CHAPTER XLVI.
WAITING FOR THE TRAIN AT MIDNIGHT.
Stopping occasionally to talk with the people along the road, and dining at a farm-house, I did not reach Corinth until sunset. The first thing I noticed, in passing the fortifications, was that the huts of the negro garrison were dismantled; and I found the citizens rejoicing over the removal of the troops. I returned to Mr. M——’s house, and was welcomed by Mrs. M——, who seemed almost to have forgotten that I was not only a Yankee, but a “bad Yankee” from Massachusetts. And here I may remark that, whatever hostility was shown me by the Southern people on account of my Northern origin, it usually wore off on a short acquaintance. Mrs. M—— had a private room for me this time; and she caused a great, glowing fire to be made in it for my comfort. After supper she invited me into her sitting-room, where we talked freely about the bad Yankees, the war, and emancipation.
Both her husband and father claimed to be Union men: but their Unionism was of a kind too common in the South. They hated the secession leaders almost as bitterly as they hated the Yankee government.
Mrs. M——: “Slavery was bad economy, I know; but oh, it was glorious!”—spoken with a kind of romantic enthusiasm. “I’d give a mint of money right now for servants like I once had,—to have one all my own!”—clasping her hands in the ardor of that passionate wish.
“Ladies at the North,” she went on, “if they lose their servants, can do their own work; but we can’t, we can’t!”
She bemoaned the loss of a girl she formerly owned; a bright mulattress, very pretty and intelligent. “She could read and write as well as I could. There was no kind of work that girl couldn’t do. And so faithful!—I trusted everything to her, and was never deceived.”
I asked if she could feel in her heart that it was right to own such a creature.
“I believed in it as much as I believed in the Bible. We were taught it from our infancy,—we were taught it with our religion. I still think it was right; but I think it was because we abused slavery that it was taken from us. Emancipation is a worse thing for our servants than for us. They can’t take care of themselves.”
“What has become of that favorite girl of yours?”
“She is in St. Louis. She works at her trade there; she’s a splendid dressmaker. Oh, if I only had her to make my dresses now, like she used to! She owns the house and lot where she lives; she has bought it with the money she has earned. She’s married to a very fine mulatto man.”