The South As It Is: 1865–1866

Chapter 4

IV LYNCHBURG, VA., July 24, 1865 THE Southside Railroad Company promises in its advertisements to take passengers through from Richmond to Lynchburg, a distance of about one hundred and thirty miles, in twenty-four hours. Packet-boats ply between the two cities, but that mode of travelling, besides being very slow and tedious, is made uncomfortable by the heat, and I decided to make the journey by rail. At half after six in the morning, I was assured, the train would leave the station; so breakfasting at five, I set out for the south bank of the James River. All the railway bridges were destroyed by Lee's retreating forces, and trains going southward start from the town of Manchester. I found no depot nor baggage-master. Half a dozen dilapidated cars were standing about, and a rusty looking engine was cracking and puffing up and down, shifting them from one track to another, and making up a train. Of this two passenger carriages formed a part, both on the outside adorned with a painted representation of two Confederate flags, and splashed half way up with the yellowish-red mud of this region, and, inside, both dirty and exceedingly uncomfortable. Long ago, I suppose, cushions had disappeared, the only vestiges of them that remained being an occasional wad of horse-hair, or a shred of faded plush still clinging to the frame-work of the seats. In the window-sashes were many broken panes, and where the glass was wholly gone wood had been substituted. The floors were filthy. Such as they were, these two carriages were given up to the occupancy of ladies and the gentlemen accompanying them, 34 The South As It Is: 1865-1866 35 together with a number of sick and wounded Confederate soldiers; other passengers found sitting and standing room in the freight cars. Even at that early hour the sun began to shine hotly down upon the baked and cracked soil of the railroad, and moving my trunk into the shadow cast by the leaving train, I sat and watched the crowd assembled at the station. There were, perhaps, a hundred and fifty people collected together . Negro drivers, liberal of the whip and vociferous in expostulation with their mules, drove loaded wagons to the baggage cars. Dirty-looking whites and dirtier Negroes were selling "fried pies" and other uninviting edibles. A crippled Negro was retailing cider, which he poured from a jug with a cornstalk stopper into a tin can that once had held preserved salmon. Newsboys were crying the New York Daily News and Herald, and the Richmond morning papers. Here in Virginia it is possible, I observe, to get a copy of the Herald for some time after every copy of the News has been sold. At last the train was got together, and at about half after seven o'clock we began our southward journey, pitching and jolting slowly along. Indeed, throughout the day the rate of speed was but seldom so great that an active man might not have got off the train and on again without inconvenience or danger. I was told that even in the times before the war the trains never made much more than fifteen miles an hour. The country through which this railway passes lies south of the James, and at a distance varying from ten to forty miles. Between Lynchburg and Richmond the river makes a great curve to the north, that it may skirt the elevated ridge of land on the crown of which the road is built. The land is comparatively unproductive, and Virginians ask the traveller not to form an opinion of the fertility of their State from the appearance of this particular region. Yet there is some good bottom land. The country has many creeks, for in this ridge, close by the line of the road, are the head-waters both of the streams that flow north-easterly into the Appomattox and James, and also of those which seek the tributaries of the Roanoke on the south. I saw but little land under cultivation ; indeed, the greater portion of the surface seemed to be not John Richard Dennett cleared at all. An occasional field of wheat-stubble, a cluster of farm buildings, surrounded by a field of corn, the railroad itself, here and there a tortuous footpath, winding away into the hot and solitary forest, furnished for the greater part of the way the only indications that the almost unbroken...