Cara’s Blog

The ignorance of some of the individuals from the reading dumbfounded me. No wonder soldiers were widely feared when they came home and no wonder there was such an outbreak of violence in America after the Civil War. With 10,000,000 pills and 2,841,000 ounces of opiates given out liberally to wounded veterans how could this not happen? With large portion of the country readjusting to society and fighting the “soldiers disease” of heroin and morphine addiction I can imagine that there was a lot of chaos. By the time it was realized how serious these drugs were, it was too late. The damage had been done. Something else that shocked me was that families of confederate soldiers were not allowed to lay flowers on the graves of their dead. One man went as far as to say that it was desecration to do this because the confederates were rebels. That men and women had to hide flowers in their clothing to lie down is absurd.

While I do not identify with the hatred that was felt by many Southerners towards blacks, I think the North was to blame for a lot of the racial out lash. Based on the readings from To Appomattox and Beyond we know how much southern men valued their masculinity. They were pressured from all sides of society to preserve their manhood and this included the power of human ownership. As the south was rightfully stripped of this right they felt as if their manhood was “crushed.” Right away the same men that they had recently owned started to hold offices and essentially govern them. Furthermore, black troops were sent by the north to try to control order after the war’s end because white troops had no desire to. “Social Fraternities” like the KKK helped Southern men regain what manhood they believed they lost.