A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  During those weeks and for the remainder of February, John thought hard about his future. He had known for some time what he was moving away from: not only his sinful past but also the war, which he was doing everything he could to avoid. He had never been exactly sure, however, what he was moving toward—until now: “Ever since my conversion I had felt it my unavoidable duty to prepare myself for the Ministry.… [T]o serve God acceptab[l]y I must devote myself to his cause.” He worried, however, that he was “unworthy of the position.… I was not well read.… I had read history, but not religious works.” On the other hand, he felt he had a “tolerable good English education” and was young enough to have time to learn more. “[C]onsequently I resolved to commence preparation for the Ministry.”48

  Uncle Allen and Aunt Mary were willing to help. John would be welcome to stay on with them while he studied. They would make no demands on him, even during the busy spring planting season.49

  The unanswered question was whether John would be able to pursue his calling in peace. Roane County at this time was safer than many other sections of east Tennessee, but it was by no means a haven from the war. Just days before John returned from Knoxville, there had been a fierce shoot-out between a Yankee scouting party and a squad of rebel cavalry near Kingston, the county seat. Other armed and mounted parties—guerrillas or perhaps bandits—had been spotted in the area lately, too.50

  John borrowed some books from the Methodist preacher and began his studies. He now knew what path he would follow. He did not know what lay along that path, however; and so he kept his pistol close at hand.51

  SAMUEL AGNEW

  Early on New Year’s Day 1865, in the southeastern corner of Tippah County, Mississippi, word spread that the Yankees were coming. The citizens of the community had heard such rumors dozens of times over the last three years. More often than not these alarms proved false, but no one was willing to gamble on this one. Men and women scurried to hide their valuables and carry the news to their neighbors, shattering the stillness of this clear, cold Sunday morning.1

  When the report reached the Agnew plantation, Samuel Agnew knew what to do. The thirty-one-year-old minister and his family were veterans of many Yankee alarms. With the help of their slaves, Sam and his father rounded up the mules and cattle and headed for a patch of woods a mile and a half away, beyond the fields that lay waiting for the plows and harrows of spring. The woods of Tippah County were dense with pine and oak; in many places there was a thick undergrowth of blackjack, too. Even in the leafless winter, men and livestock could safely hide from Yankee scouts.2

  Sam had an appointment to preach that day at the home of a family named Corder, but now he wondered if he should risk going. It was dangerous for a man to be accosted by the Yankees, even a noncombatant like Sam. Federal raiding parties sometimes took men away as prisoners on suspicion of being guerrillas or simply to keep them out of the hands of the rebel army’s conscription agents. Sam and his father, Enoch, always camped out in the woods with their animals during Yankee alarms, taking shelter in a tent made of quilts. Because the enemy soldiers did not, as a rule, bother women and children, the rest of the Agnew family—Sam’s mother, his teenage siblings, and his wife—would usually stay at home and summon Sam and Enoch when the scare was over.3

  9. Sam Agnew’s diary entry for January 1, 1865

  That morning’s report put the Yankees just this side of Ripley, the county seat, which was about fifteen miles northwest of the Agnew plantation. The Corder home was in the opposite direction, so Sam decided to take a chance and go. There he found “a respectable congregation,” as he later noted in his diary, meaning a good-sized one. The rumor of a Yankee raid had not, he learned, reached that neighborhood. Of course, a respectable congregation those days was considerably smaller than what he had been used to before the war, what with so many men away in the army or dead.4

  Sam preached from Philippians 2:23, where Paul speaks of his faithful assistant Timotheus: “Him therefore I hope to send presently, as soon as I shall see how it will go with me.” Afterward, he mounted up and headed back toward the plantation. On the way, he stopped at the home of his aunt and uncle, Mary and Joseph Agnew, and ate dinner with them. Then he made his way to the campsite in the woods and joined his father. Shortly after dusk the two men doused their fire, broke camp, and led the animals back home, “having concluded,” Sam explained, “that the alarm was false because no Yankees have yet appeared.”5

  Sam wrote in his diary that night, as usual, just before going to bed. He began with a prayer: “January 1, New Year’s day—Sabbath. In the good Providence of God I am allowed to enter another year. May God guide and bless me and mine this year.”6

  In the weeks that followed there were signs that God had indeed blessed Sam and his family, at least in one respect. Unlike a lot of other Tippah countians, the Agnews were able to procure enough food to get them through the winter. Although the devastating Yankee raid in June 1864 had stripped them of every ounce of stored provisions, it had not left them destitute. They had managed to hide their beef cattle and work animals before the Yankees arrived (the hogs were already safe in the woods, for they roamed free until fattening time in the fall). The growing crops—corn, wheat, cotton—had suffered some damage in the battle that raged across the plantation, but were mostly unharmed; and the same was true of the garden vegetables. A good deal of fencing had been torn down, but Sam’s father immediately put the slaves to work rebuilding it so that livestock and wildlife could not invade the fields and garden. The harvest that fall was not bountiful, but it was sufficient.7

  Once the harvesting was finished, all hands worked to convert the crops and livestock into food for the table. The corn was shucked and, along with the threshed wheat, hauled to a miller for grinding. The cotton was ginned and baled, then stored until it could be sold or traded for food and other necessities. Because beef was hard to preserve, the Agnews generally slaughtered steers individually as needed. Pork was another matter, however. They were accustomed to laying in a year’s supply after rounding up and fattening the hogs, but that required two things: cold weather and salt.8

  The Confederacy’s salt shortage had plagued farmers in Tippah since the war began, but this winter there was some relief. Mississippi state authorities had procured a large supply from the saltworks in south Alabama and made it available for purchase or trade at various depots. On December 15 Enoch dispatched a wagon to Guntown, a station on the Mobile & Ohio Railroad nine miles away. The wagon carried 404 pounds of flour; it returned with 195 pounds of salt. Five days later, after a cold snap set in, Enoch and the blacks began the process of slaughtering, butchering, salting, and packing. Sam joined in, this being one of the few plantation tasks for which he was needed. They killed fifteen hogs that day, hurrying to preserve the meat before the temperature rose. More cool weather on January 5 brought an opportunity to kill another seven.9

  The Agnews were among the fortunate, for many in Tippah had been hit harder than they by the Yankees and now faced a winter of hunger. The county government was doing what it could to help them, but it was not enough. The local authorities levied a tax-in-kind and distributed whatever provisions they collected to the needy. The problem was that there was so little to go around; few families had much of a surplus. Certainly the Agnews did not. When the tax collector came to their home in early February and demanded his tithe, they grew concerned: “This tax in kind bears hard on us,” Sam wrote. “We have no corn or wheat to spare.”10

  Tax collectors and Yankee raiders were not the only ones scouring the area for provisions. The rebel army’s impressment officers were also active. Farmers dreaded seeing them coming almost as much as they dreaded the Yankees. Even when they operated strictly according to army regulations—which limited the amount they could seize and mandated compensation—their visitations could be ruinous. Unfortunately for Tippah County residents, northern Mississippi was “defended” by a number of ill-disciplined rebel cavalry ou
tfits that habitually took what they pleased with no regard for regulations. “I call this an outrage,” Sam had fumed on one occasion when rebel troopers rode off with a neighbor’s mule, “not an impressment but a robbery.” Even as the citizens prayed to be spared any more Yankee incursions, they prayed for deliverance from their own troops.11

  As the winter of 1864–65 progressed, the food shortage in the county became acute. In mid-February Sam learned from his Uncle Joseph, one of the officials responsible for provisioning the poor, that the tax-in-kind receipts would fall far short of what was needed to prevent starvation. “The prospect,” said Sam, “is gloomy now.” There was talk of sending county agents south to try to purchase provisions in the less-ravaged sections of the state. No one knew what else could be done. It was possible to smuggle goods in from Yankee-occupied Tennessee in exchange for cotton, but only in limited amounts and at great expense and risk.12

  Hauling provisions into the county from whatever direction was very difficult now, thanks to deteriorating roads and demolished bridges. Even in the best of times, Tippah was a rough place for a loaded wagon. Most of the roads were nothing more than narrow paths cut through the dense woods that dominated the landscape. Mud collected at every low spot along the way whenever it rained, and where streams crossed, the roads often washed out altogether. The county government had built bridges across the major streams, but many of these were now just piles of charred or chopped lumber, destroyed by Yankee raiders as they withdrew or by rebel troops trying to obstruct the raiders. No road maintenance or bridge repair had been done for years, so disrupted was the county by repeated enemy invasions.13

  The wretched roads of Tippah were unusually crowded in the weeks following New Year’s day 1865. There were a lot of rebel army supply wagons to be seen, mostly moving south, and Rebel infantrymen passing in every direction, many alone or in small groups. Sam questioned everyone he met about this and finally pieced together what was going on. It was bad news. Confederate general John B. Hood’s Army of Tennessee had suffered disaster in a battle at Nashville in December and was now in headlong retreat. The army was not just defeated, it seemed, but wrecked. Hood had ordered what was left of it to concentrate at Tupelo, twenty miles south of the Agnew plantation.14

  What Sam heard and saw of the condition of Hood’s troops was particularly disturbing. They were scattered, demoralized, famished, and “in a bad fix, without shoes or clothes.… The men that I have seen are lean, ragged and jaded.” He felt sorry for these “Poor fellows,” but at the same time they made him uneasy. Hungry men were liable to do anything if they were not strictly disciplined, and many of those Sam saw were under no officer’s control. He feared especially the coarse, lower-class men so numerous among the army’s rank and file. As he had remarked on another occasion, after Confederate troops had marched past his plantation and looted one of the slave cabins, “Some of them are rough cases. We have in our army some [men] as vile … as the Yankees.”15

  It was certain that many of the starving ragamuffins now tramping through the countryside had no intention of rejoining their units, at least not any time soon. Whether they could stay out of the clutches of the rebel authorities would remain to be seen. The cavalry that patrolled northern Mississippi kept a sharp lookout for stragglers, deserters, and draft-evaders. And men of military age were conspicuous these days, for there were few left on the home front.

  Although notoriously inefficient in many ways, the Confederate government rigorously enforced the draft. Sam had seen firsthand the thoroughness of rebel conscription. He could not count the number of times he had looked up from his reading or writing to see a squad of cavalry passing by on a man-hunting expedition. And the conscriptors were as pitiless as they were diligent. In November 1863, two men whom Sam knew were apprehended and marched off as draftees despite the fact—as Sam noted indignantly in his diary—that one was nearly blind and the other was a dwarf. Sam himself had been accosted, too. On one occasion, his protestations that he was a minister and thus exempt were dismissed by a skeptical officer until Sam pulled manuscripts of his sermons from his pocket and offered them as proof.16

  Between the conscripts and the many volunteers, Sam’s community had been bled nearly dry of men aged seventeen to fifty. Only a handful were exempted or detailed to civilian jobs, by reason of occupation or disability. Sam knew precisely how heavy a toll the war had levied on his community, for he had recently helped Uncle Joseph prepare a report on their precinct for the county government. Since the war began, exactly 200 men of the precinct had entered military service. Of these, eight had been discharged as unfit, eight were prisoners of war, thirty were deserters, and forty-three were dead. One of the dead was Sam’s brother, Luther.17

  The Confederate authorities knew full well by the winter of 1864–65 that they were scraping the bottom of the conscript barrel. There were simply no more reserves of manpower to draw on. There were tens of thousands of deserters throughout the Confederacy, of course, but getting them back into the ranks in any great number was impossible, for they were as elusive as wild game. Meanwhile, the South’s armies were wasting away while the North’s grew stronger.

  By late winter many in the Confederacy were ready to take drastic steps to try to fill the depleted ranks. In Richmond, Congress was debating a bill to enlist slave men as combat soldiers. Sam followed the debate with interest whenever he could get his hands on a current newspaper. The great question, of course, was whether slaves would willingly fight for the South.18

  Curious about what the slaves themselves thought, Sam spoke with some of his father’s men. None would go into the ranks voluntarily, he learned. “Our negroes do not fancy the business and I believe will take [to] the woods before they would be conscripted.”19

  Enoch Agnew owned forty-five slaves on the eve of the Civil War, and since then he had lost only a few. He was luckier than many other planters in Tippah County. Since the Yankee raids had begun in 1862, large numbers of slaves had run off with the invaders. Because the Agnews’ district had been plundered less often than most others in the county, the slaves there had had fewer opportunities to escape. The big raid in June 1864 had offered no chance, for the Yankees had fled back to Tennessee in panic after being whipped by Forrest, abandoning their wagons and everything else. For now, slavery was intact on the Agnew plantation and in Tippah as a whole. The county officials were maintaining slave patrols (as best they could, anyway, given the scarcity of white men), and the rebel cavalry troopers who roamed the area were keeping an eye out for black runaways. But everyone in Tippah knew that the “peculiar institution” stood close to the brink of disintegration. Another big enemy raid through the county could mean the end.20

  Many planters in these circumstances fretted ceaselessly about their slaves and watched warily for signs of unrest. Some in Tippah had even moved their slaves, or a portion of them, to safer parts of the South. But the Agnews saw no cause for anxiety. Sam noted on the day after Christmas 1864 that the family’s blacks were celebrating the holidays as they always had and “seem to be enjoying themselves.” As the winter went on, there was no trouble with the Agnew slaves, no hint of restlessness or defiance. But then a shocking incident on January 27 raised questions that the Agnews were reluctant to confront.21

  It happened in the early afternoon, just after dinner. Sam and his father were at the picket fence in front of the house, talking to a soldier who was passing by on the road. Suddenly, from the direction of the slave quarters, came the sound of an enormous explosion. Sam and Enoch rushed to the spot and joined the crowd of blacks that had already gathered. “[A] most horrible sight met my gaze,” Sam wrote. Nineteen-year-old Neely, one of the family’s slaves, “was lying on the ground … with his legs both terribly mangled, up to near his loins. One knee had the flesh entirely stripped from the bones, and the projecting naked bones and mixed mass of flesh and clothing was a harrowing spectacle.”22

  Hurriedly questioning the other blacks, Sam and
Enoch discovered that the explosion was caused by an artillery shell. There were a lot of these around the plantation, live rounds left behind in June 1864 by the fleeing Yankees. Enoch had cautioned the slaves time and again not to go near them, but Neely had ignored the warning. He had taken a hammer and chisel and tried to open a shell to get out the gunpowder. Two slave children standing near when the round exploded suffered facial burns. Had they not been bundled up in winter clothing on this cold afternoon, their burns would have been more extensive. One of the two was also hit by a shell fragment, breaking his left arm just above the wrist; the other child was miraculously not hit by the several fragments that ripped his pants and one earflap of his cap. Another piece of the shell punctured Neely’s abdomen and coursed upward through his body.23

  Neely was carried into one of the eight cabins that comprised the Agnew slave quarters. Enoch and Sam immediately went to work, one ministering to the body and the other to the soul. Enoch had been a physician before taking up planting, and he still treated patients when no other doctor could be found. For Neely he could do little, however; the young man’s injuries were obviously mortal. Sam conversed earnestly with him as he lay dying. “He was perfectly rational but I do not think he fully realized his danger—the transition was so sudden from perfect health to the jaws of death.… [H]e did not know whether he was willing to die or not. He said he trusted in Christ. He rather discouraged my proposal to pray with him.” He died as the sun was setting.24