Besides, the agitators and the Negro troops led them to hope for an eventual
distribution of property. 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