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?
