Savannah, December 4, 1865

Savannah, December 4, 1865

 XLII. SUMMARY OF FIVE WEEKS' OBSERVATIONS IN GEORGIA.

"A KIND Providence has cast our lot in the midst of a land unparalleled in the richness of its soil and resources, and unsurpassed in the material elements necessary for a great, happy, powerful, and prosperous State," said ex-Governor Herschel V. Johnson, in the brief address with which he closed the session of the late State Convention. There was something of State pride in the words, and yet they are true in a very large sense. Moreover, their truth can scarcely be recognized by any one more forcibly than by the traveller fresh from the dreary wilderness of the Carolinas.

Very much of Georgia reminds one of Central New York. Not that there are pretty villages and prosperous towns, nor that there are churches and school-houses and multiplied evidences of thrift and industry and intelligence; but that Nature has been very kind in her gifts of soil and surface, setting rich acres into a beautiful and comfortable diversity of hill and valley, upland and lowland, open country and thrifty timber. The extreme southern section is much like the Carolinas in its general features, -- sand and swamp, piny woods and piny barrens; but even there the soil is richer and more easily worked than in the country farther up the coast. Elsewhere, however, with local exceptions, the State is much more inviting than any part of the Carolinas to the man from the North or the West. Given perfect freedom of speech and a hearty acquiescence in the new order of things, and even the New England farmer could easily find a home within Georgia.
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I note, also, that for one Northern man coming into the Carolinas to live there are at least twenty coming into this State. They come mainly from the States of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, though I have met men from New York, Connecticut, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The greater proportion of all these are men who were soldiers; and among those yet in service I found not a few who declare their intention of coming back here before winter is over if they are mustered out prior to Christmas.

Atlanta seems to be the centre from which this new life radiates; it is the great Exchange, where you shall find everybody if you only wait and watch. I saw it with wonder, and think of it with ever-increasing wonder. The very genius of the West, holding in the one hand all its energies and in the other all its extravagances, is there; not sitting in the supreme ease of settled pause, but standing in the nervous tension of expectant movement. What is thus affirmed of Atlanta is to a less extent true of twenty other places in that quarter of the State. That these new men will make good settlers who shall doubt?

I believe the contempt for labor and the laborer is at least quite as strong in Georgia as even in South Carolina. In the office of head-quarters at Americus I met an ex-colonel, a man of forty-five years, who had a plantation and worked thirty-four negroes. I asked him how he and his neighbors were getting on with the fall work. "I know nothing about the work, sir," said he with a lofty air, in which there was a fine sneer. At Macon I found a man who mourned for the State because her "gentlemen" had all been ruined, and she must hereafter be the home of "greasy workingmen."

It has not been held degrading to "be in trade," and accordingly hundreds of men are opening little stores in localities where those already existent find but precarious support. Since the war it has not been held degrading to superinted a plantation, and accordingly many men are
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looking for easy supernumerary places among the planters. But woe to the upper-class white man who proposes to come down from his proud idleness and put his own hand into farm work! And woe to him of that class who talks of learning a trade! -- "What, work with niggers and Yankees!"

The people, as a class, are much more intelligent than those of the other Southern States I have visited, though an exception in this regard must be made respecting the residents of several counties in the lower section. The State once had a good system of common schools, and, though it could not be made to live, it was productive of much benefit for a time. There is also noticeable here a certain degree and quality of energy that I did not find to the northeast. It does not manifest itself in varied industries so much as in the victory over despondency consequent upon the downfall of the Confederacy. Give the people a right mind upon the question of the dignity of labor, and you shall see here what Governor Johnson covets, -- "a great, happy, powerful, and prosperous State."

I also find here, in a certain proportion, what gives the North its superiority, -- a middle class of people. The Georgia aristocrat is not always, as in Carolina, a great landholder; but his aristocracy takes even a more lordly tone than that of the other State. The poor white, the "cracker," is certainly as low in the scale of human existence as anything can be in this country. Between these two far-apart extremes is a great class whose presence assures the future of the State. Altogether too many of its members despise manual labor and covet a professional life; but time will bring them good sense, and with that will come the new era in which Georgia may rightly call herself the "Empire State of the South."

The prevailing vice of the whole people seems to be whiskey drinking. I have seen three times as much here in a
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month as I saw in the Carolinas in two months. That the native, on starting out for a ride in the cars or stage, should take a bottle of "Bourbon" or "old rye" or "sod-corn" or some other similar liquid, is a deal more in keeping than that he should take a lunch or a clean shirt. Not to drink is to separate yourself from the mass and frequently bring upon yourself personal criticism of an unpleasant sort.

There is scarcity of food everywhere; in many whole counties the merest necessaries of life are all any family have or can afford, while among the poorer classes there is great lack of even these. Of course this poverty falls most hardly on the negroes. The Freedmen's Bureau reports something less than two thousand pauper blacks in the State; but I know it will find ten thousand as soon as the cold weather comes, if it has agencies in most of the counties. But the suffering will not by any means be confined to the blacks. Hundreds of the "cracker" families will have a hard fight to keep the lean wolf of starvation from the doors of their wretched cabins; and not a few of those who before the war never knew any want, will now know that sharpest of all wants, -- the want of food.

The people accept the repudiation of the Rebel war debt quite cheerfully, considering the doleful prophecies of the gentlemen of the late Convention. So many of the delegates there so earnestly assured me that their constituents were so exceedingly anxious to pay that eighteen millions of dollars, that I was half led into believing that the President had imposed a hard condition upon the Georgians. Haply, I doubted and did n't waste much sympathy, for I find that it was all a grand game of speculation. Men who had bought the bonds at ten to twenty cents on the dollar were anxious the State should be held to the payment of their face value, but, strange as it may seem, I have n't found a single man, except those thus pecuniarily interested, who finds fault because of the repudiation!
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The feeling toward Northern men is very far from being liberal or kindly. Many of them are, as I have already said, coming in here; they are tolerated, but, generally speaking, not welcomed. Having once fought to overcome resistance to the government, they must fight again to overcome prejudice against the spirit of the nation. There are many counties in the State in which Northern labor and capital would not be safe but for the presence of the military. I know that this is a broad and serious assertion. I make it with full consciousness of its meaning.

The worst feature of the political situation is that the secondary character of the authority of the general government is everywhere virtually asserted. "Our defeat was the necessary result of superiority of numbers and resources," says ex-Governor Johnson gravely, without any recognition of the fact that he and they had warred against the supreme law of the land. The one thing I have had to report from all sections, as well as the lesson taught in the earlier elections and now thunderingly echoed in the later elections, is that the general sentiment asserts that every man's fealty is first due to the State. Not to have "gone with the State" in her late struggle is now to be scorned and contemned.

That a State has the right to secede is a doctrine not so generally held in Georgia as I supposed. Of course it follows from the doctrine of State supremacy, but the common people have not pushed this latter dogma to its conclusion. The average and common talk designates the late war as "the revolution," this being a phrase I did not more than once or twice hear during my trip in South Carolina, and a phrase very little used even in North Carolina.

The Georgians like to contrast themselves with the South-Carolinians. "They are all miserable cusses," said a gentleman to me at Augusta when I talked with him about the people on the opposite side of the river. "The chief danger now is that we shall show too much servility," says Ben Hill
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in his everywhere-lauded card respecting the test oath. "I reckon your folks found us standing up for our rights better than they did in C'lina," queried a man of me at Columbus. "It's all very well to require certain things of South Carolina, but the President makes a mistake when he undertakes to dictate to us," observed a Macon gentleman to me. And, "Tell your people not to suppose we are of the same blood as they are," responded his companion.

The idea broached by one of the speakers in the late Convention -- that a subsequent Convention could undo its work -- seems to have many supporters in the State. How far any of these would like to have that work undone is more than I can say. I only know there are plenty of men who argue that it is not of binding effect because done under duress. The Convention was called in violation of the Constitution, they say, and did its work at the point of the bayonet. It is not the voice of a free people, and may be repudiated as soon as we are in the Union again.

The aggregate vote of the State in the recent election was greater for members of Congress than for Governor. "I said I never would vote again in the United States," remarked a man to me at Fort Valley, "and I'm not ready yet to do so." This person represents a small class of the voters. Another class is represented by the Atlanta man whom I heard say, "I will not vote again till I can do so without knuckling to the d -- d Yankees." A larger class than either of these is represented by the young fellow in the Macon and Milledgeville cars who loudly exclaimed, "No, by G -- d, I never 'll vote for a man who did n't go with the State in the revolution!" The votes of that class were not cast for Governor Jenkins, but were all given for some of the congressional candidates.

The citizens of the State are excessively anxious to be let alone with regard to the freedman. Ex-Governor Johnson spoke the average sentiment of the people, when he said,
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"If we cannot succeed in making an efficient laborer of him, I think it will be useless for any one else to attempt it; and I trust that we may hereafter have the poor privilege of being let alone in reference to this class of our population." In South Carolina, nearly everybody spoke of the negro as though he had become the special charge of the Yankees; here, however, with the exception of an occasional remark to the effect that Greeley ought to come down and look after his family, there is much of this talk which indirectly asserts the continued supremacy of the whites over the blacks.

That many of the leading men desire to see the negro have a fair chance is beyond all question. I have met some such men. They take pains to tell me that he was very docile and trustworthy during the war, that he is not to blame for being free, and that he ought to be justly treated now. A few men even go so far as to urge that he must be educated. This is the bright side of the picture.

There was an exciting season in the recent Methodist Annual Conference, at Macon, over the case of a certain Rev. J. H. Caldwell, whose offence appeared to be that he had preached two sermons on the "Abuses of Slavery." One would think a minister of the Gospel might speak upon that subject, but the native Georgian loves the spirit of slavery as well now as he ever did, and the action of the presiding elder in removing Mr. Caldwell was sustained by the Conference. And this in the month of November, 1865!

The complaint that the free negro will not work is even more common than in South Carolina. There I found many persons anxious to argue the point, anxious to show me why he would not work; but here the fact is assumed in a somewhat lofty manner that precludes discussion.

That the negro will not work simply because he is free is the most insolent of all the humbugs of Southern society. Thus, a Macon gentleman, who has a plantation below Albany, told me of his experience. He was in the army of
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Johnston, and came home in the early part of June. He heard that many planters were losing their help, and at once went down to his plantation, called his negroes together, made them a little speech, told them they were free, and could go where they pleased, said he would be glad to have them remain where they were, and would pay them fair wages for fair work. Some conference followed, resulting in arrangements mutually satisfactory. The negroes were faithful to their work all through the season, he has fairly set off to them their share of the crops made, and everything on his plantation has prospered. He has added about fifty to the hands thereon, and made a contract for the coming year with the whole number. Yet his neighbors, proceeding on the assumption that the freedmen will not work, have, of course, found all kinds of difficulty with them, and are generally unable to make contracts for next season. I have yet to hear of a single instance in which the method adopted by this gentleman has failed in securing work.

Everybody tells the Northern man that the negroes all expect a gift of lands or mules at Christmas. I have made numberless inquiries among them, bearing upon this point, and I declare my confident conviction that the assertion is untrue. There are some negroes in the southern, or perhaps I should say the southeastern section, who do expect some division of land at that time; and there are some in the western part who appear to have hopes that Christmas will bring them mules and carts; but the aggregate number of both these classes is comparatively small, and is very far from warranting the talk which one everywhere hears.

The truth in respect to the situation is, that the negroes are uncommonly ignorant of their rights and responsibilities. The State is very large, and the regular agents of the Freedmen's Bureau are very few in number. The old negro at Macon, who said to me, "One say dis, an' one say dat, an' we don' know, an' so hol' off till Janerwery," expressed
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the feeling of his people. The negro is lazy, he is improvident, and he prefers job work to season-contract work; but where he is honestly informed and fairly treated, I believe he does quite as well as any one had a right to expect that he would.

The negroes of this State seem more suspicious and distrustful of the whites than those of the Carolinas. I judge that the Western troops did not use them quite fairly, and failed to strengthen their confidence in the Yankees. Moreover, not a few of the numerous post-commandants have been men utterly unfit to deal with the blacks, while I fear that some of them have been only less pro-slavery than the natives themselves. The appointment of local agents of the Freedmen's Bureau will give the blacks an opportunity to appeal to some responsible authority; and when these are good men, it will do much to bring about a proper relationship between the two classes of people.

In some sections a new method of crime is developing. In almost any of the larger places it is matter of daily report that negroes have been guilty of theft for which bad whites are primarily responsible. In a few counties there are reported gangs of which white men are leaders and negroes are members, whose purpose is systematic plunder; and at Macon I heard of a gang thus organized for the murder of men against whom the leaders had spite or prejudice. I believe this state of affairs prevails more generally in the northwestern section than elsewhere.

The negro's prospects are not, on the whole, as good as they ought to be in this great State. He has freedom in name, but it will be some time before he gets it in fact. His hope lies in the continued military occupation of the State and the continued existence of the Freedmen's Bureau. Even with these for his aid and protection, his condition is bad enough; take these away, and in a good portion of the counties he would very soon not even have left the name of freedman.