We have been up to
the Mulberry Plantation with Colonel Colcock and Judge Magrath, who were sent
to Columbia by their fellow-citizens in the low country, to hasten the slow
movement of the wisdom assembled in the State Capital. Their message was, they
said: “Go ahead, dissolve the Union, and be done with it, or it will be worse
for you. The fire in the rear is hottest.” And yet people talk of the
politicians leading! Everywhere that I have been people have been complaining
bitterly of slow and lukewarm public leaders.
Judge Magrath is a
local celebrity, who has been stretched across the street in effigy, showing
him tearing off his robes of office. The painting is in vivid colors, the
canvas huge, and the rope hardly discernible. He is depicted with a countenance
flaming with contending emotions—rage, disgust, and disdain. We agreed that the
time had now come. We had talked so much heretofore. Let the fire-eaters have
it out. Massachusetts and South Carolina are always coming up before the
footlights.
As a woman, of
course, it is easy for me to be brave under the skins of other people; so I
said: “Fight it out. Bluffton1 has brought on a fever that only
bloodletting will cure.” My companions breathed fire and fury, but I dare say
they were amusing themselves with my dismay, for, talk as I would, that I could
not hide.
At Kingsville we
encountered James Chesnut, fresh from Columbia, where he had resigned his seat
in the United States Senate the-day before. Said some one spitefully, “Mrs.
Chesnut does not look at all resigned.” For once in her life, Mrs. Chesnut held
her tongue: she was dumb. In the high-flown style which of late seems to have
gotten into the very air, she was offering up her life to the cause.
We have had a brief
pause. The men who are all, like Pickens,2 “insensible to fear,” are
very sensible in case of small-pox. There being now an epidemic of small-pox in
Columbia, they have adjourned to Charleston. In Camden we were busy and frantic
with excitement, drilling, marching, arming, and wearing high blue cockades.
Red sashes, guns, and swords were ordinary fireside accompaniments. So wild
were we, I saw at a grand parade of the home-guard a woman, the wife of a man
who says he is a secessionist per se, driving about to see the drilling
of this new company, although her father was buried the day before.
Edward J. Pringle
writes me from San Francisco on November 30th: “I see that Mr. Chesnut has resigned
and that South Carolina is hastening into a Convention, perhaps to secession.
Mr. Chesnut is probably to be President of the Convention. I see all of the
leaders in the State are in favor of secession. But I confess I hope the black
Republicans will take the alarm and submit some treaty of peace that will
enable us now and forever to settle the question, and save our generation from
the prostration of business and the decay of prosperity that must come both to
the North and South from a disruption of the Union. However, I won't speculate.
Before this reaches you, South Carolina may be off on her own hook — a separate
republic.”
_______________
1 A reference to what was known as “the
Bluffton movement” of 1844, in South Carolina. It aimed at secession, but was
voted down.
2 Francis W. Pickens, Governor of South
Carolina, 1860-62. He had been elected to Congress in 1834 as a Nullifier, but
had voted against the " Bluffton movement." From 1858 to 1860, he was
Minister to Russia. He was a wealthy planter and had fame as an orator.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 2-4
