A Year in the South (4 page)

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 possessions.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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From the moment the war began, many Southerners worried about enemy invasion. Tippah County seemed safe enough at first, however, for it lay deep inside the Confederacy. Few foresaw how quickly the armies of the North would conquer west and middle Tennessee and penetrate northern Mississippi. Between early 1862 and late 1864 Tippah was raided by federal troops at least sixty times. Sam's community, in the county's southeastern corner, was spared many of these visitations but still suffered enormously: farms were stripped of provisions and livestock, bridges and fences were destroyed, government and churches and trade were disrupted, and many slaves marched away with the invaders to freedom. The Agnew plantation was hit several times, with considerable property losses.
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The last Yankee raid that the Agnews endured prior to 1865 was an utter nightmare. In June 1864 a passing force of 7,800 federal troops was attacked by a Confederate force only half that size, under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest. The final stage of the ensuing day-long battle (known as Brice's Crossroads) was fought on the Agnew plantation. When the terrifying roar of cannons and small arms finally ceased and the smoke cleared, the Agnews emerged from hiding to find the plantation sacked, its buildings riddled with bullet holes, its fields strewn with the corpses of Northern and Southern soldiers. Wounded men lay in and around the Agnew house, many screaming in pain. The dead were buried quickly and the wounded removed, but the carcasses of horses and mules took days to dispose of. For a long time the place stank of death.
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Forrest's stunning victory in this battle cleared Tippah of invaders for a time, and the Yankees did not seriously molest the county during the remainder of 1864. Order was gradually restored and life resumed something like its customary rhythms. But neither Sam Agnew nor anybody else knew how long this state of affairs would continue. With the Yankees in possession of Tennessee, the citizens of Tippah found themselves poised vulnerably on the Confederacy's frontier. Any day might bring another invasion, another season of chaos and ruin.
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P
ART
O
NE

WINTER

LOUIS HUGHES

South Alabamians sometimes call it simply the Bigbee. It is a short name for a long river that rolls lazily, with many twists and turns, southward from the heart of the state to Mobile on the Gulf coast. In early 1865 the Tombigbee was high and busy with steamboats. They chugged up and down the river between Demopolis and Mobile, stopping at landings here and there to load or unload. Bales of cotton and piles of Osnaburg sacks crowded the decks of many of the boats. The sacks held the more precious cargo: they were filled with salt.
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Many of the sacks were marked “Alabama.” These were loaded aboard at a stop on the east bank of the river in Clarke County, some sixty miles north of Mobile. A road led inland from the landing there, and a short distance up that road lay the Alabama state saltworks. It was a sprawling little settlement centered around a large wooden building with a veranda. This building was the headquarters, in which Louis Hughes lived and worked.
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Lou, as he was used to being called, had stepped easily into his new situation when he came to the works in 1863. A well-trained butler was a prized and useful servant, and thus Lou was immediately singled out from the other leased slaves and set to work in that role. He did a good job and became a favorite of the state salt commissioner, Benjamin Woolsey, whose office was in the headquarters. Matilda, Lou's wife, was put to work as a cook. She, too, won the commissioner's approval; her bread and rolls, he said, were as good as any he had ever tasted. Woolsey, a lawyer and planter by profession, had at one time offered to buy Lou and Matilda for three thousand dollars, but Boss had turned him down.
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Boss was dead now, of course. January 1, 1865, was the first anniversary of his death. His sudden passing had shocked his family and slaves but resulted in no immediate changes for Lou and Matilda. They and the other McGehee slaves stayed on at the saltworks by order of Madam, Boss's widow, who remained at her father's plantation in Mississippi.
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There were many slaves at the works in early 1865, perhaps 200 or more. Their muscle and sweat and skills powered an extensive manufacturing operation. It was a scene of almost constant activity, for there were all sorts of tasks to be done and the Confederacy's salt famine generated a sense of urgency. Slave men did most of the heavy labor—boring wells, tending pumps and furnaces, chopping and hauling wood, making bricks, building levees, sacking and weighing and loading the salt. The slave women cooked and did laundry and other chores with the help of the older children. Whites did the other jobs: among the two dozen or so employed at the works, besides the salt commissioner, were a superintendent, a clerk, a bookkeeper, a commissary manager, a doctor, a wagon master, two steam-engine operators, several artisans, and a number of overseers.
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The saltworks was not just a manufacturing operation but a community, and a largely self-sustaining one. All the people who worked there lived on the site. Most of the slaves resided in barracks or cabins that were spaced neatly along a street. The whites had separate residences or took rooms upstairs at the headquarters. Like any respectable Southern village, the works had a smithy, a cooperage, a shoemaking shop, a carpentry shop, a sawmill, a gristmill, and a cemetery. It also boasted a hospital, a commissary, a sack-making shop, a storehouse, and at least one kitchen. The works produced no grain or meat (these were purchased from outside sources), but it had a dairy and a seven-acre vegetable garden that helped feed the whole community.
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Like any village, too, the works had its own economy, an informal system of borrowing and bartering, swapping and selling. Slaves as well as whites engaged in this casual commerce and Lou Hughes was one of those clever enough to make money from it. The story he tells about this in his memoir illustrates one of the curious things about the Old South: how the rigid laws and protocols of slavery and race relations were sometimes ignored in the intimacy of communal life.

As Lou tells it, one day in the early part of 1865 he approached the superintendent of the works, N. S. Brooks, about getting some tobacco. He had a hundred dollars he had borrowed from three other slaves; they had earned it doing extra chores at the works in their free time. Lou wanted this tobacco not to smoke but to resell. Brooks liked Lou and was happy to do him a favor, so he took the money and dispatched an order by boat to a merchant in Mobile. Four days later a package containing thirty-six plugs of tobacco arrived. Brooks turned it over to Lou, who, after finishing his morning duties at headquarters, set out to peddle the plugs among the black laborers at the works. Within an hour he had sold every plug at five dollars apiece, for a profit of eighty dollars. Later, as Lou was serving the noon meal in the headquarters' dining room, Brooks asked him how he had done with the tobacco.

“I did very well,” Lou replied. “[T]he only trouble was I did not have enough.”

Brooks questioned him a little more, then drew out pencil and paper and did some figuring. His own salary was a meager $150 a month in rapidly depreciating Confederate money. After the meal, while Lou was clearing the table, Brooks came in from the veranda where he had been smoking with the clerk and made a proposition: he would order all the tobacco Lou could sell if Lou would split the profit with him fifty-fifty. Lou agreed.

Brooks ordered another shipment that day—500 plugs. When it came, Lou went into business in earnest. He recruited three other slaves as agents and gave them some plugs on consignment. The three were William, who was foreman of the wood-chopping detail; Uncle Hudson, who cared for the horses and mules; and John, who worked at the hospital. Every two or three days each would turn in his proceeds and take some more plugs. Meanwhile, whenever Lou had any free time following his afternoon chores, he would saddle up an old pony and, with Brooks's blessing, ride around through the neighborhoods surrounding the works and sell more plugs. The other slaves were curious about the source of the tobacco, but Lou kept it a secret. “In two weeks we had taken in $1,600,” he recalled, “and I was happy as I could be. Brooks was a fine fellow—a northerner by birth, and did just what he said he would. I received one-half of the money. Of course this was all rebel money, but I was sharp, and bought up all the silver I could find.”
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It must be said that few other slaves in the Old South were as successful in this respect as Lou. He held a privileged position at the works, thanks to his special skills and his close relationship with Superintendent Brooks and Commissioner Woolsey. Certainly Uncle Hudson, William, John, and even Matilda, for that matter, enjoyed no such liberties, not to mention the legions of others who did the saltworks' daily drudgery with ax and spade and hoe. Each might carve out some personal space in the informal communal setting, but that space was very narrow. For if the saltworks embodied the casual intimacy of a Southern village, it also embodied the rigorous discipline and exacting work routines of a Southern plantation.

The slaves at the works labored six days a week. Most of them, as was customary in the South, worked from sunup to sundown; those who tended the furnaces, however, had to work in shifts both day and night, for the furnaces were kept going around the clock every day except Sunday, when all work ceased. Because most of the jobs at the saltworks required very heavy labor, Brooks and Woolsey—who shared responsibility for managing the works—preferred to lease adult male slaves. They paid the slave owners not in cash but in kind: four bushels (about 200 pounds) of salt per month for an able-bodied male hand. The payment for women and children was less, and while Brooks and Woolsey would accept any healthy slave sent to them, they encouraged owners to send only men.
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The two managers found it easy to hire white employees, for a job at the saltworks exempted a man from Confederate military conscription. But they could never get all the slaves they wanted. They tried to recruit a work force of 300 but found that many slave owners were reluctant to put their valuable property in somebody else's hands during such uncertain times. Both spent a good deal of time corresponding with concerned lessors or potential lessors, assuring them that the slaves at the saltworks received generous rations (at least three and a half pounds of bacon and a peck of cornmeal per week, along with milk and vegetables), got skilled medical care when they needed it, and were closely supervised.
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This last was a particularly touchy matter. Brooks and Woolsey did their best to keep their leased bondsmen always under the watchful eye of some white person. They employed at least eight overseers at the works, and one even slept in the same quarters with the blacks. Nevertheless, slaves at the works could, and occasionally did, slip away. Few of these runaways were seeking freedom; in most cases they were simply reacting to some treatment they regarded as unfair. Mild protests of this sort were familiar to every Southern slave master. A typical instance had occurred at the works in March 1864, when twelve slaves owned by a Mobile couple named Ketchum ran off, upset because their cornmeal ration was short that week. All but one of the twelve eventually returned voluntarily and Woolsey sent them back to work without punishment. He then sat down to write an explanation to the Ketchums, who feared that their slaves had been mistreated or had been enticed away by “disloyal white men.” The slaves were well cared for and well protected, Woolsey insisted. The cornmeal was short only because the steam engine that ran the gristmill had broken down; it was now fixed, and he would see to it that full rations were always provided in the future. Moreover, he assured the Ketchums, he had not waited for the runaways to come back on their own: on learning of their flight, he had dispatched three overseers to track them down. “I spared no trouble or expense to get them back.”
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