Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: Tuesday, July 23, 1861

Witnessed for the first time a military funeral. As that march came wailing up, they say Mrs. Bartow fainted. The empty saddle and the led war-horse — we saw and heard it all, and now it seems we are never out of the sound of the Dead March in Saul. It comes and it comes, until I feel inclined to close my ears and scream.

Yesterday, Mrs. Singleton and ourselves sat on a bedside and mingled our tears for those noble spirits — John Darby, Theodore Barker, and James Lowndes. To-day we find we wasted our grief; they are not so much as wounded. I dare say all the rest is true about them — in the face of the enemy, with flags in their hands, leading their men. “But Dr. Darby is a surgeon.” He is as likely to forget that as I am. He is grandson of Colonel Thomson of the Revolution, called, by way of pet name, by his soldiers, “Old Danger.'” Thank Heaven they are all quite alive. And we will not cry next time until officially notified.

SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 88

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: June 24, 1861

Last night I was awakened by loud talking and candles flashing, tramping of feet, growls dying away in the distance, loud calls from point to point in the yard. Up I started, my heart in my mouth. Some dreadful thing had happened, a battle, a death, a horrible accident. Some one was screaming aloft — that is, from the top of the stairway, hoarsely like a boatswain in a storm. Old Colonel Chesnut was storming at the sleepy negroes looking for fire, with lighted candles, in closets and everywhere else. I dressed and came upon the scene of action.

“What is it? Any news?” “No, no, only mamma smells a smell; she thinks something is burning somewhere.” The whole yard was alive, literally swarming. There are sixty or seventy people kept here to wait upon this household, two-thirds of them too old or too young to be of any use, but families remain intact. The old Colonel has a magnificent voice. I am sure it can be heard for miles. Literally, he was roaring from the piazza, giving orders to the busy crowd who were hunting the smell of fire.

Old Mrs. Chesnut is deaf; so she did not know what a commotion she was creating. She is very sensitive to bad odors. Candles have to be taken out of the room to be snuffed. Lamps are extinguished only in the porticoes, or farther afield. She finds violets oppressive; can only tolerate a single kind of sweet rose. A tea-rose she will not have in her room. She was totally innocent of the storm she had raised, and in a mild, sweet voice was suggesting places to be searched. I was weak enough to laugh hysterically. The bombardment of Fort Sumter was nothing to this. After this alarm, enough to wake the dead, the smell was found. A family had been boiling soap. Around the soap-pot they had swept up some woolen rags. Raking up the fire to make all safe before going to bed, this was heaped up with the ashes, and its faint smoldering tainted the air, at least to Mrs. Chesnut's nose, two hundred yards or more away.

Yesterday some of the negro men on the plantation were found with pistols. I have never before seen aught about any negro to show that they knew we had a war on hand in which they have any interest.

Mrs. John de Saussure bade me good-by and God bless you. I was touched. Camden people never show any more feeling or sympathy than red Indians, except at a funeral. It is expected of all to howl then, and if you don't “show feeling,” indignation awaits the delinquent.

SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 66-7

Address of Reverend James Freeman Clarke at the Funeral of William Lowell Putnam, October 29, 1861

In the fatal battle a week ago, Putnam fell while endeavoring to save a wounded companion, — fell, soiled with no ignoble dust — “non indecoro pulvere sordidum.” Brought to the hospital-tent, he said to the surgeon, who came to dress his wound, “Go to some one else, to whom you can do more good; you cannot save me,” — like Philip Sydney, giving the water to the soldiers who needed it more than himself. And still more striking, as showing his earnest conscientiousness, is the fact that he refused to allow Sturgis to remove him, saying: “It is your duty to leave me. It is your duty to go to your own men, and leave me here.” And his friend was obliged to carry him away in spite of this protest.

How hard that these precious lives should be thus wasted, apparently for naught, through the ignorance or the carelessness of those whose duty it was to make due preparation, before sending them to the field! How can we bear it?

We could not bear it, unless we believed in God. But it is not any blind chance, nor yet any human folly, which controls these events. All is as God wills, who knows what the world needs, and what we need, better than we can know it. And the death of Christ has taught us that it is God's great law that the best shall be sacrificed to save the worst, the innocent suffering for the good of the guilty. This is the law, ordained before the earth was made; and every pure soul sacrificed in a struggle with evil is another “lamb slain from the foundation of the world.”

And do we not see, in these great sacrifices, that the heroism itself is already a great gain? Is it not something to know that we do not belong to a degenerate race? Is it not a great blessing to know that we also, and our sons, are still as capable as our fathers were of great and noble sacrifices, — that Massachusetts still produces heroes, — that these boys of yours, trained perhaps in luxury, can, at the call of their country, die cheerfully for their land?

SOURCE: Edwin Everett Hale, Editor, James Freeman Clarke: Autobiography, Diary and Correspondence, p. 274-5