CHAPTER XXXIX.

THE HEART OF TENNESSEE.

Having spent the remainder of the forenoon in riding over other portions of the field, we returned to Murfreesboro’; and at half-past three o’clock I took the train for Nashville.

At Nashville I remained four days,—four eminently disagreeable days of snow, and rain, and fog, and slush, and mud. Yet I formed a not unfavorable impression of the city. I could feel the influence of Northern ideas and enterprise pulsating through it. Its population, which was less than twenty-four thousand at the last census, nearly doubled during the war. Its position gives it activity and importance. It is a nostril through which the State has long breathed the Northern air of free institutions. It is a port of entry on the Cumberland, which affords it steamboat communication with the great rivers. It is a node from which radiate five important railroads connecting it with the South and North. The turnpikes leading out of it in every direction are the best system of roads I met with anywhere in the South.

Middle Tennessee is the largest of the three natural divisions of the State. It is separated from the West division by the Tennessee River, and from East Tennessee by the Cumberland Mountains. It is a fine stock-raising country; and the valley of the Cumberland River affords an extensive tract of excellent cotton and tobacco lands.

Nashville is the great commercial emporium of this division. The largest annual shipment of cotton from this port was fifty thousand bales; the average, before the war, was about half as many: during 1865, it was fully up to this average, consisting mostly of old cotton going to market. Six thousand hogsheads of tobacco, two million bushels of corn, and twenty-five thousand hogs,—besides ten thousand casks of bacon and twenty-five hundred tierces of lard,—were yearly shipped from this port. The manufacturing interest of the place is insignificant.

The prospects of the country for the present year seemed to me favorable. The freedmen were making contracts, and going to work. Returned Rebels were generally settling down to a quiet life, and turning their attention to business. The people were much disposed to plant cotton, and every effort was making to put their desolated farms into a tillable condition.

Yet Middle Tennessee is but an indifferent cotton-growing region. It is inferior to West Tennessee, and can scarcely be called a cotton country, when compared with the rich valleys of the more Southern States. Eight hundred pounds of seed cotton[12] to the acre are considered a good crop on the best lands. The quality of Middle Tennessee cotton never rates above “low middling,” but generally below it, (the different qualities of cotton being classed as follows: inferior, ordinary, good ordinary, low middling, middling, good middling, middling fair, good fair, and fine.)

I found considerable business doing with an article which never before had any money-value. Cotton seed, which used to be cast out from the gin-houses and left to rot in heaps, the planter reserving but a small portion for the ensuing crop, was now in great demand, prices varying from one to three dollars a bushel. In some portions of the Rebel States it had nearly run out during the war, and those sections which, like Tennessee, had continued the culture of the plant, were supplying the deficiency. The seed, I may here mention, resembles, after the fibre is removed by the gin, a small-sized pea covered with fine white wool. It is very oily, and is considered the best known fertilizer for cotton lands.

* * * * *

Nashville is built on the slopes of a hill rising from the south bank of the Cumberland. Near the summit, one hundred and seventy-five feet above the river, stands the capitol, said to be the finest State capitol in the United States. The view it commands of the surrounding country is superb; and seen from afar off, it seems, with its cupola and Ionic porticoes, to rest upon the city like a crown. It is constructed of fine fossiliferous limestone, three stories in height; with a central tower lifting the cupola two hundred feet from the ground. This tower is the one bad feature about the building. It is not imposing. The site is a lofty crest of rock, which was fortified during the war, converting the capitol into a citadel. The parapets thrown up around the edifice still remain.

My visit happened on the first anniversary of the battle of Nashville, which took place on the fifteenth and sixteenth days of December, 1864;—a battle which, occurring after many great and sanguinary conflicts, did not rise to highest fame; and which has not yet had ample justice done it. It is to be distinguished as the only immediately decisive battle of the war,—the only one in which an army was destroyed. By it the army of Hood was annihilated, and a period put to Rebel power in the States which Sherman had left behind him on his great march.

The scene of the battle, the sweeping undulations of the plain, the fields, the clumps of woods, and the range of hills beyond, are distinctly visible in fair weather from the house-tops of the city, and especially from the capitol. The fight took place under the eyes of the citizens. Every “coigne of vantage” was black with spectators. Patriots and Rebel sympathizers were commingled: the friends and relatives of both armies crowding together to witness the deadly struggle; a drama of fearfully intense reality! The wife of a noted general officer who was in the thickest of the fight, told me something of her experience, watching from the capitol with a glass the movements of his troops, the swift gallop of couriers, the charge, the repulse, the successful assault, the ground dotted with the slain, and the awful battle cloud, rolling over all, enfolding, as she at one time believed, his dead form with the rest. But he lived; he was present when she told me the story;—and shall I ever forget the emotion with which he listened to the recital? The battle was no such terrible thing to the soldier in the midst of it, as to the loved one looking on.

The State legislature adjourned for the Christmas holidays on the morning of my visit to the capitol; but I was in time to meet and converse with members from various parts of the State. They were generally a plain, candid, earnest class of men. They were the loyal salt of the State. Some of them were from districts in which there were no Union men to elect them; to meet which contingency the names of the candidates for both houses had been placed on a general ticket. Thus members from West and Middle Tennessee, where the Rebel element was paramount, were elected by votes in East Tennessee, which was loyal.

With Mr. Frierson, Speaker of the Senate, I had a long conversation. He was from Maury County, and a liberal-minded, progressive man, for that intensely pro-slavery and Rebel district. We talked on the exciting topic of the hour,—negro suffrage, and the admission of negro testimony in the courts. “My freedmen,” he said, “are far more intelligent and better prepared to vote, than the white population around us.” Yet as a class he did not think the negroes prepared to exercise the right of suffrage, and he was in favor of granting it only to such as had served in the Union army. To the negroes’ loyalty and good behavior he gave the highest praise. “It is said they would have fought for the Confederacy, if the opportunity had been given them in season. But I know the negro, and I know that his heart was true to the Union from the first, and throughout; and I do not believe he would have fought for the Rebellion, even on the promise of his liberty.” He thought the blacks competent to give testimony in the courts; but for this step society in Tennessee was not prepared. Both the right of voting and of testifying must be given them before long, however.

There were two classes of Union men in Tennessee. One class had manifested their loyalty by their uncompromising acts and sacrifices. The other class were merely _legal_ Union men, professing loyalty to the government and friendliness to the negro. “These are not to be trusted,” said Mr. Frierson. “Their animosity against the government and the freedmen, and more particularly against _heart_ Union men, is all the more dangerous because it is secret.” And it was necessary in his opinion to retain the Freedmen’s Bureau in the State, and to keep both Rebels and rebel sympathizers excluded from power, for some years.

I have given so much of this conversation to illustrate the views entertained by the average, moderate, common-sense Union men of Tennessee. Far behind them, on the question of human rights, were some of the negro-haters and Rebel-persecutors of East Tennessee; while there was a handful of leading men as far in advance of them. A good sample of these was the honorable John Trimble, of Nashville, also a member of the legislature, whom I had the satisfaction of meeting on two or three occasions: a man of liberal and cultivated mind, singularly emancipated from cant and prejudice. He had just introduced into the General Assembly a bill extending the elective franchise to the freedmen, with certain restrictions; for the passage of which there was of course little chance.

I was just in time to catch Governor Brownlow as he was about going home for the holidays. I should have been sorry to miss seeing this remarkable type of native Southern-Western wit. As an outspoken convert from the pro-slavery doctrines he used to advocate, to the radical ideas which the agitations of the times had shaken to the surface of society, he was also interesting to me. I found him a tall, quiet individual, of a nervous temperament, intellectual forehead, and a gift of language,—with nothing of the blackguard in his manners, as readers of his writings might sometimes be led to expect. His conversation was characteristic. He believed a Rebel had no rights except to be hung in this world, and damned after death. But this and other similar expressions did not proceed so much from a vindictive nature, as from that tendency to a strong, extravagant style of statement, for which Western and Southern people, and especially the people of Tennessee, are noted.

Of his compatriots, the Union-loving East Tennesseeans, he said, “It is hard to tell which they hate most, the Rebels, or the negroes.” He did not sympathize with them in the ill-feeling they bestowed upon the latter. He was in favor of the Negro Testimony Bill, which had just been defeated in the legislature by East Tennessee members; and as for negro suffrage, he thought it was sure to come in a few years.

“The Rebels,” said he, “are as rebellious now as ever. If Thomas and his bayonets were withdrawn, in ten days a Rebel mob would drive this legislature out. Congress,” he added, “will have to legislate for all the Rebel States, Tennessee with the rest.”

From the Governor’s I went over to the division head-quarters to call on Major-General Thomas,—a very different type of native Southern men. Born and bred a Virginian, his patriotism was national, knowing no State boundaries. In appearance, he is the most lion-like of all the Union generals I have seen. An imperturbable, strong soul, never betrayed into weakness or excess by any excitement, his opinions possessed for me great value.

We spoke of the national soldiers’ cemeteries in his division; and he informed me that besides those I had visited at Chattanooga and Murfreesboro’, others proposed by him had been sanctioned by the War Department. “We shall have one here at Nashville; and I have already selected the site for it,”—a fortified hill in the suburbs. “There will be one at Franklin; also one at Memphis; another at Shiloh; and another large one at Atlanta;” for he did not favor the plan of burying the dead of the Atlanta campaign at Chattanooga.

The military division, called the “Division of the Tennessee,” which General Thomas commands, comprises the States of Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

He did not think that in either of those States there was any love for the Union, except in the hearts of a small minority. Tennessee was perhaps an exception. It was the only one of the Southern States that had reorganized on a strictly Union basis. It had disfranchised the Rebels. The governor, the legislature, and the recently elected members of Congress, were unquestionably loyal men. The Rebel State debt had been repudiated, and the Constitutional Amendment abolishing slavery adopted. East Tennessee could take care of itself; but in Middle and West Tennessee, where the Rebel sentiment predominated, personal and partisan animosities were so strong that Union men must for some time to come have the protection of the government. There were then in Tennessee about six thousand troops, stationed chiefly at Chattanooga, Memphis, and Nashville, with smaller garrisons scattered throughout the State, sufficient to remind the people that the government still lived.

As for the freedman, General Thomas thought the respectable classes, and especially the intelligent large planters, were inclined to treat him with justice; but habit and prejudice were so strong even with them, that the kind of justice he might expect would be largely mixed with wrong and outrage, if the Bureau was withdrawn.

The General was in the receipt of information, from entirely distinct and reliable sources, concerning secret organizations in the Southern States, the design of which was to embarrass the Federal Government and destroy its credit, to keep alive the fires of Rebel animosity, and to revive the cause of the Confederacy whenever there should occur a favorable opportunity, such as a political division of the North, or a war with some foreign power. As his testimony on this subject has been made public, I shall say nothing further of it here, except to express my sense of the weight to be attached to the conclusions of so calm and unprejudiced a man.

He had great faith in the negro. “I may be supposed to know something about him, for I was raised in a slave State; and I have certainly seen enough of him during and since the war. There is no doubt about his disposition to work and take care of himself, now he is free.” When I spoke of the great difference existing between different African races, he replied, “There is more ability and fidelity in these apish-looking negroes than you suppose”; and he proceeded to relate the following story:—

“I had a servant of the kind you speak of during the war. I saw him first at a hotel in Danville, Kentucky; he waited on me a good deal, and attracted my attention because he looked so much like a baboon. He took a liking to me, from some cause, and in order to be near me, engaged in the service of one of my staff-officers. I saw him occasionally afterwards, but gave him little attention, and had no suspicion of the romantic attachment with which I had inspired him. At length I had the misfortune to lose a very valuable servant, and did not know how I should replace him: servants were plenty enough, but I wanted one who could understand what I wished to have done without even being told my wishes, and who would have it done almost before I was aware of the necessity. I happened to name these qualities of a perfect valet in the presence of one of my aides, who said to me, ‘I have just the man you want; and though I wouldn’t part with him for any other cause, you shall have him.’ I accepted his offer; and what was my surprise when he introduced to me the baboon. I at first thought it a jest; but soon learned that he had conferred upon me a great favor. I never had such a servant. In a week’s time he understood perfectly all my habits and requirements, and it was very rare I ever had to give him a verbal order. We had difficulty in getting our washing and ironing properly done, in the army; but one day I noticed my linen was looking better than usual. The fellow had anticipated my want in that respect, and learned to wash and iron expressly to please me. He soon became one of the best washers and ironers I ever saw; I don’t think a woman in America could beat him. As soon as his newly acquired art became known, it was in demand; and he asked permission to do the linen of some of my officers, which I granted. He was industrious and provident; he supported, a family, and, during the three years he was with me, laid by two thousand dollars.”

Among other prominent men I saw was General Fiske, of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Assistant-Commissioner for the States of Tennessee and Kentucky. There were in his district six hundred thousand freedmen. He was issuing eight hundred rations daily to colored women and children, and three times as many to white refugees. “During the past four years,” said he, “between Louisville and Atlanta, we have fed with government charity rations sixty-four white to one colored person.” The local poor he refused to feed. “I told the Mayor of Nashville the other day that if he did not take care of his poor, I would assess the whiskey shops for their benefit. There are four hundred and eighteen shops of that kind in this city; and eighteen thousand dollars a day are poured down the throats of the people.”

The colored people of Nashville had organized a provident association managed exclusively by themselves, the object of which was the systematic relief of the poor, irrespective of color.

Speaking of the differences arising between the freedmen and the whites, General Fiske said, “In thirteen cases out of fifteen, the violation of contracts originates with the whites.” Since the defeat of the Negro Testimony Bill in the legislature, he had taken all cases, in which freedmen were concerned, out of the civil courts, and turned them over to freedmen’s courts, where alone justice could be done them.

“In my work of elevating the colored race,” said he, “I get more hearty coöperation from intelligent and influential Rebel slave-holders, than from the rabid Unionists of East Tennessee.”

Speaking of the laziness with which the negroes were charged, he said, “They are more industrious than the whites. You see young men standing on street corners with cigars in their mouths, and hands in their pockets, swearing the negroes won’t work; while they themselves are supported by their own mothers, who keep boarding-houses. The idle colored families complained of are usually the wives and children of soldiers serving in the Federal army; and they have as good a right to be idle as the wives and children of any other men who are able and willing to support their families. In this city, it is the negroes who do the hard work. They handle goods on the levee and at the railroad; drive drays and hacks; lay gas-pipes; and work on new buildings. In the country they are leasing farms; some are buying farms; others are at work for wages. Able-bodied plantation hands earn fifteen and twenty dollars a month; women, ten and twelve dollars; the oldest boy and girl in a family, five and nine dollars. Hundreds of colored families are earning forty dollars a month, besides their rations, quarters, medical attendance, and the support of the younger children.”

The schools of General Fiske’s district, under the superintendence of Professor Ogden, were in a promising condition. There were near fifteen thousand pupils, and two hundred and sixty-four teachers. Many summer schools, which for want of school-houses were kept under trees, had been discontinued at the coming on of winter. Rebels returning home with their pardons were also turning the freedmen out of buildings used as school-houses. The consequence was a falling off of nearly one third in the number of pupils since September.

In Nashville there was a school supported by the United Presbyterian Mission, numbering eight hundred pupils; and another by the Pennsylvania Freedmen’s Relief Association, numbering three hundred and fifty. The American Missionary Association and Western Freedmen’s Aid had united in purchasing, for sixteen thousand dollars, land on which had been erected twenty-three government hospital buildings, worth fifty thousand dollars, which, “by the superior management of General Fiske,” said Professor Ogden, “have been secured for our schools.” It was proposed to establish in them a school, having all grades, from the primary up to the normal. There was a great need of properly qualified colored teachers to send into by-places; which this school was designed to supply.

General Fiske had introduced a system of plantation schools, which was working well. Benevolent societies furnished the teachers, and planters were required to furnish the school-houses. A plantation of one hundred and fifty hands and forty or fifty children would have its own school-house. Smaller plantations would unite and build a school-house in some central location. These conditions were generally put into the contracts with the planters, who were beginning to learn that there was nothing so encouraging and harmonizing to the freedmen as the establishment of schools for their children.

Footnote 12:

That is, of cotton and seed: the gin takes out fifty or sixty per cent. of the gross weight.