Friday, March 25, 2016

`Now Our Cause Was Lost'

“One of our most difficult tasks was to find a good substitute for coffee. This palatable drink, if not a real necessary of life, is almost indispensable to the enjoyment of a good meal, and some Southerners took it three times a day. Coffee soon rose to thirty dollars per pound; from that it went to sixty and seventy dollars per pound. Good workmen received thirty dollars per day; so it took two days hard labor to buy one pound of coffee, and scarcely any could be had even at that fabulous price.”

The alien becomes familiar with an understanding of the details. Coffee is a medicinal necessity. Life without its curative powers is unimaginable. In A Blockaded Family: Life in Southern Alabama during the Civil War (Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1888), the euphoniously named Parthenia Antoinette Hague (1838-1914) describes domestic life in the Deep South during the Civil War, including the stratagems families used to overcome shortages caused by the Union blockade. She catalogues various unlikely coffee substitutes:

“There were those who planted long rows of the okra plant on the borders of their cotton or corn fields, and cultivated this with the corn and cotton. The seeds of this, when mature, and nicely browned, came nearer in flavor to the real coffee than any other substitute I now remember. Yam potatoes used to be peeled, sliced thin, cut into small squares, dried, and then parched brown; they were thought to be next best to okra for coffee. Browned wheat, meal, and burnt corn made passable beverages; even meal-bran was browned and used for coffee if other substitutes were not obtainable.”

Caffeine is absent from all of these plants, and the flavor of the coffee substitutes must have been uninviting, yet Hague never complains. Three things about her book impress this reader: her documentarian’s eye for detail (she describes the improvised weaving of a hoop skirt on a “common house-loom”), the clarity of her prose and the dignified stoicism of her bearing. Writing more than twenty years after Appomattox, Hague is still longing for the lost antebellum world. Sentiments like this will strain a contemporary reader’s credulity: “We were happy and contented, both master and slave.” Hague describes the care given to an eighteen-year-old slave named Jim when he becomes sick. Her words betray a moral universe beyond the understanding of American readers in the twenty-first century:

“One or the other watched him day and night (for he was a very valuable boy) and gave the medicine. One Saturday during his illness his master had to go to the city for some purpose, and he asked me to help his wife and daughter care for Jim that day, saying, as he stepped into his buggy, `Now be careful of Jim, and see to it that he lacks for nothing; if he dies, I've lost one thousand dollars, good as gold.’ It was nothing uncommon then for able-bodied young negro men to be valued at from one thousand to eighteen hundred dollars. If Jim be living to-day, I know he has not forgotten our giving him his medicine and gruel at the regular hours, heating hot bricks and placing them at his feet as the doctor ordered, nor how I burned my fingers muffling the hot bricks.”

The anecdote reminded me of Eugene Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) in which he observes that “southern paternalism, like every other paternalism, had little to do with Ole Massa’s ostensible benevolence, kindness, and good cheer. It grew out of the necessity to discipline and morally justify a system of exploitation. It did encourage kindness and affection, but it simultaneously encouraged cruelty and hatred.”

The double nature of the slaveholders’ world makes A Blockaded Family a strangely tense and complicated book, despite Hague and her poise. Personally, she is charming, intelligent and companionable. Only her world is an abomination. Here are Hague’s penultimate paragraphs:

“What a change from 1861, when all were so buoyant and full of fiery patriotism, with never a thought of being overcome! Now our cause was lost, all our homes more or less despoiled, the whole South seemingly almost hopelessly ruined, every little town and village garrisoned by the troops who had overcome us by great odds.

“Yet after all our great and sore afflictions, I found only cheerfulness and Christian resignation at the end of these troublous war times, and the hope that we might yet rise above our misfortunes.”

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