DOWN THE MISSISSIPPI.
At Memphis I took passage in a first-class Mississippi steam-packet for
Vicksburg. It was evening when I went on board. The extensive saloon,
with its long array of state-rooms on each side, its ornamental gilt
ceiling, and series of dazzling chandeliers, was a brilliant spectacle.
A corps of light-footed and swift-handed colored waiters were setting
the tables,—bringing in baskets of table-cloths, and spreading them;
immense baskets of crockery, and distributing it; and trays of silver,
which added to the other noises its ringing and jingling accompaniment.
About the stove and bar and captain’s office, at the end of the saloon,
was an astonishing crowd of passengers, mostly standing, talking,
drinking, buying tickets, playing cards, swearing, reading, laughing,
chewing, spitting, and filling the saloon, even to the ladies’ cabin at
the opposite end, with a thick blue cloud which issued from countless
bad pipes and cigars, enveloped the supper-tables, and bedimmed the
glitter of the chandeliers. In that cloud supper was to be eaten.
At a signal known only to the initiated I noticed that pipes were put
out and quids cast out, and a mighty rush began. Two lines of battle
were formed, confronting each other, with the table between them, each
dauntless hero standing with foot advanced, and invincible right hand
laid upon the back of a chair. In this way every place was secured at
least five minutes before the thundering signal was given for the
beginning of the conflict. At last the gong-bearing steward, poising his
dread right hand, anxiously watched by the hostile hosts, till the
ladies were fairly seated, beat the terrible roll and, instantly, every
chair was jerked back with a simultaneous clash and clatter, every
soldier plunged forward, every coat-tail was spread, and every pair of
trousers was in its seat.
Then, rallied by the gong from deck and state-room and stove, came the
crowd of uninitiated ones, (_quorum pars parva fui_,) hungry,
rueful-faced, dismayed, finding themselves in the unhappy position of
the fifth calf that suckled the cow with but four teats,—compelled to
wait until the rest had fed.
After supper, there were music and dancing in the after-part of the
saloon, and gambling, and clicking glasses, and everlasting talk about
Yankees and niggers and cotton, in the other part. There were a few
Federal officers in their uniforms, and a good many Rebel officers in
civil dress. I recognized a thin sprinkling of Northern capitalists and
business men. But the majority were Mississippi and Arkansas planters
going down the river to their estates: a strongly marked, unrefined,
rather picturesque class,—hard swearers, hard drinkers, inveterate
smokers and chewers, wearing sad-colored linen for the most part, and
clad in coarse “domestic,” slouching in their dress and manners, loose
of tongue, free-hearted, good-humored, and sociable. They had been to
Memphis to purchase supplies for their plantations, or to lease their
plantations, or to hire freedmen, or to “buy Christmas” for their
freedmen at home. They appeared to have plenty of money, if the
frequency with which they patronized the bar was any criterion. Liquors
on board the Mississippi steamers were twenty-five cents a glass, and
the average cost of such dram-drinking as I witnessed could not have
been less than three or four dollars a day for each man. A few did not
seem to be much attracted by the decanters; while others made drafts
upon them every hour, or two or three times an hour, from morning till
bedtime, and were never sober, and never quite drunk.
How shall I describe the conversation of these men? Never a word did I
hear fall from the lips of one of them concerning literature or the
higher interests of life; but their talk was of mules, cotton, niggers,
money, Yankees, politics, and the Freedmen’s Bureau,—thickly studded
with oaths, and garnished with joke and story.
Once only I heard the subject of education indirectly alluded to. Said a
young fellow, formerly the owner of fifty niggers,—“I’ve gone to
school-keeping.”—“O Lord!” said his companion, “you ha’n’t come down to
that!”
I judged that most were married men, from a remark made by one of them:
“A married man thinks less of personal appearance than a bachelor. I’ve
done played out on that since I got spliced.”
There were a few Tennesseeans aboard, who envied the Mississippians
their Rebel State government, organized militia, and power over the
freedmen. “We might make a pile, if we could only regulate the labor
system. But that can’t be done in this dog-goned Brownlow State. In
Mississippi, if they can only carry out the laws they’ve enacted,
there’ll be a chance.” It was impossible to convince these gentlemen
that the freedmen could be induced to work by any other means than
despotic compulsion.
Leaving the gamblers over their cards, and the tipplers over their
glasses, I went to bed,—to be awakened at midnight by an inebriated
gentleman (weight two hundred, as he thickly informed me) climbing into
the berth above me.
After a night of fog, Christmas morning dawned. In the cabin, the
generous steward gave to each passenger a glass of egg-nog before
breakfast; not because it was Christmas, but because passengers were
human, and egg-nog (especially the whiskey in it) was one of the
necessities of life.
The morning was warm and beautiful. Mists were chasing each other on the
river, and clouds were chasing each other in the sky. A rival steamer
was passing us. The decks of both boats were black with spectators
watching the race, and making comments upon it: “Look how she piles the
water up ahead of her!” “She’ll open a gap of a mile between us in an
hour!” and so forth.
The river was about half a mile in breadth. We were running down the
broad current between high banks covered with forests, on one side, and
sand-bars extending their broad yellow shelves out into the river, on
the other. Sometimes the sand was on our right, then it shifted to our
left; it was nearly always to be seen on one side, but never on both
sides at once. The river is continually excavating one bank and making
another opposite,—now taking from Arkansas to give to Mississippi, and
now robbing Mississippi to pay Arkansas, and thus year after year
forming and destroying plantations. I remember one point on the Arkansas
shore where the bank rose forty feet above the water, and was covered
with trees eighteen inches in thickness; of which a gentleman of the
country said to me, “That is all a recent formation. Forty years ago the
bed of the river was where that bank is.” The water was now tearing away
again what it had so suddenly built up, trying to get back into its old
bed.
We were making landings at every plantation where passengers or freight
were to be put off, or a signal was shown from the shore. Sometimes a
newspaper or piece of cloth was fluttered by negroes among the trees on
the bank; or a man who wished to come on board, stood on some exposed
point and waved his handkerchief or hat. There was never a wharf, but
the steamer, rounding to in the current, and heading up stream, went
bunting its broad nose against the steep, yielding bank. The planks were
pushed out; the passengers stepped aboard or ashore, and the deck-hands
landed the freight.
Dirtier or more toilsome work than this landing of the freight I have
seldom seen. Heavy boxes, barrels of flour and whiskey, had to be lifted
and rolled up steep paths in the soft sand to the summit of the bank.
Often the paths were so narrow that but one man could get hold of the
end of a barrel and lift it, while another hauled it from above, their
feet sinking deep at every step. Imagine a gang of forty or fifty men
engaged in landing boxes, casks, sacks of corn and salt, wagons,
live-stock, ploughs; hurrying, crowding, working in each other’s way,
sometimes slipping and falling, the lost barrel tumbling down upon those
below; and the mate driving them with shouts and curses and kicks, as if
they were so many brutes.
Here the plantations touched the river; and there the landing-place was
indicated by blazed trees in the forest, where negroes and mules were in
waiting.
Wooding-up was always an interesting sight. A long wood-pile lines the
summit of the bank, perhaps forty feet above the river. The steamer
lands; a couple of stages are hauled out: fifty men rush ashore and
climb the bank; the clerk accompanies them with pencil and paper and
measuring-rod, to take account of the number of cords; then suddenly
down comes the wood in an amazing shower, rattling, sliding, bounding,
and sometimes turning somersaults into the river. The bottom and side of
the bank are soon covered by the deluge; and the work of loading begins
in equally lively fashion. The two stages are occupied by two files of
men, one going ashore at a dog-trot, empty-handed, and another coming
aboard with the wood. Each man catches up from two to four sticks,
according to their size or his own inclination, shoulders them, falls
into the current, not of water, but of men, crosses the plank, and
deposits his burden where the corded-wood, that stood so lately on the
top of the bank, is once more taking shape, divided into two
equally-balanced piles on each side of the boiler-deck.
The men are mostly negroes, and the treatment they receive from the mate
is about the same as that which they received when slaves. He stands on
the shore between the ends of the two stages, within convenient reach of
both. Not a laggard escapes his eye or foot. Often he brandishes a
billet of wood, with which he threatens, and sometimes strikes; and now
he flings it at the head of some artful dodger who has eluded his blow.
And all the while you hear his hoarse, harsh voice iterating with
horrible crescendo: “Get along, _get along_! Out o’ the way’th that
wood! _out o’ the way_, OUT O’ THE WAY! OUT O’ THE WAY! _Git on_, GIT
ON, GIT ON!”
Meanwhile the men are working as hard as men can reasonably be expected
to work; and how they discipline their souls to endure such brutality is
to me a mystery.
Planters got off at every landing, by day and night; and although a few
came aboard, the company was gradually thinning out. At one plantation a
colony of sixty negroes landed. They had a “heap of plunder.” Beds and
bedding, trunks, tubs, hen-coops, old chests, old chairs,
spinning-wheels, pots, and kettles, were put off under the mate’s
directions, without much ceremony. The dogs were caught and pitched into
the river, much to the distress of the women and children, who appeared
to care more for the animals than for any other portion of their
property. These people had been hired for an adjoining plantation. The
plantation at which we landed had been laid waste, and the mansion and
negro-quarters burned, leaving a grove of fifty naked chimneys
standing,—“monuments of Yankee vandalism,” said my Southern friends.
At one place a fashionably dressed couple came on board, and the
gentleman asked for a state-room. Terrible was the captain’s wrath. “God
damn your soul,” he said, “get off this boat!” The gentleman and lady
were colored, and they had been guilty of unpardonable impudence in
asking for a state-room.
“Kick the nigger!” “He ought to have his neck broke!” “He ought to be
hung!” said the indignant passengers, by whom the captain’s prompt and
energetic action was strongly commended.
The unwelcome couple went quietly ashore, and one of the hands pitched
their trunk after them. They were in a dilemma: their clothes were too
fine for a filthy deck passage, and their skins were too dark for a
cabin passage. So they sat down on the shore to wait for the next
steamer.
“They won’t find a boat that’ll take ’em,” said the grim captain.
“Anyhow, they can’t force their damned nigger equality on to me!” He was
very indignant to think that he had landed at their signal. “The expense
of running this boat is forty dollars an hour,—six thousand dollars a
trip;—and I can’t afford to be fooled by a nigger!” I omit the epithets.
Afterwards I heard the virtuous passengers in calmer moments talking
over the affair. “How would you feel,” said one, with solemn emphasis,
“to know that _your wife was sleeping in the next room to a nigger and
his wife_?” The argument was unanswerable: it was an awful thought!
There is not a place of any importance on the river between Memphis and
Vicksburg, a distance of four hundred miles. The nearest approach to an
exception is Helena, on the Arkansas shore, a hastily built,
high-perched town, looking as if it had flown from somewhere else and
just lit. Another place of some note is Napoleon, which was burnt during
the war. Here there is one of those natural “cut-offs” for which the
Mississippi is remarkable; the river having formed for itself a new
channel, half a mile in length, across a tongue of land about which it
formerly made a circuit of twelve miles. We passed through the cut-off,
and afterwards made a voyage of six miles up the old channel, which
resembles a long, placid, winding lake, to Beulah Landing, called after
a novel of that name written by a Southern lady.
I remember Beulah as the scene of a colored soldier’s return. He had no
sooner landed from the steamer than his friends in waiting seized him,
men, women, and girls, some grasping his hands, some clinging to his
arms and waist, others hanging upon his neck, smothering him in their
joyful embraces. All who could reach him hugged him; while those who
could not reach him hugged those who were hugging him, as the next best
thing to be done on the happy occasion.
Below Napoleon, the cleared lands of many plantations extend to the
river, while others show only a border of trees along the shore. The
banks were continually caving, masses of earth flaking off and falling
into the turbid current, as we passed. The levees, neglected during the
war, were often in a very bad condition. The river, encroaching upon the
shores upon which these artificial embankments were raised, had made
frequent breaches in them, and in many places swept them quite away; so
that whole plantations lay at the mercy of the usual spring freshets,
which render cotton culture on such unprotected lands impracticable.
The power and extent of these freshets is something astonishing. The
river averages nearly half a mile in width. Its depth is very great,
often exceeding one hundred feet. Its average velocity is something over
two miles an hour. Yet when come the sudden rains and thaws, and the
great tributaries, with their thousand lesser streams, pour their floods
into the bosom of the Father of Waters, this huge artery becomes but an
insignificant channel for them, and they spread out into a vast lake
inundating the valley. The course of the river is then traceable only by
the swifter current in its vicinity, and by the broad sinuous opening
through the forests. A gentleman of my acquaintance told me that in
Bolivar County, Mississippi, he had ridden thirty miles back from the
river, and seen all the way the marks of high water on the trees as far
up as he could reach with his riding-whip.
The crevasses, or breaks in the levees and banks, which occur at such
times, are often terrific. Plantations are destroyed, and buildings
swept away. Boats are drawn into the current and carried inland, to be
landed, like the Ark, on the subsidence of the waters, or lost among the
trees of the deep swamps.
The violence of these freshets is said to be on the increase of late
years, from two or three causes,—the drainage of newly cultivated lands;
and the cut-offs and the levees, which project the floods more directly
upon the lower country, instead of retarding the water, and suffering it
to spread out gradually over the valley, naturally subject to its
overflow.
The best-protected plantations are those which are completely surrounded
by independent levees. “If my neighbor’s levee breaks, my land is still
defended,” said a planter to me, describing his estate. “Inside of the
levee is a ditch by which the water that soaks in can all be drained to
one place and thrown over the embankment by a steam-pump.”
I learned something of the planter’s anxiety of mind during the great
floods. “Many is the time I’ve sat up all night just like these mates,
looking after the levee on my plantation. Come a wind from the right
direction, I’d catch up a lantern, and go out, and maybe find the water
within three or four inches of the top. In some places a little more
would send it over and make a break. My heart would be nigh about to
melt, as I watched it. Sometimes I waited, all night long, to see
whether the water would go an inch higher. If it didn’t, I was safe; if
it did, I was a ruined man.”
On some of the levees negroes were at work making the necessary repairs;
but I was told that many plantations would remain unprotected and
uncultivated until another year.
I had heard much about the anticipated negro insurrections at Christmas
time. But the only act of violence that came to my knowledge, committed
on that day, was a little affair that occurred at Skipwith’s Landing, on
the Mississippi shore, a few miles below the Arkansas and Louisiana
line. Four mounted guerillas, wearing the Confederate uniform, and
carrying Spencer rifles, rode into the place, robbed a store kept by a
Northern man, robbed and murdered a negro, and rode off again,
unmolested. Very little was said of this trifling operation. If such a
deed, however, had been perpetrated by freedmen, the whole South would
have rung with it, and the cry of “Kill the niggers!” would have been
heard from the Rio Grande to the Atlantic.