Less bitterness was observed than might have been expected. The most heated manifestations were those of the returning Rebel soldiers against some who had tempted them into the ranks. Here and there one heard of a case in which returned soldiers had attacked or even hung citizens for failures to keep their promises about supporting the families of those who had volunteered. Northerners in Mobile had an idea that the presence of our soldiers alone prevented such scenes in the city itself, and they professed, on what authority I scarcely know, to enumerate at least twenty cases of the kind in adjoining counties. But proofs were not wanting of the spirit in which, to the very last, the conflict against the Government had been waged. One of our officers, whose duty led him to search for a quantity of Rebel manuscripts, by lucky accident discovered in time a torpedo planted among them, and so arranged that his movement of the papers would have been sure to explode it. The spirit of unconquerable hate, after the battle was fought and lost, could hardly go further.
“Where do you come from?” one of the party happened to ask a negro who had been employed for some trifling service. “From Charleston, sah. I b’longed to Massa Legree, uncle to the great lawyer.” Massa Legree had proved worthy of the name which an Abolition pen has made immortal. He had sold this man into Alabama fifteen years ago, and the gray-wooled fellow said that since then he had neither seen nor heard from wife or child. “But I’s much ’bliged to all the good gemmen and ladies as has helped us to freedom. We’ll all s’port oursel’s now, and I’s hope soon to hab money enough to go back and look for my old ’oman and babies.” The poor man seemed to have no comprehension of the fact that his babies of fifteen years ago were scarcely to be considered babies now.
He was right about their supporting themselves. During the preceding month the military authorities had issued rations to the destitute Mobilians, white and black alike. To the master race no less than fifty-nine thousand rations had been given away by the Government they had been trying to subvert. Among the negroes only eleven thousand and eighty (or less than one-fifth as many,) had been needed. In June the number of destitute negroes had decreased till they were drawing only one-tenth as many rations daily as were required by the whites. A stranger might have concluded that it was the white race that was going to prove unable to take care of itself, instead of the emancipated slaves, over whose future, unless brightened by some vision of compulsory labor, their late loving masters grew so sad.
The explanation was a simple one. The negroes had gone to work: it was the only way they knew for getting bread, except when the morals of slavery had taught them to steal, and for that there was now small chance. The whites had nobody left to go to work for them, and that was the only way to get bread they knew.
Throughout the city the negroes found plenty of employments. In the country they were already talking of clubbing together and working plantations. But I heard of no movement of this kind that promised success. They had been accustomed to obey a common master; relieved from his control, each one now wanted to set up for master on his own account, and “boss” the rest. There was little doubt that they would make enough to keep from starving; but there was no prospect of their doing much more. Large cotton crops were not to be expected from any plantation which negroes controlled.
An evidence or two appeared of the “war of races” which the mourners over dead Slavery were predicting. Some negroes were heard of, at Montgomery, who had come into the city with their ears cut off by their former masters, in punishment for their assertion of their freedom. Of course, such things were far from general; but the fact that they ever occurred gave point to the occasional croakings about negro insurrections. “Negro insurrections,” forsooth! We need new dictionaries to help us understand one another, when knocking a man down for trying the playful liberty of cutting your ears off becomes “insurrection!”
Mobile houses showed the straits to which the people had been reduced. The pianos all jangled, and the legs of the parlor-chairs were out of tune quite as badly. Sofas had grown dangerous places for any but the most slow-motioned and sedate. Missing bits of veneering from the furniture illustrated the absence of Yankee prepared glue. The glories of fine window-curtains had departed. Carpets had in many cases gone for army blankets.
We saw curious rough earthen mugs, that looked as if they had been dug out of Pompeii, where they had been badly glazed by the heat of the lava. These were specimens of home manufacture, to take the place of broken glasses, and had been sold at several dollars apiece, Confederate money. “It didn’t make much difference what they asked; it was about as easy to pay ten dollars of that stuff as one. But look out that your own greenbacks don’t soon get in the same fix.” A Rebel songster was a rare prize, presented by a Mobile lady to one of our party. Its cover was of wall paper, over which the title was printed; and the paper for the body of the book was scarcely whiter.