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 t