July 12, 1865---George Washington Carver and the ecological cost of war

JULY 12, 1865:                    

 

George Washington Carver (d. 1943) was born this day in Diamond, Missouri, the human property of a recalcitrant slaveowner who had not yet emancipated his slaves. As a newborn, Carver was among a group of slaves snatched by (or sold to) night-riding Confederate holdouts. Among the other slaves involved in this incident were Carver’s mother and sister, both of whom were never seen again. The infant Carver was eventually returned to his father by an Abolitionist raider who was involved in an attack on the night-riders.

 

He was taught to read by his remaining relatives. Around the age of seven, hearing that there was a “negro school” in Neosho, George Washington Carver walked the distance (about 12  miles), and was admitted. He was the school’s star pupil. At thirteen, he graduated, and moved on to Fort Scott, Kansas’ local black “Academy.”  However, a lynching in Fort Scott convinced him to move to Minneapolis, Kansas, where he completed his Primary education.

Although he was accepted to Highland College in Highland, Kansas based on his grades, he was not admitted to the school due to his race. At loose ends, he became an “Exoduster,” an African-American permitted to homestead the prairie,  and thus began his fascination with botany. He also became an avid portrait artist of trees and plants.

In 1891, he became the first black student at Iowa Agricultural College (now the University of Iowa) in Ames.  He completed his Master’s Degree in botany in 1896, and became the first black professor at the College / University.

Invited by Booker T. Washington to teach agricultural science at the Tuskeegee Institute, Carver remained on the faculty there for 47 years.

Although Carver is most famous for his improvements to the peanut crop, he also improved sweet potatoes, soybeans, pecans, and other crops. Carver’s work was critical to the ecosystem and the economy of the South, since unrelenting cotton agriculture had morbidly depleted the soils of the old Confederacy. He instituted crop rotation as a normative practice as well as the nitrogenization of soils. Carver’s work undoubtedly saved lives, as, beginning in 1915, the boll weevil destroyed nearly the whole of the cotton crop for the next four years. Able to replace cotton with other, edible, crops, Southerners had both crops to sell and crops to eat during the infestation.

In 1921, Carver testified before Congress on agronomy and agribusiness. Although several Congressmen had tried to block his testimony (based on color), Carver proved to be such an erudite and fascinating speaker that he presented a lecture that lasted several hours and resulted in the passage of new farming regulations.  During the Dust Bowl Years of the Great Depression, Carver worked with American industry (including the usually unpleasantly racist and anti-semitic Henry Ford) to develop new plant-based products to aid struggling farmers. With Ford’s industrial muscle backing him, Carver was able to do much to ameliorate the suffering of farmers. Perhaps most impressive, at a time when racism was at its zenith, Carver was publicly credited and respected for his work.   

Carver’s work ultimately undid some of the tremendous ecological damage wrought by the Civil War, damage traces of which remain today.  

Wars are, by their very nature, environmental catastrophes. Armies destroy not only farms and livestock, but the natural homes of wild creatures of all sorts. Armies consume forests like termites, both by harvesting them and by using them as battlefields. They foul surface waters by using them as immediate sewage systems, and foul ground waters by having the chemical components of military material leach into water tables. They spread disease via garbage dumping and by the introduction of new microorganisms into previously pristine areas.  They devour the natural environment like monsters.

Civil War armies were, if not highly mechanized, huge, larger than almost all Southern cities in population. As they moved across the South, they were the equivalents of hordes of locusts, stripping bare the earth down to its very soil.  The once-bucolic South, with its ordered lanes and farms and woodlots, was reduced to a moonscape by 1865.  

The North consumed forests too --- for wagons, ships’ masts, caissons, and firewood, among myriad other things. At least two million trees were killed during the war. The Union and Confederate armies annually consumed 400,000 acres of forest for firewood alone.

With its natural ecosystems destroyed, the States of America --- United and Confederate alike --- suffered through epidemics and pandemics, especially in the close-packed army camps and P.O.W. camps. It was said that, “A Confederate prison is the place/Where hunting for lice is no disgrace.” Men ate rats (“They taste very much like a young squirrel,” wrote Lt. Edmund D. Patterson), and the fleas on the rats drank the blood of the hungry soldiers. It is perhaps the greatest of miracles that an outbreak of the Black Death did not accompany the scourge of war.

Every mineral that had an industrial use was extracted and put to use, in significantly larger numbers than before the war. The Civil War saw the birth of the petroleum industry, in part because the Yankee whaling fleets were being destroyed by Commerce-Raiding.

A comparison of the 1860 and 1870 censuses reveals a dramatic surge in all of the extractive industries, and every sector of the American economy, with one notable exception – Southern agriculture, which would need another decade to return to prewar levels.

It is doubtful that any species loss was sustained during the war itself, despite the death of large numbers of animals who wandered into harm’s way: It has been speculated that more than a million horses and mules were casualties of the war. But we should note that the most notable extinction of the late 19th century and early 20th century --- that of the passenger pigeon --- began at the end of the Civil War. Repeating rifles were a wartime development, and they were turned against birds and bison indiscriminately. They declined from billions to dozens between the 1870s and the 1890s. The last known passenger pigeon, Martha, died on Sept. 1, 1914. The bison remains in much reduced numbers.

George Perkins Marsh, the world’s first professional ecologist, recognized the heavy price of the Civil War when he wrote in 1864, “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste.”

A Passenger Pigeon c. 1896. Once numbered in the tens of billions, the species went extinct in 1914.

This immense heap of bison skulls on the western plains represents just a slight fraction of the animals killed off between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War

One hundred and fifty years later, facing climate change and the exhaustion of planetary resources, too many people have yet to learn the lessons Carver and Marsh tried so hard to impart. *

*This post was adapted in part from The New York Times: The Civil War’s Environmental Impact by Ted Widmer, November 15, 2014.

July 11, 1865---To "Hellmira" and back

JULY 11, 1865:          

“Camp Chemung” the notorious Civil War Prison Camp in Elmira, New York, often referred to as “Hellmira” is closed, and dismantling begins. Once a Union training center, “Camp Rathbun,” the P.O.W. Camp held at its fullest capacity about 13,000 prisoners, of whom nearly 3,000 died (about 25%). This was comparable to Andersonville (29%) where the prisoners also lived in tents. 

July 10, 1865--1,776

JULY 10, 1865:                   

The first rails of the eastern spur of the Transcontinental Railroad are laid in Omaha, Nebraska. The total length of the line when finished is 1,776 miles. 

 

July 9, 1865---Of Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, “The Year of Jublio,” and “The Lost Cause”

JULY 9, 1865:            

Of Carpetbaggers, Scalawags, “The Year of Jublio,” and “The Lost Cause”:

I  

“The Year of Jublio” lasted exactly six days, from April 9^th to April 15^th 1865. Newly-freed slaves, rejoicing in their Emancipation, hearing of Abraham Lincoln’s death, were shocked into a gloom even more profound than that which struck white Americans. For, of all Americans, the future of the black race seemed the least certain even before Lincoln died. After Lincoln’s murder even the question of Emancipation seemed open for debate once more.

In the event, and perhaps in honor of Lincoln’s memory, the United States stood by the promise of Emancipation. At least de jure.  By July 9, 1865, former slaves were regularly suffering social and economic discrimination on a scale that reduced many of them to the status of serfs.

II

The postwar expansion of sharecropping was perhaps a natural outgrowth of the South’s dislocated social system. Sharecropping had, ironically, been a system instituted by President Lincoln himself on January 23, 1864, when he approved a policy that directed Unionist Planters who had freed their slaves to treat their former human chattel as employees. The Freedmen were to be hired and paid fairly for their labor. Lincoln hoped “to re-commence the cultivation of . . . plantations.”  Under the original policy, the military was to ensure Planters’ compliance with the new system.

While it worked well on paper, the new system failed miserably in practice. Even during the war, most Unionist white landowners, in financial ruin, could do nothing more than offer their farmhands payment-in-kind as a percentage of the crop raised. 

After the war, the large Planters’ holdings were expropriated by Executive Order. This left only smallholders in possession of their farms. Frequently a small farm could not produce enough even to feed the farmer and his family, never mind any former slaves that might be working the land. With no money to buy seed stocks or farm tools everyone starved together. Frequently, struggling white farmers sold their land to other whites and worked as sharecroppers themselves.

Those whites who were doing marginally better agreed to let the former slaves “crop” on their land but took the lion’s share of whatever was produced. The white landowners were frequently in deep debt themselves, with their land carrying multiple mortgages. The tenant blacks lived a marginal existence. They were, despite producing a relative much, only able to consume a little. Hunger was often a concomitant of being a member of a sharecropper’s family. What little progress the average sharecropper might make was stalled and reversed by the necessity to buy seed and tools and other necessaries from the landowner, almost always on credit at inflated prices. Huge credit balances got carried over from year to year and represented a vast debt that could never be paid off. And the whole rickety system, of course, depended on the vagaries of Mother Nature. One bad season could spell disaster not only for individuals but for whole communities, black and white together.

Former slave quarters: A sharecropper's cabin in the cotton fields, circa 1900

Postwar sharecropping had other risks. Southern whites, defeated in battle and impoverished in peace, living on war-torn lands, and subsisting on barter, had even less patience for Freedmen than they had had for slaves, which at least represented a capital investment to them.  Blacks were beaten regularly and cheated constantly. If a black became “uppity” he could easily find himself dead, or at the least thrown off the land, condemned to starving, along with his family. 'Croppin' was a family affair, with even young children working the fields.

An eleven year old Mississippi sharecropper, 1937. Note the crude mule-drawn plow

Blacks who dared to move off the plantations often found themselves in even worse conditions. If a black traveled without the proper passes he might be subject to arrest. As an unknown arrival in another area or in a town, blacks were frequently suspected of having fled crimes, and many, especially young black men, were severely punished or jailed or killed for what they “might” have done elsewhere. 

The situation only grew worse with the imposition of Black Codes. Beginning in Opelousas, Louisiana in early July 1865, by the end of the summer, the vast majority of southern towns had regulations specifying where blacks could live (and where they could not), how they must act, and the types of work they could do. Most skilled and semiskilled work was reserved for whites. Blacks who had been trained as carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, mechanics and the like suddenly found themselves unable to find any work other than agriculture. If they could work, the Black Codes set their wages at impossibly low levels.  The majority of blacks, who were heavy laborers without skills or education, fared even worse.

 The typical 'cropping contract  was between "Freedmen" and "Plantation" as though each generation of tenants were ex-slaves. Sharecropping as a system endured until the 1960s.

  Faced with a world that did not want them, many former slaves returned to their home plantations only to discover that in many cases their bankrupt former Masters could not provide even the marginal security of sharecropping. Sometimes the former Masters were fearful of Federal punishment for slavekeeping and so they turned out the freed people in a world turned suddenly, irrevocably upside down.

Although it is safe to say that most freedmen embraced Emancipation passionately, this was not the case for a significant minority. Many ex-slaves feared losing the paternalistic protections --- as arbitrary as they were --- of a system of bondage that had endured for centuries. Other ex-slaves, realizing that their illiteracy and lack of marketable skills would make them easy marks in the larger world, resisted leaving the familiar farms and plantations they knew. Former house slaves, who were often treated with affection and even some deference, chose to remain with their former Masters. “Mammies” who had sometimes raised three generations of white children in one family, and were beloved, often resisted even talk of being free.  The white families that kept these servants often felt the same. In a world where all was uncertain, some, and more than a few, clung to what certainty they could.

III

Almost universally damned by native Southerners as speculators, cheats, slick city folk, “dirty Yankees,” “damned nigger-lovers,” "Jews", crooks, and cowards, carpetbaggers (named for their stylish luggage) were the first villains of the dawning era of Reconstruction.

In actuality, although some carpetbaggers earned their perjoratives, many were typical reasonably decent folk who believed they were aiding the South by bringing much-needed infusions of Northern capital and industry into the devastated region. 

Virtually every Northerner who came South was called a carpetbagger by someone, although the first “carpetbaggers” were Northern religious missionaries (among them many women) who came South to educate and aid the newly freed people with health care and other services. The close association of Yankee women with black men in particular drove most ex-Confederates wild. It was dangerous work that could lead a white woman to be lynched alongside a black man based upon sheer speculation. As a result, the Northern Missionary Societies established ironclad rules about behavior and social norms. Later, Federal garrison troops often guarded the “Negro Schools” and the teachers who taught in them.  

The free blacks were not always happy with the Northern missionaries either, as the whites, largely New England Congregationalists, forcibly imposed their strict brand of Christianity on  black communities more at ease with more emotional forms of spiritual expression.

The carpetbaggers began to come south in ever-larger numbers as the war wound down. Young middle-class entrepreneurs looking for opportunities were able to buy immense swaths of Dixie land for pennies on the dollar. Supplying black field hands with mules and tools, the new white landowners began cultivating the old plantations. Unlike struggling native Southern farmers, the Northern landowners could pay their black employees hard cash. Sharecropping among Northern white owners was a much rarer phenomenon.

Although Southerners almost always characterized carpetbaggers as cynical exploiters of blacks, most carpetbaggers actively supported expanding the rights of the freed people. Their activism only broadened as Federal garrisons spotted more and more of the South. In places where Northern whites provided a bulwark against Southern oppression, black self-expression flowered. The cash-pay employees of the whites were able to buy their own land, open shops, grow businesses, become educated, and eventually move into politics.  And though there is a persistent myth that the State Legislatures of the Reconstruction States became dens of iniquity manned by avaricious Yankee transplants and mindless, half-barbarous black stooges, the fact is that most of the blacks who entered politics were freeborn preachers, well self-educated businesspeople, or ambitious and intelligent freedmen.

 

And though the Reconstruction Legislatures were later derided as circuses, their members passed much important legislation including new bills for rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of the South. But they also passed bills granting blacks Civil Rights and restricting the liberties of whites who, as yet, had not taken their Loyalty Oaths to the United States. The idea of blacks --- any blacks --- having greater rights than whites --- any whites --- enraged the Caucasian population of the South.

It’s likely that no matter what good the carpetbaggers may have done they would have been utterly demonized by Southerners simply as domineering outsiders. As Reconstruction evolved, Southerners felt more and more like an occupied people. 

IV

Scalawags were the Southern-born equivalents of carpetbaggers. Just as carpetbaggers were seen as avaricious and exploitative, scalawags were seen as opportunistic and manipulative, as evil turncoat Southerners who welcomed Yankee intervention in Dixie as a way of improving their own lot (and lining their pockets) by cheating "honest whites" and exploiting "ignorant darkies."

Carpetbagger and Scalawag

Just as with the carpetbaggers, undoubtedly there were some cynical scalawags, but a good number of Southerners aided the Yankees, civilian and military, by way of stabilizing the destroyed socioeconomic structures of the South. And it is little wonder that the Federal authorities tended to appoint friendly, rather than hostile, Southerners to important and powerful positions in the Reconstruction South.  Parson William Brownlow of Knoxville, who, during the war swore that he would “fight the rebels until hell freezes over and then I will fight them on the ice,” became Governor of Tennessee, and enforced draconian measures against white Southerners.

Scalawags were not just Southerners who kept to the shadows. Many ex-Confederate officers, including Generals James Longstreet and (eventually) “Unconquered” Jo Shelby, and the seemingly implacable Colonel John Mosby became enthusiastic scalawags. Longstreet was shunned, Shelby served in public office, and Mosby was appointed U.S. Consul to Hong Kong (in part to keep him safe from vindictive denizens of Dixie). Even Robert E. Lee, with his support of reunification, could have been styled a scalawag, but no one would have dared to utter the word in reference to Lee.

 

Most Reconstruction Governors were Southern Unionists who had spent extensive time in the North or Northerners who had spent extensive time in the South.  Working with the occupying military authorities, they expanded black Civil Rights. More than a few Southerners realistically recognized that the South would never function normally without black input, though resistance to the idea was widespread and violent. Carpetbaggers and scalawags ran a high risk of being murdered along with the blacks they aided. 

V

Devastated economically, emotionally, and psychologically by the defeat of the Confederacy, white Southerners greeted the postwar peace by clinging desperately, some obsessively, to a growing body of beliefs that have been described collectively as the “Lost Cause” mythology.  

In the opening days of the war, most Southerners believed that their military traditions and sense of honor would allow them to prevail in the conflict.

After the defeat of the Confederacy, white Southerners consoled themselves by attributing the war’s loss to factors beyond their control, such as the physical size of the Union armies and the brute force and destructiveness exhibited by Generals such as Sherman. This was the outlook eventually adopted by Robert E. Lee, and many Southerners followed Lee’s philosophical lead.

Other primary beliefs of the Lost Cause mythos include:

A belief in the high moral standards, heroism, and valor of Confederate Officers and Gentlemen. Generals such as Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson stand out as exemplars of the type.  Robert E. Lee often has demigod status among advocates of “The Lost Cause.”

A corresponding belief in the low cunning of Union soldiers and officers like William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan, who practiced “total war” to the ruination of the gallant South while on the March to the Sea and in the Shenandoah Valley.

The belief that betrayal (by General James Longstreet) and gross incompetence (by General George Pickett) were the major causes of the Southern defeat at Gettysburg. Gettysburg is seen as the turning point of the war.

An insistence that the Civil War (often called “The War of Northern Aggression”) was fought in defense of States' Rights, rather than to preserve slavery, which was a benign institution in which the slaves were loyal and faithful to their benevolent masters.  In this view, the North “invaded” the South, which was within its rights to demand the cession of Fort Sumter in 1861.  

The argument that secession was a Constitutionally-permissible response to Northern cultural and economic domination.  In this view, secession was the only response to Northern attacks against the Southern way of life, especially the “Peculiar Institution.”

The term “Lost Cause” first appeared in the title of an 1866 book by the historian Edward A. Pollard, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. For several years thereafter, the “Lost Cause” mythology became a growing article of faith among an increasing number of Southern whites.

Among the major literary exponents of The Lost Cause were former Lieutenant General Jubal A. Early C.S.A., who wrote a series of nakedly self-serving articles for the Southern Historical Society in the 1870s, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who wrote his political memoirs in 1881 as The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, and former Admiral/General Raphael Semmes C.S.A., whose exhaustive, exciting and noble though bitter memoir, Memoirs of Service Afloat During The War Between the States was published in 1869 and became a best-seller.  Robert E. Lee wrote no memoir.

The Lost Cause mythos was thereafter embraced by such groups as the United Daughters of The Confederacy (UDC) and the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) as well as becoming an article of faith with the Ku Klux Klan. Slowly, the North ceded its view of Civil War and Reconstruction history to the South. Hollywood classics such as Birth of A Nation (1915) and Gone With The Wind (1939) institutionalized the Southern view of the war’s end among almost all Americans, and ennobled the Lost Cause as a righteous one. As of 2015, the United States has only begun to address the reality of such presentations.