I sympathized sincerely with this honest gentleman and his orphan wards. “But you forget,” I said, “that such a war as we have passed through cannot be, without involving in its calamities the innocent as well as the rest. It would have been well if that fact had not been overlooked in the beginning.”
He made no reply. I afterwards learned from his friends that he was one of the original and most fiery secessionists of Charleston. He made a public speech, early in ’sixty-one,—printed in the newspapers at the time,—in which he expressly pledged his life and his fortune to the Confederate cause. His life he had managed to preserve; and of his fortune sufficient remained for the elegant maintenance of his own and his sister’s children; so that it appeared to me quite unreasonable for him to complain of the misfortune which he himself had been instrumental in bringing upon the orphans.
The party separated, each man going to look at his own estate. I accompanied one who had three fine plantations in the vicinity. A Northern man by birth, his sympathy had been with the government, while he found his private interest in working for the Confederate usurpation under profitable contracts. By holding his tongue and attending to business he had accumulated a handsome fortune,—wisely investing his Confederate scrip in real estate, which he thought somewhat more substantial. These plantations were a part of his earnings. Being a Northern man, and at heart a Union man, he deemed it hard that they should not be at once restored to him. The fact that they were his reward for aiding the enemies of his country,—rich gains, so to speak, snatched from the wreck of a pirate ship on board which he had served,—did not seem to have occurred to him as any bar to his claims.
At first we found all the freedmen’s houses shut up, and as silent as if the inhabitants had all gone to a funeral. By pressing into some of them, we discovered a few women and children, but the men had disappeared. Since they were not to resist our coming, it seemed their policy to have nothing whatever to do with us. At last we found an old negro too decrepit to run away, who sullenly awaited our approach.
“What is your name, uncle?”
“Samuel Butler.”
“Where are you from?”
“From St. John.”
“How did you come here?”
“Yankees fotch me.”