A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  John stretched out on a table in the waiting room and tried to sleep, but could not. After a while he went outside to the platform. For a long time he paced back and forth along its length, melancholy and pensive. He thought about his parents in Greene County. He had not seen them in over a year and wondered when he would see them again. He thought about his commitment to Christ. That brought a measure of comfort, for, as he reminded himself, no matter how far from home he journeyed, he would always have “one friend who never forsakes those who do his will.” Mostly, though, he thought about Tennie.10

  The noise of the approaching train interrupted his reverie. He looked down the track and saw the locomotive, with its huge headlight, “glaring like a demon through the darkness.” Quickly the adults roused the children and gathered the luggage. As the train came to a stop, hissing and screeching, John took his valise in one hand and the littlest child in the other. Stepping up onto the end platform of one of the passenger cars, he squeezed through the door, made his way down the center aisle, and found a seat. The others climbed aboard, too, and a few moments later the conductor clanged the brass bell and the train moved out.11

  South and west they headed, along the track of the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad. Barely had they stowed their bags and gotten the youngsters settled when the train stopped at Athens, ten miles from Sweetwater. John had visited this town once or twice in the past to peddle the cigars he and Uncle Allen had made. When the train pulled out and left Athens behind, continuing on its southwesterly route, he realized that he was now farther from home than he had ever been.12

  The interior of the long low-ceilinged car in which he rode was dimly illuminated by a lamp. There was nothing to be seen from the windows, for the night was moonless and pitch-black. John sat silently, rocking ever so slightly with the motion of the train and listening to the iron wheels clatter rhythmically over the rails.13

  After a while, Mullens, who was sitting beside him, decided he needed cheering up. “Come John,” he said, “don’t be grievin[g] about that sweet heart a[l]ready; stir up and don’t be so drowsy.”

  John was in no mood for banter. “It is true I feel gloomy,” he replied stiffly, “but as for me being grieving, I believe you are mistaken.”

  “Well stir your stump,” Mullens chirped, “and let’s talk about them devils up in Green[e] County.”

  “Up in Green[e] County?”

  “Yes,” said Mullens, “them we’re running from.”

  Now John began to get very annoyed. He no more wanted to talk about the unionist gang than about Tennie. He wished Mullens would shut up. “For my part,” he said sharply, “I am not running from any devils as I know of.”

  Mullens persisted jovially. “Well it looks mighty like it the way this old train jogs along; it’s more like flying.”

  To this John declined to reply. Mullens finally gave up and eventually dozed off, leaving John alone with his thoughts.14

  He was still awake and brooding when the eastern sky began to brighten with the rising sun. It was around 5:30 and the train was approaching Chattanooga. To the left lay Missionary Ridge and ahead, beyond the city, towered Lookout Mountain. These were the renowned battlefields where, in November 1863, Ulysses S. Grant’s forces had dealt smashing blows to the rebel Army of Tennessee, breaking its siege of the city, sending it reeling back into Georgia, and opening the way for Sherman’s later campaign against Atlanta. Chattanooga had remained an important Union army post from that time until the end of the war, and it was even now garrisoned by Yankee troops. It had also become a haven for slaves who had deserted their masters in the wake of Sherman’s army. Thousands still resided in the city or in a settlement they had established nearby known as Contraband.15

  16. Chattanooga at the time of the Civil War. Lookout Mountain looms in the distance.

  At the Chattanooga depot, John and his party collected their baggage and got off the train. They would have to change to another to continue on their way, and it was not scheduled to leave for an hour. As he waited, John gazed around the depot. He was revolted by what he saw. Not only was the place crowded and noisy and disorderly, but it was also teeming with blacks. He had seen few or none since his stay in Knoxville back in January, and he would just as soon never see any again.16

  He heard voices raised in anger not far from where he stood. Turning to look, he saw a white man and a black man arguing. In a moment they were pummeling one another. To John’s disgust, the black got the better of the white and thrashed him. Before that fight was over, another broke out nearby. “[T]his did not concern me,” John remarked, “as it was between two negroes.”17

  There was worse to come. Not thirty feet away he saw “two big, rusty negroes” in U.S. army uniforms. They were members of the Yankee garrison, assigned to patrol the depot. As John watched, the soldiers moved in to arrest a white man for some infraction. He resisted, but to no avail. “[G]athering him like dogs would a sheep,” John wrote, “one by each arm, they drug him off to prison,” both cursing profanely the whole time. John boiled with anger. “O how I wanted to shoot them down, like an old hunter would a panther.” He was glad when the train whistle blew, signaling the passengers to board. “I longed to be off from this place where negro equality was being [en]forced so rigidly.”18

  The train chugged westward, skirting the base of Lookout Mountain, and traveled twenty miles or so before dipping southward into Alabama. John and his companions marveled at the scenery along this stretch. In places the track was cut right into a mountainside. On one hand would be a nearly perpendicular wall of rock hundreds of feet high, and on the other a ravine equally deep, into which it seemed the careening locomotive might tumble at any moment.19

  Nearing Bridgeport, the train crossed the Tennessee River on a long wooden trestle. After a breakfast stop in Stevenson, it headed north, now on the track of the Nashville & Chattanooga Railroad, and soon reentered Tennessee. Everywhere along this route were reminders that it had been one of the Union army’s vital lifelines in subduing the Confederacy. At frequent intervals stood stout blockhouses and redoubts, empty now of Yankee soldiers and cannons but still imposing.20

  By noon the train had passed through the rugged middle Tennessee highlands and into the fertile lowlands. This was a world far different from what John had known in east Tennessee. It was a world of great plantations and great wealth—or had been, before the war. Remnants of it survived: from his car window John saw stately mansions surrounded by broad, level fields of ripe cotton; in the fields, gangs of black men and women were at work. But he saw, too, large stretches of abandoned land, fenceless and overgrown, and the charred ruins of houses and barns. Middle Tennessee had been smitten harder by the hand of war than almost any other region of the South, and the scars would be long in healing.21

  The train stopped in Murfreesboro in midafternoon but was soon on its way again. Just north of the town John saw more vestiges of war. An immense circular earthwork was located here—Fortress Rosecrans, built during the latter part of the conflict by the Yankee occupation forces. Fully a mile across and three in circumference, it was big enough to hold an army. Within it, and for a thousand yards around it, every tree had been cut down. John got a close-up view of this great ugly sore upon the land, for the railroad track cut directly through it.22

  Not far beyond the fortress, the train passed the Stones River battlefield where, in the winter of 1862–1863, one of the war’s bloodiest engagements was fought. Evidence of its ferocity was visible still: tree trunks mutilated by Minié balls and shells, and row upon row of graves. “What a scene of death and bloodshed must have been here,” John thought. He was especially moved at the sight of the final resting places “of those who had bravely fought in both armies; thousands of them buried here far from home and friends with only a small board to tell where they lay and many not even that.” He was reminded that, but for the grace of God, he himself might be lying in such a grave.23

  It was about five o’clock
when the train rolled into the Nashville & Chattanooga depot on the south side of Nashville. Now they would have to change trains again, and to do so they must get to the city’s north side, where the Louisville & Nashville depot was located. Stepping down from their car, they found themselves in the midst of a crowd even denser and unrulier than that in Chattanooga. Hurrying passengers, importuning hack drivers, shiftless loafers, and others of all sorts, black and white, jostled for room on the platform and inside the depot.24

  Pushing their way through the mob to the street, John and the others boarded a big mule-drawn omnibus for the crosstown trip. As the vehicle wended its way along the streets, John gazed around in awe. Nashville was by far the biggest city he had ever seen. It had been a sizable place even before the war, but after the Yankees captured it and made it a primary base of operations, the population mushroomed. Even with the end of the war and the demobilization of the Union army, the military presence in Nashville remained strong. It seemed that wherever one looked there was an army barracks, hospital, quartermaster depot, or repair shop, and soldiers were everywhere, many of them black. No section of the city, however, saw more military activity than Smoky Row, the rowdy brothel district near the river. During the war it had achieved legendary status among Union soldiers, who patronized it by the thousands, and it was still going strong. Besides dozens of whorehouses, it boasted a large proportion of Nashville’s four hundred saloons.25

  On the city’s highest hill stood the massive, domed state capitol, which the Northern occupiers had turned into a citadel bristling with cannons, but which now was stripped of armament and back in the hands of the state government. As the omnibus trundled past it, John reflected bitterly on Tennessee’s political situation. A few minutes later he caught sight of the state penitentiary. “My only wish was that … all fit subjects in the state was in it; and that Brownlow the most base of all could be … transfer[r]ed from the State mansion to it. If this was done I felt that I could return home and live among friends at peace.” Then the graves he had seen earlier in the day came to his mind, and he was seized by a premonition: “som[e]thing within told me that those extensive graveyards was not yet complete, and that there must yet be another conflict to add to their dimensions, before justice was given to all.”26

  When the omnibus halted at the Louisville & Nashville depot, John and the others got out. The scene inside was just as chaotic as at the Nashville & Chattanooga depot, but they would not have to endure it long, for the train to Louisville was to leave at 6:45. Mingling with the other sounds here were the cries of newsboys hawking the Nashville Daily Press and Times, which many passengers bought because it printed the Louisville & Nashville timetable every day. Those who purchased a copy that day, and who had the time and the inclination to peruse the classified advertisements, read this poignant notice, one of many such to be seen in Southern newspapers in the postwar months:

  $200 REWARD

  During the year 1849, Thomas Sample carried away from this city as his slaves, my daughter Polly and son George Washington, to the State of Mississippi, and subsequently to Texas, and when last heard from they were in Lagrange, Texas. I will give $100 each for them to any person who will assist them or either of them to get to Nashville, or get word to me of their whereabouts, if they are alive. Any information concerning them left in this city at my place, so that I can get it, will be liberally rewarded.

  Ben East27

  It was dark when the train steamed out of the station, carrying John and his companions northward. The others were soon asleep, but he remained wakeful and pensive. Not until the train was well into Kentucky did he finally doze off. He awoke at a little after five in the morning, and a few minutes later the Louisville depot came into view. “Here as usual we found it difficult to get out of the train for ‘nig[g]ers.’ … [T]hey had forgot how to get out of the way of white people.” Another omnibus ride brought the travelers to the south bank of the Ohio River, where a ferry was available to take them to the other side. The sun was well up when John stepped off the ferry in Jeffersonville, Indiana, setting foot for the first time on Northern soil.28

  There was a half-hour wait for the train to Indianapolis, and John spent it gazing back across the river at Louisville, wondering when he would see the South again. At boarding time, the party decided, for the children’s sake, to sit in the ladies’ car, where smoking, spitting, and unseemly behavior were prohibited. The train had just set out when, as John put it, “I was insulted for the first time on the trip.”29

  It happened that he was wearing a gray suit that resembled a Confederate uniform. He had not previously given it a thought, but now he noticed that some of the other passengers were staring at him unpleasantly, and he soon guessed the cause. Stubbornly he decided to ignore them. “I had a blue suit in my vali[s]e which wo[ul]d have pleased them better, but I did not feel disposed to chang[e] uniform merely to gratify them.”30

  An assistant conductor entered the car, took a hard look at John’s outfit, and confronted him officiously:

  “Have you a wife in here?” he asked.

  John wanted to reply that that was none of his business, but instead merely said “No sir I hav’nt.”

  “Well what are you doing in the ladies’ coach?”

  “I have some little girls here to take care of.”

  “Where is their parents?”

  “There they are.”

  “Well give them to their parents, and you get to another coach.”

  “I have a right to stay here and intend to do it.”

  “Well get out of here, or I’ll put you out.”31

  Rather than cause a scene, John left the car and went to another. He sat there stewing, determined not to let this “impertinent yankee” get the better of him. When the senior conductor came by, John told him what had happened and said he was going back to the ladies’ car. The conductor said it was all right with him.32

  Back in the ladies’ car, he found that a man had taken his place. “I ordered him out of my seat which he hesitatingly obeyed.” When the assistant conductor came through again, he gave John a “sour look … but said nothing.” John then settled back in his seat, “smartly elevated at the thought of outwit[t]ing a yankee for once.”33

  The train continued northward. The landscape John saw now was quite unlike anything he was accustomed to, and he scrutinized it skeptically. “It seemed to be to[o] low and flat, to be healthy.” Indianapolis, which the train reached in the early afternoon, likewise failed to impress him. It “is a large city,” he wrote, “but I was not pleased with its appearance.” Compounding the city’s ugliness, in his eyes, was its reputation as a hotbed of radical Republicanism. He had nothing but contempt for “such an aboli[t]ion ‘hole.’”34

  North of Indianapolis, two tracks ran side by side for a distance, and here John and his fellow travelers had some excitement. Their train left the city simultaneously with another on the parallel track and, as John recalled,

  This gave occasion for a very nice race across the flat prairie. Off both trains went at full spe[e]d for several miles[;] it was hard to tell which was going to be winner. The passengers of both trains [were] poking themselves half out of the windows, yelling, [w]hooping and waving their hats, hollowing at the top of their voices for their engineer to “put on more steam.” Citizens were flying from their dwellings to the front yards to see the race.

  At last John’s train slowed, conceding victory to its rival.35

  Two and a half hours after nightfall the travelers reached the southern tip of Lake Michigan, whose shoreline the train then followed toward Chicago. John found the sight breathtaking. Ships glided back and forth over the vast stretch of water, their lanterns visible for miles through the darkness. Most spectacular were the great, multitiered passenger steamboats, their many windows ablaze with light. To John they looked like “larg[e] and fine mansion[s] floating on the water’s s[u]rface.”36

  It was midnight when they got to Chicago. At f
irst John was disappointed that he would not see the city by day, but he felt differently when he saw that the streets were brightly illuminated by gas lamps and still pulsing with activity. For the next hour or two he walked the streets enthralled. The city struck him as a place of enormous contrasts: on the one hand there was “beauty and magnificence”; on the other, “all kinds of wickedness.” Saloons were everywhere, and passing them he heard from within “the most profane epithets.” In the space of a few blocks he observed “every mode of swindling which could be thought of or invented.… [G]ambling tables were to be seen surround[ed] by groups of profligate and drunken men. Occasionally the police would stroll through the streets picking up such as they could catch.”37

  From Chicago they traveled westward through the heart of the Illinois prairie. It was after dark on September 21 when they arrived at a village on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Leaving the train, they boarded a ferry that took them across to Burlington, Iowa. There they secured lodging at a hotel, allowing them at last to catch up on their sleep. The next day they resumed their westward train journey, after saying good-bye to Mullens, who was setting out in a different direction to seek his fortune.38

  Late that night they arrived in Oskaloosa, Iowa, where Uncle Jim intended to make his new home. “Thus ended our long and toilsome journey of twelve hundred miles,” John wrote, “after a lapse of exactly four days, or 96 hours, after leaving Sweetwater.”39

  It took them some time to get settled. Uncle Jim hunted around for a farm to rent, had no luck, and soon moved on to Springfield, twenty miles away in Keokuk County, where he found what he was looking for. Meanwhile, John hired out as a laborer and worked for several farmers around Oskaloosa. After a few weeks, however, he joined Uncle Jim and his family in Springfield.40