Letter by an Illinois Democrat Denouncing the Emancipation Proclamation, Wendell Phillips, and the Suspension of Habeas Corpus: “I said fight all of you Negro loving ones, I am not of that class”.
St. Augustine, Knox County, Illinois: September 29, 1863. Autograph letter signed, A. J. Rausern, four pages, 5 x 8 inches. Excellent. Item #List3719
A forceful anti-emancipation letter sent from western Illinois during the second year of the Civil War. Written nine months after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect and only weeks after the Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, the letter captures the views of a Northern Democrat who supported the war for preservation of the Union but regarded both emancipation and the expansion of executive power under Lincoln as unconstitutional departures from the principles of the Founding generation.
After briefly discussing his health and employment as a bookkeeper at a steam mill, Rausern turns to politics, contrasting Illinois with Massachusetts and launching into a lengthy denunciation of abolitionists, whom he accuses of urging others into military service while themselves avoiding personal sacrifice:
“We are not going to have a draft in Illinois this time, having an excess of 8,151 yet credited to us on the next if there should be another call. That is not a bad contrast for us by the side of the Abolition State of Massachusetts that has always howled, yet done but little fight. Abolition always did mean 40 miles from any fight. Look at the Cowardly Scoundrel of the New York Independent. Wanted a draft, and all men hung & quartered that was not in favor of said draft, ‘But’, what did he do, when drafted. Skulked and did not want to pay or fight. That is the way with Wendell Phillips, Owen Lovejoy, Wm. Lloyd Garrison & all of the ranting Abolitionists. When it comes to the test they want someone else to do the fighting.”
The letter articulates a position common among Northern War Democrats during 1863: support for military action against secession coupled with opposition to emancipation. Rausern writes:
“I was in for the war and the Govt. until said Govt. made the Abolition Proclamation, then I said fight all of you Negro loving ones, I am not of that class. Some may say that it was a military necessity. That is all nonsense and no one that is well informed will say so. Previous to that the North was united, the South divided. Now vice versa.”
He continues with an extended constitutional critique of Lincoln’s wartime policies, particularly the suspension of habeas corpus, arguing that “the President being the Executive, not the Legislative part of our Govt., has no right to do it”, and that Congress could not delegate that power:
“The old Fool thinks that it is a political necessity, not a military one. I am for the Constitution and the Govt. as it was left to us by our Revolutionary fathers and for it if needs be will sacrifice life & fortune for its defence & support.”
Rausern concludes by attacking the abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips, repeating contemporary accusations that Phillips had spent years seeking to undermine the Constitution and the Union itself:
“But it looks gloomy when such men as Wendell Phillips is cited to as models of Patriots, that makes his boast that he has laboured 19 years to break up this Govt. and that the Constitution is a compact of death and in league with Devils. This is not idle talk, it is language that he used in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, and that Negro visaged Vice Pres’t Hamlin cheered him when he said it. He repeated the same language in Cincinnati, Ohio and got rotten egged for his treasonable statements. The West is not of that kind, notwithstanding the cry of Copper-head of Abolition New England. We are for whipping Southern traitors and Northern Abolitionists, for they are alike guilty of treason.”
Overall the letter expresses Midwestern Democratic opposition to emancipation and wartime executive power, written from the home front as the political consensus that had initially sustained the Union war effort was fracturing.
Price: $850.00