Pure-Hearted Ancestors

Prof. Gottfried, I am a great fan, keep up the good work! Even so, I must disagree about your assessment in “Nikki’s Lost Cause” (February 2024 Chronicles) Specifically, your statement that “there is no evidence that most Union soldiers cared about the issue of slavery…”

I can’t offer evidence to the contrary that my great-grandfathers were committed abolitionists, other than family anecdotes. But I believe that if you question people in my “ethnic group”—of the Historical American Nation, subspecies Yankee—you will always get similar family stories. 

Just shy of 70 percent of my ancestors lived in North America by 1690, and a similar percentage were in Illinois by 1812. I am a first cousin, seven times removed, of President Abraham Lincoln, who was also of Illinois. My family is Illinois down to the protoplasm. I was blessed with an intact family and knew my forebears while they were alive going back to my great-great grandparents. In consequence, the Civil War, for us, was a “living memory,” in that living family members remembered somebody who had fought in the war.

I had three great-grandfathers who fought in the South, and they fought to end slavery. At least one died and lies in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Another lost a leg (which I believe also lies in Mississippi), and my grandmother remembered him frightening the children by taking off his prosthetic. We still have a small cannon and a gun from that war, which are fired once per year in early July.

Whenever a child among us asked our elders why they went to fight the Civil War, the answer was never “states rights,” pro or contra. It was always and only “to free the slaves,” period. 

These people were not intellectuals, or even educated. But the historical legacy that they left to their posterity these past 159 years was that they had left their farms and went south to answer the call to end slavery, and they succeeded. If Nikki Haley were not the child of foreigners, she would have learned that from her great-grandparents, too. And that is why she answered so foolishly. 

—James Jones
Overland Park, Kan. 

In his editorial “Nikki’s Lost Cause” in the February 2024 issue of Chronicles, Prof. Gottfried writes “…there is no evidence that most Union Soldiers cared about the issue of slavery…”

In 1976, the town where my parents grew up in southwestern Wisconsin issued, as a bicentennial project, a translation of a book from the 1920s about the early Norwegian settlers in that area. Included were several letters home from Norwegian-American soldiers in the Union army. In those letters, the soldiers referred to the Confederacy as “the tyrants.” That would suggest that at least some Union soldiers—perhaps many—cared about the issue of slavery.

—John D. Lien

Prof. Gottfried replies:

It was certainly not my intention to suggest that nobody in the Union army cared about slavery, and I most certainly would not question Mr. Jones’s characterization of his Illinois Abolitionist ancestors who volunteered to fight against the slaveholding South. What I said was that it’s hard to imagine “most” of those in the Union army fighting specifically against slavery. 

Although I cannot prove this contention conclusively, for example, by questioning long dead Union veterans, there are good reasons to assume my assertion is correct. Out of the more than 2 million men who fought against the Confederacy, there is little evidence that most of them were active Abolitionists, who at the time of the Civil War were a only small percentage of the population.

Although only about 8 percent of the Union army consisted of draftees, one-quarter of this force was made up of recently arrived European immigrants who in most cases were coaxed into joining, in return for material rewards and/or promise of citizenship. Possibly some of these volunteers were opposed to slavery, but it’s hard to believe that issue was very high on their list of priorities. According to the judgment of the very pro-Union historian James McPherson in his 1994 book What They Fought For: 1861-1865, city dwellers signed up for the war because they were financially strapped, particularly after the Panic of 1857, which affected the urban poor disproportionately. 

From his examination of Union soldiers’ letters and diaries during the first 18 months of the war, McPherson notes that to “defend the Union” was by far the most common reason the soldiers gave for why they were fighting. Remember that President Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward were ready in 1861 to guarantee the continuation of slavery in the South in order to keep the Southern states from seceding. They also supported the proposed 1861 constitutional amendment by Ohio Senator Thomas Corwin that would have prohibited federal interference with slavery in the states.

Lincoln also made it clear in his famous letter to Horace Greeley of Aug. 22, 1862, that he was opposing the Southern rebellion first and foremost to hold the Union together, not to free slaves. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,” he wrote.

Moreover, Northern commanders, like George McClellan, were themselves slave owners. I would remind Mr. Jones that in southern New England, where I grew up, monuments to the Union dead stressed their sacrifice to preserve the Union against the “Southern rebellion.” Slavery is rarely, if ever, mentioned on these monuments. 

I also would not question Mr. Lien’s statement that “many” Union soldiers from Wisconsin and elsewhere in the U.S. were agitated about slavery in the American South, and this may have motivated their desire to prosecute the war. What I would challenge is the contention that “most” of the Union forces felt as deeply about that issue as did Mr. Lien’s ancestor.

A Stabbed Heart

I’ve subscribed to the magazine for some years and found the November 2023 issue, “The End of the Dollar” especially informative. Prof. Robert Murphy’s article “The Coming Displacement of the Dollar,” followed by Mr. Greg Kaza’s “The Political Roots of America’s Inflation Problem,” and Prof. Srdja Trifkovic’s “The World De-Dollarized” comprised a very neat package that I’m sharing with my neighbors up here in Prescott.

Another reader from Arizona responded to the November issue in the letter “Immigration’s Costs” (December 2024 Chronicles), describing how the fate of the dollar is the fundament upon which real lives are lived. I generally focus on what these Chronicles articles did not address: “the social impact of the dollar decline,” as Mr. Vinck put it, and the “societal fractures” that attend. I’m wary of economic analyses that often miss the point, or at least seem to, when the consequences are so overwhelming. The economic and cultural collapses we are currently experiencing more than touch the pocketbook—they stab the heart.

—Robert Edwards

Prescott, Arizona

A Welcome Division

I thank Chronicles for closing 2023 with an outstanding December issue. It provides much ammo for the war that looks certainly to heat up in 2024 between the neo-Marxist revolution within the Democratic Party and the warmongering of the Republican Party, versus those resisting it.

Peaceful separation, as recommended by Prof. Gottfried in a recent issue, (“The Future of the American Resistance” October 2023 Chronicles) certainly must be an option. This also was articulated by Christopher Sandford’s Correspondence letter, “A Divide in the Oregon Trail.” The map and photos starkly show the dichotomy within the Beaver State between the western, largely urban blue and the eastern, largely rural red. These divided areas, cultures, and peoples have little in common, as shown by the Portland “tent city” in contrast with Oregon’s enchanting coastline and skyline, which beckons the sane and levelheaded still trapped in the city.

However, Mr. Sandford claims it’ll be a hard, long struggle to achieve this independence; it shouldn’t be. The U.S. Constitution is vague whether counties can secede from one state and join another. But if a multitude of eastern Oregonians want secession, the process should be fairly simple: a referendum in each county, then a referendum in the state they seek to join. If the counties successfully secede, then they officially become part of that state and are no longer part of their former state. Oregon could set the benchmark for other secession movements.

Thanks to Mr. Sandford for generating a much-needed discussion of, and strategy for, nonviolent, peaceful, and (at times) necessary secession. The real resistance in America may soon have no other choice.

—Kenneth Reynolds,

Bronx, N.Y.