In the days and weeks following his conversion, John felt nearly overwhelmed by the sense of transformation. “It was now to me, as begin[n]ing to live again. I was now entering on a new life.” He knew it would not necessarily be a comfortable life: “my cross would at times be hard to bear.” There was always the danger that he might “backslide.” So he continued to pray hard, “asking for strength and aid to bear me on through life and to enable me to resist the many temptations I knew would beset me.”20
Almost forgotten in the euphoria of his conversion was the errand that had brought him to Knox County: selling his cigars. George Whillock had long since returned to Roane County with the carriage; and so, after bidding the Browns farewell, John gathered up his wares and made his way alone the few miles to Knoxville. He was disappointed to find that there was a cigar-making establishment in town and all the stores were well stocked with that particular commodity. “I could not sell cigars in K[noxville] for any price.” As it happened, however, Uncle Thomas maintained a little grocery store in town and was looking for someone to clerk there. John, who had no urgent need to return to Roane right away, agreed to work in the store for a while.21
He had spent time in Knoxville before, first as a Confederate soldier and later, after the town fell to the Yankees, as a prisoner of war and as a supplier for the garrison troops. The grim ugliness of the place was therefore no surprise to him. The town, which sat on the north bank of the Tennessee River and in normal times could boast a certain charm, had suffered badly since the war began, thanks mainly to military occupation by one side and then the other. “[A] mass of dismal, dilapidated, weather-beaten buildings,” is how one visitor described Knoxville in early 1865, “… with narrow, muddy, filthy streets.”22
Surrounding the town was a ring of defensive works consisting of deep trenches and stout breastworks punctuated by hilltop redoubts with cannons. In the area between the edge of town and the circle of fortifications, virtually every blade of grass and every stalk of wheat and corn had been trampled into the mud. Beyond the fortifications, for hundreds of yards, every tree had been cut down and hauled away to provide a clear field of fire. In these barren stretches could be seen the shallow graves of Confederate soldiers who had died during the rebel army’s abortive attempt to recapture the town in late 1863. Even in the summer there was little greenery visible in or around Knoxville. It was a hideously scarred landscape painted in shades of gray and dull brown, and now the bleak winter weather made the scene even drearier.23
The town was a depressing sight, but at the same time it was bustling. The population, about 5,300 before the war, was close to 8,000 now, not counting the troops. There were thousands of blue-clad soldiers, some billeted in town, others camped around the perimeter, and their presence was pervasive. Many of the town’s buildings had been seized for army use and new ones had been constructed. The Lamar House on Gay Street, once Knoxville’s best hotel, was now quartering troops. The Deaf and Dumb Asylum had been turned into an army hospital. There were two military prisons and a number of warehouses and repair shops. The commander of the District of East Tennessee, Brigadier General Davis Tillson, had his headquarters in Knoxville. And the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a Northern benevolent association dedicated to the welfare of Union soldiers, had an office in town.24
The wartime population boom and the Yankees’ appropriation of buildings conspired to create a serious shortage of living accommodations. “Every house, stable, kitchen and shanty in the town is occupied,” the local newspaper reported. John Robertson was fortunate to be able to room in the store where he worked, for lodging in Knoxville was very expensive. In fact, everything in town was expensive. Because so little food or other provisions could be drawn from the ravaged country around Knoxville, the bulk of the town’s supplies had to come from the North by way of Nashville and Chattanooga—a long, costly trip by rail and water. High prices were at least partly responsible for the rash of thefts in Knoxville. As the newspaper noted, thieves were “digging under smokehouses, robbing corncribs, breaking into stores, and stealing clothes off of lines and fences.”25
No one broke into John’s store while he was there, but he had other annoyances to contend with. The cold, for one thing. The temperature remained unusually low and the store was poorly heated. “I suffered no little, at night,” he recalled. The late hours kept by some of the townsfolk interrupted his slumber, too: “The City way of sleeping did not suit me.” He was particularly disturbed by the goings-on at Reed & Riley’s opera house, which was right next to the store and featured musical shows or plays every night. Not only did the place generate a lot of noise and violate the sanctity of the Sabbath, but it also put temptation in John’s path. He was admittedly “fond of places of amusement,” but he believed them to be, like novels, a worldly indulgence that distracted one from the course of righteousness. The opera house beckoned seductively, but John remained strong: “I found it very hard to resist it, but did.”26
Another vexation was that Knoxville was full of people he detested. It was not the Yankee soldiers who bothered him: he had made his peace with the invaders, and after he took the oath, they let him alone. His problem was the native unionists and the blacks.
John had never given much thought to the great principles at stake in the war. His family took their stand with the Confederacy and that was enough for him. The war he had known was not so much an ideological or sectional conflict as it was a community conflict, and the real enemy to him was not the people of the North but his unionist neighbors.
Now John was forced to rub shoulders with unionists every day, for Knoxville was crowded with them. Of course, every citizen in the town was at least nominally a unionist, including John. The federal authorities allowed no one to live there who refused to take the oath. But John and others who took the oath reluctantly spurned the label of unionist—that belonged to those who took it gladly.27
John did not regard all unionists as enemies. There were many who tried to stay on peaceful terms with neighbors and kinsmen who opposed them politically, just as there were many secessionists who tried to do the same. Both Thomas Collier and John Brown were in fact unionists, and they had never been anything but kind to John Robertson. But many others were unforgiving. It was unionists of that sort who had tried to kill John from ambush, who had plundered his parents’ farm, who had kidnapped him and turned him over to the federal army, and who had run him off from his teaching job with threats of violence. In their eyes, of course, John deserved everything he got, for he had persecuted unionists with equal zeal. They had no forgiveness in their hearts for him and others like him; and he had none for them.28
In the year and a half since the Yankees captured Knoxville, the town’s unionist population had swelled. The new arrivals were mostly refugees from outlying areas where rebel guerrillas were active or from the northeastern corner of the state, which was still controlled by the Confederate army. More were straggling in every day and they were a pitiful sight. “It is sickening to the heart,” wrote one Knoxvillian, “to stand here and look at … men, women, and children, coming in through the mud and rain … driven from their homes.… [T]he tales they tell [of persecution by rebels] are heartrending.” Some came with a little property they had salvaged—a wagonload of clothes and furniture, a few head of cattle—but most were destitute. Because the town could absorb no more, General Tillson had ordered the construction of a refugee shelter on the south side of the river.29
The plight of the refugees had stirred some fellow unionists to come to their aid. In early 1864 they organized the East Tennessee Relief Association and sent agents into the North to solicit contributions. Northerners responded generously. The relief association maintained an office in Knoxville where food and clothing shipped from the North were doled out to needy refugees. The office also operated as an employment agency, finding jobs for refugees who wanted to stay in Knoxville and work.30
One of the founders of the relief association
was Knoxville’s most prominent unionist, William G. Brownlow, known to all as Parson Brownlow. He had begun his career decades earlier as a hellfire-and-brimstone Methodist circuit preacher, but later he turned to politics and journalism and became the Democrat-bashing editor of the Knoxville Whig. His no-holds-barred speeches and editorial diatribes were famous even beyond east Tennessee. When the war came, he took aim at the secessionists and made himself so obnoxious to the Confederate authorities that they shut down his press, threw him in prison, threatened to hang him, and finally exiled him to the North. After Knoxville fell to the Yankee army, Brownlow returned. He resurrected his newspaper, renaming it the Whig and Rebel Ventilator, and set about to make life miserable for his enemies. The paper’s columns blazed with anger and vengefulness. Editor Brownlow openly incited unionists to retaliate for wrongs suffered at the hands of their rebel neighbors. When criticized for his vindictiveness, he was unapologetic: “If we have been instrumental,” he wrote in an editorial published shortly before John Robertson arrived in town, “in bringing to a violent death any one or more of the God-forsaken and hell-deserving persecutors of Union families in East Tennessee, we thank God most devoutly.… Shoot them down like dogs, is our advice.”31
John and other rebels who had taken the oath were, in Brownlow’s eyes, among the God-forsaken and hell-deserving, for the parson regarded no one as a friend who had not been a staunch unionist since the beginning of the war. His extreme views were too much for some east Tennessee unionists, but they carried great weight, for Brownlow was powerful. In addition to controlling the Whig and Rebel Ventilator, he was the U.S. Treasury agent for east Tennessee, with broad authority to regulate trade and confiscate rebel property. Soon he would command even greater authority. Delegates representing the state’s unionists had recently gathered in Nashville for a constitutional convention that marked the first step toward restoring civil government in Tennessee and getting the state readmitted to the Union. The delegates had nominated Brownlow to be governor of the restored state. An election would be held in March, and the parson was certain to win.32
Had Brownlow known John Robertson and been able to read his mind, his suspicions about oath-taking rebels would only have been confirmed. In his heart, John had never renounced the Confederate cause. Although his life had taken a new course and he no longer had any desire to serve in the rebel ranks or wreak vengeance on his unionist enemies, he still hoped to see a victorious Confederate States of America. He could not say so publicly, of course. And when Yankees were around, he had to keep his mouth shut about another matter he had strong opinions on: the Emancipation Proclamation.33
John hated blacks. He hated them with a visceral passion that would have puzzled whites from other parts of the South where blacks were more numerous. John’s family, like the vast majority of east Tennessee families, owned no slaves; and in the community where John grew up, as in most other east Tennessee communities, blacks were few. Virtually all Southern whites agreed that blacks were inferior and slavery justified. But those like John who had little day-to-day contact with blacks generally sneered at the racial paternalism manifested by many whites and instead regarded blacks with loathing.34
Back in December 1863, when John was living in the Knoxville area and chopping wood for the federal army, he had had an encounter with blacks that left him literally nauseated. He had been assigned to a work gang that included not only Irish and German immigrants, which was bad enough in John’s view, but also several men whom he described as “the greasiest looking nig[g]ers I ever saw.” Just being around them made him sick. He refused to eat or sleep with the gang, and at the first opportunity he quit the job and found another.35
Such intense racism was common to east Tennessee’s secessionists and unionists alike. Parson Brownlow himself was, before the war, one of the most vocal negrophobes and proslavery spokesmen in the South. The parson now endorsed emancipation as a way to punish rebels, but he still had no love for blacks. John Robertson not only hated them but also wished earnestly for their continued enslavement.36
There were more blacks in Knoxville now than John had ever seen in his life. Hundreds had come in from the countryside, having run away from their owners. Although President Abraham Lincoln had, for political reasons, exempted Tennessee from the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was now extinct pretty much everywhere in the state because the federal military authorities refused to act to preserve it. Even unionist masters were turned away when they appealed to the Yankees for help in disciplining their slaves or retrieving runaways.37
The fugitive slaves who came into Knoxville joined the small number of blacks native to the town, some of whom had been free before the war. There were a good number of other blacks to be seen on the streets of town as well: they wore blue uniforms and belonged to the 1st U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery. The regiment had been organized in Knoxville about a year earlier and served as part of the garrison force. It was one of many black units mustered into the Union army since President Lincoln authorized the recruitment of blacks in 1863.38
If runaway slaves and black soldiers were not enough to turn John’s stomach, Knoxville also had a black school with a black teacher. His name was Alfred Anderson and he had been born free in the nearby town of Maryville in 1832. Since 1849 he had lived in Knoxville and for the last four years had served as pastor of a little congregation of black Methodists. Anderson had only “a smaul education,” as he put it; he could “Read Rite And A littel mour.” But he had great compassion for those of his people who had been denied even that. He established the school in August 1864 to help bring the blessing of literacy to his “down troden race.” About a hundred children were now enrolled. Classes were held in a building that Anderson rented for fifty dollars a month; it also served as his church. The school was run on a shoestring, for only about half the students paid any tuition; “the uthers,” Anderson explained, “aint Abel.” He was hoping for financial help from one of the Northern benevolent societies that had taken up the cause of educating the South’s blacks.39
All things considered, Knoxville was about as awful a place as John Robertson could imagine, and he did not tarry long there. He could have stayed on, had he wanted to, for Uncle Thomas needed him in the store. And there was other work available: the cigar manufacturer in town was advertising for help, and John had learned to make a pretty good cigar. But he was ready to get back to Roane County.40
About the last day of January, John said good-bye to Uncle Thomas and made his way to the railroad station at the north end of town. He boarded a train that took him southwest on the tracks of the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad. From the window of his car, he saw a frozen landscape. Many ponds and streams were solid with ice, an uncommon sight in that part of the country. Some twelve miles down the line, near Concord, the train passed a spot where a terrible accident had occurred just a day or two earlier. A locomotive had thrown an axle and derailed with its cars, killing four passengers and injuring sixteen. All twenty were U.S. soldiers, members of a detachment that was being rushed from Knoxville down to Athens, Tennessee, to rescue a garrison under attack by Confederate cavalry.41
John’s train continued on, to Lenoir’s Station and then Loudon, where it crossed the river on a long trestle heavily guarded by Northern troops. When the train pulled into the village of Philadelphia, a little over thirty miles from Knoxville, he got off. From here it was a twelve-mile walk to the farm of another uncle, Allen Robertson, where John had made his home since October.42
There was a tavern in Philadelphia, but John did not stop there. He walked on for three miles until he came to a house that he knew to be the home of some distant relatives of his. Although he had never met them, he decided to knock on the door and introduce himself. They were hospitable and invited him to stay overnight. But John wanted to get home. After visiting a while and warming himself by the fire, he pushed on.43
It was around five o’clock, nearly nightfall, when he reached the Blue Sp
rings community. Here he stopped to see some friends, who informed him that a revival was in progress at Blue Springs Church. “This was joyful news to me,” John recalled. “[T]here was where I wanted to be.” But it was getting late, and so he pressed on the short distance to Uncle Allen’s.44
8. This modern church stands on the site of Blue Springs Church of Roane County, Tennessee, which John Robertson attended in 1865. In the woods just behind the church, John retired for private prayer.
Allen Robertson, a brother of John’s father, was fifty-three years old; his wife, Mary, was nineteen years younger. They had six children. Until 1862 the family had lived in Greene County. Like John’s father, Uncle Allen was a man of modest means, a small farmer who never held slaves and who lived by the sweat of his own brow. One of the few luxuries he enjoyed was a carriage that he had bought just before Christmas for eighty dollars and had let John use for the trip to Knoxville. Uncle Allen and Aunt Mary had been good to John, taking him into their home after he was driven from his teaching job. Now they welcomed him back after his month-long stay in Knox County.45
After supper on the night following his arrival, John set out for Blue Springs Church, a mile and a half away. He found a large crowd gathered there, including many friends and acquaintances. They knew of his spiritual quest and wondered why he now declined to go forward to the mourners’ bench. “They soon learned the cause,” John wrote, “and came to me one by one to give me their hand in token of their love, and to welcome me into the glorious work.”46
The revival at Blue Springs Church continued for two more weeks, and John went every day and night. Sometimes he sang with the choir; at other times he encouraged the mourners or went outside to pray in secret, “bowed on my knees, in a piece of wood just above the church, earnestly beseeching God to do a mighty work among us.” When the revival ended, he met with the minister in charge and was formally accepted as a member of the Methodist church.47
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