CHAPTER LXVIII.

POLITICS AND FREE LABOR IN GEORGIA.

AT Milledgeville, -a mere village (of twenty-five hundred inhabitants before the war), surrounded by a beautiful hilly and wooded country, I saw something of the Georgia State Legislature. It was at work on a cumbersome and rather useless freedmen's code, which, however, contained no very objectionable features. In intelligence and political views this body represented the State very fairly. I was told that its members, like the inhabitants of the State at large, were, with scarce an exception, believers in the right of secession. The only questions that ever divided them on that subject, were not as to the right, but as to the policy; and whether the State should secede separately, or coöperate with the other seceding States.

Since the Rebel State debt had been repudiated, there existed a feeling among both legislators and people that all debts, public and private, ought to be wiped out with it. I remember well the argument of a gentleman of Morgan County. "Two thirds of the people in this county are left hopelessly involved by the loss of the war debt. There is a law to imprison a man for paying what the act of the convention takes from him the power of paying. The more loyal portion of our citizens would not invest in Confederate scrip, but put their money into State bonds, which they thought safe from repudiation. A large number of debts are for negro property. Now, since slavery is abolished, all debts growing out of slavery ought to be abolished. Four or five men in this county," he added, "have the power to ruin over thirty families, whose obligations they bought up with Confederate money. As that money turns out to have never been legally good for anything, all such obligations should be cancelled.”

DAVIS DESPOTISM.

SLAVE PROPERTY.— SCHOOLS. 489

Throughout the State I heard the bitterest complaints against the Davis despotism. "There was first a tax of ten per cent. levied on all our produce; then of twelve per cent. on all property. Worse still, our property was seized at the will of the government, and scrip given in exchange, which was not good for taxes or anything else. There was public robbery by the government, and private robbery by the officers of the government. The Secretary of War, Seddon, had grain to sell; so he raised the price of it to forty dollars a bushel, when it should have sold for two dollars and a half. The conscript act was executed with the most criminal partiality. A man of an influential family had no difficulty in evading it. During the last year of the war, there were one hundred and twentytwo thousand young Confederates in bomb-proof situations. But an ordinary conscript was treated like a prisoner, thrown into jail, and often handcuffed.”

The value of slave property was the subject of endless debate. Said a Georgia planter: "I owned a hundred niggers: their increase paid me eight per cent., their labor four per cent.; and I've sixty thousand dollars' worth of property buried in that lot," pointing to the plantation graveyard. The convention that reconstructed the State had not the grace to accept emancipation without inserting in the new Bill of Rights the proviso "that this acquiescence in the action of the United States Government is not intended as a relinquishment, or waiver or estoppel of such claim for compensation of loss sustained by reason of the emancipation of his slaves as any citizen of Georgia may hereafter make upon the justice. and magnanimity of that government." And there existed in most minds a growing hope that, when the Southern representatives got into Congress, measures would be carried, compelling the government not only to pay for slaves, but for all other losses occasioned by the war.

Not one of the men elected as members of Congress could take the Congressional test-oath. The mere fact that a man could take that oath was sufficient to insure his defeat.

Georgia has no common-school system. The poor, who can

show that they are unable to pay for the tuition of their children, are permitted to send them to private schools on the credit of the county in which they reside. Few, however, take advantage of a privilege which involves a confession of poverty. There is great need of Northern benevolent effort to bring forward the education of the poor whites in all these States.

I found the freedmen's schools in Georgia supported by the New-England Freedmen's Aid Society, and the American Missionary Association. These were confined to a few localities, principally to the large towns. There were sixty-two schools, with eighty-nine teachers, and six thousand six hundred pupils. There were in other places, self-supporting schools, taught by colored teachers, who did not report to the State Superintendent. The opposition to the freedmen's schools, on the part of the whites, was generally bitter; and in several counties school-houses had been burned, and the teachers driven away, on the withdrawal of the troops. Occasionally, however, I would hear an intelligent planter make use of a remark like this: "The South has been guilty of the greatest inconsistency in the world, in sending missionaries to enlighten the heathen, and forbidding the education of our own servants."

At Augusta, I visited a number of colored schools; among others, a private one kept by Mr. Baird, a colored man, in a little room where he had secretly taught thirty pupils during the war. The building, containing a store below and tenements above, was owned and occupied by persons of his own race the children entered it by different doors, the girls with their books strapped under their skirts, the boys with theirs concealed under their coats; all finding their way in due season to the little school-room. I was shown the doors and passages by which they used to escape and disperse, at the approach of white persons.

Mr. Baird told me that during ten years previous to the war, he taught a similar school in the city of Charleston, South Carolina. The laws prohibited persons of color from teaching; and accordingly he employed a white woman to assist him.

GEORGIAN AND MISSISSIPPIAN DESTITUTION. 491

She sat and sewed, and kept watch, until the patrol looked in, when she appeared as the teacher, and the real teacher (a small man) fell back as a pupil. It was ostensibly a school for free colored children, the teaching of slaves to read being a criminal offence; yet many of those were taught,

On the road to Augusta, my attention was attracted by the conversation of two gentlemen, a Georgian and a Mississippian, sitting behind me in the car.

We had just passed Union Point, where there was considerable excitement about an unknown negro found lying out in the woods, sick with the small-pox. Nobody went to his relief, and the citizens, standing with hands in their pockets, allowed that, if he did not die of his disease, he would soon perish from exposure and starvation.

"The trouble is just here," said the Georgian behind me. "The niggers have never been used to taking care of their own sick. Formerly, if anything was the matter with them, their masters had them taken care of; and now they don't mind anything about disease, except to be afraid of it. If they've a sick baby, they let it die. They're like so many children themselves, in respect to sickness."

"How much better off they were when slaves! said the Mississippian. "A man would see to his own niggers, like he would to his own stock. But the niggers now don't belong to anybody, and it's no man's business whether they live or die.”

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"I exercise the same care over my niggers I always did," replied the Georgian. They are all with me yet. Only one ever left me. He was a good, faithful servant, but sickly. He said one day he thought he ought to have wages, and I told him if he could find anybody to do better by him than I was doing, he'd better go. He went, and took his family; and in six weeks he came back again. Edward,' I said, 'how's this?' I want to come and live with you again, master, like I always have,' he said. 'I find I ain't strong enough to work for wages.' Edward,' I said, 'I am very sorry; you wanted

to go, and I got another man in your place; now I have nothing for you to do, and your cabin is occupied.' He just burst into tears. I've lived with you all my days, master,' he said, and now I have no home!' I could n't stand that. Take an ax,' I said; go into the woods, cut some poles, and build you a cabin. As long as I have a home, you shall have one.' He was the happiest man you ever saw!"

"A Yankee would n't have done that," said the Mississippian. “Yankees won't take care of a poor white man. I've travelled in the North, and seen people there go barefoot in winter, with ice on the ground."

"Indeed!" said I, turning and facing the speaker. "What State was that in ?”

"In the State of New York," he replied. "I've seen hundreds of poor whites barefoot there in the depth of winter."

"That is singular," I remarked. "I am a native of that State; I lived in it until I was twenty years old, and have travelled through it repeatedly since; and I never happened to see what you describe."

"I have seen the same thing in Massachusetts too.”

"I have been for some years a resident of Massachusetts, and have never yet seen a man there barefoot in the snow.'

The Mississippian made no direct reply to this, but ran on in a strain of vehement and venomous abuse of the Yankees, in which he was cordially joined by his friend the Georgian. Although not addressed to me, this talk was evidently intended for my ear; but I had heard too much of the same sort everywhere in the South to be disturbed by it. At length the conversation turned upon the Freedmen's Bureau.

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"General Tillson" (Assistant Commissioner for the State) "has done a mighty mean thing!" said the Georgian. "I've just made contracts to pay my freedmen seventy-five and a hundred dollars a year. And now he is going to issue an order requiring us to pay them a hundred and forty-four dollars. That will ruin us. Down in South-western Georgia they can afford to pay that; but in my county the land is so poor we can't feed our people at that rate. I'm going to