TRAMPING TO THE SEA

I passed through two ancient capitals of Georgia, first Milledgeville, and then Louisville. The relationship which Milledgeville bore to Atlanta reminded me of the relationship of the old Cossack capital of the Don country to the modern industrial wilderness of South Russia called Rostof-na-Donu. But business is business, and there is only business in this land. Even along the way to the old capital it is always so many miles to Goldstein’s on the mile-posts instead of so many miles to Milledgeville.

The old legislature sat at Milledgeville, but it fled at the approach of Sherman. It was a day of great astonishment when General Slocum paused in his supposed march upon Augusta and General Howard in his attack on Macon, and one came south from Madison while the other marched north from McDonough. There was an extraordinary sauve qui peut. Panic seized the politicians and the rich gentry of the place, for the rumor of the terrible ways of the foragers was flying ahead of the Union Army. Everyone strove to carry off or hide his treasures. They must have had terrible privations and some adventures on the road trying to race the army, and they would have done better to remain to face the music, for no private effects were destroyed in this city. Similar scenes were enacted as at Covington. The darkies made a great day of jubilee, and hugged and kissed the soldiers who had set them free. The cotton was burned and made a great flare—seventeen hundred bales of it even in those days. The depots, magazines, arsenals, and factories were blown up. Governor Brown had fled with all his furniture, and Sherman in the governor’s house slept on a roll of army blankets on the bare floor.

There are many signs of ease and refinement in the spacious streets of Milledgeville, though it has increased little in size since the war. It has large schools for the training of cadets and the training of girls. These are model institutions and are very valuable in Georgia. The place, however, seemed to lack the cultural significance it ought to have. But it is true that churches and Sunday schools were full. No shops of any kind were open on Sundays; the people had forgotten the taste of alcoholic drink and were ready to crusade against tobacco. They are not given to lynching, though they allowed some wild men from Atlanta to break open their jail some years ago and take away a Jew and hang him. But they are too content. At church on Sunday morning the pastor complained that while all were willing to give money to God none were willing to offer themselves. He invited any who were ready to give themselves unreservedly to God to step forth, and none did. And it was an eloquent appeal by a capable orator. I met an old recluse who was at the back of the church. He had tried to give himself to God but was now living at the asylum where he had found shelter, being otherwise without means. He had been a Baptist minister at a church near Stone Mountain, but rheumatism had intervened after twenty years’ work, and he could no longer stoop to immerse the candidates for baptism. He was an Englishman who had listened to Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s lectures, and he talked of Dean Farrar’s sermons and the good deeds of the Earl of Shaftesbury. He spoke as no one speaks to-day, good old measured Victorian English. He was a touching type of the despised and rejected. He loved talking to the Negro children in the “colored” school till the townsfolk warned him against it. His books form the nucleus of the town library, but the rats have gnawn all the bindings of his “Encyclopedia Britannica,” and I formed the opinion that poor R—— living on sufferance in the lunatic asylum was probably the best read man in Milledgeville.

It is a delightful walk to Sandersville, over Buffalo Creek and over many streams crossed by the most fragile of bridges apparently never properly rebuilt since Wheeler’s cavalry destroyed them in the face of the oncoming army. Georgia used to have many excellent bridges, but it never really hindered the Yankee army by destroying them. It seems rather characteristic of the psychology of the people that they would not replace what they had had to destroy. Now at the foot of each long hill down which the automobiles tear is a trap of mere planks and gaps which chatters and indeed roars when passed over. Many motorists get into the mud.

Sandersville is a busy town hung in gloomy bunting which no one has had time to take down since the last county fair. It has a large, dusty, sandy square with a clock tower in the middle. There are great numbers of cars and lorries parked around. Cotton bales, old and new, fresh and decayed, lie on every street. Huge gins are working, and Negroes are busy shoveling oily-looking cottonseed into barns; cotton fluff is all over the roadways in little clots; every man is in his shirt; the soda bars do a great trade even in November. A stranger said to me “Come and have a drink” and we went in and had a “cherry dope.” There is an impressive-looking public library, much larger than at Milledgeville, with high frontal columns of unadorned old bricks mortared and laid in diamond fashion, a barred door, and an entrance so deep in cotton fluff, brickdust, and refuse that one might be pardoned for assuming that learning was not now in repute. On the other hand there is a fine, well-kept cemetery with large mausoleums for the rich and tiny stones for the poor.

Sandersville was the scene of one or two combats during the war. But when it is borne in mind that only a hundred of Sherman’s army died from all causes on its march to the sea, it will be understood that the strife was not serious. Sherman has been called a Prussian, and he certainly possessed military genius and understood soldiering as a mental science, but he always tried to save his men. He wished to win victories with the smallest possible loss of men, and he thought out his unorthodox plans of campaign with that in view. He could have lost half his army on this adventurous march to the sea. It was a most daring exploit, and if it had failed the whole responsibility would have been laid at Sherman’s door. But Sherman had thought the matter out, and he completely deceived his enemy. Once more after Milledgeville Slocum is seen to be threatening Augusta in the north and Howard is striking south. The cavalry is driving the enemy ahead and plunges northward to Louisville and Waynesboro, well on the way to Augusta. The enemy evacuates the central regions of Georgia, and Sherman’s infantry moves through unscathed. Foraging has become organized and systematic. The wagons amount to many thousands, and it is curious that the population did not destroy all vehicles and so prevent the army from carrying away so much. The doubt which General Sherman expressed at the beginning of the march that supplies might prove inadequate has entirely vanished, and the army has a crowd of Negro camp followers almost as big as itself. These eventually became a great hindrance, but they were evidently encouraged to join themselves to the soldiers in the Milledgeville and Sandersville district. They proved invaluable helps in the seeking out of hidden treasure and the pillaging of farmhouses. They knew the likely spots where valuables would be buried, and the soldiers knew how to worm out secrets even from the most faithful black servants on the big estates. One reason why Georgia burns and hangs more Negroes than any other State is probably because of the bitterness caused by the unstinted foraging and the “setting of the niggers against us” as they say.

Be that as it may, the seeds of future hate are always sown in present wars, and “Sherman’s bummers” in their quest of spoil took little heed of any future reckoning. The Negroes led the soldiers even to the deepest recesses of swamps or forests, and showed the hollow tree or cave or hole where lay deposited the precious family plate and jewelry and money and even clothing. It was common to take from the planter not only hams, flour, meal, yams, sorghum molasses, but above all things turkeys, so rare to-day along the line of Sherman’s march—

How the turkeys gobbled which our commissaries found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,

When we were marching thro’ Georgia!

But the bummer did not stick at these. He would borrow grandfather’s dress coat and hat surviving from the old colonial days, and his mate would array himself in grandmother’s finery, and so attired would drive their wagon back to camp, hailed by the jests of the whole army; and if they met an officer on the way they would cry out mirthfully the text of the army order—The army will forage liberally on the country.

It is said that no forager would ever sell any of his loot, that indeed it was a point of honor not to sell. The veterans of the North must therefore preserve many interesting mementoes of the South. Both officers and men took many tokens. There used to be an amusing euphemism current in Sherman’s army: it was—“A Southern lady gave me that for saving her house from being burned”—and if anyone said, “That’s a nice gold watch; where did you get it?” the soldier replied, “Oh, a Southern lady gave it to me,” etc.

The army made camp by three o’clock every day, and it was after three that most of the unauthorized foraging expeditions took place. They were gay afternoons spent in singing and gambling, athletics and cock fighting. The South was found to be possessed of a wonderful race of fighting cocks. The enthusiasts of the sport rushed from farm yard to farm yard for astonished chanticleer, and having captured him fed him well and brought him up to a more martial type of life than that which in domesticated bliss he had enjoyed with his hens. Every company had its cock fighting tournament. Each regiment, each brigade, each division, and indeed each corps, had its champion. The winners of many bloody frays were soon nicknamed “Bill Sherman” or “Johnny Logan,” but the losing bird which began to fear to face its adversary would be hailed as Beauregard or Jeff Davis. The cock fight finals were of as great interest as the combat of the Reds and White Sox to-day, and perhaps more real.

Besides game cocks each regiment had a great number of pets. These were mostly poor, homeless creatures on which the soldier had taken pity; dogs, singing birds, kids, who followed with the army and had the army’s tenderness lavished on them.

So they went, marching and camping by old Louisville and the broad waters of the Ogeechee down to Millen. The old farmers say what an impressive sight it was to watch them go by on the Millen road with seemingly more wagons than men, with all the wagons bulging with spoil and drawn by well-fed horses and mules, with long droves of cattle, and thousands of frenzied Negroes so frantic with joy that they seemed to have lost their heads and to be expecting the end of the world.

Davisboro is a dust-swept settlement two sides of a road at the foot of a hill. Doors stand open, and the general stores in all their disorder spread their wares. At one end of the little town a large gin is hard at work steaming and blowing, ravishing cotton seed from cotton fluff, and many bales are waiting. Louisville, the old capital, is a dozen miles further on beyond the woods and swamps of a sparsely settled country. It is now “the slowest town in Georgia.” It is, however, none the less pleasant for that.

There are many old houses, and in the midst of the way stands the original wooden “Slave Market” built in 1758, according to a notice affixed, but now used as a fire station. In the old colonial days when Louisville was the capital, slaves used to be brought there in large batches on market days. There was a little platform on which the all-but-naked victims had to stand and be exhibited and auctioned. As I sat on a bench and considered the building a young townsman joined himself to me and gave me a gleeful description of the slaves—“Their front teeth were filed, they spoke no English; when they saw our big green grasshoppers they ran after them and caught them and ate them. The men wore loin cloths and the women cotton chemises halfway to the knee. Lots of cows, hogs, mules, and niggers were put up and sold as cattle in a lump. Animals, that’s all they were and all they are now——” And he laughed in a curious, self-conscious way.

“It is strange to think of the history of them,” said I, “from the African wastes to the slave ship, from the slave ship to the harbors of the New World, then to these market places and to the plantations, taught baby English and hymn-singing, obtaining the Bible as an only and all-comprehending book, petted and fondled like wonderful strays from the forest in many families, tortured in others, becoming eventually a bone of fierce political contention though innocent themselves, the cause of a great war, and then released in that war and given the full rights of white American citizens.”

The young townsman’s imagination was not touched by the romance of the Negro. He was full of the wrong done to the white South by putting it under the dominance of a free Negro majority.

“You know we lynch them down here,” said he, with a smile. “They want social equality, but they are not going to get it. The nigger can’t progress any further.”

“Well, there’s a vast difference between the Negro of 1860 and the Negro of to-day,” said I. “Hundreds of universities and colleges have arisen, thousands of schools and Negro organizations for self-education. The Negro has gone a long way since in yelling crowds he followed the banners of Sherman. I do not think he is going to stop short, and I wonder where he is going to and where at last he will arrive.”

I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negro intelligentsia. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”; others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the humanitarians of New England.

In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told their slaves that the Yanks would flog them and burn them or put them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed. The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,” and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradise happy as the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with. There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day, and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shout Glory when the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion which should have been saved for the coming of the Lord.

At first Sherman’s army was quite pleased, and encouraged the emotion of the freed men. But it got to be too much for the Yankee soldiers, who felt at last that the Blacks were overdoing it and that in any case they were a nuisance. The nearer they got to Savannah the more impatient did they become. At last they began to destroy bridges between themselves and the Negroes, and put rivers between them. Then, after leaving Millen for the pine forests of the Savannah shore, they deliberately destroyed the bridge over Ebenezer Creek. There was a wild panic, a stampede, and many, it is said, were drowned in the stream. The splendor of the army went by, the brass bands, the cheering and the singing of the soldiers and the standard bearers of the North in the midst of them, the wagons, the many wagons laden with spoil, and the droves of cattle. But for Georgia and the Negro there set in the twilight of ruin and disillusion.

Rural Georgia is not very much better off to-day than it was in slavery days. The large tracts of land which the Blacks thought would be given them they neither could nor would farm. They lacked experience and initiative. They could be too easily deceived by their white neighbors, and were too subservient to their erstwhile masters to make good in the race of human individuals striving one against another.

“No Negroes own land hereabout,” said some Negro renters to me between Shady Dale and Eatonton. “They did, but got into debt and lost it. We rent a thirty-acre farm and pay two bales of cotton rent.” At the current price of cotton, 38 cents a pound, that amounted to 380 dollars in American currency, or 95 pounds in British currency, but the tenants paid in cotton, and as cotton boomed their rents advanced.

It seemed to be everywhere customary to reckon rent in cotton bales, and it is easy to see what an economic serf the Negro can become under such terms. This system, known as “truck” in England, was long since abolished, but its evils were so notorious that truck has remained a proverbial expression for chicane—hence the phrase “to have no truck with it.” The Negro is better off as a laborer on a white man’s plantation than he is when having the responsibility of picking a crop for master before he picks one for himself.

There are many features of life on the modern plantation, be it of sugar or cotton, which suggest slavery. Virtual slavery is called peonage and many examples were given me by Negroes. It is arranged in some places that the Negro handles as little money as possible. Instead of money he has credit checks, metal or cardboard disks, which he can use at the general store to purchase his provisions. He is kept in debt so that he can never get out, and so lives with a halter round his neck. Especially during the war, when the rumor of war wages was tempting the colored labor of the South to migrate North in huge numbers, efforts were made to keep the Negro without the means of straying from the locality where the labor of his hands was the foundation of the life of the community. Other forms of peonage prevalent in rural parts is the commuting of punishment for forced labor, the hiring out of penal labor to companies or public authorities. This resembles the use made of prisoners during the recent world war, and is virtual slavery.

All inroads made on the liberty of the subject might fittingly be classed as peonage—the denial of the vote to those legally enfranchised, intimidation by lynch law, etc.

I talked with an old Negro after leaving Louisville and tramping south toward Midville. He was lolling in rags on his porch—very near white. His father had been his black mother’s white master. He remembered Sherman’s passing when he was a boy. A remarkably intelligent and tragic face, where an unhappy white man looked out on the misery of abject poverty and quasi-bondage. Cotton had proved bad this year. The boll weevil had entered the pod early. There were but three or four bales to the plow. He did not know how he’d foot his bills. The rations given him in the spring had become exhausted. He had also hoped to buy clothes. He said the traders came early in the year and supplied him with all sorts of things on the strength of a large cotton crop, and he pointed to a toy bicycle lying upside down in the grass. He let his little boy stride it, and mother thought it fine. Last year God had blessed them with a very fine crop, and why should He not be as kind this year? So he signed on for the toy bicycle and for a gramophone as well. Now he complained that they were cutting off his rations, mother lay ill a-bed, the weather was getting cold, and they had no clothes. The boss was coming presently to turn them out of the cabin altogether, and they did not know where to go. Even while we were talking two bullet-headed young fellows, clean-shaven, frank, and surly, came up in an automobile, stopped short, and rated the old man from where they sat in the car. The cabin and the little cotton plantation belonged to them now, and the old fellow was reverting from small proprietor to be laborer on a plantation, and to be laborer was little better than to be slave.

“We have to let down rope ladders to our people to get them up here,” said a colored dean of a university to me. “We live in such abysses down below, and there is no regular way out of the pit.”

I felt as I was marching into Georgia as if I were descending the rope ladder. What a contrast there was between the bright, radiant-faced girls at Atlanta studying science and languages, and those whom I was meeting now. There was a regular sequence or gradation going downward to filth and serfdom. The first bathed twice a day, and spent hours working “anti-kink” not only into their hair but into their souls and minds. They were fresh and fit and happy as morning itself. That was on the Atlanta heights. I stepped down to the world of business with its heavier, gloomier types, the hard-faced, skillful, and acquisitive doctors, the fire-delivering, shadowy-minded clergy, the excited and eager yet heavy-footed politicians. I took the road and met the troubled landowners, pathetically happy to exist, though drowning in mortgage and debt; from them I passed to the farm laborers, with the jowl of the savage, matted hair, bent backs, deformed with joyless toil, exuding poisonous perspiration and foul odor, herded like cattle or worse, nearer to the beast than our domestic animals, feared by women and weak men, as beasts are feared when they come in the likeness of human beings.

There were, however, steps lower still in the ladder which leads downward from the Atlanta hills. Frequently along the road I saw men in yellow-striped overalls, plodding together, working together, overlooked by a white man with a gun, and as they walked sounded the pitiful clank-clank of the chains. It is rather curious, kandali in Siberia are an atrocity, but in sections of the United States they are quite natural.

“We do not keep ‘em in jail, but make ‘em work,” says the white man knowingly. “When there’s much work to do on the roads we soon find the labor.” At Springfield I remarked the terrible state of disrepair of the highway and public buildings. The reason was that instead of setting their criminals to work on them they handed them over to the State authorities. Other towns knew better. But in the chain gang and the striped convict so easily obtained at the courts the ex-slave was seen at his worst, and the rope ladder stopped short before touching bottom.

There is not much to endear the ordinary wooden cabins in which the mass of America’s black peasantry is found to live. They are poorer and barer than the worst you would see in Russia. Ex-serf has fared better than ex-slave. However, one detail of charm on this Georgian way was the putting up of tiny stars as a sign of boys serving in the army, a humble star of hope and glory like some tiny flower blossoming out of season in the wilds—one white star for a boy in the army, a golden one for a boy who had died. In their submerged way the Negroes were proud of having helped in the war. The glory, or the idea, or the parrot cry of “making the world safe for democracy” had penetrated even into the most obscure abodes. The poor Negro had discovered Europe at last, and was especially in love with one nation—the French. The South generally had not been very eager to see the Negro in the war and has not reacted sympathetically to the black man’s war glory.

“There’s no managing the neegahs now, they’s got so biggety since the war,” said a white woman at Shadydale. “Las’ year we white people jus’ had to pick the cotton usselves, men, women, and chillen.” She told me she did not think it a bit nice of the French girls to walk out with Negro soldiers, and then told a story of a French bride brought home by one of the white boys. She tittered. “Yes ... she had twins soon af’ she came, and would you b’lieve it, they were neegahs. Of course he sent her right back.” The French intimacy with the Negro soldiers has cooled the Southerner’s regard for the best-loved nation of Europe. It has also stirred up the racial fear concerning Negroes and white women. Because the black soldier was a favorite of the white girls in France it is thought that his eye roves more readily to the pure womanhood of the South.

Lynching seems often to be due to puritanical fervor, and is compatible with a type of religiosity. Mob feeling against love is very dangerous. A pastor kisses a girl of his congregation, a deacon happens to see it, and his career is ended. An old man on the road volunteered the fact that he had never “sinned” with a woman, black or white, his whole life. Certainly there is a high standard of righteousness. Family life is pure, and love-making is not the chief interest in life as in some European countries. Men’s minds are more on their business, and women’s on their homes. I am tempted to think that if the white race which inhabits the South were French or Russian or Polish or Greek there would be no lynchings. The great number of mixed relationships would beget tolerance for inter-racial attraction. I said to a young Floridan going through in his car—“I can well imagine a certain type of European women ogling the Negro, making eyes at him and luring him to his destruction. Have you ever come across such a type?” He answered “No, and if there were, we’d do away with her, too.”

Of course this rigidly moral point of view falls away when it is a matter of the white man and the black girl or the mulatto. The morality of the Negro woman was badly undermined in slavery days, when slave children were bred without any thought of sin or shame. But though the moral standard has been low, it is nothing like so low as it was. Pride of race has been born, and the moral purity of the colored woman as a whole is now comparatively higher. Certainly even in the country districts, where the Negro is nearest to his old state of being a chattel, there is a great decrease in the number of half-bred children. The solution of the racial problem by ultimate blending of color is not one which seems likely to succeed here in the course of nature. Black and White are far more separate and distinct in freedom than they were in slavery. Even the black mammy is dying out. There are not so many of that type of colored women. The white mother, moreover, has more scruple against giving her child away from her own breast. The Southern woman is as much against promiscuous relationships with Negro women as her manfolk is against the Negro’s roving eyes. One woman said, “You can understand the fondness of our young men for some of the Negro girls when as babies they were suckled by a Negro woman.” There is much psychological truth in that.

During these weeks on the roads of Georgia three Negroes were burned in my neighborhood, two near Savannah for supposed complicity in the murder of a deputy sheriff, and a mob of about a thousand white men took pleasure in the auto-da-fÉ. A short while later near Macon a Negro was accused of making love to a woman of fifty as she was coming home from church one Sunday evening. Some one certainly attacked her, though what was his object might be questionable. The accused man fled for his life. He was captured at midnight by certain well-known citizens whose names were published in the press. The sheriff argued with a crowd of about four hundred in the public street for about an hour and a half, and then, like Pilate, washed his hands of the matter and let the mob have its way. Paul Brooker, the Negro, lay on the ground maltreated, but living; gasoline was poured over him, a lighted match was applied, and he was burned to death. This was not in Catholic Spain in the days of the Inquisition, but in religious Georgia, solid for Wilson and the League of Nations. I was told I could not understand why such things had to be done. No Englishman and no Northerner could ever penetrate the secret of it. That seemed to put me in the wrong when conversing with the Southern people. It was a curious fact, however, that they also for their part took no pains to understand how such things made the blood boil in the veins of one who lived elsewhere. It was not the execution nor the crime but the cruelty that seemed to me unforgivable. I could understand killing the Negro, but I could not and would not care to understand the state of mind of the four hundred who enjoyed his torments.

Burnings and hangings and mob violence of other kinds are frequent in most of the States of the South, but even in such cases where the names of citizens are given in the press no prosecution or inquiry seems to follow. Thus the great flag is flouted, and it is possible to imagine the cynical mirth with which the ecstasy of the Negroes following the Army of Liberation in 1864 might be compared with the hilarity of the Southern mob in 1920 watching the ex-slave slowly burning to death on their accusation and yelling for mercy when there was no merciful ear to hear.

I suppose nothing begets hate so readily as cruelty. That is why in all wars there is so much mongering of atrocities: one side tries to find out all the cruelties and barbarities committed by the other just to stir up its own adherents. So in the Civil War all the brutalities of the slave owners were made known, and the Northern soldier’s blood boiled because of them. Although the quarrel is now healed, there was, at the time, a deep hate of the Southerners in the war. It was not only a martial conflict but personal hatred and contempt. What was done to the Blacks was aggravated by what was done to the white prisoners. The North discovered a cruelty and callousness in the South which must have been a puzzle to those who reflected that they were of the same race. For Georgia is predominantly English by extraction, and still proud, as I found, of grandfathers and great-grandfathers born in the old country. Some ascribe the change of temperament to the hot sun and to the southern latitude; more, to the brutalizing influences of slavery itself.

When I was at Millen, which once in the glare of a burning railroad swarmed with Sherman’s troopers, I went out to the old Southern battery at Lawton and saw the mounds and the fields where the pen of Northern prisoners was kept. It is waving with grass or corn to-day, and there is a beautiful crystal spring in the midst of serene, untroubled nature. Here the prisoners were concentrated in a space of ground three hundred feet square, enclosed in a stockade and without covering, exposed to all kinds of weather. When any escaped they were chased with bloodhounds. Some seven hundred and fifty died while in this concentration camp. No wonder a soldier of the time wrote: “It fevered the blood of our brave boys.... God certainly will visit the authors of all this crime with a terrible judgment.”

Sherman’s soldiers destroyed every hound they could find in Georgia as they passed through—so strongly did they resent the barbarity of hunting men with dogs. For the South had learned to hunt runaway slaves with bloodhounds, and it was a type of hunting which gave a peculiar satisfaction to the lust of cruelty. What they learned in the maltreatment of their slaves they could put into practice against the prisoners they obtained. There again, however, the war has failed to bear fruit; for the hunting of Negroes with bloodhounds has become common once more.

The Northern soldiers did not become gentler to the Southern population as they advanced further into the depths of the country. Rather the reverse. They would have been even more destructive than before had they not found the country to be more and more sparsely settled. The march from Millen to Savannah would have resulted in the harshest treatment of the people, but happily the way lay through forests and through the uncultivated wildernesses of Nature herself. The army had only its prisoners to vent its displeasure upon, and they certainly did not pet the few hundred Confederate soldiers and “civilian personages” whom they had collected in bondage. The enemy was found to have mined the road at one point. An officer of the Union Army had his leg blown off. Eight-inch shells had been buried in the sand with friction matches to explode them when trod on. Sherman was very angry, and called it murder, not war, in a way which reminds one of the indignation caused when in the late war the Germans started anything novel. The answer to this mining of the road was to make the rebel prisoners march ahead of the column in close formation so as to explode any more which might be laid on the way. They were greatly afraid, and begged hard to be let off—much to the mirth of the supposed victims. It was not until nearing one of the forts of Savannah that another mine exploded—the hurt done to the prisoners remains unrecorded.

The way is eastward to Sylvania and the Savannah River, and then south to the rice fields and the harbor. The road is deep in sand, and on each side is uncleared country with high yellow reeds below and lofty pines above. Persimmons, ripe and yellow, grow by the wayside, a luscious fruit, good when just rotten and full of softness and sun heat. Large bird-like butterflies gracefully flitting down the long corridors between the pines, and myriads of jumping mantises and grasshoppers suggest that it is not November. The golden foliage of an occasional beech reminds you that it is. The woods are deep and gloomy and melancholy. A poorer population lives by pitch-boiling and lumbering. Every pine tree is bearded with lichen. Moss hangs in long festoons from the branches. The great dark trunks are here and there silvered with congealed floods of sap. Trenches two inches deep have been cut in the wood, and tin gutters and pots have been fixed up to collect the resin. Every other tree has a brown pot tied to it, and each pot is half full of the pearly liquid life of the trees. You emerge from the forest to the pretty clearing of Rincom with a Lutheran church which has a metal swan above the spire—symbol of the fact that the first congregation, the one that built the church, had come across the water from Europe. Six miles from Rincom is the oldest church in all this part of Georgia, the Ebenezer Chapel, founded by those first German settlers who sailed up the Savannah River, and in part founded the colony of Georgia. It also is a church of the swan. The forest is very dense, and Negroes with shotguns are potting at wild birds from the highway. Wayside cottages and churches seem almost overcome with the tillandsia, a subtropical mossy growth that seems to grow downward rather than upward. There is a slight clearing and a cemetery in the depth of the forest, and the hundreds of pines and cypresses and oaks about it are weeping with this hanging moss. The county is that of Effingham. Springfield, the capital, without electric light, deep in yellow sand, with a great public square where all the many trees look like weeping willows because of this gray-green tillandsia hair trailing and waving ten or twenty feet to a tress, is an obscure town. Guideposts for Florida begin to appear, and heavy touring cars roll past on the way to Miami and Palm Beach. There are some charming wooden churches—the Negro ones being poorer, looking better sacrifices unto God than those of the Whites. But above the counter in the chief store is written

In God we trust,
All others pay cash.

The sound of the axe clashes in the woods. There are many fallen trunks on which it is possible to sit down and rest. Sea mist rolls in from the Atlantic, and warm airs push through it, feeding the marvelous tropical mosses. It’s a long way to Savannah—distance seems to be intensified by the narrowness of the gray corridor of the road through the vast, high forest. There rises from the obstructed earth black oak and sterile vine and palmettoes like ladies’ hands with opened fans. The surface whence the forest grows is swampy, old, lichened, mossy, springy. It’s hard to find solid earth, so many branches seem to be overgrown with verdure and moss. In the heat long snakes glide away from your approach, having seen you before you saw them. And rat, rat, rat, the red-polled woodpeckers in their tree-top cities call upon one another and seek their insect luncheons and then flit home and knock again. The white people speak a “nigger brogue” which is almost indistinguishable from Negro talk, and they never pronounce an r. The Negro seems very poor and illiterate and afraid. “Hear comes the OLD RELIABLE FRIND with the LIFT of CHRIST” says a notice on an old wooden church of colored folk.

I am overtaken by a Negro with a wagon and twelve bales of cotton, and though he seems trying to race a huge touring car “heading for Florida” with trunks on top and whole family within, he slows down to pick me up. His is an enormous lorry, ponderous and ramshackle, shaking the bones out of your body as it takes you along. The Negro boy held the steering wheel nonchalantly with one hand and blundered along at top speed. After ten miles of this we entered one of the vast cotton warehouses outside Savannah, passed the gateman who would not have let me in but he thought I was in charge, and we saw where a hundred thousand bales were being housed and kept. Scores of Negroes were at work manipulating bales on trolley trains run by petrol engines all over the asphalted way, and from shed to shed.

“Are you shipping much cotton?” I asked of a white man who was giving us a receipt for the cotton brought in, while a dozen husky fellows were unloading the wagon. “Not much,” said he. “Holding for better prices,” he added, and smiled knowingly.

Then with the empty wagon we rolled off for Savannah, and the boy driver told me he was going to work his passage soon on a ship from Savannah to New York. “We don’t get a chance down here.”

And yet how much better off was he with his wagon, and union wages, and life in a large city than the poor ex-slave, on the land!

While unlading, it had become dark. But an hour more through the forest brought us to the outlying slums of Savannah, and then to the “red-light district” where were music and dancing, and open doors and windows, and the red glow of the lamp luring colored youth to lowest pleasures; then to the grandeur and spaciousness of modern Savannah, and the white man’s civilization, up out of Georgia, up out of the pit, through the veil of the forest and of Nature to the serene heights of world civilization once more.