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William Faulkner famously said,
"The past is not dead.
It is not even past".

Confederate States of America - CSA

The fact cannot be disguised that slavery led up to the war, as the only remaining solution of the business, and to such a war there was only one result possible. When Virginia's Governor Letcher received Lincoln's call for troops to subjugate the "Cotton Kingdom" and bring it back under the heel of his "Mercantile Kingdom," Letcher refused, and indicted Lincoln: "You have chosen to inaugurate civil war, and we will resist it with the same spirit you have exhibited towards the South." The next day, Virginia seceded, and three years later Lincoln's army burned down Governor Letcher's house.

On this Old South there were lights and shadows which rested on no other land under the vault of heaven. There was a “chivalry,” which manifested itself in bravado and turbulence. A “chivalry” which combined the absurd and the tragic, grotesque punctilio with the shedding of blood. It was high minded. It was generous. It scorned unfairness. To it, there was “no heaven so high as faith.” It lived in an atmosphere other than that of the mart. It esteemed many things better than wealth. To it, stainless honor was a priceless jewel.

With no feeling of shame, but with a consciousness of duty well performed in their brave defense of what they deemed the right, most Southerners accepted in good faith the results of the war, abandoned secession, and agreed [grudgingly] to the abolition of slavery. In the same good faith they renewed their allegiance to the Union and were ready to defend it against any and all foes. They built monuments to their hero dead and told of their valorous deeds to their children's children. They cherished as a sweet memory the Southern Cross, under whose folds their ragged, half starved veterans performed such mighty deeds of valor, but at the same time they hailed the Stars and Stripes as the banner under which the great Southern General Washington led their fathers to victory and independence, and looked upon it as the symbol of sovereign co equal States joined together in an indestructible Union.

And it would be a very captious spirit that would find fault with the comment upon the fight at Franklin. "Of all the battles of the war there was not one more hotly contested. A reunited country should cherish with pride the memory of the gallant men who attacked and the equally gallant men who held the works that terrible November afternoon." There is no danger that the glories of those who win shall ever lack poet or historian. It is Troy that has no singer, Carthage that bequeathes no anniversaries.

The Snopes were a family of characters weaved throughout the works of Nobel Prize-winning American writer William Faulkner. Snopes appeared in every Faulkner novel and short story which constitutes a part of what is called the Yoknapatawpha chronicle. The Snopeses represented the embodiment of crass commercialism, the inevitable replacement for the dying cotton aristocracy, and the direct retribution for the sins that had caused the downfall of these degenerate Southern gentry. The traditional approach to Faulkner, first suggested by George Marion O'Donnell, claims that all Faulkner's work is a variation of the theme of the struggle between Sartoris, the moral aristocrat, and Snopes, the amoral poor white.

Material goods, a show of respectability, sensual and irresponsible lust are the goals of the new Southern men: the Sutpens, the Varners, the Snopeses. The Sutpens, landless, amoral, relentless, driven people, tore from the savage, virgin land an hundred acre kingdom which died and decayed in fire and wrath and pride. From these ashes did the Varners rebuilt the empire in the Varner dominated Mississippi town of Frenchmans Bend, in Yoknapatawpha County. The Varners were the only leading family of the town, people of some wealth but without breeding or gentility. Meanwhile, the Sartorises, the descendants of the cultured, educated, honor-bound rulers of the South, still maintained some influence. But the old order was in decline, and the Varners were getting too contented.

The scorn heaped upon the Snopes family by their observers stemmed from visions of a horde, terrifying and faceless, which can and must destroy their more genteel society. The image of clusters of vermin or rodents connoted a voracious ferocity both terrifying and anonymous. They were in many ways eccentric, rapacious, and cruel. They had the need for the money before they had the opportunity to acquire the means to get it.

Faulkner declared that the Snopes were "a tribe of people which would come into an otherwise peaceful little Southern town like ants or like mold on cheese". Ab, the nominal patriarch of the Snopes clan, is a typically impoverished Mississippi dirt farmer whose penchant for swapping and gambling pursued more and more with a vengeance keeps him even more destitute than the worn unremitting tenant farms of north Mississippi might warrant. Some continue their struggle with the worn-out farms, living in the rented shacks, continuing to absorb each new setback until like him they can bear it no longer and strike out.

The designs for amnesty and pardon under Abraham Lincoln were intended to encourage desertion from the Confederacy with a promise of leniency. Lincoln desired to hasten the end of hostilities and quickly reestablish the fraternity of the parted Union. On 08 December 1863 President Lincoln announced the “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction.” It offers pardon and restoration of property –– except slaves –– to Confederates who swear allegiance to the United States. After asking Lincoln what to do with the defeated rebel armies in March 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman remarked that, "all [Lincoln] wanted of us was to defeat the opposing armies, and to get the men composing the Confederate armies back to their homes at work on their farms and in their shops". Additionally, the Secretary of the Navy remarked after Lincoln's last cabinet meeting that Lincoln “was particularly desirous to avoid . . . any vindictiveness of punishment."

Other members of Lincoln's party were not so forgiving. Many felt that Lincoln's policies and desires were too soft and wished to punish former Confederates more harshly. They feared that former Confederates, returned to power, would not accept the fruits of Union victory, namely emancipation, and would harass black and white former Unionists in the South. To this extent, The New York Herald on April 16, 1865, estimated that Andrew Johnson's policy towards former Confederates would be "more tinctured with the inflexible justice of Andrew Jackson than with the prevailing tenderness of Abraham Lincoln".

Lincoln's assassination five days after Appomattox denied him and the Republican Party the opportunity to pursue a policy of economic reconstruction and political enfranchisement. When legal slavery ended, there were nine million people in the old Confederacy, of whom four million were uneducated and untrained former slaves. Reconstruction was a massive Federal government commitment to educate the newly freed slaves. Republicans in Congress wanted to keep former Confederates from serving in the very government they had tried to destroy.

A Democratic Senator from Tennessee who remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, Andrew Johnson was chosen by the National Union Party to be Abraham Lincoln's running mate. Upon ascending into the executive, Johnson stuck to this ideal, stating the day after being sworn in that "Treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished." President Johnson issued a proclamation on May 29, 1865, extending amnesty to most former Confederate soldiers. Despite the term "amnesty", the move was somewhat punitive on Johnson's part. He wanted to allow the larger portions of the Confederate Army to receive amnesty while punishing those who played a more important and visible role in the Confederacy. Exemption from amnesty precluded such activities as the transfer of titles or properties, and they lacked political rights.

If they qualified the soldier had to swear a loyalty oath to the United States and free any slaves that he owned. Not all soldiers qualified under this amnesty, as it excluded fourteen "classes" of individuals. The reasons for the exclusion varied and a soldier could be disqualified if they served as a Confederate officer and were educated at the United States Military Academy or Naval Academy. the Proclamation stated that "special application may be made to the President for pardon by any person belonging to the excepted classes; and such clemency will be liberally extended as may be consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States". Johnson pardoned thousands of former Confederates and, in the process, allowed them to repossess land confiscated by the government.

In the special elections of 1865 in the South, Democrats were elected, including many who had been sympathetic to the Confederate cause. The new southern state governments elected many of those same Confederates who had just spent four years and countless lives trying to overthrow the United States government in order to preserve the institution of slavery. When the 39th Congress finally opened on December 4, 1865, the large Republican majority in the House immediately counteracted the President. Clerk of the House Edward McPherson simply refused to read the names of Members-elect from former Confederate states during the opening roll call. None were sworn in.

Republicans were badly divided between radicals who supported the Congress and wanted to punish the confederate states and moderates who supported President Johnson. After a resounding victory in the 1866 midterm elections, congressional Republicans launched a sweeping effort to remake the former Confederacy. The following year Congress passed several "Reconstruction Acts," which were sweeping pieces of legislation placing most of the southern states under military government.

On Christmas Day 1868 President Johnson granted amnesty to all those former Confederates who did qualify under previous proclamations and who did not receive a formal pardon, hoping that his actions would "secure permanent peace, order, and prosperity throughout the land, and to renew and fully restore confidence and fraternal feeling among the whole people and their respect and attachment to the National Government".

In 1868 the Republicans, bolstered by the votes of African American men in the South, elected Ulysses S. Grant to the presidency. Union soldiers continued to enforce law and order in the South until 1877.