Vicksburg to Louisville.
Davis’s Bend presented no more striking illustration of the changes of
the war than a conversation on our boat, after our return. A brother of
General Wade Hampton, the South Carolina Hotspur, was on board. He saw
no great objection to negro suffrage, so far as the whites were
concerned; and for himself, South Carolinian and secessionist though he
was, he was quite willing to accept it. He only dreaded its effect on
the blacks themselves. Hitherto they had, in the main, been modest and
respectful, and mere freedom was not likely to spoil them. But the
deference to them likely to be shown by partisans eager for their votes
would have a tendency to uplift and unbalance them. Beyond this, no harm
would be done the South by negro suffrage. The old owners would cast the
votes of their people almost as absolutely and securely as they cast
their own. If Northern men expected in this way to build up a Northern
party in the South, they were gravely mistaken. They would only be
multiplying the power of the old and natural leaders of Southern
politics by every vote given to a former slave. Heretofore such men had
served their masters only in the fields; now they would do not less
faithful service at the polls. If the North could stand it, the South
could. For himself, he should make no special objection to negro
suffrage as one of the terms of reorganization, and if it came, he did
not think the South would have much cause to regret it.
* * * * *
Vicksburg, city of hills and caves, had already lost most of the traces
of the siege, that for a year blocked the progress of our arms in the
West, and concentrated the gaze of the continent. Few of the houses
showed much serious damage. The hiding-holes dug in the hill-sides, for
security against the shells, had been filled up again; stores had been
reopened; ox-teams, bringing in cotton, filled the streets; returned
Rebel soldiers were looking after their abandoned property, and
receiving the heartiest welcomes from their old friends and neighbors.
Carriages were procured, and under the escort of General Morgan L.
Smith, the commanding officer, we drove out through the formidable lines
of breast-works that run along the successive ridges back of the town,
to the spot where Generals Grant and Pemberton met to agree upon the
terms of surrender. All the way up the Mississippi, we had been
sympathetically quoting General Butler’s expressions of delight, after
his protracted residence in the flat Southern country, at “seeing hills
again.” The Vicksburg hills were the first we had seen for a month or
more; and we saw quite enough of them. A sudden storm came up; the roads
became almost as slippery as ice; the drivers, blinded with the rain,
guided their horses badly; and presently one of the carriages was
handsomely capsized in the mud, and the other one came within an inch of
a similar fate. “Nebber ’n all my born life did so afore, nor nebber
will,” protested the chap-fallen driver.
From the crest above the unpretending little monument one could trace
for miles along the tops of the hills the successive lines of
intrenchment, and mark the spots where assault after assault illustrated
the various skill of the Generals, and the unvaried gallantry of the
soldiers they more than once led to needless slaughter. Cotton already
dotted every little spot of arable land within the Rebel lines, and
beyond them many a broad field, enriched by Northern blood, was
promising a rich harvest to Northern lessees. One, a former Clerk of the
Ohio House of Representatives, rode up while we were studying the
positions which the respective armies had occupied. He thought there was
money down here, and had buried a good deal of it, any way, in these
broken ridges.
Everybody was planting cotton; every little valley bloomed with it, and
up hill-sides, that further south would have been called waste land,
were everywhere to be traced the long undulations of the cotton ridges.
As an official report about this time expressed it, “Visions of fortunes
were floating before all planters’ eyes. The only trouble was scarcity
of laborers. A quarter of a million acres, more or less, were waiting to
sprout fortunes under every stroke of the hoe. All men seemed mad.
Guerrillas were a light matter; the army-worm nothing. Cotton-seed, and
land to scatter it on, and blacks to gather in the golden fiber—and lo!
Golconda!” Worst of all, nearly every man was overreaching his means.
With capital to carry through a plantation of five hundred acres, he
would be attempting a thousand. Negroes were consequently ill-paid;
rations were likely to be of the cheapest and scantiest. If the negro,
dissatisfied with this specimen of the workings of free labor, broke his
contract and ran away, it was a proof that “free niggers would never
make cotton without a system of peonage.” “We are the only ones that
understand the nigger,” said a few of the more outspoken Mississippians,
emboldened by the growing impression that the President, as a Southern
man, was gradually coming over to their side. “Wait till Johnson gets
things a-going here, and we’ll make a contract law that will make a
nigger work.”[39]
Meantime, however, the Northerners were doing most of the
cotton-planting. Mississippians were quite sincere in believing it
impossible to grow cotton with unrestricted free labor, and many of
them, frightened at the prospect of having to pay war taxes, and
especially at what the more timorous still thought the danger of negro
suffrage, were anxious to sell, for ten dollars an acre, lands that
before the war readily commanded forty or fifty.
Memphis showed even more signs of the universal reaction than Vicksburg.
The old inhabitants were more generally back, and a longer immunity from
the punishments they had at first dreaded made them bolder. The
newspapers were almost as unbridled as in the old secession days in
their denunciations of Parson Brownlow, the East Tennessee Unionists,
the test oath, and the effort to exclude Rebel voters from the polls.
But on one point they had been utterly revolutionized. The man whom most
of all they used to “decorate with their censure,”[40] “the drunken
tailor from the mountains,” “the po’ white demagogue,” was now the
unfortunate subject of their warmest eulogies.
Business had already shown signs of revival. For the very best part of
the cotton-growing region, Memphis, since the completion of her railroad
system, had been the natural center and the only serious rival to New
Orleans. All this trade was likely to be renewed. Business men were
trying to resume, capital was everywhere in demand, and the streets
showed more of the life and bustle of a Northern community than those of
any Southern city we had seen.
Returned Rebel soldiers swarmed everywhere, in the parlors, at the
liquor-shops, about the hotels, in the theaters. A blue uniform
attracted attention; the gray flowed all about it in the unbroken stream
of the street. If there was any regulation preventing returned Rebels
from wearing the buttons and insignia of their rank, it was utterly a
dead letter.
* * * * *
At Bolivar, a single standing chimney, as seen from our hurricane-deck,
was all that marked the former site of a once bustling town. It was the
solitary monument left to tell the tale of the ruin rebellion had
brought to that community.
Further up, Fort Pillow showed no signs of either massacre or defense.
In fact, one could see nothing but a blank bluff, whence artillery might
command a fine range up or down the river.
One evening we landed just as a magnificent sunset was casting an
amethyst sparkle over the water, while great banks of orange and yellow
were reflected from above, and purple and scarlet, partly concealed by a
misty blue veil floating over them, spread across half the sky. At a
little distance beyond the wood-yard stood a row of the rudest cabins,
ranged after the fashion of the negro quarters on a plantation. Entering
one, I found a block serving as a chair for a middle-aged negress, who
sat on it before the big fire, holding a sick baby, with its little
woolly head turned toward a blaze that seemed hot enough to roast it. An
old bedstead, nailed together by pieces of rough boards and covered with
a tattered quilt, stood in one corner. In the opposite one was a rough
table, on which were the fragments of a half-eaten, heavy, sodden
“corn-pone.” In the fire-place stood a skillet covered by a broken lid,
and on an old box were piled some broken dishes. I have enumerated
absolutely everything gathered here to make comfortable the happy home
of an American freeman.
Returning to the landing, I learned from the negroes standing about that
they were refugees from cotton plantations lower down the river, over
which the guerrillas “had been a raidin’, sah.” They had hired here to a
speculator, following in the wake, of our army, to cut wood for the
steamboats. He sold his wood for four dollars a cord, cash; and out of
this paid nothing for the wood at all, and only promised to pay them a
dollar a cord for chopping it. At this rate they could have made plenty
of money, “but de trouble is, sah, he done nebber pay us. He say grillas
sunk de steamboat him money come down on, and we’m got to take goods fo’
ou’ pay. Den he sell us po’k not fit to eat, at tree bits a pound, and
de meanest co’n-meal you ever see.” Further inquiry showed that they had
bought brass rings at five or six dollars apiece, and gaudy cotton
handkerchiefs for the head at three dollars; and, in short, had done
their best to help the speculator fleece them out of the last penny of
their earnings. It was a lonely, desolate-looking spot; the simple
creatures were afraid to go away for fear of guerrillas, and here they
were completely at his mercy. Scores of such cases were to be found up
and down the river. Fortunes were made during the last year of the war
out of Mississippi wood-yards, and too often the most successful were
the readiest to cheat the poor negroes out of their paltry share of the
splendid profits.
* * * * *
At last our long journey approached its close. At Cairo we met floods of
Northern newspapers, and, for the first time, became aware that a
formidable party was organizing at the North in favor of Southern
reconstruction only on the basis of some form of negro suffrage. At
Louisville a pleasant dinner party enabled us to meet the last
collection of men from the midst of a Rebel community. At that time
there was more loyalty in Nashville than in Louisville, and about as
much in Charleston as in either. For the first and only time on the
trip, save while we were under the Spanish flag, slaves waited on us at
dinner. They were the last any of us were ever to see on American soil.
-----
Footnote 39:
They subsequently did. It was like the patent rat-trap. Nobody could
make a safer contrivance. Rats couldn’t possibly get out of it. The
only difficulty was that they declined to go in.
Footnote 40:
The happy phrase of Mr. Winter Davis in referring, in the United
States House of Representatives, to the vote of censure passed by the
Maryland Legislature for his first public act in co-operation with the
Republican party against the slaveholders’ policy.