In the naval battle the other day we had twenty-five guns in
all. The enemy had fifty-four in the Cumberland, forty-four in the St.
Lawrence, besides a fleet of gunboats, filled with rifled cannon. Why not? They
can have as many as they please. “No pent-up Utica contracts their powers”; the
whole boundless world being theirs to recruit in. Ours is only this one little
spot of ground — the blockade, or stockade, which hems us in with only the sky
open to us, and for all that, how tender-footed and cautious they are as they
draw near.
An anonymous letter purports to answer Colonel Chesnut's
address to South Carolinians now in the army of the Potomac. The man says, “All
that bosh is no good.” He knows lots of people whose fathers were notorious
Tories in our war for independence and made fortunes by selling their country.
Their sons have the best places, and they are cowards and traitors still. Names
are given, of course.
Floyd and Pillow1 are suspended from their
commands because of Fort Donelson. The people of Tennessee demand a like fate
for Albert Sidney Johnston. They say he is stupid. Can human folly go further
than this Tennessee madness?
I did Mrs. Blank a kindness. I told the women when her name
came up that she was childless now, but that she had lost three children. I
hated to leave her all alone. Women have such a contempt for a childless wife.
Now, they will be all sympathy and goodness. I took away her “reproach among
women.”
_______________
1 John [B.] Floyd, who had been Governor of
Virginia from 1850 to 1853, became Secretary of War in 1857 He was first in command
at Fort Donelson. Gideon J. Pillow had been a Major-General of volunteers in
the Mexican War and was second in command at Fort Donelson. He and Floyd
escaped from the Fort when it was invested by Grant, leaving General Buckner to
make the surrender.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 140
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