CHAPTER XII
Clubbed to His Knees
As illustrations of embarrassments we had to face, I have chiefly chosen incidents showing a kindly and forbearing spirit on the part of Federal commanders, because I desire to pay tribute wherever I may to men in blue, remembering that Southern boys are now wearing the blue and that all men wearing the blue are ours. I have chiefly chosen incidents in which the Federal officers, being gentlemen and brave men – being decent and human – revolted against exercise of cruelty to a fallen foe.
Truth compels the shield’s reverse.
In Richmond, one officer in position went to a prominent citizen and demanded $600 of him, threatening to confiscate and sell his home if he did not give it. This citizen, a lawyer and man of business, knew the threat could not be executed, and refused to meet the demand. Others not so wise paid such claims. In all parts of the South, many people, among them widows and orphans, were thus impoverished beyond the pinched condition in which war left them. Some sold their remnants of furniture, the very beds they slept on, a part of their scanty raiment, and in one case on official record, “the coverlid off the baby’s bed,” to satisfy the spurious claims of men misusing authority.
An instance illustrating our helplessness is that of Captain Bayard, who came out of the war with some make-shift crutches, a brave heart, and a love affair as the sum total of his capital in life. He made his first money by clerical work for sympathetic Federal officials. This he invested in a new suit of clothes; “They are right nice-looking,” he said with modest pride when conveying the pleasing intelligence to one interested; and he bought a pair of artificial feet.
Then he set out to see his sweetheart, feeling very proud. It was the first time he had tried his feet on the street, and he was not walking with any sense of security, but had safely traversed a square or two and was crossing a street, when a Federal officer came galloping along and very nearly ran over him; he threw up his cane. The horse shied, the cavalryman jumped off and knocked him down. As fast as he struggled up, the cavalryman knocked him down again. A burly man ran to his assistance; the cavalryman struck this man such a blow that it made tears spring in his eyes; then mounted and galloped off. “He was obliged to see,” said the captain, “that I was a cripple, and that I could not get out of his way or withstand his blows.”
The worst Virginia had to bear was as nothing to what the Carolinas suffered. There was that poor boy, who was hung in Raleigh on Lovejoy’s tree – where the Governor’s Mansion now stands. He had fired off a pistol; had hurt nobody – had not attempted to hurt anybody; it was just a boy’s thoughtless, crazy deed.
Entering Rosemont Cemetery, Newberry, S. C., one perceives on a tall marble shaft “The Lone Star of Texas” and this: “Calvin S. Crozier, Born at Brandon, Mississippi, August 1840, Murdered at Newberry, S. C., September 8, 1865.”
At the close of the war, there were some 99,00 °Confederates in Federal prisons, whose release, beginning in May, continued throughout the summer. Among these was Crozier, slender, boyish in appearance, brave, thin to emaciation, pitifully weak and homesick. It was a far cry to his home in sunny Galveston, but he had traversed three States when he fell ill in North Carolina. A Good Samaritan nursed him, and set him on his way again. At Orangeburg, S. C., a gentleman placed two young ladies, journeying in the same direction, under his care. To Crozier, the trust was sacred. At Newberry, the train was derailed by obstructions placed on the track by negro soldiers of the 33d U. S. Regiment, which, under command of Colonel Trowbridge, white, was on its way from Anderson to Columbia. Crozier got out with others to see what was the matter. Returning, he found the coach invaded by two half-drunk negro soldiers, cursing and using indecent language. He called upon them to desist, directing their attention to the presence of ladies. They replied that they “didn’t care a d – !” One attempted gross familiarities with one of the ladies. Crozier ejected him; the second negro interfered; there was a struggle in the dark; one negro fled unhurt; the other, with a slight cut, ran towards camp, yelling: “I’m cut by a d – d rebel!” Black soldiers came in a mob.
The narrative, as told on the monument, concludes: “The infuriated soldiers seized a citizen of Newberry, upon whom they were about to execute savage revenge, when Crozier came promptly forward and avowed his own responsibility. He was hurried in the night-time to the bivouac of the regiment to which the soldiers belonged, was kept under guard all night, was not allowed communication with any citizen, was condemned to die without even the form of a trial, and was shot to death about daylight the following morning, and his body mutilated.”
He had been ordered to dig his own grave, but refused. A hole had been dug, he was made to kneel on its brink, the column fired upon him, he tumbled into it, and then the black troops jumped on it, laughing, dancing, stamping. The only mercy shown him was by one humane negro, who, eager to save his life, besought him to deny his identity as the striker of the blow. White citizens watched their moment, removed his remains, and gave them Christian burial.
There was the burning of Brenham, Texas, September 7, 1866. Federal soldiers from the post attended a negro ball, and so outraged the decencies that negro men closed the festivities. The soldiers pursued the negro managers, one of whom fled for safety to a mansion, where a party of young white people were assembled. The pursuers abused him in profane and obscene terms. The gentlemen reminded them that ladies were in hearing; they said they “didn’t care a d – !” and drew pistols on the whites. A difficulty ensued, two soldiers were wounded, their comrades carried them to camp, returned and fired the town. The incendiaries were never punished, their commander spiriting them away when investigation was begun.11
“Numbers of our citizens were murdered by the soldiers of the United States, and in some instances deliberately shot down by them, in the presence of their wives and children,” writes Hon. Charles Stewart, of reconstruction times, early and late, in Texas, and cites the diabolical midnight murder of W. A. Burns and Dallas, his son, giving the testimony of Sarah, daughter of one, sister of the other, and witness of the horrible deed, from the performance of which the assassins walked away “laughing.” “Let no one suppose that the instances given were isolated cases of oppression that might occur under any Government, however good,” says Mr. Stewart. “They were of such frequent occurrence as to excite the alarm of good people.”
Federal posts were a protection to the people, affording a sense of peace and security, or the reverse, according to the character of the commanders. To show how differently different men would determine the same issue, it may be cited that General Wilde confiscated the home of Mrs. Robert Toombs to the uses of the Freedmen’s Bureau, ordering her to give possession and limiting the supplies she might remove to two weeks’ provisions. General Steedman humanely revoked this order, restoring her home to Mrs. Toombs. There was no rule by which to forecast the course a military potentate, ignorant of civil law, might pursue. The mood he was in, the dinner he had eaten, the course of a flirtation on hand, motives of personal spite, gain or favoritism, might determine a decision affecting seriously a whole community, who would be powerless to appeal against it, his caprice being law.
In a previous chapter I have told a story showing General Saxton in a most attractive light. In his “Provisional Governorship of South Carolina,” Governor Perry says: “The poor refugees (of the Sea Islands) were without fortune, money or the means of living! Many had nothing to eat except bread and water, and were thankful if they could get bread. I appointed W. H. Trescott to go to Washington and represent them in trying to recover their lands. He procured an order for the restoration, but General Saxton or some of his sub-agents thwarted in some way the design and purport of this order, and I believe the negroes are still in possession.”
So, in some places you will hear Southerners say that, save for domestic and industrial upheavals resulting from emancipation and for the privations of acute poverty, they suffered no extreme trials while under the strictly martial regime – were victims of no act of tyranny from local Federal authorities; in other places, you will hear words reflecting praise on such authorities; in others, evidence is plain that inhabitants endured worse things of military satraps than Israel suffered of Pharaoh.
As the days went by, there were fresh occasions for the conclusion: “The officers who gave Captain Bayard work and the officer who knocked him down are types of two classes of our conquerors and rulers. One is ready to help the cripple to his feet, the other to knock him down again and again. Congress will club the cripple with the negro ballot.” “If that be true,” said some, “the cripple will rise no more. Let me go hence ere my eyes behold it. Spilled blood and ruin wrought I can forgive, but not this thing!”
NEW FASHIONS
CHAPTER XIII
New Fashions: A Little Bonnet and an Alpaca Skirt
The confessions of Matoaca:
“I will never forget how queer we thought the dress of the Northern ladies. A great many came to Richmond, and Military Headquarters was very gay. Band answered band in the neighbourhood of Clay and Twelfth Streets, and the sound of music and dancing feet reached us through our closed shutters.
“Some ladies wore on the streets white petticoats, braided with black, under their dresses, which were looped up over these. Their gowns were short walking length, and their feet could be seen quite plainly. That style would be becoming to us, we said to ourselves, thinking of our small feet – at least I said so to myself. Up to that time we had considered it immodest to show our feet, our long dresses and hoop-skirts concealing them. We had been wearing coal-scuttle bonnets of plaited straw, trimmed with corn-shuck rosettes. I made fifteen one spring, acquired a fine name as a milliner, and was paid for my work.
“I recall one that was quite stunning. I got hold of a bit of much-worn white ribbon and dyed it an exquisite shade of green, with a tea made of coffee-berries. Coffee-berries dye a lovely green; you might remember that if you are ever in a war and blockaded. Our straw-and-shuck bonnets were pretty. How I wish I had kept mine as a souvenir – and other specimens of my home-made things! But we threw all our home-made things away – we were so tired of make-shifts! – and got new ones as soon as we could. How eager we were to see the fashions! We had had no fashions for a long time.
“When the Northern ladies appeared on the streets, they did not seem to have on any bonnets at all. They wore tiny, three-cornered affairs tied on with narrow strings, and all their hair showing in the back. We thought them the most absurd and trifling things! But we made haste to get some. How did we see the fashions when we kept our blinds closed? Why, we could peep through the shutters, of course. Remember, we had seen no fashions for a long time. Then, too, after the earlier days, we did not keep our windows shut.
“I began braiding me a skirt at once. The Yankees couldn’t teach me anything about braid! To the longest day I live, I will remember the reign of skirt-braid during the Confederacy! There was quite a while when we had no other trimming, yet had that in abundance, a large lot having been run through the blockade; it came to the Department. The Department got to be a sort of Woman’s Exchange. Prices were absurd. I paid $75 for a paper of pins and thought it high, but before the war was over, I was thankful to get a paper for $100. I bought, once, a cashmere dress for the price of a calico, $25 a yard, because it was a little damaged in running the blockade. At the same time, Mrs. Jefferson Davis bought a calico dress pattern for $500 and a lawn for $1,000; one of my friends paid $1,400 for a silk, another, $1,100 for a black merino. Mine was the best bargain. It lasted excellently. I made it over in the new fashion after the evacuation. One of the styles brought by the Northern ladies was black alpaca skirts fringed. I got one as soon as I could.
“The Yankees introduced some new fashions in other things besides clothes that I remember vividly, one being canned fruit. I had never seen any canned fruit before the Yankees came. Perhaps we had had canned fruit, but I do not remember it. Pleasant innovations in food were like to leave lasting impressions on one who had been living on next to nothing for an indefinite period.”
The mystery of her purchase of the alpaca skirt and the little bonnet is solved by her journal:
“I am prospering with my needlework. I sew early and late. My friends who are better off give me work, paying me as generously as they can. Mammy Jane has sold some of my embroideries to Northern ladies. Many ladies, widows and orphans, are seeking employment as teachers. The great trouble is that so few people are able to engage them or to pay for help of any kind. Still, we all manage to help each other somehow.
“Nannie, our young bride, is raising lettuce, radish, nasturtiums, in her back yard for sale. She is painting her house herself (with her husband’s help). She is going to give the lettuce towards paying the church debt. She has nothing else to give. I think I will raise something to buy window-panes for this house. Window-panes patched with paper are all the fashion in this town.
“The weather is very hot now. After supper, we go up on Gamble’s Hill, our fashionable cooling-off resort, to get a breath of fresh air; then come back and work till late in the night. O, for a glimpse of the mountains! a breath of mountain air! But I can only dream of the Greenbrier White and the Old Sweet Springs!
“Last night, on Gamble’s Hill, we observed near us a party whom we recognized by accent and good clothes as Northerners. One of the ladies, looking down on our city, said: ‘Behold the fruits of secession!’ Below us in the moonlight lay Richmond on her noble river, beautiful in spite of her wounds. A gentleman spoke: ‘Massachusetts thought of seceding once. I am sorry for these people.’ How I wanted to shout: ‘Behold the fruits of invasion!’ But, of course, I did not. I thanked our advocate with my eyes.”
A few had a little store laid up previous to the evacuation. A short time before that, the Confederate Government was selling some silver coin at $1 for $60 in notes; at Danville, it was sold for $70; and thrifty ones who could, bought.
Women who had been social queens, who had had everything heart could wish, and a retinue of servants happy to obey their behests and needing nothing, now found themselves reduced to harder case than their negroes had ever known, and gratefully and gracefully availed themselves of the lowliest tasks by which they might earn enough to buy a dress for the baby, a pair of shoes for little bare feet, coffee or tea or other luxury for an invalid dear one, or a bit of any sort of food to replenish a nearly empty larder.
The first greenbacks were brought to one family by a former dining-room servant. His mistress, unable to pay him wages, had advised him to seek employment elsewhere. At the end of a week, he returned, saying: “Mistiss, here is five dollahs. I’m makin’ twenty dollahs a month, an’ rations, waitin’ on one uh de Yankee officers. I’ll bring you my wages evvy week.” “John,” she said, “I don’t know how to take it, for I don’t see how I can ever pay it back.” He knew she was in dire straits. “You took care uh me all my life, Mistiss, an’ learnt me how to work. I orter do whut I kin fuh you.” Seeing her still hesitate: “You got property, you kin raise money on presen’y. Den you kin pay me back, but I’d be proud ef you wouldn’ bother yo’se’f.” Could her son have done more? The Old South had many negroes as good and true. Was the system altogether wrong that developed such characters?
Some of our people had Northern friends and relatives who contrived money to them. Mrs. Gracebridge was one of the fortunate; and everybody was glad. No one deserved better of fate or friends. She had entertained many refugees, was the most hospitable soul in the world. Had her table been large enough to seat the world, the world would have been welcome. From her nephew, living in New York, an officer of the United States Navy came with a message and money.
She had a way of addressing everybody as “my dear friend.” Her household teasingly warned her that she was going to call this messenger “my dear friend.” “Never!” she exclaimed. “Never in the world will I call a Yankee, ‘my dear friend!’ Never! How can you say such a thing to me! I am surprised, astonished, at the suggestion!” They listened, and before she and her guest had exchanged three sentences, heard her calling him “my dear friend,” in spite of the insistent evidence of his gorgeous blue uniform, gold lace and brass buttons, that he was decidedly a Yankee.
It was a custom, rooted and grounded in her being, to offer refreshments to guests; when nothing else was left with which to show good feeling, she would bring in some lumps of white sugar, a rarity and a luxury, and pass this around. Never will spying intimates forget the expression of that naval officer’s countenance when, at her call, a little black hand-maid presented on an old-fashioned silver salver, in an exquisite saucer, a few lumps of white sugar! He looked hard at it; then grasped the situation and a lump, glancing first at her, then at the sugar, as if he did not know whether to laugh or to cry.
She was a delightful woman. She and her two little darkeys afforded her friends no end of diversion. She had never managed her negroes in slavery-time. After the war, everybody’s darkeys did as they pleased; hers did a little more so. At this pair, she constantly exclaimed, in great surprise: “They don’t mind a word I say!” “My dear lady!” she was reminded, “you must expect that. They are free. They don’t belong to you now.”
And she would ask: “If they don’t belong to me, whose are they?” That was to her a hopeless enigma. They had to belong to somebody. It was out of decency and humanity that they should have nobody to belong to! They would stand behind her chair, giggling and bubbling over with merriment.
THE GENERAL IN THE CORNFIELD
CHAPTER XIV
The General in the Cornfield
We did anything and everything we could to make a living. Prominent citizens became pie-sellers. Colonel Cary, of General Magruder’s Staff, came home to find his family desperately poor, as were all respectable folks. He was a brave soldier, an able officer; before the war, principal of a male academy at Hampton. Now, he did not know to what he could turn his hand for the support of himself and family. He walked around his place, came in and said to his wife: “My dear, I have taken stock of our assets. You pride yourself on your apple-pies. We have an apple-tree, and a cow. I will gather the apples and milk the cow, and you will make the pies, and I will go around and sell them.”
Armed with pies, he met his aforetime antagonists at Camp Grant and conquered them quite. The pies were delicious; the seller was a soldier, an officer of distinction, in hard luck; and the men at Camp Grant were soldiers, too. There was sharp demand and good price; only the elite – officers of rank – could afford to indulge in these confections. Well it was that Yankee mothers had cultivated in their sons an appetite for pies. One Savannah lady made thirty dollars selling pies to Sherman’s soldiers; in Georgia’s aristocratic “City by the Sea,” high-bred dames stood at basement windows selling cakes and pies to whoever would buy.
Colonel Cary had thrifty rivals throughout Dixie. A once rich planter near Columbia made a living by selling flowers; a Charleston aristocrat peddled tea by the pound and molasses by the quart to his former slaves. General Stephen Elliott, Sumter’s gallant defender, sold fish and oysters which he caught with his own hands. His friend, Captain Stoney, did likewise. Gentlemen of position and formerly of wealth did not pause to consider whether they would be discredited by pursuing occupations quite as humble. Men of high attainments, without capital, without any basis upon which to make a new start in life except “grit,” did whatever they could find to do and made merry over it.
Yet reporters going over our battle-swept, war-scarred land from whose fields our laboring class had been by one fell stroke diverted, judged us by evidences of inertia seen from windows of creepy little cars – (where we had any cars at all) – that stopped every few hours to take on wood or water or to repair something or other. For a long time, there was good reason why our creepy railroads should be a doubly sore subject. Under the reconstruction governments every State paid thousands of dollars for railroads that were never built.
All that Southern white men did, according to some ready scribes, was to sit around cross-roads stores, expectorate tobacco-juice, swap jokes, and abuse Yankees and niggers. In honesty, it must be confessed there was too much of this done, any being too much. Every section has its corps of idlers, its crew of yarn-spinners and drinkers, even in ordinary times when war has not left upon men the inevitable demoralisation that follows in its train. Had railway travellers gone into cotton and cornfields and tobacco lots, they would have found there much of the flower and chivalry of the Old South “leading the row.” Sons of fathers who had been the wealthiest and most influential men in Dixie came home from the war to swing the hoe and drive the plow as resolutely as ever they had manned a battery or charged the breastworks.
But the young men of the South were not born tillers of the soil; not fitted by inheritance or education for manual toil. They were descendants of generations who had not labored with their hands but had occupied themselves as lawyers, doctors, politicians, gentlemen of leisure, and agriculturists commanding large working forces. Our nation might have been gainer had the Government devised measures by which talented men could have been at once bound to its interests and their gifts utilised for the common advantage. Instead of which, they were threatened with trial for treason, with execution or exile, were disfranchised, disqualified, put under the ban. Many who would have made brilliant and useful servants of the Republic were driven abroad and found honourable service in Mexico, Brazil, Egypt and Europe.
It is difficult for us at this day to realise what little promise life held for the young American of the South; difficult even for the South of the present to appreciate the irritations and humiliations that vexed and chafed him. Many felt that they had no longer a country.
Mischief was inevitable as the result of repressed or distorted energies, thwarted or stifled ambition. Some whose record for courage and steadiness on the field of battle reflects glory on our common country, failed utterly at adaptation. But as the patient effort of the great body politic changed the times and opened opportunity, middle-age and youth were ready to rush in with a will, occupying and improving fields of industry.
But the old people of the South never reacted. Many simply sat down and died, succumbing to bereavement, hardships and heartbreak. They felt that their country was dead. Men of their own blood, their brothers, had set an alien race, an ignorant race, half-human, half-savage, above them; were insisting that they should send their children to school with children of this race, while their consciences cried out against the mere discussion of this thing as an evil to themselves and the negro, and against the thing itself as crime. Intermarriage was discussed in legislative halls; bills sanctioning it were introduced; and the horrible black, social evil due to passions of the white man and the half-human, half-savage woman – the incubus, the nightmare, under which the whole section had groaned with groanings that cannot be uttered – was flung in their faces as more than fair reason.
With reconstruction there was strengthening of the tendency towards expatriation. Despair and disgust drove many away; and more would have gone had means been at hand. Whole families left the South and made homes in Europe; among these, a goodly proportion were proud old Huguenots from South Carolina. In some of the Cotton States it looked as if more white men were to be lost thus than had been lost in battle. In December, 1867, Mr. Charles Nathan, of New Orleans, announced through the press that he had contracted with the Emperor of Brazil to transport 1,000 yearly to that empire.
Many went into the enemy’s country – went North. Their reports to old neighbours were that they liked the enemy immensely at home; the enemy was serenely unconscious of the mischief his fad was working in other people’s homes. He set down everything ill that happened South to the Southern whites’ “race prejudice”; and sipped his own soup and ate his own pie in peace. The immigrant learned that it was wise to hold his tongue when discussion of the negro came up. He was considered not to know anything worth hearing upon the subject. His most careful and rational utterances would be met with a pitying look which said as plainly as words lips polite withheld: “Race prejudice hallucination!”
General Lee raised no uncertain voice against expatriation; from his prison cell, Jefferson Davis deplored it in the first letters he was allowed to write. Lee set prompt example in doing what his hand found to do, and in choosing a task rather for public service than for private gain. I quote a letter written by Mrs. Lee to Miss Mason, dated Derwent, Virginia, December, 1865:
“The papers will have told you that General Lee has decided to accept the position at Lexington. I do not think he is very fond of teaching, but he is willing to do anything that will give him an honourable support. He starts tomorrow en cheval for Lexington. He prefers that way, and, besides, does not like to part even for a time from his beloved steed, the companion of many a hard-fought battle… The kindness of the people of Virginia to us has been truly great, and they seem never to tire. The settlement of Palmore’s surrounding us does not suffer us to want for anything their gardens or farms can furnish… My heart sinks when I hear of the destitution and misery which abound further South – gentle and refined women reduced to abject poverty, and no hope of relief.”
Far more lucrative positions had been offered him; salaries without work, for the mere use of his name. Solicitations came from abroad, and brilliant opportunities invited across the ocean. He took the helm at Washington College with this avowal: “I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle. I have seen many of them fall under my standard. I shall devote my life now to training young men to do their duty in life.” Urged in 1867 to run for office, he declined, believing that his candidacy might not contribute to sectional unification. As nearly perfect was this man as men are made. Our National Capitol is the poorer because his statue is not there. If it ever is, I should like to see on its pedestal Grant’s tribute: “There was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.”
When the crippled and impoverished General Hood refused to receive money raised by subscription, the “Albany Evening Journal” commented: “It is the first instance we have ever seen recorded of a ‘Southern gentleman’ too proud or self-reliant to accept filthy lucre, come from what source it may.” The “Petersburg Index-Appeal” responded:
“Hood has only done what Lee did a dozen times, what Beauregard did, what Magruder did, and what President Davis did. The noble response of Magruder to the people of Texas, who contributed a handsome purse to procure him a fine plantation, was the impulse and utterance of the universal spirit of the Southern soldier: ‘No, gentlemen, when I espoused the cause of the South, I embraced poverty and willingly accepted it.’”
Near Columbia, on the ruins of his handsome home which Sherman burned, General Wade Hampton, clever at wood-work, built with his own hands and with the help of his faithful negroes, a lowly cottage to shelter himself and family. A section was added at a time, and, without any preconceived design on his part, the structure stood, when completed, a perfect cross. Miss Isabella Martin, looking upon it one day, exclaimed: “General, you have here the Southern Cross!” So “Southern Cross” the place was called. Here, Mrs. Wade Hampton, who, as Miss McDuffie, had been the richest heiress in South Carolina, and as such and as Hampton’s wife, the guardian angel of many black folk, wrought and ruled with wisdom and with sweetness unsoured by reverses. South Carolina offered Hampton a home, as Virginia and then Washington College offered Lee, but Hampton, almost in want, refused.
This is the plight in which General M. C. Butler, Hampton’s aide, came out of the war: “Twenty-nine years old, with one leg gone, a wife and three children to support, seventy slaves emancipated, a debt of $15,000, and, in his pocket, $1.75 in cash.” That was the situation of thousands. It took manhood to make something of it.
For months after the surrender, Confederates were passing through the country to their homes, and hospitality was free to every ragged and footsore soldier; the poor best the larder of every mansion afforded was at the command of the gray-jacket. How diffidently proud men would ask for bread, their empty pockets shaming them! When any man turned them off with cold words, it was not well for his neighbours to know, for so, he was like to have no more respectable guests. The soldiers were good company, bringing news from far and wide. Most were cheerful, glad they were going home, undaunted by long tramps ahead. The soldier was used to hard marches. Now that his course was set towards where loved ones watched for his coming, life had its rosy outlook that turned to gray for some who reached the spot where home had stood to find only a bank of ashes. Reports of country through which they came were often summed up: “White folks in the fields, negroes flocking to towns. Freedmen’s Bureau offices everywhere thronged with blacks.”