February 26th. – We went to see Mrs. Breckinridge, who is here with her husband. Then we paid our respects to Mrs. Lee. Her room was like an industrial school: everybody so busy. Her daughters were all there plying their needles, with several other ladies. Mrs. Lee showed us a beautiful sword, recently sent to the General by some Marylanders,
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now in Paris. On the blade was engraved, “Aide toi et Dieu t’aidera.” When we came out someone said, “Did you see how the Lees spend their time? What a rebuke to the taffy parties!”
Another maimed hero is engaged to be married. Sally Hampton has accepted John Haskell. There is a story that he reported for duty after his arm was shot off; suppose in the fury of the battle he did not feel the pain.
General Breckinridge once asked, “What’s the name of the fellow who has gone to Europe for Hood’s leg?” “Dr. Darby.” “Suppose it is shipwrecked?” “No matter; half a dozen are ordered.” Mrs. Preston raised her hands: “No wonder the General says they talk of him as if he were a centipede; his leg is in everybody’s mouth.”
March 3d. – Hetty, the handsome, and Constance, the witty, came; the former too prudish to read Lost and Saved, by Mrs. Norton, after she had heard the plot. Conny was making a bonnet for me. Just as she was leaving the house, her friendly labors over, my husband entered, and quickly ordered his horse. “It is so near dinner,” I began. “But I am going with the President. I am on duty. He goes to inspect the fortifications. The enemy, once more, are within a few miles of Richmond.” Then we prepared a luncheon for him. Constance Cary remained with me.
After she left I sat down to Romola, and I was absorbed in it. How hardened we grow to war and war’s alarms! The enemy’s cannon or our own are thundering in my ears, and I was dreadfully afraid some infatuated and frightened friend would come in to cheer, to comfort, and interrupt me. Am I the same poor soul who fell on her knees and prayed, and wept, and fainted, as the first gun boomed from Fort Sumter? Once more we have repulsed the enemy. But it is humiliating, indeed, that he can come and threaten us at our very gates whenever he so pleases. If a forlorn negro had not led them astray (and they hanged him for it) on Tuesday night, unmolested, they
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would have walked into Richmond. Surely there is horrid neglect or mismanagement somewhere.
March 4th. – The enemy has been reenforced and is on us again. Met Wade Hampton, who told me my husband was to join him with some volunteer troops; so I hurried home. Such a cavalcade rode up to luncheon! Captain Smith Lee and Preston Hampton, the handsomest, the oldest and the youngest of the party. This was at the Prestons’. Smith Lee walked home with me; alarm-bells ringing; horsemen galloping; wagons rattling. Dr. H. stopped us to say “Beast” Butler was on us with sixteen thousand men. How scared the Doctor looked! And, after all, it was only a notice to the militia to turn out and drill.
March 5th. – Tom Fergurson walked home with me. He told me of Colonel Dahlgren’s1 death and the horrid memoranda found in his pocket. He came with secret orders to destroy this devoted city, hang the President and his Cabinet, and burn the town! Fitzhugh Lee was proud that the Ninth Virginia captured him.
Found Mrs. Semmes covering her lettuces and radishes as calmly as if Yankee raiders were a myth. While “Beast” Butler holds Fortress Monroe he will make things lively for us. On the alert must we be now.
March 7th. – Shopping, and paid $30 for a pair of gloves; $50 for a pair of slippers; $24 for six spools of thread; $32 for five miserable, shabby little pocket handkerchiefs. When I came home found Mrs. Webb. At her hospital there was a man who had been taken prisoner by Dahlgren’s party. He saw the negro hanged who had misled
1. Colonel Ulric Dahlgren was a son of the noted Admiral, John H. Dahlgren, who, in July, 1863, had been placed in command of the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron and conducted the naval operations against Charleston, between July 10 and September 7, 1863. Colonel Dahlgren distinguished himself at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. The raid in which he lost his life on March 4, 1864, was planned by himself and General Kilpatrick.
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led them, unintentionally, in all probability. He saw Dahlgren give a part of his bridle to hang him. Details are melancholy, as Emerson says. This Dahlgren had also lost a leg.
Constance Cary, in words too fine for the occasion, described the homely scene at my house; how I prepared sandwiches for my husband; and broke, with trembling hand, the last bottle of anything to drink in the house, a bottle I destined to go with the sandwiches. She called it a Hector and Andromache performance.
March 8th. – Mrs. Preston’s story. As we walked home, she told me she had just been to see a lady she had known more than twenty years before. She had met her in this wise: One of the chambermaids of the St. Charles Hotel (New Orleans) told Mrs. Preston’s nurse it was when Mary Preston was a baby – that up among the servants in the garret there was a sick lady and her children. The maid was sure she was a lady, and thought she was hiding from somebody. Mrs. Preston went up, knew the lady, had her brought down into comfortable rooms, and nursed her until she recovered from her delirium and fever. She had run away, indeed, and was hiding herself and her children from a worthless husband. Now, she has one son in a Yankee prison, one mortally wounded, and the last of them dying there under her eyes of consumption. This last had married here in Richmond, not wisely, and too soon, for he was a mere boy; his pay as a private was eleven dollars a month, and his wife’s family charged him three hundred dollars a month for her board; so he had to work double tides, do odd jobs by night and by day, and it killed him by exposure to cold in this bitter climate to which his constitution was unadapted.
They had been in Vicksburg during the siege, and during the bombardment sought refuge in a cave. The roar of the cannon ceasing, they came out gladly for a breath of fresh air. At the moment when they emerged, a bomb burst
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there, among them, so to speak, struck the son already wounded, and smashed off the arm of a beautiful little grandchild not three years old. There was this poor little girl with her touchingly lovely face, and her arm gone. This mutilated little martyr, Mrs. Preston said, was really to her the crowning touch of the woman’s affliction. Mrs. Preston put up her hand, “Her baby face haunts me.”
March 11th. – Letters from home, including one from my husband’s father, now over ninety, written with his own hand, and certainly his own mind still. I quote: “Bad times; worse coming. Starvation stares me in the face. Neither John’s nor James’s overseer will sell me any corn.” Now, what has the government to do with the fact that on all his plantations he made corn enough to last for the whole year, and by the end of January his negroes had stolen it all, Poor old man, he has fallen on evil days, after a long life of ease and prosperity.
To-day, I read The Blithedale Romance. Blithedale leaves such an unpleasant impression. I like pleasant, kindly stories, now that we are so harrowed by real life. Tragedy is for our hours of ease.
March 12th. – An active campaign has begun everywhere. Kilpatrick still threatens us. Bragg has organized his fifteen hundred of cavalry to protect Richmond. Why can’t my husband be made colonel of that? It is a new regiment. No; he must be made a general!
“Now,” says Mary Preston, “Doctor Darby is at the mercy of both Yankees and the rolling sea, and I am anxious enough; but, instead of taking my bed and worrying mamma, I am taking stock of our worldly goods and trying to arrange the wedding paraphernalia for two girls.”
There is love-making and love-making in this world. What a time the sweethearts of that wretch, young Shakespeare, must have had. What experiences of life’s delights must have been his before he evolved the Romeo and Juliet business from his own internal consciousness; also that delicious
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Beatrice and Rosalind. The poor creature that he left his second best bedstead to came in second best all the time, no doubt; and she hardly deserved more. Fancy people wondering that Shakespeare and his kind leave no progeny like themselves! Shakespeare’s children would have been half his only; the other half only the second best bedstead’s. What would you expect of that commingling of materials? Goethe used his lady-loves as school-books are used: he studied them from cover to cover, got all that could be got of self-culture and knowledge of human nature from the study of them, and then threw them aside as if of no further account in his life.