THAT evening reality returned heavily when the two mothers, widows and managers of large estates and property, returned. The day had been very trying. The oath was taken as the first thing, they having made up their minds to take it at once. Then mamma asked the colonel to send a guard or a single soldier to take back the keys which they had given to the negroes and give them to her, the rightful owner of the foodstuffs in the barns. He said quite nonchalantly that she could take the keys; it was not at all necessary for him to send a guard; he would give her a written order. She remonstrated with him, saying she believed in authority, and as an officer had delivered the key to the negroes, taking it from the overseer, a white man who was in charge of the plantation, she thought it was absolutely necessary that an official or a man wearing the United States uniform should take the keys from the negroes and deliver them to her; that, without that, there was an opening for dispute and contention and disrespect. The colonel said{261} shortly he did not agree with her. She then asked about the order from Washington as to the protection of her property. Yes, he said that he had received such an order, but they knew of nothing to which it would apply. He wrote an order for the negroes to deliver the keys to her, and the interview was ended. She had some business of a different nature which she attended to in Georgetown, and then they drove back to the White House, very tired and very indignant at the want of courtesy, and desire to facilitate the return of things to a possible working order. The negroes were free—no one had a word to say on that score—but they were not owners of the land, and in order for things to assume a condition when the land could be planted, or, rather, prepared for planting, in the new order of things, the negroes would look to the officers for the tone they were expected to assume to their former owners. But it was evident these men absolutely refused to back up the white people in any way. The talk that evening was not cheering, to say the least.
Mrs. Pringle told us, after the Georgetown matter had been fully discussed, of her experience with the man, Bunker, who had led the negroes to Plantersville and behaved so outrageously{262} there, after turning over all the houses on the river, Chicora Wood included, to the negroes, to distribute all the contents among themselves. It was two days afterward that he came down to the White House, followed by an immense throng of negroes, and demanded wine and money. Mrs. Pringle, who was as bold as a lion and very clever, tall, stout, and of commanding presence, with the face of a man, met them on the piazza and refused to let them enter the house. Bunker had been drinking heavily and also some of the negroes. She spoke with authority, and said she knew the United States Government would not sanction the seizure of her things by a drunken mob, even though one man, the leader, had on the United States uniform; and the army regulations were severe against intoxication. She was a Northern woman herself and knew all about it, and had friends in the government and the army at that moment. Bunker was a little dashed, but very angry at being talked to in that haughty manner before his followers, and things looked ugly for a moment, so that Mary, who was standing behind her mother, began to cry, and, Bunker’s attention being diverted to her, he began to try to console her. She was a very beautiful girl. He brought for{263}ward some of the things he had stolen from the Plantersville people and presented them to her—silver pitchers, etc. Mary indignantly pushed them away, but her mother bent down and said: “Take them; you can restore them to the owner.” So Mary let him bring them into the piazza and present them to her, but when he began to try to console her by complimentary speeches and admiring looks, she dropped her full length on the piazza in a dead faint! Mrs. Pringle took her by the feet and dragged her in through the hall to the dining-room, and, locking the door, put the key in her pocket, and returned to the mob; but they had vanished away, leaving rapidly and quietly. They, no doubt, thought Mary was dead; those kind of people do not faint, and to see her brilliant, radiant color suddenly turn to deadly white and her mother drag her limp body away like that sobered them. In the meantime the man whom they trusted as house-servant had busied himself getting out—the keys being in the basket in the drawing-room—all the wine and liquor there was in the house. He packed it up, and took it out of the back door to a cart which he had there, and went off with the party. He was never seen by them again. When they had all gone, Mrs.{264} Pringle unlocked the door, and used restoratives, and finally succeeded in bringing Mary to life, but she was terribly weak and ill for some days. Mrs. Pringle reviled Mary for being such a weakling and failing her at a critical moment, but we all felt and she knew that Mary had really saved the day, diverting the unsteady mind of Bunker from his original intention of plunder, first her tears and then her faint had converted his rage first to pity and then to fright.
The next morning mamma and I left the hospitable, beautiful White House after breakfast and drove to Nightingale Hall, about two miles away. Here the negroes had been specially turbulent. The overseer there, Mr. Sweat, was a very good, quiet man, and had been liked by all the negroes, but in the intoxication of freedom their first exercise of it was to tell Mr. Sweat if he left the house they would kill him, and they put a negro armed with a shotgun to guard the house and see that he did not leave alive. Mr. Sweat seems to have been something of a philosopher, for he assured them he had no intention of leaving, and settled himself quite cheerfully to pass the time of his imprisonment. The key of the barns having been given to the negroes, he kept a little journal of all{265} they did. From his window he watched them take supplies from the barns, corn and rice, using the baskets which were always used in measuring grain, open baskets made to hold a bushel, which is thirty-two quarts. In this way, as he knew exactly what was in the barns, having superintended the planting, harvesting, and threshing of the grains, he could tell just how much was left. He had written all of this to my mother, getting a friendly negro who cooked for him to take charge of the letter.
When we drove in the yard the negroes soon assembled in great numbers. Mamma had not seen them at all yet. She talked with the foreman, Mack, very pleasantly from the seat in the carriage, asking after all the old people on the place, and his family, etc. Then, finally, she said:
“And now, Mack, I want the keys to the barn.”
He said: “De officer giv me de key, ma’am, en I kyant gie um to yu.”
She drew from her silk reticule the order, and said: “I have here the officer’s order to you to give the key to me.”
He took the paper and looked at it, but there rose a sullen murmur from the crowd, and a young man who had stood a little way off, balancing a{266} sharp stone in his hand and aiming it at mamma from time to time, now came nearer and leaned on the wheel of the carriage. Mamma thought he wanted to intimidate her, and so she stepped out of the carriage into the very midst of them. I motioned to follow, but she said in a low tone, as she shut the door, “Stay where you are,” and I obeyed.
The foreman said: “How we gwine eat ef we gie yu de key? We haf fu hab bittle.”
Mamma answered: “Mack, you know that every man, woman, and child on this place has full ration for a year! You know, for you measured it and gave it out yourself. If anything should be wanted, I will come down and give it out myself.”
At that the young man, still balancing the stone, laughed, and all followed in a great shout, and he said: “Yu kyant do dat, dat de man wuk. Yu kyan do um, en we’ll starve.”
But mamma held her ground, and walking up and down among them, speaking to each one by name, asking after their children and babies, all by name. Gradually the tension relaxed, and after a long time, it seemed to me ages, in which she showed no irritation, no impatience, only{267} friendly interest, no sense that they could possibly be enemies, Mack gave her the keys without any interference from the others, and we left. She did not think it wise to go to the barn to look at the crops. Having gained her point, she thought it best to leave. We were both terribly exhausted when we got home, and enjoyed a good night’s rest in our own very original-looking log house in Plantersville, which Charley had succeeded in getting made clean and comfortable for us.
The next morning, after breakfast, we started to Chicora Wood to get the keys there. Mamma did not take Charley, for he was very weak from his illness, and having made the trip down before he was strong enough. Besides that, in the condition of the country, the negroes were apt to be more irritated by the presence of a returned soldier than with ladies only. Besides which, it was a very mortifying position for a man, whose impulse, under insolence or refusal to do the right thing, was naturally to resent it, and, being perfectly powerless, not having taken the oath, he was not even recognized as a citizen, and had no rights and would have no support from the law. Therefore, it was certainly the part of wisdom to{268} leave him behind, though I did not fully understand it at the time. We did not have much trouble at Chicora. Daddy Primus had been the man to whom the keys were given, and he was a very superior, good old man. He had been head carpenter ever since Daddy Thomas’s death. He took mamma into each barn and showed her the splendid crops, and as he locked the door to each, she just held out her hand for it, and he placed the key to that barn in her hands without question. And here the people seemed glad to see her and to see me, and we walked about over the place and talked with every one.
We looked at the house; it was a wreck,—the front steps gone, not a door nor shutter left, and not a sash. They had torn out all the mahogany framework around the doors and windows—there were mahogany panels below the windows and above the doors there were panels painted—the mahogany banisters to the staircase going upstairs; everything that could be torn away was gone. The pantry steps being there, we went into the house, went all through, even into the attic. Then the big tank for the supply of the water-works, which was lined with zinc, had been torn to pieces, and the bathroom below entirely{269} torn up. It was a scene of destruction, and papa’s study, where he kept all his accounts and papers, as he had done from the time he began planting as a young man, was almost waist-deep in torn letters and papers. Poor things, they were looking, I suppose, for money or treasure of some kind in all those bundles of letters and papers most methodically and carefully tied up with red tape, each packet of accounts having a wooden slat, with the date and subject of account upon it. We looked through every corner, and then went out on the piazza and sat down and ate the lunch we had brought. It is wonderful to me, as I look back, that we were so cheerful; but we were, and after a good lunch with some hard-boiled eggs Maum Mary brought us, we got into the carriage and drove home to the dear, peaceful log house.
The next morning we started early in the carriage for Guendalos, mamma and I, driven by Daddy Aleck. This plantation belonged to my elder brother, Colonel Ben Allston, who had been in the army since the beginning of the war, never having been home at all. There had been no white man on the place, and we heard the negroes were most turbulent and excited. As we neared the{270} place the road was lined on either side by angry, sullen black faces; instead of the pleasant smile and courtesy or bow to which we were accustomed, not a sign of recognition or welcome, only an ominous silence. As the carriage passed on they formed an irregular line and followed.
This would be a test case, as it were. If the keys were given up, it would mean that the former owners still had some rights. We drove into the barnyard and stopped in front of............