Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Results of the War

 

 At the end of the war in North Carolina, General William Hardee spoke of the end of slavery and queried a Northern reporter on the true compassion of the North for the freedmen. The Radical Republicans would turn the freedmen into a voting machine to maintain political hegemony, and keep them in the South to calm Northern workers who feared low-wage labor competition should the freedmen move northward.

Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"

Results of the War:

“A correspondent for the New York Herald, Theodore C. Wilson….somehow managed to secure a seat in the [railroad] car with Hardee and [Chief of Staff Thomas B.] Roy, and now he headed off to Greensboro with them. Exploiting this opportunity, probably as Hardee breakfasted, Wilson asked him for an interview, which Hardee granted, receiving him “in a very cordial, generous, unreserved manner.” In reply to a general question about the war and slavery Hardee said:

“….I accept this war as the providence of God. He intended that the slave should be free, and now he is free. Slavery was never a paying institution….For instance, my wife owned about one hundred negroes; forty of the hundred were useless for work, yet she had to feed these forty, in order to get the work of the other sixty.

The negro will be worse off for this war. Will any of your abolitionists….feed and clothe half-a-dozen little children, in order to get the work of one man and woman? Sir, our people can pay the working negroes a fair compensation for their services, and let them take care of their own families, and then have as much left at the end of the year as we had under the old system.”

General…..Will we not have guerilla warfare?

“So help me God, sir, if we do I am ready and willing to fight to put an end to it….Let me impress it upon you that the people of the South want to live in peace with the people of the North, and you will find they will do it. They will do it cheerfully, provided your government does not resort to harsh measures. If it does resort to harsh measures, I cannot answer for the consequences. We staked our all on the success of our arms, and they failed us, and now we are willing to return and live under the laws of the United States as we find them…..”

(General William J. Hardee, Old Reliable, Nathaniel C. Hughes, Jr., LSU Press, 1965, pp. 297-298)

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