Part 22 (1/2)
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, blaht I will not stop to hear excuses There is not one word against those who stood out until the bitter end, and stackedof sadness hovers over ht, 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,
390a COL JAMES CHESNUT, SR
From a Portrait in Oil by Gilbert Stuart
391 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 srip of a tyrant whose will has never been crossed I will not atteain: ”Everybody knows a gentleman when he sees him I have never met a man who could describe one” We have had three very distinct specientlemen, each utterly different frorandson
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 oldwith 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 ood to you always” Scip says he was silent, for it ”made them mad if you praised your master”
So off in a fury, because they try to prevent his atte some feat iently, ”I hope that I never say or do anything unseemly! Sometimes I think I am subject to oes there?” If a lady's naiven 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 oill 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 hteenth century, they called hi Prince” He and Mr John Taylor,1 of Columbia, were the first up-country youths whose parents ealthy enough to send thee 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 anti prosperity, or of war and adversity, in which a representative man of this faether until now Mrs Chesnut said she drove down from Philadelphia on her bridal trip, in a chariot and four - a crea here-on account of the large families hich 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 enerations between shi+rt-sleeves and shi+rt-sleeves But these Chesnuts have secured four, from the John Chesnut as driven out froinia by the French and Indians, when that father had been killed at Fort Duquesne,2 to the John Chesnut who saunters 1 John Taylor was graduated from Princeton in 1790 and becaress 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
2 Fort Duquesne stood at the junction of the Monongahela and Alleghany Rivers Captain Trent, acting for the Ohio Coan 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 atteht miles east of it In 1758 General Forbes marched ard from Philadelphia and secured possession of the place, after the French, alarave it the na here now, the very perfection of a lazy gentleht, a dance, or a fox-hunt
The first comer of that na 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-ar hted with the fact that the present Joseph Kershaw had so distinguished hiht let the shop of a hundred years ago rest for a while ”Upon o 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 as a clerk in their shop” This clerk becaeneration 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 roo out of it for forty years Her father let her have her oay 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 ony ”Nonsense! I a and as coive up your horses? How then?”
394 May 21st - They say Governor Magrath has absconded, and that the Yankees have said, ”If you have no visible governor, ill send you one” If we had one and they found hiroes have flocked to the Yankee squad which has recently come, but they were snubbed, the rampant freed 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 ?” ”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 e expected” The colored woaudiest array, carried bouquets to the Yankees,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 circuoes on in antebellum statu quo Every day I expect to miss some faer we found at the hotel here, and we brought her to Bloo leisurely with his wife twelve miles a day, utterly careless whether he were taken prisoner or not, and that General Ha dick Anderson and Stephen Elliott, of Fort Sumter memory, are quite ready to pray for Andy Johnson, and to suby ”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 asp 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,
395 a statesentleman 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 e left on this earth If he does not die ga, 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 Baltiht It is that escapade of theirup 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 soion, and to capture and bring ho the war She knocked atI was in bed, and as I sprang up, discovered that ed, it was so full of rents I aown, but could nowhere see a shawl to drape ure
She was very kind In case my husband was arrested and needed funds, she offered rateful, but we did not accept the loan of ift, so sliht on her part; I own that
Went to our plantation, the Here; not a soul was absent frooing to kick off the traces and be free?” In their furious, e day Just the sa to better themselves they will move on William, my husband's foster-brother, came up ”Well, William, what do you want?” asked my
396 husband ”Only to look at you, ood”
June 1st - The New York Herald quotes General Sher, ”Columbia was burned by Ha on the way in Sherman's march to Colu Columbia? We came, for three days of travel, over a road that had been laid bare by Sher ruins was left in Sher was left, no house for man or beast They who burned the countryside for a belt of forty e that to ”Haht 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 hio as the red roes want to run with the hare, but hunt with the hounds They are char in their professions to us, but declare that they are to be paid by these blessed Yankees in lands andbeen slaves They were so faithful to us during the hy should the Yankees reward them, to which the only reply is that it would be by way of punishi+ng rebels
Mrs Adger1 saw a Yankee soldier strike a wo to his deed
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 Sue He was afterward and before the war a professor in the Theological Se her husband's many hardshi+ps and notable experiences in the East
397 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 washerwoo
Scipio Africanus, the Colonel's body-servant, is a soldierly looking black creature, fit to have delighted the eyes of old Frederick Williaiants 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 haood”
Eben dressed himself in his best and went at a run to ate hein He had adorned hie of a shi+p, with a handful of gaudy seals He knew the Yankees cagers ”Hand over that watch!” they said Minus his fine watch and chain, Eben returned a sadder and a wiserat his knife-board ”Why? You here? Why did you coht ive o 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, ”Ka-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- or as bitter in the saood I cried with a will He prayed that we th to stand up and bear our bitter