Diary of John Beauchamp Jones: January 12, 1865

Bright and frosty. Gold at $66 for one—yesterday, at auction.

Major R. J. Echols, Quartermaster, Charlotte, N. C., says the fire there destroyed 70,000 bushels of grain, a large amount of sugar, molasses, clothing, blankets, etc. He knows not whether it was the result of design or accident. All his papers were consumed. A part of Conner's brigade on the way to South Carolina, 500 men, under Lieut.-Col. Wallace, refused to aid in saving property, but plundered it! This proves that the soldiers were all poor men, the rich having bought exemptions or details!

Gen. Lee writes on the 8th instant, that the troops sailing out of James River are, he thinks, destined for another attack on Wilmington. But none have left the lines in front of him, etc.

Gen. Lee also writes on the 9th instant, that the commissary agents have established "a large traffic through our lines, in North Carolina, for supplies;" and he desires the press to say nothing on the subject.

Mr. Ould, to whom it appears the Secretary has written for his opinion (he was editor once, and fought a duel with Jennings Wise, Mr. Seddon being his second), gives a very bad one on the condition of affairs. He says the people have confidence in Mr. Seddon, but not in President Davis, and a strong reconstruction party will spring up in Virginia rather than adopt the President's ideas about the slaves, etc.

The Chief of the Treasury Note Bureau, at Columbia, S. C., asks where he shall fly to if the enemy approaches. It is understood one of our generals, when appealed to by the Secretary, exclaimed: "To the devil!"

Mr. Miles introduced a resolution yesterday (in Congress) affirming that for any State to negotiate peace is revolutionary. Ill time, because self-evident.

Gen. Bradley T. Johnson writes from Salisbury, N. C., that because the travel hither has been suspended by the government, the Central Railroad Company of that State refuse to send the full amount of trains for the transportation of soldiers. It must be impressed too.

I am assured by one of the President's special detectives that Francis P. Blair, Sr. is truly in this city. What for? A rumor spreads that Richmond is to be evacuated.

Gen. Lee writes for the Secretary's sanction to send officers everywhere in Virginia and North Carolina, to collect provisions and to control railroads, etc. The Secretary is sending orders to different commanders, and says he would rather have the odium than that it should fall on Lee! The Commissary. General approves Lee's measure.

Gen. Lee's dispatch was dated last night. He says he has not two days' rations for his army!

Commissary-General Northrop writes to the Secretary that the hour of emergency is upon us, and that Gen. Lee's name may "save the cause," if he proclaims the necessity of indiscriminate impressment, etc.

SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 2, p. 383-4

Dr. Spencer G. Welch to Cordelia Strother Welch, May 7, 1864

Wilderness,

May 7, 1864.

On the 5th we marched all day on the plank road from Orange Court House to this place. We got into a hard fight on the left of the road rather late in the afternoon. The fighting was desperate for two or three hours, with the least cannonading I have ever heard in a battle. I suppose this was due to the level country and the thick undergrowth. It is low, flat and entirely unfit for cultivation.

After night Major Hammond rode up to where we doctors were and told us that about two miles to the rear there was a poor Yankee who was badly wounded. He insisted that someone of us go back to help him. I went, and found him paralyzed from a shot in the back. I gave him water and morphine, and made him comfortable as best I could. The poor fellow seemed very grateful.

After I returned to our lines the order came to move back with our medical stores to Orange Court House. We marched nearly all night, but just before day we were ordered back to the Wilderness again, and we reached there soon after sunrise. Longstreet came up about this time, having made a forced march all night. Then the fighting began in earnest-continuing fearful and desperate all day. The tremendous roar of the artillery and the rattle of the musketry seemed to make the woods tremble.

Late in the afternoon of this day I went among the wounded of the Third Regiment South Carolina Volunteers and of the Yankees who had fallen into our hands. As usual on such occasions groans and cries met me from every side. I found Colonel James Nance, my old schoolmate, and Colonel Gaillard of Fairfield lying side by side in death. Near them lay Warren Peterson, with a shattered thigh-bone, and still others who were my friends. Many of the enemy were there. Not far from these was an old man, a Yankee officer, mortally wounded. I learned that he was Brigadier-General Wadsworth, once Governor of New York.

I picked up an excellent Yankee overcoat on the battlefield, but the cape is off. I will have a sack coat made of it. I also found an India rubber cloth that is big enough for four men to lie on or to make a tent of. I have never before seen a battlefield so strewn with overcoats, knapsacks, India rubber cloths and everything else soldiers carry, except at Chancellorsville. The dead Yankees are everywhere. I have never before seen woods so completely riddled with bullets. At one place the battle raged among chinquapin bushes. All the bark was knocked off and the bushes are literally torn to pieces.

Tell Bob that as soon as I draw some of the new issue I will send him the pay for your catskin shoes.

[NOTE.—After two days of hard fighting at the Wilderness and the same at Spottsylvania, and failing to break through the Confederate lines, General Grant decided to make one more determined effort by concentrating in front of the angle in the Confederate breastworks. About daylight on May 12 a desperate charge was made upon this angle, which was occupied by General Bradley T. Johnson of Maryland. This overwhelming charge by the enemy was too much, and the Confederates were borne down, and General Johnson and his command of four thousand men and twenty pieces of artillery were captured. General Lee was in the rear with a reserve force, consisting of McGowan's South Carolina Brigade and some Mississippians, whom he rushed forward, and they reoccupied the angle. The Federals jumped back over the works, but did not retreat, and, after fighting all day and a greater part of the night, both sides were utterly exhausted, and ceased. A large oak standing on the works was cut down by bullets alone.]

SOURCE: Dr. Spencer G. Welch, A Confederate Surgeon's Letters to His Wife, p. 93-6

Diary of John Beauchamp Jones: August 11, 1864

Hot and dry.

Dispatches from secret agents at Washington state that Grant and his staff have arrived, that half his army preceded him, and the remainder will soon follow. The campaign is considered a disastrous failure, and it is anticipated that henceforth the scene of operations is to be transferred from Richmond to Washington. They say President Lincoln's face expresses "great terror," and affairs there are in a critical condition.

A dispatch from Gen. Lee states that Gen. Bradley Johnson's brigade of cavalry was surprised and routed on the 7th inst. by Averill. He has directed that Gen. J. be relieved.

A dispatch from Gen. Hood (Atlanta, Ga.) says no important change in affair has occurred since yesterday, except that Major-Gen. Bates is wounded. There are 5000 militia in the trenches.

SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 2, p. 262-3

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: June 27, 1861

RICHMOND, Va., —Mr. Meynardie was perfect in the part of traveling companion. He had his pleasures, too. The most pious and eloquent of parsons is human, and he enjoyed the converse of the “eminent persons” who turned up on every hand and gave their views freely on all matters of state.

Mr. Lawrence Keitt joined us en route. With him came his wife and baby. We don't think alike, but Mr. Keitt is always original and entertaining. Already he pronounces Jeff Davis a failure and his Cabinet a farce. “Prophetic,” I suggested, as he gave his opinion before the administration had fairly got under way. He was fierce in his fault-finding as to Mr. Chesnut's vote for Jeff Davis. He says Mr. Chesnut over-persuaded the Judge, and those two turned the tide, at least with the South Carolina delegation. We wrangled, as we always do. He says Howell Cobb's common sense might have saved us.

Two quiet, unobtrusive Yankee school-teachers were on the train. I had spoken to them, and they had told me all about themselves. So I wrote on a scrap of paper, “Do not abuse our home and house so before these Yankee strangers, going North. Those girls are schoolmistresses returning from whence they came.”

Soldiers everywhere. They seem to be in the air, and certainly to fill all space. Keitt quoted a funny Georgia man who says we try our soldiers to see if they are hot enough before we enlist them. If, when water is thrown on them they do not sizz, they won't do; their patriotism is too cool.

To show they were wide awake and sympathizing enthusiastically, every woman from every window of every house we passed waved a handkerchief, if she had one. This fluttering of white flags from every side never ceased from Camden to Richmond. Another new symptom — parties of girls came to every station simply to look at the troops passing. They always stood (the girls, I mean) in solid phalanx, and as the sun was generally in their eyes, they made faces. Mary Hammy never tired of laughing at this peculiarity of her sister patriots.

At the depot in Richmond, Mr. Mallory, with Wigfall and Garnett, met us. We had no cause to complain of the warmth of our reception. They had a carriage for us, and our rooms were taken at the Spotswood. But then the people who were in the rooms engaged for us had not departed at the time they said they were going. They lingered among the delights of Richmond, and we knew of no law to make them keep their words and go. Mrs. Preston had gone for a few days to Manassas. So we took her room. Mrs. Davis is as kind as ever. She met us in one of the corridors accidentally, and asked us to join her party and to take our meals at her table. Mr. Preston came, and we moved into a room so small there was only space for a bed, wash-stand, and glass over it. My things were hung up out of the way on nails behind the door.

As soon as my husband heard we had arrived, he came, too. After dinner he sat smoking, the solitary chair of the apartment tilted against the door as he smoked, and my poor dresses were fumigated. I remonstrated feebly. “War times,” said he; “nobody is fussy now. When I go back to Manassas to-morrow you will be awfully sorry you snubbed me about those trumpery things up there.” So he smoked the pipe of peace, for I knew that his remarks were painfully true. As soon as he was once more under the enemy's guns, I would repent in sackcloth and ashes.

Captain Ingraham came with Colonel Lamar.¹  The latter said he could only stay five minutes; he was obliged to go back at once to his camp. That was a little before eight. However, at twelve he was still talking to us on that sofa. We taunted him with his fine words to the the F. F. V. crowd before the Spotswood: “Virginia has no grievance. She raises her strong arm to catch the blow aimed at her weaker sisters.” He liked it well, however, that we knew his speech by heart.

This Spotswood is a miniature world. The war topic is not so much avoided, as that everybody has some personal dignity to take care of and everybody else is indifferent to it. I mean the “personal dignity of” autrui. In this wild confusion everything likely and unlikely is told you, and then everything is as flatly contradicted. At any rate, it is safest not to talk of the war.

Trescott was telling us how they laughed at little South Carolina in Washington. People said it was almost as large as Long Island, which is hardly more than a tail-feather of New York. Always there is a child who sulks and won't play; that was our role. And we were posing as San Marino and all model-spirited, though small, republics, pose.

He tells us that Lincoln is a humorist. Lincoln sees the fun of things; he thinks if they had left us in a corner or out in the cold a while pouting, with our fingers in our mouth, by hook or by crook he could have got us back, but Anderson spoiled all.

In Mrs. Davis's drawing-room last night, the President took a seat by me on the sofa where I sat. He talked for nearly an hour. He laughed at our faith in our own powers. We are like the British. We think every Southerner equal to three Yankees at least. We will have to be equivalent to a dozen now. After his experience of the fighting qualities of Southerners in Mexico, he believes that we will do all that can be done by pluck and muscle, endurance, and dogged courage, dash, and red-hot patriotism. And yet his tone was not sanguine. There was a sad refrain running through it all. For one thing, either way, he thinks it will be a long war. That floored me at once. It has been too long for me already. Then he said, before the end came we would have many a bitter experience. He said only fools doubted the courage of the Yankees, or their willingness to fight when they saw fit. And now that we have stung their pride, we have roused them till they will fight like devils.

Mrs. Bradley Johnson is here, a regular heroine. She outgeneraled the Governor of North Carolina in some way and has got arms and clothes and ammunition for her husband's regiment.² There was some joke. The regimental breeches were all wrong, but a tailor righted that — hind part before, or something odd.

Captain Hartstein came to-day with Mrs. Bartow. Colonel Bartow is Colonel of a Georgia regiment now in Virginia. He was the Mayor of Savannah who helped to wake the patriotic echoes the livelong night under my sleepless head into the small hours in Charleston in November last. His wife is a charming person, witty and wise, daughter of Judge Berrien. She had on a white muslin apron with pink bows on the pockets. It gave her a gay and girlish air, and yet she must be as old as I am.

Mr. Lamar, who does not love slavery more than Sumner does, nor than I do, laughs at the compliment New England pays us. We want to separate from them; to be rid of the Yankees forever at any price. And they hate us so, and would clasp us, or grapple us, as Polonius has it, to their bosoms “with hooks of steel.” We are an unwilling bride. I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we got all the opprobrium of slavery and they all the money there was in it with their tariff.

Mr. Lamar says, the young men are light-hearted because there is a fight on hand, but those few who look ahead, the clear heads, they see all the risk, the loss of land, limb, and life, home, wife, and children. As in “the brave days of old,” they take to it for their country's sake. They are ready and willing, come what may. But not so light-hearted as the jeunesse dorée.

_______________

¹ Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, a native of Georgia and of Huguenot descent, who got his classical names from his father: his father got them from an uncle who claimed the privilege of bestowing upon his nephew the full name of his favorite hero. When the war began, Mr. Lamar had lived for some years in Mississippi, where he had become successful as a lawyer and had been elected to Congress. He entered the Confederate Army as the Colonel of a Mississippi regiment. He served in Congress after the war and was elected to the United States Senate in 1877. In 1885 he became Secretary of the Interior, and in 1888, a justice of the United States Supreme Court.

² Bradley Tyler Johnson, a native of Maryland, and graduate of Princeton, who had studied law at Harvard. At the beginning of the war he organized a company at his own expense in defense of the South. He was the author of a Life of General Joseph E. Johnston.

SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 68-72