The study of Reconstruction after the Civil War has got me thinking about how people in the South would have felt about things. I mean feel too. As much as many of us like to think we are primarily rational, it is human to have some emotional responses to things especially in trying times.

Booker T. Washington wrote about slaves quickly moving from the elation of being free to the realization of the responsibilities of being free and securing food and shelter. Recently freed slaves on the coast of South Carolina and Georgia must have been devastated to have lost the land General Sherman had allocated them. There was no Federal plan to assist the freedmen.

Whites in the South were defeated militarily and in many parts the war left significant devastation. In percentage terms, the loss of life was much greater than in the North. The economy was devastated, and the provision of the necessities of food and shelter would have been the primary focus of much of the population. There was some hope in that Southern leaders were busy in their state capitals complying with President Johnson’s requirements to rejoin the Union. Most of the Southern states voted to ratify the 13th Amendment officially ending slavery in December of 1865, with Georgia providing the 23rd vote to satisfy the three-quarters of the state’s requirement.

Then in early 1867, nearly two years after Lee’s surrender, things changed. Congress decided it should run reconstruction in the South. They had different rules for reestablishing bonds with the Union including setting-up of military districts to formalize military rule. Like bills today, it was not aptly named: “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States.”

Whether you were black or white in the South you would have been entitled to feel concern for how you were going to survive. Anger that the Federal Government had let you down. Resentment that you were not being treated fairly. Strikes me as the wrong feelings to foster if the primary concern was for building a power sharing multi-racial society.