Who has not heard of Wounded Knee? Most know at least the general facts surrounding what is acknowledged as an atrocity committed by the army of the United States. On December 29th, 1890, the 7th Cavalry surrounded a band of Ghost Dancers—a spiritual movement of the Lakota Sioux under a Chief named Big Foot—near Wounded Knee Creek. The soldiers demanded that the Indians surrender their weapons. As the Indians made to comply, a fight broke out between an Indian and a soldier and a shot was fired. When it was over, an estimated 150 to 300 Indians—nearly half of whom were women and children—had been killed; the cavalry lost 25 men. It was believed that the massacre was a response by the 7th Cavalry to the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, but whether or not that was true, Wounded Knee is considered the last major confrontation in the deadly war between the American government and the Plains Indians.
But Wounded Knee was also a fitting epitaph to the tactics of the United States military that began some thirty years earlier when it was loosed not against indigenous aboriginals but against people with whom those soldiers shared a common heritage of struggle and liberation from the tyranny of Great Britain. Despite growing ill feeling between the sections of the Union which only deepened as the 19th century progressed, the United States still taught the principles of a civilized and just war as codified by such men as Hugo Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel. Even Lincoln’s lead general through most of the war—until he was replaced by Ulysses Grant—Henry Halleck had written such a code in which he declared that assaults on civilians were: “coming into general disuse among the most civilized nations.” Apparently, Halleck forgot his own code as the war against the South progressed.
But let us start with the first strategy created by General Winfield Scott at Lincoln’s request and utilized from the commencement of the war. The aim of the Anaconda plan was simple; starve and strangle the South into submission. Close her ports and deprive her people not just of arms, but of food and medicine, the essentials of life itself. Thus, the nature of the war that was to be waged against the people of the South was obvious from the beginning. All that happened afterward was simply the extension and exacerbation of the already chosen path of total war against every man, woman and child of the Confederacy.
But what about Lincoln’s noble code of war, General Order 100—also known as the Lieber Code—which is the subject of a new book by John Fabian Witt entitled Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War. According to the critiques of the book, Witt tells the hidden story of the laws of war in the first century of the United States–and of the extraordinary code that emerged from it to change the course of world history. Lincoln’s Code is the haunting and inspiring story of an idea in American history: the idea that conduct in war can be regulated by law. I don’t have the book, but I can tell you that if such is Mr. Witt’s conclusion, he is either a liar or deluded. Lieber’s Code has in its 157 articles, exceptions frequently nullifying the very rules it promulgates. Indeed, Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon denounced its duplicity, stating that
“…a commander under this code may pursue a line of conduct in accordance with principles of justice, faith, and honor, or he may justify conduct correspondent with the barbarous hordes who overran the Roman Empire….”
But for all its pretense of civilized conflict the code endorsed the concept of “hard war.” According to Lieber, war is defined as a struggle not merely between the armed forces. Think back to General Halleck’s observation that assaults on non-combatants were “coming into general disuse among the most civilized nations.” Are we then to assume that Professor’s Lieber’s code was written for a nation that was not “civilized?” Apparently so, for in Article 21, Lieber states: “The citizen or native of a hostile country is thus an enemy…and as such is subjected to the hardships of war.” And in Article 29, he further states, “The more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity.” One has to wonder how Lieber defined humanity. And the good Professor finally reaches a rather interesting conclusion when he states, “The ultimate object of all modern war is a renewed state of peace.” Well, it is a fact that there is nothing more peaceful than the grave.
As with Lincoln and the Constitution, in Lieber’s code, necessity always trumped both legality and humanity. Sherman and Sheridan would never have undertaken their atrocities had they followed any of the codes of war they had been taught at the Point under Halleck. Indeed, on August 4, 1863, Sherman wrote to Grant at Vicksburg,
“The amount of burning, stealing and plundering done by our army makes me ashamed of it. I would rather quit the service if I could, because I fear that we are drifting to the worst sort of vandalism …You and I and every commander must go through the war, justly charged with crimes at which we blush.”
However, in a later response to a Southerner who called him a barbarian, Sherman said that he, as a commander:
“…may take your house, your fields, your everything, and turn you out helpless to starve. It may be wrong, but that don’t alter the case.”
Author Otto Eisenschiml, writing less than 20 years after the Nuremberg war crimes trials, asserted that Sherman should have been hanged just as the Nazi war criminals had been hanged! Instead, he was lauded and honored.
Of course, there were Union officers who objected. Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the famous black regiment honored in the film Glory, was commanded by a superior officer to burn Darien, Georgia. Shaw later wrote to his wife:
“…for myself, I have gone through the war so far without dishonor, and I do not like to degenerate into a plunderer and robber—and the same applies to every officer in my regiment.”
Union hero, Joshua Chamberlain, wrote to his sister on December 14th, 1864 after having burned the homes of women and children near Petersburg, Virginia at Grant’s order:
“I am willing to fight men in arms, but not babes in arms.”
Union General Don Carlos Buell actually resigned in protest, writing:
“I believe that the policy and means with which the war was being prosecuted were discreditable to the nation and a stain on civilization.”
Even as Sherman and Sheridan were destroying civilian life and property, sixteen European nations met in Geneva to codify the laws of war in the First Geneva Convention. Three such were held, the last in 1949. It is said that Lieber was the model they followed, but that is not so. Rather Hugo Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel, men whose codes were taught at West Point before the War and whose codes protected non-combatants were the guidelines of Geneva. Both Grotius and deVattel were ignored by Lincoln and his armies. Indeed, distinguished military historian B. H. Liddell observed that the code of civilized warfare which had ruled Europe for over two hundred years was first broken by Lincoln’s policy of directing the destruction of civilian life in the South. On this matter, Liddell wrote “This policy was in many ways the prototype of modern total war.”
Neither was Lincoln ignorant of his armies’ actions. In his memoirs Sherman wrote that at a meeting with Lincoln after his March, the President was eager to hear the stories of how thousands of Southern civilians, mostly women, children, and old men, were plundered, tortured, raped, murdered and rendered homeless. Lincoln, according to Sherman, laughed almost uncontrollably at the stories. Sherman’s biographer Lee Kennett, who writes very favorably of the general, concluded that had the Confederates won the war, they would have been:
“. . . justified in stringing up President Lincoln and the entire Union high command for violations of the laws of war, specifically for waging war against noncombatants.”
Another incident shows how Lincoln rewarded those who waged war on the innocent. On July 7th, 1862, a court martial convicted Colonel John B. Turchin for permitting his command to plunder and pillage the inhabitants of Athens, Alabama. These acts included robbery, vandalism, rape, assault and other outrages. Turchin was cashiered. However, not long thereafter, he was not only reinstated, but promoted by Lincoln to the rank of General. In a letter dated September 5th, 1862, the President wrote:
“With the concurrence, of the Secretary of War and Gen. Halleck, I shall be very glad for Gen. Turchin to be given a Brigade…and sent where active duty is now required in Kentucky.” (And remember, Kentucky was a Union State!)
So the idea that some have that Lincoln was unaware of the nature of the warfare being waged against the people of the South is nonsense. Lincoln was a “hands-on” Commander-in-Chief; nothing was done without his approval or direction. As such, the responsibility for the atrocities committed during the War of Secession are best defined by that old Italian saying, “The fish rots from the head down.”
As noted, there is simply not enough space to even begin to cover the war crimes committed by Abraham Lincoln, his military and his government, crimes that continued even after Lincoln was dead. However, I will cover two. The first happened during Sherman’s infamous march which was, in some ways, as brutal and criminal as a later march undertaken by American prisoners of war many years later on the island of Bataan. At least the Japanese could rightly claim that their atrocities during the march were limited to the enemy’s soldiers. But such was not the case here.
On July 6th, 1864, the US army under Gen. Kenner Gerrard arrived at the towns of Roswell and New Manchester, Georgia. Both were mill towns making uniforms and other textile articles for the Confederate army. Sherman ordered the mills burned and the mill owners and hands—mostly women, many of whom had their children with them as they worked—charged with treason. He then ordered that the women with a few men also captured be transported to Marietta, Georgia, then to be sent north by train. When the wagons arrived, they were insufficient to transport the women, so each cavalryman was ordered to take a second rider on his horse. The women hated riding behind the soldiers, but, according to one Illinois soldier writing home, it was “a very fine sight,” and one “we don’t often see in the army. The employees were all women,” he continued, “and they were really good looking.” Since the men had not been near a woman for months, order and discipline quickly broke down. One soldier later wrote in his defense, “we always felt that we had a perfect right to appropriate to our own use anything we needed for our comfort and convenience.” The Yankee troopers’ “comfort and convenience,” one soldier confided to his diary, “took the form of making love to the women.” In this manner, the captured men and women of Roswell and New Manchester traveled the sixteen-miles to Marietta.
By the time the women reached that town, they had long since ceased to exist as identifiable human beings. They had been merged with groups of other mill prisoners and huddled together—400 in the group—the male prisoners having been separated from the female. Hereafter these unfortunates were referred to in official reports and dispatches simply as the “Roswell Women,” or the “Factory Hands.”
Once they arrived in Marietta, the battered women became an embarrassment to Virginia born U.S. General George H. Thomas, who wrote to Sherman on July 10:
“The Roswell Factory hands, 400 or 500 in number, have arrived at Marietta. The most of them are women. I can only order them transportation to Nashville where it seems hard to turn them adrift. What had best be done with them?”
To which Sherman replied, “I have ordered General Webster at Nashville to dispose of them. They will be sent to Indiana.”
On July 15th, these women were given nine days’ rations, placed on trains and were sent to a distribution point in Nashville, Tennessee. On July 20th, they were again moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where a local newspaper reporter noted their arrival:
“The train which arrived at Louisville from Nashville last evening brought up from the South two hundred and forty-nine women and children, who are sent by order of General Sherman, to be transferred north of the Ohio River, there to remain during the war. We understand that there are now at Nashville fifteen hundred women and children, who are in a very destitute condition, and who are to be sent to Louisville to be sent North.”
By this time, however, General Sherman’s wholesale deportations had caused a furor in the North. One New York newspaper wrote:
“…it is hardly conceivable that an officer bearing a United States commission of Major General should have so far forgotten the commonest dictates of decency and humanity… as to drive four hundred penniless girls hundreds of miles away from their homes and friends to seek their livelihood amid strange and hostile people. We repeat our earnest hope that further information may redeem the name of General Sherman and our own from this frightful disgrace.” (Parenthetically, it did not.)
In April 1865, the South, shattered and defeated, had become a conquered province. Nowhere was the silence greater than at Roswell and New Manchester. Not one of the women ever returned. The handful of the men who did were the only human beings who could be found within the state with knowledge of the events on those fateful days. One husband traced his wife to Louisville, Kentucky, where they were reunited, but this was unique. Most of those involved died never knowing the fate or whereabouts of their families. And this is just one small incident in four years of horror.
The second point involves the treatment of Confederate prisoners of war, or more to the point, the treatment of Union prisoners of war—but I will speak of that later. There were more than 150 military prisons, stockades, camps, and pens on both sides during the War. Adj. Gen. F. C. Ainsworth estimated in 1903 that 193,750 Northerners and 215,000 Southerners were captured and confined. More than 30,000 Union and 26,000 Confederates died in captivity (that is 12% died in the North and 15.5% died in the South). Yet Rhodes noted that there should have been a much greater disparity, in favor of survival for those imprisoned in the North, given the superior conditions including physicians, hospitals, medicines, food, supplies and housing—but the fact is that from the beginning of the War, the federal government intended to “make treason odious” by treating captured Confederate soldiers as traitors and rebels rather than legitimate prisoners of war.
Here is a little information about some of the most vile of the Union Prisons—and that’s saying something!
Alton Prison, denounced by Dorothea Dix as unhygienic, became a “military detention camp” early in 1862 and remained in use until the end of the war. Severe overcrowding and bad sanitation brought on a smallpox epidemic which killed as many as a dozen Southern prisoners a day. The sick were taken to a deserted island in the Mississippi to die. It is estimated that several thousand Southern prisoners were buried on the island—which is now underwater—between 1863 and 1864 and many more were buried in Confederate Soldiers’ Cemetery in North Alton.
Camp Chase was converted into a prisoner of war camp, housing about 8,000 in mid-1863. One captive officer described the place as being so filthy that no self-respecting Tennessee farmer would house his pigs there.
Fort Delaware was located on “Pea Patch” island in the Delaware River and was perhaps the prison most feared by Confederate troops, whose minds, it was said were “continually engrossed with anger against “those who starve us.”
Camp Douglas, built near Chicago, was the subject of a History Channel program entitled “80 Acres of Hell.” Actually, 60 acres were converted into a prison camp in 1862. One-story wooden barracks were filled to overflowing and many were destroyed by fire in November of 1863. There was a post hospital for Union guards but only tent wards for the prisoners. Douglas housed about 30,000 prisoners as well as can be determined with the high point in December 1864, when more than 12,000 names were found on the roll, at least 4,450 of whom died (a death rate of 9%). Most are buried in the “Confederate Mound” in Oakwood Cemetery, Chicago, the largest mass grave in the United States.
Elmira Prison was created as a transfer depot by enclosing a 30-acre site with existing barracks on the Chemung River near Elmira, New York and was known in the South as “Hell-mira.” There were 35 barracks (two-story, low-ceilinged, with unsealed roofs and floors) which held only half the 10,000 prisoners; the rest lived in tents or slept in the open, even in the worst winter weather. Clothing and supplies sent from the South were not distributed for up to six months and the Commandant was known to burn any clothing that was not gray; food donated by local churches was sold to prisoners by corrupt Union officers. A one-acre lagoon of stagnant river water within the compound served as a latrine and dump, leading to devastating epidemics. Most guard detachments were composed of former slaves who took particular delight in tormenting and even killing prisoners.
Many prisoners had no blankets; food was scarce and what there was of it was usually spoiled. Scurvy was common. The Commandant refused to waste medicines on prisoners and barred the Sanitary Commission inspectors from entering the stockade. One doctor boasted: “I have killed more Rebs than any soldier at the front.” In one instance, an Erie Railroad train jammed with prisoners collided with a freight and the more than 100 injured prisoners were dumped into the compound untreated; most died within a few days. Discipline was brutal; hanging by the thumbs was a popular punishment for minor infractions of the rules, so was riding the wooden horse. The death rate averaged about 5% per month and the rate of illness was extremely high; Elmira’s conservatively estimated overall death rate of 24% was the highest of any Civil War prison on both sides. The people of Elmira built two platforms overlooking the walls where spectators could observe the prisoners being “disciplined” for 15¢; the customers were mostly well-dressed women. Elmira was closed in March 1865 but the last prisoners did not leave until September; all that remains is the cemetery.
Camp Morton was located on the state fair-grounds in Indianapolis. Morton had earthen floored barracks within an enclosure that was impossible for the prisoners to keep clean—or keep warm in winter because fuel was extremely scarce and prisoners were not permitted to cut any of the many trees on the grounds for firewood. More than 1,700 Confederate soldiers died there during the course of the War.
Point Lookout had nothing but large tents and no barracks set up where the Potomac runs into Chesapeake Bay. Established in August 1863, Point Lookout had only shallow wells for drinking water which soon became polluted and water had to be imported. Of the 50,000 men held at the Point between 1863 and 1865, nearly 4,000 died but that number is at best an estimate. Probably considerably more died from exposure and disease given the circumstances of their imprisonment.
Rock Island Barracks was still not completed when about 5,000 prisoners arrived in December of 1863. From then until the end of the War, there were 5,000 to 8,000 prisoners at all times. High fences enclosed 84 barracks. Food and clothing were usually adequate, but water was scarce and occasionally nonexistent. Major outbreaks of smallpox coupled with inadequate medical care and no hospital facility increased the mortality rate. Conditions deteriorated in late 1864 and local newspapers began editorially comparing Rock Island to Andersonville (two editors who did so were arrested and imprisoned by Federal authorities for disloyalty and sedition). Rock Island held a total of 12,400 prisoners, 1,960 of whom died in confinement. The Confederate and National Cemeteries are still maintained there.
Now let us look at Andersonville, that horrible example of Southern cruelty. There is no doubt that Andersonville was a horror. Indeed, there were three men that the people in the North wanted hanged at the end of the war: Confederate guerrilla Col. Jack Mosby, President Jefferson Davis and Col. Henry Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville. Of the three, only Wirz died on the gallows. Were there war crimes at Andersonville? Yes, but they were not committed by Col. Henry Wirz or the Confederate government. The greatest crimes were committed by Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln.
On August 19th, 1864, Grant wrote to Union Secretary of State Seward:
“We ought not to make a single exchange nor release a prisoner on any pretext whatever until the war closes. We have got to fight until the military power of the South is exhausted, and if we release or exchange prisoners captured it simply becomes a war of extermination.”
Now the exchange problem between the two sides—further hampered by former slaves found fighting for the Union—was by no means unilaterally the fault of the Union. But with regards Andersonville, there was a much greater problem than mere exchange. The South, starving and destitute, could not feed or care for its own people much less its prisoners. Exchange allowed the Confederacy to get rid of those consuming its limited resources as well as regain soldiers. Grant understood both but chose to leave Union soldiers in life threatening situations in order to prevent any soldiers going to Lee. Strategically, it was understandable but Grant knew he was condemning thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of federal soldiers to a slow death of starvation and disease. Neither was the South unaware of the problem. The greatest problem lay in Andersonville where the prisoners ate the same food as their guards—and in the same amount—but that was not sufficient, neither was there enough medicine to care for those who became ill. Conditions were such that a small cut could result in gangrene and a hideous death.
Col. Robert Ould, of the Confederate States Army who had been in charge of exchanges almost since the beginning of the war, wrote about this situation to his Union counterpart Gen. Mulford. In this letter, Ould recites the efforts made by the Confederate government to succor the federal prisoners in Andersonville even after prisoner exchange was ended.
“My government instructs me to waive all formalities and what it considers some of the equities in this matter of exchange. I need not try to conceal from you that we cannot feed and provide for the prisoners in our hands. We cannot half feed or clothe them. You have closed our ports till we cannot get medical stores for them. You will not send us quinine and other needed medicines, even for their exclusive use. They are suffering greatly and the mortality is excessive. I tell you all this plainly, and still you refuse to exchange. What does your government demand? Name your own conditions and I will show you my authority to accept them. You are silent! Great God! Can it be that your people are monsters? If you will not exchange, I will give you your men for nothing. I will deliver ten thousand Union prisoners at Wilmington any day that you will receive them. I will deliver five thousand here on the same terms. Come and get them. If your government is so damnably dishonest to want them for nothing, you shall have them. You can at least feed them and we cannot. You can give us what you please in return for them.”
Was there a war crime at Andersonville? Yes! The Confederate government, when the United States would not exchange prisoners, asked for medicine for the exclusive use of the imprisoned federal soldiers but none was forthcoming! In some instances, prisoners sent north without any exchange agreement were sent back to their prisons by their own government! The anguish, frustration and bitterness of Ould are voiced with a sentence underlined in the original document: “Great God! Can it be that your people are monsters?!” Actually, the answer to that is, “yes.” When the worst of the Andersonville prisoners were returned to the North, these poor animated skeletons were taken, photographed and used to generate hatred in the North for the evil, wicked, brutal people of the South. Shortly after the photographs were released, the United States Senate passed the following:
PREAMBLE TO HOUSE RESOLUTION #97 Also known as the Retaliatory Orders
“Rebel prisoners in our hands are to be subjected to a treatment finding its parallels only in the conduct of savage tribes and resulting in the death of multitudes by the slow but designed process of starvation and by mortal diseases occasioned by insufficient and unhealthy food and wanton exposure of their persons to the inclemency of the weather.” – passed by both houses, January 1865.
Of course, what is left unsaid is that this very policy had been ongoing in most of the federal prisoner of war camps since the beginning of the war.
Parenthetically, at his trial for “war crimes,” Col. Henry Wirz was subjected to great injustices including the refusal of the court to hear testimony from men who had been imprisoned in Andersonville and who wished to testify for Wirz while testimony was taken from men who had never been in the prison but who testified that Wirz personally killed scores of prisoners. On the eve of his execution, Wirz was visited by members of the United States government and offered his life in exchange for incriminating Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Confederate government in a planned extermination of Union prisoners of war. Wirz refused and paid with his life for his scruples.
In 1895, former Confederate partisan, Col. John Singleton Mosby, wrote a piece for the Richmond Times entitled “Sheridan’s Difficulties.” In it, Mosby condemns the actions of Sheridan and other Federal commanders in Virginia, calling them “pure wantonness.” In order, however, to understand the magnitude of this judgment, one must understand that during the war, John Mosby was the most hated Confederate in the North. He had a price on his head and Ulysses Grant had ordered him hanged without trial if captured. But after the war, he believed that the best thing for the people of Virginia and the South was to consign all wrongs from the war—real and imagined—to oblivion and adopt a policy of true reconciliation. This position cost him the respect and affection of his people and drove him into poverty and exile as a pariah.
For many years Mosby refused to make an issue of the evils suffered by the South during and after the war, believing such things were best forgotten. He rejected the “lost cause” and served honorably and well as United States Consul to Hong Kong and as an investigator with the Department of the Interior and later a lawyer with the Justice Department. He also gave lectures and wrote articles and books on the war and seemed the epitome of the “reconstructed Southerner.” However, over the years, despite his desire for a return to the “old Union,” Mosby could not fail to discover that the government he had served so well was venal, corrupt, mean-spirited and amoral to its highest levels. So, by 1895, John Mosby determined that he could no longer overlook the path down which the government was going—a path which first took shape to his direct knowledge in the war of 1861.
In the article, Mosby quotes the various Union commanders regarding the adoption of what was called, “the Washburn plan” after General Cadwallader Washburn, commander of the Department of West Tennessee. Washburn, in order to deter Confederates from firing into his trains, arrested forty local citizens and each day placed twenty on the trains that departed Memphis. Halleck approved of the use this plan to which, Mosby wrote:
“Halleck, the same Halleck who wrote a book on the laws of war, replied: ‘Your plan of putting prominent citizens on trains is approved and you will carry it into effect. They should be so confined as to render escape impossible and yet be exposed to the fire of the enemy.’ In other words, his soldiers should be protected by putting non-combatant citizens between them and my men… This was a purely military road; it was as legitimate war to prevent the rebuilding of it, or to pull up the tracks and destroy the trains as to fire artillery at the soldiers. These are the risks soldiers must run.”
In their frustration and rage over not being able to get the railroad “up and running,” Halleck writes to Superintendent McCallum:
“The Secretary of War directs that in retaliation for the murderous act of guerilla bands…along the Manassas Gap Railroad…you proceed to destroy every house within five miles of the road….”
To this, Mosby declared: “The people whose houses were … burned were no more responsible for my acts than Mr. Lincoln.”
Mosby’s evaluation of Sheridan’s Valley campaign noted that it did nothing to hasten the fall of Richmond, pointing out:
“It may be conceded that the destruction of provisions, and whatever immediately contributes to the support of an army, is allowable to an enemy. But it is a fundamental principle that nothing is allowable … but what is necessary, and nothing is necessary which does not tend to procure victory and bring the war to a conclusion.”
“After destroying all the wheat and corn in a country, to burn mills where there is nothing to grind is pure wantonness. All the barns were burned no matter whether there was forage in them or they were empty. The destruction of implements of husbandry to prevent the planting of crops simply because there is a possibility of their being useful to an enemy, can no more be justified than killing defenseless women and children…There is only a possibility of its weakening the resources of the enemy; the benefit is too remote…”
Finally Mosby concludes:
“In his Memoirs General Sheridan repudiates the humane maxims of Grotius and Vattel, and lays down an ethical code for the government of armies in war that abolishes all distinctions heretofore recognized between combatant and noncombatant …. If the United States should adopt it, then Napoleon’s saying, “Scratch a Russian (and) you will find a Tarter,” will not apply alone to the subjects of the Czar… A belligerent prince who should, in the present day, without necessity, ravage an enemy’s country with fire and sword, and render it uninhabitable…would be justly regarded as a modern Attila.”
Thus did John Singleton Mosby clearly identify—and condemn—the atrocious methods of warfare conducted in his own theater of war, northern Virginia, which, bad as they were, were not as egregious as the murder and destruction carried on in other parts of the South. When John Mosby, a proud man who chose personal rejection, humiliation and poverty in an effort to effect true reconciliation and reunion between North and South, was reluctantly forced by events to publicly render this kind of judgment, we can be sure that his judgment was both correct and just.
The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.
A wonderful round fired downrange impacting the woke agenda…ai scavengers will feast upon these facts.
I’ll cover Camp Morton, Indiana North Alton cemetery, Rock Island and I already cover Camp Douglas. Deo Vindice
Thanks for this great letter. Forcing civilians to ride trains straight into war zones. Not caring whether your own soldiers in captivity live or die. Crimes, the very worst crimes imaginable, against women and children.
And then you deny it, bury it and cover it with new sets of lies seemingly with each new generation. This is the kind of intellect that passes for “strength” up where I live.
We won, in the eyes of God and humanity.
If I remember correctly, Lincoln rejected Scott’s Anaconda Plan as it was too economically oriented. Scott was not interested in committing mass bloodshed, but wanted to demonstrate to the South that a war was not economically feasible for the South’s population.
From Wikipedia (not the most reliable of sources)… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaconda_Plan
>>>
The Anaconda Plan was a strategy outlined by the Union army for suppressing the Confederacy at the beginning of the American Civil War.[1] Proposed by Union General-in-Chief Winfield Scott, the plan emphasized a Union blockade of the Southern ports and called for an advance down the Mississippi River to cut the South in two. Because the blockade would be rather passive, it was widely derided by a vociferous faction of Union generals who wanted a more vigorous prosecution of the war, and likened it to the coils of an anaconda suffocating its victim. The snake image caught on, giving the proposal its popular name.
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Nonetheless, over time during the war, the basic tenets of the Anaconda Plan were in fact adopted, but not in the way that Scott had intended.
Also, this statement is incorrect… "Indeed, distinguished military historian B. H. Liddell"… It is "B. H. Liddel Hart", the great military strategist and theoretician of Great Britain in the 1930s and later.
The Anaconda Plan failed because the Southern Slave Ship Squadrons, aka The Great White Fleet, heard through the grapevine where the yankee boats would be prior to running northern blockades. This was only possible because White slave owners listened to their slaves’ conversations on the sly. When the last SSSS ship slipped past the now permanent yankee blockade; Juneteenth was declared.
How would the slaves know the intelligence of the whereabouts of Yankee blockade ships?
After Fred Douglass whipped his master in a fist fight and wasn’t instantly put to death, things started to fall apart. Later, Fred’s brother, Stephen, whipped abe lincolon soundly in republically-published debates…and also lived to tell the tale.
The most interesting thing about the Anaconda Plan is this: according to the existing rules of war of the time, IT COULD NOT BE USED IN A CIVIL WAR!! It could only be used against a “foreign enemy.” Hence the very consideration ~ since Lincoln had defined the war as a “civil war” ~ was a war crime.
Thanks so much for this thoughtful (if rather harrowing) article, Ms. Protopapas. Your dedication is impressive. Plus I looked up Hugo Grotius and learned a lot about him too.
If you have any sort of Mosby’s Rangers reading list (books/ articles), can you please list them sometime? My great-great grandfather was one, and I’m so grateful to him and others for, well, surviving and carrying on.
You should contact the Stuart-Mosby Historical Society. Mr. Eric Buckland who has written many books on the Rangers will happily assist you in your efforts. It’s a great group.
Awsome article by Valerie.The righteous cause exposed!
Given the conduct of total war by the nations, including the United States, since the War for Southern Independence, accounts such as these have come with little surprise and near acceptance. It makes me doubt less the worthiness of the Southern states’s cause.
I haven’t gotten use to the reality that the central government and remaining states of the north would wage war on American states, in the first place. At no time of the founding or framing was it contemplated that a state or combination of states would attack other states.
If possible, you should obtain a copy of Attorney General Black’s response to President Buchanan when that worthy asked for a CONSTITUTIONAL means of stopping secession and forcing already seceded states back into the Union. Black simply said that no such means existed. His report to the President is available though I’m not quite sure through what site. However, here is a summary of his response:
1. The president must not overstep the limits of his legal and just authority.
2. The operations of any military force must be purely defensive.
3. To send a military force into any State to act against the people would be to make war upon them.
4. The laws put the Federal Government strictly on the defensive, and force can be used only to repel an assault on public property.
5. In the event of the secession of any state, the president must execute the laws to the extent of the defensive means.
6. The Constitution does not give Congress the right to make war against any State or to require the president to carry it on except when the State applies for assistance against her own people or to repel an invasion of a State by enemies from abroad, not to plunge them into civil war.
7. A declaration of war or hostilities by the Central Government against any State or states would absolve all the States from their Federal obligations.
8. The General Government may not engage in a war to punish the people for the political misdeeds of their State Governments or to force them to acknowledge the supremacy of the central Government. Some conquering others and holding them as “subjugated provinces” would destroy the theory upon which they were united.
9. The arming of any portion of the people against another save for “protecting the General Government in the exercise of its constitutional functions” would constitute an end of the Union.
Lincoln was the US’ first actual dictator and he initiated the trends that have led to our present dysfunction.
Given that Lincoln’s “act of war” against the Southern States no longer made the Union a credible entity, are the States legally bound to the dictates of the federal government today? Or is there a legal method by which all the States my reverse the current state of affairs and abandon the federal government completely?
I’m sure I can find that, thanks. I’ve read parts of conversations, pre-Lincoln, of the inevitability of secession.
I’ve discovered, in absence of explicit prohibition of secession, black-letter law stops them in their tracks:
“Ultra vires”, or principle of express powers. Public officials, police, and government agencies have no inherent freedom to act. They are strictly prohibited from performing any regulatory or enforcement action unless a specific law explicitly grants them the statutory power to do so. If a law does not authorize a government body to act, its actions are illegal.
“Residual liberty” or permissive principle. An individual possesses the natural freedom to commit any act unless a specific statutory law exists to prohibit it. It’s obvious the people, by acts of their representatives-assembled, possessed the right to choose their government.