BY RAILROAD TO CORINTH.
I left Nashville for Decatur on a morning of dismal rain The cars were
crowded and uncomfortable, with many passengers standing. The railroad
was sadly short of rolling-stock, having (like most Southern roads) only
such as happened to be on it when it was turned over to the directors by
the government. It owned but three first-class cars, only one of which
we had with us. The rest of the passenger train was composed of box-cars
supplied with rude seats.
We passed the forts of the city; passed the battle-ground of Franklin,
with its fine rolling fields, marked by entrenchments; and speeding on
through a well-wooded handsome section of country, entered Northern
Alabama. As my observations of that portion of the State will be of a
general character, I postpone them until I shall come to speak of the
State at large.
It was raining again when I left Decatur, ferried across the Tennessee
in a barge manned by negroes. Of the railroad bridge burned by General
Mitchell, only the high stone piers remained; and freight and passengers
had to be conveyed over the river in that way. I remember a black
ferryman whose stalwart form and honest speech interested me, and whose
testimony with regard to his condition I thought worth noting down.
“I works for my old master. He raised me. He’s a right kind master. I
gits twenty dollars a month, and he finds me. Some of the masters about
hyere is right tight on our people. Then thar’s a heap of us that won’t
work, and that steal from the rest. They’re my own color, but I can’t
help saying what’s true. They just set right down, thinking they’re
free, and waiting for luck to come to ’em.” But he assured me that the
most of his people were at work, and doing well.
From the miserable little ferry-boat we were landed on the other side in
the midst of a drenching rain. To reach the cars there was a steep muddy
bank to climb. The baggage was brought up in wagons and pitched down
into mud several inches deep, where passengers had to stand in the
pouring shower and see to getting their checks.
On the road to Tuscumbia I made the acquaintance of a young South
Carolinian, whose character enlisted my sympathy, and whose candid
conversation offers some points worth heeding.
“I think it was in the decrees of God Almighty that slavery was to be
abolished in this way; and I don’t murmur. We have lost our property,
and we have been subjugated, but we brought it all on ourselves. Nobody
that hasn’t experienced it knows anything about our suffering. We are
discouraged: we have nothing left to begin new with. I never did a day’s
work in my life, and don’t know how to begin. You see me in these coarse
old clothes; well, I never wore coarse clothes in my life before the
war.”
Speaking of the negroes: “We can’t feel towards them as you do; I
suppose we ought to, but ’t isn’t possible for us. They’ve always been
our owned servants, and we’ve been used to having them mind us without a
word of objection, and we can’t bear anything else from them now. If
that’s wrong, we’re to be pitied sooner than blamed, for it’s something
we can’t help. I was always kind to my slaves. I never whipped but two
boys in my life, and one of them I whipped three weeks ago.”
“When he was a free man?”
“Yes; for I tell you that makes no difference in our feeling towards
them. I sent a boy across the country for some goods. He came back with
half the goods he ought to have got for the money. I may as well be
frank,—it was a gallon of whiskey. There were five gentlemen at the
house, and I wanted the whiskey for them. I told Bob he stole it.
Afterwards he came into the room and stood by the door,—a big, strong
fellow, twenty-three years old. I said, ‘Bob, what do you want?’ He
said, ‘I want satisfaction about the whiskey.’ He told me afterwards, he
meant that he wasn’t satisfied I should think he had stolen it, and
wanted to come to a good understanding about it. But I thought he wanted
satisfaction gentlemen’s fashion. I rushed for my gun. I’d have shot him
dead on the spot if my friends hadn’t held me. They said I’d best not
kill him, but that he ought to be whipped. I sent to the stable for a
trace, and gave him a hundred and thirty with it, hard as I could lay
on. I confess I did whip him unmercifully.”
“Did he make no resistance?”
“Oh, he knew better than that; my friends stood by to see me through. I
was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That’s the way we treat our
servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used to the new order
of things,—if we ever can.”
“In the mean while, according to your own showing, it would seem that
some restraint is necessary for you, and some protection for the
negroes. On the whole, the Freedmen’s Bureau is a good thing, isn’t it?”
He smiled: “May be it is; yes, if the nigger is to be free, I reckon it
is; but it’s a mighty bitter thing for us.”
Then, speaking of secession: “I had never thought much about politics,
though I believed our State was right when she went out. But when the
bells were ringing, and everybody was rejoicing that she had seceded, a
solemn feeling came over me, like I had never had in my life, and I
couldn’t help feeling there was something wrong. I went through the war;
there were thousands like me. In our hearts we thought more of the Stars
and Stripes than we did of the old rag we were fighting under.”
He was going to Mississippi to look after some property left there
before the war. But what he wished to do was to go North: “only I know I
wouldn’t be tolerated,—I know a man couldn’t succeed in business there,
who was pointed out as a Rebel.”
The same wish, qualified by the same apprehension, was frequently
expressed to me by the better class of young Southern men; and I always
took pains to convince them that they would be welcomed and encouraged
by all enlightened communities in the Northern States.
It was a dismal night in the cars. The weather changed, and it grew
suddenly very cold. Now the stove was red hot; and now the fire was out,
with both car-doors wide open at some stopping-place.
At two in the morning we reached Corinth. A driver put me into his hack,
and drove about town, through the freezing mud, to find me a lodging.
The hotels were full. The boarding-houses were full,—all but one, in
which, with a fellow-traveller, I was fortunate enough at last to find a
room with two beds.
It was a large, lofty room, the door fifteen feet high from the floor,
the walls eighteen feet. It had been an elegant apartment once; but now
the windows were broken, the plastering and stucco-work disfigured, the
laths smashed in places, there were bullet-holes through the walls, and
large apertures in the wainscots. The walls were covered with devices,
showing that Federal soldiers had been at home there; such as a shield,
admirably executed, bearing the motto: “The Union, it must be
preserved”; “Heaven Bless our Native Land”; “God of Battles, speed the
Right”; and so forth.
The beds were tumbled, some travellers having just got out of them to
take the train. A black woman came in to make them. The lady of the
house also came in,—a fashionably bred Southern woman, who had been
reduced, by the fortunes of the Rebellion, from the condition of a
helpless mistress of many servants, to that of a boarding-house keeper.
I asked for a single room, which I was somewhat curtly told I couldn’t
have. I then asked for more bedclothes,—for the weather continued to
grow cold, and the walls of the room offered little protection against
it. She said, “I reckon you’re mighty particular!” I replied that she
was quite correct in her reckoning, and insisted on the additional
clothing. At last I got it, very fortunately; for my room-mate, who did
not make the same demand, nearly froze in the other bed before daylight.
In the morning a black man came in and made a fire. Then, before I was
up, a black girl came in to bring a towel, and to break the ice in the
wash-basin. That the water might not freeze again before I could use it,
(for the fire, as some one has said, “couldn’t get a purchase on the
cold,”) I requested her to place the basin on the hearth; also to shut
the door; for every person who passed in or out left all doors wide,
affording a free passage from my bed to the street.
“You’re cold-natered, an’t ye?” said the girl, to whose experience my
modest requests appeared unprecedented.
Afterwards I went out to breakfast in a room that showed no chimney, and
no place for a stove. The outer door was open much of the time, and when
it was shut the wind came in through a great round hole cut for the
accommodation of cats and dogs. This, be it understood, was a
fashionable Southern residence; and this had always been the
dining-room, in winter the same as in summer, though no fire had ever
been built in it. The evening before, the lady had said to me, “The
Yankees are the cause that we have no better accommodations to offer
you,” and I had cheerfully forgiven her. But the Yankees were not the
cause of our breakfasting in such a bleak apartment.
Everybody at table was pinched and blue. The lady, white and delicate,
sat wrapped in shawls. She was very bitter against the Yankees, until I
smilingly informed her that her remarks were particularly interesting to
me, as I was a Yankee myself.
“From what State are you, Sir?”
“From Massachusetts.”
“Oh!”—with a shudder,—“they’re bad Yankees!”
“Bad enough, Heaven knows,” I pleasantly replied; “though, in truth,
Madam, I have seen almost as bad people in other parts of the world.”
The lady’s husband changed the conversation by offering me a piece of
venison which he had killed the day before. Deer were plenty in that
region. As in Tennessee and Alabama, game of all kinds—deer, foxes, wild
turkeys, wolves,—had increased greatly in Mississippi during the war;
the inhabitants having had something more formidable to hunt, or been
hunted themselves.
Mr. M—— owned two abandoned plantations: this was his town residence. He
left it just before the battle of Shiloh, and it was occupied either by
the Rebels or Yankees till the end of the war. He was originally opposed
to the secession-leaders, but he afterwards went into the war, and lost
everything, while they kept out of it and made money.
The bullet-holes in the house were made by the Rebels firing at the
Federals when they attacked the town.
The family consisted of three persons,—Mr. M——, his wife, and their
little boy. Notwithstanding their poverty, they kept four black servants
to wait upon them. They were paying a man fifteen dollars a month, a
cook-woman the same, another woman six, and a girl six: total, forty-two
dollars. It was mainly to obtain money to pay and feed these people that
they had been compelled to take in lodgers. The possibility of getting
along with fewer servants seemed never to have occurred to them. Before
the war they used to keep seven or eight. It was the old wasteful habit
of slavery: masters were accustomed to have many servants about them,
and each servant must have two or three to help him.
The freedmen, I was told, were behaving very well. But the citizens were
bitterly hostile to the negro garrison which then occupied Corinth. A
respectable white man had recently been killed by a colored soldier, and
the excitement occasioned by the circumstance was intense. It was called
“a cold-blooded murder.” Visiting head-quarters, I took pains to
ascertain the facts in the case. They are in brief as follows:—
The said respectable citizen was drunk. Going down the street, he
staggered against a colored orderly. Cursing him, he said, “Why don’t
you get out of the way when you see a white man coming?” The orderly
replied, “There’s room for you to pass.” The respectable citizen then
drew his revolver, threatening to “shoot his damned black heart out.”
This occasioned an order for his arrest. He drew his revolver, with a
similar threat, upon another soldier sent to take him, and was promptly
shot down by him. Exit respectable citizen.
Corinth is a bruised and battered village surrounded by stumpy fields,
forts, earthworks, and graves. The stumpy fields are the sites of woods
and groves cut away by the great armies. The graves are those of
soldiers slain upon these hills. Beautiful woody boundaries sweep round
all.
There is nothing about the town especially worth visiting; and my object
in stopping there was to make an excursion into the country and visit
the battle-field of Shiloh. I went to a livery-stable to engage a horse.
I was told of frequent robberies that had been committed on that road,
and urged by the stable-keeper to take a man with me; but I wished to
make the acquaintance of the country people, and thought I could do
better without a companion.