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“Now, my lads, stand firm!” and, “Now up, and let them have it!”
Our name has not gone out of print. To-day, the Examiner, as usual, pitches into the President. It thinks Toombs, Cobb, Slidell, Lamar, or Chesnut would have been far better in the office. There is considerable choice in that lot. Five men more utterly dissimilar were never named in the same paragraph.
September 19th. – A painful piece of news came to us yesterday – our cousin, Mrs. Witherspoon, of Society Hill, was found dead in her bed. She was quite well the night before. Killed, people say, by family sorrows. She was a proud and high-strung woman. Nothing shabby in word, thought, or deed ever came nigh her. She was of a warm and tender heart, too; truth and uprightness itself. Few persons have ever been more loved and looked up to. She was a very handsome old lady, of fine presence, dignified and commanding.
“Killed by family sorrows,” so they said when Mrs. John N. Williams died. So Uncle John said yesterday of his brother, Burwell. “Death deserts the army,” said that quaint old soul, “and takes fancy shots of the most eccentric kind nearer home.”
The high and disinterested conduct our enemies seem to expect of us is involuntary and unconscious praise. They pay us the compliment to look for from us (and execrate us for the want of it) a degree of virtue they were never able to practise themselves. It is a crowning misdemeanor for us to hold still in slavery those Africans whom they brought here from Africa, or sold to us when they found it did not pay to own them themselves. Gradually, they slid or sold them off down here; or freed them prospectively, giving themselves years in which to get rid of them in a remunerative way. We want to spread them over other lands, too – West and South, or Northwest, where the climate would free them or kill them, or improve them out
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of the world, as our friends up North do the Indians. If they had been forced to keep the negroes in New England, I dare say the negroes might have shared the Indians’ fate, for they are wise in their generation, these Yankee children of light. Those pernicious Africans! So have just spoken Mr. Chesnut and Uncle John, both ci-devant Union men, now utterly for State rights.
It is queer how different the same man may appear viewed from different standpoints. “What a perfect gentleman,” said one person of another; “so fine-looking, high-bred, distinguished, easy, free, and above all graceful in his bearing; so high-toned! He is always indignant at any symptom of wrong-doing. He is charming – the man of all others I like to have strangers see – a noble representative of our country.” “Yes, every word of that is true,” was the reply. “He is all that. And then the other side of the picture is true, too. You can always find him. You know where to find him! Wherever there is a looking-glass, a bottle, or a woman, there will he be also.” “My God! and you call yourself his friend.” “Yes, I know him down to the ground.”
This conversation I overheard from an upper window when looking down on the piazza below – a complicated character truly beyond La Bruyère – with what Mrs. Preston calls refinement spread thin until it is skin-deep only.
An iron steamer has run the blockade at Savannah. We now raise our wilted heads like flowers after a shower. This drop of good news revives us.1
1. By reason of illness, preoccupation in other affairs, and various deterrent causes besides, Mrs. Chesnut allowed a considerable period to elapse before making another entry in her diary.
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XI. COLUMBIA, S. C.
February 20, 1862 – July 21, 1862
COLUMBIA, S. C., February 20, 1862. – Had an appetite for my dainty breakfast. Always breakfast in bed now. But then, my Mercury contained such bad news. That is an appetizing style of matutinal newspaper. Fort Donelson1 has fallen, but no men fell with it. It is prisoners for them that we can not spare, or prisoners for us that we may not be able to feed: that is so much to be “forefended,” as Keitt says. They lost six thousand, we two thousand; I grudge that proportion. In vain, alas! ye gallant few – few, but undismayed. Again, they make a stand. We have Buckner, Beauregard, and Albert Sidney Johnston. With such leaders and God’s help we may be saved from the hated Yankees; who knows?
February 21st. – A crowd collected here last night and there was a serenade. I am like Mrs. Nickleby, who never saw a horse coming full speed but she thought the Cheerybles had sent post-haste to take Nicholas into co-partnership. So I got up and dressed, late as it was. I felt sure England had sought our alliance at last, and we would
1. Fort Donelson stood on the Cumberland River about 60 miles northwest of Nashville. The Confederate garrison numbered about 18,000 men. General Grant invested the Fort on February 13, 1862, and General Buckner, who commanded it, surrendered on February 16th. The Federal force at the time of the surrender numbered 27,000 men; their loss in killed and wounded being 2,660 men and the Confederate loss about 2,000.
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make a Yorktown of it before long. Who was it? Will you ever guess? – Artemus Goodwyn and General Owens, of Florida.
Just then, Mr. Chesnut rushed in, put out the light, locked the door and sat still as a mouse. Rap, rap, came at the door. “I say, Chesnut, they are calling for you.” At last we heard Janney (hotel-keeper) loudly proclaiming from the piazza that “Colonel Chesnut was not here at all, at all. ” After a while, when they had all gone from the street, and the very house itself had subsided into perfect quiet, the door again was roughly shaken. “I say, Chesnut, old fellow, come out – I know you are there. Nobody here now wants to hear you make a speech. That crowd has all gone. We want a little quiet talk with you. I am just from Richmond.” That was the open sesame, and to-day I hear none of the Richmond news is encouraging. Colonel Shaw is blamed for the shameful Roanoke surrender.1
Toombs is out on a rampage and swears he will not accept a seat in the Confederate Senate given in the insulting way his was by the Georgia Legislature: calls it shabby treatment, and adds that Georgia is not the only place where good men have been so ill used.
The Governor and Council have fluttered the dove-cotes, or, at least, the tea-tables. They talk of making a call for all silver, etc. I doubt if we have enough to make the sacrifice worth while, but we propose to set the example.
February 22d. – What a beautiful day for our Confederate President to be inaugurated! God speed him; God keep him; God save him!
John Chesnut’s letter was quite what we needed. In spirit it is all that one could ask. He says, “Our late reverses are acting finely with the army of the Potomac. A few more thrashings and every man will enlist for the
1. General Burnside captured the Confederate garrison at Roanoke Island on February 8, 1862.
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war. Victories made us too sanguine and easy, not to say vainglorious. Now for the rub, and let them have it!”
A lady wrote to Mrs. Bunch: “Dear Emma: When shall I call for you to go and see Madame de St. André?” She was answered: “Dear Lou: I can not go with you to see Madame de St. Andre, but will always retain the kindest feeling toward you on account of our past relations,” etc. The astounded friend wrote to ask what all this meant. No answer came, and then she sent her husband to ask and demand an explanation. He was answered thus: “My dear fellow, there can be no explanation possible. Hereafter there will be no intercourse between my wife and yours; simply that, nothing more.” So the men meet at the club as before, and there is no further trouble between them. The lady upon whom the slur is cast says, “and I am a woman and can’t fight!”
February 23d. – While Mr. Chesnut was in town I was at the Prestons. John Cochran and some other prisoners had asked to walk over the grounds, visit the Hampton Gardens, and some friends in Columbia. After the dreadful state of the public mind at the escape of one of the prisoners, General Preston was obliged to refuse his request. Mrs. Preston and the rest of us wanted him to say “Yes,” and so find out who in Columbia were his treacherous friends. Pretty bold people they must be, to receive Yankee invaders in the midst of the row over one enemy already turned loose amid us.