atmosphere as if the air had been steamed over night and was now
cooling a little. The road leaving behind Decatur and the suburbs of
Atlanta became deep red, almost scarlet in hue, and ran between broad
fields of cotton where every pod was bursting and puffing out in cotton
wool. Men with high spindle-wheeled vehicles came with cotton bales
done up in rough hempen netting. Hooded buggies rolled sedately past
with spectacled Negroes and their wives. Drummers in Ford cars tooted
and raced through the mud. Thus to Ingleside, where a turn in the road
reveals the huge hump of Stone Mountain, shadowy and mystical like
uncleft Eildons. All the soldiers as they bivouacked there or marched
past on that bright November day of ‘64 remarked the mountain, and
their gaze was turned to it in the spirit of curiosity and adventure.
I fell in with a Mr. McCaulay who was a child when Sherman marched
through. He thought the Germans in Belgium hardly equaled Sherman. Not
only did his troops burn Atlanta but almost every house in the country.
He pointed out new houses that had sprung up on the ruins of former
habitations.
... “A fence used to run right along here, and there were crops
growing. No, not cotton; there was not the demand for cotton in those
days, and not nearly so much grown in the State. Over on that side
of the road there was a huge encampment of soldiers, and I remember
stealing out to it to listen to the band.
“The foragers came to the houses and took every bit of food—left us
bone dry of food. They also took our horses and our mules and our cows
and our chickens. Sometimes a family would have a yoke of oxen hidden
in the wood, but that would be all that they had. Everyone had to flee,
and all were destitute. It was a terrible time. But we all stood by one
another and shared one another’s sorrows and helped one another as we
could.
“All colored folk also stood by us. I expect you’ve read, ‘Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,’ and ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ but the picture is terribly
overdrawn there.”
“I did not know these told the story of the march,” said I.
“They do not. But they give an account of the Negroes that is entirely
misleading. The North has queered the Negro situation by sending all
manner of people down here to stir the Negro up against us. Till we
said, ‘You and your niggers can go to the devil’—and we left them
alone.
“But that was a mistake, and we are realizing it now, and intend to
take charge of the education of the Negro ourselves, and be responsible
for him spiritually as well as physically. There never was a better
relationship between us than there is now.
“And I—I was brought up among them as a child, as an equal, played
with them, wallowed with them in the dirt, slept with them. They’re as
near to me as flesh and blood can be.”
It was curious to receive this outpouring when I had not mentioned the
Negro to him at all and seemed merely curious concerning Sherman’s
march. It is, however, characteristic of the South: the subject of the
treatment of the Negro recurs like _idée fixe_.
At Lithonia, after a meal of large yellow yams and corn and chicken
and biscuits and cane syrup, I called on old Mrs. Johnson, who lived
over the way from Mrs. Jones. Lithonia was much visited by the cavalry.
Decatur was stripped of everything, and Lithonia fared as badly in the
end. Men came into the farmyard and there and then killed the hogs and
threw them on to waiting wagons. These were foragers from the camps
outside Atlanta. But one day someone came with the news—“Sherman
has set fire to the great city and he’ll be here to-morrow.” And
sure enough on the morrow his army began to appear on the road—the
vanguard, and after that there seemed no end to the procession. The
army was all day marching past with its commissariat wagons and its
water wagons, its horses, its mules, and regiment after regiment. The
despoiled farm wives and old folk could not help being thrilled, though
they were enemies. General Slocum, who commanded the left wing of the
army, wrote his name in pencil on granny’s doorpost when he stopped at
her house with one or two of his staff.
The Confederate soldiers were “Johnny Rebs” and the Union soldiers were
“Billy Yanks.” Neither side was known to have committed any crimes
against women or children, and the latter were crazy to watch the Yanks
go by, though often their fathers were away in the hard-pressed Rebel
armies.
As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields
from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately
farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest
folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just
past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a
joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the
great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of
their lives. So whenever I saw an old man or woman sitting on a veranda
by the wayside I made bold to approach and ask what they knew of the
great march, and how it had affected them, and the Negroes.
They told of the methodical destruction of the railways, and of the
innumerable bonfires whose flames and smokes changed the look of the
sky. Every rail tie or sleeper was riven from its bed of earth and
burned, and the long steel rails were heated over the fires. To make
the fires bigger timber was brought from the woods, and every rail was
first made red-hot and then twisted out of shape—the favorite plan
being for three or four soldiers to take the hot rail from the fire,
place it between two trunks of standing pines, and then push till it
was bent nigh double.
They told of the stillness after the army had gone, and of the sense
of ruin which was upon them with their cotton destroyed, and all their
stores for the winter pillaged, and their live stock driven off. An
old dame told me how the only live animal in her neighborhood was a
broken-down army horse left behind to die by the enemy. The folk were
starving, but a woman resuscitated the horse and went off with him to
try and bring food to the village. She walked by his side for fear he
would drop down dead—and first of all she sought a little corn for the
horse, for “Old Yank” as she called him. Many a weary mile they walked
together, only to find that “Sherman’s bummers” had been there before
her. She slept the night in a Negro hut (a thing no white woman would
dream of doing now) and the Negroes fed her and gave corn to the horse
and sent her on her way. Out of several old buggies and derelict wheels
a “contrapshun” had been rigged out and tied to the old horse, but it
was not until beyond Covington and Conyers that a place was found which
the foragers had missed, and the strange buggy was loaded for home.
I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early
next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine.
The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed
me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist.
On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a
sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the
wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old
levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim
with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and
jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned
cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the
inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from
one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an
old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such
places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay
beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What
old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies!
On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some
were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the
Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over
with red mud. Among the old were graves of slaves, I was told, but
since the war no Black has been buried with the White.
An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black,
weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half
a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest
from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no
two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He
remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed
through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and
then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The
old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a
pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite
material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.
While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s
army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It
has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah,
and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching
into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are
stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.
The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets,
content that it is no longer twilight, have ceased chirping, and
exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a
beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by
the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was
along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their
footsteps in the sand.
Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod.
The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has
ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks
and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some
farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he
came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where
the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed,
but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat
and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away.
Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his
pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came
into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its
large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares.
There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed
surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jackson when the
latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.
“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four
years ...!”
He seemed appalled at his own age.
“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold
digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania
in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”
“At seventeen years many their fortunes seek
But at fourscore it is too late a week”
said I sotto voce.
“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in
the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton
in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I
was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was
all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew
afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now.
We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”
He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed
offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he
resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be
a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is
the allotted span, but....”
I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who
conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote
of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the
soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their
flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people
came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep
hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy.
Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted
and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that
would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands
of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of
the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments
and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation
house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old
gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he
understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had
been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high,
and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that
slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”
That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of
the “Coming of the Lord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance.
Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old
Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have
been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God
had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s
messenger.
So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—_carrying
salvation to the sea_—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied
by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at
Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the
unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.
The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color
to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the
cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The
Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the
Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth
that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went
Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps
that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The
order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders
to corps commanders and then passed on to all ranks. The men slept
in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts
and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm
Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed
over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock,
when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion
shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The
bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the
whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here,
another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the
fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub
of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the
clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by
the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully
and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could
be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the
chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes
of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey,
roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier
for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well,
and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodder
were provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and
equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the
traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the
army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons
and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of
everything?) moved on.
There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was
like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’
Georgia” has caught it:
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!
All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free!
So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea,
When we were marching thro’ Georgia.
The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers,
the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!
The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the
famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the
hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn.
Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then
maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now
withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age
and despair. It is a diversified country of hill and dale, with
occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running
round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns,
which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give
quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be
seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a
house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.
The Southern white man builds large, has great joy in his home, and
would love to live on a grand scale with an army of retainers. The
Negro landowner does not imitate him, and builds a less impressive
type of home, neither so large nor so inviting. Rich colored farmers
are, however, infrequent. The mass of the Negro population is of the
laboring class, and even those who rent land and farm it for themselves
are very poor and sunk in economic bondage. Their houses are mostly
one-roomed wooden arks, mere windowless sheds resting on four stones,
a stone at each corner. Furniture, if any, was of a rudimentary kind.
“See how they live,” said a youth to me. “Just like animals, and that’s
all they are.”
“Why don’t you have any windows?” I asked of a girl sitting on the
floor of her cabin.
“They jus’ doan’ make ‘em with windows,” she replied. “But we’ve got a
window in this side.”
“Yes, but without glass.”
“Ah, no, no glass.”
“Is it cold in winter?”
“Yes, mighty cold.”
Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there
were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were
lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with
cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very
furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers
on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with
a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism, _Don’t
walk if you can ride_ seemed to have been changed into, _Don’t stir
forth till you can get a lift_, and white men picked up Negroes and
Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding
of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from
hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my
like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most
that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were
readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the
other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost
my car somewhere.
A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people
were a little dumbfounded when I said I was following in Sherman’s
footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on
a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had
overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch
up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the
road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they
knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who
remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago
now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and
had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that.
“Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them
they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there
was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat
the bread of bitterness like Cain——”
After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers
in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to
set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or
entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless
there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be.
Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an
opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinley said that the
character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and
South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say.
Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were
not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a
poor store keeper:
“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”
“’Deed, sir, I do.”
“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”
“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My
father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard
Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up,
asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the
soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then
saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never
forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a
brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except
to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their
niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his
niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”
On the other hand the rich, the owners of large plantations, remained
in many cases still virulent.
“I know Sherman is in hell,” said a Mr. R—— of historic family. “When
my mother lay sick in bed the soldiers came and set fire to our cotton
gin and all our barns. They came upon us like a tribe of Indians and
burst into every room, ransacking the place for jewelry and valuable
property. I was a small boy at the time, but I shall never forget it.
They took the bungs from all our barrels and let the syrup run to
waste in the yard because they themselves wanted no more of it. They
killed our hogs and our cows before our eyes and threw the meat to the
niggers. Yes, sir. A year or so back Sherman’s son said he was going to
make a tour along the way his daddy had gone—to see what a wonderful
thing his daddy had done. Lucky for him he changed his mind. We’d a
strung him to a pole, sure——”
Such sharp feeling was, however, certainly exceptional. Near Eatonton
was a Mr. Lynch of Lynchburg, storekeeper, postmaster, wheelwright, and
blacksmith all in one. He averred that they were “hugging and kissing
the Yankees now, just as they would be hugging and kissing the Germans
in a few years.”
“There’s mean fellows on every side,” said he. “You don’t tell me
that there’s no mean fellows among the English, the French, and the
Italians. I don’t believe all the stories about the Germans. I remember
what they used to say about the Yankees. They get mighty mad with me
when I tell ‘em, but there’s plenty of mean fellows on both sides.”