KEEPERS OF THE FLAME

The Civil War wreaked unspeakable destruction on the South, and on Southerners. It had been, in the words of historian Shelby Foote, “a new kind of war, quite unlike the one for which they had bargained.” In addition to the hundreds of thousands of young men sacrificed in the war, the South was a shambles: Many of its cities had been destroyed, its institutions were in ruins, its currency worthless; crops were devastated, land was selling for a fraction of its former value, and the labor force decimated by the end of the centuries- old institution of slavery. Countless Southerners who had been financially comfortable if not outright wealthy before the war now found themselves destitute, with a questionable future under the thumb of their erstwhile enemies.

Although most Southerners would neither have acknowledged nor accepted the fact, President Abraham Lincoln had been their best hope for a return to normality; and with the violent death of the one man who had been resolved to welcome the South back into the Union without recrimination, the future promised to be a bitter one indeed. As an editorial in the warned in 1867, “The radical programme of depriving the people of the South of the last vestige of liberty is about to be carried out and…our unhappy country is about to be made the theatre of the most desperate rule the world has witnessed in modern times.” While most people elected to stay and face the changes to come, some anxious and embittered Southerners chose to start life anew on foreign soil. For four years, George S. Barnsley had been a surgeon in the 8th