ty. An Alabama planter thus
described the situation in December 1865:

"They will not work for anything but wages, and few are able to pay
wages. They are penniless but resolute in their demands. They expect to
see all the land divided out equally between them and their old masters
in time to make the next crop. One of the most intelligent black men I
know told me that in a neighboring village, where several hundred
blacks were congregated, he does not think that as many as three made
contracts, although planters are urgent in their solicitations and
offering highest prices for labor they can possibly afford to pay. The
same man informed me that the impression widely prevails that Congress
is about to divide out the lands, and that this impression is given
out by Federal soldiers at the nearest military station. It cannot be
disguised that in spite of the most earnest efforts of their old master
to conciliate and satisfy them, the estrangement between races increases
in its extent and bitterness. Nearly all the Negro men are armed with
repeaters, and many of them carry them openly, day and night."

The relations between the races were better, however, than conditions
seemed to indicate. The whites of the Black Belt were better disposed
toward the Negroes than were those of the white districts. It was in the
towns and villages that most of the race conflicts occurred. All
whites agreed that the Negro was inferior, but there were many who were
grateful for his conduct during the war and who wished him well. But
others, the policemen of the towns, the "loyalists," those who had
little but pride of race and the vote to distinguish them from the
blacks, felt no good will toward the ex-slaves. It was Truman's opinion
"not only that the planters are far better friends to the Negroes than
the poor whites, but also better than a majority of the Northern men
who go South to rent plantations." John T. Trowbridge, the novelist, who
recorded his impressions of the South after a visit in 1865, was of the
opinion that the Unionists "do not like niggers." "For there is,"
he said, "more prejudice against color among the middle and poorer
classes--the Union men of the South who owned few or no slaves--than
among the planters who owned them by scores and hundreds." The reports
of the Freedmen's Bureau are to the same effect. A Bureau agent in
Tennessee testified: "An old citizen, a Union man, said to me, said
he, 'I tell you what, if you