I was sorry to find the fires of these old feuds still burning. The State Government was in the hands of Union men, and Rebels and refugees from the Union army were disfranchised. Secessionists, who assisted at the hanging and robbing of Union men, and burned their houses, were receiving just punishment for their crimes in the civil courts and at the hands of the sheriff. This was well; and it should have been enough. But those who had suffered so long and so cruelly at the hands of their enemies did not think so. Returning Rebels were mobbed; and if one had stolen back unawares to his home, it was not safe for him to remain there. I saw in Virginia one of these exiles, who told me how homesickly he pined for the hills and meadows of East Tennessee, which he thought the most delightful region in the world. But there was a rope hanging from a tree for him there, and he dared not go back. “The bottom rails are on top,” said he: “that is the trouble.” The Union element, and the worst part of the Union element, was uppermost. There was some truth in this statement. It was not the respectable farming class, but the roughs, who kept the old fires blazing. Many secessionists and Union men, who had been neighbors before the war, were living side by side again, in as friendly relations as ever.
At Strawberry Plain, on the Holston River, I saw a manifestation of this partisan spirit. A laboring man, whom I met on the butment of the burned railroad bridge, was telling me about the Rebel operations at that place, when a fine fellow came dashing into the village on horseback.
“There’s a dog-goned Rebel now!” said my man, eyeing him with baleful glances. “He’s a rebel colonel, just come back. He’ll get warned; and then if he don’t leave, he must look out!”
I think if the “dog-goned Rebel” had seen what I saw, in the deadly determination of the man, he would have needed no further warning.
I listened to many tales of persecution and suffering endured by loyal East Tennesseeans during the war. Here is the outline of one, related to me by a farmer in Greene County.
“After the Rebel Conscript Act passed, I started with my son and a hundred other refugees to go over the mountains into Kentucky. The Rebels pursued us, put on the track by some of our secesh neighbors. Some escaped, my son with them; but I was taken, and brought back with irons on my wrists. That was the twenty-fifth of July, 1863. I was carried to Richmond, and kept in Castle Thunder till the twentieth of October. They then put me on a train to take me to Salisbury prison, in North Carolina. I was in a box car, and I found that a board at one corner of it was so loose that I could pull it off with my hands. Just at night, when we were about eighteen miles from Salisbury, and the train was running about ten miles an hour, I pulled away the board, and jumped off. I took to the fields, and tramped till I came to the Yadkin River, where a nigger took me over in his canoe. I tramped all night, and lay by the next day in the woods, and tramped again the next night, and lay by again the next day, and so on for fourteen nights and days; in which time I travelled three hundred miles. They were moonlight nights, and I got along very well, only I near-about starved. I lived on raw corn and pumpkins. I kept the line of the Western Railroad; I flanked the depots and pickets, but I was several times nigh being caught. I never entered a house, or passed near one, if I could help it. It was a hard, long, lonesome tramp. I did not speak to a human being, except the nigger that took me across the Yadkin, and another I almost run over on the road as I was coming to Asheville. He said to me, ‘Good evening.’ I muttered back something, and went on. I hadn’t gone far before I changed my mind. Something said to me, ‘Ask help of that nigger.’ I was sick and worn out, and almost perishing for want of food. Besides, I did not know the country; I saw I was coming to a town, and there was danger I might be taken. I went back, and said to the nigger, ‘Can you give me something to eat?’ He was sitting on the ground; but he jumped up, and looked at me by the moonlight, and said, ‘Where do you want to go?’ I told him. Then he knew I was a Union man running away from the Rebels. He told me to wait for him there, and came back in a little while with a heap of bread and beef. Never anything tasted so good. After I had eaten, he gave me directions how to avoid the guard, and strike the road beyond Asheville. I came over the mountains, and reached here the fourteenth night.”
East Tennessee contributed a liberal quota to the national army. Twenty-five thousand loyal refugees escaped into Kentucky, and fought their way back again with Burnside’s forces in 1863.
CHAPTER XXXII.
EAST TENNESSEE FARMERS.
I found the East Tennesseeans a plain, honest, industrious, old-fashioned people. Only about four out of five can read and write. Men of the North and West would consider them slow. They are dressed, almost without exception, in coarse, strong “domestic,” as the home-manufactured cloth of the country is called. It is woven on hand-looms, which are to be found in nearly every farm-house. Domestic is, in fact, an institution, not of Tennessee alone, but of the entire Southern country. In the absence of manufacturing establishments, the interest in this primitive private industry has not been suffered to decline. It stood the South in good stead during the war. After the importation of goods was cut off, it clothed the people. All classes wore it. Even at the time of my visit, I found many proprietors of large estates, the aristocrats of the country, wearing garments which had been spun, colored, and woven by their own slaves.
Tennessee has no system of free schools. There was a common-school fund, derived mainly from public lands given for the purpose by the United States. The State was the trustee of this fund, which the Constitution declared “permanent, never to be diminished by legislative appropriation,” nor “devoted to any other use than the support and encouragement of common schools.” The proceeds of this fund distributed among the schools in 1859, amounted to $230,430, or seventy-five cents for each scholar in the State. Treason, which betrayed so many sacred trusts, betrayed this. According to Governor Brownlow “a more perfidious act than the appropriation of this fund to treasonable purposes was not committed during the late perfidious rebellion.”