1864 Letter From New Orleans With Racist Remark

The cover was postmarked in New Orleans. The letter was headed Baton Rouge May 17, 1864. It is a pretty cover and I read the content and this caught my eyes....Read the three lines below the cover. This person was on a Union ship and, in 1864, the Union had already occupied New Orleans.

That's a really neat piece of history documented there. I'd relish reading the whole thing! Great cover & contents IMO.

Sometimes history isn't as quaint as we'd like to think.
Lovely piece though.

Note the address of the cover is directed to Bluffdale (Greene Co.), Illinois. Today, Bluffdale has a population of only 580. I can only imagine how many (or few) people were there in 1864. In fact, the post office at Bluffdale, Illinois closed way back in 1904.

Awesome find! I'd comment that while many believe the Union fought the war to end slavery this idea is far from the truth, especially when it came down the the beliefs of the actual soldiers. I'd be willing to bet this man was a Northern Democrat, also called a dough-face leading up to the conflict.

The onset of the war was about states rights. Slavery was just one of the positions taken. New Orleans was a key city that had to be taken to win the war. Any cover from NOLA or Galveston during the occupation is something to be treasured. Without those 2 Gulf coast cities the union blockade and more over the loss of trade markets for the CSA, the war may have gone even longer.

That's really splitting hairs saying "states rights" isn't it? States Rights was to simplify terms is the right to own slaves.

ILS, he's not splitting hairs. It was about states rights. Slavery was a part of that issue, but slavery itself wasn't the cause. Following current political commentary, even today there are concerns about states rights verses the federal governments preceived or actual interference with those rights.

Alas, the Confederate Constitution belies the "States Rights" argument. There were NO rights given to the Confederate States by the government in Richmond that they did not previously have as a part of the Union EXCEPT that slavery was codified. And the Confederacy was certainly not interested in the rights of Free States.
The country is so much different today from what it was in the mid 19th century that the questions being argued today have zero bearing to that time.

It is said and can be proved, that history is written by the victors. This is true today as it was 160 years ago. Not in foreign countries but in our own.

Art

Certainly true about history, but certainly not true about the Confederate Constitution.

Indeed, the secession statement issued by every state that seceded specifically mentioned the preservation of slavery in it as a primary reason for secession. Slaves were the source of the wealth of the South, specifically the Planter class that ran things. The total dollar value of slaves owned throughout the South was worth more than any other asset or commodity. Banning slavery, to most Southerners at the time, would be somewhat like banning all oil production in Texas today, or shutting down Silicon Valley in California. Oh yes, they were more than ready to secede and go to war to protect this. Get down to the soldier level and they weren't all that concerned with such things, but those who actually voted to secede and organized for war were very concerned with them.

I have been a "student" of the civil war since in high school many years ago. There are a lot of things most people don't realize, but the attitude of most Northern soldiers towards the blacks was not charitable, to put it mildly. There were those who fought to end slavery, but most served to preserve the Union--ending slavery was a minor issue, if considered at all. Even Lincoln struggled with the emancipation concept, and his declaration was made partly to cripple the Confederate States and encourage the slaves to no longer work for their masters. The other thing I would say about the word used was that it was common usage and did not always connote a negative, condescending or pejorative meaning.

Interesting how so many yanks deny the real reasons for their awful civil war. The overwhelming evidence is that it was over slavery.

Saying that it was about state's rights is not entirely untrue, but it was bout the state's right to condone slavery.

The problem today which you might not understand, being Canadian, is that for those who see themselves of a particular political bent repeat the code phrases that perpetuate their ideology. One of them is to say that the Civil War was about state's rights.

Well, saying it was "over" slavery is an oversimplification, kind of like saying that WWI was "over" the assassination of the Archduke. The South seceded because they wanted to preserve slavery. Anyone who doubts this needs to read the very words of the men who took it upon themselves to secede. The South attacked Fort Sumter and it was off and running from there. Lincoln said that if he could preserve the Union without ending slavery, he would do so, so his main goal was in preserving the union, not in ending slavery. It was only as the war kept grinding on that he saw that he had no choice if this issue were to be decided once and for all.

And back to the original topic, I would imagine that to be fairly common in that day and age, the South had no monopoly on racists, and neither did the US. Slavery ended here 20 years before King Leopold and the Belgians even began their brutal and bloody enslavement in the Congo (anyone read Heart of Darkness?), and "ethnic cleansing" still goes on in places today, sadly enough.