The Other Side of Lincoln. Welby Thomas Cox, Jr.
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wife hearing him... screamed out in a woeful and chilling manner.
Ropes were thrown over the sons of James Doyle and they were drug into the barnyard and butchered by the marauding abolitionist. Two innocent young men, no more or less guilty as any slave...punished for the sins of the father over whom they had no recourse. Born in the wrong era, to the wrong parents...cut down before they could carve out a philosophy or pass on the genetic make-up predisposed to carry on the rage, the hatred from generation to generation.
The law was unable to apprehend Brown or to stop the clandestine assassinations of those flowing into the Kansas prairie who were vociferous in their support of slavery, certain to form a majority in Kansas as a Slave State under the provisions of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the chagrin of the Abolitionist who knew they could not kill all the Proslavers...that would take an army, of the size which only the federals could and would muster in 1861.
Fremont did not condone the use of slavery. He was adamantly opposed to its spread throughout the west seeing what it had done in the south. But at the same time he was a man who believed in the rule of law and the orderly procedures for addressing issues framed on either side. He was contrite over the loss of life experienced by the Doyle family, by Charles Sumner and hundreds of slaves whose names and faces went unnoticed as history played out their dilemma and Fremont’s role in it.
He swore to get John Brown and bring him to justice and Electus Dominus Lenahan would be the man who would deliver the information necessary to bring him down.
This would be no easy matter. Communication was difficult, though improving and there were several trails, which had been recently forged making it plausible for an inventive man like John Brown to elude and evade justice, difficult but nonetheless, passable by men on the move, regardless of motivation or intention.
The army had its handful with the Indians, even though certain treaties had been negotiated for the safe passage of settlers and prospectors. They were often angered by settlers moving through stopping to hunt, fish and rest...and a growing number... putting down roots on hallowed grounds, with centuries old hunting, fishing and other natural resources which the nomadic Sioux, Apache, Cherokee, Ute, Comanche’s, Pawnees, Kiowa and the Arapahos depended upon.
The discovery of Gold in California in 1848 had brought a crush of wealth seekers over one of the major trails. The Oregon Trail north of Larimer County, ran westward through Wyoming to Oregon, California and Utah.
A Mormon battalion on its way to Salt Lake City enters the mountains west of La Porte bringing with them an unorthodox religious belief of the polygamist (one man with several wives) causing problems for the army which could not have been imagined on the Western Plains, requiring manpower continuing to diminish the small army’s strength.
Another route was forged by the Cherokee Indians in conjunction with an Anglo-American named William Russell, blazed a trail which started in Pueblo went to Fort S. Vrain on the South Platte, crossed the South Platte at the mouth of the Cache La Poudre and subsequently entered the mountains and headed for the Laramie Plains and westward to California, became known as The Cherokee Trail.
William Russell was a miner and geologist by trade. He had left his family in Pittsburgh consisting of a wife and two small children, while he attempted to quench the wanderlust and Gold fever. He had successfully organized a trip to California utilizing a pact with the Cherokee as guides across the Rockies, through the plains and into California, but returned empty handed. While attempting to organize a second expedition to California he began prospecting along The Cherokee Trail at Ralston Creek. Whereupon he made his first strike causing him to rethink his need to go to California. The news of this strike was leaked bringing forth an influx of gold-panning prospectors, many of whom had been to California and come home empty handed as well.
By then Russell had moved on making similar finds in what became known as Russell Gulch and Clear Creek. Russell was beside himself with the fever and the realization of his dream. After mining for several months he was persuaded by conscience to pack up and return to Pittsburgh for visits with his wife and two growing daughters, Marianna and Rebecca...nieces of Ima Longing Russell.
Although Mrs. Russell was from a wealthy Pittsburgh family in the printing and publishing business, and the family wanted him to learn the trade, Russell would have none of it. He was a miner and geologist; he had told her of his quest prior to marriage... his business was in Colorado. She deferred to his plans for the future of their family.
They finally agreed to let the girls remain in school in Pittsburgh while living with the maternal grandmother. The Russell’s would make the
return trip to Colorado and the two girls would come west for the summer. An event neither of the children could imagine nor anticipate the changes, which would occur in their young lives.
Historical Review
Contrary to the avowed promise of his Secretary of War, William Seward...President Lincoln sent notice to the commander of Fort Sumter and to the governor of South Carolina that he would re-supply the fort at the request of its commander Major Robert Anderson.
Anderson was under siege, surrounded by the Confederates under the command of his former student at West Point, Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, second in his class where he studied artillery now had the cannons directed at his teacher and was intent on demonstrating that he had learned his lesson well.
Major Anderson had previously abandoned, with the tacit neglect of any direction from President Buchanan, two other United States military installations in Charlestown harbor...Fort’s Moultrie and Castle Pinckney. Beauregard delivered his ultimatum to abandon Fort Sumter, through an emissary, Colonel James Chestnut, Jr., a former U.S. Senator.
“Gentlemen, if you do not batter the fort down around us, we shall all be starved in a few days.” Anderson responded.
“State the date by which you will abandon the fort under truce?” Colonel Chestnut demanded.
“Baring other instructions or the arrival of additional supplies, I shall abandon on April 15th.” Anderson said.
“Regrettably sir, we are unable to permit you to wait for supplies, munitions and additional men...you must abandon now.” Chestnut is reported to have said to Anderson, and he continued.
“If we never meet in this world again Major...I hope that we may meet in the next.”
At 4:30 A.M. on April 12-three days before the Anderson request to abandon, a single mortar was discharged...it was the signal, by Captain George S. James for the forty-three Confederate guns around Fort Sumter to fire four thousand shells...the first of which coming from Edmund Ruffin.
During the next day’s evacuation, Anderson ordered a cannon salute to the flag. One gun exploded; killing Private’s Daniel Hough and Edward Galloway...the first causalities of the Civil War were by accident.
Over the last several decades, many historians have held that Lincoln’s refusal to see his old friend Alexander Stephens who had come secretly on the orders of Jefferson Davis to meet with the Secretary of War Seward at the White House to try to work out a peaceful compromise and Lincoln’s refusal to accept Seward’s word on the issue of Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s decision to re-supply the fort upon notice to the Governor, constituted a breach of good faith in the negotiating process and the deliberate attempt by Lincoln to provoke the Confederates into firing the first shots in order to garner world opinion, especially the English, on the side of the Union.
By his act and the acts of omission by his predecessor, Lincoln not only forced the hand of the Confederacy but his call for volunteers prompted the secession of four more southern states: Arkansas; North Carolina; Tennessee and Virginia.
Head of the Union forces at that time, seventy-five year old General Winfield Scott immediately upon notice that his commander-in-chief had taken this event to the Congress as a declaration of insurrection, put forth his strategic military plan...even-though his counsel to the President on the evacuation of Fort Sumter had been viewed by many of Lincoln’s Republican friends as a