him one dollar, he would exclaim impulsively, "I work for you, Mass'r Will!" Sometimes, when he had been induced by his friends to enter a complaint against his master or mistress for wrongs done him, ludicrous and embarrassing scenes occurred in the freedmen's courts. "Now, Thomas," says the good lady, "can you have the heart to speak a word against your old, dear, kind mistress?" "No, missus, I neber will!" blubbers Thomas; and that is all the court can get out of him.

The reverence shown by the colored people toward the officers of the Bureau was often amusing. They looked to them for what they had formerly depended upon their masters for. If they had lost a pig, they seemed to think such great and all-powerful men could find it for them without any' trouble. They cheered them in the streets, and paid them at all times the most abject respect.

I was told that the blacks were quite as apt to keep their contracts as the whites; and that often, when they broke them, it was through the persuasion of some planter who lacked laborers. "Look here, Sam, I'm giving two dollars a month more than this man you are at work for; why don't you come and live with me?" A respectable planter was fined a hundred and fifty dollars for this offence, by the Bureau, whilst I was at Macon. "It is one of the worst offences we have to deal with," said Colonel Lambert, "and one that we punish most severely."

It was the popular belief that the agents of the Bureau had control of funds arising from such fines, and that they appropriated them pretty freely to their own use. On the contrary, they were required at the end of each month to make returns and forward all funds on hand to the chief quartermaster of the State, who alone was authorized to apply them in necessary expenditures.

There were four freedmen's schools in Macon, with eleven teachers and a thousand pupils. There was a night-school of two-hundred children and adults, where I saw men of my own age learning their letters, (and thought, "What if I was now

first learning my letters?") and gray-haired old men and women forming, with slowness and difficulty, by the aid of spectacles, the first characters in the writing-book. The teachers were furnished by the American Missionary Association, the freedmen paying for their own books, (an item with the booksellers,) and for the necessary fuel and lights.

Mr. Eddy, the superintendent, and an old experienced teacher, said to me: "The children of these schools have made in a given time more progress in the ordinary branches. of education than any white schools I ever taught. In mathematics and the higher sciences they are not so forward. The eagerness of the older ones to learn is a continual wonder to me. The men and women say, 'We work all day, but we'll come to you in the evening for learning, and we want you to make us learn; we 're dull, but we want you to beat it into us!

,,,

I was much interested in a class of young clergymen who recited in the evening to the young matron of the "teachers' home." One of them told me with tears of gratitude how kind and faithful all the teachers had been to them.

"Are you not mistaken?" I said. "I have been told a hundred times that the Southern people are your best friends.” He replied: "Georgia passed a law making it a penitentiary offence, punishable with five years' imprisonment, to teach a slave to read. Now we are no longer slaves, and we are learning to read. They may deceive you, but we know who are our best friends."

I was repeatedly assured by earnest secessionists that there were no Union men in Georgia; that, soon or late, all went into the rebellion. But one day I met an old man who denied the charge with indignation.

"I am sixty-five years old. I fought for the spot where Macon now stands, when it was Indian territory. I don't know what they mean by no Union men. If to fight against secession from first to last, and to oppose way, makes a Union man, I was that. Of course I paid taxes, because I could n't help it. And when Stoneman

the war in every

raided on us, and every man that could bear arms was pressed, I went with the rest, and was all day behind the breastworks. But I've always spoke my mind, and being an old citizen, I never got hung yet. A majority of the people of Macon were with me, if they had only dared to say so. They hate the secessionists now worse than they hate the Yankees: no comparison! The secessionists now cry, 'No party!' but never a party stuck together closer than they do.

"The Confederates," he went on, "injured us ten times. more than the Yankees did. When Wilson came in last April, he put a guard at my house, who stayed with me seven weeks, and did his duty faithfully."

CHAPTER LXV.

ANDERSONVILLE.

JUST across the railroad track below Macon, in a pleasant pine grove, is the Fair Ground, where was located that thing of misery known to us as the Macon Prison. It was the "Yankee Prison," down here.

I visited the spot one bright morning after a shower, when the breezes and the sunshine were in the pine-tops overhead. The ground was covered with a thin growth of brown grass, wet with the rain: stepping along which I came suddenly to a quadrangular space, as arid as the hill of Golgotha. No marks were necessary to show where the stockade had stood, with its elevated scaffolding on which walked the Rebel guard. The stockade had been removed; but the blasted and barren earth remained to testify of the homesick feet that had trodden it into dreary sterility.

A little stream runs through a hollow below the Fair Ground, carrying off much of the filth of the town. From that stream our prisoners drank. The tub set in the side of the bank at the foot of the hill, and the ditch that conducted into it the water for their use, were still there. Guarded, they came down from the stockade, to this tub, of the contents of which they were not always permitted to have enough. "I used to hear 'em yell for water," said a negro living near. "I was bad off as a slave, but I never begun to be so bad off as they was. Some of 'em had no shoes for winter, and almost no clothes."

In the pine woods on the hill above the area of the stockade is "Death's Acre," the prison burying-ground, enclosed by a plain board fence, and containing little rows of humble graves marked with stakes, and numbered. I noticed num

WIRZ, AND HIS GUILTY MASTERS.

469

bers as high as two hundred and thirty. How many national soldiers lie buried in this lot I do not know.

I shall not dwell upon the sufferings endured by the inmates of this prison. They shrink into insignificance compared with the horrors of the great military prison of Georgia and the South. Neither of these do I purpose to say much. Enough, and more than enough has been spoken and written about them. The infamy of Andersonville is world-wide.

Passing through Washington in August, 1865, I one morning looked into the hot and steaming court-room where Captain Henry Wirz was on trial. In a somewhat worn broadcloth coat, with his counsel at his side occasionally whispering him, his elbow on a table, and his thin uneasy hand fingering his dark beard or supporting his chin; attenuated, bent, and harassed with the most terrible anxieties, for, however indifferent he may have been to the lives of other and better men, there was one life to which he was not indifferent, and which was now at stake; down-looking for the most part, but frequently glancing his quick sharp eye at the court or the witnesses; there sat the miserable man, listening to minutely detailed accounts of the atrocities of which he had been the instrument. The cause he had served with such savage fidelity, had perished; and the original authors of the enormities he had been employed to commit, stalked at large, or lay in temporary confinement, confidently expecting the executive clemency; while this wretched hireling, whose sin consisted in having done their work too well, was to suffer, not the just for the unjust, but the guilty dog for the still more guilty masters.

Fifty-eight miles below Macon, by the Southwestern Railroad, is the scene of the crimes against humanity for which Henry Wirz was punished with death. The place is set down as Anderson on maps and in guide-books; and that is the name by which it was known to the inhabitants of the country, until the immense hideous business the war brought to it dignified it with the title of ville.

It is a disagreeable town, with absolutely no point of inter