Mr. Eddy, the superintendent, and an old experienced teacher, said to me: “The children of these schools have made in a given time more progress in the ordinary branches of education than any white schools I ever taught. In mathematics and the higher sciences they are not so forward. The eagerness of the older ones to learn is a continual wonder to me. The men and women say, ‘We work all day, but we’ll come to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we’re dull, but we want you to beat it into us!’”
I was much interested in a class of young clergymen who recited in the evening to the young matron of the “teachers’ home.” One of them told me with tears of gratitude how kind and faithful all the teachers had been to them.
“Are you not mistaken?” I said. “I have been told a hundred times that the Southern people are your best friends.”
He replied: “Georgia passed a law making it a penitentiary offence, punishable with five years’ imprisonment, to teach a slave to read. Now we are no longer slaves, and we are learning to read. They may deceive you, but we know who are our best friends.”
I was repeatedly assured by earnest secessionists that there were no Union men in Georgia; that, soon or late, all went into the rebellion. But one day I met an old man who denied the charge with indignation.
“I am sixty-five years old. I fought for the spot where Macon now stands, when it was Indian territory. I don’t know what they mean by no Union men. If to fight against secession from first to last, and to oppose the war in every way, makes a Union man, I was that. Of course I paid taxes, because I couldn’t help it. And when Stoneman raided on us, and every man that could bear arms was pressed, I went with the rest, and was all day behind the breastworks. But I’ve always spoke my mind, and being an old citizen, I never got hung yet. A majority of the people of Macon were with me, if they had only dared to say so. They hate the secessionists now worse than they hate the Yankees: no comparison! The secessionists now cry, ‘No party!’ but never a party stuck together closer than they do.
“The Confederates,” he went on, “injured us ten times more than the Yankees did. When Wilson came in last April, he put a guard at my house, who stayed with me seven weeks, and did his duty faithfully.”
CHAPTER LXV.
ANDERSONVILLE.
Just across the railroad track below Macon, in a pleasant pine grove, is the Fair Ground, where was located that thing of misery known to us as the Macon Prison. It was the “Yankee Prison,” down here.
I visited the spot one bright morning after a shower, when the breezes and the sunshine were in the pine-tops overhead. The ground was covered with a thin growth of brown grass, wet with the rain: stepping along which I came suddenly to a quadrangular space, as arid as the hill of Golgotha. No marks were necessary to show where the stockade had stood, with its elevated scaffolding on which walked the Rebel guard. The stockade had been removed; but the blasted and barren earth remained to testify of the homesick feet that had trodden it into dreary sterility.