WARRIORS, POLITICIANS, AND PEOPLE
Hesseltine, William B.
The Progressive s Bookshelf Warriors, Politicians, And People BEHIND THE LINES IN THE SOUTHERN CONFEDERACY, by Charles W. Ramsdell. Foreword by Wendell H. Stephenson. Louisiana State University...
...Louisiana State University Press...
...Under the exigencies of the war, state and Confederate governments passed relief laws, regulated the planting of crops, manufactured goods, carried on trade, fixed prices, and tried to stamp out speculators...
...Had the more than half a million lives and the ten billions of wasted property been saved, the wealth of the United States and the welfare of the people would notlikely have been less than they are now...
...They bore, however, little resemblance to the dashing cavaliers of Southern legend...
...And with it all, there was great confusion in administration...
...The war that followed was to her "an awful affair" and before it was half over she wondered "what kind of principle men can have who will wage the continuance of as dreadful a thing as this war...
...And her brother, Lafayette, who had joined the Confederate army with early enthusiasm, grew equally tired of "Jeff's war...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine "OH, WHAT A FAIR COUNTRY and what a glor- ious government have politicians ruined," cried Amanda McDowell from her schoolroom in the Cumberland Mountains as she learned that Tennessee had joined the Confederacy...
...The "central theme" of his story is that "the Southern people and their governments failed...
...Their folks at home bore greater burdens than the men in the ranks, suffering from the lack of food and supplies, and plagued by loneliness and worry...
...The end result was that the people became disgusted...
...Ramsdell, delivering the first Fleming lectures in 1937, surveyed the whole civil history of the Confederacy...
...These conclusions of historical scholars are given point by Amanda McDowell's journal...
...THE PLAIN PEOPLE OF THE CONFEDERACY, by Bell Irvin Wiley...
...asked Prof...
...McDowell...
...I wish myself and one of (the Yanks) as anxious for peace as I am could have matters left to us," sighed Sgt...
...To Jeff Davis and the higher army officers, keeping the army at full strength and the enemy at bay seemed the most important thing, and they had little patience with the people...
...The late Dr...
...The government impressed supplies for the war, conscripted slave labor, and seized and operated the railroads...
...Amanda McDowell would have agreed with his answer...
...Bands of bushwackers, conscript press gangs, and marauding soldiers of both armies stole hogs and horses, burned, raped, murdered, reaped private vengeance, and plundered indiscriminately in the neighborhood...
...Richard R. Smith...
...The war ruined the school, and brought poverty and distress to the McDowell family and their neighbors...
...Curtis McDowell and his four children had built the Cumberland Institute, a mountain school in Tennessee...
...But they longed for freedom, and they grabbed for it as soon as the armies of emancipation came within reach...
...Then we would go home tomorrow...
...to conserve, develop, and efficiently administer their resources...
...The soldiers were sturdy rustics, unlettered and often undisciplined, but generally excellent fighters...
...Ramsdell, "say with conviction that this war accomplished anything of lasting good that could not and would not have been won by the peaceful progress of social evolution...
...Wiley summarized the story of the soldiers, the poorer yeomanry behind the lines, and the Negroes...
...Can we...
...The impact of the Civil War upon the common folk of the Confederacy is the subject of two of the Walter L. Fleming lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University...
...FIDDLES IN THE CUMBERLANDS, by Amanda McDowell, 1861-1865 and Lela McDowell Blankenship...
...One of the sons went into the Confederate army...
...1.50...
...Louisiana State University Press...
...The execution of the laws "was left in the hands of men who . . . more and more, became demoralized by opportunities for speculation...
...The morale of the people was disintegrating rapidly as the whole social order moved toward collapse...
...the other, a Unionist, escaped to the North...
...But everywhere there was weariness of the war—weariness of bloodshed and hardship, of insecurity, of the evident hopelessness of the apparently endless struggle...
...The Negroes, making a third of the Confederacy's population, suffered least of all...
Vol. 8 • May 1944 • No. 19
