The Freedmen's Savings Bank

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 175265076X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-129631

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fleming, Walter Lynwood http://d-nb.info/gnd/120660560X

Title:: The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Place of publication:: Chapel Hill

Publisher:: Univ. of North Carolina Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: x, 170 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter I. The negro at the close of the Civil War

Collection:: Economics Books

10 THE FREEDMEN'S SAVINGS BANK That they would never have to work any more, never be hungry or cold again, was the belief of many of those last emancipated. These were also possessed by the general idea that in order to be really free they must leave their old homes for new ones and must take new names. Men fre- quently deserted their families and took on new “free” wives. Thousands wandered over the country living from hand to mouth—eating berries, green corn from the fields, and stolen chickens and pigs. In the crowded cabins near the towns and the military posts want and dis- ease, often epidemic, thinned the numbers of the Negroes until it was estimated that the blacks had lost by death as heavily as did the southern whites during the war. For several years after the war the death rate among the Negroes in the cities was twice as large as that of the whites. J. D. B. DeBow? stated in 1867 that the laborers had decreased twenty-five per cent in number since 1860, an estimate certainly too large except for the congested camps and colonies. The system of labor based on slavery was of necessity disorganized as a result of emancipa- tion. In May and June, 1865, industry was, as far as the Negroes were concerned, almost at a standstill. Those who were congregated in the towns and about the garrisons could find little to do, and those still in the country were too excited over their new freedom to work regularly. Latham, an English traveler who went through the South in 1866, said that the Negroes had secured old muskets and had become “a race of 2 Editor of DeBow’s Review.

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