The war began in April, 1861.
One month after Fort Sumter. Fourteen years after James, fourteen years of holding the household together after he went, ten children raised and grown and out in the world, the house still standing, the cotton still going to Macon. She had done all of it. She had done it well. MOTHER THOU HAST FILLED THY MISSION HERE read her tombstone in May.
The mourning goods came from Macon within weeks of her death, black bonnets, black silk, velvet ribbon, hoop skirts, the material vocabulary of grief bought and brought home to a house that had just lost its center. The household was dressing for loss in the same weeks Georgia was mobilizing for war. Both things were true at once, and the family moved through both of them the way it had always moved through hard things: without stopping.
I think about her in those last months. Not what she felt, that is not mine to say. But what she knew: that the world James had built was about to be put to a test she would not live to see through, and that the people she was leaving behind would have to find their own way through it. She had held it for fourteen years. What she handed on was sound.
That summer, the men went to war.
Troup had enlisted in June as Sergeant in Company I of the 12th Georgia Infantry, from Lowndes County where he had been living. Abner, Cornelius, and Hugh mustered together on the third of July in Company K of the 11th Infantry, three brothers in the same unit, the same way they had grown up, together, on the same ground, knowing the same people and the same roads between Perry and Macon. James was still at home; his time would come. Robert stayed. Someone had to.
Troup made it as far as Alleghany, Virginia. Disease in those early mountain camps killed more men than the fighting did, and Troup was among the first of them. September 26, 1861. He was thirty-three years old. He had watched his father lay the bricks and raise the columns and make something permanent out of raw ground. He had grown up inside what that effort produced, and then he had left for Lowndes County as a young man, the way the younger ones left when the ground filled in and the world moved further on. He did not come back.
Cornelius came back, but not the way any of them had planned. He had been wounded, discharged from Richmond in May of 1862, the disability on his record where his service record should have continued. He came home to Houston County and went back to work, the way men do when there is no other option and the work is still there waiting. Robert needed him. The plantation needed him. He took up the overseer’s role through the war years, the wound that had ended his soldiering making him available for something the family needed just as badly.
Robert ran the plantation. He had been administering the estate since 1847 and he continued through the war the same way he had always continued, methodically, practically, with the full attention of a man who understood that the estate his father had built was a thing worth preserving and that preservation required work.
The work changed. The plantation had been built on cotton, and cotton required buyers, shipping, the long commercial chain that connected a field in Houston County to markets that wanted the fiber. The war severed that chain. Fifty-one bales had sold in the last full year before the conflict. Eight sold in 1862. The ground shifted to what the Confederacy needed instead: peanuts (ground peas), corn, wheat, rye, lard. Sixteen hundred bushels of corn sold to the Confederate government in a single transaction. The syrup mill that cost two thousand dollars in Confederate currency was an investment in food production, in the practical understanding that a plantation that could feed the army was more valuable to the cause than one that produced a crop with nowhere to go.
They were not on the sidelines of this war. The estate bought Confederate bonds, the new government needed financing the same as any government, and the family put money into it. Salt, which had always been cheap enough to ignore, now cost twenty-five dollars for four bushels, and they bought it because the smokehouse required it. Shoes were made locally when the supply lines from Macon grew uncertain. And when the Confederate government called for men to dig the earthworks around Savannah, the plantation sent servants south to build the fortifications that were supposed to hold the city.
James served as overseer when Cornelius could not, and went to the front when he was called, the estate paying him each time he went. What the women did was hold the household together in the way that women hold households together when the men are elsewhere: the daily decisions, the children, the domestic continuity that does not appear in an estate ledger because it does not transact. Catharine P. went to Macon for supplies. Honora mended. Laura stayed in school as long as school was possible, moving closer to home as the war made distance less reliable, four months at Nancy’s in Gordon the first year, then a tutor she could reach on a morning’s ride.
By the summer of 1864, Sherman had burned Atlanta and turned his army toward the sea.
He had promised to make the South howl, and he was making good on it, a swath of destruction fifty miles wide, moving from Atlanta toward Savannah, living off the land it crossed and leaving little behind. Starvation was his weapon.
In July of 1864, the Macon papers brought news that an advance raiding cavalry was within a few miles of Macon, with the intention of crossing the Ocmulgee at Buzzard Roost. Sixty old men and boys formed up in front of the courthouse in Perry, armed and equipped for a campaign in defense of their homes and country. Their mission: hold the crossing, destroy the flat if necessary. The march through the swamp to the river took most of the night. At the river, the ferryman supplied the intelligence they needed: no Yankees at the Roost. Stoneman had been turned back at Macon on July 30th and later captured.
The old men appeared gratified. The boys felt it was almost disgraceful to return home without having had a fight.
That November, Sherman’s right flank came through Griswoldville about four miles east of Macon and burned what was there: the depot, the factory works where Samuel Griswold had made and repaired cotton gins over the years. When the war came, Confederate pistols were made. The plantation had sent equipment to Griswold for repair and received it back. What Sherman left behind was ash.
A Union soldier who was there wrote about it that night. His brigade of eleven hundred had faced about six thousand men. The Confederates came out of the pine timber in three lines. Old grey haired and weakly looking men and little boys, not over fifteen years old, lay dead or writhing in pain. The soldier wrote that he pitied those boys, nearly all who could talk said the Rebel cavalry had gathered them up and forced them in. Confederate losses: a thousand. Union losses: fourteen.
Four miles past Griswoldville, Nancy’s plantation lay on the army’s path to Savannah.
Sherman’s officers made their headquarters there and left it desolate when the columns moved on. Wilkinson was away with the State Guard cavalry. Nancy was there with her children. Laura was home by then, back across the Ocmulgee.
When the army was gone, the families helped each other. The piano survived, and when the Whitehurst Academy opened in January of 1866, a music teacher was secured and the piano was played again. Some things are simply made well enough to survive what is asked of them.
One of Nancy’s daughters was Thulia, who married James Myrick. Their daughter, Susan Myrick, was a friend of Margaret Mitchell’s and the technical advisor on the movie set.
The war ended in April of 1865.
The family came back to the work the same way it had always come back: practically, with things to do. The cotton grew in the fields again. The brokers who had survived were open for business. The Confederate bonds sat on the books alongside United States currency, now worth what they were worth, which was not what anyone had hoped. The family noted both without comment, because there was nothing useful to say and a great deal of work still to do.
In April of 1866, nineteen years after James died and Robert came home to administer the estate, five receipts were signed on the same day before the same Justice of the Peace. The estate distributed. The accounts settled. Abner received the house and the land.
John’s father had survived the war and come home to Houston County. The first thing he did, before the distribution was settled and before any of what came next, was go to the Houston County court and adopt his youngest sister. Laura was eighteen years old, the tenth child, born weeks after her father died, who had spent the war years being kept in school by an estate that understood what she would need. He made himself her legal guardian. Then he went back to work.
The house had stood through all of it.
Catharine was dead. Troup was dead. Griswoldville was ash. Nancy’s place had been occupied and left desolate. The Perry volunteers had gone out in the summer dark to hold the river crossing. Sherman had moved his army through the county on a path close enough that the family had spent days not knowing what or who had survived and what or who had not.
The house stood when others did not. That is what I know of the war’s mercy.