THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
to open the “cracker-line,” as the soldiers humorously called the line of supplies.
On the 1st and 2nd of October, my command arrived at Bridgeport, Alabama, on the Tennessee River. One of my first duties was to acquaint myself with the country in my front and on my flanks. Many of the scouting parties I led myself, and it was on these occasions that I came first into personal contact with the population of that hill-region of Northern Alabama, Northern Georgia, and Southwestern Tennessee. I had met Southern country people in Virginia and Maryland, and had been astonished at the ignorance of many of them as to what, among the rural population of the North, were matters of common knowledge. But my experiences in my present surroundings were far more astonishing still. Not far from my encampment I struck a farmhouse inhabited by an elderly man, his wife, and a flock of children. He was by no means a poor man, for, as he told me, he owned several hundred acres of land. But he lived in a log-house, the central part of which was open at the front with one enclosed room on the right and one on the left, with mud chimneys, the chinks between the logs being so imperfectly filled that the wind would pass through freely. There was hardly anything inside worthy of the name of furniture. The art of reading and writing was unknown in the family, except, perhaps, from hearsay. The children were dirty, ragged, and, of course, barefooted, sharing the freedom of the house with dogs and other domestic animals.
The farmer seemed to be a good-natured person, but my conversations with him disclosed an almost incredible depth of ignorance. Of the country in which he lived he had only a vague and nebulous conception. He asked me where all these people, meaning the soldiers, came from. When I told him they came from New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and
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