“whiskey-drinking odor about it”

splitting rails, a flatboat … just missing the whiskey

150 years ago today The New-York Times praised Abraham Lincoln’s letter to James Conkling defending his Emancipation Proclamation and the use of black troops to fight the rebellion. Mr. Conkling read the letter to a pro-Union mass meeting in Springfield, Illinois on September 3. 150 years ago today the Richmond Daily Dispatch printed and reviewed the same letter. The Times compared President Lincoln to George Washington; The Dispatch compared him to Ghengis Khan.

From the Richmond Daily Dispatch September 7, 1863:

Lincoln’s letter.

–The enemies of Mr. Lincoln have sometimes taken occasion to say that papers presented to the world with his signature attached, were not written by him. We think no man will be found of a nature so skeptical as to doubt that this letter is genuine. It has a flat-boat, rail-splitting, whiskey-drinking odor about it which allows of no mistake with regard to its origin.–We doubt whether any other man in his dominions could have written exactly such a letter. To find one who could come nearest to it, we should be compelled to pass in review the whole army of flat-boatmen that once made the Mississippi and the Ohio vocal with ribald jests and obscene songs.

“utterly abolishes the Constitution for the sake of preserving it”

In the days of the Union it was fashionable to defend every infringement of the Constitution by reference to the general welfare clause. That was an enactment so wide and indefinite in its signification that it was supposed to cover every usurpation and justify every violence. It was the entrance by which John Quincy Adams said he could drive a wagon and team through the Constitution. Lincoln scorns to take shelter under any law of indefinite signification. He is a military despot, and he regards his sword knot as a better warrant for his actions than any law that ever was enacted. He claims the right to emancipate our slaves, although their possession is guaranteed by the very Constitution, for the restoration of which he professes to be now fighting — under his authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States! This is the boldest avowal of the existence of a military despotism we have yet seen. It places the property of every man in Yankeedom, as well as the Confederacy, absolutely at his disposal, whenever he may think proper to denounce such man as an enemy. The most striking feature of the claim is, that it utterly abolishes the Constitution for the sake of preserving it. He and his party still regard, or affect to regard, the people of the Confederacy as citizens of the Union. If so, they are under the protection of the laws of the Union. The laws of the Union prescribe trial by jury for the crime of treason, and condemnation only upon proof of guilt satisfactory to such jury, they take especial care to repudiate all attainder of blood, and forfeiture of every kind. Yet here is a President who undertakes, by a simple proclamation, to do what the Constitution does not allow to be done in any case, under any circumstances.

total war

His rule of warfare would have suited Timour or Genghis Khan, and was extensively acted upon by those enlightened models. But it has been repudiated by every Christian people for two hundred years. The last that followed it was Marshal Turenne, when he ravaged the Palatinate with fire and sword; by which act he doubtless damned his own soul, and earned for himself the execration of posterity throughout the civilized world. Lincoln, however, but avows the principle on which his plunderers have all along been acting. Establish the principle that it is lawful to destroy everything which can be useful to an enemy, and you justify the utter destruction of every country into which an enemy may penetrate. Houses, mills, barns, growing crops, cattle, horses, sheep, agricultural implements, cities, towns, villages, everything which can support life or be the subject of property, is useful to an enemy. We thus find the ruler of a people, calling themselves free and enlightened, enunciating doctrines which would disgrace the Sepoys, and which even in the East have never been acted on since the day when Hyde Ally destroyed the Carnatic.

relying on negro valor?

The letter closes with the most humiliating confession, or rather avowal, that ever covered a nation with shame. The mighty Empire of Yankee Doodle, numbering 20,000,000 of stationary inhabitants, and an untold number of immigrants, after trying in vain for two years and a half to crush a people not one-fourth part as numerous as themselves, is indebted, according to its chief, for its most important victory to the valor of negroes. But for these negroes, we are allowed to infer, the Yankees would have been driven like whipped hounds, yelling and screaming, before the Confederates. If there is a more shameful avowal upon record we never saw it. It proves exactly what we have always said that the Yankee is inferior to the negro, and if Gibbon had known anything of the Yankee he would never have said that the negro race is inferior to the white race, without putting in a salvo for the infinite degradation of Yankee Doodle.

Genghis Khan’s “campaigns were often accompanied by wholesale massacres of the civilian populations.”

General Don Carlos Buell court-martialed Ivan Turchaninov after his troops ransacked Athens, Alabama. President Lincoln promoted Turchaninov (anglicized as Turchin) to the rank of Brigadier General before the court-martial was completed.

The political cartoons from London Punch can be viewed at Project Gutenberg