A Year in the South (7 page)

As time passed, she broadened her circle of acquaintances and cemented a number of good friendships through the ritual of visiting. Among the new friends whom Cornelia began to call on frequently, and who called at her house just as often, were the Pendletons, Ann and her daughters. Ann's husband, William, had been the rector of Lexington's Grace Episcopal Church until he resigned in 1862, and the family still lived in the rectory a few blocks from Cornelia. The Pendleton women were without their husband and father now, however, for Brigadier General Pendleton, chief of artillery in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, was with his troops in the fortifications protecting Richmond and Petersburg. When the Pendletons' son, Sandie, was killed in battle in the fall of 1864, Cornelia comforted her friends and brought them food. When Angus died a few weeks later, the Pendletons comforted her and sewed a mourning dress for Nelly.
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There were others in Lexington who were not part of Cornelia's social circle but who nevertheless came to her aid. One was Thomas Deaver, the shoemaker. In November 1863, before Angus joined her in Lexington, Cornelia had needed shoes for her boys. Angus was sending her almost all his salary, but she was spending it on other necessities as fast as it came. She approached Deaver, confessing that she could not pay him right away. He never even asked how soon she might be able to; he just said she could pay him after the war and went ahead and made the shoes. A year later, the boys were shoeless again. Winter was approaching, and Cornelia's financial plight was even gloomier than before. She agonized over whether to go to Deaver once more. At last she did, again confessing that she could not pay him. “He said he would make them,” she recalled, “and [said that] I must not feel uneasy or anxious about it; that he knew I would pay when I could.” She left the shop in tears. Deaver was a man of modest means, with a large family of his own, and Cornelia knew that his generosity entailed substantial sacrifice.
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She also knew that such kindness could not be extended to her indefinitely, by Deaver or anybody else. She had to find a source of income. As it happened, an opportunity came her way in January 1865, when an acquaintance who knew of Cornelia's skill with pencil and sketchbook told her of some young ladies in town who were willing to pay for drawing lessons.
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As worried as she was about money, Cornelia was nevertheless deeply reluctant to take the job. For one thing, she was emotionally frail, not yet recovered from the shock of Angus's death. “The thought of being daily obliged to meet strangers,” she wrote, “of not having the privilege of retirement in my present state of distress, was dreadful to me.” For another thing, she was loath to proclaim her poverty so publicly. It was a matter of pride to her that she had been able to maintain in Lexington a semblance of the refined lifestyle that women of her class were expected to cultivate: “I shrank,” she said, “from seeming … poor.”
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Cornelia's soul-searching was short-lived. She took the teaching job because “the alternative was starvation.” So, for three or four hours in the mornings, she taught drawing in her parlor. The same acquaintance who arranged this found two other young ladies who wanted advanced French lessons, and they began coming in the afternoons to read poetry and history. The two classes together brought Cornelia fifty dollars a week.
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Another bit of luck took care of the problem of winter fuel. Firewood cost more than thirty dollars a cord in Lexington, and the big drafty house on Main Street demanded a lot of it now that the weather had turned cold. Somehow Cornelia learned that the army quartermaster in Rockbridge County was hiring woodcutters; they would receive as payment one cord of every three they cut, delivered to their homes by army wagon. Harry and Allan both volunteered to hire on. Cornelia needed one of them to help around the house, however, so Allan stayed home while his older brother headed off each morning to join the chopping detail in the woods outside town.
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Clothing the family was a more difficult problem. Cornelia was determined that she and the children would present a respectable appearance no matter how poor they were, but it became harder as time went on. Ready-made clothes, when they could be found on Lexington's store shelves, were prohibitively expensive. Cornelia could sew and knit, but store-bought cloth and yarn of any sort were beyond her means, too.
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Friends and family helped her out to some extent. Her good friend Mrs. John Powell, whose husband was in the army, gave her two of his old suits that, with some alterations, fit Allan and Harry. From her sister in another part of Virginia, Cornelia got fifty pounds of wool; she dyed it black, paid to have it carded, spun, and woven (tasks she had never learned to do and had no equipment for), then made it into winter clothes. She also resorted to cannibalizing fabrics she had around the house. Laboriously she unraveled a cotton mattress, wound the thread, dyed half of it with walnut hulls, and then had it woven into brown-and-white checked cloth from which she made suits for the four youngest boys. She unraveled some old knit undershirts, too, and with the yarn knitted socks for the boys. For Nelly she cut up window and bed curtains and sewed a red dress and white muslin frock and apron. But for the most part the family had to make do with the things brought from Winchester. Once she had exhausted every possible source of new clothing, Cornelia recalled, “there was nothing more to do but mend and patch.”
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Her biggest daily challenge was feeding the family. Fortunately, she was not wholly dependent on purchased food. Since moving into the house on Main Street, she had made an effort to regain some of the self-sufficiency the family had enjoyed at Hawthorn, their Winchester estate that was a small working farm. In the lawn on the north side of the house she had the boys prepare a garden. Kenneth was mainly responsible for tending it, but Roy and even little Donald helped. From the garden they gathered peas and beans and cabbages and other vegetables, the surplus of which was stored for winter consumption. There were two apple trees in the yard, too, and the children ate roasted apples all year around.
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When an opportunity came in 1864, the family even expanded production beyond their yard. They worked out an arrangement with a farmer south of town who was willing to let them use an acre of his land to grow potatoes in return for a share. Harry and Allan, with some help from Kenneth, planted and worked the patch. The farmer, whose name was Ruffner, prepared the ground with his plow and hauled away the harvested potatoes in his wagon, half to his house and half to the McDonalds'. Cornelia stored some in the attic and the rest in the basement. Those in the attic were ruined by an early freeze in October, but the basement held enough for the family's winter needs.
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They also had a steady supply of eggs and milk, for they kept chickens behind the house and had a cow that was, in Kenneth's words, “the best milker in town.” The cow was a gift from a cousin of Cornelia who had passed through Lexington with a herd he was trying to keep from the advancing Yankee army. Since the yard was too small to provide enough forage for the cow, it was Kenneth's responsibility to lead her out twice a day to any place he could find some grass growing.
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Still, there were a number of things the family had to buy. These included meat, flour, sugar, salt, coffee, tea, and—because they had no churn—butter. Determined to be as thrifty as possible, Cornelia did not depend wholly on the stores in town for these items. Instead, she sent Harry out regularly into the countryside on a borrowed horse to dicker with the farmers for whatever provisions they had to spare.
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Friends helped out the McDonalds with food, too. Colonel William Gilham, a professor at the military institute, sent over a quarter of smoked beef in December 1864 that lasted a good while. Other friends made sure the McDonalds had a Christmas turkey. Mrs. Powell frequently brought over a portion of the coffee, sugar, and molasses that her husband sent her from Richmond, where he had a position with the army commissary department; “molasses for the children,” Cornelia noted with gratitude, “was a great treat.” Furthermore, as the wife, and now widow, of a soldier, Cornelia was eligible to buy bacon collected by the army impressment agent at the same low price that he paid the farmers for it. The amount she was allowed to purchase was, however, so small that it was useless to try to feed the family with it, so she gave it to the cook as part of her wages.
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Cornelia had to hire someone to do the cooking for the same reason she had to pay for carding, spinning, and weaving: as a well-bred woman who had always had money and slaves, she had never learned those skills because she never had to perform those chores. She was pretty much helpless in the kitchen, at least when it came to cooking meat and baking bread.
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The cook, a black woman named Susan, was very dependable and much loved by the children. She would often join the boys in singing patriotic songs, her deep voice complementing the boys' higher voices. She was something of an anomaly, however. When the war began, she had been a slave, the property of a family in Charles Town in northern Virginia, but she was eventually liberated by the Union army. For reasons of her own, she went south to rebel territory after her owners lost control of her, rather than stay within the Yankee lines. She was a kind of free slave now, living in a place of her own in Lexington, hiring herself to the McDonalds, and under no white person's control.
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The authorities in Lexington were undoubtedly aware of Susan, but they chose to disregard her curious status. Perhaps, as a woman and a sort of voluntary Confederate, she seemed unthreatening. In other respects, however, the authorities took seriously their responsibility to control the slave population. With one exception—a spasm of black mayhem during the Yankee raid in June 1864—there had been no real trouble in the town or county since the war began, but the officials had never relaxed their vigilance.
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The magistrates of the county court maintained a patrol system in Rockbridge. Seven companies of men were appointed in each of the county's districts, each company mounting up one night per week to “visit all negro quarters and other places suspected of having therein unlawful assemblies, or such slaves as may stroll from one plantation to another without permission.” It was getting harder to man these patrols, however, because so many white men were away in the army. In the Lexington district, which comprised the town and everything within a mile of it, the patrol companies earlier in the war had consisted of a captain and six privates; now, in early 1865, the number of privates was reduced to four.
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The magistrates worried not only about keeping the slaves in submission but also about keeping them at work. Rockbridge was not a plantation area—fewer than thirty farms in the county could qualify as plantations—but there were a good number of slaves there (4,000 on the eve of the war, almost one-fourth of the county's population) and a good number of slave owners (about one white family of every four). The county's prosperity depended heavily on the labor extracted from its black workers. As the war went on, however, Rockbridge was stripped of that labor just as it was stripped of its wheat, corn, and livestock. Repeatedly the state and Confederate authorities called on it and other Virginia counties for able-bodied male slaves to work on the fortifications protecting the rebel capital or to do other war-related tasks. These slaves were taken from their masters under the same laws that allowed the impressment of supplies. Moreover, as many as a hundred Rockbridge slaves ran off with the Yankee raiding party in the summer of 1864; after that, some of the county's slave owners, fearing another raid, sold off their slaves or moved them farther south. Now Rockbridge faced what the county officials believed was a dire situation. Many farms and artisan shops were critically short-handed. When the Confederate authorities ordered yet another draft of slaves in late 1864, the Rockbridge magistrates appealed, citing the “great scarcity of labor” in the county. To their relief, Rockbridge was exempted. But in February 1865 another call came, and this time there was no exemption.
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The possibility of another visitation by the federal army was on the minds of everyone in the county during the winter of 1864–65, not just the slaveholders. Only a small Confederate military force stood between the upper Shenandoah Valley and the large Union force that occupied the lower valley. This Confederate force—the remains of the so-called Army of the Valley, now consisting of just one small infantry division and some cavalry and artillery—was commanded by General Jubal Early. Few citizens of Rockbridge had much confidence in him. He had led his troops to disaster the previous fall at the battles of Winchester, Fisher's Hill, and Cedar Creek, and the Yankees had taken advantage of these victories to strip the lower valley of crops and livestock and destroy granaries, barns, mills, and anything else that might benefit the rebel army. The lower valley was now a wasteland and the people of the upper valley had no doubt that the same fate was in store for them if the Yankees came their way.
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Rockbridge citizens had, in fact, had a small taste of this new hard-war policy of the Northern army in June 1864, when a raiding force of some 18,000 troops under General David Hunter marched into the county and occupied Lexington for several days. Hunter's artillery shelled the town before entering it and his troops subsequently pillaged every house and store. Cornelia, having little in the way of provisions or valuables on hand, did not lose much, but many families were left destitute. Soldiers also looted the Virginia Military Institute—with help from the town's blacks, who, Cornelia remarked, “held high carnival” during the Yankee occupation. Susan, her cook, stole a brocade curtain from the institute and took it home to use as a quilt, although she had to hide it after the Yankees departed and order was restored. Before leaving, General Hunter had the institute burned, along with ex-Governor Letcher's house. Meanwhile, some of his troops roamed the county destroying mills, warehouses, bridges, and ironworks and running off cattle and horses. They also took away with them any slaves who wanted to go.
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