CHAPTER 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.