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The American Civil War has been the subject of sesquicentennial recollections for the past five years, paralleling the war itself that lasted from 1861 to 1865.

HISTORIC ANNIVERSARY: 13th Amendment Abolishes Slavery 150 Years Ago Dec. 6

Recalling Forgotten Wellspring of the Abolitionist Movement -- Bay City

November 27, 2015       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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On December 6th, 1865 the 13th Amendment was adopted into the United States Constitution. The 13th Amendment officially abolished slavery and involuntary servitude.

The American Civil War has been the subject of sesquicentennial recollections for the past five years, paralleling the war itself that lasted from 1861 to 1865. Those celebrations are winding down and the last official listing in the timeline is approaching Dec. 6.

Perhaps the most persistent enigma about the war is: why was it fought? Even today you may hear the nonbelievers shouting "state's rights," the "tariff," and other such nonsense.

Nearly 20 years ago your columnist began a study of the causes of the war, a study which took me to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania battlefield of July 1-3, 1863, to County Cavan, Ireland, to Danville, Kentucky, Richmond, Virginia and to Huntsville, Alabama -- all important locations in development of the story of how the war came to be and how it was resolved.

Unless Kentucky lawyer James G. Birney had persisted in his crusade to build the abolitionist movement into a political dynamo, the wave of chattel slavery of Africans and their descendants that had been rolling uncontrolled for two and a half centuries was never going to be derailed.

One of the main themes of the book "Apostles of Equality: The Birneys, the Republicans and the Civil War" (Michigan State University Press, 2011) is that northern working men were finally galvanized to fight when they realized the perils of class warfare that threatened their well-being.

It is now quite clear Northern men did not fight to free the Negroes; they fought to control the South which had ruled the nation since the founding of the Republic by exploiting the Negroes. It was the system of slavery, counting slaves as three-fifths of a man in allocating members of Congress, enshrined in the Constitution, that was the controlling factor in American politics for 75 years. Once that inequity was realized, the North was ready to fight to end it, and the South willing to fight to perpetuate it.

If Negroes could be subjugated, so could the white working class, they finally realized. Most workingmen flocked to enroll as Republicans, personified by the members of Philadelphia fire companies who made up a large share of the 23rd Pennsylvania Infantry headed by David Bell Birney.

And the 550 lumberjacks, millworkers and roustabouts from Bay County Michigan, making up an incredible 17 percent of the population (men, women & children) of the new community, who donned the Union blue and marched South.

The recognition of Bay City's role in the evolution of the nation has yet to be fully recognized. Since the infant pioneer Michigan town was the home of James G. Birney while he was organizing abolitionists into the Republican Party, and when he ran for President and helped defeat slavery defender Henry Clay, this was ground zero for one of the most important political movements in world history.

Let's examine how the movement grew up and coalesced into a juggernaut of public opinion and military might.

A seminal moment in the ideological conflict between ordinary folks and the aristocratic elite represented by southern slaveholders came when Senator Henry Clay said on the floor of the Senate "if we cannot have black slaves we must have white ones."

The Republican Party arose in Michigan and Wisconsin from deep-seated fears of domination of the nation by the brutal whip-wielding class of slave masters and their minions.

The arrogant Senator Clay, neighbor and onetime friend of James G. Birney, had displayed his superiority complex as early as the War of 1812 when he opined that a few regiments of Kentucky milita alone would be sufficient to defeat the British. Clay was dead long before the rebel attack on Fort Sumter that started the Civil War in 1861, but his culture of violence and superiority lived on in the south.

The religious moralism of James G. Birney, welling up from his organizing of abolitionists in Michigan, finally coalesced in a gathering of men of diverse opinions after decades of indecision under one Republican tent -- former Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Liberty and Free Soil adherents included.

The political movement against slavery progressed gradually in the wake of Birney's courageous Presidential runs in 1840 and 1844: Anti-slavery candidates for President following Birney were Martin VanBuren, Free Soil, 1848; John P. Hale, Free Soil, 1852; John C. Fremont, Republican, 1856; Abraham Lincoln, Republican, 1860 and 1864.

The effectiveness of the transformation was proven in 1860 when pro-slavery forces, aware that Lincoln's election would mean disaster for the evil practice, took the South -- some of it reluctantly -- out of the Union and to war.

Most Confederate soldiers didn't own slaves but they were in the thrall of the plantation overlords who were their neighbors. A southern code that mandated dueling, often to the death, over small points of honor, kept any potential dissenter in line.

As ordinary poor farm boys recruited for slave patrols to subdue any uprising by blacks, the average non-slaveholder had been part of the military class from boyhood. One southerner could whip 10 Yankees was their misguided belief.
There was jubilation in Charleston South Carolina and throughout the south when the war came. The most optimistic estimate was that the south would "whup" the Yankees in as little as a few weeks.

What they found out, much to their chagrin, that farm boys from Maine, Michigan and Wisconsin were every bit as tough as they were. And, they could ride just as well, or better, the Northern cavalry under George Armstrong Custer showing its finest at Gettysburg in stopping the flamboyant Jeb Stuart, foiling Robert E. Lee's desperate gamble that had George Pickett and 15,000 men assault the Union center while Stuart was to hit the line from the rear.

Birney, too, was four years in the grave when the cannon burst on Sumter, but his spirit of freedom and equality for all, nascent and diverse as it was, also coalesced in the hearts and minds of those who followed Abraham Lincoln into the Union stand against the Philistines below the Mason-Dixon Line.

But the philanthropic goal of Birney was achieved with the creation of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, outlawing slavery, adopted Dec. 6, 1865.

13th Amendment

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Section 2.

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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