Shall We Rebuild Again? Atlanta Faces the Problem of Central Area Blight
Reconstruction: The Second Civil War | Article
Rebuilding the S After the War
Historians review the problems of re-edifice a region destroyed by four years of bitter war.
What kind of destruction did the South endure?
Eric Foner: The great army of the West, commanded by General William T. Sherman, enters Savannah, Georgia, at Christmas of 1864. They have just come on their march to the bounding main, starting out in Atlanta. They have marched through the eye of Georgia... They have destroyed everything in their path that could exist of use to the Confederacy: railroad tracks, they have burned plantations. They have liberated tens of thousands of slaves, enforcing the Emancipation Announcement 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 property; he destroys their livelihoods and he liberates their slaves.
He's trying to demonstrate that the South has no power that tin forestall the Due north from prevailing in this war. If he can march right through the eye of one of the most important Southern states without any opposition even, wreaking destruction and liberating the slaves... And for generations afterward, the name Sherman volition be a catchword for cruelty in the minds of white Southerners and white Georgians who experience this.
What did Southerners discover when they returned home?
Dana Nelson: Fan Butler describes the terrible atmospheric condition on her trip down [to her Georgia rice plantation]. You know, they're following Sherman's path, so it'due south desolation everywhere. Cities have been burned out. Fields have been burned out. And of course they can't observe decent accommodations in that location. The train tracks have been blown upwards, so they have to portage across a river considering the bridge has been blown out, and then be pulled backwards in a railroad train car from another role of the rails. They stay in miserable accommodations on the way down.
The lands oasis't been cultivated for 4 years, and anybody who has a garden knows what happens if you don't till it and found it every year. So the lands were in slaughterhouse and the houses had been gutted. All the furniture was gone. The houses were in existent disarray. Fan complains nigh all the rain coming in, and all the mosquitoes, her utter disability to run a household in the way that she was accustomed to running one. And and then they really had to make exercise. The interesting thing is that many of the newly freed residents of those islands had kept some of their goods in their possession, and then at that place was a trickle of household materials that came back to them, that had been saved past their former slaves for their render.
Did Northerners realize how bad conditions were down Southward?
David Blight: Like the destroyed abbeys of 17th-century England in the English language civil war, which are nonetheless all over the English landscape... the S now was a landscape with ruins -- ruined plantations... in the immediate backwash of the war, ruined cities. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the war, many major magazines and newspapers in the North sent correspondents traveling in the Due south, writing story later story, which were published into very popular books nearly the conditions of the S, the landscape of the South, what battlefields looked like, the old trench works, what the onetime plantations now appeared to exist. America for the first time was a society with the experience of all-out war, that had given them ruins.
What were the chief intentions of the federal government's reconstruction efforts?
Ed Ayers: A good fashion to think of Reconstruction is a fix of goals that the Republicans in Washington had in mind. And those goals are for the Due south to rebuild the social order along the lines of the North: gratuitous labor, complimentary ballot box, and full general equality earlier the law. That's all. And when those things are in place, then the South is back in the Union. But every bit simple as that sounds, in practice it is remarkably complicated.
How did the nation approach the process of rebuilding?
David Blight: There was no script for Reconstruction. If anything, winning the state of war, by comparison, was easier than now that agonizing statesman like political process of planning what to do about Reconstruction. Reconstruction was a massive logistical, political, Ramble, economic claiming like the state had never faced.
Information technology had now faced the challenge of all-out state of war. It had mobilized to defeat the Southward. It had created the largest armies in the history of the earth to deport this war. It had found generals who could prosecute the kind of war that it took to win. There was always a rich debate, since 1863, over plans of reconstruction, which was essentially a Constitutional debate. What say-so would the federal government accept? How would Southern states exist restored to the Union? How quickly would they exist restored to the Union? And there was the beginnings of a fence almost the question of blackness manhood suffrage: Would that occur or would that non occur? Merely there was not much of a debate still about what to do with four meg freed slaves, hundreds of thousands of starving white refugees, a conquered, defeated, devastated Due south, a destroyed economy in many regions of the South, rivers that now had to be dredged because boats had been sunk in them, cities that had been burned. Americans faced for the first 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 society in ruin. And the responsibleness now was to come with a plan to reconstruct this, to restore this society.
How did philosphies about rebuilding differ?
Eric Foner: The land issue is really one of the cruxes of the whole debate over Reconstruction, because and so many different issues come up into the land question. For African Americans, state is essential to really enjoying freedom. 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 merely to African Americans. Jefferson had said the same thing: The truly free person is the small farmer, the yeoman farmer. Lincoln had said the same affair many times: The person who works for wages his entire life is not truly costless. This was a very common idea in 19th-century America. The ground of freedom is economical independence. And in a rural, agricultural society, the only style you lot're going to become economic independence is by owning land. Land'south not a panacea. Plenty of white farmers are having trouble at this time. But land at least gives yous the wherewithal to decide for yourself how you lot're going to piece of work, when you're going to work, what crop you're going to grow, not being under the direction of white either slaveowners or employers. So for blacks, state is essential to freedom.
Many in the Due north call back that distributing state will be a punishment. "These slaveowners, these rebels, have led the South into the Civil War. They're responsible for this terrible destruction and loss of life. Take away their land. Then you volition really destroy the planter class, which has been the cause of so much trouble." This is what Thaddeus Stevens, the Congressman from Pennsylvania says...
And then at that place'south the question of what is going to be the nature of the Southern economy after the war. If the plantations remain intact, information technology'll still be an aristocratic society with a minor group owning all the major economic resources, then you have landless workers working for them. Is that really a democratic society? No. The South should exist modeled on the North. The Due north is a lodge of small farmers out in the West, the Midwest. That'due south what the South should be. In other words, if you're going to really change Southern society and become away from the social structure of slavery as well as the ownership of man past human being of slavery, you're going to take to break up these big plantations.
In practice, what made rebuilding so difficult?
David Bane: Taxation was a huge problem. It'southward not the virtually exciting subject in history to some people, merely think nigh it. Information technology was a huge trouble in the Reconstruction states. How exercise y'all fund public facilities? How do you fund the public school? How exercise you build a hospital? How do you fund the dredging of a river? How do you lot rebuild Charleston, Due south Carolina? How practice you rebuild Richmond? Where would the money come from? What do y'all tax? Practice you tax state? Do yous tax livestock? You lot tin can't tax slaves anymore because they don't exist. Who gets taxed, at what level? So they're debating public policy of the most important kind. They're debating the institution of new roads. They're debating the nature of elections. They're debating redistricting of states. In the sometime days, the districts of a state were gerrymandered past the planter class, so that basically the 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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