But of Mr. Chesnut’s three crazes: Maryland is to be made the seat of war, old Morrow’s idea of buying up
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steamers abroad for our coast defenses should be adopted, and, last of all, but far from the least, we must make much cotton and send it to England as a bank to draw on. The very cotton we have now, if sent across the water, would be a gold mine to us.
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VI. CHARLESTON, S. C.
May 25, 1861 – June 24, 1861
CHARLESTON, S. C., May 25,1861. – We have come back to South Carolina from the Montgomery Congress, stopping over at Mulberry. We came with R. M. T. Hunter and Mr. Barnwell. Mr. Barnwell has excellent reasons for keeping cotton at home, but I forget what they are. Generally, people take what he says, also Mr. Hunter’s wisdom, as unanswerable. Not so Mr. Chesnut, who growls at both, much as he likes them. We also had Tom Lang and his wife, and Doctor Boykin. Surely there never was a more congenial party. The younger men had been in the South Carolina College while Mr. Barnwell was President. Their love and respect for him were immeasurable and he benignly received it, smiling behind those spectacles.
Met John Darby at Atlanta and told him he was Surgeon of the Hampton Legion, which delighted him. He had had adventures. With only a few moments on the platform to interchange confidences, he said he had remained a little too long in the Medical College in Philadelphia, where he was some kind of a professor, and they had been within an ace of hanging him as a Southern spy. “Rope was ready,” he sniggered. At Atlanta when he unguardedly said he was fresh from Philadelphia, he barely escaped lynching, being taken for a Northern spy. “Lively life I am having among you, on both sides,” he said, hurrying away. And I moaned, “Here was John Darby like
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to have been killed by both sides, and no time to tell me the curious coincidences.” What marvelous experiences a little war begins to produce.
May 27th. – They look for a fight at Norfolk. Beauregard is there. I think if I were a man I’d be there, too. Also Harper’s Ferry is to be attacked. The Confederate flag has been cut down at Alexandria by a man named Ellsworth,1 who was in command of Zouaves. Jackson was the name of the person who shot Ellsworth in the act. Sixty of our cavalry have been taken by Sherman’s brigade. Deeper and deeper we go in.
Thirty of Tom Boykin’s company have come home from Richmond. They went as a rifle company, armed with muskets. They were sandhill tackeys – those fastidious ones, not very anxious to fight with anything, or in any way, I fancy. Richmond ladies had come for them in carriages, feted them, waved handkerchiefs to them, brought them dainties with their own hands, in the faith that every Carolinian was a gentleman, and every man south of Mason and Dixon’s line a hero. But these are not exactly descendants of the Scotch Hay, who fought the Danes with his plowshare, or the oxen’s yoke, or something that could hit hard and that came handy.
Johnny has gone as a private in Gregg’s regiment. He could not stand it at home any longer. Mr. Chesnut was willing for him to go, because those sandhill men said “this was a rich man’s war,” and the rich men would be the officers and have an easy time and the poor ones would
1. Ephraim Elmer Ellsworth was a native of Saratoga County, New York. In 1860 he organized a regiment of Zouaves and became its Colonel. He accompanied Lincoln to Washington in 1861 and was soon sent with his regiment to Alexandria, where, on seeing a Confederate flag floating from a hotel, he personally rushed to the roof and tore it down. The owner of the hotel, a man named Jackson, met him as he was descending and shot him dead. Frank E. Brownell, one of Ellsworth’s men, then killed Jackson.
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be privates. So he said: “Let the gentlemen set the example; let them go in the ranks.” So John Chesnut is a gentleman private. He took his servant with him all the same.
Johnny reproved me for saying, “If I were a man, I would not sit here and dole and drink and drivel and forget the fight going on in Virginia.” He said it was my duty not to talk so rashly and make enemies. He “had the money in his pocket to raise a company last fall, but it has slipped through his fingers, and now he is a common soldier.” “You wasted it or spent it foolishly,” said I. “I do not know where it has gone,” said he. “There was too much consulting over me, too much good counsel was given to me, and everybody gave me different advice.” “Don’t you ever know your own mind?” “We will do very well in the ranks; men and officers all alike; we know everybody.”
So I repeated Mrs. Lowndes’s solemn words when she heard that South Carolina had seceded alone: “As thy days so shall thy strength be.” Don’t know exactly what I meant, but thought I must be impressive as he was going away. Saw him off at the train. Forgot to say anything there, but cried my eyes out.
Sent Mrs. Wigfall a telegram – “Where shrieks the wild sea-mew?” She answered: “Sea-mew at the Spotswood Hotel. Will shriek soon. I will remain here.”
June 6th. – Davin! Have had a talk concerning him to-day with two opposite extremes of people.
Mrs. Chesnut, my mother-in-law, praises everybody, good and bad. “Judge not,” she says. She is a philosopher; she would not give herself the pain to find fault. The Judge abuses everybody, and he does it so well – short, sharp, and incisive are his sentences, and he revels in condemning the world en bloc, as the French say. So nobody is the better for her good word, or the, worse for his bad one.
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In Camden I found myself in a flurry of women. “Traitors,” they cried. “Spies; they ought to be hanged; Davin is taken up, Dean and Davis are his accomplices.” “What has Davin done?” “He’ll be hanged, never you mind.” “For what?” “They caught him walking on the trestle work in the swamp, after no good, you may be sure.” “They won’t hang him for that!” “Hanging is too good for him!” “You wait till Colonel Chesnut comes.” “He is a lawyer,” I said, gravely. “Ladies, he will disappoint you. There will be no lynching if he goes to that meeting to-day. He will not move a step except by habeas corpus and trial by jury, and a quantity of bench and bar to speak long speeches.”
Mr. Chesnut did come, and gave a more definite account of poor Davin’s precarious situation. They had intercepted treasonable letters of his at the Post Office. I believe it was not a very black treason after all. At any rate, Mr. Chesnut spoke for him with might and main at the meeting. It was composed (the meeting) of intelligent men with cool heads. And they banished Davin to Fort Sumter. The poor Music Master can’t do much harm in the casemates there. He may thank his stars that Mr. Chesnut gave him a helping hand. In the red hot state our public mind now is in there will be a short shrift for spies. Judge Withers said that Mr. Chesnut never made a more telling speech in his life than he did to save this poor Frenchman for whom Judge Lynch was ready. I had never heard of Davin in my life until I heard he was to be hanged.
Judge Stephen A. Douglas, the “little giant,” is dead; one of those killed by the war, no doubt; trouble of mind.
Charleston people are thin-skinned. They shrink from Russell’s touches. I find his criticisms mild. He has a light touch. I expected so much worse. Those Englishmen come, somebody says, with three P’s – pen, paper, prejudices. I dread some of those after-dinner stories. As to
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that day in the harbor, he let us off easily. He says our men are so fine looking. Who denies it? Not one of us. Also that it is a silly impression which has gone abroad that men can not work in this climate. We live in the open air, and work like Trojans at all manly sports, riding hard, hunting, playing at being soldiers. These fine, manly specimens have been in the habit of leaving the coast when it became too hot there, and also of fighting a duel or two, if kept long sweltering under a Charleston sun. Handsome youths, whose size and muscle he admired so much as they prowled around the Mills House, would not relish hard work in the fields between May and December. Negroes stand a tropical or semitropical sun at noon-day better than white men. In fighting it is different. Men will not then mind sun, or rain, or wind.