Art–– All officers or persons in the military or naval service of the United States are prohibited from employing any of the forces under their respective commands for the purpose of returning fugitives from service or labor who may have escaped from any persons to whom such service or labor is claimed to be due, and any officer who should be found guilty by a court-martial of violating this article shall be dismissed from the service.

            Sec. 2. And be it further enacted, That this act shall take effect from and after its passage.” Also the ninth and tenth sections of an act entitled  “An act to suppress insurrection, to punish treason and rebellion, to seize and confiscate the property of rebels, and for other purposes,” approved July 17, 1862, and which sections are in the words and figures following:

            Sec. 9. And be it further enacted that all slaves of persons who shall hereafter be engaged in rebellion against the Government of the United States, or who shall in any way give aid or comfort thereto, escaping from such persons and taking refuge within the lines of the army, and all slaves captured from such persons or deserted by them and coming under the control of the Government of the United States, and all slaves of such persons found on (or) being within any place occupied by rebel forces and afterwards occupied by the forces of the United States, shall be deemed captives of war and shall be forever free of their servitude and not again held as slaves.

            Sec. 10. And be it further enacted, that no slave escaping into any State, Territory, or the District of Columbia from any other State shall be delivered up or in any way impeded or hindered of his liberty except for crime or some offense against the laws, unless the person claiming said fugitive shall first make oath that the person to whom the labor or service of such fugitive is alleged to be due is his lawful owner and has not borne arms against the United States in the present rebellion nor in any way given aid and comfort thereto; and no person engaged in the military or naval service of the United States shall, under any pretense whatever, assume to decide on the validity of the claim of any person to the service or labor of any such person to the claimant on pain of being dismissed from the service.” And I do hereby enjoin upon and order all persons engaged in the military and naval service of the United States to observe, obey, and enforce within their respective spheres of the act and sections above recited.

            And the Executive will in due time recommend that all citizens of the United States who shall have remained loyal thereto throughout the rebellion shall, upon the restoration of the constitutional relation between the United States and their respective States and people, if that relation shall have been suspended or disturbed, be compensated for all losses by acts of the United States, including the loss of slaves.

            In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

            Done at the City of Washington, this 22d day of September, A. D. 1862 and of the Independence of the United States the eighty-seventh.

                                                                                                                                Abraham Lincoln

(Seal)

By The President:

            William H. Seward, Secretary of State.

            Taken from”A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789 - 1897, published by authority of Congress by James D. Richardson, a Representative from the State Of Tennessee, Volume VI, Page 96.

(This is the one that really flew to the outside world and was published)

By the President of the United States of America.

 

A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas on the 22d day of September, A. D.1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

            “That on the 1^st day of January, A. D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.

            That the Executive will on the 1^st day of January aforesaid, by proclamation, designated the States and parts of States, if any, in which the people thereof, respectively, shall be in rebellion against the United States; and the fact that any State or the people thereof shall on that day be in good faith represented in the Congress of the United States by members chosen thereto at elections wherein a majority of the qualified voters of such States shall have participated shall, in the absence of strong countervailing testimony, be deemed conclusive evidence that such State and the people thereof are not in rebellion against the United States.”

            Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and Government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion, do, on this 1^st day of January, A. D.1863, and in accordance with my purpose so to do, publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof, respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana (except the parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. James, Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the city of New Orleans), Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Anne, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth), and which excepted parts are for the present left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

            And by virtue of the power and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are now and henceforward shall be free, and that the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons.

            And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that in all cases when allowed they labor faithfully for reasonable wages

            And I further declare and make known that such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.

            And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.

            In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. (Seal)  Done at the city of Washington, on this 1^st day of January, A. D. 1863, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.

                                                                                                                                Abraham Lincoln

By the President:

            William H. Seward,  Secretary of State

            Taken from “A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789 - 1897, published by authority of Congress by James D. Richardson, a Representative from the State of Tennessee, Volume VI, Page 157

 

******************************

 

04 B            Treatment of  prisoners IN THE CONFEDERACY

FROM THE GRAY BOOK, CHARLES H. SMITH, CDR.

GENERAL HQ, BOX 5164, SOUTHERN DIV,

HATTIESBURG, MS, 39401, C.S.A..

            New England citizens were traders by instinct and profession, ad with the birth of commerce in the new world they eagerly turned to the high profits of the African slave trade and made it a regular business.  The “Hartford Courant” in an issue of July, 1916, said, “Northern rum had much to do with the extension of slavery in the South (Connecticut) as well as in Boston, made snug fortunes for themselves by sending rum to Africa to be exchanged for slaves and then selling the slaves to the planters of Southern states. 

            Rhode Island at an early date had 150 vessels engaged in the slave trade, while at a later date, when New York had loomed to the front of the trade, the New York “Journal of Commerce” is quoted as saying, “Few of our readers are aware of the extent to which this infernal traffic is carried on vessels clearing from New York and down town merchants of wealth and respectability are engaged extensively in buying and selling African negroes, and have been for an indefinite number oh years.”

            As early as 1711 a slave market was established in New York City in the neighborhood of Wall Street where slaves from Africa were brought to supply the Southern market.  There was another prominent slave market in Boston.  The slaves were hurried into the South as fast as possible as hundreds died from cold and exposure and the sudden change from a tropic African climate to a bleak Northern temperature.  The United States Dept. Marshall for that New York district reported in 1856 that the “business of fitting out slavers was never prosecuted with greater energy than at present” In a year and a half preceding the War Between The States eighty five slave trading vessels are reported as fitting out in New York harbor and DuBois writes that, “from 1850 to 1860 the fitting out of slavers became a flourishing business in the United States and centered in New York City.

            Although Massachusetts and New York were thus prominent in the business of enslaving and importing Africans and selling them to South America and the Southern colonies, and later th Southern states in the Union, other parts of New England, took most prominent part in the slave trade.  Indeed, in the “Reminiscenses of Samuel Hopkins,” Rhode Island is said to have been “more deeply interested in the slave trade than any other colony in New England and has enslaved more Africans.”

            Thus beginning with that first slave ship of this country, the “Desire” of Marblehead, Mass., the slave trade flourished in New England and New York.  The favorite method was to exchange rum for negroes and to sell the negroes to the Southern plantations.  Federal laws were powerless to hold in check the keenness for this profitable traffic in human flesh.  As late as 1850, the noted slave smuggler, Drake, who operated along the Gulf Coast, is reported to have said, “Slave trading is growing more profitable every year, and if you should hang all the Yankee merchants engaged in it, hundreds more would take their places.”

            The outlawing of the traffic seemed to stimulate it.  From the very inception of the institution of slavery in this country there was protest and action against it throughout the Southern colonies. The vigorous action of Virginia and her protests to the Royal government to prohibit further importation of slaves to her territory are well known.  We have seen how Jefferson introduced into the Declaration of Independence a protest against the slave trade which he withdrew at the behest of New England.  Every prominent man in Virginia at this period was in favor of gradual emancipation and there were more members of abolition societies in the South than in the North.  Only with the rise of rabid abolitionists of New England and their fierce denunciations of the South did the South abandon hope of gradual emancipation.  Touching this, Mr. Cecil Chesterman, quoted above, states very pointedly in his “History of the United States,” “What could exceed the effrontery of men,”

asked the Southerner, “who reproach us with grave personal sin in owning property which they themselves sold us and the price of which is at this moment in their pockets?”  Virginia legislated against slavery over a score of times”  South Carolina protested against it as early as 1727, and in Georgia there was absolute prohibition of it by law.  Let it be remembered that when the National Government took action and the slavery prohibition laws of Congress went into effect in 1808, every Southern state had prohibited it.

            But, as stated, the outlawing of the traffic seemed to stimulate it.  In the early years of the 19^th century thousands of slaves were imported into this country.  In the year of 1819, Gen. James Talmadge, speaking in the House of Representatives, declared: “It is a well known fact that about 11,000 slaves have been brought into our country this year.” [Let the reader be aware that this was said 24 years after this trade had been abolished. CLM Sr] And Sergeant, of Pennsylvania, said: “It is notorious that in spite of the utmost vigilance that can be employed, African negroes are clandestinely brought in and sold as slaves.”

            This “vigilance” he speaks of, however , was much ridiculed by others, and it was openly hinted that the efforts of the Federal authorities to suppress the trade, even the look-out for slavers along the African coast as conducted be vessels of the United States Navy, were merely perfunctory, Blake in his “History of the Slavery and the Slave Trade,” published in 1857 [two yrs after it was made illegal. Clm sr] says: “It is stated upon good upon authority that in 1844 more slaves were carried away from Africa in ships than in 1744 when the trade was legal and in full vigor:” while in the year immediately preceding the opening of the War Between The States, John ? Underwood is quoted as writing to the New York Tribune: “I have ample evidence of the fact that the reopening of the African slave trade is an accomplished fact and the traffic is brisk.”  Not only was the traffic brisk with the United States but thousands were being smuggled into Brazil.

            Southern members of Congress complained of the violations of the law and the illegal importation of slaves into their territory.  Smith, of South Carolina, said on the floor of Congress in 1919: “Our Northern friends are not afraid ti furnish the Southern States with Africans;” and in 1819, in Middleton, of South Carolina, and Wright,  of Virginia, estimated the illicit introduction of slaves at from 1300 to 1500 respectively.

            There is interest in the striking fact that one year before the outbreak of the War Between the States, and at the time when the rabid abolitionists of New England and the North were most vigorous in their denunciations of the South and the slave holders, there were in Massachusetts only 9000 free negroes, while in Virginia there were 53,000 of these negroes, free, and able to go where they pleased: and it is significant that about as many free negroes chose to live in Southern slave holding states as dwelt in the Northern states; ans many of these free negroes owned slaves themselves and were well-to-do citizens. [See “Black Slave Owners. Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790 - 1860" by Larry Koger, ISBN 1-57003-037-5. clm sr.] In the city of City of Charleston, S. C., some three hundred free negroes slaves themselves.

            In closing this article the following letter, which appeared in the New Orleans Picayune years ago, may be of interest: “My father, Capt John Julius Guthrie, then of United States Navy, while executive officer of the sloop of war “Saratoga” on April 21^st , 1861, captured at the mouth of the Congo River, on the west coast of Africa, the slave ship ‘Nightingale’ with 900 slaves aboard.  The slaver was owned, manned and equipped in the City of Boston, Mass., and in reference to the date it will appear that her capture was after the assault on Fort Sumter and the Baltimore riot consequent upon the passage of the 6^th Massachusetts Regiment through the city.  This was the last slaver caputred (sic) by an American war ship and as my Father soon after resigned and went into the Confederate service, her owners were never brought to trial.  Al this is a matter of record on file at the Navy Department in Washington.  Thus it will be seen that the last capture of a slaver was by a Southern officer and the good people of Massachusetts were ngaged (sic) in this nefarious business at the beginning of our unhappy War.” Signed: J. Julius Guthrie, Portsmouth, Va.

            Too long has the South had the odium of slavery forced upon her.  With the institution thrust upon her against her protest, the slaves flourished in her boundaries on account of climate, and economic conditions favored the spread of the institution itself.  The facts set forth above indicate the innocence of the South in foisting this feature upon our national life, as well as her freedom from guilt in the continued importation of slaves into this country.  While no claim is made for special virtue in that the South did not engage in the slave importing business as the North did, yet the facts as they exist are to her credit.  With the facts in her favor, the South sits still under the false indictments constantly made against her by the section of our country most responsible for the whole trouble.  Willing to abide by the verdict of posterity, if the verdict is based upon the truth, and not upon the false statements of Northern historians, writers, and speakers, and willing to accept her share, her full share of due responsibility, this section, in justice to her dead who died gloriously in a maligned cause, and to her unborn children, inheritors of a glorious heritage, must set forth to the world the facts as they are, neither tainted with injustice to others nor burdened with hypocritical claims of rightness for herself and; and these facts will establish her in the proud position to which she has all along been entitled among the people of the earth.

 

******************************

 

  05 A            Treatment of  prisoners IN THE CONFEDERACY

FROM THE GRAY BOOK, CHARLES H. SMITH, CDR.

GENERAL HQ, BOX 5164, SOUTHERN DIV,

HATTIESBURG, MS, 39401, C.S.A..

ARTICLE By Matthew Page Andrews

Author of the History of  The United States, Dixie Book of Days, &C, &C.

            Only a generation ago, Raphael Semmes, commander of the Confederate warship Alabama, was widely advertised as a“pirate”and Robert E. Lee was stigmatized as a “traitor.” Thousands of young Americans were taught so to regard these Southern leaders.  Now, however , these terms are nearly obsolete; while many Northern historians, such as Charles Francis Adams, who fought on the Federal side in the War of Secession, and Gamaliel Bradford, who grew up after the war, have delighted in honoring Lee and other Southern leaders as Americans whose character and achievements are the ennobling heritage of a united Nation.

            It was more or less natural that Americans should have been led astray of the truth in the heat of sectional strife and partisan

 expression. Misconceptions have arisen out of every war. In fifty years, however, Americans have made progress in overcoming war prejudices than the people of other lands in the twice or thrice that period.

            This is encouraging, yet the fact that the greater number of our textbooks, and consequently our schools, teach that “the cause for which the South fought was unworthy:” that the Southern leaders “were laboring under some of the most curious hallucinations which a student of history meets in the whole course of his researches ;” and that “the South was the champion of the detested institution of slavery,” indicates a lamentable state of historical ignorance on the part of those who should know better.  The characters of the Southern leaders are longer aspersed but their motives are besmirched or clouded and their cause unjustly condemned because it is still widely misunderstood*(1).

            Furthermore, since the beginning of the World War of 1914, the conduct of the Prussians, together with the character of their cause, has been compared with the character of the Confederate conduct of the War of Secession, together with the cause and character of Southern statesman. Reputable magazines of wide circulation and writers of prominence have compared the Confederate treatment of prisoners with Prussian outrages in Belgium and France. American newspapers also have printed literally thousands of such comparative references. Fortunately, nine-tenths of these comparisons have been made through ignorance of the facts and not through any malicious desire of the authors to defame the fair name of a single fellow-American on the Confederate side or the “lost cause” which he represented with unsurpassed devotion and valor.

            Side by side with these accusations, in some cases, generous praise is bestowed upon the former “pirate” Semmes as having furnished a model for warfare on the high seas; and it is freely stated that his observance of all requirements of international custom and of the dictates of humanity in civilized warfare held not only to the letter, but also the full spirit of the law.  It is not denied, also, that Lee, the Confederate chieftain and quondam “traitor” has offered the noblest example of orders of conduct for an army in the enemy’s country that all history can show, and that these orders were also carried out “even to the protection of a farmer’s fence rails!” The Boston Transcript, for example, took occasion, in 1917, to publish these orders in full.

            Nevertheless, in regard to the treatment of prisoners, the sweeping condemnation of James G. Blaine, delivered in an outburst of war-inspired and partisan condemnation of the South is still, in a general way, believed by Americans who have, of late, been echoing them, although in milder terms and in limitation of the number of those held to have been guilty. Mr Blaine declared some ten years after the war: “Mr Davis [President of the Confederate States] was the author, knowingly, deliberately, guiltily, and willfully, of the gigantic murder and crime at Andersonville. And I here, before God measuring my words, knowing their full extent and import declare that neither the deeds of the Duke of Alva in the low countries, nor the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, nor the thumb screws and engines of torture of the Spanish Inquisition, begin to compare in atrocity with the hideous crimes of Andersonville.”

            Historians do not now accept this statement as true, solemnly made as it was by a man who, a few years later, barely missed election to the highest office in the gift of the people of the United States. Furthermore, American historians, even if inclined to bias, do not now go into any detail in the matter of these charges. They refer the reader, however, to a mass of matter, the major part of which is as false today as when James G. Blaine based upon it his colossal libel of Jefferson Davis and the military and civil authorities of the Southern Confederacy. As above stated, the so-called “general” historian has dropped this matter in detail, though  Mr. Blaine exclaimed dramatically that it would remain as the “blackest page” in the annals of all time.*(2)

             On the other hand, innumerable monographs have been written upon this subject, four-fifths of which are either false per se, or based on false evidence such as that which has misled so many Americans from the time of James G. Blaine and contemporary historians, to editors of and writers in magazines and newspapers of the second decade in the twentieth century. With this one notable exception, American history is rapidly freeing its narrative of misconception in all its phases. It is here that we now find the last great stronghold of sectional misconception.

            If four-fifths of the monographs on prison life in the South are false per se, are based on false evidence, it follows that one-fifth are true or approximately so. The writer has had the privilege of knowing personally a distinguished Union Veteran who suffered privations at Libby Prison. Published in 1912, his story, as it affects his personal experiences, is doubtless true in every respect; yet this same good American helped to publish simultaneously another volume by one of his comrades that is a tissue of falsehood and slander from beginning to end. The voracious author seemed to take his mendacious comrade at his face value, and he advertised as worthy history a gross historical libel.*(3)

            Again with reference to a portion of the truthful fifth part of the testimony in monographs or special articles, it should be said that a concerted attempt has apparently been made by certain interestd (sic) individuals and groups to cry down, suppress, or defame the authors of these monographs. The average good American citizen, who likes to believe that the people of one section “about average up to “ the people of another, is moved to amazement at the extreme violence of the attacks made upon men who, on this one subject, would say even the least in defense of their former opponents. “God knows we suffered there.”said one of the ex-prisoners of andersonville, “but we found out that the Confederate soldier had our fare and often less, and he was often as shoeless as we, in time, became.  We were the worse off chiefly because of enforced confinement, hope deferred, and longing for home and freedom.”  Men who have made such statements as these or who have defended their former captors, have been bitterly attacked in Grand Army Posts–not by men of similar liberal ideals, but by narrow-minded men who were otherwise good citizens and by bounty-jumpers and deserters who made it their business to fan the flames of sectional passion so that the public would continue to support them in the way which has been exposed by Charles Francis Adams.  In some cases, the thought of all this false testimony weighed like a heavy load upon the consciences of patriotic Union Veterans who loved their whole country and honored their former Confederate foes as opponents worthy of their steel. One of these men who was thus moved to write what he held to be true had long looked forward to the honor of commanding his Department of the Grand Army of the Republic.  His published narrative defending the motives of his former captors cost him this honor, even though it contained no single word or phrase that reflected unfavorably upon the cause of the North.  An historian who undertook to inquire about the veracity of the narrative was told by well-meaning men across the Continent from the author that the “the book was untrustworthy” and that the author was unreliable.  A quiet and careful investigation was, however, made by him into the character and career of the “witness”, and the favorable testimony of those in a position to know him best in all his relations led the historian to place the greatest confidence in his testimony.* (4)

            The charges preferred against the authorities of the Confederacy  were, for several years, made the most important subject  under consideration  by the people and even the government of the United States. During that period, the magnitude and violence of the accusations obscured much more weighty and serious problems and placed the South on the defensive, because it was not better element  in the North but the radical and partisan minority that had, for the moment, the ear of the country and the world.          

 

 See 05 B Cont