The People That I Was Meet During My Trip To The South

During my trip to the South, I met a former slave, a widow, a Confederate veteran, and a minister, who all had different stories on the toll that the war had on them. These stories tell their experiences during the final months of the war as well as some months after the war. They each told me about how the change from being their own country to having the Union change their way of life completely affected them and the people around them, both good and bitter experiences.

I met a former slave named Louis Hughes who worked on the salt works as a cook with his wife Matilda deep on Alabama. Under his owner, Louis was able to make a profit by selling tobacco plugs within the slave community and make a small profit for himself. While the Confederates were still in control of Alabama, the politics established there had little to do with him since he could do little about it, but as the South was collapsing, slave owners started to over work their slaves to increase profits as much as possible before they lost their slaves to the Union.

When the Union formally took over, slave owners had refused to free their slaves here was hopeful talk among some Southern planters in those early summer weeks that the U.S. Supreme Court might nullify the Emancipation Proclamation , leaving the reconstructed Southern state governments free to restore slavery or compensate slaveholders. (Ash, 127) Eventually, Louis and George went to fetch the Union army to free their plantation, and succeeded.

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As soon as they were free, Louis got a job almost immediately, as well as other freedmen who even started new businesses. Freedmen also started to establish other buildings like churched where they had black men preaching

There was also a widow named Cornelia McDonald who was the wife of an officer in the Confederate Army. She also had seven children, a few of them were old enough to leave the house, but Cornelia had to keep watch of the younger children. They could barely get by with the money decreasing value everyday, everyone in Lexington had to resort to trading instead of using Confederate Dollars. The war took a heavy toll on her and the children’s lives because the Government was constantly using resources for the troops and the war effort, so they were left with only table scraps to feed them for the whole day. With the Yankees coming in, there were new laws which mostly replaced people in political power, banned any rebel organization, and freed the slaves. Since her husband had died to the Union Army, she hated the idea of being forced to live the way the North wanted to force on the South.