Would the South Fight the Civil War Again
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War | Article
Rebuilding the South After the War
Historians review the problems of re-building a region destroyed past iv years of bitter war.
What kind of destruction did the S suffer?
Eric Foner: The great ground forces of the West, allowable past Full general William T. Sherman, enters Savannah, Georgia, at Christmas of 1864. They have just come on their march to the sea, starting out in Atlanta. They have marched through the heart of Georgia... They accept destroyed everything in their path that could be of utilize to the Confederacy: railroad tracks, they have burned plantations. They have liberated tens of thousands of slaves, enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln... Sherman says when he starts out on the march, "I can brand Georgia howl." He's bringing the war to the civilian population. He doesn't kill civilians. He doesn't attack them, but he destroys holding; he destroys their livelihoods and he liberates their slaves.
He's trying to demonstrate that the South has no ability that tin foreclose the N from prevailing in this war. If he can march right through the center of one of the nigh important Southern states without whatsoever opposition even, wreaking devastation and liberating the slaves... And for generations afterward, the proper noun Sherman will be a byword for cruelty in the minds of white Southerners and white Georgians who experience this.
What did Southerners notice when they returned habitation?
Dana Nelson: Fan Butler describes the terrible atmospheric condition on her trip down [to her Georgia rice plantation]. Yous know, they're post-obit Sherman's path, so it's desolation everywhere. Cities have been burned out. Fields have been burned out. And of class they can't find decent accommodations there. The train tracks take been blown up, so they have to portage across a river considering the bridge has been blown out, and and so be pulled backwards in a train automobile from another part of the rails. They stay in miserable accommodations on the way down.
The lands oasis't been cultivated for four years, and everyone who has a garden knows what happens if you don't till it and constitute information technology every year. And then the lands were in butchery and the houses had been gutted. All the furniture was gone. The houses were in real disarray. Fan complains near all the rain coming in, and all the mosquitoes, her utter disability to run a household in the fashion that she was accustomed to running one. And so they really had to make do. The interesting matter is that many of the newly freed residents of those islands had kept some of their goods in their possession, and so at that place was a trickle of household materials that came back to them, that had been saved past their former slaves for their return.
Did Northerners realize how bad conditions were downwards S?
David Blight: Like the destroyed abbeys of 17th-century England in the English ceremonious state of war, which are still all over the English landscape... the South now was a landscape with ruins -- ruined plantations... in the firsthand backwash of the state of war, ruined cities. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the war, many major magazines and newspapers in the Northward sent correspondents traveling in the Due south, writing story after story, which were published into very popular books virtually the conditions of the South, the landscape of the S, what battlefields looked like, the old trench works, what the erstwhile plantations now appeared to be. America for the outset fourth dimension was a social club with the experience of all-out war, that had given them ruins.
What were the main intentions of the federal authorities's reconstruction efforts?
Ed Ayers: A good way to think of Reconstruction is a set of goals that the Republicans in Washington had in mind. And those goals are for the Southward to rebuild the social social club along the lines of the North: free labor, free ballot box, and full general equality earlier the law. That'south all. And when those things are in place, and then the South is back in the Wedlock. But as elementary as that sounds, in practice information technology is remarkably complicated.
How did the nation approach the process of rebuilding?
David Blight: There was no script for Reconstruction. If annihilation, winning the war, by comparing, was easier than now that agonizing statesman like political process of planning what to practise virtually Reconstruction. Reconstruction was a massive logistical, political, Constitutional, economical challenge like the state had never faced.
Information technology had at present faced the claiming of all-out war. It had mobilized to defeat the South. Information technology had created the largest armies in the history of the globe to bear this war. Information technology had institute generals who could prosecute the kind of war that it took to win. There was always a rich argue, since 1863, over plans of reconstruction, which was substantially a Ramble debate. What authority would the federal regime have? How would Southern states exist restored to the Union? How rapidly would they be restored to the Marriage? And there was the beginnings of a debate nigh the question of black manhood suffrage: Would that occur or would that non occur? But at that place was not much of a argue still about what to do with iv meg freed slaves, hundreds of thousands of starving white refugees, a conquered, defeated, devastated South, a destroyed economy in many regions of the Southward, rivers that now had to exist dredged because boats had been sunk in them, cities that had been burned. Americans faced for the showtime time in their history a landscape of ruins, cities in ruin, crops in ruin, an economy in ruin, and a whole department of the population with their psyche, their spirit, their lodge in ruin. And the responsibility now was to come up up with a plan to reconstruct this, to restore this society.
How did philosphies well-nigh rebuilding differ?
Eric Foner: The land event is really one of the cruxes of the whole debate over Reconstruction, because so many different bug come up into the land question. For African Americans, state is essential to really enjoying liberty. The person who is dependent, economically dependent on someone else for their livelihood, is not truly free. Now, that's not an idea that was limited only to African Americans. Jefferson had said the same matter: The truly gratuitous person is the pocket-sized farmer, the yeoman farmer. Lincoln had said the aforementioned thing many times: The person who works for wages his entire life is not truly complimentary. This was a very common idea in 19th-century America. The basis of liberty is economic independence. And in a rural, agricultural gild, the but way you're going to get economic independence is by owning land. State's not a panacea. Enough of white farmers are having problem at this time. Merely country at to the lowest degree gives y'all the wherewithal to make up one's mind for yourself how you're going to work, when you're going to work, what ingather you're going to grow, not beingness under the direction of white either slaveowners or employers. So for blacks, state is essential to freedom.
Many in the N think that distributing state will be a punishment. "These slaveowners, these rebels, have led the South into the Civil State of war. They're responsible for this terrible destruction and loss of life. Accept away their land. Then you will actually destroy the planter class, which has been the crusade of then much problem." This is what Thaddeus Stevens, the Congressman from Pennsylvania says...
Then there'due south the question of what is going to be the nature of the Southern economy after the war. If the plantations remain intact, it'll still be an aristocratic order with a small grouping owning all the major economical resources, so you take landless workers working for them. Is that really a democratic gild? No. The Due south should exist modeled on the Due north. The Northward is a social club of small-scale farmers out in the West, the Midwest. That'southward what the Southward should exist. In other words, if you're going to really modify Southern order and get away from the social structure of slavery as well as the ownership of man by human being of slavery, you're going to have to intermission up these big plantations.
In practice, what made rebuilding then difficult?
David Bane: Taxation was a huge problem. It's not the almost heady bailiwick in history to some people, only recall about it. It was a huge problem in the Reconstruction states. How do y'all fund public facilities? How do you fund the public schoolhouse? How exercise you build a hospital? How do you lot fund the dredging of a river? How do you rebuild Charleston, South Carolina? How do you rebuild Richmond? Where would the coin come from? What practise you tax? Do you revenue enhancement land? Exercise y'all tax livestock? You can't tax slaves anymore because they don't exist. Who gets taxed, at what level? So they're debating public policy of the near of import kind. They're debating the establishment of new roads. They're debating the nature of elections. They're debating redistricting of states. In the old days, the districts of a land were gerrymandered by the planter class, so that basically united states were controlled by planters... from those regions.
Source: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/reconstruction-rebuilding-south-after-war/
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