EAST TENNESSEE FARMERS.
I found the East Tennesseeans a plain, honest, industrious,
old-fashioned people. Only about four out of five can read and write.
Men of the North and West would consider them slow. They are dressed,
almost without exception, in coarse, strong “domestic,” as the
home-manufactured cloth of the country is called. It is woven on
hand-looms, which are to be found in nearly every farm-house. Domestic
is, in fact, an institution, not of Tennessee alone, but of the entire
Southern country. In the absence of manufacturing establishments, the
interest in this primitive private industry has not been suffered to
decline. It stood the South in good stead during the war. After the
importation of goods was cut off, it clothed the people. All classes
wore it. Even at the time of my visit, I found many proprietors of large
estates, the aristocrats of the country, wearing garments which had been
spun, colored, and woven by their own slaves.
Tennessee has no system of free schools. There was a common-school fund,
derived mainly from public lands given for the purpose by the United
States. The State was the trustee of this fund, which the Constitution
declared “permanent, never to be diminished by legislative
appropriation,” nor “devoted to any other use than the support and
encouragement of common schools.” The proceeds of this fund distributed
among the schools in 1859, amounted to $230,430, or seventy-five cents
for each scholar in the State. Treason, which betrayed so many sacred
trusts, betrayed this. According to Governor Brownlow “a more perfidious
act than the appropriation of this fund to treasonable purposes was not
committed during the late perfidious rebellion.”
The people of East Tennessee took more interest, perhaps, in
common-school education, than the inhabitants of other parts of the
State; but that was not much. The school-fund went but a little way
toward the support of schools. There were scattered throughout the
country log school-houses capable of accommodating fifty pupils each.
The tuition varied from two dollars and a half to three dollars a
scholar. The teachers were supported by neighborhood subscriptions. But
education was regarded by the poor as a luxury which they could not
afford; and even the middling class was apt to consider their money and
their children’s labor of more importance than book-learning. The war,
and the waste of the school-fund, had for four years put an end to
schools, and I found the new generation growing up in ignorance.
The school-houses serve as meeting-houses. There are few churches
beside. Outside of the larger towns, scarce a spire points its finger
towards heaven. This is true not only of Tennessee, but of the whole
South. It is one of the peculiarities of the country which strike the
Northern traveller unpleasantly. The village green, with the neat
white-steepled edifice standing upon it, distinguishable from all other
buildings, is no feature of the Southern landscape. You may travel
thousands of miles and not meet with it.
Yet the East Tennesseeans are a church-going people. No especial form of
meeting-house, any more than form of worship, is necessary to the
exercise of that divine faculty by which man communes with his Maker.
The Holy Spirit enters as readily the log-hut, where two or three are
gathered together, as the great temples where multitudes assemble.
The Methodist Church predominates in East Tennessee. The United
Brethren, who admit to their communion no rum-seller, rum-drinker, nor
slaveholder, have a powerful influence. They were much persecuted in the
South before the war, as was natural in a country where the prejudice in
favor of rum and slavery was so strong; but of late, in East Tennessee,
they have grown in strength and popularity.
Farming is behind the age. Mowers and reapers, which might be employed
to fine advantage on the beautiful smooth meadows and grain-fields of
East Tennessee, have scarcely come into use at all. In Greene County I
heard of but three. Manures are wasted. It is customary to rotate crops,
until even rotation must cease, giving place to a usurpation of weeds
and broom-sedge. A favorite method of improving land is to “clover” it;
that is, to plough in crops of clover and grass. Farming utensils are
nearly all brought from the North; and there is a great need for home
manufactures here also. The farmers generally work mules and mares. The
mares are kept chiefly for breeding mules. For which purpose likewise
every neighborhood, if not every farm, has its “jack.”
The further my observations extended, the more strongly I was convinced
that mules were an indispensable substitute for horses in the South.
Animals there do not receive the cherishing care they get at the North;
and the rough, careless treatment which I saw almost universally shown
to beasts of burden, not only by the negroes, but also by the whites,
can be endured by nothing less hardy than the mule. This valuable
creature, besides possessing the advantages I have elsewhere alluded to,
is recommended for his brave appetite, which slights no part of the
product of a hill of corn, but sturdily masters stalk, cob, and shucks.
Animals are driven, both at ploughing and teaming, by one rein, which is
attached to the middle of the bridle-rein on the neck of the “lead”
horse or mule, as the “near” or left-hand beast is called. The driver
gives two little jerks for _gee_, and a steady pull for _haw_. This is
the custom throughout the South.
I found horses cheap in Tennessee. A farmer said to me, “A hundred and a
half will buy our best animal. This is not because horses are plenty,
but because money is scarce. Formerly we used to take large droves of
our stock to Georgia and the Carolinas; but that market is closed now,
there is no money there.” Several weeks afterwards, in one of the middle
counties of South Carolina, I met this very man, who told me he had come
into the State with eleven horses, and sold them all at good prices.
There had been more money hoarded, and more cotton reserved to be
exchanged for money, in parts of the South than was at first supposed.
Tennessee and Kentucky are the two great mule-breeding States. East
Tennessee takes first rank among the grazing sections of the South and
West. Wild grass abounds in the uncultivated districts. Interminable
forests on the mountain sides are carpeted with it. The woods are kept
open and free from undergrowth by fires; and this native grass springs
up and covers the ground. The mountains are full of deer which feed upon
it. Many a beautiful range of thousands of acres is also afforded the
farmers’ stock, which is sent in vast numbers to occupy this wild, free,
unfenced pasturage. Neighbors club together to make up a herd of four or
five hundred head of cattle, enough to render profitable the employment
of a herdsman. Farmers have but little hay to provide for the winter
season. The climate is such that there is no month in the year during
which cattle cannot gain at least a partial subsistence by grazing. This
I account one of the great advantages of the country.
One of the great disadvantages is the want of a market. I saw a farmer
in Jefferson County who had five thousand bushels of corn, for which he
could find no sale near home; and the cost of transportation was too
great to think of taking it out of the State. Said he, “We find it for
our interest to feed our farm-produce into stock, and drive it.”
I was told there was “a heap of thin, poor soil in East Tennessee.” The
ordinary land produces fifteen bushels of wheat, and thirty-five of corn
to the acre. The lands on the river bottoms are incomparably better.
Prices range from eight and ten to eighty and a hundred dollars per
acre, according to the situation and quality. There are farms to be had
in every section; it can scarcely be said that they are for sale, there
being no sale for them. Such is the distress for money among holders of
real estate, that land can be had in some of the most desirable
locations almost at the buyer’s own price. It is claimed that before the
war the wheat of East Tennessee commanded the highest market-prices in
Richmond and New York, as having that fine, enduring quality wheat
derives only from good limestone soils. Fruits abound,—apples, peaches,
pears, plums; and both climate and soil are admirably adapted to the
grape. The country is well watered, and its climate is mild and
salubrious. Manufacturing facilities are abundant. There are forests and
coal-mines, lead, zinc, iron, copper, marble, and unimproved water-power
to any extent.
Farmers told me they were paying the freedmen from eight to fifteen
dollars a month, and boarding them. They said, “We can afford to pay
more than Virginians can, because we farm it better.” They laughed at
the Virginians’ shiftless methods. Yet a few were beginning to learn
that even they were not perfect in the business. One who had visited
Iowa, where he saw men plough out two rows of corn at a time, and mow
and reap with machinery, one hand doing the work of four or five men,
said he had concluded that they in Tennessee didn’t know anything.