XXIX. ABOUT HAMPTON…

XXIX. ABOUT HAMPTON

As it was my intention to visit some of the freedmen’s settlements in the vicinity, the General kindly placed a horse at my disposal, and I took leave of him. A short gallop brought me to the village of Hampton, distant from the Fortress something over two miles.

“The village of Hampton,” says a copy of the “Richmond Examiner” for 1861, “is beautifully situated on an arm of the sea setting in from the adjacent roadstead which bears its name. The late census showed that the aggregate white and black population was nearly two thousand.” Some of the residences were of brick, erected at a heavy cost, and having large gardens, out-houses, and other valuable improvements. The oldest building, and the second oldest church in the State, was the Episcopal Church, made of imported brick, and surrounded by a cemetery of ancient graves. “Here repose the remains of many a cavalier and gentleman, whose names are borne by numerous families all over the Southern States.”

On the night of August 7th, 1861, the Rebels, under General Magruder, initiated what has been termed the “warfare against women and children and private property,” which has marked the war of the Rebellion, by laying this old aristocratic town in ashes. It had been mostly abandoned by the secessionist inhabitants on its occupation by our troops, and only a few white families, with between one and two hundred negroes, remained. Many of the former residents came back with the Rebel troops and set fire to their own and their neighbors’ houses. Less than a dozen buildings remained standing; the place being reduced to a wilderness of naked chimneys, burnt-out shells, and heaps of ashes.

I found it a thrifty village, occupied chiefly by freedmen. The former aristocratic residences had been replaced by negro huts. These were very generally built of split boards, called pales, overlapping each other like clapboards or shingles. There was an air of neatness and comfort about them which surprised me, no less than the rapidity with which they were constructed. One man had just completed his house. He told me that it took him a week to make the pales for it and bring them from the woods, and four days more to build it.

A sash-factory and blacksmith’s shop, shoemakers’ shops and stores, enlivened the streets. The business of the place was carried on chiefly by freedmen, many of whom were becoming wealthy, and paying heavy taxes to the government.

Every house had its wood-pile, poultry and pigs, and little garden devoted to corn and vegetables. Many a one had its stable and cow, and horse and cart. The village was surrounded by freedmen’s farms, occupying the abandoned plantations of recent Rebels. The crops looked well, though the soil was said to be poor. Indeed, this was by far the thriftiest portion of Virginia I had seen.

In company with a gentleman who was in search of laborers, I made an extensive tour of these farms, anxious to see with my own eyes what the emancipated blacks were doing for themselves. I found no idleness anywhere. Happiness and industry were the universal rule. I conversed with many of the people, and heard their simple stories. They had but one trouble: the owners of the lands they occupied were coming back with their pardons and demanding the restoration of their estates. Here they had settled on abandoned Rebel lands, under the direction of the government, and with the government’s pledge, given through its officers, and secured by act of Congress, that they should be protected in the use and enjoyment of those lands for a term of three years, each freedman occupying no more than forty acres, and paying an annual rent to government not exceeding six per cent. of their value. Here, under the shelter of that promise, they had built their little houses and established their humble homes. What was to become of them? On one estate of six hundred acres there was a thriving community of eight hundred freedmen. The owner had been pardoned unconditionally by the President, who, in his mercy to one class, seemed to forget what justice was due to another.

The terms which some of these returning Rebels proposed to the freedmen they found in possession of their lands, interested me. One man, whose estate was worth sixteen dollars an acre, offered to rent it to the families living on it for eight dollars an acre, provided that the houses, which they had themselves built, should revert to him at the end of the year.

My friend broke a bolt in his buggy, and we stopped at a blacksmith-shop to get another. While the smith, a negro, was making a new bolt, and fitting it neatly to its place, I questioned him. He had a little lot of half an acre; upon which he had built his own house and shop and shed. He had a family, which he was supporting without any aid from the government. He was doing very well until the owner of the soil appeared, with the President’s pardon, and orders to have his property restored to him. The land was worth twenty dollars an acre. He told the blacksmith that he could remain where he was, by paying twenty-four dollars a year rent for his half acre. “I am going to leave,” said the poor man, quietly, and without uttering a complaint.

Except on the government farm, where old and infirm persons and orphan children were placed, I did not find anybody who was receiving aid from the government. Said one, “I have a family of seven children. Four are my own, and three are my brother’s. I have twenty acres. I get no help from government, and do not want any as long as I can have land.” I stopped at another little farm-house, beside which was a large pile of wood, and a still larger heap of unhusked corn, two farm wagons, a market wagon, and a pair of mules. The occupant of this place also had but twenty acres, and he was “getting rich.”

“Has government helped you any this year?” I asked a young fellow we met on the road.

“Government helped me?” he retorted proudly. “No; I am helping government.”

We stopped at a little cobbler’s shop, the proprietor of which was supporting not only his own wife and children, but his aged mother and widowed sister. “Has government helped you any?” we inquired. “Nary lick in the world!” he replied, hammering away at his shoe.

Driving across a farm, we saw an old negro without legs hitching along on his stumps in a cornfield, pulling out grass between the rows, and making it up into bundles to sell. He hailed us, and wished to know if we wanted to buy any hay. He seemed delighted when my companion told him he would take all he had, at his own price. He said he froze his legs one winter when he was a slave, and had to have them taken off in consequence. Formerly he had received rations from the government, but now he was earning his own support, except what little he received from his friends.

It was very common to hear of families that were helping not only their own relatives, but others who had no such claim of kindred upon them. And here I may add that the account which these people gave of themselves was fully corroborated by officers of the government and others who knew them.

My friend did not succeed very well in obtaining laborers for his mills. The height of the freedmen’s ambition was to have little homes of their own and to work for themselves. And who could blame this simple, strong instinct, since it was not only pointing them the way of their own prosperity, but serving also the needs of the country?[4]

Notwithstanding the pending difficulty with the land-owners, those who had had their lots assigned them were going on to put up new houses, from which they might be driven at any day,—so great was their faith in the honor of the government which had already done so much for them.

Revisiting Virginia some months later, I learned that the Freedmen’s Bureau had interposed to protect these people in their rights, showing that their faith had not been in vain.

-----

Footnote 4:

For example: the freedmen on the Jones Place, with one hundred and twenty acres under cultivation, where they had commenced work with nothing for which they did not have to run in debt, were now the owners of both stock and farming implements; and, besides supporting their families, they were paying to the United States a large annual rent.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXX. A GENERAL VIEW OF VIRGINIA

Called home from Fortress Monroe by an affair of business requiring my attention, I resumed my Southern tour later in the fall, passing through Central and South-western Virginia, and returning from the Carolinas through Eastern Virginia in the following February. I am warned by a want of space to omit the details of these transient journeys, and to compress my remaining notes on the State into as narrow a compass as possible.[5]

Virginia was long a synonym for beauty and fertility. In the richness of her resources, she stood unrivalled among the earlier States. In wealth and population, she led them all. She was foremost also in political power; and the names she gave to our Revolutionary history still sparkle as stars of the first magnitude.

This halo about her name has been slow to fade; although, like a proud and indolent school-girl, once at the head of her class, she has been making steady progress towards the foot. Five of the original States have gone above her, and one by one new-comers are fast overtaking her. Little Massachusetts excels her in wealth, and Ohio in both wealth and population.

The causes of this gradual falling back are other than physical causes. Her natural advantages have not been overrated. The Giver of good gifts has been munificent in his bounties to her. She is rich in rivers, forests, mines, soils. That broad avenue to the sea, the Chesapeake, and its affluents, solicit commerce. Her supply of water-power is limitless and well distributed. She possesses a variety of climate, which is, with few exceptions, healthful and delightful.

The fertility of the State is perhaps hardly equal to its fine reputation, which, like that of some old authors, was acquired in the freshness of her youth, and before her powerful young competitors appeared to challenge the world’s attention. Such reputations acquire a sanctity from age, which the spirit of conservatism permits not to be questioned.

The State has many rich valleys, river bottoms, and alluvial tracts bordering on lesser streams, which go far towards sustaining this venerable reputation. But between these valleys occur intervals of quite ordinary fertility, if not absolute sterility, and these compose the larger portion of the State. Add the fact that the best lands of Eastern and Southeastern Virginia have been very generally worn out by improper cultivation, and what is the conclusion?

A striking feature of the country is its “old fields.” The more recent of these are usually found covered with briers, weeds, and broom-sedge,—often with a thick growth of infant pines coming up like grass. Much of the land devastated by the war lies in this condition. In two or three years, these young pines shoot up their green plumes five or six feet high. In ten years there is a young forest. In some of the oldest of the old fields, now heavily timbered, the ridges of the ancient tobacco lands are traceable among the trees.

Tobacco has been the devouring enemy of the country. In travelling through it one is amazed at the thought of the regions which have been burned and chewed up by the smokers and spitters of the world.

East Virginia is hilly. The southeast portion of the State is undulating, with occasional plains, and swamps of formidable extent. The soil of the tide-water districts is generally a light sandy loam. A belt of mountain ranges, a hundred miles in breadth, runs in a northeast and southwest direction across the State, enclosing some of its richest and loveliest portions. The Valley of Virginia,—as that fertile stripe is called lying west of the Blue Ridge, drained by the Shenandoah and the head-waters of the James,—is fitly called the granary of the State. It is a limestone region, admirably adapted for grains and grazing. The virginity of its soil has not been polluted by tobacco.

In 1860 there were in the State less than eleven and a half million acres of improved land, out of an area of near forty millions. Over thirteen million bushels of wheat were produced; one million of rye, Indian corn, and oats; one hundred and twenty-four million pounds of tobacco; twelve thousand seven hundred and twenty-seven bales of cotton; and two and a half million pounds of wool (in round numbers). There were four thousand nine hundred manufacturing establishments, the value of whose manufactures was fifty-one million three hundred thousand dollars. There were thirteen cotton factories, running twenty-eight thousand seven hundred spindles. The most important article of export before the war was negroes. There were sold out of the State annually twenty thousand.[6]

With the exception of the last-named staple, these annual productions are destined to be multiplied indefinitely by a vigorous system of free labor and the introduction of Northern capital. The worn-out lands can be easily restored by the application of marl and gypsum, with which the State abounds, and of other natural fertilizers. The average value of land, in 1850, was eight dollars an acre; while that of New Jersey, which never bragged of its fertility, was forty-four dollars. The former price will now buy lands in almost any section of Virginia except the Shenandoah Valley; while there is no question but that they can be raised to the latter price, and beyond, in a very few years, by judicious cultivation, united with such internal improvements as are indispensable to make the wealth of any region available.

Still greater inducements are presented to manufacturers than to farmers. To large capitalists, looking to establish extensive cotton-mills, I do not feel myself competent to offer any suggestions. But of small manufactures I can speak with confidence. Take the Shenandoah Valley for example. The wool that is raised there is sent North to be manufactured, and brought back in the shape of clothing, having incurred the expense of transportation both ways, and paid the usual tariff to traders through whose hands it has passed. The Valley abounds in iron ore of the best quality; and it imports its kettles and stoves. The same may be said of nearly all agricultural implements. The freight on many of these imports is equal to their original cost. It was said before the war that scarce a wagon, clock, broom, boot, shoe, coat, rake or spade, or piece of earthen ware, was used in the South, that was not manufactured at the North; and the same is substantially true to-day, notwithstanding the change in this particular which the war was supposed to have effected. Let any enterprising man, or company of men, with sufficient experience for the work and capital to invest, go into Virginia, make use of the natural water-power which is so copious that no special price is put upon it, and manufacture, of the materials that abound on the spot, articles that are in demand there, establishing a judicious system of exchange, and who can doubt the result, now that the great obstacle in the way of such undertakings, slavery, has been removed?

In speaking of the products of Virginia, we should not forget its oysters; of which near fourteen and a half million bushels, valued at four million eight hundred thousand dollars, were sent from Chesapeake Bay in one year, previous to the war.

Virginia never had any common-school system. One third of her adult population can neither read nor write. There was a literary fund, established to promote the interests of education, which amounted, in 1861, to something over two millions of dollars; but it was swallowed by the war. At the present time the prospect for white common schools in the State is discouraging. The only one I heard of in anything like a flourishing condition was a school for poor whites, established by the Union Commission in the buildings of the Confederate naval laboratory, at Richmond. It numbers five hundred pupils, and is taught by experienced teachers from the North. The prospect is better for the education of the freedmen. There were in the State last winter ninety freedmen’s schools, with an aggregate of eleven thousand five hundred pupils. There were two hundred teachers; twenty-five of whom were colored men and women at the head of self-supporting schools of their own race. The remaining schools, taught by experienced individuals from the North, were supported mainly by the following benevolent associations: The New-York National Freedmen’s Relief; American Missionary; Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief; Baptist Home Mission; New-England Freedmen’s Aid; and Philadelphia Friends’ Freedmen’s Relief.

The opposition manifested by a large class of whites to the establishment of these schools was at first intense and bitter. It had nearly ceased,—together with the outrages on freedmen, which had been frequent,—when, on the removal of the troops from certain localities,[7] it recommenced, and was, at my last visit, fearfully on the increase. Teachers were threatened and insulted, and school-houses broken into or burned. The better class of citizens,—many of whom see the necessity of educating the negro now that he is free,—while they have nothing to do with these acts of barbarism, are powerless to prevent them. The negro-haters are so strong an element in every society that they completely shield the wrong-doers from the reach of civil law.

The great subject of discussion among the people everywhere was the “niggers.” Only a minority of the more enlightened class, out of their large hearts and clear heads, spoke of them kindly and dispassionately. The mass of the people, including alike the well-educated and the illiterate, generally detested the negroes, and wished every one of them driven out of the State. The black man was well enough as a slave; but even those who rejoiced that slavery was no more, desired to get rid of him along with it. When he was a chattel, like a horse or dog, he was commonly cherished, and sometimes even loved like a favorite horse or dog, and there was not a particle of prejudice against him on account of color; but the master-race could not forgive him for being free; and that he should assume to be a man, self-owning and self-directing, was intolerable. I simply state the fact; I do not condemn anybody. That such a feeling should exist is, I know, the most natural thing in the world; and I make all allowances for habit and education.

It is this feeling which makes some protection on the part of the government necessary to the negro in his new condition. The Freedmen’s Bureau stands as a mediator between him and the race from whose absolute control he has been too recently emancipated to expect from it absolute justice. The belief inheres in the minds of the late masters, that they have still a right to appropriate his labor. Although we may acquit them of intentional wrong, it is impossible not to see how far their conduct is from right.

Before the war, it was customary to pay for ordinary able-bodied plantation slaves, hired of their masters, at rates varying from one hundred and ten to one hundred and forty dollars a year for each man, together with food, clothing, and medical attendance. After the war, the farmers in many counties of Virginia entered into combinations, pledging themselves to pay the freed slave only sixty dollars a year, exclusive of clothing and medical attendance, with which he was to furnish himself out of such meagre wages. They also engaged not to hire any freedman who had left a former employer without his consent. These were private leagues instituting measures similar to those which South Carolina and some other States afterwards enacted as laws, and having in view the same end, namely,—to hold the negro in the condition of abject dependence from which he was thought to have been emancipated.

That the freedman’s supposed unwillingness to work, and the employer’s poverty occasioned by the war, were not the reasons why he was to be paid less than half the wages he earned when hired out as a slave, I had abundant evidence. One illustration will suffice. Visiting the tobacco factories of Richmond, I found them worked entirely by freedmen under white superintendents. I never saw more rapid labor performed with hands than the doing up of the tobacco in rolls for the presses; nor harder labor with the muscles of the whole body than the working of the presses. The superintendents told me they had difficulty in procuring operatives. I inquired if the freedmen were well paid; and was informed that good workmen earned a dollar and a half a day.

“If the negroes will not engage in the business, why not employ white labor?”

“We tried that years ago, and it wouldn’t answer. White men can’t stand it; they can’t do the work. This press-work is a dead strain; only the strongest niggers are up to it.”

Those putting up the tobacco in rolls,—three ounces in each, though they rarely stopped to place one on the scales,—showed a skill which could have resulted only from years of practice. I learned, from conversing with them, that they were dissatisfied with their pay; and the superintendents admitted that, while the negroes worked as well as ever, labor was much cheaper than formerly. On further investigation I ascertained that a combination between the manufacturers kept the wages down, that each workman had to employ a “stemmer,” who made the tobacco ready for his hands; and that his earnings were thus reduced to less than five dollars a week, out of which he had himself and his family to support.[8]

The Bureau labored to break up these combinations, and to secure for the freedmen all the rights of freemen. Colonel Brown, the Assistant-Commissioner for Virginia, divided the State into districts, and assigned a superintendent to each. The districts were subdivided into sub-districts, for which assistant superintendents were appointed. Thus the Bureau’s influence was felt more or less throughout the State. It assisted the freedmen in obtaining employment, regulated contracts, and secured to them fair wages. It had a general superintendence of freedmen’s schools. It used such powers as it possessed to scatter the negroes, whom the exigencies of the war had collected together in great numbers at places where but few could hope for employment. It fed the destitute, the aged, the orphan, the infirm, and such as were unable to find work,—who, in that period of transition, must have perished in masses without such aid. It likewise established courts for the trial of minor cases of litigation or crime in which persons of color were concerned. Each court was originally presided over by an officer of the Bureau; but in order to secure impartial justice to all, there were associated with him two agents, one chosen by the citizens of the sub-district in which it was located, and the other by the freedmen.

There is in every community a certain percentage of its members that look to get a living without honest toil. I am not aware that the negro has any more love for work than another man. Coming into the enjoyment of freedom before they knew what freedom meant, no wonder that many should have regarded life henceforth as a Christmas frolic. The system which had held them in bondage had kept them ignorant. Having always been provided for by their masters, they were as improvident as children. They believed that the government which had been their Liberator would likewise be their Provider: the lands of their Rebel masters were to be given them, and their future was to be licensed and joyous. They had the vices of a degraded and enslaved race. They would lie and steal and shirk their tasks. Their pleasures were of a sensuous character; even their religion was sensuous; the sanctity of the marriage-tie, so long subject to the caprices of the master-race, was lightly esteemed. Under these circumstances the proportion of those who have shown a persistent determination to lead lives of vice and vagrancy, appears to me surprisingly small. Their number still decreases as their enlightenment increases. The efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and Northern missionary and educational labors among them, have contributed greatly towards this desirable result. Still more might be done if additional discretionary powers were granted the Assistant-Commissioner. Vagrants, whether white or black, should be treated as vagrants; and I thought it would have been a wholesome measure for the Bureau to make contracts for those freedmen who refused to make contracts for themselves, and were without any visible means of support.

There are in Virginia half a million negroes. Those appear most thriving and happy who are at work for themselves. I have described the freedmen’s farms about Hampton. In other portions of Southeast Virginia, where the Federal influence has been longest felt, they are equally industrious and prosperous. Captain Flagg, the superintendent at Norfolk, whose district comprises seven counties, told me that he was not issuing rations to a hundred persons, besides orphan children. In Northampton and Accomack counties every negro owns his boat, and earns with it three dollars a day at oystering, in the oyster season. There are perhaps eighteen thousand freedmen in those counties, all engaged in oystering, fishing, and the cultivation of lands which they own or hire. In Norfolk, Princess Anne, and other counties adjacent, planters were very generally renting or selling lands to the freedmen, who were rapidly becoming a respectable, solid, tax-paying class of people. Many colored soldiers were coming back and buying small farms with money earned in the service of the government. Captain Flagg, a man of sense and discretion, said to me deliberately, and gave me leave to publish the statement:—

“I believe the negro population of the seven counties of my district will compare favorably, in respect to industry and thrift, with any laboring white population of similar resources at the North.” Adding, “I believe most thoroughly in the ability of these people to get a living even where a white man would starve.”

The freedmen in other parts of the State were not doing as well, being obliged generally to enter into contracts with the land-owners. Many of these, impoverished by the war, could not afford to pay them more than seven or eight dollars a month for their labor; while some were not able to pay even that. Their fences destroyed, buildings burned, farming implements worn out, horses, mules, and other stock consumed by both armies, investments in Confederate bonds worthless, bank-stock gone, without money, or anything to exchange for money, they had often only their bare lands on which to commence life anew; and could not therefore give much encouragement to the freedman, whatever may have been their disposition towards him.

The legislative and local affairs of the State had very generally fallen under the influence, or into the hands, of those who had given aid and sympathy to the Rebellion. Indeed, Governor Pierpoint told me that there were not unquestionably loyal men enough in Virginia to form a government. “In many counties,” said he, “you will not find one.”

Yet Virginia sent to the convention of February 13th, 1861, a majority of Union delegates. It was only after the fall of Fort Sumter, and President Lincoln’s call for troops, that a vote could be had taking the State out of the Union. Eighty-eight delegates voted for the ordinance of secession, fifty-five against it. It was afterwards—in the tempest of excitement which swept over the State—adopted by the people by a majority of ninety-four thousand. It was an act of passion and madness. Travelling through the State, I found a majority of the people professing to have been at heart Union men all the while. They could never forgive South Carolina for the evil course in which she had led them; and it was very common to hear the wish expressed, “that South Carolina and Massachusetts were kicked out into the Atlantic together.” Having, however, against her better reason, seceded, Virginia became the most devoted and self-sacrificing of all the States in the cause in which she had embarked.

The railroads of the State[9] were, both financially and physically, in a bad condition. They had been used excessively during the war, and stood in need of repairs. The iron taken from the Richmond and York River Road had not been replaced. The time made by trains was necessarily slow. The rolling-stock was limited, and generally in a worse condition than the roads. But few lines were paying anything more than the expenses of running them.

The old State banks went down with the Confederacy. The circulation of the new National Banks in the State did not, in January 1866, exceed $1,300,000.

There was necessarily a great scarcity of money. It was difficult to raise funds even on the mortgage of real estate. The existence of usury laws, limiting the rate of interest at six per cent., operated to shut out Northern capital, which could find investments nearer home at more remunerative rates. When I was last in Richmond there was pending in the legislature a bill for the repeal of those laws, which, however, did not pass.

The immediate prospects of Virginia are dismal enough. But beyond this morning darkness I see the new sun rising. The great barrier, slavery, removed, all the lesser barriers to her prosperity must give way. The current of emigration, of education, of progressive ideas, is surely setting in; and in a few years we shall see this beautiful torpid body rise up, renewed with health and strength, a glory to herself and to the Union.

-----

Footnote 5:

West Virginia, which seceded from the State after the State seceded from the Union, and which now forms a separate sovereignty under the National Government, I can scarcely say that I visited. I saw but the edges of it; it is touched upon, therefore, only in the general remarks which follow.

Footnote 6:

In 1850, the number of slave-owners in the State was 55,063. Of these 11,385 owned one slave each; 15,550, more than one and less than 5; 13,030, more than 5 and less than 10; 9,456, more than 10 and less than 20; 4,880, more than 20 and less than 50; 646, more than 50 and less than 100; 107, over 100 and less than 200; 8 over 200 and less than 300; and 1, over 300.

Footnote 7:

In February, 1866, there were but 2500 troops left in the State.

Footnote 8:

After my visit to the tobacco factories, the following statement, drawn up for the colored workmen by one of their number, was placed in my hands by a gentleman who vouched for its truthfulness. I print it verbatim:—

Richmond September 18, 1865 Dear Sirs We the Tobacco mechanicks of this city and Manchester is worked to great disadvantage In 1858 and 1859 our masters hired us to the Tobacconist at a prices ranging from $150 to 180. The Tobacconist furnished us lodging food & clothing. They gave us tasks to performe, all we made over this task they payed us for. We worked faithful and they paid us faithful. They Then gave us $2 to 2.50 cts, and we made double the amount we now make. The Tobacconist held a meeting, and resolved not give more than $1.50 cts per hundred, which is about one days work—in a week we may make 600 lbs apece with a stemer. The weeks work then at $1.50 amounts to $9—the stemers wages is from $4 to $4.50 cts which leaves from $5 to 4–50 cts per week about one half what we made when slaves. Now to Rent two small rooms we have to pay from $18 to 20. We see $4 50 cts or $5 will not more then pay Rent say nothing about food Clothing medicin Doctor Bills, Tax and Co. They say we will starve through lazines that is not so. But it is true we will starve at our present wages. They say we will steal we can say for ourselves we had rather work for our living, give us a Chance. We are Compeled to work for them at low wages and pay high Rents and make $5 per week and sometimes les. And paying $18 or 20 per month Rent. It is impossible to feed ourselves and family—starvation is Cirten unles a change is brought about.

Tobacco Factory Mechanicks of Richmond and Manchester.

Footnote 9:

In 1860, there were in Virginia $66,000,000 of capital invested in 1675 miles of railroad, distributed over sixteen lines. This estimate includes 287 miles of the Baltimore and Ohio Road. In all the important roads except this, the State is a principal shareholder. The management of some of them has always been loose and uneconomical.

Governor Pierpoint wisely recommends a consolidation of certain lines:—“On the south side of James River we have the Norfolk and Petersburg, South-Side, Virginia and Tennessee, and the Richmond and Danville railroads. These roads are under the management of four different corps of officers, employed at remunerative salaries. Three of these roads form a continuous line of about four hundred miles, and all three of them afford business for the fourth. By working these roads separately a car is loaded at Norfolk with freight for Danville or Abingdon; it is brought to Petersburg to the South-Side Road, and there transferred from the Norfolk to a South-Side car; thence it is taken to Burkeville, where it is again transferred to a Danville car,—if its destination is to that town,—or taken to Lynchburg and reshipped on the Virginia and Tennessee Road, if it goes to Abingdon. In these transactions the cars are delayed, thereby causing a much larger investment in rolling-stock to accommodate the business of these roads, in addition to the labor required to load and unload the freight, besides exposing the merchandise to loss and delaying its transportation. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, with the Northwestern Virginia and Washington branches, is nearly as long as the four roads above named, and the gross earnings of that railroad is about three times as great, the charges for passengers and freight being thirty-three per cent. less than on the Virginia roads referred to; yet the whole business of the Baltimore and Ohio road is done by one corps of officers with moderate salaries. There is the same reason for consolidating the Orange and Alexandria and Virginia Central Roads.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXI. THE “SWITZERLAND OF AMERICA.”

From the grassy hills and vales of Southwest Virginia, I passed over by railroad into East Tennessee.

At first sight, the “Switzerland of America” is apt, I think, to disappoint one. It is a country of pleasant hills, bounded and broken into by mountains which do not remind you of the Alps. The cottages of the inhabitants lack the picturesque element. A few first-class farmers have comfortable-looking painted or brick houses; while scattered everywhere over the country are poverty-stricken, weather-blackened little framed dwellings and log-huts. Many of these are without windows; the inmates living by the daylight let in through doors, and the firelight from open chimneys. Good barns are rare. The common class of villages are without sidewalks or paved streets. In the rainy season they are wretched. They look like Northern villages that have set out to travel and got stuck in the mud. One or two are noteworthy.

Greenville, the county seat of Greene County, is chiefly interesting as being the home of the President. It stands on broken ground, and is surrounded by a fine hilly country shaded by oaken groves. The town, as I saw it one wet morning, was eminently disagreeable. The mud came up to the very doors of its old, dilapidated, unpainted wooden houses. Its more pretentious, white-painted and brick dwellings were not quite so deep in the mire. A hundred chimney smokes draped the brown irregular roofs. President Johnson’s house is on Main Street; a commonplace, respectable brick dwelling. The Rebels smashed the windows for him in wartimes, but they have been replaced, and the house is now occupied by the county sheriff. Every man knows “Andy Johnson.” He has a good reputation for honesty, but I was told he was “hard on money matters.” A prominent citizen who knew him intimately, said to me, “Johnson is a man of much greater ability than he has ever had credit for. When he was a tailor, he did his work well,—always a good honest job. He has many good traits, and a few bad ones. He is surly and vindictive, and a man of strong prejudices, but thoroughly a patriot.”

There is in Greenville a spring which bursts out of a hill-side in sufficient volume to carry a mill. The country abounds in springs, some of a curious character. In Johnson County, in the mountainous northeast corner of the State, there is a subterranean reservoir of water, out of which issue in the night-time, during the spring months, numbers of small black perch, of a blind species, which are caught in traps at the mouth of the spring.

Knoxville, (named in honor of Revolutionary General Knox,) the most considerable town of East Tennessee, is situated on abrupt hills, on the north bank of the Holston River, which is navigable by steamers to this point. Here is the junction of the East Tennessee and Virginia, and East Tennessee and Georgia railroads. The city has something more than eight thousand inhabitants. It was formerly the capital of the State. It is surrounded by fortified hills.

The place received rough treatment during the war. The Bell House, at which I stopped, was a miserable shell, carpetless and dilapidated, full of broken windows. The landlord apologized for not putting it into repair. “I don’t know how long I shall stop here. Hotel-keeping a’n’t my business. Nigger-dealing is my business. But that’s played out. I’ve bought and sold in my day over six hundred niggers,”—spoken with mournful satisfaction, mingled pride and regret. “Now I don’t know what I shall turn my hand to. I’m a Georgian; I came up here from Atlanta time it was burned.”

At the table of the Bell House, a Southern gentleman who sat next me called out to one of the waiters, a good-looking colored man, perhaps thirty years of age,—“Here, boy!”

“My name is Dick,” said the “boy,” respectfully.

“You’ll answer to the name I call you, or I’ll blow a hole through you!” swore the Southern gentleman.

Dick made no reply, but went about his business. The Southern gentleman proceeded, addressing the company:—

“Last week, in Chattanooga, I said to a nigger I found at the railroad, ‘Here, Buck! show me the baggage-room.’ He said, ‘My name a’n’t Buck.’ I just put my six-shooter to his head, and, by ——! he didn’t stop to think what his name was, but showed me what I wanted.”

This gentlemanly way of dealing with the “d——d impudent niggers” was warmly applauded by all the guests at the table, except one, who did not see the impudence; showing that they were gentlemen of a similar spirit.

There were a great many freedmen crowded into Knoxville from Georgia and the Carolinas, whence they had escaped during the war. The police were arresting and sending them back. East Tennesseeans, though opposed to slavery and secession, do not like niggers. There is at this day more prejudice against color among the middle and poorer classes—the “Union” men, of the South, who owned few or no slaves—than among the planters who owned them by scores and hundreds. There was a freedmen’s school-house burned in Knoxville, while I was in that part of the State; and on reaching Nashville, I learned that the negro testimony bill had been defeated in the legislature by the members from East Tennessee.

East Tennessee, owning but a handful of slaves, and having little interest in slavery, opposed secession by overwhelming majorities. She opposed the holding of a convention, at the election of February, 1861, by a vote of 30,903 against 5,577; and, at the election in June following, opposed the ordinance of separation submitted to the people by the legislature, by 32,923 votes against 14,780. The secession element proved a bitter and violent minority. Neighborhood feuds ensued, of a fierce political and personal character. When the Confederate army came in, the secessionists pointed out their Union neighbors, and caused them to be robbed and maltreated. They exposed the retreats of hunted conscripts lying out in forests and caves, and assisted in the pursuit of loyal refugees. When the National forces possessed the country, the Union men retaliated. It was then the persecutor’s turn to be stripped of his property and driven from his home.

I was sorry to find the fires of these old feuds still burning. The State Government was in the hands of Union men, and Rebels and refugees from the Union army were disfranchised. Secessionists, who assisted at the hanging and robbing of Union men, and burned their houses, were receiving just punishment for their crimes in the civil courts and at the hands of the sheriff. This was well; and it should have been enough. But those who had suffered so long and so cruelly at the hands of their enemies did not think so. Returning Rebels were mobbed; and if one had stolen back unawares to his home, it was not safe for him to remain there. I saw in Virginia one of these exiles, who told me how homesickly he pined for the hills and meadows of East Tennessee, which he thought the most delightful region in the world. But there was a rope hanging from a tree for him there, and he dared not go back. “The bottom rails are on top,” said he: “that is the trouble.” The Union element, and the worst part of the Union element, was uppermost. There was some truth in this statement. It was not the respectable farming class, but the roughs, who kept the old fires blazing. Many secessionists and Union men, who had been neighbors before the war, were living side by side again, in as friendly relations as ever.

At Strawberry Plain, on the Holston River, I saw a manifestation of this partisan spirit. A laboring man, whom I met on the butment of the burned railroad bridge, was telling me about the Rebel operations at that place, when a fine fellow came dashing into the village on horseback.

“There’s a dog-goned Rebel now!” said my man, eyeing him with baleful glances. “He’s a rebel colonel, just come back. He’ll get warned; and then if he don’t leave, he must look out!”

I think if the “dog-goned Rebel” had seen what I saw, in the deadly determination of the man, he would have needed no further warning.

I listened to many tales of persecution and suffering endured by loyal East Tennesseeans during the war. Here is the outline of one, related to me by a farmer in Greene County.

“After the Rebel Conscript Act passed, I started with my son and a hundred other refugees to go over the mountains into Kentucky. The Rebels pursued us, put on the track by some of our secesh neighbors. Some escaped, my son with them; but I was taken, and brought back with irons on my wrists. That was the twenty-fifth of July, 1863. I was carried to Richmond, and kept in Castle Thunder till the twentieth of October. They then put me on a train to take me to Salisbury prison, in North Carolina. I was in a box car, and I found that a board at one corner of it was so loose that I could pull it off with my hands. Just at night, when we were about eighteen miles from Salisbury, and the train was running about ten miles an hour, I pulled away the board, and jumped off. I took to the fields, and tramped till I came to the Yadkin River, where a nigger took me over in his canoe. I tramped all night, and lay by the next day in the woods, and tramped again the next night, and lay by again the next day, and so on for fourteen nights and days; in which time I travelled three hundred miles. They were moonlight nights, and I got along very well, only I near-about starved. I lived on raw corn and pumpkins. I kept the line of the Western Railroad; I flanked the depots and pickets, but I was several times nigh being caught. I never entered a house, or passed near one, if I could help it. It was a hard, long, lonesome tramp. I did not speak to a human being, except the nigger that took me across the Yadkin, and another I almost run over on the road as I was coming to Asheville. He said to me, ‘Good evening.’ I muttered back something, and went on. I hadn’t gone far before I changed my mind. Something said to me, ‘Ask help of that nigger.’ I was sick and worn out, and almost perishing for want of food. Besides, I did not know the country; I saw I was coming to a town, and there was danger I might be taken. I went back, and said to the nigger, ‘Can you give me something to eat?’ He was sitting on the ground; but he jumped up, and looked at me by the moonlight, and said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ I told him. Then he knew I was a Union man running away from the Rebels. He told me to wait for him there, and came back in a little while with a heap of bread and beef. Never anything tasted so good. After I had eaten, he gave me directions how to avoid the guard, and strike the road beyond Asheville. I came over the mountains, and reached here the fourteenth night.”

East Tennessee contributed a liberal quota to the national army. Twenty-five thousand loyal refugees escaped into Kentucky, and fought their way back again with Burnside’s forces in 1863.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXII. EAST TENNESSEE FARMERS

I found the East Tennesseeans a plain, honest, industrious, old-fashioned people. Only about four out of five can read and write. Men of the North and West would consider them slow. They are dressed, almost without exception, in coarse, strong “domestic,” as the home-manufactured cloth of the country is called. It is woven on hand-looms, which are to be found in nearly every farm-house. Domestic is, in fact, an institution, not of Tennessee alone, but of the entire Southern country. In the absence of manufacturing establishments, the interest in this primitive private industry has not been suffered to decline. It stood the South in good stead during the war. After the importation of goods was cut off, it clothed the people. All classes wore it. Even at the time of my visit, I found many proprietors of large estates, the aristocrats of the country, wearing garments which had been spun, colored, and woven by their own slaves.

Tennessee has no system of free schools. There was a common-school fund, derived mainly from public lands given for the purpose by the United States. The State was the trustee of this fund, which the Constitution declared “permanent, never to be diminished by legislative appropriation,” nor “devoted to any other use than the support and encouragement of common schools.” The proceeds of this fund distributed among the schools in 1859, amounted to $230,430, or seventy-five cents for each scholar in the State. Treason, which betrayed so many sacred trusts, betrayed this. According to Governor Brownlow “a more perfidious act than the appropriation of this fund to treasonable purposes was not committed during the late perfidious rebellion.”

The people of East Tennessee took more interest, perhaps, in common-school education, than the inhabitants of other parts of the State; but that was not much. The school-fund went but a little way toward the support of schools. There were scattered throughout the country log school-houses capable of accommodating fifty pupils each. The tuition varied from two dollars and a half to three dollars a scholar. The teachers were supported by neighborhood subscriptions. But education was regarded by the poor as a luxury which they could not afford; and even the middling class was apt to consider their money and their children’s labor of more importance than book-learning. The war, and the waste of the school-fund, had for four years put an end to schools, and I found the new generation growing up in ignorance.

The school-houses serve as meeting-houses. There are few churches beside. Outside of the larger towns, scarce a spire points its finger towards heaven. This is true not only of Tennessee, but of the whole South. It is one of the peculiarities of the country which strike the Northern traveller unpleasantly. The village green, with the neat white-steepled edifice standing upon it, distinguishable from all other buildings, is no feature of the Southern landscape. You may travel thousands of miles and not meet with it.

Yet the East Tennesseeans are a church-going people. No especial form of meeting-house, any more than form of worship, is necessary to the exercise of that divine faculty by which man communes with his Maker. The Holy Spirit enters as readily the log-hut, where two or three are gathered together, as the great temples where multitudes assemble.

The Methodist Church predominates in East Tennessee. The United Brethren, who admit to their communion no rum-seller, rum-drinker, nor slaveholder, have a powerful influence. They were much persecuted in the South before the war, as was natural in a country where the prejudice in favor of rum and slavery was so strong; but of late, in East Tennessee, they have grown in strength and popularity.

Farming is behind the age. Mowers and reapers, which might be employed to fine advantage on the beautiful smooth meadows and grain-fields of East Tennessee, have scarcely come into use at all. In Greene County I heard of but three. Manures are wasted. It is customary to rotate crops, until even rotation must cease, giving place to a usurpation of weeds and broom-sedge. A favorite method of improving land is to “clover” it; that is, to plough in crops of clover and grass. Farming utensils are nearly all brought from the North; and there is a great need for home manufactures here also. The farmers generally work mules and mares. The mares are kept chiefly for breeding mules. For which purpose likewise every neighborhood, if not every farm, has its “jack.”

The further my observations extended, the more strongly I was convinced that mules were an indispensable substitute for horses in the South. Animals there do not receive the cherishing care they get at the North; and the rough, careless treatment which I saw almost universally shown to beasts of burden, not only by the negroes, but also by the whites, can be endured by nothing less hardy than the mule. This valuable creature, besides possessing the advantages I have elsewhere alluded to, is recommended for his brave appetite, which slights no part of the product of a hill of corn, but sturdily masters stalk, cob, and shucks.

Animals are driven, both at ploughing and teaming, by one rein, which is attached to the middle of the bridle-rein on the neck of the “lead” horse or mule, as the “near” or left-hand beast is called. The driver gives two little jerks for gee, and a steady pull for haw. This is the custom throughout the South.

I found horses cheap in Tennessee. A farmer said to me, “A hundred and a half will buy our best animal. This is not because horses are plenty, but because money is scarce. Formerly we used to take large droves of our stock to Georgia and the Carolinas; but that market is closed now, there is no money there.” Several weeks afterwards, in one of the middle counties of South Carolina, I met this very man, who told me he had come into the State with eleven horses, and sold them all at good prices. There had been more money hoarded, and more cotton reserved to be exchanged for money, in parts of the South than was at first supposed.

Tennessee and Kentucky are the two great mule-breeding States. East Tennessee takes first rank among the grazing sections of the South and West. Wild grass abounds in the uncultivated districts. Interminable forests on the mountain sides are carpeted with it. The woods are kept open and free from undergrowth by fires; and this native grass springs up and covers the ground. The mountains are full of deer which feed upon it. Many a beautiful range of thousands of acres is also afforded the farmers’ stock, which is sent in vast numbers to occupy this wild, free, unfenced pasturage. Neighbors club together to make up a herd of four or five hundred head of cattle, enough to render profitable the employment of a herdsman. Farmers have but little hay to provide for the winter season. The climate is such that there is no month in the year during which cattle cannot gain at least a partial subsistence by grazing. This I account one of the great advantages of the country.

One of the great disadvantages is the want of a market. I saw a farmer in Jefferson County who had five thousand bushels of corn, for which he could find no sale near home; and the cost of transportation was too great to think of taking it out of the State. Said he, “We find it for our interest to feed our farm-produce into stock, and drive it.”

I was told there was “a heap of thin, poor soil in East Tennessee.” The ordinary land produces fifteen bushels of wheat, and thirty-five of corn to the acre. The lands on the river bottoms are incomparably better. Prices range from eight and ten to eighty and a hundred dollars per acre, according to the situation and quality. There are farms to be had in every section; it can scarcely be said that they are for sale, there being no sale for them. Such is the distress for money among holders of real estate, that land can be had in some of the most desirable locations almost at the buyer’s own price. It is claimed that before the war the wheat of East Tennessee commanded the highest market-prices in Richmond and New York, as having that fine, enduring quality wheat derives only from good limestone soils. Fruits abound,—apples, peaches, pears, plums; and both climate and soil are admirably adapted to the grape. The country is well watered, and its climate is mild and salubrious. Manufacturing facilities are abundant. There are forests and coal-mines, lead, zinc, iron, copper, marble, and unimproved water-power to any extent.

Farmers told me they were paying the freedmen from eight to fifteen dollars a month, and boarding them. They said, “We can afford to pay more than Virginians can, because we farm it better.” They laughed at the Virginians’ shiftless methods. Yet a few were beginning to learn that even they were not perfect in the business. One who had visited Iowa, where he saw men plough out two rows of corn at a time, and mow and reap with machinery, one hand doing the work of four or five men, said he had concluded that they in Tennessee didn’t know anything.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXIII. IN AND ABOUT CHATTANOOGA

Two hundred and fifty miles from Knoxville, lying within a coil of the serpentine Tennessee, on its south bank, surrounded by mountains, is the town of Chattanooga. Here the East Tennessee and Virginia Railroad connects with the Nashville and Chattanooga, and with the Western and Atlantic, making the place an important centre of railroad communications. The river is navigable for steamboats during eight months of the year. Here are shipped the principal exports of East Tennessee and of Southern Middle Tennessee. Hence the military importance of the place, and its historical interest.

Although embosomed amid strikingly bold and grand scenery, Chattanooga is anything but a lovely town. On the east, but a few miles distant, is Missionary Ridge,[10] a range of forest-covered mountains rising from the river and sweeping away southward into Georgia. On the southwest is Lookout Mountain, with rugged, precipitous front overlooking the river and the town. Between this mountain and Missionary Ridge lies Chattanooga Valley. Rising steeply from the edge of the town, within the curve of the river which encloses it on the north and west, is Cameron Hill, a sort of miniature copy of Lookout. A miniature only by comparison; for it is a little mountain by itself: a peaked bluff, its summit flanked by forts, and crowned by a battery of a single huge gun.

If you visit Chattanooga, climb, as I did, this hill the first fair morning after your arrival. Away on the south are the mountains of Georgia; on the north, those of Tennessee. Dividing these peaks and ranges with its shining cimeter, curves the river, overhung by precipitous crags. Far beneath you, as you look from the northern brow of the hill, ply the steamboats, breaking the surface into streaks of foam, and puffing white wreaths up into the clear, still air. Opposite, across the river, are clusters of high, wooded hills, with signal-stations on their peaks.

In the valley at the foot of Cameron, is Chattanooga, with its multitude of long, low, whitewashed wooden buildings, government storehouses, barracks, shops, rows of huts, and corrals, such as make haste always to spring up around an army’s base of supplies. Surrounding the town are red earthworks, and hills of red earth with devious roads and paths winding over them.

I found a strangely mixed population in Chattanooga,—traders, adventurers, soldiers, poor whites, refugees, and negroes. There were many Union men from the Cotton States, who had escaped into our lines during the war, and either could not or dared not return. Here is a sample of them,—a lank, sallow, ragged individual with long black hair and wild beard, whose acquaintance I made in the streets. He was a shoemaker from Georgia. His Rebel neighbors had burned his house and shop, destroyed his tools, and forced him to flee for his life. He enlisted in our army, and had been fighting his daddy and two brothers.

“My daddy,” said he, “is as good a Rebel as you’ll find. He has grieved himself nigh-about to death because he didn’t gain his independence.”

I asked him how his father would receive him if he should go back.

“I allow we shouldn’t git along together no hack! The first question I’d ask him would be if he’d tuck the oath of allegiance. That would devil him to death. Then I’d ask him if he knowed whar his President Jeff was. Then he’d jest let in to cussin’ me. But I can’t go back. The men that robbed me are jest as bad Rebels as ever, and they’d burn my house again, or give me a bullet from behind some bush.”

There was in Chattanooga a post-school for the children of poor whites and refugees. It numbered one hundred and fifty pupils of various ages,—young children, girls of fifteen and sixteen, one married woman, and boys that were almost men, all wofully ignorant. Scarcely any of them knew their letters when they entered the school. The big boys chewed tobacco, and the big girls “dipped.” The mothers, when they came to talk with the teacher about their children, appeared with their nasty, snuffy sticks in their mouths: some chewed and spat like men. One complained that she was too poor to send her children to school; at the same time she was chewing up and spitting away more than the means needful for the purpose. Tobacco was a necessity of life; education wasn’t. The tax upon pupils was very small, the school being mainly supported by what is called the “post-fund,” accruing from taxes on sutlers, rents of buildings, and military fines. The post-school is usually designed for the children of soldiers; but Chattanooga being garrisoned by colored troops, their children attended the freedmen’s schools.

The freedmen’s schools were not in session at the time of my visit, owing to the small-pox then raging among the negro population; but I heard an excellent account of them. They numbered six hundred pupils. The teachers were furnished by the Western Freedmen’s Aid Society and paid by the freedmen themselves. One dollar a month was charged for each scholar. “The colored people,” said the school-superintendent, “are far more zealous in the cause of education than the whites. They will starve themselves, and go without clothes, in order to send their children to school.”

Notwithstanding there were three thousand negroes in and around Chattanooga, Captain Lucas, of the Freedmen’s Bureau, informed me that he was issuing no rations to them. All were finding some work to do, and supporting themselves. To those who applied for aid he gave certificates, requesting the Commissary to sell them rations at Government rates. He was helping them to make contracts, and sending them away to plantations at the rate of fifty or one hundred a week. “These people,” said he, “have been terribly slandered and abused. They are willing to go anywhere, if they are sure of work and kind treatment. Northern men have no difficulty in hiring them, but they have no confidence in their old masters.” It was mostly to Northern men, leasing plantations in the Mississippi Valley, that the freedmen were hiring themselves. The usual rate of wages was not less than twelve nor more than sixteen dollars a month, for full hands.

The principal negro settlement was at Contraband, a village of huts on the north side of the river. Its affairs were administered by a colored president and council chosen from among the citizens. These were generally persons of dignity and shrewd sense. They constituted a court for the trial of minor offences, under the supervision of the Bureau. Their decisions, Captain Lucas informed me, were nearly always wise and just. “I have to interfere, sometimes, however, to mitigate the severity of the sentences.” These men showed no prejudice in favor of their own color, but meted out a rugged and austere justice to all.

One afternoon I crossed the river to pay a visit to this little village. The huts, built by the negroes themselves, were of a similar character to those I had seen at Hampton, but they lacked the big wood-piles and stacks of corn, and the general air of thrift. Excepting the ravages of the small-pox, the community was in a good state of health. I found but one case of sickness,—that of an old negro suffering from a cold on his lungs, who told me there was nothing in the world he wouldn’t give to “git shet of dis sher misery.”

I entered several of these houses; in one of which I surprised a young couple courting by the fire, and withdrew precipitately, quite as much embarrassed as they were. In another I found a middle-aged woman patching clothes for her little boy, who was at play before the open door. Although it was a summer-like December day, there was a good fire in the fireplace. The hut was built of rails and mud; the chimney of sticks and sun-dried bricks, surmounted by a barrel. The roof was of split slabs. There was a slab mantel-piece crowded with bottles and cans; a shelf in one corner loaded with buckets and pans; and another in the opposite corner devoted to plates, cups, and mugs. I noticed also in the room a table, a bed, a bunk, a cupboard, a broom without a handle, two stools, and a number of pegs on which clothing was hung. All this within a space not much more than a dozen feet square.

I asked the woman how her people were getting along.

“Some are makin’ it right shacklin’,” she replied, “there’s so many of us here. A heap is workin’, and a heap is lazin’ around.” Her husband was employed whenever he could get a job. “Sometimes he talks like he’d hire out, then like he’d sooner take land,—any way to git into work. All have to support themselves somehow.”

She knew me for a Northern man. “I’m proud of Northern men! They’ve caused me to see a heap mo’e pleasure ’n I ever see befo’e.” Her husband was a good man, but she was not at all enthusiastic about him. “I had one husband; I loved him! He belonged to a man that owned a power o’ darkeys. He sold him away. It just broke my heart. But I couldn’t live without some man, no how; so I thought I might as well marry again.” She regretted the closing of the schools. “My chap went a little, but not much.”

“Are these your chickens?”

“No, I can’t raise chickens.” It was the fault of her neighbors. “They just pick ’em up and steal ’em in a minute! Heap of our people will pick up, but they’re sly. That comes from the way they was raised. I never stole in my life but from them that owned me. They’d work me all day, and never give me enough to eat, and I’d take what I could from ’em, and believe it was right.”

Hearing martial music as I returned across the river, I went up on a hill east of the town and witnessed the dress-parade of the sixteenth colored regiment (Tennessee). I never saw a finer military display on a small scale. The drill was perfect. At the order, a thousand muskets came to a thousand shoulders with a single movement, or the butts struck the ground with one sound along the whole line. The contrast of colors was superb,—the black faces, the white gloves, the blue uniforms, the bright steel. The music by the colored band was mellow and inspiring; and as a background to the picture we had a golden sunset behind the mountains.

-----

Footnote 10:

Or Mission Ridge; named from an Indian mission formerly located in this vicinity.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXIV. LOOKOUT MOUNTAIN

The next morning General Gillem, in command at Chattanooga, supplied me with a horse, and gave me his orderly for an attendant, and I set out to make the ascent of Lookout Mountain.

Riding out southward on one of the valley roads, we had hardly crossed Chattanooga Creek before we missed our way. Fortunately we overtook a farmer and his son, who set us right. They were laboring over the base of the mountain with a wagon drawn by a pair of animals that appeared to have been mated by some whimsical caprice. A tall, bony horse was harnessed in with the smallest mule I ever saw. Imagine a lank starved dog beside a rat, and you have an idea of the ludicrous incongruity of the match.

The man had in his wagon a single bag of grist, which he had to help over the rough mountain-roads by lifting at the wheels. He had been twelve miles to mill: “away beyant Missionary Ridge.” I asked him if there was no mill nearer home. “Thar’s a mill on Wahatchie Crick, but it’s mighty hard to pull thar. Wahatchie Hill is a powerful bad hill to pull up.” He did not seem to think twelve miles to mill anything, and we left him lifting cheerfully at the wheels, while his son shouted and licked the team. I trust his wife appreciated that bag of grist.

Riding southward along the eastern side of the mountain, we commenced the ascent of it by a steep, rough road, winding among forest-trees, and huge limestone rocks colored with exquisite tints of brown and gray and green, by the moss and lichens that covered them. A range of precipitous crags rose before us, and soon hung toppling over us as we continued to climb. A heavy cloud was on the mountain, combed by the pine-tops a thousand feet above our heads.

As we proceeded, I conversed with the General’s orderly. He was a good-looking young fellow with short curly hair and a sallow complexion. I inquired to what regiment he belonged.

“The Sixth Ohio, colored.” I looked at him with surprise. “You didn’t take me for a colored man, I reckon,” he said laughingly.

I thought he must be jesting, but he assured me that he was not.

“I was born in bondage,” he said, “near Memphis. My master was my father, and my mother’s owner. He made a will that she was to be free, and that I was to learn a trade, and have my freedom when I was twenty-one. He died when I was seven years old, and the estate was divided between his mother and two sisters. I don’t know what became of the will. I was run off into Middle Tennessee and sold for three hundred dollars. I was sold again when I was fourteen for sixteen hundred dollars. I was a carpenter; and carpenters was high. When I saw other men no whiter than me working for themselves and enjoying their freedom, I got discontented, and made up my mind to put out. The year Buchanan run for President I run for freedom. I got safe over into Ohio, and there I worked at my trade till the war broke out. I went out as an officer’s servant.”

He met with various adventures, and at length became General Grant’s body-servant. He described the General as “a short, chunked man, like a Dutchman;” quiet, kind, a great smoker, a heavy drinker, very silent, and seldom excited. “There was only one time when he appeared troubled in his mind. That was on the road to Corinth, after the battle of Shiloh. He used to walk his room all night.”

After the government began to make use of colored troops he went back to Ohio and enlisted. Since the war closed, he had obtained a furlough, returned to his native place, and found his mother, who in the mean time had been held as a slave.

The clouds lifted as we reached the summit of the mountain, fifteen hundred feet above the river. We passed through Summer Town, a deserted village, formerly a place of resort for families from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, during the hot season. A rough road over the rocks and through the woods took us to Point Lookout, a mile farther north.

A lookout indeed! What cloud shadows were sweeping the mountains and valleys! We left our horses tied to some trees, and clambered down over the ledges to the brink of the precipice. Away on the northeast was Chattanooga, with its clusters of roofs resembling saw-teeth. Below us was the crooked Tennessee, sweeping up to the base of the mountain, in a coil enclosing on the opposite side a foot-shaped peninsula, to which the Indians gave the appropriate name of Moccasin Point.

Immediately beneath us, on a shelf of the mountain, between its river-washed base and the precipice on which we stood, was the scene of Hooker’s famous “battle in the clouds.” The Rebels occupied a cleared space on that tremendous elevation. Behind them rose the crags; before them gloomed the woods, covering the lower part of the mountain. Along the cleared space, between the woods and the crags, ran their line of stone breastworks, which still remained, looking like a common farm-wall. The enemy had heavy guns on the summit of the mountain, but they could not be got into position, or sufficiently depressed, to be of service. Beside, the summit, on the morning of the attack, was immersed in mist, which concealed everything. The mist did not envelop the scene of the fight, however, but hung over it; so that the “battle in the clouds” was in reality a battle under the clouds.

The Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad runs around the curve of the river, under the mountain. As we sat looking down from the Point, a coal-train appeared, crawling along the track like a black snake.

Returning over the crest to the summit of the road, we paid a visit to Mr. Foster, known as the “Old Man of the Mountain.” He was living in a plain country-house on the eastern brow, with the immense panorama of hills and vales and forests daily before his eyes. He was one of the valiant, unflinching Union men of the South. In its wild nest on that crag his liberty-loving soul had lived, untamed as an eagle, through the perils and persecutions of the war. He was sixty-nine years old; which fact he expressed in characteristically quaint style: “Tennessee came, into the Union the sixth day of June, 1796; and on the twenty-second day of June I came into the world to see about it.”

His father was a Revolutionary soldier. “He was shot to pieces, in a manner. It took a heap of his blood to nourish Uncle Sam when he was a little feller. I recollect his saying to me, ‘There’s going to be wars; and when they come, I want you to remember what the Stars and Stripes cost your old father.’ I did not forget the lesson when this cursed secession war begun.”

He was by trade a carpenter. He came up on the mountain to live twenty years before, on account of his health, which was so poor in the valley that people said he was going to die, but which had been robust ever since. Twice during the war he was condemned by the Vigilance Committee to be hung for his Union sentiments and uncompromising freedom of speech. Twice the assassins came to his house to take him.

“The first time they came, it was Sunday. My wife had gone over the mountain to preaching, and I was alone. I loaded up my horse-pistol for ’em,—sixteen buck-shot: I put in a buck load, I tell ye. There was only two of ’em; and I thought I was good for three or four. They’d hardly got inside the gate when I went out to ’em, and asked what they wanted. One said, ‘We’ve come for Old Foster!’ I just took the rascal by the arm, and gave him a monstrous clamp,—I thought I felt the bone,—and shoved him head-over-heels out of that gate. I was going to shoot t’other feller, but they rode off so fast down the mountain I had no chance.”

The next attempt on his life resulted similarly. After that, the Committee did not persist in getting him executed. “I was so old, I suppose they thought I was of no account.” He told of several other Union men, however, whom they had caused to be hung. “After the Rebels got brushed out, Sherman and Hooker came to pay me a visit, and denominated me the ‘Old Man of the Mountain.’”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXV. THE SOLDIERS’ CEMETERY

A mile and a quarter southeast from the town is the National Cemetery of Chattanooga. An area of seventy-five acres has there been set apart by the military authorities for the burial of the soldiers who died in hospitals or fell on battle-fields in that region renowned for sanguinary conflicts. It occupies a hill which seems to have been shaped by Providence for this purpose: its general form is circular, and it rises with undulations, showing a beautiful variety of curves and slopes, to a superb summit, which swells like a green dome over all.

General Thomas, commanding the Division of the Tennessee, was nominally the director of the cemetery works. But he appears to have left all in the hands of Mr. Van Horne, chaplain of the post, who, in addition to his other duties, assumed the responsible task of laying out the grounds and supervising the interments. His plan has certainly the merit of originality, and will prove, in the end, I have no doubt, as beautiful as it is unique. Copying nothing from the designs of other cemeteries, he has taken Nature for his guide. The outline of each separate section is determined by its location. Here, for example, is a shield,—the rise of the ground and the natural lines of depression suggesting that form. In the centre of each section is a monument; immediately surrounding which are the graves of officers, in positions according to their numbers and rank; while around the latter are grouped the graves of private soldiers, in lines adapted to the general shape of the section. The paths and avenues follow the hollows and curves which sweep from the base in every direction towards the summit. This is surrounded by a single circular avenue; and is to be crowned, according to the chaplain’s plan, with a grand central monument, an historic temple overlooking the whole.

The place will abound in groups of trees, verdant lawns and slopes, magnificent vistas, and concealed views designed to surprise the visitor at every step. Outcropping ledges and bold, romantic rocks afford a delightful contrast to the green of the trees and grass, and to the smoothness of the slopes.

Beside the avenue which girds the base of the hill is a cave with galleries and chambers sculptured in a variety of forms by the action of water on the limestone rock. The chaplain, who accompanied me on my visit to the cemetery, sent for a guide and a light, and we explored this natural grotto a hundred feet or more, until we came to passages too narrow to admit us into the unknown chambers beyond. Besides the entrance from the avenue, there is an opening which affords a glimpse of the blue sky by day, or of the stars by night, through the roof of the cave.

The hill rises from the Valley midway between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, commanding a view of all that historic region. The Tennessee is visible, distant a mile or more. The chaplain told me that when the river was very high, water came in and filled the galleries of the cave; thus showing that they were of great extent, and mysteriously connected with the stream.

The work on the cemetery had thus far been performed by details from the army. The post-fund, which amounted to twenty-seven thousand dollars, had defrayed all expenses. But this cannot continue. The time is coming when the people of the States will be called upon to pay the debt they owe to the heroic dead, in liberal contributions towards the completion and adornment of this spot, where probably will be gathered together a more numerous host of the slain than in any other national cemetery. From Chickamauga and Mission Ridge, from Lookout Mountain and Wahatchie, from the scenes of many lesser fights, from the hospitals, and possibly also from the fields of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, thousands upon thousands they will come, a silent host, to this goal of future pilgrimages, this “Mecca of American memories.”

Nine thousand had already been interred there at the time of my visit. No attempt was made to bury the dead by States. “I am tired of State Rights,” said General Thomas; “let’s have a national cemetery.” Out of six thousand interred before the removal of the dead of Chickamauga was begun, only four hundred were unknown. A military record is kept, in which are inscribed all ascertainable facts respecting each,—his name, rank, company, arm of service, native State, age; time, place, and cause of death; address of nearest friends, and so forth; accompanied by a full regimental index, and an individual index; so that persons in search of the graves of friends can learn by a brief examination all that is known about them, and be guided at once to the section and number where their remains are deposited. The chaplain told me that many who had come with a determination to remove the bodies of their dead, immediately on seeing the cemetery had changed that determination, convinced that they could have no more fitting resting-place.

The dead of Chickamauga were being interred while I was there; and the chaplain kindly offered to accompany me to the battle-field, where a regiment of colored soldiers were at work exhuming the buried, and gathering together the remains of the unburied dead.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXVI. MISSION RIDGE AND CHICKAMAUGA

Accordingly, one cloudy December morning the chaplain, accompanied by two ladies of his household, took me up at my hotel, and drove us out of Chattanooga on the Rossville Road.

Leaving the open valley behind us we crossed a bushy plain, and passed through a clump of oaken woods. Before us, on the east, rose Missionary Ridge, forest-covered, its steep sides all russet-hued with fallen leaves, visible through the naked brown trees.

The chaplain who witnessed the scene, described to us the storming of those heights by the Army of the Cumberland, on the twenty-fifth of November, a little more than two years before. It was the finishing stroke to which the affair at Lookout Mountain was the brilliant prelude. It was the revenge for Chickamauga. There was a Rebel line of works along the base of the ridge; and the crests were defended by infantry and heavy artillery. The charge was ordered; and forward across the plain and up the slope swept a single glittering line of steel six miles in length. The Rebels were driven from their lower works by the bayonet. The army rushed forward without firing a shot, and pausing only to take breath for a moment in the depressions of the hill; then onward again, storming the heights, from which burst upon them a whistling and howling storm of iron and lead. General Thomas says the Ridge was carried simultaneously at six different points. The attack commenced at three o’clock in the afternoon; at four the crests were taken, and Bragg’s army in flight. The first captured gun was turned upon the enemy by Corporal Kramer of the Forty-first Ohio regiment, belonging to Hazen’s brigade of Wood’s division. He discharged it by firing his musket over the vent. It took six men to carry the colors of the First Ohio to the summit, five falling by the way in the attempt. Corporal Angelbeck, finding a Rebel caisson on fire, cut it loose from the horses and run it off down the hill before it exploded. These instances of personal intrepidity (which I give on the authority of Major-General Hazen, whom I saw afterwards at Murfreesboro’) are but illustrations of the gallantry shown by our troops along the whole line.

The plain we were crossing was the same which General Hooker’s forces swept over in their pursuit of the enemy. We passed the Georgia State-line; and, amid hilly woods filled with a bushy undergrowth, entered the mountain solitudes; crossing Missionary Ridge by the Rossville Gap. Rossville, which consisted of a blacksmith-shop and dwelling in the Gap, had been burned to the ground. Beyond this point the road forked; the left-hand track leading to Ringold, the right to Lafayette.

Driving southward along the Lafayette Road we soon reached the site of Cloud Spring Hospital, in the rear of the battle-field. A desolate, dreary scene: the day was cold and wet; dead leaves strewed the ground; the wind whistled in the trees. There were indications that here the work of disinterment was about to begin. Shovels and picks were ready on the ground; and beside the long, low trenches of the dead waited piles of yellow pine coffins spattered with rain.

A little further on we came to traces of the conflict,—boughs broken and trees cut off by shells. We rode southward along the line of battle, over an undulating plain, with sparse timber on one side, and on the other a field of girdled trees, which had been a cotton-field at the time of the battle. These ghostly groves, called “deadenings,” sometimes seen in other parts of the country, are an especial feature of the Southern landscape. When timbered land is to be put under cultivation, the trees, instead of being cut away, are often merely deadened with the axe, which encircles them with a line severing the bark, and there left to stand and decay slowly through a series of years. First the sapless bark flakes and falls piecemeal, and the wind breaks off the brittle twigs and small boughs. Next the larger branches come down; and the naked trunk, covered in the course of time by a dry-rot, and perforated by worms and the bills of woodpeckers, stands with the stumps of two or three of its largest topmost limbs upstretched in stern and sullen gloom to heaven. There is something awful and sublime in the aspect of a whole forest of such. The tempest roars among them, but not a limb sways. Spring comes, and all around the woods are green and glad, but not a leaf or tender bud puts forth upon the spectral trunks. The sun rises, and the field is ruled by the shadows of these pillars, which sweep slowly around, shortening as noon approaches, and lengthening again at the approach of night. Corn and cotton flourish well; the powdery rot and half-decayed fragments which fall serving as a continual nourishment to the soil. It takes from ten to twenty years for these corpses standing over their graves to crumble and disappear beneath them. Sometimes they rot to the roots; or, when all is ready, a hurricane hurls his crashing balls, and the whole grove goes down in a night-time, like ten-pins.

Dismal enough looked the “deadening,” in the cold and drizzling rain that morning on the battle-field. Scarcely less so seemed the woods beyond, all shattered and torn by shot and shell, as if a tornado had swept them. On the northern side of these was Kelly’s house. The Dyer Farm was beyond; upon which we found two hundred colored soldiers encamped, in a muddy village of winter huts near the ruins of the burned farm-house. The Dyer family were said to be excellent Rebels. Dyer served as a guerilla; and it was his wife who burned her feather-bed in order that it might not be used by our wounded soldiers. After that patriotic act she wandered off in the woods and died. Her husband had since returned, and was now living in a new log-hut within sight of the camp.

The camp was a strange spectacle. The men were cooking their dinners or drying their clothes around out-door fires of logs which filled the air with smoke. Near by were piles of coffins,—some empty, some containing the remains of soldiers that had just been disinterred. The camp was surrounded by fields of stumps and piny undergrowth. Here and there were scattered trees, hitched at some of which were mules munching their dinners of wet hay.

There were two hundred and seventeen soldiers in camp. At first they had a horror of the work for which they were detailed. All the superstition of the African was roused within them at sight of the mouldering dead. They declared that the skulls moved, and started back with shrieks. An officer, to encourage them, unconcernedly took out the bones from a grave and placed them carefully in a coffin. They were induced to imitate his example. In a few hours they chatted or whistled and sang at their work; and in a few days it was common to see them perform their labor and eat their luncheons at the same time,—lay bones into the coffin with one hand, and hold with the other the hard-tack they were nibbling.

More than nine tenths of the bodies taken from Chickamauga were unknown. Some had been buried in trenches; some singly; some laid side by side, and covered with a little earth, perhaps not more than six inches deep, leaving feet and skull exposed; and many had not been buried at all. Throughout the woods were scattered these lonely graves. The method of finding them was simple. A hundred men were deployed in a line, a yard apart, each examining half a yard of ground on both sides of him, as they proceeded. Thus was swept a space five hundred yards in breadth. Trees were blazed or stakes set along the edge of this space, to guide the company on its return. In this manner the entire battle-field had been or was to be searched. When a grave was found, the entire line was halted until the teams came up and the body was removed. Many graves were marked with stakes, but some were to be discovered only by the raised or disturbed appearance of the ground. Those bodies which had been buried in trenches were but little decomposed; while of those buried singly in boxes not much was left but the bones and a handful of dust.

We had diverged from the Lafayette Road in order to ride along the line of battle east of it,—passing the positions occupied on Sunday, the second day, by Baird, Johnson, and Palmer’s divisions, respectively. Next to Palmer was Reynolds; then came Brannan, then Wood, then Davis, then Sheridan, on the extreme right. The line, which on Saturday ran due north and south, east of the road,—the left resting at Kelly’s house and the right at Gordon’s Mills,—was on Sunday curved, the right being drawn in and lying diagonally across and behind the road. In front (on the east) was Chickamauga Creek. Missionary Ridge was in the rear; on a spur of which the right rested. I recapitulate these positions, because newspaper accounts of the battle, and historical accounts based upon them, are on two or three points confused and contradictory: and because an understanding of them is important to what I am about to say.

Quitting the camp, we approached the scene of the great blunder which lost us the battle of Chickamauga. At half-past nine in the morning the attack commenced, the Rebels hurling masses of troops with their accustomed vigor against Rosecrans’s left and centre. Not a division gave way: the whole line stood firm and unmoved: all was going well; when Rosecrans sent the following imperative order to General Wood:—

“Close up as fast as possible on General Reynolds, and support him.”

General Brannan’s division, as you have noticed, was between Wood and Reynolds. How then could Wood close up on Reynolds without taking out his division and marching by the left flank in Brannan’s rear? In military parlance, to close up may mean two quite different things. It may mean to move by the flank in order to close a gap which occurs between one body of troops and another body. Or it may mean to make a similar movement to that by which a rank of soldiers is said to close up on the rank in front of it. To close to the right or left, is one thing; to close up on, another. To General Wood, situated as he was, the order could have no other meaning than the latter. He could not close up on General Reynolds and support him without taking a position in his rear. Yet the order seemed to him very extraordinary. To General McCook, who was present when it was received, he remarked,—

“This is very singular! What am I to do?” For to take out his division was to make a gap in the army which might prove fatal to it.

“The order is so positive,” replied McCook, “that you must obey it at once. Move your division out, and I will move Davis’s in to fill the gap. Move quick, or you won’t be out of the way before I bring in his division.”

General Wood saw no alternative but to obey the order. He would have been justified in disobeying it, only on the supposition that the commanding general was ignorant of the position of his forces. Had Rosecrans been absent from the field, such a supposition would have been reasonable, and such disobedience duty. But Rosecrans was on the field; and he was supposed to know infinitely more than could be known to any division commander concerning the exigencies of the battle. Had Wood kept his place, and Reynolds been overwhelmed and the field lost in consequence of that act of insubordination, he would have deserved to be court-martialled and shot. On the contrary, he moved his division out, and in consequence of his strict obedience to orders the field was lost. He had scarcely opened the gap between Brannan and Davis, when the Rebels rushed in and cut the army to pieces.

General Rosecrans, in his official report, sought to shift the responsibility of this fatal movement from his own shoulders to those of General Wood. This was manifestly unjust. It appears to me that the true explanation of it lies in the fact that Rosecrans, although a man of brilliant parts, had not the steady balance of mind necessary to a great general. He could organize an army, or plan a campaign in his tent; but he had no self-possession on the field of battle. In great emergencies he became confused and forgetful. It was probably this nervousness and paralysis of memory which caused the disaster at Chickamauga. He had forgotten the position of his forces. He intended to order General Wood to close to the left on Brannan; or on Reynolds, forgetting that Brannan was between them. But the order was to close up on and support Reynolds; whereas Reynolds, like Brannan, was doing very well, and did not particularly need support.

The routed divisions of the army fled to Chattanooga,—the commanding general among the foremost; where he hastened to telegraph to the War Department and the dismayed nation that all was lost; while General Garfield, his chief of staff, extricating himself from the rabble, rode back to the part of the field where firing was still heard,—running the gauntlet of the enemy’s lines,—and joined General Thomas, who, rallying fragments of corps on a spur of Missionary Ridge, was stemming the tide of the foe, and saving the army from destruction.

Through woods dotted all over with the graves of soldiers buried where they fell, we drove to the scene of that final fight.

Bones of dead horses strewed the ground. At the foot of the wooded hill were trenches full of Longstreet’s slaughtered men. That was to them a most tragical termination to what had seemed a victory. Inspired by their recent success, they charged again and again up those fatal slopes, only to be cut down like ripe grain by the deadly volleys which poured from a crescent of flame and smoke, where the heroic remnant of the army had taken up its position, and was not to be dislodged.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXVII. FROM CHATTANOOGA TO MURFREESBORO’

The military operations, of which Chattanooga was so long the centre, have left their mark upon all the surrounding country. Travel which way you will, you are sure to follow in their track. There are fortifications at every commanding point. Every railroad bridge is defended by redoubts and block-houses; and many important bridges have been burned. The entire route to Atlanta is a scene of conflict and desolation: earthworks, like the foot-prints of a Titan on the march; rifle-pits extending for miles along the railroad track; hills all dug up into forts and entrenchments; the town of Marietta in ruins; farms swept clean of their fences and buildings; everywhere, along the blackened war-path, solitary standing chimneys left, “like exclamation points,” to emphasize the silent story of destruction.

I saw a few “Union men” at Chattanooga. But their loyalty was generally of a qualified sort. One, who was well known for his daring opposition to the secession leaders, and for his many narrow escapes from death, told me how he lived during the war. Once when the Rebels came to kill him, they took his brother instead. His residence was on a hill, and three times subsequently he saved his life by taking a canoe and crossing the river in it when he saw his assassins coming. Yet this man hated the free negro worse than he hated the Rebels; and he said to me, “If the government attempts now to force negro-suffrage upon the South, it will have to wade through a sea of blood to which all that has been shed was only a drop!” Another, who claimed also to be a Union man, said, “Before the South will ever consent to help pay the National debt, there will be another rebellion bigger than the last. You would make her repudiate her own war-debt, and then pay the expenses of her own whipping. I tell you, this can’t be done.” The threats of another rebellion, and of an extraordinarily large sea of blood, were not, I suppose, to be understood literally. This is the fiery Southron’s metaphorical manner of expressing himself. Yet these men were perfectly sincere in their profession of sentiments which one would have expected to hear only from the lips of Rebels.

On the morning of Thursday, December 14th, I bid a joyful farewell to Chattanooga, which is by no means a delightful place to sojourn in, and took the train for Murfreesboro’. The weather was cold, and growing colder. Winter had come suddenly, and very much in earnest. Huge icicles hung from the water-tanks by the railroad. The frost, pushing its crystal shoots up out of the porous ground, looked like thick growths of fungus stalks. The rain and mist of the previous night were congealed upon the trees; and the Cumberland Mountains, as we passed them, appeared covered with forests of silver.

The country was uninteresting. Well-built farm-houses were not common; but log-huts, many of them without windows, predominated. These were inhabited by negroes and poor whites. I remember one family living in a box-car that had been run off the track. Another occupied a grotesque cabin having for a door the door of a car, set up endwise, marked conspicuously in letters reading from the zenith to the nadir, “U. S. MILITARY R. R.” We passed occasionally cotton-fields, resembling at that season and in that climate fields of low black weeds, with here and there a bunch of cotton sticking to the dry leafy stalks.

Next me sat a gentleman from Iowa, whose history was a striking illustration of the difference between a slave State and a free State. He had just been to visit a brother living in Georgia. They were natives of North Carolina, from which State they emigrated in early manhood. He chose the Northwest; his brother chose the South; and they had now met for the first time since their separation.

“To me,” said he, “it was a very sad meeting. Georgia is a hundred years behind Iowa. My brother has always been poor, and always will be poor. If I had to live as he does, I should think I had not the bare necessaries of life, not to speak of comforts. His children are growing up in ignorance. When I looked at them, and thought of my own children,—intelligent, cultivated, with their schools, their books, and magazines, and piano,—I was so much affected I couldn’t speak, and for a minute I’d have given anything if I hadn’t seen how he was situated. It isn’t my merit, nor his fault, that there is so great a difference now, between us, who were so much alike when boys. If he had gone to Iowa, he would have done as well as I have. If I had gone to Georgia, I should have done as poorly as he has.”

He was the only Northern man in the car besides myself,—as was to be seen not only by the countenances of the other passengers, but also by the spirit of their conversation. Behind us sat an ignorant brute, with his shirt bosom streaked with tobacco drizzle, who was saying in a loud, fierce tone, that “we’d better kill off the balance of the niggers,” for he had “no use for ’em now they were free.” Others were talking about Congress and the President. One little boy four years old amused us all. He enjoyed the range of the car, and had made several acquaintances, some of whom, to plague him, called him Billy Yank. Great was the little fellow’s indignation at this insult. “I a’n’t Billy Yank! I’m Johnny Reb!” he insisted. As the teasing continued, he flew to his mother, who received him in her arms. “Yes, he is Johnny Reb! so he is!” And his little heart was comforted.

At half-past three we reached Murfreesboro’, having been nine hours travelling one hundred and nine miles. This I found about the average rate of speed on Southern roads. The trains run slow, and a great deal of time is lost at stopping-places. Once, when we were wooding up, I went out to learn what was keeping us so long, and saw two of the hands engaged in a scuffle, which the rest were watching with human interest. On another occasion the men had to bring wood out of the forest, none having been provided for the engine near the track.

Murfreesboro’ is situated very near the centre of the State. It had in 1860 three thousand inhabitants. It has six churches, and not a decent hotel. Before the war it enjoyed the blessing of a University, a military institute, two female colleges, and two high-schools; all of which had been discontinued. It was also described to me as “a pretty, shady village, before the war.” But the trees had been cut away, leaving ugly stump-lots; and the country all around was laid desolate.

Knowing how wretched must be my accommodations at the only tavern then open to the public, General Hazen hospitably insisted on my removal to his head-quarters on the evening of my arrival. I found him occupying a first-class Tennessee mansion on a hill just outside the town. The house was cruciform, with a spacious hall and staircase in the centre, opening into lofty wainscoted rooms above and below. The richness of the dark panels, and the structural elegance of the apartments, were unexceptionable. But the occupants of these could never have known comfort in wintry weather. The house was built, like all southern houses, for a climate reputed mild, but liable to surprises of cruel and treacherous cold, against which the inhabitants make no provision. The General and I sat that evening talking over war times, with a huge fire roaring before us in the chimney, and roasting our faces, while the freezing blast blew upon our backs from irremediable crevices in the ill-jointed wainscots and casements. I slept that night in a particularly airy chamber, with a good fire striving faithfully to master the enemy, and found in the morning the contents of the water-pitcher, that stood in the room, fast frozen.

I was amused by the grimaces of the negro servant who came in to replenish the fire before I was up. He inquired if we had any colder weather than that in the North, and when I told him how I had seen iron pump-handles stick to a wet hand on a fine wintry morning, involving sometimes the sacrifice of epidermis before the teeth of the frost could be made to let go, he remarked excitedly,—

“I wouldn’t let de iron git holt o’ my hand! I hain’t no skin to spar’, mornin’ like dis sher!”

As I sat at breakfast with the General, he told me of his official intercourse with the inhabitants, since he had been in command of the post. “The most I have to do,” said he, “is to adjust difficulties between Union men and Rebels. There are many men living in this country who acted as scouts for our army, and who, when they wanted a horse to use in the service of the government, took it without much ceremony where they could find it. For acts of this kind the law-loving Rebels are now suing them for damages before the civil courts, and persecuting them in various ways, so that the military power has to interfere to protect them.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXVIII. STONE RIVER

After breakfast in a large dining-room which no fuel could heat, we went and stood by the hearth, turning ourselves on our heels, as the earth turns on its axis, warming a hemisphere at a time, until the wintry condition of our bodies gave place to a feeling of spring, half sunshine and half chill; then we clapped on our overcoats and mufflers; then two powerful war-horses of the General’s came prancing to the door, ready bridled and saddled; and we mounted. A vigorous gallop across the outskirts of the town and out on the Nashville Pike set the sympathetic blood also on a gallop, and did for us what fire in a Tennessee mansion could not do. In ten minutes we were thoroughly warm, with the exception of one thumb in a glove which I wore, and an ear on the windward side of the General’s rosy face.

Riding amid stump-fields, where beautiful forests had cast their broad shades before the war, we entered the area of the vast fortress constructed by the army of Rosecrans, lying at Murfreesboro’ after the battle. This is the largest work of the kind in the United States. A parapet of earth three miles in circumference encloses a number of detached redoubts on commanding eminences. The encircled space is a mile in diameter. It contained all Rosecrans’s storehouses, and was large enough to take in his entire army. It would require at least ten thousand troops to man its breastworks. The converging lines of the railroad and turnpike running to Nashville pass through it; and across the north front sweeps a bend of Stone River. We found the stream partly frozen, chafing between abrupt rocky shores sheathed in ice.

A mile beyond, the converging lines above mentioned cut each other at a sharp angle; the railroad, which goes out of Murfreesboro’ on the left, shifting over to the right of the turnpike. Crossing them at nearly right angles, a short distance on the Murfreesboro’ side of their point of intersection, was the Rebel line of battle, on the morning of the thirty-first of December. Half a mile beyond this point, on the Nashville side, was the Union line.

The railroad here runs through a cut, with a considerable embankment,—a circumstance of vital importance to our army, saving it, probably, from utter rout and destruction, on that first day of disaster. The right wing, thrown out two miles and more to the west of the railroad, rested on nothing. It was left hanging in the air, as the French say. An attack was expected, yet no precautions were taken to provide against an attack. General Wood, who had posted scouts in trees to observe the movements of the Rebels, reported to the commanding general that they were rapidly moving troops over and massing them on their left. Rosecrans says he sent the information to McCook; McCook says he never received it. When the attack came, it was a perfect surprise. It was made with the suddenness and impetuosity for which the enemy was distinguished, and everything gave way before it. Division after division was pushed back, until the line, which was projected nearly perpendicular to the railroad in the morning, lay parallel to it,—that providential cut affording an opportune cover for the rallying and re-forming of the troops.

Another feature of the field is eminently noticeable. The bold river banks, curving in and out, along by the east side of the railroad, made a strong position for the Union left to rest upon. Here, in a little grove called by the Rebels the “Round Forest,” between the river and the railroad, was General Wood’s division, planted like a post. On his right, like a bolt of iron in that post, was Hazen’s brigade, serving as a pivot on which the whole army line swung round like a gate. The pivot itself was immovable. In vain the enemy concentrated his utmost efforts against it. Terribly smitten and battered, but seemingly insensible as iron itself, there it stuck.[11]

It was extremely interesting to visit this portion of the field in company with one who played so important a part in the events enacted there. We rode through a cotton-field of black leafy stalks, with little white bunches clinging to them like feathers or snow. It was across that field, between Round Forest and the railroad, that Hazen’s line was formed. On the edge of it, by the forest, still lay the bones of a horse shot under him during the battle.

Near by was a little cemetery, within which the dead of Hazen’s brigade were buried. A well-built stone wall encloses an oblong space one hundred feet in length by forty in breadth. Within are thirty-one limestone tablets marking the graves of the common soldiers. In the midst of these stands a monument, on which are inscribed the names of officers whose remains are deposited beneath it. This is also of limestone, massy, well formed, ten feet square on the ground and eleven feet in height. It is interesting as being the only monument of importance and durability erected by soldiers during the war.

On the south side, facing the railroad and turnpike, is the following legend:—

“HAZEN’S BRIGADE TO THE MEMORY OF ITS SOLDIERS WHO FELL AT STONE RIVER, DEC. 31, 1862. ‘Their faces toward heaven, their feet to the foe.’”

On the east side is the following:—

“THE VETERANS OF SHILOH HAVE LEFT A DEATHLESS HERITAGE OF FAME UPON THE FIELD OF STONE RIVER.”

On the north side:—

“Erected 1863, upon the ground where they fell, by their comrades of the Nineteenth Brigade, Buell’s Army of the Ohio, Col. W. B. Hazen 41st Infantry O. Vols. commanding.”

On the west side:—

“The blood of one third its soldiers twice spilled in Tennessee crimsons the battle-flag of the brigade and inspires to great deeds.”

From the soldiers’ cemetery at Round Forest we rode on to the new National Cemetery of Stone River, then in process of construction. It lies between the railroad and the turnpike, in full view from both. A massy square-cornered stone wall encloses a space of modest size, sufficiently elevated, and covered with neatly heaped mounds, side by side, and row behind row, in such precise order, that one might imagine the dead who sleep beneath them to have formed their ghostly ranks there after the battle, and carefully laid themselves down to rest beneath those small green tents. The tents were not green when I visited the spot, but I trust they are green to-day, and that the birds are singing over them.

-----

Footnote 11:

The right brigade of Palmer’s division had been the last to yield. The left brigade, in command of Hazen, was thus exposed to fire in flank and rear, and to the attempts of the enemy to charge in front. It required terrible fighting to beat back the enemy’s double lines: it cost a third of the brave brigade; but every moment the enemy was held back was worth a thousand men to the main line. General Rosecrans improved the time so well, in hurrying troops to the new position, that, when the enemy assailed that line, the fresh divisions of Van Cleve, Wood, and Rousseau, and the artillery massed on a commanding point, not only repulsed them, but they were charged while retiring by one of Crittenden’s brigades.... The enemy had miscalculated the temper of Hazen’s brigade; and Bragg was obliged to report, as he did in his first despatch, that he “had driven the whole Federal line, except his left, which stubbornly resisted.”—Annals of the Army of the Cumberland.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXIX. THE HEART OF TENNESSEE

Having spent the remainder of the forenoon in riding over other portions of the field, we returned to Murfreesboro’; and at half-past three o’clock I took the train for Nashville.

At Nashville I remained four days,—four eminently disagreeable days of snow, and rain, and fog, and slush, and mud. Yet I formed a not unfavorable impression of the city. I could feel the influence of Northern ideas and enterprise pulsating through it. Its population, which was less than twenty-four thousand at the last census, nearly doubled during the war. Its position gives it activity and importance. It is a nostril through which the State has long breathed the Northern air of free institutions. It is a port of entry on the Cumberland, which affords it steamboat communication with the great rivers. It is a node from which radiate five important railroads connecting it with the South and North. The turnpikes leading out of it in every direction are the best system of roads I met with anywhere in the South.

Middle Tennessee is the largest of the three natural divisions of the State. It is separated from the West division by the Tennessee River, and from East Tennessee by the Cumberland Mountains. It is a fine stock-raising country; and the valley of the Cumberland River affords an extensive tract of excellent cotton and tobacco lands.

Nashville is the great commercial emporium of this division. The largest annual shipment of cotton from this port was fifty thousand bales; the average, before the war, was about half as many: during 1865, it was fully up to this average, consisting mostly of old cotton going to market. Six thousand hogsheads of tobacco, two million bushels of corn, and twenty-five thousand hogs,—besides ten thousand casks of bacon and twenty-five hundred tierces of lard,—were yearly shipped from this port. The manufacturing interest of the place is insignificant.

The prospects of the country for the present year seemed to me favorable. The freedmen were making contracts, and going to work. Returned Rebels were generally settling down to a quiet life, and turning their attention to business. The people were much disposed to plant cotton, and every effort was making to put their desolated farms into a tillable condition.

Yet Middle Tennessee is but an indifferent cotton-growing region. It is inferior to West Tennessee, and can scarcely be called a cotton country, when compared with the rich valleys of the more Southern States. Eight hundred pounds of seed cotton[12] to the acre are considered a good crop on the best lands. The quality of Middle Tennessee cotton never rates above “low middling,” but generally below it, (the different qualities of cotton being classed as follows: inferior, ordinary, good ordinary, low middling, middling, good middling, middling fair, good fair, and fine.)

I found considerable business doing with an article which never before had any money-value. Cotton seed, which used to be cast out from the gin-houses and left to rot in heaps, the planter reserving but a small portion for the ensuing crop, was now in great demand, prices varying from one to three dollars a bushel. In some portions of the Rebel States it had nearly run out during the war, and those sections which, like Tennessee, had continued the culture of the plant, were supplying the deficiency. The seed, I may here mention, resembles, after the fibre is removed by the gin, a small-sized pea covered with fine white wool. It is very oily, and is considered the best known fertilizer for cotton lands.

* * * * *

Nashville is built on the slopes of a hill rising from the south bank of the Cumberland. Near the summit, one hundred and seventy-five feet above the river, stands the capitol, said to be the finest State capitol in the United States. The view it commands of the surrounding country is superb; and seen from afar off, it seems, with its cupola and Ionic porticoes, to rest upon the city like a crown. It is constructed of fine fossiliferous limestone, three stories in height; with a central tower lifting the cupola two hundred feet from the ground. This tower is the one bad feature about the building. It is not imposing. The site is a lofty crest of rock, which was fortified during the war, converting the capitol into a citadel. The parapets thrown up around the edifice still remain.

My visit happened on the first anniversary of the battle of Nashville, which took place on the fifteenth and sixteenth days of December, 1864;—a battle which, occurring after many great and sanguinary conflicts, did not rise to highest fame; and which has not yet had ample justice done it. It is to be distinguished as the only immediately decisive battle of the war,—the only one in which an army was destroyed. By it the army of Hood was annihilated, and a period put to Rebel power in the States which Sherman had left behind him on his great march.

The scene of the battle, the sweeping undulations of the plain, the fields, the clumps of woods, and the range of hills beyond, are distinctly visible in fair weather from the house-tops of the city, and especially from the capitol. The fight took place under the eyes of the citizens. Every “coigne of vantage” was black with spectators. Patriots and Rebel sympathizers were commingled: the friends and relatives of both armies crowding together to witness the deadly struggle; a drama of fearfully intense reality! The wife of a noted general officer who was in the thickest of the fight, told me something of her experience, watching from the capitol with a glass the movements of his troops, the swift gallop of couriers, the charge, the repulse, the successful assault, the ground dotted with the slain, and the awful battle cloud, rolling over all, enfolding, as she at one time believed, his dead form with the rest. But he lived; he was present when she told me the story;—and shall I ever forget the emotion with which he listened to the recital? The battle was no such terrible thing to the soldier in the midst of it, as to the loved one looking on.

The State legislature adjourned for the Christmas holidays on the morning of my visit to the capitol; but I was in time to meet and converse with members from various parts of the State. They were generally a plain, candid, earnest class of men. They were the loyal salt of the State. Some of them were from districts in which there were no Union men to elect them; to meet which contingency the names of the candidates for both houses had been placed on a general ticket. Thus members from West and Middle Tennessee, where the Rebel element was paramount, were elected by votes in East Tennessee, which was loyal.

With Mr. Frierson, Speaker of the Senate, I had a long conversation. He was from Maury County, and a liberal-minded, progressive man, for that intensely pro-slavery and Rebel district. We talked on the exciting topic of the hour,—negro suffrage, and the admission of negro testimony in the courts. “My freedmen,” he said, “are far more intelligent and better prepared to vote, than the white population around us.” Yet as a class he did not think the negroes prepared to exercise the right of suffrage, and he was in favor of granting it only to such as had served in the Union army. To the negroes’ loyalty and good behavior he gave the highest praise. “It is said they would have fought for the Confederacy, if the opportunity had been given them in season. But I know the negro, and I know that his heart was true to the Union from the first, and throughout; and I do not believe he would have fought for the Rebellion, even on the promise of his liberty.” He thought the blacks competent to give testimony in the courts; but for this step society in Tennessee was not prepared. Both the right of voting and of testifying must be given them before long, however.

There were two classes of Union men in Tennessee. One class had manifested their loyalty by their uncompromising acts and sacrifices. The other class were merely legal Union men, professing loyalty to the government and friendliness to the negro. “These are not to be trusted,” said Mr. Frierson. “Their animosity against the government and the freedmen, and more particularly against heart Union men, is all the more dangerous because it is secret.” And it was necessary in his opinion to retain the Freedmen’s Bureau in the State, and to keep both Rebels and rebel sympathizers excluded from power, for some years.

I have given so much of this conversation to illustrate the views entertained by the average, moderate, common-sense Union men of Tennessee. Far behind them, on the question of human rights, were some of the negro-haters and Rebel-persecutors of East Tennessee; while there was a handful of leading men as far in advance of them. A good sample of these was the honorable John Trimble, of Nashville, also a member of the legislature, whom I had the satisfaction of meeting on two or three occasions: a man of liberal and cultivated mind, singularly emancipated from cant and prejudice. He had just introduced into the General Assembly a bill extending the elective franchise to the freedmen, with certain restrictions; for the passage of which there was of course little chance.

I was just in time to catch Governor Brownlow as he was about going home for the holidays. I should have been sorry to miss seeing this remarkable type of native Southern-Western wit. As an outspoken convert from the pro-slavery doctrines he used to advocate, to the radical ideas which the agitations of the times had shaken to the surface of society, he was also interesting to me. I found him a tall, quiet individual, of a nervous temperament, intellectual forehead, and a gift of language,—with nothing of the blackguard in his manners, as readers of his writings might sometimes be led to expect. His conversation was characteristic. He believed a Rebel had no rights except to be hung in this world, and damned after death. But this and other similar expressions did not proceed so much from a vindictive nature, as from that tendency to a strong, extravagant style of statement, for which Western and Southern people, and especially the people of Tennessee, are noted.

Of his compatriots, the Union-loving East Tennesseeans, he said, “It is hard to tell which they hate most, the Rebels, or the negroes.” He did not sympathize with them in the ill-feeling they bestowed upon the latter. He was in favor of the Negro Testimony Bill, which had just been defeated in the legislature by East Tennessee members; and as for negro suffrage, he thought it was sure to come in a few years.

“The Rebels,” said he, “are as rebellious now as ever. If Thomas and his bayonets were withdrawn, in ten days a Rebel mob would drive this legislature out. Congress,” he added, “will have to legislate for all the Rebel States, Tennessee with the rest.”

From the Governor’s I went over to the division head-quarters to call on Major-General Thomas,—a very different type of native Southern men. Born and bred a Virginian, his patriotism was national, knowing no State boundaries. In appearance, he is the most lion-like of all the Union generals I have seen. An imperturbable, strong soul, never betrayed into weakness or excess by any excitement, his opinions possessed for me great value.

We spoke of the national soldiers’ cemeteries in his division; and he informed me that besides those I had visited at Chattanooga and Murfreesboro’, others proposed by him had been sanctioned by the War Department. “We shall have one here at Nashville; and I have already selected the site for it,”—a fortified hill in the suburbs. “There will be one at Franklin; also one at Memphis; another at Shiloh; and another large one at Atlanta;” for he did not favor the plan of burying the dead of the Atlanta campaign at Chattanooga.

The military division, called the “Division of the Tennessee,” which General Thomas commands, comprises the States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

He did not think that in either of those States there was any love for the Union, except in the hearts of a small minority. Tennessee was perhaps an exception. It was the only one of the Southern States that had reorganized on a strictly Union basis. It had disfranchised the Rebels. The governor, the legislature, and the recently elected members of Congress, were unquestionably loyal men. The Rebel State debt had been repudiated, and the Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery adopted. East Tennessee could take care of itself; but in Middle and West Tennessee, where the Rebel sentiment predominated, personal and partisan animosities were so strong that Union men must for some time to come have the protection of the government. There were then in Tennessee about six thousand troops, stationed chiefly at Chattanooga, Memphis, and Nashville, with smaller garrisons scattered throughout the State, sufficient to remind the people that the government still lived.

As for the freedman, General Thomas thought the respectable classes, and especially the intelligent large planters, were inclined to treat him with justice; but habit and prejudice were so strong even with them, that the kind of justice he might expect would be largely mixed with wrong and outrage, if the Bureau was withdrawn.

The General was in the receipt of information, from entirely distinct and reliable sources, concerning secret organizations in the Southern States, the design of which was to embarrass the Federal Government and destroy its credit, to keep alive the fires of Rebel animosity, and to revive the cause of the Confederacy whenever there should occur a favorable opportunity, such as a political division of the North, or a war with some foreign power. As his testimony on this subject has been made public, I shall say nothing further of it here, except to express my sense of the weight to be attached to the conclusions of so calm and unprejudiced a man.

He had great faith in the negro. “I may be supposed to know something about him, for I was raised in a slave State; and I have certainly seen enough of him during and since the war. There is no doubt about his disposition to work and take care of himself, now he is free.” When I spoke of the great difference existing between different African races, he replied, “There is more ability and fidelity in these apish-looking negroes than you suppose”; and he proceeded to relate the following story:—

“I had a servant of the kind you speak of during the war. I saw him first at a hotel in Danville, Kentucky; he waited on me a good deal, and attracted my attention because he looked so much like a baboon. He took a liking to me, from some cause, and in order to be near me, engaged in the service of one of my staff-officers. I saw him occasionally afterwards, but gave him little attention, and had no suspicion of the romantic attachment with which I had inspired him. At length I had the misfortune to lose a very valuable servant, and did not know how I should replace him: servants were plenty enough, but I wanted one who could understand what I wished to have done without even being told my wishes, and who would have it done almost before I was aware of the necessity. I happened to name these qualities of a perfect valet in the presence of one of my aides, who said to me, ‘I have just the man you want; and though I wouldn’t part with him for any other cause, you shall have him.’ I accepted his offer; and what was my surprise when he introduced to me the baboon. I at first thought it a jest; but soon learned that he had conferred upon me a great favor. I never had such a servant. In a week’s time he understood perfectly all my habits and requirements, and it was very rare I ever had to give him a verbal order. We had difficulty in getting our washing and ironing properly done, in the army; but one day I noticed my linen was looking better than usual. The fellow had anticipated my want in that respect, and learned to wash and iron expressly to please me. He soon became one of the best washers and ironers I ever saw; I don’t think a woman in America could beat him. As soon as his newly acquired art became known, it was in demand; and he asked permission to do the linen of some of my officers, which I granted. He was industrious and provident; he supported, a family, and, during the three years he was with me, laid by two thousand dollars.”

Among other prominent men I saw was General Fiske, of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Assistant-Commissioner for the States of Tennessee and Kentucky. There were in his district six hundred thousand freedmen. He was issuing eight hundred rations daily to colored women and children, and three times as many to white refugees. “During the past four years,” said he, “between Louisville and Atlanta, we have fed with government charity rations sixty-four white to one colored person.” The local poor he refused to feed. “I told the Mayor of Nashville the other day that if he did not take care of his poor, I would assess the whiskey shops for their benefit. There are four hundred and eighteen shops of that kind in this city; and eighteen thousand dollars a day are poured down the throats of the people.”

The colored people of Nashville had organized a provident association managed exclusively by themselves, the object of which was the systematic relief of the poor, irrespective of color.

Speaking of the differences arising between the freedmen and the whites, General Fiske said, “In thirteen cases out of fifteen, the violation of contracts originates with the whites.” Since the defeat of the Negro Testimony Bill in the legislature, he had taken all cases, in which freedmen were concerned, out of the civil courts, and turned them over to freedmen’s courts, where alone justice could be done them.

“In my work of elevating the colored race,” said he, “I get more hearty coöperation from intelligent and influential Rebel slave-holders, than from the rabid Unionists of East Tennessee.”

Speaking of the laziness with which the negroes were charged, he said, “They are more industrious than the whites. You see young men standing on street corners with cigars in their mouths, and hands in their pockets, swearing the negroes won’t work; while they themselves are supported by their own mothers, who keep boarding-houses. The idle colored families complained of are usually the wives and children of soldiers serving in the Federal army; and they have as good a right to be idle as the wives and children of any other men who are able and willing to support their families. In this city, it is the negroes who do the hard work. They handle goods on the levee and at the railroad; drive drays and hacks; lay gas-pipes; and work on new buildings. In the country they are leasing farms; some are buying farms; others are at work for wages. Able-bodied plantation hands earn fifteen and twenty dollars a month; women, ten and twelve dollars; the oldest boy and girl in a family, five and nine dollars. Hundreds of colored families are earning forty dollars a month, besides their rations, quarters, medical attendance, and the support of the younger children.”

The schools of General Fiske’s district, under the superintendence of Professor Ogden, were in a promising condition. There were near fifteen thousand pupils, and two hundred and sixty-four teachers. Many summer schools, which for want of school-houses were kept under trees, had been discontinued at the coming on of winter. Rebels returning home with their pardons were also turning the freedmen out of buildings used as school-houses. The consequence was a falling off of nearly one third in the number of pupils since September.

In Nashville there was a school supported by the United Presbyterian Mission, numbering eight hundred pupils; and another by the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association, numbering three hundred and fifty. The American Missionary Association and Western Freedmen’s Aid had united in purchasing, for sixteen thousand dollars, land on which had been erected twenty-three government hospital buildings, worth fifty thousand dollars, which, “by the superior management of General Fiske,” said Professor Ogden, “have been secured for our schools.” It was proposed to establish in them a school, having all grades, from the primary up to the normal. There was a great need of properly qualified colored teachers to send into by-places; which this school was designed to supply.

General Fiske had introduced a system of plantation schools, which was working well. Benevolent societies furnished the teachers, and planters were required to furnish the school-houses. A plantation of one hundred and fifty hands and forty or fifty children would have its own school-house. Smaller plantations would unite and build a school-house in some central location. These conditions were generally put into the contracts with the planters, who were beginning to learn that there was nothing so encouraging and harmonizing to the freedmen as the establishment of schools for their children.

-----

Footnote 12:

That is, of cotton and seed: the gin takes out fifty or sixty per cent. of the gross weight.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XL. BY RAILROAD TO CORINTH

I left Nashville for Decatur on a morning of dismal rain The cars were crowded and uncomfortable, with many passengers standing. The railroad was sadly short of rolling-stock, having (like most Southern roads) only such as happened to be on it when it was turned over to the directors by the government. It owned but three first-class cars, only one of which we had with us. The rest of the passenger train was composed of box-cars supplied with rude seats.

We passed the forts of the city; passed the battle-ground of Franklin, with its fine rolling fields, marked by entrenchments; and speeding on through a well-wooded handsome section of country, entered Northern Alabama. As my observations of that portion of the State will be of a general character, I postpone them until I shall come to speak of the State at large.

It was raining again when I left Decatur, ferried across the Tennessee in a barge manned by negroes. Of the railroad bridge burned by General Mitchell, only the high stone piers remained; and freight and passengers had to be conveyed over the river in that way. I remember a black ferryman whose stalwart form and honest speech interested me, and whose testimony with regard to his condition I thought worth noting down.

“I works for my old master. He raised me. He’s a right kind master. I gits twenty dollars a month, and he finds me. Some of the masters about hyere is right tight on our people. Then thar’s a heap of us that won’t work, and that steal from the rest. They’re my own color, but I can’t help saying what’s true. They just set right down, thinking they’re free, and waiting for luck to come to ’em.” But he assured me that the most of his people were at work, and doing well.

From the miserable little ferry-boat we were landed on the other side in the midst of a drenching rain. To reach the cars there was a steep muddy bank to climb. The baggage was brought up in wagons and pitched down into mud several inches deep, where passengers had to stand in the pouring shower and see to getting their checks.

On the road to Tuscumbia I made the acquaintance of a young South Carolinian, whose character enlisted my sympathy, and whose candid conversation offers some points worth heeding.

“I think it was in the decrees of God Almighty that slavery was to be abolished in this way; and I don’t murmur. We have lost our property, and we have been subjugated, but we brought it all on ourselves. Nobody that hasn’t experienced it knows anything about our suffering. We are discouraged: we have nothing left to begin new with. I never did a day’s work in my life, and don’t know how to begin. You see me in these coarse old clothes; well, I never wore coarse clothes in my life before the war.”

Speaking of the negroes: “We can’t feel towards them as you do; I suppose we ought to, but ’t isn’t possible for us. They’ve always been our owned servants, and we’ve been used to having them mind us without a word of objection, and we can’t bear anything else from them now. If that’s wrong, we’re to be pitied sooner than blamed, for it’s something we can’t help. I was always kind to my slaves. I never whipped but two boys in my life, and one of them I whipped three weeks ago.”

“When he was a free man?”

“Yes; for I tell you that makes no difference in our feeling towards them. I sent a boy across the country for some goods. He came back with half the goods he ought to have got for the money. I may as well be frank,—it was a gallon of whiskey. There were five gentlemen at the house, and I wanted the whiskey for them. I told Bob he stole it. Afterwards he came into the room and stood by the door,—a big, strong fellow, twenty-three years old. I said, ‘Bob, what do you want?’ He said, ‘I want satisfaction about the whiskey.’ He told me afterwards, he meant that he wasn’t satisfied I should think he had stolen it, and wanted to come to a good understanding about it. But I thought he wanted satisfaction gentlemen’s fashion. I rushed for my gun. I’d have shot him dead on the spot if my friends hadn’t held me. They said I’d best not kill him, but that he ought to be whipped. I sent to the stable for a trace, and gave him a hundred and thirty with it, hard as I could lay on. I confess I did whip him unmercifully.”

“Did he make no resistance?”

“Oh, he knew better than that; my friends stood by to see me through. I was wrong, I know, but I was in a passion. That’s the way we treat our servants, and shall treat them, until we can get used to the new order of things,—if we ever can.”

“In the mean while, according to your own showing, it would seem that some restraint is necessary for you, and some protection for the negroes. On the whole, the Freedmen’s Bureau is a good thing, isn’t it?”

He smiled: “May be it is; yes, if the nigger is to be free, I reckon it is; but it’s a mighty bitter thing for us.”

Then, speaking of secession: “I had never thought much about politics, though I believed our State was right when she went out. But when the bells were ringing, and everybody was rejoicing that she had seceded, a solemn feeling came over me, like I had never had in my life, and I couldn’t help feeling there was something wrong. I went through the war; there were thousands like me. In our hearts we thought more of the Stars and Stripes than we did of the old rag we were fighting under.”

He was going to Mississippi to look after some property left there before the war. But what he wished to do was to go North: “only I know I wouldn’t be tolerated,—I know a man couldn’t succeed in business there, who was pointed out as a Rebel.”

The same wish, qualified by the same apprehension, was frequently expressed to me by the better class of young Southern men; and I always took pains to convince them that they would be welcomed and encouraged by all enlightened communities in the Northern States.

It was a dismal night in the cars. The weather changed, and it grew suddenly very cold. Now the stove was red hot; and now the fire was out, with both car-doors wide open at some stopping-place.

At two in the morning we reached Corinth. A driver put me into his hack, and drove about town, through the freezing mud, to find me a lodging. The hotels were full. The boarding-houses were full,—all but one, in which, with a fellow-traveller, I was fortunate enough at last to find a room with two beds.

It was a large, lofty room, the door fifteen feet high from the floor, the walls eighteen feet. It had been an elegant apartment once; but now the windows were broken, the plastering and stucco-work disfigured, the laths smashed in places, there were bullet-holes through the walls, and large apertures in the wainscots. The walls were covered with devices, showing that Federal soldiers had been at home there; such as a shield, admirably executed, bearing the motto: “The Union, it must be preserved”; “Heaven Bless our Native Land”; “God of Battles, speed the Right”; and so forth.

The beds were tumbled, some travellers having just got out of them to take the train. A black woman came in to make them. The lady of the house also came in,—a fashionably bred Southern woman, who had been reduced, by the fortunes of the Rebellion, from the condition of a helpless mistress of many servants, to that of a boarding-house keeper.

I asked for a single room, which I was somewhat curtly told I couldn’t have. I then asked for more bedclothes,—for the weather continued to grow cold, and the walls of the room offered little protection against it. She said, “I reckon you’re mighty particular!” I replied that she was quite correct in her reckoning, and insisted on the additional clothing. At last I got it, very fortunately; for my room-mate, who did not make the same demand, nearly froze in the other bed before daylight.

In the morning a black man came in and made a fire. Then, before I was up, a black girl came in to bring a towel, and to break the ice in the wash-basin. That the water might not freeze again before I could use it, (for the fire, as some one has said, “couldn’t get a purchase on the cold,”) I requested her to place the basin on the hearth; also to shut the door; for every person who passed in or out left all doors wide, affording a free passage from my bed to the street.

“You’re cold-natered, an’t ye?” said the girl, to whose experience my modest requests appeared unprecedented.

Afterwards I went out to breakfast in a room that showed no chimney, and no place for a stove. The outer door was open much of the time, and when it was shut the wind came in through a great round hole cut for the accommodation of cats and dogs. This, be it understood, was a fashionable Southern residence; and this had always been the dining-room, in winter the same as in summer, though no fire had ever been built in it. The evening before, the lady had said to me, “The Yankees are the cause that we have no better accommodations to offer you,” and I had cheerfully forgiven her. But the Yankees were not the cause of our breakfasting in such a bleak apartment.

Everybody at table was pinched and blue. The lady, white and delicate, sat wrapped in shawls. She was very bitter against the Yankees, until I smilingly informed her that her remarks were particularly interesting to me, as I was a Yankee myself.

“From what State are you, Sir?”

“From Massachusetts.”

“Oh!”—with a shudder,—“they’re bad Yankees!”

“Bad enough, Heaven knows,” I pleasantly replied; “though, in truth, Madam, I have seen almost as bad people in other parts of the world.”

The lady’s husband changed the conversation by offering me a piece of venison which he had killed the day before. Deer were plenty in that region. As in Tennessee and Alabama, game of all kinds—deer, foxes, wild turkeys, wolves,—had increased greatly in Mississippi during the war; the inhabitants having had something more formidable to hunt, or been hunted themselves.

Mr. M—— owned two abandoned plantations: this was his town residence. He left it just before the battle of Shiloh, and it was occupied either by the Rebels or Yankees till the end of the war. He was originally opposed to the secession-leaders, but he afterwards went into the war, and lost everything, while they kept out of it and made money.

The bullet-holes in the house were made by the Rebels firing at the Federals when they attacked the town.

The family consisted of three persons,—Mr. M——, his wife, and their little boy. Notwithstanding their poverty, they kept four black servants to wait upon them. They were paying a man fifteen dollars a month, a cook-woman the same, another woman six, and a girl six: total, forty-two dollars. It was mainly to obtain money to pay and feed these people that they had been compelled to take in lodgers. The possibility of getting along with fewer servants seemed never to have occurred to them. Before the war they used to keep seven or eight. It was the old wasteful habit of slavery: masters were accustomed to have many servants about them, and each servant must have two or three to help him.

The freedmen, I was told, were behaving very well. But the citizens were bitterly hostile to the negro garrison which then occupied Corinth. A respectable white man had recently been killed by a colored soldier, and the excitement occasioned by the circumstance was intense. It was called “a cold-blooded murder.” Visiting head-quarters, I took pains to ascertain the facts in the case. They are in brief as follows:—

The said respectable citizen was drunk. Going down the street, he staggered against a colored orderly. Cursing him, he said, “Why don’t you get out of the way when you see a white man coming?” The orderly replied, “There’s room for you to pass.” The respectable citizen then drew his revolver, threatening to “shoot his damned black heart out.” This occasioned an order for his arrest. He drew his revolver, with a similar threat, upon another soldier sent to take him, and was promptly shot down by him. Exit respectable citizen.

Corinth is a bruised and battered village surrounded by stumpy fields, forts, earthworks, and graves. The stumpy fields are the sites of woods and groves cut away by the great armies. The graves are those of soldiers slain upon these hills. Beautiful woody boundaries sweep round all.

There is nothing about the town especially worth visiting; and my object in stopping there was to make an excursion into the country and visit the battle-field of Shiloh. I went to a livery-stable to engage a horse. I was told of frequent robberies that had been committed on that road, and urged by the stable-keeper to take a man with me; but I wished to make the acquaintance of the country people, and thought I could do better without a companion.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLI. ON HORSEBACK FROM CORINTH

Mounting a sober little iron-gray, I cantered out of Corinth, in a northeasterly direction, past the angles of an old fort overgrown with weeds, and entered the solitary wooded country beyond.

A short ride brought me to a broken bridge, hanging its shaky rim over a stream breast-high to my horse. I paused on its brink, dubious; until I saw two ladies, coming to town on horseback to do their shopping (the fashion of the country), rein boldly down the muddy bank, gather their skirts together, hold up their heels, and take like ducks to the water. I held up my heels and did likewise. This was the route of the great armies; which whoso follows will find many a ruined bridge and muddy stream to ford.

It was a clear, crisp winter’s morning. The air was elastic and sparkling. The road wound among lofty trunks of oak, poplar, hickory, and gum, striped and gilded with the slanting early sunshine. Quails (called partridges in the South) flew up from the wayside; turtle-doves flitted from the limbs above my head; the woodpeckers screamed and tapped, greeting my approach with merry fife and drum. Cattle were grazing on the wild grass of the woods, and a solitary cow-bell rang.

Two and a half miles from town I came to a steam saw-mill, all about which the forest resounded with the noise of axes, the voices of negroes shouting to their teams, the flapping of boards thrown down, and the vehement buzz of the saw. This mill had but recently gone into operation; being one of hundreds that had already been brought from the North, and set to work supplying the demand for lumber, and repairing the damages of war.

Near by was a new house of rough logs with the usual great opening through it. It was situated in the midst of ruins which told too plain a story. Tying my horse to a bush, I entered, and found one division of the house occupied by negro servants, the other by two lonely white women. One of these was young; the other aged, and bent with grief and years. She sat by the fire, knitting, wrapped in an ancient shawl, and having a white handkerchief tied over her head. The walls and roof were full of chinks, the wind blew through the room, and she crouched shivering over the hearth.

She offered me a chair, and a negro woman, from the other part of the house, brought in wood, which she heaped in the great open fireplace.

“Sit up, stranger,” said the old lady. “I haven’t the accommodations for guests I had once; but you’re welcome to what I have. I owned a beautiful place here before the war,—a fine house, negro quarters, an orchard, and garden, and everything comfortable. The Yankees came along and destroyed it. They didn’t leave me a fence,—not a rail nor a pale. If I had stayed here, they wouldn’t have injured me, and I should have saved my house; but I was advised to leave. I have come back here to spend my days in this cabin. I lost everything, even my clothes; and I’m too old to begin life again.”

Myself a Yankee, what could I say to console her?

A mile and a half farther on, I came to another log-house, and stopped to inquire my way of an old man standing by the gate. His countenance was hard and stern, and he eyed me, as I thought, with a sinister expression.

“You are a stranger in this country?” I told him I was. “I allow you’re from the North?”—eying me still more suspiciously.

“Yes,” I replied; “I am from New England.”

“I’m glad to see ye. Alight. It’s a right cool morning: come into the house and warm.”

I confess to a strong feeling of distrust, as I looked at him. I resolved, however, to accept his invitation. He showed me into a room, which appeared to be the kitchen and sleeping-room of a large family. Two young women and several children were crowded around the fireplace, while the door of the house was left wide open, after the fashion of doors in the South country. There was something stewing in a skillet on the hearth; which I noticed, because the old man, as he sat and talked with me, spat his tobacco-juice over it (not always with accuracy) at the back-log. I remarked that the country appeared very quiet.

“Quiet, to what it was,” said the old man, with a wicked twinkle of the eye. “You’ve probably heard of some of the murders and robberies through here.”

I said I had heard of some such irregularities.

“I’ve been robbed time and again. I’ve had nine horses and mules stole.”

“By whom?”

“The bushwhackers. They’ve been here to kill me three or four times; but, as it happened, the killing was on t’ other side.”

“Who were these men?”

“Some on ’em belonged in Massissippi, and some on ’em in Tennessy. They come to my house of a Tuesday night, last Feb’uary. They rode up to the house, and surrounded it, a dozen or fifteen of ’em. ‘Old Lee!’ they shouted, ‘we want ye!’ It had been cloudy ’arly in the evening, but it had fa’red up, and as I looked out thro’ the chinks in the logs, I could see ’em moving around.

“’Come out, Old Lee! we’ve business with ye!’

“’You’ve no honest business this hour o’ the night,’ I says.

“’Come out, or we’ll fire your house.’

“’Stand back, then,’ I says, ‘while I open the doo’.’

“I opened it a crack, but instead of going out, I just put out the muzzle of my gun, and let have at the fust man.

“’Boys! I’m shot!’ he says. I’d sent a slug plumb thro’ his body. Whilst the others was getting him away, I loaded up again. In a little while they come back, mad as devils. I didn’t wait for ’em to order me out, but fired as they come up to the doo’. I hit one of ’em in the thigh. After that they went off, and I didn’t hear any more of ’em that night.”

“What became of the wounded men?”

“The one I shot thro’ the body got well. The other died.”

“How did you learn?”

“They was all neighbors of mine. They lived only a few miles from here, over the Tennessy line. That was Tuesday night; and the next Sunday night the gang come again. I was prepared for ’em. I had cut a trap through the floo’; and I had my grandson with me, a boy about twelve year old; and he had a gun. We’d just got comfortably to bed, when some men rode up to the gate, and hollah’d, “Hello!” several times. I told my wife to ask ’em what they wanted. They said they was strangers, and had lost their road and wanted the man of the house to come out. I drapped thro’ the hole in the floo’, and told my wife to tell ’em I wa’n’t in the house, and they must go somewhar else.

“’We’ll see if he’s in the house,’ they said. The house is all open underneath, and I reckoned I’d a good position; but befo’e I got a chance at ary one, they’d bust in. They went to rummaging, and threatening my wife, and skeering the children. I could hear ’em tramping over my head; till bimeby the clock struck; and I heerd one of ’em sw’ar, ‘Ten o’clock, and nary dollar yet!’ After that, I could see ’em outside the house; hunting around for me, as I allowed. I fired on one. ‘My God!’ I heered him say, ‘he’s killed me!’ I then took my grandson’s gun, and fired again. Such a rushing and scampering you never heered. They run off, leaving one of their men lying dead right out here before the doo’. We found him thar the next morning. He laid thar nigh on to two days, when some of his friends come and took him and buried him.”

“Why did those men wish to murder you?”

“They had a spite agin me, because they said I was a Union man.”

“They called him a Yankee,” said one of the young women.

“But you are not a Yankee.”

“I was born in Tennessy, and have lived either in Tennessy or Massissippi all my days. But I never was a secessioner; I went agin the war; and I had two son-in-law’s in the Federal army. Both these girls’ husbands was fighting the Rebels, and that’s what made ’em hate me. They was determined to kill me; and after that last attempt on my life, I refugeed. I went to the Yankees, and didn’t come back till the war wound up. There’s scoundrels watching for a chance to bushwhack me now.”

“Old Lee’d go up mighty quick, if they wa’n’t afeared,” remarked one of the daughters.

“I’m on hand for ’em,” said the old man,—and now I understood that wicked sparkle of his eye. “Killing is good for ’em. A lead bullet is better for getting rid of ’em than any amount of silver or gold, and a heap cheaper!”

Two miles north of Old Lee’s I came to the State boundary. While I was still in Mississippi, I saw, just over the line, in Tennessee, a wild figure of a man riding on before me. He was mounted on a raw-boned mule, and wore a flapping gray blanket which gave him a fantastic appearance. The old hero’s story had set me thinking of bushwhackers, and I half fancied this solitary horseman—or rather mule-man—to be one of that amiable gentry. He had pursued me from Corinth, and passed me unwittingly while I was sitting in Old Lee’s kitchen. He was riding fast to overtake me. Or perhaps he was only an innocent country fellow returning from town. I switched on, and soon came near enough to notice that the mule’s tail was fancifully clipped and trimmed to resemble a rope with a tassel at the end of it; also that the rider’s face was mysteriously muffled in a red handkerchief.

I was almost at his side, when hearing voices in the woods behind me, I looked around, and saw two more mounted men coming after us at a swift gallop. The thought flashed through my mind that those were the fellow’s accomplices. One to one had not seemed to me very formidable; but three to one would not be so pleasant. I pressed my iron gray immediately alongside the tassel-tailed mule, and accosted the rider, determined to learn what manner of man he was before the others arrived. The startled look he gave me, and the blue nose, with its lucid pendent drop, that peered out of the sanguinary handkerchief, showed me that he was as harmless a traveller as myself. He was a lad about eighteen years of age. He had tied up his ears, to defend them from the cold, and the bandage over them had prevented him from hearing my approach until I was close upon him.

“It’s a kule day,” he remarked, with numb lips, as he reined his mule aside to let me pass at a respectful distance,—for it was evident he regarded me with quite as much distrust as I had him.

At the same time the two other mounted men came rushing upon us, through the half-frozen puddles, with splash and clatter and loud boisterous oaths; and one of them drew from his pocket, and brandished over the tossing mane of his horse, something so like a pistol that I half expected a shot.

“How are ye?” said he, halting his horse, and spattering me all over with muddy water. “Right cold morning! Hello, Zeek!” to the rider of the tassel-tailed mule. “I didn’t know ye, with yer face tied up that fashion. Take a drink?” Zeek declined. “Take a drink, stranger?” And he offered me the pistol, which proved to be a flask of whiskey. I declined also. Upon which the fellow held the flask unsteadily to his own lips for some seconds, then passed it to his companion. After drinking freely, they spurred on again, with splash and laughter and oaths, leaving Zeek and me riding alone together.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLII. ZEEK

“Didn’t I see your horse tied to Old Lee’s gate?” said Zeek. And that led to a discussion of the old hero’s character.

“Is he a Union man?”

“I kain’t say; but that’s the story they tell on him. One of the men he killed was one of our neighbors; a man we used to consider right respectable; but he tuke to thieving during the wa’, and got to be of no account. That was the way with a many I know. You may stop at a house now whur they’ll steal your horse, and like as not rob and murder ye.”

Zeek told me he lived on the edge of the battle-field; and I engaged him to guide me to it. He thought I must be going to search for the body of some friend who fell there. When I told him I was from the North, and that my object was simply to visit the battle-field, he looked at me with amazement.

“I should think you’d be afraid to be riding alone in this country! If ’t was known you was a Yankee, and had money about you, I allow you’d get a shot from behind some bush.”

“I think the men who would serve me such a trick are very few.”

“Thar was right smart of ’em befo’e the wa’ closed. They’d just go about robbing,—hang an old gray-haired man right up, till he’d tell whur his money was. They called themselves Confederates, but they was just robbers. They’ve got killed off, or have gone off, or run out, till, as you say, there an’t but few left.”

With these exceptions, Zeek praised highly the middling class of people who inhabited that region.

“Some countries, a pore man ain’t respected no mo’e ’n a dog. ‘Tan’t so hyere. Man may be plumb pore, but if he’s honest, he’s thought as much of as anybody. Mo’e ’n two thirds of ’em can read and write.” Before the war, they used to have what they called “neighborhood schools.” The teacher was supported by the pupils, receiving two dollars a month for each: he taught only in winter, and was fortunate if he could secure forty pupils.

Flocks of sparrows flew up from the bushes or hopped along the ground. There were bluebirds also; and I noticed one or two robins. “We never see robins hyere only in winter,” said Zeek.

Green bunches of mistletoe grew on the leafless brown trees,—a striking feature of Southern woods in winter. “It’s a curiosity, the way it grows,” said Zeek. “It just grows on the tops of trees, without no rute, nor nothing. It’s a rare chance you find it on the hills; it grows mostly on the bottoms whur thar’s mo’e moisture in the air.” It was a beautiful sight to me, riding under its verdant tufts, sometimes so low on the boughs that, by rising in the stirrups, I could pluck sprigs of it, with their translucent pearly berries, as I passed. But Zeek was wrong in saying it had no root. It is supposed to be propagated by birds wiping their bills upon the limbs of trees, after eating the berries. A stray seed thus deposited germinates, and the penetrating root feeds upon the juices that flow between the bark and the wood of the tree.

We passed but few farm-houses, and those were mostly built of logs. We crossed heavy lines of Beauregard’s breastworks; and could have traced the route of the great armies by the bones of horses, horned cattle, and mules we saw whitening in the woods and by the roadside. A crest of hilly fields showed us a magnificent sweep of level wooded country on the west and south, like a brown wavy sea, with tossed tree-tops for breakers.

“Mighty pore soil along hyere,” observed Zeek. When I told him that it was as good as much of the soil of New England, which farmers never thought of cultivating without using manures, he said, “When our land gits as pore as that, we just turn it right out, and cle’r again. We don’t allow we can afford to manure. But No’th Car’linians come in hyere, and take up the land turned out so, and go to manuring it, and raise right smart truck on it.”

As I was inclined to ride faster than Zeek, he looked critically at my horse, and remarked, “I don’t reckon you give less ’n a dollar a day for that beast.” I said I gave more than that. “I ride my beasts hard enough,” he replied, “but I reckon if I paid a dollar a day for one, I’d ride him a heap harder!”

He had been down to the saw-mill, to get pay for a yoke of oxen his father had sold. “I started by sun-up, and got thar agin nine o’clock.” It was now afternoon, and he was hungry and cold. He therefore proposed to me to go home with him and get warm, before visiting the battle-field.

It was after two o’clock when we came to a hilly field covered with rotting clothes.

“Beauregard’s troops come plumb up this road, and slept hyere the night befo’e the battle. They left their blankets and knapsacks, and after they got brushed out by the Yankees, the second day, they didn’t wait to pick ’em up again.”

We entered the woods beyond, directing our course towards the western edge of the battle-field; and, after riding some distance, forded Owl Creek,—a narrow, but deep and muddy stream. Zeek’s home was in view from the farther bank; a log-house, with the usual great opening through the middle; situated on the edge of a pleasant oak-grove strewn with rustling leaves, and enclosed, with its yard and out-houses, by a Virginia rail-fence.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLIII. ZEEK’S FAMILY

“Alight!” said Zeek, dismounting at the gate.

I remonstrated against leaving the animals uncovered in the cold, but he said it was the way people did in that country; and it was not until an hour later that he found it convenient to give them shelter and food.

We were met inside the gate by a sister of the young man’s, a girl of fifteen, in a native Bloomer dress that fell just below the knees. As I entered the space between the two divisions of the house, I noticed that doors on both sides were open, one leading to the kitchen, where there was a great fire, and the other to the sitting-room, where there was another great fire, in large old-fashioned fireplaces.

Zeek took me into the sitting-room, and introduced me to his mother. There were two beds in the back corners of the room. The uncovered floor was of oak; the naked walls were of plain hewn logs; the sleepers and rough boards of the chamber floor constituted the ceiling. There were clothes drying on a pole stretched across the room, and hanks of dyed cotton thread on a bayonet thrust into a chink of the chimney. Cold as the day was, the door by which we entered was never shut, and sometimes another door was open, letting the wintry wind sweep through the house.

Zeek’s mother went to see about getting us some dinner; and his father came in from the woods, where he had been chopping, and sat in the chimney-corner and talked with me: a lean, bent, good-humored, hard-working, sensible sort of man. He told me he had five hundred acres of land, but only thirty-six under cultivation. He and Zeek did the work; they had never owned negroes.

“Three or four niggers is too much money for a pore man to invest in that way: they may lie down and die, and then whur’s yer money? Thar was five niggers owned in Middle Tennessy,” he added, “to one in this part of the State.”

Speaking of his farm, he said it was mighty good land till it wore out. He had raised two bales of cotton on three and a half acres, the past season. It was equally good for other crops. “I make some corn, some pork, some cotton, and a mule or two, every year: I never resk all on one thing.”

Looking at the open outside doors and the great roaring fires, I said I should think wood must be a very important item with Tennessee farmers.

“Yes, I reckon we burn two cords a week, such weather as this, just for fire, and as much more in the kitchen. We’ve wood enough. As we turn out old land, we must cle’r new; then we have the advantage of the ashes for ley and soap.”

“But the labor of chopping so much wood must be considerable.”

“Oh, I can chop enough in a day, or a day and a half, to last a week. Winters, farmers don’t do much else but feed and get wood.”

I said I thought they would some day regret not having kept up their cleared fields by proper cultivation, and preserved their forests.

“I allow we shall. I’ve just returned from a trip up into Middle Tennessy” (accented on the first syllable), “whur I used to live; they burnt up their timber thar, just as we’re doing hyere, and now they’re setting down and grieving because they’ve no wood. They save everything thar, to the trunks and crotches. We just leave them to rot, or log ’em up in heaps and burn ’em, whur the land’s to be cle’red; and use only the clean limbs, that chop easy and don’t require much splitting.” He broke forth in praise of a good warm fire. “Put on a big green back-log and build agin it,—that’s our fashion.”

Zeek’s mother came to announce our dinner. I crossed the open space, pausing only to wash my hands and face in a tin basin half filled with water and pieces of ice, and entered the kitchen. It was a less pretentious apartment than the sitting-room. There was no window in it; but wide chinks between the logs, and two open doors, let in a sufficiency of daylight, and more than a sufficiency of cold wind. There was a bed in one corner, and a little square pine table set in the centre of the room. A gourd of salt hung by the chimney, and a homemade broom leaned beside it. I noticed a scanty supply of crockery and kitchen utensils on pegs and shelves.

The table was neatly set, with a goodly variety of dishes for a late dinner in a back-country farm-house. I remember a plate of fried pork; fricasseed gray squirrel (cold); boiled “back of hog” (warmed up); a pitcher of milk; cold biscuit, cold corn bread, and “sweet bread” (a name given to a plain sort of cake).

We could have dined very comfortably but for the open doors. Blowing in at one and out at the other, and circulating through numberless cracks between the logs, the gale frisked at will about our legs, and made our very hands numb and noses cold while we ate. The fire was of no more use to us than one built out-of-doors. The victuals that had come upon the table warm were cold before they reached our mouths. The river of pork-fat which the kind lady poured over my plate, congealed at once into a brownish-gray deposit, like a spreading sand-bar. I enjoyed an advantage over Zeek, for I had taken the precaution to put on my overcoat and to secure a back seat. He sat opposite me, with his back towards the windward door, where the blast, pouncing in upon him, pierced and pinched him without mercy. He had not yet recovered from the chill of his long winter-day’s ride; and his lank, shivering frame, and blue, narrow, puckered face under its thin thatch of tow (combed straight down, and cut square and short across his forehead from ear to ear), presented a picture at once astonishing and ludicrous.

“Have you got warm yet, Zeek?” I cheerfully inquired.

“No!”—shuddering. “I’m plumb chilly! I’m so kule I kain’t eat.”

“I should think you would be more comfortable with that door closed,” I mildly suggested.

He slowly turned his head half round, and as slowly turned it back again, with another shiver. The possibility of actually shutting the door seemed scarcely to penetrate the tow-thatch. I suppose such an act would have been unprecedented in that country,—one which all conservative persons would have shaken their heads at as a dangerous innovation.

Zeek begged to be excused, he was so kule; and taking a piece of squirrel in one hand, and a biscuit in the other, went and stood by the fire. I found that he was averse to going out again that day: it was now late in the afternoon, and our poor animals had not yet been fed, or even taken in from where they stood curled up with the cold by the gate: I accordingly proposed to the old folks to spend the night with them, and to take Zeek with me over the battle-field in the morning. This being agreed upon, the father invited me to go out and see his stock, and his two bags of cotton.

In the yard near the house was the smoke-house, or meat-house, a blind hut built of small logs, answering the purpose of a cellar,—for in that country cellars are unknown. In it the family provisions were stored. Under an improvised shelter at one corner was the cotton, neatly packed in two bales of five hundred pounds each, and looking handsome as a lady in its brown sacking and new hoops. The hoops were a sort of experiment, which it was thought would prove successful. Usually the sacking and ropes about a bale of cotton cost as much by the pound as the cotton itself; and, to economize that expense, planters were beginning to substitute hickory hoops for ropes. The owner was very proud of those two bales, picked by his own hands and his children’s, and prepared for market at a gin and press in the neighborhood; and he hoped to realize five hundred dollars for them when thrown upon the market. A planter of a thousand bales, made by the hands of slaves he was supposed to own, and ginned and pressed on his own plantation, could not have contemplated his crop with greater satisfaction, in King Cotton’s haughtiest days.

Near the meat-house was a huge ash-leach. Then there was a simple horse-mill for crushing sorghum,—for Mr. ——, like most Southern farmers, made sufficient syrup for home consumption, besides a little for market. Under a beech-tree was a beautiful spring of water. A rail-fence separated the door-yard from the cattle-yard, where were flocks of hens, geese, ducks, and turkeys, cackling, quacking, and gobbling in such old familiar fashion that I was made to feel strangely at home in their company. There were bleating, hungry calves, and good-natured surly bulls, and patient cows waiting to be milked and fed, and a family of uncurried colts and young mules, and beautiful spotted goats, with their kids, and near by a hog-lot frill of lean and squealing swine. Speaking of the goats, Mr. —— said there was no money in them, but that he kept them for the curiosity of the thing.

There was no barn on the place. The nearest approach to it was the stable, or “mule-pen,” constructed of logs with liberal openings between them, through one of which my lonesome iron-gray put his nose as I came near, and whinnied his humble petition for fodder. There he was, stabled with mules, unblanketed, and scarcely better off than when tied to the gate-post,—for the wind circulated almost as freely through the rude enclosure as it did in Mrs. ——’s kitchen. Such hospitalities were scarcely calculated to soothe the feelings of a proud and well-bred horse; but the iron-gray accepted them philosophically.

“Where is your hay?” I inquired.

“We make no hay in this country. Our stock feeds out on the hills, or browses in the woods or cane-brakes, all winter. When we have to feed ’em, we throw out a little corn, fodder, and shucks.”

A loft over the mule-pen was filled with stalks and unhusked corn. Zeek went up into it, and threw down bundles of the former, and filled baskets of the latter, for his father to feed out to the multitude of waiting mouths.

I inquired particularly regarding the large quantities of natural manures which ought to accumulate in such a farm-yard.

“We just throw them out, and let them get trampled and washed away. We can’t haul out and spread. It’s the hardest work we ever did, and Tennesseans can’t get used to it.”

The yard was on a side hill, where every rain must wash it, and the mule-pen was conveniently situated near the brink of a gully, from which every freshet would sweep what was thrown into it. In vain I remonstrated against this system of farming: Mr. —— replied that he was brought up to it, and could not learn another.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLIV. A NIGHT IN A TENNESSEE FARM-HOUSE

We went into the house, and gathered around the sitting-room fire for a social evening’s talk. As it grew dark, the doors were closed, and we sat in the beautiful firelight. And now I learned a fact, and formed a theory, concerning doors.

The fact was this: not a door on the premises had either lock or bolt. Mule-pen, meat-house, and both divisions of the dwelling-house, were left every night without other fastening than the rude wooden latches of the country. This was a very common practice among the small farmers of that region. “It was a rare chance we ever used to hear of anything being stolen. My house was never robbed, and I never lost a mule or piece of meat till after war broke out.”

The closing of the doors at dark, not because the weather had grown colder, but apparently because there was no longer any daylight to admit, suggested to my mind the origin of the universal Southern custom of leaving doors open during the severest winter weather. The poor whites and negroes live very generally in huts and cabins without windows. Even the houses of the well-to-do small farmers are scantily supplied with these modern luxuries. The ancestors of the wealthier middle class dwelt not many years ago in similar habitations. Such is the strength of habit, and so strong the conservatism of imitative mankind, that I suppose a public statute would be necessary to compel now the shutting of doors of windowed houses against the piercing winds of the cold season; just as, according to Charles Lamb, the Chinese people’s method of obtaining roast pig by burning their dwellings over a tender suckling—that ravishing delicacy having been accidentally discovered to the world by the conflagration of a house with its adjoining pig-sty—had to be stopped by an imperial edict.

We sat without lamp or candle in the red gleaming firelight; and the faces of the little girls, who had been shrinking and shivering with the cold all day, took on a glow of comfort and pleasure, now that the house was shut. However, I could still feel gusts of the wintry air blowing upon me from openings between the logs. I have been in many Southern farm-houses; and I have heard the custom of open doors commended as necessary to give plenty of air and to toughen the inmates by wholesome exposure; but I do not now remember the habitation that was not more than sufficiently supplied with air, both for ventilating and toughening purposes, with every door closed.

Mr. —— talked quite sensibly of the origin and results of the war. He and the majority of the farmers in that region were originally Union men, and remained so to the last. “Some of the hottest secesh, too, got to be right good Union before the wa’ was over,—they found the Yankees treated ’em so much better ’n they expected, and the Rebs so much wuss.”

He accepted emancipation. “The way I look at it, the thing had growed up till it got ripe, and it fell on us in this age. It was the universal opinion before the wa’, that the country would be a heap better off without niggers. But we couldn’t go with the Abolitionists of the No’th, nor with the secesh fire-eaters. We stood as it were between two fires. That was what made it so hard.”

But he shared the common prejudice against permitting the negroes to remain and enjoy the land. “’T won’t do to have ’em settled among us. ’T would, if everybody was honest. But the whites, I’m ashamed to say it, will just prey upon them. They’re bound to be the poorest set of vagabonds that ever walked the earth. O yes, they’ll work. It’s just this way,—they’ll work if they have encouragement; and no man will without, unless he’s driven. All around hyere, and up in Middle Tennessy, whur I’ve been, they’re doing right smart. But it has seemed to bear on their minds that they wanted to rent land, and have a little place of their own. They get treated right rough by some unprincipled men, and by some that ought to know how to give ’em Christian treatment, now they’re free. But the truth is, a white man can’t take impudence from ’em. It may be a long ways removed from what you or I would think impudence, but these passionate men call it that, and pitch in.”

“Blair, an old nigger down to the saw-mill whur I went to-day,” said Zeek, “got his head split open with an axe by a man two days ago. He said Old Blair sassed him. He fell plumb crossways of the fire, and they had to roll him off.”

“That’s the way,” said Mr. ——. “Befo’e the wa’ the owner of the nigger’d have had the man arrested. He was so much property. It was as if you should kill or maim my horse. But now the nigger has no protection.”

“That’s very true, if the government does not protect him.”

We talked of the depredations of the two armies. “I never feared one party more than the other,” said Mrs. ——. “If anything, the Rebels was worst.”

“Both took hosses and mules,” said Mr. ——. “At fust, I used to try to get my property back. I’d go to head-quarters and get authority to take it whur I could find it; but always by that time ’t would be hocus-pocussed out of the way. It was all an understood thing. Aside from that, the regular armies, neither of them, didn’t steal from us. But as soon as they’d passed, then the thieves would come in. They’d take what we had, and cus us for not having mo’e. Sheep, chickens, geese, corn, watches, and money,—whatever they could lay hands on suffered. Men never thought of carrying money about them, them times, but always give it to the weemun to hide. Thar was scouts belonging to both armies, but which was mo’e robbers than scouts, that was the scourge of the country. If a man had anything, they’d be sure to h’ist it. They’d pretend to come with an order to search for gov’ment arms. It was only an excuse for robbing. They’d search for gov’ment arms in a tin-cup. They had what they called a cash rope. That was a rope to slip about a man’s neck, and swing him up with, till he’d tell whur his money was. They had a gimblet, which they said was for boring for treasures; and they always knew just whur to bore to find ’em. That was right hyere” (in a man’s temples). “They’d bore into him, till he couldn’t stand the pain, then if he had any money he’d be only too glad to give it up. These was generally Confederates. We was pestered powerful by ’em. But Harrison’s scouts was as bad as any. They pretended to be acting on the Union side. They was made up of Southern men, mostly from Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessy. They was a torn-down bad set of men; bad as the Rebs. They’d no respect for anybody or anything. One Sunday a neighbor of mine met them coming up the road. He knew them very well; and he said to them, it was Sunday, and he hoped thar’d be no disturbances that day; the people, he said, had all gone to preaching. That’s right, they said; they believed in means of grace; and they asked whur the preaching was to be, and who was going to preach. He told them, and said he was going thar himself. They said they believed a man did right to go to preaching, though they was deprived of that privilege themselves. He told ’em he hoped they’d look more after their eternal interest in futur’, and they said they intended to, and inquired mo’e particular whur the preaching was to be, and thanked him, and rode on. They then just went to plund’ring, cl’aring out his house about the fust one. Then they said they thought they’d take his advice, and look a little after their eternal interests, and go and hunt up the preaching. Then they just went over and robbed the meeting. There was seventeen horses with sidesaddles on ’em; the men generally went on foot, but the weemun rode. They tuke every horse, and left the weemun to walk home, and carry their saddles, or leave ’em.”

“Some Rebel bushwhackers,” said Mrs. ——, “went to the house of a woman I know as well as I know my own sisters, and because she wouldn’t give ’em her money—she had it in a belt under her dress tied around her waist—they knocked her eye out; then they took their knives, and cut right through to her flesh, cutting her money out.”

Both Zeek and his father kept out of the war. The latter was too old, and the former too young, to be swept in by the conscription act. “Zeek escaped well!” said the mother, with a gleam of exultation. “But I was just in dread he’d be taken!” And I gathered that a little innocent maternal fiction, as to his years, had been employed to shield him.

“Some of the hardest times we saw, hyere in the Union parts of Tennessy, was when they come hunting conscripts. They got up some dogs now that would track a man. One of my neighbors turned and shot a hound that was after him, and got away. The men come up, and they was torn-down mad when they saw the dog killed. They pressed a man and his wagon to take the carcase back to town; they lived in Adamsville, eight miles from hyere. They stopped to my house over night, going back.”

“They just bemoaned the loss of that dog,” said Mrs. ——. “They said they’d sooner have lost one of their company.”

“They got back to town, and they buried that dog now with great solemnity. They put a monument over his grave, with an epitaph on it. But some of the conscripts they’d been hunting, dug him up, and hung him to a tree, and shot him full of bullets, and made a writing which they pinned to the tree, with these words on it: ‘We’ll serve the owners of the dogs the same way next.’”

“Was Owl Crick swimming to-day, Zeek?” Mrs. —— asked; meaning, was it so high that our beasts had to swim. And that led to a remark as to the origin of the name.

“Thar’s right smart of owls on this Crick,” said Mr. ——; “sometimes we’re pestered powerful by ’em; they steal our chickens so.”

Just then we heard a wild squawking in the direction of the hen-roost. “Thar’s one catching a chicken now,” quietly observed the farmer. I certainly expected to see either him or Zeek run out to the poor thing’s rescue. But they sat unconcernedly in their chairs. It was the chicken’s business, not theirs. The squawking grew fainter and fainter, and then ceased.

“The people all through this section I allow will never forget the battle,” said Mr. ——. “Friday night Johnson’s left wing was at Brooks’s,—the last house you passed to-day befo’e you fo’ded Owl Crick. The woods was just full of men. They took Brooks, to make him show ’em the way. He said he didn’t know the woods, and that was the fact; but they swo’e he lied, and he must go with ’em, and they’d shoot him if he led ’em amiss. He was in a powerful bad fix; but, lucky for him they hadn’t gone fur when they met Dammern, an old hunter, that knew every branch and thicket in the country. So they swapped off Brooks for Dammern.

“The Federals was on the other side of us, and I allowed there was going to be a battle. And it looked to me as if it was going to be right on my farm.”

“That was the awfulest night I ever had in my life,” said Mrs. ——. “My husband was for leaving at once. But it didn’t appear like I could bear the idea of it. Though what to do with ourselves if we staid? We’ve no cellar, and if we’d had one, and got into it, a shell might have set the house afire, and buried us under it. So I proposed we should dig a hole to get into. He allowed that might be the best thing. So the next morning I got off betimes, and went over and counselled with our neighbors through the grove, and told ’em I thought it would be a grand idee to dig a pit for both our families, and so they came over hyere and went to digging.”

“You never see men work so earnest as we did till about ’leven o’clock,” said Mr. ——. “Finally we got the pit dug, between the house and the spring. But when it was done it looked so much like a grave the weemun dreaded to get into it, and so much like a breastwork we men was afraid both armies would just play their artilleries onto it. So my wife give her consent we should take to the swamps. But what to do with the pit? for if it got shelled, the house would be destroyed; and then thar was danger the armies would use the hole to bury their dead in, and the bodies would spoil our spring. And as we couldn’t take the pit with us, it appeared like thar was but one thing to do. So we put in and worked right earnest till we’d filled it up again. A rain had come on Friday night, and bogged down some of Johnson’s artillery between hyere and Corinth, and that’s my understanding why the fight didn’t come off Saturday. That give us time to git off. I took my family three miles back to a cabin in the swamp, and thar they staid till it was all over; only Zeek and me come back for some loads of goods. We took one load Saturday, and come for another Monday. That was the second day of the fight. We found the place covered with Rebel soldiers. The battle was going on then. The roar of artillery was so loud you couldn’t converse at one end of the house, whur the echo was. The musketry sounded like a roaring wind; the artillery was like peals of thunder.

“Thar was one family caught on the battle-field. They had staid, because the man was laying dangerously sick, and they dreaded to move him. After the fighting begun, they started to get away. The little boy was shot through the head, and the horse killed. The weemun then just took up the sick man and run with him down into the swamp.”

“We had a nephew living on the battle-field,” said Mrs. ——. “The family was down with the measles at the time. But when they see thar was to be a fight, they just moved a plank in the ceiling over head, and hid up all their bacon, and lard, and corn-meal, and everything to eat they couldn’t take with ’em. Then they tuke up a child apiece and come on for us; we’d done gone when they got hyere, and they come tearing through the swampy ground after us, toting their babes. They staid with us in the cabin till after the battle. But by that time his house was occupied by soldiers. He’d been right ingenious hiding his provisions, so nobody could find ’em; but the soldiers went to tearing off ceilings to get planks to make boxes, and down come the corn-meal and bacon; so they had a pretty rich supply.”

“After that,” said Mr. ——, “his house got burnt. Nearly all the houses and fences for miles, on the battle-field, was burnt, so that it was just one common. Thar was nobody left. You never see such desolation. Then the armies moved off, leaving a rich pasture. I had my cattle pastured thar all that summer.”

Mrs. —— proposed that the children should sing for me a little piece called “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh.” Her husband favored the suggestion, saying it was “a right nice composed little song.”

“I’ve plumb forgotten it,” said Zeek. And the little girls, who blushingly undertook it after much solicitation, could remember only a few lines here and there, greatly to the parents’ chagrin.

Mrs. —— was at times very thoughtful; and she told me a newly married elder daughter had that day left home with her husband.

“We’ll go by their house in the morning, and I’ll show it to you,” said Zeek.

I congratulated the parents on having their child settled so near them; yet Mrs. —— could scarcely speak of the separation without rising tears. All were eloquent in their praises of the young husband. He was doing right well, when the war, the cruel, wasteful war, swept him in, and he fought for the slave despotism four years, without a dollar of pay. That left him plumb flat. But he was a right smart worker. He was a splendid hand to make rails. He could write also. After the surrender, he just let in to work, and made a crop; and after the crop was laid by, (i. e., when the corn was hoed for the last time,) he pitched into writing. He employed himself as a teacher of that art. He had already taught nine schools, of ten successive lessons each, at two dollars a scholar. He had had as many as sixty pupils of an evening. I sympathized sincerely with the satisfaction they all felt in having their Maggie married to so smart a man. Indeed, I was beginning greatly to like this little family, and to feel a personal interest in all their affairs. It delights me now to recall that December evening, spent in the red firelight of that humble farm-house; and if I record their peculiarities of speech and manners, it is because they were characteristic and pleasing.

At eight o’clock, Zeek, weary with his long ride that day, said, “I believe I’ll lie down,” and, without further ceremony, took off his clothes and got into one of the beds in the room. Mrs. —— thought I also must be tired, and said I could go to bed when I pleased. Thinking it possible I might be assigned to the same apartment, I concluded to sit up until the audience became somewhat smaller. The girls presently went up-stairs, lighted to their beds by the fire, which shone up the stairway and through the cracks in the chamber floor. I took courage then to say that I was ready to retire; and, to my gratification, saw a candle lighted to show me to my chamber,—though I marvelled where that could be, for I supposed I had seen every room in the house, except the loft to which the girls had gone, when I had seen the sitting-room and kitchen.

Mr. —— took me first out-doors, to a stoop on the side of the house opposite the great opening. Thence a door opened into a little framed box of a room built up against the log-house, as an addition. There was scarcely space to turn in it. The walls consisted of the naked, rough boards. There was not even a latch to the door, which opened into the universal night, and which the wind kept pushing in. Mr. —— advised me to place the chair against it, which I did. I set the candle in the chair, and blew it out after I had got into bed. Then looking up, I saw with calm joy a star through the roof. It was interesting to know that this was the bridal chamber.

The bed was deep and comfortable, and I did not suffer from cold, although I could feel the fingers of the wind toying with my hair. The night was full of noises, like the reports of pistols. It was the old house cracking its joints.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLV. THE FIELD OF SHILOH

Daylight next morning shone in through the chinks of the bridal chamber (for window it had none), and I awoke refreshed, after sound sleep. The dawn was enlivened by pleasing old-time sounds,—the farmer chopping wood at the door, crowing cocks, gossiping geese, and the new-made fire snapping and crackling in the next room.

The morning was very cold. The earth was covered with white frost, like snow. We had breakfast at the usual hour. “Farmers commonly get their breakfases by sun-up,” said mine host. At table (both doors open, and everybody shivering) Mrs. —— remarked that if it was any colder in my country she would not like to live there. I said to her,—

“We should call this cold weather, though we have some much colder. But, allow me to tell you, I have suffered more from the cold since I have been in Tennessee, than I have for ten years in the North. There, when we go out of doors in winter, we go clad to meet the inclemencies of the season; and we know how to make ourselves comfortable in our houses. Here your houses are open. The wind comes in through the cracks, and you do not even think of shutting the doors. My people at home would think they would perish, if they had to breakfast with the wind blowing on them, as you have it blowing on you here.” In short, I said so much that I got one of the doors closed, which I considered a great triumph.

Zeek brought our animals to the gate; and I called for my bill. Mr. —— said it appeared like he ought not to charge me anything; he had been very glad of my company. As I insisted on discharging my indebtedness, he named a sum so modest that I smiled. “You haven’t heard of the rage for high prices, nor learned the art of fleecing the Yankees.” I gave him twice the sum, but it was with difficulty I could prevail upon him to accept it, for he said it would trouble his conscience. A simple, thoroughly good and upright man,—would there were more like him!

I mounted my horse at the gate, and in company with Zeek and his mule, set out for the battle-field. We struck Owl Creek, but instead of crossing immediately, followed a cattle-path along its bank. On our right were woods, their tops just flushing with the new-risen sun; on our left, cornfields, in some of which the corn had not yet been gathered, while in others I noticed winter wheat, (ploughed in between the rows of stalks, still standing,) covering the ground with its green mat, now hoary with frost. Fording the creek at a safe place, and pushing in an easterly direction through the woods, we came to an army road, made by Wallace’s division moving on towards Corinth, after the battle.

It was a pleasant, still morning, such as always brings to the susceptible spirit a sense of exhilaration. Leisurely we rode among the wooded hills, which I could scarcely believe were ever shaken by the roar of battle. Only the blue jay and the woodpecker made the brown vistas of the trees echo with their drumming and screaming, where had been heard the shriek and whiz of missiles and bullets tapping the trunks.

A little back from the cleared fields we came to a nice-looking new log-hut. It had no window, and but one door. This was closed; by which token Zeek knew the folks were away. This was the abode of his sister and her interesting husband; this the bridal home. Something tender and grateful swelled up in my heart as I looked at the little windowless log-cabin, and thought of the divine gift of love, and of happiness, which dwells in humble places as well as in the highest.

Quitting Wallace’s road at its junction with a neighborhood road, we struck another cow-path, which led in a northeasterly direction through the woods. We soon came upon evidences of a vast encampment. Here our right wing had intrenched itself after the battle. In this place I may remark that the astonishing fact about this field is, that our army did not intrench itself before the battle. Three weeks it lay at Shiloh, menaced by the enemy; Grant himself pronounced an attack probable, and the sagacious Sherman expected it; yet when it came, it proved a perfect surprise; it found our lines badly arranged, weak, and undefended by a single breastwork.

Beyond was a magnificent field, swept of its fences, but stuck all over with abandoned tent-supports, showing where our finally victorious legions had lain. “This field was just like a city after the fight,” said Zeek. I noticed that the trees in the surrounding groves were killed. “The Yankees skinned ’em for bark to lay on,” Zeek explained.

Crossing Shiloh Branch,—a sluggish little stream, with low, flat shores, covered with yellow sedge and sentinelled by solemn dead trees,—we ascended a woody hill, along the crest of which a row of graves showed where Hildebrand’s picket line was attacked, on that disastrous Sunday morning. Each soldier had been buried where he fell. The boughs, so fresh and green that April morning, waving over their heads in the sweet light of dawn, though dismantled now by the blasts of winter, had still a tranquil beauty of their own, gilded and sparkling with sunshine and frost. Fires in the woods had burned the bottoms of the head-boards. I stopped at one grave within a rude log-rail enclosure. “In memory of L. G. Miller,” said the tablet; but the remainder of the inscription had been obliterated by fire. I counted eighteen graves in this little row.

We rode on to Shiloh Church,—formerly a mere log-cabin in the woods, and by no means the neat white-steepled structure on some village green, which the name of country church suggests to the imagination. There Beauregard had his head-quarters after Sunday’s battle. It was afterwards torn down for its timbers, and now nothing remained of it but half-burnt logs and rubbish.

Below the hill, a few rods south of the church, Zeek showed me some Rebel graves. There many a poor fellow’s bones lay scattered about, rooted up by swine. I saw an old half-rotted shoe, containing a skeleton foot. But the most hideous sight of all, was a grinning skull pushed out of a hole in the ground, exposing the neck-bone, with a silk cravat still tied about it in a fashionable knot.

A short distance southeast of the church we visited the ruins of the Widow Ray house, burned to the ground in the midst of its blasted orchard and desolated fields. “A girl that lived hyere fell mightily in love with a Yankee soldier. Saturday night, he allowed there was going to be a battle, and come to bid her good-bye. He got killed; and she went plumb distracted. She’s married now to a mighty clever feller.”

Zeek had another romantic story to tell, as we returned to the church. “Hyere’s whur the bale of hay was. When the Rebs was brushing out the Yankees, an old Reb found a Yankee soldier nigh about this spot, that had been wounded, and was perishing for a drink of water. He just took him, and got him behind a bale of hay that was hyere, and give him drink out of his canteen, just like he’d been his own brother. Some of the time he’d be nussing him behind the hay, and the rest he’d be shooting the Yankees over it.” Some one asked him why he took such a heap of pains to save one Yankee life, while he was killing as many mo’e as he could. “They’re fighting enemies,” he said; “but a wounded man is no longer an enemy, he’s a feller being.”

Members of one family after all, though at war. Some were so in a literal sense. I recall the story of two Kentucky regiments that fought on this field, one for the bad cause and one for the good. Two brothers met, and the Federal captured the Rebel. The former recommenced firing, when the latter said, “Don’t shoot there; that’s daddy behind that tree.”

Cantering over the hills towards the northeast, we came to the scene of a severe infantry fight in the woods. There was a wild burial-place, containing some fifty patriot graves, originally surrounded by a fence of stakes wattled with saplings Both the fence and the head-boards had been broken down and partly burned. All around us were sheep feeding in the open woods; and withdrawn to the seclusion of the little burial-ground was a solitary ewe and a pair of new-born lambs.

“All these hills are just lined with graves,” said Zeek. Not far away was a fence surrounding the resting-places of “two officers and seventeen private Rebels,” as an inscription cut in the side of a black-jack informed us. There was a story connected with these graves. A Federal soldier found on the dead body of one of the officers, a watch, his likeness, his wife’s likeness, a letter from his wife, and a letter written by himself requesting that, in case he should fall, these relics might be sent to her. The soldier faithfully fulfilled this duty; and at the close of the war the wife, following the directions he forwarded to her with them, came and found his grave.

We rode a mile due north through what Zeek termed “the long avenue,” a broad, level opening through the woods, at the farther end of which, “on the elevatedest part,” a Yankee battery had been posted, doing terrible execution, if one might judge by the trunks and boughs of trees lopped off by shot and shell. The Rebels charged this battery repeatedly, and it was captured and recaptured.

Leaving the sedgy hills, and pursuing our course towards the Landing, we were stopped by a trench in the woods. It was one hundred and fifty feet long, and four deep. For some reason both ends had been left open. Two feet from the bottom, planks were laid across, the trench being filled with earth over them. Beneath the planks the dead were buried. Their bones could be seen at one of the open ends of the trench. A row of head-boards indicated the graves of Illinois volunteers.

We rode on to the spot which has given the battle its northern name. Under high bluffs, on what Zeek called a “bench,”—a shelf of land on the river bank,—approached from the land side by a road running down through a narrow ravine, stood the two log-huts, a dwelling and a grocery, which constituted the town of “Pittsburgh.” There was not so much as a wharf there, but steamers made their landing against the natural bank. There was absolutely nothing there now, the two huts having been burned. Wild ducks sat afloat on the broad, smooth breast of the river. It was not easy looking down from those heights upon the tranquil picture, to call up that other scene of battle-panic and dismay,—the routed Federal troops pouring through the woods, disorganized, beaten, seeking the shelter of the bluffs and the protection of the gun-boats; the great conflict roaring behind them; the victorious Rebels in wild pursuit; God’s solemn Sabbath changed to a horrible carnival of mad passions and bloodshed.

“The Rebels just fanned ’em out,” said Zeek. “The Yankees put up white flags under the bluff, but the Rebels didn’t come near enough to see ’em; they tuke a skeer,—the Federals fell back so easy, they was afraid of some trick. Thar was such a vast amount of ’em they couldn’t all get to the Landing. Some got drowned trying to swim Snake Creek. Numbers and numbers tried to swim the river. A Federal officer told me he saw his men swim out a little ways, get cold, then wind up together, and go to hugging each other, and sink.” Such are the traditions of the fight which have passed into the memory of the country people; but they should be taken with considerable allowance.

On the level river bottom opposite the Landing we found an extensive cornfield, bounded by heavy timber beyond. Under that shore the gun-boats lay where they shelled the advancing Rebels. It was there, emerging from the timber into the open field, that our defeated army saw, that Sunday evening, first the advanced cavalry, then a whole division of Buell’s army coming to the rescue,—banners flying and bayonets glittering among the trees. Glad sight! No wonder the runaways under the bluffs made the welkin ring with their cheers! If Buell did not arrive in time to save that day, he was in time to save the next, and turn defeat into victory.

Taking the Hamburg Road up the river, we reached the scene of General Prentiss’s disaster. The Rebels were in our camps that Sunday morning almost before the alarm of attack was given. First came the wild cries of the pickets rushing in, accompanied by the scattering shots of the enemy, and followed instantly by shells hurtling through the tents, in which the inmates were just rousing from sleep; then, sweeping like an avalanche through the woods, the terrible resistless battlefront of the enemy.

“Into the just-aroused camps thronged the Rebel regiments, firing sharp volleys as they came, and springing towards our laggards with the bayonet. Some were shot down as they were running, without weapons, hatless, coatless, toward the river. Others fell as they were disentangling themselves from the flaps that formed the doors to their tents; others as they were buckling on their accoutrements; a few, it was even said, as they were vainly trying to impress on the cruelly-exultant enemy their readiness to surrender. Officers were wounded in their beds, and left for dead, who, through the whole two days’ struggle, lay there gasping in their agony, and on Monday evening were found in their gore, inside their tents, and still able to tell the tale.”[13]

The houses all along the road were burned. In Prentiss’s front was a farm, all laid waste, the orchard shot to pieces and destroyed by balls. The woods all around were killed, perforated with countless holes, as by the bills of woodpeckers.

Striking the Hamburg and Purdy road, we went west to the spot where the Rebel General Sydney A. Johnston fell, pierced by a mortal wound. Zeek then piloted me through the woods to the Corinth Road, where, time pressing, I took leave of him, sorry I could not accept his invitation to go home with him to dinner. It was five miles to his father’s house; it was twenty miles to Corinth; and the day was already half spent.

-----

Footnote 13:

“Agate,” in the Cincinnati Gazette, who furnished the best contemporaneous account of this battle.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLVI. WAITING FOR THE TRAIN AT MIDNIGHT

Stopping occasionally to talk with the people along the road, and dining at a farm-house, I did not reach Corinth until sunset. The first thing I noticed, in passing the fortifications, was that the huts of the negro garrison were dismantled; and I found the citizens rejoicing over the removal of the troops. I returned to Mr. M——’s house, and was welcomed by Mrs. M——, who seemed almost to have forgotten that I was not only a Yankee, but a “bad Yankee” from Massachusetts. And here I may remark that, whatever hostility was shown me by the Southern people on account of my Northern origin, it usually wore off on a short acquaintance. Mrs. M—— had a private room for me this time; and she caused a great, glowing fire to be made in it for my comfort. After supper she invited me into her sitting-room, where we talked freely about the bad Yankees, the war, and emancipation.

Both her husband and father claimed to be Union men: but their Unionism was of a kind too common in the South. They hated the secession leaders almost as bitterly as they hated the Yankee government.

Mrs. M——: “Slavery was bad economy, I know; but oh, it was glorious!”—spoken with a kind of romantic enthusiasm. “I’d give a mint of money right now for servants like I once had,—to have one all my own!”—clasping her hands in the ardor of that passionate wish.

“Ladies at the North,” she went on, “if they lose their servants, can do their own work; but we can’t, we can’t!”

She bemoaned the loss of a girl she formerly owned; a bright mulattress, very pretty and intelligent. “She could read and write as well as I could. There was no kind of work that girl couldn’t do. And so faithful!—I trusted everything to her, and was never deceived.”

I asked if she could feel in her heart that it was right to own such a creature.

“I believed in it as much as I believed in the Bible. We were taught it from our infancy,—we were taught it with our religion. I still think it was right; but I think it was because we abused slavery that it was taken from us. Emancipation is a worse thing for our servants than for us. They can’t take care of themselves.”

“What has become of that favorite girl of yours?”

“She is in St. Louis. She works at her trade there; she’s a splendid dressmaker. Oh, if I only had her to make my dresses now, like she used to! She owns the house and lot where she lives; she has bought it with the money she has earned. She’s married to a very fine mulatto man.”

“It seems she can take care of herself a good deal better than you can,” I remarked. “It is she who is independent; it is you whom slavery has left helpless.”

“Well, some of them have made money, and know how to keep it. But they are very few.”

“Yet do not those few indicate what the race may become? And, when we consider the bondage from which they have just broken, and the childish improvidence which was natural to them in that condition, is it not a matter of surprise that so many know how to take care of themselves?” She candidly confessed that it was.

As an illustration of a practice Southern ladies too commonly indulge in, I may state that, while we were conversing, she sat in the chimney-corner, chewing a dainty little quid, and spitting into the fire something that looked marvellously like tobacco juice.

As I was to take the train for Memphis at two o’clock in the morning, I engaged a hackman to come to the house for me at one. Relying upon his fidelity, I went to bed, slept soundly, and awoke providentially at a quarter past the hour agreed upon. I waited half an hour for him, and he did not appear. Opening the door to listen for coming wheels, I heard the train whistle. Catching up my luggage, which luckily was not heavy, I rushed out to search, at dead of night, in a strange town, lampless, soundless, and fast asleep, for a railroad depot, which I should scarce have thought of finding even by daylight without inquiring my way. Not a living creature was abroad; not a light was visible in any house; I could not see the ground I was treading upon. Fortunately I knew the general direction in which the railroad lay; I struck it at last; then I saw a light, which guided me to the depot.

But where was the train? It was already over-due. I could hear it whistling occasionally down the track, where some accident had happened to it. The depot consisted of a little framed box just large enough for a ticket-office. You stood outside and bought your ticket through a hole. This box contained a stove, a railroad lantern, and two men. The door, contrary to the custom of the country, was kept scrupulously shut. In vain were all appeals to the two men within to open it. They were talking and laughing by their comfortable fire, while the waiting passengers outside were freezing. Two hours we waited, that cold winter’s night, for the train which did not come. There was an express-office lighted up near by, but there was no admittance for strangers there either.

Seeing a red flame a short distance up the railroad track, and human forms passing at times before it, I went stumbling out through the darkness towards it. I found it an encampment of negroes. Twelve men, women, and children were grouped in gypsy fashion about a smoky fire. They were in a miserable condition, wretchedly clad, hungry, weary, and sleepy, but unable to sleep. One woman held in her arms a sick babe, that kept up its perpetual sad wail through the night. The wind seemed to be in every direction, blowing the smoke into everybody’s eyes. Yet these suffering and oppressed creatures did for me what men of my own color had refused to do,—they made room for me at their fire, and hospitably invited me to share such poor comforts as they had. The incident was humiliating and touching. One man gave me an apple, for which I was but too glad to return him many times its cost.

They told me their story. They had been working all summer for a planter in Tishemingo County, who had refused to pay them, and they were now hunting for new homes. Two or three had a little money; the rest had none. It made my heart sick to look at them, and feel that it was out of my power to do them any real, permanent service. But they were not discouraged. Said the spokesman of the party, cheerfully,—an old gray-haired man in tatters,—“I’ll drap my feet into de road in de mornin’; I’ll go till I find somefin’!”

Hearing the train again, whistling in earnest this time, I took leave of them, and reached the depot just as it arrived.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLVII. FROM CORINTH TO MEMPHIS

At daylight we were running through the level lower counties of West Tennessee. This is by far the most fertile division of the State. Its soil is a rich black mould, adapted to the culture of cotton, tobacco, and grains, which are produced in great abundance.

Occasionally in the dim dawn, and later in the forenoon, we passed out-door fires about which homeless negroes had passed the night, and around which they still sat or stood, in wretched plight, but picturesque and cheerful,—old men and women, young children, and tall girls in tattered frocks, warming their hands, and watching with vacant curiosity the train as it shot by.

“That’s freedom! that’s what the Yankees have done for ’em!” was the frequent exclamation that fell from the lips of Southern ladies and gentlemen looking out on these miserable groups from the car windows.

“They’ll all be dead before spring.”

“Niggers can’t take care of themselves.”

“The Southern people were always their best friends. How I pity them! don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, of course I pity them! How much better off they were when they were slaves!”

With scarcely one exception there was to be detected in these expressions a grim exultation. The slave-owners, having foretold that freedom would prove fatal to the bondman, experienced a satisfaction in seeing their predictions come true. The usual words of sympathy his condition suggested had all the hardness and hollowness of cant. Those who really felt commiseration for his sufferings spoke of them in very different tones of voice.

But there was another side to the picture. At every stopping-place, throngs of well-dressed blacks crowded upon the train. They were going to Memphis to “buy Christmas,”—as the purchase of gifts for that gay season is termed. Happier faces I have never seen. There was not a drunken or disorderly person among them,—which would have been a remarkable circumstance had the occasion been St. Patrick’s day, or the Fourth of July, and had these been Irish or white American laborers. They were all comfortably clad,—many of them elegantly,—in clothes they had purchased with money earned out of bondage. They paid with pride the full fares exacted of free people, instead of the half fares formerly demanded for slaves. They had still left in their purses ample means to “buy Christmas” for their friends and relatives left at home. They occupied cars by themselves which they filled with the noise of cheerful conversation and laughter. And nobody said of them, “That is freedom! That is what the Yankees have done for them!”

Past cotton-fields and handsome mansions in the pleasant suburbs, we ran into Memphis,—a city which surprised me by its beautiful situation and commercial activity.

Memphis stands on a high bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. It is the emporium of West Tennessee, Eastern Arkansas, and Northern Mississippi, and is the most important town between New Orleans and St. Louis. Its growth has been rapid. Laid out in 1820, its population in 1840 was 8,839; in 1850, 16,000; in 1860, 50,000. Its present population is not known; but it has immensely increased since the last census, and is still increasing. I was told that, at the time of my visit, the building of nineteen hundred new houses had been contracted for, and that only labor was wanted to complete them.

In the year ending September 1st, 1860, 400,000 bales of cotton were shipped from this port. During seven months of the year 1864,—May to November inclusive,—the shipments amounted to only 34,316 bales. In 1865, from May, the month when the cotton released by the fall of the Confederacy began to pour in, to December 22d, the date of my visit, the shipments were 138,615 bales. These last figures, furnished me by the government assessors, do not include the government cotton, which passed untaxed, and a considerable quantity which came to Memphis after being taxed in interior districts.[14]

The view of the commerce of Memphis from the esplanade overlooking the landing is one of the most animated imaginable. You stand on the brow of the bluff, with the city behind you, and the river below,—its broad, sweeping current severing the States. From the foot of the bluff projects an extensive shelving bank, with an understratum of sandstone; forming a natural landing, commonly called a “levee,” although no levee is here,—the celebrated levee at New Orleans having impressed its name upon all landings of any importance up the river. You look down upon a superb array of steamers, lying along the shore; their elegantly ornamented pilot-houses and lofty tiers of decks supported by slender pillars fully entitling them to be named floating palaces. From the tower-like pipes issue black clouds of smoke, with here and there rising white puffs of steam. The levee is crowded with casks and cotton bales, covering acres of ground. Up and down the steep way cut through the brow of the bluff, affording access to the landing from the town, a stream of drays is passing and repassing. Freights are going aboard, or coming ashore. Drays are loading and unloading. Bales of cotton and hay, casks, boxes, sacks of grain, lumber, household furniture, supplies for plantations, mules, ploughs, wagons, are tumbled, rolled, carried, tossed, driven, pushed, and dragged, by an army of laborers, from the levee along the broad wooden stages to the steamers’ decks. The movement, the seeming confusion, the rattling of drays, the ringing of boats’ bells, the horrible snort of the steam-whistle, the singing calls of the deck hands heaving at a rope or lifting some heavy weight, the multitudinous shouts, and wild, fantastic gesticulations of gangs of negroes driving on board a drove of frightened mules, the voices of the teamsters, the arriving and departing packets, drift-wood going down stream, and skiffs paddling up,—the whole forms an astonishing and amusing scene. Then over the immense brown sand-bar of the Arkansas shore, and behind its interminable line of dark forest boundaries, the sun goes down in a tranquil sea of fire, reflected in the river,—a wonderfully contrasting picture. Here all is life and animation; there all is softness and peace.

Evening comes, and adds picturesque effect to the scene. The levee is lighted by great smoking and flaring flambeaux. A grate swinging in a socket on the end of a pole is filled with bituminous coal and wood, the blaze of which is enlivened by flakes of oil-soaked cotton, resembling fat, laid on from a bucket. The far-illuminating flame shoots up in the night, while the ignited oil from the grate falls in little streams of dripping blue fire into the river. Until late at night, and often all night, amid darkness and fog and rain, the loading of freight goes on by this lurid illumination. The laborers are chiefly negroes whose ebon, dusky, sallow and tawny faces, lithe attitudes, and sublime carelessness of attire, heighten the pictorial effect of the scene. Bale after bale is tumbled from the drays, and rolled down the levee,—a negro at each end of it holding and guiding it with cotton-hooks. At the foot of the landing it is seized by two other negroes, who roll it along the plank to its place on the deck of the upward-bound boat. Here are fifty men rolling barrels aboard, each at the other’s heels; and yonder is a long straggling file of blacks crossing the stage from the levee to the steamer, each carrying a box on his shoulder.

-----

Footnote 14:

Since March 15th, 1864, the government tax on cotton had been two cents a pound. The average weight of a bale, which was latterly 460 or 465 pounds, is now 500 pounds. The tax on a bale was accordingly about ten dollars. There were in Memphis at that time 30,000 bales.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us