” ‘Impossible. No spare room in the house. No getting away from here; the trains all gone. Don’t you know this hospital place is crammed to the ceiling?’ ‘Alex says I promised to marry him to-day. It is not his fault; he could not come before.’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t care,’ said the positive little thing, ‘I promised Alex to marry him to-day and I will. Send for the Rev. Robert Barnwell.’ We found Robert after a world of trouble, and the bride, lovely in Swiss muslin, was married.
“Then I proposed they should take another walk, and I went to one of my sister nurses and begged her to take me in for the night, as I wished to resign my room to the young couple. At daylight next day they took the train for
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Richmond.” Such is the small allowance of honeymoon permitted in war time.
Beauregard’s telegram: he can not leave the army of the West. His health is bad. No doubt the sea breezes would restore him, but – he can not come now. Such a lovely name – -Gustave Tautant Beauregard. But Jackson and Johnston and Smith and Jones will do – and Lee, how short and sweet.
“Every day,” says Mem, “they come here in shoals – men to say we can not hold Richmond, and we can not hold Charleston much longer. Wretches, beasts! Why do you come here? Why don’t you stay there and fight? Don’t you see that you own yourselves cowards by coming away in the very face of a battle? If you are not liars as to the danger, you are cowards to run away from it.” Thus roars the practical Mem, growing more furious at each word. These Jeremiahs laugh. They think she means others, not the present company.
Tom Huger resigned his place in the United States Navy and came to us. The Iroquois was his ship in the old navy. They say, as he stood in the rigging, after he was shot in the leg, when his ship was leading the attack upon the Iroquois, his old crew in the Iroquois cheered him, and when his body was borne in, the Federals took off their caps in respect for his gallant conduct. When he was dying, Meta Huger said to him: “An of officer wants to see you: he is one of the enemy.” “Let him come in; I have no enemies now.” But when he heard the man’s name:
“No, no. I do not want to see a Southern man who is now in Lincoln’s navy.” The officers of the United States Navy attended his funeral.
June 14th. – All things are against us. Memphis gone. Mississippi fleet annihilated, and we hear it all as stolidly apathetic as if it were a story of the English war against China which happened a year or so ago.
The sons of Mrs. John Julius Pringle have come. They
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were left at school in the North. A young Huger is with them. They seem to have had adventures enough. Walked, waded, rowed in boats, if boats they could find; swam rivers when boats there were none; brave lads are they. One can but admire their pluck and energy. Mrs. Fisher, of Philadelphia, née Middleton, gave them money to make the attempt to get home.
Stuart’s cavalry have rushed through McClellan’s lines and burned five of his transports. Jackson has been reenforced by 16,000 men, and they hope the enemy will be drawn from around Richmond, and the valley be the seat of war.
John Chesnut is in Whiting’s brigade, which has been sent to Stonewall. Mem’s son is with the Boykin Rangers; Company A, No. 1, we call it. And she has persistently wept ever since she heard the news. It is no child’s play, she says, when you are with Stonewall. He doesn’t play at soldiering. He doesn’t take care of his men at all. He only goes to kill the Yankees.
Wade Hampton is here, shot in the foot, but he knows no more about France than he does of the man in the moon. Wet blanket he is just now. Johnston badly wounded. Lee is King of Spades. They are all once more digging for dear life. Unless we can reenforce Stonewall, the game is up. Our chiefs contrive to dampen and destroy the enthusiasm of all who go near them. So much entrenching and falling back destroys the morale of any army. This everlasting retreating, it kills the hearts of the men. Then we are scant of powder.
James Chesnut is awfully proud of Le Conte’s powder manufactory here. Le Conte knows how to do it. James Chesnut provides him the means to carry out his plans.
Colonel Venable doesn’t mince matters: “If we do not deal a blow, a blow that will be felt, it will be soon all up with us. I he Southwest will be lost to us. We can not afford to shilly-shally much longer.”
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Thousands are enlisting on the other side in New Orleans. Butler holds out inducements. To be sure, they are principally foreigners who want to escape starvation. Tennessee we may count on as gone, since we abandoned her at Corinth, Fort Pillow, and Memphis. A man must be sent there, or it is all gone now.
“You call a spade by that name, it seems, and not an agricultural implement?” “They call Mars Robert ‘Old Spade Lee.’ He keeps them digging so.” “General Lee is a noble Virginian. Respect something in this world. Cæsar – call him Old Spade Cæsar? As a soldier, he was as much above suspicion, as he required his wife to be, as Cæsar’s wife, you know. If I remember Cæsar’s Commentaries, he owns up to a lot of entrenching. You let Mars Robert alone. He knows what he is about.”
“Tell us of the women folk at New Orleans; how did they take the fall of the city?” “They are an excitable race,” the man from that city said. As my informant was standing on the levee a daintily dressed lady picked her way, parasol in hand, toward him. She accosted him with great politeness, and her face was as placid and unmoved as in antebellum days. Her first question was: “Will you be so kind as to tell me what is the last general order?” “No order that I know of, madam; General Disorder prevails now.” “Ah! I see; and why are those persons flying and yelling so noisily and racing in the streets in that unseemly way?” “They are looking for a shell to burst over their heads at any moment.” “Ah!” Then, with a courtesy of dignity and grace, she waved her parasol and departed, but stopped to arrange that parasol at a proper angle to protect her face from the sun. There was no vulgar haste in her movements. She tripped away as gracefully as she came. My informant had failed to discompose her by his fearful rations. That was the one self-possessed soul then in New Orleans.
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Another woman drew near, so overheated and out of breath, she had barely time to say she had run miles of squares in her crazy terror and bewilderment, when a sudden shower came up. In a second she was cool and calm. She forgot all the questions she came to ask. “My bonnet, I must save it at any sacrifice,” she said, and so turned her dress over her head, and went off, forgetting her country’s trouble and screaming for a cab.
Went to see Mrs. Burroughs at the old de Saussure house. She has such a sweet face, such soft, kind, beautiful, dark-gray eyes. Such eyes are a poem. No wonder she had a long love-story. We sat in the piazza at twelve o’clock of a June day, the glorious Southern sun shining its very hottest. But we were in a dense shade – magnolias in full bloom, ivy, vines of I know not what, and roses in profusion closed us in. It was a living wall of everything beautiful and sweet. In all this flower-garden of a Columbia, that is the most delicious corner I have been in yet.
Got from the Prestons’ French library, Fanny, with a brilliant preface by Jules Janier. Now, then, I have come to the worst. There can be no worse book than Fanny. The lover is jealous of the husband. The woman is for the polyandry rule of life. She cheats both and refuses to break with either. But to criticize it one must be as shameless as the book itself. Of course, it is clever to the last degree, or it would be kicked into the gutter. It is not nastier or coarser than Mrs. Stowe, but then it is not written in the interests of philanthropy.
We had an unexpected dinner-party to-day. First, Wade Hampton came and his wife. Then Mr. and Mrs. Rose. I remember that the late Colonel Hampton once said to me, a thing I thought odd at the time, “Mrs. James Rose” (and I forget now who was the other) “are the only two people on this side of the water who know how to give a state dinner.” Mr. and Mrs. James Rose: if anybody