A Legacy of Blood

...Some 360,000 were Yankees and 260,000 were rebels...

...AS THE 20TH CENTURY wore on the level of racial violence did decrease...

...In fairness, Union troops sometimes retaliated...

...These atrocities have been amply documented: Local newspapers frequently covered them, professional photographers sold pictures of them, and with the advent of the Kodak and other cheap cameras families could maintain their own pictorial archives...

...So did lawlessness...

...After battles soldiers were usually buried where they fell...

...In 2005 one of the murderers, now 80 years old, was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in prison...

...They also hailed the heroic “redeemers,” who with rope and gun killed white and black Republicans alike until Reconstruction was defeated...

...Thanks to his findings, and those of men like him charged with this work in other Southern states, Congress passed a bill establishing a system of national cemeteries throughout the region...

...Thus, despite losing the War, Southerners won the peace—in a manner of speaking...

...If a Nazi analogy seems extreme, bear in mind that the South had its own concentration camps for a very long time, horrible prisons filled with black convicts like the one exposed by my former colleague David M. Oshinsky, a longtime contributor to these pages, whose “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (1996) indicts not only the traditional prison system in Mississippi but those of most Southern states...

...Such successes were temporary and local, though, while the South’s desire to drive out the Yankees and re-enslave black people (to the degree possible) remained constant...

...The ratio of deaths from disease, as against those who died in battle or of wounds, was roughly 2:1...

...The author tells a story that has been told before by historians who have laid out in chapter and verse how Southern terrorists thwarted Radical Reconstruction...

...Budiansky does not go beyond the collapse of Reconstruction, but a word or two about subsequent events is certainly in order here...

...Southern U.S...

...Today, thanks mostly to the civil rights movement, the South is part of the Sun Belt—an irony too seldom appreciated, as is the fact that civil rights activists were the true redeemers who liberated much of the South from ignorance, backwardness and poverty...

...There is so much to admire in Faust’s book that it seems almost churlish to bring up one reservation that applies not only to her...

...Historians of the South often hesitate to draw the logical conclusions suggested by their evidence...

...Family members themselves sometimes combed the battlefields that remained in Union hands, but most Union soldiers died in the Confederacy, and the remains of about 40 per cent were never identified causing additional grief to their families...

...in the North 6 per cent of eligible males perished...

...By one estimate there were about 5,000 lynchings after 1877, mostly of blacks and mostly in the South, but no one knows for sure because not every murder made its way into the papers...

...The respective death rates make this starkly clear...

...freedom of speech didn’t exist, nor did civil liberties and certainly not civil rights...

...My impression is that they fall into three broad categories...

...indictments, let alone convictions, were rare...

...By the 1980s a white man indicted for murdering a Negro was likely to be convicted and punished severely...

...Budiansky cites instances where firm action on the part of authorities backed by Federal troops was able to break reigns of terror...

...Senators defeated every effort to enact an antilynching law by using, or threatening to use, the filibuster...

...Redeemers” killed at least 3,000 freedmen and their white allies—the vast majority unarmed and always heavily outnumbered—in their winning campaign to deprive black men of the vote and white Republicans of their jobs and property...

...The violence depicted by Budiansky is sickening, but the hypocrisy and doublespeak that justified terrorism sicken too...

...And she is quite clear that the speed and efficiency of the great Union reburial program resulted from the need to forestall Southern desecrators...

...In addition, the black population fell sharply as millions moved out of the South during and after World War II in search of better jobs, presumably easing tensions...

...Further, these same Southerners tended to blame “the ‘cowardly Negroes’ for their unmanliness in having permitted themselves to be massacred by bands of armed white men: It only showed they argued in complete earnest, that black men lacked the Anglo-Saxon virtues indispensable to free men who would exercise the lofty privilege of self-government...

...Writers & Writing A Legacy of Blood By William L. O’Neill TWO New books, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 346 pp., $27.95) and Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox (Viking, 322 pp., $27.95), provide an opportunity to consider how historians have treated the South...

...Where Union graves remained in good condition it was because newly freed blacks—Faust calls them “freedpeople”—tended the cemeteries...

...The number who died on both sides came to about 620,000, out of a total population of 32 million...

...But if candid she is also brisk, dwelling on Southern crimes as little as possible...

...Sometimes the corpses traveled in sealed metallic caskets, but as the War went on embalming became increasingly common...

...Whitman’s task now became more urgent, for he had to save the Union’s fallen from enraged Southerners who, having been defeatedby Union forces, were waging war against their dead...

...This sordid deal guaranteed that Southern blacks would possess no rights any white man had to respect...

...I will get to the third category of historians later...

...Civilization consists of more than having good manners, and in Southern states even the veneer of civility did not run very deep...

...He does, however, detail the way the South employed violence and outrageous lies to get rid of the Union occupation and reduce freedpeople to the level of serfs...

...Having a lower death rate did not mean Northerners found their losses easier to bear...

...In the most notorious case three civil rights workers—two white, one black—were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964...

...Faust describes the many ways Northerners sought to cope with death on such a vast scale...

...The second group is composed of what used to be called “revisionists...

...Rather, by focusing on five brave men—four of them Northern whites, one a freedman—and by using mostly contemporary sources, he vividly exposes the dark side of a society utterly corrupted by racism...

...Lynchings, whippings and other forms of racial violence gave the lie to claims that the South had some kind of civilization...

...As racial violence declined, the South became attractive at last, not only to Northern investors but also to foreigners...

...The first, begun after the Civil War and continued well into the 20th century, consists of works by Southern “scholars” that eulogized the glories of the “lost cause” and the noble “cavaliers” who allegedly fought in defense of states’ rights...

...Of course, when African Americans did fight back, the fury of their white assailants knew no bounds...

...Washington had nothing to do with the improvement...

...This seems strange, given that it was by far the bloodiest conflict our country ever fought—a fact that would still be true even if we only counted the Union dead—and every serious book on the War notes the huge toll...

...Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremonies for what was then called the Soldiers’ National Cemetery...

...Southerners aped the ways of a democratic society, but elections were farcical: Blacks could not vote and the Democrats always won...

...But while the Union armies lost many more men than those of the Confederate states, the Union could afford its casualties and the rebels could not...

...Modern historians have exposed both the lost cause and the evils of Reconstruction as tissues of lies and myths that can only be cherished by regional chauvinists, racists and morons...

...We owe a great debt to them, for over the past half-century they have made it their mission to demolish the edifice of falsehoods constructed by generations of Southern apologists...

...This act of justice, however belated, symbolized the remarkable transformation that had taken place in the South thanks to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965...

...Most white Southerners applauded murder and fraud in the great cause of returning control of the Southern states to the men who had led them into a ruinous war— thereby earning the right, it appears, to misgovern the South in perpetuity...

...He found not only a “vast charnel house of the dead” but repeated instances of vandalized graves, desecrated corpses and destroyed headboards...

...When blacks started to vote in large numbers, violence against them decreased...

...Drew Gilpin Faust, recently named the first female president of Harvard University, has had a long and distinguished career as a historian of the South...

...Stern, which is what makes The Bloody Shirt so valuable...

...In this deeply violent, morally bankrupt culture, Christianity served vicious ends, too, justifying white privileges and defending the grossest social evils...

...It did not even lower the level of violence much, because lynching was still the preferred form of social control in the South for almost another hundred years...

...Any people who allowed their vote to be taken from them at gunpoint didn’t deserve to keep it...

...Her new book deals more with the North, but where it inevitably touches upon Southern history it displays the strengths and perhaps a weakness of an impressive body of research...

...Special excursion trains brought whole white families, children included, to the crime scenes to share in the fun of seeing black men, and sometimes women, tortured, mutilated, hung, burned to death, or some combination of the above...

...Those who did not agree kept their mouths shut to stay alive...

...Since the purpose of these killings was to keep Negroes in line, publicity served the purposes of the white establishment and the KKK...

...Racial violence flared up again in the 1960s with the rise of the civil rights movement...

...Of particular importance was the Union reburial program...

...There isn’t much new here in terms of the broad picture...

...A people whose entire way of life depended on terror could hardly be said to have had admirable values and customs...

...Local authorities rarely dared to bring indictments, and when they did no jury would dare to convict...

...InDecember 1865 the War Department assigned Edmund B. Whitman, chief quartermaster of the Tennessee Military Division, to survey the Union dead in Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama...

...Lynchings fell from hundreds each year to single digits by the 1950s...

...Here again the justice system proved to be laughable...

...Faust examines how Northerners struggled to deal with the overwhelming burdens imposed on them by the deaths of so many men...

...Although many more individuals died prematurely in the 19th century than now, people were by no means inured to death, and the carnage resulting from the War caught everyone off guard...

...But some Southerners began to realize that murdering Negroes made the region look bad and discouraged outside investment...

...At a guess, about 50 civil rights workers, most of them black, lost their lives organizing Negroes and helping them register to vote...

...But the radical nature of this transformation, and the distance that had to be traveled to bring the South up to civilized standards of behavior, underlines the excessive delicacy with which past crimes are still often treated...

...When people thought of the South as the Dark and Bloody Ground, it was inconceivable that Japanese car companies would build assembly plants there...

...William L. O’Neill, a frequent contributor to the NL, is professor of history at Rutgers University and author of A Democracy at War: America’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II...

...This puts him in the third class of historians who have written about the South: those who do not mince words and go to the heart of the matter...

...Of these, seven received convictions and light sentences, two gained their freedom as the result of a hung jury, and seven were acquitted...

...Like David Oshinsky, Stephen Budiansky is helping to change that...

...Northerners grew tired of trying to enforce order, and after the Presidential election of 1876 produced a virtual draw due to a controversy regarding electors, Republicans pledged to end the military occupation in return for Southern support of their candidate...

...For a change, Federal authorities indicted 18 white men...

...For example, those who were able to afford it paid agents to locate the bodies of their loved ones and return them home...

...When reinternment came to an end in 1871, the system comprised 74 national cemeteries where the remains of 303,536 Union soldiers rested safe at last from Southern grave robbers—although in death, as in life, black troops continued to be segregated...

...To my knowledge, no major scholar before her has focused on the effects of death in the Civil War...

...The South maintained white supremacy through a one-party system, backed up by the Ku Klux Klan and less formal paramilitary terrorist organizations that for many years advertised their crimes, often in advance...

...He has not tried to use a wide lens...

...The most popular and well-publicized lynchings drew large crowds...

...She includes Confederate sources where possible, but Union sources are much more plentiful, and the richer Northerners could do more for their dead...

...In the South 18 per cent of military-age men lost their lives...

...Faust does not shrink from discussing the Confederate habit of murdering prisoners, usually black soldiers but occasionally whites as well...

...In the North they were reburied in national cemeteries that could be cared for and protected...

...He notes at the outset that to white Southerners “the outrage was never the acts they committed only the effrontery of having those acts held against them...

...This is true of This Republic of Suffering...