July 22d.—Mrs. Davis came in so softly that I did not know she was here until she leaned over me and said: “A great battle has been fought.¹ Joe Johnston led the right wing, and Beauregard the left wing of the army. Your husband is all right. Wade Hampton is wounded. Colonel Johnston of the Legion killed; so are Colonel Bee and Colonel Bartow. Kirby Smith² is wounded or killed.” I had no breath to speak; she went on in that desperate, calm way, to which people betake themselves under the greatest excitement: “Bartow, rallying his men, leading them into the hottest of the fight, died gallantly at the head of his regiment. The President telegraphs me only that ‘it is a great victory.’ General Cooper has all the other telegrams.”
Still I said nothing; I was stunned; then I was so grateful. Those nearest and dearest to me were safe still. She then began, in the same concentrated voice, to read from a paper she held in her hand: “Dead and dying cover the field. Sherman’s battery taken. Lynchburg regiment cut to pieces. Three hundred of the Legion wounded.”
That got me up. Times were too wild with excitement to stay in bed. We went into Mrs. Preston’s room, and she made me lie down on her bed. Men, women, and children streamed in. Every living soul had a story to tell. “Complete victory,” you heard everywhere. We had been such anxious wretches. The revulsion of feeling was almost too much to bear.
To-day I met my friend, Mr. Hunter. I was on my way to Mrs. Bartow’s room and begged him to call at some other time. I was too tearful just then for a morning visit from even the most sympathetic person.
A woman from Mrs. Bartow’s country was in a fury because they had stopped her as she rushed to be the first to tell Mrs. Bartow her husband was killed, it having been decided that Mrs. Davis should tell her. Poor thing! She was found lying on her bed when Mrs. Davis knocked. “Come in,” she said. When she saw it was Mrs. Davis, she sat up, ready to spring to her feet, but then there was something in Mrs. Davis’s pale face that took the life out of her. She stared at Mrs. Davis, then sank back, and covered her face as she asked: “Is it bad news for me.” Mrs. Davis did not speak. “Is he killed?” Afterward Mrs. Bartow said to me: “As soon as I saw Mrs. Davis’s face I could not say one word. I knew it all in an instant. I knew it before I wrapped the shawl about my head.”
Maria, Mrs. Preston’s maid, furiously patriotic, came into my room. “These colored people say it is printed in the papers here that the Virginia people done it all. Now Mars Wade had so many of his men killed and he wounded, it stands to reason that South Carolina was no ways backward. If there was ever anything plain, that’s plain.”
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¹ The first battle of Bull Run, or Manassas, fought on July 21,1861, the Confederates being commanded by General Beauregard, and the Federals by General McDowell. Bull Run is a small stream tributary to the Potomac.
² Edmund Kirby Smith, a native of Florida, who had graduated from West Point, served in the Mexican War, and been Professor of Mathematics at West Point. He resigned his commission in the United States Army after the secession of Florida.
