I found this
book because I was interested in an ancestor. It’s not about my ancestor and
contains no reference to him, but it gave me insights in what he might have
experienced in what was likely the most significant year of his life.
The year 1865
was a year of phenomenal upheaval in the states that comprised the Confederacy.
Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant in
early April. By the end of the month, all other Confederate forces had
surrendered. The region was economically devastated – inflation had already
been destroying the value of Confederate money, and now Confederate government
bonds (and debts owed) were worthless.
More
significantly, the social structure, already changing because of the demands of
the war, teetered into collapse. Railroads had been destroyed in war, and
roads, never a priority in the pre-war South, had been left to deteriorate. The
old society, with larger planters at the top, was swept away. The labor force,
largely composed of slaves, had already been melting toward Union lines. Hunger
stalked many areas. Law and order was breaking down, with groups of Confederate
deserters, people left homeless, and people with old scores to settle roaming
the countryside. Livestock, often critical to plant and harvest, had been confiscated
by both Confederate government agents and invading Union troops. And after the
surrender of Confederate armies, soldiers had to make their way home across a
scarred and devastated landscape.
This is the
context for a fascinating account of the year 1865 by historian Stephen Ash. Published
in 2004, A
Year in the South 1865 details the lives of four people in different parts
of the South, how they lived, what they experienced, and how they survived. Each
of the four kept detailed journals of their experiences and lives before,
during, and after the Civil War, and Ash uses those journals and extensive
research about the history of the regions where they lived to create a
remarkable account.
Louis Hughes was
a slave for a plantation owner in northern Mississippi. He occupied a privileged
place in the slave hierarchy – the butler at the big house. Late in the war, he
and his wife Matilda, the family cook, were “leased” to the Alabama Salt Works some
65 miles north of Mobile. Salt had become the most prized commodity in the South,
with the Union blockade having stopped the usual imports. Salt was desperately
needed, and the state of Alabama had organized one of the most industrialized
operations in North America. He didn’t work in mining operations; his skills
were such that he was moved immediately into administration.
Cornelia
McDonald was a widow. Her husband Angus, a Confederate officer, had died in
late 1864 outside of Richmond. They had lived in Winchester, Virginia, in the northern
end of the Shenandoah Valley. But the valley was repeatedly attacked, looted,
and devastated by Union troops, and before her husband’s death, Cornelia had
moved herself and seven children to Lexington, in the southwest part of the
state and away from the main theaters of the war. There she found herself, once
the mistress of a plantation, having to live almost hand to mouth and dependent
upon the charity of friends and strangers.
John Robertson
was a young man from eastern Tennessee, who joined Confederate forces even
though his region of the state was strongly pro-Union. He was captured after
battel and imprisoned, and released after taking the loyalty oath to the Union.
He returned to eastern Tennessee, where received the call to become a minister.
But he had also been part of a Confederate group that hunted and terrorized
Union sympathizers, and there were former victims looking for payback. That
year, he would find himself moving with family members to Iowa.
And Samuel Agnew
was a minister who lived with his wife on his father’s plantation in Panola
County, Mississippi, some 60 or so miles south of Memphis. His accounts of the
year (he wrote journals all of his life, and at his death there were some 45
volumes in all) are filled with rumors of Yankee troop incursions, increasing
problems with the slaves working the fields, his Sunday worship services at neighboring
farms, and trying to hold family and faith together as conditions in their
local society deteriorated.
 |
| Stephen Ash |
They were four
ordinary people, but Ash’s narrative treatment of their lives provides more
insight into what was happening in the South than any number of biographies of
more famous people. He has a knack for telling an engaging story, and follows
each of the four through the seasons of winter, spring, summer and fall of 1865
to illustrate their lives, their fears, and their hopes. After reading the
accounts of each, the reader is glad that Ash includes an epilogue that
explains what happened to each of the four after 1865 – and they all lived into
the first decade of the 20th century.
A Year in the South 1865 is a wonderful story of four
ordinary people who lived in an extraordinary time. My own ancestor, another
ordinary person in an extraordinary time, was a messenger boy in the Civil War
on the Confederate side. When the war ended, he had to make his way home to
Brookhaven, Mississippi. And when he arrived, he found his family gone. He was
able to track them down and find them in east Texas.
He would have
likely recognized the stories in A Year in
the South 1865.
Top photograph: Lexington, Virginia,
circa 1865. This scene would have been everyday familiar to Cornelia McDonald.
