At one or two points along the line were rows of boxcars, run off on unused side-tracks, and filled with families of refugees. Dirty, frowzy women, with half-clad, tow-headed children, filled the doors, but over their heads we could catch glimpses of filthy interiors that not even negro cabins could equal. Doubtless the poor whites of the South are far better material for voters than intelligent negroes, for we have it on the best of authority—their own—but for dirt, and for utter ignorance of all the decencies of civilized life, no people in America, of any color, can compare with them.[[51]] I grieve to add that, in many regions in the South, they are almost the only Unionists. The intelligent people hereabouts are loyal, but in States further South the most loyal are too often the most ignorant.
“How do the negroes get along here?” I asked of an ancient Tennessee matron, looking benevolently down upon us through a pair of brass-mounted spectacles, with an offer of “snacks” for a quarter. “What? O, you mean the niggahs. They’s doin well enough, fur’s I hear.” “Are any of them suffering, hereabouts?” “Sufferin? No more’n other folks, I rekon. Everybody gits along well enough heah.” “Do the negroes behave well?” “Well’s anybody else, I guess. I don’t see much of ’em nor don’t want to, the nasty black things.”
The scenery had changed somewhat as we neared the chief town of East Tennessee. It was not quite so hilly; and there were more evidences of careful farming. Good wheat and corn-fields lined the road; and one caught many a peep at picturesque mountain residences, embowered in the abounding orchards. We had passed out of one great zone of the war into another. Sheridan, Grant, Lee, were all strange names, that suggested remote operations. We were nearer the theater on which Bragg, Johnson, Rosecrans, and Sherman had been the actors. John Morgan’s name was a charm to still the demon of mischief in naughty children. “This is whar they both belong,” said a native, as we were coming out from the dining-room at Greenville. It was to President Johnson (whose home was in this dilapidated little village,) that the reference had been made. Who the other notability of the place was, no one understood; till the native explained that he “meant Andie Johnson and John Morgan, of co’se.”
Broken bridges had grown more and more frequent; and the train crept slowly over long lines of trestle-work which timid passengers fancied they could see swaying beneath us. The road led across Strawberry Plains, where Longstreet was driven back, and wound near several of the forts.
I was once more doomed to be mistaken. We were approaching Knoxville. A haggard-looking, rough-bearded fellow leaned over and whispered in my ear, “This isn’t a good country for you and me. They’re all tories here, every d——d scoundrel of them. I’ve been chased off from my home because I had been in the Confederate army. For three weeks I’ve dodged about in the woods, and now I’m a going to get out of this Yankee country. But you had better keep mighty quiet; they’ll suspect you quicker’n me.” I advised my confidential friend to get further South as fast as possible, and the last I saw of him he was making a rush, in Knoxville, for the Dalton and Atlanta cars.
Burnt houses and solitary chimneys over one whole quarter of the city, showed that the heart of East Tennessee loyalty had not been without its sufferings. The best part, however, of the little city seemed to be saved. Straggling up and down hill, stretching off to the precipitous banks of the clear, sparkling river that skirts it, with few pretensions to elegance in its stony streets or old-fashioned architecture, but with a great deal of homely substantial comfort, Knoxville is a very fit capital for the mountain region of East Tennessee. It seemed prosperous, and likely, under the new order of things, to continue to prosper. Its people had not been accustomed to depend for support upon their slaves; they suffered the less, therefore, from the sudden disappearance of slaves. Land-owners in the vicinity held their property at enormous prices; the people had plenty; and, in a rude way, they lived very comfortably. For a time there had been a strong conflict between Unionists and their former oppressors. Men who had been driven from their homes or half-starved in the mountains, or hunted for with dogs, were not likely to be very gentle in their treatment of the men who persecuted them; and one readily believed what all observers said, that in no place through the South had the bitterness of feeling, engendered by the war, been so intense, or the violence so bloody in its consequences. Returned Rebels had not unfrequently been notified that they must leave the country, under penalty of being treated precisely as they had treated Union men when they had the power. Sometimes they were shot before such notification; sometimes after it; when, in a foolhardy spirit, they remained to brave it out.
But the prevailing tendency to violence was now turned in a new direction. The niggers were presuming to talk about getting the right to vote. The inborn poor-white hatred of the negroes was all aflame at this, and every man felt it his duty to help set back the upstart niggers. Every few nights, I was told, a negro was shot in some of the back streets, “nigger life’s cheap now; nobody likes ’em enough to have any affair of the sort investigated; and when a white man feels aggrieved at anything a nigger’s done, he just shoots him and puts an end to it.”
Doubtless there was in this a spice of exaggeration; but it was manifest that East Tennessee radicalism, however earnest on the question of punishing Rebels, did not go to the extent of defending the negroes. There was, I should judge, absolutely no public sentiment in favor of negro suffrage, and scarcely any in favor of negro education. The prejudices against them were, with the most, intense; and if any way of driving them out of the country can be found, it will be very apt to be put in force. The freedmen have more hope from Virginia Rebels than from East Tennessee Loyalists, if the public sentiment of Knoxville may be accepted as a test. In this, as in all their other political feelings, the Mountaineers are fervidly in earnest.