The direct road from Richmond to Lynchburg was not yet in running order again. “One of our fool Generals burnt a big bridge near Lynchburg,” explained a citizen, “when there wasn’t the slightest use for it, and the bridge has not been rebuilt. Some of our Generals thought if they couldn’t have everything their own way, they must ruin everything. They hadn’t sense enough to see that it was their own friends they were ruining.” The trains from Richmond to Gordonsville, however, and thence to Lynchburg were running with unexpected regularity. But, in at least one respect, Richmond was not to be moved from the good old ways. The train started from the middle of a street; and, in the absence of a depot, the passengers rendezvoused at the shops on the corner till they saw the cars coming along.

Of course, the desolation of Virginia, even in the regions most exposed to the ravages of the war had been overrated. I do not think the white people were starving, or likely to starve, anywhere from Alexandria to Gordonsville, Richmond, Fredericksburg, or Lynchburg; and within these points Virginia had suffered more than in all the rest of the State. A little corn had been grown in the summer, and that little had been husbanded in a style at which a Western farmer would stare in amazement. Every blade had been stripped from the stalks, every top had been cut, and in the center of every little inclosure a stack of blades, thatched with tops, supplemented the lack of hay and other forage for the cattle, while the abundant ears furnished the great staple of diet for the classes most likely to suffer. A few little patches of cotton whitened inclosures near the houses, at rare intervals; but the yield was light, and the cultivation had evidently been bad. Between Richmond and Gordonsville scarcely a dozen wheat-fields were seen. Great surface drains had been furrowed out all over the fields, as if the owners were afraid they had too much wheat in, and wanted a considerable portion of it washed away. Beyond Gordonsville, they became plentier, and the crops had been put in in better style.

But in the main, between Richmond and Gordonsville, as between Fredericksburg and Richmond, abandoned fields alternated with pine forests, destroyed depots, and ruined dwellings. Imaginative writers have described the droves of wild beasts which they represent as having taken possession of these desolated regions; but the sportsman is likely to find nothing more formidable than abundant coveys of quails. Our train brought up from Richmond, and left at different points along the road, numbers of the decayed Virginia gentry, equipped with dogs and fowling pieces, and eager for this result of the war, if not for others of more consequence.

Hanover Junction presented little but standing chimneys and the debris of destroyed buildings. Along the road a pile of smoky brick and mortar seemed a regularly recognized sign of what had once been a depot, and the train was sure to stop. Not a platform or water-tank had been left, and the rude contrivances hastily thrown up to get the road in running order were, in many cases, for miles and miles the only improvements visible. Young pines covered the old wheat-fields and corn-fields. Traces of breast-works wound off through the country in all directions. A coterie of young officers were constantly exclaiming, “Here we whipped the rebs.” “There’s a place where the rebs got after us mighty sharp.” Gray-coated, heavy-bearded, ragged-looking fellows listened in scowling silence, or occasionally beguiled the way by reminding each other how “Here the Yanks caught hell.”

At one or two points, where once had been considerable towns, the train was besieged by an outgrowth of the peculiar institution. A score or two of negro women, bearing trays on which were rudely arrayed what they called “snacks,” surrounded us, loudly announcing the merits of their various preparations. “Sad” biscuit and fried chicken; “sad” biscuit and fried bacon; “sad” pie-crust, covering wild grapes, constituted the main attractions; and, as a grey-coated passenger sullenly remarked, “played the devil” with the hen-roosts of the surrounding country. Doubtless this petty traffic kept the wolf from many a negro’s door through the winter.

The railroads had been supplied with rolling stock bought mainly from the supplies of our United States military railroads, or from Northern shops. One or two cars, however, of the best among all the trains we met, bore the marks of a Richmond firm. The tracks were comparatively solid; but the rails were in the worst possible condition. Looking from the rear platform, one saw every few yards a rail bent outward till he wondered why it did not throw us off; while half of them were crushed at the ends or worn off the face till scarcely half an inch remained for the wheel to touch. The roads hardly pretended to make over twelve miles per hour, and even that was in many places a very unsafe rate of speed. The conductors were, of course, ex-Rebels, so were the engineers and brakemen, and any complaint as to the running of trains was very effectually silenced by a suggestion of the improvement “since six months ago.” Gangs of hands are at work on the roads, at distances of very few miles. Negroes and Rebel soldiers worked harmoniously side by side. “I tell you, sir,” said a Yankee to a Virginian who didn’t approve of this social equality, “a white man has got just the same right a nigger has—to starve if he won’t work!”

Perched among its hills, and defended by nature’s fortifications, Lynchburg had seen little of the immediate horrors of war. Her sons had gone down to death, but her fields had not been ravaged, her barns had not been burned, her children had not been often startled by the cry of the Yankees at the gates. Men had consequently escaped, to some degree, the impoverishing effects of the rebellion. Business seemed quite brisk; the farmers of the surrounding country were prosperous, and lands were not largely offered for sale.

As our train approached the city, I fell into conversation with a citizen. He rather guessed this little town was in no fix for starving. Niggers might suffer, and doubtless would, if they grew too saucy (pronounced “sassy;”) but the people were all right. “Half a million of specie in that little town, sah, when the wah ended. What do you think of that for a little rookery among the mountains, sah?”

I suggested that very few tobacco fields were to be seen along the road. “Plenty of tobacco stored, sah. Didn’t raise much last year, because there wa’nt many men at home to manage, but there’s plenty more tobacco hid away in this country than people ever dreamed of. Gold will bring it out, sah.”

“Greenbacks,” it seemed, did not yet have the same magnetic power. Men who had been declaring for four years that the United States Government was overthrown, could not at once convince themselves that its money was good. Whoever wanted to trade with the Virginians in the rural districts, must prepare himself with gold.

The town was swarming with representatives of Northern capitalists, looking for investments. Baltimoreans were also found frequently among them. The most went further South, over the Virginia and Tennessee road; but a few had ideas about the mineral resources of these mountains. Many seemed to think it necessary to adopt the coddling policy in their talk with the Virginians. “My policy for settling up these questions,” said a Yankee, “would be to banish all the leaders, and tell the rest that they had been soundly whipped, and, now, the best thing they could do would be to go to work and repair their ruined fortunes.”

“But how could you punish those equally deserving of punishment at the North, who were just as guilty in bringing on the war?” The questioner was, not a pardoned Rebel, but a speculative Northerner.

“The Lynchburg Post-office is in a church. The Government, it seems, was not willing to pay the rent demanded for the building formerly used for postal purposes, and the rent on churches was not exorbitant. A route agent, whiling away his time while his mail was made up, told how he had taken the oath, and so become an employee of the Government again.

“I was an old route agent, you see, and I wanted to go back to a nice berth. But I had been a magistrate under the Confederacy, and I was required to swear that I had never been. I went to see President Johnson. There was an awful crowd in the lobby, but I cottoned to Captain Slade, and played Yankee a little. Leaving out part of my name, I wrote on a card simply ‘Frederick Bruce,’ and made Slade promise to lay it before the President without a word. In a moment I was called in; but, as I approached the President, I thought I could see, by the twinkle of his eye, that I wasn’t the Frederick Bruce he had expected!^[48] Well, I told him that I took a magistrate’s office under the Confederate Government, to avoid having to go into the army. He said the word ‘voluntary’ occurred at the beginning of the oath, and its force ran through the whole of it, and applied to every clause. ‘Now, sir,’ said the President, ‘it’s with your own conscience to say whether you took that office voluntarily or not.’ Of course, I didn’t, for I was compelled to do it in order to keep out of the army, and so I told the President I would take the oath at once, and he said, ‘all right.’”

The narration threw a flood of light on the style of Unionists, with whose aid the Southern States were being “reconstructed.” This map was one of the “stay-at-home” Rebels. He made no secret of his entire sympathy with the Rebel cause, but he wanted to keep out of the fight himself, and found it pleasanter to be a Rebel magistrate than a Rebel soldier.

Not very many Virginians seemed disposed to abandon the pleasant mountain homes about Lynchburg, for the doubtful bliss of Mexico or Brazil. The discovery had suddenly been made that there was a good deal more danger of “nigger equality” in either than in the United States, and the newspapers were dolorously warning the dissatisfied, that, if they should go to Brazil, they might happen to be brought before courts where negro judges presided, or be required to submit to laws enacted by the wisdom of negro legislators. It was bad to be forced to tolerate the presence of free negroes in the United States, but, really, it began to look as if they could go nowhere else without finding matters a great deal worse.

In the main, the negroes seemed to be doing well. In the Lynchburg hotels they were paid twenty dollars a month—five dollars more than they received for similar services in Richmond. “Den, besides dat, we picks up ’siderable from gemmen dat gibs us half-dollar for toting deir trunk or blacking deir boots, as I’s shore you’s gwine to do, sah.”^[49] These, however, were only the more intelligent. Through the country the negroes were by no means earning such wages, and, in fact, the most were earning none at all. They gained a precarious support by picking up occasional jobs, and by a pretty general system of pilfering.

All had the idea that in January the lands of their former masters were to be divided among them; and it was, therefore, almost impossible to make contracts with them for labor on the farms through the ensuing year. The inhabitants charged that this idea had been sedulously spread among them by the Yankee soldiers, and that they had been advised never to contract for more than a month’s work at a time, until the division of property came. Here is a specimen of the way in which the Lynchburg papers treated the difficulty:

“The refusal of these people to make contracts for labor another year completely deranges all the regular and matured plans of our farmers. They know not what provision to make for feeding their employees; what extent of soil to mark out for seed; what kind of crops to cultivate, or what calculations to make upon their operations. If they sow, they are not certain to what extent they can reap; and if they attempt a variety of crops, (including tobacco,) they have no assurance whatever that their labor will not forsake them at the very moment that it is most indispensable.

“A friend in Amherst suggests that the powers that be should issue an order to the effect that all who do not get homes, or show they have a support within themselves, by the 1st day of January, 1866, will, on the 10th of said month, (nine days’ notice being given,) be hired out to the highest bidder. Such an order would, in his opinion, cause all except the most worthless to secure homes before the 20th of December. These suggestions certainly seem to us to have wisdom in them, and to meet the difficulties, to some extent, that now so seriously embarrass and retard agricultural pursuits; and we respectfully commend them to the attention of the proper authorities. One thing is certain, that if the negroes are not made to enter into contracts, and to keep them when made, the most ruinous consequences will result to our farming interests, and provisions enough will not be made to feed our people another year. Some fanatics and deluded persons, we know, will laugh at this idea, and tell us that the South has never been so prosperous in the past as she will be in the future under our present system of labor. But taking the most favorable view of the subject, it is still manifest to every one at all familiar with the real condition of things, that freed negro labor never was and never can be made productive—that is to say, accumulative or progressive; and that any reliance upon the voluntary work of free negroes, beyond what is absolutely necessary to their sustenance, is both vain and foolish. And we predict now, with regret and pain, what the results will certainly show, that there will henceforth be a steady and permanent decline in all the productions of the South dependent upon negro labor, as there has been in the French and British emancipation islands; and that the negro himself will steadily lose all the civilization which contact with his master has given him, and finally relapse into his native barbarism.”

At the same time they were busy inducing these people, who were steadily losing all civilization and about to relapse into their native barbarism, to emigrate to Liberia; by way, it should seem, of hastening the process. One colony had already been sent off, and the papers made much of an address, written by the negro emigrants to their “best friends,” to wit, their old masters,^[50] wherein they were made to hint a conviction, in substance the same with that so current in the bar-rooms, that “Virginia is no place for free niggers.”

The people of Lynchburg were all Johnson men. That is, they believed the President disposed to exact less of them than his party wanted, and they were bound to praise the bridge that promised to carry them safely over. Here, as elsewhere, “sound conservative views” were greatly in demand; these “views” being always found to have a relation, more or less intimate, to the negro. “No man,” exclaimed one of the papers, “can fail to see that our future is pregnant with the most momentous issues, and that it will require the union of all right-thinking men to save our country from the blasting curse of a false and most destructive radical sentiment pervading it.” To resist this destructive radical sentiment, the union of all the old parties was urged. They felt sure their members would be promptly admitted, and thought it a very great outrage that any opposition should be made to their participation in the organization of the House.