LXII. NOTES ON ALABAMA…

LXII. NOTES ON ALABAMA

Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, and originally the capital of the Confederacy, is a town of broad streets and pleasant prospects, built on the rolling summits of high bluffs, on the left bank of the Alabama, one hundred miles above Selma. Before the war it had ten thousand inhabitants.

Walking up the long slope of the principal street, I came to the Capitol, a sightly edifice on a fine eminence. On a near view, the walls, which are probably of brick, disguised to imitate granite, had a cheap look; and the interior, especially the Chamber of Representatives in which the Confederate egg was hatched, appeared mean and shabby. This was a plain room, with semicircular rows of old desks covered with green baize exceedingly worn and foul. The floor carpet was faded and ragged. The glaring whitewashed walls were offensive to the eye. The Corinthian pillars supporting the gallery were a cheap imitation of bronze. Over the Speaker’s chair hung a sad-looking portrait of George Washington, whose solemn eyes could not, I suppose, forget the scenes which Treason and Folly had enacted there.

I remained two days at Montgomery; saw General Swayne and other officers of the Bureau; visited plantations in the vicinity; and conversed with prominent men of the surrounding counties. Both there, and on my subsequent journey through the eastern part of the State, I took copious notes, which I shall here compress within as small a space as possible.

I have already sketched the class of planters one meets on steamboats and railroads. These are generally men who mix with the world, read the newspapers, and feel the current of progressive ideas. Off the main routes of travel, you meet with a different class,—men who have never emerged from their obscurity, who do not read the newspapers, and who have not yet learned that the world moves. Many of them were anti-secessionists; which fact renders them often the most troublesome people our officers now have to deal with. Claiming to be Union men, they cannot understand why their losses, whether of slaves or other property, which the war occasioned, should not be immediately made up to them by the government.

As in Mississippi and Tennessee, the small farmers in the Alabama legislature were the bitterest negro-haters in that body; while the more liberal-minded and enlightened members were too frequently controlled by a back-country constituency, whom they feared to offend by voting for measures which ignorance and obstinacy were sure to disapprove.

In Alabama, as in all the Southern States, the original secessionists were generally Democrats and the Union men Old Line Whigs. The latter opposed the revolution until it swept them away; when they often went into the war with a zeal which shamed the shirking policy of many who were very hot in bringing it on, and very cool in keeping out of it. I found them now the most hopeful men of the South. If a planter said to me, “I’m going to raise a big crop of cotton this year,—my negroes are working finely,”—I needed no other test that he belonged to this class.

Concerning the loyalty of the people I shall give the testimony of a very intelligent young man of Chambers County,—whose story will in other respects prove instructive.

“I enlisted in the Confederate Army for one year; and before my time was up I was conscripted for two years; then, before these expired, I was conscripted for two more. I was made prisoner at Forest Hill, in Virginia, and taken to Harrisburg, in Pennsylvania. At the end of the war I was paroled. I knew that my people were ruined, and all my property gone. That consisted in twelve slaves; their labor supported me before the war, but now I had nothing but my own hands to depend upon. I made up my mind to stay where I was and go to work. I hired out to a farmer for six dollars a month. I had never done a stroke of labor in my life, and it came hard to me at first. But I soon got used to it.

“One day a merchant of Harrisburg was riding by, and he asked me some questions which I answered. A few days after he came that way again, got into conversation with me, and proposed to me to go into his store. He offered me eighteen dollars a month. I said to him, ‘You are very kind, sir, but you probably do not know who I am, or you would not want me: I am a Rebel soldier, just out of prison.’ He said he believed I was an honest fellow, and would like to try me. I went into his store, and after the first month he raised my wages to thirty dollars. After the second month, he gave me forty, and after the third month he gave me fifty. I had been a wild boy before the war; I had plenty of money with no restrictions upon my spending it. But I tell you I was never so happy in my life as when I was at work for my living in that store. My employer liked me, and trusted me, and I liked the people.

“I have now come home on a visit. My relations and neighbors are very much incensed against me because I tell them plainly what I think of the Yankees. I know now that we were all in the wrong, and that the North was right, about the war; and I tell them so. I have met with the most insulting treatment on this account. They feel the bitterest animosity against the government, and denounce and abuse the Yankees, and call me a Yankee, as the worst name they can give me. To you, a Northern man, I suppose they won’t say much; but they talk among themselves and to me.”

“How large a proportion of your people express such sentiments?”

“Well, sir, there are fifteen hundred voting men in the county; and all but about a hundred and eighty feel and talk the way I tell you. They can’t be reconciled to living under the old government, and those who are able are preparing to emigrate. A fund has already been raised to send agents to select lands for them in Mexico.”

“Did you find in the North any such animosity existing towards the people of the South?”

“Very little; and there was this difference: In the North it is only a few ignorant people, of the poorer class, who hate the South: I believe the mass of the Northern people, while they hate treason and rebellion, have only kind feelings towards the Southern people. But with us it is the wealthy and influential class that hates the North, while only the poor whites and negroes have any loyalty at heart. I wish,” he added, “that for every Northern man now settling in the South, a Southern man would go into business at the North, and see for himself, as I have done, just what sort of people and institutions we have all our lives been taught to misunderstand and slander.”

The editors of the southern half of the State were nearly all disloyal, judged by their prints. The same may be said of the ministers of the aristocratic churches, judged by their words and works.

There is a wide difference between the people of Northern and Southern Alabama. The inhabitants of many of the upper counties were as loyal as those of East Tennessee. In some it was necessary for the Davis government to maintain a cavalry force in order to keep the people in subjection. Such a county was Randolph, whose inhabitants were as strongly opposed to secession, as those of Chambers County, its next neighbor on the South, were in favor of it.

“The commanders discriminated in their foraging against the Union people. The fact that a man was absent in the service of the United States, or was opposed to the rebellion, was deemed a sufficient warrant to take the last piece of meat from his smoke-house, and the last ear of corn and bundle of fodder from his barns, leaving his family to starve. Randolph alone furnished nearly five hundred men who actually took up arms in the service of the United States, enlisting in whatever organization they found convenient as they made their escape from the Rebel conscripting officers into our lines. Their graves are upon every battle-field, attesting their bravery, their patriotism, and their sacrifices.”

Thus wrote, in a private letter to General Swayne, Lieutenant R. T. Smith, himself a loyal Alabamian who served in the Union army. The county was impoverished by the absence of its men in both armies, and by the troopers who preyed upon it. There was still great suffering at the time of my visit.

“Much destitution also exists,” said the lieutenant, “among the families of the late Rebels; for the soldiery, who had come in the beginning partly at their instance, consumed their substance when the means of the Union people were exhausted. Like Actæon, they were eaten by their own dogs.”

“It is a common, an every-day sight in Randolph County, to see women and children, most of whom were formerly in good circumstances, begging for bread from door to door. They must have immediate help, or perish. Fifteen hundred families, embracing five thousand persons, are in need of immediate aid.” This was in January, 1866.

The destitution here described was not confined to a portion of the country, nor was it a new thing. In 1863, the shortness of the crops, the depreciation of the currency, and the consequent high prices of provisions, produced a famine among the poorer classes. The families of soldiers, fighting the battles of a confederacy which paid them in worthless paper, were left to suffer the extremes of want, while many, who helped to bring on the war, were growing rich by speculating upon the misery it occasioned. In Mobile there were insurrections of women, driven by starvation to acts of public violence. The State was finally awakened to the necessity of ameliorating these sufferings; and during the last year of the war it fed with meal and salt one hundred and forty thousand white paupers.

This charity, inherited, in a manner, by the government which feeds the enemy it subjugates, was continued, after the war had closed, with the aid of the United States Commissary Department. At the same time the emancipation of four hundred and fifty thousand slaves,—nearly half the population of the State,—threw a large number of black paupers upon the community.

In these circumstances, the Freedmen’s Bureau proved an instrument of inestimable good. Its mediatory and organizing influence prevented outbreaks, and saved thousands from perishing. It assumed the care of homeless blacks and of white refugees. It colonized the former upon abandoned lands, and thence supplied many plantations with labor.

In the month of August, 1865, there were at one of these colonies thirty-four hundred freedmen. “I have been sending paupers to it ever since,” said General Swayne; “and there are now but one hundred and fifty persons there.” This was in January. At that time the Bureau was feeding less than twenty-five hundred blacks, and the number was rapidly diminishing.

No freedmen’s courts had been established by the Bureau in Alabama. “We had not officers enough to establish more than ten courts,” General Swayne told me. “And when those were withdrawn, the negro would have been left defenceless. I therefore preferred to educate the civil courts to do the freedmen justice.” He had displayed considerable diplomatic skill in securing the coöperation of the Convention, and getting an ordinance passed by it, which authorized civil officers to try freedmen’s cases and receive negro testimony. If an officer failed of his duty towards the blacks, his commission as an agent of the Bureau was revoked. General Swayne thought the system was working well; but he confessed that these officers required close watching; and some of his special agents, who came more directly in contact with the people, and with the actual crude state of affairs, while he saw them too much perhaps through the atmosphere of influential State officials, assured me that the justice obtained by the freedmen from these courts was but scanty. “At the outset,” said one, “they meet with obstacles. If they enter a complaint, they must give bail to appear as witnesses, or be lodged in jail. As no white man will give bail for a negro to appear as a witness against a white man, and as they don’t fancy lying perhaps weeks in jail in order to be heard, they prefer to suffer wrong rather than seek redress.”

There were but two freedmen’s schools in the State, one at Montgomery, and another at Mobile, with an aggregate of fifteen teachers and nine hundred pupils.

Everywhere I heard complaints of the demoralization of the people occasioned by the war. There were throughout the South organized bands of thieves. In Alabama, cotton-stealing had become a safe and profitable business. I was told of men, formerly respectable, and who still held their heads high in society, who were known to have made large fortunes by it. These men employ negroes to do the work, because negroes cannot give legal evidence against a white man. During the last three months of 1865, it was estimated that, on the line of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad, ten thousand bales of cotton had been stolen.

Crimes of every description, especially upon the property and persons of the freedmen, were very common. General Swayne told me that he stood greatly in need of a force of cavalry, without which it was almost impossible to arrest the offenders.

There was every prospect of a good cotton crop the present year. Since the invention of the spinning-jenny by Arkwright, and of the gin by Whitney, the culture of this great staple has received no such impulse as the recent high prices have given it. The planters were taking courage, the freedmen were at work, and a large amount of Northern capital was finding investment in the State. Even the poor whites, who never before would consent to degrade themselves by industrious labor in the field, seemed inspired by the general activity, and many of them, for the first time in their lives, were preparing to raise a few bales of cotton. Labor was not abundant. “Our best young men went off with the Yankee army; and our best girls followed the officers.” Men of sense and reputation had not much difficulty, however, in securing laborers. “When I got all ready to hire,” said one, “I just turned about four hundred hogs into a field near the road. Every freedman that came that way stopped; and in a week I had as many as I wanted. They all like to hire out where there is plenty of pork.” Others, to fill their quota of hands, were paying the fines of stout negroes on the chain-gangs, and bailing those who were lying in jail.

All sorts of contracts were entered into; and various devices were used to stimulate the energies of the freedmen. Some paid wages; some gave a share in the crop; and I heard of planters who defrayed all expenses, and gave five cents a pound for the cotton raised on their lands. One man, who hired sixty freedmen at moderate wages, divided them into six gangs of ten each, and offered a premium of three hundred dollars to the gang which should produce the greatest number of bales.

General Swayne estimated that there were five thousand Northern men in the State, engaged in planting and trading. Many of them were late army-officers. Business in the principal towns had been paying large profits; and Northern merchants, who purchased their goods at the North, were, notwithstanding the popular prejudice against them, enabled to compete with, and undersell, native traders who bought in smaller quantities and at second hand.

The hilly northern part of Alabama falls off gradually through the rolling prairies and alluvial bottoms of the central, to the low, flat southern portion of the State. Much of this latter region is sandy and barren, producing little besides poor whites and sweet potatoes. There are fertile bottom lands, however, adapted to the sugar-cane; and rice has also been successfully cultivated near the coast.

All through the lower half of the State, the long tree-moss grows with great luxuriance. It flourishes in a warm, moist climate; and the forests of the entire Southern country, below thirty-three degrees, are festooned by it. It likes the dank and heavy shade of swamps, which it darkens still more with its pendant shrouds. In favorable localities it grows to a great length, till its long-fibred masses appear dripping from the trees. One can imagine the effect when the great winds move through the woods, and to their solemn roaring is added the weird, unearthly aspect of a myriad gloomy banners, waving and beckoning from every limb.

Gathered by means of hooks attached to long poles, and seasoned by a simple process, this moss becomes a valuable article of merchandise, being principally used in the manufacture of mattresses. I saw many bales of it going down the rivers to New Orleans, Mobile, and Savannah. Its color on the boughs is a dull greenish gray; but when prepared for market, it resembles black crinkled horse-hair. A gentleman of Charleston told me that just before the war he tried the experiment of sending a bale of it to France, where it was not permitted to pass the custom-house until his factor had obtained from him a properly attested certificate, showing that it was to be taxed, not as hair, but as a vegetable substance. The French called it “vegetable horse-hair.”

The best cotton lands of Alabama lie between the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers, where a bale to the acre is the usual yield. The valleys of the Black Warrior and some lesser streams are scarcely inferior.

The general fertility of the great central portion of the State is offset by two or three disadvantages. One is the mud of the “black lime land,” which, in the rainy season, is often of such depth and tenacity that travel on the roads by means of wheeled vehicles is impracticable. A greater inconvenience is the scarcity of wells. In the northern portion of the State good water is abundant; but in other parts plantations are supplied only by means of house and field cisterns. In some towns excellent Artesian wells have been constructed; a few reaching a depth of a thousand feet, and throwing water in sufficient volume and force to carry machinery. At Selma there were lately two very good flowing wells, but on an attempt being made to bore a third, a rock was split, which injured materially the condition of the two first. In the large public square at Montgomery, the broad circular basin of the Artesian well, surrounded by an iron railing on a stone curb, visited by throngs of citizens, descending the steps, dipping up the water, or catching it as it gushes from the spout, and filling their pails and casks, forms an interesting feature of the place.

In the northern part of Alabama there are beautiful and fertile valleys adapted to the culture of both cotton and grain. On the other hand, there are hills unfit for cultivation. Between these two extremes there are upland tracts of moderate fertility, capable of producing a third or a quarter of a bale to the acre. This is the region of small farms and few negroes.

The climate throughout the elevated portions of the State is healthy and delightful. On the low river bottoms there is much suffering from fevers and mosquitoes.

The common-school system of Alabama is very imperfect. The wealthy planters send their children to private schools, and object to taxation for the education of the children of the poor. The poor, on the other hand, take no interest in schools, to which they will not send their children as long as money is to be paid for tuition, or as long as there is cotton to pick and wood to cut at home. The isolation of the inhabitants on plantations, or in widely scattered log-cabins, and the presence of an uneducated race forming nearly one half the population, have been great obstacles in the way of popular education.

Alabama has a common-school fund, derived principally from lands, comprising the sixteenth section in each township, given for educational purposes by the United States. This fund has never been consolidated, but each township enjoys the income, by sale or rent, of its own allotted portion. The system works badly. The sixteenth section is valueless in many of the townships where both the land and the inhabitants are poor, and where there is consequently most need of educational assistance; while in townships occupied by planters who have grown rich on the richness of the soil, and who need no such assistance, it has generally proved very valuable. Mr. Taylor, the State Superintendent of Schools, told me that in one of these wealthier townships, in Montgomery County, there was for some years but a single child to whose education the sixteenth-section fund could be properly applied. She was a girl; and the independent planters performed their duty faithfully in her case. They sent her to a boarding-school, where she received a fashionable education; and, when she came to marry, furnished her wedding-outfit, and presented her with a piano.

Alabama is comparatively a new State. Admitted into the Union in 1819, her rise in importance has kept pace steadily with the progress of modern cotton cultivation. It sounds strange to hear planters still young refer to their experiences in the early days of cotton in regions which are now celebrated for its production. “I came to Montgomery County in 1834,” said one. “I raised my first cotton crop in 1836. I had nine negroes, and I made a bale to the hand. They didn’t know how to pick it. So I hired thirty Indian girls to pick,—as handsome young creatures as ever you saw. Cotton was then eighteen cents a pound. The Indian war disturbed us some; but I and a dozen more settlers went out and killed more Indians than all Scott’s army. I have now two large plantations; this year I work a hundred and ten hands, and fifty-five mules and horses, on thirteen hundred acres of cotton and five hundred of corn; and I intend to make more money than ever before.”

The principal railroads of the State were all in running condition; although the rolling stock was generally shabby and scarce. The Montgomery and West Point Road, which Wilson’s raiders damaged to the amount of several millions, had been temporarily repaired. Depots were never plenty in the South, and where our forces had passed, not one was left;—a great inconvenience, especially to single gentlemen, going to take the train at two or three o’clock in the morning, finding the cars locked and guarded until the ladies should all be seated, and compelled to wait perhaps an hour, in the cold, for them to be opened.

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LXIII. IN AND ABOUT ATLANTA

The railroad runs eastward from Montgomery, forks at Opelika, and enters Georgia by two divergent routes,—the south branch crossing the Chattahoochee at Columbus, and the north branch at West Point.

Wilson, the Raider, paid his respects to both these roads. The main body of his troops proceeded to Columbus, (one of the principal towns of Georgia,) which they carried by assault, with a loss of but thirty men, capturing fifteen hundred prisoners, twenty-four pieces of artillery, and immense military stores. At the same time Lagrange’s Brigade took West Point. These were the closing battles of the great war of the rebellion. Pushing on towards Macon, Wilson’s advance was met, not by bloody opposition, but by a flag of truce announcing the surrender of Lee and the armistice between Sherman and Johnston.

Concerning our loss at West Point I was not able to obtain very exact information. A citizen, who claimed to have been in the fight, said to me, “We had seven men killed, and we just slaughtered over three hundred Yankees.” A negro said: “I saw five dead Yankees, and if there was any more nobody knows what was done with ’em.” A returned Confederate soldier, who regarded with great contempt the little affair the citizens bragged so much about, said it was no fight at all; the militia gave up the fort almost without a struggle; and there were not over a dozen men killed on both sides. The fort was situated on a high hill; and one old man, who was in it, told me they could not hold it because they couldn’t use the guns effectively,—they “couldn’t elevate ’em down enough.”

The Yankees had the credit of behaving very well at West Point. “They were going to burn the railroad depot, full of rolling stock; but a lady told ’em that would set her house, so they just run the cars off down the track, over a hundred of ’em, and fired ’em there,”—the black ruins remaining to attest the fact.

Leaving West Point at noon I reached Atlanta at seven o’clock in the evening. It was a foggy night; the streets were not lighted, the hotels were full, and the mud, through which I tramped from one to the other, with a dark guide and a very dark lantern, was ankle deep on the crossings. I was at length fortunate enough to find lodgings, with a clergyman and a cotton-speculator, in an ancient tavern-room, where we were visited all night by troops of rats, scampering across the floor, rattling newspapers, and capering over our beds. In the morning, it was discovered that the irreverent rogues had stolen the clergyman’s stockings.

A sun-bright morning did not transmute the town into a place of very great attractiveness. Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar and misery. The burnt streets were rapidly rebuilding; but in the mean while hundreds of the inhabitants, white and black, rendered homeless by the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels, which made the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of gypsies or Indians. Some of the negro huts were covered entirely with ragged fragments of tin-roofing from the burnt government and railroad buildings. Others were constructed partly of these irregular blackened patches, and partly of old boards, with roofs of huge, warped, slouching shreds of tin, kept from blowing away by stones placed on the top. Notwithstanding the ingenuity displayed in piecing these rags together, they formed but a miserable shelter at the best. “In dry weather, it’s good as anybody’s houses. But they leaks right bad when it rains; then we have to pile our things up to keep ’em dry.” So said a colored mother of six children, whose husband was killed “fighting for de Yankees,” and who supported her family of little ones by washing. “Sometimes I gits along tolerable; sometimes right slim; but dat’s de way wid everybody;—times is powerful hard right now.”

Every business block in Atlanta was burned, except one. The railroad machine-shops, the founderies, the immense rolling-mill, the tent, pistol, gun-carriage, shot-and-shell factories, and storehouses, of the late Confederacy, disappeared in flames and explosions. Half a mile of the principal street was destroyed. Private residences remained, with a few exceptions. The wooden houses of the suburbs had been already torn down, and their materials used to construct quarters for Sherman’s men. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, built by the colored people with their hard earnings, and viewed by them with as much pride and satisfaction as the Jews felt in the contemplation of the great Temple at Jerusalem, was also demolished by our soldiers,—at the instigation, it is said, of a white citizen living near, who thought the negro’s religious shoutings a nuisance.

“When I came back in May,” said a refugee, “the city was nothing but piles of brick and ruins. It didn’t seem it could ever be cleared. But in six weeks new blocks began to spring up, till now you see more stores actually in operation than we ever had before.”

The new business blocks were mostly one-story structures, with cheap temporary roofs, designed to be rebuilt and raised in more prosperous times. Nine stores of this description had just been put up by a Connecticut man; each costing three thousand dollars, and renting for twenty-five hundred. “He run a rolling-mill for the Confederate Government during the war; sold out when Sherman was coming; called himself a good Union man;—a mighty shrewd fellow!” said one who knew him.

Here and there, between the new buildings, were rows of shanties used as stores, and gaps containing broken walls and heaps of rubbish.

Rents were enormous. Fifteen and twenty dollars a month were charged for huts which a respectable farmer would hardly consider good enough for his swine. One man had crowded into his backyard five of these little tenements, which rented for fifteen dollars a month each, and a very small brick house that let for thirty dollars. Other speculators were permitting the construction, on their premises, of houses that were to be occupied rent-free, for one year, by the poor families that built them, and afterwards to revert to the owners of the land.

The destitution among both white and black refugees was very great. Many of the whites had lost everything by the war; and the negroes that were run off by their masters in advance of Sherman’s army, had returned to a desolate place, with nothing but the rags on their backs. As at nearly every other town of any note in the South which I visited, the small-pox was raging at Atlanta, chiefly among the blacks, and the suffering poor whites.

I stopped to talk with an old man building a fence before the lot containing the ruins of his burnt house. He said: “The Yankees didn’t generally burn private dwellings. It’s my opinion these were set by our own citizens, that remained after Sherman’s order that all women who had relatives in the Southern army should go South, and all males must leave the city except them that would work for government. I put for Chattanooga. My house was plundered, and I reckon, burnt, by my own neighbors,—for I’ve found some of my furniture in their houses. Some that stayed acted more honorably; they put out fires that had been set, and saved both houses and property. My family is now living in that shebang there. It was formerly my stable. The weather-boards had been ripped off, but I fixed it up the best I could to put my little ’uns in till we can do better.”

Another old man told me the story of his family’s sufferings, with tears running down his cheeks. “During the battle of July, I had typhoid fever in my house. One of my daughters died, and my other three were down with it. The cemeteries were being shelled, and I had to take out my dead child and bury her hastily in my backyard. My house was in range of the shells; and there my daughters lay, too sick to be moved.” His description of those terrible days I shall not repeat. At length his neighbors came with ambulances, and the sick daughters were removed. They were scarcely out of the house when a shell passed through it.

Walking out, one Sunday afternoon, to visit the fortifications, I stopped to look at a negro’s horse, which had been crippled by a nail in his foot. While I was talking with the owner, a white man and two negroes, who had been sitting by a fire in an open rail-cabin close by, conversing on terms of perfect equality, came out to take part in the consultation, around the couch of the sick beast. One proffered one remedy; another, another.

“If ye had some tare,” said the white man (meaning tar);—“open his huf, and bile tare and pour int’ it.”

His lank frame and slouching dress,—his sallow visage, with its sickly, indolent expression,—his lazy, spiritless movements, and the social intimacy that appeared to exist between him and the negroes, indicated that he belonged to the class known as “Sand Hillers” in South Carolina, “Clay-eaters” in North Carolina, “Crackers” in Georgia, and “white trash” and “poor whites” everywhere. Among all the individuals of this unfortunate and most uninteresting class, whom I have seen, I do not remember a specimen better worth describing. I give his story in his own words.

He told me his name was Jesse Wade. “I lived down in Cobb,” (that is, Cobb County,)—seating himself on the neap of the negro’s wagon, and mechanically scraping the mud from it with his thumb-nail. “I was a Union man, I was that, like my daddy befo’e me. Thar was no use me bein’ a fule ’case my neighbors was. The Rebel army treated us a heap wus’n Sherman did. I refugeed,—left everything keer o’ my wife. I had four bales o’ cotton, and the Rebs burnt the last bale. I had hogs, and a mule, and a hoss, and they tuk all. They didn’t leave my wife narry bedquilt. When they’d tuk what they wanted, they put her out the house and sot fire to ’t. Narry one o’ my boys fit agin the Union; they was conscripted with me, and one night we went out on guard together, we did, and jest put for the Yankees. All the men that had a little property went in for the wa’, but the po’ people was agin it. Sherman was up yer to Kenesaw Mountain then, and I left, I did, to jine him.”

Wade claimed to have acted as a scout, and referred me to the quartermaster: “This one that’s yer,” (the quartermaster at Atlanta,) “you ax him what Wade done, if you don’t reckon I tell the truth.” He pronounced the division of the Federal forces a great stroke of strategy. “Atter we split the army, the Rebels couldn’t hold us no back.”

He was very poor. “I’ve got two hosses and a wagon, and I shouldn’t have them if Sherman hadn’t gin ’em tu me.” He held up his feet, and looked at his toes protruding through great gaps in his shoes. “I kain’t git money enough to buy me a new pair, to save my life.”

“I beat ye, then,” said the owner of the crippled horse, showing a very good pair of boots.

“You’re drayin’,” said Wade. “I haul. I’m gittin’ wood to the halves. The owner’s as strong an old secessioner as ever lived. I kain’t make but tu loads a day, and one’s mine, and one’s the feller’s; I give one load for t’ other. Takes me three loads to git a cord; I git a dollar and a half, and sometime tu, for a load. I’ve got one boy that helps,—he’s about as high as hand boy standin’ hander,” (yond’ boy standing yonder,)—pointing to a negro lad of fourteen.

I asked Wade how old he was. “I’m in my fifty-one year old,” he replied; “and thar’s eight on us in the family, and tu hosses.”

I inquired concerning education in his county. “Thar’s a heap o’ po’ men in Cobb that kain’t read nor write. I’m one. I never went to skule narry time, and I was alluz so tight run I never could send my chil’n, only ’tween crap time.”

“What do you mean by ‘’tween crap time’?”

“When I’d laid by my crap,” (that is, stopped hoeing it, as corn,) “till fodder pullin’. I alluz had to make a little cotton, to keep up. I could alluz rent land befo’e the wa’, by givin’ half to the owners,—them a pound o’ cotton, and me a pound o’ cotton; them a load and me a load. That’s tu much; but I kain’t git it for that now. You might as well try to git their eyes as their land.”

Wade’s theory of reconstruction was simple, and expressed in few words: “We should tuk the land, as we did the niggers, and split it, and gin part to the niggers and part to me and t’ other Union fellers. They ’d have had to submit to it, as they did to the niggers.” I also found the freedmen, who had gathered about us, unanimously of this opinion.

“Wade,” I said, “you’re a candid man: now tell me which you think will do the most work,—a white man, or a nigger?”

“The nigger,” said Wade, surprised at so simple a question.

“Do you mean to say that one of these black men will do more work than you?”

“Yes, sho’e,” (sure.)

“What’s the reason of that?”

“’Case they was allus put mo’e at it.”

He went on to complain that he couldn’t always get pay for the work he did. “A man owes me money for wood. If he don’t pay me soon, I’ll take a stick and beat it out on him.”

“That’ll be to work for it twict, and not git it then,” observed a negro, very wisely; and I trust Wade was persuaded not to try the stick.

“Ought to have such laws yer as dey has up in Tennessee,” said another negro. “Dar you’d git yer money! Laws is strick in Tennessee! Ebery man chalks a line up dar. A man owes you money, de probo’ marshal make him toe de line. I’s been round, since de wa’ busted, and I han’t seen no whar laws like dey got up dar in Tennessee.”

By this time a large number of negroes had assembled on the spot, dressed in their Sunday clothes; and such an animated discussion of their political rights ensued, that, concluding I had strayed by mistake into an out-door convention of the freed people, I quietly withdrew,—followed by my friend Wade, who wished to know if I could accommodate him to a “chaw of tobacker.”

Atlanta is the centre of a “perfect crow’s-foot of railroads,” which have given it its business and military importance. The Western and Atlantic Road, connecting it with Chattanooga, forms a main trunk, with tributaries running into it from all parts of the North and West, and with branches from Atlanta running to all parts of the South. This road was constructed by the State, which in past years derived from it a large revenue. The war left it in a bad condition, with a dilapidated track, and merely temporary bridges in place of those which had been destroyed;—without machine-shops, or materials for the repair of what little remained of the old, worn-out rolling-stock. A purchase of four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of indispensable stock from the government, had sufficed to put it in operation, and it was contributing something, by its earnings, towards the great outlay still necessary to refurnish it and place it in thorough repair. The other railroads in the State, built by private companies, were nearly all doing well, by reason of the great amount of freight and travel passing over them. Those destroyed by Sherman belonged to corporations which could best afford to rebuild them; and work upon them was going forward with considerable vigor. All these roads had heavy claims against the Confederate Government; some of them amounting to several millions.

Georgia, before the war, had over twelve hundred miles of railroad in operation, forming the most extensive and complete system south of Tennessee and Virginia,—Alabama having but five hundred miles, and Mississippi seven hundred.

The best of the old Georgia banks were connected with the railroads. The bills of the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company were still worth, after the war had swept over the State, ninety-five per cent. of their par value. Those of the Central Railroad and Banking Company were selling for about the same. The issues of the other banks were worth from five to seventy-five per cent.; the stock being sacrificed.

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LXIV. DOWN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA

As my first view of Atlanta was had on a dismal night, (if view it could be called,) so my last impression of it was received on a foggy morning, which showed me, as I sat in the cars of the Macon train, waiting at the depot, groups of rain-drenched negroes around out-door fires; the dimly seen trees of the Park; tall ruins looming through the mist; Masonic Hall standing alone (having escaped destruction); squat wooden buildings of recent, hasty construction, beside it; windrows of bent railroad iron by the track; piles of brick; a small mountain of old bones from the battle-fields, foul and wet with the drizzle; a heavy coffin-box, marked “glass,” on the platform; with mud and litter all around.

A tide of negro emigration was at that time flowing westward, from the comparatively barren hills of Northern Georgia to the rich cotton plantations of the Mississippi. Every day anxious planters from the Great Valley were to be met with, inquiring for unemployed freedmen, or returning home with colonies of laborers, who had been persuaded to quit their old haunts by the promise of double wages in a new country. Georgia planters, who raise but a bale of cotton on three, four, or five acres, could not compete with their more wealthy Western neighbors: they higgled at paying their freedmen six or seven dollars a month, while Arkansas and Mississippi men stood ready to give twelve and fifteen dollars, and the expenses of the journey. As it cost no more to transport able-bodied young men and women than the old and the feeble, the former were generally selected and the latter left behind. Thus it happened that an unusually large proportion of poor families remained about Atlanta and other Georgia towns.

There were two such families huddled that morning under the open shed of the depot. They claimed that they had been hired by a planter, who had brought them thus far, and, for some reason, abandoned them. They had been at the depot a week or more, sleeping in piles of old rags, and subsisting on rations issued to them by the Bureau: stolid-looking mothers, hardened by field-labor, smoking short black pipes; and older children tending younger ones, feeding them out of tin cups, and rocking them to sleep in their arms. It was altogether a pitiful sight,—although, but for the rain which beat in upon them, I might have thought their freely ventilated lodgings preferable to some of the tavern-rooms I had lately slept in. But to me the most noticeable feature of the scene was the spirit manifested towards these poor creatures by spectators of my own color.

“That baby’s going to die,” said one man. “Half your children will be dead before spring.”

“How do you like freedom?” said another.

“Niggers are fated,” said a third. “About one out of fifty will take care of himself; the rest are gone up.”

“The Southern people are the niggers’ best friends,” resumed the first speaker. “They feel a great deal of sympathy for them. There are many who give them a heap of good advice when they leave them.”

Good advice is cheap; but nobody gave these homeless ones anything else, nor even that,—with a single exception: there was one who gave them kind words and money, but he was a Yankee.

The remarks of the ladies in the car were equally edifying.

“How much better they were off with somebody to take care of ’em!”

“Oh dear, yes! I declare it makes me hate an Abolitionist!”

“The government ought to have given them houses!”—(sneeringly.) “If I had seven children to take care of, I’d go back and sell ’em to my old master.”

“Do see that little bit of a baby! it’s a-kicking and screaming! I declare, it’s white! one of the young Federals’, I reckon.”

From Atlanta, until within about twenty-five miles of Macon, the railroad runs upon a ridge, from which the waters of the country flow each way,—those of the west side, through the Flint River and the Appalachicola to the Gulf; those of the east, through the Ocmulgee and Altamaha to the Atlantic. The soil of this ridge is sandy, with a mixture of red clay; much of it producing little besides oaks and pines. The doorways of the log-huts and shabby framed houses we passed, were crowded with black, yellow, and sallow-white faces,—women, children, and slatternly, barefoot girls, with long, uncombed hair on their shoulders,—staring at the train. The country is better, a little back from the railroad, as is frequently the case in the South.

Macon, at the head of steamboat navigation on the Ocmulgee River, and the most important interior town in the State, is a place of broad, pleasant streets, with a sandy soil which exempts it from mud. It had in 1860 eight thousand inhabitants. As it was a sort of city of refuge, “where everybody was run to,” during the latter years of the war, its population had greatly increased. Hundreds of white refugees from other parts of the country were still crowded into it, having no means of returning to their homes, or having no homes to return to. The corporation of Macon showed little disposition to relieve these unfortunate people, and the destitution and suffering among them were very great. They were kept from starvation by the government. “To get rid of feeding them,” said Colonel Lambert, Sub-Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, “we are now giving them free transportation wherever they wish to go.”

By a recent census, taken with a view to catching vagrants and setting them to work, the colored population of Macon was shown to be four thousand two hundred and seventy-three. “All those who are not now employed will soon be taken by the planters. If any will not hire out, they will be set to earning their living on the public streets. I have now on hand applications from Alabama and Mississippi planters for three hundred laborers; I could fill the orders if I chose to, for the negroes are much disposed to emigrate. But all the freedmen in the counties of my district are needed here, and I encourage them to remain.”

Colonel Lambert had on hand sixteen cases of murder and felonious shooting by white persons, negroes being the victims. The seventeenth case was reported from Twiggs County, while I was at Macon. A chivalrous sportsman, apparently for the fun of the thing, took a shot at a negro walking peaceably along the street, and killed him. The Colonel sent out twenty-five mounted men to hunt the murderer; but it was almost impossible to make arrests in such cases. There were in every place unprincipled men who approved the crime and helped to shield the criminal. Warned by them of the approach of blue uniforms, he would betake himself to the cane-brakes, or to some friendly garret, where he would lie safely concealed until the scouts had given up their search for him and retired from the neighborhood. These negro-shooters and their accomplices were no doubt a small minority of the people, but they were a very dangerous minority, whom the better class did not deem it prudent to offend by assisting the officers of justice.

Crimes of this description were more or less frequent in districts remote from the military posts. In some places the freedmen were shot down in mere wantonness and malice. In others, the very men who had been wishing them all dead or driven out of the country, had become enraged at seeing them emigrate for higher wages than they were willing to pay, and sworn to kill any that attempted to leave the State.

Said Colonel Lambert: “To prevent these outrages, we need a much greater military force than we have. But the force we have is being reduced by the mustering out of more troops. We are thus prevented from carrying out the intentions of the government; and there is danger that before long the continuance of its authority here will be regarded as a mere farce. What we need is cavalry; but our troops are all infantry. I mount them in a case of emergency, where some desperado is to be hunted, by seizing horses at the first livery-stable, which we return after we have got through with them, politely thanking the proprietor in the name of the government.”

The southwestern part of Georgia is one of the most fertile sections of the South: it is the region of large plantations and rich planters. The northern half of the State is comparatively unproductive: it is the region of small planters, and of farmers who do their own work with the aid of their sons. Much of the northwestern part is barren. The fertile Southwest suffered little damage from the war; it came out of it with its plantations unimpaired, and a large stock of cotton on hand. Northern and Middle Georgia were ploughed with the furrows of desolation. Sherman’s army left nothing in its track but poverty and ruin. Plantations were wasted, provisions taken, stock killed or driven away, buildings and farming implements destroyed. The people were left very poor: they raised no crops in ’65, and a famine was very generally anticipated.

In this condition, all the better class of planters recognized the sincere efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid them, and to organize a labor system which should prove beneficial to both employers and employed. They generally spoke of its officers with respect; and many acknowledged that it would be a great injury to the country to have it immediately removed. Others were bitter in their opposition to it; and I often heard such remarks as this: “The idea of a nigger having the power of bringing a white man before a tribunal! The Southern people a’n’t going to stand that.”

The negro of Middle Georgia is a creature in whom the emotions entirely predominate over the intellectual faculties. He has little of that shrewdness which town life cultivates in the black race. The agents of the Bureau complained that they had sometimes great difficulty in persuading him to act in accordance with his own interests. If a stranger offered him twelve dollars a month, and a former master in whom he had confidence, appealing to his gratitude and affection, offered him one dollar, he would exclaim impulsively, “I work for you, Mass’r Will!” Sometimes, when he had been induced by his friends to enter a complaint against his master or mistress for wrongs done him, ludicrous and embarrassing scenes occurred in the freedmen’s courts. “Now, Thomas,” says the good lady, “can you have the heart to speak a word against your old, dear, kind mistress?” “No, missus, I neber will!” blubbers Thomas; and that is all the court can get out of him.

The reverence shown by the colored people toward the officers of the Bureau was often amusing. They looked to them for what they had formerly depended upon their masters for. If they had lost a pig, they seemed to think such great and all-powerful men could find it for them without any trouble. They cheered them in the streets, and paid them at all times the most abject respect.

I was told that the blacks were quite as apt to keep their contracts as the whites; and that often, when they broke them, it was through the persuasion of some planter who lacked laborers. “Look here, Sam, I’m giving two dollars a month more than this man you are at work for; why don’t you come and live with me?” A respectable planter was fined a hundred and fifty dollars for this offence, by the Bureau, whilst I was at Macon. “It is one of the worst offences we have to deal with,” said Colonel Lambert, “and one that we punish most severely.”

It was the popular belief that the agents of the Bureau had control of funds arising from such fines, and that they appropriated them pretty freely to their own use. On the contrary, they were required at the end of each month to make returns and forward all funds on hand to the chief quartermaster of the State, who alone was authorized to apply them in necessary expenditures.

There were four freedmen’s schools in Macon, with eleven teachers and a thousand pupils. There was a night-school of two hundred children and adults, where I saw men of my own age learning their letters, (and thought, “What if I was now first learning my letters?”) and gray-haired old men and women forming, with slowness and difficulty, by the aid of spectacles, the first characters in the writing-book. The teachers were furnished by the American Missionary Association,—the freedmen paying for their own books, (an item with the booksellers,) and for the necessary fuel and lights.

Mr. Eddy, the superintendent, and an old experienced teacher, said to me: “The children of these schools have made in a given time more progress in the ordinary branches of education than any white schools I ever taught. In mathematics and the higher sciences they are not so forward. The eagerness of the older ones to learn is a continual wonder to me. The men and women say, ‘We work all day, but we’ll come to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we’re dull, but we want you to beat it into us!’”

I was much interested in a class of young clergymen who recited in the evening to the young matron of the “teachers’ home.” One of them told me with tears of gratitude how kind and faithful all the teachers had been to them.

“Are you not mistaken?” I said. “I have been told a hundred times that the Southern people are your best friends.”

He replied: “Georgia passed a law making it a penitentiary offence, punishable with five years’ imprisonment, to teach a slave to read. Now we are no longer slaves, and we are learning to read. They may deceive you, but we know who are our best friends.”

I was repeatedly assured by earnest secessionists that there were no Union men in Georgia; that, soon or late, all went into the rebellion. But one day I met an old man who denied the charge with indignation.

“I am sixty-five years old. I fought for the spot where Macon now stands, when it was Indian territory. I don’t know what they mean by no Union men. If to fight against secession from first to last, and to oppose the war in every way, makes a Union man, I was that. Of course I paid taxes, because I couldn’t help it. And when Stoneman raided on us, and every man that could bear arms was pressed, I went with the rest, and was all day behind the breastworks. But I’ve always spoke my mind, and being an old citizen, I never got hung yet. A majority of the people of Macon were with me, if they had only dared to say so. They hate the secessionists now worse than they hate the Yankees: no comparison! The secessionists now cry, ‘No party!’ but never a party stuck together closer than they do.

“The Confederates,” he went on, “injured us ten times more than the Yankees did. When Wilson came in last April, he put a guard at my house, who stayed with me seven weeks, and did his duty faithfully.”

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LXV. ANDERSONVILLE

Just across the railroad track below Macon, in a pleasant pine grove, is the Fair Ground, where was located that thing of misery known to us as the Macon Prison. It was the “Yankee Prison,” down here.

I visited the spot one bright morning after a shower, when the breezes and the sunshine were in the pine-tops overhead. The ground was covered with a thin growth of brown grass, wet with the rain: stepping along which I came suddenly to a quadrangular space, as arid as the hill of Golgotha. No marks were necessary to show where the stockade had stood, with its elevated scaffolding on which walked the Rebel guard. The stockade had been removed; but the blasted and barren earth remained to testify of the homesick feet that had trodden it into dreary sterility.

A little stream runs through a hollow below the Fair Ground, carrying off much of the filth of the town. From that stream our prisoners drank. The tub set in the side of the bank at the foot of the hill, and the ditch that conducted into it the water for their use, were still there. Guarded, they came down from the stockade, to this tub, of the contents of which they were not always permitted to have enough. “I used to hear ’em yell for water,” said a negro living near. “I was bad off as a slave, but I never begun to be so bad off as they was. Some of ’em had no shoes for winter, and almost no clothes.”

In the pine woods on the hill above the area of the stockade is “Death’s Acre,”—the prison burying-ground, enclosed by a plain board fence, and containing little rows of humble graves marked with stakes, and numbered. I noticed numbers as high as two hundred and thirty. How many national soldiers lie buried in this lot I do not know.

I shall not dwell upon the sufferings endured by the inmates of this prison. They shrink into insignificance compared with the horrors of the great military prison of Georgia and the South. Neither of these do I purpose to say much. Enough, and more than enough has been spoken and written about them. The infamy of Andersonville is world-wide.

Passing through Washington in August, 1865, I one morning looked into the hot and steaming court-room where Captain Henry Wirz was on trial. In a somewhat worn broadcloth coat, with his counsel at his side occasionally whispering him, his elbow on a table, and his thin uneasy hand fingering his dark beard or supporting his chin; attenuated, bent, and harassed with the most terrible anxieties,—for, however indifferent he may have been to the lives of other and better men, there was one life to which he was not indifferent, and which was now at stake; down-looking for the most part, but frequently glancing his quick sharp eye at the court or the witnesses; there sat the miserable man, listening to minutely detailed accounts of the atrocities of which he had been the instrument. The cause he had served with such savage fidelity, had perished; and the original authors of the enormities he had been employed to commit, stalked at large, or lay in temporary confinement, confidently expecting the executive clemency; while this wretched hireling, whose sin consisted in having done their work too well, was to suffer, not the just for the unjust, but the guilty dog for the still more guilty masters.

Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the South-western Railroad, is the scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished with death. The place is set down as Anderson on maps and in guide-books; and that is the name by which it was known to the inhabitants of the country, until the immense hideous business the war brought to it dignified it with the title of ville.

It is a disagreeable town, with absolutely no point of interest about it except the prison. Before the war it had but five buildings: a church without a steeple; a small railroad depot; a little framed box in which was the country post-office; and two dwellings,—a log-cabin, and a house with a saw- and grist-mill attached. There were other dwellings within a mile.

Such was Anderson. Anderson_ville_ contains some forty additional cheap-looking, unpainted buildings, of various sizes, all of which were constructed with reference to the prison; such as officers’ houses, large or small according to the rank of the occupants, government storehouses, hospital buildings, (for the troops on duty,) and so forth. The hospital is now used as a hotel. The entire aspect and atmosphere of the place are ugly and repulsive.

The village lies on the railroad and west of it. Between a third and one half of a mile east of it, is the prison.

The space enclosed by the rough stockade contains twenty-five acres, divided by a sluggish stream flowing through it. It looks like a great horse-yard. Much of the land is swampy, but the rest is elevated, rising on the south side gradually, and on the north side quite steeply from the brook. It was from this shallow stream, defiled with refuse from the camp of the Georgia Reserves, which it received before entering the stockade, that the thirty thousand prisoners, who were sometimes crowded into this broken oblong space, drew their chief supply of water. There were a few little springs in the banks, very precious to them.

The walls of the stockade are of upright logs about a foot in diameter, twenty feet high above the ground, in which they are set close together, deep enough to be kept firmly in their position. There are an outer and an inner wall of this description, with a space some fifty yards in breadth between them. There were sentry-boxes for the soldiers on guard, hung like birds’-nests near the top of the inner wall. These were reached by ladders. For further security, the stockade was partly surrounded by a deep ditch; and on portions of two sides there is an unfinished third line of upright logs.

The outer wall of the stockade has but one entrance. Through this the newly arrived prisoners were marched, and along the space between the two walls, to one of two gates which gave admission to the interior of the prison. How many thousands of brave and stalwart soldiers entered these infernal doors, from which only ghostly skeleton-men, or the corpses of skeleton-men, ever issued forth again!

The prisoners were of course confined within the inner wall. And not only so, but they were prevented from approaching within twenty feet of it by the dead line. Or if not prevented,—for much of the way this fatal boundary was marked only by posts set at intervals of six or seven yards,—he who, in blindness and sickness and despair, perhaps jostled out of his way by the blind, sick, despairing multitude crowded within, set his foot one inch beyond the strict limits, as some Rebel on guard chose to imagine them, crack-went a musket, a light puff of smoke curled up from one of the birds’-nests, and the poor wretch lay in his blood, groaning out the last of many groans, which ended his long misery.

I learned that when the stockade was first built the ground it encloses was covered with forest-trees. Why were they not left—at least a few of them—to bless with their cooling shade the unfortunate captives, in the heat of those terrible prison summers? Not a tree remained. Near by were forests of beautiful timber, to which they were not even permitted to go and cut wood for fuel and huts.

One can imagine nothing more dreary and disheartening than the interior view of the stockade as it is to-day, except the stockade as it was during the war. The holes in which the prisoners burrowed for protection from the weather, have been mostly destroyed by the washing rains. Nearly all the huts are in ruins. The barrack sheds, in which but a mere handful of the thirty thousand prisoners could find place, still remain, marked with sad relics,—bunks with the names of the occupants cut upon them, or fragments of benches, knives, old pipes, and old shoes.

Between the outer and inner walls were the bakehouse, the pen for sick-call, and the log-sheds in which the stocks were kept. The cookhouse was outside.

Besides the great stockade, there was a small stockade for officers, and a hospital stockade containing some eight acres, and surrounded by upright logs ten or twelve feet high.

In pleasant pine woods, about a hundred rods north of the stockade, is the original burying-ground of the Andersonville prison, enlarged and converted into a national cemetery since the war. A whitewashed picket-fence encloses a square space of near fifty acres, divided into four main sections by two avenues crossing it and cutting each other at right angles. Two of these sections—those south of the east-and-west road—are subdivided by alleys into five smaller sections, where the dead lie in long, silent rows, by hundreds. Here are about seven thousand graves. The northeast quarter of the cemetery is undivided; and here, in a single vast encampment, sleep five thousand men. There are in all near thirteen thousand graves, each with its little white head-board commemorating the name, rank, company, regiment, and date of death, of its inmate. The records show that the first death occurred on February 27th, 1864, and the last on April 28th, 1865. From April 1st, 1864, to April 1st, 1865, the average rate of mortality was over a thousand a month. It sometimes reached a hundred a day.

Apart from the rest, in the northwestern corner of the cemetery, are the graves of the Georgia Reserves who died while on duty here,—one hundred and fifteen out of four regiments. The mortality among them appears also to have been great; and indeed one cannot conceive how it should be otherwise, living as they did within the pestiferous influence of the prison atmosphere.

At the entrance to the cemetery, on the south side, appears the following inscription,—the same I noticed above the graves at Spottsylvania, and which might with propriety be placed before every national soldiers’ cemetery:—

“On Fame’s eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards with solemn round The bivouac of the dead.”

At the alley-crossings stand the following:—

“The hopes, the fears, the blood, the tears, That marked the battle strife, Are now all crowned by Victory That saved the Nation’s life.”

“Whether in the prison drear, Or in the battle’s van, The fittest place for man to die, Is where he dies for man.”

“A thousand battle-fields have drunk The blood of warriors brave, And countless homes are dark and drear In the land they died to save.”

“Then shall the dust Return to the earth as it was; And the spirit shall return Unto God who gave it.”

Over the encampment of five thousand is raised the following:—

“Through all Rebellion’s horrors Bright shines our Nation’s fame: Our gallant soldiers, perishing, Have won a deathless name.”

At the intersection of the avenues rises the flag-staff planted here by Miss Clara Barton’s party, who laid out the Cemetery Grounds in the summer of 1865. Here, on the soil of Georgia, above the graves of our dead, waves the broad symbol of the Nation’s power and victory; while all round this sanctified ground stand the ancient pines, Nature’s serene and solemn priesthood, waving their green arms, and murmuring softly, by day and all through the starry night,—whilst thou, O mother! O wife! art mourning in thy desolated Northern home,—the requiems of the weary ones at rest.

The Rebel owner of the land occupied by the prison had been pardoned by the President; and I learned of the Freedmen’s Bureau that he had asked for the restoration of his property,—demanding even that the cemetery grounds should be turned over to him.

In conclusion I may state that citizens of Georgia, living at a distance from Andersonville, said to me that they knew of the atrocities permitted there at the time of their occurrence, and that they did not think it possible for the Rebel leaders to have been ignorant of them.

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LXVI. SHERMAN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA

According to a tradition which I found current in Middle Georgia, General Sherman remarked, while on his grand march through the State, that he had his gloves on as yet, but that he should take them off in South Carolina. Afterwards, in North Carolina, I heard the counterpart of this story. As soon as he had crossed the State line, “Boys,” said he to his soldiers, “remember we are in the old North State now;” which was equivalent to putting his gloves on again.

At the mere mention of these anecdotes, however, many good Georgians and North Carolinians blazed up with indignation: “If he had his gloves on here, I should like to know what he did with his gloves off!”—and it was not easy to convince them that they had suffered less than their neighbors in South Carolina.

A Confederate brigadier-general said to me: “One could track the line of Sherman’s march all through Georgia and South Carolina by the fires on the horizon. He burned the gin-houses, cotton-presses, railroad depots, bridges, freight-houses, and unoccupied dwellings, with some that were occupied. He stripped our people of everything. He deserves to be called the Great Robber of the nineteenth century. He did a sort of retail business in North Carolina, but it was a wholesale business, and no mistake, in Georgia, though perhaps not quite so smashing as his South Carolina operations.”

Confederate soldiers delight in criticisms and anecdotes of this famous campaign. Here are two or three samples.

“When we were retreating before old Sherman, he sent word to Johnston that he wished he would leave just a horseshoe, or something to show where he had been. Hood always left enough; but Johnston licked the ground clean behind him.”

“Didn’t we have high old times laying in the water, nights when we had a chance to lay down at all! I remember, one of our boys was told he must move his position, one night, after we’d just got comfortably settled down in the wet. Says he, ‘I’ve got my water hot, and I be d——d if I’m going to move for anybody!’”

“The approach to Savannah was defended by splendid, proud forts, bristling with long old cannon, and our cowardly militia just run from them without firing a shot!”

“You should have seen Washington’s statue, at Columbia, after Sherman burned the city! Nose broke, eyes bunged, face black and blue, and damaged miscellaneously, the Father of his Country looked like he’d been to an Irish wedding.”

The citizens talked with equal freedom, but with less hilarity, of the doings of the “Great Robber.” A gentleman of Jones County said:—

“I had a noble field of corn, not yet harvested. Old Sherman came along, and turned his droves of cattle right into it, and in the morning there was no more corn there than there is on the back of my hand. His devils robbed me of all my flour and bacon and corn meal. They took all the pillow-slips, ladies’ dresses, drawers, chemises, sheets, and bed-quilts, they could find in the house, to tie up their plunder in. You couldn’t hide anything but they’d find it. I sunk a cask of molasses in a hog-wallow; that I think I should have saved, but a nigger boy the rascals had with ’em said he ’lowed there was something hid there; so he went to feeling with a stick, and found the molasses. Then they just robbed my house of every pail, cup, dish, what-not, that they could carry molasses off to their camping-ground in. After they’d broke open the cask, and took what they wanted, they left the rest to run in a river along the ground. There was one sweet hog-wallow, if there never was another!”

A lady, living near Milledgeville, was the president of a soldiers’ aid society. At the time of Sherman’s visit she had in her house a dry-goods box full of stockings knit by the fair hands of patriotic ladies for the feet of the brave defenders of their country. This box she caused to be buried in a field which was afterwards ploughed, in order to obliterate all marks of its concealment. A squadron of cavalry arriving at this field, formed in line, charged over it, and discovered the box by a hollow sound it gave forth under the hoofs of the horses. The box was straightway brought to light, to the joy of many a stockingless invader, who had the fair ladies of Milledgeville to thank for his warm feet that winter.

The Yankees took special delight in killing dogs, many an innocent cur having to atone with his life for the sins committed by bloodhounds used in hunting down negroes, conscripts, and escaped Yankee prisoners.

Sherman’s field-orders show that it was not his intention to permit indiscriminate destruction and plundering.[17] Yet these orders appear to have been interpreted by his men very liberally. A regiment, was usually sent ahead with instructions to guard private dwellings; but as soon as the guards were removed, a legion of stragglers and negroes rushed in to pillage; and I am convinced that in some cases even the guards pilfered industriously.

Wilson’s men, when they seized fresh horses for their use, turned the jaded ones loose in the country. Sherman’s army-corps acted on a different principle. The deliberate aim seemed to be to leave no stock whatever in the line of march. Whenever fresh horses were taken, the used-up animals were shot. Such also was the fate of horses and mules found in the country, and not deemed worth taking. The best herds of cattle were driven off; inferior herds were slaughtered in the fields, and left. A company of soldiers would shoot down a drove of hogs, cut out the hind-quarters, and abandon what remained.

“The Federal army generally behaved very well in this State,” said a Confederate officer. “I don’t think there was ever an army in the world that would have behaved better, on a similar expedition, in an enemy’s country. Our army certainly wouldn’t. The destruction of railroads, mills, and gin-houses, if designed to cripple us, was perfectly justifiable.

“But you did have as mean a set of stragglers following your army as ever broke jail. I’ll do you the credit to say, though, that there were more foreigners than Yankees among them.

“A lot of these rascals came to my house, and just about turned it inside out. They wouldn’t wait for my wife to give them the keys of the bureau, but smashed in the drawers with the butts of their muskets, and emptied them.

“My sister, living near me, gave her plate and valuables, locked up in a trunk, to a negro, who took it and hid it in the woods. Then, to avoid suspicion, he joined the Yankees, and was gone with ’em several days. She felt great anxiety about the trunk, until one morning he came home, by the way of the woods, grinning, with the trunk on his shoulder.

“My wife did like my sister. She gave her money and plate to a negro, who hid it; but he didn’t get off so well as the other darkey. The Yankees suspected him, and threatened to hang him if he didn’t give it up. They got the rope around his neck, and actually did string him up, till they found he would die sooner than tell, when they let him down again.

“Your fellows hung several men in my neighborhood, to make ’em tell where their money was. Some gave it up after a little hanging; but I know one man who went to the limb three times, and saved his money, and his life too. Another man had three hundred dollars in gold hid in his garden. He is very fat; weighs, I suppose, two hundred and fifty pounds. He held out till they got the rope around his neck, then he caved in. ‘I’m dogged,’ says he, ‘if I’m going to risk my weight on a rope around my neck, just for a little money!’”

An old gentleman in Putnam County, near Eatonton, related the following:—

“Sherman’s men gave my son-in-law sut! He had made that year thirty-two hundred gallons of syrup,—more than he had casks for; so he sunk a tank in the ground, and buried it. The Yankee soldiers all came and helped themselves to it. He had the finest flower-garden in the country; they made his own slaves scatter salt, and corn-on-the-cob, all over it, then they turned their horses on, and finished it. They made my own daughter wait on them at table. She said she kept servants for such work; but they replied: ‘You are none too good.’ They robbed all the houses through here of all the jewels, watches, trinkets, and hard metals the people didn’t put out of their way; and stripped us of our bedding and clothing.”

Sherman’s invasion of the South cannot properly be called a raid: even Wilson’s brilliant expedition with twelve thousand cavalry is belittled by that epithet.

Sherman had under his command four infantry corps and a corps of cavalry, pursuing different routes, their caterpillar tracks sometimes crossing each other, braiding a belt of devastation from twenty-five to fifty miles in breadth, and upwards of six hundred miles in extent. The flanking parties driving the light-footed Rebel cavalry before them; bridges fired by the fugitives; pontoon trains hurrying to the front of the advancing columns, when streams were to be crossed; the hasty corduroying of bad roads; the jubilant foraging parties sweeping the surrounding country of whatever was needful to support life and vigor in those immense crawling and bristling creatures, called army-corps; the amazing quantity and variety of plunder collected together on the routes of the wagon-trains,—the soldiers sitting proudly on their heaped-up stores, as the trains approached, then, in lively fashion, thrusting portions into each wagon as it passed,—for no halt was allowed; the ripping up of railroads, the burning and plundering of plantations; the encampment at evening, the kindling of fires, the sudden disappearance of fences, and the equally sudden springing up of shelter-tents, like mushrooms, all over the ground; the sleep of the vast, silent, guarded hosts; and the hilarious awakening to the toil and adventures of a new day; such are the scenes of this most momentous expedition, which painters, historians, romancers, will in future ages labor to conceive and portray.

Warned by the flying cavalry, and the smoke and flames of plantations on the horizon, the panic-stricken inhabitants thought only of saving their property and their lives from the invaders. Many fled from their homes, carrying with them the most valuable of their possessions, or those which could be most conveniently removed. Mules, horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, were driven wildly across the country, avoiding one foraging party perhaps only to fall into the hands of another. The mother caught up her infant; the father, mounting, took his terrified boy upon the back of his horse behind him; the old man clutched his money-bag and ran; not even the poultry, not even the dogs were forgotten; men and women shouldering their household stuffs, and abandoning their houses to the mercies of the soldiers, whose waving banners and bright steel were already appearing on the distant hill-tops.

Such panic flights were often worse than useless. Woe unto that house which was found entirely deserted! To the honor of Southern housewives be it recorded, that the majority of them remained to protect their homes, whilst their husbands and slaves ran off the live stock from the plantations.

The flight from Milledgeville, including the stampede of the Rebel State legislators, who barely escaped being entrapped by our army,—the crushing of passengers and private effects into the overloaded cars, the demand for wheeled vehicles, and the exorbitant prices paid for them, the fright, the confusion, the separation of families,—formed a scene which neither the spectators nor the actors in it will soon forget.

The negroes had all along been told that if they fell into the hands of the Yankees they would be worked to death on fortifications, or put into the front of the battle and shot if they did not fight, or sent to Cuba and sold; and that the old women and young children would be drowned like cats and blind puppies. And now the masters showed their affection for these servants by running off the able-bodied ones, who were competent to take care of themselves, and leaving the aged, the infirm, and the children, to the “cruelties” of the invaders. The manner in which the great mass of the remaining negro population received the Yankees, showed how little they had been imposed upon by such stories, and how true and strong their faith was in the armed deliverance which Providence had ordained for their race.

-----

Footnote 17:

See, in Special Field-Orders, No. 120, issued Nov. 24th, 1864, the following paragraphs:—

“IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather near the route travelled corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables or corn-meal or whatever is needed by the command; aiming at all times to keep in the wagon trains at least ten days’ provisions for the command, and three days’ forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass during the halt or a camp; they may be permitted to gather turnips, potatoes, and other vegetables, and drive in stock in front of their camps. To regular foraging parties must be intrusted the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road travelled.

“V. To army-corps commanders is intrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, &c., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army-corps commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.

“VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or brigades. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, when the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts; and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance.”

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LXVII. PLANTATION GLIMPSES

In travelling through the South one sees many plantations ruined for some years to come by improper cultivation. The land generally washes badly, and where the hill-sides have been furrowed up and down, instead of being properly “horizontalized,” the rains plough them into gulleys, and carry off the cream of the soil. Or perhaps neglect, during four years of war, has led to the same result. Many worn-out plantations are in this condition, the gulleys cutting the slopes into ridges and chasms.

In Georgia, as in parts of Alabama, one becomes weary of tracts of poor-looking country, overgrown with sedge-grass, or covered with oaks and pines. The roads, never good, in bad weather are frightful. Never a church steeple relieves the monotony of the landscape. Occasionally there is a village, its houses appearing to be built upon props. If standing upon a ridge above the highway or railroad by which you pass, the sight of the blue sky under them gives them a singular appearance.

It is customary, all through the South, to build country-houses in this manner, and rarely with cellars. The props, which are sometimes of brick, but oftener of fat pine, which makes an underpinning almost as durable as brick, lift the building a few feet from the earth and allow a free circulation of air under it. This peculiarity, which strikes a stranger as unnecessary, is not so. A Northern man of my acquaintance, settled in North Carolina, told me that he built his house in the New-England style, with a close underpinning; but soon discovered that the dampness of the earth was causing the lower timbers to rot badly. By opening the underpinning, and ventilating the foundation, he succeeded in checking the decay. Let Northern men emigrating to the South take a hint from his experience. No doubt many Southern customs, which appear to us irrational or useless, will thus be found to have originated in common sense and necessity.

I was too late to see the cotton-picking, and too early for the chopping-out and hoeing, but in season to witness the preparation of the ground for planting. Sometimes, in a gang of fifty or sixty laborers running as many ploughs on the fields of a large plantation, there would be twenty or thirty women and strong girls. The sight of so many ploughs in motion, each drawn by a single mule, and scratching its narrow furrow three inches deep, was of itself interesting; and the presence with the ploughmen of the stout black ploughwomen added to it a certain picturesqueness.

I have already related how my ignorance was enlightened with regard to the manufacture of ploughs on Alabama plantations. I afterwards saw the blacksmiths at work upon these somewhat rude implements, and learned that some of the larger plantations manufactured their own carts and wagons. The plantation harness is a simple affair, and is nearly always made on the place. While the negro women are spinning and weaving cloth in rainy-weather, the men are bending hames, braiding mule-collars of corn husks, and making back-bands of leather or bagging.

I found that some of the large plantations had, besides a white superintendent, two black overseers,—one whose sole business was to take care of the ploughs and hoes, and one who looked after the mules and other live stock.

The buildings of a first-class plantation form a little village by themselves. There is first the planter’s house, which is commonly a framed dwelling of good size, with two or four brick chimneys built outside. There is not a closet in the house. The pantry and dairy form a separate building. The kitchen is another; and the meat-house still another. Next in importance to the planter’s house is the overseer’s house. Then come the negro quarters, which, on some plantations I have seen, are very comfortable and neat-looking little framed houses. They are oftener mere huts. A barn is a rare exception. The corn is kept in cribs, and other grain in out-door bins framed with roof-like covers that shut down and lock. Then there are the mule-pens; the gin-house (if it has not been burned); and the mill for crushing sorghum. Orchards are rare, planters thinking of little besides cotton, and living, like their negroes, chiefly on hog and hominy.

Travelling by private conveyance from Eatonton—the northern terminus of the Milledgeville and Eatonton Railroad—over to Madison on the Georgia road, on my way to Augusta, I passed a night at a planter’s house of the middle class. It was a plain, one-and-a-half story, unpainted, weather-browned framed dwelling, with a porch in front, and two front windows. The oaken floors were carpetless, but clean swept. The rooms were not done off at all; there was not a lath, nor any appearance of plastering or whitewash about them. The rafters and shingles of the roof formed the ceiling of the garret-chamber; the sleepers and boards of the chamber-floor, the ceiling of the sitting-room; and the undisguised beams, studs, and clapboards of the frame and its covering, composed the walls. The dining-room was a little detached framed box, without a fireplace, and with a single broken window. There was a cupboard, a wardrobe, and a bed in the sitting-room; a little bedroom leading off from it; and two beds in the garret.

There was a glowing fire in the fireplace, beside which sat a neatly-attired, fine-looking, but remarkably silent grandmother, taking snuff, or smoking.

The house had three other inmates,—the planter and his wife, and their son, a well-educated young man, who sat in the evening reading “Handy Andy” by the light of pitch-pine chips thrown at intervals upon the oak-wood fire. No candle was lighted except for me, at bedtime.

This, be it understood, was not the house of a small farmer, but of the owner of two plantations, of a thousand acres each. He had fifty-nine negroes before the war.

There was a branch running through his estate, on the bottom-land of which he could make a bale of cotton to the acre. On the uplands it took three or four acres to make a bale. This year his son had undertaken to run the plantation we were on, while he was to oversee the other.

The young man was far more hopeful of success than his father.

The old man said: “You can’t get anything out of the niggers, now they’re free.”

“I never knew them to work any better,” said the young man.

“Just now they are showing a little spirit, maybe,” said the father; “but it won’t continue.”

“I believe mine will do more work this year than ever,” said the son.

“Perhaps they will for you, but they won’t for me.”

The old man went away early in the evening to spend the night on his other plantation. After he was gone, the young man looked up from the pages of “Handy Andy,” and remarked emphatically:—

“The great trouble in this country is, the people are mad at the niggers because they’re free. They always believed they wouldn’t do well if they were emancipated, and now they maintain, and some of them even hope, they won’t do well,—that too in the face of actual facts. The old planters have no confidence in the niggers, and as a matter of course the niggers have no confidence in them. They have a heap more confidence in their young masters, and they work well for us. They have still more confidence in the Yankees, and they work still better for them. They have the greatest affection for the Yankees; they won’t steal from them, like they will from us. I had forty-seven hogs in one lot when I took the plantation; and in two weeks there were only twenty-six left. The same thing happened to my turnip patch. I don’t reckon it is my freedmen that steal from me; but the country is full of thieving darkeys that think it’s no wrong to take from a Southern white man.”

“I wish we older ones had the faculty you say you have for making the free niggers work,” said the young man’s mother. “I always kept two women just to weave. The same women are with me now. Before they were declared free, they could weave six and eight yards of cloth a day, easy. Now the most they do is about one yard.”

The house was on the main road traversed by the 15th corps, belonging to the left wing of Sherman’s army, on its way from Madison to Milledgeville.

“I never would have thought I could stay home while the Yankees were passing,” said the young man’s mother, “but I did. They commenced passing early in the morning, and there wasn’t an hour in the day that they were not as thick, as blue pigeons along the road.

“I was very much excited at first. My husband was away, and I had nobody with me but our negroes. A German soldier came into the house first of any. He was an ugly-looking fellow as ever I saw; but I suppose any man would have looked ugly to me under such circumstances. Said he, ‘I’ve orders to get a saddle from this house.’ I told him my husband had done gone off with the only saddle we had. Then he said, ‘A pistol will do.’ I said I had no pistol. Then he told me he must have a watch of me. I had a watch, but it was put out of the way where I hoped no Yankee could find it; so I told him I had none for him.

“He then looked all around the room, and said, ‘Madam, I have orders to burn this house.’ I replied that I hoped the Federals were too magnanimous to burn houses over the heads of defenceless women. He said, ‘I’ll insure it for fifty dollars;’ for that’s the way they got a heap of money out of our people. I said, ‘I’ve no fifty dollars to pay for insuring it; and if it depends upon that, it must burn.’

“Soon as he saw he couldn’t frighten me into giving him anything, he went to plundering. He had found a purse, with five dollars in Confederate money in it, when he saw an officer coming into the front door, and escaped through the back door. He was a very great villain, and the officer said if he was caught he would be punished.

“I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for the Yankee officers. They treated me politely in every way. They couldn’t prevent my meal and bacon from being taken by the foraging parties,—all except what I had hid; but they gave me a guard to keep soldiers from plundering the house, and when one guard was taken away I had another in his place. Some families on this road, who had no guard, were so broken up they had nothing left to keep house with.

“When the foragers were carrying off our provisions, I said to an officer, ‘That’s all the corn meal I have,’—which wasn’t quite true, for I had some hid away; but he ordered the men to return me a sack. I didn’t make anything by the lie; for the next party that came along took the sack the others had left. But I did save a pot of lard. I said to an officer, ‘They’ve done taken all my turkeys and cows and hogs, and you will leave me without anything.’ ‘Take back that pot of lard to the lady,’ said he; and I soon had it where it wasn’t seen again that day.

“What was out doors nothing could prevent the soldiers from taking. I had bee-gum, and they just carried it off, hives and all. A soldier would catch up a hive, and march right along, with it on his head, and with the bees swarming all about him. They didn’t care anything for the bees. I reckon they wouldn’t sting Yankees.”

During the evening, I paid a visit to the freedmen’s quarters. The doors of the huts were all open, in a row, and I could see a dozen negro families grouped around cheerful fires within, basking in the yellow light, and looking quite happy and comfortable.

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LXVIII. POLITICS AND FREE LABOR IN GEORGIA

At Milledgeville,—a mere village (of twenty-five hundred inhabitants before the war), surrounded by a beautiful hilly and wooded country,—I saw something of the Georgia State Legislature. It was at work on a cumbersome and rather useless freedmen’s code, which, however, contained no very objectionable features. In intelligence and political views this body represented the State very fairly. I was told that its members, like the inhabitants of the State at large, were, with scarce an exception, believers in the right of secession. The only questions that ever divided them on that subject, were not as to the right, but as to the policy; and whether the State should secede separately, or coöperate with the other seceding States.

Since the Rebel State debt had been repudiated, there existed a feeling among both legislators and people that all debts, public and private, ought to be wiped out with it. I remember well the argument of a gentleman of Morgan County. “Two thirds of the people in this county are left hopelessly involved by the loss of the war debt. There is a law to imprison a man for paying what the act of the convention takes from him the power of paying. The more loyal portion of our citizens would not invest in Confederate scrip, but put their money into State bonds, which they thought safe from repudiation. A large number of debts are for negro property. Now, since slavery is abolished, all debts growing out of slavery ought to be abolished. Four or five men in this county,” he added, “have the power to ruin over thirty families, whose obligations they bought up with Confederate money. As that money turns out to have never been legally good for anything, all such obligations should be cancelled.”

Throughout the State I heard the bitterest complaints against the Davis despotism. “There was first a tax of ten per cent. levied on all our produce; then of twelve per cent. on all property. Worse still, our property was seized at the will of the government, and scrip given in exchange, which was not good for taxes or anything else. There was public robbery by the government, and private robbery by the officers of the government. The Secretary of War, Seddon, had grain to sell; so he raised the price of it to forty dollars a bushel, when it should have sold for two dollars and a half. The conscript act was executed with the most criminal partiality. A man of an influential family had no difficulty in evading it. During the last year of the war, there were one hundred and twenty-two thousand young Confederates in bomb-proof situations. But an ordinary conscript was treated like a prisoner, thrown into jail, and often handcuffed.”

The value of slave property was the subject of endless debate. Said a Georgia planter: “I owned a hundred niggers; their increase paid me eight per cent., their labor four per cent.; and I’ve sixty thousand dollars’ worth of property buried in that lot,”—pointing to the plantation graveyard. The convention that reconstructed the State had not the grace to accept emancipation without inserting in the new Bill of Rights the proviso “that this acquiescence in the action of the United States Government is not intended as a relinquishment, or waiver or estoppel of such claim for compensation of loss sustained by reason of the emancipation of his slaves as any citizen of Georgia may hereafter make upon the justice and magnanimity of that government.” And there existed in most minds a growing hope that, when the Southern representatives got into Congress, measures would be carried, compelling the government not only to pay for slaves, but for all other losses occasioned by the war.

Not one of the men elected as members of Congress could take the Congressional test-oath. The mere fact that a man could take that oath was sufficient to insure his defeat.

Georgia has no common-school system. The poor, who can show that they are unable to pay for the tuition of their children, are permitted to send them to private schools on the credit of the county in which they reside. Few, however, take advantage of a privilege which involves a confession of poverty. There is great need of Northern benevolent effort to bring forward the education of the poor whites in all these States.

I found the freedmen’s schools in Georgia supported by the New-England Freedmen’s Aid Society, and the American Missionary Association. These were confined to a few localities,—principally to the large towns. There were sixty-two schools, with eighty-nine teachers, and six thousand six hundred pupils. There were in other places, self-supporting schools, taught by colored teachers, who did not report to the State Superintendent. The opposition to the freedmen’s schools, on the part of the whites, was generally bitter; and in several counties school-houses had been burned, and the teachers driven away, on the withdrawal of the troops. Occasionally, however, I would hear an intelligent planter make use of a remark like this: “The South has been guilty of the greatest inconsistency in the world, in sending missionaries to enlighten the heathen, and forbidding the education of our own servants.”

At Augusta, I visited a number of colored schools; among others, a private one kept by Mr. Baird, a colored man, in a little room where he had secretly taught thirty pupils during the war. The building, containing a store below and tenements above, was owned and occupied by persons of his own race; the children entered it by different doors, the girls with their books strapped under their skirts, the boys with theirs concealed under their coats; all finding their way in due season to the little school-room. I was shown the doors and passages by which they used to escape and disperse, at the approach of white persons.

Mr. Baird told me that during ten years previous to the War, he taught a similar school in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The laws prohibited persons of color from teaching; and accordingly he employed a white woman to assist him. She sat and sewed, and kept watch, until the patrol looked in, when she appeared as the teacher, and the real teacher (a small man) fell back as a pupil. It was ostensibly a school for free colored children, the teaching of slaves to read being a criminal offence; yet many of those were taught.

* * * * *

On the road to Augusta, my attention was attracted by the conversation of two gentlemen, a Georgian and a Mississippian, sitting behind me in the car.

We had just passed Union Point, where there was considerable excitement about an unknown negro found lying out in the woods, sick with the small-pox. Nobody went to his relief, and the citizens, standing with hands in their pockets, allowed that, if he did not die of his disease, he would soon perish from exposure and starvation.

“The trouble is just here,” said the Georgian behind me. “The niggers have never been used to taking care of their own sick. Formerly, if anything was the matter with them, their masters had them taken care of; and now they don’t mind anything about disease, except to be afraid of it. If they’ve a sick baby, they let it die. They’re like so many children themselves, in respect to sickness.”

“How much better off they were when slaves!” said the Mississippian. “A man would see to his own niggers, like he would to his own stock. But the niggers now don’t belong to anybody, and it’s no man’s business whether they live or die.”

“I exercise the same care over my niggers I always did,” replied the Georgian. “They are all with me yet. Only one ever left me. He was a good, faithful servant, but sickly. He said one day he thought he ought to have wages, and I told him if he could find anybody to do better by him than I was doing, he’d better go. He went, and took his family; and in six weeks he came back again. ‘Edward,’ I said, ‘how’s this?’ ‘I want to come and live with you again, master, like I always have,’ he said. ‘I find I ain’t strong enough to work for wages.’ ‘Edward,’ I said, ‘I am very sorry; you wanted to go, and I got another man in your place; now I have nothing for you to do, and your cabin is occupied.’ He just burst into tears. ‘I’ve lived with you all my days, master,’ he said, ‘and now I have no home!’ I couldn’t stand that. ‘Take an ax,’ I said; ‘go into the woods, cut some poles, and build you a cabin. As long as I have a home, you shall have one.’ He was the happiest man you ever saw!”

“A Yankee wouldn’t have done that,” said the Mississippian. “Yankees won’t take care of a poor white man. I’ve travelled in the North, and seen people there go barefoot in winter, with ice on the ground.”

“Indeed!” said I, turning and facing the speaker. “What State was that in?”

“In the State of New York,” he replied. “I’ve seen hundreds of poor whites barefoot there in the depth of winter.”

“That is singular,” I remarked. “I am a native of that State; I lived in it until I was twenty years old, and have travelled through it repeatedly since; and I never happened to see what you describe.”

“I have seen the same thing in Massachusetts too.”

“I have been for some years a resident of Massachusetts, and have never yet seen a man there barefoot in the snow.”

The Mississippian made no direct reply to this, but ran on in a strain of vehement and venomous abuse of the Yankees, in which he was cordially joined by his friend the Georgian. Although not addressed to me, this talk was evidently intended for my ear; but I had heard too much of the same sort everywhere in the South to be disturbed by it. At length the conversation turned upon the Freedmen’s Bureau.

“General Tillson” (Assistant Commissioner for the State) “has done a mighty mean thing!” said the Georgian. “I’ve just made contracts to pay my freedmen seventy-five and a hundred dollars a year. And now he is going to issue an order requiring us to pay them a hundred and forty-four dollars. That will ruin us. Down in South-western Georgia they can afford to pay that; but in my county the land is so poor we can’t feed our people at that rate. I’m going to Augusta now to see about it. If Tillson insists upon it, I shall throw up my contracts: I can’t do it: I’ll sell out: I won’t live in a country that’s ruled in this way.”

“From what county are you, sir?” I inquired.

“Oglethorpe; my name is C——. Are you an agent of the Bureau?”

“No, sir.” But from some remark I made, he got the impression that I was connected with it. His abuse of the Yankees ceased; and after a while he said:—

“I believe General Tillson is a very fair man; and I understand why he intends to issue such an order. To one planter who is willing to do right by the freedmen, there are five that will be unjust towards them. I wouldn’t accept the agency of the Bureau in my county, because so many contracts have been made that I couldn’t approve; and they would get me into trouble with my neighbors. One man has hired a good fair field hand, his wife, who is a good cook, his sister, a good field hand, and his daughter, a good house servant, all for a hundred dollars a year,—twenty-five dollars apiece; and he doesn’t clothe them, either. That’s a specimen. I think the Bureau ought to interfere in such cases. But it a’n’t fair to make honest men suffer for the conduct of these sharpers.”

I said I thought so too.

“Then I hope you’ll tell General Tillson so.”

“I’ll tell him so, if you wish me to.”

“And tell him you think I’m an honest man.”

“I am inclined to think you are an honest man, and I’ll tell him that too.”

“But see here: don’t mention what I said about the Yankees, will you?”

“Certainly not: that’s of no consequence.”

C—— appeared quite anxious on that point. After serious reflection, he said:—

“If you overheard me damn the Yankees, you’ll forgive me, when I tell you how they treated me. It was after the war was over, and that’s what made it hurt so. Seven of Stoneman’s men came to my house, and put a carbine to my breast, and demanded my watch. ‘You may shoot me,’ I said, ‘but you can’t have my watch.’ ‘Then give us some dinner,’ they said. I got dinner for them, and waited on them with my own hands. They paid me for my trouble by stealing seven of my horses. While I was absent from home, trying to get back my horses, some more Yankees came and robbed my house; they broke open the bureau with a chisel, and injured more than they took. You don’t blame me for cursing ’em, do you?”

“Not in the least. According to your story, they were very great rascals.”

After another interval of silence, C—— resumed:—

“Tell General Tillson I am willing to pay my laborers every dollar they’re worth: and that I treat them well. I’ve one boy that has always been with me, and is a better overseer than any white man I ever had. He looks after my interest better than I can myself, for he is younger. I trust everything in his hands,—all my keys, and sometimes money.” He could not forbear adding,—“Your fanatics at the North wouldn’t believe I treat this man so well.”

“Very likely. But it seems you have good reason for treating him well. What do you pay him?”

“I pay him two hundred dollars a year.”

“And what would you have to pay a white overseer?”

“I couldn’t get a white man to do for me what he does, for eight hundred dollars.”

“I am quite sure,” I said, “that our fanatics at the North would not see your extraordinary kindness to this man in the same light you do. They would think him worth considerably more than you pay him. If he does the work of a white overseer, they would say he ought to have the salary of a white overseer. They are such an unreasonable set, they would consider six hundred dollars, the difference between his wages and a white man’s, a pretty heavy tax to pay on the color of his skin.”

C—— did not seem inclined to pursue the subject, but commenced talking in a very candid, sensible manner, of the old Southern methods.

“If the war only breaks them up, it will have done some good. Our large planters generally gave no attention to business. The men were fast and reckless; the women, helpless and luxurious. We gave so much attention to cotton and niggers we couldn’t stop to think of the comforts of life. And after all we were just working to enrich Northern capitalists. There are no millionaires amongst us. Three hundred thousand dollars is a rare and large fortune in Georgia.”

Arriving in Augusta that night, I went the next morning to call on General Tillson. In our conversation, I took early occasion to speak to him of my yesterday’s acquaintance, Mr. C——, of Oglethorpe County. “He will be here soon, and explain to you why it is that planters in Northern Georgia cannot afford to pay the twelve dollars a month you insist upon.”

“He will not be the first who has come to me on that business,” replied the clear-headed general. “I shall give him a patient hearing, and if he convinces me that I am wrong, he will do more than any have done yet. When it was white man against white man, these planters paid one hundred and fifty and two hundred dollars a year for first-class field-hands. Now they are not willing to pay the negro for his labor one half what they formerly paid his owner. When I took charge of the Bureau’s affairs in this State, last September, I found the ordinary wages to be from two to seven dollars a month,—sometimes as low as twelve bushels of corn for a year’s labor. And the planters complained that the freedman wouldn’t work for those prices. Now all I ask is that they should pay what his labor is worth in the open market. Men from Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, say it is worth fifteen dollars, and stand ready to give it. Since that is the case, to permit him to make contracts for very much less, is to permit him to be swindled. A little while ago many of these men were wishing the negroes all driven out of the State; and now they are in a great panic, because I am allowing them to go. They come to me to remonstrate against sending off any more laborers. ‘Gentlemen,’ I say, ‘if you cannot afford to pay the freedman what his services are worth, it is not his fault, but your misfortune.’

“But they can afford it. Here is a careful statement of facts relating to free labor in Wilkes County, which adjoins Oglethorpe. ‘One field-hand will cultivate nine acres of cotton, on which he will raise three and a half bales, worth—say three hundred and seventy-five dollars. The same hand will also cultivate nine acres of corn, raising one hundred and eight bushels, worth one hundred and eight dollars. Total, four hundred and eighty-three dollars.

“’Expenses:—Board, fifty-two dollars. Rent of cabin, six. Fuel, six. Wages, one hundred forty-four. Total, two hundred and eight dollars.’ Deducting two hundred and eight from four hundred and eighty-three, you have a clear profit of two hundred and seventy-five dollars on each man; that, too, at the rate of wages I prescribe.

“These, understand, are the planters’ own estimates. In South-western Georgia, where the land is much richer than in this section, the most extravagant charges against the plantation show a nett income of three hundred and twenty-five dollars from the labor of a full field freedman. This estimate is from data furnished by several of the most popular and extensive planters in that region.

“Now,” added the Commissioner, “when your friend, Mr. C——, of Oglethorpe, comes to make his complaint, if he is the honest man you represent him to be, I will show him, by his own figuring, that so far from being impoverished by paying his men twelve dollars a month, he will make a handsome profit from them.”

As I went out, I found Mr. C——, of Oglethorpe, in the ante-room, waiting to see the General. He regarded me with a curious, uneasy expression, fearing no doubt lest I had reported to the Commissioner his indiscreet remarks of yesterday concerning the Yankees and the Bureau. I introduced him to General Tillson, however, in a manner that seemed to reassure him, and left them closeted together.

That evening, by appointment, I saw the General at his residence. “Well,” I asked, “how did you and my friend C—— get along?” and received from him the following statement, which he had kindly had copied for me.

“Statement of —— —— C——, of Oglethorpe County, leading planter of that county.

“Good hands in county will work 8½ acres in cotton—2 bales $300 00

8½ acres in corn—85 bush. 85 00

————————— —————————

Gross Income, $385 00

“Expenses.

3 lbs. bacon a week, 60 cts. }

1 peck meal, 25 cts. }

Board of hand for year $44 20

Rent of Cabin 10 00

Fuel 25 00

Wages 144 00

————————— —————————

Total Expenses, $223 20

Nett Income from each hand, $161 80.”

“Here,” said General Tillson, “the profits of the labor are placed as low, and the expenses as high, as Mr. C—— could figure them, after considerable study. From the labor of a hundred freedmen, on his two plantations, he would clear, according to his own account, upwards of sixteen thousand dollars,—sufficient to cover all risks, and all other expenses of the plantation, and leave him a little fortune at the end of the year.”

Mr. C—— had repeated to General Tillson his statement to me, regarding the dishonest contracts made with the freedmen in his county. “The truth is,” said the General, “he wants to hire them himself for about half what they are worth, and he is indignant because others have hired them for less. He can really afford to pay his help twice what I demand, and then make two hundred dollars a year from the labor of each freedman. The other day some leading planters from South-western Georgia made the same complaint with regard to wages. ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘if you can’t pay twelve dollars a month, give your laborers a part of the crops.’ They thought one seventh of the cotton was more than they ought to give, declaring that the negro would get rich on that. ‘If sixty freedmen,’ I said, ‘can get rich on one seventh of a crop, the planter, I am sure, can get rich on six sevenths.’

“The trouble is, these men wish to make everything there is to be made, and leave the freedman nothing. They resort to the meanest schemes to cheat him. They tell the negroes that if they go with the agents of the Bureau to other places, the able-bodied among them will be carried off and sold into Cuba, and the women and children drowned in the Mississippi.[18]

“I have not yet sent a thousand negroes out of the State,” continued General Tillson. “But I have sent off enough to alarm the people, and raise the rate of wages. I told the planters on the coast of Georgia, that they must pay the women twelve dollars a month, and the men fifteen, or I would take the colored population out of their counties. That brought them to terms, after all their talk about wanting to get rid of the niggers.

“The freed people in most parts of the State are still so ignorant of their condition, that they are glad to make contracts to work for only their food and clothes. There are many, however, who will live vagrant lives, if permitted. It is necessary to compel such to enter into contracts.” Firmly convinced of this necessity, General Tillson had issued an order directing his agents to make contracts for all freedmen without other means of support, who should neglect to make contracts for themselves after a given time. The Commissioner at Washington disapproved the order, for what reason I cannot divine, unless it was feared that the over-zealous friends of the negro at the North might be alarmed by it. No contracts were made for the vagrant blacks under it; but its effect, in inducing them to make contracts for themselves, was immediate, wholesome, and very gratifying.

The officers of the Bureau were everywhere subject to the temptation of bribes; and I often heard planters remark that they could do anything with the Bureau they pleased, if they had plenty of money. General Tillson said, “I could make a million dollars here very shortly, if I chose to be dishonest. Only to-day I was offered a thousand dollars for one hundred freedmen, by a rich planter.” He had made it a rule of the Bureau to receive no personal fees whatever for any services.

Over three thousand dollars had been paid in fines by the people of Georgia for cruelties to the freedmen during the past three months. “It is considered no murder to kill a negro. The best men in the State admit that no jury would convict a white man for killing a freedman, or fail to hang a negro who had killed a white man in self-defence.”

The General added: “As soon as the troops were withdrawn from Wilkes County, last November, a gang of jay-hawkers went through, shooting and burning the colored people, holding their feet and hands in the fire to make them tell where their money was. It left such a stigma on the county that the more respectable class held a meeting to denounce it. This class is ashamed of such outrages, but it does not prevent them, and it does not take them to heart; and I could name a dozen cases of murder committed on the colored people by young men of these first families.”

General Tillson, by his tact, good sense, business capacity, freedom from prejudice for or against color, and his uniform candor, moderation, and justice, had secured for the Bureau the coöperation of both the State Convention and the Legislature, and was steadily winning the confidence and respect of the planters. The most serious problem that remained to be solved was the Sea-Island question, of which I shall speak hereafter.

The prospect was favorable for a good cotton crop in Georgia, although anxiety was felt with regard to the vitality of the seed, much of which, being several years old, had no doubt been injured by keeping.

-----

Footnote 18:

Since my return from the South, I have received a letter from a gentleman of character, late an officer in the Federal army, from which I make the following extract bearing on this subject:—

“After leaving you at Grand Gulf, I rode twenty or thirty miles into the interior, but could find little inducement for a Northern man to settle in that portion of the South. The further you go from main routes, the more hostile you find the inhabitants. I finally determined to locate on or near the Mississippi, and recent experience only confirms my earlier impressions. I am now located on the river, one hundred and sixty miles below Memphis, on the Arkansas side, and am making preparations to plant one thousand acres of cotton. It has been very difficult to secure help here, and I determined to make a trip to Georgia for the purpose of obtaining the requisite number of hands. I succeeded tolerably well, and could have hired many more than I needed, had not the people induced the negroes to believe that we were taking them to Cuba to sell them. I award the palm to the Georgians, as the meanest and most despicable class of people it was ever my misfortune to meet. While they are constantly urging that the negro will not work, they use every means to dissuade him from securing honorable and profitable employment. I was never so grossly insulted as when in Georgia. They fear the powerful arm of the government, but are to-day as bitter Rebels as at any time during the war. The consequences would be most disastrous if the military force scattered through the South should be at once removed.”

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LXIX. SHERMAN IN EASTERN GEORGIA

The track of the Central Railroad, one hundred and ninety-one miles in length, was destroyed with conscientious thoroughness by Sherman’s army. From Gordon, twenty miles below Macon, to Scarborough Station, nine miles below Millen, a distance of one hundred miles, there was still an impassable hiatus of bent rails and burnt bridges, at the time of my journey; and in order to reach Savannah from Macon, it was necessary to proceed by the Georgia road to Augusta, either returning by railroad to Atlanta, or crossing over by railroad and stage to Madison, between which places the Georgia road, destroyed for a distance of sixty-seven miles, had been restored. From Augusta I went down on the Augusta and Savannah road to a station a few miles below Waynesboro’, where a break in that road rendered it necessary to proceed by stages to Scarborough. From Scarborough to Savannah the road was once more in operation.

The relaid tracks were very rough; many of the old rails having been straightened and put down again. “General Grant and his staff passed over this road a short time ago,” said a citizen; “and as they went jolting along in an old box-car, on plain board seats, they seemed to think it was great fun: they said they were riding on Sherman’s hair-pins,”—an apt name applied to the most frequent form in which the rails were bent.

“Sherman’s men had all sorts of machinery for destroying the track. They could rip it up as fast as they could count. They burnt the ties and fences to heat the iron; then two men would take a bar and twist it or wrap it around a tree or a telegraph post. Our people found some of their iron-benders, and they helped mightily about straightening the rails again. Only the best could be used. The rest the devil can’t straighten.”

Riding along by the destroyed tracks, it was amusing to see the curious shapes in which the iron had been left. Hair-pins predominated. Corkscrews were also abundant. Sometimes we found four or five rails wound around the trunk of a tree, which would have to be cut before they could be got off again. And there was an endless variety of most ungeometrical twists and curves.

The Central Railroad was probably the best in the State. Before the war its stock paid annual dividends of fifteen per cent.,—one year as high as twenty seven and a half per cent. It owned property to the amount of a million and a half dollars, mostly invested in Europe. This will be nearly or quite sunk in repairing the damage done by Sherman. Then the road will have all of its bent iron,—for Sherman could not carry it away or burn it;—and this was estimated to be worth two thirds as much as new iron. The track, composed partly of the T and partly of the U rail, was well laid; and the station-houses were substantially built of brick. I was told that the great depot building at Millen, although of wood, was equal in size and beauty to the best structures of the kind in the North. Sherman did not leave a building on the road, from Macon to Savannah. For warehouses, I found box-cars stationed on the side tracks.

The inhabitants of Eastern Georgia suffered even more than those of Middle Georgia from our army operations,—the men having got used to their wild business by the time they arrived there, and the General having, I suspect, slipped one glove off. Here is the story of an old gentleman of Burke County:—

“It was the 14th Corps that came through my place. They looked like a blue cloud coming. They had all kinds of music,—horns, cow-bells, tin-pans, everything they could pick up that would make a hideous noise. It was like Bedlam broke loose. It was enough to frighten the old stumps in the deadenings, say nothing about the people. They burned everything but occupied dwellings. They cut the belluses at the blacksmith-shops. They took every knife and fork and cooking utensil we had. My wife just saved a frying-pan by hanging on to it; she was considerable courageous, and they left it in her hands. After that they came back to get her to cook them some biscuit.

“’How can I cook for you, when you’ve carried off everything?’ she said.

“They told her if she would make them a batch of biscuit they would bring back a sack of her own flour, and she should have the balance of it. She agreed to it; but while the biscuit was baking, another party came along and carried the sack off again.

“The wife of one of my neighbors,—a very rich family, brought up to luxuries,—just saved a single frying-pan, like we did. Their niggers and all went off with Sherman; and for a week or two they had to cook their own victuals in that frying-pan, cut them with a pocket-knife, and eat them with their fingers. My folks had to do the same, but we hadn’t been brought up to luxuries, and didn’t mind it so much.

“General Sherman went into the house of an old woman after his men had been pillaging it. He sat down and drank a glass of water. Says she to him, ‘I don’t wonder people say you’re a smart man; for you’ve been to the bad place and got scrapings the devil wouldn’t have.’ His soldiers heard of it, and they took her dresses and hung them all up in the highest trees, and drowned the cat in the well.

“A neighbor of mine buried all his gold and silver, and built a hog-pen over the spot. But the Yankees were mighty sharp at finding things. They mistrusted a certain new look about the hog-pen, ripped it away, stuck in their bayonets, and found the specie.

“Another of my neighbors hid his gold under the brick floor of his smoke-house. He put down the bricks in the same place; but the rascals smelt out the trick, pulled up the floor, got the gold, and then burnt the smoke-house. They made him take off his boots and hat, which they wore away. They left him an old Yankee hat, which he now wears. He swears he never’ll buy another till the government pays him for his losses.

“My wife did the neatest thing. She took all our valuables, such as watches and silver-spoons, and hid them in the cornfield. With a knife she would just make a slit in the ground, open it a little, put in one or two things, and then let the top earth down, just like it was before. Then she’d go on and do the same thing in another place. The soldiers went all over that cornfield sticking in their bayonets, but they didn’t find a thing. The joke of it was, she came very near never finding them again herself.

“One of my neighbors, a poor man, was stopped by some cavalry boys, who demanded his watch. He told ’em it was such a sorry watch they wouldn’t take it. They wanted to see it, and when he showed it, they said, ‘Go along!—we won’t be seen carrying off such a looking thing as that!’”

The following story was related to me by a Northern man, who had been twenty-five years settled in Eastern Georgia:—

“My neighbors were too much frightened to do anything well and in good order. But I determined I’d save as much of my property as I could drive on its own feet or load on to wagons. I took two loads of goods, and all my cattle and hogs, and run ’em off twenty miles into Screven County. I found a spot of rising ground covered with gall bushes, in the middle of a low, wet place. I went through water six inches deep, got to the knoll, cut a road through the bushes, run my wagons in, and stuck the bushes down into the wet ground where I had cut them. They were six or eight feet high, and hid everything. My cattle and hogs I turned off in a bushy field. After that, I went to the house of a poor planter and staid. That was Friday night.

“Sunday, the soldiers came. I lay hid in the woods, and saw ’em pass close by the knoll where my goods were, running in their bayonets everywhere. The bushes were green yet, and they didn’t discover anything, though they passed right by the edge of them.

“All at once I heard the women of the house scream murder. Thinks I, ‘It won’t do for me to be lying here looking out only for my own interests, while the soldiers are abusing the women.’ I crawled out of the bushes, and was hurrying back to the house, when five cavalrymen overtook me. They put their carbines to my head, and told me to give ’em my money.

“As soon as I’d got over my fright a little, I said, ‘Gentlemen, I’ve got some Confederate money, but it will do you no good.’

“’Give me your pistol,’ one said. I told him I had no pistol. They thought I lied, for they saw something in my pocket; but come to snatch it out, it was only my pipe. Then they demanded my knife.

“’I’ve nothing but an old knife I cut my tobacco with;—you won’t take an old man’s knife!’

“They let me go, and I hurried on to the house. It was full of soldiers. I certainly thought something dreadful was happening to the women; but they were screeching because the soldiers were carrying off their butter and honey and corn-meal. They were making all that fuss over the loss of their property; and I thought I might as well have stayed to watch mine.

“That night the army camped about a mile from there; and the next morning I rode over to see if I could get a safeguard for the house. But the officers said no;—they were bound to have something to eat. I went back, and left my horse at the door while I stepped in to tell the women if they wished to save anything that was left they must hide it. Before I could get out again my horse was taken. I went on after it; the army was on the march again, and I was told if I would go with it all day, I should have my horse come night. I marched a few miles, but got sick of it, and went back. I could see big fires in the direction of my house, and I knew that the town was burning.

“I got back to the poor planter’s house, and found a new misfortune had happened to him. The night before, all his hogs and mine came together to his door,—the soldiers having let the fences down. ‘This won’t do,’ I said; ‘I’m going to make another effort to save my hogs.’ But he was true Southern; he hadn’t energy; he said, ‘No use!’ and just sat still. I tolled my hogs off with corn, and scattered corn all about in the bushes to keep them there. The next day it was hot, and they lay in the shade to keep cool; so the soldiers didn’t find them.

“But when, as I said, I got back to his house, I found the soldiers slaughtering his hogs right and left. They killed every one. So much for his lack of faith. But the worst part of the joke was, they borrowed his cart to carry off his own hogs to the wagon-train which was passing on another road half a mile away. They said they’d bring it back in an hour. As it didn’t come, he went for it, and found they’d piled rails on to it and burnt it. I had taken care of my wagons, and he might have done the same with his. But that’s the difference between a Northern and a Southern man.

“Monday I returned home, and found my family living on corn-meal bran. They had been robbed of everything. The soldiers had even taken the hat off from my little grandson’s head, six years old. They took a mother-hen away from her little peeping chickens. There were fifty or a hundred soldiers in the house all one day, breaking open chests and bureaus; and those that come after took what the first had left. My folks asked for protection, being Northern people; and there was one officer who knew them; but he could control only his own men. So we fared no better than our neighbors.”

The staging to Scarborough was very rough; but our route lay through beautiful pine woods, carpeted with wild grass. It was January, but the spring frogs were singing.

The best rolling-stock of the Central Road had been run up to Macon on Sherman’s approach, and could not be got down again. So I had the pleasure of riding from Scarborough to Savannah in an old car crowded full of wooden chairs, in place of the usual seats.

The comments of the passengers on the destruction wrought by Sherman were sometimes bitter, sometimes sentimental. A benevolent gentleman remarked: “How much good might be done with the millions of property destroyed, by building new railroads elsewhere!” To which a languishing lady replied: “What is the use of building railroads for slaves to ride on? I’d rather be free, and take it afoot, than belong to the Yankees, and ride.”

Our route lay along the low, level borders of the Ogeechee River, the soil of which is too cold for cotton. We passed immense swamps, in the perfectly still waters of which the great tree-trunks were mirrored. And all the way the spring frogs kept up their shrill singing.

At some of the stations I saw bales of Northern hay that had come up from Savannah. “There is a commentary on our style of farming,” said an intelligent planter from near Millen. “This land, though worthless for cotton, could be made to grow splendid crops of grass,—and we import our hay.”

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LXX. A GLANCE AT SAVANNAH

On the 16th of November, 1864, Sherman began his grand march from Atlanta. In less than a month his army had made a journey of three hundred miles, consuming and devastating the country. On December 13th, by the light of the setting sun, General Hazen’s Division of the 15th Corps made it’s brilliant and successful assault on Fort McAlister on the Ogeechee, opening the gate to Savannah and the sea. On the night of the 20th, Savannah was hurriedly evacuated by the Rebels, and occupied by Sherman on the 21st. The city, with a thousand prisoners, thirty-five thousand bales of cotton, two hundred guns, three steamers, and valuable stores, thus fell into our hands without a battle. Within forty-eight hours a United States transport steamer came to the wharf, and the new base of supplies, about which we were all at that time so anxious, was established.

The city was on fire during the evacuation. Six squares and portions of other squares were burned. At the same time a mob collected and commenced breaking into stores and dwellings. The destroyers of railroads were in season to save the city from the violence of its own citizens.

A vast multitude of negroes had followed the army to the sea. This exodus of the bondmen from the interior had been permitted, not simply as a boon to them, but as an injury to the resources of the Confederacy, like the destruction of its plantations and railroads. What to do with them now became a serious problem. Of his conference with Secretary Stanton on the subject at Savannah, General Sherman says: “We agreed perfectly that the young and able-bodied men should be enlisted as soldiers or employed by the quartermaster in the necessary work of unloading ships, and for other army purposes; but this left on our hands the old and feeble, the women and children, who had necessarily to be fed by the United States. Mr. Stanton summoned a large number of the old negroes, mostly preachers, with whom he held a long conference, of which he took down notes. After this conference, he was satisfied the negroes could, with some little aid from the United States by means of the abandoned plantations on the sea islands and along the navigable rivers, take care of themselves.” Sherman’s “General Orders No. 15” were the result, giving negro settlers “possessory titles” to these lands. Thus originated the knotty Sea-Island controversy, of which more by-and-by.

The aspect of Savannah is peculiarly Southern, and not without a certain charm. Its uniform squares, its moist and heavy atmosphere, the night fogs that infest it, the dead level of its sandy streets, shaded by two and four rows of moss-draped trees, and its frequent parks of live-oaks, water-oaks, wild-olives, and magnolias, impress you singularly. The city, notwithstanding its low, flat appearance, is built on a plain forty feet above the river. The surrounding country is an almost unbroken level. Just across the Savannah lie the low, marshy shores of South Carolina. It is the largest city of Georgia, having something like twenty-five thousand inhabitants. Here, before the war, dwelt the aristocracy of the country, living in luxurious style upon the income of slave labor on the rice and cotton plantations.

Trade was less active at Savannah than in some of the interior towns, owing to its greater isolation. A flood of business passed through it, however. The expense of transportation was very great. Every bale of cotton brought down the river from Augusta, two hundred and thirty miles, cost eight dollars; and the tariff on returning freights was two cents a pound.

There were sixteen hundred colored children in Savannah, twelve hundred of whom attended school. Three hundred and fifty attended the schools of the Savannah Educational Association, organized and supported by the colored population. I visited one of these schools, taught by colored persons, in a building which was a famous slave-mart, in the good old days of the institution. In the large auction-room, and behind the iron-barred windows of the jail-room over it, the children of slaves were now enjoying one of the first, inestimable advantages of freedom.

If you go to Savannah, do not fail to visit the Bonaventure Cemetery, six miles from the city. You drive out southward on the Thunderbolt Road, past the fortifications, through fields of stumps and piny undergrowths, whose timber was cut away to give range to the guns, to the fragrant, sighing solitude of pine woods beyond. Leaving the main road, you pass beneath the low roof of young evergreen oaks overarching the path. This leads you into avenues of indescribable beauty and gloom. Whichever way you look, colonnades of huge live-oak trunks open before you, solemn, still, and hoary. The great limbs meeting above are draped and festooned with long fine moss. Over all is a thick canopy of living green, shutting out the glare of day. Beneath is a sparse undergrowth of evergreen bushes, half concealing a few neglected old family monuments. The area is small, but a more fitting scene for a cemetery is not conceivable.

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LXXI. CHARLESTON AND THE WAR

The railroad from Savannah to Charleston, one hundred and four miles in length, running through a country of rice-plantations, was struck and smashed by Sherman in his march from the sea. As it never was a paying road before the war, I could see no prospect of its being soon repaired. The highway of the ocean supplies its place. There was little travel and less business between the two cities, two or three small steamers a week being sufficient to accommodate all. Going on board one of these inferior boats at three o’clock one afternoon, at Savannah, I awoke the next morning in Charleston harbor.

A warm, soft, misty morning it was, the pale dawn breaking through rifts in the light clouds overhead, a vapory horizon of dim sea all around. What is that great bulk away on our left, drifting past us? That is the thing known as Fort Sumter: it does not float from its rock so easily: it is we who are drifting past it. We have just left Fort Moultrie on our right; the low shores on which it crouches lie off there still visible, like banks of heavier mist. That obscure phenomenon ahead yonder looms too big for a hencoop, and turns out to be Fort Ripley. The dawn brightens, the mist clears, and we see, far on our right, Castle Pinckney; and on our left a gloomy line of pine forests, which we are told is James Island.

This is historic ground we are traversing,—or rather historic water. How the heart stirs with the memories it calls up! What is that at anchor yonder? A monitor! A man on its low flat deck walks almost level with the water. Two noticeable objects follow after us: one is a high-breasted, proud-beaked New York steamer; the other, the wonderful light of dawn dancing upon the waves.

Before us all the while, rising and expanding as we approach, its wharves and shipping, its warehouses and church steeples, gradually taking shape, on its low peninsula thrust out between the two rivers, is the haughty and defiant little city that inaugurated treason, that led the Rebellion, that kindled the fire it took the nation’s blood to quench. And is it indeed you, city of Charleston, lying there so quiet, harmless, half asleep, in the peaceful morning light? Where now are the joy-intoxicated multitudes who thronged your batteries and piers and house-tops, to see the flag of the Union hauled down from yonder shattered little fortress? Have you forgotten the frantic cheers of that frantic hour? Once more the old flag floats there! How do you like the looks of it, city of Charleston?

I gave my travelling-bag to a black boy on the wharf, who took it on his head and led the way through the just awakened streets to the Mills House.

The appearance of the city in the early morning atmosphere, was prepossessing. It is a well built, light, and airy city. It lacks the broad streets, the public squares, and the forest of trees, which give to Savannah its charm; but it strikes one as a more attractive place for a residence. You are not at all oppressed with a sense of the lowness of the situation; and yet it is far less elevated than Savannah, the flat and narrow peninsula on which it is built rising but a few feet above high water.

Charleston did not strike me as a very cleanly town, and I doubt if it ever was such. Its scavengers are the turkey buzzards. About the slaughter-pens on the outskirts of the city, at the markets, and wherever garbage abounds, these black, melancholy birds, properly vultures, congregate in numbers. There is a law against killing them, and they are very tame. In contrast with these obscenities are the gardens of the suburban residences, green in midwinter with semi-tropical shrubs and trees.

Here centred the fashion and aristocracy of South Carolina, before the war. Charleston was the watering-place where the rich cotton and rice planters, who lived upon their estates in winter, came to lounge away the summer season, thus inverting the Northern custom. It has still many fine residences, built in a variety of styles; but, since those recent days of its pride and prosperity, it has been wofully battered and desolated.

The great fire of 1861 swept diagonally across the city from river to river. A broad belt of ruin divides what remains. One eighth of the entire city was burned, comprising much of its fairest and wealthiest quarter. No effort had yet been made to rebuild it. The proud city lies humbled in its ashes, too poor to rise again without the helping hand of Northern Capital.

The origin of this stupendous fire still remains a mystery. It is looked upon as one of the disasters of the war, although it cannot be shown that it had any connection with the war. When Eternal Justice decrees the punishment of a people, it sends not War alone, but also its sister terrors, Famine, Pestilence, and Fire.

The ruins of Charleston are the most picturesque of any I saw in the South. The gardens and broken walls of many of its fine residences remain to attest their former elegance. Broad, semicircular flights of marble steps, leading up once to proud doorways, now conduct you, over their cracked and calcined slabs, to the level of high foundations swept of everything but the crushed fragments of their former superstructures, with here and there a broken pillar, and here and there a windowless wall. Above the monotonous gloom of the ordinary ruins rise the churches,—the stone tower and roofless walls of the Catholic Cathedral, deserted and solitary, a roost for buzzards; the burnt-out shell of the Circular Church, interesting by moonlight, with its dismantled columns still standing, like those of an antique temple; and others scarcely less noticeable.

There are additional ruins scattered throughout the lower part of the city, a legacy of the Federal bombardment. The Scotch Church, a large structure, with two towers and a row of front pillars, was rendered untenantable by ugly breaches in its roof and walls, that have not yet been repaired. The old Custom-House and Post-Office building stands in an exceedingly dilapidated condition, full of holes. Many other public and private buildings suffered no less. Some were quite demolished; while others have been patched up. After all, it would seem that the derisive laughter with which the Charlestonians, according to contemporaneous accounts in their newspapers, received the Yankee shells, must have been of a forced or hysterical nature. Yet I found those who still maintained that the bombardment did not amount to much. A member of the city fire department said to me:—

“But few fires were set by shells. There were a good many fires, but they were mostly set by mischief-makers. The object was to get us firemen down in shelling range. There was a spite against us, because we were exempt from military duty.”

The fright of the inhabitants, however, was generally frankly admitted. The greatest panic occurred immediately after the occupation of Morris Island by General Gillmore. “The first shells set the whole town in commotion. It looked like everybody was skedaddling. Some loaded up their goods, and left nothing but their empty houses. Others just packed up a few things in trunks and boxes, and abandoned the rest. The poor people and negroes took what they could carry on their backs or heads, or in their arms, and put for dear life. Some women put on all their dresses, to save them. For a while the streets were crowded with runaways,—hurrying, hustling, driving,—on horseback, in wagons, and on foot,—white folks, dogs, and niggers. But when it was found the shells only fell down town, the people got over their scare; and many who went away came back again. Every once in a while, however, the Yankees would appear to mount a new gun, or get a new gunner; and the shells would fall higher up. That would start the skedaddling once more. One shell would be enough to depopulate a whole neighborhood.”

A Northern man, who was in Charleston during the war, told me that he was lying sick in a house which was struck by a shell early during the bombardment. “A darkey that was nursing me took fright and ran away, and left me in about as unpleasant a condition as I was ever in. I couldn’t stir from my bed, and there was much more danger that I might die from neglect, than from Gillmore’s shells. Finally a friend found me out, and removed me to another house a few streets above. It was nine months before the shells reached us there.”

The shelling began in July, 1863, and was kept up pretty regularly until the surrender of the city, on the 18th of February, 1865. This last event occurred just four years after the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as President of the Confederate States. How did the people of Charleston keep that last glorious anniversary?

Sherman’s northward marching army having flanked the city, its evacuation was not unexpected; but when it came, confusion and dismay came with it. The Rebel troops, departing, adhered to their usual custom of leaving ruin behind them. They fired the upper part of the city, burning an immense quantity of cotton, with railroad buildings and military stores. While the half-famished poor were rushing early in the morning to secure a little of the Confederate rice in one of the warehouses, two hundred kegs of powder blew up, killing and mutilating a large number of those unfortunate people. Here also it devolved upon the Union troops to save the city from the fires set by its own friends.

Of the sixty-five thousand inhabitants which the city contained at the beginning of the secession war, only about ten thousand remained at the time of the occupation by our troops. Those belonged mostly to the poorer classes, who could not get away. Many people rushed in from the suburbs, got caught inside the intrenchments, and could not get out again. Others rushed out panic-stricken from the burning city, and when they wished to return, found that they could not. Charleston, from the moment of its occupation, was a sealed city. Families were divided. Husbands shut within the line of fortifications drawn across the neck of the peninsula, could not hear from their families in the country; and wives in the country could not get news from their husbands. “It was two months before I could learn whether my husband was dead or alive,” said a lady, who took refuge in the interior. And some who remained in Charleston, told me it was a month before they heard of the burning of Columbia; that they could not even learn which way Sherman’s army had gone.

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LXXII. A VISIT TO FORT SUMTER

One morning I went on board the government supply steamer “Mayflower,” plying between the city and the forts below. As we steamed down to the rows of piles, driven across the harbor to compel vessels to pass under the guns of the forts, I noticed that they were so nearly eaten off by worms that, had the war continued a year or two longer, it would have been necessary to replace them. There is in these Southern waters an insect very destructive to the wood it comes in contact with. It cannot live in fresh water, and boats, the bottoms of which are not sheathed, or covered with tar, are taken occasionally up the rivers, to get rid of it. Only the palmetto is able to resist its ravages; of the tough logs of which the wharves of Charleston are constructed.

Fort Sumter loomed before us, an enormous mass of ruins. We approached on the northeast side, which appeared covered with blotches and patches of a most extraordinary description, commemorating the shots of our monitors. The notches in the half-demolished wall were mended with gabions. On the southeast side not an angle, not a square foot of the original octagonal wall remained, but in its place was an irregular steeply sloping bank of broken bricks, stones, and sand,—a half-pulverized mountain, on which no amount of shelling could have any other effect than to pulverize it still more.

I could now readily understand the Rebel boast, that Fort Sumter, after each attack upon it, was stronger than ever. Stronger for defence, as far as its walls were concerned, it undoubtedly was; but where were the double rows of portholes for heavy ordnance, and the additional loopholes on the south side for musketry? Our guns had faithfully smashed everything of that kind within their range.

On the northwest side, facing the city, the perpendicular lofty wall stands in nearly its original condition, its scientific proportions, of stupendous solid masonry, astonishing us by their contrast with the other sides. Between this wall and the wreck of a Rebel steamer, shot through and sunk whilst bringing supplies to the fort, we landed. By flights of wooden steps we reached the summit, and looked down into the huge crater within. This is a sort of irregular amphitheatre, with sloping banks of gabions and rubbish on all sides save one. On the southeast side, where the exterior of the fort received the greatest damage from the guns on Morris Island, the interior received the least. There are no casemates left, except on that side. In the centre stands the flag-staff, bearing aloft the starry symbol of the national power, once humbled here, and afterwards trailed long through bloody dust, to float again higher and haughtier than ever, on those rebellious shores. Who, that loves his country, can look upon it there without a thrill?

The fort is built upon a mole, which is flooded by high-water. It was half-tide that morning, and climbing down the slope of the southeast embankment, I walked upon the beach below,—or rather upon the litter of old iron that strewed it thick as pebble-stones. It was difficult to step without placing the foot upon a rusty cannon-ball or the fragment of a shell. The curling waves broke upon beds of these iron debris, extending far down out of sight into the sea. I suggested to an officer that this would be a valuable mine to work, and was told that the right to collect the old iron around the fort had already been sold to a speculator for thirty thousand dollars.

The following statement of the cost to the United States of some of the forts seized by the Rebels, and of others they would have been glad to seize, but could not see their way clear to do so, will interest a few readers.

Fort Moultrie, $87,601. (Evacuated by Major Anderson Dec. 26th, 1860.)

Castle Pinckney, $53,809. (Seized by South Carolina State troops, Dec. 27th, 1860.)

Fort Sumter, $977,404.

Fort Pulaski, at the mouth of the Savannah River, $988,859. (Seized by order of Governor Brown, Jan. 3d, 1861.)

Fort Morgan, Mobile Harbor, $1,242,552. (Seized Jan. 4th, 1861.)

Fort Gaines, opposite, $221,500. (Same fate.)

Fort Jackson, on the Mississippi, below New Orleans, $837,608. Its fellow, Fort St. Philip, $258,734. (Both seized Jan. 10th, 1861.)

Fort Warren, Boston Harbor, $1,208,000. (Not convenient for the Rebels to appropriate.)

Fortress Monroe, the most expensive, as it is the largest of our forts, $2,476,771. (Taken by Jeff Davis in May, 1865, under peculiar circumstances, and still occupied by him at this date, May, 1866.)

I found eighty-five United States soldiers in Sumter: a mere handful, yet they were five more than the garrison that held it at the time of Beauregard’s bombardment in April, 1861. My mind went back to those earlier days, and to that other little band. How anxiously we had watched the newspapers, week after week, to see if the Rebels would dare to execute their threats! Even the children caught the excitement, and asked eagerly, as papa came home at night with the news, “Is Fort Sumter attackted?” At last the defiant act was done, and what a raging, roaring fire it kindled all over the land! How our hearts throbbed in sympathy with Major Anderson and his seventy-nine heroes! Major, Colonel, General Anderson,—well might he step swiftly up the degrees of rank, for he was already atop of our hearts.

It was so easy for a man to blaze forth into sudden glory of renown at that time! One true, loyal, courageous deed, and fame was secure. But when the hurricane howl of the storm was at its height, when the land was all on fire with such deeds, glory was not so cheap. Only the taller flame could make itself distinguished, only the more potent voice be heard amid the roar. So many a hero of many a greater exploit than Anderson’s passed on unnoted.

And looking back coolly at the event from the walls of Sumter to-day, it is not easy to understand how a patriot and a soldier, who knew his duty, could have sat quiet in his fortress while Rebel batteries were rising all around him. He was acting on the defensive, you say,—waiting for the Rebels to commence hostilities. But hostilities had already begun. The first spadeful of earth thrown up, to protect the first Rebel gun, within range of Sumter, was an act of war upon Sumter. To wait until surrounded by a ring of fire, which could not be resisted, before opening the guns of the fort, appears, by the light both of military duty and of common sense, absurd. But fortunately something else rules, in a great revolution, besides military duty and common sense; and in the plan of that Providence which shapes our ways, I suppose Major Anderson did the best and only thing that was to be done. Besides, forbearance, to the utmost verge of that virtue, and sometimes a little beyond, was the policy of the government he served.

Reëmbarking on the steamer, and running over to Morris Island, I noticed that Sumter, from that side, looked like nothing but a solitary sandy bluff, heaved up in the middle of the harbor.

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LXXIII. A PRISON AND A PRISONER

“Is this your first visit to Charleston?” I asked General S——, one day as we dined together.

“My first visit,” he replied, “occurred in the summer of 1864, considerably against my inclination. I was lodged at the expense of the Confederate Government in the Work-House,—not half as comfortable a place as this hotel!”

Both visits were made in the service of the United States Government; but under what different circumstances! Then, a helpless, insulted prisoner; now, he came in a capacity which brought to him as humble petitioners some of the most rebellious citizens of those days. When sick and in prison, they did not minister unto him; but since he sat in an office of public power, nothing could exceed their polite, hat-in-hand attentions.

Dinner over, he proposed that we should go around and look at his old quarters in the Work-House. I gladly assented, and, on the way, drew from him the story of his capture.

He was taken prisoner at the battle of July 22d, before Atlanta, and placed on a train, with a number of other prisoners, to be conveyed to Macon.

“When we were about ten or a dozen miles from Macon, I went and sat on the platform with the guard. To prevent his suspecting my design, I told him I was disabled by rheumatism, and complained of pain and weakness in my back. He presently leaned against the car, and closed his eyes; like everybody else after the battles of July, he was pretty well used up, and in a few minutes he appeared to be asleep. His gun was cocked, ready to shoot any prisoner that attempted to escape; and I quietly took the cap off, without disturbing him. Then I didn’t dare wait a minute for a better opportunity, but jumped when I could. We were five or six miles from Macon, and the train was running about ten miles an hour. As I took my leap, I felt my hat flying from my head, and instinctively put up my hand and caught it, knowing if it was lost it might give a clew that would lead to my recapture. All this passed through my mind while I went rolling down an embankment eighteen or twenty feet high. I thought I never should strike the bottom. When I did, the concussion was so great that I lay under a fence, nearly senseless, for I don’t know how long: I couldn’t have moved, even if I had known a minute’s delay would cause me to be retaken.

“After a while I recovered, got up, crossed the fields, and found a road on the edge of some woods. It was then just at dusk. I walked all night, and in the morning found myself where I started. I had been walking around a hill, on a road made by woodmen.

“I was very tired, but I made up my mind I must leave that place. I got the points of the compass by the light in the east, and started to walk in a northerly direction, hoping to strike our lines somewhere near Atlanta. I soon passed a field of squealing hogs. I ought to have taken warning by their noise; but I kept on, and presently met a man with a bag of corn on his shoulder, going to feed them. I was walking fast, with my coat on my arm; and we passed each other without saying a word. My whole appearance was calculated to excite suspicion. Besides, one might know by my uniform that I was a Yankee officer. I suppose, by the law of self-defence, I ought to have turned about and put him out of the way of doing me any mischief. It would have been well for me if I had. I was soon out of sight; but I could hear the hogs squealing still, so I knew he had not stopped to give them the corn; I knew he had dropped his bag and run, as well as if I had watched him.

“I crossed the fields to the road, where I saw somebody coming very fast on a horse. I hid in some weeds, and presently saw this same man riding by at a sharp gallop towards a neighboring plantation.

“Then I knew I had a hard time before me. I first sat down and rubbed pine leaves and tobacco on the soles of my boots; then took once more to the fields. It wasn’t an hour before I heard the bloodhounds on my track. I can never tell what I suffered during the next three days. I did not sleep at all; I travelled almost incessantly. Sometimes when I stopped to rest the dogs would come in sight; and often I could hear them when I did not see them. I baffled them continually by changing my course, walking in streams, and rubbing tobacco and pine leaves on my boot-soles.”

“What did you live on all this time?”

“I will tell you what I ate: three crackers, which I had with me when I jumped from the cars, one water-melon, and some raw green corn I picked in a field. The third day I got rid of the dogs entirely. I saw a lonely looking house on a hill, and went to it. It was occupied by a widow. I asked for something to eat, and she cooked me a dinner while I kept watch for the dogs. Perhaps she was afraid to do differently; but she appeared very kind. When the dinner was ready I was so sick from excitement and exhaustion that I couldn’t eat. I managed to force down an egg and a spoonful of peas, and that was all. The Rebels had taken my money, and I could pay her only with thanks.

“I travelled nearly all that night again. Towards morning I lay by in a canebrake, and slept a little. It was raining hard. The next day I started on again. As I was crossing a road, suddenly a man came round a steep bank, on horseback. I didn’t see him until he was right upon me. I felt desperate. He asked me some question, and I gave him a surly answer. I thought I wouldn’t leave the road until he had gone on; but he checked his horse, and rode along by my side.

“’You look like you are in trouble,’ he said.

“’I am,’ I said.

“’Can I be of any service to you?’

“’Yes. I want to go to Crawford’s Station. How far is it?’

“He said it was three miles, and told me the way to go. Crawford’s is only fifteen miles from Macon; so you see I had not got far whilst running from the dogs.

“Suddenly a terrible impulse took me. I turned upon him; I felt fierce; I could have murdered him, if necessary.

“’I told you a lie,’ said I. ‘I am not going to Crawford’s. I am a Federal soldier trying to escape.’

“He turned pale. ‘I am the provost-marshal of this district,’ he said, after we had looked each other full in the face for about a minute, ‘and do you know it is my duty to arrest you?’

“Then a power came upon me such as I never felt before in my life; and I talked to him. I laid open the whole question of the war with a clearness and force which astonishes me now when I think of it. I believe I convinced him. Then I told him that if I had been doing my duty, it was his duty to help me escape, instead of arresting me. And then I prophesied:—‘This war is going to end,’ I said; ‘and it is going to end in only one way. As true as there is a heaven above us, your Confederate Government is going to be wiped from the earth; and then where will you be? then what will you think of the duty of one man to arrest another whose only fault is that he has been fighting for his country? The time is coming, sir, when it may make a mighty difference with you, whether you help me now, or send me to a Rebel prison.’

“He looked at me in perfect amazement. He did not answer me a word; only when I got through he said, ‘I’d give a thousand dollars if I had not met you!’ I got down to drink from a ditch by the road. Then he said, ‘I’ve got a canteen at the house which you might have.’ That was the first intimation I received that he would help me.

“He told me to stay where I was and he would bring me something better to drink than ditch-water. I looked him through. ‘I’ll trust you,’ I said; for no man ever looked as he did who wasn’t sincere. Yet there was danger he might change his mind; and I waited with great anxiety to see whether he would bring the canteen or a guard of soldiers. At last he came—with the canteen! It was full of the most delicious spring water. I can’t begin to tell you how good that water tasted! The nectar of the gods was nothing to it.

“That night he hid me between two bales of cotton in his gin-house. He brought me bacon and biscuits enough to last me two or three days. What was more to the purpose, he gave me a suit of citizens’ clothes to put on. While it was yet early, he brought me out, and went with me a mile or so on my way. He gave me the names of several citizens of the country, so that I could claim to be going to see them if anybody questioned me. I carried my uniform with me tied up in a bundle, which I intended to drop in the first piece of woods at a safe distance from his house. I never parted with a man under more affecting circumstances. An enemy, he had risked his life to save me,—for we both knew that if the part he took in my escape was discovered, his reward would be the halter.

“I had a valuable gold watch, which the Rebels had not taken from me, and I urged him to accept it. ‘If I am recaptured,’ I said, ‘some Confederate soldier will get it. If I escape, it will be the greatest source of satisfaction I can have to know that you keep this token of my gratitude.’ At last he consented to accept it, and we parted.

“I travelled due north all that day, and lay by at night in a canebrake. How it rained again! The next day, in avoiding the main roads, as I had been careful to do whenever I could, I got entangled among streams that put into the Ocmulgee River. I came to a large one, and as I was turning back from it, I saw a squad of soldiers going down to it to bathe. I was in a complete cul de sac, and I must either run for the river or meet them. I put on a bold face, and went out towards them. As it was an extraordinary situation for a stranger to be in, they naturally suspected everything was not right. They asked me where I was from, and where I was going. I said I came from near Macon, and that I was going to visit my uncle, Dr. Moore, in De Kalb County. I suppose my speech betrayed me. They didn’t suspect me of being an escaped prisoner; but their captain said, ‘I believe you’re a damned Yankee spy.’

“That sealed my fate. I was taken to Forsyth, on the Macon and Western Railroad, where I was finally recognized by the guard I had escaped from.

“While I was sitting in the depot, in my citizens’ clothes, a half-drunken Confederate soldier came in, flourishing a loaded pistol, and inquiring for the ‘damned Yankee.’ ‘What do you want of him?’ I asked. ‘To shoot his heart out!’ said he. ‘What!’ said I, ‘would you shoot a prisoner? I hope you are too chivalrous to do that.’ ‘It’s a part of my chivalry to kill every Yankee I find,’ said he. ‘Just show him to me, and you’ll see.’ ‘I’ll show him to you. I am the man. Now let’s see you shoot him.’

“He swore I was joking. He wouldn’t believe I was the Yankee, even when the guard told him I was; and he went blustering away again. I suspect that he was a fellow of more talk than courage.

“Meanwhile Mr. T——, who gave me my citizens’ dress, heard of my recapture, and came over to Forsyth, in great anxiety lest I should betray him. I pretended not to recognize him, but gave him to understand by a look that his secret was safe. He said it was very important to ascertain how I came by my clothes, and questioned me. I said I obtained them of a good and true man, whom I should never name to his injury; but that I would tell where I left my uniform, because I wished to get it again. When I described the spot, he said he believed he recognized it, and, if so, that it was on one of his neighbors’ plantations. He sent to search, and the next day I received my uniform. I forgot to state that when I was retaken, my drawers were mildewed from my lying out in the cane-brakes in the rain.

“From Forsyth I was sent to the stockade at Macon, where I found my companions from whom I separated when I jumped from the car. I hadn’t been there three days when I formed a new plan of escape. I got the other prisoners enlisted in it, and we went to tunnelling the ground under the stockade. Each man worked with a knife, or a piece of hoop,—anything that he could scratch with,—and filled a haversack with the dirt, which was brought out and scattered over the ground. As prisoners exposed to the weather were always burrowing in caves, our design was not suspected. It was exceedingly toilsome work, and it was carried on principally by night. You would be astonished to see how much a man will accomplish, with not much besides his finger-nails to do with, when his liberty is at stake. We worked six tunnels, three feet high, and extending well out beyond the stockade. The very night when we were going to open them up on the outside, one of the prisoners, a Kentuckian, betrayed us. If we had found out who he was, he wouldn’t have lived a minute. Then, just as I was maturing another plan, I was sent here.”

We were at the Work-House, a castle-like building, flanked by two tall towers; built of brick, but covered with a cement in imitation of freestone. Before the war it was used as a safe place of deposit for that description of property known as slaves. Negroes for sale and awaiting the auction-day, negroes who had or had not merited chastisement not convenient for their city masters or mistresses to administer at home, negroes who had run away, or were in danger of running away, were sent here for safe-keeping or scientific flogging, as the case might be. It was a mere jail, with cells and bolts and bars, like any other. During the war, the negroes were transferred to another building near by, and the “Work-House” became a Yankee prison, in which officers were confined.

In the same block was the City Jail, likewise turned into a prison for Federal officers. The Roper and Marine Hospitals, not far off, were put to the same use.

It was a dungeon-like entrance, dark and low and damp, to which we gained admittance through a heavy door that creaked harshly on its hinges.

“When I first entered here,” said General S——, “a cold shudder ran over me. I looked around for a chance to escape, and saw behind and on each side of me two rows of bayonets, not encouraging to the most enterprising man!”

We walked through the empty, foul, and dismal passages, up-stairs and down-stairs; visited the various cells, the old negro whipping-room, the room in which General Stoneman, the captured raider, was confined; and at length came to a room in the second story of the west tower, which was occupied by General S—— and a dozen more Federal officers. There were several wooden bunks in it, on which they slept; from among which the General singled out his own. “This is the old thing I lay on! Here is my mark!”

He looked up: “Do you see that patched place in the roof? A shell came in there one day, when we were lying on our bunks. It made these holes in the floor. But it hurt no one.”

He took me to the window. “That other tower was knocked by a shell. It was one of our amusements to watch the shells as they came up from Morris Island, rose over the ruined Cathedral yonder, and passed diagonally across these streets, until they fell. They were dropping all the time; but the gunners knew where we were, and avoided us. At night we could watch them from the time they rose, until, after describing a beautiful curve, they fell and exploded. Our guard was much more afraid of them than we were. Every day there was a fire set by them. This burnt section near the Work-House was set by a shell while I was here.”

We went down into the yard. “I never got outside of this enclosure but once. Then I went through that gate for a load of wood. I had a taste of the pure air, and I can’t tell you how good it was! It exhilarated me like wine.”

On the other side of the yard was the building to which the negroes were transferred. “Every day we could hear the yells of those who were being whipped.”

In the yard is a wooden tower of observation, which we climbed, and had a view of the city. It was occupied as a lookout by the Rebel guard.

“Near the foot of this tower,” said General S——, “was a small mountain of offal,—fragments of food, old bones, and the like, thrown out from the prison; a horrible heap,—all a moving mass of maggots,—left to engender disease. Luckily for us, the men on guard were made sick by it, and it was finally removed.

“The officer who had control of the prison has been appointed United States Marshal for the State of South Carolina, for his kindness to us,” he continued. “It is strange I never heard of his kindness when I was here. We were not whipped like the negroes; but in other respects our treatment was no better than they received. Out of curiosity I once measured my rations for ten days, and counted just fifty-five spoonfuls,—five and a half spoonfuls a day!

“I believe the prisoners at the Roper Hospital were treated very well. They had the run of the garden, and the privilege of trading with the negroes through the fence. But those who went there took an oath not to try to get away. I could have gone there, if I would have consented to take such an oath. But I wouldn’t sell the hope of escaping at any price.

“I hadn’t been here a week before we had three schemes on foot for getting out. One was to cut through a board in the yard fence; but we found we were watched too closely for that. Another was to make a tunnel to the sewer in the street in front of the prison, as I will show you.”

Descending the tower, he took me to an iron grating that covered a dark cavity in the ground under one of the prison passages.

“Here is a large cistern, which we had exhausted of its contents. One day I pulled up this grate, dropped down into the hole, lighted a candle which I had in my pocket, and made an exploration. On coming out I gave a favorable report, and that night we went to digging. We tunnelled first through the cistern wall, then through the foundation wall of the prison, and got into the sand under the street. We half filled the old cistern with the stones and dirt we dug out with sticks, old bones, and any bits of iron we could lay our hands on. We worked like rats. Two or three of us were constantly in the tunnel, while others kept watch above. A friend outside had given us information with regard to the position of the sewer; we had already struck it, and the next night we should have got into it, and into the street beyond the prison guard, when once more we were betrayed by the same Kentuckian who exposed our scheme at Macon. This time we found him out, and he had to be removed from the prison to save his life.

“We had our third and great plan in reserve.

“There were at that time six hundred prisoners in the Work-House, three hundred in the City Jail adjoining, and one thousand in the Roper and Marine Hospitals, within an arrow’s shot. These were officers. At the Race-Course prison, on the outskirts of the town, there were four thousand enlisted men. Our guard, here at the Work-House, consisted of three reliefs of thirty-three men each. They were mere militia, that had never seen service. Old soldiers like us were not afraid of such fellows; and we knew that if we made a demonstration they would be afraid of us. Our plan was, for two prisoners, at a given signal, to leap on the back of each one of the guard in the prison, and disarm him. Possibly some of us might get hurt, but we were pretty sure of success. Then, with the arms thus secured, we could easily capture the second relief guard as it marched in. Then we were to rush out immediately and seize the third relief. This would give us ninety-nine guns. With these we were to march directly upon the arsenal, capture it, and provide ourselves with all the arms and ammunition we needed. Then to release the thirteen hundred officers at the jail and hospitals, and the four thousand privates at the Race-Course, would have been easy; and we should have had a force of near six thousand men. With these, the city would have been in our power.

“Our plan then was, to set fires clear across it, from river to river, to make a barricade of burning buildings against the Rebel artillery that would have been coming down to look after us. Of course the panic and confusion of the citizens would have been extreme, and the military would hardly have known what we were about; while our plans were laid with mathematical precision. Our friend outside had smuggled in to us, done up in balls of bread, a map of Charleston, with complete explanations of every point about which we needed information; and through him we had communicated with our friends on Morris Island. We were to seize the shipping, capture the water-batteries, and hold the lower part of the town until our friends, under cover of a furious bombardment, could come to our assistance. My whole heart was in this scheme, and the time was set for its execution. The very day before the day appointed, I was exchanged, together with the principal leaders in it. To be let out just on the eve of what promised to be such a brilliant exploit, was almost a disappointment.”

“I am still interested to know-one thing,” I said. “Have you ever heard from the Rebel who gave you the citizen’s dress?”

“After the breaking up of the rebellion I wrote to him, making inquiries concerning his condition. He replied, saying that he had come out of the war a poor man, and that he did not know how he was to relieve the destitution of his family. I immediately made application in his behalf to the War Department, and obtained for him a pardon, and a place under the government, in his own county, which he now fills, and which yields him a liberal income.”

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LXXIV. THE SEA ISLANDS

The plantation negro of the great cotton and rice-growing States is a far more ignorant and degraded creature than the negro of Virginia and Tennessee. This difference is traceable to a variety of causes. First, the farmers of the slave-breeding States were formerly accustomed to select, from among their servants, the most stupid and vicious class, to be sold in the Southern market. To the same destination went all the more modern importations of raw savages from the coast of Africa. The negro is susceptible to the influences of civilization; and in the border States his intelligence was developed by much intercourse with the white race. His veins also received a generous infusion of the superior blood. The same may be said of house and town servants throughout the South. The slaves of large and isolated plantations, however, enjoyed but limited advantages of this sort; seeing little of civilized society beyond the overseer, whose lessons were not those of grace, and the poor whites around them, scarcely more elevated in the scale of being than themselves.

In South Carolina the results of these combined causes are more striking than in any other State. The excess of her black population, and the unmitigated character of slavery within her borders, afford perhaps a sufficient explanation of this fact. In 1860 she had 291,388 white, 402,406 slave, and 9,914 free colored inhabitants. Even these figures do not indicate the overwhelming predominance of black numbers in certain localities. In the poorer districts, as counties are here called, the whites are in a majority; while in certain others there were three and four times as many negroes as white persons. Herded together in great numbers, and worked like cattle, the habits of these wretched people, their comforts and enjoyments, were little above those of the brute. Under such circumstances it was hardly possible for them to make any moral or intellectual advancement, but often, even to the third generation, they remained as ignorant as when brought from the wilds of Africa.

It was owing much no doubt to this excessive black population and its degraded character, that labor appeared to be more disorganized, and the freedmen in a worse condition in South Carolina, than elsewhere. The Sea-Island question, however, had had a very marked and injurious effect upon labor in the State, and should be taken into consideration.

The most ignorant of the blacks have certain true and strong instincts, which stand them in the place of actual knowledge. Their faith in Providence has a depth and integrity which shames the halting belief of the more enlightened Christian. Next to that, and strangely blended with it, is the faith in the government which has brought them out of bondage. Along with these goes the simple and strong conviction, that, in order to be altogether free, and to enjoy the fruits of their freedom, they must have homes of their own. The government encouraged them in that belief and hope. Conscious of their own loyalty, and having a clear understanding of the disloyalty of their masters, they expected confidently, long after the war had closed, that the forfeited lands of these masters would be divided among them. It was only after earnest and persistent efforts on the part of the officers of the Bureau, to convince them that this hope was futile, that they finally abandoned it.

But by this time it had become known among the freed people of South Carolina and Georgia, that extensive tracts of land on the coast of these States had been set aside by military authority for their use. There the forty thousand bondmen who followed Sherman out of Georgia, together with other thousands who had preceded them, or come after, were established upon independent farms, in self-governing communities from which all white intruders were excluded. These settlements were chiefly upon the rich and delightful Sea Islands, which the Rebel owners had abandoned, and which now became the paradise of the freedmen’s hopes. “Go there,” they said, “and every man can pick out his lot of forty acres, and have it secured to him.”

With such fancies in his brain, the negro of the interior was not likely to remain contented on the old plantation, after learning that no acre of it was to be given him. He was naturally averse to accepting a white master, when he might be his own master elsewhere. His imaginative soul sang too, in its rude way:—

“Oh, had we some sweet little isle of our own, In a blue summer ocean, far off and alone!”

And so the emigration to the coast set in.

In October, 1865, orders were issued that no more allotments of land should be made to the Freedmen. But this did not avail to stop entirely the tide of emigration; nor did it inspire with contentment those who remained in the interior. “If a freedman has forty acres on the coast,” they reasoned, “why shouldn’t we have as much here?” Hence one of the most serious troubles the officers of the Bureau had to contend against.

In October, General Howard visited the Sea Islands with the intention of restoring to the pardoned owners the lands on which freedmen had been settled, under General Sherman’s order. According to the President’s theory, a pardon entitled the person pardoned to the immediate restoration of his property. Hence arose a conflict of authority and endless confusion. Secretary Stanton had approved of Sherman’s order, and earnestly advised the freedmen to secure homesteads under the government’s protection. General Saxton, Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau, had in every way encouraged them to do the same. So had General Hunter. Chief Justice Chase had given them similar counsel. General Howard found the land-owners urgent in pressing their claims, and the freedmen equally determined in resisting them. Impressed by the immense difficulty of the problem, he postponed its immediate solution by a compromise, leaving the main question to be settled by Congress. Congress settled it, after a fashion, in the provisions of the Freedmen’s Bureau Bill; but that, in consequence of the President’s veto, did not become a law.

By General Howard’s plan, abandoned lands on which there were no freedmen settled under Sherman’s order, or only “a few,” were to be restored to pardoned owners. Other estates, on which there were more than “a few,” were also to be restored, provided arrangements could be made, satisfactory to both the owners and the freedmen. So nothing was settled. The owners claimed the lands, and wished the freedmen to make contracts to work for them. The freedmen claimed the lands, and positively refused to make contracts.

The freedmen’s crops for the past year had generally proved failures, or nearly so. Their friends argued that this result was owing to causes that could not be controlled,—the lack of capital, of seed, of mules and farming implements, and the lateness of the season when most of them commenced work. The owners of the lands contended that the negro, under the best conditions, could not make a crop of cotton. The truth probably lies between these two extremes. The freedmen lacked experience in management, as well as planting capital; and I have no doubt but many of them thought more of a gun and a fishing-rod, sources of a pleasure so new to them, than of hard work in the field, which was anything but a novelty.

I regret to add that the freedmen’s prospects for the coming year did not appear flattering. The uncertainty of their titles caused them deep trouble and discouragement, and they did not exhibit much energy in improving lands which might be taken from them at any moment. The feeling, “This is my home and my children’s,” seemed no longer to inspire them. The majority were at work; but others were sullenly waiting to see what the government would do.

This whole question is one of great embarrassment and difficulty, and it is not easy to say how it should be decided. The plan proposed by Congress, of securing to the freedmen the possession of the lands for three years, did not seem to me a very wise one. It would take them about three years, under the most favorable circumstances, to overcome the obstacles against which their poverty and inexperience would have to struggle; and the knowledge that, after all, those homes were not to be permanently their own, would tend to discourage industry and promote vagabondism. It would be better to remove them at once, if they are to be removed at all; but then the question presents itself, can a great and magnanimous government afford to break its pledges to these helpless and unfortunate people?

On the other hand, to make their titles perpetual, is to give over to uncertain cultivation, by a race supposed to exist only for the convenience of another, the most valuable cotton-lands of those States,—for it is here alone that the incomparable long-fibred “Sea-Island” staple is produced,—a conclusion deemed inadmissible and monstrous, especially by the Rebel owners of the lands.

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LXXV. A VISIT TO JAMES ISLAND

A company of South Carolina planters, who were going over to look at their estates on James Island, and learn if any arrangements could be made with the freedmen, invited me to accompany them; and on the morning of the day appointed, I left my hotel for the purpose.

Finding I was too early for the boat, I took a stroll along the wharves, and visited the colonies of homeless plantation negroes who had sought shelter under the open coal-sheds.

There were at that time in Charleston fifteen hundred freed people of this class waiting for transportation back to their former homes, or to the plantations of new masters who had hired them. A more wretched and pitiable herd of human beings I never saw; nor had I witnessed anything like it out of South Carolina.

Families were cooking and eating their breakfasts around smoky fires. On all sides were heaps of their humble household goods,—tubs, pails, pots and kettles, sacks, beds, barrels tied up in blankets, boxes, baskets, bundles. They had brought their live-stock with them; hens were scratching, pigs squealing, cocks crowing, and starved puppies whining.

One colony was going to Beaufort. “Mosser told we to go back. We’se no money, and we’se glad to git on gov’ment kindness, to git off.” But the government was not yet ready to send them.

Many seemed deeply to regret that they were so much trouble to the government. “We wants to git away to work on our own hook. It’s not a good time at all here. We does nothing but suffer from smoke and ketch cold. We wants to begin de planting business.”

Another colony had been two weeks waiting for transportation back to their old homes in Colleton District. Their sufferings were very great. Said an old woman, with a shawl over her head: “De jew and de air hackles we more’n anyting. De rain beats on we, and de sun shines we out. My chil’n so hungry dey can’t hole up. De Gov’ment, he han’t gib we nottin’. Said dey would put we on board Saturday. Some libs and some dies. If dey libs dey libs, and if dey dies dey dies.” Such was her dim philosophy. I tried to converse with others, who spoke a wild jargon peculiar to the plantations, of which I understood hardly one word in ten.

General Scott, who had recently succeeded General Saxton as Assistant Commissioner of the Bureau in South Carolina, was hastening measures for the relief of these poor people, and to prevent any more from coming to the city.

I walked around by the delightful residences on East Bay and South Bay, commanding fine views of the harbor and Ashley River; and reached the wharf from which we were to embark.

Opposite lay James Island, with its marshy borders, and its dark-green line of pines. Boats—mostly huge cypress dug-outs, manned by negroes—were passing to and fro, some coming from the island with loads of wood, others returning, heavily laden, with families of freedmen going to their new homes, and with household goods and supplies.

“This is interesting,” said one of the planters, whom I found in waiting. “That wood comes from our plantations. The negroes cut it off, bring it over to the city, and perhaps sell it to the actual owners of the land they have taken it from. We are buying our own wood of the darkey squatters. The negroes are still going to the island, picking their lands, and staking out forty-acre lots, though the Bureau is giving no more titles.”

A large cypress dug-out came to the wharf, rowed by a black man and his son.

“These boats all belonged to the planters, till the negroes took possession of them. Now a man has to hire a passage in his own canoe, and like as any way of one of his own negroes.”

The grim, silent boatman seemed to understand well that he was master of the situation. There were seven individuals in our party, and his charge for taking us over to the Island and back was ten dollars. He made no words about it: we could accept his terms, or find another boat. The gravity and taciturnity of this man indicated decided character, and no mean capacity for self-ownership. As he and his son rowed us across the river, he attended strictly to his business, hearing the talk of the planters about the race he represented—talk by no means complimentary—with an impenetrability of countenance quite astonishing.

This was the third visit of the planters to the island, since the war. On the first occasion, they were met by a party of negroes, about forty in number, who rushed down to the landing, armed with guns, and drove them away, with threats to kill them if they came to disturb them in their homes again; whereupon they discreetly withdrew. On their second visit they were accompanied by Captain Ketchum, special agent of the Bureau for the Sea Islands, to whose influence they probably owed their lives. They were met as before, surrounded by fierce black faces and levelled guns, captured, and not permitted to regain their boat until their leaders, who could read a little, became satisfied, from an examination of the Captain’s papers, that he was an officer of the government. “We are ready to do anything for gov’ment,” they said. “But we have nothing to do with these men.”

They asked the Captain, who were the real owners of the land,—they who had been placed there by the government, or the planters who had been fighting against the government?

“That is uncertain,” replied the conscientious Captain.

The planters, who had hoped for a different reply, well aware that the negroes could not be brought to terms without a positive assurance from an officer of the Bureau that they had no good title to the lands, were very much disgusted. “We may as well go back now,” said they. And scarcely any effort was made to induce the negroes to abandon their claims and make contracts.

This was now their third visit, and it remained to be seen how they would be received. We rowed a short distance down Wappoo Creek, which separates the island from the main land, and disembarked at a plantation belonging to three orphan children, whose guardian was a member of our party. The freedmen, having learned that the mere presence of the planters on the soil could effect nothing, had changed their tactics, and now not one of them was to be seen. Although there were twenty-two hundred on the island, it appeared as solitary and silent as if it had not an inhabitant.

We found the plantation house occupied as head-quarters by an officer of the Bureau, recently sent to the island. The guardian of the three orphans took me aside, showed me the desolated grounds without, shaded by magnificent live-oaks, and the deserted chambers within.

“You can understand my feelings coming here,” he said. “My sister expired in this room. She left her children to me. This estate, containing seventeen hundred acres, and worth fifty thousand dollars, is all that remains to them; and you see the condition it is in. Why does the Government of the United States persist in robbing orphan children? They have done nothing; they haven’t earned the titles of Rebels and traitors. Why not give them back their land?”

I sympathized sincerely with this honest gentleman and his orphan wards. “But you forget,” I said, “that such a war as we have passed through cannot be, without involving in its calamities the innocent as well as the rest. It would have been well if that fact had not been overlooked in the beginning.”

He made no reply. I afterwards learned from his friends that he was one of the original and most fiery secessionists of Charleston. He made a public speech, early in ’sixty-one,—printed in the newspapers at the time,—in which he expressly pledged his life and his fortune to the Confederate cause. His life he had managed to preserve; and of his fortune sufficient remained for the elegant maintenance of his own and his sister’s children; so that it appeared to me quite unreasonable for him to complain of the misfortune which he himself had been instrumental in bringing upon the orphans.

The party separated, each man going to look at his own estate. I accompanied one who had three fine plantations in the vicinity. A Northern man by birth, his sympathy had been with the government, while he found his private interest in working for the Confederate usurpation under profitable contracts. By holding his tongue and attending to business he had accumulated a handsome fortune,—wisely investing his Confederate scrip in real estate, which he thought somewhat more substantial. These plantations were a part of his earnings. Being a Northern man, and at heart a Union man, he deemed it hard that they should not be at once restored to him. The fact that they were his reward for aiding the enemies of his country,—rich gains, so to speak, snatched from the wreck of a pirate ship on board which he had served,—did not seem to have occurred to him as any bar to his claims.

At first we found all the freedmen’s houses shut up, and as silent as if the inhabitants had all gone to a funeral. By pressing into some of them, we discovered a few women and children, but the men had disappeared. Since they were not to resist our coming, it seemed their policy to have nothing whatever to do with us. At last we found an old negro too decrepit to run away, who sullenly awaited our approach.

“What is your name, uncle?”

“Samuel Butler.”

“Where are you from?”

“From St. John.”

“How did you come here?”

“Yankees fotch me.”

“Don’t you want to go back to St. John?”

“Yankees fotch me here,” repeated the old man, “and I won’t go back widout de Yankees send me back.”

We inquired about his family and his prospects.

“My chil’n ’s out in soldiering. I made corn, peas, and potatoes, I got enough to carry me out de year. I had to bought my own clo’es, besides. Gov’ment don’t help me none.”

He had his forty-acre lot, and would not peril his claim to it by talking about a contract.

In one cabin we found a very old negro lying on the floor, miserably sick with the dropsy. He had been “a faithful old family servant,” as the phrase is; and was accounted a wise head by the planters. When asked if he thought the freedmen could be prevailed upon to contract, he replied:

“What little we do will be sarvice to we-self. We don’t want to work for rest,”—meaning the planters.

Speaking of himself, he said:

“My time is all burnt out.” He said there was a heap of idlers on the island. “Dey’m on a full spree now. Dey got a sort of frolic in de brains.” There had been considerable destitution even among the industrious ones the past year; but many of them had made fair crops, and had corn sufficient to keep them till another harvest. “Dey’m more situated better now.” The small-pox had raged on the island, and “a sight of our people had died.”

We lingered at these cabins, waiting for a guard the officer at head-quarters thought it prudent to send with us. At last he arrived,—a shining black youngster in soldier-clothes, overflowing with vanity and politeness. “I’m waiting on your occupation, gentlemen,” he said; and we started on.

We passed a field in which there were several women at work. As they had no mule, they did everything by hand, chopping up the turf and weeds with their great awkward hoes, and scraping them, with the surface soil, into little ridges, on which cotton or corn was to be planted. This process of preparing the ground is called “listing”; it answers the purpose of ploughing, and the refuse stuff scraped together, rotting, serves instead of manure.

My companion inquired on what terms they would consent to give up their forty-acre lot. One of them, poising her formidable hoe, replied in accents that carried conviction with them:

“Gov’ment drap we here. Can’t go ’till Gov’ment take we off.”

As we were now proceeding to a more remote part of the island, our colored guard walked proudly on to protect us from danger. “Dey can’t make no raid on you, widout dey makes raid on me fus’!”

He evidently felt himself vastly superior to these low-down plantation niggers. And I noticed that when we stopped to talk with any of them, and my friend recorded their names and numbers, and I also took notes, this shining black fellow in blue likewise produced a piece of card and a pencil, and appeared to be writing down very interesting and amusing memoranda.

A mile or so from head-quarters we found negro men and women working in the fields.

“Is this your farm?” my friend inquired of one of them.

“I calls it mine. General Saxton told me to come and stake out my forty acres, and he’d give me a ticket for it.”

“Wouldn’t it be better for you to contract for good wages, than to work in this way?”

“No, I don’t want to contract. I’ll eat up my corn and peas fus’.”

“Did you raise much last year?”

“I begun too late. Den de drought hit us bad. Heap of places didn’t raise much. But I got a little.”

Observing a strange looking thing of skin and bones standing in the weeds, I asked, “Is that a horse?”

“Dat’s a piece o’ one. When he gits tired, I can take my arms; I’ve good strong arms.”

Upon that one of the women struck in vehemently:

“I can plough land same as a hoss. Wid dese hands I raise cotton dis year, buy two hosses!”

Seeing the immense disadvantage under which these poor people labored, without teams, without capital, and even without security in the possession of their little homesteads, I urged them to consider well what the planters had to offer.

“If I contract, what good does my forty acres do me?”

“But you are not sure of your forty acres. This year or next they may be given back to the former owner. Then you will have nothing; for you will have spent all your time and strength in trying to get a start. But if you work for wages, you will have, if you are prudent, a hundred and fifty dollars in clear cash at the end of the year. At that rate it will not be long before you will be able to buy a little place and stock it handsomely; when you will probably be much better off than you would be working here in this way.”

I could see that this argument was not without its weight with the men. They appeared troubled by it, but not convinced. The women clamored against it, and almost made me feel that I was an enemy, giving them insidious ill advice. And when I saw the almost religious attachment of these people to their homes, and their hope and ambition bearing up resolutely against poverty and every discouragement, it would have caused me a pang of remorse to know that I had persuaded any of them to give up their humble but worthy and honest aims. Then the children came around us, carrying primers, out of which they read with pleased eagerness, either for the fun of the thing, or to show us what they could do. The parents, forgetting the disheartening words we had spoken, said cheerily, “Richard, Helen, time for school!” and the little ones scampered away; the older ones resumed their work, and we walked on.

I was pleased to see some of the forty-acre lots enclosed by substantial new fences. But every question of benefit has two sides. The other side to this was that the fine old plantation shade-trees had been cut down and split into rails; a circumstance which made my friend the planter look glum.

The island is level, with handsome hedged avenues running through it in various directions. It is nine miles in length and three in breadth. We extended our walk as far as Fort Pemberton, on Stono River, which bounded my friend’s plantations in that direction. On our return, he thought he would try one more freedman with the offer of a contract.

The man was working with his wife on a little farm of indefinite extent. “I don’t know how much land I have. I guessed off as near as I could forty acres.”

He said he had “a large fambly,” and that he came from Charleston. “I heard there was a chance of we being our own driver here; that’s why we come.” He could get along very well if he only had a horse. “But if I can git de land, I’ll take my chances.”

“But if you can’t get the land?”

“If a man got to go crost de riber, and he can’t git a boat, he take a log. If I can’t own de land, I’ll hire or lease land, but I won’t contract.”

“Come, then,” said my friend, “we may as well go home.”

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LXXVI. SHERMAN IN SOUTH CAROLINA

“The march of the Federals into our State,” says a writer in the “Columbia Phœnix,” “was characterized by such scenes of license, plunder, and conflagration as very soon showed that the threats of the Northern press, and of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as a mere brutum fulmen. Daily long trains of fugitives lined the roads, with wives and children, and horses and stock and cattle, seeking refuge from the pursuers. Long lines of wagons covered the highways. Half-naked people cowered from the winter under bush-tents in the thickets, under the eaves of houses, under the railroad sheds, and in old cars left them along the route. All these repeated the same story of suffering, violence, poverty, and nakedness. Habitation after habitation, village after village,—one sending up its signal flames to the other, presaging for it the same fate,—lighted the winter and midnight sky with crimson horrors.

“No language can describe, nor can any catalogue furnish, an adequate detail of the wide-spread destruction of homes and property. Granaries were emptied, and where the grain was not carried off, it was strewn to waste under the feet of the cavalry, or consigned to the fire which consumed the dwelling. The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing. The roads were covered with butchered cattle, hogs, mules, and the costliest furniture. Valuable cabinets, rich pianos, were not only hewn to pieces, but bottles of ink, turpentine, oil, whatever could efface or destroy, were employed to defile and ruin. Horses were ridden into the houses. People were forced from their beds, to permit the search after hidden treasures.

“The beautiful homesteads of the parish country, with their wonderful tropical gardens, were ruined; ancient dwellings of black cypress, one hundred years old, which had been reared by the fathers of the Republic,—men whose names were famous in Revolutionary history,—were given to the torch as recklessly as were the rude hovels; choice pictures and works of art from Europe, select and numerous libraries, objects of peace wholly, were all destroyed. The inhabitants, black no less than white, were left to starve, compelled to feed only upon the garbage to be found in the abandoned camps of the soldiers. The corn scraped up from the spots where the horses fed, has been the only means of life left to thousands but lately in affluence. The villages of Buford’s Bridge, of Barnwell, Blackville, Graham’s, Bamberg, Midway, were more or less destroyed; the inhabitants everywhere left homeless and without food. The horses and mules, all cattle and hogs, whenever fit for service or for food, were carried off, and the rest shot. Every implement of the workman or the farmer, tools, ploughs, hoes, gins, looms, wagons, vehicles, was made to feed the flames.”

Passing northward through the State, by the way of Orangeburg, Columbia, and Winnsboro’, I heard, all along the route, stories corroborative of the general truthfulness of this somewhat highly colored picture. The following, related to me by a lady residing in Orangeburg District, will serve as a sample of these detailed narratives.

“The burning of the bridges by the Confederates, as the Yankees were chasing them, did no good, but a deal of harm. They couldn’t stop such an army as Sherman’s, but all they could do was to hinder it, and keep it a few days longer in the country, eating us up.

“It was the best disciplined army in the world. At sundown, not a soldier was to be seen, and you could rest in peace till morning. That convinces me that everything that was done was permitted, if not ordered.

“I had an old cook with me,—one of the best old creatures you ever saw. She had a hard master before we bought her, and she carried the marks on her face and hands where he had thrown knives at her. Such treatment as she got from us was something new to her; and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for us, in return.

“’For heaven’s sake, missus,’ says she, ‘bury some flour for the chil’n!’ I gave her the keys to the smoke-house, and told her to do what she pleased. ‘Send all the niggers off the place but me and my son,’ she says, ‘for I don’t trust ’em.’ Then she and her son buried two barrels of flour, the silver pitcher and goblets, and a box of clothes. But that night she dreamed that the Yankees came and found the place; so the next morning she went and dug up all the things but the flour, which she hadn’t time to remove, and buried them under the hog-pen. Sure enough, when the Yankees came, they found the flour, but her dream saved the rest. She was afraid they would get hold of her son, and make him tell, so she kept him in the chimney-corner, right under her eyes, all day, pretending he was sick.

“Some of the negroes were very much excited by the Yankees’ coming. One of our black girls jumped up and shouted, ‘Glory to God! de Yankees is comin’ to marry all we niggers!’ But they generally behaved very well. A black man named Charles, belonging to one of our neighbors, started with a load of goods, and flanked the Yankees for three days, and eluded them.

“A good many houses were burned in our neighborhood. Some that were occupied were set on fire two or three times, and the inhabitants put them out. The Yankees set the woods on fire, and we should have all been burnt up, if our negroes hadn’t dug trenches to keep the flames from reaching the buildings. General Sherman and his staff stopped at the house of a man of the name of Walker, in Barnwell District. While Mr. Walker was thanking him for protecting his property, he turned around, and saw the house on fire. General Sherman was very indignant. Said he, ‘If I could learn who did that, he should meet with condign punishment!’

“The foragers broke down all the broadside of our barn, and let the corn out; then they broke down all the broadside of the garden, and drove in. We had three hundred bushels of corn; and they took all but fifty bushels; they told me to hide that away. We had three barrels of syrup, and they took all but one gallon. They took eight thousand pounds of fodder, and three barrels of flour, all we had. We had twelve hundred pounds of bacon, and the soldiers took all but three pieces, which they said they left for the rest to take. We had twelve bushels of rough-rice; they left us three; and afterwards soldiers came in and threw shot in it, and mixed all up with sugar.

“They loaded up our old family carriage with bacon and sweet potatoes, and drove it away,—and that hurt me worse than all.

“They took our last potatoes. Three or four had just been roasted for the children: ‘Damn the children!’ they said; and they ate the potatoes.

“Out of forty hogs, they left us six. We had twenty-one head of cattle, and they left us five. The officers were very kind to us, and if we could have had them with us all the time, we should have saved a good deal of stuff. One Yankee lieutenant was with us a good deal, and he was just like a brother to me. He reprimanded the soldiers who spoke saucily to us, telling them to remember that they had mothers and sisters at home. He wanted me to put out a white flag, because my husband is a Northern man. But I said, ‘I’ll see this house torn to pieces first, for I’m as good a Rebel as any of them!’ He took three wagon-loads of corn from us: I thought that was mighty hard, if he cared anything for me.” It was he, however, who left her the fifty bushels, which nobody took.

“The soldiers were full of fun and mischief. Says one, ‘I’m going to the smoke-house, to sweeten my mouth with molasses, and then I’m coming in to kiss these dumb perty girls.’ They emptied out the molasses, then walked through it, and tracked it all over the house. They dressed up their horses in women’s clothes. They tore up our dresses and tied them to their horses’ tails. They dressed up the negroes that followed them. They strung cow-bells all around their horses and cattle. They killed chickens and brought them into the house on their bayonets, all dripping.

“Two came into the house drunk, and ordered the old cook to get them some dinner. She told them we had nothing left. ‘Go and kill a weasel!’ said they. She boiled them some eggs. They took one, and peeled it, and gave it to my little boy. ‘Here, eat that!’ said one. ‘But I’ve a good mind to blow your brains out, for you’re a d——d little Rebel.’ This man was from Connecticut, a native of the same town my husband came from. It would have been curious if they had met, and found that they were old acquaintances!

“Some behaved very well. One was handling the fancy things on the what-not, when another said, ‘It won’t help crush the Rebellion to break them.’ ‘I ain’t going to break them,’ he said, and he didn’t.

“My husband had moved up a large quantity of crockery and glass-ware from his store in Charleston, for safety. The Yankees smashed it all. They wouldn’t stop for keys, but broke open every drawer and closet. There wasn’t a lock left in the neighborhood.

“For three nights we never lay down at all. I just sat one side of the fireplace and another young lady the other, thinking what had happened during the day, and wondering what dreadful things would come next.

“She had helped me bury three boxes of silver in the cellar. The soldiers were all around them, and afterwards I found one of the boxes sticking out; but they didn’t find them. When they asked me for my silver I thought I’d lie once, and I told them I had none. ‘It’s a lie,’ says one. Then the old cook’s son spoke up, ‘Take the word of a slave; she’s nothing buried.’ On that they stopped looking.

“Some of the officers had colored girls with them. One stopped over night with his miss at the house of one of our neighbors. When they came down stairs in the morning, she was dressed up magnificently in Mrs. J——’s best clothes. They ordered breakfast; while they were eating, the last of the army passed on, and they were left behind. ‘Captain,’ says she, ‘aint ye wery wentur’some?’

“When one division was plundering us, the men would say, ‘We’re nothing; but if such a division comes along, you’re gone up.’

“Besides the fifty bushels of corn the lieutenant left us, I don’t think there were fifty bushels in the whole district. Our neighbors were jealous because we had been treated so much better than they. The Yankees didn’t leave enough for the children to eat, nor dishes to eat off of. Those who managed to save a little corn or a few potatoes, shared with the rest.

“We thought we were served badly enough. Of all my bedding, I had but two sheets and a pillow-case left. The Yankees didn’t spare us a hat or a coat. They even took the children’s clothes. We hadn’t a comb or a brush for our heads the next day, nor a towel for our hands. But, after all is said about Sherman’s army, I confess some of our own soldiers, especially Wheeler’s men, were about as bad.

“I never gave the negroes a single order, but they went to work, after the Yankees had passed, and cleared up the whole place. They took corn and ground it; and they went to the Yankee camp for meat, and cooked it for us. Our horses were taken, but they planted rice and corn with their hoes. There were scarcely any white men in the country. Most were in the army; and the Yankees took prisoners all who came under the conscript act. They carried some away who have never been heard from since.

“My husband was in Charleston, and for weeks neither of us knew if the other was alive. I walked seventeen miles to mail a letter to him. The old cook went with me and carried my child. From seven in the morning until dark, the first day, I walked twelve miles; and five the next. The old cook didn’t feel tired a bit, though she carried the baby; but she kept saying to me, ‘Do don’t set down dar, missus; we’ll neber git dar!’ We were two days coming home again.”

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