CHAPTER XLIX.

DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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