Dixie After the War

General Toombs, going to the basement doorway of his house in Washington, exclaimed suddenly: “My God! the blue-coats!” turned and went rapidly through his house and out at the back door, saying to his wife: “Detain them at the front as long as you can.” Their daughter, Mrs. Du Bose, helped her. “Bob Toombs” was asked for. Mrs. Du Bose went to bring “Bob Toombs”; she reappeared leading a lovely boy. “Here is Bob Toombs,” she said, “Bob Toombs Du Bose, named for my father, General Toombs.”

Mrs. Toombs took them through the house, showing them into every room – keys of which were lost and had to be looked for. They would burn the building, they insisted, if General Toombs was not produced. “Burn,” she said, “and burn me in it. If I knew my husband’s hiding-place, I would not betray him.” They told her to move her furniture out. She obeyed. They changed their minds about the burning and went off. General Toombs escaped to the woods, where he remained hidden until nightfall. His friend, Captain Charles E. Irvin, got some gold from Mrs. Toombs, and carried the money to him, together with his mare, Gray Alice. From Nassau Island he crossed to England, where the doughty “rebel” was mightily liked.

Mr. Davis, Mr. Stephens, Mr. Clay, General Wheeler, and General Ralls met aboard the steamer at Augusta, all prisoners. The President’s arrest occurred the day before Mr. Stephens’, near Irwinsville. Picture it. Gray dawn in the Georgia woods. A small encampment of tents, horses, and wagons. Horses saddled and bridled, with pistols in holsters, picketed on the edge of the encampment. A negro watching and listening. Suddenly, he hurries to one of the tents: “Mars Jeff!” His call wakes a man lying fully dressed on one of the cots. “What’s the matter, Jim?” “Firin’ ’cross de branch, suh. Jes behin’ our camp. Marauders, I reckon.”

After leaving Washington, Mr. Davis had heard that marauders were in pursuit of his wife’s cortege, and turning out of his course, he rode hard across country, found his family, conveyed them beyond the present danger, as he thought, and was about to renew his journey south. Horses for himself and staff were ready, when he heard that marauders were again near; he concluded to wait, and so lay down to rest. At Jim’s call, he went to the tent-door, then turned to where his wife bent over her sleeping baby, Winnie. “They are not marauders,” he said, “but regular troopers of the United States Army.”

She begged him to leave her quickly. His horses and weapons were near the road down which the cavalry was coming. In the darkness of the tent, he caught up what he took to be his raglan, a sleeveless, waterproof garment. It was hers. She, poor soul, threw a shawl over his head. He went out of the tent, she keeping near. “Halt!” cried a trooper, levelling a carbine at him. He dropped his wraps and hurried forward. The trooper, in the dark, might miss aim; a hand under his foot would unhorse him; when Mr. Davis would mount and away. Mrs. Davis saw the carbine, cast her arms about her husband, and lost him his one chance of escape.

In one of her trunks, broken open by pilferers of the attacking party, a hoop-skirt was found. I shall refer to this historic hoop-skirt again.

I left Generals Johnston and Sherman discussing Mr. Lincoln’s death and arranging terms of peace, based upon what Sherman recognized as the object of the war – salvation of the Union; and upon instructions received from Mr. Lincoln’s own lips in their last interview when the President authorized him to “assure Governor Vance and the people of North Carolina that, as soon as the rebel armies will lay down their arms, they will at once be guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country; and that, to avoid anarchy, the State Governments now in existence will be recognized.”

“When peace does come, you may call upon me for anything. Then, I will share with you the last crust and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.” Thus Sherman closed his reply to Calhoun’s protest against the depopulation of Atlanta. Now that war was over, he was for living up to this.

In soldierly simplicity, he thought he had done an excellent thing in securing Johnston’s guarantee of disbandment of all Confederate forces, and settling all fear of guerilla warfare by putting out of arms not only regular Confederates, but any who might claim to be such.

Stanton disposed of the whole matter by ordering Grant to “proceed to the headquarters of Major-General Sherman and direct operations against the enemy.” This was, of course, the end to any terms for us. As is known, General Johnston surrendered on the same conditions with Lee. Grant so ordered his course as not to do Sherman injustice.

General Sherman wrote a spicy letter for Mr. Stanton’s benefit: the settlement he had arranged for would be discussed, he said, in a different spirit “two or three years hence, after the Government has experimented a little more in the machinery by which power reaches the scattered people of this vast country known as the South.” He had made war “hell”; now, the people of “this unhappy country,” as he pityingly designated the land he had devastated, were for peace; and he, than whom none had done more to bring them to that state of mind, was for giving them some of its fruits. “We should not drive a people to anarchy”; for protection to life and property, the South’s civil courts and governments should be allowed to remain in operation.

“The assassination has stampeded the civil authorities,” “unnerved them,” was the conclusion he drew when he went to Washington when, just after the crime, the long roll had been beaten and the city put under martial law; public men were still in dread of assassination. At the grand review in Washington, Sherman, hero of the hour, shook hands with the President and other dignitaries on the stand, but pointedly failed to accept Mr. Stanton’s.

After Mr. Lincoln’s death, leniency to “rebels” was accounted worse than a weakness. The heavy hand was applauded. It was the fashion to say hard things of us. It was accounted piety and patriotism to condemn “traitors and rebels.” Cartoonists, poets, and orators, were in clover; here was a subject on which they could “let themselves out.”

THE CHAINING OF JEFFERSON DAVIS

CHAPTER IX

The Chaining of Jefferson Davis

Strange and unreal seem those days. One President a fugitive, journeying slowly southward; the other dead, journeying slowly north and west. Aye, the hand of God was heavy on both our peoples. The cup of defeat could not be made more bitter than it was; and into the cup of triumph were gall and wormwood poured.

Hunters pursuing one chieftain with hoarse cries of “rebel!” and “traitor!” For the other, bells tolling, guns booming requiem, great cities hung with black, streets lined with weeping thousands, the catafalque a victor’s chariot before which children and maidens scattered flowers. Nearly a month that funeral march lasted – from Washington through Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago – it wound its stately way to Springfield. Wherever it passed, the public pulse beat hotter against the Southern chieftain and his people.

Yet the dead and the hunted were men of one country, born in the same State. Sharp contrasts in many ways, they were yet enough alike in personal appearance to have been brothers. Both were pure men, brave, patriotic; both kindly and true. The dead had said of the living: “Let Jeff escape.”

Johnson’s proclamation threw the entire South into a white rage and an anguish unutterable, when it charged the assassination to Mr. Davis and other representative men of the South. Swift on it came news that our President was captured, report being spread to cast ridicule upon him that, when caught, he was disguised in his wife’s garments. Caricatures, claiming to be truthful portraiture, displayed him in hoops and petticoats and a big poke bonnet, of such flaming contrasts as certainly could not have been found in Mrs. Davis’ wardrobe.

In 1904, I saw at a vaudeville entertainment in a New York department store, a stereopticon representation of the War of Secession. The climax was Mr. Davis in a pink skirt, red bonnet, yellow bodice, and parti-coloured shawl, struggling with several Federals, while other Federals were rushing to the attack, all armed to the teeth and pointing warlike weapons at this one fantastic figure of a feeble old man. The theatre was full of children. The attraction had been running some time and thousands of young Americans had doubtless accepted its travesties as history. The Northern friend with me was as indignant as myself.

When Mr. Davis’ capture was announced in theatres and other places of amusement in the North, people went crazy with joy, clapping their hands and cheering, while bands played “Yankee Doodle” and “Star-Spangled Banner.” Many were for having him hung at once. Wendell Phillips wanted him “left to the sting of his own conscience.”

Presently, we heard that the “Clyde” was bringing Mr. Davis, his family, General Wheeler, Governor Vance, and others, to Fortress Monroe. And then – will I ever forget how the South felt about that? – that Mr. Davis was a prisoner in a damp, casemated cell, that lights were kept burning in his face all night until he was in danger of blindness; that human eyes were fixed on him night and day, following his every movement; that his jailer would come and look at him contemptuously and call him “Jeff”; that sightseers would be brought to peer at him as if he were some strange wild beast; that his feeble limbs had been loaded with chains; that he was like to lose his life through hardships visited upon him! To us who knew the man personally, his sensitiveness, dignity, and refinement, the tale is harrowing as it could not be to those who knew him not thus. Yet to all Americans it must be a regrettable chapter in our history when it is remembered that this man was no common felon, but a prisoner of State, a distinguished Indian-fighter, a Mexican veteran, a man who had held a seat in Congress, who had been Secretary of War of the United States, and who for four years had stood at the head of the Confederate States.

When they came to put chains upon him, he protested, said it was an indignity to which as a soldier he would not submit, that the intention was to dishonour the South in him; stood with his back to the wall, bade them kill him at once, fought them off as long as he could – fought them until they held him down and the blacksmiths riveted the manacles upon his wasted limbs. Captain Titlow, who had the work in charge, did not like his cruel task, but he had no choice but to obey orders.6

And this was in Fortress Monroe, where of old the gates fell wide to welcome him when he came as Secretary of War, where guns thundered greeting, soldiers presented arms, and the highest officer was proud to do him honour! With bated breath we speak of Russian prisons. But how is this: “Davis is in prison; he is not allowed to say a word to any one nor is any one allowed to say a word to him. He is literally in a living tomb. His position is not much better than that of the Turkish Sultan, Bajazet, exposed by his captor, Tamerlane, in a portable iron cage.” (“New York Herald,” May 26, 1865.) The dispatch seemed positively to gloat over that poor man’s misery.

A new fad in feminine attire came into vogue; women wore long, large, and heavy black chains as decorations.

The military murder of Mrs. Surratt stirred us profoundly. Too lowly, simple, and obscure in herself to rank with heroic figures, her execution lifts her to the plane where stand all who fell victims to the troubled times. Suspicion of complicity in Mr. Lincoln’s murder, because of her son’s intimacy with Wilkes Booth, led to her death. They had her before a military tribunal in Washington, her feet linked with chains.

Several men were executed. Their prison-life and hers was another tale to give one the creeps. They were not allowed to speak to any one, nor was any one allowed to speak to them; they were compelled to wear masks of padded cloth over face and head, an opening at the mouth permitting space for breathing; pictures said to be drawn from life showed them in their cells where the only resting-places were not beds, but bare, rough benches; marched before judges with these same horrible hoods on, marched to the gallows with them on, hanging with them on.

One of the executed, Payne, had been guilty of the attack on Mr. Seward and his son; the others had been dominated and bribed by Booth, but had failed to play the parts assigned them in the awful drama his morbid brain wrought out.

OUR FRIENDS, THE ENEMY

CHAPTER X

Our Friends, the Enemy

There was small interchange of civilities between Northern and Southern ladies. The new-comers were in much evidence; Southerners saw them riding and driving in rich attire and handsome equipages, and at the theatre in all the glory of fine toilettes.

There was not so much trouble opening theatres as churches. A good many stage celebrities came to the Richmond Theatre, which was well patronised. Decorated with United States flags, it was opened during the first week of the occupation with “Don Cæsar de Bazan.” The “Whig” reported a brilliant audience. Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Grant, who had been driving over the city, were formally invited by General Weitzel to attend the play, but did not appear.

The band played every evening in the Square, and our people, ladies especially, were invited to come out. The Square and the Capitol were at one time overrun with negroes. This was stopped. Still, our ladies did not go. Federal officers and their ladies had their music to themselves. “There was no intentional slight or rudeness on our part. We did not draw back our skirts in passing Federal soldiers, as was charged in Northern papers; if a few thoughtless girls or women did this, they were not representative. We tried not to give offense; we were heart-broken; we stayed to ourselves; and we were not hypocrites; that was all.” So our women aver. In most Southern cities efforts were made to induce the ladies to come out and hear the band play.

The day Governor Pierpont arrived, windows of the Spotswood and Monumental were crowded with Northern ladies waving handkerchiefs. “I only knew from the papers,” Matoaca tells, “that the Mansion was decorated with flowers for his reception. Our own windows, which had been as windows of a house of mourning, did not change their aspect for his coming. Our rightful governor was a fugitive; Governor Pierpont was an alien. We were submissive, but we could not rejoice.” This was the feminine and social side. On the political and masculine side, he was welcomed. Delegations of prominent Virginians from all counties brought him assurances of coöperation. The new Governor tried to give a clean, patriotic administration.

Northerners held socials in each others’ houses and in halls; there were receptions, unattended by Southerners, at the Governor’s Mansion and Military Headquarters. It might have been more politic had we gone out of our way to be socially agreeable, but it would not have been sincere. Federal officers and their wives attended our churches. A Northern Methodist Society was formed with a group of adherents, Governor and Mrs. Pierpont, and, later, General and Mrs. Canby among them. “We of the Northern colony were very dependent upon ourselves for social pleasures,” an ex-member who now considers herself a Southerner said to me recently. “There were some inter-marriages. I remember an elopement; a Petersburg girl ran away with a Federal officer, and the pair sought asylum at my father’s, in Richmond’s Northern colony. Miss Van Lew entertained us liberally. She gave a notable reception to Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase and his beautiful daughter, Kate.” Miss Van Lew, a resident, was suspected of being a spy during the war.

Our ladies went veiled on the street, the motive that caused them to close their windows impelling them to cover their faces with sorrow’s shield. There was not much opportunity for young blue-coats to so much as behold our pretty girls, much less make eyes at them, had they been so minded. That veil as an accompaniment of a lissome figure and graceful carriage must have sometimes acted as a tantalising disguise.

I heard of one very cute happening in which the wind and a veil played part. Mary Triplett, our famous blonde beauty, then in the rosy freshness of early youth, was walking along when the wind took off her veil and carried it to the feet of a young Federal officer. He bent, uplifted the vagrant mask, and, with his cap held before his eyes, restored it. That was a very honest, self-denying Yankee. Perhaps he peeped around the corner of his cap. There was at that time in Richmond a bevy of marvellously lovely buds, Mattie Ould, Miss Triplett’s antithesis, among the number.

The entire South seems to have been very rich then in buds of beauty and women of distinction. Or, was it that the fires of adversity brought their charms and virtues into high relief? Names flitting through my mind are legion. Richmond’s roll has been given often. Junior members of the Petersburg set were Tabb Bolling, General Rooney Lee’s sweetheart (now his widow); Molly Bannister, General Lee’s pet, who was allowed to ride Traveller; Anne Bannister, Alice Gregory, Betty and Jeannie Osborne, Betty Cabaniss, Betty and Lucy Page, Sally Hardy, Nannie Cocke, Patty Cowles, Julia, Mary and Marion Meade, and others who queened it over General Lee’s army and wrought their pretty fingers to the bone for our lads in the trenches. To go farther afield, Georgia had her youthful “Maid of Athens,” Jule King, afterwards Mrs. Henry Grady; in Atlanta were the Clayton sisters, and Maggie Poole, Augusta Hill, Ella Ezzard, Eugenia Goode, besides a brilliant married circle. In South Carolina were Mrs. James Chesnut, her sister, Mrs. David R. Williams, and all the fair troop that figure in her “Diary From Dixie.” Louisiana’s endless roster might begin with the Slocomb family, to which General Butler paid official tribute, recording that “Mrs. Slocomb equipped the crack military company of New Orleans, the Washington Artillery, in which her son-in-law, Captain David Urquhart, is an officer.” Mrs. Urquhart’s daughter, Cora (afterwards Mrs. James Brown Potter), was, I think, a tiny maiden then. Beloved for her social charm and her charities, Mrs. Ida B. Richardson, Mrs. Urquhart’s sister, still lives in the Crescent City. There were the Leacock sisters, Mrs. Andrew Gray and Mrs. Will Howell, the “madonna of New Orleans.” There was the King family, which produced Grace King, author and historian. A Louisiana beauty was Addie Prescott, whose face and presence gave warrant of the royal blood of Spain flowing in her veins. In Mississippi was “Pearl Rivers,” afterwards Mrs. Nicholson, good genius of the “Picayune”; and Mary E. Bryan, later the genius of the “Sunny South.” Georgia and Alabama claim Mme. Le Vert, to whose intellect Lamartine paid tribute, and Augusta Evans, whose “Macaria” ran the blockade in manuscript and came out up North during the war; that delightful “Belle of the Fifties,” Mrs. Clement C. Clay, is Alabama’s own. Besides the “Rose of Texas” (Louise Wigfall), the Lone Star State has many a winsome “Southern Girl” and woman to her credit. Mrs. Roger A. Pryor is Virginia’s own. Among Florida’s fair was the “Madonna of the Wickliffe sisters,” Mrs. Yulee, Senator Yulee’s wife and, presently, Florida’s Vice-Regent for the Ladies’ Association of Mt. Vernon. Mrs. Sallie Ward Hunt and Mrs. Sallie Ewing Pope lead a long list in Kentucky, where Mary Anderson, the actress, was in her tender teens, and Bertha Honoré (afterwards Mrs. Potter Palmer) was in pinafores. To Mississippi and Missouri belongs Theodosia Worthington Valliant; and to Tennessee Betty Vance, whose beauty’s fame was world-wide, and Mary Wright, later Mrs. Treadwell. At a ball given Prince Arthur when in this country, a wealthy belle was selected to lead with him. The prince thinking he was to choose his partner, fixed on Mary Wright, exquisite in poverty’s simple white gown, and asked: “May I lead with her?” In North Carolina were Sophia Portridge, women of the houses of Devereaux, Vance, Mordecai – but I am not writing the South’s “Book of Fair and Noble Women.” I leave out of my list names brilliant as any in it.

Of all the fair women I have ever seen, Mary Meade was fairest. No portrait can do justice to the picture memory holds of her as “Bride” to D’Arcy Paul’s “Bridegroom” in the “Mistletoe Bough,” which Mrs. Edwin Morrison staged so handsomely that her amateurs were besought to “star” in the interest of good causes. Our fair maids were no idle “lilies of loveliness.” The Meade sisters and others turned talents to account in mending fallen family fortunes. Maids and matrons labored diligently to gather our soldier dead into safe resting-places. The “Lyrical Memorial,” Mrs. Platt’s enterprise, like the “Mistletoe Bough” (later produced), was called for far and wide. The day after presentation in Louisville, the Federal Commandant sent Mary Meade, who had impersonated the South pleading sepulture for her sons, a basket of flowers with a live white dove in the center.

Slowly in Richmond interchange of little human kindnesses between neighbors established links. General Bartlett, occupying the Haxall house, who had lost a leg in the war, was “the Yankee who conquered my wife,” a Southerner bears witness. “I came home one day and found him sitting with her on my steps. He suffered greatly from his old wound, bore it patiently, and by his whole conduct appealed to her sweet womanliness. His staff was quiet and orderly.”

The beautiful daughter of one family and her feeble grandmother were the only occupants of the mansion into which General Ord and his wife moved. The pair had no money and were unable to communicate with absent members of the household who had been cut off from home by the accidents of war while visiting in another city. The younger lady was ill with typhoid fever. The general and his wife were very thoughtful and generous in supplying ice, brandy, and other essentials and luxuries.

“Under Heaven,” the invalid bore grateful witness when recovering, “I owe my life to General and Mrs. Ord.” Her loveliness and helplessness were in themselves an argument to move a heart of stone to mercy; nevertheless, it was virtue and grace that mercy was shown.

We made small appeal for sympathy or aid; were too much inclined to the reverse course, carrying poverty and other troubles with a stiff-neck, scantily-clad backs, long-suffering stomachs, and pride and conscience resolved. But – though some form of what we considered oppression was continually before our eyes – our conquerors, when in our midst, were more and more won to pity and then to sympathy. Our commandants might be stern enough when first they came, but when they had lived among us a little while, they softened and saw things in a new light; and the negroes and the carpet-baggers complained of them every one, and the authorities at Washington could not change them fast enough.

Southerners here and in other cities who had Federal boarders were considered fortunate because of the money and protection secured. In such cases, there was usually mutual kindness and consideration, politeness keeping in the background topics on which differences were cruel and sharp; but the sectional dividing lines prevented free social intermingling.

In places garrisoned by soldiers of coarser types and commanded by men less gentlemanly, women sometimes displayed more pronounced disapprobation. Not always with just occasion, but, again, often with cause only too grave. At the best, it was not pleasant to have strange men sauntering, uninvited, into one’s yard and through one’s house, invading one’s kitchen and entertaining housemaids and cooks. That these men wore blue uniforms was unfortunate for us and for the uniform. At that time, the very sight of “army blue” brought terror, anguish and resentment.

Our famous physicians, Maguire and McCaw, were often called to the Northern sick. Dr. McCaw came once direct to Uncle Randolph from the Dents, where he had been summoned to Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, and Matoaca listened curiously to his and her uncle’s cordial discussion of General Grant, who had made friends at the South by his course at Appomattox and his insistence on the cartel.