EDITOR’S NOTE: This article may include historical materials that could contain offensive language or negative stereotypes. Such materials must be viewed in the context of the relevant time period. The Georgetown Times does not endorse the views expressed in such materials.
By Tom Rubillo
Repeating an important fact from the outset of this series: No one is responsible for the actions of their ancestors. Whatever blame is to be assigned for past deeds, that blame falls only on the actors, not their offspring. “Taint of blood” went out with the Magna Carta.
That said, we nonetheless live in a society that is the product of the ideas, beliefs, biases, ambitions, fears and actions of those who went before us. All of those still resonate, some more than others. They built America. They are what we’ve become. They continue to affect how we get along together as neighbors. They determine how our nation gets on in the world.
One legacy of times past has caused more trouble in American society than most. It is racism. Centuries of brutal captivity in America were followed by the eras of the “Black codes”, “Jim Crow”, “white supremacy,” separate-but-equal [sic] segregation, and, ultimately, grudged integration of more recent years. The attitudes and acts from those decades hardened the hearts and heads of many, leaving fears, suspicions and resentments behind. That wariness may be easing over time, but much of it remains.
The subject here is racism. Discussion starts with slavery.
By modern standards of international law, slavery is a crime against humanity. Before 1865, it was legal in America. Legality and morality often differ. It is the same with business.
The practice would not have existed in America without men of European ancestry in places like Liverpool and Rotterdam on one side of the Atlantic and Boston and Philadelphia on the other side being ruthless, cruel and greedy enough to be willing to profit from human misery.
Colonial ship owners and their agents made enormous fortunes from the African slave trade before 1808 when their barbarous trade was banned. In response to that embargo, these same men simply shifted routes to transport European refugees fleeing from starvation, war and oppression to America’s emerging large cities. On arrival, many among those “huddled masses” of “wretched refuse” (as identified in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty) would end up at hard labor for subsistence wages in the dank and dangerous factories, mines and sweatshops of the Northeast during early Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, the “peculiar institution” of slavery would not have survived formation of the new United States of America without being allowed to do so by the Framers of the Constitution. Those Founding Fathers did not ban it. Many of them owned, worked and profited by the labor of slaves. As far as they went in the attempt to merge law and morality was to ban importation of slaves after 1808. Owning, breeding, or working captive people like farm animals remained legal. Those slaves already in America (and, by law, their progeny) were classified by the authors of the Constitution as “other persons” who counted only as two-thirds human in the federal census. That accounting was not for the purpose of conferring legal rights or protection. It was used exclusively to pad the numbers of slave owners in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Along these same lines, through the entire antebellum period, northern banks extended credit to southern planters and extended mortgages on southern plantations. Those same banks held and used southern deposits and profits earned by the labor of slaves. Wall Street sold stocks, bonds and other securities to plantation owners, generating lots of fees and bonuses in the process. Northern insurance companies indemnified plantation owners from financial loss when slaves were injured or died (but not if emancipated). Northern mills spun southern cotton into cloth sold around the world, all to the great profit of southern planters and northern industrialists.
In short, lots of money flowed through wealthy white hands at the expense of enslaved and exploited people in America before 1865. That money coagulated around places like Newport, R.I. where, each summer, the privileged from both North and South mingled, arguing about which one abused their minions more than the other. Eventually, they all got on high horses. But the truth be known, slavery was always a national sin, not just a southern one. The Civil War, punished (and began to atone) for it at the cost of a lot of blood, innocent and otherwise while ruthless, cruel and greedy men of the era profited (or, more accurately, profiteered) from the conflict and its aftermath.
Slave auction
There is a story told about Abraham Lincoln. It reveals something about what motivated him to oppose slavery.
While still a curious young man, Lincoln attended a slave auction at the invitation of a friend. There, a young pretty girl was stripped naked and put on the auction block. She was pinched, pawed and probed by prospective buyers, all amidst crude remarks. The adolescent was emotionally overwhelmed and extremely distraught throughout the shamefully debasing, humiliating mistreatment of her at the hands of lecherous strangers.
Lincoln is reported to have been disgusted by the depravity and indecency of it all, saying something like “If I ever get a chance to do it, I’ll hit it [slavery] hard.”
This, and many other stories and comments Lincoln made, were repeated by both friend and foe during his Presidential campaign, albeit with a different spin from each side. Among other things, Lincoln supported calls for gradual emancipation and with those set free being shipped back to Africa. Entitlement to fair compensation because of an official “taking” of “property” was raised.
Southern slave holders did not like any part of what Lincoln was saying. They were not prepared to acknowledge that they were doing anything wrong by owning slaves. By this time, their mantra had become that African people were savages who had been tamed. Slave owners had actually improved these primitive people by putting them to good use on the plantations. Beyond that, slaves had no ability to take care of themselves. They actually needed their owner’s protection to survive. All that, and besides, slaves never had to worry about being unemployed, like those huddled masses of immigrants living in poverty in the North.
(That’s actually what was said. There’s a poem entitled “The Hireling and the Slave” by William J. Grayson that reads, in part:
If bound to the daily labour while he lives,
His is the daily bread that labour gives;
Guarded from want,
from beggary secure,
He never feels what Hireling crowds endure,
Nor knows, like them, in hopeless want to crave,
For wife and child,
the comforts of the slave,
Or the sad thought that, when about to die,
He leaves them to the world’s cold charity, [chara-tie?]
And sees them forced to seek the poor-house door
The last, sad, hated refuge of the poor.
No kidding. That’s what was being said: Slaves had it easy. They had job security with benefits.
The hard fact was that all working people were being exploited by the profit motive spinning out of control in the free-for-all economics of the times. Northern factories had a constant tide of immigrants to exploit. Slave owners had forced labor to rely on to reap their profits.
By 1861, there were around three million slaves in America. The average auction price for each was around $400. That added up to a $1,200,000,000+ investment in misery. Where could the federal government raise enough money for a federal bail-out that large? And where could planters get replacement labor to tend their plantations? Poor whites could be worked, but not whipped. Unlike slaves, white workers had the right of self-defense. That, and they wanted to be paid with cash, not bought off with scrip for a plantation store, meager provisions or empty promises. Or would they...?
What would they do without slaves?
All this kept plantation owners awake at night — those things, and the nagging fear that they might be poisoned at the dinner table or murdered in their beds in the middle of the night by those they thought they had the right to use and abuse.
Threats of secession should Lincoln be elected grew louder and louder. Lincoln won anyway. Not watching what he wished for, South Carolina Governor Francis W. Pickens proclaimed that “I would be willing to appeal to the gods of battle if need be to cover the state with ruin, conflagration and blood rather than submit.”
Secession
On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina General Assembly met and voted to secede from the Union. Three Georgetown planters signed the ordinance of secession: Samuel Taylor Atkinson and Francis Simons, both of Prince George Parish, and John Izard Middleton of All Saints Parish.
At this point in historical time, fewer than half of South Carolina’s white population owned slaves. Most slaves worked a relatively small number of large rice plantations in the low country and cotton plantations in the midlands. Many of Georgetown County’s river plantations were worked by hundreds of slaves. One planter on the Waccamaw Neck had more than 1,000.
Further down the food chain, white working class men everywhere had a stake in the outcome of the calamity that loomed. They would have to do the fighting and most of the dying. But, as to them, there was another practical outcome should slavery come to an end.
Many slaves were skilled mechanics and craftsmen. Many owners rented those skilled workers out as day labor. Prices of this labor-for-hire were much lower than free carpenters, smiths, masons and others skilled mechanics and craftsmen could afford to charge. This cutthroat pricing by wealthy planters was killing free white labor. For them, emancipation would result in free and open competition for work between everyone. All workmen, regardless of color, would be faced with the same economic realities. Everyone needed to earn a living. Predatory pricing of “outsourced” slave labor would end.
Class differences in economic interests or perceptions of social status are always touchy subjects to raise. Rather than emphasize these sorts of anomalies, in order to attract poorer, non-slave owning white men to join their cause, wealthy planters made blatantly racist appeals. It was one of the tactics that Georgetown’s own James Hamilton and his States Rights and Free Trade Association (SRFTA) used. Another was hothead Hamilton’s quick temper and accuracy with dueling pistols aimed at those who publicly disagreed with him. To him, dissent was a personal insult — a matter of honor, not opinion. Disagreement meant dueling to him. After a while, people stopped disagreeing.
Avoiding economics, Hamilton and his SRFTA organization, invited white “mechanics” to join their cause, sponsoring monthly meetings at which drink and stomachs full of bull stew were served. One surviving example is the oration of planter, John Townsend of Edisto, who boasted:
“In no country in the world does the poor white man, whether slaveholder or non-slaveholder, occupy so enviable a position as in the slaveholding States of the South. His color admits him to social and civil privileges which the white man enjoys nowhere else … [T]he status and color of the black race becomes the badge of inferiority, and the poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color.”
Rich man, poor man
There was a call to arms, with slaves included as unarmed sappers to clear paths, build roads, construct earthworks or other fortifications and the like. According to Dr. Walter Edgar, South Carolina’s preeminent historian, South Carolina’s draft law had more exemptions than those of any of the other Confederate States. Among other things, draftees with enough money could hire a substitute to fight for them. Some 791 well-heeled South Carolinians took advantage of this exemption.
Many other wealthier draft age men hid behind what Dr. Edgar described as the “twenty-nigger” exemption crafted by slave owning South Carolina legislators. As the number in its disrespectful name implies, it allowed draftees with twenty or more slaves to dodge the draft entirely, leaving other, slaveless souls to take their place in harm’s way.
What was “a rich man’s war” quickly became “a poor man’s fight.” Somehow, things often seem to work out that way.
In Georgetown, 125 local young men marched off with the Georgetown Rifle Guards. Only 10 of them survived the war without injury. Others who returned carried lifelong disabilities to their bodies, minds and spirits. Post-Traumatic Stress is what it is called these days.
The names of many local men who were injured or killed appear on the base of the Confederate War Memorial in the Baptist Cemetery at the intersection of Screven and Church Streets in Georgetown. There it reads:
Company A, Georgetown Rifle Guards
Captain C. W. Weston, Commanding
***
Captain C. C. White, promoted from Lieutenant for distinguished gallantry, but wounded at Atlanta on July 22, 1864, disabled and honorably discharged
1st Lt. O. P. Richardson, mortally wounded at Atlanta on July 22, 1864.
2nd Lt. J. P. Richardson, who was also mortally wounded with his kinsman at the same time and place.
2nd Lt. J. L. Richardson, was also wounded at Atlanta as his kindred were dying.
1st Sgt. J. F. LeReborr, killed at Atlanta.
Bugler C. Tabler, listed as missing in action.
Pvt. James Bostic, killed at Atlanta.
Pvt. T.J. Bourne, wounded and died, Macon, Mississippi.
Pvt. G. Cook, killed at Atlanta.
Pvt. D. M. Cook, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. I. M. Cook, captured at Murfreesboro and never returned.
Pvt. J. Clarkson, wounded at Murfreesboro and honorably discharged [probably disabled).
Pvt. B. A. Deal, wounded at Atlanta.
Pvt. S. C. David, captured at Missionary Ridge.
Pvt. E. C. Ellis, wounded at Atlanta, disabled and honorably discharged.
Pvt. Washington Emanuel, died of wounds received in Atlanta.
Pvt. W. G. Gamble, wounded at Corinth and killed at Bentonville, N.C.
Pvt. J. Gamble, wounded at Chickamauga and disabled and honorably discharged.
Pvt. S. D. Goulds, wounded at Murfreesboro, Chickamauga and again at Atlanta
Pvt. T.J. Harrison, killed at Murfreesboro.
Pvt. S. Henney, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. J. E. Holmes, wounded at Murfreesboro, Atlanta and Franklin.
Pvt. J. S. June, killed at Atlanta.
Pvt. W. H.J. Lawrimore, wounded at Atlanta.
Pvt. T. A. Mathews, killed at Atlanta.
Pvt. J. W. McCormick, wounded at Murfreesboro and again at Atlanta.
Pvt. F. S. McCants, killed at Nashville.
Pvt. J.J. Morris, wounded at Atlanta.
Pvt. J. McLawhor, wounded at Atlanta.
Pvt. James McMulken, killed at Murfreesboro.
Pvt. W. C. Ogburn, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. E. T. Porter, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. L. H. Piskin, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. J. J. Richardson, captured at Missionary Ridge.
Pvt. W. Stanners, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. A. B. Skipper, died of wounds received at Chickamauga.
Pvt. R. W. Singley, wounded at Atlanta.
Pvt. L. G. W. Shaw, wounded at Atlanta and honorably discharged [probably disabled.]
Pvt. I. D. Singletary, wounded at Atlanta.
Pvt. J. B. Thomas, captured at Missionary Ridge.
Pvt. G. C. Ward, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. J.D. West, wounded at Chickamauga.
Pvt. W. H. West, captured at Murfreesboro.
Pvt. T. E. Williamson, killed at Murfreesboro
Pvt. C. F. S. Wright, wounded at Atlanta.
The parents, wives, sweethearts, and other kindred of each of these soldiers mourned. So did those of the dead, wounded and missing who fought for the North. They included the family of John Hazzard, a member of the United States Navy who died when, after Georgetown’s surrender, the U.S.S. Harvest Moon was sabotaged and sunk.
At war’s end, shared heartbreak is what all families in America had in common. Anguish respects no political, regional, ethnic, cultural or color lines. Emotional pain cuts deeply into the souls of all.
All totaled, 600,000+ soldiers died in the Civil War. That total is greater than the combined American fatalities in all other wars this nation has ever fought, both before and since. Millions were wounded, scarred, maimed and haunted.
It was all a very high price to pay. Whatever reasons given for fighting by either side, the war actually resulted in both (1) preserving the nation and (2) putting an end to the practice of slavery. It settled the nagging problem the Founding Fathers had left behind. That institution would no longer exist.
The problem was no one had given a lot of thought to what was to follow emancipation.
“Oppression makes a wise man mad.” Ecclesiastes, 7:7. Everywhere, every time.
Tom Rubillo used to practice law, but is now retired. He has held public office, taught government, ethics and law at area colleges and has published several books. The episodes written in connection with this project will be, at its conclusion, available in one volume, or at least that is his best laid plan.