Fighting Dick Anderson and Stephen Elliott, of Fort Sumter memory, are quite ready to pray for Andy Johnson, and to submit to the powers that be. Not so our belligerent clergy. “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 my last gasp. 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, a statesman, a Christian gentleman. 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 man, then there is no courage left on this earth. If he does not die game, I give it up. Something, 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 Baltimore in the night. It is that escapade of their man Lincoln that set them on making up 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 something, which pays tremendously in the Central Park region, and to capture and bring home her belle fille, who remained North during the war. She knocked at my door. The day was barely dawning. I was in bed, and as I sprang up, discovered that my old Confederate night-gown had to be managed, it was so full of rents. I am afraid I gave undue attention to the sad condition of my gown, but could nowhere see a shawl to drape my figure.
She was very kind. In case my husband was arrested and needed funds, she offered me some “British securities” and bonds. We were very grateful, but we did not accept the loan of money, which would have been almost the same as a gift, so slim was our chance of repaying it. But it was a generous thought on her part; I own that.
Went to our plantation, the Hermitage, yesterday. Saw no change; not a soul was absent from his or her post. I said, “Good colored folks, when are you going to kick off the traces and be free?” In their furious, emotional way, they swore devotion to us all to their dying day. Just the same, the minute they see an opening to better themselves they will move on. William, my husband’s foster-brother, came up. “Well, William, what do you want?” asked my husband. “Only to look at you, marster; it does me good.”
June 1st.—The New York Herald quotes General Sherman as saying, “Columbia was burned by Hampton’s sheer stupidity.” But then who burned everything on the way in Sherman’s march to Columbia, and in the line of march Sherman took after leaving Columbia? We came, for three days of travel, over a road that had been laid bare by Sherman’s torches. Nothing but smoking ruins was left in Sherman’s track. That I saw with my own eyes. No living thing was left, no house for man or beast. They who burned the countryside for a belt of forty miles, did they not also burn the town? To charge that to “Hampton’s stupidity” is merely an afterthought. 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 him.”
The Yankees here say, “The black man must go as the red man has gone; this is a white man’s country.” The negroes want to run with the hare, but hunt with the hounds. They are charming in their professions to us, but declare that they are to be paid by these blessed Yankees in lands and mules for having been slaves. They were so faithful to us during the war, why should the Yankees reward them, to which the only reply is that it would be by way of punishing rebels.
Mrs. Adger[133] saw a Yankee soldier strike a woman, and she prayed God to take him in hand according to his deed. 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 washerwoman is packing to go.
Scipio Africanus, the Colonel’s body-servant, is a soldierly looking black creature, fit to have delighted the eyes of old Frederick William of Prussia, who liked giants. 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 hams that they never could have found, they were hid so good.”