Colonel Lambert had on hand sixteen cases of murder and felonious shooting by white persons, negroes being the victims. The seventeenth case was reported from Twiggs County, while I was at Macon. A chivalrous sportsman, apparently for the fun of the thing, took a shot at a negro walking peaceably along the street, and killed him. The Colonel sent out twenty-five mounted men to hunt the murderer; but it was almost impossible to make arrests in such cases. There were in every place unprincipled men who approved the crime and helped to shield the criminal. Warned by them of the approach of blue uniforms, he would betake himself to the cane-brakes, or to some friendly garret, where he would lie safely concealed until the scouts had given up their search for him and retired from the neighborhood. These negro-shooters and their accomplices were no doubt a small minority of the people, but they were a very dangerous minority, whom the better class did not deem it prudent to offend by assisting the officers of justice.
Crimes of this description were more or less frequent in districts remote from the military posts. In some places the freedmen were shot down in mere wantonness and malice. In others, the very men who had been wishing them all dead or driven out of the country, had become enraged at seeing them emigrate for higher wages than they were willing to pay, and sworn to kill any that attempted to leave the State.
Said Colonel Lambert: “To prevent these outrages, we need a much greater military force than we have. But the force we have is being reduced by the mustering out of more troops. We are thus prevented from carrying out the intentions of the government; and there is danger that before long the continuance of its authority here will be regarded as a mere farce. What we need is cavalry; but our troops are all infantry. I mount them in a case of emergency, where some desperado is to be hunted, by seizing horses at the first livery-stable, which we return after we have got through with them, politely thanking the proprietor in the name of the government.”
The southwestern part of Georgia is one of the most fertile sections of the South: it is the region of large plantations and rich planters. The northern half of the State is comparatively unproductive: it is the region of small planters, and of farmers who do their own work with the aid of their sons. Much of the northwestern part is barren. The fertile Southwest suffered little damage from the war; it came out of it with its plantations unimpaired, and a large stock of cotton on hand. Northern and Middle Georgia were ploughed with the furrows of desolation. Sherman’s army left nothing in its track but poverty and ruin. Plantations were wasted, provisions taken, stock killed or driven away, buildings and farming implements destroyed. The people were left very poor: they raised no crops in ’65, and a famine was very generally anticipated.
In this condition, all the better class of planters recognized the sincere efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to aid them, and to organize a labor system which should prove beneficial to both employers and employed. They generally spoke of its officers with respect; and many acknowledged that it would be a great injury to the country to have it immediately removed. Others were bitter in their opposition to it; and I often heard such remarks as this: “The idea of a nigger having the power of bringing a white man before a tribunal! The Southern people a’n’t going to stand that.”
The negro of Middle Georgia is a creature in whom the emotions entirely predominate over the intellectual faculties. He has little of that shrewdness which town life cultivates in the black race. The agents of the Bureau complained that they had sometimes great difficulty in persuading him to act in accordance with his own interests. If a stranger offered him twelve dollars a month, and a former master in whom he had confidence, appealing to his gratitude and affection, offered him one dollar, he would exclaim impulsively, “I work for you, Mass’r Will!” Sometimes, when he had been induced by his friends to enter a complaint against his master or mistress for wrongs done him, ludicrous and embarrassing scenes occurred in the freedmen’s courts. “Now, Thomas,” says the good lady, “can you have the heart to speak a word against your old, dear, kind mistress?” “No, missus, I neber will!” blubbers Thomas; and that is all the court can get out of him.
The reverence shown by the colored people toward the officers of the Bureau was often amusing. They looked to them for what they had formerly depended upon their masters for. If they had lost a pig, they seemed to think such great and all-powerful men could find it for them without any trouble. They cheered them in the streets, and paid them at all times the most abject respect.
I was told that the blacks were quite as apt to keep their contracts as the whites; and that often, when they broke them, it was through the persuasion of some planter who lacked laborers. “Look here, Sam, I’m giving two dollars a month more than this man you are at work for; why don’t you come and live with me?” A respectable planter was fined a hundred and fifty dollars for this offence, by the Bureau, whilst I was at Macon. “It is one of the worst offences we have to deal with,” said Colonel Lambert, “and one that we punish most severely.”
It was the popular belief that the agents of the Bureau had control of funds arising from such fines, and that they appropriated them pretty freely to their own use. On the contrary, they were required at the end of each month to make returns and forward all funds on hand to the chief quartermaster of the State, who alone was authorized to apply them in necessary expenditures.
There were four freedmen’s schools in Macon, with eleven teachers and a thousand pupils. There was a night-school of two hundred children and adults, where I saw men of my own age learning their letters, (and thought, “What if I was now first learning my letters?”) and gray-haired old men and women forming, with slowness and difficulty, by the aid of spectacles, the first characters in the writing-book. The teachers were furnished by the American Missionary Association,—the freedmen paying for their own books, (an item with the booksellers,) and for the necessary fuel and lights.