October 18, 1864---Some of Our Forefathers Brought Forth a Nation Dedicated to the Proposition That Not All Men are Created Equal

OCTOBER 18, 1864:                  

Defiant Copperheads, disgusted by the McClellan candidacy, call into existence the “Cincinnati Convention For The Organization of a Peace Party, upon State-Rights, Jeffersonian, Democratic Principles, and For the Promotion of Peace and Independent Nominations for President and Vice-President of the United States.” 

The delegates adopt the Kentucky Resolution of 1799 (written by Thomas Jefferson), which endorses the concept of Nullification. 

 

Despite its lengthy name and its windy writings, the Peace Party makes no headway. It is too close to the election to mount a viable third party challenge, and the trajectory of the war brings the Peace Party to a quick but not undeserved end. 

The Cincinnati Convention lives on in that it lays the foundation for the Dixiecrat Party of 1948 headed by Senator Strom Thurmond. 

October 17, 1864---“We must save ourselves from the rapacious North --- WHATEVER THE COST.”

OCTOBER 17, 1864:                   

The Governors of the Confederate States of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi meet in Augusta, Georgia. “The Augusta Conference” discusses increasing the level of Poor Relief, the raising of additional brigades of State Militia, the possibility of State-by-State-supported blockade running, the growing problem of military desertions in the C.S.A. army, and, by far most revolutionary, the emancipation of slaves to aid in the war effort. 

The idea of Confederate emancipation is gaining currency. Quietly discussed in correspondence and in diaries since the early days of the war --- “Free our negroes and put them in the army,” wrote Mary Chesnut in December 1861 --- most Southerners nonetheless remain aghast at the idea. 

Still, Confederate emancipation was bruited about frequently enough in the early days of the war to concern Ralph Waldo Emerson, who feared in 1862 that the South would emancipate its slaves, seize the moral high ground in the conflict, and win the war with European support. 

Like much else, the idea of Confederate emancipation ebbed and flowed alongside Confederate military fortunes. Contemplated in 1861, the idea became moribund in 1862 as Robert E. Lee began a string of brilliant field victories. After Gettysburg, the idea of freeing the slaves began to spread again, aided in part by the religious revivalism that was sweeping the Confederate ranks.   

In January of 1864, the iconoclastic General Patrick Cleburne C.S.A. had openly called for Confederate emancipation: “Satisfy the negro that if he faithfully adheres to our standard during the war he shall receive his freedom and that of his race . . .  and we change the race from a dreaded weakness to a position of strength.”

Cleburne’s comments, endorsed by some, rejected by many, created a firestorm in the Confederate Officer Corps so severe that Jefferson Davis had to issue an Order that the subject was off limits. But the evaporation of the Confederacy’s fighting forces --- through battle deaths, disease, defeats, and desertions --- had created a desperate need for a new reserve of troops. 

That reserve, logically, was the slave population. Numbering four million in total in 1860, the Confederacy had the option to call upon hundreds of thousands --- possibly as many as one million --- fit and healthy black men in that population to take up arms in the Southern cause. Not long after the Augusta Conference, Jefferson Davis discussed the proposal with Robert E. Lee, who enthusiastically gave it his support.

Confederate emancipation, as Lee and Davis divined it, was not intended to grant equal rights to the former slaves, but rather to place them into a condition of “peonage” in which the white population could choose (or not) to bestow limited property rights and domestic relations rights upon the newly-freed blacks. This was seen as a far better alternative than allowing the victorious Yankees to dictate racial policy after the South’s defeat in the war.  

“The time has come,” the Governor of Louisiana announced, “for us to put into the army every able-bodied negro man as a soldier.” 

The editor of the Jackson Mississippian summed up the South’s Hobson’s Choice perfectly, opining that “We must save ourselves from the rapacious North --- WHATEVER THE COST.” 

But will blacks fight for the South? By mid-October 1864, it is clear to most slaves that the North will win. The story is told of a Southern slaveowner who explained to a field hand, “If you fight for us you will be free,” to which the slave replied, “That’s as may be, Massa. But if I don’t fight for you, we’re all going to be free!”

 

 

Despite Lee’s very public support for the Confederate emancipation plan, there are Southerners who stringently believe that the “peculiar institution” is the raison d’etre of the Confederacy, and still others who consider the idea of arming slaves “monstrous,” and “revolting to Southern sentiment, Southern pride, and Southern honor.” Such men continue to insist, even in mid-October 1864, that “We are not whipped and can never be whipped.”  

October 16, 1864---Show Me . . . or die . . .

OCTOBER 16, 1864:                    

Benjamin Whitehead Lewis (1812-1866) was one of the rare Missouri Unionists living in the Confederate stronghold of Glasgow.

 

Early in the Civil War, Lewis funded a school for Glasgow’s children. He was a greatly respected citizen of the town, despite his Unionism. In his Last Will and Testament Lewis made a bequest of funds to the community to rebuild the town’s library, destroyed in the October 15th Battle of Glasgow.

 

As both a Unionist and a philanthropist, Lewis attracted the undesirable personal attentions of “Bloody Bill” Anderson. The bloodthirsty Anderson had been visiting Lewis’s home on a near daily basis in the fall of '64.

“I’ll hound him and make an example of him,” Bloody Bill declared. “We'll show them it ain’t just niggers we whip --- it's the niggers' white friends.” It is unknown why Anderson believed that Lewis, who was a slaveowner, was a “friend” of African-Americans.  

One particular day, after being told by Lewis’s wife that her husband wasn’t home, a frustrated Anderson randomly fired his rifle into the ceiling of the house, grazing Lewis, who was hiding in the attic.

On this day in 1864, Anderson finally caught up with the unfortunate Lewis. He tortured Lewis by forcing him to walk a half-mile on his knees from the Lewis home to the bank, where Anderson demanded $10,000 from Lewis at the price of his life. Being a Sunday, the bank was not open. Lewis’s slave, Zeb, ran to find the bank president, who fearfully refused to get involved or to give Lewis even his own money.

Finally, after much begging and pleading, Lewis’s family was able to raise $7,000. Anderson at first refused to take less than the $10,000 he’d demanded, but at last relented. However, as a punishment to Lewis for not paying the full amount, he lifted Lewis off the ground by his feet and dropped him on his head a number of times. Lewis sustained severe neck and skull injuries which eventually killed him.    

 

Bloody Bill Anderson’s brutality toward the Unionist Lewis was far more representative of the Civil War in Missouri than Sterling Price’s parole of Union soldiers on the previous day. 

Price’s “Campaign” (or “Raid”) into Missouri did nothing to seize the major cities of St. Louis and Jefferson City, but it did much to destroy what little civil authority remained intact in the State. 

  

As of October 1864, Missouri was a failed State. It had been at war not since 1861 but since 1854 (“The Border War”), combating itself (and Kansas) over Popular Sovereignty. Kansas had become a Free State upon its admission to the Union in 1861, but raiding and fratricidal violence persisted in Missouri even after the end of the Civil War. Peace did not come to the "Show Me" State until the mid-1870s. 

In the Civil War years, Missouri lay essentially at the center of the continent. As an entity, it looked North and South and East and West all at once, a hodgepodge of frontier settlers, slaveowners, free-soilers, and entrepeneurs, Native Americans and immigrants. The centrifugal force of all these competing pressures turned the State into a free-fire zone during the Civil War.  

A Union State with a rump Confederate government, it was a State that never seceded; yet, and nevertheless, the Secessionist Governor, Claiborne Fox Jackson, had declared war on the United States in 1861 without formally allying himself to the Confederacy.  

Jackson was long gone now, and the Missouri Unionists held the larger cities, but in the countryside, all was a nightmare. Unlike every other State, Union or Confederate, Missouri was a battleground State with no real front lines. 

Confederates and Unionists shared towns, shared kitchen tables, and even shared beds. “The enemy” wore no uniform, or both, or either. “The enemy” was anyone who was armed and wanting anything.

  

Not knowing who was friendly and who was unfriendly (and indeed loyalties changed by the day and sometimes by the hour), the men of both armies were brutal toward everyone they met. Civilians habitually shot at strangers regardless of their garb. Southerners disguised themselves in blue and Northerners disguised themselves in gray. Bushwhackers in butternut fought Jayhawkers in red leggings. Lifelong friends hanged one another upon suspicion of being with the “wrong” side, but who was “wrong” was as changeable as the weather.

  

Guerrillas like “Bloody Bill” Anderson (mostly nominally pro-Southern in outlook) burned, hacked, pillaged, robbed, and raped their way across the ruined State at random and at will, like ancient barbarians. The Confederacy feared them, seeing in their tactics “unchristian” and “dishonorable” acts that besmirched the Southern cause; but ironically the government in Richmond and the generals in the field actively supported their efforts.  

The United States vowed to destroy them, but they moved freely through the lines, hidden in plain sight. Running them to ground was a near impossibility --- they were protected by regular Confederate troops and by locals too, either out of loyalty or out of fear. In their wake they left the living maimed, and the mutilated dead.  Benjamin Whitehead Lewis was just one of thousands of innocent people whose lives were destroyed in the cyclone that was Missouri. 

Missourians themselves often refused to submit to the bushwackers. The little town of Avila was a Union stronghold. The Confederate flag never flew in Avila, and Avila’s hard-bitten Unionist residents slew any guerrillas that came near, gruesomely hanging their heads from a “death tree” on the approach to town. “Bloody Bill” once tried to take Avila; his force was beaten back with heavy losses. Avila was one of the few towns in Missouri to have come through the Civil War structurally intact, and no residents of Avila died in the war.

By 1864, more Missourians lived outside the State than within it, refugees from an incomprehensible war within a war. 

October 15, 1864---War in "Little Dixie"

OCTOBER 15, 1864:                   

The Battle of Glasgow, Missouri. Glasgow is known to history as the unofficial capital of “Little Dixie,” the most staunchly pro-Confederate area in Missouri.   

On this day, Confederate forces under General Sterling Price take the town of Glasgow, and hold it for three days, during which they appropriate the contents of the Federal supply dump there, including 1,200 muskets, 1,200 overcoats, and 150 horses, plus stocks of food and ammunition. During the battle, the town’s Unionists blow up the City Hall, where many munitions are stored. The resulting explosion devastates the downtown, and many buildings burn to the ground. 

After the battle, captured Union troops, whom Price cannot care for, are paroled and are even allowed to keep their sidearms for protection against “ruffians,” among whom are “Bloody Bill” Anderson and his gang of cutthroat “Confederate guerrillas” nominally under Price’s command. Given that Missouri has degenerated into a slaughterfield, Price’s action stands out for its simple humanity.