A Year in the South Read online

  Once she was grown, Cornelia regularly visited relatives in St. Louis during the winter social season. It had become a big and lively city by the 1840s and Cornelia enjoyed the round of activities there, especially the glittering dinner parties and balls. She was a favorite of the young bachelor gentlemen of St. Louis, some of whom were U.S. army officers stationed at Jefferson Barracks. Among those she dined and danced with were Lieutenant Ulysses “Sam” Grant and Lieutenant James “Pete” Longstreet.16

  It was back in Hannibal, however, that she met her husband-to-be. He was a widower, twenty-three years her senior, named Angus McDonald. A Virginia native, he was educated at West Point but had left the army a year or two after graduation to pursue various adventures, including frontier fur trading, Indian fighting, and real estate speculation. His brother was married to one of Cornelia’s sisters. Twenty-five-year-old Cornelia was awed when she first met this “tall, fine-looking,” middle-aged gentleman with such a commanding presence. Angus in turn was captivated by her youthful high spirits, her talents, and her graceful bearing.17

  3. Cornelia McDonald, ca. 1890

  The two were married in 1847 and took up residence in Virginia, where Angus had a law practice. Cornelia bore a baby within eleven months of the wedding, and eight more over the next thirteen years. The third child, a son, and the last, a daughter, died in infancy. In 1857 the couple settled in Winchester, in the northern part of the Shenandoah Valley. Their home was a beautiful estate called Hawthorn, on the edge of town.18

  Angus was often away, seeing to his various business and legal dealings. One of his trips took him to England for nearly six months. These absences left Cornelia alone to oversee a household that included six slaves and a hired servant. She proved to be a capable manager and a woman of great strength of will; indeed, she struck some people as imperious, uncompromising, and sharp-tongued. At the same time, however, she embodied many of the qualities that defined the ideal woman in the Old South, for she was pious, nurturing, and devoted to her family.19

  When the Civil War broke out, Angus was commissioned a colonel in the Confederate army. He commanded a cavalry regiment for several months in 1861 but his advanced age and deteriorating health rendered him unfit for field duty. Thereafter he served in various desk jobs in Richmond and elsewhere, while Cornelia remained at Hawthorn.20

  Winchester was in the path of the invading Northern armies and the town was intermittently occupied by Union forces beginning in March 1862. Living under enemy rule with small children and no husband was an enormously trying experience for Cornelia. Troops frequently searched and pillaged her house and made a wreck of the grounds. Union army authorities quartered sick and wounded soldiers in the house and took over one room for an office. Cornelia lived in fear that they would seize the whole place and throw her and the children out onto the street.21

  The periodic recapture of the town by Confederate forces bolstered the spirits of Cornelia and other Winchester residents, but when Robert E. Lee’s army retreated south from Gettysburg in the summer of 1863 Cornelia decided that she could not endure another Yankee invasion. Loading the children and some of her belongings into two wagons, and leaving behind her remaining slaves, she set out on the road, joining the many thousands of other Southerners turned into refugees by the war.22

  She settled in the little town of Lexington, which at 120 miles southwest of Winchester seemed safely distant from the enemy. Angus joined her there in December 1863, having secured an appointment as post commander. He was by this time close to sixty-five years old and enfeebled by rheumatism.23

  In June 1864 a large Union raiding force penetrated all the way to Lexington and briefly occupied the town. Angus fled but was captured in the countryside by Union cavalrymen. When the raiders withdrew northward they took their prisoner with them, and he spent months in various Northern prisons under harsh conditions. By the time he was exchanged in November 1864, his health was completely destroyed.24

  After word came of Angus’s release from prison, Cornelia waited anxiously for him to rejoin her in Lexington. She was unaware that he was near death. In late November she received a letter from Richmond, dictated by Angus, telling her that he was too unwell to travel and that she should come there. Concerned about his health but still not suspecting that he was on his deathbed, she traveled to the city, arriving on December 2. It was one day too late to see him alive.25

  She stayed in Richmond long enough to see to Angus’s burial there and then returned to Lexington, still in shock. The winter that had just begun would be the bleakest she had ever faced. Since abandoning Hawthorn, along with its dairy and garden and orchard and slaves, she and the children had been heavily dependent on Angus’s salary for survival. Now that was gone, and she was a widow, and she did not know what to do.26

  *

  The first day of 1865 was a Sunday, and on that day eighteen-year-old John Collier Robertson went to a country church not far from Knoxville, Tennessee, and prayed that Jesus Christ would come into his heart. Robertson had changed since the war began. In his own estimation, he had grown from “a rude and wicked boy” into a fairly decent young man. But he felt that his transformation was incomplete. He was struggling now to find a path to a new life of the spirit.27

  Most of his life to that point had been spent on his parents’ farm in Greene County, in upper east Tennessee, about seventy-five miles northeast of Knoxville. The county lay in the shadow of the high mountains that divide Tennessee and North Carolina and it bore little resemblance to the plantation regions that many people in those days thought of as the real South. In Greene County, as in the rest of east Tennessee, there were hardly any big planters and not many slaves. Small and middling-size yeoman farms dominated the region’s landscape.28

  The farm of John’s parents, Jesse and Margaret, was typical. It consisted of 200 acres that were cleared and fenced and another hundred or so of woodland. The Robertson family owned no slaves, but they hired enough extra labor to produce plenty for their own needs and a modest surplus to sell. They owned horses, cows, sheep, and hogs; grew a good deal of wheat, corn, and oats, a little rye, and some tobacco; raised peas and potatoes in their garden; got beeswax and honey from the bees they kept. The wool that the sheep provided was turned into cloth by John’s mother and his sister, Debbie, who also churned the family’s butter. The Robertsons were neither rich nor poor. The life they made for themselves was comfortable, but never easy.29

  4. Page from the handwritten memoir of John Robertson, recounting his activities on the first day of 1865

  John turned fifteen in the spring of 1861, and by then he had mastered all the practical skills that a farmer of the Old South needed. He could plow a field, slaughter a hog, shear a sheep, mend a fence, and ride a horse. He knew when to sow and when to reap, and he could shuck corn, thresh wheat, and cure tobacco. He valued higher learning, too, and pursued it whenever he got a break from farm work. He applied himself diligently in the classroom, regularly practiced writing, and did a lot of reading—not just the Bible but works of history as well. By the standards of the Southern yeomanry, he became quite literate. But his was a narrow and unpolished sort of literacy. He read no fiction, for he had been taught that it was frivolous. He knew almost nothing of poetry, drama, art, philosophy, or science. And try as he might to appear cultivated, his speech and writing invariably betrayed his rustic origins. He said such things as “I had went” and “I disremember,” and pronounced “once” as “wunst.”30

  If the Robertsons were in many respects typical east Tennesseans, in certain other respects they stood apart from the majority of their neighbors. For one thing, they were Democrats in a region where the Whigs had long predominated. For another, when the war came they supported their state’s secession and pledged their loyalty to the new Confederacy.31

  Most east Tennesseans, especially Whigs, bitterly opposed secession and remained steadfastly loyal to the United States. By late 1861 these unionists had moved beyond pa
ssive to active resistance, and the Confederate authorities cracked down. The unionists struck back, and by 1862 east Tennessee was in a virtual state of rebellion against the Confederacy. The minority who cast their lot with the rebels, including the Robertsons, found themselves in an uncomfortable position. The authorities were on their side, but most of their neighbors were enemies. Violence against secessionist families, carried out by bands of unionist guerrillas, became common.32

  Luckily for the Robertsons, their community remained free of violence well into 1862. In March of that year John enlisted in the Confederate army. Although not yet even sixteen years old, he had become, as he wrote in his memoir, “excited at the notion of becoming a soldier.” When his parents said no, he ran away from home, made his way to Knoxville, lied about his age, and joined an infantry regiment that was stationed in the town. For the next few weeks he lived in a rough camp, sleeping on the ground, eating bad food, and getting worn out by drill and guard duty. Before long he fell very ill with pneumonia and while in the hospital he had a change of heart. He realized he was miserable in the army and too young to leave home. He got word to his family, and his father came to plead John’s case before the regimental commander, who permitted John to go home.33

  Back on the farm in Greene County, John recuperated quickly. But before long, east Tennessee’s internal war spilled into the Robertsons’ community. When unionist guerrillas became active in the area, John joined a secessionist home guard outfit. Periodically he would mount up with this armed company of civilians and ride out to search for guerrillas. Those apprehended were turned over to the authorities for punishment. The home guardsmen did not content themselves with such scouting: frequently they forced their way into the homes of unionist families, seizing weapons and stealing valuables. “In this manner,” John recalled, “we were constantly adding enemies to those we all ready had.” Some of them retaliated. Twice, while at home, John was fired on from ambush in the dark; he survived the first attack unscathed but was wounded in the second.34

  The war in east Tennessee took a dramatic turn in August 1863 when a Northern army invaded from Kentucky and secured control of most of the region. John’s home guard unit was absorbed into the Confederate army forces that had been ordered to carry out a delaying action and John fought bravely in several sharp skirmishes. Again, however, he developed pneumonia and was permitted to go home. Traveling stealthily to avoid enemy troops, he arrived at his parents’ farm in early October.35

  He found the situation in his community drastically changed. The Yankee invasion had given the local unionists the upper hand and in John’s words, “when they got the power over us … they made us pay.” Guerrillas repeatedly pillaged the Robertsons’ farm, taking horses, saddles, food, and more. In late October John was kidnapped at gunpoint from his sickbed by a unionist whom the home guard had harassed. His captor turned him over to the federal army provost marshal in Greene County, who sent him to a military prison in Knoxville.36

  Offered the opportunity to take an oath of allegiance to the Union and thereby gain his freedom, John resisted at first. But as the days went by and he sat in prison, sick, cold, and hungry, his determination wavered. When threatened with removal to a prison in Ohio, he decided that the disgrace of apostasy was preferable to “certain death” in the North. In November 1863 he took the oath.37

  For the next nine months John moved around the Knoxville area doing a variety of things: chopping wood for the U.S. government, buying provisions in the countryside and peddling them to the Yankee garrison troops, working on the farm of an uncle who lived near town, attending school at an academy. In July 1864 he risked a visit home, although he knew that that section of east Tennessee was unpacified and extremely dangerous. He found his neighborhood ravaged, his family tormented by unionists, and many of his friends driven from their homes.38

  After returning from Greene County, he got a job teaching at a school eight miles from his uncle’s farm, but he found that his oath of allegiance was no protection against unionist vengeance. He was repeatedly harassed by unionists who had learned of his Confederate service and in October 1864 he was forced by threats of violence to give up his job. After that, he bought a pistol and moved to Roane County, southwest of Knoxville, where another of his uncles had a farm.39

  Since a time in early 1863 when his mother had gently reproached him for his all-night carousing, John Robertson had worried about his character and his soul. He had resolved at that moment to abandon his dissolute and sinful ways and was pleased thereafter when God saw fit to help him along his new path. Now, as the year 1865 began, John wanted nothing so much as to put the war behind him and devote himself to his continuing quest for moral and spiritual perfection.40

  In a more peaceful place he might have been able to do so. But in east Tennessee there was no refuge from the war. While he might with one hand eagerly take up his Bible, he would have to keep the other firmly on the grip of his pistol.

  *

  Samuel A. Agnew was a minister, thirty-one years old at the beginning of 1865. He lived on his father’s plantation in the northeastern Mississippi county of Tippah. Every day, sometimes twice a day, he wrote in his diary, meticulously recording in precise script what he had seen, heard, and done. He surely never intended for anyone else to read the diary, for he often wrote of intimate matters—everything from his own episodes of “loose bowels” to his wife’s menstrual cramps. But he also took note of all that happened in his neighborhood and the wider community. Few sections of the South were struck more fiercely by the hand of war than the Reverend Agnew’s, and his diary is a vivid chronicle of the death of the Old South and the birth of the New.41

  5. Samuel Agnew, ca. 1880–1905

  Sam Agnew himself was a decent man, a little stodgy, but upright and earnest. He was highly educated and intellectually curious, he read widely, and he reflected thoughtfully on affairs of the day and matters of faith. And even though his father was quite well-to-do and owned dozens of slaves, Sam kept no manservant and was pretty much unspoiled. He did most of his own errands, shaved himself, shined and mended his own shoes. At the same time, he had a rather snobbish attitude toward common folk and he shared with other Southern white men of that era the usual patronizing notions about women and blacks and the usual touchiness about his honor. As a man of God he was dutiful but uninspiring. He tended to get nervous when performing wedding ceremonies and his sermons were mostly dull.42

  He was born in South Carolina in 1833. His father, Enoch, was a physician with deep family roots in the Palmetto State (South Carolina’s nickname); his mother, Letitia, was a native of Ireland. Enoch eventually gave up the practice of medicine and in 1852 moved the family to Tippah County, Mississippi, where he had purchased a plantation. Sam graduated from Erskine College just before the family moved and later returned to South Carolina to attend Erskine Theological Seminary. In 1856 he was licensed to preach in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, a denomination with which his family had long been affiliated, and three years later he was ordained. He had no pastorate, however. Beginning in 1857, he served as a “stated supply” of Hopewell Church, which was near his home in Mississippi. His job was to help govern the church, to substitute as needed for the pastors of Hopewell and other ARP churches in the area, and to preach on Sundays in any neighborhood where no church of any sort existed and where the residents requested his services. He married in 1864, at the comparatively late age of thirty. His bride, Nannie McKell, was from Starkville, south of Tippah County.43

  Sam Agnew’s education, his calling, and his family’s wealth set him apart from most of his contemporaries, and there were other ways in which he was different. For one thing, he never established full independence from his parents. After embarking on his ministerial career, he continued to live with them, and he remained in their household even after marrying. He had no property of his own to speak of, a mere couple of hundred dollars’ worth of books, clothes, and other personal possess
ions.44

  For another thing, even though he had no personal servant, he led what most people of the time would have regarded as a life of ease. His ministerial duties were not full time and, except at a few busy points during the agricultural year, his father did not expect him to take any responsibility for the plantation. Thus, Sam had a lot of time on his hands. He spent it reading, visiting in the community, gardening, pursuing his hobby (botany), writing in his diary, and sometimes, as he put it, simply “lolling about.”45

  While the lives of many Southern men changed abruptly with the coming of war, Sam’s did not. As a minister, he was exempt from military service. Early in the war he considered serving as a chaplain but rejected the idea and remained at home.46

  From that vantage point Sam Agnew witnessed and faithfully recorded the experience of a community gradually engulfed by war. He kept informed on everything that went on around him; indeed, his hunger for news must have struck many people as obsessive. He devoured every newspaper he could get his hands on (although, as a strict Sabbatarian, he would not read them on Sundays), and he pumped all his neighbors for whatever information they had picked up. When reading or writing he habitually posted himself by a window with a view of the road that ran by his house; when people passed, whether friends or strangers, he would emerge from the house, hail them, and find out what they knew.47

  Like the great majority of other white families in that section of the South, Sam and his kin were Confederate patriots. Among the many young men in Sam’s community who enthusiastically joined the rebel army in the war’s early days was his younger brother, Luther. Before ever facing the enemy on the field of battle, however, Luther fell victim to disease. In January 1862 Sam traveled three hundred miles by rail to the military hospital where Luther lay ill and brought him home to recuperate. But Luther did not recover; he died in June. To Sam it was a tragic reminder of “the shortness and uncertainty of life” and the inscrutability of divine will. He and his family grieved deeply but took comfort in their faith. As time passed, the names of many other local men were added to the list of dead.48