The grain, produce, and other goods accumulated through Mary’s increasingly aggressive bargaining skills were supplemented by other goods Alf was able to supply from the various locales in which he served. Mary constantly sought such opportunities and asked him to obtain and send her a variety of goods, including thread and “dye stuffs” from Asheville and nails and tallow candles from Knoxville (which Mary had noted in a newspaper were cheaper than any available in Franklin).39 By 1864 she was even being supplied with rice—“as cheap food as we can buy”—from acquaintances coming from South Carolina. Meanwhile, Alf sent shoes from Atlanta for her children and slaves.40
As for her responsibilities in agricultural production, Mary never lacked for male workers on her farm a mile or so from town or on her garden plot in town; nor did she ever lack for male advice. Hired day labor and tenants made up a substantial part of the southern highlands’ agricultural workforce, and in the early months of Alf’s absence, a tenant and a hired slave continued to work different sections of the Bell farm under Mary’s close supervision.41 Though on occasion she referred to Bill Batey, the white tenant, as an overseer, there is no indication that he had any supervisory authority over Tom, the hired slave. Alf’s father and brother, both Franklin residents, were also regular sources of support, advice, and—on occasion—manpower. Mary’s father-in-law stayed with her and the children sometimes, and she spent a good bit of time at his house. In November 1861, Mary wrote to Alf in the first of what would be for her a typical letter combining reporting and inquiry: “Your father is shucking corn tonight. Tom is done sewing your wheat, he did not sew any rye for you, did you want him to sew some?”42
Other local men were available for short-term hire or volunteered their services or equipment. In April 1862, for instance, Mary wrote: “I got Charles to work for me one day and have got everything that I wanted planted now. I paid him in irish potatoes.” When she was “quite busy” helping to get her corn shelled, a neighbor “found out we were shelling and loaned us his sheller so we got it shelled out pretty quick.” Whereas she was firmly in control of her own garden plot, her early reports on farming operations indicated a detachment and uncertainty of what was happening there. In the same letter cited above, she admitted that “I have not found out whether Batey has sowed your cloverseed or not but I guess he has. Pa [Alf’s father] is going to let me have some flax seed and some sugarcane seed.” She went on to say that she planned to plant both “in this lot here,” an indication that she did not entirely trust the more distant operation out of town or its overseers.43
Perhaps because of that lack of full confidence in Tom or Batey, Mary constantly plied her husband with questions regarding their activities. “Had I better get Bill Batey to haul your lumber?” she asked in June 1862. “He seems to be a pretty good hand to wagon. I told Pa to inquire if it was ready. I can get Dan to cut my wood, how much did you give Jule’s negro to cut by the month? Dan wanted to charge me 75 cts a month.” She found these new responsibilities burdensome and after such reports to Alf usually concluded by stating, “I should like so much for you to come home.” At one point, she wrote out of utter exhaustion: “I wish I could be both man and woman until this war ends.”44
Alf was always quick to respond to her letters with extensive and often specific instructions and advice, detailing the timetable and procedure for what and when to plant, much of which she was to pass on to her “overseers.” When she complained of Batey’s uselessness after their apple crops had been converted into liquid form—“I do not think he will do much while his brandy lasts”—Alf told Mary to tell his tenant that “if he turns his attention to drinking and is letting the place and things go to rack I shall not let him stay. . . . Tell him he must divide the brandy with me. You must lock it up in the stove for me.”45
In January 1862, Mary reported “a big scrape up in town.” The slaves of a Mr. McCay had stolen around 600 pounds of meat and sold it to slaves on neighboring farms. McCay apparently whipped his slaves into a confession that revealed a wide variety of co-conspirators in the operation, including at least one of the Bells’ hired slaves and their overseer, Tom. Alf responded by instructing his wife to guard their smokehouse closely (which she had already informed him she was doing) and to “have a clasp and staples and lock it with the best padlocks that we have.”46
By the end of that first summer on her own, Mary demonstrated considerably more knowledge of what was transpiring on both their own and other farms. On August 29, 1862, she began a letter practically gushing with farm statistics:
Father has had his thrashing done this week and had only 54 bushels of wheat. Jesse Guffee had 31. You had 4 ½ of your own and 5 from Wm. Guffee. You have 16 ½ bushels of very good rye. . . . I would like to know what land you want rented for that and who to. Pa says we should plant more rye. Grain is very high and can hardly be bought. There is a great cry for seed of both wheat and rye. Wheat is bringing $4.00 in Haywood [County]. Two bushels of your rye will have to go for thrashing and about ⅔ of a bushel of wheat. . . .
She continued in the same vein for another paragraph. Yet she still deferred to her husband’s opinion on dispensation of their crop and reported that Mr. Batey too was “very anxious for you to come home.”47
Very little correspondence exists between the Bells in 1863, in part because Alf spent much of the year at or near home. In 1864, as a more regular exchange of letters resumed, one can detect a subtle role reversal in the Bells’ correspondence. Mary conveyed a new assurance in her reports of her activity and decision making in both financial and agricultural matters. More often than not, Alf, not Mary, asked the questions. At times he had to remind her merely to keep him abreast of the farm’s progress. At other times he barraged her with questions that reveal the range of her agricultural responsibilities:
how is your wheat and rye doing. what ground have you in corn, is the oats any account. is your clover doing good . . . is there any apples or peaches. is your horses poore. who does your blacksmithing. you can have those old Sythes fixed up so they will [be ready] for your harvest . . . is your potatoes any account. have you any lettice and onions. Have you old rye enough for coffee, do you get any milk. how does your cowes look. is the pasture good. has your foot got well. what hurt it. have you plenty to eate.48
Alf fully realized how much Mary had developed as a farmer and resigned himself to her newfound independence in that role. “As for your farming operations,” he told her, “I have nothing to say nor advice to give. Besides if I had, Caty [his nickname for Mary] takes no advice but acts for herself and on her own judgement.”49 Her letters did indeed contain mere reports, often only casual references, on what she had done or decisions she had made regarding all aspects of the farm, from planting and harvesting to storage and marketing. Particularly revealing is the extent to which she described the operation in first-person singular: “I think I will have a clover patch by next year”; “my horses are fatter than any of my neighbors work horses”; “I like my darkies better I believe than I did at first.”50
While Mary still complained about the burden she bore, she seemed to do so with far less rancor than had been the case two years earlier. “I have almost overdone myself this week,” she informed Alf in April 1864, “spinning, coloring blue, and making soap. I have been gardening some today too.” She later mused that “you have three broke down women on your place [his sister and a slave were the other two]. I believe I am the stoutest one and I am almost give out. We can all eat hearty and that is all you can brag on.” She took pride in how hard she worked, and on occasion she openly acknowledged her achievement: “I do not want to boast any but I think you can say now that you have a wife that does not eat any idle bread although she can eat a good deal when she can get it.” But her spirits remained high because of her sense of accomplishment. In July she was exuberant over how well the farm was going: “I felt so good that evrything went right with me I do not think any person could have made me mad for tw
o or three days if they had of spit in my face.”51
Mary’s references to her father-in-law and other men on whom she had depended at home were less and less frequent, as were her pleas, so desperate throughout 1862, for her husband’s return. She continued to express her love for Alf and was at times eloquent in how much she missed him; yet her calls for his return often seemed perfunctory. In February 1864 she ended a letter with a rather matter-of-fact question: “Are you going to reenlist or what are you going to do? Get out if you can honorably.” Perhaps most revealing, she began a letter in June by exclaiming, “O! Would that you were here today.” But the reason behind her urgent desire for her husband’s presence at that point was not, as it had been in the past, to pass onto him the work and responsibilities that were then hers alone, but rather, as her next sentence indicated: “I would take you over the farm and show you our prospect for a crop.”52
Even the threat of that scenario most feared by those on the home front—attack by enemy forces—hardly shook Mary’s newly gained confidence. In early February 1864, 250 men of the First Wisconsin Cavalry moved across the Tennessee border into southwestern North Carolina and got as far as Macon County before turning back.53 Though the party was never closer than twenty miles from Franklin, the residents panicked at this first real threat of enemy incursion into their area. By the time Mary reported the incident to Alf, the excitement had waned and fears subsided. But she was smug in mocking her fellow townspeople for the panic to which she apparently never succumbed. “I guess you have heard,” she said, “of the great yankee and tory raid we had or at least expected to have. . . . It was the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of. I think evry man in Macon Co., except those that were too old to get away, skidadled—home guards, preachers, doctors and all, except Cousin William Roane and he ventured far enough to find out that they were not coming.” She was no more sympathetic toward the frightened women left behind by Franklin’s male population as she described the two or three days in which they had had to endure the prospect of “fine times during yankee holadays.” In a somewhat scornful tone, she detailed a variety of mishaps other women encountered in their efforts to hide their valuables and livestock and safeguard their homes, much of which comes across as little more than slapstick in her irreverent retelling of various incidents.54
Alf’s response was just as lighthearted. He had heard newspaper accounts of the raid before he received Mary’s letter but waited until he had read her version before commenting, “We are glad to hear that the people at home had all excaped the yankees so well by flying to the mountains and staying there untill the women and children ran the yankees back.” He later commented that “the home guards of Macon should have a flag presented to them by the ladies for their galantry.”55
It was only a month after that scare that Mary Bell’s confidence in her business and farm-management skills culminated in the achievement in which she took most pride and satisfaction: her purchase of a slave family. With no trepidation of either long- or short-term risks in such an investment and no sense at all that she and Alf might well have become among the last Americans ever to achieve slaveholding status, Mary, with the help of Alf’s brother, negotiated the purchase of three slaves. In so doing, she achieved what had been a major goal since the war began.
The Bells had discussed the purchase of one or more slaves on several occasions, and as the value of Confederate currency became increasingly questionable, Alf urged Mary to convert their accumulating cash into property of some sort. In December 1862, he declared: “I don’t think it good policy to keep money on hand. I want you to invest what you have in something, either for a negro or land.” She chose the former. The fact that Alf entrusted his wife to undertake so momentous a transaction indicates how much he respected her growing business acumen. In effect he gave her free rein in terms of whom or what she purchased and how much she paid. “I want you not to ask me anything about it,” he told her. “Its enough for you to know that I want you to buy it. . . . I have a wife, and I thank god for it, who is not extravagant and [is] always trying to lay something up for the future.”56
Mary backed off from making such a purchase at that time, but late in the summer of 1863, while Alf was at home, they accepted a teenage slave girl, Eve, as payment for a long-held note owed Alf. Within several months, after Alf had returned to his regiment in Georgia, she negotiated a deal that involved trading Eve along with a cash payment in order to acquire a slave family of three, recently brought into the area from Charleston. The details of this transaction are not related here. Rather, Mary’s purchase and subsequent relationship with this new slave force, which comes to dominate her correspondence with Alf through the rest of the war, are chronicled in chapter 4 in this volume, where it is set within the context of other wartime slave sales and purchases.57
In many respects, Mary Bell’s acquisition and management of her labor force—hired and purchased, white and black—provide the most dramatic reflection of how the war allowed her to mature and to assert a sense of independence she probably would never have known otherwise. Just as the war imposed new challenges and responsibilities on her, it also provided her with new opportunities, of which she took full advantage. Hunger, poverty, and material deprivation were never among the hardships she faced. Her husband’s comfortable financial situation and his position in the community helped to shield her, but Mary’s skillful management of their resources in his absence also contributed substantially to her well-being. The relative lack of deprivation made Mary Bell’s wartime experience quite different from that of many other women in the same region, on whom the war’s impact was far more destructive, physically, emotionally, and materially.58
Yet her achievement was hardly unique or even unusual among Confederate women. In her general description of the plight of southern womanhood at war, Anne Firer Scott laid out the essence of the Bells’ experience with almost uncanny precision. “Husbands hurrying off to the army,” Scott stated, “sent back all kinds of instructions about the planting, harvesting, and marketing of crops, the management of slaves, the education of children, the budgeting of money, the collecting of old debts, and every other aspect of their business, apparently in perfect confidence that their wives would somehow cope. The women, in their turn, were polite about asking advice and begged for guidance, while carrying on as if they had always been planters, business managers, overseers of slaves, and decision makers.”59
Yet Mary Elizabeth Massey noted in the opening sentence of her book Bonnet Brigades that “had every woman and girl of the 1860s described the ways in which she was affected by the Civil War, no two accounts would have been alike.”60 It is the particularities of Mary Bell’s experience and the context in which it took place that make her letters worth such close scrutiny. Whereas there was much that was typical about her response to the war, her individuality also bears examination. She was never subjected to the brutal and destructive forces that victimized so many Appalachian women as a result of the peculiar nature of the war waged in that region.61 And unlike thousands of her counterparts, Mary Bell never offered her services to a military hospital or went to work in a factory; she was never part of any women’s voluntary association or patriotic activity to support the men and boys in gray or the cause for which they fought; she never participated in a bread riot; and she never signed a petition or wrote letters on her own behalf or Alf’s to President Jefferson Davis or Governor Zebulon B. Vance.62 For the most part, she coped with the war in very private terms and reacted to it through purely personal means.
Mary’s almost total self-absorption is among the most striking aspects of the self-portrait her letters provide; from beginning to end, her own and her family’s well-being were her only priorities. She did not fit the pattern of the many women throughout the South and in western North Carolina who were initially caught up in the spirit of the war and the meaning of the Confederate cause, only later to be disillusioned and embittered by the increasing hardships
that cause imposed on them, whose deteriorating willpower became a major impetus to massive desertions and much-weakened morale among Confederate fighting men. Mary was bitter and cynical about the war from the beginning and thumbed her nose at the patriotism of other Franklin women. If she ever consciously encouraged her husband’s abandoning the military to return home, it was during his first few months away. Though she genuinely missed him throughout the war’s duration, she was far more self-secure and her need for him far less acute during its final year.
Drew Gilpin Faust has noted the number of southern women who yearned to be men so that they might make themselves useful to the Confederacy. Mary Bell was among those expressing her desire for what Faust calls “a magical personal deliverance from gender restraints.”63 Yet when Mary proclaimed, “I wish I could be both man and woman,” she had in mind nothing as magnanimous as contributing to the war effort; she simply yearned for the strength to keep her farm, family, and finances afloat for the duration. She was certainly not alone in her firm adherence to those limited and localized goals; if anything distinguished Mary Bell’s efforts, it would probably be the degree to which she succeeded in managing all three and the tremendous satisfaction she took in doing so.
Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South Page 21