Monday, 22d—It is quite warm. Still in camp, and there’s nothing of importance. We had company inspection at 2 o’clock this afternoon.

May 21st. As we have plenty of rations we trade with the farmers, coffee, sugar, hardtack, for butter, eggs, and vegetables, and some milk. The cows eat garlic which gives to the butter and milk a bad taste, but we manage to eat the stuff, if we don’t really like the taste. We paid money for some things to the farmers. They were always anxious to get hold of a little ready cash. Some soft bread was furnished us in place of hardtack, but could most generally get hardtack. While we suffered much from hunger and thirst, we had good feed whenever near our base of supplies.

Detailed for guard duty in town. Charge of the third relief. When off duty could get excused for one hour. Visited a bookstore for something to read. Surprised to ?nd a copy of the History of Connecticut. Paid one dollar for it. The Waverly magazine was quite a favorite with the boys. Much pleasure working out the enigmas, and reading the short stories and the poetry.

May 21st, 1865.—We have found out about the gathering of negroes at Centreville yesterday. More than a week ago a notice was sent to all the negroes in this and adjoining counties to come and bring well-?lled picnic baskets. Lieutenant Zachendorf and the soldiers under his command had a message to them from the President of the United States.

When a large crowd had assembled Lieutenant Zachendorf proceeded to announce, in the name of President Johnson, the freedom of the entire negro race. They were told that they must show their appreciation of the great boon bestowed upon them by refusing to work any longer for those who had formerly held them in slavery. He proclaimed to these poor ignorant creatures the perfect equality of the races. He told them they were at liberty to help themselves to any property belonging to their former owners.

“You made it,” he said. “It is all yours.” This is outrageous. What the outcome may be none can know. Already we see a change in the demeanor of those around the house; a sullen air they have not had before. If this goes on, and we have no way to stop it, what will the end be? The terrors of San Domingo rise before our eyes.

May 21st.—They say Governor Magrath has absconded, and that the Yankees have said, “If you have no visible governor, we will send you one.” If we had one and they found him, they would clap him in prison instanter.

The negroes have flocked to the Yankee squad which has recently come, but they were snubbed, the rampant freedmen. “Stay where you are,” say the Yanks. “We have nothing for you.” And they sadly “peruse” their way. Now that they have picked up that word “peruse,” they use it in season and out. When we met Mrs. Preston’s William we asked, “Where are you going?” “Perusing my way to Columbia,” he answered.

When the Yanks said they had no rations for idle negroes, John Walker answered mildly, “This is not at all what we expected.” The colored women, dressed in their gaudiest array, carried bouquets to the Yankees, making the day a jubilee. But in this house there is not the slightest change. Every negro has known for months that he or she was free, but I do not see one particle of change in their manner. They are, perhaps, more circumspect, polite, and quiet, but that is all. Otherwise all goes on in antebellum statu quo. Every day I expect to miss some familiar face, but so far have been disappointed.

Mrs. Huger we found at the hotel here, and we brought her to Bloomsbury. She told us that Jeff Davis was traveling leisurely with his wife twelve miles a day, utterly careless whether he were taken prisoner or not, and that General Hampton had been paroled.

Fighting Dick Anderson and Stephen Elliott, of Fort Sumter memory, are quite ready to pray for Andy Johnson, and to submit to the powers that be. Not so our belligerent clergy. “Pray for people when I wish they were dead?” cries Rev. Mr. Trapier. “No, never! I will pray for President Davis till I die. I will do it to my last gasp. My chief is a prisoner, but I am proud of him still. He is a spectacle to gods and men. He will bear himself as a soldier, a patriot, a statesman, a Christian gentleman. He is the martyr of our cause.” And I replied with my tears.

“Look here: taken in woman’s clothes?” asked Mr. Trapier. “Rubbish, stuff, and nonsense. If Jeff Davis has not the pluck of a true man, then there is no courage left on this earth. If he does not die game, I give it up. Something, you see, was due to Lincoln and the Scotch cap that he hid his ugly face with, in that express car, when he rushed through Baltimore in the night. It is that escapade of their man Lincoln that set them on making up the woman’s clothes story about Jeff Davis.”

Mrs. W. drove up. She, too, is off for New York, to sell four hundred bales of cotton and a square, or something, which pays tremendously in the Central Park region, and to capture and bring home her belle file, who remained North during the war. She knocked at my door. The day was barely dawning. I was in bed, and as I sprang up, discovered that my old Confederate night-gown had to be managed, it was so full of rents. I am afraid I gave undue attention to the sad condition of my gown, but could nowhere see a shawl to drape my figure.

She was very kind. In case my husband was arrested and needed funds, she offered me some “British securities” and bonds. We were very grateful, but we did not accept the loan of money, which would have been almost the same as a gift, so slim was our chance of repaying it. But it was a generous thought on her part; I own that.

Went to our plantation, the Hermitage, yesterday. Saw no change; not a soul was absent from his or her post. I said, “Good colored folks, when are you going to kick off the traces and be free? In their furious, emotional way, they swore devotion to us all to their dying day. Just the same, the minute they see an opening to better themselves they will move on. William, my husband’s foster-brother, came up. “Well, William, what do you want?” asked my husband. “Only to look at you, marster; it does me good.”

May 20th. Our regular routine has been kept up for the past few days. Guard duty, drill, dress parade, Sunday morning inspection. When at liberty continue to take long walks out into the surrounding country. Call on the farmers. They laugh about the Yankee soldiers making friends with the cows. We tell them that’s because we like milk. We found out the cows would eat hardtack. We fed and petted them while they were out to pasture. Women do the milking in this section. I heard a woman say that she was a good milker but the Yankees could beat her and milk into a canteen at that.

May 20th, 1865.—It is late at night and this has been a perfectly horrible day. For three days Sister Mag has been very ill; last night death seemed very near and this morning her dead baby was laid in a little white casket and buried in God’s Acre. She does not know. She has known nothing for hours and the doctors give us little hope. Nellie and Fannie are nursing her. She may never be conscious again. Mother and Father do not leave her and poor Brother Amos is wretched.

Jane left this morning without bathing and dressing Rebecca, so that job fell to my share. I usually dress Eddie myself anyway but Rebecca is badly spoiled and it is difficult. I coaxed them out in the ?ower garden and then Mother sent me with some directions to the cook. Now, this cook is my own Emeline, who has always professed to love me dearly. I went to the kitchen, but she was not there. I looked around but could not see a single one of the servants who were generally, at that hour, busily employed, each one, in his or her portion of the day’s work. I went on to Emeline’s house and she was standing in the middle of the ?oor, tying on a sash of blue ribbon, which would complete quite a stunning toilet. “Emeline,” I said, “Sister Mag is so sick and Mother sends the key-basket to you and she says have a good dinner, for Dr. Betton and Dr. Gamble will be here and she is leaving everything to you. Imagine how I felt when she answered thus:

“Take dat basket back ter your mother an’ tell her if she want any dinner she kin cook it herself.”

I was hurt and dazed. I had not slept all night and I pleaded weakly, “Don’t say that Emeline, Sister Mag is so sick, the doctors think she will die.”

“Dey do? Well, what is dat ter me? I ain’t make her sick, is I?”

Silently I left her house. They are free, I thought; free to do as they please. Never before had I had a word of impudence [continue reading…]

May 20^th 1865

The Trial of the assassins is now in progress at the old Penitentiary (near the Arsenal) where rooms have been fitted up for the Court which is a Military Commission. Gen^l David Hunter is President and Joseph Holt Judge Advocate. The Court is trying eight persons who are accused of being actors in the Murder, and attack on Mr Seward, or of complicity with the assassins. Mrs Suratt, Paine, Azterot, Herold, Spangler, Sam^l Arnold, Dr Sam^l Mudd, and one other, M^cLaughlin. The trial is public and the proceedings are reported and published in the papers every day. The trial commenced a week ago and the testimony of the Witnesses is of absorbing interest to the whole country. The Prisoners have the best of Counsel and will have a fair trial. J Wilkes Booth the assassinator of the President was Shot before capture and lived but a few hours. It was not far from Port Royal, V.A. Herold was taken then. The “Army of the Potomac” and Gen^l Shermans Army and in fact all the Soldiers that could be readily got together are now assembling here for a Grand Review which is to take place next week Tuesday and Wednesday, 23^rd and 24^th In^ts. Some thirty Major Gen^ls are now in the City and Brigadiers without number. President Andrew Johnson two or three weeks ago offered a reward of $100,000 for the capture of Jefferson Davis. (He is implicated in the conspiracy to assassinate the President). He was captured by some Cavalry about a week ago in Georgia and is now confined at Fortress Monroe. It is expected that His trial will come off soon. Gov Vance of N.C. is now a prisoner in this City. None of Jeff Davis Cabinet have as yet been captured except the PM Gen^l Reagan. They are seeking safty in flight.

Saturday, 20th—There are three armies in camp here, the Army of the Potomac under General Meade, and the Armies of the Tennessee and of Georgia, both under General Sherman. We received orders that the Army of the Potomac would be reviewed by Lieutenant-General Grant on the 23d inst., and the armies under General Sherman on the 24th. The review is to take place in Washington City. It rained all day and it is very disagreeable in our camp on the commons of Alexandria. The firewood is so wet that it is almost impossible to get a fire to cook our food.

Near Alexandria. Va., May 19, 1865.

Rained all night. Reveille at 2 p.m., and started off before daylight. Men waded two or three creeks to their middles. March miserably conducted. Passed the church that Washington attended, built in 1783. It has nearly all, except roof and walls, been carried away by relic maniacs. Our division marched through Mt. Vernon by the vault and residence.

Thus closes this diary of one of the most memorable year’s campaigns in the history of modern times.

__________

We remained in camp between Alexandria and Arlington until the 23d, when we crossed the Potomac river, of which we had heard so much, and the next day (the 24th), participated in the Grand Review of the Grandest Army that ever was created.

Finale

Friday, 19th—Started at 10 a. m. and after marching fifteen miles, went into camp within four miles of Alexandria, Virginia. Sherman’s entire army arrived today and all, including the artillery, which we kept with the infantry all the way, are in camp near Alexandria.

Occoquan Creek, May 18, 1865.

Another day’s march. Heavy rain and thunder storm commenced ten minutes before our wagons got in, and then the wind blew so hard that we could not get our tent up for an hour, and everybody got thoroughly soaked.

Thursday, 18th—Some of the troops started quite early this morning, but our division left later, taking up the rear today. We marched fifteen miles and went into bivouac after crossing the Acon river, wading it just below the mouth of Bull Run creek, which empties into it. There are some fortifications here, it being near where the battles of Bull Run were fought.

May 18th.—A feeling of sadness hovers over me now, day and night, which no words of mine can express. There is a chance for plenty of character study in this Mulberry house, if one only had the heart for it. Colonel Chesnut, now ninety-three, blind and deaf, is apparently as strong as ever, and certainly as resolute of will. Partly patriarch, partly grand seigneur, this old man is of a species that we shall see no more—the last of a race of lordly planters who ruled this Southern world, but now a splendid wreck. His manners are unequaled still, but underneath this smooth exterior lies the grip of a tyrant whose will has never been crossed. I will not attempt what Lord Byron says he could not do, but must quote again: “Everybody knows a gentleman when he sees him. I have never met a man who could describe one.” We have had three very distinct specimens of the genus in this house—three generations of gentlemen, each utterly different from the other—father, son, and grandson.

African Scipio walks at Colonel Chesnut’s side. He is six feet two, a black Hercules, and as gentle as a dove in all his dealings with the blind old master, who boldly strides forward, striking with his stick to feel where he is going. The Yankees left Scipio unmolested. He told them he was absolutely essential to his old master, and they said, “If you want to stay so bad, he must have been good to you always.” Skip says he was silent, for it “made them mad if you praised your master.”

Sometimes this old man will stop himself, just as he is going off in a fury, because they try to prevent his attempting some feat impossible in his condition of lost faculties. He will ask gently, “I hope that I never say or do anything unseemly! Sometimes I think I am subject to mental aberrations.” At every footfall he calls out, “Who goes there?” If a lady’s name is given he uncovers and stands, with hat off, until she passes. He still has the old-world art of bowing low and gracefully.

Colonel Chesnut came of a race that would brook no interference with their own sweet will by man, woman, or devil. But then such manners has he, they would clear any man’s character, if it needed it. Mrs. Chesnut, his wife, used to tell us that when she met him at Princeton, in the nineties of the eighteenth century, they called him “the Young Prince.” He and Mr. John Taylor,[1] of Columbia, were the first up-country youths whose parents were wealthy enough to send them off to college.

When a college was established in South Carolina, Colonel John Chesnut, the father of the aforesaid Young Prince, was on the first board of trustees. Indeed, I may say that, since the Revolution of 1776, there has been no convocation of the notables of South Carolina, in times of peace and prosperity, or of war and adversity, in which a representative man of this family has not appeared. The estate has been kept together until now. Mrs. Chesnut said she drove down from Philadelphia on her bridal trip, in a chariot and four—a cream-colored chariot with outriders.

They have a saying here—on account of the large families with which people are usually blessed, and the subdivision of property consequent upon that fact, besides the tendency of one generation to make and to save, and the next to idle and to squander, that there are rarely more than three generations between shirt-sleeves and shirt-sleeves. But these Chesnuts have secured four, from the John Chesnut who was driven out from his father’s farm in Virginia by the French and Indians, when that father had been killed at Fort Duquesne,[2] to the John Chesnut who saunters along here now, the very perfection of a lazy gentleman, who cares not to move unless it be for a fight, a dance, or a fox-hunt.

The first comer of that name to this State was a lad when he arrived after leaving his land in Virginia; and being without fortune otherwise, he went into Joseph Kershaw’s grocery shop as a clerk, and the Kershaws, I think, so remember that fact that they have it on their coat-of-arms. Our Johnny, as he was driving me down to Mulberry yesterday, declared himself delighted with the fact that the present Joseph Kershaw had so distinguished himself in our war, that they might let the shop of a hundred years ago rest for a while. “Upon my soul,” cried the cool captain, “I have a desire to go in there and look at the Kershaw tombstones. I am sure they have put it on their marble tablets that we had an ancestor one day a hundred years ago who was a clerk in their shop.” This clerk became a captain in the Revolution.

In the second generation the shop had so far sunk that the John Chesnut of that day refused to let his daughter marry a handsome, dissipated Kershaw, and she, a spoiled beauty, who could not endure to obey orders when they were disagreeable to her, went up to her room and therein remained, never once coming out of it for forty years. Her father let her have her own way in that; he provided servants to wait upon her and every conceivable luxury that she desired, but neither party would give in.

I am, too, thankful that I am an old woman, forty-two my last birthday. There is so little life left in me now to be embittered by this agony. “Nonsense! I am a pauper,” says my husband, “and I am as smiling and as comfortable as ever you saw me.” “When you have to give up your horses? How then?”

[1] John Taylor was graduated from Princeton in 1790 and became a planter in South Carolina. He served in Congress from 1806 to 1810, and in the latter year was chosen to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, caused by the resignation of Thomas Sumter. In 1826 he was chosen Governor of South Carolina. He died in 1832.

[2] Fort Duquesne stood at the junction of the Monongahela and Alleghany Rivers. Captain Trent, acting for the Ohio Company, with some Virginia militiamen, began to build this fort in February, 1754. On April 17th of the same year, 700 Canadians and French forced him to abandon the work. The French then completed the fortress and named it Fort Duquesne. The unfortunate expedition of General Braddock, in the summer of 1755, was an attempt to retake the fort, Braddock’s defeat occurring eight miles east of it. In 1758 General Forbes marched westward from Philadelphia and secured possession of the place, after the French, alarmed at his approach, had burned it. Forbes gave it the name of Pittsburg.

Aquia Creek, Va., May 17, 1865.

We passed over the whole line of Burnside’s battle ground this morning. (It was no fight, only a Yankee slaughter.) Through Fredericksburg, the most shelled town I ever saw; crossed the Rappahannock on a miserable shaky pontoon, and have been traveling ever since in the camps of the Potomac Army. Desolation reigns equal to the Sodom and Gomorrah country.

Country much more broken than I supposed; very hot part of the day. One man of the 48th Illinois fell dead while marching, and eight or ten in our regiment badly affected by heat.

Wednesday, 17th—We started at 4 o’clock this morning and marched thirty miles today. It was very hot and a great many of the boys gave out. Our division led the advance. We passed through some very fine country and the crops are looking fine.

Five miles south of Fredericksburg, May 16, 1865.

Our division and brigade in advance of corps to-day. Made 24 miles by 2 p.m. Fences all gone on the road, but houses all standing. From a bluff three miles back had a beautiful view of about 15 miles of the Rappahannock valley and in all that did not see a fence or a cultivated field, or a specimen of either the kine, sheep, or swine families. This certainly does not largely rank the Sahara. Passed through a melancholy looking line of rifle pits, and mentally thanked Heaven for my poor prospect of ever using the like again. Passed through Bowling Green this a.m., only 11 miles from where Booth was killed.

Tuesday, 16th—Started at 4 a. m. and marched twenty miles today. We passed through Fredericksburg at 1 p. m., crossing the Rappahannock river at that place. On coming into Fredericksburg we marched along that stone wall by the bend of the river and looked down upon the lowland below where so many of our boys were marched to their death—at that terrible battle. It made me shudder to look down upon that horrible place. Fredericksburg seemed filled with Johnnies just returned from the war. At 5 o’clock we crossed the Poe river and went into bivouac.

South of Bowling Green, Va., May 15, 1865.

Crossed the Pamunky river this morning and the Mattapony this p.m. Beautiful country, but most desolate looking. Stopped at a house for the “cute and original” purpose of asking for a drink of water. While a servant went to the spring had a very interesting chat with the ladies, the first of the sex I have spoken to in Virginia. One of them was quite pleasant. She inquired if we Yankees were really all going to Mexico. Told her “such was the case,” when she remarked, “Well, all our men are killed off, and if all you Northerners go to Mexico, we women will have our rights sure.”

Heard of Davis’ capture. Did not excite an emotion.

Monday, 15th—We left bivouac at 5 o’clock this morning and marched eighteen miles. Went into bivouac for the night near the Fay river. The weather is quite warm and the roads are very bad.

Near Hanover, C. H., Va., May 14, 1865.

Only made nine miles to-day on account of the Pamunky river here being bad. We camp to-night in the Hanover “slashes,” one mile east of the birthplace of Henry Clay, and about two miles from the residence of Patrick Henry. The court house is where the latter delivered his famous speech against the clergy. Henry’s house is built of brick, imported, and was built in 1776. We passed the place where McClellan’s famous seven days’ fight commenced. The whole country is waste. I hear a country legend here that Clay was the illegitimate son of Patrick Henry. The court house was built in 1735

May 14, 1865.

Mr. Knowles, our circuit preacher, came. I like him. We agree upon a good many contested topics. He loves the old flag as well as myself and would be glad to see it floating where it ever has.

I had a long conversation with my man Elbert to-day about freedom, and told him I was perfectly willing, but wanted direction. He says the Yankees told Major Lee’s servants they were all free, but they had better remain where they were until it was all settled, as it would be in a month’s time. We heard so many conflicting rumors we know not what to do, but are willing to carry out the orders when we know them.

Sunday, 14th—It is quite warm. We remained in bivouac until 1 p. m., when we started and covered ten miles before night. We crossed the Pamunky river at 2 o’clock, after which the army divided, in order to get better roads. The Fourteenth and Seventeenth Corps took a road on the left, while the Fifteenth and the Twentieth marched on a road to the right. The roads through the lowlands are fearfully muddy.