“Ain’t no Sis of yourn!” was the sullen reply. “God knows I ain’t no kin to no Yankee!” At that moment an infant’s cry was heard.

“Hello!” said the officer. “Got a little pickaninny, hey? Boy or girl?”

“Boy chile! What’s that ter you?” snapped the woman.

“What’s his name?” persisted the soldier.

“Name’s Wheeler, dat’s what ’tis!” answered the invalid triumphantly, and the colloquy ended abruptly.

As the soldiers sat down to the table, some one, going to the door, saw Wheeler’s men come tearing down the road flat on their horses. Instantly he shouted back to his companions, “Wheeler!” but they, believing the cry to be a ruse, continued to eat. The sounds of the galloping steeds soon became audible, however, and a stampede that was highly amusing to the now relieved household took place through doors and windows. When General Wheeler arrived, he found a steaming repast already prepared, and a cordial welcome from Mrs. Whitehead and her family, including “Sis.”

CHAPTER XVIII
The Death of Abraham Lincoln

The South was now sadly crippled. Our bulwarks were demolished and our granaries emptied, our most fertile valleys occupied by the Northern army, and Confederate money was depreciated to such an extent as to make it practically useless.[[42]] Our army was thinning daily, and even the news from Richmond, save from Mr. Davis himself, seemed to carry an undertone prophetic of coming collapse. “The enemy, yesterday and to-day,” wrote Mr. Mallory, from the capital, late in October, “is, in the graphic gorillaisms, ‘pegging away’ close at us; and the flash of his guns is visible and their roar was audible from my piazza yesterday. His approaches have been very slow, to be sure, but nevertheless, he has taken no step backward, but is ‘inching’ upon Richmond surely and methodically in a way that seems as gopherlike as it is certain; and he will keep up this system unless we can, by hard fighting, push him back.”

Supported by the hope of Mr. Clay’s return, and knowing he would seek me first among those of our kin who were nearest to the coast, I lingered on Beech Island until late in January, 1865, though I did so against the advice of Colonel Clay, who urged me to go southward, and the assurances of Mr. Davis that I might safely return to Richmond, which city, the President was confident, would continue to prove an impregnable refuge. In the last days of December two such messages, equally positive and each positively opposed to the other in its significance, sped to me by courier from the capital. Who was to decide when such correspondents disagreed? Yet the need for some move became more and more urgent. To return to Huntsville was out of the question. Northern Alabama was overrun with Federal soldiers, to whom the name alone of Clay, borne as it was by three men all actively labouring for the preservation of the Confederate States, was a challenge to the exercise of fresh authority. I heard distressing news of the contemplated transportation, to Nashville, of the aged ex-Governor Clay (our uncle, Mr. McDowell, a non-combatant full of years, had already died in that prison under most pitiful circumstances), yet I was powerless to send him even a line of comfort or encouragement. Mail routes in every direction were in possession of the enemy, or liable to be interrupted by them, and straggling companies of Union soldiers were on the lookout to intercept such messengers as might attempt to bear our letters from point to point.

My husband was in Canada, or on the seas, I knew not where; J. Withers Clay, the second son of the ex-Governor, was active with pen and press in lower Alabama; Colonel Clay was stationed in Richmond in the thick of the political battle. Our parents were left alone in the old home, to brave the discomforts put upon them by their sometimes cruel and sometimes merely thoughtless oppressors. A grandson, Clement, a mere lad, but a hero in spirit, venturing into the town to succour the old people, was promptly arrested. “I wonder,” wrote one who visited our parents, “that their heartstrings have not long since snapped!”