University of Virginia Library

XVII
CAMDEN, S. C.

XVII. May 8, 1864—June 1, 1864

CAMDEN, S. C., May 8, 1864.—My friends crowded
around me so in those last days in Richmond, I forgot
the affairs of this nation utterly; though I did
show faith in my Confederate country by buying poor
Bones's (my English maid's) Confederate bonds. I gave
her gold thimbles, bracelets; whatever was gold and would
sell in New York or London, I gave.

My friends in Richmond grieved that I had to leave
them—not half so much, however, as I did that I must
come away. Those last weeks were so pleasant. No battle,
no murder, no sudden death, all went merry as a marriage
bell. Clever, cordial, kind, brave friends rallied around
me.

Maggie Howell and I went down the river to see an
exchange of prisoners. Our party were the Lees, Mallorys,
Mrs. Buck Allan, Mrs. Ould. We picked up Judge Ould
and Buck Allan at Curl's Neck. I had seen no genuine
Yankees before; prisoners, well or wounded, had been German,
Scotch, or Irish. Among our men coming ashore was
an officer, who had charge of some letters for a friend of
mine whose fiancé had died; I gave him her address. One
other man showed me some wonderfully ingenious things
he had made while a prisoner. One said they gave him rations
for a week; he always devoured them in three days, he
could not help it; and then he had to bear the inevitable
agony of those four remaining days! Many were wounded,

some were maimed for life. They were very cheerful. We
had supper—or some nondescript meal—with ice-eream
on board. The band played Home, Sweet Home.

One man tapped another on the shoulder: "Well, how
do you feel, old fellow?" "Never was so near crying in
my life—for very comfort."

Governor Cummings, a Georgian, late Governor of Utah,
was among the returned prisoners. He had been in prison
two years. His wife was with him. He was a striking-looking
person, huge in size, and with snow-white hair, fat
as a prize ox, with no sign of Yankee barbarity or starvation
about him.

That evening, as we walked up to Mrs. Davis's carriage,
which was waiting for us at the landing, Dr. Garnett
with Maggie Howell, Major Hall with me, suddenly I heard
her scream, and some one stepped back in the dark and
said in a whisper. "Little Joe! he has killed himself!"
I felt reeling, faint, bewildered. A chattering
woman clutched my arm: "Mrs. Davis's son? Impossible.
Whom did you say? Was he an interesting child? How
old was he?" The shock was terrible, and unnerved as
I was I cried, "For God's sake take her away!"

Then Maggie and I drove two long miles in silence except
for Maggie's hysterical sobs. She was wild with terror.
The news was broken to her in that abrupt way at the
carriage door so that at first she thought it had all happened
there, and that poor little Joe was in the carriage.

Mr. Burton Harrison met us at the door of the Executive
Mansion. Mrs. Semmes and Mrs. Barksdale were there,
too. Every window and door of the house seemed wide
open, and the wind was blowing the curtains. It was lighted,
even in the third story. As I sat in the drawing-room, I
could hear the tramp of Mr. Davis's step as he walked up
and down the room above. Not another sound. The whole
house as silent as death. It was then twelve o'clock; so I
went home and waked General Chesnut, who had gone

to bed. We went immediately back to the President's,
found Mrs. Semmes still there, but saw no one but her,
We thought some friends of the family ought to be in the
house.

Mrs. Semmes said when she got there that little Jeff
was kneeling down by his brother, and he called out to her
in great distress: " Mrs. Semmes, I have said all the prayers
I know how, but God will not wake Joe."

Poor little Joe, the good child of the family, was so gentle
and affectionate. He used to run in to say his prayers at
his father's knee. Now he was laid out somewhere above us,
crushed and killed. Mrs. Semmes, describing the accident,
said he fell from the high north piazza upon a brick pavement.
Before I left the house I saw him lying there, white
and beautiful as an angel, covered with flowers; Catherine,
his nurse, flat on the floor by his side, was weeping and wailing
as only an Irishwoman can.

Immense crowds came to the funeral, everybody sympathetic,
but some shoving and pushing rudely. There were
thousands of children, and each child had a green bough or
a bunch of flowers to throw on little Joe's grave, which was
already a mass of white flowers, crosses, and evergreens.
The morning I came away from Mrs. Davis's, early as it
was, I met a little child with a handful of snow drops.
"Put these on little Joe," she said; "I knew him so well,"
and then she turned and fled without another word. I did
not know who she was then or now.

As I walked home I met Mr. Reagan, then Wade Hampton.
But I could see nothing but little Joe and his broken-hearted
mother. And Mr. Davis's step still sounded in my
ears as he walked that floor the livelong night.

General Lee was to have a grand review the very day we
left Richmond. Great numbers of people were to go up by
rail to see it. Miss Turner McFarland writes: "They did
go, but they came back faster than they went. They found
the army drawn up in battle array." Many of the brave

and gay spirits that we saw so lately have taken flight, the
only flight they know, and their bodies are left dead upon
the battle-field. Poor old Edward Johnston is wounded
again, and a prisoner. Jones's brigade broke first; he was
wounded the day before.

At Wilmington we met General Whiting. He sent us to
the station in his carriage, and bestowed upon us a bottle of
brandy, which had run the blockade. They say Beauregard
has taken his sword from Whiting. Never! I will not believe
it. At the capture of Fort Sumter they said Whiting
was the brains, Beauregard only the hand. Lucifer, son of
the morning! How art thou fallen! That they should
even say such a thing!

My husband and Mr. Covey got out at Florence to procure
for Mrs. Miles a cup of coffee. They were slow about
it and they got left. I did not mind this so very much, for
I remembered that we were to remain all day at Kingsville,
and that my husband could overtake me there by the next
train. My maid belonged to the Prestons. She was only
traveling home with me, and would go straight on to Columbia.
So without fear I stepped off at Kingsville. My old
Confederate silk, like most Confederate dresses, had seen
better days, and I noticed that, like Oliver Wendell
Holmes's famous "one-hoss shay," it had gone to pieces
suddenly, and all over. It was literally in strips. I became
painfully aware of my forlorn aspect when I asked the telegraph
man the way to the hotel, and he was by no means respectful
to me. I was, indeed, alone—an old and not too respectable-looking
woman. It was my first appearance in
the character, and I laughed aloud.

A very haughty and highly painted dame greeted me
at the hotel. " No room," said she. " Who are you!"
I gave my name. "Try something else," said she. "Mrs.
Chesnut don't travel round by herself with no servants and
no nothing." I looked down. There I was, dirty, tired, tattered,
and torn. "Where do you come from?" said she.

"My home is in Camden," "Come, now, I know everybody
in Camden." I sat down meekly on a bench in the
piazza, that was free to all wayfarers.

"Which Mrs. Chesnut? " said she (sharply). "I
know both." "I am now the only one. And now what is
the matter with you? Do you take me for a spy? I know
you perfectly well. I went to school with you at Miss Henrietta
de Leon's, and my name was Mary Miller." "The
Lord sakes alive! and to think you are her! Now I see.
Dear! dear me! Heaven sakes, woman, but you are
broke!" "And tore," I added, holding up my dress.
"But I had had no idea it was so difficult to effect an entry
into a railroad wayside hotel." I picked up a long strip of
my old black dress, torn off by a man's spur as I passed him
getting off the train.

It is sad enough at Mulberry without old Mrs. Chesnut,
who was the good genius of the place. It is so lovely here
in spring. The giants of the forest—the primeval oaks,
water-oaks, live-oaks, willow-oaks, such as I have not seen
since I left here—with opopanax, violets, roses, and yellow
jessamine, the air is laden with perfume. Araby the Blest
was never sweeter.

Inside, are creature comforts of all kinds—green peas,
strawberries, asparagus, spring lamb, spring chicken, fresh
eggs, rich, yellow butter, clean white linen for one's beds,
dazzling white damask for one's table. It is such a contrast
to Richmond, where I wish I were.

Fighting is going on. Hampton is frantic, for his laggard
new regiments fall in slowly; no fault of the soldiers;
they are as disgusted as he is. Bragg, Bragg, the head of
the War Office, can not organize in time.

John Boykin has died in a Yankee prison. He had on a
heavy flannel shirt when lying in an open platform car on
the way to a cold prison on the lakes. A Federal soldier
wanted John's shirt. Prisoners have no rights; so John
had to strip off and hand his shirt to him. That caused

his death. In two days he was dead of pneumonia—may be
frozen to death. One man said: "They are taking us there
to freeze." But then their men will find our hot sun in August
and July as deadly as our men find their cold Decembers.
Their snow and ice finish our prisoners at a rapid
rate, they say. Napoleon's soldiers found out all that in
the Russian campaign.

Have brought my houseless, homeless friends, refugees
here, to luxuriate in Mulberry's plenty. I can but remember
the lavish kindness of the Virginia people when I was
there and in a similar condition. The Virginia people do
the rarest acts of hospitality and never seem to know it is
not in the ordinary course of events.

The President's man, Stephen, bringing his master's
Arabian to Mulberry for safe-keeping, said: " Why, Missis,
your niggers down here are well off. I call this Mulberry
place heaven, with plenty to eat, little to do, warm
house to sleep in, a good church."

John L. Miller, my cousin, has been killed at the head
of his regiment. The blows now fall so fast on our heads
they are bewildering. The Secretary of War authorizes
General Chesnut to reorganize the men who have been hitherto
detailed for special duty, and also those who have been
exempt. He says General Chesnut originated the plan and
organized the corps of clerks which saved Richmond in the
Dahlgren raid.

May 27th.—In all this beautiful sunshine, in the stillness
and shade of these long hours on this piazza, all comes
back to me about little Joe; it haunts me—that scene in
Richmond where all seemed confusion, madness, a bad
dream! Here I see that funeral procession as it wound
among those tall white monuments, up that hillside, the
James River tumbling about below over rocks and around
islands; the dominant figure, that poor, old, gray-haired
man, standing bareheaded, straight as an arrow, clear
against the sky by the open grave of his son. She, the bereft

mother, stood back, in her heavy black wrappings, and
her tall figure drooped. The flowers, the children, the procession
as it moved, comes and goes, but those two dark,
sorrow-stricken figures stand; they are before me now!

That night, with no sound but the heavy tramp of his
feet overhead, the curtains flapping in the wind, the gas
flaring, I was numb, stupid, half-dead with grief and terror.
Then came Catherine's Irish howl. Cheap, was that.
Where was she when it all happened? Her place was to
have been with the child. Who saw him fall? Whom will
they kill next of that devoted household?

Read to-day the list of killed and wounded.[1] One long
column was not enough for South Carolina's dead. I see
Mr. Federal Secretary Stanton says he can reenforce Suwarrow
Grant at his leisure whenever he calls for more. He
has just sent him 25,000 veterans. Old Lincoln says, in his
quaint backwoods way, "Keep a-peggin'." Now we can
only peg out. What have we left of men, etc., to meet these
"reenforcements as often as reenforeements are called
for?" Our fighting men have all gone to the front; only
old men and little boys are at home now.

It is impossible to sleep here, because it is so solemn
and still. The moonlight shines in my window sad and
white, and the soft south wind, literally comes over a bank
of violets, lilacs, roses, with orange-blossoms and magnolia
flowers.

Mrs. Chesnut was only a year younger than her husband.
He is ninety-two or three. She was deaf; but he retains
his senses wonderfully for his great age. I have always
been an early riser. Formerly I often saw him sauntering
slowly down the broad passage from his room to hers,
in a flowing flannel dressing-gown when it was winter. In

MRS. JAMES CHESNUT, SR.

From a Portrait in Oil by Gilbert Stuart.

the spring he was apt to be in shirt-sleeves, with suspenders
hanging down his back. He had always a large hair-brush
in his hand.

He would take his stand on the rug before the fire in her
room, brushing scant locks which were fleecy white. Her
maid would be doing hers, which were dead-leaf brown, not
a white hair in her head. He had the voice of a stentor, and
there he stood roaring his morning compliments. The people
who occupied the room above said he fairly shook the
window glasses. This pleasant morning greeting ceremony
was never omitted.

Her voice was "soft and low" (the oft-quoted). Philadelphia
seems to have lost the art of sending forth such
voices now. Mrs. Binney, old Mrs. Chesnut's sister, came
among us with the same softly modulated, womanly, musical
voice. Her clever and beautiful daughters were criard.
Judge Han said: "Philadelphia women scream like macaws."
This morning as I passed Mrs. Chesnut's room, the
door stood wide open, and I heard a pitiful sound. The
old man was kneeling by her empty bedside sobbing bitterly.
I fled down the middle walk, anywhere out of reach
of what was never meant for me to hear.

June 1st.—We have been to Bloomsbury again and hear
that William Kirkland has been wounded. A scene occurred
then, Mary weeping bitterly and Aunt B. frantic as
to Tanny's danger. I proposed to make arrangements for
Mary to go on at once. The Judge took me aside, frowning
angrily. "You are unwise to talk in that way. She can
neither take her infant nor leave it. The cars are closed by
order of the government to all but soldiers."

I told him of the woman who, when the conductor
said she could not go, cried at the top of her voice, "Soldiers,
I want to go to Richmond to nurse my wounded husband."
In a moment twenty men made themselves her
body-guard, and she went on unmolested. The Judge said
I talked nonsense. I said I would go on in my carriage if

need be. Besides, there would be no difficulty in getting
Mary a "permit."

He answered hotly that in no case would he let her go,
and that I had better not go back into the house. We were
on the piazza and my carriage at the door. I took it and
crossed over to see Mary Boykin. She was weeping, too, so
washed away with tears one would hardly know her. "So
many killed. My son and my husband—I do not hear a
word from them."

Gave to-day for two pounds of tea, forty pounds of coffee,
and sixty pounds of sugar, $800.

Beauregard is a gentleman and was a genius as long as
Whiting did his engineering for him. Our Creole general
is not quite so clever as he thinks himself.

Mary Ford writes for school-books for her boys. She is
in great distress on the subject. When Longstreet's corps
passed through Greenville there was great enthusiasm;
handkerchiefs were waved, bouquets and flowers were
thrown the troops; her boys, having nothing else to throw,
threw their school-books.