Quotes Concerning Reconstruction

[thea_447]

"Except in the battered South everybody and everything seemed on the move. The drain of the Civil War was over, the backward looking planters were crushed. The Industrial Revolution, wheeled ahead decades by five years of war, was creating new careers by the thousands, turning thistle-patches into whistle-stops, towns into cities, and cities into metropolitan centers. In the East a rampant prosperity touched every venture with the "everything-is-possible." In the West, the tide of emigration swept out in proportions unequaled in man's restless history. West and East, virtually every index of activity--the number of steel ingots produced, the number of trees felled, the immigrants arriving for a farm, the gentlemen leaving for a spin around Europe, the churches built--almost any statistics showed a wild surge upward." --Eric F. Goldman, Rendevous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York, 1952), p.3.

[thea_447]

Some Southerners had already thought about the tragic consequences of defeat. Rev. Benjamin M. Palmer, in his fast-day address to the Legislature of South Carolina, December 1863, said: "The contest in which we are embarked is a struggle for existence, in which defeat means simple destruction." "The Northern purpose all along, had been to reduce the South to "a state of political vassalage" and with a "refinement of cruelty" and "with suicidal madness to overthrow her domestic economy...To suppose the enmity of the North appeased just at the moment it is tasting the sweetness of revenge, is to give it credit for a generosity which would have forbidden it ever to arise...Nothing is less desired by the dominant party of the North than the reconstruction of the old Union if the South shall ever lie at its feet as helpless prey, to be devoured at will."

[ole]

Pretty words, Thea, and an insight into contemporary thought. Thanks.

[rbenne]

Thea
Your original message can be easily seen here in my home of Cleveland Ohio. A major city (at one time) that was a smallish town in 1860. Two foundrys were in what we call "the flats" here in 1860. In 1865 over 500 were in oporation. A direct result of war industry. A steel giant was born in blood

[thea_447]

Whitelaw Reid, saw clearly in the hour of defeat the humbled Southern spirit and wrote in After the War, pp. 206-207, 295-296: "The first feelings were those of baffled rage. Men who had fought four years for an idea smarted with actual anguish under the stroke which showed their utter failure. Then followed a sense of bewilderment and helplessness....I speak advisedly, and after a careful review of our whole experience through the months of May and June, in all the leading centers of the Southern influence, when I say that the National Government could at the time have prescribed no condition for the return of the Rebel States which they would not have promptly accepted. They expected nothing; were prepared for the worst; would have been thankful for anything."

[unionblue]

"Slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot."

Frederick Douglass, May 1865.

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[thea_447]

An exile in Amelia County, Virginia, ended his diary--and his life--with these words:
"I here declare my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule--to all political, social and business connections with the Yankees and the Yankee race. Would that I could impress these sentiments, in their full force, on every living Southerner and bequeath them to every one yet to be born!...And now with what will be my latest writing and utterance, and with what will be near my lastest breath, I here repeat and would willingly proclaim my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule--and all connections with Yankees, and the perfidious, malignant and vile Yankee race."

[thea_447]

In contrast, as if to reveal the Southern mind to be as uniquely American in defeat as in victory, a good Virginia woman who had given her five sons to the Confederate Army wrote in her diary: "A new era has dawned....Slavery has been abolished? Too suddenly for the real good of the Slaves, as they are not prepared to enjoy and appreciate the great boon of national freedom after being kept so many years in abject Slavery and in profound ignorance...."

Then she added: "I have this morning witnessed a procession of nearly a thousand children belonging to colored schools. It was to me the most interesting public occasion I ever witnessed. For when I thought that this was the anniversary of the day when these little ones were no longer shut out of God's truth, that the fetters of ignorance were broken, and that they might not be forced from their parents and sold at auction to the highest bidder, my heart went up in adoring gratitude to the great God; not only on their account, but that we white people were no longer permitted to go on in such wickedness, heaping up more and more wrath of God upon our devoted heads."

[thea_447]

The first thing on everyone's minds after the fighting stopped was what is to be done, something other than just quitting and going home. A dissatisfied section that for four long years had maintained a separate government of its own had to be molded back into a harmonious part of the nation. Though brought back by force, no one seemed to know what demands the victor might make and the defeated willingly accept.

General George Meade wrote to his wife: "We of the Army have done our work, the military poewr of the rebellion is shattered. It remains for statesment, if we have any, to bring the people of the South back to their allegiance and into the Union. In the meantime I presume our armies will have to occupy the Southern States. I am myself for conciliation as the policy most likely to effect a speedy reunion. If we are going to punish treason, as perhaps strict justice would demand, we shall have to shed almost as much blood as has already been poured out in this terrible war. These are points however for others to adjust."

[unionblue]

"All I want is equal rights in the court house and equal rights when I go vote."

Former slave Thomas Lee, an Alabama delegate during Reconstruction.

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