Not less than four thousand mechanics were at work; and at least as many more would have been employed, if it had been possible to secure building material enough to supply the enormous demand. A hundred and fifty or two hundred stores were already opened; and others found themselves unable to rent rooms for their goods. The streets were blockaded with drays and wagons. The four railroads were taxed to their utmost capacity, without beginning to supply all the demands upon them. The trade of the city was a third greater than it had ever been, in its most prosperous days before the war.
But the faces one saw on the streets or behind the counters were not the faces of men with whom you would choose to do business. “I have spent five days here,” exclaimed a simple-hearted scientific man, as he greeted me; “I have spent years among the Black Feet, and have been pretty much over the world, but I never saw such demoralized faces. The war has destroyed their moral character. There isn’t one man in a score here I would trust with my carpet-bag.” The geologist was too severe, but the traces of the bad passions and disregard of moral obligations which the war has taught, are written almost as plainly on the faces as are Sherman’s marks on the houses of Atlanta. More tangible evidence of the war’s demoralization was to be found in the alarming insecurity of property and even of life. Passing about the dark, crooked streets of Atlanta after night, unaccompanied and unarmed, was worse than attempting a similar exploration of the Five Points, in New York, ten years ago. Murders were of frequent occurrence; and so common a thing as garroting attracted very little attention.
The soil of the country, for many miles in all directions, is poor, but prices of land in the immediate vicinity were run up to fabulous rates. The people were infected with the mania of city building; and landholders gravely explained to you how well their plantations, miles distant, would cut up into corner lots. Cotton is, of course, the only staple. It ought to be raised in abundance, for the soil will produce nothing else, but he would be a skillful cultivator who should get an average of a third of a bale each from many acres. Ten or twelve bushels of corn to the acre would be a great crop. Indeed, throughout wide stretches in the interior of the cotton-growing States, so worthless was the soil for any other purpose, that the planters used to buy their corn and pork for the mules and negroes, and thus reserve all their arable land for the undivided growth of cotton.
A few Union men are to be found in the region to which Atlanta is the natural center. All complained that it was worse for them, under the progressing reconstruction, than for the original Rebels. “We are in no sense upheld or encouraged by the Government; public sentiment is against us because we opposed the war; or, as they said, because we were tories; but, when the Government triumphed, we were secure because we were on the winning side. But you pardon Howell Cobb and every other leading secessionist; they at once become the natural leaders in an overwhelmingly secessionist community; and we, through mistaken kindness of our own Government, are worse ostracized to-day, in the new order of things, than we ever were during the war.”
The feeling among the Rebel portion of the community against the course of the Convention was strong. “They have repudiated the debt they incurred themselves. If that Confederate debt isn’t honestly due, no debt in the world ever was. If we’ve got to repudiate that, we may as well help the Democrats repudiate the debt on the other side too. What’s fair for one is fair for the other.”[[52]]
In spite of their new-found love for President Johnson, they could not help grumbling a good deal at “this Presidential interference with the rights of a State.” They seemed utterly unable to comprehend that, after they had once submitted, they could possibly labor under any disabilities on account of their effort to overthrow the Government. “Treason is a crime, and the greatest of crimes,” vociferated the President. His Southern friends seemed to regard this as only a little joke. To interfere, for a moment, with the free action of their Conventions and Legislatures, half made up as yet of unpardoned Rebels, was monstrous. “What’s the use o’ callin’ it a free country, ef you can’t do as you please in your own Legislater?” asked one indignant Georgian. “It’s a pretty note ef we’ve got to take men as went agin the State through the wah to make laws for it now. For my part, I hain’t got no use for sich.”
The political phraseology of these Southern gentlemen is at once peculiar and concise. Every desirable thing, politically, is described as high-toned and conservative. Everything dangerous to the settled order of things, everything looking to an establishment of the results of the war, or tending to an indorsement of the political grounds on which the North suppressed the rebellion, is to be abhorred and avoided under the name of radical. President Johnson was greatly praised, “because he is conservative on the nigger.”
“Johnson knows niggers, I tell you,” said an Atlanta worthy. “He’s not going to let any such cursed radicalism as inspired Lincoln trouble him. If Johnson had been President, we wouldn’t have been embarrassed by any infernal Emancipation Proclamation.” So all good conservatives were exhorted in all the papers to convince the South of their desire to reconstruct the Union by admitting at once the Southern Representatives and Senators; and, above all, it was to be understood that sound conservative men of all parties must unite in the repeal of the odious radical oath. It absolutely prevented Rebel office-holders from at once becoming national law-makers.
Mr. Jas. F. Johnson aspired to represent the Senatorial District in the General Assembly. He furnished an excellent type of what passes among Georgians for a respectable and proper Sort of Unionism. He stated his position, in an advertisement in the public papers, thus: