For the year ending June 30, 1863 $351,311.48 For the year ending June 30, 1864 1,268,412.56 For the year ending June 30, 1865 1,772,983.48 For the year ending June 30, 1866 18,409,654.90 For the year ending June 30, 1867 23,769,078.80 For the year ending June 30, 1868 22,500,947.77 -------------- Total, $68,072,388.99[792] Of this tax Alabama paid within her borders $10,388,072.10,[793] and since she was one of the three great cotton states, her share of the tax paid in northern ports must have been several million dollars more. Of the other cotton states,--Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas,--all except Georgia, which paid about a million dollars more than Alabama, suffered in less degree. From April 1, 1865, to February 1, 1866, Alabama paid in other taxes, into the United States Treasury, $1,747,563.51, of which $1,655,218.31 was internal revenue, and from September 1, 1862, to January 30, 1872, $14,200,982 internal revenue.[794] The former sum was much more than the Federal government spent in Alabama during that year for the relief of the destitute, both black and white. The cotton spirited away by thieves and confiscated by the government would have paid several times over all the expenses of the army and the Freedmen's Bureau during the entire time of the occupation. Many times as much money was taken from the negro tenant in the form of this cotton tax as was spent in aiding him. The most crushing weight of the tax came in 1866 and 1867, and it was much heavier than the taxation imposed by the Confederate and state governments even in the darkest days of the war. Had the price of cotton remained high, the tax would not have borne so heavily on the people; but with the decline of the price the tax finally amounted to a third of the net value of the cotton, while the amount raised in these years was about one-fifth of the value of the farming lands.[795] The tax absorbed all the profits of cotton planting and left the farmer nothing.