28. General Mitchell returned from Nashville on a hand-car.
30. This is a pleasant Sunday. The sun shines, the birds sing, and the air stirs pleasantly.
The colored people of Murfreesboro pour out in great numbers on Sunday evenings to witness dress parade, some of them in excellent holiday attire. The women sport flounces and the men canes. Many are nearly white, and all slaves.
Murfreesboro is an aristocratic town. Many of the citizens have as fine carriages as are to be seen in Cincinnati or Washington. On pleasant week-day evenings they sometimes come out to witness the parades. The ladies, so far as I can judge by a glimpse through a carriage window, are richly and elegantly dressed.
The poor whites are as poor as rot, and the rich are very rich. There is no substantial well-to-do middle class. The slaves are, in fact, the middle class here. They are not considered so good, of course, as their masters, but a great deal better than the white trash. One enthusiastic colored man said in my hearing this evening: "You look like solgers. No wonder dat you wip de white trash ob de Southern army. Dey ced dey could wip two ob you, but I guess one ob you could wip two ob dem. You is jest as big as dey is, and maybe a little bigger."
A few miles from here, at a cross roads, is a guide-board: "[Illustration: Symbol: right index] 15 miles to Liberty." If liberty were indeed but fifteen miles away, the stars to-night would see a thousand negroes dancing on the way thither; old men with their wives and bundles; young men with their sweethearts; little barefooted children, all singing in their hearts:
On the march hither we passed a little, contemptible, tumble-down, seven-by-nine frame school-house. Over the door, in large letters, were the words:
The boys laughed and said: "If this is called an academy, what sort of things must their common school-houses be?" But Tennessee is a beautiful State. All it lacks is free schools and freemen.
31. Colonel Keifer, in command of four hundred men, started with ninety wagons for Nashville. He will repair the railroad in two or three places and return with provisions.
3. Struck our tents and started south, at two o'clock this afternoon; marched fifteen miles and bivouacked for the night.