Wilson’s work had been thoroughly done. The gun foundery and machine shops which he had destroyed, were only to be compared to great Government establishments like those at West Point or Fort Pitt. A confused mass of bricks and mortar covered the ground, and from the debris rose fourteen tall chimneys, the blackened monument of what had been. About a hundred great guns were lying about in various stages of manufacture. Wilson had carefully knocked off the trunnions. Among them were the heaviest siege-guns, iron field ten-pounders, guns with wrought iron muzzles screwed on, Brooks’ guns, and other varieties. One still lay on the lathe, where the workmen had been turning it when Wilson and his raiders came. On the other side of the town were the ruins of an extensive manufactory of small arms. Hundreds of musket barrels lay among the bricks and mortar, besides shot-gun barrels innumerable, and great sheaves of bayonets, fused together by the heat. But for the utter collapse of the rebellion, at about the same time, this destruction of these shops would have been justly considered the weightiest among the crowding calamities of the rebellion. An accomplished Northern mineralogist,[55] who went over the ruins with me, pronounced the iron ore, which, had been used in making the great guns, nearly equal to the Marquette ore from Lake Superior. He thought it would average sixty-five to seventy-five per cent. of pure iron, and possibly even higher. It had all been brought from the mines near Talledega, where, also, a number of founderies for the Confederate Government had been established. The war had found these people ignorant of their mineral resources, without machinery, workmen, or materials. At its close they had developed a mineral wealth which ages could not exhaust, and had built up here, as I have said, a manufactory of guns, great and small, with which only three or four in the United States could be compared. The burnt houses in the business part of the city were being rapidly rebuilt. Negro carpenters and masons seemed to have exclusive control of the work. An old negro, who worked as hod-carrier, explained that he was paid a dollar a day. “By de time I pays ten dollars a month rent fo’ my house, an’ fifteen cents a poun’ for beef or fresh po’k, or thirty cents fo’ bacon, an’ den buys my clo’es, I doesn’t hab much leff. I’s done tried it, an’ I knows brack man cant stan’ dat.” He had been “refugeed” from Tuscumbia; now he could not get back. He had been doing his best to save money enough, (forty dollars,[56]) but he couldn’t seem to get ahead at all with it. His people were all going to work well, he thought, on cotton plantations where they were sure of good pay. Of course, they would work better for the Yankees, ’cause dey freed ’em. There was no talk of insurrection among them—had never heerd of sich a thing. What should they rise for? There were no secret societies among them.