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 coöperation, confronted
each other in a state of fearful irritation, aggravated by the
pressing necessity of producing a crop that season, and embittered by
race antagonism. The Southern whites wished and hoped to be speedily
restored to the control of their States by the reëstablishment of
their State governments. To this end they were willing to recognize