I sat placidly rocking in my chair by the window, trying to hope all was for the best. Mary Hammy rushed in
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literally drowned in tears. I never saw so drenched a face in my life. My heart stopped still. “Commodore Barron is taken prisoner,” said she. “The Yankees have captured him and all his lieutenants. Poor Imogen – and there is my father scouting about, the Lord knows where. I only know he is in the advance guard. The Barron’s time has come. Mine may come any minute. Oh, Cousin Mary, when Mrs. Lee told Imogen, she fainted! Those poor girls; they are nearly dead with trouble and fright.”
“Go straight back to those children,” I said. “Nobody will touch a hair of their father’s head. Tell them I say so. They dare not. They are not savages quite. This is a civilized war, you know.”
Mrs. Lee said to Mrs. Eustis (Mr. Corcoran’s daughter) yesterday: “Have you seen those accounts of arrests in Washington?” Mrs. Eustis answered calmly: “Yes, I know all about it. I suppose you allude to the fact that my father has been imprisoned.” “No, no,” interrupted the explainer, “she means the incarceration of those mature Washington belles suspected as spies.” But Mrs. Eustis continued, “I have no fears for my father’s safety.”
August 31st. – Congress adjourns to-day. Jeff Davis ill. We go home on Monday if I am able to travel. Already I feel the dread stillness and torpor of our Sahara of a Sand Hill creeping into my veins. It chills the marrow of my bones. I am reveling in the noise of city life. I know what is before me. Nothing more cheering than the cry of the lone whippoorwill will break the silence at Sandy Hill, except as night draws near, when the screech-owl will add his mournful note.
September 1st. – North Carolina writes for arms for her soldiers. Have we any to send? No. Brewster, the plainspoken, says, “The President is ill, and our affairs are in the hands of noodles. All the generals away with the army; nobody here; General Lee in Western Virginia. Reading the third Psalm. The devil is sick, the devil a
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saint would be. Lord, how are they increased that trouble me? Many are they that rise up against me!”
September 2d. – Mr. Miles says he is not going anywhere at all, not even home. He is to sit here permanently – chairman of a committee to overhaul camps, commissariats, etc., etc.
We exchanged our ideas of Mr. Mason, in which we agreed perfectly. In the first place, he has a noble presence – really a handsome man; is a manly old Virginian, straightforward, brave, truthful, clever, the very beau-ideal of an independent, high-spirited F. F. V. If the English value a genuine man they will have one here. In every particular he is the exact opposite of Talleyrand. He has some peculiarities. He had never an ache or a pain himself; his physique is perfect, and he loudly declares that he hates to see persons ill; seems to him an unpardonable weakness.
It began to grow late. Many people had come to say good-by to me. I had fever as usual to-day, but in the excitement of this crowd of friends the invalid forgot fever. Mr. Chesnut held up his watch to me warningly and intimated “it was late, indeed, for one who has to travel tomorrow.” So, as the Yankees say after every defeat, I “retired in good order.”
Not quite, for I forgot handkerchief and fan. Gonzales rushed after and met me at the foot of the stairs. In his foreign, pathetic, polite, high-bred way, he bowed low and said he had made an excuse for the fan, for he had a present to make me, and then, though “startled and amazed, I paused and on the stranger gazed.” Alas! I am a woman approaching forty, and the offering proved to be a bottle of cherry bounce. Nothing could have been more opportune, and with a little ice, etc., will help, I am sure, to save my life on that dreadful journey home.
No discouragement now felt at the North. They take our forts and are satisfied for a while. Then the English
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are strictly neutral. Like the woman who saw her husband fight the bear, “It was the first fight she ever saw when she did not care who whipped.”
Mr. Davis was very kind about it all. He told Mr. Chesnut to go home and have an eye to all the State defenses, etc., and that he would give him any position he asked for if he still wished to continue in the army. Now, this would be all that heart could wish, but Mr. Chesnut will never ask for anything. What will he ask for? That’s the rub. I am certain of very few things in life now, but this is one I am certain of : Mr. Chesnut will never ask mortal man for any promotion for himself or for one of his own family.
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X. CAMDEN, S. C.
September 9, 1861-September 19, 1861
CAMDEN, S. C., September 9,1861. – Home again at Mulberry, the fever in full possession of me. My sister, Kate, is my ideal woman, the most agreeable person I know in the world, with her soft, low, and sweet voice, her graceful, gracious ways, and her glorious gray eyes, that I looked into so often as we confided our very souls to each other.
God bless old Betsey’s yellow face! She is a nurse in a thousand, and would do anything for “Mars Jeems’ wife.” My small ailments in all this comfort set me mourning over the dead and dying soldiers I saw in Virginia. How feeble my compassion proves, after all.
I handed the old Colonel a letter from his son in the army. He said, as he folded up the missive from the seat of war, “With this war we may die out. Your husband is the last – of my family.” He means that my husband is his only living son; his grandsons are in the army, and they, too, may be killed – even Johnny, the gallant and gay, may not be bullet-proof. No child have I.
Now this old man of ninety years was born when it was not the fashion for a gentleman to be a saint, and being lord of all he surveyed for so many years, irresponsible, in the center of his huge domain, it is wonderful he was not a greater tyrant – the softening influence of that angel wife, no doubt. Saint or sinner, he understands the world about him – au fond.
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Have had a violent attack of something wrong about my heart. It stopped beating, then it took to trembling, creaking and thumping like a Mississippi high-pressure steamboat, and the noise in my ears was more like an ammunition wagon rattling over the stones in Richmond. That was yesterday, and yet I am alive. That kind of thing makes one feel very mortal.
Russell writes how disappointed Prince Jerome Napoleon was with the appearance of our troops, and “he did not like Beauregard at all.” Well! I give Bogar up to him. But how a man can find fault with our soldiers, as I have seen them individually and collectively in Charleston, Richmond, and everywhere – that beats me.
The British are the most conceited nation in the world, the most self-sufficient, self-satisfied, and arrogant. But each individual man does not blow his own penny whistle; they brag wholesale. Wellington – he certainly left it for others to sound his praises – though Mr. Binney thought the statue of Napoleon at the entrance of Apsley House was a little like ” ‘Who killed Cock Robin?’ ‘I, said the sparrow, with my bow and arrow.’ ” But then it is so pleasant to hear them when it is a lump sum of praise, with no private crowing – praise of Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Scots Greys.
Fighting this and fighting that, with their crack corps stirs the blood and every heart responds – three times three! Hurrah!
But our people feel that they must send forth their own reported prowess: with an, “I did this and I did that.” I know they did it; but I hang my head.
In those Tarleton Memoirs, in Lee’s Memoirs, in Moultrie’s, and in Lord Rawdon’s letters, self is never brought to the front. I have been reading them over and admire their modesty and good taste as much as their courage and cleverness. That kind of British eloquence takes me. It is not, “Soldats! marchons, gloire!” Not a bit of it; but,
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MULBERRY HOUSE, NEAR CAMDEN, S. C.
From a Recent Photograph.
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