She had not the feelings her lord entertained for his distinguished antagonist, and her response was: “Tell General Turner I would not accept anything from him to save my life!”
Yet she must have been very hungry. She and her youthful son had been reduced to goober-peas. First, her supplies got down to one piece of beef-bone. She thought she would have a soup. For a moment, she left her son to watch the pot, but not to stir the soup. But he thought he would do well to stir it. So he stirred it, and turned the pot over. That day, she had nothing for dinner but goober-peas.
“When I came home,” said General Hunton, when asked for this story’s sequel, “and she told me about her message to General Turner, I wrote him the nicest letter I knew how to write, thanking him for his kindness to the wife of a man whose only claim on him was that he had fought him the best he knew how.
“I don’t think we would ever have had the trouble we had down here,” he continued, “if Northern people had known how things really were. In fact, I know we would not. Why, I never had any trouble with Northern men in all my life except that I just fought them all I knew how. And I never had better friends than among my Republican colleagues in Congress after the war. They thought all the more of me because I stood up so stoutly for the old Confederate Cause.”
Bonds coming about in the natural, inevitable order through interchange of the humanities were respected. But where they seemed the outcome of vanity, frivolity, or coquetry, that was another matter, a very serious one for the Southern participant. The spirit of the times was morbid, yet a noble loyalty was behind it.
Anywhere in the land, a Southern girl showing partiality for Federal beaux came under the ban. If there were nothing else against it, such a course appeared neither true nor dignified; if it were not treason to our lost Confederacy, it were treason to our own poor boys in gray to flutter over to prosperous conquerors.
Nothing could be more sharply defined in lights and shadows than the life of one beautiful and talented Southern woman who matronised the entertainments of a famous Federal general at a post in one of the Cotton States, and thereby brought upon herself such condemnation as made her wines and roses cost her dear. Yet perhaps such affiliations lessened the rigors of military government for her State.
One of the loveliest of Atlanta’s gray-haired dames tells me: “I am unreconstructed yet—Southern to the backbone.” Yet she speaks of Sherman’s godless cohorts as gently as if she were mother of them all. Her close neighbour was a Yankee encampment. The open ground around her was dotted with tents.
There were “all sorts” among the soldiers. None gave insolence or violence. Pilfering was the great trouble; the rank and file were “awfully thievish.” Her kitchen, as usual with Southern kitchens of those days, was a separate building. If for a moment she left her pots and ovens to answer some not-to-be-ignored demand from the house, she found them empty on her return, her dinner gone—a most serious thing when it was as by the skin of her teeth that she got anything at all to cook and any fuel to cook with; and when, moreover, cooking was new and tremendously hard work. “We could not always identify the thief; when we could, we were afraid to incur the enmity of the men. Better have our things stolen than worse happen us, as might if officers punished those men on our report. I kept a still tongue in my head.”
Though a wife and mother, she was yet in girlhood’s years, very soft and fair; had been “lapped in luxury,” with a maid for herself, a nurse for her boy, a servant to do this, that, or the other thing, for her. She thus describes her first essay at the family wash. There was a fine well in her yard, and men came to get water. A big-hearted Irishman caught the little lady struggling over soap-suds. It looked as if she would never get those clothes clean. For one thing, when she tried to wring them, they were streaked with blood from her arms and hands; she had peculiarly fine and tender skin.