The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox

The author appears to believe that the Federal Government's Reconstruction policy after the Civil War was a failure, and a close reading of this book would tend to have the reader agree. Once the war ended and Abraham Lincoln was killed, his idea of reintegrating the South into the country died along with him and the Northern politicians used the military to control what was happening in the defeated states. Whether or not this was a good idea it does not appear to have worked. Military occupation only tended to harden the anti-black prejudice in the South with consequences that lasted almost 100 years. Blacks were routinely frightened, tortured and murdered, in additon to the white Republicans who came South to aid in the rejuvenation of the countryside. This book does not paint a very pretty picture of the Southern mentality or of those white Southerners who led the resistance to black civil rights. The book is somewhat one-sided, but perhaps that is because what the author writes about is actually the way things were then. I don't know, because there are always two different ways of looking at events, and I'm sure that those from the south have an entirely different view. Facts are facts, however, so until and unless I can read something with evidence that refutes what is in this book, I will accept its conclusions.

... give or take, had established a peculiar culture in the ante bellum South, a culture that had become more isolated and insulated because of the steep decline of immigration to the region of white Europeans, in comparison to the North, following American Independence. It was a culture of touchy honor and mastery, of ready violence, of contempt for difference and intolerance of disagreement, of smooth deceit and hypocrisy, of self-righteousness beyond measure, of vituperation and vilification of perceived enemies, above all a culture of lazy entitlement and scorn for effort. How could it have been otherwise, since those were the "virtues" that allowed slaveholders to cow their slaves and non-slaveholders to behold themselves without sensing their picayune status? Crushing military defeat, widespread destruction of wealth, temporary expulsion from long-held bastions of political power were inflicted upon this culture that had no pyschic means of dealing with shame, admitting guilt, or seeking reconciliation. How could the reaction have been other than it was, a manifold multiplying of all the pre-war viciousness, of violence, ruthless hypocrisy, unimaginable hatred of the victors, inhuman rage against the former victims? If "Reconstruction" of such a culture was truly intended -- and by some heroic few it was -- then prolonged military occupation at sufficient force (a Surge, shall we say?) would have been appropriate, imprisonment and confiscations justified, resettlement of peoples at least worth considering. Short of such measures, it might well have been more humane in the long run to have let the eleven states of the Confederacy go their way and meet their proper fate. Author Stephen Budiansky portrays vividly what actually happened in the decade of "Reconstruction", ending in what Southern apologists immediately designated as "Redemption." By murder and the constant threat of murder, by terror and intimidation, by lying and cheating at every turn and every accessible level of civil society, the unrepentant secessionists and white supremacists routed the advocates of conciliation, both Southern and Northern, thwarted the purposes of the Reconstruction Amendments, made a mockery of justice and judicial process, crushed the aspirations of the freed slaves, and initiated a full century of the worst racial oppression in world history, the Jim Crow lynch-law apartheid Dixie South. Budiansky focuses his reportage on the activities of five nobly-intended men -- two officers of the Union Army, a Confederate general, a northern businessman, and a former slave -- as well as the dastardly deeds of a flock of craven scoundrels who were the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and Straight-Aheads, and other conspiracies of Terrorism. Adelbert Ames, Albert Morgan, and Lewis Merril, three of the heroic seekers of human decency that the South has persistently demeaned as 'carpetbaggers,' left ample memoirs and letters, and their careers are c

"The Bloody Shirt" is an excellent book that at least for me, shed new light on a part of the Civil War era that I only read about in high school history classes. People who stubbornly cling to the myths of "the Lost Cause" (that the war was about states rights and not about slavery) would do well to read it...but I have a feeling most won't. If you read this book, you will have a point driven home violently to you: the Civil War did not end at Appomattox Courthouse, only the Southern states' bid for independence and effort to formally preserve slavery did. In the South of the Reconstruction, the vast majority of whites steadfastly refused to accept the new order of things which allowed black men to vote. Tragically, the US government at the time lacked the will to protect the rights of the freedmen. So through a campaign of intimidation and violence, the whites overthrew the Reconstruction, imposed Jim Crowe law, and hurled the emancipated blacks down to the bottom of the social order where they never complained...because nobody dared. There is a temptation when you read some of the newspaper articles from Southern papers at the time of the "redemption" (the violent overthrow of the Reconstruction government) to think that those who committed those crimes and the Federal government that stood by while it happened were evil or apathetic to evil. I don't feel that way. Slavery only ended in the South because of force. It would be naive to think that Southern whites would passively accept this. I have no doubt that many members of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups genuinely saw themselves as heroes rescuing their beloved society from a terrible threat. I also think it would be naive to expect that the North, with its own racial problems, would be committed to resisting the "redemption." What I don't think is excusable is that anyone alive today in the South or any other part of the country apart from people like David Duke could really think that "If the South had won the war, we'd have it made." Far from it, if that had happened, I think what the Confederate States of America would have amounted to would have been a clone of apartheid-era South Africa. In closing, lest anyone say that I'm just a "yankee," I have been a life-long resident of Virginia and have great affection and admiration for the brave deeds of the Army of Northern Virginia and the South's other legions. I have a Don Troiani painting of the Lone Star Brigade fighting in the cornfield quadrangle at Antietam on my wall, and I see nothing wrong with the display of the Confederate battle flag, provided it isn't used as a sort of "Jolly Rogers" of racists. But I do believe that anyone alive today who really believes that things would have been better had the South won the war is at best a fool and at worst a racist with attitudes that are completely incompatible with the values upon which the United States is built.

One of the abiding misconceptions about the American Civil War is that the opposing armies parted with dignity, mutual respect, and even a certain degree of amiability at war's end. Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top, famously writes that he ordered his men to salute the brave Confederate soldiers who laid down their arms at Appomattox. Thus began the myth of a happy ending. But historians have long recognized that civil wars are especially violent and acrimonious, and even after peace accords are signed, aftershocks of rage and recrimination continue. Given its horrible bloodletting, it would be strange if the American Civil War were an exception to this general rule. Author Stephen Budiansky, in one of the most horrifying books I've ever read, documents the decade following Appomattox and concludes two things: the war didn't really end in 1865, and the North didn't achieve the victory it thought it did. When the "official" war ended, die-hard Confederates and secessionists seethed with anger and a stubborn refusal to submit. John Richard Dennett, a young "Nation" reporter who traveled through the South for 8 months after the war ended, concluded that nearly every Southerner he encountered was convinced that the emancipation of the slaves had reversed the natural order of things, and would eventually mean that an "inferior" race, bolstered by Republican carpetbaggers, would dominate a "superior" one. Given that a black revolt was one of the antebellum South's worst nightmares, this post-war conviction was a powerful incentive to violence. The violence grew so rapidly over the next ten years, with some 3,000 black and white elected officials murdered, elections rigged, communities terrorized by Ku Klux and "rifle society" members, and Federal laws regulating local treatment of freedmen contemptuously ignored, that Budiansky doesn't hesitate to refer to the period as one of terrorism. The atrocities he documents are staggering. Over and over I found myself comparing them to recent human rights violations in Bosnia or Africa. In September 1874, for example, Louisiana fire-eaters revolted. Citizens refused to accept the legally-elected Republican governor. A neo-Confederate puppet state government was set up and fighting broke out in the streets of New Orleans between state militia loyal to the Federal government (commanded by no less a figure than James Longstreet) and members of the infamous White League. Longstreet's militia were trounced. The "Shreveport Times," as well as other regional papers, explicitly advocated killing any Republicans or blacks elected to public office. Or take the predominantly black town of Hamburg, South Carolina, most of whose elected officials were freedmen. in 1876, white toughs disrupted a July 4th town parade. The commander of the black militia that was marching in the parade protested, and just a few days later a white army, led by two ex-Confederate generals and a thug who wo