CHAPTER XXV.

PEOPLE AND POLITICS.

One day I dined at the house of a Union man of a different stamp from the twenty-one I have mentioned. He was one of the wealthy citizens of Richmond,—a man of timid disposition and conservative views, who had managed admirably to conceal his Union sentiments during the war. He had been on excellent terms with Jeff Davis and members of his cabinet; and he was now on excellent terms with the United States authorities. A prudent citizen, not wanting in kindness of heart; yet he could say of the Emancipation Act,—

“It will prove a good thing for the slave-owners; for it will be quite as cheap to hire our labor as to own it, _and we shall now be rid of supporting the old and decrepit servants, such as were formerly left to die on our hands_.”

On being asked if he considered that he owed nothing to those aged servants, he smoothed his chin, and looked thoughtful, but made no reply.

An anecdote will show of what stuff the Unionism of this class is composed. His name happened to be the same as that of one of our generals. During the war, a Confederate officer, visiting his house, said to him,—“I am told you are a near relative of General ——, of the Federal army.”

“It’s a slander!” was the indignant reply. “He is no kin of mine, and I would disown him if he was.”

After the occupation by our troops, Union officers were welcomed at his house; one of whom said to him,—

“Are you related to our famous General ——?”

“Very likely, very likely,” was the complacent answer; “the ——’s are all connected.”

Next to the uncompromising Union men, the most sincerely loyal Virginians I saw in Richmond, or elsewhere, were those who had been lately fighting against us. Only now and then a Confederate soldier had much of the spirit of the Rebellion left in him.

“The truth is,” said Colonel D——, “we have had the devil whipped out of us. It is only those who kept out of the fight that are in favor of continuing it. I fought you with all my might until we got whipped; then I gave it up as a bad job; and now there’s not a more loyal man in the United States than I am.” He had become thoroughly converted from the heresy of secession. “No nation can live that tolerates such a doctrine; and, if we had succeeded, the first thing we should have done would have been to repudiate it.”

I became acquainted with several officers of this class, who inspired me with confidence and sympathy. Yet when one of them told me he had been awarded a government place, with four thousand a year, I could not help saying,—

“What right have you to such a place? How many capable and worthy men, who have been all the while fighting _for_ the government you have been fighting _against_, would be thankful for a situation with one half or one quarter the salary!”

The animus of the secessionists who kept out of the war, and especially of the women, still manifested itself spitefully on occasions.

“It is amusing,” said Mrs. W——, “to see the pains some of them take to avoid walking under the flag we keep flying over our door.”

Two female teachers of the freed people had, after much trouble, obtained board and lodgings in a private family, where the treatment they received was such as no sensitive person could endure. They were obliged to leave, and accept quarters in a Confederate government building not much better than a barn. Many Richmond families were glad enough to board army officers for their money; but few were prepared to receive and treat decently “nigger teachers,” at any price.

“Yet the people of Richmond are not what they were five years ago,” said General S——, who knew them well, being himself a Virginian. “Their faces have changed. They have a dazed look, like owls in a sudden light. To any one who used to see them in the old days of their pride and spirit, this is very striking. There never was such a downfall, and they have not yet recovered from the shock. They seem to be groping about, as if they had lost something, or were waiting for something. Whatever may be said of them, or whatever they may say of themselves, they feel that they are a conquered people.”

“They _were_ a conquered people,” said the radical Union men. “There never was a rebellious class more thoroughly subdued. They expected no mercy from the government, for they deserved none. They were prepared to submit to everything, even to negro suffrage; for they supposed nothing less would be required of them. But the more lenient the government, the more arrogant they become.”

Of Confederate patriotism I did not hear very favorable accounts. It burst forth in a beautiful tall flame at the beginning of the war. There were soldiers’ aid societies, patronized by ladies whose hands were never before soiled by labor. Stockings were knit, shirts cut and sewed, and carpets converted into blankets, by these lovely hands. If a fine fellow appeared among them, more inclined to gallantry in the parlor than to gallantry in the field, these same lovely hands thrust him out, and he was told that “only ‘the brave deserve the fair.’” But Southern heat is flashy and intense; it does not hold out like the slow, deep fire of the north. The soldiers’ aid societies soon grew to be an old story, and the lovely ones contented themselves with cheering and waving their handkerchiefs when the “noble defenders of the south” marched through the streets.

The “noble defenders of the south” did not, I regret to say, appreciate the cheers and the handkerchiefs as they did the shirts and the blankets.

“Many a time,” said Mrs. H——, “I have heard them yell back at the ladies who cheered them, ‘Go to ——! If you care for us, come out of your fine clothes and help us!’ After the people stopped giving, the soldiers began to help themselves. I’ve seen them rush into stores as they passed, snatch whatever they wanted, and march on again, hooting, with loaves of bread and pieces of meat stuck on the points of their bayonets.”

The sons and brothers of influential families were kept out of the war by an ingenious system of details. Every man was conscripted; but, while the poor and friendless were hurried away to fight the battles of slavery, the favored aristocrat would get “detailed” to fill some “bomb-proof” situation, as it was called.

“These ‘bomb-proofs’ finally got to be a very great nuisance. Men were ‘detailed’ to fill every comfortable berth the government, directly or indirectly, had anything to do with; and as the government usurped, in one way or another, nearly all kinds of business, it soon became difficult for an old or infirm person to get any sort of light employment. A friend of mine, whom the war had ruined, came down from the country, thinking he could get something to do here. He saw able-bodied young men oiling the wheels of the cars. He was old and lame, but he felt himself well able to do that kind of work. So he applied for a situation, and found that the young men he saw were ‘detailed’ from the army. Others were ‘detailed’ to carry lanterns for them when they had occasion to oil the car-wheels at night. It was so with every situation the poor man could have filled.”

This was the testimony of a candid old gentleman, himself an aristocrat, at whose house I passed an evening.

I took an early opportunity to make the acquaintance of Governor Pierpoint, whom I found to be a plain, somewhat burly, exceedingly good-humored and sociable person. The executive mansion occupies pleasant grounds, enclosed from a corner of Capitol Square; and as it was not more than three minutes’ walk from my hotel, I found it often very agreeable to go over and spend a leisure hour or two in his library.

Once I remarked to him: “What Virginia needs is an influx of Northern ideas, Northern energy, Northern capital; what other way of salvation is open to her?”

“None; and she knows it. It is a mistake to suppose that Northern men and Northern capital are not welcome here. They are most heartily welcome; they are invited. Look at this.”

He showed me a beautiful piece of white clay, and a handsome pitcher made from it.

“Within eighty miles of Richmond, by railroad, there are beds of this clay from which might be manufactured pottery and porcelain sufficient to supply the entire South. Yet they have never been worked; and Virginia has imported all her fine crockery-ware. Now Northern energy will come in and coin fortunes out of that clay. Under the old labor system, Virginia never had any enterprise; and now she has no money. The advantages she offers to active business men were never surpassed. Richmond is surrounded with iron mines and coal-fields, wood-lands and farm-lands of excellent quality; and is destined from its very position, under the new order of things, to run up a population of two or three hundred thousand, within not many years.”

I inquired about the state finances.

“The Rebel State debt will, of course, never be paid. The old State debt, amounting to forty millions, will eventually be paid, although the present is a dark day for it. There is no live stock to eat the grass; the mills are destroyed; business is at a stand-still; there is no bank-stock to tax,—nothing to tax, I might almost say, but the bare land. We shall pay no interest on the debt this year; and it will probably be three years before the back interest is paid. We have twenty-two millions invested in railroads, and these will all be put in a living condition in a short time. Then I count upon the development of our natural resources. In mineral wealth and agricultural advantages Virginia is inconceivably rich, as a few years will amply testify.”

As an illustration of native enterprise, he told me that there was but one village containing fifty inhabitants on the canal between Richmond and Lynchburg, a distance of one hundred and fifty miles; and land lying upon it was worth no more to-day than it was before the canal was constructed. “Neither is there a village of any size on the James River, between Richmond and Norfolk. How long would it be before brick villages and manufacturing towns would spring up on such a canal and river in one of the free States? Wasn’t it about time,” he added, “for the old machine to break to pieces?”

At the hotel I used to meet a prosperous looking, liberal faced, wide-awake person, whom I at once set down as a Yankee. On making his acquaintance, I learned that he was at the head of a company of Northern men who had recently purchased extensive coal-fields near the James River, twelve miles above Richmond.

“The mines,” he said, “had been exhausted once, and abandoned, so we bought them cheap. These Virginians would dig a little pit and take out coal until water came in and interfered with their work; then they would go somewhere else and dig another little pit. So they worked over the surface of the fields, but left the great body of the coal undisturbed. They baled with a mule. Now we have come in with a few steam-pumps which will keep the shafts free from water as fast as we sink them; and we are taking out cargoes of as good anthracite as ever you saw. Here is some of it now,” pointing to a line of loaded carts coming up from the wharf, where the coal was landed.

I asked what labor he employed.

“Negro labor. There is none better. I have worked negroes all my life, and prefer them in my business to any other class of laborers. Treat a negro like a man, and you make a man of him.”

I also made the acquaintance of a New Yorker, who was working a gold mine in Orange County, Va., and whose testimony was the same with regard to native methods and negro labor. In short, wherever I went, I became, every day, more strongly convinced that the vast, beautiful, rich, torpid state of Virginia was to owe her regeneration to Northern ideas and free institutions.

Hearing loud laughter in the court-house one evening, I looked in, and saw a round, ruddy, white-haired, hale old man making a humorous speech to a mixed crowd of respectable citizens and rowdies. It was the Honorable Mr. P——, bidding for their votes. A played-out politician, he had disappeared from public view a quarter of a century before, but had now come up again, thinking there was once more a chance for himself in the paucity of able men, whom the barrier of the test-oath left eligible to Congress.

“As for that oath,” said he, with a solemn countenance, “I confess it is a bitter cup; and I have prayed that it might pass from me.”

Here he paused, and took a sip of brandy from a glass on the desk before him. Evidently that cup wasn’t so bitter, for he smacked his lips, and looked up with a decidedly refreshed expression.

“Fellow-citizens,” said he, “I am going to tell you a little story,”—clapping his cane under his arm, and peering under his gray eyebrows. “It will show you my position with regard to that abominable oath. In the good old Revolutionary times, there lived somewhere on the borders a pious Scotchman, whose farm was run over one day by the red-coats, and the next by the Continentals; so that it required the most delicate manœuvering on his part to keep so much as a pig or a sheep (to say nothing of his own valuable neck) safe from the two armies. Now what did this pious Scotchman do? In my opinion he did very wisely. When the red-coats caught him, he took the oath of allegiance to the Crown. The next day, when the Continentals picked him up, he took the same oath to the Continental Congress. Now, being a deacon of the Presbyterian Church, in good and regular standing, certain narrow-minded brethren saw fit to remonstrate with him, asking how he could reconcile his conscience to such a course.

“’My friends,’ said he, ‘I have thought over the matter, and I have prayed over it; and I have concluded that it is safer to trust my soul in the hands of a merciful God, than my property in the hands of those thieving rascals.’

“Fellow-citizens,” resumed the candidate, after a storm of laughter on the part of the crowd, and another a sip of the cup not bitter, on his part, “I have thought over it, and prayed over it, and I have concluded that I can conscientiously take that abominable test-oath; in other words, that it is safer to trust my soul in the hands of a merciful God, than my country in the hands of the Black Republicans.”

He then proceeded to malign the people of the North, and to misrepresent their motives, in a spirit of buffoonery and shameless mendacity, which amazed me. The more outrageous the lies he told, the louder the screams of applause from his delighted audience. I could not have helped laughing at the ludicrousness of his caricatures, had I not seen that they passed for true pictures with a majority of his hearers; or had I not remembered that it was such reckless political lying as this, which had so lately misled to their ruin the ignorant masses of the South.

Having finished his speech and his brandy, he sat down; and a rival candidate mounted the platform.

“B——! B——!” shrieked the ungrateful crowd, clapping and stamping as frantically for the new speaker as for him who had labored so long for their amusement. Thereupon, the Honorable Mr. P——, pitching his hat over his eyes, and brandishing his cane, advanced upon his rival.

B——, a much younger and more slender man, quietly stripped up his coat-sleeves, exposing his linen to the elbows, and showing himself prepared for emergencies; whereat the yells became deafening. A few words passed between the rival candidates; after which B—— folded his arms and permitted P—— to make an explanation. It appeared from this that P—— had written to B——, inviting him to become a candidate for Congress. B—— had declined. Then P—— came forward as a candidate; and then B——, changing his mind, said he would be a candidate too. Hence their quarrel.

Calmly, with his sleeves still up, or ready to come up, for P—— was continually advancing upon him with cane lifted and hat set fiercely on his head,—B—— replied, giving his version of the misunderstanding. He admitted that P—— had written him such a letter. “But his suggestion with regard to my becoming a candidate was very feeble, while the intimation which accompanied it, that he meant to run if I didn’t, was very strong; reminding me of the boarder at the hotel-table, who coveted a certain dish of cakes. ‘Here, waiter,’ said he, ‘see if any of the gentlemen will have these cakes, for if they won’t, I will.’ Of course I declined the cakes. But they have been passed to me by others in a very different spirit, and now I mean to have them if I can get them,—with all deference to the appetite of my venerable friend.”

The crowd hooted, shrieked, roared. “Venerable friend” grasped his glass savagely, but, finding it empty, dashed it down again, and sprang to his feet. Desperately puffed, red in the face, once more whirling his cane aloft and knocking his hat over his brows, I thought, if he did not first get a stroke of apoplexy, B—— would this time surely get a stroke of the stick. But B—— grimly stood his ground; and, after glaring at him a moment as if about to burst, P—— muttered, “Go to the devil, then!” buttoned his coat, gave his hat another knock, and stalked out of the house amid a tumult of merriment and derision.

Nearly always, on such occasions, the disputant who loses his temper, loses his cause. B—— now had everything his own way; and a very good speech he made. He was one of those original Union men who had at first opposed secession, but afterwards yielded to the storm that swept over the State. Sent to the Convention to oppose it there, he had ended by voting for it, under instructions from his constituency. He had kept aloof from war and politics during the Rebellion, and could take the test oath; that was no such bitter cup to him. He spoke very feelingly of the return of Virginia to her place in the Union; praised the government for its clemency and moderation, and advocated a forbearing policy towards the freedmen, whom the previous speaker wished to see driven out of the State; seasoning his speech for the vulgar with timely panegyrics on the heroism of the Confederate soldiers.

The election took place a few days later; and I thought it creditable to the good sense of the district that the younger candidate was chosen.

Of the political views of the people, or of the real sentiments of the speakers themselves, not much was to be learned at such a meeting. The heart of the South was boiling with thoughts and emotions which did not come openly to the surface. On the subject of the national debt, for example. Public speakers and public prints were ominously silent about it; and seldom could a discreet citizen be induced to speak of it with any degree of frankness. I was plainly told, however, by a gentleman of Richmond, that the question was often privately discussed, and that the secessionists would never, if they could help it, submit to be taxed to pay the expenses of their own subjugation.

“But how is it proposed to help it?”

“The first step is to resume their place in the Union. Until that is accomplished, they will remain silent on this and some other delicate subjects. They hope gradually to regain their old power in the nation, when they will unite with the Democratic party of the North, and repudiate the debt.”

If I could have been seriously alarmed by such a prospect, what I witnessed at political meetings and elsewhere, would have done much to dispel my apprehensions. I was strongly impressed by this important fact. The old trained politicians,—whom a common interest, slavery, banded together, and whom no consideration of reason or justice could turn from their purpose,—that formidable phalanx had been broken: nearly every man of them had taken an active part in the Rebellion, and could not therefore, without shameful recreancy and voluntary humiliation on the part of the North, be readmitted to the councils of the nation they had attempted to destroy. In their place we may for some years hope to see a very different class of men, whose youth, or modesty, or good fortune, or good sense, before kept them aloof from political life; men new to the Congressional arena, and therefore more susceptible to the regenerating influence of national ideas and institutions.