Year: 1867

ObCphOho was dbuub w NlblG LIE
farm, a couple Of miles distant, and
readily accepted kind invitation to
take . seat in his buggy and accompany
him. As we logged along the road, fol-
lowed by his two favorite dogs, he con.
versed very freely of events in the his.
tory of the country during the past ten
wears. He was never very strong ad-
vOcste, Of slavery, per- Sc; he only de-
Tended it as State right; it was sub
ject to . great many abuses, the crown
ing one of which he considered to be the
denial OF the right of education to the
negro; however, if the institution had
lasted much longer, this would have
been remedied in Georgia, at least. He
always repudiated the idea that if the
slaves were educated they would rise in
insurrection; and he always believed
the value of q slave depended in great
measure upon the amount of intelligence
he possessed. But slavery was gone
now, and he did not believe any re-
spectacle number of the people of GeOr-
gia would re-establish it if they could.
l asked him how The negroes were
getting along in their new condition
of freedom. He replied that they
were not doing very we'll. They missed
the controlling and directing hand of
the white man; they had very vague
ideas of what freedom meal t, and many
Of them gave II no other construction
than idleness. Most of them were sat
isiied to get along from day to day, or
from hand to mouth, as the saying is.
His own negroes, he thought, had done
better than any Others in the neigh
borhood. He had given them good
chance, and yet they had scarcely
:'made OUT When the war closed he
called his negroes together-he had
thirty-one-and told them they were
free, They could either remain with
him and work for him, or go elsewhere,
as they pleased. They all decided to
remain, and he kept them on his farm,
which he turned over entirely to them,
on "shares"-he to get one-fourth of the
crops for rent, they three-fourths for
labor. They worked very well, better
than most Of the negroes around them,
and vet were unable to make both ends
meet last year. The heads Of families
all came out in debt to the stores or the
doctors. This year they might do, bet
ter; and he thought they would.


After slow drive Of about half an
hour we reached the farm. Passing by
an old ,unpainted frame house on the
roadside, Mr.. Stephens pointed to it and
said, "Thats the farmhouse of my
place. l built it to accommodate some
poor relatives of mine, who used to
live in it. Under our slave laws you
couldn't keep lot Of negroes without
some white folks ameng them, so these
poor relatives of mine came up here to
live. Since the war and the changed
condition of the negroes, they have
gone, and two negro families live there
now" AS we passed along the negroes,
old and young, saluted Mr.. Stephens
with a cordial "How d. do, Mass Alick,"
which he as cordially returned. He in
auired after several of the old folks who
were sick, and seemed to take quite as
much interest in their welfare as if they
still belonged to him. His farm con-
sists of about thousand acres, of what
he says is poor land. The whole would
not bring over three thousand dollars
he thinks; but he wouldn't sell it for
any money, as it is an old homestead
which was settled first by his grand
father in 1795. His father was obliged
to sell it shsrtly before his death, but
he, soon after his fathers death, was
able to buy it back again. The old
family grave yard is pointed out as you
| 90 along, and near it the site upon
which stood the house in which Mr..
Stephens was born.


Returning from the farm. Mr.. Stephen,
talked freely of the late war. The
South, he believed, made two fearful
mistakes: First, in going to war at all,
and secondly, in the object for which
they went to war. 1t was u great alb
surdity to think that there could be such
thing as permanent separation of the
two sections. He was opposed to seces-
sion in the first place; but when he
could not resist that-when Georgia
went ont, and he, as q State rights man,
felt bound to go with Georgia, then he
wanted to fight only for terms of recon-
struction, such as would cement the
country on a better basis than it ever
stood. jeff Davis and the fire-eaters
fought for Southern independence, and
ruined the country in doing so. | called
his attention to reports in Southern
newspapers during the war, that he,
Stephens had declared his opposition to
reconstruction upon any terms. They
were all false, he said, and he was sorry
to see in Pollard's Lost Cause, which he
considered wretehedly bad history of
the war, what pretended to be an ex-
tract from q speech made by him at
Charlotte, North Carolina, after his
unsuccessful attempt to confer with
Lincoln at Fortress Monroe, (before the
Hampton Roads conference) in which
he is represented as saying that under no
circumstances would he consent to re-
construction. He never said any such
| thing. He was recOnstructionist, he
said, from the first day of the war to
the last. Referring to politics in the
North during the war, he expressed his
regret that the peace party had not been
successful in 1864. He thought sthe
Democrats made mistake in nomin-
atinC war man. If O straight-out
peace man had been nominated he might
have been elected, and tie reconstrnc-
| tionists of the South would then have
made terms of peace and reunion with
them. "But," said l., "in the North the
people could not be persuaded that the
peace party was not secession party
'There's where you made great mis-
take" said Mr.. Stephens. "Jeff. Davis
wanted Lincoln elected; he told me so.
The reconstructionists of the South
wanted yeu of the North to elect peace
man, and we would then have over
thrown the Davis war party of the
South and made terms of reunion with
out any difficulty" I replied that 1
thought if the people Of the North had
had any assurance that the election of o
peace Democrat would have secured q
restoration of the Union on honorable
terms they would have elected one. But
the Democratic party of the North had
made itself obnoxious as secession par


ty; its leaders had been to great degree
instrumental in bringing the war about
by assuring the Southern fire-eaters of
fire in the rear party, and while they
might prefer Union to secession, they
certainly preferred secession to war
while the Republican party preferred
Union to anything else, and were will
ling to keep up the war ten years to Sc
cure it. Besides, if there were so many