The greatest weakness of both races was their extreme poverty.The crops of 1865 turned out badly, for most of the soldiers reached home too late for successful planting, and the Negro labor was not dependable.The sale of such cotton and farm products as had escaped the treasury agents was of some help, but curiously enough much of the good money thus obtained was spent extravagantly by a people used to Confederate rag money and for four years deprived of the luxuries of life.The poorer whites who had lost all were close to starvation.In the white counties which had sent so large a proportion of men to the army, the destitution was most acute.In many families the breadwinner had been killed in war.After 1862, relief systems had been organized in nearly all the Confederate States for the purpose of aiding the poor whites, but these organizations were disbanded in 1865.AFreedmen's Bureau official traveling through the desolate back country furnishes a description which might have applied to two hundred counties, a third of the South: "It is a common, an every-day sight in Randolph County, that of women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging for bread from door to door.Meat of any kind has been a stranger to many of their mouths for months.The drought cut off what little crops they hoped to save, and they must have immediate help or perish.By far the greater suffering exists among the whites.Their scanty supplies have been exhausted, and now they look to the Government alone for support.Some are without homes of any description."Where the armies had passed, few of the people, white or black, remained; most of them had been forced as "refugees" within the Union lines or into the interior of the Confederacy.Now, along with the disbanded Confederate soldiers, they came straggling back to their war-swept homes.It was estimated, in December 1865, that in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, there were five hundred thousand white people who were without the necessaries of life; numbers died from lack of food.Within a few months, relief agencies were at work.In the North, especially in the border states and in New York, charitable organizations collected and forwarded great quantities of supplies to the Negroes and to the whites in the hill and mountain counties.The reorganized state and local governments sent food from the unravaged portions of the Black Belt to the nearest white counties, and the army commanders gave some aid.As soon as the Freedmen's Bureau was organized, it fed to the limit of its supplies the needy whites as well as the blacks.
The extent of the relief afforded by the charity of the North and by the agencies of the United States Government is not now generally remembered, probably on account of the later objectionable activities of the Freedmen's Bureau, but it was at the time properly appreciated.A Southern journalist, writing of what he saw in Georgia, remarked that "it must be a matter of gratitude as well as surprise for our people to see a Government which was lately fighting us with fire and sword and shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed.In the immense crowds which throng the distributing house, I notice the mothers and fathers, widows and orphans of our soldiers.
...Again, the Confederate soldier, with one leg or one arm, the crippled, maimed, and broken, and the worn and destitute men, who fought bravely their enemies then, their benefactors now, have their sacks filled and are fed."Acute distress continued until 1867; after that year there was no further danger of starvation.Some of the poor whites, especially in the remote districts, never again reached a comfortable standard of living; some were demoralized by too much assistance; others were discouraged and left the South for the West or the North.But the mass of the people accepted the discipline of poverty and made the best of their situation.
The difficulties, however, that beset even the courageous and the competent were enormous.The general paralysis of industry, the breaking up of society, and poverty on all sides bore especially hard on those who had not previously been manual laborers.Physicians could get practice enough but no fees;lawyers who had supported the Confederacy found it difficult to get back into the reorganized courts because of the test oaths and the competition of "loyal" attorneys; and for the teachers there were few schools.We read of officers high in the Confederate service selling to Federal soldiers the pies and cakes cooked by their wives, of others selling fish and oysters which they themselves had caught, and of men and women hitching themselves to plows when they had no horse or mule.
Such incidents must, from their nature, have been infrequent, but they show to what straits some at least were reduced.Six years after the war, James S.
Pike, then in South Carolina, mentions cases which might be duplicated in nearly every old Southern community: "In the vicinity," he says, "lived a gentleman whose income when the war broke out was rated at $150,000 a year.
