with which to make good the devastations of war was not to be found south of Mason and Dixon's line. Du Bois, Black Folk, Garner, The disasters of war and reconstruction did not fall on the white population alone. The emancipated blacks suffered for want of food, clothing, and shelter. Thousands of negroes perished of hunger and disease. There is reason to believe that the loss of life was four times greater for Ch. XVI. blacks than for whites. The Freedmen's Bureau did much to relieve this appalling destitution and to set the freedmen on the way to self-support; but it was obliged to work through the military organization. Army officers, however well intentioned, are hardly fitted to deal with a complicated economic situation. System in after the Civil War. The Labor Problem. The twenty years following the Fleming, downfall of the Confederacy witnessed a change in the Industrial industrial order of the South that may fairly be termed an agricultural revolution. With emancipation, three million laborers passed immediately from a state of dependence and rigid surveillance to absolute freedom. The economic tie between master and slave was suddenly broken. The one was forced to seek laborers, and the other employment, in the open market. Both were unaccustomed to the wage relation, and both found difficulty in estimating in terms of money the services that had hitherto been rendered for means of subsistence. The freedmen, eager to realize the Hammond, blessings of liberty and esteeming labor a badge of slavery, Ch. IV. wandered about the country in search of pleasure, and rapidly gravitated to the towns. They worked only under the compulsion of absolute want, and pay day was usually followed by a week of idleness. The planters, handicapped by the losses of the war and unable to command ready money, advanced rations to their laborers but postponed the payment of wages till the crops were in. Even then they sometimes failed to make over the money due, and the negroes grew suspicious. The unsatisfactoriness of the hiring system is evidenced by the decline in wage rates from $137.50 per year in 1860 to $129 in 1867, and $100 in 1868. The plantation system, Du Bois, The Negro Farmer, 79-81. Du Bois, Negro Landholder of Georgia, 665. profitable only with gangs of cheap laborers subject to absolute control, broke down under these conditions. If he fed him The attempt to grow cotton with borrowed capital and wage labor having failed, landowners began to lease estates on shares. Tracts of from forty to eighty acres were rented to the more reliable negroes on varying conditions. If the landlord furnished seed, mule, plow, and rations, he was entitled to two thirds the crop. If, on the other hand, the renter supplied food, he kept half the crop. self and owned stock and implements, he kept two thirds the cotton grown. A negro who acquired a reputation for intelligence and industry, might secure land at a stipulated rental in cotton or money and thus be free from supervision. In a series of good seasons, with fair prices, such a tenant might clear enough to buy the land. Planters were ready to sell on easy terms considerable portions of their heavily encumbered esta:es. By 1874, within ten years of emancipation, the negro farmers of Georgia had thus acquired 338,769 acres. The poor whites, too, made good use of this chance to get possession of land and so secure opportunity for selfsupport. The necessities of planters combined with the ambition of landless laborers to break up the great estates, and the old-time plantations crumbled away into little farms. The tendency is evident in the statistics of farm acreage. The reconstruction of agriculture was a slow and difficult process, but pluck and patience have finally succeeded in rendering the South more productive under free than under slave labor. Dead lands have been reclaimed by use of fertilizers ; waste lands have been brought under cultivation; machinery and scientific methods have been brought to bear. Evidence of the losses of the war period and the gains of the subsequent decades may be gathered from farm statistics. No. 10. Young, vantages for the manufacture of cotton goods had long been realized. There was water power in abundance, free all the year round. The raw material was to be had direct American from the cotton gin, with no commissions and transportation Cotton Incharges added. Labor, too, was at hand in ever-increasing dustry, numbers. The long dormant energies of the poor whites 54-99. The South's ad Mass. Labor Bulletin, |