Southern Heritage & The Terrible Swift Sword

The Plundering of the South Part 3

Reconstruction Era

Feb 01, 2025

At the end of the Civil War in the spring of 1865, the South had lost over 254,000 men killed in battle or died of wounds and disease. Of the 194,000 seriously wounded, at least half had some physical disability from the loss of limbs, eyes, or other crippling injuries. Destruction of public and private property was widespread. In the states of South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi where the North’s total war policies had been most zealously carried out my Sherman, private property destruction exceeded 50 percent. In Virginia, Sheridan’s troops laid bare the fertile Shenandoah Valley. The loss of private property included not only homes and furnishings, but barns, livestock, crops, tools, and means of transportation. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. Two-thirds of the South’s railroads were destroyed or severely crippled. Countless bridges and river transports had been destroyed. Many industries and businesses had been laid waste. Most of Columbia, Atlanta, and much of Charleston had been deliberately torched. In Oxford, Mississippi, only one commercial business was left standing. Many small towns in numerous states vanished leaving only a smoldering trace they ever existed. General Sherman himself gave a vivid description of Southern devastation after the War.

“Mourning in every household, desolation written in broad characters across the whole face of their country, cities in ashes and fields laid waste, their commerce gone…Ruin, poverty, and distress everywhere, and now pestilence…adding to their misery.”

The South was prostrate and destitute. In contrast to Lincoln’s total was policy, with some exceptions the United Staes pursued a more benevolent policy towards citizens and private property during the Second World War. At the end of WWII in 1945, the United States sought to secure future peace and the common good with massive assistance in rebuilding the economies of West Europe, including West Germany and Italy. That was the *Marshall Plan. Reconstruction after the Civil War, there was no Marshall Plan.

Reconstruction was not a plan to rehabilitate the Southern economy. It was a plan to remake the South into an ideological image of the North, plunder its resources and economy, insure Republican political power in Washington for the long-term, and punish the South for its rebellion. The most intelligent and humane method of providing economic recovery is to cut taxes and government regulations, and to provide government assistance in rebuilding infrastructure and meeting urgent humanitarian needs. Instead, the North instituted punitive taxes and sent swarms of tax collectors and despotic government regulators to oversee the plunder and humiliation of the South. They were accomplished by swarms of political opportunists, shameless swindlers, and militant do-doers.

The high tariff policies that touched off Southern secession in 1860-1861were instituted and kept in place until 1906. As feared, these high tariffs increased the costs of living and business in the South. This put its chief export, cotton, at a competitive disadvantage with Brazilian, Indian, and Egyptian cotton. The tax revenues, mostly collected in the South, were used to enrich and subsidize Northern industry and build Northern infrastructure.

One asset the South had left after the war despite all the destruction was five million bales of cotton. Prices were also at an all-time high of fifty cents to one dollar a pound. The North confiscated three million bales of this cotton on the grounds of its association with owners who had previously sold cotton to the Confederate government. Cotton raised by slaves was also subjected to a twenty-five percent tax. It was up to the owners of cotton to prove the absence of any Confederate or slave taint, so U. S. Treasury agents frequently made some arrangements to clear the cotton by some means of bribery. Many Treasury agents were racketeers, using threats of total confiscation, if an appropriate bribe was not forthcoming. They also purchased cotton at low prices using this racketeering scheme. One Texas widow was forced to sell her 400 bales of cotton valued at $200 per bale for $75 per bale or have it confiscated by Confederate taint. Treasury agents took their payment in cotton. They were normally entitled to twenty to fifty percent of the confiscated cotton as their fee, but their shameless greed exceeded their authority. They were willing to defraud the U.S. Government as well as cotton owners. Some were caught red-handed in these schemes but were released by the Army.

In addition, a three cents per pound export tax was put on cotton. This was to pay for the war, which according to the Northern party line, Southerners had started. When cotton returned to its normal price range of twelve to eighteen cents per pound, the three-cent tax was a twenty percent burden. As usual, Treasury agents often settled for a bribe. A transportation fee of four cents per pound was also charged for the privilege of getting it to market. Cotton planters were forced to survive a gauntlet of numerous Treasury agents, racketeers, and swindlers in getting their cotton to market with no profit at all. Reconstruction governments were dominated by opportunistic carpetbaggers with little sympathy for Southerners with their own fingers deep into corruption, this left white Southerners little legal recourse. That’s when the Southerners began to call on the KKK for justice. Usually only a Klan warning for the Treasury agent to leave town was sufficient for cotton producers to get their cotton to market. The cotton tax was removed in 1868 in response to falling cotton production and increasing embarrassment in Congress. Also, two-thirds of the Northern opportunists who bought cotton plantations at distressed prices, failed in the cotton business. One Florida failure in the cotton business was Harriet Beecher Stowe. Treasury Secretary, Hugh McCulloch, was finally forced to admit by conscience:

“I am sure I sent some honest agents south; but it sometimes seems very doubtful whether any of them remained honest for very long.”

The carpetbagger states legislatures were notorious for extravagant personal spending abused, arranging legislation for personal partisan profiteering, for bribe-taking, and for costly maladministration. Taxes were raised for property owners. For the average Southern state, property taxes were four times as high in 1872 as in 1865. In South Carolina, property taxes increased thirty-fold. These taxes were not really repaying spending deficits as it took Alabama and South Carolina almost one hundred years to pay off the deficit spending in the Reconstruction era. The primary reason was to force Southern property owners to sell their land at distressed prices. At one time, over twenty percent of the land in Mississippi was for sale under property tax duress. Again, Southerners had little recourse to law. It was truly a case of taxation without representation. Most white Southerners had been disenfranchised because they served the Confederate cause. In the present era we are again rapidly reaching the dangerous point where tax consumers can out vote taxpayers.

It is only in more recent years that the South has been able to overcome the economic abuse of Reconstruction. South Carolina ranked third; Mississippi was fifth; and Georgia was the eighth. In 1880, Louisiana ranked as number thirty-seven. South Carolina had fallen to number forty-five, Mississippi to forty-six, and Georgia to number forty. These figures are somewhat distorted because of the change in status of former slaves from 1860 to 1880. Contrary to popular opinion, according to Nobel Laureate economists R.W. Fogel and S.L. Engerman, both professed liberals, black slaves in the South had a higher living standard in nutrition, housing, leisure times, medical care, and old age security than did the Northern factory workers. Their 1974 book, Time on the Cross, was not an apology for slavery, but a realistic look at the actual conditions of slavery, which were far less degraded than what most modern Americans imagine. Despite nominal legal improvements, black economic and political progress was substantially retarded by Reconstruction.

The bottom line is that the Reconstruction further devasted the South and retarded its economic recovery by many decades. The primary economic beneficiary was the Northeast. The primary political effect of the War and Reconstruction was that we evolved from a philosophy of limited government to big, powerful, highly centralized unlimited government. The degree of corruption and despotism during Reconstruction may seem incredible, but they were the natural result of a collusion of big government and politically connected businesses unchecked by the consent of the governed.

Robert E. Lee had accepted defeat at Appomattox and encouraged his men to go home and be good Americans. But in 1879 after five years of Reconstruction, he told Fletcher Stockdale, former Governor of Texas this:

“Governor, if I had foreseen the use of those people designed to make use of their victory, there would have been no surrender at Appomattox; no, sir, not by me. Had I foreseen these results of subjugation, I would have preferred to die at Appomattox with my brave men, my sword in my right hand.”