But why try to describe the horrors of such nights? Who that has not experienced them can know how we felt? Who can imagine the heartsickness when, stealing to an upper window at midnight, we watched the fierce flames rising from some neighboring home, expecting our own to be destroyed by the enemy before daylight in the same way?
Such pictures, dark and fearful, were the only ones familiar to us in old Virginia those four dreadful years.
At last the end came—the end which seemed to us saddest of all. But God knoweth best. Though "through fiery trials" he had caused us to pass, he had not forsaken us. For was not his mercy signally shown in the failure of the enemy to incite our negro slaves to insurrection during the war? Through his mercy those who were expected to become our enemies remained our friends. And in our own home, surrounded by the enemy those terrible nights, our only guard was a faithful negro servant who slept in the house, and went out every hour to see if we were in immediate danger; while his mother—the kind old nurse—sat all night in a rocking-chair in our room, ready to help us. Had we not, then, amid all our sorrows, much to be thankful for?
Among such scenes one of the last pictures photographed on my memory was that of a negro boy who was very ill with typhoid fever in a cabin not far off, and who became greatly alarmed when a brisk firing, across our house, commenced between the contending armies. His first impulse—as it always had been in trouble—was to fly to his mistress for protection, and, jumping from his bed, his head bandaged with a white cloth, and looking like one just from the grave, he passed through the firing as fast as he could, screaming: "O mistess, take kur o' me! Put me in yo' closet, and hide me from de Yankees!" He fell at the door exhausted. My mother had him brought in, and a bed was made for him in the library. She nursed him carefully, but he died in a day or two from fright and exhaustion.
Soon after this came the surrender at Appomattox, and negro slavery ended forever.
All was ruin around us,—tobacco factories burned down, sugar and cotton plantations destroyed. The negroes fled from these desolated places, crowded together in wretched shanties on the outskirts of towns and villages, and found themselves, for the first time in their lives, without enough to eat, and with no class of people particularly interested about their food, health, or comfort. Rations were furnished them a short time by the United States government, with promises of money and land which were never fulfilled. Impoverished by the war, it was a relief to us no longer to have the responsibility of supporting them. This would, indeed, have been impossible in our starving condition.
Years have passed, and the old homes have been long deserted where the scenes I have attempted to describe were enacted. The heads of the families lie buried in the old graveyards, while their descendants are scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific, always holding sacred in memory the dear old homes in Virginia.
The descendants of the negroes here portrayed,—where are they? It would take a long chapter, indeed, to tell of them. Many are crowded on the outskirts of the towns and villages North and South, in wretched thriftlessness and squalor, yet content and without ambition to alter their condition.
On the other hand, a good proportion of the race seek to improve their opportunities in schools and colleges, provided partly by the aid of Northern friends, but principally from taxes paid by their former owners in spite of the impoverished condition of the South.