PART THIRD.

THE NEW ERA IN THE VALLEY.

CHAPTER I.

THE SOUTHERN VALLEY AT THE CLOSE OF THE WAR.

The North had made great sacrifices to maintain the integrity of the Union so far as that could be done by force. No men or money had been spared; the ranks of the armies had been kept full as needed; a system of extraordinary taxation had been devised and accepted by the people and a vast debt created. The burden had been great; but, for the time, extraordinary expenditure had stimulated every branch of activity and production; immigration and machinery had taken the place of men withdrawn to the armies, and there was great prosperity, which did not cease for many years after the

war.

The South experienced the opposite fortune. With the close of the war and for some time after, its misfortunes seemed to have reached a climax. During the war all the funds obtainable were gathered by the Confederate Government for military expenditure, and little gold, or that which could be turned into gold, failed to be sent out of the country to secure military supplies. For the most part, the cash capital of the people had been in the banks and the Government acquired all the sound values deposited in them in exchange for its paper money. If that government failed its money issues would be worthless. The people burned their ships behind them and staked all on success.

That success eluded them; the Government dissolved without a successor, and as to cash resources they were ruined. The enthusiasm of the people had endeavored to supplement the efforts of the Confederate Government in the support of the army by voluntary aid, and still further reduced their slender resources. Had the blacks remained in servitude the planters could have recovered prosperity in a short time by resuming forms of industry with which they were familiar. Much of their former property had been invested in slaves. The labor they owned was their current capital; some two thousand five hundred millions of dollars had been so invested; it disappeared with the war. Multitudes of the large planters were left penniless and helpless; tens of thousands of widows and orphans, whose property had consisted chiefly of colored servants, were destitute.

For four years war had desolated their lands and cities and very many of their pleasant homes; it had struck down their vigorous men on the battlefield or returned them wounded and broken to helpless poverty, throwing their families into the deepest distress; there were no pensions to sustain the wounded, to smooth their way to health or the grave, nor to furnish a pittance to the dependent women and children. The conquering government would not, indeed, leave them to starve when their cases were known and within reach; but such dependence was a humiliation they, of all others, found it hardest to bear. The land remained and, where the rush of war had not swept, the buildings still stood; but the lands were of little value in themselves now, the houses were bare and decayed from the waste of war or free contributions of comforts to the soldiers during years of blockade, the absence of the master or loss of income.

The loss of personal property in slaves was at least $2,500, 000,000. The expense and waste of war, the destruction and deterioration of property must have been twice as much more. Industrial development was arrested in all the South with the

THE LOSSES OF THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE.

389

opening of the war except in warlike directions. The ground was cultivated for the necessary supplies of food, and some cotton still raised in the hope of getting it through the blockade to foreign markets; this was, in general, impossible, and the country was shut in from the world. War was the great fact and absorbed most of the energies it did not palsy and the resources it did not dry up. Everything was lost that, with an Anglo-American people, it was possible to lose. Their tenacious bravery, for the most part, kept the desolations of actual conflict to the great strategic lines and the regions immediately adjacent, and the interiors remained, as a rule, undisturbed; yet, all that was left was really but a remnant. The desolation was great. The diversion and loss of industrial and business energies and resources, the disorganization that entered into every field of ordinary activity, were equivalent to the entire loss of capital. The small values that remained were counterbalanced by a loss of business habits, by mental and moral depression, and the want of hopefulness that has been the true spring of American progress.

Besides all these losses, which were greater than could easily be conceived in the North, there were many and serious embarrassments to a return of prosperity. Could this population have been placed in a new country with the untamed vigor, boldness and hope of the early settlers of the Valley the difficulties would soon have been mastered. It was not the worst that everything was virtually lost, that the weight of sorrowful memory rested upon their energies. There is a vitality and recuperative force inherent in the race that would soon restore mental and physical tone. The greatest embarrassment lay in the new industrial situation. The subject and superior races stood in antagonism. The necessity of obedience had been removed from the first before the mental change that alone could render it logical and healthy had been obtained. It was impossible that the colored people should not be demoralized, industrially, by a liberty so suddenly gained. Servile

habits could not be immediately changed for a wise self-control; they could but be transformed, for a time, into license. Liberty could not mean to them what it meant to the intelligent white; it was, for the mass of them, and for an indefinite time, liberty to be idle, liberty to be absurdly inconsequent and changeable, to be careless of the future and to obey the fancies of the moment.

Thus, there was an inevitable disorganization of any labor system; the blacks remained, but in a condition singularly embarrassing to the resumption of profitable industry. The impossibility of a sudden mental revolution among the whites, all whose habits had been based on absolute control of the laboring class, added to this difficulty. It seemed an absurd situation. Chaos was come again. The mode of reconstruction adopted by the General Government required the new prosperity of the South, however, to be built up in harmony with these conditions. The Southern people had no power of control; they could not restore former relations; the principle of equality as citizens must be regarded.

The abolition of slavery became constitutional by the Thirteenth Amendment, at the close of 1865; the Civil Rights Bill became a law in the following year; the Fourteenth Amendment went into operation in 1868; and in 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment conferred the elective franchise, or right to vote, on the colored people.

The Southern people must begin anew, contrary to their habits, to their judgment, and, as they were situated mentally and industrially, to their interests. They were disfranchised for the time, lest they should exert industrial and political control and interfere with this transformation of the colored race from servitude to citizenship. So great a change, on so large a scale and in so short a time, had never before occurred in human history. It had been believed impossible. A war of races had been predicted. It had not been thought that there lay in humanity the capacity to endure a change so

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391

vast and sudden at once. All history and logic protested against it; but the Government was inexorable. The Southern people submitted, as a whole. They had the chief miseries to bear, the principal sacrifices to make, and must be consid ered as having done high honor to themselves, to the AngloAmerican race and to human nature.

The most disagreeable features of the situation for the Southern whites continued from seven to ten years in the different States, according to their progress in political "Reconstruction." At first it was a general military occupation, during which civil government was gradually organized under the supervision of intelligent army officers. Their sense of justice and sympathy for misfortune softened some of the harsher features of the situation, for the time. As soon as possible, military rule ceased and local government was conducted by the classes considered loyal to the General Government. These included a small minority of the Southern whites; Northern people newly settled in the South; officials of the General Government; and, soon, of the new citizens of African descent.

All these classes had interests more or less antagonistic to those of the great body of the Southern whites who had formed the ruling class before, and during, the war. The true Southron inevitably felt more or less contempt, aversion and hostility to those whom he regarded as the usurpers of his rights. Many of influence among these new rulers were neither very wise nor very virtuous, and sometimes their legislation and finance were really an outrage on the general public. Yet, acting under Federal and Congressional inspiration, they gave the necessary new cast to Southern institutions and forms of government by the adoption and inauguration of new State Constitutions. The colored race came into power under the guidance of Federal officers, of the Freedman's Bureau, and of Northern teachers and settlers.

It was natural that many unwise things should be done by