Archer came, a classmate of my husband's at Princeton; they,
called him Sally Archer then, he was so girlish and pretty. No trace of
feminine beauty about this grim soldier now. He has a hard face, black-bearded
and sallow, with the saddest black eyes. His hands are small, white, and
well-shaped; his manners quiet. He is abstracted and weary-looking, his mind
and body having been deadened by long imprisonment. He seemed glad to be here, and
James Chesnut was charmed. “Dear Sally Archer,” he calls him cheerily, and the
other responds in a far-off, faded kind of way.
Hood and Archer were given the two Texas regiments at the
beginning of the war. They were colonels and Wigfall was their general. Archer's
comments on Hood are: “He does not compare intellectually with General
Johnston, who is decidedly a man of culture and literary attainments, with much
experience in military matters. Hood, however, has youth and energy to help
counterbalance all this. He has a simple-minded directness of purpose always.
He is awfully shy, and he has suffered terribly, but then he has had
consolations — such a rapid rise in his profession, and then his luck to be
engaged to the beautiful Miss ——.”
They tried Archer again and again on the heated controversy
of the day, but he stuck to his text. Joe Johnston is a fine military critic, a
capital writer, an accomplished soldier, as brave as Caesar in his own person,
but cautious to a fault in manipulating an army. Hood has all the dash and fire
of a reckless young soldier, and his Texans would follow him to the death. Too
much caution might be followed easily by too much headlong rush. That is where
the swing-back of the pendulum might ruin us.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 318-9
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