Showing posts with label Military - Wars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Military - Wars. Show all posts

Monday, June 26, 2023

Loathing President Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War Years.



Ninty-one years ago, Herbert Hoover, campaigning for re-election amid the Great Depression, took special care to associate himself with Abraham Lincoln, but then so did his opponent, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had remarked a few years earlier, "I think it is time for us Democrats to claim Lincoln as one of our own." Late in the campaign, both men came to speak in Springfield and paid ceremonial visits to Lincoln's tomb.   By the 1930s, "getting right with Lincoln" in this manner had become an almost universal custom among public figures. Not only Republicans and Democrats but also Communists, Socialists, Prohibitionists, business executives and labor leaders, black Americans and members of the Ku Klux Klan—all seemed to want him on their side.

Yet, a few voices of dissent could always be heard here and there. In 1932, an old Virginia gentleman named Lyon Gardiner Tyler, son of President John Tyler continued his long personal war upon the heroic image of Lincoln. "I think he was a bad man," Tyler wrote, "a man who forced the country into an unnecessary war and conducted it with great inhumanity." Tyler was the most prominent spokesman of his time for an anti-Lincoln tradition, attenuated but persistent, that had its sturdy roots in the years of the Civil War. Examining that tradition may illuminate Lincoln's place in the national consciousness—a place that is apparently secure but never precisely the same from one year to the next.

There were three principal sources of hostility to Lincoln during the Civil War: first, the enemy-that is, the people of the Confederacy and a sizable part of the population in the Southern Border states; second, the political opposition-that is, primarily the Democratic party in the North and the Border states, but including a good many conservative Whigs as well; third, the antislavery radicals, including elements both within and outside the Republican party. One might also designate as a fourth category the hostile critics watching and commenting on the war from Europe—most notably, a substantial portion of the English press.

The Southern image of Lincoln began as a mere sectional stereotype, and Southern hostility to his presidential candidacy was largely impersonal. Secession, although undertaken in response to the outcome of the election of 1860, had nothing to do with the particular qualities and qualifications of the man elected. It was the "Black Republican party" that Southerners hated and feared, whoever might happen to be the party's official leader. But when the secession crisis erupted into civil war, Southerners laid the blame squarely on Lincoln. In the years of bloody struggle and withering hope that followed, they came increasingly to view him as the principal author of all the woe that had descended upon them. Of course, Jefferson Davis simultaneously became a detested figure in the North, but with a significant difference. Davis, leading a rebellion, symbolized treason in the mold of Benedict Arnold. In Southern eyes, Lincoln's role was that of a military conqueror—a ruthless Attila bent upon destroying a superior civilization. In fact, the Confederate image of Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s resembles the American image of Adolf Hitler in the 1940s.

The Southern indictment of Lincoln usually began with the assertion that he had made war unavoidable by opposing sectional compromise and then forcing the issue at Fort Sumter. After the first major war battle at Bull Run in July 1861, the Richmond Enquirer blamed him for all the deaths on both sides. "Of these men, Abraham Lincoln is the murderer," it declared. "We charge their blood upon him ... May the Heavens, which have rebuked his madness thus far, still battle his demon designs."

Confederates called Lincoln a "tyrant," a "fiend," and a "monster" for making war on civilians through the blockade, for authorizing the destruction of private property, for setting the likes of Ben Butler and William T. Sherman upon the Southern population, for suppressing civil liberties, for cruelly refusing to exchange prisoners, and, most of all, for emancipation, which they viewed as an incitement of slaves to rebellion and wholesale murder. In speeches, sermons, and songs, in books, magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, and broadsides, they also portrayed him as a simpleton, a buffoon, a drunkard, a libertine, a physical coward, and a pornographic storyteller.

The hatred of Lincoln sometimes crystallized into threats against his life. For instance, soon after the firing on Fort Sumter, he received from Mississippi a newspaper clipping in which a reward of $100,000 was offered for his "miserable traitorous head." Spontaneous rejoicing at his death, though perhaps more the exception than the rule in the Confederacy, was widespread. To a Georgia woman overcome with bewilderment and grief at Lee's surrender, the assassination came as "one sweet drop among so much that is painful." A Texas newspaper declared, "The world is happily rid of a monster that disgraced the form of humanity."

Such intensity of feeling was by no means confined to the rebellious South. The Civil War divided Northern and Border State Democrats into three factions: those who supported both the war and the Lincoln administration, thereby in effect changing their political allegiance; those who supported the war but opposed the administration, thus playing the classic role of "loyal opposition"; and those who opposed both the war and the administration, in some cases to the verge of treason. The latter two groups became the war and peace wings of the wartime Democratic party. Far apart in their basic attitudes toward the conflict itself, they could nevertheless agree in denouncing Lincoln for misuse of presidential power and subversion of the Constitution. They charged the administration with repressing civil liberties, with subverting the rights and powers of the states, and with transforming a war for defense of the Union into a revolutionary struggle for abolition and racial equality.

It was the progress toward emancipation that most infuriated Democratic and other conservative leaders. In their view, the same puritanical spirit of New England abolitionism that had disrupted the Union was dictating administration policy. On January 1, 1863, the day of the final Emancipation Proclamation, Benjamin R. Curtis, former Supreme Court justice, said Lincoln had been terrified and entirely subdued by the antislavery radicals. "He is shattered, dazed and utterly foolish," Curtis wrote. "It would not surprise me if he were to destroy himself." In 1864, the old Jacksonian, Amos Kendall, published a series of letters attacking the President. "Our federal Union," he declared, "is in more danger this day from Abraham Lincoln and the unprincipled and fanatical faction to whom he has surrendered himself, soul and body, than from all other causes combined."

Of course, the rankest abuse came from the copperheads, among whom none was more inventive in his vituperation than a Wisconsin editor, Marcus M. Pomeroy. Lincoln, he wrote, was "but the fungus from the corrupt womb of bigotry and fanaticism"—indeed a "worse tyrant and more inhuman butcher than has existed since the days of Nero." As the election of 1864 approached, Pomeroy editorialized: "The man who votes for Lincoln now is a traitor and murderer... And if he is elected to misgovern for another four years, we trust some bold hand will pierce his heart with dagger point for the public good." 

Among the antislavery radicals, in contrast, Lincoln seemed the embodiment of timorous, vacillating conservatism—too inhibited by constitutional qualms, too solicitous about Border State feeling, too obliging to Democrats, especially in the appointment of generals, and much too cautious in his approach to emancipation. One must distinguish, of course, between the outright abolitionists and the radical free soilers who made up the left wing of the Republican party. However, once the war had begun, the two elements tended to merge because both were vehemently emancipationist. Yet within both groups, there was considerable difference of opinion about the man in the White House. For instance, after much early abuse of Lincoln, William Lloyd Garrison came around to urging the President'President'sion and re-election in 1864. Still, his fellow abolitionist Wendell Phillips refused to do likewise and gave his support instead to the abortive candidacy of John C. Fremont. Similarly, Charles Sumner, though often critical of Lincoln, maintained a delicate balance between friendship and opposition, whereas his senatorial colleague Benjamin F. Wade labeled the President a fool, led the radical attacks upon him in Congress, opposed his renomination, and regarded his assassination as a political blessing.

Lincoln's apparent conservatism on the slavery issue drew strong criticism from radicals as early as the fall of 1861. His revocation of Fremont's edict proclaiming emancipation in Missouri provoked a storm of recrimination that was renewed in May 1862 when he revoked a similar order issued by General David Hunter for South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. In a letter to another senator, Wade sneered that nothing better could be expected from a man of Southern antecedents and "poor white trash" at that. Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist, declared in his monthly Magazine that Lincoln had become the "miserable tool of traitors and rebels" and had shown himself to be "a genuine representative of American prejudice and negro hatred."

The Emancipation Proclamation won some antislavery radicals to Lincoln's side. Many others regarded him as such a poor excuse for a president that he ought to be replaced. His bitterest radical critic was the Maryland congressman Henry Winter Davis, co-author of the Wade-Davis manifesto, which charged the President Presidentuing "personal ambition" and exercising "dictatorial usurpation" while at the same time promoting "anarchy." When Lincoln was re-elected, Davis wrote to Admiral Samuel F. DuPont, "We must for four years more rely on the forcing process of Congress to wring from that old fool what can be gotten for the nation." In voting for Lincoln, he said the people had subordinated "disgust to the necessities of a crisis."

Radical hostility to Lincoln cut closest to the bone because so much of it came from the inner circles of his own party and even from his cabinet in the person of Salmon P. Chase, whose file of incoming letters is a storehouse of unreproved attacks on the President. The fierceness of such infighting is perhaps less surprising than the vehemence and malice with which Lincoln was criticized by much of the British press. The articulate portion of the British public became emotionally involved in the American Civil War for both material and symbolic reasons. The war had a disruptive effect upon the British economy, geared as it was to cotton manufacture. But Britons also recognized the struggle from its beginning as a test of the viability of democracy, that new social force which the English ruling class feared, which the United States represented before the world, and which Lincoln in background and style virtually caricatured.

Several conservative publications hastened to draw a lesson from the ordeal of the United States. "It is only by calamities so startling as this," said the Quarterly Review, "that men can be warned of the dangers with which democracy is surrounded." The principal British complaints against Lincoln were that he persisted unreasonably in waging a futile war of reconquest and that, in the process, he was fastening a dictatorship on the United States—all the while making bad jokes as he proceeded along his sanguinary course. With the election of 1864 approaching, the London Evening Standard called him a "foul-tongued and ribald punster" who was also the "most despicable tyrant of modern days." At about the same time, the Leeds Intelligencer denounced him as "that concentrated quintessence of evil, that Nero in the most shrunken ... form of idolatry, that flatulent and indecent jester." The language of the London Times was scarcely more restrained. Condemning the Emancipation Proclamation as an effort to incite murderous slave uprisings, it suggested that Lincoln might ultimately be classed "among that catalog of monsters, the wholesale assassins and butchers of their kind."

The Times viewed Lincoln's re-election in November 1864 as "an avowed step towards the foundation of a military despotism." The United States, it said, had "entered on that transition stage, so well known to the students of history, through which Republics pass on their way from democracy to tyranny." Yet, less than half a year later, the same newspaper told its readers, "Abraham Lincoln was as little of a tyrant as any man who ever lived." [24] What had intervened, of course, was Appomattox and the assassination.

One of the great Lincoln mysteries is the relationship between the man's martyrdom and his historical stature. Few would agree with the judgment once tossed out by Harry Elmer Barnes that Booth's shot made all the difference between a hero and a "discredited politician." But few would deny that the timing and manner of his death transformed the Lincoln image. The first sign of that transformation was the enormous outpouring of grief from the American people. It astonished men in public life and chastened some of them. Even Wendell Phillips concluded, just a few days after the assassination, "Lincoln had won such loving trust from the people that it was impossible to argue anything against him."

The apotheosis of Lincoln thus began as soon as he died. Savior of the Union, the liberator of a race, struck down on Good Friday in "the most impious murder done since Calvary," he was readily assimilated into the universal myths of the fallen hero and the dying god. Many of his critics at home and abroad hastened to revise their estimates of his worth and scramble, as it were, aboard the funeral train. There was Tom Taylor's famous recantation in Punch, for instance, and there was George Bancroft, who had earlier called the President "ignorant" and "incompetent," now delivering the principal funeral oration in New York City.

Republicans, radical and otherwise, soon learned what an asset they had in the dead Lincoln, and before long they had turned February 12 into a day for celebrating party loyalty. Northern Democrats, for the most part, acquiesced in and frequently participated in the enshrining of Lincoln. For example, Samuel S. Cox of Ohio had little good to say about the President during the war, but writing twenty years afterwards he called Lincoln "the peer of the purest and greatest men of whom history leaves a record."

Cox and other Democrats could identify with Lincoln by stressing his conservatism and his leniency toward the defeated Confederacy, thus dissociating him from the alleged excesses of Radical Reconstruction. Many Southerners came to terms with the Lincoln image along this same route. Even Jefferson Davis, while continuing to hold Lincoln responsible for starting the war, concluded that his death had been a great misfortune for the South.[30] Southerners could also take comfort from some of Lincoln's remarks about race that seemed compatible with the developing post-Reconstruction system of segregation. And for progressive advocates of a "New South," such as the Georgia newspaper editor Henry W. Grady, an appreciation of Lincoln was part of the sectional reconciliation their aspirations required.

But for Southerners who bitterly regretted the failure of the Confederacy and looked back with painful nostalgia to their lost antebellum world, Lincoln remained a villain, one whom the poet Paul Hamilton Hayne was still described in 1871 as a "gawky, coarse, not over-cleanly, whisky-drinking, and whisky-smelling blackguard." Southerners devoted to the Lost Cause were the principal bearers of the anti-Lincoln tradition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They found themselves losing ground, even in their own section, increasingly regarded as a cranky remnant of the past. Yet their case against Lincoln grew stronger, or so it seemed to them, as additional evidence emerged with the passing years.

To the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, knowledge about Lincoln was continually enriched by a flow of biographies and reminiscences from men who had known him with varying degrees of intimacy. Although the tone of this often dubious material was overwhelmingly laudatory, the personal revelations of some writers, notably William H. Herndon and Ward H. Lamon, provided welcome ammunition for the dwindling but resolute corps of Lincoln haters. Eagerly they seized upon assertions that Lincoln, among other things, had mocked Christianity, sold liquor in his grocery, told off-color stories, treated women with disrespect, admitted to Herndon that his mother was probably illegitimate, and suggested that a finger and thumb were as good as a handkerchief.

The anti-Lincoln tradition seems to have reached a low ebb during the decade from the grand centennial celebration of 1909 to the close of the First World War. Still, then it made a comeback in the 1920s, a time when Lincoln studies, in general, were entering their most brilliant era. One feature of the revival was a crusade to get pro-Northern history books out of Southern schools. Supporting that cause, the United Confederate Veterans in 1922 unanimously adopted a report which declared that the Civil War "was deliberately and personally conceived and its inauguration made by Abraham Lincoln." Immediately, there were angry responses from the G.A.R. and the Dames of the Loyal Legion.

The leader of the school-book crusade was Mildred Lewis Rutherford, historian-general of the Confederated Southern Memorial Association, who maintained that Southern children must be told the truth about Abraham Lincoln. Among the "truths" she purveyed in a series of pamphlets were these: that Lincoln was a slaveholder; that as a quartermaster in the Mexican War, he tried to starve American soldiers; that he contributed $100 to the support of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry; and that Ulysses S. Grant, as commanding general of the Army, in 1867 imposed a forty-five-year censorship on all important newspapers, prohibiting any abuse of Lincoln. 

By this time, however, the more learned and distinguished Lyon Gardiner Tyler had placed himself at the head of the anti-Lincoln cult. Retiring in 1918 from the presidency of the College of William and Mary, he established Tyler's Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine. He edited it until his death on, of all days, February 12, 1935. Rare was the issue of the Magazine that did not contain some kind of attack upon what he regarded as an absurd and infamous myth. Tyler's Lincoln was ugly to look at, vulgar in his tastes, and filthy in his language. Often linked in honor with George Washington, he should instead be compared to George III, except that the latter, said Tyler, was a "kinder man." Tyler did not allow consistency to hamper his denunciations. On the one hand, Lincoln was the weakest, most vacillating, most incompetent President in history—one who took four years to win a war that should have been won in two. On the other hand, Lincoln was a mighty, satanic force in history, who, by his "blind will" alone, demolished the old Union, shattered the Constitution, and destroyed one million lives and twenty billion dollars worth of property. 

Meanwhile, Lincoln's biography in the 1920s, still dominated by gifted amateurs like Carl Sandburg and Albert J. Beveridge, was being turned into professional channels. Two signals of the change were the conversion of the Abraham Lincoln Association into a research center and the publication of James G. Randall's first book, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln. Professionalization had the critical effect of drawing Lincoln's studies into the mainstream of American historiography so that interpretation of Lincoln became virtually inseparable from the interpretation of the Civil War.

Just then, as it happened, the theme of "revisionism" was about to become a major element in Civil War scholarship. To the revisionists, the war was an avoidable conflict—a tragedy brought on by the agitation of extremists and the blundering of politicians. Abolitionists and other antislavery radicals were the prime villains of the piece. At the same time, the heroes were those compromisers like Stephen A. Douglas and John J. Crittenden, who struggled valiantly to hold the Union together. The interpretation was plainly anti-Republican and thus, to a certain extent, anti-Lincoln. One can see its influence in a tendency toward the harsher judgment of Lincoln's antebellum career, first by Beveridge and later by historians like Richard Hofstadter, Donald W. Riddle, and Reinhard H. Luthin.

An especially pungent expression of revisionism, one that also reflected the "debunking" vogue of the 1920s, was the poet Edgar Lee Masters' experiment in character assassination, Lincoln the Man. Masters' Lincoln, a cold-hearted, under-sexed, intellectually lazy, cunning, devious, calculating, sophistical, unscrupulous, demagogic politician, forced the war treacherously and illegally upon the South, waged it cruelly, and in the process, "crushed the principles of free government." The book has, with good reason, been called a "copperhead biography."

Yet most revisionists, despite of their anti-Republican perspective, were remarkably tender in their treatment of Lincoln. Indeed, one of the leading revisionists, James G. Randall, was also one of the great Lincoln biographers and an admiring one. Randall managed this straddle by positioning Lincoln relatively close to the Douglas Democrats and as far as possible from the abolitionists and radical Republicans. Randall's well-known article, "The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln," is devoted almost entirely to the abuse of Lincoln by the wartime radicals. Thus revisionism, which obviously had much in common with the views expressed by Samuel S. Cox and other Northern Democrats during the Civil War, nevertheless tended, like Cox in the postwar period, to come to terms with the heroic image of Lincoln.

Soon, however, a more aggressive challenge to that image did come from another quarter—that is, from what amounted to a revival of the radical wing of the anti-Lincoln tradition. The Old Left, including Socialists and Communists, had assimilated Lincoln to its ideals and aspirations. But the New Left and the black power militants of the 1960s found little in him to admire. Compared with Wendell Phillips or Charles Sumner, he seemed unheroic, opportunistic, and uninspired by deep moral commitment. Instead of the "Great Emancipator," suggested I. F. Stone, he might better be called the "Great Equivocator." This "tragically flawed figure," said Lerone Bennett, Jr., a senior editor of Ebony magazine, "shared the racial prejudices of most of his white contemporaries." On every issue related to blacks, he was "the very essence of the white supremacist with good intentions." He came to emancipation reluctantly, under radical pressure, and, indeed, according to some cynics, may have "issued the Proclamation to forestall more forcible action by Congress." That is, his real intention may have been to prevent effective emancipation.

In their use of evidence to support such judgments, radical writers were biased, selective, and often uncritical. Furthermore, they generally paid little attention to the limits of circumstance within which Lincoln had to work and the variety of considerations claiming his attention—such as the plain fact that proclaiming emancipation would have been a waste of time without military victory. But then, the radicals of the 1960s were interested less in scholarly fairness than in making history serve the social causes to which they had committed themselves. And there was nothing new or corrupt in that point of view. The past is not an exclusive preserve of historians. It may legitimately be used to inspire social action. Lincoln himself did so, and Jefferson, too, with spectacular success in the Declaration of Independence. The ethical problem arises when social polemics masquerade as historical scholarship, and that was sometimes the case in New Left evaluations of Lincoln.

Meanwhile, the Southern version of the anti-Lincoln tradition continued to flourish. One finds expressions of it in private correspondence as well as in speeches and publications. For example, in the 1920s, Hamilton J. Eckenrode of the University of Virginia wrote to Albert J. Beveridge, calling Lincoln "an unscrupulous politician of overmastering ambition" with "utter want of principle" and "indescribable hypocrisy." As for emancipation, "the chief result of the liberation of the negro race has been the political paralysis of half the country and the general weakening of the nation."

In 1937, Charles W. Ramsdell, a native Texan teaching at the University of Texas, presented the classic statement of the already familiar thesis that Lincoln deliberately "maneuvered the Confederates into firing the first shot" at Fort Sumter so that they would receive the blame for starting a war that he wanted. A book-length reiteration of the thesis in more intemperate language was published four years later by an Alabama attorney, John S. Tilley.

In 1947, a few dozen Southerners who had gathered in Statuary Hall of the National Capitol to celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis found themselves listening to what a Time correspondent called "a historical Pickett's charge." It was delivered by the guest speaker, "sallow, hawk-nosed Dr. Charles S. Tansill, Texas-born history professor at ... Georgetown University." Characterizing Lincoln as a "do-nothing" soldier, "invincible in peace and invisible in war," Tansill accused him of precipitating hostilities by tricking the Confederates into their attack on Sumter. The most prominent person in the audience, Representative John Rankin of Mississippi, left discreetly as soon as possible, muttering that the professor had gone "too far" and that it was time to "draw the mantle of charity over all that."

In 1959, soon after Brown v. Board of Education had inaugurated the "Second Reconstruction," there appeared a book comparing Lincoln and Jefferson Davis written by Russell Hoover Quynn, the son of a Confederate veteran from Maryland. Quynn was almost apoplectic in his hatred for Lincoln, whom he called the country's first "dictator," and in his determination to defend that "civilized, beneficial, humane" arrangement that was mislabeled "slavery." "The real monument to the Great Emancipator," he wrote, "is the maiming of the United States Constitution ... and the imposition upon the nation of a Negro race problem that progressively grows."

More recently, the neo-Confederate attack on Lincoln has been carried forward by Ludwell H. Johnson of the College of William and Mary, principally in a series of articles. Echoing and elaborating on one of Lyon Gardiner Tyler's favorite arguments, Johnson maintains that the great mystery of the Civil War is not why the South lost, but rather, why the North, with its "enormous material and numerical superiority," took so long to win. His answer is the inferiority of Northern leadership from the presidency down and the profound political composition of Northern society. According to Johnson, Lincoln was essentially a politician and little more, a man for whom "political imperatives were moral imperatives," even when that meant blinking at corruption and incompetence. Lincoln's primary aim, says Johnson, was a political one—to make the Republican party "a permanent majority in the nation"—and this political purpose impeded and tainted the conduct of the war.

In an article comparing the Union and Confederate presidents, Johnson finds Davis "clearly superior" to Lincoln as a war leader. He was more dignified, decisive, and willing to accept responsibility. He made wiser appointments, had a better strategic sense, maintained a stronger cabinet, handled his generals with greater skill, was more effective as a legislative manager, and kept his military policies free from the contamination of politics. Indeed, according to Johnson, Davis was one of the most remarkable Americans of all time and has been denied his rightful place in history because he happened to be on the losing side. "Nothing succeeds like success," Johnson observes more than once. The comparison between Lincoln and Davis would have turned out quite differently if the South had won its independence, he argues. "Suppose the French had not come to the rescue of the Patriots, and the British had crushed the American bid for independence? What would be George Washington's reputation?" The answer is that, in those circumstances, Washington would have been fortunate to come out with a reputation as high as that of Robert E. Lee (for Lee, rather than Davis, is obviously the Civil War analog of Washington). Johnson never even confronts the interesting question of why defeat should have had a disastrous effect on Davis's historical stature as a political leader but not on Lee's stature as a military leader.
Furthermore, Johnson's whole argument proves to be ultimately self-destructive. Suppose we accept all of his assertions at face value. In that case, the greatest mystery of the Civil War is this: How could Jefferson Davis and his associates have been so stupid as to get involved in a war that, according to Johnson, they had not the slightest chance of winning—not even against an enemy that was governed and commanded, according to Johnson, with pitiful incompetence?

Even fiercer than Johnson in his hostility to Lincoln is M. E. Bradford, a Texas-born, Vanderbilt-trained professor of English at the University of Dallas. Bradford's views reflect not only his Southern background but also his intellectual conservatism in the tradition of Russell Kirk, Eric Voegelin, and Willmoore Kendall. The Lincoln portrayed by Bradford in a series of articles is a demagogue, a "country hustler," a "self-made Caesar"—cold and calculating in his ambition, dishonest in his rhetoric, and unscrupulous in his use of power—a man who precipitated Civil War waged it inhumanely, spurned efforts to end it by negotiation, put political considerations ahead of the lives and welfare of his soldiers, and secured his own re-election by illegitimate military force.

Unlike Johnson, whose depreciation of Lincoln's abilities and achievements has the effect of reducing his historical significance, Bradford sees a figure of towering influence who catastrophically changed the course of American history. Bradford's Lincoln was the prime agent of a "gnostic" revolution that imposed the reform imperatives of New England Puritanism upon American politics, thereby destroying the old Union of sovereign states and setting the nation on the road to totalitarianism. Lincoln, in short, is America's Cromwell. He created the imperial presidency and converted the national government into a "juggernaut," all the while "wrapping up his policy in the idiom of Holy Scripture, concealing within the Trojan Horse of his gasconade and moral superiority an agenda that would never have been approved if presented in any other form." Bradford frequently gets tipsy from his own rhetoric in this way, and tender concern for historical accuracy never impedes his rush to judgment. But in the intensity of his conviction, he is a worthy heir and custodian of the anti-Lincoln tradition.

In the late twentieth century, it has become increasingly difficult to separate the tradition of more casual and impersonal criticism of Lincoln from the mainstream of Lincoln scholarship. Of course, the very extravagance of the Lincoln legend invites attack from trained historians and professional iconoclasts like Gore Vidal. Not without admiration for Lincoln, the consummate politician, Vidal recently trained his guns upon what he calls "the Sandburg-Mt. Rushmore Lincoln ... a solemn gloomy cuss, who speaks only in iambic pentameter, a tear forever at the corner of his eye—the result, no doubt, of being followed around by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which keeps humming 'the Battle Hymn of the Republic.'" In his presentation of the "real" Lincoln, Vidal then repeats and embroiders one of Herndon's sleazier quasi-recollections. Lincoln, it seems, caught syphilis as a young man and later infected his wife, who eventually succumbed to paresis, but not before infecting three of their children, each of whom died prematurely as a consequence—and all of which may explain why he frequently fell into fits of melancholy. So much for Gore the Myth-slayer.

A modern interpretation of Lincoln has been profoundly affected by the practice of history as a discipline and by the progress of history as a human experience. The expanding professionalization of Lincoln's studies has produced greater variety and sophistication in the assessment of his character, motives, conduct, and influence. Most notably, at present, the exploration of Lincoln's inner life is being revolutionized by the application of insights and analytic techniques drawn from other disciplines, especially psychology and literary criticism. The emerging portrait is a composite of scholarship revealing a mixture of faults and virtues, mistakes and achievements. It has become a less coherent and less heroic portrait, perhaps more meaningful in our unheroic, troubled age.

Although the overall effect remains favorable to Lincoln, some of the new scholarly writing does lend intellectual support to the anti-Lincoln persuasion, usually without also pledging emotional allegiance. For example, a recent article in Civil War History finds that Lincoln, in lifting the suppression of the Chicago Times, was governed entirely by political considerations and displayed no concern about freedom of the press. Another essay in the same journal argues that in the presidential campaign of 1860, Lincoln would have been vulnerable to an attack upon his vaunted honesty and that such an attack, if the Democrats had only been clever enough to organize it, might very well have cost him the election. Still, another case in point is George B. Forgie's psychohistorical study, Patricide in the House Divided, wherein it is maintained that Lincoln unconsciously willed and promoted the crisis of the Union as his only escape from the psychological dilemma of revering the founding fathers while at the same time resenting their historic pre-emption of the pathways to renown. Similarly, Dwight G. Anderson presents a "demonic" Lincoln who, "by acting on his motive of revenge against constitutional fathers for having preempted the field of glory," became the "very tyrant against whom Washington had warned in his Farewell Address, a tyrant who would preside over the destruction of the Constitution in order to gratify his own ambition."

Forgie and Anderson have both followed the lead of Edmund Wilson but with a significant difference. Wilson, some sixty years ago, first suggested that Lincoln, when he discussed the danger of dictatorship in his Lyceum speech, was projecting himself into the role of the "towering genius" whose craving for distinction might one day pose a mortal threat to the political system erected by the founding fathers. Forgie, in a variant version, maintains that Lincoln suppressed any such subversive thoughts and cast Stephen A. Douglas as the destructive genius, with himself as the prospective savior of the nation. By thus inventing a villain and summoning up an illusive danger, he set the stage for the disruption of the Union.

Anderson, adhering more closely to the Wilson theory, portrays Lincoln as a man hounded by anxieties about death and, therefore, hungry for the immortality of historical renown but embittered by the failure of his congressional career. This Lincoln, driven by ambition, self-hatred, and a desire for revenge, determines to assume the role of revolutionary leader and tyrant. "Denied the opportunity of 'building up,'" says Anderson, "this ambitious genius 'would set boldly to the task of pulling down.'" Lincoln's "malignant passions" were unleashed in the Fort Sumter crisis when he maneuvered the South into striking the first blow. Quickly arrogating to himself "virtually dictatorial powers as president," he also began to erect a civil religion with himself as God's appointed instrument for saving the Union. In this manner, he provided the ideological rationale whereby the United States in the twentieth century would make its disastrous attempt to become a lawgiver to the entire world.

This dark vision of Lincoln, which seems to qualify Anderson (and Forgie, too, perhaps) for membership in the anti-Lincoln tradition, is probably not so much a product of historical research as it is a by-product of recent history and a reflection of the gnawing uneasiness with which Americans currently view themselves and their past. More often than not, the great events and major trends of our own era have tended to make Lincoln less satisfactory as a national hero. The civil rights revolution underscored the poverty of his thought about the problem of race and the inadequacy of his plans for the aftermath of emancipation. The Viet Nam War and the Watergate affair dramatized the growth and menace of the so-called imperial presidency, which could be traced directly to his extraordinary use of executive power. The modern drift toward social pluralism, with its emphasis upon minority rights and its sanction of organized protest, bears little relation to the coercive majoritarianism with which he met the threat of secession. And the apocalyptic meaning of total war in our time casts a shadow of doubt across his willingness to accept war and wage it totally as an alternative to acquiescence in disunion. Furthermore, Lincoln's reputation has become more vulnerable as a result of what C. Vann Woodward calls "the fall of the American Adam"—that is, the substitution of a sense of guilt about the nation's past for an earlier sense of virtue and pride. Lincoln is still widely regarded as the representative American of his time and perhaps of all time. But the America that he represents is now often portrayed as a dark, odious country stained with cruelty, injustice, racism, and imperialist greed.

Yet, in spite of all adverse influences, Lincoln retains the admiration of most Americans and his place of pre-eminence in the national pantheon. Perhaps a kind of historical inertia holds him there now; perhaps the twenty-first century will view him much differently. But in the polls, he still ranks first. One recent presidential poll merits special attention. Of 41 historians, 39 labeled him "great," one called him a "near great," none classified him as "average" or "below average," but one branded him a "failure." Thus the anti-Lincoln tradition persists in lonely splendor, and the study of that tradition does tell us something, though far from everything, about Lincoln's unique hold upon the memory and imagination of his countrymen. In a word, he matters. He has never settled quietly into his historical niche. For anyone trying to understand America's past or shape its future, he is a force to be reckoned with—an ineluctable presence. In the words of an Englishwoman, Barbara Ward, "he is one of the very few of the world's leaders who stay alive."

By Don E. Fehrenbacher
Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Sunday, June 25, 2023

Abraham Lincoln and the Recruitment of Negro Soldiers.


In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY
When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:
  • The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.
Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:
  • "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
  • "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
  • "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM 
THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.
 


For all the volumes written about Abraham Lincoln and the eloquent words spoken by Lincoln himself—for all the polls that mark him as a great man, a national, even international, hero—the Civil War President remains something of an enigma. Our continuation of the "Lincoln and" tradition today suggests our preoccupation with his views on significant issues. Given a corollary (proposition) interest in the topic of race in American history, it is not surprising that Lincoln's place in that central theme remains a subject of debate. The revolutionary developments of the post-World War II period in the area of what is broadly termed "civil rights" have led to a reevaluation of Lincoln—from the great emancipator to the reluctant emancipator to the white supremacist, or Lincoln as just another "whitey."
A one-of-a-kind ferrotype (tintype) photograph of President-elect Abraham Lincoln.



Historians, ordinarily a judicious lot, are as involved in the reevaluation as those with more obvious ideological interests. But historians should have a greater appreciation of context. Hence, to wrench Lincoln from context, from the backdrop of his times, from the exigencies of policy, the fortunes of war, and the historical record is not a path calculated for arrival at something approximating historical truth. In our relativistic age, it is too much to expect fidelity to the record; perhaps Lincoln should remain more symbol than historical reality. The record may be discomfiting; it often is.

Abraham Lincoln was born into a political culture that was profoundly racist (to use a somewhat anachronistic term). For centuries, Europeans, whether living on the continent, in the United States, or elsewhere, had deemed the Africans a race apart, one that was in no guise the equal of the Europeans. It was a combination of that racism with economic considerations that made the enslavement of Africans fundamentally different from the slavery of other places and at other times. Practically speaking, nothing in Lincoln's formative years would lead us to expect him to be other than a man of his culture.

The laws of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois—in common with those of other political jurisdictions within the United States—held the African to be less than a citizen, less than a person.

Yet Lincoln imbibed other influences—the idea of political democracy (however limited), the concept of social mobility (however restricted), and the idea of economic improvement (however problematical). Lincoln believed the words of the Declaration of Independence; he thought that a person should not be constrained by circumstances of birth, and he embraced the Whig notions of economic growth. As an individual, he was, from all reports, singularly free from bigotry—against individuals and groups.

As much as any public man of his day, he advocated the most expansive sharing of the American dream. His re-entry into national politics in the wake of the exacerbated sectional conflict of the 1850s was predicated upon the ideas that slavery was evil and that, in certain instances, racial bigotry was unworthy of a great nation. That his political fortunes, and those of his party, were tied to the geographical restriction of slavery set him and his party apart from his political opponents. He could have been seen as radical in 1858 or 1860 (and 1948 or 1960).

The threat to slavery perceived by Lincoln's election in 1860 precipitated a train of events that culminated in the civil war. That war, whatever else it may have been, or whatever else we may wish it had been, was a titanic military struggle fraught with profound political and social consequences. Lincoln, as he remarked in his Second Inaugural Address, did not anticipate, nor did other Americans anticipate, those consequences any more than they anticipated the full horrors of that terrible conflict. Lincoln expected a relatively short war once the apparently overwhelming resources of the Union could be brought to bear against the Confederacy. Thus, the ancient prejudices of his country might have survived the war intact had the war ended with a Union victory in the first year or so. But that was not the case. Lincoln necessarily had to accept and then defend policies that arose from circumstances that forced a reconsideration of the place of Africans in the United States.

The American political and military establishment decreed in 1861 that white men would fight the war. Lincoln concurred. The Congress enacted in July 1861 that the war would be fought for the Union—not for conquest or the abolition of slavery. Lincoln concurred. When his generals and Cabinet officials moved beyond the President's plan, Lincoln overruled them. When Negro leaders asked that regiments of Negro soldiers be enrolled under the flag of freedom, Lincoln and his advisors refused. In stations high and low, many northerners seemed to fear a rebellion of slaves more than they feared a rebellion of slaveowners. Had northern arms prevailed in 1861 or early 1862, slavery might have remained status quo ante bellum.

The political attack on slavery was embodied in a series of laws termed the Confiscation Acts. Under the provisions of those laws, Lincoln could have enrolled Negro men as laborers and support elements for the armies in the field. Lincoln chose instead not to invoke those aspects of the Acts. A primary reason was his concern for the border states, especially Kentucky. Lincoln believed that wholesale emancipation or the enlistment of Negro soldiers would cause Kentucky, and probably Missouri and Maryland, to become even greater obstacles to the Union cause—to say nothing of antagonism elsewhere in the North. In the case of Kentucky, he was correct. Holding that state in the Union necessitated either overwhelming military force or some deference to the wishes of its white population. Lincoln's policy reflected a combination of both. Eventually, more Negro men entered the Army from Kentucky than from any other state except Louisiana. And the reaction of the white population in Kentucky was as hostile as had been predicted. But by 1863, the adverse reaction in Kentucky was considerably less consequential than in 1861 or 1862. 

For practical political reasons, Lincoln did not openly lead the movement toward the enlistment of Negroes. Before 1863, long before he expressed enthusiasm for the idea, he allowed others to take the first steps; he remained silent, overruled them, or caused them to be overruled. He was always sensitive to political considerations and his office's prerequisites and powers. Timing, the right moment, was critical—and Lincoln always deemed himself a better judge of the moment than those who advised him, formally or informally.

On September 25, 1861, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles allowed the recruitment of Negroes into the Navy, but only with the rank of "boy" and at a compensation of no more than $10.00 per month. The step caused little comment, perhaps because "boys" on ships were not expected to shoot Rebels or to function as part of the military establishment. 

Simon Cameron, Secretary of War, was less subtle. On October 14, 1861, he authorized Brigadier General Thomas W. Sherman to hire Negro fugitives for service in South Carolina, although he disclaimed any intent to arm them as soldiers. Lincoln seemed amenable to the idea of Negroes as "auxiliaries." But the plan failed because General Sherman apparently neither wished to use Negroes nor wanted to offend the sensibilities of white South Carolinians unduly. In December, Cameron took a more direct step. In his annual report, he openly advocated the employment of slaves as soldiers. More importantly, he allowed the report to be copied and distributed before giving it to Lincoln. The President disavowed the offensive portions of the report and ordered them deleted from his annual message to Congress. Because of that misstep and because he was a general embarrassment to the administration, Cameron was removed from the Cabinet and named minister to Russia. 

During the first half of 1862, Congress moved towards bringing Negroes into the Army—March, rendition of slaves by military forbidden; April, abolition of slavery in D.C.; July, Second Confiscation Act and Militia Act. In April and May, the new Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, encouraged (at least implicitly) the arming of Negroes in South Carolina. The situation there caused a great stir because the general in command, David Hunter, proved to be politically inept and hence a political liability. He managed to offend many officers and men in the white regiments and two congressmen of a border state, Kentucky. When those congressmen demanded explanations of what was transpiring in South Carolina, Stanton retreated into his bureaucratic defenses. Still, he did ask General Hunter for a report, which he forwarded to Congress. Hunter's report was entertaining to some Republicans (referring to "fugitive rebels") and to the border state congressmen—insulting.

During the summer of 1862, Lincoln evinced no inclination to support Hunter, to implement the provisions of the Second Confiscation Act liberating the slaves of Rebels, or to employ Negroes other than as laborers. He stated his views to the Cabinet in late July, and on August 6, he told a delegation of "Western gentlemen" that he would not arm Negroes "unless some new and more pressing emergency arises." He said such would turn "50,000 bayonets" in the border states against the Union. Steps short of actually arming Negroes would be continued—upon this, he and his critics did not differ. And in the same context, on August 22, he wrote his famous reply to Horace Greeley's "Prayer of Twenty Million": as President, he would save the Union; all else would be subordinate to that goal.

On August 10, the disheartened (if not chastened) General Hunter reported to Stanton that he was disbanding his regiment of South Carolina volunteers. But as the curtain fell on Hunter, Stanton on August 25, authorized Brigadier General Rufus Saxton at Beaufort, South Carolina, to "arm, uniform, equip, and receive into the service of the United States such number of volunteers of African descent as you may deem expedient, not exceeding 5,000." Why the reversal? Why had Stanton authorized Saxton to do what had been denied, Hunter? A comment by Lieutenant Charles Francis Adams, Jr., may be pertinent.
Regarding Hunter, "Why could not fanatics be silent and let Providence work for a while?" (And if not Providence, at least the President.) In short, had Hunter managed to be more politic concerning his fellow officers and the Congress, had he been able to restrain his rhetorical flourishes, he may not have run afoul of the critics of his policy, to say nothing of the President. The fact was, Negroes were now to be brought into the service, not by a general acting more or less on his own authority, but by order of the War Department— and the President.

In other corners of the conflict, namely Louisiana and Kansas, other generals enlisted Negroes. In New Orleans, for example, Benjamin F. Butler had negated earlier enlisting efforts but now, encouraged by Secretary of the Treasury Chase (and Mrs. Butler), called for free Negroes to enter the service. By mid-fall, three such regiments were formed in Louisiana. On August 5, 1862, the redoubtable abolitionist James H. Lane in Kansas wired Stanton that he was raising black and white units, and was there any objection? Stanton wrote Lane on August 22 and again on September 23 that such action was without the authority of President Lane and never received authorization. Still, he continued enrolling Negro soldiers in the Union. Benjamin Quarles has termed such enrollments "trial balloons," which Lincoln allowed to float when no one of consequence tried to pop. 

Of course, Lincoln discussed another matter with his Cabinet in the summer of 1862—namely, emancipation. In his "preliminary" proclamation of September 22, 1862, Lincoln did not mention Negro soldiers. In October, however, he presumably talked to one Daniel Ullmann of New York, who urged that very course. After hearing Ullmann's argument, Lincoln asked: "Would you be willing to command Negro soldiers?" Although stunned by the question, Ullmann replied in the affirmative. Given the late summer and early fall events in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Kansas, Lincoln seemed to be evolving a plan—perhaps Ullmann would pilot another of those trial balloons.

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, called for the enrollment of Negroes in the Union Army and Navy. It was contained in an almost offhand passage—entirely in keeping with Lincoln's tendency to hint, approach indirectly, and finally, defend the stated policy. Yet the proclamation was fundamental. It was a war message, a political document. The government of the United States, through the Office of the President, was now unequivocally on the side of emancipation and of bringing Negro men into the Army of the Republic.

Over the next several months, the new policy was put into effect. Ullmann appointed a brigadier general of volunteers and was explicitly charged with raising four regiments of volunteers in Louisiana (where he found public opinion far from supportive). Colonel James Montgomery of Kansas was authorized to raise a Negro regiment in South Carolina, and the governors of Massachusetts and Rhode Island were given similar authorization. Massachusetts Governor John A. Andrew, in fact, raised most of his Negro troops from the southern states. 

The primary organizing effort was placed in the hands of Lorenzo Thomas, adjutant general of the Army. His order of March 25 from Secretary Stanton was to proceed to the Mississippi Valley to enlist Negro troops and find white officers and enlisted men who would take commissions in Negro regiments. Thomas was an effective recruiter, stressing that he spoke with the full authority of the President, the Secretary of War, and the General-in-Chief. Henry W. Halleck (notorious for his General Order No. 3 in 1861) had fallen in line with administration policy and was now telling other Mississippi Valley officers to do the same. Of particular interest was the reaction of Ulysses S. Grant, who, early in the war, had no more sympathy for emancipation than did many other regulars. Yet Grant was undoubtedly a man to follow orders from Washington. Indeed, he had already made provision for organizing "contrabands" into a workforce. According to John Eaton, Jr., in charge of the contrabands, Grant believed that if the occasion arose, the fugitives could carry rifles instead of hoes, rakes, and shovels.

Halleck's advice to Grant, in a friendly, somewhat patronizing letter, was a compelling statement of administration policy. "From my position here, where I can survey the whole field, perhaps I may be better able to understand the tone of public opinion and the intentions of the Government." Grant then assured Halleck (and later the President) that he would support the policy even to the extent of ordering subordinate officers to actively " remove prejudice" against Negroes. Thomas's mission, after all, went beyond recruiting Negro men into the ranks. As Dudley Cornish has stated: "Rather was his task that of initiating Union policy on a grand scale, of breaking down white opposition to the use of Negro soldiers, of educating Union troops in the valley on this one subject, of starting the work of the organization," and then leaving others to finish the work of recruiting and training. Lincoln approved of Thomas's work, telling Stanton that Thomas was "one of the best (if not the best) instruments for this service." Perhaps Lincoln had been right after all. It was best to bring the general public along, then put the task in the hands of the professional soldiers who, without ideological biases, placed great stock in order, system, and hierarchy. The road to favor with the administration was not in embarrassing the President but inefficiently following his policy once that policy was clearly enunciated.

On Independence Day, 1863, Vicksburg surrendered; the "Father of Waters" again flowed "unvexed to the sea." Thanks were given to not only the Great Northwest but also New England, and the "Sunny South, too, in more colors than one."

In early August, Lincoln wrote to Grant, congratulating him upon his magnificent military achievement but also noting: "Gen. Thomas has gone again to the Mississippi Valley, with the view of raising colored troops. I have no reason to doubt that you are doing what you reasonably can on the same subject. I believe it is a resource that will soon close this contest if vigorously applied now. It works doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us. We were not fully ripe for it until the river was opened." On August 26, Lincoln wrote to a political friend in Illinois that some of his field commanders "who have given us our most important successes believe the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion; and that, at least one of those important successes, could not have been achieved when it was, but for the aid of Negro soldiers." He could have recited the practical, some might say cynical, reasons given for bringing Negroes into the Army—saving the lives of white soldiers. Yet, said Lincoln, "Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made must be kept." One day peace would come. "And then, there will be some Negro men who can remember that, with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while I fear, there will be some white ones, unable to forget that, with malignant heart, and deceitful speech, they have strove to hinder it.

The force of the effort for recruiting Negroes lay in the deep South and in the Northeast. Lincoln still had no wish to press the issue in the border states. And his caution was well founded, although he did authorize (through Stanton) recruiting in Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

Kentuckians were particularly resentful. When Ambrose Burnside suggested in June 1863 that the administration disavow any intention to conscript free Negroes in Kentucky, Lincoln concurred that the effort would cost more than it would gain. In January 1864, however, the War Department established a recruiting post in Paducah. Kentucky Governor Thomas E. Bramlette traveled to Washington and protested directly to Lincoln. The President explained that he had come to his policy of emancipation and arming Negroes after prudent delay—early in the war, it was not an "indispensable necessity." He changed his mind when he knew he had to choose between "surrendering the Union, and with it, the Constitution, or laying strong hand upon the colored element." He had not been certain at that time that he had made the right decision, but after a year's experience, he was convinced of it. "We have the men [130,000], and we could not have had them without the measure. And now let any Union man who complains of the measure test himself by writing down in one line that he is for subduing the rebellion by force of arms; and in the next, that he is for taking these hundred and thirty thousand men from the Union side, and placing them where they would be but for the measure he condemns. If he can not face his case so stated, it is only because he can not face the truth." That letter contained Lincoln's memorable line, "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." Lincoln meant for the letter to be circulated among the white population of Kentucky. Although his correspondents expressed satisfaction with it, Kentuckians, in general, resented recruitment of Negroes more intensely than did people of any other state. But Lincoln knew, and he made the point repeatedly from mid-1863 to the end of the war; without the Negro soldiers, there would be no Union.

Frederick Douglass said so well in 1876:
His great mission was to accomplish two things: first, to save his country from dismemberment and ruin; and second, to free his country from the great crime of slavery. To do one or the other, or both, he needed the earnest sympathy and the powerful cooperation of his loyal fellow-countrymen. Without those primary and essential conditions to success his efforts would have been utterly fruitless. Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistance to rebellion impossible. From the genuine abolition view, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent, but measuring him by the sentiment of his country—a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult—he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined

The enlistment of Negroes into the Union Army was part of Lincoln's evolving policy on slavery and race, a policy charged with political, social, and psychological overtones. The Negro man as a soldier—with rifle and bayonet—was a different figure from the slave. His presence, while a military necessity, was also a potent blow to the idea of the innate inferiority of the Africans, a view not peculiar to the South. Those who urged the enlistment of Negroes realized its implications. Some political figures saw it as a necessity, calculated to outrage the South. Negro leaders saw it from a different perspective. Not only would the enlistment of Negroes serve a military purpose, but most assuredly, it would also enhance the sense of manhood among Negro men, a sense deliberately blunted by public policy throughout the nation. Thus, while Douglass remarked on the "tardiness" of the President who "loved Rome more than he did Caesar," he insisted that emancipation and manhood, in the most profound sense, were indispensable steps toward participation in American society.

Lincoln acted as he did from necessity. His almost mystical devotion to the Union and his personal compassion for the dispossessed of the world combined into policy. Events moved him in the sense that circumstances determined the time for action. During the Civil War, a fundamental truth emerged: Negro people understood the meaning of the war and contributed to the great goal of freedom. Yet Negroes were also objects; to defeat the white South, the white North needed Negro men. Lincoln was their emancipator, their savior when he spoke as the cautious, prudent political leader and when he eloquently spoke of the magnificent contribution that Negro soldiers made to the Union. The war brought the time, and Lincoln—"preeminently the white man's President"—became the Negro man's hero.

By John T. Hubbell
Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.

Thursday, June 1, 2023

John Kinzie's Narrative of the Fort Dearborn Massacre.


In historical writing and analysis, PRESENTISM introduces present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Presentism is a form of cultural bias that creates a distorted understanding of the subject matter. Reading modern notions of morality into the past is committing the error of presentism. Historical accounts are written by people and can be slanted, so I try my hardest to present fact-based and well-researched articles.

Facts don't require one's approval or acceptance.

I present [PG-13] articles without regard to race, color, political party, or religious beliefs, including Atheism, national origin, citizenship status, gender, LGBTQ+ status, disability, military status, or educational level. What I present are facts — NOT Alternative Facts — about the subject. You won't find articles or readers' comments that spread rumors, lies, hateful statements, and people instigating arguments or fights.

FOR HISTORICAL CLARITY
When I write about the INDIGENOUS PEOPLE, I follow this historical terminology:
  • The use of old commonly used terms, disrespectful today, i.e., REDMAN or REDMEN, SAVAGES, and HALF-BREED are explained in this article.
Writing about AFRICAN-AMERICAN history, I follow these race terms:
  • "NEGRO" was the term used until the mid-1960s.
  • "BLACK" started being used in the mid-1960s.
  • "AFRICAN-AMERICAN" [Afro-American] began usage in the late 1980s.

— PLEASE PRACTICE HISTORICISM 
THE INTERPRETATION OF THE PAST IN ITS OWN CONTEXT.
 


At sunset, August 28, 1820, a canoe bearing Dr. Alexander Wolcott, Lieutenant Aeneas Mackay, Captain David Bates Douglass, and a full complement of singing French Canadian voyageurs was paddled into the mouth of the Chicago River. Its occupants "received from Mr. Kinzie all the comfortable attention, which could do away the impression of fatigue." The next morning, at five o'clock, a second canoe with Governor Lewis Cass, Major Robert Forsyth, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and the remainder of the voyageurs landed at Chicago, a village "of ten or twelve dwelling houses, with an aggregate population, of probably, sixty souls." After three months of traveling, the party of explorers was glad to be able to see the last lap of its journey ahead. 

Governor Cass, with the sanction of Secretary of War John C. Calhoun, had organized an expedition at Detroit to explore the unknown regions of Lake Superior and the upper Mississippi in order "to survey the topography of the country and collect the materials for an accurate map-to locate the site of a garrison at the foot of Lake Superior, and to purchase the ground-to investigate the subject of the northwestern copper mines, lead mines, and gypsum quarries." With a military escort, a party of Indians, and three official explorers (James Duane Doty, Alexander Chase and Charles C. Trowbridge) in addition to those listed above, the group had coasted along the western shoreline of Lake Huron and the southern shore of Lake Superior, portaged across the Healds separating the Superior watershed from the Mississippi watershed, paddled up the Great River as far as Cass Lake, followed it downstream to the mouth of the Wisconsin River, gone up the Wisconsin River and down the Fox River to Fort Howard at Green Bay. There, the soldiers joined their military units, the Indians were dismissed, and Doty, Chase and Trowbridge were dispatched around the northern rim of Lake Michigan to complete that portion of the regional survey. At Chicago, the party was again broken up. Dr. Wolcott, the sub-Indian agent at Chicago, remained at his post; Cass, Forsyth and Mackay, accompanied by John Kinzie, set out overland for Detroit; Schoolcraft and Douglass undertook a survey of the eastern shoreline of Lake Michigan. It was, on the whole, a remarkable expedition since it provided Americans with their first reliable representation of the northwestern sector of the old Northwest Territory. 

Members of the expedition were acquainted with John Kinzie, the trader at this remote outpost on "Onion Creek," who for several years had acted as an Indian agent under Governor Casso at his St. Joseph trading post, as well as his interests at Green Bay, came under the direct supervision of the Michigan Territory governor. Dr. Wolcott was a close friend of the Kinzies; a few years later, he married Kinzie's daughter Ellen, and his niece Juliette Magill married Kinzie's son John Harris Kinzie. Young John was working at Mackinac for the American Fur Company in 1820, and rumor is that he accompanied the expedition as far as Sault Ste. Marie. Major Forsyth was a nephew of John Kinzie, his father and Kinzie being half-brothers, and Forsyth's uncle, Thomas Forsyth of Peoria, was a trading partner of Kinzie: It would have been strange had the "outside" members of the expedition, Douglass and Schoolcraft, failed to solicit from eyewitness John Kinzie the story of the Chicago massacre, only eight years past. The others had already heard it, perhaps many times. 

So far as historians have been able to learn, Schoolcraft was the only person to record any part of Kinzie's account of the dreadful slaughter of August 15, 1812. Kinzie died (1828) before his son John Harris Kinzie married Juliette Magill (1830). Consequently, Juliette Kinzie's story in Wau-Bun was drawn from the memories of her husband (nine years old at the time of the massacre), of her mother-in-law (the senior Mrs. Kinzie), and of her sister-in-law Margaret Me-Killip (stepdaughter of John Kinzie and wife of Lieutenant Linai T. Helm). In the intervening years, those memories had succumbed to the erosions and accretions of time. By 1844, when Chapters 18-20 of Wau-Bun were first published, the family legend had acquired the personal biases of those who had special viewpoints to present.

Schoolcraft devoted approximately four pages to the Dearborn massacre in his Narrative [ournal of the Cass expedition. This account, published in 1821, was taken "from the description given by an eye-witness, Mr. Kinzie of Chicago, and from Captain [Nathan J Heald's official report." Schoolcraft could have added Robert B. McAfee's History of the Late War (1816), based on Captain Heald's report and on the story of a survivor of the battle, William Griffith, who lived to serve with McAfee in Colonel Richard M. Johnson's regiment in the latter part of the War of 1812. Schoolcraft's version contains many of the prejudices against Heald that were to appear later in Helm's story and in Wau-Bun. These, more than likely, he got either from his meeting with Kinzie or from the prevailing attitudes of the time: General William Hull had "sacrificed" Detroit; under his orders, Heald had "committed" the same "blunders" at Fort Dearborn. Both were locally tarred with the same brush.
The Fort Dearborn Massacre, August 15, 1812. Painting by Samuel Page.
The painting represents Mrs. Helms being rescued from her would-be slayer, Naunongee by Black Partridge. To her left is Surgeon Van Voorhes, falling mortally wounded. Other characters depicted are Capt. William Wells, Mrs. Heald on horseback, Ensign Ronan, Mrs. Ronan, Mrs. Holt, Mr. John Kinzie, and Chief Waubonsie. In the background are Indians, the wagons containing children, and the boat on the lake bearing Kinzie's family to safety.




Other firsthand reports of August 15, 1812 events include Captain Heald's official letter to Adjutant General Thomas H. Cushing, October 23, 1812, and Lieutenant Helm's 1814-1815 account written for Judge Augustus B. Woodward of Detroit. Heald's letter is factual and uncolored by any personal motives; Helm's description deliberately accuses Heald of blunders in judgment and stupidity in maneuvers. As reported by Mrs. Helm, Helm's bias formed the source of the belittling of Heald by subsequent historians and fiction writers. Years later, Mrs. Heald, defending her husband, passed on her version of the fatal day to her son, who in turn repeated it to Lyman Draper, the Wisconsin historian. These reports, as well as those of other survivors, usually second or third-hand, were carefully recorded and analyzed by Milo M. Quaife in "Chicago and the Old Northwest."

A statement of the "facts" from John Kinzie would have been a most valuable document in separating fiction and prejudice from reality. Although too deeply involved in the decisions to evacuate the fort and in the details of the withdrawal to be completely impersonal, Kinzie's firsthand story, as a noncombatant, would have provided details to balance the fiction of Wau-Bun and the venom of Helm against Heald's military report. Fortunately, such a statement is now available. Upon hearing Kinzie's story, Captain David Bates Douglass recorded it in his journal of the 1820 expedition. 

Douglass, the official topographer, intended to prepare a map of the expedition's territory and introduce it with a "memoir" written by himself and Schoolcraft. He was Schoolcraft's senior by several years and a person of consequence. A professor at the military academy at West Point, on assignment to Governor Cass for the expedition, he rightfully assumed that his plans should be given priority. Schoolcraft jumped the gun and published his own narrative before Douglass could complete the map. Other interferences prevented Douglass from finishing his task. The result was that his daily records (six leatherbound five by eight-inch topographical notebooks and eleven four by six-inch paper-back diaries) were relegated to the oblivion of attic and basement until the present writer unearthed them while preparing a new edition of Schoolcraft's Narrative Journal for publication. At the point of the Chicago entries, clearly labeled "Mr. Kinzies narrative of the Massacre," occurs the near-verbatim story, which is reproduced here. I am indebted to the gracious cooperation of the daughters of the late Moses H. Douglass, grandson of Captain Douglass, of Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, for permission to print this most significant document.

Kinzie's Narrative of the Massacre
On August 9, 1812, an express a Potawatomi Indian came there with orders to Capt. Heald, to evacuate the Fort if possible-the messenger expressed his doubts of the practicability of doing so unless the troops moved off immediately, say the next morning and that by a by rout as the Wabash Potawatomi were disaffected particularly those of Magoquous Villages and would undoubtedly stop them.

Capt. Heald, however, was somewhat distrustful of the Indian and expected Captain William Wells to be with some Miamis. He did not adopt the advice, and the Indian then pressed him through me. I also joined it to go the following day, which he also declined. He was then told he might stay as long as he pleased, and his adviser left him with this. By this time, the Potawatomi began to come in, and the idea of evacuation was known generally and talked of; they professed friendship and assurances that they would conduct the troops safely through, but it was always observed that they all came in a hostile array. In the course of the Councils that were held at this time, Capt. Heald showed the Indians the Arms, Ammunition goods, etc., which were to be given to them for their safe conduct. Things were in this state when Capt. Wells arrived with Miamis about the time that Capt. Heald had determined upon evacuating. Capt. Wells self-advised against it as we had in the fort a sufficiency of Arms Ammunition and c to have sustained the attacks of the Indians even though assisted by the British. It was, however, determined [that the fort be abandoned, I then advised, and Capt Wells agreed with me that the ammunition and liquor ought to be destroyed as the latter would only inflame them and the former would undoubtedly be used in acts of hostility against our people if not against ourselves-to this there was no other objection than Capt. Heald. having already shown it to them, he acknowledged the propriety of the step and freely agreed to adopt any measure I might suggest for justifying him in sight of the Indians for taking it. Strategem was accordingly resorted to, and the business of destruction was immediately commenced. it was intended to throw the powder into the river, but that was prevented by an accident. As I passed out of the Fort at Dusk to wash at the river, two Indians seized hold of me, but perceiving who I was, they desisted from using violence. Their curiosity had been excited by the hammering and bustle in the fort, and they desired to know what was going on. I told them we had been opening pork and flour barrels and preparing to march the next day. This satisfied them for the present, but I perceived they were on the alert and it would be unsafe to attempt throwing the powder in the River, so it was thrown in the well. Tomorrow, we will march by the route to the beach. When we reached the Sand Hillocks beyond those pines (about 2 miles) along shore," Capt. Wells, who was behind, came round in front and spoke to me, observing that we were surrounded. this I had also perceived having seen the Indian Rifles passing round our right as if forming a line to hem us in. He asked what was best to be done. I said we must make the best defense we could, and this was agreed to. The men were faced towards the land and advanced in a line up the bank as they rose. The Indians fired their first volley, and several fell, but the soldiers still preserved their order and pressed upon the Indians into the prairie. In the course of the battle, several desperate encounters took place. Ensign Ronan fought until he struck down the 3rd time, rising each time until he received the fatal blow of a tomahawk, which caused his death.

Sergeant Otho Hays pressed upon a strong Indian [Naunongee] with his bayonet and wounded him in the breast. He endeavored to parry and strike with his tomahawk, but Hays did not kill him but recovered and passed his bayonet through his body, and in this situation, he yet cut down his antagonist with his Tomahawk. Capt. Wells and Dr. Van Voorhees [Voorhis] were killed as well, 28 out of the 56 men, and Capt. Heald was badly wounded when the remainder cut their way into the prairie. In the meantime, others [Indians] had passed around the beach and got among the baggage where the women and children were, and here was perpetrated one of the most shocking scenes of butchery perhaps ever witnessed. Their shrieks of distress, their piteous appeals to father, mother, brothers and husbands for help and their prayers for mercy were there unheard and disavailing. The Tomahawk and knife performed their work without distinctions of age or condition. This scene of havoc lasted for nearly ten minutes. In the early part of the affray, I was in charge of Mrs. Kinzie, who was in my boat. Mrs. Heald and my daughter, Mrs. Helm, who was near me. Mrs. Heald. however, in her terror, soon left me and fled to her Uncle, Capt. Wells, by whose side she received several shot wounds. When the Indians got around to the baggage, some scuffling took place among some of them, which I afterward learned was about killing me. An order, however, was given out among the Indians that they should neither hurt me nor my family. Hearing this, Capt Wells requested his niece return to me, but she still clung to him.

Black Partridge, a Potawatomi Chief, now came forward and, after taking my gun, offered to take us to a place of safety, but my daughter, thinking his intentions hostile, ran at first into the lake but soon returned. I motioned to him to bring Mrs. Heald to us, which he did, and then he conducted us up to that turn of the river above the Fort.

By this time, the Potawatomi sent Le Claire, a messenger, to Capt. Heald demanded his surrender based on the terms asked of Capt. Heald? The messenger did not know, but being a man whom I had brought up and friendly to the Americans, he advised the Capt. not to surrender until they should propose some terms. Capt. Heald accordingly refused to surrender unless they would give a pledge for the lives of the prisoners─this they agreed to with the exception of those who were mortally wounded and the remaining 28 men, some of them badly wounded, were surrendered according to Thomas Burns, whose wounds appeared mortal was Tomahawked by a squaw. Three were killed by a volley fired among a group in consequence of one of them having drawn his knife as if to defend himself, mistaking their intentions when the Indians fired their pieces after the fight in honor of the dead. Several others were dispatched under various pretenses during the afternoon and evening so that probably not more than ten or 12 ultimately escaped the Massacre.  After all was over, the Indian council, among themselves, discussed the disposal of the prisoners. My family and Mrs. Heald allowed me to return to my house. the remaining soldiers were distributed among the different chiefs, and there only remained Capt. Heald to be disposed of. A subject that caused them some discussion. They were inclined to take his life and indeed were emulous among themselves of dispatching him as being the Chief on our side. They complained moreover in a council that he had deceived them by destroying the arms, etc., which he had shown to be delivered out to them, and they had heard that he had poisoned the flour. I answered them on his behalf by showing an order for this destruction and explained to them the obligations of our officers to obey the order of a superior, which they conceived of, I denied the adulteration of the flour and offered to eat of it indeed it wanted but little to convince them that the bearer of this story was a great liar. They acknowledged having deceived us and asked Capt. Heald if he thought the rest of the U.S. would forgive them. It was difficult to say. They knew from past events the pacific disposition of the prest. but if they wished to ask forgiveness, I would exchange hostages, take some of their principal men and go with them for that purpose. They asked Capt. Heald his opinion of the probable continuance and result of our war, to which he gave a suitable reply. In this state, things remained with much anxiety for him on our part when a well-disposed Indian advised me to get him away or he would be killed. I then got a faithful fellow, Chandonnai (the half-breed, staunch friend of the Americans, whom all authorities unite in crediting with noble exertions to save the prisoners) to take Mrs and Capt Heald to St. Joseph, Missouri, in his canoe, which he did though pursued 15 miles by some of them. The present interpreter, Alexander Robinson, took them to Mackinac Island, Michigan.

Some days after, 10 or 12 Indians painted black and armed came across the river to my house, and anticipating their demand, I warned Mrs. Kinzie against the event and encouraged her to meet it with courage. They came and declared their intentions of taking satisfaction of me for Heald's escape. Five Potawatomi Chiefs in the house interceded with them, and they were quieted finally with presents. The treatment of the dead was characteristic of Capt. Wells, and Dr. Van Voorhis. The name of the chief who commanded Black Partridge, reason of his kindness to me, was his son.  Capt. Wells received information the night before we marched that we should be attacked, but we had then given everything away and could not retract. After we were determined to evacuate, the Chiefs used to eat with us every day as we had a superabundance of provisions to make away with. Nuscotnoning [NuscotnemegJ was the author of the massacre. Knowing of the attack, Black Partridge commanded the Miamis, stayed behind, and took no part. They rode past at the beginning of the foray, and one Potawatomi made a short speech to this effect in Potawatomi. I am astonished at your conduct. You have been treacherous with these people you promised to conduct them safely through. You have deceived them and are about to murder them in cold blood-let me advise you to beware-you know not what evil the dead shall bring upon you. You may by and by hear your wives and children cry, and you will not be able to assist them. Potawatomi, beware. I'm saying he rode on. 

John Kinzie's Commentary
Some important verifications, variations and addenda about the massacre and its eyewitnesses can be gleaned from  Douglass' transcription of Kinzie's story. Remembering that only eight years had elapsed since the event, it is worth noting that there are many points of agreement between the story told by Kinzie and those told by his son-in-law (Helm) in  1815 and by his daughter-in-law (Mrs. Juliette Kinzie in her book, "Wau-Bun") in 1844. 
Heald's orders from Hull were to evacuate the fort, destroy the arms and ammunition, and distribute the factory goods among friendly Indians who might thus be persuaded to help escort the evacuees to Fort Wayne. In his report to General Cushing, Heald wrote that his orders were to evacuate the post, to go to Detroit by land, and "at my discretion to dispose of the public property as I thought proper." Whether Heald misread Hull's orders or disobeyed them, his interpretation of them may have caused dissension among the principals involved in the evacuation. 

Helm's narrative stated that the destination of the garrison was either Detroit or Fort Wayne. Mrs. Kinzie mentioned only Fort Wayne; John Kinzie does not indicate the destination, but his mention of Monguago's villages suggests that he had the Fort Wayne route in mind. Both Helm and Mrs. Kinzie declared that the order was to evacuate the fort "if practicable." John Kinzie said the order was to evacuate the fort "if possible." The modifying phrase, of course, made Heald appear intractable when he was really obeying his superior. Winnemac, the messenger, urged that the garrison leave the fort at once and proceed by an unusual route to Fort Wayne, according to Helm and Mrs. Kinzie. Kinzie corroborates this and gives a specific reason for Winnemac's suggestion: the disaffection of the Wabash Potawatomi. 

It is also significant that Kinzie's account agrees with Heald's in an important particular. Both men asserted that the Indians knew of the plan for evacuation of the fort as soon as the garrison officers, Kinzie, even said that the knowledge, presumably given out by the messenger, had brought the outlying Indians to the fort. Mrs. Kinzie, however, stated that Heald refused to leave until "he had collected the Indians of the neighborhood." Kinzie's parallel testimony proves that Heald was unwilling to run head-on into bands of Indians before their feelings and temper could be ascertained through councils.

Helm implied that when Captain Wells arrived and took stock of the provisions for withstanding a siege he thought it foolish to leave the fort. Mrs. Kinzie stated flatly that the junior officers argued with Heald on this point; they wished to stay at the post. Heald's reply was to cite his orders. Thereafter, the junior officers kept aloof, she said. Kinzie also says that he and Wells advised Heald to remain in the fort because of the adequacy of supplies, but he makes no reference to any quarrels between Heald and his staff. Neither Heald nor Griffith mentioned any friction in the garrison force; Schoolcraft did. 

Kinzie says that Heald showed the arms, ammunition and stores to the Indians and told them all was to be divided among them "for their safe conduct." Helm and Mrs. Kinzie asserted that Heald insisted his orders were "to deliver up all public property" to the Indians. Although Hull's order categorically eliminated any such interpretation, it is obvious from Heald's own report that he felt he had discretionary authority where government property was concerned. Heald's interpretation of his orders led the analyst to believe that the reports of Mrs. Kinzie and Helm may be accurate in this circumstance, especially as they are substantiated by John Kinzie. 

According to Mrs. Kinzie, a council was held with the Indians on August 12, which only Heald and Kinzie attended, the other officers declining to go for fear of a trap. At this meeting, she said, Heald proposed to distribute the goods and arms the next day if the Potawatomi would provide an escort. Helm, who asserted that Wells arrived at Fort Dearborn on August 12, described a council between Wells and five hundred warriors on that date. At its conclusion, Wells declared the Indians were hostile and likely to interrupt the evacuation march. Kinzie's narrative mentions "Councils which were held about this time," at which Heald exhibited the arms and supplies that would be given to the Indians for safe conduct. But he specifically sets the time of these councils: before the arrival of Wells. He does not refer to trouble between Heald and his officers but remarks that the Indians always arrived in a "hostile array." In other words, Kinzie partially verifies the stories of Helm and Mrs. Kinzie. 

After Wells arrived and after it was settled that the fort was to be abandoned, the all-important question arose: what to do with the military equipment and liquor? Heald simply stated that he had destroyed the surplus arms, ammunition, and liquor. Was it as simple as that? Mrs. Kinzie said that trader Kinzie remonstrated with Heald on the folly of giving any arms to the savages and won Heald over to his view. She lamented, however, that this decision was reached and executed before Wells appeared, and she implied that Wells would have urged a sit-tight policy had the arms not been destroyed and the provisions distributed. Helm's tale was more detailed, though it contradicted vital parts of Mrs. Kinzie's story: Kinzie and Helm urged Wells to speak to Heald about the munitions; Wells agreed only if the others would go with him. The three pleaded with the captain to dispose of the powder, lead and arms. Heald objected on the grounds that he had ordered "to deliver up to those Indians all the public property of whatsoever nature" and that it was unwise to tell lies to the Indians. They would be irritated. Then, added Helm, Kinzie volunteered to take all responsibility in the matter and quieted Heald's scruples by forging an order from Hull instructing the commanding officer to destroy the arms and ammunition. Helm did not mention liquor. Kinzie says that he and Wells advised the destruction of both ammunition and liquor. Heald's only objection was that the supplies had already been shown to the Indians. Heald, says Kinzie, "freely agreed" to adopt whatever measure would justify him in the eyes of the Indians. "Strategem was accordingly resorted to." Later in Kinzie's account, it develops that the strategy was an "order" for the "destruction" of the munitions. However, the "order" was not used until after the massacre."

What became of the arms, ammunition and liquor? From Mrs. Kinzie: surplus muskets (broken up), shot, flints, gunscrews, and part of the powder and liquor were thrown into the garrison well; the rest of the powder and liquor was thrown into the river. The noise from knocking in the barrel heads aroused suspicions about the Indians, some of whom "crept ... near the scene of action," and the river water, even the following morning, tasted like "strong grog." This violation of Heald's promise inflamed the hostility of the savages to the point of revengeful threats. At a council held with the Indians the day after the destruction of the stores, the chiefs "expressed great indignation at the loss," so said Mrs. Kinzie." Helm made no comment on these subjects. John Kinzie attaches the Indian suspicions directly to himself. At dusk while going from the fort to the river to wash, he was seized by two Indians whose "curiosity had been excited" by the bustle inside the fort. Kinzie's misleading answer satisfied them for the moment, but it was apparent that the powder could not be thrown into the river. It was, instead, dumped into the well. Kinzie says nothing about the liquor; much of it was his, and his decline in prosperity dated from this loss.

There has always been disagreement about the dates and figures involved in the massacre story. Helm and William Griffith claimed that Wells arrived at Fort Dearborn on August 12. Mrs. Kinzie said he came on August 14. Heald put his arrival on August 13, the correct date. Kinzie does not specify a time in the Douglass transcription, but in Schoolcraft's account, Wells is said to have appeared on the thirteenth. Whether Schoolcraft remembered Kinzie or quoted Heald cannot be determined: he probably quoted Heald since he also used Heald's figure of thirty for the number of friendly Miamis accompanying Wells. Kinzie and Helm said twenty-seven Miamis were in the party; Griffith, who is quite inaccurate in all phases of the account, put the number at fifty; and Mrs. Kinzie specified fifteen. Both Helm and Mrs. Kinzie said the destruction of stores took place on the thirteenth, two days before the evacuation. Kinzie substantiates Heald's time, the evening of the fourteenth, in two places: 
"preparing to march next day" and "on the morrow we marched." Thus, Kinzie twice refutes Mrs. Kinzie's contention that Wells reached the fort after the disposal of the arms and provisions.

Reports of incidents of the battle demonstrate the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. With part of the Miamis in the van and the rest in the rear under the leadership of Wells,14 the entire population of Chicago-fifty-four regulars, twelve militia, four officers, and eighteen women and children marched forth from the garrison at nine o'clock on the morning of August 15. About a mile and a half out, the party was surrounded and attacked among the sand hills on the beach. The slaughter was completed in ten (Kinzie) or fifteen (Heald) minutes. 

Who saw what? Who remembered accurately what he had seen? Mrs. Kinzie said Wells, with blackened face betokening his premonition of doom, took the lead." Heald and Kinzie stated that Wells was with the rear guard. Helm wrote that Wells informed them they were surrounded, but he made no reference to the location of the noted scout. Kinzie says that Wells "came round in front" to report that the Indians had surrounded them and asked, "what was best to be done." A plan of defense was agreed upon and at once executed. The plan was to advance the men to the top of the lake bank (Kinzie and Heald concurred in their statements) and cut their way into the prairie (a charge). The Potawatomi killed and wounded several in their first volley as the soldiers came over the crest of the bank; the others were killed in hand-to-hand encounters like those in which Ensign Ronan and Sergeant Hays met their heroic deaths. Mrs. Helm did not give the details of Ronan's gallant struggle, and hers was a more sentimental tale of the Hays-Naunongee duel: Naunongee, she wrote, lived long enough to be carried to Calumet Village, where he repented his act of ingratitude. Though Schoolcraft declared both "fell dead together," there is nothing to prove that Kinzie told him that. Schoolcraft, like Mrs. Kinzie, had an ear for a good yarn. On the other hand, Kinzie says nothing about the craven fear of Dr. Van Voorhis, who is so graphically "observed" by Mrs. Helm as she stands apart watching her husband and father. 

While the battle was in progress, the baggage train was attacked, and the women and children were massacred. When the massacre began, Mrs. Heald and Mrs. Helm were with Kinzie. According to Kinzie, Mrs. Heald fled in terror to her uncle, Captain Wells, where she received her wounds, refusing to return to Kinzie (at her uncle's request") when the Indians were instructed not to harm the Kinzie family. Certainly, he would have given his explorers and hearers (spies) that this had actually occurred. All she did was run into the lake in fright and walk out again. She hardly left her father's side.

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Mrs. Helm's lurid story of her salvation by Black Partridge was pure fabrication if John Kinzie is to be believed. 

Kinzie gives no details of Wells' death. Schoolcraft said his heart was cut out and eaten; Kinzie, as recorded by Douglass, says: "The treatment of the dead was characteristic Capt. Wells, and Dr. Van Voorhis." It is probable that Kinzie told Schoolcraft or Douglass about this. Schoolcraft also said that some of the soldiers' wives fought with swords. If he had learned this from Kinzie, it would have substantiated Mrs. Helm's story of Mrs. Holt. Neither does Kinzie say anything about the mule and whisky ransom of Mrs. Heald. The Potawatomi from whom Mrs. Helm had fled into the lake brought Mrs. Heald, at Kinzie's instruction, to the Kinzie group and then escorted them all to "that turn of the river above the Fort."

Heald and his band of survivors had got to a small elevation in the prairie out of range of the Indian guns. Helm, Griffith and Kinzie gave essentially the same account of the surrender. However, Kinzie cuts the glory from both: Griffith did not conduct the negotiations nor persuade Heald to surrender, and Helm did not have a chance to play leader as his wife boasted. All the arrangements were made between Heald and Black Bird through the one intermediary, Le Claire. However, as did Mrs. Helm, Kinzie insists that the surrender terms did not include the mortally wounded. One of the mortally wounded, Thomas Burns, said Kinzie and Helm were tomahawked by a squaw, not stable-forked (pitchforked) to death as Mrs. Helm reported. 

After the surrender, the Kinzies were allowed to return to their house and take Mrs. Heald with them. Kinzie does not mention any search for the captain's wife as she lay hidden in the boat, nor does he tell of taking a ball from her arm with his penknife." Kinzie was most helpful in arranging Heald's escape. From his account, it is clear that Heald was an unassigned prisoner, i.e., no chief, no tribe had the privilege of killing him. Mrs. Helm's relation of his being released by his Kankakee captor in order that he might accompany Mrs. Heald to St. Joseph was probably embroidery on an already over-decorated tale. The role of Chandonnai, however, in escorting the Healds across the lake is verified by the trader's statements. 

During the days that followed the Healds' departure, the Kinzies were objects of suspicion. Black Partridge and four fellow Potawatomi stayed in the Kinzie house to protect the family. Mrs. Helm told how, the day after the battle, a party of Wabash Potawatomi, unfamiliar with the Kinzie reputation among the neighboring Indians, sent their hope for longevity plummeting. The presence of the five braves was not enough to ensure the safety of any Kinzie. Mrs. Helm was hidden under a featherbed in Ouilmette's house. Only the providential appearance of Billy Caldwell said Mrs. Helm, that stayed the Wabash tomahawks. John Kinzie blows the froth from this legend several days after the battle, and the five Potawatomi chiefs and some presents saved the day nicely.

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Believe it or not, most of Billy Caldwell's history was fabricated. Caldwell claimed to have arrived on the scene just after the battle and saved John Kinzie's and his family's lives, but historians have been unable to verify it.

Finally, Kinzie's version of the reproach of the Potawatomi by the Miamis differs markedly from that of Mrs. Helm. She said the Miamis fled; Kinzie says they rode past the foray. Kinzie's half-Potawatomi gave a more characteristic Indian speech than Mrs. Helm's Miami chief. Kinzie also fails to corroborate the Wau-Bun legend of Black Partridge conscientiously giving up his American medal on the eve of the hostilities. As the trader makes other references to the foreknowledge of the attack, it is unlikely that he would have overlooked this one in retelling the circumstances and incidents of the Fort Dearborn debacle. 

So much for the correspondences and variations between Kinzie's narrative and those of Helm and Mrs. Kinzie. There are several other significant observations to be made about the Kinzie story. In the first place, Kinzie does not mention Helm at all in his account of the disaster. Had the family troubles that resulted in the Helms' divorce in 1829 already, in 1820, become a source of irritation? This may account, in part, for the absence of the anti-Heald bias so evident in the other reports. Kinzie never even hints that there was any friction between Heald and his subordinates; neither does he imply that Heald was a dunderhead. In fact, he seems to give Heald credit for common sense and strict sense of duty, although not always agreeing with his judgment." 

Kinzie's account not only substantiates or denies elements in the existing stories; it also adds much that is new, which has never been figured in any other report of the Fort Dearborn Massacre. Some of the new material is supplemental to information already at hand, and some is wholly original. In the first category fall such items as the statement that Winnemac, after failing to persuade Heald, said "he might stay as long as he pleased" before abandoning the fort; the story of Kinzie leaving the fort to wash and being seized by two suspicious Indians; the information that the chiefs who were gathered about the fort ate with the garrison every day, so great was the quantity of provisions to be consumed; the assertion that Wells received warning of the proposed attack on the night of August 14; the account of Mrs. Heald's flight to Wells, her uncle, during the fight, and of her refusal to return to the Kinzie party; and the order by the Indians not to harm any members of the Kinzie family.

The original material in Kinzie's narrative is especially valuable. From it we learn that Mrs. Helm was neither attacked by one Indian nor saved by another; that three of the soldiers were shot, not tomahawked, as a result of their mistaking the purpose of a salute to the dead; that Black Bird showed kindness to Kinzie because the latter had done some good turn for Black Bird's son. Kinzie is the first to report the post-surrender councils, one held by the Indians to arrange the division of prisoners; another, attended by Kinzie and Heald, to discuss the latter's fate. At this council, the Indians complained of being cheated out of the arms Heald promised them and accused him of poisoning the flour. The complaints were countered by Kinzie, who showed them the order to destroy the arms and offered to eat the flour. Then the Indians inquired about the chances of being forgiven by the president, and Kinzie offered to act with them if they wished to ask the president's pardon. Heald was asked about the probable outcome of the war and gave a "suitable reply." 

In the Kinzie narrative, we learn for the first time about the Indian plot to kill Heald. Mrs. Helm told a somewhat different story of his being released by his captor in order to accompany his wife, an incredible example of Indian chivalry. Kinzie's story rings more true-especially as he adds a piece of supporting evidence, the pursuit of Chandonnai's canoe by disgruntled Indians for some fifteen miles.

Mrs. Heald had sewn several hundred dollars in paper money into a short inner jacket that the captain wore under his uniform. When Heald was stripped of his military clothes, he still had the funds on him. Kinzie's explanation of the ruse employed to secure the money gives us another glittering facet in an already many-faceted plot. 

Even after two hundred and eleven years, the story still grips the readers' attention. We can be grateful that Douglass, himself a veteran of the War of 1812, encouraged Kinzie to recount the tale, even though it has lain buried in ancestral files through the intervening years. 

The Journal of the Illinois State Historian Society, Winter 1953
Edited by Dr. Neil Gale, Ph.D.