Communication with the interior is yet very uncertain. The mails are all stopped; the railroads broken up; the highways blockaded by sentries that imitate the fly-trap—let you in but won’t let you out. There is no scarcity of news here from the interior, but Savannah is, as yet, a focus which receives all these diverse rays of intelligence and reflects none back again. The town is full of black and white refugees from all parts of Georgia; both races are daily coming in large numbers, some for supplies, some to find what the policy of the Government is likely to be, some to go North. What the negroes tell, in the way of trouble with their masters, and petty persecutions that seem designed, since their freedom can’t be taken away, to make freedom very unpleasant for them, has already been partly recited. The whites are, of course, discreetly silent on such subjects, though I have heard one or two refer rather significantly to the “uncommon amount of whipping it takes now to keep the plantation niggers in order.” But they are full of complaints of their own, telling how lazy and worthless the negroes are, how Sherman’s soldiers desolated the country, and how unsettled every one feels. There is apparently no apprehension among them of guerrilla warfare; in fact, they scout at the idea. Question them as to everything for which the war was fought, the doctrine of secession, the rightfulness of slavery, the wrongs of the South, and they are found as full of the sentiments that made the rebellion as ever; but every man has apparently schooled himself into saying, with an air of utter frankness: “We’re whipped, and we give it up. There will be no more fighting of any sort; no guerrillas; no resistance to the Government; and we all accept the death of slavery as inevitable.” Ask them what should be done with them, now that they’re subdued, and they say: “We’re wholly in the hands of the Government, but would like to have our State Governments restored as soon as possible.” Ask them what should be done with the negroes, now that they’re free, and the bolder ones answer, “Put them under the care of the State Legislature;” while all seem to insist upon some sort of apprenticeship, or other legal restriction that will practically keep them as much slaves as ever. I have found no Georgian who, now that his slaves can no longer be made to work for him, expects to work for himself. In fact, working for themselves does not seem to be, in any event, of success or of failure, of loyalty or of rebellion, a part of their philosophy of life. Work is for “niggers”—not for white men. Nor do they seem to entertain any idea of selling off part of their lands, in order to get money to stock and till properly the remainder. Some of them think selling their lands, inherited from their fathers, would be dishonorable; others affect to believe that nobody would buy; while it is quite evident that, as long as they can help it, none of them mean to sell.