A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  Now that slavery was abolished, many of the Canadian fugitives were returning to the United States. But Lou was not convinced that any former slave was truly safe in America. “We did not know what might come again for our injury,” he wrote, and to him Canada was still the only refuge. He talked the matter over with Matilda and her mother and sisters, and all agreed that they should go to Canada.29

  By the time they had made up their minds to leave Hamilton, December had arrived and with it came Lou’s first Yankee winter. The trees were starkly bare, and there was a frigid crispness in the air unlike anything he had ever felt in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, or Virginia. And there were sights he had perhaps never before seen: ice skaters gliding over the frozen river basin, and store windows radiant with Christmas displays of toys, candy, and fireworks.30

  It was late in December and there was snow on the ground when Lou and his family climbed aboard a train at the Hamilton depot for the journey north. From Hamilton they traveled to Detroit. There they boarded a ferry that went across to Windsor, Ontario. It was Christmas day. As Lou stepped off the ferry and onto the Canadian shore, he felt that he was a free man at last.31

  SAMUEL AGNEW

  Not long after the morning fog lifted on September 1, it began to rain. Soon it was coming down in torrents, blown by furious winds—“the biggest rain we have had in a long, long time,” Sam Agnew wrote. The roads dissolved into bottomless muck and the creeks rose fast; even the little branch that ran near the Agnew plantation was “half up saddle skirts deep.” More rain came that night, and still more over the next two days. People stayed indoors, and farm chores and neighborly visits were postponed. No one complained, however, for the deluge seemed to herald an end to the drought that had threatened the corn and cotton. Now there was a chance that the crops could be saved.1

  The rain gave way to heat, as stifling as any that July or August had inflicted. As the roads dried and Sam resumed his usual rounds, he found himself constantly in a sweat. Early mornings offered some relief, but evenings offered none: he and everyone else in Tippah County sweltered on their porches and in their beds.2

  On Saturday, September 9, Sam packed some clothes and set out on a mule for Ebenezer Church, twelve miles away. A protracted meeting was to commence there that day, and he had agreed to take part. He left at eight in the cool of a cloudy morning, traveling at an easy pace, but by the time he reached his destination the heat was oppressive and his clothes were soaked.3

  He remained at Ebenezer for nearly a week, staying with various friends and acquaintances in the area. Uncle Young was also there, and the two took turns leading the services. Some days Sam preached in the morning, other days in the evening. He was gratified by the response of the congregation: “[I]t is cheering to the minister to behold large numbers looking and listening intently to the words of life.” Twenty-six new members were added to the church in the time that Sam was there, and one who had previously withdrawn came back into the fold.4

  During the midday dinner breaks, Sam caught up on news and gossip. There was much talk of the upcoming state election. A number of local office-seekers dropped by the church, in fact, while the meeting was in progress. “The candidates are thick around Ebenezer these days,” Sam remarked. And of course there was talk of the incessant problems with the blacks. Everyone agreed that they were pretty much worthless now, idle and disobedient. Some were altogether out of control, or so it was reported. Down in Oktibbeha County, Sam learned, there was “a good deal of excitement,” for the freedmen were “‘cutting up’ generally.”5

  Frequently the dinner conversation turned to illness and death. The sickly season would not be over until the crisp days of midautumn. On his third day at Ebenezer, Sam heard that little Harvey Hawthorn, a boy who lived in his own community, had died of the “flux”—dysentery. Others in the Hawthorn family were down with it, too. This was very disturbing news. Everyone remembered the terrible flux epidemic of 1857 that had struck in late summer and raged well into the fall, taking many lives. Sam prayed that the community would be spared another such blow.6

  He heard more reports of illness in the days following his return home. There was typhoid in the area now, and cholera. The saddest news concerned a friend, Joseph Sanford. For some reason known only to God, Sanford’s digestive system had abruptly quit working. “He has not had an action on his bowells now for 10 days,” Sam wrote on September 28, “and although most powerful purgatives have been administered they have not moved him.” There was little hope for the poor man’s recovery, and he had resigned himself to death. Sam despaired of his friend’s soul, for “He has been careless and made no pretensions of religion.”7

  Sanford’s agony came to end on the last night of September. Sam learned of his death the next day, and that evening attended his funeral. “It was after dark by the light of the moone which now shine[s] brilliantly.… I believe it is the first burial I ever witnessed by moonlight.”8

  Late in the morning of October 1, just after he heard about Sanford’s death, Sam rode to the Corders’ home to preach. This was to be the beginning of another protracted meeting, but it proved an inauspicious start, for the congregation was small. In the days that followed, the turnouts were even more disappointing, and on the fifth Sam reluctantly brought the meeting to a close. It had been a mistake, he decided, to start so late in the season. “The people are busy in their farms and hence only a few come to Church.” Harvesting had in fact been underway for a couple of weeks. The hands on the Agnew plantation went into the fields to begin picking cotton on September 20.9

  The busy pace of fall farm work slackened momentarily on election day, October 2. Sam canceled the morning sermon at the Corders that day so he could vote. He rode to the precinct polling place early and found a big crowd already there, waiting for the polls to open. The voting began at ten o’clock and proceeded slowly, for the ballot was lengthy. Every state and local office had to be filled, from governor, legislators, and congressmen down to sheriff, county clerk, and local magistrates. Sam voted for twenty-five candidates in all.10

  Political excitement had run high in the weeks leading up to election day, and the competition for offices was fierce, for this restored government of Mississippi would bear immense responsibilities. Assuming that the powers in Washington continued to allow the former Confederate states to reconstruct themselves, the men elected on October 2 would shape Mississippi’s postwar world.11

  In the days following the election, Sam picked up news of the outcome. The governor-elect was Benjamin G. Humphreys, a planter and lawyer by profession who had commanded a brigade of Mississippi infantry in Lee’s army. As a Confederate general, he was excluded from President Johnson’s general amnesty for rebels, but he had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States and then run for governor with the hope that the president would grant him a special pardon—which Johnson did, three days after the election. Humphreys was to be inaugurated on October 16, and the new state legislature would convene the same day.12

  The governor-elect was a man of conservative political temperament, a former Whig and a stout opponent of secession until the outbreak of war in the spring of 1861. The same was true, for the most part, of the other newly elected state officers. The Mississippians who went to the polls on October 2 overwhelmingly repudiated the extremist Democratic “fire-eaters” who had led their state out of the Union. They hoped that the people of the North would grasp the import of this election and thus recognize that their former enemies had accepted defeat and were now ready to resume their place in the Union. Sam was among this great majority of Mississippians who looked forward to sectional reconciliation. If the North proved as forgiving as the South, he believed, and proved willing to let the South find its own solutions to the problems it now faced, all would be well.13

  As he followed the election news and the progress of the harvest, Sam prepared himself for a temporary loss within the family circle. Nannie, who had not been down to Starkvill
e to see her family since the summer of 1864, was planning a visit. She intended to take Buddy along, for her widowed mother and most of her other kinfolk had never seen him. Her brother James, who came up on October 4, would escort her down on the train.14

  Early on the afternoon of the tenth, she, Buddy, and Sam set out in a mule-drawn carriage driven by Wiley, the black foreman. James followed on a horse that Sam had borrowed. They reached Guntown by four o’clock, unloaded the baggage at an inn, and then sent Wiley back home with the carriage. Sam wandered around town a while, picking up news, before he and the others settled in for the night at the inn.15

  They got up long before daylight and made their way to the Guntown depot, Sam and James lugging Nannie’s trunk. The train lumbered in a little after sunrise, wheels screeching and boiler huffing. While James loaded the baggage, Sam found some empty seats in the rear passenger car. He ushered Nannie and Buddy aboard and said good-bye. When the car was out of sight, he returned to the inn, ate breakfast, and then mounted the horse and headed home alone.16

  The next day, while he was at his desk working on a sermon, an unexpected visitor appeared. His name was Captain Rice, formerly of the Confederate army. He had come to retrieve the body of his brother, a rebel soldier who had been wounded in the battle of June 10, 1864, and had died that night in the Agnews’ house. The body was buried under an oak tree near the front gate. Captain Rice had first visited the grave in February 1865 while on military duty, and Sam had met him then.17

  The captain’s return journey this autumn had been a long one. He had traveled south from his home in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, to Memphis, and then east by train to Corinth, Mississippi, where he had hired a carriage for the thirty-mile trip south to the Agnews. With him, besides the hackman, was an undertaker he had picked up in Memphis. Also in the carriage was a new metallic coffin.18

  After Sam greeted Captain Rice and learned his business, he summoned two of the field hands, Thompson and Arch, who agreed to exhume the body. With pick and shovel they dug down until they exposed a wooden coffin, which they lifted out and pried open. Sam and the others stood by solemnly. “The body was much decayed and blackened and not recogni[z]able,” Sam observed. “What a mass of filthy corruption is the human body when in the grave.” The corpse was then transferred carefully to the metal coffin.19

  By the time the task was finished and the coffin was sealed tight, the sun had sunk below the horizon. Sam invited Captain Rice and his companions to spend the night. The three guests arose the next morning well before daylight in order to get an early start. After breakfasting with Sam by candlelight, they secured the coffin in the carriage and headed back to Corinth. Sam watched them go, knowing that he might have more such sorrowful visitations in the future, for there were other soldiers’ graves nearby.20

  By now it was mid-October and harvesting was mostly finished on the plantation. The hands had been picking cotton for more than three weeks and corn for more than two. The cotton demanded far less of their time than it had in the past, for Enoch had devoted little acreage to it this year. A state law in effect when he had begun spring planting restricted cotton-growing in favor of food crops for the Confederate war effort. Three bales would be about all he would get this fall; before the war, he had normally produced eighty or ninety.21

  On the morning of October 17, Sam went to the fields to pick cotton. He did it for no other reason than to shame the blacks, who on the sixteenth had done what he regarded as a poor day’s work. “I told them that I was no great picker but I knew that I could beat what they did that day.” Attaching a long cloth sack to his waist as the field hands did, he moved down the rows plucking the bolls that had ripened since the last time the field had been gone over. Periodically he emptied his sack into a large basket at the edge of the field. By noon he had gathered over thirty pounds of cotton without really pushing himself, whereupon he quit and returned to the house, satisfied that he had made his point.22

  The last boll of cotton was picked the next day. Field work was not over, for there was still some corn to be gathered and winter wheat to be planted, but these labors were lightened by the arrival of fall weather. Days were cool and clear now, and nights chilly. The leaves of the oak tree by the front gate turned a fiery red, those of the hickories nearby a brilliant yellow. Sam loved this time of year. “Poets might go into raptures,” he wrote, “celebrating the beauties of autumn.”23

  When the last of the corn was gathered and Enoch tallied it up, the Agnews had reason to give thanks. The threat of famine was now over, at least on their plantation. The rains of late August and September had revived the parched fields, and they yielded a generous harvest. Enormous heaps of corn now sat in the Agnews’ storage buildings ready to be shucked and shelled. There would be plenty for the family and the hands, and also for the hogs when it was time to pen them up for fattening. The other livestock were already enjoying the bounty of the corn fields, for the leaves that the hands had stripped from the stalks before harvest time provided tons of fodder. The mules were getting stronger now, and the beef cattle fatter.24

  Even as the Agnews gave thanks, however, they worried about the harvests yet to come, for the labor situation on their plantation was more unsettled than ever. The blacks insisted on working at their own pace and often shirked tasks that did not benefit them directly. When reprimanded, they responded with complaints of their own. Sam witnessed one such altercation between his father and Arch on November 9. With cotton-and corn-picking at an end, Arch had been assigned to make rails for fencing, but over the course of four days he split only 120. When Enoch scolded him, Arch replied that “he could not make rails on ‘beef and molasses’ and not enough of them.” Enoch was furious, “and told him plainly that he would have to do better or leave the place.”25

  The imminent expiration of the contract between the Agnews and their hands was another source of contention. The blacks were unhappy with the contract and wanted a different arrangement for next year. In late November Enoch met with Big George to discuss the matter, and they wound up arguing. Enoch was prepared to pay the hands a set amount of cash for every bale of cotton the plantation produced, which was agreeable to Big George, but the two had very different ideas about the laborers’ duties and the employer’s authority. “Pa wants his hirelings to do anything he wants,” Sam wrote. “George wants to hire to make a crop only. Pa wants a crop not only made but the farm to be kept up, fences prepared and fire wood got &c.” Neither would budge, and the negotiations ended acrimoniously.26

  The real problem, as Sam came to see, was that the blacks did not want to work as laborers at all, for “They have an idea that a hireling is not a freeman.” What they wanted was to obtain land and live as independent farmers. They chafed under the Agnews’ control and resented working for their benefit.27

  Sam regarded this dream of yeoman independence as absurd. Freedmen would never be able to get along on their own, he was certain, for they were too ignorant and foolish and lazy—especially the Agnew hands, who were undoubtedly “the most worthless in the whole country.” They ought to reconcile themselves to dependency, quit complaining, do as they were told, and show their former masters proper respect. He was getting fed up with them, and sometimes found himself wishing they would all pack up and leave. Meanwhile, he was doing more and more chores around the place, including chopping wood and shucking corn, simply because it was easier to do them himself than to wrangle with the blacks.28

  Whenever he talked with other planters, he heard of similar problems. “The inefficiency of negroes is a subject of general complaint.” Many planters were convinced, moreover, that their workers were being stirred up by agitators. The culprits most frequently named were the black U.S. army troops posted in the state, who were reportedly encouraging the freedmen to disobey and urging them not to sign contracts for 1866, claiming that the federal government was going to give them land before the present year was out. These troops were also harassing white people, it
was said. Sam heard one such story about a planter named Copeland who lived near Guntown. “It seems that Copeland drove off one of his negroe women and would not let her have her things. She reported him [to federal authorities] and a colored sergeant with a detachment of colored brethren were sent to right the matter. Copeland was cursed and abused by these blacks. One … looked at Copeland and said I know you are a d—d rascal by the look of your eye.” Sam was incensed: “Such things are hard to bear.”29

  A growing number of whites were not just angry about the racial situation but frightened. There were persistent reports from all over the state that the freedmen were plotting some sort of uprising, perhaps abetted by the black troops and their Yankee officers. These rumors were fueled by the increasingly common sight of freedmen carrying rifles and shotguns. When questioned, they invariably insisted that they were just hunting, but whites were skeptical. Sam was disturbed to learn that several of the Agnew hands had been seen in the woods with guns. “They have no use for them,” he wrote, “and they ought to be taken from them.”30

  The rumors multiplied and fed on each other as the weeks passed, and by November many sections of Mississippi were in a state of panic. The freedmen were stockpiling weapons and ammunition, it was said, and were going to rise up on Christmas Day and seize control of the plantations. Some planters were sending their families to safety in other states and preparing to defend their lives and property. Governor Humphreys ordered the local militia to muster in any county threatened by insurrection.31

  As the rumors intensified, Sam scrutinized the behavior of the Agnew hands. Although he saw nothing ominous beyond their having guns, and heard of no other suspicious activities in his community, he remained watchful. Scares of this sort had been common before the war, and Sam knew that they almost always proved to be unfounded, but no one could afford to dismiss this one out of hand. With slavery gone and the blacks unleashed, anything seemed possible.32