Tuesday, January 21, 2014

January 23, 1864---"No longer in rebellion."



JANUARY 23, 1864:            

The Union, having banned trading with Rebel States early in the war, declared that the Border States of Kentucky and Missouri were no longer subject to the ban as they were “no longer in rebellion.”







Sharecropping is born:                    

President Abraham Lincoln approves a new policy directing plantation owners to recognize the freedom of their former slaves. 

The policy directs that the Freedmen are to be hired and paid fairly for their labor. Lincoln’s hope is “to re-commence the cultivation of . . . plantations.”  The military is to ensure compliance with the new system.

Most of the white landowners, financially ruined by the war, can only offer payment-in-kind as a percentage of the crop raised. The newly freed thus move from slavery to serfdom.

The idea of Unionist slaveholders emancipating their slaves and then hiring them back as wage-earners had been bruited about for some time. President Lincoln announces that the Federal Government will subsidize the former slaveowners’ extra expenses in effectuating this plan. Few people apply for the extra funds, and eventually the offer is discontinued.

 
 
The Raleigh Standard inveigles against the Confederate Congress, the Conscription Act and the suspension of Habeas Corpus in the South --- in short, the Confederacy has taken all the steps the Union is taking to win the war. Recognizing that there is no fundamental difference between the central governments of the two States of America, United or Confederate, the editor demands to know why:

If the civil law is to be trampled under foot by the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, and every able-bodied man placed in the army from sixteen to sixty-five, — if no man is to have a hearing before a State Judge, as to the right of the enrolling officer to seize him, and if the rights of the States are to be ignored and swept away by the mere creature of the States; the common Government, the people of North Carolina will take their own affairs into their own hands, and will proceed, in convention assembled, to vindicate their liberties and their privileges. They will not submit to a military despotism. They will not submit to the destruction of their rights, personal and civil, in this or any other war.… Woe to the official character who shall attempt to turn the arms of the Confederate soldiers against the people of this State! North Carolina will not be the slave of either the Congress at Richmond or Washington. She is this day, as she has been from the first, the keystone of the Confederate arch. If that stone should fall, the arch will tumble.…

Is it not an outrage on every principle of free government for men of desperate fortunes, professing to represent other States on whose soil they dare not set their foot, to make and enforce odious and oppressive laws on our people?…

Trust them no longer. Remember their fair promises. The dwellers in the garden of Eden, when they listened to the tempting promises of Satan, were not worse deceived and ruined than were the people of the fair, happy, and blooming South when they listened to the fair promises of those arch deceivers, Yancey, Wise & Co.

A heretofore contented, prosperous, and happy people were told by them that we must withdraw all connection from our Northern taskmasters, who were making us pay one dollar and fifty cents for shoes, ten cents per yard for shirting, two dollars per sack for salt, ten cents per pound for sugar, the same for coffee, &c. And these same reckless men, who are now for putting all into the army, (except for themselves and a few favorites,) then told us that secession would be peaceable, and there would be no war; that we were to have a nation of our own, free from extortioners — a perfect paradise with the tree of life, the cotton plant, in our midst, before which all nations were to bow down and worship, and from which rivers of free trade were to flow to the ends of the earth, on the bosom of which the rich merchandise from every clime was to be freighted and poured down in our laps free of taxation. How have they deceived us? The blood of hundreds of thousands of our poor children, smoking from the many battlefields, and the cries of starving women and children tell the tale. Will our people be longer deceived by those false prophets and arch-deceivers? Or will they not command the peace, and staunch these rivers of blood?