In this Virginia History Blog on Reconstruction Virginia, we look at the aftermath of the Civil War conflict.
Nation Building in Reconstruction Virginia. “Wars within a War” describes the controversy and conflict that emerged after the end of regular army hostilities. “This Republic of Suffering” accounts for how the survivors of the Civil War carnage came to terms with their losses. “In the Cause of Liberty” relates how the Civil War changed white northerners, white southerners, and African Americans in the North and South. “America Aflame” describes how the Civil War replaced religion with a gospel of economic progress in the American nation of innovation and industry. “The Great Task Before Us” explains how fighting, financing and making sense of the Civil War altered politics and public life in every region.
Social History in Reconstruction Virginia. “Take Care of the Living” relates the efforts to reconstruct the Confederate veteran families in Virginia. “The Big House After Slavery” tells the story f how elite planter families adapted to the new free labor economy. “Freedwomen and the Freedman’s Bureau” describes the initial months after the end of hostilities.
Memory of Reconstruction Virginia. “Dreaming of Dixie” accounts how the South was created in popular American culture, “Race, War, and Rememberance” describes how the upland South was distinct but also a part of the South as a whole. “Almighty God Created the Races” is the narrative of American law, interracial marriage and Christianity from the days of Reconstruction in the mid-19th into the mid-20th century.
Nation Building in Reconstruction Virginia
Wars within a War
Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher edited Wars within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War in 2009. It is available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Wars within a War” on Amazon here.
Wartime disputes in the Civil War carried over into the postwar years and continue. This volume includes twelve articles on several important aspects of the conflict that still resonate. Six essays treat issues initially raised during the conflict. They address Confederate women bread riots and their subsequent organization for state assistance and survivor pensions. An essay looks at African Americans born free and enslaved as combatants and prisoners of war.
Six essays study developments after the war, such as the development of newly conceived cemeteries and statues to the famous and memorials to the fighting soldier. Memoirs contributed to a collective “bottom up” memory on both sides. The debate over locating Grant’s Tomb, William T. Sherman’s changing reputation in Georgia, and Hollywood interpretations of the Civil War are also explored. Issues developed surrounding veterans pensions, North and South, and their retirement homes.
Buy “Wars within a War” on Amazon here. Also by these authors, The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (2016). See also Andrew L. Slap and Gordon B. McKinney Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War’s Aftermath (2010), David W. Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), and Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis (2018).
This Republic of Suffering
Drew Gilpin Faust wrote This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War in 2008. Available from the Alfred A. Knopf Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “This Republic of Suffering” on Amazon here. A companion to John R. Neff Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (2014), and William Blair Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War (2015).
In this book, Faust explores battlefield killing, the mortally wounded dying, and the subsequent burial customs that grew up surrounding the awful cost of the American Civil War. As death became a preoccupation among most American families, their grieving became a focus for spiritualism.
Its growing popularity led many to try to communicate with the dead, though chaplains in the field and ministers at home published funeral sermons of consolation in an attempt to ease family mourning amidst the “harvest of death”. Heaven was often interpreted as “home” for the immortal soul in a way that made the long casualty lists bearable. The funeral industry underwent a substantial transformation and a massive national cemetery system developed that was continually expanded.
Buy “This Republic of Suffering” on Amazon here. Also by this author, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South (1989), and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (2004).
In the Cause of Liberty
William J. Cooper, Jr. and John M. Cardell, Jr. wrote In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals in 2009. Available from the Louisiana State University Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “In the Cause of Liberty” on Amazon here.
In these nine essays collected at Richmond’s American Civil War Center at Tredegar, the authors address the causes, effects and legacy of the Civil War. Perspectives vary among the white Northerner, the white Southerner and the African American of the three “Americas” extant in the Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction periods.
In all, slavery had a role in culture, politics, and memory. National abolition of slavery changed its ideals. From a necessary evil, Southerners had redefined it into a positive good. After the war, they saw abolition as a contribution to civilization, progress and national happiness. During the conflict, both whites and blacks in service altered their views of race and nationalism.
In the aftermath, Union activists employed memory of the war’s sacrifice to spur women’s suffrage, anti-prostitution, and U.S. economic imperialism. Former Confederate veterans, women survivors and evangelicals sought to redefine the meanings of a failed revolution. Black soldiers and their communities were inspired to crusade for political justice and social equality.
Buy “In the Cause of Liberty” on Amazon here. Also by W.J. Cooper, Jr. Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era (2008), and The American South: A History, volume II – From Reconstruction to Present (2016).
America Aflame
David Goldfield wrote America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation in 2011. It is available from the Bloomsbury Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “America Aflame” on Amazon here. A companion to George C. Rable God’s Almost Chosen People: Religious History of the American Civil War (2010) and Harry S. Stout Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War (2007).
To narrate “America’s greatest failure”, Goldfield visits Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction periods. His analysis suggests that the influence of evangelical religion limited political options to war in the North and South because of its self-righteous and moralistic rhetoric. The book engages Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Stephens throughout.
One unexpected development in postwar America was the general substitution of science for evangelical religion as the uppermost rationale in public life. National reconciliation brought the triumph of science and the corporation. The collapse of Reconstruction, elevation of Darwinism in business affairs and economic turmoil assaulted traditional beliefs and reasoning.
Buy “America Aflame” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Confederate Cities: The Urban South during the Civil War (2015), Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (2013), and with Sally G. McMillen Major Problems in the History of the American South, vol 2 (2011).
The Great Task Remaining Before Us
Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller edited The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America’s Continuing Civil War in 2010. Available from the Fordam University Press, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “The Great Task Remaining Before Us” on Amazon here. See also John David Smith An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918 (2008).
Over the course of the middle 19th century, there is a certain continuity in violence and politics, benevolence and social identity in the former slave states, whether Union or Confederate. By this standard, Reconstruction belongs in a “long Civil War era” incorporating Antebellum and the Civil War conflict.
The end of maneuvering mass armies across the South did not bring peace or resolution to fundamental questions in American racial society. Throughout the American South, ex-Confederates and conservative Unionists mobilized to maintain white supremacy in an unreconstructed “rebel democracy”. In states such as Tennessee and Alabama, Reconstruction was lost to violent intimidation and failure of federal intervention to support either blacks or whites.
The Lost Cause language of mourning and commemoration was both seeking acknowledgement for valor and reputation, and establishing a cult of invincibility and racial superiority. Reconstruction Republicans underestimated the democratic nature of the Southern white supremacy, the Redeemers political power and racial loyalty at odds with commitment to the United States. They put too much faith in Congressionally directed top-down measures for their peacetime ambitions.
Buy “The Great Task Remaining Before Us” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Veterans North and South: The Transition from Soldier to Civilian After the Civil War (2015), Soldiers North and South: The Everyday Experience of the Men Who Fought America’s Civil War (2010) and The Freedmen’s Bureau: Reconstructing the American South after the Civil War (2005).
Social History in Reconstruction Virginia
Take Care of the Living
Jeffrey W. McClurken wrote Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia in 2009. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Take Care of the Living” on Amazon here.
In this book, McClurken studies Civil War veterans in Danville and Pittsylvania County, Virginia, including their psychology and family, politics and economy, as the survivors adapted the rest of their lives to the war years experience. Eighty percent of men military age seventeen to fifty served in frontline duty, a quarter died but half returned home, numbering more than 3,500. Family strategies of moving in with relatives, taking in boarders and personal loans from local landed families such as the Sutherlins soon proved inadequate. Additional church outreach especially by Baptists, private assistance and government programs ranged from providing artificial limbs and treating mental illness to pensions and a soldiers’ home for former rebels.
The history of the Southside Virginia community untouched by marching armies in the years of tobacco boom following emancipation relates how disabled and economically disadvantaged Confederate veterans became a class of “worthy poor” who deserved institutional and governmental assistance beyond the limits of their family resources. Later Southern Progressive efforts to rationalize social welfare in the former Confederate states would extend that heart-felt sentiment.
Buy “Take Care of the Living” on Amazon here. See also James Marten Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (2014), Brian Craig Miller Empty Sleeves: Amputation in the Civil War South (2015), and Michael B. Chesson Richmond After the War, 1865-1890 (1981).
The Big House After Slavery
Amy Feely Morsman wrote The Big House after Slavery: Virginia Plantation Families and Their Postbellum Domestic Experiment in 2010. It is available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “The Big House After Slavery” on Amazon here.
Morsman examines the transition of Virginia planter families in the Virginia Piedmont and Southside to survive the challenges of defeat and emancipation. At the end of the war these families married before and after the Civil War found themselves financially impoverished with old financial obligations and without an assured supply of field labor. The planters limited any agricultural speculation and struggled with new employee relations with whites and blacks. Plantations with two hundred slaves before the war could have two dozen laborers by 1880. Elite families took on some of the labor themselves and often downsized from cash crops to small-scale farming.
The family hierarchy shifted towards codependency, as community standing required contributions from women’s work. Men and women sought to maintain elite appearances in weddings, resort vacations and fashionable attire. To maintain it, men increasingly took salaried employment away from the plantation. Many of their sons left for the urban middle class, pursuing professional careers, marrying late and having fewer children. Elite women sought out teaching as their main occupation in the post-war years. Men and women engaged in politics in the Democracy over the public debt and through voluntary farm clubs such as the Grangers and Virginia Farmers’ Assembly. Women’s civic organizations included fostering the Lost Cause.
Buy “The Big House After Slavery” on Amazon here.
Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau
Mary Farmer-Kaiser wrote Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau: Race, Gender, and Public Policy in the Age of Emancipation in 2010. It is available from the Fordham University Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau” on Amazon here.
As the Civil War drew to a close, Congress created the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands – the “Freedman’s Bureau”. Throughout the South, the Bureau sought to aid the displaced, but they also promoted the northern view of marriage and labor contracts, and the role of women in a “proper” family structure. Related issues included establishing a justice system and legal protections for black men and women, promoting free labor while discouraging vagrancy among the freedmen, intervening in contract labor and apprenticeship abuses, and settling custody battles among African American families.
While General William Tecumseh Sherman could observe that the Bureau (1865-1872) did not meet one-tenth of the expectations laid on it, southern whites found its guidance oppressive and black women found it was both a friend when it classified them as “deserving poor” and an enemy at times separating their children. White landowners sought to coerce black women into labor contracts to avoid exile as “vagrants”. Their separated children might be declared “orphans” and apprenticed out to landowners for their field labor. With widespread labor shortages throughout the South, the Bureau and local courts often worked in concert to put black women back into the workforce at depressed wages, rather than allowing family units to rely on a black man’s income supplemented by family gardening. Farmer-Kaiser explores the Freedwomen’s agency in determining a share of freedom in the South after emancipation.
Farmer-Kaiser studied the freedwomen of Virginia, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas.
Buy “Freedwomen and the Freedmen’s Bureau” on Amazon here. See also Carol Faulkner Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedman’s Aid Movement (2007).
Memory of Reconstruction Virginia
Dreaming of Dixie
Karen L. Cox wrote Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture in 2011. It is available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Dreaming of Dixie” on Amazon here. A companion to Nina Silber The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (1997), and David W. Blight Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002).
Popular culture played a role in shaping the image of the South between the late 19th century and World War II. Literature (Uncle Remus), popular songs and film (Gone with the Wind), along with radio programs (Amos ‘n’ Andy), advertising, and tourist pamphlets all contributed. Most American productions were made and consumed outside of the South itself, picturing a place immune from urbanizing and industrializing society and fostering racial stereotypes of African Americans there.
The scope of the book includes deconstruction of the Tin Pan Alley “coon songs”, Maxwell House coffee sponsoring the “Show Boat” radio program, and Aunt Jemima’s pancake mix. Consumers were promised the experience of an uncomplicated past in a culture of leisure and pastoral romance supported by loyal servants. All is pictured in a social harmony of benevolent owners on graceful estates, content hill folk, and devoted black “servants” – a proper hierarchy of race and class unlike the contested society of cities and factories. Tourism surged as an industry with the return of Union army veterans visiting southern battlefields and colonial heritage sites after 1881 as a part of sectional reconciliation.
Buy “Dreaming of Dixie” on Amazon here. See also Alic Fahs and Joan Waugh The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (2004), Anthony Harkins Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (2005), and Paul Harvey Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (2007). Also by this author, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (2003).
Race, War, and Rememberance
John C. Inscoe wrote Race, War, and Rememberance in the Appalachian South in 2008. Available from the University Press of Kentucky, Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Race, War, and Rememberance” on Amazon here.
This book is a collection of seventeen revised articles by the author about the Appalachian South devoted to the Antebellum Era, the Civil War conflict itself, and the historiography of the Civil War past. It seeks to redress the frequent omission of the Appalachian uplands by American South historians.
The distinctive cultural creation by mountain residents was neither an exclusively abolitionist and dedicated to democracy, nor a homogenous backwater of rugged Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
The diversity in politics and racial attitudes were as varied as elsewhere in the South. The mountaineers themselves were divided. Western North Carolina was a secessionist majority with Unionists, eastern Tennessee was a unionist majority with Secessionists. The plain folk of the local quarreling families were augmented by refugees and fugitives, as well as incursions of murderers, renegades and guerrillas.
Buy “Race, War, and Rememberance” on Amazon here. Also by this author, Mountain Masters: Slavery, and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (1989). See also Joseph P. Reidy Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery (2019 preorder).
Almighty God Created the Races
Fay Botham wrote Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law in 2009. It is available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. Buy “Almighty God Created the Races” on Amazon here.
In this intellectual history, Botham studies the legal and religious construction of American interracial marriage laws, their maintenance over time, and the development of a mid-20th century rejection of them. Religion played a role, as did the variations in belief and worldview among Protestants and Catholics. While Protestants were more amenable to state regulation of an institution that Catholics saw as a sacrament. But southern Catholics also accommodated themselves to state regimes of racism.
Buy “Almighty God Created the Races” on Amazon here. See also Jane Dailey Before Jim Crow: the Politics of Race in Post-emancipation Virginia (2009).
TVH Era Webpage for Civil War Virginia
The TVH webpage for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction Eras, 1824-1883, features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years.
The Table of Contents divides Political and Economic Virginia, 1824-1883 into (a) Antebellum Virginia Policy 1820-1850, (b) Antebellum Virginia Economics 1820-1850, (c) Sectionalism and Civil War 1850-1865, and Reconstruction Virginia Policy 1865-1883. Topical history is treated under headings of Social History, Gender in Virginia, and Religious Virginia.
African American Virginia, 1820-1883 is divided into (a) Plantation Slavery 1820-1865, (b) Free Blacks, Artisans and Slave Hires 1820-1850, and (c) Reconstruction African Americans 1863-1883. Finally, wars are featured under (1) Mexican War, (2) Civil War Combat and (3) CivilWar Home Front.
See Also
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.