.jpg) |
Surrender at Appomattox. |
__________
“My
World is now divided – where Yankees are
and
where Yankees are not.”
Mary
Boykin Chesnut
__________
Van Loon describes Lincoln as a man “who during four lonely and terrible years had learned how to fight without hating.” (124-398)
Andrews writes of his
travails, “The War President trod at no time a path of flowers.” (4/179)
*
By this time, Confederate finances were in shambles. In December 1861, Benjamin Andrews writes, it took $120 in paper money to buy $120 in gold. Two years later it took $1,900 and by 1864, the figure was $5,000.
Before
the war was over a pound of sugar brought $75, a spool of thread was $20. Toward
the end of the war a Confederate soldier, just paid off, went into a store to
buy a pair of boots. The price was $200. He handed the storekeeper a $500 bill.
“I can’t change this.” “Oh, never mind,” replied the paper millionaire. “I
never let a little matter like $300 interfere with a trade.” Of course when the
Confederacy collapsed all this paper money became absolutely worthless. (4/175)
Henry Kyd Douglas remembers paying
ridiculous sums in Confederate money for necessities. He gave $9.75 for two
mint juleps. Why not $10.00 he wondered. A uniform cost him $1,500, a horse
worth $250 in gold went for $5,800. A joke has a cavalryman offered $5,000 for
his broken down horse. He scoffs. “Five thousand for this horse! Why, I gave a
thousand dollars this morning for currying him!”
“The Confederate soldier was then
serving his country for less than forty cents a month in gold; he was virtually
fighting without pay, without bounty, and with no expectation of a pension. Pay
day became a sarcasm and a jest.” (20/262)
*
General Grant spends the winter of 1864-1865, gradually extending his lines at Petersburg. “He had,” Andrews writes, “a death-grip upon the Confederacy’s throat, and waited with confidence for the contortions which should announce its death.”
Continuous fighting
had drained the South of able fighting men. “Boys from fourteen to eighteen,
and old men from forty-five to sixty, were also pressed into service as junior
and senior reserves, the Confederacy thus, as General Butler wittily said, “robbing
both the cradle and the grave.” (4/120, 121)
*
January 19: General John Pegram, 33, marries Hetty Cary, 28, a Richmond socialite. The wedding is attended by a number of Confederate generals, as well as President Jefferson Davis and his wife, Varina.
One onlooker said of the
bride that the “happy gleam of her beautiful brown eyes seemed to defy all
sorrow.”
 |
Hetty Cary. |
*
February
6: Men die uselessly in the final days
of any war, particularly if they’re fighting for the losing side. Henry Kyd
Douglas was present when “General Pegram was shot through the body near the
heart. I jumped from my horse and caught him as he fell and with assistance
took him from his horse. He died in my arms, almost as soon as he touched the
ground.”
The battle soon ended and the
question – who would go tell his new wife – faced the officers.
Major New went on this unenviable duty and I took the General’s body back to my room at Headquarters. An hour after, as the General lay, dead, on my bed, I heard the ambulance pass just outside the window, taking Mrs. Pegram back to their quarters. New had not seen her yet and she did not know; but her mother was with her. A fiancée of three years, a bride of three weeks, now a widow!
NOTE TO TEACHERS: I think it would work
to ask students to write down what they think would have been Hetty’s thoughts
after hearing her husband was already dead. It might even be better to have her
write, after Lee’s army surrenders – with his sacrifice having been in vain.
*
February 17: Having turned north after taking Savannah, on this day, Sherman’s troops capture Columbia, South Carolina – where the legislature of that state first announced its decision to secede from the Union. The destruction wreaked on the city is extensive, and a fire spreads out of control.
Who struck the first match, is still in
doubt.
Many of the Yankees got drunk
before starting the rampage. Union General Henry
Slocum observed: “A drunken soldier with a musket in one hand
and a match in the other is not a pleasant visitor to have about the house on a
dark, windy night.” Sherman claimed that the raging fires were started by
evacuating Confederates and fanned by high winds. He later wrote: “Though I
never ordered it and never wished it, I have never shed any tears over the
event, because I believe that it hastened what we all fought for, the end of
the War.”
What is not in doubt: Two-thirds of
the town was reduced to ashes.
The following song, published in
1865, and written by Henry Clay Work, follows the exploits of General Sherman
and his men.
Marching through Georgia
Bring the good ol’ Bugle boys! We’ll sing another song,
Sing it with a spirit that will start the world along,
Sing it as we used to sing it fifty thousand strong,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
How the darkeys shouted when they heard the joyful sound,
How the turkeys gobbled which our commissary found,
How the sweet potatoes even started from the ground,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Yes and there were Union men who wept with joyful tears,
When they saw the honored flag they had not seen for years;
Hardly could they be restrained from breaking forth in
cheers,
While we were marching through Georgia.
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
“Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!”
So the saucy rebels said and ‘twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the Host
While we were marching through Georgia.
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
So we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train,
Sixty miles in latitude, three hundred to the main;
Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain
While we were marching through Georgia.
Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee.
Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free,
So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea,
While we were marching through Georgia.
*
March
29: Mary Boykin Chesnut captures the
coming collapse of the Confederacy, writing, “My World is now divided – where
Yankees are and where Yankees are not.
*
April 2-3: An attack by Union forces irrevocably shatters Lee’s Petersburg lines.
Lee at once telegraphed to President Davis that Petersburg and Richmond must be immediately abandoned.
It was Sunday, and the
message reached Mr. Davis in church. He hastened out with pallid lips and
unsteady tread. A panic-stricken throng was soon streaming from the doomed
city. Vehicles let for one-hundred dollars an hour in gold. The state prison-guards
fled and the criminals escaped. A drunken mob surged through the streets,
smashing windows and plundering shops. General Ewell blew up the iron-clads in
the river and burned bridges and storehouses. The fire spread till one third of
Richmond was in flames. The air was filled with a “hideous mingling of the
discordant sounds of human voices – the crying of children, the lamentations of
women, the yells of drunken men – with the roar of the tempest of flame, the
explosion of magazines, the bursting of shells.” Early on the morning of the 3d
was heard the cry, “The Yankees are coming!” Soon a column of blue-coated
troops poured into the city, headed by a regiment of colored cavalry, and the Stars
and Stripes presently floated over the Confederate capital. (IV, 123-125)
 |
Rebel soldier killed in Petersburg lines on April 2. The war was over a week later. |
Andrews writes that
2,750,000 men were called into service by the Union, “The largest number
serving at any one time being 1,000,516 on May 1, 1865.” The Confederates
called to action 1,250,000. The greatest number at any one time the Rebels ever
mustered was 690,000 on January 1, 1863. (IV, 131)
*
“No haversack, all cartridge box.”
April 9: Lee’s hungry, tattered army is forced to surrender at Appomattox Court House, Va.
Henry Kyd Douglas jokes that for a
long time the Confederate soldier’s outfit had been “no haversack, all
cartridge box.” (20-313)
He would never forget the surrender
at Appomattox:
As my decimated and ragged band with
their bullet-torn banner marched to its place, someone in the blue line broke
the silence and called for three cheers for the last brigade to surrender. It
was taken up all about him by those who knew what it meant. But for us this
soldierly generosity was more than we could bear. Many of the grizzled veterans
wept like women, and my own eyes were as blind as my voice was dumb. Years have
passed since then and time mellows memories, and now I almost forget the keen
agony of that bitter day when I recall how that line of blue broke its
respectful silence to pay such a tribute, at Appomattox, to the little line in
grey that had fought them to the finish and only surrendered because it was
destroyed. (20-319)
Douglas rode home in May 1865, on
parole, passing through Charlottesville, Waynesboro and Lexington.
As I rode through the latter place
late one afternoon, I was halted with a shout, and Buck stood in the street by
my side; he began a rapid explanation of what he had done. Fearing that I would
be sent to prison and remembering my injunction as to the hand trunk and
papers, he had determined to escape through the lines with my spare horse, my
hand trunk, and all he could carry. He swam the James River at night near Amherst
Court House, crossed the mountain and arrived safely in Lexington. There he
intended to wait awhile for me. If he could hear nothing from me and the war
went on, he intended, as he said, to “cut his way through to General Johnston”
– which it was supposed General Lee was trying to do. My horse was at pasture
out in the country and my hand trunk was hidden in a hole in the cellar under
the woodpile and everything in it was safe.
(20-320)
Douglas had attended Franklin and
Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa, graduating in 1859. He was wounded six
times during the war.
*
April 14: John Wilkes Booth shoots President Abraham Lincoln, who dies in the morning of April 15.
The historian Allan Nevins describes Lincoln, in an undated article saved from American Heritage, “Roosevelt in History: An Appraisal,” on FDR.
Of Lincoln, he writes:
His public utterances…attest [to] a rare
intellectual power. The wisdom of his principle public acts, his magnanimity
toward all foes public and private, his firmness under adversity, his elevation
of spirit, his power of strengthening the best purposes and suppressing the
worst instincts of a broad, motley democracy, place him in the front rank of
modern statesman.
When eighteen, he went to Tennessee,
where he married and was taught to read and write by his wife. He was a man of
ability, and was three years alderman and three years mayor of Greenville… In
1875 he was again elected United States senator, but died the same year.
(97-loose page)
*
Walt Whitman’s poem is an elegy for the fallen leader, the sad song of “the gray-brown bird” symbolic of the nation’s sorrow, says Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker, June 24, 2019.
He says he went online to listen
to the “melancholy arpeggio” of the hermit thrush.
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d
When lilacs last in the dooryard
bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d
in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn
with ever-returning spring.
Ever-returning spring, trinity
sure to me you bring,
Lilac blooming perennial and drooping
star in the west,
And thought of him I love.
2
O powerful western fallen
star!
O shades of night—O moody,
tearful night!
O great star disappear’d—O the
black murk that hides the star!
O cruel hands that hold me
powerless—O helpless soul of me!
O harsh surrounding cloud that
will not free my soul.
3
In the dooryard fronting an old
farm-house near the white-wash’d palings,
Stands the lilac-bush
tall-growing with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
With many a pointed blossom
rising delicate, with the perfume strong I love,
With every leaf a miracle—and
from this bush in the dooryard,
With delicate-color’d blossoms
and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,
A sprig with its flower I
break.
4
In the swamp in secluded
recesses,
A shy and hidden bird is
warbling a song.
Solitary the thrush,
The hermit withdrawn to himself,
avoiding the settlements,
Sings by himself a song.
Song of the bleeding
throat,
Death’s outlet song of life,
(for well dear brother I know,
If thou wast not granted to sing
thou would’st surely die.)
5
Over the breast of the spring,
the land, amid cities,
Amid lanes and through old
woods, where lately the violets peep’d from the ground, spotting the gray
debris,
Amid the grass in the fields
each side of the lanes, passing the endless grass,
Passing the yellow-spear’d
wheat, every grain from its shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen,
Passing the apple-tree blows of
white and pink in the orchards,
Carrying a corpse to where it
shall rest in the grave,
Night and day journeys a
coffin.
6
Coffin that passes through lanes
and streets,
Through day and night with the
great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d
flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States
themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and
winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit,
with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,
With the waiting depot, the
arriving coffin, and the sombre faces,
With dirges through the night,
with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,
With all the mournful voices of
the dirges pour’d around the coffin,
The dim-lit churches and the
shuddering organs—where amid these you journey,
With the tolling tolling bells’
perpetual clang,
Here, coffin that slowly
passes,
I give you my sprig of
lilac.
7
(Nor for you, for one
alone,
Blossoms and branches green to
coffins all I bring,
For fresh as the morning, thus
would I chant a song for you O sane and sacred death.
All over bouquets of
roses,
O death, I cover you over with
roses and early lilies,
But mostly and now the lilac
that blooms the first,
Copious I break, I break the sprigs
from the bushes,
With loaded arms I come, pouring
for you,
For you and the coffins all of
you O death.)
8
O western orb sailing the
heaven,
Now I know what you must have
meant as a month since I walk’d,
As I walk’d in silence the
transparent shadowy night,
As I saw you had something to
tell as you bent to me night after night,
As you droop’d from the sky low
down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,)
As we wander’d together the
solemn night, (for something I know not what kept me from sleep,)
As the night advanced, and I saw
on the rim of the west how full you were of woe,
As I stood on the rising ground
in the breeze in the cool transparent night,
As I watch’d where you pass’d
and was lost in the netherward black of the night,
As my soul in its trouble
dissatisfied sank, as where you sad orb,
Concluded, dropt in the night,
and was gone.
9
Sing on there in the swamp,
O singer bashful and tender, I
hear your notes, I hear your call,
I hear, I come presently, I
understand you,
But a moment I linger, for the
lustrous star has detain’d me,
The star my departing comrade
holds and detains me.
10
O how shall I warble myself for
the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my song for
the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for
the grave of him I love?
Sea-winds blown from east and
west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and
blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the
breath of my chant,
I’ll perfume the grave of him I
love.
11
O what shall I hang on the
chamber walls?
And what shall the pictures be
that I hang on the walls,
To adorn the burial-house of him
I love?
Pictures of growing spring and
farms and homes,
With the Fourth-month eve at
sundown, and the gray smoke lucid and bright,
With floods of the yellow gold
of the gorgeous, indolent, sinking sun, burning, expanding the air,
With the fresh sweet herbage
under foot, and the pale green leaves of the trees prolific,
In the distance the flowing
glaze, the breast of the river, with a wind-dapple here and there,
With ranging hills on the banks,
with many a line against the sky, and shadows,
And the city at hand with
dwellings so dense, and stacks of chimneys,
And all the scenes of life and
the workshops, and the workmen homeward returning.
12
Lo, body and soul—this
land,
My own Manhattan with spires, and
the sparkling and hurrying tides, and the ships,
The varied and ample land, the
South and the North in the light, Ohio’s shores and flashing Missouri,
And ever the far-spreading
prairies cover’d with grass and corn.
Lo, the most excellent sun so
calm and haughty,
The violet and purple morn with
just-felt breezes,
The gentle soft-born measureless
light,
The miracle spreading bathing
all, the fulfill’d noon,
The coming eve delicious, the
welcome night and the stars,
Over my cities shining all, enveloping
man and land.
13
Sing on, sing on you gray-brown
bird,
Sing from the swamps, the
recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,
Limitless out of the dusk, out
of the cedars and pines.
Sing on dearest brother, warble
your reedy song,
Loud human song, with voice of
uttermost woe.
O liquid and free and
tender!
O wild and loose to my soul—O
wondrous singer!
You only I hear—yet the star
holds me, (but will soon depart,)
Yet the lilac with mastering
odor holds me.
14
Now while I sat in the day and
look’d forth,
In the close of the day with its
light and the fields of spring, and the farmers preparing their crops,
In the large unconscious scenery
of my land with its lakes and forests,
In the heavenly aerial beauty,
(after the perturb’d winds and the storms,)
Under the arching heavens of the
afternoon swift passing, and the voices of children and women,
The many-moving sea-tides, and I
saw the ships how they sail’d,
And the summer approaching with
richness, and the fields all busy with labor,
And the infinite separate
houses, how they all went on, each with its meals and minutia of daily
usages,
And the streets how their
throbbings throbb’d, and the cities pent—lo, then and there,
Falling upon them all and among
them all, enveloping me with the rest,
Appear’d the cloud, appear’d the
long black trail,
And I knew death, its thought,
and the sacred knowledge of death.
Then with the knowledge of death
as walking one side of me,
And the thought of death
close-walking the other side of me,
And I in the middle as with
companions, and as holding the hands of companions,
I fled forth to the hiding
receiving night that talks not,
Down to the shores of the water,
the path by the swamp in the dimness,
To the solemn shadowy cedars and
ghostly pines so still.
And the singer so shy to the
rest receiv’d me,
The gray-brown bird I know
receiv’d us comrades three,
And he sang the carol of death,
and a verse for him I love.
From deep secluded
recesses,
From the fragrant cedars and the
ghostly pines so still,
Came the carol of the
bird.
And the charm of the carol rapt
me,
As I held as if by their hands
my comrades in the night,
And the voice of my spirit
tallied the song of the bird.
Come lovely and soothing
death,
Undulate round the world,
serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to
all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate
death.
Prais’d be the fathomless
universe,
For life and joy, and for
objects and knowledge curious,
And for love, sweet love—but praise!
praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of
cool-enfolding death.
Dark mother always gliding near
with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a
chant of fullest welcome?
Then I chant it for thee, I
glorify thee above all,
I bring thee a song that when
thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.
Approach strong
deliveress,
When it is so, when thou hast
taken them I joyously sing the dead,
Lost in the loving floating
ocean of thee,
Laved in the flood of thy bliss
O death.
From me to thee glad
serenades,
Dances for thee I propose
saluting thee, adornments and feastings for thee,
And the sights of the open
landscape and the high-spread sky are fitting,
And life and the fields, and the
huge and thoughtful night.
The night in silence under many
a star,
The ocean shore and the husky
whispering wave whose voice I know,
And the soul turning to thee O
vast and well-veil’d death,
And the body gratefully nestling
close to thee.
Over the tree-tops I float thee
a song,
Over the rising and sinking
waves, over the myriad fields and the prairies wide,
Over the dense-pack’d cities all
and the teeming wharves and ways,
I float this carol with joy,
with joy to thee O death.
15
To the tally of my soul,
Loud and strong kept up the
gray-brown bird,
With pure deliberate notes
spreading filling the night.
Loud in the pines and cedars
dim,
Clear in the freshness moist and
the swamp-perfume,
And I with my comrades there in
the night.
While my sight that was bound in
my eyes unclosed,
As to long panoramas of
visions.
And I saw askant the
armies,
I saw as in noiseless dreams
hundreds of battle-flags,
Borne through the smoke of the
battles and pierc’d with missiles I saw them,
And carried hither and yon
through the smoke, and torn and bloody,
And at last but a few shreds
left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
And the staffs all splinter’d
and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of
them,
And the white skeletons of young
men, I saw them,
I saw the debris and debris of
all the slain soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was
thought,
They themselves were fully at
rest, they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and
suffer’d, the mother suffer’d,
And the wife and the child and
the musing comrade suffer’d,
And the armies that remain’d
suffer’d.
16
Passing the visions, passing the
night,
Passing, unloosing the hold of
my comrades’ hands,
Passing the song of the hermit
bird and the tallying song of my soul,
Victorious song, death’s outlet
song, yet varying ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear
the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as
warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth and filling
the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the
night I heard from recesses,
Passing, I leave thee lilac with
heart-shaped leaves,
I leave thee there in the
door-yard, blooming, returning with spring.
I cease from my song for
thee,
From my gaze on thee in the
west, fronting the west, communing with thee,
O comrade lustrous with silver
face in the night.
Yet each to keep and all,
retrievements out of the night,
The song, the wondrous chant of
the gray-brown bird,
And the tallying chant, the echo
arous’d in my soul,
With the lustrous and drooping
star with the countenance full of woe,
With the holders holding my hand
nearing the call of the bird,
Comrades mine and I in the
midst, and their memory ever to keep, for the dead I loved so well,
For the sweetest, wisest soul of
all my days and lands—and this for his dear sake,
Lilac and star and bird twined
with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and
the cedars dusk and dim.
*
June 19: The last slaves in Texas receive the news. The war is over. They are free at last. This “Juneteenth” becomes a day of celebration.
Starting in 2022, the day will become a national holiday.
*
June: The Rebel cruiser, Shenandoah, unaware of the ending of the war continues on her way to Australia, destroying “seven of our merchantmen. She then went to Bering Sea and in one week captured twenty-five whalers, most of which she destroyed. … In August a British ship captain informed the commander of the Shenandoah that the Confederacy no longer existed. (97/ page number missing)
*
“Send us
our wages for the time we served you.”
August 7: Four months after the Civil War ended, a now former slave owner, Colonel P. H. Anderson wrote to his old slave, Jourdon Anderson. He asked him to return to the plantation to work. The “Negro,” as then called, had moved to Ohio where he found work for pay, and supported his family.
Jourdon replied in a letter of his own:
Dayton, Ohio,
August 7, 1865
To My Old Master, Colonel P.H.
Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee
Sir: I got your letter and was glad to
find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and
live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I
have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you
long before this for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they
never heard about your going to Col. Martin’s to kill the Union soldier that
was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I
left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still
living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again and see Miss
Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them
all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I
would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville
Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me Henry intended to shoot me if he
ever got a chance.
I want to know particularly what the
good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here; I get
$25 a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,
—the folks here call her Mrs. Anderson),—and the children—Milly, Jane and
Grundy—go to school and are learning well; the teacher says Grundy has a head
for a preacher. They go to Sunday-School, and Mandy and me attend church
regularly. We are kindly treated; sometimes we overhear others saying, “Them
colored people were slaves” down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they
hear such remarks, but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to
Col. Anderson. Many darkies would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you
master. Now, if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be
better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.
As to my freedom, which you say I can
have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in
1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy
says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you are sincerely
disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your
sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This
will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and
friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years and
Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a
week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and
eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages has been kept
back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me,
and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice
entitled to. Please send the money by Adams Express, in care of V. Winters,
Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past we
can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker
has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me
and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense.
Here I draw my wages every Saturday night, but in Tennessee there was never any
pay-day for the Negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there
will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.
In answering this letter please state
if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up and
both good-looking girls. You know how it was with Matilda and Catherine. I
would rather stay here and starve, and die if it comes to that, than have my
girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters.
You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored
children in your neighborhood, the great desire of my life now is to give my
children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.
P.S. — Say howdy to George Carter, and
thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.
From your old servant,
Jourdon Anderson
Source: Reprinted in Lydia Maria Child, The Freedmen’s Book (Boston: Tickenor and Fields, 1865), 265-67.
Suffrage: the right to vote
Mississippi elected sheriffs – but even
in areas heavily African American all sheriffs were white. Students should
realize how hopeless it might be to approach white officers
*
In his descriptions of the postwar Era, Andrews reveals his inherent prejudices time and again. In this passage he seems particularly clueless:
Great numbers of Confederates came home to find their farms sold
for unpaid taxes, perhaps mortgaged to ex-slaves. The best Southern land, after
the war, was worth but a trifle of its old value. Their ruin rendered many
insane; in multitudes more it broke down all energy. The braver spirits – men
to whom till now all toil had been strange – set to work as clerks,
depot-masters and agents of various business enterprises. High-born ladies,
widowed by Northern bullets, became teachers or governesses. In the
comparatively few cases where families retained their estates, their effort to
keep up appearances was pathetic. One by one domestics were dismissed; dinner
parties grew rare; stately coaches lost their paint and became rickety;
carriage and saddle horses were worn out at the plow and replaced by mules. At
last the master learned to open his own gates, the mistress to do her own
cooking. (11/113)
“It was difficult to get help on the plantation,” he adds, “so immersed in politics and so lazy had the field hands become.” (11/113)
(Excuse this blogger
while he gags at that last sentence.)
 |
The Confederate soldier returns to a ruined land. And has to do the work slaves used to do for nothing! |
Andrews also explained: “How angry the conflict was will appear when we see that it brought the ‘scalawag,’ the ‘carpet-bagger,’ and the negro, partly each by himself and partly together, into radical collision with all that was most solid, intelligent and moral in Southern society.” (11/114)
He does admit that there were some “perfectly honest carpet-baggers,” who viewed their task as almost missionary work. (11/117)
Others, he labels “cunning sharks.” (11/118)
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