A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  A diary found on one of the men revealed some of their plan and Union army authorities learned more from interrogating the prisoners. The story that emerged was astonishing and, to many, alarming. The operation had begun weeks earlier in Richmond, Virginia, where Confederate military officials assembled a clandestine strike force of a dozen officers and men from both the army and the navy. They were supplied with provisions, munitions, and a boat, and then transported by rail and wagon to the southwest corner of Virginia. On February 4 they loaded the boat and set out down the Holston River, which flows southwest and eventually joins another river to form the Tennessee. When they passed beyond the picket lines of the Confederate army in northeastern Tennessee and into Union-held territory, they muffled their oars and began traveling at night only, hiding during the day in brush along the banks. Narrowly avoiding detection as they floated past the large Yankee garrison at Knoxville, they reached Loudon on February 24. Here their luck began to run out. A black man spotted them while they were ashore during daylight and led Yankee troops to their location. Two of the raiders were taken prisoner. The rest got away in the boat, only to be sighted two days later near Kingston and subsequently captured by a hastily assembled posse of unionist citizens, who turned them over to the federal army.11

  The purpose of this operation, it was revealed, was disruption and sabotage. The raiders’ orders were to begin destroying steamboats once they were past Kingston, and to continue doing so all the way down to Chattanooga, where they were then to set fire to the large complex of Union army depots, boatyards, warehouses, and sawmills that lay along the river.12

  That the mission failed was a relief to the federal authorities, but they remained uneasy about its implications. By itself, it could not have amounted to anything more than an annoyance to the Union occupation forces in east Tennessee, in no way threatening their control of the region. It seemed likely, therefore, that it was part of some larger plan.13

  One possibility—hinted at by the prisoners under questioning—was that the raid was intended to prepare the way for Robert E. Lee’s army. Lee was under heavy pressure from Ulysses S. Grant’s forces, and there was speculation that Lee might abandon Richmond and Petersburg, retreat into the Appalachian mountains, and head south, perhaps to Georgia. There he might fight on indefinitely.14

  Newspapers in Knoxville and Chattanooga published detailed reports about the captured river raiders, sparking consternation among unionists. If Lee’s army marched into east Tennessee and drove the Yankees out, the region’s secessionists might be inspired to rise up against the unionist majority. Many were undoubtedly thirsting for vengeance, for in the year and a half that they had now spent under Yankee rule, they had experienced increasingly harsh treatment. Federal commanders in the region who endorsed the hard-war policy toward rebel civilians advocated by General William T. Sherman had joined hands with unionists who had suffered under Confederate rule and now demanded an eye for an eye; together they were making life miserable for secessionists. Those who flaunted their Confederate patriotism were imprisoned or banished to rebel-held territory, their homes and other property confiscated or destroyed. Even those who resisted only passively, by refusing to take the U.S. oath of allegiance, suffered penalties: they were forbidden to enter a garrisoned town or buy goods from a merchant, and their farms were routinely stripped by Yankee foragers. The secessionists’ retaliatory guerrilla warfare only provoked the Yankees and unionists to come down harder, further embittering the secessionists. Suspected guerrillas were summarily shot or hanged. Where the guerrillas proved elusive, citizens believed to have aided them were arrested and held as hostages.15

  John Robertson had managed to stay clear of this spiraling cycle of retribution ever since the Yankees invaded east Tennessee. He had done so by taking the U.S. oath and thereafter keeping quiet about his political sentiments, which remained secessionist, and by declining to retaliate when unionists harassed him about his Confederate army service and drove him from his teaching job, and also by exiling himself from Greene County, where as a rebel home guardsman he had made many enemies. He was not one of those who now yearned for revenge. He wanted only to be left alone to follow his chosen path.16

  That he wanted to be left alone by those contending for control of this troubled region did not mean that he desired to follow his path alone. More and more these days, he was thinking of taking a partner. Like any other young man, he expected to marry and raise a family, and during the past few years he had flirted with many young women and called on a few. But none had seemed the perfect romantic and spiritual mate he believed a man must seek; and besides, until he found his true course in life, he had deemed himself too callow for marriage. Now, however, he thought he might be worthy enough to be some good woman’s husband. He thought, too, that he had found the one God intended for him.17

  Her name was Margaret Tennessee Robertson—Tennie, he called her, although to everyone else she was Maggie. She was a distant cousin of his and the same age as he, and she lived on her mother’s farm not far from Uncle Allen’s. John had met her the very day he arrived in Roane County back in October, and within weeks he had fallen deeply in love with her.18

  She was riding alone on horseback the first time he saw her, as he was walking along the road trying to find his way to Uncle Allen’s. She was neatly dressed, wore a bonnet, and had strikingly blue eyes. He asked for directions, and as she spoke he found himself drawn to her. “[T]here was something there not common in the fairer sex.” He wanted to know her name but thought it would seem presumptuous to ask. She surprised him by asking if he was John Robertson—she had learned from neighborhood gossip that he was coming to live with Uncle Allen. She introduced herself and told him they were kin.19

  He saw her again not long after that, on a Sunday morning at Blue Springs Church, and they talked again. Soon he began calling on her. They found that they had much in common besides their age and family connection. Politics for one thing: her family were secessionists, and her older brother was a lieutenant in the Confederate army. This was welcome news to John, for he would never court a “Lincolnite.” Their backgrounds were similar, too. Although her father, who had died some years earlier, was a physician, the family had always lived in modest circumstances. They had a small farm, which her mother now operated with hired labor, and they owned just one horse and had never held slaves. Tennie was, moreover, a devout Christian who sought and found salvation at the same time as John. He was present when she experienced conversion at a revival meeting one night in February. When he told her of his decision to become a minister, she praised and encouraged him.20

  For some reason Uncle Allen and his family disliked her, and they tried to dissuade John from seeing her. Perhaps it was related to some old family feud. In any event, John ignored their comments and began spending a lot of time at Tennie’s house. Her mother made him welcome and graciously gave them time alone. As the weather warmed, they spent many hours sitting on the front porch, in the shade of the small grove of cedars where the house stood. Sometimes they gathered bouquets in the garden or walked together through the wooded countryside. Their favorite path was one that ran between an old, abandoned log cabin and a spring.21

  There were never any awkward silences between them, for both were the talkative, sociable sort and they enjoyed each other’s company. John was impressed by her intelligence—she was “more than my equal” in that regard, he thought—but it was her “mild and gentle manner” and “true warm heart” that touched him most. “As for beauty,” he decided, “she had enough, and of course I thought her han[d]some.”22

  She had another regular caller, but gave him no encouragement and made it clear as politely as she could that she preferred John; one time the poor man was left standing forlornly in her parlor while she and John went off to church together. And in other ways, from the “bright smile” with which she always greeted him to the earnest prayers she said for him and the funny made-up games she played with h
im, she seemed to be trying to make John understand that she cared for him. But she never told him so, and he was so afraid of being rejected that he could not bring himself to declare his love. “Many times I resolved to do so, but when I came in her presence, my heart would fail me.”23

  Between his infatuation with Tennie and the pursuit of his calling, John was preoccupied all spring. News of the war’s end caused hardly a ripple in the insular little world he now inhabited. Certainly he understood that Lee’s surrender in Virginia on April 9 and the subsequent collapse of the Confederacy secured the triumph of the unionists in east Tennessee and ended the secessionists’ dream of deliverance and revenge. If he read any newspapers or talked to anyone who had, he probably knew that all the organized Confederate forces in and around the region, along with nearly all the rebel guerrilla bands, laid down their arms by early May.24

  At some point in the late spring, however, he must have become aware that the prospect of peace in east Tennessee was not so certain after all. If he talked with any of the surrendered Confederate soldiers, he surely heard stories of the harassment many experienced as they made their way home through the region. Unionists taunted them, threatened them, and even robbed them. Some of the soldiers, fearful of being bushwhacked, returned home by back roads, traveling stealthily and only at night.25

  As the defeated rebels returned to their families, so did many of the east Tennesseans who had fought in the Union ranks, and their arrival stoked the region’s already heated atmosphere. There were tens of thousands of these men: Roane County alone contributed no fewer than seven companies of infantry and cavalry to the federal army. Some had joined up after the Yankees occupied east Tennessee, but many had done so earlier, following a long and dangerous flight through rebel-patrolled mountains to the Union lines in Kentucky. They had fought the Confederates on the battlefields, and now many of them were coming back determined to exact a price for the persecution they and their families had endured at home under the secessionist regime.26

  The vengeful mood of many east Tennessee unionists was sanctioned—and inflamed—by the state’s new governor. William G. Brownlow, the Knoxville newspaper editor and die-hard loyalist who had been imprisoned and exiled by the Confederates, was sworn into office in Nashville in April. Although U.S. troops continued to occupy the state, the new civil government of Tennessee, with Brownlow at its head, was recognized by the federal authorities as the legitimate successor to the military government that had ruled since the Yankees conquered middle and west Tennessee in 1862. None but thoroughgoing unionists had been permitted to vote in the elections of February and March 1865 that created this state government, and thus Brownlow had behind him a solidly unionist legislature and judiciary. He had also at his disposal his newspaper, the Whig and Rebel Ventilator.27

  The death of the Confederacy did nothing to soften Brownlow’s feelings toward those who had supported it. From his desk in Nashville and from his editorial office in Knoxville, there now issued a fiery stream of pronouncements intended to let the rebels know that there would be no forgiveness for their sins. Among his first official acts was to put a price on the head of former governor Isham G. Harris, who had led the state out of the Union in 1861 and later served in the Confederate army. Five thousand dollars, proclaimed Brownlow, would be the reward for apprehending “this Arch-traitor.” Brownlow furthermore announced that anyone who had taken a stand with the rebels had “forfeited all rights to citizenship, and to life itself. Every field of carnage, every rebel prison, every Union man’s grave unite with a violated law and demand the penalty, and if the courts do not administer it, an outraged people will.”28

  The governor was no doubt pleased by some of the news that reached him from east Tennessee in April and May. Whether impelled by his rhetoric or by their own hunger for revenge, many of the region’s unionists were assailing their defeated enemies. Some were doing so through the courts. Hundreds, even thousands, of damage suits were being brought by aggrieved unionists against their former persecutors, especially the rich and prominent and those who had enforced Confederate martial law and conscription. Criminal charges also were being levied, including many for treason. Brownlow, who himself filed suit against the officials who had imprisoned him, enthusiastically endorsed such retribution: “let justice be done. These traitors have had their day; now let us have ours.”29

  Outside the courtrooms, too, there was retribution. Some of the region’s churches were taking action against their rebel members. One of these was the Cedar Fork Baptist Church in the village of Philadelphia, a dozen miles from Uncle Allen’s farm, whose ruling elders formally declared “a non fellowship against all aiders and abetters of the rebel[l]ion, until satisfaction be made by them to the church in the letter and spirit of the Gosp[e]l.” The secessionists of Cedar Fork and other such congregations were given two choices: humble themselves and publicly repent their sin, or be expelled from the church.30

  Increasingly, there were reports of violence in the region: threats, beatings, even killings. Men who had served in the Confederate ranks were the most frequent targets of such vengeance. In some counties—including Greene, where John Robertson’s family still resided—it seemed that hardly a day went by that some rebel was not waylaid by a band of unionists, flogged on his bare back with switches or cowhides, and ordered to leave the area. Not a few were shot from ambush on country roads or in open confrontations on town streets. To the former Confederates, this all seemed an orchestrated campaign—a reign of terror, some called it—designed to drive them from the region. If so, there were signs that it was accomplishing its purpose. Rebel east Tennesseans in considerable numbers were fleeing to more hospitable parts of the South or electing not to return from their places of wartime exile.31

  John Robertson’s little corner of the region remained mercifully peaceful through the spring. In the town of Athens, thirteen miles south, former federal soldiers were openly threatening rebels on the streets; and near Loudon, fifteen miles east, a secessionist was killed. But John heard of no trouble any closer to home, except for some rumors of robber gangs in the vicinity. Still, he rarely left the house without his pistol.32

  It was quiet enough in those first weeks after the war’s end that the Reverend Payne, with help from John, was able to accomplish one of his longtime goals at Blue Springs Church: establishing a Sunday school. He began by calling a meeting of the congregants, who warmly approved the idea and elected him superintendent of the school. At the same time, they elected John librarian and first teacher of the boys’ class, and Tennie first teacher of the girls’ class. The school got under way in May and was a great success; together, John and Tennie and the other teachers had nearly a hundred students. During the reverend’s frequent absences, John acted as superintendent, which meant opening and closing school each Sunday by leading the students in song and prayer. “I was determined the school should not [falter], by my tardiness,” John wrote, “and was always in my place.”33

  After school on Sundays, as he and Tennie walked home together over the ridge between the church and their farms, John would talk of his calling. His progress in that regard was a good deal slower lately, he was sorry to say, for he no longer had the luxury of spending all day studying. Cousin Jacob had had a bad accident in April, when a cart loaded with rails overturned on him, leaving him with a broken thigh that would take a long time to heal. At about the same time, Uncle Allen got sick and since then had been unable to do much work. This double misfortune “throwed the tending of the crop mostly on me,” as John put it.34

  Hoeing and plowing took him away from his books in the last weeks of spring, but not away from Tennie. Uncle Allen complained that he was spending all his time with her, which was untrue, but John could not deny that he was with her a good part of the time. Any other sort of self-indulgence would have burdened him with guilt, but this did not. Tennie seemed more important than anything else right now, at least more important than studying Bible commentaries.3
5

  Summer was at hand. Spring had come and gone, and John had not confessed his love to Tennie. He promised himself that he would summon the courage to do so in the season ahead. If she answered as he prayed she would, and if the troubles besetting the world outside were kept at bay, it would be a summer of great joy.36

  CORNELIA MCDONALD

  As soon as the weather was warm enough and the soil good and dry, Cornelia McDonald put some of her boys to work in the garden that she had staked out the year before in the yard beside the house. Kenneth, who was twelve, was the principal gardener. He did not mind this duty, except for having to cut beanpoles and pea sticks from the nearby cedar thicket. He tried to convince his mother that the task was impossibly difficult, but she was adamant. His younger brother Roy also went to work in the garden, assisted sometimes by little Donald. Now and then Donald would doze off while standing up, leaning on his hoe, whereupon Roy—who was never lacking in energy—would wake him up by throwing dirt clods at him.1

  The garden would be more important than ever this year, for the family was desperately short of food. By March, they were down to two meals a day. Breakfast was usually just bread and milk, along with some eggs if the hens were cooperating. Dinner was generally bread, sorghum, and beans or potatoes. Supper they skipped, and went to bed hungry. Sometimes when Cornelia was out in the evening and glanced through the windows of other houses where the tables were being set for supper, she felt almost resentful.2

  She worried incessantly about food and money. What she earned from giving drawing and French lessons was barely enough to buy flour and beans and pay the cook. She was still waiting for the $427 due her from the Confederate government on her deceased husband’s account. The longer she waited, the less it would buy, for prices were still spiraling upward.3