I.

THE DESTRUCTION OF PROPERTY

The Ruin in City and Country

Robert Somers, Southern States, pp. 37, 114. An English traveler's observations in 1870. [1865-1870]

NEVER had a completer ruin fallen upon any city than fell upon Charleston... Her planters were reduced from affluence to poverty her merchants were scattered to the four winds of heaven her shopkeepers closed their doors, or contrived to support a precarious existence on contraband of war - her young men went to die on the battlefields or in the military prisons of the North-her women and children, who could, fled to the country. The Federal Government kept Charleston under close blockade, and added to its miseries by occasional bombardments. When this process in five years had reached the last stage of exhaustion, and the military surrender gave practical effect to emancipation, the negroes in the country parts, following up the childlike instinct of former days that Charleston was the El Dorado of the world, flocked into the ruined town, and made its aspect of misery and desolation more complete... The houses had not only lost all their bright paint without, but were mostly tenantless within; many fine mansions, long deserted, were fast mouldering into decay and ruin; and the demand for labor and the supply of provisions. were at the lowest point. Seldom has there been a more hopeless chaos out of which to construct a new order of things than Charleston presented in those days. Yet the process of amelioration has year by year been steadily going forward. . . Some of the old planters have also survived, and are seen, though diminished in numbers and with saddened countenances, yet with the steady fire of Anglo-Saxon courage in their eyes, attending to affairs like men determined to conquer fortune even in the depths of ruin and in the brink of the grave. . .

The [Tennessee Valley] consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin, and plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete.. The trail of war is

visible throughout the valley in burnt up gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories, of which latter the gable walls only are left standing, and in large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder, and having in many places become impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields without much respect to boundaries. Borne down by debts, losses, and accumulating taxes, many who were once the richest among their fellows have disappeared from the scene, and few have yet risen to take their places. But generally the old homesteads and the old families continue to be the centres of reviving industry and cultivation, and many valiant efforts have been made since the war to stay the advancing tide of barrenness and ruin. Fences have been rebuilt round not a few of the plantations, and the negro and the mule been once more set to work in growing corn and cotton.

Destruction in the Valley of Virginia

Report of Joint Committee on Reconstruction, part ii, p. 68. Statement of a native of Virginia.

[1866] PEOPLE are thinking about their private business; they want to go to work to repair their losses; they do not wish any more war, domestic or foreign war, if it can be avoided. They are tired of war. . . They are an afflicted people, terribly afflicted; almost all of them have lost sons or brothers; the country is full of widows and orphans and destitute people. I think that on the whole, the people are bearing their misfortunes with cheerfulness and fortitude, and are anxious now just to get the means of restoring their losses, and if politicians would let them alone, I think there would be no trouble whatever.

From Harper's Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles, . . the country was almost a desert. There were no fences. Speaking of the condition of the valley after General Sheridan retired, I described wheat-fields growing without any enclosure; someone asked me whether the stock would not destroy the wheat. I said "Certainly, if General Sheridan had not taken the precaution of removing all the stock." We could cultivate grain without fences, as we had no cattle, hogs, sheep, or horses, or anything else. The fences were all gone; some

of the orchards were very much injured, but the fruit trees had not been . . destroyed. The barns were all burned; a great many of the private dwellings were burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window; a most desolate state of affairs; bridges all destroyed, roads badly cut up.

The Wear and Tear of War

Whitelaw Reid, After the War, p. 224. Reid was later editor of the New York Tribune. He is now ambassador to England. He traveled in the South for several months in 1865. He quotes the following description from General Boynton. [1865]

EVERYTHING has been mended, and generally in the rudest style. Window-glass has given way to thin boards, and these are in use in railway coaches and in the cities. Furniture is marred and broken, and none has been replaced for four years. Dishes are cemented in various styles, and half the pitchers have tin handles. A complete set of crockery is never seen, and in very few families is there enough to set a table. . . A set of forks with whole tines is a curiosity. Clocks and watches have nearly all stopped. . . Hair brushes and tooth brushes have all worn out; combs are broken and are not yet replaced; pins, needles, and thread, and a thousand such articles, which seem indispensable to housekeeping, are very scarce. Even in weaving on the looms, corn-cobs have been substituted for spindles. Few have pocket knives. In fact, everything that has heretofore been an article of sale at the South is wanting now. At the tables of those who were once esteemed luxurious providers, you will find neither tea, coffee, sugar, nor spices of any kind. Even candles, in some cases, have been replaced by a cup of grease, in which a piece of cloth is plunged for a wick. The problem which the South had to solve has been, not how to be comfortable during the war, but how to live at all.

The Impoverished South

Senate Ex. Doc. no. 2, 39 Cong., 1 Sess., p. 38: Report of General Carl Schurz to President Johnson. Schurz was sent by the President to investigate conditions in the South. [1865]

IT is, indeed, difficult to imagine circumstances more unfavorable for the development of a calm and unprejudiced public

opinion than those under which the southern people are at present laboring. The war has not only defeated their political aspirations, but it has broken up their whole social organization. When the rebellion was put down they found themselves not only conquered in a political and military sense, but economically ruined. The planters, who represented the wealth of the southern country, are partly laboring under the severest embarrassments, partly reduced to absolute poverty. Many who are stripped of all available means, and have nothing but their land, cross their arms in gloomy despondency, incapable of rising to a manly resolution. Others, who still possess means, are at a loss how to use them, as their old way of doing things is, by the abolition of slavery, rendered impracticable... Others are still trying to go on in the old way, and that old way is in fact the only one they understand, and in which they have any confidence. Only a minority is trying to adopt the new order of things. A large number of the plantations. . is under heavy mortgages, and the owners know that, unless they retrieve their fortunes in a comparatively short space of time, their property will pass out of their hands. The nervous anxiety which such a state of things produces extends also to those classes of society which, although not composed of planters, were always in business connection with the planting interest, and there was hardly a branch of commerce or industry in the south which was not directly or indirectly so connected. Besides, the southern soldiers, when returning from the war, did not, like the northern soldiers, find a prosperous community which merely waited for their arrival to give them remunerative employment. They found, many of them, their homesteads destroyed, their farms devastated, their families in distress; and those that were less unfortunate found, at all events, an impoverished and exhausted community which had but little to offer them. Thus a great many have been thrown upon the world to shift as best they can. They must do something honest or dishonest, and must do it soon, to make a living, and their prospects are, at present, not very bright.

"The Crown of Poverty"

Susan Dabney Smedes, Memorials of a Southern Planter, p. 231. Copyright, 1887. This extract is used by permission of James Pott & Co. Mrs. Smedes was writing of her father, Col. Thomas L. Dabney, a Mississippi planter. [1865-1870]

Ir was now the autumn of 1866. One night he walked upstairs to the room where his children were sitting with a paper in his hand. "My children," he said, "I am a ruined man. The sheriff is down-stairs. He has served this writ on me. It is for a security debt. I do not even know how many more such papers have my name on them." His face was white as he said these words. He was sixty-eight years of age, with a large and helpless family on his hands, and the country in such a condition that young men scarcely knew how to make a livelihood.

The sheriff came with more writs. Thomas roused himself to meet them all. He determined to pay every dollar. But to do this he must have time. The sale of everything that he owned would not pay all these claims. .

A gentleman to whom he owed personally several thousand dollars courteously forebore to send in his claim. Thomas was determined that he should not on this account fail to get his money, and wrote, urging him to bring a friendly suit, that, if the worst came, he would at least get his proportion. Thus urged, the friendly suit was brought, the man deprecating the proceeding..

And now the judgments went against him one by one. On the 27th November, 1866, the Burleigh plantation was put up at auction and sold, but the privilege of buying it in a certain time reserved to Thomas. At this time incendiary fires were common. There was not much law in the land. We heard of the gin-houses and cotton-houses that were burned in all directions. One day as Thomas came back from a business journey the smouldering ruins of his gin-house met his eye. . . All the cotton that he owned was consumed in it. He had not a dollar. He had to borrow the money to buy a postage stamp, not only during this year, but during many years to

come.