“Do we make our own ploughs?” he repeated, regarding me with astonishment and indignation. “Why, sir, it wouldn’t be a civilized country, if we didn’t. How do you think, sir, we should get our ploughs?”
“Buy them, or have them made for you.”
“Buy our ploughs! It would impoverish us, sir, if we had to buy our ploughs.”
“On the contrary, I should think a plough-factory could furnish them for less than they now cost you,—that, like boots and shoes, it would be cheaper to buy them than to make them.”
“No, sir! I’ve a black man on my plantation who can make as good a plough, at as little cost, as can be made anywhere in the world.”
After that I had nothing to say, having already sufficiently exposed my ignorance.
On the third day (it was the slowest trip, our captain said, which he had made in twenty years) we reached Selma, three hundred miles above Mobile,—a pleasantly situated town, looking down from the level summit of a bluff that rises almost precipitously from the river. Before the war it had three thousand inhabitants, and exported annually near a hundred thousand bales of cotton. It is connected by railroads with the North and West, and by railroad and river with Montgomery and the East. It was a point of very great importance to the Confederacy.
I found it a scene of “Yankee vandalism” and ruin. The Confederate arsenal, founderies, and rolling-mills,—the most important works of the kind in the South, covering many acres of ground, furnished with coal and iron by the surrounding country,—together with extensive warehouses containing ammunition and military stores, were burned when Wilson captured the place. A number of private stores and dwellings were likewise destroyed; and the work of rebuilding them was not yet half completed.
Climbing the steps from the landing to the level of the town, the first object which attracted my attention was a chain-gang of negroes at work on the street; while a number of white persons stood looking on, evidently enjoying the sight, and saying to one another, “That’s the beauty of freedom! that’s what free niggers come to!”