during four years of war devoted their productive activity, aside from
the satisfaction of their current home wants, almost entirely to the
sustenance of their army and of the machinery of their government, and
having suffered great losses by the destruction of property, had, of
course, very little to sell. In fact, they were dreadfully
impoverished and needed all their laboring capacity to provide for the
wants of the next day; and as agriculture was their main resource,
upon which everything else depended, the next day was to them of
supreme importance.


_The First Crop Without Slaves_

But now the men come home from the war found their whole agricultural
labor system turned upside down. Slave labor had been their absolute
reliance. They had been accustomed to it, they had believed in it,
they had religiously regarded it as a necessity in the order of the
universe. During the war a large majority of the negroes had stayed
upon the plantations and attended to the crops in the wonted way in
those regions which were not touched by the Union armies. They had
heard of "Mas'r Lincoln's" Emancipation Proclamation in a more or less
vague way, but did not know exactly what it meant, and preferred to
remain quietly at work and wait for further developments. But when the
war was over, general emancipation became a well-understood reality.
The negro knew that he was a free man, and the Southern white man
found himself face to face with the problem of dealing with the negro
as a free laborer. To most of the Southern whites this problem was
utterly bewildering. Many of them, honest and well-meaning people,
admitted to me, with a sort of helpless stupefaction, that their
imagination was wholly incapable of grasping the fact that their