CHAPTER 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.”