"Contractors, anxious for gain, were sometimes guilty of bad faith and peculation, and frequently took possession of cotton and delivered it under contracts as captured or abandoned, when in fact it was not such, and they had no right to touch it....Residents and others in the districts where these peculations were going on took advantage of the unsettled condition of the country, and representing themselves as agents of this department, went about robbing under such pretended authority, and thus added to the difficulties of the situation by causing unjust opprobrium and suspicion to rest upon officers engaged in the faithful discharge of their duties.Agents,...frequently received or collected property, and sent it forward which the law did not authorize them to take....Lawless men, singly and in organized bands, engaged in general plunder; every species of intrigue and peculation and theft were resorted to."These agents turned over to the United States about $34,000,000.About 40,000claimants were subsequently indemnified on the ground that the property taken from them did not belong to the Confederate Government, but many thousands of other claimants have been unable to prove that their property was seized by government agents and hence have received nothing.It is probable that the actual Confederate property was nearly all stolen by the agents.One agent in Alabama sold an appointment as assistant for $25,000, and a few months later both the assistant and the agent were tried by a military court for stealing and were fined $90,000 and $250,000 respectively in addition to being imprisoned.
Other property, including horses, mules, wagons, tobacco, rice, and sugar which the natives claimed as their own, was seized.In some places the agents even collected delinquent Confederate taxes.Much of the confiscable property 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.
