A large cypress dug-out came to the wharf, rowed by a black man and his son.
“These boats all belonged to the planters, till the negroes took possession of them. Now a man has to hire a passage in his own canoe, and like as any way of one of his own negroes.”
The grim, silent boatman seemed to understand well that he was master of the situation. There were seven individuals in our party, and his charge for taking us over to the Island and back was ten dollars. He made no words about it: we could accept his terms, or find another boat. The gravity and taciturnity of this man indicated decided character, and no mean capacity for self-ownership. As he and his son rowed us across the river, he attended strictly to his business, hearing the talk of the planters about the race he represented—talk by no means complimentary—with an impenetrability of countenance quite astonishing.
This was the third visit of the planters to the island, since the war. On the first occasion, they were met by a party of negroes, about forty in number, who rushed down to the landing, armed with guns, and drove them away, with threats to kill them if they came to disturb them in their homes again; whereupon they discreetly withdrew. On their second visit they were accompanied by Captain Ketchum, special agent of the Bureau for the Sea Islands, to whose influence they probably owed their lives. They were met as before, surrounded by fierce black faces and levelled guns, captured, and not permitted to regain their boat until their leaders, who could read a little, became satisfied, from an examination of the Captain’s papers, that he was an officer of the government. “We are ready to do anything for gov’ment,” they said. “But we have nothing to do with these men.”
They asked the Captain, who were the real owners of the land,—they who had been placed there by the government, or the planters who had been fighting against the government?
“That is uncertain,” replied the conscientious Captain.
The planters, who had hoped for a different reply, well aware that the negroes could not be brought to terms without a positive assurance from an officer of the Bureau that they had no good title to the lands, were very much disgusted. “We may as well go back now,” said they. And scarcely any effort was made to induce the negroes to abandon their claims and make contracts.
This was now their third visit, and it remained to be seen how they would be received. We rowed a short distance down Wappoo Creek, which separates the island from the main land, and disembarked at a plantation belonging to three orphan children, whose guardian was a member of our party. The freedmen, having learned that the mere presence of the planters on the soil could effect nothing, had changed their tactics, and now not one of them was to be seen. Although there were twenty-two hundred on the island, it appeared as solitary and silent as if it had not an inhabitant.
We found the plantation house occupied as head-quarters by an officer of the Bureau, recently sent to the island. The guardian of the three orphans took me aside, showed me the desolated grounds without, shaded by magnificent live-oaks, and the deserted chambers within.
“You can understand my feelings coming here,” he said. “My sister expired in this room. She left her children to me. This estate, containing seventeen hundred acres, and worth fifty thousand dollars, is all that remains to them; and you see the condition it is in. Why does the Government of the United States persist in robbing orphan children? They have done nothing; they haven’t earned the titles of Rebels and traitors. Why not give them back their land?”