They are very ignorant. Their dialect is a mixture of English and African, having words and phrases belonging to neither language; though the patois is not confined to this class, but is sometimes heard in sumptuously furnished parlors.
"I suppose that you will not be sorry when the war is over," I remarked to a lady in Savannah.
"No, sir. I reckon the Confederacy is done gone for," was the reply.
It is reported that a North Carolina colonel of cavalry was heard to address his command thus,—"'Tention, battalion. Prepare to gen orto yer critter. Git!"
The order to ride rapidly was, "Dust right smart!"
You hear young ladies say, Paw, for Pa, Maw, for Ma, and then, curiously adding another vowel sound, they say kear for car, thear for there.
The poor whites of the country are called "poor white trash," "crackers," "clay-eaters," "sand-hillers," and "swamp angels," by the educated whites. There is no homogeneity of white society. The planters, as a rule, have quite as much respect for the negroes as for the shiftless whites.
Yet these miserable wretches are exceedingly bitter against the North: it is the bitterness of ignorance,—brutal, cruel, fiendish, produced by caste, by the spirit of slavery. There is more hope, therefore, of the blacks, in the future, than of this degraded class. The colored people believe that the people of the North are their friends. Freedom, food, schools, all were given by the Yankees; hence gratitude and confidence on the part of the freedmen; hence, on the part of the poor whites, hatred of the North and cruelty toward the negro. Idleness, not occupation, has been, and is, their normal condition. It is ingrained in their nature to despise work. Indolence is a virtue, laziness no reproach. Thus slavery arrayed society against every law of God, moral and physical.
The poor whites were in bondage as well as the blacks, and to all appearance will remain so, while the natural buoyancy of the negro makes him rise readily to new exigencies; with freedom he is at once eager to obtain knowledge and acquire landed estates.
The colored people who had taken up lands on the islands under General Sherman's order met for consultation in the Slave Market, at the corner of St. Julian Street and Market Square. I passed up the two flights of stairs down which thousands of slaves had been dragged, chained in coffle, and entered a large hall. At the farther end was an elevated platform about eight feet square,—the auctioneer's block. The windows were grated with iron. In an anteroom at the right women had been stripped and exposed to the gaze of brutal men. A colored man was praying when I entered, giving thanks to God for the freedom of his race, and asking for a blessing on their undertaking. After prayers they broke out into singing. Lieutenant Ketchum of General Saxton's staff, who had been placed in charge of the confiscated lands, was present, to answer their questions.