The Liberator

A SHOCKING PICTURE DRAWN FROM LIFE
(Extract from a letter written by a soldier in the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteers.)

NEAR RICHMOND, VA., June 18, 1864.

When I last wrote you, I believe we were near Fredericksburg. Since then, the rebels have been "turned" out of position after position, and have been driven across every river from the Rapidan to the James. Grant's tactics are entirely strange to see. As a rebel prisoner expressed it, "he flanks us on the left, and fights us on the right." The entire practicability of the overland route to Richmond, which the McClellanites so vehemently denounced, has been fully demonstrated. These terrible fortifications—impregnable, they said—which covered every plain and lined every crest from Fredericksburg to Richmond, have been successfully turned, and the "intersecting rivers" have been used to complete the process. And, instead of finding a hostile country, we found thousands of friends who had been long looking for us, and who rejoiced at our coming. The poor negroes! it would have done your heart good to see them at every plantation, with their bundles and children, waiting to join the train. The wagon trains alone picked up about three thousand of these freedmen—free now. God bless the President! I wish some of the pro-slavery people of the North would come out here, and see how this system of slavery has been carried on in this State, the stock-raising State of the Confederacy.

I remember about four miles north of the Pamunkey River we were met by a delegation of Uncle Toms, hardy black fellows, who wanted to emigrate to the Yankee land of promise. They said they represented 150 slaves, the property of Mr. Anderson Scott, who owned these cultivated fields for miles. They wanted to get their children carried in our transportation wagons to White House Landing, from which place they had been assured Uncle Sam would take them North. Our wagons being full, we could accommodate but few. However, anything was preferable to being a slave; so they determined to come along any way. About a mile further, we came to the mansion of this rich slave lord, Mr. Scott. A broad avenue, lined with wide-spreading magnolias in full bloom, led up to the house, which was the usual style of Southern plantation houses.

On one side of his house, and in the rear, stood a very neat and tidy little slave hut. Everything was neat and tidy about. The little yard neatly trimmed and swept, the door-step scrubbed to an astonishing degree of whiteness; everything, in fact, denoting the careful and skilful housekeeper.

Around the door were three women and about half a dozen children, from the wee baby to the young girl of fifteen or sixteen. Two of the women were about a shade lighter than the quadroon, while all the children were white. The third woman was apparently pure white; her eyes were blue, her hair was brown and straight; her features were entirely American—nothing to denote a particle of negro blood. In her arms she had a beautiful little boy about four years old, with fair hair and blue eyes. This woman was crying bitterly when we rode up. Thinking that she was a member of the family, we tried to console her by assuring her that Yankees made war upon men, and not upon women. Can you imagine how shocked we were when we were told that this white woman and child were slaves, and that the degraded mother was weeping for shame at her degradation! Lieut. Wren, Quartermaster of the 61st New York, was so excited that he bolted into the house, and his sword rattled and his spurs jingled with his impetuosity, as he strode along the halls in search of the old scoundrel, Scott.

I asked one of the women why she did not bundle up and come along, now that she had a chance, with the rest. She said she had an idiotic son in the house, who was sick, and they could not go without him. I asked this woman if she was the daughter of the owner of the plantation. She said she was! We went into the hut, and upon a clean bed there sat this poor idiot boy, white as I am, with brown hair. About this time Mr. Scott came in, the lord and owner of all these white people, whiter than himself! He is an old, shriveled up, baboon-faced, crooked-backed little specimen of Southern chivalry—aristocratic as a king, and "Virginian born, by Gawd." I asked the mother of this boy if Mr. Scott was his father. You should have seen her blush as she answered "Yes." The incestuous old beast!

This idiot son—the child of his own daughter—father and grandfather to his own children!

Now send down your pro-slavery partisans and Copperheads of the North to look upon this. Talk to me of the divinity of slavery! The horrible barbarity and crimes of this "institution" can never be told in the North. They must be seen to be believed. Is it possible that any nation can live or stand that has for its corner-stone this crime? I go on with renewed and firmer faith, if possible, in the absolute justice of our cause. I consider this war as a marvellous blessing. We are rooting out the dragon's teeth that we have sown, and in their stead drop the precious seed of freedom for all. I have an impression that amounts to a conviction, that this war will not terminate until slavery, the essence of crime and "the sum of all villanies," is destroyed completely and irretrievably. Heaven grant that so it may be. Do you know how these skin aristocrats rave over the new theory of miscegenation, or the mixture of the races? Here we have a practical illustration of their duplicity and inconsistency, in the very worst form of miscegenation—incestuous amalgamation.

All the rest of the old man's slaves (floating capital) passed by at this time with their traps and papooses, shouting, on the road to glory and to freedom, "Come along! come along! We're gwine to hab our freedom!" This sight so excited these poor white slaves, who, knowing their inability to go along without the boy, began to cry in the most distressing manner, and there in the midst of them stood this old scoundrel, the author of all this misery. I believe I would have been justified in breaking his neck.

We advised these poor people to stay, as they were perfectly safe, being inside our lines, and in case we fell back we would manage to take them with us; and in the meantime, if the old man ill-treated them, we would come back and chastise him. So we went away, and encamped that night on the banks of the sluggish and malarious Pamunkey. Let me say to you, with reverence, that this country would abolitionize the devil. We seem to have settled down to the regular operations of a siege. Everything is favorable to us. We believe Grant to be the greatest General of the age, and every soldier seems to be animated with the spirit of the Commanding General. Lee has been driven a distance of seventy miles, and is now emphatically in his "last ditch," within the sound of his own church bells.