A sister of Mrs. Lincoln is here. She brings the freshest scandals from Yankeeland. She says she rode with Lovejoy. A friend of hers commands a black regiment. Two Southern horrors – a black regiment and Lovejoy.
March 31st. – Met Preston Hampton. Constance Cary was with me. She showed her regard for him by taking his overcoat and leaving him in a drenching rain. What boyish nonsense he talked; said he was in love with Miss Dabney now, that his love was so hot within him that he was waterproof, the rain sizzed and smoked off. It did not so much as dampen his ardor or his clothes.
April 1st. – Mrs. Davis is utterly depressed. She said
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the fall of Richmond must come; she would send her children to me and Mrs. Preston. We begged her to come to us also. My husband is as depressed as I ever knew him to be. He has felt the death of that angel mother of his keenly, and now he takes his country’s woes to heart.
April 11th. – Drove with Mrs. Davis and all her infant family; wonderfully clever and precocious children, with unbroken wills. At one time there was a sudden uprising of the nursery contingent. They laughed, fought, and screamed. Bedlam broke loose. Mrs. Davis scolded, laughed, and cried. She asked me if my husband would speak to the President about the plan in South Carolina, which everybody said suited him. “No, Mrs. Davis,” said I. “That is what I told Mr. Davis,” said she. “Colonel Chesnut rides so high a horse. Now Browne is so much more practical. He goes forth to be general of conscripts in Georgia. His wife will stay at the Cobbs’s.”
Mrs. Ould gave me a luncheon on Saturday. I felt that this was my last sad farewell to Richmond and the people there I love so well. Mrs. Davis sent her carriage for me, and we went to the Oulds’ together. Such good things were served – oranges, guava jelly, etc. The Examiner says Mr. Ould, when he goes to Fortress Monroe, replenishes his larder; why not? The Examiner has taken another fling at the President, as, “haughty and austere with his friends, affable, kind, subservient to his enemies.” I wonder if the Yankees would indorse that certificate. Both sides abuse him. He can not please anybody, it seems. No doubt he is right.
My husband is now brigadier-general and is sent to South Carolina to organize and take command of the reserve troops. C. C. Clay and L. Q. C. Lamar are both spoken of to fill the vacancy made among Mr. Davis’s aides by this promotion.
To-day, Captain Smith Lee spent the morning here and gave a review of past Washington gossip. I am having
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such a busy, happy life, with so many friends, and my friends are so clever, so charming. But the change to that weary, dreary Camden! Mary Preston said: “I do think Mrs. Chesnut deserves to be canonized; she agrees to go back to Camden.” The Prestons gave me a farewell dinner; my twenty-fourth wedding day, and the very pleasantest day I have spent in Richmond.
Maria Lewis was sitting with us on Mrs. Huger’s steps, and Smith Lee was lauding Virginia people as usual. As Lee would say, there “hove in sight” Frank Parker, riding one of the finest of General Bragg’s horses; by his side Buck on Fairfax, the most beautiful horse in Richmond, his brown coat looking like satin, his proud neck arched, moving slowly, gracefully, calmly, no fidgets, aristocratic in his bearing to the tips of his bridle-reins. There sat Buck tall and fair, managing her horse with infinite ease, her English riding-habit showing plainly the exquisite proportions of her figure. “Supremely lovely,” said Smith Lee. “Look at them both,” said I proudly; “can you match those two in Virginia?” “Three cheers for South Carolina!” was the answer of Lee, the gallant Virginia sailor.
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XVII. CAMDEN, S. C.
May 8,1864 – June 1,1864
CAMDEN, S. C., May 8, 1864. – My friends crowded around me so in those last days in Richmond, I forgot the affairs of this nation utterly; though I did show faith in my Confederate country by buying poor Bones’s (my English maid’s) Confederate bonds. I gave her gold thimbles, bracelets; whatever was gold and would sell in New York or London, I gave.
My friends in Richmond grieved that I had to leave them – not half so much, however, as I did that I must come away. Those last weeks were so pleasant. No battle, no murder, no sudden death, all went merry as a marriage bell. Clever, cordial, kind, brave friends rallied around me.
Maggie Howell and I went down the river to see an exchange of prisoners. Our party were the Lees, Mallorys, Mrs. Buck Allan, Mrs. Ould. We picked up Judge Ould and Buck Allan at Curl’s Neck. I had seen no genuine Yankees before; prisoners, well or wounded, had been German, Scotch, or Irish. Among our men coming ashore was an officer, who had charge of some letters for a friend of mine whose fiancé had died; I gave him her address. One other man showed me some wonderfully ingenious things he had made while a prisoner. One said they gave him rations for a week; he always devoured them in three days, he could not help it; and then he had to bear the inevitable agony of those four remaining days! Many were wounded,
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some were maimed for life. They were very cheerful. We had supper – or some nondescript meal – with ice-cream on board. The band played Home, Sweet Home.
One man tapped another on the shoulder: “Well, how do you feel, old fellow?” “Never was so near crying in my life – for very comfort.”
Governor Cummings, a Georgian, late Governor of Utah, was among the returned prisoners. He had been in prison two years. His wife was with him. He was a striking-looking person, huge in size, and with snow-white hair, fat as a prize ox, with no sign of Yankee barbarity or starvation about him.
That evening, as we walked up to Mrs. Davis’s carriage, which was waiting for us at the landing, Dr. Garnett with Maggie Howell, Major Hall with me, suddenly I heard her scream, and some one stepped back in the dark and said in a whisper. “Little Joe! he has killed himself!” I felt reeling, faint, bewildered. A chattering woman clutched my arm: “Mrs. Davis’s son? Impossible. Whom did you say? Was he an interesting child? How old was he?” The shock was terrible, and unnerved as I was I cried, “For God’s sake take her away!”
Then Maggie and I drove two long miles in silence except for Maggie’s hysterical sobs. She was wild with terror. The news was broken to her in that abrupt way at the carriage door so that at first she thought it had all happened there, and that poor little Joe was in the carriage.
Mr. Burton Harrison met us at the door of the Executive Mansion. Mrs. Semmes and Mrs. Barksdale were there, too. Every window and door of the house seemed wide open, and the wind was blowing the curtains. It was lighted, even in the third story. As I sat in the drawing-room, I could hear the tramp of Mr. Davis’s step as he walked up and down the room above. Not another sound. The whole house as silent as death. It was then twelve o’clock; so I went home and waked General Chesnut, who had gone
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to bed. We went immediately back to the President’s, found Mrs. Semmes still there, but saw no one but her. We thought some friends of the family ought to be in the house.
Mrs. Semmes said when she got there that little Jeff was kneeling down by his brother, and he called out to her in great distress: “Mrs. Semmes, I have said all the prayers I know how, but God will not wake Joe.”
Poor little Joe, the good child of the family, was so gentle and affectionate. He used to run in to say his prayers at his father’s knee. Now he was laid out somewhere above us, crushed and killed. Mrs. Semmes, describing the accident, said he fell from the high north piazza upon a brick pavement. Before I left the house I saw him lying there, white and beautiful as an angel, covered with flowers; Catherine, his nurse, flat on the floor by his side, was weeping and wailing as only an Irishwoman can.
Immense crowds came to the funeral, everybody sympathetic, but some shoving and pushing rudely. There were thousands of children, and each child had a green bough or a bunch of flowers to throw on little Joe’s grave, which was already a mass of white flowers, crosses, and evergreens. The morning I came away from Mrs. Davis’s, early as it was, I met a little child with a handful of snow drops. “Put these on little Joe,” she said; “I knew him so well,” and then she turned and fled without another word. I did not know who she was then or now.