e
accepted the discipline of poverty and made the best of their situation.

The difficulties, however, that beset even the courageous and the
competent were enormous. The general paralysis of industry, the breaking
up of society, and poverty on all sides bore especially hard on those
who had not previously been manual laborers. Physicians could get
practice enough but no fees; lawyers who had supported the Confederacy
found it difficult to get back into the reorganized courts because of
the test oaths and the competition of "loyal" attorneys; and for
the teachers there were few schools. We read of officers high in the
Confederate service selling to Federal soldiers the pies and cakes
cooked by their wives, of others selling fish and oysters which they
themselves had caught, and of men and women hitching themselves to plows
when they had no horse or mule.

Such incidents must, from their nature, have been infrequent, but they
show to what straits some at least were reduced. Six years after the
war, James S. Pike, then in South Carolina, mentions cases which might
be duplicated in nearly every old Southern community: "In the vicinity,"
he says, "lived a gentleman whose income when the war broke out was
rated at $150,000 a year. Not a vestige of his whole vast estate remains
today. Not far distant were the estates of a large proprietor and a
well-known family, rich and distinguished for generations. The slaves
were 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."

General Lee's good example influenced many. Commercial enterprises were
willing to pay for the use of his name and reputation, but he wished
to farm and could get no opportunity. "They are offering my father
everything," his daughter said, "except the only thing he will accept,
a place to earn honest bread while engaged in some useful work." This
remark led to an offer of the presidency of Washington College, now
Washington and Lee University, which he accepted. "I have a self-imposed
task which I must accomplish," he said, "I have led the young men of
the South in battle; I have seen many of them fall under my standard.
I shall devote my life now to training young men to do their duty in
life."

The condition of honest folk was still further troubled by a general
spirit of lawlessnes