MATILDA A EVANS MD ON THE AFTERMATH OF THE CIVIL WAR (written in 1916)
The great Civil War predicted by Martha Schofield as inevitable in the settlement of the problem of slavery broke out in all its fury in 1860-1861 and was not only attended by the loss of hundreds of thousands of priceless lives, whose bodies filled the countless hospitals of pain, and made gory the prairies and furrows of old fields, as they on the side of the South as well as they on the side of the North, bled and died for the eternal right as each saw what was their duty: but the demoralization precipitated by this gigantic conflict, followed by the assassination of the President Lincoln, the idol of the whole free-civilized world, was even more staggering in its influence on the lives and fortunes of those left to solve the problems created by the great revolution.
The waste of inconceivable sums of money through the awarding of contracts, involving millions and millions of dollars by which fortunes, through little or no effort at all, were made in a single night, was openly countenanced at Washington.
Superfluous wealth chocked the nation at the North with its mighty grip and the riot of speculation, corruption and debauchery which followed, in the voting aware of the public lands free of any charge to private corporations and the granting of subsidies of millions of dollars without any compensation whatsoever, laid such burdens upon the people that many of them until this day, (1916) remain undischarged.
The paralysis experienced by the business interest as a result of this whirlwind of corruption resulted in the decline of the credit of the country to such an extent that the six per cent bonds of the Republic dropped to about seventy-three cents on the dollar in the open market. But the disastrous financial calamity which the war produced is not a consequence in comparison with the moral degradation into which the country sank.
At the South, which had been reduced to the most degraded type of poverty, there were no such opportunities for the accumulation of wealth as existed at the North and in the West. The few railroads that before the war intersected this section, had been torn up by the necessities of war and needed rebuilding, but there was no money to be had anywhere with which to do the work. All the strongest blood and brain had been either slain in battle or rendered incapacitated for the tasks which the new order of conditions had forced upon the country. Aside from the loss of millions and millions of dollars as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation and the freeing of the Slaves, the South was forced also to bear the burden of an exorbitant tax on all crops produced, especially the cotton tax.
Under such conditions it was impossible to obtain credit anywhere for the most necessary things in life and as there was almost nothing of any value produced, the greatest hardships and suffering, if not actual misery, was endured by the people of the South. Scores of persons gave up in despair and died and little children often went to bed crying from hunger.