Returning to the landing, I learned from the negroes standing about that they were refugees from cotton plantations lower down the river, over which the guerrillas “had been a raidin’, sah.” They had hired here to a speculator, following in the wake, of our army, to cut wood for the steamboats. He sold his wood for four dollars a cord, cash; and out of this paid nothing for the wood at all, and only promised to pay them a dollar a cord for chopping it. At this rate they could have made plenty of money, “but de trouble is, sah, he done nebber pay us. He say grillas sunk de steamboat him money come down on, and we’m got to take goods fo’ ou’ pay. Den he sell us po’k not fit to eat, at tree bits a pound, and de meanest co’n-meal you ever see.” Further inquiry showed that they had bought brass rings at five or six dollars apiece, and gaudy cotton handkerchiefs for the head at three dollars; and, in short, had done their best to help the speculator fleece them out of the last penny of their earnings. It was a lonely, desolate-looking spot; the simple creatures were afraid to go away for fear of guerrillas, and here they were completely at his mercy. Scores of such cases were to be found up and down the river. Fortunes were made during the last year of the war out of Mississippi wood-yards, and too often the most successful were the readiest to cheat the poor negroes out of their paltry share of the splendid profits. * * * * * At last our long journey approached its close. At Cairo we met floods of Northern newspapers, and, for the first time, became aware that a formidable party was organizing at the North in favor of Southern reconstruction only on the basis of some form of negro suffrage. At Louisville a pleasant dinner party enabled us to meet the last collection of men from the midst of a Rebel community. At that time there was more loyalty in Nashville than in Louisville, and about as much in Charleston as in either. For the first and only time on the trip, save while we were under the Spanish flag, slaves waited on us at dinner. They were the last any of us were ever to see on American soil. ----- Footnote 39: They subsequently did. It was like the patent rat-trap. Nobody could make a safer contrivance. Rats couldn’t possibly get out of it. The only difficulty was that they declined to go in. Footnote 40: The happy phrase of Mr. Winter Davis in referring, in the United States House of Representatives, to the vote of censure passed by the Maryland Legislature for his first public act in co-operation with the Republican party against the slaveholders’ policy. CHAPTER XXX. General Aspects of the South at the Close of the War.