I was pleased to see some of the forty-acre lots enclosed by substantial new fences. But every question of benefit has two sides. The other side to this was that the fine old plantation shade-trees had been cut down and split into rails; a circumstance which made my friend the planter look glum.
The island is level, with handsome hedged avenues running through it in various directions. It is nine miles in length and three in breadth. We extended our walk as far as Fort Pemberton, on Stono River, which bounded my friend’s plantations in that direction. On our return, he thought he would try one more freedman with the offer of a contract.
The man was working with his wife on a little farm of indefinite extent. “I don’t know how much land I have. I guessed off as near as I could forty acres.”
He said he had “a large fambly,” and that he came from Charleston. “I heard there was a chance of we being our own driver here; that’s why we come.” He could get along very well if he only had a horse. “But if I can git de land, I’ll take my chances.”
“But if you can’t get the land?”
“If a man got to go crost de riber, and he can’t git a boat, he take a log. If I can’t own de land, I’ll hire or lease land, but I won’t contract.”
“Come, then,” said my friend, “we may as well go home.”
CHAPTER LXXVI.
SHERMAN IN SOUTH CAROLINA.
“The march of the Federals into our State,” says a writer in the “Columbia Phœnix,” “was characterized by such scenes of license, plunder, and conflagration as very soon showed that the threats of the Northern press, and of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as a mere brutum fulmen. Daily long trains of fugitives lined the roads, with wives and children, and horses and stock and cattle, seeking refuge from the pursuers. Long lines of wagons covered the highways. Half-naked people cowered from the winter under bush-tents in the thickets, under the eaves of houses, under the railroad sheds, and in old cars left them along the route. All these repeated the same story of suffering, violence, poverty, and nakedness. Habitation after habitation, village after village,—one sending up its signal flames to the other, presaging for it the same fate,—lighted the winter and midnight sky with crimson horrors.
“No language can describe, nor can any catalogue furnish, an adequate detail of the wide-spread destruction of homes and property. Granaries were emptied, and where the grain was not carried off, it was strewn to waste under the feet of the cavalry, or consigned to the fire which consumed the dwelling. The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing. The roads were covered with butchered cattle, hogs, mules, and the costliest furniture. Valuable cabinets, rich pianos, were not only hewn to pieces, but bottles of ink, turpentine, oil, whatever could efface or destroy, were employed to defile and ruin. Horses were ridden into the houses. People were forced from their beds, to permit the search after hidden treasures.