"Quite likely, for the great business of the county has been nigger-raising, and it has been our curse. I never owned only old Peter and his wife. I wish I didn't own them, for they are old and I have got to support them; but how in the world I am to do it I don't know, for the soldiers have stripped me of everything."
"Do you mean the Union soldiers?"
"Yes, and ours (Rebels) also. First, my boys were conscripted. I kept them out as long as I could, but they were obliged to go. Then they took my horses. Then your cavalry came and took all my corn and stole my meat, ransacked the house, seized my flour, killed my pigs and chickens, and here I am, stripped of everything."
"It is pretty hard, but your leaders would have it so."
"I know it, sir, and we are getting our pay for it."
It was frankly spoken, and was the first admission I had heard from Southern lips that the South was suffering retribution for the crime of Secession. It probably did not enter his head that the selling of slaves, the breaking up of families, the sundering of heart-strings, the cries and tears and prayers of fathers and mothers, the outrages, the whippings, scourgings, branding with hot irons, were also crimes in the sight of Heaven. Broken hearts were nothing to him,—not that he was naturally worse than other men, but because slavery had blunted sensibility.
During the march the next day towards the North Anna, I halted at a farm-house. The owner had fled to Richmond in advance of the army, leaving his overseer, a stout, burly, red-faced, tobacco-chewing man. There were a score of old buildings on the premises. It had been a notable plantation, yielding luxuriant harvests of wheat, but the proprietor had turned his attention to the culture of tobacco and the breeding of negroes. He sold annually a crop of human beings for the southern market. The day before our arrival, hearing that the Yankees were coming, he hurried forty or fifty souls to Richmond. He intended to take all,—forty or fifty more,—but the negroes fled to the woods. The overseer did his best to collect them, but in vain. The proprietor raved, and stormed, and became violent in his language and behavior, threatening terrible punishment on all the runaways, but the appearance of a body of Union cavalry put an end to maledictions. He had a gang of men and women chained together, and hurried them toward Richmond.
The runaways came out from their hiding-places when they saw the Yankees, and advanced fearlessly with open countenances. The first pleasure of the negroes was to smile from ear to ear, the second to give everybody a drink of water or a piece of hoe-cake, the third to pack up their bundles and be in readiness to join the army.
"Afraid! Why, boss, I's been praying for yer to come; and now yer is here, thank de Lord."