When the War Was Over

The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865--1867

Dan T. Carter

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 1985
• eBook ISBN: 9780807151167
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In the months after Appomattox, the South was plunged into a chaos that surpassed even the disorder of the last hard months of the war itself. Peace brought, if anything, an increased level of violence to the region as local authorities of the former Confederacy were stripped of their power and the returning foot soldiers of the defeated army, hungry and without hope, raided the already impoverished countryside for food and clothing. In the wake of the devastation that followed surrender, even some of the most virulent Yankee-haters found themselves relieved as the Union army began to bring a small level of order to the lawless southern terrain.
Dan T. Carter's When the War Was Over is a social and political history of the two years following the surrender of the Confederacy -- the co-called period of Presidential Reconstruction when the South, under the watchful gaze of Congress and the Union army, attempted to rebuild its shattered society and economic structure. Working primarily from rich manuscript sources, Carter draws a vivid portrait of the political leaders who emerged after the war, a diverse group of men -- former loyalists as well as a few mildly repentant fire-eaters -- who in some cases genuinely sought to find a place in southern society for the newly emancipated slaves, but who in many other cases merely sought to redesign the boundaries of black servitude.
Carter finds that as a group the politicians who emerged in the postwar South failed critically in the test of their leadership. Not only were they unable to construct a realistic program for the region's recovery -- a failure rooted in their stubborn refusal to accept the full consequences of emancipation -- but their actions also served to exacerbate rather than allay the fears and apprehensions of the victorious North. Even so, Carter reveals, these leaders were not the monsters that many scholars have suggested they were, and it is misleading to dismiss them as racists and political incompetents. In important ways, they represented the most constructive, creative, and imaginative response that the white South, overwhelmed with defeat and social chaos, had to offer in 1865 and 1866. Out of their efforts would come the New South movement and, with it, the final downfall of the plantation system and the beginnings of social justice for the freed slaves.

I / Social Disorder and Violence in the Land of the Vanquished

ON MARCH 2, 1865, Confederate officers mustered the eleven hundred men of the Galveston, Texas, garrison on an open field near the main barracks. Shortly after 2 P.M., a private in Dege’s Artillery Battery, flanked by the post commander and an army chaplain, marched to the center of the field. At the sight of the mule-drawn wagon with its open coffin, the young soldier began weeping, then recovered his composure and stood at attention as an officer read the findings of the court martial. “You have been found guilty of willful desertion from the Army of the Confederate States of America,” he concluded, “and it is the judgement of this court that you be executed without delay as a just punishment for your crime and a fitting example for your comrades.” With the sharp rattle of a rifle volley, Antone Ricker, age seventeen, was dead.¹ Two weeks later as Nathan Bedford Forrest maneuvered his troops west of Columbus, Mississippi, to avoid encirclement by Union troops, three of his soldiers defiantly called him out from his breakfast at a Mississippi farmhouse where he had set up temporary headquarters. They “told him dey wasn’t going to fight no more,” Henry Gibbs recalled nearly seventy years later. Forrest “served de law on em,” remembered the former slave, who had brought the general his breakfast that morning. “Dem three men stood in a row,” said Gibbs, and at the roll of a drum, a firing squad aimed, “dey fired and de three men was no more.”²

Such executions were designed to stem the spreading wave of desertions in the Confederate army, but they succeeded only in advertising its disintegration. The Confederacy was dying and neither draconian measures nor patriotic exhortations could stem the spreading defeatism of soldiers and civilians alike. As late as December of 1864, a South Carolina planter had commented that most of his friends were like ostriches, plunging their heads into the sand. Even those who suspected the worst were “reticent, not daring to speak what they think.”³ The continuing list of Confederate defeats in January and February finally flushed peace advocates into the open. Although their criticism was often expressed in cautious and veiled language, it reflected the widespread loss of confidence in the future of the Confederacy. By March, a peace movement of sorts existed in every southern state and rumors of “special conventions” were rife throughout the region.

Such defeatism enraged those Confederate patriots who demanded last-ditch resistance. Capitulation was “unthinkable,” argued the Richmond Whig, for any settlement short of independence would leave the “cultivated and refined ladies” of the South “subject to their own slaves, overawed by negroes in Yankee uniforms … and forced … to the embrace of brutal Yankee husbands.” Other opponents of surrender railed against “traitorous croakers and submissionists” and outlined nightmarish scenarios of slave insurrections, Negro supremacy, property confiscation, and the inevitable “savage cruelty” that would be inflicted by the “fiendish Yankees.” The Confederacy, said one southerner, represented all that remained between anarchy and “constitutional law and conservatism” in America.⁴

Those who found it hardest to face the prospect of defeat during the fading weeks of the Confederacy coupled each confirmed disaster with the hope of some miraculous reprieve. The outlook was bleak, a Georgia soldier admitted after he learned of the fall of Fort Fisher on January 15. But he eagerly endorsed the suggestion of the Richmond Enquirer that the South agree to gradual emancipation in return for a treaty of recognition by the major European powers. “An Alliance with France or England would certainly secure our recognition and independence,” he said wistfully. Even as Lee fell back from Petersburg, the southern press reported that daily casualties from Grant’s army had reached the thousands, with resistance to the war growing throughout the North. By the time such accounts reached the hinterlands of the South they had become even more exaggerated. “Lee has joined Johnson and torn Sherman all to pieces; Sherman’s loss is 60,000 men,” reported a Mississippi planter on April 13, four days after the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. A Virginia schoolgirl, depressed at the steady advance of Sherman’s army, found encouragement in a dispatch from Confederate army chaplains reporting a “decided increase in religious interest” throughout the Army of Northern Virginia. God might yet rouse himself from his unexplained torpor and send the Yankees pell-mell back across the borders of the Confederacy.⁵

“It is wonderful the multitude of lies which are circulated to disapate [sic] depression,” observed the Reverend Samuel Agnew. “Bitter pills are considerably improved by sweetening.” But no amount of manufactured news could conceal the reality of defeat. “The people, soldiers and citizens are whipped.” A Georgia soldier on leave from his company in mid-April was jolted from the solace of his neighbor’s predictions of victory when a local black newspaper vendor demanded ten cents in coin or ten dollars in Confederate currency for a copy of the Augusta Daily Constitutionalist.⁶

Even with the surrender of the armies of Lee and Johnson in mid-April the dream of continued resistance remained alive. “The End is Not in Sight,” claimed the Constitutionalist on April 18 as it argued that the independence of the South could still be won by the Trans-Mississippi Army of Kirby Smith. As Jefferson Davis fled westward from Richmond, a handful of diehards sounded the call for further resistance. “Our cause is not dead,” insisted Brigadier General Thomas Munford in a special order to his troops. “We have sworn a thousand times by our eternal wrongs, by our sacred God-given rights … that we would be free…. Can we kneel down by the graves of our dead, kneel in the very blood from sons yet fresh and kiss the rod which smote them down? Never! Never!” Let those who were that last “organized part of the army of Northern Virginia” strike the first blow, which, “by the blessings of our gracious God, will yet come to redeem her hallowed soil.” Twelve hundred miles away, Kirby Smith, the commander of that army of the west, insisted that his forces would secure “the final success of our cause.”⁷

Those who were able to look realistically at the condition of the armies of the Confederacy had no such illusions. On May 3 at a conference at his headquarters in southwest Alabama, the same Nathan Bedford Forrest who had executed deserters six weeks earlier listened incredulously while Mississippi governor Charles Clark and former Tennessee governor Isham Harris outlined plans for retreating across the swollen Mississippi to link forces with Smith’s army. Forrest abruptly stood and interrupted the two. “Men, you may all do as you damn please,” he said, “but I’m a-going home.” When Harris insisted that Forrest take the field to repel the advancing Union forces, Forrest reminded him that his detachment would soon be outnumbered ten to one. “To make men fight under such circumstances would be nothing but murder,” he argued. Looking Harris in the eye, he concluded, “Any man who is in favor of a further prosecution of this war is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum.”⁸

Forty miles from where General Joseph E. Johnston would surrender the last significant body of Confederate forces east of the Mississippi, William Horn Battle had been shocked to hear his son advocate continued resistance at any price. Battle, near the end of a long career as lawyer, legislator, judge of the North Carolina Superior and Supreme Courts, and professor of law at the University of North Carolina, scornfully dismissed such “nonsense.” What was meant by the plea that southerners should “rouse themselves?” he asked his son, Kemp. Had they not already been roused? “Were they not intoxicated by political nonsense before 1861 & stimulated to volunteer in running amok with Christendom upon the subject of slavery?” And when that “fever” wore off, “were they not spurred on … by all means of force & fraud?” It was absurd, the senior Battle concluded, to suppose that entreaties, addresses, and proclamations could restore the vital energies of the Confederacy. “I really feel like swearing when I hear such foul bluster ventilated in my presence. It is the language of officials—of exempts—of old men who have made investments—of speculators—of ladies—it is a parrot cry—there is no sense—no apprehension of mercy—no appreciation of the past, no consideration of the future about it—and I can relieve myself only by swearing when I hear it. Do not ever mention it again—as you love me; for I fear I should be tempted into profanity.”⁹

“I do not pretend to disguise how hard, oppressive [and] cruel this all may be,” agreed Judge William Pitt Ballinger of Texas. “But if, as an inexorable fate it cannot be averted, then it is best to submit to it, and not inflame it with bitter passions.” It was advice that even the most partisan newspaper advocates of the Confederacy would echo in their editorials by mid-May. Resistance, John Dumble of the Macon Daily Telegraph told his readers, would lead only to disaster. “Our own purpose for ourselves, and our advice to others, is to acquiesce with what cheerfulness we may in the decrees of fate and the dispensations of Providence.”¹⁰

It was a “strange and uncertain time,” a Florida physician said of those days before military occupation began. Union policy had been amply reported in the southern press, but such precedents as existed were clouded by the assassination of Lincoln and the elevation of a vengeful Andrew Johnson to the presidency. A few southerners, terrified by wartime propaganda of Yankee atrocities, steeled themselves for the arrival of their conquerors. “I wish that they were here now,” a North Carolina woman confided to her fiancé. “I can endure anything better than the suspense.” Men of property and outspoken supporters of the Confederacy were free to reflect upon the punishments that might be administered to them as defeated revolutionaries: confiscation, political disfranchisement, even imprisonment. And among almost all white southerners, there was uneasiness over the future of the three and a half million black people whose bondage had been at the heart of the four years of struggle.¹¹

If the widespread wartime propaganda of Yankee atrocities unnerved white southerners, most quickly learned that this was the least of their troubles. The South in the late spring and early summer of 1865 was a land without law. “We have no currency, no law, save the primitive code that might makes right,” a frightened Georgia woman wrote in her diary. With everything in a state of disorganization, “the props that hold society are broken.” When the editor of the nearby Macon Telegraph and Confederate abandoned his presses in late April, 1865, two printers who remained behind managed to publish an abbreviated edition on May 4. Although the syntax and grammar of this one-page broadside fell short of the usual standards of the old Telegraph, the printers were able to communicate their near hysteria. The people of Georgia and of the South “face a prospect of anarchy and barbarien warfare,” warned the two men. Without the existence of “wholesome restraints” society was threatened with reversion to a state in which “every man is forced back onto his own resources, without the protecting arm of the law.” And in a vague but unmistakable reference to emancipation, they reminded their readers of the blood bath that had followed the “revolutionery upheavels in the Caribbean.”¹²

There was to be no repetition of the tragic events that marked Haitian emancipation and independence, however. When violence occurred, it was more likely to result in the death of blacks than of whites. But violence there was, and it affected every aspect of the lives and thinking of southerners—rich or poor, black and white. Under the best of circumstances it would have taken weeks to reestablish some form of organized government in the South, but these were hardly the best of times. Like most Union leaders, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton did not want to grant even a shadow of legality to the collapsing Confederate government, and he had emphasized to Union officers that all police power in the South had reverted to the United States Army. Individuals who held local civil positions should “report themselves to the military authorities … to wait the action of the General Government,” he declared in late April and early May. Southern officeholders who violated these instructions were liable to trial before a military tribunal.¹³

However advisable these orders were from a political and military point of view, it was to be some time before military garrisons could be established throughout the Deep South. In a few areas where unionists were particularly strong or where army officers were willing to exercise judgment, judges, sheriffs, commissioners, and justices of the peace had been allowed to perform their duties under the antebellum laws of the state (excepting, of course, those laws dealing with slavery). General George H. Thomas, who directed operations in Tennessee and in parts of northern Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, adopted such a policy in early 1865, and the practice was fairly common in parts of North Carolina. But though these contraventions of Stanton’s instructions were never explicitly repudiated by the War Department, they reflected exceptional circumstances. In the interregnum between the end of the war and the creation of provisional governments by Andrew Johnson, the army was law. Yet despite the best efforts of the War Department, it was to be weeks before garrisons could be stationed throughout the South. And their effectiveness would always be limited by the size of the region and the relatively limited numbers of mobile cavalry troops that could be deployed for police purposes.¹⁴

The collapse of the Confederate armies alone guaranteed an upsurge of crime as hungry veterans set out on the long march back to their homes. There was something “painful and pathetic,” noted one South Carolinian, in seeing these once proud men scrambling for handouts and reduced to petty thievery as they straggled southward. A chagrined Joseph E. Johnston could do nothing as Lee’s veterans wandered aimlessly through the lines of his still-intact army in late April, stealing mules and horses as they went and filching clothes hung out to dry.¹⁵

For the most part, soldiers seemed to concentrate upon the “impressment” (as they called it) of Confederate and state stores. “I lived four years on goobers, parched corn and rotten meat,” one former soldier defiantly told a newspaper editor, “and I saw nothing wrong with taking blankets & such from the commissary as they would have been confiscated anyhow by the Yankees when they arrived.” What often began as acts of organized groups, however, degenerated into something approaching anarchy. When homeward-bound soldiers rifled Confederate stores in Augusta, Georgia, in mid-May, they were soon joined by a mob of wagon-driving thieves who shattered store windows and seized private as well as public property while town officials stood by helplessly.¹⁶

A week earlier, Thomasville, Georgia, had been the scene of three days of disorder as disbanding soldiers passed through the town on their way west. On the night of May 6 more than fifty armed men stole eighty-nine mules and seven horses from the loosely guarded Confederate depot. Two nights later, on May 8, four hundred former soldiers attacked the Confederate storehouses under the guard of a handful of Confederate officers who remained at their posts. At the issuing commissary and the railroad commissary, they broke into two warehouses and “carried away from 75,000 to 125,000 pounds of corn.” After rifling these goods, they “demolished all books, papers and office furniture they could find … [and] then declared their intentions to burn the town.” Fortunately, they did not carry out their threat, but they did break into private stores and the end result was destitution and fear in the community.”¹⁷

Such riots occurred in several small communities in the Deep South, becoming particularly widespread in Texas in May and June when the belated surrender of Kirby Smith’s army and the absence of Union troops created a military and political vacuum. The practice of “liberating” Confederate storehouses had already become so common that Confederate governor Pendleton Murrah had issued a proclamation in mid-May ordering county sheriffs to collect and preserve all government property for “equitable distribution.” But irregular committees—in most cases undisciplined mobs—ignored Murrah’s order, broke into storehouses, and scattered materials in the streets. At La Grange and San Antonio, crowds plundered and looted food, clothing, firearms, and most ominously, whiskey and “spirits of all kinds.” When a group of paroled soldiers arrived in Houston to find that the Confederate storehouse had already been looted and its contents distributed, they threatened to burn the Texas town. Frightened citizens hastily returned a portion of the materials to the soldiers who were fed and offered accommodations by an intimidated mayor and city council. A correspondent for the New Orleans Times reported that “ex-confederate soldiers have fought four years without pay, and now they propose to pay themselves.”¹⁸

In that process of self-payment, the soldiers preferred to steal from the defunct Confederate government, observed one South Carolinian, but when public property was no longer available, they “preyed on the horses & mules of citizens who they chose to think had more than their fair share.” Eliza Andrews, a young Georgia woman, watched a filthy and bedraggled veteran walk up to her neighbor in broad daylight and calmly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter I: Social Disorder and Violence in the Land of the Vanquished
• Chapter II: Self-Reconstruction Begins: The Failure of Strait-Sect Unionism
• Chapter III: Southern Realism and Southern Honor: The Limits of Self-Reconstruction
• Chapter IV: Uncertain Prophets in the Land of the Vanquished
• Chapter V: The Proslavery Argument in a World Without Slavery
• Chapter VI: Self-Reconstruction: The Final Act
• Chapter VII: Political Alternatives in the Land of Fog and Confusion
• Index