A Year in the South (38 page)

Another cold snap a few days later ushered in hog-killing. Enoch summoned the hands on the morning of the twenty-first and the work began. They slaughtered, cleaned, and butchered eighteen hogs that day, which amounted to more than 2,000 pounds of pork. The next day, Sam helped Big George and Little George with the salting and packing. “It was very cold work,” he wrote, “handling cold, frozen meat.”
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The blacks worked willingly on these disagreeable tasks because they would get a share of the pork. But otherwise they showed little interest in plantation chores as the end of the year approached, and consequently almost daily some new dispute erupted between them and the Agnews. They had by now cast off every last trace of deference, and they responded hotly to the Agnews' complaints. They were being worked too hard, they told Enoch, and he had better ease up if he expected them to sign with him for next year. Even the younger ones were now openly defiant. Sam found himself boiling with anger one day when Tiny, the stableboy, ignored his order to fetch a mule, leaving Sam standing at the front gate. “My orders have no force,” he fumed in his diary that night. The whole lot of them, from the youngest to the oldest, were “disobedient, idle and puffed up with an idea of their own excellence.” He would put up with their insolence no longer, he vowed, and he hoped his father would quit trying to negotiate with them. “If I owned this place I would drive them off before tomorrow night.”
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On December 19, while he was in Guntown on an errand, he picked up some news that suggested things were only going to get worse. Congress, which had convened earlier in the month, had refused to seat the newly elected senators and representatives from the former Confederate states. This amounted to a rejection of President Johnson's reconstruction policy and cast doubt on the future of the Southern state governments set up during the summer and fall. Certain members of the Republican majority in Congress were saying that the traitorous rebels were being let off too easily and that the freedmen were being oppressed. A joint committee had been formed to investigate conditions in the South and advise Congress on a proper reconstruction policy. The more Sam heard about these proceedings, the more discouraged he got: “there is nothing favorable to us.”
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It soon became apparent that a great many people among the Northern leadership and public were appalled by what the white South had done, with President Johnson's approval, in the months since the war ended. What the former Confederates regarded as an honest effort on their part to accept defeat and come to terms with the new realities was seen in the North as defiance and intransigence. In the fall elections Southern voters had repudiated the extremists who had been at the forefront of secession and, instead, had chosen the more conservative of their old leaders—men such as Benjamin Humphreys of Mississippi. But in the eyes of Northerners, a reluctant rebel was still a rebel. Why, they asked, did the defeated South not turn to its loyal unionists for leadership? White Southerners also believed that they had dealt fairly and reasonably with the freedmen: they had granted them certain rights, withheld others they were unsuited for, and endeavored to restrain their primitive impulses and make them productive members of society. But when Northerners read reports about the Southern states' Black Codes, they saw a thinly veiled attempt to restore slavery. And when they read of the autumn insurrection scare, which had gripped not just Mississippi but the whole South, they saw a campaign of white terrorism against an innocent and helpless race. The ex-rebels had much to answer for, in the North's view, and it was by no means certain that the South was ready to resume full partnership in the Union.
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As Sam glumly followed the news from the North and contemplated the South's prospects, the last vestiges of the old way of life on the Agnew plantation disappeared. When December 25 came, Enoch and Letitia waited for the customary throng of blacks to appear at the back porch with shouts of “Christmas gift! Christmas gift!” As master and mistress, they had enjoyed the annual ritual of handing out presents to their people, and they delighted in the merriment that suffused the quarters on this favorite of holidays. But this year the day was different from Christmases past. “The negroes were not as jubilant as customary,” Sam observed in his diary that night. “There was fewer cries of Christmas Gift than is common.” Instead, the hands came to Enoch demanding their tenth of the proceeds from the sale of the cotton. He gave it to them, and then insisted in turn that they listen while he read aloud pertinent sections of the Black Code. A discussion about next year's contract ensued. “Pa told them,” wrote Sam, “that whoever he hired would have to work the whole year and do whatever he told them. The negroes are willing to work in the crop but no more. They … went away without making a trade.”
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One by one, in the days that followed, the blacks packed up and left the plantation. Arch departed on Tuesday the twenty-sixth, after informing the Agnews that he had signed for next year with a widow named Miller who had a farm a few miles north. “If he will work for Mrs. Miller,” Sam huffed in his diary, “it is more than he has done for Pa.” On Wednesday, a white man named Walker came in a wagon and hauled away the belongings of Big George and his family, who had agreed to come work for him. “George looks like he was mad and I think he leaves with no very pleasant feelings towards us,” Sam wrote, “although he has no cause.” On Friday, Wiley announced his intention to go; he would work next year for Frank Young, who lived in the community. Sam had not expected this, for Wiley was closer to the Agnews than were any of the other hands and had seemed more willing to come to terms with Enoch.
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By Saturday most of the others were gone, too, or were preparing to leave. All of them informed the Agnews of their destination, but Sam, whose mood grew more sour every day, professed no interest: “I don't care where they go provided they only get away from here.” Old Eliza expressed a desire to stay, but Sam dismissed it as “only pretense. I always thought her hypocritical.”
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No less disturbing than this abrupt exodus of their former slaves was the fact that not a single freedman came to the Agnews seeking work. “I suppose our negroes keep them off,” Sam wrote, “either by giving us a bad name or by telling that Pa does not want to hire.” He learned that the widow Simmons, whose farm was nearby, “has had 50 applications to hire. She must be popular among the darkies.” The Agnews' labor force was now so depleted that the family members had to do almost all the chores themselves. Sam was chopping firewood, Letitia was milking the cows, and she and the girls were doing most of the cooking.
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Sunday was the last day of the year. Sam was not scheduled to preach; he planned to go with the rest of the family to the service at Bethany Church. Since they no longer had a stableboy, Sam rounded up the mules that morning and hitched them to the carriage. Before the family set out, Enoch had an argument with some of the hands who had not yet gone. They informed him that they were going to take all the bridles on the place when they left, because they had picked them up after they were abandoned by Yankee cavalry in the battle of June 1864. Enoch got angry: six of those bridles were his, he said, for he had ordered the hands to gather them after getting permission from a Confederate quartermaster. He would discuss the matter further after church.
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That night, as he did every New Year's Eve, Sam looked back through his diary and reflected on the events of the past twelve months. It had been a year of dire calamities and momentous changes. Many people had endured great losses, many had suffered, and many had died. But he and his loved ones had been spared the worst, and he felt grateful for God's mercy. If this new world they inhabited was in some respects bleak and inhospitable—well, God had a purpose for all things, and His purpose in destroying the old world would, in the fullness of time, be revealed.
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As midnight approached, Sam took up his pen and began his last diary entry for the year. He wrote of the dispute over the bridles, of the muddy roads that had slowed the carriage on the way to church, of the sermon that the Reverend Young had preached from the book of Daniel, of all the other things he had seen and heard that day. Below the last line, in bold print, he wrote: “End of Anno Domini 1865.” Then he extinguished the candle and joined Nannie in bed. As he fell asleep, he could hear a soft rain falling.
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E
PILOGUE

1866 AND BEYOND

Sam Agnew continued to write in his diary every day until the end of his long life. His passion for recording everything he saw and heard never slackened, and eventually he filled forty-five volumes with his small script. The reader dogged enough to press on through the thousands of pages written after 1865 is rewarded with a vivid eyewitness account of what happened in one corner of the rural South during the tumultuous decades that saw the rise and fall of radical reconstruction, the populist insurgency of the small farmers, and the birth of Jim Crow.

Sam's personal life is chronicled in those pages, too, of course. It was a life of useful service that brought him deep satisfaction. In 1868, following the death of his friend and mentor the Reverend Young, he accepted a call from the congregation of Bethany Church to become pastor. He served in that capacity for the rest of his days, while continuing to preach frequently at other churches and stations in the vicinity. He devoted his later years not only to his ministry but also to writing works of local history, including an article on the battle of Brice's Crossroads published in
Confederate Veteran
magazine.
1

While Sam enjoyed many blessings in the years after 1865, he also endured a succession of tragedies. Nannie died of consumption in the summer of 1868, leaving him to care for three-year-old Buddy and a second son, James, who was barely a year old. Buddy died before he turned five, James before he turned nine. Sam grieved profoundly over these losses and had to struggle to accept them as a Christian should. “I try to be resigned,” he wrote after Buddy's death, “but it is hard and my heart rebells against this painful affliction.” His faith was strong, however. Always he reminded himself that “God knows better what is good than we do,” and the rebellion in his heart subsided.
2

18. White-bearded Sam Agnew (second from right) with his second wife, Rachel, and their children in 1896. Behind them is the plantation Big House, where Sam had lived since the 1850s.

Except for a time in 1867–68 when he taught school in Guntown, Sam continued to live on the family plantation, the greater portion of which he eventually inherited. Labor problems continued to plague the estate. Although Enoch managed to secure field hands for the 1866 season and thereafter, doing so required constant wrangling, for the freedmen continued to resist close supervision. Ultimately much of the plantation was parceled out to sharecroppers, over whom the Agnews exercised no day-to-day control. Hiring kitchen help proved to be as frustrating as recruiting field workers, and the family sometimes found themselves without a cook. Sam's diary in the years after 1865 resounds with complaints. The freed people, he declared, were “unreliable as farm laborers,” “unwilling … to cook,” and had “a predjudice against white people.”
3

The black quest for autonomy in the postwar years disrupted not only Sam's home but also his church. Before the war, the Bethany congregation had included many slaves. Afterward, most of those who stayed in the community continued their association with the church. As late as 1873 there were fifty-six black members, one-third of the total. But in that year came a great rupture, the result of growing dissatisfaction among the blacks, who resented being denied a say in governing the church while being subject to its authority and discipline. Sam and the Bethany elders wrestled earnestly with this difficulty, treating the blacks with “great forbearance,” in Sam's view, and “making allowances for their lack of education and want of judgment.” The breach could not be healed, however, and eventually forty-four blacks withdrew from membership, most of them going on to found an African Methodist Episcopal church. The experience perplexed and angered Sam, who saw it as further evidence of irrational hostility on the part of the freedmen toward whites. “Such manifestations,” he fumed, “make me feel like having nothing to do with the children of Ham.”
4