A Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama during the Civil War

by Parthenia Antoinette Hague

When the blockade had inclosed the South, our planters set about in earnest to grow wheat, rye, rice, oats, corn, peas, pumpkins, and ground peas. The chufa, a thing I had never heard of before, now came to the front, and was soon generally cultivated, along with the ground pea, as our position necessitated the production of cheap food for swine. The chufa was easily cultivated, and on fresh sandy or porous soil produced large crops. Every available spot was planted with the chufa, ground peas, and peas. Even in orchards the interstices between the fruit-trees were filled with these nutritious ground nuts. I remember an orchard near where I taught school, planted with chufas. The tubers were dropped about every two feet, in furrows three feet apart. They seemed like great bunches of grass, which spread until the interval between the plants was one mass of green foliage and roots from furrow to furrow. The owners of that orchard said the feed for their poultry had cost them nothing that season, as the whole brood of fowls lived among the chufas from the time they left the perch in the morning till they were called to be housed for the night, and that never before had poultry been so well fitted for the table, never before had the flesh been so white or so well flavored.

Ground peas were rarely grown before the war, and were generally called “goobers.” I do not remember that I knew them by any other name; so one day in school hours, when one of the little scholars called to me that “Hetty’s got my pindars,” I was somewhat mystified as to what a “pindar” was, and when I called the little girl to fetch the pindars to me, she laid two or three goobers in my hand. They were to be seen on all sides, branching out in all directions, in patches large and small. Many planters in giving their corn and cotton the “laying-by” plowing, as it was called, would plant in the middle furrows ground peas, chufas, and cuttings from the sweet potato vines, which required very slight additional labor in harvesting the crops; and by the time the crops had all been gathered in and frost appeared, the tubers were well matured, and were great helps in fattening pork, thereby enabling the planter to preserve more corn for the use of the government.

Beside growing the ground pea for help in fattening pork, a good supply was housed for seed and the use of the family. I have pleasant recollections of the many winter evenings when we would have the great oven brought into the sitting-room, placed on the hearth, with glowing red coals underneath, filled with white sand, in which we parched the pindars nice and brown. Or perhaps the oven would be filled partly with our home-made syrup, with raw ground peas hulled and dropped into the boiling syrup. Properly cooked, what nice peanut candy that made! Oil from the peanuts was also expressed for lamps and other uses during war times. In fine, peanuts, ground peas, goobers, and pindars, all one species, though known by all these names, played an important part during the blockade.

Many planters who had never grown wheat before were surprised at the great yield of grain to the acreage sown. I well remember hearing a brother of Mrs. G——, who lived in Troy, Alabama, tell of very highly fertilizing one acre of already rich soil, as a test of what he really could reap from an acre thus treated. The yield went far beyond his most sanguine expectations, for that one acre yielded seventy-five bushels of wheat. Another wealthy planter, living in the village of Glennville, Alabama, had his overseer single out and lay off one acre of very rich hammock land, which was only lightly fertilized, from which he reaped fifty measured bushels. Of course this was only testing what good uplands, or hammocks rich in soil, would yield in wheat by highly or lightly fertilizing. Mr. G—— had sown quite heavily in wheat when all avenues for its entrance to the South had been closed. I remember one twelve acres of hammock land that Mr. G—— had sown in wheat, so rich of soil that no fertilizing was necessary. Morning, noon, and night that twelve-acre hammock in wheat was a topic of conversation at the table during our meal hours. In one of our afternoon rides, when school hours were over for the day, we made haste to view this paragon of a field, and as we halted our horses on the crest of a hill from which we could “view the landscape o’er,” what a grand panorama came into view! There, not the “fields arrayed in living green,” but wave on wave of long amber wheat gently rolling in the wind. A large stream of water bounded two sides of the hammock, and heavy green foliage formed a background in vivid contrast to the golden heads whose every culm seemed on a level. We slid almost unconsciously from our saddles, hitched the horses, and were soon standing in the midst of the wheat, with eyes scarcely able to peer over that vast plain of golden-yellow. We took off our hats and gave them a sail on the already ripening grain,—for it was near harvest time,—and there they lay without perceptibly bending the stalks of wheat. We plucked some of the grain, rubbed it in our hands to free and winnow it, and found it sweet and palatable. Backward flew our thoughts to that field of wheat near Lake Tiberias through which Christ and his disciples passed on the Sabbath day and plucked the “ears of corn” and did eat, for they hungered.

The yield of the hammock was estimated to be at least five hundred bushels; but a rainy spell set in just as the reaping began, and it rained in showers, light and heavy, more or less for twenty-seven days. As the means then for harvesting wheat were of a primeval order, the reaping was slow and tedious, so that most of the grain was badly damaged, and some was entirely spoiled.

There was great bother when it came to threshing the wheat; many and varied were the means employed for freeing the chaff from the grain. Some planters threshed and fanned the wheat at their gin-houses. I remember a portable thresher came into our settlement, and traveled from plantation to plantation, threshing for a percentage of the grain. Others, whose sowing and reaping was on a small scale, resorted to ruder methods to free the grain,—methods which called to mind the rural life and manners of ancient times. Sometimes the wheat was threshed with the rudest sort of home-made flails.

A woman, whose husband and two sons were in the army, lived near our settlement in a cottage which stood some little distance from the roadside, in a cluster of oaks, whose foliage almost hid the house from passers-by. While yet some rods from the dwelling, one day, there came to our ears a succession of regular thwacks, the meaning of which we could not define by the sound. As the woman was a neighbor, we turned aside to investigate, and opened wide our eyes when we beheld the woman seated in a chair, with a common sized barrel just in front of her, within good striking distance. There she sat, a sheaf of wheat held with both hands, and with this she was vigorously belaboring the barrel, at every stroke a shower of wheat-grains raining down upon quilts and coverlets which had been arranged to catch it. By this simple process she flailed as much as a bushel or two at one time. She then spread the sheets out on the ground, in the open air, and poured the wheat on them in a continuous stream. The wind acted as a great “fan,” the grain by its own weight falling in one place, while the chaff was carried off by the wind. When that threshing was ground at the flouring mill and used up, the same rude flailing was repeated.

Another contrivance for threshing wheat, even more unique, was that of a woman whose husband also was in our army. She was left with five small children, but managed to cultivate a small farm with those of the five children who had grown enough to give a little help. She raised a small plat of wheat year by year as the war went on. She had in her smoke-house a large trough that was used for salting pork when killed in the winter; indeed, nearly all smoke-houses then had large troughs, some as many as two or three, hewn and dug out from the stocks of trees, and sometimes six or eight feet long. They were very useful in holding salted pork, salt, soap, and dried bacon packed down in leached ashes. The woman cleaned her trough nicely, untied the sheaves of wheat, and placed them in the trough, not quite brimming, so as to lose none of the grains; then with heavy sticks and little wooden mauls she had roughly shaped, she and her little children would beat the grain free of the husks. It was then winnowed the same way as was the woman’s who threshed over the barrel.