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 28 The Long Way Home M a y – J u l y 1 8 6 5 “A Nation Born in a Day” Chaplain Lyman B. Ames got the regiment’s pay safely back to Ohio. He returned to Savannah in early February to find the Twenty-Ninth Ohio long gone. Getting back to them would not be easy. He boarded a ship heading north up the coast, hoping to catch up with them in their march through South Carolina. During a stopover on Hilton Head Island, the news came of the fall of Charleston, which Ames referred to as Babylon. There were expressions of joy everywhere in the flying of the Stars and Stripes and the sounds of salutatory cannon fire. Even the giant guns at Fort Pulaski, off Savannah, could be heard rumbling with celebration. He sensed that the sea island’s black people would be affected most by the end of the Confederacy, and he took a particular interest in their reaction. He attended their impromptu “praise meetings” at a colored Sabbath school that had been established recently by a Northerner of good intentions. The students were restless at first in this new environment of desk sitting and book learning, but once settled they were as attentive as white children. Ames was given charge of three thirteen-year-old girls whom he found naturally bright. They showed evidence of having had religious instruction, although it had clearly been in the form of stories told to them, and not read. Perhaps here, on this sandy isle, was his life’s mission. “Truly here is work for the Christian Philanthropist to raise up, educate, elevate & Christianize these ‘freedmen.’”1 The tide of activity seemed to be flowing in the direction of Charleston, and he made plans to get there. Once arrived, he spent his days touring the city’s famous sights, recent and ancient. He took a boat ride in a drizzly fog out to Fort Sumter.2 On another excursion, he sailed onto the bay to see Fort Moultrie, and then the famous floating battery from which some of the war’s first shots had been fired by the rebels. It was half-submerged in the water and as rotten now as the Confederacy, which had placed guns atop it far back in the spring of 1861.3 His real interest was talking to everyone he could find and recording the stories of which every man’s life, both white and black were made. His pursued his inquiries with as much interest as a news correspondent covering life in a city the day after an earthquake.4 The white citizens interested in protecting their homes were taking the oath of allegiance and putting the Stars and Stripes at their doors to show they were “warm for the Union,” and their property therefore off-limits to pillagers.5 There were upward of ten thousand black people in the city, slaves one day, and the next as free as anyone else. He was seeing with his own eyes “a nation born in a day!”6 He witnessed processions of freedmen and -women carrying banners inscribed with hopeful mottos, marching through the streets behind the Twenty-Seventh U.S. Colored Infantry. Colored recruiting parties marched through the streets carrying the Stars and Stripes accompanied by brass bands, and m ay – j u ly 1 8 6 5 369 everywhere they were surrounded by joyous colored men eager to enlist. He visited a public school, run now under the auspices of the U.S. Army, and found that two-thirds of the students were black, which Ames regarded as absolutely revolutionary. He also noted that the two races were kept separate.7 Both whites and Negroes took over abandoned houses, freely entering others to appropriate furnishings . In this casual freebooting, Ames found the behavior of the freedmen better than that of the poor whites. Some of the white residents he encountered were trying to rebuild lives and careers. One day he went to get his boots repaired and found not only the shoemaker but a lawyer and a jeweler all working in the same small space. Some people in Savannah were clinging to the old ways by intention or had been paralyzed by the instantaneous disappearance of a way of life they had assumed would go on forever. Ames was invited into the home of a Mr. Ryon. He had come down to Charleston from New York years before and made a fortune...

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