“As a member of the Georgia Convention, entertaining the views I then did, I opposed the immediate secession of the State from the Union, and used every effort in my power to prevent it, until I became satisfied that a controlling majority of the Convention entertained different views. I then yielded my opposition, believing it to be the best interest of the State to be united in supporting the action taken by a majority of the Convention. And since that time, until the surrender of the Confederate armies, I did all in my power, both in person and means, to sustain the resolution of the Convention, and establish, if possible, the independence of the Southern States.”
Another style of Unionism might be inferred from the phrase heard a dozen times every day: “I’ve taken the oath,” or, “I’ve got my pardon; and I’m just as big a Rebel now as ever I was.” “I’ve got just the same rights now that any of the d——d Yankees have,” added one, “and I mean to demand my rights. I’m pardoned; there’s nothing against me, and I mean to demand fair treatment.” He had Confederate cotton, which he insisted should not be taken from him, since, although he had subscribed it to the Rebel Government, he had never made the actual delivery.
Between Atlanta and Knoxville one passes over the track of the destroyer. Down to Dalton the damage from the war has not been very great; but for the rest of the route, solitary chimneys and the debris of burnt buildings everywhere tell the old, old story. If the country did not reveal it so plainly, it might still be read in the faces of our passengers. Every one of them was a record of some phase of the contest, of its squalor and misery, of its demoralization, of its barbarism, or of its ennoblement. Bright, fair faces that ought to have adorned happy rural homes, grown coarse and brassy, flaunted beside young officers. They were the transformation of the camps—the results of its license and lax morality. Trembling old refugees watched the conductor as he counted their hard-earned gatherings, to see if the little pile of fractional currency would be all exhausted in paying their fare home. Aimless young men in gray, ragged and filthy, seemed, with the downfall of the rebellion they had fought for, to have lost their object in life, and stared stupidly at the clothes and comfortable air of officers and strangers from the North. By the roadside, here and there, might be seen—as I saw on a public corner, in the midst of all the bustle and whirl of Atlanta—a poor, half starved, half naked white woman, gathering her little children about her, and cowering in the gray dawn over the dull embers by which, in dull wretchedness, she had watched through the weary night.
And, as one looks over the scene, and takes in the full sense of all this sad destruction, a Major from Longstreet’s staff sits down to talk. “If you of the North want now to conciliate and settle the South, you must do one of three things: re-establish slavery; give the old masters in some way power to compel the negroes to work; or colonize them out of the country, and help us to bring in white laborers!” A handsome man he is; tall, bearded like the pard, brown with campaigning, battered, clad in worn-out Confederate gray, but with good army blue pantaloons, taken, doubtless, from the body of some dead or captured soldier of the Republic. Such waste and destruction all about us; and still these insatiable men—these handsome tigers—want more conciliation!
Some Southern merchants, from different points in Alabama and Georgia, were returning from New York, after making their purchases. They could not say too much about the kindness with which they had been met, and their disappointment at not finding the Yankees all eager to drink their blood for desert after dinner. But in a moment after such expressions they would break out into the most fearful and blasphemous invectives against some conspicuous Northerner, who had the misfortune to differ from them as to the best mode of re-establishing peace throughout the Rebel regions. These people have discovered that they must tolerate the opinions of others, but their intolerant spirits have not yet been sufficiently disciplined to it; and so it happens that sometimes, now, their utter impotence only serves to increase their malice. Must the poor negroes prove the vent for this rage that dare not reach to higher objects?
Manifestly the negroes themselves have no faith in them. At one of the railroad eating-houses I happened to ask a fine looking old “uncle” what wages he received.
“Twenty dollahs a month, sah; but I’se gwine to quit. ’Tain’t enuff, is it?”
“O yes, uncle, if they give you twenty dollars a month and your boarding, you are getting fully as much as you would get at the best places in the North for this kind of work. In Richmond they are only getting fifteen dollars.”
“You tink, den, sah, dat we oughtn’t fur to quit—dat when dey pay us twenty dollahs dey ain’t a cheatin’ us?”