In the preceding chapter we pointed out the manner in which General Halleck, by forced assessments, compelled the more wealthy of the disloyal of St. Louis to assist in caring for the refugees among us. This suggests our varied experiences in dealing with these unfortunates that, during the whole period of the war, came flocking in upon us, not only from Missouri, but also from regions farther south. When General Grant, by his masterful campaign, had swept all obstructions from the Mississippi River, and opened up western Kentucky, western Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and northern Texas, poor whites and negroes, freed by the onward march of our victorious army, fled, in ever-increasing numbers, from all that conquered territory, to our city. They came on government transports, came by boat-loads, sent by Union generals because they had become a serious impediment to military movements; they came also in wagons and carts of wonderful make, and in large numbers on foot. St. Louis was for them a city of refuge.
But to set forth clearly the problem that was thrust upon us by their coming, we must separate the heterogeneous multitude that appealed to us for charity into homogeneous classes. We certainly cannot justly affirm the same things of them all. Here, as elsewhere in society, we found different and interesting types.
First of all there were some loyal white refugees. While most of these were from the western and interior counties of our own State, a few came from States farther south. They fled from their homes, which had been made unsafe by rebel guerrillas and bushwhackers. So far as possible they had converted their property into money, which they brought with them. They came to stay. Some of them purchased residences in St. Louis. Many of them, by the stern logic of war, had become emancipationists, while they retained some of their old prejudices. The notion that everything vile lurked under the harmless word, abolitionist, had been woven into the very tissue of their being. They persistently believed that there were at least three devils in the North and East: an editorial devil, Horace Greeley; a clerical devil, Henry Ward Beecher; and a lecturing devil, Wendell Phillips. But war by its victories and defeats gradually illuminated their minds. The horns and hoofs of these imaginary devils slowly faded from their vision. And a few years after the surrender at Appomattox, many of these very men by tongue and ballot endeavored to make the editorial devil President of the United States.
But there was a still larger number of rebel refugees. They were usually found in knots at boarding-houses kept by Southern sympathizers. They were always hilarious when the rebel army was victorious, and crestfallen when it suffered defeat. Most of them had sufficient means, snatched from the ravages of war, to sustain them in comfort. A few of them were rich. For the most part they were permitted to live in peace among us, securely shielded by the government that they sought to overthrow. Occasionally, they were found aiding those in arms against the United States, and a few of them, as we have already noted, were arrested and sent beyond the lines of the Federal army.
But by far the most numerous class of refugees were poor and wretched beyond description. They entered St. Louis in rags, often hatless and shoeless, sallow, lean, half-starved, unkempt. Very many of them were women and children in pitiable plight, half naked, shivering, penniless, dispirited. Most of them professed to be loyal. Their husbands and fathers had been killed because they were Union men. Some of them were the wives and children of Union volunteer soldiers from Arkansas; on that account the rebels drove them from their homes. Moreover, the Confederates, to a considerable extent, recruited their armies from the poor whites, whose families they left to find their way into the Union lines. But many that came were dazed. They hardly knew why the war was being waged. Whether they were loyal or disloyal it would have puzzled the most astute to find out. Pinching want had driven them from their comfortless dwellings in the South. Their main quest was bread.
But while in tatters and gaunt with hunger, most of them were utterly unwilling to work. They regarded manual labor as a disgrace. They had been taught in the school of slavery that honest toil was servile and ignoble. The notion quite generally prevailed among them that since they had fled from rebeldom, the government was under obligation to feed and clothe them, while they sat down in idleness and glumly received its gifts. What charity added to government supplies they thoughtlessly consumed, and then stretched out empty, thriftless hands for more.
An incident or two will present in concrete form their aristocratic notions concerning labor. James E. Yeatman, President of the Western Sanitary Commission, became deeply interested in a girl of sixteen, belonging to a refugee family from Arkansas. With considerable personal effort he secured for her the position of nurse-girl in a household where her highest good, in every way, would have been sought. Rejoicing in doing a benevolent deed, though a very busy man, with great responsibilities weighing on mind and heart, he drove more than two miles to apprise her mother of his success. The family were living on government rations, and every article of their dress showed their extreme poverty; but the mother met this offer of a place for her half-starved child by exclaiming: “W’at, my darter a sarvant and work like a niggah! no, sah! she’ll rot fust!” “Very well, madam,” with righteous indignation replied Mr. Yeatman, “let her rot;” and jumping into his buggy, drove hurriedly back to his office in the city.
I visited a family of this class at the Virginia Hotel, an old hostelry, which was used as an asylum for freedmen and white refugees. The room adjoining one occupied by a family of refugees had been assigned to a negro. These refugees were clothed in rags and were barefooted. The unkempt hair of the wife and mother was a mass of matted tangles. In their cheerless apartment there was neither stove nor bed. They slept on straw and ate from the hand of charity. While I was taking in the situation and speaking an encouraging word, a benevolent lady stepped in to relieve their pressing wants, but, strange to tell, found their pride sorely mortified, not by their personal appearance nor by the litter and filth in which they were living, but because there was a negro in the next room. The mother voiced the complaint of that poverty-stricken household, by saying, in a peculiar drawl: “I say now, we’uns doan think that ah sooperintend ort to put that niggah in thah; we’uns doan like that ah purty wal.”
I stepped into the adjoining apartment that I might see what had so offended these aristocratic paupers, and found that the negro, a contraband or fugitive from bondage, had entered his room at the same time that the white refugees had entered theirs. But he had found an old broom and had swept his room, an old stove and had put it up; had gathered some soft coal to burn in it; had gotten somewhere a rickety bedstead and set it up and had put on it a tick filled with straw. He had procured a wash-basin, a cracked looking-glass, and something to eat. While his room was bare and poor enough, he had made it look in some measure homelike. At all events he greatly distanced his squalid white neighbors, who felt degraded by his presence.
Most of the white refugees were illiterates. Their ignorance was so dense that we are in no danger of exaggerating it. I once sat down by the side of a sick boy of this class, who lay on a dirty blanket spread on the floor. His mother, also ill, lay near him. She was afraid that he would die. They had fled from Batesville, Arkansas, and exposure to cold and rain, while on their journey, had brought on fever. She could not read and knew very little of the world outside of the neighborhood where, up to that time, she had spent her life. Her sick son was fifteen years old. She wished me to talk with him, which I was glad to do. I told him of Christ, who came into the world to save sinners, and was ready to save him. He listened eagerly, but soon said: “If you mean by sin cussin, I never done that.” When I told him of Jesus he looked intently into my face, and said: “I never heard of him before.” I felt myself to be a real missionary, sent to tell one poor, sick boy, a stranger in a strange city, of the Saviour, who then and there was ready to receive him as his child. But these cases were not rare among poor whites. The few that could read formed the exceptional class.