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.
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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