This yellow Confederate quire of paper, my journal, blotted
by entries, has been buried three days with the silver sugar-dish, teapot,
milk-jug, and a few spoons and forks that follow my fortunes as I wander. With
these valuables was Hood's silver cup, which was partly crushed when he was
wounded at Chickamauga.
It has been a wild three days, with aides galloping around
with messages, Yankees hanging over us like a sword of Damocles. We have been
in queer straits. We sat up at Mrs. Bedon's dressed, without once going to bed
for forty-eight hours, and we were aweary.
Colonel Cadwallader Jones came with a despatch, a sealed
secret despatch. It was for General Chesnut. I opened it. Lincoln, old Abe
Lincoln, has been killed, murdered, and Seward wounded! Why? By whom? It is
simply maddening, all this.
I sent off messenger after messenger for General Chesnut. I
have not the faintest idea where he is, but I know this foul murder will bring
upon us worse miseries. Mary Darby says, “But they murdered him themselves. No Confederates
are in Washington.” “But if they see fit to accuse us of instigating it?” “Who
murdered him? Who knows?” “See if they don't take vengeance on us, now that we
are ruined and can not repel them any longer.”
The death of Lincoln I call a warning to tyrants. He will
not be the last President put to death in the capital, though he is the first.
Buck never submits to be bored. The bores came to tea at
Mrs. Bedon's, and then sat and talked, so prosy, so wearisome was the
discourse, so endless it seemed, that we envied Buck, who was mooning on the
piazza. She rarely speaks now.
SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 381-2
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