Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: July 26, 1865

I do not write often now, not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear, and why dwell upon those things?

Colonel Chesnut, poor old man, is worse — grows more restless. He seems to be wild with “homesickness.” He wants to be at Mulberry. When there he can not see the mighty giants of the forest, the huge, old, wide-spreading oaks, but he says he feels that he is there so soon as he hears the carriage rattling across the bridge at the Beaver Dam.

I am reading French with Johnny — anything to keep him quiet. We gave a dinner to his company, the small remnant of them, at Mulberry house. About twenty idle negroes, trained servants, came without leave or license and assisted. So there was no expense. They gave their time and labor for a good day's feeding. I think they love to be at the old place.

Then I went up to nurse Kate Withers. That lovely girl, barely eighteen, died of typhoid fever. Tanny wanted his sweet little sister to have a dress for Mary Boykin's wedding, where she was to be one of the bridesmaids. So Tanny took his horses, rode one, and led the other thirty miles in the broiling sun to Columbia, where he sold the led horse and came back with a roll of Swiss muslin. As he entered the door, he saw Kate lying there dying. She died praying that she might die. She was weary of earth and wanted to be at peace. I saw her die and saw her put in her coffin. No words of mine can tell how unhappy I am. Six young soldiers, her friends, were her pall-bearers. As they marched out with that burden sad were their faces.

Princess Bright Eyes writes: “Our soldier boys returned, want us to continue our weekly dances.” Another maiden fair indites: “Here we have a Yankee garrison. We are told the officers find this the dullest place they were ever in. They want the ladies to get up some amusement for them. They also want to get into society.”

From Isabella in Columbia: “General Hampton is home again. He looks crushed. How can he be otherwise? His beautiful home is in ruins, and ever present with him must be the memory of the death tragedy which closed forever the eyes of his glorious boy, Preston! Now! there strikes up a serenade to General Ames, the Yankee commander, by a military band, of course. . . . Your last letters have been of the meagerest. What is the matter ?'”

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 403-4

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: August 2, 1865

Dr. Boykin and John Witherspoon were talking of a nation in mourning, of blood poured out like rain on the battle-fields—for what? “Never let me hear that the blood of the brave has been shed in vain! No; it sends a cry down through all time.”

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 404

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: Saturday, July 4, 1865

Saturday I was in bed with one of my worst headaches. Occasionally there would come a sob and I thought of my sister insulted and my little sweet Williams. Another of my beautiful Columbia quartette had rough experiences. A raider asked the plucky little girl, Lizzie Hamilton, for a ring which she wore. “You shall not have it,” she said. The man put a pistol to her head, saying, “Take it off, hand it to me, or I will blow your brains out.” “Blow away,” said she. The man laughed and put down his pistol, remarking, " You knew I would not hurt you.” “Of course, I knew you dared not shoot me. Even Sherman would not stand that.”

There was talk of the negroes where the Yankees had been — negroes who flocked to them and showed them where silver and valuables had been hid by the white people. Ladies’-maids dressed themselves in their mistresses' gowns before the owners’ faces and walked off. Now, before this every one had told me how kind, faithful, and considerate the negroes had proven. I am sure, after hearing these tales, the fidelity of my own servants shines out brilliantly. I had taken their conduct too much as a matter of course. In the afternoon I had some business on our place, the Hermitage. John drove me down. Our people were all at home, quiet, orderly, respectful, and at their usual work. In point of fact things looked unchanged. There was nothing to show that any one of them had even seen the Yankees, or knew that there was one in existence.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 402-3

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: June 27, 1865

An awful story from Sumter. An old gentleman, who thought his son dead or in a Yankee prison, heard some one try the front door. It was about midnight, and these are squally times. He called out, “What is that?” There came no answer. After a while he heard some one trying to open a window and he fired. The house was shaken by a fall. Then, after a long time of dead silence, he went round the house to see if his shot had done any harm, and found his only son bathed in his own blood on his father's door-step. The son was just back from a Yankee prison — one of his companions said — and had been made deaf by cold and exposure. He did not hear his father hail him. He had tried to get into the house in the same old way he used to employ when a boy.

My sister-in-law in tears of rage and despair, her servants all gone to “a big meeting at Mulberry,” though she had made every appeal against their going. “Send them adrift,” some one said, “they do not obey you, or serve you; they only live on you.” It would break her heart to part with one of them. But that sort of thing will soon right itself. They will go off to better themselves — we have only to cease paying wages — and that is easy, for we have no money.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 401-2

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: June 12, 1865

Andy, made lord of all by the madman, Booth, says, “Destruction only to the wealthy classes.” Better teach the negroes to stand alone before you break up all they leaned on, O Yankees! After all, the number who possess over $20,000 are very few.

Andy has shattered some fond hopes. He denounces Northern men who came South to espouse our cause. They may not take the life-giving oath. My husband will remain quietly at home. He has done nothing that he had not a right to do, nor anything that he is ashamed of. He will not fly from his country, nor hide anywhere in it. These are his words. He has a huge volume of Macaulay, which seems to absorb him. Slily I slipped Silvio Pellico in his way. He looked at the title and moved it aside. “Oh,” said I, “I only wanted you to refresh your memory as to a prisoner's life and what a despotism can do to make its captives happy!”

Two weddings — in Camden, Ellen Douglas Ancrum to Mr. Lee, engineer and architect, a clever man, which is the best investment now. In Columbia, Sally Hampton and John Cheves Haskell, the bridegroom, a brave, one-armed soldier.

A wedding to be. Lou McCord's. And Mrs. McCord is going about frantically, looking for eggs “to mix and make into wedding-cake,” and finding none. She now drives the funniest little one-mule vehicle.

I have been ill since I last wrote in this journal. Serena 's letter came. She says they have been visited by bushwhackers, the roughs that always follow in the wake of an army. My sister Kate they forced back against the wall. She had Katie, the baby, in her arms, and Miller, the brave boy, clung to his mother, though he could do no more. They tried to pour brandy down her throat. They knocked Mary down with the butt end of a pistol, and Serena they struck with an open hand, leaving the mark on her cheek for weeks.

Mr. Christopher Hampton says in New York people have been simply intoxicated with the fumes of their own glory. Military prowess is a new wrinkle of delight to them. They are mad with pride that, ten to one, they could, after five years' hard fighting, prevail over us, handicapped, as we were, with a majority of aliens, quasi foes, and negro slaves whom they tried to seduce, shut up with us. They pay us the kind of respectful fear the British meted out to Napoleon when they sent him off with Sir Hudson Lowe to St. Helena, the lone rock by the sea, to eat his heart out where he could not alarm them more.

Of course, the Yankees know and say they were too many for us, and yet they would all the same prefer not to try us again. Would Wellington be willing to take the chances of Waterloo once more with Grouchy, Blucher, and all that left to haphazard? Wigfall said to old Cameron¹ in 1861, “Then you will a sutler be, and profit shall accrue.” Christopher Hampton says that in some inscrutable way in the world North, everybody “has contrived to amass fabulous wealth by this war.'”

There are two classes of vociferous sufferers in this community: 1. Those who say, “If people would only pay me what they owe me!” 2. Those who say, “If people would only let me alone. I can not pay them. I could stand it if I had anything with which to pay debts.”

Now we belong to both classes. Heavens! the sums people owe us and will not, or can not, pay, would settle all our debts ten times over and leave us in easy circumstances for life. But they will not pay. How can they?

We are shut in here, turned with our faces to a dead wall. No mails. A letter is sometimes brought by a man on horseback, traveling through the wilderness made by Sherman. All railroads have been destroyed and the bridges are gone. We are cut off from the world, here to eat out our hearts. Yet from my window I look out on many a gallant youth and maiden fair. The street is crowded and it is a gay sight. Camden is thronged with refugees from the low country, and here they disport themselves. They call the walk in front of Bloomsbury “the Boulevard.”

H. Lang tells us that poor Sandhill Milly Trimlin is dead, and that as a witch she had been denied Christian burial. Three times she was buried in consecrated ground in different churchyards, and three times she was dug up by a superstitious horde, who put her out of their holy ground. Where her poor, old, ill-used bones are lying now I do not know. I hope her soul is faring better than her body. She was a good, kind creature. Why supposed to be a witch? That H. Lang could not elucidate.

Everybody in our walk of life gave Milly a helping hand. She was a perfect specimen of the Sandhill “tackey” race, sometimes called “country crackers.” Her skin was yellow and leathery, even the whites of her eyes were bilious in color. She was stumpy, strong, and lean, hard-featured, horny-fisted. Never were people so aided in every way as these Sandhillers. Why do they remain Sandhillers from generation to generation? Why should Milly never have bettered her condition?

My grandmother lent a helping hand to her grandmother. My mother did her best for her mother, and I am sure the so-called witch could never complain of me. As long as I can remember, gangs of these Sandhill women traipsed in with baskets to be filled by charity, ready to carry away anything they could get. All are made on the same pattern, more or less alike. They were treated as friends and neighbors, not as beggars. They were asked in to take seats by the fire, and there they sat for hours, stony-eyed, silent, wearing out human endurance and politeness. But their husbands and sons, whom we never saw, were citizens and voters! When patience was at its last ebb, they would open their mouths and loudly demand whatever they had come to seek.

One called Judy Bradly, a one-eyed virago, who played the fiddle at all the Sandhill dances and fandangoes, made a deep impression on my youthful mind. Her list of requests was always rather long, and once my grandmother grew restive and actually hesitated. “Woman, do you mean to let me starve?” she cried furiously. My grandmother then attempted a meek lecture as to the duty of earning one's bread. Judy squared her arms akimbo and answered, “And pray, who made you a judge of the world? Lord, Lord, if I had 'er knowed I had ter stand all this jaw, I wouldn't a took your ole things,” but she did take them and came afterward again and again.

_______________

¹ Simon Cameron became Secretary of War in Lincoln's Administration, on March 4, 1861. On January 11, 1862, he resigned and was made Minister to Russia.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 398-401

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: June 1, 1865

The New York Herald quotes General Sherman as saying, “Columbia was burned by Hampton's sheer stupidity.'” But then who burned everything on the way in Sherman's march to Columbia, and in the line of march Sherman took after leaving Columbia? We came, for three days of travel, over a road that had been laid bare by Sherman's torches. Nothing but smoking ruins was left in Sherman's track. That I saw with my own eyes. No living thing was left, no house for man or beast. They who burned the countryside for a belt of forty miles, did they not also burn the town? To charge that to “Hampton's stupidity “ is merely an afterthought. This Herald announces that Jeff Davis will be hanged at once, not so much for treason as for his assassination of Lincoln. “Stanton, '” the Herald says, '”has all the papers in his hands to convict him.”

The Yankees here say, “The black man must go as the red man has gone; this is a white man's country.” The negroes want to run with the hare, but hunt with the hounds. They are charming in their professions to us, but declare that they are to be paid by these blessed Yankees in lands and mules for having been slaves. They were so faithful to us during the war, why should the Yankees reward them, to which the only reply is that it would be by way of punishing rebels.

Mrs. Adger¹ saw a Yankee soldier strike a woman, and she prayed God to take him in hand according to his deed. The soldier laughed in her face, swaggered off, stumbled down the steps, and then his revolver went off by the concussion and shot him dead.

The black ball is in motion. Mrs. de Saussure's cook shook the dust off her feet and departed from her kitchen to-day—free, she said. The washerwoman is packing to go.

Scipio Africanus, the Colonel's body-servant, is a soldierly looking black creature, fit to have delighted the eyes of old Frederick William of Prussia, who liked giants. We asked him how the Yankees came to leave him. “Oh, I told them marster couldn't do without me no how; and then I carried them some nice hams that they never could have found, they were hid so good.”

Eben dressed himself in his best and went at a run to meet his Yankee deliverers — so he said. At the gate he met a squad coming in. He had adorned himself with his watch and chain, like the cordage of a ship, with a handful of gaudy seals. He knew the Yankees came to rob white people, but he thought they came to save niggers. “Hand over that watch!” they said. Minus his fine watch and chain, Eben returned a sadder and a wiser man. He was soon in his shirt-sleeves, whistling at his knife-board. “Why? You here? Why did you come back so soon?” he was asked. “Well, I thought may be I better stay with ole marster that give me the watch, and not go with them that stole it.” The watch was the pride of his life. The iron had entered his soul.

Went up to my old house, “Kamschatka.” The Trapiers live there now. In those drawing-rooms where the children played Puss in Boots, where we have so often danced and sung, but never prayed before, Mr. Trapier held his prayer-meeting. I do not think I ever did as much weeping or as bitter in the same space of time. I let myself go; it did me good. I cried with a will. He prayed that we might have strength to stand up and bear our bitter disappointment, to look on our ruined homes and our desolated country and be strong. And he prayed for the man '”we elected to be our ruler and guide.” We knew that they had put him in a dungeon and in chains.² Men watch him day and night. By orders of Andy, the bloody-minded tailor, nobody above the rank of colonel can take the benefit of the amnesty oath, nobody who owns over twenty thousand dollars, or who has assisted the Confederates. And now, ye rich men, howl, for your misery has come upon you .You are beyond the outlaw, camping outside. Howell Cobb and R. M. T. Hunter have been arrested. Our turn will come next, maybe. A Damocles sword hanging over a house does not conduce to a pleasant life.

_______________

¹ Elizabeth K. Adger, wife of the Rev. John B. Adger, D. D., of Charleston, a distinguished Presbyterian divine, at one time a missionary to Smyrna where he translated the Bible into the Armenian tongue. He was afterward and before the war a professor in the Theological Seminary at Columbia. His wife was a woman of unusual judgment and intelligence, sharing her husband's many hardships and notable experiences in the East.

² Mr. Davis, while encamped near Irwinsville, Ga., had been captured on May 10th by a body of Federal cavalry under Lieutenant-Colonel Pritchard. He was taken to Fortress Monroe and confined there for two years, his release being effected on May 13, 1867, when he was admitted to bail in the sum of $100,000, the first name on his bail-bond being that of Horace Greeley.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 396

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 21, 1865

They say Governor Magrath has absconded, and that the Yankees have said, “If you have no visible governor, we will send you one.” If we had one and they found him, they would clap him in prison instanter.

The negroes have flocked to the Yankee squad which has recently come, but they were snubbed, the rampant freedmen. “Stay where you are,” say the Yanks. “We have nothing for you.” And they sadly “peruse”  their way. Now that they have picked up that word “peruse,” they use it in season and out. When we met Mrs. Preston's William we asked, “Where are you going?” “Perusing my way to Columbia,” he answered.

When the Yanks said they had no rations for idle negroes, John Walker answered mildly, “This is not at all what we expected.” The colored women, dressed in their gaudiest array, carried bouquets to the Yankees, making the day a jubilee. But in this house there is not the slightest change. Every negro has known for months that he or she was free, but I do not see one particle of change in their manner. They are, perhaps, more circumspect, polite, and quiet, but that is all. Otherwise all goes on in antebellum status quo. Every day I expect to miss some familiar face, but so far have been disappointed.

Mrs. Huger we found at the hotel here, and we brought her to Bloomsbury. She told us that Jeff Davis was traveling leisurely with his wife twelve miles a day, utterly careless whether he were taken prisoner or not, and that General Hampton had been paroled.

Fighting Dick Anderson and Stephen Elliott, of Fort Sumter memory, are quite ready to pray for Andy Johnson, and to submit to the powers that be. Not so our belligerent clergy. “Pray for people when I wish they were dead?” cries Rev. Mr. Trapier. '”No, never! I will pray for President Davis till I die. I will do it to my last gasp. My chief is a prisoner, but I am proud of him still. He is a spectacle to gods and men. He will bear himself as a soldier, a patriot, a statesman, a Christian gentleman. He is the martyr of our cause.” And I replied with my tears.

“Look here: taken in woman's clothes?” asked Mr. Trapier. “Rubbish, stuff, and nonsense. If Jeff Davis has not the pluck of a true man, then there is no courage left on this earth. If he does not die game, I give it up. Something, you see, was due to Lincoln and the Scotch cap that he hid his ugly face with, in that express car, when he rushed through Baltimore in the night. It is that escapade of their man Lincoln that set them on making up the woman's clothes story about Jeff Davis.”

Mrs. W. drove up. She, too, is off for New York, to sell four hundred bales of cotton and a square, or something, which pays tremendously in the Central Park region, and to capture and bring home her belle fille, who remained North during the war. She knocked at my door. The day was barely dawning. I was in bed, and as I sprang up, discovered that my old Confederate night-gown had to be managed, it was so full of rents. I am afraid I gave undue attention to the sad condition of my gown, but could nowhere see a shawl to drape my figure.

She was very kind. In case my husband was arrested and needed funds, she offered me some “British securities” and bonds. We were very grateful, but we did not accept the loan of money, which would have been almost the same as a gift, so slim was our chance of repaying it. But it was a generous thought on her part; I own that.

Went to our plantation, the Hermitage, yesterday. Saw no change; not a soul was absent from his or her post. I said, “Good colored folks, when are you going to kick off the traces and be free?” In their furious, emotional way, they swore devotion to us all to their dying day. Just the same, the minute they see an opening to better themselves they will move on. William, my husband's foster-brother, came up. “Well, William, what do you want?” asked my husband. “Only to look at you, marster; it does me good.”

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 394-6

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 18, 1865

A feeling of sadness hovers over me now, day and night, which no words of mine can express. There is a chance for plenty of character study in this Mulberry house, if one only had the heart for it. Colonel Chesnnt, now ninety-three, blind and deaf, is apparently as strong as ever, and certainly as resolute of will. Partly patriarch, partly grand seigneur, this old man is of a species that we shall see no more — the last of a race of lordly planters who ruled this Southern world, but now a splendid wreck. His manners are unequaled still, but underneath this smooth exterior lies the grip of a tyrant whose will has never been crossed. I will not attempt what Lord Byron says he could not do, but must quote again: “Everybody knows a gentleman when he sees him. I have never met a man who could describe one.” We have had three very distinct specimens of the genus in this house—three generations of gentlemen, each utterly different from the other — father, son, and grandson.

African Scipio walks at Colonel Chesnut's side. He is six feet two, a black Hercules, and as gentle as a dove in all his dealings with the blind old master, who boldly strides forward, striking with his stick to feel where he is going. The Yankees left Scipio unmolested. He told them he was absolutely essential to his old master, and they said, “If you want to stay so bad, he must have been good to you always.” Skip says he was silent, for it “made them mad if you praised your master.”

Sometimes this old man will stop himself, just as he is going off in a fury, because they try to prevent his attempting some feat impossible in his condition of lost faculties. He will ask gently, “I hope that I never say or do anything unseemly! Sometimes I think I am subject to mental aberrations.” At every footfall he calls out, “Who goes there?” If a lady's name is given he uncovers and stands, with hat off, until she passes. He still has the old-world art of bowing low and gracefully.

Colonel Chesnut came of a race that would brook no interference with their own sweet will by man, woman, or devil. But then such manners has he, they would clear any man's character, if it needed it. Mrs. Chesnut, his wife, used to tell us that when she met him at Princeton, in the nineties of the eighteenth century, they called him “the Young Prince.” He and Mr. John Taylor,¹ of Columbia, were the first up-country youths whose parents were wealthy enough to send them off to college.

When a college was established in South Carolina, Colonel John Chesnut, the father of the aforesaid Young Prince, was on the first board of trustees. Indeed, I may say that, since the Revolution of 1776, there has been no convocation of the notables of South Carolina, in times of peace and prosperity, or of war and adversity, in which a representative man of this family has not appeared. The estate has been kept together until now. Mrs. Chesnut said she drove down from Philadelphia on her bridal trip, in a chariot and four — a cream-colored chariot with outriders.

They have a saying here — on account of the large families with which people are usually blessed, and the subdivision of property consequent upon that fact, besides the tendency of one generation to make and to save, and the next to idle and to squander, that there are rarely more than three generations between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves. But these Chesnuts have secured four, from the John Chesnut who was driven out from his father's farm in Virginia by the French and Indians, when that father had been killed at Fort Duquesne,² to the John Chesnut who saunters along here now, the very perfection of a lazy gentleman, who cares not to move unless it be for a fight, a dance, or a fox-hunt.

The first comer of that name to this State was a lad when he arrived after leaving his land in Virginia; and being without fortune otherwise, he went into Joseph Kershaw's grocery shop as a clerk, and the Kershaws, I think, so remember that fact that they have it on their coat-of-arms. Our Johnny, as he was driving me down to Mulberry yesterday, declared himself delighted with the fact that the present Joseph Kershaw had so distinguished himself in our war, that they might let the shop of a hundred years ago rest for a while. '”Upon my soul,” cried the cool captain, “I have a desire to go in there and look at the Kershaw tombstones. I am sure they have put it on their marble tablets that we had an ancestor one day a hundred years ago who was a clerk in their shop.” This clerk became a captain in the Revolution.

In the second generation the shop had so far sunk that the John Chesnut of that day refused to let his daughter marry a handsome, dissipated Kershaw, and she, a spoiled beauty, who could not endure to obey orders when they were disagreeable to her, went up to her room and therein remained, never once coming out of it for forty years. Her father let her have her own way in that; he provided servants to wait upon her and every conceivable luxury that she desired, but neither party would give in.

I am, too, thankful that I am an old woman, forty-two my last birthday. There is so little life left in me now to be embittered by this agony. “Nonsense! I am a pauper,” says my husband, “and I am as smiling and as comfortable as ever you saw me.” “When you have to give up your horses? How then?”

_______________

¹ John Taylor was graduated from Princeton in 1790 and became a planter in South Carolina. He served in Congress from 1806 to 1810, and in the latter year was chosen to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, caused by the resignation of Thomas Sumter. In 1826 he was chosen Governor of South Carolina. He died in 1832.

¹ Fort Duquesne stood at the junction of the Monongahela and Alleghany Rivers. Captain Trent, acting for the Ohio Company, with some Virginia militiamen, began to build this fort in February, 1754. On April 17th of the same year, 700 Canadians and French forced him to abandon the work. The French then completed the fortress and named it Fort Duquesne. The unfortunate expedition of General Braddock, in the summer of 1755, was an attempt to retake the fort, Braddock's defeat occurring eight miles east of it. In 1758 General Forbes marched westward from Philadelphia and secured possession of the place, after the French, alarmed at his approach, had burned it. Forbes gave it the name of Pittsburg.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 390-3

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 16, 1865

We are scattered and stunned, the remnant of heart left alive within us filled with brotherly hate. We sit and wait until the drunken tailor who rules the United States of America issues a proclamation, and defines our anomalous position.

Such a hue and cry, but whose fault? Everybody is blamed by somebody else. The dead heroes left stiff and stark on the battle-field escape, blame every man who stayed at home and did not fight. I will not stop to hear excuses. There is not one word against those who stood out until the bitter end, and stacked muskets at Appomattox.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 390

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 10, 1865

A letter from a Pharisee who thanks the Lord she is not as other women are; she need not pray, as the Scotch parson did, for a good conceit of herself. She writes, “I feel that I will not be ruined. Come what may, God will provide for me.” But her husband had strengthened the Lord's hands, and for the glory of God, doubtless, invested some thousands of dollars in New York, where Confederate moth did not corrupt nor Yankee bummers break through and steal. She went on to tell us: “I have had the good things of this world, and I have enjoyed them in their season. But I only held them as steward for God. My bread has been cast upon the waters and will return to me.”

E. M. Boykin said to-day: “We had a right to strike for our independence, and we did strike a bitter blow. They must be proud to have overcome such a foe. I dare look any man in the face. There is no humiliation in our position after such a struggle as we made for freedom from the Yankees.” He is sanguine. His main idea is joy that he has no negroes to support, and need hire only those he really wants.

Stephen Elliott told us that Sherman said to Joe Johnston, “Look out for yourself. This agreement only binds the military, not the civil, authorities.” Is our destruction to begin anew? For a few weeks we have had peace.

Sally Reynolds told a short story of a negro pet of Mrs. Kershaw's. The little negro clung to Mrs. Kershaw and begged her to save him. The negro mother, stronger than Mrs. Kershaw, tore him away from her. Mrs. Kershaw wept bitterly. Sally said she saw the mother chasing the child before her as she ran after the Yankees, whipping him at every step. The child yelled like mad, a small rebel blackamoor.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 389-90

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 4, 1865

Home again at Bloomsbury. From Chester to Winnsboro we did not see one living thing, man, woman, or animal, except poor William trudging home after his sad disaster. The blooming of the gardens had a funereal effect.

Nature is so luxuriant here, she soon covers the ravages of savages. No frost has occurred since the seventh of March, which accounts for the wonderful advance in vegetation. This seems providential to these starving people. In this climate so much that is edible can be grown in two months.

At Winnsboro we stayed at Mr. Robertson's. There we left the wagon train. Only Mr. Brisbane, one of the general's couriers, came with us on escort duty. The Robertsons were very kind and hospitable, brimful of Yankee anecdotes. To my amazement the young people of Winnsboro had a May-day celebration amid the smoking ruins. Irrepressible is youth.

The fidelity of the negroes is the principal topic. There seems to be not a single case of a negro who betrayed his master, and yet they showed a natural and exultant joy at being free. After we left Winnsboro negroes were seen in the fields plowing and hoeing corn, just as in antebellum times. The fields in that respect looked quite cheerful. We did not pass in the line of Sherman's savages, and so saw some houses standing.

Mary Kirkland has had experience with the Yankees. She has been pronounced the most beautiful woman on this side of the Atlantic, and has been spoiled accordingly in all society. When the Yankees came, Monroe, their negro manservant, told her to stand up and hold two of her children in her arms, with the other two pressed as close against her knees as they could get. Mammy Selina and Lizzie then stood grimly on each side of their young missis and her children. For four mortal hours the soldiers surged through the rooms of the house. Sometimes Mary and her children were roughly jostled against the wall, but Mammy and Lizzie were stanch supporters. The Yankee soldiers taunted the negro women for their foolishness in standing by their cruel slave-owners, and taunted Mary with being glad of the protection of her poor ill-used slaves. Monroe meanwhile had one leg bandaged and pretended to be lame, so that he might not be enlisted as a soldier, and kept making pathetic appeals to Mary.

“Don't answer them back, Miss Mary,” said he. “Let ’em say what dey want to; don't answer 'em back. Don't give ’em any chance to say you are impudent to ’em.”

One man said to her: “Why do you shrink from us and avoid us so? We did not come here to fight for negroes; we hate them. At Port Royal I saw a beautiful white woman driving in a wagon with a coal-black negro man. If she had been anything to me I would have shot her through the heart.” “Oh, oh!” said Lizzie, “that's the way you talk in here. I'll remember that when you begin outside to beg me to run away with you.”

Finally poor Aunt Betsy, Mary's mother, fainted from pure fright and exhaustion. Mary put down her baby and sprang to her mother, who was lying limp in a chair, and fiercely called out, “Leave this room, you wretches! Do you mean to kill my mother? She is ill; I must put her to bed.” Without a word they all slunk out ashamed. “If I had only tried that hours ago,” she now said. Outside they remarked that she was “an insolent rebel huzzy, who thinks herself too good to speak to a soldier of the United States,” and one of them said: “Let us go in and break her mouth.” But the better ones held the more outrageous back. Monroe slipped in again and said: “Missy, for God's sake, when dey come in be sociable with 'em. Dey will kill you.”

“Then let me die.”

The negro soldiers were far worse than the white ones.

Mrs. Bartow drove with me to Mulberry. On one side of the house we found every window had been broken, every bell torn down, every piece of furniture destroyed, and every door smashed in. But the other side was intact. Maria Whitaker and her mother, who had been left in charge, explained this odd state of things. The Yankees were busy as beavers, working like regular carpenters, destroying everything when their general came in and stopped them, He told them it was a sin to destroy a fine old house like that, whose owner was over ninety years old. He would not have had it done for the world. It was wanton mischief. He explained to Maria that soldiers at such times were excited, wild, and unruly. They carried off sacks full of our books, since unfortunately they found a pile of empty sacks in the garret. Our books, our letters, our papers were afterward strewn along the Charleston road. Somebody found things of ours as far away as Vance's Ferry.

This was Potter's raid.¹ Sherman took only our horses. Potter's raid came after Johnston's surrender, and ruined us finally, burning our mills and gins and a hundred bales of cotton. Indeed, nothing is left to us now but the bare land, and the debts contracted for the support of hundreds of negroes during the war.

[A]. H. Boykin was at home at the time to look after his own interests, and he, with John de Saussure, has saved the cotton on their estates, with the mules and farming utensils and plenty of cotton as capital to begin on again. The negroes would be a good riddance. A hired man would be a good deal cheaper than a man whose father and mother, wife and twelve children have to be fed, clothed, housed, and nursed, their taxes paid, and their doctor's bills, all for his half-done, slovenly, lazy work. For years we have thought negroes a nuisance that did not pay. They pretend exuberant loyalty to us now. Only one man of Mr. Chest nut's left the plantation with the Yankees.

When the Yankees found the Western troops were not at Camden, but down below Swift Creek, like sensible folk they came up the other way, and while we waited at Chester for marching orders we were quickly ruined after the surrender. With our cotton saved, and cotton at a dollar a pound, we might be in comparatively easy circumstances. But now it is the devil to pay, and no pitch hot. Well, all this was to be.

Godard Bailey, editor, whose prejudices are all against us, described the raids to me in this wise: They were regularly organized. First came squads who demanded arms and whisky. Then came the rascals who hunted for silver, ransacked the ladies' wardrobes and scared women and children into fits — at least those who could be scared. Some of these women could not be scared. Then came some smiling, suave, well-dressed officers, who " regretted it all so much." Outside the gate officers, men, and bummers divided even, share and share alike, the piles of plunder.

When we crossed the river coming home, the ferry man at Chesnut's Ferry asked for his fee. Among us all we could not muster the small silver coin he demanded. There was poverty for you. Nor did a stiver appear among us until Molly was hauled home from Columbia, where she was waging war with Sheriff Dent's family. As soon as her foot touched her native heath, she sent to hunt up the cattle. Many of our cows were found in the swamp; like Marion's men they had escaped the enemy. Molly sells butter for us now on shares.

Old Cuffey, head gardener at Mulberry, and Yellow Abram, his assistant, have gone on in the even tenor of their way. Men may come and men may go, but they dig on forever. And they say they mean to “as long as old master is alive.” We have green peas, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, new potatoes, and strawberries in abundance — enough for ourselves and plenty to give away to refugees. It is early in May and yet two months since frost. Surely the wind was tempered to the shorn lamb in our case.

Johnny went over to see Hampton. His cavalry are ordered to reassemble on the 20th — a little farce to let themselves down easily; they know it is all over. Johnny, smiling serenely, said, “The thing is up and forever.”

Godard Bailey has presence of mind. Anne Sabb left a gold card-case, which was a terrible oversight, among the cards on the drawing-room table. When the Yankee raiders saw it their eyes glistened. Godard whispered to her: “Let them have that gilt thing and slip away and hide the silver.” “No!” shouted a Yank, “you don't fool me that way; here's your old brass thing; don't you stir; fork over that silver.'” And so they deposited the gold card-case in Godard's hands, and stole plated spoons and forks, which had been left out because they were plated. Mrs. Beach says two officers slept at her house. Each had a pillow-case crammed with silver and jewelry—" spoils of war,” they called it.

Floride Cantey heard an old negro say to his master: “When you all had de power you was good to me, and I 'll protect you now. No niggers nor Yankees shall tech you. If you want anything call for Sambo. I mean, call for Mr. Samuel; dat my name now.”

_______________

¹ The reference appears to. be to General Edward E. Potter, a native of New York City, who died in 1889. General Potter entered the Federal service early in the war. He recruited a regiment of North Carolina troops and engaged in operations in North and South Carolina and Eastern Tennessee.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 384-9

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 2, 1865

CAMDEN, S. C. – Since we left Chester nothing but solitude, nothing but tall blackened chimneys, to show that any man has ever trod this road before. This is Sherman's track. It is hard not to curse him. I wept incessantly at first. The roses of the gardens are already hiding the ruins. My husband said Nature is a wonderful renovator. He tried to say something I else and then I shut my eyes and made a vow that if we were a crushed people, crushed by weight, I would never be a whimpering, pining slave.

We heard loud explosions of gunpowder in the direction of Camden. Destroyers were at it there. Met William Walker, whom Mr. Preston left in charge of a car-load of his valuables. General Preston was hardly out of sight before poor helpless William had to stand by and see the car plundered. “My dear Missis! they have cleaned me out, nothing left,” moaned William the faithful. We have nine armed couriers with us. Can they protect us?

Bade adieu to the staff at Chester. No general ever had so remarkable a staff, so accomplished, so agreeable, so well bred, and, I must say, so handsome, and can add so brave and efficient.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 384

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: May 1, 1865

In Chester still. I climb these steep steps alone. They have all gone, all passed by. Buck went with Mr. C. Hampton to York. Mary, Mrs. Huger, and Pinckney took flight together. One day just before they began to dissolve in air, Captain Gay was seated at the table, halfway between me on the top step and John in the window, with his legs outside. Said some one to-day, “She showed me her engagement ring, and I put it back on her hand. She is engaged, but not to me.” “By the heaven that is above us all, I saw you kiss her hand.” “That I deny.” Captain Gay glared in angry surprise, and insisted that he had seen it. “Sit down, Gay,” said the cool captain in his most mournful way. “You see, my father died when I was a baby, and my grandfather took me in hand. To him I owe this moral maxim. He is ninety years old, a wise old man. Now, remember my grandfather's teaching forevermore — ‘A gentleman must not kiss and tell.’”

General Preston came to say good-by. He will take his family abroad at once. Burnside, in New Orleans, owes him some money and will pay it. “There will be no more confiscation, my dear madam,” said he; “they must see that we have been punished enough.” “They do not think so, my dear general. This very day a party of Federals passed in hot pursuit of our President.”

A terrible fire-eater, one of the few men left in the world who believe we have a right divine, being white, to hold Africans, who are black, in bonds forever; he is six feet two; an athlete; a splendid specimen of the animal man; but he has never been under fire; his place in the service was a bomb-proof office, so-called. With a face red-hot with rage he denounced Jeff Davis and Hood. “Come, now,” said Edward, the handsome, “men who could fight and did not, they are the men who ruined us. We wanted soldiers. If the men who are cursing Jeff Davis now had fought with Hood, and fought as Hood fought, we'd be all right now.”

And then he told of my trouble one day while Hood was here. “Just such a fellow as you came up on this little platform, and before Mrs. Chesnut could warn him, began to heap insults on Jeff Davis and his satrap, Hood. Mrs. Chesnut held up her hands. ‘Stop, not another word. You shall not abuse my friends here! Not Jeff Davis behind his back, not Hood to his face, for he is in that room and hears you.’” Fancy how dumfounded this creature was.

Mrs. Huger told a story of Joe Johnston in his callow days before he was famous. After an illness Johnston's hair all fell out; not a hair was left on his head, which shone like a fiery cannon-ball. One of the gentlemen from Africa who waited at table sniggered so at dinner that he was ordered out by the grave and decorous black butler. General Huger, feeling for the agonies of young Africa, as he strove to stifle his mirth, suggested that Joe Johnston should cover his head with his handkerchief. A red silk one was produced, and turban-shaped, placed on his head. That completely finished the gravity of the butler, who fled in helplessness. His guffaw on the outside of the door became plainly audible. General Huger then suggested, as they must have the waiter back, or the dinner could not go on, that Joe should eat with his hat on, which he did.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 382-3

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 22, 1865

This yellow Confederate quire of paper, my journal, blotted by entries, has been buried three days with the silver sugar-dish, teapot, milk-jug, and a few spoons and forks that follow my fortunes as I wander. With these valuables was Hood's silver cup, which was partly crushed when he was wounded at Chickamauga.

It has been a wild three days, with aides galloping around with messages, Yankees hanging over us like a sword of Damocles. We have been in queer straits. We sat up at Mrs. Bedon's dressed, without once going to bed for forty-eight hours, and we were aweary.

Colonel Cadwallader Jones came with a despatch, a sealed secret despatch. It was for General Chesnut. I opened it. Lincoln, old Abe Lincoln, has been killed, murdered, and Seward wounded! Why? By whom? It is simply maddening, all this.

I sent off messenger after messenger for General Chesnut. I have not the faintest idea where he is, but I know this foul murder will bring upon us worse miseries. Mary Darby says, “But they murdered him themselves. No Confederates are in Washington.” “But if they see fit to accuse us of instigating it?” “Who murdered him? Who knows?” “See if they don't take vengeance on us, now that we are ruined and can not repel them any longer.”

The death of Lincoln I call a warning to tyrants. He will not be the last President put to death in the capital, though he is the first.

Buck never submits to be bored. The bores came to tea at Mrs. Bedon's, and then sat and talked, so prosy, so wearisome was the discourse, so endless it seemed, that we envied Buck, who was mooning on the piazza. She rarely speaks now.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 381-2

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 19, 1865

Just now, when Mr. Clay dashed up-stairs, pale as a sheet, saying, “General Lee has capitulated,” I saw it reflected in Mary Darby's face before I heard him speak. She staggered to the table, sat down, and wept aloud. Mr. Clay's eyes were not dry. Quite beside herself Mary shrieked, “Now we belong to negroes and Yankees !” Buck said, “I do not believe it.”

How different from ours of them is their estimate of us. How contradictory is their attitude toward us. To keep the despised and iniquitous South within their borders, as part of their country, they are willing to enlist millions of men at home and abroad, and to spend billions, and we know they do not love fighting per se, nor spending money. They are perfectly willing to have three killed for our one. We hear they have all grown rich, through “shoddy,” whatever that is. Genuine Yankees can make a fortune trading jackknives.

“Somehow it is borne in on me that we will have to pay the piper,'” was remarked to-day. “No; blood can not be squeezed from a turnip. You can not pour anything out of an empty cup. We have no money even for taxes or to be confiscated.”

While the Preston girls are here, my dining-room is given up to them, and we camp on the landing, with our one table and six chairs. Beds are made on the dining-room floor. Otherwise there is no furniture, except buckets of water and bath-tubs in their improvised chamber. Night and day this landing and these steps are crowded with the elite of the Confederacy, going and coming, and when night comes, or rather, bedtime, more beds are made on the floor of the landing-place for the war-worn soldiers to rest upon. The whole house is a bivouac. As Pickens said of South Carolina in 1861, we are “an armed camp.”

My husband is rarely at home. I sleep with the girls, and my room is given up to soldiers. General Lee's few, but undismayed, his remnant of an army, or the part from the South and West, sad and crestfallen, pass through Chester. Many discomfited heroes find their way up these stairs. They say Johnston will not be caught as Lee was. He can retreat; that is his trade. If he would not fight Sherman in the hill country of Georgia, what will he do but retreat in the plains of North Carolina with Grant, Sherman, and Thomas all to the fore?

We are to stay here. Running is useless now; so we mean to bide a Yankee raid, which they say is imminent. Why fly? They are everywhere, these Yankees, like red ants, like the locusts and frogs which were the plagues of Egypt.

The plucky way in which our men keep up is beyond praise. There is no howling, and our poverty is made a matter of laughing. We deride our own penury. Of the country we try not to speak at all.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 378-80

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 17, 1865

A letter from Mrs. Davis, who writes: “Do come to me, and see how we get on. I shall have a spare room by the time you arrive, indifferently furnished, but, oh, so affectionately placed at your service. You will receive such a loving welcome. One perfect bliss have I. The baby, who grows fat and is smiling always, is christened, and not old enough to develop the world's vices or to be snubbed by it. The name so long delayed is Varina Anne. My name is a heritage of woe.

“Are you delighted with your husband? I am delighted with him as well as with my own. It is well to lose an Arabian horse if one elicits such a tender and at the same time knightly letter as General Chesnut wrote to my poor old Prometheus. I do not think that for a time he felt the vultures after the reception of the General's letter.

“I hear horrid reports about Richmond. It is said that all below Ninth Street to the Rocketts has been burned by the rabble, who mobbed the town. The Yankee performances have not been chronicled. May God take our cause into His own hands.”

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 378

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 15, 1865

What a week it has been — madness, sadness, anxiety, turmoil, ceaseless excitement. The Wigfalls passed through on their way to Texas. We did not see them. Louly told Hood they were bound for the Rio Grande, and intended to shake hands with Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico. Yankees were expected here every minute. Mrs. Davis came. We went down to the cars at daylight to receive her. She dined with me. Lovely Winnie, the baby, came, too. Buck and Hood were here, and that queen of women, Mary Darby. Clay behaved like a trump. He was as devoted to Mrs. Davis in her adversity as if they had never quarreled in her prosperity. People sent me things for Mrs. Davis, as they did in Columbia for Mr. Davis. It was a luncheon or breakfast only she stayed for here. Mrs. Brown prepared a dinner for her at the station. I went down with her. She left here at five o'clock. My heart was like lead, but we did not give way. She was as calm and smiling as ever. It was but a brief glimpse of my dear Mrs. Davis, and under altered skies.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 377-8

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 7, 1865

Richmond has fallen and I have no heart to write about it. Grant broke through our lines and Sherman cut through them. Stoneman is this side of Danville. They are too many for us. Everything is lost in Richmond, even our archives. Blue black is our horizon. Hood says we shall all be obliged to go West — to Texas, I mean, for our own part of the country will be overrun.

Yes, a solitude and a wild waste it may become, but, as to that, we can rough it in the bush at home.

De Fontaine, in his newspaper, continues the old cry. “Now Richmond is given up,” he says, “it was too heavy a load to carry, and we are stronger than ever.” “Stronger than ever?” Nine-tenths of our army are under ground and where is another army to come from? Will they wait until we grow one?

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 377

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 5, 1865

Miss Middleton's letter came in answer to mine, telling her how generous my friends here were to me. “We long,” she says, “for our own small sufficiency of wood, corn, and vegetables. Here is a struggle unto death, although the neighbors continue to feed us, as you would say, ‘with a spoon.’ We have fallen upon a new device. We keep a cookery book on the mantelpiece, and when the dinner is deficient we just read off a pudding or a crême. It does not entirely satisfy the appetite, this dessert in imagination, but perhaps it is as good for the digestion.”

As I was ready to go, though still up-stairs, some one came to say General Hood had called. Mrs. Hamilton cried out, '”Send word you are not at home.” “Never!'” said I. “Why make him climb all these stairs when you must go in five minutes?” “If he had come here dragging Sherman as a captive at his chariot wheels I might say ‘not at home,’ but not now.” And I ran down and greeted him on the sidewalk in the face of all, and walked slowly beside him as he toiled up the weary three stories, limping gallantly. He was so well dressed and so cordial; not depressed in the slightest. He was so glad to see me. He calls his report self-defense; says Joe Johnston attacked him and he was obliged to state things from his point of view. And now follow statements, where one may read between the lines what one chooses. He had been offered a command in Western Virginia, but as General Lee was concerned because he and Joe Johnston were not on cordial terms, and as the fatigue of the mountain campaign would be too great for him, he would like the chance of going across the Mississippi. Texas was true to him, and would be his home, as it had voted him a ranch somewhere out there. They say General Lee is utterly despondent, and has no plan if Richmond goes, as go it must.

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 376-7

Diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut: April 3, 1865

Saw General Preston ride off. He came to tell me good-by. I told him he looked like a Crusader on his great white horse, with William, his squire, at his heels. Our men are all consummate riders, and have their servants well mounted behind them, carrying cloaks and traps — how different from the same men packed like sardines in dirty railroad cars, usually floating inch deep in liquid tobacco juice.

For the kitchen and Ellen's comfort I wanted a pine table and a kitchen chair. A woman sold me one to-day for three thousand Confederate dollars.

Mrs. Hamilton has been disappointed again. Prioleau Hamilton says the person into whose house they expected to move to-day came to say she could not take boarders for three reasons: First, “that they had smallpox in the house.” “And the two others?” “Oh, I did not ask for the two others!”

SOURCES: Mary Boykin Chesnut, Edited by Isabella D. Martin and Myrta Lockett Avary, A Diary From Dixie, p. 375-6