“Greenbacks,” it seemed, did not yet have the same magnetic power. Men who had been declaring for four years that the United States Government was overthrown, could not at once convince themselves that its money was good. Whoever wanted to trade with the Virginians in the rural districts, must prepare himself with gold.
The town was swarming with representatives of Northern capitalists, looking for investments. Baltimoreans were also found frequently among them. The most went further South, over the Virginia and Tennessee road; but a few had ideas about the mineral resources of these mountains. Many seemed to think it necessary to adopt the coddling policy in their talk with the Virginians. “My policy for settling up these questions,” said a Yankee, “would be to banish all the leaders, and tell the rest that they had been soundly whipped, and, now, the best thing they could do would be to go to work and repair their ruined fortunes.”
“But how could you punish those equally deserving of punishment at the North, who were just as guilty in bringing on the war?” The questioner was, not a pardoned Rebel, but a speculative Northerner.
“The Lynchburg Post-office is in a church. The Government, it seems, was not willing to pay the rent demanded for the building formerly used for postal purposes, and the rent on churches was not exorbitant. A route agent, whiling away his time while his mail was made up, told how he had taken the oath, and so become an employee of the Government again.
“I was an old route agent, you see, and I wanted to go back to a nice berth. But I had been a magistrate under the Confederacy, and I was required to swear that I had never been. I went to see President Johnson. There was an awful crowd in the lobby, but I cottoned to Captain Slade, and played Yankee a little. Leaving out part of my name, I wrote on a card simply ‘Frederick Bruce,’ and made Slade promise to lay it before the President without a word. In a moment I was called in; but, as I approached the President, I thought I could see, by the twinkle of his eye, that I wasn’t the Frederick Bruce he had expected![[48]] Well, I told him that I took a magistrate’s office under the Confederate Government, to avoid having to go into the army. He said the word ‘voluntary’ occurred at the beginning of the oath, and its force ran through the whole of it, and applied to every clause. ‘Now, sir,’ said the President, ‘it’s with your own conscience to say whether you took that office voluntarily or not.’ Of course, I didn’t, for I was compelled to do it in order to keep out of the army, and so I told the President I would take the oath at once, and he said, ‘all right.’”
The narration threw a flood of light on the style of Unionists, with whose aid the Southern States were being “reconstructed.” This map was one of the “stay-at-home” Rebels. He made no secret of his entire sympathy with the Rebel cause, but he wanted to keep out of the fight himself, and found it pleasanter to be a Rebel magistrate than a Rebel soldier.
Not very many Virginians seemed disposed to abandon the pleasant mountain homes about Lynchburg, for the doubtful bliss of Mexico or Brazil. The discovery had suddenly been made that there was a good deal more danger of “nigger equality” in either than in the United States, and the newspapers were dolorously warning the dissatisfied, that, if they should go to Brazil, they might happen to be brought before courts where negro judges presided, or be required to submit to laws enacted by the wisdom of negro legislators. It was bad to be forced to tolerate the presence of free negroes in the United States, but, really, it began to look as if they could go nowhere else without finding matters a great deal worse.
In the main, the negroes seemed to be doing well. In the Lynchburg hotels they were paid twenty dollars a month—five dollars more than they received for similar services in Richmond. “Den, besides dat, we picks up ’siderable from gemmen dat gibs us half-dollar for toting deir trunk or blacking deir boots, as I’s shore you’s gwine to do, sah.”[[49]] These, however, were only the more intelligent. Through the country the negroes were by no means earning such wages, and, in fact, the most were earning none at all. They gained a precarious support by picking up occasional jobs, and by a pretty general system of pilfering.
All had the idea that in January the lands of their former masters were to be divided among them; and it was, therefore, almost impossible to make contracts with them for labor on the farms through the ensuing year. The inhabitants charged that this idea had been sedulously spread among them by the Yankee soldiers, and that they had been advised never to contract for more than a month’s work at a time, until the division of property came. Here is a specimen of the way in which the Lynchburg papers treated the difficulty: