A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  As the days grew warmer and the roads dried, Sam’s ministerial rounds became less onerous and the congregations got larger. He kept his appointments dutifully, faltering only twice all spring. The first time was during the Yankee raid, which forced him to miss an appointment at the Corders. The second time was a very warm Sunday later in March, when he got sick while delivering a sermon at Hopewell Church and had to stop. “I think it was caused by an overheat,” he wrote. “I regretted the occurrence very much but could not help it.”19

  Two weeks later, in early April, he was at the Corders’ home preaching from the book of Proverbs when he was interrupted by the appearance of some cavalry who were hunting conscripts and deserters. This business, Sam had noticed, was getting increasingly ugly. The rebel army was hungrier than ever for manpower, while a growing number of men were doing all they could to stay out of the army’s clutches. Conscriptors had recently caught and dragged away a man in Sam’s district, “a desperate character” who had escaped from army custody before and, in Sam’s opinion, would surely do so this time, too. Near Baldwyn, a village just a few miles from the Agnews’ plantation, cavalrymen tried to arrest a man named Jack Davis who was reportedly “encourag[ing] soldiers to remain away from the army,” but Davis refused to be taken and “escaped under fire.” Man-hunting cavalry now made it a practice to descend on churches and preaching stations on Sunday mornings, hoping to bag their quarry at worship.20

  The hunters and the hunted would soon end their desperate game. On April 16 Sam preached at Hopewell and learned that a cavalry detachment was nearby chasing deserters and seizing horses. This was the last time he ever heard of such an outfit in his vicinity. On May 3, he visited Baldwyn and spoke with an army officer posted there. This was the last evidence of Confederate authority he ever saw. Well before spring turned to summer, the war ended and the Confederate States of America ceased to exist.21

  Sam chronicled the death of the Confederacy meticulously. On April 11 he talked to a man who had just returned from a trading trip to Tennessee. The man swore he had seen a Northern newspaper, dated the sixth, that told of “the evacuation of Richmond by Lee and its occupation by the Yankees.” His story was so convincing that Sam was not inclined to dismiss it as he did most rumors. Two days passed before Sam heard anything more. “The fall of Richmond is confirmed,” he wrote. There was also a report that Lee had moved his army south “and torn Sherman all to pieces,” but this he thought dubious. “When disasters come there must be some good news to be manufactured to solace the people. Bitter pills are considerably improved by sweetening.”22

  As the warm days of mid-April succeeded one another and the woods turned a deep green, Sam interrogated everyone he met more intently than ever, but news was agonizingly slow to come. Not until the seventeenth, when he spoke with a passer-by on the road near his house, did he learn more. The man had heard that Northern papers were reporting “the surrender of Lee with 25,000 men on the 9th.” The papers apparently gave “minute details of the affair,” Sam noted, “and from this I fear that it is all too true.” By the nineteenth he had heard enough to convince him that Lee’s army was gone. “This is the severest blow the Confederacy has received yet.… What our leaders will do remains to be seen.”23

  He was more skeptical when he heard a rumor on April 21 that President Lincoln had been assassinated. By the twenty-fourth he was pretty much persuaded, but conflicting stories about that and everything else continued to circulate. Many people he talked to refused to believe that Lee had capitulated. “Things are in a mighty ‘jumble’ at this time.”24

  By the end of the first week of May the truth could no longer be denied. It was certain that not only Lee’s army but all Confederate forces east of the Mississippi had surrendered. The Confederate government was defunct, and Jefferson Davis and other officials were on the run. “[T]he Confederacy,” Sam declared, “is dead.… Confed. currency is now worthless. Thus ends a war in which the South has gained nothing and lost millions of property and thousands of precious lives.”25

  By the second week of May returning rebel soldiers could be seen trudging along Tippah County’s roads. Through the remainder of the spring hardly a day passed that Sam did not encounter one or more. The first he met were men of the commands that surrendered in Mississippi and Alabama, but before long they were joined by survivors of the final campaigns in Virginia and North Carolina. Among the returnees were many friends and loved ones of the Agnews. Uncle Young’s son, James, was home by May 11. Two days later Nannie’s brother, James McKell, appeared at the Agnews’ door—“Nannie is rejoiced,” wrote Sam. But there were others in the community who waited in vain during May for the return of their sons and brothers. One was an acquaintance of Sam’s named Gambrell, who only now learned that his son Robert had been killed near Richmond just before the city fell. “Gambrell has now lost 4 sons in the war,” Sam wrote, “and has not a living son in the world.”26

  Given the abrupt collapse of Confederate authority and the sudden appearance of large numbers of men loosed from restraint, no one in Tippah should have been surprised at the wave of disorder that shook the county in May. On the fifth, Sam’s friend Squire Nutt suffered “an outrage” at the hands of three soldiers who, according to Sam, “were deserting in order to avoid a surrender.” The three had stopped at Nutt’s home and asked if they might get feed for their horses. The squire invited them in. “After sitting a while Nutt went out with them to attend to their horses. When they got out one said We have carried this far enough. We understand, Sir, that you have money and we want it. Nutt denied the fact. They hung him twice and otherwise badly injured him. They got only $4.00 from him.”27

  “Hear of more robberies,” Sam wrote on May 12. “Five men, soldiers, robbed an old man near Orizaba recently. They hung him twice and burned his body severely with powder before they did accomplish their design.… Mrs. Duke had all her horses stolen last night.… The robbing parties are getting bold.… Lawlessness seems to be the order of the day.”28

  If the specters of famine, defeat, and anarchy were not enough to frighten Tippah residents, the citizens also confronted the prospect of an unleashed slave population. All sorts of stories were circulating about what the Yankees intended to do about the blacks. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had declared them free, but Lincoln was dead now and Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee unionist, was president. “People are still ignorant of the terms of the surrender,” Sam wrote on May 8. “What will be done with the negroes is still unknown.” The next day, however, he got hold of a recent Memphis newspaper that indicated that the victors considered slavery “dead now immediately and forever.” Reports confirming this drifted in over the next few days, and on the fifteenth Sam wrote that “The general opinion now is that slavery is dead.” But, he added, “some still are incredulous because they do not want to believe it. Just like Lee’s surrender it is an unpalatable truth.” Only in the fourth week of May, after news came of a statement by President Johnson confirming the abolition of slavery, was all doubt removed.29

  Nor was there any doubt by late May that the federal authorities would be able to enforce the decree of emancipation, at least in Sam’s vicinity. As early as May 6 a force of one hundred Union troops had arrived in Baldwyn. They did not stay long, but another detachment passed through the village a week later, and yet another on the twenty-fifth. By the end of the month, Yankee garrison forces were posted at a number of points along the Mobile & Ohio Railroad, which ran through Baldwyn and Guntown. Their presence was sufficient to deter any slaveholder in the area who might be considering trying to hold his people in bondage.30

  The unanswered question was what the blacks would do. Sam kept a close eye on the Agnew slaves all spring, especially after reports of the Confederacy’s collapse began coming in—reports that invariably reached the slave quarters soon after they reached the Big House. As the weeks passed, the blacks grew unruly. On April 11, the day he learned from a passing trader about the
fall of Richmond, Sam discovered that some of the slaves had bought liquor from the trader and were carousing in the quarters. “They had better been at work,” he grumbled. “The negroes now are so indolent and disobedient that it is better to be without them than with them.” There was even bigger trouble elsewhere in the district that month. “Singleton Hughes lost all of his most valuable slaves Saturday night [April 28]. They have gone to the Yankees.”31

  Slavery disintegrated on the Agnew plantation in May. On the eighth, when Sam was still trying to sort out conflicting reports about the Yankees’ intentions, he noted that “The negroes themselves evidently think they are free.” None left the plantation, and none threatened the Agnews in any way; they simply quit working except as it suited them. The Agnews were exasperated. “Got some tobacco plants … and planted 60 hills in the old cow lot,” Sam wrote on May 25. “Would have planted more but the negroes have got so ‘high’ that they would not obey my orders.”32

  10. This double cabin, built in 1852, once stood on the Agnew plantation in Tippah County, Mississippi. It was probably used to house slaves, one of eight such cabins on the plantation. It was moved in the 1960s to a site two or three miles away.

  Neither the Agnews nor anybody else knew what to do. Crops and livestock had to be tended, but any attempt to coerce the blacks might provoke Yankee intervention. It was known that in the regions long occupied by the Yankees, former masters were paying wages to their former slaves, and by the end of spring some in Sam’s community were experimenting with that system. But everything was so unsettled that little could be accomplished. One of Sam’s neighbors met with his field hands to discuss hiring them, Sam learned, but they “declined contracting with him. He then drove them off from the place and has not a negroe now.” Rumor had it that federal agents would soon be on hand to supervise the signing of labor contracts, and Sam and Enoch thought it best not to negotiate with their blacks until an agent arrived. Meanwhile, work on the Agnew plantation proceeded fitfully.33

  Sam and many others were certain that emancipation would prove disastrous, not just for whites but also for the freed people. It was an article of faith among planters that blacks were incapable of caring for themselves and would not work except under threat of the lash. “The status of the negroe is changed from a slave to a hireling,” Sam wrote, “and the most reflecting [persons] think that the change is fraught with sore evils to the poor negroe.” It appeared to him that the blacks’ idea of freedom was to “live off their masters and do nothing.… [T]hey will find it very different from what they suppose.” He was pleased when he read President Johnson’s admonition to the freed people: “liberty is freedom to work.”34

  The political situation in the last days of spring was no less confused than the labor situation. A thousand rumors circulated about the U.S. government’s intentions with regard to reconstruction, but Sam could learn nothing reliable. The only formal authority now functioning in Mississippi was the army of occupation. In the latter part of May, Union troops marched into Jackson, seized the state offices and records, dissolved the legislature, and deposed the governor. County governments thereupon suspended operation. Tippah’s officials held one last meeting in May—in a hotel in Ripley, for the courthouse had been burned down by Yankees in 1864—and then went home to await word of their status.35

  The dissolution of state and local government aggravated the crises of labor, order, and food. This last was on the minds of the Agnews more than any other as spring ended. On May 27 Sam recorded a disturbing incident. He set out for Hopewell early that morning on a mule named Peter, but on the way the mule “gave out” and “fell down with me, broke my saddle girth, throwing me over his head.” Neither was hurt, but Peter could no longer carry Sam and had to be led the rest of the way. “Weakness was the cause,” Sam decided. Peter was “weak from heavy work and light feed.”36

  Corn for the Agnews and their neighbors continued to trickle in on the railroad, thanks to the exertions of the two men who had gone south to buy it, but it was never enough. And there was a new problem: the railroad now refused to accept Confederate money. Only specie or Yankee greenbacks could be used to pay shipping charges, and both were scarce. Greenbacks had been circulating in Tippah for some time, as a result of the clandestine trade with Tennessee, but never in large amounts. The Agnews had none at this time, so Enoch was forced to spend a couple of days going from house to house in the area trying to borrow some. He managed to get enough to pay his share of the freight but then suffered another setback: a gang of surrendered rebel cavalrymen raided a boxcar at the Guntown depot and made off with 150 bushels set aside for him and Uncle Joseph.37

  There were other matters, too, on the Agnews’ minds in late spring. Little Buddy was sick on and off, and they worried about him. Some of the poppies bloomed, but Sam was not sure they would yield opium. Everything seemed uncertain. Sam watched and prayed, but saw no sure signs: whatever God had in store for the Agnews, and for the South, He had not yet seen fit to reveal. Sam tried to imagine the world to come.38

  JOHN ROBERTSON

  There were days in the early part of the spring when John Robertson was able to put the war completely out of his mind. Uncle Allen’s farm was not exactly off the beaten path, but it was tucked into a corner of east Tennessee that saw few passers-by. The railroad was eight miles away and the nearest town of any size was thirteen. The view from the window of John’s room, where he spent most of his time, reinforced the sense of isolation. In whatever direction he looked, tall oak trees or a rise of land loomed up to block his gaze. Like most other farms in Roane County, Uncle Allen’s lay on rolling bottom land flanked by densely forested ridges, high and steep. Thick woods surrounded the fields where corn and wheat and grass grew. It was a rare farmer in that section of the country who could stand in his own yard and see a neighbor’s house or barn.1

  Friends called at Uncle Allen’s farm now and then, and John left the house frequently to visit in the community or attend church or meet with the Reverend Payne, the Methodist preacher who was helping him prepare for the ministry. But unless someone brought up the subject of the war, John gave it little thought. Since experiencing conversion and deciding to devote his life to the Lord, he had put aside most worldly matters. Uncle Allen and Aunt Mary kindly provided for him and made no demands on his time. He was free to concentrate on matters of the spirit.2

  He spent the better part of most days in his upstairs bedroom reading. “I was not satisfied,” he recalled in his memoir, “… unless I had a book in my hand.” His reading was rigidly circumscribed, however. He vowed he would open no book that did not promise in some way to make him a better servant of God. “Novels were offered me, but I refused to read them.… Well did I know that I might read those books of fiction till my looks were grey and I would never be wiser than when I commenced.” Instead, he waded through a six-volume set of Biblical commentary that the Reverend Payne loaned him and found it very edifying.3

  Few who had known him only in his earlier days would have recognized him now. Just three years ago, this serious young man had been a hell-raiser of a boy, rowdy, eager for military adventure, and burning with vengefulness toward his unionist enemies. All that was behind him now. Even his physical appearance had changed strikingly since then, transfigured by the hardships of camp life, combat, hospital, and prison. When he last visited his home in Greene County, his parents had barely recognized him.4

  So sober and earnest and weathered was he now that it was easy to forget how young he was. As spring began, he was not yet nineteen. But he himself was painfully aware of his age, and sometimes he felt inadequate for the work he was undertaking. One evening, as the family gathered for their daily worship, Uncle Allen asked him to read the Bible passage. John, who had never been called on before, flushed with embarrassment and proceeded to read with trembling lips: “I could scar[c]ely utter a word distinctly,” he recalled. This awkward moment was nothing, however, compared to the near-panic he
experienced when the Reverend Payne singled him out to lead a prayer in church one Sunday. That he was able on this occasion to do his duty—albeit with a good deal of stumbling—he ascribed to divine intervention.5

  As painful as these and other such incidents were, John was “determined not to falter in anything required of me,” and he never declined a request. “Thus by degrees, battling against my embarrassment, I overcame my timidity.”6

  While John prepared, Uncle Allen plowed and planted. His son Jacob, who was nearly seventeen, labored alongside him in the fields. With only the two of them working it, the little farm would not produce much, but what it yielded sufficed for the family, which numbered nine including John. Uncle Allen’s household had never known affluence; he and Mary and the children lived plainly and were content to do so.7

  The other farmers in the community likewise busied themselves in the fields as the spring planting season began. Roane County was one of the quieter places in east Tennessee at this time, for which the inhabitants were profoundly grateful. Some other parts of the region were so ravaged by destruction and violence that normal life was impossible: farmers had given up trying to plants crops, churches and schools and courthouses were closed, and people were afraid to leave their homes.8

  Roane was not wholly insulated from danger, however. The small garrisons of Yankee troops stationed at a few points in and around the county were hardly enough to secure order at all times in every community. Now and then the quiet was shattered by a rebel cavalry raid, a guerrilla ambush, or some other frightening reminder that this region was still at war—and still at war with itself.9

  In the early days of March the county was buzzing with news of a bizarre Confederate operation that had come to an abrupt end on the bank of the Tennessee River not many miles from Uncle Allen’s farm. A small band of rebel soldiers and sailors had been captured, along with their thirty-foot boat, as they were secretly making their way downriver. The boat was loaded with hand grenades, underwater mines, and incendiary devices made with turpentine-soaked cotton.10