Offered is an original printing of "Truth of War Conspiracy 1861," the privately published pamphlet of Huger William Johnstone, a Confederate veteran who issued the work at his own expense in Georgia in 1921. Forty pages, the front wrapper serving as the title page. The pamphlet is a foundational text of the twentieth-century Lost Cause argument that the war was deliberately provoked by the Lincoln administration, and it is listed in Monaghan's Lincoln Bibliography.

Johnstone opens with a page of personal memoranda establishing his standing to write on the subject. He records that from May 1861 to January 1862 he served in the 5th Georgia Volunteers, C.S.A., at Pensacola, Florida, under Col. John K. Jackson, and describes taking part in the night expedition against Billy Wilson's Zouaves on Santa Rosa Island — the Confederates driving the Federals into Fort Pickens, burning their camp, and capturing the commanding officer, Major Vogdes, who was mounted on a mule. He goes on to relate meeting the same officer, by then General Israel Vogdes, some twenty years later at Fort Adams, Rhode Island, where Vogdes discussed the affair and stated that he had reinforced Fort Pickens before Fort Sumter was fired upon. That remark, Johnstone writes, sent him to the records; he names Stephens, Davis, Semmes, Taylor, Maury, Shouler and others among the authorities he read, and states that in 1917 he at last perfected the proofs on which the pamphlet rests. He also recalls meeting Admiral Raphael Raphael Semmes in Washington in 1861 and again at Mobile in 1870.

A foreword opens with the well-known anecdote of the young John Randolph of Roanoke rising at a Richmond banquet during Washington's administration to propose a sentiment that brought the room to its feet. The text proper, headed "Truth of War Conspiracy 1861," begins with the origins of party division under Washington and Adams, Hamilton's Federalism against the Republican-Democratic principles of Jefferson and Madison, the Resolutions of 1798-9 and the Kentucky Resolutions, and the descent of that constitutional argument to Calhoun and Jefferson Davis. Johnstone then turns to Lincoln directly — the first inaugural address of March 4, 1861, the Lamon and Herndon portraits of Lincoln's early life, Vallandigham, and the wartime treatment of civil liberty.

The core of the pamphlet is the Powhatan affair: Johnstone's contention that the diversion of the U.S.S. Powhatan from the Fort Sumter relief expedition to Fort Pickens, ordered through Seward and Lt. David Dixon Porter, demonstrates premeditation on Lincoln's part. The final page carries a table headed "Date of Act — Cypher — Authorities and Memoranda," keyed to circled letters and figures printed in the margins of the text, citing the Official Records volume four on Lincoln's secret Powhatan telegram, Welles's fitting-out order and his order to Mercer, Porter's sailing, Seward's telegram directing Porter to give up the Powhatan and Porter's answer, Capt. Poor's report of the Powhatan flying English colors, Porter's "20 minutes, or sunk," Capt. Adams to Capt. Dupont, Capt. Barron on the armistice, Judge Campbell's two unanswered letters to Seward, and the July 10, 1861 joint resolution to legalize the President's acts. It is this apparatus of citation, unusual in a veteran's polemic, that has kept the pamphlet in print and in argument for a century.

CONDITION

Complete at forty pages. Uniform age toning throughout, a heavy horizontal fold through all leaves from long storage, light soiling and thumbing, chipping and small losses at the extremities, and the leaves loosening at the stitching. Text clean and fully legible throughout.    [ss][ph:L]

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