But nothing else could be expected from a class who had never felt anything but the heel of oppression.

History shows that such vagrancy has always followed the immediate emancipation of a large number of slaves.

Many Negroes who flocked to the towns and army camps, moreover, had like their masters and poor whites seen their homes broken up or destroyed by the invading Union armies.

Whites who had never learned to work were also roaming and in some cases constituted marauding bands.[48] There was, moreover, an actual drain of laborers to the lower and more productive lands in Mississippi and Louisiana.[49] This developed later into a more considerable movement toward the Southwest just after the Civil War, the exodus being from South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi to Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas.

Here was the pioneering spirit, a going to the land of more economic opportunities.