From Atlanta I took the railway for Montgomery, Alabama. We had been traveling, thus far, in third-class passenger cars. Now we came down to box freight cars, around the sides of which a board bench was placed for the accommodation of such passengers as cared to sit down.

“’Ere’s your Cincinnati and Nashville papers, Gazette, Commercial, Press, and Times! All about the execution of Champ Ferguson!”

“Yes, and I wish it was all about the execution of the scoundrels that tried him.”

The scene was a box-car on the West Point (Georgia) Railroad; the speaker an Alabama planter, on his way home from Atlanta.

I have been seeking to exhibit, as fairly as I could, the actual talk and temper, not of the office-holders or office-seekers, who are, of course, all things to all men, but of the people one meets on the cars, in the hotels, at the wayside, and on the plantations. The expression above quoted, about Champ Ferguson, is but a specimen of what was often heard among men proverbially outspoken, and, then, more than ever disposed, in the bitterness of their defeat, to let out all the gall that was in them. The Tennessee guerrilla had far more friends and sympathizers throughout this region than had the men who convicted him. The unjust detention of Mr. Jefferson Davis was everywhere deplored. “By —,” exclaimed an Alabamian to me to-day, with a horrible oath, “are you going to hang Jeff. Davis? That’s what I want to know. You might as well hang all the honorable men in the South, for he was only their trusty agent.” Even Wirz was covered with the broad mantle of Southern charity. It was universally thought that his trial had been grossly unfair; that Government gave him no opportunity to get witnesses, and that he was entirely innocent.^[54] The report of his execution had just arrived, and while some refused to believe it, others took great delight in repeating the words of the dispatch, as sweetened to suit the prevailing taste, by some Southern news agent: “He died bravely, protesting his innocence.”

I do not mean that these people are nursing a new rebellion. For many years they will be the hardest people in the civilized world to persuade into insurrection. But they nurse the embers of the old one, and cherish its ashes. They are all Union men, in the sense that they submit, (since they can’t help themselves,) and want to make all they can out of their submission. But to talk of any genuine Union sentiment, any affection for the Union, any intention to go one step further out of the old paths that led to the rebellion, than they are forced out is preposterous. They admit that they are whipped; but the honest ones make no pretense of loving the power that whipped them.

It has been currently supposed at the North, that the desolation wrought by the war, would lead to an intense hatred of the leaders who brought it on. But this hatred has taken another turn. Instead of hating their own leaders they hate ours. They do not realize that such men as Mason, Yancey, Davis, and Toombs led them, for selfish purposes, into this sea of blood; they followed these leaders willingly, believe in them still, and insist that the North brought on the war by illegal encroachments, which they were bound in honor to resist. Such were the expressions I heard everywhere around me, and, however little might be said for their loyalty, their honesty and candor could not be doubted. The men to suspect of dishonesty are not these who frankly, admit that they are defeated and bound to submit, but still insist that they were right in the start of the quarrel. The men who make haste to adjure all the principles they fought for, and to acknowledge their dead brothers and sons to have been traitors, they are the ones whose new-born “loyalty” is sown upon the sand. When the nutriment of the offices is withdrawn, look out for a withering.

One or two plantations between Atlanta and West Point showed gangs of negroes at work clearing off the lands, and preparing for a cotton crop; but by far the greater number seemed still abandoned. Since leaving East Tennessee, I had not seen one white man at work. The negroes, who were breaking up the cotton lands, did it with little “bull-tongues,” such as Northern farmers use to cultivate their corn. A good, moldboard plow seemed unheard of.

At West Point, a village of cheap frame houses, where we stopped for dinner, large piles of cotton bales filled the public square. Even the primitive cultivation we had seen, seemed to produce fair crops. Half a bale to the acre was above the average yield. There were few large plantations; and the population seemed mainly composed of small farmers, cultivating from one to four or five hundred acres.

At Opelika we reached the ultimate in the matter of railroad traveling. The Macon train pushed out with a couple of box cars, containing no seats, into which were loaded passengers, baggage, freight, and fuel. The locomotive bore only the battered remnants of what had been a smoke-stack; the machinery was rusty; the head-light was gone, and even the bell was broken. On the Montgomery train we congratulated ourselves on better fortune. We had ordinary box freight cars, into which we climbed, ladies and gentlemen alike, through the sliding doors at the side; but in each car half-a-dozen pine board benches had been arranged, across which the ladies scrambled to a corner, free at once from dust, light, and ventilation, and over which every one trampled in getting into or out of the car.

With less fear of dust, and more love for fresh air than my fellow travelers, I established myself in the door. While we waited for the engine, a plantation negro, who seemed to belong to the lowest possible grade, approached us. He was not idiotic, but he seemed hopelessly and inconceivably stupid. No such existence as his would be possible on a large plantation. It is only where the attrition of social intercourse is almost wholly removed that a human being can possibly grow to manhood with so little advancement beyond the condition of the brutes around him.

He was clad in the coarsest negro cloth, ragged, dirty, ill-fitting. Head and feet were bare. I asked him if he knew he was free.

“Ya-a-a-s, sah.”

“Well, are you ready to live with some good man, and go to work to earn your living?”

“I reckon.”

“How much do you think you ought to have per month?”

“Dunno.” And the stupid stare was broken by a puzzled expression, as if this seemed a very hard and a very serious question.

“Do you know how to raise cotton?”

“Ya-a-a-s, sah, I kin make cotton well’s any man.”

“How much can you make to the acre, on your place?”

“Dunno.”

“How much did you make altogether this year?”

“’Bout bay an’ half, dis yeah; but we’s done hab ’bout eight bays over from las’ yeah.”

“What do you think of Andie Johnson?” interjected an amused auditor of the conversation.

“Who him?”

“He’s President of the United States. Do you know what that is?”

“Who him?”

“Who?”

“Why, Pres’den’?”

Evidently he was not strong on politics; so we reverted to something he might be expected to be more familiar with.

“Did you ever see a bigger town than this?”

“N-n-no.”

“This is the biggest town in the world, isn’t it?”

“No; I’s heern dat C’lumbus is heap sight bigger.”

“Columbus is the biggest town you ever heard of, is it?”

He scratched his head for some time at the unwonted exercise it was getting, but finally concluded as how he’d heern tell dat Mobile was bigger still.

“How much do you suppose you’d sell for?” This was asked, because it was said in some places that the ignorant negroes didn’t know they were free, and even had no knowledge of the meaning of the word.

“I’s free. Ain’t wuf nuffin.”

“How much were you worth before the war?”

“Wen old massah died, him praisement said I wuf fifteen hunder dollah.”

“When did your master die?”

“Dunno.”

“Was it a year ago?”

“Spec it was a yeah.”

“What did he die of?”

“He’m drunk and fell off him hoss.”

The public sentiment of the listening crowd seemed to decide that inquiries had been pressed far enough in that direction. I next fell back on something they were all interested in.

“Would you work for five dollars a month?”

He seemed a little puzzled, but thought he wouldn’t, “harly.”

“Would you work for ten?”

“Spec I would, sah.”

“Would you stick at it, if a man hired you?”

“Ya-a-a-s. Ef I once ’mence, and git money, I’s wuck on. Jis git me money an’ I wucks.”

I wrote this conversation down carefully at the time. The negro may fairly be taken as a sample of the most ignorant plantation hands, in the interior of the poorest cotton-growing districts, and the conversation may therefore have a certain value, as showing the lowest degree of intelligence among the class on whom it is proposed to confer the right of suffrage.

All the trains on which I had traveled for some days, had contained numbers of Northerners going down to look at the cotton lands. Many went prepared to buy; all went either to buy or lease, if they found the prospects as encouraging as they hoped. To all these, the central belt of Alabama seemed a promising field. Its lands are the richest east of Louisiana and west of the South Carolina and Georgia Sea Islands; and the country is entirely healthy, which is more than can be said of either of the other regions. A bale to the acre could be made on the first-class lands, and the Alabama bale means a hundred pounds more than that of Louisiana or the west. Nearly all the lands could, with careful culture, be made to average half a bale. Then, within easy railroad connection, is Mobile on the south, while on the north, a twelve hours’ ride carries the debilitated planter to the bracing breezes of the mountains.

In September and October these lands were selling at five dollars an acre. In November I imagine that the average was very nearly ten, and it was constantly rising. The papers were full of advertisements of plantations for rent or sale. The great rush was from men of small means at the North, who wanted from four hundred to a thousand acres; but a few were looking for heavier investments. Here are a couple of specimens of the kind of lands offering:

“For Sale or Rent.—A plantation on the Alabama River, containing fourteen hundred acres, one thousand of which are cleared, under good fence and in fine order for a crop. It has a three-story brick gin-house, a large brick stable and corn-crib, a new, well-finished dwelling with four rooms on the floor, all covered with tin roofs and built in the most substantial manner; nine double tenement framed negro houses, with piazzas in front; a large kitchen and smoke-house, a good blacksmith-shop, two never-failing wells of excellent water, some seven or eight miles of Osage-orange hedge. No plantation on the Alabama River lies better or is probably more healthy. The quality of land about the average of Alabama River. I think I risk nothing in saying it is the best improved plantation in the State of Alabama.”

“For Sale or Rent.—My plantation, one mile above Montgomery, immediately on the river, containing about 2,000 acres, 1,300 in cultivation. There is a steam grist-mill, which propels two gins, on the place, and every other improvement which constitutes a complete plantation. I will rent for a share in the crop. This is well known as one of the very best cotton farms in the State.”

When these plantations were rented, the owners asked three to five dollars rent, payable 1st of January, 1867; or, if he furnished all the mules, corn, bacon, and everything else except the labor, he would require one-half the crop.

The old planters seemed utterly despondent about raising cotton by free negro labor. A few thought of watching the Yankees and imitating their policy; but the most of those who did not propose flying to Brazil, were dreaming of imported white labor. The following was one of their fine schemes:

“White Labor Agency.—Rates of Hire of White Laborers:

Payable at the end of the year.

They contract for one year, to do the same work as the negro; live in the same cabins, and on the same rations; clothe themselves and pay their own doctor’s bills. Time lost by sickness deducted from wages.

One in every six of Germans agree to speak English. Cost of transportation, $15 per head, to accompany orders, but to be deducted from wages.

An order will be forwarded to New York on Saturday, the 11th instant.”

A “Planters’ Convention” was to be held in a couple of weeks, to agree upon a policy for making the negroes work. But they had no faith in it, unless they could have power to seize upon every idle negro they found, put a hoe in his hand, and vigorously apply the lash. The local papers were calling out lustily to “checkmate the Freedmen’s League.” This association, it seemed, had “taken upon itself to fix the wages of freedmen at ten dollars per month,” a rate higher than had been heretofore ruling. “Teach the darkies,” urged one of the papers, “that this leaguing is a game that two can play at. If they assume to dictate, we will oust them; and supply their places with better laborers, whom we can import from the North;” and it greatly encouraged itself herein, by its interpretation of a recent speech by the President: “President Johnson, in his speech to the negroes, plainly intimated that the Lincolnian idea of everything for the negro, and everything by the negro, had no receptacle in his brain.”

A pioneer company of planters, disgusted with “free niggers,” the United States Government, the defeat, and everything connected with the country, were about to sail for Brazil, taking with them farming utensils and provisions for six months. “The present destination of the colony,” it was laconically explained by the managers, “is the city of Para, on the Amazon; its ultimate location on a tributary of that river, between five and ten degrees south latitude. Length of voyage two thousand miles; sailing time about three weeks.”

Others were proposing to send agents North from every county, to secure white emigrants. Public sentiment was against the sale of lands to the Yankees; “Get white laborers,” they urged, “and in a year you’ll make enough to be able to hold on to your lands.”

Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy. It has none of the characteristics of a capital, no collections of able men, mainly occupied, officially or unofficially, in public affairs; no tone of government and of the world; it is simply a beautiful and well preserved little inland Southern city; well built; sandy, of course, like all Southern towns; regularly laid out, and, for a wonder, well drained. The Southern taste for huge columns and tawdry architectural display, is conspicuous; but many of the private residences are elegant. The residence of the President of the Confederacy, (at the time when Montgomery was the capital,) is a large, substantially built and commodious house; less pretentious in style than the most; and in every way more desirable than the one subsequently presented to the Confederate Government, with such a flourish of trumpets, by the city of Richmond, for Mr. Davis’ occupancy.

Business seemed quite brisk; and very heavy stocks of goods—far too heavy, one would think, for the impoverished country—had been sent down on credit by New York merchants.

Cotton filled the warehouses, and drays loaded with it, crowded the streets, and the river bank, where it was shipped for Mobile. Some of it was Government cotton; more had belonged to the Rebel Government, and had been stolen by private individuals. Such were the results of the policy of meddling with this cotton at all by Government agents. Infinite scandal and no profits accrued. Thieves of Rebel cotton had been paying seventy-five dollars a bale to have the cotton carried by steamer to Mobile! There the gauntlet was to be run again; but if successfully passed, the net profits on each bale were still over a hundred dollars.

The newspapers found it difficult to realize that free speech and a free press were at last established. The Montgomery Mail thought these correspondents from the North ought to be kept in their own section—they did nothing but misrepresent and slander. Similar suggestions occurred every day. The temper which used to display itself in lynching gentlemen whose writings were not satisfactory, now found this safer outlet.

But they all indorsed President Johnson; the despot of Tennessee, the tory who had deserted his section and attempted to grind down his people; the drunken tailor and demagogue, had suddenly become the pattern of all statesmanlike virtues. A new associate editor, making his bow in the Montgomery Ledger, found it necessary to say: “I believe him a true friend of the ill-fated South, and lifting himself above the mad waves of Black Republican fanaticisms, that are dashing and breaking themselves around his elevated position, I think that he is endeavoring to rise to the patriotic duty of leading his country, out from its distracted condition, into the calm sunshine of national repose and prosperity.”

It was a curious exemplification of popular tastes, that the newspapers surrendered their editorial columns to elaborate disquisitions on the circus. The citizens talked of it as people in the similar pretensions at the North would of the opera; and for days before its advent it seemed as if everybody was preparing for its coming. But why not? Did not the leading journal announce in double leaded type, in its leading column, that “The circus has always been a favorite amusement with the South, and the Southern taste upon the subject has ever been so fastidious and demanded so much, that it is a well known fact, that as the term goes, a circus that would go down well on the European continent and elsewhere, would be criticised and ignored in the South?” And did it not gratefully announce that “we have the pleasure to hail, as an evidence of returning peace and prosperity, the advent of a real circus, one of the old time establishments; with all its concomitants to allure, please, and give satisfaction?”

It even grew eloquent on the history of the performers, thus:

“It is no small feature upon their escutcheon to know that the old Southern favorite, gentleman and actor, Mr. S. P. Stickney, with his charming daughter and talented son, are on the list of performers, and eliciting vast applause whenever they appear. Some years ago a little boy came here with a circus company, about whom nothing was particularly noticeable, save vivacity and sprightliness of manner, and a rather large amount of good looks; in fact, he was what the ladies call a sweet little boy. That little boy is now the eminent clown and original jester, Jimmy Reynolds, sharing the honors with Dr. Thayer; and if we mistake not, Doctor, you must look to your laurels, or Jimmy will snatch the chaplet from your brow. Jimmy is well aware of the prejudices of the Southern people with regard to expression, and will take good care they are not invaded.”

This opinion, it was to be understood, was one of weight and moment; for the editor haughtily added:

“We claim to be sufficiently well acquainted with the principal artists in the equestrian business to know those of merit, who have visited the South, and whose names are a guarantee against any aggression upon refinement and delicacy.”

And, finally, the timid were reassured on an important point:

“An admirable arrangement has been perfected by which Freedmen will be comfortably accommodated in a section of the pavilion, fitted up expressly for them, and entirely distinct from the rest of the audience, with a separate entrance. By all the indications, we have no fear but that this great company will achieve a success here commensurate with its merits.”

The Mayor of Atlanta, the editors, and sundry other important personages, published a card in the papers of that city about the circus, “commending the establishment to public favor and generous patronage in its tour throughout the State and the South.”

Mr. Gorsüch and other gentlemen who had been connected with the Rebel “Bureau of Niter and Mining,” were busy with a great speculation by which they all felt sure of retrieving their fortunes. They had organized a monster oil company—on paper—and had already leased over a quarter million acres of lands, in Central and Northern Alabama, and adjacent parts of the neighboring States. Some Northern geologists, who had been exploring this region, were inclined to laugh at them, but they were full of dreams about spouting wells and flowing fortunes.

Some of them seemed, however, to imagine that the gold regions west of the Coosa River, were likely to prove more profitable. Hitherto they had paid but little; but there was much talk about what scientific work would do for them.

Some very worthy people of Montgomery were much disposed to plume themselves on their Southern blood. A Baptist preacher, who kept a book-store, (and had once been known as editor of a series of school books,) was a specimen. “I’ve got my pardon,” he began, warmed into confidence by a trifling purchase, “and am all right for the future. I’ve done well, too, by the war, and my profits were mainly invested North. But I’m tired of this crowd of Yankees that is pouring down here. The more I see of them, the more I am convinced that they are a totally different class of people, and can never assimilate with us Southerners. What a miserable picayune way of doing things by retail they have, to be sure!” The worthy gentleman was asked where he was born. “Well,” he admitted with a wry face, “I was born in New Jersey, but then I’ve been in the South from childhood, and am completely identified with her!” Precisely similar was the reluctant confession of a planter here, who had been exalting the virtues of pure Southern blood, and complaining of Yankee meanness. He was born in northern New York!

There was no indication whatever of the slightest disposition to foment another war. “I’ve had enough of fighting to last me my lifetime,” said a young man who was hoping to resume work on his plantation. “We’re all glad it’s over,” said a business man. “Still we think we were right in the outset. We believe in the right of secession as much as we ever did; but what difference does that make? What’s the use of your right to do a thing, if you know you’ll get soundly whipped if you attempt it?”