enue.

RAILROADS AND BANKS.

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which have given it its business and military importance. The Western and Atlantic Road, connecting it with Chattanooga, forms a main trunk, with tributaries running into it from all parts of the North and West, and with branches from Atlanta running to all parts of the South. This road was constructed by the State, which in past years derived from it a large revThe war left it in a bad condition, with a dilapidated track, and merely temporary bridges in place of those which had been destroyed; without machine-shops, or materials for the repair of what little remained of the old, worn-out rolling-stock. A purchase of four hundred thousand dollars' worth of indispensable stock from the government, had sufficed to put it in operation, and it was contributing something, by its earnings, towards the great outlay still necessary to refurnish it and place it in thorough repair. The other railroads in the State, built by private companies, were nearly all doing well, by reason of the great amount of freight and travel passing over them. Those destroyed by Sherman belonged to corporations which could best afford to rebuild them; and work upon them was going forward with considerable vigor. All these roads had heavy claims against the Confederate Government; some of them amounting to several millions.

Georgia, before the war, had over twelve hundred miles of railroad in operation, forming the most extensive and complete system south of Tennessee and Virginia, — Alabama having but five hundred miles, and Mississippi seven hundred.

The best of the old Georgia banks were connected with the railroads. The bills of the Georgia Railroad and Banking Company were still worth, after the war had swept over the State, ninety-five per cent. of their par value. Those of the Central Railroad and Banking Company were selling for about the same. The issues of the other banks were worth from five to seventy-five per cent.; the stock being sacrificed.

CHAPTER LXIV.

DOWN IN MIDDLE GEORGIA.

As my first view of Atlanta was had on a dismal night, (if view it could be called,) so my last impression of it was received on a foggy morning, which showed me, as I sat in the cars of the Macon train, waiting at the depot, groups of raindrenched negroes around out-door fires; the dimly seen trees of the Park; tall ruins looming through the mist; Masonic Hall standing alone (having escaped destruction); squat wooden buildings of recent, hasty construction, beside it; windrows of bent railroad iron by the track; piles of brick; a small mountain of old bones from the battle-fields, foul and wet with the drizzle; a heavy coffin-box, marked "glass," on the platform; with mud and litter all around.

A tide of negro emigration was at that time flowing westward, from the comparatively barren hills of Northern Georgia to the rich cotton plantations of the Mississippi. Every day anxious planters from the Great Valley were to be met with, inquiring for unemployed freedmen, or returning home with colonies of laborers, who had been persuaded to quit their old haunts by the promise of double wages in a new country. Georgia planters, who raise but a bale of cotton on three, four, or five acres, could not compete with their more wealthy Western neighbors: they higgled at paying their freedmen six or seven dollars a month, while Arkansas and Mississippi men stood ready to give twelve and fifteen dollars, and the expenses of the journey. As it cost no more to transport able-bodied young men and women than the old and the feeble, the former were generally selected and the latter left behind. Thus it happened that, an unusually large proportion of poor families remained about Atlanta and other Georgia towns.

SCENE AT THE DEPOT.

461

There were two such families huddled that morning under the open shed of the depot. They claimed that they had been hired by a planter, who had brought them thus far, and, for some reason, abandoned them. They had been at the depot a week or more, sleeping in piles of old rags, and subsisting on rations issued to them by the Bureau: stolid-looking mothers, hardened by field-labor, smoking short black pipes; and older children tending younger ones, feeding them out of tin cups, and rocking them to sleep in their arms. It was altogether a pitiful sight,—although, but for the rain which beat in upon them, I might have thought their freely ventilated lodgings preferable to some of the tavern-rooms I had lately slept in. But to me the most noticeable feature of the scene was the spirit manifested towards these poor creatures by spectators of my own color.

"That baby's going to die," said one man. children will be dead before spring."

"How do you like freedom?" said another. Niggers are fated," said a third.

66

"Half your

"About one out of fifty

will take care of himself; the rest are gone up."

"The Southern people are the niggers' best friends," resumed the first speaker. "They feel a great deal of sympathy for them. There are many who give them a heap of good advice when they leave them."

Good advice is cheap; but nobody gave these homeless ones anything else, nor even that, with a single exception: there was one who gave them kind words and money, but he was a Yankee.

The remarks of the ladies in the car were equally edifying. "How much better they were off with somebody to take care of 'em!”

"Oh dear, yes! I declare it makes me hate an Abolitionist!"

"The government ought to have given them houses!" (sneeringly.) "If I had seven children to take care of, I'd go back and sell 'em to my old master."

"Do see that little bit of a baby! it's a-kicking and scream

ing! I declare, it's white! one of the young Federals', reckon."

I

From Atlanta, until within about twenty-five miles of Macon, the railroad runs upon a ridge, from which the waters of the country flow each way,- those of the west side, through the Flint River and the Appalachicola to the Gulf; those of the east, through the Ocmulgee and Altamaha to the Atlantic. The soil of this ridge is sandy, with a mixture of red clay; much of it producing little besides oaks and pines. The doorways of the log-huts and shabby framed houses we passed, were crowded with black, yellow, and sallow-white faces,women, children, and slatternly, barefoot girls, with long, uncombed hair on their shoulders, staring at the train. The country is better, a little back from the railroad, as is frequently the case in the South.

Macon, at the head of steamboat navigation on the Ocmulgee River, and the most important interior town in the State, is a place of broad, pleasant streets, with a sandy soil which exempts it from mud. It had in 1860 eight thousand inhabitants. As it was a sort of city of refuge, "where everybody was run to," during the latter years of the war, its population had greatly increased. Hundreds of white refugees from other parts of the country were still crowded into it, having no means of returning to their homes, or having no homes to return to. The corporation of Macon showed little disposition to relieve these unfortunate people, and the destitution and suffering among them were very great. They were kept from starvation by the government. "To get rid of feeding them," said Colonel Lambert, Sub-Assistant-Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, "we are now giving them free transportation wherever they wish to go."

By a recent census, taken with a view to catching vagrants and setting them to work, the colored population of Macon was shown to be four thousand two hundred and seventythree. "All those who are not now employed will soon be taken by the planters. If any will not hire out, they will be set to earning their living on the public streets. I have now