Colonel Childs came with a letter from my husband and a
newspaper containing a full account of Sherman 's cold-blooded brutality in
Columbia. Then we walked three miles to return the call of my benefactress,
Mrs. MeDaniel. They were kind and hospitable at her house, but my heart was
like lead; my head ached, and my legs were worse than my head, and then I had a
nervous chill. So I came home, went to bed and stayed there until the Fants
brought me a letter saying my husband would be here today. Then I got up and
made ready to give him a cheerful reception. Soon a man called, Troy by name,
the same who kept the little corner shop so near my house in Columbia, and of
whom we bought things so often. We had fraternized. He now shook hands with me
and looked in my face pitifully. We seemed to have been friends all our lives.
He says they stopped the fire at the Methodist College, perhaps to save old Mr.
McCartha's house. Mr. Sheriff Dent, being burned out, took refuge in our house.
He contrived to find favor in Yankee eyes. Troy relates that a Yankee officer
snatched a watch from Mrs. McCord's bosom. The soldiers tore the bundles of
clothes that the poor wretches tried to save from their burning homes, and
dashed them back into the flames. They meant to make a clean sweep. They were
howling round the fires, like demons, these Yankees in their joy and triumph at
our destruction. Well, we have given them a big scare and kept them miserable
for four years — the little handful of us.
A woman we met on the street stopped to tell us a painful
coincidence. A general was married but he could not stay at home very long
after the wedding. When his baby was born they telegraphed him, and he sent
back a rejoicing answer with an inquiry, “Is it a boy or a girl?” He was killed
before he got the reply. Was it not sad? His poor young wife says, “He did not
live to hear that his son lived.” The kind woman added, sorrowfully, “Died and
did not know the sect of his child.” “Let us hope it will be a Methodist,” said
Isabella, the irrepressible.
At the venison feast Isabella heard a good word for me and
one for General Chesnut's air of distinction, a thing people can not give
themselves, try as ever they may. Lord Byron says, Everybody knows a gentleman
when he sees one, and nobody can tell what it is that makes a gentleman. He
knows the thing, but he can't describe it. Now there are some French words that
can not be translated, and we all know the thing they mean — gracieuse and
svelte, for instance, as applied to a woman. Not that anything was said
of me like that — far from it. I am fair, fat, forty, and jolly, and in my
unbroken jollity, as far as they know, they found my charm. “You see, she
doesn't howl; she doesn't cry; she never, never tells anybody about what she
was used to at home and what she has lost.” High praise, and I intend to try
and deserve it ever after.
SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 362-3
