“And what was done with the white man?”
“Nothing. There’s nobody to do anything in such cases, unless the nigger goes all the way to the Freedmen’s Bureau and makes a complaint. Then there’s little chance of getting the fellow that cut him.”
Three miles further on, we reached a point to which the railroad had been repaired, and took the cars for Winnsboro’. While we were waiting by moonlight in the shelterless and stumpy camping-ground which served as a station, one of my South Carolina friends said to me: “We may as well tell the whole truth as half. The Yankees treated us mighty badly: but a heap of our own people followed in their track and robbed on their credit.”
On the train I found a hotel-keeper from Winnsboro’ drumming for customers. He was abusing the Yankees with great violence and passion until he found that I was one. After that he kept remarkably quiet, and even apologized to me for his remarks, until I told him I had concluded to go to the house of a rival runner. Thereupon he broke forth again.
“They’ve left me one inestimable privilege—to hate ’em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate ’em. Talk about Union! They had no object in coming down here, but just to steal. I’m like a whipped cur; I have to cave in; but that don’t say I shall love ’em. I owned my own house, my own servants, my own garden, and in one night they reduced me to poverty. My house was near the State House in Columbia. It was occupied by Howard’s head-quarters. When they left, they just poured camphene over the beds, set ’em afire, locked up the house, and threw away the key. That was after the burning of the town, and that’s what made it so hard. Some one had told ’em I was one of the worst Rebels in the world, and that’s the only truth I reckon, that was told. I brought up seven boys, and what they hadn’t killed was fighting against ’em then. Now I have to keep a boarding-house in Winnsboro’ to support my wife and children.”
At Winnsboro’ I passed the night. A portion of that town also had been destroyed; and there too Sherman’s “bummers” were said to have behaved very naughtily. For instance: “When the Episcopal church was burning, they took out the melodeon, and played the devil’s tunes on it till the house was well burned down: then they threw on the melodeon.”
CHAPTER LXXX.
A GLIMPSE OF THE OLD NORTH STATE.
The next day I entered North Carolina.
Almost immediately on crossing the State line, a change of scene was perceptible. The natural features of the country improved; the appearance of its farms improved still more. North Carolina farmers use manures, and work with their own hands. They treat the soil more generously than their South Carolina neighbors, and it repays them.
That night I passed at the house of a Connecticut man, in a country village,—a warm and comfortable New-England home transported to a southern community,—and went on the next day to Raleigh.