“People in ordinary sarcumstances along yer are a mighty industrious people. It’s the rich that keep this country down. The way it generally is, a few own too much, and the rest own noth’n’. I know hundreds of thousands of acres of land put to no uset, which, if it was cut up into little farms, would make the country look thrifty. This is mighty good land; clay bottom; holds manure jest like a chany bowl does water. But the rich ones jest scratched over a little on’t with their slave labor, and let the rest go. They wouldn’t sell; let a young man go to ’em to buy, and they’d say they didn’t want no poo’ whites around ’em; they wouldn’t have one, if they could keep shet of ’em. And what was the result? Young men would go off to the West, if they was enterpris’n’, and leave them that wa’n’t enterpris’n’ hyer to home. Then as the old heads died off, the farms would run down. The young women would marry the lazy young men, and raise up families of lazy children.”
The country all about Fredericksburg was very unhealthy. Elijah, on making inquiries, could hear of scarcely a family on the road exempt from sickness.
“It was never so till sence the wa’. Now we have chills and fever, jest like they do in a new country. It’s owin’ to the land all comin’ up to weeds; the dew settles in ’em and they rot, and that fills the air with the ager. I’ve had the ager myself till about a fortnight ago; then soon as I got shet of that, the colic took me. Eat too much on a big appetite, I suppose. I like to live well; like to see plenty of everything on the table, and then I like to see every man eat a heap.”
I commended Elijah’s practical sense; upon which he replied,—
“The old man is right ignorant; can’t read the fust letter; never went to school a day; but the old man is right sharp!”
He was fond of speaking of himself in this way. He thought education a good thing, but allowed that all the education in the world could not give a man sense. He was fifty years old, and had got along thus far in life very well.
“I reckon thar’s go’n’ to be a better chance for the poo’ man after this. The Union bein’ held together was the greatest thing that could have happened for us.”
“And yet you fought against it.”
“I was in the Confederate army two year and a half. I was opposed to secession; but I got my head a little turned after the State went out, and I enlisted. Then, when I had time to reconsider it all over, I diskivered we was wrong. I told the boys so.
“’Boys,’ says I, ‘when my time’s up, I’m go’n’ out of the army, and you won’t see me in ag’in.’