SHERMAN'S UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULT. 359 subscription among officers and soldiers of the national army, and dedicated on July 4th, 1864, the first anniversary of the surrender of the city. It bears the following inscription: - SITE OF INTERVIEW BETWEEN MAJOR-GENERAL GRANT, U. S. A., AND LIEUTENANT-GENERAL PEMBERTON, JULY 4, Nothing certainly could be more simple and modest. Not a syllable is there to wound the sensibilities of a fallen foc. Yet, since the close of the war, when the returning Confederates first obtained access to this monument, it had been shamefully mutilated. The fact that it was never injured before, and the circumstance that the eagle and shield of the escutcheon surmounting the inscription had been nearly obliterated by persistent battering and grinding, showed that no mere relichunters had been hammering here, but that the mischief had been done by some enemy's hand. The shaft was enclosed by a handsome iron fence, which we found broken and partly thrown down. From the monument we rode northward over ridges crowned with zigzag fortifications, around steep crests and slopes, and past deep ravines green with tangled cane-brakes, a broken and wild region; crossing over through woods and hilly cottonfields to the western brow of the bluffs, where Sherman made his unsuccessful assault in the gloomy last days of 1862. We reined up our horses on a commanding point, and looked down upon the scene of the battle. Away on our left was the Mississippi, its bold curve sweeping in from the west, and doubling southward toward the city. Before us, under the bluff, was the bottom across which our forces charged, through the bristling abatis and their terrible entanglements, and in the face of a murderous fire captured the Rebel rifle-pits, a most heroic, bloody, but worse than useless work. Finding a road that wound down the steep hill-sides, we galloped through the cotton-fields of the bottom to Chickasaw Bayou, which bounded them on the west,-a small stream flowing down through swamps and lagoons, from the Yazoo, and emptying into the Mississippi below the battle-field. We rode along its bank, and found one of the bridges by which our forces had crossed. Beyond were ancient woods, sombre and brown, bearded with long pendant moss. Returning across the bottom, the Lieutenant guided us to three prominent elevations in the midst of the plain, which proved to be Indian mounds of an interesting character. The largest was thirty feet in height, and one hundred and fifty feet across the base. Leaving the ladies in the saddle, the Lieutenant and myself hitched our horses to a bush on one of the smaller mounds, and entered an excavation which he had assisted in making on a former visit. We found the earth full of human bones and antique pottery. A little digging exposed entire skeletons sitting upright, in the posture in which they had been buried, — who knows how many centuries before? Who were these ancient people, over whose unknown history the past had closed, as the earth had closed over their bodies? Perhaps these burial-mounds marked the scene of some great battle on the very spot where the modern fight took place. We found the surface of the mound, washed by the storms of centuries, speckled with bits of bones, yellowish, decayed, and often friable to the touch. Fragments of pottery were also exposed, ornamented in a variety of styles, showing that this ancient people was not without rude arts. The cotton-fields on the bluffs and in the bottom were cultivated by a colony of freedmen, whose village of brown huts we passed, on the broad hill-side above the river, as we returned to the city. The ride back over the western brow of the bluffs was one to be remembered. The sun was setting over the forests and plains of Louisiana, which lay dark on the horizon, between the splendid sky and the splendid, wide-spreading river reflecting "WILL THE FREEDMEN WORK?" 361 it. Every cloud, every fugitive fleece, was saturated with fire. The river was a flood of molten gold. The ever-varying glory seemed prolonged for our sakes. The last exquisite tints had scarcely faded, leaving the river dark and melancholy, sweeping between its solitary shores, when we left the crests, with the half-moon sailing in a thinly-clouded sky above our heads, and descended, by the deep-cut, narrow streets, and through the open gates at the breast works, into the city. The next day, in company with Major-General Wood, in command of the Department of Mississippi, I visited the fortifications below Vicksburg. For a mile and a half we rode along beside banks perforated with "gopher-holes" dug by the Rebel soldiers, and lines of rifle-pits, which consisted often of a mere trench cut across the edge of a crest. These were the river-side defences. The real fortifications commenced with a strong fort constructed on a commanding bluff. This did not abut on the river, as maps I had seen, and descriptions I had read, had led me to expect. Below the city a tract of low bottom-land opens between the river and the bluffs, of such a nature that no very formidable attack was to be apprehended in that quarter. Standing upon the first redan, we saw a mile or two of low land and tangled and shaggy cypress swamps intervening between us and the glimpses of shining light which indicated the southward course of the Mississippi. In this excursion, as in that of the previous day, I noticed on every side practical answers to the question, "Will the freedmen work?" In every broken field, in every available spot on the rugged crests, was the negro's little cotton patch. Riding through the freedmen's quarter below the town the General and I called at a dozen or more different cabins, putting to every person we talked with the inquiry,—how large a proportion of the colored people he knew were shiftless characters. We got very candid replies: the common opinion being that about five out of twenty still had a notion of living without work. Yet, curiously enough, not one would admit that he was one of the five, every man and woman acknowledging that labor was a universal duty and necessity. CHAPTER LI. FREE LABOR IN MISSISSIPPI. COLONEL THOMAS, Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau for the State of Mississippi, stationed at Vicksburg, gave the negroes more credit for industry than they gåve each other. In the large towns, to which vagrancy naturally gravitates, one in four was probably a fair estimate of the proportion of colored people unable or unwilling to earn an honest livelihood. "But I am confident," said the Colonel, "there is no more industrious class of people anywhere than the freedmen who have little homesteads of their own. colonies under my charge, working lands assigned them by the government, have raised this year ten thousand bales of cotton, besides corn and vegetables for their subsistence until another harvest." The Other well-informed and experienced persons corroborated this statement. Dr. Warren, Superintendent of Freedmen's Schools in Mississippi, told me of a negro family, consisting of one man, three women, and a half-grown girl, who took a lot of five acres, which they worked entirely with shovel and hoe, having no mule, and on which they had that season cleared five hundred dollars, above all expenses. I heard of numerous other well-authenticated instances of the kind. Dr. Warren spoke of the great eagerness of the blacks to buy or lease land, and have homes of their own. This he said accounted in a great measure for their backwardness in making contracts. He said to one intelligent freedman: "The whites intend to compel you to hire out to them." The latter replied: "What if we should compel them to lease us lands?" There were other reasons why the blacks would not contract. At Vicksburg, a gentleman who had been fifty miles. “HONESTY" OF A SOUTHERN PLANTER. 363 up the valley looking for a plantation, said to me: "The negroes everywhere I went have been shamefully abused. They had been promised that if they would remain and work the plantations, they should have a share of the crops; and now the planters refuse to give them anything. They have no confidence in Southern men, and will not hire out to them; but they are very eager to engage with Northern men.' This was the universal testimony, not only of travellers, but of candid Southern planters. One of the latter class explained to me how it was that the freedman was cheated out of his share of the crop. After the cotton is sent to market, the proprietor calls up his negroes, and tells them he has "farnished them such and such things, for which he has charged so much, and that there are no profits to divide. The darkey don't understand it, he has kept no accounts; but he knows he has worked hard and got nothing. He won't hire to that man again. But I, and any other man who has done as he agreed with his niggers, can hire now as many as we want." Colonel Thomas assured me that wo thirds of the laborers in the State had been cheated out of their wages during the past year. Mr. C, a Northern man who had taken a plantation at -, (I omit names, for he told me that not only his property but his life depended upon the good-will of his neighbors,) related to me his experience. He hired his plantation of a gentleman noted for his honesty: "He goes by the name of Honest Mall through the country. But honesty appeared to be a virtue to be exercised only towards white people: it was too good to be thrown away on niggers. This M has four hundred sheep, seventy milch cows, fifteen horses, ten mules, and forty hogs, all of which were saved from the Yankees when they raided through the country, by an old negro who run them off across a swamp. Honest M has never given that negro five cents. Another of his slaves had a cow of his own from which he raised a fine pair of oxen: Honest M lays claim to those oxen and sells them. A slave-woman that belonged to him had a cow she had raised |