Congressman Rutherford B. Hayes to Lucy Webb Hayes, June 6, 1866

WASHINGTON, D. C., June 6, 1866.

MY DARLING:— I knew you would feel more keenly the loss of the dear boy when you got home, and in the quiet hours were reminded of his loss. My chief consolation is found in thinking of the good ones we have left. . . .

Andy is thought to be more conciliatory in his feelings, but nothing is very certain in that quarter. There are certainly some good indications. . . .

Affectionately, ever yours,

R.

MRS. HAYES.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 3, p. 26

Lydia Slocum to Lieutenant-General Ulysses S. Grant, August 8, 1864

Clyde, Ohio, August 8, 1864.

To General Grant:

Dear Sir:—I hope you will pardon me for troubling you with the perusal of these few lines from the trembling hand of the aged grandma of our beloved General James B. McPherson, who fell in battle. When it was announced at his funeral, from the public print, that when General Grant heard of his death he went into his tent and wept like a child, my heart went out in thanks to you for the interest you manifested in him while he was with you. I have watched his progress from infancy up. In childhood he was obedient and kind; in manhood, interesting, noble, and persevering, looking to the wants of others. Since he entered the war, others can appreciate his worth more than I can. When it was announced to us by telegraph that our loved one had fallen, our hearts were almost rent asunder; but when we heard the Commander-in-Chief could weep with us too, we felt, sir, that you have been as a father to him, and this whole nation is mourning his early death. I wish to inform you that his remains were conducted by a kind guard to the very parlor where he spent a cheerful evening in 1861 with his widowed mother, two brothers, an only sister, and his aged grandmother, who is now trying to write. In the morning he took his leave at six o'clock, little dreaming he should fall by a ball from the enemy. His funeral services were attended in his mother's orchard, where his youthful feet had often pressed the soil to gather the falling fruit; and his remains are resting in the silent grave scarce half a mile from the place of his birth. His grave is on an eminence but a few rods from where the funeral services were attended, and near the grave of his father.

The grave, no doubt, will be marked, so that passers by will often stop and drop a tear over the dear departed. And now, dear friend, a few lines from you would be gratefully received by the afflicted friends. I pray that the God of battles may be with you, and go forth with your arms till rebellion shall cease, the Union be restored, and the old flag wave over our entire land.

With much respect, I remain your friend,

Lydia Slocum,               

Aged 87 years and 4 months.

SOURCE: Phineas Camp Headley, The Life and Campaigns of General U. S. Grant, p. 517-8

Lieutenant-General Ulysses S. Grant to Lydia Slocum, August 10, 1864

Head-quartees Armies Of The U. S.

CitY Point, Va., Aug. 10, 1864.

Mrs. LYdia Slocum:

My Dear Madam:—Your very welcome letter of the 3d instant has reached me. I am glad to know that the relatives of the lamented Major-General McPherson are aware of the more than friendship existing between him and myself. A nation grieves at the loss of one so dear to our nation's cause. It is a selfish grief, because the nation had more to expect from him than from almost any one living. I join in this selfish grief, and add the grief of personal love for the departed. He formed, for some time, one of my military family. I knew him well; to know him was to love. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability, and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. Your bereavement is great, but cannot exceed mine.

Yours truly,

U. S. Grant.

SOURCE: Phineas Camp Headley, The Life and Campaigns of General U. S. Grant, p. 518

Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes to Lucy Webb Hayes, August 23, 1863

Camp White, August 23, i863.

Dearest:  — Very glad to get your good letter from Columbus. I wish I could travel with you a few weeks now. Everybody praises our nephew and his wife. That last phrase means Laura.

You must tell me more particulars about Fanny and Minnie, or do they call her Emily now? If she is growing into a young lady as fast as I suppose she is, Emily is the best name.

I got a letter from Mother at the same time with yours. She is very contented and happy at Fremont. You will be together soon. I hope you will manage to have the boys like her. She is not likely to have much time to enjoy with her grandsons, and I hope the most will be made of it.

I see that our beautiful little lost one is in your thoughts a great deal — much more perhaps than you thought he would be when you left here. If it does not sadden your life, as I think it does not, I am not sorry that you remember him so often. He was too lovely to be forgotten. Your moralizing on your want of dignity and all that doesn't disturb me. You'll do for your husband, and I love you so much, darling. Be cheerful and happy. Do as well as you can by the boys, but don't worry about them. They will come out sometime. — Love to all.

Affectionately yours,

R.

Mrs. Hayes.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 429

Diary of John Beauchamp Jones: May 12, 1863

The departments and all places of business are still closed in honor of Gen. Jackson, whose funeral will take place to-day. The remains will be placed in state at the Capitol, where the people will be permitted to see him. The grief is universal, and the victory involving such a loss is regarded as a calamity.

The day is bright and excessively hot; and so was yesterday.

Many letters are coming in from the counties in which the enemy's cavalry replenished their horses. It appears that the government has sent out agents to collect the worn-down horses left by the enemy; and this is bitterly objected to by the farmers. It is the corn-planting season, and without horses, they say, they can raise no crops. Some of these writers are almost menacing in their remarks, and intimate that they are about as harshly used, in this war, by one side as the other.

To-day I observed the clerks coming out of the departments with chagrin and mortification. Seventy-five per cent. of them ought to be in the army, for they are young able-bodied men. This applies also to the chiefs of bureaus.

The funeral was very solemn and imposing, because the mourning was sincere and heartfelt. There was no vain ostentation. The pall bearers were generals. The President followed near the hearse in a carriage, looking thin and frail in health. The heads of departments, two and two, followed on foot — Benjamin and Seddon first — at the head of the column of young clerks (who ought to be in the field), the State authorities, municipal authorities, and thousands of soldiers and citizens. The war-horse was led by the general's servant, and flags and black feathers abounded.

Arrived at the Capitol, the whole multitude passed the bier, and gazed upon the hero's face, seen through a glass in the coffin.

Just previous to the melancholy ceremony, a very large body of prisoners (I think 3500) arrived, and were marched through Main Street, to the grated buildings allotted them. But these attracted slight attention, — Jackson, the great hero, was the absorbing thought. Yet there are other Jacksons in the army, who will win victories, — no one doubts it.

The following is Gen. Lee's order to the array after the intelligence of Gen. Jackson's death:

“Headquarters Army Northern Va.,

“May 11th, 1863.

“general Orders No. 61.

“With deep grief the Commanding General announces to the army the death of Lieut.-Gen. T. J. Jackson, who expired on the 10th inst., at 3½ P.M. The daring, skill, and energy of this great and good soldier, by the decree of an all-wise Providence, are now lost to us. But while we mourn his death, we feel that his spirit still lives, and will inspire the whole army with his indomitable courage and unshaken confidence in God as our hope and our strength. Let his name be a watchword to his corps, who have followed him to victory on so many fields. Let officers and soldiers emulate his invincible determination to do everything in the defense of our beloved country.

“R. E. Lee, General.”

The Letter of Gen. Lee to Gen. Jackson.

The letter written by Gen. Lee to Gen. Jackson before the death of the latter is as follows:

“CHANCELLORVILLE, May 4th.

“General: —

“I have just received your note informing me that you were wounded. I cannot express my regret at the occurrence. Could I have dictated events, I should have chosen for the good of the country to have been disabled in your stead.

“I congratulate you upon the victory which is due to your skill and energy.

“Most truly yours,

“R. E. Lee.

“To Gen. T. J. Jackson.”

“The nation's agony,” as it is termed in a Washington paper, in an appeal for 500,000 more men, now demands a prompt response from the people. And yet that paper, under the eye and in the interest of the Federal Government, would make it appear that “the Army of the Potomac” has sustained no considerable! disaster. What, then, constitutes the “nation's agony”? Is it the imminency of war with England? It may be, judging from the debates in Parliament, relating to the liberties the United States have been taking with British commerce. But what do they mean by the “nation?” They have nothing resembling a homogeneous race in the North, and nearly a moiety of the people are Germans and Irish. How ridiculous it would have been even for a Galba to call his people the Roman nation! An idiot may produce a conflagration, but he can never rise to the dignity of a high-minded man. Yet that word “Nation” may raise a million Yankee troops. It is a “new thing.”

The Northern papers say Charleston is to be assailed again immediately; that large reinforcements are going to Hooker, and that they captured six or eight thousand prisoners in their flight on the Rappahannock. All these fictions are understood and appreciated here; but they may answer a purpose in the North, by deceiving the people again into the belief that Richmond will certainly fall the next time an advance is made. And really, where we see such extravagant statements in the Federal journals, after a great battle, we are much rejoiced, because we know them to be unfounded, and we are led to believe our victory was even greater than we supposed it to be.

SOURCE: John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital, Volume 1, p. 321-3

Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes: Wednesday, July 16, 1862

Camp Green Meadows. — A warm, beautiful day. The men busy building shades (bowers or arbors) over their streets and tents, cleaning out the springs, and arranging troughs for watering horses, washing, and bathing. The water is excellent and abundant.

I read “Waverley,” finishing it. The affection of Flora McIvor for her brother and its return is touching; they were orphans. And oh, this is the anniversary of the death of my dear sister Fanny — six years ago! I have thought of her today as I read Scott's fine description, but till now it did not occur to me that this was the sad day. Time has softened the pain. How she would have suffered during this agonizing war! Perhaps it was best — but what a loss!

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 304

Diary of Lieutenant-Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes: June 21, 1862

Camp Jones, Flat Top. — . . . Rather agreeable social evenings with the officers at my quarters, the band enlivening us with its good music.

Dr. McCurdy having been appointed inspector of hospitals for this division, we had a Dr. Hudson, of Medina, a new state surgeon, assigned to us as assistant surgeon in Dr. McCurdy's place. Dr. Hudson turns out to be a thin-skinned, nervous, whimsical, whining Yankee. He has just heard of the death of a favorite daughter. His grief loses all respectability, coupled as it is with his weaknesses and follies. We agreed today with Dr. Holmes (the medical head man) to swap our Dr. Hudson “unsight, unseen” for any spare doctor he could turn out. We find we caught a Dr. Barrett, lately of Wooster, a young man of good repute. We take him, pleased well with the bargain.

SOURCE: Charles Richard Williams, editor, Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes, Volume 2, p. 291-2

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to John L. Motley, August 29, 1862

Boston, 21 Charles Street,

August 29, 1862.

My Dear Motley: I don't know how I can employ the evening of my birthday better than by sitting down and beginning a letter to you. I have heard of your receiving my last, and that you meant to reply to it soon. But this was not in the bond, and whether you write or not, I must let you hear from me from time to time. I know what you must endure with a non-conductor of a thousand leagues between you and this great battery, which is sending its thrill through us every night and morning. I know that every different handwriting on an envelop, if it comes from a friend, has its special interest, for it will give an impression in some way differing from that of all others. My own thoughts have been turned aside for a while from those lesser occurrences of the day which would occupy them at other times by a domestic sorrow, which, though coming in the course of nature, and at a period when it must have been very soon inevitable, has yet left sadness in mine and other households. My mother died on the 19th of this month, at the age of ninety-three, keeping her lively sensibilities and sweet intelligence to the last. My brother John had long cared for her in the most tender way, and it almost broke his heart to part with her. She was a daughter to him, she said, and he had fondly thought that love and care could keep her frail life to the filling up of a century or beyond it. It was a pity to look on him in his first grief; but time, the great consoler, is busy with his anodyne, and he is coming back to himself. My mother remembered the Revolution well, and she was scared by the story of the redcoats coming along and killing everybody as they went, she having been carried from Boston to Newburyport. Why should I tell you this? Our hearts lie between two forces — the near ones of home and family, and those that belong to the rest of the universe. A little magnet holds its armature against the dragging of our own planet and all the spheres.

I had hoped that my mother might have lived through this second national convulsion. It was ordered otherwise, and with the present prospects I can hardly lament that she was spared the period of trial that remains. How long that is to be no one can predict with confidence. There is a class of men one meets with who seem to consider it due to their antecedents to make the worst of everything. I suppose —— —— may be one of these. I met him a day or two since, and lost ten minutes in talk with him on the sidewalk — lost them, because I do not wish to talk with any man who looks at this matter empirically as an unlucky accident, which a little prudence might have avoided, and not a theoretical necessity. However, he said to me that the wisest man he knew — somebody whose name I did not know — said to him long ago that this war would outlast him, an old man, and his companion also, very probably. You meet another man, and he begins cursing the government as the most tyrannical one that ever existed. “That is not the question,” I answer. “How much money have you given for this war? How many of your boys have gone to it? How much of your own body and soul have you given to it?” I think Mr. —— —— is the most forlorn of all the Jeremiahs I meet with. Faith, faith is the only thing that keeps a man up in times like these; and those persons who, by temperament or underfeeding of the soul, are in a state of spiritual anemia, are the persons I like least to meet, and try hardest not to talk with.

For myself, I do not profess to have any political wisdom. I read, I listen, I judge to the best of my ability. The best talk I have heard from any of our home politicians was that of Banks, more than a year and a half ago. In a conversation I had with him, he foreshadowed more clearly the plans and prospects and estimated more truly the resources of the South than any one else with whom I had met. But prophets in America and Europe have been at a very heavy discount of late. Count Gasparin seems to me to have the broadest and keenest understanding of the aims and ends of this armed controversy. If we could be sure of no intermeddling, I should have no anxiety except for individuals and for temporary interests. If we have grown unmanly and degenerate in the north wind, I am willing that the sirocco should sweep us off from the soil. If the course of nature must be reversed for us, and the Southern Goths must march to the “beggarly land of ice” to overrun and recolonize us, I have nothing to object. But I have a most solid and robust faith in the sterling manhood of the North, in its endurance, its capacity for a military training, its plasticity for every need, in education, in political equality, in respect for man as man in peaceful development, which is our law, in distinction from aggressive colonization; in human qualities as against bestial and diabolical ones; in the Lord as against the devil. If I never see peace and freedom in this land, I shall have faith that my children will see it. If they do not live long enough to see it, I believe their children will. The revelations we have had from the Old World have shed a new light for us on feudal barbarism. We know now where we are not to look for sympathy. But oh, it would have done your heart good to see the processions of day before yesterday and to-day, the air all aflame with flags, the streets shaking with the tramp of long-stretched lines, and only one feeling showing itself, the passion of the first great uprising, only the full flower of which that was the opening bud.

There is a defense of blubber about the arctic creatures through which the harpoon must be driven before the vital parts are touched. Perhaps the Northern sensibility is protected by some such incasing shield. The harpoon is, I think, at last through the blubber. In the meanwhile I feel no doubt in my own mind that the spirit of hostility to slavery as the cause of this war is speedily and certainly increasing. They were talking in the cars to-day of Fremont's speech at the Tremont Temple last evening. His allusions to slavery — you know what they must have been — were received with an applause which they would never have gained a little while ago. Nay, I think a miscellaneous Boston audience would be more like to cheer any denunciation of slavery now than almost any other sentiment.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 267-71

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: March 12, 1865

Better to-day. A long, long weary day in grief has passed away. I suppose General Chesnut is somewhere—but where? that is the question. Only once has he visited this sad spot, which holds, he says, all that he cares for on earth. Unless he comes or writes soon I will cease, or try to cease, this wearisome looking, looking, looking for him.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 364

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: July 10, 1862

My husband has come. He believes from what he heard in Richmond that we are to be recognized as a nation by the crowned heads across the water, at last. Mr. Davis was very kind; he asked him to stay at his house, which he did, and went every day with General Lee and Mr. Davis to the battle-field as a sort of amateur aide to the President. Likewise they admitted him to the informal Cabinet meetings at the President's house. He is so hopeful now that it is pleasant to hear him, and I had not the heart to stick the small pins of Yeadon and Pickens in him yet a while.

Public opinion is hot against Huger and Magruder for McClellan's escape. Doctor Gibbes gave me some letters picked up on the battlefield. One signed “Laura,” tells her lover to fight in such a manner that no Southerner can ever taunt Yankees again with cowardice. She speaks of a man at home whom she knows, “who is still talking of his intention to seek the bubble reputation at the cannon's mouth.” “Miserable coward!” she writes, “I will never speak to him again.” It was a relief to find one silly young person filling three pages with a description of her new bonnet and the bonnet still worn by her rival. Those fiery Joan of Arc damsels who goad on their sweethearts bode us no good.

Rachel Lyons was in Richmond, hand in glove with Mrs. Greenhow. Why not? “So handsome, so clever, so angelically kind,” says Rachel of the Greenhow, “and she offers to matronize me.”

Mrs. Philips, another beautiful and clever Jewess, has been put into prison again by “Beast” Butler because she happened to be laughing as a Yankee funeral procession went by.

Captain B. told of John Chesnut's pranks. Johnny was riding a powerful horse, captured from the Yankees. The horse dashed with him right into the Yankee ranks. A dozen Confederates galloped after him, shouting, “Stuart! Stuart!” The Yankees, mistaking this mad charge for Stuart's cavalry, broke ranks and fled. Daredevil Camden boys ride like Arabs!

Mr. Chesnut says he was riding with the President when Colonel Browne, his aide, was along. The General commanding rode up and, bowing politely, said: “Mr. President, am I in command here?” “Yes.” “Then I forbid you to stand here under the enemy's guns. Any exposure of a life like yours is wrong, and this is useless exposure. You must go back.” Mr. Davis answered: “Certainly, I will set an example of obedience to orders. Discipline must be maintained.” But he did not go back.

Mr. Chesnut met the Haynes, who had gone on to nurse their wounded son and found him dead. They were standing in the corridor of the Spotswood. Although Mr. Chesnut was staying at the President's, he retained his room at the hotel. So he gave his room to them. Next day, when he went back to his room he found that Mrs. Hayne had thrown herself across the foot of the bed and never moved. No other part of the bed had been touched. She got up and went back to the cars, or was led back. He says these heartbroken mothers are hard to face.

SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 201-2