Fayetteville, North Carolina 28304
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Civil War aftermath, in black and white - The Boston Globe July 6, 2006/ posted 8/28/06
Response to �A True Story.�
If Americans are going to live up to the promise of what America stands for then the true stories of our history must be taught to all Americans across this great country. The story of Reconstruction is one of many that have been reconstructed and distorted to mollify the feelings of some while trampling on the feelings of others.
We are reminded that 200,000 Americans of African ancestry were in the Union army and navy during the Civil War. In addition, 38,000 were killed. But without their help the Union could not have won the war, and the war might have been very prolonged.
The Union army was placed in the south to protect the newly freed bondsmen and as history has shown as soon as that protection was removed , in 1868 for most southern states, a mere three years after the Civil War ended, whites reasserted terrorist tactics to force blacks into peonage.
The 1867 Reconstruction Act was abhorrent to many white southerners because it included citizenship, the right to vote for African American men, and southern states would have 3-5 years out of the Union.
White anger at losing its labor force and the possibility of having to share political and economic power led to the attempt to re-enslave people through sharecropping, crop lien, Jim Crow laws and America�s home grown terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, which rampaged into the 20th century, killing, burning, maiming, destroying communities and killing thousands of African Americans and any whites who had the temerity to support blacks.
Americans paid $13 billion dollars for the rebuilding of Europe under the Marshall Plan. On the other hand, the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands, known as the Freedman�s Act, was established in March, 1865 to oversee abandoned land; provide food, clothing and health care; negotiate contracts and establish schools. The Commissioner, Gen. Howard, was paid $3,000 per year; his Assistant Commissioners $2,500.Gen. Howard kept the Bureau solvent through land sales and rentals until 1866 when President Johnson undermined this solvency by returning all lands to pre-Civil War owners. The largest set aside of the Freedmen�s Bureau was $500,000 for education. Additionally, African Americans donated $1 million dollars toward their own education by 1870. Was there mismanagement in the Freedmen�s Bureau? Ask yourself, � Is there mismanagement in government today? Do we have dishonest government bureaucrats today?� Of course- and we must not shy away from wrongs committed then, just as we should not shy away from those committed today. But the idea that all persons, most of whom supported the rights of America�s new citizens were �carpetbaggers� and �scalawags� is the use of negative terms to define people who were attempting to uphold the premises of the United States Constitution. We need to stop the name calling and we need to stop using the terminology of the losers to define people.
In spite of the poorly organized Freedmen�s Bureau, which was plagued with corruption, indifference and outright hostility toward blacks, the Bureau did help to lead this country to greater democracy on two fronts:
1. Public education for blacks and poor whites.
2. Women gaining the right to vote
It was a result of the Reconstruction Act that free public education was introduced. Not only the newly freed bondsmen but their poor white counterparts were able for the first time to attend school. Many of the so-called �Carpetbaggers� were in fact idealistic, dedicated, underpaid and overworked teachers-black and white- who understood the importance of helping to create a literate society-one that had been denied the right to education for nearly 250 years. Some of these person included Edmonia Highgate, Tunis Gulic Campbell, Virginia C. Green, Hezekiah Hunter, Blanche Virginia Harris and countless others whose names we know and others whose names are lost in history.
My suggestions to those who wish to continue to rhapsodize and fantasize about the �suffering south� do the following:
1. Declare North Carolina as a separate territory from the United States and attack a United States military installation such as Fort Bragg.
Just try those acts of treason as happened in 1861 and see what happens. Unfortunately, when you start a war and you lose that war, consequences must be paid. Continuing to defend a �lost cause� only means you continue to suffer.
The south lost the war and the result has been the growth of a huge, powerfully rich country known as the United States of America that most of us are lucky to be a part of.
Nancy Shakir