THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or report, that their conduct could on the whole be called lawless. There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious excesses hardly, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout very good natured. They would crowd around the military posts to learn from the Yankee officers and soldiers something more about their “freedom” and also to get something to eat when they were hungry. Then they had their carousels with singing and dancing and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious paroxysms. But while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the situation then existing. Those negroes strayed away from the plantations just at the time when their labor was most needed to secure the crops of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts were made by white people to drive the straggling negroes back to the plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine personally into several of those cases, and I saw in various hospitals negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off or whose bodies were slashed with knives or bruised with whips, or bludgeons, or punctured with shot wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable number in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or strung upon the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane irritation against them. Indeed, these conditions in their worst form were only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the
[ 175 ]
