When the War Was Over: The Failure of Self-Reconstruction in the South, 1865--1867

by Dan T. Carter

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807112046
• ISBN13: 9780807112045
• Release Date: April 1985
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A distant mirror...

This book focuses on a neglected chapter of reconstrution, the period of "presidential recontruction" which preceded "congressional" or "radical recontruction." Carter gives a detailed picture based almost entirely on primary sources of the south immediately after the civil war and the hosts of dilemmas that confront both the region and the nation as a whole. In the process, Carter gives the most sympathetic picture of southern conservatives who lead reconstruction efforts since the school of Dunning, perhaps since Dunning himself. In contrast to the characterization of them being unreconstructed rebels, Carter illustrates that while many of them were confederates, most were reluctant confederates who either opposed secession until after the election of Lincoln or until their states seceded. (Contrary to unionist myth making at the time, the bulk of white southerners were not "straight-sect" unionists, oppressed by a miniscule "slavocracy." After war's end there was just not enough of them to reestablish elected government.) Indeed this book it almost a companion piece to Croft's RELUCTANT CONFEDERATES, as most of these "conservatives" were old whigs and constitutional unionist, just as Croft's subjects, who were conscious of the south's backwardness before the war and dreamed of south with manufacturing, infrastructure, diversified agriculture, and public education. To all advocates of the "failure of southern leadership" to explain everything that's gone wrong with the region since antebellum, Carter makes a compelling case, that these were the best, most far sighted men the south could have chosen. But in Carter's book, this is almost to damn them with faint praise for as a group they are blinkered by notions of negro inequality, "the sanctity of debt", and a positive horror of confiscation. As the south refuses to be suitably "penitent" for their past sins of slavery and secession as well as enacting "black codes" that, at best, make freedmen "wards of the state" and less than truly free, the north becomes more open-ended in their demands for re-admission to the union. Carter's "old whigs" end up being overcome, as "reasonable, moderate" men often do, by inexorable events, losing support in the south *and* the north. Along the way Carter illustrates the collapse of social order, familiar to any observer of South Africa after aparthied or Russia after communism, interracial conflict, especially fears of an black insurrection to confiscate land, the debate over "wartime debts," strangely pertinent today with the issue of "third world debt," not to mention the difficult (and not wholly successful) transition from slave labor to free labor, which ultimately results in the tenant/sharecropping system. In sum this book presents what Barabara Tuchman would call "a distant mirror", not with contemporary U.S. but the *world* at the turn of the millenium. Carter writes excellently and as mentioned above depends heavily on primary materials. This d