After the war many Confederate officers fled to foreign countries rather than live in the reunited republic; some 3,000 went to Brazil alone, in an ill-fated effort to build a prosperous new life.
A striking contrast was the North Carolinian, Dick Ragland, a man of a wealth plantation family who swore an oath, upon hearing of Lee’s surrender, that he would not life a finger to work so long as he lived.
Ragland also vowed that he would never cross to the north side of the Potomac, or stray south of Atlanta, Georgia. Until after 1910 he tramped the South as a vagrant, shaggy and ragged, with a pack on his back, carrying a long stick with a bayonet fixed on its end.
