I asked my husband what that correspondence between Sherman and Hampton meant – this while I was preparing something for our dinner. His back was still turned as he gazed out of the window. He spoke in the low and steady monotone that characterized our conversation the whole day, and yet there was something in his voice that thrilled me as he said: “The second day after our march from Columbia we passed the M.’s. He was a bonded man and not at home. His wife said at first that she could not find forage for our horses, but afterward she succeeded in procuring some. I noticed a very handsome girl who stood beside her as she spoke, and I suggested to her mother the propriety of sending her out of the track of both armies. Things were no longer as heretofore; there was so much straggling, so many camp followers, with no discipline, on the outskirts of the army. The girl answered quickly, ‘I
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wish to stay with my mother.’ That very night a party of Wheeler’s men came to our camp, and such a tale they told of what had been done at the place of horror and destruction, the mother left raving. The outrage had been committed before her very face, she having been secured first . After this crime the fiends moved on. There were only seven of them. They had been gone but a short time when Wheeler’s men went in pursuit at full speed and overtook them, cut their throats and wrote upon their breasts: ‘These were the seven!’ ”
“But the girl?”
“Oh, she was dead!”
“Are his critics as violent as ever against the President?” asked I when recovered from pity and horror. “Sometimes I think I am the only friend he has in the world. At these dinners, which they give us everywhere, I spoil the sport, for I will not sit still and hear Jeff Davis abused for things he is no more responsible for than any man at that table. Once I lost my temper and told them it sounded like arrant nonsense to me, and that Jeff Davis was a gentleman and a patriot, with more brains than the assembled company.” “You lost your temper truly,” said I. “And I did not know it. I thought I was as cool as I am now. In Washington when we left, Jeff Davis ranked second to none, in intellect, and may be first, from the South, and Mrs. Davis was the friend of Mrs. Emory, Mrs. Joe Johnston, and Mrs. Montgomery Blair, and others of that circle. Now they rave that he is nobody, and never was.” “And she?” I asked. “Oh, you would think to hear them that he found her yesterday in a Mississippi swamp!” “Well, in the French Revolution it was worse. When a man failed he was guillotined. Mirabeau did not die a day too soon, even Mirabeau.”
He is gone. With despair in my heart I left that railroad station. Allan Green walked home with me. I met his wife and his four ragged little boys a day or so ago. She
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is the neatest, the primmest, the softest of women. Her voice is like the gentle cooing of a dove. That lowering black future hangs there all the same. The end of the war brings no hope of peace or of security to us. Ellen said I had a little piece of bread and a little molasses in store for my dinner to-day.
March 6th. – To-day came a godsend. Even a small piece of bread and the molasses had become things of the past. My larder was empty, when a tall mulatto woman brought a tray covered by a huge white serviette. Ellen ushered her in with a flourish, saying, “Mrs. McDaniel’s maid.” The maid set down the tray upon my bare table, and uncovered it with conscious pride. There were fowls ready for roasting, sausages, butter, bread, eggs, and preserves. I was dumb with delight. After silent thanks to heaven my powers of speech returned, and I exhausted myself in messages of gratitude to Mrs. McDaniel.
“Missis, you oughtn’t to let her see how glad you was,” said Ellen. “It was a lettin’ of yo’sef down.”
Mrs. Glover gave me some yarn, and I bought five dozen eggs with it from a wagon – eggs for Lent. To show that I have faith yet in humanity, I paid in advance in yarn for something to eat, which they promised to bring to-morrow. Had they rated their eggs at $100 a dozen in “Confederick” money, I would have paid it as readily as $10. But I haggle in yarn for the millionth part of a thread.
Two weeks have passed and the rumors from Columbia are still of the vaguest. No letter has come from there, no direct message, or messenger. “My God!” cried Dr. Frank Miles, “but it is strange. Can it be anything so dreadful they dare not tell us?” Dr. St. Julien Ravenel has grown pale and haggard with care. His wife and children were left there.
Dr. Brumby has at last been coaxed into selling me enough leather for the making of a pair of shoes, else I should have had to give up walking. He knew my father
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well. He intimated that in some way my father helped him through college. His own money had not sufficed, and so William C. Preston and my father advanced funds sufficient to let him be graduated. Then my uncle, Charles Miller, married his aunt. I listened in rapture, for all this tended to leniency in the leather business, and I bore off the leather gladly. When asked for Confederate money in trade I never stop to bargain. I give them $20 or $50 cheerfully for anything – either sum.
March 8th. – Colonel Childs came with a letter from my husband and a newspaper containing a full account of Sherman’s cold-blooded brutality in Columbia. Then we walked three miles to return the call of my benefactress, Mrs. McDaniel. They were kind and hospitable at her house, but my heart was like lead; my head ached, and my legs were worse than my head, and then I had a nervous chill. So I came home; went to bed and stayed there until the Fants brought me a letter saying my husband would be here today. Then I got up and made ready to give him a cheerful reception. Soon a man called, Troy by name, the same who kept the little corner shop so near my house in Columbia, and of whom we bought things so often. We had fraternized. He now shook hands with me and looked in my face pitifully. We seemed to have been friends all our lives. He says they stopped the fire at the Methodist College, perhaps to save old Mr. McCartha’s house. Mr. Sheriff Dent, being burned out, took refuge in our house. He contrived to find favor in Yankee eyes. Troy relates that a Yankee officer snatched a watch from Mrs. McCord’s bosom. The soldiers tore the bundles of clothes that the poor wretches tried to save from their burning homes, and dashed them back into the flames. They meant to make a clean sweep. They were howling round the fires like demons, these Yankees in their joy and triumph at our destruction. Well, we have given them a big scare and kept them miserable for four years – the little handful of us.
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A woman we met on the street stopped to tell us a painful coincidence. A general was married but he could not stay at home very long after the wedding. When his baby was born they telegraphed him, and he sent back a rejoicing answer with an inquiry, “Is it a boy or a girl?” He was killed before he got the reply. Was it not sad? His poor young wife says, “He did not live to hear that his son lived.” The kind woman added, sorrowfully, “Died and did not know the sect of his child.” “Let us hope it will be a Methodist,” said Isabella, the irrepressible.
At the venison feast Isabella heard a good word for me and one for General Chesnut’s air of distinction, a thing people can not give themselves, try as ever they may. Lord Byron says, Everybody knows a gentleman when he sees one, and nobody can tell what it is that makes a gentleman. He knows the thing, but he can’t describe it. Now there are some French words that can not be translated, and we all know the thing they mean – gracieuse and svelte, for instance, as applied to a woman. Not that anything was said of me like that – far from it. I am fair, fat, forty, and jolly, and in my unbroken jollity, as far as they know, they found my charm. “You see, she doesn’t howl; she doesn’t cry; she never, never tells anybody about what she was used to at home and what she has lost.” High praise, and I intend to try and deserve it ever after.