Among our passengers were a number of Georgia and Alabama cotton-planters, full of their complaints about the “niggers and the Yanks.” A New Yorker, going South to look at some mineral lands, said to give fine indications of gold in paying quantities, sat near me and began a free and easy talk about the condition of the negro, resources of the South, etc. He wasn’t in favor of negro suffrage as a condition of re-admission to Congress, but he thought the Southern States themselves might, before long, come to see that an intelligent negro would have as good a claim to the ballot as an ignorant white man. “G—d d——n the infamous, dirty, liver-hearted scoundrel,” exclaimed a low fellow in the same seat with me, whom I had taken for an army sutler, but who turned out to be a Georgia planter, “the dirty Yankee says a nigger is as good as a white man. The old Abolition sneak,” and so on, with epithets far less dainty and moral. The Georgian had made as great a mistake about me as I had about him. He took me for a Southerner! The conversation went on about the Southern prejudices against conspicuous Northerners, like Greeley and Beecher, and the New Yorker and myself soon had half the eyes in the cars fixed on us. Presently a deal of whispering, accompanied with sullen looks, began. Half an hour afterward, a quiet, meek-looking individual (who turned out to be a freedom-shrieker, started in Massachusetts and graduated in Kansas,) stepped beside me, as we were all on the platform looking at the country, “Did you know those fellows got very mad at your Abolitionism? That sallow, long-haired Macon merchant wanted to have you lynched, and swore roundly that tar and feathers would be too good for you.” “How did it end?” I asked. “Oh, a little Georgian said it was all true, and you and the New Yorker ought to be lynched, but, that since this d——d war, that thing was played out!” It may be readily inferred that for the rest of the trip the few Northerners on board continued to talk Abolitionism enough to have astonished Wendell Phillips himself. Making a virtue of necessity, the Southerners, after a time, became sociable. My Georgia neighbor told me of his two splendid plantations, not far from Columbus, one of four hundred and eighty acres, and the other of eighteen hundred acres. He had gone North, utterly down-hearted, and willing to sell out for a dollar an acre in gold; but they had treated him well in New York; there was less revengeful, bitter feeling than he had expected; Yankees were coming down to cultivate cotton beside him; and he was going to watch them and profit by it. If they could make money, growing cotton, he knew he could. If they could make the niggers work he would adopt their policy, and he knew he could do as well with niggers, whenever he found out how to get the power to control them, as any Yankee could.