A VISIT TO JAMES ISLAND.
A company of South Carolina planters, who were going over to look at
their estates on James Island, and learn if any arrangements could be
made with the freedmen, invited me to accompany them; and on the morning
of the day appointed, I left my hotel for the purpose.
Finding I was too early for the boat, I took a stroll along the wharves,
and visited the colonies of homeless plantation negroes who had sought
shelter under the open coal-sheds.
There were at that time in Charleston fifteen hundred freed people of
this class waiting for transportation back to their former homes, or to
the plantations of new masters who had hired them. A more wretched and
pitiable herd of human beings I never saw; nor had I witnessed anything
like it out of South Carolina.
Families were cooking and eating their breakfasts around smoky fires. On
all sides were heaps of their humble household goods,—tubs, pails, pots
and kettles, sacks, beds, barrels tied up in blankets, boxes, baskets,
bundles. They had brought their live-stock with them; hens were
scratching, pigs squealing, cocks crowing, and starved puppies whining.
One colony was going to Beaufort. “Mosser told we to go back. We’se no
money, and we’se glad to git on gov’ment kindness, to git off.” But the
government was not yet ready to send them.
Many seemed deeply to regret that they were so much trouble to the
government. “We wants to git away to work on our own hook. It’s not a
good time at all here. We does nothing but suffer from smoke and ketch
cold. We wants to begin de planting business.”
Another colony had been two weeks waiting for transportation back to
their old homes in Colleton District. Their sufferings were very great.
Said an old woman, with a shawl over her head: “De jew and de air
hackles we more’n anyting. De rain beats on we, and de sun shines we
out. My chil’n so hungry dey can’t hole up. De Gov’ment, he han’t gib we
nottin’. Said dey would put we on board Saturday. Some libs and some
dies. If dey libs dey libs, and if dey dies dey dies.” Such was her dim
philosophy. I tried to converse with others, who spoke a wild jargon
peculiar to the plantations, of which I understood hardly one word in
ten.
General Scott, who had recently succeeded General Saxton as Assistant
Commissioner of the Bureau in South Carolina, was hastening measures for
the relief of these poor people, and to prevent any more from coming to
the city.
I walked around by the delightful residences on East Bay and South Bay,
commanding fine views of the harbor and Ashley River; and reached the
wharf from which we were to embark.
Opposite lay James Island, with its marshy borders, and its dark-green
line of pines. Boats—mostly huge cypress dug-outs, manned by
negroes—were passing to and fro, some coming from the island with loads
of wood, others returning, heavily laden, with families of freedmen
going to their new homes, and with household goods and supplies.
“This is interesting,” said one of the planters, whom I found in
waiting. “That wood comes from our plantations. The negroes cut it off,
bring it over to the city, and perhaps sell it to the actual owners of
the land they have taken it from. We are buying our own wood of the
darkey squatters. The negroes are still going to the island, picking
their lands, and staking out forty-acre lots, though the Bureau is
giving no more titles.”
A large cypress dug-out came to the wharf, rowed by a black man and his
son.
“These boats all belonged to the planters, till the negroes took
possession of them. Now a man has to hire a passage in his own canoe,
and like as any way of one of his own negroes.”
The grim, silent boatman seemed to understand well that he was master of
the situation. There were seven individuals in our party, and his charge
for taking us over to the Island and back was ten dollars. He made no
words about it: we could accept his terms, or find another boat. The
gravity and taciturnity of this man indicated decided character, and no
mean capacity for self-ownership. As he and his son rowed us across the
river, he attended strictly to his business, hearing the talk of the
planters about the race he represented—talk by no means
complimentary—with an impenetrability of countenance quite astonishing.
This was the third visit of the planters to the island, since the war.
On the first occasion, they were met by a party of negroes, about forty
in number, who rushed down to the landing, armed with guns, and drove
them away, with threats to kill them if they came to disturb them in
their homes again; whereupon they discreetly withdrew. On their second
visit they were accompanied by Captain Ketchum, special agent of the
Bureau for the Sea Islands, to whose influence they probably owed their
lives. They were met as before, surrounded by fierce black faces and
levelled guns, captured, and not permitted to regain their boat until
their leaders, who could read a little, became satisfied, from an
examination of the Captain’s papers, that he was an officer of the
government. “We are ready to do anything for gov’ment,” they said. “But
we have nothing to do with these men.”
They asked the Captain, who were the real owners of the land,—they who
had been placed there by the government, or the planters who had been
fighting against the government?
“That is uncertain,” replied the conscientious Captain.
The planters, who had hoped for a different reply, well aware that the
negroes could not be brought to terms without a positive assurance from
an officer of the Bureau that they had no good title to the lands, were
very much disgusted. “We may as well go back now,” said they. And
scarcely any effort was made to induce the negroes to abandon their
claims and make contracts.
This was now their third visit, and it remained to be seen how they
would be received. We rowed a short distance down Wappoo Creek, which
separates the island from the main land, and disembarked at a plantation
belonging to three orphan children, whose guardian was a member of our
party. The freedmen, having learned that the mere presence of the
planters on the soil could effect nothing, had changed their tactics,
and now not one of them was to be seen. Although there were twenty-two
hundred on the island, it appeared as solitary and silent as if it had
not an inhabitant.
We found the plantation house occupied as head-quarters by an officer of
the Bureau, recently sent to the island. The guardian of the three
orphans took me aside, showed me the desolated grounds without, shaded
by magnificent live-oaks, and the deserted chambers within.
“You can understand my feelings coming here,” he said. “My sister
expired in this room. She left her children to me. This estate,
containing seventeen hundred acres, and worth fifty thousand dollars, is
all that remains to them; and you see the condition it is in. Why does
the Government of the United States persist in robbing orphan children?
They have done nothing; they haven’t earned the titles of Rebels and
traitors. Why not give them back their land?”
I sympathized sincerely with this honest gentleman and his orphan wards.
“But you forget,” I said, “that such a war as we have passed through
cannot be, without involving in its calamities the innocent as well as
the rest. It would have been well if that fact had not been overlooked
in the beginning.”
He made no reply. I afterwards learned from his friends that he was one
of the original and most fiery secessionists of Charleston. He made a
public speech, early in ’sixty-one,—printed in the newspapers at the
time,—in which he expressly pledged his life and his fortune to the
Confederate cause. His life he had managed to preserve; and of his
fortune sufficient remained for the elegant maintenance of his own and
his sister’s children; so that it appeared to me quite unreasonable for
him to complain of the misfortune which he himself had been instrumental
in bringing upon the orphans.
The party separated, each man going to look at his own estate. I
accompanied one who had three fine plantations in the vicinity. A
Northern man by birth, his sympathy had been with the government, while
he found his private interest in working for the Confederate usurpation
under profitable contracts. By holding his tongue and attending to
business he had accumulated a handsome fortune,—wisely investing his
Confederate scrip in real estate, which he thought somewhat more
substantial. These plantations were a part of his earnings. Being a
Northern man, and at heart a Union man, he deemed it hard that they
should not be at once restored to him. The fact that they were his
reward for aiding the enemies of his country,—rich gains, so to speak,
snatched from the wreck of a pirate ship on board which he had
served,—did not seem to have occurred to him as any bar to his claims.
At first we found all the freedmen’s houses shut up, and as silent as if
the inhabitants had all gone to a funeral. By pressing into some of
them, we discovered a few women and children, but the men had
disappeared. Since they were not to resist our coming, it seemed their
policy to have nothing whatever to do with us. At last we found an old
negro too decrepit to run away, who sullenly awaited our approach.
“What is your name, uncle?”
“Samuel Butler.”
“Where are you from?”
“From St. John.”
“How did you come here?”
“Yankees fotch me.”
“Don’t you want to go back to St. John?”
“Yankees fotch me here,” repeated the old man, “and I won’t go back
widout de Yankees send me back.”
We inquired about his family and his prospects.
“My chil’n ’s out in soldiering. I made corn, peas, and potatoes, I got
enough to carry me out de year. I had to bought my own clo’es, besides.
Gov’ment don’t help me none.”
He had his forty-acre lot, and would not peril his claim to it by
talking about a contract.
In one cabin we found a very old negro lying on the floor, miserably
sick with the dropsy. He had been “a faithful old family servant,” as
the phrase is; and was accounted a wise head by the planters. When asked
if he thought the freedmen could be prevailed upon to contract, he
replied:
“What little we do will be sarvice to we-self. We don’t want to work for
rest,”—meaning the planters.
Speaking of himself, he said:
“My time is all burnt out.” He said there was a heap of idlers on the
island. “Dey’m on a full spree now. Dey got a sort of frolic in de
brains.” There had been considerable destitution even among the
industrious ones the past year; but many of them had made fair crops,
and had corn sufficient to keep them till another harvest. “Dey’m more
situated better now.” The small-pox had raged on the island, and “a
sight of our people had died.”
We lingered at these cabins, waiting for a guard the officer at
head-quarters thought it prudent to send with us. At last he arrived,—a
shining black youngster in soldier-clothes, overflowing with vanity and
politeness. “I’m waiting on your occupation, gentlemen,” he said; and we
started on.
We passed a field in which there were several women at work. As they had
no mule, they did everything by hand, chopping up the turf and weeds
with their great awkward hoes, and scraping them, with the surface soil,
into little ridges, on which cotton or corn was to be planted. This
process of preparing the ground is called “listing”; it answers the
purpose of ploughing, and the refuse stuff scraped together, rotting,
serves instead of manure.
My companion inquired on what terms they would consent to give up their
forty-acre lot. One of them, poising her formidable hoe, replied in
accents that carried conviction with them:
“Gov’ment drap we here. Can’t go ’till Gov’ment take we off.”
As we were now proceeding to a more remote part of the island, our
colored guard walked proudly on to protect us from danger. “Dey can’t
make no raid on you, widout dey makes raid on me fus’!”
He evidently felt himself vastly superior to these low-down plantation
niggers. And I noticed that when we stopped to talk with any of them,
and my friend recorded their names and numbers, and I also took notes,
this shining black fellow in blue likewise produced a piece of card and
a pencil, and appeared to be writing down very interesting and amusing
memoranda.
A mile or so from head-quarters we found negro men and women working in
the fields.
“Is this your farm?” my friend inquired of one of them.
“I calls it mine. General Saxton told me to come and stake out my forty
acres, and he’d give me a ticket for it.”
“Wouldn’t it be better for you to contract for good wages, than to work
in this way?”
“No, I don’t want to contract. I’ll eat up my corn and peas fus’.”
“Did you raise much last year?”
“I begun too late. Den de drought hit us bad. Heap of places didn’t
raise much. But I got a little.”
Observing a strange looking thing of skin and bones standing in the
weeds, I asked, “Is that a horse?”
“Dat’s a piece o’ one. When he gits tired, I can take my arms; I’ve good
strong arms.”
Upon that one of the women struck in vehemently:
“I can plough land same as a hoss. Wid dese hands I raise cotton dis
year, buy two hosses!”
Seeing the immense disadvantage under which these poor people labored,
without teams, without capital, and even without security in the
possession of their little homesteads, I urged them to consider well
what the planters had to offer.
“If I contract, what good does my forty acres do me?”
“But you are not sure of your forty acres. This year or next they may be
given back to the former owner. Then you will have nothing; for you will
have spent all your time and strength in trying to get a start. But if
you work for wages, you will have, if you are prudent, a hundred and
fifty dollars in clear cash at the end of the year. At that rate it will
not be long before you will be able to buy a little place and stock it
handsomely; when you will probably be much better off than you would be
working here in this way.”
I could see that this argument was not without its weight with the men.
They appeared troubled by it, but not convinced. The women clamored
against it, and almost made me feel that I was an enemy, giving them
insidious ill advice. And when I saw the almost religious attachment of
these people to their homes, and their hope and ambition bearing up
resolutely against poverty and every discouragement, it would have
caused me a pang of remorse to know that I had persuaded any of them to
give up their humble but worthy and honest aims. Then the children came
around us, carrying primers, out of which they read with pleased
eagerness, either for the fun of the thing, or to show us what they
could do. The parents, forgetting the disheartening words we had spoken,
said cheerily, “Richard, Helen, time for school!” and the little ones
scampered away; the older ones resumed their work, and we walked on.
I was pleased to see some of the forty-acre lots enclosed by substantial
new fences. But every question of benefit has two sides. The other side
to this was that the fine old plantation shade-trees had been cut down
and split into rails; a circumstance which made my friend the planter
look glum.
The island is level, with handsome hedged avenues running through it in
various directions. It is nine miles in length and three in breadth. We
extended our walk as far as Fort Pemberton, on Stono River, which
bounded my friend’s plantations in that direction. On our return, he
thought he would try one more freedman with the offer of a contract.
The man was working with his wife on a little farm of indefinite extent.
“I don’t know how much land I have. I guessed off as near as I could
forty acres.”
He said he had “a large fambly,” and that he came from Charleston. “I
heard there was a chance of we being our own driver here; that’s why we
come.” He could get along very well if he only had a horse. “But if I
can git de land, I’ll take my chances.”
“But if you can’t get the land?”
“If a man got to go crost de riber, and he can’t git a boat, he take a
log. If I can’t own de land, I’ll hire or lease land, but I won’t
contract.”
“Come, then,” said my friend, “we may as well go home.”