eds. In the front yard of one of the houses I
observed some fresh stumps and stacks of cordwood and an old man busy
cutting down with an ax a magnificent shade-tree. There was something
distinguished in his appearance that arrested my attention--fine
features topped with long white locks; slender, delicate hands;
clothes shabby, but of a cut denoting that they had originally been
made for a person above the ordinary wood-chopper. My companion, a
Federal captain, did not know him. I accosted him with the question to
whom that house belonged. "It belongs to me," he said. I begged his
pardon for asking the further question why he was cutting down that
splendid shade-tree. "I must live," he replied, with a sad smile. "My
sons fell in the war; all my servants have left me. I sell fire-wood
to the steamboats passing by." He swung his ax again to end the
conversation. A warm word of sympathy was on my tongue, but I
repressed it, a look at his dignified mien making me apprehend that he
might resent being pitied, especially by one of the victorious enemy.

At Vicksburg I learned from General Slocum that Governor Sharkey
himself had, upon more mature reflection, given up the organization of
his State militia as too dangerous an experiment.

I left the South troubled by great anxiety. Four millions of negroes,
of a race held in servitude for two centuries, had suddenly been made
free men. That an overwhelming majority of them, grown up in the
traditional darkness of slavery, should at first not have been able to
grasp the duties of their new condition, together with its rights, was
but natural. It was equally natural that the Southern whites, who had
known the negro laborer only as a slave, and who had been trained only
in the habits and ways of thinking of the master class, should have
stubbornly clung to their traditional prejudice that the negro would
not work without physical compulsion. They might have concluded that
their prejudice was unreasonable; but, such is human nature, a
prejudice is often the more tenaciously clung to the more unreasonable
it is. There was, therefore, a strong tendency among the whites to
continue the old practices of the slavery system to force the negro
freedmen to labor for them. Thus the two races, whose well-being
depended upon their peaceable and harmonious cooeperation, confronted
each other in a state of fearful irritation, aggravated by the
pressing necessity of producing a crop that season