About midday on Dec. 20, 1860, the writer sat in an audience room in Macon, Ga., listening to an address delivered by Hon. Howell Cobb to the Cotton Planters' Convention, then in session in that city. After all these years my memory retains no trace of that address in either theme or outline. I do recall, however, an interruption in its delivery, remembered, possibly, because it threw a crimson tint over the years that followed it, and for the further reason that if there had been no occasion for such an interruption, these records might never have been written. While Mr. Cobb was speaking, a messenger entered the hall and handed him a telegram. He broke the seal, glanced over its contents and then read the following message to the audience: "The South Carolina Convention has just passed the Ordinance of Secession from the Union." From that moment the "Cotton Planters' Convention" was no longer in it. The audience became a howling mob. That night there was a torchlight procession with brass band accompaniments. The streets were packed with a solid mass of excited, fevered, yelling humanity. The people were simply wild for Southern independence and the scene was probably duplicated in every Southern city.
In the early months in '61, when all hope of a peaceful separation had passed, the war fever attacked first the towns and cities where the people were in constant touch with each other and where the daily press kept the public pulse at more than normal beat. As the demand for troops increased, the infection spread to quiet country places with their monthly church service and their weekly mail. And so in due time it reached the community in which I lived, a community of quiet, well-to-do farmers, whose knowledge of Jomini and the art of war was decidedly limited. A military organization of thirty of forty men was, however, effected and Mr. John D. Mongin, the only member who knew the difference between "shoulder arms" and "charge bayonet," was elected captain. Our weekly drills at the academy grounds were confined largely to marching in single rank to the music of a rustic drummer and fifer, who seemed in blissful ignorance of anything but "slow time." There was a short-legged Frenchman in the company, whose number was "32" and, who in counting off, always responded with "dirty too." A year or two later those of us, who had seen actual service, could probably have made the same response without impairing in the least our reputation for veracity. As there was not sufficient material in the community to form a full company, my brother and myself, with D. W. Mongin, A. J. and J. H. Rhodes, made application to the Oglethorpe Infantry, 1st Ga. Regiment, then at Laurel Hill, Va., for admission into its ranks, and were accepted. Leaving Augusta July 31, 1861, in company with George Pournelle and Ginnie Hitt, who were returning from a ten days' furlough, we stopped over in Richmond a day and visited the Confederate Congress then in session. Sitting in the gallery of the Senate Chamber looking down upon Alex Stephens in the chair and Bob Toombs, Ben Hill, E. A. Nisbet R. M. T. Hunter and other worthies in the Hall, Luke Lane, an old college classmate, wrote on the fly leaf of the pocket diary, from which these records are partly taken a sort of preface, closing it with these words: "Here's hoping that every Yankee may find a bloody grave;" and Ginnie Hitt, sitting by, wrote beneath it: "Amen, say I." Luke appended my initials to the sentiment, but as it was stronger than my inclinations prompted me to endorse, I erased them. We visited also the prison hospital where the Federals wounded at Manassas, were being cared for. It was my first contact with "grim visaged war."
To a stripling boy, reared in a quiet country home and in a community in which there had never occurred a serious personal difficulty, I had neither inherited nor acquired any taste for carnage or bloodshed, and the scene was not a pleasant one. And yet the battlefield unfortunately soon dulls our natural sensibilities and begets an indifference to suffering that would shock us in civil life.
On reaching Monterey, Va., where the Oglethorpes were recuperating from the hardships of the "Laurel Hill Retreat," we found every tent occupied and we remained at the village inn until quarters could be provided. I remember that I slept, or tried to sleep, on the bare floor of our room as a sort of preparation for the life on which I was entering. In this connection I recall another fact, a peculiarity of this tavern, and that was its capacity for the utilization of green apples as an article of public diet. My experience with hostelries is not claimed to be at all extensive, but among those whose hospitality I have had the good or bad fortune to enjoy, or endure, this particular inn, on the line named, certainly "took the dilapidated linen from the lonely shrub." We were treated to apples baked and stewed and fried, to apple tarts and custards and dumplings, to apple butter and it would probably be no exaggeration to say, "there were others." After paying our bill Dan Mongin remarked, "When green apple season plays out this hotel is going to suspend." In verification of his prophecy, when we passed through Monterey en route to join Stonewall Jackson in December, its doors were closed, its lights were gone and all its halls deserted. Whether its demise was due to the green apple theory, I am unable to say.
My first month in camp was devoid of incident, its monotony being varied only by squad drill, guard duty, foraging for maple syrup and other edibles among the Dutch farmers of that section and digging graves for the unfortunate victims of the campaign just ended. One of the graves which the writer helped to dig in very hard clay, was appropriated by a burial squad from another regiment for one of their own dead. I am not lawyer enough to say whether the act was petty larceny, forcible entry and detainer, or what an old colored friend of mine once diagnosed as "legal mischievous" with the accent on the second syllable.
MY FIRST MARCH.
On Sept. 7, '61, Sterling Eve, Ginnie Hitt, Dan Mongin and the writer, not having been favored with the confidence of Gen. Lee as to his military plans, went into the country on a foraging expedition. This trip was probably inspired by a triumph in the culinary line achieved by Dr. Hitt and George Pournelle in supplying our table with two varieties of dumpling, apple and huckleberry, on the same day. We had no bag, in which to boil the dumpling and were forced to use the mess towel as a substitute. How long it had been subjected to its ordinary uses before being utilized in this way I do not now recall. Dr. Hitt remembers, however, or says he does, that the entire outer surface of the dumplings was towel-marked. The nature of the mark referred to is left without further discussion to the imagination of the reader. In this connection I recall another incident in the culinary line, which may be as well recorded here as elsewhere. About twenty years after the war I met Dr. Hitt in Augusta and taking something from my pocket, I handed it to him and asked if he could give me any information as to its character. He examined it very carefully by sight, touch and smell, and then said very confidently: "Oh, yes, I know what that is. It is a stone taken from a deer's liver." His diagnosis was not "reasonably" correct. The article under examination was a Confederate biscuit baked in our camp at Jacksonboro, Tenn., in 1863, sent to my father's family as a specimen and preserved during all those years. If I had taken the precaution to have immersed it in insect powder it would probably at this date have been still in the ring, though possibly a little disfigured. A few years after Dr. Hitt's examination, I found that it had—
"Like an insubstantial pageant faded
Leaving not a wrack"—
but only a little dust behind.
On our return from the foraging tour with a good supply of potatoes, onions and maple syrup, we found the camp deserted—a camp favored with the purest mountain air and the finest spring water, and yet where Dan Mongin wrote to his father for brandy to counteract the effects of malaria. The entire force at Monterey had been ordered to report to Gen. Henry R. Jackson on Green Brier River, and had broken camp two hours before our arrival. After resting an hour we began the tramp, trudging over the mountain roads for eight miles in the mud and rain and stopping for the night at the residence of a Col. Campbell in Crab Bottom. Here we had the pleasure of meeting the first two heroines of the war, Miss McLeod and Miss Kerr. They had ridden seventy miles on horseback without an escort to notify Gen. Garnett of McLellan's approach. My first day's march, though a short one, had broken me down so thoroughly that I was compelled to tax the kindness of a 3rd Arkansas Regiment wagoner for a ride next day. The entry in my journal for that date begins with these words: "Took the road with a heavy heart and a heavier load." Three years later, under the hardening process of camp life I was enabled to march, on Hood's tramp to Nashville and back to Corinth, Miss., twenty miles a day continuously and rode only one of the eight hundred miles covered in that campaign. During my two days experience as an "Arkansas Traveler" I think I heard more expletive, unadulterated "cussin" from the driver of that wagon than it has ever been my misfortune to listen to. His capacity in this line seemed to be not only double barreled, but of the magazine gun variety. If he had failed to pass his examination in the school of profanity I have never seen a man who was entitled to a diploma. I appreciated the ride, but was glad to reach our new camp, since it relieved me of his presence.