[12]. That is, of cotton and seed: the gin takes out fifty or sixty per cent. of the gross weight.
CHAPTER XL.
BY RAILROAD TO CORINTH.
I left Nashville for Decatur on a morning of dismal rain The cars were crowded and uncomfortable, with many passengers standing. The railroad was sadly short of rolling-stock, having (like most Southern roads) only such as happened to be on it when it was turned over to the directors by the government. It owned but three first-class cars, only one of which we had with us. The rest of the passenger train was composed of box-cars supplied with rude seats.
We passed the forts of the city; passed the battle-ground of Franklin, with its fine rolling fields, marked by entrenchments; and speeding on through a well-wooded handsome section of country, entered Northern Alabama. As my observations of that portion of the State will be of a general character, I postpone them until I shall come to speak of the State at large.
It was raining again when I left Decatur, ferried across the Tennessee in a barge manned by negroes. Of the railroad bridge burned by General Mitchell, only the high stone piers remained; and freight and passengers had to be conveyed over the river in that way. I remember a black ferryman whose stalwart form and honest speech interested me, and whose testimony with regard to his condition I thought worth noting down.
“I works for my old master. He raised me. He’s a right kind master. I gits twenty dollars a month, and he finds me. Some of the masters about hyere is right tight on our people. Then thar’s a heap of us that won’t work, and that steal from the rest. They’re my own color, but I can’t help saying what’s true. They just set right down, thinking they’re free, and waiting for luck to come to ’em.” But he assured me that the most of his people were at work, and doing well.
From the miserable little ferry-boat we were landed on the other side in the midst of a drenching rain. To reach the cars there was a steep muddy bank to climb. The baggage was brought up in wagons and pitched down into mud several inches deep, where passengers had to stand in the pouring shower and see to getting their checks.
On the road to Tuscumbia I made the acquaintance of a young South Carolinian, whose character enlisted my sympathy, and whose candid conversation offers some points worth heeding.
“I think it was in the decrees of God Almighty that slavery was to be abolished in this way; and I don’t murmur. We have lost our property, and we have been subjugated, but we brought it all on ourselves. Nobody that hasn’t experienced it knows anything about our suffering. We are discouraged: we have nothing left to begin new with. I never did a day’s work in my life, and don’t know how to begin. You see me in these coarse old clothes; well, I never wore coarse clothes in my life before the war.”