The South Was Right

by James Ronald Kennedy

  As the Yankees entered this region, about twenty thousand strong, they were confronted by Gen. Richard Taylor with about 3,500 men. As the Confederate army moved out, the women, children, and old men were left to contend with the invaders. The people were subjected to all forms of abuse. In St. Mary Parish, ladies stood in fear as Yankee soldiers ransacked their homes and chased the servant girls. To one old and frightened lady an intoxicated soldier stated, “Dry up; we’ve seen enough of you Southern women’s tears.” Moving to another part of the home another drunken soldier pushed a goblet to her lips and commanded, “Drink, you damned old rebel, drink to the Union!”21 In the same parish, a horrified lady seeking help from an officer implored a Union colonel to protect her person and property. The colonel’s reply was, “Protect you! Protect you a rebel; never! No protection to rebels!”22 Thus the army of the Union did battle with the unarmed women and children of the South.

  The following is just a sample of some of the degradations perpetrated by the Yankee army in Louisiana during its invasion of the Cajun country:

  Lafayette: At the home of an infirm and bed-ridden man, all valuables were taken, including the covering on which the invalid was lying.23

  Petite-Anse Island: Union soldiers entered the home of a man ninety years old, taking all his clothing and other valuables including the covers from his bed. Then as they left his home they cursed the old man.24

  St. Mary Parish: Yankee troops ransacked the home of a Mr. Gou-las, stripping his family of all their clothes, even the infant’s clothes, and all bedding.25

  Fausse Pointe: While in the process of being robbed, a Mr. Vil-meau heard his wife crying for help. Going to her aid, he found several ruffians fighting with her for her personal jewelry. While one succeeded in getting a ring from her hand by biting her finger, causing it to bleed profusely, another jerked her earrings out of her ears, tearing the flesh and causing them to bleed. Vilmeau was shot twice while trying to assist his bleeding wife.26

  New Iberia: A Mr. Borel’s house was pillaged by Yankees who took with them everything of value, including all the food for the family. On leaving the home, they also took Borel’s horse, his only means of support for himself and his children. Borel went to Yankee general Nathaniel Banks and explained how everything he had was taken from him and that his children would starve if he did not get his horse back. Whereupon General Banks explained, “The horse is no more your property than the rest. Louisiana is mine. I intend to take everything.”27

  Morgan City: Even the resting place of the dead was not left alone by the invaders. In this city the late Dr. Brashear’s tomb was broken into by the Yankees, and his earthly remains were tossed out. His metal coffin was taken for their own use.28

  New Iberia: The materials from the graves were used for chimneys and hearthstones for the Yankee army. The cemetery was used as a horse corral. While the families of the deceased watched in horror, the Yankees ransacked the burial vaults of the dead, scattering the remains upon the ground.29

  Opelousas: A Massachusetts unit turned the Protestant (Methodist) church there into a “den of infamy.”30

  New Iberia: The invaders stole the sacred vessels from the Catholic church and danced in the robes of the priest.31

  Franklin: Federal soldiers pillaged and ransacked the Methodist church, using the pews and other items to furnish a billiard sa-loon.32

  Franklin: The home of a Mr. Theodore Fay was ransacked; even the toys of his grandchildren were taken by the Yankees.33

  The fates would not suffer the plundering Yankee forever. Finally the Confederates met and defeated the invaders and sent them reeling back toward New Orleans. Union general Nathaniel Banks once again proved to be a better general plunderer than a military leader. General Banks ordered another expedition into Louisiana’s heartland. This time he attempted to take his army to Texas via Shreveport. Once again the usual activities of plunder and destruction were visited upon the hapless and defenseless civilians. The invasion of Northwest Louisiana also met with the same disaster for the Yankees. At the Battle of Mansfield, the Yankees were completely defeated by General Taylor.34 The following day, the Yankee army was hit again by the Confederates at the Battle of Pleasant Hill, Louisiana. All this pressure was enough to convince the Yankees to beat another retreat down the Red River to Alexandria.35

  It was in Alexandria that the invaders, with the victorious Confederates hot on their heels, decided to vent their wrath on the defenseless people and town. On the withdrawal of the United States military force from the city, a systematic plan was executed to burn the whole place.36 Without giving any notice to the inhabitants, the invaders set fires which spread throughout the town. Very little was saved; women and children were forced from their homes by the inferno and driven by the flames down to the river’s edge to escape the heat.37 A Yankee reporter from the St. Louis Republican was so moved by this wanton, barbaric act that he wrote an account of the burning. He stated, “Women gathering their helpless babes in their arms, rushing frantically through the streets with screams and cries that would have melted the hardest hearts to tears; little boys and girls running hither and thither crying for their mothers and fathers; old men leaning on a staff for support to their trembling limbs, hurrying away from the suffocating heat of their burning dwellings and homes.”38 He went on to give an account of how the people were driven to the river to save themselves, salvaging only the clothes on their backs. Ninety percent of the city was consumed by the fires of the Yankee terrorists.

  Fire, sword, and starvation were employed against the hated “rebels” regardless of their age, race, sex, or status as noncomba-tants. This is the legacy left by the invader, a legacy of death and destruction. When we understand the enormity of these acts perpetrated on the civilians of the South, we wonder why a few monuments are not raised in memorial to those who had to stand in the path of the Yankees and suffer at home as well as those who stood in the line of battle. There is no way to know how much suffering or how many deaths there were among the loyal civilian population, but no doubt the numbers are high. When counting the Southern dead during the war, we should also take into account those who died because of acts of the Yankee invader which led to starvation, disease, and murder.

  Not only did Governor Henry Watkins Allen’s report on the conduct of the invader make note of the barbarity of the enemy, but it also shed some light on the preconceived (prejudiced) ideas the Yankee had about life in the South, especially the relations between the black and white people. One thing that bothered the Yankee was that the slave population did not rise up in open rebellion against their white masters.

  Having been fed on a daily diet of “hate the South” propaganda from such trash as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other lies, the Yankees believed that all the slaves would welcome their “liberators” and rise up to kill their white masters. If this had happened, the war would have lasted no more than a year or so. But the Yankee invaders did not receive the cooperation from the blacks that they had counted on!

  The Yankees expected to find blacks being whipped daily, starved, and worked to death by a fat and lazy Southern upper class. What they found was that the blacks were much divided as to what they should do with these Yankees who claimed to be their friends. Some blacks did go over to the Yankees after the Yankees were in control, another group remained loyal to their white families, and another group waited to see which way the wind was blowing before doing anything. Usually this group’s loyalty depended upon whichever army was in control of the region at that time. This breakdown in loyalty closely parallels the loyalty of the civilian population of the American colonies during the American Revolutionary War.

  This situation was not what the Yankees expected to find. They had been told by all the Abolitionist newspapers that the slaves were just waiting to rise up and throw off the chains of slavery. In reality this may have happened if the Yankee army had been invading a South American or a Caribbean country. As has been noted by James Walvin in his
work Slavery and the Slave Trade, the system of slavery in the American South was the most benign of all the systems then in practice. This, he concludes, is why in other countries of the Western Hemisphere there had been so many slave revolts, many of which were successful, but little such activity was seen in the South.39

  It was a common belief among the Yankees that the Southern blacks were all slaves and could own no property. The fact that many Southern blacks were free men and women of color, with as much freedom as black people in the North (if not more), was shocking to the Yankees. But even more shocking was the fact that many of these free blacks were slave holders themselves. In Louisiana, at the Olivier Plantation, the Yankees were surprised to find that the owner was a widowed, free lady of color who presided over a large plantation run by slave labor. A member of the Twelfth Connecticut in a letter home stated that he had been surprised to find as many free blacks down South as he had seen in the larger cities of the North. He wrote, “Some of the richest planters, men of really great wealth, are of mixed descent.”40 He stated that these Negroes would gather to stare at the Northern soldiers as they passed, and “These are not the former slaves, observe, but the former masters.”41 (emphasis added)

  As the Yankees were retreating from the disaster in South Louisiana, at the town of Vermilion a “rebel’s” home was put to the torch. The man’s children and sick wife were in the house. After getting his family to safety, he begged the Yankee soldiers to help him put out the fire, because it was threatening all he had for his children and dying wife. No amount of imploring could move the Yankees to action, but a slave from the next plantation came to the assistance of the white man. After the effort had to be abandoned, the soldiers gathered around the black man and wanted to know why he, a slave, would help this rebel. One Yankee suggested that the black man helped only to steal the man’s money. At this point the black man denied that he was a thief or that he had been paid for his actions. He contended that he had helped the white man only because of their friendship. The Yankees would not believe this story and told the slave that if he did not give up his money he would be shot. When he persisted, the troops shot him in the thigh. The slave, Benjamin George, survived the Yankee-inflicted wound but remained a one-legged invalid for the rest of his life.42

  Another example of Yankee prejudice is found in Governor Henry Watkins Allen’s report of Yankee atrocities in Alexandria. In the official report, Affidavit No. 4, a story is related of how the Yankees treated a free woman of color.43 When they came upon a small but well-furnished dwelling in which they found a Negro lady, they demanded to know where her master was. When she informed them that she had no master and was a free lady of color, they laughed at her and told her that she was just hiding her master. They then set about stealing all of her valuables, destroying what they did not take. She begged them to stop and leave her and her property in peace. They once again told her that they knew that she was a liar, because, “Niggers could not own property in this state.”44 (emphasis added) All that this lady had worked for—her home, food, and savings—was taken from her. Before they left, the soldiers even pulled down her house and cut up a pile of lumber that she had accumulated for home improvements.

  This arrogant, “know-it-all” attitude has caused more hard feelings between the Yankees and their Southern counterparts than anything else. Once they accept a point of view about the South, Yankees refuse to be bothered with facts to the contrary. We can remember very well in the early 1960s when young college students came down South to correct all the “errors” of Southern life. One such boy could hardly wait to leave campus and go downtown to see for himself how the white people made the “darkies” walk in the street rather than allow them on the sidewalks. No amount of assurance would persuade him that this did not happen. He knew what we did to “darkies” in Mississippi. Even after his return from town, he was still convinced that we had pulled a fast one on him, and that after he left, the poor old “darkies” would once again be walking in the dust of the streets (the streets were paved but he still saw dirt roads downtown!).

  Lest anyone think that the Yankees in the Trans-Mississippi District were the only ones who treated blacks poorly, consider the actions of the men of the Seventeenth Maine Regiment. Throughout his journal, Pvt. John W. Haley displays his total contempt for both the Irish and the Negroes. On moving into Richmond, after its fall, some Negroes got too close for the bluecoats. Haley stated, “A host of young niggers followed us to camp and soon made themselves too familiar. We bounced them up in blankets and made them butt against each other also against some pork barrels and hard-bread boxes. A couple hours worth of bouncing satisfied them. One young nigger had an arm broke and several others were more or less maltreated.”45 So “offensive” were Haley’s words about blacks in his journal, whom he always referred to as “niggers,” that the editor felt compelled to apologize to the reader about Haley’s views on black people.46 Notice that she did not feel compelled to apologize to the people of the South for the barbaric actions of the Yankee directed against the Southern people! Obviously using the racial slur “nigger” and being cruel to blacks was wrong (a point we do not disagree with); but the pillage and destruction of homes, and the rape and starvation of noncombatant women, children, the elderly, and the infirm—and other such atrocities too numerous to mention—was acceptable by the editor if perpetrated against Southerners. Only a Yankee or a Southern Scalawag could be so depraved as to believe such a lie.

  The Human Shield Policy

  During the summer of 1990, the leading news consisted of the events in Iraq and Kuwait. One of the more heinous acts in modern times was committed by Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein. He had the audacity to take Americans and other foreigners as hostages and use them as human shields to protect his vital military bases. The idea of this inhumane and barbaric policy brought down upon Iraq the condemnation of the entire civilized world. Where do you suppose Hussein got the idea of using prisoners as human shields to protect military installations? Perhaps Hussein had been studying the war measures used by the Yankees in their invasion of the South!

  Approximately the same time Hussein was setting up his human shield, the Yankee myth-makers were hard at work making a “documentary” entitled “The Civil War.” As we have noted, this propaganda series was produced by a prejudiced man from the North—the place where so many slaves were brought into this country after the Yankee flesh merchants had kidnapped them from their homes in Africa. The Northern myth-makers seem to have trouble remembering such facts that are not in keeping with the official Yankee myth of history.

  Now let’s see if our Southern history will help us determine where Hussein got his idea about using humans as a shield to protect military installations.

  In the summer of 1864 the South was pressed on all fronts. The city of Charleston, South Carolina, was under a Yankee blockade. The combined guns of the Yankee forts and the Union navy were shelling the city. The Confederates were answering the Yankees shot for shot. The Yankee government took six hundred Southern POWs and sent them to Charleston. The Yankee invader had hit upon a great idea—“Why not put Southern POWs in front of our position and make the Confederates fire on their own men?” By this method the Yankees hoped to prevent further shelling of the Yankee position by the Confederates.47

  Captain Walter MacRae of the Seventh North Carolina was one of the six hundred hostages used by the United States government as a part of its human shield. He gives a vivid account of life under the guns and the resultant horrors visited upon these innocent Southern POWs. The prisoners were placed in a stockade less than two acres square. They were beneath the guns of the Yankee fort and situated so that every shot from the Confederate forts “… must either pass over our heads or right through the pen [stockade]. Any which fell short or exploded a tenth of a second too soon, must strike death and destruction through our crowded ranks.”48

  Captain MacRae describes the poor living conditions and foo
d that was issued to the Southern POWs. The men were confined in a very small area (two acres), and no sanitary facilities were provided. They had to eat, sleep, and care for their wounded in the same place where garbage and sewage were dumped. Their only supply of water was from holes they dug in the sand. The water holes quickly filled with a mixture of rain water, salt water, garbage, and sewage. Their food consisted of provisions that had been condemned by the Federal government as unfit for Yankee troops. These “rations” consisted of worm- and insect-infested hardtack, a one-inch square, one-half-inch-thick piece of pork, and eight ounces of sour corn meal.

  The POWs were placed under the guard of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts (Glory) and its cruel commander, Col. E. N. Hollo-well. When some of the POWs protested the conditions of the rations to Colonel Hollowell, he replied, in true Yankee fashion, “… there was meat enough in the crackers, bugs, and worms.”49

  Within the stockade, the Yankees roped off a perimeter. Any POW who walked too close would be shot. Colonel Hollowell also gave orders to the black troops to shoot into any gathering of POWs larger than ten men or at any POW who broke any other rule of the prison.

  This barbaric attempt of the Yankee invader to use Southern POWs as a shield to protect their positions did not work. Captain MacRae noted that the Southern gunners did slow down and take more time to aim (the better to hit the Yankee invader). With each well-placed shot from the Southern guns, a great shout of joy would go up from the Southern hostages. When the Southern guns fired, someone in the stockade would shout and everyone would hit the dirt and watch as the friendly fire would do its work on the invader. After a few months of this bombardment, the Yankees removed the men to another prison where they were treated no better, but at least they were not in danger of being killed by their own men.