Atlanta is the centre of a “perfect crow’s-foot of railroads,” which have given it its business and military importance. The Western and Atlantic Road, connecting it with Chattanooga, forms a main trunk, with tributaries running into it from all parts of the North and West, and with branches from Atlanta running to all parts of the South. This road was constructed by the State, which in past years derived from it a large revenue. The war left it in a bad condition, with a dilapidated track, and merely temporary bridges in place of those which had been destroyed;—without machine-shops, or materials for the repair of what little remained of the old, worn-out rolling-stock. A purchase of four hundred thousand dollars’ worth of indispensable stock from the government, had sufficed to put it in operation, and it was contributing something, by its earnings, towards the great outlay still necessary to refurnish it and place it in thorough repair. The other railroads in the State, built by private companies, were nearly all doing well, by reason of the great amount of freight and travel passing over them. Those destroyed by Sherman belonged to corporations which could best afford to rebuild them; and work upon them was going forward with considerable vigor. All these roads had heavy claims against the Confederate Government; some of them amounting to several millions.
Georgia, before the war, had over twelve hundred miles of railroad in operation, forming the most extensive and complete system south of Tennessee and Virginia,—Alabama having but five hundred miles, and Mississippi seven hundred.
The best of the old Georgia banks were connected with the railroads. The bills of the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company were still worth, after the war had swept over the State, ninety-five per cent. of their par value. Those of the Central Railroad and Banking Company were selling for about the same. The issues of the other banks were worth from five to seventy-five per cent.; the stock being sacrificed.
CHAPTER LXIV.
DOWN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA.
As my first view of Atlanta was had on a dismal night, (if view it could be called,) so my last impression of it was received on a foggy morning, which showed me, as I sat in the cars of the Macon train, waiting at the depot, groups of rain-drenched negroes around out-door fires; the dimly seen trees of the Park; tall ruins looming through the mist; Masonic Hall standing alone (having escaped destruction); squat wooden buildings of recent, hasty construction, beside it; windrows of bent railroad iron by the track; piles of brick; a small mountain of old bones from the battle-fields, foul and wet with the drizzle; a heavy coffin-box, marked “glass,” on the platform; with mud and litter all around.
A tide of negro emigration was at that time flowing westward, from the comparatively barren hills of Northern Georgia to the rich cotton plantations of the Mississippi. Every day anxious planters from the Great Valley were to be met with, inquiring for unemployed freedmen, or returning home with colonies of laborers, who had been persuaded to quit their old haunts by the promise of double wages in a new country. Georgia planters, who raise but a bale of cotton on three, four, or five acres, could not compete with their more wealthy Western neighbors: they higgled at paying their freedmen six or seven dollars a month, while Arkansas and Mississippi men stood ready to give twelve and fifteen dollars, and the expenses of the journey. As it cost no more to transport able-bodied young men and women than the old and the feeble, the former were generally selected and the latter left behind. Thus it happened that an unusually large proportion of poor families remained about Atlanta and other Georgia towns.
There were two such families huddled that morning under the open shed of the depot. They claimed that they had been hired by a planter, who had brought them thus far, and, for some reason, abandoned them. They had been at the depot a week or more, sleeping in piles of old rags, and subsisting on rations issued to them by the Bureau: stolid-looking mothers, hardened by field-labor, smoking short black pipes; and older children tending younger ones, feeding them out of tin cups, and rocking them to sleep in their arms. It was altogether a pitiful sight,—although, but for the rain which beat in upon them, I might have thought their freely ventilated lodgings preferable to some of the tavern-rooms I had lately slept in. But to me the most noticeable feature of the scene was the spirit manifested towards these poor creatures by spectators of my own color.
“That baby’s going to die,” said one man. “Half your children will be dead before spring.”
“How do you like freedom?” said another.
“Niggers are fated,” said a third. “About one out of fifty will take care of himself; the rest are gone up.”