A Year in the South (31 page)

The train stopped in Murfreesboro in midafternoon but was soon on its way again. Just north of the town John saw more vestiges of war. An immense circular earthwork was located here—Fortress Rosecrans, built during the latter part of the conflict by the Yankee occupation forces. Fully a mile across and three in circumference, it was big enough to hold an army. Within it, and for a thousand yards around it, every tree had been cut down. John got a close-up view of this great ugly sore upon the land, for the railroad track cut directly through it.
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Not far beyond the fortress, the train passed the Stones River battlefield where, in the winter of 1862–1863, one of the war's bloodiest engagements was fought. Evidence of its ferocity was visible still: tree trunks mutilated by Minié balls and shells, and row upon row of graves. “What a scene of death and bloodshed must have been here,” John thought. He was especially moved at the sight of the final resting places “of those who had bravely fought in both armies; thousands of them buried here far from home and friends with only a small board to tell where they lay and many not even that.” He was reminded that, but for the grace of God, he himself might be lying in such a grave.
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It was about five o'clock when the train rolled into the Nashville & Chattanooga depot on the south side of Nashville. Now they would have to change trains again, and to do so they must get to the city's north side, where the Louisville & Nashville depot was located. Stepping down from their car, they found themselves in the midst of a crowd even denser and unrulier than that in Chattanooga. Hurrying passengers, importuning hack drivers, shiftless loafers, and others of all sorts, black and white, jostled for room on the platform and inside the depot.
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Pushing their way through the mob to the street, John and the others boarded a big mule-drawn omnibus for the crosstown trip. As the vehicle wended its way along the streets, John gazed around in awe. Nashville was by far the biggest city he had ever seen. It had been a sizable place even before the war, but after the Yankees captured it and made it a primary base of operations, the population mushroomed. Even with the end of the war and the demobilization of the Union army, the military presence in Nashville remained strong. It seemed that wherever one looked there was an army barracks, hospital, quartermaster depot, or repair shop, and soldiers were everywhere, many of them black. No section of the city, however, saw more military activity than Smoky Row, the rowdy brothel district near the river. During the war it had achieved legendary status among Union soldiers, who patronized it by the thousands, and it was still going strong. Besides dozens of whorehouses, it boasted a large proportion of Nashville's four hundred saloons.
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On the city's highest hill stood the massive, domed state capitol, which the Northern occupiers had turned into a citadel bristling with cannons, but which now was stripped of armament and back in the hands of the state government. As the omnibus trundled past it, John reflected bitterly on Tennessee's political situation. A few minutes later he caught sight of the state penitentiary. “My only wish was that … all fit subjects in the state was in it; and that Brownlow the most base of all could be … transfer[r]ed from the State mansion to it. If this was done I felt that I could return home and live among friends at peace.” Then the graves he had seen earlier in the day came to his mind, and he was seized by a premonition: “som[e]thing within told me that those extensive graveyards was not yet complete, and that there must yet be another conflict to add to their dimensions, before justice was given to all.”
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When the omnibus halted at the Louisville & Nashville depot, John and the others got out. The scene inside was just as chaotic as at the Nashville & Chattanooga depot, but they would not have to endure it long, for the train to Louisville was to leave at 6:45. Mingling with the other sounds here were the cries of newsboys hawking the
Nashville Daily Press and Times,
which many passengers bought because it printed the Louisville & Nashville timetable every day. Those who purchased a copy that day, and who had the time and the inclination to peruse the classified advertisements, read this poignant notice, one of many such to be seen in Southern newspapers in the postwar months:

$200 REWARD

During the year 1849, Thomas Sample carried away from this city as his slaves, my daughter Polly and son George Washington, to the State of Mississippi, and subsequently to Texas, and when last heard from they were in Lagrange, Texas. I will give $100 each for them to any person who will assist them or either of them to get to Nashville, or get word to me of their whereabouts, if they are alive. Any information concerning them left in this city at my place, so that I can get it, will be liberally rewarded.

Ben East
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It was dark when the train steamed out of the station, carrying John and his companions northward. The others were soon asleep, but he remained wakeful and pensive. Not until the train was well into Kentucky did he finally doze off. He awoke at a little after five in the morning, and a few minutes later the Louisville depot came into view. “Here as usual we found it difficult to get out of the train for ‘nig[g]ers.' … [T]hey had forgot how to get out of the way of white people.” Another omnibus ride brought the travelers to the south bank of the Ohio River, where a ferry was available to take them to the other side. The sun was well up when John stepped off the ferry in Jeffersonville, Indiana, setting foot for the first time on Northern soil.
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There was a half-hour wait for the train to Indianapolis, and John spent it gazing back across the river at Louisville, wondering when he would see the South again. At boarding time, the party decided, for the children's sake, to sit in the ladies' car, where smoking, spitting, and unseemly behavior were prohibited. The train had just set out when, as John put it, “I was insulted for the first time on the trip.”
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It happened that he was wearing a gray suit that resembled a Confederate uniform. He had not previously given it a thought, but now he noticed that some of the other passengers were staring at him unpleasantly, and he soon guessed the cause. Stubbornly he decided to ignore them. “I had a blue suit in my vali[s]e which wo[ul]d have pleased them better, but I did not feel disposed to chang[e] uniform merely to gratify them.”
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An assistant conductor entered the car, took a hard look at John's outfit, and confronted him officiously:

“Have you a wife in here?” he asked.

John wanted to reply that that was none of his business, but instead merely said “No sir I hav'nt.”

“Well what are you doing in the ladies' coach?”

“I have some little girls here to take care of.”

“Where is their parents?”

“There they are.”

“Well give them to their parents, and you get to another coach.”

“I have a right to stay here and intend to do it.”

“Well get out of here, or I'll put you out.”
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Rather than cause a scene, John left the car and went to another. He sat there stewing, determined not to let this “impertinent yankee” get the better of him. When the senior conductor came by, John told him what had happened and said he was going back to the ladies' car. The conductor said it was all right with him.
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Back in the ladies' car, he found that a man had taken his place. “I ordered him out of my seat which he hesitatingly obeyed.” When the assistant conductor came through again, he gave John a “sour look … but said nothing.” John then settled back in his seat, “smartly elevated at the thought of outwit[t]ing a yankee for once.”
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The train continued northward. The landscape John saw now was quite unlike anything he was accustomed to, and he scrutinized it skeptically. “It seemed to be to[o] low and flat, to be healthy.” Indianapolis, which the train reached in the early afternoon, likewise failed to impress him. It “is a large city,” he wrote, “but I was not pleased with its appearance.” Compounding the city's ugliness, in his eyes, was its reputation as a hotbed of radical Republicanism. He had nothing but contempt for “such an aboli[t]ion ‘hole.'”
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North of Indianapolis, two tracks ran side by side for a distance, and here John and his fellow travelers had some excitement. Their train left the city simultaneously with another on the parallel track and, as John recalled,

This gave occasion for a very nice race across the flat prairie. Off both trains went at full spe[e]d for several miles[;] it was hard to tell which was going to be winner. The passengers of both trains [were] poking themselves half out of the windows, yelling, [w]hooping and waving their hats, hollowing at the top of their voices for their engineer to “put on more steam.” Citizens were flying from their dwellings to the front yards to see the race.

At last John's train slowed, conceding victory to its rival.
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Two and a half hours after nightfall the travelers reached the southern tip of Lake Michigan, whose shoreline the train then followed toward Chicago. John found the sight breathtaking. Ships glided back and forth over the vast stretch of water, their lanterns visible for miles through the darkness. Most spectacular were the great, multitiered passenger steamboats, their many windows ablaze with light. To John they looked like “larg[e] and fine mansion[s] floating on the water's s[u]rface.”
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It was midnight when they got to Chicago. At first John was disappointed that he would not see the city by day, but he felt differently when he saw that the streets were brightly illuminated by gas lamps and still pulsing with activity. For the next hour or two he walked the streets enthralled. The city struck him as a place of enormous contrasts: on the one hand there was “beauty and magnificence”; on the other, “all kinds of wickedness.” Saloons were everywhere, and passing them he heard from within “the most profane epithets.” In the space of a few blocks he observed “every mode of swindling which could be thought of or invented.… [G]ambling tables were to be seen surround[ed] by groups of profligate and drunken men. Occasionally the police would stroll through the streets picking up such as they could catch.”
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From Chicago they traveled westward through the heart of the Illinois prairie. It was after dark on September 21 when they arrived at a village on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Leaving the train, they boarded a ferry that took them across to Burlington, Iowa. There they secured lodging at a hotel, allowing them at last to catch up on their sleep. The next day they resumed their westward train journey, after saying good-bye to Mullens, who was setting out in a different direction to seek his fortune.
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Late that night they arrived in Oskaloosa, Iowa, where Uncle Jim intended to make his new home. “Thus ended our long and toilsome journey of twelve hundred miles,” John wrote, “after a lapse of exactly four days, or 96 hours, after leaving Sweetwater.”
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It took them some time to get settled. Uncle Jim hunted around for a farm to rent, had no luck, and soon moved on to Springfield, twenty miles away in Keokuk County, where he found what he was looking for. Meanwhile, John hired out as a laborer and worked for several farmers around Oskaloosa. After a few weeks, however, he joined Uncle Jim and his family in Springfield.
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What really drew John to that village was not the prospect of being with kinfolk but of going to school. As small as it was—John guessed there were not more than 500 inhabitants—Springfield nevertheless boasted a fine public high school. Hungry for more education, he enrolled in November and threw himself into his studies energetically. Among the courses he took were algebra, composition, elocution, and dictation. “I don't think ever a poor fellow studied harder than I did,” he recalled. “Midnight generally found me with book in hand.” He boarded at Uncle Jim's, a quarter-mile from the school, earning his keep by chopping firewood and doing other chores around the farm. He rarely missed class and never fell behind in the lessons.
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Springfield also boasted a literary and debating society that met each Friday night. John attended a meeting soon after his arrival and decided “It was a good institution, well calculated to make an orat[o]r of a young man if there was any such trait about him.” He joined at the next meeting and a week later got his first experience of formal debate, taking the floor to argue in favor of knowledge over wealth as “the greatest influence” in society. The following week the question was “Which is the greatest man? Gen. Grant or Gen. Sherman?” John volunteered to take Grant's side—somewhat reluctantly, “not being a lover of either of the ‘great men.'” Leaving it to his two teammates to praise Grant, he lit into Sherman. That general's famous march through Georgia and the Carolinas, proclaimed John, exemplified nothing better than “the bloody and detestable code of the savage.… Men [were] shot down, women [were] insulted and abused, depredations committed contrary to all rules of civilized warfare.… I ask, in the name of God, what honor can you tie on behind this degraded man?” When the debate concluded and the audience declared the winning team, John felt proud. “The unanimous voice of the house … was, ‘hurra[h] for Gen. Grant.'”
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John's developing taste for argumentation found another outlet in religion. There were two churches in Springfield. One was Methodist, and John joined it soon after he arrived. The other was Campbellite and, as John soon learned, its members were waging a campaign to win souls away from his church. They proselytized aggressively, with some success, for they were well informed on doctrine and could out-argue most of the Methodists. John decided to answer their challenge. He borrowed some books from his minister to brush up on Methodism and started attending the meetings of the Campbellites to learn where they stood. Seeing him in their church, they thought they might be gaining a convert, but, as John wrote, “The more I heard them preach the further I got from their doctrine.” He was especially put off by their emphasis on baptism, a ritual they insisted on performing even when the creeks and ponds were icy: “This was more faith in water than I could muster,” he remarked. Before long he was taking on the Campbellite minister himself in lengthy, animated private discussions, contradicting him point by point.
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