Confederate Military History, Vol. 12
THE SOUTH SINCE THE WAR
BY LIEUT.-GEN. STEPHEN D. LEE
Confederate Military History, Vol. 12
THE SOUTH SINCE THE WAR.
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"THE war between the States" came suddenly and finally to an end in the spring of 1865. The effort which the seceded States made to maintain their independence brought under demand every resource of the people, and they utterly exhausted everything they had in order to make their cause a success.
The army of Gen. Robert E. Lee, in Virginia, surrendered April 9th; that of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, in North Carolina, April 26th; that of Gen. Richard Taylor, in Mississippi, May 4th, and that of Gen. E. Kirby Smith, west of the Mississippi river, May 26, 1865. All other organized bodies of Confederate troops, as well as individual soldiers, wherever they happened to be, reported to the nearest officer in command of Union troops, surrendered and received their paroles. The surrender of the Confederate armies and soldiers was universal and sincere, so much so that there was not a Confederate soldier under arms throughout the South from Maryland to Mexico, by June 9, 1865, or two months from the date of the surrender of General Lee's army in Virginia. There was no reservation in this surrender, no desire or effort to continue the struggle as guerrillas or otherwise.
There was complete submission to the authority of the United States government by all in official and private station. President Jefferson Davis, Vice-President A. H. Stephens, Governor Brown of Georgia, Governor Clark of Mississippi, Gen. Howell Cobb, and Senator Hill of Georgia, and other distinguished citizens of various parts of the South, were immediately arrested and imprisoned. The members of the Confederate cabinet were either prisoners, fugitives or exiles. The Confederate congress was disbanded, the judiciary inoperative, the treasury empty, and the finances, resources and civil power of the Confederate States of America perished in the death struggle.
The complete and sudden collapse of the Confederate government officially was typical of the complete exhaustion and prostration of the South in the almost superhuman effort she had made to sustain herself against the great odds in men and resources which the United States government had brought to bear against her. The seceded States had put in the field more than their white arms-bearing population; when we consider how soon the border States were overrun and occupied, and remember how soon large portions of the territory of these seceded States were also guarded by the Union armies as to prevent any effort to further recruit the Southern armies, this is the more apparent. The Confederacy had enlisted an army of a little over 700,000 men and had fought over 2,200 battles. The struggle was made over nearly every foot of her territory. She had lost the flower of her youth in the death of 325,000 men from the casualties of war (about one-half her enlisted strength), and many more were disabled and ruined in health. It is a moderate estimate to say that 20 per cent of the white bread-winners of the South were killed or disabled by the war. There was scarcely a home from which one or two had not been taken. The mortality of the Southern troops was enormously greater in proportion than was that of the Union troops, which was only 359,000 men in all, while that of the Southern troops was 325,000 men, the forces of the former outnumbering the latter by over 2,000,000. The contending armies had moved to and fro over the Confederate territory, leaving many cities in ashes and tracts of country in almost every State in waste. The desolation of war had reached nearly every locality and home. The people were utterly impoverished. Nearly all business was destroyed, and the farms gone to wreck. There was no money in circulation; the banks were generally broken; there was no credit system; most of the commercial agencies were inoperative or suspended. The work stock used in making crops had been mostly destroyed or carried away. Provisions were scarce, having been taken by the one or the other of the contending armies. The paroled soldiers returned to find their homes desolate, and they were disheartened and humiliated by failure. They had nothing at hand with which to begin life anew, except their land and the brave hearts which had carried them through four years of war, which ended in the defeat of a cause they deemed just and honorable.
They found at home 4,000,000 slaves suddenly emancipated as a result of the war. They realized that the greatest problem any people had ever had to solve on sudden notice faced them. The negroes, as was natural that it should be, were greatly demoralized, and had but a faint conception of the responsibility of the freedom that was theirs, and that they knew had been brought about by the defeat of the Southern armies. Large numbers of them thought that freedom meant a cessation of labor on their part, and that the great government which had freed them by force of arms would feed, clothe and provide for them. They generally left their work in the fields and went in crowds to the cities and towns, where they were fed and cared for at the expense of the United States government. All this added greatly to the chaos and confusion of the time.
Private debts that had been incurred in a period of great prosperity, prior to 1861, and were unpaid at the beginning of the war, were still unpaid, and the property, on which most of these debts were contracted, no longer existed. The railroads and other means of transportation were almost wrecked. All factories and other industries were generally destroyed. Agriculture, the main means of support in the South, was almost demoralized by the need of work animals and on account of the dis. organized labor.
To add to the general confusion, the country was flooded with adventurers from the North, camp followers of the Union armies, and others who rushed to the South as soon as they realized that the war was over. These men, imbued with the prejudices and passions which existed at the North during the war, at once began to inflame the negroes against their recent masters, and offered themselves as their friends and advisers in their new condition of freedom. In many portions of the South, the property of private individuals was seized and claimed as abandoned property (under the Freedmen's bureau law), and taken possession of for the use of the United States, and this property assigned for use to negroes who had left their homes and work. The new advisers generally led the negroes to believe that the Southern people were going to try to put them back into slavery, and that the United States government would give to each able-bodied negro man at least forty acres of land and a mule.
To add to the general gloom, great apprehension was felt regarding the future. The war had been waged cruelly toward the close, as was evidenced by the track of desolation and devastation (without a parallel in modern warfare for its pitiless barbarity), averaging 50 miles in breadth, from the Tennessee line through Georgia to Savannah, and through South Carolina by Columbia to North Carolina, by the Union army under Gen. W. T. Sherman; and the desolation in the valley of Virginia by General Sheridan, surpassing if anything that caused by Sherman's march to the sea. Every thing the South fought for was lost and surrendered. The general feeling which was mingled with apprehension and fear found expression (by Lamar) as follows: "We have given up the right of a people to secede from the Union; we have given up the right of each State tojudge for itself of the infraction of the Constitution and the mode of redress; we have given up the right to frame our own domestic institutions. We fought for all these and we lost in that controversy."
It is difficult to estimate the pecuniary loss of the South in the war, but it may be partially estimated by comparing her conditions in 1860 and 1870 according to the United States census. In 1860 the total assessed value of property in the United States was $12,000,000,000. The assessed value in the South was $5,200,000,000 (44 per cent), and at that time the South was increasing in wealth faster than any other portion of the United States. The census of 1870 showed the assessed valuation in the South to be $3,000,000,000 only, a decline of $2,200,000,000 since the census of 1860, and the property of the South decreasing in value instead of increasing. This, too, in face of the fact that the total assessed value in the whole country was $14,170,000,000, an increase of $4,370,000,000 in the North, showing that the North had gotten rich during the war while the South was impoverished.
Though the valuation of property by census is used to estimate the values officially, it is always considerably less than the real value. The loss of the South is only partially shown by the census. If we consider what was spent by the South to carry on the war, the destruction of property during the war, and the other losses incident to so great and complete a failure, it is estimated that the total loss of the South will not fall below $5,000,000,-000. Alexander H. Stephens, in his history of the United States, says the war cost both sides $8,000,000,-000, three-fourths of the assessed value of property in the whole United States at the beginning of the war. When we consider that the war debt incurred by the United States government alone was $3,000,000,000, the estimate given is less than a reasonable one, for the cost to the North in actual loss and expense in prosecuting the war was far beyond the war debt--the cost being estimated by some writers at $8,000,000,000.
Such was the condition of the South at the time (1865); exhausted, prostrated, disarmed, and in the presence of the victorious North, which then had an army, perhaps the best the world ever saw, of over 1,000,000 soldiers under arms. "Thus ended the war between the States," says Mr. Stephens. "It was waged by the Federals with the sole object, as they declared, of 'maintaining the Union under the Constitution,' while by the South it was waged with the great object of maintaining the inestimable sovereign right of local self-government on the part of the Southern States." The war had lasted four years, and the battles fought were among the greatest of modern times, great patriotism and generalship being displayed on both sides. The successes and defeats during most of the time were nearly equally divided, until finally the South fell from exhaustion before overwhelming numbers and resources. Over 2,000,000 soldiers had been brought against her, over and above her total forces, with a navy numbering 700 vessels of war, manned by 105,000 sailors, not including chartered vessel s numbering near 3,000. This great fleet was used in occupying and holding the numerous rivers in Confederate territory, in blockading the coast from Maryland to the Rio Grande, and in transporting armies and supplies around territory which could hot be crossed or occupied directly.
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