had
lapsed with the surrender of the Confederate armies.

Beneath a disorganized society lay a devastated land. The destruction of
property affected all classes of the population. The accumulated capital
of the South had disappeared in worthless Confederate stocks, bonds,
and currency. The banks had failed early in the war. Two billion dollars
invested in slaves had been wiped out. Factories, which had been running
before the war or were developed after 1861 in order to supply the
blockaded country, had been destroyed by Federal raiders or seized
and sold or dismantled because they had furnished supplies to the
Confederacy. Mining industries were paralyzed. Public buildings which
had been used for war purposes were destroyed or confiscated for the
uses of the army or for the new freedmen's schools. It was months before
courthouses, state capitols, school and college buildings were again
made available for normal uses. The military school buildings had been
destroyed by the Federal forces. Among the schools which suffered
were the Virginia Military Institute, the University of Alabama, the
Louisiana State Seminary, and many smaller institutions. Nearly all
these had been used in some way for war purposes and were therefore
subject to destruction or confiscation.

The farmers and planters found themselves "land poor." The soil
remained, but there was a prevalent lack of labor, of agricultural
equipment, of farm stock, of seeds, and of money with which to make good
the deficiency. As a result, a man with hundreds of acres might be as
poor as a Negro refugee. The desolation is thus described by a Virginia
farmer:

"From Harper's Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles... the
country was almost a desert.... We had no cattle, hogs, sheep, or horse
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; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing
without roof, or door, or window."

Much land was thrown on the market at low prices--three to five dollars
an acre for land worth fifty dollars. The poorer lands could not be sold
at all, and thousands of farms were deserted by their owners. Everywhere
recovery from this agricultural depression was slow. Five years after
the war Robert Somers, an English traveler, said of the Tennessee
Valley:

"It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of sem