“That woman,” said he to me, “has got a nigger husband. That’s what makes her talk that way. White folks won’t associate with her, and she goes with the darkies. We used to have lynch law for them cases. Such things wa’n’t allowed. A nigger had better have been dead than be caught living with a white woman. The house would get torn down over their heads some night, and nobody would know who did it.”
“Are you sure such things were not allowed? Five out of six of your colored population have white blood in their veins. How do you account for it?”
“O, that comes from white fathers!”
“And slave mothers,” said I. “That I suppose was all right; but to a stranger it doesn’t look very consistent. You would lynch a poor black man for living in wedlock with a white woman, and receive into the best society white men who were raising up illegitimate slave children by their colored mistresses.”
“Yes, that’s just what was done; there’s no use denying it. I’ve seen children sold at auction in Fredericksburg by their own fathers. But nobody ever thought it was just right. It always happened when the masters was in debt, and their property had to be taken.”
The field below the stone wall belonged to this young man’s mother. It was now a cornfield; a sturdy crop was growing where the dead had lain in heaps.
“Soon as Richmond fell I came home; and ’Lijah and I went to work and put in that piece of corn. I didn’t wait for Lee’s surrender. Thousands did the same. We knew that if Richmond fell, the war would be removed from Virginia, and we had no notion of going to fight in other States. The Confederate army melted away just like frost in the sun, so that only a small part of it remained to be surrendered.”
He invited me to go through the cornfield and see where the dead were buried. Near the middle of the piece a strip some fifteen yards long and four wide had been left uncultivated. “There’s a thousand of your men buried in this hole; that’s the reason we didn’t plant here.” Some distance below the cornfield was the cellar of an ice-house, in which five hundred Union soldiers were buried. And yet these were but a portion of the slain; all the surrounding fields were scarred with graves.
Returning to Fredericksburg, I visited the plain northwest of the town, also memorable for much hard fighting on that red day of December. I found a pack of government wagons there, an encampment of teamsters, and a few Yankee soldiers, who told me they were tired of doing nothing, and “three times as fast for going home” as they were before the war closed.
In the midst of this plain, shaded by a pleasant grove, stands a brown brick mansion said to have been built by George Washington for his mother’s family. Not far off is a monument erected to Mary, the mother of Washington, whose mortal remains rest here. It is of marble, measuring some nine feet square and fifteen in height, unfinished, capped with a mat of weeds, and bearing no inscription but the names of visitors who should have blushed to desecrate the tomb of the venerated dead. The monument has in other ways been sadly misused; in the first place, by balls which nicked and chipped it during the battle; and afterwards by relic-hunters, who, in their rage for carrying away some fragment of it, have left scarce a corner of cornice or pilaster unbroken.