FEBRUARY 4, 1864:
A
reporter for the
Boston Traveler reports on “The
Desolation in Tennessee”:
An enterprising adventurer, who has been on a tour in
Tennessee of an extensive and somewhat dangerous character, on his return to
Murfreesboro, writes,under date of Jan. 30, as follows:
‘In years gone, and not long ago, Tennessee was a paradise.
Peace and plenty smiled; law and order reigned. How is it now? After a week's
journey, I sit me down to paint you a picture of what I have seen. To the East
and to the West, to the North, and to the south, the sights are saddening,
sickening. Government mules and horses are occupying the homes—aye, the
palaces—in which her chivalric sons so often slumbered.
The monuments of her taste, the evidences of her art,
characteristics of her people, are being blotted from existence. Her churches
are being turned into houses of prostitution, her seminaries shelter the sick
and sore, whose griefs and groans reverberate where once the flower of our
youth were wont to breathe poetic passions and dance to the music of their
summer's sun. Her cities, her towns and her villages are draped in mourning.
Even the country, ever and always so much nearer God and nature than these,
wear the black pall. Go from Memphis to Chattanooga, and it is like the march
from Moscow in olden time.
The State capitol, like the Kremlin, alone remains of her
former glory and greatness. Let this point (Murfreesboro) be the centre, and
then make a circumference of thirty miles with me, and we will stay "a
week in the womb of desolation." Whether you go on the Selma, the Shelbyville,
the Manchester, or any other pike, for a distance of thirty miles either way,
what do we behold? One wide, wild and dreary waste, so to speak.
The fences are all burned down; the apple, the pear and the
plum trees burned in ashes long ago, the torch applied to thousands of splendid
mansions, the walls of which alone remain, and even this is seldom so, and where
it is, their smooth plaster is covered with vulgar epithets and immoral
diatribes. John Smith and Jo Doe, Federate and Confederate warriors, have left
jack knife stereotyping on the doors and casings, where these, in their
fewness, are preserved. The rickets and the railings—where are they?
Where are the rose bushes and the violets? But above all,
and beyond all, and dearer and more than all else—where, or where, are the once
happy and contented people fled who lived and breathed and had their being
here? Where are the rosy cheeked cherubs and blue eyed maidens gone? Where are
the gallant young men? Where are all—where are any of them?
But where are they gone—this once happy and contented
people? The young men are sleeping in their graves at Shiloh, at Corinth, at
Fort Donelson, and other fields of so-called glory. The young women have died
of grief or are brokenhearted; the children are orphans. Poor little things, I
pity them from my heart as look at them—black and white—for they seem to have
shared a common fate, and like dying in a common destiny. Their lives—I mean
the master and slave, and their offspring—seem to have been inseparably
blended. In many cases I found two or three white children, whose parents were
dead, left to the mercies of the faithful slaves; and again, I have seen a
large number of little negro children, whose parents were likewise dead,
nestled in the bosom of some white families, who, by a miracle, were saved from
the vandalism of war.’
Of the more than 10,000 battles of the
Civil War, 1,200 were fought in Tennessee.
