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Emancipation and the Army of the Cumberland
Issues: Reconstruction
1)
If soldiers in the Army of the Cumberland accepted
emancipation as a way to defeat the Confederacy, they
felt no obligation to assist the ex-slaves once the war
was done. While the memoirs and regimentals
express a range of attitudes about freeing blacks as
part of the war, they are united in an absolute silence
about Reconstruction. As Army of the Cumberland
veterans tell it, the war ended in 1865.
2) Of
course, the former slaves saw the end of the war as only
the beginning. Although the Confederate republic
had lost, the former masters remained, along with broad
community support for the slave system. As the
defeated states put their local governments back
together in 1865 with the assistance of the new
president, Andrew Johnson, they passed what came to be
known as the Black Codes: a series of laws
designed to regulate relations between the ex-bondpeople
and the white community. As the former bondpeople
saw it, these laws created a system as harsh as slavery
had been.
3) The
majority of Republicans in Congress thought so, too.
Worried that the defeated states were putting their
former institution back in place, Republicans in the
House and Senate passed a series of measures that
effectively tried to remake the political order of the
defeated states. In particular, they sought to
create new state-level Republican parties based around
utilizing the ex-slaves as voters. What resulted
from this was several years of violence that eventually
destroyed these state Republican regimes.
4)
Before these Reconstruction state governments were
removed, the population in the victorious states became
disillusioned. Although Republican voters
initially supported Congress's attempt to overcome the
Black Codes, that support lessened quickly. By the
middle of the 1870s, most of the population of the Union
states had divorced themselves from Reconstruction,
veterans of the Union armies included.
5) As a
result, by the time Army of the Cumberland veterans sat
down to write regimental histories and memoirs, they
could treat Reconstruction as though it had never
existed. Of course, their silence provides no clue
whether or not they had supported Congress's efforts at
the time. However, it was clear that their intense
pride at having defeated secession hinged on eliminating
even the hint that Reconstruction had happened at all.
Even those veterans who insisted that the war against
the Confederacy was a war against slavery let that
crusade end with Lee's surrender.
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