(Waiting at the
depot). Going as usual to the department this morning, I found orders had been
issued for our immediate removal to Richmond. Barely had I time to run home,
dash a few more articles into my trunk, say good-bye, and join the others here.
We girls are all together—Elise, Ernestine, Sadie, Bet, and myself. We have
been seated in the train for hours and hours. Oh! this long waiting; it is
weary work! A reign of terror prevails in the city, and the scene about me will
ever live in memory. Government employees are hastening to and fro, military
stores are being packed, troops in motion, aids-de-camp flying hither and
thither, and anxious fugitives crowding about the train, begging for
transportation. All kinds of rumors are afloat, every newcomer bringing a new
version. The latest is that Hardee has refused to evacuate Charleston, and will
not combine forces with Hampton in order to save the capital. I am strangely
laden; I feel weighted down. Six gold watches are secreted about my person, and
more miscellaneous articles of jewelry than would fill a small jewelry shop—pins,
rings, bracelets, etc. One of my trunks is packed with valuables and another
with provisions. Shelling has begun from the Lexington heights, and under such
conditions this waiting at the depot has a degree of nervousness mixed with
impatience. We catch, now and again, peculiar whizzing sounds—shells, they say.
Sherman has come; he is knocking at the gate. Oh, God! turn him back! Fight on
our side, and turn Sherman back!
Charlotte, N. C.—We
stopped in Winnsboro awhile, but at last came on here. That was a sad, sad
parting! Shall I ever look into their dear faces again—my father and mother,
and poor little Johnnie, wrested by the exigencies of war from his mother's
knee? People who have never been through a war don't know anything about war.
May I never pass through another. Why will men fight? Especially brothers? Why
cannot they adjust their differences and redress their wrongs without the
shedding of woman's tears and the spilling of each other's blood?
But I dare not
write, nor even think much on this strain. My old friend J. B. L. is along. He
is very kind. Think of his lifting our heavy trunks into the baggage car with
his own hands! Otherwise they would be sitting on the railroad platform in
Columbia yet. Say what you please, it is, after all, the men whom we women have
to depend on in this world. J. B. L's. friend, whom he asked permission to
present to us, is a graduate of the Medical College of New York, a young
Hippocrates of profoundly scientific attainments. Nor is that all—he is
possessed of all that ease of manner and well-bred poise for which the F. F.
V.'s are noted.
SOURCE: South
Carolina State Committee United Daughters of the Confederacy, South
Carolina Women in the Confederacy, Vol. 1, “A Confederate
Girl's Diary,” p. 275-6
