Speaking of the negroes: “We can’t feel towards them as you do; I suppose we ought to, but ’t isn’t possible for us. They’ve always been our owned servants, and we’ve been used to having them mind us without a word of objection, and we can’t bear anything else from them now. If that’s wrong, we’re to be pitied sooner than blamed, for it’s something we can’t help. I was always kind to my slaves. I never whipped but two boys in my life, and one of them I whipped three weeks ago.”
“When he was a free man?”
“Yes; for I tell you that makes no difference in our feeling towards them. I sent a boy across the country for some goods. He came back with half the goods he ought to have got for the money. I may as well be frank,—it was a gallon of whiskey. There were five gentlemen at the house, and I wanted the whiskey for them. I told Bob he stole it. Afterwards he came into the room and stood by the door,—a big, strong fellow, twenty-three years old. I said, ‘Bob, what do you want?’ He said, ‘I want satisfaction about the whiskey.’ He told me afterwards, he meant that he wasn’t satisfied I should think he had stolen it, and wanted to come to a good understanding about it. But I thought he wanted satisfaction gentlemen’s fashion. I rushed for my gun. I’d have shot him dead on the spot if my friends hadn’t held me. They said I’d best not kill him, but that he ought to be whipped. I sent to the stable for a trace, and gave him a hundred and thirty with it, hard as I could lay on. I confess I did whip him unmercifully.”
“Did he make no resistance?”
“Oh, he knew better than that; my friends stood by to see me through. I was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That’s the way we treat our servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used to the new order of things,—if we ever can.”
“In the mean while, according to your own showing, it would seem that some restraint is necessary for you, and some protection for the negroes. On the whole, the Freedmen’s Bureau is a good thing, isn’t it?”
He smiled: “May be it is; yes, if the nigger is to be free, I reckon it is; but it’s a mighty bitter thing for us.”
Then, speaking of secession: “I had never thought much about politics, though I believed our State was right when she went out. But when the bells were ringing, and everybody was rejoicing that she had seceded, a solemn feeling came over me, like I had never had in my life, and I couldn’t help feeling there was something wrong. I went through the war; there were thousands like me. In our hearts we thought more of the Stars and Stripes than we did of the old rag we were fighting under.”
He was going to Mississippi to look after some property left there before the war. But what he wished to do was to go North: “only I know I wouldn’t be tolerated,—I know a man couldn’t succeed in business there, who was pointed out as a Rebel.”
The same wish, qualified by the same apprehension, was frequently expressed to me by the better class of young Southern men; and I always took pains to convince them that they would be welcomed and encouraged by all enlightened communities in the Northern States.