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 semi- ruin and
plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete . . . .
The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin-houses,
ruined bridges, mills, and factories . . . and in large tracts of once
cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long
neglected, are in disorder, and having in many places become impassable, new
tracks have been made through the woods and fields without much respect to
boundaries."

Similar conditions existed wherever the armies had passed, and not in the
country districts alone. Many of the cities, such as Richmond, Charleston,
Columbia, Jackson, Atlanta, and Mobile had suffered from fire or bombardment.