Many efforts have been made to show the price paid by the South for its attempt at independence, but these have always failed to be exact. No scheme of accounting can uncover all the costs. It is a sufficient suggestion as to the total that a million men, at the prime of life, were diverted from ordinary production for about three years. Not only did the South lose the products of their labor, but it lost many of them, while its houses, barns, and other permanent improvements wore out, were burned, or went to pieces from lack of care. Its slave property was destroyed. Poverty was universal within the region of the Confederacy when Johnson issued his amnesty proclamation and the troops came home. The most immediate problems before the Southern planter in the spring of 1865 were his dilapidated buildings, his spring crops, and his labor supply. Without money or credit, he needed all the stiffness of a proud caste to hold off bankruptcy. The daughter of a prominent Mississippi planter told later how her father, at seventy years, did the family washing to keep his daughters from the tub. A society whose men and women took this view of housework (for the daughters let their father have his way) had much to learn before it could reestablish itself. Yet this same stubbornness carried the South through the twenty trying years after the war. The system of slave labor was gone, but the negroes were still the chief reliance for labor. It appears from the scanty records that are available that the planters expected to reopen the plantations using the freedmen as hired laborers. In 1865 and 1866 they tried this, only to find that the negro had got beyond control and would not work. Supervision had become hateful to him. A vagrant life appealed to his desire for change. At best, he was unintelligent and indolent. In a few years it became clear that the old type of plantation had vanished, and that the substitute was far from satisfactory.