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[Treat the South] as conquered provinces and settle them with new men and exterminate or drive out the present rebels as exiles.1 Congressman Thaddaeus Stevens (R-Penn.)
We believe in a war of extermination.... Brig. Gen. James H. Lane, U.S.A.2
IN THIS CHAPTER we will see how the intentional elimination of black and white Southerners was the official policy of the United States of America under Lincoln and Radical Republicans3 in Congress. Their goal was to “exterminate” enough of the native Southern population to allow the southern part of the United States to be “repopulated” with Northerners who would then support the expanding Federal Empire.4 Their intention was to completely remake the South into a second class image of the North.5 Never again would Southern political power be allowed to stand in the way of protective tariffs or other “progressive” federal legislation. The North used an aggressive war to exterminate its traditional Southern political adversary. This “vigorous” war policy was endorsed and encouraged by Lincoln and Congress then under Republican control.
One of the primary reasons for post-war Southern poverty was the death of over a million black and white Southerners in the war and post-war period. This loss of valuable Southern “human capital” would hinder Southern economic development for generations to come.6 Thanks to Lincoln’s aggressive war waged against a sovereign nation—the Confederate States of America—the Southern states would never again attain economic or political parity with the other states in Lincoln’s newly-created Federal Empire. We the people of the South have been reduced from prosperity to virtual peonage to the economically successful North—a second class Southern economy for a second class people! The Federal Empire’s unofficial motto would hence forth be: Vae victis—Woe to the vanquished!
When Americans think of “wars of extermination” they never consider that the United States of America might be guilty of such atrocities. Yet, as we shall see, this was one the United States’ primary goals as it invaded, conquered and occupied its smaller neighbor, the Confederate States of America. It has been estimated that the number of Southerners “murdered” by the U.S. Army would be equal to 3.5 million souls if “standardized for the South’s 2010 population.”7 The death toll of invasion and occupation for black Southerners alone has been estimated to be between 400,000 to one million.8 Accurate records do not exist due to the utter destruction caused by the Federal invaders, but their intentions are well documented. In the winter of 1863-4 the Governor of Louisiana, Henry Watkins Allen, issued a report stating that more blacks had died in Louisiana due to the effects of invasion in the previous year than the total of white deaths in both armies!9 A Mississippi Unionist stated during Reconstruction that 50% of blacks in Mississippi died during the war.10 Taken at face value the prior estimate would seem unreasonable. But when viewed in light of the events in the “Devil’s Punchbowl” at Natchez, Mississippi, it becomes believable. The “Devil’s Punchbowl” was the name given to a contraband, actually concentration camp established by the Union army after it occupied Natchez. Over 20,000 “freed” slaves died in the Union army’s concentration camp in the year following the Union army’s occupation of Natchez. The camp was walled off by the Union army to prevent escape.11 Most, if not all, historians schooled in the Northern narrative of the war— that narrative being a biased depiction of an “evil” South fighting to keep blacks in slavery while the virtuous North willingly shed its blood to free their black brothers— such historians pass off atrocity claims as being no more than mere Confederate “wartime propaganda” designed to inflame Southerners.12 But as one scholar discovered:
As my research progressed, however, I found similar accounts of the same outrages in the extant papers of planters, clergy....But the most persuasive evidence is in the letters and diaries of the Northern soldiers....the circumstances described by Union onlookers are frequently even more sordid and deplorable than those depicted by... Confederate authors.13
Northerners had for generations readily consumed an outpouring of biased anti-South propaganda. The hatred of the South that was engendered by this slanderous anti-South propaganda worked its magical effect upon the armed invaders of the South. A Massachusetts colonel wrote the Republican Governor back home, declaring:
The thing we seek is permanent dominion....We must take their ports, their mines, their water power, the very soil they plow.14
Nor was this desire to exterminate Southerners only expressed by Union soldiers and United States elected officials. Henry Ward Beecher, a Yankee Radical Abolitionist, while speaking at Exeter Hall in London in 1863, responded thusly when asked why not just let the South go: “Why not let the South go? O that the South would go! But then they must leave us their lands.” If this attitude was only a rare exception, then perhaps it could be overlooked. But the facts demonstrate that not only was it not rare, it was in fact the official attitude and policy of the United States government—no longer a Republic but now the supreme, all-powerful, Federal Empire. During the War and the Empire’s post-war effort to destroy the South’s influence in the government of the empire no one, black or white, was safe from the hand of the cruel invader. David Conyngham, a Northern newspaper reporter, described the horrors visited upon the people of the South and bluntly confirmed that, “Color is no protection from these [Yankee] roughriders.”15 The murderous actions of the Yankee invader against the black population when found alone led to the practice of always having a white person with a black traveler. Benjamin S. Stafford describes the precarious condition of black Southerners in South Carolina after Sherman’s Army passed through the area: “There were bands of roving bush whacker, Yankee bummers who would not harm [a black person] if he had some white person with him. On the other hand, if he were by himself, they would in most cases simply kill him and take his wagon and [valuables].” 16
The poverty imposed upon the people of the South by the United States of America resulted from more than merely the loss of material and financial property. The major loss was the tremendous loss of what economists refer to as “human capital.” Approximately 25% of the South’s white male population became causalities17 as a result of their heroic efforts to defend their homes and families from a numerically superior, vicious and merciless invader. This “human capital” loss represented a large portion of the South’s best and brightest—men who would not be available to help restore a destroyed Southern economy. But direct war causalities are not the only ones to be considered. Added to that number must be the even larger number of black and white Southern civilians— men, women, children and infants who died as a result of disease and starvation—a direct result of the Federal Empire’s extermination policy (euphemistically referred to by Lincoln, Republicans in the U.S. Congress and others as a “vigorous war policy”).
