Alas! my husband’s zeal in fulfilling my commissions all went for naught, for the boxes containing them (save two, which were deposited with Mrs. Chestnut, at Columbia, and later fell prey to the Federals or to the flames, we never knew which) were swallowed by the sea, and only he himself came home with the Government papers he had guarded, as the sole baggage he was able to save from the wreck of the Rattlesnake of all he had carried. And yet not all, for a long-lost pet which he had been enabled to reclaim for General Lee[[36]] was also brought safely to shore.
“Tell him,” wrote my sister, from Richmond, that “General Lee’s dog arrived safely. Poor dog! I’m sorry for him, for he will find the Confederacy a poor place to come to to get anything to eat! I trust for the country’s sake, he knows how to live without eating!”
For the making of our toilette we discovered the value of certain gourds, when used as wash cloths. Their wearing qualities were wonderful; the more one used them the softer they became. Needles were becoming precious as heirlooms; pins were the rarest of luxuries; for the greater part of the time locust thorns served us instead. Writing paper was scarcely to be had, and the letters of that period which were sent out by private persons were often unique testimony to the ingenuity of the senders. Wall-paper, perhaps, was most frequently resorted to, and we made our crude envelopes of anything we could find. We made our own writing fluids, our commonest resource being the oak ball, a parasite, which, next to the walnut burr, is the blackest thing in the vegetable world. Or, this failing us, soot was scooped from the chimney, and, after a careful sifting, was mixed with water and “fixed” with a few drops of vinegar. Sometimes we used pokeberries, manufacturing a kind of red ink, or, made thin with water, some bit of miraculously saved shoe polish provided us with an adhesive black fluid.
Our difficulties were as great in the matter of transmitting our letters, when once they were written. We might intrust them to the mails, but these particularly were prey to our invaders; or we might charge with the care of them some traveller who was known to be making his way to the city for which the letters were addressed. Stray newspapers reached us at “Redcliffe” occasionally, from even so distant a point as our capital, and efforts were made by local editors to purvey the news of battles and the movements of the armies, but the supply of paper necessary for the issuing of a daily journal and even a weekly edition was difficult to obtain. What at first had appeared as morning papers were changed to evening editions, as the cost of candles, by which the compositors must work, had risen in ’3 to three and one-half dollars a pound. Our brother, J. Withers Clay, who owned and edited the Confederate, turned peripatetic, and issued his paper where he could, being obliged to keep shifting, printing paraphernalia and all, with the movements of the army in the Tennessee region. Writing us from Chattanooga, on August 16, 1863, he thus described his life: “I am living in camp style. I mess with my office boys and our fare is frugal. My bed is a piece of carpet, laid on a door, with one end elevated on two bricks and the other resting on the floor. I lay my blue blanket on this, and my bones on that, with my head supported by my overcoat and carpet sack, and cover myself with a Mexican scarf when it is cool!”
On the whole, our condition was almost like that of the ancients who depended on passing travellers for gossip or news of the welfare or whereabouts of friends or kin. Thus my sister (by every tie of affection), writing from Richmond in the spring of ’4, said: “Have no idea where you are, but send this letter by General Sparrow to Macon, care of Mrs. Whittle. The last intelligence I had of you was through Colonel Phillips. He told me he saw you between Augusta and Macon somewhere.”
Nor dared we avail ourselves of our telegraph wires, so costly had the sending of a few lines become. For the briefest message sent C. O. D. from Macon to Richmond, my sister paid sixteen dollars and implored me to send no more! The chief resource of the people was the arrival of the local train, at which time the railway stations swarmed with inquirers on foot, hedged in by others as eager, who had driven long distances in such vehicles as were at their command.
My life was one of continual suspense, notwithstanding the arrival of special couriers who came from time to time from Richmond bearing tidings of my absent husband. All lives that lie in close parallels to governments carry heavy anxieties. Mine, in those days of strife and terror, was no exception to this general rule. As negotiator at Niagara Falls with Professor Holcombe and others, the eyes of the North as well as those of the South for months had been fixed upon Mr. Clay, his interviews with Horace Greeley and the messengers sent to him by Mr. Lincoln having excited varying comments and criticisms that were anything but reassuring. Our friends in Richmond, however, wrote cheeringly:
“... I hear occasionally of Mr. Clay,” ran a letter from the Executive Mansion, dated August 31st, ’4, “but for some time past nothing has been received from him. The company he keeps[[37]] as reported by the newspapers cannot render you apprehensive of his being too happy to wish to return, though your desire to be with him may have increased his probable want of more congenial communion when the day’s work is done. I am assured that his health has improved by Canadian air, and we may hope that he will bring back increased ability to labour in the cause of the Confederacy, if it should not be his portion to relieve us of the need for further toil such as now is imposed. The carping spirit which prompted the criticism[[38]] on his course would have found sufficient cause whatever he might have done; or, if nothing had been done, that would have served equally. No one can hope to please everybody. You would not wish your husband to escape the reviling of those who envy such as they cannot rival, and strive to drag others down from the heights to which they cannot rise?”
Messages were numerous, urging my return to Richmond, which our President and the Mallorys assured me was the safest of places.
“Now that Sherman’s barbarians are in unpleasant proximity to you,” wrote Secretary Mallory, “why not come to the front where security, sympathy, mint juleps, an admiring audience, the freshest gossip and the most unselfish regard, all combine with the boom and flash of guns to welcome your coming? The correspondence between your lord and master and Holcombe on one side, and Greeley on the other, is doing good service. The parties, fragments, cliques and individuals in the United States who desire peace, but differ upon the modus operandi of getting it, will now learn that with Lincoln at the head of affairs, no peace is possible; while our weak brothers in North Carolina and Georgia who have clamoured so loudly that peace propositions should be made to us, cannot fail to see that, at present, peace with Lincoln means degradation. I am very glad Mr. Clay went, for I see that his presence must be beneficial to our cause.”