The War Between The States Discussions

There was more than one attempt to provide free confiscated southern land to former slaves and poor whites.
The first attempt was done under Gen. Sherman's Special Field Orders No. 15.
But most all of the land ended up being given back to the original owners after they were granted amnesty by Pres. Johnson.
Several black communities did maintain control of their land, and some families obtained new land by homesteading

Then Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act in June, 1866 giving publicly owned land to freedpeople and white southern loyalists in 5 southern states.
But it only allowed ~6 months for land claims before the act expired.
Free blacks entered about 6,500 claims to homesteads; about 1000 of these eventually resulted in property certificates

There was a 3rd attempt to give away land.
On March 11, 1867, House Speaker Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania introduced a bill (H.R. 29) that outlined a plan for confiscated land in the "confederate States of America."
Section four of the proposed bill explicitly called for land to be distributed to former slaves, but the bill failed.

There was also a movement to provide the same pensions to freedpeople as were provided to disabled civil war veterans but that effort also failed.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2010/summer/slave-pension.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forty_acres_and_a_mule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thaddeus_Stevens

 

From a letter 3 May 1865
"As far as the strategic situation is concerned, at Richmond Grant has achieved a precise replica of the battle of Jena, and with the same result: the whole of the enemy army is trapped. Only he didn’t have so far to march to gather the fruits.
Johnston has now surrendered, too, so I've won my wager of 2 months ago: that by 1 May the Southerners would have no army left. Whoever still offers resistance will be taken in as a brigand, and rightly so. At any rate, Johnson will insist on confiscation of the great estates, which will make the pacification and reorganisation of the South rather more acute. Lincoln would scarcely have insisted on it.
The Southern sympathisers here are consoling themselves for the hypocritical wailing they were obliged to put on over the assassination [of Lincoln], by prophesying that it'll be Grant I, Emperor of America, within 4 weeks. What jackasses they have made of themselves!
Incidentally, their ‘Majesties’ must be absolutely furious that Lincoln’s assassination has made such a colossal impact throughout the world. None of them has yet had such an honour.
Best wishes to your wife and the girls."

 

The peace conference in Feb.,1861 was held after the deep south had seceded but before Lincoln had taken office.
Many politicians headed by Ex-President Tyler, a Virginia plantation owner, discussed how to appease the remaining border states from seceding by holding a peace conference.
Among the proposals was the Critenden Plan which the lame duck Congress and Senate refused to pass.
Hundred's of politiicians were involved in trying to come up with a compromise including by a group of 33 Congressman to immediately admit New Mexico into the Union as a slave state which would have defacto extended the Missouri Compromise line.
But that failed as some southern Democrats also voted to table it.
Tyler was also opposed to the Critenden plan and ended up heading the Virginia secession convention and became a delegate to the Confederate Congress.
He predicted that the formation of the Confederacy would not lead to war.
That was soon proven false after the attack on Sumter, but shows that as a Viriginian, a southern leader and ex-President, he played a major role in making it more likely that war would occur.
At the time he was about 71 years old and died within the next year which leads one to wonder if he was exercising his best judgement..

"On the same day the Peace Conference started, local voters elected Tyler to the Virginia Secession Convention.
He presided over the opening session on February 13, 1861, while the Peace Conference was still under way.
Tyler abandoned hope of compromise and saw secession as the only option, predicting that a clean split of all Southern states would not result in war.
In mid-March he spoke against the Peace Conference resolutions, and on April 4 he voted for secession even when the convention rejected it. On April 17, after the attack on Fort Sumter and Lincoln's call for troops, Tyler voted with the new majority for secession."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tyler#Prelude_to_the_American_Civil_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Conference_of_1861
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden_Compromise

 

Another Virginia President Zachary Taylor was in office California statehood was being considered which would have broken the tie of 15 free and 15 states.
Taylor supported allowing California in as a free state and rejected the Missouri Compromise of 1850.
Northern Representatives who supported the compromise underestimated the ability of the Federal gov't. to enforce the soon to become new Fugitive Slave law which was to be circumvented by many states.

It was during that time that 9 slave states had gathered in Nashville to figure out a compromise as a result of California statehood.
Even though some radicals had urged secession at that time, they ended up proposing that the Missouri Compromise Line of 1820 be extended to the Pacific Ocean which also didn't pass.
It wasn't until after he died in mid-term and Millard Fillmore became President that the Missouri Compromise of 1850 was able to be passed which left a lot of hostility between both sides.

"The situation was further complicated by President Taylor, who was putting forward his own plan. His original recommendation to Congress, half a year earlier, had been simply to admit California as a free state. While this was an element of every genuine compromise plan, Taylor now proposed to simply take no action with regard to the other territories. This was unacceptable to the proponents of a compromise.

In early June, a convention consisting of delegates from nine slave states gathered in Nashville. The radicals among them urged secession if slavery was restricted in any of the new territories, but moderate voices prevailed. The convention put forward a "compromise" position of their own, which involved extending the free-slave boundary agreed in the Missouri Compromise of 1820 to the Pacific Ocean. Such a position could not gain Congressional approval.

President Taylor's death in July 1850 brought Millard Fillmore into office. The new president was open to a compromise that would address the concerns of both sides. At the same time, the Senate leaders who had believed that an omnibus bill would be best, concluded instead that it would be better to present the measure in pieces. Thus, between September 9 and 20, five separate bills were dealt with.

The compromise balanced sectional interests by enacting the following:

1. California was admitted to the Union as a free state.

2. The New Mexico and Utah territories were to decide the question issue by relying on “popular sovereignty," allowing the actual settlers to vote on the issue.

3. Texas lost the New Mexico territory, but received $10 million from the federal government for its loss.

4. The slave trade in the District of Columbia was abolished.

5. A new Fugitive Slave Act was passed.

The Compromise of 1850 generated positive and negative results. Its passage quieted sectional animosities for a few years (until the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854) and held off the Civil War for about 10 years. On the other hand, Northerners were so enraged by the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act that it was impossible to strike future compromises."

https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h79.html

 

A short time after California statehood became a divisive issue, 2 other issues that appeared to have sectional implications were the purchase of land from Mexico which became known as the Gasden Purchase and the proposed route of a transcontinental railroad.

Jefferson Davis was considered to be a staunch advocate of both a southern railroad route and buying land from Mexico including southern California if possible.
One can only guess if he was also interested in securing both for the purpose of extending slavery and southern business interests.
South Carolina railroad magnate and seccessionist Sam Gasden made overtures to divide California into 2 states, north and south, and even asked California's permission to bring slaves there for farming purposes.

"The Senate conducted a ratification debate marked by much bitterness. Southern politicians badly wanted to approve the treaty and secure their railroad route. Northern interests objected to any more land that could become slave territory and did not want to give any support to the southern railroad idea. The treaty was eventually ratified by a very close vote in 1854." --->>> https://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h82.html

"The administration of President Pierce, strongly influenced by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, saw an opportunity to acquire land for the railroad, as well as to acquire significant other territory from northern Mexico.[5] In those years, the debate over slavery in the United States entered into many other debates, as the acquisition of new territory opened the question of whether it would be slave or free territory; in this case, the debate over slavery ended progress on construction of a southern transcontinental rail line until the early 1880s, although the preferred land became part of the nation and was used as intended after the Civil War.[

James Gadsden and California

Gadsden supported nullification in 1831. When California was admitted to the Union as a free state in 1850, he advocated secession by South Carolina. Gadsden considered slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation".[12]

When the secession proposal failed, Gadsden worked with his cousin Isaac Edward Holmes, a lawyer in San Francisco since 1851, and California state senator Thomas Jefferson Green, in an attempt to divide California into northern and southern portions and proposed that the southern part allow slavery. Gadsden planned to establish a slave-holding colony there based on rice, cotton, and sugar, and wanted to use slave labor to build a railroad and highway that originated in either San Antonio or the Red River valley. The railway or highway would transport people to the California gold fields. Toward this end, on December 31, 1851, Gadsden asked Green to secure from the California state legislature a large land grant located between the 34th and 36th parallels, along the proposed dividing line for the two California states.[15]

A few months later, Gadsden and 1,200 potential settlers from South Carolina and Florida submitted a petition to the California legislature for permanent citizenship and permission to establish a rural district that would be farmed by "not less than Two Thousand of their African Domestics". The petition stimulated some debate, but it finally died in committee."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_Purchase#James_Gadsden_and_California

 

Still arguing over slavery while the purposes behind the creation of the schism and conflict are ignored.
Go for it!

A book for those with wide comfort zones:
To The Victor Go The Myths & Monuments : the history of the first 100 years of the war against God and the Constitution, 1776-1876, and its modern impact.

 

All your recommendations seem to come from one source library, and a self serving one at that.
I would suggest reading writings from the period and not 20th century agenda driven interpretations if one truly wants to learn history. Explore the minds and writings of those who lived the history, not those who live today.

 

I think there is an important argument to be made for the impact that religion had on the period, it was and driving and polarizing force on both sides, but it is not a topic we can discuss here, so it is irrelevant.

 

"While a great deal has been written about the major battlefield leaders and conflicts of the American Civil War, military policy and its role on the home front and especially its impact on the dissenting population living in the Confederacy has not received the same careful attention. Only recently have scholars begun to reevaluate the wartime role of southern unionists who resisted the Confederate government."

In the spring of 1861, forty-nine year old Roland Gooch, a white farmer who resided in Wake County, North Carolina, experienced what must have been some of the most terrifying hours of his life. Several months earlier during the Presidential election of November 1860 Gooch went to the polls and optimistically cast his ballot for Constitutional Union Party Presidential candidate John Bell of Tennessee. Bell was the man Gooch believed could stop already boiling sectional tensions between the northern and southern states from spilling out of a political cauldron and onto the battlefield. But Republican anti-slavery candidate Abraham Lincoln won that election and in response South Carolina and six of her sister states seceded. Later that next February, as seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama to found the Confederate States of America, Gooch followed up his earlier vote with one against a North Carolina secession convention, an initiative that failed to pass in a statewide referendum. But after President Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to put down a rebellion in the seceding states following the fall of Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina Harbor that April, many North Carolinians had had enough of what they perceived as northern coercion. Secessionists living in North Carolina were agitated and their numbers were rapidly growing. In May, secessionists got what they wanted when a hastily assembled North Carolina convention adopted an ordinance of 18 secession and took the state out of the Union. Men and women like Roland Gooch were left in a precarious position in their home communities. “I was arrested by a Vigilance Committee of my neighborhood because I cursed the war,” Gooch later recounted, “because I was a Union[ist].”

https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/myers_barton_a_200905_phd.pdf

 

Slaves were not the only ones who were liberated by Northern soldiers.

The Southern Unionists were referred to in Henry Clay Work’s song Marching Through Georgia:


"Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia."

 

This post is totally removed from the time period specified by Zonie, waaay back at the start of this thread, but it is directly connected to the War and its aftermath - and includes an account of a man who served with BOTH sides in the War, and his Daughter - who is STILL collecting a Civil War Pension for his Service.

https://rare.us/rare-news/history/civil-war-pension/

I sure hope that link works...

Richard/Grumpa

PS: Zonie, feel free to move this, I just think the thread could use a little respite from all the heavy debate.

 

I wonder what tory feelings in America would have been had the rebels been defeated.

 

Trying to get back on track, when was the Model 1861 musket developed, and by who (or whom, as the case may be)? I do know that it was adopted in 1861, AND that my first rifle was one of the tens of thousands made. But I have always wondered about the design and "figuring it all out". Was the Enfield designed at the same time? How was the .577 caliber adopted? Both were wonderful in their performance, for the day and time.

 

That's not "on track", it's off track and off topic of this thread. Perhaps you should start a new topic/thread in the Percussion rifles forum or do a search for an existing springfield or enfield topic. Sounds like you have some interesting questions.

 

I don't quite understand your question Tenn, are you talking in a post civil war context or revolutionary war context. The latter is unrelated.

 

Even before the Declaration of Independence, slavery had already become one of the most important domestic political issues and would remain that way up until the end of the civil war and the passage of the post war Amendments.
After all, Jefferson was the champion of states rights and even he believed that the nation might eventually go to war to bring an end to it.
Since you don't seem to agree then please let us know what you think caused the civil war.

Jefferson wrote:

"In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

In fact, Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration did recognize the issue of slavery. In it, he stated that King George had "waged cruel War against Nature itself, violating its most sacred Rights of Life and Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable Death, in their Transportation thither." Why were this and subsequent passages on slavery removed?

Those who drafted the Declaration believed that it was better to remove the section dealing with slavery than risk a long debate over the issue of slavery. They needed the support for independence from the southern states. The clause itself was stricken out at the request of delegates from South Carolina, and Georgia, but with the agreement of New England states. The delegates recognized that the Declaration was going to result in war with England and that if the colonies were not united, they would not prevail. It was too big an issue for thirteen separate and independent colonies to tackle before they had even formed a country or won independence from England.

At the same time, the Founders knew that eventually slavery had to be ended.

On many occasions, the Founders spoke and wrote statements showing they wanted slavery abolished gradually. That way, they could keep the new country intact while doing so. Yet, not doing anything about slavery was postponing a day of reckoning. The Founders knew that not taking any action would ultimately put the country in grave danger.

Thomas Jefferson, the most difficult of the founders to comprehend, twice tried to bring emancipation, yet he also held slaves until his death. His words here reveal his inner conflict about the issue:

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest."
--->>> http://www.ushistory.org/declaration/lessonplan/slavery.html

Also see: --->>> https://www.monticello.org/slavery-at-monticello/liberty-slavery

 

Grant wrote in his memoirs;

"There has always been great conflict of opinion as to the number of troops engaged in every battle, or all important battles, fought between the sections, the south magnifying the number of Union troops engaged and belittling their own.
Northern writer have fallen, in many instances into the same error. I have often heard gentlemen, who were thoroughly loyal to the union speak of what a splendid fight the south made and successfully continued for four years before yielding of their 12 million people against our twenty, and of the twelve four being colored slaves, non-combatants. I will add to their argument, We had many regiments of brave and loyal men who volunteered under great difficulty from the twelve million belonging to the South."

 

Only two cultures fighting for political freedom. Accept in the south the general population threw greater level of support to their cause.

 

Carbon6, I do strongly feel that it is an appropriate topic for a Forum entitled "The War Between the States".
No one has told me that you are a moderator, and I stand by my questions for this Forum. Much better to talk about the weapons used, and how they came to be, than the current situation politically, and how the Civil War is affecting that.
If the moderator tells me that it is an inappropriate place, I shall quite happily move the questions that obviously "offend" you.

 

It seems that the development of military rifles were based on improvements over previous [Springfield] models.
In this case the 1861 was an improvement over the 1855 which were also rifles and made to shoot the newly designed mini balls which were tested to be more accurate at longer range than .69 caliber round balls from a smoothbore.

"The smoothbore barrel and inaccurate round ball were also being replaced by rifled barrels and the newly invented Minié ball. This increased the typical effective range of a musket from about fifty yards (46 m) to several hundred yards. The Model 1855 had an effective range of 500 yards (460 m) and was deadly to over 1,000 yards (910 m).[2]

The barrel on the Model 1855 was .58 caliber, which was smaller than previous muskets. The Model 1816 Musket and all of its derivatives up through the Model 1842 Musket had been .69 caliber, but tests conducted by the U.S. Army showed that the smaller .58 caliber was more accurate when used with a Minié ball." --->>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1855

If you read the Wiki article about the 1861, it will provide words in blue that are links to other Wiki articles that provide additional clues to investigate about US military weapon and bullet technology development.--->>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1861

If I am not mistaken, I have read an article about the development of the mini ball.
I think that it was invented in concert with the person who invented the first wooden sabot and possibly the perfection of rifling.
At some point, the mini ball became more perfected without needing to use a sabot.
But I think that this goes beyond the scope of your question.

The mini ball brings you here:--->>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minié_ball

Which in turn brings you to Henri-Gustave Delvigne and the development of Cylindro-conical bullets and also wooden sabots:--->>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Gustave_Delvigne