This Federal visitation was not without wholesome effect. Yet the negroes would not work till starvation drove them to it. The Captain's head-plower came confessing: "Cap'n, I 'clar' 'fo' Gawd, suh, I ain' got no vittles fuh my wife an' chillun. I ain' got a day's rations in my cabin." "It's your own fault. You can go to work any minute you want to." "Cap'n, I'se willin'. I been willin' fuh right smart while. I ain' nuvver seed dis way we been doin' wuz zackly right. I been 'fused in my min'. But de other niggers dee won' let me wuk. Dee don' want me tuh wuk fuh you, suh. I'se feared." The Captain was sorely tempted to give rations without conditions, but realised that he must stand his ground. In a day or two the head-plower reappeared. "Cap'n, I come tuh ax you tuh lemme wuk fuh you, suh." "All right. There's your plow and mule ready. You can draw rations ahead." One by one all came back. They had suffered, and their ex-master had suffered with them. Many planters had severer trials than the Captain and his immediate neighbours. Down on the coast, negroes demanded possession of plantations, barricaded them and shot at owners. They pulled up bridges so owners could not reach their homes, and in this and other ways kept the whites out of property. Many planters never recovered their lands. When the time came that they might otherwise have done so, they were unable to pay accumulated taxes, and their homesteads passed forever out of their keeping. In making contracts, Captain Pinckney's negroes did not want money. "We don' trus' dat money. Maybe it git lak Confeddick money." In rice they saw a stable value. Besides a share in the general crop, the Captain gave each hand a little plot on which to grow rice for family consumption. When the general crop was divided into shares, they would say, after retaining a "sample": "Keep my part, suh, an' sell it wid yo's." They knew he could do better for them than they could for themselves. In business and in the humanities, they looked to him as their truest friend. If any got sick, got out of food and clothes, got into a difficulty or trouble of any sort, they came or sent for him; sought his advice about family matters wherein they would trust no other man's counsel; trusted him in everything except politics, in regard to which they would rely upon the word of the most unprincipled stranger did he but appear under the title "Republican," "Radical," "Union Leaguer." Carpet-baggers told them: "If the whites get into power, they will put you back in slavery, and will not let your wives wear hoop-skirts. If we win the election we will give you forty acres and a mule." "I know for a fact," Captain Pinckney assured me, "that at Adam's Run negroes came to the polls bringing halters for mules which they expected to carry home."