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2.
in the State had been so nearly reduced by the failure of crops for the two years preceeding.- The laboring classes, disappointed and disheartened at the repeated failure of the bright prospects formed in the early part of the seasons, and landowners discouraged by a series of barren results, it became a question of most anxious concern to every one, not so much how to retrieve their shattered fortunes as how they could procure the necessaries of life, and anticipating the future by the experience of the past, it seemed as though hope itself had been well nigh abandoned.
 
The wages for which laborers contracted in 1866 were so extravagant, and the crop realized so meagre, that the universal failure to pay even a portion of the wages due for that year produced general dissatisfaction among the freedmen at the system of contracting for money wages and created very erroneous ideas as to the value of their labor.-