Governor Vance has been very unpopular, and the people seem to take kindly enough to the idea that his authority will not be recognized. They say he was a Union man in feeling and conviction, but that Jeff. Davis, alarmed by the dissatisfaction in North Carolina, sent for him about the time of his last election, and persuaded him that he could be the next President of the Confederacy! The Presidential idea was as baneful in Rebeldom, as it has proved to so many Northern statesmen, and Vance was destroyed.
Every Northern man in Wilmington lives in the very best style the place affords, no matter how slender his visible resources. I was the guest of a civil officer whose salary can not be over two thousand dollars. His home was a spacious three-story double structure, that would have done no discredit to Fifth Avenue. You approach it through a profusion of the rarest shrubbery; it was in the most aristocratic quarter of the city, was elegantly furnished, and filled with servants—all on two thousand dollars a year, less the Government tax. But this is modest and moderate. The officer at least made the one house serve all his purposes. Another—a Colonel on duty here—is less easily satisfied. He has no family, but he finds one of the largest and best-furnished double houses in the town only sufficient for his bachelor wants, as a private residence. Another house, equally spacious and eligible, is required for the uses of his office! And, in general, our people seem to go upon the theory that, having conquered the country, they are entitled to the best it has, and in duty bound to use as much of it as possible.
These houses are generally such as were shut up by their rich Rebel owners on the approach of our troops below the city. The proprietors have retired to adjacent country places, to be out of harm’s way till they see how Rebels are to be treated, and already they are making their calculations about returning in the fall, with a coolness almost disconcerting to their self-appointed tenants. Mrs. General Hawley tells a piquant story of a visit from the wife of a runaway Rebel, whose showy but uncomfortable house the General has seized for quarters and private residence. The lady made herself as agreeable as possible, spoke of the General’s occupancy and her own absence, much as people who had gone off to the sea-shore for the summer might speak of renting their town house till their return; intimating that she wouldn’t hurry the General commanding for the world, and hoped that he would remain with his family until it was entirely convenient to remove, but suggested that she and her husband thought they would probably return in a couple or three months, when, of course, they supposed their house would be ready for them! Confiscation seemed to have no terrors for her; or, if it had, they were dexterously concealed under an air of smiling and absolute assurance.
The loosest ideas prevail as to the execution of the “abandoned-property” act of the Thirty-seventh Congress. Deserted houses, not absolutely needed for military purposes, can be rented for handsome sums, and to whatever amounts can be thus realized the Government has an equitable as well as legal claim. But here, and report says everywhere throughout the South, are evidences of the old clashing betwixt War and Treasury Department officials; and between them, the revenue the Government ought to derive from the abandoned property, is sadly reduced.
The practice of regarding everything left in the country as legitimate prize to the first officer who discovers it, has led, in some cases, to performances little creditable to the national uniform. What shall be thought of the officer who, finding a fine law library, straightway packed it up and sent it to his office in the North? Or what shall be said of the taste of that other officer who, finding in an old country residence a series of family portraits, imagined that they would form very pretty parlor ornaments anywhere, and sent the entire set, embracing the ancestors of the haughty old South Carolinian for generations back, to look down from the walls of his Yankee residence?
One sees, at first, very little in the mere external appearance of Wilmington to indicate the sufferings of war. The city is finely built (for the South); the streets are lined with noble avenues of trees; many of the residences are surrounded with elegant shrubbery; there is a bewildering wealth of flowers; the streets are full, and many of the stores are open. Sutlers, however, have taken the places of the old dealers; and many of the inhabitants are inconceivably helpless and destitute. While I was riding over the city with Captain Myers, a young Ohio artillerist, a formerly wealthy citizen approached him to beg the favor of some means of taking his family three or four miles into the country. The officer could only offer the broken “Southron” a pair of mules and an army wagon; and this shabby outfit, which four years ago he would not have permitted his body servant to use, he gratefully accepted for his wife and daughter!
Struggling through the waste of sand which constitutes the streets, could be seen other and more striking illustrations of the workings of the war: a crazy cart, with wheels on the eve of a general secession, drawn generally by a single horse, to which a good meal of oats must have been unknown for months, loaded with tables, chairs, a bedstead, a stove and some frying-pans, and driven by a sallow, lank, long-haired, wiry-bearded representative of the poor white trash, who had probably perched a sun-bonneted, toothless wife, and a brace of tow-head children among the furniture; or a group, too poor even for a cart, clothed in rags, bearing bundles of rags, and, possibly, driving a half-starved cow. These were refugees from the late theater of military operations. They seemed hopeless, and, in some cases, scarcely knew where they wanted to go.
Few of the old residents of Wilmington are believed to have profited by the blockade running. It was always considered a disreputable business, in which a high-minded Rebel would not care to be thought concerned; and so it fell chiefly into the hands of foreigners, and particularly of Jews. A few prominent Richmond people were believed to be deeply engaged in it—Trenholm, Governor Smith, Benjamin and Jeff Davis are all named—but wherever the profits went, they did not go to a general diffusion of property among the Wilmingtonians themselves.