CHAPTER LXXIX.
THE RIDE TO WINNSBORO’.
For a distance of thirty miles north of Columbia, I had an interesting experience of staging over that portion of the Charlotte and South Carolina Railroad destroyed by Sherman. Much of the way the stage route ran beside or near the track. Gangs of laborers were engaged in putting down new ties and rails, but most of the old iron lay where our boys left it.
It was the Seventeenth Corps that did this little job, and it did it well. It was curious to note the different styles of the destroying parties. The point where one detail appeared to have left off and another to have begun was generally unmistakable. For a mile or two you would see nothing but hair-pins, and bars wound around telegraph posts and trees. Then you would have corkscrews and twists for about the same distance. Then came a party that gave each heated rail one sharp wrench in the middle, and left it perhaps nearly straight, but facing both ways. Here was a plain business method, and there a fantastic style, which showed that its authors took a wild delight in their work.
Early in the morning I rode with the driver, in the hope of learning something of him with regard to the country. But he proved to be a refugee from East Tennessee, where he said a rope-noose was waiting for him. An active Rebel, he had been guilty of some offences which the Union men there could not forgive.
Finding him as ignorant of the country as myself, I got down, and took a seat inside the coach. Within, an animated political discussion was at its height. Two South Carolinians and a planter from Arkansas were dissecting the Yankees in liveliest fashion; while a bitter South Carolina lady and a good-natured Virginian occasionally put in a word.
It was some time before I was recognized as a representative of all that was mean and criminal in the world. At length something I said seemed to excite suspicion; and the Arkansan wrote something on a card, which was passed to every one of the company except me. An alarming hush of several minutes ensued. It was as if a skeleton had appeared at a banquet. The abuse of the Yankees was the banquet; and I was perfectly well aware that I was the skeleton. At last the awful silence was broken by the Arkansan.
“What is thought of negro suffrage at the North?”
The question was addressed to me. I replied that opinion was divided on that subject; but that many people believed some such security was necessary for the freedmen’s rights. “They do not think it quite safe,” I said, “to leave him without any voice in making the laws by which he is to be governed,—subject entirely to the legislation of a class that cannot forget that he was born a slave.”
“I believe,” said one of the South Carolinians, “all that is owing to the lies of the newspaper correspondents travelling through the South, and writing home whatever they think will injure us. I wish every one of ’em was killed off. If it wasn’t for them, we should be left to attend to our own business, instead of being ridden to death by our Yankee masters. It isn’t fair to take solitary instances reported by them, as representing the condition of the niggers and the disposition of the whites. Some impudent darkey, who deserves it, gets a knock on the head, or a white man speaks his mind rather too freely to some Yankee who has purposely provoked him, and a long newspaper story is made out of it, showing that every nigger in the South is in danger of being killed, and every white man is disloyal.”
“Certainly,” I said, “isolated cases do not represent a whole people. But the acts of a legislative body may be supposed to represent the spirit and wishes of its constituents. We consider the negro code enacted by your special legislature simply abominable. It is enough of itself to show that you are not quite ready to do the freedmen justice. Your present governor appears to be of the same opinion, judged by his veto of the act to amend the patrol laws, and his excellent advice to your representatives who passed it. You are wholly mistaken, my friend, in supposing that the people of the North wish anything of you that is unnecessary, unreasonable, or unjust. They may be mistaken with regard to what is necessary, but they are honest in their intentions.”