Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

He warned a delegation of South Carolina blacks on March 10 that “the use of the military force in civil affairs was repugnant to the genius of American institutions, and should be dispensed with if possible.” (Despite this “repugnance,” Hayes had no hesitation four months later in using federal troops to suppress a great national railway strike). So there was no surprise when, on April 10, Hayes refused to intervene in the disputed South Carolina governor’s election, and withdrew the federal troops that had been protecting governor Daniel H. Chamberlain in the statehouse in Columbia. Chamberlain, seeing the handwriting on the wall, conceded the election to one of Robert E. Lee’s former cavalry chiefs, Wade Hampton. “Today,” Chamberlain bitterly informed his disheartened black supporters, “by order of the President whom your votes alone rescued from overwhelming defeat, the Government of the United States abandons you, deliberately withdraws from you its support, with the full knowledge that the lawful government of the State will be speedily overthrown.”101 In Mississippi, Republican ex-governor Adelbert Ames wrote out what may serve as the epitaph of Reconstruction:

Yes, a revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery. Now it is too late. The nation should have acted but it was “tired of the annual autumnal outbreaks in the South.” … The political death of the Negro will forever release the nation from the weariness from such “political outbreaks.”102

Well, not forever. But for then, the Civil War and its era were finally over.

EPILOGUE

It was not until August 20, 1866, that President Andrew Johnson officially declared that the Civil War was “at an end and that peace, order, tranquility, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.” Peace enough certainly existed, at least in the sense that the organized shooting was by then long over, but tranquility was quite another matter. Overall, approximately one out of every ten white males of military age in 1860 was dead by 1865 from some war-related cause. Between 1866 and 1885 the Federal War Department issued three successive enumerations of Union army wartime deaths, finally arriving at a figure of 360,222. Precise as this sounds, it was in fact an approximation; and indeed, based on census reconstructions, the numbers of deaths may have been under-reported, on both sides, by as much as 20 percent. There were no death or grave registration units in the Civil War armies; after-action reports contained reckonings of the number killed in action, but those reports relied on the record keeping of sergeants and adjutants who might have limited time and limited information for their accounts. In battles where key officers were killed, tallies and reports were often never made; in some instances, officers were encouraged to undercount their casualties in order to soften the blow to civilian morale back home. At the Wilderness in 1864, Gouverneur K. Warren, commanding the 5th Corps of the Army of the Potomac, was overheard telling a staffer not to report “data which he had gathered at the hospitals. ‘It will never do, Locke, to make a showing of such heavy losses,’ quickly observed Warren.” After that, wrote Morris Schaff, the officer who overheard Warren, I “I always doubted reports of casualties until officially certified.” (Robert E. Lee also appears to have pressured officers to revise their casualty reports downward).1

Even with this caveat in mind, it seems safe to say that something like 110,000 Northern men were killed outright in battle, with another 250,000 dying of disease, accidents, and even sunstroke; the number of wounded, which could mean anything from minor punctures to double amputation and blindness, was pegged at another 275,000. Added to the 7,000 or so navy dead and wounded, and the butcher’s bill for the preservation of the Union amounted to at least 640,000 dead and wounded. In practical terms, six out of every hundred men of military age in the North died during the war, and one out of every six who actually served perished. Of the soldiers who served, one out of every sixty-five was killed, one out of every fifty-six died of his wounds, one of every thirteen or fourteen died of disease, and one out of every ten was wounded. Every one of these statistics, in turn, generated ripples throughout American society for decades thereafter. As many as 200,000 more Northern soldiers may have died as a result of wounds, disease, and other causes in the single decade after the war. Attached to each of these figures were widening networks of parents or dependent families that saw their breadwinners and children lost or horribly mutilated emotionally and physically by the war. By 1900, the federal government would be paying pensions to nearly a million Union veterans or their dependents, in what amounted to the nation’s first Social Security system. By 1879, pension pay-outs amounted to 11.25 percent of the entire federal budget (at a time when the pension costs for the entire British empire stood at less than 3.5 percent). By 1903, there were 970,322 Civil War pensioners (both veterans and widows of veterans) at a total cost of almost $139 million, which had now become 22.5 percent of all federal expenditures.2

But these costs paled beside the toll that the war exacted from the Confederacy. Confederate war deaths were, in terms of overall numbers, fewer than the Union’s, although the quality of Confederate record keeping (not unaffected by the amount of Confederate destruction in the last year of the war) is even less reliable than its Union counterpart. Estimates of Confederate battle-related deaths range from 74,500 to 94,000, while between 110,000 to 160,000 Confederate soldiers died of various diseases. But the Confederacy had a far smaller pool of military manpower to draw upon: not only was the military-age population of the South smaller, but it was restricted until the very end of the war to whites, so the war