A Year in the South (15 page)

Few who had known him only in his earlier days would have recognized him now. Just three years ago, this serious young man had been a hell-raiser of a boy, rowdy, eager for military adventure, and burning with vengefulness toward his unionist enemies. All that was behind him now. Even his physical appearance had changed strikingly since then, transfigured by the hardships of camp life, combat, hospital, and prison. When he last visited his home in Greene County, his parents had barely recognized him.
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So sober and earnest and weathered was he now that it was easy to forget how young he was. As spring began, he was not yet nineteen. But he himself was painfully aware of his age, and sometimes he felt inadequate for the work he was undertaking. One evening, as the family gathered for their daily worship, Uncle Allen asked him to read the Bible passage. John, who had never been called on before, flushed with embarrassment and proceeded to read with trembling lips: “I could scar[c]ely utter a word distinctly,” he recalled. This awkward moment was nothing, however, compared to the near-panic he experienced when the Reverend Payne singled him out to lead a prayer in church one Sunday. That he was able on this occasion to do his duty—albeit with a good deal of stumbling—he ascribed to divine intervention.
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As painful as these and other such incidents were, John was “determined not to falter in anything required of me,” and he never declined a request. “Thus by degrees, battling against my embarrassment, I overcame my timidity.”
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While John prepared, Uncle Allen plowed and planted. His son Jacob, who was nearly seventeen, labored alongside him in the fields. With only the two of them working it, the little farm would not produce much, but what it yielded sufficed for the family, which numbered nine including John. Uncle Allen's household had never known affluence; he and Mary and the children lived plainly and were content to do so.
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The other farmers in the community likewise busied themselves in the fields as the spring planting season began. Roane County was one of the quieter places in east Tennessee at this time, for which the inhabitants were profoundly grateful. Some other parts of the region were so ravaged by destruction and violence that normal life was impossible: farmers had given up trying to plants crops, churches and schools and courthouses were closed, and people were afraid to leave their homes.
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Roane was not wholly insulated from danger, however. The small garrisons of Yankee troops stationed at a few points in and around the county were hardly enough to secure order at all times in every community. Now and then the quiet was shattered by a rebel cavalry raid, a guerrilla ambush, or some other frightening reminder that this region was still at war—and still at war with itself.
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In the early days of March the county was buzzing with news of a bizarre Confederate operation that had come to an abrupt end on the bank of the Tennessee River not many miles from Uncle Allen's farm. A small band of rebel soldiers and sailors had been captured, along with their thirty-foot boat, as they were secretly making their way downriver. The boat was loaded with hand grenades, underwater mines, and incendiary devices made with turpentine-soaked cotton.
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A diary found on one of the men revealed some of their plan and Union army authorities learned more from interrogating the prisoners. The story that emerged was astonishing and, to many, alarming. The operation had begun weeks earlier in Richmond, Virginia, where Confederate military officials assembled a clandestine strike force of a dozen officers and men from both the army and the navy. They were supplied with provisions, munitions, and a boat, and then transported by rail and wagon to the southwest corner of Virginia. On February 4 they loaded the boat and set out down the Holston River, which flows southwest and eventually joins another river to form the Tennessee. When they passed beyond the picket lines of the Confederate army in northeastern Tennessee and into Union-held territory, they muffled their oars and began traveling at night only, hiding during the day in brush along the banks. Narrowly avoiding detection as they floated past the large Yankee garrison at Knoxville, they reached Loudon on February 24. Here their luck began to run out. A black man spotted them while they were ashore during daylight and led Yankee troops to their location. Two of the raiders were taken prisoner. The rest got away in the boat, only to be sighted two days later near Kingston and subsequently captured by a hastily assembled posse of unionist citizens, who turned them over to the federal army.
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The purpose of this operation, it was revealed, was disruption and sabotage. The raiders' orders were to begin destroying steamboats once they were past Kingston, and to continue doing so all the way down to Chattanooga, where they were then to set fire to the large complex of Union army depots, boatyards, warehouses, and sawmills that lay along the river.
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That the mission failed was a relief to the federal authorities, but they remained uneasy about its implications. By itself, it could not have amounted to anything more than an annoyance to the Union occupation forces in east Tennessee, in no way threatening their control of the region. It seemed likely, therefore, that it was part of some larger plan.
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One possibility—hinted at by the prisoners under questioning—was that the raid was intended to prepare the way for Robert E. Lee's army. Lee was under heavy pressure from Ulysses S. Grant's forces, and there was speculation that Lee might abandon Richmond and Petersburg, retreat into the Appalachian mountains, and head south, perhaps to Georgia. There he might fight on indefinitely.
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Newspapers in Knoxville and Chattanooga published detailed reports about the captured river raiders, sparking consternation among unionists. If Lee's army marched into east Tennessee and drove the Yankees out, the region's secessionists might be inspired to rise up against the unionist majority. Many were undoubtedly thirsting for vengeance, for in the year and a half that they had now spent under Yankee rule, they had experienced increasingly harsh treatment. Federal commanders in the region who endorsed the hard-war policy toward rebel civilians advocated by General William T. Sherman had joined hands with unionists who had suffered under Confederate rule and now demanded an eye for an eye; together they were making life miserable for secessionists. Those who flaunted their Confederate patriotism were imprisoned or banished to rebel-held territory, their homes and other property confiscated or destroyed. Even those who resisted only passively, by refusing to take the U.S. oath of allegiance, suffered penalties: they were forbidden to enter a garrisoned town or buy goods from a merchant, and their farms were routinely stripped by Yankee foragers. The secessionists' retaliatory guerrilla warfare only provoked the Yankees and unionists to come down harder, further embittering the secessionists. Suspected guerrillas were summarily shot or hanged. Where the guerrillas proved elusive, citizens believed to have aided them were arrested and held as hostages.
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John Robertson had managed to stay clear of this spiraling cycle of retribution ever since the Yankees invaded east Tennessee. He had done so by taking the U.S. oath and thereafter keeping quiet about his political sentiments, which remained secessionist, and by declining to retaliate when unionists harassed him about his Confederate army service and drove him from his teaching job, and also by exiling himself from Greene County, where as a rebel home guardsman he had made many enemies. He was not one of those who now yearned for revenge. He wanted only to be left alone to follow his chosen path.
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That he wanted to be left alone by those contending for control of this troubled region did not mean that he desired to follow his path alone. More and more these days, he was thinking of taking a partner. Like any other young man, he expected to marry and raise a family, and during the past few years he had flirted with many young women and called on a few. But none had seemed the perfect romantic and spiritual mate he believed a man must seek; and besides, until he found his true course in life, he had deemed himself too callow for marriage. Now, however, he thought he might be worthy enough to be some good woman's husband. He thought, too, that he had found the one God intended for him.
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Her name was Margaret Tennessee Robertson—Tennie, he called her, although to everyone else she was Maggie. She was a distant cousin of his and the same age as he, and she lived on her mother's farm not far from Uncle Allen's. John had met her the very day he arrived in Roane County back in October, and within weeks he had fallen deeply in love with her.
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She was riding alone on horseback the first time he saw her, as he was walking along the road trying to find his way to Uncle Allen's. She was neatly dressed, wore a bonnet, and had strikingly blue eyes. He asked for directions, and as she spoke he found himself drawn to her. “[T]here was something there not common in the fairer sex.” He wanted to know her name but thought it would seem presumptuous to ask. She surprised him by asking if he was John Robertson—she had learned from neighborhood gossip that he was coming to live with Uncle Allen. She introduced herself and told him they were kin.
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He saw her again not long after that, on a Sunday morning at Blue Springs Church, and they talked again. Soon he began calling on her. They found that they had much in common besides their age and family connection. Politics for one thing: her family were secessionists, and her older brother was a lieutenant in the Confederate army. This was welcome news to John, for he would never court a “Lincolnite.” Their backgrounds were similar, too. Although her father, who had died some years earlier, was a physician, the family had always lived in modest circumstances. They had a small farm, which her mother now operated with hired labor, and they owned just one horse and had never held slaves. Tennie was, moreover, a devout Christian who sought and found salvation at the same time as John. He was present when she experienced conversion at a revival meeting one night in February. When he told her of his decision to become a minister, she praised and encouraged him.
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For some reason Uncle Allen and his family disliked her, and they tried to dissuade John from seeing her. Perhaps it was related to some old family feud. In any event, John ignored their comments and began spending a lot of time at Tennie's house. Her mother made him welcome and graciously gave them time alone. As the weather warmed, they spent many hours sitting on the front porch, in the shade of the small grove of cedars where the house stood. Sometimes they gathered bouquets in the garden or walked together through the wooded countryside. Their favorite path was one that ran between an old, abandoned log cabin and a spring.
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There were never any awkward silences between them, for both were the talkative, sociable sort and they enjoyed each other's company. John was impressed by her intelligence—she was “more than my equal” in that regard, he thought—but it was her “mild and gentle manner” and “true warm heart” that touched him most. “As for beauty,” he decided, “she had enough, and of course I thought her han[d]some.”
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She had another regular caller, but gave him no encouragement and made it clear as politely as she could that she preferred John; one time the poor man was left standing forlornly in her parlor while she and John went off to church together. And in other ways, from the “bright smile” with which she always greeted him to the earnest prayers she said for him and the funny made-up games she played with him, she seemed to be trying to make John understand that she cared for him. But she never told him so, and he was so afraid of being rejected that he could not bring himself to declare his love. “Many times I resolved to do so, but when I came in her presence, my heart would fail me.”
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Between his infatuation with Tennie and the pursuit of his calling, John was preoccupied all spring. News of the war's end caused hardly a ripple in the insular little world he now inhabited. Certainly he understood that Lee's surrender in Virginia on April 9 and the subsequent collapse of the Confederacy secured the triumph of the unionists in east Tennessee and ended the secessionists' dream of deliverance and revenge. If he read any newspapers or talked to anyone who had, he probably knew that all the organized Confederate forces in and around the region, along with nearly all the rebel guerrilla bands, laid down their arms by early May.
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At some point in the late spring, however, he must have become aware that the prospect of peace in east Tennessee was not so certain after all. If he talked with any of the surrendered Confederate soldiers, he surely heard stories of the harassment many experienced as they made their way home through the region. Unionists taunted them, threatened them, and even robbed them. Some of the soldiers, fearful of being bushwhacked, returned home by back roads, traveling stealthily and only at night.
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As the defeated rebels returned to their families, so did many of the east Tennesseans who had fought in the Union ranks, and their arrival stoked the region's already heated atmosphere. There were tens of thousands of these men: Roane County alone contributed no fewer than seven companies of infantry and cavalry to the federal army. Some had joined up after the Yankees occupied east Tennessee, but many had done so earlier, following a long and dangerous flight through rebel-patrolled mountains to the Union lines in Kentucky. They had fought the Confederates on the battlefields, and now many of them were coming back determined to exact a price for the persecution they and their families had endured at home under the secessionist regime.
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