The two addressed each other with great respect and affection. Their feeling of kinship and of family worth was very strong. “There were four brothers of us,” said the elder; “and I am the only one of them that ever went to the prison-house. After my old, kind master died, I had a difficulty with my mistress; she was very exasperating in her language to me, till I lost my temper, and said I could live in torment, but I couldn’t live with her, and wished she would sell me. She sent for an officer; and I said, ‘I am as willing to go to jail as I am to take a drink of water.’ When the sheriff saw me, he was very much surprised, and he said, ‘Why, John, why are you here?’ I told him I had parted with my temper, and said what no man ought to have said to a woman. He said, ‘What a pity! such a name as your master gave you, John!’ He interceded with my mistress, and the fourth day she had me taken out. I told her I had acknowledged my fault to my Maker, and I was willing to acknowledge it to her. She said she was wrong too; and we agreed very well after that. I was a very valuable servant to her. I could whitewash, mend a fence, put in glass, use tools, serve up a dinner, and then wait on it as gracefully as any man that ever walked around a table. Then I would hitch up the carriage, and drive her out. And I have never seen the day yet when she has given me five dollars.”
He had always thought deeply on the subject of his condition.
“But I never felt at liberty to speak my mind until they passed an act to put colored men into the army. That wrought upon my feelings so I couldn’t but cry;” and the tears were in his eyes again at the recollection. “They asked me if I would fight for my country. I said, ‘I have no country.’ They said I should light for my freedom. I said, ‘To gain my freedom, I must fight to keep my wife and children slaves.’ Then, after the war was over, they told us they had no more use for niggers. I said I thought it hard, after they’d lived by the sweat of our faces all our days, that now we must be banished from the country, because we were free.”
He spoke hopefully of his race. “If we can induce them to be united, and to feel the responsibility that rests upon them, they will get along very well. Many have bought themselves, and paid every dollar to their masters, and then been sold again, and been treated in this way till they have no longer any confidence in the promises a white man makes them. They won’t stay with their old masters on any terms. Then there are some that expect to live without work. There are some colored men, just as there are white men, that won’t work to save their lives. Others won’t stay, for this reason: The master takes their old daddy, and old mammy, and little children, and casts them out on the forks of the road, and tells them to go to the Court House, where the Yankees are, for he don’t want ’em; then of course the young men and young women go too.”
Early next morning, I went out to view the town. In size and importance Petersburg ranks as the second city in the State. In 1860 it had 18,275 inhabitants. It had fifty manufacturing establishments in operation, employing three thousand operatives, and consuming annually $2,000,000 worth of raw material. Twenty factories manufactured yearly 12,000,000 pounds of tobacco. The falls of the Appomattox afford an extensive water-power, and the river is navigable to this place.
I found the city changed greatly from its old prosperous condition. Its business was shattered. Its well-built, pleasant streets, rising upon the south bank of the Appomattox, were dirty and dilapidated. All the lower part of the town showed the ruinous effect of the shelling it had received. Tenantless and uninhabitable houses, with broken walls, roofless, or with roofs smashed and torn by missiles, bear silent witness to the havoc of war. In the ends of some buildings I counted more than twenty shot-holes. Many battered houses had been repaired,—bright spots of new bricks in the old walls showing where projectiles had entered.
The city was thronged by a superfluous black population crowding in from the country. I talked with some, and tried to persuade them to go back and remain at their old homes. But they assured me that they could not remain: their very lives had been in danger; and they told me of several murders perpetrated upon freedmen by the whites, in their neighborhoods, besides other atrocities. Yet it was evident many had come to town in the vague hope of finding happy adventures and bettering their condition.
I remember a gang of men, employed by the government, waiting for orders, with their teams, on the sunny side of a ruined street. Several, sitting on the ground, had spelling-books: one was teaching another his letters; a third was reading aloud to a wondering little audience; an old man, in spectacles, with gray hair, was slowly and painfully spelling words of two letters, which he followed closely with his heavy dark finger along the sunlit page,—altogether a singular and affecting sight.
Having letters to General Gibbon commanding the military district, I called on him at his head-quarters in a fine modern Virginia mansion, and through his courtesy obtained a valuable guide to the fortifications, in the person of Colonel E——, of his staff.
We drove out on the Jerusalem plank-road, leaving on our right the reservoir, which Kautz’s cavalry in their dash at the city mistook for a fort, and retired from with commendable discretion.