Tuesday. — Now this, they say, is positive: '”Fort
Sumter is to be released and we are to have no war.” After all, far too good to
be true. Mr. Browne told us that, at one of the peace intervals (I mean
intervals in the interest of peace), Lincoln flew through Baltimore, locked up
in an express car. He wore a Scotch cap. We went to the Congress. Governor
Cobb, who presides over that august body, put James Chesnut in the chair, and
came down to talk to us. He told us why the pay of Congressmen was fixed in
secret session, and why the amount of it was never divulged — to prevent the
lodging-house and hotel people from making their bills of a size to cover it
all. "The bill would be sure to correspond with the pay," he said. In
the hotel parlor we had a scene. Mrs. Scott was describing Lincoln, who is of
the cleverest Yankee type. She said: “Awfully ugly, even grotesque in
appearance, the kind who are always at the corner stores, sitting on boxes,
whittling sticks, and telling stories as funny as they are vulgar.” Here I
interposed: “But Stephen A. Douglas said one day to Mr. Chesnut, ‘Lincoln is
the hardest fellow to handle I have ever encountered yet.’” Mr. Scott is from California,
and said Lincoln is “an utter American specimen, coarse, rough, and strong; a
good-natured, kind creature; as pleasant-tempered as he is clever, and if this
country can be joked and laughed out of its rights he is the kind-hearted
fellow to do it. Now if there is a war and it pinches the Yankee pocket instead
of filling it.”
Here a shrill voice came from the next room (which opened
upon the one we were in by folding doors thrown wide open) and said: “Yankees
are no more mean and stingy than you are. People at the North are just as good
as people at the South.” The speaker advanced upon us in great wrath.
Mrs. Scott apologized and made some smooth, polite remark,
though evidently much embarrassed. But the vinegar face and curly pate refused
to receive any concessions, and replied:
“That comes with a very bad grace after what you were saying,” and she
harangued us loudly for several minutes. Some one in the other room giggled
outright, but we were quiet as mice. Nobody wanted to hurt her feelings. She
was one against so many. If I were at the North, I should expect them to
belabor us, and should hold my tongue. We separated North from South because of
incompatibility of temper. We are divorced because we have hated each other so.
If we could only separate, a “separation à l’agréable,”
as the French say it, and not have a horrid fight for divorce. The poor exile
had already been insulted, she said. She was playing “Yankee Doodle” on the
piano before breakfast to soothe her wounded spirit, and the Judge came in and
calmly requested her to “leave out the Yankee while she played the Doodle.” The
Yankee end of it did not suit our climate, he said; was totally out of place
and had got out of its latitude. A man said aloud: “This war talk is nothing.
It will soon blow over. Only a fuss gotten up by that Charleston clique.” Mr.
Toombs asked him to show his passports, for a man who uses such language is a
suspicious character.
SOURCE: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin
and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 18-20
