Day 60. April 29, 1862.
60
talk is about going home, by what route….
April Tuesday 29 1862
Raining some this morning. We had to strike tents load up and take up the line of march to join our Brigade some 53 miles from this place Winchester to New Market. At 10 ½ oclock we took up the line of march. The 3 companys left looking was Co D Co L Co I. To work on the Turnpike the other 6 companys came on. We had mudy roads. We came on to 2 ½ miles from Strausburg where we camped where the enemy had camped after the Battle of Winchester the night of the 24 where our cannon killed two men and wounded some. The day turned out to be a fine day. I saw splendid grain along the road and a grate deal that had no fences around and the fences all burnt.* This is the affects of war
*Fence rails cost a penny per. Fence rails were often used for fire: fire for cooking, for heat, for light. As weapons, & to hide behind. Horses would gnaw at them in abject hunger.
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 54
“7a.m. 52; 2p.m. 61; 9p.m. 52. Sprinkled rain.”
Note: the lack of fences, houses, general destruction. Winchester will take until after WWII to start bouncing back. By 1865, then by 1895:
Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861– 1865 Richard R. Duncan P. 255
“Peace may have brought stability and security, but the physical destruction was staggering. Desolation in the Stephenson’s Depot area was the most acute. The Shepherdstown Register, describing the bleakness on July 15, 1865, noted “From Winchester to Harrisonburg fences are scarcely to be seen….From Winchester to Strasburg scarcely any crops have been planted, and scarcely a chicken, horse, cow or pig is to be seen.” In filing a claim with the Southern Claims Commission James N. Jolliffe, from near Clearbrook, asked compensation for 13,068 rails taken by Union troops in the winter of 1864-65.” Cornelia McDonald, hoping to return to Winchester, sent her son to investigate the condition of their house. He found it an uninhabitable ruin. Frederic Morton estimates that in and around the town “more than 200 houses were missing,” some demolished, others burned. The most noticeable ravages were on Main Street, where a hundred homes had been used as slaughterhouses or stables. Land-tax assessments in 1865 indicated 29 buildings destroyed, 98 damaged, and a property devaluation of $80,827. The courthouse was a shell. An editorial on December 11, 1895, noted, “’Every building that survived the torch, both in the city and county, was more or less out of repair.’”
The Civil War The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 715-716
“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:
NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865
Samuel T. Foster: Diary, April 18-May 4, 1865
April 28th
“We had a dreadful night, all hands up and talking over the situation. They go over the war again, count up the killed and wounded, then the results obtained– It is too bad! If crying would have done any good, we could have cried all night.
Just to think back at the beginning of this war– and see the young men in the bloom of life– the flower of the country– Volunteering to defend their country from the Yankee hosts, who were coming to desolate their homes. Men who shut their stores and warehouses, stoped their plows, droped the axe, left their machinery lying idle, closed their law offices, churches banks and workshops, and all fall into line to defend the country.
Now where are they. As for our own Company, Regt. And Brgd.- they can be found at Ark. Post, at the prison cemetery of Camp Springfield Ill. At Chicakmauga– at Missionary Ridge– at New Hope Church 27 May 64 at Atlanta Aug 22/64 at Jonesboro Ga at Franklin and Nashville Tenn. Dec/64 and there find the remains of as noble men, and as kind hearted faithful friends as ever trod the face of the earth.
And those men who fell in 1864 even in Dec. 64 sacrificed their lives as freely as did the very first that fell in the war. There was no cooling down, no tapering off, no lukewarmness permitted in those men, but they would brave danger when ordered as fearless of Yankee bullets as if they no power to hurt them. At Franklin Tenn. Dec 1st or Nov 30/64 was the most wholesale butchery of human lives ever witness by us. Those brave men had been taught by Genl Johnson to fear nothing when he made a fight, and expecting the same thing of Hood, were betrayed into a perfect slaughter pen.
Who is to blame for all this waste of human life? It is too bad to talk about. And what does it amount to? Has there been anything gained by all this sacrifice? What were we fighting for, the principles of slavery?
And now the slaves are all freed, and the Confederacy has to be dissolved. We have to go back into the Union. Ah! there is the point. Will there ever be any more Union, as there once was?”
“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:
NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 716 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
April 29th
“Men still talking politics, but it is over and over the same thing, with the same regrets for our loss, and end with the same “What does it amount to?”
Later in the day the talk is about going home, by what route, and whether we will have to walk all the way &c &c.
Men are beginning to realize their situation, and are talking about going home to Texas. Our guns have all been turned in, to our own Ordnance officers. And we suppose to save us from further humiliation there has not been a Yank in sight of us yet.
Our Muster rolls went up yesterday for paroles, which will be here tomorrow or next day.”
Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 207
“Had we made these people really free, our act might have been regarded as one redeeming feature of the war. Even then, however, it would have been, not the object of the war, but simply a non-intended incident. We assured the people of the south all the time that we did not intend to free their slaves. It was only after great numbers of bloody battles had been fought, a majority of which were disastrous to ourselves, only after hundreds of thousands of our bravest young men had fallen, only after we began to need the aid of the slaves to free ourselves from the deadly grip which the Rebels held upon our own throats, that we thought of freeing the slaves. Then we thought of it only as a “military necessity.” Only as such, did we accomplish it. For this “military necessity,” which we did not create, we deserve no credit. For us to claim credit for freeing the slaves, under compulsion, is like thieves claiming credit for dropping their plunder, when too hard pressed by their pursuers to escape with it. If anybody deserves any credit for the so-called freeing of the slaves, it is certainly the Rebels whose persistent valor created the “military necessity” which alone led to its accomplishment.”
Bloody Engagements: John R. Kelso’s Civil War John R. Kelso Edited by Christopher Grasso P. 207 Footnote
“Dyer D. Lum (1839-93), another Union veteran to become an anarchist intellectual, also looked back on his earlier “logic of patriotism” as a “delusion.” Lum did not see the Civil War as a capitalist conspiracy. But in it and through it the greed animating the soul of the northern industrial system expanded and came to dominate American civilization. “In preserving the Union we created a new union– of capital,” Lum wrote. “From God to man the scepter passed, but progress did not halt. The priestly amulet and the kingly crown no longer have mystic power in government…. The purse has succeeded the crown as the symbol of authority.’”
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made Eugene D. Genovese P. 132-133
“People who say that the slavery days were better, said Katie Rose of Arkansas, “didn’t have no white master and overseer lak we all had on our place….I hear my chillun read about General Lee, and I know he was a good man, but I didn’t know nothing about him den, but I know he wasn’t fighting for dat kind of white folks.”And Charley Moses of Mississippi added: “Slavery days was better ‘an I can’t forgit the sufferin’. Oh, God! I hates ’em, hates ’em….If all marsters had been good like some, the slaves would all a-been happy. But marsters like mine ought never been allowed to own Niggers.”
The attitudes of the slaves grew out of the adjustment they had made to a paternalistic relationship, within which they had defined their role in their own way. When Uncle Osborne, a carpenter in Georgia, remained to work for wages so that, in a variety of ways, he could take care of the distressed white family, he did not thereby display servility or reject freedom. We know as much because as soon as the worst had passed for the whites, he courteously took himself off to work for himself. “Shorty” Wadley Clemons of Alabama could not stand by and watch his old mistress starve after her husband had died and she had lost her land. He had worked himself into a comfortable station and had become well off; so, he supported her until her death and would have paid for her funeral, had the local whites not decided that he had done more than enough and that they ought to assume responsibility. Charles Davenport of Mississippi stayed with his master after the war. “When I looked at my marster,” he explained, “and knowed he needed me, I pleased to stay.” Liza Jones of Texas, among many others, told a similar story. The freedmen in the Sea Islands, disappointed and disgruntled as they were by the dashing of their hopes for land, did not enjoy seeing their old masters suffer, whether because they were old masters or because they were human beings in trouble. They offered help and even, when they could, gave them money. When the Union troops entered Richmond a servant told Jennie D. Harrold’s mother, who like others had only Confederate money, which is to say no money at all: “Miss Thomasia, I expect to have more money than you have now, in silver and gold, so we wish to give you each a 25 cents to start life with.” A nasty thrust? Yes, but more to the point, a comment on how the mighty have fallen.”
It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America (2019) Reniqua Allen P. 148-149
“On January 16, 1865, General William Sherman declared that four hundred thousand acres of confiscated Confederate land be redistributed to almost four million enslaved people. The order, known as Field Order Number 15, gave confiscated Union land on the Southern coast stretching from South Carolina to Florida, the Sea Islands in Georgia, and some mainland areas to newly freed Blacks, in forty-acre plots. It also established that the land would be solely run by Black folk. They would later order that a mule could be loaned to the settler in addition to the forty acres. The African American population was ecstatic, and by June 1865, forty thousand Blacks had moved to what became known as “Sherman land.”
Their joy was short-lived. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson ascended to the presidency, the order was overturned, and the land returned to the previously slave-owning rebels. As scholar Henry Louis Gates wrote, “Imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed.
Homeownership has long been a path to the middle class and a symbolic fulfillment of the American Dream for Americans. However, one cannot forget the intentionality in all of this. When the government began promoting homeownership and all the matters involved in the “home” in the early twentieth century, it took the onus off institutions to solve domestic problems and turned them into individual, moral concerns. In the Black community, this idea was particularly influential. Booker T. Washington was convinced that homeownership was a path to not only economic freedom but proving Blacks “respectability” as American citizens. “You must learn to love home better than any other place on earth…. You should always be thinking how you will make it prettier and happier than it is.” He further specifies what the home should look like, mentioning having a “nice fence about your dwelling… glass in your windows,” as well as “a little paint, a little whitewash, a few yards of paper, some gravel walks and a few flowers.”
While Black folk were being told this, however, the reality in the early twentieth century was that it was hard for anybody—including Whites—to own a home, and the Depression only compounded the problem. Determined to help ensure this dream become a reality, the government created the federal Housing Administration. The FHA insured bank loans that would cover 80 percent of the purchase price of the home; however, it did so by explicitly excluding Blacks and other people who lived in or near Black communities from these loans. In 1944, the GI Bill gave veterans subsidies for mortgages. Once again, Blacks were often denied these benefits. Their denial was devastating: between the FHA and the Veteran’s Administration, which administered the GI loans, $120 billion worth of new housing was financed between 1934 and 1962. Less than 2 percent of those funds went to Black and other non-White families.
Lorraine Hansberry’s famous 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, based on her father’s lawsuit against the city of Chicago concerning restrictive racial covenants, defined the value of homeownership for a new generation. As the character Mama talks about her dreams of a house, she says, “It’s just a plain little old house but it’s made good and solid and it will be ours. Walter Lee, it makes a difference in a man when he can walk on floors that belong to him.’”
Note: GI Bill: In 2021, Senator Warnock introduced the GI Restoration Act in the House. South Carolina, Massachusetts, Georgia joined together to introduce the legislation. “While our generation didn’t commit this wrong, we should be committed to making it right.” Descendants & surviving spouses of WWII vets would gain access college, housing, loans to start businesses.
Senator Reverend Warnock: “Racial inequity in how the immense benefits of the original G.I. Bill were disbursed are well-documented, and we’ve all seen how these inequities have trickled down over time, leaving Black World War II veterans and their families without the benefits they earned through service and sacrifice. The G.I. Bill Restoration Act represents a major step toward righting this injustice and repairing the economic harms experienced by Black WWII veterans and their families.”
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this is the affects of war….
What if their meanings failed them in the end? Everyones? Then what? Now what?
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