settler. It is just beside the old Eatonton factory which Sherman
burned down. At the next turn in the road there is a roaring as of many
waters. A screen of pine and rank grass undergrowth hides an impressive
sight. A step inward takes you to the romantic stone foundation of the
old factory; you can climb up on one of the pillars and look out. The
interior of the factory is all young trees and moss and tangles of
evergreen, but beyond it rushes a mighty stream over a partially dammed
broad course, red as blood, but wallowing forward in creamy billows and
white foam.
The factory was used to weave coarse cotton cloth, and had evidently
been worked by water power. Quite forgotten now, unvisited, it was yet
a picturesque memorial of the march, and I was surprised to see no
names of visitors scrawled on the walls of its massive old foundations.
I walked into Eatonton by a long and picturesque wooden bridge over the
crimson river, a strange and wonderful structure completely roofed,
and shady as a tunnel. The evening sun blazed on the old wood and on
the red tide and on the greenery beyond, making the scene look like a
colored illustration of a child’s tale.
Eatonton, where Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were actually born, is now a
hustling “city” with bales of cotton fluff higglety-pigglety down its
streets, and again beautiful bales of extra quality in the windows
of its cotton brokers. There are also modern mills where cotton is
being spun. The business men on the streets talk of “spots” and
“futures”—spot cotton being apparently that which you have on the spot
and can sell now, and futures being crops yet to be picked, which,
presuming on kind Providence, may be sold and re-sold many times before
being grown. What is said of Eatonton may be said of Milledgeville,
twenty miles further on. It is a cotton town. It is a gracious seat as
well, with a scent of history about its old buildings, but it impresses
one as a great cotton center. The streets of Milledgeville were almost
blocked with cotton bales. It would have been easy to fight a battle of
barricades there. The principal church looked as if it were fortified
with cotton bales, and it would have been possible to walk fifty or
a hundred yards stepping on the tops of the bales. Bales were on the
tidy lawns of shady villas or stacked on the verandas, and everywhere
the hard-working gins were roaring and grinding as they tore out the
cottonseed from the white fluff and left cotton that could be spun.
Wisps of cotton lint blew about all over the streets, and cotton was
entangled in dogs’ fur and children’s hair. In the porches of Negro
cabins it was heaped high till the entrance to the doorway itself was
blocked.
Cotton was booming at Savannah and New Orleans, and despite talk of the
weevil destroying the pod, and of bad weather and bad crops, it was
clear that Georgia was very prosperous. Men and women discussed the
price of cotton as they might horse races or State-lottery results or
raffles. Everyone wanted room to store his cotton and hold it till the
maximum price was reached. My impression of Georgia now was that it was
not nearly so rich in live stock and in food as it had been in the time
of Sherman. In his day it grew its own food and was the supply source
of two armies. To-day it imports the greater part of its food. It sells
its cotton and buys food from the more agricultural States of the
South. It might have been thought to be a land overflowing with fruit
and honey and milk, but fruit and honey are cheaper in New York than
there, and there is no margin of milk to give away. Meat is scarce and
dear. There is no plenty on the table unless it be of sweet potatoes.
I imagine that after Sherman’s raid the farmers felt discouraged, and
decided never to be in a position to feed an enemy army again. There
are many always urging the Georgian to grow corn and raise stock, and
so make Georgia economically independent, but the farmer always meets
the suggestion with the statement that cotton gives the largest return
on any given outlay and takes least trouble. That is true, but it is
largely because the Negro cotton picker is such a cheap laboring hand.
A farm laborer would automatically obtain more than a cotton picker.
The hypnotic effect of the slave past is strong and binding upon the
Negroes. Perhaps it is still the curse of Georgia. There are still
planters who drive their laborers with the whip and the gun—though the
shortage of labor during the war caused these to be put up. It is not
in money in the bank that one must reckon true prosperity. However,
in this material way, Georgia has quite recovered from the Civil War.
But she has lost a good many of the compensations of true agriculture;
cotton is so commercial a product that there is no glamour about it,
not even about the old plantations, unless it be that of the patient
melancholy of the cotton pickers.
VI
TRAMPING TO THE SEA
I passed through two ancient capitals of Georgia, first Milledgeville,
and then Louisville. The relationship which Milledgeville bore to
Atlanta reminded me of the relationship of the old Cossack capital of
the Don country to the modern industrial wilderness of South Russia
called Rostof-na-Donu. But business is business, and there is only
business in this land. Even along the way to the old capital it is
always so many miles to Goldstein’s on the mile-posts instead of so
many miles to Milledgeville.
The old legislature sat at Milledgeville, but it fled at the approach
of Sherman. It was a day of great astonishment when General Slocum
paused in his supposed march upon Augusta and General Howard in his
attack on Macon, and one came south from Madison while the other
marched north from McDonough. There was an extraordinary sauve qui
peut. Panic seized the politicians and the rich gentry of the place,
for the rumor of the terrible ways of the foragers was flying ahead of
the Union Army. Everyone strove to carry off or hide his treasures.
They must have had terrible privations and some adventures on the road
trying to race the army, and they would have done better to remain to
face the music, for no private effects were destroyed in this city.
Similar scenes were enacted as at Covington. The darkies made a great
day of jubilee, and hugged and kissed the soldiers who had set them
free. The cotton was burned and made a great flare—seventeen hundred
bales of it even in those days. The depots, magazines, arsenals,
and factories were blown up. Governor Brown had fled with all his
furniture, and Sherman in the governor’s house slept on a roll of army
blankets on the bare floor.
There are many signs of ease and refinement in the spacious streets of
Milledgeville, though it has increased little in size since the war.
It has large schools for the training of cadets and the training of
girls. These are model institutions and are very valuable in Georgia.
The place, however, seemed to lack the cultural significance it ought
to have. But it is true that churches and Sunday schools were full. No
shops of any kind were open on Sundays; the people had forgotten the
taste of alcoholic drink and were ready to crusade against tobacco.
They are not given to lynching, though they allowed some wild men from
Atlanta to break open their jail some years ago and take away a Jew
and hang him. But they are too content. At church on Sunday morning
the pastor complained that while all were willing to give money to
God none were willing to offer themselves. He invited any who were
ready to give themselves unreservedly to God to step forth, and none
did. And it was an eloquent appeal by a capable orator. I met an old
recluse who was at the back of the church. He had tried to give himself
to God but was now living at the asylum where he had found shelter,
being otherwise without means. He had been a Baptist minister at a
church near Stone Mountain, but rheumatism had intervened after twenty
years’ work, and he could no longer stoop to immerse the candidates
for baptism. He was an Englishman who had listened to Carlyle’s and
Ruskin’s lectures, and he talked of Dean Farrar’s sermons and the good
deeds of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He spoke as no one speaks to-day,
good old measured Victorian English. He was a touching type of the
despised and rejected. He loved talking to the Negro children in the
“colored” school till the townsfolk warned him against it. His books
form the nucleus of the town library, but the rats have gnawn all the
bindings of his “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and I formed the opinion
that poor R—— living on sufferance in the lunatic asylum was probably
the best read man in Milledgeville.
It is a delightful walk to Sandersville, over Buffalo Creek and over
many streams crossed by the most fragile of bridges apparently never
properly rebuilt since Wheeler’s cavalry destroyed them in the face of
the oncoming army. Georgia used to have many excellent bridges, but
it never really hindered the Yankee army by destroying them. It seems
rather characteristic of the psychology of the people that they would
not replace what they had had to destroy. Now at the foot of each long
hill down which the automobiles tear is a trap of mere planks and gaps
which chatters and indeed roars when passed over. Many motorists get
into the mud.
Sandersville is a busy town hung in gloomy bunting which no one has had
time to take down since the last county fair. It has a large, dusty,
sandy square with a clock tower in the middle. There are great numbers
of cars and lorries parked around. Cotton bales, old and new, fresh and
decayed, lie on every street. Huge gins are working, and Negroes are
busy shoveling oily-looking cottonseed into barns; cotton fluff is all
over the roadways in little clots; every man is in his shirt; the soda
bars do a great trade even in November. A stranger said to me “Come
and have a drink” and we went in and had a “cherry dope.” There is an
impressive-looking public library, much larger than at Milledgeville,
with high frontal columns of unadorned old bricks mortared and laid
in diamond fashion, a barred door, and an entrance so deep in cotton
fluff, brickdust, and refuse that one might be pardoned for assuming
that learning was not now in repute. On the other hand there is a fine,
well-kept cemetery with large mausoleums for the rich and tiny stones
for the poor.
Sandersville was the scene of one or two combats during the war. But
when it is borne in mind that only a hundred of Sherman’s army died
from all causes on its march to the sea, it will be understood that
the strife was not serious. Sherman has been called a Prussian, and
he certainly possessed military genius and understood soldiering as
a mental science, but he always tried to save his men. He wished to
win victories with the smallest possible loss of men, and he thought
out his unorthodox plans of campaign with that in view. He could have
lost half his army on this adventurous march to the sea. It was a
most daring exploit, and if it had failed the whole responsibility
would have been laid at Sherman’s door. But Sherman had thought the
matter out, and he completely deceived his enemy. Once more after
Milledgeville Slocum is seen to be threatening Augusta in the north
and Howard is striking south. The cavalry is driving the enemy ahead
and plunges northward to Louisville and Waynesboro, well on the way
to Augusta. The enemy evacuates the central regions of Georgia, and
Sherman’s infantry moves through unscathed. Foraging has become
organized and systematic. The wagons amount to many thousands, and it
is curious that the population did not destroy all vehicles and so
prevent the army from carrying away so much. The doubt which General
Sherman expressed at the beginning of the march that supplies might
prove inadequate has entirely vanished, and the army has a crowd of
Negro camp followers almost as big as itself. These eventually became a
great hindrance, but they were evidently encouraged to join themselves
to the soldiers in the Milledgeville and Sandersville district. They
proved invaluable helps in the seeking out of hidden treasure and the
pillaging of farmhouses. They knew the likely spots where valuables
would be buried, and the soldiers knew how to worm out secrets even
from the most faithful black servants on the big estates. One reason
why Georgia burns and hangs more Negroes than any other State is
probably because of the bitterness caused by the unstinted foraging and
the “setting of the niggers against us” as they say.
Be that as it may, the seeds of future hate are always sown in present
wars, and “Sherman’s bummers” in their quest of spoil took little heed
of any future reckoning. The Negroes led the soldiers even to the
deepest recesses of swamps or forests, and showed the hollow tree or
cave or hole where lay deposited the precious family plate and jewelry
and money and even clothing. It was common to take from the planter not
only hams, flour, meal, yams, sorghum molasses, but above all things
turkeys, so rare to-day along the line of Sherman’s march—
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissaries found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
When we were marching thro’ Georgia!
But the bummer did not stick at these. He would borrow grandfather’s
dress coat and hat surviving from the old colonial days, and his mate
would array himself in grandmother’s finery, and so attired would drive
their wagon back to camp, hailed by the jests of the whole army; and if
they met an officer on the way they would cry out mirthfully the text
of the army order—_The army will forage liberally on the country._
It is said that no forager would ever sell any of his loot, that
indeed it was a point of honor not to sell. The veterans of the North
must therefore preserve many interesting mementoes of the South.
Both officers and men took many tokens. There used to be an amusing
euphemism current in Sherman’s army: it was—“A Southern lady gave
me that for saving her house from being burned”—and if anyone said,
“That’s a nice gold watch; where did you get it?” the soldier replied,
“Oh, a Southern lady gave it to me,” etc.
The army made camp by three o’clock every day, and it was after three
that most of the unauthorized foraging expeditions took place. They
were gay afternoons spent in singing and gambling, athletics and cock
fighting. The South was found to be possessed of a wonderful race of
fighting cocks. The enthusiasts of the sport rushed from farm yard
to farm yard for astonished chanticleer, and having captured him fed
him well and brought him up to a more martial type of life than that
which in domesticated bliss he had enjoyed with his hens. Every company
had its cock fighting tournament. Each regiment, each brigade, each
division, and indeed each corps, had its champion. The winners of many
bloody frays were soon nicknamed “Bill Sherman” or “Johnny Logan,”
but the losing bird which began to fear to face its adversary would
be hailed as Beauregard or Jeff Davis. The cock fight finals were of
as great interest as the combat of the Reds and White Sox to-day, and
perhaps more real.
Besides game cocks each regiment had a great number of pets. These
were mostly poor, homeless creatures on which the soldier had taken
pity; dogs, singing birds, kids, who followed with the army and had the
army’s tenderness lavished on them.
So they went, marching and camping by old Louisville and the broad
waters of the Ogeechee down to Millen. The old farmers say what an
impressive sight it was to watch them go by on the Millen road with
seemingly more wagons than men, with all the wagons bulging with spoil
and drawn by well-fed horses and mules, with long droves of cattle,
and thousands of frenzied Negroes so frantic with joy that they seemed
to have lost their heads and to be expecting the end of the world.
* * * * *
Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of
a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder
spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard
at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff,
and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen
miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled
country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none
the less pleasant for that.
There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the
original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice
affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days
when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in
large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the
all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As
I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined
himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their
front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big
green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them.
The men wore loin cloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to
the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold
as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are
now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way.
“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the
African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors
of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations,
taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an
only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful
strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming
eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent
themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and
given the full rights of white American citizens.”
The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the
Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it
under the dominance of a free Negro majority.
“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want
social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t
progress any further.”
“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the
Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges
have arisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for
self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds
he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop
short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will
arrive.”
I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris,
on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England
Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the
nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to
help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their
place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of
mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness
which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the
white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White
men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negro
_intelligentsia_. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”;
others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two
wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists
who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the
humanitarians of New England.
In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told
their slaves that the Yanks would flog them and burn them or put
them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children
in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with
their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation
was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is
the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among
slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not
much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed.
The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their
hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to
the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds
had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the
most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in
an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of
the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the
vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage
and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New
York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of
free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,”
and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan
and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradise happy as
the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with.
There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did
the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day,
and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted
state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shout
_Glory_ when the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion
which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.
At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion
of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers,
who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any
case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more
impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges
between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then,
after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they
deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild
panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream.
The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and
the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in
the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and
the droves of cattle. But for Georgia and the Negro there set in the
twilight of ruin and disillusion.
Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery
days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given
them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and
initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors,
and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the
race of human individuals striving one against another.
“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between
Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it.
We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the
current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars
in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants
paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.
It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales,
and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under
such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since
abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained
a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no
truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s
plantation than he is when having the responsibility of picking a crop
for master before he picks one for himself.