A Year in the South (5 page)

Few if any fugitives from the works ever made it to freedom, for—as all the slaves realized—the chances of escaping from a place so deep inside the Confederacy were slim. Even if they managed to elude the pursuing overseers, they were almost certain to fall into the clutches of local authorities somewhere. Such was the fate of three of the McGehee slaves named Sam, Devro, and Lafayette; they ran off from the works in late 1864 only to wind up in a county jail, from which Brooks and Woolsey retrieved them. Blacks traveling alone in the rural South always aroused suspicion, and they could expect to be accosted frequently and forced to explain themselves.
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Runaways were not the biggest problem the two managers had to deal with. But even little problems can be anguishing to those working under great pressure. Brooks and Woolsey shouldered a heavy burden in running the works. It was a task of great importance, for of all the shortages that plagued the Confederacy, none was more critical than the shortage of salt.

Few Southerners had foreseen such a shortage when the war began. They took their salt for granted, as it had always been cheap and plentiful. Most of it was imported from England and the West Indies, arriving as ballast in the ships that came to Southern ports to get cotton. So inexpensive was this foreign salt in the antebellum years that the South hardly bothered to produce its own. But as the blockading squadrons of the Union navy began sealing off the Confederate ports in 1861 and 1862, salt grew scarce.
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The shortage of salt was not a mere inconvenience; it was a crisis that threatened the survival of the Confederacy. Humans and livestock must have salt in their diet for good health. Moreover, in the nineteenth century meat was preserved primarily by salting, butter needed salt to stay fresh, and hides required dehydration by salt before they could be turned into leather. By a conservative estimate, the Confederacy needed 300 million pounds of salt per year—thirty-three pounds, on average, for each of its nine million inhabitants.
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Before the war, thirty-three pounds of salt could have been bought anywhere in the South for less than fifty cents; but by 1862 it cost over thirteen dollars and was sometimes hard to find even at that price. As citizens protested and appealed for help, Confederate authorities set about developing domestic sources. There were only a few places in the South where salt could be produced in quantity, and one was in Clarke County, Alabama. Underneath the palmetto flats that bordered the Tombigbee and its tributaries in this county the ground water was so saline that a kettle of it, boiled down, would yield at least an eighth of a kettle of salt. The state government held title to most of this salt-rich land, which stretched for miles along the river, and early in the war the governor declared the state holdings open to the public and encouraged individuals and businesses to exploit them. He also ordered that the state establish its own salt-making operation.
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The Alabama state saltworks opened in October 1862. Considering the general primitiveness of industry in the Old South, it was an extraordinary facility—large, technologically sophisticated, efficient. The production process began at the wells that were bored in the mucky flats to a depth of a hundred feet or so and lined with cypress wood. Steam-powered pumps, mounted on tall scaffolds erected over the wells, sucked the brine to the surface and spewed it into wooden troughs that carried it to the furnaces. There were at least four furnaces at the state works, great brick contrivances thirty or forty feet long, with towering chimneys. They were fueled by vast quantities of wood, cut in the surrounding forests. On the furnaces, large kettles and pans full of brine bubbled away until nothing was left but pure salt. Twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, the furnaces roared and the water boiled. In a good month, the state works could produce over a hundred thousand pounds of salt. After being dried and sacked, it was hauled to the river by wagon to await boats. Some of it was shipped out as payment for supplies or leased slaves, but the bulk of it was distributed among the counties of Alabama, whose citizens could purchase it at cost.
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The state saltworks was one of the last things still functioning well in the Confederacy by 1865. The rebel states, battered relentlessly by the Yankee army and navy and disintegrating internally, were sinking to their knees. The success of Superintendent Brooks and Commissioner Woolsey was remarkable considering the problems they faced, particularly the scarcity of black laborers. The two managers benefited in one sense from the Confederacy's military reverses, for every advance of the Yankee army drove more slave owners into the Confederate interior seeking a safe place to put their slaves to work; still, the number of slaves the saltworks gained thereby was not enough.

Aggravating the chronic labor shortage at the saltworks was the health problem. The marshy lands that yielded the valuable brine were a breeding ground for disease. Sickness and death plagued the works, keeping the doctor busy, the hospital crowded, and the cemetery growing. As the year 1865 opened, the little community was just recovering from a malaria epidemic that had almost halted operations; Brooks reported in November 1864 that he was the only person at the works, white or black, who had not yet come down with this “swamp fever.” As he wrote, Woolsey lay prostrate in bed, too sick even to make out his regular report, and the bookkeeper appeared to be close to death. Among those who died that fall were three of the McGehee slaves, two of them children. Brooks ordered the carpenter to build coffins for the three, and then billed Madam for the cost.
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During another of the epidemics that swept the works—this one typhoid—Lou Hughes got a chance to practice another skill he had acquired: nursing. It was something he had learned years before from Boss, who had been a physician. Boss had given up his medical practice when he acquired a plantation, but he continued to treat his own slaves and he trained Lou to assist him. He prepared many of his medicines himself, using the recipes in Dr. Gunn's popular treatise. He even had a large medicine cabinet built into a wall of his Memphis house. Young Lou was entranced. To him the cabinet was a wondrous thing, and when his master was practicing his healing craft, he seemed immensely wise and gentle. Patiently Boss taught Lou how to identify all the potions by sight and smell, and how to prepare each one and measure out the proper dosage. In this way Lou mastered the mysteries of ipecac and castor oil, Cook's pills and mustard baths. He learned also about the medicinal herbs that grew plentifully in the South and before long he was going into the woods himself to gather slippery elm and the root of alum, poplar, and wild cherry. He absorbed not only his master's medicinal knowledge but also his bedside skills, for Boss brought him along to the slave cabins where he treated colicky babies and dyspeptic field hands.
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Nursing was only one of many skills Lou acquired in the McGehee household. He could drive a carriage, cultivate an ornamental garden, and even operate a sewing machine, not to mention serve expertly as butler and body servant. But it was nursing that he liked more than anything else. When he was called on to act as a night nurse for a sick slave at the saltworks, he did so gladly. This was the first case of typhoid he had ever seen, but he remembered what Boss had taught him about the disease, and he did what he could, drawing on whatever medicines the works' hospital could offer. The patient was too far gone to respond to Lou's tender ministration, however, and he died within a few days.
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Disease was not the only threat to health at the saltworks; accidents, too, took a toll. Much of the work done there was hazardous. Razor-sharp ax blades and falling trees caused casualties among the wood choppers; blazing fuel and boiling brine scorched and scalded the furnace tenders. The various steam engines in and around the works posed another sort of danger, one tragically illustrated on January 19, 1865, when the
Dick Keys
blew up on the Tombigbee. This was one of the steamboats that made regular runs up and down the river; it was at a point some miles below the works when all five of its boilers exploded with a tremendous roar, blasting the vessel to bits. More than half a dozen people were killed and many others injured.
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There were natural disasters, too, along the river that winter. Heavy rain in late January and early February brought dangerously high water in the creeks that fed the Tombigbee, flooding out roads. An even worse deluge at the end of February sent river water spilling over the levee that protected the saltworks, inundating the furnaces and wells and halting operations for a time. It was not only a wet winter but an extraordinarily cold one, too, by the standards of south Alabama. The last part of January saw seven consecutive days with temperatures at least eight degrees below freezing. A week later came a heavy snowfall, a rare sight so far south.
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Louis Hughes had many matters on his mind during those chilly, soggy days of January and February. There was almost always something demanding his attention at headquarters: fireplaces or stoves to be tended, items to be fetched or delivered for Woolsey and Brooks, meals to be served. In the little spare time that he could find, there was his tobacco venture to attend to and other personal things as well, especially one: his and Matilda's new baby.

She was born in February and they named her Lydia. She was not their first child, but she was the only one now living (twins born to them in 1859 had died in infancy). The new addition to their family made the upstairs room at headquarters, where they lodged, a little more crowded, but it probably meant also some time off from cooking for Matilda, for it was customary among slave masters to accommodate nursing mothers.
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Matilda was thirty-four, nearly two years older than Lou, when she brought forth this child. They had married in the Memphis mansion of Boss and Madam on November 30, 1858. It was a wedding of a sort few slaves could boast of: Boss, acting on one of his frequent paternalistic impulses, arranged a formal ceremony in the parlor, brought in a white minister to officiate, and invited not only his own slaves but those of his neighbors, too.
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Matilda had known Lou from the time she arrived at the mansion in 1855. Her first months there had been miserable. She had grown up with her mother and six brothers and sisters in Kentucky, but in 1855 her master had decided to sell the whole family. He hired two agents to take the eight blacks to Memphis, where they were put on the auction block in the prominent slave-trading establishment of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Matilda's mother and five of her siblings were all sold to different buyers and taken away. Matilda and her sister Mary Ellen were sold to Boss, who gave Mary Ellen to his sister-in-law as a present and kept Matilda as a cook.
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Torn from her family, Matilda was inconsolable for a time. To Lou she seemed “a sad picture to look at.… Any one could see she was almost heartbroken.” Her grief eventually subsided, and her blossoming relationship with Lou no doubt brought her much joy and comfort. But with the passage of time came new miseries for her to contend with, including the death of her twin babies and the cruelty of Madam, who abused Matilda no less than she abused Lou.
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The marriage of Matilda and Lou was in some ways a union of opposites. They had very different temperaments, for one thing. Lou was about as bold and resourceful as a slave could get away with being; Matilda was timid and tended to go to pieces in a crisis. They had spiritual differences, too. Matilda was a devout Christian whose faith consoled her in gloomy times: “God will help us,” she would tell Lou; “let us try and be patient.” Lou was not exactly a skeptic, but neither was he deeply religious. And he had a couple of habits that no doubt bothered the pious Matilda: he wore a voodoo bag, a little leather pouch containing roots and pins and such that supposedly had the power to protect him from harm; and he drank whiskey, often carrying a bottle around with him. With all their differences, however, the two were deeply committed to each other.
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The months that Lou and Matilda spent at the saltworks were undoubtedly the happiest time either had experienced since being purchased by the McGehees. This is not to say that it was some sort of idyll; Lou may have had an agreeable job, indulgent supervisors, extraordinary privileges, a lucrative business, and a healthy new baby, but he and Matilda were never for a moment allowed to forget that they were enslaved members of a despised race. Moreover, as long as they remained at this site deep within the Confederacy, Lou's dream of escape was unattainable. Still, they would remember this as a good time in their lives.

The question was how long this happy interlude was going to last. Reports of a possible Yankee advance against Mobile had reached Clarke County in December 1864. One of the few major cities of the Confederacy still unconquered, Mobile was defended by 10,000 Southern troops, 300 cannons, and five gunboats. But no one knew how big a force the North might throw against the city. And if Mobile fell, the state saltworks would be vulnerable—it was absurd to think that the two small rebel forts perched atop bluffs overlooking the Tombigbee below the works would stop the powerful Yankee army and navy.
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Lou Hughes probably knew that Woolsey and Brooks had a contingency plan for such an emergency. If enemy forces threatened the works, the two managers intended to evacuate all the slaves and try to return them to their owners. As the winter of 1864–65 came to a close, there still seemed no cause for alarm. The Clarke County newspaper assured the citizens as late as March 9 that “All is quiet about Mobile.” But how much longer that would be was anyone's guess.
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