CHAPTER XVI.SPOTTSYLVANIA COURT-HOUSE.

CHAPTER XVI.SPOTTSYLVANIA COURT-HOUSE.

Elijah wished to drive me the next day to Spottsylvania Court-House, and, as an inducement for me to employ him, promised to tackle up his mare. He also proposed various devices for softening the seats of his wagon. No ingenuity of plan, however, sufficed to cajole me. There was a livery-stable in Fredericksburg, and I had conceived a strong prejudice in its favor.

The next morning, accordingly, there might have been seen wheeling up to the tavern-door a shining vehicle,—a bran-new buggy with the virgin gloss upon it,—drawn by a prancing iron-gray in a splendid new harness. The sarcastic stable-man had witnessed my yesterday’s departure and return, and had evidently exhausted the resources of his establishment to furnish forth a dazzling contrast to Elijah’s sorry outfit. The driver was a youth who wore his cap rakishly over his left eyebrow. I took a seat by his side on a cushion of the softest, and presently might have been seen riding out of Fredericksburg in that brilliant style,—nay,wasseen, by one certainly, who was cut to the heart. We drove by the “stonewall” road under the Heights, and passed a house by the corner of which a thin-visaged “old man” of fifty was watering a sad little beast at a well. The beast was “that mare”; and the old man was Elijah. I shall never forget the look he gave me. I bade him a cheerful good-morning; but his voice stuck in his throat; he could not say “good-morning.” Our twinkling wheels almost grazed the hubs of the old wagon standing in the road as we passed.

That I might have nothing to regret, the stable-keeper had given me a driver who was in the Spottsylvania battle.

“You cannot have seen much service, at your age,” I said, examining his boyish features.

“I was four year in de army, anyhow,” he replied, spitting tobacco-juice with an air of old experience. “I enlisted when I was thirteen. I was under de quartermaster at fust; but de last two year I was in de artillery.”

I observed that he useddeforthealmost invariably, with many other peculiarities of expression which betrayed early association with negroes.

“What is your name?”

“Richard H. Hicks.”

“What is your middle name?”

“I ha’n’t got no middle name.”

“What does theHstand for?”

“Hstands for Hicks: Richard H. Hicks; dat’s what dey tell me.”

“Can’t you read?”

“No, I can’t read. I never went to school, and never had no chance to learn.”

Somehow this confession touched me with a sadness I had not felt even at the sight of the dead men in the woods. He, young, active, naturally intelligent, was dead to a world without which this world would seem to us a blank,—the world of literature. To him the page of a book, the column of a newspaper, was meaningless. Had he been an old man, or black, or stupid, I should not have been so much surprised. I thought of Shakspeare, David, the prophets, the poets, the romancers; and as my mind glanced from name to name on the glittering entablatures, I seemed to be standing in a glorious temple, with a blind youth at my side.

“Did you ever hear of Sir Walter Scott?”

“No, I never heerd of that Scott. But I know a William Scott.”

“Did you ever hear of Longfellow?”

“No, I never heerd of him?”

“Did you never hear of a great English poet called Lord Byron?”

“No, sir, I never knowed dar was such a man.”

What a gulf betwixt his mind and mine! Sitting side by side there, we were yet as far apart as the great globe’s poles.

“Do you mean to go through life in such ignorance?”

“I don’t know; I’d learn to read if I had de chance.”

“Find a chance! make a chance! Even the little negro boys are getting the start of you.”

“I reckon I’ll go to school some dis winter,” said he. “Dar’s go’n’ to be a better chance fo’ schools now; dat’s what dey say.”

“Why now?” I asked.

“I don’t know; on’y dey say so.”

“You think, then, it was a good thing that the Confederacy got used up and slavery abolished?”

“It mought be a good thing. All I know is, it’s so, and it can’t be ho’ped” (helped). “It suits me well enough. I’ve been gitt’n’ thirty dollars a month dis summer, and that’s twicet mo’e ’n I ever got befo’e.”

I could not discover that this youth of seventeen had ever given the great questions involving the welfare of his country a serious thought. However, the vague belief he had imbibed regarding better times coming in consequence of emancipation, interested me as a still further evidence of the convictions entertained by the poorer classes on this subject.

As we rode over the hills behind Fredericksburg, a young fellow came galloping after us on a mule.

“Whar ye go’n’, Dick?”

“I’m go’n’ to de battle-field wi’ dis gentleman.”

“He’s from the No’th, then,” said the young fellow.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because no South’n man ever goes to the battle-fields: we’ve seen enough of ’em.” He became very sociable as we rode along. “Ye see that apple-tree? I got a right good pair o’ pants off one o’ your soldier’s under that tree once.”

“Was he dead?”

“Yes. He was one of Sedgwick’s men; he was killed when Sedgwick took the Heights. Shot through the head. Thepants wa’n’t hurt none.” And putting spurs to his mule, he galloped ahead.

I noticed that he and Richard, like many of the young men, white and black, I had seen about Fredericksburg, wore United States army trousers.

“Dey was all we could git one while,” said Richard. “I reckon half our boys ’u’d have had to go widout pants if it had n’t been for de Union army. Dar was right smart o’ trad’n’ done in Yankee clothes, last years o’ de wa’.”

“Did you rob a dead soldier of those you have on?”

“No; I bought dese in Fredericksburg. I never robbed a dead man.”

“But how did you know they were not taken from a corpse?”

“Mought be; but it couldn’t be ho’ped. A poo’ man can’t be choice.”

Richard expressed great contempt—inspired by envy, I thought—of the young chap riding the mule.

“United States gov’ment give away a hundred and fifty old wore-out mules in Fredericksburg, not long ago; so now every lazy fellow ye see can straddle his mule! He a’n’t nobody, though he thinks he’s a heavy coon-dog!”

“What do you mean by aheavy coon-dog?”

“Why, ye see, when a man owns a big plantation, and a heap o’ darkeys, and carries a heavy pocket, or if he’s do’n’ a big thing, den we call him a heavy coon-dog. Jeff Davis was a heavy coon-dog; but he’s a light coon-dog now!”

Our route lay through a rough, hilly country, never more than very thinly inhabited, and now scarcely that. About every two miles we passed a poor log house in the woods, or on the edge of overgrown fields,—sometimes tenantless, but oftener occupied by a pale, poverty-smitten family afflicted with the chills. I do not remember more than two or three framed houses on the road, and they looked scarcely less disconsolate than their log neighbors.

It is twelve miles from Fredericksburg to Spottsylvania Court-House. At the end of nine or ten miles we began tomeet with signs of military operations,—skirmish-lines, rifle-pits, and graves by the roadside.

Rising a gentle ascent, we had a view of the Court-House, and of the surrounding country,—barren, hilly fields, with here and there a scattered tree, or clump of trees, commonly pines, and boundaries of heavier timber beyond. There were breastworks running in various directions,—along by the road, across the road, and diagonally over the crests. The country was all cut up with them; and I found the Rebel works strangely mixed up with our own. As our army advanced, it had possessed itself of the enemy’s rifle-pits, skirmish-line, and still more important intrenchments, and converted them to its own use.

Grant’s main line of breastworks, very heavy, constructed of rails and stakes and earth, crosses the road at nearly right angles, and stretches away out of sight on either side over the hills and into the woods. I was reminded of what Elijah had told me the day before at Brock’s Road, in the Wilderness. “Grant’s breastworks run thirty miles through the country, from near Ely’s Ford on the Rapidan, spang past Spottsylvany Court-House and the Mattapony River.”

The road to the Court-House runs south. On the left was Beverly’s house, and a shattered empty house on the right. Richard pointed out the hill on which his battery was stationed early in the battle. “We had to git away f’om dar, though. Your batteries drove us.”

We rode on to the Court-House: a goodly-brick building, with heavy pillars in front, one of which had been broken off by a shell, leaving a corner of the portico hanging in the air. There were but six other buildings of any importance in the place,—one jail, one tavern, (no school-house,) one private dwelling, and three churches; all of brick, and all more or less battered by artillery.

Entering the Court-House amid heaps of rubbish which littered the yard about the doors, I had the good fortune to find the county clerk at his desk. He received me politely, and offered to show me about the building. It had been wellriddled by shot and shell; but masons and carpenters were at work repairing damages; so that there was a prospect of the county, in a few months, having a court-house again.

“What is most to be regretted,” the clerk said, “is the destruction of documents which can’t be restored. All the records and papers of the court were destroyed by the Union soldiers after they got possession.” And he showed me a room heaped with the fragments. It looked like a room in a rag-man’s warehouse.

Returning to his office, he invited me to sit down, and commenced talking freely of the condition and prospects of the country. The area of corn-land planted was small; but the soil had been resting two or three years, the season had been favorable, and the result was an excellent crop. “We shall probably have a surplus to dispose of for other necessaries.” The county had not one third the number of horses, nor one tenth the amount of stock, it had before the war. Many families were utterly destitute. They had nothing whatever to live upon until the corn-harvest; and many would have nothing then. The government had been feeding as many as fifteen hundred persons at one time.

“How many of these were blacks?”

“Perhaps one fifth.”

“How large a proportion of the population of the county are blacks?”

“Not quite one half.”

“The colored population require proportionately less assistance, then, than the white?” He admitted the fact. “How happens it?” I inquired; for he had previously told me the old hackneyed tale, that the negroes would not work, and that in consequence they were destined to perish like the Indians.

“They’ll steal,” said he; and he made use of this expression, which he said was proverbial: “An honest nigger is as rare as a lock of har on the palm of my hand.”

“But,” I objected, “it seems hardly possible for one class of people to live by stealing in a country you describe as so destitute.”

“A nigger will live on almost nothing,” he replied. “It isn’t to be denied, however, but that some of them work.”

He criticised severely the government’s system of feeding the destitute. “Hundreds are obtaining assistance who are not entitled to any. They have only to go to the overseers of the poor appointed by government, put up a poor mug, and ask for a certificate in a weak voice; they get it, and come and draw their rations. Some draw rations both here and at Fredericksburg, thus obtaining a double support, while they are well able to work and earn their living, if left to themselves. The system encourages idleness, and does more harm than good. All these evils could be remedied, and more than half the expense saved the government, if it would intrust the entire management of the matter in the hands of citizens.”

“Is it the whites, or the blacks, who abuse the government’s bounty?”

“The whites.”

“It appears, then, that they have the same faults you ascribe to the blacks: they are not over-honest, and they will not work unless obliged to.”

“Yes, there are shiftless whites to be sure. There’s a place eight miles west from here, known as Texas, inhabited by a class of poor whites steeped in vice, ignorance, and crime of every description. They have no comforts, and no energy to work and obtain them. They have no books, no morality, no religion; they go clothed like savages, half sheltered, and half fed,—except that government is now supporting them.”

“Do the whites we are feeding come mostly from that region?”

“O, no; they come from all over the county. Some walk as far as twenty miles to draw their fortnight’s or three weeks’ rations. Some were in good circumstances before the war; and some are tolerably well off now. A general impression prevails that this support comes from a tax on the county; so every man, whether he needs it or not, rushes in for a share. It is impossible to convince the country people that it is the United States government that is feeding them. Why,sir, there are men in the back districts who will not yet believe that the war is over, and slavery at an end!”

“It appears,” said I, “that ignorance is not confined to the region you call Texas; and that, considering all things, the whites are even more degraded than the blacks. Why doesn’t some prophet of evil arise and predict that the white race, too, will die out because it is vicious and will not work?”

“The whites are a different race, sir,—a different race,” was the emphatic, but not very satisfactory reply. “The negro cannot live without the care and protection of a master.”

“You think, then, the abolition of slavery a great misfortune?”

“A great misfortune to the negroes, certainly; but not to the whites: we shall be better off without them.”

“It is singular that the negroes have no fear of the fate you predict for them. They say, on the contrary, ‘We have been supporting our masters and their families all our lives, and now it is a pity if we cannot earn a living for ourselves.’”

“Well, I hope they will succeed!”

This is the reply the emancipated slave-owners almost invariably make to the above argument; sometimes sarcastically, sometimes gravely, sometimes commiseratingly, but always incredulously. “The negro is fated;” this is the real or pretended belief; and this they repeat, often with an ill-concealed spirit of vindictiveness, an “I-told-you-so!” air of triumph, until one is forced to the conclusion that their prophecy is their desire.

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