A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  In the latter part of November came alarming reports of a planned “outbreak of the negroe population” in Sam’s own county of Tippah. The plot was apparently extensive and well organized. “[T]here is a central committee at Ripley,” Sam heard, “and delegates from every neighborhood in the county. The Central Committee receive their instructions from some Yankees.” The plan was “to rise about Christmas and kill all the white men and boys.” It was supposedly uncovered by a white man who had disguised himself in a U.S. army uniform, won the conspirators’ confidence, “and ascertained their plans, numbers and supply of arms.”33

  Once the authorities were apprised of the plot, the county militia sprang into action, fanning out through the countryside in search of insurrectionists and weapons. Dozens of blacks were taken into custody. “One was killed,” Sam learned, “because he ran and would not surrender.”34

  At two o’clock in the morning of November 24, a squad of militiamen descended on the Agnew plantation and forced their way into the blacks’ cabins to search for weapons. Less than twelve hours later the same squad reappeared and again invaded the cabins. All together, five guns were confiscated, one of them a rifle “shortened so as to answer for a pistol,” as Sam noted suspiciously. Every freedman’s cabin in the neighborhood was likewise raided. No one was arrested, but many guns were seized. “Some of the negroes take this move in high dudgeon,” Sam wrote, “and say they thought they had equal rights with a white man to bear arms.”35

  In the days that followed, Sam anxiously sought more news. The blacks being held in the county jail in Ripley were interrogated thoroughly, he learned, but the authorities could find no evidence of a conspiracy and soon let them go. The frantic rumors persisted for a while, but then died down. By December things were quiet again.36

  Although he remained convinced that disarming the blacks was a prudent measure, Sam eventually concluded that this Tippah County insurrection scare was groundless. The conspiracy rumors “were only the creations of the imaginations of timid people.” As the panic subsided, he reflected ruefully on one of its potential consequences: “the negroes must think that the white people are afraid of them.”37

  Similar spasms of hysterical reaction gripped communities throughout the state in November. Once calm was restored, Mississippians turned their attention to other matters. Among the most important was the progress of the new state legislature, which had been in session since mid-October. The legislators had much to do. The state’s government was bankrupt, its economy deranged, its transportation network a shambles, its indigents desperate for relief. All of these problems had to be addressed and the state’s course toward the future set.38

  No issue was more pressing, however, than that of race. What role the freedmen should play in the postwar world was an enormously important and difficult question, now further complicated by the uprising scare. President Johnson’s position was that the white people of the South, acting through their restored state governments, should be free to define the place of the black race as they saw fit, as long as they did not try to reestablish slavery. Southern whites knew, however, that they must also reckon with the demands of Congress and the Northern public. Few were willing to grant the freedmen anything like equality, but between chattel slavery and full citizenship there lay a vast terrain where the blacks might be situated.39

  The racial statutes enacted by the Mississippi legislature during the fall, known collectively as the Black Code, seemed to Sam and most other whites a reasonable solution. The freedmen were granted certain basic rights: their marriages and other contracts would be legally recognized, they could bring civil suits and criminal charges before the law, their testimony would be accepted in court cases involving a black. They would not, however, be allowed to serve on juries or testify in any case to which a black was not a party. Nor would they be allowed to vote. They were also denied full economic freedom: none would be permitted to rent or lease farmland; any who were unemployed, even temporarily, would be prosecuted as vagrants and forced to work to pay off their fine; any who quit before their labor contract expired would be arrested and sent back to their employer. With the insurrection scare in mind, the legislature also outlawed “seditious speeches” by blacks and barred them from owning guns or bowie knives.40

  Sam followed the legislative proceedings closely in the newspapers. He was also keenly interested in the pronouncements of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which had authority to intervene in matters involving blacks. From what Sam could tell, the bureau officials in Mississippi accepted the premise that something less than full equality was sufficient for the Negro race, and they seemed more or less satisfied with the Black Code. In particular, the bureau seemed to endorse the notion that compulsion was necessary to get the blacks to work. In a published statement addressed to the freedmen, the head of the bureau in Mississippi explained why he supported the state’s new vagrancy law: “I cannot ask the civil officers to leave you idle, to beg or steal. If they find any of you without business and means of living, they will do right if they treat you as bad persons and take away your misused liberty.” Bureau officials furthermore warned the blacks that there would be no government distribution of land, no “forty acres and a mule.” Dismiss that false rumor, they advised, hasten to sign contracts for next year, and labor dutifully for your employer.41

  Sam wondered how much good these lectures would do. The freedmen remained restless, and even with the Black Code in effect, they had enough leverage in labor negotiations to frustrate the planters. Those on the Agnew plantation continued to haggle over every task and talked of leaving at year’s end if they did not get what they wanted.42

  The freedmen were not the only restless spirits in postwar Mississippi. As the fall progressed, Sam noticed a great many white people on the move, particularly young men of the poorer sort. They passed frequently on the road that ran by the plantation, many on foot, nearly all strangers to the county, some from distant parts of the South. While there was nothing threatening about them, they seemed as unsettled as the roving freedmen Sam saw so often. A number of them stopped to inquire about renting or sharecropping land. Among these were two former Confederate soldiers named Sutton and Wardlaw. They were from McNairy County, Tennessee, they told Sam, but they could live there no longer, for the unionists who dominated their community had sworn to run the former rebels out. Others whom Sam met seemed not so much uprooted by the war as liberated by it, sensing in the turmoil of the postwar months new opportunities to make their way in the world.43

  Some of these fortune seekers and refugees had left wives and children at home, intending to send for them once they found a place to settle. Talking with them, Sam was no doubt reminded how much he missed Nannie and Buddy, who had been with Nannie’s family in Starkville since early October. He celebrated his thirty-second birthday on November 22 without them, but he was cheered by the knowledge that they were scheduled to return by train the next day. Wiley drove him to Guntown in the carriage to meet them. The train arrived a couple of hours after dark with Nannie and Buddy on board. Sam greeted them joyfully, but his spirits fell as soon as he saw his baby’s face, which was “much disfigured by an eruption.… The left cheek was almost a solid black scab, and the right looked very sore.” The little fellow had suffered from this affliction almost the whole time he was in Starkville, but Nannie had never mentioned it in her letters.44

  They spent the night at the inn down the street from the depot, but Sam got little sleep for worrying about Buddy. First thing the next morning, he consulted a doctor in town and was relieved to learn that the condition, while uncomfortable, was not dangerous. It was called milk scab and would clear up on its own.45

  They lingered in Guntown no longer than necessary, for Nannie was anxious to be home and Enoch needed the mules to get his cotton to market. Once the crop was all picked, cleaned, and dried, Enoch and the hands had run it through a gin to remove the seeds and then compressed it into bales using a big screw press. Th
ree bales weighing about 400 pounds each were now bagged and ready for sale.46

  On November 27, the Agnews’ big farm wagon set out for Memphis with the cotton. The driver was a hired white man. Enoch, whose health was poor, did not go along in the wagon but, instead, took the train. He returned a week later, having sold the cotton for forty-four cents a pound—considerably more than he had gotten for the two bales from the 1864 crop that he had sold back in July, but less than he could have gotten if he had made it to market earlier in the fall. Two days later the wagon returned, laden with supplies.47

  Wintry weather arrived in the second week of December. When Sam looked out his window early on the eighth, he saw thick frost, and on the thirteenth came a cold north wind. The next morning was frigid. “[E]ven my ink is a solid mass,” he noted. “Old winter has been slow coming but he has come at last.” On the sixteenth there was snow. It fell for two hours, then gave way to a heavy mist that froze as it descended, wrapping the tree branches and twigs in dazzling cocoons of ice.48

  Another cold snap a few days later ushered in hog-killing. Enoch summoned the hands on the morning of the twenty-first and the work began. They slaughtered, cleaned, and butchered eighteen hogs that day, which amounted to more than 2,000 pounds of pork. The next day, Sam helped Big George and Little George with the salting and packing. “It was very cold work,” he wrote, “handling cold, frozen meat.”49

  The blacks worked willingly on these disagreeable tasks because they would get a share of the pork. But otherwise they showed little interest in plantation chores as the end of the year approached, and consequently almost daily some new dispute erupted between them and the Agnews. They had by now cast off every last trace of deference, and they responded hotly to the Agnews’ complaints. They were being worked too hard, they told Enoch, and he had better ease up if he expected them to sign with him for next year. Even the younger ones were now openly defiant. Sam found himself boiling with anger one day when Tiny, the stableboy, ignored his order to fetch a mule, leaving Sam standing at the front gate. “My orders have no force,” he fumed in his diary that night. The whole lot of them, from the youngest to the oldest, were “disobedient, idle and puffed up with an idea of their own excellence.” He would put up with their insolence no longer, he vowed, and he hoped his father would quit trying to negotiate with them. “If I owned this place I would drive them off before tomorrow night.”50

  On December 19, while he was in Guntown on an errand, he picked up some news that suggested things were only going to get worse. Congress, which had convened earlier in the month, had refused to seat the newly elected senators and representatives from the former Confederate states. This amounted to a rejection of President Johnson’s reconstruction policy and cast doubt on the future of the Southern state governments set up during the summer and fall. Certain members of the Republican majority in Congress were saying that the traitorous rebels were being let off too easily and that the freedmen were being oppressed. A joint committee had been formed to investigate conditions in the South and advise Congress on a proper reconstruction policy. The more Sam heard about these proceedings, the more discouraged he got: “there is nothing favorable to us.”51

  It soon became apparent that a great many people among the Northern leadership and public were appalled by what the white South had done, with President Johnson’s approval, in the months since the war ended. What the former Confederates regarded as an honest effort on their part to accept defeat and come to terms with the new realities was seen in the North as defiance and intransigence. In the fall elections Southern voters had repudiated the extremists who had been at the forefront of secession and, instead, had chosen the more conservative of their old leaders—men such as Benjamin Humphreys of Mississippi. But in the eyes of Northerners, a reluctant rebel was still a rebel. Why, they asked, did the defeated South not turn to its loyal unionists for leadership? White Southerners also believed that they had dealt fairly and reasonably with the freedmen: they had granted them certain rights, withheld others they were unsuited for, and endeavored to restrain their primitive impulses and make them productive members of society. But when Northerners read reports about the Southern states’ Black Codes, they saw a thinly veiled attempt to restore slavery. And when they read of the autumn insurrection scare, which had gripped not just Mississippi but the whole South, they saw a campaign of white terrorism against an innocent and helpless race. The ex-rebels had much to answer for, in the North’s view, and it was by no means certain that the South was ready to resume full partnership in the Union.52

  As Sam glumly followed the news from the North and contemplated the South’s prospects, the last vestiges of the old way of life on the Agnew plantation disappeared. When December 25 came, Enoch and Letitia waited for the customary throng of blacks to appear at the back porch with shouts of “Christmas gift! Christmas gift!” As master and mistress, they had enjoyed the annual ritual of handing out presents to their people, and they delighted in the merriment that suffused the quarters on this favorite of holidays. But this year the day was different from Christmases past. “The negroes were not as jubilant as customary,” Sam observed in his diary that night. “There was fewer cries of Christmas Gift than is common.” Instead, the hands came to Enoch demanding their tenth of the proceeds from the sale of the cotton. He gave it to them, and then insisted in turn that they listen while he read aloud pertinent sections of the Black Code. A discussion about next year’s contract ensued. “Pa told them,” wrote Sam, “that whoever he hired would have to work the whole year and do whatever he told them. The negroes are willing to work in the crop but no more. They … went away without making a trade.”53

  One by one, in the days that followed, the blacks packed up and left the plantation. Arch departed on Tuesday the twenty-sixth, after informing the Agnews that he had signed for next year with a widow named Miller who had a farm a few miles north. “If he will work for Mrs. Miller,” Sam huffed in his diary, “it is more than he has done for Pa.” On Wednesday, a white man named Walker came in a wagon and hauled away the belongings of Big George and his family, who had agreed to come work for him. “George looks like he was mad and I think he leaves with no very pleasant feelings towards us,” Sam wrote, “although he has no cause.” On Friday, Wiley announced his intention to go; he would work next year for Frank Young, who lived in the community. Sam had not expected this, for Wiley was closer to the Agnews than were any of the other hands and had seemed more willing to come to terms with Enoch.54

  By Saturday most of the others were gone, too, or were preparing to leave. All of them informed the Agnews of their destination, but Sam, whose mood grew more sour every day, professed no interest: “I don’t care where they go provided they only get away from here.” Old Eliza expressed a desire to stay, but Sam dismissed it as “only pretense. I always thought her hypocritical.”55

  No less disturbing than this abrupt exodus of their former slaves was the fact that not a single freedman came to the Agnews seeking work. “I suppose our negroes keep them off,” Sam wrote, “either by giving us a bad name or by telling that Pa does not want to hire.” He learned that the widow Simmons, whose farm was nearby, “has had 50 applications to hire. She must be popular among the darkies.” The Agnews’ labor force was now so depleted that the family members had to do almost all the chores themselves. Sam was chopping firewood, Letitia was milking the cows, and she and the girls were doing most of the cooking.56

  Sunday was the last day of the year. Sam was not scheduled to preach; he planned to go with the rest of the family to the service at Bethany Church. Since they no longer had a stableboy, Sam rounded up the mules that morning and hitched them to the carriage. Before the family set out, Enoch had an argument with some of the hands who had not yet gone. They informed him that they were going to take all the bridles on the place when they left, because they had picked them up after they were abandoned by Yankee cavalry in the battle of June 1864. Enoch got angry: six of those br
idles were his, he said, for he had ordered the hands to gather them after getting permission from a Confederate quartermaster. He would discuss the matter further after church.57

  That night, as he did every New Year’s Eve, Sam looked back through his diary and reflected on the events of the past twelve months. It had been a year of dire calamities and momentous changes. Many people had endured great losses, many had suffered, and many had died. But he and his loved ones had been spared the worst, and he felt grateful for God’s mercy. If this new world they inhabited was in some respects bleak and inhospitable—well, God had a purpose for all things, and His purpose in destroying the old world would, in the fullness of time, be revealed.58

  As midnight approached, Sam took up his pen and began his last diary entry for the year. He wrote of the dispute over the bridles, of the muddy roads that had slowed the carriage on the way to church, of the sermon that the Reverend Young had preached from the book of Daniel, of all the other things he had seen and heard that day. Below the last line, in bold print, he wrote: “End of Anno Domini 1865.” Then he extinguished the candle and joined Nannie in bed. As he fell asleep, he could hear a soft rain falling.59

  EPILOGUE

  1866 AND BEYOND

  Sam Agnew continued to write in his diary every day until the end of his long life. His passion for recording everything he saw and heard never slackened, and eventually he filled forty-five volumes with his small script. The reader dogged enough to press on through the thousands of pages written after 1865 is rewarded with a vivid eyewitness account of what happened in one corner of the rural South during the tumultuous decades that saw the rise and fall of radical reconstruction, the populist insurgency of the small farmers, and the birth of Jim Crow.