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The ACW and Reconstruction

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  • The ACW and Reconstruction

    As per Julie's request, here's a thread to discuss all things Reconstruction: the recovery of the Southern economy following the ACW, the facts and myths of how Reconstruction was executed, and anything else such as the acutal Reconstruction legislation.
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

  • #2
    Here's a PBS website that 7th SF had linked to in an earlier thread: American Experience | Reconstruction: The Second Civil War | PBS
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

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    • #3
      Originally posted by Shek View Post
      Here's a PBS website that 7th SF had linked to in an earlier thread: American Experience | Reconstruction: The Second Civil War | PBS
      I'll be back as soon as i watch it and do some other research.;)

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      • #4
        Since Sherman's march to Savannah and then north through the Carolina's often is used to set the stage about the destruction found after the war, here's a map that shows the march route. The width of his columns totaled 50-60 miles, and so that is the swath of "destruction." Most of GA, SC, and NC was therefore untouched by Sherman, and despite his rhetoric, only SC truly saw unencumbered destruction for their role in being the first state to secede.

        The state that probably suffered the most was Virginia, and with the exception of the Shenandoah Valley and Sheridan's operations there in 1864, the destruction came from the simple routine of foraging fences/trees/abandoned buildings for firewood and breastworks material and crops/livestock to supplement rations (this was done by both sides). To give a relative measure, the second largest city in the Confederacy during the ACW was wherever the AOP was encamped.

        "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

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        • #5
          Originally posted by Shek View Post
          As per Julie's request, here's a thread to discuss all things Reconstruction: the recovery of the Southern economy following the ACW, the facts and myths of how Reconstruction was executed, and anything else such as the acutal Reconstruction legislation.
          Wow, that was fast. ;)

          I gotta read-up before I do any posting. Later. :)

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          • #6
            Here's a link with the number of US soldiers stationed in the South during Reconstruction at various periods:

            reconstruction: Definition from Answers.com

            April 1865 - 250K
            Sep 1865 - 187K*
            Dec 1865 - 88K*
            Apr 1866 - 39K*
            Dec 1866 - 20K*
            Oct 1868 - 18K (6K on Texas border)
            Fall 1876 - 6K (3K on Texas border)

            *Numbers aren't given, but these figures include soldiers who weren't involved in enforcing order in the South and instead were stationed on the Texas border with Mexico to protect against a French invasion.
            "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

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            • #7
              Here's a work that specifically addresses the economics postbellum:

              One kind of freedom: the economic ... - Google Books

              By their statistics, industry and infrastructure were at pre-war levels by 1869/1870 and "recovered." Farmland was cleared and ready for pre-war level production by 1867; however, they had less labor available (emancipation and death) and so they couldn't produce the same yields.

              From this, recovery was complete within 5 years with the exception that all money invested in slaves was lost and crop yields would take longer to recover due to the loss of laborers. I've seen another thesis that under sharecropping, you couldn't get the same amount of mileage out of field hands as you could have under slavery, which would be another potential reason for lesser agricultural output.
              "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

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              • #8
                From what I gather, the railroads were repaired rather quickly after the war and the manufacturing industry in the South did fairly well, but the agricultural sector lacked labor in the fields, and the livestock was devastated during the war. Plantation farming was replaced by tenant-farming. Still reading...

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                • #9
                  State by State, Virginia to be first.

                  Virginia

                  Richmond, the capital city of the Confederacy and an important port city, languished after the war, unable to compete with new railroads. Covered with battle sites, Virginia was one of the states most damaged by war; farm values plummeted from the fifth-highest in the nation to the 10th. The state attempted to attract capital with low taxes and subsidies.

                  1860

                  Number of Farms 86,468
                  Value of Farm Land $371.8 million
                  Number of Factories 5,385
                  Value of Manufactured Products $50.7 million

                  1870

                  Number of Farms 73,849
                  Value of Farm Land $213 million
                  Number of Factories 5,933
                  Value of Manufactured Products $38.4 million


                  Data source: University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center. United States Historical Census Data Browser.
                  University of Virginia Library

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                  • #10
                    Virginia's economic prosperity in the twentieth century depended more on industry and government than on traditional agriculture. Until the 1990s, government was the second largest source of employment in Virginia, but the reduction of the United States military in that decade has meant the loss of thousands of military-related jobs. Tourism had developed into a billion-dollar-a-year enterprise by 1970 and remains an important industry.

                    In the sphere of Virginia agriculture, which continues to decline in relative importance, the most significant changes came in the development of increasing numbers of dairy farms in the northern part of the state and of truck farms on the eastern shore. Peanut growing and processing centered around Suffolk, and the production of Smithfield hams replaced tobacco as the standard staple among a large number of southside farms.

                    The significance of manufacturing also has fallen recently in Virginia's economy, with jobs in trade and service increasing to replace it. Nonetheless, the per capita income of Virginians remains almost 10 percent above the national average.

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                    • #11
                      Here's an essay that discusses the counterrevolution that ended Northern will and resulted in the cessation of Reconstruction, both in terms of maintaining a federal presence in the South as well as in terms of ending the enforcement of the newly passed amendments in the South:

                      http://warhistorian.org/hogue-colfax.pdf
                      Attached Files
                      "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

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                      • #12
                        The failure of the United States to implement post-conflict amnesty in a non-partisan manner during the Reconstruction Era exacerbated sectional and political tensions and economic recovery problems. Continuing tensions from this flawed approach led to the near-term failure of reconciliation. That failure led to over a century of social and moral dilapidation in the South and social angst in the rest of the United States.

                        The failures of political leaders to place the national interest above partisan political agendas led to the return of sectionalism in the United States. Only nation-wide mobilization to fight the Spanish-American War—and later, two world wars—would give the nation unifying causes large enough to overcome sectionalism. The crossing of sectional boundaries for military training helped reconcile the white population.

                        The use of federalized troops in 1957 to force desegregation of the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, showed that it took almost a century before the U.S. government was willing to use federal power to make political changes required for true social reconciliation.

                        But as some degrees of sectionalism and racism linger in this country, current events sometimes lead one to wonder if reconciliation in post-Civil War United States has yet to finish. Certainly, the reconciliation that has occurred appears imperfect to many.

                        http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/Military...228_art009.pdf

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                        • #13
                          Reconstruction officially ended in 1877 when the new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, removed the last federal troops from the public and put them back to their barracks. Reconstruction was a noble attempt by Radical Republicans in Congress, along with moderates, to attempt to bring blacks into American society.

                          However, due to the many obstacles which faced them - reluctant presidents, a vicious and brutal Southern atmosphere, lack of funds, lack of a clear understanding of what was necessary - Reconstruction failed relatively quickly. It was a period when many people from the North had certain zeal to go and right the wrongs of the pre Civil War South, but that too faded quickly as even teachers were harassed for attempting to help the Negroes.

                          Some people argue that Reconstruction was a period in which Congress abused its powers and overstepped the Constitution in order to get their ideologies put forth. This is possible, depending on which side one is looking at it from. There were many times when it seemed as Northern Republicans were overstepping their boundaries, such as the Third Enforcement Act when there was talk about suspending Habeas Corpus in order to combat the Ku Klux Klan. However, I am sure that the freedmen did not care about the Constitution when it came to their lives being taken by madmen in white sheets.

                          I see Reconstruction as the United States government attempting to bring a rebel society more in line with, not only the Constitution, but also principles of humanity and the belief that all men should have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It would be about another century, during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s before America began grappling again with the moral questions which were so prevalent during Reconstruction.

                          I have done alot of reading Shek, and I have concluded that all forms and attempts of reconstruction were a failure, which is why it took a full century until the MLK era.

                          Your thoughts?

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                          • #14
                            The above is my opinion of social reconstruction.

                            Economically speaking, economic historians who have examined the immediate effects of the war have reached a few important conclusions:

                            First, the idea that the South was physically destroyed by the fighting has been largely discarded. Most writers have accepted the argument of Ransom and Sutch (2001) that the major "damage" to the South from the war was the depreciation and neglect of property on farms as a significant portion of the male workforce went off to war for several years.

                            Second was the impact of emancipation. Slaveholders lost their enormous investment in slaves as a result of emancipation. Planters were consequently strapped for capital in the years immediately after the war, and this affected their options with regard to labor contracts with the freedmen and in their dealings with capital markets to obtain credit for the planting season. The freedmen and their families responded to emancipation by withdrawing up to a third of their labor from the market. While this was a perfectly reasonable response, it had the effect of creating an apparent labor "shortage" and it convinced white landlords that a free labor system could never work with the ex-slaves; thus further complicating an already unsettled labor market. In the longer run, as Gavin Wright (1986) put it, emancipation transformed the white landowners from "laborlords" to "landlords." This was not a simple transition. While they were able, for the most part, to cling to their landholdings, the ex-slaveholders were ultimately forced to break up the great plantations that had been the cornerstone of the antebellum Southern economy and rent small parcels of land to the freedmen under using a new form of rental contract -- sharecropping. From a situation where tenancy was extremely rare, the South suddenly became an agricultural economy characterized by tenant farms.

                            The result was an economy that remained heavily committed not only to agriculture, but to the staple crop of cotton. Crop output in the South fell dramatically at the end of the war, and had not yet recovered its antebellum level by 1879. The loss of income was particularly hard on white Southerners; per capita income of whites in 1857 had been $125; in 1879 it was just over $80 (Ransom and Sutch 1979). Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gross crop output in the South rose by about one percent per year at a time when the GNP of United States (including the South) was rising at twice that rate. By the end of the century, Southern per capita income had fallen to roughly two-thirds the national level, and the South was locked in a cycle of poverty that lasted well into the twentieth century.

                            How much of this failure was due solely to the war remains open to debate.

                            http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/ransom.civil.war.us

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                            • #15
                              Originally posted by Julie View Post
                              The result was an economy that remained heavily committed not only to agriculture, but to the staple crop of cotton. Crop output in the South fell dramatically at the end of the war, and had not yet recovered its antebellum level by 1879. The loss of income was particularly hard on white Southerners; per capita income of whites in 1857 had been $125; in 1879 it was just over $80 (Ransom and Sutch 1979). Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, gross crop output in the South rose by about one percent per year at a time when the GNP of United States (including the South) was rising at twice that rate. By the end of the century, Southern per capita income had fallen to roughly two-thirds the national level, and the South was locked in a cycle of poverty that lasted well into the twentieth century.
                              Julie its not just well into the 20th century, we are finishign the first decade of the 21st century and income in some regions is still barely 1/3 of the national median.

                              The landlords were banking under the sharecropper system. In 1930 the average white sharecropper family lived on a cash budget of less than $200 a year while the national median wage was closer to $1400 a year. Even FDR's plans to drive up agricultural prices would not help much. Most farmers had long since lost the deeds to their land and were renters. So the planters go paid not to plant, but the share croppers got nothing. It would take the massive infusion of cash during WWII and the invention of mechanized cotton harvesting to really kill the system. WWII not only built bases, but via the GI Bill provided incentives to go to school and you see the start of an educated class in the South that is not also part of the land owning class.

                              Of course these were mostly whites, and they moved to the cities or left the region altogether. In the black belt especially the delta, the displaced former black sharecroppers were left with nothing as usual- a state that persist today. The modern delta region has a median income on par with Mexico around $17,000 a year as compared to the national median of around $45,000.

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