XLVIII. FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS AND THE FREEDMEN’S BUREAU…

XLVIII. FREEDMEN’S SCHOOLS AND THE FREEDMEN’S BUREAU

By a census taken in June, 1865, there were shown to be 16,509 freedmen in Memphis. Of this number 220 were indigent persons, maintained, not by the city or the Bureau, but by the freed people themselves. During the past three years, colored benevolent societies in Memphis had contributed five thousand dollars towards the support of their own poor.

There were three thousand pupils in the freedmen’s schools. The teachers for these were furnished, here as elsewhere, chiefly by benevolent societies in the North. Such of the citizens as did not oppose the education of the blacks, were generally silent about it. Nobody said of it, “That is freedom! That is what the Yankees are doing for them!”

Visiting these schools in nearly all the Southern States, I did not hear of the white people taking any interest in them. With the exception of here and there a man or woman inspired by Northern principles, I never saw or heard of a Southern citizen, male or female, entering one of those humble school-rooms. How often, thinking of this indifference, and watching the earnest, Christian labors of that little band of refined and sensitive men and women and girls, who had left cheerful homes in the North and voluntarily exposed themselves to privation and opprobrium, devoting their noblest energies to the work of educating and elevating the despised race,—how often the stereotyped phrase occurred to me, “The Southern people were always their best friends!”

The wonder with me was, how these “best friends” could be so utterly careless of the intellectual and moral interests of the freedmen. For my own part, I could never enter one of those schools without emotion. They were often held in old buildings and sheds good for little else. There was not a school-room in Tennessee furnished with appropriate seats and desks. I found a similar condition of things in all the States. The pews of colored churches, or plain benches in the vestries, or old chairs with boards laid across them in some loft over a shop, or out-of-doors on the grass in summer,—such was the usual scene of the freedmen’s schools.

In the branches taught, and in the average progress made, these do not differ much from ordinary white schools at the North. In those studies which appeal to the imagination and memory, the colored pupil excels. In those which exercise the reflective and reasoning faculties, he is less proficient.

But it is in the contrasts of age and of personal appearance which they present, that the colored schools differ from all others. I never visited one of any size in which there were not two or three or half a dozen children so nearly white that no one would have suspected the negro taint. From these, the complexion ranges through all the indescribable mixed hues, to the shining iron black of a few pure-blooded Africans, perhaps not more in number than the seemingly pure-blooded whites. The younger the generation, the lighter the average skin; by which curious fact one perceives how fast the race was bleaching under the “peculiar” system of slavery.[15]

The contrast of features is no less than that of complexions. Here you see the rosy child, whose countenance shows a perfect Caucasian contour, shaded perhaps by light brown curls, reciting in the same class with thick-lipped girls and woolly-headed boys.

The difference in ages is even more striking. Six years and sixty may be seen, side by side, learning to read from the same chart or book. Perhaps a bright little negro boy or girl is teaching a white-haired old man, or bent old woman in spectacles, their letters. There are few more affecting sights than these aged people beginning the child’s task so late in life, often after their eyesight has failed. Said a very old man to a teacher who asked him his age, “I’m jammed on to a hundred, and dis is my fust chance to git a start.”

The scholars are generally well behaved. It is the restlessness and love of fun of the younger ones which prove the greatest trial to the teacher’s patience. The proportion of vicious mischief-makers is no greater than in white schools. In the evening-schools, attended chiefly by adults, all is interest and attention. The older pupils are singularly zealous and assiduous in their studies. The singing is usually excellent. Never shall I forget the joyous blending of sweet, rich, exultant childish voices, to which I often listened. The voices of singing children are always delightful and touching: how especially so the musical choruses of children, once slaves, singing the glad songs of freedom!

At Memphis, as at Nashville and other points in Tennessee, I saw much of the operations of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

General Fiske appeared to me peculiarly fitted for his position; and he was generally supported by firm and efficient officers; although, like all the Assistant-Commissioners I saw, he complained that the law establishing the Bureau did not permit him to choose his own agents. He had to take such army officers as were given him; some of whom were always found to be incompetent, or neglectful of their duties, or so prejudiced for or against the blacks that they were rendered incapable of administering justice. A few were in sympathy with slavery. Others, meaning to do right, were seduced from a straightforward course by the dinners to which they were invited by planters who had favors to ask. With such, the rights of the freedmen were sure to suffer, when into the opposite scale were thrown the aristocratic Rebel’s flattering attentions and the smiles of his fair daughters.

It was the practice of the agents of the Bureau to make frequent tours of their counties, and General Fiske himself was in the habit of running off every few days to visit some important point, where his organizing and conciliatory influence was necessary. Often he would find the planters and the freedmen separated by hedges of animosity and distrust. Usually his first step was to call together as large an audience as could be obtained of both classes, and explain to them the object of the Bureau, and the duty each class owed the other. In nearly every instance, earnestness and common sense prevailed; the freedmen came forward and made contracts with the land-owners, and the land-owners conceded to the freedmen advantages they had refused before.

Sometimes exciting and dramatic scenes occurred at these meetings. “Not long ago,” said General Fiske, “I addressed a mixed audience of three thousand persons at Spring Hill. The meeting was presided over by a black man. Rebel generals and Federal generals sat together on the platform. I made a short speech, and afterwards answered questions for anybody, white or black, that chose to ask them. I had said that the intention of the Bureau was to do justice to all, without respect to color; when there rose up in the audience a tall, well dressed, fine-looking woman, sallow, very pale, and much agitated, and wished to know if she could have justice. Said she, ‘I was owned by a respectable planter in this neighborhood who kept me as his wife for many years. I have borne him five children. Two of them are dead. A short time ago he married another woman, and drove me and my three children off.’ The man was in the audience. Everybody present knew him, and there were a hundred witnesses that could vouch for the truth of the woman’s story. I told her justice should certainly be done in her case. The respectable planter now supports her and her three children.”

I have known many wrongs of this nature to be righted by the Bureau; the late slave-owners learning that instead of making their offspring by bondwomen profitable to them as chattels, in the new order of things they were to be held responsible for their maintenance.

The freedmen’s courts were designed to adjudicate upon cases which could not be safely intrusted to the civil courts.[16] They are in reality military courts, and the law by which they are governed is martial law. I found them particularly efficient in Tennessee. The annoying technicalities and legal quibbles by which, in ordinary courts, the truth is so often inextricably embarrassed, were here swept aside, and justice reached with admirable directness. I have watched carefully scores of cases decided by these tribunals, and do not remember one in which substantial justice was not done. No doubt exceptions to this rule occur, but I am satisfied that they are no more frequent than those which occur in common-law courts; and they are insignificant compared with the wholesale wrong to which the unprotected freedman would be subjected in communities where old slave codes and immemorial prejudice deny to him human rights.

The freedmen’s court is no respecter of persons. The proudest aristocrat and the humblest negro stand at its bar on an equal footing. I remember a case in which a member of the Tennessee Legislature was the defendant, and upwards of twenty freedmen hired by him were the plaintiffs. He had voted against the Negro Testimony Bill, which, if it had passed, would have placed his case in a civil court; and now he had the satisfaction of seeing eight of these blacks stand up and testify against him. He admitted that they were faithful and truthful men; and their testimony was so straightforward, I was astonished that he should have waited to have his accounts with them adjusted by the Bureau.

Many difficulties arise from honest misunderstandings between the contracting parties. These are decided by the Bureau according to general rules of equity, and nearly always to the satisfaction of both. I was assured by several of the most experienced officers of the Bureau in Tennessee, that, in cases where contracts were fully understood, they were much less frequently broken by the freedmen than by the whites.

Complaints of assaults upon freedmen, and even upon women and girls, were very common. Here is a simple story of wrong related to me by a girl of fourteen whom I saw, weary and famished and drenched, after she had walked thirty-four miles to obtain the protection of the Bureau, bearing the marks of cruel beatings upon her back.

“My name is Milly Wilson; I live in Wilson County; my mistress’s brother was my father. I have been kept a slave since Emancipation. I worked in de cornfield; I had to hoe and drap corn; I ho’ped gether the corn and shuck it. I had to cuke; and I had spinning to do. I ho’ped sow, hoe, and pick cotton. I had to pick bolls and bring ’em into house, and pick cotton out o’ bolls till chickens crowed for midnight. Dey never give me nothing. I didn’t dare ax ’em for wages; and dey said if I run away dey’d shoot me. My mistress tried to whoop me, but she couldn’t; I’d run from her. Den her son Tom whooped me with a soap-paddle till he broke it. He struck me side of head with his fist, and knocked me down.” (Her face was still discolored by the blow.) “His father said, ‘That’s no way to beat ’em; take ’em down and paddle ’em.’ Dat night I lef’. I told Jennie to tell ’em I’d gone to Murfreesboro’, so dey wouldn’t git on de right track; and I started for Nashville. It wasn’t long till day when I lef’. I walked till sun-up; and laid by de balance part of de day in an old barn. I had nothing to eat, but on’y jist de meat and bread I had for my supper I took and carried with me for de nex’ day. De nex’ night de moon riz. I couldn’t see de moon, but it give light enough so I could see how to walk. Two miles from Triune I found some friends, and dey give me breakfas’. Wednesday mornin’ it was sleetin’, and dey give me a shawl. Thursday I got to Nashville. Now I want to send for my clothes; for it was so dark when I lef’ I couldn’t see to find ’em. I lef’ my clothes, and a skillet and led, and a basket.” The court sent not only for these, but for Master Tom who had paddled her, and for Master Tom’s father who had abetted the outrage and held her enslaved after slavery was abolished. This is a very mild case compared with some that came to my knowledge, too horrible or too disgusting to be narrated.

The freedmen’s affairs in West Tennessee were giving the Bureau daily less and less trouble,—both whites and blacks beginning to learn that contracts were made to be kept, and that their mutual interests depended upon mutual good-will. The most aggravated and embarrassing cases were from Mississippi. The farce of opening the civil courts to the blacks in that State had caused a discontinuance of the freedmen’s courts, and the result was a stampede of wronged and outraged people across the line. During an hour I spent at the Bureau one morning, a stream of these cases kept coming in. The newly organized Mississippi militia, under pretence of searching for arms which the blacks were supposed to have provided for the forthcoming Christmas insurrections, had committed robberies, murders, and other outrages, against these unoffending and unprotected people. The Bureau at Memphis could do nothing but refer these cases to the Assistant-Commissioner at Vicksburg, who could do nothing but refer them to the civil courts, which let them alone. One case I recall, however, in which the officers at Memphis thought they could do something. A colored man, who had been managing a Mississippi plantation under contract for a quarter of the crop, came to Memphis for a redress of grievances. The owner had given him fifteen dollars, and refused to give him anything more for his labor. The cotton was baled, and ready for market. It would soon be in Memphis. “Keep watch of that cotton,” said the agent; “and as soon as it arrives, we will attach it, and you shall have your share.”

While I was there, two negroes came in from Parson Botts’s plantation, in De Soto County, (Mississippi,) bringing guns which they had run off with on the approach of the militia. The wife of one of these men had been beaten over the head with a pistol, and afterwards hung by the neck, to compel her to disclose where the guns were hidden. In this case there was no redress.

A great variety of business is brought before the Bureau. Here is a negro-man who has printed a reward offering fifty dollars for information to assist him in finding his wife and children, sold away from him in times of slavery: a small sum for such an object, you may say, but it is all he has, and he has come to the Bureau for assistance. Here is a free mulattress, who was stolen by a guerilla during the war, and sold into slavery in Arkansas, and she has come to enter a claim for wages earned during two years of enforced servitude. Yonder is a white woman, who has been warned by the police that she must not live with her husband because he is black, and who has come to claim protection in her marriage relation, bringing proof that she is in reality a colored woman. That poor old crippled negro was maimed for life when a slave by a cruel master, who will now be compelled to pension him. Yonder comes an old farmer with a stout colored boy, to get the Bureau’s sanction to a contract they wish to make. “Pull off your hat, Bob,” says the old man; “you was raised to that;” for he was formerly the lad’s owner. He claims to have been a Union man. “I was opposed to secession till I was swep’ plumb away.” He is very grateful for what the officers do for him, and especially for the good advice they give the boy. “I’ll do well by him, and larn him to read, if he’ll do well by me.”

As they go out, in comes a powerful, short-limbed black, in tattered overcoat, with a red handkerchief on his head, and with a lordly countenance, looking like a barbarian chief. He has made a crop; found everything—mules, feed, implements; hired his own help,—fifteen men and women; managed everything; by agreement he was to have one half; but, owing to an attempt to swindle him, he has had the cotton attached; and now it is not on his own account he has come, but he is owing his men wages, and they want something for Christmas, which he thinks reasonable, and he desires the Bureau’s assistance to raise three hundred dollars on the said cotton. “For I’m bound,” he says, “to be liberal with my men.”

Here is a boy, who was formerly a slave, to whom his father, a free man, willed a sum of money, which the boy’s owner borrowed, giving his note for it, but never repaid,—for did not the boy and all that he had belong to his master? The worn and soiled bit of paper is produced; and now the owner will have that money to restore, with interest. Lucky for the boy that he kept that torn and dirty scrap carefully hidden all these years! Such documents are now serving to right many an ancient wrong. I saw at the Freedmen’s Bureau at Richmond a large package of wills, made in favor of slaves, usually by their white fathers, all which had been suppressed by the legitimate heirs. One, a mere rotten and jaundiced rag, scarcely legible, had been carried sewed in the lining of a slave-woman’s dress for more than forty years,—the date of the will being 1823. Her son was legally emancipated by that instrument; but her owner, who claimed to be his owner by inheritance, threatened to kill her if the will was not destroyed, and he believed that it had been destroyed. That boy was now a middle-aged man, having passed the flower of his years in bondage; and his mother was an old woman, living to thank God that her son was free at last. The master, a rich man, had as yet no idea of the existence of that will, by which he was to be held responsible for the payment of over forty years’ wages to his unlawful bondman.

From another of these documents, made by a white master, I copied the following suggestive paragraph: “It is also my last will and desire that my beloved wife SALLY DANDRIDGE, and my son HARRISON, and my daughters CHARITY and JULIA, should be free; and it is my wish and desire for them to be emancipated hereafter, and for them to remain as free people.” Another paragraph gave them property. This will, like nearly all the rest, had been registered and proved; and, like them, it had been suppressed,—the beloved wife and son and daughters remaining in bondage, until the slave system went down with the Rebellion, and a day of judgment came with the Freedmen’s Bureau.

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Footnote 15:

At Vicksburg, Miss., in one school of 89 children, only three were of unmixed African blood. In another, there were two black and 68 mixed. In a school for adults, there were 41 black to 50 mixed. In a school of children on a Mississippi plantation, there were 46 black and 23 mixed. In another plantation school, there were 30 black and 7 mixed. These figures illustrate not only the rapid bleaching of the race, but also the difference in color between town and country.

Footnote 16:

See Paragraph VII. in Circular No. 5, issued by Major-General Howard, Commissioner of the Bureau, and approved by the President, June 2d, 1865:—

“In all places where there is an interruption of civil law, or in which local courts, by reason of old codes, in violation of the freedom guaranteed by the Proclamation of the President and the laws of Congress, disregard the negro’s right to justice before the laws, in not allowing him to give testimony, the control of all subjects relating to refugees and freedmen being committed to this Bureau, the Assistant-Commissioners will adjudicate, either themselves or through officers of their appointment, all difficulties arising between negroes themselves, or between negroes and whites or Indians, except those in military service, so far as recognizable by military authority, and not taken cognizance of by the other tribunals, civil or military, of the United States.”

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XLIX. DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI

At Memphis I took passage in a first-class Mississippi steam-packet for Vicksburg. It was evening when I went on board. The extensive saloon, with its long array of state-rooms on each side, its ornamental gilt ceiling, and series of dazzling chandeliers, was a brilliant spectacle. A corps of light-footed and swift-handed colored waiters were setting the tables,—bringing in baskets of table-cloths, and spreading them; immense baskets of crockery, and distributing it; and trays of silver, which added to the other noises its ringing and jingling accompaniment. About the stove and bar and captain’s office, at the end of the saloon, was an astonishing crowd of passengers, mostly standing, talking, drinking, buying tickets, playing cards, swearing, reading, laughing, chewing, spitting, and filling the saloon, even to the ladies’ cabin at the opposite end, with a thick blue cloud which issued from countless bad pipes and cigars, enveloped the supper-tables, and bedimmed the glitter of the chandeliers. In that cloud supper was to be eaten.

At a signal known only to the initiated I noticed that pipes were put out and quids cast out, and a mighty rush began. Two lines of battle were formed, confronting each other, with the table between them, each dauntless hero standing with foot advanced, and invincible right hand laid upon the back of a chair. In this way every place was secured at least five minutes before the thundering signal was given for the beginning of the conflict. At last the gong-bearing steward, poising his dread right hand, anxiously watched by the hostile hosts, till the ladies were fairly seated, beat the terrible roll and, instantly, every chair was jerked back with a simultaneous clash and clatter, every soldier plunged forward, every coat-tail was spread, and every pair of trousers was in its seat.

Then, rallied by the gong from deck and state-room and stove, came the crowd of uninitiated ones, (quorum pars parva fui,) hungry, rueful-faced, dismayed, finding themselves in the unhappy position of the fifth calf that suckled the cow with but four teats,—compelled to wait until the rest had fed.

After supper, there were music and dancing in the after-part of the saloon, and gambling, and clicking glasses, and everlasting talk about Yankees and niggers and cotton, in the other part. There were a few Federal officers in their uniforms, and a good many Rebel officers in civil dress. I recognized a thin sprinkling of Northern capitalists and business men. But the majority were Mississippi and Arkansas planters going down the river to their estates: a strongly marked, unrefined, rather picturesque class,—hard swearers, hard drinkers, inveterate smokers and chewers, wearing sad-colored linen for the most part, and clad in coarse “domestic,” slouching in their dress and manners, loose of tongue, free-hearted, good-humored, and sociable. They had been to Memphis to purchase supplies for their plantations, or to lease their plantations, or to hire freedmen, or to “buy Christmas” for their freedmen at home. They appeared to have plenty of money, if the frequency with which they patronized the bar was any criterion. Liquors on board the Mississippi steamers were twenty-five cents a glass, and the average cost of such dram-drinking as I witnessed could not have been less than three or four dollars a day for each man. A few did not seem to be much attracted by the decanters; while others made drafts upon them every hour, or two or three times an hour, from morning till bedtime, and were never sober, and never quite drunk.

How shall I describe the conversation of these men? Never a word did I hear fall from the lips of one of them concerning literature or the higher interests of life; but their talk was of mules, cotton, niggers, money, Yankees, politics, and the Freedmen’s Bureau,—thickly studded with oaths, and garnished with joke and story.

Once only I heard the subject of education indirectly alluded to. Said a young fellow, formerly the owner of fifty niggers,—“I’ve gone to school-keeping.”—“O Lord!” said his companion, “you ha’n’t come down to that!”

I judged that most were married men, from a remark made by one of them: “A married man thinks less of personal appearance than a bachelor. I’ve done played out on that since I got spliced.”

There were a few Tennesseeans aboard, who envied the Mississippians their Rebel State government, organized militia, and power over the freedmen. “We might make a pile, if we could only regulate the labor system. But that can’t be done in this dog-goned Brownlow State. In Mississippi, if they can only carry out the laws they’ve enacted, there’ll be a chance.” It was impossible to convince these gentlemen that the freedmen could be induced to work by any other means than despotic compulsion.

Leaving the gamblers over their cards, and the tipplers over their glasses, I went to bed,—to be awakened at midnight by an inebriated gentleman (weight two hundred, as he thickly informed me) climbing into the berth above me.

After a night of fog, Christmas morning dawned. In the cabin, the generous steward gave to each passenger a glass of egg-nog before breakfast; not because it was Christmas, but because passengers were human, and egg-nog (especially the whiskey in it) was one of the necessities of life.

The morning was warm and beautiful. Mists were chasing each other on the river, and clouds were chasing each other in the sky. A rival steamer was passing us. The decks of both boats were black with spectators watching the race, and making comments upon it: “Look how she piles the water up ahead of her!” “She’ll open a gap of a mile between us in an hour!” and so forth.

The river was about half a mile in breadth. We were running down the broad current between high banks covered with forests, on one side, and sand-bars extending their broad yellow shelves out into the river, on the other. Sometimes the sand was on our right, then it shifted to our left; it was nearly always to be seen on one side, but never on both sides at once. The river is continually excavating one bank and making another opposite,—now taking from Arkansas to give to Mississippi, and now robbing Mississippi to pay Arkansas, and thus year after year forming and destroying plantations. I remember one point on the Arkansas shore where the bank rose forty feet above the water, and was covered with trees eighteen inches in thickness; of which a gentleman of the country said to me, “That is all a recent formation. Forty years ago the bed of the river was where that bank is.” The water was now tearing away again what it had so suddenly built up, trying to get back into its old bed.

We were making landings at every plantation where passengers or freight were to be put off, or a signal was shown from the shore. Sometimes a newspaper or piece of cloth was fluttered by negroes among the trees on the bank; or a man who wished to come on board, stood on some exposed point and waved his handkerchief or hat. There was never a wharf, but the steamer, rounding to in the current, and heading up stream, went bunting its broad nose against the steep, yielding bank. The planks were pushed out; the passengers stepped aboard or ashore, and the deck-hands landed the freight.

Dirtier or more toilsome work than this landing of the freight I have seldom seen. Heavy boxes, barrels of flour and whiskey, had to be lifted and rolled up steep paths in the soft sand to the summit of the bank. Often the paths were so narrow that but one man could get hold of the end of a barrel and lift it, while another hauled it from above, their feet sinking deep at every step. Imagine a gang of forty or fifty men engaged in landing boxes, casks, sacks of corn and salt, wagons, live-stock, ploughs; hurrying, crowding, working in each other’s way, sometimes slipping and falling, the lost barrel tumbling down upon those below; and the mate driving them with shouts and curses and kicks, as if they were so many brutes.

Here the plantations touched the river; and there the landing-place was indicated by blazed trees in the forest, where negroes and mules were in waiting.

Wooding-up was always an interesting sight. A long wood-pile lines the summit of the bank, perhaps forty feet above the river. The steamer lands; a couple of stages are hauled out: fifty men rush ashore and climb the bank; the clerk accompanies them with pencil and paper and measuring-rod, to take account of the number of cords; then suddenly down comes the wood in an amazing shower, rattling, sliding, bounding, and sometimes turning somersaults into the river. The bottom and side of the bank are soon covered by the deluge; and the work of loading begins in equally lively fashion. The two stages are occupied by two files of men, one going ashore at a dog-trot, empty-handed, and another coming aboard with the wood. Each man catches up from two to four sticks, according to their size or his own inclination, shoulders them, falls into the current, not of water, but of men, crosses the plank, and deposits his burden where the corded-wood, that stood so lately on the top of the bank, is once more taking shape, divided into two equally-balanced piles on each side of the boiler-deck.

The men are mostly negroes, and the treatment they receive from the mate is about the same as that which they received when slaves. He stands on the shore between the ends of the two stages, within convenient reach of both. Not a laggard escapes his eye or foot. Often he brandishes a billet of wood, with which he threatens, and sometimes strikes; and now he flings it at the head of some artful dodger who has eluded his blow. And all the while you hear his hoarse, harsh voice iterating with horrible crescendo: “Get along, get along! Out o’ the way’th that wood! out o’ the way, OUT O’ THE WAY! OUT O’ THE WAY! Git on, GIT ON, GIT ON!”

Meanwhile the men are working as hard as men can reasonably be expected to work; and how they discipline their souls to endure such brutality is to me a mystery.

Planters got off at every landing, by day and night; and although a few came aboard, the company was gradually thinning out. At one plantation a colony of sixty negroes landed. They had a “heap of plunder.” Beds and bedding, trunks, tubs, hen-coops, old chests, old chairs, spinning-wheels, pots, and kettles, were put off under the mate’s directions, without much ceremony. The dogs were caught and pitched into the river, much to the distress of the women and children, who appeared to care more for the animals than for any other portion of their property. These people had been hired for an adjoining plantation. The plantation at which we landed had been laid waste, and the mansion and negro-quarters burned, leaving a grove of fifty naked chimneys standing,—“monuments of Yankee vandalism,” said my Southern friends.

At one place a fashionably dressed couple came on board, and the gentleman asked for a state-room. Terrible was the captain’s wrath. “God damn your soul,” he said, “get off this boat!” The gentleman and lady were colored, and they had been guilty of unpardonable impudence in asking for a state-room.

“Kick the nigger!” “He ought to have his neck broke!” “He ought to be hung!” said the indignant passengers, by whom the captain’s prompt and energetic action was strongly commended.

The unwelcome couple went quietly ashore, and one of the hands pitched their trunk after them. They were in a dilemma: their clothes were too fine for a filthy deck passage, and their skins were too dark for a cabin passage. So they sat down on the shore to wait for the next steamer.

“They won’t find a boat that’ll take ’em,” said the grim captain. “Anyhow, they can’t force their damned nigger equality on to me!” He was very indignant to think that he had landed at their signal. “The expense of running this boat is forty dollars an hour,—six thousand dollars a trip;—and I can’t afford to be fooled by a nigger!” I omit the epithets.

Afterwards I heard the virtuous passengers in calmer moments talking over the affair. “How would you feel,” said one, with solemn emphasis, “to know that your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and his wife?” The argument was unanswerable: it was an awful thought!

There is not a place of any importance on the river between Memphis and Vicksburg, a distance of four hundred miles. The nearest approach to an exception is Helena, on the Arkansas shore, a hastily built, high-perched town, looking as if it had flown from somewhere else and just lit. Another place of some note is Napoleon, which was burnt during the war. Here there is one of those natural “cut-offs” for which the Mississippi is remarkable; the river having formed for itself a new channel, half a mile in length, across a tongue of land about which it formerly made a circuit of twelve miles. We passed through the cut-off, and afterwards made a voyage of six miles up the old channel, which resembles a long, placid, winding lake, to Beulah Landing, called after a novel of that name written by a Southern lady.

I remember Beulah as the scene of a colored soldier’s return. He had no sooner landed from the steamer than his friends in waiting seized him, men, women, and girls, some grasping his hands, some clinging to his arms and waist, others hanging upon his neck, smothering him in their joyful embraces. All who could reach him hugged him; while those who could not reach him hugged those who were hugging him, as the next best thing to be done on the happy occasion.

Below Napoleon, the cleared lands of many plantations extend to the river, while others show only a border of trees along the shore. The banks were continually caving, masses of earth flaking off and falling into the turbid current, as we passed. The levees, neglected during the war, were often in a very bad condition. The river, encroaching upon the shores upon which these artificial embankments were raised, had made frequent breaches in them, and in many places swept them quite away; so that whole plantations lay at the mercy of the usual spring freshets, which render cotton culture on such unprotected lands impracticable.

The power and extent of these freshets is something astonishing. The river averages nearly half a mile in width. Its depth is very great, often exceeding one hundred feet. Its average velocity is something over two miles an hour. Yet when come the sudden rains and thaws, and the great tributaries, with their thousand lesser streams, pour their floods into the bosom of the Father of Waters, this huge artery becomes but an insignificant channel for them, and they spread out into a vast lake inundating the valley. The course of the river is then traceable only by the swifter current in its vicinity, and by the broad sinuous opening through the forests. A gentleman of my acquaintance told me that in Bolivar County, Mississippi, he had ridden thirty miles back from the river, and seen all the way the marks of high water on the trees as far up as he could reach with his riding-whip.

The crevasses, or breaks in the levees and banks, which occur at such times, are often terrific. Plantations are destroyed, and buildings swept away. Boats are drawn into the current and carried inland, to be landed, like the Ark, on the subsidence of the waters, or lost among the trees of the deep swamps.

The violence of these freshets is said to be on the increase of late years, from two or three causes,—the drainage of newly cultivated lands; and the cut-offs and the levees, which project the floods more directly upon the lower country, instead of retarding the water, and suffering it to spread out gradually over the valley, naturally subject to its overflow.

The best-protected plantations are those which are completely surrounded by independent levees. “If my neighbor’s levee breaks, my land is still defended,” said a planter to me, describing his estate. “Inside of the levee is a ditch by which the water that soaks in can all be drained to one place and thrown over the embankment by a steam-pump.”

I learned something of the planter’s anxiety of mind during the great floods. “Many is the time I’ve sat up all night just like these mates, looking after the levee on my plantation. Come a wind from the right direction, I’d catch up a lantern, and go out, and maybe find the water within three or four inches of the top. In some places a little more would send it over and make a break. My heart would be nigh about to melt, as I watched it. Sometimes I waited, all night long, to see whether the water would go an inch higher. If it didn’t, I was safe; if it did, I was a ruined man.”

On some of the levees negroes were at work making the necessary repairs; but I was told that many plantations would remain unprotected and uncultivated until another year.

I had heard much about the anticipated negro insurrections at Christmas time. But the only act of violence that came to my knowledge, committed on that day, was a little affair that occurred at Skipwith’s Landing, on the Mississippi shore, a few miles below the Arkansas and Louisiana line. Four mounted guerillas, wearing the Confederate uniform, and carrying Spencer rifles, rode into the place, robbed a store kept by a Northern man, robbed and murdered a negro, and rode off again, unmolested. Very little was said of this trifling operation. If such a deed, however, had been perpetrated by freedmen, the whole South would have rung with it, and the cry of “Kill the niggers!” would have been heard from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic.

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L. IN AND ABOUT VICKSBURG

On the afternoon of the third day we came in sight of Vicksburg,—four hundred miles from Memphis by water, although not more than half that distance in a straight line, so voluminous are the coils of the Great River.

The town, seen across the intervening tongue of land as we approached it,—situated on a high bluff, with the sunlight on its hills and roofs and fortifications,—was a fine sight. It diverted my attention, so that I looked in vain for the famous canal cut across the tongue of land, which pushes out from the Louisiana shore, and about which the river makes an extensive curve.

“You couldn’t have found it without looking mighty close,” said a native of the country. “It’s a little small concern. The Yankees made just a big ditch to let the water through, thinking it would wash out, and make a cut-off. If it had, Farragut’s fleet could have got through, and Vicksburg would have been flanked, high and dry. But, in the first place, they did not begin the ditch where the current strikes the shore; in the next place the water fell before the ditch was completed, and never run through it at all.”

On the opposite shore, overlooking this peninsula and the winding river, stands Vicksburg, on the brow of a line of bluffs which sweep down from the north, here first striking the Mississippi. In this ridge the town is set,—to compare gross things with fine,—like a diamond in the back of a ring. It slopes up rapidly from the landing, and is built of brick and wood, not beautiful on a nearer view.

The hills are cut through, and their sides sliced off, by the deeply indented streets of the upper portion of the city. Here and there are crests completely cut around, isolated, and left standing like yellowish square sugar-loaves with irregular tops. These excavations afforded the inhabitants fine facilities for burrowing during the siege. The base of the hills and the cliff-like banks of the dug streets present a most curious appearance, being completely honey-combed with caves, which still remain, a source of astonishment to the stranger, who half fancies that a colony of large-sized bank-swallows has been industriously at work there.

The majority of the caves were mere “gopher-holes,” as the soldiers call them. Others were quite spacious and aristocratic. The entrance was usually large enough to admit a person stooping slightly; but within, the roofs of the best caves were hollowed sufficiently to permit a man to stand upright. The passage by which you entered commonly branched to the right and left, forming with its two arms a sort of letter Y, or letter T.

Every family had its cave. But only a few of the more extensive ones were permanently occupied. “Ours” (said a lady resident) “was very large and quite comfortable. There was first the entrance, under a pointed arch; then a long cross-gallery. Boards were laid down the whole length and covered with carpets. Berths were put up at the sides, where we slept very well. At first we did not take off our dresses when we lay down; but in a little while we grew accustomed to undressing and retiring regularly. In the morning we found our clothes quite wet from the natural dampness of the cave. Over the entrance there was built a little arbor, where our cooking was done, and where we sat and talked with our neighbors in the daytime, when there were no shells dropping. In the night the cave was lighted up. We lived this sort of life six weeks.”

But few buildings were destroyed by the shells. Those that were partially injured had generally been patched up. After the twenty-sixth of May, when the bombardment became almost incessant, being continued night and day, it was estimated that six thousand shells were thrown into the city by the mortars on the river-side every twenty-four hours. Grant’s siege guns, in the rear of the bluffs, dropped daily four thousand more along the Rebel lines. The little damage done by so great a bombardment is a matter of surprise. The soldiers had also their “gopher-holes,” and laughed at the projectiles. Of the women and children in the town, only three were killed and twelve injured.

Both citizens and troops suffered more from the scarcity of provisions than from the abundance of shells. On both the river and land sides the city was completely cut off from supplies. The garrison was put upon fourteen-and-a-half-ounce rations; and in the town, mule-meat, and even dog-meat, became luxuries.

The day after my arrival I joined a small equestrian party, got up by Lieutenant E—— for my benefit, and rode out to visit the fortifications behind the city. We first came to the line of works thrown up by our troops after the capitulation. Exterior to these, zigzagging along the eastern brow of the bluffs, from the Mississippi, below Vicksburg, to the Yazoo River on the North, a distance of near fifteen miles, were the original Rebel defences, too extensive to be manned by less than a large army.

Three miles northeast of the city we passed Fort Hill, in the “crater” of which, after the Rebel bastions had been successfully mined and blown up, occurred one of the most desperate fights that marked the siege. Pushed up dangerously near to the Rebel position, is the advanced Federal line. Between the two, a little way down the slope from Fort Hill, is the spot rendered historic by the interview which terminated the long struggle for the key to the Mississippi. There, in full view of the confronting armies, the two commanding generals met under an oak-tree, and had their little talk.

Every vestige of the tree, root and branch, had long since disappeared,—cut up, broken up, dug up, and scattered over the country in the form of relics; and we found on the spot a monument, which bids fair to have a similar fate.

This was originally a neat granite shaft, erected by a private subscription among officers and soldiers of the national army, and dedicated on July 4th, 1864, the first anniversary of the surrender of the city. It bears the following inscription:—

SITE OF INTERVIEW BETWEEN MAJOR-GENERAL GRANT, U. S. A., AND LIEUTENANT-GENERAL PEMBERTON, JULY 4, 1863.

Nothing certainly could be more simple and modest. Not a syllable is there to wound the sensibilities of a fallen foe. Yet, since the close of the war, when the returning Confederates first obtained access to this monument, it had been shamefully mutilated. The fact that it was never injured before, and the circumstance that the eagle and shield of the escutcheon surmounting the inscription had been nearly obliterated by persistent battering and grinding, showed that no mere relic-hunters had been hammering here, but that the mischief had been done by some enemy’s hand. The shaft was enclosed by a handsome iron fence, which we found broken and partly thrown down.

From the monument we rode northward over ridges crowned with zigzag fortifications, around steep crests and slopes, and past deep ravines green with tangled cane-brakes,—a broken and wild region; crossing over through woods and hilly cotton-fields to the western brow of the bluffs, where Sherman made his unsuccessful assault in the gloomy last days of 1862.

We reined up our horses on a commanding point, and looked down upon the scene of the battle. Away on our left was the Mississippi, its bold curve sweeping in from the west, and doubling southward toward the city. Before us, under the bluff, was the bottom across which our forces charged, through the bristling abatis and their terrible entanglements, and in the face of a murderous fire captured the Rebel rifle-pits,—a most heroic, bloody, but worse than useless work.

Finding a road that wound down the steep hill-sides, we galloped through the cotton-fields of the bottom to Chickasaw Bayou, which bounded them on the west,—a small stream flowing down through swamps and lagoons, from the Yazoo, and emptying into the Mississippi below the battle-field. We rode along its bank, and found one of the bridges by which our forces had crossed. Beyond were ancient woods, sombre and brown, bearded with long pendant moss.

Returning across the bottom, the Lieutenant guided us to three prominent elevations in the midst of the plain, which proved to be Indian mounds of an interesting character. The largest was thirty feet in height, and one hundred and fifty feet across the base. Leaving the ladies in the saddle, the Lieutenant and myself hitched our horses to a bush on one of the smaller mounds, and entered an excavation which he had assisted in making on a former visit.

We found the earth full of human bones and antique pottery. A little digging exposed entire skeletons sitting upright, in the posture in which they had been buried,—who knows how many centuries before? Who were these ancient people, over whose unknown history the past had closed, as the earth had closed over their bodies? Perhaps these burial-mounds marked the scene of some great battle on the very spot where the modern fight took place.

We found the surface of the mound, washed by the storms of centuries, speckled with bits of bones, yellowish, decayed, and often friable to the touch. Fragments of pottery were also exposed, ornamented in a variety of styles, showing that this ancient people was not without rude arts.

The cotton-fields on the bluffs and in the bottom were cultivated by a colony of freedmen, whose village of brown huts we passed, on the broad hill-side above the river, as we returned to the city.

The ride back over the western brow of the bluffs was one to be remembered. The sun was setting over the forests and plains of Louisiana, which lay dark on the horizon, between the splendid sky and the splendid, wide-spreading river reflecting it. Every cloud, every fugitive fleece, was saturated with fire. The river was a flood of molten gold. The ever-varying glory seemed prolonged for our sakes. The last exquisite tints had scarcely faded, leaving the river dark and melancholy, sweeping between its solitary shores, when we left the crests, with the half-moon sailing in a thinly-clouded sky above our heads, and descended, by the deep-cut, narrow streets, and through the open gates at the breastworks, into the city.

The next day, in company with Major-General Wood, in command of the Department of Mississippi, I visited the fortifications below Vicksburg. For a mile and a half we rode along beside banks perforated with “gopher-holes” dug by the Rebel soldiers, and lines of rifle-pits, which consisted often of a mere trench cut across the edge of a crest. These were the river-side defences. The real fortifications commenced with a strong fort constructed on a commanding bluff. This did not abut on the river, as maps I had seen, and descriptions I had read, had led me to expect. Below the city a tract of low bottom-land opens between the river and the bluffs, of such a nature that no very formidable attack was to be apprehended in that quarter. Standing upon the first redan, we saw a mile or two of low land and tangled and shaggy cypress swamps intervening between us and the glimpses of shining light which indicated the southward course of the Mississippi.

In this excursion, as in that of the previous day, I noticed on every side practical answers to the question, “Will the freedmen work?” In every broken field, in every available spot on the rugged crests, was the negro’s little cotton patch.

Riding through the freedmen’s quarter below the town the General and I called at a dozen or more different cabins, putting to every person we talked with the inquiry,—how large a proportion of the colored people he knew were shiftless characters. We got very candid replies: the common opinion being that about five out of twenty still had a notion of living without work. Yet, curiously enough, not one would admit that he was one of the five,—every man and woman acknowledging that labor was a universal duty and necessity.

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LI. FREE LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI

Colonel Thomas, Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for the State of Mississippi, stationed at Vicksburg, gave the negroes more credit for industry than they gave each other. In the large towns, to which vagrancy naturally gravitates, one in four was probably a fair estimate of the proportion of colored people unable or unwilling to earn an honest livelihood. “But I am confident,” said the Colonel, “there is no more industrious class of people anywhere than the freedmen who have little homesteads of their own. The colonies under my charge, working lands assigned them by the government, have raised this year ten thousand bales of cotton, besides corn and vegetables for their subsistence until another harvest.”

Other well-informed and experienced persons corroborated this statement. Dr. Warren, Superintendent of Freedmen’s Schools in Mississippi, told me of a negro family, consisting of one man, three women, and a half-grown girl, who took a lot of five acres, which they worked entirely with shovel and hoe, having no mule, and on which they had that season cleared five hundred dollars, above all expenses. I heard of numerous other well-authenticated instances of the kind.

Dr. Warren spoke of the great eagerness of the blacks to buy or lease land, and have homes of their own. This he said accounted in a great measure for their backwardness in making contracts. He said to one intelligent freedman: “The whites intend to compel you to hire out to them.” The latter replied: “What if we should compel them to lease us lands?”

There were other reasons why the blacks would not contract. At Vicksburg, a gentleman who had been fifty miles up the valley looking for a plantation, said to me: “The negroes everywhere I went have been shamefully abused. They had been promised that if they would remain and work the plantations, they should have a share of the crops; and now the planters refuse to give them anything. They have no confidence in Southern men, and will not hire out to them; but they are very eager to engage with Northern men.”

This was the universal testimony, not only of travellers, but of candid Southern planters. One of the latter class explained to me how it was that the freedman was cheated out of his share of the crop. After the cotton is sent to market, the proprietor calls up his negroes, and tells them he has “furnished them such and such things, for which he has charged so much, and that there are no profits to divide. The darkey don’t understand it,—he has kept no accounts; but he knows he has worked hard and got nothing. He won’t hire to that man again. But I, and any other man who has done as he agreed with his niggers, can hire now as many as we want.”

Colonel Thomas assured me that two thirds of the laborers in the State had been cheated out of their wages during the past year.

Mr. C——, a Northern man who had taken a plantation at ——, (I omit names, for he told me that not only his property but his life depended upon the good-will of his neighbors,) related to me his experience. He hired his plantation of a gentleman noted for his honesty: “He goes by the name of ‘Honest M——’ all through the country. But honesty appeared to be a virtue to be exercised only towards white people: it was too good to be thrown away on niggers. This M—— has four hundred sheep, seventy milch cows, fifteen horses, ten mules, and forty hogs, all of which were saved from the Yankees when they raided through the country, by an old negro who run them off across a swamp. Honest M—— has never given that negro five cents. Another of his slaves had a cow of his own from which he raised a fine pair of oxen: Honest M—— lays claim to those oxen and sells them. A slave-woman that belonged to him had a cow she had raised from a calf: Honest M—— takes that, and adds it to his herd. He promised his niggers a share of the crops this year; but he has sold the cotton, and locked up the corn, and never given one of them a dollar. And all this time he thinks he is honest: he thinks Northern capitalists treat free laborers in this way. You can’t get it through the heads of these Southern planters that the laboring class has any rights.

“Honest M—— has two plantations,” continued Mr. C——: “he rents me one of them. But he gave me notice at the start that he should take all the niggers from my plantation, and that I must look out for my own help. When I went to take possession I was astonished to find the niggers all there.

“’How’s this?’ I said. ‘I thought these people were going with you?’

“He said he couldn’t induce one of them to contract; and he had about given up the idea of running his other plantation, because the niggers wouldn’t work. He had offered twenty-five dollars a month, with board and medical attendance, and they wouldn’t engage to him even for that.

“’Well,’ said I, ‘if you have got through I should like to hire them.’

“He said I was welcome to try. They knew me to be a Northern man, and when I called them around me for a talk, they all came with grinning faces. Said I: ‘Mr. M—— offers you twenty-five dollars a month. That is more than I can afford to pay, and I think you’d better hire to him.’ They looked stolid: they couldn’t see it: they didn’t want to work for him at any price.

“Then I said, ‘If you won’t work for him, will you work for me?’ I never saw faces light up so in my life. ‘Yes, master! Yes, master!’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘ten dollars a month is all I can afford to pay.’ That made no difference, they said; they’d rather work for ten dollars, and be sure of their pay, than for twenty-five dollars, and be cheated out of it. I gave them a day to think of it: then they all came forward and made contracts, with one exception. They went right to work with a will: I won’t ask men to do any better than they have been doing. They are having their Christmas frolic now, and it’s as merry a Christmas as ever you saw!”

I met with many planters in the situation of Honest M——. Having made arrangements to run their plantations, and got in the necessary supplies, they had discovered that “the niggers wouldn’t contract.” They were then trying to lease their lands to Northern capitalists.

I have seldom met a more anxious, panic-stricken set of men than the planters I saw on the steamer going down to Vicksburg to hire freedmen. Observing the success of Northern men, they had suddenly awakened to the great fact that, although slavery was lost, all was not lost, and that there was still a chance to make something out of the nigger. They could not hire their own freedmen, and were going to see what could be effected with freedmen to whom they were not known. Each seemed to fear lest his neighbor should get the start of him.

“They’re just crazy about the niggers,” said one, a Mississippian, who was about the craziest of the set,—“crazy to get hold of ’em.”

“But,” I remarked, “they say the freedmen won’t work.”

“Well, they won’t,” said my Mississippi friend, unflinchingly.

“Then what do you want of them?”

“Well, I found everybody else was going in for hiring ’em, and if anything was to be made, I didn’t want to be left out in the cold.” Adding with great candor and earnestness: “If everybody else would have refused to hire ’em anyhow, that would have just suited me: I’d have been willing to let my plantation go to the devil for one year, just to see the free niggers starve.”

I saw this gentleman afterwards in Vicksburg, and was not deeply grieved to learn that he had failed to engage a single freedman. “They are hiring to Northern men,” said he, bitterly; “but they won’t hire to Southern men anyhow, if they can help it.”

“How do you account for this singular fact?” I asked.

“I don’t know. They’ve no confidence in us; but they imagine the Yankees will do wonders by ’em. The Southern people are really their best friends.” At which stereotyped bit of cant I could not forbear a smile.

The usual terms proposed by the planters were one hundred and fifty dollars, for a full hand, payable at the end of the year; together with doctors’ bills, two hundred pounds of pork, and a peck of meal a week.

The terms most approved by Colonel Thomas were as follows: Fifteen dollars a month, with food, including flour, sugar, and molasses; a little patch of ground for each family, and Saturday afternoon, for the raising of their own vegetables; the freedmen to clothe themselves.

The planters insisted on furnishing all needful supplies, and charging the blacks for them when not stipulated for in the contract. The alleged reason for this was that the negroes, if allowed to buy their own supplies, would spend half their time in running about the country for knick-knacks. But the better class of planters admitted that the system was liable to gross abuse. “I have neighbors,” said one, “who keep stores of plain goods and fancy articles for their people; and, let a nigger work ever so hard, and earn ever so high wages, he is sure to come out in debt at the end of the year.”

Those who had given the free-labor system a fair trial admitted that the negro would work as well as ever before, while in the field,—some said better; but he would not work as many hours.

“How many hours did he formerly work?” I inquired; and received the following statement with regard to what was done on a well-regulated Mississippi plantation.

“Mr. P——’s niggers were in the field at daylight. It was so in the longest days of summer, as at other times of the year. They worked till six o’clock, when their breakfast was carried to them. They had just time enough allowed them to eat their breakfast; then they worked till noon, when their dinner was carried to them. They had an hour for their dinner. At six o’clock their supper was carried to them. Then they worked till dark. There were cisterns in the field, where they got their water. Nobody was allowed to leave the field from the time they entered it in the morning until work was over at night. That was to save time. The women who suckled babies had their babies carried to them. A little nigger-boy used to drive a mule to the field with a cart full of nigger babies; and the women gave the brats their luncheon while they ate their own. So not a minute was lost.”

And this was the plantation of a “liberal” owner, worked by a “considerate and merciful overseer.” It appeared, according to the planters’ own statements, that their slaves used to work at least sixteen hours a day in summer,—probably more, for they had chores to do at home after dark. That they should not choose to keep up such a continual strain on their bodily faculties, now that they were free, did not appear to me very unreasonable,—but that was perhaps because I was prejudiced.

Under the old system, many plantations were left entirely to the management of overseers, the owners living in some pleasant town where they enjoyed the advantages of society for themselves and of schools for their children. The overseer who could produce the most cotton to the hand was in great request, and commanded the highest wages. The natural result was that both lands and negroes were often worked to a ruinous excess. But the occupation of these best overseers was now gone. Not a freedman would hire out to work on plantations where they were known to be employed. Some managed, however, to avoid being thrown out of business by attaching themselves to other plantations, and changing their title. With the negroes a name is imposing. Many would engage cheerfully to work under a “superintendent,” who would not have entered the field under an “overseer.”

But it is easier to change an odious name than an odious character. Said a candid Southern planter to me, “I should get along very well with my niggers, if I could only get my superintendent to treat them decently. Instead of cheering and encouraging them, he bullies and scolds them, and sometimes so far forgets himself as to kick and beat them. Now they are free they won’t stand it. They stood it when they were slaves, because they had to. He can’t get the notion out of his head that they are still somehow slaves. When I see things going right badly, I take him, and give him a good talking to. Then for about three days he’ll use ’em better, and everything goes smooth. But the first I know, there’s more bullying and beating, and there’s more niggers bound to quit.”

Meanwhile the Christmas holidays were effecting a change in the prospects of free labor for the coming year. I never witnessed in so short a time so complete a revolution in public feeling. One day it seemed that everybody was in despair, complaining that the niggers wouldn’t work; the next, everybody was rushing to employ them. And the freedmen, who, before Christmas, had refused to make contracts, vaguely hoping that lands would be given them by the government, or leased to them by their owners, now came forward to make the best terms they could. The presence of the Bureau at this time in the South was an incalculable benefit to both parties. It inspired the freedmen with confidence, and persuaded them, with the promise of its protection, to hire out once more to the Southern planters. The trouble was, that there was not labor enough in the State to supply the demand. Many negroes had enlisted in the war; others had wandered back to the slave-breeding States from which they had been sold; others had become small proprietors; and others had died, in consequence of the great and sudden change in their circumstances which the war had brought about.

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LII. A RECONSTRUCTED STATE

It seemed impossible for the people of Mississippi—and the same may be said of the Southern people generally—to understand the first principle of the free-labor system. Their notions of it were derived from what they had seen of the shiftless poor whites about them, demoralized by an institution that rendered labor disreputable. They could not conceive of a man devoting himself voluntarily to hard manual toil, such as they had never seen performed except under the lash. Some compulsory system seemed to them indispensable. Hence the new black codes passed by the reconstructed legislatures of several States.

Mississippi, like South Carolina, on returning to the fold of the Union, from which those innocent lambs had strayed, made haste to pass apprentice laws, vagrant laws, and laws relating to contracts and labor, designed to bring back the freedmen under the planters’ control. “An Act to regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice,” passed in November, 1865, provides that “all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes, under the age of eighteen, who are orphans,” or are not maintained by their parents, shall be apprenticed “to some competent and suitable person,”—the former owner to “have the preference;” that “the said apprentices shall be bound by indenture, in the case of males until they are twenty-one years old, and in case of females until they are eighteen years old”; that said master or mistress shall have power to inflict “moderate corporal chastisement”; that in case the apprentice leaves them without their consent, he may be committed to jail, and “punished as provided for the punishment of hired freedmen, as may be from time to time provided for by law,”—the meaning of which is clear, although the grammatical construction is muddy; and that any person who shall employ, feed, or clothe an apprentice who has deserted his master, “shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor,” and so forth.

It will be seen that, by this act, (approved November 22d, 1865,) not merely children without means of support may be thus bound out under a modified system of slavery, but that young girls, and lads of from fourteen to eighteen, capable not only of supporting themselves, but of earning perhaps the wages of a man or woman, may be taken from the employment of their choice and compelled to serve without wages the master or mistress assigned them by the court.

“An Act to amend the Vagrant Laws of the State” provides that “all freedmen over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business,” (as if no man was ever honestly without employment,) “or found unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the day or night time, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding fifty dollars, and imprisoned at the discretion of the court not exceeding ten days”; provided, however, that in case any freedman “shall fail for five days after the imposition of said fine to pay the same, that it shall be, and is hereby, made the duty of the sheriff of the proper county to hire out said freedman to any person who will for the shortest period of service pay said fine or forfeiture and all costs.”

A bill “To confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for other Purposes,” enacts “That all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this State, and may acquire personal property and choses in action, by descent or purchase, and may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated towns and cities.”

Not to speak of the gross injustice of this last provision, what shall be said of the wisdom of that legislation which prohibits an entire laboring class from acquiring real estate in the country, where their presence and energies are indispensable, and holds out an inducement for them to flock to the towns, which are crowded with them already, but where alone they can hope to become freeholders?

Another section of this bill enacts that freedmen shall be competent witnesses in all cases where freedmen are parties to the suit, or where a crime is alleged to have been committed by a white person upon the person or property of a freedman. But it does not give them the power to testify in cases in which only white persons are concerned. All the negro testimony bills which I have seen, passed by the legislatures of the reconstructed States under gentle pressure from Washington, are marked by this singular inconsistency. If the negro is a competent witness in cases in which his own or his fellow’s interests are involved, he is certainly a competent witness in cases involving only the interests of white persons. He is permitted to give evidence when there may exist a temptation for him to swear falsely, and not when there is no such temptation. By the enactment of such laws the whites are in reality legislating against themselves. Even Governor Humphreys—late Rebel general, but now the reconstructed executive of the “loyal” State of Mississippi, elected for his services in the Confederate cause—in his message to this same legislature, favoring the admission of negroes into the courts as an indispensable step towards ridding the State of the military power, and of “that black incubus, the Freedman’s Bureau,” made this suggestive statement:—

“There are few men living in the South who have not known many white criminals to go ‘unwhipt of justice’ because negro testimony was not permitted in the courts.”

The act “To confer Civil Rights on the Freedmen,” proceeds to make the following provisions, which look much more like wrongs: “That every freedman, free negro, and mulatto shall, on the second Monday of January, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and annually thereafter, have a lawful home or employment,” (of course on any terms that may be offered him,) “and shall have written evidence thereof, as follows, to wit: If living in any incorporated city, town, or village, a license from the Mayor thereof; and if living outside of any incorporated city, town, or village, from the member of the Board of Police of his beat, authorizing him or her to do irregular and job work, or a written contract, as provided in section sixth of this act; which licenses may be revoked for cause, at any time, by the authority granting the same.”

Section sixth enacts: “That all contracts for labor made with freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes, for a longer period than one month, shall be in writing and in duplicate; ... and said contracts shall be taken and held as entire contracts; and if the laborer shall quit the service of the employer before expiration of his term of service, without good cause, he shall forfeit his wages for that year up to the time of quitting.” But who is to be the judge with regard to the “good cause?” The white man, of course, and not the negro.

“Section 7. Be it further enacted, That every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free negro, or mulatto, who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his or her term of service.”

Section ninth provides that if any person “shall knowingly employ any such deserting freedman, free negro, or mulatto, or shall knowingly give or sell to any such deserting freedman, free negro, or mulatto any food, raiment, or other thing, he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than twenty-five dollars, and not more than two hundred dollars and the costs.”

These extracts—which I have made verbatim from an authorized copy of the recent State laws, with only such abridgments as were necessary to compress them within reasonable limits—show plainly enough what ideas prevail in the late Slave States on the subject of free labor. The design of all such enactments is simply to place both the labor and the laborer in the power of the employer, and to reorganize slavery under a new name. The fact that they are practically set aside and annulled by the military power and the Freedmen’s Bureau, does not set aside or annul the spirit which dictated them. This still animates the people of the South; and I was often plainly told that as soon as the States were fully restored to their rights, just such laws as these would certainly be put in force. I remarked to a Mississippi planter, “Do you not think it was unwise for your Legislature to pass such a code of laws?” “Yes, it was unwise, at this time,” he replied, not understanding the scope of my question. “We showed our hand too soon. We ought to have waited till the troops were withdrawn, and our representatives admitted to Congress; then we could have had everything our own way.”

Since the admission of negro testimony in the civil courts of the State, the freedmen’s courts had been discontinued,—greatly to the disadvantage of the colored race. The civil courts could hardly be induced to give the negro’s cause a hearing. There were some exceptions; and at Vicksburg I found a judge who seemed inclined to administer justice without regard to the prejudice against color. This was Judge Yerger, an original Union man,—one of the seven (against seventy-eight) who voted No, on the adoption of the ordinance of secession in the Convention of 1861; the same who, when asked by a member what title should be given to that act, replied, “Call it An Ordinance for the Abolition of Slavery and the Desolation of the South.”

Yerger was the President of the new Convention that reconstructed the State. That Convention was animated by a very different temper from that shown by the new Legislature. The Convention was composed of the best men in Mississippi, who went prepared to do what the Government at Washington had a right to expect of rebellious States returning to their allegiance; the Legislature was made up of a different class, elected after the people of the South had been encouraged in their animosity and arrogance by the discovery that treason was not to be punished, nor made particularly odious. The Convention was governed by men of large influence and liberal views; the Legislature was controlled by narrow-minded intermeddlers, mostly from the poorer districts of the State, where the inhabitants hated the negroes the more by way of revenge for having owned so few.

It was claimed by the better class that the Legislature did not represent them, and there was talk of calling another State Convention. But the Legislature, although it did not carry out the views of the more enlightened and progressive citizens, nor reflect in any way the sentiments of the great mass of true Union men in the South, namely, the blacks, represented quite faithfully the majority by which it was elected.

I have already alluded to the organizing of the State militia,—an abuse that unfortunately received the sanction of the Administration. The only possible excuse for it was the cry raised regarding anticipated negro insurrections. To guard against danger from a class whose loyalty and good behavior during the war challenged the admiration of the world, arms were put into the hands of Confederate soldiers who had returned to their homes reeking with the blood of the nation. Power was taken from the friends of the government and put into the hands of its enemies. The latter immediately set to work disarming the former. They plundered their houses, under the pretence of searching for weapons; committing robberies, murders, and other atrocities, with authentic reports of which pages might be filled. Neither were white men, known to sympathize with the Union party of the North, safe from their violence. Governor Humphreys himself, startled by the magnitude of the evil that had been called into existence, told Colonel Thomas that he had been obliged to disband several militia companies already organized, “on learning that they were sworn to kill negroes asserting their independence, and to drive off Northern men.”

Of what was being done by private parties outside of the militia organizations, a curious glimpse is given in the following “general order,” published in the Holmesville (Miss.) “Independent”:—

“[General Order No. 1.]

“SUMMIT, MISS., Nov. 28, 1865.

“In obedience to an order of His Excellency, the Governor of Mississippi, I have this day assumed command of all the militia in this section of the State, with head-quarters at this place. And whereas it has been reported to me that there are various individuals, not belonging to any military organization, either State or Federal, who are engaged in shooting at, and sometimes killing, the freedmen on private account; and whereas there are other white men reported as the attendants of, and participants in, the negro balls, who, after placing themselves upon a social equality with the people of color, raise quarrels with the freedmen, upon questions of social superiority already voluntarily waived and relinquished by them in favor of the negro, by which the peace of the country is broken and the law disregarded; I therefore order the arrest of all such offenders, by the officers and soldiers under my command, and that they be taken before some civil officer having power to commit to the county jail, for the purpose of awaiting the action of the Grand Jury.

“Men must quit blacking themselves, and do everything legally.

“OSCAR J. E. STUART, “Q. M. G. and Col. Com. Militia.”

The objection here seems to be to shooting the freedmen “on private account,” or doing anything “illegally,” thus taking the proper work of the militia out of its hands.

There were no doubt serious apprehensions in the minds of the people on the subject of negro insurrections. But a great deal that was said about them was mere pretence and cant, with which I have not seen fit to load these pages. There was not, while I was in the South, the slightest danger from a rising of the blacks, nor will there be, unless they are driven to desperation by wrongs.

I remember two very good specimens of formidable negro insurrections. One was reported in Northern Mississippi, and investigated personally by General Fiske, who took pains to visit the spot and learn all the facts concerning it. According to his account, “a colored man hunting squirrels was magnified into a thousand vicious negroes marching upon their old masters with bloody intent.”

The other case was reported at the hotel in Vicksburg where I stopped, by a gentleman who had just arrived in the steamer “Fashion” from New Orleans. He related an exciting story of a rising of the blacks in Jefferson Parish, and a great slaughter of the white population. He also stated that General Sheridan had sent troops to quell the insurrection. Afterwards, when at New Orleans, I made inquiry of General Sheridan concerning the truth of the rumor, and learned that it was utterly without foundation. The most noticeable phase of it was the effect it had upon the guests at the hotel table. Everybody had been predicting negro insurrections at Christmas-time; now everybody’s prophecy had come true, and everybody was delighted. A good deal of horror was expressed; but the real feeling, ill-concealed under all, was exultation.

“What will Sumner & Co. say now?” cried one.

“The only way is to kill the niggers off, and drive ’em out of the country,” said another.

I was struck by the perfect unanimity with which the company indorsed this last sentiment. All the outrages committed by whites upon blacks were of no account; but at the mere rumor of a negro insurrection, what murderous passions were roused!

Of the comparative good behavior of whites and blacks in a large town, the police reports afford a pretty good indication. Vicksburg, which had less than five thousand inhabitants in 1860, had in 1865 fifteen thousand. Of these, eight thousand were blacks. On Christmas-day, out of nineteen persons brought before the police court for various offences, fourteen were white and five colored. The day after there were ten cases reported,—nine white persons and one negro. The usual proportion of white criminals was more than two thirds.

An unrelenting spirit of persecution, shown towards Union men in Mississippi, was fostered by the reconstructed civil courts. Union scouts were prosecuted for arson and stealing. A horse which had been taken by the government, and afterwards condemned and sold, was claimed by the original owner, and recovered,—the quartermaster’s bill of sale, produced in court by the purchaser, being pronounced null and void. The government had leased to McAlister, a Northern man, an abandoned plantation, with the privilege of cutting wood upon it, for which he paid forty cents a cord: the Rebel owner returns with his pardon, and sues the lessee for alleged damages done to his property by the removal of wood, to the amount of five thousand dollars; a writ of attachment issues under the seal of the local court, and the defendant is compelled to give bonds to the amount of ten thousand dollars, or lie in jail. Such cases were occurring every day.

The beautiful effect of executive mercy upon rampant Rebels was well illustrated in Mississippi. A single example will suffice. The Reverend Dr. ——, an eloquent advocate of the Confederate cause,—who, as late as March 23d, 1865, delivered a speech before the State Legislature, urging the South to fight to the last extremity,—under strong pretences of loyalty, obtained last summer a full pardon, and an order for the restoration of his property. The —— House, in Vicksburg, belonging to this reverend gentleman, was at that time used as a hospital for colored persons by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Returning, with the President’s authority, he turned out the sick inmates with such haste as to cause the deaths of several; and on the following Sunday preached a vehement sermon on reconstruction, in which he avowed himself a better friend to the blacks than Northern men, and declared that it was “the duty of the government to treat the South with magnanimity, because it was not proper for a living ass to kick a dead lion.”

There was great opposition to the freedmen’s schools. Dr. Warren, the superintendent for the State, told me that “if the Bureau was withdrawn not a school would be publicly allowed.” There were combinations formed to prevent the leasing of rooms for schools; and those who would have been willing to let buildings for this purpose were deterred from doing so by threats of vengeance from their neighbors. In Vicksburg, school-houses had been erected on confiscated land, which had lately been restored to the Rebel owners, and from which they were ordered, with other government buildings, to be removed.

In the month of November there were 4750 pupils in the freedmen’s schools,—the average attendance being about 3000. Of these, 2650 were advanced beyond the alphabet and primer; 1200 were learning arithmetic, and 1000 writing.

The schools were mainly supported by the Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends, the Ohio Yearly Meeting, the American Freedmen’s Aid Commission, (composed of various denominations,) and the American Missionary Association, (Congregational.) Elkanah Beard, of the Indiana Yearly Meeting, was the first to organize a colony of colored refugees in Mississippi, and through him his society have furnished to the freedmen practical relief, in the shape of food, clothing, and shelter, to a very great amount. The United Presbyterian Body had fifteen teachers at Vicksburg and Davis’s Bend. The Old School Presbyterian Church had a missionary at Oxford, introducing schools upon plantations, and the Moravian Church had a pioneer at Holly Springs.

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LIII. A FEW WORDS ABOUT COTTON

The best cotton lands in the States lie between 31° and 36° north latitude. Below 31° the climate is too moist, causing the plant to run too much to stalk, and the fibre to rot. Above 36° the season is too short and too cold. The most fertile tracts for the cultivation of cotton are the great river bottoms. In the Mississippi Valley, twice or even three or four times as much may be raised to the acre as in Northern Alabama or Middle Tennessee. But in the Valley there is danger from floods and the army worm, by which sometimes entire crops are swept away. On the uplands there is danger from drought.

The life of the planter is one of care and uncertainty. It requires almost as extensive organization to run a large plantation as a factory. You never know, until the crop is picked, whether you are going to get fifty or five hundred pounds to the acre. Anxiety begins at planting-time. The weather may be too wet; it may be too dry; and the question eagerly asked is, “Will you have a stand?” If the “stand” is favorable,—that is, if the plants come up well, and get a good start,—you still watch the weather, lest they may not have drink enough, or the levees, lest they may have too much. Look out also for the destructive insects: kindle fires in your fields to poison with smoke the moths that lay the eggs; and scatter corn to call the birds, that they may feed upon the newly-hatched worms. Perhaps, when the cotton is just ready to come out, a storm of rain and wind beats it down into the mud. Then, when the crop is harvested, it is liable to be burned; and you must think of your insurance.

Notwithstanding these disadvantages, there is great fascination in the culture,—the possibility of clearing in one season from a good plantation fifty or a hundred thousand dollars, causing you to take cheerfully all risks. The plausible figures dazzle you; and to the Northern man the novelty of the life in prospect for a year or two is itself an inducement. You think little of the danger to health from the miasmas of the swamps; or to property, from the midnight torch of an enemy; or to life, from the ill-timed recreation of some bushwhacking neighbor. And you are quite insensible to what the Southern planter deems the greatest of all risks that beset your crop,—that some day your freedmen will desert, and leave it to destruction.

I found many Northern planters in the upland districts of Alabama and Tennessee, where lands are cheaper, plantations smaller, and the risks less, than in the Mississippi Valley. But the latter region proved the greater attraction to adventurous capital. Men from the Middle States and the great West were everywhere, buying and leasing plantations, hiring freedmen, and setting thousands of ploughs in motion.

From experienced cotton-growers I obtained various estimates of the cost and probable profits of a crop the present year. They usually differed little as to items of expense, but sometimes very widely as to profits, according to each man’s conjectures regarding freedmen’s willingness to work, and the price of cotton next fall, which one would place as low as fifteen cents, and another as high as fifty. The annexed statement, furnished by the Southern Land Agency at Vicksburg, is probably as good as any:—

“Sir:—The following is an estimate of the expense and cash capital required to cultivate 500 acres of cotton land within the scope of our agency, for the year 1866.

25 mules @ $150 $3,750

25 single sets plough harness @ $4 100

3 lumber wagons @ $75 225

25 single ploughs @ $13 325

10 double ploughs @ $18 180

700 bushels cotton-seed @ $1 700

Total outlay for stock, seed, and implements $5,280

1200 bushels corn @ $0.75 $900

120 barrels of corn meal @ $6 (about 1⅓ lb. per ration) 720

84 barrels pork @ $35 (about ⅔ lb. per ration) 2,940

250 gallons molasses @ $0.75 (about ¾ gallon per ration each) 187

5 barrels salt @ $3, for stock and hands 15

Wages of 60 hands for 10 months @ $15 per month 9,000

Incidentals 1,000

Total for supplies, wages, and incidentals $14,762

Rent of 500 acres land @ $10 5,000

———————

Total outlay during the season $25,042

Value of the articles on hand at the end of the year:—

Amount paid for stock and implements, _less ¼ for usual wear_ 3,435

Amount paid for cotton-seed, which is replaced from the crop 700 $4,135

———————

Leaving total expenditure during the year $20,907

For the actual amount of cash required up to the time a portion of the crop may be disposed of—say Sept. 30th—deduct ⅔ of the rent, which is not due until the crop is gathered 3,333

Last quarter’s expenditures for supplies, wages, &c. 4,940 $8,273

———————

$16,769

“From which calculation we see that the actual cash capital required is $16,769, or about $33 per acre, and the actual expense about $42 per acre. But as men’s financial abilities differ materially, we think it quite possible to cultivate land with smaller capital. Many are hiring men, agreeing to pay but a small portion of their wages monthly, and the balance at the end of the year; while others save the use of capital by procuring supplies on a short credit, or by allowing a portion of the crop for rent.

“The average crop on alluvial land is full one bale per acre; on second bottom or table lands, about ⅔ bale, and on uplands ½ bale.

“Clothing and extra supplies furnished to hands are usually charged against their wages.

“This calculation is considered by the most experienced cotton-growers in the country a fair and liberal estimate; and from it you may estimate the profit on any sized tract, as the difference in the amount of land tilled will not materially change the figures.

“Very respectfully,” etc.

Here the cost of some articles is placed too low. Two hundred dollars each for mules would be nearer the actual price. The cotton-seed to be replaced by the crop should also be thrown out of the consideration if you expect to close up business at the end of the year, for although seed this season brought one dollar and upwards, it has no merchantable value in ordinary times. This you will take into account if intending to undertake a plantation next year.

But suppose we call the total expenditure for this year twenty-four thousand dollars. And suppose a full crop is produced,—five hundred acres yielding an equal number of bales. Taking twenty-five cents a pound as a safe estimate, you have for each bale (of five hundred pounds) $125; for five hundred bales, $62,500. From this gross amount deduct the total expenditure, and you have remaining $38,500. If you go to the uplands where less cotton is produced, you employ fewer hands, and have less rent to pay,—perhaps not more than four or five dollars for good land. Should cotton be as low as twenty cents, you have still a fair margin for profits; and should it be as high as fifty, as many confidently maintain it will be, the resulting figures are sufficiently exciting.

In 1850 Mississippi produced 484,292 bales, of 400 pounds each; in 1860, more than twice that quantity. The present year, notwithstanding the scarcity of labor and the number of unprotected and desolated plantations, there is a prospect of two thirds of an average crop,—say half a million bales. The freedmen are working well; and cotton is cultivated to the neglect of almost everything else. If we have a good cotton season, there will be a large yield. If there is a small yield, the price will be proportionately high. So that in either case the crop raised in Mississippi this year bids fair to produce forty or fifty million dollars.

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LIV. DAVIS’S BEND.—GRAND GULF.—NATCHEZ

Descending the Mississippi, the first point of interest you pass is Davis’s Bend, the former home of the President of the Confederacy.

A curve of the river encircles a pear-shaped peninsula twenty-eight miles in circumference, with a cut-off across the neck seven hundred yards in length, converting it into an island. There is a story told of a man who, setting out to walk on the levee to Natchez, from Mr. Joe Davis’s plantation, which adjoins that of his brother Jeff, unwittingly made the circuit of this island, and did not discover his mistake until he found himself at night on the spot from which he had started in the morning.

About a mile from the river stands the Jeff Davis Mansion, with its wide verandas and pleasant shade-trees. The plantation comprises a thousand acres of tillable land, now used as a Home Farm for colored paupers, under the superintendence of a sub-commissioner of the Bureau. Here are congregated the old, the orphaned, the infirm, and many whose energies of body and mind were prematurely worn out under the system which the Confederacy was designed to glorify and perpetuate.

Here you find the incompetent and thriftless. Some have little garden-spots, on which they worked last season until their vegetables were ripe, when they stopped work and went to eating the vegetables. The government cultivates cotton with their labor; and once, at a critical period, it was necessary to commence ejecting them from their quarters in order to compel them to work to keep the grass down.

The freedmen on the other plantations of the island represent other qualities of the race. Besides the Home Farm there are five thousand acres divided into farms and homesteads, cultivated by the negroes on their own account, and paying a large rent to the government. On these little farms twenty-five hundred bales of cotton were raised last year, besides large quantities of corn, potatoes, and other produce. Many of the tenants had only their naked hands to begin with: they labored with hoes alone the first year, earning money to buy mules and ploughs the next. The signal success of the colony perhaps indicates the future of free labor in the South, and the eventual division of the large plantations into homesteads to be sold or rented to small farmers. This system suits the freedman better than any other; and under it he is industrious, prosperous, and happy.

There were about three thousand people at the Bend. Some worked a few acres, others took large farms, and hired laborers. Fifty had accumulated five thousand dollars each during the past two years; and one hundred others had accumulated from one to four thousand dollars. Some of these rising capitalists had engaged Northern men to rent plantations for the coming year, and to take them in as partners,—the new black code of Mississippi prohibiting the leasing of lands to the freedmen.

The colony is self-governing, under the supervision of the sub-commissioner. There are three courts, each having its colored judge and sheriff. The offender, before being put on trial, can decide whether he will be tried by a jury, or have his case heard by the judge alone. Pretty severe sentences are sometimes pronounced; and it is found that the negro will take cheerfully twice the punishment from one of his own color that he will from a white court.

Some sound sense often falls from the lips of these black Solomons. Here is a sample. A colored man and his mother are brought up for stealing a bag of corn.

Judge: “Do you choose to be tried by a jury?”

Culprit (not versed in the technicalities of the court): “What’s dat?”

Judge: “Do you want twelve men to come in and help me?”

Culprit, emphatically: “No, sah!”—for he thinks one man will probably be too much for him.

Judge, sternly: “Now listen you! You and your mother are a couple of low-down darkies, trying to get a living without work. You are the cause that respectable colored people are slandered, and called thieving and lazy niggers; when it’s only the likes of you that’s thieving and lazy. Now this is what I’ll do with you. If you and your mother will hire out to-day, and go to work like honest people, I’ll let you off on good behavior. If you won’t, I’ll send you to Captain Norton. That means, you’ll go up with a sentence. And I’ll tell you what your sentence will be: three months’ hard labor on the Home Farm, and the ball and chain in case you attempt to run away. Now which will you do?”

Culprit, eagerly: “I’ll hire out, sah!” And a contract is made for him and his mother on the spot.

The next point of interest is Grand Gulf; the only place that offered any resistance to our gun-boats between Vicksburg and Port Hudson. It had before the war a thousand inhabitants, three churches, and several steam-mills. Water and fire appear to have conspired against it. The Yankees burned every vestige of the village, and the river has torn away a large section of the bank on which it stood. A number of cheap whitewashed wooden buildings have taken its place on the shore; above and behind which rises a steep rocky bluff, covered with sparse timber, sedge, and cane-brakes, and crowned by Rebel batteries.

There was formerly an extensive whirlpool below the confluence of the Big Black with the Mississippi, which had worn a gulf six hundred feet deep, just above this place: hence its name, Grand Gulf. This immense chasm has been filled, since the beginning of the war, by the river that excavated it; and where the whirlpool was there is now a solid sand-bar overgrown with cotton-wood bushes. Opposite the town, on the Louisiana side, there is another sand-bar, bare and low, occupying the place of a fine plantation that flourished there before the war.

A hundred and twenty miles below Vicksburg is Natchez, one of the most romantically and beautifully situated cities in the United States. It is built on an almost precipitous bluff, one hundred and fifty feet above the river, which is overlooked by a delightful park and promenade along the city front. The landing is under the bluff.

The “Quitman” (in which I had taken passage) stopped several hours at Natchez getting on board a quantity of cotton. Above Vicksburg, I noticed that nearly all the cotton was going northward: below, it was going the other way, toward New Orleans. At every town, and at nearly every plantation landing, we took on board, sometimes a hundred bales and more, sometimes but two or three, until the “Quitman” showed two high white walls of cotton all round her guards, which were sunk to the water’s edge. She was constructed to carry forty-three hundred bales.

On the levee at Natchez I made the acquaintance of an old plantation overseer. He knew all about cotton raising. “I’ve overseed in the swamps, and I’ve overseed on the hills. You can make a bale to the acre in the swamps, and about one bale to two acres on the hills. I used to get ten to fifteen hundred dollars a year. I’m hiring now to a Northern man, who gives me three thousand. A Northern man will want to get more out of the niggers than we do. Mine said to me last night, ‘I want you to get the last drop of sweat and the last pound of cotton out of my niggers;’ and I shall do it. I can if anybody can. There’s a heap in humbuggin’ a nigger. I worked a gang this summer, and got as much work out of ’em as I ever did. I just had my leading nigger, and I says to him, I says, ‘Sam, I want this yer crop out by such a time; now you go ahead, talk to the niggers, and lead ’em off right smart, and I’ll give you twenty-five dollars.’ Then I got up a race, and give a few dollars to the men that picked the most cotton, till I found out the extent of what each man could pick; then I required that of him every day, or I docked his wages.”

As we were talking, the mate of the “Quitman” took up an oyster-shell and threw it at the head of one of the deck-hands, who did not handle the cotton to suit him. It did not hurt the negro’s head much, but it hurt his feelings.

“Out on the plantations,” observed my friend the overseer, “it would cost him fifty dollars to hit a nigger that way. It cost me a hundred and fifty dollars just for knocking down three niggers lately,—fifty dollars a piece, by ——!”

He thought the negroes were going to be crowded out by the Germans; and went on to say, with true Southern consistency,—

“The Germans want twenty dollars a month, and we can hire the niggers for ten and fifteen. The Germans will die in our swamps. Then as soon as they get money enough to buy a cart and mule, and an acre of land somewhar, whar they can plant a grape-vine, they’ll go in for themselves.”

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LV. THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI

We were nearly all night at Natchez loading cotton. The next day, I noticed that the men worked languidly, and that the mate was plying them with whiskey. I took an opportunity to talk with him about them. He said,—

“We have a hundred and eighty hands aboard, all told. Thar’s sixty deck-hands. That a’n’t enough. We ought to have reliefs, when we’re shipping freight day and night as we are now.”

I remarked: “A gentleman who came up to Vicksburg in the ‘Fashion,’ stated, as an excuse for the long trip she made, that the niggers wouldn’t work,—that the mates couldn’t make them work.”

He replied: “I reckon the hands on board the ‘Fashion’ are about in the condition these are. These men are used up. They ha’n’t had no sleep for four days and nights. I’ve seen a man go to sleep many a time, standing up, with a box on his shoulder. We pay sixty dollars a month,—more’n almost any other boat, the work is so hard. But we get rid of paying a heap of ’em. When a man gets so used up he can’t stand no more, he quits. He don’t dare to ask for wages, for he knows he’ll get none, without he sticks by to the end of the trip.”

While we were talking, a young fellow, not more than twenty years old, came up, looking very much exhausted, and told the mate he was sick.

“Ye a’n’t sick neither!” roared the mate at him, fiercely. “You’re lazy! If you won’t work, go ashore.”

The fellow limped away again, and went ashore at the next landing.

“Is he sick or lazy?” I asked.

“Neither. He’s used up. He was as smart a hand as I had when he came aboard. But they can’t stand it.”

“Was it always so?”

“No; before the war we had men trained for this work. We had some niggers, but more white men. We couldn’t git all the niggers we wanted; a fifteen hundred dollar man wore out too quick.”

“The whites were the best, I suppose.”

“The niggers was the best. They was more active getting down bales. They liked the fun. They stand it better than white men. Business stopped, and that set of hands all dropped off,—went into the war, the most of ’em. Now we have to take raw hands. These are all plantation niggers. Not one of ’m’ll ship for another trip; they’ve had enough of it. Thar’s no compellin’ ’em. You can’t hit a nigger now, but these d——d Yankee sons of b——s have you up and make you pay for it.”

I told him if that was the case, I didn’t think I should hit one.

“They’ve never had me up,” he resumed. “When I tackle a nigger, it’ll be whar thar an’t no witnesses, and it’ll be the last of him. That’s what ought to be done with ’em,—kill ’em all off. I like a nigger in his place, and that’s a servant, if thar’s any truth in the Bible.”

This allusion to Scripture, from lips hot with words of wrath and wrong, was especially edifying.

The “Quitman” was a fine boat, and passengers, if not deck-hands, fared sumptuously on board of her. The table was equal to that of the best hotels. An excellent quality of claret wine was furnished, as a part of the regular dinner fare, after the French fashion, which appears to have been introduced into this country by the Creoles, and which is to be met with, I believe, only on the steamboats of the Lower Mississippi.

On the “Quitman,” as on the boat from Memphis to Vicksburg, I made the acquaintance of all sorts of Southern people. The conversation of some of them is worth recording.

One, a Mississippi planter, learning that I was a Northern man, took me aside, and with much emotion, asked if I thought there was “any chance of the government paying us for our niggers.”

“What niggers?”

“The niggers you’ve set free by this abolition war.”

“This abolition war you brought upon yourselves; and paying you for your slaves would be like paying a burglar for a pistol lost on your premises. No, my friend, believe me, you will never get the first cent, as long as this government lasts.”

He looked deeply anxious. But he still cherished a hope. “I’ve been told by a heap of our people that we shall get our pay. Some are talking about buying nigger claims. They expect, when our representatives get into Congress, there’ll be an appropriation made.”

He went on: “I did one mighty bad thing. To save my niggers, I run ’em off into Texas. It cost me a heap of money. I came back without a dollar, and found the Yankees had taken all my stock, and everything, and my niggers was free, after all.”

Jim B——, from Warren County, ten miles from Vicksburg, was a Mississippi planter of a different type,—jovial, generous, extravagant in his speech, and, in his habits of living, fast. “My niggers are all with me yet, and you can’t get ’em to leave me. The other day my boy Dan drove me into town; when we got thar, I says to him, ‘Dan, ye want any money?’ ‘Yes, master, I’d like a little?’ I took out a ten-dollar bill and give him. Another nigger says to him, ‘Dan, what did that man give you money for?’ ‘That man?’ says Dan; ‘I belongs to him.’ ‘No, you don’t belong to nobody now; you’re free.’ ‘Well,’ says Dan, ‘he provides for me, and gives me money, and he’s my master, any way.’ I give my boys a heap more money than I should if I just hired ’em. We go right on like we always did, and I pole ’em if they don’t do right. This year I says to ’em, ‘Boys, I’m going to make a bargain with you. I’ll roll out the ploughs and the mules and the feed, and you shall do the work; we’ll make a crop of cotton, and you shall have half. I’ll provide for ye, give ye quarters, treat ye well, and when ye won’t work, pole ye like I always have. They agreed to it, and I put it into the contract that I was to whoop ’em when I pleased.”

Jim was very enthusiastic about a girl that belonged to him. “She’s a perfect mountain-spout of a woman!” (if anybody knows what that is.) “When the Yankees took me prisoner, she froze to a trunk of mine, and got it out of the way with fifty thousand dollars Confederate money in it.”

He never wearied of praising her fine qualities. “She’s black outside, but she’s white inside, shore!” And he spoke of a son of hers, then twelve years old, with an interest and affection which led me to inquire about the child’s father. “Well,” said Jim, with a smile, “he’s a perfect little image of me, only a shade blacker.”

An Arkansas planter said: “I’ve a large plantation near Pine Bluff. I furnish everything but clothes, and give my freedmen one third of the crop they make. On twenty plantations around me, there are ten different styles of contracts. Niggers are working well; but you can’t get only about two thirds as much out of ’em now as you could when they were slaves” (which I suppose is about all that ought to be got out of them). “The nigger is fated: he can’t live with the white race, now he’s free. I don’t know one I’d trust with fifty dollars, or to manage a crop and control the proceeds. It will be generations before we can feel friendly towards the Northern people.”

I remarked: “I have travelled months in the South, and expressed my sentiments freely, and met with better treatment than I could have expected five years ago.”

“That’s true; if you had expressed abolition sentiments then, you’d have woke up some morning and found yourself hanging from some limb.”

Of the war he said: “Slavery was really what we were fighting for, although the leaders didn’t talk that to the people. They saw the slave interest was losing power in the Union, and trying to straighten it up, they tipped it over.”

A Louisiana planter, from Lake Providence,—and a very intelligent, well-bred gentleman,—said: “Negroes do best when they have a share of the crop; the idea of working for themselves stimulates them. Planters are afraid to trust them to manage; but it’s a great mistake. I know an old negro who, with three children, made twenty-five bales of cotton this year on abandoned land. Another, with two women and a blind mule, made twenty-seven bales. A gang of fifty made three hundred bales,—all without any advice or assistance from white men. I was always in favor of educating and elevating the black race. The laws were against it, but I taught all my slaves to read the Bible. Each race has its peculiarities: the negro has his, and it remains to be seen what can be done with him. Men talk about his stealing: no doubt he’ll steal: but circumstances have cultivated that habit. Some of my neighbors couldn’t have a pig, but their niggers would steal it. But mine never stole from me, because they had enough without stealing. Giving them the elective franchise just now is absurd; but when they are prepared for it, and they will be some day, I shall advocate it.”

Another Louisianian, agent of the Hope Estate, near Water-Proof, in Tensas Parish, said: “I manage five thousand acres,—fourteen hundred under cultivation. I always fed my niggers well, and rarely found one that would steal. My neighbors’ niggers, half-fed, hard-worked, they’d steal, and I never blamed ’em. Nearly all mine stay with me. They’ve done about two thirds the work this year they used to, for one seventh of the crops. Heap of niggers around me have never received anything; they’re only just beginning to learn that they’re free. Many planters keep stores for niggers, and sell ’em flour, prints, jewelry and trinkets, and charge two or three prices for everything. I think God intended the niggers to be slaves; we have the Bible for that:” always the Bible. “Now since man has deranged God’s plan, I think the best we can do is to keep ’em as near a state of bondage as possible. I don’t believe in educating ’em.”

“Why not?”

“One reason, schooling would enable them to compete with white mechanics.”

“And why not?”

“It would be a disadvantage to the whites,” he replied,—as if that was the only thing to be considered by men with the Bible in their mouths! “In Mississippi, opposite Water-Proof, there’s a minister collecting money to buy plantations in a white man’s name, to be divided in little farms of ten and fifteen acres for the niggers. He couldn’t do that thing in my parish: he’d soon be dangling from some tree. There isn’t a freedman taught in our parish; not a school; it wouldn’t be allowed.”

He admitted that the war was brought on by the Southern leaders, but thought the North “ought to be lenient and give them all their rights.” Adding: “What we want chiefly is to legislate for the freedmen. Another thing: the Confederate debt ought to be assumed by the government. We shall try hard for that. If we can’t get it, if the North continues to treat us as a subjugated people, the thing will have to be tried over again,”—meaning the war. “We must be left to manage the nigger. He can’t be made to work without force.” (He had just said his niggers did two thirds as much work as formerly.) “My theory is, feed ’em well, clothe ’em well, and then, if they won’t work, d—n ’em, whip ’em well!”

I did not neglect the deck-passengers. These were all negroes, except a family of white refugees from Arkansas, who had been burnt out twice during the war, once near Little Rock, and again in Tennessee, near Memphis. With the little remnant of their possessions they were now going to seek their fortunes elsewhere,—ill-clad, starved-looking, sleeping on deck in the rain, coiled around the smoke-pipe, and covered with ragged bedclothes.

The talk of the negroes was always entertaining. Here is a sample, from the lips of a stout old black woman:—

“De best ting de Yankees done was to break de slavery chain. I shouldn’t be here to-day if dey hadn’t. I’m going to see my mother.”

“Your mother must be very old.”

“You may know she’s dat, for I’m one of her baby chil’n, and I’s got ’leven of my own. I’ve a heap better time now ’n I had when I was in bondage. I had to nus’ my chil’n four times a day and pick two hundred pounds cotton besides. My third husband went off to de Yankees. My first was sold away from me. Now I have my second husband again; I was sold away from him, but I found him again, after I’d lived with my third husband thirteen years.”

I asked if he was willing to take her back.

“He was willing to have me again on any terms”—emphatically—“for he knowed I was Number One!”

Several native French inhabitants took passage at various points along the river, below the Mississippi line. All spoke very good French, and a few conversed well in English. One, from Point Coupée Parish, said: “Before the war, there were over seventeen thousand inhabitants in our parish.” (In Louisiana a county is called a parish.) “Nearly thirteen thousand were slaves. Many of the free inhabitants were colored; so that there were about four colored persons to one white. We made yearly between eight and nine thousand hogsheads of sugar, and fifteen hundred bales of cotton. The war has left us only three thousand inhabitants. We sent fifteen hundred men into the Confederate army. All the French population were in favor of secession. The white inhabitants of these parishes are mostly French Creoles. We treated our slaves better than the Americans treated theirs. We didn’t work them so hard; and there was more familiarity and kindly feeling between us and our servants. The children were raised together; and a white child learned the negroes’ patois before he learned French. The patois is curious: a negro says ‘Moi pas connais’ for ‘Je ne sais pas’ (I do not know); and they use a great many African words which you would not understand. Our slaves were never sold except to settle an estate. Besides these two classes there was a third, quite separate, which did not associate with either of the others. They were the free colored, of French-African descent, some almost or quite white, with many large property holders and slave-owners among them; a very respectable class, forming a society of their own.”

The villages and plantation dwellings along here, with their low roofs and sunny verandas, on the level river bank, had a peculiarly foreign and tropical appearance.

The levees of Louisiana form a much more extensive and complete system than those of Mississippi. In the latter State there is much hilly land that does not need their protection, and much swamp land not worth protecting; and there is, I believe, no law regarding them. In the low and level State of Louisiana, however, a large and fertile part of which lies considerably below the level of high water, there is very strict legislation on the subject, compelling every land-owner on the river to keep up his levees. This year the State itself had undertaken to repair them, issuing eight per cent. bonds to the amount of a million dollars for the purpose,—the expense of the work to be defrayed eventually by the planters.

For a long distance the Lower Mississippi, at high water, appears to be flowing upon a ridge. The river has built up its own banks higher than the country which lies back of them; and the levees have raised them still higher. Behind this fertile strip there are extensive swamps, containing a soil of unsurpassed depth and richness, but unavailable for want of drainage. Three methods are proposed for bringing them under cultivation. First, to surround them by levees, ditch them, and pump the water out by steam. Second, to cut a canal through them to the Gulf. Third, to turn the Mississippi into them, and fill them with its alluvial deposit. This last method is no doubt the one Nature intended to employ; and it is the opinion of many that man, confining the flow of the stream within artificial limits, attempted the settlement of this country several centuries too soon.

A remarkable feature of Louisiana scenery is its forests of cypress-trees growing out of the water, heavy, sombre, and shaggy with moss.

The complexion of the river water is a light mud-color, which it derives from the turbid Missouri,—the Upper Mississippi being a clear stream. Pour off a glass of it after it has been standing a short time, and a sediment of dark mud appears at the bottom. Notwithstanding this unpleasant peculiarity, it is used altogether for cooking and drinking purposes on board the steamboats, and I found New Orleans supplied with it.

A curious fact has been suggested with regard to this wonderful river,—that it runs up hill. Its mouth is said to be two and a half miles higher—or farther from the earth’s centre—than its source. When we consider that the earth is a spheroid, with an axis shorter by twenty-six miles than its equatorial diameter; and that the same centrifugal motion which has caused the equatorial protuberance tends still to heap up the waters of the globe where that motion is greatest; the seeming impossibility appears possible,—just as we see a revolving grindstone send the water on its surface to the rim. Stop the grindstone, and the water flows down its sides. Stop the earth’s revolution, and immediately you will see the Mississippi River turn and flow the other way.

Some years ago I made a voyage of several days on the Upper Mississippi, to the head of navigation. It was difficult to realize that this was the same stream on which I was now sailing day after day in an opposite direction,—six days in all, from Memphis to New Orleans. From St. Anthony’s Falls to the Gulf, the Mississippi is navigable twenty-two hundred miles. Its entire length is three thousand miles. Its great tributary, the Missouri, is alone three thousand miles in length: measured from its head-waters to the Gulf, it is four thousand five hundred miles. Consider also the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red River, and the hundred lesser streams that fall into it, and well may we call it by its Indian name, Michi-Sepe, the Father of Waters.

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LVI. THE CRESCENT CITY

On the morning of January 1st, 1866, I arrived at New Orleans.

It was midwinter; but the mild sunny weather that followed the first chill days of rain, made me fancy it May. The gardens of the city were verdant with tropical plants. White roses in full bloom climbed upon trellises or the verandas of houses. Oleander trees, bananas with their broad drooping leaves six feet long, and Japan plums that ripen in February, grew side by side in the open air. There were orange-trees whose golden fruit could be picked from the balconies which they half concealed. Magnolias, gray-oaks and live-oaks, some heavily hung with moss that swung in the breeze like waving hair, shaded the yards and streets. I found the roadsides of the suburbs green with grass, and the vegetable gardens checkered and striped with delicately contrasting rows of lettuce, cabbages, carrots, beets, onions, and peas in blossom.

The French quarter of the city impresses you as a foreign town transplanted to the banks of the Mississippi. Many of the houses are very ancient, with low, moss-covered roofs projecting over the first story, like slouched hat-brims over quaint old faces. The more modern houses are often very elegant, and not less picturesque. The names of the streets are Pagan, foreign, and strange. The gods and muses of mythology, the saints of the Church, the Christian virtues, and modern heroes, are all here. You have streets of “Good Children,” of “Piety,” of “Apollo,” of “St. Paul,” of “Euterpe,” and all their relations. The shop-signs are in French, or in French and English. The people you meet have a foreign air and speak a foreign tongue. Their complexions range through all hues, from the dark Creole to the ebon African. The anomalous third class of Louisiana—the respectable free colored people of French-African descent—are largely represented. Dressed in silks, accompanied by their servants, and speaking good French,—for many of them are well educated,—the ladies and children of this class enter the street cars, which they enliven with the Parisian vivacity of their conversation.

The mingling of foreign and American elements has given to New Orleans a great variety of styles of architecture; and the whole city has a light, picturesque, and agreeable appearance. It is built upon an almost level strip of land bordering upon the left bank of the river, and falling back from the levee with an imperceptible slope to the cypress and alligator swamps in the rear. The houses have no cellars. I noticed that the surface drainage of the city flowed back from the river into the Bayou St. John, a navigable inlet of Lake Ponchartrain. The old city front lay upon a curve of the Mississippi, which gave it a crescent shape: hence its poetic soubriquet. The modern city has a river front seven miles in extent, bent like the letter S.

The broad levee, lined with wharves on one side and belted by busy streets on the other, crowded with merchandise, and thronged with merchants, boatmen, and laborers, presents always a lively and entertaining spectacle. Steam and sailing crafts of every description, arriving, departing, loading, unloading, and fringing the city with their long array of smoke-pipes and masts, give you some idea of the commerce of New Orleans.

Here is the great cotton market of the world. In looking over the cotton statistics of the past thirty years, I found that nearly one half the crop of the United States had passed through this port. In 1855–1856 (the mercantile cotton year beginning September 1st and ending August 31st) 1,795,023 bales were shipped from New Orleans,—986,622 to Great Britain (chiefly to Liverpool); 214,814 to France (chiefly to Havre); 162,657 to the North of Europe; 178,812 to the South of Europe, Mexico, &c.; and 222,100 coastwise,—151,469 going to Boston and 51,340 to New York. In 1859–1860, 2,214,296 bales were exported, 1,426,966 to Great Britain, 313,291 to France, and 208,634 coastwise,—131,648 going to Boston, 62,936 to New York, and 5,717 to Providence. This, it will be remembered, was the great cotton year, the crop amounting to near 5,000,000 bales.

One is interested to learn how much cotton left this port during the war. In 1860–1861, 1,915,852 bales were shipped, nearly all before hostilities began; in 1861–1862, 27,627 bales; in 1862–1863, 23,750; in 1863–1864, 128,130; in 1864–1865, 192,351. The total receipts during this last year were 271,015 bales. From September 1st, 1865, to January 1st, 1866, the receipts were 375,000 bales; and cotton was still coming. The warehouses on the lower tributaries of the Mississippi were said to be full of it, waiting for high water to send it down. There had been far more concealed in the country than was supposed: it made its appearance where least looked for; and such was the supply that experienced traders believed that prices would thenceforth be steadily on the decline.

A first-class Liverpool steamer is calculated to take out 3000 500-pound bales, the freight on which is 7–8ths of a penny per pound,—not quite two cents. The freight to New York and Boston is 1 1–4th cents by steamers, and 7–8ths of a cent by sailing-vessels.

I put up at the St. Charles, famous before the war as a hotel, and during the war as the head-quarters of General Butler. It is a conspicuous edifice, with white-pillared porticos, and a spacious Rotunda, thronged nightly with a crowd which strikes a stranger with astonishment. It is a sort of social evening exchange, where merchants, planters, travellers, river-men, army men, (principally Rebels,) manufacturing and jobbing agents, showmen, overseers, idlers, sharpers, gamblers, foreigners, Yankees, Southern men, the well dressed and the prosperous, the rough and the seedy, congregate together, some leaning against the pillars, and a few sitting about the stoves, which are almost hidden from sight by the concourse of people standing or moving about in the great central space. Numbers of citizens regularly spend their evenings here, as at a club-room. One, an old plantation overseer of the better class, told me that for years he had not missed going to the Rotunda a single night, except when absent from the city. The character he gave the crowd was not complimentary.

“They are all trying to get money without earning it. Each is doing his best to shave the rest. If they ever make anything, I don’t know it. I’ve been here two thousand nights, and never made a cent yet.”

I inquired what brought him here.

“For company; to kill time. I never was married, and never had a home. When I was young, the girls said I smelt like a wet dog; that’s because I was poor. Since I’ve got rich, I’m too old to get married.”

What he was thinking of now was a fortune to be made out of labor-saving machinery to be used on the plantations: “I wish I could get hold of a half-crazy feller, to fix up a cotton planter, cotton-picker, cane-cutter, and a thing to hill up some.”

He talked cynically of the planters. “They’re a helpless set. They’re all confused. They don’t know what they’re going to do. They never did know much else but to get drunk. If a man has a plantation to rent or sell, he can’t tell anything about it; you can’t get any proposition out of him.”

He complained that Northern capital lodged in the cotton belt; but little of it getting through to the sugar country. He did not know any lands let to Northern men. “They hav’n’t got sugar on the brain; it’s cotton they’re all crazy after.”

He used to oversee for fifteen hundred dollars a year: he was now offered five thousand. He was a well-dressed, rather intelligent, capable man; and I noticed that the planters treated him with respect. But his manner toward them was cool and independent: he could not forget old times. “I never was thought anything of by these men, till I got rich. Then they began to say ‘Dick P—— is a mighty clever feller;’ and by-and-by it got to be ‘Mr. P——.’ Now they all come to me, because I know about business, and they don’t know a thing.”

Like everybody else, he had much to say of the niggers. “A heap of the planters wants ’em all killed off. But I believe in the nigger. He’ll work, if they’ll only let him alone. They fool him, and tell him such lies, he’s no confidence. I’ve worked free niggers and white men, and always found the niggers worked the best. But no nigger, nor anybody else, will work like a slave works with the whip behind him. You can’t make ’em. I was brought up to work alongside o’ niggers, and soon as I got out of it, nothing, no money, could induce me to work so again.”

Speaking of other overseers, he said: “I admit I was about as tight on the nigger as a man ought to be. If I’d been a slave, I shouldn’t have wanted to work under a master that was tighter than I was. But I wa’n’t a priming to some. You see that red-faced feller with his right hand behind him, talking with two men? He’s an overseer. I know of his killing two niggers, and torturing another so that he died in a few days.” (I omit the shocking details of the punishment said to have been applied.) “The other night he came here to kill me because I told about him. He pulled out his pistol, and says he, ‘Dick P——, did you tell so-and-so I killed three niggers on Clark’s plantation?’ ‘Yes,’ I says, ‘I said so, and can prove it; and if there’s any shooting to be done, I can shoot as fast as you can.’ After that he bullied around here some, then went off, and I hav’n’t heard anything about shooting since.”

Among the earliest acquaintances I made at New Orleans was General Phil. Sheridan, perhaps the most brilliant and popular fighting man of the war. I found him in command of the Military Division of the Gulf, comprising the States of Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. In Florida he had at that time seven thousand troops; in Louisiana, nine thousand; and in Texas, twenty thousand, embracing ten thousand colored troops at Corpus Christi and on the Rio Grande, watching the French movements.

It was Sheridan’s opinion that the Rebellion would never be ended until Maximilian was driven from Mexico. Such a government on our borders cherished the seeds of ambition and discontent in the minds of the late Confederates. Many were emigrating to Mexico, and there was danger of their uniting either with the Liberals or the Imperialists, and forming a government inimical to the United States. To prevent such a possibility, he had used military and diplomatic strategy. Three thousand Rebels having collected in Monterey, he induced the Liberals to arrest and disarm them. Then in order that they should not be received by the Imperialists, he made hostile demonstrations, sending a pontoon train to Brownsville, and six thousand cavalry to San Antonio, establishing military posts, and making extensive inquiries for forage. Under such circumstances, Maximilian did not feel inclined to welcome the Rebel refugees. It is even probable that, had our government at that time required the withdrawal of the French from Mexico, the demand, emphasized by these and similar demonstrations, would have been complied with. Maximilian is very weak in his position. Nineteen twentieths of the people are opposed to him. There is no regular, legitimate taxation for the support of his government, but he levies contributions upon merchants for a small part of the funds he requires, and draws upon France for the rest. His “government” consists merely of an armed occupation of the country; with long lines of communication between military posts, which could be easily cut off and captured one after another by a comparatively small force.

The Southern country, in the General’s opinion, was fast becoming “Northernized.” It was very poor, and going to be poorer. The planters had no enterprise, no recuperative energy: they were entirely dependent upon Northern capital and Northern spirit. He thought the freedmen’s affairs required no legislation, but that the State should leave them to be regulated by the natural law of supply and demand.

Phil. Sheridan is a man of small stature, compactly and somewhat massively built, with great toughness of constitutional fibre, and an alert countenance, expressive of remarkable energy and force. I inquired if he experienced no reaction after the long strain upon his mental and bodily powers occasioned by the war.

“Only a pleasant one,” he replied. “During my Western campaigns, when I was continually in the saddle, I weighed but a hundred and fifteen pounds. My flesh was hard as iron. Now my weight is a hundred and forty-five.”

He went over with me to the City Hall, to which the Executive department of the State had been removed, and introduced me to Governor Wells, a plain, elderly man, affable, and loyal in his speech. I remember his saying that the action of the President, in pardoning Governor Humphreys, of Mississippi, after he had been elected by the people on account of his services in the Confederate cause, was doing great harm throughout the South, encouraging Rebels and discouraging Union men. “Everything is being conceded to traitors,” said he, “before they have been made to feel the Federal power.” He spoke of the strong Rebel element in the Legislature which he was combating; and gave me copies of two veto messages which he had returned to it with bills that were passed for the especial benefit of traitors. The new serf code, similar to that of Mississippi, engineered through the Legislature by a member of the late Confederate Congress, he had also disapproved. After this, I was surprised to hear from other sources how faithfully he had been carrying out the very policy which he professed to condemn,—even going beyond the President, in removing from office Union men appointed by Governor Hahn and appointing Secessionists and Rebels in their place; and advocating the Southern doctrine that the Government must pay for the slaves it had emancipated. Such discrepancies between deeds and professions require no comment. Governor Wells is not the only one, nor the highest, among public officers, who, wishing to reconcile the irreconcilable, and to stand well before the country whilst they were strengthening the hands and gaining the favor of its enemies, have suffered their loyal protestations to be put to some confusion by acts of doubtful patriotism.

At the Governor’s room I had the good fortune to meet the Mayor of the city, Mr. Hugh Kennedy, whom I afterwards called upon by appointment. By birth a Scotchman, he had been thirty years a citizen of New Orleans, and, from the beginning of the Secession troubles, had shown himself a stanch patriot. He was appointed to the mayoralty by President Lincoln; General Banks removed him, but he was afterwards reinstated.

I found him an almost enthusiastic believer in the future greatness of New Orleans. “It is certain,” he said, “to double its population in ten years. Its prosperity dates from the day of the abolition of slavery. Men who formerly lived upon the proceeds of slave-labor are now stimulated to enterprise. A dozen industrial occupations will spring up where there was one before. Manufactures are already taking a start. We have two new cotton-mills just gone into operation. The effect upon the whole country will be similar. Formerly planters went or sent to New York and Boston and laid in their supplies; for this reason there were no villages in the South. But now that men work for wages, which they will wish to spend near home, villages will everywhere spring up.”

Living, in New Orleans, he said, was very cheap. The fertile soil produces, with little labor, an abundance of vegetables the year round. Cattle are brought from the extensive prairies of the State, and from the vast pastures of Texas: and contractors had engaged to supply the charitable institutions of the city with the rumps and rounds of beef at six cents a pound.

The street railroads promised to yield a considerable revenue to the city. The original company paid only $130,000 for the privilege of laying down its rails, and an exclusive right to the track for twenty-five years. But two new roads had been started, one of which had stipulated to pay to the city government eleven and a half per cent. of its gross proceeds, and the other twenty-two and a half per cent. “In two or three years an annual income from that source will not be less than $200,000.”

From Mr. Kennedy I learned that free people of color owned property in New Orleans to the amount of $15,000,000.

He was delighted with the working of the free-labor system. “I thought it an indication of progress when the white laborers and negroes on the levees the other day made a strike for higher wages. They were receiving two dollars and a half and three dollars a day, and they struck for five and seven dollars. They marched up the levee in a long procession, white and black together. I gave orders that they should not be interfered with as long as they interfered with nobody else; but when they undertook by force to prevent other laborers from working, the police promptly put a stop to their proceedings.”

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LVII. POLITICS, FREE LABOR, AND SUGAR

Through the courtesy of the Mayor I became acquainted with some of the radical Union men of New Orleans. Like the same class in Richmond and elsewhere, I found them extremely dissatisfied with the political situation and prospects. “Everything,” they said, “has been given up to traitors. The President is trying to help the nation out of its difficulty by restoring to power the very men who created the difficulty. To have been a good Rebel is now in a man’s favor; and to have stood by the government through all its trials is against him. If an original secessionist, or a time-serving, half-and-half Union man, ready to make any concession for the convenience of the moment, goes to Washington, he gets the ear of the administration, and comes away full of encouragement for the worst enemies the government ever had. If a man of principle goes to Washington, he gets nothing but plausible words which amount to nothing, if he isn’t actually insulted for his trouble.”

I heard everywhere the same complaints from this class. And here I may state that they were among the saddest things I had to endure in the South. Whatever may be thought of the intrinsic merits of any measures, we cannot but feel misgivings when we see our late enemies made jubilant by them, and loyal men dismayed.

The Union men of New Orleans were severe in their strictures on General Banks. “It was he,” they said, “who precipitated the organization of the State government on a Rebel basis. Read his General Orders No. 35, issued March 11th, 1864, concerning the election of delegates to the Convention. Rebels who have taken the amnesty oath are admitted to the polls, and loyal colored men are excluded. Section 4th reads, ‘Every free white man,’ &c. Since his return to Massachusetts he has been making speeches in favor of negro suffrage. He is in favor of it there, where it is popular as an abstraction, and a man gets into Congress on the strength of it; but he was not in favor of it here, where there was a chance of making it practical. His excuse was, that if black men voted white men would take offence, and keep away from the polls. Very likely some white men would, but loyal white men wouldn’t. That he had the power to extend the franchise to the blacks, or at least thought he had, may be seen by his apology for not doing so, in which he says: ‘I did not decide upon this subject without very long and serious consideration,’ and so forth. So he let the great, the golden opportunity slip, of organizing the State government on a loyal basis,—of demonstrating the capacity of the colored man for self-government, and, of setting an example to the other Rebel States.”

Being one day in the office of Mr. Durant, a prominent lawyer and Union man, I was much struck by the language and bearing of a gentleman who called upon him, and carried on a long conversation in French. Having understood that the Creoles were nearly all secessionists, I was surprised to hear this man give utterance to the most enlightened Republican sentiments. After he had gone out, I expressed my gratification at having met him.

“That,” said Mr. Durant, “is one of the ablest and wealthiest business men in New Orleans. He was educated in Paris. But there is one thing about him you do not seem to have suspected. He belongs to that class of Union men the government has made up its mind to leave politically bound in the hands of the Rebels. That man, whom you thought refined and intelligent, has not the right which the most ignorant, Yankee-hating, negro-hating Confederate soldier has. He is a colored man, and has no vote.”

There were six daily newspapers published in New Orleans,—five in English and one in English and French,—besides several weeklies. There was but one loyal sheet among them, and that was a “nigger paper,” the Tribune, not sold by any newsboy, and, I believe, by but one news-dealer.

I called on General T. W. Sherman, in command of the Eastern District of Louisiana, who told me that, in order to please the people, our troops had been withdrawn from the interior, and that the militia, consisting mostly of Rebel soldiers, many of whom still wore the Rebel uniform, had been organized to fill their place. The negroes, whom they treated tyrannically, had been made to believe that it was the United States, and not the State government, that had thus set their enemies to keep guard over them.

Both Governor Wells and General Sherman had received piles of letters from “prominent parties” expressing fears of negro insurrections. The most serious indications of bloody retribution preparing for the white race had been reported in the Teche country, where regiments of black cavalry were said to be organized and drilled. The General, on visiting the spot, and investigating the truth of the story, learned that it had its foundation in the fact that some negro boys had been playing soldier with wooden swords. No wonder the Rebel militia was thought necessary!

From General Baird, Assistant-Commissioner, and General Gregg, Inspecting-Agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau, I obtained official information regarding the condition of free labor in Louisiana. A detailed account of it would be but a recapitulation, with slight variations, of what I have said of free labor in other States. The whites were as ignorant of the true nature of the system as the blacks. Capitalists did not understand how they could secure labor without owning it, or how men could be induced to work without the whip. It was thought necessary to make a serf of him who was no longer a slave. To this end the Legislature had passed a code of black laws even more objectionable than that enacted by the Legislature of Mississippi. By its provisions freedmen were to be arrested as vagrants who had not, on the 10th of January, 1866, entered into contracts for the year. They were thus left little choice as to employers, and none as to terms. They were also subjected to a harsh system of fines and punishments for loss of time and the infraction of contracts; and made responsible for all losses of stock on the plantation, until they should be able to prove that they had not killed it. Although these laws had not been approved by the Governor, there was no doubt but they would be approved and enforced as soon as the national troops were removed.

A majority of the Southern planters clamored for the withdrawal of the troops and the Freedmen’s Bureau. But Northern planters settled in the State as earnestly opposed the measure. “If the government’s protection goes, we must go too. It would be impossible for us to live here without it. Planters would come to us and say, ‘Here, you’ve got a nigger that belongs to us;’ they would claim him, under the State laws, and compel him to go and work for them. Not a first-class laborer could we be sure of.”

Here, as elsewhere, the fact that the freedmen had no independent homes, but lived in negro-quarters at the will of the owner, placed him under great disadvantages, which the presence of the Bureau was necessary to counteract. The planters desired nothing so much as to be left to manage the negroes with or without the help of State laws. “With that privilege,” they said, “we can make more out of them than ever. The government must take care of the old and worthless niggers it has set free, and we will put through the able-bodied ones.” The disposition to keep the freedmen in debt by furnishing their supplies at dishonest prices, and to impose upon their helplessness and ignorance in various other ways, was very general.

Fortunately there was a great demand for labor, and the freedmen, with the aid of the Bureau, were making favorable contracts with their employers. When encouraged by just treatment and fair wages, they were working well. But they were observed to be always happier, thriftier, and more comfortable, living in little homes of their own and working land on their own account, than in any other condition. “I believe,” said General Gregg, “the best thing philanthropic Northern capitalists can do both for the freedmen and for themselves, is to buy up tracts of land, which can be had in some of the most fertile sections of Louisiana at two, three, and five dollars an acre, to be leased to the freedmen.”

The more enlightened planters were in favor of educating the blacks. But the majority were opposed to it; so that in many parishes it was impossible to establish schools, while in others it had been very difficult. In January last there were 278 teachers in the State, instructing 19,000 pupils in 143 schools. The expenses, $20,000 a month, were defrayed by the Bureau from the proceeds of rents of abandoned and confiscated estates. But this source of revenue had nearly failed, in consequence of the indiscriminate pardoning of Rebel owners and the restoration of their property. In New Orleans, for example, the rents of Rebel estates had dwindled, in October, 1865, to $8,000; in December, to $1,500; and they were still rapidly diminishing. The result was, it had been necessary to order the discontinuance of all the schools in the State at the end of January, the funds in the treasury of the Bureau being barely sufficient to hold out until that time. It was hoped, however, that they would soon be reëstablished on a permanent basis, by a tax upon the freedmen themselves. For this purpose, the Assistant Commissioner had ordered that five per cent. of their wages should be paid by their employers to the agents of the Bureau. The freedmen’s schools in New Orleans were not in session at the time I was there; but I heard them highly praised by those who had visited them. Here is Mr. Superintendent Warren’s account of them:—

“From the infant which must learn to count its fingers, to the scholar who can read and understand blank-verse, we have grades and departments adapted and free to all. Examinations, promotions, and gradations are had at stated seasons. The city is divided into districts; each district has its school, and each school the several departments of primary, intermediate, and grammar. A principal is appointed to each school, with the requisite number of assistants. Our teachers are mostly from the North, with a few Southerners, who have heroically dared the storm of prejudice to do good and right. The normal method of teaching is adopted, and object teaching is a specialty.

“There are eight schools in the city, with from two to eight hundred pupils each, which, with those in the suburbs, amount to sixteen schools with nearly six thousand pupils and one hundred teachers.”

It was estimated that there were at least fifty thousand Northern men in Louisiana. Some were in the lumber business, which had been stimulated to great activity throughout the South. Many were working cotton plantations with every prospect of success; a few had purchased, others were paying a fixed rent, while some were furnishing capital to be refunded by the crop, of which they were to have a third or a half.

Occasionally I heard of one who had taken a sugar plantation. Mr. ——, a merchant of New York, told me he had for two years been working the Buena Vista plantation, in St. James Parish. He employed an agent, and visited the place himself once a year. There were twelve hundred acres under cultivation, for which he paid an annual rent of sixteen thousand dollars. There was one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of machinery on the plantation. He employed sixty freedmen. They worked faithfully and well, but needed careful management. During the past year but one had deserted, while two had been discharged. They received one third of their wages monthly, and the remainder at the end of the year. “If they were paid in full as fast as their work was done, when sugar-making season comes they would be apt to quit, the labor is so hard,—though we pay them then fifty cents a night extra.”

I inquired concerning profits. “The first year we lost money. This year we have made it up, and more. Next year we shall be in full blast.”

It takes three years from the start to get a sugar plantation going; and in two years, if neglected, the cane will run out. This is the case in Louisiana,—although I was told that in the West Indies some kinds of cane would yield twenty or thirty successive crops, without replanting. In some parts of the State, where the soil is too dry, or the climate too cold for the most profitable cultivation, it requires replanting every year for the subsequent year’s crop.

The majority of the plantations in Lower Louisiana, said to be good for little else but sugar and sweet potatoes, were waste and unavailable. St. Mary’s Parish had been almost entirely abandoned. The cane had run out; seed-cane was not to be had; and to recommence the culture an outlay of capital was necessary, from which no such immediate, bountiful returns could be anticipated as from the culture of cotton.

The sugar region and the cotton belt overlap each other. Cane may be cultivated to some extent as far north as 34°, while cotton ranges as far south as 30°, although it can scarcely be considered a safe or profitable crop much below 31°. In 1850 there were in Louisiana 4205 cotton and 1558 sugar plantations. This year cotton is not only king, but a usurper, holding with uncertain tenure much of the special province of sugar.

Good cotton plantations in Louisiana yield a bale (of five hundred pounds) to the acre. The sugar crop varies from five hundred to thirty-five hundred pounds, according to the fitness of the soil, the length of the season, and the mode of culture. A hogshead of eleven hundred and fifty pounds to the acre, is about an average crop.

Five different varieties of cane are used by the planters of Louisiana. The cuttings from which it is propagated are called “seed-cane.” They are cut in September, and laid in “mats,”—a sort of stack adapted to protect them from frost. Cane is usually planted between the months of October and March. Two or three stalks are laid together in prepared rows seven feet apart, and covered by five or six inches of soil. This is called the “mother-cane.” In cold soil it rots, and is eaten by vermin. The first year’s growth is called “plant-cane,” and is ploughed and hoed like corn. On being cut, new stalks spring up from the roots. These subsequent year’s stalks are called rattoons,—a West Indian word, derived from the Spanish retonó, (retoñar, to sprout again,) which was probably imported into Louisiana, together with the Creole cane, by the refugees from St. Domingo, in 1794.

“There’s nothing handsomer,” said my friend Dick P——, the overseer, “than a field of cane on the first of June, high as your head, all green, a thousand acres, waving and shining in the wind.” It is a lively scene when a gang of fifty or sixty negroes, armed with knives, enter such a field in the fall, and the cutting begins.

I was desirous of seeing a sugar-mill in operation, but could hear of none within convenient visiting distance. The scene is thus described in a letter written by a Northern lady whose husband was last year working a Louisiana plantation:—

“I am sitting in the gallery of a building two hundred and fifty feet long. This gallery was made expressly for the white overseer, and overlooks all that is going on in the main building. There is a sleeping-room in each end of it, and a large open space in the middle which serves as a dining-room; here I am writing. In the opposite end of the building I can see the engine which carries all the machinery; just this side of it are the great rollers that crush the cane, and the apron, or feed-carrier, that carries the cane from the shed outside up to the crushers.

“Just this side of the crushers are four large vats that receive the juice. From these it is carried into two large kettles, where the lime is put in, and the juice is raised to the boiling-point, and then skimmed. From these kettles the juice is transferred by means of a bucket attached to a long pole, to the next kettle, where it is worked to the right consistency for clarifying.

“This done, it is conveyed, by means of a steam-pump, to the filtering room, where it is passed into large vats filled with burnt bones, called bone black, through which it is filtered, and thus freed from all impurities. From these filters it is run off into a large cistern, and pumped up by the same steam-pump into tanks, where, by means of faucets, it is drawn into the sugaring-off pan. In this pan it is heated by means of a coil of pipe that winds round and round till it fills the bottom of the pans and carries the steam which, in from fifteen to twenty minutes, finishes the boiling process. From this pan it is let off into a box car, set on a railroad track which runs up and down between the coolers, which are ranged along each side of this end of the building, like pews in a church.

“The Creoles along the coast have looked with amazement all summer upon our success with free black laborers, and have been obliged to acknowledge that they never saw a more cheerful, industrious set of laborers in all their experience. ‘But wait till sugar-making comes,’ they have said, ‘and then see if you can get off your crop without the old system of compulsion. Your niggers will flare up when you get off your ten-hour system. They are not going to work night and day, and you cannot get off the crop unless they do.’

“White sugar-makers presented themselves, telling us, in all sobriety, ‘Niggers cannot be trusted to make sugar,’ and offering, with great magnanimity, to oversee the matter for five hundred dollars. J—— declined all such friendly offers, and last Monday morning commenced grinding cane. The colored men and women went to work with a will,—no shirking or flinching. The cutters pushed the handlers, the handlers pushed the haulers, and so on, night and day, each gang taking their respective watches, and all moving on with the regularity of clock-work.

“And so the business went on with black engineers, black crushers, black filterers, black sugar-makers,—all black throughout,—but the sugar came out splendid in quantity and quality. Sixty hogsheads of sugar, finished by Saturday night, and things in readiness for the Sabbath’s rest, is acknowledged by old planters to be the largest run ever made in this sugar-house for the first week of the sugar season. So they gape and stare, and wonder that humanity and justice can bring forth more profitable results than the driver’s whip.”

Louisiana has been the great sugar-growing State of the Union. For several years before the war, the annual crop varied from 100,000 to 450,000 hogsheads. In 1864 less than nine thousand hogsheads were produced. In 1865 the crop amounted to between sixteen and seventeen thousand hogsheads, less than was raised in 1860 on four plantations!

Attempts were being made to introduce white laborers into Louisiana. While I was there, one hundred Germans, who had been hired in New York for a sugar plantation, were landed in New Orleans. Within twenty-four hours thirty of them deserted for higher wages; by which trifling circumstance planters, who had hoped to exchange black for white labor, were very much disgusted.

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LVIII. THE BATTLE OF MOBILE BAY

Leaving New Orleans for Mobile at half-past four o’clock, by the usual route, I reached Lake Ponchartrain by railroad in time to take the steamer and be off at sunset.

The lake, with its low, dark-wooded shores, and its placid, glassy waters, unruffled by a breeze, outspread under the evening sky, was a scene of solitary and tranquil beauty. Here its breast was burnished with the splendors of a reflected cloud, which faded, leaving upon the darkening rim of the lake the most delicate belts of green, and blue, and violet, until these faded in their turn, and the gloomy surface appeared sprinkled all over with molten stars. Strange constellations rose in the Southern hemisphere; while others about the opposite pole, which never set in the latitude of the Northern States, were below the horizon. The “Dipper” was dipped in the lake. I had never seen the North Star so low before.

I walked the deck with the mate, who had been a good Rebel, and was concerned in the capture of the United States steamer “Water Witch.”

“I had command of one of the boats,” said he. “There was a consultation of officers, and it was proposed to make the attack that night at eleven o’clock; we would have the tide with us then. ‘For that very reason,’ I said, ‘I would postpone it until two. Then we shall have the tide against us. It will be harder pulling down to her, but we can board better, and if we miss grappling the first time we shan’t drift by and get fired upon; and if we fail, we can come back on the tide.’”

The steamer was surprised, and the boarding was a success. “The officer in command of our party was killed, and the command devolved upon me. I got three wounds, one through this arm, one across my stomach, and one through the fleshy part of my thigh. But I laid out a man for each wound. I got to the cabin, and had my sword at the captain’s throat, and would have run him through, if he hadn’t been mighty glib in his speech: ‘I surrender! I surrender!’ He didn’t stammer a bit! ‘Do you surrender your command?’ ‘Yes, yes! I do!’ And in a minute I stopped the fighting.”

This is the style of story one hears travelling anywhere in the South. Lying in my berth in the cabin, I was kept awake half the night by Rebel soldiers relating similar adventures.

The next morning we were in the Gulf of Mexico. We had entered by the South Pass, the tide being unfavorable for an inside passage between the islands and the coast. It was a summer-like, beautiful day. Gulls and pelicans were sailing around and over the steamer and sporting on the waves. On the south was the open Gulf; on our left, a series of low, barren, sandy islands,—Ship Island among them, reminding one of Butler’s Expedition.

All the morning we sailed the lustrous, silken waters of the Gulf; approaching in the afternoon the entrance to Mobile Bay. Porpoises were tumbling, and pelicans diving, all around us. Flocks of gulls followed, picking up the fragments of our dinner thrown overboard by the cook. Sometimes a hundred would be fighting in the air for a morsel one of them had picked up,—chasing the bird that bore it, snatching it, dropping it, and darting to catch it as it fell,—until left far behind, and almost lost to sight on the horizon; then they would come up again, flapping low along our white wake, until another fragment attracted and detained them.

We passed the curious, well-defined line, where the yellowish river-water from the Bay and the pure liquid crystal of the Gulf met and mingled. On our left, the long, smooth swells burst into white breakers on the shoals below Pelican Island. On the point of Dauphin Island beyond was Fort Gaines, while close upon our right, as we passed up, was Fort Morgan, on a point of the main land,—its brick walls built upon a sheet of sand white as snow.

Having kept the outside passage, instead of the usual route of the New Orleans steamers, our course lay between these forts, up the main ship-channel, past the scene of Farragut’s famous fight. I thought of Brownell’s ringing lyric of that day:—

“Gaines growled low on our left, Morgan roared on our right: Before us, gloomy and fell, With breath like the fume of hell, Lay the Dragon of iron shell, Driven at last to the fight!

* * * * *

“Every ship was drest In her bravest and her best, As if for a July day; Sixty flags and three, As we floated up the Bay; Every peak and mast-head flew The brave Red, White, and Blue: We were eighteen ships that day.

* * * * *

“On in the whirling shade Of the cannon’s sulphury breath, We drew to the Line of Death That our devilish Foe had laid; Meshed in a horrible net, And baited villanous well, Right in our path were set Three hundred traps of hell!”

These were the torpedoes, one of which destroyed the iron clad “Tecumseh,” Commander T. A. M. Craven.

“A moment we saw her turret, A little heel she gave, And a thin white spray went o’er her, Like the crest of a breaking wave; In that great iron coffin, The Channel for their grave, The Fort their monument, (Seen afar in the offing,) Ten fathom deep lie Craven, And the bravest of our brave.”

We passed very near to the spot where that “great iron coffin” still lies at the bottom of the stream.

But the ships went in undismayed.

“Right abreast of the Fort, In an awful shroud they lay, Broadsides thundering away, And lightnings in every port,— Scene of glory and dread! A storm-cloud all aglow With flashes of fiery red, The thunder raging below, And the forest of flags overhead!

* * * * *

“Fear? a forgotten form! Death? a dream of the eyes! We were atoms in God’s great storm That roared through the angry skies.”

The combat with the Rebel ram “Tennessee,” the “Dragon of iron shell,” commanded by Admiral Buchanan, (the same who commanded the “Merrimac” in her brief but brilliant career in Hampton Roads,) was as fierce as any of the old sea-fights, but wholly unique and modern.

“Half the fleet, in an angry ring, Closed round the hideous Thing, Hammering with solid shot, And bearing down, bow on bow: He has but a minute to choose; Life or Renown?—which now Will the Rebel Admiral lose?

“Cruel, haughty, and cold, He was ever strong and bold: Shall he shrink from a wooden stem? He will think of that brave band He sank in the ‘Cumberland,’— Ay, he will sink like them!

“Nothing left but to fight Boldly his last sea-fight! Can he strike? By Heaven, ’t is true! Down comes the traitor Blue, And up goes the captive White!

“Up went the White! Ah, then, The hurrahs that once and again Rang from three thousand men All flushed and savage with fight! Our dead lay cold and stark, But our dying, down in the dark, Answered as best they might,— Lifting their poor lost arms, And cheering for God and Right!”

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LIX. MOBILE

Above the forts the merchant fleet lies at anchor, twenty-five miles from Mobile,—the shallowness of the bay preventing at all times vessels drawing more than ten feet of water from going up to the city. The extensive gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, presents not a single first-class harbor. The first you meet with is that of Pensacola.

Steamers were plying between the ships and the city, receiving and delivering cargoes. We met or passed them as we kept on our course. Blueish lines of forests enclosed the Bay. Four miles below the city we came in sight of the Rebel defences. On our right were the bastion and extensive fortifications of Spanish Fort, commanding Minetta Bay and several miles of the coast of Mobile Bay. This work, originally built by De Soto more than three centuries ago, was finally invested by our fleet and land forces on the day of the fall of Richmond. It surrendered on the ninth of April, and on the eleventh Mobile was evacuated. The water approaches to this fort, and to the other defences of the city, were strewn with torpedoes, by which four or five vessels of our fleet were blown up.

We passed a line of obstructions, consisting of piles and sunken wrecks thrown across the channel; and Mobile, a smoking, sunlit city, lay before us on the low shore. By the direct channel it was less than three miles distant; but, in order to reach it, we were compelled to ascend Spanish River to the Mobile River, and descend that stream, a circuit of over twenty miles. It was four o’clock when we reached the wharf.

Mobile is a level, shady town, regularly laid out, and built on a dry, sandy plain. It is the principal city of Alabama, and the second city in importance in the Gulf States; its commerce ranking next to that of New Orleans. For several years before the war its annual exports of cotton were between six and seven hundred thousand bales. It endured a four years’ blockade, falling into Federal hands only at the latter end of the war.

But its great catastrophe did not occur until some time after the termination of hostilities. It would seem as if the genius of Destruction was determined to strike a final blow at the city. The explosion of the lately captured Confederate ammunition was one of the most terrible disasters of the kind ever known. It was stored in a large three-story warehouse one street back from the river. The last of Dick Taylor’s shells were going in, when, it is supposed, one of them accidentally ignited. Twenty brick blocks, and portions of other blocks, were instantly blown to atoms. Four or five hundred persons were killed,—it was never known how many. A black volcanic cloud of smoke and fragments went up into the sky: “It was big as a mountain,” said one. It was succeeded by a fearful conflagration sweeping over the field of ruins. Ten thousand bales of cotton were burned. The loss of property was so immense that nobody ventured to estimate it.

In the vicinity of the explosion, citizens were thrown off their feet, chimneys knocked down, and windows and doors demolished. Lights of glass were broken all over the city, a mile or more from the scene of the explosion.

“I was lifted from the ground, and my hat thrown off,” said one. “Then I looked up, and there were great black blocks of something in the air, high as I could see, and shells exploding.”

Said another: “I was riding out a mile and a half from the city. I heard a sound, and at the same time my head and shoulders were thrown forward on my horse’s neck, as if I had dodged. ‘That’s the first time I’ve dodged a cannon,’ I said, ‘and that’s after the war is over.’ I looked around, and saw the strangest cloud going up slowly over the city. Then I knew it was the shock that had thrown me down.”

The town had neither the means nor the material to rebuild: “We made no bricks during the war.” I found the scene of the disaster a vast field of ruins. Where had stood the warehouse in which the ammunition was stored, there was a pit twenty feet deep, half filled with water, and surrounded by fragments of iron and bricks, and unexploded shells. A large brick block, containing a cotton-press, which stood between the magazine and the river, had entirely disappeared. “The bricks were all blown into the water, and we never saw them any more.”

Business was brisk. “There are more goods on Dauphin Street to-day,” an old merchant told me, “than I have ever before seen in the whole of Mobile.” And the captain of the Mobile steamer, who took me up the Alabama to Selma, said: “There was never such a trade on this river before. Nobody ever expected such a freight on this boat: her guards are all under water.” Her upward-bound lading consisted mostly of supplies for plantations and provincial stores,—barrels of Western flour and whiskey that had come down the Mississippi, and boxes of fine liquors, soap, starch, and case goods, from the North Atlantic ports. Her downward freight was chiefly cotton.

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LX. ALABAMA PLANTERS

The Alabama River steamers resemble those of the Mississippi, although inferior in size and style. But one meets a very different class of passengers on board of them. The Alabamians are a plain, rough set of men, not so fast as the Mississippi-Valley planters, but more sober, more solid, more loyal. They like their glass of grog, however, and some of them are very sincere in their hatred of the government. I found the most contradictory characters among them, which I cannot better illustrate than by giving some specimens of their conversation.

Here is one of the despairing class. “The country is ruined; not only the Southern country, but the Northern country too. The prosperity of our people passed away with the institution of slavery. I shall never try to make another fortune. I made one, and lost it in a minute. I had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in niggers. I am now sixty years old. I’ll bet a suit of clothes against a dime, there’ll be no cotton crop raised this year. If there’s a crop grown, the hands that raise it won’t pick it. Some few niggers go on, and do well, just as before; but they’re mighty scarce. They never will be as well off again as they have been, and some of ’em see it. A nigger drayman came to me the other day and asked me to buy him. He said, ‘I want a master. When I had a master, I had nothing to do but to eat and drink and sleep, besides my work. Now I have to work and think too.’ When I said the law wouldn’t allow me to buy him, he looked very much discouraged.”

I heard of a few such cases as this drayman’s, but they were far less common than one would have expected. Poor fellow, he did not know that if he was ever to be anything but an animal, a beast of burden, it was necessary for him to begin to think.

Mr. J——, of Marengo County, also an old man, talked in a different spirit.

“The trouble with the freedmen is, they have not yet learned that living is expensive. They never before had any idea where their clothes came from, except that ‘Master gave ’em to me.’ In my county, I find them generally better disposed than the whites. I don’t know of a case where they have been treated kindly and justly, and have deserted their masters. A few restless ones are exceptions. I noticed one of my boys that I had asked to make a contract for the coming year, packing up his things; and I said to him, ‘Warren, what are you doing?’ He replied, ‘Master, they say if we make contracts now, we’ll be branded, and made slaves again.’ I had always treated him well. I don’t remember that I ever struck him, but he says I did strike him once, and he’s a truthful boy. Another old man that I was raised with, said, ‘Master, all the contract I want with you is that you shall bury me, or I’ll bury you.’ He said he would go on and work for me like he always had; and he’ll do it, for he’s an honest man.”

Mr. J—— related the case of one of his neighbors who contracted with his freedmen to furnish their supplies and give them one fifth of the crop. He gave them provisions for a year at the start; and deducted a dollar a day for lost time. “He raised the largest crop of corn he ever did; but when he came to harvest it, he owed them nothing, though he had kept his contract. He was honest, but he had managed badly. I give my hands a share of the crop,” added Mr. J——. “But I do not give them provisions any faster than they need them, for if I did they would call in their friends, make a great feast, and eat up everything,—they are so generous and improvident. I deduct a dollar a day for lost time, but instead of putting it into my own pocket, I give the lazy man’s dollar to those who do the lazy man’s work. I find that encourages them, and the consequence is, there are few lost days.”

This genial old gentleman, whom I found to be well known and highly esteemed throughout the country, justified the North in its course during the war, and expressed confidence in the future of the South under the free-labor system.

Mr. G——, one of the bitterest Yankee-haters I met, became nevertheless one of my most intimate steamboat acquaintances. I cull the following from many talks I had with him.

“I owned a cotton factory in Dallas County, above Selma. I had two plantations besides, and an interest in a tan-yard. Wilson’s Thieves came in, and just stripped me of everything. They burned eight hundred bales of cotton for me. That was because I happened to be running my mill for the Confederate government. I was making Osnaburgs for the government for a dollar a yard, when citizens would have paid me four dollars a yard; and do you imagine I’d have done that except under compulsion? But the Yankee rascals didn’t stop to consider that fact. They skipped my neighbors’ cotton and burned mine.

“In other respects they treated them as bad as they did me. They robbed our houses of everything they could find and carry away. I shouldn’t have had a thing left, if it hadn’t been for my niggers. Some of ’em run off my mules and saved ’em. I gave all my gold and silver to an old woman who kept it hid from the raiders. On one of my plantations a colored carpenter and his wife barrelled up three barrels of fine table crockery and buried it. One of the Yankee officers rode up and said to this woman, ‘Where’s your husband?’ ‘There’s my husband,’ she said, pointing to the mulatto. ‘You’re a sight whiter’n he is,’ he said,—for she is white as anybody, and he had taken her for the lady of the house. An old negro saved the tannery by pleading with the vandals, and lying to ’em a little bit.

“Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold wouldn’t cover my losses. I never can feel towards this government like I once did. I got started to leave the country; I swore I wouldn’t live under a government that had treated me in this way. I made up my mind to go to Brazil. I got as far as Mobile, and changed my mind. Now I’ve concluded to remain here, like any alien. I’m a foreigner. I scorn to be called a citizen of the United States. I shall take no oath, so help me God! Unless,” he added immediately, “it is to enable me to vote. I want to vote to give the suffrage to the negro.”

As I expressed my surprise at this extraordinary wish, he went on: “Because I think that will finish the job. I think then we’ll have enough of the nigger, North and South, and all will combine to put him out of the country.”

“It seems to me,” I said, “you are a little ungrateful after all you say your negroes have done for you.”

“There are a few faithful ones among them,” he replied. “If all were like some of mine I wouldn’t say anything. They’re as intelligent and well behaved as anybody. But I can’t stand free niggers, any how!”

“I notice,” said I, “that every man who curses the black race, and prays for its removal or extermination, makes exceptions in favor of negroes he has raised or owned, until I am beginning to think these exceptions compose a majority of the colored population.”

G—— made no reply to the remark, but resumed,—

“I want this country filled up with white men. I want the large plantations cut up, and manufactories established. We never had any manufactories for this reason: Southern capitalists all jammed their money into niggers and land. As their capital increased, it was a few more niggers, a little more land. The few factories we had were consequently one-horse concerns, that couldn’t compete with those at the North. They were patronized by men who wanted to buy on credit. If a man had cash, he went to the North to buy goods; if he was short, he bought here. Consequently, to carry on a business of a hundred thousand dollars, a capital of three hundred thousand dollars was necessary. Two thirds of it was sunk; below the water, like the guards of this boat.

“Now I want the old system played out. But,” continued G——, “if the Freedmen’s Bureau is withdrawn, things will work back again into their old grooves. The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live. It won’t need any law for that. Planters will have an understanding among themselves: ‘You won’t hire my niggers, and I won’t hire yours;’ then what’s left for them? They’re attached to the soil, and we’re as much their masters as ever. I’ll stake my life, this is the way it will work. The country will be no better off than it ever was. To make a farming and manufacturing country, like you have at the North, we must put the nigger out of the way. For this reason, I hope the cotton crop this year will be a failure. And I not only hope, but I know it will. There a’n’t labor enough in the country; the planters are going to bid against each other, and make contracts they won’t be able to keep, and that’s going to put the Old Harry into the freedmen.”

I remarked that, as long as the demand for labor exceeded the supply, planters would continue to bid against each other, and that the plan he had suggested, by which the freedman was to be made a serf without the aid of legislation, would thus be defeated.

“Let the Bureau be taken away,” he replied, “and planters will come into the arrangement. That is, all honorable ones will; and if a man hasn’t honor enough to come in, he’ll be scared in. If he hires my niggers, or yours, he’ll be mobbed.”

Mr. H——, of Lowndes County, often joined in our conversation. “I don’t believe my friend G—— here believes half he says. I am sure the South is going to make this year a million bales,—probably much more. One thing planters have got to learn: the old system is gone up, and we must begin new. It won’t do to employ the old overseers; they can’t learn to treat the freedmen like human beings. I told my overseer the old style wouldn’t do,—the niggers wouldn’t stand it,—and he promised better fashions; but it wasn’t two days before he fell from grace, and went to whipping again. That just raised the Old Scratch with them; and I don’t blame ’em.”

H—— went on to say that it was necessary now to treat the negroes like men. “We must deal justly with them;” he had a great deal to say about justice. “We must reason with them,—for they are reasonable beings;” and he repeated some of the excellent homilies with which he had enlightened their consciences and understandings.

“’Formerly,’ I said to them, ‘you were my slaves; you worked for me, and I provided for you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If you were sick, I had the doctor come to you. When you needed clothes, clothes were forthcoming; and you never went hungry for lack of meal and pork. You had little more responsibility than my mules.

“’But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the responsibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did, now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped, and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly and lazy, your wages will be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will be prosperous and respected and happy.”

“They all understood this talk,” added H——, “and liked it, and went to work like men on the strength of it. If every planter would begin that way with his freedmen, there’d be no trouble. There’s everything in knowing how to manage them.”

“If anybody knows how to manage them, you do,” said G——. Then turning to me: “H—— is the shrewdest manager in this country. There’s a good story about his managing a nigger and a horse;—shall I tell it, H——?”

“Go ahead,” said H——, laughing.

“An old nigger of his picked up a horse the Yankee raiders had turned loose in the country, and brought him home to H——’s plantation. The old nigger gave the horse to his son Sip, and died. The horse had been used up, but he turned out to be a mighty good one,—just such an animal as H—— wanted; so he laid claim to him, and Sip had to go to the Freedmen’s Bureau for an order to compel my friend here to give him up. He told his story, got the order, and brought it home, and showed it to H——, who looked at it, then looked at Sip, and said, ‘Do you know what this paper says?’ ‘It says I’m to have de hoss; dat’s what dey told me.’ ‘I’ll tell you what it says,’ and H—— pretended to read the order: ‘If this boy troubles you any more about that horse, give him a sound thrashing!’ ‘’Fore God,’ says Sip, ‘I done went to de wrong man!’”

I looked to see H——, the just man, who treated his freed people like rational beings, deny the truth of this story.

“G—— has told something near the fact; but there’s one thing he has left out. I just put my Spencer to Sip’s head, and told him if he pestered me any more about that horse, I’d kill him. He knew I was a man of my word, and he never pestered me any more.”

I thought G—— must have intended the story as a hard hit at H——’s honesty; but I now saw that he really meant it as a compliment to his “shrewd management,” and that as such H—— received it with satisfaction.

“But,” said I, “as you relate the circumstance, it seems to me the horse belonged to Sip.”

“A nigger has no use for a horse like that,” replied H——.

“He had been brought on to the plantation and fed there at H——’s expense,” explained G——.

“Hadn’t he done work enough to pay for his keeping?”

“Yes, and ten times over,” said H——, frankly. “I foresaw in the beginning there was going to be trouble about the ownership of that horse. So I told my driver to kill him,—with hard work, I mean. He tried his best to do it; but he was such a tough beast, he did the work and grew fat all the time.”

I was still unable to see why the horse did not belong rightfully to Sip, instead of his master. But one thing I did see, more and more plainly: that it was impossible for the most honorable men who had been bred up under the institution of slavery to deal at all times and altogether honorably with those they had all their lives regarded as chattels. Mr. H—— was one of the fairest and most sensible men in his speech whom I chanced to meet; and I believe that he was sincere,—or at least meant to be sincere. I made inquiries concerning him of his neighbors fifty miles around,—for every large planter knows every other, at least by reputation, within a circuit of several counties,—and all spoke of him as a just and upright man. No doubt if I had had dealings with him I should have found him so. He meant to give the freedmen their rights, but he was only beginning dimly to perceive that they had any rights; and when it came to treating a black man with absolute justice, he did not know the meaning of the word.

Mr. B——, of Monroe County, was a good sample of the hopeful class.

“We’re brushed out, and must begin new. I’ve lost as much as any other man, but it’s foolish to sit down and complain of that. I believe if Southern men will only take courage, and do their best, in five years the country will be more prosperous than ever. When you hear it said the country is ruined, and the niggers won’t work, the trouble is in them that make the complaint, and not in the niggers. My niggers say to me, ‘Massa Joe, we ought to work mo’e ’n we ever did befo’e; for once, we just worked for our victuals and clothes, and now we’re getting wages besides.’ And they’ll do it,—they are doing it. If you want a freedman to do what he promises, you’ve only to set him the example, and do by him just what you promise. I’ve a negro foreman on my plantation that has been with me twenty years; and I can trust him to manage just as far as I can trust myself.

“Talk about the country being ruined!” B—— went on: “I’m sick of such nonsense. Just look at it. I hire my freedmen by the year; I give four and five dollars a month to women, and seven and eight to men. A woman will do about two thirds as much work ploughing, hoeing, and picking as a man. For two months now I shall keep my women spinning and making clothes, and my men cutting and hauling wood to the steamboats, for which I get four dollars a cord. That will pay their wages and more. Then what have we got to do the rest of the year? Make a crop of cotton. If we don’t make more than a quarter of a crop, it will pay handsomely, at present prices; but it’s my opinion we shall make a good crop. I used to find it profitable to pay a hundred and fifty dollars a year for slaves, with cotton at ten cents a pound; and if I can’t make money now, I’m a fool.”

A Mobile merchant, overhearing this talk, remarked: “You are the most hopeful man, Mr. B——, I ever saw. I don’t know but what you say is true; but it won’t do to talk it very loud, so they’ll hear it on the other side of the water. It’s our policy to talk the other way, and keep the prices up.”

B—— assured me that the majority of the planters in Monroe County were of his way of thinking. They had formed an Agricultural Association, the object of which was “to protect and preserve the colored population, by furnishing them employment and ministering to their wants and necessities.” The constitution adopted by this association breathes such a different spirit from the serf-codes of Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina, that it is refreshing and encouraging to refer to it. I quote some of its provisions:—

“ARTICLE 6th. It shall be the duty of the Executive Committee to look after the welfare of the freedmen, in their respective beats, to inspect and sanction each and every contract made between the freedmen and their employers, and to see that said freedmen are not deceived or overreached in any contract made with the employer.... And when any contract, as aforesaid, shall be fairly and understandingly made, it shall be the law between the parties thereto, and when any difficulty arises between any freedman and his white employer, relative to the construction or performance of any contract, said committeeman may act as arbitrator between the parties, and his decision shall be final, unless one or both of the parties desire an appeal.

“ART. 8th. It shall be the duty of all the officers of this Association, to see that the freedman shall receive from his employer his wages or earnings, and in case such employer refuses to pay promptly such wages and earnings, to aid the freedman by their full power in the collection of the same.

“ART. 9th. It shall also be the duty of this Association, and particularly the officers thereof, to see that the freedman shall comply with his contracts with his employer unless he can show some good or reasonable excuse for the non-performance.

“ART. 13th. It shall be the duty of the said Association to provide a home for the aged and helpless freedmen of the county, and for such others as are unable to make an honest support, and to see that they are provided with the necessaries of life,—to devise ways and means for their permanent relief and support.

“ART. 15th. It shall be the duty of this Association, and all the officers thereof, to favor, as much as possible, the education and schooling of the colored children in said county, and to aid in devising ways and means, and making arrangements for having said children properly taught and their general morals taken care of.”

The association taxed itself for the purpose of carrying out the provisions of its constitution. Every planter in Monroe County had joined it. General Swayne, Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for Alabama, had approved its action, and appointed its president superintendent of freedmen for that county. “The thing is working admirably,” said B——. “The planters are encouraged, and the freedmen are contented and at work.”

I said to him: “If all the members of the association are as sincere as yourself, and will perform what they promise; if all the counties in the State will follow the example of Monroe; and if other States will follow the example of Alabama, there will be no longer any trouble about reconstruction: the great problem of the country will be solved.”

He said he believed so, and was sure the association would act in good faith. And I heard afterwards that Conecuh County had already followed the example of Monroe.

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LXI. WILSON’S RAID

We had lovely weather, sailing up the Alabama River. The shores were low, and covered with cane-brakes, or with growths of water-oak, gum, sycamore, and cotton-wood trees, with here and there dark and shaggy swamps. Then plantations began to appear, each with its gin-house and cotton-press, planter’s house, corn-crib, and negro-quarters, on the river’s bank.

The sycamores, with their white trunks covered all over with small black spots, and heavily draped with long moss, presented a peculiar appearance. Green tufts of the mistletoe grew upon the leafless tree-tops. Clouds of blackbirds sometimes covered the shore, casting a shadow as they flew. The second day, the low shores disappeared, replaced by pleasantly wooded bluffs and elevated plantations.

Nearly all the planters I met had been down to Mobile to purchase their supplies for the season. Freight went ashore at every landing. Recent rains had made the steep clayey banks as slippery as if they had been greased; and it was quite exciting to see the deck-hands carry up the freight,—many a poor fellow getting a perilous fall. The wood for the steamboat was sometimes shot from the summit of the bluff down a long wooden spout which dropped it at the landing.

Seeing some heavy bars of iron going ashore at one place, I asked an old gentleman to what use they were put on the plantation.

“They are to make ploughs of, sir.”

“Does every plantation make its own ploughs?”

“Do we make our own ploughs?” he repeated, regarding me with astonishment and indignation. “Why, sir, it wouldn’t be a civilized country, if we didn’t. How do you think, sir, we should get our ploughs?”

“Buy them, or have them made for you.”

“Buy our ploughs! It would impoverish us, sir, if we had to buy our ploughs.”

“On the contrary, I should think a plough-factory could furnish them for less than they now cost you,—that, like boots and shoes, it would be cheaper to buy them than to make them.”

“No, sir! I’ve a black man on my plantation who can make as good a plough, at as little cost, as can be made anywhere in the world.”

After that I had nothing to say, having already sufficiently exposed my ignorance.

On the third day (it was the slowest trip, our captain said, which he had made in twenty years) we reached Selma, three hundred miles above Mobile,—a pleasantly situated town, looking down from the level summit of a bluff that rises almost precipitously from the river. Before the war it had three thousand inhabitants, and exported annually near a hundred thousand bales of cotton. It is connected by railroads with the North and West, and by railroad and river with Montgomery and the East. It was a point of very great importance to the Confederacy.

I found it a scene of “Yankee vandalism” and ruin. The Confederate arsenal, founderies, and rolling-mills,—the most important works of the kind in the South, covering many acres of ground, furnished with coal and iron by the surrounding country,—together with extensive warehouses containing ammunition and military stores, were burned when Wilson captured the place. A number of private stores and dwellings were likewise destroyed; and the work of rebuilding them was not yet half completed.

Climbing the steps from the landing to the level of the town, the first object which attracted my attention was a chain-gang of negroes at work on the street; while a number of white persons stood looking on, evidently enjoying the sight, and saying to one another, “That’s the beauty of freedom! that’s what free niggers come to!”

On inquiring what the members of the chain-gang had done to be punished in this ignominious manner, I got a list of their misdemeanors, one of the gravest of which was “using abusive language towards a white man.” Some had transgressed certain municipal regulations, of which, coming in from the country, they were very likely ignorant. One had sold farm produce within the town limits, contrary to an ordinance which prohibits market-men from selling so much as an egg before they have reached the market and the market-bell has rung. For this offence he had been fined twenty dollars, which being unable to pay, he had been put upon the chain. Others had been guilty of disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and petty theft, which it was of course necessary to punish. But it was a singular fact that no white men were ever sentenced to the chain-gang,—being, I suppose, all virtuous.

The battle of Selma was not a favorite topic with the citizens, most of whom were within the stockade, or behind the breastworks, captured by an inferior force of the Yankee invaders. But on the subject of the burning and pillaging that ensued they were eloquent.

A gray-haired old gentleman said to me: “I was in the trenches when Wilson came. Everybody was. I just watched both ways, and when I saw how the cat was jumping, I threw my musket as far as I could, dropped down as if I was killed, and walked into town atter the Yankees. I stood by my own gate, when four drunken fellows came up, slapped me on the shoulder, and said, ‘This old man was in the stockade,—he’s a Rebel!’ ‘Of course I’m a Rebel,’ I said, ‘if I’m ketched in a Rebel trap.’

“They was taking me away when an officer rode up. ‘Old man,’ says he, ‘can you show me where the corn depot is?’ ‘I reckon I kin, if these gentlemen will let me,’ I says. So I got off; and when I had showed him the corn he let me go.

“The fire was first set by our own men: that was in the cotton yards. They blazed up so quick, the Yankees couldn’t have got thar without they went on wires. The next was the post-office; that they burned. The next was a drug store; the other drug store they didn’t burn, but they smashed everything in it. The Arsenal was owing me and my family fifteen hundred dollars, when they destroyed it.

“They just ruined me. They took from me six cows, four mules, fifteen hogs, fifteen hundred pounds of bacon, eight barrels of flour, and fifty-five sacks of corn. They took my wife’s and daughters’ clothing to carry away flour in. I saw a man take my wife’s best dress, empty into it all the flour he could tote, tie it up, clap it on his shoulder, and march off. Another went off with an elegantly embroidered petticoat full of flour swung on his arm. Another would take a pair of ladies’ drawers, fill the legs with flour, and trot off with ’em riding straddle of his neck. It made me feel curi’s! It made me feel like if I had ’em down in the squirrel woods, I could shoot a right smart passel of ’em with a will!”

There were one hundred and fifty dwellings burned; some caught from the shops and warehouses, and others were said to have been set by marauders. These robbed everybody, even the negroes in the streets and the negro-women in their houses. Charles Mencer, a well-known and respectable colored man, related to me the following:—

“I worked here in a saddle-shop, at the time of Wilson’s raid. I hired my time of my master, and had laid up two hundred dollars in gold and silver: I had invested my earnings in specie, and in two watches, because I knew the Confederacy couldn’t last. The Yankees came in on Sunday evening; they robbed my house and stole my gold and silver, and one of my watches. Four of them stopped me in the street, and took my other watch, and my pocket-book, with all my Confederate money in it.”

The rest of this man’s story possesses a semi-historical interest.

“The next Tuesday General Wilson sent for me; he wanted somebody that he could trust to carry despatches for him down the river to General Canby, and I had been recommended to him by some colored people. I said I would take them; and I sewed them up in my vest collar. Then I went to my master, and told him there was no chance for work since the Yankees had come in, and got a pass from him to go down to Mobile and find work. Tuesday night I started in a canoe, and paddled down the river. I dodged the Rebel guard when I could, but I was taken and searched twice, and got off by showing my master’s pass. I paddled night and day, and got to Montgomery Hill on Sunday. There I saw Federal troops, and went ashore, and delivered myself up to the captain. He took me to General Lucas, who sent me with a cavalry escort to General Canby at Blakely.”

For this service Mencer was paid three hundred dollars in greenbacks, which he had recently invested in a freedmen’s newspaper, “The Constitutionalist,” just started in Mobile.

The negroes everywhere sympathized with the Federal cause, and served it when they could; but they would seldom betray a master who had been kind to them. Many stories were told me by the planters, illustrating this fidelity. Here is one, related by a gentleman of Lowndes County:—

“The Yankees, when they left Selma, passed through this side of the river, on their way to Montgomery. The streams were high; that hindered them, and did us a sight of damage. I got the start of ’em, and run off my horses and mules. I gave a valise full of valuable papers to my negro boy Arthur, and told him to hide it. He took it, and put it in his trunk,—threw out his own clothes to hide my property; for he didn’t suppose the Yankees would be mean enough to rob niggers. But they did: after they robbed my house, they went to the negro-quarters, and pilfered them. They found my valise, took out my old love-letters, and had a good time reading ’em for about an hour. Then they said to Arthur,—

“’You are your master’s confidential servant, a’n’t you?’

“’Yes, sir,’ says Arthur, proud of the distinction.

“’You know where he has gone with his mules and horses?’

“’Yes, sir, I know all about it.’

“’Jump on to this horse, and go and show us where he is, and we’ll give you five dollars.’

“’I don’t betray my master for no five dollars,’ says Arthur.

“’Then,’ says they, ‘we’ll shoot you if you won’t show us!’ And they put their carbines to his head.

“He never flinched. ‘You can shoot me if you like,’ he says, ‘but I sha’n’t betray my master!’

“They were so struck with his courage and fidelity that they just let him go. So I saved my horses. He don’t know it, but I’m going to give that boy a little farm and stock it for him.”

Another planter in Lowndes County, an old man, told me his story, which will pass as a sample of a hundred others.

“The Yankees burnt my gin-house and screw. They didn’t burn my house, for they made it a rule to destroy none but unoccupied dwellings. But they took everything from my house they wanted, and ruined about everything they didn’t want. They mixed salt with the sugar, emptied it on the floor, and poured vinegar on it. They took a great fancy to a little grandson of mine. They gave him a watch, and told him they’d give him a little pony to ride if he would go to camp with them. ‘I won’t go with you,’ says he, ‘for you’re taking away all the flour that we make biscuit of.’ They carried him a little ways, when they stopped to burn a school-house. ‘Here! You mustn’t burn that!’ he says; ‘for that’s our school-house.’ And they didn’t burn it.”

“The Confederates used me as bad as the Yankees,” said Mr. M——, a planter whom I saw in Macon County. “They had taken twenty-six horses from me, when Wilson came and took thirty more. I ran off six of my best horses to a piny hill; and there I got on a high stump, and looked over the bushes, to see if the Yankees were coming. I wasn’t near as happy as I’d been some days in my life! All I thought of was to get my horses off down one side of the hill, if I saw the raiders coming up the other.”

This gentleman had been extensively engaged in the culture of the grape,—to which, by the way, the soil and climate of Alabama are admirably adapted. He had in his cellar twenty thousand dollars’ worth of wine, when Wilson came. His wife caused it all to be destroyed, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the soldiers. The last cask was scarcely emptied when they arrived. “She thought she’d sooner deal with men sober than drunk,” said M——. “They treated her very well and took nothing from the house they didn’t need.”

The route of Wilson’s cavalry can be traced all the way, by the burnt gin-houses with which they dotted the country. At Montgomery they destroyed valuable founderies and machine-shops, after causing the fugitive Rebels to burn a hundred thousand bales of cotton, with the warehouses which contained it. I followed their track through the eastern counties of Alabama, and afterwards recrossed it in Georgia, where the close of hostilities terminated this, the most extensive and destructive raid of the war.

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