V

VMARCHING THROUGH GEORGIATravelingfrom Chattanooga to Atlanta the mind inevitably reverts to the American Civil War, for in 1863 the victory of the North marched from Chattanooga and the famous battle of Lookout Mountain to the taking of Atlanta and the discomfiture of Georgia. The glorious Stars and Stripes came victoriously out of the Northern horizon, climbed each hill, dipped and climbed again, with a clamorous, exultant Northern soldiery behind it. General Sherman began to gather his great fame, while General Lee, the adventuresome Southern leader, allowed himself to be cut off in Virginia. The efforts of the South had been very picturesque, like the play of a gambler with small resources and enormous hopes, but the shades of ruin gathered about her and began to negative the charm of her beginnings. Lincoln had proclaimed the freedom of the slaves. The South pretended that in any case slavery could not survive the war, and in token of this she enlisted Negro soldiers, making them free men from the moment of enlistment. In military extremity policy promises much which afterwardsingrate security will not ratify. The Southern planter might have obtained some measure of indemnification for the loss of his slaves had he come to terms in time. But he hoped somehow he might win the right to manage his Negroes as he wished without interference. There was the same violent state of mind on the subject of the Negroes as slaves as there is now on the subject of the Negroes as free men. All that was missing was the white-woman talk. Though originally the colonists had been generally opposed to the introduction of slavery, yet slavery had taken captive and then poisoned most men’s minds. The South chose to fight to the end rather than sacrifice the institution prematurely. There was a pride, as of Lucifer, in the Southerner, too, a belief in himself that foredoomed him to be hurled into outer darkness and to fall through space for nine days. Sherman’s army, when it burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia laying the country waste, was inspired with something like the wrath of God.In order to see the ex-slave and ex-master to-day, it is necessary to dwell not only in cities but in the country, and I chose to walk across the State of Georgia as the best way to ascertain what life in the country was like. And I followed in the way Sherman had gone. There, if anywhere, it seemed to me, the reactions of the war and of slavery must be apparent to-day.Sherman was something of a Prussian. He was a capable and scientific soldier. From an enemy’s standpoint, he was not a humanitarian. War to him was a trade of terror and blood, and he was logical. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said he. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” And when he had captured Atlanta he ordered the whole population to flee.If they cared to go North, they would find their enemies not unkind. If they thought there was safety in the South—then let them go further south to whatever protection the beaten Southern Army could afford.So North and South they fled, the people of Atlanta, but mostly South, for they were bitter; and the roads filled with the pitiful array of thousands of men and women and children with their old-fashioned coaches, with their barrows, with their servants, with those faithful Blacks who still heeded not the fact that “the day of liberation had arrived.” All under safe-conduct to Hood’s army.What complaints, what laments, as the proud Southern population took the road. A lamentation that is heard till now! And when the people had gone, the city of Atlanta was set on fire. Sherman had decided to march to the sea, and he could not afford to leave an enemy population in his rear, nor could he allow the chance that secret arsenals might exist there after hehad gone. It was a never to be forgotten spectacle, “the heaven one expanse of lurid fire, the air filled with flying, burning cinders.” “We were startled and awed,” says a soldier who marched with the rest, “seeing vast waves and sheets of flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty billows—a gigantic sea of fire.” Small explosions arranged by the engineers were punctuated by huge explosions when hidden stores of ammunition were located, and while these added ruin to ruin in the city they sounded as lugubrious and awful detonations to the soldiery on the road. Depots, churches, shops, warehouses, homes flared from every story and every window. Those who remained in the town were few, but it was impossible not to be stirred if not appalled. A brigade of New England soldiers was the last to leave, and marched out by Decatur Street, led by the band of the 33rd Massachusetts regiment, playingJohn Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in his graveHis soul is marching on—the lurid glare of the fire gleaming upon their bayonets and equipment, inflaming their visages and their eyes which were already burning with the war faith of the North.That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of theFair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them, as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire. On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in medicine, law, and business inthe city. They roll along in the joyous freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is. How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows in their faces!“We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some hundreds of lads in white shouting at thetop of their voices—they climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in a wild game of “Follow my leader.”Rah, rah, rah, they cry,rah, rah, rah, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time. Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten, and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned.Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and inits general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds, a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.”[3]Sherman himself had not decided on what point exactly he would march. But he never intended to march against Lee at Richmond, though the South and his own soldiers believed it. He always designed to reach the sea and reopen maritime communication with the North, and kept in mind Savannah, Port Royal, and even Pensacola in North Florida. So universal was the belief that he was marching on Richmond by way of Augusta that in all the country districts of Georgia where the left wing marched they will tell you still that the enemy was marching on Augusta.You shall maintain discipline, patience, and courage, said Sherman to his army.And I will lead you to achievements equal to any of thepast. We are commencing a long and difficult march to a new base, but all the chances of war have been provided for. The habitual order of march will be by four roads as nearly parallel as possible. The columns will start habitually at 7 a. m. and make about 15 miles a day. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. Horses, mules, and wagons belonging to the inhabitants may be appropriated by the cavalry and artillery freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly. All foragers will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and they will endeavor to leave each family reasonable means of sustenance. Negroes who are able-bodied and serviceable may be taken along if supplies permit. All non-combatants and refugees should go to the rear and be discouraged from encumbering us. Some ether time we may be able to provide for the poor Whites and Blacks seeking to escape the bondage under which they are now suffering. To corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., but the measure of the inhabitants’ hostility should be the measure of the ruin which commanders should enforce.[4]There was much more said in those very finely written and emphatic orders, but the sentencethat captured the imagination of the common soldier was certainly “the army will forage liberally on the country” which at once became a common gag among the men. For it spelt loot and fun and treasure trove and souvenirs and everything else that stirs a soldier’s mind. There is a human note throughout the whole of General Sherman’s orders, but no softness, rather an inexorable sternness. He had no patience with the cause of the Rebels nor with their ways of fighting. He and his staff were not averse from the idea of reading the population of Georgia and South Carolina a terrible lesson. While the march was military it inevitably became punitive. The cotton was destroyed, the farms pillaged, the slaves set free, the land laid waste. It was over a comparatively narrow strip of country, but Sherman was like the wrath of the Lord descending upon it.So out marched the four divisions (14th, 15th, 17th, and 20th) joyously singing as they went the soldiers’ songs of the war—One and FreeandHe who first the Flag would lowerSHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT.and all manner of variants of John Brown to the Glory Hallelujah chorus.The way out from Atlanta is now a road of cheap shops and Jewish pawnbrokers, Negrobeauty parlors, bag shops, gaudy cinema and vaudeville sheds, fruit stalls and booths of quack doctors and magic healers, vendors of the Devil’s corn cure, fortune tellers, and what not. A Negro skyscraper climbs upward. It is decidedly a “colored neighborhood,” and rough crowds of Negro laborers and poor Whites frolic through the litter of the street. Painfully the electric cars sound their alarms and budge and stop, and budge again, threading their way through the masses, glad to get clear after half a mile of it and then plunge into the comparative spaciousness of villadom outside the city.It is not as it was of yore. Where the bloody July battle of Atlanta raged a complete peace has now settled down amid the dignified habitations of the rich. Trees hide the view, and children play upon the lawns of pleasant houses while the older folk rock to and fro upon the chairs of shady verandas.Dignified Decatur dwells on its hill by the wayside, and has reared its pale monument to the Confederate dead. On this white obelisk the cause of the South is justified. Within sight of it rises an impressive courthouse, which by its size and grandeur protests the strength of the law in a county of Georgia.There was a gloomy sky with lowering clouds, and a warm, clammy atmosphere as if the air had been steamed over night and was now cooling a little. The road leaving behindDecatur and the suburbs of Atlanta became deep red, almost scarlet in hue, and ran between broad fields of cotton where every pod was bursting and puffing out in cotton wool. Men with high spindle-wheeled vehicles came with cotton bales done up in rough hempen netting. Hooded buggies rolled sedately past with spectacled Negroes and their wives. Drummers in Ford cars tooted and raced through the mud. Thus to Ingleside, where a turn in the road reveals the huge hump of Stone Mountain, shadowy and mystical like uncleft Eildons. All the soldiers as they bivouacked there or marched past on that bright November day of ‘64 remarked the mountain, and their gaze was turned to it in the spirit of curiosity and adventure.I fell in with a Mr. McCaulay who was a child when Sherman marched through. He thought the Germans in Belgium hardly equaled Sherman. Not only did his troops burn Atlanta but almost every house in the country. He pointed out new houses that had sprung up on the ruins of former habitations.... “A fence used to run right along here, and there were crops growing. No, not cotton; there was not the demand for cotton in those days, and not nearly so much grown in the State. Over on that side of the road there was a huge encampment of soldiers, and I remember stealing out to it to listen to the band.“The foragers came to the houses and took every bit of food—left us bone dry of food. They also took our horses and our mules and our cows and our chickens. Sometimes a family would have a yoke of oxen hidden in the wood, but that would be all that they had. Everyone had to flee, and all were destitute. It was a terrible time. But we all stood by one another and shared one another’s sorrows and helped one another as we could.“All colored folk also stood by us. I expect you’ve read, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ but the picture is terribly overdrawn there.”“I did not know these told the story of the march,” said I.“They do not. But they give an account of the Negroes that is entirely misleading. The North has queered the Negro situation by sending all manner of people down here to stir the Negro up against us. Till we said, ‘You and your niggers can go to the devil’—and we left them alone.“But that was a mistake, and we are realizing it now, and intend to take charge of the education of the Negro ourselves, and be responsible for him spiritually as well as physically. There never was a better relationship between us than there is now.“And I—I was brought up among them as a child, as an equal, played with them, wallowedwith them in the dirt, slept with them. They’re as near to me as flesh and blood can be.”It was curious to receive this outpouring when I had not mentioned the Negro to him at all and seemed merely curious concerning Sherman’s march. It is, however, characteristic of the South: the subject of the treatment of the Negro recurs likeidée fixe.At Lithonia, after a meal of large yellow yams and corn and chicken and biscuits and cane syrup, I called on old Mrs. Johnson, who lived over the way from Mrs. Jones. Lithonia was much visited by the cavalry. Decatur was stripped of everything, and Lithonia fared as badly in the end. Men came into the farmyard and there and then killed the hogs and threw them on to waiting wagons. These were foragers from the camps outside Atlanta. But one day someone came with the news—“Sherman has set fire to the great city and he’ll be here to-morrow.” And sure enough on the morrow his army began to appear on the road—the vanguard, and after that there seemed no end to the procession. The army was all day marching past with its commissariat wagons and its water wagons, its horses, its mules, and regiment after regiment. The despoiled farm wives and old folk could not help being thrilled, though they were enemies. General Slocum, who commanded the left wing of the army, wrote his name in pencil on granny’s doorpostwhen he stopped at her house with one or two of his staff.The Confederate soldiers were “Johnny Rebs” and the Union soldiers were “Billy Yanks.” Neither side was known to have committed any crimes against women or children, and the latter were crazy to watch the Yanks go by, though often their fathers were away in the hard-pressed Rebel armies.As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of their lives. So whenever I saw an old man or woman sitting on a veranda by the wayside I made bold to approach and ask what they knew of the great march, and how it had affected them, and the Negroes.They told of the methodical destruction of the railways, and of the innumerable bonfires whose flames and smokes changed the look of the sky. Every rail tie or sleeper was riven from its bed of earth and burned, and the long steel rails were heated over the fires. To make the fires bigger timber was brought from the woods, andevery rail was first made red-hot and then twisted out of shape—the favorite plan being for three or four soldiers to take the hot rail from the fire, place it between two trunks of standing pines, and then push till it was bent nigh double.They told of the stillness after the army had gone, and of the sense of ruin which was upon them with their cotton destroyed, and all their stores for the winter pillaged, and their live stock driven off. An old dame told me how the only live animal in her neighborhood was a broken-down army horse left behind to die by the enemy. The folk were starving, but a woman resuscitated the horse and went off with him to try and bring food to the village. She walked by his side for fear he would drop down dead—and first of all she sought a little corn for the horse, for “Old Yank” as she called him. Many a weary mile they walked together, only to find that “Sherman’s bummers” had been there before her. She slept the night in a Negro hut (a thing no white woman would dream of doing now) and the Negroes fed her and gave corn to the horse and sent her on her way. Out of several old buggies and derelict wheels a “contrapshun” had been rigged out and tied to the old horse, but it was not until beyond Covington and Conyers that a place was found which the foragers had missed, and the strange buggy was loaded for home.I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine. The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist. On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies! On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over with red mud. Among theold were graves of slaves, I was told, but since the war no Black has been buried with the White.An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black, weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah, and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets, content that it is nolonger twilight, have ceased chirping, and exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their footsteps in the sand.Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod. The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed, but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away. Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares. There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jacksonwhen the latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four years ...!”He seemed appalled at his own age.“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”“At seventeen years many their fortunes seekBut at fourscore it is too late a week”said I sotto voce.“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now. We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is the allotted span, but....”I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of the “Coming of theLord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance. Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s messenger.So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—carrying salvation to the sea—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders to corps commanders and thenpassed on to all ranks. The men slept in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock, when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here, another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey, roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well, and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodderwere provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of everything?) moved on.There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’ Georgia” has caught it:Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free!So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea,When we were marching thro’ Georgia.The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers, the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn. Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age and despair. It is adiversified country of hill and dale, with occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns, which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.The Southern white man builds large, has great joy in his home, and would love to live on a grand scale with an army of retainers. The Negro landowner does not imitate him, and builds a less impressive type of home, neither so large nor so inviting. Rich colored farmers are, however, infrequent. The mass of the Negro population is of the laboring class, and even those who rent land and farm it for themselves are very poor and sunk in economic bondage. Their houses are mostly one-roomed wooden arks, mere windowless sheds resting on four stones, a stone at each corner. Furniture, if any, was of a rudimentary kind. “See how they live,” said a youth to me. “Just like animals, and that’s all they are.”“Why don’t you have any windows?” I asked of a girl sitting on the floor of her cabin.“They jus’ doan’ make ‘em with windows,” she replied. “But we’ve got a window in this side.”“Yes, but without glass.”“Ah, no, no glass.”“Is it cold in winter?”“Yes, mighty cold.”Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism,Don’t walk if you can rideseemed to have been changed into,Don’t stir forth till you can get a lift, and white men picked up Negroes and Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost my car somewhere.A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people were a little dumbfoundedwhen I said I was following in Sherman’s footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that. “Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat the bread of bitterness like Cain——”After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be. Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinleysaid that the character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say. Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a poor store keeper:“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”“’Deed, sir, I do.”“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up, asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”On the other hand the rich, the owners of large plantations, remained in many cases still virulent.“I know Sherman is in hell,” said a Mr. R—— of historic family. “When my mother lay sick in bed the soldiers came and set fire to our cotton gin and all our barns. They came upon us like a tribe of Indians and burst into every room, ransacking the place for jewelry and valuable property. I was a small boy at the time, but I shall never forget it. They took the bungs from all our barrels and let the syrup run to waste in the yard because they themselves wanted no more of it. They killed our hogs and our cows before our eyes and threw the meat to the niggers. Yes, sir. A year or so back Sherman’s son said he was going to make a tour along the way his daddy had gone—to see what a wonderful thing his daddy had done. Lucky for him he changed his mind. We’d a strung him to a pole, sure——”Such sharp feeling was, however, certainly exceptional. Near Eatonton was a Mr. Lynch of Lynchburg, storekeeper, postmaster, wheelwright, and blacksmith all in one. He averred that they were “hugging and kissing the Yankees now, just as they would be hugging and kissing the Germans in a few years.”“There’s mean fellows on every side,” said he. “You don’t tell me that there’s no mean fellows among the English, the French, and the Italians. I don’t believe all the stories about the Germans. I remember what they used to say about the Yankees. They get mighty madwith me when I tell ‘em, but there’s plenty of mean fellows on both sides.”The village was named after the old man’s grandfather—an Irish settler. It is just beside the old Eatonton factory which Sherman burned down. At the next turn in the road there is a roaring as of many waters. A screen of pine and rank grass undergrowth hides an impressive sight. A step inward takes you to the romantic stone foundation of the old factory; you can climb up on one of the pillars and look out. The interior of the factory is all young trees and moss and tangles of evergreen, but beyond it rushes a mighty stream over a partially dammed broad course, red as blood, but wallowing forward in creamy billows and white foam.The factory was used to weave coarse cotton cloth, and had evidently been worked by water power. Quite forgotten now, unvisited, it was yet a picturesque memorial of the march, and I was surprised to see no names of visitors scrawled on the walls of its massive old foundations.I walked into Eatonton by a long and picturesque wooden bridge over the crimson river, a strange and wonderful structure completely roofed, and shady as a tunnel. The evening sun blazed on the old wood and on the red tide and on the greenery beyond, making the scene look like a colored illustration of a child’s tale.Eatonton, where Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were actually born, is now a hustling “city” with bales of cotton fluff higglety-pigglety down its streets, and again beautiful bales of extra quality in the windows of its cotton brokers. There are also modern mills where cotton is being spun. The business men on the streets talk of “spots” and “futures”—spot cotton being apparently that which you have on the spot and can sell now, and futures being crops yet to be picked, which, presuming on kind Providence, may be sold and re-sold many times before being grown. What is said of Eatonton may be said of Milledgeville, twenty miles further on. It is a cotton town. It is a gracious seat as well, with a scent of history about its old buildings, but it impresses one as a great cotton center. The streets of Milledgeville were almost blocked with cotton bales. It would have been easy to fight a battle of barricades there. The principal church looked as if it were fortified with cotton bales, and it would have been possible to walk fifty or a hundred yards stepping on the tops of the bales. Bales were on the tidy lawns of shady villas or stacked on the verandas, and everywhere the hard-working gins were roaring and grinding as they tore out the cottonseed from the white fluff and left cotton that could be spun. Wisps of cotton lint blew about all over the streets, and cotton was entangled in dogs’ fur and children’s hair. In theporches of Negro cabins it was heaped high till the entrance to the doorway itself was blocked.Cotton was booming at Savannah and New Orleans, and despite talk of the weevil destroying the pod, and of bad weather and bad crops, it was clear that Georgia was very prosperous. Men and women discussed the price of cotton as they might horse races or State-lottery results or raffles. Everyone wanted room to store his cotton and hold it till the maximum price was reached. My impression of Georgia now was that it was not nearly so rich in live stock and in food as it had been in the time of Sherman. In his day it grew its own food and was the supply source of two armies. To-day it imports the greater part of its food. It sells its cotton and buys food from the more agricultural States of the South. It might have been thought to be a land overflowing with fruit and honey and milk, but fruit and honey are cheaper in New York than there, and there is no margin of milk to give away. Meat is scarce and dear. There is no plenty on the table unless it be of sweet potatoes. I imagine that after Sherman’s raid the farmers felt discouraged, and decided never to be in a position to feed an enemy army again. There are many always urging the Georgian to grow corn and raise stock, and so make Georgia economically independent, but the farmer always meets the suggestion with the statement that cotton gives the largest return on any givenoutlay and takes least trouble. That is true, but it is largely because the Negro cotton picker is such a cheap laboring hand. A farm laborer would automatically obtain more than a cotton picker. The hypnotic effect of the slave past is strong and binding upon the Negroes. Perhaps it is still the curse of Georgia. There are still planters who drive their laborers with the whip and the gun—though the shortage of labor during the war caused these to be put up. It is not in money in the bank that one must reckon true prosperity. However, in this material way, Georgia has quite recovered from the Civil War. But she has lost a good many of the compensations of true agriculture; cotton is so commercial a product that there is no glamour about it, not even about the old plantations, unless it be that of the patient melancholy of the cotton pickers.VITRAMPING TO THE SEAI passedthrough two ancient capitals of Georgia, first Milledgeville, and then Louisville. The relationship which Milledgeville bore to Atlanta reminded me of the relationship of the old Cossack capital of the Don country to the modern industrial wilderness of South Russia called Rostof-na-Donu. But business is business, and there is only business in this land. Even along the way to the old capital it is always so many miles to Goldstein’s on the mile-posts instead of so many miles to Milledgeville.The old legislature sat at Milledgeville, but it fled at the approach of Sherman. It was a day of great astonishment when General Slocum paused in his supposed march upon Augusta and General Howard in his attack on Macon, and one came south from Madison while the other marched north from McDonough. There was an extraordinary sauve qui peut. Panic seized the politicians and the rich gentry of the place, for the rumor of the terrible ways of the foragers was flying ahead of the Union Army. Everyone strove to carry off or hide his treasures. They must have had terrible privationsand some adventures on the road trying to race the army, and they would have done better to remain to face the music, for no private effects were destroyed in this city. Similar scenes were enacted as at Covington. The darkies made a great day of jubilee, and hugged and kissed the soldiers who had set them free. The cotton was burned and made a great flare—seventeen hundred bales of it even in those days. The depots, magazines, arsenals, and factories were blown up. Governor Brown had fled with all his furniture, and Sherman in the governor’s house slept on a roll of army blankets on the bare floor.There are many signs of ease and refinement in the spacious streets of Milledgeville, though it has increased little in size since the war. It has large schools for the training of cadets and the training of girls. These are model institutions and are very valuable in Georgia. The place, however, seemed to lack the cultural significance it ought to have. But it is true that churches and Sunday schools were full. No shops of any kind were open on Sundays; the people had forgotten the taste of alcoholic drink and were ready to crusade against tobacco. They are not given to lynching, though they allowed some wild men from Atlanta to break open their jail some years ago and take away a Jew and hang him. But they are too content. At church on Sunday morning the pastor complainedthat while all were willing to give money to God none were willing to offer themselves. He invited any who were ready to give themselves unreservedly to God to step forth, and none did. And it was an eloquent appeal by a capable orator. I met an old recluse who was at the back of the church. He had tried to give himself to God but was now living at the asylum where he had found shelter, being otherwise without means. He had been a Baptist minister at a church near Stone Mountain, but rheumatism had intervened after twenty years’ work, and he could no longer stoop to immerse the candidates for baptism. He was an Englishman who had listened to Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s lectures, and he talked of Dean Farrar’s sermons and the good deeds of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He spoke as no one speaks to-day, good old measured Victorian English. He was a touching type of the despised and rejected. He loved talking to the Negro children in the “colored” school till the townsfolk warned him against it. His books form the nucleus of the town library, but the rats have gnawn all the bindings of his “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and I formed the opinion that poor R—— living on sufferance in the lunatic asylum was probably the best read man in Milledgeville.It is a delightful walk to Sandersville, over Buffalo Creek and over many streams crossedby the most fragile of bridges apparently never properly rebuilt since Wheeler’s cavalry destroyed them in the face of the oncoming army. Georgia used to have many excellent bridges, but it never really hindered the Yankee army by destroying them. It seems rather characteristic of the psychology of the people that they would not replace what they had had to destroy. Now at the foot of each long hill down which the automobiles tear is a trap of mere planks and gaps which chatters and indeed roars when passed over. Many motorists get into the mud.Sandersville is a busy town hung in gloomy bunting which no one has had time to take down since the last county fair. It has a large, dusty, sandy square with a clock tower in the middle. There are great numbers of cars and lorries parked around. Cotton bales, old and new, fresh and decayed, lie on every street. Huge gins are working, and Negroes are busy shoveling oily-looking cottonseed into barns; cotton fluff is all over the roadways in little clots; every man is in his shirt; the soda bars do a great trade even in November. A stranger said to me “Come and have a drink” and we went in and had a “cherry dope.” There is an impressive-looking public library, much larger than at Milledgeville, with high frontal columns of unadorned old bricks mortared and laid in diamond fashion, a barred door, and an entrance so deep in cotton fluff, brickdust, and refuse that one might be pardonedfor assuming that learning was not now in repute. On the other hand there is a fine, well-kept cemetery with large mausoleums for the rich and tiny stones for the poor.Sandersville was the scene of one or two combats during the war. But when it is borne in mind that only a hundred of Sherman’s army died from all causes on its march to the sea, it will be understood that the strife was not serious. Sherman has been called a Prussian, and he certainly possessed military genius and understood soldiering as a mental science, but he always tried to save his men. He wished to win victories with the smallest possible loss of men, and he thought out his unorthodox plans of campaign with that in view. He could have lost half his army on this adventurous march to the sea. It was a most daring exploit, and if it had failed the whole responsibility would have been laid at Sherman’s door. But Sherman had thought the matter out, and he completely deceived his enemy. Once more after Milledgeville Slocum is seen to be threatening Augusta in the north and Howard is striking south. The cavalry is driving the enemy ahead and plunges northward to Louisville and Waynesboro, well on the way to Augusta. The enemy evacuates the central regions of Georgia, and Sherman’s infantry moves through unscathed. Foraging has become organized and systematic. The wagons amount to many thousands, and it is curious that the populationdid not destroy all vehicles and so prevent the army from carrying away so much. The doubt which General Sherman expressed at the beginning of the march that supplies might prove inadequate has entirely vanished, and the army has a crowd of Negro camp followers almost as big as itself. These eventually became a great hindrance, but they were evidently encouraged to join themselves to the soldiers in the Milledgeville and Sandersville district. They proved invaluable helps in the seeking out of hidden treasure and the pillaging of farmhouses. They knew the likely spots where valuables would be buried, and the soldiers knew how to worm out secrets even from the most faithful black servants on the big estates. One reason why Georgia burns and hangs more Negroes than any other State is probably because of the bitterness caused by the unstinted foraging and the “setting of the niggers against us” as they say.Be that as it may, the seeds of future hate are always sown in present wars, and “Sherman’s bummers” in their quest of spoil took little heed of any future reckoning. The Negroes led the soldiers even to the deepest recesses of swamps or forests, and showed the hollow tree or cave or hole where lay deposited the precious family plate and jewelry and money and even clothing. It was common to take from the planter not only hams, flour, meal, yams, sorghum molasses, butabove all things turkeys, so rare to-day along the line of Sherman’s march—How the turkeys gobbled which our commissaries found,How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,When we were marching thro’ Georgia!But the bummer did not stick at these. He would borrow grandfather’s dress coat and hat surviving from the old colonial days, and his mate would array himself in grandmother’s finery, and so attired would drive their wagon back to camp, hailed by the jests of the whole army; and if they met an officer on the way they would cry out mirthfully the text of the army order—The army will forage liberally on the country.It is said that no forager would ever sell any of his loot, that indeed it was a point of honor not to sell. The veterans of the North must therefore preserve many interesting mementoes of the South. Both officers and men took many tokens. There used to be an amusing euphemism current in Sherman’s army: it was—“A Southern lady gave me that for saving her house from being burned”—and if anyone said, “That’s a nice gold watch; where did you get it?” the soldier replied, “Oh, a Southern lady gave it to me,” etc.The army made camp by three o’clock every day, and it was after three that most of the unauthorized foraging expeditions took place. They were gay afternoons spent in singing andgambling, athletics and cock fighting. The South was found to be possessed of a wonderful race of fighting cocks. The enthusiasts of the sport rushed from farm yard to farm yard for astonished chanticleer, and having captured him fed him well and brought him up to a more martial type of life than that which in domesticated bliss he had enjoyed with his hens. Every company had its cock fighting tournament. Each regiment, each brigade, each division, and indeed each corps, had its champion. The winners of many bloody frays were soon nicknamed “Bill Sherman” or “Johnny Logan,” but the losing bird which began to fear to face its adversary would be hailed as Beauregard or Jeff Davis. The cock fight finals were of as great interest as the combat of the Reds and White Sox to-day, and perhaps more real.Besides game cocks each regiment had a great number of pets. These were mostly poor, homeless creatures on which the soldier had taken pity; dogs, singing birds, kids, who followed with the army and had the army’s tenderness lavished on them.So they went, marching and camping by old Louisville and the broad waters of the Ogeechee down to Millen. The old farmers say what an impressive sight it was to watch them go by on the Millen road with seemingly more wagons than men, with all the wagons bulging with spoil and drawn by well-fed horses and mules, withlong droves of cattle, and thousands of frenzied Negroes so frantic with joy that they seemed to have lost their heads and to be expecting the end of the world.Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff, and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none the less pleasant for that.There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them. The men wore loincloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way.“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations, taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and given the full rights of white American citizens.”The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it under the dominance of a free Negro majority.“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t progress any further.”“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges havearisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will arrive.”I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negrointelligentsia. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”; others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the humanitarians of New England.In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told their slaves thatthe Yanks would flog them and burn them or put them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed. The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,” and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradisehappy as the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with. There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day, and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shoutGlorywhen the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers, who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then, after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream. The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and the droves of cattle. Butfor Georgia and the Negro there set in the twilight of ruin and disillusion.Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors, and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the race of human individuals striving one against another.“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it. We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibilityof picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is calledpeonageand many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms ofpeonageprevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery.All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed aspeonage—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. Hewas lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belongedto them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,” said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foulodor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together, overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious,kandaliin Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are quite natural.“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching bottom.There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and barer than the worst you would seein Russia. Ex-serf has fared better than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’ had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’ she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has cooled the Southerner’sregard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women. Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of the South.Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous. A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered “No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was. Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children. The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much psychological truth in that.During these weeks on the roads of Georgiathree Negroes were burned in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men took pleasure in the auto-da-fé. A short while later near Macon a Negro was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however, that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It was not the executionnor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who enjoyed his torments.Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear to hear.I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was, at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was doneto the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race. For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud, as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery itself.When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering, exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of all this crime with a terrible judgment.”Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia as they passedthrough—so strongly did they resent the barbarity of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become common once more.The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry, and called it murder,not war, in a way which reminds one of the indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims. It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.The way is eastward to Sylvania and the Savannah River, and then south to the rice fields and the harbor. The road is deep in sand, and on each side is uncleared country with high yellow reeds below and lofty pines above. Persimmons, ripe and yellow, grow by the wayside, a luscious fruit, good when just rotten and full of softness and sun heat. Large bird-like butterflies gracefully flitting down the long corridors between the pines, and myriads of jumping mantises and grasshoppers suggest that it is not November. The golden foliage of an occasional beech reminds you that it is. The woods are deep and gloomy and melancholy. A poorer population lives by pitch-boiling and lumbering. Every pine tree is bearded with lichen. Moss hangs in long festoons from the branches. The great dark trunks are here and there silveredwith congealed floods of sap. Trenches two inches deep have been cut in the wood, and tin gutters and pots have been fixed up to collect the resin. Every other tree has a brown pot tied to it, and each pot is half full of the pearly liquid life of the trees. You emerge from the forest to the pretty clearing of Rincom with a Lutheran church which has a metal swan above the spire—symbol of the fact that the first congregation, the one that built the church, had come across the water from Europe. Six miles from Rincom is the oldest church in all this part of Georgia, the Ebenezer Chapel, founded by those first German settlers who sailed up the Savannah River, and in part founded the colony of Georgia. It also is a church of the swan. The forest is very dense, and Negroes with shotguns are potting at wild birds from the highway. Wayside cottages and churches seem almost overcome with the tillandsia, a subtropical mossy growth that seems to grow downward rather than upward. There is a slight clearing and a cemetery in the depth of the forest, and the hundreds of pines and cypresses and oaks about it are weeping with this hanging moss. The county is that of Effingham. Springfield, the capital, without electric light, deep in yellow sand, with a great public square where all the many trees look like weeping willows because of this gray-green tillandsia hair trailing and waving ten or twenty feet to a tress, is anobscure town. Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto God than those of the Whites. But above the counter in the chief store is writtenIn God we trust,All others pay cash.The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans. The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy, springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. Andrat,rat,rat, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which isalmost indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce anr. The Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden church of colored folk.I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton, and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.Then with the empty wagon we rolled off forSavannah, and the boy driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the “red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah, and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit, through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of world civilization once more.

VMARCHING THROUGH GEORGIATravelingfrom Chattanooga to Atlanta the mind inevitably reverts to the American Civil War, for in 1863 the victory of the North marched from Chattanooga and the famous battle of Lookout Mountain to the taking of Atlanta and the discomfiture of Georgia. The glorious Stars and Stripes came victoriously out of the Northern horizon, climbed each hill, dipped and climbed again, with a clamorous, exultant Northern soldiery behind it. General Sherman began to gather his great fame, while General Lee, the adventuresome Southern leader, allowed himself to be cut off in Virginia. The efforts of the South had been very picturesque, like the play of a gambler with small resources and enormous hopes, but the shades of ruin gathered about her and began to negative the charm of her beginnings. Lincoln had proclaimed the freedom of the slaves. The South pretended that in any case slavery could not survive the war, and in token of this she enlisted Negro soldiers, making them free men from the moment of enlistment. In military extremity policy promises much which afterwardsingrate security will not ratify. The Southern planter might have obtained some measure of indemnification for the loss of his slaves had he come to terms in time. But he hoped somehow he might win the right to manage his Negroes as he wished without interference. There was the same violent state of mind on the subject of the Negroes as slaves as there is now on the subject of the Negroes as free men. All that was missing was the white-woman talk. Though originally the colonists had been generally opposed to the introduction of slavery, yet slavery had taken captive and then poisoned most men’s minds. The South chose to fight to the end rather than sacrifice the institution prematurely. There was a pride, as of Lucifer, in the Southerner, too, a belief in himself that foredoomed him to be hurled into outer darkness and to fall through space for nine days. Sherman’s army, when it burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia laying the country waste, was inspired with something like the wrath of God.In order to see the ex-slave and ex-master to-day, it is necessary to dwell not only in cities but in the country, and I chose to walk across the State of Georgia as the best way to ascertain what life in the country was like. And I followed in the way Sherman had gone. There, if anywhere, it seemed to me, the reactions of the war and of slavery must be apparent to-day.Sherman was something of a Prussian. He was a capable and scientific soldier. From an enemy’s standpoint, he was not a humanitarian. War to him was a trade of terror and blood, and he was logical. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said he. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” And when he had captured Atlanta he ordered the whole population to flee.If they cared to go North, they would find their enemies not unkind. If they thought there was safety in the South—then let them go further south to whatever protection the beaten Southern Army could afford.So North and South they fled, the people of Atlanta, but mostly South, for they were bitter; and the roads filled with the pitiful array of thousands of men and women and children with their old-fashioned coaches, with their barrows, with their servants, with those faithful Blacks who still heeded not the fact that “the day of liberation had arrived.” All under safe-conduct to Hood’s army.What complaints, what laments, as the proud Southern population took the road. A lamentation that is heard till now! And when the people had gone, the city of Atlanta was set on fire. Sherman had decided to march to the sea, and he could not afford to leave an enemy population in his rear, nor could he allow the chance that secret arsenals might exist there after hehad gone. It was a never to be forgotten spectacle, “the heaven one expanse of lurid fire, the air filled with flying, burning cinders.” “We were startled and awed,” says a soldier who marched with the rest, “seeing vast waves and sheets of flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty billows—a gigantic sea of fire.” Small explosions arranged by the engineers were punctuated by huge explosions when hidden stores of ammunition were located, and while these added ruin to ruin in the city they sounded as lugubrious and awful detonations to the soldiery on the road. Depots, churches, shops, warehouses, homes flared from every story and every window. Those who remained in the town were few, but it was impossible not to be stirred if not appalled. A brigade of New England soldiers was the last to leave, and marched out by Decatur Street, led by the band of the 33rd Massachusetts regiment, playingJohn Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in his graveHis soul is marching on—the lurid glare of the fire gleaming upon their bayonets and equipment, inflaming their visages and their eyes which were already burning with the war faith of the North.That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of theFair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them, as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire. On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in medicine, law, and business inthe city. They roll along in the joyous freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is. How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows in their faces!“We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some hundreds of lads in white shouting at thetop of their voices—they climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in a wild game of “Follow my leader.”Rah, rah, rah, they cry,rah, rah, rah, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time. Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten, and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned.Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and inits general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds, a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.”[3]Sherman himself had not decided on what point exactly he would march. But he never intended to march against Lee at Richmond, though the South and his own soldiers believed it. He always designed to reach the sea and reopen maritime communication with the North, and kept in mind Savannah, Port Royal, and even Pensacola in North Florida. So universal was the belief that he was marching on Richmond by way of Augusta that in all the country districts of Georgia where the left wing marched they will tell you still that the enemy was marching on Augusta.You shall maintain discipline, patience, and courage, said Sherman to his army.And I will lead you to achievements equal to any of thepast. We are commencing a long and difficult march to a new base, but all the chances of war have been provided for. The habitual order of march will be by four roads as nearly parallel as possible. The columns will start habitually at 7 a. m. and make about 15 miles a day. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. Horses, mules, and wagons belonging to the inhabitants may be appropriated by the cavalry and artillery freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly. All foragers will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and they will endeavor to leave each family reasonable means of sustenance. Negroes who are able-bodied and serviceable may be taken along if supplies permit. All non-combatants and refugees should go to the rear and be discouraged from encumbering us. Some ether time we may be able to provide for the poor Whites and Blacks seeking to escape the bondage under which they are now suffering. To corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., but the measure of the inhabitants’ hostility should be the measure of the ruin which commanders should enforce.[4]There was much more said in those very finely written and emphatic orders, but the sentencethat captured the imagination of the common soldier was certainly “the army will forage liberally on the country” which at once became a common gag among the men. For it spelt loot and fun and treasure trove and souvenirs and everything else that stirs a soldier’s mind. There is a human note throughout the whole of General Sherman’s orders, but no softness, rather an inexorable sternness. He had no patience with the cause of the Rebels nor with their ways of fighting. He and his staff were not averse from the idea of reading the population of Georgia and South Carolina a terrible lesson. While the march was military it inevitably became punitive. The cotton was destroyed, the farms pillaged, the slaves set free, the land laid waste. It was over a comparatively narrow strip of country, but Sherman was like the wrath of the Lord descending upon it.So out marched the four divisions (14th, 15th, 17th, and 20th) joyously singing as they went the soldiers’ songs of the war—One and FreeandHe who first the Flag would lowerSHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT.and all manner of variants of John Brown to the Glory Hallelujah chorus.The way out from Atlanta is now a road of cheap shops and Jewish pawnbrokers, Negrobeauty parlors, bag shops, gaudy cinema and vaudeville sheds, fruit stalls and booths of quack doctors and magic healers, vendors of the Devil’s corn cure, fortune tellers, and what not. A Negro skyscraper climbs upward. It is decidedly a “colored neighborhood,” and rough crowds of Negro laborers and poor Whites frolic through the litter of the street. Painfully the electric cars sound their alarms and budge and stop, and budge again, threading their way through the masses, glad to get clear after half a mile of it and then plunge into the comparative spaciousness of villadom outside the city.It is not as it was of yore. Where the bloody July battle of Atlanta raged a complete peace has now settled down amid the dignified habitations of the rich. Trees hide the view, and children play upon the lawns of pleasant houses while the older folk rock to and fro upon the chairs of shady verandas.Dignified Decatur dwells on its hill by the wayside, and has reared its pale monument to the Confederate dead. On this white obelisk the cause of the South is justified. Within sight of it rises an impressive courthouse, which by its size and grandeur protests the strength of the law in a county of Georgia.There was a gloomy sky with lowering clouds, and a warm, clammy atmosphere as if the air had been steamed over night and was now cooling a little. The road leaving behindDecatur and the suburbs of Atlanta became deep red, almost scarlet in hue, and ran between broad fields of cotton where every pod was bursting and puffing out in cotton wool. Men with high spindle-wheeled vehicles came with cotton bales done up in rough hempen netting. Hooded buggies rolled sedately past with spectacled Negroes and their wives. Drummers in Ford cars tooted and raced through the mud. Thus to Ingleside, where a turn in the road reveals the huge hump of Stone Mountain, shadowy and mystical like uncleft Eildons. All the soldiers as they bivouacked there or marched past on that bright November day of ‘64 remarked the mountain, and their gaze was turned to it in the spirit of curiosity and adventure.I fell in with a Mr. McCaulay who was a child when Sherman marched through. He thought the Germans in Belgium hardly equaled Sherman. Not only did his troops burn Atlanta but almost every house in the country. He pointed out new houses that had sprung up on the ruins of former habitations.... “A fence used to run right along here, and there were crops growing. No, not cotton; there was not the demand for cotton in those days, and not nearly so much grown in the State. Over on that side of the road there was a huge encampment of soldiers, and I remember stealing out to it to listen to the band.“The foragers came to the houses and took every bit of food—left us bone dry of food. They also took our horses and our mules and our cows and our chickens. Sometimes a family would have a yoke of oxen hidden in the wood, but that would be all that they had. Everyone had to flee, and all were destitute. It was a terrible time. But we all stood by one another and shared one another’s sorrows and helped one another as we could.“All colored folk also stood by us. I expect you’ve read, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ but the picture is terribly overdrawn there.”“I did not know these told the story of the march,” said I.“They do not. But they give an account of the Negroes that is entirely misleading. The North has queered the Negro situation by sending all manner of people down here to stir the Negro up against us. Till we said, ‘You and your niggers can go to the devil’—and we left them alone.“But that was a mistake, and we are realizing it now, and intend to take charge of the education of the Negro ourselves, and be responsible for him spiritually as well as physically. There never was a better relationship between us than there is now.“And I—I was brought up among them as a child, as an equal, played with them, wallowedwith them in the dirt, slept with them. They’re as near to me as flesh and blood can be.”It was curious to receive this outpouring when I had not mentioned the Negro to him at all and seemed merely curious concerning Sherman’s march. It is, however, characteristic of the South: the subject of the treatment of the Negro recurs likeidée fixe.At Lithonia, after a meal of large yellow yams and corn and chicken and biscuits and cane syrup, I called on old Mrs. Johnson, who lived over the way from Mrs. Jones. Lithonia was much visited by the cavalry. Decatur was stripped of everything, and Lithonia fared as badly in the end. Men came into the farmyard and there and then killed the hogs and threw them on to waiting wagons. These were foragers from the camps outside Atlanta. But one day someone came with the news—“Sherman has set fire to the great city and he’ll be here to-morrow.” And sure enough on the morrow his army began to appear on the road—the vanguard, and after that there seemed no end to the procession. The army was all day marching past with its commissariat wagons and its water wagons, its horses, its mules, and regiment after regiment. The despoiled farm wives and old folk could not help being thrilled, though they were enemies. General Slocum, who commanded the left wing of the army, wrote his name in pencil on granny’s doorpostwhen he stopped at her house with one or two of his staff.The Confederate soldiers were “Johnny Rebs” and the Union soldiers were “Billy Yanks.” Neither side was known to have committed any crimes against women or children, and the latter were crazy to watch the Yanks go by, though often their fathers were away in the hard-pressed Rebel armies.As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of their lives. So whenever I saw an old man or woman sitting on a veranda by the wayside I made bold to approach and ask what they knew of the great march, and how it had affected them, and the Negroes.They told of the methodical destruction of the railways, and of the innumerable bonfires whose flames and smokes changed the look of the sky. Every rail tie or sleeper was riven from its bed of earth and burned, and the long steel rails were heated over the fires. To make the fires bigger timber was brought from the woods, andevery rail was first made red-hot and then twisted out of shape—the favorite plan being for three or four soldiers to take the hot rail from the fire, place it between two trunks of standing pines, and then push till it was bent nigh double.They told of the stillness after the army had gone, and of the sense of ruin which was upon them with their cotton destroyed, and all their stores for the winter pillaged, and their live stock driven off. An old dame told me how the only live animal in her neighborhood was a broken-down army horse left behind to die by the enemy. The folk were starving, but a woman resuscitated the horse and went off with him to try and bring food to the village. She walked by his side for fear he would drop down dead—and first of all she sought a little corn for the horse, for “Old Yank” as she called him. Many a weary mile they walked together, only to find that “Sherman’s bummers” had been there before her. She slept the night in a Negro hut (a thing no white woman would dream of doing now) and the Negroes fed her and gave corn to the horse and sent her on her way. Out of several old buggies and derelict wheels a “contrapshun” had been rigged out and tied to the old horse, but it was not until beyond Covington and Conyers that a place was found which the foragers had missed, and the strange buggy was loaded for home.I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine. The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist. On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies! On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over with red mud. Among theold were graves of slaves, I was told, but since the war no Black has been buried with the White.An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black, weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah, and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets, content that it is nolonger twilight, have ceased chirping, and exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their footsteps in the sand.Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod. The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed, but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away. Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares. There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jacksonwhen the latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four years ...!”He seemed appalled at his own age.“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”“At seventeen years many their fortunes seekBut at fourscore it is too late a week”said I sotto voce.“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now. We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is the allotted span, but....”I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of the “Coming of theLord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance. Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s messenger.So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—carrying salvation to the sea—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders to corps commanders and thenpassed on to all ranks. The men slept in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock, when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here, another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey, roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well, and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodderwere provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of everything?) moved on.There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’ Georgia” has caught it:Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free!So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea,When we were marching thro’ Georgia.The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers, the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn. Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age and despair. It is adiversified country of hill and dale, with occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns, which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.The Southern white man builds large, has great joy in his home, and would love to live on a grand scale with an army of retainers. The Negro landowner does not imitate him, and builds a less impressive type of home, neither so large nor so inviting. Rich colored farmers are, however, infrequent. The mass of the Negro population is of the laboring class, and even those who rent land and farm it for themselves are very poor and sunk in economic bondage. Their houses are mostly one-roomed wooden arks, mere windowless sheds resting on four stones, a stone at each corner. Furniture, if any, was of a rudimentary kind. “See how they live,” said a youth to me. “Just like animals, and that’s all they are.”“Why don’t you have any windows?” I asked of a girl sitting on the floor of her cabin.“They jus’ doan’ make ‘em with windows,” she replied. “But we’ve got a window in this side.”“Yes, but without glass.”“Ah, no, no glass.”“Is it cold in winter?”“Yes, mighty cold.”Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism,Don’t walk if you can rideseemed to have been changed into,Don’t stir forth till you can get a lift, and white men picked up Negroes and Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost my car somewhere.A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people were a little dumbfoundedwhen I said I was following in Sherman’s footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that. “Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat the bread of bitterness like Cain——”After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be. Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinleysaid that the character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say. Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a poor store keeper:“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”“’Deed, sir, I do.”“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up, asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”On the other hand the rich, the owners of large plantations, remained in many cases still virulent.“I know Sherman is in hell,” said a Mr. R—— of historic family. “When my mother lay sick in bed the soldiers came and set fire to our cotton gin and all our barns. They came upon us like a tribe of Indians and burst into every room, ransacking the place for jewelry and valuable property. I was a small boy at the time, but I shall never forget it. They took the bungs from all our barrels and let the syrup run to waste in the yard because they themselves wanted no more of it. They killed our hogs and our cows before our eyes and threw the meat to the niggers. Yes, sir. A year or so back Sherman’s son said he was going to make a tour along the way his daddy had gone—to see what a wonderful thing his daddy had done. Lucky for him he changed his mind. We’d a strung him to a pole, sure——”Such sharp feeling was, however, certainly exceptional. Near Eatonton was a Mr. Lynch of Lynchburg, storekeeper, postmaster, wheelwright, and blacksmith all in one. He averred that they were “hugging and kissing the Yankees now, just as they would be hugging and kissing the Germans in a few years.”“There’s mean fellows on every side,” said he. “You don’t tell me that there’s no mean fellows among the English, the French, and the Italians. I don’t believe all the stories about the Germans. I remember what they used to say about the Yankees. They get mighty madwith me when I tell ‘em, but there’s plenty of mean fellows on both sides.”The village was named after the old man’s grandfather—an Irish settler. It is just beside the old Eatonton factory which Sherman burned down. At the next turn in the road there is a roaring as of many waters. A screen of pine and rank grass undergrowth hides an impressive sight. A step inward takes you to the romantic stone foundation of the old factory; you can climb up on one of the pillars and look out. The interior of the factory is all young trees and moss and tangles of evergreen, but beyond it rushes a mighty stream over a partially dammed broad course, red as blood, but wallowing forward in creamy billows and white foam.The factory was used to weave coarse cotton cloth, and had evidently been worked by water power. Quite forgotten now, unvisited, it was yet a picturesque memorial of the march, and I was surprised to see no names of visitors scrawled on the walls of its massive old foundations.I walked into Eatonton by a long and picturesque wooden bridge over the crimson river, a strange and wonderful structure completely roofed, and shady as a tunnel. The evening sun blazed on the old wood and on the red tide and on the greenery beyond, making the scene look like a colored illustration of a child’s tale.Eatonton, where Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were actually born, is now a hustling “city” with bales of cotton fluff higglety-pigglety down its streets, and again beautiful bales of extra quality in the windows of its cotton brokers. There are also modern mills where cotton is being spun. The business men on the streets talk of “spots” and “futures”—spot cotton being apparently that which you have on the spot and can sell now, and futures being crops yet to be picked, which, presuming on kind Providence, may be sold and re-sold many times before being grown. What is said of Eatonton may be said of Milledgeville, twenty miles further on. It is a cotton town. It is a gracious seat as well, with a scent of history about its old buildings, but it impresses one as a great cotton center. The streets of Milledgeville were almost blocked with cotton bales. It would have been easy to fight a battle of barricades there. The principal church looked as if it were fortified with cotton bales, and it would have been possible to walk fifty or a hundred yards stepping on the tops of the bales. Bales were on the tidy lawns of shady villas or stacked on the verandas, and everywhere the hard-working gins were roaring and grinding as they tore out the cottonseed from the white fluff and left cotton that could be spun. Wisps of cotton lint blew about all over the streets, and cotton was entangled in dogs’ fur and children’s hair. In theporches of Negro cabins it was heaped high till the entrance to the doorway itself was blocked.Cotton was booming at Savannah and New Orleans, and despite talk of the weevil destroying the pod, and of bad weather and bad crops, it was clear that Georgia was very prosperous. Men and women discussed the price of cotton as they might horse races or State-lottery results or raffles. Everyone wanted room to store his cotton and hold it till the maximum price was reached. My impression of Georgia now was that it was not nearly so rich in live stock and in food as it had been in the time of Sherman. In his day it grew its own food and was the supply source of two armies. To-day it imports the greater part of its food. It sells its cotton and buys food from the more agricultural States of the South. It might have been thought to be a land overflowing with fruit and honey and milk, but fruit and honey are cheaper in New York than there, and there is no margin of milk to give away. Meat is scarce and dear. There is no plenty on the table unless it be of sweet potatoes. I imagine that after Sherman’s raid the farmers felt discouraged, and decided never to be in a position to feed an enemy army again. There are many always urging the Georgian to grow corn and raise stock, and so make Georgia economically independent, but the farmer always meets the suggestion with the statement that cotton gives the largest return on any givenoutlay and takes least trouble. That is true, but it is largely because the Negro cotton picker is such a cheap laboring hand. A farm laborer would automatically obtain more than a cotton picker. The hypnotic effect of the slave past is strong and binding upon the Negroes. Perhaps it is still the curse of Georgia. There are still planters who drive their laborers with the whip and the gun—though the shortage of labor during the war caused these to be put up. It is not in money in the bank that one must reckon true prosperity. However, in this material way, Georgia has quite recovered from the Civil War. But she has lost a good many of the compensations of true agriculture; cotton is so commercial a product that there is no glamour about it, not even about the old plantations, unless it be that of the patient melancholy of the cotton pickers.

MARCHING THROUGH GEORGIA

Travelingfrom Chattanooga to Atlanta the mind inevitably reverts to the American Civil War, for in 1863 the victory of the North marched from Chattanooga and the famous battle of Lookout Mountain to the taking of Atlanta and the discomfiture of Georgia. The glorious Stars and Stripes came victoriously out of the Northern horizon, climbed each hill, dipped and climbed again, with a clamorous, exultant Northern soldiery behind it. General Sherman began to gather his great fame, while General Lee, the adventuresome Southern leader, allowed himself to be cut off in Virginia. The efforts of the South had been very picturesque, like the play of a gambler with small resources and enormous hopes, but the shades of ruin gathered about her and began to negative the charm of her beginnings. Lincoln had proclaimed the freedom of the slaves. The South pretended that in any case slavery could not survive the war, and in token of this she enlisted Negro soldiers, making them free men from the moment of enlistment. In military extremity policy promises much which afterwardsingrate security will not ratify. The Southern planter might have obtained some measure of indemnification for the loss of his slaves had he come to terms in time. But he hoped somehow he might win the right to manage his Negroes as he wished without interference. There was the same violent state of mind on the subject of the Negroes as slaves as there is now on the subject of the Negroes as free men. All that was missing was the white-woman talk. Though originally the colonists had been generally opposed to the introduction of slavery, yet slavery had taken captive and then poisoned most men’s minds. The South chose to fight to the end rather than sacrifice the institution prematurely. There was a pride, as of Lucifer, in the Southerner, too, a belief in himself that foredoomed him to be hurled into outer darkness and to fall through space for nine days. Sherman’s army, when it burned Atlanta and marched through Georgia laying the country waste, was inspired with something like the wrath of God.

In order to see the ex-slave and ex-master to-day, it is necessary to dwell not only in cities but in the country, and I chose to walk across the State of Georgia as the best way to ascertain what life in the country was like. And I followed in the way Sherman had gone. There, if anywhere, it seemed to me, the reactions of the war and of slavery must be apparent to-day.

Sherman was something of a Prussian. He was a capable and scientific soldier. From an enemy’s standpoint, he was not a humanitarian. War to him was a trade of terror and blood, and he was logical. “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will,” said he. “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.” And when he had captured Atlanta he ordered the whole population to flee.

If they cared to go North, they would find their enemies not unkind. If they thought there was safety in the South—then let them go further south to whatever protection the beaten Southern Army could afford.

So North and South they fled, the people of Atlanta, but mostly South, for they were bitter; and the roads filled with the pitiful array of thousands of men and women and children with their old-fashioned coaches, with their barrows, with their servants, with those faithful Blacks who still heeded not the fact that “the day of liberation had arrived.” All under safe-conduct to Hood’s army.

What complaints, what laments, as the proud Southern population took the road. A lamentation that is heard till now! And when the people had gone, the city of Atlanta was set on fire. Sherman had decided to march to the sea, and he could not afford to leave an enemy population in his rear, nor could he allow the chance that secret arsenals might exist there after hehad gone. It was a never to be forgotten spectacle, “the heaven one expanse of lurid fire, the air filled with flying, burning cinders.” “We were startled and awed,” says a soldier who marched with the rest, “seeing vast waves and sheets of flames thrusting themselves heavenward, rolling and tossing in mighty billows—a gigantic sea of fire.” Small explosions arranged by the engineers were punctuated by huge explosions when hidden stores of ammunition were located, and while these added ruin to ruin in the city they sounded as lugubrious and awful detonations to the soldiery on the road. Depots, churches, shops, warehouses, homes flared from every story and every window. Those who remained in the town were few, but it was impossible not to be stirred if not appalled. A brigade of New England soldiers was the last to leave, and marched out by Decatur Street, led by the band of the 33rd Massachusetts regiment, playing

John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in his graveHis soul is marching on—

the lurid glare of the fire gleaming upon their bayonets and equipment, inflaming their visages and their eyes which were already burning with the war faith of the North.

That was in the fall of 1864. Years have passed and healed many wounds. Now it is Atlanta in the fall of 1919 and the crush of theFair time. All Georgia is at her capital city. The automobiles are forced to a walking pace, there are so many of them, and they vent their displeasure in a multiform chorus of barking, howling, and hooting. So great is the prosperity of the land that the little farmer and the workingman have their cars, not mere “Ford runabouts,” but resplendently enameled, capacious, smooth-running, swift-starting coaches where wife and family disport themselves more at home than at home. Atlanta’s new life has grown from the old ruins and hidden them, as a young forest springs through the charred stumps of a forest fire. On each side Atlanta’s skyscrapers climb heavenward in severe lines, and where heaven should be the sky signs twinkle. Every volt that can be turned into light is being used. The shops and the stores and the cinemas are dazzling to show what they are worth. The sidewalks are thronged with Southern youth whose hilarious faces and gregarious movements show a camaraderie one would hardly observe in the colder North. Jaunty Negro boys mingle with the crowd and are mirthful among themselves—as well dressed as the Whites, sharing in the “record trade” and the boom of the price of cotton. They are not slaves to-day, but are lifted high with racial pride and the consciousness of universities and seminaries on Atlanta’s hills, and successes in medicine, law, and business inthe city. They roll along in the joyous freedom of their bodies, and make the South more Southern than it is. How pale and ghostlike the South would seem without its flocks of colored children, without those many men and women with the sun shadows in their faces!

“We love our niggers and understand them,” say the Whites, repeating their formula, and you’d think there was no racial problem whatever in the South, to see the great “Gate City” given over to merriment unrestrained and many a Negro colliding with many a White youth and yet never a fight—nothing on the crowded streets to exemplify the accepted hostility of one to the other. One has the thought that perhaps Atlanta did not burn in vain, and that the South as well as the North believes in the immortality of the soul of John Brown.

The tobacco-chewing, smiling, guffawing crowds of the street, and Peachtree Street jammed with people and cars! What a hubbub the four jammed-up processions of automobiles are making—like choruses of hoarse katydids crying only for repetition’s sake and the lust of noise! But there is more noise and more joy still a-coming! Skirling and shrieking, in strange contrast to the Negroes and to the clothed Whites and to the color of night itself, comes the parade of college youths all in their pajamas and nightshirts. Long queues of some hundreds of lads in white shouting at thetop of their voices—they climb in and out of the electric cars, rush into shops and theatres in a wild game of “Follow my leader.”Rah, rah, rah, they cry,rah, rah, rah, and rush into hotels, circle the foyer, and plunge among the amazed diners in the dining rooms, thread their way around tables and up the hotel balustrade, invade bedrooms, go out at windows and down fire escapes, and then once more file along the packed streets amidst autos and cars, raving all the while with pleasure and excitement. It is good humor and boisterousness and the jollity of the Fair time. Up above all the flags and the bunting wave listlessly in the night air. It seems impossible but that the firing of Atlanta is forgotten, and the pitiful exodus of its humiliated people—forgotten also the exultancy of the soldiers of the North singing while the city burned.

Sherman with 60,000 men and 2500 wagons but only 60 guns marched out, and none knew what his destination was. A retreat from Atlanta comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow was about to commence. The hostile farming population of Georgia and the Carolinas should harass the Yankee army as the Russian peasants had done the French in 1812. That was the Southern belief and the substance of Southern propaganda at the time. Not so the Northern Army, which had the consciousness of victory and a radiant belief in its cause and inits general. “A feeling of exhilaration seemed to pervade all minds, a feeling of something to come, vague and undefined, still full of venture and intense interest. Even the common soldiers caught the inspiration, and many a group called out: ‘Uncle Billy, I guess Grant is waiting for us at Richmond.’ The general sentiment was that we were marching for Richmond and that there we should end the war, but how and when they seemed to care not, nor did they measure the distance, or count the cost in life, or bother their brains about the great rivers to be crossed and the food required for man and beast that had to be gathered by the way.”[3]

Sherman himself had not decided on what point exactly he would march. But he never intended to march against Lee at Richmond, though the South and his own soldiers believed it. He always designed to reach the sea and reopen maritime communication with the North, and kept in mind Savannah, Port Royal, and even Pensacola in North Florida. So universal was the belief that he was marching on Richmond by way of Augusta that in all the country districts of Georgia where the left wing marched they will tell you still that the enemy was marching on Augusta.

You shall maintain discipline, patience, and courage, said Sherman to his army.And I will lead you to achievements equal to any of thepast. We are commencing a long and difficult march to a new base, but all the chances of war have been provided for. The habitual order of march will be by four roads as nearly parallel as possible. The columns will start habitually at 7 a. m. and make about 15 miles a day. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. Horses, mules, and wagons belonging to the inhabitants may be appropriated by the cavalry and artillery freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor and industrious, usually neutral or friendly. All foragers will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and they will endeavor to leave each family reasonable means of sustenance. Negroes who are able-bodied and serviceable may be taken along if supplies permit. All non-combatants and refugees should go to the rear and be discouraged from encumbering us. Some ether time we may be able to provide for the poor Whites and Blacks seeking to escape the bondage under which they are now suffering. To corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., but the measure of the inhabitants’ hostility should be the measure of the ruin which commanders should enforce.[4]

There was much more said in those very finely written and emphatic orders, but the sentencethat captured the imagination of the common soldier was certainly “the army will forage liberally on the country” which at once became a common gag among the men. For it spelt loot and fun and treasure trove and souvenirs and everything else that stirs a soldier’s mind. There is a human note throughout the whole of General Sherman’s orders, but no softness, rather an inexorable sternness. He had no patience with the cause of the Rebels nor with their ways of fighting. He and his staff were not averse from the idea of reading the population of Georgia and South Carolina a terrible lesson. While the march was military it inevitably became punitive. The cotton was destroyed, the farms pillaged, the slaves set free, the land laid waste. It was over a comparatively narrow strip of country, but Sherman was like the wrath of the Lord descending upon it.

So out marched the four divisions (14th, 15th, 17th, and 20th) joyously singing as they went the soldiers’ songs of the war—

One and Free

and

He who first the Flag would lowerSHOOT HIM ON THE SPOT.

and all manner of variants of John Brown to the Glory Hallelujah chorus.

The way out from Atlanta is now a road of cheap shops and Jewish pawnbrokers, Negrobeauty parlors, bag shops, gaudy cinema and vaudeville sheds, fruit stalls and booths of quack doctors and magic healers, vendors of the Devil’s corn cure, fortune tellers, and what not. A Negro skyscraper climbs upward. It is decidedly a “colored neighborhood,” and rough crowds of Negro laborers and poor Whites frolic through the litter of the street. Painfully the electric cars sound their alarms and budge and stop, and budge again, threading their way through the masses, glad to get clear after half a mile of it and then plunge into the comparative spaciousness of villadom outside the city.

It is not as it was of yore. Where the bloody July battle of Atlanta raged a complete peace has now settled down amid the dignified habitations of the rich. Trees hide the view, and children play upon the lawns of pleasant houses while the older folk rock to and fro upon the chairs of shady verandas.

Dignified Decatur dwells on its hill by the wayside, and has reared its pale monument to the Confederate dead. On this white obelisk the cause of the South is justified. Within sight of it rises an impressive courthouse, which by its size and grandeur protests the strength of the law in a county of Georgia.

There was a gloomy sky with lowering clouds, and a warm, clammy atmosphere as if the air had been steamed over night and was now cooling a little. The road leaving behindDecatur and the suburbs of Atlanta became deep red, almost scarlet in hue, and ran between broad fields of cotton where every pod was bursting and puffing out in cotton wool. Men with high spindle-wheeled vehicles came with cotton bales done up in rough hempen netting. Hooded buggies rolled sedately past with spectacled Negroes and their wives. Drummers in Ford cars tooted and raced through the mud. Thus to Ingleside, where a turn in the road reveals the huge hump of Stone Mountain, shadowy and mystical like uncleft Eildons. All the soldiers as they bivouacked there or marched past on that bright November day of ‘64 remarked the mountain, and their gaze was turned to it in the spirit of curiosity and adventure.

I fell in with a Mr. McCaulay who was a child when Sherman marched through. He thought the Germans in Belgium hardly equaled Sherman. Not only did his troops burn Atlanta but almost every house in the country. He pointed out new houses that had sprung up on the ruins of former habitations.

... “A fence used to run right along here, and there were crops growing. No, not cotton; there was not the demand for cotton in those days, and not nearly so much grown in the State. Over on that side of the road there was a huge encampment of soldiers, and I remember stealing out to it to listen to the band.

“The foragers came to the houses and took every bit of food—left us bone dry of food. They also took our horses and our mules and our cows and our chickens. Sometimes a family would have a yoke of oxen hidden in the wood, but that would be all that they had. Everyone had to flee, and all were destitute. It was a terrible time. But we all stood by one another and shared one another’s sorrows and helped one another as we could.

“All colored folk also stood by us. I expect you’ve read, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ but the picture is terribly overdrawn there.”

“I did not know these told the story of the march,” said I.

“They do not. But they give an account of the Negroes that is entirely misleading. The North has queered the Negro situation by sending all manner of people down here to stir the Negro up against us. Till we said, ‘You and your niggers can go to the devil’—and we left them alone.

“But that was a mistake, and we are realizing it now, and intend to take charge of the education of the Negro ourselves, and be responsible for him spiritually as well as physically. There never was a better relationship between us than there is now.

“And I—I was brought up among them as a child, as an equal, played with them, wallowedwith them in the dirt, slept with them. They’re as near to me as flesh and blood can be.”

It was curious to receive this outpouring when I had not mentioned the Negro to him at all and seemed merely curious concerning Sherman’s march. It is, however, characteristic of the South: the subject of the treatment of the Negro recurs likeidée fixe.

At Lithonia, after a meal of large yellow yams and corn and chicken and biscuits and cane syrup, I called on old Mrs. Johnson, who lived over the way from Mrs. Jones. Lithonia was much visited by the cavalry. Decatur was stripped of everything, and Lithonia fared as badly in the end. Men came into the farmyard and there and then killed the hogs and threw them on to waiting wagons. These were foragers from the camps outside Atlanta. But one day someone came with the news—“Sherman has set fire to the great city and he’ll be here to-morrow.” And sure enough on the morrow his army began to appear on the road—the vanguard, and after that there seemed no end to the procession. The army was all day marching past with its commissariat wagons and its water wagons, its horses, its mules, and regiment after regiment. The despoiled farm wives and old folk could not help being thrilled, though they were enemies. General Slocum, who commanded the left wing of the army, wrote his name in pencil on granny’s doorpostwhen he stopped at her house with one or two of his staff.

The Confederate soldiers were “Johnny Rebs” and the Union soldiers were “Billy Yanks.” Neither side was known to have committed any crimes against women or children, and the latter were crazy to watch the Yanks go by, though often their fathers were away in the hard-pressed Rebel armies.

As I walked along the red road betwixt the fluffy cotton fields from village to village and from mansion to mansion, those stately farmhouses of the South, I was always on the lookout for the oldest folk along the way. The young ones knew only of the war that was just past, the middle-aged thought of the old Civil War as somewhat of a joke, but the only thing the old folks will never laugh over is the great strife which with its before and after made the very passion of their lives. So whenever I saw an old man or woman sitting on a veranda by the wayside I made bold to approach and ask what they knew of the great march, and how it had affected them, and the Negroes.

They told of the methodical destruction of the railways, and of the innumerable bonfires whose flames and smokes changed the look of the sky. Every rail tie or sleeper was riven from its bed of earth and burned, and the long steel rails were heated over the fires. To make the fires bigger timber was brought from the woods, andevery rail was first made red-hot and then twisted out of shape—the favorite plan being for three or four soldiers to take the hot rail from the fire, place it between two trunks of standing pines, and then push till it was bent nigh double.

They told of the stillness after the army had gone, and of the sense of ruin which was upon them with their cotton destroyed, and all their stores for the winter pillaged, and their live stock driven off. An old dame told me how the only live animal in her neighborhood was a broken-down army horse left behind to die by the enemy. The folk were starving, but a woman resuscitated the horse and went off with him to try and bring food to the village. She walked by his side for fear he would drop down dead—and first of all she sought a little corn for the horse, for “Old Yank” as she called him. Many a weary mile they walked together, only to find that “Sherman’s bummers” had been there before her. She slept the night in a Negro hut (a thing no white woman would dream of doing now) and the Negroes fed her and gave corn to the horse and sent her on her way. Out of several old buggies and derelict wheels a “contrapshun” had been rigged out and tied to the old horse, but it was not until beyond Covington and Conyers that a place was found which the foragers had missed, and the strange buggy was loaded for home.

I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine. The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist. On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies! On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over with red mud. Among theold were graves of slaves, I was told, but since the war no Black has been buried with the White.

An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black, weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.

While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah, and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.

The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets, content that it is nolonger twilight, have ceased chirping, and exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their footsteps in the sand.

Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod. The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed, but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away. Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares. There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jacksonwhen the latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.

“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four years ...!”

He seemed appalled at his own age.

“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”

“At seventeen years many their fortunes seek

But at fourscore it is too late a week”

said I sotto voce.

“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now. We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”

He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is the allotted span, but....”

I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”

That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of the “Coming of theLord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance. Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s messenger.

So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—carrying salvation to the sea—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.

The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders to corps commanders and thenpassed on to all ranks. The men slept in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock, when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here, another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey, roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well, and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodderwere provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of everything?) moved on.

There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’ Georgia” has caught it:

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free!So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea,

When we were marching thro’ Georgia.

The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers, the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!

The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn. Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age and despair. It is adiversified country of hill and dale, with occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns, which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.

The Southern white man builds large, has great joy in his home, and would love to live on a grand scale with an army of retainers. The Negro landowner does not imitate him, and builds a less impressive type of home, neither so large nor so inviting. Rich colored farmers are, however, infrequent. The mass of the Negro population is of the laboring class, and even those who rent land and farm it for themselves are very poor and sunk in economic bondage. Their houses are mostly one-roomed wooden arks, mere windowless sheds resting on four stones, a stone at each corner. Furniture, if any, was of a rudimentary kind. “See how they live,” said a youth to me. “Just like animals, and that’s all they are.”

“Why don’t you have any windows?” I asked of a girl sitting on the floor of her cabin.

“They jus’ doan’ make ‘em with windows,” she replied. “But we’ve got a window in this side.”

“Yes, but without glass.”

“Ah, no, no glass.”

“Is it cold in winter?”

“Yes, mighty cold.”

Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism,Don’t walk if you can rideseemed to have been changed into,Don’t stir forth till you can get a lift, and white men picked up Negroes and Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost my car somewhere.

A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people were a little dumbfoundedwhen I said I was following in Sherman’s footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that. “Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat the bread of bitterness like Cain——”

After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be. Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinleysaid that the character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say. Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a poor store keeper:

“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”

“’Deed, sir, I do.”

“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”

“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up, asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”

On the other hand the rich, the owners of large plantations, remained in many cases still virulent.

“I know Sherman is in hell,” said a Mr. R—— of historic family. “When my mother lay sick in bed the soldiers came and set fire to our cotton gin and all our barns. They came upon us like a tribe of Indians and burst into every room, ransacking the place for jewelry and valuable property. I was a small boy at the time, but I shall never forget it. They took the bungs from all our barrels and let the syrup run to waste in the yard because they themselves wanted no more of it. They killed our hogs and our cows before our eyes and threw the meat to the niggers. Yes, sir. A year or so back Sherman’s son said he was going to make a tour along the way his daddy had gone—to see what a wonderful thing his daddy had done. Lucky for him he changed his mind. We’d a strung him to a pole, sure——”

Such sharp feeling was, however, certainly exceptional. Near Eatonton was a Mr. Lynch of Lynchburg, storekeeper, postmaster, wheelwright, and blacksmith all in one. He averred that they were “hugging and kissing the Yankees now, just as they would be hugging and kissing the Germans in a few years.”

“There’s mean fellows on every side,” said he. “You don’t tell me that there’s no mean fellows among the English, the French, and the Italians. I don’t believe all the stories about the Germans. I remember what they used to say about the Yankees. They get mighty madwith me when I tell ‘em, but there’s plenty of mean fellows on both sides.”

The village was named after the old man’s grandfather—an Irish settler. It is just beside the old Eatonton factory which Sherman burned down. At the next turn in the road there is a roaring as of many waters. A screen of pine and rank grass undergrowth hides an impressive sight. A step inward takes you to the romantic stone foundation of the old factory; you can climb up on one of the pillars and look out. The interior of the factory is all young trees and moss and tangles of evergreen, but beyond it rushes a mighty stream over a partially dammed broad course, red as blood, but wallowing forward in creamy billows and white foam.

The factory was used to weave coarse cotton cloth, and had evidently been worked by water power. Quite forgotten now, unvisited, it was yet a picturesque memorial of the march, and I was surprised to see no names of visitors scrawled on the walls of its massive old foundations.

I walked into Eatonton by a long and picturesque wooden bridge over the crimson river, a strange and wonderful structure completely roofed, and shady as a tunnel. The evening sun blazed on the old wood and on the red tide and on the greenery beyond, making the scene look like a colored illustration of a child’s tale.

Eatonton, where Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were actually born, is now a hustling “city” with bales of cotton fluff higglety-pigglety down its streets, and again beautiful bales of extra quality in the windows of its cotton brokers. There are also modern mills where cotton is being spun. The business men on the streets talk of “spots” and “futures”—spot cotton being apparently that which you have on the spot and can sell now, and futures being crops yet to be picked, which, presuming on kind Providence, may be sold and re-sold many times before being grown. What is said of Eatonton may be said of Milledgeville, twenty miles further on. It is a cotton town. It is a gracious seat as well, with a scent of history about its old buildings, but it impresses one as a great cotton center. The streets of Milledgeville were almost blocked with cotton bales. It would have been easy to fight a battle of barricades there. The principal church looked as if it were fortified with cotton bales, and it would have been possible to walk fifty or a hundred yards stepping on the tops of the bales. Bales were on the tidy lawns of shady villas or stacked on the verandas, and everywhere the hard-working gins were roaring and grinding as they tore out the cottonseed from the white fluff and left cotton that could be spun. Wisps of cotton lint blew about all over the streets, and cotton was entangled in dogs’ fur and children’s hair. In theporches of Negro cabins it was heaped high till the entrance to the doorway itself was blocked.

Cotton was booming at Savannah and New Orleans, and despite talk of the weevil destroying the pod, and of bad weather and bad crops, it was clear that Georgia was very prosperous. Men and women discussed the price of cotton as they might horse races or State-lottery results or raffles. Everyone wanted room to store his cotton and hold it till the maximum price was reached. My impression of Georgia now was that it was not nearly so rich in live stock and in food as it had been in the time of Sherman. In his day it grew its own food and was the supply source of two armies. To-day it imports the greater part of its food. It sells its cotton and buys food from the more agricultural States of the South. It might have been thought to be a land overflowing with fruit and honey and milk, but fruit and honey are cheaper in New York than there, and there is no margin of milk to give away. Meat is scarce and dear. There is no plenty on the table unless it be of sweet potatoes. I imagine that after Sherman’s raid the farmers felt discouraged, and decided never to be in a position to feed an enemy army again. There are many always urging the Georgian to grow corn and raise stock, and so make Georgia economically independent, but the farmer always meets the suggestion with the statement that cotton gives the largest return on any givenoutlay and takes least trouble. That is true, but it is largely because the Negro cotton picker is such a cheap laboring hand. A farm laborer would automatically obtain more than a cotton picker. The hypnotic effect of the slave past is strong and binding upon the Negroes. Perhaps it is still the curse of Georgia. There are still planters who drive their laborers with the whip and the gun—though the shortage of labor during the war caused these to be put up. It is not in money in the bank that one must reckon true prosperity. However, in this material way, Georgia has quite recovered from the Civil War. But she has lost a good many of the compensations of true agriculture; cotton is so commercial a product that there is no glamour about it, not even about the old plantations, unless it be that of the patient melancholy of the cotton pickers.

VITRAMPING TO THE SEAI passedthrough two ancient capitals of Georgia, first Milledgeville, and then Louisville. The relationship which Milledgeville bore to Atlanta reminded me of the relationship of the old Cossack capital of the Don country to the modern industrial wilderness of South Russia called Rostof-na-Donu. But business is business, and there is only business in this land. Even along the way to the old capital it is always so many miles to Goldstein’s on the mile-posts instead of so many miles to Milledgeville.The old legislature sat at Milledgeville, but it fled at the approach of Sherman. It was a day of great astonishment when General Slocum paused in his supposed march upon Augusta and General Howard in his attack on Macon, and one came south from Madison while the other marched north from McDonough. There was an extraordinary sauve qui peut. Panic seized the politicians and the rich gentry of the place, for the rumor of the terrible ways of the foragers was flying ahead of the Union Army. Everyone strove to carry off or hide his treasures. They must have had terrible privationsand some adventures on the road trying to race the army, and they would have done better to remain to face the music, for no private effects were destroyed in this city. Similar scenes were enacted as at Covington. The darkies made a great day of jubilee, and hugged and kissed the soldiers who had set them free. The cotton was burned and made a great flare—seventeen hundred bales of it even in those days. The depots, magazines, arsenals, and factories were blown up. Governor Brown had fled with all his furniture, and Sherman in the governor’s house slept on a roll of army blankets on the bare floor.There are many signs of ease and refinement in the spacious streets of Milledgeville, though it has increased little in size since the war. It has large schools for the training of cadets and the training of girls. These are model institutions and are very valuable in Georgia. The place, however, seemed to lack the cultural significance it ought to have. But it is true that churches and Sunday schools were full. No shops of any kind were open on Sundays; the people had forgotten the taste of alcoholic drink and were ready to crusade against tobacco. They are not given to lynching, though they allowed some wild men from Atlanta to break open their jail some years ago and take away a Jew and hang him. But they are too content. At church on Sunday morning the pastor complainedthat while all were willing to give money to God none were willing to offer themselves. He invited any who were ready to give themselves unreservedly to God to step forth, and none did. And it was an eloquent appeal by a capable orator. I met an old recluse who was at the back of the church. He had tried to give himself to God but was now living at the asylum where he had found shelter, being otherwise without means. He had been a Baptist minister at a church near Stone Mountain, but rheumatism had intervened after twenty years’ work, and he could no longer stoop to immerse the candidates for baptism. He was an Englishman who had listened to Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s lectures, and he talked of Dean Farrar’s sermons and the good deeds of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He spoke as no one speaks to-day, good old measured Victorian English. He was a touching type of the despised and rejected. He loved talking to the Negro children in the “colored” school till the townsfolk warned him against it. His books form the nucleus of the town library, but the rats have gnawn all the bindings of his “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and I formed the opinion that poor R—— living on sufferance in the lunatic asylum was probably the best read man in Milledgeville.It is a delightful walk to Sandersville, over Buffalo Creek and over many streams crossedby the most fragile of bridges apparently never properly rebuilt since Wheeler’s cavalry destroyed them in the face of the oncoming army. Georgia used to have many excellent bridges, but it never really hindered the Yankee army by destroying them. It seems rather characteristic of the psychology of the people that they would not replace what they had had to destroy. Now at the foot of each long hill down which the automobiles tear is a trap of mere planks and gaps which chatters and indeed roars when passed over. Many motorists get into the mud.Sandersville is a busy town hung in gloomy bunting which no one has had time to take down since the last county fair. It has a large, dusty, sandy square with a clock tower in the middle. There are great numbers of cars and lorries parked around. Cotton bales, old and new, fresh and decayed, lie on every street. Huge gins are working, and Negroes are busy shoveling oily-looking cottonseed into barns; cotton fluff is all over the roadways in little clots; every man is in his shirt; the soda bars do a great trade even in November. A stranger said to me “Come and have a drink” and we went in and had a “cherry dope.” There is an impressive-looking public library, much larger than at Milledgeville, with high frontal columns of unadorned old bricks mortared and laid in diamond fashion, a barred door, and an entrance so deep in cotton fluff, brickdust, and refuse that one might be pardonedfor assuming that learning was not now in repute. On the other hand there is a fine, well-kept cemetery with large mausoleums for the rich and tiny stones for the poor.Sandersville was the scene of one or two combats during the war. But when it is borne in mind that only a hundred of Sherman’s army died from all causes on its march to the sea, it will be understood that the strife was not serious. Sherman has been called a Prussian, and he certainly possessed military genius and understood soldiering as a mental science, but he always tried to save his men. He wished to win victories with the smallest possible loss of men, and he thought out his unorthodox plans of campaign with that in view. He could have lost half his army on this adventurous march to the sea. It was a most daring exploit, and if it had failed the whole responsibility would have been laid at Sherman’s door. But Sherman had thought the matter out, and he completely deceived his enemy. Once more after Milledgeville Slocum is seen to be threatening Augusta in the north and Howard is striking south. The cavalry is driving the enemy ahead and plunges northward to Louisville and Waynesboro, well on the way to Augusta. The enemy evacuates the central regions of Georgia, and Sherman’s infantry moves through unscathed. Foraging has become organized and systematic. The wagons amount to many thousands, and it is curious that the populationdid not destroy all vehicles and so prevent the army from carrying away so much. The doubt which General Sherman expressed at the beginning of the march that supplies might prove inadequate has entirely vanished, and the army has a crowd of Negro camp followers almost as big as itself. These eventually became a great hindrance, but they were evidently encouraged to join themselves to the soldiers in the Milledgeville and Sandersville district. They proved invaluable helps in the seeking out of hidden treasure and the pillaging of farmhouses. They knew the likely spots where valuables would be buried, and the soldiers knew how to worm out secrets even from the most faithful black servants on the big estates. One reason why Georgia burns and hangs more Negroes than any other State is probably because of the bitterness caused by the unstinted foraging and the “setting of the niggers against us” as they say.Be that as it may, the seeds of future hate are always sown in present wars, and “Sherman’s bummers” in their quest of spoil took little heed of any future reckoning. The Negroes led the soldiers even to the deepest recesses of swamps or forests, and showed the hollow tree or cave or hole where lay deposited the precious family plate and jewelry and money and even clothing. It was common to take from the planter not only hams, flour, meal, yams, sorghum molasses, butabove all things turkeys, so rare to-day along the line of Sherman’s march—How the turkeys gobbled which our commissaries found,How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,When we were marching thro’ Georgia!But the bummer did not stick at these. He would borrow grandfather’s dress coat and hat surviving from the old colonial days, and his mate would array himself in grandmother’s finery, and so attired would drive their wagon back to camp, hailed by the jests of the whole army; and if they met an officer on the way they would cry out mirthfully the text of the army order—The army will forage liberally on the country.It is said that no forager would ever sell any of his loot, that indeed it was a point of honor not to sell. The veterans of the North must therefore preserve many interesting mementoes of the South. Both officers and men took many tokens. There used to be an amusing euphemism current in Sherman’s army: it was—“A Southern lady gave me that for saving her house from being burned”—and if anyone said, “That’s a nice gold watch; where did you get it?” the soldier replied, “Oh, a Southern lady gave it to me,” etc.The army made camp by three o’clock every day, and it was after three that most of the unauthorized foraging expeditions took place. They were gay afternoons spent in singing andgambling, athletics and cock fighting. The South was found to be possessed of a wonderful race of fighting cocks. The enthusiasts of the sport rushed from farm yard to farm yard for astonished chanticleer, and having captured him fed him well and brought him up to a more martial type of life than that which in domesticated bliss he had enjoyed with his hens. Every company had its cock fighting tournament. Each regiment, each brigade, each division, and indeed each corps, had its champion. The winners of many bloody frays were soon nicknamed “Bill Sherman” or “Johnny Logan,” but the losing bird which began to fear to face its adversary would be hailed as Beauregard or Jeff Davis. The cock fight finals were of as great interest as the combat of the Reds and White Sox to-day, and perhaps more real.Besides game cocks each regiment had a great number of pets. These were mostly poor, homeless creatures on which the soldier had taken pity; dogs, singing birds, kids, who followed with the army and had the army’s tenderness lavished on them.So they went, marching and camping by old Louisville and the broad waters of the Ogeechee down to Millen. The old farmers say what an impressive sight it was to watch them go by on the Millen road with seemingly more wagons than men, with all the wagons bulging with spoil and drawn by well-fed horses and mules, withlong droves of cattle, and thousands of frenzied Negroes so frantic with joy that they seemed to have lost their heads and to be expecting the end of the world.Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff, and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none the less pleasant for that.There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them. The men wore loincloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way.“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations, taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and given the full rights of white American citizens.”The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it under the dominance of a free Negro majority.“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t progress any further.”“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges havearisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will arrive.”I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negrointelligentsia. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”; others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the humanitarians of New England.In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told their slaves thatthe Yanks would flog them and burn them or put them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed. The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,” and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradisehappy as the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with. There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day, and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shoutGlorywhen the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers, who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then, after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream. The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and the droves of cattle. Butfor Georgia and the Negro there set in the twilight of ruin and disillusion.Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors, and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the race of human individuals striving one against another.“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it. We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibilityof picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is calledpeonageand many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms ofpeonageprevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery.All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed aspeonage—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. Hewas lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belongedto them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,” said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foulodor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together, overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious,kandaliin Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are quite natural.“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching bottom.There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and barer than the worst you would seein Russia. Ex-serf has fared better than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’ had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’ she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has cooled the Southerner’sregard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women. Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of the South.Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous. A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered “No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was. Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children. The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much psychological truth in that.During these weeks on the roads of Georgiathree Negroes were burned in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men took pleasure in the auto-da-fé. A short while later near Macon a Negro was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however, that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It was not the executionnor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who enjoyed his torments.Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear to hear.I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was, at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was doneto the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race. For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud, as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery itself.When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering, exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of all this crime with a terrible judgment.”Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia as they passedthrough—so strongly did they resent the barbarity of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become common once more.The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry, and called it murder,not war, in a way which reminds one of the indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims. It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.The way is eastward to Sylvania and the Savannah River, and then south to the rice fields and the harbor. The road is deep in sand, and on each side is uncleared country with high yellow reeds below and lofty pines above. Persimmons, ripe and yellow, grow by the wayside, a luscious fruit, good when just rotten and full of softness and sun heat. Large bird-like butterflies gracefully flitting down the long corridors between the pines, and myriads of jumping mantises and grasshoppers suggest that it is not November. The golden foliage of an occasional beech reminds you that it is. The woods are deep and gloomy and melancholy. A poorer population lives by pitch-boiling and lumbering. Every pine tree is bearded with lichen. Moss hangs in long festoons from the branches. The great dark trunks are here and there silveredwith congealed floods of sap. Trenches two inches deep have been cut in the wood, and tin gutters and pots have been fixed up to collect the resin. Every other tree has a brown pot tied to it, and each pot is half full of the pearly liquid life of the trees. You emerge from the forest to the pretty clearing of Rincom with a Lutheran church which has a metal swan above the spire—symbol of the fact that the first congregation, the one that built the church, had come across the water from Europe. Six miles from Rincom is the oldest church in all this part of Georgia, the Ebenezer Chapel, founded by those first German settlers who sailed up the Savannah River, and in part founded the colony of Georgia. It also is a church of the swan. The forest is very dense, and Negroes with shotguns are potting at wild birds from the highway. Wayside cottages and churches seem almost overcome with the tillandsia, a subtropical mossy growth that seems to grow downward rather than upward. There is a slight clearing and a cemetery in the depth of the forest, and the hundreds of pines and cypresses and oaks about it are weeping with this hanging moss. The county is that of Effingham. Springfield, the capital, without electric light, deep in yellow sand, with a great public square where all the many trees look like weeping willows because of this gray-green tillandsia hair trailing and waving ten or twenty feet to a tress, is anobscure town. Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto God than those of the Whites. But above the counter in the chief store is writtenIn God we trust,All others pay cash.The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans. The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy, springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. Andrat,rat,rat, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which isalmost indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce anr. The Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden church of colored folk.I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton, and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.Then with the empty wagon we rolled off forSavannah, and the boy driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the “red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah, and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit, through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of world civilization once more.

TRAMPING TO THE SEA

I passedthrough two ancient capitals of Georgia, first Milledgeville, and then Louisville. The relationship which Milledgeville bore to Atlanta reminded me of the relationship of the old Cossack capital of the Don country to the modern industrial wilderness of South Russia called Rostof-na-Donu. But business is business, and there is only business in this land. Even along the way to the old capital it is always so many miles to Goldstein’s on the mile-posts instead of so many miles to Milledgeville.

The old legislature sat at Milledgeville, but it fled at the approach of Sherman. It was a day of great astonishment when General Slocum paused in his supposed march upon Augusta and General Howard in his attack on Macon, and one came south from Madison while the other marched north from McDonough. There was an extraordinary sauve qui peut. Panic seized the politicians and the rich gentry of the place, for the rumor of the terrible ways of the foragers was flying ahead of the Union Army. Everyone strove to carry off or hide his treasures. They must have had terrible privationsand some adventures on the road trying to race the army, and they would have done better to remain to face the music, for no private effects were destroyed in this city. Similar scenes were enacted as at Covington. The darkies made a great day of jubilee, and hugged and kissed the soldiers who had set them free. The cotton was burned and made a great flare—seventeen hundred bales of it even in those days. The depots, magazines, arsenals, and factories were blown up. Governor Brown had fled with all his furniture, and Sherman in the governor’s house slept on a roll of army blankets on the bare floor.

There are many signs of ease and refinement in the spacious streets of Milledgeville, though it has increased little in size since the war. It has large schools for the training of cadets and the training of girls. These are model institutions and are very valuable in Georgia. The place, however, seemed to lack the cultural significance it ought to have. But it is true that churches and Sunday schools were full. No shops of any kind were open on Sundays; the people had forgotten the taste of alcoholic drink and were ready to crusade against tobacco. They are not given to lynching, though they allowed some wild men from Atlanta to break open their jail some years ago and take away a Jew and hang him. But they are too content. At church on Sunday morning the pastor complainedthat while all were willing to give money to God none were willing to offer themselves. He invited any who were ready to give themselves unreservedly to God to step forth, and none did. And it was an eloquent appeal by a capable orator. I met an old recluse who was at the back of the church. He had tried to give himself to God but was now living at the asylum where he had found shelter, being otherwise without means. He had been a Baptist minister at a church near Stone Mountain, but rheumatism had intervened after twenty years’ work, and he could no longer stoop to immerse the candidates for baptism. He was an Englishman who had listened to Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s lectures, and he talked of Dean Farrar’s sermons and the good deeds of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He spoke as no one speaks to-day, good old measured Victorian English. He was a touching type of the despised and rejected. He loved talking to the Negro children in the “colored” school till the townsfolk warned him against it. His books form the nucleus of the town library, but the rats have gnawn all the bindings of his “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and I formed the opinion that poor R—— living on sufferance in the lunatic asylum was probably the best read man in Milledgeville.

It is a delightful walk to Sandersville, over Buffalo Creek and over many streams crossedby the most fragile of bridges apparently never properly rebuilt since Wheeler’s cavalry destroyed them in the face of the oncoming army. Georgia used to have many excellent bridges, but it never really hindered the Yankee army by destroying them. It seems rather characteristic of the psychology of the people that they would not replace what they had had to destroy. Now at the foot of each long hill down which the automobiles tear is a trap of mere planks and gaps which chatters and indeed roars when passed over. Many motorists get into the mud.

Sandersville is a busy town hung in gloomy bunting which no one has had time to take down since the last county fair. It has a large, dusty, sandy square with a clock tower in the middle. There are great numbers of cars and lorries parked around. Cotton bales, old and new, fresh and decayed, lie on every street. Huge gins are working, and Negroes are busy shoveling oily-looking cottonseed into barns; cotton fluff is all over the roadways in little clots; every man is in his shirt; the soda bars do a great trade even in November. A stranger said to me “Come and have a drink” and we went in and had a “cherry dope.” There is an impressive-looking public library, much larger than at Milledgeville, with high frontal columns of unadorned old bricks mortared and laid in diamond fashion, a barred door, and an entrance so deep in cotton fluff, brickdust, and refuse that one might be pardonedfor assuming that learning was not now in repute. On the other hand there is a fine, well-kept cemetery with large mausoleums for the rich and tiny stones for the poor.

Sandersville was the scene of one or two combats during the war. But when it is borne in mind that only a hundred of Sherman’s army died from all causes on its march to the sea, it will be understood that the strife was not serious. Sherman has been called a Prussian, and he certainly possessed military genius and understood soldiering as a mental science, but he always tried to save his men. He wished to win victories with the smallest possible loss of men, and he thought out his unorthodox plans of campaign with that in view. He could have lost half his army on this adventurous march to the sea. It was a most daring exploit, and if it had failed the whole responsibility would have been laid at Sherman’s door. But Sherman had thought the matter out, and he completely deceived his enemy. Once more after Milledgeville Slocum is seen to be threatening Augusta in the north and Howard is striking south. The cavalry is driving the enemy ahead and plunges northward to Louisville and Waynesboro, well on the way to Augusta. The enemy evacuates the central regions of Georgia, and Sherman’s infantry moves through unscathed. Foraging has become organized and systematic. The wagons amount to many thousands, and it is curious that the populationdid not destroy all vehicles and so prevent the army from carrying away so much. The doubt which General Sherman expressed at the beginning of the march that supplies might prove inadequate has entirely vanished, and the army has a crowd of Negro camp followers almost as big as itself. These eventually became a great hindrance, but they were evidently encouraged to join themselves to the soldiers in the Milledgeville and Sandersville district. They proved invaluable helps in the seeking out of hidden treasure and the pillaging of farmhouses. They knew the likely spots where valuables would be buried, and the soldiers knew how to worm out secrets even from the most faithful black servants on the big estates. One reason why Georgia burns and hangs more Negroes than any other State is probably because of the bitterness caused by the unstinted foraging and the “setting of the niggers against us” as they say.

Be that as it may, the seeds of future hate are always sown in present wars, and “Sherman’s bummers” in their quest of spoil took little heed of any future reckoning. The Negroes led the soldiers even to the deepest recesses of swamps or forests, and showed the hollow tree or cave or hole where lay deposited the precious family plate and jewelry and money and even clothing. It was common to take from the planter not only hams, flour, meal, yams, sorghum molasses, butabove all things turkeys, so rare to-day along the line of Sherman’s march—

How the turkeys gobbled which our commissaries found,How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,

When we were marching thro’ Georgia!

But the bummer did not stick at these. He would borrow grandfather’s dress coat and hat surviving from the old colonial days, and his mate would array himself in grandmother’s finery, and so attired would drive their wagon back to camp, hailed by the jests of the whole army; and if they met an officer on the way they would cry out mirthfully the text of the army order—The army will forage liberally on the country.

It is said that no forager would ever sell any of his loot, that indeed it was a point of honor not to sell. The veterans of the North must therefore preserve many interesting mementoes of the South. Both officers and men took many tokens. There used to be an amusing euphemism current in Sherman’s army: it was—“A Southern lady gave me that for saving her house from being burned”—and if anyone said, “That’s a nice gold watch; where did you get it?” the soldier replied, “Oh, a Southern lady gave it to me,” etc.

The army made camp by three o’clock every day, and it was after three that most of the unauthorized foraging expeditions took place. They were gay afternoons spent in singing andgambling, athletics and cock fighting. The South was found to be possessed of a wonderful race of fighting cocks. The enthusiasts of the sport rushed from farm yard to farm yard for astonished chanticleer, and having captured him fed him well and brought him up to a more martial type of life than that which in domesticated bliss he had enjoyed with his hens. Every company had its cock fighting tournament. Each regiment, each brigade, each division, and indeed each corps, had its champion. The winners of many bloody frays were soon nicknamed “Bill Sherman” or “Johnny Logan,” but the losing bird which began to fear to face its adversary would be hailed as Beauregard or Jeff Davis. The cock fight finals were of as great interest as the combat of the Reds and White Sox to-day, and perhaps more real.

Besides game cocks each regiment had a great number of pets. These were mostly poor, homeless creatures on which the soldier had taken pity; dogs, singing birds, kids, who followed with the army and had the army’s tenderness lavished on them.

So they went, marching and camping by old Louisville and the broad waters of the Ogeechee down to Millen. The old farmers say what an impressive sight it was to watch them go by on the Millen road with seemingly more wagons than men, with all the wagons bulging with spoil and drawn by well-fed horses and mules, withlong droves of cattle, and thousands of frenzied Negroes so frantic with joy that they seemed to have lost their heads and to be expecting the end of the world.

Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff, and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none the less pleasant for that.

There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them. The men wore loincloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way.

“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations, taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and given the full rights of white American citizens.”

The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it under the dominance of a free Negro majority.

“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t progress any further.”

“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges havearisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will arrive.”

I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negrointelligentsia. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”; others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the humanitarians of New England.

In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told their slaves thatthe Yanks would flog them and burn them or put them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed. The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,” and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradisehappy as the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with. There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day, and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shoutGlorywhen the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.

At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers, who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then, after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream. The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and the droves of cattle. Butfor Georgia and the Negro there set in the twilight of ruin and disillusion.

Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors, and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the race of human individuals striving one against another.

“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it. We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.

It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibilityof picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.

There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is calledpeonageand many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms ofpeonageprevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery.

All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed aspeonage—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.

I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. Hewas lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belongedto them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.

“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,” said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”

I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foulodor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.

There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together, overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious,kandaliin Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are quite natural.

“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching bottom.

There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and barer than the worst you would seein Russia. Ex-serf has fared better than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.

“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’ had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’ she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has cooled the Southerner’sregard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women. Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of the South.

Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous. A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered “No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”

Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was. Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children. The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much psychological truth in that.

During these weeks on the roads of Georgiathree Negroes were burned in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men took pleasure in the auto-da-fé. A short while later near Macon a Negro was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however, that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It was not the executionnor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who enjoyed his torments.

Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear to hear.

I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was, at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was doneto the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race. For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud, as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery itself.

When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering, exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of all this crime with a terrible judgment.”

Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia as they passedthrough—so strongly did they resent the barbarity of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become common once more.

The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry, and called it murder,not war, in a way which reminds one of the indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims. It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.

The way is eastward to Sylvania and the Savannah River, and then south to the rice fields and the harbor. The road is deep in sand, and on each side is uncleared country with high yellow reeds below and lofty pines above. Persimmons, ripe and yellow, grow by the wayside, a luscious fruit, good when just rotten and full of softness and sun heat. Large bird-like butterflies gracefully flitting down the long corridors between the pines, and myriads of jumping mantises and grasshoppers suggest that it is not November. The golden foliage of an occasional beech reminds you that it is. The woods are deep and gloomy and melancholy. A poorer population lives by pitch-boiling and lumbering. Every pine tree is bearded with lichen. Moss hangs in long festoons from the branches. The great dark trunks are here and there silveredwith congealed floods of sap. Trenches two inches deep have been cut in the wood, and tin gutters and pots have been fixed up to collect the resin. Every other tree has a brown pot tied to it, and each pot is half full of the pearly liquid life of the trees. You emerge from the forest to the pretty clearing of Rincom with a Lutheran church which has a metal swan above the spire—symbol of the fact that the first congregation, the one that built the church, had come across the water from Europe. Six miles from Rincom is the oldest church in all this part of Georgia, the Ebenezer Chapel, founded by those first German settlers who sailed up the Savannah River, and in part founded the colony of Georgia. It also is a church of the swan. The forest is very dense, and Negroes with shotguns are potting at wild birds from the highway. Wayside cottages and churches seem almost overcome with the tillandsia, a subtropical mossy growth that seems to grow downward rather than upward. There is a slight clearing and a cemetery in the depth of the forest, and the hundreds of pines and cypresses and oaks about it are weeping with this hanging moss. The county is that of Effingham. Springfield, the capital, without electric light, deep in yellow sand, with a great public square where all the many trees look like weeping willows because of this gray-green tillandsia hair trailing and waving ten or twenty feet to a tress, is anobscure town. Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto God than those of the Whites. But above the counter in the chief store is written

In God we trust,All others pay cash.

The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans. The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy, springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. Andrat,rat,rat, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which isalmost indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce anr. The Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden church of colored folk.

I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton, and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.

“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.

Then with the empty wagon we rolled off forSavannah, and the boy driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”

And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!

While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the “red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah, and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit, through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of world civilization once more.

Back to IndexNext