We went to the Congress. Governor Cobb, who presides
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over that august body, put James Chesnut in the chair, and came down to talk to us. He told us why the pay of Congressmen was fixed in secret session, and why the amount of it was never divulged – to prevent the lodginghouse and hotel people from making their bills of a size to cover it all. “The bill would be sure to correspond with the pay,” he said.
In the hotel parlor we had a scene. Mrs. Scott was describing Lincoln, who is of the cleverest Yankee type. She said: “Awfully ugly, even grotesque in appearance, the kind who are always at the corner stores, sitting on boxes, whittling sticks, and telling stories as funny as they are vulgar.” Here I interposed: “But Stephen A. Douglas said one day to Mr. Chesnut, ‘Lincoln is the hardest fellow to handle I have ever encountered yet.’ ” Mr. Scott is from California, and said Lincoln is “an utter American specimen, coarse, rouge, and strong; a good-natured, kind creature; as pleasant-tempered as he is clever, and if this country can be joked and laughed out of its rights he is the kind-hearted fellow to do it. Now if there is a war and it pinches the Yankee pocket instead of filling it – ”
Here a shrill voice came from the next room (which opened upon the one we were in by folding doors thrown wide open) and said: “Yankees are no more mean and stingy than you are. People at the North are just as good as people at the South.” The speaker advanced upon us in great wrath.
Mrs. Scott apologized and made some smooth, polite remark, though evidently much embarrassed. But the vinegar face and curly pate refused to receive any concessions, and replied: “That comes with a very bad grace after what you were saying,” and she harangued us loudly for several minutes. Some one in the other room giggled outright, but we were quiet as mice. Nobody wanted to hurt her feelings. She was one against so many. If I were at the
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North, I should expect them to belabor us, and should hold my tongue. We separated North from South because of incompatibility of temper. We are divorced because we have hated each other so. If we could only separate, a “separation à l’agréable,” as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce.
The poor exile had already been insulted, she said. She was playing “Yankee Doodle” on the piano before breakfast to soothe her wounded spirit, and the Judge came in and calmly requested her to “leave out the Yankee while she played the Doodle.” The Yankee end of it did not suit our climate, he said; was totally out of place and had got out of its latitude.
A man said aloud: “This war talk is nothing. It will soon blow over. Only a fuss gotten up by that Charleston clique.” Mr. Toombs asked him to show his passports, for a man who uses such language is a suspicious character.
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III. CHARLESTON, S. C.
March 26, 1861 – April 15, 1861
CHARLESTON, S. C., March 26, 1861. – I have just come from Mulberry, where the snow was a foot deep – winter at last after months of apparently May or June weather. Even the climate, like everything else, is upside down. But after that den of dirt and horror, Montgomery Hall, how white the sheets looked, luxurious bed linen once more, delicious fresh cream with my coffee! I breakfasted in bed.
Dueling was rife in Camden. William M. Shannon challenged Leitner. Rochelle Blair was Shannon’s second and Artemus Goodwyn was Leitner’s. My husband was riding hard all day to stop the foolish people. Mr. Chesnut finally arranged the difficulty. There was a court of honor and no duel. Mr. Leitner had struck Mr. Shannon at a negro trial. That’s the way the row began. Everybody knows of it. We suggested that Judge Withers should arrest the belligerents. Dr. Boykin and Joe Kershaw 1 aided Mr. Chesnut to put an end to the useless risk of life.
John Chesnut is a pretty soft-hearted slave-owner. He had two negroes arrested for selling whisky to his people on his plantation, and buying stolen corn from them. The culprits in jail sent for him. He found them (this snowy
1. Joseph B. Kershaw, a native of Camden, S. C., who became famous in connection with “The Kershaw Brigade” and its brilliant record at Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chickamauga, Spottsylvania, and elsewhere throughout the war.
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weather) lying in the cold on a bare floor, and he thought that punishment enough; they having had weeks of it. But they were not satisfied to be allowed to evade justice and slip away. They begged of him (and got) five dollars to buy shoes to run away in. I said: “Why, this is flat compounding a felony.” And Johnny put his hands in the armholes of his waistcoat and stalked majestically before me, saying, “Woman, what do you know about law?”
Mrs. Reynolds stopped the carriage one day to tell me Kitty Boykin was to be married to Savage Heyward. He has only ten children already. These people take the old Hebrew pride in the number of children they have. This is the true colonizing spirit. There is no danger of crowding here and inhabitants are wanted. Old Colonel Chesnut 1 said one day: “Wife, you must feel that you have not been useless in your day and generation. You have now twenty-seven great-grandchildren.”
Wednesday. – I have been mobbed by my own house servants. Some of them are at the plantation, some hired out at the Camden hotel, some are at Mulberry. They agreed to come in a body and beg me to stay at home to keep my own house once more, “as I ought not to have them scattered and distributed every which way.” I had not been a month in Camden since 1858. So a house there would be for their benefit solely, not mine. I asked my cook if she lacked anything on the plantation at the Hermitage. “Lack anything?” she said, “I lack everything. What are corn-meal, bacon, milk, and molasses? Would that be
1. Colonel Chesnut, the author’s father-in-law, was born about 1760. He was a prominent South Carolina planter and a public-spirited man. The family had originally settled in Virginia, where the farm had been overrun by the French and Indians at the time of Braddock’s campaign, the head of the family being killed at Fort Duquesne. Colonel Chesnut, of Mulberry, had been educated at Princeton, and his wife was a Philadelphia woman. In the final chapter of this Diary, the author gives a charming sketch of Colonel Chesnut.
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VIEW OF CHARLESTON DURING THE WAR.
From an Old Print.
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all you wanted? Ain’t I been living and eating exactly as you does all these years? When I cook for you, didn’t I have some of all? Dere, now!” Then she doubled herself up laughing. They all shouted, “Missis, we is crazy for you to stay home.”
Armsted, my butler, said he hated the hotel. Besides, he heard a man there abusing Marster, but Mr. Clyburne took it up and made him stop short. Armsted said he wanted Marster to know Mr. Clyburne was his friend and would let nobody say a word behind his back against him, etc., etc. Stay in Camden? Not if I can help it. “Festers in provincial sloth” – that’s Tennyson’s way of putting it.
“We” came down here by rail, as the English say. Such a crowd of Convention men on board. John Manning 1 flew in to beg me to reserve a seat by me for a young lady under his charge. “Place aux dames,” said my husband politely, and went off to seek a seat somewhere else. As soon as we were fairly under way, Governor Manning came back and threw himself cheerily down into the vacant place. After arranging his umbrella and overcoat to his satisfaction, he coolly remarked: “I am the young lady.” He is always the handsomest man alive (now that poor William Taber has been killed in a duel), and he can be very agreeable that is, when he pleases to be so. He does not always please. He seemed to have made his little maneuver principally to warn me of impending danger to my husband’s political career. “Every election now will be a surprise. New cliques are not formed yet. The old ones are principally bent upon displacing one another.” “But the Yankees, those dreadful Yankees!” “Oh,
1. John Lawrence Manning was a son of Richard I. Manning, a former Governor of South Carolina. He was himself elected Governor of that State in 1852, was a delegate to the convention that nominated Buchanan, and during the War of Secession served on the staff of General Beauregard. In 1865 he was chosen United States Senator from South Carolina, but was not allowed to take his seat.