But Yankee invasions and raids sooner or later destroyed most of this new industry, along with anything else of economic value within reach, so that by war’s end much of the South was an economic desert. The war not only killed one-quarter of the Confederacy’s white men of military age. It also killed two-fifths of southern livestock, wrecked half of the farm machinery, ruined thousands of miles of railroad, left scores of thousands of farms and plantations in weeds and disrepair, and destroyed the principal labor system on which southern productivity had been based.
