Is the sea drying up? Is it going up into mist and
coming down on us in a water-spout? The rain, it raineth every day. The weather
typifies our tearful despair, on a large scale. It is also Lent now — a quite
convenient custom, for we, in truth, have nothing to eat. So we fast and pray,
and go dragging to church like drowned rats to be preached at.
My letter from my husband was so — well, what in a woman you
would call heart-broken, that I began to get ready for a run up to Charlotte.
My hat was on my head, my traveling-bag in my hand, and Ellen was saying “Which
umbrella, ma'am?” “Stop, Ellen,” said I, “someone is speaking out there.” A tap
came at the door, and Miss McLean threw the door wide open as she said in a
triumphant voice: “Permit me to announce General Chesnut.” As she went off she
sang out, “Oh, does not a meeting like this make amends?”
We went after luncheon to see Mrs. Munroe. My husband wanted
to thank her for all her kindness to me. I was awfully proud of him. I used to
think that everybody had the air and manners of a gentleman. I know now that
these accomplishments are things to thank God for. Father O'Connell came in,
fresh from Columbia, and with news at last. Sherman's men had burned the
convent. Mrs. Munroe had pinned her faith to Sherman because he was a Roman
Catholic, but Father O'Connell was there and saw it. The nuns and girls marched
to the old Hampton house (Mrs. Preston's now), and so saved it. They walked
between files of soldiers. Men were rolling tar barrels and lighting torches to
fling on the house when the nuns came. Columbia is but dust and ashes, burned
to the ground. Men, women, and children have been left there homeless,
houseless, and without one particle of food — reduced to picking up corn that
was left by Sherman's horses on picket grounds and parching it to stay their
hunger.
How kind my friends were on this, my fete day! Mrs. Rutledge
sent me a plate of biscuit; Mrs. Munroe, nearly enough food supplies for an
entire dinner; Miss McLean a cake for dessert. Ellen cooked and served up the
material happily at hand very nicely, indeed. There never was a more successful
dinner. My heart was too full to eat, but I was quiet and calm; at least I
spared my husband the trial of a broken voice and tears. As he stood at the
window, with his back to the room, he said: “Where are they now — my old blind
father and my sister? Day and night I see her leading him out from under
his own rooftree. That picture pursues me persistently. But come, let us talk
of pleasanter things.” To which I answered, “Where will you find them?”
He took off his heavy cavalry boots and Ellen carried them
away to wash the mud off and dry them. She brought them back just as Miss
Middleton walked in. In his agony, while struggling with those huge boots and trying
to get them on, he spoke to her volubly in French. She turned away from him
instantly, as she saw his shoeless plight, and said to me, “I had not heard of
your happiness. I did not know the General was here.” Not until next day did we
have time to remember and laugh at that outbreak of French, Miss Middleton
answered him in the same language. He told her how charmed he was with my
surroundings, and that he would go away with a much lighter heart since he had
seen the kind people with whom he would leave me.
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 struggling, so many camp followers, with no discipline, on
the outskirts of the army. The girl answered quickly, ‘I 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 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.
SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 357-61
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