We found the earth full of human bones and antique pottery. A little digging exposed entire skeletons sitting upright, in the posture in which they had been buried,—who knows how many centuries before? Who were these ancient people, over whose unknown history the past had closed, as the earth had closed over their bodies? Perhaps these burial-mounds marked the scene of some great battle on the very spot where the modern fight took place.
We found the surface of the mound, washed by the storms of centuries, speckled with bits of bones, yellowish, decayed, and often friable to the touch. Fragments of pottery were also exposed, ornamented in a variety of styles, showing that this ancient people was not without rude arts.
The cotton-fields on the bluffs and in the bottom were cultivated by a colony of freedmen, whose village of brown huts we passed, on the broad hill-side above the river, as we returned to the city.
The ride back over the western brow of the bluffs was one to be remembered. The sun was setting over the forests and plains of Louisiana, which lay dark on the horizon, between the splendid sky and the splendid, wide-spreading river reflecting it. Every cloud, every fugitive fleece, was saturated with fire. The river was a flood of molten gold. The ever-varying glory seemed prolonged for our sakes. The last exquisite tints had scarcely faded, leaving the river dark and melancholy, sweeping between its solitary shores, when we left the crests, with the half-moon sailing in a thinly-clouded sky above our heads, and descended, by the deep-cut, narrow streets, and through the open gates at the breastworks, into the city.
The next day, in company with Major-General Wood, in command of the Department of Mississippi, I visited the fortifications below Vicksburg. For a mile and a half we rode along beside banks perforated with “gopher-holes” dug by the Rebel soldiers, and lines of rifle-pits, which consisted often of a mere trench cut across the edge of a crest. These were the river-side defences. The real fortifications commenced with a strong fort constructed on a commanding bluff. This did not abut on the river, as maps I had seen, and descriptions I had read, had led me to expect. Below the city a tract of low bottom-land opens between the river and the bluffs, of such a nature that no very formidable attack was to be apprehended in that quarter. Standing upon the first redan, we saw a mile or two of low land and tangled and shaggy cypress swamps intervening between us and the glimpses of shining light which indicated the southward course of the Mississippi.
In this excursion, as in that of the previous day, I noticed on every side practical answers to the question, “Will the freedmen work?” In every broken field, in every available spot on the rugged crests, was the negro’s little cotton patch.
Riding through the freedmen’s quarter below the town the General and I called at a dozen or more different cabins, putting to every person we talked with the inquiry,—how large a proportion of the colored people he knew were shiftless characters. We got very candid replies: the common opinion being that about five out of twenty still had a notion of living without work. Yet, curiously enough, not one would admit that he was one of the five,—every man and woman acknowledging that labor was a universal duty and necessity.
CHAPTER LI.
FREE LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI.
Colonel Thomas, Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau for the State of Mississippi, stationed at Vicksburg, gave the negroes more credit for industry than they gave each other. In the large towns, to which vagrancy naturally gravitates, one in four was probably a fair estimate of the proportion of colored people unable or unwilling to earn an honest livelihood. “But I am confident,” said the Colonel, “there is no more industrious class of people anywhere than the freedmen who have little homesteads of their own. The colonies under my charge, working lands assigned them by the government, have raised this year ten thousand bales of cotton, besides corn and vegetables for their subsistence until another harvest.”
Other well-informed and experienced persons corroborated this statement. Dr. Warren, Superintendent of Freedmen’s Schools in Mississippi, told me of a negro family, consisting of one man, three women, and a half-grown girl, who took a lot of five acres, which they worked entirely with shovel and hoe, having no mule, and on which they had that season cleared five hundred dollars, above all expenses. I heard of numerous other well-authenticated instances of the kind.