Many honorable men in the South were taking the benefit of the bankrupt law. Thomas's relations and friends urged him to take the law. It was madness, they said, for a man of his age, in the condition the country was then in, to talk of settling the immense debts that were against him. He refused with scorn to listen to such proposals. But his heart was well-nigh broken. He called his children around him, as he lay in bed, not eating and scarcely sleeping.

"My children," he said, "I shall have nothing to leave you but a fair name. But you may depend that I shall leave you that. I shall, if I live, pay every dollar that I owe. If I die, I leave these debts to you to discharge. Do not let my name be dishonored."

But he soon aroused himself from his depression and set about arranging to raise the money needed to buy in the plantation. It could only be done by giving up all the money brought in by the cotton crop for many years. This meant rigid self denial for himself and his children. He could not bear the thought of seeing his daughters deprived of comforts. He was ready to stand unflinchingly any fate that might be in store for him. . . He determined to spare his daughters all such labor as he could perform. General Sherman had said that he would like to bring every Southern woman to the washtub. "He shall never bring my daughters to the wash-tub," Thomas Dabney said. "I will do the washing myself." And he did it for two years. He was in his seventieth year when he began to do it.

This may give some idea of the labors, the privations, the hardships, of those terrible years. The most intimate friends of Thomas, nay, his own children, who were not in the daily life at Burleigh, have never known the unprecedented selfdenial, carried to the extent of acutest bodily sufferings, which he practiced during this time. A curtain must be drawn over the life of my lion-hearted father!

Oftentimes he was so exhausted when he came in to dinner that he could not eat for a while. He had his old bright way of making everyone take an interest in his pursuits,

sym

and

pathy was as necessary and sweet to him as to a child, he showed with pride what he had done by his personal labor in gardening and in washing. He placed the clothes on the line as carefully as if they were meant to hang there always, and they must be admired, too! He said, and truly, that he had never seen snowier ones. . . At the end of a hard day's work he would say, sometimes, "General Sherman has not brought my daughters to the wash-tub." . . His hands were much bent with age and gout. No glove could be drawn over them. They had been so soft that a bridle rein, unless he had his gloves on, chafed them unpleasantly. He expressed thankfulness that the bent fingers and palms did not interfere with his holding either his hoe-handle or his pen. . . He tried hard to learn to plough, but could not do it. It was a real disappointment. He tried to learn to cut wood, but complained that he could not strike twice in the same spot. was with great labor that he got a stick cut in two. His failure in this filled him with a dogged determination to succeed, and he persisted in cutting wood in the most painful manner, often till he was exhausted. Some one told him of a hand-saw for sawing wood, and he was delighted and felt independent when he got one. He enjoyed it like a new toy, and it was so much better in his hands than the axe. He sawed wood by the hour, in the cold and in the heat..

It

The Ruin of the Slaveholders

J. S. Pike, The Prostrate State, p. 117. Pike was a native of Maine, traveling in South Carolina in 1871. From 1861 to 1866 he was minister to Belgium. In 1871 he was associate editor of the New York Tribune. [1865+]

EVERYTHING went into Confederate securities; everything to eat and everything to wear was consumed, and when the war suddenly ended there was nothing left but absolute poverty and nakedness. Famine followed, and suffering beyond computation, the story of which has never been told. Rich planters' families subsisted on corn-bread when they could get it, but often they could not, and then they resorted to a coarse cattle

fodder known as "cow-peas." It is reported of the poet Timrod, who contributed his fiery lyrics in aid of the rebellion — all that he had to give — that he and his were saved from actual starvation, when they were at their last gasp, just previous to his death. Others fared not so well.

There were numerous large slave-holders and property-owners in and about Columbia who went down in the general ruin. Some were immensely wealthy; there were several families owning 500 and 1000 slaves apiece. Many were proprietors of plantations on the banks of the Mississippi. These plantations were more or less mortgaged. When slavery went, the mortgages consumed the rest; and men enjoying an income of $100,000 a year on the opening of the war were stripped of their last cent at its close. An elderly gentleman of nearly eighty years, formerly a rich man, and president of a bank of about $1,000,000 capital, was able by great exertion to save his dwelling from conflagration in Columbia. It was all he preserved from the wreck of his fortunes. Happily he was a lover of flowers, and had a large greenhouse in his gardens. In his stripped condition he resorted to it for support; and today he lives by personally growing flowers for sale, which he does with a cheerful assiduity which gilds his misfortunes, and lends even a pleasing glow to the evening of his life. Old Wade Hampton, of Revolutionary memory, who won his spurs at the battle of Eutaw Springs, and was an aid-de-camp of General Washington, was a resident of Columbia, and owned vast estates. He and his family were the grandees of the county for all these subsequent generations. They numbered their slaves by the thousand when the war began, and had large plantations in other States. The family is now broken and scattered. The great old family mansion and extensive grounds filled with rare exotics, the abode of luxurious hospitality for seventy years, has, since the war, been haunted by ghosts, and now, dilapidated and falling into decay, passes into the hands of strangers. In the vicinity lived a gentleman whose income, when the war broke out, was rated at $150,000 He was not only a victim to the general ruin, but

a year.

peculiar circumstances added to his misfortunes. Not a vestige of his whole vast property of millions remains today. Not far distant were the estates of a large proprietor and a well known family, rich and distinguished for generations. The slaves are gone. The family is gone. A single scion of the house remains, and he peddles tea by the pound and molasses by the quart, on a corner of the old homestead, to the former slaves of the family, and thereby earns his livelihood. .

But the poor people were stripped as well as the rich. Though they had but little, yet that little was their all. And to lose it was to lose all. And to this was added a grievous disappointment. They were hoarding their imaginary money,, feeling that they were sure to come out rich in the end. Great was their dismay and their astonishment when they found they had leaned on a broken reed, and their visions of sudden wealth had vanished in an instant.

The Wreck of the Railways

House Report no. 34, 39 Cong., 2 Sess., pp. 714, 821, 832, 866, 1026, 1036. The following extracts are from the reports of the principal Southern railways in 1865.

[1865]

FROM Pocahontas to Decatur, [Alabama] one-hundred and fourteen miles, almost entirely destroyed, except the road-bed and iron rails and they in very bad condition - every bridge and trestle destroyed, cross-ties rotten, buildings burned, watertanks gone, ditches filled up, and track grown up in weeds and bushes; not a saw-mill near the line; the labor system of the country gone. About forty miles of the track was burned, cross-ties entirely destroyed, and rails bent and twisted in such manner as to require great labor to straighten, and a large portion of them requiring renewal. . .

That portion of the road [in Mississippi] not having received any attention since 1862, it became enveloped with briers, bushes, and grass, the undisturbed growth of three years, thus causing . . the decay of the pine timber used in its construction. There was scarcely a single bridge on that sec

tion that was not wholly or in part, destroyed by fire, or rendered unfit for use by decay. Of the cross-ties on this section, fully three fourths have to be replaced to render the road safe for the transit of cars and locomotives. . .

Of the splendidly equipped road. . of the 49 locomotives, 37 passenger cars, (many of which had never been used,) and 550 freight, baggage, and gravel cars, there remained fit for use, though in a damaged condition, between Jackson and Canton, I locomotive, 2 second class passenger cars, I first class passenger car, I baggage car, I provision car, 2 stock and 2 flat cars.

On the section between Jackson and Brookhaven, there were in use 2 locomotives, damaged, having been partly burned; 4 box-cars, one of which was used for passengers, and 9 flat cars. All the other locomotives have been burned or damaged by time and exposure, and rendered unfit for service. . Of all the depot buildings and platforms attached, woodsheds, and water stations and division houses, which were in complete repair in 1862, there remained only [three] buildings.. the remainder having all, from time to time, been destroyed by the armed forces in their vicinity.

In Selma [Alabama], the depot, shops, with the tools and machinery, foundry, engine-house, and store-house were in ruins. The track was damaged, and covered with the wrecks of burnt locomotives and cars which had been left in a disabled condition. . . All the truss-bridges and station-houses, and several of the water-tanks south of Shelby Springs, were burnt. About one mile of the track was rendered unserviceable by the burning of the cross-ties and the bending of the iron. North of Talladega the . . bridges and all the station-houses were destroyed by General Croxton's command. The rolling stock which had been saved had been cut off from the road by the destruction of two bridges on the Selma and Meridian road, and consequently could not be made available in the work of reconstruction. The laboring force. . was in great part scattered and demoralized. Throughout the country disorganization, and a general scarcity of provisions, and of all appliances