The Effect of A Divided America
The Civil War is commonly accepted as the advent of ‘total war,’ or war that relies on and targets non-combatants as well as soldiers. Americans today accept the strategies employed by the Union with the understanding that after the Reconstruction, the South was right as rain, but that was not always the case. In the City of Savannah, Georgia, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the city faired far worse than the soldiers who meant to protect it, and suffered long after the Civil War concluded in 1865.
The truth behind why the war had to turn to new strategies developed to intimidate the general population is quite dark. By the beginning of the war, the American North and South had become so culturally different that the two already felt like different countries, and the divide over the issue of slavery was the perfect issue to initiate the split. Once America was divided, Union leaders knew there was only one way to achieve a real victory against two ideologically different nations, and that was completer subjugation. General William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union knew this, and underwent a campaign to make southerners question the validity of their nation by proving the Confederacy’s inability to protect them.
General Sherman achieved his goal by marching sixty-thousand troops from the City of Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. During this march they raided food stores and plantations, burning them after they had taken what they wanted. Dolly Sumner Lunt, a white woman living on a Georgia plantation at the time of Sherman’s March wrote, later to be republished by the University of North Carolina Press, “They robbed every house along the road of its provisions, sometimes taking every piece of meat, blankets and wearing apparel, silver and arms of every description.” The people of the South were afraid of Sherman’s troops, and the Confederate troops were not capable of doing much to protect the people of Savannah.
When General Sherman and his troops began to close in on Savannah, the Confederate Army decided the best course of action was to retreat across the Savannah River into South Carolina. The troops were able to successfully retreat by using river barges tied end to end spanning across the river, but the speed of their retreat combined with a lack of any civilian evacuation left the citizens of Savannah vulnerable and unsure of their futures. The Southern troops actions worked with Sherman’s strategy to scare southerners into questioning whether their system could protect them. While these tactics were certainly effective, one can quickly see the negative effects of this approach to reuniting the nation.
According to U.S. census records, the population growth of the white population of Chatham county (the county containing Savannah and a couple small farming communities) drops from 1860–1870, growing by a population of approximately 1,200 people, compared to the previous decades growth of over 6,000 people. This growth is dwarfed by the growth of the black population of Savannah, which in the same span of time grew nine times that of whites, from a combined 15,000 freed and enslaved in 1860 to 24, 000 in 1870.
One might think this increase in the black population, combined with black men gaining the right to vote in 1870, meant that some large political changes would help Savanah join the North and other southern cities in an era of change. This was not the case, as restrictive voting laws and intimidation made it almost impossible for any immediate change to take place. An example of this intimidation can be found in Authors Leslie Harris and Daina Ramey Berry’s book Slavery and Freedom in Savannah, where the Reconstruction era politician James M. Simms is quoted stating, “There was only one polling location for the entire city; the three required ballot boxes were put inside the Chatham County courthouse.” This had differed from most of Savannah’s history, where ballot boxes had been evenly spread across the city. This relocation of boxes made it easier for the former Confederates still in political power and local authorities to enforce their racially motivated voting laws.
The Union takeover of the South also caused incredible social instability, as elite whites lost their main status symbol, and poor whites lost the only group they could exercise power over. In order to maintain control over the community, white elites took on conservative party platforms, appealing to the poor white’s negative attitude to the formerly enslaved that they now shared status with in order to win elections. Elite whites in power did not use their power to improve Savannah’s economic situation. Racist ideologies held black people in positions of poverty as sharecroppers, instead of encouraging this new population of workers to work in railroads or industrial positions.