A Year in the South (12 page)

Although notoriously inefficient in many ways, the Confederate government rigorously enforced the draft. Sam had seen firsthand the thoroughness of rebel conscription. He could not count the number of times he had looked up from his reading or writing to see a squad of cavalry passing by on a man-hunting expedition. And the conscriptors were as pitiless as they were diligent. In November 1863, two men whom Sam knew were apprehended and marched off as draftees despite the fact—as Sam noted indignantly in his diary—that one was nearly blind and the other was a dwarf. Sam himself had been accosted, too. On one occasion, his protestations that he was a minister and thus exempt were dismissed by a skeptical officer until Sam pulled manuscripts of his sermons from his pocket and offered them as proof.
16

Between the conscripts and the many volunteers, Sam's community had been bled nearly dry of men aged seventeen to fifty. Only a handful were exempted or detailed to civilian jobs, by reason of occupation or disability. Sam knew precisely how heavy a toll the war had levied on his community, for he had recently helped Uncle Joseph prepare a report on their precinct for the county government. Since the war began, exactly 200 men of the precinct had entered military service. Of these, eight had been discharged as unfit, eight were prisoners of war, thirty were deserters, and forty-three were dead. One of the dead was Sam's brother, Luther.
17

The Confederate authorities knew full well by the winter of 1864–65 that they were scraping the bottom of the conscript barrel. There were simply no more reserves of manpower to draw on. There were tens of thousands of deserters throughout the Confederacy, of course, but getting them back into the ranks in any great number was impossible, for they were as elusive as wild game. Meanwhile, the South's armies were wasting away while the North's grew stronger.

By late winter many in the Confederacy were ready to take drastic steps to try to fill the depleted ranks. In Richmond, Congress was debating a bill to enlist slave men as combat soldiers. Sam followed the debate with interest whenever he could get his hands on a current newspaper. The great question, of course, was whether slaves would willingly fight for the South.
18

Curious about what the slaves themselves thought, Sam spoke with some of his father's men. None would go into the ranks voluntarily, he learned. “Our negroes do not fancy the business and I believe will take [to] the woods before they would be conscripted.”
19

Enoch Agnew owned forty-five slaves on the eve of the Civil War, and since then he had lost only a few. He was luckier than many other planters in Tippah County. Since the Yankee raids had begun in 1862, large numbers of slaves had run off with the invaders. Because the Agnews' district had been plundered less often than most others in the county, the slaves there had had fewer opportunities to escape. The big raid in June 1864 had offered no chance, for the Yankees had fled back to Tennessee in panic after being whipped by Forrest, abandoning their wagons and everything else. For now, slavery was intact on the Agnew plantation and in Tippah as a whole. The county officials were maintaining slave patrols (as best they could, anyway, given the scarcity of white men), and the rebel cavalry troopers who roamed the area were keeping an eye out for black runaways. But everyone in Tippah knew that the “peculiar institution” stood close to the brink of disintegration. Another big enemy raid through the county could mean the end.
20

Many planters in these circumstances fretted ceaselessly about their slaves and watched warily for signs of unrest. Some in Tippah had even moved their slaves, or a portion of them, to safer parts of the South. But the Agnews saw no cause for anxiety. Sam noted on the day after Christmas 1864 that the family's blacks were celebrating the holidays as they always had and “seem to be enjoying themselves.” As the winter went on, there was no trouble with the Agnew slaves, no hint of restlessness or defiance. But then a shocking incident on January 27 raised questions that the Agnews were reluctant to confront.
21

It happened in the early afternoon, just after dinner. Sam and his father were at the picket fence in front of the house, talking to a soldier who was passing by on the road. Suddenly, from the direction of the slave quarters, came the sound of an enormous explosion. Sam and Enoch rushed to the spot and joined the crowd of blacks that had already gathered. “[A] most horrible sight met my gaze,” Sam wrote. Nineteen-year-old Neely, one of the family's slaves, “was lying on the ground … with his legs both terribly mangled, up to near his loins. One knee had the flesh entirely stripped from the bones, and the projecting naked bones and mixed mass of flesh and clothing was a harrowing spectacle.”
22

Hurriedly questioning the other blacks, Sam and Enoch discovered that the explosion was caused by an artillery shell. There were a lot of these around the plantation, live rounds left behind in June 1864 by the fleeing Yankees. Enoch had cautioned the slaves time and again not to go near them, but Neely had ignored the warning. He had taken a hammer and chisel and tried to open a shell to get out the gunpowder. Two slave children standing near when the round exploded suffered facial burns. Had they not been bundled up in winter clothing on this cold afternoon, their burns would have been more extensive. One of the two was also hit by a shell fragment, breaking his left arm just above the wrist; the other child was miraculously not hit by the several fragments that ripped his pants and one earflap of his cap. Another piece of the shell punctured Neely's abdomen and coursed upward through his body.
23

Neely was carried into one of the eight cabins that comprised the Agnew slave quarters. Enoch and Sam immediately went to work, one ministering to the body and the other to the soul. Enoch had been a physician before taking up planting, and he still treated patients when no other doctor could be found. For Neely he could do little, however; the young man's injuries were obviously mortal. Sam conversed earnestly with him as he lay dying. “He was perfectly rational but I do not think he fully realized his danger—the transition was so sudden from perfect health to the jaws of death.… [H]e did not know whether he was willing to die or not. He said he trusted in Christ. He rather discouraged my proposal to pray with him.” He died as the sun was setting.
24

Sam attended Neely's burial the next day. “It was [an] affecting sight to see the sorrow of his Mother and sister. Like Rachel's daughters they refused to be comforted. The body was carried by hand to the grave. A good many neighbor negroes were present and as the procession slowly proceeded to the graveyard they sang the 103d. Psalm.” A few weeks later Sam made a headboard for the grave, carefully inscribing Neely's name in black paint.
25

To the Agnews this incident was not only tragic but also disturbing. As Sam noted, Neely had “wanted to get the powder out but he never told what he wanted to do with it.” Sam did not dwell on the troubling implications, however. Neely was “a steady, quiet, industrious boy,” and a church member. Surely his intentions were innocent. And perhaps some blessings would come out of this, blessings both temporal and spiritual: “The negroes seem much affected by this terrible visitation. I hope it will be sanctified to their good.”
26

Neely's death disrupted the plantation routine only briefly. After he was laid to rest the slaves resumed their sunup-to-sundown duties. Winter was not a busy time, of course, but there were always chores to do: livestock to be tended, equipment and buildings to be repaired, fences to be mended, firewood to be chopped, cooking and laundry to be done. This winter ended early for the Agnew slaves, for during a warm spell in mid-February Enoch decided to get a head start on spring plowing. On February 17 the field hands hitched the mules to the plows and went to work breaking up the hard, weedy ground.
27

The plantation demanded a great deal of Enoch's attention, for it was large—372 cleared acres and over 1,400 of woodland—and he had no overseer. Sam, however, was little involved once hog-killing was finished. The only other time he was summoned to help that winter was a few days after plowing began, when a wind-whipped fire that had started somehow in the woods ignited a section of fence. He assisted in tearing down unburned fencing to halt the fire's spread.
28

Sam spent most of his time that winter indoors with his family. The house was big but unpretentious, a comfortable, two-story white frame structure with lots of rooms and fireplaces and a veranda in the rear. His waking hours were mostly occupied with reading and writing, but he also spent time tutoring his sixteen-year-old sister, Margaret, whose schooling had been cut short by the war. He gave her lessons in physiology, botany, and mathematics, while Enoch tutored the youngest child, thirteen-year-old Erskine. The older daughter, Mary, was eighteen and had finished school. The other occupants of the house were Letitia, Sam's mother, and Nannie, his wife. Nannie never left the house these days, for she was pregnant. The baby was due in early March.
29

Sam also devoted time that winter to gardening, but not for food or recreation. He was trying to raise opium poppies. Narcotics, like all other medicines, were critically scarce, and the Confederate government was urging citizens to grow poppies. Sam obtained some seeds and in January selected a plot of ground not far from the house. After preparing it for cultivation with the help of a slave boy, he spent all of one day and part of the next planting the seeds one by one in long, straight rows. In the weeks that followed he tended his poppy patch diligently but met with frustration after frustration: cows and hogs got into the patch and trampled it, heavy rains washed away many of the sprouts. Still, he was confident he could raise several hundred flowers to maturity, “If the sheep do not eat them up.”
30

On most Sundays, and some Saturdays, Sam was called away from home by ministerial duties. He usually had a preaching appointment, either at one of the local Associate Reformed Presbyterian churches whose pastor happened to be absent or at one of the “preaching stations” (mostly private homes) where he had been summoned by the faithful. When his appointment was at Hopewell Church, fifteen miles distant, he would usually set out Saturday afternoon and spend the night at a friend's house on the way, so as to arrive in time for the eleven o'clock Sabbath service. When he preached elsewhere, there was enough time on Sunday morning to get where he was going if he kept his mount moving at a steady gait. He rode a mule these days, for there was only one horse left on the plantation and it was too decrepit to be mounted.
31

The hazards Sam faced on his Sabbath rounds were not limited to possible encounters with Yankee raiders. Bad weather was an even bigger threat to his ministry. Even if he persevered through the rain, snow, or cold to keep his appointment, he could not be sure that the congregation would do so. On January 8, “A raw, unpleasant day,” he rode to the Mt. Zion community to preach in the home of a family named Anderson, but besides the Andersons only seven people showed up. Four weeks later he made his way to the Corder home through rain and sleet, getting his feet wet crossing the swollen streams, but found not a soul there to greet him besides the Corders. On Sundays when the weather was so miserable that there was no hope of a “respectable congregation,” he simply stayed home.
32

When he had no Sabbath appointment and the weather was tolerable, he usually attended services at Bethany, an ARP church located at Brice's Crossroads, three miles away. This was the pastorate of his beloved “Uncle Young”—the Reverend James L. Young, a fifty-six-year-old widower and Sam's ecclesiastical mentor. Sam occasionally preached at Bethany himself, at Uncle Young's invitation. It was something of a miracle that the church still stood, for it had been at the vortex of the battle in June 1864. It was left riddled by bullets and shells, its floor and pews sticky with the blood of wounded soldiers. Members of the congregation cleaned up the building and grounds and repaired most of the damage in a matter of weeks, but reminders of that dreadful day remained: a bullet hole in the pulpit, and dozens of soldiers' graves in the little cemetery beside the church.
33

All winter long, whether he was at home or traveling about, Sam continued his assiduous news-gathering. He talked to almost everyone he saw and devoured every newspaper he could get. Much of what he picked up was rumor, a lot of it absurdly improbable, but he carefully evaluated everything and generally had a pretty good idea of what was going on. The war news was very discouraging. By late January Sam knew that a large portion of what remained of Hood's army was being sent east to try to block Sherman's advance through the Carolinas. “This leaves Mississippi without the shadow of defense,” he noted glumly, “and the Yankees are expected soon to occupy the whole country.” When torrential rains in late February turned Tippah County's roads into quagmires, Sam and others were actually thankful, for the only thing that could stop the enemy now was mud.
34

Almost every day he heard rumors of peace, but he had long ago learned to discount them. Great Britain and France were going to intervene, it was said, and guarantee Confederate independence; the British were massing an army and a fleet of ironclad ships in Canada and intended to attack the United States; French warships had broken the Yankee blockade of Mobile and French troops were coming to the South's aid; Lee and Grant had signed a truce. Others might credit such stories, Sam sniffed, but “I simply believe not one word.… Drowning men catch at straws and our people swallow with avidity everything that promises peace.”
35