A Civil War Boyhood: I. Growing Up in the Ante-Bellum South

I

I WAS born in 1844, and was reared in the sunny South, in middle Tennessee. My first memories are of planters’ mansions and Negro cabins; of cotton fields and small county towns; of intelligent, proud, and courteous slave barons, and of ignorant, slovenly, poor white trash in the country and an incipient bourgeoisie of lawyers, doctors, and tradesmen in the towns; of dashing young country squires who spent their time in hunting, horse racing, gambling, and drinking, and of beautiful maidens, the prizes of zealous and sometimes fierce competition between the coxcombs of the country and the beaus of the towns; and, at the bottom of all, the vast mass of African slaves which served as the base of the political, economic, and social structure. It was the mediæval period of American history and presented the bright sides and the dark sides of mediæval civilization.

I am bound to say that I think it was little understood by the northern half of our country. Slavery was regarded, after the middle of the nineteenth century, too much in the nature of crime, and the plantation aristocracy too much as arrogant, overbearing, and violent men. They were generally men of great courtesy and kind hearts, and, in most cases, regarded their relation to their slaves as a grave trust to be faithfully discharged, rather than as an opportunity for exploitation. As I remember it, the person of my father’s household who endured the greatest hardships of life was my dear good mother, who was called on to minister to every black who might have a pain in the tip of his toe at any time of the day or night.

Generally, the slaves had enough of good nourishing food to eat, and were fairly well clad and not uncomfortably housed. They worked short hours and never knew what a strenuous effort meant. They had their churches, their camp meetings and revivals, where their religious fervor found vent, and they made themselves hoarse with singing and shouting. They had, also, their places of entertainment, where they gathered in the evening and danced to the picking of the banjo and the rattle of the bones. They had also time and opportunity to earn a little money for themselves, which was protected by law as the bondsman’s peculium. They were sometimes whipped and beaten, not often by the slave owner himself, but by cruel overseers or malicious poor whites. The slave masters themselves, when not guided by humanitarian impulses, were too well aware of economic disadvantage to injure their property in this foolish way. The chief amount of slave whipping of which I had any cognizance was inflicted by gatherings of nonslave-owning whites, during periods of excitement over suspected plots for insurrection among the slaves, plots which rarely had any existence outside the morbid imagination of the ignorant poor whites. Several times I witnessed slave owners defending their slaves, at the risk of their own lives, against these senseless cruelties.

The spectre of slave revolt was something which would not down, but it rarely appeared within the vision of the slaveholders themselves. They knew the temper of their slaves, and were always in close touch with them. In fact, real friendship existed between them in very many cases. It was the vast mass of the whites owning no Negroes who were the greatest enemies of the slaves. They had no pecuniary interest in Negroes. They were jealous of the riches and the social standing of the slave lords. They were ignorant, suspicious, superstitious, and vindictive. They led lives of monotony and drudgery, and to them a slave inquisition and a slave beating for the extraction of confessions were exciting diversions; the sensational results of these mediæval processes of inquiry furnished an extended enjoyment for their idle minds.

The slaves themselves did not, as a rule, feel their lot to be a hard one, and were not good material out of which to make insurgents. For, in addition to their general loyalty to their masters, they felt a sort of social contempt for the non-slaveholding white man. They even felt contempt for the white man who owned very few slaves and also for the slaves of a white man who owned but a few of them. They — that is, the slaves of the slave lords — were accustomed to designate the slaves of a holder of only a small number of bondsmen as ‘poor niggers.’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have been a fair representation of an exceptional case of Negro treatment, but, as a description of general conditions, it was a gross exaggeration.

II

The people of the North had, furthermore, an exaggerated notion of the wealth and luxurious living of the slave lords. In contrast with the wealth and luxury of the rich bankers, manufacturers, merchants, and transportation magnates of the present day, the mode of life of the slave barons was moderate and simple. Their mansions of good Colonial style made a handsome outside appearance, but the inside comfort was not great. With no plumbing, no electricity, no gas, no central heating, either by steam, hot water, or hot air, they were excessively cold in winter and excessively hot in summer. Every drop of water had to be brought into the house by hand and heated in kettles over an open fire. There was no ice, no refrigerators, no places to keep things cool, except in a little hut built around and over a spring, called a spring house, where snakes and toads, worms and tadpoles, congregated. From the point of view of the house comforts of this day, the man of moderate means would consider the life of the richest planter of 1850 as filled with inconvenience and even hardship.

And when it came to intercourse and transportation and trade, things were, if possible, still worse. There were few railroads, fewer telegraph lines, and no telephones. Heavy vehicles had to be dragged over bad, muddy, rutty roads. Riding on horseback was the chief method of intercourse between plantations and settlements. The doctor was miles away and always had to be fetched by messenger; there were no, or almost no, apothecary shops or hospitals, except in a few cities, no way to procure supplies if the annual hoard should happen to give out or become unfit for use. Such were some of the inconveniences which obstructed intercourse of people, and, while making life hard and monotonous, impeded the development of a common understanding and a consensus of opinion. There were few newspapers, and the people’s love of politics was gratified and fed and excited by parades, barbecues, debates between candidates, and not infrequently expressed itself in fights and murders.

I remember, as a child between five and ten years of age, the interest I took in the joint debates of candidates for office, when I heard such prominent statesmen as Henry Clay, John J. Crittenden, James C. Jones, Humphrey Marshall, John Bell, Meredith P. Gentry, Andrew Johnson, Horace Maynard, William G. Brownlow, A. S. Colyar, Charles C. Crowe, Aaron V. Brown, John C. Brown, Isham G. Harris, Robert Toombs, Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, debate on the questions of the day — the fugitive slave law and the compromise measures of 1850. I remember quite distinctly the presidential campaigns of 1852 and 1856, and the deep disappointment of the Whigs at the defeat of General Scott in 1852 and of Mr. Fillmore in 1856. In 1852 the Southern Whigs were great admirers of Webster, but did not trust him fully. I do not remember that he ever went into the Southern States; the estimation of him, therefore, was not direct, and suffered somewhat by indirection. Scott was a Southerner, and moreover had military glamour which counted for much in the chivalrous South.

It was silly on the part of the Whigs to nominate him, but it is hardly probable that Webster would have been successful. I never saw Webster. I remember, however, that my father and the Whigs of Tennessee preferred him to Scott or to anybody else, except possibly Clay.

An event of the campaign of 1856 which stands quite vividly in my memory illustrates with considerable significance the spirit and customs of the times. One day during this campaign I happened to be in a small village near my father’s home, and was one of an audience of about one hundred persons gathered about a Whig orator, named Pugh, who was extolling the virtues of the Whig candidate, Mr. Fillmore, and denouncing the character and the record of his adversary, Mr. Buchanan. Just at the moment when the speaker was indulging in one of his highest flights of oratorical invective, a party of Democrats rode into the place, headed by a noted rough named Bradshaw, who had decorated his horse’s head with the antlers of a buck covered with flowing ribbons of red, white, and blue. He and his party were singing the doggerel lines, —

Bradshaw sprang from his horse as he rode up to the rickety bench on which the speaker was standing, and with a loud voice denounced him as a liar and slanderer. Pugh struck the man with his clenched fist. Thereupon the latter flourished a revolver in Pugh’s face and pulled the trigger. The ball missed its mark and struck another man, killing him almost instantly. Pugh’s assailant raised his arm for a second attempt, but Pugh was too quick for him, and, drawing a bowie knife which was carried up the coat sleeve, sheathed it in Bradshaw’s breast by one powerful stroke which felled him lifeless to the earth. This was only one of several fatal encounters which I witnessed during that campaign and still remember with great distinctness. The country was approaching a period of general violence and gave evidence of it in a reign of universal hate born of misunderstanding and jealousy.

III

The period between 1856 and 1860 I spent at school in preparation for college. My father provided for me a first-rate classical teacher from the University of North Carolina, named Montgomery Forbes. I do not think I imbibed much of the spirit of classical learning from him. He grounded me fairly well in the rudiments of Greek and Latin grammar and taught me to read both languages with some little facility, so that I found no difficulty in entering college in the autumn of 1861. Classics, however, were not my favorite study. Mathematics had the chief fascination for me, with history as a relaxation. My early aspiration was to be a military engineer. Forbes was a fair mathematician, also, and guided me with some success through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.

Before the date of my entrance to college came the great catastrophe. The rise of the Republican Party between 1856 and 1860 had filled the South with alarm, and in some degree the North as well. Its principles were greatly misunderstood in the South, as new movements generally are. The Republican programme and party were confounded with the abolitionist programme and party, and it was represented by the Southern leaders to be the aim of the Republicans to secure the destruction of slavery in the states, as well as its prohibition from the territories, by any and all means, fair or foul, but especially by slave insurrection. As the presidential election of 1860 drew near, the South was terrorized by secessionist propaganda, which spread the idea among Southerners that the triumph of the Republican Party would mean the desolation of their homes, the rape of their wives and daughters, and the destruction of their property. Liberty, morality, and civilization were declared to be staked upon the issue, and it was loudly and universally proclaimed that the United States would not be a fit place in which to live unless the Republican Party should be defeated at the polls and laid so low that it could never raise its odious head again.

In the midst of this excitement the John Brown raid occurred at Harper’s Ferry. It was taken throughout the South as the irrefragable proof of everything asserted in the secessionist propaganda. The deeds of Brown and his men were exaggerated into hideous atrocities, and the tale of them repeated again and again from every platform and pulpit and at every fireside. The seeds of hate were sown broadcast by designing men, and every social means and pressure was used to whip every man, woman, and child into line with the secessionist purpose.

IV

I remember with perfect clearness how my father and his Whig friends tried to point out to the insane extremists how secession and war, even successful war, would bring about the liberation of the slaves more surely and quickly than remaining in the Union, since, should the country be divided, there would be no obligation on the one part to secure the return of fugitive slaves to the owners in the other part, as was provided in the existing Constitution of the Union. But the angry Secessionists would not listen. They threatened all men of moderate views with violence in case the voters should be influenced by such arguments, and actually inflicted it, both by mob rule and by the forms of law, after they had gotten possession of the state governments and passed the secession ordinances.

I heard then for the first time the proposition that, when a drunken mob lynched an unoffending person for an act which was no offense at law, the government should at once make that act a crime and itself perform the next execution, and in this way appease the mob and forestall lynching, instead of arresting and punishing the lynchers. It was a strange turning of things — I will not say ideas — upside down, or rather downside up. But we must always remember that ‘whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.’

When no more than fifteen years of age, I saw the folly of indulging the passions of anger and hate in the solution of public questions. During the months between the passage of the secession ordinance by Tennessee in June of 1861 and the occupation of the state by the military power of the Union in the spring of 1862, it was no uncommon thing to see, hanging by the neck from the limb of a tree, a man whose only offense had been loyalty to the Union as created and preserved in the Constitution, and that too in the name of liberty and democracy. Such experiences threw such a sadness over my young life, and produced in me such an early realization of the innate hypocrisy of the human soul, that I wonder I have not dwelt always under deeper pessimism than has actually possessed me. As it was, I early lost faith in the wisdom and goodness of the mass of mankind. I have always found most men ignorant, narrow, greedy, prejudiced, malicious, brutal, and vindictive. The supermen, who make the ideas and ideals of civilization, I have found very few and very far between.

After the secession of the Southern States and the formation of the Confederacy, the tyranny over opinion was perfected, and the reign of terror, instituted both by the government and by society, whipped everybody into line and made the South solid, as it was said, in the defense of its property and liberty. The old Whig Unionists were completely cowed. Even a man like John Bell made his way into a ‘secret’ meeting in the courthouse at Nashville and gave in his adherence to the Secessionist cause.

All during the summer of 1861 the persecution of the Unionists went on. Every kind of social boycott and proscription was meted out to them. They were required not only to obey the will of the majority as expressed through law and government, but to give voluntary support to the Secessionist cause and even to talk and think as the Secessionists did. The famous saying of Lincoln in the debates of 1858 with Douglas, that the slaveholders were not satisfied with the assurance that the Republicans did not plan to abolish slavery in the states and did not believe that there was any power under the Constitution to do so, but demanded that the Republicans should think and feel about slavery as they, the slaveholders, themselves did, certainly proved to be no exaggeration of the demands made by the Secessionists in 1861 of the Unionists, many of whom were the largest slave owners in the border states of the South. Freedom of thought and expression was swept away completely as having no value when brought into opposition to the holy cause of secession. Men were estranged and persecuted as traitors if they dared to question either the rights or the policy of secession, and were hung by drunken mobs on trees and left there as food for crows and buzzards.

The social ‘racket’ was also played with high success. The Secessionist slave lords and their ladies ‘stooped to conquer’ the adherence of the bourgeoisie and even the poor white trash by social recognition. The ambition of every social climber met, for the first time, with full opportunity for gratification. The democratizing of society was the inevitable result, and the Secessionists actually believed themselves to be the real democrats of the age and declared themselves to be the upholders, par excellence, of democratic ideals. It was one of those eras when everything is turned upside down and the power to distinguish between truth and falsehood is lost in the hysteria of fancied patriotism.

V

It was in the midst of such a topsyturvy period that I entered college. The institution to which I was sent was Cumberland University at Lebanon, Wilson County, Tennessee. The University consisted then of a Preparatory School, a College of Arts and Letters, a Law School, and a Divinity School. It was a sectarian institution of the Presbyterian Church. At that time it was chiefly noted for its Law School, conducted by two eminent Southern jurists, Judge Green and Judge Caruthers. My teacher, Forbes, had prepared me for his own alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but the disturbed condition of things influenced my parents to keep me nearer home.

Sometime in early September of 1861, I was fitted out with a trunk of clothing, a box of books, a box of tallow candles, and a Negro boy, and started from my home in Giles County to the University at Lebanon some eighty miles away. A lumbering family coach, drawn by two stout horses and guided by a Negro driver, conveyed me and my boy, together with all my other paraphernalia, to my destination. I was accompanied by a man named William Lewis, who was acquainted with the route and with a number of people residing along it at whose houses we might find lodging, for it was a three-day journey by the means of travel at my command. It was a monotonous and uneventful ride through the county towns of Lewisburg, Shelby ville, and Murfreesboro, and in the afternoon of the third day we arrived at our destination.

Lebanon was at that time one of the prettiest of Tennessee’s county towns, situated in a rolling limestone region with, consequently, snow-white roads and evergreen forests, and built regularly around a square, in the centre of which stood the courthouse. The business houses, law offices, doctors’ offices, and hotel occupied the four sides of the square, and the dwellings faced the streets radiating therefrom. The University stood upon an eminence in the southern portion of the town, and consisted of a single large brick building devoted entirely to the purposes of instruction. There were no dormitories; the students boarded with the families in the town.

Mr. Lewis knew a lady, named Peyton, who had a small family and a large house, and he applied to her for board and lodging for me and my Negro boy. Mrs. Peyton took me in and gave me a little house in the corner of her grounds, consisting of one large room, with a large bed for myself and a small one for my attendant. This accommodation, with board for myself and the Negro boy, was furnished me for the sum of four dollars and fifty cents a week, and that was considered a rather extravagant scale of living.

On the day following my arrival, I entered the college in the sophomore year, thanks to the preparation which Forbes had given me. The institution was presided over at that time by the Reverend Thomas Anderson, who, in the absence of the professor of Latin, taught that subject and was quite vain of his proficiency in it. The Reverend Dr. Beard, professor in the Divinity School, taught Greek in the absence of the professor of Greek, and the noted professor of mathematics, Mr. Buchanan, was still at his post. The School of Law had suspended operations, since most of the students in this school had already enlisted in the Confederate Army. President Anderson taught logic, rhetoric, and philosophy. These subjects composed the entire curriculum of the College.

I soon made acquaintances among the leading families of the town — the Cahalls, the Caruthers’, the Greens, the Stokes’, the McDonalds, the Hattons, and others. It was a very cultivated society of old Whig families, and, while yielding to the Secessionist majority and government, was Unionist in spirit. The jurists — Cahall, Caruthers, and Green — were old men, and this fact somewhat removed them from the political arena and sheltered them from attack. Jordan Stokes was the ablest lawyer and the bestread man in the town. He was of middle age and a staunch Unionist. He had a most interesting family, consisting of his charming wife, four sons, and two daughters. The sons became my closest friends, and at the end of the war we found ourselves together again at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Jordan Stokes was ostracized by the Secessionists and was so persecuted that he finally removed to Nashville when that place was occupied by the Federal Army in February of 1862.

Robert Hatton was next to Stokes in ability, and an even more brilliant orator. At the outbreak of the war he was also a Whig and a Unionist. He was virtually driven into the Confederate Army by the direst sort of social persecution. A mob of students of the University from the cotton states gathered about his house one night when his young wife was nearing confinement, and threatened to burn the house and kill Hatton if he did not come forward publicly and proclaim his adherence to the Secessionist cause. To save the life of his wife, he sacrificed his own political connections, entered the Confederate Army, became colonel of a regiment, and was killed in one of the Virginia battles, fighting valiantly for a cause which he loathed in his heart of hearts.

VI

My period of study at Cumberland University was profitable, and my life in Lebanon pleasant but all too short. It extended only from the beginning of September 1861 to the end of February 1862. On the last Sunday evening of this latter month, I was sitting in the Presbyterian Church listening to a sermon from the paster, Dr. McDonald, when the clatter of a horse’s hoofs was heard outside, and a moment afterward the rider appeared, spurred and booted, in the aisle of the church and strode up to the pulpit. He handed the pastor a slip of paper and then retired. With ashen cheeks and trembling lips the pastor read the contents of the message to the waiting and expectant congregation. ‘ Mill Springs is lost. Fort Donelson has fallen. The remainder of Crittenden’s army is retreating toward Lebanon, and the Bowling Green forces are retiring upon Nashville.’ This meant that the first line of the Confederate armies in the west had been driven back on both flanks, and that the centre was rapidly retreating in order to save itself from capture.

The congregation left the church and filed into the street to find panic and confusion all around. In a few minutes the news came that the defeated Mill Springs army was bivouacking for the night on the turnpike road leading from Lebanon to Carthage, the next county town toward the northeast, and that these troops were only about ten miles away. This signified, of course, that if the Confederates continued their retreat Lebanon and the country around would in a few days be occupied by the Federal military forces.

On the next morning I walked out upon the Carthage turnpike to meet the retreating Confederates. It was raining gently, and after an hour’s brisk promenade I saw in the distance what appeared to be a steaming mass of staggering, shrouded beings. As they drew nearer, I made them out to be the shattered regiments and companies of the vanquished Mill Springs army. At its head rode their commander, General George B. Crittenden, son of the famous Kentucky Whig leader, John J. Crittenden, a degenerate son of a worthy sire. He was drunk as a loon, reeling from side to side on his horse, cursing and swearing at ill fate and everybody and everything about him. His staff officers were for the most part in the same miserable plight. The troops followed in great disorder, many without firearms or hats or shoes, and most of them with old worn blankets, their only covering at night, tied with a string around their necks and reaching down below their knees, which gave them their ghoul-like appearance.

The disorganized and demoralized army of not over five thousand men did not halt in Lebanon, but marched on toward Murfreesboro. This signified that the Bowling Green army and the fragments of the Fort Donelson garrison would not undertake to make a stand at Nashville, but that all the Confederate units in Kentucky and Tennessee would concentrate upon Murfreesboro, some thirty miles to the southeast of Nashville, and then determine their further plan for resistance.

The students at the University whose parents resided south of Murfreesboro saw at once that they must go southward with the Crittenden army or be separated from their homes by both lines of the hostile forces. There were not many of us, so we procured an old stagecoach and started on in the rear of the Confederate troops. After a weary ride of some twelve hours, over heavy roads in the midst of a drizzling rain, we approached Murfreesboro to find that Albert Sidney Johnston’s army from Bowling Green had, by forced marches via Nashville, already, in large part, arrived. Some Federal cavalry were in pretty close pursuit, and once or twice, just before arriving at the town, we caught sight of them in the distance. Their purpose seemed, however, to be to reconnoitre rather than to attack.

We found everything in the greatest possible confusion in the town. It was then a relatively small place of some two or three thousand inhabitants, prettily situated between the forks of Stone River, and not at all prepared or calculated to take care of an army of from fifteen to twenty thousand men. Soldiers were billeted everywhere, and, since most of them were drunk, they filled the streets with din and disorder. The famous regiment of Texas Rangers was among them, and they galloped hither and thither on their wiry, tough little bronchos, shouting and cursing and rolling all over the backs and sides of their ugly beasts, even touching the ground with their hands and then bringing themselves to an upright position again. There seemed to be no vedettes or sentinels, no discipline or command, and I have always believed that if the Federal troops had pressed forward more actively they might have captured the entire disorganized and demoralized force before the bridges over the south fork of Stone River, swept away by the spring flood, could have been rebuilt, and thus have forestalled the battle of Shiloh and the Corinth campaign.

When our stagecoach drew up before the tavern, as it was called, not an inch of room was to be had in either the house or the stable. Happily, one of our number, a boy named Waller, from Selma, Alabama, knew a Dr. King who resided in Murfreesboro. He sought out the house and procured the Doctor’s assent to our sleeping on his parlor floor. There was no way to go southward from Murfreesboro until the bridges should be restored, and we were therefore tenants of Dr. King’s parlor for three or four days, during which time we picked up our meals wherever we could find them.

It was the Doctor who informed us that the Confederate Army would not make a stand at Murfreesboro, but would retreat farther southward as soon as the river could be crossed; he advised us to move onward before the bridges were finished, for fear of being left behind when the army should occupy the roads and crossing. Following this advice, we abandoned our impedimenta, walked down to the bridge in process of reconstruction over the south branch of the river, crawled out over the timbers as far as they reached, jumped down into the water, and waded to the south bank, where we found a train of freight cars standing.

After some hours this train started toward Chattanooga. I rode on it as far as a station called Wartrace, and took there another train over the branch to Shelbyville, where a cousin of my mother resided, with whom I lodged overnight and by whom I was sent onward to my father’s place in Giles County.

I arrived home without further incident about the middle of March 1862. With this, the first chapter of my life reached its conclusion, and my education in the usual sense was now to be interrupted by a period of participation in the war.

(These reminiscences of a Civil War boyhood will be concluded next month)