Transcriber's Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

After the War:
A Southern Tour.
MAY 1, 1865, TO MAY 1, 1866.

By WHITELAW REID.

PUBLISHERS:

MOORE, WILSTACH & BALDWIN,

25 West Fourth Street, Cincinnati.

New York, 60 Walker Street.

LONDON:

SAMPSON LOW, SON & CO.

1866.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by

MOORE, WILSTACH & BALDWIN,

In the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Ohio.

PREFACE.

With the exception of the unhealthy summer months, I spent the greater part of the year following the close of the Rebellion, in traveling through the late Rebel States, passing first around their entire coast line; and, on subsequent trips, crossing by various routes through the interior.

I have sought, in the following pages, to show something of the condition in which the war left the South, the feelings of the late insurgents, the situation and capacities of the liberated slaves, and the openings offered, under the changed condition of affairs, to capital and industry from without.

A couple of months, this spring, spent on the great cotton plantations of the Mississippi Valley, enabled me to make a closer study of the character of the average plantation negro than tourists have ordinarily found practicable; and the concluding chapters are mainly devoted to these observations.

A further word of explanation may be needed as to the part of the volume describing the journey of Mr. Chief-Justice Chase. After the inauguration of President Johnson, Mr. Chase determined to visit the Southern cities, to learn as much as possible, from actual observation, of the true condition of the country. The Secretary of the Treasury was then about to send a revenue cutter to the New Orleans station, and on board of her a special agent, charged with the duty of examining the agencies, and carrying into effect the directions of the Department in the several South Atlantic and Gulf ports. He tendered the use of this vessel to the Chief-Justice, and orders were issued by the President and the Secretaries of War and of the Navy, to the officers in the naval, military, and civil services to afford him all facilities that their respective duties would allow.

It was under these circumstances that the Chief-Justice made his Southern journey. He had the best opportunities of information, and communicated his views, from time to time, to the President. As a member of the party on board the cutter, I thus enjoyed considerable, though, in some respects, more limited opportunities of observation.

A small portion of the material in the following pages has previously appeared in the journal with which I was connected, but it has all been rewritten.

W. R.

Library of the House,         }

Washington, May, 1866. }

CONTENTS.

AFTER THE WAR.

CHAPTER I.
Why, and How the Trip was Made.

The most interesting records of the great revolution just ending have seemed to me to be those portraying the spirit and bearing of the people throughout the South, just before and at the outbreak of the war. Stories of battles, and sieges, and retreats, are kaleidoscopic repetitions of deeds with which all history is crowded; but with what temper great communities plunged into this war, which has overwhelmed them, for what fancied causes, to what end, in what boundless self-confidence and overwhelming contempt of their antagonists, with what exuberance of frenzied joy at the prospect of bloodshed, with what wild dreams of conquest, and assurance of ill-defined but very grand honors, and orders, and social dignities—all this, as faithfully set down by the few who had opportunities to observe it, constitutes the strangest and most absorbing contribution to the literature of the Rebellion.

So I have thought that what men now most want to know, is something of the temper and condition in which these same communities come out from the struggle. By the side of the daguerreotypes of the South entering upon the war, even the hastiest pencil sketch of the South emerging from the war may possess an interest and attraction of its own.

Therefore, when early in the month of April I was invited to accompany a small party, bound on a voyage of official inspection and observation, from Fortress Monroe around the whole Atlantic and Gulf Coast to New Orleans, and thence up the Mississippi, I congratulated myself upon the opportunity thus afforded of seeing, under the most favorable circumstances, the Southern centers which had nursed and fed the rebellion. Means of communication through the interior of the South are so thoroughly destroyed, and Southern society is so completely disorganized, that it is only in the cities one can hope for any satisfactory view of the people. Even there the overshadowing military authority, and the absence of all accustomed or recognized modes of expressing public sentiment, as through the press, the bar, public meetings, the pulpit, or unrestrained social intercourse, combine to render the task of observation infinitely more difficult than at any previous period.

But all the more, on these accounts, the Southern cities are the places to which we must first look for any satisfactory idea of the Southern condition; and a trip which embraces visits to Norfolk, Newbern, Beaufort, Wilmington, Charleston, Port Royal, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Key West, Mobile, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, and Memphis, with visits to plantations all along the route, and occasional trips into the interior, ought not to fail in furnishing a good view of the gradual beginnings to crystallize again out of the chaos to which the war had reduced one-third of the nation.

The trip would have been begun some weeks earlier, but for the deed of horror in Ford’s Theater. But, as Secretary McCulloch well said, the wheels of Government moved on without a perceptible jar; and the arrangements of President Lincoln were only temporarily delayed by the accession of President Johnson. An ocean-going revenue cutter was ordered around from New York to Fortress Monroe for the party, and early on the morning of the first of May, the cutter “Northerner” was announced as in readiness to convey us to the Fortress.

In the afternoon an officer was good enough to bring me the following:

Executive Mansion, Washington, May 1, 1865.

Permission is granted Whitelaw Reid, Esq., to proceed by sea to New Orleans, Louisiana, and return by sea or inland to Washington, District of Columbia, and to visit any port or place en route in the lines of national military occupation.

[Signed,] ANDREW JOHNSON,

President of the United States.

I had not supposed a pass necessary; but as the rest of the party went on official business, it had been thought best to cover my case with a document, about the scope and authority of which no question could be raised. At that time passes to visit many of the Southern points were still eagerly sought and procured with difficulty. The War Department was the place to which, in general, application was to be made, and the speculative gentry who mostly wanted such favors, stood in wholesome awe of the downright Secretary. A pass so nearly unlimited as mine was an unheard of rarity, and before the afternoon was over, two or three who had in some way found out that I had it, were anxious to know if “five hundred or even a thousand dollars would be any inducement” to me to part with it!

By nine in the evening the last of the little party had entered the cozy cabin of the “Northerner.” There were the usual good-byes to the friends who had driven down to the Navy Yard wharf to see us off; playful injunctions from young officers about laying in supplies of cigars at Havana, and from fair ladies about bringing back for them parrots and monkeys, pine apples and bananas; some consultations among the officials of the party; some final messages and instructions sent down at the last moment by the Government: then fresh good-byes; the plank was pulled in, and we steamed out into the darkness.

Everybody compared supplies with everybody else; it was found that there were books enough in the party to set up a circulating library, and paper enough for writing a three-volume novel; the latest dates of newspapers had been laid in; the last issues of the magazines, and even a fresh number of the old North American were forthcoming; while Napoleon’s Cæsar, in all the glory of tinted paper and superb letter-press, formed the pièce de résistance that bade fair to master us all—as Horace Greeley used maliciously to say the old National Intelligencer mastered him, when he couldn’t get asleep in any other way!

CHAPTER II.
A School of Unadulterated Negroes—An Ancient Virginia Town under the Dispensation of Sutlers.

Our steamer for the voyage was to be the revenue cutter “Wayanda,” a trim, beautifully-modeled, ocean-going propeller, carrying six guns, and manned with a capital crew. While Captain Merryman was making his final preparation for a cruise, much longer than he had expected when the telegraph hurried his vessel around from New York, we retained the little “Northerner” for a trip up to Norfolk—only delaying long enough at the Fortress to drive out and see a great negro school, established by General Butler.

The wharves were crowded by the usual curious throng of idle spectators, laborers taking care of supplies, soldiers on duty, and a very sparse sprinkling of ladies. Rebel soldiers by scores were mixed in the groups, or could be seen trudging along the sidewalks toward the Commissary’s.

Everywhere were negroes—on the sidewalks—driving the wagons—in the huts that lined the road. All the slaves of the adjoining counties seem to have established themselves at the Fortress. As we crossed the long, narrow isthmus, contracting at last to an attenuated causeway, which separates the Fortress from the main land, and came out into the ancient village of Hampton, the negro huts thickened into swarms, and fairly covered the sites of the old aristocratic residences which the Rebels fired early in the war when compelled to evacuate the place. Bricks, two centuries old, imported by the early colonists from Great Britain, for the mansions of the first families, were built up into little outside chimneys for these cabins of the Freedmen; and here and there one noticed an antique Elizabethan chair, of like age and origin, converted to the uses of a portly negress.

To our right, down on the water’s edge, rose a high, narrow residence—the former home of John Tyler; near it was another, somewhat less pretentious, as well as less uncouth, which had formerly been occupied by S. R. Mallory. Both find loyal and benevolent uses now at the hands of the Government. Near them was a long colonnade, with spacious piazzas, fronting a many-windowed brick hospital, which one of our party was observed closely scrutinizing. “Upon my word,” he exclaimed, after a moment’s reflection, “that is the old Chesapeake Female College, of which I have been, from the foundation, one of the Trustees.” Pale-faced men in blue occupied the chambers of the boarding-school misses; and sentries, pacing to and fro, kept a stricter guard than strictest duenna of boarding-school ever achieved.

To our left extended a stretch of marshy meadows and half-cultivated fields. In their midst was one little field cultivated above all the rest. White boards, with a trifle of modest lettering on each, dotted its surface, and the grass grew greenest over long, carefully-smoothed hillocks. A file of slow-paced soldiers, with arms reversed, was entering the inclosure; behind them followed an army wagon, with five rude pine boxes piled upon it; beyond, quietly, and, as one loved to think, even sadly, regarding the scene, was a group of paroled Rebel soldiers; while, as we turned, in passing, to catch a last glimpse of the mourners in blue by the open graves, there was seen away behind us, rippling in the breeze above the fort, the old flag for which these dead had died, and against which these Rebels had fought.

We found the school-house (a barn-like frame structure), a little removed from the cluster of negro huts, and took the school fairly by surprise. Passing up a long hall, wide enough for double rows of desks, in the center, with seats for about ten or twelve boys in each, and an aisle on either side, with benches for the class recitations against the walls, we came to an elevated platform, from which led off, in opposite directions, two other precisely similar halls. The fourth, completing the cross, was designed for girls, and was yet unfinished. Down these three long halls were ranged row after row of cleanly-clad negro boys, from the ages of six and seven up to sixteen or seventeen.

All seemed attentive; and though the teachers complained that the sudden entrance of visitors always led to more confusion than usual, there was certainly no more than one would expect from any school of equal extent anywhere, or under any management. The rolls contained the names of three hundred and seventy-four pupils, of whom about two hundred were present. The Superintendent, who seemed an earnest, simple-minded man, enthusiastically convinced that he had a “mission” here, spoke of this as about the average attendance. The parents, he said, were themselves so uncertain, and so little accustomed, as yet, to habits of regularity, that they could not well bring up this average to a better point. It seemed to me surely not so far behind our ordinary public schools at the North as to suggest any unfavorable contrasts.

These children had all been slaves, and nearly all had accompanied their parents on their escape from the plantations of the Peninsula, and of the upper counties of North Carolina, to the Fortress. The parents had generally been field hands, and one noticed among the children very few faces not of pure African descent. Such masses of little woolly heads, such rows of shining ivories, and flat noses and blubber lips, I had never seen collected before, unless in a state of filth utterly unbearable. The teachers were all convalescent soldiers from the hospitals, moving noiselessly about among the benches in their hospital slippers and cheap calico wrappers—as they themselves had often seen moving about among their hospital cots the angels of mercy from the North. Who shall say they were not doing as beneficent a work, or that the little negroes might not well follow them with as longing and affectionate a gaze?

Several classes were called up to exhibit their proficiency. Doubtless the teachers selected their best scholars for the test—I think even Northern schools sometimes do that—but there can be little opportunity for deception in the reading of an unlearned lesson in a book, or in answers to questions in mental arithmetic, propounded by the visitors themselves. It was strange to see boys of fourteen or fifteen reading in the First Reader; but stranger to observe how intelligently scholars in the First Reader went about their work, and with what comparative rapidity they learned. I passed among the forms and conversed with a good many of the soldier-teachers. They all united in saying that on an average the raw negro boys admitted to the school would learn their letters and be able to read well in the First Reader in three months; while some of them, who were originally bright, and who were kept in regular attendance, made considerably more rapid progress.

An advanced class, composed of the little negro “monitors” who had been longest in the school, was summoned to the platform to read a lesson in the Fourth Reader. One or two of them read very badly; one or two quite well, and with an evident understanding of what was said. The best reader in the class was the smallest boy, an ebony-faced urchin, whose head looked as a six-pound round shot, coated with curled hair from a mattress, might. The Superintendent exhibited his manner of calling out the classes through the whole school to recite, the military style in which the boys were required to march to their places at the word of command, and the general adherence to military forms, even in such minutiæ as distributing slates, removing the stools for the monitors, returning books to their places, and the like.

Then came a little address from the Dominie of our party, a former South Carolina lawyer and heavy slaveholder; and we finally took our leave, the little urchins eagerly handing up their slates, as we passed, to have us see their penmanship; and laboriously tracing out, in school-boy characters, their oddly-sounding names, to show us how readily they could write.

This school is kept up at little or no expense to the Government, save the original cost of erecting the rough board structure in which it is held. The parents of the children have been, to a considerable extent, employed by the Government as laborers in the Quartermaster’s Department; and, meantime, the convalescents from the hospitals have prepared the sons, in some measure, for the new order of things. Still there is more dependence on charity than could be desired, especially among the parents. Negroes need to be taught—just as slaves of any race or color would need to be taught—that liberty means, not idleness, but merely work for themselves instead of work for others; and that, in any event, it means always work. To teach them this, do not gather them in colonies at military posts, and feed them on Government rations; but throw them in the water and have them learn to swim by finding the necessity of swimming. For the present, these collections of negroes are an inevitable result of the war; and that would be a barbarous Government indeed which would not help in time of distress the men whose friendship to it has brought them into distress; but it must be the first care of the authorities to diminish the charity, and leave the negroes, just as it would leave the white men—to take care of themselves.

On arriving at Norfolk, we were met, at the shabby-looking old wharf, by General Gordon, commanding the post. Carriages were in waiting, and we were rapidly whirled past the tumble-down warehouses, through streets of stores from which every former proprietor had gone, by the old English brick church, whence the former pastor had departed, past elegant residences of prominent rebels, in whose parlors sat the wives of Yankee officers, and through whose superb gardens we were invited to wander, and pluck at will great bending bunches of flowers that, at Washington, were still scarce in the hot-houses.

From the gardens we turned toward the country to see the old line of fortifications (planned, curiously enough, by a nephew of one of our party), by which the Virginians, in the first months of the war, had been confident they could hold Norfolk forever against the Yankee scum. Negro soldiers manned the lines the rebel engineer had traced; but wild flowers covered the embankments, and we plucked azalias of exquisite fragrance from the crumbling embrasures. It was not less strange that another member of our party, then foremost in the Cabinet, had undertaken the search hereabouts for a landing for our troops, after the officers had given it up; and had actually chosen the point where they were safely debarked, and whence they had turned these long lines, and reduced Norfolk—“Merrimac” and all—without a blow.

The wild flowers filled the moist evening air with their perfume as we drove back through the negro quarter. Every hut exhibited the tender tokens of mourning for the good, dead President, which were missing on many aristocratic residences. There were no evidences of suffering or destitution among these people; and it was not from their windows that the lowering glances were turned upon the General, and the well-known features of the anti-slavery leader by his side.

Norfolk ought to do, and will do a fine business—whenever it has any country to do business for. It must always be the great shipping point for the Virginia and North Carolina coast; the heaviest vessels can lie by its wharves, and between it and Hampton Roads is room for the navies of the world. But, thus far, there is scarcely any business, save what the army has brought, and what the impoverished inhabitants who remain are themselves able to support. Sutlers have sat in the high places until they have amassed fortunes; but the merchants whose deserted store rooms they are occupying are paroled and ruined Rebel officers. No trade comes or can come from the interior. The people have no produce to spare, and no money with which to buy. And the very number of able-bodied men in the country has been sadly reduced.[^[1]]

Everything is controlled by the military authority; and while there may be a genuine Union sentiment that warranted the attempted elections of Congressmen, one may still be permitted a quiet suspicion of the independent and disinterested patriotism of the voters. Just as we were pushing off, Mr. Chandler, a nervous, restless, black-haired Virginian, came hobbling out from his carriage. He was a claimant for a seat in the last House, which was refused; and was the leader of the Virginia delegation to the Baltimore Convention, whose admission to that body his fluent and impassioned rhetoric secured. Naturally he is a warm supporter of the Pierpoint State Government, believes that “the loyal men of the State constitute the State,” and doesn’t see why the fact that they are few in numbers should prevent their exercising all the powers of the State. Just now he and the few really loyal men, like him, are very bitter against the Rebels, whom they wish to have excluded from any participation in the ready-made State Government, which they hope soon to have transferred from Alexandria to Richmond, and extended over the State. But they frankly admit themselves to be in a very small minority; and it remains to be seen how long a minority, however loyal, can govern, in a republican country.

[1]. Calculations, seemingly accurate, have placed the number of dead and disabled Virginia soldiers at 105,000, or nearly one-tenth of the entire free population of the State.

CHAPTER III.
“Beauties of the Sea”—First Views of Cracker Unionism.

On our return to the Fortress, the “Wayanda” was ready; there was a hurried transhipment in the dark; not a little dismay at the straitened proportions of the cabin; an assignment of state-rooms, which gave me the D. D. of the party as chum; and so—amid the Doctor’s loud groans and lamentations over confining a rational human being in a straight jacket of a bed like that—to sleep.

There was a very hasty toilette next morning, and a very undignified rush for the fresh air on deck. We had started in the night, were well out on the ocean, a pretty heavy sea was running, and the mettlesome little “Wayanda” was giving us a taste of her qualities. Nothing could exceed the beauty of her plunges fore and aft, and lurches from port to starboard; but the party were sadly lacking in enthusiasm. Presently breakfast was announced, and we all went below very bravely and ranged ourselves about the table. Before the meal was half over, the Captain and the Doctor’s were left in solitary state to finish it alone. For myself—although seasoned, as I had vainly imagined, by some experiences in tolerably heavy storms—I freely confess to the double enjoyment of the single cup of tea I managed to swallow. “For,” said the Dominie, argumentatively, “you have the pleasure of enjoying it first as it goes down, and then a second time as it comes up.”

To keep one another in countenance as we held our uncertain positions on the rolling and plunging deck, we combined to rehearse all the old jokes about sea sickness. One gave a definition of it, which, like many another indifferent thing, has been unwarrantably fathered on the late President. “Sea sickness is a disorder which for the first hour makes you afraid you’ll die, but by the second hour makes you afraid you won’t!” Another recited Artemus Ward’s groaning lamentation over Point Judith, to the effect that he “never before saw a place where it was so hard to keep inside one’s clothes and outside one’s breakfast!” “Sure, it isn’t say sick yez are,” pleasantly suggested an Irish engineer, among the officers, who looked provokingly happy amid all the pitching—“it isn’t say sick yez are; but yez mighty sick of the say!” “O si sic omnes!” punned the Chief Justice. How the rest stood it I don’t know; but that was the last straw, and drove one unfortunate of the party to his state-room, and a basin and towel.

Toward evening the sea calmed down, and one after another emerged on deck. The air was delightfully bracing; the moon sent its broad streams of light, shaking across the waters; the revolving light of Hatteras shone out—guide and safeguard to a hundred eyes besides our own—and so with calmest weather, and a delicious beauty of scene that no words need be vainly employed in efforts to describe, we spent half the night in watching the passage of the ship by the most dangerous part of the Atlantic coast. Next morning, at breakfast, we were steaming under the guns of Port Macon into the harbor where Butler and Porter rendezvoused for Fort Fisher.

As a boat’s crew slowly pulled some of our party through the tortuous channel by which even the lightest gigs have to approach the single landing of Beaufort, the guns of the naval force began to thunder out a salute for the Chief Justice. “How many guns does a Chief Justice receive?” inquired one, as he counted the successive discharges. “You’d a great deal better ask,” reprovingly hinted the Doctor, “how many guns a Baptist minister receives!” “Well, how many, Doctor!” “Oh, just count these up, and then you’ll know!” With which church-militant suggestion, we rounded to at a crazy old wharf, climbed up a pair of rickety steps that gave the Doctor premonitions of more immersion than even he had bargained for, and stood in the town of Beaufort, North Carolina. In front of us was the Custom House—a square, one-story frame building, perched upon six or eight posts—occupied now by a Deputy Treasury Agent. A narrow strip of sand, plowed up by a few cart wheels, and flanked by shabby-looking old frame houses, extended along the water front, and constituted the main business street of a place that, however dilapidated and insignificant, must live in the history of the struggle just ended. Near the water’s edge was a small turpentine distillery, the only manufacturing establishment of the place.

The landing of a boat’s crew, with an officer in charge and a flag fluttering at the stern, seemed to be an event in Beaufort, and we were soon surrounded by the notabilities. A large, heavily and coarsely-built man, of unmistakable North Carolina origin, with the inevitable bilious look, ragged clothes and dirty shirt, was introduced, with no little eclat, as “the Senator from this District.” “Of what Senate?” some one inquired. “The North Caroliner Senate, Sir,” “Umph, Rebel Senate of North Carolina,” growled the Captain, sotto voce; “you make a devil of a fuss about your dignity! North Carolina Rebel Senate be hanged! A New York constable outranks you.” But the Senator didn’t hear; and his manner showed plainly enough that no doubts of his importance ever disturbed the serene workings of his own mind. The Clerk of the Court, the Postmaster, the doctor, the preacher and other functionaries were speedily added to the group that gathered in the sand bank called a pavement.

“How are your people feeling?” some one asked. “Oh, well, sir; we all went out unwillingly, you know,” responded the legislator, fresh from the meetings of the Rebel Senate at Raleigh, “and most of us are very glad to get back.” “Have you no violent Rebels yet?” “Yes, quite a good many, among the young bloods; but even they all feel as if they had been badly whipped, and want to give in.” “Then they really feel themselves whipped?” “Yes, you’ve subjugated us at last,” with a smile which showed that the politician thought it not the worst kind of a joke after all.

“And, of course, then you have only to submit to any terms the conquerors may impose?” “No, sir—oh, ah—yes, any terms that could be honorably offered to a proud, high-minded people!” The rest of the dignitaries nodded their heads approvingly at this becoming intimation of the terms the “subjugated” State could be induced to accept. It was easy to see that the old political tricks were not forgotten, and that the first inch of wrong concession would be expected to lead the way to many an ell.

“What terms do you think would be right?” The County Clerk, a functionary of near thirty years’ service, took up the conversation, and promptly replied, “Let Governor Vance call together the North Caroliner Legislator. We only lacked a few votes of a Union majority in it before, and we’d be sure to have enough now.” “What then?” “Why, the Legislater would, of course, repeal the ordinance of secession, and order a convention to amend the Constitution. I think that convention would accept your constitutional amendment.”

“But can you trust your Governor Vance? Did not he betray the Union party after his last election?”

“Yes, he sold us out clean and clear.”

“He did nothing of the sort. North Caroliner has not got a purer patriot than Governor Vance.” And so they fell to disputing among themselves.

I asked one of the party what this Legislature, if thus called together, would do with the negroes?

“Take ’em under the control of the Legislater, as free niggers always have been in this State. Let it have authority to fix their wages, and prevent vagrancy. It always got along with ’em well enough before.”

“Are you not mistaken about its always having had this power?”

“What!” exclaimed the astonished functionary. “Why, I was born and raised hyar, and lived hyar all my life; Do you suppose I don’t know?”

“Apparently not, sir; for you seem to be ignorant of the fact that free negroes in North Carolina were voters from the formation of the State Government down to 1835.”

“It isn’t so, stranger.”

“Excuse me; but your own State records will show it;[^[2]] and, if I must say so, he is a very ignorant citizen to be talking about ways and means of reorganization, who doesn’t know so simple and recent a fact in the history of his State.”

The Cracker scratched his head in great bewilderment. “Well, stranger, you don’t mean to say that the Government at Washington is going to make us let niggers vote?”

“I mean to say that it is at least possible.”

“Well, why not have the decency to let us have a vote on it ourselves, and say whether we’ll let niggers vote?”

“In other words, you mean this: Less than a generation ago you held a convention, which robbed certain classes of your citizens of rights they had enjoyed, undisputed, from the organization of your State down to that hour. Now, you propose to let the robbers hold an election to decide whether they will return the stolen property or not.”

“Stranger,” exclaimed another of the group, with great emphasis, “is the Government at Washington, because it has whipped us, going to make us let niggers vote?”

“Possibly it will. At any rate a strong party favors it.”

“Then I wouldn’t live under the Government. I’d emigrate, sir. Yes, sir, I’d leave this Government and go north!”

And the man, true to his States’-Rights training, seemed to imagine that going north was going under another Government, and spoke of it as one might speak of emigrating to China.

Meantime, the younger citizens of Beaufort (of Caucasian descent) had found better amusement than talking to the strangers in the sand bank of a street. One of them wagered a quarter (fractional currency) that he could whip another. The party thus challenged evinced his faith in his own muscle by risking a corresponding quarter on it. The set-to was at once arranged, in the back-yard of the house in front of which we were standing, and several side bets, ranging from five to as high as fifteen cents, were speedily put up by spectators.

One of our party, who joined the crowd at the amusement, reported that half-a-dozen rounds were fought—a few “niggers” gravely looking on from the outskirts of the throng—that several eyes were blacked, and both noses bruised; that there was a fall, and a little choking and eye-gouging, and a cry of “give it up;” that then the belligerents rose and shook hands, and stakes were delivered, and the victor was being challenged to another trial, with a fresh hand, as we left the scene of combat; and so closed our first visit to a North Carolina town.

[2]. North Carolina, by her Constitution of 1776, prescribed three bases of suffrage:

1. All FREEMEN twenty-one years old, who have lived in the county twelve months, and have had a freehold of fifty acres for six months, may vote for a member of the Senate.

2. All FREEMEN, of like age and residence, who have paid public taxes, may vote for members of the House of Commons for the county.

3. The above two classes may, if residing or owning a freehold in a town, vote for members of the House of Commons for such town: provided, they shall not already have voted for a member for the county, and vice versa.

By the Constitution, as amended in 1835, all freemen, twenty-one years of age, living twelve months in the State, and owning a freehold of fifty acres for six months, should vote, except that

“No free negro, free mulatto, or free person of mixed blood, descended from negro ancestors to the fourth generation inclusive (though one ancestor of each generation may have been a white person), shall vote for members of the Senate or House of Commons.”

The last clause would seem to have looked to amalgamation as a pretty steady practice, for such zealous abolition and negro-haters. Under the Constitution of 1776, free negroes, having the requisite qualifications, voted as freely as any other portion of the voting population.

CHAPTER IV.
Newbern and Beaufort—Black and White.

Shortly after our arrival in the harbor, the military authorities had provided a special train for us—that is to say, a train composed of a wheezy little locomotive and an old mail agent’s car, with all the windows smashed out and half the seats gone. By this means we were enabled, an hour after our visit to Beaufort, to be whirling over the military railroad from the little collection of Government warehouses on the opposite side of the harbor, called Morehead City, to Newbern.

The whole way led through the exhausted turpentine forests of North-eastern North Carolina, which the turpentine growers have for many years been abandoning for the more productive forests of upper South Carolina. Here and there were swamps which Yankee drainage would soon convert into splendid corn land; and it is possible that Yankee skill might make the exhausted pineries very profitable; but, for the present, this country is not likely to present such inducements as to attract a large Northern emigration.

The poorer people seem to be quietly living in their old places. Where the paroled rebel soldiers have returned, they have sought their former homes, and evince a very decided disposition to stay there. Throughout this region there is, as we learned, comparatively little destitution. The ocean is a near and never-failing resource; and from Newbern and Beaufort (both of which have been in our possession during the greater part of the war) supplies have gone through the lines by a sort of insensible and invisible perspiration, which it would be unkind, to the disinterested traders who follow in the wake of an army, to call smuggling.

Passing the traces of the works thrown up at the point where Burnside had his fight, we entered the remarkable city of log cabins, outside the city limits, which now really forms the most interesting part of the ancient town of Newbern. Before the war, it had between five and six thousand inhabitants; now, these newly-built cabins on the outskirts, alone, contain over ten thousand souls.[^[3]] Yet, withal, there are few old residents here. The city proper is, to a considerable extent, deserted by its former inhabitants, and filled by Union refugees from all parts of the State; while these squares of crowded cabins contain solely Union refugees—of another color, but not less loyal.

Within a few days back, however, men, whose faces have not been seen in Newbern for nearly four years, are beginning to appear again, with many an anxious inquiry about property, which they think ought to have been carefully preserved for them during their hostile absence. Sometimes they have kept an aged mother, or an aunt, or a widowed sister, in the property, to retain a claim upon it; and in these cases they seem to find little difficulty in quietly resuming possession. But, in more instances, they are forced to see others in an occupancy they can not conveniently dispute, and to learn of fortunes made from the property they abandoned.

The hotel keeper, for example, has returned. He finds here a Yankee, who, seeing the house deserted when we occupied the city, and being told by the officers that they wanted a hotel, determined to keep it. The Yankee has paid no rent; he has been at no expense, and he has made a sum reckoned at over a hundred thousand dollars, by his hotel keeping and a little cotton planting which he was able to combine with it. Naturally, he is in no haste to give up his rent-free establishment, and the Rebel owner has the satisfaction of contemplating the Yankee in possession, and calculating the profits which might have gone into his own pockets but for the frantic determination, four years ago, never to submit to the tyrannical rule of the Illinois gorilla. Returning merchants find sutlers behind their counters, reckoning up gains such as the old business men of Newbern never dreamed of; all branches of trade are in the hands of Northern speculators, who followed the army; half the residences are filled with army officers, or occupied by Government civil officials, or used for negro schools, or rented out as “abandoned property.”

Yankee enterprise even made money out of what had been thrown away long before the war. In the distillation of turpentine a large residuum of the resin used to be carted away as rubbish, not worth the cost of its transportation to market. The mass thus thrown out from some of the Newbern distilleries, had gradually been buried under a covering of sand and dirt. A couple of Yankee adventurers, digging for something on the bank of the river, happened to strike down upon this resin, quietly had it mined and shipped to a Northern market. I am afraid to tell how many thousands of dollars they are said to have made by the lucky discovery.

The negro quarter has been swelled to a size greater than that of almost any city on the coast, by accessions from all parts of the State. They came in entirely destitute. The Government furnished them rations, and gave the men axes, with which they cut down the pine trees and erected their own cabins, arranging them regularly in streets, and “policing” them as carefully as a regiment of veteran soldiers would do. Every effort was then made to give them work in the Quartermaster’s Department, to keep them from being simply an expense to the Government; but the close of the war necessarily cuts off this source of employment, and the General commanding is now looking with no little uneasiness to the disposition to be made of this great collection of negroes, for scarcely a tithe of whom can the natural wants of the town itself supply employment.

Some have rented a large rice plantation in the vicinity—contrary to the currently-received theory that no human being, white or black, will work on rice grounds except when driven to it—and they are doing exceedingly well. Others could go further into the interior and do the same, if they were sure of protection; but till some understanding with the planters is reached, and the status of the Rebel planters themselves is defined, this is almost impracticable. Something, however, must be done to disperse this unwholesome gathering at Newbern, or the tumor, thus neglected, may do serious injury.

A dispatch from General Sherman (on his way north from Savannah, and forced by bad weather to put in at Beaufort) had reached Newbern, while we were there, expressing a very earnest desire to see Chief Justice Chase; and on the return of the party, General Sherman’s vessel was lying at the wharf, opposite the railroad terminus, awaiting us. Nervous and restless as ever, the General looked changed (and improved) since the old campaigns in the South-west. He was boiling over with pride at the performances of his army through the winter, and all the more indignant, by consequence, at the insults and injustice he imagined himself to have received, in consequence of his arrangement with Johnston. “I fancied the country wanted peace,” he exclaimed. “If they don’t, let them raise more soldiers.”

The General complained, and, doubtless, with some truth, if not justice, that the Government had never distinctly explained to him what policy it desired to have pursued. “I asked Mr. Lincoln explicitly, when I went up to City Point, whether he wanted me to capture Jeff. Davis, or let him escape, and in reply he told me a story.”

That “story” may now have a historical value, and I give it, therefore, as General Sherman said Mr. Lincoln told it—only premising that it was a favorite story with Mr. Lincoln, which he told many times, and in illustration of many points of public policy.

“I’ll tell you, General,” Mr. Lincoln was said to have begun, “I’ll tell you what I think about taking Jeff. Davis. Out in Sangamon county there was an old temperance lecturer, who was very strict in the doctrine and practice of total abstinence. One day, after a long ride in the hot sun, he stopped at the house of a friend, who proposed making him a lemonade. As the mild beverage was being mixed, the friend insinuatingly asked if he wouldn’t like just the least drop of something stronger, to brace up his nerves after the exhausting heat and exercise. ‘No,’ replied the lecturer, ‘I couldn’t think of it; I am opposed to it on principle. But,’ he added, with a longing glance at the black bottle that stood conveniently at hand, ‘if you could manage to put in a drop unbeknownst to me, I guess it wouldn’t hurt me much!’ Now, General,” Mr. Lincoln concluded, “I’m bound to oppose the escape of Jeff. Davis; but if you could manage to let him slip out unbeknownst-like, I guess it wouldn’t hurt me much!”

“And that,” exclaimed General Sherman, “is all I could get out of the Government as to what its policy was, concerning the Rebel leaders, till Stanton assailed me for Davis’ escape!”

A heavy gale blew on the coast all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and neither General Sherman’s Captain nor our own thought it wise to venture out. Meanwhile, delegations of the Beaufort people came off in little sail-boats to visit the “Wyanda,” bring us flowers and strawberries, and talk politics. Since their last demonstrations, a few days ago, they had toned down their ideas a good deal; and the amount of their talk, stripped of its circumlocution and hesitation, was simply this: that they were very anxious to re-organize, and would submit to anything the Government might require to that end. They said less against negro suffrage than before—frankly said it would be very obnoxious to the prejudices of nearly the whole population, but added, that if the Government insisted on it, they would co-operate with the negroes in reorganization. “But the poor, shiftless creatures will never be able to support themselves in freedom. We’ll have half of them in poor-houses before a year!”[^[4]] Nothing could overcome this rooted idea, that the negro was worthless, except under the lash. These people really believe that, in submitting to the emancipation of the slaves, they have virtually saddled themselves with an equal number of idle paupers. Naturally, they believe that to add a requirement that these paupers must share the management of public affairs with them is piling a very Pelion upon the Ossa of their misfortunes.

My room-mate, the Doctor, appointed me a “deacon for special service”—even he had absorbed military ways of doing things from our neighbors—and I arranged for his preaching in Beaufort, Sunday morning. The people were more than glad to welcome him, and he had a big congregation, with a sprinkling of black fringe around its edges, to appreciate his really eloquent discourse; while the trees that nodded at the pulpit windows shook out strains of music, which the best-trained choristers could never execute, from the swelling throats of a whole army of mocking-birds. An old Ironsides-looking man, who had occupied an elder’s seat beside the pulpit, rose at the close, and said he little expected to have ever seen a day like this. Everybody started forward, anticipating a remonstrance against the strong Unionism and anti-slavery of the Doctor’s sermon, but instead there came a sweeping and enthusiastic indorsement of everything that had been said. He saw a better day at hand, the old man said, and rejoiced in the brightness of its coming. How many an old man, like him, may have been waiting through all these weary years for the same glad day!

At other times there were fishing parties which caught no fish, though General Sherman sent them over enough fine ocean trout to enable them to make a splendid show on their return; and riding parties that got no rides, but trudged through the sand on foot, to the great delectation of the artist who sketched, con amore, the figures of gentlemen struggling up a sandy hill, eyes and ears and mouth full, hands clapped on hat to secure its tenure, and coat tails manifesting strong tendencies to secede bodily, while in the distance, small and indistinct, could be perceived the ambulance that couldn’t be made to go, and underneath was written the touching inscription, “How Captain Merryman and Mr. R. accepted Mrs. W.’s invitation, and took a ride on the beach at Fort Macon.”

At last the gale subsided a little, and we got off. Another salute was fired as we steamed out; the “Wayanda” returned a single shot in acknowledgment, and all too soon we were among the breakers, pitching and writhing, fore and aft, starboard and larboard, diagonally crosswise and backward, up to the sky and down, till the waves poured over the deck, and the masts seemed inclined to give the flags and streamers at their tops a bath. But for some of us, at least, the seasickness was gone. Io Triumphe!

[3]. The census of 1860 gave the population of Newbern at, whites, 2,360; blacks, 3,072; aggregate, 5,432. The Newbern people are now setting forth, as a reason for inducing emigration, that the city is the largest in the State, and has a population of between twenty and thirty thousand. The increase is mainly made up of negroes.

[4]. And yet an official report, since published in the newspapers, shows that out of three thousand whites in Beaufort last winter, between twelve and fourteen hundred were applicants for the charity of Government rations. Out of about an equal number of negroes, less than four hundred were dependent on the Government! The secret of the disparity was, that the negroes took work when they could get it; the whites were “ladies and gentlemen,” and wouldn’t work.

A Richmond letter, of June 30th, in the Boston Commonwealth, testifies to the same feeling among the Virginians. Describing the charities of the Sanitary Commission, it says:

“The most fastidious, though not too dainty to beg, were yet ludicrously exacting and impatient. They assumed, in many ways, the air of condescending patrons. ‘Do you expect me to go into that dirty crowd?’ ‘Haven’t you some private way by which I could enter?’ ‘I can never carry that can of soup in the world!’ they whined. The sick must suffer, unless a servant was at command to ‘tote’ a little box of gelatine; and the family must wait till some alien hand could take home the flour. The aristocratic sometimes begged for work. Mr. Williams, of the Sanitary Commission, when asked by a mother to furnish work for her daughters, said: ‘If they will serve as nurses to the suffering men in your own army hospitals, I will secure pay for them.’ ‘My daughters go into a hospital!’ exclaimed the insulted mother. ‘They are ladies, sir!’ ‘Our Northern ladies would rather work than beg,’ quietly remarked Mr. Williams. Another mother begged Mr. Chase, of the Union Commission, to give her daughters ‘something to do.’ ‘Anything by which they can earn something, for we have not a penny in the world.’ ‘They shall help me measure flour,’ said Mr. Chase. ‘My daughters are ladies, sir,’ replied the mother.”

CHAPTER V.
Fort Fisher.

On the morning of the 8th of May we came in sight of a long, low line of sand banks, dotted with curious hillocks, between which the black muzzles of heavy guns could be made out, and fringed with a perfect naval chevaux-de-frise of wrecked blockade runners, whose broken hulls and protruding machinery gave an ill-omened look to the whole coast. As we were closely studying the bleak aspect of this entrance to the great smuggling entrepôt of the Southern Confederacy, the glasses began to reveal an unexpected activity along the line of the guns, which our signal shot for a pilot by no means diminished. Our ship drew too much water to cross the bar, excepting at high tide, and we were, consequently, compelled to go over in the Captain’s gig to the pilot boat—a proceeding that the rough sea made very difficult and even dangerous. Leaving those who could not venture the transhipment, to roll wearily among the breakers till evening, we headed straight through the narrow and difficult channel for Fort Fisher, and learned that we had been mistaken for the Rebel pirate “Stonewall,” and that the guns had been shotted ready to open fire the moment we should show signs of a disposition to run in.[^[5]]

Ah! that weary day at Fort Fisher! To see a fort is naturally supposed to be not the most formidable of undertakings; but to see Fort Fisher means a ride of miles over the bleakest of sand bars; means the climbing of great heaps of sand, under the hottest of suns; means a scrambling over irregular chasms and precipices of sand, where the explosions have destroyed at once every semblance of fortification and every foot of solid earth—means all this, prolonged for hours, under the penalty of the consciousness that otherwise you would be pretending to see Fort Fisher, when you were doing nothing of the sort.

We began by climbing Battery Buchanan, near the landing, and inside the main line of works. Trenches, embrasures, casemate and barbette guns, bomb-proofs, gabions, riflemen’s pits, all in sand that no rifle projectiles could breach, and bombardment could only render stronger, seemed to assure absolute impregnability to this work alone, except against regular siege operations. Yet it was but protection for one flank of the long line before which Weitzel turned back, and which no soldiers but ours would ever have stormed. To this battery (so called, although a perfect and very strong fort in itself) the Rebels made their last retreat, after that long, hand-to-hand fight through the sea front of the fort, which stretched far into the night, and seemed doubtful to the last. But Battery Buchanan, though impregnable, as a flank to the sea line, is itself commanded by the last work of that sea line; and so when the Mound Battery fell into our hands, its guns had only to be turned, and Buchanan fell almost without a struggle.

The Mound Battery is a vast heap of sand, uplifting its guns and embrazures from a flat and desert beach against the sky, and commanding perfectly the whole northern entrance to the river. It contained one of the finest specimens of heavy ordnance ever seen in this country, the famous Armstrong rifle, presented by British sympathizers to the Confederacy.

Imagine a long line of batteries, connected by traverses in the sand, separated by huge hillocks of sand, and fronted by deep trenches in the sand, stretching away almost interminably along the coast toward the North, and ending in another strong work, which was supposed to protect that flank as perfectly as Buchanan did the other; put in magazines and bomb-proofs, at convenient points, and a very heavy armament; then conceive muzzles of the guns knocked off, guns dismounted, carriages shattered, the parapets plowed with shells, a great crater in the sand where a magazine had exploded, all shape and symmetry battered out of the works, and only their rude strength remaining; and you have Fort Fisher.

The ground was covered with showers of musket balls. Behind every traverse could be found little heaps of English-made cartridges, which the Rebel sharpshooters had laid out for the convenience of rapid firing, as they defended line after line of the successive batteries, along which they were driven. Fragments of shells lay everywhere over the works. Behind them were great heaps of shells, bayonets, broken muskets, and other fragments of iron, which were being dug out and collected to be sold for old iron. Hundreds on hundreds of acres were under negro cultivation, producing this valuable crop.

No man, I think, will ride along the coast line, which, by an inconceivable amount of labor, has been converted into one immense fort, without sympathizing with the officers who refused to assault it, and marveling at the seeming recklessness which success converted into the splendid audacity of the final attack.[^[6]]

The pilot boat was again placed at the disposal of our party, after some hours spent at Fort Fisher, and we ran over to Fort Caswell, one of the main defenses of the other entrance. It was originally a regularly-built brick fortification, with casemate and barbette guns, salients, ditch and interior castle, pierced with loopholes, for a last defense with musketry. Like Fort Macon, at Beaufort (and like Sumter), this has been converted into an infinitely stronger work, by having earthen fortifications thrown up outside and against it. The Rebels blew it up after the surrender of Fort Fisher, and we shall probably be making appropriations, every Congress, for the next dozen years to rebuild it.

The labor here, as well as the vast amount involved in the construction of Fort Fisher, was all performed by slaves, impressed from time to time by the Rebel authorities. Both works were completed—Wilmington had grown rich on the profits of blockade-running; Nassau had risen to first-class commercial importance, and the beach under these guns was strewn with the wrecks, which spoke more loudly than could any balance sheet, of the profits of a business that could afford such losses—before our Congress had done disputing whether the Constitution, and a due regard for the rights of our Southern brethren, would permit us to use negroes as teamsters!

[5]. The Stonewall seems indeed to have produced about this time an excitement along the whole coast, amounting, in some places, to panic. The naval officer at Key West, for example, issued orders to extinguish the lights in the light-houses along the coast, lest the Stonewall should run into some of the harbors and destroy the shipping.

[6]. The joint Committee of Congress on the Conduct of the War, after examining Generals Grant, Butler, Weitzel and Terry, and Admiral Porter, as well as the Rebel commander of the Fort, and after a careful inspection of the fortifications themselves, have, in a report published since the above was written, reached substantially the same conclusions. They attach no blame to any one for the failure to attack, in the first movement upon the Fort.

CHAPTER VI.
Wilmington—Unionism—Blockade Running—Destitution—Negro Talk—Land Sales.

General Hawley, commanding at Wilmington, had come down to Fort Fisher, on hearing of the arrival of our party, accompanied by General Abbott, General Dodge, and a number of prominent citizens of North Carolina. They were all transferred to our vessel, and, with the tide in her favor, and under sail, the “Wayanda” astonished us all by steaming up the river at the rate of fourteen knots an hour. Captain Merryman, however, insisted she could do as much any time, only it wasn’t always convenient to get her best speed out of her! And, of course, we were bound to believe the Captain. Do we not make it a point of patriotic duty to believe all the brilliant reports of the running capacity displayed by our iron-clads and double-enders?

Blockade runners had been sunk for miles up the river, and in some places the hulls and machinery still formed a partial obstruction to navigation. Torpedoes, fished out by the navy, lay here and there along the banks, and a few, it was said, were still in the channel, unless, as was hoped, the tide had washed them away.

Among the North Carolinians accompanying General Hawley, were a couple of gentlemen from Raleigh—Mr. Moore, a leading lawyer there, and Mr. Pennington, the editor of the Raleigh Progress—who had come down to Wilmington to see Chief Justice Chase. Another gentleman in the company, introduced as “Mr.” Baker—a tall, slender man, of graceful manners, and evident culture and experience—had been through nearly the whole war as Colonel of a North Carolina Rebel regiment.

Strangely enough, Colonel Baker claimed to have been a Union man all the time, from which some idea may be had of the different phases Unionism in the South has assumed. His father had been a Unionist of unquestioned firmness; but the son, returning from Europe in the midst of the secession enthusiasm, found the social pressure of his circle too much to withstand. “I was forced,” he naively said, “to raise a regiment in order to retain my influence in the community!” And, with equal naïveté, he added, that if he had not thus retained his influence, he could now have been of no use in aiding to compose these difficulties! He pointed out a fine rice plantation on the bank of the river, which he had owned, but about his title to which, now, he seemed to have some doubts. He claimed, and other Wilmingtonians agreed with him, that the rice grown here is superior to that of South Carolina and Georgia, and that its culture, in spite of the latitude, is quite as profitable.[^[7]]

The gentlemen from Raleigh and Colonel Baker seemed each to be a representative of a different phase of North Carolina Unionism. The editor had always opposed secession till it was accomplished. Then he was compelled to go with the current, but as soon as the first fury was over, and the reaction began, he became openly anti-Davis, and as much anti-war as he dared. He was an enthusiastic admirer of General Sherman; thought the censure by the Northern press, of his arrangement with Johnston, very unjust; was anxious now for the speediest possible restoration of civil authority, and believed the people stood willing to acquiesce in whatever basis of reorganization the President would prescribe. If he had his way, he would have no negro suffrage; even that would be preferable to remaining unorganized, and would be accepted by the people, though it would cause great dissatisfaction.

The lawyer, on the other hand, insisted that none would revolt, with more loathing, from the bare idea of negro suffrage, than the best Union men in the State, who had suffered the most for their devotion to the Government and opposition to the war. “It would not even be satisfactory,” he insisted, “to leave the negroes, like other non-voting classes, to take care of themselves. To leave them absolutely without any control, save such as the law extends to white people, also, would be unendurable. Either you must take pity,” he exclaimed, “on those of us who, for four years, have endured everything for the sake of the old flag, and send the negroes out of the country altogether, or you must place them under the control of the Legislature.” “What policy toward them would the Legislature be apt to adopt?” “It ought to provide against vagrancy; adopt measures to require them to fulfill their contracts for labor, and authorize their sale, for a term of years, for breaches of order.[^[8]] Either do that, and so protect us against an intolerable nuisance, or colonize them out of the country.”

The Colonel was not so emphatic in favor of this virtual re-enslavement of the negroes, nor so peremptory in his condemnation of negro suffrage; but he thought it would be wise to conciliate as much as possible, and to avoid deep-seated prejudices. It was easy to see that he was looking to what would be the least unpopular with the people of North Carolina; and, indeed, I heard later in the evening, that he was not unwilling to ask them to send him to Congress.

Clearly enough, few Union men in the South, who have political aspirations, can be safely expected to advocate justice, much less generosity, to the negro, or severity to the Rebels. The latter are sure to be voters—many of them now, after carelessly taking oaths of allegiance—all of them some day; and politicians are not likely to make haste in doing that which they know to be odious to the men whose votes they want.

At a dinner party at General Hawley’s, and subsequently at a little party, later in the evening, we saw and heard a good deal of the feelings of the people. The women are very polite to Yankee officers in particular, but very bitter against Yankees in general. Negro troops are their especial detestation; and for the monstrosity of attempting to teach negroes to read and write, they could find no words to express their scorn. A young officer told me that he had been “cut” by some ladies, with whom he had previously been on very cordial terms, because they had seen him going into one of the negro schools! The men of North Carolina may be “subjugated,” but who shall subjugate the women?

Governor Vance has been very unpopular, and the people seem to take kindly enough to the idea that his authority will not be recognized. They say he was a Union man in feeling and conviction, but that Jeff. Davis, alarmed by the dissatisfaction in North Carolina, sent for him about the time of his last election, and persuaded him that he could be the next President of the Confederacy! The Presidential idea was as baneful in Rebeldom, as it has proved to so many Northern statesmen, and Vance was destroyed.

Every Northern man in Wilmington lives in the very best style the place affords, no matter how slender his visible resources. I was the guest of a civil officer whose salary can not be over two thousand dollars. His home was a spacious three-story double structure, that would have done no discredit to Fifth Avenue. You approach it through a profusion of the rarest shrubbery; it was in the most aristocratic quarter of the city, was elegantly furnished, and filled with servants—all on two thousand dollars a year, less the Government tax. But this is modest and moderate. The officer at least made the one house serve all his purposes. Another—a Colonel on duty here—is less easily satisfied. He has no family, but he finds one of the largest and best-furnished double houses in the town only sufficient for his bachelor wants, as a private residence. Another house, equally spacious and eligible, is required for the uses of his office! And, in general, our people seem to go upon the theory that, having conquered the country, they are entitled to the best it has, and in duty bound to use as much of it as possible.

These houses are generally such as were shut up by their rich Rebel owners on the approach of our troops below the city. The proprietors have retired to adjacent country places, to be out of harm’s way till they see how Rebels are to be treated, and already they are making their calculations about returning in the fall, with a coolness almost disconcerting to their self-appointed tenants. Mrs. General Hawley tells a piquant story of a visit from the wife of a runaway Rebel, whose showy but uncomfortable house the General has seized for quarters and private residence. The lady made herself as agreeable as possible, spoke of the General’s occupancy and her own absence, much as people who had gone off to the sea-shore for the summer might speak of renting their town house till their return; intimating that she wouldn’t hurry the General commanding for the world, and hoped that he would remain with his family until it was entirely convenient to remove, but suggested that she and her husband thought they would probably return in a couple or three months, when, of course, they supposed their house would be ready for them! Confiscation seemed to have no terrors for her; or, if it had, they were dexterously concealed under an air of smiling and absolute assurance.

The loosest ideas prevail as to the execution of the “abandoned-property” act of the Thirty-seventh Congress. Deserted houses, not absolutely needed for military purposes, can be rented for handsome sums, and to whatever amounts can be thus realized the Government has an equitable as well as legal claim. But here, and report says everywhere throughout the South, are evidences of the old clashing betwixt War and Treasury Department officials; and between them, the revenue the Government ought to derive from the abandoned property, is sadly reduced.

The practice of regarding everything left in the country as legitimate prize to the first officer who discovers it, has led, in some cases, to performances little creditable to the national uniform. What shall be thought of the officer who, finding a fine law library, straightway packed it up and sent it to his office in the North? Or what shall be said of the taste of that other officer who, finding in an old country residence a series of family portraits, imagined that they would form very pretty parlor ornaments anywhere, and sent the entire set, embracing the ancestors of the haughty old South Carolinian for generations back, to look down from the walls of his Yankee residence?

One sees, at first, very little in the mere external appearance of Wilmington to indicate the sufferings of war. The city is finely built (for the South); the streets are lined with noble avenues of trees; many of the residences are surrounded with elegant shrubbery; there is a bewildering wealth of flowers; the streets are full, and many of the stores are open. Sutlers, however, have taken the places of the old dealers; and many of the inhabitants are inconceivably helpless and destitute. While I was riding over the city with Captain Myers, a young Ohio artillerist, a formerly wealthy citizen approached him to beg the favor of some means of taking his family three or four miles into the country. The officer could only offer the broken “Southron” a pair of mules and an army wagon; and this shabby outfit, which four years ago he would not have permitted his body servant to use, he gratefully accepted for his wife and daughter!

Struggling through the waste of sand which constitutes the streets, could be seen other and more striking illustrations of the workings of the war: a crazy cart, with wheels on the eve of a general secession, drawn generally by a single horse, to which a good meal of oats must have been unknown for months, loaded with tables, chairs, a bedstead, a stove and some frying-pans, and driven by a sallow, lank, long-haired, wiry-bearded representative of the poor white trash, who had probably perched a sun-bonneted, toothless wife, and a brace of tow-head children among the furniture; or a group, too poor even for a cart, clothed in rags, bearing bundles of rags, and, possibly, driving a half-starved cow. These were refugees from the late theater of military operations. They seemed hopeless, and, in some cases, scarcely knew where they wanted to go.

Few of the old residents of Wilmington are believed to have profited by the blockade running. It was always considered a disreputable business, in which a high-minded Rebel would not care to be thought concerned; and so it fell chiefly into the hands of foreigners, and particularly of Jews. A few prominent Richmond people were believed to be deeply engaged in it—Trenholm, Governor Smith, Benjamin and Jeff Davis are all named—but wherever the profits went, they did not go to a general diffusion of property among the Wilmingtonians themselves.

Jay Cooke was under the impression that there must be a great deal of gold throughout the Southern cities, and especially in this center of blockade running, that ought to be available for the 7.30 loan; but the testimony here goes to show that the wealthy people have most of their gold abroad, and that they do not have a great deal of it anywhere. Undoubtedly nothing would more tend to tie these people to the Union than such a cord as a United States bond, connecting their pockets with national permanence and prosperity, but they seem now hard enough pressed to buy the necessaries of life; and money for investments in national securities, is not likely to flow northward, for the simple reason that it is not in the country.

Negroes are already beginning to congregate here from the surrounding country. They do not wish to trust their old masters on the plantations; and, without any definite purpose or plan, they have a blind, but touching instinct, that wherever the flag is floating it is a good place for friendless negroes to go. Others are hunting up children or wives, from whom they have long been separated. Quite a number have been located on plantations, and these are working better than could be expected; but the uncertainty of their tenure of the land, the constant return of the old proprietors, and the general confusion and uncertainty as to the ownership of real estate, under the confiscation and abandoned-property laws, combine to unsettle both them and the Superintendents of Freedmen, who are trying to care for them.

The native negroes of Wilmington, however, are doing well. They are of a much higher order of intelligence than those from the country; are generally in comfortable circumstances, and already find time to look into politics. They have a Union League formed among themselves, the object of which is to stimulate to industry and education, and to secure combined effort for suffrage, without which they insist that they will soon be practically enslaved again. A delegation of them waited on Mr. Chase; and certainly looked as well and talked as lucidly as any of the poor whites would have done. There are a very few of the whites who encourage them; but, in general, the bitterest prejudice against these black Unionists, is still among those who have been the only white Unionists—the often-described poor white trash.

The Wilmington negroes have no faith in the ready assent to the proposition that slavery is dead, which all the old slaveholders give. They say—and the negro refugees, all, and some of the whites bear them out in it—that in the country slavery still practically exists. The masters tell them that slavery is to be restored as soon as the army is removed; that the Government is already mustering the army out of service; that next year, when the State is reorganized, the State authorities will control slavery. Meantime, the negroes are worked as hard as ever—in some cases a little harder—and they have no more protection from the cruelty of the whites than ever.[^[9]]

“I tell you, sah” said a very intelligent negro, who had been reciting the present troubles of his people, “we ain’t noways safe, ‘long as dem people makes de laws we’s got to be governed by. We’s got to hab a voice in de ‘pintin’ of de law-makers. Den we knows our frens, and whose hans we’s safe in.”

The war, according to these negroes, had, in some respects, made slavery harder for them than before. They were naturally trusted less, and watched more. Then, when provisions became scarce, their rations, on the large plantations, were reduced. On one, for example, the field hands got no meat at all, and their allowance consisted of a peck of unsifted corn-meal and a pint of molasses per week. On another, they got two pounds of meat, a peck of meal, and a quart of molasses per week. Before the war, they had double, as much meat, and a peck and a-half of meal. Thus fed, they were expected to begin work in the fields at daybreak, and continue, with only the intermission of half an hour at noon, till dark.

In some cases the negroes, understanding that they are freed, have refused to work without a contract for wages. Some of them have been promised their board, and a quarter of the corn crop; others three dollars for a season’s work; others a dollar and a-half or two dollars a month. But the town negroes, especially those of the League, say they have but little faith that the contracts will be kept.

Further conversation with the people led me to think that, in the main, they might be divided into three classes. One, embracing, I think, a majority of the people, is thoroughly cowed by the crushing defeat, has the profoundest respect for the power that has whipped them so badly, and, under the belief of its necessity, will submit to anything the Government may require—negro suffrage, territorial pupilage—anything. A smaller class are Union men, if they can have the Union their way—if the negroes can be kept under, and themselves put foremost. And another class are violent and malignant Rebels, enraged at their defeat, and hardly yet willing to submit to the inevitable.

The loss of life has been frightful. Half the families are in mourning. I hear of a Danville regiment, twelve hundred strong, of whom less than fifty survive. Not less than eighty thousand arms-bearing men of the State are believed to have been killed or disabled. This, and the disorganization of the labor system, have naturally left thousands of families through the State utterly destitute. Mr. Pennington, the editor of the Raleigh Progress, predicts great distress next winter. In fact, the Government is already issuing rations to thousands of destitute whites.

As yet, notwithstanding their poverty and destitution, few of the large landowners have put their estates in the market. No such feeling exists here, however, as in Virginia, where the farmers are said to hold on with a death grip to their lands, and to consider it discreditable to sell to a Yankee. Many of the most violent Rebels here will sell at exceedingly low rates, in order to get out of the country, where everything reminds them of their mortifying defeat and disgrace. And of those who remain, large numbers will be forced to sell part of their lands, to get means for living comfortably on the remainder.[^[10]] The new blood, likely thus to be infused into North Carolina, will be its salvation; and the capital which is now seeking openings for trade, will presently find vastly more profitable returns from investments in lands.

General Hawley, General Abbott and their wives, the Collector, the Treasury Agent, a party of staff officers and others, pursued us with kindness till our vessel had absolutely pushed off from the almost deserted wharf, which, four years ago, was crowded with the keels of a thriving commerce, and even a year ago bustled with scores of adventurous blockade runners. Trade, indeed, follows the flag; but for trade you must have money; and of this there is far too little in the exhausted country to bring back business into its old channels, as speedily as Northern speculators are imagining.

Some of the officers and their wives came down with us in the river steamer, to the bar, whither the “Wayanda” had returned to await us; and kindly good-byes and fluttering handkerchiefs could still be heard and seen after the vessels had each begun moving. At the North we think little of loyalty; here loyal men, and especially those in the service of the Government, seem drawn toward each other, as are men who serve under the same flag in a foreign country.

[7]. The farther north you can grow any grain, or other crop, and mature it, the better it is—according to the theory of the North Carolina planters. The rice crop is more profitable here, they claim, than on the best plantations about Savannah.

[8]. In other words, call them freedmen, but indirectly make them slaves again. The same idea seems to pervade the State, and, indeed, the entire South. Colonel Boynton, a very intelligent and trustworthy officer, writing from Danville, North Carolina, on the 21st of June, said:

“The belief is by no means general here, that slavery is dead, and a hope that, in some undefined way, they will yet control the slaves, is in many minds, amounting with some to a conviction. They look for its restoration through State action—not yet comprehending that the doctrine of State sovereignty has been somewhat shattered by the war. Here, as in Richmond, the people, instead of grappling with the fact that the war has liberated the slaves, are very busy proving the utter worthlessness of the negroes, and treating them with additional cruelty and contempt—neither offering them fair inducements to work, or working themselves.”

[9]. Numerous instances were told, while I was at Wilmington, but the following case, related by Colonel Boynton, occurred farther in the interior:

“Here in Salisbury, two prominent men are on trial by a military court, for killing a negro, and one of the wealthiest, most refined and respectable young ladies in all this section, is under twenty thousand dollars bonds to appear and answer for shooting a negro woman with her own hands. Miss Temple Neeley is considered one of the belles of the State. The family is very wealthy, aristocratic, and all that, and stands at the very top in this section. Her mother was flogging a little negro child, when the mother of the child interfered to protect it. Miss Neeley stepped up, and, drawing a revolver from her pocket, shot the negro woman dead, firing a second ball into the body. She was arrested, and will be tried by a military court. The papers here are defending her, and trying to stir up the old feeling toward the slaves, and excusing her under the black laws of the State.”

[10]. On the 1st of August a single real estate firm in Raleigh advertised no less than sixty-three different tracts of North Carolina lands for sale at low rates, and on easy terms. Here are a couple of specimens:

“We offer for sale one of the finest rice plantations in the State of North Carolina, known as ‘Lyrias,’ and situated on the north-west branch of Cape Fear river, three and a-half miles above Wilmington. This plantation contains 275 acres, 250 of which are cleared, and 25 are river swamp lands. There is also an upland settlement attached, with a dwelling-house, all necessary outhouses, comfortable quarters for fifty laborers, and an excellent well of water.

“The rice lands, with the exception of about 20 acres, are of a clay soil, of unsurpassed and inexhaustible fertility, and capable of producing rice, corn, wheat, oats, peas and hay.

“It is every way susceptible of being also made a good stock farm, for cattle and hogs, and an excellent market garden.

“The entire plantation is in good order. It has on it two commodious barns, 100 by 40 and 75 by 60 feet, respectively. Also, a steam engine of ten-horse power, together with a powerful pump, or water elevator, worked by the engine, which throws out two thousand gallons of water per minute. Also, a threshing machine, in a building 25 by 85 feet.”

“All that really baronial estate, known as William S. Pettigrew’s ‘Magnolia Plantation,’ for sale cheap.—1,000 acres improved!—Over 600 acres in a high state of cultivation!—50, or over, bushels of corn per acre!—Rich alluvial soils, suitable for farms and vegetable gardens!—Only ten hours from Norfolk!—Water transportation from the barn.—The far-famed ‘Scuppernong’ grape is a native of this county, and grows in a luxuriant abundance unsurpassed in any country. The residence, barns, out-buildings, groves, etc., etc., are very superior. Good well of water, etc., etc.

“This very large, and really magnificent estate, contains seven thousand acres of those rich alluvial Scuppernong river lands; one thousand acres already drained, and most of it in a high state of cultivation, and the whole of the rest can be easily and effectually drained; thus opening up large plantations scarcely surpassed in fertility by the Mississippi bottoms, which they greatly exceed in proximity to markets, having cheap and easy carriage, almost, if not quite, from the barn door to Norfolk, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and the whole world!

“Sea-going vessels can now come within a few miles of the barn door, and by deepening one canal, this desirable result can be obtained.”

CHAPTER VII.
Charleston Harbor—Could Sumter have been Stormed—Negroes and Poor Whites.

We steamed into Charleston Harbor early in the morning; and one by one, Sumter, Moultrie, Pinkney, and at last the City of Desolation itself rose from the smooth expanse of water, as the masts of ships rise from the ocean when you approach them. Where, four years ago, before the fatal attack on this now shapeless heap of sand and mortar, the flags of all nations fluttered, and the wharves were crowded with a commerce that successfully rivaled Savannah, Mobile and every other Southern city save New Orleans, and even aspired to compete with New York in the Southern markets, only transports and Quartermasters’ vessels were now to be seen, with here and there a passenger steamer, plying to and from New York for the accommodation of Yankee officers and their wives! The harbor itself was dotted with insignificant-looking iron clads, mingled with an occasional old ship of the line, and, in ampler supply, the modern “Yankee gunboats,” of the double-ender type, which formed so potent a cause for alarm in the councils of the privates in the Rebel armies.

The elegant residences along the battery front retained the aristocratic seclusion of their embowering shrubbery, creepers and flowering plants; but even through these gracious concealments which Nature cast over them, the scars from the Swamp Angel could everywhere be seen. Pavements had been torn up from the principal business streets, to build the batteries that lined the shore; and great embankments, crowned with Tredegar guns, shut out the prospect from many an aristocratic window. The unfinished Custom House was among the most conspicuous buildings, the white marble blocks lying scattered about it, as they were left by the workmen four years ago. “We’ll never finish it,” the fervid revolutionists said, as they began the war. “We’ve paid Yankee tariffs long enough; now, hurrah for free trade with our friends of France and Great Britain!” But the Custom House stands, and next winter Mr. Fessenden will be reporting to the Senate an item in the military appropriation bill for its completion.

Admiral Dahlgren and Fleet Captain Bradford came alongside in the Admiral’s gig, soon after our arrival; and while our boatswain was piping his whistle as the Admiral came over the ship’s side, the guns of the “Pawnee” began a salute for the Chief Justice. The Treasury Agent and some other officials soon followed, and the Admiral took the party under his charge, transferred us to a comfortable and speedy little harbor steamer, and started toward that first goal of every man’s curiosity—Sumter.

The rebellion has left its marks on the pale, thoughtful features of the Admiral, not less than upon the harbor he has been assailing. The terrible death of noble young Ulric Dahlgren, a martyr to the barbarism of slavery, might well grave deep traces on a father’s face; but the climate here, and the labors of the past have also been very trying, and one can readily believe, what used to be rather sarcastically urged by the Admiral’s enemies, that his health did not permit him to keep up in gunnery with General Gillmore.

We passed a little sailing vessel manned by blacks. The Admiral told us that they had brought it down one of the rivers, the other day, and he had allowed them to keep it. They earn a livelihood bringing wood to the city. Recently there have been a number of outrages perpetrated on the blacks inland, by their late masters and some of the returning Rebel soldiers. Greatly infuriated, the blacks came to him begging for arms. “I have never before doubted their orderly disposition,” he said, “and I am not sure that anybody would remain orderly under those circumstances.”

The Charleston city negroes were represented as unexpectedly intelligent. “Out of two hundred and seventy-four laborers at work on the streets,” said one of the city officials who had joined us, “one hundred and seventy-four are negroes—the rest whites. Of the negroes, over a hundred (or over four-sevenths) can read, while scarcely one-seventh of the whites have made the same advancement!”[^[11]] Captain Bradford gave a significant illustration of the progress of some ideas among the less intelligent negroes of the country. They had again and again asked him, he said, what good it did them to make them free, unless they were to own the land on which they had been working, and which they had made productive and valuable. “Gib us our own land and we take care ourselves; but widout land, de ole massas can hire us or starve us, as dey please.”

A huge mass of iron was pointed out as we passed, not unlike the plates of the famous “Merrimac,” or like the gunboat “Benton,” on the Mississippi. It was one of the Rebel iron clads, sunk just before the evacuation of the city. They had injured it very little, and our authorities are confident of making it one of the best iron clads in the service. Enforced self-reliance, had, indeed, gone far toward making the South a nation; for here were fine engines, worthy of our most extensive Northern shops, which had been manufactured in Georgia within a year. Before the war, such an undertaking as making engines for a great steamer, in the South, was scarcely dreamed of. Near the iron clad lay some of the cigar-shaped torpedo boats—an invention never very successful, and now, let us hope, with its occupation, wholly gone.

The obstructions in the harbor, which so long kept the iron clads under Dupont and Dahlgren at bay, still stretched in a long line, unbroken in parts, across from Sumter toward the land on either side. Plenty of torpedoes were supposed to be still in the harbor—Captain Bradford himself had been blown up not long ago by one of them, to the serious discomposure of his personal effects, in cabin and state-room, but without actual physical injury.

But for two things, a stranger might have supposed Sumter a mere pile of mortar, stones and sand, which only culpable lack of enterprise left to block up the harbor. From the center of the rubbish rose a flagstaff, with the stars and stripes floating at the top; and near the water’s edge, uninjured casements still stood among the debris, with black muzzles peeping out, as from the lower deck of an old ship of the line. Closer inspection showed, also, some little howitzers and other light pieces, placed on what was once the parapet.

The sun fairly parboiled us, and, coming into this tropical heat so suddenly—for the night before, on the deck of the “Wayanda,” at sea, we were wearing overcoats—it was so oppressive as to produce a sickening faintness on some of the party; but we patiently followed everywhere, clambered over the shapeless sea wall, inspected the sand gabions, worked our way into the snugly-protected little out-looks for the sharpshooters, ran down the inside of what had been the walls, and dived into the subterranean regions where the casemate guns stood all the time of the bombardment, uninjured, but not deigning to waste their ammunition in useless replies. The contracted but comparatively comfortable quarters here remain almost as the Rebels left them. A long, damp hall, with a few cots still standing in it, was the place for the garrison, where they slept in comparative indifference to the explosion of shells overhead; a rather more airy hall still contained the old, split-bottom arm-chairs, which the officers had collected; on another side were the hospitals, and—ghastly sight—there, on a shelf, were half a dozen coffins, which had been all ready for the reception of the next victims to Gillmore’s shells!

Fresh from Fort Fisher, which had been stormed, it was natural that one should look on Fort Sumter with surprise, when told that it could not be stormed. The officers say the garrison would have retreated to the casemates, from whence they could have made the occupation of the interior area of the fort impossible; but surely the men who swarmed over that northern end of Fort Fisher, and fought through the whole afternoon and far into the night, from traverse to traverse, down to the Mound battery, would have needed little time to establish themselves here. They say, too, that the fire from the Rebel works on Morris Island would have rendered Sumter untenable, but that fire could not have been more powerful than ours had been from James Island. Yet the Rebels did not find Sumter untenable on account of our fire. Whether an assault upon Sumter—necessarily bloody beyond precedent—could have been justified by the maxims of war, is a question; but that such men as took Fort Fisher could have taken Fort Sumter, if aided by a proper naval force, seems to me clear.

It is said that the Rebels had a similar idea—long in fact before Fort Fisher had been attacked. It was one of the strange personal complications of this war, that the regular Rebel officer who had command of Sumter when our terrific bombardment began, had no faith in its defensibility, and had been replaced by a young nephew of the very Dominie of our party, who has been walking with us over the ruins. The Doctor is as glad as any of us that the fort is reduced, but his eye kindled as Admiral Dahlgren gave the tribute of honest admiration to the splendid bravery and tenacity of his Rebel nephew.

From Sumter we steamed off to Sullivan’s Island, and in a few moments were clambering among the mazes of the Rebel works. Here, four years ago, the first fortifications of the war were thrown up. Here the dashing young cavaliers, the haughty Southrons who scorned the Yankee scum and were determined to have a country and a history for themselves, rushed madly into the war as into a picnic. Here the boats from Charleston landed every day cases of champagne, pâtés innumerable, casks of claret, thousands of Havana cigars, for the use of the luxurious young Captains and Lieutenants, and their friends among the privates. Here were the first camps of the war, inscribed, as the newspapers of those days tell us, with such names of companies as “The Live Tigers,” “The Palmetto Guards,” “The Marion Scorpions,” “The Yankee Smashers.” Here, with feasting, and dancing, and love making, with music improvised from the ball room, and enthusiasm fed to madness by well-ripened old Madeira, the free-handed, free-mannered young men who had ruled “society” at Newport and Saratoga, and whose advent North had always been waited for as the opening of the season, dashed into revolution as they would into a waltz. Not one of them doubted that, only a few months later, he should make his accustomed visit to the Northern watering places, and be received with the distinction due a hero of Southern independence. Long before these fortifications, thus begun, were abandoned, they saw their enterprise in far different lights, and conducted it in a far soberer and less luxurious way.

The works stretched along the sandy shore of Sullivan’s Island almost as far as the eye can reach. They consist of huge embankments of sand, revetted with palmetto logs, and were evidently planned throughout by a skillful engineer. Coupling these with the works on the other side of the harbor, and with Sumter, one readily believes them to constitute the strongest system of harbor defenses on the coast. Strolling around one of the works, we came upon a little slab, near a palmetto tree, under the shade of the embankment, “To Osceola, Patriot and Warrior.” It is the grave of one of the last of the Florida chieftains, who died here in confinement, and for whom some white enemy, but admirer, had done these last tender honors. Shall the latest warriors of this island ever find similar admirers?

After our fatiguing trip, the Admiral spread out, on our return to the flag-ship, a lunch of oranges, bananas, pine-apples, and other tropical fruits, brought over from Havana. At the end of his table hung the only Union flag, or trace of anything resembling it, which the naval officers have been able to find anywhere in South Carolina or Georgia—a long, narrow strip of coarse bunting, containing two stripes, red and white, and a few stars in a ground of blue—taken from a deserted cabin near Savannah.

New York papers, only five days old, had just arrived. In the midst of the wonders which the war had wrought here, it was scarcely surprising to see even the New York Herald out vigorously for negro suffrage!

[11]. The ignorance of the poor whites in South Carolina is proverbial. But, as a negro acutely pointed out, “Dey haven’t learned, because dey don’t care; we, because dey wouldn’t let us.” A little before the time of this visit, James Redpath, acting as Superintendent of the schools, reported nine public day and five night schools, under the superintendence of his bureau, with the following average attendance:

CHAPTER VIII.
Charleston, Now and Four Years Ago.

In the afternoon, the General commanding the post was waiting with carriages for the party, at the wharf, when Admiral Dahlgren set us ashore. The wheels cut deep into the sand, throwing it into our faces and filling the carriage with it, till we began to realize what it meant to have taken up the pavements to get stone for the fortifications.

“Shall we go first to the statue of Calhoun?” asked the General. “It is scarcely necessary—here is his monument,” said some one (in imitation of the old eulogium), pointing around the destroyed parts of the city. Later in the ride we did pass an old statue to William Pitt, which the English-loving cavaliers of Carolina had erected in the old Colonial days. During the Revolutionary war, a British ball broke off one of its arms. When we entered the city it was found that the other was also gone.

A foreigner, who visited Charleston in May, 1861, spoke of these streets as “looking like Paris in the revolution—crowds of armed men singing and promenading the streets; the battle blood running through their veins; that hot oxygen, which is called ‘the flush of victory,’ on the cheek; restaurants full; reveling in bar rooms, club rooms crowded, orgies and carousings in taverns or private houses, in tap rooms, down narrow alleys, in the broad highways.” This is the anniversary of that mad era; but the streets look widely different. There are crowds of armed men in the streets, but they move under the strictest discipline and their color is black. No battle blood mantles the faces of the haggard and listless Charlestonians one meets—it is rather blood born of low diet and water gruel. For the flush of victory we have utter despondency. The restaurants are closed and the shutters are up; the occupants of the club rooms are dead, or in prison, or in exile; there is still carousing in taverns, but it is only by the flushed and spendthrift Yankee officers who are willing to pay seventy-five cents for a cobbler.

Of the leaders of those days, scarcely one remains to receive the curses which, even in the midst of their hatred of the Yankees, the people pour out upon the men who converted their prosperity into desolation. Then they were singing—

“With mortar, paixhan and petard,

We send Old Abe our Beauregard.”

But Beauregard is a prisoner, given leave, by “Old Abe’s” parole, to humbly enter his home at New Orleans, from which the loving wife, whom he deserted for secession, has gone out forever. Huger is dead. Barnwell Rhett is in exile, and the very journal by which he fed and nurtured the germs of the Rebellion, has passed absolutely out of existence—no new editor daring to revive so ill-omened a thing as the Charleston Mercury.[^[12]] Governor Pickens, who announced in one of his early proclamations that he was born insensible to fear, has lived to learn his mistake, and has vanished into the dim unknown of “the interior.” Governor Aiken, who, (like that political eunuch, Alexander H. Stephens,) weakly yielded his convictions and eased his conscience by blockade running, instead of fighting, has, for some unknown reason, been arrested and sent to Washington. Governor Manning, Porcher Miles, Senator Chesnut, Barnwell, have all vanished into thin air before the Ithuriel touch—nay, rather before the mere approach of negro bayonets. The merchants, too, whom Southern independence was to make the cotton factors of the world, have disappeared. Their direct line of steamers to Liverpool failed to get beyond the blockading fleet, and long before the politicians had given it up, these men were hopelessly ruined. Trenholm, indeed, pushed a precarious but lucrative trade in blockade running, and succeeded better in managing his own funds than he did those of the Rebel Treasury Department; but he is now an absconding member of the Jeff. Davis Cabinet, and will be fortunate if he escape arrest. Rose and Minor are gone.

One name, of all that were so prominent in Charleston four years ago, should never be taken on loyal lips save with reverent regard—that of Mr. Petigru. He remained faithful to the last; but his eyes were not permitted to see the old flag waving again, and his wife is to-day in Charleston, living on Government rations! She has stated her destitution frankly, however, to General Gillmore, commanding the Department, and some small part of the nation’s debt to her husband will yet, it is hoped, be paid in the tenderest care for herself.

“There are twenty thousand people here in Charleston,” said the haughty representative of an ancient Carolinian name, “and only six families among them all!” Judging from what one sees on the streets, one could very readily believe the paradox which, in Carolina lips, becomes no paradox at all. There are plenty of resident Irish on the streets; the poorer class of natives, too, begin to venture out; but, in the course of the whole afternoon’s driving about the city, I did not see a single one whom I should have supposed to belong to a leading family. My companion had spent the greater part of his life in Charleston, and, in his own language, knew everybody in the town; but he failed to see one whom he recognized as having ever held any position in politics or society.

The extent of the damage by the bombardment has, I imagine, been generally overrated at the North. The lower part of the city was certainly not an eligible location for a quiet residence; but it is an error to suppose that most of the houses, or any considerable number of them, have been destroyed. The shells generally failed to explode, and the marks on the houses are rather scars than serious breaches. Roofs are injured, walls are weakened, windows destroyed and floors more or less ripped up; but still the houses stand, and can, with comparatively little outlay, be repaired. The General’s headquarters are established in the midst of the bombarded district; but the elegant house which he occupies shows no mark whatever. Most of the other officers who have taken houses are in the same quarter, and I observe that they have the same passion, as at Wilmington, for getting the very best establishments in a place.

The General drove us through the Arsenal grounds, and past those of the Military Academy, where, of old, the martial spirit of South Carolina had been fostered. The drives and walks had been bordered with spherical case, round shot and shell; and here and there, at the corners, little ornamental effects were produced by the erection of small pillars, made of our long rifle projectiles, flanked by a few broken bayonets. It was thus the Charlestonians amused themselves during the progress of the bombardment.

Passing through the shabby suburbs, which would hardly comport with the dignity of a first-class Northern village, we came out upon the track where, of yore, all the beauty and fashion of Charleston was wont to congregate—the Race Course. Of late years it has been used for a different purpose. Here, without shelter, without clothing, and with insufficient food, were confined the Yankee prisoners; and in a little inclosure, back of the judges’ stand, may be seen their uncounted graves. Sympathizing hands have cleared away the weeds, and placed over the entrance an inscription that must bring shame to the cheek of every Southern man who passes: “The Martyrs of the Race Course.” Near it was an elegant cemetery, carefully tended, glorious with superb live-oaks, and weeping with the long, pendent trails of the silvery Spanish moss; but into this consecrated ground no Yankee’s body could be borne. Negro soldiers were strolling through it as we passed, and some were reading from showy tombstones, to the dusky groups around them, the virtues of the—masters from whom they had run away to enlist!

Occasional vehicles were seen on the road, bringing in black and white refugees. The country is in such confusion that many seek the safe shelter of the cities, solely from the blind instinct that where there is force there must be protection. Such wagons and such horses were surely never seen. Each rivaled the other in corners, in age, in protuberance, and shakiness, and general disposition to tumble down and dissolve. They all bring in saddening stories of destitution in the country. Still I am inclined to think that these stories are exaggerated. There is little evidence of actual suffering in the country; and in the cities none who want have any scruples in calling upon the hireling minions of the tyrannical Washington Government for rations. Next winter is the dead point of danger. There is a smaller breadth of cereals sown in the South this year than in any year since 1861, and by fall the stock on hand is likely to be exhausted. Now the suffering is only individual; then it promises to be too nearly general.

On the other hand, the reports from the North-west, or mountain region of the State, indicate little prospect of suffering. “I tell you,” said a South Carolinian, from Greenville, “the South could have continued the war for ten years, if it had had your Northern gift of perseverance. We were neither exhausted of men nor of provisions; it was only that the flame of enthusiasm had burnt out. I have myself traveled, within the past month, through sections of South Carolina, from Greenville to Columbia, and thence north-east and north-west, so as to know accurately the condition of the crops in one-half the State. There is no trouble about starvation. The people are not suffering, except in such isolated cases as you will always find, and there is a larger breadth of grains planted than ever before. With reasonable care there ought to be no starvation this winter.”

There was a little party in the evening, in the fine old mansion of a noted Charleston banker, but there were few South Carolinians there, excepting the house servants who had remained to wait on the new occupants. Admiral Dahlgren, Major-General Saxton, two or three Brigadiers and Brevet Brigadiers, and their wives, made up the bulk of the company; and the talk was of the army and navy and the policy of the Government. A gentleman was introduced as the editor of the Charleston Courier, and I was not a little surprised to find that redoubtable Rebel personage greeting me with the warmth of an old acquaintance. He turned out to be a former attaché of a leading New York paper, who had often reported to me in Washington, when I had been in temporary charge of its bureau there.

Persons writing from here in the spring of 1861, said there was no feature of the feeling among the leaders more marked than their scarcely disguised hostility to the freedom of the press. I had been reading over some of those letters, of four years ago, in the morning; and it sounded curiously, like a continuation of the old strain, to hear the editor’s lamentations over the impossibility of making a newspaper where you could express no opinions, and couldn’t always even print the news. “Here, yesterday, for example, was a reconstruction meeting. The call for it was sent to me. I published that, and then sent phonographers to make a full report of the proceedings. There was a big row; the whites ordered out the negroes; then the latter got re-enforced, and came back to maintain their ground, whereupon the whites left. The speeches on both sides were racy; there was a good deal of excitement. I had a splendid report of the whole thing, and it was capital news. I had it all in type, when an order came to make no allusion whatever to the meeting. This morning everybody thinks the Courier is behind the times, because it didn’t know anything about the reconstruction meeting!”

After the party, the Dominie told me of his explorations among his old friends in Charleston.

I ought, perhaps, before this, to have explained that my genial room mate, whom I have been rather irreverently terming the Dominie, is Rev. Dr. Fuller, of Baltimore, now a noted Baptist clergyman, formerly a leading South Carolina lawyer and planter. He still owns large plantations on the sea islands, and, down to the date of the emancipation proclamation, had on them between two hundred and two hundred and fifty slaves, who came to him by inheritance, and whom, under the laws of South Carolina, he was unable either to educate or emancipate. Governor Bradford said to him once: “Mr. Lincoln’s emancipation idea has been an expensive one to you, Doctor. It must have cost you over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” “Yes, I presume it did; but then, Governor, it took over a hundred and fifty thousand pounds of iron off my conscience!” So great had been the change since he held his public discussion with President Wayland, on the rightfulness of, and Scriptural warrant for, slavery!

All the Doctor’s connections were with the South, and nearly all his relations, who have not been killed, are living here. It was his nephew who held Fort Sumter to the last; a near relative of his laid out the fortifications at Fort Fisher; another was the Rebel engineer at Norfolk. Last night he found a granddaughter, of perhaps the most prominent member of the first Congress, living on Government rations! Another, equally destitute, bears a historic name, and is the granddaughter of one of Washington’s most confidential friends and intimate advisers in the Revolutionary war.

It has been naturally supposed that the bitterest drop in all the bitter cup of humiliation for these haughty South Carolinians, must be the necessity of accepting alms from the Government they had been seeking to overthrow. But the ingenious high priestesses of secession regard the matter in no such light. The Dominie found a number of them living solely on Government rations. He hastened to offer them assistance. Their Northern relatives had already repeatedly volunteered similar offers, but they refused them all, and persisted in living on the bacon and hard bread issued by the United States Commissary. They explained that they preferred to make “the Washington Government” support them. It had robbed them of all they had, and now the very least it could do was to pay their expenses.[^[13]] Every penny of cost to which they put it was so much got back from the fortunes of which it had robbed them, by waging this wicked war for their subjugation! Doesn’t somebody think it a shame that these repentant South Carolinians should be treated with so little magnanimity as the Government is displaying; and that Northern Abolitionists should quit watching them critically, and “mind their own business?” Already, a few of the South Carolinians talk thus; and in a few months, if freedom of expression is allowed them, we shall see much of the old vituperation of the Government and of the North.

[12]. A proposition has since been made to re-establish it, as an organ of the freedmen—to be edited by negroes!

[13]. The same idea prevailed among some of the Richmond Rebels. A Richmond letter to the Boston Commonwealth, dated 30th June, describing the scenes at the points where rations were gratuitously issued to the destitute, says:

“‘We are all beggars, now!’ I heard one of them say, apologetically. But most of the high-born were coarse and imperious. ‘This is not begging,’ one of the most inveterate beggars said. ‘It is taking from the United States Government a very small portion of what it owes us.’ ‘As long as the Yankees have taken possession of Richmond, of course it’s their place to feed us,’ more than one said. To the few who gave thanks, and to the many who cursed, all the Commissions gave largely, for several weeks.”

CHAPTER IX.
“Unionism”—Black and White, in Charleston and Through South Carolina.

A very few Union men could be seen. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a few could be found less treasonable than the majority of South Carolinians.

“To be frank with you,” said one of these men, a sallow-faced country lawyer, from the mountain district, “to be frank with you, we were all Rebels. The North has never understood, and I doubt if it ever will understand, the absolute unanimity with which, after the war was begun, we all supported it. While there was any use in it, we resisted secession; but after the State seceded, our district, which was always strongly Union, sent more and better volunteers to the war than any other.”

“You mean, then, that after secession was accomplished, the former Unionists became more violent Rebels than the rest; and that, practically, not a soul in the State remained true to the Union, except the negroes?”

“Well, I suspect you’re a little mistaken about the negroes. They’re very ignorant, and most of them were, and are, governed by their masters’ notions.”

“What security have we, in restoring political power to a community disposed toward us as yours was, and still feeling as you now represent?”

“Oh, our people are impulsive, and they are always decided, one way or the other!”

“Suppose Representatives should be admitted to Congress, and South Carolina should thus be clothed with all her old power. You who, before secession, were the Union men, will be the only voters now; but in two or three years, of course, everybody will vote again. Will not you original Union men be again outnumbered by the original secessionists?”

“I don’t believe we ever were outnumbered. I don’t believe there ever was a majority for secession in South Carolina.”

“The poll books tell a different story.”

“Yes; but remember we had been fighting secession for thirty years, and had got tired of it. Men said these restless spirits will never be quiet until they have tried secession. If we don’t let them try it now, they’ll keep us in a constant turmoil until we do. It is bound to come some time, and we may as well spare ourselves further trouble and let it come now.”

“In other words, then, men said, let the Union be destroyed, with whatever attendant horrors, rather than one should be bothered to keep up this perpetual struggle.”

“Well, not exactly that. You must remember there was a tremendous pressure. I myself had my house surrounded by a hundred and fifty armed men, one night, before the election, because they thought I was a Union man. There was no making head against the current.”

“By your showing, then, the rebel element was resistless before the passage of the secession ordinance, and universal after it. As you frankly say, you were all rebels. We have incurred an enormous debt in subduing you, and we know that there is a small party at the North openly, and a larger one secretly, desirous of repudiating that debt, in order to shake off the burden of heavy taxation. Now, if South Carolina, and other States occupying her position, are restored to power in the nation, what security have we that all you rebels would continue voting for heavy taxation to pay the debt incurred in whipping you? Would there not be very great danger of your uniting with this minority at the North, and thus securing a national majority in favor of repudiation?”

“Well, our attention has never been called to that subject, and we were not aware that there was likely to be any portion whatever of your people favorable to repudiation. I can’t say, however, what our more violent people would do. There has been very little comparison of views; and all our efforts must first be given to getting our civil authority and power restored, without considering what questions may come up back of that.”

“With what political party at the North, then, would your people be more likely to affiliate?”

“Of course with the Democratic. We have understood all along that it sympathized more with us than any other; that it was more opposed to the war, more disposed to leave us alone with our slaves, more ready for favorable terms of peace.”

“And if any considerable portion of that party were to propose lightening the taxes by repudiating (in reduction of interest or otherwise) part of the debt incurred in subduing you, you would be very apt to unite with them?”

“I don’t know but we would; but I can’t say; for, as yet, we are giving no attention to anything excepting reorganization!”

Recurring to his admissions concerning the bitterness of the original secessionists, I asked: “What security will we have, if political power should be fully restored to South Carolina, that the secessionists may not regain control of the State Government, and prove as pestilent as ever, if not in the field, then in Congress, and in the old expedients of obnoxious State legislation?”

“Oh, a barrel of cider never ferments twice.”

I asked about the popular feeling toward Jeff. Davis, curious to see if the hatred to him, of which we have heard at the North, really exists among any class in South Carolina except the negroes. My Union man replied: “There is a very general feeling of great kindness to him, and great sympathy for his present misfortunes. One party in the South assailed his administration very bitterly; but the feeling was not, to any extent, a personal one. He is greatly admired and loved by our people.”

“Was the South exhausted of men when the rebellion broke down? Was it really impossible to re-enforce Lee’s army, and, if so, what citizens have you now for re-organizing State government except the rebel soldiers, unless, indeed, you reckon the negroes?”

“The South never was exhausted of men, sir; there were plenty of them everywhere. Disaffection, weariness, indisposition to the long strain of an effort that took more than four years to accomplish its purpose; that was what broke down the Confederacy. There were plenty of men all the time, but they dodged the conscripting officer, or deserted at the first chance they got. Of course, our losses by death and disabling wounds have been terribly great; but the race of arms-bearing men in South Carolina is not extinct.”[^[14]]

On the afternoon of our last day’s stay in Charleston, a meeting, in one of the negro churches, afforded me the first opportunity of the trip to see large masses of negroes together. It was called a week or two ago by General Saxton, who stands in the light of a patron saint to all these people; but it was doubtless swelled by the hope that Chief Justice Chase, whom General Saxton had earnestly invited, might consent to be present. He had emphatically refused, the evening before, and had forbidden any announcement of his name; but had finally said that, if he could go unheralded, he would like to see the negroes together.

The church is of the largest size, and belongs exclusively to the negroes, who have their own negro pastor, occupy pews in the body of the building, and send the poor people to the galleries, very much after the fashion of their white brethren. The pavement in front was crowded, and the steps were almost impassable. A white-wooled old deacon saw my difficulty in forcing my way up the steaming aisle, and, crowding the negroes and negresses aside with little ceremony, led me to a seat almost under the pulpit, where I found, perhaps, a dozen whites, all told. Among them was Colonel Beecher—a brother of Henry Ward Beecher—and at the table sat the inevitable reporter. If the people of Timbuctoo were to have a great meeting to consider the subject of their rights, and were to give a week’s notice of it, I believe some gentleman with a pocket full of sharpened lead pencils, and a phonographic red-ruled note-book under his arm, would come walking up at the last moment and announce himself as the special reporter for some enterprising American journal.

A Major-General, in full uniform, occupied the desk and was addressing the crammed audience of negroes in a plain, nervous, forcible manner. It was an odd sight, but General Saxton certainly adorns the pulpit. Ladies would call him a handsome man; and his black hair and luxurious English whiskers and mustache would be their especial admiration. He looks—to judge of his intellect by his face and head—narrow, but intense; not very profound in seeing the right, but energetic in doing it when seen; given to practice, rather than theory; and, withal, good and true. He is the first regular army officer who was found willing to undertake this work of caring for and superintending the freedmen; and he has done it faithfully, under all manner of slights and obloquy from brother officers, who thought his work unworthy of West Point. And yet he undertook it, not from any special love of the negro, but because he was ordered. “I would have preferred being in the field,” he said simply, last night, “but I was ordered to do this thing, and I have tried to do it faithfully, till the Government gave me something else to do. I was educated in its school and for its service, and I thought it my business to do whatever it required.” The Government has rarely been so fortunate in selecting its agents for tasks that required peculiar adaptability.

The audience was a study. Near the pulpit sat a coal-black negro, in the full uniform of a Major of the army, with an enormous regulation hat—be sure there was no lack of flowing plume, or gilt cord and knots—disposed on the table beside him. At every emphatic sentence in the General’s speech he shouted, “Hear, hear,” and clapped his hands, with the unction and gravity of an old parliamentarian. Near him were two others in uniform, one a mulatto, the other scarcely more than a quadroon, and both with very intelligent faces, and very modest and graceful in their bearing. One was a First Lieutenant, the other a Major.

Around them was a group of certainly the blackest faces, with the flattest noses and the wooliest heads, I ever saw—the mouths now and then broadening into a grin or breaking out into that low, oily, chuckling gobble of a laugh which no white man can ever imitate. Beyond them ranged all colors and apparently all conditions. Some, black and stalwart, were dressed like quiet farm laborers, and had probably come in from the country, or had been field hands before the war. Others, lighter in color and slighter in build, were dressed in broadcloth, with flashy scarfs and gaudy pins, containing paste, or Cape May diamonds. Others looked like the more intelligent class of city laborers; and there were a few old patriarchs who might recollect the days of Denmark Vesey. On the other side of the church was a motley, but brilliant army of bright-colored turbans, wound around wooly heads, and tawdry bandanas, and hats of all the shapes that have prevailed within the memory of this generation, and bonnets of last year’s styles, with absolutely a few of the coquettish little triangular bits of lace and flowers which the New York milliners have this year decreed. Some of them wore kid gloves, all were gaudily dressed, and, a few, barring the questionable complexion, had the air and bearing of ladies.

They were all enthusiastic, the women even more than the men. Some of the ancient negresses sat swaying to and fro, with an air of happy resignation, only broken now and then by an emphatic nod of the head, and an exclamation, “Dat’s true, for shore.” The younger ones laughed and giggled, and when the great cheers went up, clapped with all their might, and looked across to see how the young men were doing, and whether their enthusiasm was observed. Ah, well! Who is there who doesn’t want to know whether his world, be it a big one or a little one, is noticing him?

But the noteworthy point in all this enthusiasm was, that it was intelligent. Bulwer makes Richelieu relent toward a young man who applauded his play at the proper places. General Saxton had equal occasion to be gratified with his auditors. On taking his seat, he was followed by the gorgeous Major (who turned out to be the same negro about whom Lord Brougham raised that beautiful little diplomatic muddle with United States Minister Dallas, at a meeting of the Royal Geographical Society in London). The Major was not happy in his remarks, and elicited very little applause, till, suddenly, he was astounded by a thundering burst of it. He began acknowledging the compliment, but the tumult burst out louder than ever; and the orator finally discovered that it was not for him, but for Major-General Gillmore, commanding the department, who was advancing up the aisle, escorting Chief Justice Chase.

Presently General Saxton introduced the Chief Justice, and the whole audience rose and burst out into cheer after cheer, that continued unintermittedly till we had counted at least nine, and possibly one or two more. The negroes may be very ignorant, but it is quite evident that they know, or think they know, who their friends are. The little “talk” that followed was like its author, simple, straightforward and weighty, till, at the close, it rose into a strain of unaffected eloquence that almost carried the excitable audience off their feet. “’Tisn’t only what he says,” whispered an enthusiastic negro behind me to his neighbor, “but it’s de man what says it. He don’t talk for nuffin, and his words hab weight.”[^[15]]

After more tumultuous cheering, the audience called for Gillmore, till the great artillerist absolutely blushed in his embarrassment. His speeches for Charleston were made from the muzzle of the Swamp Angel.

I spent the evening in the Charleston Courier office. The old library remained, and Congressional Globes and arguments on the divine right of slavery stood side by side with Reports of the Confederate Congress, and official accounts of battles, while on the wall was pasted one of the most bombastic proclamations of the runaway Governor. Several of the old attaches of the concern remain, among them a phonographic reporter and the cashier. The circulation of this most flourishing Southern paper in the seaboard States, had dwindled down to less than a thousand. “We wrote our reports,” said the phonographer, “on the backs of old grocery bills, and in blank pages torn out of old account books.” “We deserved all we got,” he continued, “but you ought not to be hard on us now. The sun never shone on a nobler or kinder-hearted people than the South Carolinians, and this was always the nicest town to live in, in the United States.”

Encountering a so-called South Carolina Unionist, from the interior, I asked about the relations between the negroes and their old masters. “In the main, the niggers are working just as they used to, not having made contracts of any sort, because there was no competent officer accessible before whom the contracts could be approved. A few have been hired by the day; and some others have gone to work for a specified share in the crops. In a great many cases the planters have told them to work ahead, get their living out of the crops, and what further share they were entitled to should be determined when the officers to approve contracts came. Then, if they couldn’t agree, they could separate.”

“Have there been no disturbances between the negroes and their former masters, no refusals to recognize the destruction of slavery?”

“In our part of the State, none. Elsewhere I have heard of them. With us, the death of slavery is recognized, and made a basis of action by everybody. But we don’t believe that because the nigger is free he ought to be saucy; and we don’t mean to have any such nonsense as letting him vote. He’s helpless, and ignorant, and dependent, and the old masters will still control him.[^[16]] I have never been a large slaveholder myself—for the last year or two I have had but twelve, little and big. Every one of them stays with me, just as before, excepting one, a carpenter. I told him he’d better go off and shift for himself. He comes back, every two or three nights, to tell me how he is getting along; and the other day he told me he hadn’t been able to collect anything for his work, and I gave him a quarter’s provisions to get started with.”

“I had to give him,” he significantly added, “a sort of paper—not, of course, pretending to be legal—certifying that he was working for himself, with my consent, in order to enable him to get along without trouble.” There was a world of meaning in the phrase, “To enable him to get along without trouble,” though he was as free as the man that gave the paper.

I asked what they would do with the negroes, if they got permission to re-organize.

“Well, we want to have them industrious and orderly, and will do all we can to bring it about.”

“Will you let any of them vote?”

“That question has not been discussed. Nobody could stand up in the State who should advocate promiscuous negro suffrage. It is possible that a few might be willing to let the intelligent negroes vote—after some years, at any rate, if not now.”

“I believe you let the sandhillers vote. Don’t you know that these disfranchised negroes of Charleston are infinitely their superiors, in education, industry, wealth and good conduct?”

“Well, they’re pretty bad, it’s true—those sandhillers—but there isn’t the same prejudice against them.”

The moon lit up, with a softened effulgence, all the beauties, and hid all the scars of Charleston, as, late at night, I walked, through its desolate streets, and by its glorious shrubbery, to the landing, and hailed the “Wayanda.” A boat shot out of the shadow for me; and before I had joined the Doctor, below deck, the anchor had been hoisted and the vessel was under way.

[14]. This man now holds an office under the National Government in South Carolina.

[15]. This was Mr. Chase’s single “speech” during the entire trip. Ten minutes, or less, of familiar and fatherly talk to helpless negroes, advising them to industry, economy and good order, telling them he thought they should vote, but didn’t know whether the Government would agree with him, and advising that, if the right of suffrage should be refused them, they should behave so well, educate themselves so fast, and become so orderly and prosperous, that the Government should see they deserved it; this was what subsequently became, in certain Northern newspapers, “Chief-Justice Chase’s endless stump speeches, and shameless intriguing with old political leaders, in his electioneering tour through the South.” The speech is given in full in the appendix (A).

[16]. The disposition to “control” the negroes after the old fashion, subsequently developed itself in Eastern South Carolina, to such an extent that the military commandant considered the following order necessary:

“Headquarters Northern District, D. S., }