“He never flinched. ‘You can shoot me if you like,’ he says, ‘but I sha’n’t betray my master!’
“They were so struck with his courage and fidelity that they just let him go. So I saved my horses. He don’t know it, but I’m going to give that boy a little farm and stock it for him.”
Another planter in Lowndes County, an old man, told me his story, which will pass as a sample of a hundred others.
“The Yankees burnt my gin-house and screw. They didn’t burn my house, for they made it a rule to destroy none but unoccupied dwellings. But they took everything from my house they wanted, and ruined about everything they didn’t want. They mixed salt with the sugar, emptied it on the floor, and poured vinegar on it. They took a great fancy to a little grandson of mine. They gave him a watch, and told him they’d give him a little pony to ride if he would go to camp with them. ‘I won’t go with you,’ says he, ‘for you’re taking away all the flour that we make biscuit of.’ They carried him a little ways, when they stopped to burn a school-house. ‘Here! You mustn’t burn that!’ he says; ‘for that’s our school-house.’ And they didn’t burn it.”
“The Confederates used me as bad as the Yankees,” said Mr. M——, a planter whom I saw in Macon County. “They had taken twenty-six horses from me, when Wilson came and took thirty more. I ran off six of my best horses to a piny hill; and there I got on a high stump, and looked over the bushes, to see if the Yankees were coming. I wasn’t near as happy as I’d been some days in my life! All I thought of was to get my horses off down one side of the hill, if I saw the raiders coming up the other.”
This gentleman had been extensively engaged in the culture of the grape,—to which, by the way, the soil and climate of Alabama are admirably adapted. He had in his cellar twenty thousand dollars’ worth of wine, when Wilson came. His wife caused it all to be destroyed, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the soldiers. The last cask was scarcely emptied when they arrived. “She thought she’d sooner deal with men sober than drunk,” said M——. “They treated her very well and took nothing from the house they didn’t need.”
The route of Wilson’s cavalry can be traced all the way, by the burnt gin-houses with which they dotted the country. At Montgomery they destroyed valuable founderies and machine-shops, after causing the fugitive Rebels to burn a hundred thousand bales of cotton, with the warehouses which contained it. I followed their track through the eastern counties of Alabama, and afterwards recrossed it in Georgia, where the close of hostilities terminated this, the most extensive and destructive raid of the war.
CHAPTER LXII.
NOTES ON ALABAMA.
Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, and originally the capital of the Confederacy, is a town of broad streets and pleasant prospects, built on the rolling summits of high bluffs, on the left bank of the Alabama, one hundred miles above Selma. Before the war it had ten thousand inhabitants.
Walking up the long slope of the principal street, I came to the Capitol, a sightly edifice on a fine eminence. On a near view, the walls, which are probably of brick, disguised to imitate granite, had a cheap look; and the interior, especially the Chamber of Representatives in which the Confederate egg was hatched, appeared mean and shabby. This was a plain room, with semicircular rows of old desks covered with green baize exceedingly worn and foul. The floor carpet was faded and ragged. The glaring whitewashed walls were offensive to the eye. The Corinthian pillars supporting the gallery were a cheap imitation of bronze. Over the Speaker’s chair hung a sad-looking portrait of George Washington, whose solemn eyes could not, I suppose, forget the scenes which Treason and Folly had enacted there.