Though past sixty when the war began, William Freeland, ashamed that Maryland was undecided, had gone to Richmond and volunteered. He had cut a fine figure riding away on his horse--his well-tailored gray uniform setting off the iron gray of his hair. The ladies of Richmond had leaned from their windows, fluttering lace handkerchiefs. They would not have recognized him when he came back to Freelands. His hair was thinned and white, his uniform a tattered, filthy rag; the bony nag he rode could scarcely make it to the old sycamore. But the house still stood. It had not been pillaged or burned. His land had not been plowed with cannon; it was not soaked with blood. Suddenly the spring evening was cold, and he shuddered. Involuntarily his hand reached toward the bell. Then it fell back. No one would answer. Old Sue was in the kitchen, but she was too deaf to hear. He would have to get some help on the place. The thought of paying wages to the ungrateful blacks filled him with rage. The cause of all the suffering and woe, they had turned on their masters, running after Yankees. Some of them had even shot white men! Gall bit into his soul as he remembered the strutting colored soldiers in Richmond. The sound of a cart coming up the drive broke into his gloomy meditation. The master frowned. A side road led around to the back. Peddlers’ carts had no place on the drive. Then he remembered. This was probably the man he was expecting--impudent upstart! His hand shook, but he braced himself. He had promised to listen to him. “He’s likely a damn Yankee, though he claims he’s from Georgia,” Freeland’s friend, the Colonel, had said. “But he’s got a scheme for getting the niggers back in their place. He says they’re dying like flies on the roads, they’ll be glad to get back to work. Just bide your time, old man, we’ll have all our niggers back. Where can they go?” The master did not rise to greet his guest. He hated the sniveling oaf. But before the cart went rumbling back along the drive the owner of Freelands had parted with precious dollars. Similar transactions were being carried on all over the South that spring. “Were the planters willing to bestow the same amount of money upon the laborers as additional wages, as they pay to runners and waste in dishonest means of compulsion, they would have drawn as many voluntary and faithful laborers as they now obtain reluctant ones. But there are harpies, who, most of them, were in the slave trade, and who persuade planters to use them as brokers to supply the plantations with hands, at the same time using all means to deceive the simple and unsophisticated laborer.”[22] But things were stirring in the land. Frederick Douglass in Rochester sending out his paper--sending it South! The handsome, popular Francis L. Cardoza, charming young Negro Presbyterian minister in New Haven, Connecticut, resigning his Church and saying, “I’m going South!” “What!” his parishioners exclaimed.