A beautiful boy, too young to fight and die, and a member of an Alabama regiment, was dying from a terrible wound a few feet off. His mother had been telegraphed for at his request. In the wild delirium of his dying moments he had been steadily calling for her, “Oh, mother, come; do come quickly!” Then, under the influence of opiates given to smooth his entrance into eternal rest, he dozed and slumbered. The thunders of the great guns along the lines of the immortal Lee roused him up. Just then his dying eyes rested upon one of the lovely matrons of Richmond advancing toward him. His reeling brain and distempered imagination mistook her for his mother. Raising himself up, with a wild, delirious cry of joy, which rang throughout the hospital, he cried: “Oh, mother! I knew you would come! I knew you would come! I can die easy now;” and she, humoring his illusion, let him fall upon her bosom, and he died happy in her arms, her tears flowing for him as if he had been her own son.
LETTERS FROM THE POOR AT HOME
[Phoebe Y. Pember.]
A thousand evidences of the loving care and energetic labor of the patient ones at home, telling an affecting story that knocked hard at the gates of the heart, were the portals ever so firmly closed; and with all these came letters written by poor, ignorant ones who often had no knowledge of how such communications should be addressed. 133 These letters, making inquiries concerning patients from anxious relatives at home, directed oftener to my office than my home, came in numbers, and were queer mixtures of ignorance, bad grammar, worse spelling, and simple feeling. However absurd the style, the love that filled them chastened and purified them. Many are stored away, and though irresistibly ludicrous, are too sacred to print for public amusement. In them could be detected the prejudices of the different sections. One old lady in upper Georgia wrote a pathetic appeal for a furlough for her son. She called me “My dear sir,” while still retaining my feminine address, and though expressing the strongest desire for her son’s restoration to health, entreated in moving accents that if his life could not be spared, that he should not be buried in “Ole Virginny dirt”—rather a derogatory term to apply to the sacred soil that gave birth to the Presidents,—the soil of the Old Dominion.
Almost all of these letters told the same sad tale of destitution of food and clothing; even shoes of the roughest kind being either too expensive for the mass or unattainable by the expenditure of any sum, in many parts of the country. For the first two years of the war, privations were lightly dwelt upon and courageously borne, but when want and suffering pressed heavily, as times grew more stringent, there was a natural longing for the stronger heart and frame to bear part of the burden. Desertion is a crime that meets generally with as much contempt as cowardice, and yet how hard for the husband or father to remain inactive in winter quarters, knowing that his wife and little ones were literally starving at home—not even at home, for few homes were left.
LIFE IN RICHMOND DURING THE WAR
[Southern Historical Papers, Volume 19. From the Cosmopolitan, December, 1891; by Edward M. Alfriend.]
For many months after the beginning of the war between the States, Richmond was an extremely gay, 134 bright, and happy city. Except that its streets were filled with handsomely attired officers and that troops constantly passed through it, there was nothing to indicate the horrors or sorrows of war, or the fearful deprivations that subsequently befell it. As the war progressed its miseries tightened their bloody grasp upon the city, happiness was nearly destroyed, and the hearts of the people were made to bleed. During the time of McClellan’s investment of Richmond, and the seven days’ fighting between Lee’s army and his own, every cannon that was fired could be heard in every home in Richmond, and as every home had its son or sons at the front of Lee’s army, it can be easily understood how great was the anguish of every mother’s heart in the Confederate capital. These mothers had cheerfully given their sons to the Southern cause, illustrating, as they sent them to battle, the heroism of the Spartan mother, who, when she gave the shield to her son, told him to return with it or on it.