“Negro men, who had wandered a while looking for an invisible freedom, came back and went to work on the farm from force of habit. They now received wages and bought their own food. That was the only apparent difference that freedom had brought them.” Walter Hines Page from Reminiscences of his boyhood during the WBTS.

“The war abolished slavery and with the exception of a few Negroes who found that freedom brought them cares and hardships such as they had not known in slavery, I never heard a Southerner say he regretted it.” Robert Catlett Cave"