April 22nd. Today’s news is very cheering; it is that Lincoln and Seward have both been assassinated, and that there is to be an Armistice.
(Here the diary-letter ends without signature.)
REMINISCENCES OF MRS. MARY RHODES (WARING) HENAGAN
———
(Written in December, 1917, to be Read at a Meeting of The
Girls of the Sixties, Columbia, S. C.)
———
The evacuation of Charleston, crossing of our soldiers over the Santee river, burning the bridge behind them, left the lower part of the State in the power of the Yankees.
My home was in this deserted region. We knew that our enemies were all around and had visited in no kind manner many of the neighboring plantations, but Chelsea, our plantation and winter home, seemed to be exempted. We learned afterward that this was due to the devotion of our slaves.
At last the Yankees did come. Our home, a big old colonial house built in 1714, was packed with refugees run from the coast from their homes earlier in the war. My mother directed each of us to go to my grandmother’s room as soon as we saw the Yankees coming, and meet them in a body there. My grandmother had passed her eightieth mile-stone and was old for her years.
As day after day passed and no Yankees came we felt more at ease. On one particular day in February, 1865, the young folks were sitting in a room removed from the main body of the house, one reading aloud and the others knitting, when my sister-in-law put her head in at the door and exclaimed, “Girls, the Yankees.” There was a rush for the house and my grandmother’s room. Just as we reached it the house was surrounded by an excited crowd of men calling for the Confederate soldier they had seen enter the house. There was no soldier there and they were so informed, but they insisted there was one for they had seen him. Their officers had some trouble in keeping them from searching the house. One officer stood at the front door with my father, who was the physician of the neighborhood, Dr. Morton Waring, and the other at the back door with my mother and her sister. Just then the excitement was relieved by one of our young negro men walking up with a military cap on.
There was no soldier with us just then, only a boy not yet in service.
Our young horses were gone, for the negro boys had taken them all into the swamp a half mile away as soon as the Yankees were in sight. Some of the soldiers were anxious to take my father’s horses that he used for his practice, but this Captain Hulbert, one of their officers, would not permit, telling his men they might need the services of a doctor and he could not get to them if his horses were gone.
Captain Hulbert told my father that his negroes had represented him as such a kind friend to them that the general in command had directed him not to enter his house or permit any outrages, only to free the negroes, as they thought they were slaves until each plantation was visited and the negroes told they were free.