Lieut. M——, of the Freedmen’s Commission, having invited me to visit Camp Lee, about two miles from the city, came for me one afternoon in a fine large carryall, comfortably covered, cushioned, and carpeted.
“Perhaps you will not feel honored,” he remarked, as we rattled up Broad Street, “but you will be interested to know that this is General Robert E. Lee’s head-quarters’ wagon. You are riding on the seat he rode on through the campaigns of the last two years. Your feet are on a piece of carpet which one of the devoted secessionists of Richmond took up from his hall-floor expressly to line the General’s wagon-bottom,—little thinking Yankee boot-soles would ever desecrate it! After Lee’s surrender, this wagon was turned over to the quartermaster’s department, and the quartermaster turned it over to us.” I was interested, indeed; I was carried back to those sanguinary campaigns; and I fancied I could see the face of him sitting there where I sat, and read the thoughts of his mind, and the emotions of his heart, in those momentous nights and days. I imagined the plans he revolved in his brain, shut in by those dark curtains; what he felt after victory, and what after defeat; the weariness of body and soul; the misgivings, the remorse, when he remembered his treason and the folly of Virginia,—for he certainly remembered them in the latter gloomy periods, when he saw the black cloud of doom settling down upon a bad and failing cause.
Camp Lee, formerly a fair ground, was the conscript camp of the Confederacy. I had been told many sad stories of young men, and men of middle age, some of them loyal, seized by the conscript officers and sent thither, as it were to a reservoir of the people’s blood, whose stream was necessary to keep the machinery of despotism in motion. I paced the grounds where, with despairing hearts, they took their first lessons in the art by which they were to slay and be slain. I stood by the tree under which deserters were shot. Then I turned to a very different scene.
The old barrack buildings were now the happy homes of a village of freedmen. Groups of barefooted and woolly-headed negro children were at play before the doors, filling the air with their laughter, and showing all their ivory with grins of delight as I passed among them. The old men took off their caps to me, the wise old aunties welcomed me with dignified smiles, and the younger women looked up brightly from their ironing or cooking as I went by. The young men were all away at their work. It was, with few exceptions, a self-supporting community, only about a dozen old or infirm persons, out of three hundred, receiving aid from the government.
A little removed from the negro village was a cottage formerly occupied by Confederate officers.
“In that house,” said the Lieutenant, “is living a very remarkable character. You know him by reputation, ——, formerly one of the ablest writers on ‘De Bow’s Review,’ and considered the great champion of slavery in the South.”
“What! the author of ——?” a somewhat celebrated book in its day, and in the latitude for which it was written; designed to set forth the corrupt and perishable nature of free societies and progressive ideas, and to show that slavery was the one divine and enduring institution.
“The very man. He is now a pauper, living on the bounty of the government. The rent of that cottage is given him, and he draws rations of the Relief Commission. He will be glad to see you; and he has two accomplished daughters you will be glad to see.”
Accordingly we called upon him; but, declining to enter the house, we sat under the stoop, where we could look across the desolate country at the sunset sky.
Mr. ——, an emaciated, sallow, feeble old man, received us affably, and talked with us freely on his favorite topics. He had lived to see the one divine and enduring institution die; but civilization still survived; and the race that found its welfare and happiness only in bondage seemed pretty well off, and tolerably happy,—witness the negro village close by: and the world of progressive ideas still moved on. Yet this great champion of slavery did not appear to have learned the first lesson of the times. All his arguments were the old arguments; he knew nothing but the past, which was gone forever; and the future to him was chaos.