When I reached the army, Johnston had, at Beauregard’s request, been placed in command, and, with his splendid skill, was fighting Sherman at every step, yet drawing his small force farther and farther back without demoralization, and without a wagon’s loss.
[CHAPTER XLII.]
Eighteen hundred and sixty-five! Annus iræ! Year of blood and tears, famine and oppression! God send that Time’s womb may be barren ere such another offspring shall curse our land!
Could one behold, as in a panorama, the South of ‘60 and the South of ‘65, even a devil would weep over the ruin wrought in five years.
In the one picture he would see wide-spreading fields, with waving, luxuriant crops, worked by throngs of joyous light-hearted negroes, who sing, in a resounding chorus, as they guide their sleek teams up and down the fertile furrows; he would see long villages of negro quarters, each house with its garden and patch, its pig and chickens, and its happy children playing at the door, while within some old camp-meeting hymn is mingling with the drone of the wheel and the clack of the loom; he would see premises adorned with all the appliances of wealth, stables filled with blooded stock, pastures grazed by herds of purest breed, kennels filled with well trained dogs, gardens of roses, orchards of fruit, and groves of magnificent oaks, amid which towers the stately mansion, its windows aglow with hospitality, and its porches thronged with fair faces and noble forms.
In the other he would see the broad fields lying idle and waste, the ditches overflowed, the fences broken down; no chorus sounds, no life is seen save in a distant corner of the field, where a “fourth part tenant” plows a little steer around an arid patch of corn. He would see the quarters all deserted, the children gone, the wheel still, and the loom silent, the very doors holding their wooden lips ajar to speak “desolation!” He would see dotted over the country the squalid huts of the freedmen, their children sick, and no one to secure the doctor’s pay, that he may attend; their mortgage on the crop, made to the nearest merchant, for their year’s support, consumed in midsummer by their own extravagance, and the invariable bull, scarce able to plow an hour in the day for want of food. Oh, Boston! “Hub of the Universe!” “Cradle of Freedom!” You drove a sharp trade indeed with Africa’s children when you gave them the ballot in exchange for life, and comfort, and home! He would see the mansion amid the oaks, if standing at all, standing silent and drear, the smoke only rising from one chimney, the shutters all closed, and a woman in black walking wearily up and down the gloomy hall, while down in the garden, under the willow, rests a marble slab, with the inscription: “Killed at the battle of Somewhere.”
But, as I was saying, it was the spring of ‘65.
The great army of Sherman had wound its blasting way from Atlanta to the sea. In its trail lay ashes and ruin; lone, blackened chimneys, plundered cities, and weeping women. The ever ascending smoke told its course; not the white smoke of honorable battle, but thick black volumes from burning homes, that, like the ink of a recording angel, wrote their hellish deeds upon the scroll of the sky.