Around all the encampments, and everywhere along the road, we saw
the bare sites of what had evidently been tracts of hard-wood forest,
indicated by the unsightly stumps of well-grown trees, not smoothly
felled by regular axe-men, but hacked, haggled, and unevenly amputated,
as by a sword or other miserable tool, in an unskilful hand. Fifty years
will not repair this desolation. An army destroys everything before and
around it, even to the very grass; for the sites of the encampments are
converted into barren esplanades, like those of the squares in French
cities, where not a blade of grass is allowed to grow. As to the other
symptoms of devastation and obstruction, such as deserted houses,
unfenced fields, and a general aspect of nakedness and ruin, I know not
how much may be due to a normal lack of neatness in the rural life of
Virginia, which puts a squalid face even upon a prosperous state of
things; but undoubtedly the war must have spoilt what was good, and made
the bad a great deal worse. The carcasses of horses were scattered along
the wayside.
One very pregnant token of a social system thoroughly disturbed was
presented by a party of contrabands, escaping out of the mysterious
depths of Secessia; and its strangeness consisted in the leisurely delay
with which they trudged forward, as dreading no pursuer, and encountering
nobody to turn them back.
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