“Soon as he saw he couldn’t frighten me into giving him anything, he went to plundering. He had found a purse, with five dollars in Confederate money in it, when he saw an officer coming into the front door, and escaped through the back door. He was a very great villain, and the officer said if he was caught he would be punished.
“I don’t know what I should have done if it hadn’t been for the Yankee officers. They treated me politely in every way. They couldn’t prevent my meal and bacon from being taken by the foraging parties,—all except what I had hid; but they gave me a guard to keep soldiers from plundering the house, and when one guard was taken away I had another in his place. Some families on this road, who had no guard, were so broken up they had nothing left to keep house with.
“When the foragers were carrying off our provisions, I said to an officer, ‘That’s all the corn meal I have,’—which wasn’t quite true, for I had some hid away; but he ordered the men to return me a sack. I didn’t make anything by the lie; for the next party that came along took the sack the others had left. But I did save a pot of lard. I said to an officer, ‘They’ve done taken all my turkeys and cows and hogs, and you will leave me without anything.’ ‘Take back that pot of lard to the lady,’ said he; and I soon had it where it wasn’t seen again that day.
“What was out doors nothing could prevent the soldiers from taking. I had bee-gum, and they just carried it off, hives and all. A soldier would catch up a hive, and march right along, with it on his head, and with the bees swarming all about him. They didn’t care anything for the bees. I reckon they wouldn’t sting Yankees.”
During the evening, I paid a visit to the freedmen’s quarters. The doors of the huts were all open, in a row, and I could see a dozen negro families grouped around cheerful fires within, basking in the yellow light, and looking quite happy and comfortable.
CHAPTER LXVIII.
POLITICS AND FREE LABOR IN GEORGIA.
At Milledgeville,—a mere village (of twenty-five hundred inhabitants before the war), surrounded by a beautiful hilly and wooded country,—I saw something of the Georgia State Legislature. It was at work on a cumbersome and rather useless freedmen’s code, which, however, contained no very objectionable features. In intelligence and political views this body represented the State very fairly. I was told that its members, like the inhabitants of the State at large, were, with scarce an exception, believers in the right of secession. The only questions that ever divided them on that subject, were not as to the right, but as to the policy; and whether the State should secede separately, or coöperate with the other seceding States.
Since the Rebel State debt had been repudiated, there existed a feeling among both legislators and people that all debts, public and private, ought to be wiped out with it. I remember well the argument of a gentleman of Morgan County. “Two thirds of the people in this county are left hopelessly involved by the loss of the war debt. There is a law to imprison a man for paying what the act of the convention takes from him the power of paying. The more loyal portion of our citizens would not invest in Confederate scrip, but put their money into State bonds, which they thought safe from repudiation. A large number of debts are for negro property. Now, since slavery is abolished, all debts growing out of slavery ought to be abolished. Four or five men in this county,” he added, “have the power to ruin over thirty families, whose obligations they bought up with Confederate money. As that money turns out to have never been legally good for anything, all such obligations should be cancelled.”
Throughout the State I heard the bitterest complaints against the Davis despotism. “There was first a tax of ten per cent. levied on all our produce; then of twelve per cent. on all property. Worse still, our property was seized at the will of the government, and scrip given in exchange, which was not good for taxes or anything else. There was public robbery by the government, and private robbery by the officers of the government. The Secretary of War, Seddon, had grain to sell; so he raised the price of it to forty dollars a bushel, when it should have sold for two dollars and a half. The conscript act was executed with the most criminal partiality. A man of an influential family had no difficulty in evading it. During the last year of the war, there were one hundred and twenty-two thousand young Confederates in bomb-proof situations. But an ordinary conscript was treated like a prisoner, thrown into jail, and often handcuffed.”
The value of slave property was the subject of endless debate. Said a Georgia planter: “I owned a hundred niggers; their increase paid me eight per cent., their labor four per cent.; and I’ve sixty thousand dollars’ worth of property buried in that lot,”—pointing to the plantation graveyard. The convention that reconstructed the State had not the grace to accept emancipation without inserting in the new Bill of Rights the proviso “that this acquiescence in the action of the United States Government is not intended as a relinquishment, or waiver or estoppel of such claim for compensation of loss sustained by reason of the emancipation of his slaves as any citizen of Georgia may hereafter make upon the justice and magnanimity of that government.” And there existed in most minds a growing hope that, when the Southern representatives got into Congress, measures would be carried, compelling the government not only to pay for slaves, but for all other losses occasioned by the war.