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them to give three cheers for Jeff Davis and his generals.” “You forget, my child, that we are on our way to a funeral.”
Found my new house already open hospitably to all comers. My husband had arrived. He was seated at a pine table, on which someone had put a coarse, red table-cover, and by the light of one tallow candle was affably entertaining Edward Barnwell, Isaac Hayne, and Uncle Hamilton. He had given them no tea, however. After I had remedied that oversight, we adjourned to the moonlighted piazza. By tallow-candle-light and the light of the moon, we made out that wonderful smile of Teddy’s, which identifies him as Gerald Grey.
We have laughed so at broken hearts – the broken hearts of the foolish love stories. But Buck, now, is breaking her heart for her brother Willie. Hearts do break in silence, without a word or a sigh. Mrs. Means and Mary Barnwell made no moan – simply turned their faces to the wall and died. How many more that we know nothing of!
When I remember all the true-hearted, the light-hearted the gay and gallant boys who have come laughing, singing and dancing in my way in the three years now past; how I have looked into their brave young eyes and helped then as I could in every way and then saw them no more forever how they lie stark and cold, dead upon the battle-field, or moldering away in hospitals or prisons, which is worse-I think if I consider the long array of those bright youth and loyal men who have gone to their death almost before my very eyes, my heart might break, too. Is anything worth it – this fearful sacrifice, this awful penalty we pay for war?
Allen G. says Johnston was a failure. Now he will wait and see what Hood can do before he pronounces judgment on him. He liked his address to his army. It was grand and inspiring, but every one knows a general has not time to write these things himself. Mr. Kelly, from New Orleans,
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says Dick Taylor and Kirby Smith have quarreled. One would think we had a big enough quarrel on hand for one while already. The Yankees are enough and to spare. General Lovell says, “Joe Brown, with his Georgians at his back, who importuned our government to remove Joe Johnston, they are scared now, and wish they had not.”
In our democratic Republic, if one rises to be its head, whomever he displeases takes a Turkish revenge and defiles the tombs of his father and mother; hints that his father was a horse-thief and his mother no better than she should be; his sisters barmaids and worse, his brothers Yankee turncoats and traitors. All this is hurled at Lincoln or Jeff Davis indiscriminately.
August 2d. – Sherman again. Artillery parked and a line of battle formed before Atlanta. When we asked Brewster what Sam meant to do at Atlanta he answered, “Oh – oh, like the man who went, he says he means to stay there!” Hope he may, that’s all.
Spent to-day with Mrs. McCord at her hospital. She is dedicating her grief for her son, sanctifying it, one might say, by giving up her soul and body, her days and nights, to the wounded soldiers at her hospital. Every moment of her time is surrendered to their needs.
To-day General Taliaferro dined with us. He served with Hood at the second battle of Manassas and at Fredericksburg, where Hood won his major-general’s spurs. On the battle-field, Hood, he said, “has military inspiration.” We were thankful for that word. All now depends on that army at Atlanta. If that fails us, the game is up.
August 3d. – Yesterday was such a lucky day for my housekeeping in our hired house. Oh, ye kind Columbia folk! Mrs. Alex Taylor, née Hayne, sent me a huge bowl of yellow butter and a basket to match of every vegetable in season. Mrs. Preston’s man came with mushrooms freshly cut and Mrs. Tom Taylor’s with fine melons.
Sent Smith and Johnson (my house servant and a
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carpenter from home, respectively) to the Commissary’s with our wagon for supplies. They made a mistake, so they said, and went to the depot instead, and stayed there all day. I needed a servant sadly in many ways all day long, but I hope Smith and Johnson had a good time. I did not lose patience until Harriet came in an omnibus because I had neither servants nor horse to send to the station for her.
Stephen Elliott is wounded, and his wife and father have gone to him. Six hundred of his men were destroyed in a mine; and part of his brigade taken prisoners: Stoneman and his raiders have been captured. This last fact gives a slightly different hue to our horizon of unmitigated misery.
General L – told us of an unpleasant scene at the President’s last winter. He called there to see Mrs. McLean. Mrs. Davis was in the room and he did not speak to her. He did not intend to be rude; it was merely an oversight. And so he called again and tried to apologize, to remedy his blunder, but the President was inexorable, and would not receive his overtures of peace and good-will. General L – is a New York man. Talk of the savagery of slavery, heavens! How perfect are our men’s manners down here, how suave, how polished are they. Fancy one of them forgetting to speak to Mrs. Davis in her own drawing-room.
August 6th. – Archer came, a classmate of my husband’s at Princeton; they called him Sally Archer then, he was so girlish and pretty. No trace of feminine beauty about this grim soldier now. He has a hard face, black-bearded and sallow, with the saddest black eyes. His hands are small, white, and well-shaped; his manners quiet. He is abstracted and weary-looking, his mind and body having been deadened by long imprisonment. He seemed glad to be here, and James Chesnut was charmed. “Dear Sally Archer,” he calls him cheerily, and the other responds in a far-off, faded kind of way.
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Hood and Archer were given the two Texas regiments at the beginning of the war. They were colonels and Wigfall was their general. Archer’s comments on Hood are: “He does not compare intellectually with General Johnston, who is decidedly a man of culture and literary attainments, with much experience in military matters. Hood, however, has youth and energy to help counterbalance all this. He has a simple-minded directness of purpose always. He is awfully shy, and he has suffered terribly, but then he has had consolations – such a rapid rise in his profession, and then his luck to be engaged to the beautiful Miss – .”
They tried Archer again and again on the heated controversy of the day, but he stuck to his text. Joe Johnston is a fine military critic, a capital writer, an accomplished soldier, as brave as Cæsar in his own person, but cautious to a fault in manipulating an army. Hood has all the dash end fire of a reckless young soldier, and his Texans would follow him to the death. Too much caution might be followed easily by too much headlong rush. That is where the swing-back of the pendulum might ruin us.
August 10th. – To-day General Chesnut and his staff departed. His troops are ordered to look after the mountain passes beyond Greenville on the North Carolina and Tennessee quarter.
Misery upon misery. Mobile1 is going as New Orleans went. Those Western men have not held their towns as we held and hold Charleston, or as the Virginians hold Richmond. And they call us a “frill-shirt, silk-stocking chivalry,” or “a set of dandy Miss Nancys.” They fight desperately in their bloody street brawls, but we bear privation and discipline best.
August 14th. – We have conflicting testimony. Young
1. The battle of Mobile Bay, won under Farragut, was fought on August 5, 1864.
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Wade Hampton, of Joe Johnston’s staff, says Hood lost 12,000 men in the battles of the 22d1 and 24th, but Brewster, of Hood’s staff, says not three thousand at the utmost. Now here are two people strictly truthful, who tell things so differently. In this war people see the same things so oddly one does not know what to believe.
Brewster says when he was in Richmond Mr. Davis said Johnston would have to be removed and Sherman blocked. He could not make Hardee full general because, when he had command of an army he was always importuning the War Department for a general-in-chief to be sent there over him. Polk would not do, brave soldier and patriot as he was. He was a good soldier, and would do his best for his country, and do his duty under whomever was put over him by those in authority. Mr. Davis did not once intimate to him who it was that he intended to promote to the head of the Western Army.