A Year in the South

by Stephen V. Ash

  In July the Agnews also lost their only remaining horse. He was named Jin, and he succumbed not to the mysterious malady that felled the mules but to old age aggravated by hunger. Sam was saddened by this loss, for Jin had been on the plantation since Enoch bought him in 1856. By 1865 Jin was about sixteen years old and too frail to be ridden, although he could still do a little pulling. Mostly he just grazed in the pasture. On the morning of July 19, Sam went there looking for him but could not find him. Around noon some of the field hands found him dead and told Sam. “I went down and saw him. Hog[s] and buzzards and maggots are feeding on him. He was seen living yesterday evening and I think from appearances he must have died yesterday.… He has been my companion on many a long, lonely ride.”28

  Neither the Agnews nor anybody else in the community could afford to lose any more draft animals. They were already in short supply, for many had been given up over the last four years to the Confederate and Union armies. Thus there was great consternation when a report circulated during the summer that U.S. cavalry were going through the countryside seizing any livestock marked with the brand of the Union or Confederate army. According to the Yankees, these were the rightful property of the U.S. government, but the citizens had a different view of the matter. During the war, Union troops raiding northern Mississippi had sometimes abandoned their worn-out horses and mules, and in many cases citizens had taken possession of them and nursed them back to health. Citizens had also acquired and rehabilitated a number of decrepit animals belonging to the rebel army, some of them abandoned, some condemned by the Confederate government and auctioned off. None of the Agnews’ animals bore a “US” or “CS” brand, but there were other farmers in the area who stood to lose a valuable horse or mule.29

  Even if draft animals and rainfall had been plentiful, however, the Agnews and other planters would still have worried about the fall harvest because the labor situation was in turmoil. As the summer went on, the blacks seemed more unreliable than ever and the whites grew more and more exasperated. Many of the Agnews’ farm hands, Sam wrote, were simply “doing as they please: they go off in daylight on their own business and are not giving their master’s concerns any attention.” As a consequence, Sam found himself taking on unaccustomed chores around the plantation: making a new rope for the well bucket, gathering and cleaning the loose bits of cotton scattered around the floor of the gin house. Even Wiley, the longtime foreman, was undependable now. Enoch reported that while he was in Memphis on his trading expedition, Wiley wandered off on his own, leaving Enoch and Erskine to tend to the wagon and mules.30

  The whole black population, in Sam’s view, was not only disobedient and “trifling” but maddeningly unsettled. Many were leaving the plantations and taking to the road. Even those who remained on their former owners’ estates spent a good deal of time going about the district, visiting with friends and kin, having barbecues and picnics. In some districts, according to stories Sam heard, the blacks were not just restless but dangerously out of control. In the Starkville area, Nannie’s home, they were reportedly “hold[ing] carnival” and “prowling through the country stealing.”31

  Some whites were reacting with violence. Nannie’s brother William told Sam about such an incident on the McKell family farm near Starkville: one of the hands had left the place but then decided to return; when he did, the overseer “gave him a good whipping.” This was a risky action. U.S. military commanders in the state had made it clear, through a series of proclamations reprinted in all the newspapers, that no physical abuse of the freedmen would be tolerated. These pronouncements were reiterated by agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which was operating in Mississippi before the summer ended. And it appeared, from reports Sam heard, that the federal authorities were enforcing their word. “Was told that a gentleman of Aberdeen was recently fined $50.00 for slapping a negroe off the pavement,” Sam noted on July 20, and “another was fined $25.00 for striking a little negroe. Rev. Mr. Brooks of Okolona was cruelly beaten by some Yankees because his wife whipped a little negroe recently.” Sam was indignant. “The negroe is a sacred animal,” he fumed. “The Yankees are about negroes like the Egyptians were about cats. Negrophilism is the passion with them. When they come to their senses they will find that the negroe must be governed in some way.”32

  There was no whipping on the Agnew place that summer. Sam and Enoch were sufficiently impressed by the threat of Yankee retaliation to dismiss any thought of physically coercing their unruly workers. But both were convinced that some measure of discipline must be restored or the plantation would go to ruin. Fortunately for them and other planters, the Yankees had no intention of letting the Southern economy suffer any longer from the derangement of the labor system.

  “Negrophilism” was a gross caricature of the U.S. government’s attitude toward the freedmen, as Sam himself recognized in his more reflective moments. In reality, federal authorities had many doubts about the newly freed slaves. They were especially skeptical about the blacks’ capacity for self-discipline and were determined to see that they did not abuse their freedom by shirking work. From the various military headquarters and Freedmen’s Bureau offices in Mississippi issued a stream of proclamations warning the freedmen against idleness. “[I]t must be clearly understood,” a bureau official declared, “that belonging to a place and lying about without work does not entitle any one to wages, nor even to food.” All who were able to work must do so, the Yankees decreed. But, at the same time, workers must be fairly compensated. To ensure justice to laborer and employer alike, contracts were to be drawn up, signed, and submitted to the federal authorities for approval.33

  In obedience to this command, and because he could see no other way to impose any semblance of order on his plantation, Enoch called the hands together on the last day of July and, as Sam wrote, “broached the matter of hiring.” Enoch made an offer; the blacks demanded more. No agreement was reached. “Pa’s terms are not palatable to the negroes,” Sam noted in his diary that night, “and I think he will have to make them some concessions.”34

  The next day, Enoch met with the hands again, and this time he gave in. The agreement involved no cash wages, for cash was scarce. Instead, the hands were to receive food, clothing, and shelter, and also one-tenth of the fall harvest, to be distributed among them. They also secured the right to a half-day off every other Saturday. For their part, they agreed “to be diligent honest and faithful as farm laborers.” Sam recorded all this in his diary, adding “I think it very probable that some of them will fall short of their obligation.”35

  Negotiating with field hands was a new and unwelcome experience for Enoch: it galled him to bargain rather than to command. The blacks proved quite adept at using the leverage that freedom had given them. Being able to say no, with the threat of leaving in search of a better deal, was a powerful economic weapon. Enoch knew that if he refused to compromise, his laborers would likely desert him. Some already had: several were now living in Memphis. Moreover, he had heard that two others had been offered employment by a neighboring planter. Enoch discussed this last matter with Sam, who agreed that it was a disturbing development, perhaps heralding a future in which planters were all competing desperately with one another for labor. Hiring away a neighbor’s hands, Sam declared, was “an unkind, unfriendly act.”36

  Sam spent the whole morning of August 2 drawing up contracts, one for each black family on the plantation. By the time he was finished, his fingers were aching. After dinner, he rode to the homes of two neighbors and brought them back to act as witnesses. Then he and Enoch summoned the hands to the rear portico of the Big House for the formal signing ceremony. Each of the nine black family heads—Wiley, Thompson, Arch, Eliza, Caroline, Franky, Tom, Big George, and Little George—signed two copies of his or her contract by mark. Enoch and the witnesses signed each copy, too.37

  The other planters in the vicinity were likewise making contracts with their hands, Sam learned. But there was still the matter of federal
approval. On August 12 Sam found out that the U.S. authorities were insisting on a single contract embracing all hands on each plantation, rather than separate family contracts. He and Enoch therefore had to draw up a new document and arrange another signing ceremony. They gave two copies to a friend who was on his way to Okolona, the nearest federal post. He returned a few days later with one copy endorsed and approved by an army major.38

  In some respects, the Agnews’ contract preserved the old system of labor: the field hands would continue to work in gangs under the direction of Enoch or his foreman, and all the blacks would continue to live in the former slave quarters. But whether this arrangement would be renewed after the end of the year, when the contract expired, was anyone’s guess. On some plantations, freedmen were insisting on more independence. They wanted to move out of the quarters, rent a portion of the estate sufficient to sustain their family, build a cabin on it, and work it without day-to-day supervision. Few planters would willingly surrender that much control to their laborers, of course. Nor would many planters gladly accede to the other demands that were, with increasing frequency, being voiced by freedmen throughout the South: demands for land of their own, for civil rights, for the vote.39

  Sam got irate at any suggestion that blacks might be entitled to something. For now, however, that matter was in abeyance. There could be no legislation on the status of the freedmen until the new state government went into operation in the fall and Congress met in the winter. In any event, there were more immediate matters to deal with, in Sam’s view. Besides the labor problem, there was the continuing food crisis. And now there was another concern: sickness.

  The dog days of summer were always an unhealthy time in Mississippi, but this season seemed especially bad. Sam filled his diary with news of illness. Luther Richey, a young neighbor who had only recently returned from a Northern prison camp, came down with a serious fever, perhaps related to the battle wound in his arm that had never completely healed. Uncle Joseph Agnew suffered an intense attack of diarrhea that laid him low for at least five days. Erskine spent three days “very sick with a high fever.” Buddy broke out in hideous skin eruptions of a sort the Agnews had never seen. “What it is I know not,” said Sam. He speculated that Buddy had contracted it from another infant, whose mother had visited the Agnews recently. Sam and Nannie dosed him with sulphur and applied sugar of lead to the sores, but it took him a long time to heal.40

  There was so much sickness in the community that summer that the local physicians were overwhelmed, and Enoch, who had long ago given up the practice of medicine, was called on for help. But then he himself fell ill. He had been in poor health for many years anyway, the victim of a chronic form of diarrhea. When cholera struck him on the evening of August 5, the family feared for his life. Sam described his father’s torments: “His bowells were acting and the pain was so great that he made loud moans. This was accompanied with nausea and vomiting. He was, to use his own language ‘so sick.’” Some time after midnight the family decided to call in a doctor. Sam ran to a neighbor’s home to borrow a horse, which he brought back and turned over to Thompson with orders to gallop to Guntown and fetch Dr. Borth. All that the family could do after that was try to comfort Enoch and wait anxiously for the doctor. They were greatly relieved when, a little before dawn, Enoch’s symptoms began to abate. By the time Dr. Borth arrived at eight, he was no longer needed. But Enoch was left weak and dehydrated, and he remained bedridden for days.41

  When he was not nursing the sick, helping Nannie tend Buddy, or doing chores around the plantation, Sam spent his time as he always had: visiting, reading, preparing sermons. He also worked in his tobacco patch, which had succeeded his disappointing poppy experiment as a useful pastime. Back in May he had transplanted 156 tobacco seedlings in a well-fertilized plot of land formerly used as a cow lot. The drought had taken a toll since then, but he still had well over a hundred plants. They demanded a lot of effort: there were always weeds to be chopped and worms to be picked off. The summer heat, however, kept Sam out of the patch except in the early mornings and late evenings.42

  The first part of August began the laying-by season, when the ripening corn and cotton needed no further attention. In the rural South it was a time of relaxation and communal gatherings, a respite between the hard work of cultivating and the hard work of harvesting. Among the gatherings were “protracted meetings” at the churches, where preaching and baptizing and soul-saving went on for days at a time. Sam was cheered by news of joyous meetings being held in his vicinity: at Orizaba, Buncombe, Wallerville, Locust Grove, Lebanon, and Mt. Gilead. Among the nine people who underwent immersion at Mt. Gilead on August 20 was his friend James West. “James was baptized at Hopewell as an infant,” Sam noted wryly, “but I suppose he did not think this was well enough done.”43

  Sam took part in no protracted meetings in those waning days of summer, but he kept up his Sabbath appointments. On August 27, the last Sunday of the month, he rode to the Corders’ home. Waiting for him at the brush arbor was the largest congregation he had yet seen there. He had prepared two sermons for this occasion; he delivered both, with a half-hour break between them. The first was from Acts: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” The second was from Isaiah: “The sinners in Zion are afraid.… Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” The congregation listened attentively to Sam’s messages of salvation and damnation. Encouraged, he announced that he would return on the first Sunday of October and lead a meeting of several days.44

  After the service he ate dinner with the Corders, relaxed and chatted with them until about five o’clock, and then rode home. Over the next few days he left the plantation only once, to visit Aunt Rilla and to check on a carriage wheel that Enoch had sent to a blacksmith for repair. On August 30, some travelers came by the plantation, parked their wagons just off the road near the garden, and camped for the night. They had some recent newspapers that they loaned to Sam. He stayed up late that night reading them. As he read, it began to rain. It rained through the next day and into the evening, and when he awoke on the first day of September the landscape was shrouded in fog.45

  CORNELIA MCDONALD

  Just before summer began, harry McDonald took a job as a farm laborer, working for a man named Reid who had an estate on the outskirts of Lexington. Cornelia tried to talk him out of it, but she could not deny that the family needed the money badly, and at last she gave in. She was never really happy about it, however. It hurt to see her son trudge off just after daybreak each morning and then slump home fourteen hours later, exhausted and grimy. Harry was not unused to hard work—he had spent much of the winter and early spring chopping wood—but this field labor was grueling. When he returned home at dusk he would collapse wordlessly into a chair, doze for a while, and then head upstairs to bed, too tired to join the family’s evening get-togethers or even to read. He never complained, however, and he stuck to the work manfully despite the long hours, the increasingly hot weather, and the paltry wages.1

  Cornelia was unhappy about Harry’s job not only because it took such a physical toll on him, but also because she thought it degrading. Here was her first-born hoeing and plowing some planter’s cornfield, side-by-side with blacks, when he should be in school preparing for a profession. Not only that, but Allan, the next oldest, had now taken a job, too, doing yard work and running errands for a family on the other end of town. And Cornelia herself, of course, was working as a private tutor. Just four years earlier the McDonalds had been ensconced among the South’s propertied and cultured elite, possessed of land, slaves, money, self-sufficiency, and a fair amount of leisure. Now they were crammed into a rented house, laboring from morning to night, wearing patched and repatched clothes, counting pennies, and scrambling to make ends meet. Thinking about it made Cornelia sick at heart. “To see my noble sons, little daughter, and pretty little boys dragged down so low, how could I bear it.”2<
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  She felt even sicker when she contemplated the future. If her financial situation did not improve, the family might well slide further into society’s depths. The house rent was coming due, and she had no money to pay it. Every bit of income was going to buy food and pay the cook. Even so, the family was not getting enough to eat, particularly Cornelia, who was growing noticeably thin and hollow-eyed. “At times,” she recalled, “I was so weak from hunger that I could scarcely go up and down stairs.”3

  In her desperation, she took a gamble that she soon regretted. A man came to her one day offering to take over the cultivation of her garden if she would let him have the produce from half of it. With Harry and Allan both away all day, the garden was being worked solely by Kenneth, Roy, and Donald, who were small and woefully unskilled. Thinking it over, Cornelia calculated that she would get more in the long run from a well-tended half-garden than a poorly tended whole one. She therefore accepted the man’s proposal. He let her choose her half, and she selected the one that included two apple trees.4

  As the summer weeks went by and the garden yielded its bounty, Cornelia rued her decision. Her half produced little besides apples. She was not being cheated, she was certain of that: she kept an eye on the man and made sure he was devoting equal attention to the two sections. But for some unfathomable reason, hers failed while his prospered. As he hauled away basket after basket of ripe peas and other produce, Cornelia and the children ate beans and roasted apples.5