The next morning mamma and I left the hospitable, beautiful White House after breakfast and drove to Nightingale Hall, about two miles away. Here the negroes had been specially turbulent. The overseer there, Mr. Sweat, was a very good, quiet man, and had been liked by all the negroes, but in the intoxication of freedom their first exercise of it was to tell Mr. Sweat if he left the house they would kill him, and they put a negro armed with a shotgun to guard the house and see that he did not leave alive. Mr. Sweat seems to have been something of a philosopher, for he assured them he had no intention of leaving, and settled himself quite cheerfully to pass the time of his imprisonment. The key of the barns having been given to the negroes, he kept a little journal of all they did. From his window he watched them take supplies from the barns, corn and rice, using the baskets which were always used in measuring grain, open baskets made to hold a bushel, which is thirty-two quarts. In this way, as he knew exactly what was in the barns, having superintended the planting, harvesting, and threshing of the grains, he could tell just how much was left. He had written all of this to my mother, getting a friendly negro who cooked for him to take charge of the letter.
When we drove in the yard the negroes soon assembled in great numbers. Mamma had not seen them at all yet. She talked with the foreman, Mack, very pleasantly from the seat in the carriage, asking after all the old people on the place, and his family, etc. Then, finally, she said:
“And now, Mack, I want the keys to the barn.”
He said: “De officer giv me de key, ma’am, en I kyant gie um to yu.”
She drew from her silk reticule the order, and said: “I have here the officer’s order to you to give the key to me.”
He took the paper and looked at it, but there rose a sullen murmur from the crowd, and a young man who had stood a little way off, balancing a sharp stone in his hand and aiming it at mamma from time to time, now came nearer and leaned on the wheel of the carriage. Mamma thought he wanted to intimidate her, and so she stepped out of the carriage into the very midst of them. I motioned to follow, but she said in a low tone, as she shut the door, “Stay where you are,” and I obeyed.