They took us all back to the fence where I crossed over, all the others having been caught.  Our hearts were filled with dismay.  All looked as if they were condemned to be hung.  We knew not what was to be done with us.  The women were pitiful to see, crying and moaning—­all courage utterly gone.  They started back with us to Old Master Jack’s, at Panola, and we stopped for the night at a small farm house.  The old woman who kept it said, tauntingly:  “You niggers going to the Yankees?  You all ought to be killed.”  We started on the following morning, and got back home at one o’clock in the afternoon.  All of us were whipped.  All the members of the family were very angry.  Old Lady Jack McGee was so enraged that she said to my wife:  “I thought you were a Christian.  You’ll never see your God.”  She seemed to think that because Matilda had sought freedom she had committed a great sin.

* * * * *

Incidents.

Ever since the beginning of the war, and the slaves had heard that possibly they might some time be free, they seemed unspeakably happy.  They were afraid to let the masters know that they ever thought of such a thing, and they never dreamed of speaking about it except among themselves.  They were a happy race, poor souls! notwithstanding their down-trodden condition.  They would laugh and chat about freedom in their cabins; and many a little rhyme about it originated among them, and was softly sung over their work.  I remember a song that Aunt Kitty, the cook at Master Jack’s, used to sing.  It ran something like this: 

     There’ll be no more talk about Monday, by and by,
     But every day will be Sunday, by and by.

The old woman was singing, or rather humming, it one day, and old lady McGee heard her.  She was busy getting her dinner, and I suppose never realized she was singing such an incendiary piece, when old Mrs. McGee broke in upon her:  “Don’t think you are going to be free; you darkies were made by God and ordained to wait upon us.”  Those passages of Scripture which refer to master and servants were always cited to us when we heard the Word preached; and they were interpreted as meaning that the relation of master and slave was right and proper—­that they were rightly the masters and we the slaves.

I remember, not long after Jeff Davis had been elected president of the Confederacy, that I happened to hear old Master Jack talking to some of the members of the family about the war, etc.  All at once the old man broke out:  “And what do you think! that rascal, Abraham Lincoln, has called for 300,000 more men.  What is Jeff Davis doin’-doin’?” He talked on, and seemed so angry that he gave no one a chance to answer:  “Jeff Davis is a grand rascal-rascal,” said he, “he ought to go into the field himself.”  At first all the Southerners were jubilant over Davis; but as they were losing so, and the Unionists gaining, they grew angry and denounced him oftentimes in unsparing terms.