There was general uncertainty, however, as to whether they had any right to sell, or whether the titles they might execute would be valid. They were not willing to believe it possible that an attempt would be made to enforce so absurd a piece of legislation as the Yankee confiscation law, but still there was no telling!
Communication with the interior was still very difficult. They could reach Selma and Montgomery by a week’s steamboating, and the Tombigbee would take them to Demopolis, but trips were rare; and though Mobile was the necessary political and business heart of the State, this heart’s circulation was yet so impaired, that it neither strengthened nor was strengthened thereby. What was said at Mobile, therefore, was not, as formerly, the concentrated thought of the State, gathered there through all its converging lines of approach, but rather the thought of those who were accustomed to speak for the State, at a period when almost completely isolated from their constituents.
Railroads were not in running order, nor likely to be for some months. The war had destroyed their rolling stock. Some were left without cars; nearly all without good locomotives. Bridges were burnt; rails were torn up and twisted for miles and miles; the companies themselves were utterly impoverished; and unless they could get unlooked-for aid, most of them would have to go into liquidation.
To the courtesies of a serenade, drives, rides, dinners, and innumerable calls, the officials added a review of the entire military force in and about Mobile, in honor of the Chief Justice.
The Mobile men gathered about the corners, or sullenly contemplated the pageant from their windows, but scarcely a lady could be seen. They had neither smiles nor glances, just then, for the garrison of the conqueror. One needed indeed to be sanguine, as he watched the scene, and especially as he studied the bearing of the inhabitants, not to think of Warsaw.
General Granger, a fine, soldierly-looking person, with face browned by many a campaign, and a history through the war, from its very inception down to his last action, at the head of the land forces co-operating with Farragut in the attack on Mobile, that makes soldiers always ready to follow where he leads, took his station, with the Chief Justice by his side, and a showy staff surrounding them, at the crossing of the principal streets. Regiment after regiment marched past, whose banners, as they drooped low in salute, showed names of nearly every battle in the war. One came up with swinging, steady tramp, but with ranks sadly thinned, though often recruited. Its tattered and stained standards were crowned with the name of the first great conflict of the West. In their young, fresh beauty they had waved where Lyon fell.
Infantry, artillery, and cavalry streamed by, and then came the sight which brought curses to the mouths of nearly all the onlookers. The negro troops marched very handsomely, and made, perhaps, the best appearance of any regiments in the column; but every citizen seemed to consider their appearance as a personal insult to himself. That the “miserable runaway niggers” behaved so handsomely only aggravated the offense. “There’s my Tom,” muttered a plethoric old citizen, while the natural red of his face inflamed to purple. “How I’d like to cut the throat of the dirty, impudent good-for-nothing!”
But no such voices reached the party surrounded by the glittering staff. The subjugation was as yet too fresh and real. One had to mingle with them to find how sore they were at the degradation of being guarded by these runaway slaves of theirs. To be conquered by the Yankees was humiliating, but to have their own negroes armed and set over them they felt to be cruel and wanton insult. Yet they scarcely dared still to speak of it above whispers, and their combination of rage and helplessness would have been ludicrous, but for its dark suggestions of the future.
The review occurred early in the morning, and the heat did not seem oppressive to us, quietly remaining about the hotel; but a portion of our party who were out riding found it intense, and in the course of the day there were several deaths in the suburbs, chiefly among Northern men, from sun-stroke. But the general testimony of Northerners in Mobile is to the effect that they find but little difference between people from the different sections in their capacity for enduring the heat. Only its long continuance, they say, and not its intensity, makes the Southern summer dangerous to Northern men.