The Aftermath of War

The roads from Appomattox led in many different directions. Along the way each of the roads held strange sights for the weary, homeward-bound warrior in 1865. If his home was in the North he saw few evidences of destruction, unless he traveled through the region around Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania. But there were other evidences of change, some of them as fascinating as they were subtle; and they were as much the product of the war as the crumpled bridges or the battered buildings that now lay far behind. Traveling through the North, one could feel a new sense of satisfaction. Everywhere wartime industrialization had brought signs of growth. There was also the clear determination to fulfill the destiny of power and prosperity implicit in the forces that had culminated in the smashing Northern victory. What Union soldier could not quicken his pace as he moved not only nearer his loved ones but also closer to what would surely be a glorious future!

As the Confederate warrior made his way homeward he was reminded in countless ways of the extent of the holocaust that had engulfed his beloved land. At the end of the war scores of visitors from the North and other parts of the world swarmed over the South, and their descriptions of the prostrate South dwell upon the widespread devastation suffered by the Confederacy. Fields were laid waste, cities burned, bridges and roads destroyed. Even most of the woefully inadequate factories were leveled, as if to underscore the unchallenged industrial superiority of the North. And if the Union forces did not loot quite as many smokehouses and pantries as they were blamed for, what they did do emphasized the helplessness of the once proud Confederates.

Carl Schurz, with little sympathy for the South, was touched by the utter ruin that seemed to be everywhere. Traveling through the South on a mission for the President in 1865 he said that the countryside "looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation—the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly patch of cotton or corn cultivated by Negro squatters." To another, Columbia was "a wilderness of crumbling walls, naked chimneys and trees killed by flames." And for years to come many an hour would be spent in argument over who burned the proud Carolina town. But there was little room for debating the fact that a good deal of South Carolina had become a "howling waste," as Captain Daniel Oakey described it.

It mattered little to the returning soldier in gray whether Sherman and Grant had wrought the havoc or whether a defensive "scorched earth policy" of the Confederates had brought it about. The damage was done—doubtless by both sides. What really mattered was the staggering magnitude of the task now challenging the responsible white Southerner. As he looked upon the broken and scattered pieces of the way of life he knew and loved, he hardly knew where or how to begin. Somehow, though, he must begin the heart-rending task of trying to put the pieces together again.

Eleven states were out of the Union, awaiting readmission at the pleasure and the mercy of the North. The economy of the South had been smashed, and local resources for rebuilding were meager indeed. Thousands of white refugees wandered over the land, not certain that they had a home and even less certain of the treatment they would receive if they returned. Numberless blacks, free at last, had run either with their masters ahead of the Union invasion or from their masters toward the Union lines. Others of the four million were merely moving about to "test" their freedom and, inadvertently, to cause grave apprehensions among their former masters.

Even before the war white Southerners had frequently entertained a wild, nightmarish fear that the slaves would rise up, slay them, and overthrow the institution of slavery. It had happened in Haiti. Perhaps it would happen here. In 1865 Southern whites "knew" that there was nothing to hold back the tide. Wild rumors flashed through the South that the freedmen would strike in vengeance. Some whites were even certain of the date. It would be New Year's Day, 1866, they said. How could they keep their minds on rebuilding when their former slaves were poised to complete the destruction? That this was pure fantasy, born of a sense of guilt and despair, only the passage of time and the remarkable reserve of the freedmen could prove.

The vanquished people were not entirely without resources for rebuilding, however. Their recognition of defeat did not carry with it any acknowledgment of deficiency in leadership, self-respect, or the validity of their position. If anything, the crushing defeat on the field of battle had solidified the whites in their determination to preserve the integrity of their way of life. Four years of war, Wilbur Cash in The Mind of the South has said, "had left these Southerners ... far more aware of their differences and of the line which divided what was Southern from what was not. And upon that line all their intensified patriotism and love, all their high pride in the knowledge that they had fought a good fight and had yielded only to irresistible force, was concentrated, to issue in a determination ... to hold fast to their own, to maintain their divergences, to remain what they had been and were." The young white Southerner who described the South in 1865 as conquered but not subdued was, perhaps, more accurate than he realized. And the sense of unity created by the war did much to perpetuate and strengthen the view that the Southern cause was not entirely lost.

The heart of the white Southerner had gone out of the war. His confidence in his leaders had been shaken. The Confederacy had collapsed, and the vast majority of the Confederates did accept military defeat. It did not follow, however, that they accepted the politics of Lincoln, the economics of Chase, or the moral principles of Garrison. It was a naïve Northerner, indeed, who expressed the belief in 1865 that Virginia would be "regenerated by Northern ideas and free institutions." There would be regeneration of the entire section, white Southerners confidently believed, but only on the basis of Southern ideas and Southern institutions. Nothing had happened at Appomattox to change this fundamental conviction. The attachment of white Southerners to their way of life was as strong as ever, and they were determined to preserve it. To be sure, some were bitter that their lives...