and its annual budget of one hundred thousand dollars and
more. It made out four thousand pay-rolls a year, registered
all freedmen, inquired into grievances and redressed them,
laid and collected taxes, and established a system of public
schools. So, too, Colonel Eaton, the superintendent of
Tennessee and Arkansas, ruled over one hundred thousand
freedmen, leased and cultivated seven thousand acres of cotton
land, and fed ten thousand paupers a year. In South Carolina
was General Saxton, with his deep interest in black folk. He
succeeded Pierce and the Treasury officials, and sold forfeited
estates, leased abandoned plantations, encouraged schools,
and received from Sherman, after that terribly picturesque
march to the sea, thousands of the wretched camp followers.

Three characteristic things one might have seen in Sherman's
raid through Georgia, which threw the new situation in shadowy
relief: the Conqueror, the Conquered, and the Negro. Some
see all significance in the grim front of the destroyer, and
some in the bitter sufferers of the Lost Cause. But to me
neither soldier nor fugitive speaks with so deep a meaning as
that dark human cloud that clung like remorse on the rear of
those swift columns, swelling at times to half their size,
almost engulfing and choking them. In vain were they ordered
back, in vain were bridges hewn from beneath their feet; on
they trudged and writhed and surged, until they rolled into
Savannah, a starved and naked horde of tens of thousands.
There too came the characteristic military remedy: "The
islands from Charleston south, the abandoned rice-fields along
the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country
bordering the St. John's River, Florida, are reserved and set