What Happened to Me

by La Salle Corbell Pickett

Soon after the battle my Soldier returned to recruit his division. On Sunday we walked down Broad Street to the Monumental Episcopal Church. It was the first time we had gone to church together and he was telling me that this church was called the Monumental because it was built upon the site of the old Richmond theater, burned in 1811. My Soldier's grandmother was a victim of the fire, as were the Governor of Virginia and more than sixty of Richmond's best known citizens. The fire and the long funeral procession had been described to him by those who held in memory the mournful cortège darkening the streets of the beautiful city as Death had clouded the lives of the thousands who followed their loved ones for the last time on earth.

As we went down Broad Street Hill we saw a little Hebrew child standing first on one foot and then on the other, crying. He had rubbed his dirty hands on his tear-stained face until it was covered with muddy streaks.

"Come, come, my little man, what is the matter?" asked my Soldier.

"My shoes is a hurtin' an' pinchin' me so. They feels like I was a walkin' on red-hot corncobs. Oh-oh-oh! Mister, I can't walk; I can't get anywhere at all."

Kneeling, my Soldier unlaced and took off the shoes, rubbed the little feet, tied the shoes together, handed them to the boy, and with his own clean handkerchief wiped away the tears. Lifting the child in his arms he carried him home, some three blocks farther on. We went our way and as I walked beside my Soldier in his gray uniform cloaked with the glory and the gloom of the world's greatest battle, I felt prouder of the simple sweet nature offering sympathy and aid to "one of the least of these" than of all the valor of the soldier on the field.

Only a few days before he had ridden from Gettysburg to Richmond, cheer after cheer following him along the way. Men, women and children were at the roadside to welcome him and hang garlands on his horse. He had been the central figure in a scene so supreme that it needed not victory to crown it with glory. Yet not the flowers of love nor the echo of the cannon's thunder, the grave duties nor the heavy sorrows that were laid upon him, could so fill his heart as to leave no room for the cry of suffering from an unknown child.

In September of that year my Soldier married me. He had confided in General Longstreet and asked for a furlough. The Corps Commander replied that they were not granting furloughs. "But," he said, with that twinkle in his eye so well remembered by all who knew General Lee's "old War Horse," "I might detail you for special duty and you could stop off and be married." So my Soldier was detailed for "special duty."

Unfortunately, the Federals south of the line were at that time worshipping exclusively at the shrine of Mars. For them Cupid was absolutely dethroned. So much opposed were they to our marriage and so insistent in their efforts to induce my Soldier to pay them a prolonged visit instead of wasting his time in wedding frivolities that it became necessary for me to cross the lines. This I did with the assistance of my uncle, Doctor John T. Phillips, who took my father and me under his protection, smuggled us across, my father driving a load of fodder in which my trunks were concealed. My mother could not leave my little baby brother, now Dr. Edwin F. Corbell, an eminent and beloved physician of North Carolina, to go with me, so I was accompanied by one of her friends as chaperon. I quaked inwardly when we met some Federal cavalrymen but kept up a brave front and, recognizing Dr. Phillips, the riders allowed his permit to cover the party and we passed on our way.

At Waverley Station we were met by my uncle, Colonel J. J. Phillips, and his wife, and by my Soldier's brother and aunt and uncle, Miss Olivia and Mr. Andrew Johnston. With them we went on to Petersburg and on September 15, 1863, in St. Paul's Church, the marriage took place. We left for Richmond amid the salute of guns, hearty cheers, the chimes of bells and the music of bands and bugles.

As by that time the food supply of the South was reduced to narrow limits, salt being procured by digging up and boiling the earth from under the smokehouses, browned sweet potatoes cut into bits and toasted serving for coffee, and lumps of sugar being sold at high prices for the hospital fund, it might be thought that our prospect of finding a banquet awaiting us in Richmond was not brilliant. But friends and relations of my Soldier had exerted themselves to do him honor, and the result was such as had not been seen in Virginia for many a day. It was sora season and so generous was the supply that the feast was afterward known as the "wedding sora-supper." The birds had been killed at night with paddles, for the South was not wasting her small store of ammunition on sora with so many more important targets in sight. The birds, killed at Curl's Neck on the James River, and thousands of beaten biscuit, gallons of terrapin stew, and turkeys boned and made into salad by the neighbors and the old plantation servants under the supervision of Mr. and Mrs. Sims, the overseer and his wife at Turkey Island, my Soldier's old colonial home, were sent us as bridal presents. Mrs. Robert E. Lee's gift was a fruit-cake, the making of which she had superintended, and Bishop Dudley's mother sent us a black fruit-cake that had been put away for her own golden wedding.