A few negro soldiers were standing guard on the river bank, one day, as our steamer touched to land our party at the lower side of the great bend below Vicksburg, for a visit to the adjacent cotton plantations. The officers sent off for ambulances for us. While we were awaiting their arrival, the relief guard came up, marching with a precision and erect, soldierly bearing that spoke well for their drill sergeants, and proved no small source of astonishment to the party of paroled rebels we had on board.

“A nigger’s just like a monkey,” growled one; “whatever he sees a white man do he’ll imitate; and he’ll study over it a cussed sight harder’n he will over his work. But how one o’ them black devils with muskets ’d run ef a white man was to start after him with a whip!” And with this he walked up to one of the soldiers, saying, rather harshly: “Boy, le’ me see your gun,” and offering to take hold of it. The soldier stepped hastily back, and brought his weapon into position for immediate use. “How the war has demoralized the cussed brutes!” muttered the discomfited scion of the master race, as he retired.

It was our first experience on the plantation of Mr. Jefferson Davis. Nearly all the nine thousand acres included in the bend of the river here had formerly belonged to Joseph Davis, brother to the President of the late Confederacy. Jefferson was a soldier and a politician, but no planter. He brought reputation and social position to the family, but no money. His brother balanced the account by giving him, from his own large estate, a plantation of a thousand acres. Here, down to the outbreak of the war, Mr. Davis was accustomed to spend a portion of his time, his brother and the late General Quitman being his only neighbors. Negro soldiers were now doing duty on the landing whence his cotton had been shipped, and “runaway niggers” were tilling his fertile fields on their own account.

The outer levee was damaged by the unusually high floods which had brought destruction to so many enterprising planters from the North; and for some hundreds of yards our ambulances cut deep into the rich mud over which the Mississippi had been depositing fresh alluvial soil. An inner levee had been hastily heightened, and when we passed this, the sodden, desolate aspect of the country changed. A few cabins, surrounded by small inclosures, seemed to have been used in the old times for trusty negroes sent to work or watch at the landing. Beyond these, the road led us through a broad field of cotton, unbroken by hill or valley, fence or tree, save here and there a single cotton-wood, whose position by the roadside had saved it. The whole face of the country, almost as far as the eye could reach, was plowed into what a Northern farmer would have taken for low sweet-potato ridges. On the tops of these ridges, in separate hills, grew the soft and still tender cotton-stalks, beginning to be well covered with the white and red flowers; for even cotton wore the Rebel colors. The petals were soft and flabby, and the flower was like a miniature hollyhock. For these “earliest blooms” planters keep eager watch, and to have the first in a neighborhood is a distinction, prized as a Northern farmer would prize a premium for the best crop of wheat in a county.

Occasionally a few rows were found carefully tilled and free from weeds; but in very many more, weeds and cotton were struggling for the mastery, with the emancipated negroes reveling in their first taste of liberty, spectators rather than participants in the contest on which their support depended. Doubtless the plantation had looked better under Mr. Davis’ control, indifferent planter as he was.

Presently a double row of common negro quarters came in sight, and at their end a white frame house, by no means palatial, but still considerably larger than most of the residences to be found even on the premises of wealthy planters. The road led us up to the back door. “Massa allus meant to turn de road, and bring it roun’ in front, under dem trees,” explained an old negro. Entering at the back gate, and coming “roun’ in front,” we found a little lawn, on which a partially abortive attempt had been made to grow shade-trees and shrubbery. The house was a narrow one, having but a single story, with a hall running through the middle, and a couple of medium-sized rooms opening into it on either side. Beyond these, on each hand, was a wing, containing smaller rooms. In front was a veranda, or, as Southerners all call it, a gallery, with pretentious wooden columns; and at either wing was another gallery, with more columns. Above the central piazza was wrought, in sprigs of cedar, a soldier’s inscription, drawn from nursery recollections: “The house that Jeff. built;” and over the main door a few more sprigs of evergreen, prettily arranged, spelled out the last word the master of the house would have uttered to any of its recent visitors: “Welcome.” A couple of Yankee school-mistresses were within, and they were the teachers of the boys and girls of Mr. Davis’ slaves, and of the runaways from plantations in the interior, to whom the welcome was given. A beautiful little quadroon girl, with clustering ringlets and wondering face, stood in the doorway. She was one of the children of the place, and was the offspring of no Northern “miscegenation.”^[37]

All the furniture belonging to the house had long ago been carried off. Respect for the rights of absent property owners has nowhere been a very marked characteristic of the movements of the Northern armies; and articles from the “house of Jeff. Davis hisself,” as one of the soldiers phrased it, were too tempting to be long left unappropriated. Odd pieces of furniture of the most incongruous styles had been gathered up from adjacent plantations, completing as motley an establishment as ever vexed the eye of Yankee housekeeper. A few books lay scattered over the shelves; tactics for Northern soldiers and spelling-books for slaves lying among defenses of the divine right of slavery and constitutional arguments in favor of repudiation and secession.

To the right of the house was a garden full of neglected shrubbery, from which, as we left, we plucked a bouquet of June flowers. Swarms of woolly-headed children lay about the doors and under the little projecting roofs of the quarters; and old men and women filled up the door-ways, to stare at us as we passed. Some of them had “b’longed to Mass’r Jeff.,” others to “Mass’r Joe;” others came from the interior. The jail was pointed out, where “Mass’r Joe” used to confine refractory slaves, and at which he used, on Sunday mornings, to hold a court of plenary and summary jurisdiction for the trial of prisoners. A band of iron, four inches wide and half an inch thick, with a heavy chain attached, was one of the relics found in the house. It had been used for the most troublesome slaves. During the day they had to wear it in the fields; at night a padlock secured it to a staple in the wall of the jail.

From the quarters we drove to the dilapidated old cotton-gin. The floors were partially torn up; boards hung by single nails on the walls; doors were off their hinges or gone. By one of the gin-stands were piled up boxes marked “Enfield cartridges;” and in the lint-room were stacks of muskets. Looking from its window over the cotton-press, we saw in the adjacent cotton-field a regiment of the faithful and affectionate creatures, clad in the “blue on black,” at which Rebel newspapers used to laugh, and presenting arms to a former Senatorial colleague of the late proprietor. They had for months protected the freedmen of this entire region from the hostility of their old masters; and but for their presence, the extensive mission schools carried on at another part of the estates inclosed by the bend, must have been abandoned.

Over a thousand scholars, mostly children, have been enrolled at these schools, but the attendance was very irregular. The teachers reported, with an enthusiasm that may, perhaps, have warped their judgments a little, that, wherever the attendance was regular, the progress was as rapid as the average progress of white children in the Northern public schools. This, however, referred only to the primary branches. Too little advancement had been made beyond these to warrant any general opinion as to the average capacity likely to be displayed.

The good missionaries, sent down by Northern Churches, had been zealously laboring at the moral condition of the negroes whom slavery had Christianized. They made encouraging reports, but the facts they mentioned scarcely warranted so cheerful a view of the results of their labors. In the great collections of negroes sent here in 1864, they found marriage practically unknown. The grossest immorality universally prevailed. They had duly married the couples who were living together, which some of them thought a very valuable performance; but it did not appear that the ceremony had yet produced much effect on the habits of the people. They had preached to them and prayed with them, and, as one of them said:

“Their interest in religious instructions is very encouraging. As a people, they are much more easy of access on the subject of religion than white people. When asked if they are pious, they will readily give an answer of yes or no. All professors of religion are free to tell their religious experience. There is no part of religious worship they enjoy so much, and in which they spend so much time, as in singing. In prayer they are generally very earnest, often using expressions that indicate a deep sense of unworthiness. One will often hear such expressions as these: ‘Heavenly Master, wilt thou be pleased to hear us?’ ‘O Jesus, Master, if thou be pleased, do come along dis way by thy Holy Spirit;’ ‘We know we are not heard for our much speaking.’ The gratitude which they have often manifested to me for reading and expounding to them the Scriptures has been a rich reward for my labors.”

But the good man was compelled to admit that, when these “professors of religion” came out of the prayer-meetings, they had no hesitation in stealing whatever little delicacies they could find for next morning’s breakfast, or in appropriating somebody’s mule, and making off before daylight for some other locality. They would very humbly confess their sins on bended knees, and straightway rise to tell some outrageous lie, by which they hoped to get a little money. What reason had anybody to hope that they believed the story they told on their knees any more than the other?

Last year the negroes congregated on these plantations cultivated their crops in their own way and on their own account. The military authorities selected some seventy of the best, and allotted to each a tract of thirty acres. Each was permitted to draw mules and supplies, to be paid for at the end of the year, and each hired as many negroes to assist him as he thought he needed to cultivate the land. The officers say they worked well, and would have made large profits, but for the ravages of the army-worm. As it was, they only gathered one hundred and thirty bales of cotton from their entire plantation, or scarcely one-twelfth of a good crop. White lessees, managing large places on the river, suffered equally from the army-worm, but saved a much larger proportion of cotton. Still, the experiment was a success. The negroes paid back all the advances made them by the Government, and some of them had a balance of between five hundred and a thousand dollars profits.^[38]

These results, it is true, could not have been attained without Government encouragement and direction; but surely no better way of dispensing charity was ever devised than to make the destitute earn it for themselves, and pay back the advances furnished them. Nor was there anything in the operations of the negro farmers last year, nor in their prospects when we visited them in June, 1865, to warrant a doubt as to their capacity for supporting themselves and managing their own affairs, when once fairly started. Whether they would furnish the country as great an amount of cotton for export, as under the old system, is another and a very different question.

We drove through miles of cotton and corn, rank with the luxuriant growth of a soil marvelous for its fertility. Then came a bad road along a broken levee, through a cypress swamp, where amid the gloom of trailing moss, hanging down almost to the edge of the stagnant, scum-covered water, one could dimly make out the great cypress-knees, and fancy them fit resting-places for the snakes and alligators which are said to constitute the only inhabitants. Finally our ambulances could go no further over the narrow road, and for a little distance we followed on foot the little path beaten by the crowds of negroes constantly flocking to the river. The luxuriant grass waved over and almost concealed it; and here and there it was overgrown with vines, so that every step crushed the juicy dewberries under our feet. The steamboat had passed around the bend, and lay awaiting us as we emerged on its northern side.