Roanoke Civil War Round Table Presents Dr. Molly Mersmann on “Rebuilding the South…” [March 11]

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Kevin C. Donovan

U.S. Major General George B. McClellan

A Prostrate Southern Phoenix?

As the four-year nightmare that was the Civil War ended, the eleven Southern states of the deceased Confederacy awoke to a new nightmare: their land, people, and economy all were utterly devastated.

The war had been fought primarily in the South. Hundreds of thousands of troops had marauded throughout the region. Soldiers of both sides had consumed huge amounts of crops and animals, often destroying what they could not carry off. Barns, mills, factories had been destroyed. An estimated four million acres of trees had been felled for military use, with dire environmental effects on farmland productivity. Many Southern towns were in ruins.

Of a white population of about 5.5 million, nearly a half million Southerners had been killed, wounded or captured (many of the latter dying). A generation of productive young men was lost. Left behind were widows, orphans, refugees and thousands of disabled veterans.

There was no Southern economy to speak of. Not only were farms and industry devastated, a key means of commercial transportation, railroads, had been particularly targeted for obliteration. And of course, the Southern economy’s most valuable pre-War asset, humans in bondage, had been erased by the war. Not only had emancipation suddenly wiped out a collective investment of about $4 billion, but the South had also lost its (enslaved) workforce.

Without agriculture, industry, infrastructure, and its accustomed workforce, how could the South recover? How did it recover?

To answer these questions, on Tuesday, March 11, the Roanoke Civil War Round Table—winner of a 2024 Kegley Award for Heritage Education [see https://roanokepreservation.org/preservation-awards/]—hosts Marshall University professor Dr. Molly Mersmann, who will address “Rebuilding the South: How the South Started and Continued to Rebuild During and After the Civil War.”

Dr. Mersmann (Ph.D. Purdue University) is an assistant professor of American history, specializing in the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Her manuscript, “Repair, Restore, Rebuild: Reconstructing the South in the Wake of the American Civil War,” investigates how Southerners rebuilt their landscape, their societies, and their lives after the war and who they expected their allies to be in the process. A past Postdoctoral Associate of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies, she has spoken at numerous engagements, including Virginia Tech’s Civil War Weekend, Manassas National Battlefield Park’s Lecture Series, and the Organization of American Historians Conference.

Date, Time & Location: Tuesday, March 11 (7:00 pm). Chapel of the Residents’ Center at Friendship, 397 Hershberger Road, Roanoke, VA, 24012. Admission is free (but becoming a Round Table member welcome).