d to be exact. No
scheme of accounting can uncover all the costs. It is a sufficient
suggestion as to the total that a million men, at the prime of life,
were diverted from ordinary production for about three years. Not only
did the South lose the products of their labor, but it lost many of
them, while its houses, barns, and other permanent improvements wore
out, were burned, or went to pieces from lack of care. Its slave
property was destroyed. Poverty was universal within the region of the
Confederacy when Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation and the troops
came home.

The most immediate problems before the Southern planter in the spring of
1865 were his dilapidated buildings, his spring crops, and his labor
supply. Without money or credit, he needed all the stiffness of a proud
caste to hold off bankruptcy. The daughter of a prominent Mississippi
planter told later how her father, at seventy years, did the family
washing to keep his daughters from the tub. A society whose men and
women took this view of housework (for the daughters let their father
have his way) had much to learn before it could reestablish itself. Yet
this same stubbornness carried the South through the twenty trying years
after the war.

The system of slave labor was gone, but the negroes were still the chief
reliance for labor. It appears from the scanty records that are
available that the planters expected to reopen the plantations using the
freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to
find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work.
Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his
desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few
years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and
that the substitute was far from satisfactory.

Failing at hiring the negro for wages, the planter tried to rent to him
a part of the estate. But since the tenant was penniless the landlord
had to find much or all of the tools and stock, and too often had to see
the crops deserted while the negro went riding around the county on his
mule, full of his new independence. The census records show the decline
of the plantation as the labor system changed. In 1860 the average
American farm contained 199 acres, while those of the eleven seceding
States ranged in average from 245 in Arkansas, to 430 in Georgia, and
591 in Texas. All were far above the national average, f