The Sequel of Appomattox, A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States | Page 6

peculation and theft were resorted to."
These agents turned over to the United States about $34,000,000. About 40,000 claimants were subsequently indemnified on the ground that the property taken from them did not belong to the Confederate Government, but many thousands of other claimants have been unable to prove that their property was seized by government agents and hence have received nothing. It is probable that the actual Confederate property was nearly all stolen by the agents. One agent in Alabama sold an appointment as assistant for $25,000, and a few months later both the assistant and the agent were tried by a military court for stealing and were fined $90,000 and $250,000 respectively in addition to being imprisoned.
Other property, including horses, mules, wagons, tobacco, rice, and sugar which the natives claimed as their own, was seized. In some places the agents even collected delinquent Confederate taxes. Much of the confiscable property was not sold but was turned over to the Freedmen's Bureau* for its support. The total amount seized cannot be satisfactorily ascertained. The Ku Klux minority report asserted that 3,000,000 bales of cotton were taken, of which the United States received only 114,000. It is certain that, owing to the deliberate destruction of cotton by fire in 1864-65, this estimate was too high, but all the testimony points to the fact that the frauds were stupendous. As a result the United States Government did not succeed in obtaining the Confederate property to which it had a claim, and the country itself was stripped of necessities to a degree that left it not only destitute but outraged and embittered. "Such practices," said Trowbridge, "had a pernicious effect, engendering a contempt for the Government and a murderous ill will which too commonly vented itself upon soldiers and Negroes." * See pp. 89 et seq.
The South faced the work of reconstruction not only with a shortage of material and greatly hampered in the employment even of that but still more with a shortage of men. The losses among the whites are usually estimated at about half the military population, but since accurate records are lacking, the exact numbers cannot be ascertained. The best of the civil leaders, as well as the prominent military leaders, had so committed themselves to the support of the Confederacy as to be excluded from participation in any reconstruction that might be attempted. The business of reconstruction, therefore, fell of necessity to the Confederate private soldiers, the lower officers, nonparticipants, and lukewarm individuals who had not greatly compromised themselves. These politically and physically uninjured survivors included also all the "slackers" of the Confederacy. But though there were such physical and moral losses on the part of those to whom fell the direction of affairs, there was also a moral strengthening in the sound element of the people who had been tried by the discipline of war.
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. A Freedmen'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.