Washington, May, 1866. }
CONTENTS.
| PAGE. | |
|---|---|
| Preface. | [iii] |
| CHAPTER I. | |
| Why, and How the Trip was Made. | [9] |
| CHAPTER II. | |
| A School of Unadulterated Negroes—An Ancient Virginia Town under the Dispensation of Sutlers. | [13] |
| CHAPTER III. | |
| “Beauties of the Sea”—First Views of Cracker Unionism. | [21] |
| CHAPTER IV. | |
| Newbern and Beaufort—Black and White. | [28] |
| CHAPTER V. | |
| Fort Fisher. | [37] |
| CHAPTER VI. | |
| Wilmington—Unionism—Blockade Running—Destitution—Negro Talk—Land Sales. | [42] |
| CHAPTER VII. | |
| Charleston Harbor—Could Sumter have been Stormed—Negroes and Poor Whites. | [57] |
| CHAPTER VIII. | |
| Charleston, Now and Four Years Ago. | [65] |
| CHAPTER IX. | |
| “Unionism”—Black and White, in Charleston and Through South Carolina. | [75] |
| CHAPTER X. | |
| Port Royal and Beaufort. | [87] |
| CHAPTER XI. | |
| Among the Sea Islanders. | [94] |
| CHAPTER XII. | |
| Business, Speculation and Progress Among the Sea Island Negroes. | [122] |
| CHAPTER XIII. | |
| Pulaski—Savannah—Bonaventure. | [131] |
| CHAPTER XIV. | |
| White and Black Georgians—The Savannah Standard of Unionism. | [142] |
| CHAPTER XV. | |
| Florida Towns and Country—A Florida Senator. | [158] |
| CHAPTER XVI. | |
| Orange Groves and an Ancient Village—The Oldest Town and Fort in the United States—Northern Speculations. | [168] |
| CHAPTER XVII. | |
| Dungeness, and the “Greatest of the Lees”—Cultivation of the Olive—Criminations of the Officers. | [174] |
| CHAPTER XVIII. | |
| The Southern “Ultima Thule” of the United States. | [180] |
| CHAPTER XIX. | |
| A Remarkable Negro Story—One of the Strange Possibilities of Slavery. | [189] |
| CHAPTER XX. | |
| Among the Cubans—The Impending Downfall of Cuban Slavery. | [194] |
| CHAPTER XXI. | |
| Scenes in Mobile—The Cotton Swindles. | [202] |
| CHAPTER XXII. | |
| Mobile Loyalists and Reconstructionists—Black and White. | [217] |
| CHAPTER XXIII. | |
| New Orleans and New Orleans Notabilities. | [227] |
| CHAPTER XXIV. | |
| The Beginning Reaction—Northern Emigrants and New Orleans Natives. | [236] |
| CHAPTER XXV. | |
| Among the Negro Schools. | [246] |
| CHAPTER XXVI. | |
| Talks with the Citizens, White and Black. | [259] |
| CHAPTER XXVII. | |
| A Free-labor Sugar Plantation. | [268] |
| CHAPTER XXVIII. | |
| The “Jeff. Davis Cotton Plantation”. | [279] |
| CHAPTER XXIX. | |
| Vicksburg to Louisville. | [288] |
| CHAPTER XXX. | |
| General Aspects of the South at the Close of the War. | [295] |
| CHAPTER XXXI. | |
| Mid-summer at the Capitol. | [304] |
| CHAPTER XXXII. | |
| Richmond, after Six Months of Yankee Rule. | [315] |
| CHAPTER XXXIII. | |
| Lynchburg—The Interior of Virginia. | [328] |
| CHAPTER XXXIV. | |
| Knoxville and the Mountaineers—Glimpses of Southern Ideas. | [339] |
| CHAPTER XXXV. | |
| Atlanta—Georgia Phases of Rebel and Union Talk. | [355] |
| CHAPTER XXXVI. | |
| Montgomery—The Lowest Phase of Negro Character—Politics and Business. | [365] |
| CHAPTER XXXVII. | |
| Selma—Government Armories—Talks among the Negroes. | [380] |
| CHAPTER XXXVIII. | |
| Mississippi Tavern Talks on National Politics—Scenes in the Interior. | [390] |
| CHAPTER XXXIX. | |
| Mobile Temper and Trade—Inducements of Alabama to Emigrants. | [400] |
| CHAPTER XL. | |
| Phases of Public Sentiment in New Orleans before Congress met. | [407] |
| CHAPTER XLI. | |
| Cotton Speculations—Temper of the Mississippians. | [414] |
| CHAPTER XLII. | |
| Memphis—Out from the Reconstructed. | [425] |
| CHAPTER XLIII. | |
| Congress takes Charge of Reconstruction. | [429] |
| CHAPTER XLIV. | |
| Southern Feeling after the Meeting of Congress. | [439] |
| CHAPTER XLV. | |
| Political and Business Complications in the South-West. | [448] |
| CHAPTER XLVI. | |
| The Sugar and Rice Culture in Louisiana—Profits and Obstacles. | [457] |
| CHAPTER XLVII. | |
| A Cotton Plantation—Work, Workmen, Wages, Expenses, and Returns. | [475] |
| CHAPTER XLVIII. | |
| Among the Cotton Plantations—Rations and Ways of Work. | [492] |
| CHAPTER XLIX. | |
| Plantation Negroes—Incidents and Characteristics. | [503] |
| CHAPTER L. | |
| Further Illustrations of Plantation Negro Character. | [525] |
| CHAPTER LI. | |
| Payments, Strikes, and other Illustrations of Plantation Negro Character. | [546] |
| CHAPTER LII. | |
| Labor Experiments and Prospects. | [558] |
| CHAPTER LIII. | |
| Concluding Suggestions. | [574] |
| Appendix. | [581] |
AFTER THE WAR.
CHAPTER I.
Why, and How the Trip was Made.
The most interesting records of the great revolution just ending have seemed to me to be those portraying the spirit and bearing of the people throughout the South, just before and at the outbreak of the war. Stories of battles, and sieges, and retreats, are kaleidoscopic repetitions of deeds with which all history is crowded; but with what temper great communities plunged into this war, which has overwhelmed them, for what fancied causes, to what end, in what boundless self-confidence and overwhelming contempt of their antagonists, with what exuberance of frenzied joy at the prospect of bloodshed, with what wild dreams of conquest, and assurance of ill-defined but very grand honors, and orders, and social dignities—all this, as faithfully set down by the few who had opportunities to observe it, constitutes the strangest and most absorbing contribution to the literature of the Rebellion.
So I have thought that what men now most want to know, is something of the temper and condition in which these same communities come out from the struggle. By the side of the daguerreotypes of the South entering upon the war, even the hastiest pencil sketch of the South emerging from the war may possess an interest and attraction of its own.
Therefore, when early in the month of April I was invited to accompany a small party, bound on a voyage of official inspection and observation, from Fortress Monroe around the whole Atlantic and Gulf Coast to New Orleans, and thence up the Mississippi, I congratulated myself upon the opportunity thus afforded of seeing, under the most favorable circumstances, the Southern centers which had nursed and fed the rebellion. Means of communication through the interior of the South are so thoroughly destroyed, and Southern society is so completely disorganized, that it is only in the cities one can hope for any satisfactory view of the people. Even there the overshadowing military authority, and the absence of all accustomed or recognized modes of expressing public sentiment, as through the press, the bar, public meetings, the pulpit, or unrestrained social intercourse, combine to render the task of observation infinitely more difficult than at any previous period.
But all the more, on these accounts, the Southern cities are the places to which we must first look for any satisfactory idea of the Southern condition; and a trip which embraces visits to Norfolk, Newbern, Beaufort, Wilmington, Charleston, Port Royal, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Key West, Mobile, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, and Memphis, with visits to plantations all along the route, and occasional trips into the interior, ought not to fail in furnishing a good view of the gradual beginnings to crystallize again out of the chaos to which the war had reduced one-third of the nation.
The trip would have been begun some weeks earlier, but for the deed of horror in Ford’s Theater. But, as Secretary McCulloch well said, the wheels of Government moved on without a perceptible jar; and the arrangements of President Lincoln were only temporarily delayed by the accession of President Johnson. An ocean-going revenue cutter was ordered around from New York to Fortress Monroe for the party, and early on the morning of the first of May, the cutter “Northerner” was announced as in readiness to convey us to the Fortress.