What was life like during Reconstruction for poor white southerners?

Poor white
Southerners did not have an easy life in the South after the Civil War.  A lot of men either did
not come back from the war, or they came back maimed.  Many horses and cattle were lost due to
armies collecting them or "bummers" (deserters from both sides) confiscating them.
 Many areas of the South immediately after the war were quite lawless. The Union army raided
farms around battlefields and a large part of Georgia and the Carolinas were rendered barren by
Sherman's March to the Sea.  Many poor Southerners left and went North and West, looking for
work and opportunity.  There was also the relationship they had with the former slaves.  These
former slaves competed with the poor Southerners for agricultural work, thus creating a racist
system in which the former slave was demonized by both his former owners and by whites who were
close to him in terms of income.  Many poor whites turned to sharecropping, in which the farmer
worked the land and paid his rent in the form of part of the crop. Of course the farmer went
into debt to buy the feed, seed, and supplies, and often crops were wiped out by drought or
insects--in the 1870s a boll weevil problem destroyed millions of acres of cotton in Georgia.
 This system perpetuated poverty for working-class white Southerners and sharecropping would be
common in the South until WWII when many of these poor whites left for factory jobs in the North
or to fight the Axis in WWII.