When the Yankees Came

Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865

Stephen V. Ash

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780807847954, 9780807822234
• eBook ISBN: 9780807860137
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Southerners whose communities were invaded by the Union army during the Civil War endured a profoundly painful ordeal. For most, the coming of the Yankees was a nightmare become real; for some, it was the answer to a prayer. But as Stephen Ash argues, for all, invasion and occupation were essential parts of the experience of defeat that helped shape the southern postwar mentality.
When the Yankees Came is the first comprehensive study of the occupied South, bringing to light a wealth of new information about the southern home front. Among the intriguing topics Ash explores are guerrilla warfare and other forms of civilian resistance; the evolution of Union occupation policy from leniency to repression; the impact of occupation on families, churches, and local government; and conflicts between southern aristocrats and poor whites. In analyzing these topics, Ash examines events from the perspective not only of southerners but also of the northern invaders, and he shows how the experiences of southerners differed according to their distance from a garrisoned town.

1. Citizens and Soldiers

The First Invasions and Early Occupation Policy

Three weeks after the war began, a worried citizen of northern Virginia warned the state military commander about “the condition of things on this exposed frontier.” Yankee troops were already massing on the border, he claimed, “not regular and disciplined soldiers, but fanatics and lawless ruffians ready for every outrage and violence.” At about the same time, four other northern Virginians raised the alarm. “If devastation and plunder are to form a part of the system of this war, this is certainly an inviting field for it,” they wrote. “This was selected as the theater of John Brown’s raid, and … these Northern troops will be apt to follow [Brown’s] footsteps.”¹

Indeed, tocsins clanged all along the Potomac’s south shore in those first weeks of war, for northern Virginia was the North’s likeliest target. But elsewhere, too, Southerners apprehended imminent danger. Tennesseans and Arkansans, like Virginians, lived on the Confederacy’s northern frontier; they were safe only as long as the North hesitated to send armies through the border states of Kentucky and Missouri. Residents of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts were defenseless against amphibious invasion. People along the Mississippi knew that the river was a highway to their doorsteps.

The fears that gripped the South in the wake of Fort Sumter convulsed the most threatened regions, and the closer the prospect of actual invasion loomed the more frenzied was the public agitation. Repeatedly the specter of the predatory Yankee soldier was invoked. A group of tidewater Virginians, beseeching the Confederate War Department for protection, pointed to their region’s wealth of resources, “all of which, as well as the lives and liberties of our people generally, and the honor of our women, is exposed to the marauding depredations of the enemy.” A resident of Virginia’s isolated eastern shore likewise pleaded for Confederate troops: “Being at war, as we are, with an unrelenting and profligate enemy, the women and children of every locality ought to be assured of some protection.”²

For every admonition about the enemy at the gates, moreover, there was another about the enemy within. “[T]he slave population is becoming restless and discontented,” warned the tidewater Virginians in their letter to the War Department. A woman in the same region begged Virginia’s governor to exempt her son from militia duty; he was one of the few white men left in the neighborhood, she explained, and without him “I would be exposed to the treachery of the blacks, and the cruelty of an invading foe.” Citizens of Loudoun County in northern Virginia asked for Confederate troops not only to protect their rich harvest of corn and wheat, but also to overawe the county’s numerous Unionists. A coastal North Carolinian reported that the most patriotic men in his region had volunteered and gone to the front, leaving “a majority … unsound and unreliable in case of an attack by the enemy.” In tidewater Virginia, a Confederate officer urged quick action to “prevent the possibility of the disaffected element from gaining the ascendency”—an element he identified with poor whites “who have refused to volunteer, and who would undoubtedly join the enemy at the first opportunity.”³

Civil and military authorities in the threatened regions took action. Along the Gulf coast, for example, the alarm was sounded after Union warships and troopships began gathering offshore in December 1861. The following March, at the request of Louisiana’s governor, the Confederacy declared martial law in New Orleans and surrounding parishes. All white males over the age of sixteen were required to register with the provost marshal, and those claiming Confederate citizenship had to take an oath of allegiance; all persons not in sympathy with the Confederacy were to leave “without delay”; citizens were encouraged to report suspected subversives. Fearful of spies, the mayor of New Orleans banned street masking, and Mardi Gras that year was an unusually quiet affair.⁴

On the Gulf coast, and at other points of danger, authorities tightened the screws on the black and white underclass. Restrictions on slaves and free blacks were redoubled, patrols were strengthened, and some slaveowners removed their bondsmen and bondswomen to safer regions. In southeastern Virginia a Confederate officer worried that fishermen along the James River, many of them free blacks, might serve as guides for the Federal army; “I shall order these free negroes to be arrested,” he decided, “… and the fishing skiffs to be destroyed—those of low white men as well as those of the negroes. Some of the whites are as dangerous as the negroes.” In Pensacola, where martial law was in force, the commanding officer took note of “certain hungry, worthless people, white as well as colored, who frequent Pensacola and vicinity and who have no observable occupation.… [T]hey are warned to leave or the consequences must be on their own heads. The gallows is erected at Pensacola and will be in constant use.”⁵

In most of the endangered areas the Confederate army was stretched too thin to repel an invasion in force. Citizens and civil officials therefore took steps to strengthen the militia and recruit local home defense units. In northern Mississippi, for instance, residents organized “independent scouts” and “military home guard” companies whose purpose was “to annoy the enemy” and “not only to watch, to pursue & to [gather] information but to waylay & strike.” In northern Arkansas’s White County, local men banded together informally in 1862 “to fight any enemy that came into the County.”⁶

There were some who scoffed at such precautions, insisting that the Yankee threat was still remote. But their complacency evaporated the moment the Northern armies actually appeared. The approach of the enemy in force ended all doubts about the imminence of danger and evoked the South’s worst fears. “A reckless and unprincipled tyrant has invaded your soil,” Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard told the people of northern Virginia as a Union army moved south from Washington in June 1861. “Abraham Lincoln … has thrown his abolition hosts among you.… All rules of civilized warfare are abandoned, and they proclaim by their acts, if not on their banners, that their war-cry is ‘Beauty and booty.’”⁷

A few weeks later Beauregard and his army met the enemy forces at Manassas and sent them fleeing back to Washington. The reprieve was a brief one, however. By the following spring much of northern Virginia was in Union hands, along with substantial territory elsewhere in the Confederacy, including parts of southeastern Virginia and all of the eastern shore; points along the coasts of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida; southeastern Louisiana along the Mississippi River, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge; middle and western Tennessee, including Nashville and Memphis; and sections of Arkansas, northern Mississippi, and northern Alabama. In some cases Union military occupation followed a climactic battle or maneuver that sent the Rebel army reeling in retreat. Often, especially in the case of coastal incursions, there was simply no substantial Confederate force to oppose the enemy.

Shock, confusion, panic: thus did eyewitnesses describe the scene in every invaded region as word spread that the Yankees were coming and could not be stopped. “There is great Panic in town,” a South Carolinian reported after the Federals landed at nearby Hilton Head in November 1861, “—particularly among the women.” “[E]very one is almost wild with excitement,” wrote a Louisianan upriver from New Orleans just after the city fell; “oh what dreadful news it is.” As Union troops entered Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in early 1862, Kate Sperry in Winchester described the townspeople as “all crazy—perfectly frantic.”⁸

The turmoil in the invaded districts was often aggravated by uncertainty about the enemy’s exact location and intentions. With communications disrupted and facts scarce, rumors flourished. “[H]undreds of reports verry contradictory,” middle Tennessean Nimrod Porter noted in his journal as the Yankees approached in February 1862; “The awful state of affairs, and the greate uncertainty of events, & the suspense is truly almost too much for me to beare.”⁹

The most chaotic scenes were enacted in the cities, for the strategic importance of the cities invited enemy attack and the concentration of people magnified the general hysteria. Nashville, for example, was thrown into utter panic in February 1862 after Fort Donelson fell and the Confederate army began retreating south. News that the Yankees were coming arrived on a Sunday as the citizens were at church. “The congregations … were dismissed,” Nashvillian Louisa Pearl reported, “& people were seen hurrying to & fro like crazy people not knowing what to do.” By nightfall the post office and the newspapers had shut down, and the governor, the state legislators, and the public archives were on a train headed out of town. Over the next few days stores and markets closed, and groceries, coal, and firewood grew scarce. Paper money became worthless and banks were emptied of specie by frantic depositors. Unable to carry off all the commissary and quartermaster stores, Confederate troops threw open government warehouses to the public, and unruly crowds of citizens gathered to help themselves.¹⁰

New Orleans witnessed similar scenes two months later as a Federal fleet steamed up the Mississippi River toward the city. Terror seized the populace, businesses and schools closed, military and civil officials left in haste. Mobs broke into the public warehouses, carried off food, and burned or dumped into the river all they could not take. Another mob entered a government munitions factory and seized guns and ammunition.¹¹

When Confederate troops prepared to pull out, citizens who earlier had welcomed their presence now found reason to deplore it. In such cities as Nashville and New Orleans military authorities grew desperate in their effort to remove war materiel. Feverishly they rounded up and put to work every man and boy they could lay hands on and seized every horse, mule, carriage, wagon, boat, and railroad car they found. Worse yet was the outright destruction of public and private property. Because everything of use to the enemy had to be removed or demolished, Confederate armies in retreat left a trail of ruin. The citizens of New Orleans watched in dismay as thirteen thousand bales of cotton went up in flames along the levee; nearby in the water drifted the burning remains of boats that could not be taken away. Upriver at Baton Rouge the cotton was drenched with the city’s whiskey supply before being set to the torch. Nashvillians lost two fine bridges across the Cumberland River; the people of Fredericksburg, Virginia, lost three across the Rappahannock. In and around Jacksonville, Florida, Confederate soldiers laid waste to sawmills, warehouses, factories, and a railroad station. Most galling of all was the frequent pillaging and wanton vandalism by retreating troops. In Nashville the last remaining soldiers made themselves so obnoxious by drinking and looting that at least one resident was ready to welcome the enemy. “I do hope the Northern army will come & take possession soon,” Louisa Pearl wrote, “or we shall all be in danger. I fear [the Confederates] may take it into their heads to burn us out when they get ready to go.”¹²

Many citizens in the invaded areas decided not to await the enemy’s arrival, but instead to flee. Some began packing and moving out at the first alarm; as the Yankees neared, roads grew clogged with refugees in wagons and carriages or on foot. Steamboats and railroad cars were likewise jammed with frightened men, women, and children carrying bundles of belongings. Witnesses often vividly described the scene. A South Carolinian in Beaufort in November 1861 “found the people under intense excitement, the mass of whom were making preparations to go to some place of safety on the main-land.… I found that the steamer was almost filled with the various and voluminous properties of the citizens, who were eagerly taking advantage of any and every method to get their things away.” Middle Tennessean Nimrod Porter breathlessly recounted the “greate excitement” in his community in February 1862: “people leaving every where for the south.… [O]ure state bank in Columbia packing up for a run off with all the money[.] Thousands people come from Nashville to Columbia a perfect stampead.”¹³

The likeliest persons to flee were leading secessionists, high-ranking Confederate officials, and former Federal officeholders. Such men—be they politicians, judges, civil servants, or other public figures—were generally convinced that their fate at the hands of the enemy would be at least a dungeon cell and possibly a noose. Furthermore, the most zealous and outspoken Confederate loyalists in any community frequently became refugees, too, even if they were people of no particular prominence, either from fear of reprisals or from an especially intense abhorrence of Yankee rule.¹⁴

Aristocrats were also among those most likely to forsake their homes, for several reasons. First of all, they tended to be among the Confederacy’s most fervent champions. And, too, many held conspicuous public positions. Moreover, they had much to lose materially if the invaders turned out to be as rapacious as they were reputed to be. Although fleeing meant abandoning real property, it meant saving a good deal of personal property—especially slaves, but also other valuable, movable possessions such as currency, bonds, jewelry, silverware, and furniture. Furthermore, the aristocrats’ wealth, professional skills, and wide social contacts eased the disruptions of refugee life: planters could obtain land and equipment in the interior and return to farming; professional men could procure a house and office and resume business. In fact, many aristocrats in the exposed regions made plans for evacuation and purchased or rented homes in the interior well before any Yankees appeared.¹⁵

For every Southerner who fled, however, there were many more who decided to stay and face the enemy. One factor in their decision was the hardship and uncertainty of refugee life. Even for those with plentiful resources and good health, the prospect of taking to the road and beginning a new life was daunting. Another factor was the desire to protect property that could not be removed. This was especially common among the yeomen, who had few or no slaves and little other movable property of any great value but who owned farms or shops on which they depended for their living. For most such people, and many wealthier ones as well, fear of losing home and livelihood prevailed over fear of the enemy.¹⁶

Among many who stayed there was a strong suspicion that the Yankees were not really as beastly as they were cracked up to be, or, at least, that they could be dealt with if one could muster the courage to confront them. One explanation for this is that a good number of Southerners had enough personal acquaintance with Northerners to discredit the most exaggerated stereotypes; and, too, since the beginning of the war the Northern government had repeatedly denied any radical or punitive aims. To what extent Southerners may thus have been comforted about the invaders is hard to gauge. But the fact is that many chose not to flee who certainly would have been among the first to go if they really believed every story about the enemy. Many merchants, for example, remained with their wares and many county and municipal officials remained with their records in spite of the Yankees’ alleged penchant for sacking and burning. Substantial numbers of planters remained at home with their slaves despite reports that the Yankees were coming to finish the work John Brown had begun.¹⁷

Especially noteworthy is the fact that women in great numbers declined to flee despite rumors that the Northern soldiers intended to rape their way through the South. Older women, in particular, often manifested no terror of the enemy and seemed confident that they could come to terms with them. In some families, mothers remained at home while daughters were sent into the interior. In many cases husbands and older sons fled, leaving wives and mothers to protect the home, in the belief that the Federals would not dare to mistreat women. It appears, in fact, that on the whole women were less likely than men to become refugees, suggesting that the often-invoked image of the Yankee as rapist was more a propaganda device than a genuine article of popular faith.¹⁸

Just how many Southerners left the invaded regions is hard to judge. The frequent reports of towns and communities wholly or nearly abandoned must be evaluated ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• When the Yankees Came
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue Spring 1861
• 1. Citizens and Soldiers
• 2. Rebels and Conquerors
• 3. Three Worlds
• 4. Deliverance and Disillusion
• 5. To the Red Sea
• 6. The Other Jubilee
• 7. In a Strange Land
• 8. No River of Fire
• Epilogue Summer 1865
• Map Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index