So we found public feeling everywhere along the Atlantic coast. So, by the common testimony of all, it was found throughout the limits of the rebellion, down to the period when the terms of the President’s North Carolina proclamation came to be generally understood. On the Gulf we caught the first responsive notes given to that proclamation by the revived Southern temper. By the time we reached New Orleans the change was complete; the reaction had set in. Men now began to talk of their rights, and to argue constitutional points; as if traitors had rights, or treason were entitled to constitutional protection. They had discovered that, having laid down their arms, they were no longer Rebels, and could no longer be punished; as the thief who is forced to abandon his booty is no longer a thief, and may laugh at penitentiaries. As Mr. Randall Hunt dextrously put it, “We withdrew our Representatives from Congress, and tried to go out of the Union. You went to war to keep us in. You have conquered; we submit, and send back our Representatives. What more do you want?” The President had lustily proclaimed treason a crime, but the Southern people took his actions in preference to his words, and were confirmed in their own view that it was but a difference of opinion on a constitutional point, in which, under the circumstances, they were ready to yield.
Not less marked was the reaction on all points connected with the negro. He was saucy and rude; disposed to acts of violence; likely, by his stupid presumptions, to provoke a war of races, which could only end in his extermination. In all this the Freedmen’s Bureau encouraged him, and thus became solely a fomenter of mischief. The presence of negro troops tended to demoralize the whole negro population. Negro evidence would make courts of justice a mockery. As to negro suffrage, none but the black-hearted Abolitionists who had brought on this war, and were now doing their best to provoke a second, would dream of seriously asking the South to submit to so revolting a humiliation.
The mistake of the last four or five years had been the one against which Henry A. Wise had warned them in the beginning. They ought to have fought for their rights within the Union. That they must do now.
Throughout the war, the North believed in the existence of a strong Union party at the South. Under the peculiar circumstances of our trip, it would seem natural that, if there was such a party, we should have found traces of it. Individual Unionists there were, of course; noble men, who braved every threat, and stood faithful to the last. But, speaking of a Union party only as comprising numbers of men sufficient to form an appreciable element in political or social movements, I was ready, on our return, to affirm that, save in East Tennessee and small portions of North Carolina, there was no such party in the South. In many of the States the opponents of secession had been in a majority in 1860. But the movement once started, blood once drawn, the honor of the States once involved, secession swept everything before it. The avalanche begins in a little snow-bank. Once set in motion, whatever stands in the way serves only to swell its bulk and augment its power.
Men who had voted against secession at the risk of their lives, again and again told me that they were soon forced to go with the current. The son of one had volunteered, “and, of course, sir, my prayers and hopes went with my boy and the cause in which he was engaged.” The property of another was in danger, and to save it he volunteered. At Bull Run his bosom friend fell by a Yankee ball; from that moment he “was a Rebel, heart and soul.” “My family, friends, neighbors, old political leaders, all went with the State,” said another. “I knew it was madness, but I could not desert them, and I would not be a tory.”
Men like Governor Brown and Alex. H. Stephens were thought at the North to be leaders of a Union party. Whatever their private views, neither they nor any other prominent men dared permit themselves to be regarded in that light at home. “They were opponents of the Administration, not of the war,” as a Georgian very earnestly explained. “They opposed Mr. Davis, not because he made war at all, but because he did it with less vigor and skill than they demanded.”
The belief was prevalent at the North, that, when secession failed, the decimated and beggared people would turn in bitter rage upon the leaders who had brought them to such a pass. But from Fortress Monroe and Key West to Cairo, I never heard one solitary indication of such a feeling.
Many men criticised Mr. Davis’ conduct of the war with severity; but wherever an expression was made at all, it was one of sympathy for his fate, and of indignation at the thought of awarding him any other punishment than was allotted to the humblest follower in the cause. “He was but our agent,” they said. “He only did our bidding. Our fault with him was that he didn’t do it as skillfully as we expected.”
General Lee was everywhere reverenced. The common form of allusion to him was, “that great and good man.” In Mobile, and throughout the Mississippi Valley, General Jos. E. Johnston was an universal favorite. Beauregard had an ovation when he returned. In New Orleans, the bitterest complaint against the President’s Amnesty Proclamation was, that under it they would be compelled to select obscure persons, or new-comers, for Representatives, “instead of our old and tried leaders.”