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A Couple of Civil War Books
Oct. 29th, 2019 08:50 am“If Lincoln had lived, some dreamed, had Johnson been a statesman, had more moderate Republicans taken the reins, Reconstruction could have mended rather than divided the nation, they argued. Some Radicals, for their part, believed that a firmer stand by the North at the moment of surrender, when the white South was malleable and quiescent, might have set the nation on a course of greater justice.”
The above quote comes from Edward L Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which is (among other things) a refutation of both of the above viewpoints. Reconstruction, he argues, could not have mended the nation, because there never was a moment when the white south was malleable and quiescent; in fact,“the white South had never, for a moment, proved willing to accept more than the end of slavery and the end of the Confederacy as the price of defeat.”
In other words, the overwhelming majority of white southerners accepted neither moral responsibility for the war nor the moral imperative of racial equality. Reconstruction failed because these white southerners rolled back as much of Reconstruction as possible ( through both politics and violence) as soon as the Union troops left. And this would have held true even if Reconstruction had been more moderate, because the white South would have considered any Reconstruction, no matter how mild, tantamount to tyranny.
(After Lincoln’s assassination, some southerners began to speak wistfully of him: if Lincoln was alive, he wouldn’t let the Radical Republicans treat him so unjustly, etc. etc. Of course it’s impossible to know exactly what course Lincoln would have followed had he lived, but I think it’s fair odds that no matter what he did, the white South would have continued to anathemize him as “the tyrant Abraham” just as they did during the war. Generally they seem to have considered it crushingly unjust whenever anything didn’t go 100% their own way.)
The failure of Reconstruction, therefore, occurred not because of the particular policies the Radical Republicans enacted, but because the south refused to comply with any policies without an occupying force to make them do it, and in the end the northern electorate lost the will to maintain that occupying force. Or, as Ayers puts it, “It was not that Reconstruction failed from some internal flaw. Rather, each success consumed political energy, and so did each loss. The Republicans constructed a remarkable machine at every level of government and society, but they ran out of electoral fuel to run the machine.”
***
Guy R. Hasegawa’s Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs has a much narrower focus, naturally. A few notes for future reference:
There were two main artificial leg designs. One, made of willow-staves, was basically a leg-shaped barrel; the other had a central “bone” made of metal; both, unlike the earlier peglegs, had moveable joints at the ankle (and knee, if the leg included a knee). Some models had lateral motion in the ankle as well as up and down, but this was more expensive and debate raged whether it actually improved functionality.
Artificial legs seem to have been much more useful than artificial arms. “The usefulness of an artificial arm, said the U.S. surgeon general in 1892, ‘is regarded as nil, and although some may claim it to be an ornamental addition to a maimed individual, the man with a war record generally prefers his empty sleeve.’”
There’s solid numerical evidence to back this up: once Congress enacted legislation so that every five years (later three) soldiers could either get a replacement limb or the equivalent value in money, roughly 20% of leg amputees took a new leg rather than money, while less than 2% of arm amputees chose an artificial arm. The old soldier with the empty sleeve wasn’t just a literary trope.
Of course, that 20% figure suggests that either veterans were taking remarkable care of their artificial legs, or there were also a good number of leg amputees who either could not or did not care to use a prosthetic - or at least thought $75 cash on the barrel was more useful than a new prosthetic leg.
Not all amputees could wear prosthetics: if the amputation was at the shoulder or hip-joint, there was no stump to fix a prosthetic to, and not all stumps healed so as to be able to support a prosthesis. It also took some months after the amputation for the swelling to go down enough for a prosthetic to be fitted, and one of the difficulties the prosthetic-makers faced was that soldiers often wanted a prosthetic long before the swelling had subsided.
The above quote comes from Edward L Ayers’ The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America, which is (among other things) a refutation of both of the above viewpoints. Reconstruction, he argues, could not have mended the nation, because there never was a moment when the white south was malleable and quiescent; in fact,“the white South had never, for a moment, proved willing to accept more than the end of slavery and the end of the Confederacy as the price of defeat.”
In other words, the overwhelming majority of white southerners accepted neither moral responsibility for the war nor the moral imperative of racial equality. Reconstruction failed because these white southerners rolled back as much of Reconstruction as possible ( through both politics and violence) as soon as the Union troops left. And this would have held true even if Reconstruction had been more moderate, because the white South would have considered any Reconstruction, no matter how mild, tantamount to tyranny.
(After Lincoln’s assassination, some southerners began to speak wistfully of him: if Lincoln was alive, he wouldn’t let the Radical Republicans treat him so unjustly, etc. etc. Of course it’s impossible to know exactly what course Lincoln would have followed had he lived, but I think it’s fair odds that no matter what he did, the white South would have continued to anathemize him as “the tyrant Abraham” just as they did during the war. Generally they seem to have considered it crushingly unjust whenever anything didn’t go 100% their own way.)
The failure of Reconstruction, therefore, occurred not because of the particular policies the Radical Republicans enacted, but because the south refused to comply with any policies without an occupying force to make them do it, and in the end the northern electorate lost the will to maintain that occupying force. Or, as Ayers puts it, “It was not that Reconstruction failed from some internal flaw. Rather, each success consumed political energy, and so did each loss. The Republicans constructed a remarkable machine at every level of government and society, but they ran out of electoral fuel to run the machine.”
***
Guy R. Hasegawa’s Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs has a much narrower focus, naturally. A few notes for future reference:
There were two main artificial leg designs. One, made of willow-staves, was basically a leg-shaped barrel; the other had a central “bone” made of metal; both, unlike the earlier peglegs, had moveable joints at the ankle (and knee, if the leg included a knee). Some models had lateral motion in the ankle as well as up and down, but this was more expensive and debate raged whether it actually improved functionality.
Artificial legs seem to have been much more useful than artificial arms. “The usefulness of an artificial arm, said the U.S. surgeon general in 1892, ‘is regarded as nil, and although some may claim it to be an ornamental addition to a maimed individual, the man with a war record generally prefers his empty sleeve.’”
There’s solid numerical evidence to back this up: once Congress enacted legislation so that every five years (later three) soldiers could either get a replacement limb or the equivalent value in money, roughly 20% of leg amputees took a new leg rather than money, while less than 2% of arm amputees chose an artificial arm. The old soldier with the empty sleeve wasn’t just a literary trope.
Of course, that 20% figure suggests that either veterans were taking remarkable care of their artificial legs, or there were also a good number of leg amputees who either could not or did not care to use a prosthetic - or at least thought $75 cash on the barrel was more useful than a new prosthetic leg.
Not all amputees could wear prosthetics: if the amputation was at the shoulder or hip-joint, there was no stump to fix a prosthetic to, and not all stumps healed so as to be able to support a prosthesis. It also took some months after the amputation for the swelling to go down enough for a prosthetic to be fitted, and one of the difficulties the prosthetic-makers faced was that soldiers often wanted a prosthetic long before the swelling had subsided.
