Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/492

 47 6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

The soil of the white counties was less fertile; the people were not wealthy before the war, and during the war they suffered from the depredations of the enemy and from the operation of the tax-in-kind which bore heavily upon them when they had nothing to spare. The white men went to the war, and there were only women, children, and old men to work the fields. The heaviest losses among the Alabama Confederate troops were from the ranks of the white-county soldiers. In all of these counties there was destitution after the first year of the war, and after 1862 from one-fourth to one-half of the soldiers' families received aid from the state. The bountiful Black Belt furnished enough for all. At the close of hostilities the condition of the people in the poorer counties was pitiable. Stock, fences, barns, and in many cases dwellings had disappeared; the fields were grown up in weeds ; and no supplies of any kind were available. How many of the people managed to live was a mystery. Some walked twenty miles to get food, and there were cases of starvation. No seed of any kind and no farm implements were to be had. The best work of the Freedmen's Bureau was done in relieving these white people from want until they could make a crop.

The Black Belt was the richest, as well as the least exposed, section of the state, and fared well until the end of the war. The laborers were negro slaves, and these worked as well in war time as in peace. Immense food crops were made in 1863 and 1864, and there was no suffering among whites or blacks. Until 1865 there was no loss from Federal invasion, but with the spring of 1865 misfortunes came. Four large armies marched through the central portions of the state, burning, destroying, confiscating. In June, 1865, the Black Belt was in almost as bad condition as the white counties. All buildings in the track of the armies had disappeared; the stores of provisions were confiscated; gin- houses and mills were burned; cattle, horses, and mules were carried away ; and nothing much was left except the negroes and the rich land. The returning planter, like the farmer, found his agricultural implements worn out and broken, and in all the land there was no money to purchase the necessaries of life. But in the portions of the black counties untouched by the armies there were