Destitution at the South.
—, Va., THURSDAY, MAY 10, 1866. Situated as you are you have no adequate idea of the extreme destitution prevailing in Virginia, and it is said to be less here than in the more Southern States. If ever a people were punished for their acts, surely the Southern people have been, and the end is not yet. We have lost our friends on the battle field and from disease; we have had our property destroyed, and every industrial interest of the country completely annihilated. As for my individual interest, the loss of my negroes, except as property, affects me but little; but in the aggregate the loss has beggared the South. I do not expect to live to see an approach to a renewal of our former prosperity. Not only on this account, but the violent disruption of the whole social fabric, followed as it has been, and will indefinitely be, by political agitation, will prevent for many years anything like the calmness and quiet so necessary to restore the disjointed and broken machinery of industry and enterprise. Laying aside the money question of the value of the dozen or fifteen negroes I have lost, more than half of whom have absolutely perished from excess of freedom, I am better off without them. But as it is, I am about the poorest man who claims to be a gentleman, that you can possibly know. "You cannot conceive of the destitution of the poor whites here. The men returned from the war too late last season to make much bread for this year. So they are now utterly destitute. I do not doubt that in this district at least two hundred children must die within a month, of actual starvation. Corn is two dollars a bushel and flour twenty dollars a barrel. Those who have will sell only for cash, which these poor wretches have not. I was in the upper part of the State the other day, when an actual "bread riot" took place. Some fifteen men, whose families were starving, resolved to take corn from the crib of a rich neighbor near the home of J. C. Calhoun. He armed some forty of his negroes and a few white men, captured the ring-leader, and he was carried to jail. The citizens then interceded for him, and he was released. I had known the man in the army. As he was going away he saw me and said, "What am I to do? I am now going home to my family and they have not had a mouthful to eat for thirty-six hours."—From Boston Journal.