was not sold but was turned over to the Freedmen's Bureau* for its support.
The total amount seized cannot be satisfactorily ascertained. The Ku Klux
minority report asserted that 3,000,000 bales of cotton were taken, of which
the United States received only 114,000. It is certain that, owing to the
deliberate destruction of cotton by fire in 1864-65, this estimate was too
high, but all the testimony points to the fact that the frauds were
stupendous. As a result the United States Government did not succeed in
obtaining the Confederate property to which it had a claim, and the country
itself was stripped of necessities to a degree that left it not only destitute
but outraged and embittered. "Such practices," said Trowbridge, "had a
pernicious effect, engendering a contempt for the Government and a murderous
ill will which too commonly vented itself upon soldiers and Negroes." * See
pp. 89 et seq.

The South faced the work of reconstruction not only with a shortage of
material and greatly hampered in the employment even of that but still more
with a shortage of men. The losses among the whites are usually estimated at
about half the military population, but since accurate records are lacking,
the exact numbers cannot be ascertained. The best of the civil leaders, as
well as the prominent military leaders, had so committed themselves to the
support of the Confederacy as to be excluded from participation in any
reconstruction that might be attempted. The business of reconstruction,
therefore, fell of necessity to the Confederate private soldiers, the lower
officers, nonparticipants, and lukewarm individuals who had not greatly
compromised themselves. These politically and physically uninjured survivors
included also all the "slackers" of the Confederacy. But though there were
such physical and moral losses on the part of those to whom fell the direction
of affairs, there was also a moral strengthening in the sound element of the
people who had been tried by the discipline of war.