REFUGEES
In the preceding chapter we pointed out the manner in which General
Halleck, by forced assessments, compelled the more wealthy of the
disloyal of St. Louis to assist in caring for the refugees among us.
This suggests our varied experiences in dealing with these unfortunates
that, during the whole period of the war, came flocking in upon us, not
only from Missouri, but also from regions farther south. When General
Grant, by his masterful campaign, had swept all obstructions from the
Mississippi River, and opened up western Kentucky, western Tennessee,
Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and northern Texas, poor whites and
negroes, freed by the onward march of our victorious army, fled, in
ever-increasing numbers, from all that conquered territory, to our city.
They came on government transports, came by boat-loads, sent by Union
generals because they had become a serious impediment to military
movements; they came also in wagons and carts of wonderful make, and in
large numbers on foot. St. Louis was for them a city of refuge.
But to set forth clearly the problem that was thrust upon us by their
coming, we must separate the heterogeneous multitude that appealed to us
for charity into homogeneous classes. We certainly cannot justly affirm
the same things of them all. Here, as elsewhere in society, we found
different and interesting types.
First of all there were some loyal white refugees. While most of these
were from the western and interior counties of our own State, a few came
from States farther south. They fled from their homes, which had been
made unsafe by rebel guerrillas and bushwhackers. So far as possible
they had converted their property into money, which they brought with
them. They came to stay. Some of them purchased residences in St. Louis.
Many of them, by the stern logic of war, had become emancipationists,
while they retained some of their old prejudices. The notion that
everything vile lurked under the harmless word, abolitionist, had been
woven into the very tissue of their being. They persistently believed
that there were at least three devils in the North and East: an
editorial devil, Horace Greeley; a clerical devil, Henry Ward Beecher;
and a lecturing devil, Wendell Phillips. But war by its victories and
defeats gradually illuminated their minds. The horns and hoofs of these
imaginary devils slowly faded from their vision. And a few years after
the surrender at Appomattox, many of these very men by tongue and ballot
endeavored to make the editorial devil President of the United States.
But there was a still larger number of rebel refugees. They were usually
found in knots at boarding-houses kept by Southern sympathizers. They
were always hilarious when the rebel army was victorious, and
crestfallen when it suffered defeat. Most of them had sufficient means,
snatched from the ravages of war, to sustain them in comfort. A few of
them were rich. For the most part they were permitted to live in peace
among us, securely shielded by the government that they sought to
overthrow. Occasionally, they were found aiding those in arms against
the United States, and a few of them, as we have already noted, were
arrested and sent beyond the lines of the Federal army.
But by far the most numerous class of refugees were poor and wretched
beyond description. They entered St. Louis in rags, often hatless and
shoeless, sallow, lean, half-starved, unkempt. Very many of them were
women and children in pitiable plight, half naked, shivering, penniless,
dispirited. Most of them professed to be loyal. Their husbands and
fathers had been killed because they were Union men. Some of them were
the wives and children of Union volunteer soldiers from Arkansas; on
that account the rebels drove them from their homes. Moreover, the
Confederates, to a considerable extent, recruited their armies from the
poor whites, whose families they left to find their way into the Union
lines. But many that came were dazed. They hardly knew why the war was
being waged. Whether they were loyal or disloyal it would have puzzled
the most astute to find out. Pinching want had driven them from their
comfortless dwellings in the South. Their main quest was bread.
But while in tatters and gaunt with hunger, most of them were utterly
unwilling to work. They regarded manual labor as a disgrace. They had
been taught in the school of slavery that honest toil was servile and
ignoble. The notion quite generally prevailed among them that since they
had fled from rebeldom, the government was under obligation to feed and
clothe them, while they sat down in idleness and glumly received its
gifts. What charity added to government supplies they thoughtlessly
consumed, and then stretched out empty, thriftless hands for more.
An incident or two will present in concrete form their aristocratic
notions concerning labor. James E. Yeatman, President of the Western
Sanitary Commission, became deeply interested in a girl of sixteen,
belonging to a refugee family from Arkansas. With considerable personal
effort he secured for her the position of nurse-girl in a household
where her highest good, in every way, would have been sought. Rejoicing
in doing a benevolent deed, though a very busy man, with great
responsibilities weighing on mind and heart, he drove more than two
miles to apprise her mother of his success. The family were living on
government rations, and every article of their dress showed their
extreme poverty; but the mother met this offer of a place for her
half-starved child by exclaiming: “W’at, my darter a sarvant and work
like a niggah! no, sah! she’ll rot fust!” “Very well, madam,” with
righteous indignation replied Mr. Yeatman, “let her rot;” and jumping
into his buggy, drove hurriedly back to his office in the city.
I visited a family of this class at the Virginia Hotel, an old hostelry,
which was used as an asylum for freedmen and white refugees. The room
adjoining one occupied by a family of refugees had been assigned to a
negro. These refugees were clothed in rags and were barefooted. The
unkempt hair of the wife and mother was a mass of matted tangles. In
their cheerless apartment there was neither stove nor bed. They slept on
straw and ate from the hand of charity. While I was taking in the
situation and speaking an encouraging word, a benevolent lady stepped in
to relieve their pressing wants, but, strange to tell, found their pride
sorely mortified, not by their personal appearance nor by the litter and
filth in which they were living, but because there was a negro in the
next room. The mother voiced the complaint of that poverty-stricken
household, by saying, in a peculiar drawl: “I say now, we’uns doan think
that ah sooperintend ort to put that niggah in thah; we’uns doan like
that ah purty wal.”
I stepped into the adjoining apartment that I might see what had so
offended these aristocratic paupers, and found that the negro, a
contraband or fugitive from bondage, had entered his room at the same
time that the white refugees had entered theirs. But he had found an old
broom and had swept his room, an old stove and had put it up; had
gathered some soft coal to burn in it; had gotten somewhere a rickety
bedstead and set it up and had put on it a tick filled with straw. He
had procured a wash-basin, a cracked looking-glass, and something to
eat. While his room was bare and poor enough, he had made it look in
some measure homelike. At all events he greatly distanced his squalid
white neighbors, who felt degraded by his presence.
Most of the white refugees were illiterates. Their ignorance was so
dense that we are in no danger of exaggerating it. I once sat down by
the side of a sick boy of this class, who lay on a dirty blanket spread
on the floor. His mother, also ill, lay near him. She was afraid that he
would die. They had fled from Batesville, Arkansas, and exposure to cold
and rain, while on their journey, had brought on fever. She could not
read and knew very little of the world outside of the neighborhood
where, up to that time, she had spent her life. Her sick son was fifteen
years old. She wished me to talk with him, which I was glad to do. I
told him of Christ, who came into the world to save sinners, and was
ready to save him. He listened eagerly, but soon said: “If you mean by
sin _cussin_, I never done that.” When I told him of Jesus he looked
intently into my face, and said: “I never heard of him before.” I felt
myself to be a real missionary, sent to tell one poor, sick boy, a
stranger in a strange city, of the Saviour, who then and there was ready
to receive him as his child. But these cases were not rare among poor
whites. The few that could read formed the exceptional class.
Moreover, a large part of them were discouraged, downhearted, often
utterly hopeless. Very many of them also were ill. For a considerable
period about fifty per cent. of the poor white refugees, when they
reached our city, were sent to hospitals. It was extremely difficult to
care for them. Unaccustomed to the ordinary comforts of intelligent and
thrifty communities, they had little or no appreciation of the things
offered to them by the benevolent to alleviate their sufferings. The
delicacies usually so highly prized by the sick were manifestly
repulsive to many of them. Some Christian women, anxious to do what they
could to help and cheer them, carried to the hospital preserved fruits
and jellies. Rejoicing in doing good to those in distress, they
personally offered them these tempting delicacies, prepared by their own
hands. But the wretched sufferers, having never seen nor tasted such
food, said to the angels of mercy that urged them to partake, “We’uns
don’t want that ah; bring us clabber and cawn cakes, that’s what we’uns
like.”
A few days after I visited the same hospital and talked with the surgeon
in charge of it. He told me that the sick refugees seemed to be utterly
destitute of heart and hope, and that it was quite impossible to get
such dejected men upon their feet again. While he spoke the clock struck
twelve. “Before nine o’clock,” he said, “I visited every man in the
hospital and carefully noted his condition. I did not find one
desperately ill, nor did I see any evidence of approaching death. But
since that time three of them have died.” “And how,” I asked, “do you
account for their deaths?” He replied, “They die simply because they
have not enough ambition to breathe.”
But of course they were not all alike. Their differences were
interesting and suggestive. A gentleman told me that a Baptist woman
from Mississippi wished to see me. I found her on Third Street, in the
second story of a tumble-down brick house. She was not an object of
charity. She had brought along with her enough money and household stuff
to meet all of her bodily wants. But the things in her room seemed to be
in inextricable confusion. She apparently had a genius for disorder. Her
apartment was grimy, filthy, malodorous; like the king’s “offence” in
“Hamlet,” it was rank and smelled to heaven. She was of medium height,
fat, had brown, frowzy hair, and dull, leaden eyes, under dust-colored
eyebrows. Her cheeks were sallow and flabby. Around her obesity hung a
faded, dirty, calico gown, that did not quite reach her ankles. Her bare
feet were conspicuous, thrust into a pair of coarse slippers, with
worn-down, run-over heels. Hanging to her belt by her side was a cow’s
horn, in which was a stick, frayed at one end, making a rude brush. She
offered me a chair, and having seated herself by a rusty, rickety
cooking-stove, our conversation began. “Ah ye,” she said, “the Babtis’
minister?” I told her who I was. She now took the stick from the horn at
her side, put the brush end of it into her mouth and sucked it for a
moment, and then thrusting it once more into the horn, returned it,
laden with snuff, to her mouth again. I had heard of snuff-dippers, but
this was the first one that I had ever seen. Apparently refreshed by her
dip, she said that she was a member of a “Babtis’” church down in
“Mississipp,” and wished to “jine” a “Babtis’” church here in St. Louis.
What could I say to such a proposal? I saw at a glance that unless she
was thoroughly converted from her present habits and mode of life my
church would not be congenial to her; so I fell back upon a stratagem,
by which I might satisfy her without denying her request, which request,
in itself, was of course altogether creditable to her. I fled for refuge
to the deep prejudice of the poor whites against negroes. I commended
her, I could not do otherwise, for her determination to identify herself
with her own denomination in our city, but told her that a negro
belonged to my church, and that I had never heard any one in the church
object to it, and that she might not on that account feel at home there.
I did not tell her that he was the sexton, and had, before his
manumission, belonged to one of my deacons. But the fact that I did lay
before her was sufficient for my purpose. Her prejudice was aroused;
even her dull eyes for a moment shot fire, as she declared that she
would never “jine” a church that had a “niggah” in it. Thus ended my
call.
But I found in my varied labors on their behalf, that most women among
them were free from the disgusting habit of snuff-dipping, and that some
of them were not violently prejudiced against negroes. If in a measure
all entertained such prejudice, some at least held it in reasonable
abeyance. A woman of this sort became a member of my church. She was
ordinarily neat in appearance, but could neither read nor write. She had
lived in a back country place in Tennessee, where most of those with
whom she daily associated were illiterates. At the breaking out of the
war her husband became a volunteer Union soldier. On that account she
was harassed and tormented by the people of her neighborhood so that she
fled to St. Louis for asylum, where soon after her husband’s regiment
was encamped. Being an earnest Christian, she at once united with the
church; but her husband was soon sent South to engage in active service
in the field. He knew how to write, and she often received letters from
him, which she could not read. She was deeply mortified in being
compelled to ask others to read to her her husband’s letters and to
write hers in reply. Spurred by her sense of shame, she resolved to
overcome her defect. And such was her ability that in a few weeks she
could both read and answer her husband’s letters without any help from
others. I shall never forget the triumphant joy with which she told me
that in a letter just received, her husband assured her that he was able
to read every word that she had written him. Then she said to me, “Where
I lived in Tennessee hardly anybody could read and write, and I never
thought of learning; but up here, where everybody reads and writes, I
felt awfully ashamed that I couldn’t, so I said I must know how too.”
And with great glee, she added, “I do now.” During all the period of the
war she was a very efficient Christian worker in the encampments and
hospitals in and around our city. This was another species of the white
refugees; a class that had the will and native talent to overcome their
disabilities and rise to a higher rank in the social scale.
There were also many among them who were improvident and wasteful. Still
some of this class were teachable. I remember a widow with three little
daughters who came up from Arkansas. She had there some real estate, but
being a Unionist, she had been compelled by the violence of her
secession neighbors to leave in hot haste. Having had neither time nor
opportunity to convert her holdings into money, on her arrival in St.
Louis, she found herself in want, and was forced, for a time, to depend
on charity for the bare necessities of life. She could neither read nor
write, but was a sincere Christian, and anxious to do her best. She and
her children were decent in appearance. She united with my church and as
often as she could attended the public services. The good women of my
congregation took her under their care and generously provided for her.
Among other things they gave her a boiled ham, and were greatly
disheartened by finding, two or three days after, that when she and her
children had eaten a part of it, she had thrown the rest of it out of
the window. In the heat of the moment they declared that they would
never help her any more. But I pleaded for her. I told them that what
seemed to them inexcusable wastefulness was simply her habit of life,
and that they must talk kindly with her about it, and if possible, lead
her to live reasonably and economically. They did so. She received their
instructions with hearty thanks, declaring that she had done only what
she had been accustomed to do at her home in Arkansas, but that she
would now act according to their wishes and directions. Soon there was
manifest improvement in her humble home, and in the personal appearance
of herself and her little daughters. She sent them to the public school.
They soon learned to read. Great was her joy when they could read to her
their Sunday-school books and the New Testament. At the close of the war
she sold her property in Arkansas, and bought a place a few miles from
St. Louis in Illinois. The last time I saw her was at the depot, across
the river, whither she had gone with her children, to take the cars for
her new home. They were plainly but neatly dressed. They had been
transformed by the patient, kindly work of intelligent Christian women.
They had found a new life and were radiant with joy. So to me, the
curtain fell on that scene. With renewed confidence I went back to the
city and to my labors, feeling how richly it paid to work for poor white
refugees.
But the greatness of their number appalled us. During the war nearly
forty thousand entered our gates. To care adequately and
discriminatingly for such a multitude, many of whom, as we have already
seen, were densely ignorant and averse to honest toil, was a task too
vast for a city of not more than a hundred and fifty-two thousand
inhabitants. So in this, as in every great need engendered by the war,
the Federal government, through its military officers, lent a strong,
helping hand; while the Sanitary Commission, whose work we propose to
set forth in a subsequent chapter, took a leading part in this great and
urgent charity. Through this triune agency, among many projects
inaugurated to meet the wants of the refugees, a six-story building, the
precursor of several others of like character, was fitted up for their
accommodation. Into it a thousand of them were put. Here they were not
simply lodged and fed, but were taught to read and write. They were also
set at various kinds of manual labor, and while this to many of them was
the bitterest ingredient in their cup, it helped pay their way, and gave
them truer and higher ideas of work. And in all our manifold efforts on
their behalf, we endeavored not simply to feed and clothe them, but also
to meet their higher needs, to develop their minds and elevate their
morals.
But the presentation of our experiences with the refugees would not be
complete without at least a brief survey of the freedmen or fugitives
from bondage. After General Benjamin F. Butler, in 1861, had
felicitously decided that slaves captured by his troops, or fleeing into
his lines, were contraband of war, and so justly subject to
confiscation, throughout the North they were generally designated
contrabands, and they usually bore that name among us. While from first
to last a multitude of them of various shades of color fled to our city,
they were by no means as numerous as the white refugees; and while they
were all illiterate, having been inured to labor they were usually ready
to engage in any menial service. Those who had been trained in household
work were at once employed by the best families of the city; while many
field hands, that came to us in the winter, had to be cared for by the
government and by private charity, until spring, when most of them found
remunerative work in cleaning up yards, cultivating gardens, and on
farms outside the city. Only a small contingent remained to tax our
benevolence. Some of these were spiritless and thriftless; and some were
crippled or sick. However, since the contrabands, taken as a whole, were
ready to work, and were greatly delighted, for the first time in their
lives, to work for wages, the problem of caring for them was
comparatively an easy one.
Many suggestive incidents pertaining to them, some sad, some
mirth-provoking, came under my eye. The contrabands usually trudged into
the city in groups, bearing in their hands or on their shoulders
budgets, filled with old clothing or useless traps, their heads covered
with dilapidated hats or caps, or, in the case of the women, wrapped
about with red bandanas. Their garments were coarse, often tattered, and
usually quite insufficient to shield them against the cold of winter.
They wore shoes and boots of cowhide which in very many cases were
nearly worn out, so that often their black toes protruded. But one cold,
frosty, winter day a motley company of fugitives, men, women and
children, came marching in barefooted. We asked them how they came to be
in such a wretched plight? They said that as they were going “long de
road” out in the country, some “Confed sogers” seized them, set them on
a bank by the roadside, and pulled off their shoes, and then told them
just to run for their lives. Their unusual predicament, and the
unanimity and heartiness of their artless testimony, convinced all who
heard that they told the truth. It might have been horse-play on the
part of some company of the State Guards, but if so, it was a grim and
terrible joke to this knot of contrabands, compelling them to walk many
miles with bare feet along frozen, snowy roads, the feet of the little
children frost-bitten and bleeding.
An occurrence vastly more pathetic was woven into my pastoral
experience. A slaveholder of the cruel sort lived near Jefferson City.
There belonged to him a little girl eight years old, together with her
mother and aunt. The early winter of 1861 and 1862 was bitterly cold.
During one of the severest days of that trying season, the thermometer
hovering about zero, he compelled these two women to saw wood all day
out in the open air, and the mite of a girl to bring the sawed sticks
into his wood-shed. With hands stinging from the biting frost, they
besought him to let them warm themselves by the fire; and he answered
their petition with the lash. Before the day ended they nearly perished
and the fingers of the child were frozen. That night they determined to
run away. They knew that on account of the war many other slaves were
quitting their masters; why should not they flee from the cruelty of
theirs? In the darkness the following night they slipt away unobserved.
They headed for St. Louis. The little child, always feeble, was soon
exhausted. So the mother and aunt by turns carried her on their backs.
They hid in ravines and thickets, when they thought themselves in
danger. They ate the crackers and bread that they brought with them.
They slept by haystacks and in outhouses. They were frost-bitten. They
were full of fear lest the child should die. For seventy-five or eighty
miles they breasted wind and snow, when they met a squad of Union
soldiers, and asked them for protection and guidance. The soldiers as
best they could supplied their wants, and conducted them to St. Louis.
There the doors of a Christian home opened to them. No longer slaves,
they were happy. Those who employed them spoke to them kindly. The lash
was never again to lacerate their quivering flesh. They were justly paid
for their toil. They owned themselves. They had no words to express the
joy of it all.
But the bitter was mingled with the sweet. That perilous flight from
bondage with the chilling winds and snows beating upon them proved fatal
to the child that they so tenderly loved. From exposure during that long
winter journey on foot consumption fastened itself upon her. She was
happy, however, even in her extreme sickness. The children in the
household loved and petted her. Little children have no prejudice
against color. But she grew weaker day by day. She had some notion that
God loved her, and that Jesus would come and take her to heaven. And on
her cot, with her face turned upward, she sank as gently to her long
slumber as the infant falls asleep in its mother’s arms.
At this time, when ruthless war, without respect to slave laws, was
breaking the chains of bondmen, two contrabands became servants under my
own roof. One of them was a black man about twenty-five years old. He
said his name was Jim, and so we called him, though his full name was
James Jackson. He did the rougher work required by the household, split
the wood, brought in the coal, kept the yard in trim, ran errands, and
cared for the horse and carriage. He proved to be teachable and
trustworthy. According to his light, he was a good man. One day when he
was splitting wood, I said to him: “Jim, they say that if you negroes
are set free you will not be able to take care of yourselves, to earn
your own living. What do you say to that?” He left his axe sticking in
the log that he was splitting and fell into a brown study, but soon
replied: “I’se can’t see that. We’se took care of them and us too for a
long time, and can’t we’se take care of ourselves?” That seemed to be
good reasoning, and I felt sure that Jim could earn his own way.
He said that he would like to learn to read, and for a good many weeks I
tried to instruct him in the art. But being utterly unaccustomed to that
sort of mental effort, he made very slow progress. However, by degrees,
he mastered the names of the letters, and was able with painful effort
to read a few of the simplest words. He was a Christian and wanted to
read the Bible. So I bought him a New Testament of large, plain print
and, after a hard struggle, he was seemingly able to read the text:
“Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give
you rest.” He was very happy over his acquisition, and so was I. He
would read that text over and over again. He had no doubt that he really
read it, nor had I. But wishing him to add something to his
acquisitions, I turned to another chapter in the Gospel of Matthew, and,
putting my finger on a verse, asked him to read it. He intently fixed
his eyes upon it and began: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” I asked him to read another
verse, in another chapter, and running his finger along the words, he
read: “Come unto me, etc.” I afterwards found him at times reading his
New Testament, but I feel quite sure that he never found anything in it
except that gracious, tender invitation of his Saviour. He of course
read simply from his memory, but thought that he read from his book.
I afterwards united him in marriage to an excellent colored woman. They
set up housekeeping for themselves. They did well and were happy.
Whether Jim lives now or not, I do not know, but if he has passed away,
I am sure that in the hour of his death he heard his Lord say: “Come
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest.”
The other contraband servant was a middle-aged woman, who gave her name
as Harriet. She was large and muscular, and black as ink. She would pick
up, as though it were a trifle, a washtub full of water and carry it
across the room. Nothing seemed to weary her, She did cheerfully her
daily tasks. She was happy in her new-found freedom. To receive week by
week money for her labor made her cup of joy brim over. The dawning
consciousness that she belonged to herself and had a right to what she
earned filled her with unspeakable gladness.
She too had an abiding trust in Christ. She said she was “_Methdis_.”
She had an active mind. She was intellectually much brighter than Jim.
Her new condition and surroundings awakened within her mind many
inquiries. Busy with her new thoughts as she worked, one day she said:
“Dar ah some tings that I doan unerstan. Up in de State where I lived,
wen thar was ’vival meetin an dey wanted us to be good and ’jine’ de
chuch, den we had souls; but wen dey wants to sell us down souf, den we
has no souls. Can you tell me about dat? Seems mighty strange!”
This was an outburst from an honest, sturdy soul, that had been kept in
ignorance. It vividly revealed the antagonistic forces that often
battled for supremacy in the minds of Christian slaveholders. When they
sorely needed money they stifled their consciences with the figment that
their slaves were merely beasts, that might be sold with impunity; but
when their better selves were touched by heavenly influences, they felt
that their chattels had immortal souls that might be saved or lost. It
has been said that some men, like modern ships, are made up of distinct
compartments, which, in moral action, have no communication with each
other. So it seems to have been with some professedly Christian
slaveholders; at slave sales and whipping-posts the tyrant compartment
was in full and exclusive activity; while at revival meetings the
Christian compartment put forth its exclusive energy.