At this time one of his staff officers writes, “The actual invasion of South Carolina has begun. The well-known sight of columns of black smoke meets our gaze again.” And another Federal officer, “There can be no doubt of the assertion that the feeling among the troops was one of extreme bitterness toward the people of South Carolina. It was freely expressed as the column hurried over the bridge at Sister’s Ferry, eager to commence the punishment of the original Secessionists. Threatening words were heard from soldiers who prided themselves on conservatism in house-burning while in Georgia, and officers openly confessed their fears that the coming campaign would be a wicked one. Just or unjust as this feeling was toward the country people in South Carolina, it was universal. I first saw its fruits at Purisburg, where two or three piles of blackened bricks and an acre or so of dying embers marked the site of an old, Revolutionary town; and this before the column had fairly got its hand in.... The army might safely march the darkest night, the crackling pine woods shooting up their columns of flame, and the burning houses along the way would light it on.... As for the wholesale burnings, pillage, devastation, committed in South Carolina, magnify all I have said of Georgia some fifty-fold, and then throw in an occasional murder, ‘just to bring an old hard-fisted cuss to his senses,’ and you have a pretty good idea of the whole thing.”
General Sherman testifies that “the whole army is burning with insatiable desire to wreak vengeance on South Carolina. I almost tremble at her fate.”
And one of his captains remarks of the situation several weeks later. “It was sad to see this wanton destruction of property which ... was the work of ‘bummers’ who were marauding through the country committing every sort of outrage. There was no restraint except with the column or the regular foraging parties. We had no communications and could have no safeguards. The country was necessarily left to take care of itself, and became a howling waste. The ‘Coffee-coolers’ of the Army of the Potomac were archangels compared to our ‘bummers’ who often fell to the tender mercies of Wheeler’s cavalry, and were never heard of again, earning a fate richly deserved.”
Winter is not truly winter in South Carolina, but in the winter of ’65 it rained and rained and rained. All swamps and streams were out, low-lying plantations were under water, the country looked like a flooded rice-field. The water-oaks and live-oaks and magnolias stood up, shining and dark, beneath the streaming sky; where the road was corduroyed it was hard to travel, and where it was not wheels sank and sank. All the world was wet, and the canes in the marshes made no rustling. When it did not rain the sky remained grey, a calm grey pall keeping out the sun, but leaving a quiet grey-pearl light, like a dream that is neither sad nor glad.
“It is,” said Désirée, “the air of Cape Jessamine that winter you came.”
“Yes. The road to Vidalia! We passed at nightfall a piece of water with a bit of bridge. I helped push a gun upon it, and the howitzer knocked me on the head for my pains. I fell down, down into deep water, forty fathoms at the least, and blacker than ebony at midnight.... And then I waked up in Rasmus’s cabin, and we had supper, and water came under the door, and we circumvented the bayou, and went to the Gaillard place which was called Cape Jessamine. And there I found a queen in a russet gown and a soldier’s cloak. The wind blew the cloak out and made a canopy of it in the light of torches and bonfires. She stood upon the levee and bitted and bridled the Mississippi River—and I fell in love, deep, deep, forty thousand fathoms deep—”
“Two years.... You were so ragged and splashed with mud—And my heart beat like that! and said to me ‘Who is this that comes winged and crowned?’—Listen!”
They were on a road somewhat to the southeast of Columbia, Désirée in an open wagon driven by a negro boy, Edward—major now of the ——th Virginia—riding beside her on a grey horse. Ahead, at some distance, they just saw the regiment, marching through a gloomy wood, bound for a post on the Edisto. The sound of its going and the voices of the men came faintly back through the damp and quiet air. But what they heard was nearer, a passionate weeping amid the trees at a cross-road. Coming to this opening they found a spacious family carriage drawn by two ancient plough horses, a cart with a mule attached, and two or three negro pedestrians. The whole had stopped the moment before and with reason. A white-haired lady, stretched upon the cushions of the carriage laid cross-wise, had just breathed her last. The weeping was her daughter’s, a dark, handsome girl of twenty. Two negro women lamented also, while the coachman had gotten down from the box and stood staring, with a working face. There were some bags and pillows and things of little account heaped in the cart, and on these a small negro boy was profoundly sleeping.
Edward dismounted and Désirée stepped down from the wagon. “What could they do? How sad it was!—Was there any help?—” Désirée lifted the girl from her mother’s form, drew her away to a roadside log, and sitting there, held her close and let her weep. Edward saw the oldest negro woman, murmuring constantly to herself, close the eyes of the dead mistress, straighten her limbs and fold her hands. The other woman sat on the earth and rocked herself. The plough horses and the mule lowered their heads and cropped what green bush and grass there was. The little black boy slept on and on. Edward talked with the coachman. “Yaas, marster, dat so!—’Bout thirty miles south from here, sah. Bienvenu—er Lauren’s place. En de Yankees come hollerin’ en firin’ en hits daid of night en old Marster en young Marster wif Gineral Lee.—One officer, he say git away quick! en he give me er guard en I hitches up, en we lif’ ol’ Mistis out of her bed where she’s had pneumonia, en Miss Fanny en her mammy en Julia dar wif her boy, we teks de road.”
Désirée and Edward saw the forlorn cortège proceed on its way with hopes of a village or some country house. They stood a moment watching it disappear, then Désirée rested her hand upon his arm and mounted again into the wagon, and he sprang upon his horse that was named Damon, and the negro boy touched the mule drawing the wagon with his whip, and they all went on after the regiment. They found it at twilight, encamped in the hospitable houses and the one street of a tiny rain-soaked hamlet. Headquarters was the parsonage and here was a room ready for the Major’s wife. From colonel to cook the ——th Virginia loved the Major’s wife. Romance dwelled with her, and a queenliness that was never vanquished. Her presence never wearied; she knew when to withdraw, to disappear, how not to give trouble, and how, when she gave it, to make it seem a high guerdon, a princess’s favour. Sometimes the regiment did not see her for weeks or even months on end, and then she came like a rose in summer, a more golden light on the fields, a deeper blue in the sky. She made mystics of men.