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and the need for enforcement.
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Now, you may know from reading Foner by now
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that the reduction in the Union Armies was overnight,
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from nearly a million men in arms to a mere 15 to 20,000, by 1866;
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and a fair portion of those are being sent west to fight Indians.
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And one of the great deep myths about the melodrama of Reconstruction,
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or the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction over the years,
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is that the South was put under this military occupation,
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"Bayonet rule," As it so often was called.
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About the only time a Union soldier fixed a bayonet,
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in all the Reconstruction years,
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was when they put their bayonets on,