As soon as my husband heard we had arrived, he came, too. After dinner he sat smoking, the solitary chair of the apartment tilted against the door as he smoked, and my poor dresses were fumigated. I remonstrated feebly. “War times,” said he; “nobody is fussy now. When I go back to Manassas to-morrow you will be awfully sorry you snubbed me about those trumpery things up there.” So he smoked the pipe of peace, for I knew that his remarks were painfully true. As soon as he was once more under the enemy’s guns, I would repent in sackcloth and ashes.
Captain Ingraham came with Colonel Lamar.[45] The latter said he could only stay five minutes; he was obliged to go back at once to his camp. That was a little before eight. However, at twelve he was still talking to us on that sofa. We taunted him with his fine words to the F. F. V. crowd before the Spotswood: “Virginia has no grievance. She raises her strong arm to catch the blow aimed at her weaker sisters.” He liked it well, however, that we knew his speech by heart.
This Spotswood is a miniature world. The war topic is not so much avoided, as that everybody has some personal dignity to take care of and everybody else is indifferent to it. I mean the “personal dignity of” autrui. In this wild confusion everything likely and unlikely is told you, and then everything is as flatly contradicted. At any rate, it is safest not to talk of the war.
Trescott was telling us how they laughed at little South Carolina in Washington. People said it was almost as large as Long Island, which is hardly more than a tail-feather of New York. Always there is a child who sulks and won’t play; that was our rôle. And we were posing as San Marino and all model-spirited, though small, republics, pose.
He tells us that Lincoln is a humorist. Lincoln sees the fun of things; he thinks if they had left us in a corner or out in the cold a while pouting, with our fingers in our mouth, by hook or by crook he could have got us back, but Anderson spoiled all.
In Mrs. Davis’s drawing-room last night, the President took a seat by me on the sofa where I sat. He talked for nearly an hour. He laughed at our faith in our own powers. We are like the British. We think every Southerner equal to three Yankees at least. We will have to be equivalent to a dozen now. After his experience of the fighting qualities of Southerners in Mexico, he believes that we will do all that can be done by pluck and muscle, endurance, and dogged courage, dash, and red-hot patriotism. And yet his tone was not sanguine. There was a sad refrain running through it all. For one thing, either way, he thinks it will be a long war. That floored me at once. It has been too long for me already. Then he said, before the end came we would have many a bitter experience. He said only fools doubted the courage of the Yankees, or their willingness to fight when they saw fit. And now that we have stung their pride, we have roused them till they will fight like devils.
Mrs. Bradley Johnson is here, a regular heroine. She outgeneraled the Governor of North Carolina in some way and has got arms and clothes and ammunition for her husband’s regiment.[46] There was some joke. The regimental breeches were all wrong, but a tailor righted that—hind part before, or something odd.
Captain Hartstein came to-day with Mrs. Bartow. Colonel Bartow is Colonel of a Georgia regiment now in Virginia. He was the Mayor of Savannah who helped to wake the patriotic echoes the livelong night under my sleepless head into the small hours in Charleston in November last. His wife is a charming person, witty and wise, daughter of Judge Berrien. She had on a white muslin apron with pink bows on the pockets. It gave her a gay and girlish air, and yet she must be as old as I am.
Mr. Lamar, who does not love slavery more than Sumner does, nor than I do, laughs at the compliment New England pays us. We want to separate from them; to be rid of the Yankees forever at any price. And they hate us so, and would clasp us, or grapple us, as Polonius has it, to their bosoms “with hooks of steel.” We are an unwilling bride. I think incompatibility of temper began when it was made plain to us that we got all the opprobrium of slavery and they all the money there was in it with their tariff.