Thm a Memoir

Contents

AN INTRODUCTION

BIRTH OF T. H. McCALLIE

MY CONVERSION

Choice of Profession

In the Seminary

My First Charge—1859

My Second Charge

A Great Revival at Washington Rhea Co

The Civil War

My Third Charge Jan. 1862

My Marriage

An Episode. Prayer Answered Immediately

The Federal Occupation of the City of Chattanooga

The Seige of Chattanooga

The Lifting of the Seige

Christmas 1863

Services Again

School Keeping

Our Church Edifice

Of How the Quartermaster Outwitted Rebel Tom McCallie

Prayer Answered

Peace

1865

A Marriage in Our Family

Redeemed from Destruction

State of the Country in 1865-6 at the

Close of the Civil War

The Condition of the Churches at this Time

An Incident of Such Labor

Loyalty in East Tennessee

Rev. Mr. McCallie at Cleveland

An Incident of 66 or 67

Resignation from My Charge in 1873

1873 to 1874

A Revival Meeting

Necrology

Family and Home Training

Fidelity to Slaves

Crises

The Value of an Incidental Remark

The Fourth Crisis

Giving Up in Chattanooga

The Legacy of Thomas Hooke McCallie

About the McCallie School

On Presbyterianism

The Visitation of the Sick

How He Should Behave in the Sick Room

Different Classes

An Incident

Subject Matter of Prayer

Our Materialistic Age

How to Deal With the Dying

The Editor’s Appreciation of THM

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AN INTRODUCTION

To the Life and Times of Thomas Hooke McCallie

Thomas Hooke McCallie or THM, as we shall call him throughout this book, was born August 1, 1837 in the village of Washington in southeast Tennessee. Washington was a center of sorts, the county seat of Rhea County and a Tennessee River port with a dozen or so families. The town was on the American frontier between the Cherokee Indians and the flood of white settlers from the states on the Eastern Seaboard. THM’s father, also named Thomas, had settled there in 1823. THM wrote a memoir that includes a meager sketch of his family’s emigration from Scotland, their settling in Tennessee, and a more informative telling of his own personal life story, including the calamitous years of the Civil War and its immediate aftermath. Much of his memoir—started in 1901 and completed in the following several years—is taken from his journals made at the time of the events recalled. Something over a hundred years later, the editor—THM’s only surviving grandson—is pleased to publish THM—A Memoir just as he wrote it and with some additions of our own.

There is nothing unique about THM’s family’s leaving Scotland for the New World. In fact, his story is typical of many thousands of individuals and families who left the borderlands of England and the north of Ireland in the eighteenth century, simply looking for a better place to live. Consider this quotation from a letter written in 1774 by the Custom Officer in Wigtown in the Southwest of Scotland to a Treasury official in London. The letter is the Custom Officer’s response to an enquiry from Treasury asking why there was such a continuing flood of emigrants from Scotland and the North of England to the New World.

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… the only reason they gave for their emigration was that they were informed and understood they could live much better and with more ease in the country to which they were going than they could in this country. These persons and some others who had before that period gone to N. America having wrote letters to their relations and friends in this country advising of their beneficial settlements there, and of their having purchased for a trifling sum the (ownership) of a considerable extent of lands that produce plentifully the necessaries and comforts of life has raised a spirit of Emigration amongst others of like station in this country next to madness. … As one of the abovementioned letters from N. America fell accidentally into our hands we observed that the writer thereof advised his friends who intended to remove themselves to that country to carry nothing with them excepting some cloaths and the rest of their effects in money, as goods would only be an encumbrance on them …[1]

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We don’t presume that this letter relates in any direct or personal way to the McCallie family, but we are told that John McCallie, THM’s grandfather, emigrated from that very same Wigtown in 1775, the year after this letter was written. It’s not much of a stretch to consider that the letter draws a pretty accurate picture of the world that John and his brothers wanted to leave. Historians of today have added considerably to our understanding of the causes and the patterns of immigration about which this letter from Wigtown is a specific example and of which John McCallie was a part. Albion’s Seed—Four British Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer[2] describes in extensively documented detail four major waves of British immigration to that part of North America which would become the United States and how these successive waves in large part determined the cultural identity of our United States to the present day (language, politics, social order, religious practices, among many other folkways, to borrow Fischer’s term). There is no better way to present Fischer’s thesis than to quote directly from the introduction to his book:

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During the very long period from 1629 to 1775, the present area of the United States was settled by at least four large waves of English-speaking immigrants. The first was an exodus of Puritans from the east of England to Massachusetts during a period of eleven years from 1629 to 1640. The second was the migration of a small Royalist elite and large numbers of indentured servants from the south of England to Virginia (ca.1642–75). The third was a movement from the North Midlands of England and Wales to the Delaware Valley (ca. 1675–1725). The fourth was a flow of English-speaking people from the borders of North Britain and northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry, mostly during the half-century from 1718 to 1775.

These four groups shared many qualities in common. All of them spoke the English language. Nearly all were British Protestants. Most lived under British laws and took pride in possessing British liberties. At the same time, they also differed from one another in many other ways: in their religious denominations, social rank, historical generations, and also in the British regions from whence they came. They carried across the Atlantic four different sets of British folkways which became the basis of regional cultures in the New World.

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No doubt when John McCallie and his brothers left Wigtown, they were completely unaware of their part in a history-making emigration; they were thinking only of their own immediate needs—a plot of land, a place to raise a family, or as the custom officer put it, live much better and with more ease. As they took that leap of faith into the New World, they unwittingly became bit players in a momentous series of events that dramatically changed the whole world. They were Albion’s seed, more specifically a part of Fischer’s fourth wave from the lowlands of Scotland and the English borderlands to the Appalachian backcountry.

And backcountry it was, country perfectly suited to this wave of hundreds of thousands of individuals, mostly tenant farmers, laborers, and their families during the half century before 1775. Most landed in Philadelphia or nearby New Castle. Their aggressive behavior, strange clothes, and unfamiliar speech made them unwelcome by the already-established Quaker gentry (Fischer’s third wave). Responding to the urge to own their own land, they moved quickly into south central Pennsylvania, and as that area became crowded, the wave poured on down the Great Valley of Virginia, establishing settlements along the way and on into Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia, and the Carolina Piedmont. John McCallie and many of his descendants made East Tennessee their home, but the wave continued well into the nineteenth century, moving on into Arkansas, Texas, and the far West by way of the Oregon Trail. THM and his memoir are about one family’s role in that larger story.

But the memoir is not just about one family’s migration from the Old World to the New; in fact, the information we have about their movements is completely lacking in detail. And even though the Civil War is front and center to much of the story, the military historian won’t find the memoir a source of new information about the battles and strategies of the war. THM witnessed the war as an uncomfortable and unwilling bystander. To be more specific, he announced at the very beginning of the war that he could not support either side, North or South. He believed that the South was wrong in seceding, but he also believed the North had no right to coerce (his word) the Southern states into remaining in the Union. Consequently, he reports the war, not as a series of military events, but as it impacted the details of his life, his family, his church, and his ministry. THM and his family were caught between the two opposing forces disclaiming allegiance to both causes. In practice, this turned out to be an impossible assignment. Much of the memoir turns on the result of THM’s refusal to take sides in a world where everyone had to make a choice.

If the memoir is not a story of one family’s venture into the New World, and if not a commentary on the Civil War, what is the central theme of THM’s story? Above all, it is a story of Christian faith. John McCallie may have arrived in Philadelphia with only some cloaths on his back—as suggested by the custom officer at Wigtown, but he also carried a powerful religious faith based on the Holy Bible and framed in the Presbyterianism of John Knox and John Calvin. In his will, John McCallie made no mention of bequeathing his faith to his children, but pass it on he did, first to his son Thomas and then to his grandson.[3] THM, a graduate of Union Theological Seminary in New York City, perhaps the most outstanding of the country’s seminaries of that day, spells out on every page of the memoir not just the talk but the everyday walk of a man of great Christian faith. This is the real message of the memoir: how one man following the faith of his fathers lived the Christian life in a time of overwhelming chaos and turmoil.

A few words about the history of the memoir and of this present edition: A slightly reduced and much-prettified newspaper version of the memoir was published in 1938 in the Centennial Edition of the Chattanooga Free Press. The edition presented here is complete and exactly as THM wrote it—spelling, grammar, punctuation, and all—and with editorial additions of our own. At a number of places in the memoir, comments by the editor and informational pieces from other witnesses of the events being reported by THM have been added. In every instance, an editorial note indicates text by the editor or sources other than THM.

David P. McCallie, Editor

Chattanooga, Tenn

June 4, 1901.

I, Thomas Hooke McCallie, aged 64 yrs Aug 1 1901, have been requested by my son, Spencer Marye McCallie to write in this book some things about my ancestors, which I cheerfully do.

I find the following record in my fathers handwriting in a little book left by him in his secretary drawer, giving an account of his ancestors, at least as far back as his grandfather.

Editor’s Note:

The paragraphs that follow were taken by THM directly from his father’s little book. For purposes of clarity, we have placed the material THM has taken from his father’s book into one segment, all of which follows here. In the original manuscript, THM had divided his father’s contribution into several smaller segments. Nothing has been omitted.

"Alexander McCallie[4] lived in two or three miles of White Horn, Wigden Parish, Lowlands of Scotland. He married Margaret Majough. They had four sons, Andrew, John, Simon and Archibald,[5] two girls, Mary and Ann.

"John McCallie, son of the above Alexander was born Jan 8th 1754 at the above named residence of his fathers in Scotland, he emigrated to America in 1775, landed at Philadelphia, Penn. He settled a few years near Hunterstown, York County Pennsylvania, married Nancy Burcesy, moved to the mouth of Chucky[6] in East Tennessee, thence to Blount Co. He had by his first wife, Nancy, three sons and two daughters, Alexander, John, and Andrew, Susannah and Catharine. Then his wife, Nancy, died and he married Mary McCulloch and had by his second wife, Mary, two sons and two daughters, Thomas and Archibald, Nancy and Elizabeth.

"John McCallie, first mentioned, died at his residence Mch 21st 50 minutes after 9 o’clock P.M. 1831 aged 77 years 2 months and 13 days.

"Thomas McCallie, before mentioned, was born in Blount Co. E. Tennessee Sept 4 1795 and lived with his father until he was 21 years old, then went to Maryville and lived about eleven months, then went to Knoxville and lived about 6 years, including a trip of about four months to Alabama, then settled in Washington Rhea Co. Tenn. the 1st day of November 1823, and engaged in merchandising. Was married by Rev. Isaac Anderson Dec 26 1831, to Miss Mary A. Hooke of Blount Co. near Maryville and had a son born 9th Oct 1832, Albert Alexander.[7]

"My father (Jno McCallie) was a member of the Presbyterian Church and kept family worship up twice a day and often talked with me about my soul’s salvation and urged the necessity of my serving the Lord. I always believed that I must have religion or I would be lost, but lived in the careless, sinful way that a majority of the human family are doing.

"In the Fall of 1826 I received my first serious impressions under an exhortation of (Rev.) Wm. W. Woods, that is to say, the first that continued until I thought I rec’d saving faith. I was much affected under sermons and meetings in secret and in the lonesome woods (though they were not lonesome to me). I formed many solemn resolutions and called on the growth of the forests to witness my engagements. I thought at many times I would not find relief. I strove very hard as I thought to resign. I continued on in this course for about 12 months.

"Sunday 23, 1827, Sunday of sacrament, after the service of the tables, when the anxious were called up, the first time I could not go. My heart felt harder than it ever had done I thought in my life. I became alarmed. I thought my day of grace was past by but after solemn exhortation it appeared as if I was forced to go. I went up but found no relief. At night the same feelings continued. I resolved at one time to tell the preacher that I knew he had been praying for me for some time, that he might now quit, for my day of grace was over, I again thought that I would strive against the devil and see what would be the consequence.

"Sep. 24, in the morning I came to a final resolution to content my mind and feel resigned to my fate as I thought I was in the hands of a Just God, having been under conviction for about 12 months as before mentioned subject to considerable intermissions. I went to the woods as that was my place for relief and made another resignation of my all, feeling resigned and content to receive whatever should be my fate. I think if ever a soul was willing to receive punishment for its sins I was. I felt that it would be right that I should be punished for my sins and I saw as I thought the propriety of my being content and resigned to my fate.

"I thought I was in duty bound to thank God for what he had done for me and have confidence in God for the future for the goodness he had bestowed on me in times past. I felt my praise was ever due Him.

"I started to return from the woods toward home. Just as I got 20 or 30 feet out of the woods I began to receive a great change of feelings in my heart. I thought I must return to the woods to thank my God for my pleasant feelings. I had like to have not got to the woods. I began to run faster and faster till at last I was obliged to stop, fall down and thank the Lord for my happy feelings and I do assure you they were happy to me. I went so light that I thought I could almost fly. I felt great ease of mind all that day. In the course of that day I put up a great many petitions for my enemies. My worst enemies was most in my mind; those that I considered my enemies were very wicked and their condition pressed heavily on my mind. I had a most earnest desire for the welfare of those that I considered my enemies. They were very wicked and their condition pressed heavily on my mind. I put up many petitions for them.

"Tuesday, 25th Sep. (1827) had more pleasant feeling than ever before,