South after the civil war



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SOUTH AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
"Throughout the South, fences were down, weeds had overrun the fields, windows were broken, livestock had disappeared. The assessed valuation of property declined from 30 to 60 percent in the decade after 1860. In Mobile, business was stagnant; Chattanooga and Nashville were ruined; and Atlanta's industrial sections were in ashes."
Historian William Hesseltine, 1936

the impact on the fighting men including casualties


  • 1860 census figures, 18 percent of all white males in the South aged 13 to 43 died in the war




  • Historian William F. Fox: 74,524 killed and died of wounds; 59,292 died of disease.

  • Including Confederate estimates of battle losses where no records exist would bring the Confederate death toll to 94,000 killed and died of wounds.

  • Fox complained that records were incomplete, especially during the last year of the war, and that battlefield reports likely under-counted deaths




  • Thomas L. Livermore, using Fox's data, put the number of Confederate non-combat deaths at 166,000, using the official estimate of Union deaths from disease and accidents as a comparison

  • However, this excludes the 30,000 deaths of Confederate troops in prisons, which would raise the minimum number of deaths to 290,000.




  • 260,000 for the Confederacy remained commonly cited, they are incomplete.

  • Many Confederate records being missing - Confederate widows not reporting deaths; both armies only counted troops who died during their service; tens of thousands died of wounds or diseases after being discharged.

  • Francis Amasa Walker, Superintendent of the 1870 Census, used census and Surgeon General data to estimate 350,000 Confederate military deaths


the impact on Confederate women


War placed a burden on southern white women:

  • They were often left alone on farms and plantations

  • Women were forced to manage business affairs and discipline slaves

  • Women mobilized to support soldiers in the field and stepped out the traditional sphere

  • In Richmond ‘government girls’ staffed many clerkships in the bureaucracy

They became legendary

But as the war went on and death toll mounted, women believe independence wasn’t worth the cost

Dissatisfaction grew conveyed in letters to loved ones

Decline in civilian morale encouraged desertion from the army



economic costs

sLAVERY


  • The wealth amassed in slaves and slavery for the Confederacy's 4 million blacks effectively ended when Union armies arrived

  • They were nearly all freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.

  • Slaves in the border states and those located in some former Confederate territory occupied before the Emancipation Proclamation were freed by state action or (on December 6, 1865) by the Thirteenth Amendment.

  • A system of sharecropping as developed where landowners broke up large plantations and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families.

  • Sharecropping was a way for very poor farmers, both white and black, to earn a living from land owned by someone else. The landowner provided land, housing, tools and seed, and perhaps a mule, and a local merchant provided food and supplies on credit. At harvest time the sharecropper received a share of the crop (from one-third to one-half, with the landowner taking the rest). The cropper used his share to pay off his debt to the merchant.

INFASTRUCTURE


  • The war destroyed much of the wealth that had existed in the South.

  • All accumulated investment Confederate bonds was forfeit

  • Most banks and railroads were bankrupt.

  • Income per person in the South dropped to less than 40 percent of that of the North, a condition that lasted until well into the 20th century.

  • In South Carolina before the war, for instance, there were 965,000 hogs. After the surrender of the Confederate Army in 1865, the hog population in South Carolina had dropped to 150,000.

  • The South's farms were not highly mechanized, but the value of farm implements and machinery in the 1860 Census was $81 million and was reduced by 40% by 1870.





EXPENDITURE





  • The Confederacy spent $3.3billion

  • Also, inflation reached 9000% by end of the war compared to 1861 (printing more paper money)

  • Currency was almost worthless – gold, silver and currency in short supply

  • Reconstruction with no money to pay for it

  • After slaves were free in the South, plantation owners would have to pay workers


Physically destruction


Fought in southern soil

Atlanta, Richmond reduced to ashes

Infrastructure in ruins

Homes and plantations burned and robbed

Crops stolen/destroyed and land was scorched

‘Looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation’



the devastation of Georgia.


Sherman's March was devastating to both Georgia and the Confederacy in terms of economics and psychology. Sherman himself estimated that the campaign had inflicted $100 million (about $1.4 billion in 2012 dollars) in damages, about one fifth of which "inured to our advantage" while the "remainder is simple waste and destruction." His army wrecked 300 miles (480 km) of railroad and numerous bridges and miles of telegraph lines. It seized 5,000 horses, 4,000 mules, and 13,000 head of cattle. It confiscated 9.5 million pounds of corn and 10.5 million pounds of fodder, and destroyed uncounted cotton gins and mills.
Sherman's campaign of total war extended to Georgian civilians. In July 1864, during the Atlanta campaign, Sherman ordered approximately 400 Roswell mill workers, mostly women, arrested as traitors and shipped as prisoners to the North with their children. There is little evidence that more than a few of the women ever returned home.

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