The South As It Is: 1865–1866

Chapter 9

IX August 29, 1865 LATE this forenoon I left Lynchburg, and set out on a horseback journey into North Carolina. The weather has been bright and hot all day, and the road hilly and dusty, so that I have ridden slowly, and travelled no more than twenty-one miles. In that distance I found but one person going the same way with myself, although the country, especially in the vicinity of the city, is pretty thickly settled, and a good half the land lying along the road is cleared and laid out in farms. The man was a German from Hesse-Darmstadt, going out to look at some land which he hoped to purchase. He was in the United States five years, he said, and had been forced to spend two of it in the Confederate army. Except for that, he liked America better than Germany; more money could be made here than there, and the climate pleased him much better. He came to Virginia because he had a good heap of friends here, and had found it a good State; but the Virginian people did not like foreigners. They said if it had not been for the foreigners in the Yankee army, the South never would have been whipped. He reckoned that was so. Nearly half the Northern soldiers were German , Irish, and Dutch. But the people round here did not want to part with their land to anybody; they thought it made them great to own much land. He wished the Government would confiscate, so that land would become cheap. I said that in the Lynchburg papers I had seen quite a large number of farms advertised as for sale. Yes, he said, but they wanted more than the right price; it was one of those farms that he 88 John Richard Dennett was then going to look at, but he would not give twenty-five or thirty dollars all acre. He would buy or lease two hundred acres and raise grain; his brother would help him, and they would hire as few Negroes as they could. Some would be necessary, but all of them were bad-great liars and unfaithful workers. As I rode along, Negroes were everywhere busy stripping off the com-blades and tying them into small bundles, which are hung upon the stalks to be cured by the sun. Later in the day they could be seen coming up out of the fields, carrying on their heads great stacks of the dried fodder, which is at once stowed away in bladehouses . These are small buildings with walls of logs, between which are left wide apertures for the admission of air, as the fodder is apt to grow musty. Besides blade stripping no field work seemed to be going on, except here and there a little mowing, and on one farm a white man and a boy were laying a stone wall, the first I have seen in the State. Out of the towns, the zigzag fence of rails is almost universal. The surface of the country over which I have travelled today is rolling and much diversified. The landscape is a good deal shut in by woods, but often today I have been able to see the distant Peaks of Otter, dark blue against the pale blue of the horizon, and almost to be mistaken for clouds, except that every other cloud was fleecy white. The soil seemed fertile; there was abundance of timber, the apple trees and the late peach trees were laden with fruit, and all the crops appeared to be thriving well. Indian com was everywhere, and I saw occasional patches of cotton, tobacco, and broom-com growing near the houses. More frequent were fields of sorghum. But a small portion of the land is under cultivation . The people living in this section of the country have no railway or water communication with their markets, and all produce designed for Lynchburg and Danville has to be transported by wagon. I have met seven or eight of these heavy vehicles today, toiling slowly along the road. They are canvas-covered, drawn by four or six mules or oxen, and loaded with tobacco in hogsheads or packed loose. Some were driven by Negroes, bilt more usually The South As It Is: 1865-1866 they were in charge of white men, who walked beside the team, while on top of the load, among the hay and com-blades, were the women and children going...