JAY GOULD'S LIBERTARIAN DREAM

I wish modern libertarians could meet Jay Gould. Because Jay Gould was unfettered capitalism in the flesh, “the human incarnation of avarice,” as one minister described him, the Mephistopheles of Wall Street, the robber baron par excellence, “prince of the railroad schemers”, and the man within whom all the theories of the libertarians about capitalism and freedom met the reality of human nature, and got the living tar beat out of it.

He (above) was a “…short, thin man with cold black eyes, a narrow face and, in his maturity, a “full black beard”. Born into poverty, his mother was active in the Methodist Church until her death, when Jay was 10 years old. When he was seventeen, Jay apprenticed himself to a surveyor, Mr. Oliver Diston, at the salary of $10 a month. When Jay started issuing his own maps for sale, Diston sued his apprentice. Jay’s attorney, Mr T. R. Westbrook,  managed to have the lawsuit dismissed. But, as one biographer noted, from that day forward, “…there was scarcely a day during his whole life that (Jay Gould) did not have some litigation on his hands.”

His map business made Jay $5, 000, which he invested with Zadock Pratt, a Manhattan leather merchant. Smothering Mr. Pratt in adoration, the 21 year old Jay proposed to write the older man’s biography. That project drew the pair into a partnership in a new leather tannery south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  Using  Pratt’s money, Jay built an entire company town, which he named “Gouldborough”. He wrote Pratt sycophantic letters, in one describing the organizing meeting for the new community. “Three hearty cheers were proposed for the Hon(erable) Zadock Pratt…This is certainly a memorandum worthy of note in your biography, of the gratitude and esteem which Americans hold your enterprising history.”  However Mr. Pratt, who knew a lot more about the tanning business than did the young Jay Gould, had begun to see through the fog of compliments.

Pratt (above) showed up at the plant unannounced in the summer of 1858, to go over the books.  He quickly discovered them to be a confusing mess, showing unauthorized risky investments, including in a private bank which Jay had established in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania.  But the company did not share in the bank's profits. Those went only to Jay Gould. Pratt decided to fire his erstwhile friend and sue him to take ownership of the bank.  However, Jay had anticipated this, and had already lined up a richer and more docile partner.  In August,  when confronted by Pratt, Gould stunned the man by offering to buy him out for $60,000.  Pratt quickly accepted.  The cash for the buyout had come from Jay’s new partner, Charles Lessup.

But it wasn’t long before even the somnolent Lessup began to suspect he was being had, too. By the fall of 1859 Lessup was panicked by the commitments Jay had made, using his good name. But it was too late.  On 6 October, 1859, facing financial disaster, Charles Lessup shot himself.  Lessup’s daughters bitterly demanded Jay repay them for their father’s lost investment, and Jay countered with an offer of a payment of $10,000 a year for six years.  He had, of course, neglected to include any interest during the five year delay.  Unfortunately for Jay, the Lessup families’ lawyers caught the omission.  Still, in the early months of 1860, it became clear that Jay was hiding huge assets from the family.

Lawyers and 40 deputized men were dispatched to the tannery on Tuesday morning, 13 March, 1860. They flashed the legal papers, ushered the workers out and padlocked the doors. They held the place for a little over six hours, until Jay returned from New York.  Just past noon some 200 men stormed the building with axes, muskets and rifles.  Four men were shot, others were badly beaten, and according to the New York Herald, “…those who did not escape were violently flung from the windows and doors…”  As Jay Gould would later boast, “I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half.”  The courts would eventually throw Jay Gould out of the tannery, but by then he had shifted his operations to a place more suited to his nature; the unregulated economic free-for-all that was Wall Street.

While North and South battled over slavery, Jay Gould battled over wealth. He formed his own brokerage firm -  Smith, Gould and Martin.  Like all of Gould's  partners, Smith and Martin  were soon left behind, broken and broke.  Gould  then made the acquaintance of James “Big Jim” Fisk, who made a fortune smuggling southern cotton through the Federal armies, and selling Confederate War Bonds. And even while brave men died in their tens of thousands,  Gould and Fisk joined with Daniel Drew, director of the Erie Railroad, in their own, private war.

Their enemy was Cornelius Vanderbilt (above), who owned every railroad in the east except the Erie. Naturally, “The Commodore”, as Vanderbilt liked to be called, was seeking a monopoly, so he could charge whatever freight rates he wanted, and he began to buy stock in the Erie. Sensing blood in the water, Jay and friends printed up 100,000 new shares of Erie stock, which The Commodore promptly bought, and which the board of the Erie – Drew, Fisk and Jay Gould – immediately declared to be worthless.

Bilked out of $7 million, Vanderbilt filed legal papers to examine the Erie’s books.  Jay and friends grabbed the company records and retreated to New Jersey, where they re-incorporated.  Vanderbilt then had arrest warrants issued for all three men, but since New York law could not touch them in New Jersey, the Commodore began to assemble ships and men to invade that state,  all by himself. While the Erie Board prepared to receive the invaders, Jay managed to slide a bill through the New York State assembly making the issuing of worthless stock, perfectly legal, retroactively, of course.

This trick was managed by the simple expedient of giving William “Boss” Tweed (above), the head of political graft in New York, a seat on the Erie board.  That brought the Erie War to a temporary pause.  And if you are feeling sorry for the Commodore, remember that Cornelius himself once said, “Law, what do I care about the law? Ain't I got the power?" -  another libertarian hero.  The entire bunch were so busy cheating and stealing they barely noticed the end of the Civil War.

With the Commodore’s cash, and further fortified by looting the Erie’s assets, Jay, Fisk and Drew began their own complicated scheme to raise freight rates on the Erie Railroad. Using the profits from that scheme, in 1869 they began to buy and hoard gold, because raising the price of gold would raise the price of wheat, which would allow them to raise the freight rates they charged farmers for shipping the wheat.  As insurance the trio took on another partner, Abel R. Corbin, who happened to be President Grant’s brother-in law.  The new partner gave the appearance that “the fix” was in, and other investors jumped on the bandwagon. The price of gold skyrocketed.

When President Grant learned about the manipulations, he immediately ordered the U.S. Treasury to sell $4 million in gold. On 24 September, 1869, the sudden influx hit the market like a bomb, and gold dropped 30% in a day.  The date would henceforth be known as “Black Friday” - at least until October of 1929. Thousands of investors were wiped out, including Abel Corbin. An angry mob swarmed the Gould’s brokerage offices, smashing the furnishings and chanting “Who killed Charles Lessup?” Of course the trio of Gould, Fisk and Drew, walked away from the wreckage with an $11 million profit.

Gould's own partner Daniel Drew was to be his next victim.  In 1870 Fisk and Gould sold their shares in the Erie to their one time enemy the Commodore, for $5 million. The deal gave Vanderbilt his monopoly, but it also revealed that the Erie was bankrupt.  And it left Daniel Drew, abandoned by his partners, out $1.5 million. He would die flat broke nine years later, just one more partner and one more victim of Jay Gould.

Big Jim Fisk was saved from a similar fate when, in 1871, a competitor for a woman shot him to death in a New York Hotel. After that Jay was reduced to stealing from lesser partners, such as Major Abin A. Selover, who actually considered himself a friend of Gould’s.  It was Selover who introduced Jay to a California friend of his, James R. Keene.  After Keene and Selover had both been battered by Gould in a contest for control of the telegraph company, Western Union,  Jay and Selover happened to meet on the street one day. Jay tried to walk past, but for once in his life, Jay Gould had been caught out in the open.

Selover grabbed Jay be the collar and shouted, “I’ll teach you to tell me lies!” The six foot tall Selover then threw Jay to the ground, and then yanked him up again by one hand, dangling him above the stairwell of a below-street level barbershop. With his free arm Selover began slapping the Mephistopheles of Wall Street and shouting, “Gould, you are a damn liar!” Nobody who witnessed the event interrupted to disagree. When Selover finally let go, Gould dropped 8 feet to the stairs. A stock broker the next day quipped, “It was characteristic of Mr. Gould that he landed on his feet.”

Overnight, Abin Selover became the most popular man in New York City. Jay Gould was smart enough not to press charges, since no jury could be expected to convict anyone of assaulting Jay Gould. Henceforth, Jay never went out without a body guard. He began to describe himself as the “most hated man in New York”, but there was a touch of pride in his voice when he said it. Selover eventually went broke, as did Keene. However, when he finally died in 1892, Jay Gould was the ninth richest man in America, worth about $77 million. He died a hero only to those who never did business with him. Gould scoffed at the idea that Wall Street should be regulated. “People will deal in chance….Would you not, if you stopped it, promote gambling?”

It was and is a philosophy which fails to see an advantage to drawing a line between gambling and investing. It is the philosophy of libertarianism. It is the philosophy of unmitigated greed. It was the philosophy of Jay Gould.  And people had lots of reasons to hate him. Not a very healthy hero.

- 30 -

POLITICS MEETS FRAUD

I have a mystery story for you, and it begins one October morning in 1954, when the agricultural reporter for the Cuero Record, Ken Roland Towery, was making his morning rounds of the DeWitt County Courthouse (above).  Each day Ken stopped in the offices of county officials, to see if anything newsworthy might be going on.  Poking his head into the district clerk's office, he asked the secretary if anything was up. She replied no, but then she asked him a question. “Ken, what was going on out at the Country Club last night?” When Ken said he hadn't heard anything, she explained, “Oh, they had a big meeting out there, I understand.” And thus began a scandal that would bring down a three term Texas Governor.

Ken Towery had already led an unusual life. After joining the army in 1940 (above), he arrived in the Philippines just in time to be first wounded, and then in March of 1942, made a Japanese prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a POW camp in Korea, and did not get back to Texas until 1946. Under the G.I. bill he studied chemistry, but he had contracted tuberculous in Korea he had to drop out. He took a job working for his hometown newspaper, the Cuero Record. The sleepy south Texas county seat (pronounced Quair-oh, Spanish for “rawhide”) stood at the junction of three highways, and along the “Gulf, Western Texas and Pacific Railway”. The major business in the rolling countryside was raising cows, chickens and turkeys. And the major business in town was slaughtering them or shipping them elsewhere for slaughter – that and county government. So usually, nothing much happened in Cuero.

But when the secretary described the Country Club meeting to Ken that October morning, she used a few racial epithets, because in Texas in 1954, African Americans and Mexican Americans were usually allowed in the Country Club (above) only as servants. Ken returned to the paper and asked Elvin Wright, an African American press operator, if he could check with his neighbors about the meeting. A week later Wright told him, “All I know is they had a meeting out there and they talked land, they talked about a lot of land.”

That rang a bell with Ken. A few months earlier a local farmer named Webber had approached Ken with a letter on blue paper one his hired hands had received from the Veterans Land Board. The man wanted to know what the letter meant. Webber explained, “It looks like you bought some land somewhere”.  But the man insisted, “I ain't bought no land.” Those two curious events, an illiterate man who had not bought land, and a racially mixed meeting in an area where, in Ken's words, “White people just don't set up big parties for colored field hands”, was enough to send the reporter looking for Shorty Robinson, the black custodian for the brand new Country Club. Shorty explained that two club members, T. J. McLarty and a Notary Republic named Ledbetter, had paid him ten dollars for every black veteran he had rounded up for the meeting with the Veteran's Land board.

The Veteran's Land Board was the brainchild of “General” Bascom Giles (above), eight term elected commissioner of the General Land Office in Austin, Texas. The land board had been approved by the voters in November of 1946. Under Giles' plan, the state issued $75 million in bonds. That money was then used to offer 40 year, 3% interest rate loans of up to $7,500 for each veteran applicant. With just 5% down, they could now purchase up to 20 acres of land. Running the program was Giles, with oversight supposedly provided by three term Governor Alan Shivers and Attorney General John Ben Shepperd.  In 1951, because of rising land prices, an amendment allowed two or more veterans to jointly purchase a tract, which they were allowed to later subdivide and resell.  Ken Towery now headed off to Austin, to speak to Bascom Giles.

At first Ken was told “The General” might not even be in that afternoon. So Ken told the secretary that he was from Cuero, and wanted to talk about the blue letter received by Farmer William's employee. Within 20 minutes Bascom Giles (above) was warmly welcoming the reporter into his office. Giles began by insisting no irregularities had occurred in the program in DeWitt county, and yet blamed any mistakes on an appraiser who had already been fired. But, insisted Giles, he had checked the application in question, it had been signed by the farmhand, and any accusation of fraud was just “politics”.  Ken left after the ten minute meeting,  wondering why Giles was defending himself against accusations which Ken had not made.

Back in Ceuro, Ken confided his concerns to DeWitt County Attorney Wiley Cheatham. Wiley revealed he been investigating the Land Board since the previous August, when “ veterans started trickling in, complaining that they hadn't bought any land, wanting to know what the blue slips were, were there payments to be made. Some of them had pink slips...delinquent notices.” Wiley added he had heard of similar problems in at least six other counties.

Wiley asked Ken to hold the story for a few days, while he drove the 94 miles up highway 183 to Austin. On Friday, 5 November, 1954,  Cheatham informed Ken he had received no cooperation from the Land Board, and to go ahead with the story.  Two weeks later, in the Sunday, 14 November, 1954 edition of the Cuero Record,  Ken Towery broke the story of the Veteran's Land Board fraud.

The scam he laid out worked as follows: speculators like T. J. McLarty first obtained options on tracts of land at standard market prices.  Then, at events like the sales pitch at the Cuero Country Club, they fooled minority veterans into signing authorizations to act as their agents.  The speculators then bribed employees of the Land Board (including Giles) to provide highly inflated appraisals on the properties they held options on. Finally, in the veterans' names, the speculators obtained the 3% loans from the Veterans Land Board to purchase the property at the inflated price. They made only the 5% down payment at the option price, and pocketed the rest of the loan, leaving the veterans with the payments and ruined credit.

Two years later a Texas state Senate report would say, “The plan . . . constituted a highly reprehensible practice, especially in view of the 'spread' between the original purchase price paid by the 'promoters' and the appraised price paid by the Veterans Land Board, resulting in unconscionable and shocking profits . . . without risk and with only token expense to them and the 'rooking' of the veteran-purchaser.”  The scam proved so profitable the speculators could even afford to pay many barely literate veterans up to a hundred dollars for their signatures. One veteran admitted, “They said they'd give me a new set of tires for my car and so I signed up.”

The scandal did not explode instantly. In fact, Bascom Giles had just been elected to his ninth term as Land Office Commissioner.  But thanks to Ken Towerly's (above) work, investigations which had already begun in seven counties began producing headlines of their own. The State Attorney General, John Ben Shepperd, who had rarely attended meetings of the Veterans Land Board, quickly opened his own investigation, as did that other absentee board member, Governor Alan Shivers. Twenty-one people were indicted by grand juries.  Early the following March  Bascom Giles was indicted for conspiracy to steal $83,000 (nearly $600,000 in present day). He was the first Texas state officer convicted for crimes committed while in office. He was sentenced to six years. Fines and civil suits by the state collected all but $3,000 of the money he stole.

When it was all over the State Auditor reported that over $3.5 million ($25 million today) had been stolen, defrauding 591 veterans and 39 land owners. Threatened with jail time, most of those indicted had cut deals, buying back the land from the veterans at the inflated price the crooks had been paid, and re-embursing the land board. So the state of Texas got most of their money back, and only two of the crooks did any substantial time behind bars. But one of those two was T.J.McLarty, of tiny Cuero. 

Governor Shivers (above) was never directly implicated in any involvement in the Veterans' Land Board scandal, but because of his shoddy oversight,  his reputation was so damaged that he did not run for re-election, and left politics. His greatest political claim to fame was that in 1952, as a conservative Democrat, he had delivered Texas to Republican Presidential candidate Dwight Eisenhower.  After politics, he served as a regent for the University of Texas, and died of a heart attack in January of 1985.

In 1955 Ken Towerly (above) won the Pulitzer Prize,  and the Associated Press sent him a check for $4.00, for reprinting his story nationwide.  He later interviewed Bascom Giles in the state penitentiary at Huntsville.  In his own interview 60 years later, Ken recalled, “He had long stories, of course, like all crooks do...everybody out there is doing it, I don’t know why they picked on me....And I told Bascom...“If you know of anything,  well just name them”...And he said, “Oh, no, it wouldn’t do any good.,,They're all doing it”  After his release in 1958, Bascom Giles moved to Venice Florida, where he died in a car accident, in 1993.

And Ken went into politics. He never ran for public office, but he did work on the staff of Texas Republican Senator John Towers. As of May, 2016, he was still enjoying his unusual life

- 30 -

VICKSBURG Chapter Thirty-Six

The 38 year old bespectacled Democratic publisher of the Hinds County Gazette, George William Harper (above), was worried.  Even during the bright arrogance of 1861, the one time mayor, two term state representative and major of militia had watched with foreboding as “The Raymond Fencibles” marched off to war in Virginia. Despite his personal rejection of succession, George had volunteered as commissariat, securing supplies for the 2 regiments raised in Hinds county. And this gave him a perspective as, over the next two years, the war crept closer to 512 Palestine Street in Raymond, where George's wife Anna their six children lived.

Raymond seemed safe from the anarchy of the war. The petite capital of Hinds county was off the main road between Vicksburg and Jackson, yet close to the Natchez Trace, on property donated by General Raymond Robinson. By 1862 the 1,500 white residents boasted a new Greek revival county court house (above)... 

...Two respectable rooming houses - “The City” and “The Oak Tree” (above) hotels - as well as the not quite so respectable Florin House, several grand homes and two dozen or more tenement apartments. 

The town also boasted a new Episcopalian  church as well as the older Methodist church, ministered over by the Reverend Cooper - who was also owner of the diuretic medicinal waters of Coopers Wells resort (above)  just south of town. There were a couple of dry goods stores, a few saloons and blacksmiths, a hand full of doctors, a flurry of lawyers and Harper's  Hinds County Gazette - second oldest newspaper in the state. Raymond was as peaceful a town as could be found in the cotton empire. And then, four days ago on 2 May, 1863, the Yankees had captured Port Gibson, just 50 miles to the south.

The sudden appearance of blue uniforms in the very gut of Mississippi ripped apart the carefully cultured self image of gentility which had graced the south for a century. In a region already stripped of young white males, the nightmare of retribution was abruptly set free to stalk the land in daylight, and the thousands of ways the “peculiar institution” had twisted and bent the society, laws and psychology of the south were revealed for their hypocrisy. So terrifying was this sudden reality it must be doubtful if either master or slave welcomed the revelation without reservations.

On Tuesday, 5 May, halfway between Raymond and Edward's Depot. 500 troopers of the 2^nd Illinois Cavalry had descended upon and captured 100 mounted infantry of the 20^th Mississippi. That put Yankees within 8 miles of Raymond.  

The next morning, George Harper used his new Number 3 Washington Press, manufactured by New York based Robert Hoe and Company, to deliver the depressing news to his readers. It was, he wrote, “...a very gloomy day. Enemy reported at Edwards Station, Auburn, Cayuga, (and) Rocky Springs.”

George assured his readers the Yankees would concentrate on Vicksburg, 40 miles to the east, and that the fighting would come no closer than the banks of the Big Black River – still 20 miles, a full day's travel, away.  But George knew a zone of uncertainty had opened up in the rolling hills of central Mississippi, bordered by Bayou Pierre on the south, the Big Black River on the west, Snake Creek to the east, and to the north, the little community of Edward's Depot.

The 20 year old Tennessean Richard O. “Rich” Edward was one of the 75,000 whites drawn and 100,000 slaves forced to Mississippi after the 1830 Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. The sudden creation of 11 million acres of land turned conventional economics on its head. As attorney and author of “The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi”, Joseph Glover Baldwin put it, “The country was just settling up”. Fraud was rampant, and yet it seemed every idiot was making money. One of them explained, “...credit is plenty, and he who has no money can do as much business as he who has...”. “Rich” Edward easily acquired a few hundred acres in the Yazoo River delta and started growing cotton.

In 1834, Mississippi produced 85 million pounds of cotton. Three years later the cotton kingdom produced 200 million pounds of the white fiber. Over the same time the price paid for that cotton in New Orleans almost doubled. This drove inflation, but again, few seemed to notice. Baldwin explained that “Money, or what passed for money was the only cheap thing to be had.” It seemed as if the good times would go on forever. They did not.

During March and February of 1837 the price of cotton dropped 25%. The immediate cause was President Andrew Jackson's order that the only payment accepted for Federal lands would be in gold or silver. This caused private banks to raise interest rates on paper – or specie – loans. And that produced a seemingly endless string of bankruptcies. In August of 1838, Colonel William H. Shelton, President of one of the largest banks in Mississippi,  fled after his bank failed - “Gone to Texas” was the phrase. A year later he committed suicide. In 1840 the entire state of Mississippi defaulted on $2 million worth of loans to cotton farmers. It took seven long years for the recovery to even begin.

In 1847 Richard Edward paid a dollar an acre for a section of 640 acres of Harlan County, 16 miles from Vicksburg and just east of the Big Black tributary called Baker's Creek. It was a new cotton boom. In 1850 Richard's 30 slaves produced 180, 500 pound bales of cotton, shipped out of his own depot on the Mississippi Southern Railroad (above). By 1860 Richard's wealth included 124 slave laborers, making him one of the top 12% of plantation slave owners.

But in a back room at Edward's Produce and Grocery was the iron fist required to make that wealth possible – 300 muskets and 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Almost every large plantation in the south had a such larder, ever ready to respond to the great slave revolt, when it came. The 3,000 weapons destroyed by Grierson's raid were further evidence of doomsday vaults dispersed though out Mississippi.  And these were not hysterical fantasies. 

According to the 1860 census, there were 791,000 humans living in the state of Mississippi, of whom 437,000 – 55% - were owned by the remaining 350,000 – 45%. Some 80,000 white Mississippi men then went to war, further unbalancing the social power structure. It would have been odd, if the whites had not felt vulnerable, because they were.

But in the pine forests of Winston county, in north/central Mississippi,  there were only 122 black slaves, owned by just 14 white families - out of the total of 637 white families in the district. There was strong pro-union sentiment in Winston County. Yet even here, where masters vastly outnumbered those in bondage, owner Mr. C. D, Kelly was willing to believe his own cook's tale of a mass slave conspiracy. Her name was never provided, but Mr. Kelly said that on Friday, 20 September, while he was “chastising”, the “girl”, she had revealed a massive plot to poison every white family in the county.  

She said she had been provided with poison to murder her master, his wife and child.  According to the New York Times, a week after learning of the plot, Mr. Kelly, “...called on some five or six responsible and sober-thinking gentlemen,” to form a Vigilance Committee. On 28 September the committee went from plantation to plantation, beating slaves without explanation or examination. The following day, the committee returned and some of the slaves spontaneously “confessed”, leading to the arrest of about 30 slaves. It was assumed white agitators had been lead the conspiracy, specifically a traveling photographer, later detained in Philadelphia and identified only as G. Harrington – possibly Cole Harrington, originally from New York City.

Observed The Times, “ Knowing well that the law is too tardy in its course...” the committee “...unanimously committed” to pass punishment, “...on all persons, black or white, that may be impeached before it. of aiding or abetting in insurrectionist plans or movements, heretofore or hereafter.” The result, as reported in the Louisville and St. Louis newspapers, was that one negro and Mr. Harrington “had been hung.” 

And, of course the remaining 29 slaves were whipped, “...so severely, that it was thought they would die.’’

In February of 1862 Joseph Davis, elder brother to Confederate President Jeff Davis,  took his family and “house slaves” to Alabama for their safety.  But the moment the master's boat left the dock of his Hurricane Plantation,  his field hands took control of the entire peninsula, ransacking both Joseph's Hurricane Plantation house and Jefferson Davis' Brierfield Plantation house.   

All the cotton was burned, while the self-emancipated slaves took everything they could use back to their cabins (above) And there they stayed.  A Confederate lieutenant, dispatched with a patrol to put down the rebellion was shot at. The officer complained that, “...almost all the slaves on (the) Davis plantation had guns and newspapers.” 

Fifteen of the rebellious slaves were caught and several executed, but the remaining slaves remained defiant. They even refused to surrender the property to the Yankees, when they arrived. 

It was clear for some time to the so called benign slave masters that they were sitting atop a powder keg of their own making. 

Robert Augustus Tombs (above), the 53 year old alcoholic Georgia genius, made the other obvious point regarding slavery in his farewell address in U.S. Senate. He said, “We want no negro equality, no negro citizenship...” But this deeply racist man also accepted as fact the theory that slavery was doomed in America. A year later, as Confederate Secretary of State, he assured the Confederate Congress, "In 15 years more, without a great increase in Slave territory, either the slaves must be permitted to flee from the whites, or the whites must flee from the slaves." The fuse on the powders keg was already burning.

 Viewed on a purely economic basis, slavery in the America was already dying. The first slave empires had been Virginia and Maryland. Fifteen to twenty years later, South Carolina had replaced them, “... due to the exhaustion of the soil.” As the cotton bushes consumed the available nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in the soil, cotton yields in first South Carolina and fifteen years later, in Mississippi and Georgia began falling off. By 1860, Arkansas and Louisiana were the new queens of cotton production. By 1875, if not earlier, Texas would be used up. And then, without expansion into Mexico, slavery in the Americas would die a natural death.

Would the United States fight a new war, as they had in 1838 to seize Texas, to convert Mexico into the new slave empire? Was it likely Britain and France would allow such a conquest, if attempted,  to go unchallenged?  

The truth was, as George William Harper well knew, the day of the slave empire was over. And the American Civil War was about one third of the nation refusing to accept that reality.

Three men who would affirm that unequivocal reality to the citizens of the Confederacy - President Abraham Lincoln, in Washington, D.C., commander of the Army of the Tennessee, Lieutenant General Ulysses Simpson Grant,  and General William Tecumseh Sherman, who on 6 May, 1863, stepped ashore at Grand Gulf, Mississippi, at the head of the 15,000 men of his XVth. Corp.

- 30 -