AFTER THE WAR. CHAPTER I. Why, and How the Trip was Made. The most interesting records of the great revolution just ending have seemed to me to be those portraying the spirit and bearing of the people throughout the South, just before and at the outbreak of the war. Stories of battles, and sieges, and retreats, are kaleidoscopic repetitions of deeds with which all history is crowded; but with what temper great communities plunged into this war, which has overwhelmed them, for what fancied causes, to what end, in what boundless self-confidence and overwhelming contempt of their antagonists, with what exuberance of frenzied joy at the prospect of bloodshed, with what wild dreams of conquest, and assurance of ill-defined but very grand honors, and orders, and social dignities—all this, as faithfully set down by the few who had opportunities to observe it, constitutes the strangest and most absorbing contribution to the literature of the Rebellion. So I have thought that what men now most want to know, is something of the temper and condition in which these same communities come out from the struggle. By the side of the daguerreotypes of the South entering upon the war, even the hastiest pencil sketch of the South emerging from the war may possess an interest and attraction of its own. Therefore, when early in the month of April I was invited to accompany a small party, bound on a voyage of official inspection and observation, from Fortress Monroe around the whole Atlantic and Gulf Coast to New Orleans, and thence up the Mississippi, I congratulated myself upon the opportunity thus afforded of seeing, under the most favorable circumstances, the Southern centers which had nursed and fed the rebellion. Means of communication through the interior of the South are so thoroughly destroyed, and Southern society is so completely disorganized, that it is only in the cities one can hope for any satisfactory view of the people. Even there the overshadowing military authority, and the absence of all accustomed or recognized modes of expressing public sentiment, as through the press, the bar, public meetings, the pulpit, or unrestrained social intercourse, combine to render the task of observation infinitely more difficult than at any previous period. But all the more, on these accounts, the Southern cities are the places to which we must first look for any satisfactory idea of the Southern condition; and a trip which embraces visits to Norfolk, Newbern, Beaufort, Wilmington, Charleston, Port Royal, Savannah, Fernandina, St. Augustine, Jacksonville, Key West, Mobile, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Natchez, Vicksburg, and Memphis, with visits to plantations all along the route, and occasional trips into the interior, ought not to fail in furnishing a good view of the gradual beginnings to crystallize again out of the chaos to which the war had reduced one-third of the nation.