Category: Aftermath: Destruction

The Great American Misfortune

The Northern States actually gained wealth, population and power between 1861 and 1865, during the concurrent destruction of the American Confederacy. The North’s industrial production exploded and made agriculture prosper, while the flood of European immigration more than replaced the men in blue lost by Grant, Sheridan and Sherman. The South was in shambles and soon the North would send its carpetbaggers and Union League organizers to loot anything of value that remained.

The Great American Misfortune

“On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union army landed in Texas. At Galveston he proclaimed, in the name of President Johnson, that the authority of the United States over Texas was restored, that all acts of the Confederacy were null and void, and that the slaves were free. With him, thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French in Mexico; the others congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the State. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior and most camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the State with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by.

Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as “right.” They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texans were stubborn and prideful people. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy too.

The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The State was placed under military rule and army tribunals replaced the civil courts . . . Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. More galling than the actual atrocities [by Union soldiers], however, was the fact that most Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.

Thousands of the occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of resistance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.

Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town and no soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville.

This had not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full and lasting effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts and suspicions along with psychic damage in the native Texas soul.”

(Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. T.R. Fehrenbach. Collier Books, 1968, pp. 394-395)

 

The Bitterness of Surrender

Like other defeated American soldiers in the South mid-1865, Gen. Bryan Grimes dealt with illness and “grief of surrender” amid constant rumors of pending retribution at the hands of the Yankee governors. One was “a report that they would hang all officers above the rank of captain and all their property confiscated,” his wife Charlotte recalled. “We were living in a “Reign of Terror.”

The Bitterness of Surrender

“Grim scenes abounded as homeward-bound North Carolinians rode south for home [after Appomattox]. One event in particular must have made him wonder what was in store for him as a defeated soldier without the means to fight back. According to Grimes’ astute traveling companion, Thomas Devereux:

“[We came upon] an old man, Loftin Terrel, his house was on the roadside, and he was knee-deep in feathers where [Sherman’s bummers] had ripped open the beds in search of valuables. A yearling and a mule colt were lying dead in the lot, they had been wantonly shot. Old man Terrel was sitting on his doorstep, he said there was not a thing left in the house and every bundle of fodder and grain of corn had been carried off; that he had been stripped of everything he owned and had not a mouthful to eat. They had even killed his dog which was lying dead near the house.”

On Sunday, April 16, 1865, Grimes rode into Raleigh atop his trustful horse Warren. Charlotte was “delighted to see him under any conditions,” but recalled that, “he would reproach me for want of patriotism when I said so, he was so miserable over [General Joseph Johnston’s] the surrender.”

The Federals garrisoning [Raleigh] issued orders forbidding former Confederates from wearing their uniforms. For many this directive presented a dilemma, for they had no other clothes to wear and no money to purchase new one. Charlotte responded to the order by covering her husband’s brass uniform buttons with bootblack, a ruse Grimes described made him look as though he was “in mourning for the Confederacy.” The ever-resourceful Charlotte, despite Grimes’ protestations, sold several of her silk dresses for $100 and used the money to purchase his civilian clothes. “It seemed to hurt him to have to use this money,” she explained, “but I would take no denial.”

Raleigh was a very different town from the one Grimes left four years earlier. The victorious Yankees seemed everywhere . . . [and he] no money, no income . . . [and] not a cent in the world, explained Charlotte, “except for a few gold pieces he had carried all through the war.” Fortunately, Grimes’ brother William was in a position to assist the destitute couple [and] gave them “two hundred dollars in gold quilted in a belt under my corsets,” wrote Charlotte.”

(Lee’s Last Major General: Bryan Grimes of North Carolina. T. Harrell Allen. Savas Publishing, 1999, pp. 258; 260)

 

Conditions Just After the War

North Carolina’s wartime Governor Zebulon Vance wrote the following postwar letter to an Australian friend. Importantly, he mentions the South’s fear of a similar massacre of white persons as occurred in mid-1790s Haiti – with the Nat Turner massacre as an example of abolitionist-inspired revolt. The northern States did not want black migration to their section as the ex-slaves would work at low wages and take jobs from white workers.

Conditions Just After the War

“Of course I cannot give you much criticism upon the war, or the causes of our failure; nor can I attempt to do justice to the heroism of our troops or of the great men developed by the contest. This is the business of the historian, and when he traces the lines which are to render immortal the deeds of this revolution, if truth and candor guide his pen, neither our generals nor our soldiers will be found inferior to any who have fought and bled within a century.

When all of our troops had laid down their arms, then was immediately seen the results which I had prophesied. Slavery was declared abolished – two thousand millions of property gone from the South at one blow, leaving four million freed vagabonds among us – outnumbering in several States the whites – to hang as an incubus upon us and re-enact from time to time the horrors of Hayti and San Domingo. This alone was a blow from which the South will not with reasonable industry recover in one hundred years.

Then too, the States have been reduced to the condition of territories, their Executive and Judicial (and all other) officers appointed by the Federal Government, and are denied all law except that of the military. Our currency, of course, is gone, and with it went the banks and bonds of the State, and with them went to ruin thousands of widows, orphans and helpless persons whose funds were invested therein.

Their railroads destroyed, towns and villages burned to ashes, fields and farms laid desolate, homes and homesteads, palaces and cabins only marked to the owners eye by the blackened chimneys looming out on the landscape, like the mile marks on a great highway of desolation as it swept over the blooming plains and happy valleys of our once prosperous land!  The stock all driven off and destroyed, mills and agricultural implements specially ruined; many wealthy farmers making with their own hands a small and scanty crop with old artillery horses turned out by the troops to die.

But, thank God, though witchcraft and poverty doth abound, yet charity and brotherly love doth much more abound. A feeling of common suffering has united the hearts of our people and they help one another.  Our people do not uselessly repine over their ruined hopes. They have gone to work with amazing alacrity and spirit. Major Generals, Brigadiers, Congressmen, and high functionaries hold the plough and sweat for their bread. A fair crop was the reward of last season’s labor, and there will hardly be any suffering for next year except among the Negroes, who, forsaking their old masters, have mostly flocked into town in search of their freedom, where they are dying and will die by the thousands.”

(Conditions Just After the War, letter of Zebulon Vance to John Evans Brown of Sidney, Australia, reprinted in the Raleigh News & Observer, Confederate Veteran Magazine, June 1931, pp. 215-216)

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

Credit should be given to New York Governor Horatio Seymour for immediately seeing through Lincoln’s 10-percent plan of “reconstruction” of the United States, that is, creating loyal States out of conquered provinces. Even the Radical Republicans saw that Lincoln’s plan would only increase executive power while restricting their predatory raids on Southern property.

Lincoln’s Rotten Borough Political Device

“From the night of the October 1863 elections in Ohio and Pennsylvania, Lincoln kept his eyes glued on the coming contest. Two days later he was back in the War Department discussing political prospects.

The first development in the campaign was a Presidential proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction for the Southern States. On December 8 Lincoln announced that any person in the South – with the exception of high-ranking civil and military officers of the Confederacy – might be granted amnesty if he took an oath of allegiance to the United States. Moreover, whenever ten percent of the population of any State had taken the oath, they might hold elections and establish a State government, which the President would recognize.

The political implications of the proclamation were immediately evident to both Radical Republicans and Democrats. Horatio Seymour of New York perceived it as a new assault on popular liberties. In his January message to the legislature, he pointed out that the arbitrary military power of the federal government was growing steadily. Moreover, every measure to pervert the war into a war against private property and personal rights at the South had been paralleled by claims to exercise military power at the North.

He enumerated them: there was the emancipation proclamation for the South, and the suspension of habeas corpus at the North; the Confiscation Act for the South, and arrests, imprisonment and banishment for Northern citizens; the claim to destroy political organizations in the South, and the armed interference in Northern elections.

These acts against Northern liberties had been justified as necessary, but the government had given up no powers when the emergency had passed. In fact, “more prerogatives are asserted in the hour of triumph than were claimed as a necessity in days of disaster and danger.” The doctrine of Southern degradation, explained the Governor, “is a doctrine of Northern bankruptcy . . . it is a measure for lasting despotism over one-third of our country, which will be the basis for military despotism over the whole land.”

As for Lincoln’s reconstruction program, Seymour saw it as a political device. The minority of one-tenth in reconstructed States would be kept in power by the North’s arms and treasure. There would be no motive, prophesied the Governor, to draw the remaining population into the fold; instead, “there will be every inducement of power, of gain, and of ambition, to perpetuate the condition of affairs.”

Moreover, it would be to the interest of the national administration to continue this system of government. Nine controlled States in the South with 70,000 voting population would balance in the House of Representatives and in the electoral college one half the population of the United States. Fourteen hundred men in Florida would balance New York in the Senate.

Thus, the nine States mentioned in Lincoln’s proclamation, together with Pierpont’s [western] Virginia would constitute a system of rotten boroughs that would govern the nation.”

(Lincoln and the War Governors. William B. Hesseltine. Alfred A. Knopf, 1955. Pp.-350-353)

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

Gen. Hardee’s View – Spring 1865

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson, had been at General Kilpatrick’s headquarters in Durham Station, awaiting an opportunity to get into the Confederate camp. General Joseph E. Johnston had agreed that he might come if he could find means of transportation. Early the next morning . . . Wilson somehow managed to secure a seat in the car with [General William J.] Hardee and [aide-de-camp Thomas B.] Roy and now headed off to Greensboro with them.

Exploiting his opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery, Hardee said:

. . . “I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution . . . For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed [clothe and maintain the health of] these forty to get in order to get the work of the other sixty. The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists . . . feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of a man and woman?

Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

(General William J. Hardee: Old Reliable. Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr. LSU Stat University Press. 1965, pg. 297)

Mute Reminders of the Injuries Suffered

Mute Reminders of the Injuries Suffered

“Let these blackened ruins remain untouched. We are not an artistic people as the Yankees claim to be, we have neither the taste nor the money for Gettysburg monuments and amphitheatrical cemeteries. Our dead heroes sleep sweetly in the bosom of the old mother, whom they died to defend, and in her poverty the old mother has not decked their resting places with precious stones and miracles of art.

We have monuments enough left by the invader. The Ionian Greeks would not rebuild the temples which their barbaric enemies destroyed; they allowed the ruins to remain as mute reminders of the injuries suffered; as must appeals to heaven for vengeance. Let us in this spirit refuse to efface these memorials of our savage foes. In after-times it will almost a patent of nobility to have a ruin in the family.”  Basil L. Gildersleeve

“This Country Splitting Business”

After the Japanese capitulation in 1945 the US government stymied an already-existing pan-Korean government, albeit leftist, in favor of installing Syngman Rhee, who ruled the south as a virtual dictator. The latter used former Japanese soldiers as police and government officials, with the support of the Americans. The 1950 war, which many believe was initiated by Rhee, cost the lives of a million Koreans and virtually leveled the country with bombing. Today, North Korea is the real Korea and ruled by Koreans; and South Korea remains a US-controlled colony.

“This Country Splitting Business”

“Senator Stuart Symington: ‘We go into this country splitting business . . . First, we split Germany. Then we split China. We stay with billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of people in the case of Germany; China we stay with billions and billions of dollars and thousands of people. Then we split Korea and stay there with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of military [troops], all at heavy cost to the American taxpayer. Then we split Vietnam . . . now we split Laos . . . Do you know of any other country we plan to split pretty soon?

Mr. [William J.] Porter (US Ambassador to South Korea): No sir.

Senator Symington: This has been quite an interesting policy, hasn’t it, over the years? Our allies don’t do [this], nor do our possible enemies. We do it all over the world . . . ‘

(Hearings before the Subcommittee on US Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad of the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 91st Congress, 2nd Session, 1970, pp. 1579-82)

 

A Land as Silent as a Graveyard

A Land as Silent as a Graveyard

“The raids and rumors of raids were so traumatic to Clarissa Bowen that the tired, terrified woman miscarried. “All was over and we knew that God had taken from us the desire from our hearts – our much prayed for and longed for treasure,” the South Carolinian wrote in her journal, June 1865. “O, it was hard, very, very hard to give up . . . My recovery had been slow, being constantly retarded by fear of the Yankees.”

“Still another batch of Yankees . . .,” a weary Eliza Andrews scribbled in her diary. “One of them proceeded to distinguish himself at once, by ‘capturing’ a Negro’s watch. They carry out their principles by robbing impartially, without regard to race, color or previous condition. Ginny Dick has kept his watch and chain hid ever since the bluecoats put forth this act of philanthropy, and . . . old Maum Betsy says that she has “knowed white folks all her life an’ some mighty mean ones, but Yankees is de fust ever she seed mean enough to steal from n******.”

Not surprisingly, after suffering through several such visits, most plantations and farms had little more to offer. “We were left almost destitute,” said one stunned and suddenly impoverished lady. “Our poverty,” noted another victim, “is now our protection.”

Eventually, the highways of the South began to resemble scenes from antiquity and the plundering hordes of Mongolia. Observed one man:

“The road was filled with an indiscriminate mass of armed men on horseback and on foot, carts, wagons, cannon and caissons, rolling along in most tumultuous disorder, while to the right and to the left, joining the mass, and detaching from it, singly and in groups, were hundreds [of soldiers] going empty-handed and returning laden. Country carts, horses, mules and oxen, followed by Negro men, women and even children, (who were pressed into service to carry plunder) laden with every conceivable object, were approaching and mingling in mass from every side.

When the blue tide finally receded and moved off to garrison the cities and towns of the South, it left behind in its wake a land “as silent as a graveyard.”

(The Day Dixie Died – Southern Occupation 1865-1866. Thomas and Debra Goodrich. Stackpole Books, 2001, pp. 100-101)

The Sack of Williamsburg

The Sack of Williamsburg

“Our [25th Pennsylvania Regiment] picket line extended from the York to the James Rivers, about four miles; and with gunboats on either flank was a strong one.

One of the pickets posted at Williamsburg was at the old brick house once occupied by Governor Page of Virginia. It was built of brick imported from England. The library in the mansion was a room about eighteen by twenty feet, and the walls had been covered with books from floor to ceiling; but now the shelving had been torn down and the floor was piled with books in wretched disorder – trampled upon – most pitiful to see. In the attic of this old house the boys found trunks and boxes of papers of a century past – documents, letters, etc.

Among the latter were those bearing the signatures of such men as Jefferson, Madison, Richard Henry Lee; and one more signed by Washington.”

(25th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers in the War of the Rebellion. Samuel H. Putnam. Putnam, Davis and Company, Publishers. 1886, pp. 249-250)

Union Victory in Colorado

Union Victory in Colorado

Philadelphian Edward W. Wynkoop migrated westward in the late 1850s and became an officer in the First Colorado Regiment early in the Civil War. By 1864 his unit was fighting irate Cheyenne Indians who resisted the constant encroachments of white settlement in their territory. His view of the Indian being less than human was in line with most easterners coming West.

Wynkoop’s superior was Ohioan Colonel John Chivington, a Methodist minister who believe that the Cheyenne would “have to be soundly whipped before they will be quiet.” He instructed now-Major Wynkoop that any Cheyenne found in his vicinity were to be killed outright as that was the only way to deal with them.

Wynkoop came to better understand the Cheyenne leaders after they agreed to peace negotiations as well as release white captives, though Unionist Governor John Evans at Denver agreed with Chivington. Major Wynkoop’s better relations with the Cheyenne was rewarded with his transfer to Fort Reilly, Kansas, ostensibly for not killing enough Indians.

In late November 1864 Col. Chivington, in command of the First and Third Colorado Regiments descended upon the Cheyenne-Arapaho village at Sand Creek which thought it was at peace with the whites. Chivington’s dawn attack butchered about two hundred Cheyenne – two-thirds of them women and children. His troopers later paraded through Denver “with the genitals of the dead dangling from their shirts and hats.”

Wynkoop was soon promoted to lieutenant-colonel and charged with investigating the Sand Creek “battle.” He called the affair an “unprecedented atrocity” in which “women and children were killed and scalped, children shot at their mothers’ breasts, and all the bodies mutilated in the most horrible manner.” Despite the official investigation and Wynkoop’s condemnation of Chivington’s monstrous conduct, the colonel was not charged and allowed to resign and retire from the United States Army.

Col. Chivington’s massacre of helpless Cheyenne only intensified the conflict as the southern Plains once again dripped with blood. Wynkoop continued to arrange peace talks and bring more peaceful relations, but continued postwar white encroachments brought an uneasy peace.

In early 1867 came Gen. Hancock and Custer to threaten the Indians – later came Sheridan, Sherman and Miles on their mission to clear the Plains of Indians.

(Between the Army and the Cheyenne. Louis Kraft. Military History Quarterly, Winter, 2002, pp. 48-53)