e slaves was goin' to get 40 acres and a mule. I tell you
they didn't wait to see if they was going to get another meal. They went
wild, walking and hooping up and down the road. They found out when they
nearly starved they had got the bad end of the game somehow. Then to
keep em from starvin' they had certain days to go to Lawrence and get a
little rations. Not much I tell you. They started stealin' and the Ku
Klux started up bout that.

"The President got killed (Abraham Lincoln). Then they knowed the gig
was up. They had to go to work hard as ever and mighty little to eat.
The slaves did vote. It was the color of the paper they used way they
knowed how to vote. The Republican government had full sway 12 years.
All the offices at Edgefield nearly was Negroes cept the sheriff. The
Yankees tell em what to do way they knowed how. Butler went to Congress.
He was a Negro--(???). That was what the Ku Klux was mad bout. They run
the Yankees out and took holt of the offices soon as they could.

"Our master had no Ku Klux comin' on our place. He protected us, It
wasn't no different than slavery till I was nearly grown and a drove was
walking going west to better place. I got in with them and come on. The
Ku Klux had killed several Negroes. That scared them all up. I remember
Tuscaloosa, Alabama when we cone through there. We was walking--a line
a mile long--marching and singing. They was building back in a hurry
seemed like to me. The town had been burned up. Some dropped out to get
work along. Some fell out sick. Some so weak they died long the road.
Had to keep up. Some stopped; they never caught up no more. Mostly old
folks or half starved folks couldn't keep going. The Ku Klux whoop and
shoot you down for any little thing. They started at night, fraid of the
Yankees but they whooped and run them out and the Negroes left. The Ku
Klux got so bold they didn't dress up nor go at night neither. At first
they was careful then they got bold. The Yankee soldiers bout all they
was afraid of. The Negroes found out who some of the Ku Klux was and
told the Yankees but it didn't do much good. After bout twelve years all
the Yankees gone back home. The white folks down in Carolina thought
bout as little of them as Negroes. They wouldn't let them have no land
if they did have money to pay any price for it. They didn't want them
living amongst them. They say they rether have a Negro family.

"The biggest Negro uprisin' I ever seed was at