A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  Before they left Memphis, they had a gratifying reunion with their soldier friends. The two troopers had come to the city on some business and went out of their way to hunt up Lou. They were glad to learn that he and the others were doing well. Lou could hardly express his gratitude for what the two men had done back in Panola. He regarded them as heroes. Only after they said farewell did he realize that he had never learned their names.59

  It was mid-August when Lou and the rest of the family packed up their things, headed down to the wharf, and booked passage on a steamboat to Cincinnati. The boat took them northward up the Mississippi and then, at Cairo, turned northeastward. As they made their way up the Ohio, Lou could look starboard and see the South he was leaving; on the port side was the North, and his future.60

  The boat docked in Cincinnati. Lou and the others made their way from the wharf to the heart of the huge city, gazing around in awe and trepidation. It was an overwhelming place, and they were utter strangers on a nearly hopeless quest. The only thing to do was to start asking around. They approached one black person after another, Matilda giving her mother’s name and description. Incredibly, one man they questioned said that he knew such a woman, and he gave directions to the house where she boarded. When they reached the place, they knocked on the door, and a moment later Matilda and Mary Ellen were joyfully embracing the mother they had not seen for ten years.61

  SAMUEL AGNEW

  The early days of summer found Sam Agnew hard at work in his poppy patch, intent and hopeful. The time had come to see if his countless hours of labor in the patch during the winter and spring would be rewarded. For months he had battled weeds, fended off invading livestock, repaired damage from torrential rains, hauled water from the creek during dry spells, and spread swamp mud and cotton seed as fertilizer. Now the plants were flowering, the pink blooms clashing wildly with the green expanses of corn and cotton that surrounded the patch. On the first day of June, Sam counted 164 blooms, and more appeared in the days thereafter. Within each bloom was a hard little green capsule, from which the precious opium had to be drawn.1

  Moving down the rows of poppies on his knees, Sam painstakingly scarified each capsule by slicing lightly into it with a blade. He did this almost every evening throughout June, Sundays excepted. In the mornings he would go down the rows again, carefully gathering the gummy opium that had seeped from the cuts overnight. Capsules whose wounds had healed were rescarified until nothing more came forth. “It is a wearisome business,” Sam decided, “tedious and slow.”2

  It was also, in the end, a disappointing business. “The yield is small,” Sam admitted, “—smaller than I anticipated.” When the last drop of juice had been wrung from the poppies and dried, his father, Enoch, weighed the entire harvest on his apothecary scales. It came to barely more than an ounce. Sam recorded this tersely in his diary and never mentioned poppies again.3

  Besides keeping him tired and sore, his labors among the poppies hindered his news-gathering, for from the patch he could not see the road. Still, by chatting with passers-by whenever he was back at the house, by pumping acquaintances for information when he ran errands off the plantation, and by poring over every newspaper he could get, he picked up a good deal of news and rumor. But neither he nor anybody else in Tippah County really knew what was going on. No less than the last weeks of spring, the first weeks of summer were a time of confusion, uncertainty, and trepidation.4

  The threat of famine, for one thing, continued to haunt the county. The Agnews were better off than many: no one on their plantation, white or black, was starving. But the farm animals were on short rations and had been for some time. On June 11 Sam recorded another incident involving the mule Peter, who in May had fallen and thrown him. This time Peter got mired in muck when he stepped into a pond. Too weak to extricate himself, he had to be pulled out. “Pa’s mules,” Sam wrote, “are broke down by hard work and nothing to eat.”5

  The grain shortage in the community could not be remedied anytime soon. During the spring the Agnews and their neighbors had managed to get some corn from the counties to the south, but those sources were now depleted; one of the neighbors went down in the latter part of June to see what he could buy but returned empty-handed. The Yankee occupation forces were distributing corn to needy people at certain points in northeastern Mississippi—corn from Confederate government depots, captured at war’s end—but none was being doled out in Sam’s vicinity. With the war over, military restrictions on trade had ended, and more and more wagons could be seen heading north to Tennessee; but getting to La Grange or Memphis, the nearest Tennessee trade centers, meant a very long trek on very bad roads, and the amount of goods that could be hauled back and forth was limited. The winter wheat was ready for harvesting by early June, but none of the farmers had planted many acres in wheat; everybody was counting on the corn crop, which would not ripen until the fall—and which was now stunted and unpromising, hurt by lack of rain. Sam, like others in his community, was quite concerned. “[W]hat we are to do for bread,” he wrote, “is more than I can tell.”6

  The political situation, too, was troubling. The county government was still in a state of suspension. Until it could be revived, roads and bridges would go unrepaired, the poor would go unfed, and the robbers and horse thieves who infested the county would go unprosecuted. The fate of the county government depended on the state government, likewise suspended since the war’s end. The fate of the state government depended, in turn, on what the federal government would do. And so all eyes turned toward Washington, where the new president was formulating a policy of reconstruction.

  Sam learned from a newspaper on June 7 that President Johnson had recently made his first major pronouncement on the subject. The Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon granted political absolution to those who had supported the Confederacy. They had only to take an oath pledging their allegiance to the United States and their acceptance of emancipation in order to avoid punishment for their “treason.” However, there were some rebels not included in this general amnesty. Leading Confederate military and civil officials were required to apply to the president for a special pardon, as were a few other categories of Southerners—among them anyone who owned taxable property worth over $20,000. That provision was clearly aimed at the planters, a class whom Johnson despised and whom he blamed for the breakup of the Union. This was something the Agnews would have to reckon with: before the war, Enoch had listed the value of his plantation as $23,500.7

  On June 13 Johnson set in motion the reconstruction of Mississippi by appointing a provisional governor, William L. Sharkey, whose job was to see that a state constitutional convention was held and a new state government set up. This promised an early end to military rule and the speedy revival of local government. Sam and his fellow citizens were pleased by this development but remained apprehensive about the South’s future. The U.S. Congress had yet to be heard from on the matter of reconstruction, for it had adjourned in March and would not convene again until December. It was heavily dominated by Northern Republicans, many of them members of the radical faction who wanted to punish the rebellious South.8

  Like many others that summer, Sam closely followed newspaper reports about Jefferson Davis, for the fate of the Confederate president might well be a harbinger of things to come. Davis had fled Richmond when the city fell and had been captured by federal troops in Georgia on May 10. “I have long looked upon [him] as a good, able man,” Sam commented on learning of his capture, “but he is unfortunate for in the hands of his enemies he will certainly hang.” Rumors in early June seemed to confirm Sam’s prediction. “I hope it is not so,” he wrote. “If Davis is executed it will always be a foul blot on the escutcheon of the United States.” As it turned out, the rebel leader was not summarily hanged, but his treatment was hardly lenient: he was imprisoned in a dank cell in an army fortress and shackled in leg irons. Sam was appalled by this news, and by the report that Davis was to be tried not only for treason but als
o for complicity in Lincoln’s assassination.9

  Another matter of great concern as summer began was what to do about the blacks—the freedmen, as Sam was now starting to call them. Beyond the fact that they were no longer slaves, nothing was certain. Those on the Agnew place continued to work, but only as they saw fit. Most of the necessary chores were getting done, including harvesting the wheat, tending the livestock, and cultivating the corn and cotton. But they were not getting done with anything like the efficiency of the old days, for the blacks could only be cajoled now, not commanded.10

  The other thing Sam observed about the blacks, besides their disinclination to work like slaves, was their restlessness and sense of expectancy. They apparently had gotten the notion that the Yankees were going to see that they were rewarded for their years of unrequited toil. They seemed reluctant to settle down until they saw what the future held.11

  Sam had an interesting encounter that set him to thinking about this. On June 9 a squad of Yankee cavalrymen came by the house and stopped at the front gate, and he went out to greet them. It struck him as a notable occasion—“the first time for me to meet and talk with wild Yankees since the war began.” Northern troops had come by several times during the war, of course, but Sam had always hidden in the woods on those occasions. Now there was no reason to hide, and he was curious about his former enemies. As it happened, these soldiers had fought in the battle there the previous June, so they and Sam found much to talk about.12

  As they chatted, Sam noticed that “The negroes left the field and came flocking to the house,” eager to see what the Yankees had to offer. The troopers ignored them, however, and soon mounted up and rode off. Sam got a certain satisfaction from this. “In my opinion,” he wrote, the blacks “were sorely disappointed that nothing was done for them.”13

  If June 1865 was a time of uncertainty and anxiety for Sam and his neighbors, it was also in some respects a time of joy. For one thing, families were still welcoming home sons and brothers and fathers who wore the Confederate gray. These latest returnees were mostly men who had been in Northern prison camps when the war ended; the Yankees had finally released them and made arrangements to transport them south. Sam was pleased to see many friends and loved ones among them, especially his young cousin John D. Agnew. John had been in the family’s prayers for a long time. In 1861, just turned twenty, he had enlisted in the 32nd Mississippi Infantry, a regiment that went on to fight in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. Wounded by an exploding shell at Chickamauga in September 1863, he had recovered and returned to his unit, only to be captured near Atlanta in July 1864. Since then he had been imprisoned at Camp Douglas in Chicago. Released on June 17, he arrived home nine days later. “I was rejoiced to meet him,” wrote Sam.14

  Sam rejoiced, too, at the large congregations that now greeted him on his preaching rounds. Every Sunday he saw new faces, as well as familiar faces long missing. When he rode to the Corders’ home on June 4, he found the place packed with the biggest crowd he had ever seen there. Anticipating an even bigger turnout the next time he came, some members of the congregation talked of moving the meeting outdoors and building a brush arbor for shelter. Sure enough, when Sam returned four weeks later, an arbor was in place. But the crowd was so large that not all could find seats in the shade. Sam was deeply gratified that his words were reaching so many, and he gave thanks to God.15

  Sam’s domestic circle, too, was a source of joy. Little Buddy, born in early March, had been sick during the spring, forcing Sam and Nannie to postpone his baptism. But now he was well, and on Sunday morning, June 18, his parents bundled him up, mounted mules, and carried him three miles through a light rain to Bethany Church. Sam’s mentor, Uncle Young—James L. Young, the pastor of Bethany—performed the rite. Buddy was christened Enoch David, in honor of Sam’s father.16

  This was the first time Nannie had been off the plantation since early in her pregnancy. In the weeks that followed, she went on more outings, glad for the opportunity to catch up on neighborly visiting. When her brother William came up from Starkville to see her, they rode over to Uncle Young’s house and spent the night. On another occasion she and Sam spent the night with Sam’s widowed aunt Rilla, John D. Agnew’s mother. Nannie always brought Buddy along on these excursions, but he was getting so big now that she asked her companions to take turns carrying him. By the time he was four months old, Buddy weighed twenty-three and a half pounds—only a pound and a half less than his father had weighed at that age, as Sam proudly noted in his diary. Buddy was teething by this time, too, which made for some restless nights for him and his parents.17

  By July the weather had turned sultry, and life in Tippah County assumed its customary summer pace—slower, more languid. Only the robbers and thieves showed no sign of listlessness: their depredations continued unabated. With civil law enforcement still suspended and the Yankee occupation forces apparently unwilling or unable to restore order, some of the men of the community talked of forming, as Sam put it, a “secret organization to repress thieving.” On July 14 a meeting was held in a neighbor’s home, a vigilante company of thirty men was organized, and a captain and lieutenant were elected. Sam’s father attended the meeting. Sam did not, but he gave the company his blessing: “I hope it will do good.”18

  The vigilantes did not ride for long. On the last day of July, local officials convened in Ripley and revived the Police Board, the county’s administrative body. Among the first actions taken by the resurrected board was ordering the sheriff to see that the county jail was repaired and made ready to receive prisoners. In the weeks following, the sheriff went after lawbreakers and Tippah County’s crime wave gradually subsided. At its next meeting, in August, the board took the first steps toward getting the county’s roads and bridges repaired.19

  The revival of county government came at the behest of Provisional Governor Sharkey in Jackson, who on July 1 proclaimed that persons holding local office in the state when the war ended could temporarily resume their duties after taking the amnesty oath prescribed by President Johnson. The same day he issued that proclamation, Sharkey began the restoration of state government by ordering an election for delegates to a convention that would revise the state’s constitution and take other necessary steps.20

  The election was scheduled for Monday, August 7. On that day, Sam mounted a mule and rode to the designated polling place for his precinct. Before he could cast his ballot, he had to take the amnesty oath. He transcribed it word for word in his diary that night:

  I, Samuel A. Agnew, do solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Union of States thereunder, and that I will in like manner abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of Slaves. So help me God.

  “I did not fancy the latter part of this oath much,” he added.21

  Tippah County was entitled to four delegates, and there being only four candidates, Sam voted for all of them. A week later, the convention began its work in Jackson. By the time it adjourned on August 24, it had amended the state constitution to recognize the end of slavery, had declared null and void the state’s 1861 ordinance of secession, and had set October 2 as the date for the election of state and local officials. Sam closely followed the convention’s proceedings in the newspapers, and looked forward to the reestablishment of Mississippi’s government.22

  If the political uncertainty that had clouded the late spring and early summer months was dissipating a bit, the food problem was not. By July Sam was convinced that a crisis was at hand. The animals on the Agnew plantation were growing more and more feeble; some of them, Sam noted, “are so weak that when they get down they can’t get up.” And it was not just the animals that he worried about now: the Agnews themselves were running short of food. The wheat crop was very disappointing. Enoch reported in early July, after
it had all been gathered, that it was “not near enough” to meet the family’s needs. At the same time, the Agnews’ supply of bacon ran out, and Enoch was forced to call on neighbors for a loan. No one in the community had much of anything to spare, however. Sam’s uncle, Joseph Agnew, for one, had very nearly emptied his larder by July and was actually facing the prospect of hunger.23

  The only thing the Agnews could see to do for now was to go to Tennessee and buy provisions. Enoch had two bales of cotton on hand that he could sell there. On the evening of July 17, Sam helped him load the bales into a wagon. At nine the next morning, Enoch set out for Memphis, more than ninety miles away. His black foreman, Wiley, drove the wagon, and Sam’s fourteen-year-old brother, Erskine, went along for the ride. If the roads stayed dry and the mules held up, they could make it to Memphis in four days.24

  It was after dark on the twenty-eighth when the wagon pulled into the yard of the Agnew plantation, filled with provisions for the family and for a few of the neighbors who had asked Enoch to buy some things for them. Enoch had gotten thirty-four cents a pound for one of his bales and thirty-eight for the other—$300 or so in total. His purchases would keep the family and the hands supplied for a while, perhaps until the fall harvest.25

  The question now was whether that harvest would prove adequate. The rainfall shortage that had plagued the crops in spring continued through the summer. Hardly a drop of rain fell on the Agnew plantation between July 18 and August 11. Toward the end of summer some showers came, but Sam was afraid they might be “too late to do [the] corn much good.” The crop was “badly injured” and the yield would probably be light.26

  Drought was not the only problem threatening the harvest. A sickness of some kind was killing the Agnews’ mules. It was an ailment that Sam and Enoch had never seen before, and they were perplexed by it. It began with a large swelling on the animal’s jaw or near its ear, which sometimes discharged a fluid. Whether the mules’ weakness exacerbated this affliction was uncertain; in any event, it was quite deadly. The Agnews lost three mules in the space of two weeks. This meant three fewer animals available for the plowing necessary to cultivate the corn and cotton, and three fewer to haul the harvested crops in the fall.27