IN AND ABOUT ATLANTA.
The railroad runs eastward from Montgomery, forks at Opelika, and enters
Georgia by two divergent routes,—the south branch crossing the
Chattahoochee at Columbus, and the north branch at West Point.
Wilson, the Raider, paid his respects to both these roads. The main body
of his troops proceeded to Columbus, (one of the principal towns of
Georgia,) which they carried by assault, with a loss of but thirty men,
capturing fifteen hundred prisoners, twenty-four pieces of artillery,
and immense military stores. At the same time Lagrange’s Brigade took
West Point. These were the closing battles of the great war of the
rebellion. Pushing on towards Macon, Wilson’s advance was met, not by
bloody opposition, but by a flag of truce announcing the surrender of
Lee and the armistice between Sherman and Johnston.
Concerning our loss at West Point I was not able to obtain very exact
information. A citizen, who claimed to have been in the fight, said to
me, “We had seven men killed, and we just slaughtered over three hundred
Yankees.” A negro said: “I saw five dead Yankees, and if there was any
more nobody knows what was done with ’em.” A returned Confederate
soldier, who regarded with great contempt the little affair the citizens
bragged so much about, said it was no fight at all; the militia gave up
the fort almost without a struggle; and there were not over a dozen men
killed on both sides. The fort was situated on a high hill; and one old
man, who was in it, told me they could not hold it because they couldn’t
use the guns effectively,—they “couldn’t elevate ’em down enough.”
The Yankees had the credit of behaving very well at West Point. “They
were going to burn the railroad depot, full of rolling stock; but a lady
told ’em that would set her house, so they just run the cars off down
the track, over a hundred of ’em, and fired ’em there,”—the black ruins
remaining to attest the fact.
Leaving West Point at noon I reached Atlanta at seven o’clock in the
evening. It was a foggy night; the streets were not lighted, the hotels
were full, and the mud, through which I tramped from one to the other,
with a dark guide and a very dark lantern, was ankle deep on the
crossings. I was at length fortunate enough to find lodgings, with a
clergyman and a cotton-speculator, in an ancient tavern-room, where we
were visited all night by troops of rats, scampering across the floor,
rattling newspapers, and capering over our beds. In the morning, it was
discovered that the irreverent rogues had stolen the clergyman’s
stockings.
A sun-bright morning did not transmute the town into a place of very
great attractiveness. Everywhere were ruins and rubbish, mud and mortar
and misery. The burnt streets were rapidly rebuilding; but in the mean
while hundreds of the inhabitants, white and black, rendered homeless by
the destruction of the city, were living in wretched hovels, which made
the suburbs look like a fantastic encampment of gypsies or Indians. Some
of the negro huts were covered entirely with ragged fragments of
tin-roofing from the burnt government and railroad buildings. Others
were constructed partly of these irregular blackened patches, and partly
of old boards, with roofs of huge, warped, slouching shreds of tin, kept
from blowing away by stones placed on the top. Notwithstanding the
ingenuity displayed in piecing these rags together, they formed but a
miserable shelter at the best. “In dry weather, it’s good as anybody’s
houses. But they leaks right bad when it rains; then we have to pile our
things up to keep ’em dry.” So said a colored mother of six children,
whose husband was killed “fighting for de Yankees,” and who supported
her family of little ones by washing. “Sometimes I gits along tolerable;
sometimes right slim; but dat’s de way wid everybody;—times is powerful
hard right now.”
Every business block in Atlanta was burned, except one. The railroad
machine-shops, the founderies, the immense rolling-mill, the tent,
pistol, gun-carriage, shot-and-shell factories, and storehouses, of the
late Confederacy, disappeared in flames and explosions. Half a mile of
the principal street was destroyed. Private residences remained, with a
few exceptions. The wooden houses of the suburbs had been already torn
down, and their materials used to construct quarters for Sherman’s men.
The African Methodist Episcopal Church, built by the colored people with
their hard earnings, and viewed by them with as much pride and
satisfaction as the Jews felt in the contemplation of the great Temple
at Jerusalem, was also demolished by our soldiers,—at the instigation,
it is said, of a white citizen living near, who thought the negro’s
religious shoutings a nuisance.
“When I came back in May,” said a refugee, “the city was nothing but
piles of brick and ruins. It didn’t seem it could ever be cleared. But
in six weeks new blocks began to spring up, till now you see more stores
actually in operation than we ever had before.”
The new business blocks were mostly one-story structures, with cheap
temporary roofs, designed to be rebuilt and raised in more prosperous
times. Nine stores of this description had just been put up by a
Connecticut man; each costing three thousand dollars, and renting for
twenty-five hundred. “He run a rolling-mill for the Confederate
Government during the war; sold out when Sherman was coming; called
himself a good Union man;—a mighty shrewd fellow!” said one who knew
him.
Here and there, between the new buildings, were rows of shanties used as
stores, and gaps containing broken walls and heaps of rubbish.
Rents were enormous. Fifteen and twenty dollars a month were charged for
huts which a respectable farmer would hardly consider good enough for
his swine. One man had crowded into his backyard five of these little
tenements, which rented for fifteen dollars a month each, and a very
small brick house that let for thirty dollars. Other speculators were
permitting the construction, on their premises, of houses that were to
be occupied rent-free, for one year, by the poor families that built
them, and afterwards to revert to the owners of the land.
The destitution among both white and black refugees was very great. Many
of the whites had lost everything by the war; and the negroes that were
run off by their masters in advance of Sherman’s army, had returned to a
desolate place, with nothing but the rags on their backs. As at nearly
every other town of any note in the South which I visited, the small-pox
was raging at Atlanta, chiefly among the blacks, and the suffering poor
whites.
I stopped to talk with an old man building a fence before the lot
containing the ruins of his burnt house. He said: “The Yankees didn’t
generally burn private dwellings. It’s my opinion these were set by our
own citizens, that remained after Sherman’s order that all women who had
relatives in the Southern army should go South, and all males must leave
the city except them that would work for government. I put for
Chattanooga. My house was plundered, and I reckon, burnt, by my own
neighbors,—for I’ve found some of my furniture in their houses. Some
that stayed acted more honorably; they put out fires that had been set,
and saved both houses and property. My family is now living in that
shebang there. It was formerly my stable. The weather-boards had been
ripped off, but I fixed it up the best I could to put my little ’uns in
till we can do better.”
Another old man told me the story of his family’s sufferings, with tears
running down his cheeks. “During the battle of July, I had typhoid fever
in my house. One of my daughters died, and my other three were down with
it. The cemeteries were being shelled, and I had to take out my dead
child and bury her hastily in my backyard. My house was in range of the
shells; and there my daughters lay, too sick to be moved.” His
description of those terrible days I shall not repeat. At length his
neighbors came with ambulances, and the sick daughters were removed.
They were scarcely out of the house when a shell passed through it.
Walking out, one Sunday afternoon, to visit the fortifications, I
stopped to look at a negro’s horse, which had been crippled by a nail in
his foot. While I was talking with the owner, a white man and two
negroes, who had been sitting by a fire in an open rail-cabin close by,
conversing on terms of perfect equality, came out to take part in the
consultation, around the couch of the sick beast. One proffered one
remedy; another, another.
“If ye had some tare,” said the white man (meaning tar);—“open his huf,
and bile tare and pour int’ it.”
His lank frame and slouching dress,—his sallow visage, with its sickly,
indolent expression,—his lazy, spiritless movements, and the social
intimacy that appeared to exist between him and the negroes, indicated
that he belonged to the class known as “Sand Hillers” in South Carolina,
“Clay-eaters” in North Carolina, “Crackers” in Georgia, and “white
trash” and “poor whites” everywhere. Among all the individuals of this
unfortunate and most uninteresting class, whom I have seen, I do not
remember a specimen better worth describing. I give his story in his own
words.
He told me his name was Jesse Wade. “I lived down in Cobb,” (that is,
Cobb County,)—seating himself on the neap of the negro’s wagon, and
mechanically scraping the mud from it with his thumb-nail. “I was a
Union man, I was that, like my daddy befo’e me. Thar was no use me bein’
a fule ’case my neighbors was. The Rebel army treated us a heap wus’n
Sherman did. I refugeed,—left everything keer o’ my wife. I had four
bales o’ cotton, and the Rebs burnt the last bale. I had hogs, and a
mule, and a hoss, and they tuk all. They didn’t leave my wife narry
bedquilt. When they’d tuk what they wanted, they put her out the house
and sot fire to ’t. Narry one o’ my boys fit agin the Union; they was
conscripted with me, and one night we went out on guard together, we
did, and jest put for the Yankees. All the men that had a little
property went in for the wa’, but the po’ people was agin it. Sherman
was up yer to Kenesaw Mountain then, and I left, I did, to jine him.”
Wade claimed to have acted as a scout, and referred me to the
quartermaster: “This one that’s yer,” (the quartermaster at Atlanta,)
“you ax him what Wade done, if you don’t reckon I tell the truth.” He
pronounced the division of the Federal forces a great stroke of
strategy. “Atter we split the army, the Rebels couldn’t hold us no
back.”
He was very poor. “I’ve got two hosses and a wagon, and I shouldn’t have
them if Sherman hadn’t gin ’em tu me.” He held up his feet, and looked
at his toes protruding through great gaps in his shoes. “I kain’t git
money enough to buy me a new pair, to save my life.”
“I beat ye, then,” said the owner of the crippled horse, showing a very
good pair of boots.
“_You_’re drayin’,” said Wade. “_I_ haul. I’m gittin’ wood to the
halves. The owner’s as strong an old secessioner as ever lived. I kain’t
make but tu loads a day, and one’s mine, and one’s the feller’s; I give
one load for t’ other. Takes me three loads to git a cord; I git a
dollar and a half, and sometime tu, for a load. I’ve got one boy that
helps,—he’s about as high as hand boy standin’ hander,” (yond’ boy
standing yonder,)—pointing to a negro lad of fourteen.
I asked Wade how old he was. “I’m in my fifty-one year old,” he replied;
“and thar’s eight on us in the family, and tu hosses.”
I inquired concerning education in his county. “Thar’s a heap o’ po’ men
in Cobb that kain’t read nor write. I’m one. I never went to skule narry
time, and I was alluz so tight run I never could send my chil’n, only
’tween crap time.”
“What do you mean by ‘_’tween crap time_’?”
“When I’d laid by my crap,” (that is, stopped hoeing it, as corn,) “till
fodder pullin’. I alluz had to make a little cotton, to keep up. I could
alluz rent land befo’e the wa’, by givin’ half to the owners,—them a
pound o’ cotton, and me a pound o’ cotton; them a load and me a load.
That’s tu much; but I kain’t git it for that now. You might as well try
to git their eyes as their land.”
Wade’s theory of reconstruction was simple, and expressed in few words:
“We should tuk the land, as we did the niggers, and split it, and gin
part to the niggers and part to me and t’ other Union fellers. They ’d
have had to submit to it, as they did to the niggers.” I also found the
freedmen, who had gathered about us, unanimously of this opinion.
“Wade,” I said, “you’re a candid man: now tell me which you think will
do the most work,—a white man, or a nigger?”
“The nigger,” said Wade, surprised at so simple a question.
“Do you mean to say that one of these black men will do more work than
you?”
“Yes, sho’e,” (sure.)
“What’s the reason of that?”
“’Case they was allus put mo’e at it.”
He went on to complain that he couldn’t always get pay for the work he
did. “A man owes me money for wood. If he don’t pay me soon, I’ll take a
stick and beat it out on him.”
“That’ll be to work for it twict, and not git it then,” observed a
negro, very wisely; and I trust Wade was persuaded not to try the stick.
“Ought to have such laws yer as dey has up in Tennessee,” said another
negro. “Dar you’d git yer money! Laws is strick in Tennessee! Ebery man
chalks a line up dar. A man owes you money, de probo’ marshal make him
toe de line. I’s been round, since de wa’ busted, and I han’t seen no
whar laws like dey got up dar in Tennessee.”
By this time a large number of negroes had assembled on the spot,
dressed in their Sunday clothes; and such an animated discussion of
their political rights ensued, that, concluding I had strayed by mistake
into an out-door convention of the freed people, I quietly
withdrew,—followed by my friend Wade, who wished to know if I could
accommodate him to a “chaw of tobacker.”
[Illustration: CONVENTION OF FREEDMEN DISCUSSING THEIR POLITICAL
RIGHTS.]
Atlanta is the centre of a “perfect crow’s-foot of railroads,” which
have given it its business and military importance. The Western and
Atlantic Road, connecting it with Chattanooga, forms a main trunk, with
tributaries running into it from all parts of the North and West, and
with branches from Atlanta running to all parts of the South. This road
was constructed by the State, which in past years derived from it a
large revenue. The war left it in a bad condition, with a dilapidated
track, and merely temporary bridges in place of those which had been
destroyed;—without machine-shops, or materials for the repair of what
little remained of the old, worn-out rolling-stock. A purchase of four
hundred thousand dollars’ worth of indispensable stock from the
government, had sufficed to put it in operation, and it was contributing
something, by its earnings, towards the great outlay still necessary to
refurnish it and place it in thorough repair. The other railroads in the
State, built by private companies, were nearly all doing well, by reason
of the great amount of freight and travel passing over them. Those
destroyed by Sherman belonged to corporations which could best afford to
rebuild them; and work upon them was going forward with considerable
vigor. All these roads had heavy claims against the Confederate
Government; some of them amounting to several millions.
Georgia, before the war, had over twelve hundred miles of railroad in
operation, forming the most extensive and complete system south of
Tennessee and Virginia,—Alabama having but five hundred miles, and
Mississippi seven hundred.
The best of the old Georgia banks were connected with the railroads. The
bills of the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company were still worth,
after the war had swept over the State, ninety-five per cent. of their
par value. Those of the Central Railroad and Banking Company were
selling for about the same. The issues of the other banks were worth
from five to seventy-five per cent.; the stock being sacrificed.