A VOICE FROMSouth CarolinaTwelve Chapters Before Hampton and Two
Chapters after Hampton |
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A VOICE FROMSouth CarolinaTwelve Chapters Before Hampton and Two
Chapters after Hampton |
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| CHAPTER SECOND - AFTER THE
WAR It is impossible to conceive of a more gloomy and cheerless welcome than that which awaited the Confederate soldier returning to his home in South Carolina. If it was in the broad track of Sherman across the State, two chimneys alone, in most cases, would mark the place of his once happy dwelling; or, if his house was spared, his famished family could only welcome him to a shelter, a forlorn picture of desolation. If his house was gone, the returned soldier would have to travel many a weary mile in search of his loved ones, who had been compelled to seek for food and shelter elsewhere. There was no hope of hospitality in the immediate vicinity, where every morsel was prized far more than gold had been in former years. And when his house was spared, he would have to listen to harrowing accounts of officers and privates of the invading army indulging themselves in such acts of cruelty and barbari5m as seemed to belong to another age, and another country. The " standing order," in the whole march across the State, was to pillage and burn to the ground every abandoned dwelling; but, if occupied, then to pillage, but not to burn. Exuno disce omnes. The indignant wife would have to tell of the rude entering of rough and boisterous squads. Some would go to the out-buildings to learn from the servants the circumstances of the family— the first question always being as to the probability of any hid treasure. If they found cause to suspect that money had actually been secreted, how the soldier's heart would fire at the dastardly means resorted to to extort confession. Pistols ready cocked were held to the head of the defenceless wife, or the aged father would be taken to some convenient place, whatever its character, and hung by the neck, until life was nearly extinct. If these failed, then he would be whipped until, either their purpose was gained, or the victim deprived of consciousness. In the meantime, other parties would be equally busy. The smokehouse would soon be broken open, and the family carriage, with horses attached, stood ready for the unusual freight. Hams, sides of bacon, corn, flour, all the supplies so carefully guarded, and economically used, would be piled in the carriage, till the load would reach the roof, then horses and carriage, with supplies, would disappear, the horses going at a furious rate. While some would be busy killing the cattle and poultry of every kind, another party would swagger into the dwelling and ransack it from cellar to garret. After breaking into every place that had a lock, and throwing out of the windows whatever their friends below could put to any possible use, they would call the servants in, to help themselves to whatever might strike their fancies. Then returning to the room where they had left the whole family, of wife, daughters and children, cowering in one corner, they would utter the coarsest abuse of husband and brothers, and gloat over their terror and their tears. Not satisfied yet, with this, their manly revenge, they would lead in the servant girls, all dressed in the finest they could find in their young mistress's wardrobes, and dance with them over carpets, soon to be ripped into suitable breadths for saddle-cloths. The piano, which fur-hished the jingle for the dance, would afterwards be disjointed by their bayonets, and the fragments thrown out of the window. On leaving the house, if they found anything that could be of any possible use to the family, they would most wantonly destroy it— sometimes emptying barrels of sorghum into the watering troughs, and, ripping open feather-beds and pillows, discharge their contents into this, and with .their bayonets stir the whole into a thorough mixture. If any domestic animal was left, it was shot down, and rendered unfit for food. It required many hours for this immense army to march by, but when the last squad of bummers departed there would be absolutely nothing left which could contribute to food or any other family comfort. The servants, of course, were all enticed to follow the army, and, for days, such families would subsist on selected parts of the animals so wantonly killed and cut to pieces, and on corn scattered on the ground where the cavalry horses had been last fed—there were no hogs left now, to dispute possession of such relics. Such was the tale of desolation for the returned soldier, if his home had been anywhere in that wide belt so thoroughly ploughed by Sherman, from the Georgia line, near Savannah, to the North Carolina line. If his home had been in Columbia, his heart would be wrung by the recital of those terrible and horrible scenes of that stormy February night, of which the world has already heard so much. A whole city burned to the ground, including the State House and other public buildings, and all in half a night, was no very wonderful feat for so large a body of incendiaries. This treat had been promised his army, by Sherman, all through his weary march through Georgia, and his men enjoyed it, as only such an army could be expected to do. None but those who witnessed their bacchanalian orgies can fully appreciate them, and forma just conception how nearly those clothed in human forms can personate devils incarnate. If he had once lived in ease and luxury in those favored sea islands, or if his home had once been in the midst of the culture, wealth and refinement of Beaufort and its vicinity, a heart-sickening account of ruin and poverty awaited him. He would hear how the fall of Port Royal, early in the war, left them exposed to the inroads of enemies, just a little less barbarous than Sherman's bummers. These did not use the torch as their favorite weapon, but were very little behind them in the cowardly revenge of insulting the vanquished. They were told to stay at home but on condition of full equality with their former slaves. In this, too, all possible collision must be avoided, as they were bound to favor the "wards of the nation." Of course, in this early stage of the war, with the whole State before them, and yet confident of final success, these natives would submit to no such humiliating conditions, and nearly all that section of country was abandoned to negroes and camp-followers. Their exodus was a sad one, and the consequences were deplorable and lasting. Those who could afford it, chartered steamers and removed their families and furniture to Charleston for refuge. Others, and much the greater part, left their all behind them, and escaped with their families alone. Those who had removed to Charleston fared no better. The great fire which followed soon after, and swept diagonally across the city, from the Cooper to the Ashley, and over the quarter where they had just domiciled, consumed in one night the accumulations of long years of labor and economy. The sufferings of these people were more deplorable than those of any other section of the State. Their estates thus abandoned were seized by their negro slaves and by strangers, and in most cases have passed entirely from their possession. What from dividing them out by military order, and from selling for United States taxes, the titles even have passed into other hands, and they are left destitute. Impoverished and ruined in fortune, they even now can be found scattered over the State, in circumstances of great destitution. And what was their crime? Simply their living in the neighborhood of the first post that fell into the hands of the enemy in open war. Was this civilized warfare, to seize and appropriate to government officials whole areas of the territory, and all the private property, merely because the military post near them had fallen ? We will have to look far back into the annals of the past to find any precedent for this course, and only succeed when on the confines of the dark ages. When the returned soldier had once seen his premises, fenceless, and grown up in weeds, the doors and blinds of his house all gone, used up for fire-wood, the portraits of his ancestors taking the places of fire-screens, and even their tombstones, in Beaufort, applied to other and meaner purposes, his heart would sink too low to rise again to any hope of restoring the past. But when he would find the whole vicinity given up to a motley gang, and miscegenation and open concubinage the prevailing habits of the ne# settlers, his impulse was to put his family and all he held dear, as far as possible from this moral pestilence. It could be his home no longer! And poor old Charleston, the once proud metropolis of the State, the seat of elegance and refinement, and of a hospitality so world-wide in its fame ! Like all her sons, the returned soldier had cherished a filial affection for his native city, unknown to a migratory people. When he had gone forth as a hopeful volunteer, and all through the hardships,, fightings and privations of a long war, the most cheering picture before him was, old Charleston restored to her commercial importance. Though he knew that the course of events before the war had caused her to subside into a mere dependency on her northern rivals, still he knew that it had not always been so. There had been a time when, she held proud rank with these same rivals, and her commerce, too, had whitened foreign seas. He knew that about the time of the Revolution she had had six large ship-yards in active operation; and as early as between 1740 and 1779, she had built twenty-five square-rigged vessels, besides very many coasters for the West India trade and that of the Atlantic coast. Under new and brighter auspices, why might not prosperity not only be restored to her, but be greatly enhanced? The Southern Confederacy once established, why might not this ancient city become the New York of the New Republic? These had been his day-dreams for four long years, but what was his awaking? Her wharves either torn up, or rotted down from disuse, her princely mansions, which had been venerated for generations, all ragged from bursting shells, and shattered in the unprecedented bombardment of those long and weary years, her streets covered with coatings of grass, and her public squares so grown up in weeds that the wild beasts from the country found ample shelter there through the demolished enclosures. But grand even in ruins, proudly had she defied all the enemy's engines of destruction for more than two long years, and only fell when her citizen soldiers marched out to defend more vital points. It was some days before the evacuation was even known to the enemy, and then he marched in, only to triumph over women and children, in their battered dwellings and blackened walls. But here, too, they assumed all their peculiar" rights of the conquerors," and we have the same sickening tales of private property seized for government use, or no known use at all, and of private rights insulted and outraged by the elevation of the slave to the position of master. Just here, the writer would pause to notice some most ungenerous flings against the energy and enterprise of this stricken city, graced by those modern cant phrases of " Bourbonism," "old fogyism," " fossilized," &c, and all this accompanied by glowing contrasts, pictured in the cases of Chicago and Boston. That while these two great cities had built up their waste places, as if by magic, the traces of the fire which occurred in Charleston more than thirteen years ago are still manifest in the vacant lots and crumbling walls which mark its progress. These carpers should remember that the business of Charleston was not only paralyzed by the war, but was "dead, twice dead, plucked up by the roots!" Savannah and some of her other Southern neighbors were revived by the return of some of their strongest firms, with increased capitals, who had removed to places of safety at the beginning of hostilities ; but there was no such recuperation for this old city. Her merchants and business men stood in their own lot through the whole strife, and were all prostrated together. They, therefore, had to begin, as the phrase is, from the stump. Even in these circumstances, the enterprise and grit of her citizens would soon have restored a measure of prosperity, if they could have had a fair field for their development. but, just then, she was turned over to African rule, both State and municipal; and what people could have flourished under such insatiate and incessant draining Sampson, shorn of his locks, was not more completely in the hands of his Philistines. But to come back to our returned soldier. Even in the most favored sections of the State, scenes of desolation and decay awaited him. Four long years of rigid blockade from without, and of extortion and rapacity from heartless " speculators " from within, had blackened all the picture his imagination had painted of home, and, worst of all, his rights of citizenship were all gone. The old State was peopled by negroes and " paroled prisoners of war," without even the forms of civilized government. Her courthouses were all closed, her Governor was himself a prisoner in the Dry Tortugas, and even municipal government of incorporated towns was all suspended. It afforded a striking evidence of the law-abiding character of her citizens, that, in this complete interregnum of all constituted authority, which continued for so many months, there should be so few infractions of the public peace; and that all things should go on as orderly and peacefully as they did. The negroes had not yet been tampered with, and were as obedient and faithful as they had been during the war. The whole history of the State, during this short period, was a practical illustration of the power of public opinion in maintaining order, and in preserving the peace of the community. Sometimes a small garrison of colored troops would be marched to some point in the interior, and then a series of petty annoyances would begin and expand. The little 11 Lieutenant commanding" would be judge, jury and sheriff, in his little " Military Court," and fines were almost exclusively his penalties. How near these fines ever got to the United States treasury has never been ascertained, and probably never will be. All the cases, it may be safely said, were of colored plaintiffs against white defendants, on charges of " assault and battery." The negroes would be put up to all manner of insolence by their brethren in uniform and their friends, and when a blow, or other punishment, would thus be provoked, the culprit would soon be seized by an armed squad, and taken to headquarters "Lieutenant commanding", whether by day or by night, and irrespective of distance or state of health. This petty tyranny was excessively annoying, particularly as these fines, varying from twenty to one hundred dollars, had to be promptly met, when there was no money in the country. Heir-looms and old family plate had in most instances to be sacrificed, and the " Court," too often, became the purchaser. And following hard upon these intolerable annoyances, came the "Freedman's Bureau," emerging from its embryo state on the Sea Islands, and spreading its filthy meshes all over the State. These were, at first, mere swindling machines in the hands of sharpers. Afterwards party contrivances were superadded for the political bondage of the black man, far more galling than those world-abused " chains of slavery." These man-traps furnished appropriate schooling for that rapacious crew who afterwards revelled in the treasury of the State. Here Scott and his congenial colleagues received that impervious coating over everything like conscience, which fitted him and them for the open robbing of public funds. By way of gossiping postscript to this chapter, it may be remarked that these colored garrisons, so profusely scattered over the State, rejoiced in the high-sounding titles of "57th," " 59th" &c," Massachusetts Regiments," and some explanation seems necessary for the fact that Massachusetts Regiments were so exclusively selected to march over South Carolina soil, after the surrender. In the malarial regions near Port Royal, including most of the Sea Islands, the slaves employed in the culture of rice and cotton constituted the very lowest type of the African race in the State. They were for the most part the immediate descendants of the latest importations of native Africans brought to our shores, in New England vessels, up to 1808—the limit fixed in the constitution to the " slave trade." These were generally worked in large gangs, having but little intercourse with the whites. For example, Governor Aiken owned more than one thousand of them, on his Island of Jehossee, and with the exception of his overseer, his physician, and the methodist preacher, they seldom saw a white man from one Christmas to another. Now, these were the fields from which Massachusetts swelled the numbers of her regiments, with the rank and file, who could not even speak her vernacular. The officers of these regiments may have belonged, and probably did belong, to the "cod fish aristocracy," but all the privates were the genuine Cudjoes and Cuffees of this class—familiarly known as "Gullah negroes." Their language was an unintelligible jargon to these officers, and nothing short of the u bounty-cash" could have induced them to undertake the drilling of these thick-skulled, semi-savage soldiers. These garrison commands afforded appropriate training for the richer spoils of the Freedman's Bureau, into which these self-sacrificing patriots so quickly retired, on the cessation of hostilities; and to which they so tenaciously clung, as long as there was a dollar of congressional appropriation in their treasuries. |
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