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 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.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 317-8
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