Knoxville and the Mountaineers—Glimpses of Southern Ideas.
It was only the first week in November, but the morning air was keen and
frosty, as I made my hurried preparations for leaving Lynchburg, on the
East Tennessee Railroad. The “hotel” served up tough beefsteaks and
gluey, blueish hot bread for breakfast. Everything was astir, and the
little city wore as cheerful an air as though war had not been near its
borders. A crowd of passengers pressed into the gloomy-looking depot.
But three cars were provided, of which the last was occupied by negroes
and soldiers. Into the second the railway officials carefully sorted the
gentlemen, and the one nearest the engine was reserved for the ladies.
In all, the glass windows had been broken by the soldiers during the
war, and the whole Confederacy was unable to furnish glass large enough
to repair them. Smaller sash had been accordingly put in and filled by
seven-by-nine panes. There was a scramble for seats, and many had to
stand for fifty or sixty miles.
Icicles hung at the pump spouts and around the water-tanks as the train
started; and, for miles among the mountains, the first ice of the season
could be seen covering the ponds and reflecting back the glowing tints
of the autumnal foliage.
From Lynchburg to the Tennessee line (at Bristol,) was a distance of 204
miles, to which our prudent railroad managers devoted twenty-two hours,
or an average of a trifle over nine miles an hour! The crowded
passengers made loud complaints as they began to ascertain the rate of
progress; but a glance at the road from the rear platform was enough to
silence the growlers. Crushed rails, occasional gaps where a stone was
inserted to prevent the car wheels from coming down to the ties, sharp
outward curves (the traces of the twists Yankee raiders had given the
rails,) shaky cross-ties and fresh earth-ballasting, combined with
curves around mountain precipices, and rough pine trestle-work, where
once were substantial bridges, to give one fresh convictions of the need
of Accident Insurance Companies. The officers had counted the bad rails,
and reported that in an hundred miles an aggregate of not less than
sixteen miles ought to be removed without one day’s delay.
A more beautiful route could scarcely be found. Lovely little valleys
peeped out among the hills, pretty well cultivated, and dotted with
houses that showed comparatively little signs of destitution within. The
mountain sides were covered with forests, and the abounding cattle found
the sweetest blue grass everywhere. Finer grazing lands for cattle or
sheep could scarcely be imagined. Some day Yankee enterprise will
utilize the magnificent water power, convert the forest into gold mines,
and find real gold mines in the mountain chasms. The mineral wealth of
this region is unimagined. Shrewd geologists were already traversing it
in all directions; and with the next season we shall have the launch of
company after company with “magnificent mining prospects.” The shrewdly
managed will be profitable to the shareholders; the shrewd managers will
find _their_ profits always, whether shareholders do or do not.
Two heavy freight cars followed the last of the passenger cars in our
train. They were needed in addition to the regular express car, to carry
the accumulations of a single day’s express matter at Lynchburg, in the
charge of a single company. Southerners were talking largely about the
patronage they would extend to General Joe Johnston’s Express Company;
but just then, they seemed to be doing very well in the way of
sustaining its great rival. The express safes in our train contained six
hundred thousand dollars in gold. A couple of hundred thousand, the
agents said, was quite frequently a single day’s consignment. Most of
this goes South to buy cotton—a little, also, to buy cotton plantations.
All hands about these trains are Rebels, of course. Our several
conductors were full of pleasant reminiscences about their narrow
escapes from Yankee raiding parties. “Right yeah I had a hard chase,”
said one; “I was within a mile of town when I heerd that the Yankees was
thar. I run back to the watch-tank and waited. Pretty soon the Yanks
heerd I was thar, unloadin’ soldiers, and off the fools went, without
even destroyin’ two cah-loads of ammunition that stood thar. Nobody
never tuck no train from me amongst them all,” he continued, “except
Stone_man_, but he caught me nice. Stone_man_ he got a whole train from
me a’most before I knowed he was thar. Smart General, that Stone_man_.”
* * * * *
Among our passengers were a number of Georgia and Alabama
cotton-planters, full of their complaints about the “niggers and the
Yanks.” A New Yorker, going South to look at some mineral lands, said to
give fine indications of gold in paying quantities, sat near me and
began a free and easy talk about the condition of the negro, resources
of the South, etc. He wasn’t in favor of negro suffrage as a condition
of re-admission to Congress, but he thought the Southern States
themselves might, before long, come to see that an intelligent negro
would have as good a claim to the ballot as an ignorant white man. “G—d
d——n the infamous, dirty, liver-hearted scoundrel,” exclaimed a low
fellow in the same seat with me, whom I had taken for an army sutler,
but who turned out to be a Georgia planter, “the dirty Yankee says a
nigger is as good as a white man. The old Abolition sneak,” and so on,
with epithets far less dainty and moral. The Georgian had made as great
a mistake about me as I had about him. He took me for a Southerner!
The conversation went on about the Southern prejudices against
conspicuous Northerners, like Greeley and Beecher, and the New Yorker
and myself soon had half the eyes in the cars fixed on us. Presently a
deal of whispering, accompanied with sullen looks, began. Half an hour
afterward, a quiet, meek-looking individual (who turned out to be a
freedom-shrieker, started in Massachusetts and graduated in Kansas,)
stepped beside me, as we were all on the platform looking at the
country, “Did you know those fellows got very mad at your Abolitionism?
That sallow, long-haired Macon merchant wanted to have you lynched, and
swore roundly that tar and feathers would be too good for you.” “How did
it end?” I asked. “Oh, a little Georgian said it was all true, and you
and the New Yorker ought to be lynched, but, that since this d——d war,
that thing was played out!” It may be readily inferred that for the rest
of the trip the few Northerners on board continued to talk Abolitionism
enough to have astonished Wendell Phillips himself.
Making a virtue of necessity, the Southerners, after a time, became
sociable. My Georgia neighbor told me of his two splendid plantations,
not far from Columbus, one of four hundred and eighty acres, and the
other of eighteen hundred acres. He had gone North, utterly
down-hearted, and willing to sell out for a dollar an acre in gold; but
they had treated him well in New York; there was less revengeful, bitter
feeling than he had expected; Yankees were coming down to cultivate
cotton beside him; and he was going to watch them and profit by it. If
they could make money, growing cotton, he knew he could. If they could
make the niggers work he would adopt their policy, and he knew he could
do as well with niggers, whenever he found out how to get the power to
control them, as any Yankee could.
I have conversed with dozens of planters, before and since, whose talk
all runs in the same channel. They have no sort of conception of free
labor. They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the
law of force. When they speak of a policy of managing free negro
laborers, they mean a policy by which they can compel them to work. “Why
not depend on the power of wages, if they work, or of want, if they
don’t, to settle the labor question?” I asked one. “They’ll work just
long enough to get a dollar, and then they’ll desert you in the midst of
the picking season, till they’ve spent it all, and have become hungry
again.” “But Northern laborers are as anxious to save money and get on
in the world as capitalists themselves.” “Northern laborers are like
other men; Southern laborers are nothing but niggers, and you can’t make
anything else out of them. They’re not controlled by the same motives as
white men, and unless you have power to compel them, they’ll only work
when they can’t beg or steal enough to keep from starving.”
My Georgia planter, after first mistaking me for a Southerner, next
mistook me for a plantation seeker, and earnestly advised me to go into
the southwestern portion of his State. “You can make an average of half
a bale to the acre on all the lands about there. I grow a bale to the
acre on my lands. Went home this year after Lee surrendered, and I got
my parole, ripped up half the corn my niggers had planted, and put it in
cotton in May, and raised fifty bales, worth two hundred and fifty
dollars a bale. Such land as that you can get at five dollars an acre.
Then it’s far healthier than the rich cotton lands in the west; and you
have the best society in the country. Within a few miles of my
plantation are half-a-dozen of the very first families in Georgia—the
very best society I ever saw!”
But he was anxious to sell, nevertheless. There was no use talking about
it, the niggers wouldn’t work unless you had the power to compel them to
it. Yankees talked mighty big about money bringing them to industrious
habits; but, in a month’s trial before he left home, he hadn’t been able
to hire a nigger for next year, or to hear of a neighbor who had hired
one. The black vagabonds all expected their masters’ lands at Christmas,
and the Yankees were putting them up to it. He would take six dollars an
acre now for his lands. All through his section (Columbus, Georgia,)
lands could still be bought at from three to nine dollars, although
prices were now advancing a little. For himself, he always made a bale
to the acre; but then his were the best lands in the county. His
neighbors never averaged over half a bale.
Altogether his plantation was quite an advantageous one. It was only
twenty miles from town, and he could get his letters down quite
frequently. They were sent in the care of his Columbus friends, and any
person from the neighborhood who happened to be in town brought them
out.
He had been in the war four years, and was heartily glad that it was
over. Still it was an utter surprise. Neither the army nor the people
had ever known to what straits they were reduced; but if the Western
army had been equal to the Eastern, it would never have happened. The
Army of Virginia was an army of gentlemen. There was no such material in
that Western army. All the troops in the world couldn’t have taken
Lookout Mountain from Bob Lee’s army. “But you had three things too many
for us, the Irish, the niggers, and Jesus Christ. So we’re subjugated,
and cussed glad for leave to go to work and try to get ahead a little
again. But,” and he broke out into fearful oaths against, “the
scoundrels you hired with money, to butcher our young men, and enslave
the bravest people on the face of the earth!”
By and by we came to a place for dinner. “That’s the very best railroad
eating-house I ever saw anywhere.” Fortified by his recommendation, we
all went in. Not a thing was there on the table save sour bread and
tough steak, smothered in onions. But it excelled in one thing—the bill
was a dollar, and the money was to be paid, not merely in advance of the
meal, but before you got a sight at the table.
Another Georgian subsequently entered into the conversation. He hoped
the Yankees would come down with their money and machinery, and have
good luck growing cotton, for their good luck would now be good luck to
everybody. “Yankees have always made more money among us than we ever
made ourselves. There was ——, a Yankee, who came down to our country
without even a change of linen, the poorest poor devil you ever see. He
has married two of the best plantations on Pearl River, and is now a
millionaire. Another fellow came down from New York, poor, traded a
little, made money one way and another, till he got a start, and now he
owns four of our best plantations.”
They agreed in exaggerating the difficulties of the cotton cultivation.
It was the very hardest of all crops, they really reckoned. You had to
begin your plowing at New Years, and work right along, as close as you
could push things, with your whole force. By April you had to plant,
and, then, it was one perpetual rush to keep ahead of the grass and
weeds, till July. Then you got your arrangements completed for picking;
went to work at it as early as you could, and were kept driving till the
last of December. Fact was, it took thirteen months to make a good crop
of cotton. One hand, they supposed, ought to work twenty acres; ten in
cotton, and as many more in corn. Others tried to work twenty-five acres
with one hand, but they didn’t do it very well. They only plowed three
to four inches deep, and were sure that if they stirred up the ground
deeper than that, it would be too loose for the cotton to take a firm
root!
But free niggers could never be depended upon for such continuous and
arduous work. The abolition of slavery was the death-blow to the great
cotton interest of the United States. “I honestly believe,” exclaimed
the young Georgia planter first named, “that in five years the South
will be a howling wilderness. The great mass of our lands are fit for
nothing else, and you’ve destroyed the only labor with which we can
cultivate them in cotton.”
* * * * *
Near Wytheville, accident threw me into conversation with a tall,
raw-boned mountaineer, who might have been good looking but for the
vulgarity of dyeing his moustache. He had been in the war for awhile,
and then had gone to speculating. “I’ve made a good deal out of the war,
and if the cussed thing hadn’t collapsed quite so soon, I’d been a
millionaire—_in Confed_!” He was extravagant in his praises of Floyd,
and presently it transpired that he had commanded a regiment on Floyd’s
right, in one of the early affairs of the war—“Carnifex Ferry,” in West
Virginia. He seemed delighted to learn that I had myself seen something
of that fight—from the other side—and was at once full of inquiries and
boasts. “I tell you, we got off mighty smart. The men didn’t know we
were retreating; had been told they were only going to change their
position. You scoundrels got my flag and trunk though. But what in
thunder was that infernal racket on your left, after dark, when you were
drawing off?” I explained the sad mistake by which a couple of our
regiments had fired into each other. “Well, do you know, you scared us
worse with that performance of yours than anything else? We felt certain
you were going to sweep in on our right.” Curiously enough, this precise
maneuver had been urged upon General Rosecrans by General (then Colonel)
Smith, of the Thirteenth Ohio, and but for the approach of night might
have been executed. I gathered from the Rebel Colonel that it would
probably have been successful.
“But we came very near using up your Dutch General, when you crossed the
river and followed us up to the mountain. Old Bob Lee came down and
reinforced us. All our arrangements were made for Floyd to march around
to your rear. We were about to start, the guides were all ready, the
route selected, and we would have been in your rear before daylight,
with Bob Lee in your front; but Lee thought we were too late starting,
and made us stop till the next night. By the next night, there was no
Rosecrans there.”
* * * * *
At one or two points along the line were rows of boxcars, run off on
unused side-tracks, and filled with families of refugees. Dirty, frowzy
women, with half-clad, tow-headed children, filled the doors, but over
their heads we could catch glimpses of filthy interiors that not even
negro cabins could equal. Doubtless the poor whites of the South are far
better material for voters than intelligent negroes, for we have it on
the best of authority—their own—but for dirt, and for utter ignorance of
all the decencies of civilized life, no people in America, of any color,
can compare with them.[51] I grieve to add that, in many regions in the
South, they are almost the only Unionists. The intelligent people
hereabouts are loyal, but in States further South the most loyal are too
often the most ignorant.
“How do the negroes get along here?” I asked of an ancient Tennessee
matron, looking benevolently down upon us through a pair of
brass-mounted spectacles, with an offer of “snacks” for a quarter.
“What? O, you mean the niggahs. They’s doin well enough, fur’s I hear.”
“Are any of them suffering, hereabouts?” “Sufferin? No more’n other
folks, I rekon. Everybody gits along well enough heah.” “Do the negroes
behave well?” “Well’s anybody else, I guess. I don’t see much of ’em nor
don’t want to, the nasty black things.”
* * * * *
The scenery had changed somewhat as we neared the chief town of East
Tennessee. It was not quite so hilly; and there were more evidences of
careful farming. Good wheat and corn-fields lined the road; and one
caught many a peep at picturesque mountain residences, embowered in the
abounding orchards. We had passed out of one great zone of the war into
another. Sheridan, Grant, Lee, were all strange names, that suggested
remote operations. We were nearer the theater on which Bragg, Johnson,
Rosecrans, and Sherman had been the actors. John Morgan’s name was a
charm to still the demon of mischief in naughty children. “This is whar
they both belong,” said a native, as we were coming out from the
dining-room at Greenville. It was to President Johnson (whose home was
in this dilapidated little village,) that the reference had been made.
Who the other notability of the place was, no one understood; till the
native explained that he “meant Andie Johnson and John Morgan, of
co’se.”
Broken bridges had grown more and more frequent; and the train crept
slowly over long lines of trestle-work which timid passengers fancied
they could see swaying beneath us. The road led across Strawberry
Plains, where Longstreet was driven back, and wound near several of the
forts.
I was once more doomed to be mistaken. We were approaching Knoxville. A
haggard-looking, rough-bearded fellow leaned over and whispered in my
ear, “This isn’t a good country for you and me. They’re all tories here,
every d——d scoundrel of them. I’ve been chased off from my home because
I had been in the Confederate army. For three weeks I’ve dodged about in
the woods, and now I’m a going to get out of this Yankee country. But
you had better keep mighty quiet; they’ll suspect you quicker’n me.” I
advised my confidential friend to get further South as fast as possible,
and the last I saw of him he was making a rush, in Knoxville, for the
Dalton and Atlanta cars.
* * * * *
Burnt houses and solitary chimneys over one whole quarter of the city,
showed that the heart of East Tennessee loyalty had not been without its
sufferings. The best part, however, of the little city seemed to be
saved. Straggling up and down hill, stretching off to the precipitous
banks of the clear, sparkling river that skirts it, with few pretensions
to elegance in its stony streets or old-fashioned architecture, but with
a great deal of homely substantial comfort, Knoxville is a very fit
capital for the mountain region of East Tennessee. It seemed prosperous,
and likely, under the new order of things, to continue to prosper. Its
people had not been accustomed to depend for support upon their slaves;
they suffered the less, therefore, from the sudden disappearance of
slaves. Land-owners in the vicinity held their property at enormous
prices; the people had plenty; and, in a rude way, they lived very
comfortably. For a time there had been a strong conflict between
Unionists and their former oppressors. Men who had been driven from
their homes or half-starved in the mountains, or hunted for with dogs,
were not likely to be very gentle in their treatment of the men who
persecuted them; and one readily believed what all observers said, that
in no place through the South had the bitterness of feeling, engendered
by the war, been so intense, or the violence so bloody in its
consequences. Returned Rebels had not unfrequently been notified that
they must leave the country, under penalty of being treated precisely as
they had treated Union men when they had the power. Sometimes they were
shot before such notification; sometimes after it; when, in a foolhardy
spirit, they remained to brave it out.
But the prevailing tendency to violence was now turned in a new
direction. The niggers were presuming to talk about getting the right to
vote. The inborn poor-white hatred of the negroes was all aflame at
this, and every man felt it his duty to help set back the upstart
niggers. Every few nights, I was told, a negro was shot in some of the
back streets, “nigger life’s cheap now; nobody likes ’em enough to have
any affair of the sort investigated; and when a white man feels
aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just shoots him and puts an
end to it.”
Doubtless there was in this a spice of exaggeration; but it was manifest
that East Tennessee radicalism, however earnest on the question of
punishing Rebels, did not go to the extent of defending the negroes.
There was, I should judge, absolutely no public sentiment in favor of
negro suffrage, and scarcely any in favor of negro education. The
prejudices against them were, with the most, intense; and if any way of
driving them out of the country can be found, it will be very apt to be
put in force. The freedmen have more hope from Virginia Rebels than from
East Tennessee Loyalists, if the public sentiment of Knoxville may be
accepted as a test. In this, as in all their other political feelings,
the Mountaineers are fervidly in earnest.
A prophet is generally without honor in his own country, and it is not
surprising that there should be other places in the United States where
they have more confidence in President Johnson than at Knoxville. The
people of Greenville are very proud of having given a President to the
country; but in Knoxville they are inclined to reserve their praises.
“What in h—ll is he palavering with the Democrats for?” asked one.
Others could hardly be brought to express an opinion about him; and I
found very few except the office-holders who were warmly and without
reservation his friends. “He’s pardoning cursed scoundrels all the time,
such as we’ve been shooting out here, on sight.” “Why don’t he hang Jeff
Davis, as he said in the Senate he would?” “Well, he’s got to play his
hand out pretty soon, and we’ll see whether he’s going to desert us.”
Such are some of the voices I heard in November among the East
Tennesseeans. They didn’t give Mr. Johnson up; in fact, they still
wanted very much to believe in him; but they had more faith in Parson
Brownlow. More hanging and fewer pardons would, as they thought, better
suit the existing wants of the South.
The chief newspaper of the place is “Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig and Rebel
Ventilator.” Its name is a pretty good index, at once to its contents,
and to the temper of the people among whom it is a favorite. The Rev.
Governor and Editor tersely summed up his views of the political
situation:
“The Southern leaders still have the devil in them, and presuming
upon the leniency of the President, they are losing sight of their
real positions. Louisiana is proposing to elect ex-Governor Allen,
now a refugee traitor in Mexico, to gubernatorial honors, on the
ground that he is endeared to the people because of his services
rendered in the cause of the rebellion. In North Carolina, Georgia,
and Alabama, unpardoned Rebels are running for Congress, boasting
that they are still unpardoned and do not intend to change. We are
sorry to see this state of things, but it is just what we predicted
from the start. The war was closed out two years too soon. * * The
mild and benignant policy of the President has been abused; is not
at all appreciated by Rebel leaders, but is insultingly demanded as
their _right_! These Southern Rebels have their fate in their own
keeping, and they are nursing their wrath to keep it warm. We feel
confident that the President will not yield any more ground to them,
if indeed he does not withdraw from them what he has conceded.”
On many accounts East Tennessee offers peculiar advantages to the poorer
classes of Northern emigrants, who wish to avail themselves of the cheap
prices of lands in the South. There are few large planters; small farms
are easily purchased; the community is made up of men not ashamed to
labor for themselves, and not disposed to sneer at the emigrant who
fences his own fields and does his own plowing. Lands about Knoxville
commanded high prices—fifty dollars per acre and upwards—but through the
greater part of the country they could be bought, in November, at prices
ranging from two to ten dollars. The soil is a rich, dark limestone,
producing good crops of corn, oats, wheat, hay and potatoes. Much of the
country is admirably adapted for grazing; and horses, mules, sheep,
cattle, and hogs are reared in great abundance. The climate is
delightful. Water-power is abundant; iron and coal are found in almost
every county; copper, zinc, lead, and the famous Tennessee marble also
abound. Give East Tennessee her long-sought railroad connection with
Cincinnati and the North, and the emigration thither from all the
over-crowded localities of the Middle States can not fail to be very
large.
-----
Footnote 51:
I have said nothing concerning these poor whites, which is not
mildness itself compared with the descriptions of other travelers.
Here is one of the latest, from the very intelligent Southern
correspondent of the Boston Advertiser, Mr. Sidney Andrews.
Fortunately the classes he describes are confined, almost exclusively,
to the south-eastern States:
“Whether the North Carolina ‘dirt-eater,’ or the South Carolina
‘sand-hiller,’ or the Georgia ‘cracker,’ is lowest in the scale of
human existence, would be difficult to say. The ordinary plantation
negro seemed to me, when I first saw him in any numbers, at the very
bottom of not only probabilities but also possibilities, so far as
they affect human relations; but these specimens of the white race
must be credited with having reached a yet lower depth of squalid and
beastly wretchedness. However poor or ignorant, or unclean, or
improvident he may be, I never yet found a negro who had not at least
a vague desire for a better condition, an undefined longing for
something called freedom, a shrewd instinct of self-preservation.
These three ideas—or, let me say, shadows of ideas—do not make the
creature a man, but they light him out of the bounds of brutedom. The
Georgia ‘cracker,’ as I have seen him since leaving Milledgeville,
seems to me to lack not only all that the negro does, but also even
the desire for a better condition, and the vague longing for an
enlargement of his liberties and his rights. I walked out into the
country, back of Albany and Andersonville, when at those places, and
into the country back of Fort Valley this morning; and, on each
occasion, I fell in with three or four of these ‘cracker’ families.
Such filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility,
such bestial instincts, such groveling desires, such mean longings;
you would question my veracity as a man if I were to paint the
pictures I have seen! Moreover, no trick of words can make plain the
scene in and around one of these habitations; no fertility of language
can embody the simple facts for a Northern mind; and the case is one
in which even seeing itself is scarcely believing. Time and effort
will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood, but I almost doubt if
it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into
respectability.”