USA > Georgia > Ten years on a Georgia plantation since the war > Part 6
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The proximity of the other place to Darien has a very demoralising effect upon the negroes there. Here everything moves on steadily and quietly, as it used to do in old
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times. Bram still has charge, and with his three nice grown sons, gives the tone to the place. We have planted about a hundred and twenty-five acres of cotton, all of which are coming up well and healthy. But this time last year it looked well too, and then, alas ! alas ! was totally destroyed by the army- worm, so who can tell if it may not again be swept from off the face of the earth in a single night, as it was last year.
Your notion, and Miss F-'s, that the negroes ought at once to be made to realise their new condition and position, is an im- possibility, and you might just as well expect children of ten and eleven to suddenly realise their full responsibilities as men and women, as these people. That they will come to it in time I hope and believe, and for that purpose I am having them educated, trying to increase their desire for comforts, and excite their ambition to furnish their houses and make them neat and pretty. But the change was too great to expect them to adopt
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the new state of things at once, and they must come to it by degrees, during which time my personal influence is necessary to keep them up in their work, and to prevent them falling into habits of utter worthlessness, from which they can never be reclaimed.
From the first, the fixed notion in their minds has been that liberty meant idleness, and they must be forced to work until they become intelligent enough to know the value of labour. As for starving them into this, that is impossible too, for it is a well-known fact that you can't starve a negro. At this moment there are about a dozen on Butler's Island who do no work, consequently get no wages and no food, and I see no difference whatever in their condition and those who get twelve dollars a month and full rations. They all raise a little corn and sweet potatoes, and with their facilities for catching fish and oysters, and shooting wild game, they have as much to eat as they want, and now are quite satisfied with that, not yet having
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learned to want things that money alone can give.
The proof that my theory about personal influence is the only means at present by which the people can be managed, is that my father, by his strong influence over them last year, made the best crop that was raised in the country, and this year our people are working far better than others in the neigh- bourhood, and we have again the prospect of a large crop, while our neighbours are in despair, their hands running off, refusing to work, and even in some places raising riots in the place. Not that their masters are not paying them their wages, for in some cases they are giving them more than we do ; but because they just pay them off so much a month and trouble their heads no more about them, just as if they were white labourers. Now, my desire and object is to put them on this footing as soon as possible, but they must be kept in leading-strings until they are able to stand alone.
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CHAPTER IV.
1868-1869.
RECONSTRUCTION.
IN November of the same year I again visited the South, having received during the summer one or two sensational telegrams from my agent, who was apt to lose his head, and although they sounded very alarming, they proved to be the creation of a vivid imagina- tion or unfounded reports, and on the whole the people had done very well, and we had a large crop for the acreage planted. This year I took a friend with me, and my maid. Christmas, politics, and paying-off had again upset all the negroes, and many of them said they intended to leave the place, and some
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did. We were now giving 12 dollars a month, with rations, half the money being paid at the end of every month, and the rest, at the end of the year. Knowing that it was quite use- less to try and get them to settle down until after the first of the year, I let them alone and devoted myself to the children, for whom I had a beautiful Christmas tree. I wrote on Christmas evening an account of it all.
Christmas 1868.
Dearest M-, You have heard of our safe arrival, and how much more comfortable the travelling was than last year. We arrived about a month ago, and I have been hard at work ever since. The negroes do not seem to be in a very satisfactory condition, but it is owing in a great measure, I think, to its being Christmas time. They are all prepared again to make their own, and different, terms for next year, but except for the bother and trouble I don't feel very anxious about it, for we have a gang of Irishmen doing the
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banking and ditching, which the negroes utterly refuse to do any more at all, and therefore, until the planting begins, we can do without the negro labour.
Last year they humbugged me completely by their expressions of affection and desire to work for me, but now that the novelty of their getting back once more to their old home has entirely worn off and they have lost their old habits of work, the effects of freedom are beginning to tell, and everywhere sullen unwillingness to work is visible, and all round us people are discussing how to get other labourers in the place of negroes. But alas ! on the rice lands white labour is impos- sible, so that I really don't know what we shall do, and I think things look very gloomy for the planters. Our Northern neighbours on St. Simon's, the D-s, who were most hopeful last year, are now perfectly discouraged with the difficulties they have to encounter with their labour, and of course having to lose two - or three months every year while the negroes
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are making up their minds whether they will work or not, obliges us to plant much less ground than we should otherwise do. How- ever, there is no use taking evil on account, and when we are ruined will be time enough to say free labour here is a failure, and I still hope that when their Christmas excite- ment is over, the people will settle down to work.
My Christmas tree this afternoon was a great success ; it was really very pretty. I had three rooms packed full of people, the women begging me to give them dolls and the toys, which I had brought of course for the children alone. The orange trees are a miracle of beauty ; many of the branches touch the ground from the weight of the fruit, and you cannot walk under them with- out knocking the oranges with your head. Several of the trees have yielded two thou- sand, and the whole crop is estimated at sixteen thousand.
We had a small excitement about this
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time, owing to a report which went the round of the plantations, that there was to be a general negro insurrection on the Ist of the year. I did not much believe it, but as I had promised my friends at the North, who were very anxious about me, to run no risks and to take every precaution against danger, I thought it best to seek some means of pro- tection. I first asked my friend whether she felt nervous and would rather leave the Island, but she, being a true soldier's daughter, said no, she would stay and take her chance with me. We then agreed to say nothing about it to my maid, who was a new English maid, thinking that if we did not mind having our throats cut, neither need she-particularly as she now spent most of her time weeping at the horrors which sur- rounded her.
I wrote therefore to our nearest military station and asked that a guard of soldiers might be sent over for a day or two, which was done. But as they came without any
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officer, and conducted themselves generally disagreeably, stealing the oranges, worrying the negroes, and making themselves entirely at home even to the point of demanding to be fed by me, I packed them off, preferring to take my chance with my negroes than with my protectors. I don't believe that there was the least foundation for the report of the insurrection, but we had trouble enough the whole winter in one form or other.
The negroes this year and the following seemed to reach the climax of lawless in- dependence, and I never slept without a loaded pistol by my bed. Their whole manner was changed ; they took to calling their former owners by their last name with- out any title before it, constantly spoke of my agent as old R-, dropped the pleasant term of ' Mistress,' took to calling me ' Miss Fanny,' walked about with guns upon their shoulders, worked just as much and when they pleased, and tried speaking to me with
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their hats on, or not touching them to me when they passed me on the banks. This last rudeness I never permitted for a moment, and always said sharply, ' Take your hat off instantly,' and was obliged to take a tone to them generally which I had never done before. One or two, who seemed rather more inclined to be insolent than the rest, I dismissed, always saying, 'You are free to leave the place, but not to stay here and behave as you please, for I am free too, and moreover own the place, and so have a right to give my orders on it, and have them obeyed.'
I felt sure that if I relaxed my discipline for one moment all was up, and I never could control the negroes or plant the place again ; and to this unerring rule I am sure I owe my success, although for that year, and the two following, I felt the whole time that it was touch-and-go whether I or the negroes got the upper hand.
A new trouble came upon us too, or
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rather an old trouble in a new shape. Negro adventurers from the North, finding that politics was such a paying trade at the South, began pouring in, and were really worse than the whites, for their Southern brethren looked upon their advent quite as a proof of a new order of things, in which the negroes were to rule and possess the land.
We had a fine specimen in one Mr. Tunis Campbell, whose history is rather peculiar. Massachusetts had the honour of giving him birth, and on his first arrival in Georgia he established himself, whether with or without permission I know not, on St. Catherine's Island, a large island midway between Savannah and Darien, which was at that time deserted. The owner, without returning, rented it to a Northern party, who on coming to take possession found Mr. Campbell established there, who declined to move, on some pretended permission he had from the Government to occupy it, and it was neces- sary to apply to the authorities at Darien to
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remove him, which was done by sending a small armed force. He then came to Darien, and very soon became a leader of the negroes, over whom he acquired the most absolute control, and managed exactly as he pleased, so that when the first vote for State and county authorities was cast, he had no diffi- culty in having himself elected a magistrate, and for several years administered justice with a high hand and happy disregard of law, there being no one to oppose him.
Happily, he at last went a little too far, and arrested the captain of a British vessel, which had come to Darien for timber, for assault and battery, because he pushed Campbell's son out of the way on the deck of his own ship. The captain was brought before Campbell, tried, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine, from which he very naturally appealed to the English Consul in Savannah, who of course ordered his release at once. This and some other equally lawless acts by which Mr. Campbell was in the habit of
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filling his own pockets, drew the attention of the authorities to him, and a very good young judge having just been put on our circuit, he was tried for false imprisonment, and sen- tenced to one year's imprisonment, himself, which not only freed us from his iniquitous rule, against which we had had no appeal, but broke the spell which he held over the negroes, who up till the time of his downfall, had believed his powers omnipotent, and at his instigation had defied all other authority ; which state of things had driven the planters to despair, for there seemed to be no remedy for this evil, the negroes throwing all our authority to the wind, and following Campbell wherever he chose to lead them.
So desperate were some of the gentlemen, that at one time they entertained the idea of seeing if they could not buy Campbell over, and induce him by heavy bribes to work for us, or rather to use his influence over our negroes to make them work for us. And this proposition was made to me, but I could not
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consent to such a plan. In the first place it was utterly opposed to my notions of what was right, and my pride revolted from the idea of making any such bargain with a crea- ture like Campbell ; besides which I felt sure it was bad policy, that if we bought him one day he would sell us the next. So I re- fused to have anything to do with the project, and it was fortunately never carried out, for although during the next three or four years Campbell gave us infinite trouble, he would have given us far more had we put ourselves in his power by offering him a bribe.
My agent unfortunately was not much assistance to me, being nervous, timid, and irresolute. Naturally his first thought was to raise the crops by any means that he could, but feeling himself powerless to enforce his orders, owing to the fact that we had no proper authorities to appeal to, should our negroes misbehave themselves, these repre- sentatives of the Government pandering to the negroes in every way, in order to
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secure their votes for themselves, he was obliged to resort to any means he could, to get any work out of the negroes at all, often changing his tactics and giving different orders from day to day. In vain I implored him to be firm, and if he gave an order to stand to it; but the invariable answer was, ' It's of no use, Miss B-, I should only get myself into trouble, and have the negro sheriff sent over by Campbell to arrest me.' And everyone went on the same principle. One of the negroes committed a brutal murder, but no notice was taken of it by any of the authorities, until, with much personal trouble, I had him arrested and shut up. · Shortly afterwards, greatly to my astonish- ment and indignation, I met him walking about the place, and on inquiring how he had got out, was coolly informed that 'a gentle- man had hired him, from the agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, to work on his planta- tion.' I went at once to the agent, and told him that if the man was not re-arrested at
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once and kept confined, I would report him to the higher authorities.
A few days afterwards I visited the same negro in his prison (!) which turned out to be a deserted warehouse, with no fastening upon the door, and here I found him playing the fiddle to a party who were dancing. He did meet his fate however, poor fellow, at last, but not for three years, when our own courts were re-established, and he was tried, sen- tenced, and hanged.
On another occasion I had to insist upon two of my own negroes being sent off the place, as they had been caught stealing rice. No one would try them, and my agent pro- posed to let them off for the present, as he needed their labour just then.
Finding things so unsettled and unsatis- factory, I determined to remain at the South during the summer, fearing that we might after all lose the crops we had with so much difficulty got planted ; and part of the hot weather I passed at St. Simon's, and part in
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South Carolina, with the same friends I had been with the winter before.
On St. Simon's I found as usual a very different state of things from that on Butler's Island. The people were working like machinery, and gave no trouble at all, which was owing perhaps somewhat to the fact that there were only fifty, instead of three hundred, and at the head of the fifty was Bram, with eight of his family at work under him. He was really a remarkable man, and gave the tone to the whole place. And oh ! the place was so beautiful; each day it seemed to me to grow more so. All the cattle had come down, and it was a pretty sight to see first the thirty cows, then the sheep, of which there were over a hundred, with their lambs, come in for the night, and then the horses led out to water before going to bed. I used to go round every evening to visit them in their different pens and places, where they were all put up for the night. The stable I visited several times a day, as I
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had not much faith in my groom, and once when I was telling him how to rub one of the horses down with a wisp of straw when he came in hot, he said, 'Yis, so my ole missus (my mother) taught me, and stand dere to see it done.' To which I could only say, ' You seem to have forgotten the lesson pretty thoroughly.'
In July I went to South Carolina, and found my friends moved from the rice plan- tation to a settlement about fifteen miles distant in the pine woods, which formerly had been occupied entirely by the overseers, when the gentlemen and their families could afford to spend their summer at the North, a thing they no longer could afford, nor wished to do. The place and the way of living were altogether queerer than anything I had ever imagined. The village consisted of about a dozen houses, set down here and there among the tall pine trees, which grew up to the very doors, almost hiding one house from another. The place was very
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healthy and the sanitary laws very strict. No two houses were allowed to be built in a line, no one was allowed to turn up the soil, even for a garden, and no one, on pain of death, to cut down a pine tree ; in which way they succeeded in keeping it perfectly free from malaria, and the air one breathed was full of the delicious fragrance of the pines, which in itself is considered a cure for most ills. In front of each house was a high mound of sand, on which at night a blazing pine fire was lit to drive away malaria that might come from the dampness of the night. These fires had the most picturesque effect, throwing their glare upon the red trunks of the pines and lighting the woods for some distance around.
The houses were built in the roughest possible manner, many of them being mere log-houses. The one we were in was neither plastered nor lined inside, one thick- ness of boards doing for both inside and outside walls. M- and I slept literally
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under the shingles, between which and the walls of the house, we could lie and watch the stars ; but I liked feeling the soft air on my face, and to hear it sigh softly through the tall pines outside, as I lay in bed. Occa- sionally bats came in, which was not so pleasant, and there was not one room in the house from which you could not freely dis- course with anyone in any other part of the building. Hampton Point, which I had always regarded as the roughest specimen of a house anyone could live in, was a palace compared with this. We were nevertheless perfectly comfortable, and it was really pretty, with numbers of easy-chairs and comfortable sofas about, and the pretty bright chintz curtains and covers, which looked very well against the fresh whitewashed boards ; and there was an amusing incongruity between a grand piano and fine embroidered sheets and pillow cases, relics of past days of wealth and luxury, and our bare floors and walls.
Most of the people were very poor, which
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created a sort of commonwealth, as there was a friendly feeling among them all, and desire to share anything good which one got with his neighbours; so that, constantly through the day, negro servants would be seen going about from one house to another, carrying a neatly covered tray, which contained pre- sents of cakes or fruit, or even fresh bread that some one had been baking. There was a meat club, which everyone belonged to, and to which everyone contributed in turn, either an ox or a sheep a week, which was then divided equally, each house re- ceiving in turn a different part, so that all fared alike, and one week we feasted sump- tuously off the sirloin, and the next, not so well, from the brisket.
Mrs. P- was most energetic, direct- ing the affairs of the estate with a masterly hand, and at the same time devoting her- self to the comfort and happiness of her children ; reading French or German, or practising music with her daughter in the
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mornings, and being always ready to re- ceive her boys on their return from their hard day's work on the plantation, to which they rode fifteen miles every morning, and back the same distance in the evening, with interest and sympathy in the day's work, and a capital good dinner, which especially ex- cited my admiration, as half the time there really seemed nothing to make it of. But they were better off than most of the people, who were very wretched. Many of them had their fine plantation houses, with everything in them, burnt to the ground during the war, and had no money and very little idea of how to help themselves. In the next house to us was Mrs. M-, an elegant, refined, and cultivated old lady, with soft silver grey hair and delicate features that made her look like a picture on Sèvres china, and as unable as a Sèvres cup to bear any rough handling, but who lived without many of the ordinary necessaries of life, and was really starving to death because she could
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not eat the coarse food which was all she could get.
Poor people ! they were little used to such hardships, and seemed as helpless as children, but nevertheless were patient and never complained.
The woods around were full of deer, and the gentlemen hunted very often-not for sport so much as for food. They generally started about five o'clock in the morning and were aroused by a horn which was sounded in the centre of the village by the hunts- man. As soon as it was heard, the hounds began to bay from the different houses, at each of which two or three were kept, no one being rich enough to keep the whole pack ; but being always used to hunt to- gether, they did very well, and made alto- gether a very respectable pack. One day they brought home three deer, having started ten ; so for the next few days we had a grand feast of venison.
Among other subjects connected with
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our rice plantations was one which interested us all very much at that time-the ques- tion of introducing Chinese labour on our plantations in the place of negro labour, which just then seemed to have become hopelessly unmanageable. There seemed to be a general move in this direction all through the Southern States, and I have no doubt was only prevented by the want of means of the planters, which, as far as I personally am concerned, I am glad was the case. Just then, however, we were all very keen about it, and it sounded very easy, the Pacific Railway having opened a way for them to reach us. One agent actually came for orders, and I, with the others, engaged some seventy to try the experiment with, first on General's Island. I confess I felt a little nervous about the result, but agreed with my neighbours in not being willing to see half my property uncultivated and going to ruin for want of labour. It was not only that negro labour could no longer be de-
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pended upon, but they seemed to be dying out so fast, that soon there would be but few left to work. This new labour would of course have sealed their doom, and in a few years none would have been left. I wrote about it at the time :-
' Poor people ! it seems impossible to arouse them to any good ambition, their one idea and desire being -- not to work. Their newspaper in Charlestown, edited by a negro, published an article the other day on the prospect, and said it would be the best thing that could happen to the negroes if the Chinese did come, as then they too could get them as servants, and no longer have to work even for themselves. I confess I am utterly unable to understand them, and what God's will is concerning them, unless He intended they should be slaves. This may shock you ; but why in their own country have they no past history, no monuments, no literature, never advance or improve, and here, now that they are free, are going
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steadily backwards, morally, intellectually, and physically. I see it on my own place, where, in spite of school and ministers, and every inducement offered them to improve their condition, they are steadily going down- wards, working less and worse every year, until, from having come to them with my heart full of affection and pity for them, I am fast growing weary and disgusted.
' Mrs. P-, who when she first married and came to the South was a strong aboli- tionist, an intimate friend of Charles Summers and believer in Mrs. Stowe, says that she firmly believes them incapable of being raised now ; and a few days ago I had a long talk with Mrs. W-, the cousin of an Englishwoman who married and came out here with all the English horror of, and ideas about, slavery. Her husband dying shortly after, left her in- dependent and very rich, so she determined to devote her life and means to the people who were thus thrown on her for help and protection. She first sent out to England for
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