The South
by John Townsend Trowbridge
(Unabridged facsimile edition from Mercer University Press, Macon, 2006; edited by J.H. Segars)
The South: A Tour of Its Battlefields and Ruined Cities, A Journey Through the Desolated States and Talks with the People;
Being a Description of the Present State of the Country--Its Agriculture--Railroads--Business and Finances--
Giving an Account of Confederate Misrule, and of the Sufferings Necessities and Mistakes, Political Views, Social Conditions and Prospects, Of the Aristocracy, Middle Class, Poor Whites and Negroes.
Including Visits to Patriot Graves and Rebel Prisons--
And Embracing Special Notes on the Free Labor System--Education and Moral Elevation of the Freedmen--
Also, on Plans of Reconstruction and Inducements to Emigration.
From Personal Observations and Experience During Months of Southern Travel.
By J.T. Trowbridge
1867
Ever read bits of the Domesday Book? (Hint: Pronounce it "doomsday.") William the Conqueror had his new kingdom surveyed around the year 1070, you'll recall, as an aid to efficient taxation. Late in the year 1865, journalist John Trowbridge was commissioned to survey the recently devastated South, not so a king could read his findings but so that a sovereign public in the North could.
It turns out that 800 years makes some difference, but not as much as you might think. Domesday clerks described both the wealth of each manor and its resources "before," that is, before the Norman regime took over. Resources meant land under the plow, fish catches, rents, duties and taxes, forests and such. (Forests being measured not in acres or board-feet, but in the number of pigs they supported.) In his 1865-66 travels, Trowbridge also collected statistics to describe changes of fortune. West Tennessee shipped so many bales of cotton before the Civil War and an eighth as many in 1865; rice crops in South Carolina dropped from so many tierces "before" to a drastically smaller number; eastern Virginia's iron and steel industry, lively "before," just about ceased to exist by war's end.
But The South, etc. is not a bluebook; it's a combination of economic survey, travelogue, amateur sociological study, military history and political forecast. The writer, a noted New England man of letters, spent many months on his research and produced a work that's unique in three ways: where Trowbridge went, who he interviewed, and above all when he made his tour.
The guy didn't just visit most every Confederate state east of the Mississippi, he went into the back country as well as the capitals. He traveled by train and stagecoach, on horseback and farm wagons, in fine carriages and on foot. He saw and, in a few cases, shared the privations of rural and urban folks, white and black. (In a masterly bit of reportorial economy, he sets his observations of ruined small farmers next to the laments of former slave owners who now have to comb their own hair. No comment required.) He listened to anybody who'd talk to him, and the most amazing variety of people did: one-armed rebel soldiers, ladies reduced to keeping bed-and-breakfasts, skilled workers and unskilled hands now set free, big and small planters, layabouts, "Union men" who had to keep their sentiments to themselves in wartime, legislators, farmers who were poor "before" and still are. The only constant seems to be that wherever he finds a general (a host of U.S. officers became administrators of the Freedmen's Bureau), he gives us a press release. All the other people talk like human beings, though.
Some of their voices are right familiar, by the way. A Virginian complains that soldiers from North Carolina said "you'uns"--a pronoun my East Tennessee grandparents used. Trowbridge quotes at length and makes an honest effort to represent the dialects he hears, though he frankly throws up his hands when faced with a group of Gullah-speaking former slaves. He has a pretty good ear: You really can tell the Carolinians and the Mississipians apart. I was struck again and again by the author's ability to pass as a Southerner--he reports that people who professed to abhor Yankees were shocked when he revealed himself as one.
But really nothing else about The South, etc. is as telling as the date. Trowbridge traveled the conquered lands when memories were fresh, when woods mown down by gunfire hadn't grown back, when former slaves were still exploring a new world. And in hindsight, when Northern radicals had not created the system of Reconstruction that lasted till 1877. People in the Southern states, for example, are agitated by the question of "negro suffrage." (Some of them against it but resigned, others against it and defiant, a bare few--including the author--in favor of it eventually, when "the negro" has advanced a few more steps toward full citizenship.) No one in the South and almost no one anywhere else could know that the suffrage question would be resolved all at once . . . then re-resolved after Reconstruction . . . then gradually adjusted during Jim Crow times . . . then re-re-resolved in the 1960s and beyond. A modern reader can't help putting the events of 1865-66 into some context formed by processes that weren't yet apparent: economic and political gains of African-Americans, the almost total reversal of those gains, the beginning of real absorption of the South into the Union as Jim Crow and the Spanish-American War unified the nation, and very slow changes in the national consensus about civil rights. Nothing that Trowbridge reported in 1866 was still true in 1876, but everything that he reported did lead, in the long run, to something that's familiar to Americans today.
This is why you should read the book. The author thought he knew what had gone wrong, and how it had been finally put right. He was dead wrong, but his 590-page snapshot of the South is valuable the way every snapshot is: It presents a fact about a moment, prompts the memory and leads on to other stories.
By the way, Trowbridge's use of two words is bothersome. The first is "nigger," of course, not only quoted in Southerners' speech but also used by the author himself. Nothing to be done about this one, but a note on the second may help. It's "emigration." Some diehards did emigrate, for example from Alabama to Brazil, but that's not what the author is concerned about. He means emigration from Ohio and Connecticut to the region of low land prices and low labor costs. In other words, what a Southerner calls immigration.
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The South