THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
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 firewood to the steamboats passing by.” He swung his axe 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. No fair-minded man could have had my experiences in the Southern country without conceiving and cherishing a profound and warm sympathetic feeling for the Southern people, white as well as black. From what I had seen and heard, the resources of the South in men and means had all through the Civil War, been so enormously inferior to those of the North, that it was fairly amazing how the South could have sustained the desperate struggle four long years—a struggle full of heroic self-sacrifice, the prowess of which extorted admiration. And that gallant devotion had been wasted upon a hopeless cause—the cause of slavery—which, while held sacred by the white people of the South, was abhorred by the moral sense and the enlightened opinion of the century. Now the South found precipitated upon it a problem of tremendous moment and perplexing difficulty—the problem of abruptly transforming a social organism based upon slave labor into a free labor society. 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
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