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colored teachers to send into by-places; which this school was designed to supply.

General Fiske had introduced a system of plantation schools, which was working well. Benevolent societies furnished the teachers, and planters were required to furnish the schoolhouses. A plantation of one hundred and fifty hands and forty or fifty children would have its own school-house. Smaller plantations would unite and build a school-house in some central location. These conditions were generally put into the contracts with the planters, who were beginning to learn that there was nothing so encouraging and harmonizing to the freedmen as the establishment of schools for their children.

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CHAPTER XL.

BY RAILROAD TO CORINTH.

I LEFT Nashville for Decatur on a morning of dismal rain The cars were crowded and uncomfortable, with many pas sengers standing. The railroad was sadly short of rollingstock, having (like most Southern roads) only such as happened to be on it when it was turned over to the directors by the government. It owned but three first-class cars, only one of which we had with us. The rest of the passenger train was composed of box-cars supplied with rude seats.

We passed the forts of the city; passed the battle-ground of Franklin, with its fine rolling fields, marked by entrenchments; and speeding on through a well-wooded handsome section of country, entered Northern Alabama. As my observations of that portion of the State will be of a general character, I postpone them until I shall come to speak of the State at large.

It was raining again when I left Decatur, ferried across the Tennessee in a barge manned by negroes. Of the railroad bridge burned by General Mitchell, only the high stone piers remained; and freight and passengers had to be conveyed over the river in that way. I remember a black ferryman whose stalwart form and honest speech interested me, and whose testimony with regard to his condition I thought worth noting down.

"I works for my old master. He raised me. He's a right kind master. I gits twenty dollars a month, and he finds me. Some of the masters about hyere is right tight on our people. Then thar's a heap of us that won't work, and that steal from the rest. They're my own color, but I can't help saying what's true. They just set right down, thinking they 're

CONVERSATION WITH A SOUTH CAROLINIAN. 291

free, and waiting for luck to come to 'em." But he assured me that the most of his people were at work, and doing well. From the miserable little ferry-boat we were landed on the other side in the midst of a drenching rain. To reach the cars there was a steep muddy bank to climb. The baggage was brought up in wagons and pitched down into mud several inches deep, where passengers had to stand in the pouring shower and see to getting their checks.

On the road to Tuscumbia I made the acquaintance of a young South Carolinian, whose character enlisted my sympathy, and whose candid conversation offers some points worth heeding.

"I think it was in the decrees of God Almighty that slavery was to be abolished in this way; and I don't murmur. We have lost our property, and we have been subjugated, but we brought it all on ourselves. Nobody that has n't experienced it knows anything about our suffering. We are discouraged : we have nothing left to begin new with. I never did a day's work in my life, and don't know how to begin. You see me in these coarse old clothes; well, I never wore coarse clothes in my life before the war."

Speaking of the negroes: "We can't feel towards them as you do; I suppose we ought to, but 't is n't possible for us. They've always been our owned servants, and we've been used to having them mind us without a word of objection, and we can't bear anything else from them now. If that's wrong, we 're to be pitied sooner than blamed, for it's something we can't help. I was always kind to my slaves. I never whipped but two boys in my life, and one of them I whipped three weeks ago."

"When he was a free man?"

"Yes; for I tell you that makes no difference in our feeling towards them. I sent a boy across the country for some goods. He came back with half the goods he ought to have got for the money. I may as well be frank, — it was a gallon of whiskey. There were five gentlemen at the house, and I wanted the whiskey for them. I told Bob he stole it.

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Afterwards he came into the room and stood by the door, big, strong fellow, twenty-three years old. I said, Bob, what do you want?' He said, 'I want satisfaction about the whiskey.' He told me afterwards, he meant that he was n't satisfied I should think he had stolen it, and wanted to come to a good understanding about it. But I thought he wanted satisfaction gentlemen's fashion. I rushed for my gun. I'd have shot him dead on the spot if my friends had n't held me. They said I'd best not kill him, but that he ought to be whipped. I sent to the stable for a trace, and gave him a hundred and thirty with it, hard as I could lay on. I confess I did whip him unmercifully.'

"Did he make no resistance?"

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Oh, he knew better than that; my friends stood by to see me through. I was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That's the way we treat our servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used to the new order of things, — if we ever can."

--

"In the mean while, according to your own showing, it would seem that some restraint is necessary for you, and some protection for the negroes. On the whole, the Freedmen's

Bureau is a good thing, is n't it?"

He smiled: "May be it is; yes, if the nigger is to be free, I reckon it is; but it's a mighty bitter thing for us.”

Then, speaking of secession: "I had never thought much about politics, though I believed our State was right when she went out. But when the bells were ringing, and everybody was rejoicing that she had seceded, a solemn feeling came over me, like I had never had in my life, and I could n't help feeling there was something wrong. I went through the war; there were thousands like me. In our hearts we thought more of the Stars and Stripes than we did of the old rag we were fighting under.”

He was going to Mississippi to look after some property left there before the war. But what he wished to do was to go North: "only I know I would n't be tolerated, — I know a man could n't succeed in business there, who was pointed out as a Rebel "

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The same wish, qualified by the same apprehension, was frequently expressed to me by the better class of young Southern men ; and I always took pains to convince them that they would be welcomed and encouraged by all enlightened communities in the Northern States.

It was a dismal night in the cars. The weather changed, and it grew suddenly very cold. Now the stove was red hot; and now the fire was out, with both car-doors wide open at some stopping-place.

At two in the morning we reached Corinth. A driver put me into his hack, and drove about town, through the freezing mud, to find me a lodging. The hotels were full. The boarding-houses were full, all but one, in which, with a fellow-traveller, I was fortunate enough at last to find a room with two beds.

It was a large, lofty room, the door fifteen feet high from the floor, the walls eighteen feet. It had been an elegant apartment once; but now the windows were broken, the plastering and stucco-work disfigured, the laths smashed in places, there were bullet-holes through the walls, and large apertures in the wainscots. The walls were covered with devices, showing that Federal soldiers had been at home there; such as a shield, admirably executed, bearing the motto: "The Union, it must be preserved"; "Heaven Bless our Native Land"; "God of Battles, speed the Right"; and so forth.

The beds were tumbled, some travellers having just got out of them to take the train. A black woman came in to make them. The lady of the house also came in, a fashionably bred Southern woman, who had been reduced, by the fortunes of the Rebellion, from the condition of a helpless mistress of many servants, to that of a boarding-house keeper.

I asked for a single room, which I was somewhat curtly told I could n't have. I then asked for more bedclothes, for the weather continued to grow cold, and the walls of the room offered little protection against it. She said, "I reckon you're mighty particular!" I replied that she was quite correct in