Atlanta—Georgia Phases of Rebel and Union Talk.
From Knoxville I went direct to Atlanta, Georgia, the key of the great
campaigns in the West, the memorable surrender of which re-elected
President Lincoln, and proved the beginning of the end.
The city was adapting itself, with remarkable rapidity, to the new order
of things. “Sherman, his mark,” was still written too plainly to be soon
effaced, in gaping windows and roofless houses, heaps of ruins on the
principal corners and traces of unsparing destruction everywhere. The
burnt district of Richmond was hardly more thoroughly destroyed than the
central part of Atlanta; yet, with all the advantages of proximity to
the North, abundant capital, and an influx of business and money from
above the Potomac, Richmond was not half so far rebuilt as Atlanta. What
is more remarkable, the men who were bringing a city out of this desert
of shattered brick—raising warehouses from ruins, and hastily
establishing stores in houses half finished and unroofed—were not
Yankees, but pure Southerners. These people were taking lessons from
Chicago, and deserved to have, as they then seemed likely to have, the
foremost of the interior cities of the Gulf States.
Not less than four thousand mechanics were at work; and at least as many
more would have been employed, if it had been possible to secure
building material enough to supply the enormous demand. A hundred and
fifty or two hundred stores were already opened; and others found
themselves unable to rent rooms for their goods. The streets were
blockaded with drays and wagons. The four railroads were taxed to their
utmost capacity, without beginning to supply all the demands upon them.
The trade of the city was a third greater than it had ever been, in its
most prosperous days before the war.
But the faces one saw on the streets or behind the counters were not the
faces of men with whom you would choose to do business. “I have spent
five days here,” exclaimed a simple-hearted scientific man, as he
greeted me; “I have spent years among the Black Feet, and have been
pretty much over the world, but I never saw such demoralized faces. The
war has destroyed their moral character. There isn’t one man in a score
here I would trust with my carpet-bag.” The geologist was too severe,
but the traces of the bad passions and disregard of moral obligations
which the war has taught, are written almost as plainly on the faces as
are Sherman’s marks on the houses of Atlanta. More tangible evidence of
the war’s demoralization was to be found in the alarming insecurity of
property and even of life. Passing about the dark, crooked streets of
Atlanta after night, unaccompanied and unarmed, was worse than
attempting a similar exploration of the Five Points, in New York, ten
years ago. Murders were of frequent occurrence; and so common a thing as
garroting attracted very little attention.
The soil of the country, for many miles in all directions, is poor, but
prices of land in the immediate vicinity were run up to fabulous rates.
The people were infected with the mania of city building; and
landholders gravely explained to you how well their plantations, miles
distant, would cut up into corner lots. Cotton is, of course, the only
staple. It ought to be raised in abundance, for the soil will produce
nothing else, but he would be a skillful cultivator who should get an
average of a third of a bale each from many acres. Ten or twelve bushels
of corn to the acre would be a great crop. Indeed, throughout wide
stretches in the interior of the cotton-growing States, so worthless was
the soil for any other purpose, that the planters used to buy their corn
and pork for the mules and negroes, and thus reserve all their arable
land for the undivided growth of cotton.
* * * * *
A few Union men are to be found in the region to which Atlanta is the
natural center. All complained that it was worse for them, under the
progressing reconstruction, than for the original Rebels. “We are in no
sense upheld or encouraged by the Government; public sentiment is
against us because we opposed the war; or, as they said, because we were
tories; but, when the Government triumphed, we were secure because we
were on the winning side. But you pardon Howell Cobb and every other
leading secessionist; they at once become the natural leaders in an
overwhelmingly secessionist community; and we, through mistaken kindness
of our own Government, are worse ostracized to-day, in the new order of
things, than we ever were during the war.”
The feeling among the Rebel portion of the community against the course
of the Convention was strong. “They have repudiated the debt they
incurred themselves. If that Confederate debt isn’t honestly due, no
debt in the world ever was. If we’ve got to repudiate that, we may as
well help the Democrats repudiate the debt on the other side too. What’s
fair for one is fair for the other.”[52]
In spite of their new-found love for President Johnson, they could not
help grumbling a good deal at “this Presidential interference with the
rights of a State.” They seemed utterly unable to comprehend that, after
they had once submitted, they could possibly labor under any
disabilities on account of their effort to overthrow the Government.
“Treason is a crime, and the greatest of crimes,” vociferated the
President. His Southern friends seemed to regard this as only a little
joke. To interfere, for a moment, with the free action of their
Conventions and Legislatures, half made up as yet of unpardoned Rebels,
was monstrous. “What’s the use o’ callin’ it a free country, ef you
can’t do as you please in your own Legislater?” asked one indignant
Georgian. “It’s a pretty note ef we’ve got to take men as went agin the
State through the wah to make laws for it now. For my part, I hain’t got
no use for sich.”
The political phraseology of these Southern gentlemen is at once
peculiar and concise. Every desirable thing, politically, is described
as high-toned and conservative. Everything dangerous to the settled
order of things, everything looking to an establishment of the results
of the war, or tending to an indorsement of the political grounds on
which the North suppressed the rebellion, is to be abhorred and avoided
under the name of radical. President Johnson was greatly praised,
“because he is conservative on the nigger.”
“Johnson knows niggers, I tell you,” said an Atlanta worthy. “He’s not
going to let any such cursed radicalism as inspired Lincoln trouble him.
If Johnson had been President, we wouldn’t have been embarrassed by any
infernal Emancipation Proclamation.” So all good conservatives were
exhorted in all the papers to convince the South of their desire to
reconstruct the Union by admitting at once the Southern Representatives
and Senators; and, above all, it was to be understood that sound
conservative men of all parties must unite in the repeal of the odious
radical oath. It absolutely prevented Rebel office-holders from at once
becoming national law-makers.
Mr. Jas. F. Johnson aspired to represent the Senatorial District in the
General Assembly. He furnished an excellent type of what passes among
Georgians for a respectable and proper Sort of Unionism. He stated his
position, in an advertisement in the public papers, thus:
“As a member of the Georgia Convention, entertaining the views I
then did, I opposed the immediate secession of the State from the
Union, and used every effort in my power to prevent it, until I
became satisfied that a controlling majority of the Convention
entertained different views. I then yielded my opposition, believing
it to be the best interest of the State to be united in supporting
the action taken by a majority of the Convention. And since that
time, until the surrender of the Confederate armies, I did all in my
power, both in person and means, to sustain the resolution of the
Convention, and establish, if possible, the independence of the
Southern States.”
Another style of Unionism might be inferred from the phrase heard a
dozen times every day: “I’ve taken the oath,” or, “I’ve got my pardon;
and I’m just as big a Rebel now as ever I was.” “I’ve got just the same
rights now that any of the d——d Yankees have,” added one, “and I mean to
demand my rights. I’m pardoned; there’s nothing against me, and I mean
to demand fair treatment.” He had Confederate cotton, which he insisted
should not be taken from him, since, although he had subscribed it to
the Rebel Government, he had never made the actual delivery.
* * * * *
Between Atlanta and Knoxville one passes over the track of the
destroyer. Down to Dalton the damage from the war has not been very
great; but for the rest of the route, solitary chimneys and the debris
of burnt buildings everywhere tell the old, old story. If the country
did not reveal it so plainly, it might still be read in the faces of our
passengers. Every one of them was a record of some phase of the contest,
of its squalor and misery, of its demoralization, of its barbarism, or
of its ennoblement. Bright, fair faces that ought to have adorned happy
rural homes, grown coarse and brassy, flaunted beside young officers.
They were the transformation of the camps—the results of its license and
lax morality. Trembling old refugees watched the conductor as he counted
their hard-earned gatherings, to see if the little pile of fractional
currency would be all exhausted in paying their fare home. Aimless young
men in gray, ragged and filthy, seemed, with the downfall of the
rebellion they had fought for, to have lost their object in life, and
stared stupidly at the clothes and comfortable air of officers and
strangers from the North. By the roadside, here and there, might be
seen—as I saw on a public corner, in the midst of all the bustle and
whirl of Atlanta—a poor, half starved, half naked white woman, gathering
her little children about her, and cowering in the gray dawn over the
dull embers by which, in dull wretchedness, she had watched through the
weary night.
And, as one looks over the scene, and takes in the full sense of all
this sad destruction, a Major from Longstreet’s staff sits down to talk.
“If you of the North want now to conciliate and settle the South, you
must do one of three things: re-establish slavery; give the old masters
in some way power to compel the negroes to work; or colonize them out of
the country, and help us to bring in white laborers!” A handsome man he
is; tall, bearded like the pard, brown with campaigning, battered, clad
in worn-out Confederate gray, but with good army blue pantaloons, taken,
doubtless, from the body of some dead or captured soldier of the
Republic. Such waste and destruction all about us; and still these
insatiable men—these handsome tigers—want more conciliation!
Some Southern merchants, from different points in Alabama and Georgia,
were returning from New York, after making their purchases. They could
not say too much about the kindness with which they had been met, and
their disappointment at not finding the Yankees all eager to drink their
blood for desert after dinner. But in a moment after such expressions
they would break out into the most fearful and blasphemous invectives
against some conspicuous Northerner, who had the misfortune to differ
from them as to the best mode of re-establishing peace throughout the
Rebel regions. These people have discovered that they must tolerate the
opinions of others, but their intolerant spirits have not yet been
sufficiently disciplined to it; and so it happens that sometimes, now,
their utter impotence only serves to increase their malice. Must the
poor negroes prove the vent for this rage that dare not reach to higher
objects?
Manifestly the negroes themselves have no faith in them. At one of the
railroad eating-houses I happened to ask a fine looking old “uncle” what
wages he received.
“Twenty dollahs a month, sah; but I’se gwine to quit. ’Tain’t enuff, is
it?”
“O yes, uncle, if they give you twenty dollars a month and your
boarding, you are getting fully as much as you would get at the best
places in the North for this kind of work. In Richmond they are only
getting fifteen dollars.”
“You tink, den, sah, dat we oughtn’t fur to quit—dat when dey pay us
twenty dollahs dey ain’t a cheatin’ us?”
“By no means. Work straight ahead, and do the best you can, as long as
you can get such wages.”
“Well, den, sah, I’ll do as you say. I was afeared of dese men cheatin’
me, because I knowed dey would if dey could. But I’ll do jus as you say,
sah. If you say wuck on, I’ll do it.” And three or four of the servants
who had gathered about, nodded and grinned their approval of the old
man’s conclusions.
“That’s just the trouble,” exclaimed a young Alabamian, to whom, a few
hours later, I was narrating the incident. “These fellows have all got
to believe in the Yankees, and to think that we, who have always been
their best friends, want to cheat them. It’s going to ruin the South.
Five years hence, I firmly believe, the cotton-growing regions will be
an utter waste, unless you Yankees, who don’t know anything about cotton
growing, come in, learn it, and get the niggers to work for you. They
won’t half work for us.”
“Won’t a fair day’s wages, in the long run, be sure to bring a fair
day’s work?”
“No. I tell you, the nigger _never_ works except when he is compelled
to. It isn’t in his nature, and you can’t put it in. He’ll work a day
for you for good wages, and then will go off and spend it; and you’ll
not get another lick out of him till he’s hungry, and has got nothing to
eat.”
“Possibly, at first. But remember, these people are intoxicated with
their first draught of freedom. Wait a little while, and as they get
settled, and see something of the rewards of steady industry, they’ll be
as eager to accumulate and save, as any other class of laborers.”
“Not a bit of it. I tell you, niggers are niggers. You’re talking about
a different class of laborers altogether. That’s always the way. You
know, and every Northern man knows, that we have been the best friends
the nigger ever had. Yet this is the way they treat us. They’ll work for
you a little while, and then they’ll serve you in the same style.”
An old negro on the platform, at the very moment, was droning out a
curious commentary on the Alabamian’s complaints: “One-half of dese
niggers,” said he to the brakeman, “one-half of dese niggers ought to be
killed, any how. Dey don’t do nuffin but hang roun’ and steal from dem
dat work.” His old brass watch, it seems, had been stolen, and he was
scowling through his brass-mounted goggles in the direction in which he
supposed the thief had gone.
I told the Alabamian of the persistent labors of the Sea Island negroes.
He utterly refused to believe that I had not been deceived. Finally, the
crucial test was mentioned—the balances to their credit in the National
Bank.[53] “Well, I don’t understand it. There were never any such
niggers around in our country.” And with that he suddenly ended the
talk.
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Footnote 52:
Mr. Simmons said in the Georgia Convention: “Let us repudiate only
under the lash and the application of military power, and then, as
soon as we are an independent sovereignty, restored to our equal
rights and privileges in the Union, let us immediately call another
Convention and resume the debt.”
Footnote 53:
Some weeks before this, on the 17th of September, 1865, the balances
to the credit of the Sea Island negroes, in their National Bank,
amounted to $195,587 08.