Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/288

272 by the need of work animals and on account of the dis-organized labor.

To add to the general confusion, the country was flooded with adventurers from the North, camp followers of the Union armies, and others who rushed to the South as soon as they realized that the war was over. These men, imbued with the prejudices and passions which existed at the North during the war, at once began to inflame the negroes against their recent masters, and offered themselves as their friends and advisers in their new condition of freedom. In many portions of the South, the property of private individuals was seized and claimed as abandoned property (under the Freedmen's bureau law), and taken possession of for the use of the United States, and this property assigned for use to negroes who had left their homes and work. The new advisers generally led the negroes to believe that the Southern people were going to try to put them back into slavery, and that the United States government would give to each able-bodied negro man at least forty acres of land and a mule.

To add to the general gloom, great apprehension was felt regarding the future. The war had been waged cruelly toward the close, as was evidenced by the track of desolation and devastation (without a parallel in modern warfare for its pitiless barbarity), averaging 50 miles in breadth, from the Tennessee line through Georgia to Savannah, and through South Carolina by Columbia to North Carolina, by the Union army under Gen. W. T. Sherman ; and the desolation in the valley of Virginia by General Sheridan, surpassing if anything that caused by Sherman's march to the sea. Every thing the South fought for was lost and surrendered. The general feeling which was mingled with apprehension and fear found expression (by Lamar) as follows: "We have given up the right of a people to secede from the Union ; we have given up the right of each State to