A more beautiful route could scarcely be found. Lovely little valleys peeped out among the hills, pretty well cultivated, and dotted with houses that showed comparatively little signs of destitution within. The mountain sides were covered with forests, and the abounding cattle found the sweetest blue grass everywhere. Finer grazing lands for cattle or sheep could scarcely be imagined. Some day Yankee enterprise will utilize the magnificent water power, convert the forest into gold mines, and find real gold mines in the mountain chasms. The mineral wealth of this region is unimagined. Shrewd geologists were already traversing it in all directions; and with the next season we shall have the launch of company after company with “magnificent mining prospects.” The shrewdly managed will be profitable to the shareholders; the shrewd managers will find their profits always, whether shareholders do or do not.
Two heavy freight cars followed the last of the passenger cars in our train. They were needed in addition to the regular express car, to carry the accumulations of a single day’s express matter at Lynchburg, in the charge of a single company. Southerners were talking largely about the patronage they would extend to General Joe Johnston’s Express Company; but just then, they seemed to be doing very well in the way of sustaining its great rival. The express safes in our train contained six hundred thousand dollars in gold. A couple of hundred thousand, the agents said, was quite frequently a single day’s consignment. Most of this goes South to buy cotton—a little, also, to buy cotton plantations.
All hands about these trains are Rebels, of course. Our several conductors were full of pleasant reminiscences about their narrow escapes from Yankee raiding parties. “Right yeah I had a hard chase,” said one; “I was within a mile of town when I heerd that the Yankees was thar. I run back to the watch-tank and waited. Pretty soon the Yanks heerd I was thar, unloadin’ soldiers, and off the fools went, without even destroyin’ two cah-loads of ammunition that stood thar. Nobody never tuck no train from me amongst them all,” he continued, “except Stoneman, but he caught me nice. Stoneman he got a whole train from me a’most before I knowed he was thar. Smart General, that Stoneman.”
Among our passengers were a number of Georgia and Alabama cotton-planters, full of their complaints about the “niggers and the Yanks.” A New Yorker, going South to look at some mineral lands, said to give fine indications of gold in paying quantities, sat near me and began a free and easy talk about the condition of the negro, resources of the South, etc. He wasn’t in favor of negro suffrage as a condition of re-admission to Congress, but he thought the Southern States themselves might, before long, come to see that an intelligent negro would have as good a claim to the ballot as an ignorant white man. “G—d d——n the infamous, dirty, liver-hearted scoundrel,” exclaimed a low fellow in the same seat with me, whom I had taken for an army sutler, but who turned out to be a Georgia planter, “the dirty Yankee says a nigger is as good as a white man. The old Abolition sneak,” and so on, with epithets far less dainty and moral. The Georgian had made as great a mistake about me as I had about him. He took me for a Southerner!
The conversation went on about the Southern prejudices against conspicuous Northerners, like Greeley and Beecher, and the New Yorker and myself soon had half the eyes in the cars fixed on us. Presently a deal of whispering, accompanied with sullen looks, began. Half an hour afterward, a quiet, meek-looking individual (who turned out to be a freedom-shrieker, started in Massachusetts and graduated in Kansas,) stepped beside me, as we were all on the platform looking at the country, “Did you know those fellows got very mad at your Abolitionism? That sallow, long-haired Macon merchant wanted to have you lynched, and swore roundly that tar and feathers would be too good for you.” “How did it end?” I asked. “Oh, a little Georgian said it was all true, and you and the New Yorker ought to be lynched, but, that since this d——d war, that thing was played out!” It may be readily inferred that for the rest of the trip the few Northerners on board continued to talk Abolitionism enough to have astonished Wendell Phillips himself.
Making a virtue of necessity, the Southerners, after a time, became sociable. My Georgia neighbor told me of his two splendid plantations, not far from Columbus, one of four hundred and eighty acres, and the other of eighteen hundred acres. He had gone North, utterly down-hearted, and willing to sell out for a dollar an acre in gold; but they had treated him well in New York; there was less revengeful, bitter feeling than he had expected; Yankees were coming down to cultivate cotton beside him; and he was going to watch them and profit by it. If they could make money, growing cotton, he knew he could. If they could make the niggers work he would adopt their policy, and he knew he could do as well with niggers, whenever he found out how to get the power to control them, as any Yankee could.
I have conversed with dozens of planters, before and since, whose talk all runs in the same channel. They have no sort of conception of free labor. They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the law of force. When they speak of a policy of managing free negro laborers, they mean a policy by which they can compel them to work. “Why not depend on the power of wages, if they work, or of want, if they don’t, to settle the labor question?” I asked one. “They’ll work just long enough to get a dollar, and then they’ll desert you in the midst of the picking season, till they’ve spent it all, and have become hungry again.” “But Northern laborers are as anxious to save money and get on in the world as capitalists themselves.” “Northern laborers are like other men; Southern laborers are nothing but niggers, and you can’t make anything else out of them. They’re not controlled by the same motives as white men, and unless you have power to compel them, they’ll only work when they can’t beg or steal enough to keep from starving.”
My Georgia planter, after first mistaking me for a Southerner, next mistook me for a plantation seeker, and earnestly advised me to go into the southwestern portion of his State. “You can make an average of half a bale to the acre on all the lands about there. I grow a bale to the acre on my lands. Went home this year after Lee surrendered, and I got my parole, ripped up half the corn my niggers had planted, and put it in cotton in May, and raised fifty bales, worth two hundred and fifty dollars a bale. Such land as that you can get at five dollars an acre. Then it’s far healthier than the rich cotton lands in the west; and you have the best society in the country. Within a few miles of my plantation are half-a-dozen of the very first families in Georgia—the very best society I ever saw!”
But he was anxious to sell, nevertheless. There was no use talking about it, the niggers wouldn’t work unless you had the power to compel them to it. Yankees talked mighty big about money bringing them to industrious habits; but, in a month’s trial before he left home, he hadn’t been able to hire a nigger for next year, or to hear of a neighbor who had hired one. The black vagabonds all expected their masters’ lands at Christmas, and the Yankees were putting them up to it. He would take six dollars an acre now for his lands. All through his section (Columbus, Georgia,) lands could still be bought at from three to nine dollars, although prices were now advancing a little. For himself, he always made a bale to the acre; but then his were the best lands in the county. His neighbors never averaged over half a bale.