THE NEGRO AT THE CLOSE OF THE CIVIL WAR 11 
hunters.” Crops were poor in 1865 and again in 
1866, and the white planters and farmers were 
so reduced in means that they were unable to 
pay cash wages to Negroes. It was several years 
before a workable labor system was evolved. 
In addition to the freedmen’s general roving 
there was a stream of migration from the Atlan- 
tic states toward the Southwest, while all over 
the southern country there was a constant mov- 
ing toward their old homes of thousands who 
had been carried by their masters into the in- 
terior to escape capture by the Federals, and of 
those who had enlisted in the F ederal armies or 
had followed them out of the South, or had been 
gathered into the numerous “contraband” and 
refugee colonies. Frederick Douglass thus de- 
scribed conditions: “The government had left 
the freedman in a bad condition. . . , It felt 
that it had done enough for him. It had made 
him free, and henceforth he must work his own 
way in the world. Yet he had none of the con- 
ditions of self-preservation or self-protection. 
- + « He was free from the individual master but 
the slave of society. Hehad neither money, prop- 
erty, nor friends. He was free from the old 
plantation but he had nothing but the dusty 
road under his feet. He was free from the old 
Quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave 
to the rains of summer and to the frosts of 
winter. He was turned loose naked, hungry and 
destitute,” 3 
“FORTY ACRES AND A MULE” 
The “Forty Acres and a Mule” delusion exer- 
* Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, by himself. I, p. 89,