Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail -- telling a dramatic story of real people in a time of great upheaval and offering a fresh perspective on a pivotal moment in history.
As the calendar turned to 1865, four
Southerners faced an uncertain future. Louis Hughes, Samuel Agnew, Cornelia
McDonald, and John Robertson observed, and participated in, the Civil War
entering its final stages. Hughes, a Deep South slave, McDonald, a Virginia
Confederate army wife and mother of seven, Robertson, an East Tennessee former
Confederate soldier, and Agnew, a Mississippi preacher and son of a prominent
planter, each experienced the dying days of the Confederacy with varying
degrees of despair, hope, restlessness and serenity. The stories of these four
Southerners comprise Stephen Ash's A Year in the South. Ash traces the lives of
these "ordinary" Southerners through the entirety of 1865, using the
changing seasonal motif to examine the myriad challenges and opportunities that
befell the South in the year the Confederacy died. Dividing the chapters into
"Winter," "Spring," "Summer," and "Fall and
Winter Again," Ash implores the reader to trace the tribulations of these
four individuals as "they stepped across the threshold between the old
world and the new" (p. xiv). Each Southerner's narrative is compelling in
its own right.
Louis Hughes spent much of the Civil
War as a hired slave on the salt works along Alabama's Tombigbee River. Though
trained as a butler, Hughes adapted quite well at the salt works just north of
Mobile. He and his wife, Matilda, hired as a cook in the works, soon became
favorites of the state Salt Commissioner, Benjamin Woolsey. Within the local
slave community Hughes established a significant economic niche by selling
tobacco plugs. With Woolsey's blessing, Hughes operated his business for much
of the latter period of the war and made a sizable income. But the collapse of
Confederate authority in South Alabama brought this "happy interlude"
to an end (p. 28). Hughes' owner took him and his wife from the salt works to
Mississippi and trapped them in bondage for months after the war's conclusion;
in the remote section of northern Mississippi where Hughes toiled into the
summer months of 1865, no Federal troops arrived to enforce the Emancipation
Proclamation. Though his master refused to submit to the new order, Hughes
managed to escape to Memphis, summon two Union officers, and take them back to
Mississippi to free the remaining slaves on the plantation. When Hughes and his
wife returned to Memphis they prepared for a new journey to Cincinnati, where
Matilda's mother had escaped in 1855. The Hughes family continued on to Canada
after reconnoitering with Matilda's mother; though many former slave-emigres in
Canada returned to the United States following the war's end, Hughes never felt
confident that his freedom would be protected in postwar America. He would
later return to the United States and settle in Milwaukee, but his movement to
Canada after the war reveals an intriguing counter-migration largely ignored by
historians. Indeed, his odyssey illustrates two phenomena that historians would
do well to explore in greater depth: the refusal of many masters in the
Southern interior to accede to emancipation for months after the war's end, and
the sizable migration of African Americans to the cities of the North and West.
Whereas Hughes suffered the first
half of 1865 in bondage, only to fulfill his ambitions of freedom later in the
year, Sam Agnew's emotional trajectory followed an opposite course. The son of
a Mississippi planter named Enoch Agnew, Sam served the Tippah County community
as a minister from the beginning of the war. Exempt from Confederate military
service because of his occupation, Sam Agnew avoided some of the harrowing
battlefield experiences of his fellow Confederates. Like others in the Confederate
interior, Agnew remained confidant of the South's military fortunes as late as
February 1865. The economic strains of war, and the increasingly destructive
Federal raids into the community, finally destroyed the edifice of plantation
life that the Agnews had come to take for granted. Not only did the Agnews'
crops fail in the summer drought of 1865, but the entire workforce abandoned
the lands they had tilled for decades. Unlike in the remote plantation district
where Louis Hughes toiled into the summer, Federal troops immediately descended
upon the Agnews' plantation with orders to enforce the Emancipation
Proclamation. The Agnew plantation slaves did not flee or threaten the Agnew
family in any way, but they "simply quit working except as it suited them"
(p. 82). Like other ex-slaves in Mississippi, the Agnew's freedmen and women
negotiated sharecropping arrangements that galled the sensibilities of planters
unaccustomed to bargaining with blacks. The ex-slaves worked the Agnew
plantation until the end of the year and, in a symbolic reminder of the
changing times, eschewed the customary "Christmas gift" offered by
the paternalistic household head; by New Year's Day, all of Agnews' former
slaves left the plantation for places unknown. In many ways, Sam Agnew's story
is a familiar one, recounted most famously by historian James Roark in his book
Masters without Slaves. But Ash personalizes the sense of loss, despair and
alienation among the master class with particular clarity and emotional
resonance.
In the Upper South the Civil War and
its aftermath embroiled the population in a different sort of struggle than
that in Alabama and Mississippi. Rampant guerrilla war and the destruction of
civilian life by passing armies characterized the Civil War experience in the
Upper South states of Virginia and Tennessee. Cornelia McDonald's beloved
Shenandoah Valley served as the "breadbasket of the Confederacy" and,
for that, suffered a bitterly punitive expedition by Union General Philip
Sheridan in the fall of 1864. Cornelia McDonald lost her husband, Confederate
Colonel Angus McDonald, to disease shortly after he was released from a
military prison in 1864. A widow and mother of seven children, Cornelia
McDonald endured the downfall of the Confederacy from the vantage point of
Lexington, Virginia. Her friends in the tightly knit college town of Lexington,
including the wife of General William Pendleton, helped Cornelia survive the
difficult winter and spring of 1865. She eventually took a job as an art
teacher and hired her boys out to the army quartermaster to chop wood. Though
she survived the financial hardship borne of war and the loss of her husband,
Cornelia's spirits dampened considerably with the demise of the Confederacy.
Cornelia McDonald was a "reluctant Confederate,"siding with the Union
until the war broke out. But once the war began in earnest she adopted the
Confederate cause with zeal. In the spring of 1865 the Confederate dream died,
leaving Lexington an impoverished town hosting a stream of refugees, black and
white. Cornelia was especially haunted by the new social order that liberated
the town's slaves and required her sons to perform degrading duties as farm
laborers in order to survive. In many ways, Cornelia McDonald found her voice
in protest against the imperious Union officer occupying the town. In defiance
of Union authorities, but always careful to avoid rebuke, she was a
"master of the cold stare, the condescending voice, the subtle
insult" (p. 159). Her own family's struggle to survive prevented her from
engaging in the momentous events of the city beyond the episodic glare of
dissent against Yankee soldiers. But her reliance upon communal ties,
cultivated through four years of war and increasing deprivation, nourished her
spirit as she struggled to survive.
The most intriguing story in A Year
in the South involves the life of John Robertson, a Confederate soldier in
heavily Unionist East Tennessee. For much of the war, the state's Confederate
government established a considerable foothold in East Tennessee despite the
region's Unionist majority. As a Confederate East Tennessean, John Robertson
was a member of a potent, though increasingly endangered minority; rampant
guerrilla warfare gradually undermined Confederate authority in the eastern
section of the state. Once the Union army established control of the east in
late 1863, Confederates like John Robertson found themselves on the run. By
late 1864 Robertson surrendered to Union authorities and took the new oath of
loyalty. John Robertson tried to end his war in 1864, but ongoing guerrilla and
counter-guerrilla struggle in East Tennessee continued to ensnare Robertson for
another year. He turned increasingly to religion, and he hoped to settle down
with a woman he recently met and start a family. But Unionists under the sway
of the Radical William Brownlow refused to allow former Confederates like
Robertson to retreat into the private world. In the summer of 1865 Unionists
accused him of participating in a Confederate raid years earlier and threatened
revenge on him. Robertson knew that his life was in danger and that he could no
longer survive in post-war East Tennessee. Robertson then began a journey not
unlike that of Louis Hughes; he headed north to Indiana and Chicago, and then he
headed west into Iowa. If the postwar migration of African Americans from the
South to the old Northwest is a largely understudied phenomena, the flight of
former Confederates--especially those fleeing local Unionists--to the North,
garners even less attention from historians. The irony of fleeing to the land
of the former enemy did not escape John Robertson, but for him the war was as
distant as the Old South. He was ready to move on, even if those around him
were not.
A Year in the South is a meticulously researched and
beautifully written narrative that weaves together the lives of four intriguing
individuals with larger, often under appreciated elements of the post-Civil War
South. The delayed emancipation in many remote regions of the South, migration of
blacks and whites to the North and West, reassertion of community ties in the
midst of widespread destruction, and the spiritual awakening of Southerners
vexed by such a cataclysmic loss, all characterized in some way or another the
lives of John Robertson, Cornelia McDonald, Louis Hughes and Samuel Agnew. ... Ash's book
succeeds in telling us "how the New South came to be" and "what
the Old South was" (p. xii).
Aaron Astor. Review of Ash, Stephen V., A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. December, 2005.
