Only the good-natured Virginian went in with me to the dining-room. The lady of the house, sitting at the table with us, soon began to talk about the Yankees. “They often dine here,” she said. “But I have nothing to say to them. As soon as I know who they are, I go out of the room.” She was very sociable; and when I informed her at parting that she had been entertaining a Yankee, she appeared confused and incredulous.
Such was the spirit commonly shown by the middle class of South Carolinians. But I remember some marked exceptions. Late in the afternoon we stopped at a place which a sturdy old farmer said was Ridgeway before Sherman came there: “I don’t know what you’d call it now.”
“If the devil don’t get old Sherman,” said one of my travelling companions, “there a’n’t no use having a devil.”
“We did it ourselves,” said the farmer. “We druv the nail and the Yankees clinched it.”
In the coach, the South Carolinians had just been denying that any outrages were committed on the freedmen in that part of the country. So I asked this man if he had heard of any such.
“Heard of ’em? I hear of ’em every day. I’m going to Columbia to-night to attend the trial of one of my neighbors for shooting a negro woman.”
“You must expect such things to happen when the niggers are impudent,” observed one of my companions.
“The niggers a’n’t to blame,” said the farmer. “They’re never impudent, unless they’re trifled with or imposed on. Only two days ago a nigger was walking along this road, as peaceably as any man you ever saw. He met a white man right here, who asked him who he belonged to. ‘I don’t belong to anybody now,’ he says; ‘I’m a free man.’ ‘Sass me? you black devil!’ says the white fellow; and he pitched into him, and cut him in four or five places with his knife. I heard and saw the whole of it, and I say the nigger was respectful, and that the white fellow was the only one to blame.”
“What became of the negro?”
“I don’t know; he went off to some of his people.”