Sunday, May 18.—A very hot day. Our patients are nearly all gone. Captain Dearing left to-day. He is in a fair way to recover. He was one of the worst of the wounded. Three of the ladies are very sick. Miss Marks is not expected to live. She has made up her mind to that effect, and is perfectly resigned. She is a member of the Episcopal Church.
Friday, May 18, 2012
E’s Journal.
May 17, Spaulding.
Steaming up York River.
We have just been transferred to this big The boat, while the Wilson Small goes for repairs. This boat will accommodate four or five hundred men in bunks, now being put up by the carpenter and filled with mattresses stuffed by the “Lost Children” who are garrisoning Yorktown. . . .
May 18. My entry was broken short by the arrival of 160 men for the Knickerbocker, and we were once more very busy. They were all fed, — numbered, and recorded by name, (Charley’s work), and put to bed. Next morning arrived 115 more, for whom the Elizabeth with Miss Wormeley, Miss Gilson, and two men of the staff had been sent up Queen’s Creek — tired, miserable fellows, who had been lying in the wet and jolted over horrible roads. There was another tugboat full, too, and Mrs. Griffin and I took charge of both till the men were moved into the Knickerbocker.
We are now steaming up towards White House, all on deck enjoying the sail except Mr. Knapp and Charley, who are unpacking quilts for the bunks now ready.
May 18th.—Norfolk has been burned and the Merrimac sunk without striking a blow since her coup d’état in Hampton Roads. Read Milton. See the speech of Adam to Eve in a new light. Women will not stay at home; will go out to see and be seen, even if it be by the devil himself.
Very encouraging letters from Hon. Mr. Memminger and from L. Q. Washington. They tell the same story in very different words. It amounts to this: “Not one foot of Virginia soil is to be given up without a bitter fight for it. We have one hundred and five thousand men in all, McClellan one hundred and ninety thousand. We can stand that disparity.”
What things I have been said to have said! Mr. _____ heard me make scoffing remarks about the Governor and the Council—or he thinks he heard me. James Chesnut wrote him a note that my name was to be kept out of it—indeed, that he was never to mention my name again under any possible circumstances. It was all preposterous nonsense, but it annoyed my husband amazingly. He said it was a scheme to use my chatter to his injury. He was very kind about it. He knows my real style so well that he can always tell my real impudence from what is fabricated for me.
There is said to be an order from Butler¹ turning over the women of New Orleans to his soldiers. Thus is the measure of his iniquities filled. We thought that generals always restrained, by shot or sword if need be, the brutality of soldiers. This hideous, cross-eyed beast orders his men to treat the ladies of New Orleans as women of the town—to punish them, he says, for their insolence.
Footprints on the boundaries of another world once more. Willie Taylor, before he left home for the army, fancied one day—day, remember—that he saw Albert Rhett standing by his side. He recoiled from the ghostly presence. “You need not do that, Willie. You will soon be as I am.” Willie rushed into the next room to tell them what had happened, and fainted. It had a very depressing effect upon him. And now the other day he died in Virginia.
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¹ General Benjamin F. Butler took command of New Orleans on May 2, 1862. The author’s reference is to his famous “Order No. 28,” which reads: ” As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans, in return for the most scrupulous non-interference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her vocation.” This and other acts of Butler in New Orleans led Jefferson Davis to issue a proclamation, declaring Butler to be a felon and an outlaw, and if captured that he should be instantly hanged. In December Butler was superseded at New Orleans by General Banks.
May 18.—A skirmish took place near Searcy, on the Little Red River, Arkansas, between one hundred and fifty men of Gen. Osterhaus’s division, and some six hundred rebels, under Colonels Coleman and Hicks, in which the latter were routed, with a loss of one hundred and fifty left on the field and quite a number wounded.
—A fight took place at Princeton, Va., between the Nationals under the command of General Cox and a body of rebels under Humphrey Marshall, in which the Nationals lost thirty killed and seventy wounded.
—S. Phillips Lee, United States Navy, commanding the advance naval division on the Mississippi River, demanded the surrender of Vicksburgh to the authority of the United States.— (Doc. 111.)
