I’m talking about the failure of the North to rebuild the infrastructure of the South which plunged it into poverty, ill health and bitterness. Whether “rebellion” or war, it’s been shown that helping your former enemies is a winning strategy. I understand the bitterness on both sides but pragmatism over all.
And I'm saying, hyperbole aside, the South suffered a great deal less than the losing side of any other rebellion I'm aware of. During the period before and during the Southern rebellion, a rebellion had been going on in China which killed 25 million and left whole sections of the country deserted wastelands. The French Revolution was a bloodbath, as was the English Civil War. What happened to the south was nothing by comparison.
Hi miss marmelstein. You raise a valid point. Things were tough for southerners after the war, and circumstances were exacerbated by the assassination of Lincoln - an act that hardened hearts all around. History is replete with anecdotes of carpetbaggers exploiting southerners - it happened and it was unseemly.
But can you also pause for a moment and recognize the harm that southerners did to themselves through their resistance to reformation post-war? Upstream in this thread we spoke of the necessity for the errant states to ratify the 13th amendment as a condition for readmission, and the refusal of Mississippi to comply. Mississippi was also the first state to impose “black codes” - which later “evolved” into the notorious Jim Crow laws.
My point is that all parties had some culpability and the foot-dragging on the part of southerners didn’t exactly hasten their reconstruction.
Except the US did rebuild the infrastructure in the southern states, and in fact expanded and improved it. At the beginning of the war, the south had 9600 miles of railroad, in a hodgepodge of track gauges. In 1870 there were 11,000 miles of a uniform gauge and in 1890 there were 26,000 miles. Almost all built with northern money. The cities that were destroyed in the war were rebuilt within a few years.
That the south fell into "poverty, ill health and bitterness" was partly the result of economic conditions that pre-dated the war--an economy built on a couple of commodity crops at a time the world economy was rapidly industrializing--and partly the loss of the free labor and financial asset that owning human beings provided. The southern states are far more comparable in their economy to the other nations ringing the Caribbean than they are to the northern states.