Part 3
At the time of the first great battle of the Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, Wilmer and Martha McLean resided in a plantation home in the vicinity of Manassas, where they found themselves caught up in the battle. A portion of the fighting spilled across their property, and Rebel General Beauregard used their home as his headquarters before a Union shell burst down the chimney into the kitchen.
After that brush with fire, the McLeans relocated 150 miles south to a large brick house located on farmland near the county seat of Appomattox, where Wilmer could peacefully ply his trade as a provisioner to the Rebel armies. Three years, eight months, and 19 days after First Bull Run, the War came knocking on their door again, and it ended in their front parlor.
After the War, Wilmer McLean defaulted on his debts, and his Appomattox house was sold at public auction in 1869. Eventually, in the 1890s, the McLean “Surrender House” was purchased by speculators who had it carefully dismantled with the intention of reconstructing it in Washington and charging an admission fee. That plan fell through, but pieces of the house were preserved on site and it was later rebuilt by the National Park Service and is maintained as a national historical monument.
U.S. Grant’s home in Galena, Illinois was also preserved, as was Lee’s house, the former Custis-Lee Mansion in Arlington, Virginia (now called “Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial,” a National Park Service property). And Stonewall Jackson’s house in Lexington, Virginia is a historical museum open to visitors today. And so with George Washington’s winter headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey, and hundreds of other historic structures of significance to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.
But not Grant’s Culpeper headquarters. It remained intact for 44 years after hosting Grant and the launch of the Overland Campaign, but the Barbour house was torn down in 1908. How was that allowed to happen? Who made the decision to let the Barbour house be demolished instead of preserved as a landmark, especially when it had already survived so long after the end of the War?
The Barbour house was demolished at a time when pro-Confederacy revisionist historians, exemplified by William Archibald Dunning of Columbia University, were at the height of their influence across American academia. The so-called “Dunning School” of scholars taught that Reconstruction was an illegitimate, corrupt, and politically ruinous program concocted by the Radical Republicans to wreak vengeance on the white Southerners who had rebelled against the Union and to oust them from power unjustly by military force—military force directed and supervised by U.S. Grant.
Even by the summer of 2021 in Culpeper, no plaque or marker commemorated the site of Grant’s headquarters. Instead (I kid you not), there stood a large monument to Confederate soldiers on the very property once occupied by the Barbour house:
This monument was erected by Confederate veterans in 1911, and its placement on the site of the Barbour house next to the county courthouse on West Davis Street could not have been a coincidence. Hard to fathom why it wasn’t taken down years ago and replaced with a prominent marker commemorating Grant and the importance of the Overland Campaign.
The Museum of Culpeper History, located by the town’s railroad station, offers displays on, among other things, local Indian culture, the Revolutionary War, and the Civil War period, highlighting Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and “Gallant” John Pelham, a young artillery officer in J.E.B. Stuart’s corps of Lee’s army who was wounded in a nearby battle and died in Culpeper in March 1863. There are no displays on Grant or his use of the Barbour house as his headquarters.
The Museum’s Web site features a video, entitled “Visit Culpeper, Virginia—History & Heritage,” that includes remarks from Joe McKinney of the Brandy Station Foundation, who says the following about the Civil War history of Culpeper:
“In the Civil War, Culpeper was the scene of very, very severe fighting. Robert E. Lee had his headquarters here in Culpeper. Stonewall Jackson was the commander at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, which is considered his greatest victory, in August 1862. Most people who you’ve heard about in the Civil War at one time or another were here in Culpeper.”
No mention of Grant by name and no word about the role the town played in the Union’s War-ending strategy.
Culpeper’s official “History of the Town,” a paper adopted and made part of the town’s Comprehensive Plan in March 2002 (based on a master’s thesis submitted by Genevieve Keller to the University of Virginia in 1975), does include a quick reference to Grant’s time in the Barbour house in advance of the Battle of the Wilderness and the bivouacking of the Union Army, which, according to local tradition, it says, “denuded” the countryside of firewood for 20 miles around. But the paper places these events in the middle of what it terms “the Federal Occupation of 1863/64.” And the Civil War section of the paper closes with a full-page parlor portrait photo of Culpeper’s favorite son, Rebel General A.P. Hill.
The town also commemorates the famous Culpeper Minute Men, a local militia battalion of riflemen formed on July 17, 1775 that marched under a white and black flag depicting a rattlesnake with the words “Liberty or Death” and “Don’t Tread on Me.”
The Minute Men joined the Virginia Patriot militia commanded by William Woodford and saw action in early engagements of the Revolutionary War, including the December 1775 Battle of Great Bridge in Chesapeake, where the Patriots succeeded in driving the British Governor and his troops out of Virginia. (Many of the Patriots were particularly incensed with the Governor for issuing a proclamation offering freedom to any slave in Virginia who would fight for the British.) The future Chief Justice of the United States, John Marshall, was a member of the Minute Men and fought at Great Bridge.
There’s a monument along a nature trail in Culpeper’s Yowell Meadow Park marking the very spot where the Minute Men first organized under a large oak tree in what was then known as “Clayton’s Old Field,” a spread of open bottomland just west of Mountain Run.
The original battalion disbanded in early 1776 and its members joined other units in the Continental Army.
But in 1860, with the potential for a secessionist conflict looming, a group of locals met again at the same spot under the same oak tree to revive the Culpeper Minute Men under the same rattlesnake flag. After Virginia voted to secede from the Union and war broke out in April 1861, the reconstituted Minute Men mustered into a Rebel infantry company and fought for the Confederacy throughout the Civil War.
In 1861-1862, Clayton’s Old Field became a recruiting and training camp for the Rebel army called “Camp Henry”—named after Patrick Henry, father of the rallying cry “Give me liberty or give me death,” who had stood opposite John Marshall and James Madison at the Virginia Ratifying Convention in June 1788 and argued against ratification of the U.S. Constitution because of concerns that the new Federal Government could usurp the legal rights of citizens protected by State law, including property rights in slaves.
On October 24, 2020, the Town of Culpeper and Foundation Forward, a non-profit educational organization, held a ceremony in Yowell Meadow Park to dedicate Virginia’s first “Charters of Freedom Monument” (the 32nd such monument placed by Foundation Forward).
The monument is a large impressive set of brick and concrete display cases enclosing thick bronze plates on which are etched full-scale replicas of the Declaration of Independence, the original Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights, just as you would see the parchment versions on display in the Rotunda of the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives in Washington, D.C. And next to the monument in Yowell Meadow Park is a new polished granite marker honoring the original Culpeper Minute Men of 1775-1776.
The Charters of Freedom Monument does not include the Civil War Amendments to the U.S. Constitution (also known as the Reconstruction Amendments):
The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, abolishes slavery for all time in the United States.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868—
(Section 1:) Grants citizenship to former slaves and others born or naturalized in the U.S. (thereby superseding the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott holding) and prohibits States from abridging the privileges or immunities of citizens of the U.S. and from denying to any person the rights of due process and equal protection of the laws;
(Section 2:) Provides that the whole number of persons residing in each State will be counted when apportioning Representatives in Congress (subject to reduction if the State denies the right to vote to adult citizens otherwise eligible to vote) (replacing the Constitution’s original compromise limiting the representation of slave States in Congress by counting only 3/5 of their slave populations for apportionment purposes);
(Section 3:) Disqualifies from holding any Federal or State office (subject to waiver by 2/3 vote of Congress) all persons who, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution, have violated that oath by engaging in or actively aiding insurrection or rebellion against the U.S. (a disqualification Congress voted to remove in 1872, at Grant’s urging, for all Rebels but the most senior Confederate officers, and that Congress removed posthumously for Robert E. Lee in 1975 and Jefferson Davis in 1978); and
(Section 4:) Confirms the validity of the public debt of the United States, including all debts incurred in responding to insurrection or rebellion; invalidates all debts incurred by States in support of insurrection or rebellion; and prohibits the payment of claims for the loss or emancipation of a former slave (thus foreclosing any compensation for former slaveholders, such as the payments Lincoln had proposed in 1862).
And the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, guarantees the right to vote to all U.S. citizens regardless of race, color, or status as a former slave.
Each of these Civil War Amendments includes a provision (Section 5 in the Fourteenth Amendment and Section 2 in the others) declaring that Congress “shall have power to enforce” the Amendment “by appropriate legislation.”
Back in 1861, the Rebels, too, put forward their own putative charter of freedom. When representatives of the original secessionist States (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Florida) met in convention in Montgomery, Alabama in March of that year, they adopted what they called the “Constitution of the Confederate States of America.” (Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and would-be governments from Missouri and Kentucky were admitted to the Confederacy after ratification of the CSA Constitution.)
The Rebel charter was identical in nearly all respects to the U.S. Constitution of 1787 (plus the first twelve Amendments) except for certain telling modifications.
Many of the alterations were structural reforms designed to limit further the power of the central government and enhance States’ powers relative to the original Constitution. For example, they:
Dropped references to forming “a more perfect Union” and promoting “the general Welfare” and declared instead that each State would retain “its sovereign and independent character” within the new federal government;
Allowed States to impeach federal officers living and working within the State upon a 2/3 vote of both chambers of the State’s Legislature;
Excluded from the Confederate congress’s power to regulate commerce the authority “to appropriate money for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce,” other than for specified improvements to harbors and navigation;
Prohibited the congress from enacting any law, including a bankruptcy law, that purported to discharge a debt retroactively;
Required the federal post office department to pay its expenses out of its own revenues beginning in March 1863 (a reform the real Congress eventually enacted in 1971 when it reorganized the Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service);
Required a 2/3 vote of both houses of congress for most appropriations of money from the federal treasury and for the admission of new States into the Confederacy;
Provided that each federal law could relate to only one subject, which had to be identified in the title of the law (a reform often suggested under the U.S. Constitution);
Allowed two or more States to enter into compacts for the improvement of navigation on rivers flowing between or through those States (enabling greater local and regional management of navigable waterways);
Specified the president’s power to remove executive officers (an omission in the U.S. Constitution that later gave rise to the showdown between Andrew Johnson and the Republican Congress);
Gave the president a line-item veto over individual appropriations (something frequently advocated for the U.S. Constitution right up to the present day);
Limited the president to a single six-year term of office (mirroring a proposed Constitutional amendment, designed to elevate Presidential decision making above partisanship, first suggested in 1808 and raised from time to time throughout U.S. history, including by President Nixon in 1973); and
Eliminated congress’s authority to propose constitutional amendments and provided instead that any three States could call a convention to consider proposed amendments.
As indicated, several of these structural reforms had long been under discussion and did not originate in the minds of the secessionists.
But the most significant and telling changes adopted in the CSA Constitution were those specifically designed to preserve and promote the institution of “negro slavery” and to protect the property interests of slaveholders. These changes would have resolved the major slavery issues left open at the framing of the original U.S. Constitution decisively in the South’s favor. They:
Prohibited the passage of any “law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves”;
Provided that the citizens of each State “shall have the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired”; and
Provided that in all territories acquired by the Confederacy, “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.”
The Confederate Constitution retained the principle that only 3/5 of slaves were to be counted in apportioning the States’ representatives in congress (and in the electoral college) and any direct taxes among the States.
During the framing of the U.S. Constitution at Philadelphia in 1787, anti-slavery delegates from Northern States, such as Alexander Hamilton of New York, argued that the Southern slave States should not be allowed to count their slave populations at all (0/5) for purposes of determining the size of their representation in Congress and the electoral college, since the slaves had no freedom and were denied the rights of citizenship, including the right to vote.
Not surprisingly, the Southern States’ delegates, on the other hand, argued for the full representational benefit of their whole populations, including both free and enslaved persons (5/5).
The 3/5 compromise adopted in the U.S. Constitution reflected more the relative bargaining power of the Southern States (primarily Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas) versus the Northern States (primarily Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and New York) at the Constitutional Convention, as well as the relative balance of interests for the Southern States in maximizing their apportionment of representation versus minimizing their apportioned burden of direct taxes, than it did any purported value judgment about the relative “worth” of slaves as human beings.
Why did the CSA Constitution retain the 3/5 compromise, rather than use the 5/5 measure the Southern States had pushed for in 1787? Probably because the Southern States had long come to accept their relative apportionments and did not wish to reopen the issue for fresh debate and the difficult negotiation of a new fundamental compromise on representation and taxes, especially since the urgent issue at hand for the delegates to the Confederate convention in Montgomery was the impending conflict with the Union, and not so much the framing of a more perfect federal structure.
The CSA Constitution also maintained the status quo by banning the importation of slaves: It prohibited the “importation of negroes of the African race from any foreign country” (other than “the United States of America”) and gave the Confederate congress “power to prohibit the introduction of slaves from any State not a member of, or Territory not belonging to, this Confederacy.”
At the time the U.S. Constitution was framed in 1787, only two Southern States, South Carolina and Georgia, still allowed the importation of slaves. Virginia had been the first to ban it, in legislation proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1778, and there was strong support for ending it entirely.
In addition to the widely held view, as expressed by Jefferson in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence, that the slave trade should be prohibited as “execrable commerce” that involved the “miserable death” of countless victims in slave galleys, there was a powerful economic incentive for the Southern slaveowners to favor the ban: The foreign importation of new slaves would inevitably dilute the considerable value of existing slave holdings.
The U.S. Congress had banned the foreign importation of slaves at the earliest opportunity permitted under the original Constitution—1808—and the Confederate slave States in 1861 were content to keep the ban in place.
Considering the various modifications approved at Montgomery, taken altogether, it’s evident that the CSA Constitution provides conclusive documentary proof that the prime motivation for the Southern States to secede from the Union and the reason they started the Rebellion and fought so tenaciously to advance the cause of the Confederacy (thus the reason the entire Civil War happened) was slavery.
As Lincoln said in his December 1862 Message to Congress, “Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.”