A prophet is generally without honor in his own country, and it is not surprising that there should be other places in the United States where they have more confidence in President Johnson than at Knoxville. The people of Greenville are very proud of having given a President to the country; but in Knoxville they are inclined to reserve their praises. “What in h—ll is he palavering with the Democrats for?” asked one. Others could hardly be brought to express an opinion about him; and I found very few except the office-holders who were warmly and without reservation his friends. “He’s pardoning cursed scoundrels all the time, such as we’ve been shooting out here, on sight.” “Why don’t he hang Jeff Davis, as he said in the Senate he would?” “Well, he’s got to play his hand out pretty soon, and we’ll see whether he’s going to desert us.” Such are some of the voices I heard in November among the East Tennesseeans. They didn’t give Mr. Johnson up; in fact, they still wanted very much to believe in him; but they had more faith in Parson Brownlow. More hanging and fewer pardons would, as they thought, better suit the existing wants of the South.
The chief newspaper of the place is “Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig and Rebel Ventilator.” Its name is a pretty good index, at once to its contents, and to the temper of the people among whom it is a favorite. The Rev. Governor and Editor tersely summed up his views of the political situation:
“The Southern leaders still have the devil in them, and presuming upon the leniency of the President, they are losing sight of their real positions. Louisiana is proposing to elect ex-Governor Allen, now a refugee traitor in Mexico, to gubernatorial honors, on the ground that he is endeared to the people because of his services rendered in the cause of the rebellion. In North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, unpardoned Rebels are running for Congress, boasting that they are still unpardoned and do not intend to change. We are sorry to see this state of things, but it is just what we predicted from the start. The war was closed out two years too soon. * * The mild and benignant policy of the President has been abused; is not at all appreciated by Rebel leaders, but is insultingly demanded as their right! These Southern Rebels have their fate in their own keeping, and they are nursing their wrath to keep it warm. We feel confident that the President will not yield any more ground to them, if indeed he does not withdraw from them what he has conceded.”
On many accounts East Tennessee offers peculiar advantages to the poorer classes of Northern emigrants, who wish to avail themselves of the cheap prices of lands in the South. There are few large planters; small farms are easily purchased; the community is made up of men not ashamed to labor for themselves, and not disposed to sneer at the emigrant who fences his own fields and does his own plowing. Lands about Knoxville commanded high prices—fifty dollars per acre and upwards—but through the greater part of the country they could be bought, in November, at prices ranging from two to ten dollars. The soil is a rich, dark limestone, producing good crops of corn, oats, wheat, hay and potatoes. Much of the country is admirably adapted for grazing; and horses, mules, sheep, cattle, and hogs are reared in great abundance. The climate is delightful. Water-power is abundant; iron and coal are found in almost every county; copper, zinc, lead, and the famous Tennessee marble also abound. Give East Tennessee her long-sought railroad connection with Cincinnati and the North, and the emigration thither from all the over-crowded localities of the Middle States can not fail to be very large.
[51]. I have said nothing concerning these poor whites, which is not mildness itself compared with the descriptions of other travelers. Here is one of the latest, from the very intelligent Southern correspondent of the Boston Advertiser, Mr. Sidney Andrews. Fortunately the classes he describes are confined, almost exclusively, to the south-eastern States:
“Whether the North Carolina ‘dirt-eater,’ or the South Carolina ‘sand-hiller,’ or the Georgia ‘cracker,’ is lowest in the scale of human existence, would be difficult to say. The ordinary plantation negro seemed to me, when I first saw him in any numbers, at the very bottom of not only probabilities but also possibilities, so far as they affect human relations; but these specimens of the white race must be credited with having reached a yet lower depth of squalid and beastly wretchedness. However poor or ignorant, or unclean, or improvident he may be, I never yet found a negro who had not at least a vague desire for a better condition, an undefined longing for something called freedom, a shrewd instinct of self-preservation. These three ideas—or, let me say, shadows of ideas—do not make the creature a man, but they light him out of the bounds of brutedom. The Georgia ‘cracker,’ as I have seen him since leaving Milledgeville, seems to me to lack not only all that the negro does, but also even the desire for a better condition, and the vague longing for an enlargement of his liberties and his rights. I walked out into the country, back of Albany and Andersonville, when at those places, and into the country back of Fort Valley this morning; and, on each occasion, I fell in with three or four of these ‘cracker’ families. Such filthy poverty, such foul ignorance, such idiotic imbecility, such bestial instincts, such groveling desires, such mean longings; you would question my veracity as a man if I were to paint the pictures I have seen! Moreover, no trick of words can make plain the scene in and around one of these habitations; no fertility of language can embody the simple facts for a Northern mind; and the case is one in which even seeing itself is scarcely believing. Time and effort will lead the negro up to intelligent manhood, but I almost doubt if it will be possible to ever lift this ‘white trash’ into respectability.”
CHAPTER XXXV.
Atlanta—Georgia Phases of Rebel and Union Talk.
From Knoxville I went direct to Atlanta, Georgia, the key of the great campaigns in the West, the memorable surrender of which re-elected President Lincoln, and proved the beginning of the end.
The city was adapting itself, with remarkable rapidity, to the new order of things. “Sherman, his mark,” was still written too plainly to be soon effaced, in gaping windows and roofless houses, heaps of ruins on the principal corners and traces of unsparing destruction everywhere. The burnt district of Richmond was hardly more thoroughly destroyed than the central part of Atlanta; yet, with all the advantages of proximity to the North, abundant capital, and an influx of business and money from above the Potomac, Richmond was not half so far rebuilt as Atlanta. What is more remarkable, the men who were bringing a city out of this desert of shattered brick—raising warehouses from ruins, and hastily establishing stores in houses half finished and unroofed—were not Yankees, but pure Southerners. These people were taking lessons from Chicago, and deserved to have, as they then seemed likely to have, the foremost of the interior cities of the Gulf States.