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and
    twenty locomotives, immense quantities of military supplies, and
    35,000 bales of cot on. The arsenal, factory shops, and foundries at
    Selma were systematical y destroyed. Perhaps most shocking to
    local whites, before moving on to at ack Georgia, Wilson's o cers
    quickly raised a one-thousand-man regiment of black troops, placed
    under the command of the Third Ohio Cavalry28
    With the remaining Confederate armies commanded by Gen.
    Robert E. Lee and Gen. Joseph E. Johnston unable to unite,
    Je erson Davis's hope to continue the rebel ion as a guerril a
    struggle col apsed. Cut o from his remaining troops, his Alabama
    munitions system destroyed, deprived of the last regions of relative
    security in the South, he at empted to ee to Texas or Mexico.
    Under hot pursuit by detachments of General Wilson's troops, he
    was captured by Union forces in Georgia weeks later. The war
    came final y to its end.
    Alabama had su ered losses totaling $500 mil ion—a sum
    beyond comprehension in 1865. The total value of farm property
    was reduced during the war from $250 mil ion to less than $98
    mil ion, including the loss of slaves. Al banks in the state had
    col apsed. Agricultural production levels would not match that of
    1860 for another forty years.29
    But the nal days of the war proved to be only the beginning of a
    more inexorable and anarchic struggle. A vicious white insurgency
    against the Union occupation and the specter of black citizenship
    began to take shape, presaged by the conduct of Home Guard
    patrols like the one Oliver Cot ingham had joined. The patrols,
    uncoordinated and increasingly contemptuous of any authority
    during the war, had come to be known more as bandits and thugs
    than defenders of the Confederacy. After four years of conscriptions
    verging on kidnappings, violence perpetrated against critics of
    rebel ion, and ruthless seizures of supplies and property, the Home
    Guard was in many places as despised as the Yankee troops. But in
    the aftermath of a sudden—and in much of the South, unanticipated
    —surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic
    —surrender, no clear central authority existed in the domestic
    a airs of places too smal or remote to warrant a detachment of
    northern troops. In the Deep South, that meant nearly everyplace
    outside state capitals and economic centers.
    The result, in the two years preceding Henry and Mary's wedding,
    was a spreading wave of internecine violence and thievery by
    returning Confederate soldiers, particularly against those
    southerners who had doubted the war. Deserters, who had been far
    more numerous than southern mythology acknowledged, began
    set ling old scores. The increasing lawlessness of the postwar years
    was, rather than a wave of crime by freed slaves as so often
    claimed, largely perpetrated against whites by other whites.
    The Cot ingham farm sat in the middle of this unrest. One gang of
    deserters in Bibb County, made up of men believed to have
    abandoned the armies of both the North and the South, cal ed
    themselves the Uglies, and marauded through the countryside
    during the war, robbing farms and threatening Confederate
    supporters. Another gang inhabited the Yel ow Leaf swamp on the
    border with adjoining Chilton County. A paramilitary band of men
    near the town of Monteval o, cal ing itself Blackwel 's Cavalrymen,
    hunted the countryside for Confederate deserters before the
    southern surrender and continued as an outlaw gang after the war.
    The group eventual y murdered a total of seventeen local men.
    White lawlessness was so rampant in Shelby County that less than a
    year before Henry and Mary's wedding, Union military o cials in
    the Alabama capital threatened to send troops into the area to
    restore peace.30
    Chilton County had been a hotbed of such guerril a activity
    throughout the war and emerged as a refuge for Confederate
    deserters and southerners who remained loyal to the Union. A local
    plantation owner,