18th. Melissa came last night. Lu has gone over to see her. Talked of getting up a paper asking absent officers to leave the service. Dropped it. Rainy. Major Welch came over. Quite a time with Div. excitement.
May 2015
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.
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.
Chattanooga, Thursday, May 18. Yesterday’s rain continued all day to-day with slight interruptions. Groomed “Old Gray” which is about all I did. A little before noon we turned out to see a battalion of the 13th Tennessee. They march by in their grey. Still they come, thicker and faster and more of them.
5 P. M. Rebel General Williams marched in at the head of the 1st, 2nd, and 9th Kentucky, the 1st Brigade of Wheeler’s Cavalry. They rode good horses. At the bridge a line of blue flanked them on either side. They rode along with downcast eye and clouded brow, officers each having three or four revolvers strapped to themselves, as they were allowed to retain side-arms. Undoubtedly most of them were transferred from the privates’ belts before coming in. The surplus ones were thrown into the river they say. And these were the men that had for four years made themselves notorious by their heinous deeds, now allowed all civility. I fear they are tame from policy, and not from principles, and will yet give us trouble.
On guard at 7 P. M., No. 1, third relief, so I must retire in order to get up at 11 P. M.
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.
17th. Chester and I walked about town. Cavalry arrived yesterday. At noon we got a carriage and drove over to Command. Seemed good to see the boys again. Beautiful camp, two miles from A. W. and A. with the Potomac, Giesboro and Heights in full view. Very romantic.

“Desolation reigns equal to the Sodom and Gomorrah country.”–Army Life of an Illinois Soldier, Charles Wright Wills.
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.
Chattanooga, Wednesday, May 17. Reveille sounded very early every morning now. Begin to feel very well, think I can grind hard-tack enough to keep the system going for a while. Nothing to read or do, so procured a pass to see if I could not find some reading matter in town.
Found Chattanooga literally filled with “gray backs” riding to and fro at will. About 200 hundred came in this morning, a portion of Hardee’s Corps, the picked escort of Old Jeff. They followed him to Washington, Ga., when he took it alone with a few friends, and left them to go and receive their paroles, which they received at Atlanta, Ga. Many of them were quite splendidly dressed, having the finest uniforms I have ever seen with them. I talked with many of them in a friendly strain, astonished to find them so ignorant of the history of the last year. But most of them are heartily tired of war, and say they are willing to bide the will of the United States, but fear Andy Johnson’s severity. One poor fellow in a sad strain said he “was going to the place where his home once was, but God knows where it is now, I have not heard from any of them for ten months.” They were commanded by one of the most desperate, wild-looking colonels I have ever seen, a fair representation of the pictures we see of brigand chiefs or buccaneers. He wore a large, warm, home-made cloak, plaited around the waist like an old fashioned wammus, hanging clear to his heels, and a coarse white hat with a brim a foot wide, and greasy hair below the shoulders. About evening six hundred more came in.
Silver and gold is quite plenty. Dealers in town are reaping a harvest. Scrip is useless, a newsboy hesitating to sell a paper for $100.00 of it.
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.
16th. A cool morning. Up betimes. Dreamed till nervous about F. Would that I could reasonably get this subject out of my mind. God guide me. There would be satisfaction in a short look into the future. Chet and I called on Electa and Lorenzo. Went to a Catholic Fair.