“There wasn’t much chance for me up there. Besides, I came near losing my life before I got away. You see, the masters, soon as they found out they couldn’t keep their slaves, began to treat them about as bad as could be. Then, because I made use of this remark, that I didn’t think we colored folks ought to be blamed for what wasn’t our fault, for we didn’t make the war, and neither did we declare ourselves free,—just because I said that, not in a saucy way, but as I say it to you now, one man put a pistol to my head, and was going to shoot me. I got away from him, and left. A great many came away at the same time, for it wasn’t possible for us to stay there.
“Now tell me candidly,” said I, “how the colored people themselves behaved.”
“Well, just tolerable. They were like a bird let out of a cage. You know how a bird that has been long in a cage will act when the door is opened; he makes a curious fluttering for a little while. It was just so with the colored people. They didn’t know at first what to do with themselves. But they got sobered pretty soon, and they are behaving very decent now.”
Harper’s Ferry affords a striking illustration of the folly of secession. The government works here gave subsistence to several hundred souls, and were the life of the place. The attempt to overturn the government failed; but the government works, together with their own prosperity, the mad fanatics of Harper’s Ferry succeeded easily enough in destroying. “The place never will be anything again,” said Mr. B., of the repair-shop, “unless the government decides to rebuild the armory,—and it is doubtful if that is ever done.”
Yet, with the grandeur of its scenery, the tremendous water-power afforded by its two rushing rivers, and the natural advantage it enjoys as the key to the fertile Shenandoah Valley, Harper’s Ferry, redeemed from slavery, and opened to Northern enterprise, should become a beautiful and busy town.
CHAPTER VIII.
A TRIP TO CHARLESTOWN.
One morning I took the train up the Valley to Charlestown, distant from Harper’s Ferry eight miles.
The railroad was still in the hands of the government. There were military guards on the platforms, and about an equal mixture of Loyalists and Rebels within the cars. Furloughed soldiers, returning to their regiments at Winchester or Staunton, occupied seats with Confederate officers just out of their uniforms. The strong, dark, defiant, self-satisfied face typical of the second-rate “chivalry,” and the good-natured, shrewd, inquisitive physiognomy of the Yankee speculator going to look at Southern lands, were to be seen side by side, in curious contrast. There also rode the well-dressed wealthy planter, who had been to Washington to solicit pardon for his treasonable acts, and the humble freedman returning to the home from which he had been driven by violence, when the war closed and left him free. Mothers and daughters of the first families of Virginia sat serene and uncomplaining in the atmosphere of mothers and daughters of the despised race, late their slaves or their neighbors’, but now citizens like themselves, free to go and come, and as clearly entitled to places in the government train as the proudest dames of the land.
We passed through a region of country stamped all over by the devastating heel of war. For miles not a fence or cultivated field was visible.
“It is just like this all the way up the Shenandoah Valley,” said a gentleman at my side, a Union man from Winchester. “The wealthiest people with us are now the poorest. With hundreds of acres they can’t raise a dollar. Their slaves have left them, and they have no money, even if they have the disposition, to hire the freed people.”