Dixie After the War

A conversation occurring between another of our physicians and a feminine patient is not without significance. The lady and the doctor’s wife had been friends before the war. “Why has your wife not called upon me, Doctor?” she asked. “Has she forgotten me?” “No, ma’am,” he answered gently, and then in a low, kindly voice: “But she cannot – yet – forget all that has happened since you were girls together.” “But she should not treasure it against me individually.” “She does not, ma’am. But she cannot forget – yet. You would understand if you had been in the beleagured land. If the good women of the North could only imagine themselves in the place of the women of the South during the last four years and in their place now!”

She sighed. “I can see only too plainly that they have suffered unutterably many things that we have been spared. And that they suffer now. It’s natural, too, that they should hate to have us here lording it over them.”

Very different was the spirit of the wife of a Federal officer stationed at Augusta, Georgia, whose declaration that she hoped to see the day when “black heels should stand on white necks” startled the State of Georgia. Many good ladies came South firm in the belief that all Southerners were negro-beaters, slave-traders, and cut-throats; a folk sadly benighted and needing tutelage in the humanities; and they were not always politic in expressing these opinions.

After war, the war spirit always lingers longest in non-combatants – in women and in men who stayed at home and cheered others on. “The soldiers,” said General Grant, “were in favor of a speedy reconstruction on terms least humiliating to the Southern people.” He wrote Mrs. Grant from Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865: “The suffering that must exist in the South … will be beyond conception; people who speak of further retaliation and punishment do not conceive of the suffering endured already, or they are heartless and unfeeling.”

General Halleck to General Meade, April 30, 1865: “The Army of the Potomac have shown the people of Virginia how they would be treated as enemies. Let them now prove that they know equally well how to treat the same people as friends.”

“The terrible sufferings of the South,” our press commented, “have softened the hearts of the stern warriors of the Armies of the Potomac and the Cumberland, and while they are calling for pity and justice for us, politicians and fanatics call for vengeance.” General Sherman said: “I do think some political power might be given to the young men who served in the rebel army, for they are a better class than the adventurers who have gone South purely for office.”

During an exciting epoch in reconstruction, I was sitting beside a wounded ex-Confederate in an opera-box, listening to a Southern statesman haranguing us on our wrongs, real and heavy enough, heaven knows, heavier than ever those of war had been. “Rather than submit to continued and intensified humiliations,” cried the orator, a magnetic man of the sort who was carrying Northern audiences to opposite extremes, “we will buckle on our swords and go to war again!” “It might be observed,” remarked my veteran drily, while I clapped my hands, “that if he should buckle on his sword and go to war, it would be what he did not do before.” I held my hands quite still during the rest of that speech.

“Our women never were whipped!” I have heard grizzled Confederates say that proudly. “There is a difference,” remarked one hoary-headed hero, who, after wearing stars on his collar in Confederate service represented his State in the Federal Congress, “between the political and the feminine war-spirit. The former is too often for personal gain. Woman’s is the aftermath of anguish. It has taken a long time to reconstruct Southern women. Some are not reconstructed yet. Suffering was stamped too deep for effacement. The Northern woman suffered with her Southern sister the agony of anxiety and bereavement. But the Southern had other woes, of which the Northern could have no conception. The armies were upon us. There was devastation. The Southern woman and her loved ones lacked food and raiment, the enemy appropriating what we had and blocking ways by which fresh supplies might come; her home was burned over her head. Sometimes she suffered worse things than starvation, worse things than the destruction of her home.

“And women could only sit still and endure, while we could fight back. Women do not understand that war is a matter of business. I had many friends among the men I fought – splendid, brave fellows. Personally, we were friends, and professionally, enemies. Women never get that point of view.”

Woman’s war spirit is faithfulness and it is absolutely reckless of personal advantages, as the following incident may illustrate. General Hunton and General Turner knew each other pretty well, although in their own persons they had never met. They had commanded opposing forces and entertained a considerable respect for each other. General Turner was the first Federal officer that came to Lynchburg, when General Hunton’s wife and youthful son were refugees; he sent Dr. Murray, a Confederate surgeon, to call upon Mrs. Hunton with the message that she was to suffer for nothing he could supply. General Hunton was in prison, she knew not where; was not sure if he were alive or dead.

She had not the feelings her lord entertained for his distinguished antagonist, and her response was: “Tell General Turner I would not accept anything from him to save my life!”

Yet she must have been very hungry. She and her youthful son had been reduced to goober-peas. First, her supplies got down to one piece of beef-bone. She thought she would have a soup. For a moment, she left her son to watch the pot, but not to stir the soup. But he thought he would do well to stir it. So he stirred it, and turned the pot over. That day, she had nothing for dinner but goober-peas.

“When I came home,” said General Hunton, when asked for this story’s sequel, “and she told me about her message to General Turner, I wrote him the nicest letter I knew how to write, thanking him for his kindness to the wife of a man whose only claim on him was that he had fought him the best he knew how.

“I don’t think we would ever have had the trouble we had down here,” he continued, “if Northern people had known how things really were. In fact, I know we would not. Why, I never had any trouble with Northern men in all my life except that I just fought them all I knew how. And I never had better friends than among my Republican colleagues in Congress after the war. They thought all the more of me because I stood up so stoutly for the old Confederate Cause.”

Bonds coming about in the natural, inevitable order through interchange of the humanities were respected. But where they seemed the outcome of vanity, frivolity, or coquetry, that was another matter, a very serious one for the Southern participant. The spirit of the times was morbid, yet a noble loyalty was behind it.

Anywhere in the land, a Southern girl showing partiality for Federal beaux came under the ban. If there were nothing else against it, such a course appeared neither true nor dignified; if it were not treason to our lost Confederacy, it were treason to our own poor boys in gray to flutter over to prosperous conquerors.

Nothing could be more sharply defined in lights and shadows than the life of one beautiful and talented Southern woman who matronised the entertainments of a famous Federal general at a post in one of the Cotton States, and thereby brought upon herself such condemnation as made her wines and roses cost her dear. Yet perhaps such affiliations lessened the rigors of military government for her State.

One of the loveliest of Atlanta’s gray-haired dames tells me: “I am unreconstructed yet – Southern to the backbone.” Yet she speaks of Sherman’s godless cohorts as gently as if she were mother of them all. Her close neighbour was a Yankee encampment. The open ground around her was dotted with tents.

There were “all sorts” among the soldiers. None gave insolence or violence. Pilfering was the great trouble; the rank and file were “awfully thievish.” Her kitchen, as usual with Southern kitchens of those days, was a separate building. If for a moment she left her pots and ovens to answer some not-to-be-ignored demand from the house, she found them empty on her return, her dinner gone – a most serious thing when it was as by the skin of her teeth that she got anything at all to cook and any fuel to cook with; and when, moreover, cooking was new and tremendously hard work. “We could not always identify the thief; when we could, we were afraid to incur the enmity of the men. Better have our things stolen than worse happen us, as might if officers punished those men on our report. I kept a still tongue in my head.”

Though a wife and mother, she was yet in girlhood’s years, very soft and fair; had been “lapped in luxury,” with a maid for herself, a nurse for her boy, a servant to do this, that, or the other thing, for her. She thus describes her first essay at the family wash. There was a fine well in her yard, and men came to get water. A big-hearted Irishman caught the little lady struggling over soap-suds. It looked as if she would never get those clothes clean. For one thing, when she tried to wring them, they were streaked with blood from her arms and hands; she had peculiarly fine and tender skin.

“Faith an’ be jabbers!” said Pat, “an’ what is it that you’re thryin’ to do?” “Go away, and let me alone!” “Faith, an’ if ye don’t lave off clanin’ thim garmints, they’ll be that doirty – ” “Go ’way!” “Sure, me choild, an’ if ye’ll jis’ step to the other soide of the tub without puttin’ me to the inconvaniance – ” He was about to pick her up in his mighty hands. She moved and dropped down, swallowing a sob.

“Sure, an’ it’s as good a washerwoman as ivver wore breeches I am,” said Pat. “An’ that’s what I’ve larned in the army.” In short order, he had all the clothes hanging snow-white on the line; before he left, he cut enough wood for her ironing. “I’m your Bridget ivery wash-day that comes ’roun’,” he said as he swung himself off. He was good as his word. This brother-man did her wash every week. “Sure, an’ it’s a shame it is,” he would say, “the Government fadin’ the lazy nagurs an’ God an’ the divvil can’t make ’em wur-r-k.”

Through Tony, her son, another link was formed ’twixt late enemies. It was hard for mothers busy at housework to keep track of young children; without fences for definement of yard-limits, and with all old landmarks wiped out, it was easy for children to wander beyond bearings. A lost child was no rarity. One day General and Mrs. Saxton drove up in their carriage, bringing Tony. Tony had lost himself; fright, confusion, lack of food, had made him ill; he had been brought to the attention of the general and his wife, who, instead of sending the child home by a subordinate, came with him themselves, the lady holding the pale little fellow in her arms, comforting and soothing him. Thus began friendship between Mrs. S. and Mrs. Saxton; not only small Tony was now pressed to take airings with Yankees, but his mother. The general did all he could to make life easier for her; had wood hauled and cut for her. The Southern woman’s reduction to poverty and menial tasks mortified him, as they mortified many another manly blue-coat, witness of the reduction. “It is pitiable and it is all wrong,” said one officer to Mrs. S. “Our people up North simply don’t know how things are down here.” A lady friend of Mrs. S.’s tells me that she knew a Northern officer – (giving his name) – who resigned his commission because he found himself unable to witness the sufferings of Southern women and children, and have a hand in imposing them.

Rulers who came under just condemnation as “military satraps” governing in a democracy in time of peace by the bayonet, when divorced from the exercise of their office, won praise as men. Thus, General Meade’s rule in Georgia is open to severest criticism, yet Ellen Meade Clarke, who saw him as the man and not as the oppressor, says: “I had just married and gone to Atlanta when Sherman ordered the citizens out, which order I hastily obeyed, leaving everything in my Peachtree cottage home. Was among the first to return. Knew all the generals in command; they were all neighbors; General Meade, who was sent to see me by some one bearing our name, proved a good and faithful friend and, on his death-bed, left me his prayer-book.”

LOVERS AND PRAYERS

CHAPTER XI

Buttons, Lovers, Oaths, War Lords, and Prayers for Presidents

Some military orders were very irritating.

The “Button Order” prohibited our men from wearing Confederate buttons. Many possessed no others and had not money wherewith to buy. “Buttons were scarce as hens’ teeth.” The Confederacy had been reduced to all sorts of makeshifts for buttons. Thorns from thornbushes had furnished country folks with such fastenings as pins usually supply, and served convenience on milady’s toilette-table when she went to do up her hair.

One clause in that monstrous order delighted feminine hearts! It provided as thoughtful concession to all too glaring poverty that: “When plain buttons cannot be procured, those formerly used can be covered with cloth.” Richmond ladies looked up all the bits of crape and bombazine they had, and next morning their men appeared on the streets with buttons in mourning! “I would never have gotten Uncle out of the front door if he had realized what I was up to,” Matoaca relates. “Not that he was not mournful enough, but he did not want to mourn that way.”

Somehow, nobody thought about Sam’s button; he was a boy, only fifteen. He happened to go out near Camp Grant in his old gray jacket, the only coat he had; one of his brothers had given it to him months before. It was held together over his breast by a single button, his only button. A Yankee sergeant cut it off with his sword. The jacket fell apart, exposing bepatched and thread-bare underwear. His mother and sisters could not help crying when the boy came in, holding his jacket together with his hand, his face suffused, his eyes full of tears of rage and mortification.

The “Button Trouble” pervaded the entire South. The Tennessee Legislature, Brownlow’s machine, discussed a bill imposing a fine of $5 to $25 upon privates, and $25 to $50 upon officers for wearing the “rebel uniform.” The gaunt, destitute creatures who were trudging, stumping, limping, through that State on their way from distant battlefields and Northern prisons to their homes, had rarely so much as fifty cents in their pockets. Had that bill become a law enforced, Tennessee prisons must have overflowed with recaptured Confederates, or roads and woods with men in undress.

Many a distinguished soldier, home-returning, ignorant that such an order existed, has been held up at the entrance to his native town by a saucy negro sergeant who would shear him of buttons with a sabre, or march him through the streets to the Provost’s office to answer for the crime of having buttons on his clothes.

The provision about covering buttons has always struck me as the unkindest cut of all. How was a man who had no feminine relatives to obey the law? Granted that as a soldier, he had acquired the art of being his own seamstress, how, when he was in the woods or the roads, could he get scraps of cloth and cover buttons?

But of all commands ever issued, the “Marriage Order” was the most extraordinary! That order said people should not get married unless they took the Oath of Allegiance. If they did, they would be arrested. I have forgotten the exact wording, but if you will look up General Order No. 4,7 April 29, and signed by General Halleck, you can satisfy any curiosity you may feel. It was a long ukase, saying what-all people should not do unless they took the oath (some felt like taking a good many daily!). Naturally, young people were greatly upset. Many had been engaged a weary while, to be married soon as the war should be over.

Among those affected was Captain Sloan, whose marriage to Miss Wortham was due the Tuesday following. The paper containing the order, heavily ringed with black, darkened the roseate world upon which the bride-elect opened her lovely eyes Saturday morning. The same hand that had put the order in mourning had scribbled on the margin: “If Captain Sloan is not ready to take that oath, I am.”

Her maid informed her that Mr. Carrington, an elderly friend, fond of a joke, was awaiting her. Descending to the drawing-room, she found it full of sympathising neighbours, her betrothed in the midst, all debating a way out of the difficulty. Not even sharp-witted lawyers could see one. In times so out of joint law did not count.

The situation was saved by the fact that General Halleck had a namesake in Captain Sloan’s family. The Captain’s “Uncle Jerry” (otherwise General Jerry Gilmer, of South Carolina) had called a son “Henry Halleck” in honour of his one-time class-mate at West Point. When the idea of the namesake as basis of appeal dawned on Captain Sloan, day was passing. Miss Wortham’s father, who, before the Federal Government had interfered with his dominion as a parent, had been anxious that his very youthful daughter and her betrothed should defer their union, was now quite determined that the rights of the lovers should not be abrogated by Uncle Sam. As member of the Confederate Ambulance Committee, he had been in close touch with Colonel Mulford, Federal Commissioner of Exchange; Judge Ould, Confederate Commissioner, was his personal friend; in combination with these gentlemen, he arranged a meeting twixt lover and war lord.

General Halleck received Hymen’s ambassador with courtesy. The story of the namesake won his sympathetic ear. When told what consternation his order was causing – Captain Sloan plead other cases besides his own – the war lord laughed, scribbled something on a slip of official paper and handed it to Captain Sloan, saying: “Let this be known and I suppose there will be a good many weddings before Monday.” The slip read like this: “Order No. 4 will not go into effect until Monday morning. H. W. Halleck, General Commanding.”

Alas! there were no Sunday papers. The news was disseminated as widely as possible; and three weddings, at least, in high society, happened Sunday in consequence. Mrs. Sloan, a prominent member of Baltimore society, gave her own account of the whole matter in Mrs. Daniel’s “Confederate Scrap-Book,” which any one may see at the Confederate Museum.

“The gown I wore the day after my marriage,” she relates, “was a buff calico with tiny dots in it, and as it was prettily and becomingly made, I looked as well, and I know I was as happy, as if it had been one of Worth’s or Redfern’s most bewildering conceits – and I am sure it was as expensive, as it cost $30 a yard.”

General Halleck’s order was not unique. Restrictions on marriage had been incorporated in the State Constitution of Missouri, 1864, a section prescribing that “No person shall practice law, be competent as bishop, priest, deacon, minister, elder, or other clergyman of any religious persuasion, sect, or denomination, teach, preach, or solemnise marriage until such person shall have first taken the oath required as to voters.” “Under these provisions,” commented Senator Vest, from whom I borrow, “the parent who had given a piece of bread or a cup of water to a son in the Confederate service, or who had in any way expressed sympathy for such son, was prohibited from registering as voter, serving as juror, or holding any office or acting as trustee, or practicing law, or teaching in any school, or preaching the Gospel, or solemnising the marriage rite.”8

Strictly construed, the test-oath imposed by Congress in 1867, like that of Missouri, excluded from franchise and office, the parent who had given a piece of bread or a cup of water or his sympathy to a son in the Confederate service; and the negro who had made wheat and corn for his master’s family, as the applicant must swear that he had not “given aid or comfort to” Confederates.

The Missouri test-oath was one that prominent Union men, among them General Francis P. Blair, leader of the Union Party in his State, a man who had taken part in the siege of Vicksburg and marched with Sherman to the sea, were unable to take. Americans beholding his statue in Statuary Hall, Washington, as that of one of the two sons Missouri most delights to honour, will find food for curious reflection in the fact that General Blair, going in full Federal uniform to register as a voter, was not allowed to do so. Visitors to Blair Hall at the St. Louis Exposition may have been reminded of this little incident of reconstruction. In 1867, Father John A. Cummings was arrested and tried for performing parochial duties without taking the oath. A bill forbidding women to marry until they took the oath was passed by Tennessee’s Senate, but the House rejected it. This bill, like Missouri’s law, discriminated against ministers of the Gospel; those who had sympathised with “rebels” or in any way aided them, were condemned to work on the public roads and other degrading forms of expiation.

There was no appreciable reluctance on the part of the people to take the oath of allegiance. They could honestly swear for the future to sustain the Government of the United States, but few, or no decent people, even Unionists, living among Confederates, could vow they had given no “aid or comfort” to one. The test-oath cultivated hypocrisy in natives and invited carpet-baggers. A native who would take it was eligible to office, while the honest man who would not lie, was denied a right to vote.

In readiness to take the oath of allegiance, people rushed so promptly to tribunals of administration that the sincerity of the South was questioned at the North, where it could not be understood how sharp was our need to have formalities of submission over and done with, that we might get to work. One striking cartoon pictured Columbia upon a throne gloomily regarding a procession that came bending, bowing, kneeling, creeping, crawling, to her feet, General Lee leader and most abject, with Howell Cobb, Wade Hampton, and other distinguished Southerners around him. Beneath was this: “Can I trust these men?” On the opposite page, a one-legged negro soldier held out his hand; beneath was: “Franchise? And not this man?”

A few people had serious scruples of conscience against taking the oath. I know of two or three whose attitude, considering their personalities, was amusing and pathetic. There was one good lady, Mrs. Wellington, who walked all the way from Petersburg to Richmond, a distance of twenty miles, for fear the oath might be required if she boarded a car!

I turn to Matoaca’s journal:

“I have been visiting Cousin Mary in Powhatan. Of course they have military government there, too. Soldiers ride up, enter without invitation, walk through the house, seat themselves at the piano and play; promenade to the rear, go into the kitchen, sit down and talk with the darkeys.

“At church, I saw officers wearing side-arms. They come regularly to watch if we pray for the President of the United States. I hope they were edified; a number stood straight up during that prayer. Among the most erect were the M. girls, who have very retroussé noses. The Yankees reported: ‘Not only do they stand up when the President is prayed for, but they turn up their noses.’ They sent word back: ‘A mightier power than the Yankee Army turned up our noses.’

“I hear they have dealt severely with Rev. Mr. Wingfield because he would not read that prayer for the President. When brought up for it, he told the examining officer he could not – it was a matter of conscience. They put a ball and chain on him and made him sweep the streets. And these people are the exponents of ‘freedom,’ and ‘liberty of conscience.’ They come from a land whose slogan is these words! They have no right to force us to pray according to their views. For myself, I kneel during the prayer, I try to pray it; I seek to feel it, since to pray without feeling is mockery. But I don’t feel it.

“Uncle advised: ‘My daughter, no man needs your prayers more than the President of the United States. He has great and grave responsibilities. We must desire that a higher power shall direct him. The President is surrounded by advisers bent on revenge, so bent on it that they seem to care nothing whatever for the Union – the real union of the North and South.’ So I bow my head, and I try – God knows I try! But thoughts of all the blood that has been shed, of the homes that have been burned, the suffering and starvation endured, will rush into my mind as I kneel. Dear Christ! did you know how hard a command you laid upon us when you said, ‘Pray for your enemies?’”