“The city is filled with the wounded and dead,” echoed our cousin John Withers. “It is fortunate you are away and saved the necessity of beholding the horrible sights which are now so common here! Great numbers of Alabamians are killed and wounded....” And he added in a letter, written in an interval of the awful Seven Days Battles: “For four days I have been awaiting some decisive move on the part of our forces, but nothing has been done yet to settle affairs. McClellan has not been routed, but his army is, no doubt, demoralised to such an extent as to render any other demonstration against Richmond out of the question for many weeks.... The President has come up from the battle-field, and I hear that a courier from the French and British Consuls is to leave here for Washington to-night or in the morning. We will secure between thirty and forty thousand small arms by our late operations; many of them much injured by being bent. The enemy have a position now which we cannot well assail successfully. They are under their gunboats and have gotten reinforcements.... There is a report to-night that Magruder has captured eight hundred Yankees to-day, but I place no reliance upon any rumour until it is confirmed as truth. General Beauregard has made a most successful retreat to Baldwin, thirty-five miles south of Corinth, on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. The move was necessary, and I have no doubt will be a great blow to the enemy. He carried all his heavy guns, tents, and so on. General Lee is in command of the army hereabouts, and I am sure we will whip McClellan’s army when the grand contest shall take place. The rain of last night will forbid any movement for two or three days. When the fight opens again, we will have thousands upon thousands of wounded here!”
Such were the accruing records of woe and of personal and national loss which followed Senator Clay and me throughout those autumn months of ’2. The inroad made upon the gallant regiments of our own State were frightful. The ranks of the splendid Fourth Alabama Regiment, picked men of our finest blood, the flower of our hopes, as handsome a body as a State might muster, were terribly thinned. Wherever a call came our Alabamians were found in the front, the envy and admiration of the army, quickening the courage and firing the imaginations of every company that beheld them. But oh! our men had need of a mighty courage, for soon the very seed-corn of our race became a sacrifice. The picture rises before me of a youthful cousin[[27]] who fell at Malvern Hill, shot down as he bore aloft the banner which he fondly hoped would lead to victory. His blood-stained cap, marked by a bullet hole, was all that returned of our fair young soldier boy. Another youth,[[28]] on whom the love and hope of a dear circle was settled, fell with his heart pierced, and so swift was the passing of his soul that he felt no pain nor sorrow. They say an eager smile was on his face when they found him. For years his loved ones, gazing upon it with weeping eyes, treasured the blood-stained, bullet-torn handkerchief that had lain over the wounded heart of the boy!
The tears start afresh when, looking into my memory, there passes before me that army of the dead and gone. Oh! the sorrow that overcame all who knew him (and the circle was wide as half the South itself) when the news came of the death of Colonel Sydenham Moore, who fell at Seven Pines; and even the enemy spoke solemnly at the passing of our beloved General Tracy, who died so courageously fighting in the battle of Port Gibson, within three-quarters of a year! “I have little active service at this post,” he complained from Vicksburg, in March of ’3, “and the very fact incapacitates me for the discharge of duties of other kinds. In fact, I am ennuied past description!” So, chafing impatiently to write his name in brave deeds across some page of the Confederate States’ history, he sprang to meet the call when it came, and fell, crowned with immortal glory in the hearts of a loving people.
General Tracy’s young wife was awaiting him, an infant at her bosom, when we returned late in November of ’2 for a brief stay at Huntsville, from which, for a time, the Union soldiers had been beaten back. By this time our valley seemed so safe that families from other threatened districts came to take refuge in it. Colonel Basil Duke, among others, brought his wife to Huntsville. Numerous absentee householders came back; and interest in local enterprises was resumed. When, in December, my husband returned to his duties in the Senate, there was small reason to apprehend an early reappearance, in Huntsville, of the Federals. “North Alabama,” General Bragg assured my husband, “is as secure now as it was when I held Murfreesboro!” And on this assurance our spirits rose and we departed again, promising ourselves and our parents we would return within a few months at most.
Mr. Clay proceeded at once to Richmond, beset now with deadly enemies within as well as without. Smallpox and scarlet fever raged there, as in many of our larger cities, and I pleaded in vain to be allowed to accompany him. I turned my way, therefore, in company with others of our kin, toward Macon, where was sojourning our sweet sister, Mrs. Hugh Lawson Clay, at the home of Major Anderson Comer, her father. Thence it was proposed I should proceed with her later to Richmond under the escort of Colonel Clay.
That winter the weather was peculiarly cold, so much so that on the plantations where wheat had been sown, a fear was general lest the grain be killed in the ground. The journey to Macon, therefore, was anything but comfortable, but it had its amusing sides nevertheless. We were a party of women.
“We arrived safely (self, Kate, Alice and servants),” I wrote in a kaleidoscopic account which I gave my husband of the indications of the times as seen en route. “We rode from Stevenson to Chattanooga on the freight train, the baggage-cars on the passenger-train being unable to receive a single trunk. Arriving at Chattanooga, we would have been forced to go to the small-pox hotel or remain in the streets but for the gallantry of an acquaintance of ours, an army officer of Washington memory, who gave up his room to us, and furnished some wagons to have our baggage hauled to the depot. At Atlanta there was a scatteration of our forces.... When night came” (being fearful of robbery, for hotels were unsafe) “I stuffed in one stocking all my money, and in the other, mine and Alice’s watches, chains, pins, and charms. I felt not unlike Miss Kilmansegg, of the precious Leg. We fumigated the room, had a bed brought in for Emily, and retired. At breakfast Colonel Garner told me that Uncle Jones [Withers] was in the house, and in a few minutes he presented himself. He got in at three that morning, en route for Mobile with thirty days’ leave; looked worn, and was sad, I thought. Colonel George Johnson, of Marion, also called, and we had them all and Dr. W., of Macon, to accompany us to the cars. The guard at the gate said ‘Passport, Madam,’ but I replied, ‘Look at my squad; General Withers, Colonel Garner of Bragg’s staff, and a Colonel and Lieutenant in the Confederate service. I think I’ll pass!’” And I passed!
CHAPTER XIV
Refugee Days in Georgia
Our stay in Macon, where it had been my intention to remain but a few weeks, lengthened into months; for, upon his arrival in Richmond, Senator Clay found the conditions such as to render my joining him, if not impracticable, at least inadvisable. The evils of a year agone had multiplied tenfold. Food was growing scarcer; the city’s capacity was tested to the uttermost, and lodgings difficult to obtain. The price of board for my husband alone now amounted to more than his income. Feeling in legislative circles was tense, the times engendering a troublesome discontent and strife among eager and anxious politicians. Complaints from the army poured in. Our soldiers were suffering the harshest deprivations. Wearing apparel was scarce. Many of our men marched in ragged and weather-stained garments and tattered shoes, and even these were luxuries that threatened soon to be unattainable. Our treasury was terribly depleted, and our food supply for the army was diminishing at a lamentable rate.
“You will be surprised to know,” wrote General Tracy from Vicksburg, in March, 1863, “that in this garrisoned town, upon which the hopes of a whole people are set, and which is liable at any time to be cut off from its interior lines of communication, there is not now subsistence for one week. The meat ration has already been virtually discontinued, the quality being such that the men utterly refuse to eat it, though the contract continues to be worth between one thousand and fifteen hundred dollars per diem.”