were enormous. The general paralysis of industry, the breaking up of society,
and poverty on all sides bore especially hard on those who had not previously
been manual laborers. Physicians could get practice enough but no fees;
lawyers who had supported the Confederacy found it difficult to get back into
the reorganized courts because of the test oaths and the competition of
"loyal" attorneys; and for the teachers there were few schools. We read of
officers high in the Confederate service selling to Federal soldiers the pies
and cakes cooked by their wives, of others selling fish and oysters which they
themselves had caught, and of men and women hitching themselves to plows when
they had no horse or mule.

Such incidents must, from their nature, have been infrequent, but they show to
what straits some at least were reduced. Six years after the war, James S.
Pike, then in South Carolina, mentions cases which might be duplicated in
nearly every old Southern community: "In the vicinity," he says, "lived a
gentleman whose income when the war broke out was rated at $150,000 a year.
Not a vestige of his whole vast estate remains today. Not far distant were the
estates of a large proprietor and a well-known family, rich and distinguished
for generations. The slaves were gone. The family is gone. A single scion of
the house remains, and he peddles tea by the pound and molasses by the quart,
on a corner of the old homestead, to the former slaves of the family and
thereby earns his livelihood."

General Lee's good example influenced many. Commercial enterprises were
willing to pay for the use of his name and reputation, but he wished to farm
and could get no opportunity. "They are offering my father everything," his
daughter said, "except the only thing he will accept, a place to earn honest
bread while engaged in some useful work." This remark led to an offer of the
presidency of Washington College, now Washington and Lee University, which he
accepted. "I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish," he said, "I