A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  “Now my friend,” said one of the Yankees, “I am afraid if you go to the captain you will be defeated. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do. Give my comrade and me one of your bottles of whisky, and we will put you on a straight track. The reason why I say this is that our captain has been sweetened by the rebel farmers. He is invited out to tea by them every evening. I know he will put you off. But I will write a note to some comrades of mine who, I know, will bring you out safe.”27

  Lou and George consented at once to the deal, and handed over the bottle. The cavalryman scribbled a note, gave it to them, and told them how to find the two men it was addressed to. “They are brave,” he added, “and the only two I know of that can help you.” The soldiers then mounted up and rode off.28

  It was about eleven o’clock the next morning, Sunday, when Lou and George pulled up outside the village of Senatobia. They left the wagon there, went on foot to the cavalry camp, and found the men they had been instructed to see. The soldiers read the note and questioned Lou and George a bit, then told them to return to their wagon and wait. They did so, and a little while later the soldiers joined them. They wanted to know more about the proposed expedition, including the distance to Master Jack’s. After Lou and George had answered all their questions, the soldiers agreed to go. Lou gave them ten dollars each, with the promise of ten more if the rescue mission was successful. The soldiers then headed back to camp to bring out their horses—surreptitiously, so as not to be spotted by their captain, who was unaware of what they were up to. When they left, Lou and George climbed back into the wagon and set out. The soldiers caught up with them a couple of miles down the road.29

  As the little rescue party entered the Como district, Lou and George grew nervous. They were now back in the land of slavery, and they were attracting a lot of ugly stares from the white people they passed. But they pressed on, comforted by the company of the two tough cavalry troopers with their revolvers and carbines.30

  Just after sundown they reached the lane that led to Master Jack’s. The soldiers spurred their mounts and rode ahead, through the grove and into the front yard of the Big House. The only person to be seen was a black man working at the woodpile. “Go in and tell your master, Mr. McG[eh]ee, to come out,” one of the soldiers ordered, “we want to see him.” The man obeyed. A moment later William McGehee emerged from the house and confronted the soldiers.31

  Lou and George had by now reached the yard in their wagon. Lou saw that the critical moment was at hand. He was frightened. The soldiers were stout fellows, but there were only two of them, and William McGehee was just the sort of man who might challenge them. He was a twenty-nine-year-old hothead who had served four years in the Confederate army, ending his service in an elite combat unit, General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry escort. And he had proved himself willing to use deadly force to keep his family’s black people enslaved.32

  The two soldiers, however, had been warned by Lou of the possibility of violent resistance by the McGehees and they had devised a plan. Their first words to William were: “We want feed for seventy-five head of horses.”33

  Lou heard William protest that he could not provide so much feed and heard the soldiers repeat their demand. He and George did not slow the wagon, but steered directly for the slave quarters. The soldiers followed them.34

  William ran into the Big House in a fury and aroused the family. “It is Louis and George,” he said, “and I’ll kill one of them tonight.” But when he told the other McGehees of the soldiers’ demand, they were persuaded that the two troopers were but the advance scouts of a large force of Yankee cavalry. They convinced William to settle down and not do anything stupid.35

  Lou and George pulled up to their cabin and got down from the wagon. Kitty was at the door. “I am all ready,” she told them. She had been preparing for their return: the few belongings that the two families intended to take were ready to load, and there was food stockpiled for the journey to freedom. Lou and George immediately began loading the wagon.36

  Meanwhile Master Jack and the circuit minister who boarded with him had come down to the quarters. The soldiers spotted them and rode up to them. “[W]hat are you doing here?” one of the troopers snarled. “Why have you not told these two men, Louis and George, that they are free men—that they can go and come as they like?”37

  By now the quarters were in an uproar. The other blacks had come out of their cabins and were gathering around the wagon to find out what was going on. Lou and George finished loading; in their frantic haste it took only twenty minutes. They hurried their wives and the baby into the wagon and headed for the lane, escorted by the soldiers. The packed vehicle could not hold them all, so Lou walked alongside while George drove. Kitty sat at her husband’s side; Matilda and the baby perched atop a mattress in the bed of the wagon. The five were followed by nine others, who had made an instant decision to join the escape.38

  They halted at the Big House and waited a moment for Matilda’s sister, Mary Ellen, to join them. She was Mary McGehee Farrington’s maidservant. As she exited the house with her two children, Mary Ellen spoke some parting words to her mistress: “Good-bye; I wish you good luck.” Mrs. Farrington replied angrily: “I wish you all the bad luck.” Mary Ellen ignored the remark and joined Lou while her children scrambled into the wagon beside Matilda.39

  The moon was only six days shy of full, so there was plenty of light for a night journey. The little band—now numbering nineteen, including the soldiers—followed the lane to the gate, turned onto the road, and moved off in the direction of Senatobia. In the rush to get away, few of the blacks had given a thought to clothing or provisions. Most were hatless and some, including Matilda and Mary Ellen, were barefoot. Only Kitty brought food, and fortunately she had enough for all.40

  Until they were out of the Como district, the fugitives could not rest easy. It was possible that the McGehees would sound the alarm, organize a posse, and try to overtake or ambush them. So they trudged along warily, the soldiers occasionally riding ahead to scout. They stopped just one time during the night, and then only because of an accident. As the wagon descended the steep bank of a stream, the mattress slid off into the water, taking Matilda, the baby, and Mary Ellen’s children with it. The four were unhurt, but the horses got spooked and grew balky. It was an hour before they could get the wagon moving again.41

  By the time the sun began to creep above the horizon, they had gone far enough to feel fairly safe. At that point, the soldiers said they must leave them; they had to hurry back to camp for morning roll call. But they assured the blacks that if the party had not arrived in Senatobia by the time roll call was finished, they would come back to see about them. Lou gave the two men the rest of their fee, and they trotted off.42

  The blacks arrived at the cavalry camp about nine in the morning. There they halted, contacted their soldier friends, made breakfast, and rested. Later that day they resumed the journey, having decided to make Memphis their destination. That night they camped along the road and on Tuesday plodded into the city. They were “a pitiful crowd to look at,” Lou recalled—filthy, exhausted, and hot, fanning themselves with palm leaves. An old black man who saw them was so moved that he ran into the road to greet them, exclaiming “Oh! here dey come, God bless ’em! Poor chil’en! they come fannin.”43

  As they neared the heart of the city, they realized it was the Fourth of July. People thronged the streets, blacks and whites, soldiers and civilians. Flags were everywhere—not the rebel banner that Lou had seen so often in the last four years, but the Stars and Stripes—and there were parades and bands playing. To the new arrivals from Panola, it was an unforgettable sight. It seemed almost as if the city had turned out to celebrate their escape from bondage.44

  Freedom: it was an inexpressibly exhilarating feeling. But at the same time, Lou and the others were apprehensive. What would they do now? As the festivities swirled around them, they talked things over and began to disperse, each to seek his or her own pa
th.45

  Lou scouted around and found a room to rent. It would be crowded, for Mary Ellen had chosen to stay with him and Matilda. The next day he went job-hunting. Perhaps he remembered how busy the hacks had been on election day; in any event, he quickly found work as a hack driver. His employer was certainly glad to have him, for Lou was an expert at the reins of a carriage and he knew his way around the city.46

  14. Memphis river front at the time of the Civil War

  In the days that followed, as he carried passengers here and there, Lou had a chance to visit every part of the city and talk to people and get a sense of what was going on. It was an exciting place to be, there was no doubt of that. He surely spent much of his time going up and down the busy street that led to the wharf. It was graded but still steep, a challenge to even the best driver. The scene down along the river was what really captivated visitors to Memphis. The city was the chief port between St. Louis and New Orleans, and rare was the steamboat that did not pay a visit on its way up or down. On any given day that summer one could see boats of all shapes and sizes moored along the wharf, rocking gently in the muddy water. Overshadowing the others were the great “floating palaces,” multitiered and gaily painted, with enormous paddle wheels and towering smokestacks. One could also see along the wharf dozens or even hundreds of cotton bales, stacked and awaiting shipment—last year’s crop, only now able to be shipped to market.47

  Something was doing at the wharf all the time, but the arrival of a boat triggered a particularly colorful flurry of activity. As the vessel put in, hucksters and hackmen would crowd around to proposition the debarking passengers, their voices competing with the calls of the deck hands and the shouted orders of the captain. Newsboys would jump aboard even before the gangplanks descended, then scurry among the passengers hawking the latest issue of the Memphis Bulletin or the Argus. Once the boat was secured, stevedores would lug 400-pound bales to the dockside and push them up one plank while passengers and luggage and freight descended on another. Sunset brought no cessation of activity: illumination was provided by lanterns hung on poles all along the wharf, and the bells and whistles of arriving and departing boats could be heard through the night.48

  When his work took him into the southern section of the city, Lou had a chance to size up the situation of his fellow freedmen. Here was concentrated the bulk of Memphis’s black population. Seven hundred or so, mostly women and children, resided in a camp on President’s Island that had been established by the army. It was the last one remaining of several “contraband camps” set up around Memphis during the war to care for fugitive slaves. But the majority of the city’s freedmen lived in rented rooms or abandoned buildings or shanties in what was now being called South Memphis. Here a true black urban community was in the making, something that did not exist—could not exist—in Memphis in the days of slavery. There were newly founded black churches, led by black ministers. There were black businesses, including stores and restaurants and barber shops. There were black fraternal organizations, such as the Sons of Ham. And there were aspiring black political leaders—men like Joseph Caldwell, a drayman, and John Brown, a barber—who were speaking publicly to the freedmen and any whites who would listen, proclaiming the message that simple freedom was not enough, that the former slaves must have civil rights and even the ballot.49

  Memphis’s black community glowed with optimism and a sense of expectation in that summer of 1865. These were, for the most part, men and women who had fled the plantations and refused to return, for they were determined that freedom would mean more than just hoeing some planter’s cotton for wages and taking orders from an overseer who likely as not still carried the same whip he wielded in the days of slavery. Their numbers were increasing daily, for the city seemed to offer not only protection from the tyranny of the planters and overseers but also opportunity. And yet, as Lou and anyone else who visited South Memphis could see, for most of the freedmen opportunity was proving elusive. Lou was lucky—he had skills beyond agricultural ones, and he had some money. Most of the ex-slaves in Memphis had neither, and they now sat in squalid hovels, many of them ragged and hungry and idle because there were nowhere near enough unskilled jobs in the city to accommodate them. For now they were willing to bide their time in the hope that something would turn up. So much depended on what the state and federal governments would do, on what kind of reconstruction the South was going to have. There were rumors that the plantations would be confiscated, broken up, and distributed to the freedmen so that they could become independent farmers. In the meantime, many spent their days drinking and gambling in the saloons that had sprung up in the South Memphis community. Some turned to begging or prostitution or thievery to make a living.50

  Another thing apparent to anyone who walked or rode the streets of Memphis that summer was the fierce resentment of many of the whites toward the freedmen. The Irish immigrants, who competed with the blacks for the available unskilled jobs, were the most openly hostile. In the recent election the Irish had pretty much taken control of the city government, and now the freedmen faced an unfriendly municipal authority. Mayor John Park was an Irishman, as were over half the aldermen and ninety percent of the policemen. The Irish resented not only the burgeoning population of freedmen in the city, but also the black U.S. soldiers stationed at nearby Fort Pickering, who were seen often on the streets.51

  Among the many others whose bitterness toward the freed blacks was apparent were the returned rebel soldiers. There were hundreds in the city that summer, many still wearing Confederate uniforms (shorn of brass buttons and military insignia, however, by order of the federal authorities), and a lot of them were as idle as some of the freedmen. They hung around sullenly on the street corners and in the saloons and hotel lounges, too cowed by the presence of the Yankee occupiers to start trouble, but glaring with hostility at every display of black freedom.52

  There were others in Memphis, however, who regarded themselves as friends of the blacks. Among these were a small corps of Northern missionaries, many of them women, who had dedicated their lives to the enlightenment of the former slaves. Most had come to the city during the war. They were sponsored by humanitarian organizations such as the American Missionary Association, headquartered in New York, and the Western Freedmen’s Aid Commission of Cincinnati. By the summer of 1865 missionaries were operating more than a dozen schools in Memphis where black children and adults were taught the three R’s.53

  Another who professed good will toward the freedmen had arrived in the city just one day after Lou and Matilda. He was a Union army general named Davis Tillson, who was assigned to head the Memphis office of the newly created Freedmen’s Bureau, a federal agency intended to aid the Southern blacks in their transition from slavery to freedom. The Freedmen’s Bureau superseded the army offices of freedmen’s affairs, such as Captain Walker’s, and possessed broad authority in all matters pertaining to the former slaves. General Tillson made it clear from the start that the blacks under his jurisdiction would have protection. “No person shall escape punishment,” he warned, “… who is guilty of wrong or injustice to the Freed people.” Within days of his arrival he called on Mayor Park to discuss the status of the city’s blacks. When he learned that under existing Tennessee law no black testimony could be accepted in court, Tillson set up a Freedmen’s Bureau court and ordered the city officials to turn over all civil and criminal cases involving blacks.54

  These white Northern friends of the black Memphians were well meaning and in many ways admirable men and women, idealistic and progressive. And yet, as Lou surely began to sense during those summer weeks, their vision of the black race and its future was in some ways at odds with that of the blacks themselves. The missionaries, for their part, were patronizing and paternalistic. They viewed the blacks as childlike and heathenish, cursed with barbarous customs and unseemly manners, and badly in need of some lessons in middle-class decorum and self-control. Acquiring these qualities, one of the missionaries wro
te, would “fit them to take care of themselves.”55

  General Tillson was likewise certain that the freedmen needed guidance. “Their ignorance,” he said, “… makes them insensible to their best interests.” They required the bureau’s help in order to understand “what freedom means.” He pronounced them deficient in the virtues of “neatness, thrift and industry,” and he banned the sale of liquor to them. Tillson disapproved especially of the large number of black Memphians who sat idle while planters were clamoring for their labor and offering decent wages. There could be only one explanation, he insisted, for their reluctance to return to the plantations: they were lazy. In August he came to a decision. Unemployed freedmen would be forced to leave the city and find work in the countryside.56

  Lou was in no immediate danger of expulsion for he was self-supporting. He was, in fact, making a pretty good living by the standards of black Memphis. Nevertheless, he was restless. Memphis was stifling, and not only because of the summer heat. Here, he was now convinced, his freedom could not be fully realized; and he knew that no other place in the South would offer any better opportunities. He must go north. He was not sure what he would find there, but he sensed that “somehow … it would be better for us.”57

  What finally spurred him to move on was a chance encounter with a man who had knowledge of Matilda’s mother. Matilda had not seen her since the day in 1855 when they were separated in a Memphis slave market. After gaining freedom, the man said, she had gone to Cincinnati; but that was all he knew. Lou, Matilda, and Mary Ellen talked it over and concluded that even though the chance of finding her was slim, it was worth a try. They would go to Cincinnati.58