One day in August a squad of Union Tennessee Cavalry was brought in. We tried in vain to find out what Sherman was doing, and how large an army he had. They only knew that they had been captured while on picket duty, and that Sherman had a “powathful lahge ahmy.”
Your ordinary Southerner of those days, had a profound and an abiding ignorance of numbers. They were to him what pork is to a Jew, an unclean thing. He had no use for them, and would at a venture accept ten thousand dollars, as a greater sum than a million, for the reason that it took more words to express the former, than the latter sum.
In the winter of 1862, while Mitchell’s Division was camped at Bacon Creek, Ky., we had a picket post on a plantation owned by a man named Buckner, a cousin of the rebel General S. B. Buckner, he was, or professed to be, a Union man. He went down to Green River on one occasion to visit Buell’s army. On his return I asked him how many soldiers General Buell had? “I can’t just say,” he replied, “but theys a powahful lot of em.” “Yes but how many thousand?” said I. “Well I wont be right suah, but theys a heap moah than a right smart chance of em,” was as near an approach to numbers as I could induce him to express.
Geography is on the same catalogue with Arithmetic. While marching from Shepardsville to Elizabethtown, in 1861 we camped for the night on Muldraugh’s Hill, near the spot where President Lincoln was born. After we had “broke ranks” I went with others to a farm house not far away to procure water. A middle aged man met us, and after granting us permission to get water from his well, he asked me, “what regiment is that?” I told him it was the 10th Wisconsin. “Westconstant, Westconstant, let me see is Westconstant in Michigan?” inquired he.
After the battle of Chickamauga, while we were at McLaw’s Division Hospital, our Surgeon took charge of a rebel soldier lad not more than sixteen years of age, who in addition to a severe wound, was suffering from an attack of fever. One morning the surgeon went to him and asked, “how are you this morning my boy?” “Well I feel a heap bettah, but I’m powahful weak yet, doctah,” was his reply.
Notwithstanding these people know nothing of numbers, or of Geography, or of Orthography and not much of any ology, or ism, yet they are good riders, good marksmen, good card players, good whiskey drinkers, and barring the troubles which grew out of the “late unpleasantness” and “moonshining” they are in the main kind-hearted people to the whites.