Free A Year in the South by Stephen V. Ash

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    At every step in the creation of this book I have been blessed with help from friends, acquaintances, and strangers. It is a pleasure to acknowledge their generosity.
    At or near the top of every historian’s list of debts are those owed to archivists. I especially want to thank Steve Cotham, director of the McClung Historical Collection in Knoxville, and his staff members Sally Polhemus and Ted Baehr; it was Steve who brought to my attention the fascinating memoir of John Robertson. I have also received assistance far beyond the call of duty from the director and staff of the Special Collections department of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Jim Lloyd, Nick Wyman, Bill Eigelsbach, and Aaron Purcell. When doing research at the National Archives in Washington, I have had the benefit of Mike Musick’s vast knowledge of federal records. Archivists at the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, the Virginia Historical Society, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the Library of Virginia, the Perkins Library of Duke University, the Illinois State Historical Library, the Rockbridge Historical Society of Lexington, and Historic Elmwood Cemetery of Memphis have been of great help, too; I wish that space permitted me to name them all.
    I am also in debt to many fellow historians. Nelson Lankford, Lynda L. Crist, Robert Kenzer, John D. Fowler, Kent Dollar, and Trevor Smith are just a few of those who have generously provided information. Three of my colleagues in the History Department of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville—Kathy Brosnan, Lorri Glover, and Bruce Wheeler—deserve special thanks for their interest in and encouragement of this project, not to mention their good company at our late-afternoon “seminars” at Charlie Pepper’s.
    A number of people outside the archival and academic realms have also gone out of their way to help me. Walter Davis of Jackson, Alabama, took me around the site of the Clarke County saltworks and explained the process of salt making. Tommy Lee and Edwina Carpenter of the Brice’s Crossroads Museum and Visitors Center in Baldwyn, Mississippi, arranged for me to see the site of the Agnew plantation and provided me with some wonderful photographs. Mr. and Mrs. Buddy Lipscomb of Como, Mississippi, introduced me to J. Paul White of Senatobia, who showed me Fredonia Methodist Church and the site of the McGehee plantation. Robert E. Gartz of Brookfield, Wisconsin, tracked down Louis Hughes’s grave and date of death. David Frazier of Guntown, Mississippi, sent me information on Samuel Agnew by way of Brenda Rayman of Knoxville. A special thank you goes to Pat Tindle of Topeka, Kansas, who has provided a wealth of helpful material and assisted me in other ways too numerous to mention. I am also deeply grateful to the legions of genealogists across the country whose unsung labors have unearthed an enormous amount of historical data—much of it now online—without which this book could not have been written.
    I can find no words to properly acknowledge two final debts, and so I must acknowledge them plainly and inadequately. My family has been an unfailing source of encouragement, support, and wisdom. And so too has Paul H. Bergeron of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who took me under his wing when I began graduate school nearly thirty years ago and has been my guide and friend ever since; to him this book is dedicated.

PREFACE
    This book is about four ordinary people in an extraordinary time. Their names were Louis Hughes, Cornelia McDonald, John Robertson, and Samuel Agnew. From birth to death, they lived far apart from one another and in very different circumstances. They had little in common except this: they were Southerners who lived through the pivotal moment of Southern