America Aflame (67 page)

CHAPTER 17

ASPIRATIONS

TWO WEEKS AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
ended, N. J. Bell, a railroad conductor, enjoyed a layover in Wilmington, North Carolina. A small boy and a little girl who lived on the edge of the railyard came up to him asking for something to eat. He gave them whatever bread and meat they could carry away. The children were very thankful. Their father had been killed during the war, and both their mother and grandmother were sick. Bell returned to Wilmington two months later. Lounging in the railyard, he inquired about the fate of the boy and girl. He learned that their mother had died and the children had starved to death.
1

The homecoming of the southern soldier was quite different from that of his counterpart in the North, if either came home at all. Sometimes there was nothing to come home to. A young man on his way home traveled by train through the same Georgia countryside Sherman's army had passed six months earlier. Out his window, he saw “a desolated land. Every village and station we stopped at presented an array of ruined walls and chimneys standing useless and solitary.” Beyond the towns, abandoned fields alternated with pine forests. Livestock gone or dead; farm equipment missing or destroyed; heirloom seeds for cotton lost; seedbeds choked with weeds; levees and canals fallen into disrepair; shops shuttered or destroyed. If a family were fortunate enough to salvage a plough, they would have to drag it through the fields themselves. Starvation loomed over a landscape of despair.
2

Richmond, the once-proud capital of the Confederacy, stood as forlorn and as hollow as the late cause. Blackened chimneys were silhouetted against the sky. Debris clogged streets. Vacant lots here and there punctuated by a granite facade with nothing behind it. Piles of cinders everywhere. Residents lined up to receive rations from federal authorities, a file of “sickly-faced women, jaundiced old men and children in rags, with here and there a seedy gentleman who had seen better days, or a stately female in faded apparel … whom the war had reduced to want.” A resident copied from Lamentations:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!

How is she become as a widow!

She that was great among the nation,

And princess among the provinces,

How is she become tributary!
3

For the next forty years, the southerner's per capita income remained stagnant. Two thirds of the South's wealth had disappeared, as had one out of four white men between the ages of twenty and forty. Confederate currency was worthless. Total northern wealth increased by a robust 50 percent between 1860 and 1870; southern wealth declined by 60 percent. Even if slaves are removed from the calculation, the decline was 30 percent. It would take the South sixty years to reach the level of wealth it possessed in 1860.

Refugeeing women and children making their way back home chronicled the sorrowful journey. Elizabeth Allston and her mother recalled, “We were never out of the sight of dead things, and the stench was almost unbearable. Dead horses along the way and, here and there, a leg or an arm sticking out of a hastily made too-shallow grave.… No living thing was left.” It made a difference that the bloody war had been fought on southern ground.
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Loss surrounded southerners—a home, a loved one, a favorite heirloom. Rooms where children had played and grown into adulthood; gardens that once greeted the spring with lustrous beauty; and soft evenings of tea and cakes and conversation. It was not only the loss of things, but also the loss of what those things represented. When Mary Chesnut returned to her Camden, South Carolina, home from Richmond, she came to a ravaged ruin, furniture smashed, anything of value plundered. Union soldiers had burned the last reserves of cotton that were her family's livelihood. The land remained, but burdened by huge debts that she would never be able to repay. The memories came flooding back to her most vividly at night when the day's chores were over and everyone had gone to bed. She wrote to a friend, “There are nights here with the moonlight, cold & ghastly, & the screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear my hair & cry aloud for all that is past & gone.” All that remained was “lavender and pressed-rose memories.”
5

Wade Hampton III would never forget or forgive. Scion of a prominent South Carolina family, owner of large tracts of land and slaves before the war, he never allowed himself to succumb to the fury of some of his comrades in the years following the surrender. His outward civility did not imply accommodation, however. Appomattox was a way station, not the destination. Together with his fellow white men of South Carolina, he would help steer the state back home.

Hampton was a moderate. He had opposed secession, and fire-eaters repulsed him. When Lincoln called for troops, however, the forty-three-year-old planter knew his duty. The Hampton Legion was born. He fought ably and rose to the Confederate high command. He hated the war. As early as October 1862, he wrote home, “My heart has grown sick of the war, & I long for peace.” Two years later, Hampton's cavalry confronted three Union infantry corps outside of Petersburg. A Yankee bullet found one of his sons, Preston. Hampton raced over, cradled the dying boy in his arms, and cried, “My son, my son!”
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Six months later, the war was over. Hampton returned to his home outside Columbia and discovered there was no home. His property destroyed, many of his slaves gone, and deep in debt from which he would never recover, Hampton faced the future with $1.75 in his pocket. Yet he was not the worst off by far. He had only lost his brother, his son, and his livelihood. He wanted desperately to get back to the past. And he wanted vindication.

As the desperation grew, some took the law into their own hands and looted shops or stole from farmers. “A spirit of lawlessness seems to pervade the town,” the
Montgomery Advertiser
complained. The general disorder bred other crimes as well. The
Atlanta New Era
chronicled a crime wave of “rape, murder, suicide, theft, burglary, garroting, pocket picking, embezzlement, elopements, bigamy, [and] adultery.” With few police officers and dark streets—most towns and cities lacked gas to light their streetlamps—law enforcement was negligible. A northern journalist visiting Atlanta warned, “Passing about the dark, crooked streets of Atlanta after night, unaccompanied and unarmed, was worse than attempting a similar exploration of the Five Points in New York.”
7

The world had not merely changed for southerners; it had turned upside down, as if, suddenly, they had happened upon a mirror universe of whence they had come. In Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, gaiety ruled the streets in April 1861, like “Paris in the Revolution.” On the fourth anniversary of this merriment, Charleston's streets were still crowded, only this time with armed black soldiers. The restaurants were shuttered or destroyed; and their patrons were dead, in prison, or destitute. The taverns were rollicking, but the patrons all wore blue uniforms. Occasionally, a soldier in a Confederate uniform wandered by, not to tweak his former enemy but because he had no other clothes to wear.
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The elevation of African Americans grated most on white southerners. Watching a contingent of black soldiers marching through the streets of Mobile, a white resident exclaimed, “There's my Tom. How I'd like to cut the throat of the dirty, impudent good-for-nothing!” The slaves were now masters, and the masters felt like slaves. “Change, change, indelibly stamped upon everything I meet, even upon the faces of the people!” former vice president Alexander Stephens remarked sadly.
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The blame for this terrible state of affairs clearly lay with the Yankees. Mary Chesnut expressed the sentiment of many in similarly reduced circumstances: “I … wish they were
all
dead—all Yankees.” While northerners hurried to forget, southerners wrapped themselves in resentment. What they saw on a daily basis, and the hunger and deprivation they felt, had a great deal to do with it. They had lost the war, to be sure, but to many it was not a fair fight. “You had three things too many for us,” a Georgia planter told northern journalist Whitelaw Reid, “the Irish, the niggers, and Jesus Christ.” Many southerners accepted as fact that northern armies consisted almost entirely of immigrants conscripted as they landed. It would not be the last myth about the war to prevail in the South.
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Resentful southerners were not anxious to take up arms again, at least not against Yankee armies. They would express and act upon their bitterness in safer venues. However cordial they might be to northern visitors and soldiers, and however accepting they seemed of the war's outcome, they were still pursuing the rebellion. Whitelaw Reid reported that he met many professed Unionists in the South, but “to talk of any genuine Union sentiment … any intention to go one step further out of the old paths that led to the rebellion … is preposterous.” Time and again, Reid encountered congenial hosts who informed him that the North forced the South into the war, that the South had no choice but to defend encroachments on its liberty. Reid never heard anyone suggest that, somehow, southerners might have contributed to the conflict. Without accountability, there could be no contrition.
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Without contrition, white southerners were likely to respond with hostility to restrictions or conditions imposed by federal authority. Wade Hampton fired off a letter to Andrew Johnson, who favored mild terms for southern reentry into the Union. Hampton informed the president that the federal government could not demand more of the South than simple loyalty. “You have no right to ask or to expect that she will at once profess unbounded love for the Union.” While southerners accepted defeat, Hampton warned Johnson that “the brave men … fought to the last in a cause which they believe,
and still believe
.” If Johnson contemplated a form of apprenticeship for southern states, southerners would perceive that as an insult: “She [the South] will never … tarnish her name by inscribing on her escutcheon … that she has been guilty.” Hampton acknowledged the end of both slavery and southern independence, but he did not recognize the rightness of these outcomes. With such attitudes, any conditions imposed on the South would have been perceived as unjust.
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White southerners would register their defiance privately for the time being. Careful to maintain an outer demeanor of loyalty for fear of losing their property, their political rights, or worse, they accepted the verdict of the war, but not that it was over. As a Virginian told New England journalist John T. Trowbridge, “The war feeling here is like a burning bush with a wet blanket wrapped around it. Looked at from the outside, the fire seems quenched. But just peep under the blanket and there it is, all alive, and eating, eating in.” Georgia humorist Bill Arp put the feelings of fellow white southerners in more earthy terms: “Who's sorry? Who's repentin? Who ain't proud of our people? Who loves our enemies? Nobody but a durned sneak.”
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Whites in the South sometimes demonstrated their feelings in more public ways, especially in the cities, though subtly. Women refused to walk under the American flag or crossed the street when approaching a northern man. Federal authorities banned the display of Confederate symbols. Veterans covered their buttons with mourning cloth and left them on their coats. The resistance had its song:

Oh, I'm a good old Rebel,

Now that's just what I am;

For the “fair land of Freedom”

I do not care a dam.

I'm glad I fit against it—

I only wish we'd won.

And I don't want no pardon,

For anything I done.

Three hundred thousand Yankees

Lie still in Southern dust

We got three hundred thousand

Before they conquered us.

They died of Southern fever

And Southern steel and shot.

I wish we'd killed three million

Instead of what we got.
14

Many northerners suspected southern professions of loyalty to the Union. Their prewar history of placing state above national interests and their vigorous defense of slavery did not evaporate at Appomattox. Those advocating a strong hand toward the South after the war reminded their colleagues, “Cannon conquer, but they do not necessarily convert.” Southerners believed their loss in the war represented a failure of numbers, not of ideas.
Harper's
printed numerous dispatches from the South in the months after the surrender to demonstrate the persistent rebelliousness of the southern white population. A correspondent from Memphis wrote to
Harper's
, “The rebellious spirit of the people here is as bitter and strong as it has been at any time during the last five years.”
15

Outward acquiescence and inward resistance toward those who have brought down calumny upon your family is a good strategy for survival in the short run. White southerners, however, wanted more than survival. Like Hampton, they wanted vindication. Most of all they wanted to reconstruct their lives, their communities, and their civilization. Loathing the present, fearing the future, they looked to the past.

White southerners groped for meaning in defeat. If, as their ministers and leaders had told them, they were fighting a holy war, then they must have sinned against God. Yet the Old Testament is replete with examples of God's Chosen People receiving severe punishment for serious transgressions against His laws. God held out the possibility of redemption if His people repented. “He loveth whom he chasteneth,” from Hebrews 12:6, became the scriptural foundation of a new southern faith. It enabled white southerners to rationalize their loss and move forward in their lives with the belief in their ultimate redemption. As northerners moved away from a civil society informed and directed by evangelical Protestantism, southerners embraced it, and embraced it so fiercely that it became a folk religion indistinguishable from southern culture. Thomas Markham, a Presbyterian minister, took this theme in a sermon he delivered in New Orleans shortly after the end of the war: the “present afflictions which are but for a moment, shall work out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” Defeat was not an adverse judgment on the South so much as a motivation to create a perfect society. “Defeat,” the Rev. Moses Drury Hoge of Richmond declared, “is the discipline which trains the truly heroic soul to further and better endeavors.” For southerners, “it is better to be chastened, than to be let alone.”
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