Shortly after our arrival in the harbor, the military authorities had provided a special train for us—that is to say, a train composed of a wheezy little locomotive and an old mail agent’s car, with all the windows smashed out and half the seats gone. By this means we were enabled, an hour after our visit to Beaufort, to be whirling over the military railroad from the little collection of Government warehouses on the opposite side of the harbor, called Morehead City, to Newbern.

The whole way led through the exhausted turpentine forests of North-eastern North Carolina, which the turpentine growers have for many years been abandoning for the more productive forests of upper South Carolina. Here and there were swamps which Yankee drainage would soon convert into splendid corn land; and it is possible that Yankee skill might make the exhausted pineries very profitable; but, for the present, this country is not likely to present such inducements as to attract a large Northern emigration.

The poorer people seem to be quietly living in their old places. Where the paroled rebel soldiers have returned, they have sought their former homes, and evince a very decided disposition to stay there. Throughout this region there is, as we learned, comparatively little destitution. The ocean is a near and never-failing resource; and from Newbern and Beaufort (both of which have been in our possession during the greater part of the war) supplies have gone through the lines by a sort of insensible and invisible perspiration, which it would be unkind, to the disinterested traders who follow in the wake of an army, to call smuggling.

Passing the traces of the works thrown up at the point where Burnside had his fight, we entered the remarkable city of log cabins, outside the city limits, which now really forms the most interesting part of the ancient town of Newbern. Before the war, it had between five and six thousand inhabitants; now, these newly-built cabins on the outskirts, alone, contain over ten thousand souls.^[3] Yet, withal, there are few old residents here. The city proper is, to a considerable extent, deserted by its former inhabitants, and filled by Union refugees from all parts of the State; while these squares of crowded cabins contain solely Union refugees—of another color, but not less loyal.

Within a few days back, however, men, whose faces have not been seen in Newbern for nearly four years, are beginning to appear again, with many an anxious inquiry about property, which they think ought to have been carefully preserved for them during their hostile absence. Sometimes they have kept an aged mother, or an aunt, or a widowed sister, in the property, to retain a claim upon it; and in these cases they seem to find little difficulty in quietly resuming possession. But, in more instances, they are forced to see others in an occupancy they can not conveniently dispute, and to learn of fortunes made from the property they abandoned.

The hotel keeper, for example, has returned. He finds here a Yankee, who, seeing the house deserted when we occupied the city, and being told by the officers that they wanted a hotel, determined to keep it. The Yankee has paid no rent; he has been at no expense, and he has made a sum reckoned at over a hundred thousand dollars, by his hotel keeping and a little cotton planting which he was able to combine with it. Naturally, he is in no haste to give up his rent-free establishment, and the Rebel owner has the satisfaction of contemplating the Yankee in possession, and calculating the profits which might have gone into his own pockets but for the frantic determination, four years ago, never to submit to the tyrannical rule of the Illinois gorilla. Returning merchants find sutlers behind their counters, reckoning up gains such as the old business men of Newbern never dreamed of; all branches of trade are in the hands of Northern speculators, who followed the army; half the residences are filled with army officers, or occupied by Government civil officials, or used for negro schools, or rented out as “abandoned property.”

Yankee enterprise even made money out of what had been thrown away long before the war. In the distillation of turpentine a large residuum of the resin used to be carted away as rubbish, not worth the cost of its transportation to market. The mass thus thrown out from some of the Newbern distilleries, had gradually been buried under a covering of sand and dirt. A couple of Yankee adventurers, digging for something on the bank of the river, happened to strike down upon this resin, quietly had it mined and shipped to a Northern market. I am afraid to tell how many thousands of dollars they are said to have made by the lucky discovery.

The negro quarter has been swelled to a size greater than that of almost any city on the coast, by accessions from all parts of the State. They came in entirely destitute. The Government furnished them rations, and gave the men axes, with which they cut down the pine trees and erected their own cabins, arranging them regularly in streets, and “policing” them as carefully as a regiment of veteran soldiers would do. Every effort was then made to give them work in the Quartermaster’s Department, to keep them from being simply an expense to the Government; but the close of the war necessarily cuts off this source of employment, and the General commanding is now looking with no little uneasiness to the disposition to be made of this great collection of negroes, for scarcely a tithe of whom can the natural wants of the town itself supply employment.

Some have rented a large rice plantation in the vicinity—contrary to the currently-received theory that no human being, white or black, will work on rice grounds except when driven to it—and they are doing exceedingly well. Others could go further into the interior and do the same, if they were sure of protection; but till some understanding with the planters is reached, and the status of the Rebel planters themselves is defined, this is almost impracticable. Something, however, must be done to disperse this unwholesome gathering at Newbern, or the tumor, thus neglected, may do serious injury.

A dispatch from General Sherman (on his way north from Savannah, and forced by bad weather to put in at Beaufort) had reached Newbern, while we were there, expressing a very earnest desire to see Chief Justice Chase; and on the return of the party, General Sherman’s vessel was lying at the wharf, opposite the railroad terminus, awaiting us. Nervous and restless as ever, the General looked changed (and improved) since the old campaigns in the South-west. He was boiling over with pride at the performances of his army through the winter, and all the more indignant, by consequence, at the insults and injustice he imagined himself to have received, in consequence of his arrangement with Johnston. “I fancied the country wanted peace,” he exclaimed. “If they don’t, let them raise more soldiers.”

The General complained, and, doubtless, with some truth, if not justice, that the Government had never distinctly explained to him what policy it desired to have pursued. “I asked Mr. Lincoln explicitly, when I went up to City Point, whether he wanted me to capture Jeff. Davis, or let him escape, and in reply he told me a story.”

That “story” may now have a historical value, and I give it, therefore, as General Sherman said Mr. Lincoln told it—only premising that it was a favorite story with Mr. Lincoln, which he told many times, and in illustration of many points of public policy.

“I’ll tell you, General,” Mr. Lincoln was said to have begun, “I’ll tell you what I think about taking Jeff. Davis. Out in Sangamon county there was an old temperance lecturer, who was very strict in the doctrine and practice of total abstinence. One day, after a long ride in the hot sun, he stopped at the house of a friend, who proposed making him a lemonade. As the mild beverage was being mixed, the friend insinuatingly asked if he wouldn’t like just the least drop of something stronger, to brace up his nerves after the exhausting heat and exercise. ‘No,’ replied the lecturer, ‘I couldn’t think of it; I am opposed to it on principle. But,’ he added, with a longing glance at the black bottle that stood conveniently at hand, ‘if you could manage to put in a drop unbeknownst to me, I guess it wouldn’t hurt me much!’ Now, General,” Mr. Lincoln concluded, “I’m bound to oppose the escape of Jeff. Davis; but if you could manage to let him slip out unbeknownst-like, I guess it wouldn’t hurt me much!”

“And that,” exclaimed General Sherman, “is all I could get out of the Government as to what its policy was, concerning the Rebel leaders, till Stanton assailed me for Davis’ escape!”

A heavy gale blew on the coast all day Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and neither General Sherman’s Captain nor our own thought it wise to venture out. Meanwhile, delegations of the Beaufort people came off in little sail-boats to visit the “Wyanda,” bring us flowers and strawberries, and talk politics. Since their last demonstrations, a few days ago, they had toned down their ideas a good deal; and the amount of their talk, stripped of its circumlocution and hesitation, was simply this: that they were very anxious to re-organize, and would submit to anything the Government might require to that end. They said less against negro suffrage than before—frankly said it would be very obnoxious to the prejudices of nearly the whole population, but added, that if the Government insisted on it, they would co-operate with the negroes in reorganization. “But the poor, shiftless creatures will never be able to support themselves in freedom. We’ll have half of them in poor-houses before a year!”^[4] Nothing could overcome this rooted idea, that the negro was worthless, except under the lash. These people really believe that, in submitting to the emancipation of the slaves, they have virtually saddled themselves with an equal number of idle paupers. Naturally, they believe that to add a requirement that these paupers must share the management of public affairs with them is piling a very Pelion upon the Ossa of their misfortunes.

My room-mate, the Doctor, appointed me a “deacon for special service”—even he had absorbed military ways of doing things from our neighbors—and I arranged for his preaching in Beaufort, Sunday morning. The people were more than glad to welcome him, and he had a big congregation, with a sprinkling of black fringe around its edges, to appreciate his really eloquent discourse; while the trees that nodded at the pulpit windows shook out strains of music, which the best-trained choristers could never execute, from the swelling throats of a whole army of mocking-birds. An old Ironsides-looking man, who had occupied an elder’s seat beside the pulpit, rose at the close, and said he little expected to have ever seen a day like this. Everybody started forward, anticipating a remonstrance against the strong Unionism and anti-slavery of the Doctor’s sermon, but instead there came a sweeping and enthusiastic indorsement of everything that had been said. He saw a better day at hand, the old man said, and rejoiced in the brightness of its coming. How many an old man, like him, may have been waiting through all these weary years for the same glad day!

At other times there were fishing parties which caught no fish, though General Sherman sent them over enough fine ocean trout to enable them to make a splendid show on their return; and riding parties that got no rides, but trudged through the sand on foot, to the great delectation of the artist who sketched, con amore, the figures of gentlemen struggling up a sandy hill, eyes and ears and mouth full, hands clapped on hat to secure its tenure, and coat tails manifesting strong tendencies to secede bodily, while in the distance, small and indistinct, could be perceived the ambulance that couldn’t be made to go, and underneath was written the touching inscription, “How Captain Merryman and Mr. R. accepted Mrs. W.’s invitation, and took a ride on the beach at Fort Macon.”

At last the gale subsided a little, and we got off. Another salute was fired as we steamed out; the “Wayanda” returned a single shot in acknowledgment, and all too soon we were among the breakers, pitching and writhing, fore and aft, starboard and larboard, diagonally crosswise and backward, up to the sky and down, till the waves poured over the deck, and the masts seemed inclined to give the flags and streamers at their tops a bath. But for some of us, at least, the seasickness was gone. Io Triumphe!