Effects of Civil War in the South Research Paper

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Civil War

After the last shots of Civil War were heard, and following the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln, the South had been humiliated and devastated. The repercussions of war included loss of life, land, and livelihood. Patriarchy and racism remained entrenched, but the emancipation of slaves significantly transformed the social landscape of the South. Liberated slaves started from scratch without access to cultural or social capital, and many eventually migrated North. African-American culture was able to emerge, and in many cases, to flourish. Meanwhile, the white power structures in the South resigned themselves to ignorance, causing the South to remain the most backwards, uneducated, and poor region of the United States for over a century. Far from inspiring the South to transform its social, cultural, economic, and political institutions, the entrenched plantation society and Confederate identity took deep root there. Jim Crow symbolizes the extent to which Southern whites were willing to go to cling to their outmoded norms. The Civil War officially ended the institution of slavery in the south but left dreadful repercussions on the economic, political, and social landscape of the South.

The death toll and injury casualties of the Civil War remain unparalleled, as "some thirty-seven percent of all Southern white males of military age were wounded or killed," (American Civil War Center). This decimated the male labor force, which would add to the South's economic burden. The systematic subjugation of women and their exclusion from social, economic, and political affairs likewise made it difficult to rebuild the economy of the South (Faust). With African-Americans barred access to social status, the South allowed itself to stagnate socially instead of adapt to changing times. Even after the population would stabilize no amount of patriarchal power could remedy the devastation wrought by the Civil War. Patriarchy remained entrenched, as did systems of racial subjugation.

One of the results of the Civil War on the South was the emancipation of slaves, ensured by the Presidential decree declaring the former slaves are "forever free," (Lincoln). Emancipation occurred without project management, structure, or vision. Ultimately, Reconstruction failed to provide blacks or whites what they needed to rebuild their society. Many African-Americans fled to urban centers in the North in order to find work in the burgeoning industrial economies there. The blacks that remained in the South had few resources from which to build a viable economy of their own, and likewise lacked social status. A plantation-based economy needed to be rapidly replaced, but the underlying systems of white supremacy remained intact.

Lincoln's message was straightforward: the United Stats aligned itself with universal moral principles like the injunction against murder. Any state that did not agree with the Emancipation Proclamation would therefore be viewed "in rebellion against the United States," (Lincoln). The white supremacist leaders of the south viewed Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation as a violation of their right to oppress people. To try to assert their lost power and regain what they thought they lost, whites systematically oppressed blacks through methods like black codes. The Jim Crow era ensued due to lack of federal supervision over the local affairs of the South. Racist whites felt threatened by blacks being their equals, and perceived blacks to be economic threats to their role in the labor market. Instead of raising the bar for everyone by competing for industrialization, whites formed the Ku Klux Klan and elected racist public officials who supported white interests. The South still suffers from the lingering effects of poorly managed social reconstruction. Moreover, the division between the cultures of the North and South is still evident in the 21st century. The South was and still is characterized by a celebration of ignorance and perpetual religious extremism. The culture of the American South had been shaped prior to the Civil War, and in many ways that culture remains intact. The Confederate defeat revealed "the region's moral inadequacies," (Faust 1).

The eventual empowerment of blacks was a result of the Civil War, because emancipation was the first step necessary for social justice. It was only at great expense and after a long time were African-Americans able to achieve some semblance of social justice. The legacy of racial divisions remained throughout the 20th century and still lingers in the 21st. However, the end of the slavery era allowed black American identity and consciousness to emerge W.E.B. DuBois epitomizes the flowering of African-American culture only possible after the Civl War. Racism remains a public humiliation of America and a raw wound in its side. The Civil War ended slavery, but it did not end racism.

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The Southern economy was devastated after the Civil War. Slavery provided a potentially limitless source of free labor, for even after the demise of the transatlantic slave trade, new generations of slaves would provide the labor forces with which to run plantations. The South resisted industrialization, banking on its ability to remain economically viable without diversifying its portfolio. Its economic problems therefore began prior to the war, in failing to diversify the Southern economy and refusing to incorporate industrialization into its economic future. By enslaving African-Americans, southerners also restricted its own labor market. Once slavery was outlawed, plantation owners had no viable business model and went into debt to finance the rebuilding of their plantations including the purchasing of equipment and of course, labor (Ransom). Having to pay workers for their labor devastated many plantations, while others decided to hire their former slaves as paid laborers. Drawing up new contracts proved difficult for many plantation owners, who had no experience doing so, and no labor market within which to operate. About one third of liberated African-Americans fled their former oppressors, too, depleting the slave market. Those former slaves who remained in the South and pursued "reasonable wages" as Lincoln asked, did not enjoy upward social mobility in the wake of emancipation because their wages remained deplorably low.

As a result, the South continues to be the poorest part of the nation. The South "shared little in the economic growth of the nation as a whole until World War II," because it lacked the ability to consider alternative labor market models (American Civil War Center). Many blacks migrated northwards, further depleting the South's access to a strong labor market. Lincoln advised the slaves to "labor faithfully for reasonable wages," and to only use violence if "necessary" in "self-defense," (Lincoln). Self-defense was often necessary. Stunted social and economic growth in the South were problems that were accompanied by crippling political policies in the aftermath of the Civil War. Akin to Russia appointing KGP officials after the downfall of communism, the South elected racist Civil War heroes during the Reconstruction Era.

Thus, the South perpetuated its own problems. By refusing to change politically, the South facilitated the failure of Reconstruction. Weak federal mandate contributed to the political decimation of the South. As a result, religious extremism and racism led to anarchic forms of oppression including socially sanctioned lynching of African-Americans and the validation of the KKK. As the KKK became a surrogate political institution in the South, so too did voter suppression, restricted access to land ownership, and other issues. Sectional reunion "could not have been achieved without the resubjugation of many of those people whom the war had freed from centuries of bondage," (Blight 3). Resubjugation took the form of economic, social, and political oppression. Sharecropping systems were the modern equivalent of feudalism, in which former slaves worked off small parcels of land but paid leases to white landowners. Social oppression remains salient in the south, and political oppression ensued especially after the assassination of Lincoln and the rise to power of Vice President Johnson, himself a Southerner sympathetic to Confederate concerns and bent on ensuring the irrelevance of Reconstruction.

The economy of the south had been built entirely on agriculture, and the war had destroyed much arable land throughout the region. It took a full decade for the South to be able to produce as much crop output as it had before the war (Widmer). Part of the problem was that the technologies of war had annihilated the land, clear cutting its flora and destroying the capacity for its soil to produce (Widmer). Another problem was that many of the tenders of the land were fighting during the war and were subsequently killed, or were slaves who were liberated from their farming duties (Ransom). Furthermore, the South had developed its own Confederate currency during the war. After the war, its currency was worthless. "People had taken to engaging in barter or using Union dollars (if they could be found) to conduct their transactions," and inflation was unbearable (Ransom 1).

After the Civil War, African-Americans had access to social, political, legal, and economic empowerment. It was not until 1964 that Civil Rights were federally recognized. The South's inability to develop a future-focused economic or political policy, or to shift its normative culture of racism, led to current conditions throughout the region.

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