‘WAY DOWN IN ALABAM’

At the break-up of the great Rebellion I found myself at Selma, Alabama, still in the service of the United States, and although my duties were now purely civil my treatment was not uniformly so, and I am not surprised that it was not.  I was a minor official in the Treasury Department, engaged in performance of duties exceedingly disagreeable not only to the people of the vicinity, but to myself as well.  They consisted in the collection and custody of “captured and abandoned property.”  The Treasury had covered pretty nearly the entire area of “the States lately in rebellion” with a hierarchy of officials, consisting, as nearly as memory serves, of one supervising agent and a multitude of special agents.  Each special agent held dominion over a collection district and was allowed an “agency aide” to assist him in his purposeful activity, besides such clerks, laborers and so forth as he could persuade himself to need.  My humble position was that of agency aide.  When the special agent was present for duty I was his chief executive officer; in his absence I represented him (with greater or less fidelity to the original and to my conscience) and was invested with his powers.  In the Selma agency the property that we were expected to seize and defend as best we might was mostly plantations (whose owners had disappeared; some were dead, others in hiding) and cotton.  The country was full of cotton which had been sold to the Confederate Government, but not removed from the plantations to take its chance of export through the blockade.  It had been decided that it now belonged to the United States.  It was worth about five hundred dollars a bale—­say one dollar a pound.  The world agreed that that was a pretty good price for cotton.

Naturally the original owners, having received nothing for their product but Confederate money which the result of the war had made worthless, manifested an unamiable reluctance to give it up, for if they could market it for themselves it would more than recoup them for all their losses in the war.  They had therefore exercised a considerable ingenuity in effacing all record of its transfer to the Confederate Government, obliterating the marks on the bales, and hiding these away in swamps and other inconspicuous places, fortifying their claims to private ownership with appalling affidavits and “covering their tracks” in an infinite variety of ways generally.

In effecting their purpose they encountered many difficulties.  Cotton in bales is not very portable property; it requires for movement and concealment a good deal of cooeperation by persons having no interest in keeping the secret and easily accessible to the blandishments of those interested in tracing it.  The negroes, by whom the work was necessarily done, were zealous to pay for emancipation by fidelity to the new regime, and many poor devils among them forfeited their lives by services performed with more loyalty than discretion.