The South (1866)An illustration from John Townsend Trowbridge’s “The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities”
Travel accounts from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War illuminate social, economic, and political conditions in the former Confederacy. Among the best are John Richard Dennett’s The South As It Is: 1865–1866, Sidney Andrews’ The South Since the War, and Whitelaw Reid’s After the War: A Tour of the Southern States, 1865–1866. A fourth writer, novelist John T. Trowbridge, visited eight states in 1865–1866 and published The South: A Tour of Its Battle-Fields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States, and Talks with the People (1866; abridged in 1956 by Gordon Carroll as The Desolate South, 1865–1866: A Picture of the Battlefields and of the Devastated Confederacy). Trowbridge described the war’s impact on the natural and built environment, devoted significant attention to racial attitudes and tensions, and captured the volatility of early Reconstruction.
Trowbridge was nearly 40 when he set out from Boston to form “correct impressions of the country, of its inhabitants, of the great contest of arms just closed, and of the still greater contest of principles not yet terminated.” He reached his conclusions by “conversing with all sorts of people from high state officials to ‘low-down’ whites and Negroes.” Whenever possible in his text, he “stepped aside and let the people speak for themselves.” Trowbridge’s account might offend some modern readers who struggle with history’s sharp edges. He frequently quoted crude racial epithets and other harsh language and, although the author of an antislavery novel titled Neighbor Jackwood (1857), he shared some common stereotypes about African Americans. Still, he pronounced the leading black men in the region “far better prepared to have a hand in making the laws by which they are to be governed than the whites are to make those laws for them.”
The book includes memorable impressions of famous battle sites. Trowbridge visited the ground where Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee first collided in May 1864 and found it littered with the detritus of two armies. “Canteens, fragments of shells, straps, buckles, cartridge boxes, socks, old shoes, rotting letters,” he wrote, “… all these signs, and others sadder still, remained to tell their silent story of the great fight of the Wilderness.” A crude Union cemetery occupied “a little clearing surrounded by a picket fence and comprising seventy trenches, each containing the remains of I know not how many dead.” Headboards at one end of each trench read: “Unknown United States soldiers, killed May, 1864.”
Union burial parties had included no Rebels in the little plot, prompting an angry reaction among local inhabitants. “As a grim sarcasm on this neglect,” wrote Trowbridge, “somebody had flung three human skulls over the paling into the cemetery, where they lay blanching among the graves.” Just outside the fence were several Confederate graves, each of them “shallow, and the settling of the earth over the bodies had left the feet of one of the poor fellows sticking out.”
FindAGraveJohn Townsend Trowbridge
Trowbridge noted simmering tensions between former Confederates and white unionists but described antipathy toward African Americans that transcended wartime political divisions. “East Tennesseeans,” he wrote bluntly, “though opposed to slavery and secession, do not like Negroes.” Although pro-secession slaveholders had been “a bitter and violent minority” in this part of the state, there was “more prejudice against color among the middle and poorer classes—the ‘Union’ men of the South, who owned few or no slaves—than among planters who owned them by scores and hundreds.” While in Tennessee, Trowbridge observed Freedmen’s Bureau courts in session. “They are in reality military courts,” he noted, “and the law by which they are governed is martial law. I found them particularly efficient in Tennessee.”
Antagonism toward the North emerged from discussions with former Rebels in all the states, but only in South Carolina did Trowbridge encounter “gross personal insults on account of my Northern origin.” During a train ride near Columbia, a fellow passenger wished all Yankee journalists “was killed off.” This angry man charged that unwelcome visitors such as Trowbridge created a false portrait of the South where every black person “is in danger of being killed, and every white man is disloyal.”
Trowbridge repeatedly described attitudes and conditions that would frustrate the process of Reconstruction. In Mississippi, he mentioned an “unrelenting spirit of persecution, shown towards Union men” as well as “great opposition to the freedmen’s schools.” The specter of racial violence kept former Confederates on edge. But although many white people appeared apprehensive “on the subject of Negro insurrections,” Trowbridge dismissed most of what he heard about the topic as “mere cant.” “There was not, while I was in the South,” he asserted, “the slightest danger from a rising of the blacks, nor will there be, unless they are driven to desperation by wrongs.”
Passages dealing with monuments will seem current to modern readers. On the battlefield of Second Bull Run, Trowbridge commented about an early memorial to Union troops: “At the summit of the field stands another monument, dedicated to the ‘Memory of the Patriots who fell at Groveton, August 28th, 29th, and 30th, 1862.’” The inscription “had been mutilated by some Rebel hand and made to read ‘Confederate Patriots.’” A friend accompanying Trowbridge “stepped upon the pedestal … and ground the offensive word out of the tablet.” Similarly, at Vicksburg a “neat granite shaft, erected by private subscription among officers and soldiers of the National Army” had been defaced. The inscription read: “Site of / Interview Between / Major-General Grant, U.S.A., / And / Lieutenant-General Pemberton, / July 4, 1863.” “Not a syllable is there to wound the sensibilities of a fallen foe,” wrote an angry Trowbridge. “Yet, since the close of the war,” he continued, “when returning Confederates first obtained access to this monument, it had been shamefully mutilated.” An eagle and shield above the inscription had been obliterated, which proved “that no mere relic hunters had been here, but that the mischief had been done by some enemy’s hand.”
Trowbridge closed with a mixed message concerning the region’s future. He believed the White South had no stomach for renewed warfare, but of “unarmed rebellion, of continued sectional strife, stirred up by Southern politicians, there exists very great danger.” The goal would be “to obtain the exclusive control of the freedmen and to make such laws for them as shall embody the prejudices of the late slave-holding society….” In this prediction, Trowbridge proved sadly prescient.
Gary W. Gallagher has published widely on the era of the Civil War, including several articles in The Civil War Monitor.
