The Civil War devastated the South. One out of every three of the soldiers who had enlisted in the Confederate army died, for a total of 260,000 fatalities. Civilians saw the cornerstone of the South—its land and plantations—destroyed by vanquishing northern troops. In the wake of the war, countless southerners suffered not only from the humiliation of losing to the North but also from hunger, a lack of clean water, and homelessness. With the young men who might have been able to rebuild the southern economy dead, and the Emancipation Proclamation ridding the South of its slave-based economy, the region experienced an economic collapse. Land values dropped precipitously at the war’s end; property in Virginia that had sold for one hundred dollars per acre before the war was now being offered for two dollars per acre. Thomas...