As a body, the negroes had been conducting themselves with propriety, and good feeling prevailed. Their greatest delight was in the dignity of unaccustomed surnames, duster coats, gauntlet gloves, albums, clocks and other wares, with which enterprising northern peddlers tempted them. Their childish delight in these novel possessions for a while filled the measure of their happiness. But some of them who had been following armies contracted nomadic habits; others were incapable of rational exercise of their novel privileges, and became disturbers of the peace. Their depredations soon rendered stock raising impracticable. Every plantation had a gin-house, and these houses, with their valuable contents, were exposed to incendiaries seeking revenge for real or fancied grievances, and many were destroyed. Men with the "easy money" acquired during the period of cotton stealing set up crossroad stores at every available point and dispensed vile whiskey in barter for bags of loose cotton and corn, ostensibly the "shares" of those offering them, but really often stolen from lint rooms and cribs, and even from the ungarnered crops in the fields. These traders did an immense business, many of them setting up gins and baling screws. The existing "sundown and sunrise" law was enacted to destroy this nefarious traffic. It prohibited the sale of farm products between sunset and sunrise. CHAPTER SIX MILITARY REGULATIONS Another cause of irritation was the offensive conduct of soldiers composing the garrisons, which provoked collisions with the more impetuous citizens. In 1865 the federal soldiers in Tuscaloosa, Greensboro, Eutaw and other towns subjected the people to very offensive regulations. Only a few examples need be mentioned as exhibiting the temper of both sides: The former soldiers of the Confederacy, having no means with which to replenish their wardrobes, wore their uniforms. The federals threatened, and sometimes attempted, to cut the buttons from the old gray coats, and the proud wearers were forced to resort to the expedient of covering them with thin cloth rather than let them serve as a pretext for insults. Flags were stretched across the sidewalks, so that pedestrians would have to pass under them. To defeat the obvious purpose, men and women, in going about, resorted to the roadway or diverged from the sidewalks at points where the flags were placed. In some instances these unwilling and protesting people were seized and forced under the flags. These and other practices, devised to provoke the people to exhibitions of hostility, caused severe smarting. Perhaps many young men who had received war schooling were not reluctant to encounter their former antagonists.