112 WHIP AND SPUE. 



Point, the sky was red with the flames of burn- 

 ing corn and cotton. On a single plantation, 

 our flanking party burned thirty-seven hundred 

 bushels of tithe corn, which was cribbed near 

 the railroad; no sooner was its light seen at the 

 plantation houses than hundreds of negroes, who 

 swarmed from their quarters to join our column, 

 fired the rail-built cribs in which the remaining 

 nine-tenths of the crop was stored. Driven wild 

 with the infection, they set the torch to man- 

 sion house, stables, cotton-gin, and quarters, un- 

 til the whole village-like settlement was blazing 

 in an unchecked conflagration. To see such 

 wealth, and the accumulated products of such 

 vast labor, swept from the face of the earth, 

 gave to the aspect of war a saddening reality, 

 which was in strong contrast to the peaceful 

 and harmless life our brigade had thus far led. 

 In all this prairie region there is no waste land, 

 and the evidences of wealth and fertility lay 

 before us in all directions. As we marched, the 

 negroes came en masse from every plantation to 

 join our column, leaving only fire and absolute 



