University of Virginia Library

XXI
CAMDEN, S. C.

XXI. May 2, 1865—August 2, 1865

CAMDEN, S. C., May 2, 1865.—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
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.

May 4th.—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 '11 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.

J. 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. Chesnut'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."

May 10th.—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.

May 16th.—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.

May 18th.—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 Chesnut,
now ninety-three, blind and deaf, is apparently as strong as
ever, and certainly as resolute of will. Partly patriarch,

COL. JAMES CHESNUT, SR.

From a Portrait in Oil by Gilbert Stuart.

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 bodly 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." Scip 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,[2] 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,[3] 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?"

May 21st.—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
statu 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."

June 1st.—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. Adger[4] 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 faee; 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 African us, 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 nohow; 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.[5] 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.

June 12th.—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. MeCord
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, Blücher, and all that

left to haphazard? Wigfall said to old Cameron[6] 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 Miily 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.

June 27th.—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 tearsw 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.

July 4th.—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

SARSFIELD, NEAR CAMDEN, S. C.

Built by General Chesnut after the War, and the Home of himself and Mrs. Chesnut until they Died.
From a Recent Photograph.

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.

July 26th.—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?"

August 2d.—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."