he 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. It was estimated, in December 1865, that in the states
of Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, there were five hundred thousand
white people who were without the necessaries of life; numbers died from
lack of food. Within a few months, relief agencies were at work. In
the North, especially in the border states and in New York, charitable
organizations collected and forwarded great quantities of supplies to
the Negroes and to the whites in the hill and mountain counties. The
reorganized state and local governments sent food from the unravaged
portions of the Black Belt to the nearest white counties, and the
army commanders gave some aid. As soon as the Freedmen's Bureau was
organized, it fed to the limit of its supplies the needy whites as well
as the blacks.

The extent of the relief afforded by the charity of the North and by
the agencies of the United States Government is not now generally
remembered, probably on account of the later objectionable activities
of the Freedmen's Bureau, but it was at the time properly appreciated.
A Southern journalist, writing of what he saw in Georgia, remarked that
"it must be a matter of gratitude as well as surprise for our people to
see a Government which was lately fighting us with fire and sword and
shell, now generously feeding our poor and distressed. In the immense
crowds which throng the distributing house, I notice the mothers and
fathers, widows and orphans of our soldiers. ... Again, the Confederate
soldier, with one leg or one arm, the crippled, maimed, and broken, and
the worn and destitute men, who fought bravely their enemies then, their
benefactors now, have their sacks filled and are fed."

Acute distress continued until 1867; after that year there was no
further danger of starvation. Some of the poor whites, especially in the
remote districts, never again reached a comfortable standard of living;
some were demoralized by too much assistance; others were discouraged
and left the South for the West or the North. But the mass of the peopl