A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  What really drew John to that village was not the prospect of being with kinfolk but of going to school. As small as it was—John guessed there were not more than 500 inhabitants—Springfield nevertheless boasted a fine public high school. Hungry for more education, he enrolled in November and threw himself into his studies energetically. Among the courses he took were algebra, composition, elocution, and dictation. “I don’t think ever a poor fellow studied harder than I did,” he recalled. “Midnight generally found me with book in hand.” He boarded at Uncle Jim’s, a quarter-mile from the school, earning his keep by chopping firewood and doing other chores around the farm. He rarely missed class and never fell behind in the lessons.41

  Springfield also boasted a literary and debating society that met each Friday night. John attended a meeting soon after his arrival and decided “It was a good institution, well calculated to make an orat[o]r of a young man if there was any such trait about him.” He joined at the next meeting and a week later got his first experience of formal debate, taking the floor to argue in favor of knowledge over wealth as “the greatest influence” in society. The following week the question was “Which is the greatest man? Gen. Grant or Gen. Sherman?” John volunteered to take Grant’s side—somewhat reluctantly, “not being a lover of either of the ‘great men.’” Leaving it to his two teammates to praise Grant, he lit into Sherman. That general’s famous march through Georgia and the Carolinas, proclaimed John, exemplified nothing better than “the bloody and detestable code of the savage.… Men [were] shot down, women [were] insulted and abused, depredations committed contrary to all rules of civilized warfare.… I ask, in the name of God, what honor can you tie on behind this degraded man?” When the debate concluded and the audience declared the winning team, John felt proud. “The unanimous voice of the house … was, ‘hurra[h] for Gen. Grant.’”42

  John’s developing taste for argumentation found another outlet in religion. There were two churches in Springfield. One was Methodist, and John joined it soon after he arrived. The other was Campbellite and, as John soon learned, its members were waging a campaign to win souls away from his church. They proselytized aggressively, with some success, for they were well informed on doctrine and could out-argue most of the Methodists. John decided to answer their challenge. He borrowed some books from his minister to brush up on Methodism and started attending the meetings of the Campbellites to learn where they stood. Seeing him in their church, they thought they might be gaining a convert, but, as John wrote, “The more I heard them preach the further I got from their doctrine.” He was especially put off by their emphasis on baptism, a ritual they insisted on performing even when the creeks and ponds were icy: “This was more faith in water than I could muster,” he remarked. Before long he was taking on the Campbellite minister himself in lengthy, animated private discussions, contradicting him point by point.43

  Rarely did John encounter any hostility on account of his Confederate service. While he made no secret of it, neither did he boast of it, and he kept his sentiments on current political affairs mostly to himself. His rule in these matters was “to attend to my own business and let every body else alone as near as possible.” Finding that this was so, the citizens of Springfield responded in kind. Now and then, especially when wearing his gray suit, he would notice people staring at him and whispering among themselves; and once he overheard some boys snickering behind his back about the “Rebel” in their village. But generally the people accepted him. For his part, he came to like these Iowa Yankees pretty well—especially after he realized they were not all Republicans, much less radicals. There were many “good hearted clever people” here, he decided, and in no time at all he had a number of friends.44

  He never felt, however, that he was one of them. In fact, the longer he stayed in Springfield, the more he was struck by how different these Northerners were from him and his fellow Southerners. It was not just their politics and accents, he noticed, but also their manners and character. For one thing, there was the brusque way they addressed strangers, so unlike the courteousness that prevailed in the South. “The first I noticed of this was in Indiana,” John wrote, “when the train conduct[o]r spoke so abruptly to me as if I was a dog. I afterward found that this … was nothing uncommon amongst Northern people.” Responding politely to such rudeness got him nowhere, he found. “I soon learned how to turn the cold shoulder too and others said I was going to make a ‘good yankee’ before a year.”45

  Even those who were not strangers to him often displayed an aloofness that John found puzzling. “You might meet them in the road 40 times a day, or pass their house I don’t care how close, they would never salute or speak to you.… I always liked to see a man tend to his own business, but they attend to it to[o] close.” He was even more perplexed by the lack of visiting and meal-sharing. “I have known families to live there one year and even more, and there had never been one of their neighbors in their house. Ev[e]ry family has its own neighbors they visit and revisit, but never add new neighbors to their circle. Two or three neighbors are as many as any of them want.” Furthermore, “If a neighbor comes in about dining time or while they are dining, they are but seldom asked to eat, nor do they expect to be asked.… A stranger is never invited to eat.”46

  It was the storekeepers who really irritated him. Instead of simply stating the price of an item and letting the customer take it or leave it, they would name a wildly inflated price and then expect the customer to dicker. “If they saw [that] you would not give their price they would begin to fall, but you could never get them in sight of cost. They would lie all the time and offer to swear to every word they said.… [T]hey think lying and cheating is honorable.” John learned their tricks, however, and was soon haggling as shrewdly as any Yankee.47

  There were two Northern traits he found admirable. One was the willingness to support a good public school system. Although he got tired of hearing them “laughing and making sport of the ignorance of the South,” which they did frequently, he had to admit that “as a general thing the Northern people is the best educated.”48

  The other thing he admired was that Northerners, at least those he lived among, “do not drink so much ardent spirits. A drunkard is looked down upon, and is almost drum[m]ed out of society. It should be looked upon in this way in all States.” John himself had not touched liquor in more than a year and had pledged never to do so again. “It is one of the most debasing practices a man could engage in. It makes of him a slave.”49

  The one thing he could not get used to in Iowa was the weather. “The cold Northwestern winds were very disagreeable, and some mornings I found it very hard to face them going to School.” A snowfall came in late October, far earlier than he was accustomed to, and others came frequently thereafter. The snow always remained on the ground for days or weeks, for the sun was no match for the cold.50

  In mid-December a freezing rain left everything thickly coated with ice for many days. John was dazzled by the stark beauty of the scene—“The prairies were like a vast Ocean covered with ice,” he wrote—but he found himself almost immobilized. The younger people of the village simply strapped on their skates and went about their business, but John did not know how to skate and feared that if he tried, he would break his neck. He affixed metal cleats to his boot heels as the older folk did, but still had trouble getting around. The first time he slipped and fell, he hit his head hard on the ice and skinned one side of his face from ear to chin.51

  As busy as he was in the last weeks of the year, his thoughts still turned frequently to home. He missed his family and ached with longing for Tennie. Iowa was not a bad place, all things considered, he thought, but “I had left my heart in Tenn[essee].”52

  The last day of 1865 was a Sunday. “The weather was cold and disagreeable,” John recalled. There would be worse to come before this winter was over, he knew. How many more Yankee winters he must endure before he could go home, he did not know.53

  CORNELIA MCDON
ALD

  On September 9, 1865, an office of the Freedmen’s Bureau opened in Lexington, Virginia. The white residents of the town, who had been seething with resentment ever since the Yankee occupation force arrived in June, were thus provoked anew.1

  The agent in charge of the office was First Lieutenant C. Jerome Tubbs of the 58th Pennsylvania Infantry. A New Yorker by birth and a house carpenter by trade, the thirty-three-year-old Tubbs had served in the Union army since 1861. He had endured long stretches of dull garrison duty in North Carolina and Virginia, punctuated by intervals of hard campaigning. He had dealt with a lot of rebels, in and out of uniform, and he had little sympathy for them.2

  It took Lieutenant Tubbs no time at all to size up the citizens of Lexington and Rockbridge County. They were, in his view, unrepentant rebels of the worst sort. “Holy Water would as easily spring from a rock,” he remarked caustically in a report, “as loyal sentiments from their Rebellious hearts.” He was convinced, moreover, that the citizens had malevolent intentions toward the blacks. While he admitted that a few were “well disposed and willing to help the freedmen in making an honorable living,” he believed that most “try to take every advantage of the freedmen they can, and only wish the troops were withdrawn [so] that they might execute their diabolical scheme of wholesale slaughter of the poor freedmen. Occasionally one is bold enough to speak out plainly that as soon as the damned Yankees [leave] they will shoot [the blacks] like dogs.”3

  The day he assumed his new post in Lexington, Tubbs began issuing orders. “[A]ll difficulties between the whites and Freedmen will be reported at this office without delay,” he commanded. He would see to it that the former slaves were treated justly. He had his orders printed as handbills and posted them around the town.4

  The citizens of Lexington sized up Lieutenant Tubbs no less quickly than he did them. In their eyes he was an arrogant, meddling little tyrant. Cornelia McDonald was among the many who regarded him with utter contempt. She thought his high-handed pronouncements not only humiliating to the whites but also provocative to the blacks, encouraging them “to be impudent and aggressive.”5

  Not long after Tubbs arrived, Cornelia had a run-in with him. One afternoon he appeared on her front porch and began questioning her. He was “a clerky looking man,” she observed, with “an impudent manner.” He demanded to know who had torn down a handbill that he had posted on her fence. Cornelia had seen Roy do it, and so she summoned him to the porch, assuming that Tubbs would dismiss the incident when he saw that the culprit was a nine-year-old. Instead, he proceeded to scold the boy harshly. Roy evinced neither contrition nor fear, but merely stared at Tubbs with a “mocking face and fiery black eyes.” Tubbs grew furious. He threatened to punish Roy and then turned on Cornelia: “You must learn how to control your children,” he fumed, “and I can tell you that if the offense is repeated you may find yourself in the Old Capitol prison.”6

  At that moment Harry came riding by on a horse he had borrowed to run an errand. Noticing the trouble on the porch, he went around to the backyard, dismounted, and then walked through the house to the front door, horsewhip in hand. He moved toward Tubbs, raised the whip, and growled “Get out of this house, you rascal.” The lieutenant, who stood only five and a half feet tall, looked up at Harry, and then, as Cornelia put it, “hastened away … effecting a rather disorderly retreat.”7

  Although Tubbs backed down from a physical confrontation with Harry, he carried out his official duties vigorously, investigating every report of trouble between blacks and whites in his jurisdiction and seeing that justice was done. Hardly a day went by that he did not adjudicate a complaint of some sort. Wages and labor contracts were a frequent source of contention. One day in October, for instance, a man named Hector Perry came to the office claiming that he had never been paid for the work he did for Mathney Perry, his former owner, during the spring and early summer, during which time he was still being held as a slave. The bureau’s rule in Virginia was that anyone still enslaved when the war ended was entitled to wages beginning with April 10, 1865, the day after Lee’s surrender. Tubbs immediately dispatched a message to Mathney Perry, telling him to pay Hector Perry eight dollars for each month he had been forced to work without wages beyond April 10 or face arrest. “This employing of the Freedmen and refusing to pay them,” Tubbs added sternly, “will not be tolerated.” Mathney Perry showed up at the office the next day to protest, but Tubbs was unmoved. In the account book where he carefully recorded every case he investigated, he noted the outcome of this one: “Mathney Perry agreed to pay in a few days, but thought it hard to pay his own servants.”8

  As the autumn progressed, Lieutenant Tubbs saw plenty of evidence supporting his belief that the whites could not be trusted to deal fairly with the freed people. Fraud was commonplace, there were instances of violence, and it also appeared that the law was being used as a weapon. In October, the Rockbridge County court took up a burglary case involving a black man named William Gwyn. Although martial law was technically in effect, the occupation authorities generally let the civil authorities handle criminal matters of this sort. The fate of Gwyn raised questions about that policy, however. He was charged with taking clothing and food from the home of a white man—specifically, two pairs of pants, four shirts, two pairs of socks, a pair of drawers, a coat, a vest, and a ham, the whole valued at fifty dollars. After denying him the jury trial he requested, the court convicted and sentenced him. The sentence was five years in the penitentiary.9

  Evidence of this sort encouraged Lieutenant Tubbs to keep a vigilant eye on Rockbridge County’s whites. But at the same time, he endeavored to be scrupulously fair. Even as they reviled him, the whites had to admit that Tubbs often took their side. One day in September, for example, a freedwoman named Martha Smith came to him complaining that her employer, Jacob Nicely, refused to pay her. After questioning Nicely, however, Tubbs concluded that Smith “had told a wil[l]ful bare faced lie” and was “a worthless servant and of a disreputable character.” He dismissed the charge.10

  Tubbs was also determined to monitor the blacks’ moral rectitude. As was true of many other Yankees, his sympathy for their plight was tempered by a certain skepticism about their character. Dealing with their domestic problems consumed a good portion of his time. A typical instance involved Emily Banks, who came to him with a complaint that her husband, Elick, had deserted her and was going to wed another woman. Tubbs duly summoned Elick, who insisted that Emily was unfaithful to him and that he therefore considered the marriage over. Tubbs proceeded to deliver a lecture on conjugal duties, informing Elick that “he must not quit his wife and marry another woman—but must support the one he has already got.”11

  The arrival of the officious Lieutenant Tubbs added to what was, in the eyes of Lexington’s white inhabitants, an already oppressive federal presence. There was also a U.S. Treasury agent in town, who was making himself obnoxious by going from house to house and farm to farm demanding that the citizens turn over any U.S. or Confederate government property they held, particularly horses. And, of course, the federal army garrison was still on hand, forty men under the command of Major Robert Redmond, who was no more tolerant of impenitent rebels than was Tubbs.12

  Redmond was particularly incensed at the behavior of the Reverend William Pendleton. After Grace Episcopal Church was closed by army directive, Pendleton began holding Sunday services in his home for a small invited congregation, and Redmond was convinced that he was using these occasions to incite hostility against the federal government. Pendleton continued, moreover, to annoy the military authorities with haughty letters of protest. Although Redmond was powerless to interfere with the rector’s private services, he firmly refused to reopen the church and missed no opportunity to put Pendleton in his place. After receiving yet another letter from the rector in September detailing why he could not in good conscience offer the required prayer for the president, Redmond replied curtly: “Your quibbling would be impertinent were it no
t contemptible.”13

  Pendleton was not the only prominent ex-Confederate in Lexington whose behavior the Yankees were watching during the fall. There was a newcomer whose influence on the citizens was potentially far greater than the rector’s. He arrived in town on a September afternoon, a gray-haired, gray-bearded man in a gray suit, riding a gray horse. He came to assume the presidency of Washington College. He was Robert E. Lee.14

  That Lexington was the new home of the Confederacy’s greatest hero was a matter of enormous pride to the citizens. It had come about quite fortuitously. When the war ended, Washington College found itself on the brink of extinction. The student body had enlisted in the army en masse in the spring of 1861, and for the next four years the institution had limped along as a preparatory school for boys under military age. It had suffered badly during General Hunter’s raid in 1864—library books were stolen or destroyed, laboratory equipment wrecked, windows and doors smashed—and when the federal garrison troops arrived after the war, they seized some of the college buildings for offices and barracks and did a good deal more damage. On top of all that, much of the college endowment was in now-worthless Confederate bonds. The school needed not only funds, repairs, and students, but also a president, for the last one had been run out of town in 1861 because of his Union sentiments.15

  In the summer of 1865, a member of the college’s board of trustees happened to learn that Robert E. Lee—who had remained in Virginia since the surrender, first in Richmond and then on a farm west of the city—was looking for a job. Sensing an opportunity, the trustees acted boldly. On August 4 they held a meeting and unanimously elected Lee president of the college. They then sent him word of their action, hoping he would consider the matter seriously, but well aware that he would have many other, and certainly more lucrative, offers.16