Expenditures of all kinds were lessened.

Government was reduced to its lowest terms, and the salaries of state officers were fixed at ridiculously small figures.
Inadequate school taxes were levied; the asylums for the insane, though kept alive, could not take care of all who should have been admitted; appropriations for higher education, if made at all, were small; there was little or no social legislation.

The politicians taught the people that low taxes were the greatest possible good and, when prosperity began to return and a heavier burden of taxation might easily have been borne, the belief that the efficiency of a government was measured by its parsimony had become a fixed idea.

There was little scandal anywhere.

No governments in American history have been conducted with more economy and more fidelity than the governments of the Southern States during the first years after the Reconstruction period.