University of Virginia Library

XII
FLAT ROCK, N. C.

XII. August 1, 1862—August 8, 1862

FLAT ROCK, N. C., August 1, 1862.—Being ill I left
Mrs. McMahan's for Flat Rock.[1] It was very hot
and disagreeable for an invalid in a boarding-house
in that climate. The La Bordes and the McCord girls came
part of the way with me.

The cars were crowded and a lame soldier had to stand,
leaning on his crutches in the thoroughfare that runs between
the seats. One of us gave him our seat. You may
depend upon it there was no trouble in finding a seat for
our party after that. Dr. La Borde quoted a classic anecdote.
In some Greek assembly an old man was left standing.
A Spartan gave him his seat. The Athenians cheered
madly, though they had kept their seats. The comment was,
"Lacedemonians practise virtue; Athenians know how to
admire it."

Nathan Davis happened accidentally to be at the station
at Greenville. He took immediate charge of Molly and
myself, for my party had dwindled to us two. He went
with us to the hotel, sent for the landlord, told him who I
was, secured good rooms for us, and saw that we were made

comfortable in every way. At dinner I entered that immense
dining-room alone, but I saw friends and acquaintances
on every side. My first exploit was to repeat to Mrs.
Ives Mrs. Pickens's blunder in taking a suspicious attitude
toward men born at the North, and calling upon General
Cooper to agree with her. Martha Levy explained the
grave faces of my auditors by saying that Colonel Ives was
a New Yorker. My distress was dire.

Louisa Hamilton was there. She told me that Captain
George Cuthbert, with his arm in a sling from a wound by
no means healed, was going to risk the shaking of a stagecoach;
he was on his way to his cousin, William Cuthbert's,
at Flat Rock. Now George Cuthbert is a type of the finest
kind of Southern soldier. We can not make them any better
than he is. Before the war I knew him; he traveled in
Europe with my sister, Kate, and Mary Withers. At once I
offered him a seat in the comfortable hack Nathan Davis
had engaged for me.

Molly sat opposite to me, and often when I was tired
held my feet in her lap. Captain Cuthbert's man sat with
the driver. We had ample room. We were a dilapidated
company. I was so ill I could barely sit up, and Captain
Cuthbert could not use his right hand or arm at all. I had
to draw his match, light his cigar, etc. He was very quiet,
grateful, gentle, and, I was going to say, docile. He is a
fiery soldier, one of those whose whole face becomes transfigured
in battle, so one of his men told me, describing his
way with his company. He does not blow his own trumpet,
but I made him tell me the story of his duel with the Mercury's
reporter. He seemed awfully ashamed of wasting
time in such a scrape.

That night we stopped at a country house half-way toward
our journey's end. There we met Mr. Charles
Lowndes. Rawlins Lowndes, his son, is with Wade Hampton.

First we drove, by mistake, into Judge King's yard, our

hackman mistaking the place for the hotel. Then we made
Farmer's Hotel (as the seafaring men say).

Burnet Rhett, with his steed, was at the door; horse and
man were caparisoned with as much red and gold artillery
uniform as they could bear. He held his horse. The stirrups
were Mexican, I believe; they looked like little sidesaddles.
Seeing his friend and crony, George Cuthbert,
alight and leave a veiled lady in the carriage, this handsome
and undismayed young artillerist walked round and
round the carriage, talked with the driver, looked in at the
doors, and at the front. Suddenly I bethought me to raise
my veil and satisfy his curiosity. Our eyes met, and I
smiled. It was impossible to resist the comic disappointment
on his face when a woman old enough to be George
Cuthbert's mother, with the ravages of a year of gastric
fever, almost fainting with fatigue, greeted his vision. He
instantly mounted his gallant steed and pranced away to
his fiancée. He is to marry the greatest heiress in the
State, Miss Aiken. Then Captain Cuthbert told me his
name.

At Kate's, I found Sally Rutledge, and then for weeks
life was a blank; I remember nothing. The illness which
had been creeping on for so long a time took me by the
throat. At Greenville I had met many friends. I witnessed
the wooing of Barny Heyward, once the husband of
the lovely Lucy Izard, now a widower and a bon parti.
He was there nursing Joe, his brother. So was the beautiful
Henrietta Magruder Heyward, now a widow, for poor
Joe died. There is something magnetic in Tatty Clinch's
large and lustrous black eyes. No man has ever resisted
their influence. She says her virgin heart has never beat
one throb the faster for any mortal here below—until now,
when it surrenders to Barny. Well, as I said, Joseph Heyward
died, and rapidly did the bereaved beauty shake the
dust of this poor Confederacy from her feet and plume her
wings for flight across the water.

[Let me insert here now, much later, all I know of that
brave spirit, George Cuthbert. While I was living in the
winter of 1863 at the corner of Clay and Twelfth Streets in
Richmond, he came to see me. Never did man enjoy life
more. The Preston girls were staying at my house then,
and it was very gay for the young soldiers who ran down
from the army for a day or so. We had heard of him, as
usual, gallantly facing odds at Sharpsburg.[2] And he asked
if he should chance to be wounded would I have him
brought to Clay Street.

He was shot at Chancellorsville,[3] leading his men. The
surgeon did not think him mortally wounded. He sent me
a message that "he was coming at once to our house." He
knew he would soon get well there. Also that "I need not
be alarmed; those Yankees could not kill me." He asked
one of his friends to write a letter to his mother. Afterward
he said he had another letter to write, but that he
wished to sleep first, he felt so exhausted. At his request
they then turned his face away from the light and left him.
When they came again to look at him, they found him dead.
He had been dead for a long time. It was bitter cold;
wounded men lost much blood and were weakened in that
way; they lacked warm blankets and all comforts. Many
died who might have been saved by one good hot drink or a
few mouthfuls of nourishing food.

One of the generals said to me: "Fire and reckless courage
like Captain Cuthbert's are contagious; such men in an

army are invaluable; losses like this weakened us, indeed."
But I must not linger longer around the memory of the
bravest of the brave—a true exemplar of our old régime,
gallant, gay, unfortunate.—M. B. C.]

August 8th.—Mr. Daniel Blake drove down to my sister's
in his heavy, substantial English phaeton, with stout
and strong horses to match. I went back with him and
spent two delightful days at his hospitable mansion. I met
there, as a sort of chaplain, the Rev. Mr.—. He dealt unfairly
by me. We had a long argument, and when we knelt
down for evening prayers, he introduced an extemporaneous
prayer and prayed for me most palpably. There was
I down on my knees, red-hot with rage and fury. David
W. said it was a clear case of hitting a fellow when he was
down. Afterward the fun of it all struck me, and I found
it difficult to keep from shaking with laughter. It was not
an edifying religious exercise, to say the least, as far as I
was concerned.

Before Chancellorsville, was fatal Sharpsburg.[4] My
friend, Colonel Means, killed on the battle-field; his only
son, Stark, wounded and a prisoner. His wife had not recovered
from the death of her other child, Emma, who had
died of consumption early in the war. She was lying on a
bed when they told her of her husband's death, and then
they tried to keep Stark's condition from her. They think
now that she misunderstood and believed him dead, too.
She threw something over her face. She did not utter one
word. She remained quiet so long, some one removed the
light shawl which she had thrown over her head and found

she was dead. Miss Mary Stark, her sister, said afterward,
"No wonder! How was she to face life without her husband
and children? That was all she had ever lived for."
These are sad, unfortunate memories. Let us run away
from them.

What has not my husband been doing this year, 1862,
when all our South Carolina troops are in Virginia? Here
we were without soldiers or arms. He raised an army, so to
speak, and imported arms, through the Trenholm firm. He
had arms to sell to the Confederacy. He laid the foundation
of a niter-bed; and the Confederacy sent to Columbia to
learn of Professor Le Conte how to begin theirs. He bought
up all the old arms and had them altered and repaired.
He built ships. He imported clothes and shoes for our soldiers,
for which things they had long stood sorely in need.
He imported cotton cards and set all idle hands carding
and weaving. All the world was set to spinning cotton. He
tried to stop the sale of whisky, and alas, he called for reserves
—that is, men over age, and he committed the unforgivable
offense of sending the sacred negro property to
work on fortifications away from their owners' plantations.