December broke the earliest hope of the revived Southern temper. The preponderating Rebel element, which reorganized the State Governments under Mr. Johnson’s proclamations, first expected to take Congress by a coup de main, organize the House through a coalition with the Northern Democracy, and, having thus attained the mastery of the situation, repeal the war legislation and arrange matters to suit themselves. Defeated in this by the incorruptible firmness of Mr. McPherson, the Clerk, they next hoped by Executive pressure, combined with Southern clamor, to force a speedy admission of all Representatives from the rebellious States who could take the prescribed oath. These once in, the rest was easy. They were to combine with the Northern Democracy and such weak Republicans as Executive influence could control, repeal the test oath, thus admit all the other Southern applicants, and turn over the Government to a party which, at the North, had opposed the war for the Union, and at the South had sustained the war against it.

By the 1st of January all knew that the plot had failed. A few days later, I left the Capital again for the South.

Traveling wholly by land from Washington to New Orleans, taking the trip leisurely, with frequent stoppages and constant intercourse with the people, I had abundant opportunities for discovering at once the marked change in the tone of public sentiment. In November I had found it buoyant and defiant. In January it was revengeful, but cowed.

Prominent public men were much more cautious in their expressions. They talked less of their demands; were more disposed to make elaborate arguments on their rights. There were few boasts as to what the South would do, or how heartily that true Southern man, the President, would sustain them; there was more tendency to complain that they had been whipped for trying to go out, and that now the door was shut in their faces when they tried to come in.

A very few, whom I should judge to have been Union men through the war, or to have been so thoroughly disgusted with the rebellion as to accept its defeat with cheerfulness, professed their entire satisfaction with the action of Congress. “It is none of our business to be making a fuss or demanding anything,” said one of these. “We’ve been guilty of a great crime; we have reason to be thankful that we are treated as leniently as we are, and it becomes us to keep quiet, and hope for the best.”

Such were the expressions of two classes. Together, they were but a small minority.

Everywhere, on the cars, in the hotels, on the streets, at public meetings, in social intercourse with the people at their homes, the great majority held very different language.

A little east of Lynchburg, an officer in the national uniform happened to pass through the cars. “There’s one of the infernal villains,” exclaimed an old man in homespun behind me. “Well,” said his companion, “perhaps it isn’t right to talk so, but how can we help hating them? They’ve burned our houses and made us paupers, and now they kick us out of the Capitol. May be my sons may feel differently, by the time they’re as old as I am, if they have to live with them, but I always expect to hate the sight of a Yankee till my dying day.” These were plain old Virginians from the mountains, apparently farmers.

At Grand Junction, Tennessee, I whiled away half a day in the bar-room of a dilapidated little frame house called a hotel. A wood contractor from one of the interior towns of Northern Mississippi was the leading talker. For hisself, he’d rather be a pauper all his days than do business with the dirty, mean, low-down Yankees. Certainly four out of every five in the room at any period during that half day, in some form or another re-echoed the sentiment.

On the cars of the Mississippi Central Railroad, a party of girls, attended by one or two rustic beaux, going down to New Orleans to see the sights and have their winter “society,” monopolized the conversation, and did it in no whispered tones. The burden of all their discourse, the staple subject that never failed them—when questions as to how long Sam stayed the other night when he came to see Sally, were fully exhausted—the pièce de résistance to which they always reverted, was the meanness, the ignorance, the hatefulness, the cowardice of the detested Yankees. One had to leave school because the dirty Yankees were too near. Another’s “par” had lost all his house servants because the sneaking Yankees had enticed them away. Another knew that the Yankees were all cowards, and would never have overpowered us if they hadn’t called in the Dutch, Irish, niggers, and all the rest of their superiors in creation, to help them. “Didn’t my brother Tom—you know, Lizzie, he’s as brave and gallant a man as ever lived—didn’t he tell me hisself, with his own lips, that he chased five of ’em, in full uniforms, with swords in their hands, and plenty of revolvers, full gallop, out of Holly Springs? His own self, mind you, by hisself.” The presence of an officer in uniform in the car, part of the day, only served to increase the volubility and virulence with which these Mississippi ladies delivered their utterances.

By and by one of the beaux, having run out of subjects for talk with the ladies, took a seat beside me, and produced the unfailing Mississippi substitute for an introduction—a whisky bottle. “Try some, stranger; don’t be afeard. Jist sample it. You’ll find it the rale stuff.” “Didn’t that Yankee officer look sheepish just now, when the gals was givin’ it to him so hot?” he asked, after our acquaintance had progressed smoothly for some time. This was a little too much for Northern flesh and blood, and I informed him that I was a Yankee myself.

“Stranger, you’re jokin’.” I insisted that it was a solemn fact.

“Whar’d you come from?”

“From Washington City.”

“Well, who’d a thought it? But, stranger”——and a prolonged stare followed.

“I say, stranger, take another drink,” and the uncorked bottle of villainous whisky was thrust to my lips. “I rather guess, stranger, you must be pretty well used to hearin’ that sort o’ thing, if you’ve been down heah long. The truth is, you don’t look like one o’ them sort, and I don’t b’lieve y’ are one o’ the mean kind anyway; but we do all hate the Yankees like pizen—thar’s no use tryin’ to hide it.”

I traveled one day through Northern Alabama and Western Tennessee with a Texan, who had been North, begging merchants to give him credit again, and help him on his legs.

“I tell you, you don’t none o’ you know anything about the meanness of the Yankees. I’ve been among them—I understand ’em. Why, do you know, a little thing a Texas store-keeper’d throw in ’thout thinking to tell you of ’t, one o’ them New York fellers’ll make you out a bill for, and ten to one he’ll reckon in the interest till paid.”

In such a strain he entertained his listeners for hours. By his account; Northern hotels were sponging houses, as compared with similar establishments in the South. Northern railroads were wholesale swindles, the churches were like the circus, and a “high-toned gentleman” was unknown. From this the talk naturally digressed to life in Texas. We had vivid accounts of little personal differences with the Bowie-knife; precise instructions as to the best way to stand to make your antagonist miss you in a duel, while you got a good shot at him; and challenges to anybody to name as charming a town to live in, under this Yankee-cursed Government, as Galveston, Texas. Nobody named one.

At last we came to an eating-house. “We’d better hurry,” some one suggested. “Oh, there’ll be plenty of room,” said the Texan. “There’s a lot of cowardly Yankees in the front car. You don’t ketch them payin’ a dollar for dinner. They stole enough at the breakfast-table to last till to-morrow mornin’.”

All this was, of course, the merest froth, thrown not without scum to the surface of the social agitation. A civil engineer, holding a responsible position on a leading Southern railroad, whom I encountered the next day, expressed very clearly the prevailing views of the better classes.

“What do they mean at Washington? They said the war was to maintain the Union. They succeeded in it and wouldn’t let us go out. What then? Why, they next refuse to let us in.”

This man was a gentleman; he was intelligent, familiar with political questions, apparently not bitter. Yet, when I tried to explain to him the view at the North, that every one who had in any way attempted to overturn the Union was a traitor to it, not to be again invested with civil rights till atonement for the treason had been made, or, at least, till security was given against its repetition, he seemed to regard it as something monstrous, unheard of, not to be endured.

“It all resolves itself back into this: we honestly thought we had a right to go out. You thought differently; went to war about it, and established by numbers what you could not by argument. We submit. We accept the situation. Then, having refused to let us out, you slam the door in our faces and won’t let us in. During the war you maintained that we were not out, and never could get out. The war over, you now maintain that we are out, and must stay out till you subject us to fresh humiliations.”

“I tell you,” he continued, with evident sincerity and deep feeling, “no free people in the history of the world were ever treated with such indignity. There was some feeling, not of love for the Union, but of readiness to be at least obedient, even though we could not become affectionate children. They are destroying all this at Washington. Our people feel that you are cruelly and wantonly trifling with us—yes, insulting us; that, having conquered, you have not the magnanimity of brave conquerors, but are bent upon heaping humiliation on your unfortunate victims.”

“Do you mean that the people feel like making armed resistance to the action of Congress?”

“Feel like it? Yes. Likely to do it? No. You have us at your mercy. We are powerless, impotent. You can work your will upon us; but men do not forget things seared into their hearts. The time will come when the Yankees will learn to regret their present course.”

Of a hundred conversations with intelligent gentlemen from different parts of the interior (not politicians), this one gave the clearest statement of the common feeling. I believe it to have been almost universal in Mississippi, and to have been entertained by a majority of the citizens in West Tennessee, and in the interior of Georgia and Alabama.

The mistake made by Northern statesmen, through the whole winter of 1860, was in not believing the South to be in earnest. They thought the conventions were political bluster; the secession itself a piece of bravado. Perhaps there is danger of a similar mistake again. To us, all this talk of defeated traitors about the humiliation of not being immediately reinvested with political rights in the Government they tried to destroy, seems very absurd bluster. Perhaps their politicians see it in the same light; but their people do not. Very many in some of the States, certainly a majority, actually smart under the exclusion of their representatives as a studied, brutal insult to a beaten and helpless enemy.

A change in the feeling toward the negroes was also manifest from the first day’s entrance within the cotton region. In November nothing could exceed the hatred which seemed everywhere felt to the freedmen. Now, this feeling was curiously and almost ludicrously mingled with an effort to conciliate them. Cotton was no longer king, but the cotton-maker was. Men approached the negro with an effort at kind manners; described to him the comforts of their plantations, and insinuatingly inquired if he wouldn’t like to enter into contract for a year. The sable owner of muscle, his woolly head greatly perplexed with this unwonted kindness, held aloof, and seemed, as he respectfully listened to the glowing inducements, to be wondering whether the fly would make anything by his visit to the nicely-arranged parlors of the Mississippi spiders.

The anxious planters argued and pleaded, and the puzzled negroes—kept up their thinking, I suppose. At any rate, very few contracts were yet made in many parts of the interior, especially in Mississippi, though by this time it was near the close of January, and the season for beginning the year’s cotton work was rapidly passing away. They were willing to contract on the Mississippi River, and, to some extent, along railroads; but they were very shy about venturing into the interior at all, and, when they did, insisted on remaining in sight of the towns. “I could have got plenty of hands at Vicksburg,” complained a planter returning from an unsuccessful trip for labor, “if I had only been able to pick my plantation up and move it twelve miles across the country to Holly Springs.” Another came nearer success: “I could have got plenty right at home, if my quarters had been at the other side of my plantation, where it joins the corporation-line of the village; but the black rascals wouldn’t trust themselves the width of my plantation away from town for fear I would eat ’em up.”

An old Mississippian was returning from New Orleans in a great rage: “Do you believe, sah, I even demeaned myself so much as to go to a d——d nigger, who called himself a labor agent, and offered him five dollars a head for all the hands he could get me. He promised ’em at once, and I was all right till I told him they was to be sent to ——, Mississippi. To think of it, sah! The black scoundrel told me flat he wouldn’t send me a man. ‘Why not,’ says I; ‘I’ll give you your money when they start.’ ‘I wouldn’t send you a man ef you gave me a hundred dollars a head,’ said the dirty, impudent black dog. And why? All because the sassy scoundrel said he didn’t like our Mississippi laws.”

I subsequently learned that these statements were literally correct, and that many Mississippi planters who had gone to New Orleans for laborers, found they could engage plenty, but lost their hold on every man as soon as they let him know that it was in Mississippi he was wanted. Through the interior, planters were complaining of the disappearance of the negroes. They couldn’t imagine where the worthless things had suddenly sunk to, until it occurred to some of them to observe that this disappearance began shortly after their reconstructed Legislature had embodied its wisdom in laws on the negro question.