2 June 1862 – 8 June 1862

A battle is said to be raging round Richmond. I am at the Prestons’. James Chesnut has gone to Richmond suddenly on business of the Military Department. It is always his luck to arrive in the nick of time and be present at a great battle. Wade Hampton shot in the foot, and Johnston Pettigrew killed. A telegram says Lee and Davis were both on the field: the enemy being repulsed. Telegraph operator said: “Madam, our men are fighting.” “Of course they are. What else is there for them to do now but fight?” “But, madam, the news is encouraging.” Each army is burying its dead: that looks like a drawn battle. We haunt the bulletin-board. Back to McMahan’s. Mem Cohen is ill. Her daughter, Isabel, warns me not to mention the battle raging around Richmond. Young Cohen is in it. Mrs. Preston, anxious and unhappy about her sons. John is with General Huger at Richmond; Willie in the swamps on the coast with his company. Mem tells me her cousin, Edwin de Leon, is sent by Mr. Davis on a mission to England. Rev. Robert Barnwell has returned to the hospital. Oh, that we had given our thousand dollars to the hospital and not to the gunboat! “Stonewall Jackson’s movements,” the Herald says, “do us no harm; it is bringing out volunteers in great numbers.” And a Philadelphia paper abused us so fervently I felt all the blood in me rush to my head with rage.

Doctor John Cheves is making infernal machines in Charleston to blow the Yankees up; pretty name they have, those machines. My horses, the overseer says, are too poor to send over. There was corn enough on the place for two years, they said, in January; now, in June, they write that it will not last until the new crop comes in. Somebody is having a good time on the plantation, if it be not my poor horses. Molly will tell me all when she comes back, and more. Mr. Venable has been made an aide to General Robert E. Lee. He is at Vicksburg, and writes, “When the fight is over here, I shall be glad to go to Virginia.” He is in capital spirits. I notice army men all are when they write. Apropos of calling Major Venable “Mr.” Let it be noted that in social intercourse we are not prone to give handles to the names of those we know well and of our nearest and dearest. A general’s wife thinks it bad form to call her husband anything but “Mr.” When she gives him his title, she simply “drops” into it by accident. If I am “mixed” on titles in this diary, let no one blame me. Telegrams come from Richmond ordering troops from Charleston. Can not be sent, for the Yankees are attacking Charleston, doubtless with the purpose to prevent Lee’s receiving reenforcements from there. Sat down at my window in the beautiful moonlight, and tried hard for pleasant thoughts. A man began to play on the flute, with piano accompaniment, first, “Ever of thee I am fondly dreaming,” and then, “The long, long, weary day.” At first, I found this but a complement to the beautiful scene, and it was soothing to my wrought-up nerves. But Von Weber’s “Last Waltz” was too much; I broke down. Heavens, what a bitter cry came forth, with such floods of tears! the wonder is there was any of me left. I learn that Richmond women go in their carriages for the wounded, carry them home and nurse them. One saw a man too weak to hold his musket. She took it from him, put it on her shoulder, and helped the poor fellow along. If ever there was a man who could control every expression of emotion, who could play stoic, or an Indian chief, it is James Chesnut. But one day when he came in from the Council he had to own to a break-down. He was awfully ashamed of his weakness. There was a letter from Mrs. Gaillard asking him to help her, and he tried to read it to the Council. She wanted a permit to go on to her son, who lies wounded in Virginia. Colonel Chesnut could not control his voice. There was not a dry eye there, when suddenly one man called out, “God bless the woman.” Johnston Pettigrew’s aide says he left his chief mortally wounded on the battle-field. Just before Johnston Pettigrew went to Italy to take a hand in the war there for freedom, I met him one day at Mrs. Frank Hampton’s. A number of people were present. Some one spoke of the engagement of the beautiful Miss —— to Hugh Rose. Some one else asked: “How do you know they are engaged?” “Well, I never heard it, but I saw it. In London, a month or so ago, I entered Mrs. ——’s drawing-room, and I saw these two young people seated on a sofa opposite the door.” “Well, that amounted to nothing.” “No, not in itself. But they looked so foolish and so happy. I have noticed newly engaged people always look that way.” And so on. Johnston Pettigrew was white and red in quick succession during this turn of the conversation; he was in a rage of indignation and disgust. “I think this kind of talk is taking a liberty with the young lady’s name,” he exclaimed finally, “and that it is an impertinence in us.” I fancy him left dying alone! I wonder what they feel—those who are left to die of their wounds—alone—on the battle-field. Free schools are not everything, as witness this spelling. Yankee epistles found in camp show how illiterate they can be, with all their boasted schools. Fredericksburg is spelled “Fredrexbirg,” medicine, “metison,” and we read, “To my sweat brother,” etc. For the first time in my life no books can interest me. Life is so real, so utterly earnest, that fiction is flat. Nothing but what is going on in this distracted world of ours can arrest my attention for ten minutes at a time.

Battles occur near Richmond, with bombardment of Charleston. Beauregard is said to be fighting his way out or in. Mrs. Gibson is here, at Doctor Gibbes’s. Tears are always in her eyes. Her eldest son is Willie Preston’s lieutenant. They are down on the coast. She owns that she has no hope at all. She was a Miss Ayer, of Philadelphia, and says, “We may look for Burnside now, our troops which held him down to his iron flotilla have been withdrawn. They are three to one against us now, and they have hardly begun to put out their strength—in numbers, I mean. We have come to the end of our tether, except we wait for the yearly crop of boys as they grow up to the requisite age.” She would make despondent the most sanguine person alive. “As a general rule,” says Mrs. Gibson, “government people are sanguine, but the son of one high functionary whispered to Mary G., as he handed her into the car, ‘Richmond is bound to go.’” The idea now is that we are to be starved out. If they shut us in, prolong the agony, it can then have but one end. Mrs. Preston and I speak in whispers, but Mrs. McCord scorns whispers, and speaks out. She says: “There are our soldiers. Since the world began there never were better, but God does not deign to send us a general worthy of them. I do not mean drill-sergeants or military old maids, who will not fight until everything is just so. The real ammunition of our war is faith in ourselves and enthusiasm in our cause. West Point sits down on enthusiasm, laughs it to scorn. It wants discipline. And now comes a new danger, these blockade-runners. They are filling their pockets and they gibe and sneer at the fools who fight. Don’t you see this Stonewall, how he fires the soldiers’ hearts; he will be our leader, maybe after all. They say he does not care how many are killed. His business is to save the country, not the army. He fights to win, God bless him, and he wins. If they do not want to be killed, they can stay at home. They say he leaves the sick and wounded to be cared for by those whose business it is to do so. His business is war. They say he wants to hoist the black flag, have a short, sharp, decisive war and end it. He is a Christian soldier.”

Beauregard retreating and his rear-guard cut off. If Beauregard’s veterans will not stand, why should we expect our newly levied reserves to do it? The Yankee general who is besieging Savannah announces his orders are “to take Savannah in two weeks’ time, and then proceed to erase Charleston from the face of the earth.” Albert Luryea was killed in the battle of June 1st. Last summer when a bomb fell in the very thick of his company he picked it up and threw it into the water. Think of that, those of ye who love life! The company sent the bomb to his father. Inscribed on it were the words, “Albert Luryea, bravest where all are brave.” Isaac Hayne did the same thing at Fort Moultrie. This race has brains enough, but they are not active-minded like those old Revolutionary characters, the Middletons, Lowndeses, Rutledges, Marions, Sumters. They have come direct from active-minded fore-fathers, or they would not have been here; but, with two or three generations of gentlemen planters, how changed has the blood become! Of late, all the active-minded men who have sprung to the front in our government were immediate descendants of Scotch, or Scotch-Irish—Calhoun, McDuffie, Cheves, and Petigru, who Huguenotted his name, but could not tie up his Irish. Our planters are nice fellows, but slow to move; impulsive but hard to keep moving. They are wonderful for a spurt, but with all their strength, they like to rest.

Paul Hayne, the poet, has taken rooms here. My husband came and offered to buy me a pair of horses. He says I need more exercise in the open air. “Come, now, are you providing me with the means of a rapid retreat?” said I. “I am pretty badly equipped for marching.” Mrs. Rose Greenhow is in Richmond. One-half of the ungrateful Confederates say Seward sent her. My husband says the Confederacy owes her a debt it can never pay. She warned them at Manassas, and so they got Joe Johnston and his Paladins to appear upon the stage in the very nick of time. In Washington they said Lord Napier left her a legacy to the British Legation, which accepted the gift, unlike the British nation, who would not accept Emma Hamilton and her daughter, Horatia, though they were willed to the nation by Lord Nelson. Mem Cohen, fresh from the hospital where she went with a beautiful Jewish friend. Rachel, as we will call her (be it her name or no), was put to feed a very weak patient. Mem noticed what a handsome fellow he was and how quiet and clean. She fancied by those tokens that he was a gentleman. In performance of her duties, the lovely young nurse leaned kindly over him and held the cup to his lips. When that ceremony was over and she had wiped his mouth, to her horror she felt a pair of by no means weak arms around her neck and a kiss upon her lips, which she thought strong, indeed. She did not say a word; she made no complaint. She slipped away from the hospital, and hereafter in her hospital work will minister at long range, no matter how weak and weary, sick and sore, the patient may be. “And,” said Mem, “I thought he was a gentleman.” “Well, a gentleman is a man, after all, and she ought not to have put those red lips of hers so near.”

Cheves McCord’s battery on the coast has three guns and one hundred men. If this battery should be captured John’s Island and James Island would be open to the enemy, and so Charleston exposed utterly. Wade Hampton writes to his wife that Chickahominy was not as decided a victory as he could have wished. Fort Pillow and Memphis have been given up. Next! and next!