Chronicles of Chicora Wood

by Elizabeth W. Allston Pringle

The bloodless battle had been won.

Charles Petigru Allston’s Narrative

During the war there was great demand for horses, which increased as the time went on. My father always raised a few horses, and at this time there was a gray stallion (part Arab), just four years old, that my father had given to me the winter before he died; there were also several other horses, saddle and draft. After my father’s death, my mother, in the summer of 1864, made an arrangement with some friends in the Cavalry Service, C. S. A., Butler’s Command, to take and use our horses, with the promise that any that survived should be returned to us after the war.

One of the horses was killed under Edward L. Wells, of the Charleston Light Dragoons, as Butler’s Scouts were leaving Cheraw, S. C., by a Parrot shell that passed through him, going in at the tail and coming out of the chest, did not explode, and left Wells uninjured.

My gray stallion was ridden by Julius Pringle all through Virginia, wherever Butler’s Cavalry went, and returned safe and sound. The other two horses, a gray gelding and a bay filly, were alive at the time of the surrender, and Julius Pringle turned them over to a young negro of ours, who had been sent along with the horses, in charge of them (Sam Galant) somewhere in Virginia, and told him to make his way back home, and to get away before the actual surrender. The lad was of a family who had been long in our service, family servants for generations; his father had been my father’s body-servant for years, and then been succeeded in that office by one of his sons, and Sam had grown up with me. My father had sent him to Charleston to be instructed in music by Mr. Dauer, a German, with three others, and he played the violin very well. This boy had no money that we knew of, food was scarce, straggling marauders many, the horses in pretty poor shape, yet he managed to work his way with two horses through the country, and arrive at Crowley Hill safe, but nearly starved, both he and the horses, specially the gray. I asked him afterward how he managed it; he said he seldom moved during the day, but got out of the way as much as possible, and let the horses eat grass; then at night he travelled, but was careful to avoid all other travellers, and also all camp-fires. He must have done some very adroit foraging, also, or he would surely have starved. Horses were specially valuable then, and we were glad to see these two return.

After things settled down somewhat, in May, 1865, I think, my mother decided that she would have to go to the plantation home in Georgetown County to look after affairs there, and try to restore order. A deserter from the fleet off the coast had gone through all the plantations near Georgetown, and incited the negroes to plunder and rob in every direction, and had caused much trouble and demoralization. Several fine dwellings had been completely destroyed, and all of them robbed of every movable article. My mother and one of my sisters started in the carriage, with a pair of horses driven by old Aleck—I rode along on horseback—Julius Pringle, also on horseback, joined us. There was practically no law in the land, but the influence of established authority in the past kept a very fair semblance of order. We had a journey of over ninety miles ahead of us, roads and everything uncertain, but we made the trip safely and with little incident, and arrived safely at Plantersville, which was a collection of houses built irregularly in the pineland, as summer homes for the rice-planters along the rivers, who had to leave the comfortable plantation homes in May and go to the rough pineland houses until November, on account of malaria fever. Our summer house was on the sea, and could not be occupied at all during the war, so my father had built by his carpenters in this settlement a large log house, on lightwood pillars ten feet high, to escape damp, and put on it a double roof of cypress shingles, in which there was not a single metal nail; they were securely fastened on with wooden pins. (Up to the year 1900 this roof did not have to be renewed.) To this log house my mother, sister, and myself were to go.

. . . . . . . .

After a while we had to set to work to gather in some of the furniture which the negroes had carried off and hidden, for we had not enough to get along with; my mother, having taken the oath as soon as she returned to the low country, some time before, applied to the military authorities, and a corporal and three men were detailed to assist in recovering what we could find.... There were some wild and weird scenes enacted. The nigs had been told that everything would belong to them; that the government would punish the whites for the war, by taking their property and dividing it among the nigs, giving forty acres to each head of family, etc. So when we arrived, backed by soldiers, to take from them what they had collected of our belongings, they were much taken aback, and some of them were inclined to resist. However, we gathered up enough furniture and stuff to get along comfortably.

. . . . . . . .