"General Sherman's second step in this campaign will have been equally successful with the first, if he is able to cross the Ogeechee to-morrow without much opposition. Davis and Kilpatrick's movement has been a blind in order to facilitate the passage over the Ogeechee of the main body of the army, which for two days past has been marching on parallel roads south of the railroad.
"Thus far, we have reason to believe that the rebels are ignorant of our principal movement, and are trembling with fear that Augusta is our objective.
"Kilpatrick is doing the same work which he accomplished with such high honor when covering our right flank in the early days of the campaign. His column now acts as a curtain upon the extreme left, through which the enemy may in vain attempt to penetrate.
"The most pathetic scenes occur upon our line of march daily and hourly. Thousands of negro women join the column, some carrying household truck; others, and many of them there are, who bear the heavy burden of children in their arms, while older boys and girls plod by their sides. These women and children are, by some commanders, ordered back, heartrending though it may be to refuse them liberty. One begs that she may go to see her husband and children at Savannah. Long years ago she was forced from them and sold. Another has heard that her boy was in Macon, and she is 'done gone with grief goin' on four years.'
"But the majority accept the advent of the Yankees as the fulfillment of the millennial prophecies. The 'day of jubilee,' the hope and prayer of a lifetime, has come. They cannot be made to understand that they must remain behind, and they are satisfied only when General Sherman sometimes tells them that we shall come back for them some time, and that they must be patient until the proper hour of deliverance comes (this because they so swarmed).
"The other day a woman with a child in her arms was working her way along amongst the teams and crowds of cattle and horsemen. An officer called to her kindly: 'Where are you going, aunty?'
"She looked up into his face with a hopeful, beseeching look, and replied:
"'I'se gwine whar you'se gwine, massa.'
"At a house a few miles from Milledgeville we halted for an hour. In an old hut I found a negro and his wife, both of them over sixty years old. In the talk which ensued nothing was said which led me to suppose that either of them was anxious to leave their mistress, who, by the way, was a sullen, cruel-looking woman, when all at once the old negress straightened herself up, and her face, which a moment before was almost stupid in its expression, assumed a fierce, almost devilish aspect.
"Pointing her shining black finger at the old man crouched in the corner of the fireplace, she hissed out: