“I exercise the same care over my niggers I always did,” replied the Georgian. “They are all with me yet. Only one ever left me. He was a good, faithful servant, but sickly. He said one day he thought he ought to have wages, and I told him if he could find anybody to do better by him than I was doing, he’d better go. He went, and took his family; and in six weeks he came back again. ‘Edward,’ I said, ‘how’s this?’ ‘I want to come and live with you again, master, like I always have,’ he said. ‘I find I ain’t strong enough to work for wages.’ ‘Edward,’ I said, ‘I am very sorry; you wanted to go, and I got another man in your place; now I have nothing for you to do, and your cabin is occupied.’ He just burst into tears. ‘I’ve lived with you all my days, master,’ he said, ‘and now I have no home!’ I couldn’t stand that. ‘Take an ax,’ I said; ‘go into the woods, cut some poles, and build you a cabin. As long as I have a home, you shall have one.’ He was the happiest man you ever saw!”
“A Yankee wouldn’t have done that,” said the Mississippian. “Yankees won’t take care of a poor white man. I’ve travelled in the North, and seen people there go barefoot in winter, with ice on the ground.”
“Indeed!” said I, turning and facing the speaker. “What State was that in?”
“In the State of New York,” he replied. “I’ve seen hundreds of poor whites barefoot there in the depth of winter.”
“That is singular,” I remarked. “I am a native of that State; I lived in it until I was twenty years old, and have travelled through it repeatedly since; and I never happened to see what you describe.”
“I have seen the same thing in Massachusetts too.”
“I have been for some years a resident of Massachusetts, and have never yet seen a man there barefoot in the snow.”
The Mississippian made no direct reply to this, but ran on in a strain of vehement and venomous abuse of the Yankees, in which he was cordially joined by his friend the Georgian. Although not addressed to me, this talk was evidently intended for my ear; but I had heard too much of the same sort everywhere in the South to be disturbed by it. At length the conversation turned upon the Freedmen’s Bureau.
“General Tillson” (Assistant Commissioner for the State) “has done a mighty mean thing!” said the Georgian. “I’ve just made contracts to pay my freedmen seventy-five and a hundred dollars a year. And now he is going to issue an order requiring us to pay them a hundred and forty-four dollars. That will ruin us. Down in South-western Georgia they can afford to pay that; but in my county the land is so poor we can’t feed our people at that rate. I’m going to Augusta now to see about it. If Tillson insists upon it, I shall throw up my contracts: I can’t do it: I’ll sell out: I won’t live in a country that’s ruled in this way.”
“From what county are you, sir?” I inquired.