Echoes of Reconstruction: How Many Union Soldiers Occupied the South During Reconstruction?

Emerging Civil War is pleased to welcome back Patrick Young, author of The Reconstruction Era blog

Last year, I was talking about researching the Reconstruction Era at a Civil War Roundtable, and a man there said that he loves the Civil War, but he doesn’t read anything about Reconstruction. I told him that was similar to saying you studied the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but you were not interested in anything after the tearing down of Saddam’s statue. Nothing really happened after the icon fell, right?

When we look back at Reconstruction, whatever you think about it, there are a few misconceptions that even students of history fall prey to.

When I was in high school on New York’s Long Island, not a Confederate heartland, we did study Reconstruction for about a week. It was at the end of the Vietnam War, and I had talked to Vietnam vets from my own family. They told me about the resistance of Vietnamese to having strangers in their land. I imagined Southerners’ natural resistance to an overwhelming armed presence of Northern troops for twelve years in their streets. Whatever I might have thought about slavery, who would want the army down the block from their house? If you watched Civil War movies and made-for-TV series a half-century ago, you might have asked yourself that question, too.

As an adult, I started studying Reconstruction, and one of the things I looked to was the imposition of military authority in the former Confederacy after the Civil War. We know that the Union Army mobilized between 1.5 and 2 million men during the war. Most of those still left alive and in the ranks were active in the South in April 1865. However, as you know, soon after Lincoln was assassinated, on May 23 and May 24, 1865, regiments were called together for the Grand Review in Washington to celebrate the end of the war, and fairly soon after the Big Parade, those units went back to their states and were demobilized.

By January 1866 the United States Army in the ten Confederate states (leaving out Texas) was only 61,800 soldiers, not two million. Basically this meant that about 6,000 men were allocated per insurrectionist state. Two months later, there were only 41,000 soldiers there. By September 1866, a year and three months after the Grand Review, there were just over 17,000 men in those ten states, less than 2,000 Federal soldiers per state.

Texas did have a larger proportion of Federal soldiers stationed in it after the war. In August 1865 there were 48,259 Union troops in Texas. Even in January of 1866 there were still 25,085 United States soldiers there. However, very few were concerned with Reconstruction. Most were there to keep an eye on Emperor Maximilian and his French troops trying to construct a European colony in Mexico.

The decision by President Andrew Johnson to cut the costs of occupation also impacted the efficacy of the occupying army. Johnson sold most of the Army’s horses as a cost-saving measure after the war, which meant that about 90 percent of the soldiers in the South were infantry. The soldiers on foot were seeking out the mounted guerrillas of the KKK, the Knights of the White Camellia, and other mounted terrorist groups by marching on foot in “hot” pursuit!

A second decision by Johnson also had an impact. Most of the white troops under arms in April of 1865 were near the expiration of their terms of enlistment. When regiments were released after the Grand Review, the whole regiment went home, including those just recently recruited. However, many United States Colored Troops still had more than a year left to serve in the summer of 1865. Unfortunately, Johnson, a noted racist, did not want them to be stationed in the South. Most were removed from those states that participated in the rebellion.So the United States Colored Troops, of whom more than half of their volunteers came from the South, were largely moved out of that region by the fall of 1865.

Now we can look at the microlevel impact. Let us look at the number of Federal soldiers in Mississippi, for example. Federal troops in the state went from 16,500 men in July 1865 down to 4,500 in February 1866. By May 1866 there were only 439 troops left in the whole state. After serious outbreaks of Ku Klux Klan violence in 1868, troops were increased by about a thousand men and then began to go down again in 1869, with little more than a full strength regiment for the whole state. Mississippi had nearly 800,000 people living there at the time. The growing terror could not be controlled by a thousand soldiers.

In Tennessee, where the Ku Klux Klan came into being in the first half of 1866, there were 53,459 Union troops in July 1865, of whom 11,782 were cavalry. By June 1866 when the Ku Klux Klan first manifested itself, there were only 1,416 United States troops for the whole state; none of whom were cavalry!

In Memphis in May of 1866 a riot led by white police officers killed 30 to 46 African Americans. There were only 235 Federal troops in that strategic Mississippi River city, which had a population of nearly 40,000.

In South Carolina, where the war started and Confederate sympathies were among the strongest in the South, we see a similar denuding of Federal forces. South Carolina had 10,307 United States troops in July 1865, but it had fallen off to just 1,992 in June 1866.

In Georgia, where Confederate Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon was reportedly behind the growth of the Klan in 1866 and 1867, Federal troops had declined to only 593 soldiers by the time the Klan was founded in June 1866.

The myth of a heavily occupied South during Reconstruction was part of the effective propaganda cooked up by the proponents of the Lost Cause in the last third of the 19th century. This myth has been repeated all the way up to the present day. And it is effective.

Sources:

Mapping Occupation by Greg Downs and Scott Nesbit provides an online data set listing Federal troop strengths at state and municipal levels.

After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War by Greg Downs published by Harvard University Press (2017)