After more tumultuous cheering, the audience called for Gillmore, till the great artillerist absolutely blushed in his embarrassment. His speeches for Charleston were made from the muzzle of the Swamp Angel.
I spent the evening in the Charleston Courier office. The old library remained, and Congressional Globes and arguments on the divine right of slavery stood side by side with Reports of the Confederate Congress, and official accounts of battles, while on the wall was pasted one of the most bombastic proclamations of the runaway Governor. Several of the old attaches of the concern remain, among them a phonographic reporter and the cashier. The circulation of this most flourishing Southern paper in the seaboard States, had dwindled down to less than a thousand. “We wrote our reports,” said the phonographer, “on the backs of old grocery bills, and in blank pages torn out of old account books.” “We deserved all we got,” he continued, “but you ought not to be hard on us now. The sun never shone on a nobler or kinder-hearted people than the South Carolinians, and this was always the nicest town to live in, in the United States.”
Encountering a so-called South Carolina Unionist, from the interior, I asked about the relations between the negroes and their old masters. “In the main, the niggers are working just as they used to, not having made contracts of any sort, because there was no competent officer accessible before whom the contracts could be approved. A few have been hired by the day; and some others have gone to work for a specified share in the crops. In a great many cases the planters have told them to work ahead, get their living out of the crops, and what further share they were entitled to should be determined when the officers to approve contracts came. Then, if they couldn’t agree, they could separate.”
“Have there been no disturbances between the negroes and their former masters, no refusals to recognize the destruction of slavery?”
“In our part of the State, none. Elsewhere I have heard of them. With us, the death of slavery is recognized, and made a basis of action by everybody. But we don’t believe that because the nigger is free he ought to be saucy; and we don’t mean to have any such nonsense as letting him vote. He’s helpless, and ignorant, and dependent, and the old masters will still control him.[[16]] I have never been a large slaveholder myself—for the last year or two I have had but twelve, little and big. Every one of them stays with me, just as before, excepting one, a carpenter. I told him he’d better go off and shift for himself. He comes back, every two or three nights, to tell me how he is getting along; and the other day he told me he hadn’t been able to collect anything for his work, and I gave him a quarter’s provisions to get started with.”
“I had to give him,” he significantly added, “a sort of paper—not, of course, pretending to be legal—certifying that he was working for himself, with my consent, in order to enable him to get along without trouble.” There was a world of meaning in the phrase, “To enable him to get along without trouble,” though he was as free as the man that gave the paper.
I asked what they would do with the negroes, if they got permission to re-organize.
“Well, we want to have them industrious and orderly, and will do all we can to bring it about.”
“Will you let any of them vote?”