A Year in the South (26 page)

CORNELIA MCDONALD

Just before summer began, harry McDonald took a job as a farm laborer, working for a man named Reid who had an estate on the outskirts of Lexington. Cornelia tried to talk him out of it, but she could not deny that the family needed the money badly, and at last she gave in. She was never really happy about it, however. It hurt to see her son trudge off just after daybreak each morning and then slump home fourteen hours later, exhausted and grimy. Harry was not unused to hard work—he had spent much of the winter and early spring chopping wood—but this field labor was grueling. When he returned home at dusk he would collapse wordlessly into a chair, doze for a while, and then head upstairs to bed, too tired to join the family's evening get-togethers or even to read. He never complained, however, and he stuck to the work manfully despite the long hours, the increasingly hot weather, and the paltry wages.
1

Cornelia was unhappy about Harry's job not only because it took such a physical toll on him, but also because she thought it degrading. Here was her first-born hoeing and plowing some planter's cornfield, side-by-side with blacks, when he should be in school preparing for a profession. Not only that, but Allan, the next oldest, had now taken a job, too, doing yard work and running errands for a family on the other end of town. And Cornelia herself, of course, was working as a private tutor. Just four years earlier the McDonalds had been ensconced among the South's propertied and cultured elite, possessed of land, slaves, money, self-sufficiency, and a fair amount of leisure. Now they were crammed into a rented house, laboring from morning to night, wearing patched and repatched clothes, counting pennies, and scrambling to make ends meet. Thinking about it made Cornelia sick at heart. “To see my noble sons, little daughter, and pretty little boys dragged down so low, how could I bear it.”
2

She felt even sicker when she contemplated the future. If her financial situation did not improve, the family might well slide further into society's depths. The house rent was coming due, and she had no money to pay it. Every bit of income was going to buy food and pay the cook. Even so, the family was not getting enough to eat, particularly Cornelia, who was growing noticeably thin and hollow-eyed. “At times,” she recalled, “I was so weak from hunger that I could scarcely go up and down stairs.”
3

In her desperation, she took a gamble that she soon regretted. A man came to her one day offering to take over the cultivation of her garden if she would let him have the produce from half of it. With Harry and Allan both away all day, the garden was being worked solely by Kenneth, Roy, and Donald, who were small and woefully unskilled. Thinking it over, Cornelia calculated that she would get more in the long run from a well-tended half-garden than a poorly tended whole one. She therefore accepted the man's proposal. He let her choose her half, and she selected the one that included two apple trees.
4

As the summer weeks went by and the garden yielded its bounty, Cornelia rued her decision. Her half produced little besides apples. She was not being cheated, she was certain of that: she kept an eye on the man and made sure he was devoting equal attention to the two sections. But for some unfathomable reason, hers failed while his prospered. As he hauled away basket after basket of ripe peas and other produce, Cornelia and the children ate beans and roasted apples.
5

While the McDonalds and other families in Lexington struggled to sustain themselves, they struggled also to come to terms with the reality of Confederate defeat. The period of uncertainty following Lee's surrender ended on June 9, when a detachment of U.S. cavalry rode in and took possession of the town. This temporary occupation force was succeeded in July by a permanent force of forty soldiers of the 58th Pennsylvania Infantry. With the Yankees' arrival, martial law was in effect in Lexington.
6

Slavery, which the local authorities had preserved more or less intact since the demise of the Confederacy, collapsed abruptly with the coming of federal troops. The occupiers decreed that no blacks were to be held against their will, and those who had been forced to labor without pay since the war's end must receive back wages for that time. Any whites who continued to resist emancipation would be arrested and jailed, the federals warned, as would all other “refractory persons.”
7

Even before the troops appeared, the people of Lexington experienced a Yankee invasion of sorts, but it was one they had not anticipated. Beginning not long after Appomattox, a number of Northern entrepreneurs rolled into town on wagons loaded with merchandise and proceeded to set up shop as tradesmen. Many of the townsfolk deeply resented this intrusion. The Reverend William Pendleton, husband of Cornelia's friend Ann Pendleton, spoke bitterly of the “Yankee adventurers” who came “to cheat our people out of their little remaining coin.” By early summer an informal boycott was in the making. The Northern merchants, as Reverend Pendleton's daughter Rose reported in June, “have a great deal of custom among the negroes, but very little if any among the white people.”
8

The citizens reserved their fiercest hostility, however, for the occupation troops. They saw no reason why U.S. soldiers should be lording it over them, no reason why martial law should prevail in their town. They had accepted Confederate defeat and laid down their arms. While few regarded the reunion of the nation with any enthusiasm, no one was resisting federal authority. They wanted only to be left alone to restore order and prosperity to their community. Cornelia was one of many in Lexington who thought military rule gratuitous, despotic, and humiliating. “In every way possible the town people were annoyed and persecuted,” she wrote, “I among the rest. Some new and oppressive prohibition or arbitrary command [was] inflicted on us every day.”
9

By word and gesture, Lexington's citizens let the Yankee soldiers know they were unwelcome. Cornelia was an old hand at this sort of thing. Back in Winchester during the war, she had earned a reputation for standing up to the enemy soldiers who periodically occupied the town. A neighbor of hers there described her as “daring in her audacity,” and “one of the talking heroines.” Her audacity was carefully gauged, however: while she made it clear to the Yankees how she felt about them, she always stopped short of the kind of brazen remark that would provoke retaliation. She was a master of the cold stare, the condescending voice, the subtle insult.
10

In the eyes of Lexington's occupiers, the smoldering hostility displayed by citizens like Cornelia only proved the need for a military presence in the town. What they saw as they patrolled the streets in the summer of 1865 was a sullen, unsubdued mass of rebels who, if left to their own devices, would undoubtedly try to reenslave the blacks and probably try again to overthrow the U.S. government. Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Clay, commander of the military subdistrict that included Lexington, was outraged at their behavior. They are “impudent and insulting to officers and soldiers,” he wrote, and “There are many … who openly glory in the part they have taken in the rebellion.” In his view, anyone who did not sincerely embrace the national government was defying it, and he saw “very little real affection for the Union” in this section of Virginia. “The inhabitants of Lexington,” he added, “are perhaps the most bitter.”
11

In truth, the conqueror's hand rested lightly on the citizens of Lexington. The townspeople may have been “annoyed,” as Cornelia claimed, but they were hardly “persecuted.” With the war over, the federal army relaxed its stern policy of retribution and destruction aimed at bringing Southern citizens to their knees. The first contingent of occupation troops in Lexington did commit some depredations in and around the town and taunted the inhabitants to some extent—even Colonel Clay admitted they “were rather a hard party”—but for the most part the soldiers posted in the town during the summer were restrained and well disciplined. They seized no private property and occupied no citizens' homes, although Colonel Clay did require them to confiscate all U.S. and Confederate government property in the citizens' hands and did give them permission to take possession of any public building they needed. Nor did the occupation troops interfere in the citizens' attempts to make a living and get the local economy back on its feet, except to make sure they did not abuse their black laborers.
12

All things considered, the little Yankee force in Lexington was something less than tyrannical, and Cornelia—who had experienced truly harsh and destructive Union army rule in Winchester—knew better than most that this was so. Now and then the troops even won the citizens' gratitude, as, for example, in late July, when they rounded up all the unemployed freedmen in town and put them to work cleaning the streets. The editor of the
Lexington Gazette
remarked on that occasion that the federals deserved “double thanks for thus ridding the town of two nuisances—idle negroes and dirty streets.”
13

If the oppressions of Yankee rule in Lexington were more symbolic than otherwise, injuring honor and pride more than anything else, they were nonetheless galling to the citizens. In July the town was shaken by a controversy that aggravated the citizens' resentment, even as it confirmed the Yankees' belief that these people were still rebels at heart.

The controversy involved the Reverend Pendleton, rector of Grace Episcopal Church and former chief of artillery in Lee's army. A man of great dignity and aristocratic bearing, he was also among the most bitter and unyielding of Lexington's ex-Confederates. Writing to a kinswoman two months after Appomattox, Pendleton characterized the victorious Union army as a host of “German, Irish, negro, and Yankee wretches [who] invad[ed] our homes under the impulse of Northern envy and malice, stimulated by fanatical madness in some, lust of power and plunder in others, and iniquitous passion in all, though sought to be covered over by the shallow preten[s]e of virtuous devotion to constitutional liberty.” Regarding the justness of the Confederate cause, he told another correspondent in June that “my convictions remain wholly unchanged.” The secession of the Southern states was a proper response to “the great wrongs inflicted … by their Northern copartners, in … flagrant violation of the compact of union.” He now accepted defeat, but only grudgingly: “As it has … pleased the Almighty Ruler of the world to permit us to be overwhelmed, I … am willing to submit myself peaceably to an authority which, whatever I think of its justice, I cannot resist to any good purpose.” At the same time, he continued to hope “for some ordering in the future by which divine Providence may yet enable us to achieve the independence which is our birthright and of which we have now been despoiled by a mighty combination.”
14

As one of Lexington's most prominent citizens and stoutest champions of the Southern cause, Pendleton took it upon himself to defend the townspeople against military misrule. The Yankee troops had been in town only a month when he fired off his first letter of protest to the commanding officer. “On my way from church yesterday attending several ladies,” he wrote, “I met two of your soldiers. They so occupied the foot walk as to compel the ladies to yield the way and walk round to avoid them.” He knew of similar incidents of “disrespectful obstruction” by the troops, he said, and he advised the commander that such “offensive conduct” was “irritating to our people.”
15

Four days later Pendleton dispatched another protest to the same officer. This time he had been personally offended, and grievously so. He had gone to the cemetery on the south end of town to visit the grave of his son, Alexander “Sandie” Pendleton, a Confederate officer mortally wounded in battle in 1864. To his horror, he found that it “had been very recently desecrated by a serious mutilation of the head-board. This indignity has, I have no doubt, been perpetrated by some of your men. I found three of them in the grave yard at the time of my visit, one of them indecently exhibiting himself under a call of nature near the gate.”
16

Pendleton also voiced his protests from the pulpit, and in doing so he sparked a conflict with the military authorities that disturbed the town for months. On Sunday, July 9, he preached from the Beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” In his sermon he spoke of the material as well as spiritual poverty that now afflicted his homeland, and he pointed a finger of blame: “The spoliations of iniquitous power and the atrocities of devastating enemies, have spread this experience through our beloved South.” Those responsible would ultimately be punished by a just God, he assured the congregation, and the righteous would be vindicated.
17

He never mentioned Yankees specifically, but the sermon's message was obvious to his listeners, including whoever subsequently reported it to the military. The following Sunday, three federal army officers were seated in the pews. Pendleton nevertheless delivered his sermon just as he had prepared it, including passages in which he alluded to the occupiers as “representatives of the Gigantic power which oppresses the land” and spoke of the destruction that God invariably inflicts on an ungodly kingdom, especially an “Infidel blasphemous, atrocious tyranny … in its pride of power.”
18

This was too much for the military authorities. Shortly after the service ended, a sergeant and three armed privates marched into the church and confronted Pendleton in the vestry. The sergeant told him he was under arrest. Despite his insistence that he “be treated with propriety,” he was locked up in the guardhouse. There he penned yet another letter to the commanding officer, protesting his confinement in a filthy and uncomfortable cell—the guardhouse was a converted corncrib—where he was forced “to listen to the ribaldry and profanity of your common soldiers.” Released after eight hours, he was summoned the next morning to an interrogation by several officers. He refused to answer questions and condemned his persecutors' “ungentlemanly conduct.”
19