document, that “We must all hang together or we will all hang separately” was no joke—it was a potential fate staring them all in the face.

Tilley’s argument that the Confederate secession was similar to the colonial one of 1776 fails to acknowledge the most important distinction between the two events: success vs. failure. Washington is not a traitor because he won. Lee is a traitor because he lost. It really is that simple.

The 13^th chapterlet is titled “THE SOUTH FIRED TIIE FIRST SHOT,” to which Tilley responds (correctly), “IT DID,” followed by the question, “WHY?” followed by a rather slanted discussion of what is usually referred to as the “Fort Sumter crisis.” A fairly decent chronology of these events can be found here. Let me offer my responses to particular points Tilley makes.

He first writes, “After South Carolina exercised its right to secede, Fort Sumter at Charleston was manned by a Union garrison. The State demanded possession of the fort and offered to pay for it. Although the Secretary of State of the United States solemnly promised that the garrison would be removed, his Government failed to give the necessary order.” Leaving aside the entire notion of a “right to secede,” there is a lot here that is at best problematic.

Things became a tad complicated once President Lincoln came into office on March 4. His Secretary of State, William Seward, had been expected to win the Republican nomination in 1860, but Lincoln unexpectedly defeated him. In the first several weeks of the new Administration, Seward played a dangerous game of communicating with a set of Confederate “commissioners” through intermediaries. He consistently assured them that Fort Sumter would indeed be evacuated, but in fact the Cabinet was moving in the direction of sending an expedition to re-supply and perhaps re-inforce the garrison. Tilley knows all of this, having written about it, elsewhere; Seward was trying to take practical control of the Administration, a game he lost decisively in an exchange of letters with Lincoln on April 1^st, but these back-channel negotiations did much to confuse the Confederates regarding Fort Sumter.

Tilley next writes, “Resisting the temptation to take the fort by force, the Carolinians had nevertheless given fair warning that no reinforcement would be tolerated.” He neglects to mention that South Carolina had been building positions for heavy cannon and mortars all around Fort Sumter since late December (in fact, they were in no position “to take the fort by force” until right before they did). On the very day that Lincoln was inaugurated, Gov. Pickens telegraphed to Tredegar Iron Works in Virginia—which had not seceded, yet—asking for 400 shells for heavy guns “in addition to those already ordered.” On April 1^st, before the relief expedition was ordered to proceed, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, now commanding the Confederate troops in Charleston Harbor, telegraphed his government that his batteries would all be in place in a few days, and asks, "What instructions?" Before Lincoln was inaugurated, the Provisional Confederate government had passed legislation for creating an army of indefinite size; further legislation passed on March 6, 1861, specified that the army was to be 100,000 men; the size of the entire United States Army was then less than 20,000 men.

In other words, the Confederates were preparing for war long before the relief fleet set sail.

The 14^th chapterlet is titled THE “STARVING GARRISON,” and Tilley opens by writing, “The OFFICIAL RECORD, published by the United States Government, discloses that, beginning January 20, 1861, the Governor of South Carolina arranged to supply the Sumter command with fresh meat, vegetables, and groceries.” This, in fact, is at best disingenuous, and, at worst, simply false.

Prior to this paragraph, Tilley has made several references to a letter from Maj. Anderson (which was shown to Lincoln on March 5, 1861), commanding the Fort Sumter garrison, in which Anderson warns of a very low food supply at the fort, and that without being resupplied, he would soon be forced to surrender the fort. Tilley gives no precise citation to the appropriate OR (Official Records) volume, which is not surprising given his target audience (young readers). Still, his point is obvious: How can the garrison be low on rations if they are being supplied from the Charleston markets? And therein lies a very complicated and confusing tale.

So much for being provided food by South Carolina. (It is true that the Charleston papers were reporting that the garrison was being supplied by South Carolina.)

Tilley complains about the expedition to send “provisions” to the fort, as though this was a duplicitous effort. In fact, Lincoln sent a courier to South Carolina’s Gov. Francis Pickens, explicitly telling him that a fleet was on its way, and if no effort were made to obstruct it, then only food would be delivered to the fort. The armed vessels were only to get involved if the effort to deliver provisions was opposed. Was this a political maneuver to get the Confederates to fire the first shot (on boats full of bread)? There is little doubt about that, and less doubt that the Confederates were foolish enough to fire on the fort anyway. They had a choice, they made their decision, and Tilley is trying to somehow suggest it did not mean what it obviously did mean. He neglects to tell the reader that there was a strong possibility that the outbreak of open war would induce many of the Upper South slave states (NC, VA, TN, AR) to secede; in fact, all four did, and adding Virginia to the Confederacy was vital for its long-term survival. (There is a well-known quote from Virginia secessionist Roger Pryor on this point: “I will tell your Governor what will put [Virginia] in the Southern Confederacy in less than an hour by a Shrewsbury clock. Strike a blow!”) Tilley also neglects to tell the reader that Davis was being told things like, “Sir, unless you sprinkle blood in the face of the people of Alabama, they will be back in the old Union in less than ten days!” Lincoln was playing for time; Davis could not afford to give him any (and frankly did not want to give him any), and so ordered the fort to be attacked.

Well, this is usually a simple question—the side that starts shooting is usually considered the side that began the war. The Confederates fired the first shots at Fort Sumter early in the morning of April 12, 1862. (See above for the details.) If you don’t like that date, you can go back to January 9, 1861, when the steamer Star of the West, carrying supplies and reinforcements for Fort Sumter was fired upon as it attempted to enter Charleston Harbor. But we can also go back to January 3, when Georgia seized Fort Pulaski, or January 4, when Alabama seized the arsenal at Mount Vernon, or January 5, when Alabama seized Forts Morgan and Gaines, or January 6, when Florida seized the Apalachicola arsenal, or December 27, when South Carolina seized Fort Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. All of these were United States facilities, and the acts of the individual states seizing them were acts of war, as such things were understood in the mid-19^th Century. The fact that hostilities did not break out prior to March 4, 1861, had much to do with the supine character of the Buchanan Administration in its final weeks.

Tilley opens by writing, “KNOWLEDGE that Lincoln's reinforcing squadron was on the way compelled the Southerners to act. On April 12th, Beauregard demanded evacuation of the fort. Anderson declined to comply.” Strictly speaking, the demand was made on the afternoon of April 11, but of more importance is the fact that Beauregard was ordered to demand the evacuation of the fort on April 10, a decision which had been made in Montgomery on April 9. (Curious, is it not, that the Confederate government made the fateful decision to start the war exactly four years before Lee’s surrender to Grant essentially ended it?) Warned that they would be firing on a starving garrison (all food supplies would be exhausted by mid-day of the 15^th), they nonetheless decided to initiate hostilities. According to some accounts the Confederate Secretary of State, Robert Toombs of Georgia, gave an impassioned speech against this step, saying, “It is unnecessary; it puts us in the wrong; it is fatal,” and that it would stir up a “hornet's nest” of hostility towards the South.

Several historians have reached the conclusion that both Lincoln and Davis were in the same position: Neither one wanted to start a war over Fort Sumter, but both were willing to have a war that started at Fort Sumter. Lincoln simply played the better game, and maneuvered Davis into firing the first shot.

The 17^th chapterlet is titled “’THAT IS MAGNIFICENT, BUT THAT IS NOT WAR’”

I am at a loss to understand Tilley’s point here. His text recounts the fact that Beauregard sent offers of assistance to Anderson once it became apparent that a major fire had broken out inside the fort. (The wooden barracks had caught fire, and this eventually threatened the fort’s magazine, which is what led to the surrender of the fort.) This sort of “chivalric” approach to conflict was not unheard of in the 19^th Century, although it would not be a major feature of the Civil War.

Again, I am at a loss to understand Tilley’s point here. He seems to think a brief moment of solemn honor to a defeated foe absolves the Confederacy of the opprobrium of having started what would become an incredibly bloody Civil War over their desire to hold other men in chattel bondage, something that was under no threat at all at the time the batteries opened fire.

Tilley begins with a question: “WOULD YOU LIKE conclusive proof that Lincoln's plan was to badger the Southerners into ‘firing the first shot’”? He then follows this with some quotes from a couple of Federal officials (Gideon Welles and Gustavus Fox) which do confirm that getting the Confederates to strike the first blow was an important part of the planning. Part of the issue here is Tilley’s use of the word “badger;” Lincoln did not “badger” anyone, not as the word is commonly understood. He simply managed the situation to his advantage, very skillfully. Tilley seems to be uncomfortable admitting that the rudely educated frontier politician Abraham Lincoln was able to out-maneuver the well-born (and highly educated) Southern leaders such as Davis and Toombs. Eventually, Tilley quotes from a letter that Lincoln sent to Gustavus Fox, in which it is made clear that one object of the Sumter relief expedition was to get the Confederates to fire on shipments of bread. Lincoln’s precise words, as (correctly) quoted by Tilley, were: “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort Sumter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”

It seems to me that Tilley is really complaining that a government composed of the South’s highly educated leading lights of the 1850s was out-maneuvered by a frontier politician with almost no formal education.

The very sad fact is that there is suffering in almost any prisoner of war camp, from the Civil War (both sides) up through the modern age. In our Civil War, neither side really planned for extensive numbers of prisoners, especially after the Dix-Hill Exchange and Parole Cartel went into effect in the summer of 1862. Sadly, this agreement collapsed in 1863 (it would take a book to illuminate the causes, but here is a brief chronology) and this led to a massive increase of prisoners held by both sides, and the frank fact is that neither side was prepared for this. Overcrowding and sanitation were the biggest problems. Southern lack of medical supplies and basic food rations were two others. Tilley’s “dependable authority” for “Confederate authorities constantly pressed exchanges on equal terms” is two Southern advocates, J.L.M. Curry and William Robertson Garrett, neither of which had any formal role in the administration of the cartel. (The Confederacy’s principal person in these matters, Assistant Secretary of War and Agent of Exchange Robert Ould, did a very credible job on the Confederacy’s behalf in this regard. Much better, frankly, than the Federal officials who occupied the corresponding position on the other side.)

The fact is that both sides pressed for “exchanges on equal terms,” but they had differing notions of “equal terms.” In particular, the Confederates consistently refused to treat African-American troops as anything other than escaped slaves (they were often massacred rather than being taken prisoner).

The Dix-Hill Cartel had set up a system for the exchange and parole of prisoners, including a table of how many privates would be exchanged for, say, a major-general; in this particular case, the number is 60, which of course prompts the sarcastic observation that many major-generals were not worth 10 privates, let alone 60! Prisoners were paroled (released to the custody of their own side, but forbidden from doing any meaningful military duty) if there was no one held by the other side for them to be exchanged for. Administration of the cartel quickly devolved into a series of arguments between the two sides over its administration, with the result that the United States suspended its operation in the summer of 1863.

There were numerous efforts to alleviate the suffering, but many of these died when one side or the other made what the other side considered “unreasonable demands” (such as the United States insisting on black troops being treated equally with white troops). There were two such efforts which did work to some extent, although both came very late in the war:

Tilley fails to discuss (no surprise here) the often brutal treatment of captured black Union troops, nor does he mention the wholesale kidnapping of free blacks in the North during Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863.

The 21^st chapterlet is titled “'WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE—WITH CHARITY FOR ALL.'” Tilley’s point here seems to be that several of Lincoln’s actions during the war are in contradiction with the phrase from his Second Inaugural, “With malice toward none, with charity for all . . .” However, Lincoln is looking forward, to how the war should be concluded and the resulting peace managed; he is not looking backwards and assessing how the war has been conducted. Tilley seems confused about the nature of war; he appears to think of it as a polite parlour game in which no one of virtue should be hurt. People who fight wars that way usually end up losing them.

Tilley continues to “bang the drum” regarding the relief expedition. This entire chapterlet is constructed in order to bring in a quote from Gen. Winfield Scott as to the nature of the relief expedition, which he characterizes as follows: “[An] expedition, under cover of certain ships of war, whose object is to reinforce Fort Sumter.” It certainly is true that the expedition was organized with that object, but that does not change the fact that the orders were to, at first, attempt to land provisions, only; if that effort were resisted by the Confederates, only then would troops and material of war be landed, and only then would the warships engage the batteries. (And Gov. Pickens of South Carolina was informed of this on April 8, 1861; he promptly informed the Confederate government, and this eventually precipitated the bombardment of Fort Sumter.) Now, as it happened, the Confederates had anticipated the scheme that Capt. Fox had devised, to use small boats to transfer loads of provisions from transports to the fort at night, and thus guns were positioned to sweep that approach to the fort, and boats were assigned to patrol those waters, so the plan was doomed. In any event, the Confederates opened fire on the fort before any attempt was made to land anything.

Tilley is simply desperate to avoid the raw fact that the Confederates opened fire on an out-manned garrison composed of men almost out of food, and with minimal ability to defend themselves. (Tilley appears to be unaware of the fact that, while Maj. Anderson’s garrison of U.S. troops was reasonably supplied with gunpowder, very few of the guns at Fort Sumter had been mounted, and there were almost no cartridge bags---the linen bags that would hold the powder charge used to fire each gun.) Maj. Anderson told them he would have to evacuate the post for lack of provisions by the middle of the 15^th. Why not wait?

It seems to be almost required in some circles to denigrate Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Tilley does not shrink from this task, for he quickly characterizes the book as a “caricature.”

First, Tilley quotes Albert J. Beveridge, a politician and historian who first worked for James G. Blaine (“the continental liar from the state of Maine”) in 1884 and eventually served 12 years in the Senate as a Republican, representing Indiana. He supported Teddy Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” candidacy in 1916. Then, after advising President Wilson some, he left politics and turned to historical writing, publishing a four-volume biography of Chief Justice John Marshal over the years 1916—1919, then turned his pen on Abraham Lincoln, completing two volumes of a planned four volume treatment, which were published in 1928 after his death in 1927. The two volumes cover Lincoln’s life up through 1858, which is after the 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Apparently, the full work was completed, it is not clear by whom, as all four volumes exist on the Internet Archive.) I made a brief survey of the relevant section of Beveridge’s Vol. II and found this (Vol II, p. 137):

“The narrative [Uncle Tom’s Cabin] was written with dramatic genius. It was a succession of incidents, each picturesque, some startling. In this fashion the whole abolition argument and appeal was presented. The entire story, or any section of it, could be dramatized and acted with little effort. Characters were so drawn as to give the impression that they were typical. The distinct and emphatic idea thus conveyed to the reader was that, as a class, the slaves were frightfully abused and yearning for freedom; that Southern men, with tepid exceptions, were tyrannical and vile; that, in general, Southern women were incompetent, sluggish, and cruel. While figures were made to appear and things to happen that showed the easier side of slavery, they were subordinated to the drama and were used to make prominent the horrible and the base.”

Most of the assertions Tilley cites to Beveridge are here, but he somehow neglected to include the “dramatic genius” comment.

Tilley then reminds his readers of something Lincoln himself once said: “I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution of slavery.” (Taken from Lincoln’s 1854 speech in Peoria.) Finally, Tilley quotes from an Alabama Episcopal Bishop about the book, whose thoughts are that the “most striking character” of the novel is the slave, Uncle Tom; the “most attractive character” was Eva, the daughter of a slaveholder, and the villain of the novel was Simon Legree, a Northerner.

I might well respond, “Indeed, what is the point, Mr. Tilley?” Stowe’s book accurately—she later published A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which she basically pointed to actual accounts which were the basis for the events in her novel (Tilley does not mention this book at all, but Beveridge does, approvingly)—revealed the Southern slave system for what it was. Beveridge goes on to say that the book was (page 138), “the literary sensation of the period,” later adding (also page 138), “Its success abroad was as great as in the United States,” and, more significantly (page 139), “There can be no possible doubt that Uncle Tom’s Cabin largely created that European public opinion which was so strong an influence in preventing recognition of the Southern Confederacy by England and France.”

While I have not read Mr. Beveridge’s biography in full, I do think there is enough evidence here to suggest that Tilley indulged in a bit of selective citation; “cherry picking” is the modern term, I believe.

And yes, the villain of the book is indeed the Yankee, Simon Legree. So what is your point, Mr. Tilley? Legree is working on Southern slave plantations. How does his Northern birth absolve the South of any of the blame for slavery? He is being paid by Southerners, after all. How does his Northern birth make any of the narrative of the book a “caricature”?

And once again, I am confused. Tilley begins with what he calls a version “of ‘history’ taught in Southern High Schools.” In this passage, the bombardment of Fort Sumter is ordered by the Virginia secessionist Roger Pryor, not Gen. Beauregard, not Jefferson Davis. Oh, yes, and “the bombardment began at once” (apparently without giving the emissaries time to withdraw).

This is simply not true. Tilley’s second paragraph is much more accurate and is supported by multiple accounts, including the OR. But in his third paragraph, Tilley again goes off the rails. He writes, “Note carefully the ‘history,’ that ‘Neither Davis nor Lincoln had ordered’ the bombardment.”

I am at a loss to fathom Tilley’s point. He first wrote this book in 1951, which means that the history textbooks used in Southern schools were almost surely approved by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). That organization existed to preserve the Lost Cause memory of the Civil War. If that erroneous text (first paragraph) was being taught to Southern school children in 1951, it was the UDC’s fault, and Tilley should have known that.

He should also have understood that the order to reduce the fort by bombardment, having come from Confederate Secretary of War Leroy Pope Walker, was essentially an order from Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Oh, yes, and he also should have known that Anderson’s remark about “the hopelessness of his position” (actually, the fact that he had very little left in the way of food for his men) was forwarded to Montgomery, Alabama (at that time the capital of the Confederacy) and, after a bit of back-and-forth, Beauregard was ordered to commence the bombardment. In other words, the aides (Chesnut and Lee) did not make the decision; Beauregard, acting under orders from Walker, who was acting under orders from Davis, did.

The point here appears to be that the Confederacy had no chance to win, and so their effort to form a slave-based republic should be . . . what? I am again at a loss to understand Tilley’s point here. If they had no chance to win, why start a war that leads to 750,000 deaths? Why not simply accept Lincoln’s election and work to defeat him in 1864?

Tilley first cites some well-known facts: “The North had a white population four times as large as that of the South. The South had no army, no navy, no treasury, no adequate munitions plants, practically no manufacturing. In material resources the North was far superior.”

(Allow me to point out two missing points here. Tilley focuses on the white population, which allows him to avoid mentioning the 200,000 black men who enlisted in U.S.C.T. [United States Colored Troops] regiments, as well as the large slave population in the Confederacy which kept their economy going, albeit at a pathetic rate. He also does a great disservice to the efforts of one George Washington Rains, who built and managed one of the most efficient and high-quality gunpowder plants ever built, in Augusta, Georgia. No Confederate army ever lost a battle due to a lack of ammunition.)

Tilley then complains, to some extent inaccurately, about the Federal Army’s use of the Spencer repeating rifle. The Spencer rifle and carbine (a shorter version designed for cavalry use) were indeed serious advances in weapons design. So was the Henry rifle, precursor to the Winchester, which could hold 15 rounds, compared to the Spencer’s seven. Neither got the wide usage that Tilley suggests. The ossified officers in command of United States Army ordnance acquisitions were against these new weapons, on the grounds that they would lead troops to waste ammunition. By mid-1863, most Federal cavalry were armed with some kind of breech-loading carbine, but usually they were single-shot weapons. One brigade of mounted infantry in the Army of the Cumberland carried Spencers and did good service with them on several occasions in 1863. By the opening of the 1864 campaign most Federal cavalry were armed with Spencers or Henrys. But very few infantry regiments carried such weapons. (I have read accounts of individual companies being armed with these weapons, though.) Tilley’s excuse falls flat on factual grounds, and even if it was accurate, so what? What does it say about the political decision-making of the Confederacy that they would go to war against an opponent capable of producing such weapons? The moral position of the Confederacy is not improved by admitting that they were, literally, out-gunned. (Interesting factoid: Both the Spencer and the Henry depended upon copper to make the “fixed ammunition” that the guns used. After the battles around Chattanooga in the fall of 1863, the Confederacy had no source of copper, so they were unable to make use of the Spencer or Henry weapons that they captured, nor could they “reverse engineer” them and produce their own versions. In fact, they were reduced to raiding North Carolina moonshine stills to get copper to make ordinary percussion caps for their muzzle-loading rifles.)

Tilley finally gets into the well-trod ground of “destruction of resources,” pointing to the campaigns led by Sheridan (in the Shenandoah Valley) and Sherman (in south Georgia), both in 1864, as well as other material deficiencies of the Confederate military effort. Yes, the average Confederate soldier deserves massive plaudits for continuing the fight as long as they did in the face of a foe with comparatively inexhaustible resources. But that does not make them right. It does call into question the judgment of the Confederate leadership, which was unable to recognize inevitable defeat when it was staring them in the face. There was no <bleeping> point in continuing the struggle after the debacle at Nashville in December of 1864. None. Nada. Nicht.

The only result of Tilley’s discussion here is to cast a huge amount of doubt on the decision-making of the Confederate leadership.

The 26^th chapterlet is titled “ ‘RECONSTRUCTION’ 一A PROGRAM OF VENGEANCE”

There is a lot that can be said about Reconstruction. Tilley’s mature years were in a time when the dominant scholarly view on Reconstruction was the “Dunning school,” named after Columbia Prof. William A. Dunning whose scholarly writings and (perhaps more important) those of his students and followers heavily influenced how the nation came to understand the immediate postwar period. Suffice it to say, that a lot of more modern scholarship has given us a different perspective on the period.

Political disputes over the reconstruction of the Union began even before the 1864 campaigns began, with the passage of the Wade-Davis Bill, which President Lincoln opposed. As a result, he “pocket vetoed” the bill, which meant that Congress could not even attempt to over-ride the veto.

The differences between Congress and President Lincoln were not totally minor, but they paled in comparison to the differences between Congress and President Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln after his April 14, 1865, assassination. Johnson was a staunch Unionist from Tennessee, but he was no friend to the newly freed slaves of the South, and this became the focus of almost all the controversy and contention in the late 1860s. Congress wanted to protect the freedmen from being dragged back into a condition essentially akin to slavery. Johnson cared very little for such notions. When the elections of 1866 gave the Republicans huge majorities in both Houses of Congress, they were able to enact what became known as “Radical Reconstruction,” which lasted, roughly, from 1867 until 1877, and featured expanded political rights and opportunities for the black men of the former Confederacy.

Sadly, there was a violent backlash to Radical Reconstruction, with violence being used to resist assertions of black political power in the states of the former Confederacy. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Red Shirts (in South Carolina), and the Knights of the White Camelia (Louisiana) rose up and terrorized anyone attempting to assert black political rights or power. Armed clashes were not uncommon, and several outright massacres of blacks and their allies occurred, such as those at Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Hamburg, South Carolina (1876), and Thibodaux, Louisiana (1887). Opponents of Radical Reconstruction claimed that the state governments were corrupt, that the black officials had no idea how to run the states effectively, many of the governors that had been elected were actually Northern men who had come south to obtain political power and corrupt wealth, and that the states were being pillaged to serve the interests of Republican politicians in the North.

A number of modern studies of Reconstruction exist, any of which would be a far better source of information than any of the Dunning School efforts, or the book that Tilley quoted from. A short list might include the following:

The Author/Publisher does not consider himself an expert on Reconstruction, so prefers to outline the events, broadly (as done, above) and then point folks to good resources for them to read on their own.

The 27^th chapterlet is titled “SOME REASONS FOR SECESSION,” and it goes off the rails at the outset.

Tilley writes: “The South was wholly agricultural, the North largely commercial,” and that is simply false. Census data from 1860 shows that the states of the Confederacy had a total of nearly 177 million acres of land involved in farming, and this land was valued at slightly more than $1.7 billion. On the other hand, the eastern Free States (not counting California and Oregon) had over 146 million acres of land involved in farming, a comparable if smaller figure, and this land was valued at over $4 billion.

In any event, if the South went to war in the absence of the commercial and manufacturing necessities of modern (i.e., 19^th Century) warfare, what does this say about the quality of Confederate leadership? We have returned to this point several times: Instead of starting a war that leads to 750,000 deaths and destroys your own economy, why not simply accept the election of Abraham Lincoln and work to defeat him and his party in 1864?

He later writes, “New England offended with snobbish airs of superiority.” And Virginia and South Carolina did not? (There is an old and somewhat ugly joke: “How is South Carolina like China?” “They worship their ancestors and eat a lot of rice.” “How is Virginia different?” “They don’t eat so much rice.”)

Tilley then asserts, “Colonies imposed tariffs upon goods from other colonies.” I frankly cannot respond to whether or not this happened in the Colonial period, but imposing any kind of tax or tariff on interstate commerce is a violation (Article I, Sec. 9, Paragraph 9—"No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State”) of the Constitution.

“Next, certain ‘Abolitionists’ took pains to incite Southern slaves to rise against their masters.” Once again, this is an assertion without any supporting evidence. I suspect that Tilley is referring to John Brown’s raid on the Harpers Ferry Arsenal in October, 1859, which was financially supported by a number of prominent abolitionists. But there is a totally overlooked issue here: If you are holding someone in slavery, isn’t some kind of “push back” to be expected? Don’t most of us cheer for Kirk Douglas in the movie Spartacus, even though we know the sad and tragic ending? Tilley is essentially trying to say that the enslavers were “good guys” deserving of some protection from the natural response of their enslaved people. Why do we cheer for Kirk Douglas, and not for John Brown?

Finally, he plays the inevitable tariff card, writing, “Later Congress enacted a ‘protective tariff’ which enriched the North at the expense of other sections.” As with the earlier discussion about POW camps, it would take a book to deal with this issue in complete detail. There had been a bit of a sectional dust-up over tariff policy in the 1828—1832 period (approximately). The immediate cause was the so-called “Tariff of Abomination,” passed by Congress in 1828 under the Administration of John Quincy Adams. The tariff was indeed protectionist, meaning it was designed to raise prices on certain imported goods in order to allow American manufacturers to compete against cheaper products imported from Europe. Under the quiet, behind-the-scenes, leadership of John C. Calhoun, who was now Vice-President in the Andrew Jackson Administration (elected in 1828), the South Carolina legislature advanced the theory of nullification, asserting that a state could nullify a Federal law with its borders. The situation was rather tense, with President Jackson threatening to hang anyone who defied Federal authority, but a compromise tariff was worked out, and tariff rates had actually declined ever since the early 1830s. Some secessionists in 1860 did mention tariffs as a motivating factor, but they were in a vast minority. I have previously quoted Lawrence Keitt as follows: "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." When he said this, he was responding to Maxcy Gregg, a future Brigadier General in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, who would die at Fredericksburg in December of 1862, and who had said, on the floor of the South Carolina Convention, speaking about the South Carolina Declaration of Causes, “Not one word is said about the tariff, which has caused us so many years of contest. The main stress is made upon the unimportant point of fugitive slaves, and the laws passed by various Northern States obstructing the recovery of fugitive slaves.” Despite Gregg’s objections, the Convention passed the document as we now see it.

Indeed; the main stress was upon issues related to slavery, because the slave South could not tolerate a President who was opposed to slavery.

The 28^th (and last) chapterlet is titled “MEET JEFFERSON DAVIS.” As was said at the beginning, Tilley’s purpose, partially, in this book, is to make Jefferson Davis the noble leader of a pure and doomed effort. The brief review of Davis’s life (taken from the Encyclopedia Brittanica) is accurate, although Tilley’s own commentary is a tad over-the-top in its idolatry. Tilley neglected to add part of Davis’s story which actually humanizes an otherwise cold and austere man.

Davis was married twice. His first marriage was to Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of Colonel Zachary Taylor, who would become a General during the Mexican War and President shortly afterwards. Col. Taylor did not approve of the romance, as he did not want his daughter to be an army wife, and only reluctantly gave permission for Sarah to marry Davis; the wedding took place on June 17, 1835. Sadly, both she and her husband contracted malaria shortly afterwards, while visiting Jefferson’s sister Anna in Louisiana. Davis survived, but Sarah did not, passing away on Sept. 15, 1835. Slightly less than twelve years later, during the Mexican War, on February 22, 1847, Col. Jefferson Davis’s regiment of Mississippi volunteer infantry played a key role in winning the Battle of Buena Vista for General Zachary Taylor. According to some accounts, Taylor told Col. Davis after the battle that his daughter had been a better judge of men than he was.

Davis’s second marriage, to Varina Howell, 18 years younger than he was, produced six children, only three of whom lived to past the age of ten: Jefferson Davis, Jr., born in 1857, but died of yellow fever at the age of 21; Varina Anne, born in 1864, but died, unmarried and childless, on September 18, 1898; and Margaret Howell, born in 1855, married and raised a family of four children, but died in 1909 at the age of 54. Margaret’s children are the only grandchildren of the Confederate president. One of Jefferson and Varina’s children, Joseph Evan, died at the age of five in 1864, by falling off a balcony at the Confederate White House in Richmond.

Author Tilley wants his readers to gain some insight into Jefferson Davis by perhaps reading excerpts of two of his speeches, his Farewell Address to the United States Senate, and his first address to the Confederate Congress. In the spirit of completeness, I will offer here the complete texts of both of those speeches, plus several others:

Tilley also delves into the possible trial of Davis for treason. This is a long and complex issue, which I will deal with by pointing the reader to the Jefferson Davis Papers website at Rice University. The material dealing with the case against Davis is about four paragraphs below the top of that webpage.

“If the Declaration of Independence justified the secession of 3,000,000 Colonists in 1776 why did it not justify the secession of 5,000,000 Southerners from the Union in 1861?”

A quick and partial answer is because the Southerners did not issue a document like the Declaration of Independence. Several individual states issued documents explaining why they were seceding, but none were based on anything like the lofty principles of Jefferson’s 1776 document. There was no declaration akin to “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal;” Instead, we have Mississippi saying, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” and the Vice-President of the Confederacy saying, “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition."