We traveled all night, and reached Wilmington, N. C, early
in the morning. There I saw a Northern steamer which had been seized in retaliation
for some of the seizures of the New Yorkers. And there was a considerable
amount of ordnance and shot and shell on the bank of the river. The people
every where on the road are for irremediable, eternal separation. Never were
men more unanimous. And North Carolina has passed the ordinance, I understand,
without a dissenting voice. Better still, it is not to be left to a useless
vote of the people. The work is finished, and the State is out of the Union
without contingency or qualification. I saw one man, though, at Goldsborough,
who looked very much like a Yankee, and his enthusiasm seemed more simulated
than real; and some of his words were equivocal. His name was Dibble.
To-day I saw rice and cotton growing, the latter only an
inch or so high. The pine woods in some places have a desolate appearance; and
whole forests are dead. I thought it was caused by the scarifications for
turpentine; but was told by an intelligent traveler that the devastation was
produced by an insect or worm that cut the inner bark.
The first part of South Carolina we touched was not
inviting. Swamps, with cane, and cypress knees, and occasionally a plunging
aligator met the vision. Here, I thought the Yankees, if they should carry the
war into the far south, would fare worse than Napoleon's army of invasion in
Russia.
But railroads seldom run through the fairest and richest
portions of the country. They must take the route where there is the least
grading. We soon emerged, however, from the marshy district, and then beheld
the vast cotton-fields, now mostly planted in corn. A good idea. And the grain
crops look well. The corn, in one day, seems to have grown ten inches.
In the afternoon we were whisked into Georgia, and the face of
the country, as well as the color of the soil, reminded me of some parts of France
between Dieppe and Rouen. No doubt the grape could be profitably cultivated
here. The corn seems to have grown a foot since morning.
SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's
Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 34-5
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