I do not know whether she thought it my duty to obey my husband. But I thought it my duty to go to my mother, as I risked nothing but myself.
We had two days of an exciting drama under our very noses, before our eyes. A party had come to Columbia who said they had run the blockade, had come in by flag of truce, etc. Colonel Goodwyn asked me to look around and see if I could pick out the suspected crew. It was easily done. We were all in a sadly molting condition. We had come to the end of our good clothes in three years, and now our only resource was to turn them upside down, or inside out, and in mending, darning, patching, etc.
Near me on the train to Alabama sat a young woman in a traveling dress of bright yellow; she wore a profusion of curls, had pink cheeks, was delightfully airy and easy in her manner, and was absorbed in a flirtation with a Confederate major, who, in spite of his nice, new gray uniform and two stars, had a very Yankee face, fresh, clean-cut, sharp, utterly unsunburned, florid, wholesome, handsome. What more in compliment can one say of one’s enemies? Two other women faced this man and woman, and we knew them to be newcomers by their good clothes. One of these women was a German. She it was who had betrayed them. I found that out afterward.
The handsomest of the three women had a hard, Northern face, but all were in splendid array as to feathers, flowers, lace, and jewelry. If they were spies why were they so foolish as to brag of New York, and compare us unfavorably with the other side all the time, and in loud, shrill accents? Surely that was not the way to pass unnoticed in the Confederacy.
A man came in, stood up, and read from a paper, “The surrender of Vicksburg.”[96] I felt as if I had been struck a hard blow on the top of my head, and my heart took one of its queer turns. I was utterly unconscious: not long, I dare say. The first thing I heard was exclamations of joy and exultation from the overdressed party. My rage and humiliation were great. A man within earshot of this party had slept through everything. He had a greyhound face, eager and inquisitive when awake, but now he was as one of the seven sleepers.
Colonel Goodwyn wrote on a blank page of my book (one of De Quincey’s—the note is there now), that the sleeper was a Richmond detective.
Finally, hot and tired out, we arrived at West Point, on the Chattahoochee River. The dusty cars were quite still, except for the giggling flirtation of the yellow gown and her major. Two Confederate officers walked in. I felt mischief in the air. One touched the smart major, who was whispering to Yellow Gown. The major turned quickly. Instantly, every drop of blood left his face; a spasm seized his throat; it was a piteous sight. And at once I was awfully sorry for him. He was marched out of the car. Poor Yellow Gown’s color was fast, but the whites of her eyes were lurid. Of the three women spies we never heard again. They never do anything worse to women, the high-minded Confederates, than send them out of the country. But when we read soon afterward of the execution of a male spy, we thought of the “major.”
At Montgomery the boat waited for us, and in my haste I tumbled out of the omnibus with Dr. Robert Johnson’s assistance, but nearly broke my neck. The thermometer was high up in the nineties, and they gave me a stateroom over the boiler. I paid out my Confederate rags of money freely to the maid in order to get out of that oven. Surely, go where we may hereafter, an Alabama steamer in August lying under the bluff with the sun looking down, will give one a foretaste, almost an adequate idea, of what’s to come, as far as heat goes. The planks of the floor burned one’s feet under the bluff at Selma, where we stayed nearly all day—I do not know why.
Met James Boykin, who had lost 1,200 bales of cotton at Vicksburg, and charged it all to Jeff Davis in his wrath, which did not seem exactly reasonable to me. At Portland there was a horse for James Boykin, and he rode away, promising to have a carriage sent for me at once. But he had to go seven miles on horseback before he reached my sister Sally’s, and then Sally was to send back. On that lonely riverside Molly and I remained with dismal swamps on every side, and immense plantations, the white people few or none. In my heart I knew my husband was right when he forbade me to undertake this journey.