osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2019-10-29 08:50 am
osprey_archer) wrote2019-10-29 08:50 am
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A Couple of Civil War Books
“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.
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Generally they seem to have considered it crushingly unjust whenever anything didn’t go 100% their own way This characterizes a fair percentage of the people I meet, of *any* political stripe.
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There was a fellow who lost both his forearms, Samuel H. Decker, who served as doorkeeper for the U.S. House of Representatives after the war wearing a pair of artificial arms. So clearly his artificial arms gave him a certain amount of dexterity. But perhaps the model was difficult to use, or very expensive, or something; there was clearly some reason most arm amputees didn't think the artificial arms were worth it.
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I read Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen by Philip Dray a few years ago, which is probably mostly the same information (though with a different focus) as The Thin Light of Freedom, but it's really stuck in my mind ever since.
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The thing that gets me about the what-ifs of Reconstruction is that, in order for Reconstruction to work, southern whites would have needed to be less stubbornly attached to their white supremacist beliefs and their desire to keep their social structure as unchanged as possible (they conceded that slavery was over, but that was absolutely their only concession to change) - but if these imaginary less-stubborn southerners existed, there would never have been Reconstruction because there never would have been a Civil War in the first place, because they would not have thrown a hissy fit and seceded after Lincoln's election.
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Unfortunately it didn't actually focus that much on Congress – the title's a bit misleading – though it did focus on the black leaders who managed to get elected positions (though not all in Congress) during the brief years that Reconstruction actually worked, and the white supremacists who lead to their downfall.
I keep thinking that if the federal government had been a bit more forceful, more willing to call in the troops to enforce the new legal civil rights, it could have worked out – but they probably would have needed to maintain that for an entire generation, to bring up new Southerners more used to the new status quo, and there's no way they could have gotten the electoral support for that. The North too, was tired and bored and just didn't want to deal anymore.
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But it's also possible that violence would have erupted when the Union forces pulled out, even if it happened decades after the war ended. There are other historical examples of violence erupting after an occupying force leaves. But who knows! This is the frustrating thing about historical what-ifs: maybe things could have gone better, but they also might have just gone bad differently.
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Yeah, that sounds horribly accurate....and also horribly familiar, right now (thinking of Coates's We Were Eight Years in Power, which links Obama with Reconstruction).
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