The Senate Apologizes for Slavery and Jim Crow Laws — But Why?
So many lines of white slave holders were killed off in the civil war only their black lines survived.
That’s news to me. Remember that any slave owner who had more than 20 slaves was exempt from the Confederate draft (theoretically because they were needed to keep the slaves in line). This is one of the reasons that even Southerners who fought for the Confederacy sometimes called it “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
It is the case that I suspect that most of the wealth that slave owners enjoyed before the war hasn’t passed on to their descendants. The cost of the war was enormous in taxes and in defaulted Confederate and state war bonds. The emancipation of slaves took away much of the wealth.
A typical value for slaves was about $300-$400 (field hands and skilled slaves worth a lot more; aged slaves who were of limited labor value far less); a master with 300 slaves had about $90,000 worth of slaves–equivalent to $2.7 million today. When the war was over, all those slaves were gone–and the land that they worked was now worth a lot less.
And for more than a few, Sherman’s measures meant that there wasn’t even a nice house anymore. There were other forms of destruction as well. My great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel McIlvaine, 10th Indiana Volunteer Infantry, describes how Confederate General Zollicoffer was killed in battle–and the bridge into Nashville in which much of his wealth was located, but destroyed by retreating Confederate forces–impoverishing Zollicoffer’s widow and children.
