Thousands of the acres along the road belonged to the Rhetts, thousands to the Heywards, thousands to the Manigault the Lowndes, the Middletons, the Hugers, the Barnwells, and the Elliots—­all names too well known in the history of our country’s sorrows.  Occasionally one of their stately mansions could be seen on some distant elevation, surrounded by noble old trees, and superb grounds.  Here they lived during the healthy part of the year, but fled thence to summer resort in the highlands as the miasmatic season approached.

The people we saw at the stations along our route were melancholy illustrations of the evils of the rule of such an oligarchy.  There was no middle class visible anywhere—­nothing but the two extremes.  A man was either a “gentleman,” and wore white shirt and city-made clothes, or he was a loutish hind, clad in mere apologies for garments.  We thought we had found in the Georgia “cracker” the lowest substratum of human society, but he was bright intelligence compared to the South Carolina “clay-eater” and “sand-hiller.”  The “cracker” always gave hopes to one that if he had the advantage of common schools, and could be made to understand that laziness was dishonorable, he might develop into something.  There was little foundation for such hope in the average low South Carolinian.  His mind was a shaking quagmire, which did not admit of the erection of any superstructure of education upon it.  The South Carolina guards about us did not know the name of the next town, though they had been raised in that section.  They did not know how far it was there, or to any place else, and they did not care to learn.  They had no conception of what the war was being waged for, and did not want to find out; they did not know where their regiment was going, and did not remember where it had been; they could not tell how long they had been in service, nor the time they had enlisted for.  They only remembered that sometimes they had had “sorter good times,” and sometimes “they had been powerful bad,” and they hoped there would be plenty to eat wherever they went, and not too much hard marching.  Then they wondered “whar a feller’d be likely to make a raise of a canteen of good whisky?”

Bad as the whites were, the rice plantation negros were even worse, if that were possible.  Brought to the country centuries ago, as brutal savages from Africa, they had learned nothing of Christian civilization, except that it meant endless toil, in malarious swamps, under the lash of the taskmaster.  They wore, possibly, a little more clothing than their Senegambian ancestors did; they ate corn meal, yams and rice, instead of bananas, yams and rice, as their forefathers did, and they had learned a bastard, almost unintelligible, English.  These were the sole blessings acquired by a transfer from a life of freedom in the jungles of the Gold Coast, to one of slavery in the swamps of the Combahee.

I could not then, nor can I now, regret the downfall of a system of society which bore such fruits.