The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 39, July 1935 - April, 1936 Page: 105
346 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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The Confederate Exodus to Latin America
The grand old town of Charleston had fared little better. Five
months after the close of the war a northern visitor saw it "a
city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of widowed women,
of rotting wharves, of desolated warehouses, of weed-wild gar-
dens, of miles of grass-grown streets, of acres of pitiful and
voiceless barrenness."0 The wharves were so overgrown that they
resembled a wilderness; droves of army mules grazed in the
streets; St. Michael's Church, once the center of the city's fash-
ionable and aristocratic life, gave silent testimony to the bom-
bardment; northern soldiers' graves identified the famous old
Race Course.10
But South Carolina-indeed the entire South--was a rural
community; and in the country the end of the war found condi-
tions bad enough. In hundreds of places country mansions lay
in ashes; in many others the buildings remained, but their in-
teriors had been stripped of the libraries, paintings, and even
family portraits by northern soldiers. Confiscations, mortgages,
and loans to the Confederate government left many a wealthy
landholder a pauper. One scion of a Carolina estate that yielded
$150,000 a year in ante-bellum days peddled tea by the pound
and molasses by the quart on a corner of the old homestead to
the former family slaves in order to gain a livelihood. Planta-
tion lands that before the war brought twenty-five and thirty
dollars an acre were now to be had at two, three, four, five, and
ten dollars an acre, with small chance of sale. The poor peo-
ple of the country had lost less, but the little was their all."
Conditions in Georgia were fully as bad. With the excep-
tion of a single block, the entire business district of Atlanta
had been laid in ruins. Blackened jumbles of brick and mortar,
charred remnants of upright timbers, scattered pieces of sheet-
iron roofing, and all other sorts and shapes of rubbish told of
General Sherman's visit. The desolation marking the sixty-
mile path made by the general's army in its advance from the
capital to the sea almost defies description. The havoc wrought
'Sidney Andrews, The South since the War, 1.
1Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, III, 165.
'J. S. Pike, The Prostrate State, 101 et seq.; Francis B. Simkins, "The
Problem of South Carolina Agriculture after the Civil War," in the
North Carolina Hist. Rev., VII, No. 1, 46-77.105
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 39, July 1935 - April, 1936, periodical, 1936; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101095/m1/119/: accessed May 2, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.