""Worse Than Slavery"" Topic

"In the tumultuous summer of 1861, a Mississippi planter named William Nugent rode off to war with a regiment from Vicksburg. He did not expect a very long fight, viewing a Southern victory as all but inevitable. Nugent worried instead about his own mortality--about dying on a faraway battlefield without "leaving an heir behind to . . . represent me hereafter in the affairs of men." His early letters home were filled with bluster and pride. "I feel that I would like to shoot a Yankee." he told his young wife. "The North will yet suffer for this fratricidal war she has forced upon us--Her fields win be desolated, her cities laid to waste, and the treasuries of her citizens dissipated in the vain attempt to subjugate a free people."

Nugent was mistaken, of course. By war's end, only the South matched his grim portrait of destruction, and no other state had suffered more than his own. The fields of Mississippi had been "desolated" by fire and flood and simple neglect. The cities had been flattened by Grant's artillery and pillaged by Sherman's roaming troops. Following the seven-month siege of Vicksburg in 1863, Union soldiers had marched through the heart of Mississippi, burning houses, killing livestock, and trampling crops. Writing to his wife in 1864, Nugent described the damage near Jackson, the state capital, which had just been put to the torch: "The largest plantations are . . . grown up in weeds . . . ; fences are pulled down & destroyed; houses burned; negroes run off. . . The prospects are gloomy enough and may be worse. I think the present year will wind it up and. . . see me at home again."…"

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Armand

"War is Hell"

You are right….

Armand

Most of the horrors described here are well post war. It never occurred to me, over this side of the Pond, that the plight of black folk almost worsened in the South after emancipation.

Suddenly they were now seen as far more of a threat to the status quo and almost treated worse than when slaves.

When will we ever learn, as the song goes?