“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.”
Smedley D. Butler
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 23, 2015
DEVASTATION IN THE SOUTH
Many of the South's largest cities, and much of its human and material resources, were destroyed during the Civil War by the Union armies.
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
- Describe the devastation wreaked on the South by the Civil War
KEY POINTS
- Much of the livestock and farming supplies of the South were also destroyed.
- The South transformed from a prosperous minority of landholders to a tenant agriculture system.
- Many of the recently freed slaves could only find jobs in unskilled and service industries.
- One in four white Southern men of military age was killed during the war.
- After emancipation, the entire economy of the South had to be rebuilt on a different basis.
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
- Describe the devastation wreaked on the South by the Civil War
KEY POINTS
- Much of the livestock and farming supplies of the South were also destroyed.
- The South transformed from a prosperous minority of landholders to a tenant agriculture system.
- Many of the recently freed slaves could only find jobs in unskilled and service industries.
- One in four white Southern men of military age was killed during the war.
- After emancipation, the entire economy of the South had to be rebuilt on a different basis.
Reconstruction played out against a backdrop of a once prosperous economy in ruins. The Confederacy in 1861 had 297 towns and cities with a combined population of 835,000; of these, 162 locations with 681,000 total residents were at one point occupied by Union forces. Eleven were destroyed or severely damaged by war action, including Atlanta, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; and Richmond, Virginia. These eleven contained 115,900 people in the 1860 census, or 14% of the urban South. The number of people who lived in the destroyed towns represented just over 1% of the Confederacy's combined urban and rural populations. In addition, 45 courthouses were burned (out of 830), destroying the documentation for the legal relationships in the affected communities.
Farms were in disrepair, and the prewar stock of horses, mules and cattle was much depleted, with two-fifths of the South's livestock killed. 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. The transportation infrastructure lay in ruins, with little railroad or riverboat service available to move crops and animals to market. Railroad mileage was located mostly in rural areas and over two-thirds of the South's rails, bridges, rail yards, repair shops and rolling stock were in areas reached by Union armies, which systematically destroyed what they could. Even in untouched areas, the lack of maintenance and repair, the absence of new equipment, the heavy over-use, and the deliberate relocation of equipment by the Confederates from remote areas to the war zone ensured the system would be ruined at war's end. Restoring the infrastructure—especially the railroad system—became a high priority for Reconstruction state governments.
The enormous cost of the Confederate war effort took a high toll on the South's economic infrastructure. The direct costs to the Confederacy in human capital, government expenditures, and physical destruction from the war totaled $3.3 billion. By 1865, the Confederate dollar was worthless due to massive inflation, and people in the South had to resort to bartering services for goods, or else use scarce Union dollars. With the emancipation of the southern slaves, the entire economy of the South had to be rebuilt. Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, white planters had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops. As a result, a system of sharecropping was developed where landowners broke up large plantations and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families. The South was transformed from a prosperous minority of landed gentry slaveholders into a tenant farming agriculture system.
The end of the Civil War was accompanied by a large migration of new freedpeople to the cities. In the cities, African Americans were relegated to the lowest paying jobs such as unskilled and service labor. Men worked as rail workers, rolling and lumber mills workers, and hotels workers. The large population of slave artisans during antebellum had not translated into a large number of freemen artisans during the Reconstruction. Black women were largely confined to domestic work employed as cooks, maids, and child nurses. Others worked in hotels. A large number became laundresses.
Over a fourth of Southern white men of military age—meaning the backbone of the South's white workforce—died during the war, leaving countless families destitute. Per capita income for white southerners declined from $125 in 1857 to a low of $80 in 1879. By the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the South was locked into a system of poverty. How much of this failure was caused by the war and by previous reliance on agriculture remains the subject of debate among economists and historians.
Broad Street, Charleston, South Carolina
This photograph of Broad Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, taken in 1865, shows the devastation of the South following the Civil War.
Source: Boundless. “Devastation in the South.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 19 Jun. 2015. Retrieved 23 Jun. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/reconstruction-1865-1877-19/the-aftermath-of-the-war-138/devastation-in-the-south-733-6732/
Farms were in disrepair, and the prewar stock of horses, mules and cattle was much depleted, with two-fifths of the South's livestock killed. 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. The transportation infrastructure lay in ruins, with little railroad or riverboat service available to move crops and animals to market. Railroad mileage was located mostly in rural areas and over two-thirds of the South's rails, bridges, rail yards, repair shops and rolling stock were in areas reached by Union armies, which systematically destroyed what they could. Even in untouched areas, the lack of maintenance and repair, the absence of new equipment, the heavy over-use, and the deliberate relocation of equipment by the Confederates from remote areas to the war zone ensured the system would be ruined at war's end. Restoring the infrastructure—especially the railroad system—became a high priority for Reconstruction state governments.
The enormous cost of the Confederate war effort took a high toll on the South's economic infrastructure. The direct costs to the Confederacy in human capital, government expenditures, and physical destruction from the war totaled $3.3 billion. By 1865, the Confederate dollar was worthless due to massive inflation, and people in the South had to resort to bartering services for goods, or else use scarce Union dollars. With the emancipation of the southern slaves, the entire economy of the South had to be rebuilt. Having lost their enormous investment in slaves, white planters had minimal capital to pay freedmen workers to bring in crops. As a result, a system of sharecropping was developed where landowners broke up large plantations and rented small lots to the freedmen and their families. The South was transformed from a prosperous minority of landed gentry slaveholders into a tenant farming agriculture system.
The end of the Civil War was accompanied by a large migration of new freedpeople to the cities. In the cities, African Americans were relegated to the lowest paying jobs such as unskilled and service labor. Men worked as rail workers, rolling and lumber mills workers, and hotels workers. The large population of slave artisans during antebellum had not translated into a large number of freemen artisans during the Reconstruction. Black women were largely confined to domestic work employed as cooks, maids, and child nurses. Others worked in hotels. A large number became laundresses.
Over a fourth of Southern white men of military age—meaning the backbone of the South's white workforce—died during the war, leaving countless families destitute. Per capita income for white southerners declined from $125 in 1857 to a low of $80 in 1879. By the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, the South was locked into a system of poverty. How much of this failure was caused by the war and by previous reliance on agriculture remains the subject of debate among economists and historians.
Broad Street, Charleston, South Carolina
This photograph of Broad Street, in Charleston, South Carolina, taken in 1865, shows the devastation of the South following the Civil War.
Source: Boundless. “Devastation in the South.” Boundless U.S. History. Boundless, 19 Jun. 2015. Retrieved 23 Jun. 2015 from https://www.boundless.com/u-s-history/textbooks/boundless-u-s-history-textbook/reconstruction-1865-1877-19/the-aftermath-of-the-war-138/devastation-in-the-south-733-6732/
Monday, June 22, 2015
THE POST CIVIL WAR SOUTH
That the South in these postwar years desperately needed the best thought the country could give was only too apparent. The South had been broken by the war. Lands were devastated. Proud plantations were now mere wrecks. Billions of economic value in slaves had been wiped away by emancipation measures without that compensation which Lincoln himself had admitted to be equitable. Difficult social problems presented themselves in the sudden elevation of a servile race to the status of free laborers and enfranchised citizens. Accumulated capital had disappeared. Banks were shattered; factories were dismantled; the structure of business intercourse had crumbled. In Atlanta, Columbia, Mobile, Richmond, and many other places great havoc had been wrought by fire.
The interior of South Carolina, in the wake of Sherman's march, "looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation--the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters. In the city of Columbia . . .a thin fringe of houses encircled a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings, which had been destroyed by a sweeping conflagration." The Tennessee valley, according to the account of an English traveler, "consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete. . . . The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt up gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left standing, and in large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. . . . Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many who were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their places."
Many of the people had no homes. "From Winchester to Harrisonburg scarce a crop, fence, chicken, horse, cow, or pig was in sight. . . . Extreme destitution prevailed throughout the entire valley. All able-bodied negroes had left; only those unfit to work remained. The country between Washington and Richmond was . . . like a desert." Southerners were without adequate currency. They had put their wealth into Confederate bonds or had given their produce for such bonds; now these securities, together with Confederate money, were utterly worthless. Prominent men, including Confederate generals, were "asking what they could do to earn their bread." The city of Richmond may be taken as an example. A Federal relief commission was formed; the city was divided into thirty districts; and house-to-house visiting was instituted. By April 21, 1865, rations to the number of 128,000 had been issued; and it was estimated that 15,000 persons had been given relief. A report of the time stated that 35,000 persons in the region near Atlanta were dependent for subsistence upon the Federal government, and that in Atlanta itself there were 15,000 recipients. Many Confederate soldiers, just discharged from Northern prisons, were given rations. A Southern soldier remarked that "it must be a matter of gratitude as well as surprise, for our people to see a Government which was lately fighting us with fire, and sword, and shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed. . . . There is much in this that takes away the bitter sting . . . of the past."
The war, as already noted, killed a quarter of a million soldiers of the South. The number of civilians that perished as a by-product of the struggle cannot be estimated. What had taken place was the collapse of a civilization. In one community in South Carolina, wrote a contemporary observer, "lived a gentleman whose income, when the war broke out, was rated at $150,000 a year. . . . Not a vestige of his whole vast property of millions remains today. Not far distant were the estates of a large proprietor and a well-known family, rich and distinguished for generations. The slaves are gone. The family is gone. A single scion of the house remains, and he peddles tea by the pound and molasses by the quart, on a corner of the old homestead, to the former slaves of the family, and thereby earns his livelihood."
A Louisiana citizen told a United States senator of a postwar visit to sugar plantations on the Bayou Teche -- the "garden spot of Louisiana." In prewar days, he said, with the "Devil of Slavery" in the land, this region presented a picture of fully cultivated fields, neatly whitewashed cabins for the hands, and sugar houses of the best construction, making the whole scene a "paradise to the eye." Now, with the devil of slavery gone, sugar houses had been destroyed, fences burned, weeds and brush were taking possession, and not a plantation was in decent order. Planters were without money or credit, could not borrow, and had no means of hiring or maintaining hands. A Louisiana planter who in 1861 had a sugar crop worth $125,000 was brushing his own shoes and dispensing with house service in postwar days. From High Shoals, North Carolina, came an eye-witness account of conditions in that state: "almost thorough starvation from the failure of the last years crop"; "ten beggars here to one in Washington"; "whole families ... coming in from South Carolina to seek food and obtain employment"; "agriculturists . . . entirely stripped by the Confederacy and . . . forced into the ranks to return to their poor wives and children destitute and unable to get any work." Summing up the situation, this writer said: "A more completely crushed country I have seldom witnessed." "The great majority," he added, "are as loyal to the Union as I could wish to see them."
Areas lately within the Confederacy were treated as conquered provinces and Federal troops were kept in occupation of the principal towns. The presence of these Federal soldiers, many of them Negroes, at a time when Southern armies had been disbanded and the wearing of the Southern uniform prohibited, was referred to by the Alabama legislature as "a constant source of irritation to the people . . . [which had] doubtless provoked at various times unpleasant collisions." It was not merely that violence and even death resulted from clashes between the soldiers and ex-Confederates; the white people felt shocked and insulted by Negro troops in their midst, being "jostled from the sidewalks by dusky guards" among whom they recognized, in some cases, their former servants.
Transportation, meager and primitive enough before the war, was now in a pitiful state after the destruction incidental to military operations. Roads had fallen into disrepair; horses and mules, and the food to support them, became "scarce and dear"; "wagons and ambulances were about the only vehicles which remained fit." On Mississippi's main north-and-south line "the stations were burned, the rolling stock had disappeared, and most of the roadbed and the bridges had been destroyed." The thoroughness of railroad destruction in Georgia has already been noted. The Charleston and Savannah road was "a mere wreck; every bridge and trestle was destroyed, including the magnificent and costly bridges over the Ashley, Edisto, and Savannah rivers; the depot in Charleston was burned, as well as the depots and buildings at eleven of the way stations, and nearly the whole track torn up." The close of the war found the Greenville and Columbia Railroad a sad victim not only of Federal invasion but of requisition by the government at Richmond, as compensation for which the road "had the bonds and notes of a fallen government." These instances were but typical of conditions throughout the South. Railroad facilities were in need of thorough rebuilding; but "unstable political conditions, fraud, mismanagement, trade conditions, and lack of financial resources" made the work of rehabilitation slow and difficult.
If space permitted, it would be of interest to note the reaction of particular individuals in the South to the changed situation after Appomattox. To some the outcome was not a shock at all, but a relief. "I was not disappointed at the result of the war [wrote H. V. Johnson of Georgia]--I feared defeat and disaster from the beginning--I believed slavery would fall with the Confederacy. . . " In an address to his fellow citizens in September, 1865, Alexander H. H. Stuart of Virginia stated his position. He had been "inflexibly opposed" to the secession of Virginia and refused to change his vote cast in convention against the ordinance. After hostilities opened he voted to ratify the ordinance, he said, "not because I approved it, but because I believed that [otherwise] . . . we should have an internecine war added to the civil war which had already been inaugurated." During the war he usually abstained from public affairs; and "all assistance I gave to the Confederate cause [he declared] was by feeding the hungry" and otherwise assisting in soldier relief. His sympathies were, however, naturally with his own people and he was proud of their wartime gallantry and honor. After the surrender of Lee he prepared and signed a call for a mass meeting in Augusta County in order to facilitate restoration; later in the same year he was chosen by his district for membership in the Federal Congress in a campaign in which he urged his opposition to secession as a reason for his choice in the hope that it would appeal to conservative men in the North.
There were many Johnsons and Stuarts; but on the other hand there were conspicuous cases of Southerners to whom defeat seemed unbearable. General Early first betook himself to Mexico; then he went to Canada; after that he sought unsuccessfully to promote the emigration of ex-Confederates to New Zealand. The scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury sought after the war to bring about a similar colonization of former Confederates in Mexico; J. P. Benjamin, escaping through Florida and the Bahamas, made his way to England, where he became Queens counsel and practiced law with distinction. Breckinridge departed to Europe via the Florida Keys and Cuba. Edmund Ruffin, bequeathing unmitigated hatred of Yankees to Southerners yet unborn, ended his life by a pistol shot.
Source: "The Civil War and Reconstruction" by J.G. Randall and David Herbert Donald
http://www.civilwarhome.com/postwarsouth.html
The interior of South Carolina, in the wake of Sherman's march, "looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation--the fences all gone; lonesome smoke stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood; the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters. In the city of Columbia . . .a thin fringe of houses encircled a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings, which had been destroyed by a sweeping conflagration." The Tennessee valley, according to the account of an English traveler, "consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete. . . . The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt up gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left standing, and in large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. . . . Borne down by losses, debts, and accumulating taxes, many who were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their places."
Many of the people had no homes. "From Winchester to Harrisonburg scarce a crop, fence, chicken, horse, cow, or pig was in sight. . . . Extreme destitution prevailed throughout the entire valley. All able-bodied negroes had left; only those unfit to work remained. The country between Washington and Richmond was . . . like a desert." Southerners were without adequate currency. They had put their wealth into Confederate bonds or had given their produce for such bonds; now these securities, together with Confederate money, were utterly worthless. Prominent men, including Confederate generals, were "asking what they could do to earn their bread." The city of Richmond may be taken as an example. A Federal relief commission was formed; the city was divided into thirty districts; and house-to-house visiting was instituted. By April 21, 1865, rations to the number of 128,000 had been issued; and it was estimated that 15,000 persons had been given relief. A report of the time stated that 35,000 persons in the region near Atlanta were dependent for subsistence upon the Federal government, and that in Atlanta itself there were 15,000 recipients. Many Confederate soldiers, just discharged from Northern prisons, were given rations. A Southern soldier remarked that "it must be a matter of gratitude as well as surprise, for our people to see a Government which was lately fighting us with fire, and sword, and shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed. . . . There is much in this that takes away the bitter sting . . . of the past."
The war, as already noted, killed a quarter of a million soldiers of the South. The number of civilians that perished as a by-product of the struggle cannot be estimated. What had taken place was the collapse of a civilization. In one community in South Carolina, wrote a contemporary observer, "lived a gentleman whose income, when the war broke out, was rated at $150,000 a year. . . . Not a vestige of his whole vast property of millions remains today. Not far distant were the estates of a large proprietor and a well-known family, rich and distinguished for generations. The slaves are gone. The family is gone. A single scion of the house remains, and he peddles tea by the pound and molasses by the quart, on a corner of the old homestead, to the former slaves of the family, and thereby earns his livelihood."
A Louisiana citizen told a United States senator of a postwar visit to sugar plantations on the Bayou Teche -- the "garden spot of Louisiana." In prewar days, he said, with the "Devil of Slavery" in the land, this region presented a picture of fully cultivated fields, neatly whitewashed cabins for the hands, and sugar houses of the best construction, making the whole scene a "paradise to the eye." Now, with the devil of slavery gone, sugar houses had been destroyed, fences burned, weeds and brush were taking possession, and not a plantation was in decent order. Planters were without money or credit, could not borrow, and had no means of hiring or maintaining hands. A Louisiana planter who in 1861 had a sugar crop worth $125,000 was brushing his own shoes and dispensing with house service in postwar days. From High Shoals, North Carolina, came an eye-witness account of conditions in that state: "almost thorough starvation from the failure of the last years crop"; "ten beggars here to one in Washington"; "whole families ... coming in from South Carolina to seek food and obtain employment"; "agriculturists . . . entirely stripped by the Confederacy and . . . forced into the ranks to return to their poor wives and children destitute and unable to get any work." Summing up the situation, this writer said: "A more completely crushed country I have seldom witnessed." "The great majority," he added, "are as loyal to the Union as I could wish to see them."
Areas lately within the Confederacy were treated as conquered provinces and Federal troops were kept in occupation of the principal towns. The presence of these Federal soldiers, many of them Negroes, at a time when Southern armies had been disbanded and the wearing of the Southern uniform prohibited, was referred to by the Alabama legislature as "a constant source of irritation to the people . . . [which had] doubtless provoked at various times unpleasant collisions." It was not merely that violence and even death resulted from clashes between the soldiers and ex-Confederates; the white people felt shocked and insulted by Negro troops in their midst, being "jostled from the sidewalks by dusky guards" among whom they recognized, in some cases, their former servants.
Transportation, meager and primitive enough before the war, was now in a pitiful state after the destruction incidental to military operations. Roads had fallen into disrepair; horses and mules, and the food to support them, became "scarce and dear"; "wagons and ambulances were about the only vehicles which remained fit." On Mississippi's main north-and-south line "the stations were burned, the rolling stock had disappeared, and most of the roadbed and the bridges had been destroyed." The thoroughness of railroad destruction in Georgia has already been noted. The Charleston and Savannah road was "a mere wreck; every bridge and trestle was destroyed, including the magnificent and costly bridges over the Ashley, Edisto, and Savannah rivers; the depot in Charleston was burned, as well as the depots and buildings at eleven of the way stations, and nearly the whole track torn up." The close of the war found the Greenville and Columbia Railroad a sad victim not only of Federal invasion but of requisition by the government at Richmond, as compensation for which the road "had the bonds and notes of a fallen government." These instances were but typical of conditions throughout the South. Railroad facilities were in need of thorough rebuilding; but "unstable political conditions, fraud, mismanagement, trade conditions, and lack of financial resources" made the work of rehabilitation slow and difficult.
If space permitted, it would be of interest to note the reaction of particular individuals in the South to the changed situation after Appomattox. To some the outcome was not a shock at all, but a relief. "I was not disappointed at the result of the war [wrote H. V. Johnson of Georgia]--I feared defeat and disaster from the beginning--I believed slavery would fall with the Confederacy. . . " In an address to his fellow citizens in September, 1865, Alexander H. H. Stuart of Virginia stated his position. He had been "inflexibly opposed" to the secession of Virginia and refused to change his vote cast in convention against the ordinance. After hostilities opened he voted to ratify the ordinance, he said, "not because I approved it, but because I believed that [otherwise] . . . we should have an internecine war added to the civil war which had already been inaugurated." During the war he usually abstained from public affairs; and "all assistance I gave to the Confederate cause [he declared] was by feeding the hungry" and otherwise assisting in soldier relief. His sympathies were, however, naturally with his own people and he was proud of their wartime gallantry and honor. After the surrender of Lee he prepared and signed a call for a mass meeting in Augusta County in order to facilitate restoration; later in the same year he was chosen by his district for membership in the Federal Congress in a campaign in which he urged his opposition to secession as a reason for his choice in the hope that it would appeal to conservative men in the North.
There were many Johnsons and Stuarts; but on the other hand there were conspicuous cases of Southerners to whom defeat seemed unbearable. General Early first betook himself to Mexico; then he went to Canada; after that he sought unsuccessfully to promote the emigration of ex-Confederates to New Zealand. The scientist Matthew Fontaine Maury sought after the war to bring about a similar colonization of former Confederates in Mexico; J. P. Benjamin, escaping through Florida and the Bahamas, made his way to England, where he became Queens counsel and practiced law with distinction. Breckinridge departed to Europe via the Florida Keys and Cuba. Edmund Ruffin, bequeathing unmitigated hatred of Yankees to Southerners yet unborn, ended his life by a pistol shot.
Source: "The Civil War and Reconstruction" by J.G. Randall and David Herbert Donald
http://www.civilwarhome.com/postwarsouth.html
THE SOUTH AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
Richmond, Virginia in ruins.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kim_scarborough/490761515/
The North had to thoroughly defeat the South to claim victory in the Civil War. As the conflict wore on, the Southern army suffered depravations, but refused to surrender. President Lincoln knew he had to leave no doubt that the South had been defeated. The Union armies marched through the region destroying everything useful for the war effort. In the aftermath, the region lay in ruins. It took a century for the South to recover from the destruction wrought by the Union armies.
The Union armies destroyed four major southern cities. Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia, and Richmond lay smoldering at war’s end. Seven other major urban centers burned. Overall, over 50% of urban areas were destroyed. This destruction hampered southern industrial strength, but only represented about 1% of the total population.
Most southerners lived in the country, but were not spared the Union’s wrath. The war decimated the rural south. Most of the able-bodied men fought in the war. Around 200,000 died and thousands others wounded and maimed. On top of this, emancipation further reduced the workforce. Moreover, thousands of farm animals died or were confiscated further restricting the food supply and labor.
Union armies confiscated whatever they needed, including animals, as they marched through the South. They destroyed what was not needed and torched farmland. Even if a farm survived unscathed, the destruction of the southern transportation infrastructure made travel to market impossible. In the end, the destruction totaled over $3 billion as the Confederate dollar became worthless.
In 1865, few southerners held American money. A system of barter and sharecropping developed. Income declined by over 30%. Meanwhile, many African Americans migrated to the cities to look for work. They mostly took low paying menial labor jobs, which further depressed wages. Others returned to their old masters to work as sharecroppers. By the early 20th century, the South was locked into a cycle of poverty. Despite attempts at Reconstruction, the region did not fully recover until the latter half of the century.
The Civil War decimated the South. The region lost its manpower, animal power, infrastructure, and labor force. As a result, income and wealth plummeted drastically. The North moved to reconstruct the region, but failed. In the end, it took a century for the Old South to recover from the war and emerge as the “New South.”
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-south-after-the-civil-war
http://www.examiner.com/article/the-south-after-the-civil-war
Saturday, June 16, 2012
AP - Drones, computers new weapons of US shadow wars
WASHINGTON (AP) — After a decade of costly conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American way of war is evolving toward less brawn, more guile.
Drone aircraft spy on and attack terrorists with no pilot in harm’s way. Small teams of special operations troops quietly train and advise foreign forces. Viruses sent from computers to foreign networks strike silently, with no American fingerprint.
It’s war in the shadows, with the U.S. public largely in the dark.
In Pakistan, armed drones, not U.S. ground troops or B-52 bombers, are hunting down al-Qaida terrorists, and a CIA-run raid of Osama bin Laden’s hide-out was executed by a stealthy team of Navy SEALs.
In Yemen, drones and several dozen U.S. military advisers are trying to help the government tip the balance against an al-Qaida offshoot that harbors hopes of one day attacking the U.S. homeland.
In Somalia, the Horn of Africa country that has not had a fully functioning government since 1991, President Barack Obama secretly has authorized two drone strikes and two commando raids against terrorists.
In Iran, surveillance drones have kept an eye on nuclear activities while a computer attack reportedly has infected its nuclear enrichment facilities with a virus, possibly delaying the day when the U.S. or Israel might feel compelled to drop real bombs on Iran and risk a wider war in the Middle East.
The high-tech warfare allows Obama to target what the administration sees as the greatest threats to U.S. security, without the cost and liabilities of sending a swarm of ground troops to capture territory; some of them almost certainly would come home maimed or dead.
But it also raises questions about accountability and the implications for international norms regarding the use of force outside of traditional armed conflict. The White House took an incremental step Friday toward greater openness about the basic dimensions of its shadowy wars by telling Congress for the first time that the U.S. military has been launching lethal attacks on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen. It did not mention drones, and its admission did not apply to CIA operations.
“Congressional oversight of these operations appears to be cursory and insufficient,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy issues for the Federation of American Scientists, a private group.
“It is Congress’ responsibility to declare war under the Constitution, but instead it appears to have adopted a largely passive role while the executive takes the initiative in war fighting,” Aftergood said in an interview.
That’s partly because lawmakers relinquished their authority by passing a law just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that essentially granted the White House open-ended authority for armed action against al-Qaida.
Secret wars are not new.
For decades, the CIA has carried out covert operations abroad at the president’s direction and with congressional notice. It armed the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who fought Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, for example. In recent years the U.S. military’s secretive commando units have operated more widely, even in countries where the U.S. is not at war, and that’s blurred the lines between the intelligence and military spheres.
In this shroud of secrecy, leaks to the news media of classified details about certain covert operations have led to charges that the White House orchestrated the revelations to bolster Obama’s national security credentials and thereby improve his re-election chances. The White House has denied the accusations.
The leaks exposed details of U.S. computer virus attacks on Iran’s nuclear program, the foiling of an al-Qaida bomb plot targeting U.S. aircraft, and other secret operations.
Two U.S. attorneys are heading separate FBI investigations into leaks of national security information, and Congress is conducting its own probe.
It’s not just the news media that has pressed the administration for information about its shadowy wars.
Some in Congress, particularly those lawmakers most skeptical of the need for U.S. foreign interventions, are objecting to the administration’s drone wars. They are demanding a fuller explanation of how, for example, drone strikes are authorized and executed in cases in which the identity of the targeted terrorist is not confirmed.
“Our drone campaigns already have virtually no transparency, accountability or oversight,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and 25 other mostly anti-war members of Congress wrote Obama on Tuesday.
A few dozen lawmakers are briefed on the CIA’s covert action and clandestine military activity, and some may ask to review drone strike video and be granted access to after-action reports on strikes and other clandestine actions. But until two months ago, the administration had not formally confirmed in public its use of armed drones.
In an April speech in Washington, Obama’s counterterrorism chief, John Brennan, acknowledged that despite presidential assurances of a judicious use of force against terrorists, some still question the legality of drone strikes.
“So let me say it as simply as I can: Yes, in full accordance with the law — and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives — the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific al-Qaida terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” he said.
President George W. Bush authorized drone strikes in Pakistan and elsewhere, but Obama has vastly increased the numbers. According to Bill Roggio of The Long War Journal, an online publication that tracks U.S. counterterrorism operations, the U.S. under Obama has carried out an estimated 254 drone strikes in Pakistan alone. That compares with 47 strikes during the Bush administration.
In at least one case the target was an American. Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida leader, was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in September.
According to a White House list released late last year, U.S. counterterrorism operations have removed more than 30 terrorist leaders around the globe. They include al-Qaida in East Africa “planner” Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, who was killed in a helicopter strike in Somalia.
The drone campaign is highly unpopular overseas.
A Pew Research Center survey on the U.S. image abroad found that in 17 of 21 countries surveyed, more than half of the people disapproved of U.S. drone attacks targeting extremist leaders in such places as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. In the U.S., 62 percent approved of the drone campaign, making American public opinion the clear exception.
The U.S. use of cyberweapons, like viruses that sabotage computer networks or other high-tech tools that can invade computers and steal data, is even more closely shielded by official secrecy and, arguably, less well understood.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been a leading critic of the administration’s handling of information about using computers as a tool of war.
“I think that cyberattacks are one of the greatest threats that we face,” McCain said in a recent interview, “and we have a very divided and not very well-informed Congress addressing it.”
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and national security officials often talk publicly about improving U.S. defenses against cyberattack, not only on U.S. government computer systems but also against defense contractors and other private networks linked, for example, to the U.S. financial system or electrical grid. Left largely unexplained is the U.S. capacity to use computer viruses and other cyberweapons against foreign targets.
In the view of some, the White House has cut Congress out of the loop, even in the realm of overt warfare.
Sen. James Webb, D-Va., who saw combat in Vietnam as a Marine, introduced legislation last month that would require that the president seek congressional approval before committing U.S. forces in civil conflicts, such as last year’s armed intervention in Libya, in which there is no imminent security threat to the U.S.
“Year by year, skirmish by skirmish, the role of the Congress in determining where the U.S. military would operate, and when the awesome power of our weapon systems would be unleashed has diminished,” Webb said.
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