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Section 2: Building the Black Community: The Family Section 2: Building the Black Community: The Church Section 2: Building the Black Community: The School Section 2: Quest for Economic Autonomy and Equal Rights Section 2: Memory and Mourning Section 2: Violence

Memory and Mourning

Most Southern whites responded to defeat with grief and dismay. "The demoralization is complete," wrote a Georgia girl. "We are whipped, there is no doubt about it."

Privately, white Southerners struggled to come to terms with the appalling loss of life, a disaster without parallel in the American experience.

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Many women had taken on new roles during the Civil War, assuming greater and greater authority for managing farms and plantations while their husbands were absent, or serving as nurses, teachers, and in other professions.

The death of nearly 260,000 soldiers meant that women would continue to fill these roles, even as they struggled to help surviving husbands and sons adapt to the reality of defeat.
Copyright 2003
A New Birth of Freedom: Reconstruction During the Civil War The Meaning of Freedom: Black and White Responses to Slavery