Part 9

I spent a night in Conyers in beautiful country, and was away early next morning on the Covington road. The road was shadowy and sanguine. The heavy gossamer mist which closed out the view of the hills clothed me also with white rime. Warm, listless airs stole through the mist. On my right, away over to the heaviness of the mist curtain, was a sea of dark green spotted and flecked with white; on my left was the wretched single track of the railway to Covington rebuilt on the old levels where it was destroyed in ‘64. Wooden carts full to the rim with picked cotton rolled clumsily along the red ruts of the road, and jolly-looking Negroes sprawled on the top as on broad, old-fashioned cottage feather beds. And ever and anon there overtook me the inevitable “speed merchants,” hooting and growling and racketing from one side to the other of the broken way. I sat down on a stone in an old wayside cemetery, sun-bleached and yet hoary also with mist. Such places have a strange fascination, and I knew some of those who lay beneath the turf had lain unwitting also when the army went by. What old-fashioned names—Sophronias and Simeons and Claramonds and Nancies! On most of the graves was the gate of heaven and a crown, and on some were inscribed virtues, while on one was written “He belonged to the Baptist Church.” The oldest stones had all fallen and been washed over with red mud. Among the old were graves of slaves, I was told, but since the war no Black has been buried with the White.

An old Negro in cotton rags, grizzled white hair on his black, weather-beaten face, told me where the colored folk lay buried half a mile away, where he, too, would lay down his old back and rest from cotton picking at last. “But on de day ob Judgment dere be no two camps,” said he. “No, sir ... only black and white souls.” He remembered the joy night and the jubilation after the army passed through, and how all the colored boys danced and sang to be free, and then the disillusion and the famine and the misery that followed. The old fellow was a cotton picker, and had a large cotton bag like a pillow case slung from his shoulders—an antediluvian piece of Adamite material with only God and cotton and massa and the Bible for his world.

While sitting on this wayside stone I have the feeling that Sherman’s army has marched past me. It has gone over the hill and out of view. It has marched away to Milledgeville and Millen and Ebenezer and Savannah, and not stopped there. It has gone on and on till it begins marching into the earth itself. For all that are left of Sherman’s warriors are stepping inward into the quietness of earth to-day.

The mist lifts a little, and the hot sun streams through. The crickets, content that it is no longer twilight, have ceased chirping, and exquisite butterflies, like living flames, are on the wing. It is a beautiful part of the way, and where there is a sunken, disused road by the side of the new one I take it for preference. For probably it was along that the soldiers went. Now young pines are springing from their footsteps in the sand.

Here no cars have ever sped, and for a long while no foot has trod. The surface is smooth and unfooted like the seashore when the tide has ebbed away, and bright flowers greet the wanderer from unfarmed banks and gullies. So to Almon, where an old gaffer told me how he and some farm lads with shotguns had determined they would “get” Sherman when he came riding past with his staff, and how they hid behind a bush, where the Methodist church is now standing, and let fly. Sherman they missed, but hit someone else and they fled to the woods. He lost both his hat and his gun in the chase which followed, but nevertheless got away. Not that I believed in its entirety the old man’s story. It was his pet story, told for fifty years, and had become true for him. I came into Covington, a regular provincial town, whose chief feature is its large sandy square about which range its shops with their scanty wares. There I met another old man, a captain who served under Lee, and indeed surrendered with him. He had been beside Stonewall Jackson when the latter died. He was now eighty-four years, haunting the Flowers Hotel.

“This world’s a mighty empty place, believe me,” said he. “Eighty-four years ...!”

He seemed appalled at his own age.

“Threescore and ten is the allotted span.... At seventeen I went gold digging ... seeking gold ... it was the first rush of the digging mania in California, but I only got six hundred dollars worth.”

“At seventeen years many their fortunes seek But at fourscore it is too late a week”

said I sotto voce.

“A mighty empty place,” repeated the old captain, rocking his chair in the dusk. “Yes, Sherman marched through here. He burned all the cotton in the barns. I was born here, and lived here mos’ all my life, but I was with Lee then. That war ought never to have been. No, sir. It was all a mistake. We thought Abraham Lincoln the devil incarnate, but knew afterwards he was a good friend to the South. It’s all forgotten now. We bear the North no grudge except about the niggers——”

He interrupted himself to greet a pretty girl passing by, and he seemed offended if any woman passed without smiling up at him. But when he resumed conversation with me he reverted to “The world’s getting to be a mighty empty place ... eighty-four years ... threescore and ten is the allotted span, but....”

I turn therefore to the witness of the time, and the genius who conceived the march and watched his soldiers go. Thus Sherman wrote of Covington: “We passed through the handsome town of Covington, the soldiers closing up their ranks, the color bearers unfurling their flags, and the bands striking up patriotic airs. The white people came out of their houses to behold the sight, spite of their deep hatred of the invaders, and the Negroes were simply frantic with joy. Whenever they heard my name they clustered about my horse, shouted and prayed in their peculiar style which had a natural eloquence that would have moved a stone. I have witnessed hundreds, if not thousands of such scenes, and can see now a poor girl in the very ecstasy of the Methodist ‘shout,’ hugging the banner of one of the regiments and jumping to the ‘feet of Jesus’.... I walked up to a plantation house close by, where were assembled many Negroes, among them an old gray-haired man of as fine a head as I ever saw. I asked him if he understood about the war and its progress. He said he did; that he had been looking for the ‘Angel of the Lord’ ever since he was knee-high, and though we professed to be fighting for the Union he supposed that slavery was the cause, and that our success was to be his freedom....”

That was the characteristic Negro point of view—the expectation of the “Coming of the Lord,” the coming of the angel of deliverance. Their only lore was the Bible, and their especial guide was the Old Testament. Despite all talk of their masters, talk which would have been dismissed as “eyewash” in the war of 1918, they believed that God had sent to rescue them. They waited the miraculous. Sherman was God’s messenger.

So the glorious sixty thousand broke into quiet Georgia—_carrying salvation to the sea_—in an ever memorable way. The foe, stupefied by defeat, was massing on the one hand at Augusta and on the other at Macon, bluffed on the left and on the right, while in the center the unprobed purpose of the general reigned in secret but supreme.

The Twentieth Corps on the extreme left went by Madison, giving color to a proposed attack on Augusta. The Fifteenth feinted at Macon, the cavalry galloping right up to that city and inviting a sortie. The Seventeenth Corps was in close support of the Fifteenth, and the Fourteenth kept in the center. It was the route of the Fourteenth that I decided to follow, and it was also the way along which went Sherman himself. It was generally understood by the Fourteenth Corps that Milledgeville was its object at the end of a week’s marching. The order of march for the morrow was issued overnight by army commanders to corps commanders and then passed on to all ranks. The men slept in the open, and beside watch fires which burned all night. Outposts and sentries kept guard, though there were few alarms. The warm Southern night with never a touch of frost, even in November, passed over the sleeping army. Reveille was early, commonly at four o’clock, when the last watch of the night was relieved. The unwanted clarion shrilled through men’s slumbers, blown by urgent drummer boys. The bugles of the morning sounded, and then slowly but unmistakably the whole camp began to rouse from its stertorousness, and one man here, another there, would start up to stir the smouldering embers of the fires and make them all begin to blaze; and then began the hubbub of cleaning and the hubbub of cooking, the neighing of horses, the clatter of wagon-packing and harnessing. Reveille was made easier by the prospects of wonderful breakfasts—not mere army rations, the bully and hard-tack of a later war, but all that a rich countryside could be made to provide—“potatoes frying nicely in a well-larded pan, the chicken roasting delicately on the red-hot coals, the grateful fumes of coffee,” says one chronicler of the time—fried slices of turkey, roast pig, sweet yams, sorghum syrup, and corn fortified the soldier for the day’s march. Horses and mules also fared astonishingly well, and amid braying and neighing and pawing huge quantities of fodder were provided. Then once more insistent bugles called; knapsacks and equipment were strapped on, the horses and mules were put in the traces, the huge droves of cattle were marshaled into the road, and the army with its officers and sergeants and wagons and guns and pontoons and impedimenta of every kind (did not Sherman always carry two of everything?) moved on.

There was something about the aspect of the army on the march that was like a great moving show. The musical composition of “Marching Thro’ Georgia” has caught it:

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee! All hail the flag, the flag which sets you free! So we brought salvation from Atlanta to the Sea, When we were marching thro’ Georgia.

The clangor of brass, the braying of mules, the shouts of the soldiers, the ecstasy of the Negroes, and then the proud starry flag of the Union!

The procession has all long since gone by, and men speak of the famous deeds “as half-forgotten things.” It is a quiet road over the hill and down into the vale with never a soldier or a bugle horn. Cotton, cotton, cotton, and cotton pickers and tiny cabins, and then maize stalks, corn from which long since the fruit has been cut, now withered, warped, shrunken, half fallen in every attitude of old age and despair. It is a diversified country of hill and dale, with occasionally a huge gray wooden mansion with broad veranda running round, and massive columns supporting overhanging roof. The columns, which are veritable pine trunks just trimmed and planed or sawn, give quite a classical air to the Southern home. Sometimes there will be seven or eight of these sun-bleached columns on the frontage of a house, and the first impression is one of stone or marble.

The Southern white man builds large, has great joy in his home, and would love to live on a grand scale with an army of retainers. The Negro landowner does not imitate him, and builds a less impressive type of home, neither so large nor so inviting. Rich colored farmers are, however, infrequent. The mass of the Negro population is of the laboring class, and even those who rent land and farm it for themselves are very poor and sunk in economic bondage. Their houses are mostly one-roomed wooden arks, mere windowless sheds resting on four stones, a stone at each corner. Furniture, if any, was of a rudimentary kind. “See how they live,” said a youth to me. “Just like animals, and that’s all they are.”

“Why don’t you have any windows?” I asked of a girl sitting on the floor of her cabin.

“They jus’ doan’ make ‘em with windows,” she replied. “But we’ve got a window in this side.”

“Yes, but without glass.”

“Ah, no, no glass.”

“Is it cold in winter?”

“Yes, mighty cold.”

Some cabins were poverty-stricken in the extreme. But in others there were victrolas, and in cases where the merest amenities of life were lacking you would find a ramshackle Ford car. On the road Negroes with cars were almost as common as white men, and some Negroes drove very furiously and sometimes very skillfully. There were no foot passengers on the road. I went all the way to Milledgeville before I fell in with a man on foot going a mile to a farm. The current Americanism, _Don’t walk if you can ride_ seemed to have been changed into, _Don’t stir forth till you can get a lift_, and white men picked up Negroes and Negroes white men without prejudice, but with an accepted understanding of use and wont. I was looked upon with some doubt, and scanned from hurrying cars with puzzlement. Lonely Jasper County had not seen my like before. But saying “Good day!” and “How d’ye do?” convinced most that the strange foot traveler was an honest Christian. Lifts were readily proffered by men going the same way. Those who whirled past the other way may have reflected that since I was on foot I must have lost my car somewhere.

A common question put to me was, “What are you selling?” and people were a little dumbfounded when I said I was following in Sherman’s footsteps. That had not occurred to them as a likely occupation on a hot afternoon. I felt rather like a modern Rip Van Winkle who had overslept reveille by half a century and was trying in vain to catch up with the army which had long since turned the dusty corner of the road. Still, the Southerners were surprisingly friendly. They said they knew nothing about it themselves, and then took me to the old folk who remembered. The old folk quavered forth—“It’s a long, long time ago now.” It interested them always that I had been in the German war and had marched to the Rhine, and they were full of questions about that. “Oh, but this war was not a patch on that one,” they said. “I tell them they don’t know what war is yet—what we suffered then, what ruin there was, how we had to work and toil and roughen our white hands, and eat the bread of bitterness like Cain——”

After the Civil War the initial struggle of the settlers and pioneers in the founding of the colony had to be repeated. Everyone had to set to and work. The help of the Negroes was at first diminished or entirely cut off. Even the necessary tools were lacking. Nevertheless there was now a surprising absence of bitterness. “The war had to be. Slavery was bad for the South, and it took the war to end it” was an opinion on all men’s mouths. “When President McKinley said that the character of Robert E. Lee was the common inheritance of both North and South he healed the division the war had made,” I heard someone say. Even of Sherman, though there were bitter memories of him, there were not a few ready to testify to his humaneness—for instance, this from a poor store keeper:

“I suppose you’re not old enough to remember the Civil War?”

“’Deed, sir, I do.”

“Do you remember Sherman’s march?”

“Yes, I was only a child, but it made a powerful impression on me. My father was killed in the war. And we were scared to death when we heard Sherman was coming. But he never did me any harm. An officer came up, asked where my father was, learned he was dead. And he made all the soldiers march past the house, waited till the last one had gone, then saluted and left us. Captain Kelly was his name, and I shall never forget his face, it was all slashed about with old scars. He was a brave man, I’m sure.... No, they didn’t do much harm hereabout, except to those who had a lot of slaves or to those who had treated their niggers badly. If they found out that a man had been ill-treating his niggers they stripped his house and left him with not a thing——”

On the other hand the rich, the owners of large plantations, remained in many cases still virulent.

“I know Sherman is in hell,” said a Mr. R—— of historic family. “When my mother lay sick in bed the soldiers came and set fire to our cotton gin and all our barns. They came upon us like a tribe of Indians and burst into every room, ransacking the place for jewelry and valuable property. I was a small boy at the time, but I shall never forget it. They took the bungs from all our barrels and let the syrup run to waste in the yard because they themselves wanted no more of it. They killed our hogs and our cows before our eyes and threw the meat to the niggers. Yes, sir. A year or so back Sherman’s son said he was going to make a tour along the way his daddy had gone—to see what a wonderful thing his daddy had done. Lucky for him he changed his mind. We’d a strung him to a pole, sure——”

Such sharp feeling was, however, certainly exceptional. Near Eatonton was a Mr. Lynch of Lynchburg, storekeeper, postmaster, wheelwright, and blacksmith all in one. He averred that they were “hugging and kissing the Yankees now, just as they would be hugging and kissing the Germans in a few years.”

“There’s mean fellows on every side,” said he. “You don’t tell me that there’s no mean fellows among the English, the French, and the Italians. I don’t believe all the stories about the Germans. I remember what they used to say about the Yankees. They get mighty mad with me when I tell ‘em, but there’s plenty of mean fellows on both sides.”

The village was named after the old man’s grandfather—an Irish settler. It is just beside the old Eatonton factory which Sherman burned down. At the next turn in the road there is a roaring as of many waters. A screen of pine and rank grass undergrowth hides an impressive sight. A step inward takes you to the romantic stone foundation of the old factory; you can climb up on one of the pillars and look out. The interior of the factory is all young trees and moss and tangles of evergreen, but beyond it rushes a mighty stream over a partially dammed broad course, red as blood, but wallowing forward in creamy billows and white foam.

The factory was used to weave coarse cotton cloth, and had evidently been worked by water power. Quite forgotten now, unvisited, it was yet a picturesque memorial of the march, and I was surprised to see no names of visitors scrawled on the walls of its massive old foundations.

I walked into Eatonton by a long and picturesque wooden bridge over the crimson river, a strange and wonderful structure completely roofed, and shady as a tunnel. The evening sun blazed on the old wood and on the red tide and on the greenery beyond, making the scene look like a colored illustration of a child’s tale.

Eatonton, where Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox were actually born, is now a hustling “city” with bales of cotton fluff higglety-pigglety down its streets, and again beautiful bales of extra quality in the windows of its cotton brokers. There are also modern mills where cotton is being spun. The business men on the streets talk of “spots” and “futures”—spot cotton being apparently that which you have on the spot and can sell now, and futures being crops yet to be picked, which, presuming on kind Providence, may be sold and re-sold many times before being grown. What is said of Eatonton may be said of Milledgeville, twenty miles further on. It is a cotton town. It is a gracious seat as well, with a scent of history about its old buildings, but it impresses one as a great cotton center. The streets of Milledgeville were almost blocked with cotton bales. It would have been easy to fight a battle of barricades there. The principal church looked as if it were fortified with cotton bales, and it would have been possible to walk fifty or a hundred yards stepping on the tops of the bales. Bales were on the tidy lawns of shady villas or stacked on the verandas, and everywhere the hard-working gins were roaring and grinding as they tore out the cottonseed from the white fluff and left cotton that could be spun. Wisps of cotton lint blew about all over the streets, and cotton was entangled in dogs’ fur and children’s hair. In the porches of Negro cabins it was heaped high till the entrance to the doorway itself was blocked.