The prospects of the country for the present year seemed to me favorable. The freedmen were making contracts, and going to work. Returned Rebels were generally settling down to a quiet life, and turning their attention to business. The people were much disposed to plant cotton, and every effort was making to put their desolated farms into a tillable condition.
Yet Middle Tennessee is but an indifferent cotton-growing region. It is inferior to West Tennessee, and can scarcely be called a cotton country, when compared with the rich valleys of the more Southern States. Eight hundred pounds of seed cotton[[12]] to the acre are considered a good crop on the best lands. The quality of Middle Tennessee cotton never rates above “low middling,” but generally below it, (the different qualities of cotton being classed as follows: inferior, ordinary, good ordinary, low middling, middling, good middling, middling fair, good fair, and fine.)
I found considerable business doing with an article which never before had any money-value. Cotton seed, which used to be cast out from the gin-houses and left to rot in heaps, the planter reserving but a small portion for the ensuing crop, was now in great demand, prices varying from one to three dollars a bushel. In some portions of the Rebel States it had nearly run out during the war, and those sections which, like Tennessee, had continued the culture of the plant, were supplying the deficiency. The seed, I may here mention, resembles, after the fibre is removed by the gin, a small-sized pea covered with fine white wool. It is very oily, and is considered the best known fertilizer for cotton lands.
Nashville is built on the slopes of a hill rising from the south bank of the Cumberland. Near the summit, one hundred and seventy-five feet above the river, stands the capitol, said to be the finest State capitol in the United States. The view it commands of the surrounding country is superb; and seen from afar off, it seems, with its cupola and Ionic porticoes, to rest upon the city like a crown. It is constructed of fine fossiliferous limestone, three stories in height; with a central tower lifting the cupola two hundred feet from the ground. This tower is the one bad feature about the building. It is not imposing. The site is a lofty crest of rock, which was fortified during the war, converting the capitol into a citadel. The parapets thrown up around the edifice still remain.
My visit happened on the first anniversary of the battle of Nashville, which took place on the fifteenth and sixteenth days of December, 1864;—a battle which, occurring after many great and sanguinary conflicts, did not rise to highest fame; and which has not yet had ample justice done it. It is to be distinguished as the only immediately decisive battle of the war,—the only one in which an army was destroyed. By it the army of Hood was annihilated, and a period put to Rebel power in the States which Sherman had left behind him on his great march.
The scene of the battle, the sweeping undulations of the plain, the fields, the clumps of woods, and the range of hills beyond, are distinctly visible in fair weather from the house-tops of the city, and especially from the capitol. The fight took place under the eyes of the citizens. Every “coigne of vantage” was black with spectators. Patriots and Rebel sympathizers were commingled: the friends and relatives of both armies crowding together to witness the deadly struggle; a drama of fearfully intense reality! The wife of a noted general officer who was in the thickest of the fight, told me something of her experience, watching from the capitol with a glass the movements of his troops, the swift gallop of couriers, the charge, the repulse, the successful assault, the ground dotted with the slain, and the awful battle cloud, rolling over all, enfolding, as she at one time believed, his dead form with the rest. But he lived; he was present when she told me the story;—and shall I ever forget the emotion with which he listened to the recital? The battle was no such terrible thing to the soldier in the midst of it, as to the loved one looking on.
The State legislature adjourned for the Christmas holidays on the morning of my visit to the capitol; but I was in time to meet and converse with members from various parts of the State. They were generally a plain, candid, earnest class of men. They were the loyal salt of the State. Some of them were from districts in which there were no Union men to elect them; to meet which contingency the names of the candidates for both houses had been placed on a general ticket. Thus members from West and Middle Tennessee, where the Rebel element was paramount, were elected by votes in East Tennessee, which was loyal.
With Mr. Frierson, Speaker of the Senate, I had a long conversation. He was from Maury County, and a liberal-minded, progressive man, for that intensely pro-slavery and Rebel district. We talked on the exciting topic of the hour,—negro suffrage, and the admission of negro testimony in the courts. “My freedmen,” he said, “are far more intelligent and better prepared to vote, than the white population around us.” Yet as a class he did not think the negroes prepared to exercise the right of suffrage, and he was in favor of granting it only to such as had served in the Union army. To the negroes’ loyalty and good behavior he gave the highest praise. “It is said they would have fought for the Confederacy, if the opportunity had been given them in season. But I know the negro, and I know that his heart was true to the Union from the first, and throughout; and I do not believe he would have fought for the Rebellion, even on the promise of his liberty.” He thought the blacks competent to give testimony in the courts; but for this step society in Tennessee was not prepared. Both the right of voting and of testifying must be given them before long, however.
There were two classes of Union men in Tennessee. One class had manifested their loyalty by their uncompromising acts and sacrifices. The other class were merely legal Union men, professing loyalty to the government and friendliness to the negro. “These are not to be trusted,” said Mr. Frierson. “Their animosity against the government and the freedmen, and more particularly against heart Union men, is all the more dangerous because it is secret.” And it was necessary in his opinion to retain the Freedmen’s Bureau in the State, and to keep both Rebels and rebel sympathizers excluded from power, for some years.