Part 20

We now come to that period in the history of Vicksburg, when, during the Civil War, for a time the even current of commercial and business life gave place to a series of events, perhaps the most notable and far-reaching in influence on the shifting fortunes and results of the great conflict. The bluffs at Vicksburg are of pre-eminent importance as a strategic point to the complete control of the great river which almost divides the continent from south to north, penetrates the upper valley nearly to the great chain of lakes, and with its affluents affords about fifteen thousand miles of navigation. No object contributing to the final issue of the war could have presented itself to the great leaders on both sides of the conflict as of more urgent need than the possession and control of the Mississippi. In 1862, movements were begun against the fortifications which the Confederates had placed on the Cumberland and Tennessee and the upper Mississippi. So important and urgent did this appear as a necessary means to a speedy and successful close of the war that operations were begun very early to drive the Confederates from the river, and were conducted both from above and from its mouth. The close of the year 1862 found the Federal naval and military forces dominating the river from the north as far south as Vicksburg, and from the south as far north as Port Hudson. A campaign, supported by the fleet, was undertaken on the east side of the river. The Federal forces moved from the Yazoo River along the banks of the Chickasaw Bayou with a view of gaining a foothold on the bluffs above the city. A battle, stubbornly contested, was fought, and resulted in the defeat and repulse of the Union forces. It demonstrated the impracticability of capturing the city by attacking the army entrenched on the bluffs.

[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF GENERAL U. S. GRANT.]

The following year a much larger army was convoyed down the river by a fleet of gunboats, and landed at Milliken’s bend, sixteen or seventeen miles above the city, on the west bank of the river. A tentative and unsuccessful effort was made by General Grant to divert the river across the peninsula by cutting a canal, so as to pass his vessels of war and transports below out of reach of the batteries on the bluffs. Meantime a furious and incessant cannonade was kept up between the gunboats and shore batteries. Finally a large part of his fleet, under cover of the darkness of night, succeeded in passing the batteries, with the loss of one vessel and serious damage to others. This movement on the water, followed by the marching of the army down the west bank, unmistakably indicated to General Pemberton, Confederate commandant, the plan and purpose of the campaign. He promptly withdrew the most of his army from the breastworks, crossed the Big Black River, and so disposed his men as to retard or arrest altogether the march of General Grant. General Pemberton’s plan was to form a junction with General Johnston, who was on his way to take part in the defence of Vicksburg. General Grant succeeded in interposing his army between Johnston and Pemberton, gave battle to Johnston at Jackson, and obliged him to fall back northward to Canton. Heavy and obstinate battles were fought at Baker’s Creek, Champion Hills and at Big Black. Pemberton, failing to unite forces with Johnston, deemed it prudent to recross the Big Black, return and re-occupy his trenches round the city. General Grant followed and closely invested the Confederate works, placing his army behind breastworks and in trenches. Two or three gallant assaults made on the Confederate works were met with determined courage and repulsed with great loss of life. The control of the river by the gunboats, above and below, made the reception of reinforcements or supplies from the west or from any source by water, impossible. The land forces spread around the fortifications cut off succor from the south and east, so that it became a mere question of time, before starvation would compel a surrender without more waste of life in hazardous and bloody assaults. When Pemberton marched to the Big Black, the supply of food in the city was low; on his return his army was placed on short rations. Constant service on the fortifications, inadequate food supply and midsummer heat developed a great deal of sickness, so that when the surrender was made on the 4th of July, after a siege of forty days, provisions were about exhausted, and one third or more of the garrison were on the sick-list, unfit for military duty. It is perhaps not out of place to say that in no campaign of the Civil War was there higher courage or greater devotion to soldierly duty displayed than here, by both participants. The events of the siege derive their true significance from the circumstance that they constituted the fatal blow which broke the Confederate power and hastened the war to its end.

[Illustration: SIEGE OF VICKSBURG.]

The National Cemetery on the bluffs, just north of the corporate limits of the city, is, taken all in all, perhaps the most attractive patriotic cemetery in the South. The visitor to the city always seeks it first. Nature has given to it sublimity; art and landscape-engineering have imparted all the freshness and loveliness that flower and shrub and tree can give. Here rest sixteen thousand soldiers who lost their lives in the service of their country in and around Vicksburg. Such care and veneration for those who fell under the national flag while a grateful tribute to valor and heroism serve at the same time to keep ever fresh and active sentiments of martial valor and a warmer pride in all that adds glory to the country and illustrates its military prowess.

Nothing could more strongly and nobly testify to the fact that all the issues and controversies which culminated in a long and bloody war have been closed and settled and relegated to the past than the measures now in process of execution to convert the trenches and bastions around the city of Vicksburg into a park beautified by all that landscape-engineering and art can do to make the place attractive. That which appeals to-day with so much force to the sensibilities of Americans is not so much the mere transformation of the rugged hills, as that the place so wonderfully transformed is and will ever be a perpetual witness that sectional discords and strifes have disappeared from our national life, and that henceforth the great family of States and Territories, with their seventy or eighty millions of people, are members and citizens of a common country, protected by the same flag, the emblem of sovereignty to all.

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KNOXVILLE

THE METROPOLIS OF EASTERN TENNESSEE

BY JOSHUA W. CALDWELL

The beginnings of Knoxville were Scotch-Irish. Its founder was James White, a Scotch-Irishman from North Carolina. Its first place of worship was a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian Church, wherein the faith of the Covenant was preached without mitigation, to the edification and uplifting of the community. The dominant element of its population until after the Civil War was Presbyterian, and it is still strong.

The first effort of the white men to possess themselves of any part of Tennessee was in 1756, when old Fort Loudon was erected about thirty miles west of where Knoxville now stands. Fort Loudon did not long resist the Cherokees. Its short story is one of the most romantic and one of the most tragic in the early history of the Southwest.

[Illustration: JOHN SEVIER, FIRST GOVERNOR OF TENNESSEE.]

Twelve years later, the first permanent settlement in Tennessee was made upon the waters of the Watauga in the northeast corner of the State. This little community became, soon afterwards, the Watauga Association, a practically independent government, with a written constitution; indisputably the first of the kind that was formed on this continent, by men of American birth, and inspired by American sentiment. Its leaders were James Robertson, afterwards the founder of Nashville, a typical Scotch-Irish pioneer; John Sevier, afterwards the first Governor of Tennessee, a man of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Huguenot descent, and of extraordinary abilities, who became a resident of Knoxville; and John Carter, presumably descended from the noted Virginia family of that name, many of whose descendants are citizens of Knoxville.

About the year 1787, the settlements having extended gradually down the Holston, we find James White living upon the site of Knoxville and owning, then or later, much of the land now covered by the city. If traditionary statements are to be trusted, a part at least of the first house erected by James White is still standing, its original sturdy and loopholed logs protected and preserved by a sheathing of boards. The name first given the settlement was “White’s Fort.”

In 1790, North Carolina having ceded her possessions west of the Alleghanies to the United States, the “Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio” was created, and President Washington named as its Governor his friend William Blount, of North Carolina. In 1791, Governor Blount decided to make White’s Fort, which was by that time called Knoxville in honor of General Henry Knox, the capital of the territory, and the town site was surveyed in part and laid off into lots by its owner, James White, in that year.

[Illustration: WILLIAM BLOUNT, GOVERNOR OF SOUTHWEST TERRITORY.]

The location is on the north bank of the Holston, four miles south of the junction of the French Broad and Holston rivers, giving to the last stream the name to which it is entitled, without regard to many temporary, ineffective and indefensible changes of river nomenclature in East Tennessee by legislation. Between two creeks, once clear and vigorous, but now defiled and depleted by many civilized uses, rises a plateau of about two hundred and fifty acres, of diversified but comparatively level surface. Where this elevation slopes to the river on the southeast, the town made its beginning, and climbed slowly up the hill until it reached the highest point overlooking the river, which was crowned with a blockhouse known as the barracks, where a scanty garrison of regulars was intended to protect the settlers and to overawe the Cherokees. The barracks boasted at least one great gun, which was fired morning and evening with punctuality and impressiveness.

The coming of Governor Blount was the beginning of the greatness of Knoxville. Blount was a notable man. He had been a silent but respected and not uninfluential member of the convention that framed the Federal Constitution. He was the friend of Washington, and his lineage was most ancient and most honorable, reaching back to the time of William the Conqueror, in whose train, and among the beneficiaries of whose bounty, was one of his ancestors. The family had been settled long, in opulent circumstances and in social and political prominence, in North Carolina. The Governor was a man of education, of fine presence, of graceful and winning manners and of unfailing, if dignified, urbanity. He was unquestionably the first gentleman as well as the chief magistrate of the “Territory of the United States South of the River Ohio,” although neither honorable lineages nor good manners were wanting there. In addition to all this his Excellency was most fortunate in his wife. The praises of the lovely and accomplished Mary Grainger Blount were in the mouths of all men, and even of many women in those days. It was a memorable occasion when the Governor brought his gracious lady from North Carolina to Knoxville, and placed her at the head of his court, which was conducted with no little circumstance and dignity.

It is said that he imported, likewise, weather-boarding, wherewith he encased the logs of a great house which he had constructed as a home for his wife, and that no sooner had this attractive and expensive transformation been accomplished, than the front yard was converted into a flower garden, the first of its kind in the town, and certainly one of the most admired anywhere.

In July, 1791, Governor Blount made at Knoxville a treaty with the Cherokees. Nearly fifteen hundred Indians were present, including forty-one chiefs. The Governor had caused to be erected in a conspicuous place on a hillside overlooking the river a large tent, wherein he remained withdrawn until all the expected company had assembled. Then the doors of the tent were thrown open and he stood forth, arrayed in splendor, and surrounded by the chief civil and military notables of the territory. The resplendency of his Excellency’s dress-sword, laced coat and cocked hat are much commented on by historians. Second in splendor of raiment and dignity of deportment to the Governor only, was James Armstrong, known as “Trooper,” formerly a dragoon in his Britannic Majesty’s service, and versed in the ways of courts. The _Annalist_ of Tennessee characterizes him, for this occasion, as “_arbiter elegantiarum_.” The Governor stood upon a platform, and one by one in due order the Cherokee chiefs were presented by Mr. Armstrong, while the assembled warriors gazed in awe upon the imposing ceremony. A treaty was solemnly entered into, and was speedily broken by both whites and Indians.

In 1794, an act of the territorial Legislature was passed, which after reciting the founding, in 1791, of a town named Knoxville in honor of Major-General Henry Knox, “said town consisting of sixty-four lots, numbered from one to sixty-four consecutively,” enacts in solemn form, that a town be established on the spot indicated, and names commissioners for its government. In 1797, fifty-nine more lots with necessary streets were added. In 1799, the town was authorized by law to elect its commissioners, but for two years the act seems to have been ineffective. The commissioners when finally elected entered promptly upon a course of vigorous municipal legislation and administration. Among other things a town sergeant was elected, and required to patrol the streets three nights a week, or oftener at his option. Slaughter-pens within the town limits, wooden chimneys, hogs upon the streets, dead or alive, and the firing of guns and pistols within the corporate limits were declared nuisances, punishable by fine, fifty cents being the highest lawful fine. Two of the offences for which this highest fine was prescribed were drunkenness and Sabbath-breaking. A few years later, presumably under pressure of popular demand, the hog ordinance was repealed, but the provision against wooden chimneys seems to have been rigorously enforced.

In 1815, the town was empowered to elect a Mayor, and Thomas Emmerson, afterwards a Judge of the Supreme Court of the State, became the first Mayor.

That the name Knoxville had been adopted before November 5, 1791, is made certain by the fact that on that day appeared the initial number of the _Knoxville Gazette_, the first newspaper published within the bounds of Tennessee. Its publisher was one George Roulstone, a native of New England, whose Yankee enterprise appeared in the fact that while the paper from the first was called the _Knoxville Gazette_, it was for some time published at Rogersville, an older town, seventy miles east of Knoxville. It is supposed that the publisher was prevented by difficulties of transportation from moving his press to Knoxville. The _Gazette_ was a three-column paper of four pages. It had not many advertisements and very little local news, but was filled with accounts of the French Revolution and of European affairs in general. It gave much space to questions of ethics, and reprinted many political and patriotic speeches.

The first and only Legislature of the Territory met at Knoxville in February, 1794. Among the acts passed was one establishing a college near Knoxville, to be called Blount College, in honor of the Governor. This it is believed was the first strictly non-sectarian institution of higher learning established in the United States. It was afterwards successively named East Tennessee College, East Tennessee University, and the University of Tennessee, under which last name it now exists and flourishes. It is unsurpassed among Southern institutions of learning for its thoroughness, and in respect of its beautiful situation is almost unequaled in the whole country.

The treaty made by Governor Blount in 1791 bound the whites to refrain from encroachments on the Indian lands, and pledged the Indians to desist from hostilities. The whites did not all act in good faith, while the Indians, with characteristic treachery, failed from the outset to regard the treaty. At first the Cherokees contented themselves with occasional outrages, but in the year 1793 it was known that the whole nation was in arms. The Indians were emboldened by the avowedly pacific policy of the Federal Government. Governor Blount had received specific instructions to act only on the defensive. Arson and murder were of daily occurrence and went unpunished. It was with genuine relief, therefore, that the whites received news, late in the summer of 1793, that the Indians had, in effect, declared war. On the night of the 24th of September, 1793, a body of more than a thousand warriors crossed the Tennessee River some twenty-five miles below Knoxville and marched in the direction of that place. Seven hundred of this invading force were Creeks and the remainder Cherokees, and, strangely enough, one hundred of the Creeks were mounted. It was the intention to reach and to attack Knoxville at daylight, but they found difficulty in crossing the river, and were further delayed by a consultation among the leaders upon an interesting question. This was whether they should kill all the people of Knoxville, or only the men. The discussion of this nice question of casuistry proved so attractive, or provoked so many differences, that daylight seems to have found it still unsettled.

[Illustration: UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE.]

At sunrise on the 25th the Indians heard the morning gun at the barracks at Knoxville and concluded that it was an alarm signal. Halting near Cavet’s blockhouse, eight miles from the village, they entertained themselves by decoying and butchering the inmates. Their coming had been made known on the 24th to the people of Knoxville, who prepared with courage and energy to resist them. The total fighting strength of the whites was forty men. It was determined to waylay the Indians, and after firing upon them to retreat to the barracks. Accordingly, leaving two old men with the women and children, the remaining thirty-eight spent the night concealed on a wooded ridge west of the town, fearlessly awaiting a foe outnumbering them more than twenty to one. Early on the morning of the 25th, however, a messenger brought the news that the Indians had lost heart after the affair at Cavet’s and were in full retreat.

In this little band of defenders was the Rev. Samuel Carrick, a Presbyterian minister, afterwards the first President of Blount College, of whose conduct on this occasion there is a pleasing and honorable tradition. It is said that when news of the invasion came he was preparing to bury his wife, who had just died, but, putting aside his grief, and leaving her beloved remains to be buried by the women of the neighborhood, he seized his rifle and hastened to take his post at the front.

A month later the Tennessee militia, led by Sevier, were in the heart of the Indian country, and the battle of Etowah, on the 17th of October, 1793, ended the campaign and cowed the savages.

From this time until the Civil War, Knoxville was outside the current of important public events. From 1792 to 1796, it was the capital of the “Territory South of the River Ohio”; from 1796 to 1811, except for a little while in 1807, it was the capital of Tennessee. About this time the capital of the State became peripatetic, on account of the westward trend of population. As late as 1834, we find a member of the Constitutional Convention of that year introducing a resolution for the ascertainment of the “centre of gravity” of the State, with a view to the permanent location of the capital upon it. It will be interesting to know that the official to whom the question was referred reported the centre of gravity to be identical with the geographical centre. The capital was finally fixed at Nashville, which is not on the centre of gravity, but is otherwise fully entitled to the honor. Meanwhile, in 1817, the capital returned for a brief stay at Knoxville, and then finally departed westward.

The Constitutional Convention of 1796 met at Knoxville in January of that year with William Blount as President, and promulgated the first Constitution of Tennessee. John Sevier was the first Governor and took up his abode at Knoxville. He began to build a large brick house, but hospitality and every form of liberality exhausted his means and he removed to the country before the first story of the house had been constructed. The house was completed by another owner and was designed to overlook the town from a distance. It now stands with its back and one side to intersecting modern streets, and its front to the side yard. Sevier was for eleven years Governor, and then was elected to Congress. He died in 1815 while on a journey to the Creek nation as Commissioner of the United States. His remains reposed in Alabama until 1889, when they were disinterred, brought to Knoxville, and deposited in the Court-House yard, where their final resting-place is marked by a graceful shaft of native white marble. Sevier, always the popular hero of Tennessee, is the most brilliant figure in the pioneer history of the Southwest.

Blount was one of the first Senators from Tennessee. His impeachment as Senator upon charges which to this day no man fully understands and which to the Western people seem to have imported no turpitude, did not affect his standing in Tennessee. He is buried in Knoxville in the old First Presbyterian churchyard.

[Illustration: HUGH L. WHITE.]

Within a few feet of his grave is the tomb of Hugh Lawson White, son of James White, “the founder,” and known as the “American Cato.” He was a Judge of the Supreme Court of Tennessee, many years a member of the United States Senate, and for a time its President. He was long the intimate friend of Andrew Jackson, but was alienated by Jackson’s imperious methods, and became a candidate for the Presidency of the United States against Jackson’s political heir, Martin Van Buren. He was defeated, but carried his own and two other Southern States. He was one of the strongest, purest and most patriotic of American statesmen, and was a conspicuous figure in the Senate even in the days of Webster, Calhoun, Clay and Benton. For fifteen years (from 1812 to 1827) he was President of the Bank of Tennessee, located at Knoxville, which was almost the only bank in the South that weathered the financial storms which followed the War of 1812.

On the western limit of the town stands an old weather-boarded log house, wherein tradition declares that George Farragut, the father of the Admiral, once lived. The county records show that George Farragut owned the ground on which the house is situated. The great Admiral certainly was born in Knox county at Low’s Ferry near Campbell’s Station, where, on the 15th of May, 1900, Admiral Dewey unveiled a monument, which was erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution to his illustrious predecessor. Old deeds to George Farragut sometimes call him “Fairregret,” but he signs himself Farragut.

[Illustration: ADMIRAL FARRAGUT.]

Sam Houston was reared near Knoxville, and there are many stories of his handsome presence, winning manners, great abilities and abounding debts.