The greatest weakness of both races was their extreme poverty. The crops of
1865 turned out badly, for most of the soldiers reached home too late for
successful planting, and the Negro labor was not dependable. The sale of such
cotton and farm products as had escaped the treasury agents was of some help,
but curiously enough much of the good money thus obtained was spent
extravagantly by a people used to Confederate rag money and for four years
deprived of the luxuries of life. The poorer whites who had lost all were
close to starvation. In the white counties which had sent so large a
proportion of men to the army, the destitution was most acute. In many
families the breadwinner had been killed in war. After 1862, relief systems
had been organized in nearly all the Confederate States for the purpose of
aiding the poor whites, but these organizations were disbanded in 1865. A
Freedmen's Bureau official traveling through the desolate back country
furnishes a description which might have applied to two hundred counties, a
third of the South: "It is a common, an every-day sight in Randolph County,
that of women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances,
begging for bread from door to door. Meat of any kind has been a stranger to
many of their mouths for months. The drought cut off what little crops they
hoped to save, and they must have immediate help or perish. By far the greater
suffering exists among the whites. Their scanty supplies have been exhausted,
and now they look to the Government alone for support. Some are without homes
of any description."

Where the armies had passed, few of the people, white or black, remained; most
of them had been forced as "refugees" within the Union lines or into the
interior of the Confederacy. Now, along with the disbanded Confederate
soldiers, they came straggling back to their war-swept homes. It was
estimated, in December 1865, that in the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and
Georgia, there were five hundred thousand white people who were without the
necessaries of life; numbers died from lack of food. Within a few months,