Knoxville, after you haven't had a bath in two months
by Jack Neely
In Madison Drake's description of his first visit, 135 years ago this week, Knoxville sounds just a little like Oz.
"A clearing suddenly afforded me a glimpse of a city upon a hill," he writes, "and, looking, I behold, not more than two or three miles away, my country's flag.... I now felt like a man, and life was still worth all the sacrifices I had made...."
If the sight of Knoxville could make every tourist feel like that, we wouldn't need to worry much about convention centers.
Madison Drake, 27, a onetime newspaperman from Trenton, N.J., wasn't your typical Yankee tourist. Small and skeletally thin, he may have weighed less than 90 pounds. His cracked feet were bleeding. His heavy beard and dirty blue clothes were busy with lice.
Madison Drake was an escaped POW. A lieutenant in the Union army, Drake had leapt from a Confederate prison train as it crossed the Congaree River in South Carolina. For 47 days, Drake and three other escapees had lived in fetid swamps and cold mountains in a weird odyssey across the South to the fabled Union stronghold of Knoxville.
I would never have heard about Lt. Drake if not for a new reprint of his 1880 memoir, Fast and Loose in Dixie, published this year by the Salt Press in Florida. It's not a great edition: there are typos on nearly every page. It cries out for a chronology and footnotes and maps, but it has none. Still, it's a hell of a read; I've carried it in my jacket pocket for days.
Formal letters and journals written by some officers make the Civil War seem even longer ago than it was, in some mythical, legendary time. A few accounts sound like any bright guy at the bar just this afternoon, bragging a little after one cold glass of porter. Fast And Loose In Dixie is one of those.
He'd been captured in Virginia back on May 16 as his New Jersey 9th Volunteers was unsuccessfully trying to seize Richmond. Drake entered Richmond as a prisoner; after a couple of weeks at the hellhole known as Libby Prison, he soon found himself headed south to prison camps in Macon, then Savannah, then Charleston.
As he starved, Drake became a master at tunneling, though all of his tunnels were discovered, one of them when a cow fell into it.
Drake and his troublesome fellow officers were being transferred by train to another prison when one of his campadres feigned a vomiting attack. He and three others jumped and ran. Chapter 14 is called "Fed By Negroes In the Swamps."
They received aid from with a series of slaves, loyalists, and Confederate deserters. In the Carolinas, Drake heard that Knoxville, secured by Burnside's men a year ago, would be their safest bet.
Unable to recapture Knoxville, Confederate forces were harassing East Tennessee. Their commander was one John Breckinridge, who happened to be former Vice President of the United States (not to mention presidential nominee in the problematic election of 1860). One guerrilla band attacked Drake's camp, scattering the original cadre of escapees. Only two exhausted Yankees approached Knoxville that November afternoon, Drake and his superior, Capt. J.E. Lewis. To Lt. Drake, U.S.A., Knoxville was "a beautiful and gladsome spectacle."
Knoxville's Union guards were skeptical of Drake's story, but eventually conducted Drake and Lewis to General Samuel Powhatan Carter, the provost marshal who fed them dinner.
After that, they found a saloon. Drake wasn't a drinker, but in those days, saloons offered shaves and haircuts; to Drake, that was the first order of business. Drake mentioned to the barber, a black man, that he'd just gotten in from South Carolina. He was surprised by the barber's response.
"He walked in the most deliberate manner to the front door, opened it, and told us to 'leave de shop!'.... He was the first colored person that had ever treated me meanly, and I told him so." His comment made the barber even angrier. He declared he wouldn't "shave a rebel for all de money in town!"
When they convinced him they were Union men, the barber gave them free haircuts and shaves.
Another barber down the street also offered baths. "On the barber's return we were watching the sportive antics of the millions of lice which had borne us company for the past six months. The poor barber, after a glance at the situation, held up his hands in horror, and almost went into a fit. 'My God, gentlemen! If this was known I'd be ruined, for no one would ever come in here again."
Without asking permission, the barber picked up their old blue uniforms with tongs, soaked them in turpentine, took them out into the street, and set them on fire. Drake writes that neither of them shed a tear "at the terrible fate of those who had stuck so closely to us." Fortunately, Gen. Carter had given them fresh government-issue privates' uniforms.
Next they went to the Franklin House, one of Knoxville's two best hotels, located on Main Street, where we'd later build a courthouse. There was a crowd around the desk clerk's counter; Drake and Lewis elbowed their way in, but found they couldn't convince the clerk to give them a free night. "How do you expect us to run a hotel if travelers do not pay?" he said. It caused a stir among a knot of blue-coated officers who came over and began messing with them. "Say, young fellow," one said, taking Drake for a private, "What are you doing with those bars on your shoulders?" After some arguing, the officer threatened to arrest Drake if he didn't take off his bars and "get back to camp."
They weren't satisfied until Drake had told their whole story. "It proved to be the best speech I had ever made," he recalls. The same officer who had threatened him paid his bill for the night.
A staff officer escorted Drake and Lewis to the private dining room of Gen. Alvan Gillem. The Shiloh veteran bought them supper and had them tell their story once again, but he was more interested in hearing what they'd learned of what Breckinridge was up to.
Back out in the lobby, they smoked imported cigars with the other bluecoats.
Drake stayed in town for a couple of days, writing letters to family and sightseeing. He was mainly interested in seeing the Gay Street printing office of the famous Parson Brownlow, the newspaperman then enjoying a national reputation as the South's most outspoken Unionist. Drake was disappointed the parson himself wasn't in.
Then he caught a train to Chattanooga—south was the safest way north for a Union man in 1864—then to Nashville, just as it was under the Confederates' final, desperate siege. His circuitous, war-avoiding route took him to Louisville and Indiana before he made his way to New Jersey. There he learned his condition was worse than he thought; doctors considered amputating his feet. That January, Harper's Weekly told Drake's story to the nation.
He requested a discharge from the army, but after a few weeks' recovery, he was sent back to the rejoin his division in the Carolinas. The discharge he had requested was finally approved—two days after Appomattox.
The scrawny, lice-ridden Yankee who dragged himself into Knoxville 135 years ago eventually won the Congressional Medal of Honor.
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