Davis’s Bend presented no more striking illustration of the changes of the war than a conversation on our boat, after our return. A brother of General Wade Hampton, the South Carolina Hotspur, was on board. He saw no great objection to negro suffrage, so far as the whites were concerned; and for himself, South Carolinian and secessionist though he was, he was quite willing to accept it. He only dreaded its effect on the blacks themselves. Hitherto they had, in the main, been modest and respectful, and mere freedom was not likely to spoil them. But the deference to them likely to be shown by partisans eager for their votes would have a tendency to uplift and unbalance them. Beyond this, no harm would be done the South by negro suffrage. The old owners would cast the votes of their people almost as absolutely and securely as they cast their own. If Northern men expected in this way to build up a Northern party in the South, they were gravely mistaken. They would only be multiplying the power of the old and natural leaders of Southern politics by every vote given to a former slave. Heretofore such men had served their masters only in the fields; now they would do not less faithful service at the polls. If the North could stand it, the South could. For himself, he should make no special objection to negro suffrage as one of the terms of reorganization, and if it came, he did not think the South would have much cause to regret it.

Vicksburg, city of hills and caves, had already lost most of the traces of the siege, that for a year blocked the progress of our arms in the West, and concentrated the gaze of the continent. Few of the houses showed much serious damage. The hiding-holes dug in the hill-sides, for security against the shells, had been filled up again; stores had been reopened; ox-teams, bringing in cotton, filled the streets; returned Rebel soldiers were looking after their abandoned property, and receiving the heartiest welcomes from their old friends and neighbors.

Carriages were procured, and under the escort of General Morgan L. Smith, the commanding officer, we drove out through the formidable lines of breast-works that run along the successive ridges back of the town, to the spot where Generals Grant and Pemberton met to agree upon the terms of surrender. All the way up the Mississippi, we had been sympathetically quoting General Butler’s expressions of delight, after his protracted residence in the flat Southern country, at “seeing hills again.” The Vicksburg hills were the first we had seen for a month or more; and we saw quite enough of them. A sudden storm came up; the roads became almost as slippery as ice; the drivers, blinded with the rain, guided their horses badly; and presently one of the carriages was handsomely capsized in the mud, and the other one came within an inch of a similar fate. “Nebber ’n all my born life did so afore, nor nebber will,” protested the chap-fallen driver.

From the crest above the unpretending little monument one could trace for miles along the tops of the hills the successive lines of intrenchment, and mark the spots where assault after assault illustrated the various skill of the Generals, and the unvaried gallantry of the soldiers they more than once led to needless slaughter. Cotton already dotted every little spot of arable land within the Rebel lines, and beyond them many a broad field, enriched by Northern blood, was promising a rich harvest to Northern lessees. One, a former Clerk of the Ohio House of Representatives, rode up while we were studying the positions which the respective armies had occupied. He thought there was money down here, and had buried a good deal of it, any way, in these broken ridges.

Everybody was planting cotton; every little valley bloomed with it, and up hill-sides, that further south would have been called waste land, were everywhere to be traced the long undulations of the cotton ridges. As an official report about this time expressed it, “Visions of fortunes were floating before all planters’ eyes. The only trouble was scarcity of laborers. A quarter of a million acres, more or less, were waiting to sprout fortunes under every stroke of the hoe. All men seemed mad. Guerrillas were a light matter; the army-worm nothing. Cotton-seed, and land to scatter it on, and blacks to gather in the golden fiber—and lo! Golconda!” Worst of all, nearly every man was overreaching his means. With capital to carry through a plantation of five hundred acres, he would be attempting a thousand. Negroes were consequently ill-paid; rations were likely to be of the cheapest and scantiest. If the negro, dissatisfied with this specimen of the workings of free labor, broke his contract and ran away, it was a proof that “free niggers would never make cotton without a system of peonage.” “We are the only ones that understand the nigger,” said a few of the more outspoken Mississippians, emboldened by the growing impression that the President, as a Southern man, was gradually coming over to their side. “Wait till Johnson gets things a-going here, and we’ll make a contract law that will make a nigger work.”^[39]

Meantime, however, the Northerners were doing most of the cotton-planting. Mississippians were quite sincere in believing it impossible to grow cotton with unrestricted free labor, and many of them, frightened at the prospect of having to pay war taxes, and especially at what the more timorous still thought the danger of negro suffrage, were anxious to sell, for ten dollars an acre, lands that before the war readily commanded forty or fifty.

Memphis showed even more signs of the universal reaction than Vicksburg. The old inhabitants were more generally back, and a longer immunity from the punishments they had at first dreaded made them bolder. The newspapers were almost as unbridled as in the old secession days in their denunciations of Parson Brownlow, the East Tennessee Unionists, the test oath, and the effort to exclude Rebel voters from the polls. But on one point they had been utterly revolutionized. The man whom most of all they used to “decorate with their censure,”^[40] “the drunken tailor from the mountains,” “the po’ white demagogue,” was now the unfortunate subject of their warmest eulogies.

Business had already shown signs of revival. For the very best part of the cotton-growing region, Memphis, since the completion of her railroad system, had been the natural center and the only serious rival to New Orleans. All this trade was likely to be renewed. Business men were trying to resume, capital was everywhere in demand, and the streets showed more of the life and bustle of a Northern community than those of any Southern city we had seen.

Returned Rebel soldiers swarmed everywhere, in the parlors, at the liquor-shops, about the hotels, in the theaters. A blue uniform attracted attention; the gray flowed all about it in the unbroken stream of the street. If there was any regulation preventing returned Rebels from wearing the buttons and insignia of their rank, it was utterly a dead letter.

At Bolivar, a single standing chimney, as seen from our hurricane-deck, was all that marked the former site of a once bustling town. It was the solitary monument left to tell the tale of the ruin rebellion had brought to that community.

Further up, Fort Pillow showed no signs of either massacre or defense. In fact, one could see nothing but a blank bluff, whence artillery might command a fine range up or down the river.

One evening we landed just as a magnificent sunset was casting an amethyst sparkle over the water, while great banks of orange and yellow were reflected from above, and purple and scarlet, partly concealed by a misty blue veil floating over them, spread across half the sky. At a little distance beyond the wood-yard stood a row of the rudest cabins, ranged after the fashion of the negro quarters on a plantation. Entering one, I found a block serving as a chair for a middle-aged negress, who sat on it before the big fire, holding a sick baby, with its little woolly head turned toward a blaze that seemed hot enough to roast it. An old bedstead, nailed together by pieces of rough boards and covered with a tattered quilt, stood in one corner. In the opposite one was a rough table, on which were the fragments of a half-eaten, heavy, sodden “corn-pone.” In the fire-place stood a skillet covered by a broken lid, and on an old box were piled some broken dishes. I have enumerated absolutely everything gathered here to make comfortable the happy home of an American freeman.

Returning to the landing, I learned from the negroes standing about that they were refugees from cotton plantations lower down the river, over which the guerrillas “had been a raidin’, sah.” They had hired here to a speculator, following in the wake, of our army, to cut wood for the steamboats. He sold his wood for four dollars a cord, cash; and out of this paid nothing for the wood at all, and only promised to pay them a dollar a cord for chopping it. At this rate they could have made plenty of money, “but de trouble is, sah, he done nebber pay us. He say grillas sunk de steamboat him money come down on, and we’m got to take goods fo’ ou’ pay. Den he sell us po’k not fit to eat, at tree bits a pound, and de meanest co’n-meal you ever see.” Further inquiry showed that they had bought brass rings at five or six dollars apiece, and gaudy cotton handkerchiefs for the head at three dollars; and, in short, had done their best to help the speculator fleece them out of the last penny of their earnings. It was a lonely, desolate-looking spot; the simple creatures were afraid to go away for fear of guerrillas, and here they were completely at his mercy. Scores of such cases were to be found up and down the river. Fortunes were made during the last year of the war out of Mississippi wood-yards, and too often the most successful were the readiest to cheat the poor negroes out of their paltry share of the splendid profits.

At last our long journey approached its close. At Cairo we met floods of Northern newspapers, and, for the first time, became aware that a formidable party was organizing at the North in favor of Southern reconstruction only on the basis of some form of negro suffrage. At Louisville a pleasant dinner party enabled us to meet the last collection of men from the midst of a Rebel community. At that time there was more loyalty in Nashville than in Louisville, and about as much in Charleston as in either. For the first and only time on the trip, save while we were under the Spanish flag, slaves waited on us at dinner. They were the last any of us were ever to see on American soil.