It has been currently supposed at the North, that the desolation wrought by the war, would lead to an intense hatred of the leaders who brought it on. But this hatred has taken another turn. Instead of hating their own leaders they hate ours. They do not realize that such men as Mason, Yancey, Davis, and Toombs led them, for selfish purposes, into this sea of blood; they followed these leaders willingly, believe in them still, and insist that the North brought on the war by illegal encroachments, which they were bound in honor to resist. Such were the expressions I heard everywhere around me, and, however little might be said for their loyalty, their honesty and candor could not be doubted. The men to suspect of dishonesty are not these who frankly, admit that they are defeated and bound to submit, but still insist that they were right in the start of the quarrel. The men who make haste to adjure all the principles they fought for, and to acknowledge their dead brothers and sons to have been traitors, they are the ones whose new-born “loyalty” is sown upon the sand. When the nutriment of the offices is withdrawn, look out for a withering.
One or two plantations between Atlanta and West Point showed gangs of negroes at work clearing off the lands, and preparing for a cotton crop; but by far the greater number seemed still abandoned. Since leaving East Tennessee, I had not seen one white man at work. The negroes, who were breaking up the cotton lands, did it with little “bull-tongues,” such as Northern farmers use to cultivate their corn. A good, moldboard plow seemed unheard of.
At West Point, a village of cheap frame houses, where we stopped for dinner, large piles of cotton bales filled the public square. Even the primitive cultivation we had seen, seemed to produce fair crops. Half a bale to the acre was above the average yield. There were few large plantations; and the population seemed mainly composed of small farmers, cultivating from one to four or five hundred acres.
At Opelika we reached the ultimate in the matter of railroad traveling. The Macon train pushed out with a couple of box cars, containing no seats, into which were loaded passengers, baggage, freight, and fuel. The locomotive bore only the battered remnants of what had been a smoke-stack; the machinery was rusty; the head-light was gone, and even the bell was broken. On the Montgomery train we congratulated ourselves on better fortune. We had ordinary box freight cars, into which we climbed, ladies and gentlemen alike, through the sliding doors at the side; but in each car half-a-dozen pine board benches had been arranged, across which the ladies scrambled to a corner, free at once from dust, light, and ventilation, and over which every one trampled in getting into or out of the car.
With less fear of dust, and more love for fresh air than my fellow travelers, I established myself in the door. While we waited for the engine, a plantation negro, who seemed to belong to the lowest possible grade, approached us. He was not idiotic, but he seemed hopelessly and inconceivably stupid. No such existence as his would be possible on a large plantation. It is only where the attrition of social intercourse is almost wholly removed that a human being can possibly grow to manhood with so little advancement beyond the condition of the brutes around him.
He was clad in the coarsest negro cloth, ragged, dirty, ill-fitting. Head and feet were bare. I asked him if he knew he was free.
“Ya-a-a-s, sah.”
“Well, are you ready to live with some good man, and go to work to earn your living?”
“I reckon.”