They are returning to tables that had empty chairs around them throughout the war and now will be permanently empty, because many thousands of those men will not return back to their families. They are dealing with scenes like this, largescale property destruction, destroyed by battlefield engagements or by the destruction of military installations. The march to the sea, this particular image of richmond being destroyed as the union army marched in in a grand victorious manner. The smoldering ruins, if you will, left all across the south. We talked a little bit before about the crisis in faith that southern veterans had, that they had prayed to god in many ways for that speedy and big victory and now are returning home as defeated men, as losers, if you will. There are many ways sort of embodying if you will rem, sitting in the corner losing their religion because god had turned away from them. Some came home completely disillusioned, angry, frustrated. One veteran, though, remained somewhat hopeful, though. He said defeat must be the will of god and is therefore right. We must look forward therefore with heart and hope to the future, trusting that god will strengthen us to override all obstacles and triumph all difficulties. Another woman noted this demoralization that we feel is now complete. We are whipped. There is no doubt about it. So when these veterans are g r t hahp hc to face mixed reactions as they come off of trains or just walk become into their communities or come off of a horse that they had taken home. In some cities, you saw these veterans return home and communities rushed out to give them big hugs and welcome them home. Whitelaw reed is one of these guys in savannah after the civil war and witnessed many of these reunions. He said he saw crowds gather that seemed in no [ inaudible ] from the lack of success in the war. He noticed men were dressed in gray uniforms missing legs and arms and they were getting a little bit of extra attention. He said the compliments would rain upon that veteran until the extra blush the blushes would show upon his cheeks and he was convinced that he had taken the most gallant and manly course in the world. Now as these veterans return home, they return back to that dining room table chair that had been empty for so long but some of them now are crippled soldiers, home from wars with only wounds and glory to pay. There was a case of a major john haskill who had lost an arm krg the war. He was actually on the porscporg with some women. As confederate soldiers were walking by on their way back to the community after the war comes to a conclusion, he turns around and showcases the empty sleeve, the sort of waving in the breeze from his coat jacket and all of the soldiers who marched by were impressed. They took off their hats and cheered and greeted him as they went by. Each regiment catching inspiration from the one ahead of it according to an eyewitness. But these cheers are shortlived in many ways, particularly because this aura of defeat is now hanging over the confederacy itself. If you are like me and had to suffer through the Philadelphia Eagles yesterday losing to miami it sort of creates a stupid loss to miami, it sort of gives you that little bit of internal cloud of defeat and are you like oh, did i really want to watch any more nfl Football Games today. But then you watch Peyton Manning look even worse than the Philadelphia Eagles and it makes you feel a little bit better about yourself, right . And for these particular veterans, where else were they going to go to find that little bit of i think extra oomph, if you will, to feel better. For some veterans it was the fact that they came home with injuries that they didnt need to show to people in their communities. In fact, one confederate veteran noted that he decided he came home with a gunshot wound that was hidden in his chest and he had to deal with the bullet there for the rest of his life but he was happy about it because nobody could tell that he had been wounded. He wasnt going to get that look from somebody in the community saying oh, he must have lost his arm in that war, that war that didnt turn out so well. Clement moody noted when the southern confederacy had been wrapped in her bloody winding sheet and the formerly cherished hope of the south had gone down in darkness and death, the transition now begins for veterans themselves. Some come home with empty sleeves, some come hobbling home on one leg, some left both legs on the battlefield, some with sightless eyeballs groping their way home in blindness, in darkness, all came in tatters and rags to look upon the ashes of their ruined homes. He pleaded we needed to recognize these men who had been so physically damaged. You can imagine this to be a little bit of a strange transition, if you will. Imagine living that life for three, four years of constant excitement, constant marching, wearing on your body, the elements, the constant fear that you may have going into battle, and all of a sudden, it stops immediately. It just ends. That whole process that you have gotten used to physically, emotionally, mentally, is now gone and you come home with the memories of it, with the good memories of the war, with the negative memories of the war, and possibly psychological or physical repercussions that the war itself had caused. For historians its difficult in terms of chronicling these particular stories about veterans and their difficulties after the war, and for a few reasons is because civil war folks were very good at writing everything down in letters and diary entries during the war. They chronicled every bad piece of hard tack they ate, every raindrop that fell, every battle and every moment that they spent on guard duty, but then they come home. Theyre not chronicling the war in that amount of significant detail as they had previously. And so we are left with only those who kept writing diary entries to actually tell us what all of this means in the grand scope of things. The other thing is that some confederates we can say well, we can go to the pension files, these documents when confederate soldiers will fill out documents to get money and prospects which we will talk about in a few minutes but those files in many ways are incomplete. They are also hidden from public view. In fact, some states actually still have medical seals on these documents because they contain private details. Medical details, about family members that you dont want necessarily to go public. So for the veterans who came home psychologically disturbed, some of them turned to alcohol abuse, some to drug abuse, particularly opium. We also see some contemplate and actually commit suicide. Bill hicks is one of these guys. He was described as the pristine man if you will, colossus in form. He lost a leg in the battle of shilo in 1862. He came home to a law practice that seemed promising but wasnt that great overall. Every day, hicks thought about that leg that he had lost in the war. It preyed on him until according to one of his friends, he had no choice but to blow out his brains because he didnt want to live the rest of his life as [ inaudible ]. Another veteran who had severely beaten his child to take out some of his frustrations actually stood in front of the mirror and then put a revolver to his temple and fired. Charles meninger wrote who had his businesses fail economically with debts and wounds decided to end his life on a drug overdose. These are extreme responses albeit but i think they give us some sense of the level of death and despair that veterans are facing. In fact, i dont think its a coincidence that historians now are looking at all of these darker issues if you will of the American Civil War, this dark turn particularly because of what our own service men and women are facing now as they return home from iraq and afghanistan. I think those of you who like to read a lot about the civil war will see over the next five to ten years quite a bit of literature on those who lost limbs, those who ended up in mental institutions, those who were homeless or abused drugs or alcohol, because they didnt find ways to adjust back. Because its very easy i think for historians when they write the grand narrative of American History to end the civil war chapter on appomattox, the war comes to conclusion, reconciliation, reunion is beginning and you turn the next page and its reconstruction. There is no if you will continued stories of those individuals who were in the midst of the war as they tried to transition home. You can imagine if you came home with an injury like these confederate veterans here that you see on the screen. The amount of chronic pain that you are going to have to deal with on a daily basis. Southerners werent supposed to complain. This is part of their sort of southern mantra of what makes them men. They are not supposed to tell all their friends how awful their injuries are, they are not supposed to complain. They are supposed to do it in stoic silence. Yet that pain is going to be now a constant part of their life. Wounds that go from time to time to leak a little bit of pus. Maybe a stump that wasnt perfectly formed and the bone inside decides one day while youre trying to walk down a set of stairs to poke back through the skin and create constant, constant pain. A ringing in your ears that was caused by all of the artillery shells that exploded next to you during the war that never seemed to subside. Constant headaches that blurred vision. Others even had the sensation that their limbs were still a part of their body. We call this phantom limb or sensory hallucination disorder today. In fact, i was able to uncover two cases of this. One confederate veteran who awoke crying in a hospital and he said i thought i was sleeping with my little brother at home and my foot, the one that was cut off, itched and i tried to rub it against the other and my foot was not there, just this stump. It seems strange that in terms of the sensory hallucination it was usually in fingers, toes, feet and hands. You wouldnt necessarily feel that your whole leg was there, but you would still feel those toes or that foot maybe itching and trying to scratch it and it didnt exist. Then all of a sudden, you have this horrific visualization, this realization that that limb is not coming back. Another case of a guy in a hospital bed, he would always sort of quick flip over on his body and constantly, and the patient next to him asked, got up the gumption to ask him why are you always rolling so quickly in the middle of the night. He said that he always had this scratch on one side of his back and he would flip over so his arm could scratch it except the arm wasnt there any longer. It had been removed from the war. A constant reminder he had to deal with that he was going to be an amputee. These confederate veterans, particularly those who are disabled, become in many ways living symbols of what that defeat meant for the confederacy itself. They are the constant reminders both them themselves and for society at large, who is going to look at them on a daily basis. You can imagine for southerners who have these proscribed notions of what southern manhood is and southern womanhood and how are they going to deal with these dilapidated bodies, altered forms of manhood who also went off to war to prove themselves as true honorable men but come home defeated and now have symbols of that defeat. Southerners in some ways remain in flux over how to deal with their veterans. In macon, georgia shortly after the end of the civil war, the newspaper reported that one night, a gentleman got drunk and passed out on the streets of macon, georgia and two kids ages 9 and 11 saw him on the street, picked up a rusty saw and sawed off his leg. Well, actually what they did was they sawed off his prosthetic leg, his wooden leg he had attached which seems like a really strange phenomenon but the newspapers in macon pointed out that these children had depicted and been part of one of the great depravties of the age, if you will, that they had done this to this particular confederate veteran who had served in the war but then done something that had gone against the constructs of how southerners were expected to behave in society. You should be able to control your liquor. You are not going to go out and get drunk in a bar and pass out drunk on the streets and so some ways this was the children sort of reminding this gentleman look, this is not how a real southern man behaves, but at the same time, it is these children not understanding that he was a veteran, that he had given a part of his body in the cause of the war itself. So for these who are coming home disheveled and distraught, they have to find some sort of Economic Opportunity to move forward. Most veterans worked, confederate soldiers who went off to war were doing manual labor jobs, farming was the largest occupation of most confederate soldiers. They are going to come home and go back to the fields that their wives or other family members tended while they were away at war but if you were physically disabled, can you keep doing that same level of manual labor . Theres a case in georgia, a confederate veteran who had lost a leg and his wife would literally just take him out to the plow and tie him to it so he could actually just steer the plow itself but would have to rely on the animals to move the plow forward. Another worker who ended up in a tobacco warehouse could only work a few hours a day because he could barely stand on the one leg that he had. It was just too painful. Other Educational Opportunities would spring up, in fact, a few Southern States, virginia, georgia and mississippi, will offer free classes for wounded veterans to allow you to get an education and even become a teacher. But not everyones cut out for being educators. James frazier is one of these men who lost a limb during the war. In fact, he was described that he did not have a very enviable life after the civil war. He came home and decided to take up teaching but he routinely lashed out at his students because they were always texting on their phones or playing candy crush or candy crush soda now with the little gummy bears you have to get to float to the top. Maybe thats why he lashed at them. No, it was the reality that he could not bear to deal with this chronic pain that he constantly had and this reminder of failure. So then frazier ended up meeting a woman and they fell in love and they got married, but then she shortly died and then he actually ends up in court because he was accused of beating her children, his now stepchildren, because in many ways, he just couldnt handle his new reality of dealing with failure in the aftermath of the American Civil War. Of course, i think one of the best places maybe, if you are an amputee and looking for a potential job, is to run for political office. In fact, you can use that to garner sympathy. There are cases throughout the postwar period of veterans running, missing arms, missing legs, this is always noted in sort of their campaign bios that you would see appearing in the newspapers and they would emphasize that over and over again. One of these guys is francis ni nichols who is a double amputee that we see on the screen. Because so much of him had been physically damaged during the war, some reporters actually questioned whether the constituents in louisiana should be willing to vote for a man in this physical condition to be governor of their state. And nichols thought about it and he said well, i guess they can just vote for whatevers left of me to hold the governorship of louisiana. Which they will do twice. He will actually serve two terms as governor in louisiana. But large veterans large numbers of veterans, though, are not going to have those political opportunities, those Educational Opportunities or able to transition back into manual labor. They are going to have to beg for work and find signs everywhere that say no main confederate need apply. One veteran in louisiana noted a man with one arm cannot be expected to ever make as much as two. When that becomes your financial reality, when you cannot find a job, you end up begging on the streets for money. This is one particular confederate veteran who was became a fixture on the Capitol Steps of austin, texas in the postwar years. Every day as legislators would sort of come into their offices to debate the bills for the legislature in the state of texas, he would be out front as you can see selling pencils, hoping to elicit a little bit of sympathy from those legislators who would buy some pencils and then allow him to survive. As you can see, he is missing a leg, he has just sort of this wooden sort of device, peg leg thats attached for a place to hold the stump in, but its not going to be very comfortable, its certainly not one of these advanced prosthetic limbs. Its a strange irony that this man is sort of here on these steps begging legislators for money, because in many ways, the legislators had not done him any service. Texas was a state that did not give their confederate veterans any prosthetic limbs and waited several decades to actually extend pension benefits. He is in this particular case, if you will, this part of life, because the legislators had not done anything to assist him, to help him transition back into society. A doctor who saw this veteran on numerous occasions on the Capitol Steps wrote this about him. Poor old confed, despised old rebel. They told you a wound would be an honor and you a hero. Cruel mockery, bitter deception, your life blood shed, your youth wasted all in vain. These groups of beggers started popping up all over the streets of southern cities. Confederate veterans begging for money just so they could survive. The city of new orleans in particular had decided to crack down on this large number of beggers in the streets of the french quarter, particularly because the wealthy members of new Orleans Society did not want to interact with these men on a daily basis. So in 1883, the city of new orleans holds an event known as the corraling of the cripples as it was announced in the newspapers, where city officials went through the streets rounded up all those beggers, the wounded veterans, and put them in the shakes spears alms house. When they put them away, they realized many of them were confederate veterans who had no other options to survive in society other than to beg for money. So these cities started to actually transition the laws a little bit where they would say no begging allowed on the streets unless you are a confederate veteran. That was the loophole. So how do you prove yourself a confederate veteran when somebody comes by and says do you have the right to beg for money here . Do you show them your confederate i. D. Card that you got during the war . Well, they didnt have them. You show your uniform. Thats your clearest marker of your identity. But what we find is cases of men who stole unifo