Chapter XI: The Privations of a Citizen

On reaching home we found change written upon everything. During our four years and three months’ absence the city government was in control of aliens or carpetbaggers who ground out checks and bonds with a lavish hand. After paying my last fifty cents for dinner at the Commercial Hotel, I borrowed five cents from a friend, and proceeded across the ferry, which was just above the Louisville and Nashville Railroad bridge. I trudged along the White’s Creek pike and finally stopped and tried to locate myself. When I left home, the whole country around Edgefield was a vast forest of large poplars, sweet-gum, hackberry, hickory, and walnut. There never was a country that produced such fine and diversified timber as this. It was all gone, and the stumps dug up. I looked for the old homestead, and found a dilapidated house that resembled it; the weatherboarding had been stripped off for some distance, and not a piece of fence was in sight. The trees my mother planted in 1845, the year before she died, were all gone. I walked near the old house, where some mulatto children were playing on the porch. I stopped to look at them, but could not recognize them. Presently a white woman came out on the porch, and I said, “Who are you?” She replied, “I am Jim’s wife.” I saw at once that she was a Northern woman. The “Jim” she had reference to was one of my former faithful slaves. As soon as I got one dollar and twenty-five cents, I went before Mr. R. McPhail Smith and took the amnesty oath, and Jim and his wife had to vamoose the ranch. I trudged along for four miles farther to the home of Judge Whitworth, on the Brick Church turnpike, which I reached early in the evening. The family were all glad to see me; and after supper, feeling very tired, I went to the office room to bed, but could not sleep. Man is a creature of habit, and I had been so used to sleeping on a hard surface that I got up, took a quilt, and slept well in the front yard under the apple trees. James, George, and Leonard followed me, and it was nearly a month before I got used to a bed.

After helping on the farm for a month I came to the city and went to work for the Express Company. No one who had participated in the war on the Southern side could vote. In order to vote, a man had to subscribe to an oath that he had not aided, abetted, or sympathized with secession. Of course that disfranchised nearly all of the whites, and no one could vote save carpetbaggers and the colored population. Those who had real estate at that time, in addition to the city, county, and state tax, had a special tax to pay on the Edgefield and Kentucky and the Tennessee and Pacific Railway. So we had taxation without representation. The city was in the hands of a military post and metropolitan police; the railroads were United States military roads, and were managed by superintendents. It took nearly the entire police force to look after the lawless soldiers, who would rob and in some instances murder inoffensive citizens. We had no law or order; everything was in a chaotic state. In the meantime the Kuklux Klan and Palefaces were a law unto themselves. The object of the Kuklux Klan was a laudable one. It was to intimidate the evil doer and to protect the weak against the strong. No one knew who the Grand Cyclops was unless he recognized his voice in the giving of the oath, as it was administered in a deep guttural voice, and with hoodwink. The Palefaces were auxiliaries of the Kuklux, and were composed of young men who were too young to go in the war of 1861. Any Kuklux could join the Palefaces. Their mode of initiation was quite tragic. A large tent was in the hall room, and a sentinel paced to and fro; near by was a gallows, and before the initiate was to be hanged there was a terrible scuffling and firing of pistols. This was done to try the mettle of the young candidate. The Kuklux ceremony was quite tame compared with that of the Palefaces. The Kuklux Klan were supposed to have been tried by the fires of battle, and no other kind of firing was required in their initiation. I recollect five meeting places: in the powder magazine of Fort Negley; Masonic Temple; under the Olympic Theater; a store on Market Street; and over Evans, Fite, Porter, and Company’s store. Those serving as Grand Cyclops were Player Martin, E. R. Richardson, Frank Anderson, Captain John W. Morton; and Judge J. H. Hales, of the Palefaces. There were about four thousand of the Kuklux and Palefaces in the city and county. Each Klan had a Grand Cyclops, but many of their names I have forgotten. I never heard of a large procession of Kuklux riding through our city intimidating the metropolitan police. There were some eighteen in the squad, and they were not trying to intimidate the police. On the other hand, I have always thought that the Kuklux Klan were auxiliaries to the police in suppressing crime. Columbia and Pulaski would sometimes have a horseback procession of one hundred and fifty or two hundred horsemen, the men all heavily gowned and the horses’ hoofs muffled; and they presented quite a weird troop as they noiselessly marched through the towns, which would strike awe to the evil doers. It was not done especially to intimidate the blacks, but whites as well, if guilty of wrongdoing. The blacks who behaved themselves had the best of friends in the Kuklux Klan. I never heard of but two deeds of violence in our community during the existence of the Klan. One was that of a white man who was mistreating his wife. The Klan to which Captain P. M. Griffin belonged took the man out, gave him a good whipping, and sent him home. The man afterwards always behaved himself, and I think he died a good citizen. The Klans were located in all parts of the city and country, and kept up with their neighbors’ doings. When a man was doing wrong a note saying “Beware,” and signed “Kuklux Klan,” was enough. The fellow’s guilty conscience would say, “I am the man,” and thus a reformation in his conduct would take place. So I have always maintained that the Klans were great conservators of law and order. The next deed of violence was the case of Mr. Barmore, of Indianapolis. It was said that Governor Brownlow had offered a large reward to any one who would ferret out the Klan, and Mr. Barmore came to Nashville. He soon called at the Express office for a package, and I asked for identification, and he brought in Mr. Sparling, who was at that time agent for the Knickerbocker Life Insurance Company. Mr. Barmore would have attracted attention anywhere. He was a man of fine physique, and dressed very conspicuously for a detective. He wore a fur cap, velvet jacket and trousers, high-top patent leather boots with trousers stuffed in boot-legs, and carried under his arm a large silver-mounted cane. After his first introduction he frequently called at the office for packages, and talked with me, but never mentioned the Kuklux Klan, although he knew that I had been in the Confederate army. One day he went to Columbia, and the Klan gave him a mock and asked him not to come to that section any more. A few weeks later he was in Pulaski, but did not get any information, and left on the train for Nashville. The Pulaski Klan wired Columbia: “Barmore is on the train.” Four men in Columbia bought tickets to Godwin, and took seats near Barmore. I think Pitts Brown was the conductor. Just before Duck River bridge was reached one of the men pulled the bell cord and said to Barmore: “We want you.” They carried him below the turnpike bridge, put a rope around his neck, and, notwithstanding his plea for mercy, they deposited his body in Duck River.

In 1870 our franchise was restored while D. W. C. Senter was Governor, and the Kuklux Klan was disbanded forever.

Another great privation, and I shall have finished. On December 4, 1868, I was returning home from Cincinnati on the steamer _United States_. It was a cold, stormy night, and there were thirty barrels of coal oil on the bow. At 11:20 the _America_ collided with our steamer, knocking a large hole in the bow, igniting the coal oil, and the vessel commenced to burn and sink at the same time. We had a large passenger list, one hundred and thirty of whom were lost. As soon as I felt the shock of the collision I rushed up to the hurricane roof to see what had struck our boat. I saw the _America_ standing out between us and the shore, and there was no sign of fire about her except the lights from the cabin. From the light of our fire I read her name distinctly. I ran at once to the ladies’ cabin and said to James W. McFerrin and wife: “Get out on the guards quick; the _America_ will save us.” I then hurried back to my stateroom, which was near the office, to get my watch and money. When I came out of my room, the vessel was afire from stem to stern, and on account of the dense coal oil smoke I came near suffocating, and had to crawl some one hundred and fifty feet to the ladies’ cabin, where all was in great confusion. Mothers were calling for husbands and children, husbands shrieking for wives and children. In all my privations in life I have never witnessed such a heartrending scene, and I was powerless to aid any one. When I reached the outer guard, aft of the wheel-house and near where I left Mr. McFerrin and wife, the bow of the _America_ was passing by, and the fire was nearly to the top of her chimneys. I started to jump on the stageplank space, but all around were burning piles of baled hay. As soon as her bow passed I took a plunge, and went down, I suppose, about twelve feet; and when I struck the bottom, I shot up like a rocket, and struck out for the shore, which I soon reached. But I got very cold when a few feet up the bank, and could go no farther. I had on nothing but my underclothes, and but for a flatboatman who carried me on his back about two hundred yards to the burning _America_, I believe I would have succumbed to the cold. On my berth that night was my Baltimore overcoat, which I had worn in General Lee’s army and had sent to relatives in Virginia before the Wilderness campaign. My relatives had forwarded it to me at Nashville in the fall of 1865, and it was lost in that terrible holocaust; but I was glad to get out.

I was sick for quite a while after the wreck, and the doctor said that one of my lungs was involved; but I said, “Doctor, I am too young a man to give up so early;” and I have been leading an active life to this date (December 3, 1906).