“Capt. Rhett doesn’t know it, sir; but he isn’t my master. He thinks I’m free, and hired me at twenty five dollars a month; but he never paid me any of it. I belong to Mrs. John Spring. She used to hire me out summers, and have me wait on her every winter, when she came South. After the war, she couldn’t come, and they were going to sell me for Government because I belonged to a Northerner. Sold a great many negroes in that way. But I slipped away to the army. Have tried to come to you twice before in Maryland, but couldn’t pass our pickets.”
“Were you at Antietam?”
“Yes, boss. Mighty hard battle!”
“Who whipped?”
“Yous all, massa. They say you didn’t; but I saw it, and know. If you had fought us that next day,—Thursday,—you would have captured our whole army. They say so themselves.”
“Who?”
“Our officers, sir.”
“Did you ever hear of old John Brown?”
“Hear of him? Lord bless you, yes, boss: I’ve read his life, and have it now in my trunk in Charleston; sent to New York by the steward of ‘The James Adger,’ and got it. I’ve read it to heaps of the colored folks. Lord, they think John Brown was almost a god. Just say you was a friend of his, and any slave will almost kiss your feet, if you let him. They sav, if he was only alive now, he would be king. How it did frighten the white folks when he raised the insurrection! It was Sunday when we heard of it. They wouldn’t let a negro go into the streets. I was waiter at the Mills House in Charleston. There was a lady from Massachusetts, who came down to breakfast that morning at my table. ‘John,’ she says, ‘I want to see a negro church; where is the principal one?’ ‘Not any open to-day, mistress,’ I told her. ‘Why not?’ ‘Because a Mr. John Brown has raised an insurrection in Virginny.’ ‘Ah!’ she says; ‘well, they’d better look out, or they’ll get the white churches shut up in that way some of these days, too!’ Mr. Nicholson, one of the proprietors, was listening from the office to hear what she said. Wasn’t that lady watched after that? I have a History of San Domingo, too, and a Life of Fred. Douglass, in my trunk, that I got in the same way.”
“What do the slaves think about the war?”