A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

in 1862, the Confederacy enacted the first conscription laws in American history, including provisions that a draftee could avoid service by producing a substitute, and that one able-bodied white male would be exempted for every twenty slaves. This “class legislation” was deeply resented in the upcountry, for the cost of a substitute quickly rose far beyond the means of most white families, while the “twenty Negro” provision, a response to the decline of discipline on the plantations, allowed many overseers and planters sons to escape military service.

More than ever before, the Southern upcountry was divided against itself between 1861 and 1865. Yeomen supplied both the bulk of Confederate soldiers and the majority of deserters and draft resistors.

Regions like East Tennessee and western North Carolina and individual counties in the hill country of other states would embrace the Republican party after the Civil War and remain strongholds well into the twentieth century. Their loyalty first to the Union and then to Republicanism did not, however, imply abolitionist sentiment during the war (although they were perfectly willing to see slavery sacrificed to preserve the Union) or a commitment to the rights of blacks thereafter. Upcountry Unionism, Northern reporter Sidney Andrews explained in the fall of 1865, rested above all on “hatred of those who went into the Rebellion” and of “a certain ruling class” that had brought upon the region the devastating impact of the Civil War.

Now the prospect opened of an affluent, democratic, free labor South, with small farms replacing the great plantations and Northern capital and migrants energizing the society. And presiding over the transformation would stand a benevolent and powerful national state.