Just now, when Mr. Clay dashed up-stairs, pale as a sheet,
saying, “General Lee has capitulated,” I saw it reflected in Mary Darby's face
before I heard him speak. She staggered to the table, sat down, and wept aloud.
Mr. Clay's eyes were not dry. Quite beside herself Mary shrieked, “Now we belong
to negroes and Yankees !” Buck said, “I do not believe it.”
How different from ours of them is their estimate of us. How
contradictory is their attitude toward us. To keep the despised and iniquitous
South within their borders, as part of their country, they are willing to
enlist millions of men at home and abroad, and to spend billions, and we know they
do not love fighting per se, nor spending money. They are perfectly
willing to have three killed for our one. We hear they have all grown rich,
through “shoddy,” whatever that is. Genuine Yankees can make a fortune trading
jackknives.
“Somehow it is borne in on me that we will have to pay the
piper,'” was remarked to-day. “No; blood can not be squeezed from a turnip. You
can not pour anything out of an empty cup. We have no money even for taxes or
to be confiscated.”
While the Preston girls are here, my dining-room is given up
to them, and we camp on the landing, with our one table and six chairs. Beds
are made on the dining-room floor. Otherwise there is no furniture, except
buckets of water and bath-tubs in their improvised chamber. Night and day this
landing and these steps are crowded with the elite of the Confederacy,
going and coming, and when night comes, or rather, bedtime, more beds are made
on the floor of the landing-place for the war-worn soldiers to rest upon. The
whole house is a bivouac. As Pickens said of South Carolina in 1861, we are “an
armed camp.”
My husband is rarely at home. I sleep with the girls, and my
room is given up to soldiers. General Lee's few, but undismayed, his remnant of
an army, or the part from the South and West, sad and crestfallen, pass through
Chester. Many discomfited heroes find their way up these stairs. They say
Johnston will not be caught as Lee was. He can retreat; that is his trade. If
he would not fight Sherman in the hill country of Georgia, what will he do but
retreat in the plains of North Carolina with Grant, Sherman, and Thomas all to
the fore?
We are to stay here. Running is useless now; so we mean to
bide a Yankee raid, which they say is imminent. Why fly? They are everywhere,
these Yankees, like red ants, like the locusts and frogs which were the plagues
of Egypt.
The plucky way in which our men keep up is beyond praise.
There is no howling, and our poverty is made a matter of laughing. We deride
our own penury. Of the country we try not to speak at all.
SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 378-80
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