“What are we going to do with them?” Colie asked as she pulled the silver forks from the sideboard drawer.
“We’ll bury them in the orchard,” Lottie replied, thinking up a plan as she spoke. “The ground there has just been plowed, and it will be hard for Lincoln’s men to see fresh shovel marks.”
“Good thinking,” Colie said. “I have all the cutlery.”
“Great,” Lottie said, throwing the last sugar bowl into her pillowcase. “Let’s go.”
On the way out the door, Lottie grabbed the shovel from the fireplace. Outside, the slave, Uncle Jacob, was steadying the horse while Orie and Mrs. Moon packed clothes onto the wagon.
“Seen anything yet?” Lottie asked.
Orie stood up and shaded the sun from her eyes with her hand. “I see smoke rising from Carter’s Mill,” she gasped. “Hurry!”
Lottie hoisted the heavy pillowcase over her shoulder and, shovel in hand, headed for the apple orchard as fast as she could. She could hear Colie’s heavy breathing a few steps behind her.
By the time they reached the apple trees, they were both out of breath. “How about burying it here?” Colie asked between gasps.
Lottie shook her head. “It’s too obvious,” she said. “We have to bury it somewhere where it will be hard to find.”
The two sisters dragged the pillowcases down the rows of trees. “How about here?” Colie asked again.
“That looks fine,” Lottie replied. “Just put a tiny mark on the tree there that only we can recognize so we can dig it up later.”
Lottie ran farther down the row and found a second spot beside another tree. She began digging with her hands while she waited for Colie to finish with the fireplace shovel. After every few scoops of dirt, Lottie looked around, fully expecting to see Union soldiers coming over the rise. Soon both pillowcases of silver were buried and the dirt replaced over them so that it was impossible to tell that the ground had been disturbed.
Lottie and Colie ran back to the house to wash their hands and see what else they could do to help. There was not much. Their mother had dispatched Uncle Jacob to hide the wagon several miles away in the thick bushes that lay on the outskirts of their property. Now all they could do was wait. Lottie tried not to think of the awful stories she had read about the Union soldiers and their raids. She knew that farther south many plantation owners had fled their land, only to return to find all of the buildings burned to the ground, their livestock killed and eaten, and their slaves scattered. Lottie hoped her family would fare better than that, but she knew that whatever happened, now that the war was ending, their lives would be very different from before.
Like most people in the South, Lottie had no idea what peace with the North would mean. She wondered how people in the South could go back to being part of one country after the Union army had killed so many young southern men, not to mention the destruction Sherman’s men had caused as they rampaged through Georgia. Lottie sighed; so much hatred and bitterness flowed between the two sides. She had little doubt in her mind that she would never again enjoy the innocent life she had lived before the war. Even if the North managed to show some kindness to the South, the plantation way of life her ancestors had practiced was no longer possible. President Abraham Lincoln had issued a proclamation freeing all slaves, and most of the railroads and many of the grand old plantations in the South had been destroyed. Besides, there seemed to be no point in going back to producing cotton, even if they could find the workers. Great Britain, which had purchased most of the South’s cotton, had found a new supply from India.
Lottie and her mother and sisters waited into the night, but no Union soldiers came. They all slept fitfully in the parlor with the door barred and Orie’s trusty pistol close at hand. The following morning they learned that the cloud of smoke they had seen rising from Carter’s Mill was not the plantation burning but the dust kicked up by a herd of sheep being driven to Scottsville. Everyone was relieved, yet the possibility of Union fighters ransacking Viewmont was a continual threat for several more weeks until the last few bands of Confederate soldiers surrendered and the Civil War was officially declared over.
Lottie watched as many of the family slaves wrapped their few meager belongings in knapsacks and set out for the North to find their own way in life. A number, however, chose to stay on the Viewmont property, though there was little for them to do. Mrs. Moon, like most other plantation owners, faced some serious choices. There simply was not enough money to pay former slaves to work. The Confederate bonds she had converted the family’s currency into at the beginning of the war were not even worth the paper they were printed on. To make matters worse, the two bags of silver and jewelry that Lottie and Colie had buried in the orchard could not be found. Had someone else dug them up, or in the panic of the moment had the two girls become confused about exactly where they buried the bags? No one knew. In fact, the bags would never be found.
The end of the war also left the other members of the Moon family with some tough decisions to make. Orie and her husband, John Andrews, decided to go to Alabama with their three sons. They wanted to help John’s father rebuild his farm. Meanwhile, Ike Moon, who was now married, asked his mother to give him four hundred acres of Viewmont land for a farm of his own. He soon found, however, that he could not manage the farm on his own, and he sold the piece of land. It was the first of many parcels of Viewmont land to leave the family’s hands.
Whatever happened, Lottie’s mother was determined to give Eddie and Mollie a good education. She leased out the rest of Viewmont’s land, except for the house, orchard, and cemetery, in exchange for one third of the proceeds from the crops raised on it. She used this money to keep herself and Colie and to send Eddie and Mollie to the Richmond Female Institute. This took all the money she had. The two younger girls were not able to come home for the holidays because Mrs. Moon could not afford their coach fares.
In the midst of all the changes the war had brought, Lottie had her own decisions to make. Before the war she had toyed with the idea of having a career, simply for the satisfaction of having it. Now that the war was over, however, getting a job and earning her own money became an urgent matter.
As Lottie pondered what to do next, the Reverend Broadus received a letter from the First Baptist Church in Danville, Kentucky, asking whether he could recommend a woman to assist at the female academy the church was running. The Reverend Broadus visited Lottie and explained that her name was the first that had come to mind when he read the letter. Lottie was excited by the prospect. It was just the opportunity she had been looking for, and within a week she was packed and ready to go.
Danville, like just about every other city in the South, was in a state of turmoil, with hundreds of war widows and orphaned or abandoned children roaming throughout the area. The principal of the female academy there, the Reverend Selph, a kind-hearted man, had given away many scholarships to the daughters of destitute Baptist pastors. Because of his generosity, the school was never quite able to cover all of its costs. Nevertheless, Lottie came to feel very much at home there. After her first year, she signed up for a second and recruited her sister Mollie to join her as a junior staff member.
Besides teaching a variety of subjects, Lottie busied herself teaching a Sunday school class for teenage girls. It was lively and fun, and all the young girls in the church counted down the months until they were old enough to join the group. Lottie also spent time visiting Dr. George Burton, who had been a Southern Baptist medical missionary in China. Dr. Burton had returned to the United States just before the Civil War broke out and had been unable to return because of the conflict and a lack of money. As a result, he had turned his attention to raising money to help support his fellow missionaries in China and, whenever he had the opportunity, to speaking to church groups about the needs of China.
Lottie listened to all Dr. Burton had to say. The idea of being a missionary piqued her interest, though there were two things that made it only a dream. First, Lottie was a single woman, and the only women the Southern Baptists would send overseas were married. Second, since the end of the Civil War, not one missionary had been sent out by the church. The Southern Baptists were too poor to pay the salary for a new missionary. Indeed, to save money, they had recalled a number of missionaries from the mission field.
Lottie kept in touch with her family by letter, though many of the letters she received back from her mother were upsetting. Mrs. Moon seemed to be in a state of constant despair, and she usually asked Lottie for more money to help pay the taxes on the property. Colie had left home to teach in Bristol, Virginia, and she too sent money to try to keep Viewmont in the hands of the Moon family.
Besides the possibility of losing Viewmont, another issue upset Mrs. Moon very much. Lottie’s two younger sisters, Mollie and Colie, had done the unthinkable; both had decided to convert to Roman Catholicism. Colie was even talking about entering a convent and becoming a nun. Their decision shocked Mrs. Moon. The girls’ father had built the biggest Baptist church for miles around, and she had raised her daughters to follow in the family tradition of being Baptist. She poured out her anguish over their decision in letter after letter to Lottie, who wrote back urging her mother to be loving and tolerant of their decision. However, their conversion to Catholicism was one shock too many for Mrs. Moon. She decided life was no longer worth living. She lay in bed refusing to eat or drink anything and just stared blankly at the wall. Lottie hurried home to her bedside, but she could do nothing to change her mother’s mind and persuade her to eat. Anna Maria Moon, Lottie’s mother, died on June 21, 1870, at sixty-one years of age.
Mrs. Moon’s will was read, and the land was distributed according to her wishes, although there was little money left to distribute. The estate was worth only a fortieth of what it had been worth before the Civil War. Lottie received a small allowance, but since it was not enough to live on, she would have to keep working or get married.
That fall, Lottie returned to Danville for her fourth year of teaching. By now she was the head teacher of history, grammar, and literature. When she arrived back at school, a new teacher by the name of Anna Safford was waiting to meet her. Much to Lottie’s relief, Anna’s strong teaching subjects were mathematics and astronomy, the two subjects Lottie most disliked teaching.
Lottie and Anna soon discovered that in many ways they had led very similar lives. Anna was three years older than Lottie, single, intelligent, lively, kind, and a strong Christian. Both women had been forced to work after their families had lost their fortunes as a result of the Civil War.
There were some differences between the two as well. Anna was as firm a Presbyterian as Lottie was a Baptist. After a few disagreements, the two of them decided not to discuss their differing ideas about baptism and a few other doctrinal issues and instead stick to discussing topics they could agree on. A strong friendship quickly developed between the two women, and soon Lottie and Anna found they had another thing in common: Both harbored a secret dream of becoming a missionary, though neither of them came from a church that was willing to send out single women as missionaries.
Although Lottie and Anna could see no obvious way to make their dream a reality, they often discussed ways they could both be more useful. They wondered whether they should head farther south, where the need for teachers to educate girls was critical. The Civil War had changed southern society, and many girls who would have looked forward to marriage and a comfortable home supplied by their husbands now had to find ways to support themselves. Over 135,000 southern men had been killed in the war, and there were now simply not enough men to meet the demand for husbands. Plus, many of the men who survived the war had been left wounded or had lost all or most of their land and money.
