DOWN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA.
As my first view of Atlanta was had on a dismal night, (if view it could
be called,) so my last impression of it was received on a foggy morning,
which showed me, as I sat in the cars of the Macon train, waiting at the
depot, groups of rain-drenched negroes around out-door fires; the dimly
seen trees of the Park; tall ruins looming through the mist; Masonic
Hall standing alone (having escaped destruction); squat wooden buildings
of recent, hasty construction, beside it; windrows of bent railroad iron
by the track; piles of brick; a small mountain of old bones from the
battle-fields, foul and wet with the drizzle; a heavy coffin-box, marked
“glass,” on the platform; with mud and litter all around.
A tide of negro emigration was at that time flowing westward, from the
comparatively barren hills of Northern Georgia to the rich cotton
plantations of the Mississippi. Every day anxious planters from the
Great Valley were to be met with, inquiring for unemployed freedmen, or
returning home with colonies of laborers, who had been persuaded to quit
their old haunts by the promise of double wages in a new country.
Georgia planters, who raise but a bale of cotton on three, four, or five
acres, could not compete with their more wealthy Western neighbors: they
higgled at paying their freedmen six or seven dollars a month, while
Arkansas and Mississippi men stood ready to give twelve and fifteen
dollars, and the expenses of the journey. As it cost no more to
transport able-bodied young men and women than the old and the feeble,
the former were generally selected and the latter left behind. Thus it
happened that an unusually large proportion of poor families remained
about Atlanta and other Georgia towns.
There were two such families huddled that morning under the open shed of
the depot. They claimed that they had been hired by a planter, who had
brought them thus far, and, for some reason, abandoned them. They had
been at the depot a week or more, sleeping in piles of old rags, and
subsisting on rations issued to them by the Bureau: stolid-looking
mothers, hardened by field-labor, smoking short black pipes; and older
children tending younger ones, feeding them out of tin cups, and rocking
them to sleep in their arms. It was altogether a pitiful
sight,—although, but for the rain which beat in upon them, I might have
thought their freely ventilated lodgings preferable to some of the
tavern-rooms I had lately slept in. But to me the most noticeable
feature of the scene was the spirit manifested towards these poor
creatures by spectators of my own color.
“That baby’s going to die,” said one man. “Half your children will be
dead before spring.”
“How do you like freedom?” said another.
“Niggers are fated,” said a third. “About one out of fifty will take
care of himself; the rest are gone up.”
“The Southern people are the niggers’ best friends,” resumed the first
speaker. “They feel a great deal of sympathy for them. There are many
who give them a heap of good advice when they leave them.”
Good advice is cheap; but nobody gave these homeless ones anything else,
nor even that,—with a single exception: there was one who gave them kind
words and money, but he was a Yankee.
The remarks of the ladies in the car were equally edifying.
“How much better they were off with somebody to take care of ’em!”
“Oh dear, yes! I declare it makes me hate an Abolitionist!”
“The government ought to have given them houses!”—(sneeringly.) “If I
had seven children to take care of, I’d go back and sell ’em to my old
master.”
“Do see that little bit of a baby! it’s a-kicking and screaming! I
declare, it’s white! one of the young Federals’, I reckon.”
From Atlanta, until within about twenty-five miles of Macon, the
railroad runs upon a ridge, from which the waters of the country flow
each way,—those of the west side, through the Flint River and the
Appalachicola to the Gulf; those of the east, through the Ocmulgee and
Altamaha to the Atlantic. The soil of this ridge is sandy, with a
mixture of red clay; much of it producing little besides oaks and pines.
The doorways of the log-huts and shabby framed houses we passed, were
crowded with black, yellow, and sallow-white faces,—women, children, and
slatternly, barefoot girls, with long, uncombed hair on their
shoulders,—staring at the train. The country is better, a little back
from the railroad, as is frequently the case in the South.
Macon, at the head of steamboat navigation on the Ocmulgee River, and
the most important interior town in the State, is a place of broad,
pleasant streets, with a sandy soil which exempts it from mud. It had in
1860 eight thousand inhabitants. As it was a sort of city of refuge,
“where everybody was run to,” during the latter years of the war, its
population had greatly increased. Hundreds of white refugees from other
parts of the country were still crowded into it, having no means of
returning to their homes, or having no homes to return to. The
corporation of Macon showed little disposition to relieve these
unfortunate people, and the destitution and suffering among them were
very great. They were kept from starvation by the government. “To get
rid of feeding them,” said Colonel Lambert, Sub-Assistant-Commissioner
of the Freedmen’s Bureau, “we are now giving them free transportation
wherever they wish to go.”
By a recent census, taken with a view to catching vagrants and setting
them to work, the colored population of Macon was shown to be four
thousand two hundred and seventy-three. “All those who are not now
employed will soon be taken by the planters. If any will not hire out,
they will be set to earning their living on the public streets. I have
now on hand applications from Alabama and Mississippi planters for three
hundred laborers; I could fill the orders if I chose to, for the negroes
are much disposed to emigrate. But all the freedmen in the counties of
my district are needed here, and I encourage them to remain.”
Colonel Lambert had on hand sixteen cases of murder and felonious
shooting by white persons, negroes being the victims. The seventeenth
case was reported from Twiggs County, while I was at Macon. A chivalrous
sportsman, apparently for the fun of the thing, took a shot at a negro
walking peaceably along the street, and killed him. The Colonel sent out
twenty-five mounted men to hunt the murderer; but it was almost
impossible to make arrests in such cases. There were in every place
unprincipled men who approved the crime and helped to shield the
criminal. Warned by them of the approach of blue uniforms, he would
betake himself to the cane-brakes, or to some friendly garret, where he
would lie safely concealed until the scouts had given up their search
for him and retired from the neighborhood. These negro-shooters and
their accomplices were no doubt a small minority of the people, but they
were a very dangerous minority, whom the better class did not deem it
prudent to offend by assisting the officers of justice.
Crimes of this description were more or less frequent in districts
remote from the military posts. In some places the freedmen were shot
down in mere wantonness and malice. In others, the very men who had been
wishing them all dead or driven out of the country, had become enraged
at seeing them emigrate for higher wages than they were willing to pay,
and sworn to kill any that attempted to leave the State.
Said Colonel Lambert: “To prevent these outrages, we need a much greater
military force than we have. But the force we have is being reduced by
the mustering out of more troops. We are thus prevented from carrying
out the intentions of the government; and there is danger that before
long the continuance of its authority here will be regarded as a mere
farce. What we need is cavalry; but our troops are all infantry. I mount
them in a case of emergency, where some desperado is to be hunted, by
seizing horses at the first livery-stable, which we return after we have
got through with them, politely thanking the proprietor in the name of
the government.”
The southwestern part of Georgia is one of the most fertile sections of
the South: it is the region of large plantations and rich planters. The
northern half of the State is comparatively unproductive: it is the
region of small planters, and of farmers who do their own work with the
aid of their sons. Much of the northwestern part is barren. The fertile
Southwest suffered little damage from the war; it came out of it with
its plantations unimpaired, and a large stock of cotton on hand.
Northern and Middle Georgia were ploughed with the furrows of
desolation. Sherman’s army left nothing in its track but poverty and
ruin. Plantations were wasted, provisions taken, stock killed or driven
away, buildings and farming implements destroyed. The people were left
very poor: they raised no crops in ’65, and a famine was very generally
anticipated.
In this condition, all the better class of planters recognized the
sincere efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid them, and to organize a
labor system which should prove beneficial to both employers and
employed. They generally spoke of its officers with respect; and many
acknowledged that it would be a great injury to the country to have it
immediately removed. Others were bitter in their opposition to it; and I
often heard such remarks as this: “The idea of a _nigger_ having the
power of bringing a _white man_ before a tribunal! The Southern people
a’n’t going to stand that.”
The negro of Middle Georgia is a creature in whom the emotions entirely
predominate over the intellectual faculties. He has little of that
shrewdness which town life cultivates in the black race. The agents of
the Bureau complained that they had sometimes great difficulty in
persuading him to act in accordance with his own interests. If a
stranger offered him twelve dollars a month, and a former master in whom
he had confidence, appealing to his gratitude and affection, offered him
one dollar, he would exclaim impulsively, “I work for you, Mass’r Will!”
Sometimes, when he had been induced by his friends to enter a complaint
against his master or mistress for wrongs done him, ludicrous and
embarrassing scenes occurred in the freedmen’s courts. “Now, Thomas,”
says the good lady, “can you have the heart to speak a word against your
old, dear, kind mistress?” “No, missus, I neber will!” blubbers Thomas;
and that is all the court can get out of him.
The reverence shown by the colored people toward the officers of the
Bureau was often amusing. They looked to them for what they had formerly
depended upon their masters for. If they had lost a pig, they seemed to
think such great and all-powerful men could find it for them without any
trouble. They cheered them in the streets, and paid them at all times
the most abject respect.
I was told that the blacks were quite as apt to keep their contracts as
the whites; and that often, when they broke them, it was through the
persuasion of some planter who lacked laborers. “Look here, Sam, I’m
giving two dollars a month more than this man you are at work for; why
don’t you come and live with me?” A respectable planter was fined a
hundred and fifty dollars for this offence, by the Bureau, whilst I was
at Macon. “It is one of the worst offences we have to deal with,” said
Colonel Lambert, “and one that we punish most severely.”
It was the popular belief that the agents of the Bureau had control of
funds arising from such fines, and that they appropriated them pretty
freely to their own use. On the contrary, they were required at the end
of each month to make returns and forward all funds on hand to the chief
quartermaster of the State, who alone was authorized to apply them in
necessary expenditures.
There were four freedmen’s schools in Macon, with eleven teachers and a
thousand pupils. There was a night-school of two hundred children and
adults, where I saw men of my own age learning their letters, (and
thought, “What if _I_ was now first learning _my_ letters?”) and
gray-haired old men and women forming, with slowness and difficulty, by
the aid of spectacles, the first characters in the writing-book. The
teachers were furnished by the American Missionary Association,—the
freedmen paying for their own books, (an item with the booksellers,) and
for the necessary fuel and lights.
Mr. Eddy, the superintendent, and an old experienced teacher, said to
me: “The children of these schools have made in a given time more
progress in the ordinary branches of education than any white schools I
ever taught. In mathematics and the higher sciences they are not so
forward. The eagerness of the older ones to learn is a continual wonder
to me. The men and women say, ‘We work all day, but we’ll come to you in
the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we’re dull,
but we want you to beat it into us!’”
I was much interested in a class of young clergymen who recited in the
evening to the young matron of the “teachers’ home.” One of them told me
with tears of gratitude how kind and faithful all the teachers had been
to them.
“Are you not mistaken?” I said. “I have been told a hundred times that
the Southern people are your best friends.”
He replied: “Georgia passed a law making it a penitentiary offence,
punishable with five years’ imprisonment, to teach a slave to read. Now
we are no longer slaves, and we are learning to read. They may deceive
you, but _we_ know who are our best friends.”
I was repeatedly assured by earnest secessionists that there were no
Union men in Georgia; that, soon or late, all went into the rebellion.
But one day I met an old man who denied the charge with indignation.
“I am sixty-five years old. I fought for the spot where Macon now
stands, when it was Indian territory. I don’t know what they mean by no
Union men. If to fight against secession from first to last, and to
oppose the war in every way, makes a Union man, I was that. Of course I
paid taxes, because I couldn’t help it. And when Stoneman raided on us,
and every man that could bear arms was pressed, I went with the rest,
and was all day behind the breastworks. But I’ve always spoke my mind,
and being an old citizen, I never got hung yet. A majority of the people
of Macon were with me, if they had only dared to say so. They hate the
secessionists now worse than they hate the Yankees: no comparison! The
secessionists now cry, ‘No party!’ but never a party stuck together
closer than they do.
“The Confederates,” he went on, “injured us ten times more than the
Yankees did. When Wilson came in last April, he put a guard at my house,
who stayed with me seven weeks, and did his duty faithfully.”