“Just now they are showing a little spirit, maybe,” said the father; “but it won’t continue.”
“I believe mine will do more work this year than ever,” said the son.
“Perhaps they will for you, but they won’t for me.”
The old man went away early in the evening to spend the night on his other plantation. After he was gone, the young man looked up from the pages of “Handy Andy,” and remarked emphatically:—
“The great trouble in this country is, the people are mad at the niggers because they’re free. They always believed they wouldn’t do well if they were emancipated, and now they maintain, and some of them even hope, they won’t do well,—that too in the face of actual facts. The old planters have no confidence in the niggers, and as a matter of course the niggers have no confidence in them. They have a heap more confidence in their young masters, and they work well for us. They have still more confidence in the Yankees, and they work still better for them. They have the greatest affection for the Yankees; they won’t steal from them, like they will from us. I had forty-seven hogs in one lot when I took the plantation; and in two weeks there were only twenty-six left. The same thing happened to my turnip patch. I don’t reckon it is my freedmen that steal from me; but the country is full of thieving darkeys that think it’s no wrong to take from a Southern white man.”
“I wish we older ones had the faculty you say you have for making the free niggers work,” said the young man’s mother. “I always kept two women just to weave. The same women are with me now. Before they were declared free, they could weave six and eight yards of cloth a day, easy. Now the most they do is about one yard.”
The house was on the main road traversed by the 15th corps, belonging to the left wing of Sherman’s army, on its way from Madison to Milledgeville.
“I never would have thought I could stay home while the Yankees were passing,” said the young man’s mother, “but I did. They commenced passing early in the morning, and there wasn’t an hour in the day that they were not as thick, as blue pigeons along the road.
“I was very much excited at first. My husband was away, and I had nobody with me but our negroes. A German soldier came into the house first of any. He was an ugly-looking fellow as ever I saw; but I suppose any man would have looked ugly to me under such circumstances. Said he, ‘I’ve orders to get a saddle from this house.’ I told him my husband had done gone off with the only saddle we had. Then he said, ‘A pistol will do.’ I said I had no pistol. Then he told me he must have a watch of me. I had a watch, but it was put out of the way where I hoped no Yankee could find it; so I told him I had none for him.
“He then looked all around the room, and said, ‘Madam, I have orders to burn this house.’ I replied that I hoped the Federals were too magnanimous to burn houses over the heads of defenceless women. He said, ‘I’ll insure it for fifty dollars;’ for that’s the way they got a heap of money out of our people. I said, ‘I’ve no fifty dollars to pay for insuring it; and if it depends upon that, it must burn.’