Here and there, between the new buildings, were rows of shanties used as stores, and gaps containing broken walls and heaps of rubbish.
Rents were enormous. Fifteen and twenty dollars a month were charged for huts which a respectable farmer would hardly consider good enough for his swine. One man had crowded into his backyard five of these little tenements, which rented for fifteen dollars a month each, and a very small brick house that let for thirty dollars. Other speculators were permitting the construction, on their premises, of houses that were to be occupied rent-free, for one year, by the poor families that built them, and afterwards to revert to the owners of the land.
The destitution among both white and black refugees was very great. Many of the whites had lost everything by the war; and the negroes that were run off by their masters in advance of Sherman’s army, had returned to a desolate place, with nothing but the rags on their backs. As at nearly every other town of any note in the South which I visited, the small-pox was raging at Atlanta, chiefly among the blacks, and the suffering poor whites.
I stopped to talk with an old man building a fence before the lot containing the ruins of his burnt house. He said: “The Yankees didn’t generally burn private dwellings. It’s my opinion these were set by our own citizens, that remained after Sherman’s order that all women who had relatives in the Southern army should go South, and all males must leave the city except them that would work for government. I put for Chattanooga. My house was plundered, and I reckon, burnt, by my own neighbors,—for I’ve found some of my furniture in their houses. Some that stayed acted more honorably; they put out fires that had been set, and saved both houses and property. My family is now living in that shebang there. It was formerly my stable. The weather-boards had been ripped off, but I fixed it up the best I could to put my little ’uns in till we can do better.”
Another old man told me the story of his family’s sufferings, with tears running down his cheeks. “During the battle of July, I had typhoid fever in my house. One of my daughters died, and my other three were down with it. The cemeteries were being shelled, and I had to take out my dead child and bury her hastily in my backyard. My house was in range of the shells; and there my daughters lay, too sick to be moved.” His description of those terrible days I shall not repeat. At length his neighbors came with ambulances, and the sick daughters were removed. They were scarcely out of the house when a shell passed through it.
Walking out, one Sunday afternoon, to visit the fortifications, I stopped to look at a negro’s horse, which had been crippled by a nail in his foot. While I was talking with the owner, a white man and two negroes, who had been sitting by a fire in an open rail-cabin close by, conversing on terms of perfect equality, came out to take part in the consultation, around the couch of the sick beast. One proffered one remedy; another, another.
“If ye had some tare,” said the white man (meaning tar);—“open his huf, and bile tare and pour int’ it.”
His lank frame and slouching dress,—his sallow visage, with its sickly, indolent expression,—his lazy, spiritless movements, and the social intimacy that appeared to exist between him and the negroes, indicated that he belonged to the class known as “Sand Hillers” in South Carolina, “Clay-eaters” in North Carolina, “Crackers” in Georgia, and “white trash” and “poor whites” everywhere. Among all the individuals of this unfortunate and most uninteresting class, whom I have seen, I do not remember a specimen better worth describing. I give his story in his own words.
He told me his name was Jesse Wade. “I lived down in Cobb,” (that is, Cobb County,)—seating himself on the neap of the negro’s wagon, and mechanically scraping the mud from it with his thumb-nail. “I was a Union man, I was that, like my daddy befo’e me. Thar was no use me bein’ a fule ’case my neighbors was. The Rebel army treated us a heap wus’n Sherman did. I refugeed,—left everything keer o’ my wife. I had four bales o’ cotton, and the Rebs burnt the last bale. I had hogs, and a mule, and a hoss, and they tuk all. They didn’t leave my wife narry bedquilt. When they’d tuk what they wanted, they put her out the house and sot fire to ’t. Narry one o’ my boys fit agin the Union; they was conscripted with me, and one night we went out on guard together, we did, and jest put for the Yankees. All the men that had a little property went in for the wa’, but the po’ people was agin it. Sherman was up yer to Kenesaw Mountain then, and I left, I did, to jine him.”
Wade claimed to have acted as a scout, and referred me to the quartermaster: “This one that’s yer,” (the quartermaster at Atlanta,) “you ax him what Wade done, if you don’t reckon I tell the truth.” He pronounced the division of the Federal forces a great stroke of strategy. “Atter we split the army, the Rebels couldn’t hold us no back.”