A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  Even those of high rank now faced an uncertain future. General Pendleton had returned home to Lexington a few days after Appomattox to find his family’s food supply reduced to one small ham, some bread and milk, and a little lettuce. He was pleased to learn that he would be able to resume his former position as rector of the Episcopal church; however, given the difficult circumstances of the church just now, the vestrymen could promise him no regular salary. But the general did have a horse, a garden beside his house, and some vacant lots on the edge of town. And, although fifty-five years old, he was blessed with strength and health. He therefore went to work as a farmer, plowing and planting and cultivating. Many days he labored in his little fields from dawn to dusk. Now and then, passing soldiers would stop to ask him where they might get something to eat, never suspecting that this dirty, sweat-streaked, gray-bearded man had been one of Lee’s chief lieutenants.35

  And then there were the civilian refugees. Many of these also trudged through Lexington in the last weeks of spring, traveling northward from their places of wartime exile to return to the homes they had abandoned when the Yankees invaded northern Virginia. Most were unsure of what they would find when they reached home and many had no idea how they would make a living thereafter. One day there appeared at Cornelia’s door an old friend from Winchester, an elderly man named Joseph Sherrard, a refugee who was now heading home. He had been one of Winchester’s prominent citizens before the war, a well-to-do banker and businessman. He was penniless, he told Cornelia, having put all his money into his now-defunct bank and Confederate bonds. His “hair was whiter than ever,” Cornelia noticed upon greeting him, and his “aged, withered face” was “hopeless and sad.” Still, he had blessings to count. His son Joseph Jr., who had served in the 11th Virginia Cavalry with Edward, had survived the war in good health, although wounded five times.36

  Cornelia herself was a refugee from Winchester, and she too thought of going home. But before spring ended she received a discouraging report from a relative who had just been there. Hawthorn, the family’s sixty-acre estate on the outskirts of the town, was an uninhabitable ruin; the destruction begun by the Yankee occupiers while Cornelia and her children were living there was now complete. Although the house still stood, everything else was gone. The barn, stable, granary, smokehouse, henhouse, and every other outbuilding had been torn down and carried away for firewood; even the privy had disappeared. The wooden fences had suffered the same fate, while the stone fences had been carted off to bolster military fortifications. The orchard had fallen to the ax, along with the stately cedar trees that had flanked the driveway. The lawn and garden had been trampled into oblivion by horses’s hooves and wagon wheels. To get the place back into condition to support the family would require capital and labor far beyond anything Cornelia could muster. And besides, she could not even afford to rent the wagon and team they would need to move back.37

  Assuming the victorious Yankees did not undertake the wholesale confiscation of rebel property—a punitive measure that some Northern leaders were urging—Cornelia would be able to sell Hawthorn and her late husband’s other land holdings, and thus regain some economic security. But, given the confusion and uncertainty now gripping the South, it would likely take years to adjudicate the estate and secure a title. Nor could Cornelia count on any immediate financial help from kinfolk; from what she could learn, no one in her extended family was any better off than she.38

  She saw no alternative: she and the children would have to stay put for now and get along the best they could. “So therefore I remained in Lexington,” she wrote, “seeing no prospect of relief, and having no hope of assistance.”39

  LOUIS HUGHES

  In the latter part of March, Union forces moved against Mobile—45,000 troops, in two great columns, approaching the city from the south and east. Word of the invasion came by steamboat sixty miles up the Tombigbee to the state saltworks, where Superintendent Brooks and Commissioner Woolsey received the news anxiously. By the end of the month the invaders were pounding the city’s defensive works with siege artillery. On April 11 the battered rebels abandoned their fortifications and retreated northward; the triumphant Yankees marched into Mobile the next day. As soon as they learned of the city’s capture, Brooks and Woolsey put into action their contingency plan.1

  Lou Hughes had not yet sold all 500 of his tobacco plugs when Brooks informed him that the saltworks was being evacuated and the slaves were all being sent back to their owners. The superintendent wrote out a letter of explanation to Madam, gave it to Lou, and then set about shutting down the works. Lou and Matilda gathered up the things they intended to take along—including several hundred dollars, much of it now safely converted into silver coins, that Lou’s tobacco venture had brought him—and joined the rest of the slaves as they were furnished with provisions and then led down to the river.2

  At the river the slaves found a scene of confusion. Hundreds of local citizens, many driving wagons piled high with their possessions, jammed the area around the landing, desperate to get away before the Yankees appeared. But there was nothing anyone there could do for now but mill around nervously until a boat came by. At seven o’clock the next morning, one was spotted in the far distance, chugging upstream from the direction of Mobile. Some of the citizens, unable to make out its markings, panicked: “It is a gun boat,” they shouted. “The Yankees are coming!” However, it proved to be one of the river packets, and as it put into the landing the citizens stifled their terror and began jostling for a place in line to board. Taking passage upriver would have been the fastest way to flee, but the boat could not accommodate such a crowd. The captain did agree, however, to ferry people, wagons, and teams across the river.3

  It took a long time for the saltworks slaves to get across, for the frightened locals insisted on going first. Once they were on the west bank, Lou, Matilda, and the rest set out northward on foot, escorted probably by some of the overseers from the works. They headed for Demopolis, about seventy-five miles away.4

  When the little column trudged into Demopolis, after a journey of several days, Lou and Matilda and their newborn were sent to the train station. Brooks had arranged for the three to go the rest of the way home by rail. Lou was to inform Madam that the saltworks had been abandoned and that the rest of her slaves were on the way to her.5

  The train that Lou and Matilda boarded took them westward across the state line to Meridian, where they boarded another that continued west to Jackson. There they changed to a northbound train that carried them along the tracks of the Mississippi Central to Grenada. In Grenada they transferred to the Mississippi & Tennessee line, which ran north to Panola County.6

  Delays were inevitable on the deteriorating rail lines of the Confederacy, and it was probably well past the middle of April when Lou and Matilda stepped off the train at the depot in Panola County. Spring was well advanced by then and, although the weather had not yet turned hot, the air was humid and the foliage dense. As they walked the several miles to their destination, they passed woods of oak and hickory and pine that alternated with plowed fields. Panola was cotton country—the name in fact was derived from an Indian word for cotton—and it was now planting time.7

  Ahead of them a lane intersected the road they were following. A large gate straddled the lane where it met the road. This was the entrance to the plantation of Master Jack McGehee, Madam’s father. It was a familiar sight to Lou and Matilda, for both had lived here for a time after leaving Memphis. Passing through the gate, they followed the lane through a grove and across the yard to the Big House. There they presented themselves to Madam and delivered their news along with Brooks’s letter.8

  Madam immediately dispatched some wagons to rendezvous with the slaves coming on foot from Demopolis; the wagons would take them the rest of the way to Mississippi. They were not to be brought to Master Jack’s plantation, however, for he did not need them. Instead, Madam arranged for them to be rented out in various towns along the way
: some in Jackson, some in Grenada, some in the county seat. Of all the McGehee slaves who had labored at the works, only Lou and Matilda would be kept at home with Madam and her family.9

  Matilda was sent to the kitchen and put to work. There would be plenty of cooking for her to do, for the Big House was crowded: Master Jack had taken in not only Madam and her children but also another of his widowed daughters, Mary Farrington, and her son, along with the local Methodist circuit rider and his wife. Lou, however, would not be waiting on them, for Master Jack put him to work in the fields. He and Matilda were assigned to live in one of the slave cabins, which they would share with another couple named George and Kitty.10

  There were ten such cabins on this plantation, which before the war had been home to fifty-seven slaves. Master Jack was not the biggest slaveholder in Panola County, but he had by far the biggest plantation—4,500 acres, over seven square miles. A good part of that acreage was devoted to cotton, and the plantation also embraced fields sown with corn and wheat, pastures where cattle and sheep grazed, and 2,000 acres of woodland where hogs rooted. The estate boasted as well a large orchard and garden, a stable that could accommodate fifteen horses and forty mules, and a dairy big enough for twenty cows.11

  As Lou looked around the plantation that spring, however, he could see that it was not what it had once been. While Panola County had never suffered the kind of massive Yankee invasion that had brought utter ruin to many other Confederate regions, it had not altogether escaped punishment. Union raiding parties had swept through the area a number of times and had pillaged Master Jack’s plantation at least once. Nervously anticipating another raid, the McGehees had taken steps to preserve what was left of their valuables. They had boxed up all the silverware in the house—$250 worth of knives, forks, spoons, trays, and cake baskets—and buried it under the henhouse. Barrels and boxes of other things went down into a pit dug under the Big House. The family’s finest clothes were wrapped up and stashed in the house; certain slaves were designated to come running at the first report of a raid and carry the clothing to their cabins, which the Yankees would presumably not bother to loot.12

  The rebel army had been as destructive as the Yankees. In one corner of the plantation there lay a heap of charred wood, all that remained of a shelter that Master Jack had built in 1862 to protect his cotton. Like other planters in that section of the country, he had had to store his crop after the capture of Memphis, which cut him off from his customary market. And, like others, he then had to watch helplessly while Confederate soldiers put every bale to the torch to keep it out of the hands of the advancing army of General Ulysses S. Grant—which never reached Panola.13

  When the county tax assessor came around in 1864, Master Jack reported some of the losses he had suffered since the war began. The 120 taxable cattle he had had in 1861 had been reduced to 70. Three of his best horses were gone, and so were his piano, his clock, and two of his three carriages. Nor were his smokehouse and grain bins as full as they once had been, for the Confederate government had seized its share of produce through the tax-in-kind: by 1864 Master Jack had surrendered 1,650 bushels of corn, 130 bushels of wheat, and 2,406 pounds of bacon to feed the rebel army.14

  These material losses weighed heavily on Master Jack, but not so heavily as the personal losses he had endured since the war broke out. Malinda, his wife of more than fifty years and the mother of his thirteen children, had died in the spring of 1864, leaving him deeply depressed. Her death had come soon after that of their oldest son, Miles. Two of their sons-in-law, one of them Boss, had died not long before that; and a grandson had been killed at the battle of Shiloh in 1862. And now this grieving widower had responsibility for two widowed daughters and their families, and the management of a plantation with no overseer.15

  He knew that he would not have to bear these burdens much longer. He was seventy-six years old and in bad health; his hand shook so badly he could no longer sign his name legibly. His mortality was much on his mind. In the carriage house of his plantation was stored a coffin that he intended for himself. It had been built two years earlier when his son-in-law Charles Dandridge died, having accidentally shot himself while practicing with a pistol at a neighboring plantation. Fine caskets being nearly impossible to procure in the Confederacy by that time, Master Jack had made do by ordering two of his slaves to cobble together a plain coffin using some lumber on hand. They covered it with black fabric from one of Malinda McGehee’s dresses and lined the inside with the opera cloak of Charles’s widow, Tabitha Ann. But when Charles’s corpse was lifted up to be placed inside, it proved to be too bloated to fit. Master Jack then ordered a larger coffin prepared and put away the smaller for himself.16

  12. John S. “Master Jack” McGehee

  It may be that death held no terror for him. He was a devout Christian, a pillar of the local Methodist church. And he could die with the assurance that he had a reputation as a generous man and a good neighbor. Local people remembered especially an episode in 1851, when typhoid struck among the slaves of a family whose farm adjoined Master Jack’s. It was cotton-picking time, and the family stood to lose their whole crop for lack of hands to gather it. Without a word to his neighbors, Master Jack sent his own hands over to do the job.17

  He was not so esteemed among the blacks, however. Lou, for one, was secretly contemptuous of the old man. He mocked Master Jack’s peculiar way of speaking, his habit of repeating a word or part of a word (“I don’t know what Edmund is thinking about-out,” Lou heard him say upon first seeing Boss’s mansion, “to build such a house-house”). Lou sneered, too, at the old man’s bluster. He talked big, Lou recalled in his memoir, but “was the verriest coward when danger was present.” Lou had been at the plantation during the Yankee raid and had seen Master Jack cringing in bed with a pretended stomach ache to avoid facing the enemy pillagers, all the while whining, “Where are they? Are they gone?” and calling for a slave to come nurse him: “Tell Kitty-itty-itty to get me a mush poultice-oltice.” Lou also regarded Master Jack as a harsh slave owner. He had often heard the old man chide Boss for his paternalism, saying it only spoiled the servants. “It will ruin them,” he had muttered while observing Lou and Matilda’s marriage ceremony, “givin wedins-wedins.”18

  Master Jack considered Lou not only spoiled but also unreliable. Even before his first escape attempt, Master Jack had warned Boss about him: “Keep you[r] eye on that boy … he is slippery-slippery, too smart-art.” The old man’s suspicions were aggravated when, on one of his frequent visits to the Memphis estate, he discovered chalk marks on the side of the barn and correctly surmised that Lou was trying to learn to write.19

  It may have been because Master Jack disliked Lou that he did not put him to work in the Big House when he arrived from the saltworks. Or perhaps he was needed more in the fields. Whatever the reason, Lou now found himself with a hoe in his hand. It was not unfamiliar work. Though he had been primarily a house servant, he had occasionally been sent to the fields by Boss during busy seasons on the Pontotoc plantation, and he had learned how to plow and plant and hoe and pick. Still, it was a great change for him, exchanging his nice suit and shoes and white linen apron for the rough brogans and homespun shirt and pants of a field hand, and leaving behind the polishing and dusting and serving to sweat amid the furrows. Now, too, he had to live in a crowded, dirt-floor cabin with rude wooden furniture and a primitive grease lamp for lighting. (At least his mattress was comfortable: the McGehees had hidden some of their ginned cotton from the Yankees by having the slaves stuff it into their bedticks.) And unless Matilda managed to bring some of the white folks’ food back to their cabin, Lou had to eat the common fare of the field hands. This meant a lot of bacon and corn bread. The latter was nicknamed “Johnny Constant” by the slaves; they were treated to wheat bread so rarely that they called it “Billy Seldom.”20

  Of the fifty or so slaves then on the plantation, about half were “full hands,” that is, fully grown but not elderly. Ea
ch had his or her assigned task. Most, like Lou, labored in the fields in a work gang supervised by the black foreman, Uncle Peter. One slave, whose name was John Smith, cared for the livestock. Of the women who did not work in the fields, some, including Matilda, spent their days cooking; others did laundry or weaving, worked in the garden, or served as maids in the Big House. The black children on the plantation, including thirteen-year-old Hannah and eleven-year-old Clarke, helped out with various tasks to the extent of their ability. Only the smaller children and babies were exempt from work. They were tended during the day in the plantation nursery by an older slave woman.21

  Six days a week, the slaves labored from dawn to dusk. For Lou and the other field hands this meant rising before daylight and heading for the fields without breakfast. They took along a “morning bite” left over from the previous night’s supper and downed it during a brief break. Around noon they halted for dinner, which was usually brought to them in the fields. After eating and resting a while, all hands went back to work until sundown.22

  By arriving late in the season, Lou had missed some of the heaviest field work: pulling the old stalks in the cotton fields and corn fields, deep plowing with a shovel plow to break up the compacted soil, and more plowing with a turning plow to line the fields with furrows and ridges in preparation for planting. He had also missed corn-planting, which was done before cotton-planting. Most of Master Jack’s cotton seed was probably already in the ground before Lou got there, too, though there was still time to plant more. This was done by running a scratch plow along each ridge to create what was called a drill, then dropping seeds into the drills and covering the seeds with soil using a hoe. As soon as the corn and cotton plants began to poke above the surface, cultivation began. For Lou and the others in the work gang, this meant long days spent with hoe in hand, bent over and moving slowly through the fields, carefully chopping away weeds and thinning out the sprouting plants. Now and then as the season progressed the hands also had to hitch a bull-tongue plow to a mule and run it down the furrows to destroy weeds and loosen up the soil for better drainage, taking care not to run over the growing plants or cut their roots. On rainy days there were indoor chores to do, including carding and spinning wool and making the oak baskets in which the ripe cotton would be collected in the fall.23