How hard blow Gettysburg was for the Confederacy?

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Generally, people are judged on their ability to keep their word. Few Southern noncommissioned officers abandoned their oaths. Few Navy officers did. But almost the entire political class of the South renounced their oath to defend the Constitution.


No, that was a choice. He hadn’t fought in the Mexican War for Virginia. He’d just been offered the command of the Army to put down the rebellion.

its really not.


? So... my elite consensus is that a guy born to (and married into) what amounted to American royalty, who was successful in his military career, and who could literally see the White House from his porch, had, wait for the consensus... political ambitions?

And that when he saw that those ambitions were impossible, he chose to go with the side where they were possible?

I might be silly but anyone who has visited Arlington House is given the same facts during the tour.

Now they don’t talk about overwhelming ego or personal ambitions, but I don’t think that is a hard inference to draw.

I have been to Arlington a dozen times. I have been following this conflict for decade. Your insistence that Lee has political ambitions and fought for the Confedersacy to rule America is perhaps the most misplaced conclusion I have ever heard in my life.

And the Great Captain is not a Northerner, he is in the parlance of the day a Westerner. And the Western armies are what won this war.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Certainly, but who would vote for him? He would get no support from the South, and his prospects of winning the Northern vote against Northern candidates with similar military plaudits and no rebellious families were not as good.

Lee turned down multiple requests from multiple states to become politically active in any role he chose.

Lee constantly warned against building Confederate memorials and eschewed the Lost Cause mythology in order to allow the healing of the nation to occur. He is lionized by the movement and rejects it utterly.

He diminishes himself and goes to teach school. He regrets his military career. And henceforth will actively walk out of time in any kind of parade to prove it.

That is not ambition by any definition I know. This is a man to whom Duty and Honor are carved into stone.

 

[Barsoom]

Lee turned down multiple requests from multiple states to become politically active in any role he chose.

Lee constantly warned against building Confederate memorials and eschewed the Lost Cause mythology in order to allow the healing of the nation to occur. He is lionized by the movement and rejects it utterly.

He diminishes himself and goes to teach school. He regrets his military career. And henceforth will actively walk out of time in any kind of parade to prove it.

That is not ambition by any definition I know. This is a man to whom Duty and Honor are carved into stone.

You're talking about the years after the Civil War. Lee indeed behaved admirably then. It is, though, a time when the highest level at which he could be politically active with any chance of success was statewide (Wilson in 1912 was the first Southerner elected president since the war). And that during Reconstruction when he would have had to compromise between the federals and the Lost Cause. I do believe he rejected the requests out of honorable motives but I also think he can't have been very tempted.

When I discuss Lee's ambition it's the pre-war years I'm talking about. I'm actually not sure that Lee had the White House as his ambition, that was @Yakman's contention; I gave him the point because your defense was too strong IMO. I've already referred to testimony from his contemporaries and passages in his letters that indicate Lee aimed to rise high in his military career. In my experience people don't get promoted to the rank Lee reached based only on competence, it also takes considerable skill at networking and some effort. I feel justified in saying that there was an element of ambition in Lee's character.

Whether that extended to the political sphere, I think it's pretty much impossible to say. Several generals had already been elected president, but Lee hadn't yet led an army during a war, so he lacked the prerequisite military success and he was sensible enough not to boast of an ambition he didn't (yet) have the means to reach for. Had he won the war for the Confederacy the way would have been open for him, no doubt. Had he commanded the Union armies, he would have alienated his natural constituency. Both of those are what-ifs so not proof but I do believe that ambition pointed rather to the option he chose than to the alternative. In either case winning was the condition. When the South lost, the way to the highest office was barred for Lee.

As I explained above, I believe that too much has been made of Lee and for entirely the wrong reasons. I do not hold Lee responsible for his whitewashing, that was a later generation working for a cause he indeed spurned. But it is still the task of serious history to remove the layer of myth and look at the man beneath. Who, as all men of his stature, was a complex character. Neither purely noble nor merely base, able to stand out from his contemporaries as a brilliant general but in his social thought typical for his time and place.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

You're talking about the years after the Civil War. Lee indeed behaved admirably then. It is, though, a time when the highest level at which he could be politically active with any chance of success was statewide (Wilson in 1912 was the first Southerner elected president since the war). And that during Reconstruction when he would have had to compromise between the federals and the Lost Cause. I do believe he rejected the requests out of honorable motives but I also think he can't have been very tempted.

When I discuss Lee's ambition it's the pre-war years I'm talking about. I'm actually not sure that Lee had the White House as his ambition, that was @Yakman's contention; I gave him the point because your defense was too strong IMO. I've already referred to testimony from his contemporaries and passages in his letters that indicate Lee aimed to rise high in his military career. In my experience people don't get promoted to the rank Lee reached based only on competence, it also takes considerable skill at networking and some effort. I feel justified in saying that there was an element of ambition in Lee's character.

Whether that extended to the political sphere, I think it's pretty much impossible to say. Several generals had already been elected president, but Lee hadn't yet led an army during a war, so he lacked the prerequisite military success and he was sensible enough not to boast of an ambition he didn't (yet) have the means to reach for. Had he won the war for the Confederacy the way would have been open for him, no doubt. Had he commanded the Union armies, he would have alienated his natural constituency. Both of those are what-ifs so not proof but I do believe that ambition pointed rather to the option he chose than to the alternative. In either case winning was the condition. When the South lost, the way to the highest office was barred for Lee.

As I explained above, I believe that too much has been made of Lee and for entirely the wrong reasons. I do not hold Lee responsible for his whitewashing, that was a later generation working for a cause he indeed spurned. But it is still the task of serious history to remove the layer of myth and look at the man beneath. Who, as all men of his stature, was a complex character. Neither purely noble nor merely base, able to stand out from his contemporaries as a brilliant general but in his social thought typical for his time and place.

Don't worry. I know who is suggesting the Lee for President line of rhetoric and it isn't you. I was just following up on your points.

Human beings are human beings, I only know of one who could be described as perfect - the rest of us are wholly flawed with gaping blind spots and it is our duty to figure out where they are hiding within ourselves.

As I have said multiple times, there is truth and honor in both sides of this conflict and the concepts demand you dive beneath the waves and inspect the hull rather than the paint job it has been given this season. The South are not all devils, the North are not all angels - but there are certainly angels and devils present on both sides of this conflict before, during and after the war.

other than that, I think you and I agree on far more than we disagree in this arena.

 

[Director]

Why exactly would the medicine have been awful?

@Yakman - Woof. There's a lot going on in this thread. I believe you are working from some false premises and may not have the information you need. I'd recommend you read a good biography of Lee - not one of the fawning ones. There are a lot, so i won't recommend. But an examination of his life will, I think, show that he was a man rigidly repressed and devoted to duty. His father left the family burdened with debts, his wife developed serious dibilitating illness. An uncle (I think) died leaving a lot of conditions in his will that couldn't be carried out without money - which he didn't leave. Lee had nothing but his army paycheck - quite small. And, in the pre-war Army, promotions almost never came. Without the war he might have died a penniless lieutenant with a crippled wife, trying to keep his family plantations going and stay out of debt.

He never, ever entertained any thought of running for a public office. When people came to him with offers, he refused. He could have had any position in Virginia, I think, but he never tried for a single one, pre or post war. He was, as near as I can tell, entirely devoid of or even repulsed by ambition. Robert Lee had his faults, but he would have thought it a disgrace to advance his own interests. So: he never expressed any no political or personal ambition, never permitted himself to be a political candidate and refused every offer brought to him.

Robert E Lee did not want public office outside the Army.



Post-war, the North tried to Reconstruct the South on Northern lines, giving land and suffrage to freed slaves and insisting that formerly wealthy Southerners pay all the taxes they had skipped during the war. That they had paid those taxes to the governments of Confederate states or nation did not matter. The ideal was to so break the South that it could never rise to the financial and political power it had held before the war.

Railroads, industries - whole cities were destroyed. And there were a lot of armed, angry former soldiers whose nation had collapsed and whose army had surrendered, which left them bitter and vengeful. So the first chance they got, they threw out the post-war constitutions and wrote new ones around the ideals of white power, Jim Crow and share-cropping (which, as it was usually administered, was slavery combined with the company store). Fading Republican electoral power led to those constitutions being approved. (Some say the 1876 election of Rutherford Hayes was a deal that lifted Reconstruction in exchange for letting Hayes be President.)

To really Reconstruct the South you'd have had to secure economic and political liberty for African Americans and probably enforce it with soldiers. You'd have had to really go after the Klan, kill the members and take their property. You'd have had to vigorously prosecute the Wilmington gang, reject the White Power state constitutions and maybe keep Southern senators and representatives from being seated. You'd have had to find the political strength to hold down the South for generations, fund an armed occupation and fight a guerrilla war for generations. The USA would have had to become a bloody tyranny.

You would, in short, have had to change entrenched attitudes about race by violent, repressive and likely unlawful means. Which, from a study of history, we can see rarely works unless you have the stomach to kill an awful lot of people, do a lot of damage, and reduce the survivors to political impotence. There were maybe six million whites in the South. Do you think the nation could survive killing a million of them? How about half a million? Because less wouldn't do the job.

That's why I say that I think the medicine would have been awful.

 

[Director]

@Barsoom - Lee's performance in the Army, particularly in the Mexican War, brought him the attention and favor of Winfield Scott, the Commanding General of the Army. That was the only person he needed to rise in the Army... but at the outbreak of the war he was still only a lt Colonel and had no real prospect of being promoted much higher. He did seriously consider leaving the Army to look after his wife and to try to resolve his family financial problems, but he needed his Army pay too much.

I have never seen any evidence that Lee ever seriously considered running for or accepting political office. Is there any evidence? If not we can leave speculation aside and consider it closed: Lee had no political ambition.

 

[Director]

@Barsoom - I do not remember Lee being asked to take political office before the Civil War. He did consider leaving the Army in order to settle his family's financial affairs - a relative (on the Custis side I think) left several near bankrupt properties, a complicate will and - as I recall no money.

I have never seen any evidence that Lee ever seriously considered running for or accepting political office.

. I think it quite possible that people proposed electoral offices to him - he was the son of a Revolutionary hero, the male inheritor of the Lee and Custis lines and the representative of the First Families of Virginia (go watch Lee's song in '1776' - seriousLEE, expedientLEE, quickLEE. Hilarious). But i haven't read a Lee biography in decades and I suspect you'd have to go through all his correspondence to famiLEE (sorry can't get it out of my head), friends and acquaintances to be sure.

I believe that if Lee had ever expressed any interest, he'd have gotten elected. From what I can tell, he never showed even a flicker.

I also disagree with your view of Reconstruction. Neither Lincoln nor Johnson wanted to break the south economically.

No. But the Radical Republicans did want to break the economic and political power of the South. I apologize if that was not clear.
They called it Reconstruction for a reason - with demolition a part of it. And the Radicals did intend for Reconstruction to be permanent.

I don't disagree when you say the problem with Reconstruction was Southern resistance, but I add the caveat that it failed because of a lack of willpower and political power to make it stick.

Removed - Had a dad

 

[Dinglehoff]

The scare quotes around stunning and brave tell their own story. No one here or in the serious histories of Lee has claimed that for themselves. You're doing the attacking here and in a very sneaky way. Why don't you come right out and tell us what the proper understanding of Lee and the South should be, in your opinion? Which ideas have been "inculcated" in us? By whom? And why are they wrong?

The sanctimonious moralizing of yourself and others is the claim to it; like you can get your own piece of the fake holy war you were told about your whole life by doing it.

 

[Barsoom]

removed - Had a dad

I don't disagree when you say the problem with Reconstruction was Southern resistance, but I add the caveat that it failed because of a lack of willpower and political power to make it stick.

Definitely willpower. I don't know if the coercive power to make it stick would have been there, it hasn't been tried.

 

[Director]

@Barsoom - very gracious of you to say so. I appreciate it. If I was not clear, it could be because the answer got spread over multiple posts.
Basically, I thought Reconstruction didn't go far enough to do much good, but that pushing it further would have made life very difficult as white Southerners fought back. When asked 'how difficult' I responded a post explaining what I thought. My private opinion is that Reconstruction didn't solve the issues but was abandoned part-way - sort of like a Versailles Treaty, the worst of both worlds. I think it should have been pushed, but I recognize the political power to do so just wasn't going to be there long term - only a tyranny can keep up that sort of repression.

I regret I reacted so strongly, but - wow - you really hit a nerve. It shocked me more because I've found you to be a calm and reasonable poster.

As Grant said, "Let us have peace." I look forward to your further comments.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Under Lincoln, Reconstruction would have been reformation and a welcoming of the prodigal son to the family table and create an environment where all men might be truly equal over time. This made the Department of War furious.

Reconstruction managed by Stanton's Department of War after Lincoln's assassination was designed to punish, not reform.

There is an image buried in that nightmare of brilliance called 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd where the wife beats the schoolmaster, the schoolmaster beats his students who in turn decide they don't need no education. It applies in this case in a very real and dramatic way. The North beat on the Southerners, the Southerners took it out on the Blacks. The North created absolutely the worst possible environment possible for the Blacks when the withdrew their armies, almost as if by design as retribution for what came before; leaving their enemy divided and easily conquered by each passing wind.

Then begins the House of Cards of lies about the war. The North came to free the Blacks rather than fighting for Union begats the Lost Cause mythology and the erecting of monuments that Lee so despised. Each generation painting whatever they want over the events, where now we have Robert E. Lee sitting in the Custis Mansion sipping mint juleps while eying the White House rather than actually in the field building civil works projects that brings him promotion after promotion in a very small army and is singularly picked out for high command when push comes to shove.

And here we are, still arguing over the same points. All because Lincoln's bodyguard had a drink at the bar where John Wilkes Boothe was waiting to quietly slip out the back door and into Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater that fateful night.

 

[JodelDiplom]

Under Lincoln, Reconstruction would have been reformation and a welcoming of the prodigal son to the family table and create an environment where all men might be truly equal over time. This made the Department of War furious.

Reconstruction managed by Stanton's Department of War after Lincoln's assassination was designed to punish, not reform.

There is an image buried in that nightmare of brilliance called 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd where the wife beats the schoolmaster, the schoolmaster beats his students who in turn decide they don't need no education. It applies in this case in a very real and dramatic way. The North beat on the Southerners, the Southerners took it out on the Blacks. The North created absolutely the worst possible environment possible for the Blacks when the withdrew their armies, almost as if by design as retribution for what came before; leaving their enemy divided and easily conquered by each passing wind.

Then begins the House of Cards of lies about the war. The North came to free the Blacks rather than fighting for Union begats the Lost Cause mythology and the erecting of monuments that Lee so despised. Each generation painting whatever they want over the events, where now we have Robert E. Lee sitting in the Custis Mansion sipping mint juleps while eying the White House rather than actually in the field building civil works projects that brings him promotion after promotion in a very small army and is singularly picked out for high command when push comes to shove.

And here we are, still arguing over the same points. All because Lincoln's bodyguard had a drink at the bar where John Wilkes Boothe was waiting to quietly slip out the back door and into Lincoln's box at Ford's Theater that fateful night.

The image of the lost son is a powerful one but how would the economic realities have been papered over? The conflict between former slaves and former masters was as much a class and labor conflict as it was a social and race conflict. Manumission destroyed almost as much wealth by turning property into free citizens, as the total cost of the whole Civil War effort cost the federal and confederate governments. The upper classes of the South, which a hypothetical Lincolnite reconstruction wanted to embrace as lost sons depended on the continued supply of labor by those freed black people, whom the Lincolnite reconstruction would also want to embrace as citizens with civil rights and civil duties. If they get those rights then the non slave holding white population now faces enormous competition for jobs and social advancement from them, too. Keep in mind this was an agrarian society, jobs and opportunities for advancement are more or less a fixed quantity in this kind of society. Traditionally, in agrarian societies these kind of conditions where suddenly a lot more people want to eat well, earn well, and live well, leads to economic conditions that resemble those of overpopulation. There would be huge pressure on emigration from the rural areas of the south, as the only possible relief valve, if subjugation and reduction to near slavery of the (black) excess population isn't permitted.

I just can't see the path from Lincolnite reconstruction towards this aim of a politically pacified, racially harmonious, prosperous reconstructed South. Something has to give, there's too much of a zero sum to these class, labor, social and race conflicts that follow the liberation of the huge slave population.

Option 1: the upper class has their property confiscated and distributed among the freedman, basically a huge land reform that exterminates the southern gentry as a social class but gives the blacks the means to provide for themselves. This resolves the conflict between the whites who didn't own slaves and the blacks, for the most part. They're no longer competitors for jobs and the part of the economic output that went to the plantation owners, is now in the hands of the blacks.

Option 2: The upper class gets to keep its ownership of the land, political magic manages to reconcile the labor conflict between former masters and former slaves on equitable terms that effectively turns the black citizens into free labor who get to negotiate their wages with their employers, they become resident citizens with rights and privileges albeit their social status is now that of day laborers, not that of farmers. Now the non slave owning whites are the big losers. So many more men looking for jobs in the same, largely static, rural economy as before. From the perspective of white laborers, it's a huge deterioration of their living conditions. Since Lincolnite political magic managed to make the plantation owners happy and loyal again, the white power class is presumably on its own in dealing with this problem now... The Klan never gets off the ground without support from the upper classes but there would still be a lot of banditry and, probably, mass emigration towards the western territories as disaffected white southerners pack up and leave, cursing Lincoln all the way from Mississippi to Colorado or wherever they settle.

Option 3: The upper class gets to keep its ownership of the land, political efforts turns them loyal. Political efforts also reconcile the bulk of the white population with the union. But this means listening to their complaints and giving them a lot of what they say they want. And what do they want? They want the freed slaves to be kept separate, to not compete that much for jobs, to not compete for opportunities for social advancement and to not become a strong political force. Give them that and they're content with forgetting about the war, deny them and they'll be angry and take up arms against the federal agents and the black population. You're at the same impasse as in our history, except things are a bit less bad because Lincolnite political magic reconciled the upper classes for the most part. But hey it's not a feudal society, the white lower classes have voting rights and can vote the upper classes out of their positions of political power! Oops... So, no, actually the upper classes will align with the demands of the white lower classes. Hmm. There's no way out of this that satisfies all three sides in my view under this option. So Lincoln has to accept that the black population gets the short end of the stick as a price to win back the allegiance of the white southerners. Because he's Lincoln and he cares about the black population I suppose the federal government now pretty much has to organize a mass exodus of black freedmen from the south to alleviate the problems stemming from giving them the short end of the stick. Maybe western frontier settlement is now a black affair? Maybe the Great Migration of black people from the south into the northern cities starts 50 years early. The race problem might not be as bad as in real history, but it will still be very difficult.

In real history, black people weren't the only people who suffered harsh violence when white majority population started to perceive them as competition. Chinese and Japanese in California and the western states can sing a song about that. Why would blacks have it better even if the president tried to hold his protective hands over them.

Summary... I think even Lincoln wouldn't have managed to pull off a reconstruction that left upper class whites, lower class whites and black freedmen in the south happy. It would probably have gone over better than the mess that happened in real history but there would still be many who would see things as terrible and blame Lincoln for it. I don't like quoting movies to make serious points but the quote from that batman movie really comes to my mind here... "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain." and I think of Lincoln when I write that

 

[Ming]

Violent resistance to overthrow reconstruction wasn't inevitable.

Reconstruction has three phases.

1.) War Reconstruction: 1863 - 1865 (Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln's Assassination) - Run by the War Department and Freedman's bureau.
2.) Presidential Reconstruction : 1865-1867 - Johnson Administration let the southern states rebuild themselves.
3.) Congressional Reconstruction: - 1867 to 1877 Congress passes the reconstruction acts over Johnson's veto then uses the army to dismantle the ex confederate governments and ensure the rights of freedmen.

It's important to note that the political coalition of Congressional reconstruction (African Americans, Poor southern Whites who were locked out of power in the antebellum south, and carpetbaggers) was a winning coalition and it was stable.

The free black population of these states was enough to ensure electoral dominance across the south if they were allowed to vote.

State	1870 Census Proportion
Alabama	47.7%
Arkansas	25.2%
Florida	48.8%
Georgia	46.0%
Kentucky	16.8
Mississippi	53.7
North Carolina	36.6%
South Carolina	58.9%
Tennessee	25.6%
Texas	31.0%
Virginia	41.9%

Free blacks and the marginal land yeomen who saw the rebellion as a 'rich man's war and a poor man's fight' would be enough to control most states in the confederacy. The old south had a very good system in denying the yeomen a say in how their governments were run and the presidential reconstruction governments set about applying it to the freedmen.

When congressional reconstruction broke up the old administrations and brought to power the three-legged stool of blacks, poors, and carpetbaggers the coalition worked. But that's not the story of reconstruction we remember. What happened?

The republican coalition fractured on the issue of taxes.

The yeomen like a lot of people at the time didn't care much for ideas about equality with the freedmen but they would vote with them against the old aristocracy if they were left alone to their traditional ways of life.

The central strategy of the republican attempts to dismantle the plantation system and distribute land was to raise taxes on landed property and force inefficient plantations to quit claim with the idea that this would fall into the hands of both the freedmen and poor whites.

A byproduct of this strategy is that the white yeomen now needed cash to settle their tax bills. Before the war southern states were the most lightly taxed in terms of real property, preferring sales and poll taxes. The Yeomen were left to themselves as long as they didn't try to influence matters of government. This new cash requirement forced the formerly self sufficient poor whites into labor situations that they considered degrading and corrupting. It also brought them into economic competition with landless freedmen. Whereas before Yeomen were indifferent about the freedmen now you started to see resentments grow. The only thing worse than having to take a side job shoveling manure to keep your family farm was having to underbid a ni**** to keep it.

The former planter class exploited these feelings and organized 'tax conventions' where they used examples of corruption and waste to illustrate 'carpetbagger misrule' and also stirred up racial feelings against uppity Negroes and miscegenation to radicalize the yeomen.

Poor whites were enlisted in this way as foot soldiers in the campaign of redemption that began in 1874 and overthrew the republican governments and dismantled the taxes. The poor whites eventually found themselves also pushed out of representation after the redemption governments disenfranchised blacks. . . leaving their only consolation that they weren't on the bottom.

Republican electoral strength waned only due to violence. Violence that wasn't inevitable but was the result of a very successful propaganda campaign.

 

[JodelDiplom]

Violent resistance to overthrow reconstruction wasn't inevitable.

Reconstruction has three phases.

1.) War Reconstruction: 1863 - 1865 (Emancipation Proclamation to Lincoln's Assassination) - Run by the War Department and Freedman's bureau.
2.) Presidential Reconstruction : 1865-1867 - Johnson Administration let the southern states rebuild themselves.
3.) Congressional Reconstruction: - 1867 to 1877 Congress passes the reconstruction acts over Johnson's veto then uses the army to dismantle the ex confederate governments and ensure the rights of freedmen.

It's important to note that the political coalition of Congressional reconstruction (African Americans, Poor southern Whites who were locked out of power in the antebellum south, and carpetbaggers) was a winning coalition and it was stable.

The free black population of these states was enough to ensure electoral dominance across the south if they were allowed to vote.

State	1870 Census Proportion
Alabama	47.7%
Arkansas	25.2%
Florida	48.8%
Georgia	46.0%
Kentucky	16.8
Mississippi	53.7
North Carolina	36.6%
South Carolina	58.9%
Tennessee	25.6%
Texas	31.0%
Virginia	41.9%

Free blacks and the marginal land yeomen who saw the rebellion as a 'rich man's war and a poor man's fight' would be enough to control most states in the confederacy. The old south had a very good system in denying the yeomen a say in how their governments were run and the presidential reconstruction governments set about applying it to the freedmen.

When congressional reconstruction broke up the old administrations and brought to power the three legged stool of blacks, poors, and carpetbaggers the coalition worked. But that's not the story of reconstruction we remember. What happened?

The republican coalition fractured on the issue of taxes.

The yeomen like a lot of people at the time didn't care much for ideas about equality with the freedmen but they would vote with them against the old aristocracy if they were left alone to their traditional ways of life.

The central strategy of the republican attempts to dismantle the plantation system and distribute land was to raise taxes on landed property and force inefficient plantations to quit claim with the idea that this would fall into the hands of both the freedmen and poor whites.

A byproduct of this strategy is that the white yeomen now needed cash to settle their tax bills. Before the war southern states were the most lightly taxed in terms of real property, preferring sales and poll taxes. The Yeomen were left to themselves as long as they didn't try to influence matters of government. This new cash requirement forced the formerly self sufficient poor whites into labor situations that they considered degrading and corrupting.

The former planter class exploited these feelings and organized 'tax conventions' where they used examples of corruption and waste to illustrate 'carpetbagger misrule' and also stirred up racial feelings against uppity Negroes and miscegenation to radicalize the yeomen.

Poor whites were enlisted in this way as foot soldiers in the campaign of redemption that began in 1874 and overthrew the republican governments and dismantled the taxes. The poor whites eventually found themselves also pushed out of representation after the redemption governments disenfranchised blacks. . . leaving their only consolation that they weren't on the bottom.

Republican electoral strength waned only due to violence. Violence that wasn't inevitable but was the result of a very successful propaganda campaign.

Hmm, that's interesting. Sounds like congress did try a half hearted social engineering experiment along the lines of a strategy to expropriate a part of the planter class and redistribute the land to a part of the black population.

But it sounds like there wasn't a role for any of these involved parties to become serious tax payers?

Who did pay taxes in the reconstruction era south? Were the plantation owners significant tax payers? Or the city populations?

 

[Director]

There wasn't a lot of what we would consider 'real money'. Thanks to Andrew Jackson dismantling the Bank of the United States, there was a little bit of coined money coming out of the US mints - and a flood of paper notes issued basically by any bank that wanted to do so. Counterfeiting was easy and rampant (would you recognize a $2 note from the Farmers Bank of Denver? IS there a Farmer's Bank of Denver?), discounting was severe (would you gamble on that $2 note for $2 worth of materials or offer $1?) and control was non-existent. But the bank notes were necessary because Congress would not approve issuing Federal paper notes and there just wasn't enough gold and silver to mint enough coin for the size of the US economy (probably the greatest in the world sometime between 1876 and 1890). This is why California (and later Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas and Colorado were so vitally important - as was the rise of a solid, trust-able paper note).

As a result of loose financial control the US suffered a major contraction/expansion cycle about every 8 years. The war brought some stability - massive spending led to steadier economic expansion and the issue of Union 'greenbacks' (printed in green ink on the back side) helped get enough cash into an economy that needed a lot of liquid capital. The South printed a lot of money - a lot more than the Union - but unlike the greenbacks theirs were backed only by patriotism and hope and their value declined under Weimar-like inflation.

The South ended the war with its railroads and factories destroyed, entire cities burned down (Richmond, Columbia, Atlanta), billions of investment in slaves evaporated and with the life-savings of many, having been invested in Southern victory, gone up in smoke. Add in the fact that 250,000 male (worker) casualties came out of a total population of maybe 6 million... and many more people were permanently injured...

The rural South had gotten by on barter for decades - where there is little trade there is little money - and post-war found they had little to sell and no hard cash on hand. All Confederate money was worthless and the rich planters had never had any money - everything was invested in more slaves and more land, or in building fine homes. The big plantations couldn't operate without labor and that cheap labor had run off, so without a cash crop to sell there wasn't anything to sell but land. Enter carpetbaggers...

Part of what the North wanted from Reconstruction was to have Freedmen and poorer whites own and run small farms (40 Acres And A Mule). They'd have modest prosperity as in the North and Midwest and would owe loyalty to Republicans for giving it to them. That would build up a power bloc against the former slave-owners and big plantation owners. But...

Northern farms already produced enough grains and livestock. What the South had to sell before-the-war were VERY profitable cash crops like cotton, tobacco, hemp, rice and indigo (and some sugar, I think). But you cannot profitably raise those crops without a lot of labor, or move them to market without railroads, steamboats and cash. And since cotton rips the nutrients out of the soil you need a LOT of new land (the original reason the South wanted slavery expanded).

So: enter sharecropping, the company store and company scrip to pay the workers, not cash. But... you need a big operation to run those, to clear new land and to grow the big profitable cash crops. Small farms can't do it, can't raise or sell much of anything else and so have no cash on hand (and they must have cash for hardware and anything they cannot grow or make).

Ergo, when the tax-man comes (and he only accepts hard money) they can't pay, either because they ate what they raised (and so could not sell it) or because they couldn't raise high-value cash crops - and so have no cash. This creates no loyalty to the government taxing them and in addition drives a wedge between poorer whites and Freedmen ('They're takin' yer jobs!').


Apologies for the extreme length. I'm not an expert on finance or financial history, so feel free to correct what I got wrong. But the tl;dr is that the South lost almost all pre-war accumulated wealth and entered into an era of having to pay for labor and pay for fertilizer for worn-out soil, an era of very depressed prices for their agricultural products and an era of hard, deflationary money policy (the gold versus silver debate). @JodelDiplom - the truth is they had no money for taxes because they literally had no money.

 

[Yakman]

There wasn't a lot of what we would consider 'real money'. Thanks to Andrew Jackson dismantling the Bank of the United States, there was a little bit of coined money coming out of the US mints - and a flood of paper notes issued basically by any bank that wanted to do so. Counterfeiting was easy and rampant (would you recognize a $2 note from the Farmers Bank of Denver? IS there a Farmer's Bank of Denver?), discounting was severe (would you gamble on that $2 note for $2 worth of materials or offer $1?) and control was non-existent. But the bank notes were necessary because Congress would not approve issuing Federal paper notes and there just wasn't enough gold and silver to mint enough coin for the size of the US economy (probably the greatest in the world sometime between 1876 and 1890). This is why California (and later Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas and Colorado were so vitally important - as was the rise of a solid, trust-able paper note).

As a result of loose financial control the US suffered a major contraction/expansion cycle about every 8 years. The war brought some stability - massive spending led to steadier economic expansion and the issue of Union 'greenbacks' (printed in green ink on the back side) helped get enough cash into an economy that needed a lot of liquid capital. The South printed a lot of money - a lot more than the Union - but unlike the greenbacks theirs were backed only by patriotism and hope and their value declined under Weimar-like inflation.

The South ended the war with its railroads and factories destroyed, entire cities burned down (Richmond, Columbia, Atlanta), billions of investment in slaves evaporated and with the life-savings of many, having been invested in Southern victory, gone up in smoke. Add in the fact that 250,000 male (worker) casualties came out of a total population of maybe 6 million... and many more people were permanently injured...

The rural South had gotten by on barter for decades - where there is little trade there is little money - and post-war found they had little to sell and no hard cash on hand. All Confederate money was worthless and the rich planters had never had any money - everything was invested in more slaves and more land, or in building fine homes. The big plantations couldn't operate without labor and that cheap labor had run off, so without a cash crop to sell there wasn't anything to sell but land. Enter carpetbaggers...

Part of what the North wanted from Reconstruction was to have Freedmen and poorer whites own and run small farms (40 Acres And A Mule). They'd have modest prosperity as in the North and Midwest and would owe loyalty to Republicans for giving it to them. That would build up a power bloc against the former slave-owners and big plantation owners. But...

Northern farms already produced enough grains and livestock. What the South had to sell before-the-war were VERY profitable cash crops like cotton, tobacco, hemp, rice and indigo (and some sugar, I think). But you cannot profitably raise those crops without a lot of labor, or move them to market without railroads, steamboats and cash. And since cotton rips the nutrients out of the soil you need a LOT of new land (the original reason the South wanted slavery expanded).

So: enter sharecropping, the company store and company scrip to pay the workers, not cash. But... you need a big operation to run those, to clear new land and to grow the big profitable cash crops. Small farms can't do it, can't raise or sell much of anything else and so have no cash on hand (and they must have cash for hardware and anything they cannot grow or make).

Ergo, when the tax-man comes (and he only accepts hard money) they can't pay, either because they ate what they raised (and so could not sell it) or because they couldn't raise high-value cash crops - and so have no cash. This creates no loyalty to the government taxing them and in addition drives a wedge between poorer whites and Freedmen ('They're takin' yer jobs!').


Apologies for the extreme length. I'm not an expert on finance or financial history, so feel free to correct what I got wrong. But the tl;dr is that the South lost almost all pre-war accumulated wealth and entered into an era of having to pay for labor and pay for fertilizer for worn-out soil, an era of very depressed prices for their agricultural products and an era of hard, deflationary money policy (the gold versus silver debate). @JodelDiplom - the truth is they had no money for taxes because they literally had no money.

@Director but wasn’t the planters’ debt also wiped out by the War? It’s not like the 1st Bank of Slaveryville would have survived the war.

I don’t think that the financial situation of a post-plantation South was as dire as you suppose if there were no debts.

Now, yes, there were financial interests in the North which benefited from slavery-see the Manhattan proposal to become a neutral territory-but those were tiny, Democratic enclaves in a Radical Republican country and had little real sway in Reconstruction government.

 

[JodelDiplom]

There wasn't a lot of what we would consider 'real money'. Thanks to Andrew Jackson dismantling the Bank of the United States, there was a little bit of coined money coming out of the US mints - and a flood of paper notes issued basically by any bank that wanted to do so. Counterfeiting was easy and rampant (would you recognize a $2 note from the Farmers Bank of Denver? IS there a Farmer's Bank of Denver?), discounting was severe (would you gamble on that $2 note for $2 worth of materials or offer $1?) and control was non-existent. But the bank notes were necessary because Congress would not approve issuing Federal paper notes and there just wasn't enough gold and silver to mint enough coin for the size of the US economy (probably the greatest in the world sometime between 1876 and 1890). This is why California (and later Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas and Colorado were so vitally important - as was the rise of a solid, trust-able paper note).

As a result of loose financial control the US suffered a major contraction/expansion cycle about every 8 years. The war brought some stability - massive spending led to steadier economic expansion and the issue of Union 'greenbacks' (printed in green ink on the back side) helped get enough cash into an economy that needed a lot of liquid capital. The South printed a lot of money - a lot more than the Union - but unlike the greenbacks theirs were backed only by patriotism and hope and their value declined under Weimar-like inflation.

The South ended the war with its railroads and factories destroyed, entire cities burned down (Richmond, Columbia, Atlanta), billions of investment in slaves evaporated and with the life-savings of many, having been invested in Southern victory, gone up in smoke. Add in the fact that 250,000 male (worker) casualties came out of a total population of maybe 6 million... and many more people were permanently injured...

The rural South had gotten by on barter for decades - where there is little trade there is little money - and post-war found they had little to sell and no hard cash on hand. All Confederate money was worthless and the rich planters had never had any money - everything was invested in more slaves and more land, or in building fine homes. The big plantations couldn't operate without labor and that cheap labor had run off, so without a cash crop to sell there wasn't anything to sell but land. Enter carpetbaggers...

Part of what the North wanted from Reconstruction was to have Freedmen and poorer whites own and run small farms (40 Acres And A Mule). They'd have modest prosperity as in the North and Midwest and would owe loyalty to Republicans for giving it to them. That would build up a power bloc against the former slave-owners and big plantation owners. But...

Northern farms already produced enough grains and livestock. What the South had to sell before-the-war were VERY profitable cash crops like cotton, tobacco, hemp, rice and indigo (and some sugar, I think). But you cannot profitably raise those crops without a lot of labor, or move them to market without railroads, steamboats and cash. And since cotton rips the nutrients out of the soil you need a LOT of new land (the original reason the South wanted slavery expanded).

So: enter sharecropping, the company store and company scrip to pay the workers, not cash. But... you need a big operation to run those, to clear new land and to grow the big profitable cash crops. Small farms can't do it, can't raise or sell much of anything else and so have no cash on hand (and they must have cash for hardware and anything they cannot grow or make).

Ergo, when the tax-man comes (and he only accepts hard money) they can't pay, either because they ate what they raised (and so could not sell it) or because they couldn't raise high-value cash crops - and so have no cash. This creates no loyalty to the government taxing them and in addition drives a wedge between poorer whites and Freedmen ('They're takin' yer jobs!').


Apologies for the extreme length. I'm not an expert on finance or financial history, so feel free to correct what I got wrong. But the tl;dr is that the South lost almost all pre-war accumulated wealth and entered into an era of having to pay for labor and pay for fertilizer for worn-out soil, an era of very depressed prices for their agricultural products and an era of hard, deflationary money policy (the gold versus silver debate). @JodelDiplom - the truth is they had no money for taxes because they literally had no money.

Aha, that's very insightful and I thank you very much for taking the time to write this modest wall of text for us here

The economic conditions you describe sound a lot like they could have made any reconstruction policy fail no matter how well intentioned... It could work if the freedmen were given a good supply of credit in order to invest into their farms, and were encouraged to go through a bit of stratification with black 'kulaks' owning larger farms on which economy of scale makes investments rational, and other black people work for them. An economy that generates surpluses and taxable revenue.

Ultimately any successful social engineering that tries to set up loyal population blocs, needs to turn these loyal groups into tax payers or find a social role for them, that doesn't involve paying tax (warrior class / aristocracy / government enforcers). The idea that you could build a prosperous society on self sufficient yeomen who live on small farms sounds awfully utopian tbh. Sooner or later government will want to do big projects that cost money, and if they don't have a strong tax base, government needs to go to cap in hand to those who have the money and beg them. That's usually the end of utopian egalitarian policy.

Did any other US states outside the defeated south run on such social/political models? Freeholding yeomen who live cashless lives, hand in mouth?

By the way, the way you described the general economic conditions of that time remind me of the economic conditions of post reunification Germany. Here too, we were on high spirits and full of hope that east Germany could quickly be turned into "blossoming landscapes" by investments into their mostly run down but potentially valuable economy. Highly skilled work force, good trade connections into East Europe, etc. But the German federal bank didn't support expansionary fiscal policy, instead they contracted the money supply because they thought debts were already too high. Depression, emigration and xenophobia ensued.

 

[Barsoom]

Did any other US states outside the defeated south run on such social/political models? Freeholding yeomen who live cashless lives, hand in mouth?

Most newly settled states went through a pioneer stage with little or no cash economy. Which raises the question of how long that stage would have lasted in the South. Considering that the South possessed valuable trade crops and infrastructure lacking in the pioneer states, it seems to me that a cashless economy would be a very temporary situation.

 

[Andre Bolkonsky]

Most newly settled states went through a pioneer stage with little or no cash economy. Which raises the question of how long that stage would have lasted in the South. Considering that the South possessed valuable trade crops and infrastructure lacking in the pioneer states, it seems to me that a cashless economy would be a very temporary situation.

You would be wrong. It was the worst situation imaginable. Grant and other generals describe hordes of people scraping grain off the ground left by government horses being fed for nourishment, people of some standing begging door to door, and incredible privation and starvation. The Southern Farms had grown wild, the levees were not maintained. The entire nation was starving at the end of the war and it was about to get worse.

The South was very profitable and wealthy prior to the War of the Rebellion. There were over $60M in deposits in Southern Banks in 1860. There was less than $15M at the end of the war. The railroads are wrecked, locomotives and rolling stock are all seized, and the paddle boats have vanished from the rivers. Confederate scripts and bonds were worthless. And the profitable Confederate cotton bonds sold in Europe to generate hard cash to buy ships and material were rendered worthless with the stroke of a pen leaving European speculators to take the hit.

Enter the Carpet Baggers and the Scallywags . . . .

There were approximately 2M bales of cotton at 400 pounds per bale worth about $175 each that all simply vanished as contraband seized - privately and publicly - by the North. The Cotton Traders were either immoral when they got there, or their head was turned by greed five minutes after they arrived according to the media of the day. That roughly $350M in potential hard currency was HUGE compared to the pittance of money available to the impoverised peoples of the South who had given everything they owned to support their boys in the field protecting their homes. But the Cotton Traders made a fortune, and leads to Grant banning Jews from traveling with the army because of their business tactics being in direct opposition to military policy by racing ahead and paying pennies on the dollar what it would be worth to the army sold at auction when seized.

And the coup de grace were 'back taxes'. The Federal Government had put a tax on private property in each state to raise money to wage war. The South ignored the taxes during the conflict, but the Treasury Agents collected and earned huge profits for themselves. They placed unpayable liens on prime real estate in re-captured lands and then resold them for a huge profit, the majority of which went into their own pocket. Even the govenment found this a vile practice and returned unsold property back to its owners, but the individuals who bought prime real estate cheap were allowed to keep their gains.

The South was kept impoverished, according to many estimates, for 85 years and this cycle ends in the 1950's with the post war economic boom. Texas complains loud and long prior to the Oil Exemption legislation passed during the war that New York controlled her ability to pump oil at the rate New York thought appropriate. And the South was determined to Rise Again.

So when @Director says they had no money - they had no money. Period. This is intentional. Divide and Conquer.

I am emphasing this point because I want you to understand the mindset of these individuals during the post-war years who lost everything, they need a cause to believe in and an enemy to hate. Neither are hard to find. I am not saying it is just, I am not agreeing with either faction, I am merely pointing out what color the cow is.

 

[Ming]

Hmm, that's interesting. Sounds like congress did try a half hearted social engineering experiment along the lines of a strategy to expropriate a part of the planter class and redistribute the land to a part of the black population.

But it sounds like there wasn't a role for any of these involved parties to become serious tax payers?

Who did pay taxes in the reconstruction era south? Were the plantation owners significant tax payers? Or the city populations?

It wouldn't have been easy but the south would have successfully rebuilt if it wasn't for the panic of 1873.

Southern tax policy before the war was laser focused on upholding the plantation system. Land was lightly taxed if at all. Planters had to hold A LOT of land and more importantly, they had to hold it out of use from smallholders who would use it more efficiently.

Under the plantation system large landholders were allowed to self assess their property. These assessments were useless and what property taxes existed were not a major source of revenue for southern states. Property taxes were often combined with a capitation tax, a tax on each worker employed. This was structured in a way to discourage a free labor system and make plantations artificially competitive. I believe in Mississippi the tax on each slave was something like 0.75, while a free white laborer was $1.00 and a free black laborer was $3. These effects combined to make holding huge tracts of land and working them with slaves artificially cheap, and industry or commerce artificially expensive. Thus, a truly free labor market could never compete with the plantation system's tax advantages even though free labor is in fact more efficient.

These effects pushed white yeomen to marginal land and consolidated the best fields into huge plantations whose incentives were to acquire more and more land and more and more slaves and seek political favors to keep the whole thing secure. However, the plantation system was inefficient by its nature and the fact that land was so cheap to hold meant that before the war the South had more idle farmland than the North even though the South had more small farmers pushed to cultivate marginal land. The only taxes that fell on such poor people were poll taxes. As director pointed out, they had no money to pay such a tax and as a result they did not vote. These marginal farmers saw little in the rebellion for them and areas where they dominated were unionist strongholds becoming part of the republican coalition post-war.


After the war the planters tried to reassemble the old system but found this impossible with free labor. They tried using black codes to make slavery by another name, but they also turned to the tax system they had used against yeomen for political reasons. Southern taxes during presidential reconstruction were once again, light on landowners and heavy on labor and industry in order to safeguard the plantation's economic and political power.

Throughout the world, political elites have employed poll or 'head' taxes, which require individuals to obtain cash, to prod self-sufficient peasants to enter the labor market. In Presidential Reconstruction, tax policy was intended, in part, to reinforce the planter's position vis-a-vis labor. Heavy poll taxes were levied on freedmen, encouraging them to work for wages, while those unable to pay were deemed vagrants, who could be hired out to anyone meeting the tax bill. Meanwhile, levies on landed property remained extremely low (one tenth of 1 percent in Mississippi, for example), shielding planters and yeomen from the burden of rising government expenditures. As a result, 'the man with his two thousand acres paid less tax than any one of the scores of hands he may have had in his employ who owned not a dollar's worth of property.' He also paid less than town craftsmen, whose earnings were taxed at rates far higher than real estate. In Mississippi's Warren County, the three largest landowners each paid less than $200 in taxes, while the owner of a livery stable paid nearly $700, a butcher over $200, and a shoemaker $75. In addition, localities added poll taxes of their own, sometimes, in black belt counties, raising the bulk of their revenue in this manner. Mobile levied a special tax of $5 on every adult male 'and if the tax is not paid,' reported the city's black newspaper, 'the chain-gang is the punishment.' With state, county, and local levies, blacks might find themselves paying $15 in poll taxes alone.

Not surprisingly, blacks resented a highly regressive revenue system whose proceeds, as a North Carolina Bureau agent reported, " they state, and with truth, that they derive no benefit whatever" Even though taxes on blacks as well as whites helped fill their coffers, states and municipalities barred blacks from poor relief, orphanages, parks, schools, and other public facilities, insisting that the Freedmen's Bureau provide blacks with the services they required. The few state efforts to provide for the freedmen's needs were funded by special taxes levied on blacks, rather than from general revenues.

The many failures of the Johnson administration led to congress taking the lead on reconstruction after the election of 1866. There is much ink spilled over the abuses and corruption during the Grant administration but again, taxes are the main story.

The reconstruction acts brought the Army into 10 southern states to guarantee the rights of freedmen. They oversaw the establishment of a coalition of white, loyalist republicans, freedmen, and northern settlers that tried to fundamentally change the system the south operated by. This political power was finally able to begin addressing the plantation system and it settled on a strategy of land, education, and infrastructure.

Presidential reconstruction had flirted with education and railroads, but was never willing to collect enough revenue to fund them (North Carolina's governor John Worth abolished the education system he had sponsored due to fears that they would have to also educate negroes). The new coalition however aimed itself squarely at the plantation and sought to kill 3 birds with one stone: Taxation.

In order to service the bonds issued for infrastructure, fund new public goods open to all such as schools and hospitals, and compel a better use and distribution of land the reconstruction governments turned to a Jeffersonian idea: The property tax.

Expenses from debt service and public goods were at levels never before seen in the south and federal aid was not forthcoming. Taxes were necessarily raised to defray costs and repair state credit but virtually none of the elected officials of the region had ever handled money at this scale before and there was no political class equipped to handle the responsibility. (Veterans of the Confederate administration were barred from holding office, though they were unlikely to be sympathetic to the aims of reconstruction) Most of the new class meant well but there was an expectation that progress was inevitable, money inexhaustible and towns, businessmen offered 'incentives' to attract the railroad over their neighbors. Corruption was the inevitable result. Revenue was lower than anticipated so property was reassessed and taxes raised higher. Land values in the South were devastated by the war and high property taxes drove them further down requiring assessors to compensate. Taxes on real property rose sharply over the next few years, in some cases by an order of magnitude. Mississippi went from 0.1% property taxes in 1869 to 1.4% at the end of Reconstruction in 1874, a figure that can understate the change since taxation could be levied by both the municipality and the county and sometimes the state.

The third aim of higher taxes on land was to force inefficient plantations to sell their land or forfeit with the eventual aim of ending up in the hands of the freedmen. This 'free market' attempt to address the land question did not work quite as intended but definitely had an impact. At one time, 15% of the taxable land in Mississippi was subject to forfeiture. However the planter class went to great lengths to keep their lands from falling into the hands of the freedmen, often colluding with neighbors to keep out bids and using intimidation. However the tax did cause landholders to intensify use and bring idle lands into production. Few freedmen gained title to land from tax sales but a great deal did progress to become tenants rather than laborers or sharecroppers.

For the first time, landowners in the south were forced to pay significantly for their holdings and they howled. Politically, the opposition democrats shifted some of their rhetoric away from blacks and towards taxes. Contrary to the prewar practice of self assessment, elected republican officials now set the taxable values. White planters were forced meaningfuly contribute to the public treasury. Self sufficient yeomen were now compelled to participate in the 'market' in order to acquire the necessary cash similar to how blacks were compelled under the codes.

Blacks however largely went untaxed because they failed to acquire title to land, due in no small part to the machinations of the planters. Democrats were able to exploit this to drive a wedge in the republican coalition, opening the door for Redemption. The panic of 1873 and subsequent collapse in cotton prices caused massive hardship and drove the region to desperation. Debt taken on to acquire capital to start cotton production became unsustainable for some. The yeomen were forced to work harder and longer to settle their tax bills. The few blacks who had acquired land or capital on credit were wiped out. Sharecroppers were trapped when harvests yielded just enough to settle their debt to landowners, leaving no savings. (The landowners were happy to let them try again next year.) The planter class seized the opportunity to redirect economic anxiety against their political enemies. Violent coups were recast as 'popular' uprisings against 'carpetbagger misrule' (or unofficially n-word misrule). The weary north prepared to send in the troops to restore order but the election of 1876 was contested and a compromise allowed the republican, Rutherford Hayes to gain the white house in exchange for withdrawal of 'bayonet rule'.