CHARLESTON, S. C. — We have come back to South
Carolina from the Montgomery Congress, stopping over at Mulberry. We came with
R. M. T. Hunter and Mr. Barnwell. Mr. Barnwell has excellent reasons for
keeping cotton at home, but I forget what they are. Generally, people take what
he says, also Mr. Hunter's wisdom, as unanswerable. Not so Mr. Chesnut, who
growls at both, much as he likes them. We also had Tom Lang and his wife, and
Doctor Boykin. Surely there never was a more congenial party. The younger men
had been in the South Carolina College while Mr. Barnwell was President. Their
love and respect for him were immeasurable and he benignly received it, smiling
behind those spectacles. Met John Darby at Atlanta and told him he was Surgeon
of the Hampton Legion, which delighted him. He had had adventures. With only a
few moments on the platform to interchange confidences, he said he had remained
a little too long in the Medical College in Philadelphia, where he was some
kind of a professor, and they had been within an ace of hanging him as a
Southern spy. “Rope was ready,” he sniggered. At Atlanta when he unguardedly
said he was fresh from Philadelphia, he barely escaped lynching, being taken
for a Northern spy. “Lively life I am having among you, on both sides,” he said,
hurrying away. And I moaned, “Here was John Darby like to have been killed by
both sides, and no time to tell me the curious coincidences.” What marvelous
experiences a little war begins to produce.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 57-8
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