Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/338

322 had passed, a fiery furnace, as it were, of devastating war and reconstruction and destruction of over fifteen years. Every true citizen realized the fearful conditions surrounding him to begin social, political and material life anew. A condition without a precedent in history confronted them. Their brothers of the North were still hostile, suspicious, distrustful, and watching them with vigilant eyes, possibly to try a new experiment in restoration.

Yet they were at least able to face the future and apply their wisdom and statesmanship to the upbuilding of a new civilization, having to accept the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution irrevocably, although fastened on them by the bayonet; and having negro suffrage as a fixed fact, and that, too, in face of the great burdens imposed on them in the ten years' experiment. It looked as if the effort they could not avoid in the solution of the intricate problem was made hopeless by the conditions they had to accept. Two races differing in almost every respect, one a governing race with a proud prestige of success, the other a docile, inexperienced, uneducated race without a record, had to live side by side with equal political power and rights.

The new problem which Southern statesmen had to face and solve, was surrounded by every possible adverse condition. At the same time, the need most pressing above all others was to restore confidence and prosperity, and provide employment to hands made idle by destruction of all manufacturing enterprises and all employments not strictly agricultural. Although the South was mainly agricultural, because her peculiar conditions made her so before the war, still she had been proportionally doing her share in all lines of development before the struggle. The almost total destruction of all these lines of industry, reduced her people in starting, to the one primitive pursuit of every people—agriculture, as an immediate way of making a living. The Southern