When discussing the
Reconstruction period, most will paint the South as ignorant racists and
nothing else. There is always a cause and effect to all things. What would lead
the people of the South to such racial hostilities?
Terror begets terror. Opposition
and violent hostility grew out of chaos. With the emancipation of the slaves
set in motion, life in the South was changing; however, other aspects of
Southern life did not return to any sort of normalcy after Lee’s surrender.
As Confederate soldiers
were returning home from the war, they were finding more than emancipated slaves;
they were coming home to tremendous confusion and disorder. Governmental order
was nonexistent outside of some larger cities and near Federal troops. “The
people were forbidden to take steps toward setting up any kind of government.”1
The South became a
lawless land were “Federal and Confederate deserters, and bushwhackers and
outlaws of every description”2 were free to roam and terrorize. Hard
and despite times create environments where horrible crimes occur. Murders and “outrages
upon women were frequent.”3 Thieves would prey upon the defenseless.
Want for food was
great. What the war had not already consumed or what the Federal army had not
confiscated, the thieves would steal from the Southern farmers. Southern
mothers began to trade sex with Federal troops, so that their poor children
would not starve to death.4
The Freedmen’s Bureau
would only intensify the resentful feelings between the white Southerners and
the ex-slaves. Northerners would teach the ex-slaves that the Southerner “was
naturally unfriendly to him.”5
Logically, the poorest
whites without land of their own welcomed the emancipation of the slaves in
hopes that they could become wage workers on the labor less farms; however, the
competition for employment would create some friction between the two groups.
Rumors would circulate
that the Union League would confiscate the property of the white land owners
and redistribute them among the ex-slaves.6 The cotton fraud of 1865—where
private cotton was confiscated as “Confederate government cotton” and the
proceeds of the sales divided up by Federal agents—took advantage of
Southerners after the war.7 The cotton tax of 1865-1868 would take “$70,000,000
from the cotton farmers [both white and black] of the South.”8 Refusal
of congressional representation of the Southern states and the Reconstruction
Acts would generate a belief among Southerners that they were being “persecuted
by the Washington government.”9
Many Confederate
soldiers, who received a pardon at Appomattox, felt that their treatment in the
years following the war was in violation of the terms of their surrender. Even Robert E. Lee admitted that he would not
have surrendered to Grant had he known how the South would be treated in the
post war years. Lee expressed his
feelings to Texas Governor Fletcher Stockdale on the matter: “Governor, if I
had foreseen the use those people designed to make of their victory, there
would have been nor surrender at Appomattox Courthouse; no sir, not by me. Had
I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at
Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”10
In light of the
circumstances after the war, it is easy to see how desperation could have
forced Southerners into continuing their war against the North through a
campaign of terror. The North had backed a wounded animal into a corner and it
lashed out against them.
Notes:
1. Fleming, Walter Lynwood. "Civil War and Reconstruction in
Alabama." 654. New York: The Columbia University Press, 1905.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "The Real Lincoln." 205.
New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.
5. Fleming, Civil War and
Reconstruction in Alabma, p. 654.
6. Ibid, p. 655.
7. Woodman, Harold D. "King Cotton and his Retainers: Financing and
Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925." 238. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1990.
8. Woodman, Harold D. " Documentary History of
Reconstruction: Political, Miltary, Social, Religious, Educational &
Industrial - 1865 to the Present Time, Volume I." 5. Cleveland: The Arthur
H. Clark Company, 1906.
9. Fleming, Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabma, p. 655.
10. DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln, p.
201.
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