The Contraband Question Revisited

Today's entry is from The Southern Confederacy.  It re-printed a letter to the editor of the New York Tribune supporting the idea of moving freed slaves to Haiti, along with an interesting response. See my blog posting Send Contrabands to Haiti for a letter from James Redpath in support of sending Contrabands to Haiti.

The Contraband Controversy

 July 21

To the Editor of the New York Tribune:

Sir:  The plan of disposing of the contraband negroes which Mr. Redpath proposes in your issue to day is the only feasible one I have seen.  To send them to Africa, India or Central America, would be impolitic and too expensive.  Any one acquainted with the West Indie Islands can see that they are best adapted to the development of our emancipated negroes. . .

EMANCIPATIONIST

New York, July 8, 1961

This document explains fully the prime objective for the accomplishment of which the impending struggle is forced upon the people of the Seceded States by the Yankees -- those God-fearing, law-abiding, Constitution-and-Union reverencing patriots of the North, with whom we of the South heretofore associated and fraternised, always, and even to our hurt disadvantage, and deep disgrace.

By contraband negroes, is meant the slaves belonging to the Southern people, which the Hessians of Lincoln may be lucky enough to steal from our plantations and run off, by underground thoroughfares, into the lines of our enemies.  We are assured "that the Administration (Lincoln) "will free all fugitives" (slaves) "while the war lasts."  There was no need of this "assurance," because, though denied by the Illinois blackguard, and his filthy lying, amalgamtion Secretary, Seward, yet every intelligent man and woman in the South knows that, to crush out slavery in the Confederate States, is the main object to be accomplished by waging this unholy crusade against us.  "Any other" object "would disgrace and stultify" Lincoln and the hireling serfs now surrounding him, and succoring his vain attempts at coercion and subjugation! . . .

MODUS OPERANDI . . .

(From This Week in Georgia Civil War History, (http://georgiainfo.galileo.usg.edu/CivilWar/jul261.htm).

Sheet Music cover, from Library of Congress Collection

The Star Spangled Banner Revisited

From The Southern Confederacy, an Atlanta newspaper, June 9, 1861

This is a Confederate man's take on the Star Spangled Banner.

Letter to the editor:

Star Spangled Banner.  I have seen and heard various lamentations over the prospect of the repudiation of this song; particularly the air, which is supposed to have been composed for it.  I beg to dispel the illusion.  Very early in life, I took a fancy to music; and among my father's books, published, I think, before the Revolution, and certainly before the "Star Spangled Banner" was written, was one of songs with accompanying music, painted in London.  From it, I learned to play on the flute the air to which the "Star Spangled Banner" was adapted, and send you one verse of the song.  Seeing that the Yankees steal everything else, it is not surprising that they have stolen music.  For myself, I have no hesitation in singing the air to the original song; which, now that the "Star Spangled Banner" is only emblematical of Black Republican murder and robbery, is a far more pious offering to the God of music than anything which reminds us of the desecration of the once honored, but now forever cursed National flag:

To Anacreon in heaven where he sat in full glee,
A few sons of harmony sent a petition,
That he their inspirer and patron would be,
When this answer arrived from the jolly old Grecian:
Voice, fiddle and flute, no longer be mute,
I'll lend you my name and inspire you to boot!
And besides I'll instruct you like me to entwine
The myrtle of Venus and Bacchus's vine.

The air is a beautiful one, and can be sung without recalling, I trust, the memory of that standard which signalizes power without right or humanity, and numbers without laws, human or divine.

From the Library of Congress Collection