from about $5,800,000 to $24,000,000, and millions of the
increase could not be accounted for by the authorities responsible for
it.

=Economic Ruin--Urban and Rural.=--No matter where Southern men turned
in 1865 they found devastation--in the towns, in the country, and along
the highways. Atlanta, the city to which Sherman applied the torch, lay
in ashes; Nashville and Chattanooga had been partially wrecked; Richmond
and Augusta had suffered severely from fires. Charleston was described
by a visitor as "a city of ruins, of desolation, of vacant houses, of
rotten wharves, of deserted warehouses, of weed gardens, of miles of
grass-grown streets.... How few young men there are, how generally the
young women are dressed in black! The flower of their proud aristocracy
is buried on scores of battle fields."

Those who journeyed through the country about the same time reported
desolation equally widespread and equally pathetic. An English traveler
who made his way along the course of the Tennessee River in 1870 wrote:
"The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin
houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories ... and large tracts of
once cultivated land are stripped of every vestige of fencing. The
roads, long neglected, are in disorder and, having in many places become
impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields
without much respect to boundaries." Many a great plantation had been
confiscated by the federal authorities while the owner was in
Confederate service. Many more lay in waste. In the wake of the armies
the homes of rich and poor alike, if spared the torch, had been
despoiled of the stock and seeds necessary to renew agriculture.

=Railways Dilapidated.=--Transportation was still more demoralized. This
is revealed in the pages of congressional reports based upon first-hand
investigations. One eloquent passage illustrates all the rest. From
Pocahontas to Decatur, Alabama, a distance of 114 miles, we are told,
the railroad was "almost entirely destroyed, except the road bed and
iron rails, and they were in a very bad condition--every bridge and
trestle destroyed, cross-ties rotten, buildings burned, water tanks
gone, tracks grown up in weeds and bushes, not a saw mill near the line
and the labor system of the country gone. About forty miles of the track
were burned, the cross-ties entirely destroyed, and the rails bent and
twisted in such a manner as to require great labor t